George Eggleston was born in Vevay, Indiana, in 1839, and lived there until he was 17, when he inherited a family plantation in Virginia. He went to college in Richmond, and became caught up in Southern intellectual and social life. When the Civil War broke out, Eggleston joined the Confederate army. Having survived the conflict, he spent the rest of his life as a writer, working for newspapers including the New York World under Joseph Pulitzer. This is one of a series of essays he wrote hoping “to strengthen the kindly feelings” between former enemies.
“I never wore a star on my collar,” George Eggleston wrote nine years after the end of the Civil War, “and every reader of military novels knows that adventures worth writing about never befall a soldier below the rank of major.” This final essay begins with a look at life behind the Confederate lines at the end of the war, when it was obvious that the South was losing. The soldiers remained “convinced of the absolute righteousness of our cause,” Eggleston writes, and refused to admit even the possibility of failure. As the Confederate army was being pounded and grew smaller with each battle, the men began to believe they would not survive and became fatalistic. “A sort of religious ecstasy took possession of the army,” he reports. “They held danger and fatigue alike in contempt.” He describes the utter chaos that followed the surrender, as soldiers and civilians tried to make their way home over a wasted country, without any plan or direction. For a time the South was overrun by marauding groups of men, all searching for food. Rumors swept over the land; in some places, it took two weeks to confirm the news of Lincoln’s assassination. Eggleston’s narrative treats the issue of the newly freed slaves from the point of view of a one-time master, insisting on a wishful Southern version of “the negro” as “faithful and affectionate … constitutionally loyal to his obligations as he understands them …”
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