About a week after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in mid-April 1861, 38-year-old South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chesnut sat down with her journal. She had been in Charleston—a city gripped by “the war spirit”—to witness the engagement that marked the opening of the Civil War. Now back in the safety and quiet of her home, she marveled at how quickly life had changed. “I have been sitting idly today,” she wrote, “looking out upon this beautiful lawn, wondering if this can be the same world I was in a few days ago.”
While Chesnut’s musing is over a century-and-a-half old and motivated by vastly different circumstances, it does seem apt today. In a matter of a few months, our world has been turned upside-down by the appearance of COVID-19. Streets and businesses sit largely empty as we shelter in place in hopes of slowing the spread of the virus. Spring and summer plans have been put on hold with no firm idea of when they might resume, if they do at all. In short, we simply don’t know when our lives might begin to get back to normal—or what that normal might look like when it arrives.
Our regular readers will note that the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on this issue of the Monitor. Absent are our Travels and Agenda sections, both rendered impractical to produce given the current restrictions on travel and the cancellation of most Civil War-related events. Conditions permitting, we’ll have them back in the fall.
Until then, please remain vigilant and take care.
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In more positive news, I’m pleased to announce the appearance in this issue of a new column: Fighting Words (page 22), a space where a rotating lineup of historians will probe the unique Civil War origins of a variety of well-known terms and expressions. In this installment, Stephen Berry—who will oversee the space and who readers will remember for his previous Monitor column, Casualties of War—delves into the quirky word used to describe retreats big and small, skedaddle.
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