Author James Johnston has given us a treasure: Washington's own Scarlett O'Hara. Here was a bold, young Southern bride, married to a Washington family split by the Civil War, living out those four terrible years in Richmond to be close to her Confederate husband Henry should he get leave to visit her. Margaret Loughborough endures all the hardships and realities of that appalling conflict, and author Johnston elegantly fleshes out what Margaret describes to us in his chapter entitled "Commentary." Here is a story of hunger and malnutrition, a still-born baby, bloody, dying soldiers, and constant fear.
Margaret digresses at times to tell of donating all her silk gowns to "the cause" so that balloons could be made, of making a ball dress out of old curtain lace faded to brown and working the browned edges into her dress pattern (who wouldn't recall Scarlett in Gone With the Wind pulling down the velvet curtains to have Mammy help her make a stylish gown?). Perhaps her most poignant story is that of the soldier "...who had lost his arms and legs...said he, "I am the happiest man in the South. I wrote my sweetheart and released her from her engagement to such a wreck, but she replied, "Come, if there is enough of you left to be carried to the altar, I hold you to your promise."" Toward the end of the war, Margaret makes her tortuous way across roads in horrible condition to Washington and her husband's family, and there awaits news of Richmond's fall, Henry's return, and then of Lincoln's assassination.
In 2001 author James Johnston stumbled on a draft of Margaret Loughborough's talk to the Daughters of the Confederacy about her war-time experiences during our Civil War. He determined two incredible things: that her original "diary", upon which she based her talk, might still exist somewhere in Washington archives (and he gives us a good account of his hunt for it), and that a brief note of hers, saying that her husband Henry had slipped through Union lines in Washington to visit his parents at their estate "Grassland", might prove Confederate General John McCausland's claim that he had briefly occupied a Union fort and looked out over Washington. Henry was with McCausland, and his family's estate "Grassland" was near Union Fort Gaines.
This is a small book, but so chock full of lost history, surprising revelations, and poignant stories, that each could be a book in itself. Margaret is Washington's Scarlett O'Hara, and this book is true movie material. Is Hollywood listening?
