THE HILLTOP
On the court house portico sat the prominent men of the county, lawyers
and planters, men of name and place, moulders of thought and leaders in
action. Out of these came the speakers. One by one, they stepped into
the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty,
such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense crowd
listened, hardly breathing, now it broke into wild applause. The
speakers dealt with an approaching tempest, and with a gesture they
checked off the storm clouds. "_Protection for the manufacturing North
at the expense of the agricultural South_--an old storm centre!
_Territorial Rights_--once a speck in the west, not so large as a man's
hand, and now beneath it, the wrangling and darkened land! _The Bondage
of the African Race_--a heavy cloud! Our English fathers raised it; our
northern brethren dwelled with it; the currents of the air fixed it in
the South. At no far day we will pass from under it. In the mean time we
would not have it _burst_. In that case underneath it would lie ruined
fields and wrecked homes, and out of its elements would come a fearful
pestilence! _The Triumph of the Republican Party_--no slight darkening
of the air is that, no drifting mist of the morning! It is the triumph
of that party which proclaims the Constitution a covenant with death and
an agreement with hell!--of that party which tolled the bells, and fired
the minute guns, and draped its churches with black, and all-hailed as
saint and martyr the instigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in
a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the
Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the
Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong--all these are in the bosom
of that cloud!--_The Sovereignty of the State._ Where is the tempest
which threatens here? _Not_ here, Virginians! but in the pleasing
assertion of the North, 'There is no sovereignty of the State!' 'A State
is merely to the Union what a county is to a State.' O shades of John
Randolph of Roanoke, of Patrick Henry, of Mason and Madison, of
Washington and Jefferson! O shade of John Marshall even, whom we used to
think too Federal! The Union! We thought of the Union as a golden
thread--at the most we thought of it as a strong servant we had made
between us, we thirteen artificers--a beautiful Talus to walk our coasts
and cry 'All's well!' We thought so--by the gods, we think so yet! That
_is_ our Union--the golden thread, the faithful servant; not the monster
that Frankenstein made, not this Minotaur swallowing States! _The
Sovereignty of the State!_ Virginia fought seven years for the
sovereignty of Virginia, wrung it, eighty years ago, from Great Britain,
and has not since resigned it! Being different in most things, possibly
the North is different also in this. It may be that those States have
renounced the liberty they fought for. Possibly Massachusetts--the years
1803, 1811, and 1844 to the contrary--does regard herself as a county.
Possibly Connecticut--for all that there was a Hartford
Convention!--sees herself in the same light. Possibly. 'Brutus saith 't
is so, and Brutus is an honourable man!' But Virginia has not renounced!
Eighty years ago she wrote a certain motto on her shield. To-day the
letters burn bright! Unterrified then she entered this league from which
we hoped so much. Unterrified to-morrow, should a slurring hand be laid
upon that shield, will she leave it!"
Allan Gold, from the schoolhouse on Thunder Run, listened with a
swelling heart, then, amid the applause which followed the last speaker,
edged his way along the crowded old brick pavement to where, not far
from the portico, he made out the broad shoulders, the waving dark hair,
and the slouch hat of a young man with whom he was used to discuss these
questions. Hairston Breckinridge glanced down at the pressure upon his
arm, recognized the hand, and pursued, half aloud, the current of his
thought. "I don't believe I'll go back to the university. I don't
believe any of us will go back to the university.--Hello, Allan!"
"I'm for the preservation of the Union," said Allan. "I can't help it.
We made it, and we've loved it."
"I'm for it, too," answered the other, "in reason. I'm not for it out of
reason. In these affairs out of reason is out of honour. There's nothing
sacred in the word _Union_ that men should bow down and worship it! It's
the thing behind the word that counts--and whoever says that
Massachusetts and Virginia, and Illinois and Texas are united just now
is a fool or a liar!--Who's this Colonel Anderson is bringing forward?
Ah, we'll have the Union now!"
"Who is it?"
"Albemarle man, staying at Lauderdale.--Major in the army, home on
furlough.--Old-line Whig. I've been at his brother's place, near
Charlottesville--"
From the portico came a voice. "I am sure that few in Botetourt need an
introduction here. We, no more than others, are free from vanity, and we
think we know a hero by intuition. Men of Botetourt, we have the honour
to listen to Major Fauquier Cary, who carried the flag up Chapultepec!"
Amid applause a man of perhaps forty years, spare, bronzed, and
soldierly, entered the clear space between the pillars, threw out his
arm with an authoritative gesture, and began to speak in an odd, dry,
attractive voice. "You are too good!" he said clearly. "I'm afraid you
don't know Fauquier Cary very well, after all. He's no hero--worse luck!
He's only a Virginian, trying to do the right as he sees it, out yonder
on the plains with the Apaches and the Comanches and the sage brush and
the desert--"
There was an interruption. "How about Chapultepec?"--"And the Rio
Grande?"--"Didn't we hear something about a fight in Texas?"
The speaker laughed. "A fight in Texas? Folk, folk, if you knew how many
fights there are in Texas--and how meritorious it is to keep out of
them! No; I'm only a Virginian out there." He regarded the throng with
his magnetic smile, his slight and fine air of gaiety in storm. "As you
know, I am by no means the only Virginian, and they are heroes, the
others, if you like!--real, old-line heroes, brave as the warriors in
Homer, and a long sight better men! I am happy to report to his kinsmen
here that General Joseph E. Johnston is in health--still loving
astronomy, still reading du Guesclin, still studying the Art of War.
He's a soldier's soldier, and that, in its way, is as fine a thing as a
poet's poet! I see men before me who are of the blood of the Lees. Out
there by the Rio Grande is a Colonel Robert E. Lee, of whom Virginia may
well be proud! There are few heights in those western deserts, but he
carries his height with him. He's marked for greatness. And there are
'Beauty' Stuart, and Dabney Maury, the best of fellows, and Edward
Dillon, and Walker and George Thomas, and many another good man and
true. First and last, there's a deal of old Virginia following Mars, out
yonder! We've got Hardee, too, from Georgia, and Van Dorn from
Mississippi, and Albert Sidney Johnston from Kentucky--no better men in
Homer, no better men! And there are others as soldierly--McClellan with
whom I graduated at West Point, Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Sedgwick,
Sykes, and Averell. McClellan and Hancock are from Pennsylvania,
Fitz-John Porter is from New Hampshire, Sedgwick from Connecticut, Sykes
from Delaware, and Averell from New York. And away, away out yonder, in
the midst of sage brush and Apaches, when any of us chance to meet
around a camp-fire, there we sit, while coyotes are yelling off in the
dark, there we sit and tell stories of home, of Virginia and
Pennsylvania, of Georgia and New Hampshire!"
He paused, drew himself up, looked out over the throng to the mountains,
studied for a moment their long, clean line, then dropped his glance and
spoke in a changed tone, with a fiery suddenness, a lunge as of a tried
rapier, quick and startling.
"Men of Botetourt! I speak for my fellow soldiers of the Army of the
United States when I say that, out yonder, we are blithe to fight with
marauding Comanches, with wolves and with grizzlies, but that we are
not--oh, we are not--ready to fight with each other! Brother against
brother--comrade against comrade--friend against friend--to quarrel in
the same tongue and to slay the man with whom you've faced a thousand
dangers--no, we are not ready for that!
"Virginians! I will not believe that the permanent dissolution of this
great Union is come! I will not believe that we stand to-day in danger
of internecine war! Men of Botetourt, go slow--go slow! The Right of the
State--I grant it! I was bred in that doctrine, as were you all.
Albemarle no whit behind Botetourt in that! The Botetourt
Resolutions--amen to much, to very much in the Botetourt Resolutions!
South Carolina! Let South Carolina go in peace! It is her right!
Remembering old comradeship, old battlefields, old defeats, old
victories, we shall still be friends. If the Gulf States go, still it is
their right, immemorial, incontrovertible!--The right of
self-government. We are of one blood and the country is wide. God-speed
both to Lot and to Abraham! On some sunny future day may their children
draw together and take hands again! So much for the seceding States. But
Virginia,--but Virginia made possible the Union,--let her stand fast in
it in this day of storm! in this Convention let her voice be heard--as I
know it will be heard--for wisdom, for moderation, for patience! So, or
soon or late, she will mediate between the States, she will once again
make the ring complete, she will be the saviour of this great historic
Confederation which our fathers made!"
A minute or two more and he ended his speech. As he moved from between
the pillars, there was loud applause. The county was largely Whig,
honestly longing--having put on record what it thought of the present
mischief and the makers of it--for a peaceful solution of all troubles.
As for the army, county and State were proud of the army, and proud of
the Virginians within it. It was amid cheering that Fauquier Cary left
the portico. At the head of the steps, however, there came a question.
"One moment, Major Cary! What if the North declines to evacuate Fort
Sumter? What if she attempts to reinforce it? What if she declares for a
_compulsory_ Union?"
Cary paused a moment. "She will not, she will not! There are politicians
in the North whom I'll not defend! But the people--the people--the
people are neither fools nor knaves! They were born North and we were
born South and that is the chief difference between us! A _Compulsory_
Union! That is a contradiction in terms. Individuals and States,
harmoniously minded, unite for the sweetness of Union and for the
furtherance of common interests. When the minds are discordant, and the
interests opposed, one may be bound to another by Conquest--not
otherwise! What said Hamilton? _To coerce a State would be one of the
maddest projects ever devised!_" He descended the court house steps to
the grassy, crowded yard. Here acquaintances claimed him, and here, at
last, the surge of the crowd brought him within a yard of Allan Gold and
his companion. The latter spoke. "Major Cary, you don't remember me. I'm
Hairston Breckinridge, sir, and I've been once or twice to Greenwood
with Edward. I was there Christmas before last, when you came home
wounded--"
The older man put out a ready hand. "Yes, yes, I do remember! We had a
merry Christmas! I am glad to meet you again, Mr. Breckinridge. Is this
your brother?"
"No, sir. It's Allan Gold, from Thunder Run."
"I am pleased to meet you, sir," said Allan. "You have been saying what
I should like to have been able to say myself."
"I am pleased that you are pleased. Are you, too, from the university?"
"No, sir. I couldn't go. I teach the school on Thunder Run."
"Allan knows more," said Hairston Breckinridge, "than many of us who are
at the university. But we mustn't keep you, sir."
In effect they could do so no longer. Major Cary was swept away by
acquaintances and connections. The day was declining, the final speaker
drawing to an end, the throng beginning to shiver in the deepening cold.
The speaker gave his final sentence; the town band crashed in
determinedly with "Home, Sweet Home." To its closing strains the county
people, afoot, on horseback, in old, roomy, high-swung carriages, took
this road and that. The townsfolk, still excited, still discussing,
lingered awhile round the court house or on the verandah of the old
hotel, but at last these groups dissolved also. The units betook
themselves home to fireside and supper, and the sun set behind the
Alleghenies.
Allan Gold, striding over the hills toward Thunder Run, caught up with
the miller from Mill Creek, and the two walked side by side until their
roads diverged. The miller was a slow man, but to-day there was a red in
his cheek and a light in his eye. "Just so," he said shortly. "They must
keep out of my mill race or they'll get caught in the wheel."
"Mr. Green," said Allan, "how much of all this trouble do you suppose is
really about the negro? I was brought up to wish that Virginia had never
held a slave."
"So were most of us. You don't hold any."
"No."
"No more I don't. No more does Tom Watts. Nor Anderson West. Nor the
Taylors. Nor five sixths of the farming folk about here. Nor seven
eighths of the townspeople. We don't own a negro, and I don't know that
we ever did own one. Not long ago I asked Colonel Anderson a lot of
questions about the matter. He says the census this year gives Virginia
one million and fifty thousand white people, and of these the fifty
thousand hold slaves and the one million don't. The fifty thousand's
mostly in the tide-water counties, too,--mighty little of it on this
side the Blue Ridge! Ain't anybody ever accused Virginians of not being
good to servants! and it don't take more'n half an eye to see that the
servants love their white people. For slavery itself, I ain't
quarrelling for it, and neither was Colonel Anderson. He said it was
abhorrent in the sight of God and man. He said the old House of
Burgesses used to try to stop the bringing in of negroes, and that the
Colony was always appealing to the king against the traffic. He said
that in 1778, two years after Virginia declared her Independence, she
passed the statute prohibiting the slave trade. He said that she was the
first country in the civilized world to stop the trade--passed her
statute thirty years before England! He said that all our great
Revolutionary men hated slavery and worked for the emancipation of the
negroes who were here; that men worked openly and hard for it until
1832. Then came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those
women and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall
Abolition people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on
like grim death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where
the explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking, so a lot
of men have risen with us to advocate without thinking. And underneath
all the clamour, there goes on, all the time, quiet and steady, a
freeing of negroes by deed and will, a settling them in communities in
free States, a belonging to and supporting Colonization Societies. There
are now forty thousand free negroes in Virginia, and Heaven knows how
many have been freed and established elsewhere! It is our best people
who make these wills, freeing their slaves, and in Virginia, at least,
everybody, sooner or later, follows the best people. 'Gradual
manumission, Mr. Green,' that's what Colonel Anderson said, 'with
colonization in Africa if possible. The difficulties are enough to turn
a man's hair grey, but,' said he, 'slavery's knell has struck, and we'll
put an end to it in Virginia peacefully and with some approach to
wisdom--if only they'll stop stirring the gunpowder!'"
The miller raised his large head, with its effect of white powder from
the mill, and regarded the landscape. "'We're all mighty blind, poor
creatures,' as the preacher says, but I reckon one day we'll find the
right way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned,
lovable, never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole,
way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and King
George saddled us with, not much to their betterment and to our certain
hurt. I reckon we'll find it. But I'm damned if I'm going to take the
North's word for it that she has the way! Her old way was to sell her
negroes South."
"I've thought and thought," said Allan. "People mean well, and yet
there's such a dreadful lot of tragedy in the world!"
"I agree with you there," quoth the miller. "And I certainly don't deny
that slavery's responsible for a lot of bitter talk and a lot of
red-hot feeling; for some suffering to some negroes, too, and for a deal
of harm to almost all whites. And I, for one, will be powerful glad when
every negro, man and woman, is free. They can never really grow until
they are free--I'll acknowledge that. And if they want to go back to
their own country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it
to them--even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did
them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You couldn't
scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help them back to
their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for instance--never see one
that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three Oaks,--_he'd_ say he
couldn't possibly think of going--must stay at Three Oaks and look after
Miss Margaret and the children! No, it isn't an easy subject, look at it
any way you will. But as between us and the North, it ain't the main
subject of quarrel--not by a long shot it ain't! The quarrel's that a
man wants to take all the grist, mine as well as his, and grind it in
his mill! Well, I won't let him--that's all. And here's your road to
Thunder Run."
Allan strode on alone over the frozen hills. Before him sprang the
rampart of the mountains, magnificently drawn against the eastern sky.
To either hand lay the fallow fields, rolled the brown hills, rose the
shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The
evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown
south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded. There was only the
earth, field and hill and mountain, the up and down of a narrow road,
and the glimmer of a distant stream. The sunset had been red, and it
left a colour that flared to the zenith.
The young man, tall, blond, with grey-blue eyes and short, fair beard,
covered with long strides the frozen road. It led him over a lofty hill
whose summit commanded a wide prospect. Allan, reaching this height,
hesitated a moment, then crossed to a grey zigzag of rail fence, and,
leaning his arms upon it, looked forth over hill and vale, forest and
stream. The afterglow was upon the land. He looked at the mountains, the
great mountains, long and clean of line as the marching rollers of a
giant sea, not split or jagged, but even, unbroken, and old, old, the
oldest almost in the world. Now the ancient forest clothed them, while
they were given, by some constant trick of the light, the distant,
dreamy blue from which they took their name. The Blue Ridge--the Blue
Ridge--and then the hills and the valleys, and all the rushing creeks,
and the grandeur of the trees, and to the east, steel clear between the
sycamores and the willows, the river--the upper reaches of the river
James.
The glow deepened. From a farmhouse in the valley came the sound of a
bell. Allan straightened himself, lifting his arms from the grey old
rails. He spoke aloud.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,--
The bell rang again, the rose suffused the sky to the zenith. The young
man drew a long breath, and, turning, began to descend the hill.
Before him, at a turn of the road and overhanging a precipitous hollow,
in the spring carpeted with bloodroot, but now thick with dead leaves,
lay a giant oak, long ago struck down by lightning. The branches had
been cut away, but the blackened trunk remained, and from it as vantage
point one received another great view of the rolling mountains and the
valleys between. Allan Gold, coming down the hill, became aware, first
of a horse fastened to a wayside sapling, then of a man seated upon the
fallen oak, his back to the road, his face to the darkening prospect.
Below him the winter wind made a rustling in the dead leaves. Evidently
another had paused to admire the view, or to collect and mould between
the hands of the soul the crowding impressions of a decisive day. It
was, apparently, the latter purpose; for as Allan approached the ravine
there came to him out of the dusk, in a controlled but vibrant voice,
the following statement, repeated three times: "We are going to have
war.--We are going to have war.--We are going to have war."
Allan sent his own voice before him. "I trust in God that's not
true!--It's Richard Cleave, there, isn't it?"
The figure on the oak, swinging itself around, sat outlined against the
violet sky. "Yes, Richard Cleave. It's a night to make one think,
Allan--to make one think--to make one think!" Laying his hand on the
trunk beside him, he sprang lightly down to the roadside, where he
proceeded to brush dead leaf and bark from his clothing with an old
gauntlet. When he spoke it was still in the same moved, vibrating voice.
"War's my _metier_. That's a curious thing to be said by a country
lawyer in peaceful old Virginia in this year of grace! But like many
another curious thing, it's true! I was never on a field of battle, but
I know all about a field of battle."
He shook his head, lifted his hand, and flung it out toward the
mountains. "I don't want war, mind you, Allan! That is, the great stream
at the bottom doesn't want it. War is a word that means agony to many
and a set-back to all. Reason tells me that, and my heart wishes the
world neither agony nor set-back, and I give my word for peace.
Only--only--before this life I must have fought all along the line!"
His eyes lightened. Against the paling sky, in the wintry air, his
powerful frame, not tall, but deep-chested, broad-shouldered, looked
larger than life. "I don't talk this way often--as you'll grant!" he
said, and laughed. "But I suppose to-day loosed all our tongues, lifted
every man out of himself!"
"If war came," said Allan, "it couldn't be a long war, could it? After
the first battle we'd come to an understanding."
"Would we?" answered the other. "Would we?--God knows! In the past it
has been that the more equal the tinge of blood, the fiercer was the
war."
As he spoke he moved across to the sapling where was fastened his horse,
loosed him, and sprang into the saddle. The horse, a magnificent bay,
took the road, and the three began the long descent. It was very cold
and still, a crescent moon in the sky, and lights beginning to shine
from the farmhouses in the valley.
"Though I teach school," said Allan, "I like the open. I like to do
things with my hands, and I like to go in and out of the woods. Perhaps,
all the way behind us, I was a hunter, with a taste for books! My
grandfather was a scout in the Revolution, and his father was a
ranger.... God knows, _I_ don't want war! But if it comes I'll go. We'll
all go, I reckon."
"Yes, we'll all go," said Cleave. "We'll need to go."
The one rode, the other walked in silence for a time; then said the
first, "I shall ride to Lauderdale after supper and talk to Fauquier
Cary."
"You and he are cousins, aren't you?"
"Third cousins. His mother was a Dandridge--Unity Dandridge."
"I like him. It's like old wine and blue steel and a cavalier poet--that
type."
"Yes, it is old and fine, in men and in women."
"He does not want war."
"No."
"Hairston Breckinridge says that he won't discuss the possibility at
all--he'll only say what he said to-day, that every one should work for
peace, and that war between brothers is horrible."
"It is. No. He wears a uniform. He cannot talk."
They went on in silence for a time, over the winter road, through the
crystal air. Between the branches of the trees the sky showed intense
and cold, the crescent moon, above a black mass of mountains, golden and
sharp, the lights in the valley near enough to be gathered.
"If there should be war," asked Allan, "what will they do, all the
Virginians in the army--Lee and Johnston and Stuart, Maury and Thomas
and the rest?"
"They'll come home."
"Resigning their commissions?"
"Resigning their commissions."
Allan sighed. "That would be a hard thing to have to do."
"They'll do it. Wouldn't you?"
The teacher from Thunder Run looked from the dim valley and the
household lamps up to the marching stars. "Yes. If my State called, I
would do it."
"This is what will happen," said Cleave. "There are times when a man
sees clearly, and I see clearly to-day. The North does not intend to
evacuate Fort Sumter. Instead, sooner or later, she'll try to reinforce
it. That will be the beginning of the end. South Carolina will reduce
the fort. The North will preach a holy war. War there will be--whether
holy or not remains to be seen. Virginia will be called upon to furnish
her quota of troops with which to coerce South Carolina and the Gulf
States back into the Union. Well--do you think she will give them?"
Allan gave a short laugh. "No!"
"That is what will happen. And then--and then a greater State than any
will be forced into secession! And then the Virginians in the army will
come home."
The wood gave way to open country, softly swelling fields, willow
copses, and clear running streams. In the crystal air the mountain walls
seemed near at hand, above shone Orion, icily brilliant. The lawyer from
a dim old house in a grove of oaks and the school-teacher from Thunder
Run went on in silence for a time; then the latter spoke.
"Hairston Breckinridge says that Major Cary's niece is with him at
Lauderdale."
"Yes. Judith Cary."
"That's the beautiful one, isn't it?"
"They are all said to be beautiful--the three Greenwood Carys. But--Yes,
that is the beautiful one."
He began to hum a song, and as he did so he lifted his wide soft hat and
rode bareheaded.
"It's strange to me," said Allan presently, "that any one should be gay
to-day."
As he spoke he glanced up at the face of the man riding beside him on
the great bay. There was yet upon the road a faint after-light--enough
light to reveal that there were tears on Cleave's cheek. Involuntarily
Allan uttered an exclamation.
The other, breaking off his chant, quite simply put up a gauntleted hand
and wiped the moisture away. "Gay!" he repeated. "I'm not gay. What gave
you such an idea? I tell you that though I've never been in a war, I
know all about war!"