[Note: This article was prepared (in 1891) at the instance of Mr. HORACE
SCUDDER, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series
of papers to be written by men who by virtue of education, intellectual
endowment and social position were supposed to be high and lifted up
above vulgar passion and prejudice. The business of these elect
gentlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them to an active
participation in so rude an affair as war. After publication in the
Atlantic, the essays were to be gathered into a book and Mr. SCUDDER
fancied that thus collected they would prove a valuable addition to the
history of the times. The series stopped at the third number and the
book was never published. Whilst I did not concur in Mr. SCUDDER'S view,
I accepted the compliment and began to write with a lighter heart than I
bore as I went on. At the end I was dipping my pen into something red,
into something briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to have been
contagious, for some years afterwards (1899) Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER, in his
America To-day (p. 142), wrote as follows:
"I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the
sentiment of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say
an elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it
moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found
myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at
me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together."]
A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the
coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took
their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively
conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each
other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England
would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their fellow-travellers. The
veterans went into the minute detail that always puts me to shame, when
I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the
military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well
acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the
soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I
remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned
themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields
were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and
desultory to be of any value to the historian of the war. For my own
life that experience has been of the utmost significance, and despite
the heavy price I have had to pay for my outings, despite the daily
reminder of five long months of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An
able-bodied young man, with a long vacation at his disposal, could not
have done otherwise, and the right to teach Southern youth for nine
months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers
at the front for three. Self-respect is everything; and it is something
to have belonged in deed and in truth to an heroic generation, to have
shared in a measure its perils and privations. But that heroic
generation is apt to be a bore to a generation whose heroism is of a
different type, and I doubt whether the young people in our car took
much interest in the very audible conversation of the two veterans.
Twenty-five years hence, when the survivors will be curiosities, as
were Revolutionary pensioners in my childhood, there may be a renewal of
interest. As it is, few of the present generation pore over The Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War, and a grizzled old Confederate has been
heard to declare that he intended to bequeath his copy of that valuable
work to some one outside of the family, so provoked was he at the
supineness of his children. And yet, for the truth's sake, all these
battles must be fought over and over again, until the account is
cleared, and until justice is done to the valor and skill of both sides.
[Note: I had a similar experience some years after I wrote this paper,
when I was spending the summer at Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering
far enough off into the country to lose myself--for me no unfamiliar
feat--I joined a man who was driving his cows to town and in my talk
with him it turned out that he had been through the Valley campaign on
the other side, and together we recalled encounters and scenes that were
not recorded in the histories, insignificant skirmishes--significant
enough to those who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the little
brush at Weyer's Cave, where the Confederates came near bagging General
Merritt? I have not been allowed to forget it these fifty years.]
The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers
do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked
from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to New York, their
conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts went back into my own past,
and two pictures came up to me from the time of the war.
[Note: Apropos of this passage my friend and classmate of the Princeton
days, Gen. BRADLEY T. JOHNSON, told me that one hot day riding to meet a
fight that would make the day still hotter, he stopped at a roadside
cabin and asked for a drink of water. The woman who brought it, brought
it in a broken and cracked mug, and he assured me that every
ramification of those cracks was indelibly impressed on his brain. He
could have drawn a map of the mug. Experiences like these help us to
understand the details of the Homeric narrative, and to me there is
nothing unnatural in Homer's mention of the washing troughs that Hector
saw as he fled before the face of Achilles (Il. 22, 154 foll.).]
[Note: The fight under EARLY, to which I refer, was fought July 24,
1864. It was a brilliant feat of arms and has left other memories than
those recorded. As A. D. C. to General GORDON I gave General TERRY, one
of the brigade commanders, the order to advance, and I still hear the
cry of one of the men who had been in a disastrous affair a few weeks
before--the fight in which Gen. W. E. JONES fell. "This hain't no New
Hope, Gineral." I still see the light of battle on the faces of the men
as they went forward. My blood tingles as I write.]
In the midsummer of 1863 I was serving as a private in the First
Virginia Cavalry. Gettysburg was in the past, and there was not much
fighting to be done, but the cavalry was not wholly idle. Raids had to
be intercepted, and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt himself too
much; so that I gained some experience of the hardships of that arm of
the service, and found out by practical participation what is meant by a
cavalry charge. To a looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who
charges, or is supposed to charge,--for the horse seemed to me mainly
responsible,--the details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one of these
charges some of us captured a number of the opposing force, among them a
young lieutenant. Why this particular capture should have impressed me
so I cannot tell, but memory is a tricky thing. A large red fox scared
up from his lair by the fight at Castleman's Ferry stood for a moment
looking at me; and I shall never forget the stare of that red fox. At
one of our fights near Kernstown a spent bullet struck a horse on the
side of his nose, which happened to be white, and left a perfect imprint
of itself; and the jerk of the horse's head and the outline of the
bullet are present to me still. The explosion of a particular caisson,
the shriek of a special shell, will ring in one's ears for life. A
captured lieutenant was no novelty, and yet this captured lieutenant
caught my eye and held it. A handsomer young fellow, a more
noble-looking, I never beheld among Federals or Confederates, as he
stood there, bare-headed, among his captors, erect and silent. His eyes
were full of fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, and his
hair seemed to tighten its curls in defiance. Doubtless I had seen as
fine specimens of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen without
looking, and this man was evidently what we called a gentleman.
[Note: "Deboshed" is a reminiscence of an essay of LOWELL'S on
Reconstruction, in which he makes light of Southern claims to
aristocracy.]
Southern men were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told
in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride,--foolish in
itself, foolish in that it did not have the heraldic backing that was
claimed for it; the utmost concession being that a number of "deboshed"
younger sons of decayed gentry had been shipped to Virginia in the early
settlement of that colony. But the very pride played its part in making
us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid
"deboshed," of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians, a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we
all held to the same standard, and showed, as was thought, undue
exclusiveness on this subject. But this prisoner was the embodiment of
the best type of Northern youth, with a spirit as high, as resolute, as
could be found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen; and though in theory
all enlightened Southerners recognized the high qualities of some of our
opponents, this one noble figure in "flesh and blood" was better
calculated to inspire respect for "those people," as we had learned to
call our adversaries, than many pages of "gray theory."
[Note: General LEE always referred to the enemy as "those people." JOHN
S. WISE, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1894. WISE is one ear-witness among
many, and I thought of General LEE, as well as of Dante, when I wrote in
my Introductory Essay to Pindar, xxxviii:
A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with a stroke.
In the second Olympian P. is telling of the blessedness of the
souls that have overcome. When he comes to the damned, he calls
them simply "those."--_Non ragioniam di lor._]
[Note: Lieut. Gen. JOHN B. GORDON, Reminiscences, p. 422. Perhaps I may
be pardoned for adding that when I read the passage in which mention is
made of my service on his staff, I wrote to my chief, whose own bearing
on the battlefield was an inspiration, that no tribute to my Greek
scholarship I had received or could receive would ever be more
cherished, if so much; and I cited the famous epitaph inscribed on the
tomb of Aeschylus at Gela. No mention is made of his great tragedies. It
is simply recorded that Aeschylus had quitted himself like a man in the
Persian war.
[Greek: alkên d' eudokimon Marathônion alsos an eipoi kai bathychaitêeis
Mêdos epistamenos.]
In these Notes I am furnishing a key to the persons referred to in the
article. There is a Confederate graveyard near my old home, the
University of Virginia, in which hundreds of those who fell on the field
or perished in the hospital, were laid to rest. At first a rude
headboard marked each grave with the name, the company, the regiment, to
be replaced, it was thought, by some more substantial monument at the
end of the war; but the end of the war brought the consciousness of dire
poverty that could hardly furnish food for the living, and so it was
sadly resolved rather than leave these ghastly and decaying reminders of
individual suffering and sacrifice to level the whole field and sow it
in grass, but not until a pious soul, an English artist who bore the
un-English name of SCHARF, had recorded each name and the place of
burial on an elaborate plat. Still I cannot forbear to contribute my
rude shingle here and there to the memory of my comrades. The
staff-officer mentioned here was GEORGE H. WILLIAMSON, of Maryland. Two
years before I made his acquaintance Mr. _William M. Blackford_, of
Lynchburg, wrote in his diary, since privately printed, under the date
July 25, 1862: Williamson, an interesting man, educated at Harvard and
abroad, was a rising lawyer in Baltimore when the war broke out and he
enlisted as a private in a Maryland regiment.]
[Note: A revival of religion to counterbalance, as it were, the revival
of brutality, is a recurring phenomenon of great wars. The tide of
skepticism in Greece was checked by the Persian War, and even to-day the
French army shews a return to the Man of Sorrows, whose effigy had been
removed from all public buildings.]
A little more than a year afterwards, in Early's Valley campaign,--a
rude school of warfare,--I was serving as a volunteer aide on General
Gordon's staff. The day before the disaster of Fisher's Hill I was
ordered, together with another staff officer, to accompany the general
on a ride to the front. The general had a well-known weakness for
inspecting the outposts,--a weakness that made a position in his suite
somewhat precarious. The officer with whom I was riding had not been
with us long, and when he joined the staff had just recovered from
wounds and imprisonment. A man of winning appearance, sweet temper, and
attractive manners, he soon made friends of the military family, and I
never learned to love a man so much in so brief an acquaintance, though
hearts knit quickly in the stress of war. He was highly educated, and
foreign residence and travel had widened his vision without affecting
the simple faith and thorough consecration of the Christian. Here let me
say that the bearing of the Confederates is not to be understood without
taking into account the deep religious feeling of the army and its great
leaders. It is an historical element, like any other, and is not to be
passed over in summing up the forces of the conflict. "A soldier without
religion," says a Prussian officer, who knew our army as well as the
German, "is an instrument without value"; and it is not unlikely that
the knowledge of the part that faith played in sustaining the Southern
people may have lent emphasis to the expression of his conviction.
We rode together towards the front, and as we rode our talk fell on
Goethe and on Faust, and of all passages the soldiers' song came up to
my lips,--the song of soldiers of fortune, not the chant of men whose
business it was to defend their country. Two lines, however, were
significant:--
Kühn ist das Mühen,
Herrlich der Lohn.
We reached the front. An occasional "zip" gave warning that the
sharpshooters were not asleep, and the quick eye of the general saw that
our line needed rectification and how. Brief orders were given to the
officer in command. My comrade was left to aid in carrying them out. The
rest of us withdrew. Scarcely had we ridden a hundred yards towards camp
when a shout was heard, and, turning round, we saw one of the men
running after us. "The captain had been killed." The peace of heaven was
on his face, as I gazed on the noble features that afternoon. The bullet
had passed through his official papers and found his heart. He had
received his discharge, and the glorious reward had been won.
This is the other picture that the talk of the two old soldiers called
up,--dead Confederate against living Federal; and these two pictures
stand out before me again, as I am trying to make others understand and
to understand myself what it was to be a Southern man twenty-five years
ago; what it was to accept with the whole heart the creed of the Old
South. The image of the living Federal bids me refrain from harsh words
in the presence of those who were my captors. The dead Confederate bids
me uncover the sacred memories that the dust of life's Appian Way hides
from the tenderest and truest of those whose business it is to live and
work. For my dead comrade of the Valley campaign is one of many; some
of them my friends, some of them my pupils as well. The 18th of July,
1861, laid low one of my Princeton College room-mates; on the 21st, the
day of the great battle, the other fell,--both bearers of historic
names, both upholding the cause of their State with as unclouded a
conscience as any saint in the martyrology ever wore; and from that day
to the end, great battle and outpost skirmish brought me, week by week,
a personal loss in men of the same type.
[Note: The Princeton College room-mate who fell on the 18th of July was
JAMES KENDALL LEE, a distant relative of the great soldier; the other
was PEYTON RANDOLPH HARRISON, of Martinsburg (W.) Va., representative of
the oldest families in the old state. His brother, DABNEY CARR HARRISON
(Princeton, '48), another close friend, took service in the Confederate
army, first as chaplain, then as captain of a company, and was killed at
Fort Donelson which, as I painfully remember, was at first reported as a
Confederate victory.]
The surrender of the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria was a surprise
to friend and foe alike; and the severe historian of the Peloponnesian
war pauses to record the answer of a Spartan to the jeering question of
one of the allies of the Athenians,--a question which implied that the
only brave Spartans were those who had been slain. The answer was tipped
with Spartan wit; the only thing Spartan, as some one has said, in the
whole un-Spartan affair. "The arrow," said he, "would be of great price
if it distinguished the brave men from the cowards." But it did seem to
us, in our passionate grief, that the remorseless bullet, the
remorseless shell, had picked out the bravest and the purest. It is an
old cry,--
Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten.
Still, when Schiller says in the poem just quoted,
Ohne Wahl vertheilt die Gaben,
Ohne Billigkeit das Glück,
Denn Patroklus liegt begraben
Und Thersites kommt zurück,
his illustration is only half right. The Greek Thersites did not return
to claim a pension.
[Note: Thersites--strange that Schiller in his Siegeslied should have
forgotten it--never lived to return. According to the Scholia Vetera on
Lycophron, 999, this monkey-shaped ([Greek: pithêkomorphos]) creature
was slain by Achilles for gouging out the eyes of Penthesilea's maid,
with whom Achilles had fallen in love. A better point was made by Ovid,
that master of points (Am. 2, 6, 41): _Tristia Phylacidae Thersites
funera vidit._]
[Note: The French artist was GUILLAUME, who came to this country shortly
before the war. In the picture to which I refer, General LEE was the
main figure. GUILLAUME'S picture of the Surrender at Appomattox bore
evidence of minute study of every detail of that historic event.]
Of course, what was to all true Confederates beyond a question "a holy
cause," "the holiest of causes," this fight in defence of "the sacred
soil" of our native land, was to the other side "a wicked rebellion" and
"damnable treason," and both parties to the quarrel were not sparing of
epithets which, at this distance of time, may seem to our children
unnecessarily undignified; and no doubt some of these _epitheta
ornantia_ continue to flourish in remote regions, just as pictorial
representations of Yankees and rebels in all their respective
fiendishness are still cherished here and there. At the Centennial
Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of
honour in the "Art Annex," was given to Rothermel's painting of the
battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is
lighted up with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped
on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my
recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the
malicious pleasure I felt when I was informed of the high price that the
State of Pennsylvania had paid for that work of art. The dominant
feeling was amusement, not indignation. But as I looked at it I recalled
another picture of a battle-scene, painted by a friend of mine, a French
artist, who had watched our life with an artist's eye. One of the
figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle
of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as
blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and
the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in a
buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which
continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of
gentle nurture,--the souvenir that the Confederate so often received
from fair sympathizers in border towns. I am not a realist, but I would
not exchange that homely toothbrush in the Confederate's buttonhole for
the most angelic smile that Rothermel's brush could have conjured up.
[Note: The toothbrush was a badge of culture on both sides, as the
following passage shows:
"'Light marching order' implies that a soldier may carry upon his person
only a few of the more obvious necessities of life and no luxuries save
tobacco. But a soldier must be clad even to sixty rounds of ball
cartridge. Small wonder is it then, if only the lightest toothbrush
drawn through the buttonhole of his blouse must suffice as an epitome of
the refinements of life. Many of the victories of our adversaries were
fairly attributed to the scantier attire and lighter marching order of
the men."--Atlantic Monthly, May, 1893, p. 214.]
[Note: DAVID RAMSAY, grandson of the historian and biographer of
Washington of the same name, my fellow-student at Göttingen in 1852,
fell after heroic services at Battery Wagner in 1863. What the state,
what the country lost in the promise of that rare man, this is not the
place to rehearse. Scholar, wit, embodiment of all the inherited social
graces of what we once called "the better days," delightful companion,
devoted and generous friend, he is still in memory part of my life.]
Now I make no doubt that most of the readers of The Atlantic have got
beyond the Rothermel stage, and yet I am not certain that all of them
appreciate the entire clearness of conscience with which we of the South
went into the war. A new patriotism is one of the results of the great
conflict, and the power of local patriotism is no longer felt to the
same degree. In one of his recent deliverances Mr. Carnegie, a canny
Scot who has constituted himself the representative of American
patriotism, says, "The citizen of the republic to-day is prouder of
being an American than he is of being a native of any State in the
country." What it is to be a native of any State in the country,
especially an old State with an ancient and honorable history, is
something that Mr. Carnegie cannot possibly understand. But the "to-day"
is superfluous. The Union was a word of power in 1861 as it is in 1891.
Before the secession of Virginia a Virginian Breckinridge asked: "If
exiled in a foreign land, would the heart turn back to Virginia, or
South Carolina, or New York, or to any one State as the cherished home
of its pride? No. We would remember only that we were Americans." Surely
this seems quite as patriotic as Mr. Carnegie's utterance; and yet, to
the native Virginian just quoted, so much stronger was the State than
the central government that, a few weeks after this bold speech, he went
into the war, and finally perished in the war. "A Union man," says his
biographer, "fighting for the rights of his old mother, Virginia." And
there were many men of his mind, noted generals, valiant soldiers. The
University Memorial, which records the names and lives of the alumni of
the University of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war, two hundred
in number,--this volume, full "of memories and of sighs" to every
Southern man of my age, lies open before me as I write, and some of the
noblest men who figure in its pages were Union men; and the Memorial of
the Virginia Military Institute tells the same story with the same
eloquence. The State was imperilled, and parties disappeared; and of the
combatants in the field, some of the bravest and the most conspicuous
belonged to those whose love of the old Union was warm and strong, to
whom the severance of the tie that bound the States together was a
personal grief. But even those who prophesied the worst, who predicted a
long and bloody struggle and a doubtful result, had no question about
the duty of the citizen; shared the common burden and submitted to the
individual sacrifice as readily as the veriest fire-eater,--nay, as they
claimed, more readily. The most intimate friend I ever had, who fell
after heroic services, was known by all our circle to be utterly at
variance with the prevalent Southern view of the quarrel, and died
upholding a right which was not a right to him except so far as the
mandate of his State made it a right; and while he would have preferred
to see "the old flag" floating over a united people, he restored the new
banner to its place time after time when it had been cut down by shot
and shell.
[Note: For Pericles' budget, see Thuc. 2, 13.
Thuc. 1, 141: [Greek: tên autên dynatai doulôsin hê te megistê kai
elachistê dikaiôsis apo tôn homoiôn pro dikês tois pelas epitassomenê.]]
Those who were bred in the opposite political faith, who read their
right of withdrawal in the Constitution, had less heart-searching to
begin with than the Union men of the South; but when the State called
there were no parties, and the only trace of the old difference was a
certain rivalry which should do the better fighting. This ready response
to the call of the State showed very clearly that, despite varying
theories of government, the people of the Southern States were
practically of one mind as to the seat of the paramount obligation.
Adherence to the Union was a matter of sentiment, a matter of interest.
The arguments urged on the South against secession were addressed to
the memories of the glorious struggle for independence, to the
anticipation of the glorious future that awaited the united country, to
the difficulties and the burdens of a separate life. Especial stress was
laid on the last argument; and the expense of a separate government, of
a standing army, was set forth in appalling figures. A Northern student
of the war once said to me, "If the Southern people had been of a
statistical turn, there would have been no secession, there would have
been no war." But there were men enough of a statistical turn in the
South to warn the people against the enormous expense of independence,
just as there are men enough of a statistical turn in Italy to remind
the Italians of the enormous cost of national unity. "Counting the cost"
is in things temporal the only wise course, as in the building of a
tower; but there are times in the life of an individual, of a people,
when the things that are eternal force themselves into the calculation,
and the abacus is nowhere. "Neither count I my life dear unto myself"
is a sentiment that does not enter into the domain of statistics. The
great Athenian statesman who saw the necessity of the Peloponnesian war
was not above statistics, as he showed when he passed in review the
resources of the Athenian empire, the tribute from the allies, the
treasure laid up in the House of the Virgin. But when he addressed the
people in justification of the war, he based his argument, not on a
calculation of material resources, but on a simple principle of right.
Submission to any encroachment, the least as well as the greatest, on
the rights of a State means slavery. To us submission meant slavery, as
it did to Pericles and the Athenians; as it did to the great historian
of Greece, who had learned this lesson from the Peloponnesian war, and
who took sides with the Southern States, to the great dismay of his
fellow-radicals, who could not see, as George Grote saw, the real point
at issue in the controversy. Submission is slavery, and the bitterest
taunt in the vocabulary of those who advocated secession was
"submissionist." But where does submission begin? Who is to mark the
point of encroachment? That is a matter which must be decided by the
sovereign; and on the theory that the States are sovereign, each State
must be the judge. The extreme Southern States considered their rights
menaced by the issue of the presidential election. Virginia and the
Border States were more deliberate; and Virginia's "pausing" was the
theme of much mockery in the State and out of it, from friend and from
foe alike. Her love of peace, her love of the Union, were set down now
to cowardice, now to cunning. The Mother of States and Queller of
Tyrants was caricatured as Mrs. Facing-both-ways; and the great
commonwealth that even Mr. Lodge's statistics cannot displace from her
leadership in the history of the country was charged with trading on her
neutrality. Her solemn protest was unheeded. The "serried phalanx of her
gallant sons" that should "prevent the passage of the United States
forces" was an expression that amused Northern critics of style as a bit
of antiquated Southern rodomontade. But the call for troops showed that
the rodomontade meant something. Virginia had made her decision; and if
the United States forces did not find a serried phalanx barring their
way,--a serried phalanx is somewhat out of date,--they found something
that answered the purpose as well.
[Note: The friend was the late A. MARSHALL ELLIOTT, Professor of Romance
Languages in the Johns Hopkins, whose life of study was matched by a
life of adventure.]
The war began, the war went on. Passion was roused to fever heat. Both
sides "saw red," that physiological condition which to a Frenchman
excuses everything. The proverbial good humor of the American people did
not, it is true, desert the country, and the Southern men who were in
the field, as they were much happier than those who stayed at home, if I
may judge by my own experience, were often merry enough by the camp
fire, and exchanged rough jests with the enemy's pickets. But the
invaded people were very much in earnest, however lightly some of their
adversaries treated the matter, and as the pressure of the war grew
tighter the more sombre did life become. A friend of mine, describing
the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in Paris, when the circle of
fire was drawing round the city, and foreigners were hastening to
escape, told me that the press was so great that he could touch in every
direction those who had been crushed to death as they stood, and had not
had room to fall. Not wholly unlike this was the pressure brought to
bear on the Confederacy. It was only necessary to put out your hand and
you touched a corpse; and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of a
brother or a friend. Every Southern man becomes grave when he thinks of
that terrible stretch of time, partly, it is true, because life was
nobler, but chiefly because of the memories of sorrow and suffering. A
professional Southern humorist once undertook to write in dialect a
Comic History of the War, but his heart failed him, as his public would
have failed him, and the serial lived only for a number or two.
[Note: Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the Sea--I was riveted
to my bed at the time--were not, are not so philosophic. See the
narrative in BRADLEY JOHNSON'S Life of Joseph E. Johnston. Nor was I so
philosophical when I followed the raiders of 1863, nor when I saw the
fires that lighted up the Valley of Virginia in 1864, and that was
before the systematic devastation recorded by MERRITT, who carried it
out. "When our army," says MERRITT (Battles and Leaders, 4, 512),
"commenced its return march, the cavalry was deployed across the Valley,
burning, destroying or taking nearly everything of value, or likely to
be of value to the enemy. It was a severe measure, and appears severer
now in the lapse of time, but it was necessary as a measure of war." The
plea of 1864 was the same as the plea of 1914. In a vivid sketch of
Sherman's March, Prof. HENRY E. SHEPHERD, whose North Carolina home,
Fayetteville, lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 4,
678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it "baffles all the
resources of literary art and the affluence even of our English speech,"
and those who know Professor SHEPHERD'S resources and affluence will
recognize the desperate nature of the task. As for the Valley, I have
before me a protest against the erection of a monument to Sheridan, in
which the writer gives an itemized account of the havoc inflicted on the
property of non-combatants in the County of Rockingham alone. The
protest reminds me of my youthful surprise when I first saw the statue
of Tilly in the Feldherrnhalle at Munich. Somehow I had not thought well
of Tilly before. But all estimates of military exigencies must be
revised by the light of the new standards of the time in which we live.
However, as this note goes to the printer, I am made aware of an article
by Maj. JOHN BIGELOW, U. S. A., published in the N. Y. Times of June 13,
1915, in which the author musters the evidence of the behaviour of
Sherman's men. 1864 seems not to have been so very far behind 1914 after
all.]
[Note: "The hate of Celt to Saxon, and the contempt of Saxon for Celt,
simply paled and grew expressionless when compared with the contempt and
hate felt by the Southron towards the Yankee anterior to our Civil War
and while it was in progress. No Houyhnhnms ever looked on Yahoo with
greater aversion; better, far better death than further contamination
through political association."--C. F. ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical
Solidarity, p. 176.
One recalls Halleck's Connecticut:
Virginians look
Upon them with as favorable eyes
As Gabriel on the devil in paradise.]
The war began, the war went on. War is a rough game. It is an omelet
that cannot be made without breaking eggs, not only eggs in _esse_, but
also eggs in _posse_. So far as I have read about war, ours was no
worse than some other wars. While it lasted, the conduct of the
combatants on either side was represented in the blackest colors by the
other. Even the ordinary and legitimate doing to death was considered
criminal if the deed was done by a ruthless rebel or a ruffianly
invader. Non-combatants were especially eloquent. In describing the end
of a brother who had been killed while trying to get a shot at a Yankee,
a Southern girl raved about the "murdered patriot" and the "dastardly
wretch" who had anticipated him. But I do not criticize, for I remember
an English account of the battle of New Orleans, in which General
Pakenham was represented as having been picked off by a "sneaking Yankee
rifle." Those who were engaged in the actual conflict took more
reasonable views, and the annals of the war are full of stories of
battlefield and hospital in which a common humanity asserted itself. But
brotherhood there was none. No alienation could have been more complete.
Into the cleft made by the disruption poured all the bad blood that had
been breeding from colonial times, from Revolutionary times, from
constitutional struggles, from congressional debates, from "bleeding
Kansas" and the engine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf was
fixed, as it seemed forever, between North and South. The hostility was
a very satisfactory one--for military purposes.
[Note: Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been discarded.
Mr. PAXSON, Professor of American History in the University of
Wisconsin, has devoted a volume to shew that while the South was
defending an impossible cause, it could not hold different views--that
these were the unavoidable result of environment and natural resources.
How different is all this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted
from its issue of April 17, 1865.
"Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebellion. There is nothing
whatever that its leaders have scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and
torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities,
piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the most hideous character
and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places--whatever
is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have
resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of
deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slaveholders' rebellion
will be eternal."
True, "slaveholders' rebellion" still survives here and there. So
WILLIAM HARRISON CLARKE, in The Civil Service Law, Preface, says:
"Parties, when they strive solely for principle, are the life of a
nation; but when they strive solely for pelf, patronage, and power they
are its death. Even corrupt party leaders may destroy a republic;
sometimes even ambitious leaders may do so. Did a nation ever make a
narrower escape than did our own during the slaveholders' rebellion? Who
but ambitious party leaders caused that rebellion?"]
[Note: "Vous êtes de France, mais je suis de Bretagne." "Eh bien! Ce
n'est pas le même pays." "Mais c'est la même patrie." La femme se borna
à répondre, "Je suis de Siscoingnard."--V. HUGO, Quatre-Vingt-Treize.]
The war began, the war went on,--this politicians' conspiracy, this
slaveholders' rebellion, as it was variously called by those who sought
its source, now in the disappointed ambition of the Southern leaders,
now in the desperate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy to
perpetuate their power, and to secure forever their proprietorship in
their "human chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern people were
but puppets in the hands of political wirepullers, or blind followers of
hectoring "patricians." To those who know the Southern people nothing
can be more absurd; to those who know their personal independence, to
those who know the deep interest which they have always taken in
politics, the keen intelligence with which they have always followed
the questions of the day. The court-house green was the political
university of the Southern masses, and the hustings the professorial
chair, from which the great political and economical questions of the
day were presented, to say the least, as fully and intelligently as in
the newspapers to which so much enlightenment is attributed. There was
no such system of rotten boroughs, no such domination of a landed
aristocracy, throughout the South as has been imagined, and venality,
which is the disgrace of current politics, was practically unknown. The
men who represented the Southern people in Washington came from the
people, and not from a ring. Northern writers who have ascribed the firm
control in Congress of the national government which the South held so
long to the superior character, ability, and experience of its
representatives, do not seem to be aware that the choice of such
representatives and their prolonged tenure show that in politics, at
least, the education of the Southerner had not been neglected. The rank
and file then were not swayed simply by blind passion or duped by the
representations of political gamesters. Nor did the lump need the
leavening of the large percentage of men of the upper classes who served
as privates, some of them from the beginning to the end of the war. The
rank and file were, to begin with, in full accord with the great
principles of the war, and were sustained by the abiding conviction of
the justice of the cause. Of course, there were in the Southern army, as
in every army, many who went with the multitude in the first
enthusiastic rush, or who were brought into the ranks by the needful
process of conscription; but it is not a little remarkable that few of
the poorest and the most ignorant could be induced to forswear the cause
and to purchase release from the sufferings of imprisonment by the
simple process of taking the oath. Those who have seen the light of
battle on the faces of these humble sons of the South, or witnessed
their steadfastness in camp, on the march, in the hospital, have not
been ashamed of the brotherhood.
There is such a thing as fighting for a principle, an idea; but
principle and idea must be incarnate, and the principle of States'
rights was incarnate in the historical life of the Southern people. Of
the thirteen original States, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina,
and Georgia were openly and officially upon the side of the South.
Maryland as a State was bound hand and foot. We counted her as ours, for
the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay united as well as divided. Each of these
States had a history, had an individuality. Every one was something more
than a certain aggregate of square miles wherein dwelt an uncertain
number of uncertain inhabitants, something more than a Territory
transformed into a State by the magic of political legerdemain; a
creature of the central government, and duly loyal to its creator.
[Note: "The brandished sword of her coat of arms would have shown what
manner of _placida quies_ she would have ensued." The proof-reader of
the Atlantic not being over-familiar with the Massachusetts coat of arms
(_Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem_) or Scriptural language,
substituted for the foregoing what one reads in the article as printed
in the Atlantic (p. 82): "The brandished sword would have shown what
manner of _placida quies_ would have ensued...."]
[Note: The wish that South Carolina had been scuttled is the wish of
Chilon for Cythera. Herod. 7, 235.]
[Note: This impression, erroneous as it seems, was contravened in a
letter from Mr. WM. A. COURTENAY, Mayor and historian of Charleston, who
wrote to me: "The W. L. I. was named for George Washington. The 22d of
February was celebrated as the anniversary from 1807-92 (thirty years
ago in Fort Sumter under fire), and the connection of the corps with
Col. Wm. Washington was not until April, 1827, on the presentation of
the Eutaw flag to the corps by his widow." However, the memory of the
lesser Washington is still kept alive, and the William Washington house
is still one of the show places of my native city. As a further
illustration of local patriotism I may add that the Charleston boys were
more excited over the 28th of June, the battle of Fort Moultrie, than
over the national Fourth of July.]
In claiming this individuality, nothing more is claimed for Virginia and
for South Carolina than would be conceded to Massachusetts and
Connecticut; and we believed then that Massachusetts and Connecticut
would not have behaved otherwise than we did, if the parts had been
reversed. The brandished sword would have shown what manner of _placida
quies_ Massachusetts would have ensued, if demands had been made on her
at all commensurate with the Federal demands on Virginia. These older
Southern States were proud of their history, and they showed their pride
by girding at their neighbors. South Carolina had her fling at Georgia,
her fling at North Carolina; and the wish that the little State had been
scuttled at an early day was a plagiarism from classical literature that
might have emanated from the South as well as from the North. Virginia
assumed a superiority that was resented by her Southern sisters as well
as by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions
of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was
not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to
be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to
encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would
split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was
not sufficiently strong to make the States sink their contributions to
the common cause in the common glory. Washington was the one national
hero, and yet the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston was named, not
after the illustrious George, but after his kinsman, William. The story
of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill did not thrill the South
Carolinian of an earlier day, and those great achievements were actually
criticized. Who were Putnam and Stark that South Carolinians should
worship them, when they had a Marion and a Sumter of their own? Vermont
went wild, the other day, over Bennington as she did not over the
centenary of the surrender at Yorktown. Take away this local patriotism
and you take out all the color that is left in American life. That the
local patriotism may not only consist with a wider patriotism, but may
serve as a most important element in wider patriotism, is true. Witness
the strong local life in the old provinces of France. No student of
history, no painter of manners, can neglect it. In Gerfaut, a novel
written before the Franco-Prussian war, Charles de Bernard represents an
Alsatian shepherd as saying, "I am not French; I am Alsatian,"--"_trait
de patriotisme de clocher assez commun dans la belle province du Rhin_,"
adds the author, little dreaming of the national significance of that
"patriotisme de clocher." The Breton's love of his home is familiar to
every one who has read his Renan, and Blanche Willis Howard, in Guenn,
makes her priest exclaim, "Monsieur, I would fight with France against
any other nation, but I would fight with Brittany against France. I love
France. I am a Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." The Provençal
speaks of France as if she were a foreign country, and fights for her as
if she were his alone. What is true of France is true in a measure of
England. Devonshire men are notoriously Devonshire men first and last.
If this is true of what have become integral parts of kingdom or
republic by centuries of incorporation, what is to be said of the
States that had never renounced their sovereignty, that had only
suspended it in part?
The example of state pride set by the older States was not lost on the
younger Southern States, and the Alabamian and the Mississippian lived
in the same faith as did the stock from which they sprang; and the
community of views, of interest, of social order, soon made a larger
unit and prepared the way for a true nationality, and with the
nationality a great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the elements that
made up the Confederacy did not prove the great source of weakness that
was expected. The Border States looked on the world with different eyes
from the Gulf States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole planter of
Louisiana were of different strains; and yet there was a solidarity that
has never failed to surprise the few Northerners who penetrated the
South for study and pleasure. There was an extraordinary ramification of
family and social ties throughout the Southern States, and a few
minutes' conversation sufficed to place any member of the social
organism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, like the University of
Virginia, within the Southern border did much to foster the community of
feeling, and while there were not a few Southerners at Harvard and Yale,
and while Princeton was almost a Southern college, an education in the
North did not seem to nationalize the Southerner. On the contrary, as in
the universities of the Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance
with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points,
were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of
view; there was no weakening of the home ties. West Point made fewer
converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of
Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands.
All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may
serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the
facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All that I vouch
for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the
simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own
minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in
our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more
imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South
who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but
not their faith in the cause.
It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded in one's own mind without
the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher,
and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the
existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not
worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the
disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into
a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. Now
this matter of allegiance is just such a question. Open the October
number of The Atlantic and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom many
military men on the Southern side consider to have been the ablest of
all the Federal generals. He was, as every one knows, a Virginian, and
it seemed to us that his being a Virginian was remembered against him in
the Federal councils. "His severance," says the writer in The Atlantic,
"from family and State was a keen trial, but 'his duty was clear from
the beginning.' To his vision there was but one country,--the United
States of America. He had few or no friends at the North. Its political
policy had not seemed to him to be wise. But he could serve under no
flag except that which he had pledged his honor to uphold." Passing over
the quiet assumption that the North was the United States of America,
which sufficiently characterizes the view of the writer, let us turn to
the contrast which would at once have suggested itself even if it had
not been brought forward by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than
Thomas decided the question at the same time, and decided it the other
way. To Lee's vision there was but one course open to a Virginian, and
the pledge that he had given when Virginia was one of the United States
of America had ceased to bind him when Virginia withdrew from the
compact. His duty was clear from the hour when to remain in the army
would have been to draw his sword against a people to whom he was
"indissolubly bound."
[Note: "I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere did the original
spirit of State Sovereignty and allegiance to the State then survive in
greater intensity and more unquestioning form than in Virginia--the 'Old
Dominion'--the mother of States and of Presidents.
"State pride, a sense of individuality, has immemorially entered more
largely and more intensely into Virginia and Virginians than into any
other section or community of the United States. Only in South Carolina
and among Carolinians, on the trans-Atlantic continent, was a somewhat
similar sense of locality and obligation of descent to be found. There
was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the pride which the MacGregors
and Campbells took in their clan and country. In other words, the
Virginian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last century, not to
any appreciable extent, undergone nationalization."--CHAS. FRANCIS
ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137.
I have referred to Mr. ADAMS repeatedly because as a man of my time and
nearly of my age he understood the difficulty of moving the point of
view fifty years backward.]
These contrasted cases are indeed convenient tests for color-blindness.
There may "arise a generation in Virginia," or even a generation of
Virginians, "who will learn and confess" that "Thomas loved Virginia as
well as the sons she has preferred to honor, and served her better." But
no representative Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the
color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has not yielded to treatment
during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the close of the
war, and may as well be accepted for an indefinite period. When social
relations were resumed between the North and the South,--they followed
slowly the resumption of business relations,--what we should call the
color-blindness of the other side often manifested itself in a delicate
reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no
means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long
years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been
considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of
the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the
study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising
subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of
the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a
pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to
say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.
[Note: In these days of mutual understanding and mutual forgiveness, I
shall hardly be believed when I say that as late as 1885, twenty years
after the close of the war, some of my Northern friends who had been
taught the duty of "making treason odious" advised me to suppress or
modify the following passage in my Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as
savoring of disloyalty:
The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man
whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no
discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the
struggle. It was no treason to Medize before there was a Greece,
and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very
different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this
side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another
aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes
of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little
experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That
Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece,
should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed
Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would
have come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should
have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas--all
this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war
that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may
not consider respectable.]
Some fifteen years ago Mr. Lowell was lecturing in Baltimore, and during
the month of his stay I learned to know the charm of his manner and the
delight of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I
was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning
cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he
had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the
Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over
for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to
the great quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just before he left
Baltimore, he was talking as no other man could talk about the Yankee
dialect, and turning to me he said with a half smile and a deep twinkle
in his eye, "I should like to have you read what I have written about
the Yankee dialect, but I am afraid you might not like the context." A
few days afterwards I received from him the well-known preface to the
Second Series of The Biglow Papers, cut out from the volume. It was a
graceful concession to Southern weakness, and after all I may have been
mistaken in thinking that I could read the Second Series as literature,
just as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two-penny Post Bag. In
fact, on looking into the Second Series again, I must confess that I
cannot even now discover the same merits that I could not help
acknowledging in the First Series, which I read for the first time in
1850, when I was a student in Berlin. By that time I had recovered from
my boyish enthusiasm over the Mexican war, and as my party had been
successful, I could afford to enjoy the wit and humor of the book, from
the inimitable Notices of an Independent Press to the last utterance of
Birdofredum Sawin; and I have always remembered enough of the contents
to make a psychological study of the Second Series a matter of interest,
if it were not for other things.
On the second occasion we were passing together under the shadow of the
Washington Monument, and the name of Lee came by some chance into the
current of talk. Here Mr. Lowell could not refrain from expressing his
view of Lee's course in turning against the government to which he had
sworn allegiance. Doubtless he felt it to be his duty to emphasize his
conviction as to a vital clause of his creed, but it instantly became
evident that this was a theme that could not be profitably pursued, and
we walked in silence the rest of the way,--the author of the line
Virginia gave us this imperial man,
and the follower of that other imperial man Virginia gave the world;
both honest, each believing the other hopelessly wrong, but absolutely
sincere.
[Note: Of many consentient utterances I select this one by a prominent
Southerner:
"The Confederate soldiers did not go to war to perpetuate slavery. Most
of them never owned a slave, and our hero, Gen. ROBERT E. LEE, said that
if he owned every one of the slaves in the South he would give them for
the preservation of the Union. It was not for the slaves they fought,
but for principle, for their homes and native land."--T. F. GOODE,
Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893.]
Scant allusion has been made in this paper to the subject of slavery,
which bulks so large in almost every study of the war. A similar
scantiness of allusion to slavery is noticeable in the Memorial volume,
to which I have already referred; a volume which was prepared, not to
produce an impression on the Northern mind, but to indulge a natural
desire to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy; a book written
by friends for friends. The rights of the State and the defence of the
country are mentioned at every turn; "the peculiar institution" is
merely touched on here and there, except in one passage in which a
Virginian speaker maintains that as a matter of dollars and cents it
would be better for Virginia to give up her slaves than to set up a
separate government, with all the cost of a standing army which the
conservation of slavery would make necessary. This silence, which might
be misunderstood, is plain enough to a Southern man. Slavery was simply
a test case, and except as a test case it is too complicated a question
to be dealt with at the close of a paper which is already too long.
Except as a test case it is impossible to speak of the Southern view of
the institution, for we were not all of the same mind.
[Note: "When, within our memory, some flippant Senator [Hammond] wished
to taunt the people of this country by calling them 'the mudsills of
society,' he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the
green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the beds of the rivers
are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State."--R. W.
EMERSON, Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892, p. 33.
In an oration delivered before the United Confederate Veterans, June 14,
1904, RANDOLPH HARRISON McKIM, a former pupil of mine and a cousin of my
college mates mentioned on page 16, says: "The political head of the
Confederacy entered upon the war, foreseeing (February, 1861) the
eventual loss of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy
actually set his slaves free before the war was half over."--The Motives
and Aims of the Soldiers of the South in the Civil War, p. 28. The whole
oration confirms the positions taken in this article.]
There were theorists who maintained that a society based on the rock of
slavery was the best possible in a world where there must be a lowest
order; and the doctrine of the "mud-sill" as propounded by a leading
thinker of this school evoked mud volcanoes all over the North.
Scriptural arguments in defence of slavery formed a large part of the
literature of the subject, and the hands of Southern clergymen were
upheld by their conservative brothers beyond the border.
Some who had read the signs of the times otherwise knew that slavery was
doomed by the voice of the world, and that no theory of society could
withstand the advance of the new spirit; and if the secrets of all
hearts could have been revealed, our enemies would have been astounded
to see how many thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States
felt the crushing burden and the awful responsibility of the institution
which we were supposed to be defending with the melodramatic fury of
pirate kings. We were born to this social order, we had to do our duty
in it according to our lights, and this duty was made indefinitely more
difficult by the interference of those who, as we thought, could not
understand the conditions of the problem, and who did not have to bear
the expense of the experiments they proposed.
There were the practical men who saw in the negro slave an efficient
laborer in a certain line of work, and there were the practical men who
doubted the economic value of our system as compared with that of the
free States, and whom the other practical men laughed to scorn.
There was the small and eminently respectable body of benevolent men who
promoted the scheme of African colonization, of which great things were
expected in my boyhood. The manifest destiny of slavery in America was
the regeneration of Africa.
The people at large had no theory, and the practice varied as much in
the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family
relations. Too much tragedy and too much idyl have been imported into
the home life of the Southern people; but this is not the place to
reduce poetry to prose.
On one point, however, all parties in the South were agreed, and the
vast majority of the people of the North--before the war. The
abolitionist proper was considered not so much the friend of the negro
as the enemy of society. As the war went on, and the abolitionist saw
the "glory of the Lord" revealed in a way he had never hoped for, he saw
at the same time, or rather ought to have seen, that the order he had
lived to destroy could not have been a system of hellish wrong and
fiendish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the liberators would have
been fulfilled, and the horrors of San Domingo would have polluted this
fair land. For the negro race does not deserve undivided praise for its
conduct during the war. Let some small part of the credit be given to
the masters, not all to the finer qualities of their "brothers in
black." The school in which the training was given is closed, and who
wishes to open it? Its methods were old-fashioned and were sadly behind
the times, but the old schoolmasters turned out scholars who, in certain
branches of moral philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates of the
new university.
[Note: A recent historian of the war, PAXSON (The Civil War, p. 248),
says: "Northern revenge in the guise of the preservation of the dearly
won Union was worse for the South than the war."
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 165: "Outrages, and humiliations
worse than outrage, of the period of so-called reconstruction but actual
servile domination."
_L. c._, p. 173: "It may not unfairly be doubted whether a people
prostrate after civil conflict has ever received severer measure than
was dealt out to the so-called reconstructed Confederate States during
the years immediately succeeding the close of strife. That the policy
inspired at the time a feeling of bitter resentment in the South was no
cause for wonder." To me the cause for wonder was and is that a
Virginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten the bitterness, as
is evinced by the following passage in an oration delivered shortly
after the publication of this article:
"No such peace as our peace ever followed immediately upon such a war as
our war. The exhausted South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous
North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely died away when not
only peace, but peace and goodwill were re-established, and the victors
and the vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages of war and
advancing the common welfare of the whole country, as if the old
relations, social, commercial and political between the people of the
two sections had never been disturbed."--CHARLES MARSHALL, of Lee's
Staff, on Grant, May 30, 1892.]
[Note: It was out of the bitterness of this reconstruction period that I
penned the following sonnet to the memory of JOHN M. DANIEL, editor of
the Richmond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more than threescore
editorial articles during the year 1863-4:
DIS MANIBUS
I. M. D.
We miss your pen of fire, whose cloven tongue
Illum'd the good and blasted what was base.
We miss you, fearless fighter for our race,
Your arrows words, your bow a will highstrung.
We miss you, for you tower'd from among
The herd of writers with that careless grace
That springs from undisputed strength. Your place
Is vacant still. Your bow is still uphung.
'Tis well. This were no time for you. The strings
Of your proud heart forefelt the blow and broke;
And when you died, 'twas better thus to die
Than live to see this swarm of crawling things,
And burn with words that must remain unspoke
Where "art is tongue-tied by authority."]
[Note: The school was the Episcopal High School near Alexandria,
Virginia; the principal, the late L. M. BLACKFORD.]
[Note: Ov. Her. 3, 106:
According to Ovid, Briseis was a non-Greek. _Littera_, she writes (v.
2), _vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu_. According to recent
authorities, she was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that Achilles
was musical as Odysseus was not.
[Greek: ton d' heuron phrena terpomenon phormingi ligeiê, kali,
daidaleê, epi d' argyreon zygon êen.]--Il. 9, 185-6.]
[Note: Lesbos was an island consecrated to music from the days of
Orpheus, and we can imagine the lovers singing together and Achilles
solacing his loneliness by chanting to Patroclus the praises of his lost
love.]
[Note: The valued friend was and is ARCHER ANDERSON, of Richmond,
Virginia.]
[Note: "Why is it that wherever one goes in all parts of England one
always finds--thoroughly as I believe the institution of slavery is
detested in this country--every man sympathizing strongly with the
Southerners, and wishing them all success? We do so for this reason ...
Englishmen love liberty, and the Southerner is fighting, not only for
his life, but for that which is dearer than life, for liberty; he is
fighting against one of the most grinding, one of the most galling, one
of the most irritating attempts to establish tyrannical government that
ever disgraced the history of the World."--G. W. BENTINCK, quoted by
CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 111.]
I have tried in this paper to reproduce the past and its perspective, to
show how the men of my time and of my environment looked at the problems
that confronted us. It has been a painful and, I fear, a futile task. So
far as I have reproduced the perspective for myself it has been a
revival of sorrows such as this generation cannot understand; it has
recalled the hours when it gave one a passion for death, a shame of
life, to read our bulletins. And how could I hope to reproduce that
perspective for others, for men who belong to another generation and
another region, when so many men who lived the same life and fought on
the same side have themselves lost the point of view not only of the
beginning of the war, but also of the end of the war, not only of the
inexpressible exaltation, but of the unutterable degradation? They have
forgotten what a strange world the survivors of the conflict had to
face. If the State had been ours still, the foundations of the earth
would not have been out of course; but the State was a military
district, and the Confederacy had ceased to exist. The generous policy
which would have restored the State and made a new union possible, which
would have disentwined much of the passionate clinging to the past, was
crossed by the death of the only man who could have carried it through,
if even he could have carried it through; and years of trouble had to
pass before the current of national life ran freely through the Southern
States. It was before this circuit was complete that the principal of
one of the chief schools of Virginia set up a tablet to the memory of
the "old boys" who had perished in the war,--it was a list the length
of which few Northern colleges could equal,--and I was asked to furnish
a motto. Those who know classic literature at all know that for
patriotism and friendship mottoes are not far to seek, but during the
war I felt as I had never felt before the meaning of many a classic
sentence. The motto came from Ovid, whom many call a frivolous poet; but
the frivolous Roman was after all a Roman, and he was young when he
wrote the line,--too young not to feel the generous swell of true
feeling. It was written of the dead brothers of Briseis:--
Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque iacent.
The sentiment found an echo at the time, deserved an echo at the time.
Now it is a sentiment without an echo, and last year a valued personal
friend of mine, in an eloquent oration, a noble tribute to the memory of
our great captain, a discourse full of the glory of the past, the wisdom
of the present, the hope of the future, rebuked the sentiment as idle
in its despair. As well rebuke a cry of anguish, a cry of desolation out
of the past. For those whose names are recorded on that tablet the line
is but too true. For those of us who survive it has ceased to have the
import that it once had, for we have learned to work resolutely for the
furtherance of all that is good in the wider life that has been opened
to us by the issue of the war, without complaining, without repining.
That the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of
civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery, is a thesis which we
feel ourselves bound to maintain whenever our motives are challenged or
misunderstood, if only for our children's sake. But even that will not
long be necessary, for the vindication of our principles will be made
manifest in the working out of the problems with which the republic has
to grapple. If, however, the effacement of state lines and the complete
centralization of the government shall prove to be the wisdom of the
future, the poetry of life will still find its home in the old order,
and those who loved their State best will live longest in song and
legend,--song yet unsung, legend not yet crystallized.