Matilda Champion

Matilda Champion: The War Years
By Rebecca Blackwell Drake

Matilda Champion, the beautiful red-haired wife of Sidney S. Champion, was thirty-four years old and the mother of four small children when the war came to Champion Hill. Her husband, Sid Champion, had joined with the 28th Mississippi Cavalry as early as March of 1862 and was with his regiment in Vicksburg at the time.

The 1906 photograph of Matilda Montgomery Champion. At the time of the photograph she was 77 years and 8 months old.

On the morning of May 16, 1863, Matilda was at home when the battle erupted. She sought safety into the cellar where she held her youngest son, Sid II, in her lap until the sounds of battle subsided. Her three older children, William, Balfour and Mary were most likely in the cellar as well. As soon travel was possible, she left in the carriage with the children, heading for her parents home in Madison County.

In the hours and days following the Battle of Champion Hill, Grant used the Champion home as headquarters and as a hospital. Matilda's lovely home and gardens became the site for major and minor surgical procedures, including amputations. Many a soldier lost a limb while lying on Matilda's dinning room table.

One of the Union soldiers to suffer an amputation was Pvt. C. M. Parker, who returned to Champion Hill in the years after the war. He later wrote to Matilda recalling that sad day in both of their lives: "Our regt stayed the night of May 15th at Bolton. How distinctly I remember it since it was a lovely evening. We were tired of long marches and that night we slept soundly on the green grass. Oh! What a great strong young man I was - it was my last night with a full set of limbs. You speak of things at your old home on May 16, 1863. I do not know just where your extension table was used. There were many operating tables. I should think more than twenty. I can remember seeing several from where I lay - they were out under the trees in the shade, tho some were in the house. Oh! I saw some awful operations as I lay there waiting for my turn the night of the 16th. I lay under a tree - I think a pine - just north of the west gate. The next morning I was moved round east of the house under a shade made from boughs of trees. In the afternoon, after my amputation, I was moved cross the road where the field hospital was established. I stayed there just one month then was sent north. Yes, I ate many a mess of soup cooked in your pots."

During the Union occupation of the Champions' home and in the months to follow, Matilda continued to live at Brae Mar, the plantation home of her parents in nearby Madison County. She returned to Champion Hill on July 2-3 to save what items she could from her war-torn home. On July 10, she wrote to Sid who was taken prisoner immediately after the fall of Vicksburg: "Well, our beloved Vicksburg has fallen, the city of a Southern heart's pride. Our own Mississippi is now invaded and what is to become of us? We must suffer as others have done long since our property was destroyed……I am willing to work but Oh God when will this war end and let severed families be reunited. Our house is destroyed, torn to pieces and perhaps burned by this time. I was there on the 2nd and 3rd of this month to get away all we had left there; much is destroyed but we have enough yet if we could only be permitted to enjoy it once more."

In 1863-1864, as the war progressed, Sid rejoined his regiment and left for northern Georgia to fight in the campaign for Atlanta. Matilda was forced to move to a refugee home in a poor and isolated section of Rankin County. Here, she was safe from the vagrants who were pilfering homes around the countryside. For the remainder of the war, Matilda lived a lonely existence in the refugee home, lamenting all that she had lost as a result of the great conflict.

In 1865, following the surrender, Sid and Matilda were finally reunited at Champion Hill where they built a modest house near the site of their original home. However, things were never the same. Matilda's grandson, Sid III, described the final years of his grandfather's life: "Sid was not the man he once was. The Georgia Campaign had taken too much out of him. His wound [bullet through the neck during the Battle of Nashville in 1864] kept on hurting. He had drawn too heavily on his spiritual strength and his physical energy. He now knew that he had believed in too many things that were not so. He had no will to live and so an attack of fever carried him away in 1868. He was a broken old man at 45 years of age."

In later years, many a Union soldier returned to visit the battlefield at Champion Hill. Matilda greeted all the veterans hospitably and reminisced the war with them. She also corresponded with those who wrote to her. In 1902, W. A. Oliphant from Petersburg, Indiana, wrote an apology for the part that he played in the destruction of the Champion home: "I am glad to know that you are still living for I know that the world is better off with you in it. I remember well your kindness to me in other days and it pains me exceedingly to know that I was a party to the destruction of your beautiful plantation. But, I was only a machine of war. I was a kind hearted boy who never knowingly hurt a human being except as an act of war."

In October of 1906, Matilda was invited by the state of Illinois to attend the dedication of the Illinois Monument as a special guest. Matilda gladly accepted the honor and took the train to Vicksburg to celebrate in the occasion. A year later, she received a letter requesting that she send a photograph of herself for publication in a book entitled "Illinois at Vicksburg." The letter stated, "All of us felt so highly honored to have you with us on that occasion that we feel the story of 'Illinois at Vicksburg' would not be complete without your picture as our most distinguished guest."

In the end, Matilda Montgomery Champion and her willingness to forgive endeared her to those she once considered the enemy. Matilda died in 1907 at the age of 78. To her grandson, Sid Champion III, she left everything including the land known as Champion Hill.

Matilda Champion in 1907 at the dedication of the monument to Brig. Gen. Lloyd Tilghman on the Champion Hill Battlefield.

*Historic Source: Notes by Sidney Champion III as told to him by his grandmother, Matilda. The Civil War letters of Sid and Matilda Champion, 1862-1865, now the property of Sidney Johnson Champion, will be edited and published by Rebecca Drake and Margie Bearss in 2005.