IN THE SIXTIES
By Harold Frederic
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons
1893
[Illustration: 0007]
PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION
In nothing else under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious
department of woman’s attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more
eccentric in its variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal
revolution of letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the
hardiest of them ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade
has whims of its own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make
them long and didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy.
Upon occasion it has been thought desirable to throw upon this
introductory formula the responsibility of explaining everything that
was to follow in the book, and, again, nothing has seemed further from
the proper function of a preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes
the prevalent mode has discouraged prefaces altogether--and thus it
happens that the present author, doomed to be doing in England at least
something of what the English do, has never before chanced to write one.
Yet now it seems that in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is
an American edition.
The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession
that the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were
all, it is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old
World in any other sense.
In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as
hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which
Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side
and on the other, was in its results very strictly American.
The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named
book, “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in
my mind. All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the
Revolutionary War, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded
this record by fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of
tales told by my grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who
were but middle-aged people when she was a child. She herself had come
into curious relation with one of the terrible realities of that period.
At the age of six it was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a
brook running through the Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the
deep-hole close beside where she worked was the spot in which the owner
of the farm had lain hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two
days and nights while Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a
single remove, I came myself into contact with the men who held Tryon
County against the King, and my boyish head was full of them. Before
I left school, at the age of twelve, I had composed several short but
lurid introductions to a narrative which should have for its central
feature the battle of Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed,
or rather for my contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the
teacher when my crime was detected, I was expelled from the school.
The plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which I
busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now
the Oneida Historical Society, and to prepare for a befitting
celebration of the coming hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The
circumstance that I had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a
member of the Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the
celebration it organized and superintended. It was at this time that I
gathered the first materials for my projected work, from members of the
Fonda and other families. Eight years later I was in the position of
having made at least as many attempts to begin this book, which I had
never ceased to desire to write, and for which I had steadily collected
books and other data; one of these essays ran to more than twenty
thousand words, and several others were half that length, but they were
all failures.
In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist
friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the _Weekly Echo_
for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in
Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme
facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending
it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating
the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his
secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of
earning two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story
of my own at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to
the editor of the _Weekly Echo_, who happened to be a friend of mine as
well. He read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on
the first page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but
might do well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty
dollars depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction
came. I realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless
mooning over my Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than
at the outset, simply because I did not know how to make a book of any
kind, let alone a historical book of the kind which should be the most
difficult and exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the
contemporary story I had begun--if only to learn what it was really like
to cover a whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”--which
still has the _Echo_ man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description
of the barn-yard.
At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of
preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for
me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the
praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree
of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back
upon now with surprise--and not a little envy. It was in the fine flush
of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the book
I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount
of material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps,
biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along
with me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was
written in eight months--and that, too, at a time when I had also a
great deal of newspaper work to do as well.
“The Lawton Girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to
“Seth’s Brother’s Wife,” but here I found myself confronted by agencies
and influences the existence of which I had not previously suspected. In
“Seth’s Brother’s Wife” I had made the characters do just what I wanted
them to do, and the notion that my will was not altogether supreme had
occurred neither to them nor to me. The same had been true of “In the
Valley,” where indeed the people were so necessarily subordinated to the
evolution of the story which they illustrated rather than shaped, that
their personalities always remained shadowy in my own mind. But in
“The Lawton Girl,” to my surprise at first, and then to my interested
delight, the people took matters into their own hands quite from the
start. It seemed only by courtesy that I even presided over their
meetings, and that my sanction was asked for their comings and goings.
As one of many examples, I may cite the interview between Jessica and
Horace in the latter’s office. In my folly, I had prepared for her here
a part of violent and embittered denunciation, full of scornful epithets
and merciless jibes; to my discomfiture, she relented at the first sight
of his gray hair and troubled mien, when I had brought her in, and would
have none of my heroics whatever. Once reconciled to the posture of a
spectator, I grew so interested in the doings of these people that I
lost sight of a time-limit; they wandered along for two years, making
the story in leisurely fashion as they went. At the end I did assert my
authority, and kill Jessica--she who had not deserved or intended at all
to die--but I see now more clearly than any one else that it was a false
and cowardly thing to do.
There remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing
with varying aspects of home life in the North--or rather in my little
part of the North--during the Civil War. These stories are by far closer
to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they seem to me
to contain the best things I have done or ever shall do, partly
because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and
experiences of my own childhood--and a little also, no doubt, for the
reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal
affection had desired for them. Of all the writers whose books affected
my younger years, I think that MM. Erckmann-Chatrian exerted upon me the
deepest and most vital influence. I know that my ambition to paint some
small pictures of the life of my Valley, under the shadow of the vast
black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in
humble imitation of their studies of Alsatian life in the days of the
Napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly
inspired by any other writers. By this confession I do not at all wish
to suggest comparisons. The French writers dealt with a period remote
enough to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a
reading public vehemently interested in everything that could be told
them about that period. These stories of mine lack these aids--and
doubtless much else beside. But they are in large part my own
recollections of the dreadful time--the actual things that a boy from
five to nine saw and heard about him, while his own relatives were being
killed, and his school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood
forced into mourning and despair--and they had a right to be recorded.
A single word in addition to an already over-long preface. The locality
which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the
War stories may be identified in a general way with Central New York,
but in no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town
with one actually in existence. The political exigencies of “Seth’s
Brother’s Wife” made it necessary to invent a Congressional District,
composed of three counties, to which the names of Adams, Jay, and
Dearborn were given. Afterwards the smaller places naturally took names
reflecting the quaint operation of the accident which sprinkled our
section, as it were, with the contents of a classical pepper-box. Thus
Octavius, Thessaly, Tyre, and the rest came into being, and one tries to
remember and respect the characteristics they have severally developed,
but no exact counterparts exist for them in real life, and no map of the
district has as yet been drawn, even in my own mind.
H. F.
London, February 16, 1897.
THE COPPERHEAD
CHAPTER I--ABNER BEECH
It was on the night of my thirteenth birthday, I know, that the old
farm-house was burned over our heads. By that reckoning I must have been
six or seven when I went to live with Farmer Beech, because at the time
he testified I had been with him half my life.
Abner Beech had often been supervisor for his town, and could have
gone to the Assembly, it was said, had he chosen. He was a stalwart,
thick-shouldered, big man, with shaggy dark eyebrows shading stern hazel
eyes, and with a long, straight nose, and a broad, firmly shut mouth.
His expansive upper lip was blue from many years of shaving; all the
rest was bushing beard, mounting high upon the cheeks and rolling
downward in iron-gray billows over his breast. That shaven upper lip,
which still may be found among the farmers of the old blood in our
district, was, I dare say, a survival from the time of the Puritan
protest against the mustaches of the Cavaliers. If Abner Beech, in the
latter days, had been told that this shaving on Wednesday and Saturday
nights was a New England rite, I feel sure he would never have touched
razor again.
He was a well-to-do man in the earlier time--a tremendous worker, a
“good provider,” a citizen of weight and substance in the community. In
all large matters the neighborhood looked to him to take the lead. He
was the first farmer roundabout to set a mowing-machine to work in his
meadows, and to put up lightning-rods on his buildings. At one period
he was, too, the chief pillar in the church, but that was before the
episode of the lightning-rods. Our little Union meeting-house was
supplied in those days by an irregular procession of itinerant
preachers, who came when the spirit moved and spoke with that entire
frankness which is induced by knowledge that the night is to be spent
somewhere else. One of these strolling ministers regarded all attempts
to protect property from lightning as an insolent defiance of the Divine
Will, and said so very pointedly in the pulpit, and the congregation
sat still and listened and grinned. Farmer Beech never forgave them.
There came in good time other causes for ill-feeling. It is beyond the
power of my memory to pick out and arrange in proper sequence the events
which, in the final result, separated Abner Beech from his fellows. My
own recollections go with distinctness back to the reception of the news
that Virginia had hanged John Brown; in a vaguer way they cover the two
or three preceding years. Very likely Farmer Beech had begun to fall out
of touch with his neighbors even before that.
The circumstances of my adoption into his household--an orphan
without relations or other friends--were not of the sort to serve this
narrative. I was taken in to be raised as a farm-hand, and was no more
expected to be grateful than as if I had been a young steer purchased
to toil in the yoke. No suggestion was ever made that I had incurred any
debt of obligation to the Beeches. In a little community where every one
worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all
shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent
spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or
received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less
nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer’s only son.
In the course of time I came, indeed, to be a more sympathetic unit in
the household, so to speak, than poor Jeff himself. But that was only
because he had been drawn off after strange gods.
At all times--even when nothing else good was said of him--Abner
Beech was spoken of by the people of the district as a “great hand for
reading.” His pre-eminence in this matter remained unquestioned to the
end. No other farmer for miles owned half the number of books which he
had on the shelves above his writing-desk. Still less was there any
one roundabout who could for a moment stand up with him in a discussion
involving book-learning in general. This at first secured for him the
respect of the whole country-side, and men were proud to be agreed with
by such a scholar. But when affairs changed, this, oddly enough, became
a formidable popular grievance against Abner Beech. They said then that
his opinions were worthless because he got them from printed books,
instead of from his heart.
What these opinions were may in some measure be guessed from the titles
of the farmer’s books. Perhaps there were some thirty of them behind the
glass doors of the old mahogany bookcase. With one or two agricultural
or veterinary exceptions, they related exclusively to American history
and politics. There were, I recall, the first two volumes of Bancroft,
and Lossing’s “Lives of the Signers,” and “Field-Books” of the two
wars with England; Thomas H. Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View;” the four
green-black volumes of Hammond’s “Political History of the State of
New York:” campaign lives of Lewis Cass and Franklin Pierce and larger
biographies of Jefferson and Jackson, and, most imposing of all, a whole
long row of big calf-bound volumes of the Congressional Globe, which
carried the minutiae of politics at Washington back into the forties.
These books constituted the entire literary side of my boyish education.
I have only the faintest and haziest recollections of what happened when
I went during the winter months to the school-house at the Four Corners.
But I can recall the very form of the type in the farmer’s books.
Every one of those quaint, austere, and beardless faces, framed in
high collars and stocks and waving hair--the Marcys, Calhouns, DeWitt
Clintons, and Silas Wrights of the daguerreotype and Sartain’s primitive
graver--gives back to me now the lineaments of an old-time friend.
Whenever I could with decency escape from playing checkers with Jeff,
and had no harness to grease or other indoor jobs, I spent the winter
evenings in poring over some of these books--generally with Abner Beech
at the opposite side of the table immersed in another. On some rare
occasion one of the hired men would take down a volume and look through
it--the farmer watching him covertly the while to see that he did not
wet his big thumbs to turn over the leaves--but for the most part we
two had the books to ourselves. The others would sit about till bedtime,
amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or
mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples
and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of the district
and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their
stockinged feet.
This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the
household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew,
from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about
the things we read. As it became apparent, year by year, that young
Jeff was never going to read anything at all, Abner Beech more and more
distinguished me with conversational favor. It cannot be said that the
favoritism showed itself in other directions. I had to work as hard
as ever, and got no more play-time than before. The master’s eye was
everywhere as keen, alert, and unsparing as if I had not known even my
alphabet. But when there were breathing spells, we talked together--or
rather he talked and I listened--as if we were folk quite apart from the
rest.
Two fixed ideas thus arose in my boyish mind, and dominated all my
little notions of the world. One was that Alexander Hamilton and John
Marshall were among the most infamous characters in history. The other
was that every true American ought to hold himself in daily readiness
to fight with England. I gave a great deal of thought to both these
matters. I had early convictions, too, I remember, with regard to Daniel
Webster, who had been very bad, and then all at once became a very good
man. For some obscure reason I always connected him in my imagination
with Zaccheus up a tree, and clung to the queer association of images
long after I learned that the Marshfield statesman had been physically a
large man.
Gradually the old blood-feud with the Britisher became obscured by
fresher antagonisms, and there sprouted up a crop of new sons of Belial
who deserved to be hated more even than had Hamilton and Marshall.
With me the two stages of indignation glided into one another so
imperceptibly that I can now hardly distinguish between them. What I do
recall is that the farmer came in time to neglect the hereditary enemy,
England, and to seem to have quite forgotten our own historic foes to
liberty, so enraged was he over the modern Abolitionists. He told me
about them as we paced up the seed rows together in the spring, as we
drove homeward on the hay-load in the cool of the summer evening, as we
shovelled out a path for the women to the pumps in the farm-yard through
December snows. It took me a long time to even approximately grasp the
wickedness of these new men, who desired to establish negro sovereignty
in the Republic, and to compel each white girl to marry a black man.
The fact that I had never seen any negro “close to,” and had indeed
only caught passing glimpses of one or more of the colored race on the
streets of our nearest big town, added, no doubt, to the mystified alarm
with which I contemplated these monstrous proposals. When finally an old
darky on his travels did stroll our way, and I beheld him, incredibly
ragged, dirty, and light-hearted, shuffling through “Jump Jim Crow” down
at the Four Corners, for the ribald delectation of the village loafers,
the revelation fairly made me shudder. I marvelled that the others could
laugh, with this unspeakable fate hanging over their silly heads.
At first the Abolitionists were to me a remote and intangible class,
who lived and wrought their evil deeds in distant places--chiefly New
England way. I rarely heard mention of any names of persons among them.
They seemed to be an impersonal mass, like a herd of buffaloes or a
swarm of hornets. The first individuality in their ranks which attracted
my attention, I remember, was that of Theodore Parker. The farmer one
day brought home with him from town a pamphlet composed of anti-slavery
sermons or addresses by this person. In the evening he read it, or as
far into it as his temper would permit, beating the table with his huge
fist from time to time, and snorting with wrathful amazement. At last he
sprang to his feet, marched over to the wood-stove, kicked the door
open with his boot, and thrust the offending print into the blaze. It
is vivid in my memory still--the way the red flame-light flared over his
big burly front, and sparkled on his beard, and made his face to shine
like that of Moses.
But soon I learned that there were Abolitionists
everywhere--Abolitionists right here in our own little farmland township
of northern New York! The impression which this discovery made upon
me was not unlike that produced on Robinson Crusoe by the immortal
footprint. I could think of nothing else. Great events, which really
covered a space of years, came and went as in a bunch together, while
I was still pondering upon this. John Brown was hanged, Lincoln
was elected, Sumter was fired on, the first regiment was raised and
despatched from our rustic end of Dearborn County--and all the time it
seems now as if my mind was concentrated upon the amazing fact that some
of our neighbors were Abolitionists.
There was a certain dreamlike tricksiness of transformation in it all.
At first there was only one Abolitionist, old “Jee” Hagadorn. Then,
somehow, there came to be a number of them--and then, all at once,
lo! everybody was an Abolitionist--that is to say, everybody but Abner
Beech. The more general and enthusiastic the conversion of the others
became, the more resolutely and doggedly he dug his heels into the
ground, and braced his broad shoulders, and pulled in the opposite
direction. The skies darkened, the wind rose, the storm of angry popular
feeling burst swooping over the countryside, but Beech only stiffened
his back and never budged an inch.
At some early stage of this great change, we ceased going to church at
all. The pulpit of our rustic meeting-house had become a platform from
which the farmer found himself denounced with hopeless regularity on
every recurring Sabbath, and that, too, without any chance whatever of
talking back. This in itself was hardly to be borne. But when
others, mere laymen of the church, took up the theme, and began in
class-meetings and the Sunday-school to talk about Antichrist and
the Beast with Ten Horns and Seven Heads, in obvious connection with
Southern sympathizers, it became frankly insufferable. The farmer did
not give in without a fierce resistance. He collected all the texts he
could find in the Bible, such as “Servants, obey your masters,” “Cursed
be Canaan,” and the like, and hurled them vehemently, with strong, deep
voice, and sternly glowing eyes, full at their heads. But the others had
many more texts--we learned afterwards that old “Jee” Hagadorn enjoyed
the unfair advantage of a Cruden’s Concordance--and their tongues were
as forty to one, so we left off going to church altogether.
Not long after this, I should think, came the miserable affair of the
cheese-factory.
The idea of doing all the dairy work of a neighborhood under a common
roof, which originated not many miles from us, was now nearly ten years
old. In those days it was regarded as having in it possibilities of
vastly greater things than mere cheesemaking. Its success among us had
stirred up in men’s minds big sanguine notions of co-operation as the
answer to all American farm problems--as the gateway through which we
were to march into the rural millennium. These high hopes one recalls
now with a smile and a sigh. Farmers’ wives continued to break down and
die under the strain, or to be drafted off to the lunatic asylums;
the farmers kept on hanging themselves in their barns, or flying off
westward before the locust-like cloud of mortgages; the boys and girls
turned their steps townward in an ever-increasing host. The millennium
never came at all.
But at that time--in the late fifties and early sixties--the
cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams
and roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district;
their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a
town-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personages
than the supervisor and assessor.
Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. I
fancy he gave the very land on which it was built, and where you will
see it still, under the willows by the upper-creek bridge. He sent to it
in those days the milk of the biggest herd owned by any farmer for miles
around, reaching at seasons nearly one hundred cows. His voice, too,
outweighed all others in its co-operative councils.
But when our church-going community had reached the conclusion that a
man couldn’t be a Christian and hold such views on the slave question as
Beech held, it was only a very short step to the conviction that such
a man would water his milk. In some parts of the world the theft of a
horse is the most heinous of conceivable crimes; other sections exalt
to this pinnacle of sacredness in property a sheep or a pheasant or a
woman. Among our dairymen the thing of special sanctity was milk. A man
in our neighborhood might almost better be accused of forgery or bigamy
outright, than to fall under the dreadful suspicion of putting water
into his cans.
Whether it was mere stupid prejudice or malignant invention I know
not--who started the story was never to be learned--but of a sudden
everybody seemed to have heard that Abner Beech’s milk had been refused
at the cheese-factory. This was not true, any more than it was true that
there could possibly have been warrant for such a proceeding. But what
did happen was that the cheese-maker took elaborate pains each morning
to test our cans with such primitive appliances as preceded the
lactometer, and sniffed suspiciously as he entered our figures in a
separate book, and behaved generally so that our hired man knocked him
head over heels into one of his whey vats. Then the managers complained
to the farmer. He went down to meet them, boiling over with rage. There
was an evil spirit in the air, and bitter words were exchanged. The
outcome was that Abner Beech renounced the co-operative curds of his
earlier manhood, so to speak, sold part of his cattle at a heavy loss,
and began making butter at home with the milk of the remainder.
Then we became pariahs in good earnest.