On May 10, 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured near Irwinville, Georgia while trying to escape pursuing Union forces. Confederate partisan Emma Holmes of Charleston kept a diary of her life during the Civil War. Upon hearing of Jeff Davis’s capture, she wrote at the end of May:
“…poor President Davis-I grieve for his saddest of fates…President Davis certainly seems to have erred very much to the injury of our cause by his strong prejudices for and against certain generals and other public men, but it is wrong to put the entire failure of our great cause upon his shoulders, when laxity of discipline, corruption, speculation, avarice, desertion & staying at home were the faults of the army and nation. And to think that he and his officers must suffer ignominious deaths! May God guard and protect them in these dark hours of trial.”
On June 10, she returned to the subject of the captured Confederate leader:
“We are indeed a conquered people. Each day brings the dread fact more strongly to view, but none alas more humiliating and painful to every feeling heart than the fate of our President and great officials….I wept as I pictured [to] myself the hideous fate to which Yankee malignity had condemned ‘those I had delighted to honor.’ Oh God I shudder when I think of it-a living death, for him who wielded our destinies for four years. Great as his errors of judgement have been and much as our failure may have been owing to his obstinate prejudices…still he was a pure minded patriot….To me, it is [a] dreadful idea that not only must he bear in his living tomb the consequences of his own misuse of power, but the execrations of thousands of his countrymen, who lay all the blame of our fearful failure on his shoulders. If there is anyone I pity I & feel for from the depths of my heart, it is Jefferson Davis…
…two soldiers always in the same room, guarding, yet never allowed to exchange a single word with their captive…Lights are not allowed him…and thus leave him to linger out life in the horrible blankness of the tomb…The malignity of such fiends as the Yankees could not invent keener torture.”
[The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes ed by John Marszalek pp. 443-444 and 451-452]
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Very interesting diary entry. Did she write anything about the KKK, suppression of black voting, the Federal occupation of South Carolina, the emergence of the Lost Cause etc. in her later years? It would also be interesting to read of her reaction to the presence of Black Federal troops, the terms under which state could be readmitted.
Black troops:
https://thereconstructionera.com/a-charleston-lady-on-the-capture-of-black-soldiers/