BAYARD TAYLOR said to me once of a publishing house, “An honest firm,
but one that has an incorrigible habit of _failing_!”
The habit was epidemic in the first half of 1861. Among others who
caught the trick were my publishers. Like a thunderbolt came the
announcement, when I was expecting my February semi-annual remittance
of fat royalties: “We regret to inform you that we have been compelled
to succumb to the stringency of the times.”
The political heavens were black with storm-clouds, and, as was
inevitable then, and is now, the monetary market shut its jaws tightly
upon everything within reach. We could not reasonably have expected
immunity, but we had. We had never known the pinch of financial
“difficulties.” Prudent salaried men are the last to feel hard times,
if their wage is paid regularly. I had three books in the hands of the
“failing” firm. All were “good sellers,” and I had come to look upon
royalties as my husband regarded his salary, as a sure and certain
source of revenue.
We had other and what appeared to us graver anxieties. My sister Alice
had passed the winter with us, and the climate had told unhappily upon
her throat. My husband had not escaped injury from the pernicious
sea-fogs and the malarial marshes, over which the breath of the
Atlantic flowed in upon us. He had a bronchial cough that defied
medical treatment; and March, the worst month of the twelve for tender
throats and susceptible lungs, would soon be upon us. His physician,
a warm personal friend, ordered him South, and the church seconded
the advice by a formal grant of an out-of-season vacation. We did not
change our main plan in consequence of the disappointment as to funds.
Nor did we noise our loss abroad. Somehow, the truth leaked out. Not a
word of condolence was breathed to us. But on the afternoon of the day
but one before that set for our departure, the daughter of a neighborly
parishioner dropped in to leave a basket of flowers, and to say that
her father and mother “would like to call that evening, if we were
to be at home.” I answered that we should be glad to see them, and
notified my husband of the impending call. The expected couple appeared
at eight o’clock, and by nine the parlors were thronged with guests
who “dropped in, in passing, to say ‘Good-bye.’” None stayed late, and
before any took leave, there was the presentation of a parcel, through
the hands of Edgar Farmer, a member of the Consistory, who, in days to
come, was to be to my husband as David to Jonathan. He was young then,
and of a goodly presence, with bright, kind eyes and a happy gift of
speech. Neither Mr. Terhune nor I had any misgivings of what was in
prospect, when he was asked to step forward and face the spokesman
deputed to wish us _Bon voyage_ and recovery of health in our old home.
Mr. Farmer said this felicitously, and with genuine feeling. Then he
asked the pastor’s acceptance of a parcel “containing reading-matter
for the journey.”
The reading-matter was bank-bills, the amount of which made us open
our eyes wide when the company had dispersed and we undid the ribbons
binding the “literature.”
That was their way of doing things in the “Old First.” A way they never
lost. In a dozen-and-a-half years we should have become used to it, but
we never did. Each new manifestation of the esteem in which they held
their leader, and of the royally generous spirit that interfused the
whole church, as it might the body and soul of one man, remained to the
last a fresh and delicious surprise.
Ten days out of the six weeks of our vacation were spent in Charlotte.
Mr. Terhune’s successor was Rev. Henry C. Alexander, one of a family
of notable divines whose praise is in all the Presbyterian churches.
He was a bachelor, and the “nest among the oaks” was rented to an
acquaintance. I did not enter it then, or ever again. I even looked
the other way when we drove or walked past the gate and grove. To let
this weakness be seen would have been ungracious, in the face of the
hospitalities enlapping us during every hour of our stay. We dined with
one family, supped with another, spent the night and breakfasted with
a third, and there was ever a houseful of old friends to meet us. My
husband wrote to his father:
“Swinging around the circle at a rate that would turn
steadier heads. And talk of the fat of the land and groaning
tables! These tables fairly _shriek_, and the fat flows like
a river. Heaven send we may live through it! We _like_ it,
all the same!”
And enjoyed every hour, albeit senses less agreeably preoccupied might
have detected the smell of gunpowder in the air.
I am often asked if we were not uneasy for the safety of the Union,
while in the thick of sectional wordy strife, and how it was possible
to enjoy visits when much of the talk must have jarred upon the
sensibilities of loyal lovers of that Union.
The truth is that I had been used to political wrangling from my youth
up. The fact that South Carolina and six other States had seceded
in name from the control of the Federal government; that, in every
county and “Cross-Roads” hamlet, from the Gulf of Mexico to Chesapeake
Bay, bands of volunteers were drilling daily and nightly, and that
cargoes of arms were arriving from the North and in distribution among
the enlisted militiamen; that the Southern papers sounded the tocsin
of war to the death, and “Death in the last ditch!” and “Down with
the Yankees!” with every red-hot issue; that a convention had been
solemnly summoned to meet in Richmond to decide upon the action of the
Old Dominion at the supreme moment of the nation’s destiny—weighed
marvellously little against the settled conviction, well-nigh sublime
in its fatuousness, that the right must prevail, and that such furious
folly must die ignominiously before the steadfast front maintained by
the Union men of the infected section.
To my apprehension, so much that we heard was sheer gasconade, amusing
for a time from its very unreason and illogical conclusions, and often
indicative of such blatant ignorance of the spirit and the resources of
the Federal government, that I failed to attach to it the importance
the magnitude of the mischief deserved to have.
I refused stubbornly to let the clear joy of my holiday be clouded by
the smoke from blank cartridges. So light was my spirit that I made
capital for fun of bombastic threats and gloomy predictions, touching
the stabling of Confederate cavalry in Faneuil Hall inside of three
months from the day of the inauguration of the “Springfield Ape” at
Washington. The Vice-President was a full-blooded negro, or, at the
least, a mulatto, I was assured over and over. Wasn’t his name damning
evidence of the disgraceful fact? What white man ever called his child
“Hannibal”?