Part 11

What we call 1861 was not a year. It was history changing front; a cycle dying, an era born. Ignorance was still shaking himself by the hand pompously, after the manner of his species, and saying to himself: "Go to! I am lord of the bailiwick as aforetime; I will bind and stack and thresh as of hoariest yore." But knowledge was looming; information was coming to the front with a seafaring hitch to his trousers as one who had traveled far; even the professional reformer, who talks dialectics while his wife toils sixteen hours a day to nourish his soaring soul, found auditors. But knowledge did not loom to an adequate altitude or permeate to a sufficient degree of prevalence. Else had no Southron dared promise himself to whip the people who had invented and built up and managed the great material enterprises of the nation--or desired to whip them. Ignorance fluttered around recklessly until he singed his ostentatious whiskers in the flames of the pit; yea, more,--until he was blistered to the eyebrows with scorchings of the everlasting bonfire. Where ignorance is bliss, politics degenerates into irredeemable idiocy and ineffable slush; the campaign of mutual delusion goes on and on, the whole day long, the whole summer through, the whole year round; the oracle is an imitation statesman, whose head was cast in a heroic mold, but the jelly didn't "jellify;" his clientage is the adult male population of an infested village, whose howling need is a dog-killery. Under such leadership popular illumination is a slothful, discouraging process. The modest, uncultivated mule is liable at times to reverse the accepted formula, and put his best foot backward. The half-savage conductors of an orthodox Afro-American cremation in Texas typify an equally marked social retrogression.

It is, as a rule, futile to preach predestination to people who are not in the four hundred, but a general movement for the dissemination of knowledge is effective in tearing away ignorance, as the rich soil of Iowa is ripped up the back with a gang plow. With a due allowance of school-houses in the south forty years ago, the slaveholders' rebellion would have been impossible, just as in the prosperous, progressive American republic of to-day with ten million depositors in her banks and twenty million children in her schools, a successful assault on intelligence and prosperity would be impossible. Ignorance, as we have stated, fluttered recklessly near the scorchings of the bonfire. Whereupon knowledge achieved a popularity unprecedented since our first ancestress risked for its acquisition the fairest prospects of her distant and inconceivably multitudinous posterity.

During ten years next succeeding the war, its loyal survivors were habitually called, half in affection, half in honor: "Our Boys in Blue." Even those who had hated their cause and mourned their success conceded the fitness of a sobriquet which exalted their uniform to the dignity of a moral attribute, and tinged their classification with the hue of their trousers. It was Plato who said: "The brave shall be crowned. He shall wed the fair. He shall be honored at the sacrifice and the banquet." This was the era of the wedding, the barbecue, the "present arms" to a phalanx of angels--as was eminently fitting.

The women of '61 were not the wailing watchers and tearful lint-scrapers of a too current tradition. They were soulful, heart-strong heroines, the swordless soldiers of the Union. Lint-scraping and bandage winding were minor episodes. Their work was many sided as a prism, with every angle reflecting a radiant intensity. And all the ladders of grace that led from bloodiest battle-fields straight to the bending heavens, were built up, round by round, from the piety and devotion of intrepid womanhood.

The Boys in Blue were rapidly and happily and most appropriately mated to the noble girls they left behind them. One of Napoleon's marshals exclaimed when dying: "I have dreamed a beautiful dream." To the Boy in Blue, suffused with blushes as the compliments rained on him, both war and peace were chrysanthemum visions, soft, rosy and spicy. The compliments were well earned and welcome; welcome and wholesome as a thoughtful surgeon's timely prescription in the cold drizzle of a night march, when he proffered his flask with: "Gentlemen, you need a tonic; leave a drop for me!" Even the chastened copperhead hissed no expostulation; he simply folded his Nessus shirt around him and lay down in baffled schemes, his only punishment being an enforced allegiance to the proudest flag and grandest country the world has ever seen.

When ten years more had lent distinction and distance to receding perspectives, the title changed to "Our Gallant Veterans." The asperity of opposition had softened; the respect of friends had deepened. There was tenderness in the accent which pronounced the words and in the sentiment which inspired them. All recognized that wherever a surviving soldier stood, there was a sentinel of liberty. The Veterans came to the front in every sphere of activity, with the nerve that stakes a royal flush against a marble synagogue. They performed their full share of every-day work, and they rose to high positions in the state. They generously divided the honors, even turning out early in the morning to give the devil his dews. This was comparatively easy, as the exposure of the crime of 1873 had not then upset nearly everything, nor had the new woman come, constantly provoking controversies with the antagonistic sex.

The Veterans moved on the savage borderland and conquered it. They 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.

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, anæsthetic 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 æsthetic 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.