Civil War Profiles: Yankee woman plus Rebel man equals inevitable friction

Date Published: August 28, 2015
By Thomas J. Ryan
Special to the Coastal Point

... Ferris noted in her diary that on Tuesday evening, March 29, 1864, her cousin Ferris Bringhurst alerted her that an acquaintance named George Moody had arrived in town. Moody was a captured Confederate soldier released from prison at Fort Delaware under military escort ... “Our meeting was stormy,” Anna recorded ...

“<W>ell, Anna are you as much of an Abolitionist as you were?” Anna pointedly responded, “<Y>es, ten times blacker than ever” ...

... “As far as appearance goes, he looks as if he had ‘stolen the livery of Heaven to serve the devil in.’” She continued more candidly, “His military life has developed his remarkable personal advantages, he wears the real old-fashioned cocked hat & is a beau ideal of a soldier of the Revolutionary type — as magnificent as Mr. Washington himself — I have never seen anything like him & our soldiers look quite insignificant beside him.”

Ferris recovered from her reverie with the comment that Moody had a “full share of Southern arrogance, which is really imperial in its way and is still ‘full of fire & fury,’ but not I think of real hope & confidence in their bad cause.” She wrote that she was glad to have seen him but preferred they would not meet again until we have “Union & Liberty one & inseparable <re>established all over our country” ...

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