MEMORIAL DAY.
The patriotic men of the South who had so valorously insisted upon their
rights throughout the deadly passage at arms, felt that now the war was
over, that the country should settle down on the great common principle
of the constitution--the principle that had triumphed in 1780. They had
an intuitive abhorrence to confiding extravagant power in the hands of
the corrupt and ignorant. They could not understand how the Union could
be preserved by the annexation of eleven conquered provinces, and asked
themselves the question, "Will not the light of these eleven pale stars
be totally obscured by a central sun blighting and destroying every germ
of constitutional liberty?" The Union, said they, was safe in the hands
of President Lincoln. Rome was safe when Cincinnatus was called from the
plow, but she was torn asunder by the wars of Scylla and Marius, and
history is more or less a repetition of itself.
Despite the catastrophe that overlaid the South because of the unhappy
issue of the war; the gravity of which enemies, both domestic and
foreign, have scandalized by calling it "rebellion," despite the fact
that disbanded forces were still prosecuting their conquests, not
against disciplined armies in the field, but against men, women and
children, in the lawful pursuit of peace and happiness, with a vengeance
hourly reinforced by new resources and fresh horrors, and with a terror
that mastered our fettered souls; our people felt that there was at
least one refuge from the blast of the tornado--still a sheltering rock
to which they could flee from the cruel cloud-burst.
In passing the eye rapidly over the outline of the circumstances in
which persecution originated; in reviewing the cause that unsettled the
deep foundations of social life, the southern people felt that there
were hallowed spots of ground so strongly buttressed in the hearts of
the people that the violence of the storm could not rustle a leaf or
shake a twig; that these consecrated precincts they could lawfully
appropriate, and as to this claim, the carpet-baggers with all their
hosts of misrule had the honor, magnanimity and mercy to forget, forgive
and forbear. Here at least there could be no intrusion, because the
baser passions were fenced upon the outside; and amid this sad
continuity of graves the heart would be uplifted in gratitude to God,
who in his great mercy had given to the nineteenth century and to the
South, such undying examples of patriotism and valor. Here lie the bones
of men who dared to say, when the political system of the South was
strangely inverted, that it was such a menace to southern institutions
that it could not go unchallenged; a palpaple violation of the public
faith. To what other convulsions and changes are we predestined? they
asked. Shall we leave our character, our civilization, our very being to
the unresisted assault and prepare such an epitaph for our tombs? Shall
we declare ourselves outlawed from the community of nations? "Nay, war
rather to the cost of the last dollar, and slaughter of the last man."
Such was the sentiment of the men who sleep so peacefully in these
graves. Such was the sentiment of the men, women and children, who
to-day stand over these graves to honor the brave, and to reproduce a
fresh page in history, and lay it reverently by in our southern
Valhalla.
Col. Seymour was the orator of the day. "Stonewall Jackson," his old
commander, the subject, and his friends, Judge Bonham and the
ex-governor honored auditors. The old governor, whitelocked and
furrowed, in introducing the orator observed with a proper decorum. "For
what Stonewall Jackson and his brave men did, we have no apologies to
make here or elsewhere. I had rather wear here," said he, striking his
aged breast, "a scar from the victorious field of Manassas, than the
jewelled star of St George, or the Victorian Cross."
I can reproduce in a fragmentary way parts of the patriotic address
which I herein give to the reader, to show that there was "life in the
old land yet."
"MY COMRADES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:
"One year ago to-day, with the reverence of a pilgrim, I stood by the
grave of Stonewall Jackson; and I remembered that every battle order he
ever wrote, every victory he ever won, was a thank offering to the
christian's God.
"I thought, too, of the thousand highways that rayed out from citadels
of oppression, barricaded with human bones. I thought of the seas of
human slaughter, whose redundant tides flowed on and on as libations
upon the altars of ambition.
"I saw as it were the faded crowns and the crumbling thrones of dead
despots, who once girdled the earth with a cincture of fire, and marked
its boundaries with the sword, writing again their achievements where
mankind might read and wonder.
"I saw again the accusing throngs of pensioned widows from the Moselle,
the Rhine, the Danube, the Nile, and wherever else the scarlet standards
of fanaticism flaunted their challenge, hastening to record their
anguish, where the tyrants had memorialized their deeds.
"I saw everywhere the badges of speculative knavery, of incorrigible
wrong; Cossacks all, who knew no law but force, and no patriotism but
greed.
"I thought of the Spaniard, riding to the stirrup-leather in the blood
of babes in the Netherlands; of the Hun and his proclamation 'beauty and
booty,' and I thought of the angel of God's mercy proclaiming an
armistice; giving a refreshing peace to the saturated earth after these
monsters were dead, and I bowed with a profounder reverence at this
hallowed grave in the valley of Virginia.
"I thought then of Alcibiades at Abydos; of Alexander at Issus; of
Scipio at Zama; of Hannibal at Cannae; of Pompey at Pharsalia; of Cæsar
at the Rubicon; of Napoleon at Marengo; and I thought, as Vattel
thought, that warriors such as these failed to prosecute the rights of
their countrymen by force.
"I thought of the keen blade of the assassin that cut in twain the heart
of Alcibiades; of the dagger of Brutus; of the murder of Clitus; of the
hemlock; of the suicide's sword at Thrapsus; of the assassination at
Miletus; of the fifth paragraph in the will of Napoleon; and then I
thought of the bleeding earth these warriors had scarified and scourged,
until they were drunken with excess of human slaughter; and then I
looked back over the tide of centuries for a single example of
disinterested patriotism, and I bowed my head once more to hear a
protest from principalities in their orphanage, and commonwealths in
their sorrow.
"I thought again of Jackson, as he knelt in prayer, when the great guns
were signaling the issue of battle, as with hands uplifted to heaven he
was supplicating his Father to guide and guard his poor country in her
sore hour of travail, and I thought if there were a Pericles somewhere,
who from the foot of our American Acropolis would sound his fame, the
'bloody chasm' would be bridged by a single span.
"A little more than three years ago, by the violation of a plain order,
the tears of a nation, magnanimous and patriotic, rained down upon and
extinguished almost the last camp fire of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Within
that short period events, like chasing shadows, both clouded and
glorified the perspective of history. Within a like period of time this
great country, by a vigorous discipline, has completely obliterated
lines and boundaries that once circumscribed the ambition of men. A
trifling order methinks of Jackson, but it cancelled our charter of
freedom, it rendered a nude pact our declaration of independence. It was
only the nod of the head of an unlettered peasant at Hougomont, but it
sent somersaulting into the sunken road of Ohain the steel clad
cuirassiers of Napoleon the great; dipped the imperial purple starred
with bees, into the silt of the English channel, and paragraphed the
capitulation of Paris with the civil death of the great emperor. Such
are some of the pivots upon which great crises rotate.
Forty eight years after the Scotch-Greys pierced the uplifted visors of
the old guard, there glided down the echoing corridors of time this
sententious order; "Shoot down without halting the man who dares to
cross the lines to-night."
The catastrophe that rode as a courier upon the flank of this order,
hacked the sword, unnerved the arm that was carving out of a heart of
fire a civilization whose altars and whose shrines were relumed by the
torch of liberty; but the God of battles, amid the carnage, called a
halt. It was a night of exasperation, of despair. Ten million people
watched, as watchers never watched before, the last flickering of a
life that laid down its all, at the altar of love and duty. Those ten
million people kept their vigil like vestal virgins, and saw, alas, the
frenzied spirit of hate and wrath snuff out the candle and heard the
groans of the victim of his own blunder, as he cried out in his
delirium, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the
trees."
There has been now and again an illustrious personage, who appears to us
to have been mirrored upon the foreground of events like some titanic
silhouette. The irony of fate has dealt with such a man, as the creature
of an hour, holding him in thrall in time of peace, to become the storm
spirit in some great crisis. When he dies the face of history is
saddened and obscured, and a twilight like that observed under Southern
skies, falls upon the world. Such a person may be fitly called the
courier of fate; or better still, the tragedian of revolution. He cannot
be weighed or measured by the definitive judgment of contemporaries.
When he dies the stride of conquest is checked; sword blades dripping
with human blood are thrust back into scabbards. In war, he is its
inspiration; its providence.
I make no allusion just now to that splendid effigy that is yet
discerned in the haze that lowers over Vienna, Berlin and Moscow; that
incomprehensible tutor of strategic science, who with sword and cannon
cut a red swath through the capital cities of Europe; and partitioned
the world into two dominions, as if he were only dividing in twain an
apple. I speak not of him, whom this man that "embarrassed God," found a
waif, and made a giant, whose death hastened to its decline that
splendid imperialism that the great Napoleon erected on the ruins of the
commune.
The fall of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville thrust betwixt the
Confederacy and independence a pall so dense, that it could not be cut
asunder with the sword.
I can compare Stonewall Jackson with no hero, living or dead. He stood
in the foreground an unique personality--a phenomenon. With the genius
of war he appeared almost supernaturally mated. Whether his unparalleled
victories were the result of combinations essentially tactical, of
methods logically conceived, or of an intuition that almost without
arrangement forced its power upon vast evolutions, will perhaps never be
known.
The plain profile of this man reminds one of the hard-hitting,
rough-riding Roundhead. His dispatches smacked of the Calvinism of
Ireton and Cromwell. "God blessed our arms at McDowell yesterday."
Wherever there was a downpour of leaden rain Jackson and the "Ironsides"
would have been in accord. His was the spirit that resolved combinations
in his favor. His masterly apprehension of issues diminished the carnage
by plucking the fruit before it was fully ripe. In war as elsewhere he
was absorbed by a fatalism, such as Mohammedans sum up when they say
"What is to be, will be." Napoleon, like an astrologer, believed in a
star; Jackson, unlike an astrologer, believed in Him who made the star
and lighted it in the candelabra of night.
A few years ago an American asked a halting, mutilated soldier of the
Old Guard to tell him how Napoleon died? "The great Emperor dead! He
will not die," was the sententious answer from the man who had fought
under the shadow of his eagles at Wagram and Marengo. It was with
something of this vague, indefinable superstition, of this heroic belief
in "Old Stonewall" as their providence that one of the "Old Brigade"
would hearken dubiously to such a challenge, "Tell us how Stonewall
Jackson died?"
Critics who have judged with more or less asperity have said that his
capacity as a commander was limited to the manoeuvres of a corps.
Strange fatuity! A score of battle fields prove the opinion false. If
such had been the case, the history of Port Republic, Harper's Ferry,
Groveton and Winchester would have been written the other way.
I saw this imperturbable man at Cold Harbor. Again he reminded one of
the "predestined" leader of the Ironsides. "If the enemy stand at
sunset, press them with the bayonet." All commands issuing from him
found their climax in this supreme order. The hero of Toulon never
caressed the fire throated 12 pounder more ardently than did Jackson. He
would have swept every obstruction from the field with a single battery,
or failing in this would have "pressed" them with the bayonet. His camp
fires are now extinguished. The old army of the Shenandoah is an
aggregation of phantoms. Winchester, Port Royal, Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville appear as mirage reminiscences rather, that steal
unbidden upon the soul when its depths are full of darkness and shadows.
"We walk to-day listlessly over the great, rough, heroic life of
Stonewall Jackson, but on either side of us are monuments and memorials
to his renown ever brightening to a higher luster.
It is a stern business, this going to war. Reconciliation is
problematical, more frequently impossible. The public pulse in 1861 was
intensely excited. One boastingly said upon one side that all the blood
that would be spilt, could be wiped up with a silk handkerchief. Another
on the other side with equal bravado answered that he would live to call
the roll of his slaves from the foot of Bunker Hill, and thus there was
boast and badinage until the "Anaconda" turned his many-hued scales to
the sun on the 21st of July, 1861.
The scene from the northern point of view was exceedingly dramatic--a
magnificent host all in tinsel--a composite picture of carnival and war.
A flash, as of gunpowder; a blazing up as of dry heath; a shout ever so
frightful, and half infernal, and the whole universe seemed wrapt in
flame and wild tumult. But the fire has died out; tumultuous passion is
allayed; the old South with its mountains and glades, rivers and
valleys, the stars above its sodden ground beneath, is still there.
"Jackson believed in the southern cause, as if it had been a revelation
from God. Cromwell said, 'Let us obey God's will' while he whetted his
sword blade to drink the slaughter of women, and nursing babes at
Drogheda. Jackson said, 'Let us obey God's will,' whilst bringing to the
altar the offering of universal emancipation.
"Jackson believed that the war of invasion was a heartless crusade
against mankind and womankind, and the civilization of the South, and
the higher law proclamation was the aftermath of the pernicious
broadcasting of seed sown by Horace Greely, Gerritt Smith, and Joshua R.
Giddings. The old stubble required to be ploughed under, said they;
unhappily in seeding the ground they scattered here and there dragons'
teeth and forthwith there sprang up armed men.
"Jackson believed that the 'Grand army' in holiday attire, with
flaunting banners and careering squadrons, were an aggregation of
iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of images, creeds, institutions,
traditions, homes, country. So believed he when the 'Anaconda' with
panting sides drew back to strike.
"Man to man, bayonet to bayonet, cannon to cannon, bosom to bosom, here
was challenged the asserted right of coercion, of frenzy against frenzy,
patriotism, anger, vanity, hope, dispair; each facing and meeting the
other like dark clashing whirlwinds."
Hither sped Jackson with the swoop of the eagle, down the valley from
Gordonsville to fresher carnage, to a bloodier banquet. Hither he came
with as high a resolve as ever animated Peter the Hermit, to plant upon
the sand dunes of Palestine the fiery cross; whether right or wrong,
cannot now be known. The formula by which he may be judged is yet
undiscovered.
Eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, and Jackson with folded arms, occupies
the plateau near the "Henry House." Just beyond is a dark confused death
wrestle. Forty thousand athletes against eighty thousand athletes; two
hundred odd iron throats perpetually vomiting an emetic of death.
Hope within him burns like a freshly lighted fagot. There is a quiver in
the hardened nerves; the old sun-scorched cap is in his hand; the lips
are slightly parted; the order given, and the 'old Stonewall Brigade' is
hurled like an immense projectile upon ranks of human flesh. There is a
halt, a recoil; cannon spit out their fire, their hail, their death upon
bosoms bared to the shock. 'There stands Jackson like a Stonewall.'
Under that name he was baptized with blood at Manassas. Everywhere that
faded coat and tarnished stars were the oriflame of battle and the old
brigade followed them as if they had been the white plume of Navarre.
This incomparable leader never failed in a single battle from the day
when with 2800 men at Kernstown he held in check 20,000 men and covered
the retreat of the army from Centreville to Manassas, where he cut their
communications and decoyed their columns into the iron jaws of
Longstreets reserves. Such achievements were not accidental. No
manoeuvre could mislead the clear judgment that presided serenely in
that soul of fire. It is not too much to say that the conqueror of Port
Republic was an overmatch in strategy and technique of war for his
opponents.
He's in the saddle, now fall in--
Steady! the whole brigade!
Hill's at the ford cut off; he'll win
His way out with ball and blade.
What matter if our shoes are worn--
What matter if our feet are torn--
The foe had better ne'er been born
That gets in Stonewall's way.
There were other attractions there, too; flower girls had brought
hither, not the funereal cypress and willow, but bright and beautiful
carnations and violets, and streaming about the heads of the throngs
were battle flags, torn and tattered--almost shredded by shot and
shell--cross-barred with blue, with pale white stars like enameled
lilies peeping out of the azure ground. Lifeless eyes and voiceless lips
now, had cheered these flags with the same joy that once greeted the
eagles of Napoleon. Withered skeleton hands now, had borne them at the
head of charging squadrons and battalions, the guidons of victorious
armies--the guerdon of a nation's trust and faith. If out of the cold,
dead white stars could come again the old gleam of light as it lighted
up the line of direction over the mountain passes of Virginia and the
valley of the Shenandoah, what a halo of glory would encircle Winchester
and Gordonsville and Chantilly! how dramatic the narrative; how truthful
the history; how inspiring the reminiscence; how fully and completely
vindicated the Old South--the lost cause! But there is no light in the
stars, and the broad bands of blue upon the blood-red field are
disfiguring scars upon the face of an incident long since closed, and
closed forever, full of tragedy and patriotism.
The old Governor was exceedingly complimentary towards his old friend,
Colonel Seymour, "for his patriotic address," and very cordially invited
him to visit him at his home.
Alice had formed new acquaintances, and Clarissa too had honored this
most interesting occasion with her presence. She had carried a basketful
of flowers that had been carefully plucked and assorted by her young
mistress, and with very tender hands Alice had placed them in a stone
urn at the foot of a grave that seemed to have been more profusely
decorated than the others. Indeed, it was the grave of the soldier boy
who had been the first to fall in the terrible holocaust of war.
"Miss Alice," Clarissa asked quite feelingly, "Haint yu dun und fotched
back to yo membrunce dis here po sojer boy dat fout in de battle of
Manassy, und was brung back home to pine away und die? Me und yu seed
him arter he got home, und hit made my flesh creep und crawl lak
katterpillers when I seed how de yankeys had mommucked up dat po chile.
Dare wus wun arm all twisted kattykornered twell you couldn't tell
pine-plank whedder it growed wid de fingers pinted disserway or
datterway, und den dare wus er hole in de buzzum dat yu cud farely see
de daylight on de tother side. Grate king! De yankeys mouter shot dat po
chile wid a steer kyart; he wus de wustest lookin' humans I eber seed in
my born days, und he wus de onliest chile of his po mammy. Dare's her
grabe too. Dare day lay side by side, und de Lord in hebben only knows
what day's dun und sed erbout dis here war up yander. I'm ergwine ter
strow dese lillies o' de walley on boff on em. Po fings, I hopes und
prays day has dun und gon froo de purly gates whey dare aint no war, nur
tribulation of sperrets nudder." And the old negro knelt reverently at
the graves and placed the white flowers upon them. As she rose from the
solemn service she said feelingly to her young mistress, "Pend upon it,
missis, sumbody's bleeged to suffer fer all dis gwines on epseps dare
aint no troof in proverdense nur grace nudder. Miss Alice, bress yer
life, Gord aint ergwine ter suffer his people ter be mommucked up in no
sich er fashion. Now dar is dat po 'oman lying out dare; ef de yankeys
hadn't kilt her onliest son, she would be right here ergwine erbout
spreddin flowers on de grabes o' dese po sojers, und she'd er heerd ole
marser a speechifying to all dese fokeses."
Alice was not in the humor to indulge Clarissa in further observations.
She was thinking of a grave over yonder in old Virginia, and wondering
if some fair hand was not arranging the flowers and tenderly placing
them upon the grave of her boy lover.
The setting sun was shooting little slivers of gold from its beautiful
disc all around the cemetery, and the shadows from magnolias and weeping
willows were deepening and darkening all the while, when the Colonel,
his daughter and Clarissa drove home in the old barouche, tired out with
the fatigue incident to the day and its burdens.