Recollections of a Varied Life Part 8

There are twenty-two families living on that plantation now, most of them growing rich or well-to-do by the cultivation of the little truck farms into which the broad acres have been parceled out. The woodlands that used to shelter the wild flowers and furnish fuel for the great open fireplaces, have been stripped to furnish kindling wood for kitchen ranges in Northern cities. Even the stately locust trees that had shaded the lawns about the old mansion have been converted into policemen's clubs and the like, and potatoes grow in the soil where greensward used to carpet the house grounds.

Economically the change means progress and prosperity, of course, but to me the price paid for it seems out of proportion to the goods secured.

But then I am old-fashioned, and perhaps, in spite of the strenuous life I have led, I am a sentimentalist,--and sentiment is scorned as silly in these days.

There is another aspect of the matter that deserves a word, and I have a mind to write that word even at risk of anathema from all the altars of sociology. At seventy years of age one is less sensitive to criticism than at thirty.

All the children of the twenty-two truck farming families on that old plantation go to school. They are taught enough to make out bills, add up columns of figures, and write business letters to their commission merchants. That is what education means now on that plantation and on hundreds of others that have undergone a like metamorphosis. No thought or dream of culture enters into the scheme. Under the old system rudimentary instruction was merely a stepping stone by which to climb up to the education of culture. Under the theories of economics it is a great gain thus to subst.i.tute rudimentary instruction for all in the place of real education and culture for a cla.s.s. But is it gain? Is the world better off with ten factory hands who can read, write, and cipher, than with one Thomas Jefferson or George Wythe or Samuel Adams or Chancellor Livingston who knows how to think? Are ten factory girls or farmers' wives the full equivalent of one cultured gentlewoman presiding gracefully and graciously over a household in which the amenities of life are more considered than its economics?

Meanwhile the education of the race of men and women who once dwelt there has correspondingly lost its culture aspect. The young men of that old family are now bred to be accountants, clerks, men of business, who have no time to read books and no training that leads to the habit of thinking; the young women are stenographers, telegraph operators, and the like. They are estimable young persons, and in their way charming.

But is the world richer or poorer for the change?

It is not for me to answer; I am prejudiced, perhaps.

However it may be, the old life is a thing completely dead and done for, and the only compensation is such as the new affords. Everything that was distinctive in that old life was burned out by the gunpowder of the Civil War. Even the voices of the Virginia women--once admired throughout the land--are changed. They still say "right" for "very," and "reckon" for "think," and their enunciation is still marked by a certain lack of emphasis, but it is the voice of the peac.o.c.k in which they speak, not that of the dove.

[Sidenote: An Old Fogy's Questionings]

Whenever I ask myself the questions set down above, I find it necessary to the chastening of my mind to recite my creed:

I believe that every human being born into this world has a right to do as he pleases, so long as in doing as he pleases he does not interfere with the equal right of any other human being to do as he pleases;

I believe in the unalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

I believe that it is the sole legitimate function of government to maintain the conditions of liberty and to let men alone.

Nevertheless, I cannot escape a tender regret when I reflect upon what we have sacrificed to the G.o.d Progress. I suppose it is for the good of all that we have factories now to do the work that in my boyhood was done by the village carpenter, tanner, shoemaker, hatter, tailor, tin-smith, and the rest; but I do not think a group of factory "hands,"

dwelling in repulsively ugly tenement buildings and dependent upon servitude to the trade union as a means of escaping enslavement by an employing corporation, mean as much of human happiness or signify as much of helpful citizenship as did the home-owning, independent village workmen of the past. In the same way I do not think the subst.i.tution of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture of a cla.s.s has been altogether a gain. As I see young men flocking by thousands to our universities, where in earlier times there were scant hundreds in attendance, I cannot avoid the thought that most of these thousands have just enough education of the drill sort to pa.s.s the entrance examinations and that they go to the universities, not for education of the kind that brings enlargement of mind, but for technical training in arts that promise money as the reward of their practice.

And I cannot help wondering if the change which relegates the Arts course to a subordinate place in the university scheme is altogether a change for the better. Economically it is so, of course. But economics, it seems to me, ought not to be all of human life. Surely men and women were made for something more than mere earning capacity.

But all this is blasphemy against the great G.o.d Progress and heresy to the gospel of Success. Its voice should be hushed in a land where fame is awarded not to those who think but to those who organize and exploit; where men of great intellect feel that they cannot afford to serve the country when the corporations offer them so much higher salaries; and where it is easier to control legislation and administration by purchase than by pleading.

The old order changed, both at the North and at the South when the war came, and if the change is more marked in the South than at the North it is only because the South lost in the struggle for supremacy and suffered desolation in its progress.

XXVII

I have elsewhere pointed out in print that Virginia did not want war, or favor secession. Her people, who had already elected the avowed emanc.i.p.ationist, John Letcher, to be their governor, voted by heavy majorities against withdrawal from the Union. In her const.i.tutional convention, called to consider what the old mother state should do after the Cotton States had set up a Southern Confederacy, the dominant force was wielded by such uncompromising opponents of secession as Jubal A.

Early, Williams C. Wickham, Henry A. Wise, and others, who when war came were among the most conspicuous fighters on the Southern side. It is important to remember that, as Farragut said, Virginia was "dragooned out of the Union," in spite of the abiding unwillingness of her people.

[Sidenote: Under Jeb Stuart's Command]

I was a young lawyer then, barely twenty-one years of age. I spoke and voted--my first vote--against the contemplated madness. But in common with the Virginians generally, I enlisted as soon as war became inevitable, and from the 9th of April, 1861, to the 9th of April, 1865--the date of Lee's surrender--I was a soldier in active service.

I was intensely in earnest in the work of the soldier. As I look back over my seventy years of life, I find that I have been intensely in earnest in whatever I have had to do. Such things are temperamental, and one has no more control over his temperament than over the color of his eyes and hair.

Being intensely in earnest in the soldier's work, I enjoyed doing it, just as I have keenly enjoyed doing every other kind of work that has fallen to me during a life of unusually varied activity.

I went out in a company of horse, which after brief instruction at Ashland, was a.s.signed to Stuart's First Regiment of Virginia Cavalry.

The regiment was composed entirely of young Virginians who, if not actually "born in the saddle," had climbed into it so early and lived in it so constantly that it had become the only home they knew. I suppose there was never gathered together anywhere on earth a body of hors.e.m.e.n more perfectly masters of their art than were the men of that First Regiment, the men whom Stuart knew by their names and faces then, and whose names and faces he never afterward forgot, for the reason, as he often said to us, that "You First Regiment fellows made me a Major-General." Even after he rose to higher rank and had scores of thousands of cavaliers under his command, his habit was, when he wanted something done of a specially difficult and dangerous sort, to order a detail from his old First Regiment to do it for him.

The horsemanship of that regiment remained till the end a model for emulation by all the other cavalry, and, in view of the demonstrations of it in the campaign preceding Mana.s.sas (Bull Run) it is no wonder that when the insensate panic seized upon McDowell's army in that battle the cry went up from the disintegrated mob of fugitives that they could not be expected to stand against "thirty thousand of the best hors.e.m.e.n since the days of the Mamelukes." The "thirty thousand" estimate was a gross exaggeration, Stuart's command numbering in fact only six or seven hundred, but the likening of its horsemanship to that of the Mamelukes was justified by the fact.

As a robust young man who had never known a headache I keenly enjoyed the life we cavalrymen led that summer. It was ceaselessly active--for Stuart's vocabulary knew not the word "rest"--and it was all out of doors in about as perfect a summer climate as the world anywhere affords.

We had some tents, in camp, in which to sleep after we got tired of playing poker for grains of corn; but we were so rarely in camp that after a little while we forgot that we owned canvas dwellings, and I cannot remember, if I ever knew, what became of them at last. For the greater part of the time we slept on the ground out somewhere within musket shot of the enemy's lines, and our waking hours were pa.s.sed in playing "tag" with the enemy's scouting parties, encountered in our own impertinent intrusions into the lines of our foeman. A saddle was emptied now and then, but that was only a forfeit of the game, and the game went on.

[Sidenote: The Life of the Cavaliers]

It must have been a healthy life that we led. I well remember that during that summer my company never had a man on the sick list. When the extraordinary imbecility of the Confederate commissary department managed to get rations of flour to us, we wetted it with water from any stream or brook that might be at hand, added a little salt, if we happened to have any, to the putty-like ma.s.s, fried the paste in bacon fat, and ate it as bread. According to all the teachings of culinary science the thing ought to have sent all of us to gra.s.s with indigestions of a violent sort; but in fact we enjoyed it, and went on our scouting ways utterly unconscious of the fact that we were possessed of stomachs, until the tempting succulence of half-ripened corn in somebody's field set appet.i.te a-going again and we feasted upon the grain without the bother of cooking it at all.

Of course, we carried no baggage with us during the days and weeks when we were absent from camp. We had a blanket apiece, somewhere, we didn't know where. When our shirts were soiled we took them off and washed them in the nearest brook, and if orders of activity came before they were dried, we put them on wet and rode away in full confidence that they would dry on our persons as easily as on a clothesline.

One advantage that I found in this neglect of impedimenta was that I could always carry a book or two inside my flannel shirt, and I feel now that I owe an appreciable part of such culture as I have acquired to the reading done by bivouac fires at night and in the recesses of friendly cornfields by day.

There were many stories current among the good women at home in those days of men's lives being saved by Bibles carried in their clothes and opportunely serving as shields against bullets aimed at their wearers'

hearts. I do not know how much truth there may have been in these interesting narratives, nor have I any trustworthy information upon which to base an estimate of the comparative armorplate efficacy of Bibles and other books. But one day, as I well remember, the impact of a bullet nearly knocked me off my horse, and I found afterward that the missile had deeply imbedded itself in a copy of "Tristram Shandy" which lay in the region of my transverse colon. A Bible of equal thickness would doubtless have served as well, but it was the ribald romance of Laurence Sterne that stopped a bullet and saved my life that day.

It may be worth while to add that the young woman from whom I had borrowed the book never would accept the new copy I offered to provide in exchange for the wounded one.

This cavalry service abounded in adventures, most of them of no great consequence, but all of them interesting at the time to those who shared in them. It was an exciting game and a fascinating one to a vigorous young man with enough imagination to appreciate it as I did. I enjoyed it intensely at the time and, as the memory of it comes back to me now, I find warmth enough still in my blood to make me wish it were all to do over again, with youth and health and high spirits as an accompaniment.

[Sidenote: Delights of the War Game]

War is "all h.e.l.l," as General Sherman said, and as a writer during many years of peace, I have endeavored to do my part in making an end of it.

I have printed much in ill.u.s.tration of the fact that war is a cruel, barbarous, inhuman device for settling controversies that should be settled and could be settled by more civilized means; I have shown forth its excessive costliness and its unspeakable cruelty to the women and children involved as its victims. I have no word of that to take back.

But, as I remember the delights of the war game, I cannot altogether regret them. I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that war, with all its inhuman cruelty, its devastation, and its slaughter, calls forth some of the n.o.blest qualities of human nature, and breeds among men chivalric sentiments that it is well worth while to cherish.

And the inspiration of it is something that is never lost to the soul that has felt it. When the Spanish-American troubles came, and we all thought they portended a real war instead of the ridiculous "muss" that followed, the old spirit was so strong upon me that I enlisted a company of a hundred and twenty-four men and appealed to both the state and the national governments for the privilege of sharing in the fighting.

So much for psychology.

XXVIII

Among my experiences in the cavalry service was one which had a sequel that interested me.

Stuart had been promoted and Fitzhugh Lee, or "Fitz Lee" as we called him, had succeeded to the command of the First Regiment.

One day he led a party of us on a scouting expedition into the enemy's lines. In the course of it we charged through a strong infantry picket numbering forty or fifty men. As our half company dashed through, my horse was shot through the head and sank under me. My comrades rode on and I was left alone in the midst of the disturbed but still belligerent picket men. I had from the first made up my mind that I would never become a prisoner of war. I had stomach for fighting; I was ready to endure hardship; I had no shrinking from fatigue, privation, exposure, or anything else that falls to the lot of the soldier. But I was resolute in my determination that I would never "go to jail"--a phrase which fitly represented my conception of capture by the enemy.

So, when my horse dropped me there in the middle of a strong picket force, I drew both my pistols, took to a friendly tree, and set to work firing at every head or body I could see, with intent to sell my life for the very largest price I could make it command.