Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/307

 The Heroine of Confederate Point.

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THE HEROINE OF CONFEDERATE POINT.

AN INTERESTING CONTEMPORANEOUS ACCOUNT OF

THE HEROIC DEFENCE OF FORT FISHER,

DECEMBER 24th and 25th, 1864.

By the Wife of the Commandant, Colonel William Lamb.

[The patriotism and fortitude which animated and sustained the young matron, whose touching letter is here given, was, as is univer- sally admitted, a typical exemplification of the Southern woman in the late war between the States. ED.]

In the fall of 1857, a lovely Puritan maiden, still in her teens, was married in Grace church, Providence, Rhode Island, to a Virginia youth, just passed his majority, who brought her to his home in Norfolk, a typical ancestral homestead, where beside the " white folks" there was quite a co-lony of family servants from the picka- ninny just able to crawl to the old grey headed mammy who had nursed " ole massa." She soon became enamoured of her surround- ings and charmed with the devotion of her colored maid, whose sole duty it was to wait upon her young missis. When the John Brown raid burst upon the South and her husband was ordered to Harper's Ferry, there was not a more indignant matron in all Virginia, and when at last secession came, the South did not contain a more enthusiastic little rebel.

On the 1 5th of May, 1862, a few days after the surrender of Nor- folk to the Federals, by her father-in-law, then mayor, amid the excitement attending a captured city, her son Willie was born. Cut off from her husband and subjected to the privations and annoyances incident to a subjugated community, her father insisted upon her coming with her children to his home in Providence; but, notwith- standing she was in a luxurious home, with all that parental love could do for her, she preferred to leave all these comforts to share