James E. Stewart to John Milton Binckley, October 26, 1865: Part I

[James Erskine Stewart at Luray, Virginia, to John Milton Binckley at Washington City, October 26, 1865, part 1]:

Luray Page Co. Va.

October 28, 1865

Dear Binckley

Your letter of May 25 last did not reach me till the latter part of the summer but was none the less acceptable for that as there is no one upon “God’s green earth” from whom I and my family would have been more delighted to hear. We had many and many times talked of you and yours and wondered into what port the storms and times of pests of war had driven you. Of your venerable old mother we had long since considered that she “had gone to that bosom from whence no traveller returns” and were therefore the more delighted in receiving your letter to find that she was still living.

The objection to your letter is that it tells us so little of yourself and yours. We should have been pleased to have heard something of your wife and children and how you were getting along. What are you doing? Are you still driving away in the same city or are you grinding up pills? Or have you a notion for the Law again, as I have not been told just dreamed you had! Let us know? The first pays regret instantly of “Green Backs” (alas! The Golden Calf with [?] away) the second savors too much the whole do. [ditto?] . . . for a genius of your taste . . . of suits your love of disputation -- as a  . . . at least it does us who are in . . . up.

We shall strike South when there keeping with us money-stay laws and caused no conservatives practice. But still we are as . . . will our calamities as possible over. Old club days. We made a noble struggle . . . we can years for our right, and in all could . . .  

South has last better days. But lack of numbers and resources . . . and no . . .  her teeming millions aided assisted as she was all the time “by all the world and the rest of mankind.” Could we have held out another four or so months, we would have whipped the North. I know you will launch at that and say ah! “Captain” – how mistaken you are. Had not “Stonewall” Jackson . . . the night of the great Chancellorsville, victory he would have bagged Hooker to a deadlier . . . but if he had missed him that night and gone with Lee to Gettysburg we should have won that fight and indeed the war. But with the death of Jackson “our glory” seems to have followed upon our heels, blunder after blunder seemed to tend upon our military efforts ‘till it culminated in the fatal and disastrous removal of Gen’l Joe Johns[t]on from Atlanta. Had that not taken place Sherman would never have made his triumphal march to the coast. But our villainous currency had  . . . to do with our failure to attain ends. It had been a  . . . and on . . . so low that our men deserted by thousands before the spring campaign opened. Lee fought Grant at Petersburg . . . last grapples with . . . skirmish line.

Virginians have been accused in “old times” of vanity (and it occurs to me you used to fling it at me sometimes) in thinking they were the greatest people on earth, but did not this war prove it?  We furnished more and better troops than any two States in the Confederacy. We fought till the last trumpet sounded. Our State bared her bosom to the storm and received its heaviest blows, scarred all over from North to South from East to West. Robbed by the hand of despotic power of our territory, our negroes all gone, our fertile fields desolated and destroyed, our barns and mills burnt &c &c and yet our people stand amidst the ruins comparatively erect submitting gallantly and cheerfully to the fate of war, yet strong and firm in the belief of the righteousness of the cause for which they fought and in the belief of the great principles of Constitutional right and Constitutional liberty, as they are taught in the great “Magna Chart[a]: of the Va. & Ky. resolutions of 1798 & 99, as they did on the day when Beauregard first struck the spark front the flint of the Revolution, when he opened upon Sumter. The great pillars of States Rights and state sovereignty upon which the edifice of our Government stood, and which kept the Government together for nearly a century of time, have however bene terribly assaulted and damaged by this war, and though the country is . . . with all its hosannahs over the Union yet that Union is …………………  years more, it will be high and dry upon that fatal shore, where so many of its “illustrious predecessors” have been wrecked. . .

[Charlotte (aka Charlotta) Stocker Binckley ~ "your venerable old mother" (1788-1877)
John Milton Binckley (1821-1878)
Mary Louisa Mitchell Binckley ~ "your wife" (1838-1930)
Judge James Erskine Stewart (1815-1890)
Fannie E. Stewart (1825-1913)
n.b. The Stewarts and Binckleys lived in Georgetown in 1860. Stewart is listed as a clerk in the 1860 census].

Original manuscript in the John Milton Binckley Papers, 1816-1943. Library of Congress Manuscript Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA. This is my rough transcription. Stewart wrote a torrent of tightly crowded, almost hieroglyphic words, many of them difficult to decipher. I added paragraph breaks for easier reading.  

Many thanks to William Myers for sending scanned copies of the documents from the Binckley papers, and also to Mary Davy and Sally Young for their assistance.