The Soldier’s Mother: 1864

A Heart-broken Mother.

In 1864, notice was given that a boat-load of prisoners from Andersonville would be exchanged, and that they would be landed at Annapolis, Md.  Men and women came from every part of the United States, each with the hope of meeting a friend whom they knew to be confined at Andersonville. Of course, among such a large number there could not be more than one in a hundred that could find the friend they came after. When the boat came up to the wharf there was a great crowd to welcome the forlorn creatures, and to inquire after others who did not come.

Among the expectants was the mother of a soldier in the twelfth Connecticut regiment, who rushed on board the boat, asking every soldier she saw, for her boy. From deck to cabin, in the cots and among the barrels she searched for him; but he was not there, and no one had heard of him. She had brought a cap, a shirt and a pair of pants, that he might have a clean change, and with these across her arm she wandered among the crowd saying, in a half-inquiring, vacant tone, “He has not come; he has not come.”

For a year after she went regularly to the wharf at sunrise from her lodgings, which nobody could find, and gazed for an hour down the bay, and murmuring, “He has not come,” would go to the post surgeon with the same cap, shirt and pants, and ask why her boy had not come. They shut the door in her face, and she wandered down to the wharf and was found the next morning stiff and cold, sitting upright behind some old barrels on the wharf, with her glassy eyes still gazing down the bay toward the point where steamers first came in sight.

“He had not come to her                                            

But she had gone to him.”

Jamestown [NY] Journal 15 October 1869: p. 2

 

 

Mrs Daffodil invites you to join her on the curiously named “Face-book,” where you will find a feast of fashion hints, fads and fancies, and historical anecdotes

You may read about a sentimental succubus, a vengeful seamstress’s ghost, Victorian mourning gone horribly wrong, and, of course, Mrs Daffodil’s efficient tidying up after a distasteful decapitation in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales.