Suffolk Christian Sun

March 21, 1862

Page 3

YANKEES VISITING WIDOW OF EX-PRESIDENT POLK

General Grant and his staff visited Nashville, and called upon Mrs. James K. Polk.  Of the interview a Yankee writer says:

She received her visitors courteously, but with a polished coldness that indicated sufficiently in which direction her sympathies ran—she was simply polite and ladylike; in no case patriotic.  While she discreetly forbore to give utterance to any expression of sympathy for the South, she as rigidly avoided saying anything that might be construed into a wish for the success of the Government.  She hoped, she said, that the tomb of her husband would protect her household from insult and her property from pillage; further that she expected nothing from the United States and desired nothing.

The correspondent finds “that the ladies of Nashville are as full of treason as they are in occasional cases of loveliness.”  Among the evidences of their contempt for the Yankees the following is given:

Occasionally I met other specimens of Nashville ladies, who, in many cases, supposing me to be a soldier, from the possession of a blue overcoat, described, upon meeting, a wide semi-circle of avoidance, swinging, as they did so, their restundant skirts with a contemptuous flirt, far out, as if the very touch of a blue coat would be contamination.   And then the angle at which the noses of the naughty darlings went up, and the extent to which their lips and eyes went down were not the least interesting portion of these little byplays, and assisted materially in showing the exquisite breeding of these amiable demoiselles.

Richmond Enquirer

[Transcribed by Sharon Strout]