concerned his own candidacy. He had a pronounced distaste for politics
and public life, and he stoutly argued that some one who had lived all
his life in that community would be better able than he to win all there
was of conservatism to his support. He entreated these his friends to
adopt that course. It was significant of the high place he had won in
the estimation of the community’s best, that they refused to listen to
his protest, and, by a proclamation over their own signatures, announced
him as their candidate and urged all men who sincerely desired wise and
prudent counsels to prevail in a matter which involved Virginia’s entire
future, to support him at the polls.
Thus compelled against his will to be a candidate, Arthur entered at
once upon a canvass of ceaseless activity. He did not mean to be
defeated. He spoke every day and many times every day, and better still
he talked constantly to the groups of men who surrounded him, setting
forth his views persuasively and so convincingly that when the polls
closed on that fateful fourth of February, it was found that Arthur
Brent had been elected by a plurality which amounted almost to a
majority, to represent his district in that constitutional convention
which must decide Virginia’s commanding course, and in large degree,
perhaps, determine the final issue of war or peace.
When the convention met nine days later it was found that an
overwhelming majority of the members held views identical, or nearly so,
with those of Arthur Brent. There were a very few uncompromising
secessionists in the body, and also a few unconditional Union men, who
declared their hostility to secession upon any terms, at any time, under
any circumstances. Among these unconditional Union men, curiously enough
were two who afterwards became notable fighters for the Southern
cause--namely Jubal A. Early and William C. Wickham.
But the overwhelming majority opposed secession as a mistaken policy,
uncalled for by anything in the then existing circumstances, and certain
to precipitate a devastating war; while at the same time maintaining the
constitutional right of each state to secede, and holding themselves
ready to vote for Virginia’s secession, should the circumstances so
change as to render that course in their judgment obligatory upon the
state under the law of honor.
That change occurred in the end, as we shall presently see. But, in the
meantime, these representatives of the Virginia people wrought with all
their might for the maintenance of peace and the preservation of the
Union. They counselled concession and sweet reasonableness, on both
sides. They urged upon both the commanding necessity of endeavoring, in
a spirit of mutual forbearance, to find some basis of adjustment by
which that Union which Virginia had done so much to bring about, and
under which the history of the Republic had been a matter of universal
pride both North and South, might be preserved and established anew upon
secure foundations. More important than all this was the fact that these
representative men of Virginia denied to the seceding cotton states the
encouragement of Virginia’s sanction for their movement, the absolutely
indispensable moral and material support of the mother state.
For a time there was an encouraging prospect of the success of these
Virginian efforts. Nobody, North or South, believed that the cotton
states would long stand alone in their determination, if Virginia and
the other border states that looked to her for guidance--Kentucky, North
Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Maryland--should continue to hold
aloof.
In the meantime Mr. Lincoln, after his inauguration, had a somewhat
similar problem to deal with at the North. There was a party there
clamorous for instant war with a declared purpose of abolishing slavery.
The advocates of that policy pressed it upon the new president as
urgently as the extreme secessionists at the South pressed secession
upon Virginia. Mr. Lincoln saw clearly, as these his advisers did not,
that their policy was utterly impracticable. From the very beginning he
insisted upon confining his administration’s efforts rigidly to the task
of preserving the Union with the traditional rights of all the states
unimpaired. He saw clearly that there were men by hundreds of thousands
at the North, who would heart and soul support the administration’s
efforts to preserve the Union, even by war if that should be necessary,
but who would antagonize by every means in their power a war for the
extirpation of slavery at cost of Federal usurpation of control over any
state in its domestic affairs.
Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln held to his purpose. He would make no attempt
to interfere with slavery where it constitutionally existed, and he
would make no direct effort to compel seceding states to return to the
Union; but he would use whatever force he might find necessary to
repossess the forts, arsenals, post-offices and custom houses which the
seceding states had seized upon within their borders, and he would
endeavor to enforce the Federal laws there.
But in order to accomplish this, military forces were necessary, and the
government at Washington did not possess them. There was only the
regular army, and it consisted of a mere handful of men, scattered from
Eastport, Maine, to San Diego, California, from St. Augustine, Florida
to Puget’s Sound, and charged with the task--for which its numbers were
utterly inadequate--of keeping the Indians in order and proper
subjection. It is doubtful that Mr. Lincoln could have concentrated a
single full regiment of regulars at any point, even at risk of
withdrawing from the Indian country the men absolutely necessary to
prevent massacre there. He therefore called for volunteers with whom to
conduct such military operations as he deemed necessary. He apportioned
the call among the several states that had not yet seceded. He called
upon Virginia for her quota.
That was the breaking point. Virginia had to choose. She must either
furnish a large force of volunteers with which the Federal government
might in effect coerce the seceding states into submission, or she must
herself secede and cast in her lot with the cotton states. To the
Virginian mind there was only one course possible. The Virginians
believed firmly and without doubt or question in the right of any state
to withdraw from the Union at will. They looked with unimagined horror
upon every proposal that the Federal power should coerce a seceding
state into submission. They regarded that as an iniquity, a crime, a
proceeding unspeakably wrongful and subversive of liberty. They could
have nothing to do with such an attempt without dishonor of the basest
kind. Accordingly, almost before the ink was dry upon the call upon
Virginia for volunteers with which to make war upon the seceding
Southern States, the Virginia, pro-Union convention, adopted an
ordinance of secession, and the Civil War was on.
The men who had, so long and so earnestly, and in face of such
contumely, labored to keep Virginia in the Union and to use all that
state’s commanding influence in behalf of peace, felt themselves obliged
to yield to the inevitable, and to consent to a sectional war for which
they saw no necessity and recognized no occasion. They had wasted their
time in a futile endeavor to bring about a reconciliation where the
conflict had been all the while hopelessly “irrepressible.” There was
nothing for it now but war, and Virginia, deeply deprecating war, set
herself at work in earnest to prepare for the conflict.
In accordance with his lifelong habit of mind, Arthur Brent in this
emergency put aside all thoughts of self-interest, and looked about him
to discover in what way he might render the highest service to his
native land, of which he was capable. He was unanimously chosen by each
of two companies of volunteers in his native county, to be their
captain. In their rivalry with each other, they agreed to make him major
in command of a battalion to be formed of those two companies and two
others that were in process of organization.
He peremptorily declined. “I know nothing of the military art,” he wrote
to the committee that had laid the proposal before him. “There are
scores of men in the community better fit than I am for military
command. Especially there is your fellow citizen, John Meaux, trained at
West Point and eminently fit for a much higher command than any that you
can offer him. Put him, I earnestly adjure you, into the line of
promotion. Elect him to the highest military office within your gift,
and let me serve as a private under him, in either of your companies, if
no opportunity offers for me to render a larger service and a more
valuable one than that. There is scarcely a man among you who couldn’t
handle a military force more effectively than I could. Let your most
capable men be your commanders, big and little. I believe firmly in the
dictum ‘the tools to him who can use them.’ For myself I see a more
fruitful opportunity of service than any that military command could
bring to me. I have a certain skill which, I think, is going to be
sorely needed in this war. It is my firm belief that the struggle upon
which we are entering is destined to last through long years of
suffering and sore want. We are mainly dependent upon importation not
only for the most pressingly necessary of our medicines but for that
absolute necessity of life, salt. If war shall shut us in, as it is
extremely likely to do, we must find means which we do not now possess
of producing these and other things for ourselves, including the
materials for that prime requisite of war--gunpowder. It so happens that
I have skill in such manufactures as these, and I purpose to turn it to
account whenever the necessity shall come upon us. In the meantime, as a
surgeon and, upon occasion, as a private soldier I may perhaps be able
to do more for Virginia and for the South than I could ever hope to do
by assuming those functions of military command for which I have neither
natural fitness nor the fitness of training.”
All this was deemed very absurd at the time. The war, it was thought,
could not last more than sixty days--an opinion which Mr. Secretary of
State Seward, on the other side of the line, confidently shared, though
his anticipations of the end of it were quite different from those
entertained at the South. Why a young man of spirit, such as Arthur
Brent was, should refuse to enter upon the brief but glorious struggle
in the capacity of a major with the prospect of coming out of it a
brigadier-general, his neighbors could not understand. Nor could any of
them, with one exception, understand his anticipations of a long war, or
his conviction that, end as it might, the war would make an early end of
slavery, overturning the South’s industrial system and bringing sore
poverty upon the people. The one exception was Robert Copeland, the
thrifty young man who had lost caste by “making too many hogsheads of
tobacco to the hand.” He shared Arthur’s views, and he acted upon them
in ways that Arthur would have scorned to do. He sent all his negroes to
Richmond to be sold by auction to the traders to the far South. He
converted his plantation, with all its live stock and other
appurtenances into money, and with the proceeds of these his sellings he
hurried to New York and purchased diamonds. These he bestowed in a belt
which he buckled about his person and wore throughout the war, upon the
principle that whatever value there might or might not be in other
things when the war should be over, diamonds always command their price
throughout the civilized world. When after this was done he sought to
enlist in one of the companies forming in his neighborhood, he was
rejected by unanimous vote, because he had sold negroes, while the men
of the company held rigidly to a social standard of conduct which he had
flagrantly defied. He went to Richmond. He raised a company of ruffians,
which included many “jailbirds” and the like. He made himself its
captain, and went into the field as the leader of a “fighting battery.”
He distinguished himself for daring, and came out of the war, four years
later, a brigadier-general. As such he was excluded from the benefits of
the early amnesty proclamation. But he cared little about that. He went
to New York, sold his diamonds for fifty per cent more than their cost,
and accepted high office in the army of the Khedive of Egypt. He thus
continued active in that profession of arms in which he had found his
best opportunity to exercise his peculiar gift of “getting out of men
all there is in them”--which was the phrase chosen by himself to
describe his own special capabilities.[C]
XXXIII
“AT PARIS IT WAS”
_D_uring all this year of wandering on the part of Dorothy Edmonia did
her duty as a correspondent with conspicuous fidelity. To her letters
far more than to Dorothy’s own, Arthur was indebted for exact
information as to Dorothy’s doings and Dorothy’s surroundings and
Dorothy’s self. For Dorothy’s reticence concerning herself grew upon her
as the months went on. She wrote freely and with as much apparent candor
and fulness as ever, but she managed never to reveal herself in the old
familiar fashion. Not that there was anything of estrangement in her
words or tone, for there was nothing of the kind. It was only that she
manifested a certain shyness and reserve concerning her own thought and
feeling when these became intimate,--a reserve like that which every
woman instinctively practises concerning details of the toilet. A woman
may frankly admit to a man that she finds comfort in the use of a
little powder, but she does not want him to see the powder box and puff.
She may mention her shoe-strings quite without hesitation, but if one of
them comes unfastened, she will climb two flights of stairs rather than
let him see her readjust it.
In somewhat that way Dorothy at this time wrote to Arthur. If she read a
book or saw a picture that pleased her, she would write to him, telling
him quite all her external thought concerning it; but if it inspired any
emotion of a certain sort in her, she had nothing whatever to say
concerning that. In one particular, too, she deliberately abstained from
telling him even of her pursuits and ambitions. He was left to hear of
that from Edmonia, who wrote:
“Apparently we are destined to remain here in Paris during the rest of
our stay abroad. For Dorothy has a new craze which she will in no wise
relinquish or abate. For that, you, sir, are responsible, for you
planted the seed that are now producing this luxuriant growth of quite
unfeminine character. You taught Dorothy the rudiments of chemistry and
physics. You awakened in her a taste for such studies which has grown
into an uncontrollable passion.
“She has become the special pupil of one of the greatest chemists in
France, and she almost literally lives in his laboratory, at least
during the daylight hours. She goes to operas about twice a week, and
she takes violin lessons from a woman before breakfast; but during the
rest of the time she does nothing but slop at a laboratory sink. Her
master in this department is madly in love--not with her, though he
calls her, in the only English phrase he speaks without accent, ‘the
apple of his eye,’--but with her enthusiasm in science. He describes it
as a ‘grand passion’ and positively raves in ejaculatory French and
badly broken English, over the extraordinary rapidity with which she
learns, the astonishing grasp she has of principles, and the readiness
with which she applies principles to practice. ‘Positively’ he exclaimed
to me the other day, ‘she is no longer a student--she is a
chemist,--almost a great chemist. If I had to select one to take
absolute control of a laboratory for the nice production of the most
difficult compounds, I would this day choose not any man in all France,
but Mademoiselle by herself.’ Then he paid you a compliment. He added;
‘and she tells me she has studied under a master for only a few months!
It is marvellous! It is incredible, except that we must believe
Mademoiselle, who is the soul of honor and truth. Ah--that is what
gives her her love of science--for science loves nothing but truth. But
her first master must be a wonder, a born teacher, an enthusiast, a real
master who inspires his pupil with a passion like his own.’
“I confirmed Dorothy’s statement that she had received only a few
months’ tuition in a little plantation laboratory, but--at the risk of
making you disagreeably conceited, I will tell you this--I fully
confirmed the judgment he had formed of Dorothy’s master.
“‘Ah, you know him then?’ the enthusiastic Frenchman broke out; ‘and you
will tell me his name, which Mademoiselle refused to speak in answer to
my inquiry? And you will give me a letter which may excuse me for the
deep presumption when I write to him? I _must_ write to him. I must know
a master who has no other such in all France. His name Mademoiselle
Bannister, his name, I pray you.’
“Now comes the curious part of the story. I told Monsieur your name and
address, and his eyes instantly lighted up. ‘Ah, that accounts for all!’
he exclaimed. ‘I know the Dr. Brent. He was my own pupil till I could
teach him nothing that he did not know. Then he taught me all the
original things he had learned for himself during his stay in my
laboratory and before that. Then we ceased to be master and pupil. We
were after that two masters working together and every day finding out
much that the world can never be enough grateful for. He is truly a
wonder, Mister the Doctor Brent! I no longer am surprised at
Mademoiselle Sout’s accomplishments and her enthusiasm. But why did she
not want to speak to me his name? Is it that she loves him and he loves
her not--ah, no, that cannot be! He _must_ love Mademoiselle Sout’ after
he has taught her. Nothing else is possible. But is it then that he is
dull to find out, and that he doubts the reaction of her love in return
for his? Ah, no! He is too great a chemist for that. There must be some
other explanation and I cannot find it out. But Mister the Doctor Brent
is after all only an American. The Americans are what you call alert in
everything but one. Mister the Doctor Brent would quickly discover the
smallest error in a reaction and he would know the cause of it. But he
did not note the affinity in Mademoiselle for himself. I am not a
greater chemist than he is, and yet I see it instantly, when she does
not want to speak to me his name! He is a man most fortunate, in that I
am old and have Madame at home and three young sons in the École
Polytechnique! Ah, how ardently I should have wooed Mademoiselle, the
charming, if she had come to me as a pupil twenty five years ago!’
“Now, I’m not quite sure Arthur that your danger in that quarter is
altogether past. Yes, I am. That was a sorry jest. But I sincerely hope
that on our return you may be a trifle more alert than you have hitherto
been in discovering ‘reactions.’ You don’t at all deserve that I should
thus enlighten and counsel you. And it may very easily prove to be too
late when we return. For, in spite of her absorption in chemistry, and
the horribly stained condition of her fingers sometimes, I drag her to
all sorts of entertainments, and at the Tuileries especially she is a
favorite. The Empress is so gracious to ‘the charming American,’ as she
calls her, that she even summons me to her side for the sake of
Dorothy’s company. The entire ‘eligible list’ of the diplomatic corps
has gone daft about her beauty, her naïveté and her wonderful
accomplishments. The Duc de Morny has even ventured to call twice at our
hotel, begging the privilege of ‘paying his respects to the charming
young American.’ But the Duc de Morny is a beast--an accomplished,
fascinating beast, if you please, but a beast, nevertheless,--and I have
used my woman’s privilege of fibbing so far as to send him word, each
time, that Mademoiselle was not at home.
“‘Why did the Duc de Morny want to call upon me?’ queried the simple,
honest minded Dorothy, when she heard of the visits of this greatest
potentate in France next to the Emperor. I could not explain, so I
fibbed a bit further and told her it was only his extreme politeness and
the French friendship for Americans.
“Young Jefferson Peyton, you know, has been following us from the
beginning. Dorothy expresses surprise, now and then, that his route
happens, so singularly to coincide with our own. I think he will explain
all that to her presently. He has greatly improved by travel. He has
learned that his name and family count for nothing outside Virginia, and
that he is personally a man of far less consequence than he has been
brought up to consider himself. Now that he has been cured of a conceit
that was due rather to his provincial bringing up than to any innate
tendency in that direction, now that he has seen enough of the world to
acquire a new perspective in contemplating himself, he has become in
truth a very pleasing young man. His father did well to act upon Aunt
Polly’s advice and send him abroad for education and culture. He is
going to propose to Dorothy at the very first opportunity. He has told
me so himself, and as she has a distinct liking for the amiable and
really very handsome young fellow, I cannot venture upon any confident
prediction as to the consequences.”
That letter came as a Christmas gift to Arthur Brent. One week later, on
the New Year’s day, came one from Dorothy which made amends by reason of
its resumption of much of the old tone of candor and confidence which he
had so sadly missed from her letters during many months past.
“I want to go home, Cousin Arthur,” she began. “I want to go home at
once. I want my dear old mammy to put her arms around me as she used to
do when I was a little child, and croon me to sleep, so that I may
forget all that has happened to me. And, I want to talk with you again,
Cousin Arthur, as freely as I used to do when you and I rode together
through the woodlands or the corn at sunrise, when we didn’t mind a
wetting from the dew, and when our horses and my dear dogs seemed to
enjoy the glory of the morning as keenly as we did. It is in memory of
those mornings that I send you back the soiled handkerchief you mailed
to me. I want you, please, to give it to Ben, and tell him I make him a
present of it, because it is no longer fit for you to use. You needn’t
tell him anything more than that. He will understand. But I mustn’t
leave you any longer to the mercy of such neglect on the part of
servants to whom you are always so good. I must get home again before
this terrible war breaks out. I have read all your letters about it a
hundred times each, and I have tried to fit myself for my part in it.
When you told me how great the need was likely to be for somebody
qualified to make medicines, and salt, and saltpetre and soda and potash
for gunpowder--no, you didn’t tell me of all that, you wrote to Edmonia
about it, and that hurt my feelings because it seemed to put me out of
your life and work--but when Edmonia told me what you had written about
it, I set myself to work again at my chemistry, and I have worked so
diligently at it that my master, Mons. X. declares that I am capable of
taking complete charge of a laboratory and doing the most difficult and
delicate of all the work needed. I believe I am. Anyhow, he has somehow
found out,--though I certainly never told him of it--that you taught me
at the beginning and he insists upon giving me a letter to you about my
qualifications.
“You say you hope Virginia will not secede, and that perhaps, after all,
there will be no war. But I see clearly that you have no great
confidence in your own hopes. So I am in a great hurry to get home
before trouble comes. After it comes it may be too late for me to get
home at all.