“RICHMOND, _June 10th, 1843._
“MY DEAR WIFE,—After a fatiguing day it is with great
pleasure I sit down to have a little chat with you, and to
inform you of our progress. Were I disposed to give credit
to lucky and unlucky days, a little incident occurred on
our way down which would have disturbed me very much. We
were going on at a reasonable rate when, to our surprise,
the front of the ‘splendid line of coach’ assumed a strange
position, and for a moment I thought we should be wrecked,
but it was only minus a wheel—one of the front ones having
taken leave of us and journeying, ‘singly and alone,’ on the
other side of the turnpike. We were soon ‘all right,’ and
arrived here in good health but much fatigued. Mother has
hardly got rested yet, but thinks another quiet day will be
sufficient, and that she will be ready to start on Monday
morning and be able to hold out to go through without again
stopping. We have passed over the most fatiguing part of our
journey. We shall leave on Monday morning by the railroad,
and, unless some accident should happen on the way, expect
to be in Boston on Wednesday about 9 o’clock A.M. It is my
intention to keep on, unless mother should require rest,
more than can be had on the line of travel.... Well, love,
are you not tired of this overparticularity about business?
I will not weary you any longer with it. I have never left
home with a stronger feeling of regret than at the present
time, and it appears that the older I get, the greater the
trial to stay away. Now you will say that it is because you
become more and more interesting. Well, it must be so, for
I cannot discover any other cause. Do not let it be long
before you write.
“The heat, wind, and dust of the city to-day have put me
entirely out of trim for writing, and my talent is but small
even under the most favorable circumstances. By-the-bye,
called on Mrs. D. last evening to deliver a message from Mr.
D. _Quite_ a pleasant ten minutes’ affair, and was excused.
Herbert must save some of those nice plants for that box to
be placed on a pole, and tell him if he is a good boy we
will try and have a nice affair for the little birds. My
_man_ must have a hand in the work, if it be only to look
on, and Alice can do the talking part. Don’t let Virginia
take to her chamber. Keep her circulating about the house in
all dry weather; the wind will not injure her, unless it be
quite damp, at least so I think.
“_Sunday, 11th._—Attended Doctor Plumer’s church this
morning, and heard a young man, the son of one of the
professors at Princeton, preach. The sermon was good, but
should have preferred the Doctor. Morning rainy and no one
in from Olney.
“_Evening._—Attended Mr. Magoon’s church. He preached from
the words, ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked,’ etc. A
good, practical sermon; he alluded to ministers and church
members away from home, and showed them in many cases to
be mockers of God, and instanced inconsistencies, all of
which he termed ‘mockery.’ Expect to-night to hear Doctor
Plumer. Now, love, you have a full history up to the time of
our departure. Write to me soon, and, after telling about
yourself, the children, and servants, give me an account
of store, farming, and gardening operations. Those large
sheets will hold a great deal, if written very close. Kiss
Alice and the baby for father. Tell Herbert and Horace that
father wishes them to be good boys and learn fast. And now,
dear Anna, I must bid you adieu, commending you and our dear
ones to the care of Him whose mercies have been so largely
bestowed on us in days past. May He preserve you from all
evil and cause you to dwell in perfect peace.”
The foregoing extracts from a letter written by my father during the
(to us) “wonderful summer” of our sojourn in Prince Edward had to do
with the periodical visit paid by my grandmother to her Massachusetts
home. I am deeply impressed in the perusal of these confidential
epistles with the absolute dependence of the strong man—whom mere
acquaintances rated as reserved to sternness, and singularly
undemonstrative, even to his friends—upon the gentle woman who was,
I truly believe, the one and only love of his lifetime. He talked
to her by tongue and by pen of every detail of business; she was
the confidante of every plan, however immature; she, and she alone,
fathomed the depths of a soul over which Puritan blood and training
impelled him to cast a veil. In all this he had not a secret from her.
Portions of the letter which I have omitted go into particulars of
transactions that would interest few women.
No matter how weary he was after a day of travel or work, he had always
time to “talk it out” with his _alter ego_. The term has solemn force,
thus applied. In the injunction to write of domestic, gardening, and
farming affairs, he brings in “the store,” now of goodly proportions
and “departments,” and into which she did not set foot once a week, and
then as any other customer might. “Those large sheets will hold a great
deal if written very close,” he says, archly. They had evidently been
provided for this express purpose before he left home.
One paragraph in the exscinded section of the letter belongs to a day
and system that have lapsed almost from the memory of the living.
An infant of Mary Anne, my mother’s maid, was ill with whooping-cough
when the master took his journey northward.
“I am quite anxious to hear how Edgar is,” he writes. “I fear the case
may prove fatal, and am inclined to blame myself for leaving home
before it was decided. Yet I know he is in good hands, and that you
have done and will do everything necessary for his comfort. Also that,
in the event of his death, all that is proper will be attended to. When
I get home the funeral shall be preached, of which you will please
inform his parents.”
No word of written or spoken comfort would do more to soothe the hearts
of the bereaved parents than the assurance that the six-months-old baby
should have his funeral sermon in good and regular order. The discourse
was seldom preached at the time of interment. Weeks, and sometimes
months, intervened before the friends and relatives could be convened
with sufficient pomp and circumstance to satisfy the mourners. I have
attended services embodying a long sermon, eulogistic of the deceased
and admonitory of the living, when the poor mortal house of clay had
mouldered in the grave for half a year. I actually knew of one funeral
of a wife that was postponed by untoward circumstances until, when
a sympathizing community was convoked to listen to the sermon, the
ex-widower sat in the front seat as chief mourner with a second wife
and her baby beside him. And the wife wore a black gown with black
ribbon on her bonnet, out of respect to her predecessor!
They were whites, and church members in good and regular standing.
Little Edgar died the day after my father took the train from Richmond
for the fast run through to Boston—in two days and two nights! When
the master got home after a month’s absence, the funeral sermon was
preached in old Petersville Church, three miles from the Court House,
on a Sunday afternoon, and the parents and elder children were conveyed
thither in the family carriage, driven by Spotswood, who would now be
the “coachman.” Then he was the “carriage-driver.” They took time for
everything then-a-days, and plenty of it.
In September, Mea and I had the culmination of our experiences and
“privileges” upon College Hill in the Hampden-Sidney Commencement. I
had never attended one before. I have seen none since that were so
grand, and none that thrilled me to the remotest fibre of my being as
the exercises of that gloriously cloudless day. I hesitate to except
even the supreme occasion when, from a box above the audience-floor
packed with two thousand students and blazing with electric lights, I
saw my tall son march with his class to receive his diploma from the
president of a great university, and greeted him joyfully when, the
ceremonial over, he brought it up to lay in my lap.
There were but four graduates in that far-off little country college
with the hyphenated name and the honored history. It may be that their
grandchildren will read the roll here: Robert Campbell Anderson, Thomas
Brown Venable, Paul Carrington, and Mr. Rice, whose initials I think
were “T. C.” There were, I reiterate, but four graduates, but they
took three honors. Robert Anderson was valedictorian; Mr. Rice of the
uncertain initials had the philosophical oration; Tom Brown Venable
had the Latin salutatory; and Paul Carrington, the one honorless man,
made the most brilliant speech of them all. It was a way he had. The
madcap of the college—who just “got through,” as it were, by the skin
of his teeth, by cramming night and day for two months to make up for
an indefinite series of wretched recitations and numberless escapades
out of class—he easily eclipsed his mates on that day of days. The boys
used to say that he was “Saul,” until he got up to declaim, or make an
original address. Then he was “Paul.” He was Pauline, _par éminence_,
to-day.
I could recite verbatim his lament over Byron’s wasted powers, and
I see, as if it were but yesterday that it thrilled me, the pose and
passion of the outburst, arms tossed to heaven in the declamation:
“O! had his harp been tuned to Zion’s songs!”
Music was “rendered” by an admirably trained choir. The hour of the
brass-band had not come yet to Hampden-Sidney. And the choir rendered
sacred music—such grand old anthems as,
“Awake! awake! put on thy strength, O Zion!
Put on thy beautiful garments”;
and,
“How beautiful upon the mountains
Are the feet of him that publisheth salvation;
That saith unto Zion,
‘Thy God reigneth!’”
Doctor Maxwell was the president then, and was portentous in my eyes in
his don’s gown.
Dear old Hampden-Sidney! she has arisen, renewed in youth and vigor,
from the cinders of semi-desolation, has cast aside the sackcloth and
ashes of her grass-widowhood, and stepped into the ranks of modern
progress. I like best to recall her when she maintained the prestige of
her traditional honors and refused to accept decadence as a fixed fact.