I have lived a long life—rather a happy and a busy than a merry
one—enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim,
shirking no needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my
credit. It were, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up
exclusive ownership of these. They are the joint products and property
of my dear wife and myself.
I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far
back as I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is
worth living for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a
world of ours.
I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affection
between my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their golden
wedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicity
fifty-four—counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years.
Never was a young fellow more in love than I—never has love been more
richly rewarded—yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements.
I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of
Sections—amid its turmoil and peril—and when at its close we were
married, at Nashville, Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the
future an adventure. It was at Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that
fate brought us together and riveted our destinies. She had a fine
contralto voice and led the church choir. Doctor Palmer, of New
Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into the long prayer of the
Presbyterian service. Bragg’s army was still in middle Tennessee. There
was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the bursting of a shell
too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell fragments
on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were upon us.
The man of God gave no sign that anything unusual was happening. He did
not hurry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying.
Nor was there panic in the congregation, which did not budge.
That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally
ended, and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the
benediction, the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the
several doorways.
I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the
firing had become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it
before attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated
for nearly two years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home
again.
In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far
South I had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and
distinguished and altogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of
his day, Andrew Ewing, who, though a Democrat, had in high party times
represented the Whig Nashville district in Congress and in the face of
assured election declined the Democratic nomination for governor of the
state. A foremost Union leader in the antecedent debate, upon the
advent of actual war he had reluctantly but resolutely gone with his
state and section.
V
The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical
Secessionists of the South have much historically to answer for. The
racial warp and woof in the United States were at the outset of our
national being substantially homogeneous. That the country should have
been geographically divided and sectionally set by the ears over the
institution of African slavery was the work of agitation that might
have attained its ends by less costly agencies.
How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the
straight way ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes
from Africa and sold them to the planters of the South, putting the
money it got for them in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South,
having bought its slaves from the slave traders of the North under the
belief that slave labor was requisite to the profitable production of
sugar, rice and cotton, stood by property-rights lawfully acquired,
recognized and guaranteed by the Constitution. Thence arose an
irrepressible conflict of economic forces and moral ideas whose
doubtful adjustment was scarcely worth what it cost the two sections in
treasure and blood.
On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the
Southern side, self-defense. Neither side had any sure law to coerce
the other. Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to
establish a case convincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought
to a finish so gallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its
origination largely a game of party politics.
The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought
it about were relatively few in number. The South was at least
defending its own. That what it considered its rights in the Union and
the Territories being assailed it should fight for aggressively lay in
the nature of the situation and the character of the people. Aggression
begot aggression, the unoffending negro, the provoking cause, a passive
agent. Slavery is gone. The negro we still have with us. To what end?
Life indeed is a mystery—a hopelessly unsolved problem. Could there be
a stronger argument in favor of a world to come than may be found in
the brevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where this side of
heaven shall we look for the court of last resort? Who this side of the
grave shall be sure of anything?
At this moment the world having reached what seems the apex of human
achievement is topsy-turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of any
moment when it was not so? That to keep what we call the middle of the
road is safest most of us believe. But which among us keeps or has ever
kept the middle of the road? What else and what next? It is with
nations as with men. Are we on the way to another terrestrial collapse,
and so on ad infinitum to the end of time?