THE LEGACY OF HATE
... Immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.
--PARADISE LOST.
The last time I went abroad, a Briton on the boat told me a story about
an American tourist who asked an old English gardener how they made such
splendid lawns over there.
"First we cut the grass," said the gardener, "and then we roll it. Then
we cut it, and then we roll it."
"That's just what we do," said the American.
"Ah," returned the gardener, "but over here we've been doing it five
hundred years!"
In Liverpool another Englishman told me the same story. Three or four
others told it to me in London. In Kent I heard it twice, and in Sussex
five or six times. After going to Oxford and the Thames I lost count.
In the South my companion and I had a similar experience with the story
about that daughter of the Confederacy who declared she had always
thought "damn Yankee" one word. In Maryland that story amused us, in
Virginia it seemed to lose a little of its edge, and we are proud to
this day because, in the far southern States, we managed to grin and
bear it.
Doubtless the young lady likewise thought that "you-all" was one word.
However I refrained from suggesting that, lest it be taken for an
attempt at retaliation. And really there was no occasion to retaliate,
for the story was always told with good-humored appreciation not only of
the dig at "Yankees"--collectively all Northerners are "Yankees" in the
South--but also of the sweet absurdity of the "unreconstructed" point of
view.
Speaking broadly of the South, I believe that there survives little real
bitterness over the Civil War and the destructive and grotesquely named
period of "reconstruction." When a southern belle of to-day damns
Yankees, she means by it, I judge, about as much, and about as little,
as she does by the kisses she gives young men who bear to her the
felicitous southern relationship of "kissing cousins."
Even from old Confederate soldiers I heard no expressions of violent
feeling. They spoke gently, handsomely and often humorously of the war,
but never harshly. Real hate, I think, remains chiefly in one quarter:
in the hearts of some old ladies, the wives and widows of Confederate
soldiers--for there are but few mothers of the soldiers left. The wonder
is that more of the old ladies of the South have not held to their
resentment, for, as I have heard many a soldier say, women are the
greatest sufferers from war. One veteran said to me: "My arm was
shattered and had to be amputated at the shoulder. There was no
anesthetic. Of course I suffered, but I never suffered as my mother did
when she learned what I had endured."
Be they haters of the North or not, the old ladies of the South are
among its chief glories, and it should be added that another of those
glories is the appreciation that the South has for the white-haired
heroines who are its mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers, and
the unfailing natural homage that it pays them. I do not mean by this
merely that children and grandchildren have been taught to treat their
elders with respect. I do not mean merely that they love them. The thing
of which I speak is beyond family feeling, beyond the respect of youth
for age. It is a strong, superb sentiment, something as great as it is
subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old
ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love
and reverence of a proud people for its flag.
Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the
parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war. Of these only one
spoke with heat. He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in
all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon
women by soldiers--such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German
invasion of Belgium and France--he replied with a great show of feeling
that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by
northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea. At this
my heart sank, for I had treasured the belief that, despite the
roughness of war, unprotected women had generally been safe from the
soldiers of North and South alike. What was my relief, then, on later
receiving from this same young man a letter in which he declared that he
had been mistaken, and that after many inquiries in Georgia he had been
unable to learn of a single case of such crime. If it is indeed true
that such things did not occur in the Civil War--and I believe
confidently that it is true--then we have occasion, in the light of the
European War, to revise the popular belief that of all wars civil war is
the most horrible.
The attitude of the modern South (the "New South" which, by the way, one
Southerner described to me as meaning "northern capital and smoke")
toward its own "unreconstructed" citizens, for all its sympathy and
tenderness, is not without a glint of gentle humor. More than once, when
my companion and I were received in southern homes with a cordiality
that precluded any thought of sectional feeling, we were nevertheless
warned by members of the younger generation--and their eyes would
twinkle as they said it--to "look out for mother; she's
unreconstructed." And you may be sure that when we were so warned we did
"look out." It was well to do so! For though the mother might be a frail
old lady, past seventy, with the face of an angel and the normal
demeanor of a saint, we could see her bridle, as we were presented to
her, over the thought there here were two Yankees in her
home--Yankees!--we could see the light come flashing up into her eyes
as they encountered ours, and could feel beneath the veil of her austere
civility the dagger points of an eternal enmity. By dint of self-control
on her part, and the utmost effort upon ours to be tactful, the
presentation ceremony was got over with, and after some formal speeches,
resembling those which, one fancies, may be exchanged by opposing
generals under a flag of truce, we would be rescued from her, removed
from the room, before her forbearance should be strained, by our
presence, to the point of breaking. A baleful look would follow us as we
withdrew, and we would retire with a better understanding of the flaming
spirit which, through that long, bloody conflict against overwhelming
odds in wealth, supplies, and men, sustained the South, and which at
last enabled it to accept defeat as nobly as it had accepted earlier
victories.... How one loves a gentle old lady who can hate like that!
In this chapter, when it appeared originally, in "Collier's Weekly," I
made the statement that I had seldom spent an hour in conversation with
a Southerner without hearing some mention of the Civil War, and that I
had heard other Northerners remark upon this matter, and express
surprise at the tenacity with which the war holds its place in the
foreground of the southern mind.
This, like many another of my southern observations, brought me letters
from readers of "Collier's," residing in the South. A great number of
the letters thus elicited, as well as comments made upon these chapters
by the southern press, have been of no small interest to me. On at
least one subject (the question discussed in the next chapter, as to
whether the expression "you-all" is ever used in the singular) my
correspondents have convinced me that my earlier statement was an error,
while on other subjects they have modified my views, and on still others
made my convictions more profound. Where it has been possible, and where
it has seemed, for one reason or another, to be worth while, I have
endeavored, while revising the story of my southern wanderings for this
book, to make note of the other fellow's point of view, especially in
cases where he disagrees with me.
The following, then, is from a letter written on the stationery of
Washington and Lee University, and applies to certain statements
contained in this chapter:
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a newspaper publisher: "Were I
the publisher of a paper, instead of the usual division into
Foreign, Domestic, etc., I think I should distribute everything
under the following heads: 1. True. 2. Probable. 3. Wanting
confirmation. 4. Lies, and be careful in subsequent papers to
correct all errors in preceding ones."
Allow me to suggest that your story might, under Mr. Jefferson's
category, be placed under "2." Perhaps you went to see "The Birth
of a Nation" before you wrote it. It has been my experience that my
acquaintances among the F.F.V.'s have been far more interested in
whether Boston or Brooklyn would win the pennant than in discussing
the Civil War. By the young men of the South the War was forgotten
long ago.
This letter has caused me to wonder whether the frequency with which my
companion and I heard the Civil War discussed, may not, perhaps, have
been due, at least in part, to our own inquiries, resulting from the
consuming interest that we had in hearing of the War from those who
lived where it was fought.
Yet, after all, it seems to me most natural that the South should
remember, while the North forgets. Not all Northerners were in the war.
But all Southerners were; if a boy was big enough to carry a gun, he
went. The North almost completely escaped invasion, and upon one
occasion when a southern army did march through northern territory, the
conduct of the invading troops toward the civilian population (the false
Barbara Frietchie legend to the contrary notwithstanding) was so
exemplary as to set a record which is probably unequaled in history.[2]
The South, upon the other hand, was constantly under invasion, and the
record of destruction wrought by northern armies in the valley of the
Shenandoah, on the March to the Sea, and in some other instances, is
writ in poverty and mourning unto this day.
[2] See chapter on Colonel Taylor and General Lee.
Thus, except politically, the North now feels not the least effect from
the war. But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of
conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined--as
instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax
returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since
the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.
So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the
northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be
studied in school under the heading "United States History," it has not,
in southern eyes, become altogether "book history," but is history that
lives--in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded
letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great
houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields,
and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn
up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.
Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not
forget. The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that
remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the
South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever. If to err is
human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its
humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same
token, attained something like divinity.
Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have
understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.
Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in
those States which suffered the greatest hardships. I know, for
instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to
enter the Massachusetts Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and there
are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses
on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and
Stripes. The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the
South. Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother's
bridal wreath. When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe,
Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many
Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a
negro child. However, war had not then broken out in Europe. It would be
different now.
A Virginia lady told me of having gone to a dentist in Winchester,
Virginia, and having taken her little niece with her. The child watched
the dentist put a rubber dam in her aunt's mouth, and then, childlike,
began to ask questions. She was a northern child, and she had evidently
heard some one in the town speak of Sheridan's ride.
"Auntie," she said, "was Sheridan a Northerner or a Southerner?"
Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist
answered for her. "He was a drunken Yankee!" he declared vehemently.
When, later, the rubber dam was removed, the aunt protested.
"Doctor," she reproved, "you should not have said such a thing to my
niece. She is from New York."
"Then," returned the unrepentant dentist, "she has heard the truth for
once!"
Doubtless this man was an inheritor of hate, like the descendants of one
uncompromisingly bitter old Southerner whose will, to be seen among the
records of the Hanover County courthouse, in Virginia, bequeaths to his
"children and grandchildren and their descendants throughout all future
generations, the bitter hatred and everlasting malignity of my heart and
soul against the Yankees, including all people north of Mason and
Dixon's line."