D.G. Martin

CHAPEL HILL — It is hard to put aside the bad feelings we have for wartime adversaries. It is hardest for families who lost loved ones or soldiers who saw their comrades suffer and fall in battle.

Making friends with the former enemy may never be possible for them.

We learned that lesson again recently when Fayetteville Mayor Tony Chavonne recently proposed a sister city relationship with Soc Trang, a small city in southern Vietnam.

He wrote, “Thankfully, we have seen positive change in the four decades since the end of the Vietnam War.... We have a wonderful opportunity to tell the country and the world that our diverse community, reflective in many ways of America’s military conflicts over the decades, has moved past the divisiveness and pain of the past and today celebrates being a military town and honors those who served.”

But not everybody agreed. Some Vietnam Vets said they were not ready for a Vietnamese sister city. “It just dredges up a lot of bad feelings,” one local Vet observed.

Another, responding to the mayor’s effort to heal any remaining wartime wounds said simply, “Sir, I don’t need to be healed.”

Even harder to heal are the open wounds from the American Civil War. It has been more than 145 years since Sherman’s troops marched through Fayetteville on the way to Bentonville, the surrender at Bennett Place---and the occupation of Chapel Hill.

In Chapel Hill, people still talk about the time when the Union troops took over the town in April and early May of 1865. Mostly, they talk about how one young Chapel Hill woman “too quickly” made friends with the enemy general in charge of the occupying forces.
Maybe you remember the story. Ella Swain, daughter of University of North Carolina President and former Governor David Swain, met Union General Smith Atkins when he made an official visit to the President’s home.

It must have been love at first sight. A few months later they were married, over the protest of students, who rang the campus bells for hours to disrupt the wedding ceremony, and in the face of many townspeople, who ignored their invitations to attend.

How could a Southern woman so quickly put aside her negative feelings about the soldiers who had destroyed and conquered her region? And, whatever happened to the couple whose marriage got such an unusual start?

Those questions have been answered thanks to a new book by the couple’s great-great granddaughter, Suzy Barile. She is the author of “Undaunted Heart: The True Story of a Southern Belle & a Yankee General.”

Taking advantage of family records, the writings of contemporary observers like Cornelia Phillips Spencer, and Barlie’s own energetic research, she takes her readers back to 1865 when two seemingly mismatched people fell immediately and deeply in love. Within days after their first meeting, the Yankee general writes love poetry to the Southern belle. She refuses to accept a copy until he modifies it to confess his love for her.

Barlie’s book is non-fiction, but her report on the couple’s courtship reads like a romance novel.

Less intense, but even more satisfying, is her description of how the couple set up housekeeping in Atkins’s hometown of Freeport, Illinois, and built a happy marriage, despite the loss of children and other disappointments. The family maintained Ella Swain Atkins’s North Carolina connections, dividing her time between Illinois and her native state until her untimely death at 38 years of age, in 1881, while she was in North Carolina.

Perhaps Smith and Ella Swain Atkins rushed their peacemaking at the end of the Civil War. But, I think they taught us a good lesson.

Better to make peace too early than to wait too long.
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D.G. Martin is the host of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs Sundays at 5 p.m. Check his blog and view prior programs at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch/