HOW SLEEP THE BRAVE?
Two days afterward, Mollie Ainslie took the train for the North,
accompanied by Lugena and her children. At the same time went
Captain Pardee, under instructions from Hesden Le Moyne to verify
the will, discover who the testator really was, and then ascertain
whether he had any living heirs.
To Mollie Ainslie the departure was a sad farewell to a life which
she had entered upon so full of abounding hope and charity, so
full of love for God and man, that she could not believe that all
her bright hopes had withered and only ashes remained. The way was
dark. The path was hedged up. The South was "redeemed."
The poor, ignorant white man had been unable to perceive that
liberty for the slave meant elevation to him also. The poor,
ignorant colored man had shown himself, as might well have been
anticipated, unable to cope with intelligence, wealth, and the subtle
power of the best trained political intellects of the nation; and
it was not strange. They were all alone, and their allies were
either as poor and weak as themselves, or were handicapped with the
brand of Northern birth. These were their allies--not from choice,
but from necessity. Few, indeed, were there of the highest and the
best of those who had fought the nation in war as they had fought
against the tide of liberty before the war began--who would accept
the terms on which the nation gave re-established and greatly-increased
power to the States of the South.
So there were ignorance and poverty and a hated race upon one side,
and, upon the other, intelligence, wealth, and pride. The former
_outnumbered_ the latter; but the latter, as compared with the
former, were a Grecian phalanx matched against a scattered horde
of Scythian bowmen. The Nation gave the jewel of liberty into the
hands of the former, armed them with the weapons of self-government,
and said: "Ye are many; protect what ye have received." Then it
took away its hand, turned away its eyes, closed its ears to every
cry of protest or of agony, and said: "We will not aid you nor
protect you. Though you are ignorant, from you will we demand
the works of wisdom. Though you are weak, great things shall be
required at your hands." Like the ancient taskmaster, the Nation
said: "_There shall no straw be given you, yet shall ye deliver
the tale of bricks._"
But, alas! they were weak and inept. The weapon they had received
was two-edged. Sometimes they cut themselves; again they caught it
by the blade, and those with whom they fought seized the hilt and
made terrible slaughter. Then, too, they were not always wise--which
was a sore fault, but not their own. Nor were they always brave,
or true--which was another grievous fault; but was it to be believed
that one hour of liberty would efface the scars of generations of
slavery? Ah! well might they cry unto the Nation, as did Israel
unto Pharaoh: "Theree is no straw given unto thy servants, and they
say to us, 'Make brick': and behold thy servants are beaten; but
the fault is in thine own people." They had simply demonstrated
that in the years of Grace of the nineteenth century liberty could
not be maintained nor prosperity achieved by ignorance and poverty,
any more than in the days of Moses adobe bricks could be made without
straw. The Nation gave the power of the South into the hands of
ignorance and poverty and inexperience, and then demanded of them
the fruit of intelligence, the strength of riches, and the skill of
experience. It put before a keen-eyed and unscrupulous minority--a
minority proud, aggressive, turbulent, arrogant, and scornful
of all things save their own will and pleasure--the temptation to
enhance their power by seizing that held by the trembling hands
of simple-minded and unskilled guardians. What wonder that it was
ravished from their care?
Mollie Ainslie thought of these things with some bitterness. She
did not doubt the outcome. Her faith in truth and liberty, and
her proud confidence in the ultimate destiny of the grand Nation
whose past she had worshiped from childhood, were too strong to
permit that. She believed that some time in the future light would
come out of the darkness; but between then and the present was a
great gulf, whose depth of horror no man knew, in which the people
to serve whom she had given herself must sink and suffer--she
could not tell how long. For them there was no hope.
She did not, indeed, look for a continuance of the horrors which
then prevailed. She knew that when the incentive was removed the
acts would cease. There would be peace, because there would no
longer be any need for violence. But she was sure there would be
no real freedom, no equality of right, no certainty of justice.
She did not care who ruled, but she knew that this people--she
felt almost like calling them her people--needed the incentive of
liberty, the inspiriting rivalry of open and fair competition, to
enable them to rise. Ay, to prevent them from sinking lower and
lower. She greatly feared that the words of a journal which gloried
in all that had been done toward abbreviating and annulling the
powers, rights, and opportunities of the recent slaves might yet
become verities if these people were deprived of such incentives.
She remembered how deeply-rooted in the Southern mind was the idea
that slavery was a social necessity. She did not believe, as so
many had insisted, that it was founded merely in greed. She believed
that it was with sincere conviction that a leading journal had
declared: "The evils of free society are insufferable. Free society
must fail and give way to a _class society_--a social system
old as the world, universal as man."
She knew that the leader of a would-be nation had declared: "A
thousand must die as slaves or paupers in order that one gentleman
may live. Yet they are cheap to any nation, even at that price."
So she feared that the victors in the _post-bellum_ strife
which was raging around her would succeed, for a time at least, in
establishing this ideal "class society." While the Nation slumbered
in indifference, she feared that these men, still full of the spirit
of slavery, in the very name of law and order, under the pretense
of decency and justice, would re-bind those whose feet had just
begun to tread the path of liberty with shackles only less onerous
than those which had been dashed from their limbs by red-handed
war. As she thought of these things she read the following words
from the pen of one who had carefully watched the process of
"redemption," and had noted its results and tendency--not bitterly
and angrily, as she had done, but coolly and approvingly:
"We would like to engrave a prophecy on stone, to be read of generations
in the future. The Negro, in these [the Southern] States, will be
slave again or cease to be. His sole refuge from extinction will
be in slavery to the white man." [Footnote: Out of the numerous
declarations of this conviction which have been made by the
Southern press every year since the war, I have selected one from
the _Meridian (Miss.) Mercury_ of July 31st, 1880. I have done
this simply to show that the sentiment is not yet dead.]
She remembered to have heard a great man say, on a memorable
occasion, that "the forms of law have always been the graves of buried
liberties." She feared that, under the "forms" of _subverted_
laws, the liberties of a helpless people would indeed be buried.
She had little care for the Nation. It was of those she had served
and whose future she regarded with such engrossing interest that she
thought. She did not dream of remedying the evil. That was beyond
her power. She only thought she might save some from its scath. To
that she devoted herself.
The day before, she had visited the cemetery where her brother's
ashes reposed. She had long ago put a neat monument over his grave,
and had herself supplemented the national appropriation for its
care. It was a beautiful inclosure, walled with stone, verdant
with soft turf, and ornamented with rare shrubbery. Across it ran
a little stream, with green banks sloping either way. A single great
elm drooped over its bubbling waters. A pleasant drive ran with
easy grade and graceful curves down one low hill and up another.
The iron gate opened upon a dusty highway. Beside it stood the
keeper's neat brick lodge. In front, and a little to the right,
lay a sleepy Southern town half hidden in embowering trees. Across
the little ravine within the cemetery, upon the level plateau, were
the graves, marked, in some cases, by little square white monuments
of polished marble, on which was but the single word, "Unknown." A
few bore the names of those who slept below. But on one side there
were five long mounds, stretching away, side by side, as wide as
the graves were long, and as long as four score graves. Smoothly
rounded from end to end, without a break or a sign, they seemed a
fit emblem of silence. Where they began, a granite pillar rose high,
decked with symbols of glory interspersed with emblems of mourning.
Cannon, battered and grim, the worn-out dogs of war, gaped with
silent jaws up at the silent sky. No name was carved on base or
capital, nor on the marble shield upon the shaft. Only, "Sacred to
the memory of the unknown heroes who died--."
How quick the memory fills out the rest! There had been a military
prison of the Confederacy just over the hill yonder, where the
corn now grew so rank and thick. Twelve thousand men died there
and were thrown into those long trenches where are now heaped-up
mounds that look like giants' graves--not buried one by one, with
coffin, shroud, and funeral rite, but one upon another heaped and
piled, until the yawning pit would hold no more. No name was kept,
no grave was marked, but in each trench was heaped one undistinguishable
mass of dead humanity!
Mollie Ainslie, when she had bidden farewell to her brother's grave,
looked on these piled-up trenches, scanned the silent shaft, and
going into the keeper's office just at hand, read for herself the
mournful record:
Known 94
Unknown 12,032
------
Total 12,126
Died in Prison 11,700
As she wandered back to the town, she gleaned from what she had
seen a lesson of charity for the people toward whom her heart had
been full of hardness.
"It was thus," she said to herself, "that they treated brave foemen
of their own race and people, who died, not on the battle-field,
but of lingering disease in crowded prison pens, in the midst of
pleasant homes and within hearing of the Sabbath chimes. None cared
enough to give to each a grave, put up a simple board to mark the
spot where love might come and weep--nay, not enough even to make
entry of the name of the dead some heart must mourn. And if they
did this to their dead foemen and kinsmen, their equals, why should
we wonder that they manifest equal barbarity toward the living
freedman--their recent slave, now suddenly exalted. _It is the
lesson and the fruitage of slavery!"_
And so she made excuse both for the barbarity of war and the
savagery which followed it by tracing both to their origin. She
did not believe that human nature changed in an hour, but that
centuries past bore fruit in centuries to come. She thought that
the former master must be healed by the slow medicament of time
before he could be able to recognize in all men the sanctity of
manhood; as well as that the freedman must be taught to know and
to defend his rights.
When she left the cemetery, she mounted Midnight for a farewell
ride. The next morning, before he arose, Hesden Le Moyne heard the
neigh of his old war-horse, and, springing from his bed, he ran
out and found him hitched at his gate. A note was tied with a blue
ribbon to his jetty forelock. He removed it, and read:
"I return your noble horse with many thanks for the long loan. May
I hope that he will be known henceforth only as Midnight?
"MOLLIE."
He thought he recognized the ribbon as one which he had often seen
encircling the neck of the writer, and foolishly treasured it upon
his heart as a keepsake.
The train bore away the teacher, and with her the wife and children
who fled, not knowing their father's fate, and the lawyer who
sought an owner for an estate whose heir was too honorable to hold
it wrongfully.