I have lived a long life--rather a happy and a busy than a merry
one--enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirking
no needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my credit. It
were, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownership
of these. They are the joint products and property of my dear wife and
myself.
I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far back
as I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is worth
living for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a world of
ours.
I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affection
between my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their golden
wedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicity
fifty-four--counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years.
Never was a young fellow more in love than I--never has love been more
richly rewarded--yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements.
I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of Sections--amid
its turmoil and peril--and when at its close we were married, at Nashville,
Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the future an adventure. It was
at Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us together and
riveted our destinies. She had a fine contralto voice and led the church
choir. Doctor Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into the
long prayer of the Presbyterian service. Bragg's army was still in middle
Tennessee. There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the bursting
of a shell too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell
fragments on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were upon
us.
The man of God gave no sign that anything unusual was happening. He did not
hurry. He did not vary the tones of his voice. He kept on praying. Nor was
there panic in the congregation, which did not budge.
That was the longest long prayer I ever heard. When it was finally ended,
and still without changing a note the preacher delivered the benediction,
the crowded church in the most orderly manner moved to the several
doorways.
I was quick to go for my girl. By the time we reached the street the firing
had become general. We had to traverse quite half a mile of it before
attaining a place of safety. Two weeks later we were separated for nearly
two years, when, the war over, we found ourselves at home again.
In the meantime her father had fallen in the fight, and in the far South
I had buried him. He was one of the most eminent and distinguished and
altogether the best beloved of the Tennesseeans of his day, Andrew Ewing,
who, though a Democrat, had in high party times represented the Whig
Nashville district in Congress and in the face of assured election declined
the Democratic nomination for governor of the state. A foremost Union
leader in the antecedent debate, upon the advent of actual war he had
reluctantly but resolutely gone with his state and section.
V
The intractable Abolitionists of the North and the radical Secessionists of
the South have much historically to answer for. The racial warp and woof in
the United States were at the outset of our national being substantially
homogeneous. That the country should have been geographically divided and
sectionally set by the ears over the institution of African slavery was
the work of agitation that might have attained its ends by less costly
agencies.
How often human nature seeking its bent prefers the crooked to the straight
way ahead! The North, having in its ships brought the negroes from Africa
and sold them to the planters of the South, putting the money it got for
them in its pocket, turned philanthropist. The South, having bought its
slaves from the slave traders of the North under the belief that slave
labor was requisite to the profitable production of sugar, rice and cotton,
stood by property-rights lawfully acquired, recognized and guaranteed by
the Constitution. Thence arose an irrepressible conflict of economic forces
and moral ideas whose doubtful adjustment was scarcely worth what it cost
the two sections in treasure and blood.
On the Northern side the issue was made to read freedom, on the Southern
side, self-defense. Neither side had any sure law to coerce the other.
Upon the simple right and wrong of it each was able to establish a case
convincing to itself. Thus the War of Sections, fought to a finish so
gallantly by the soldiers of both sides, was in its origination largely a
game of party politics.
The extremists and doctrinaires who started the agitation that brought it
about were relatively few in number. The South was at least defending its
own. That what it considered its rights in the Union and the Territories
being assailed it should fight for aggressively lay in the nature of the
situation and the character of the people. Aggression begot aggression, the
unoffending negro, the provoking cause, a passive agent. Slavery is gone.
The negro we still have with us. To what end?
Life indeed is a mystery--a hopelessly unsolved problem. Could there be
a stronger argument in favor of a world to come than may be found in the
brevity and incertitude of the world that is? Where this side of heaven
shall we look for the court of last resort? Who this side of the grave
shall be sure of anything?
At this moment the world having reached what seems the apex of human
achievement is topsy-turvy and all agog. Yet have we the record of any
moment when it was not so? That to keep what we call the middle of the road
is safest most of us believe. But which among us keeps or has ever kept the
middle of the road? What else and what next? It is with nations as with
men. Are we on the way to another terrestrial collapse, and so on ad
infinitum to the end of time?