I cannot make out why, having the friends and incentives I had in
Columbus, I should have wished to go away, but more and more I did wish
that. There was no reason for it except my belief that my work would be
less acceptable if I remained in the West; that I should get on faster
if I wrote in New York than if I wrote in Columbus. Somehow I fancied
there would be more intellectual atmosphere for me in the great city,
but I do not believe this now, and I cannot see how I could anywhere
have had more intelligent sympathy. When I came home from Venice in
1865, and was looking about for some means of livelihood, I found that
Lowell had a fancy for my returning to the West, and living my literary
life in my own air if not on my own ground. He apparently thought the
experiment would be interesting; and if I were again twenty-eight I
should like to try it. I would indeed have been glad then of any humble
place on a newspaper in the West; but the East more hospitably entreated
me, and after a flattering venture in New York journalism I was asked to
the place in Boston which of all others in the world was that I could
most have desired.
In those Columbus days I was vaguely aware that if I went farther from
home I should be homesick, for where I was, in that happy environment, I
was sometimes almost intolerably homesick. From my letters home I find
that I was vividly concerned in the affairs of those I had left there,
striving and saving to pay for the printing-office and the house with so
little help from me. I was still sometimes haunted by the hypochondria
which had once blackened my waking hours with despair; I dare say I was
always overworking, and bringing my fear upon me out of the exhaustion
of my nerves. Perhaps I am confiding too much when I speak of this most
real, most unreal misery, but if the confession of it will help any who
suffer, especially in the solitude of youth which inexperience makes a
prison-house, I shall not be ashamed of what some may impute to me for
weakness. If one knows there is some one else who is suffering in his
kind, then one can bear it better; and in this way, perhaps, men are
enabled to go to their death in battle, where they die with thousands of
others; in the multitudinous doom of the Last Day its judgments may not
be so dreadful to the single culprit. Like every one who lives, I was a
congeries of contradictions, willing to play with the fancies that came
to me, but afraid of them if they stayed too late. Yet I did not lose
much sleep from them; it is after youth is gone that we begin to lose
sleep from care; while our years are few we indeed rise up with care,
but it does not wake night-long with us, as it does when our years are
more.
I had a most cheerful companion in my colleague, Price, who so loved to
laugh and to make laugh. If he never made the calls or went to the
parties to which I tempted him, apparently he found our own society
sufficient, and, in fact, I could not wish for anything better myself
than when, the day's work and the night's pleasure ended for me, we sat
together in the editorial-room, where our chief seldom molested us, and
waited for the last telegraphic despatches before sending the paper to
press. Sometimes we had the company of officials from the State House
who came over to while away the hours, more haggard for them than for
us, with the stories they told while we listened. They were often such
stories as Lincoln liked, no doubt for the humorous human nature and
racy character in them. Very likely he found a relief in them from the
tragedy overhanging us all, but not molesting our young souls with the
portents which the sad-eyed man of duty and of doom was aware of, or
perhaps not yet aware of.
The strangest impression that the time has left with me is a sense of
the patient ignorance which seemed to involve the whole North. Doubtless
the South, or the more positive part of it, knew what it was about; but
the North could only theorize and conjecture and wait while those who
were in keeping of the nation were seeking its life. In the glare of the
events that followed volcanically enough, it seems as if the North must
have been of the single mind which it became when the shot fired on Fort
Sumter woke it at last to the fact that the country was really in peril.
But throughout the long suspense after Lincoln's election till his
inauguration there was no settled purpose in the North to save the
Union, much less to fight for it. People ate and slept for the most part
tranquilly throughout; they married and gave in marriage; they followed
their dead to the grave with no thought that the dead were well out of
the world; they bought and sold, and got gain; what seemed the end could
not be the end, because it had never come before.
After the war actually began we could not feel that it had begun; we had
the evidence of our senses, but not of our experiences; in most things
it was too like peace to be really war. Neither of the great sections
believed in the other, but the South, which was solidified by the
slaveholding caste, had the advantage of believing in itself, and the
North did not believe in itself till the fighting began. Then it
believed too much and despised the enemy at its throat. Among the
grotesque instances of our self-confidence I recall the consoling
assurance of an old friend, a chief citizen and wise in his science, who
said, as the hostile forces were approaching each other in Virginia,
"Oh, they will run," and he meant the Southerners, as he lifted his fine
head and blew a whiff from his pipe into the air. "As soon as they see
we are in earnest they will run," but it was not from us that they ran;
and the North was startled from its fallacy that sixty days would see
the end of the rebellion, whose end no prophet had now the courage to
forecast. We of the Ohio capital wore a very political community, the
most political in the whole state, in virtue of our being the capital,
but none of the rumors of war had distracted us from our pleasures or
affairs, at least so far as the eyes of youth could see. With our faith
in the good ending, as if our national story were a tale that must end
well, with whatever suspenses, or thrilling episodes, we had put the
day's anxieties by and hopefully waited for the morrow's consolations.
But when the fateful shot was fired at Fort Sumter, it was as if the
echo had not died away when a great public meeting was held in response
to the President's call for volunteers, and the volunteering began with
an effect of simultaneity which the foreshortening of past events always
puts on to the retrospective eye. It seemed as if it were only the night
before that we had listened to the young Patti, now so old, singing her
sweetest in that hall where the warlike appeals rang out, with words
smiting like blows in that "Anvil Chorus" which between her songs had
thrilled us with the belief that we were listening to the noblest as
well as the newest music in the world.
I have sometimes thought that I would write a novel, with its scene in
our capital at that supreme moment when the volunteering began, but I
shall never do it, and without the mask of fiction one cannot give the
living complexion of events. Instantly the town was inundated from all
the towns of the state and from the farms between as with a tidal wave
of youth; for most of those who flooded our streets were boys of
eighteen and twenty, and they came in the wild hilarity of their young
vision, singing by day and by night, one sad inconsequent song, that
filled the whole air, and that fills my sense yet as I think of them:
"Oh, nebber mind the weather, but git ober double trouble,
For we're bound for the happy land of Canaan."
They wore red shirts, as if the color of the Garibaldian war for Union
in Italy had flashed itself across the sea to be the hue of our own war
for Union. With interlinked arms they ranged up and down, and pushed the
willing citizens from the pavement, and shouted the day and shouted the
night away, with no care but the fear that in the outpour of their
death-daring they might not be gathered into the ranks filling up the
quota of regiments assigned to Ohio. The time had a sublimity which no
other time can know, unless some proportionate event shall again cause
the nation to stand up as one man, and the spectacle had a mystery and
an awe which I cannot hope to impart. I knew that these boys, bursting
from their fields and shops as for a holiday, were just such boys as I
had always known, and if I looked at any one of them as they went
swaggering and singing up and down I recognized him for what they were,
but in their straggling ranks, with their young faces flushed the red of
the blouses and their young eyes flaming, I beheld them transfigured. I
do not pretend that they were of the make of armies such as I had seen
pictured marching in serried ranks to battle, and falling in bloody
windrows on the smoke-rolled plain. All that belonged to
"Old, unhappy, far-off days,"
and not to the morrows in which I dwelt. But possibly if I had written
that forever-to-be-unwritten novel I might have plucked out the heart of
the moment and laid it throbbing before the reader; and yet I might
rather have been satisfied with the more subjective riddle of one who
looked on, and baffled himself with question of the event.
Only two or three of the friends who had formed our College group went
to the war; of these my friend Comly, had been one of the earliest, and
when I found him officer of the day at the first camp of the volunteers,
he gave me what time he could, but he was helplessly pre-occupied, and
the whole world I had known was estranged. One morning I met another
friend, coming down the State House steps and smiling radiantly; he also
was a law student, and he had just been made adjutant of a newly
accepted regiment. Almost immediately afterward he was changed to the
line, and at the end of the war, after winning its last important
battle, John G. Mitchell came out with the rank of brigadier-general, to
which the brevet of major-general could scarcely add distinction. By the
chances which play with our relations in life I had not known him so
well as some others. He was not of the College group; but after the war
we came familiarly together in the friendship of the cousins who had
become our wives. In that after-time he once held me rapt with the
stories of his soldier life, promising, or half promising, to put them
down for print, but never doing it, so that now they are lost to that
record of personal experience of battle which forms so vital a part of
our history. No stories of that life which I have read have seemed to me
so frank, so full, so real, as those he told.
Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and
talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he
easily beat me. Now the pine sheds covered the long tables, spread with
coffee and pork and beans, and the rude bunks filled with straw, and
here and there a boy volunteer frowzily drowsing in them. It was one of
the many shapeless beginnings which were to end in the review of the
hundred thousands of seasoned soldiers marching to their mustering out
in Washington after four years of fire and blood. No one could imagine
that any of these boys were to pass through that abyss, or that they
would not come safely out. Even after the cruel disillusion of Manassas
the superstition of quick work remained with the North, and the three
years' quota of Ohio was filled almost as jubilantly as the three
months', but not quite so jubilantly. Sons and brothers came with tears
to replace fathers and brothers who had not returned from Manassas, and
there was a funeral undertone in the shrilling of the fifes and the
throbbing of the drums which was not so before. Life is like Hamlet and
will oftentimes "put an antic disposition on," which I have never been
one to refuse recognition, and now I must, with whatever effect from it,
own a bit of its mockery. One of our reporters was a father whose son
had been among the first to go, and word came that the boy had been
killed at Manassas. I liked the father as I had liked the son, and the
old man's grief moved me to such poor offer of consolation as verse
could make. He was deeply touched, but the next day another word came
that the boy was alive and well, and I could not leave my elegiacs with
his father, who was apparently reluctant to renounce the glory of them,
although so glad. But he gave them back, and I depersonalized them by
removing the name of the young soldier, and finally printed them in the
volume of poems which two or three people still buy every year.