"Dear Darling Loulie"

By Rachel Taylor Hall

This compilation of the letters of Cordelia Lewis Scales originally was transcribed and annotated in the 1950’s by Dr. Benjamin Gray Lumpkin and Martha Neville Lumpkin. The genealogical interest the pair took in their ancestors centered on family research into the life of Dabney Minor Scales, who served as a second lieutenant on the Shenandoah, the most important and famous ship of the Confederate Navy.

Now available in an electronic edition for the first time, this collection of letters written by Cordelia Lewis Scales, who lived eight miles north of Holly Springs. Mississippi, depicts the life and general morale of the civilian population during the War between the States. Four of these letters were included in Percy L. Rainwater (ed.), "The Civil War Letters of Cordelia Scales," in Journal of Mississippi History, 1 (July, 1939), 169–181, which produced seven letters covering the period from May 19, 1861, to February 18, 1866. The collection includes a variety of letters also penned by Dabney Scales and other members of Cordelia's immediate family.

The research notes that annotate the letters from Cordelia are both anecdotal and academic. Many insights are provided by these notes and comments shed important light on life in Holly Springs before, during and after the War between the States. Mentions of famous politicians and military leaders add color to the emotions and experiences of Cordelia and other family members who penned letters in this collections. Photographs of Dabney Minor Scales and Cordelia Lewis Scales are included in the electronic version. Also included are photographs of original sketches drawn by Dabney Minor Scales, which he inserted into his letters regarding his naval service on the Shenandoah and the Arkansas. Material on the lives and treatment of slaves and former slaves during these periods is also provided.

With an ever growing interest in the War Between the States, online documents such as this lend support to the fact that this War of Northern Aggression left an ongoing imprint on Southern culture. Re-enactors, whether mildly interested or hardcore, whether from North or South, whether academics or rebel progeny, will all find excellent material in this collection of letters that was carefully annotated with historical background material so lovingly by Ben and Martha Lumpkin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broomhandle Books
• Release date: Sep 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311580511

Rachel Taylor Hall

Rachel Taylor Hall is a true daughter of the South. She was born and raised in Clarksville, Tennessee, on the Taylor Plantation.In 1817, Drewery Taylor purchased 400 acres of crop land in Montgomery County, Tennessee and set up the Taylor Plantation. The working land produced corn, soybeans and tobacco. By 1849 the Taylor plantation had expanded to nearby land where it included a grist mill and a candle factory.The plantation remained a working farm until the late 1980’s. At the time the original house and land were sold, the overseer’s cabin, coal house, former slave cabins, corn crib, horse barn and several other outbuildings were still standing. At the time of sale, the Taylor family took with them one article in particular: a freestanding combination safe from the overseer’s cabin.The members of the Taylor family who vacated the property said this safe had been in the overseer’s cabin for 150 years. It was acquired new and still remains in the hands of Rachel Taylor, the last living Taylor descendant.Rachel Taylor, notwithstanding the fear of ancestors turning in their graves, moved temporarily to Ohio to attend college and married a Yankee in 1987. To ensure she would not be the cause of another Yankee invasion to the South, Rachel refused to bear children until returning to Tennessee. She and her own Southern children continue each day to do their best to educate and indoctrinate a Yankee husband and father to Southern ways and customs. As such, the war goes on!

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Foreword

Genealogical research has been improved and facilitated greatly by the growth of online software and platforms for creating family trees. Along with that, the sharing of previously family only documents has become common. As our ancestries begin to link and correspond with those of people we previously had no idea even existed, many of these private and exclusive documents take on new levels of significance.

When Broomhandle Books received this manuscript via e-mail, we agreed to publish it with the understanding that it may become useful to others searching for background into the Minor and Scales families, who stood for the Confederacy during the War Between the States.

The manuscripts presented in our Genealogy series come in many forms. Some, like this one, are the gathering of correspondence by family members and actual scholarly research into a family’s past as it linked with the greater events of its time. Others are manuscripts containing the reminiscences of the more intimate details of family life from the perspective of individual members. Still others take bits and pieces of family history, both anecdotal and primary source, to draw out the life or lives of ancestors in order to remember them for future generations.

In any event, we believe the pieces published in our genealogy series all will offer useful insights as individuals continue to search their backgrounds for more and more substantive material about family background.

The Editors at Broomhandle Books

August 10, 2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by the Publisher

Introduction to the Third Edition

Photograph of Dabney Minor Scales

Photograph of Cordelia Lewis Scales

The Shenandoah and Lieutenant Dabney Minor Scales

Sketch of The Shenandoah

Introduction to the First Edition

Letter I: May 19, 1861

Letter II: August 4, 1861

Letter III: August 17, 1861

Letter IV: October 11, 1861

Letter V: November 24, 1861

Letter VI: February 9, 1862

Letter VII: May 18, 1862

Letter VIII: October 29, 1862

Letter IX: January 27, 1863

Letter X: January 20, 1864

Letter XI: February 18, 1866

Letter XII: June 21, 1866

Letter XIII: October 15, 1866

Letter XIV: November 20, 1866

Letter XV: December 11, 1866

Letter XVI: December 17, 1866

Letter XVII: February 6, 1867

Letter XVIII: February 6, 1867

Letter XIX: April 7, 1867

Letter XX: April 28, 1867

Letter XXI: May 28, 1867

Letter XXII: June 12, 1867

Letter XXIII: August 2, 1867

Letter XXIV: September 22, 1867

Letter XXV: October 8, 1867

Letter XXVI: October 14, 1867

Letter XXVII: December 22, 1867

Letter XXVIII: February 14, 1868

Letter XXIX: February 14, 1868

Letter XXX: May 29, 1868

Letter XXXI: June 9, 1868

Letter XXXII: June 9, 1868

Letter XXXIII: December 8, 1868

Letter XXXIV: December 8, 1868

Letter XXXV: April 2, 1869

Letter XXXVI: December 4, 1869

Letter XXXVII: February 7, 1871

Conclusion

Appendix 1, Marshall County Volunteers from Holly Springs, Mississippi

Appendix 2, Dabney Scales’s Letter on the Cruise of the Shenandoah

Delia’s letter to Dabney Scales, March 8, 1866

Identifications of the people mentioned herein

Dabney Scales’s letter written from the Arkansas

Notes to Text, Commentary, and Letters

Dear Darling Loulie

Letters of Cordelia Lewis Scales to Loulie W. Irby

During and After the War Between the States

INTRODUCTION TO THE THIRD EDITION

The compilation of the letters of Cordelia Lewis Scales began in the 1950’s by my Great Aunt and Great Uncle, Ben Gray Lumpkin and Martha Neville Lumpkin. The genealogical interest the pair took in their predecessors centered on their research into the life of Dabney Minor Scales, who served as a second lieutenant on the Shenandoah, the most important and famous ship of the Confederate Navy.

Like most native Southerners who admire and honor their family members who served the Confederacy, I found the sentiments for liberty as alive in my own heart as those that Cordelia expressed in 1861, when she wrote The love of liberty is the truest & noblest aspiration which can ever inspire the human heart. In the last few years, Americans from many States have gathered signatures and offered up petitions of secession to the White House. The stand for states’ rights remains central to the lifeblood of American democracy. If secession petitions give solace to the aggrieved in our divided nation of today, we can experience the feelings of our predecessors, whose same love of personal and cultural liberty sparked the birth of the Confederacy so many years ago.

I decided to make this book available in its entirety, as completed by my Great Aunt and Great Uncle Lumpkin, to a wider audience. As such, I have transcribed this document, correcting typographical errors and missing dates in the notes and commentary sections, to put it into the necessary format to make it accessible in any online reading format. While doing so, I have recreated digitally the photographs and drawings from the original two editions of the book.

Like Martha Neville Lumpkin, and for exactly the same reasons, I struggled to maintain the misspellings and errors throughout Cordelia’s letters, as well as the letters of others in her family. However, perhaps the most difficult part of my work was linking the voluminous and valuable notes addended to the material presented in this collection. Throughout the original printed first and second editions the notes were available on the very pages containing the letters themselves. As such a system would not work with an edition for electronic readers, I have renumbered all the notes and moved them to the end of the document. I trust readers will find little difficulty in jumping back and forth using the links between the text and the notes. The notes do shed great light on the contents of some of the letters and I encourage readers to access them as an aid in understanding the background, characters and events referred to in Delia’s letters.

However, for me, the greatest advantage to moving the historical footnotes off the pages of the letters themselves was to free up the actual text of the letters. The letters became exactly as my Great Aunt described:

Delia’s errors in spelling and her failure to conform to modern punctuation are very evident; but she was writing in the careless haste of youth – for Loulie’s eyes alone – and she wrote, and spelled, as she spoke.

Cordelia Lewis Scales was a vibrant young woman with a strong voice. In the early years her voice was Southern, adolescent, vibrant, rebellious, hopeful, and brave. In the later correspondence the voice remains brave and rebellious, but becomes also mature, fearful, despondent, grief-stricken and disbelieving. Freed of the weight of notes on military campaigns, troop movements, newspaper accounts, and family lore, we see Cordelia completely and fully as she reveals herself to her correspondent as events occur and information filters through her home.

With an ever growing interest in the War Between the States, online documents such as this lend support to the fact that this War of Northern Aggression has left an ongoing imprint on our Southern culture. Re-enactors, whether mildly interested or hardcore, whether from North or South, whether academics or rebel progeny, will all find excellent material in this collection of letters that was carefully annotated with historical background material so lovingly by Ben and Martha Lumpkin.

I thank them for ensuring this treasured family correspondence received the careful attention they provided. I trust they would approve of my efforts in ensuring their own work sees its well-deserved light of day in the digital age.

Rachel Taylor Hall

September 10, 2014

DABNEY MINOR SCALES

... a gallant young officer ...

CORDELIA LEWIS SCALES

Age 15

"the right bower of the Rebel army"

Less than a year after this picture was made, Cordelia was writing the letters contained in this book. The hint of mischief in her eyes is reflected in her letters.

The Shenandoah and Lieutenant Dabney Minor Scales

The D.M. Scales who appended the note to the sketch of the Shenandoah was a second lieutenant on that most famous ship of the Confederate Navy – which is the subject of the book entitled The Gallant Rebel by Stanley Horne (published by Rutgers University Press, 1947). Some of the activities of the Shenandoah are detailed in Lieutenant Scales’ letter reprinted in Appendix 2 of this third edition of Dear Darling Loulie.

Before being assigned to the Shenandoah, Lieutenant Scales, a native of Marshall County, Mississippi, had volunteered for duty in the armed forces of Mississippi, from which he resigned as indicated by his letter to Governor Pettus contained in this volume. His first duty in the Confederate Navy was service on the Arkansas. From the deck of that ship, he wrote the letter and sketched the action of that ship near Vicksburg, also contained in this volume. Dabney’s sketch from that letter is reproduced in its entirety herein.

As indicated by the letters and notes in Dear Darling Loulie, as well as the section on the Scales family in Martha Neville Lumpkins’s book entitled, Minor, Scales, Cottrell, and Gray Families of Virginia, North Carolina, and Mississippi (1974), pages 15-48, Dabney Scales was the son of Peter Scales and Ann Meriwether Minor. Besides the Delia of the letters (who married Ben Cottrell Gray), he had brothers and sisters listed on page 28 of Martha Neville Lumpkin’s book on the Minor and Scales families.

After the war, Dabney Minor Scales married Susan Winchester Powell. Their children were George Winchester (1890-1979), Dabney, and Ann Minor, who married R. Yates Welford, and lived in Cordova, Tennessee. Mrs. Yates generously supplied the sketch of the Shenandoah contained herein. George Scales homesteaded land in Wyoming about 20 miles from Sheridan, and became a prosperous rancher and Ford dealer.

Immediately after returning from the Confederate Navy, Dabney Minor Scales spent a short time in Mexico, later studied law, and practiced law in Memphis until his death in 1920.

This sketch of the Shenandoah herein is copyrighted.

Confederate States Steamer Shenandoah

Having received by the bark Barracouta the sad intelligence of the overthrow of the Confederate Government, all attempts to destroy the shipping or property of the United States will cease from this date, in accordance with which the first lieutenant, William C. Whittle, Jr., received the order from the commander to strike below the battery and disarm the ship and crew.

2d of Aug 1865 D.M. Scales

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST EDITION

This book contains a series of letters which were written by Cordelia (Delia) Lewis Scales and members of her family to Loulie W. Irby – Delia’s schoolmate at the State Female Institute, Memphis, Tennessee – during and soon after the War Between the States.

Loulie was evidently a dear and thoughtful person, for she kept these letters all her life; and when she died, her daughter found them among her effects, with the following request, written with a pencil on ruled paper:

Send to Cordelia Scales Gray of Holly Springs, Miss. When I am dead, or to her children.

Lou W. Anderson

July 21th, 1898

The letters covering the period of the war were written by Delia. In the post war letters, she is joined by other members of her family.

When I first copied these letters, I was in my teens; and I must have been embarrassed at my grandmother’s phonetic spelling and, sometimes, bad grammar; for I did a vigorous job of editing; and if I failed to correct an error, it was because I did not recognize it. This time, I frequently used a magnifying glass to read the faded pages so that I could reproduce the letters just as they were written. In the cold bluntness of the typewritten page, Delia’s errors in spelling and her failure to conform to modern punctuation are very evident; but she was writing in the careless haste of youth – for Loulie’s eyes alone – and she wrote, and spelled, as she spoke. [See Note 1]

I have added footnotes which are associated with some of Delia’s allusions and have introduced some of the letters with explanatory notes to set the scene for her account of events. I hope I have not burdened the letters with too many notes; for I have read them at intervals for many years and have never failed to find in them a pleasant chuckle and a renewed appreciation of the gallantry of the persons whose characters are written into their letters; and I want other members of the family to share my pleasure.

Since they were close friends, Loulie obviously understood Delia’s allusions to members of the Scales family; but we, reading the letters nearly a hundred years later, need an account of when Delia’s family came to Mississippi and their relationships.

In 1836, four years after the Treaty of Pontotoc opened the Chickasaw territory in north Mississippi to white settlers, Dabney Minor left Orange County, Virginia and came to Mississippi. He settled about ten miles north of Holly Springs, in Marshall County, and called his home Woodlawn, after the Minor home in Virginia. [See Note 2] By 1838, the number of settlers in the vicinity of Dabney’s home had increased to such an extent that the little town of Hudsonville was incorporated. [See Note 3]

Dabney must have given enthusiastic reports of the possibilities in Mississippi when he wrote home, for in 1845 Peter Scales, who had married Dabney’s sister, Ann Meriwether Minor, and was living at Woodlawn, sold the old home place to Ann’s cousin, John Todd Quarles, and came to Mississippi. [See Note 4] He settled about eight miles northeast of Holly Springs, near Hudsonville, and called his home Oakland.

Besides Cordelia Lewis, Peter and Ann Scales had seven children, all born at Woodlawn, in Virginia. Ellen, the oldest of the Scales children, died in Mississippi in 1850, aged 22. John Laidly, a boy of 15, died in 1852. At the time Mississippi seceded from the Union, January 9, 1861, the remaining children were alive. They were:

MARY, born May 14, 1830, married to George N. Robinson in September, 1855, and was living in Memphis.

JOSEPH WATKINS, born August 12, 1832, probably was practicing law either in Holly Springs or Memphis.

HENRY MINOR, born March 17, 1835. I believe Henry was living at Hernando, Mississippi. He graduated in law at the University of Mississippi in 1859. [See Note 5]

LUCIE MINOR, born November 30, 1839, married John Adair Humphries on January 1, 1859. Within a year she was a widow; and in 1861 she and her little daughter, Adair, were living at Oakland. [See Note 6]

DABNEY MINOR, born June 1, 1842, was a student at Annapolis. On February 18, 1861, he resigned and returned to Mississippi.

CORDELIA LEWIS, born July 18, 1844 [See Note 7] was a student at the State Female Institute in Memphis. Probably because of her illness (see Letter IV), Delia left School early in the spring of 1861 and returned to Oakland.

Although no battles were fought on Mississippi soil in the first year of the war, her sons eagerly answered the call to duty, and won military distinction at every point where the sovereignty of their new nation was threatened. At home, Delia kept an observing eye on the news from the battle fronts, flirted with every uniform she encountered, and periodically wrote Loulie. Her version of a storm tossed era began on May 19, 1861 when she wrote Loulie the first letter in this series.

LETTER I

… how my heart ached to bid my dear brothers farewell …

Home Sweet Home

Oakland

May 19th 1861

My Dearest little Loulie,

Once more I am permitted to perform the pleasing duty of returning thanks for the reception of glad tidings from a loved and absent friend. Your kind letter came yesterday morning; and received, like all its predesessors, a most warm and heartfelt welcome. I am sorry, dear Loulie, that it took you so long to decide whether it was worth answering or not but am very glad the decision was in my favor.

I was very much surprised to see that you had left the old college. I supposed you left before Tennessee joined our Southern Confederacy. I think your Pa acted perfectly right, and it shows that he is a true hearted Southerner. [See Note 8]

I am very sorry on your account that Caldwell will leave for I know your great attachment for him. I dont care how many leave, now that all my brothers have left, for the more that go the less they will have to do. Brother Henry is still at Pensacola, poor fellow, he’s had a hard time of it. [See Note 9]

Oh! Lou, you cant imagine how my heart ached to bid my dear brothers farewell, not knowing that I would ever see them again; but I will not anticipate misfortune, and as a passing