Chapter 3

The example of state pride set by the older States was not lost on the younger Southern States, and the Alabamian and the Mississippian lived in the same faith as did the stock from which they sprang; and the community of views, of interest, of social order, soon made a larger unit and prepared the way for a true nationality, and with the nationality a great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the elements that made up the Confederacy did not prove the great source of weakness that was expected. The Border States looked on the world with different eyes from the Gulf States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole planter of Louisiana were of different strains; and yet there was a solidarity that has never failed to surprise the few Northerners who penetrated the South for study and pleasure. There was an extraordinary ramification of family and social ties throughout the Southern States, and a few minutes' conversation sufficed to place any member of the social organism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, like the University of Virginia, within the Southern border did much to foster the community of feeling, and while there were not a few Southerners at Harvard and Yale, and while Princeton was almost a Southern college, an education in the North did not seem to nationalize the Southerner. On the contrary, as in the universities of the Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points, were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of view; there was no weakening of the home ties. West Point made fewer converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands.

All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All that I vouch for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded in one's own mind without the passionate desire to make converts that animates the born preacher, and any one may be excused from preaching when he recognizes the existence of a mental or moral color-blindness with which it is not worth while to argue. There is no umpire to decide which of the disputants is color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degenerate into a wearisome reiteration of points which neither party will concede. Now this matter of allegiance is just such a question. Open the October number of The Atlantic and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom many military men on the Southern side consider to have been the ablest of all the Federal generals. He was, as every one knows, a Virginian, and it seemed to us that his being a Virginian was remembered against him in the Federal councils. "His severance," says the writer in The Atlantic, "from family and State was a keen trial, but 'his duty was clear from the beginning.' To his vision there was but one country,--the United States of America. He had few or no friends at the North. Its political policy had not seemed to him to be wise. But he could serve under no flag except that which he had pledged his honor to uphold." Passing over the quiet assumption that the North was the United States of America, which sufficiently characterizes the view of the writer, let us turn to the contrast which would at once have suggested itself even if it had not been brought forward by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than Thomas decided the question at the same time, and decided it the other way. To Lee's vision there was but one course open to a Virginian, and the pledge that he had given when Virginia was one of the United States of America had ceased to bind him when Virginia withdrew from the compact. His duty was clear from the hour when to remain in the army would have been to draw his sword against a people to whom he was "indissolubly bound."

[Note: "I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere did the original spirit of State Sovereignty and allegiance to the State then survive in greater intensity and more unquestioning form than in Virginia--the 'Old Dominion'--the mother of States and of Presidents.

"State pride, a sense of individuality, has immemorially entered more largely and more intensely into Virginia and Virginians than into any other section or community of the United States. Only in South Carolina and among Carolinians, on the trans-Atlantic continent, was a somewhat similar sense of locality and obligation of descent to be found. There was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the pride which the MacGregors and Campbells took in their clan and country. In other words, the Virginian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last century, not to any appreciable extent, undergone nationalization."--CHAS. FRANCIS ADAMS, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137.

I have referred to Mr. ADAMS repeatedly because as a man of my time and nearly of my age he understood the difficulty of moving the point of view fifty years backward.]

These contrasted cases are indeed convenient tests for color-blindness. There may "arise a generation in Virginia," or even a generation of Virginians, "who will learn and confess" that "Thomas loved Virginia as well as the sons she has preferred to honor, and served her better." But no representative Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has not yielded to treatment during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the close of the war, and may as well be accepted for an indefinite period. When social relations were resumed between the North and the South,--they followed slowly the resumption of business relations,--what we should call the color-blindness of the other side often manifested itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.

[Note: In these days of mutual understanding and mutual forgiveness, I shall hardly be believed when I say that as late as 1885, twenty years after the close of the war, some of my Northern friends who had been taught the duty of "making treason odious" advised me to suppress or modify the following passage in my Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as savoring of disloyalty:

The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason to Medize before there was a Greece, and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision. That Pindar should have had an intense admiration of the New Greece, should have felt the impulse of the grand period that followed Salamis and Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and should have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of Hellas--all this is not incompatible with an attitude during the Persian war that those who see the end and do not understand the beginning may not consider respectable.]

Some fifteen years ago Mr. Lowell was lecturing in Baltimore, and during the month of his stay I learned to know the charm of his manner and the delight of his conversation. If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, I could not have withstood that easy grace, that winning cordiality. Every one knew where he had stood during the war, and how he had wielded the flail of his "lashing hail" against the South and the Southern cause and "Southern sympathizers." But that warfare was over for him, and out of kindly regard for my feelings he made no allusion to the great quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just before he left Baltimore, he was talking as no other man could talk about the Yankee dialect, and turning to me he said with a half smile and a deep twinkle in his eye, "I should like to have you read what I have written about the Yankee dialect, but I am afraid you might not like the context." A few days afterwards I received from him the well-known preface to the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, cut out from the volume. It was a graceful concession to Southern weakness, and after all I may have been mistaken in thinking that I could read the Second Series as literature, just as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two-penny Post Bag. In fact, on looking into the Second Series again, I must confess that I cannot even now discover the same merits that I could not help acknowledging in the First Series, which I read for the first time in 1850, when I was a student in Berlin. By that time I had recovered from my boyish enthusiasm over the Mexican war, and as my party had been successful, I could afford to enjoy the wit and humor of the book, from the inimitable Notices of an Independent Press to the last utterance of Birdofredum Sawin; and I have always remembered enough of the contents to make a psychological study of the Second Series a matter of interest, if it were not for other things.

On the second occasion we were passing together under the shadow of the Washington Monument, and the name of Lee came by some chance into the current of talk. Here Mr. Lowell could not refrain from expressing his view of Lee's course in turning against the government to which he had sworn allegiance. Doubtless he felt it to be his duty to emphasize his conviction as to a vital clause of his creed, but it instantly became evident that this was a theme that could not be profitably pursued, and we walked in silence the rest of the way,--the author of the line

Virginia gave us this imperial man,

and the follower of that other imperial man Virginia gave the world; both honest, each believing the other hopelessly wrong, but absolutely sincere.

[Note: Of many consentient utterances I select this one by a prominent Southerner:

"The Confederate soldiers did not go to war to perpetuate slavery. Most of them never owned a slave, and our hero, Gen. ROBERT E. LEE, said that if he owned every one of the slaves in the South he would give them for the preservation of the Union. It was not for the slaves they fought, but for principle, for their homes and native land."--T. F. GOODE, Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893.]

Scant allusion has been made in this paper to the subject of slavery, which bulks so large in almost every study of the war. A similar scantiness of allusion to slavery is noticeable in the Memorial volume, to which I have already referred; a volume which was prepared, not to produce an impression on the Northern mind, but to indulge a natural desire to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy; a book written by friends for friends. The rights of the State and the defence of the country are mentioned at every turn; "the peculiar institution" is merely touched on here and there, except in one passage in which a Virginian speaker maintains that as a matter of dollars and cents it would be better for Virginia to give up her slaves than to set up a separate government, with all the cost of a standing army which the conservation of slavery would make necessary. This silence, which might be misunderstood, is plain enough to a Southern man. Slavery was simply a test case, and except as a test case it is too complicated a question to be dealt with at the close of a paper which is already too long. Except as a test case it is impossible to speak of the Southern view of the institution, for we were not all of the same mind.

[Note: "When, within our memory, some flippant Senator [Hammond] wished to taunt the people of this country by calling them 'the mudsills of society,' he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the beds of the rivers are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State."--R. W. EMERSON, Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892, p. 33.

In an oration delivered before the United Confederate Veterans, June 14, 1904, RANDOLPH HARRISON McKIM, a former pupil of mine and a cousin of my college mates mentioned on page 16, says: "The political head of the Confederacy entered upon the war, foreseeing (February, 1861) the eventual loss of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy actually set his slaves free before the war was half over."--The Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the South in the Civil War, p. 28. The whole oration confirms the positions taken in this article.]

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 crushing burden and the awful responsibility of the institution 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 hellish 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-fashioned 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 passage 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 principal, 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 ligeiê, kali, daidaleê, epi d' argyreon zygon êen.]--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 institution of slavery is detested in this country--every man sympathizing strongly with the Southerners, and wishing 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 passion 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 passionate 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 pass before the current of national life ran freely through the Southern States. It was before this circuit was complete that the principal 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 classic literature at all know that for patriotism and friendship mottoes are not far to seek, but during the war I felt as I had never felt before the meaning of many a classic 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 cum patriaque iacent.