VI

A Confederate commentary on Thucydides, on the scale of the remarks just

made on the name of the war, would outrun the lines of this study. Let

us pass from Thucydides to the other contemporary chronicler who turns

out some sides of the "Doric war" about which Thucydides is silent. The

antique Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details

that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History.

Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That

was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his

description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the

country people were crowded when the Lacedæmonians invaded Attica. But

when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque

details about the rookeries and the wine-jars inhabited by the

newcomers. Diogenes' jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no invention, and

I have known less comfortable quarters than the hogshead which I

occupied for a day or two in one of my outings during the war.

The plague was too serious a matter for even Aristophanes to make fun

of, and the annalist of the war between the States will not find any

parallel in the chronicles of the South. There was no such epidemic as

still shows its livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the verses of

Lucretius. True, some diseases of which civic life makes light proved to

be veritable scourges in camp. Measles was especially fatal to the

country-bred, and for abject misery I have never seen anything like

those cases of measles in which nostalgia had supervened. Nostalgia,

which we are apt to sneer at as a doctor's name for homesickness, and to

class with cachexy and borborygmus, was a power for evil in those days,

and some of our finest troops were thinned out by it, notoriously the

North Carolinians, whose attachment to the soil of their State was as

passionate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, Attic or

Peloponnesian.

[Note: Gresham's law was anticipated by Aristophanes, Ran. 718, foll.]

But the frightful mortality of the camp does not strike the imagination

so forcibly as does the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman cares

to analyze hospital reports and compare the medical with the surgical

history of the war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so

easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the

dominant note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as military. The

Confederate soldier was often on short rations, but the civilian was not

much better off. I do not mean those whose larders were swept by the

besom of the invaders. "Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, left

in the house," was not an uncommon cry along the line of march; but it

was heard elsewhere, and I remember how I raked up examples of European

and Asiatic frugality with which to reinforce my editorials and hearten

my readers,--the scanty fare of the French peasant, the raw oatmeal of

the Scotch stonecutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss mountaineer, the

Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the Greek's handful of olives, and the

Hindoo's handful of rice. The situation was often gayly accepted. The

not infrequent proclamation of fastdays always served as a text for

mutual banter, and starvation-parties were the rule, social gatherings

at which apples were the chief refreshment. Strange streaks of luxury

varied this dead level of scant and plain fare. The stock of fine wines,

notably madeiras, for which the South was famous, did not all go to the

hospitals. Here and there provident souls had laid in boxes of tea and

bags of coffee that carried them through the war, and the chief outlay

was for sugar, which rose in price as the war went on, until it almost

regained the poetical character it bore in Shakespeare's time. Sugar,

tea, and coffee once compassed, the daintiness of old times occasionally

came back, and I have been assured by those who brought gold with them

that Richmond was a paradise of cheap and good living during the war,

just as the United States will be for foreigners when our currency

becomes as abundant as it was in the last years of the Confederacy.

Gresham's law ought to be called Aristophanes' law. In all matters

pertaining to the sphere of civic life, merry Aristophanes is of more

value than sombre Thucydides, and if the gospel of peace which he

preaches is chiefly a variation on the theme of something to eat, small

blame to him. Critics have found fault with the appetite of Odysseus as

set forth by Homer. No Confederate soldier will subscribe to the

censure, and there are no scenes in Aristophanes that appeal more

strongly to the memory of the Southerner, civilian or soldier, than

those in which the pinch of war makes itself felt.

Farmers and planters made their moan during the Confederacy, and

doubtless they had much to suffer. "Impressment" is not a pleasant word

at any time, and the tribute that the countryman had to yield to the

defense of the South was ruinous,--the indirect tribute as well as the

direct. The farmers of Virginia were much to be pitied. Their homes were

filled with refugee kinsfolk; wounded Confederates preferred the private

house to the hospital. Hungry soldiers and soldiers who forestalled the

hunger of weeks to come, laid siege to larder, smoke-house,

spring-house. Pay, often tendered, was hardly ever accepted. The

cavalryman was perhaps a trifle less welcome than the infantryman,

because of the capacious horse and the depleted corn-bin, but few were

turned away. Yet there was the liberal earth, and the farmer did not

starve, as did the wretched civilian whose dependence was a salary,

which did not advance with the rising tide of the currency. The woes of

the war clerks in Richmond and of others are on record, and important

contributions have been made to the economical history of the

Confederate States. I will not draw on these stores. I will only tell of

what I have lived, as demanded by the title of this paper. The income of

the professors of the University of Virginia was nominally the same

during the war that it was before, but the purchasing power of the

currency steadily diminished. If it had not been for a grant of

woodland, we should have frozen as well as starved during the last year

of the war, when the quest of food had become a serious matter. In our

direst straits we had not learned to dispense with household service,

and the household servants were never stinted of their rations, though

the masters had to content themselves with the most meagre fare. The

farmers, generous enough to the soldiers, were not overconsiderate of

the non-combatants. Often the only way of procuring our coarse food was

by making contracts to be paid after the war in legal currency, and

sometimes payment in gold was exacted. The contracts were not always

kept, and the unfortunate civilian had to make new contracts at an

enhanced price. Before my first campaign in 1861, I had bought a little

gold and silver, for use in case of capture, and if it had not been for

that precious hoard I might not be writing this sketch. But despite the

experience of the airy gentlemen who alighted in Richmond during the

war, even gold and silver would not always work wonders. Bacon and

corned beef in scant measure were the chief of our diet, and not always

easy to procure. I have ridden miles and miles, with silver in my palm,

seeking daintier food for the women of my household, but in vain. There

was nothing to do except to tighten one's belt, and to write editorials

showing up the selfishness of the farming class and prophesying the

improvement of the currency.

No wonder, then, that with such an experience a bookish Confederate

should turn to the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian war with

sympathetic interest. The Athenians, it is true, were not blockaded as

we were, and the Athenian beaux and belles were not reduced to the

straits that every Confederate man, assuredly every Confederate woman,

can remember. Our blockade-runners could not supply the demands of our

population. We went back to first principles. Thorns were for pins, and

dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible

garments were made possible. Miracles of turning were performed, not

only in coats, but even in envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave it to

his womankind in order to make the body of a riding-habit. Dainty feet

were shod in home-made foot-gear which one durst not call shoes. Fairy

fingers which had been stripped of jewelled rings wore bone circlets

carved by idle soldiers. There were no more genuine tears than those

which flowed from the eyes of the Southern women resident within the

Federal lines when they saw the rig of their kinswomen, at the cessation

of hostilities. And all this grotesqueness, all this dilapidation, was

shot through by specimens of individual finery, by officers who had

brought back resplendent uniforms from beyond seas, by heroines who had

engineered themselves and their belongings across the Potomac.

[Note: As is well known, the Greek had a mania for shoes. For women's

shoes see Av. Lys. 417. For other cordwainer's wares, _l. c._, 110.]

Of all this the scholar found nothing in the records of the

Peloponnesian war. The women of Megara may have suffered, but hardly the

Corinthian women; and the Athenian dames and damsels were as particular

about their shoes and their other cordwainer's wares as ever. The story

that Socrates and his wife had but one upper garment between them is a

stock joke, as I have shown elsewhere. "Who first started the notable

jest it is impossible, at this distance of time, to discover, just as

it is impossible to tell whose refined wit originated the conception of

the man who lies abed while his solitary shirt is in the wash." The

story was intended to illustrate, not the scarcity of raiment in the

Peloponnesian war, but the abundance of philosophy in the Socratic soul.

All through that war the women of Athens seem to have had as much finery

as was good for them. The pinch was felt at other points, and there the

Confederate sympathy was keen.

In The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the hero, Dicæopolis, makes a

separate peace on his individual account with the Peloponnesians and

drives a brisk trade with the different cantons, the enthusiasm reaching

its height when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and his eels. This

ecstasy can best be understood by those who have seen the capture of a

sutler's wagon by hungry Confederates; and the fantastic vision of a

separate peace became a sober reality at many points on the lines of the

contending parties. The Federal outposts twitted ours with their lack

of coffee and sugar; ours taunted the Federals with their lack of

tobacco. Such gibes often led, despite the officers, to friendly

interchange. So, for instance, a toy-boat which bore the significant

name of a parasite familiar to both sides made regular trips across the

Rappahannock after the dire struggle at Fredericksburg, and promoted

international exchange between "Yank" and "Johnny Reb." The daydream of

Aristophanes became a sober certainty.

The war was not an era of sweetness and light. Perhaps sugar was the

article most missed. Maple sugar was of too limited production to meet

the popular need. Sorghum was a horror then, is a horror to remember

now. It set our teeth on edge and clawed off the coats of our stomachs.

In the army sugar was doled out by pinches, and from the tables of most

citizens it was banished altogether. There were those who solaced

themselves with rye coffee and sorghum molasses regardless of ergot and

acid, but nobler souls would not be untrue to their gastronomic ideal.

Necessity is one thing, mock luxury another. If there had been honey

enough, we should have been on the antique basis; for honey was the

sugar of antiquity, and all our cry for sugar was but an echo of the cry

for honey in the Peloponnesian war. Honey was then, as it is now, one of

the chief products of Attica. It is not likely that the Peloponnesians

took the trouble to burn over the beds of thyme that gave Attic honey

its peculiar flavor, but the Peloponnesians would not have been soldiers

if they had not robbed every beehive on the march; and, sad to relate,

the Athenians must have been forced to import honey. When Dicæopolis

makes the separate peace mentioned above, he gets up a feast of good

things, and there is a certain unction in the tone with which he orders

the basting of sausage-meat with honey, as one should say mutton and

currant jelly. In The Peace, when War appears and proceeds to make a

salad, he says,--

I'll pour some Attic honey in.