The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 Part 2

There were theorists who maintained that a society based on the rock of slavery was the best possible in a world where there must be a lowest order; and the doctrine of the "mud-sill" as propounded by a leading thinker of this school evoked mud volcanoes all over the North.

Scriptural arguments in defence of slavery formed a large part of the literature of the subject, and the hands of Southern clergymen were upheld by their conservative brothers beyond the border.

Some who had read the signs of the times otherwise knew that slavery was doomed by the voice of the world, and that no theory of society could withstand the advance of the new spirit; and if the secrets of all hearts could have been revealed, our enemies would have been astounded to see how many thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States felt the crus.h.i.+ng burden and the awful responsibility of the inst.i.tution which we were supposed to be defending with the melodramatic fury of pirate kings. We were born to this social order, we had to do our duty in it according to our lights, and this duty was made indefinitely more difficult by the interference of those who, as we thought, could not understand the conditions of the problem, and who did not have to bear the expense of the experiments they proposed.

There were the practical men who saw in the negro slave an efficient laborer in a certain line of work, and there were the practical men who doubted the economic value of our system as compared with that of the free States, and whom the other practical men laughed to scorn.

There was the small and eminently respectable body of benevolent men who promoted the scheme of African colonization, of which great things were expected in my boyhood. The manifest destiny of slavery in America was the regeneration of Africa.

The people at large had no theory, and the practice varied as much in the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family relations. Too much tragedy and too much idyl have been imported into the home life of the Southern people; but this is not the place to reduce poetry to prose.

On one point, however, all parties in the South were agreed, and the vast majority of the people of the North--before the war. The abolitionist proper was considered not so much the friend of the negro as the enemy of society. As the war went on, and the abolitionist saw the "glory of the Lord" revealed in a way he had never hoped for, he saw at the same time, or rather ought to have seen, that the order he had lived to destroy could not have been a system of h.e.l.lish wrong and fiendish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the liberators would have been fulfilled, and the horrors of San Domingo would have polluted this fair land. For the negro race does not deserve undivided praise for its conduct during the war. Let some small part of the credit be given to the masters, not all to the finer qualities of their "brothers in black." The school in which the training was given is closed, and who wishes to open it? Its methods were old-fas.h.i.+oned and were sadly behind the times, but the old schoolmasters turned out scholars who, in certain branches of moral philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates of the new university.

[Note: A recent historian of the war, PAXSON (The Civil War, p. 248), says: "Northern revenge in the guise of the preservation of the dearly won Union was worse for the South than the war."

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 165: "Outrages, and humiliations worse than outrage, of the period of so-called reconstruction but actual servile domination."

_L. c._, p. 173: "It may not unfairly be doubted whether a people prostrate after civil conflict has ever received severer measure than was dealt out to the so-called reconstructed Confederate States during the years immediately succeeding the close of strife. That the policy inspired at the time a feeling of bitter resentment in the South was no cause for wonder." To me the cause for wonder was and is that a Virginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten the bitterness, as is evinced by the following pa.s.sage in an oration delivered shortly after the publication of this article:

"No such peace as our peace ever followed immediately upon such a war as our war. The exhausted South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely died away when not only peace, but peace and goodwill were re-established, and the victors and the vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages of war and advancing the common welfare of the whole country, as if the old relations, social, commercial and political between the people of the two sections had never been disturbed."--CHARLES MARSHALL, of Lee's Staff, on Grant, May 30, 1892.]

[Note: It was out of the bitterness of this reconstruction period that I penned the following sonnet to the memory of JOHN M. DANIEL, editor of the Richmond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more than threescore editorial articles during the year 1863-4:

DIS MANIBUS I. M. D.

We miss your pen of fire, whose cloven tongue Illum'd the good and blasted what was base.

We miss you, fearless fighter for our race, Your arrows words, your bow a will highstrung.

We miss you, for you tower'd from among The herd of writers with that careless grace That springs from undisputed strength. Your place Is vacant still. Your bow is still uphung.

'Tis well. This were no time for you. The strings Of your proud heart forefelt the blow and broke; And when you died, 'twas better thus to die Than live to see this swarm of crawling things, And burn with words that must remain unspoke Where "art is tongue-tied by authority."]

[Note: The school was the Episcopal High School near Alexandria, Virginia; the princ.i.p.al, the late L. M. BLACKFORD.]

[Note: Ov. Her. 3, 106:

According to Ovid, Briseis was a non-Greek. _Littera_, she writes (v.

2), _vix bene barbarica Graeca notata manu_. According to recent authorities, she was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that Achilles was musical as Odysseus was not.

[Greek: ton d' heuron phrena terpomenon phormingi ligeie, kali, daidalee, epi d' argyreon zygon een.]--Il. 9, 185-6.]

[Note: Lesbos was an island consecrated to music from the days of Orpheus, and we can imagine the lovers singing together and Achilles solacing his loneliness by chanting to Patroclus the praises of his lost love.]

[Note: The valued friend was and is ARCHER ANDERSON, of Richmond, Virginia.]

[Note: "Why is it that wherever one goes in all parts of England one always finds--thoroughly as I believe the inst.i.tution of slavery is detested in this country--every man sympathizing strongly with the Southerners, and wis.h.i.+ng them all success? We do so for this reason ...

Englishmen love liberty, and the Southerner is fighting, not only for his life, but for that which is dearer than life, for liberty; he is fighting against one of the most grinding, one of the most galling, one of the most irritating attempts to establish tyrannical government that ever disgraced the history of the World."--G. W. BENTINCK, quoted by CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 111.]

I have tried in this paper to reproduce the past and its perspective, to show how the men of my time and of my environment looked at the problems that confronted us. It has been a painful and, I fear, a futile task. So far as I have reproduced the perspective for myself it has been a revival of sorrows such as this generation cannot understand; it has recalled the hours when it gave one a pa.s.sion for death, a shame of life, to read our bulletins. And how could I hope to reproduce that perspective for others, for men who belong to another generation and another region, when so many men who lived the same life and fought on the same side have themselves lost the point of view not only of the beginning of the war, but also of the end of the war, not only of the inexpressible exaltation, but of the unutterable degradation? They have forgotten what a strange world the survivors of the conflict had to face. If the State had been ours still, the foundations of the earth would not have been out of course; but the State was a military district, and the Confederacy had ceased to exist. The generous policy which would have restored the State and made a new union possible, which would have disentwined much of the pa.s.sionate clinging to the past, was crossed by the death of the only man who could have carried it through, if even he could have carried it through; and years of trouble had to pa.s.s before the current of national life ran freely through the Southern States. It was before this circuit was complete that the princ.i.p.al of one of the chief schools of Virginia set up a tablet to the memory of the "old boys" who had perished in the war,--it was a list the length of which few Northern colleges could equal,--and I was asked to furnish a motto. Those who know cla.s.sic literature at all know that for patriotism and friends.h.i.+p mottoes are not far to seek, but during the war I felt as I had never felt before the meaning of many a cla.s.sic sentence. The motto came from Ovid, whom many call a frivolous poet; but the frivolous Roman was after all a Roman, and he was young when he wrote the line,--too young not to feel the generous swell of true feeling. It was written of the dead brothers of Briseis:--

Qui bene pro patria c.u.m patriaque iacent.

The sentiment found an echo at the time, deserved an echo at the time.

Now it is a sentiment without an echo, and last year a valued personal friend of mine, in an eloquent oration, a n.o.ble tribute to the memory of our great captain, a discourse full of the glory of the past, the wisdom of the present, the hope of the future, rebuked the sentiment as idle in its despair. As well rebuke a cry of anguish, a cry of desolation out of the past. For those whose names are recorded on that tablet the line is but too true. For those of us who survive it has ceased to have the import that it once had, for we have learned to work resolutely for the furtherance of all that is good in the wider life that has been opened to us by the issue of the war, without complaining, without repining.

That the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves bound to maintain whenever our motives are challenged or misunderstood, if only for our children's sake. But even that will not long be necessary, for the vindication of our principles will be made manifest in the working out of the problems with which the republic has to grapple. If, however, the effacement of state lines and the complete centralization of the government shall prove to be the wisdom of the future, the poetry of life will still find its home in the old order, and those who loved their State best will live longest in song and legend,--song yet unsung, legend not yet crystallized.

A SOUTHERNER IN THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

I

[Note: The ambitious t.i.tle, "Two Wars," has been restored to the headline by typographical pressure.]

[Note: History is philosophy teaching by examples. Ps. Dionys. xi, 2 (399R): [Greek: historia philosophia estin ek paradeigmaton].]

I had intended to call this study Two Wars, but I was afraid lest I should be under the domination of the t.i.tle, and an elaborate comparison of the Peloponnesian War and the War between the States would undoubtedly have led to no little sophistication of the facts.

Historical parallel bars are usually set up for exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and n.o.body expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, who is responsible for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by examples. This definition is about as valuable as some of those other definitions that express one art in terms of another: poetry in terms of painting, and painting in terms of poetry. "Architecture is frozen music" does not enable us to understand either perpendicular Gothic or a fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines history in terms of philosophy, or a philosopher philosophy in terms of history, you may be on the lookout for sophistication. Your philosophical historian points his moral by adorning his tale. Your historical philosopher allows no zigzags in the march of his evolution.

In like manner, the attempt to express one war in terms of another is apt to lead to a wresting of facts. No two wars are as like as two peas.

Yet as any two marriages in society will yield a certain number of resemblances, so will any two wars in history, whether war itself be regarded as abstract or concrete,--a question that seems to have exercised some grammatical minds, and ought therefore to be settled before any further step is taken in this disquisition, which is the disquisition of a grammarian. Now most persons would p.r.o.nounce war an abstract, but one excellent manual with which I am acquainted sets it down as a concrete, and I have often thought that the author must have known something practically about war. At all events, to those who have seen the midday sun darkened by burning homesteads, and wheatfields illuminated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is sufficiently concrete. The very first dead soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes war forever out of the category of abstracts.

[Note: JOHN AUGUSTINE WAs.h.i.+NGTON, 'as always in the Was.h.i.+ngton family'

W. GORDON McCABE.]

When I was a student abroad, American novices used to be asked in jest, "Is this your first ruin?" "Is this your first nightingale?" I am not certain that I can place my first ruin or my first nightingale, but I can recall my first dead man on the battlefield. We were making an advance on the enemy's position near Huttonsville. Nothing, by the way, could have been more beautiful than the plan, which I was privileged to see; and as we neared the objective point, it was a pleasure to watch how column after column, marching by this road and that, converged to the rendezvous. It was as if some huge spider were gathering its legs about the victim. The special order issued breathed a spirit of calm resolution worthy of the general commanding and his troops. n.o.body that I remember criticised the tautological expression, "The progress of this army must be forward." We were prepared for a hard fight, for we knew that the enemy was strongly posted. Most of us were to be under fire for the first time, and there was some talk about the chances of the morrow as we lay down to sleep. Moralizing of that sort gets less and less common with experience in the business, and this time the moralizing may have seemed to some premature. But wherever the minie ball sang its diabolical mosquito song there was death in the air, and I was soon to see brought into camp, under a flag of truce, the lifeless body of the heir of Mount Vernon, whose graceful riding I had envied a few days before. However, there was no serious fighting. The advance on the enemy's position had developed more strength in front than we had counted on, or some of the spider's legs had failed to close in. A misleading report had been brought to headquarters. A weak point in the enemy's line had been reinforced. Who knows? The best laid plans are often thwarted by the merest trifles,--an insignificant puddle, a jingling canteen. This game of war is a hit or miss game, after all. A certain fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set out with a stock of that article. So our resolute advance became a forced reconnaissance, greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more ardent spirits. We found out exactly where the enemy was, and declined to have anything further to do with him for the time being. But in finding him we had to clear the ground and drive in the pickets. One picket had been posted at the end of a loop in a chain of valleys. The road we followed skirted the base of one range of hills. The house which served as the headquarters of the picket was on the other side. A meadow as level as a board stretched between. I remember seeing a boy come out and catch a horse, while we were advancing. Somehow it seemed to be a trivial thing to do just then. I knew better afterwards. Our skirmishers had done their work, had swept the woods on either side clean, and the pickets had fallen back on the main body; but not all of them. One man, if not more, had only had time to fall dead. The one I saw, the first, was a young man, not thirty, I should judge, lying on his back, his head too low for comfort. He had been killed outright, and there was no distortion of feature. No more peaceful faces than one sees at times on the battlefield, and sudden death, despite the Litany, is not the least enviable exit. In this case there was something like a mild surprise on the countenance. The rather stolid face could never have been very expressive. An unposted letter was found on the dead man's body. It was written in German, and I was asked to interpret it, in case it should contain any important information. There was no important information; just messages to friends and kindred, just the trivialities of camp life.

The man was an invader, and in my eyes deserved an invader's doom. If sides had been changed, he would have been a rebel, and would have deserved a rebel's doom. I was not stirred to the depths by the sight, but it gave me a lesson in grammar, and war has ever been concrete to me from that time on. The horror I did not feel at first grew steadily. "A sweet thing," says Pindar, "is war to those that have not tried it."

II

[Note: SPANGENBERG was a literary "b.u.mmer." The real author was one ANDREAS GUARNA of Salerno. See FRaNKEL, Zeitschrift fur Litteraturgeschichte, xiii, 242.]

[Note: Pindar's words are: [Greek: glyky d' apeiroisi polemos].]

Concrete or abstract, there are general resemblances between any two wars, and so war lends itself readily to allegories. Every one has read Bunyan's Holy War. Not every one has read Spangenberg's Grammatical War.

It is an ingenious performance, which fell into my hands many years after I had gone forth to see and to feel what war was like. In Spangenberg's Grammatical War the nouns and the verbs are the contending parties. Poeta is king of the nouns, and Amo king of the verbs. There is a regular debate between the two sovereigns. The king of the verbs summons the adverbs to his help, the king of the nouns the p.r.o.nouns.

The camps are pitched, the forces marshalled. The neutral power, participle, is invoked by both parties, but declines to send open a.s.sistance to either, hoping that in this contest between noun and verb the third party will acquire the rule over the whole territory of language. After a final summons on the part of the king of the verbs, and a fierce response from the rival monarch, active hostilities begin.

We read of raids and forays. Prisoners are treated with contumely, and their skirts are docked as in the Biblical narrative. Treachery adds excitement to the situation. Skirmishes precede the great engagement, in which the nouns are worsted, though they have come off with some of the spoils of war; and peace is made on terms dictated by Priscian, Servius, and Donatus. Spangenberg's Grammatical War is a not uninteresting, not uninstructive squib, and the salt of it, or saltpetre of it, has not all evaporated after the lapse of some three centuries. There are bits that remind one of the Greco-Turkish war of a few weeks ago.

[Note: Terror and Affright, Il. 15, 19: [Greek: hos phato kai rh'

hippous keleto Deimon te Phobon te | zeugnymen]. These horses of Ares furnished the names Deimos and Phobos for the two satellites of the planet Mars. Such traces of familiarity with the cla.s.sics are refres.h.i.+ng to one who lives in an age when allusion is under the ban. How many appreciate the appropriateness of the Baltimore County Timonium, named after Mark Antony's growlery in Plutarch? Not many of the sports who some years ago laid their bets on Irex recalled the line of the Odyssey 13, 86:

[Greek: