The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 Part 1

The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915.

by Basil L. Gildersleeve.

PREFACE

In the last score of years I have often been urged by friends and sympathizers to bring out as a separate issue my article, The Creed of the Old South, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1892, and which attracted wider attention than anything I have ever written.

As this is the jubilee of the great year 1865, the memories of that distant time come thronging back to the actors in the momentous struggle, and I am prompted to publish in more accessible form my record of views and impressions that may seem strange even to the survivors of the conflict, now rapidly pa.s.sing away. To this paper I have added an essay on a cognate theme--A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War--which was published in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1897, and which has been accepted by the eminent historian, Mr. Rhodes, as an historical doc.u.ment. These specimens of what I call my Sarga.s.so work ("Weeds from the Atlantic") are reproduced by the kind permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company. A few slips of pen and type have been corrected, and a few notes out of the ma.s.s of literature evoked by the first essay, or akin to it, have been added for the benefit of the third generation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: signature of Basil L. Gildersleeve]

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, JUNE, 1915.

THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH

[Note: This article was prepared (in 1891) at the instance of Mr. HORACE SCUDDER, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series of papers to be written by men who by virtue of education, intellectual endowment and social position were supposed to be high and lifted up above vulgar pa.s.sion and prejudice. The business of these elect gentlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them to an active partic.i.p.ation in so rude an affair as war. After publication in the Atlantic, the essays were to be gathered into a book and Mr. SCUDDER fancied that thus collected they would prove a valuable addition to the history of the times. The series stopped at the third number and the book was never published. Whilst I did not concur in Mr. SCUDDER'S view, I accepted the compliment and began to write with a lighter heart than I bore as I went on. At the end I was dipping my pen into something red, into something briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to have been contagious, for some years afterwards (1899) Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER, in his America To-day (p. 142), wrote as follows:

"I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say an elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together."]

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 apt.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage my friend and cla.s.smate 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 a.s.sured 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 c.u.mbrous. 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 n.o.ble-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 st.u.r.dy 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 n.o.ble 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, x.x.xviii:

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 d.a.m.ned, 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 pa.s.sage 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed 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.

We rode together towards the front, and as we rode our talk fell on Goethe and on Faust, and of all pa.s.sages the soldiers' song came up to my lips,--the song of soldiers of fortune, not the chant of men whose business it was to defend their country. Two lines, however, were significant:--

Kuhn ist das Muhen, Herrlich der Lohn.

We reached the front. An occasional "zip" gave warning that the sharpshooters were not asleep, and the quick eye of the general saw that our line needed rectification and how. Brief orders were given to the officer in command. My comrade was left to aid in carrying them out. The rest of us withdrew. Scarcely had we ridden a hundred yards towards camp when a shout was heard, and, turning round, we saw one of the men running after us. "The captain had been killed." The peace of heaven was on his face, as I gazed on the n.o.ble features that afternoon. The bullet had pa.s.sed through his official papers and found his heart. He had received his discharge, and the glorious reward had been won.

This is the other picture that the talk of the two old soldiers called up,--dead Confederate against living Federal; and these two pictures stand out before me again, as I am trying to make others understand and to understand myself what it was to be a Southern man twenty-five years ago; what it was to accept with the whole heart the creed of the Old South. The image of the living Federal bids me refrain from harsh words in the presence of those who were my captors. The dead Confederate bids me uncover the sacred memories that the dust of life's Appian Way hides from the tenderest and truest of those whose business it is to live and work. For my dead comrade of the Valley campaign is one of many; some of them my friends, some of them my pupils as well. The 18th of July, 1861, laid low one of my Princeton College room-mates; on the 21st, the day of the great battle, the other fell,--both bearers of historic names, both upholding the cause of their State with as unclouded a conscience as any saint in the martyrology ever wore; and from that day to the end, great battle and outpost skirmish brought me, week by week, a personal loss in men of the same type.

[Note: The Princeton College room-mate who fell on the 18th of July was JAMES KENDALL LEE, a distant relative of the great soldier; the other was PEYTON RANDOLPH HARRISON, of Martinsburg (W.) Va., representative of the oldest families in the old state. His brother, DABNEY CARR HARRISON (Princeton, '48), another close friend, took service in the Confederate army, first as chaplain, then as captain of a company, and was killed at Fort Donelson which, as I painfully remember, was at first reported as a Confederate victory.]

The surrender of the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria was a surprise to friend and foe alike; and the severe historian of the Peloponnesian war pauses to record the answer of a Spartan to the jeering question of one of the allies of the Athenians,--a question which implied that the only brave Spartans were those who had been slain. The answer was tipped with Spartan wit; the only thing Spartan, as some one has said, in the whole un-Spartan affair. "The arrow," said he, "would be of great price if it distinguished the brave men from the cowards." But it did seem to us, in our pa.s.sionate grief, that the remorseless bullet, the remorseless sh.e.l.l, had picked out the bravest and the purest. It is an old cry,--

Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten.

Still, when Schiller says in the poem just quoted,

Ohne Wahl vertheilt die Gaben, Ohne Billigkeit das Gluck, Denn Patroklus liegt begraben Und Thersites kommt zuruck,

his ill.u.s.tration is only half right. The Greek Thersites did not return to claim a pension.

[Note: Thersites--strange that Schiller in his Siegeslied should have forgotten it--never lived to return. According to the Scholia Vetera on Lycophron, 999, this monkey-shaped ([Greek: pithekomorphos]) creature was slain by Achilles for gouging out the eyes of Penthesilea's maid, with whom Achilles had fallen in love. A better point was made by Ovid, that master of points (Am. 2, 6, 41): _Tristia Phylacidae Thersites funera vidit._]

[Note: The French artist was GUILLAUME, who came to this country shortly before the war. In the picture to which I refer, General LEE was the main figure. GUILLAUME'S picture of the Surrender at Appomattox bore evidence of minute study of every detail of that historic event.]

Of course, what was to all true Confederates beyond a question "a holy cause," "the holiest of causes," this fight in defence of "the sacred soil" of our native land, was to the other side "a wicked rebellion" and "d.a.m.nable treason," and both parties to the quarrel were not sparing of epithets which, at this distance of time, may seem to our children unnecessarily undignified; and no doubt some of these _epitheta ornantia_ continue to flourish in remote regions, just as pictorial representations of Yankees and rebels in all their respective fiendishness are still cherished here and there. At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of honour in the "Art Annex," was given to Rothermel's painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted up with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt when I was informed of the high price that the State of Pennsylvania had paid for that work of art. The dominant feeling was amus.e.m.e.nt, not indignation. But as I looked at it I recalled another picture of a battle-scene, painted by a friend of mine, a French artist, who had watched our life with an artist's eye. One of the figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in a b.u.t.tonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture,--the souvenir that the Confederate so often received from fair sympathizers in border towns. I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush in the Confederate's b.u.t.tonhole for the most angelic smile that Rothermel's brush could have conjured up.

[Note: The toothbrush was a badge of culture on both sides, as the following pa.s.sage shows:

"'Light marching order' implies that a soldier may carry upon his person only a few of the more obvious necessities of life and no luxuries save tobacco. But a soldier must be clad even to sixty rounds of ball cartridge. Small wonder is it then, if only the lightest toothbrush drawn through the b.u.t.tonhole of his blouse must suffice as an epitome of the refinements of life. Many of the victories of our adversaries were fairly attributed to the scantier attire and lighter marching order of the men."--Atlantic Monthly, May, 1893, p. 214.]

[Note: DAVID RAMSAY, grandson of the historian and biographer of Washington of the same name, my fellow-student at Gottingen in 1852, fell after heroic services at Battery Wagner in 1863. What the state, what the country lost in the promise of that rare man, this is not the place to rehea.r.s.e. Scholar, wit, embodiment of all the inherited social graces of what we once called "the better days," delightful companion, devoted and generous friend, he is still in memory part of my life.]

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 const.i.tuted 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 n.o.blest men who figure in its pages were Union men; and the Memorial of the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.e.l.l.