The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 Part 4

VI

A Confederate commentary on Thucydides, on the scale of the remarks just made on the name of the war, would outrun the lines of this study. Let us pa.s.s from Thucydides to the other contemporary chronicler who turns out some sides of the "Doric war" about which Thucydides is silent. The antique Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History.

Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque details about the rookeries and the wine-jars inhabited by the newcomers. Diogenes' jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no invention, and I have known less comfortable quarters than the hogshead which I occupied for a day or two in one of my outings during the war.

The plague was too serious a matter for even Aristophanes to make fun of, and the annalist of the war between the States will not find any parallel in the chronicles of the South. There was no such epidemic as still shows its livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the verses of Lucretius. True, some diseases of which civic life makes light proved to be veritable scourges in camp. Measles was especially fatal to the country-bred, and for abject misery I have never seen anything like those cases of measles in which nostalgia had supervened. Nostalgia, which we are apt to sneer at as a doctor's name for homesickness, and to cla.s.s with cachexy and borborygmus, was a power for evil in those days, and some of our finest troops were thinned out by it, notoriously the North Carolinians, whose attachment to the soil of their State was as pa.s.sionate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, Attic or Peloponnesian.

[Note: Gresham's law was antic.i.p.ated by Aristophanes, Ran. 718, foll.]

But the frightful mortality of the camp does not strike the imagination so forcibly as does the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman cares to a.n.a.lyze hospital reports and compare the medical with the surgical history of the war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the dominant note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as military. The Confederate soldier was often on short rations, but the civilian was not much better off. I do not mean those whose larders were swept by the besom of the invaders. "Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, left in the house," was not an uncommon cry along the line of march; but it was heard elsewhere, and I remember how I raked up examples of European and Asiatic frugality with which to reinforce my editorials and hearten my readers,--the scanty fare of the French peasant, the raw oatmeal of the Scotch stonecutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss mountaineer, the Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the Greek's handful of olives, and the Hindoo's handful of rice. The situation was often gayly accepted. The not infrequent proclamation of fastdays always served as a text for mutual banter, and starvation-parties were the rule, social gatherings at which apples were the chief refreshment. Strange streaks of luxury varied this dead level of scant and plain fare. The stock of fine wines, notably madeiras, for which the South was famous, did not all go to the hospitals. Here and there provident souls had laid in boxes of tea and bags of coffee that carried them through the war, and the chief outlay was for sugar, which rose in price as the war went on, until it almost regained the poetical character it bore in Shakespeare's time. Sugar, tea, and coffee once compa.s.sed, the daintiness of old times occasionally came back, and I have been a.s.sured by those who brought gold with them that Richmond was a paradise of cheap and good living during the war, just as the United States will be for foreigners when our currency becomes as abundant as it was in the last years of the Confederacy.

Gresham's law ought to be called Aristophanes' law. In all matters pertaining to the sphere of civic life, merry Aristophanes is of more value than sombre Thucydides, and if the gospel of peace which he preaches is chiefly a variation on the theme of something to eat, small blame to him. Critics have found fault with the appet.i.te of Odysseus as set forth by Homer. No Confederate soldier will subscribe to the censure, and there are no scenes in Aristophanes that appeal more strongly to the memory of the Southerner, civilian or soldier, than those in which the pinch of war makes itself felt.

Farmers and planters made their moan during the Confederacy, and doubtless they had much to suffer. "Impressment" is not a pleasant word at any time, and the tribute that the countryman had to yield to the defense of the South was ruinous,--the indirect tribute as well as the direct. The farmers of Virginia were much to be pitied. Their homes were filled with refugee kinsfolk; wounded Confederates preferred the private house to the hospital. Hungry soldiers and soldiers who forestalled the hunger of weeks to come, laid siege to larder, smoke-house, spring-house. Pay, often tendered, was hardly ever accepted. The cavalryman was perhaps a trifle less welcome than the infantryman, because of the capacious horse and the depleted corn-bin, but few were turned away. Yet there was the liberal earth, and the farmer did not starve, as did the wretched civilian whose dependence was a salary, which did not advance with the rising tide of the currency. The woes of the war clerks in Richmond and of others are on record, and important contributions have been made to the economical history of the Confederate States. I will not draw on these stores. I will only tell of what I have lived, as demanded by the t.i.tle of this paper. The income of the professors of the University of Virginia was nominally the same during the war that it was before, but the purchasing power of the currency steadily diminished. If it had not been for a grant of woodland, we should have frozen as well as starved during the last year of the war, when the quest of food had become a serious matter. In our direst straits we had not learned to dispense with household service, and the household servants were never stinted of their rations, though the masters had to content themselves with the most meagre fare. The farmers, generous enough to the soldiers, were not overconsiderate of the non-combatants. Often the only way of procuring our coa.r.s.e food was by making contracts to be paid after the war in legal currency, and sometimes payment in gold was exacted. The contracts were not always kept, and the unfortunate civilian had to make new contracts at an enhanced price. Before my first campaign in 1861, I had bought a little gold and silver, for use in case of capture, and if it had not been for that precious h.o.a.rd I might not be writing this sketch. But despite the experience of the airy gentlemen who alighted in Richmond during the war, even gold and silver would not always work wonders. Bacon and corned beef in scant measure were the chief of our diet, and not always easy to procure. I have ridden miles and miles, with silver in my palm, seeking daintier food for the women of my household, but in vain. There was nothing to do except to tighten one's belt, and to write editorials showing up the selfishness of the farming cla.s.s and prophesying the improvement of the currency.

No wonder, then, that with such an experience a bookish Confederate should turn to the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian war with sympathetic interest. The Athenians, it is true, were not blockaded as we were, and the Athenian beaux and belles were not reduced to the straits that every Confederate man, a.s.suredly every Confederate woman, can remember. Our blockade-runners could not supply the demands of our population. We went back to first principles. Thorns were for pins, and dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible garments were made possible. Miracles of turning were performed, not only in coats, but even in envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave it to his womankind in order to make the body of a riding-habit. Dainty feet were shod in home-made foot-gear which one durst not call shoes. Fairy fingers which had been stripped of jewelled rings wore bone circlets carved by idle soldiers. There were no more genuine tears than those which flowed from the eyes of the Southern women resident within the Federal lines when they saw the rig of their kinswomen, at the cessation of hostilities. And all this grotesqueness, all this dilapidation, was shot through by specimens of individual finery, by officers who had brought back resplendent uniforms from beyond seas, by heroines who had engineered themselves and their belongings across the Potomac.

[Note: As is well known, the Greek had a mania for shoes. For women's shoes see Av. Lys. 417. For other cordwainer's wares, _l. c._, 110.]

Of all this the scholar found nothing in the records of the Peloponnesian war. The women of Megara may have suffered, but hardly the Corinthian women; and the Athenian dames and damsels were as particular about their shoes and their other cordwainer's wares as ever. The story that Socrates and his wife had but one upper garment between them is a stock joke, as I have shown elsewhere. "Who first started the notable jest it is impossible, at this distance of time, to discover, just as it is impossible to tell whose refined wit originated the conception of the man who lies abed while his solitary shirt is in the wash." The story was intended to ill.u.s.trate, not the scarcity of raiment in the Peloponnesian war, but the abundance of philosophy in the Socratic soul.

All through that war the women of Athens seem to have had as much finery as was good for them. The pinch was felt at other points, and there the Confederate sympathy was keen.

In The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the hero, Dicaeopolis, makes a separate peace on his individual account with the Peloponnesians and drives a brisk trade with the different cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and his eels. This ecstasy can best be understood by those who have seen the capture of a sutler's wagon by hungry Confederates; and the fantastic vision of a separate peace became a sober reality at many points on the lines of the contending parties. The Federal outposts twitted ours with their lack of coffee and sugar; ours taunted the Federals with their lack of tobacco. Such gibes often led, despite the officers, to friendly interchange. So, for instance, a toy-boat which bore the significant name of a parasite familiar to both sides made regular trips across the Rappahannock after the dire struggle at Fredericksburg, and promoted international exchange between "Yank" and "Johnny Reb." The daydream of Aristophanes became a sober certainty.

The war was not an era of sweetness and light. Perhaps sugar was the article most missed. Maple sugar was of too limited production to meet the popular need. Sorghum was a horror then, is a horror to remember now. It set our teeth on edge and clawed off the coats of our stomachs.

In the army sugar was doled out by pinches, and from the tables of most citizens it was banished altogether. There were those who solaced themselves with rye coffee and sorghum mola.s.ses regardless of ergot and acid, but n.o.bler souls would not be untrue to their gastronomic ideal.

Necessity is one thing, mock luxury another. If there had been honey enough, we should have been on the antique basis; for honey was the sugar of antiquity, and all our cry for sugar was but an echo of the cry for honey in the Peloponnesian war. Honey was then, as it is now, one of the chief products of Attica. It is not likely that the Peloponnesians took the trouble to burn over the beds of thyme that gave Attic honey its peculiar flavor, but the Peloponnesians would not have been soldiers if they had not robbed every beehive on the march; and, sad to relate, the Athenians must have been forced to import honey. When Dicaeopolis makes the separate peace mentioned above, he gets up a feast of good things, and there is a certain unction in the tone with which he orders the basting of sausage-meat with honey, as one should say mutton and currant jelly. In The Peace, when War appears and proceeds to make a salad, he says,--

I'll pour some Attic honey in.

Whereupon Trygaeus cries out,--

Ho, there, I warn you use some other honey.

Be sparing of the Attic. That costs sixpence.

Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans mola.s.ses; "those mola.s.ses," as the article was often called, with an admiring plural of majesty.

[Note: Almost as touching as the _pluralis maiestaticus_ of "those mola.s.ses" is the Scythian archer's personification of honey as [Greek: Attikos melis], Ar. Thesm. 1192.]

But a Confederate student, like the rest of his tribe, could more readily renounce sweetness than light, and light soon became a serious matter. The American demands a flood of light, and wonders at the English don who pursues his investigations by the glimmer of two candles. It was hard to go back to primitive tallow dips. Lard might have served, but it was too precious to be used in lamps. The new devices were dismal, such as the vile stuff called terebene, which smoked and smelt more than it illuminated, such as the wax tapers which were coiled round bottles that had seen better days. Many preferred the old way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which cost many an old reader his eyes.

Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, terebene, pine-knots, were all represented in the Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the war went on. "A bibulous wick"

was a sinner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp and hasten combustion was little short of a crime. Management in the use of oil--otherwise considered the height of n.i.g.g.ardliness--was the rule, and could be all the more readily understood by the Confederate student when he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as well; that it was the Attic b.u.t.ter, and to a considerable extent the Attic soap. Under the Confederacy b.u.t.ter mounted to the financial milky way, not to be scaled of ordinary men, and soap was also a problem. Modern chemists have denied the existence of true soap in antiquity. The soap-suds that got into the eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of his Sat.u.r.day-night scrubbing were not real soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soapbox. No wonder, then, that oil was exceeding precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no wonder that all these little details of daily hardship come back even now to the old student when he reopens his Aristophanes. No wonder that the ever present Peloponnesian war will not suffer him to forget those four years in which the sea of trouble rose higher and higher.

NOTES

[Transcriber's note: the 'Notes' have been moved to their respective pages and appear as 'Notes']

POSTSCRIPT.--The bulk of the Notes would have been greatly augmented, if I had undertaken to explain 1892 as well as 1865 to the children of 1915. In 1892 Mr. CARNEGIE (p. 19) was not yet the benefactor of the outworn members of my own profession, and Mr.

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS was declaiming against the College Fetich to which I have borne a life long allegiance. To some of my own allusions I have lost the clue and find myself in the category with which BROWNING has made the world familiar.

CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS OF THE NORTHERN PRESS

"A poetical view of the Southern cause in the Civil War."--The Nation, January, 1892.

"An attempt on the part of Professor Gildersleeve to make the Creed of the Old South seem a little less absurd than it has for twenty years past."--Springfield Republican.

"Professor B. L. Gildersleeve states the Creed of the Old South in a way to make every Northern man respect those who took up arms like General Lee under the conviction that the State had the first claim upon their allegiance. The writer would have strengthened this sympathy, however, did he show that he had been docile to the stern teacher, experience, and had come to reject the parochial creed of state rights."--Literary World, January 2, 1892.

"I hope it is not improper to add that wherever, in all Christendom, there is hearty appreciation of profound learning allied to conscience and to a refined life, the recent paper of the Johns Hopkins professor of philology will be taken as conclusive proof that good and true and able men could uphold the cause of the Confederacy even in arms, and never doubt in their hearts that they were right."--JACOB DOLSON c.o.x, "Why the Men of '61 Fought for the Union," Atlantic Monthly, March, 1892.