Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 1White, Andrew Dickson
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Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 1
White, Andrew Dickson
Cornell University; Diplomats -- United States -- Biography; White, Andrew Dickson, 1832-1918
Another experience of that summer dwells in my memory.
I was staying, during the first week of September,
with my dear old friend, Dr. Henry M. Field, at Stockbridge,
in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, and
had the good fortune, at the house of his brother, the
eminent jurist, David Dudley Field, to pass a rainy evening
in company with Mr. Burton Harrison, who, after a
distinguished career at Yale, had been the private secretary
of Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy.
On that evening a storm had kept away all but a
few of us, and Mr. Harrison yielded to our entreaties to
give us an account of Mr. Davis's flight at the surrender of
Richmond, from the time when he quietly left his pew in
St. Paul's Church to that of his arrest by United States
soldiers. The story was most vivid, and Mr. Harrison, as
an eye witness, told it simply and admirably. There had
already grown out of this flight of Mr. Davis a most
luxuriant tangle of myth and legend, and it had come to
be generally believed that the Confederate president had
at last endeavored to shield himself behind the women of
his household; that when arrested he was trying to escape
in the attire of his wife, including a hooped skirt and a
bonnet, and that he was betrayed by an incautious display
of his military boots beneath his wife's flounces. The
simple fact was that, having separated from his family
party, and seeking escape to the coast or mountains, he
was again and again led by his affection for his family to
return to them, his fears for them overcoming all care
for himself; and that, as he was suffering from neuralgia,
he wore over his clothing, to guard him from the incessant
rain, Mrs. Davis' waterproof cloak. Out of this grew the
legend which found expression in jubilant newspaper
articles, songs, and caricatures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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