Chapter 2

Now I make no doubt that most of the readers of The Atlantic have got beyond the Rothermel stage, and yet I am not certain that all of them appreciate the entire clearness of conscience with which we of the South went into the war. A new patriotism is one of the results of the great conflict, and the power of local patriotism is no longer felt to the same degree. In one of his recent deliverances Mr. Carnegie, a canny Scot who has constituted himself the representative of American patriotism, says, "The citizen of the republic to-day is prouder of being an American than he is of being a native of any State in the country." What it is to be a native of any State in the country, especially an old State with an ancient and honorable history, is something that Mr. Carnegie cannot possibly understand. But the "to-day" is superfluous. The Union was a word of power in 1861 as it is in 1891. Before the secession of Virginia a Virginian Breckinridge asked: "If exiled in a foreign land, would the heart turn back to Virginia, or South Carolina, or New York, or to any one State as the cherished home of its pride? No. We would remember only that we were Americans." Surely this seems quite as patriotic as Mr. Carnegie's utterance; and yet, to the native Virginian just quoted, so much stronger was the State than the central government that, a few weeks after this bold speech, he went into the war, and finally perished in the war. "A Union man," says his biographer, "fighting for the rights of his old mother, Virginia." And there were many men of his mind, noted generals, valiant soldiers. The University Memorial, which records the names and lives of the alumni of the University of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war, two hundred in number,--this volume, full "of memories and of sighs" to every Southern man of my age, lies open before me as I write, and some of the noblest men who figure in its pages were Union men; and the Memorial of the Virginia Military Institute tells the same story with the same eloquence. The State was imperilled, and parties disappeared; and of the combatants in the field, some of the bravest and the most conspicuous belonged to those whose love of the old Union was warm and strong, to whom the severance of the tie that bound the States together was a personal grief. But even those who prophesied the worst, who predicted a long and bloody struggle and a doubtful result, had no question about the duty of the citizen; shared the common burden and submitted to the individual sacrifice as readily as the veriest fire-eater,--nay, as they claimed, more readily. The most intimate friend I ever had, who fell after heroic services, was known by all our circle to be utterly at variance with the prevalent Southern view of the quarrel, and died upholding a right which was not a right to him except so far as the mandate of his State made it a right; and while he would have preferred to see "the old flag" floating over a united people, he restored the new banner to its place time after time when it had been cut down by shot and shell.

[Note: For Pericles' budget, see Thuc. 2, 13.

Thuc. 1, 141: [Greek: tên autên dynatai doulôsin hê te megistê kai elachistê dikaiôsis apo tôn homoiôn pro dikês tois pelas epitassomenê.]]

Those who were bred in the opposite political faith, who read their right of withdrawal in the Constitution, had less heart-searching to begin with than the Union men of the South; but when the State called there were no parties, and the only trace of the old difference was a certain rivalry which should do the better fighting. This ready response to the call of the State showed very clearly that, despite varying theories of government, the people of the Southern States were practically of one mind as to the seat of the paramount obligation. Adherence to the Union was a matter of sentiment, a matter of interest. The arguments urged on the South against secession were addressed to the memories of the glorious struggle for independence, to the anticipation of the glorious future that awaited the united country, to the difficulties and the burdens of a separate life. Especial stress was laid on the last argument; and the expense of a separate government, of a standing army, was set forth in appalling figures. A Northern student of the war once said to me, "If the Southern people had been of a statistical turn, there would have been no secession, there would have been no war." But there were men enough of a statistical turn in the South to warn the people against the enormous expense of independence, just as there are men enough of a statistical turn in Italy to remind the Italians of the enormous cost of national unity. "Counting the cost" is in things temporal the only wise course, as in the building of a tower; but there are times in the life of an individual, of a people, when the things that are eternal force themselves into the calculation, and the abacus is nowhere. "Neither count I my life dear unto myself" is a sentiment that does not enter into the domain of statistics. The great Athenian statesman who saw the necessity of the Peloponnesian war was not above statistics, as he showed when he passed in review the resources of the Athenian empire, the tribute from the allies, the treasure laid up in the House of the Virgin. But when he addressed the people in justification of the war, he based his argument, not on a calculation of material resources, but on a simple principle of right. Submission to any encroachment, the least as well as the greatest, on the rights of a State means slavery. To us submission meant slavery, as it did to Pericles and the Athenians; as it did to the great historian of Greece, who had learned this lesson from the Peloponnesian war, and who took sides with the Southern States, to the great dismay of his fellow-radicals, who could not see, as George Grote saw, the real point at issue in the controversy. Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt in the vocabulary of those who advocated secession was "submissionist." But where does submission begin? Who is to mark the point of encroachment? That is a matter which must be decided by the sovereign; and on the theory that the States are sovereign, each State must be the judge. The extreme Southern States considered their rights menaced by the issue of the presidential election. Virginia and the Border States were more deliberate; and Virginia's "pausing" was the theme of much mockery in the State and out of it, from friend and from foe alike. Her love of peace, her love of the Union, were set down now to cowardice, now to cunning. The Mother of States and Queller of Tyrants was caricatured as Mrs. Facing-both-ways; and the great commonwealth that even Mr. Lodge's statistics cannot displace from her leadership in the history of the country was charged with trading on her neutrality. Her solemn protest was unheeded. The "serried phalanx of her gallant sons" that should "prevent the passage of the United States forces" was an expression that amused Northern critics of style as a bit of antiquated Southern rodomontade. But the call for troops showed that the rodomontade meant something. Virginia had made her decision; and if the United States forces did not find a serried phalanx barring their way,--a serried phalanx is somewhat out of date,--they found something that answered the purpose as well.

[Note: The friend was the late A. MARSHALL ELLIOTT, Professor of Romance Languages in the Johns Hopkins, whose life of study was matched by a life of adventure.]

The war began, the war went on. Passion was roused to fever heat. Both sides "saw red," that physiological condition which to a Frenchman excuses everything. The proverbial good humor of the American people did not, it is true, desert the country, and the Southern men who were in the field, as they were much happier than those who stayed at home, if I may judge by my own experience, were often merry enough by the camp fire, and exchanged rough jests with the enemy's pickets. But the invaded people were very much in earnest, however lightly some of their adversaries treated the matter, and as the pressure of the war grew tighter the more sombre did life become. A friend of mine, describing the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in Paris, when the circle of fire was drawing round the city, and foreigners were hastening to escape, told me that the press was so great that he could touch in every direction those who had been crushed to death as they stood, and had not had room to fall. Not wholly unlike this was the pressure brought to bear on the Confederacy. It was only necessary to put out your hand and you touched a corpse; and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of a brother or a friend. Every Southern man becomes grave when he thinks of that terrible stretch of time, partly, it is true, because life was nobler, but chiefly because of the memories of sorrow and suffering. A professional Southern humorist once undertook to write in dialect a Comic History of the War, but his heart failed him, as his public would have failed him, and the serial lived only for a number or two.

[Note: Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the Sea--I was riveted to my bed at the time--were not, are not so philosophic. See the narrative in BRADLEY JOHNSON'S Life of Joseph E. Johnston. Nor was I so philosophical when I followed the raiders of 1863, nor when I saw the fires that lighted up the Valley of Virginia in 1864, and that was before the systematic devastation recorded by MERRITT, who carried it out. "When our army," says MERRITT (Battles and Leaders, 4, 512), "commenced its return march, the cavalry was deployed across the Valley, burning, destroying or taking nearly everything of value, or likely to be of value to the enemy. It was a severe measure, and appears severer now in the lapse of time, but it was necessary as a measure of war." The plea of 1864 was the same as the plea of 1914. In a vivid sketch of Sherman's March, Prof. HENRY E. SHEPHERD, whose North Carolina home, Fayetteville, lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 4, 678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it "baffles all the resources of literary art and the affluence even of our English speech," and those who know Professor SHEPHERD'S resources and affluence will recognize the desperate nature of the task. As for the Valley, I have before me a protest against the erection of a monument to Sheridan, in which the writer gives an itemized account of the havoc inflicted on the property of non-combatants in the County of Rockingham alone. The protest reminds me of my youthful surprise when I first saw the statue of Tilly in the Feldherrnhalle at Munich. Somehow I had not thought well of Tilly before. But all estimates of military exigencies must be revised by the light of the new standards of the time in which we live. However, as this note goes to the printer, I am made aware of an article by Maj. JOHN BIGELOW, U. S. A., published in the N. Y. Times of June 13, 1915, in which the author musters the evidence of the behaviour of Sherman's men. 1864 seems not to have been so very far behind 1914 after all.]

[Note: "The hate of Celt to Saxon, and the contempt of Saxon for Celt, simply paled and grew expressionless when compared with the contempt and hate felt by the Southron towards the Yankee anterior to our Civil War and while it was in progress. No Houyhnhnms ever looked on Yahoo with greater aversion; better, far better death than further contamination through political association."--C. F. ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity, p. 176.

One recalls Halleck's Connecticut:

Virginians look Upon them with as favorable eyes As Gabriel on the devil in paradise.]

The war began, the war went on. War is a rough game. It is an omelet that cannot be made without breaking eggs, not only eggs in _esse_, but also eggs in _posse_. So far as I have read about war, ours was no worse than some other wars. While it lasted, the conduct of the combatants on either side was represented in the blackest colors by the other. Even the ordinary and legitimate doing to death was considered criminal if the deed was done by a ruthless rebel or a ruffianly invader. Non-combatants were especially eloquent. In describing the end of a brother who had been killed while trying to get a shot at a Yankee, a Southern girl raved about the "murdered patriot" and the "dastardly wretch" who had anticipated him. But I do not criticize, for I remember an English account of the battle of New Orleans, in which General Pakenham was represented as having been picked off by a "sneaking Yankee rifle." Those who were engaged in the actual conflict took more reasonable views, and the annals of the war are full of stories of battlefield and hospital in which a common humanity asserted itself. But brotherhood there was none. No alienation could have been more complete. Into the cleft made by the disruption poured all the bad blood that had been breeding from colonial times, from Revolutionary times, from constitutional struggles, from congressional debates, from "bleeding Kansas" and the engine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf was fixed, as it seemed forever, between North and South. The hostility was a very satisfactory one--for military purposes.

[Note: Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been discarded. Mr. PAXSON, Professor of American History in the University of Wisconsin, has devoted a volume to shew that while the South was defending an impossible cause, it could not hold different views--that these were the unavoidable result of environment and natural resources. How different is all this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted from its issue of April 17, 1865.

"Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebellion. There is nothing whatever that its leaders have scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and torturings, wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great cities, piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally assassination in high places--whatever is inhuman, whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men have resorted to. They will leave behind names so black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the execration of the slaveholders' rebellion will be eternal."

True, "slaveholders' rebellion" still survives here and there. So WILLIAM HARRISON CLARKE, in The Civil Service Law, Preface, says:

"Parties, when they strive solely for principle, are the life of a nation; but when they strive solely for pelf, patronage, and power they are its death. Even corrupt party leaders may destroy a republic; sometimes even ambitious leaders may do so. Did a nation ever make a narrower escape than did our own during the slaveholders' rebellion? Who but ambitious party leaders caused that rebellion?"]

[Note: "Vous êtes de France, mais je suis de Bretagne." "Eh bien! Ce n'est pas le même pays." "Mais c'est la même patrie." La femme se borna à répondre, "Je suis de Siscoingnard."--V. HUGO, Quatre-Vingt-Treize.]

The war began, the war went on,--this politicians' conspiracy, this slaveholders' rebellion, as it was variously called by those who sought its source, now in the disappointed ambition of the Southern leaders, now in the desperate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy to perpetuate their power, and to secure forever their proprietorship in their "human chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern people were but puppets in the hands of political wirepullers, or blind followers of hectoring "patricians." To those who know the Southern people nothing can be more absurd; to those who know their personal independence, to those who know the deep interest which they have always taken in politics, the keen intelligence with which they have always followed the questions of the day. The court-house green was the political university of the Southern masses, and the hustings the professorial chair, from which the great political and economical questions of the day were presented, to say the least, as fully and intelligently as in the newspapers to which so much enlightenment is attributed. There was no such system of rotten boroughs, no such domination of a landed aristocracy, throughout the South as has been imagined, and venality, which is the disgrace of current politics, was practically unknown. The men who represented the Southern people in Washington came from the people, and not from a ring. Northern writers who have ascribed the firm control in Congress of the national government which the South held so long to the superior character, ability, and experience of its representatives, do not seem to be aware that the choice of such representatives and their prolonged tenure show that in politics, at least, the education of the Southerner had not been neglected. The rank and file then were not swayed simply by blind passion or duped by the representations of political gamesters. Nor did the lump need the leavening of the large percentage of men of the upper classes who served as privates, some of them from the beginning to the end of the war. The rank and file were, to begin with, in full accord with the great principles of the war, and were sustained by the abiding conviction of the justice of the cause. Of course, there were in the Southern army, as in every army, many who went with the multitude in the first enthusiastic rush, or who were brought into the ranks by the needful process of conscription; but it is not a little remarkable that few of the poorest and the most ignorant could be induced to forswear the cause and to purchase release from the sufferings of imprisonment by the simple process of taking the oath. Those who have seen the light of battle on the faces of these humble sons of the South, or witnessed their steadfastness in camp, on the march, in the hospital, have not been ashamed of the brotherhood.

There is such a thing as fighting for a principle, an idea; but principle and idea must be incarnate, and the principle of States' rights was incarnate in the historical life of the Southern people. Of the thirteen original States, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia were openly and officially upon the side of the South. Maryland as a State was bound hand and foot. We counted her as ours, for the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay united as well as divided. Each of these States had a history, had an individuality. Every one was something more than a certain aggregate of square miles wherein dwelt an uncertain number of uncertain inhabitants, something more than a Territory transformed into a State by the magic of political legerdemain; a creature of the central government, and duly loyal to its creator.

[Note: "The brandished sword of her coat of arms would have shown what manner of _placida quies_ she would have ensued." The proof-reader of the Atlantic not being over-familiar with the Massachusetts coat of arms (_Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem_) or Scriptural language, substituted for the foregoing what one reads in the article as printed in the Atlantic (p. 82): "The brandished sword would have shown what manner of _placida quies_ would have ensued...."]

[Note: The wish that South Carolina had been scuttled is the wish of Chilon for Cythera. Herod. 7, 235.]

[Note: This impression, erroneous as it seems, was contravened in a letter from Mr. WM. A. COURTENAY, Mayor and historian of Charleston, who wrote to me: "The W. L. I. was named for George Washington. The 22d of February was celebrated as the anniversary from 1807-92 (thirty years ago in Fort Sumter under fire), and the connection of the corps with Col. Wm. Washington was not until April, 1827, on the presentation of the Eutaw flag to the corps by his widow." However, the memory of the lesser Washington is still kept alive, and the William Washington house is still one of the show places of my native city. As a further illustration of local patriotism I may add that the Charleston boys were more excited over the 28th of June, the battle of Fort Moultrie, than over the national Fourth of July.]

In claiming this individuality, nothing more is claimed for Virginia and for South Carolina than would be conceded to Massachusetts and Connecticut; and we believed then that Massachusetts and Connecticut would not have behaved otherwise than we did, if the parts had been reversed. The brandished sword would have shown what manner of _placida quies_ Massachusetts would have ensued, if demands had been made on her at all commensurate with the Federal demands on Virginia. These older Southern States were proud of their history, and they showed their pride by girding at their neighbors. South Carolina had her fling at Georgia, her fling at North Carolina; and the wish that the little State had been scuttled at an early day was a plagiarism from classical literature that might have emanated from the South as well as from the North. Virginia assumed a superiority that was resented by her Southern sisters as well as by her Northern partners. The Old North State derided the pretensions of the commonwealths that flanked her on either side, and Georgia was not slow to give South Carolina as good as she sent. All this seemed to be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old enough and strong enough to encourage the hopes of the Union leaders that the Confederacy would split along state lines. The cohesive power of the Revolutionary war was not sufficiently strong to make the States sink their contributions to the common cause in the common glory. Washington was the one national hero, and yet the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston was named, not after the illustrious George, but after his kinsman, William. The story of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill did not thrill the South Carolinian of an earlier day, and those great achievements were actually criticized. Who were Putnam and Stark that South Carolinians should worship them, when they had a Marion and a Sumter of their own? Vermont went wild, the other day, over Bennington as she did not over the centenary of the surrender at Yorktown. Take away this local patriotism and you take out all the color that is left in American life. That the local patriotism may not only consist with a wider patriotism, but may serve as a most important element in wider patriotism, is true. Witness the strong local life in the old provinces of France. No student of history, no painter of manners, can neglect it. In Gerfaut, a novel written before the Franco-Prussian war, Charles de Bernard represents an Alsatian shepherd as saying, "I am not French; I am Alsatian,"--"_trait de patriotisme de clocher assez commun dans la belle province du Rhin_," adds the author, little dreaming of the national significance of that "patriotisme de clocher." The Breton's love of his home is familiar to every one who has read his Renan, and Blanche Willis Howard, in Guenn, makes her priest exclaim, "Monsieur, I would fight with France against any other nation, but I would fight with Brittany against France. I love France. I am a Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." The Provençal speaks of France as if she were a foreign country, and fights for her as if she were his alone. What is true of France is true in a measure of England. Devonshire men are notoriously Devonshire men first and last. If this is true of what have become integral parts of kingdom or republic by centuries of incorporation, what is to be said of the States that had never renounced their sovereignty, that had only suspended it in part?