The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915

A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their fellow-travellers. The veterans went into the minute detail that always puts me to shame, when I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and desultory to be of any value to the historian of the war. For my own life that experience has been of the utmost significance, and despite the heavy price I have had to pay for my outings, despite the daily reminder of five long months of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An able-bodied young man, with a long vacation at his disposal, could not have done otherwise, and the right to teach Southern youth for nine months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three. Self-respect is everything; and it is something to have belonged in deed and in truth to an heroic generation, to have shared in a measure its perils and privations. But that heroic generation is apt to be a bore to a generation whose heroism is of a different type, and I doubt whether the young people in our car took much interest in the very audible conversation of the two veterans. Twenty-five years hence, when the survivors will be curiosities, as were Revolutionary pensioners in my childhood, there may be a renewal of interest. As it is, few of the present generation pore over The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and a grizzled old Confederate has been heard to declare that he intended to bequeath his copy of that valuable work to some one outside of the family, so provoked was he at the supineness of his children. And yet, for the truth's sake, all these battles must be fought over and over again, until the account is cleared, and until justice is done to the valor and skill of both sides.

[Note: I had a similar experience some years after I wrote this paper, when I was spending the summer at Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering far enough off into the country to lose myself--for me no unfamiliar feat--I joined a man who was driving his cows to town and in my talk with him it turned out that he had been through the Valley campaign on the other side, and together we recalled encounters and scenes that were not recorded in the histories, insignificant skirmishes--significant enough to those who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the little brush at Weyer's Cave, where the Confederates came near bagging General Merritt? I have not been allowed to forget it these fifty years.]

The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to New York, their conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts went back into my own past, and two pictures came up to me from the time of the war.

[Note: Apropos of this passage my friend and classmate of the Princeton days, Gen. BRADLEY T. JOHNSON, told me that one hot day riding to meet a fight that would make the day still hotter, he stopped at a roadside cabin and asked for a drink of water. The woman who brought it, brought it in a broken and cracked mug, and he assured me that every ramification of those cracks was indelibly impressed on his brain. He could have drawn a map of the mug. Experiences like these help us to understand the details of the Homeric narrative, and to me there is nothing unnatural in Homer's mention of the washing troughs that Hector saw as he fled before the face of Achilles (Il. 22, 154 foll.).]

[Note: The fight under EARLY, to which I refer, was fought July 24, 1864. It was a brilliant feat of arms and has left other memories than those recorded. As A. D. C. to General GORDON I gave General TERRY, one of the brigade commanders, the order to advance, and I still hear the cry of one of the men who had been in a disastrous affair a few weeks before--the fight in which Gen. W. E. JONES fell. "This hain't no New Hope, Gineral." I still see the light of battle on the faces of the men as they went forward. My blood tingles as I write.]

In the midsummer of 1863 I was serving as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry. Gettysburg was in the past, and there was not much fighting to be done, but the cavalry was not wholly idle. Raids had to be intercepted, and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt himself too much; so that I gained some experience of the hardships of that arm of the service, and found out by practical participation what is meant by a cavalry charge. To a looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who charges, or is supposed to charge,--for the horse seemed to me mainly responsible,--the details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one of these charges some of us captured a number of the opposing force, among them a young lieutenant. Why this particular capture should have impressed me so I cannot tell, but memory is a tricky thing. A large red fox scared up from his lair by the fight at Castleman's Ferry stood for a moment looking at me; and I shall never forget the stare of that red fox. At one of our fights near Kernstown a spent bullet struck a horse on the side of his nose, which happened to be white, and left a perfect imprint of itself; and the jerk of the horse's head and the outline of the bullet are present to me still. The explosion of a particular caisson, the shriek of a special shell, will ring in one's ears for life. A captured lieutenant was no novelty, and yet this captured lieutenant caught my eye and held it. A handsomer young fellow, a more noble-looking, I never beheld among Federals or Confederates, as he stood there, bare-headed, among his captors, erect and silent. His eyes were full of fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, and his hair seemed to tighten its curls in defiance. Doubtless I had seen as fine specimens of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen without looking, and this man was evidently what we called a gentleman.

[Note: "Deboshed" is a reminiscence of an essay of LOWELL'S on Reconstruction, in which he makes light of Southern claims to aristocracy.]

Southern men were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride,--foolish in itself, foolish in that it did not have the heraldic backing that was claimed for it; the utmost concession being that a number of "deboshed" younger sons of decayed gentry had been shipped to Virginia in the early settlement of that colony. But the very pride played its part in making us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid "deboshed," of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we all held to the same standard, and showed, as was thought, undue exclusiveness on this subject. But this prisoner was the embodiment of the best type of Northern youth, with a spirit as high, as resolute, as could be found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen; and though in theory all enlightened Southerners recognized the high qualities of some of our opponents, this one noble figure in "flesh and blood" was better calculated to inspire respect for "those people," as we had learned to call our adversaries, than many pages of "gray theory."

[Note: General LEE always referred to the enemy as "those people." JOHN S. WISE, Atlantic Monthly, April, 1894. WISE is one ear-witness among many, and I thought of General LEE, as well as of Dante, when I wrote in my Introductory Essay to Pindar, xxxviii:

A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with a stroke. In the second Olympian P. is telling of the blessedness of the souls that have overcome. When he comes to the damned, he calls them simply "those."--_Non ragioniam di lor._]

[Note: Lieut. Gen. JOHN B. GORDON, Reminiscences, p. 422. Perhaps I may be pardoned for adding that when I read the passage in which mention is made of my service on his staff, I wrote to my chief, whose own bearing on the battlefield was an inspiration, that no tribute to my Greek scholarship I had received or could receive would ever be more cherished, if so much; and I cited the famous epitaph inscribed on the tomb of Aeschylus at Gela. No mention is made of his great tragedies. It is simply recorded that Aeschylus had quitted himself like a man in the Persian war.

[Greek: alken d' eudokimon Marathonion alsos an eipoi kai bathychaiteeis Medos epistamenos.]

In these Notes I am furnishing a key to the persons referred to in the article. There is a Confederate graveyard near my old home, the University of Virginia, in which hundreds of those who fell on the field or perished in the hospital, were laid to rest. At first a rude headboard marked each grave with the name, the company, the regiment, to be replaced, it was thought, by some more substantial monument at the end of the war; but the end of the war brought the consciousness of dire poverty that could hardly furnish food for the living, and so it was sadly resolved rather than leave these ghastly and decaying reminders of individual suffering and sacrifice to level the whole field and sow it in grass, but not until a pious soul, an English artist who bore the un-English name of SCHARF, had recorded each name and the place of burial on an elaborate plat. Still I cannot forbear to contribute my rude shingle here and there to the memory of my comrades. The staff-officer mentioned here was GEORGE H. WILLIAMSON, of Maryland. Two years before I made his acquaintance Mr. William M. Blackford, of Lynchburg, wrote in his diary, since privately printed, under the date July 25, 1862: Williamson, an interesting man, educated at Harvard and abroad, was a rising lawyer in Baltimore when the war broke out and he enlisted as a private in a Maryland regiment.]

[Note: A revival of religion to counterbalance, as it were, the revival of brutality, is a recurring phenomenon of great wars. The tide of skepticism in Greece was checked by the Persian War, and even to-day the French army shews a return to the Man of Sorrows, whose effigy had been removed from all public buildings.]

A little more than a year afterwards, in Early's Valley campaign,--a rude school of warfare,--I was serving as a volunteer aide on General Gordon's staff. The day before the disaster of Fisher's Hill I was ordered, together with another staff officer, to accompany the general on a ride to the front. The general had a well-known weakness for inspecting the outposts,--a weakness that made a position in his suite somewhat precarious. The officer with whom I was riding had not been with us long, and when he joined the staff had just recovered from wounds and imprisonment. A man of winning appearance, sweet temper, and attractive manners, he soon made friends of the military family, and I never learned to love a man so much in so brief an acquaintance, though hearts knit quickly in the stress of war. He was highly educated, and foreign residence and travel had widened his vision without affecting the simple faith and thorough consecration of the Christian. Here let me say that the bearing of the Confederates is not to be understood without taking into account the deep religious feeling of the army and its great leaders. It is an historical element, like any other, and is not to be passed over in summing up the forces of the conflict. "A soldier without religion," says a Prussian officer, who knew our army as well as the German, "is an instrument without value"; and it is not unlikely that the knowledge of the part that faith played in sustaining the Southern people may have lent emphasis to the expression of his conviction.