The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 Part 3

oude ken irex kirkos homarteseien elaphrotatos peteenon.]]

But there is no military science in Bunyan's Holy War nor in Spangenberg's Grammatical War: why should there be? Practical warfare is rough work. To frighten, to wound, to kill,--these three abide under all forms of military doctrine, and the greatest of these is frightening.

Ares, the G.o.d of war, has two satellites, Terror and Affright. Fear is the Gorgon's head. The serpents are very real, very effective, in their way, but logically they are unessential tresses. The Gorgon stares you out of countenance, and that suffices. The object is the removal of an obstacle. Killing and wounding are but means to an end. Hand-to-hand fighting is rare, and it would be easy to count the instances in which cavalry meets the shock of cavalry. Crossing sabres is not a common pastime in the red game of war. It makes a fine picture, to be sure, the finer for the rarity of the thing itself.

To frighten, to wound, to kill, being the essential processes, war amounts to the same thing the world over, world of time and world of s.p.a.ce. Whether death or disability comes by Belgian ball or Spencer bullet, by the stone of a Balearic slinger, by a bolt from a crossbow, is a matter of detail which need not trouble the philosophic mind, and the ancients showed their sense in ascribing fear to divine inspiration.

[Note: The Scandinavian scholar, JESPERSEN.]

If the processes of war are primitive, the causes of war are no less so.

It has been strikingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar that "language was born in the courting-days of mankind: the first utterance of speech something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melodious love-songs of the nightingale." "War, the father of all things," goes back to the same origin as language. The serenade is matched by the battle-cry. The fight between two c.o.c.k-pheasants for the love of a hen-pheasant is war in its last a.n.a.lysis, in its primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the bottom of it. It is the h.e.l.l-fire to which we owe the heat that is necessary to some of the n.o.blest as to some of the vilest manifestations of human nature.

Righteous indignation, sense of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, consecration to country, fine words all, fine things, but so many of the men who represent these fine things perish. It wrings the heart at a distance of more than thirty years to think of those who have fallen, and love still maintains pa.s.sionately that they were the best. At any rate, they were among the best, and both sides are feeling the loss to this day, not only in the men themselves, but in the sons that should have been born to them.

Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient number of resemblances, in killed, wounded, and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, or, if you choose to give it a milder name, rivalry. These things are of the essence of war, and the manifestations run parallel even in the finer lines. One c.o.c.k-pheasant finds the drumming of another c.o.c.k-pheasant a very irritating sound, Chanticleer objects to the note of Chanticleer, and the more articulate human being is rasped by the voice of his neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad Boeotian speech. Parson Evans's "seese and putter" were the bitterest ingredients in Falstaff's dose of humiliation. "Yankee tw.a.n.g" and "Southern drawl" incited as well as echoed hostility.

[Note: Ach. 527.]

Borderers are seldom friends. "An Attic neighbor" is a Greek proverb.

Kentucky and Ohio frown at each other across the river. Cincinnati looks down on Covington, and Covington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian war to a kidnapping affair between Athens and Megara. The underground railroad preceded the aboveground railroad in the history of the great American conflict.

There were jealousies enough between Athens and Sparta in the olden times, which correspond to our colonial days, and in the Persian war, which was in a sense the Greek war of independence. In like manner the chronicles of our Revolutionary period show that there was abundance of bad blood between Northern colonies and Southern colonies. The Virginian planter whom all have agreed to make the one national hero was after all a Virginian, and Virginians have not forgotten the impatient utterances of the "imperial man" on the soil of Ma.s.sachusetts and in the streets of New York. n.o.body takes Knickerbocker's History of New York seriously, as owlish historians are wont to take Aristophanes. Why not? We accept the hostility of Attica and Boeotia, of Attica and Megara; and there are no more graphic chapters than those which set forth the enmity between New York and Maryland, between New Amsterdam and Connecticut.

[Note: The Peloponnesians called it the Attic War (Thuc. 5, 28, 3); the Ionians the Doric War. In a recent number of the Jahrbucher, x.x.xv, No. 2 (1915), there is a discussion of the name of the Peloponnesian War apropos of the present "World-war," or, if you choose, "Wirrwarr." For our war the misnomer "The Civil War" has been adopted as the official designation.]

Business is often more potent than blood. Nullification, the forerunner of disunion, rose from a question of tariff. The echoes had not died out when I woke to conscious life. I knew that I was the son of a nullifier, and the nephew of a Union man. It was whispered that our beloved family physician found it prudent to withdraw from the public gaze for a while, and that my uncle's windows were broken by the palmettoes of a nullification procession; and I can remember from my boyhood days how unreconciled citizens of Charleston shook their fists at the revenue cutter and its "foreign flag." Such an early experience enables one to understand our war better. It enables one to understand the Peloponnesian war better, the struggle between the union of which Athens was the mistress and the confederacy of which Sparta was the head.

Non-intercourse between Athens and Megara was the first stage. The famous Megarian decree of Pericles, which closed the market of Athens to Megarians, gave rise to angry controversy, and the refusal to rescind that decree led to open war. But Megara was little more than a pretext.

The subtle influence of Corinth was potent. The great merchant city of Greece dreaded the rise of Athens to dominant commercial importance, and in the conflict between the Corinthian bra.s.s and the Attic clay, the clay was shattered. Corinth does not show her hand much in the Peloponnesian war. She figures at the beginning, and then disappears.

But the old mole is at work the whole time, and what the Peloponnesians called the Attic war, and the Attics the Peloponnesian war, might have been called the Corinthian war. The exchange, the banking-house, were important factors then as now. "Sinews of war" is a cla.s.sical expression. The popular cry of "Persian gold" was heard in the Peloponnesian war as the popular cry of "British gold" is heard now.

True, there was no slavery question in the Peloponnesian war, for antique civilization without slavery is hardly thinkable; but after all, the slavery question belongs ultimately to the sphere of economics. The humanitarian spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was at work in the Southern States as in the Northern States, but it was hampered by economic considerations. Virginia, as every one knows, was on the verge of becoming a free State. Colonization flourished in my boyhood. A friend of my father's left him trustee for his "servants," as we called them. They were quartered opposite our house in Charleston, and the pickaninnies were objects of profound interest to the children of the neighborhood. One or two letters came from the emigrants after they reached Liberia. Then silence fell on the African farm.

Some of the most effective anti-slavery reformers were Charlestonians by birth and breeding. I cannot say that Grimke was a popular name, but homage was paid to the talent of Frederick, as I remember only too well, for I had to learn a speech of his by heart, as a schoolboy exercise.

But the economic conditions of the South were not favorable to the spread of the ideas represented by the Grimkes. The slavery question kept alive the spirit that manifested itself in the tariff question.

State rights were not suffered to slumber. The Southerner resented Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lacedaemonian dictation, and our Peloponnesian war began.

III

The processes of the two wars, then, were the same,--killing, wounding, frightening. The causes of the two wars resolved themselves into the elements of hatred. The details of the two wars meet at many points; only one must be on one's guard against merely fanciful, merely external resemblances.

In 1860 I spent a few days in Holland, and among my various excursions in that fascinating country I took a solitary trip on a _treckschuit_ from Amsterdam to Delft. Holland was so true to Dutch pictures that there was a retrospective delight in the houses and in the people. There was a charm in the very signs, in the names of the villas; for my knowledge of Dutch had not pa.s.sed beyond the stage at which the Netherlandish tongue seems to be an English-German Dictionary, disguised in strong waters. But the thing that struck me most was the general aspect of the country. Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The gates guarded the bridges and the ca.n.a.ls were the fences, but the ca.n.a.ls and the low bridges were not to be seen at a distance, and the visual effect was that of isolated gates. It was an absurd landscape even after the brain had made the necessary corrections.

In the third year of the war I was not far from Fredericksburg. The country had been stripped, and the forlorn region was a sad contrast to the smug prosperity of Holland. And yet of a sudden the Dutch landscape flashed upon my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like Holland, was dotted with fenceless gates. The rails of the inclosures had long before gone to feed bivouac fires, but the great gates were too solidly constructed to tempt marauders. It was an absurd landscape, an absurd parallel.

Historical parallels are often no better. When one compares two languages of the same family, the first impression is that of similarity. It is hard for the novice to keep his Italian and his Spanish apart. The later and more abiding impression is that of dissimilarity. A total stranger confounds twins in whom the members of the household find but vague likeness. There is no real resemblance between the two wars we are contemplating outside the inevitable features of all armed conflicts, and we must be on our guard against the sophistication deprecated in the beginning of this study. And yet one coming fresh to a comparison of the Peloponnesian war and the war between the States might see a striking similarity, such as I saw between the Dutch landscape and the landscape in Spottsylvania.

The Peloponnesian war, like our war, was a war between two leagues, a Northern Union and a Southern Confederacy. The Northern Union, represented by Athens, was a naval power. The Southern Confederacy, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Sparta, was a land power. The Athenians represented the progressive element, the Spartans the conservative. The Athenians believed in a strong centralized government. The Lacedaemonians professed greater regard for autonomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal of hardihood, might multiply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a pa.s.sage from Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.

[Note: According to _fama clamosa_, Winfield was originally Wingfield, a very common Virginian name. The cla.s.sical parallel of Tromes and Atrometos will suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes.

Dem. 18, 129.]

Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already said, imperil one's intellectual honesty, and one would not like to imitate the Byzantine historians who were given to similar tricks. One of these gentlemen, Choricius by name, had a seaport to describe. How the actual seaport lay mattered little to Choricius, so long as the Epid.a.m.nus of Thucydides was at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were a.s.signed to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epid.a.m.nus. Little matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere.

Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse for Hampton Roads; and Thucydides' description of the naval engagement and the watching crowds would be made available for the fight between Merrimac and Monitor.

The debates in Thucydides would be a quarry for the debates in either Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings, if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the strange doctrine that apophthegms were more to be trusted than any other form of tradition. There could not have been a more hopeless thesis. The general who said that he would burn his coat if it knew his plans has figured in all the wars with which I have been contemporary, was a conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and pa.s.sed from camp to camp in the war between the States. The _mot_, familiar to the cla.s.sical scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to that das.h.i.+ng sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be ascribed to both leaders in the final battle of Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about Socrates is pieced out with tabs and tags borrowed from different periods. I have heard, say, in the afternoon, a good story at the expense of a famous American revival preacher which I had read that morning in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw off for the special behoof of college presidents and university professors.

Why hold up Choricius to ridicule? He was no worse than others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it was another Byzantine historian who conveyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps so much of his high game. The Greek historian of the Roman Empire, the Roman historian of every date, are no better, and Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, who has devoted many pages to the arraignment of Thucydides' style, cribs with the utmost composure from the author he has vilipended.

Still, we must not set down every coincidence as borrowing. Thucydides himself insists on the recurrence of the same or similar events in a history of which human nature is a constant factor. "Undo this b.u.t.ton"

is not necessarily a quotation from King Lear. "There is no way but this" was original with Macaulay, and not stolen from Shakespeare.

"Never mind, general, all this has been my fault," are words attributed to General Lee after the battle of Gettysburg. This is very much the language of Gylippus after the failure of his attack on the Athenian lines before Syracuse. How many heroic as well as unheroic natures have had to say "Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa."

[Note: Thuc. 7, 5, 2: [Greek: ouk ephe to hamartema ekeinon all' heautou genesthai.]]

Situations may recur, sayings may recur, but no characters come back.

Nature always breaks her mould. "I could not help muttering to myself,"

says Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, "when the good pastor this morning told me that Klopstock was the German Milton, 'a very _German_ Milton, indeed!!!'" and Coleridge's italics and three exclamation points may answer for all parallelisms. When historical characters get far enough off it may be possible to imitate Plutarch, but only then. Victor Hugo wrote a pa.s.sionate protest against the execution of John Brown, in which he compared Virginia hanging John Brown with Was.h.i.+ngton putting Spartacus to death. What Was.h.i.+ngton would have done with Spartacus can readily be divined. Those who have stood nearest to Grant and Sherman, to Lee and Jackson, the men, fail to see any strong resemblance to leaders in other wars. Nicias, in the Peloponnesian war, whose name means Winfield, has nothing in common with General Scott, whose plan of putting down the rebellion, the "Anaconda Plan," as it was called, bears some resemblance to the scheme of Demosthenes, the Athenian general, for quelling the Peloponnese. Brasidas was in some respects like Stonewall Jackson, but Brasidas was not a Presbyterian elder, nor Stonewall Jackson a cajoling diplomatist.

IV

This paper is rapidly becoming what life is,--a series of renunciations,--and the reader is by this time sufficiently enlightened as to the reasons why I gave up the ambitious t.i.tle Two Wars, and subst.i.tuted A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War. If I were a military man, I might have been tempted to draw some further ill.u.s.trations from the history of the two struggles, but my short and desultory service in the field does not ent.i.tle me to set up as a strategist. I went from my books to the front, and went back from the front to my books, from the Confederate war to the Peloponnesian war, from Lee and Early to Thucydides and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood my Greek history and my Greek authors better for my experience in the field, but some degree of understanding would have come to me even if I had not stirred from home. For while my home was spared until the month preceding the surrender, every vibration of the great struggle was felt at the foot of the Blue Ridge. We were not too far off to sympathize with the scares at Richmond. There was the p.a.w.nee affair, for instance. Early in the war all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report that the p.a.w.nee was on its way up James River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, just as all Athens was stirred, in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, by a naval demonstration against the Piraeus. The p.a.w.nee war, as it was jocularly called, did not last long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to which the civilian soul naturally resorts in every time of trouble, were soon laid aside, and the only artillery to which the extemporized warriors were exposed was the artillery of jests. Even now survivors of those days recur to the tumultuous excitement of that p.a.w.nee Sunday as among the memorable things of the war, and never without merriment. Perhaps n.o.body expected serious resistance to be made by the clergymen and the department clerks and the business men who armed themselves for the fray. Home guards were familiar b.u.t.ts on both sides of the line, but home guards have been known to die in battle, and death in battle is supposed to be rather tragic than otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made less tragic by the age of the combatant. The ancients thought a young warrior dead something fair to behold. To Greek poet and Roman poet alike an aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. No one is likely to forget Virgil's Priam, Tyrtaeus' description of an old soldier on the field of battle came up to me more than once, and there is stamped forever on my mind the image of one dying Confederate, "with white hair and h.o.a.ry beard, breathing out his brave soul in the dust" on the western bank of the fair Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before, that same old Confederate, as a member of the awkward squad, would have been a legitimate object of ridicule; and so the heroes of the p.a.w.nee war, the belted knights, or knights who would have been belted could belts have been found for their civic girth, were twitted with their heroism.

[Note: Tyrtaeus Fr. 8, 23:

[Greek: ede leukon echonta kare polion te geneion thymon apopneiont'

alkimon en konie].

The first line is taken from Il. 22, 74. I do not continue the citation because the Homeric pa.s.sage has not been subjected to the refining process of Mr. MURRAY'S redactors of the Iliad.]

[Note: The b.l.o.o.d.y Angle, May 12, 1864, an unforgettable date.]

[Note: Girl in the Carpathians and Scholar in Politics are t.i.tles of current publications taken at random to ill.u.s.trate the personal element and its unfitness.]

But our scares were not confined to scares that came from Richmond. One cavalry raid came up to our very doors, and Custer and his men were repelled by a handful of reserve artillerymen. Our home guard was summoned more than once to defend Rockfish Gap, and I remember one long summer night spent as a mounted picket on the road to Palmyra. Every battle in that "dancing ground of war" brought to the great Charlottesville hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. Crutch-races between one-legged soldiers were organized, and there were timber-toe quadrilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the shelter of the Blue Ridge it was easy enough to get into the range of bullets. A semblance of college life was kept up at the University of Virginia. The students were chiefly maimed soldiers and boys under military age; but when things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers would edge nearer to the h.e.l.l of battle and the boys would rush off to the game of powder and ball.

One little band of these college boys chose an odd time for their baptism of fire, and were put into action during the famous fight of "the b.l.o.o.d.y angle." From the night when word was brought that the Federals had occupied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled into the provost marshal's office at Charlottesville and took the oath of allegiance, the war was part of my life, and it is not altogether surprising that the memories of the Confederacy come back to me whenever I contemplate the history of the Peloponnesian war, which bulks so largely in all Greek studies. And that is all this paper really means.

It belongs to the cla.s.s of inartistic performances of which Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It has no unity except the accidental unity of person. A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no more artistic right to be than A Girl in the Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet it may serve as a doc.u.ment. But what will not serve as a doc.u.ment to the modern historian? The historian is no longer the poor creature described by Aristotle. He is no annalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along by the mechanical sequence of events. "The master of them that know" did not know everything. He did not know that history was to become as plastic as poetry, as dramatic as a play.

V

[Note: [Greek: akoueis Aischine]; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood friend was a scholar of the old times and would not have paused to consider whether the omission of [Greek: o] was due to scorn of aeschines or dread of the hiatus.]

The war was a good time for the study of the conflict between Athens and Sparta. It was a great time for reading and re-reading cla.s.sical literature generally, for the South was blockaded against new books as effectively, almost, as Megara was blockaded against garlic and salt.

The current literature of those three or four years was a blank to most Confederates. Few books got across the line. A vigorous effort was made to supply our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, and large consignments ran the blockade. Else little came from abroad, and few books were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these I recall especially Bulwer's Strange Story; Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, popularly p.r.o.nounced "Lee's Miserables"; and the historical novels of Louise Muhlbach, known to the Confederate soldier as "Lou Mealbag." All were eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantine and Joseph the Second would not last forever, and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some of us exhumed neglected treasures, and I remember that I was fooled by Bulwer's commendation of Charron into reading that feebler Montaigne. The Southerner, always conservative in his tastes and no great admirer of American literature, which had become largely alien to him, went back to his English cla.s.sics, his ancient cla.s.sics. Old gentlemen past the military age furbished up their Latin and Greek. Some of them had never let their Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was serving on General Gordon's staff, I met at Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of the old school who declaimed with fiery emphasis, in the original, choice pa.s.sages of Demosthenes' tirade against aeschines. Not Demosthenes himself could have given more effective utterance to "Hearest thou, aeschines?" I thought of my old friend again not so very long ago, when I read the account that the most brilliant of modern German cla.s.sicists gives of his encounter with a French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war, and of the heated discussion that ensued about the comparative merits of Euripides and Racine. The bookman is not always killed in a man by service in the field. True, Lachmann dropped his Propertius to take up arms for his country, but Reisig annotated his Aristophanes in camp, and everybody knows the story of Courier, the soldier h.e.l.lenist. But the tendency of life in the open air is to make the soul imbody and imbrute, and after a while one begins to think scholars.h.i.+p a disease, or, at any rate, a bad habit; and the Scythian nomad, or, if you choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the normal, healthy type. You put your Pickering Homer in your kit. It drops out by reason of some sudden change of base, and you do not mourn as you ought to do. The fact is you have not read a line for a month. But when the Confederate volunteer returned, let us say, from Jack's Shop or some such homely locality, and opened his Thucydides, the old charm came back with the studious surroundings, and the familiar first words renewed the spell.

"Thucydides of Athens wrote up the war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians." "The war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians" is a somewhat lumbering way of saying "the Peloponnesian war." But Thucydides never says "the Peloponnesian war." Why not? Perhaps his course in this matter was determined by a spirit of judicial fairness. However that may be, either he employs some phrase like the one cited, or he says "this war"

as we say "the war," as if there were no other war on record.

"Revolutionary war," "war of 1812," "Seminole war," "Mexican war,"--all these run glibly from our tongues, but we also lumber when we wish to be accurate. The names of wars, like the names of diseases, are generally put off on the party of the other part. We say "French and Indian war"

without troubling ourselves to ask what the French and Indians called it, but "Northern war" and "Southern war" were never popular designations. "The war between the States," which a good many Southerners prefer, is both bookish and inexact. "Civil war" is an utter misnomer. It was used and is still used by courteous people, the same people who are careful to say "Federal" and "Confederate." "War of the rebellion," which begs the very question at issue, has become the official designation of the struggle, but has found no acceptance with the vanquished. To this day no Southerner uses it except by way of quotation, as in Rebellion Record, and even in the North it was only by degrees that "reb" replaced "secesh." "Secession" was not a word with which to charm the "old-line Whigs" of the South. They would fight the battles of the secessionists, but they would not bear their name. "The war of secession" is still used a good deal in foreign books, but it has no popular hold. "The war," without any further qualification, served the turn of Thucydides and Aristophanes for the Peloponnesian war. It will serve ours, let it be hoped, for some time to come.