transferred sandy deserts into radiant farmsteads, festooned with
clematis and enameled with gladiolus. Hated by men with stinging
consciences or none, they retaliated never--or hardly ever. Though
poor they were not discouraged; sockless, they were not ashamed. When
bedizzened with frontier fringes, even Doctor Mary Walker with all her
trousers was not arrayed like one of them. Many of them went south,
where they were greeted with black looks from white men and white
smiles from black men; a few remained there and outgrew both.
Gleefully as the beefsteak sings on the gridiron, the ring of their
axes sounded through northern forests; their hearts and heads were
solid to the innermost core, like the stumps they left behind them.
Broad prairies in the west blossomed with their chinchilla moustaches
and their alfalfa whiskers. They opened mines, subdued vast
wildernesses, tunneled mountains for railways and syphoned them for
irrigation. They equipoised some of that surplus gravity which has at
times caused the country to tip up on its eastern edge. They did not
wear toothpick shoes, lemon-colored or otherwise; these they left to
the weak and vicious elements of an effete civilization.
With the army shoe, the army bean, the army mule, and the unfailing
army nerve, they marched on to new and noble conquests. They organized
commonwealths; founded cities; edited newspapers; captured
judgeships, governorships, senatorships, the presidency,
administering the multiform functions to their own eternal honor and
with benefit to all. Officeholding had charms for them recondite as
the link between beans and blue-stockings, inscrutible as the dynamics
of a cucumber which has concealed its aggressiveness until 3 a. m.
Should the demon of filibuster raise his crest from opposition benches
in any one of a score of legislative assemblies, you might readily
count a full quorum of them, each busily tying knots with his tongue
which no agility of his teeth could undo, each kindly instructing
novices how to work a tennis racket or advising experts how to extract
honey from Celtic ground-apples. Their arguments might be loose in the
joints like a plaisance camel, but they unerringly arrived at an
available conclusion. The feeble but sage members of a swell chappie
clique might pronounce them insufferable as to style, but they went on
capturing and conquering things by instinctive predilection and force
of habit. They experienced little exhilaration from the effervescence
of hired rapture and purchased adulation; their financial views
habitually had the ring of two metals; their accomplishments might
stop short of the mandolin and their scholarship shy at an ablative
absolute. But they reached the goal, on the average, and "Get there
Eli!" was their practical rendition of the motto "Excelsior."
Of seven presidents elected since the close of the war, six were
ex-soldiers. Minnesota points with pride to her nine soldier
governors. The Veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and
involuntary honors of their admiring countrymen, while the chief
function of their traducers seems to have been to crop thistles, grow
ears and bray.
The surviving Veterans of the Union army were neither drones in the
busy hive of national development, nor a burden on the benevolence of
their fellow-citizens. Ninety-five per cent. of them made a success in
the civil battles of life--doing men's part honorably, industriously,
heroically in the work of the world. Only five per cent. were
failures, less than three per cent. ever became wholly dependent on
public charity for support.
[Illustration: _The veterans quietly gathered in the voluntary and
involuntary honors.... One state points with pride to her nine soldier
governors, and of seven presidents elected since the close of the war,
six were ex-soldiers_]
An appalling phalanx of apparitions at times menaced the peace of
nervous taxpayers over prospective drafts on their plethoric
resources. A cat may kick at a king. Men gifted with wind and lungs,
men with well-shaved voice and neatly-modulated nose, have proclaimed
a shuddering dread of future difficulty in preparing for wholesale
care of the thriftless ex-soldier. But those unsophisticated suspects
went on ruthlessly, recklessly, paying their own full share of the
taxes and manifestly bent on relentlessly taking care of themselves.
The identical persons who in the honey-dew days of the "Boys in Blue"
had gaily floated in geysers of taffy, constantly sprayed with
cascades of gush, were, ten years later, the objects of fathomless
solicitude on the part of contemporaries who feared that universal
pauperism would engulf them. Vain was the dread; bootless the
solicitude. In the aggregate, the discharged Veterans contributed in
taxes more than the sum total of their army pay, and by their own
productive labor added more to the wealth of the nation than the
entire cost of the war. And at any time within the last thirty years
there might have been found in all our prisons a larger per capita
proportion of former church dignitaries and bank officers than of
honorably discharged soldiers of the Union. The typical Veteran was
neither a tramp nor a bummer. He was a thrifty, self-respecting,
patriotic citizen. At the plow, the anvil, the lathe; on the engine,
the mail car, the ship; in the lumbering camp, the harvest field, the
counting-room, the factory; at the bar, on the bench, in the
pulpit--everywhere in spheres of useful, successful effort, he wrought
faithfully, ardently, triumphantly.
Even where the Veterans never went, their influence penetrated and
vivified and fructified. Their aromatic, anaesthetic codfish, their
mackerel stuffed with savor and salinity, have carried freedom's
tidings to Borneo's wilds. A Grand Army post annually observes
memorial day in distant Honolulu. Ireland and Poland, lanced spots of
a huge European suppuration, have felt the pulsations of our victory.
And on the dim frontiers of far-off Argentina, sweet girl graduates of
Minnesota's normal schools, daughters of Veterans, turbaned with
haloes and aproned with the flag, are unfolding the mysteries of
orthography, chirography, cube roots, and syllogisms, to rejoicing
grandchildren of authentic Patagonian cannibals. Whether as a Daniel
come to judgment or a Jonah come to grief, the "Gallant Veteran"
adorned his era--an era that is past.
The third decade brought peculiar revelations and some characteristic
iconoclasms, wrought by the most gothic of vandals known to human
kind. The deeds of the Boy in Blue and the Gallant Veteran have been
told and retold in verses so musical that they might almost be punched
with holes and performed on self-playing pianos, automatically, as it
were. But the terms are obsolete, and the current period has brought
its special designation, tremulous as a phrase from De Senectute, and
redolent of lean and slippered Pantaloon--"The Old Soldier." It came
in the days when colored cartoons were growing on the country like a
bad habit, and it came to stay. Whether applied in honor and
tenderness, or in derision and mockery, who can tell?
This epithet tells a truth, though perhaps emanating from indecent
exposure of intellect in a brain whose convolutions are more crooked
than the ram's horn that triturated the defenses of Jericho. It tells
a truth, though more cruel than that sweeping massacre when the
patriarch Cain came within one of slaying all the youth in Asia, or
than the edict which collared and cuffed a dilapidated Coxey in the
shadow of the capitol's proud dome.
Whether we like it or not, it has elements of permanence,--that
euphony which is the kernel of fact; that levity which is the soul of
wit; that pointedness which is the test of endurance. It has
manifestly come to abide. When the lady lacteal artist lactealizes the
sober, circumspect cow, the product is harmless as the process and
participants; no spirituous or vinous venom from that nourishing
fountain e'er exudes. When the lion eats a lamb the lamb becomes
lion; when the lamb eats a lion the results can be better imagined
than depicted. When the commonweal tourist falls aweary, he wins
consolation from a rehearsal of "Bunion's Pilgrim's Progress, or the
Trials of a Trail," and rises refreshed.
When the ex-soldier feels rheumatic twinges clutching at his nerves
like an eagle's beak, resistance were vain as kicking at a thunderbolt
in crocheted slippers. He is still vigorous, considering all that he
has gone through--and all that has gone through him! But he is not
invulnerable; some of his elasticity is as deceptive as the
hospitality of an alleged park dotted all over with warnings to keep
off the grass. He may profitably display that charity which covers a
multitude of sarcasms, and serenely accept the inevitable as a
companion piece to tariff reduction, civil-service reform, lectures on
advanced domesticity by the emancipated female whose family lives on
canned goods, and other copyrighted jokes. Yes; the Boys in Blue have
donned the Gray. They are no longer young; they will never be
younger; they are "Old Soldiers" now, and will be to the end.
Meanwhile they exist as an active element in society, none the less
interested and observant because of their phenomenal experience. A
subtle, half-forgotten aroma of school-boy Latin permeates the back
parlors of their minds, but the grand beacon-lights of world history
flush all the front windows with a ruddy glow. They lag, superfluous
it may be, like lingering aborigines who are chewing salt pork,
sandwiched with bread of idleness, out in the bad lands; but they will
not linger long. The ribald glee of the society sharp, boasting an
aesthetic eclat acquired at Christmas free lunches and other luxurious
functions, probes to no sore spots. Honesty is probably the best
policy when the amount involved is small, but it is the best
principle, always and everywhere. Those who practice it look upon
themselves with the pleased astonishment of a man who has made a
verified prediction. Those who ignore it look upon themselves with a
cold diagonal Japanese stare of non-recognition--while still the
wonder grows that average-sized consciences can stand so many blows.
The Old Soldier can afford to be honest and admit the hideous
imputation of adolescence. Yes! Eleven hundred times, yes. It were
safer as well as honester to admit, than to join issue and challenge
proof. Should he deny it, any unprejudiced tribunal would summarily
rule out all evidence for the defense and refuse to note an exception.
Only two generations lie between the shirt-sleeves of the money-making
ancestor and the patched pants of his impoverished great-grand-son;
only two generations ago, Astor was chasing the festive mink and
Vanderbilt was sculling the shapeless scow. Hence life is too short to
be frittered away in vain regrets and useless denials. The Boys in
Blue have all grown Gray.
The sensations of a dizzy man when the floor rises up around him,
while east and west come together with a crash, are an antidote to his
precedent fairest visions of the heavenly. There are said to be tenors
before whose singing the larks are struck dumb and take to the woods,
while the whole landscape melts into one golden chalice of liquid
melody.
But time, the enchantress, with all her benefactions, all her favor,
all her consideration, has wrought no miracle of perpetual youth for
the Boys in Blue or the gallant Veterans. The free coinage of silver
has gone on among their plenteous locks, whether auburn, black or
brown, unmindful of the edict of 1873. Dyes are futile; pigments are
in vain; bleaches are superfluous. The process goes on; sure, steady,
inevitable, inexorable.
The Old Soldier pleads guilty to those who take toll of yellow meal
and neglect the weightier matters of the law. But he does not yet
apologize for persistent existence. They who resent his longevity as
an economic affront, contradicting all mortuary tables, whist formulas
and crap combinations, must abide the result, even though it create an
ice gorge in Ohio politics. He braves the feeble wrath of the
political dilettante, with a daily surplus of brains (fried in
crumbs), principally solicitous to provide mermaids with divided
skirts and get dried insects on the free list. He fully indorses
Horace Greeley's theory that snobs are the poorest breed of horned
cattle on earth. He does not even excuse himself to the frosty orators
of the alumni platform, educated beyond the limits of their intellect,
who assume to stand high in the councils of their creator, but
neglected to bring their souls with them when they condescended to be
born.
The Rhode Island colonists defiantly proclaimed, in the midst of a
witch burning era, "There are no witches on this earth, nor
devils--excepting Massachusetts ministers, and such as they." Men with
paunches and other signs of wealth, men with white neckgear and other
signs of piety, men with binocles and other signs of culture, men with
unclassifiable crania and faces unfit for publication, have snubbed
and jeered the Old Soldier, but he still survives. An unsullied
Americanism vindicates itself always against the world. When the royal
United States Berkshire came in competition with the pauper hog of
foreign climes, his victory was decisive; he now reigns triumphant,
even in Westphalia, the home of ham!
Stock exchange piousness, on affectionate terms with itself, and
clear, calm, introspective natures, stuffed with binomial theorems,
may sneer at compassion and gratitude; are not small potatoes the raw
material of a dignity that is born of starch? The county seat molder
of public opinion who can manage to keep three jumps ahead of the
sheriff, and pay for his boiler plate editorial C. O. D., vies with
the New York newspaper syndicate backed by indefinite millions of
Chicago beef money, in delicate sarcasm. Go to the mule, thou dizzard,
and learn of him! From that speechless, untranslatable functionary
valuable information may be extracted wholly novel to thy groveling
consciousness; amongst much else surely this, that gratefulness is
mate to saintliness. Even in the late James brothers' section of
darkest America, this is accepted orthodoxism. The statesman with
pickerel brow and muscalonge integument may join the ecclesiastical
mignonette and journalistic geranium in proclaiming threatened peril
to the republic from the fulfillment of a moiety of her despairing
pledge to provide for the disabled. The oblique expostulations of
professed friends are less endurable than the open malice of enemies.
The one-story man with a gravel roof has no conception of sky-parlors.
Let the untranslatable functionary rise up and bray responding echoes
in fit, sufficient answer.
They jest at scars who never sniffed saltpetre. They mock at wounds
who never confronted a foe more tangible than a Baconian cryptogam.
But the Old Soldier has learned to contemplate with philosophic
tolerance the weak and wicked sides of human nature--the Christian
science side, the Tammany tiger side, for example. Bluffs were unknown
in his heartsome, wholesome youth; nor were jockeys subsidized to give
their backers tips. Undreamed-of was the soft, seductive game of
flim-flam. No one then suggested a law for the protection of innocent,
elderly congressmen from the wiles of the seminary miss. The Veteran
can pity those who hate him, and defy the gurgling giggle of his
scorners--in the words of Sam Johnson, "he remembers who kicked him
last." He who smote with the sword of the Lord and of Abraham safely
ignores an effervescence of mouth-vapor. Let those who surrendered to
the idols of the uncircumcised and now seek to expunge their records,
find merciful oblivion if they can. He tenders no apologies for his
motives and invokes no forgetfulness of his deeds. Like the backwoods
preacher entangled in an unmanageable sentence, he may have lost his
nominative case, but he is bound for the kingdom of heaven.
The Old Soldier, entrenched in his philosophy as in a bastioned
citadel, rejoices in a redeemed country strong enough to regard with
forbearance the foibles of quondam foes. The men who looked bravely
into his eyes across the frowning ramparts of Vicksburg, or who, fed
on raw corn and persimmons, fluttered their heroic rags for a year
between him and beckoning Richmond, only ten miles distant, have been
welcomed, as with "sweet, reluctant, amorous delay" they returned to
enjoy the privileges and even to accept the honors of the rich
citizenship he fought to restore to them. He sees them squeezing pure
olive oil and genuine creamery butter out of honest old cottonseed. He
puts his own traditional pride of supremacy in the matter of basswood
hams and white oak nutmegs resolutely behind him, and hails them
proudly as right worthy fellow-yankees and brethren beloved. Whatever,
if anything, the present may withhold of universal consent to the
sacredness of his cause or the completeness of his triumph, he
exultantly leaves to time, to God and to history.
The Old Soldier claims no undue meed of praise. Standing in the limpid
incandescence of a momentous epoch, his pardonable pride has only
degenerated into boastfulness on rare and radiant village greens,
where self-delusion finds a fertile soil fenced with applauding
auditors. It was his fortune to have contributed to the preservation
of the Union, the emancipation of the slave and the regeneration of
the country. But save and except as aforesaid, he makes no pretense
of having done it all. He had mighty and Almighty help.
Sometimes the credit for emancipation is ascribed to the heroic
agitators, who, before the appeal to projectiles, had long demanded
unconditional abolition. It is error to award the palm of this
splendid consummation to any class of men. Slavery perished because
its death-doom had been sounded on the celestial chimes; because the
nineteenth century had come; because the flying engine and the
speaking wire had come; because the steel pen and the postage-stamp
had come; because the free school, the newspaper and the open Bible
had come; because Wilberforce, and Garrison, and Harriet Stowe had
come; because Lincoln, and Seward, and Stanton had come; because
Grant, and Sherman, and Sheridan had come; because two million gallant
boys in blue had come; because the great and terrible day of the Lord
had come, and not all the powers of evil could longer buttress and
bulwark the crowning iniquity of the universe. Give to all the potent
factors a full measure of the award. But let the rapture of
self-eulogy never eclipse vital historic truth. Slavery succumbed, not
more to military force than to the eternal verities. And rebellion
surrendered not alone to Grant and his legions, but also to the loyal
men and women who stood behind them, and to the churches and colleges,
the mills and mines and storehouses, the homes and herds and harvests
of the mighty North.
They fell, who lifted up a hand
And bade the sun in heaven stand!
They smote and fell, who set the bars
Against the progress of the stars,
And stayed the march of motherland!
They stood, who saw the future come
On through the fight's delirium!
They smote and stood, who held the hope
Of nations on that slippery slope
Amid the cheers of Christendom.
In adversity's hard school the Old Soldier learned transcendent
lessons of human brotherhood such as no other school could have taught
him, dilute the tincture, water the stock, or inflate the currency of
educational methods how we may. Escaping from cruel prison pens,
where there was no one to love nor to caress, and with no light to
direct but that sun of the sleepless, melancholy star, his hand
reached out into the darkness searching for a guide; it was grasped by
another hand, warm, loyal and true; the hand of a man and a brother; a
black hand indeed, but it was all the same in the dark.
He learned respect for authority and order, scorning the malcontents,
who, hornet-like, always stand sting-end uppermost, stinging their
friends to show their independence, their enemies to show their
impartiality, and each other to keep in practice; unwholesome whether
in conjunction or apogee; a bundle of tinder and rockets, on a raft of
smoke-storm, with sparks wildly flying; each a flask for brittleness,
whether decipherable into a nursing bottle or a sulphuric carboy. He
learned to value his country as more precious for his personal
sacrifice, stimulating his just demand that America shall henceforth
be reserved for such as are or wish to be Americans; for those to whom
her institutions are a birthright or those who bring due appreciation
of her blessings; shaking from her skirts the imported vermin of the
slums; spurning back from her shores the redhanded apostles of
anarchy, who dream of freedom in the death of law, and search for
thrift in robbery and violence.
The Old Soldier is something of a politician. He loves to help save
the country again and again, on every convenient occasion. Soon after
each and every quadrennial interchange of governmental figure-heads,
the whole population is prepared to admit that we have narrowly
escaped a vast hemispherical catastrophe. Even when the election has
only been carried by a constitutional majority of three--two
Winchesters and a shot-gun--the escape is just as grateful. For the
campaign torch may then be extinguished; the paroxysm of hysterics
illuminated by an aurora borealis vex and vaunt no more. The shout of
the torch-bearer, screaming himself into grippe and pneumonia, is
quenched. The heeler and the howler are alike silent--they have folded
their tepees like Arabs and fled in wild dismay. The candidate no
longer inhales the whiff of whisky sours or clasps hands chiefly
notable as rich feeding ground for microbes. The precinct chairman,
reveling in his labor of lucre, bow-legged but full of enthusiasm, has
subsided. The able editor, a man of ice and iron, carrying around a
head heavily weighted with unpublished matter, can gaze down the
flamboyant vista of his victorious career and take a needed rest.
The orator, whose seductive notes were rainbows melting into song, can
now sadly meditate on blind-stagger luck in politics; the senatorial
aspirant can proceed to gather in votes on a rising market; the
triumphant boss can accept from his Chicago admirers the finest
banquet their slaughterhouses yield; the average honest partisan can
rejoice in the temporary submergence of that specifically,
super-righteous element, the "saving five per cent." of voters, who
usually keep the country from going to destruction, by serenely,
sweetly, holding the balance of power.
When the alleged campaign of lungs, larceny and lunacy is thus ended,
the wind-weavers and phrase-coiners are dumb, and the country has
escaped from the desperate situation of one whose incurable disease is
attacked by an infallible remedy. Herr Most, with a string of
transatlantic gutterals foaming from his lips, and Herr Altgeld
brandishing his gold-clause lease before our blinking eyes, enter into
the very sinew and substance of our recurring nightmares. We scorn
them, and our scorn bites--usually. But this time it falls harmless as
one of Chauncey Depew's periodical four-track, block-signal
presidential booms. The nightmare raves and ravages until the ballots
come down like an avalanche and smother it--ballots called
"snowflakes" in the old chestnut, but now each six inches wide,
thirty-two inches long and many-hued that wayfarers need not err.