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Portrait of a civilian
Elizabeth Herndon Maury
on the Virginia home front
The war came early to Elizabeth Herndon
Maury. Born into a leading Virginia family in
1835, she was the daughter of famous
oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury,
and his wife, Anne Hull Herndon. She
married a cousin named William A. Maury,
and the couple were living in Washington,
DC, with their young daughter when war
erupted in 1861. Like Mrs Robert E. Lee,
Betty and Will Maury became refugees
almost immediately. Their staunch southern
sympathies and loyalty to Virginia dictated
that they move south. Over the next two
years, Maury spent most of her time with
relatives and friends in Fredericksburg,
Richmond, and other places between those
two cities. A diary for the period June 1861
to March 1863 details her thoughts and
movements and illuminates several facets of
civilian life in the Confederacy.
Maury made no apologies for her support
of Virginia's decision to secede. When a
gentleman from New York voiced regret at
her father's resignation from the United
States navy, Betty immediately defended the
action. 'He speaks ... of Pa's resignation ... as
if he were dead,' she wrote on 3 June 1861.
'I told him that I was proud of my father
before, but I was a hundred times prouder of
him now.' Northerners had always honored
her father 'far more than those at the South,
but he could not take sides against his own
people, against his native State and against
the right.' Betty bore no good will towards
Virginians who failed to support the
Confederacy. Learning of Winfield Scott's
decision to retire as General-in-Chief of the
Union armies in November 1861, she
penned a scathing reaction: 'Lincoln and his
Cabinet called upon the old humbug to
express their regret and thank him for his
services to his country and his adherence to
the Union,' she wrote. 'The old crocodile
Elizabeth Herndon Maury. whose diary was published
privately by her daughter in l938.The edition ran to just
25 copies, making it one of the scarcest and most
desirable Civil War diaries. (Collection of Fredericksburg
and Spotsylvania National Military Park)was effected to tears and wishes that he was
able to assist in crushing the rebellion. And
he is a Virginian.'
The precipitate departure from Washington
had left Betty without most of her possessions- a common experience for Confederate
refugees. She had lived a comfortable life, and
she missed her things. A sense of longing and
unpredictability accompanied a diary entry
written in Fredericksburg in the summer of
1861: 'It is strange how one can become
accustomed to almost any mode of life. Here
we are now almost as happy as in our best
days and we cannot look into the future of
this world at all. Cannot form an idea as to
where or in what condition we may be one
month hence.'