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A Womans Wartime Journal

An Account of the Passage over Georgias Plantation of Shermans Army on the March to the Sea, as Recorded in the Diary of Dolly Sumner Lunt (Mrs. Thomas Burge). With an Introduction and Notes by Julian Street

By Dolly Sumner Lunt

A DocSouth Books Edition
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
Chapel Hill

A DocSouth Books Edition, 2012

ISBN 978-1-4696-0778-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Published by
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library
CB #3900 Davis Library
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890
http://library.unc.edu

Documenting the American South
http://docsouth.unc.edu
docsouth@unc.edu

Distributed by
The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
1-800-848-6224
http://www.uncpress.org

This book was digitally printed.

ABOUT THIS EDITION

This edition is made available under the imprint of DocSouth Books, a collaborative endeavor between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library and the University of North Carolina Press. Titles in DocSouth Books are drawn from the Librarys Documenting the American South (DocSouth) digital publishing program, online at docsouth.unc.edu. These print and downloadable e-book editions have been prepared from the DocSouth electronic editions.

Both DocSouth and DocSouth Books present the transcribed content of historic books as they were originally published. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, and typographical errors are therefore preserved from the original editions. DocSouth Books are not intended to be facsimile editions, however. Details of typography and page layout in the original works have not been preserved in the transcription.

DocSouth Books editions incorporate two pagination schemas. First, standard page numbers reflecting the pagination of this edition appear at the top of each page for easy reference. Second, page numbers in brackets within the text (e.g., [Page 9]) refer to the pagination of the original publication; online versions of the DocSouth works use this same original pagination. Page numbers shown in tables of contents and book indexes, when present, refer to the original works printed page numbers and therefore correspond to the page numbers in brackets.

SUMMARY

Dolly Sumner Lunt was born in Bowdoinham, Maine in 1817. Although she was related to the fierce abolitionist, Charles Sumner, she moved south to Covington, Georgia to join her recently married sister. While teaching school in the area, Lunt met and married Thomas Burge, and she settled into life on his plantation. Her husband passed away in 1858, and Mrs. Burge managed the affairs of the plantation herself during the Civil War.

Burge begins her diary, A Womans Wartime Journal, published in 1918, by voicing her anxiety about the approach of General Shermans Northern army on January 1, 1864. While she worries over the arrival of Shermans troops and their habit of pillaging and burning everything in their path, she records stories of visits by local raiders posing as U.S. soldiers and the sleepless nights she has spent watching fires on the horizon. Despite Burges efforts to hide her valuable possessions, which include sending her mules into the woods, dividing her stores of meat among the slaves, and burying the silver, the passing Union troops raid her house and plantation, taking her slaves with them. They also set fire to cotton bales in her barn. The blaze burns out before spreading, so Burges property is largely spared the widespread destruction suffered by neighboring plantations. In Burges last entries, dated December 1865, she writes optimistically about the recovery of her farm, her new sharecropping system, and the first cheerful Christmas in years.

Harris Henderson and Armistead Lemon

[Cover Image]

[Frontispiece Image]

[Title Page Image]

A WOMANS WARTIME JOURNAL

AN ACCOUNT OF THE PASSAGE OVER A GEORGIA PLANTATION OF SHERMANS ARMY ON THE MARCH TO THE SEA, AS RECORDED IN THE DIARY OF

DOLLY SUMNER LUNT

(Mrs. Thomas Burge)

With an Introduction and Notes by
JULIAN STREET

NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO. 1918

Copyright, 1918, by THE CENTURY CO.

[Page v] INTRODUCTION

Though Southern rural life has necessarily changed since the Civil War, I doubt that there is in the entire South a place where it has changed less than on the Burge Plantation, near Covington, Georgia. And I do not know in the whole country a place that I should rather see again in springtimethe Georgia springtime, when the air is like a tonic vapor distilled from the earth, from pine trees, tulip trees, balm-of-Gilead trees (or bam trees, as the negroes call them), blossoming Judas trees, Georgia crab-apple, dogwood pink and white, peach blossom, wistaria, [Page vi]sweet-shrub, dog violets, pansy violets, Cherokee roses, wild honeysuckle, azalia, and the evanescent green of new treetops, all carried in solution in the sunlight.

It is indicative of the fidelity of the plantation to its old traditions that though more than threescore springs have come and gone since Sherman and his army crossed the red cottonfields surrounding the plantation house, and though the Burge family name died out, many years ago, with Mrs. Thomas Burge, a portion of whose wartime journal makes up the body of this book, the place continues to be known by her name and her husbands, as it was when they resided there before the Civil War. Some of the negroes mentioned in the journal still live in cabins on the plantation, and almost all the younger generation [Page vii]are the children or grandchildren of Mrs. Burges former slaves.

Mrs. Burge (Dolly Sumner Lunt) was born September 29, 1817, in Bowdoinham, Maine. That she was brought up in New England, in the heart of the abolitionist movement, and that she was a relative of Charles Sumner, consistent foe of the South, lends peculiar interest to the sentiments on slavery expressed in her journal. As a young woman she moved from Maine to Georgia, where her married sister was already settled. While teaching school in Covington she met Thomas Burge, a plantation-owner and gentleman of the Old South, and presently married him. When some years later Mr. Burge died, Mrs. Burge was left on the plantation with her little daughter Sarah (the Sadai of the journal) and her slaves, [Page viii]numbering about one hundred. Less than three years after she was widowed the Civil War broke out, and in 1864 this cultivated and charming woman saw Shermans army pass across her fields on the March to the Sea.

At the time of my visit to the plantation the world was aghast over the German invasion of Belgium, the horrors of which had but recently been fully revealed and confirmed.... What, then, I began to wonder, must life have been in this part of Georgia, when Shermans men came by? What must it have been to the woman and the little girl living on these acres, in this very house? For though Germanys assault was upon an unoffending neutral state and was the commencement of a base war, whereas Shermans March through Georgia was an invasion of what was then the enemys [Page ix]country for the purpose of breaking the back of that enemy and thus terminating the war, nevertheless military necessity was the excuse in either case for a campaign of deliberate destructionwhich, in the State of Georgia, was measured by Sherman himself at one hundred millions.

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