AN AGREEABLE DELAY

AN AGREEABLE DELAY

We reached Winchester at dusk in a heavy rain storm, and, on arriving at the general's headquarters, which were in the Taylor Hotel, he told me that, as he had concluded to forward certain important papers by me to Richmond, which would take two or three hours to prepare, I would not be able to get off as soon as I expected. I was very glad to know this, as more time was thereby given me to spend with my only son, a youth in his teens, who had received two severe wounds in the battle of the previous Sunday and was then lying disabled at the house of a friend in Winchester, where, by the way, on hastening to see him, I had the unexpected happiness to find my wife also, who had managed, with much difficulty, to reach there two days before. The exigencies of the times had prevented our meeting for many months previously, and our brief interview by the bedside of our wounded son was the only we had for more than a year thereafter.

Truly war, under any circumstances and in any shape, is a sad disturber of domestic life. In its best aspects it is a deplorable calamity to any country. But, when it comes in that direct of forms - in the hideous guise of a fratricidal civil war - raging in the region of one's own residence, with its debasing system of social espionage and ex parte criminations, alienating communities and separating friends, filling the hearts of families with anxieties and dread, desolating their fair fields and destroying their happy homes, even over the defenseless heads of women and children, the horrors of that calamity, to say nothing of its sanguinary features, are enhanced a hundredfold, and no people of the South experienced them in greater degree or endured them with more heroic and uncomplaining fortitude than those whose fate it was to live during the late war in the lower Valley of Virginia, within a radius of forty miles around the battle-scarred town of Winchester. Especially may this be said of those “ministering angels,” the mothers and daughters of that historic valley, where the most delicately nurtured and refined ladies of the land were ever found among the foremost in all good works, and never weary in well-doing for the sick and suffering soldiers of both sections throughout the whole of that sad and sanguinary episode of our country's history. 

 The source: Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. VII. Richmond, Virginia, January, 1879. No. 1.