WARS AND RUMORS OF WAR
We sent our carriage down to Wallingford that evening and had my new
friend, Mr. Orme, out to Cowles' Farms for that night. He was a stranger
in the land, and that was enough. I often think to-day how ready we were
to welcome any who came, and how easily we might have been deceived as
to the nature of such chance guests.
Yet Orme so finely conducted himself that none might criticise him, and
indeed both my father and mother appeared fairly to form a liking for
him. This was the more surprising on the part of both, since they were
fully advised of the nature of his recent speech, or sermon, or what you
choose to call it, at the Methodist church, the sentiments of which
scarce jumped with their own. Both my parents accepted Orme for what he
purported to be, a minister of the gospel; and any singularity of his
conduct which they may have noticed they ascribed to his education in
communities different from our own quiet one. I remember no acrimonious
speech during his visit with us, although the doctrine which he had
pronounced and which now and again, in one form or another, he renewed,
was not in accord with ours. I recall very well the discussions they
had, and remember how formally my mother would begin her little
arguments: "Friend, I am moved to say to thee"; and then she would go
on to tell him gently that all men should be brothers, and that there
should be peace on earth, and that no man should oppress his brother in
any way, and that slavery ought not to exist.
"What! madam," Orme would exclaim, "this manner of thought in a Southern
family!" And so he in turn would go on repeating his old argument of
geography, and saying how England must side with the South, and how the
South must soon break with the North. "This man Lincoln, if elected,"
said he, "will confiscate every slave in the Southern States. He will
cripple and ruin the South, mark my words. He will cost the South
millions that never will be repaid. I cannot see how any Virginian can
fail to stand with all his Southern brothers, front to front against the
North on these vital questions."
"I do not think the South would fight the North over slavery alone. The
South loves the flag, because she helped create it as much or more than
the North. She will not bear treason to the flag." Thus my father.
"It would be no treason," affirmed Orme, "but duty, if that flag became
the flag of oppression. The Anglo-Saxon has from King John down refused
to be governed unjustly and oppressively."
And so they went on, hour after hour, not bitterly, but hotly, as was
the fashion all over the land at that time. My father remained a Whig,
which put him in line, sometimes, with the Northern men then coming into
prominence, such as Morrill of New England, and young Sherman from
across the mountains, who believed in the tariff in spite of what
England might say to us. This set him against the Jefferson clans of our
state, who feared not a war with the North so much as one with Europe.
Already England was pronouncing her course; yet those were not days of
triumphant conclusions, but of doubtful weighing and hard judgment, as
we in old Virginia could have told you, who saw neighbors set against
each other, and even families divided among themselves.
For six years the war talk had been growing stronger. Those of the South
recoiled from the word treason--it had a hateful sound to them--nor have
they to this day justified its application to themselves. I myself
believe to-day that that war was much one of geography and of lack of
transportation. Not all the common folk of the North or of the South
then knew that it was never so much a war of principle, as they were
taught to think, but rather a war of self-interest between two clashing
commercial parties. We did not know that the unscrupulous kings of the
cotton world, here and abroad, were making deliberate propaganda of
secession all over the South; that secession was not a thing voluntary
and spontaneous, but an idea nourished to wrong growth by a secret and
shrewd commercial campaign, whose nature and extent few dreamed, either
then or afterward. It was not these rich and arrogant planters of the
South, even, men like our kin in the Carolinas, men like those of the
Sheraton family, who were the pillars of the Confederacy, or rather, of
the secession idea. Back of them, enshrouded forever in darkness--then
in mystery, and now in oblivion which cannot be broken--were certain
great figures of the commercial world in this land and in other lands.
These made a victim of our country at that time, even as a few great
commercial figures seek to do to-day, and we, poor innocent fools, flew
at each other's throats, and fought, and slew, and laid waste a land,
for no real principle and to no gain to ourselves. Nothing is so easy to
deceive, to hoodwink, to blind and betray, as a great and innocent
people that in its heart loves justice and fair play.
I fear, however, that while much of this talk was going on upon the
galleries at Cowles' Farms, I myself was busier with the training of my
pointer than I was with matters of politics. I was not displeased when
my mother came to me presently that afternoon and suggested that we
should all make a visit to Dixiana Farm, to call upon our neighbors, the
Sheratons.
"Mr. Orme says he would like to meet Colonel Sheraton," she explained,
"and thee knows that we have not been to see our neighbors for some time
now. I thought that perhaps Colonel Sheraton might be moved to listen to
me as well as to Mr. Orme, if I should speak of peace--not in argument,
as thee knows, but as his neighbor."
She looked at me a moment, her hand dusting at my coat. "Thee knows the
Sheratons and the Cowles have sometimes been friends and sometimes
enemies--I would rather we were friends. And, Jack, Miss Grace is quite
thy equal--it any may be the equal of my boy. And some day thee must be
thinking, thee knows--"
"I was already thinking, mother," said I gravely; and so, indeed, I was,
though perhaps not quite as she imagined.
At least that is how we happened to ride to the Sheratons that
afternoon, in our greater carriage, my father and Mr. Orme by the side
of my mother, and I alongside on horseback. In some way the visit seemed
to have a formal nature.
Colonel Sheraton met us at his lawn, and as the day was somewhat warm,
asked us to be seated in the chairs beneath the oaks. Here Miss Grace
joined us presently, and Orme was presented to her, as well as to Mrs.
Sheraton, tall, dark, and lace-draped, who also joined us in response to
Colonel Sheraton's request. I could not fail to notice the quick glance
with which Orme took in the face and figure of Grace Sheraton; and,
indeed he had been a critical man who would not have called her fair to
look upon.
The elder members of the party fell to conversing in their
rocking-chairs there on the lawn, and I was selfish enough to withdraw
Miss Grace to the gallery steps, where we sat for a time, laughing and
talking, while I pulled the ears of their hunting dog, and rolled under
foot a puppy or two, which were my friends. I say, none could have
failed to call Grace Sheraton fair. It pleased me better to sit there on
the gallery steps and talk with her than to listen once more to the
arguments over slavery and secession. I could hear Colonel Sheraton's
deep voice every now and then emphatically coinciding with some
statement made by Orme. I could see the clean-cut features of the
latter, and his gestures, strongly but not flamboyantly made.
As for us two, the language that goes without speech between a young man
and a maid passed between us. I rejoiced to mock at her, always, and did
so now, declaring again my purpose to treat her simply as my neighbor
and not as a young lady finished at the best schools of Philadelphia.
But presently in some way, I scarce can say by whose first motion, we
arose and strolled together around the corner of the house and out into
the orchard.