“Everything Seems So Changed”: The Civil War through Mary C. Moore’s Letters, 1861-1863
On January 26, 1861, representatives at the secession convention in Baton Rouge adopted the “Ordinance of Secession” by a vote of 113 to 17. Presented by the representative from St. Martin Parish, John Moore, the Ordinance dissolved “the union between the State of Louisiana and other states united with her under…The Constitution of the United States.”
Portrait of Mary Conrad Weeks Moore. From the collection of the Shadows-on-the-Teche.
On February 4, 1861, Mary Weeks Moore wrote to her husband, John Moore, requesting papers and news of events regarding the secession movement. “I do hope the border states [Virigina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas] will Join or we will look & be insignificant to other nations.” In a March 2 letter, Mary wrote “By what I can glean from the papers, the other States have left us in the lurch and will in spite of their threats and boasts serve with Lincoln.”
Aside from her concern over how many southern states would join the secession movement, by mid-February Mary was facing a rebellion in her own family. Her grandson David Weeks Magill was at school near Petersburg, Virginia. In a letter to Judge Moore, dated February 19, 1861, Mary complained, “David writes that he wants to come home and fight. I beg you will write and forbid it…. So many young men are makeing [sic] the state of the country an excuse for comeing [sic] home…. He will worry my life out if he comes here.”
John may well have written forbidding David to not leave school, but to no avail as by March, Mr. Worsham’s school “broke up” and all the boys were sent home, including David and John’s grandson Aaron Prescott. On April 24, 1861, Governor Thomas Moore called upon the men of Louisiana to support the Confederacy, and David was among the first to enlist. By the end of 1861, a postscript in one of Mary’s letters to John indicates that David was in the army and stationed at Camp Moore.
Just three days before Christmas 1861, Mary sat down to write to her still absent husband. Her son Charley and his family had visited her in New Iberia, but following news of his barn burning, Charley and his family returned home, leaving Mary feeling quite alone. “The only thing cheers me at all is the hope of a war with England rising about the Mason & Slidell affair…. I do hope that England will give them a lesson.”
Originally published in Harper’s Weekly on November 30, 1861, the print depicts the two Confederate commissioners being brought onboard the USS San Jacinto. Library of Congress 2022885927.
Mary was referring to an incident which occurred in November 1861, when Captain Charles Wilkes of the USS San Jacinto stopped the British steamer Trent and removed James Mason and John Slidell, two Confederate commissioners on their way to England to seek support for the southern cause. Mary’s hope of England joining the war on the side of the south might well have come to pass had not U.S. Secretary Seward ordered Mason and Slidell released and reprimanded Wilkes for handling the matter improperly. The release orders were given on December 26, 1861, dashing Mary’s hopes that England would “give them [the North] a lesson.”
Twelve months into the war, Mary’s letters repeatedly refer to the uncertainty of the mail, the lack of letters and papers getting through, and the overwhelming anxiety of not knowing what was happening. A letter written August 7, 1862, includes news that David Magill was at Vicksburg. He wrote home requesting his grandmother to send Austin, an enslaved person on the Magill plantation, to him at Vicksburg, and Mary was attempting to find someone who could take Austin there.
In this same letter, Mary wrote about the terrible looting taking place in Lafourche, specifically at the plantation of Duncan F. Kenner [Ashland-Belle Helene]. Racehorses, silver plates, “carpeting and all valuables” were carried off by the Union Army after “they’d locked the Ladies up in their rooms.” Meanwhile, along the Bayou Teche, there had been so much rain that Mary pitied “the [Confederate] cavalry from Texas exposed to it all in the large prairie.”
By December 16, 1862, Union gun boats were within three miles of Butte La Rose, a mound on the west bank of the Atchafalaya River about 12 miles from St. Martinville. Mary wrote to John requesting his advice on what she “had best send off, all the family are urgeing [sic] me to start the carts.” She was hampered in any attempt to move property from the path of the advancing enemy by the fact that Burwell and Marcellus, two of her enslaved people and “the only ones that know the way,” were too sick to go. She again referred to the “dreadful” happenings at Lafourche, and said the “contrabands [are] worse than the Yankees.” [Contrabands were enslaved people freed by the Union Army.] Mary expressed worry that enslaved individuals near “the Lake are very rebellious [now that] they have seen the Yankees,” and feared the consequences should they become armed.
In the face of the northern troops moving into Louisiana up the Bayou Teche, many planters, including John Moore, William Frederick Weeks, Alfred Weeks, and Allie Weeks Meade, moved their households and enslaved laborers to northwestern Louisiana and Texas. In a letter dated August 2, 1863, Mary wrote she felt “abandoned by all.” The mail had again become very uncertain. The movement of the Union and Confederate armies curtailed travel, and she rarely saw or heard from members of her family. For Mary, “every thing seems so changed.”
In the next few months things would change even more for in November 1863, Major General William Buel Franklin chose the Shadows for his headquarters from which he directed the Union defense of New Iberia, “an important supply and communications link.” General Franklin took over the outbuildings and the ground floor of the main house while Mary, her sister-in-law Hannah Jane Conrad, and enslaved women Louisa, Charity, and Sidney occupied the family living quarters on the second and third floors.
On December 29, 1863, while General Franklin and his men still occupied the property, Mary died in her sleep. On the eve of her death she was reported to have been in a cheerful mood and “laughed at the Yankees” camped around her home. John, writing a few years after the war, credited Mary’s refusal to abandon her house as the reason “that the House and Yard with our beautiful Shrubbery was preserved.” Unlike his plantations near Franklin that were “very much devastated and destroyed.” The Shadows received very little damage, only losing some outbuildings and all fencing.
During the Union occupation of her home, Mary was urged to take the oath of allegiance and by so doing make things easier for herself, but she unhesitatingly refused stating, “No Hannah Jane, my Husband and children shall never know that mortification.”
Originally published in the Shadows Service League newsletter (Vol 13, No 3), March 1991.
