FROM the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every
night by “making up stories,” down to the present hour, every human
life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate
knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some
measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no
tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.
I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of
conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and _living_
of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from “Preface” to
“Finis,” I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by
comparison.
My children tell me, laughingly, that I “turn everything into a story.”
In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my
hand.
In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no
dramatic effects or artistic “situations.” “The Story of My Long Life”
tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in
the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing
that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness—which was
almost a shock—that, of all the authors still on active professional
duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to
the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a
quarter-century. I, alone, am left to tell, of my own knowledge and
experience, what the Old South was in deed and in truth. Other and far
abler pens than mine have portrayed scenes of those days with skill I
cannot emulate. But theirs is hearsay evidence—second-hand testimony
as truly as if they wrote of Shakespeare’s haps and mishaps in the
grammar-school at Stratford-on-Avon, or of Master George Herbert’s
early love affairs.
True, the fathers told it to the generation following, and the
generation has been faithful to the traditions committed to it. What I
have to say in the aforesaid gossip over the confidential fire is of
what I saw and heard and did—and _was_ in that hoary Long Ago.
Throughout the telling I have kept the personal touch. The story
is autobiography—not history. I began it for my children, whose
importunities for tales of the olden—and now forever gone—“times” have
been taken up by the least grandchild.
It was my lot to know the Old South in her prime, and to see her
downfall. Mine to witness the throes that racked her during four black
and bitter years. Mine to watch the dawn of a new and vigorous life and
the full glory of a restored Union. I shall tell of nothing that my
eyes did not see, and depict neither tragedy nor comedy in which I was
not cast for a part.
Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading-lamp in
the living-room, and not for the library shelves. To the family and to
those who make and keep the home do I commit it.