Recollections of a Varied Life
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Title: Recollections of a Varied Life
Author: George Cary Eggleston
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[Illustration: George Cary Eggleston]
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1910
Copyright, 1910
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published March, 1910_
TO MARION MY WIFE
I DEDICATE THESE RECOLLECTIONS
OF A LIFE THAT SHE HAS LOYALLY
SHARED, ENCOURAGED, AND INSPIRED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introductory 1
II. The Country as I First Knew It--Intensity of Its
Americanism--The Lure of New Orleans 2
III. Provincialism--A Travel Center--Road Conditions--
Mails--The Estrangement of Communities and Other
Isolating Conditions 4
IV. The Composite West--Dialect--The Intellectual Class 7
V. The Sturdy Kentuckians and Their Influence 9
VI. A Poor Boy's Career 13
VII. "Shooting Stock" 14
VIII. A Limitless Hospitality 16
IX. Industrial Independence and Thrift 18
X. Early Railroads--A Precocious Skeptic--Religious
Restriction of Culture 20
XI. Culture by Stealth 24
XII. Civilization on Wheels 26
XIII. A Breakfast Revolution 28
XIV. A Bathroom Episode 30
XV. Western School Methods 32
XVI. "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"--A Bit of Literary History 34
XVII. The Biggest Boy--A Vigorous Volunteer
Monitor--Charley Grebe 38
XVIII. What's in a Name? 42
XIX. A Buttermilk Poet 43
XX. Removal to Virginia--Impressions of Life There--The
Contradiction of the Critics in Their Creative
Incredulity 45
XXI. The Virginian Life 48
XXII. The Virginian Attitude Toward Money--Parson J----'s
Checks--The Charm of Leisureliness 49
XXIII. The Courtesy of the Virginians--Sex and
Education--Reading Habits--Virginia Women's Voices 55
XXIV. The Story of the West Wing--A Challenge to the
Ghosts--The Yellow-Gray Light--And Breakfast 60
XXV. Authors in Richmond--G. P. R. James, John Esten Cooke,
Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie, John R. Thompson, etc.--John Esten
Cooke, Gentleman--How Jeb Stuart Made Him a Major 66
XXVI. The Old Life in the Old Dominion and the New--An
Old Fogy's Doubts and Questionings 72
XXVII. Under Jeb Stuart's Command--The Legend of the
Mamelukes--The Life of the Cavaliers--Tristram
Shandy Does Bible Duty--The Delights of the War
Game and the Inspiration of It 76
XXVIII. Fitz Lee and an Adventure--A Friendly Old Foe 81
XXIX. Pestilence 86
XXX. Left Behind--A Gratuitous Law Practice Under
Difficulties--The Story of Tom Collins--A Death-Bed
Repentance and Its Prompt Recall 87
XXXI. Sharp-Shooter Service--Mortar Service at
Petersburg--The Outcome of a Strange Story 93
XXXII. The Beginning of Newspaper Life--Theodore Tilton
and Charles F. Briggs 99
XXXIII. Theodore Tilton 107
XXXIV. Further Reminiscences of Tilton 111
XXXV. The Tilton-Beecher Controversy--A Story as Yet Untold 115
XXXVI. My First Libel Suit 116
XXXVII. Libel Suit Experiences--The Queerest of Libel
Suits--John Y. McKane's Case 119
XXXVIII. Early Newspaper Experiences--Two Interviews with
President Grant--Grant's Method 123
XXXIX. Charlton T. Lewis 129
XL. Hearth and Home--Mary Mapes Dodge--Frank R.
Stockton--A Whimsical View of Plagiary 131
XLI. Some Plagiarists I Have Known--A Peculiar Case of
Plagiary--A Borrower from Stedman 139
XLII. The "Hoosier Schoolmaster's" Influence--Hearth and
Home Friendships and Literary Acquaintance--My First
Book--Mr. Howells and "A Rebel's Recollections"--My
First After-Dinner Speech--Mr. Howells, Mark Twain,
and Mr. Sanborn to the Rescue 145
XLIII. A Novelist by Accident--"A Man of Honor" and the
Plagiarists of Its Title--A "Warlock" on the Warpath
and a Lot of Fun Lost 151
XLIV. John Hay and the Pike County Ballads--His Own Story
of Them and of Incidents Connected with Them 157
XLV. A Disappointed Author--George Ripley's Collection
of Applications for His Discharge--Joe Harper's
Masterpiece--Manuscripts and Their Authors--Mr. George
P. Putnam's Story 166
XLVI. Joaquin Miller--Dress Reform a la Stedman 172
XLVII. Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration--Accident's Part
in the Literary Life--My First Boys' Book--How One
Thing Leads to Another 179
XLVIII. The First Time I Was Ever Robbed--The _Evening
Post_ Under Mr. Bryant--An Old-Fashioned Newspaper--Its
Distinguished Outside Staff--Its Regard for
Literature--Newspaper Literary Criticism and the
Critics of That Time--Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Idea
of New York as a Place of Residence--My Own
Appointment and the Strange Manner of It 186
XLIX. A Study of Mr. Bryant--The Irving Incident 194
L. Mr. Bryant's Tenderness Towards Poets--A Cover
Commendation--How I Grieved a Poet--Anonymous
Literary Criticism 199
LI. A Thrifty Poet's Plan--Mr. Bryant and the Poe
Article--The Longfellow Incident--The Tupper
Embarrassment 205
LII. Mr Bryant's _Index Expurgatorius_--An Effective
Blunder in English--Mr. Bryant's Dignified
Democracy--Mr. Cleveland's Coarser Method--Mr.
Bryant and British Snobbery 209
LIII. The Newspaper Critic's Function--A Literary News
"Beat"--Mr. Bryant and Contemporary Poets--Concerning
Genius--The True Story of "Thanatopsis" 217
LIV. An Extraordinary Case of Heterophemy--The Demolition
of a Critic 222
LV. Parke Godwin--"A Lion in a Den of Daniels"--The
Literary Shop Again--Literary Piracy--British
and American 227
LVI. The Way of Washington Officials--A Historical
Discovery--A Period Out of Place--A Futile Effort
to Make Peace--The "Intelligent Compositor" at His
Worst--Loring Pacha--War Correspondents--The Tourist
Correspondent--Loring's Story of Experience 234
LVII. "A Stranded Gold Bug"--Results of a Bit of Humor 247
LVIII. Mrs. Custer's "Boots and Saddles"--The Success
and Failure of Books 252
LIX. Letters of Introduction--The Disappointment of Lily
Browneyes--Mark Twain's Method--Some Dangerous Letters
of Introduction--Moses and My Green Spectacles 255
LX. English Literary Visitors--Mr. Edmund Gosse's
Visit--His Amusing Misconceptions--A Question of
Provincialism--A Literary Vandal 265
LXI. The Founding of the Authors' Club--Reminiscences
of Early Club Life--John Hay and Edwin Booth on
Dime Novels 272
LXII. The Authors Club--Its Ways and Its Work--Watch-Night
Frolics--Max O'Rell and Mark Twain--The Reckless
Injustice of the Humorists--Bishop Potter's
Opinion--The Club's Contribution of Statesmen and
Diplomats--The Delight of the Authors Club "After
the Authors Have Gone Home"--"Liber Scriptorum,"
the Club's Successful Publishing Venture 277
LXIII. In Newspaper Life Again--Editing the _Commercial
Advertiser_--John Bigelow's Discouraging
Opinion--Henry Marquand and Some of My
Brilliant "Cubs"--Men Who Have Made Place and
Name for Themselves--The Dread Task of the
Editor-in-Chief--Yachting with Marquand and the
Men I Met on Deck--Parke Godwin--Recollections of
a Great and Good Man--A Mystery of Forgetting 286
LXIV. Newspapers Then and Now--The Pulitzer Revolution--The
Lure of the _World_--A Little Dinner to James R.
Osgood 300
LXV. Service on the _World_--John A. Cockerill--An
Editorial Perplexity--Editorial Emergencies--In
Praise of the Printers--Donn Piatt--"A Syndicate
of Blackguards"--An Unmeant Crime 307
LXVI. First Acquaintance with Joseph Pulitzer--His
Hospitality, Courtesy, Kindliness, and Generosity--His
Intellectual Methods--The Maynard Case--Bryan's
Message and Mr. Pulitzer's Answer--Extraordinary
Political Foresight 319
LXVII. A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the
Government--The Power of the Press 327
LXVIII. Recollections of Carl Schurz 333
LXIX. The End of Newspaper Life 337
LXX. My Working Ways--Extemporary Writing--The Strange
Perversity of the People in Fiction--The Novelist's
Sorest Perplexity--Working Hours and Working Ways--My
Two Rules as to Literary Style 339
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE
I
Mr. Howells once said to me: "Every man's life is interesting--to
himself."
I suppose that is true, though in the cases of some men it seems
a difficult thing to understand.
At any rate it is not because of personal interest in my own life that
I am writing this book. I was perfectly sincere in wanting to call these
chapters "The Autobiography of an Unimportant Man," but on reflection
I remembered Franklin's wise saying that whenever he saw the phrase
"without vanity I may say," some peculiarly vain thing was sure to
follow.
I am seventy years old. My life has been one of unusually varied
activity. It has covered half the period embraced in the republic's
existence. It has afforded me opportunity to see and share that
development of physical, intellectual, and moral life conditions, which
has been perhaps the most marvelous recorded in the history of mankind.
Incidentally to the varied activities and accidents of my life, I have
been brought into contact with many interesting men, and into relation
with many interesting events. It is of these chiefly that I wish to
write, and if I were minded to offer an excuse for this book's
existence, this would be the marrow of it. But a book that needs excuse
is inexcusable. I make no apology. I am writing of the men and things I
remember, because I wish to do so, because my publisher wishes it, and
because he and I think that others will be interested in the result.
We shall see, later, how that is.
This will be altogether a good-humored book. I have no grudges to
gratify, no revenges to wreak, no debts of wrath to repay in cowardly
ways; and if I had I should put them all aside as unworthy. I have
found my fellow-men in the main kindly, just, and generous. The chief
pleasure I have had in living has been derived from my association with
them in good-fellowship and all kindliness. The very few of them who
have wronged me, I have forgiven. The few who have been offensive to me,
I have forgotten, with conscientiously diligent care. There has seemed
to me no better thing to do with them.
II
It is difficult for any one belonging to this modern time to realize the
conditions of life in this country in the eighteen-forties, the period
at which my recollection begins.
The country at that time was all American. The great tides of
immigration which have since made it the most cosmopolitan of countries,
had not set in. Foreigners among us were so few that they were regarded
with a great deal of curiosity, some contempt, and not a little pity.
Even in places like my native town of Vevay, Indiana, which had been
settled by a company of Swiss immigrants at the beginning of the
century, the feeling was strong that to be foreign was to be inferior.
Those who survived of the original Swiss settlers were generously
tolerated as unfortunates grown old, and on that account entitled to
a certain measure of respectful deference in spite of their taint.
[Sidenote: The Lure of New Orleans]
To us in the West, at least, all foreigners whose mother tongue was
other than English were "Dutchmen." There is reason to believe that
this careless and inattentive grouping prevailed in other parts of the
country as well as in the West. Why, otherwise, were the German speaking
people of Pennsylvania and the mountain regions south universally known
as "Pennsylvania Dutch?"
And yet, in spite of the prevailing conviction that everything foreign
was inferior, the people of the Ohio valley--who constituted the most
considerable group of Western Americans--looked with unapproving but
ardent admiration upon foreign life, manners, and ways of thinking as
these were exemplified in New Orleans.
In that early time, when the absence of bridges, the badness of roads,
and the primitive character of vehicular devices so greatly emphasized
overland distances, New Orleans was the one great outlet and inlet of
travel and traffic for all the region beyond the mountain barrier that
made the East seem as remote as far Cathay. Thither the people of the
West sent the produce of their orchards and their fields to find a
market; thence came the goods sold in the "stores," and the very
money--Spanish and French silver coins--that served as a circulating
medium. The men who annually voyaged thither on flat-boats, brought back
wondering tales of the strange things seen there, and especially of the
enormous wickedness encountered among a people who had scarcely heard
of the religious views accepted among ourselves as unquestioned and
unquestionable truth. I remember hearing a whole sermon on the subject
once. The preacher had taken alarm over the eagerness young men showed
to secure employment as "hands" on flat-boats for the sake of seeing
the wonderful city where buying and selling on the Sabbath excited no
comment. He feared contamination of the youth of the land, and with
a zeal that perhaps outran discretion, he urged God-fearing merchants
to abandon the business of shipping the country's produce to market,
declaring that he had rather see all of it go to waste than risk the
loss of a single young man's soul by sending him to a city so
unspeakably wicked that he confidently expected early news of its
destruction after the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The "power of preaching" was well-nigh measureless in that time and
region, but so were the impulses of "business," and I believe the usual
number of flat-boats were sent out from the little town that year. The
merchants seemed to "take chances" of the loss of souls when certain
gain was the stake on the other side, a fact which strongly suggests
that human nature in that time and country was very much the same in
its essentials as human nature in all other times and countries.
III
[Sidenote: A Travel Center]
The remoteness of the different parts of the country from each other
in those days is difficult to understand, or even fairly to imagine
nowadays. For all purposes of civilization remoteness is properly
measured, not by miles, but by the difficulty of travel and intercourse.
It was in recognition of this that the founders of the Republic gave
to Congress authority to establish "post offices and post roads," and
that their successors lavished money upon endeavor to render human
intercourse easier, speedier, and cheaper by the construction of the
national road, by the digging of canals, and by efforts to improve the
postal service. In my early boyhood none of these things had come upon
us. There were no railroads crossing the Appalachian chain of mountains,
and no wagon roads that were better than tracks over ungraded hills and
quagmire trails through swamps and morasses. Measured by ease of access,
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were at a greater distance from
the dwellers in the West than Hong Kong or Singapore is now, while
Boston was remoter than the mountains of the moon.
There were no telegraphs available to us; the mails were irregular,
uncertain, and unsafe. The wagons, called stagecoaches, that carried
them, were subject to capture and looting at the hands of robber bands
who infested many parts of the country, having their headquarters
usually at some town where roads converged and lawlessness reigned
supreme.
One such town was Napoleon, Indiana. In illustration of its character an
anecdote was related in my boyhood. A man from the East made inquiry in
Cincinnati concerning routes to various points in the Hoosier State, and
beyond.
"If I want to go to Indianapolis, what road do I take?" he asked.
"Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the road northwest."
"If I want to go to Madison?"
"Go to Napoleon, and take the road southwest."
"Suppose I want to go to St. Louis?"
"Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the national road west."
And so on, through a long list, with Napoleon as the starting point of
each reply. At last the man asked in despair:
"Well now, stranger, suppose I wanted to go to Hell?"
The stranger answered without a moment's hesitation, "Oh, in that case,
just go to Napoleon, and stay there."
That is an episode, as the reader has probably discovered. To return
to the mails. It was not until 1845, and after long agitation, that the
rate on letters was reduced to five cents for distances less than three
hundred miles, and ten cents for greater distances. Newspaper postage
was relatively even higher.
The result of these conditions was that each quarter of the country
was shut out from everything like free communication with the other
quarters. Each section was isolated. Each was left to work out its own
salvation as best it might, without aid, without consultation, without
the chastening or the stimulation of contact and attrition. Each region
cherished its own prejudices, its own dialect, its own ways of living,
its own overweening self-consciousness of superiority to all the rest,
its own narrow bigotries, and its own suspicious contempt of everything
foreign to itself.
In brief, we had no national life in the eighteen-forties, or for long
afterwards,--no community of thought, or custom, or attitude of mind.
The several parts of the country were a loose bundle of segregated and,
in many ways, antagonistic communities, bound together only by a common
loyalty to the conviction that this was the greatest, most glorious,
most invincible country in the world, God-endowed with a mental, moral,
and physical superiority that put all the rest of earth's nations
completely out of the reckoning. We were all of us Americans--intense,
self-satisfied, self-glorifying Americans--but we had little else in
common. We did not know each other. We had been bred in radically
different ways. We had different ideals, different conceptions of life,
different standards of conduct, different ways of living, different
traditions, and different aspirations. The country was provincial to the
rest of the world, and still more narrowly provincial each region to the
others.
IV
[Sidenote: The Composite West]
I think, however, that the West was less provincial, probably, and less
narrow in its views and sympathies than were New England, the Middle
States, and the South at that time, and this for a very sufficient
reason.
The people in New England rarely came into contact with those of the
Middle and Southern States, and never with those of the West. The people
of the Middle States and those of the South were similarly shut within
themselves, having scarcely more than an imaginary acquaintance with the
dwellers in other parts of the country. The West was a common meeting
ground where men from New England, the Middle States, and the South
Atlantic region constituted a varied population, representative of all
the rest of the country, and dwelling together in so close a unity that
each group adopted many of the ways and ideas of the other groups, and
correspondingly modified its own. These were first steps taken toward
homogeneity in the West, such as were taken in no other part of the
country in that time of little travel and scanty intercourse among men.
The Virginians, Carolinians, and New Englanders who had migrated to the
West learned to make and appreciate the apple butter and the sauerkraut
of the Pennsylvanians; the pie of New England found favor with
Southerners in return for their hoecake, hominy, chine, and spareribs.
And as with material things, so also with things of the mind. Customs
were blended, usages were borrowed and modified, opinions were fused
together into new forms, and speech was wrought into something different
from that which any one group had known--a blend, better, richer, and
more forcible than any of its constituent parts had been.
In numbers the Virginians, Kentuckians, and Carolinians were a strong
majority in the West, and the so-called "Hoosier dialect," which
prevailed there, was nearly identical with that of the Virginian
mountains, Kentucky, and the rural parts of Carolina. But it was
enriched with many terms and forms of speech belonging to other
sections. Better still, it was chastened by the influence of the small
but very influential company of educated men and women who had come from
Virginia and Kentucky, and by the strenuous labors in behalf of good
English of the Yankee school-ma'ams, who taught us by precept to make
our verbs agree with their nominatives, and, per contra, by unconscious
example to say "doo," "noo," and the like, for "dew," "new," etc.
The prevalence of the dialect among the uneducated classes was indeed,
though indirectly, a ministry to the cause of good English. The educated
few, fearing contamination of their children's speech through daily
contact with the ignorant, were more than usually strict in exacting
correct usage at the hands of their youngsters. I very well remember
how grievously it afflicted my own young soul that I was forbidden,
under penalty, to say "chimbly" and "flanner" for "chimney" and
"flannel," to call inferior things "ornery," to use the compromise term
"'low"--abbreviation of "allow,"--which very generally took the place
of the Yankee "guess" and the Southern "reckon," and above all to call
tomatoes "tomatices."
It is of interest to recall the fact that this influential class of
educated men and women, included some really scholarly persons, as well
as a good many others who, without being scholarly, were educated and
accustomed to read. Among the scholarly ones, within the purview of
my memory, were such as Judge Algernon S. Stevens, Judge Algernon S.
Sullivan, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, the Hendrickses, the Stapps,
the Rev. Hiram Wason, my own father, and Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, a very
brilliant woman, who taught school for love of it and wrote books that
in our time would have given her something more than the provincial
reputation she shared with Alice and Phoebe Cary, and some others.
V
[Sidenote: The Sturdy Kentuckians]
Of still greater consequence, perhaps, so far as influence upon their
time and country was concerned, were the better class of Kentuckians
who had crossed the Ohio to become sharers in the future of the great
Northwest.
These were mostly men of extraordinary energy--physical and mental--who
had mastered what the Kentucky schoolmasters could teach them, and
had made of their schooling the foundation of a broader education the
dominant characteristic of which was an enlightenment of mind quite
independent of scholarly acquisition.
These men were thinkers accustomed, by habit and inheritance, to look
facts straight in the face, to form their own opinions untrammeled by
tradition, unbiased by fine-spun equivocation, and wholly unrestrained
in their search for truth by conventional hobbles of any kind. Most
of them had more or less Scotch-Irish blood in their veins, and
were consequently wholesome optimists, full of courage, disposed to
righteousness of life for its own sake, and resolutely bent upon the
betterment of life by means of their own living.
Most of them numbered one or more Baptist or Methodist preachers among
their ancestry--men of healthy minds and open ones, men to whom religion
was far less a matter of emotion than of conduct, men who did the duty
that lay next to them--be it plowing or praying, preaching or fighting
Indians or Englishmen--with an equal mind.
Men of such descent were educated by environment in better ways than any
that schools can furnish. From infancy they had lived in an atmosphere
of backwoods culture,--culture drawn in part from such books as were
accessible to them, and in greater part from association with the strong
men who had migrated in early days to conquer the West and make of it a
princely possession of the Republic.
The books they had were few, but they were the very best that English
literature afforded, and they read them over and over again with
diligence and intelligence until they had made their own every
fecundative thought the books suggested. Then they went away, and
thought for themselves, with untrammeled freedom, of the things thus
presented to their minds. I have sometimes wondered if their method
of education, chiefly by independent thinking, and with comparatively
little reverence for mere "authority," might not have been better, in
its character-building results at least, than our modern, more bookish
process.
That question does not concern us now. What I wish to point out is the
fact that the country owes much to the influence of these strong men
of affairs and action, whose conviction that every man owes it to his
fellow-men so to live that this may be a better world for other men
to live in because of his having lived in it, gave that impulse to
education which later made Indiana a marvel and a model to the other
states in all that concerns education. Those men believed themselves and
their children entitled to the best in schooling as in everything else,
and from the very beginning they set out to secure it.
[Sidenote: Early Educational Impulses]
If a wandering schoolmaster came within call, they gave him a
schoolhouse and a place to live in, and bade him "keep school."
When he had canvassed the region round about for "scholars," and was
ready--with his ox gads--to open his educational institution, the three
or four of these men whose influence pervaded and dominated the region
round about, said a word or two to each other, and made themselves
responsible for the tuition fees of all the boys and girls in the
neighborhood whose parents were too poor to pay.
In the same spirit, years later, when an effort was made to establish
colleges in the state, these men or their children who had inherited
their impulse, were prompt to furnish the money needed, however hard
pressed they might be for money themselves. I remember that my mother--the
daughter of one of the most conspicuous of the Kentuckians--when she was
a young widow with four children to bring up on an income of about $250
a year, subscribed $100 to the foundation of Indiana Asbury University,
becoming, in return, the possessor of a perpetual scholarship, entitling
her for all time to maintain a student there free of tuition. It was
with money drawn from such sources that the colleges of Indiana were
founded.
Under the influence of these Kentuckians, Virginians, and men of
character who in smaller numbers had come out from New England and the
Middle States, there was from the first an impulse of betterment in the
very atmosphere of the West. Even the "poor whites" of the South who
had migrated to the Northwest in pursuit of their traditional dream of
finding a land where one might catch "two 'possums up one 'simmon tree,"
were distinctly uplifted by the influence of such men, not as a class,
perhaps, but in a sufficient number of individual cases to raise the
average level of their being. The greater number of these poor whites
continued to be the good-natured, indolent, unthrifty people that their
ancestors had always been. They remained content to be renters in a
region where the acquisition of land in independent ownership was easy.
They continued to content themselves with an inadequate cultivation of
their crops, and a meager living, consequent upon their neglect. They
continued to give to shooting, fishing, and rude social indulgences the
time they ought to have given to work. But their children were learning
to read and write, and, better still, were learning by observation the
advantages of a more industrious living, and when the golden age of
steamboating came, they sought and found profitable employment either
upon the river or about the wharves. The majority of these were content
to remain laborers, as deckhands and the like, but in some of them at
least ambition was born, and they became steamboat mates, pilots, and,
in some cases, the captains and even the owners of steamboats. On the
whole, I think the proportion of the class of people who thus achieved
a higher status, bettering themselves in enduring ways was quite as
large as it ever is in the history of an unfortunate or inferior class
of men. In the generations that have followed some at least of the
descendants of that "poor white" class, whose case had always been
accounted hopeless, have risen to distinction in intellectual ways. One
distinguished judge of our time, a man now of national reputation, is
the grandson of a poor white who negligently cultivated land rented from
a relative of my own. His father was my schoolmate for a season, and was
accounted inferior by those of us who were more fortunately descended.
So much for free institutions in a land of hope, opportunity, and
liberty, where the "pursuit of happiness" and betterment was accounted
an "unalienable right."
VI
[Sidenote: A Poor Boy's Career]
In another case that comes home to me for reasons, the betterment was
more immediate. My maternal grandfather, the old Kentuckian, George
Craig, whose name is preserved in many ways in the geographical
nomenclature of Southern Indiana, had an abundantly large family of
children. But with generously helpful intent it was his habit to adopt
bright boys and girls whose parents were poverty-stricken, in order to
give them such education as was available in that time and country, or,
in his favorite phrase, to "give them a show in the world." One of these
adopted boys was the child of parents incredibly poor. When he came to
my grandfather the boy had never seen a tablecloth or slept in a bed. He
knew nothing of the uses of a knife and fork. A glass tumbler was to him
a wonder thing. He could neither read nor write, though he was eleven
years of age. The towel given to him for use on his first introduction
to the family was an inscrutable mystery until one of the negro servants
explained its uses to him.
Less than a score of years later that boy was a lawyer of distinction, a
man of wide influence, a state senator of unusual standing, and chairman
of the committee that investigated and exposed the frauds perpetrated
upon the state in the building of the Madison and Indianapolis
railroad--the first highway of its kind constructed within the state.
In one sense, he owed all this to George Craig. In a truer sense he owed
it to his own native ability, which George Craig was shrewd enough to
discover in the uncouth and ignorant boy, and wise enough to give its
opportunity.
VII
It was a common practice of the thrifty and well-to-do of that time,
thus to adopt the children of their poorer neighbors and bring them up
as members of their own families. Still more common was the practice of
taking destitute orphans as "bound boys" or "bound girls." These were
legally bound to service, instead of being sent to the poorhouse, but in
practical effect they became members of the families to whose heads they
were "bound," and shared in all respects the privileges, the schooling,
and everything else that the children of the family enjoyed. They were
expected to work, when there was work to be done, but so was every
other member of the family, and there was never the least suggestion of
servile obligation involved or implied. I remember well the affection in
which my mother's "bound girls" held her and us children, and the way
in which, when they came to be married, their weddings were provided for
precisely as if they had been veritable daughters of the house.
On one of those occasions it was rumored in the village, that a
"shiveree"--Hoosier for charivari--was to mark the event. My father,
whose Virginian reverence for womanhood and marriage and personal
dignity, was prompt to resent that sort of insult, went to a neighbor
and borrowed two shotguns. As he carried them homeward through the main
street of the village, on the morning before the wedding, he encountered
the ruffian who had planned the "shiveree," and was arranging to carry
it out. The man asked him, in surprise, for my father was a studious
recluse in his habits, if he were going out after game.
[Sidenote: "Shooting Stock"]
"No," my father replied. "It is only that a very worthy young woman,
a member of my family, is to be married at my house to-night. I hear
that certain 'lewd fellows of the baser sort' are planning to insult
her and me and my family with what they call a 'shiveree.' If they do
anything of the kind, _I am going to fire four charges of buckshot
into the crowd_."
As my father was known to be a man who inflexibly kept his word, there
was no "shiveree" that night.
That father of mine was a man of the gentlest spirit imaginable, but at
the same time a man of resolute character, who scrupulously respected
the rights and the dignity of others, and insistently demanded a like
respect for his own. Quite episodically, but in illustration of the
manners of the time, I may here intrude an incident, related to me many
years afterwards by Judge Taylor, a venerable jurist of Madison. My
father was looking about him for a place in which to settle himself in
the practice of law. He was temporarily staying in Madison when a client
came to him. The man had been inveigled into a game of cards with some
sharpers, and they had worked off some counterfeit money upon him. He
purposed to sue them. My father explained that the law did not recognize
the obligation of gambling debts, and the man replied that he knew that
very well, but that he wanted to expose the rascals, and was willing to
spend money to that end. The case came before Judge Taylor. My father
made an eloquently bitter speech in exposition of the meanness of men
who--the reader can imagine the rest. It was to make that speech that
the client had employed the young lawyer, and, in Judge Taylor's opinion
he "got his money's worth of gall and vitriol." But while the speech
was in progress, the three rascals became excited and blustering under
the castigation, and he, the judge, overheard talk of "shooting the
fellow"--to wit my father. Just as the judge was meditating measures of
restraint that might be effective at a time when most men were walking
arsenals, he heard one of them hurriedly warn his fellows in this wise:
"Say--you'd better not talk too much about shooting--they tell me that
young lawyer comes from Virginia, and he _may be of shooting stock_."
The Virginians had a reputation for quickness on trigger in that region.
The warning was sufficient. The three gamblers took their punishment and
slunk away, and there was no assassination.
VIII
The readiness with which the well-to-do men of that region adopted or
otherwise made themselves responsible for the bringing up of destitute
children, was largely due to the conditions of life that prevailed in
that time and country. There was no considerable expense involved in
such adoption. The thrifty farmer, with more land than he could possibly
cultivate, produced, easily, all the food that even a multitudinous
family could consume. He produced also the wool, the flax, and the
cotton necessary for clothing, and these were carded, spun, woven, and
converted into garments for both sexes by the women folk of the home.
Little, if anything, was bought with actual money, and in the midst
of such abundance an extra mouth to feed and an extra back to clothe
counted for next to nothing, while at that time, when work, on
everybody's part, was regarded quite as a matter of course, the boy or
girl taken into a family was easily able to "earn his keep," as the
phrase was.
Nevertheless, there was a great-hearted generosity inspiring it all--a
broadly democratic conviction that everybody should have a chance in
life, and that he who had should share with his brother who had not,
freely and without thought of conferring favor.
[Sidenote: A Limitless Hospitality]
It was upon that principle, also, that the hospitality of that time
rested. There was always an abundance to eat, and there was always a bed
to spare for the stranger within the gates; or if the beds fell short,
it was always easy to spread a pallet before the fire, or, in extreme
circumstances, to make the stranger comfortable among a lot of quilts
in a corn-house or hay-mow.
It was my grandfather's rule and that of other men like him, to provide
work of some sort for every one who asked for it. An extra hoe in summer
was always of use, while in winter there was corn to be shelled, there
were apples to be "sorted," tools to be ground, ditches to be dug, stone
fences to be built, wood to be chopped, and a score of other things to
be done, that might employ an extra "hand" profitably. Only once in all
his life did George Craig refuse employment to a man asking for it. On
that occasion he gave supper, lodging, and breakfast to the wayfarer;
but during the evening the man complained that he had been walking all
day with a grain of corn in his shoe, and, as he sat before the fire, he
removed it, to his great relief but also to his undoing as an applicant
for permanent employment. For the energetic old Kentuckian could
conceive of no ground of patience with a man who would walk all day in
pain rather than take the small trouble of sitting down by the roadside
and removing the offending grain of corn from his shoe.
"I have no use," he said, "for a man as lazy as that."
Then his conscience came to the rescue.
"I can't hire a lazy fellow like you for wages," he said; "but I have a
ditch to be dug. There will be fifteen hundred running feet of it, and
if you choose, I'll let you work at it, at so much a foot. Then if you
work you'll make wages, while if you don't there'll be nothing for me
to lose on you but your keep, and I'll give you that."
The man decided to move on.
IX
The life of that early time differed in every way from American life as
men of the present day know it.
The isolation in which every community existed, compelled a degree of
local self-dependence the like of which the modern world knows nothing
of. The farmers did most things for themselves, and what they could not
conveniently do for themselves, was done for them in the villages by
independent craftsmen, each cunningly skilled in his trade and dependent
upon factories for nothing. In my native village, Vevay, which was in
nowise different from other Western villages upon which the region
round about depended for supplies, practically everything wanted was
made. There were two tinsmiths, who, with an assistant or two each,
in the persons of boys learning the trade, made every utensil of tin,
sheet-iron, or copper that was needed for twenty-odd miles around. There
were two saddlers and harnessmakers; two or three plasterers; several
brick masons; several carpenters, who knew their trade as no carpenter
does in our time when the planing mill furnishes everything already
shaped to his hand, so that the carpenter need know nothing but how to
drive nails or screws. There was a boot- and shoe-maker who made all
the shoes worn by men, women, and children in all that country, out of
leather bought of the local tanner, to whom all hides were sold by their
producers. There was a hatter who did all his own work, whose vats
yielded all the headgear needed, from the finest to the commonest,
and whose materials were the furs of animals caught or killed by the
farmers' boys and brought to town for sale. There was even a wireworker,
who provided sieves, strainers, and screenings of every kind, and there
was a rope walk where the cordage wanted was made.
[Sidenote: Industrial Independence]
In most households the women folk fashioned all the clothes worn by
persons of either sex, but to meet the demand for "Sunday bests" and
that of preachers who must wear broadcloth every day in the week, and
of extravagant young men who wished to dazzle all eyes with "store
clothes," there was a tailor who year after year fashioned garments upon
models learned in his youth and never departed from. No such thing as
ready-made clothing or boots or shoes--except women's slippers--was
known at the time of which I now write. Even socks and stockings were
never sold in the shops, except upon wedding and other infrequent
occasions. For ordinary wear they were knitted at home of home-spun
yarn. The statement made above is scarcely accurate. Both socks and
stockings were occasionally sold in the country stores, but they were
almost exclusively the surplus products of the industry of women on the
farms round about. So were the saddle blankets, and most of the bed
blankets used.
Local self-dependence was well-nigh perfect. The town depended on the
country and the country on the town, for nearly everything that was
eaten or woven or otherwise consumed. The day of dependence upon
factories had not yet dawned. The man who knew how to fashion any
article of human use, made his living by doing the work he knew how to
do, and was an independent, self-respecting man, usually owning his
comfortable home, and destined by middle age to possess a satisfactory
competence.
Whether all that was economically or socially better than the system
which has converted the independent, home-owning worker into a factory
hand, living in a tenement and carrying a dinner pail, while tariff
tribute from the consumer makes his employer at once a millionaire
and the more or less despotic master of a multitude of men--is a
question too large and too serious to be discussed in a book of random
recollections such as this. But every "strike" raises that question in
the minds of men who remember the more primitive conditions as lovingly
as I do.
As a matter of curious historical interest, too, it is worth while to
recall the fact that Henry Clay--before his desire to win the votes of
the Kentucky hemp-growers led him to become the leading advocate of
tariff protection--used to make eloquent speeches in behalf of free
trade, in which he drew horrifying pictures of life conditions in the
English manufacturing centers, and invoked the mercy of heaven to spare
this country from like conditions in which economic considerations
should ride down social ones, trample the life out of personal
independence, and convert the home-owning American workman into a mere
"hand" employed by a company of capitalists for their own enrichment at
cost of his manhood except in so far as the fiat of a trades union might
interpose to save him from slavery to the employing class.
Those were interesting speeches of Henry Clay's, made before he sacrificed
his convictions and his manhood to his vain desire to become President.
X
[Sidenote: The Early Railroad]
At the time of my earliest recollections there was not a mile of
railroad in Indiana or anywhere else west of Ohio, while even in Ohio
there were only the crudest beginnings of track construction, on isolated
lines that began nowhere and led no whither, connecting with nothing,
and usually failing to make even that connection.
He who would journey from the East to the West, soon came to the end of
the rails, and after that he must toilsomely make his way by stagecoach
across the mountains, walking for the most part in mud half-leg deep,
and carrying a fence rail on his shoulder with which to help the stalled
stagecoach out of frequent mires.
Nevertheless, we heard much of the railroad and its wonders. It was our
mystery story, our marvel, our current Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
We were told, and devoutly believed, that the "railcars" ran at the rate
of "a mile a minute." How or why the liars of that early period, when
lying must have been in its infancy as an art, happened to hit upon
sixty miles an hour as the uniform speed of railroad trains, I am
puzzled to imagine. But so it was. There was probably not in all the
world at that time a single mile of railroad track over which a train
could have been run at such a speed. As for the railroads in the Western
part of this country, they were chiefly primitive constructions, with
tracks consisting of strap iron--wagon tires in effect--loosely spiked
down to timber string pieces, over which it would have been reckless to
the verge of insanity to run a train at more than twelve miles an hour
under the most favorable circumstances. But we were told, over and over
again, till we devoutly believed it--as human creatures always believe
what they have been ceaselessly told without contradiction--that the
"railcars" always ran at the rate of a mile a minute.
The first railroad in Indiana was opened in 1847. A year or two later,
my brother Edward and I, made our first journey over it, from Madison to
Dupont, a distance of thirteen miles. Edward was at that time a victim
of the faith habit; I was beginning to manifest a skeptical, inquiring
tendency of mind which distressed those responsible for me. When Edward
reminded me that we were to enjoy our first experience of traveling at
the rate of a mile a minute, I borrowed his bull's-eye watch and set
myself to test the thing by timing it. When we reached Dupont, alter the
lapse of ninety-six minutes, in a journey of thirteen miles, I frankly
declared my unbelief in the "mile a minute" tradition. There was no
great harm in that, perhaps, but the skeptical spirit of inquiry that
had prompted me to subject the matter to a time test, very seriously
troubled my elders, who feared that I was destined to become a "free
thinker," as my father had been before me, though I was not permitted to
know that. I was alarmed about my skeptical tendencies myself, because
I believed the theology and demonology taught me at church, having no
means of subjecting them to scientific tests of any kind. I no longer
believed in the "mile a minute" tradition, as everybody around me
continued to do, but I still believed in the existence and malign
activity of a personal devil, and I accepted the assurance given me
that he was always at my side whispering doubts into my ears by way
of securing the damnation of my soul under the doctrine of salvation
by faith. The tortures I suffered on this account were well-nigh
incredible, for in spite of all I might do or say or think, the doubts
continued to arise in my mind, until at last I awoke to the fact that
I was beginning to doubt the doctrine of salvation by faith itself,
as a thing stultifying to the mind, unreasonable in itself, and
utterly unjust in its application to persons like myself, who found
it impossible to believe things which they had every reason to believe
were not true.
[Sidenote: A Precocious Skeptic]
Fortunately I was young and perfectly healthy, and so, after a deal
of psychological suffering I found peace by reconciling myself to the
conviction that I was foreordained to be damned in any case, and that
there was no use in making myself unhappy about it. In support of that
comforting assurance I secretly decided to accept the Presbyterian
doctrine of predestination instead of the Methodist theory of free
will in which I had been bred. I had to make this change of doctrinal
allegiance secretly, because its open avowal would have involved a sound
threshing behind the smoke-house, with perhaps a season of fasting and
prayer, designed to make the castigation "take."
I remember that when I had finally made up my mind that the doctrine
of predestination was true, and that I was clearly one of those who
were foreordained to be damned for incapacity to believe the incredible,
I became for a time thoroughly comfortable in my mind, very much
as I suppose a man of business is when he receives his discharge in
bankruptcy. I felt myself emancipated from many restraints that had sat
heavily on my boyish soul. Having decided, with the mature wisdom of
ten or a dozen years of age, that I was to be damned in any case, I saw
no reason why I should not read the fascinating books that had been
forbidden to me by the discipline of the Methodist Church, to which
I perforce belonged.
In that early day of strenuous theological requirement, the Methodist
Church disapproved of literature as such, and approved it only in so far
as it was made the instrument of a propaganda. Its discipline required
that each person upon being "received into full membership"--the
Methodist equivalent of confirmation--should take a vow not "to read
such books or sing such songs as do not pertain to the glory of God." I
quote the phrase from memory, but accurately I think. That prohibition,
as interpreted by clerical authority at the time, had completely closed
to me the treasures of the library my scholarly father had collected,
and to which, under his dying instructions, my mother had added many
scores of volumes of the finest English literature, purchased with the
money for which his law books had been sold after his death.
I had read a little here and there in those books, and had been
fascinated with the new world they opened to my vision, when, at the
ripe age of ten or twelve years, I was compelled by an ill-directed
clerical authority to submit myself to the process of being "received
into full membership," under the assumption that I had "reached the age
of responsibility."
After that the books I so longed to read were forbidden to me--especially
a set entitled "The British Drama," in which appeared the works of
Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, and a long list
of other classics, filling five thick volumes. By no ingenuity of
construction could such books be regarded as homilies in disguise, and
so they were Anathema. So was Shakespeare, and so even was Thiers'
"French Revolution," of which I had devoured the first volume in delight,
before the inhibition fell upon me, blasting my blind but eager aspiration
for culture and a larger knowledge of the world and of human nature.
XI
[Sidenote: Culture by Stealth]
After I made up my mind to accept damnation as my appointed portion,
I felt myself entirely free to revel at will in the reading that so
appealed to my hungry mind; free, that is to say, so far as my own
conscience was concerned, but no freer than before so far as the
restraints of authority could determine the matter. I had no hesitation
in reading the books when I could do so without being caught at it, but
to be caught at it was to be punished for it and, worse still, it was to
have the books placed beyond my reach, a thing I dreaded far more than
mere punishment. Punishment, indeed, seemed to me nothing more than a
small advance upon the damnation I must ultimately suffer in any case.
The thing to be avoided was discovery, because discovery must lead to
the confiscation of my books, the loss of that liberty which my
acceptance of damnation had given to me.
To that end I practised many deceits and resorted to many subterfuges.
I read late at night when I was supposed to be asleep. I smuggled books
out into the woods and hid them there under the friendly roots of trees,
so that I might go out and read them when I was supposed to be engaged
in a search for ginseng, or in a hunt for the vagrant cow, to whose
unpunctuality in returning to be milked I feel that I owe an appreciable
part of such culture as I have acquired.
The clerical hostility to literature endured long after the period of
which I have been writing, long after the railroad and other means of
freer intercourse had redeemed the West from its narrow provincialism.
Even in my high school days, when our part of the country had reached
that stage of civilization that hangs lace curtains at its windows,
wears store clothes of week days, and paints garden fences green instead
of white, we who were under Methodist dominance were rigidly forbidden
to read fiction or anything that resembled fiction, with certain
exceptions. The grown folk of our creed permitted themselves to read the
inane novels of the Philadelphia tailor, T. S. Arthur; the few young men
who "went to college," were presumed to be immune to the virus of the
Greek and Latin fictions they must read there--probably because they
never learned enough of Greek or Latin to read them understandingly--and
finally there were certain polemic novels that were generally permitted.
Among these last the most conspicuous example I remember was a violently
anti-Roman Catholic novel called "Danger in the Dark," which had a vogue
that the "best-sellers" of our later time might envy. It was not only
permitted to us to read that--it was regarded as our religious duty in
order that we might learn to hate the Catholics with increased fervor.
The religious animosities of that period, with their relentless
intolerance, their unreason, their matchless malevolence, and their
eagerness to believe evil, ought to form an interesting and instructive
chapter in some history of civilization in America, whenever a scholar
of adequate learning and the gift of interpretation shall undertake that
work. But that is a task for some Buckle or Lecky. It does not belong to
a volume of random reminiscences such as this is.
XII
[Sidenote: Civilization on Wheels]
Though the railroads, when at last they came to us, failed utterly in
their promise of transportation at the rate of "a mile a minute," they
did something else, presently, that was quite as remarkable and far
worthier in its way. They ran down and ran over, and crushed out of
existence a provincialism that had much of evil promise and very little
of present good in it. With their coming, and in some degree in advance
of their coming, a great wave of population poured into the West from
all quarters of the country. The newcomers brought with them their
ideas, their points of view, their convictions, their customs, and
their standards of living. Mingling together in the most intimate ways,
socially and in business pursuits, each lost something of his prejudices
and provincialism, and gained much by contact with men of other ways of
thinking and living. Attrition sharpened the perceptions of all and
smoothed away angles of offense. A spirit of tolerance was awakened
such as had never been known in the Western country before, and as
the West became populous and prosperous, it became also more broadly
and generously American, more truly national in character, and more
accurately representative of all that is best in American thought and
life than any part of the country had ever been. It represented the
whole country and all its parts.
The New Englanders, the Virginians, the Pennsylvanians, the Carolinians,
the Kentuckians, who were thus brought together into composite
communities with now and then an Irish, a French, a Dutch, or a German
family, a group of Switzers, and a good many Scotchmen for neighbors
and friends, learned much and quickly each from all the others.
Better still, each unlearned the prejudices, the bigotries, and the
narrownesses in which he had been bred, and life in the great West took
on a liberality of mind, a breadth of tolerance and sympathy, a generous
humanity such as had never been known in any of the narrowly provincial
regions that furnished the materials of this composite population. It
seems to me scarcely too much to say that real Americanism, in the broad
sense of the term, had its birth in that new "winning of the West,"
which the railroads achieved about the middle of the nineteenth century.
With the coming of easier and quicker communication, not only was the
West brought into closer relations with the East, but the West itself
became quickly more homogeneous. There was a constant shifting of
population from one place to another, much traveling about, and a free
interchange of thought among a people who were eagerly alert to adopt
new ideas that seemed in any way to be better than the old. As I recall
the rapid changes of that time it seems to me that the betterments came
with a rapidity rarely if ever equaled in human history. A year or
two at that time was sufficient to work a revolution even in the most
conservative centers of activity. Changes of the most radical kind and
involving the most vital affairs, were made over-night, as it were, and
with so little shock to men's minds that they ceased, almost immediately,
to be topics of conversation. The old had scarcely passed away before
it was forgotten, and the new as quickly became the usual, the ordinary,
the familiar order of things.
XIII
I do not mean to suggest that the West, or indeed any other part of the
country, at once put aside all its crudities of custom and adopted the
ways of living that we are familiar with in this later time. All that
has been a thing of gradual accomplishment, far slower in its coming
than most people realize.
I remember that when Indianapolis became a great railroad center and a
city of enormous proportions--population from 15,000 to 20,000, according
to the creative capacity of the imagination making the estimate--a
wonderful hotel was built there, and called the Bates House. Its splendors
were the subject of wondering comment throughout the West. It had
washstands, with decorated pottery on them, in all its more expensive
rooms, so that a guest sojourning there need not go down to the common
washroom for his morning ablution, and dry his hands and face on a
jack-towel. There were combs and brushes in the rooms, too, so that
if one wanted to smooth his hair he was not obliged to resort to the
appliances of that sort that were hung by chains to the washroom walls.
[Sidenote: A Breakfast Revolution]
Moreover, if a man going to the Bates House for a sojourn, chose to pay
a trifle extra he might have a room all to himself, without the prospect
of being waked up in the middle of the night to admit some stranger,
assigned by the hotel authorities to share his room and bed.
All these things were marvels of pretentious luxury, borrowed from
the more "advanced" hostelries of the Eastern cities, and as such they
became topics of admiring comment everywhere, as illustrations of the
wonderful progress of civilization that was taking place among us.
But all these subjects of wonderment shrank to nothingness by
comparison, when the proprietors of the Bates House printed on their
breakfast bills of fare, an announcement that thereafter each guest's
breakfast would be cooked after his order for it was given, together
with an appeal for patience on the part of the breakfasters--a patience
that the proprietors promised to reward with hot and freshly prepared
dishes.
This innovation was so radical that it excited discussion hotter even
than the Bates House breakfasts. Opinions differed as to the right
of a hotel keeper to make his guests wait for the cooking of their
breakfasts. To some minds the thing presented itself as an invasion
of personal liberty and therefore of the constitutional rights of the
citizen. To others it seemed an intolerable nuisance, while by those
who were ambitious of reputation as persons who had traveled and were
familiar with good usage, it was held to be a welcome advance in
civilization. In approving it, they were able to exploit themselves as
persons who had not only traveled as far as the state capital, but while
there had paid the two dollars a day, which the Bates House charged
for entertainment, instead of going to less pretentious taverns where
the customary charge of a dollar or a dollar and a half a day still
prevailed, and where breakfast was put upon the table before the gong
invited guests to rush into the dining room and madly scramble for what
they could get of it.
In the same way I remember how we all wondered over the manifestation of
luxury made by the owners of a newly built steamboat of the Louisville
and Cincinnati Mail Line, when we heard that the several staterooms
were provided with wash-basins. That was in the fifties. Before that
time, two common washrooms--one for men and the other for women--had
served all the passengers on each steamboat, and, as those washrooms
had set-bowls with running water, they were regarded as marvels of
sumptuousness in travel facilities. It was partly because of such
luxury, I suppose, that we called the steamboats of that time "floating
palaces." They seemed so then. They would not impress us in that way
now. Perhaps fifty years hence the great ocean liners of the present,
over whose perfection of equipment we are accustomed to wonder, will
seem equally unworthy. Such things are comparative and the world
moves fast.
XIV
[Sidenote: A Bathroom Episode]
The crudities here referred to, however, are not properly to be reckoned
as belonging exclusively to the West, or as specially indicative of the
provincialism of the West. At that time and for long afterward, it was
usual, even in good hotels throughout the country, to assign two men,
wholly unacquainted with each other, to occupy a room in common. It
was expected that the hotel would provide a comb and brush for the use
of guests in each room, as the practice of carrying one's own toilet
appliances of that kind had not yet become general. Hotel rooms with
private bathrooms adjoining, were wholly unknown before the Civil War,
and the practice of taking a daily bath was very uncommon indeed. A hotel
guest asking for such a thing would have been pointed out to bystanders
as a curiosity of effete dandyism. Parenthetically, I may say that as
late as 1886 I engaged for my wife and myself a room with private bath
on the first floor of the Nadeau House, then the best hotel in Los
Angeles, California. The man at the desk explained that the bathroom did
not open directly into the room, but adjoined it and was accessible
from the dead end of the hallway without. We got on very well with this
arrangement until Saturday night came, when, as I estimated the number,
all the unmarried men of the city took turns in bathing in my private
bathroom. When I entered complaint at the desk next morning, the clerk
evidently regarded me as a monster of arrogant selfishness. He explained
that as I had free use of the bathroom every day and night of the week,
I ought not to feel aggrieved at its invasion by other cleanly disposed
persons on "the usual night for taking a bath."
The experience brought two facts to my attention: first, that in the
opinion of the great majority of my fellow American citizens one bath a
week was quite sufficient, and, second, that the fixed bathtub, with hot
and cold water running directly into it, is a thing of comparatively
modern use. I suppose that in the eighteen-fifties, and quite certainly
in the first half of that decade, there were no such appliances of
luxurious living in any but the very wealthiest houses, if even there.
Persons who wanted an "all-over bath," went to a barber shop for it, if
they lived in a city, and, if they lived elsewhere, went without it, or
pressed a family washtub into friendly service.
So, too, as late as 1870, in looking for a house in Brooklyn, I found it
difficult to get one of moderate rent cost, that had other water supply
than such as a hydrant in the back yard afforded.
XV
To return to the changes wrought in the West by the construction of
railroads and the influx of immigration from all parts of the country.
In nothing else was the improvement more rapid or more pronounced
than in education. Until the early fifties, and even well into them,
educational endeavors and educational methods were crude, unorganized,
wasteful of effort, and utterly uncertain of result. From the very
beginning the desire for education had been alert and eager in the West,
and the readiness to spend money and effort in that behalf had been
unstinted. But the means were lacking and system was lacking. More
important still there was lack of any well-considered or fairly uniform
conception of what education ought to aim at or achieve.
In the rural districts schools were sporadic and uncertain. When a
"master" was available "school kept," and its chief activity was to
teach the spelling of the English language. Incidentally it taught
pupils to read and the more advanced ones--ten per cent. of all,
perhaps, to write. As a matter of higher education rudimentary
arithmetic had a place in the curriculum. Now and then a schoolmaster
appeared who essayed other things in a desultory way but without results
of any consequence. In the villages and towns the schools were usually
better, but even there the lack of any well-ordered system was a blight.
[Sidenote: School Methods]
The schoolmasters were frequently changed, for one thing, each newcoming
one bringing his own notions to bear upon problems that he was not
destined to remain long enough to solve. Even in the more permanent
schools, kept by very young or superannuated preachers, or by Irish
schoolmasters who conducted them on the "knock down and drag out" system,
there was no attempt to frame a scheme of education that should aim at
well conceived results. In every such school there were two or three
boys taking "the classical course," by which was meant that without the
least question or consideration of their fitness to do so, they had
dropped all ordinary school studies and were slowly plodding along in
rudimentary Latin, in obedience to some inherited belief on the part of
their parents that education consists in studying Latin, that there is
a benediction in a paradigm, and that fitness for life's struggle is
most certainly achieved by the reading of "Historia Sacra," "Cornelius
Nepos," and the early chapters of "Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic
War."
Other pupils, under the impression that they were taking a "scientific
course," were drilled in Comstock's Physiology and Natural Philosophy,
and somebody's "Geography of the Heavens." The rest of the
school--plebeians all--contented themselves with reading, writing,
arithmetic, geography, and a vain attempt to master the mysteries and
mists of Kirkham's Grammar.
The railroads quickly changed all this. They brought into the West
men and women who knew who Horace Mann was, and whose conceptions of
education in its aims and methods were definite, well ordered, and
aggressive.
These set to work to organize graded school systems in the larger towns,
and the thing was contagious, in a region where every little town was
confidently ambitious of presently becoming the most important city in
the state, and did not intend in the meantime to permit any other to
outdo it in the frills and furbelows of largeness.
With preparatory education thus organized and systematized, and with
easy communication daily becoming easier, the ambition of young men
to attend colleges and universities was more and more gratified, so
that within a very few years the higher education--so far as it is
represented by college courses--became common throughout the country,
while for those who could not achieve that, or were not minded to do so,
the teaching of the schools was adapted, as it never had been before,
to the purpose of real, even if meager education.
Even in the remotest country districts a new impetus was given to
education, and the subjection of the schools there to the supervision
of school boards and professional superintendents worked wonders of
reformation. For one thing the school boards required those who wished
to serve as teachers to pass rigid examinations in test of their
fitness, so that it was no longer the privilege of any ignoramus who
happened to be out of a job to "keep school." In addition to this
the school boards prescribed and regulated the courses of study, the
classification of pupils, and the choice of text-books, even in country
districts where graded schools were not to be thought of, and this
supervision gave a new and larger meaning to school training in the
country.
XVI
It was my fortune to be the first certified teacher under this system
in a certain rural district where the old haphazard system had before
prevailed, and my experience there connects itself interestingly, I
think, with a bit of literary history. It was the instigation of my
brother, Edward Eggleston's, most widely popular story, "The Hoosier
Schoolmaster," which in its turn was the instigation of all the
fascinating literature that has followed it with Hoosier life conditions
for its theme.
[Sidenote: "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"]
My school district lay not many miles from the little town in which my
family lived, and as I had a good pair of legs, well used to walking, I
went home every Friday night, returning on Monday morning after a four
o'clock breakfast. On these week-end visits it was my delight to tell of
the queer experiences of the week, and Edward's delight to listen to
them while he fought against the maladies that were then threatening his
brave young life with early extinction.
Years afterwards he and I were together engaged in an effort to
resuscitate the weekly illustrated newspaper _Hearth and Home_, which
had calamitously failed to win a place for itself, under a number of
highly distinguished editors, whose abilities seemed to compass almost
everything except the art of making a newspaper that people wanted and
would pay for. Of that effort I shall perhaps have more to say in a
future chapter. It is enough now to say that the periodical had a weekly
stagnation--it will not do to call it a circulation--of only five
or six thousand copies, nearly half of them gratuitous, and it had
netted an aggregate loss of many thousands of dollars to the several
publishers who had successively made themselves its sponsors. It was our
task--Edward's and mine--to make the thing "pay," and to that end both
of us were cudgeling our brains by day and by night to devise means.
One evening a happy thought came to Edward and he hurriedly quitted
whatever he was doing to come to my house and submit it.
"I have a mind, Geordie," he said, "to write a three number story,
called 'The Hoosier Schoolmaster,' and to found it upon your experience
at Riker's Ridge."
We talked the matter over. He wrote and published the first of the
three numbers, and its popularity was instant. The publishers pleaded
with him, and so did I, to abandon the three number limitation, and
he yielded. Before the serial publication of the story ended, the
subscription list of _Hearth and Home_ had been many times multiplied
and Edward Eggleston was famous.
He was far too original a man, and one possessed of an imagination too
fertilely creative to follow at all closely my experiences, which had
first suggested the story to him. He made one or two personages among
my pupils the models from which he drew certain of his characters, but
beyond that the experiences which suggested the story in no way entered
into its construction. Yet in view of the facts it seems to me worth
while to relate something of those suggestive experiences.
I was sixteen years old when I took the school. Circumstances
had compelled me for the time to quit college, where, despite my
youthfulness, I was in my second year. The Riker's Ridge district
had just been brought under supervision of the school authorities at
Madison. A new schoolhouse had been built and a teacher was wanted
to inaugurate the new system. I applied for the place, stood the
examinations, secured my certificate, and was appointed.
[Sidenote: The Riker's Ridge District]
On my first appearance in the neighborhood, the elders there seemed
distinctly disappointed in the selection made. They knew the school
history of the district. They remembered that the last three masters had
been "licked" by stalwart and unruly boys, the last one so badly that
he had abandoned the school in the middle of the term. They strongly
felt the need, therefore, of a master of mature years, strong arms, and
ponderous fists as the person chosen to inaugurate the new system. When
a beardless boy of sixteen presented himself instead, they shook their
heads in apprehension. But the appointment had been made by higher
authority, and they had no choice but to accept it. Appreciating the
nature of their fears, I told the grave and reverend seigniors that my
schoolboy experience had shown my arms to be stronger, my fists heavier,
and my nimbleness greater perhaps than they imagined, but that in the
conduct of the school I should depend far more upon the diplomatic
nimbleness of my wits than upon physical prowess, and that I thought I
should manage to get on.
There was silence for a time. Then one wise old patriarch said:
"Well, may be so. But there's Charley Grebe. You wouldn't make a
mouthful for him. Anyhow, we'll see, we'll see."
Charley Grebe was the youth who had thrashed the last master so
disastrously.
Thus encouraged, I went to my task.
The neighborhood was in no sense a bad one. There were none of the
elements in it that gave character to "Flat Creek" as depicted in
"The Hoosier Schoolmaster." The people were all quiet, orderly, entirely
reputable folk, most of them devotedly pious. They were mainly of
"Pennsylvania Dutch" extraction, stolid on the surface but singularly
emotional within. But the school traditions of the region were those
of the old time, when the master was regarded as the common enemy, who
must be thwarted in every possible way, resisted at every point where
resistance was possible, and "thrashed" by the biggest boy in school
if the biggest boy could manage that.
There was really some justification for this attitude of the young
Americans in every such district. For under the old system, as I very
well remember it, the government of schools was brutal, cruel, inhuman
in a degree that might in many cases have excused if it did not justify
a homicidal impulse on the part of its victims. The boys of the early
time would never have grown into the stalwart Americans who fought the
Civil War if they had submitted to such injustice and so cruel a tyranny
without making the utmost resistance they could.
XVII
I began my work with a little friendly address to the forty or fifty
boys and girls who presented themselves as pupils. I explained to
them that my idea of a school was quite different from that which had
before that time prevailed in that region; that I was employed by the
authorities to teach them all I could, by way of fitting them for life,
and that I was anxious to do that in the case of every boy and girl
present. I expressed the hope that they in their turn were anxious to
learn all I could teach them, and that if any of them found their
studies too difficult, I would gladly give my time out of school hours
to the task of discovering the cause of the difficulty and remedying it.
I explained that in my view government in a school should have no object
beyond that of giving every pupil opportunity to learn all he could, and
the teacher opportunity to teach all he could. I frankly abolished the
arbitrary rule that had before made of whispering a grave moral offense,
and substituted for it a request that every pupil should be careful not
to disturb the work of others in any way, so that we might all make the
most of our time and opportunity.
It was a new gospel, and in the main it fell upon deaf ears. A few of
the pupils were impressed by its reasonableness and disposed to meet the
new teacher half way. The opinion of the majority was expressed by one
boy whom I overheard at recess when he said to one of his fellows:
[Sidenote: The Biggest Boy]
"He's skeered o' Charley Grebe, an' he's a-tryin' to soft-sawder us."
The first day or two of school were given to the rather perplexing work
of classifying pupils whose previous instruction had been completely at
haphazard. During that process I minutely observed the one foe against
whom I had received more than one warning--Charley Grebe. He was a
young man of nearly twenty-one, six feet, one or two inches high,
broad-shouldered, muscular, and with a jaw that suggested all the
relentless determination that one young man can hold.
When I questioned him with a view to his classification, he was polite
enough in his uninstructed way, but exceedingly reserved. On the whole
he impressed me as a young man of good natural ability, who had been
discouraged by bad and incapable instruction. After he had told me,
rather grudgingly I thought, what ground his studies had covered, he
suddenly changed places with me and became the questioner.
"Say," he broke out, interrupting some formal question of mine, "Say,
do you know anything in fact? Do you know Arithmetic an' Algebra an'
Geometry and can you really teach me? or are you just pretending, like
the rest?"
I thought I understood him and I guessed what his experience had been. I
assured him that there was nothing in Arithmetic that I could not teach
him, that I knew my Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry, and could
help him to learn them, if he really desired to do so. Then adopting
something of his own manner I asked:
"What is it you want me to do, Charley? Say what you have to say, like
a man, and don't go beating about the bush."
For reply, he said:
"I want to talk with you. It'll be a long talk. I want you to go home
with me to-night. Father said I might invite you. Will you come?"
There was eager earnestness in his questions, but there was also a note
of discouragement, if not quite of despair in his tone. I agreed at once
to go with him for the night, and, taking the hand he had not thought of
offering, I added:
"If there is any way in which I can help you, Charley, I'll do it
gladly."
Whether it was the unaccustomed courtesy, or the awakening of a new
hope, or something else, I know not, but the awkward, overgrown boy
seemed at once to assume the dignity of manhood, and while he had never
been taught to say "thank you" or to use any other conventionally polite
form of speech, he managed to make me understand by his manner that he
appreciated my offer, and a few minutes later, school having been
dismissed, he and I set out for his home.
There he explained his case to me. He wanted to become a shipwright--a
trade which, in that time of multitudinous steamboat building on the
Western rivers, was the most inviting occupation open to a young man
of energy. He had discovered that a man who wished to rise to anything
like a mastery in that trade must have a good working knowledge of
Arithmetic, elementary Algebra, Geometry, and at least the rudiments
of Trigonometry. He had wanted to learn these things and some of his
previous schoolmasters had undertaken to teach them, with no result
except presently to reveal to him their own ignorance. His father
permitted him six months more of schooling. He had "sized me up," he
said, and he believed I could teach him what he wanted to learn. But
could he learn it within six months? That was what he wanted me to
tell him. I put him through a close examination in Arithmetic that
night--consuming most of the night--and before morning I had satisfied
myself that he was an apt pupil who, with diligence and such earnest
determination as he manifested, could learn what he really needed of
mathematics within the time named.
[Sidenote: A Vigorous Volunteer Monitor]
"You can do it, Charley, if you work hard, and I'll help you, in school
hours and out," was my final verdict.
"It's a bargain," he said, and that was all he said. But a day or
two later a boy in school--a great, hulking fellow whose ugliness
of disposition I had early discerned--made a nerve-racking noise by
dragging his pencil over his slate in a way that disturbed the whole
school. I bade him cease, but he presently repeated the offense. Again
I rebuked him, but five minutes or so later he defiantly did the thing
again, "just to see if the master dared," he afterward explained.
Thereupon Charley Grebe arose, seized the fellow by the ear, twisted
that member until its owner howled with pain, and then, hurling him
back into his seat, said:
"_You heard the master! You'll mind him after this or I'll make you._"
The event fairly appalled the school. The thought that Charley Grebe was
on the master's side, and actively helping him to maintain discipline,
seemed beyond belief. But events soon confirmed it. There was a little
fellow in the school whom everybody loved, and whose quaint, childish
ways afterwards suggested the character of "Shocky" in "The Hoosier
Schoolmaster." There was also a cowardly brute there whose delight it
was to persecute the little fellow on the playground in intolerable
ways. I sought to stop the thing. To that end I devised and inflicted
every punishment I could think of, short of flogging, but all to no
purpose. At last I laid aside my convictions with my patience, and gave
the big bully such a flogging as must have impressed his mind if he had
had anything of the kind about his person.
That day, at the noon recess, the big bully set to work to beat
the little boy unmercifully in revenge for what I had done for his
protection. I was looking out through a Venetian blind, with intent to
go to the rescue, when suddenly Charley Grebe, who was playing town
ball threw down the bat, seized the fellow, threw him across his knees,
pinioned his legs with one of his own, and literally wore out a dozen or
more thick blue ash shingles over that part of his victim's body which
was made for spanking.
When at last he released the blubbering object of his wrath he slapped
his jaws soundly and said:
"Don't you go a-whining to the master about this. If you do it'll be
a good deal wuss for you. I'm a-takin' this here job off the master's
hands."
I gave no hint that I had seen or heard. But from that hour forth no
boy in the school ever gave me the smallest trouble by misbehavior. The
school perfectly understood that Charley Grebe was "a-takin' this here
job off the master's hands," and the knowledge was sufficient.
After that only the big girls--most of them older than I was--gave me
trouble. I met it with the explanation that I could never think of
punishing a young woman, and that I must trust to their honor and
courtesy, as girls who expected presently to be ladies, for their
behavior. The appeal was a trifle slow in eliciting a response, but
in the end it answered its purpose.
XVIII
[Sidenote: What's in a Name?]
While I was enrolling and classifying the pupils, I encountered a
peculiarly puzzling case. There were five John Riddels in the school,
and I found that all of them were sons of the same man, whose name also
was John Riddel. No one of them had a middle name or any other sort
of name by which he might be distinguished from his brothers. On the
playground they were severally known as "Big John Riddel," "John
Riddel," "Johnny Riddel," "Little John Riddel," and "Little Johnny
Riddel," while their father was everywhere known as "Old John Riddel,"
though he was a man under fifty, I should say. He lived near, in a
stone house, with stone barns and out-houses, an ingeniously devised
milk-house, and a still more ingeniously constructed device for bringing
water from the spring under the hill into his dwelling.
In brief his thrift was altogether admirable, and the mechanical devices
by which he made the most of every opportunity, suggested a fertilely
inventive mind on the part of a man whose general demeanor was stolid to
the verge of stupidity. When I was taking supper at his house one night
by special invitation, I asked him why he had named all his sons John.
For reply he said:
"John is a very good name," and that was all the explanation I ever got
out of him.
XIX
One pupil I had at Riker's Ridge, was Johnny G. His people had some
money and Johnny had always dressed better than the rest of us could
afford to do, when several years before, he and I had been classmates
in the second or third grade of the Grammar School in Madison. Johnny
had never got out of that grade, and even when I was in my second year
in college, he gave no promise of ever making a scholastic step forward.
But he had relatives on Riker's Ridge, and when he heard that I was to
be the teacher there he promised his people that he would really make
an effort if they would let him live with his relatives there and become
my pupil. It was so arranged, and Johnny came to me, with all his
dazzling waistcoats and trousers with the latest style of pockets, and
all the rest of the upholstery with which he delighted to decorate his
person.
I think he really did make an effort to master the rudimentary school
studies, and I conscientiously endeavored to help him, not only in
school but of evenings. For a time there seemed to be a reasonable
promise of success in lifting Johnny to that level of scholastic
attainment which would permit him to return to Madison and enter the
High School. But presently all this was brought to naught. Johnny was
seized by a literary ambition that completely absorbed what mind he had,
and made his school studies seem to him impertinent intrusions upon the
attention of one absorbed in higher things.
He told me all about it one afternoon as I walked homeward with him,
intent upon finding out why he had suddenly ceased to get his lessons.
"I'm going to write a song," he told me, "and it's going to make me
famous. I'm writing it now, and I tell you it's fine."
"Tell me about it, Johnny," I replied. "What is its theme? And how much
of it have you written?"
"I don't know what it's to be about," he answered, "if that's what you
mean by its theme. But it's going to be great, and I'm going to make the
tune to it myself."
"Very well," I replied encouragingly. "Would you mind reciting to me so
much of it as you've written? I'd like to hear it."
"Why, of course. I tell you it's going to be great, but I haven't got
much of it done yet--only one line, in fact."
[Sidenote: A Buttermilk Poet]
Observing a certain discouragement in his tone I responded:
"Oh, well, even one line is a good deal, if it's good. Many a poem's
fortune has been made by a single line. Tell me what it is."
"Well, the line runs: 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under her arm.'
Don't you see how it sort o' sings? 'With a pitcher of buttermilk under
her arm'--why, it's great, I tell you. Confound the school books! What's
the use of drudging when a fellow has got it in him to write poetry like
that? 'With a pit-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm'--don't it sing?
'With a _pit_-cher of but-termilk un-der her arm.' 'With a _pit_-cher
of _but_-termilk--un-der her arm.' Whoopee, but it's great!"
I lost sight of Johnny soon after that, and I have never heard what
became of that buttermilk pitcher, or the fascinating rhythm in which it
presented itself. But in later years I have come into contact with many
literary ambitions that were scarcely better based than this. Indeed, if
I were minded to be cynical--as I am not--I might mention a few magazine
poets whose pitchers of buttermilk seem to me--but all that is foreign
to the purpose of this book.
Before quitting this chapter and the period and region to which it
relates, I wish to record that Charley Grebe mastered the mathematics
he needed, and entered hopefully upon his apprenticeship to a ship
carpenter. I hope he rose to the top in the trade, but I know nothing
about it.
XX
Not many months after my school-teaching experience came to an end,
circumstances decreed that my life should be changed in the most radical
way possible in this country. I quitted the rapidly developing,
cosmopolitan, kaleidoscopic West, and became a dweller upon the old
family plantation in Virginia, where my race had been bred and nurtured
ever since 1635 when the first man of my name to cross the seas
established himself there and possessed himself of lavishly abundant
acres which subsequent divisions among his descendants had converted
into two adjoining plantations--the ancestral homes of all the
Egglestons, so far, at least, as I knew them or knew of them.
I suppose I was an imaginative youth at seventeen, and I had read
enough of poetry, romance, and still more romantic history, to develop
that side of my nature somewhat unduly. At any rate it was strongly
dominant, and the contrast between the seething, sordid, aggressive,
and ceaselessly eager life of the West, in which I had been bred and
the picturesquely placid, well-bred, self-possessed, and leisurely life
into which the transfer ushered me, impressed me as nothing else has
ever done. It was like escaping from the turmoil of battle to the
green pastures, and still waters of the Twenty-third Psalm. It was
like passing from the clamor of a stock exchange into the repose of
a library.
I have written much about that restful, refined, picturesque old
Virginia life in essays and romances, but I must write something more
of it in this place at risk of offending that one of my critics who not
long ago discovered that I had created it all out of my own imagination
for the entertainment of New England readers. He was not born,
I have reason to believe, until long after that old life had passed
into history, but his conviction that it never existed, that it was
_a priori_ impossible, was strong enough to bear down the testimony
of any eye-witness's recollection.
[Sidenote: Creative Incredulity]
It has often been a matter of chastening wonder and instruction to me to
observe how much more critics and historians can learn from the intuitions
of their "inner consciousness" than was ever known to the unfortunates
who have had only facts of personal observation and familiar knowledge
to guide them. It was only the other day that a distinguished historian
of the modern introspective, self-illuminating school upset the
traditions of many centuries by assuring us that the romantic story
of Antony and Cleopatra is a baseless myth; that there never was any
love affair between the Roman who has been supposed to have "madly
flung a world away" for worship of a woman, and the "Sorceress of the
Nile"--the "star-eyed Egyptian" who has been accused of tempting him
to his destruction; that Cleopatra merely hired of Antony the services
of certain legions that she needed for her defense, and paid him for
them in the current money of the time and country.
Thus does the incredulous but infallible intuition of the present
correct the recorded memory of the past. I have no doubt that some day
the country will learn from that sort of superior consciousness that in
the Virginia campaign of the Wilderness, Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor,
where men are now believed to have fought and marched so heroically with
empty bellies and often with unshod feet, there were in fact no such
discomforts incident to the discussion; that Grant and Lee like the
courteous commanders they were, suspended the argument of arms at the
dinner hour each day in order that their men might don evening clothes
and patent leather shoes and sit down to banquets of eleven courses,
with _pousse cafes_ and cigars at the end. Nevertheless, I shall write
of the old Virginia life as I remember it, and let the record stand at
that until such time as it shall be shown by skilled historical criticism
that the story of the Civil War is a sun myth and that the old life which
is pictured as having preceded it was the invention of the romance
writers.
XXI
The first thing that impressed me in that old life, when I was thrust
into it, was its repose, the absence of stress or strain or anxious
anticipation, the appreciation of to-morrow as the equal of to-day for
the doing of things and the getting of things done. My trunks had missed
connection somewhere on the journey, and I thought of telegraphing about
the matter. My uncle, the master of the plantation and head of the
family, discouraged that, and suggested that I should go fishing in a
neighboring creek instead. The telegraph office was six miles away. He
had never sent a telegram in his life. He had no doubt the trunks would
come along to-morrow or next day, and the fish in the creek were just
then biting in encouraging fashion.
That was my first lesson, and it impressed me strongly. Where I had
come from nobody would have thought of resting under the uncertainty or
calmly contemplating the unwarranted delay. Here nobody thought of doing
anything else, and as the trunks did in fact come the next day without
any telegraphing or hurry or worry, I learned that it was just as well
to go fishing as to go fussing.
[Sidenote: The Virginian Way]
The restful leisureliness of the life in Virginia was borne in upon me
on every hand, I suppose my nerves had really been upon a strain during
all the seventeen years that I had lived, and the relief I found in my
new surroundings doubtless had much to do with my appreciation of it
all. I had been used to see hurry in everything and everybody; here
there was no such thing as hurry. Nobody had a "business engagement"
that need interfere with anything else he was minded to do. "Business,"
indeed, was regarded as something to be attended to on the next court
day, when all men having affairs to arrange with each other were sure
to meet at the Court-House--as the county seat village was usually
called. Till then it could wait. Nobody was going to move away.
Everybody was "able to owe his debts." Why bother, then, to make a
journey for the settlement of a matter of business which could wait as
well as not for next court day to come round? It was so much pleasanter
to stay at home, to entertain one's friends, to ride over the
plantation, inspecting and directing crop work, to take a gun and go
after squirrels or birds or turkeys, to play backgammon or chess or
dominoes in the porch, to read the new books that everybody was talking
about, or the old ones that Virginians loved more--in brief, there was
no occasion for hurry, and the Virginians wasted none of their vital
force in that way.
The very houses suggested repose. They had sat still upon their
foundations for generations past, and would go on doing so for
generations to come. The lawns were the growth of long years, with
no touch of recent gardeners' work about them. The trees about the
house grounds had been in undisputed possession there long before the
grandfathers of the present generation were born. There was nowhere any
suggestion of newness, or rawness, of change actual or likely to come.
There were no new people--except the babies--and nobody ever dreamed of
changing his residence.
XXII
Another thing that peculiarly impressed me, coming as I did from a
region where the mart was the center about which all life's activities
circled, was the utter absence of talk about money or the things that
relate to money. Practically there was no money in use among the
planter folk, except when a journey to distant points required the
lining of a purse. Except in the very smallest way the planters never
used money in their daily lives. They rarely bought anything directly,
and they never thought of selling anything except in planter fashion
through accredited agencies. Once a year they shipped the tobacco and
the wheat their fields had produced, to the city, for a commission
merchant to sell. The commission merchant held a considerable part of
the proceeds to the planter's credit, and when the planter wanted
anything of consequence he simply wrote to the commission merchant to
buy it for him. The rest of the money from the sale of the plantation
products was deposited in bank to the planter's account. If the women
folk went to town on a shopping expedition, they bought whatever they
wanted in the stores and had it "charged," for every planter's credit
was limitless in the shops. When the bill was rendered, which was never
in a hurry, the planter drew a check in discharge of it. He had no
"blank check" book. No such thing was known in that community. He simply
wrote his check at top of a sheet of foolscap, stating in it what it was
for, and courteously asking the bank "please" to pay the amount. Then
he carefully cut off the remainder of the sheet and put it away as an
economy of paper. The next time he drew a check or anything of the sort,
he took a fresh sheet of paper for the purpose and carefully laid away
all that was not used of it. Thus was his instinct of economy gratified,
while his lordly sense of liberality in the use of material things was
not offended. When he died, the drawers filled with large and small
fragments of foolscap sheets were cleared out and left for his successor
to fill in his turn.
[Sidenote: Parson J----'s Checks]
This custom of paying by check so strongly commended itself to a certain
unworldly parson of my time, that he resorted to it on one occasion in
entire ignorance and innocence of the necessity of having a bank deposit
as a preliminary to the drawing of checks. He went to Richmond and
bought a year's supplies for his little place--it was too small to be
called a plantation--and for each purchase he drew a particularly polite
check. When the banks threw these out, on the ground that their author
had no account, the poor old parson found the situation a difficult one
to understand. He had thought that the very purpose of a bank's being
was to cash checks for persons who happened to be short of money.
"Why, if I'd had the money in the bank," he explained, "I shouldn't
have written the checks at all; I should have got the money and paid
the bills."
Fortunately the matter came to the knowledge of a well-to-do and
generous planter who knew parson J. and who happened to be in Richmond
at the time. His indorsement made the checks good, and saved the
unworldly old parson a deal of trouble.
The planters were not all of them rich by any means. Hardly one of
those in Virginia had possessions that would to-day rank him even among
moderately rich men. But they were scrupulously honorable men, they
were men of reasonable property, and their credit rested firmly upon
the fact that they were able to pay and the equally important fact
that they meant to pay. They lived lavishly, but the plantation itself
furnished most of the materials of the lavishness, so that there was no
extravagance in such living. For the rest they had a sufficient regard
for those who were to come after them to keep the total volume of the
debt upon the estate within such limits as the estate could easily
stand.
What I wish to emphasize here is that the methods of their monetary
transactions were such as to make of money a very infrequent subject
of consideration in their lives and conversations.
Economically it would have been better for them if things had been
otherwise, but socially, the utter absence of pecuniary flavor from
their intercourse, lent a peculiar charm to it, especially in the eyes
and mind of a youth brought up as I had been in an atmosphere positively
grimy with the soot of monetary considerations.
There was hardly one of those plantations whose utterly waste products
were not worth more in the markets near at hand than were the tobacco
and wheat which alone the planters sold. When I came into the practice
of law a few years later, and had charge of the affairs of a number of
estates, I brought this matter of waste to the attention of my clients,
with all the earnestness I could put into my pleading. I showed them
prices current to prove that if they chose to market their surplus
apples, potatoes, sweet potatoes, lambs, pigs, poultry, and dairy
products, all of which they gave away or suffered to go to waste, they
might discharge their hereditary debts at once and build up balances in
bank. They had sagacity enough to understand the facts, but not one of
them would ever consent to apply them practically. It would be "Yankee
farming," was the ready reply, and that was conclusive. It was not the
custom of the planters to sell any but staple products, and they were
planters, not farmers.
[Sidenote: The Charm of Leisureliness]
All these things helped, when I first came into relations with them, to
impress my young mind with the poise, the picturesqueness, the restful
leisureliness of the Virginian life, and the utter absence from it of
strenuousness, and still more of sordidness. For the first time in my
life I was living with people who thought of money only on those annual
or other occasions when they were settling their affairs and paying
their debts by giving notes for their sum; people who regarded time not
as something to be economized and diligently utilized for the sake of
its money value, but as a means of grace, if I may so speak without
irreverence; as an opportunity of enjoyment, for themselves and for
others; as a thing to be spent with the utmost lavishness in the doing
of things agreeable, in the reading of books that pleased, in the riding
of horses that put the rider upon his metal to match their tameless
spirit, in the cultivation of flowers, in the improvement of trees by
grafting and budding, and even in the idler pleasures of tossing grace
hoops, or hotly maintaining an indoor contest at battledore and
shuttlecock when it rained heavily. These and a score of other pastimes
seemed good in the eyes of the Virginian men and women. The men went
shooting or fox hunting or hare coursing, or fishing, each in its
season. The women embroidered and knitted nubias, and made fancy work,
and they walked long miles when not riding with escorts, and dug much in
the ground in propagation of the flowers they loved. They kept house,
too, with a vigilance born of the fact that in keeping house they were
also keeping plantation. For they must not only supervise the daily
dispensation of foodstuffs to all the negroes, but they must visit and
personally care for the sick, the aged, the infirm, and the infantile
among the black people. They must put up fruits and jams and pickles
and ketchups and jellies and shrubs and cordials enough to stock a
warehouse, in anticipation of the plantation needs. They must personally
cut out and direct the making of all the clothing to be worn by the
blacks on the plantation, for the reason that the colored maids,
seamstresses and dressmakers who were proud to fashion the gowns of
their young mistresses, simply would not "work for de field
hands,"--meaning the negroes of the plantation.
Yet with it all these women were never hurried, never scant of time in
which to do anything that might give pleasure to another. I never knew
one of them to plead preoccupation as a reason for not going riding or
walking, or rendering some music, or joining in a game, or doing
anything else that others wanted her to do.
The reason for all this was simple enough. The young women who kept
house--and it was usually the young women who did so--were up and at
it before the dawn. By the time that the eight-thirty or nine o'clock
breakfast was served, all their necessary work was done for the day;
often it was done in time to let them take a ride before breakfast
if the young man suggesting it happened to be an agreeable fellow.
After all was done upon which that day's conduct of the house and the
plantation depended, the gentlewomen concerned adopted the views of
their masculine mentors and exemplars. They accepted to-morrow as a good
enough stalking horse for to-day, and, having laid out their work well
in advance, they exacted of their servitors that the morrow's morning
should begin with a demonstration of to-day's work well done.
So they, too, had leisure, just as the meal hours had. I had been
brought up on five or six o'clock breakfasts, eleven-thirty or twelve
o'clock dinners, and early suppers. Here the breakfast hour was eight
thirty at the earliest and nine usually; "snack" was served about one to
those who chose to come to it, dinner at three or four, with no hurry
about it, and supper came at nine--the hour at which most people in the
West habitually went to bed.
The thing suited me, personally, for I had great ambitions as a student
and habitually dug at my mathematics, Latin, and Greek until two in the
morning. I was always up by daylight, and after a plunge into the cold
water provided for me in a molasses barrel out under the eaves, I
usually took a ride in company with the most agreeable young woman who
happened to be staying in the house at the time.
Sometimes I had two to escort, but that was rare. Usually there was
another young man in the house, and usually, under such circumstances, I
saw to it that he did not lie long abed. And even when there was no such
recourse, the "other girl" was apt to conjure up some excuse for not
wishing to ride that morning.
XXIII
[Sidenote: The Courtesy of the Virginians]
Indeed, one of the things that most deeply impressed me among the
Virginians was the delicacy and alert thoughtfulness of their courtesy.
The people of the West were not ill-mannered boors by any means, but
gentle, kindly folk. But they were not versed in those little momentary
courtesies of life which create a roseate atmosphere of active good
will. In all that pertained to courtesy in the larger and more
formal affairs of social life, the people of the West were even more
scrupulously attentive to the requirements of good social usage than
these easy-going Virginians were, with their well-defined social status
and their habit of taking themselves and each other for granted. But in
the little things of life, in their alertness to say the right word or
do the trifling thing that might give pleasure, and their still greater
alertness to avoid the word or act that might offend or incommode, the
Virginians presented to my mind a new and altogether pleasing example
of courtesy.
In later years I have found something like this agreeably impressed upon
me when I go for a time from New York to Boston. Courtesy could not
be finer or more considerate among people of gentle breeding who know
each other than it is in New York. But in their considerate treatment of
strangers, casually encountered in public places, the Boston people give
a finer, gentler, more delicate flavor to their courtesy, and it is a
delightful thing to encounter.
In Virginia this quality of courtesy was especially marked in the
intercourse of men and women with each other. The attitude of both was
distinctly chivalrous. To the woman--be she a child of two, a maiden
of twenty, or a gentlewoman so well advanced in years that her age was
unmentionable--the man assumed an attitude of gentle consideration, of
deference due to sex, of willingness to render any service at any cost,
and of a gently protective guardianship that stopped at nothing in the
discharge of its duty. To the man, be he old or young, the woman yielded
that glad obedience that she deemed due to her protector and champion.
I had never seen anything like this before. In the West I had gone to
school with all the young women I knew. I had competed with them upon
brutally equal terms, in examinations and in struggles for class honors,
and the like. They and we boys had been perfectly good friends and
comrades, of course, and we liked each other in that half-masculine way.
But the association was destructive of romance, of fineness, of delicate
attractiveness. There was no glamor left in the relations of young men
and young women, no sentiment except such as might exist among young
men themselves. The girls were only boys of another sort. Our attitude
toward them was comradely but not chivalric. It was impossible to feel
the roseate glow of romance in association with a young woman who had
studied in the same classes with one, who had stood as a challenge in
the matter of examination marks, and who met one at any hour of the day
on equal terms, with a cheery "good-morning" or "good-evening" that had
no more of sentiment in it than the clatter of a cotton mill.
[Sidenote: Sex and Education]
In my judgment, that is the conclusive objection to co-education,
except perhaps among the youngest children. It robs the relations of
the sexes of sentiment, of softness, of delicacy. It makes of girls an
inferior sort of boys, and of boys an inferior sort of girls. It cannot
completely negative sex, but it can and does sufficiently negative it
to rob life of one of its tenderest charms.
In Virginia for the first time I encountered something different.
There the boys were sent to old field schools where in rough and tumble
fashion, they learned Latin and robust manliness, Greek and a certain
graciousness of demeanor toward others, the absence of which would have
involved them in numberless fights on the playgrounds. The girls were
tenderly dame-nurtured at home, with a gentlewoman for governess, with
tutors to supplement the instruction of the governess, and with a year
or two, perhaps, for finishing, at Le Febre's or Dr. Hoge's, or some
other good school for young women.
Both the young men and the young women read voluminously--the young men
in part, perhaps, to equip themselves for conversational intercourse
with the young women. They both read polite literature, but they read
history also with a diligence that equipped them with independent
convictions of their own, with regard to such matters as the conduct of
Charlotte Corday, the characters of Mirabeau, Danton, and Robespierre,
the ungentlemanly treatment given by John Knox to Mary, Queen of Scots,
and all that sort of thing. Indeed, among the Virginia women, young and
old, the romantic episodes of history, ancient, mediaeval, and modern,
completely took the place, as subjects of conversation, of those gossipy
personalities that make up the staple of conversation among women
generally.
Let me not be misunderstood. These women did not assume to be "learned
ladies." It was only that they knew their history and loved it and were
fond of talking about it, quite as some other women are fond of talking
about the interesting scandal in the domestic relations of the reigning
matinee hero.
The intercourse between men and women thus educated was always easy,
gracious, and friendly, but it was always deferential, chivalric, and
imbued with that recognition of sex which, without loss of dignity on
either side, holds man to be the generously willing protector, and woman
the proudly loyal recipient of a protection to which her sex entitles
her, and in return for which she gladly yields a submission that has
nothing of surrender in it.
There was a fascination to me in all this, that I find it impossible to
describe and exceedingly difficult even to suggest.
I may add that I think the young women of that time in Virginia were
altogether the best educated young women I have ever encountered in any
time or country. And, best of all, they were thoroughly,
uncompromisingly feminine.
Of the men I need only say that they were masculine, and fit mates
for such women. I do not at all think they were personally superior
to men of other parts of the country in those things that pertain to
character and conduct, but at least they had the advantage of living
in a community where public opinion was all-dominant, and where that
resistless force insisted upon truth, integrity, and personal courage
as qualities that every man must possess if he expected to live in that
community at all. It was _noblesse oblige_, and it inexorably controlled
the conduct of all men who hoped for recognition as gentlemen.
The sentiment took quixotic forms at times, perhaps, but no jesting over
these manifestations can obscure the fact that it compelled men to good
behavior in every relation of life and made life sweeter, wholesomer,
and more fruitful of good than it otherwise would have been.
[Sidenote: The Voices of Virginia Women]
I must add a word with respect to that most fascinating of all things,
the Virginia girl's voice. This was music of so entrancing a sort that
I have known young men from other parts of the country to fall in love
with a voice before they had seen its possessor and to remain in love
with the owner of it in spite of her distinct lack of beauty when
revealed in person.
Those girls all dropped the "g"s at the end of their participles; they
habitually used double negatives, and, quite defiantly of dictionaries,
used Virginian locutions not sanctioned by authority. If challenged on
the subject their reply would have been that which John Esten Cooke gave
to an editor who wanted to strike a phrase out of one of his Virginia
romances, on the ground that it was not good English. "It's good
Virginian," he answered, "and for my purpose that is more important."
But all such defects of speech--due not to ignorance but to a charming
wilfulness--were forgotten in the music of the voices that gave them
utterance.
There are no such voices now, even in Virginia, I regret to say.
Not of their own fault, but because of contact with strangely altered
conditions, the altogether charming Virginia girls I sometimes meet
nowadays, have voices and intonations not unlike those of women in other
parts of the country, except that they preserve enough of the old lack
of emphasis upon the stronger syllables to render their speech often
difficult to understand. There is compensation for that in the gentle,
laughing readiness with which they repeat utterances not understood on
their first hearing.
XXIV
It was during the roseate years of the old Virginia life not long before
the war that I had my first and only serious experience of what is
variously and loosely called the "occult" and the "supernatural."
It is only in answer to solicitation that I tell the story here as it
has been only in response to like solicitation that I have orally told
it before.
In order that I may not be misunderstood, in order that I may not be
unjustly suspected of a credulity that does not belong to me, I wish to
say at the outset that I am by nature and by lifelong habit of mind a
skeptic. I believe in the natural order, in cause and effect, in the
material basis of psychological phenomena. I have no patience with the
mystical or the mysterious. I do not believe in the miraculous, the
supernatural, the occult--call it what you will.
And yet the experience I am about to relate is literally true, and the
story of it a slavishly faithful record of facts. I make no attempt to
reconcile those facts with my beliefs or unbeliefs. I venture upon no
effort at explanation. I have set forth above my intellectual attitude
toward all such matters; I shall set forth the facts of this experience
with equal candor. If the reader finds the facts irreconcilable with my
intellectual convictions, I must leave him to judge as he may between
the two, without aid of mine. The facts are these:
I was one of a house party, staying at one of the most hospitable
of Virginia mansions. I was by courtesy of Virginia clannishness
"cousin" to the mistress of the house, and when no house party was in
entertainment I was an intimate there, accustomed to go and come at
will and to reckon myself a member of the family by brevet.
[Sidenote: The Story of the West Wing]
At the time now considered, the house was unusually full, when a letter
came announcing the immediate coming of still other guests. In my close
intimacy with the mistress of the plantation I became aware of her
perplexity. She didn't know where and how to bestow the presently coming
guests. I suggested that I and some others should take ourselves away, a
suggestion which her hospitable soul rejected, the more particularly in
my case, perhaps, because I was actively planning certain entertainments
in which she was deeply interested. Suddenly it occurred to me that
during my long intimacy in the house I had never known anybody to occupy
the room or rooms which constituted the second story of the west wing of
the building. I asked why not bring that part of the spacious mansion
into use in this emergency, thinking that its idleness during all the
period of my intimacy there had been due only to the lack of need in a
house so large.
"Cousin Mary," with a startled look of inquiry upon her face, glanced
at her husband, who sat with us alone on a piazza.
"You may as well tell him the facts," he said in reply to the look.
"He won't talk."
Then she told me the history of the room, explaining that she objected
to any talk about it because she dreaded the suspicion of superstition.
Briefly the story was that several generations earlier, an old man
almost blind, had died there; that during his last illness he had had
his lawyer prepare his will there; that he was too feeble, when the
lawyer finished, even to sign the document; that he placed it under his
pillow; that during the night his daughter abstracted and copied it,
changing only one clause in such fashion as to defeat the long cherished
purpose of the dying man; that she placed her new draft under the pillow
where the old one had been and that in the morning the nearly blind old
man executed that instead of the other.
"Now I'm not superstitious, you know," said Cousin Mary very earnestly,
"but it is a fact that from that day to this there has been something
the matter with that room. During the time of my great uncle, who
brought me up, you know, and from whom I inherited the plantation, many
persons tried to sleep in it but none ever stayed there more than an
hour or two. They always fled in terror from the chamber, until at last
my uncle forbade any further attempt to occupy the room lest this should
come to be called a haunted house. Since I became mistress here three
persons have tried the thing, all of them with the same result."
"It's stuff and nonsense," I interposed, "but what yarns did they tell?"
"They one and all related the same singular experience," she answered,
"though neither of them knew what the experience of the others had
been."
"What was it?" I asked with resolute incredulity.
"Why, each of them went to the room in full confidence that nothing
would happen. Each went to bed and to sleep. After a while he waked to
find the whole room pervaded by a dim, yellowish gray or grayish yellow
light. Some of them used one combination of words and some the other,
but all agreed that the light had no apparent source, that it was
all-pervasive, that it was very dim at first, but that it steadily
increased until they fled in panic from its nameless terror. For ten
years we permitted no repetition of the experiment, but a year ago my
brother--he's an army officer, you know--insisted upon sleeping in the
room. He remained there longer than anybody else ever had done, but
between two and three o'clock in the morning he came down the stairs
with barely enough strength to cling to the balustrades, and in such
an ague fit as I never saw any one else endure in all my life. He had
served in the Florida swamps and was subject to agues, but for several
months before that he had been free from them. I suppose the terror
attacked his weakest point and brought the chills on again."
[Sidenote: A Challenge to the Ghosts]
"Did he have the same experience the rest had had?" I asked.
"Yes, except that he had stayed longer than any of them and suffered
more."
"Cousin Mary," I said, "I am going to sleep in that room to-night, with
your permission."
"You can't have it," she answered. "I've seen too much of the terror to
permit a further trifling with it."
"Then I'll sleep there without your permission," I answered. "I'll break
in if necessary, and I'll prove by a demonstration that nobody can
question, what nonsense all these imaginings have been."
Cousin Mary was determined, but so was I, and at last she consented
to let me make the attempt. She and I decided to keep the matter to
ourselves, but of course it leaked out and spread among all the guests
in the house. I suppose the negro servants who were sent to make up the
bed and supply bath water told. At any rate my coming adventure was the
sole topic of conversation at the supper table that night.
I seized upon the occasion to give a warning.
"I have borrowed a six-shooter from our host," I announced, "and if I
see anything to shoot at to-night I shall shoot without challenging. So
I strongly advise you fellows not to attempt any practical jokes."
The response convinced me that nothing of the kind was contemplated, but
to make sure, our host, who perhaps feared tragedy, exacted and secured
from each member of the company, old and young, male and female, a pledge
of honor that there should be no interference with my experiment, no
trespass upon my privacy.
"With that pledge secured," I said, perhaps a trifle boastfully, "I
shall stay in that room all night no matter what efforts the spooks may
make to drive me out."
It was about midnight, or nearly that, when I entered the room. It was
raining heavily without, and the wind was rattling the stout shutters of
the eight great windows of the room.
I went to each of those windows and minutely examined it. They were
hung with heavy curtains of deep red, I remember, for I observed every
detail. Four of them were in the north and four in the south wall of the
wing. The eastern wall of the room was pierced only by the broad doorway
which opened at the head of the great stairs. The door was stoutly built
of oak, and provided with a heavy lock of iron with brass knobs.
The western side of the room held a great open fireplace, from which a
paneled oaken wainscot extended entirely across the room and up to the
ceiling. Behind the wainscot on either side was a spacious closet which
I carefully explored with two lighted bedroom candles to show me that
the closets were entirely empty.
Having completed my explorations I disrobed, double-locked the door, and
went to bed, first placing the six-shooter handily under my pillow. I
do not think I was excited even in the smallest degree. My pulses were
calm, my imagination no more active than a young man's must be, and my
brain distinctly sleepy. The great, four-poster bed was inexpressibly
comfortable, and the splash and patter of the rain as it beat upon
the window blinds was as soothing as a lullaby. I forgot all about the
experiment in which I was engaged, all about ghosts and their ways,
and went to sleep.
[Sidenote: The Yellow-Gray Light]
After a time I suddenly waked to find the room dimly pervaded by
that yellowish-gray or grayish-yellow light that had so disturbed
the slumbers of others in that apartment. My awakening was so complete
that all my faculties were alert at once. I felt under my pillow and
found my weapon there. I looked to its chambers and found the charges
undisturbed. The caps were in place, and I felt myself armed for any
encounter.
But I had resolved in advance, to be deliberate, self-possessed, and
calm, whatever might happen, and I kept faith with myself. Instead of
hastily springing from the bed I lay there for a time watching the weird
light as it slowly, almost imperceptibly, increased in intensity, and
trying to decide whether they were right who had described as "yellowish
gray" or they who had called it "grayish yellow." I decided that the
gray distinctly predominated, but in the meanwhile the steady increase
in the light and in its pervasiveness warned me, and I slipped out of
bed, taking my pistol with me, to the dressing case on the other side
of the room--the side on which the great oaken door opened.
The rain was still beating heavily against the window blinds, and the
strange, yellowish gray light was still slowly but steadily increasing.
I was resolute, however, in my determination not to be disturbed or
hurried by any manifestation. In response to that determination I
glanced at the mirror and decided that the mysterious light was
sufficient for the purpose, and I resolved I would shave.
Having done so, I bathed--a little hurriedly, perhaps, because of the
rapidly increasing light. I was deliberate, however, in donning my
clothing, and not until I was fully dressed did I turn to leave the
room. Glancing at every object in it--all now clearly visible, though
somewhat shadowy in outline--I decided at last upon my retreat. I turned
the key, and the bolt in the lock shot back with sound enough to startle
calmer nerves than mine.
I turned the knob, but the door refused to open!
For a moment I was puzzled. Then I remembered that it was a double lock.
A second later I was out of that chamber, and the oaken door of it was
securely shut behind me.
I went down the great stairway, slowly, deliberately, in pursuance of my
resolution; I entered the large hallway below, and thence passed into
the oak-wainscoted dining-room, where I sat down to breakfast with the
rest of the company.
It was nine o'clock of a dark, rainy morning.
XXV
In Virginia at the time of which I am writing, everybody, men, women,
and children, read books and talked about them. The annual output of
the publishers was trifling then, as compared with the present flood of
new books, and as a consequence everybody read all the new books and
magazines, and everybody talked about them as earnestly as of politics
or religion. Still more diligently they read old books, the classics of
the language. Literature was regarded as a vital force in human affairs,
and books which in our time might relieve the tedium of a railway
journey and be forgotten at its end, were read with minute attention and
discussed as earnestly as if vital interests had depended upon an
accurate estimation of their quality.
As a consequence, authorship was held in strangely glamorous esteem. I
beg pardon of the English language for making that word "glamorous"; it
expresses my thought, as no other term does, and it carries its meaning
on its face.
[Sidenote: The "Solitary Horseman"]
I remember that in my student days in Richmond there came a visitor
who had written one little book--about Rufus Choate, I think, though
I can find no trace of it in bibliographies. I suspect that he was a
very small author, indeed, in Boston, whence he came, but he was an
AUTHOR--we always thought that word in capital letters--and so he was
dined and wined, and entertained, and not permitted to pay his own hotel
bills or cab charges, or anything else.
Naturally a people so disposed made much of their own men of letters,
of whom there was quite a group--if we reckon their qualifications as
generously as the Virginians did. Among them were three at least whose
claim to be regarded as authors was beyond dispute. These were John
Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and the English novelist, G. P. R. James,
who at that time was serving as British consul at Richmond. And there
was Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie, who played the part of literary queen
right royally.
Mr. James was a conspicuous figure in Richmond. He was a robust
Englishman in his late fifties, rather short and rather stout.
The latter impression was aided by the fact that in his afternoon
saunterings about the town, he usually wore a sort of roundabout, a
coat that ended at his waist and had no tails to it. To the ribald
and the jocular he was known as "the Solitary Horseman" because of his
habit of introducing novels or chapters with a lonely landscape in which
a "solitary horseman" was the chief or only figure. To those of us who
were disposed to be deferential he was known as "the Prince Regent,"
in memory of the jest perpetrated by one of the wits of the town.
Mr. James's three initials, which prompted John G. Saxe to say that
he "got at the font his strongest claims to be reckoned a man of
letters"--stood for "George Payne Rainsford," but he rarely used anything
more than the initials--G. P. R. When a certain voluble gentlewoman asked
Tom August what the initials stood for he promptly replied:
"Why, George Prince Regent, of course. And his extraordinary courtesy
fully justifies his sponsors in baptism for having given him the name."
The lady lost no time in telling everybody of the interesting fact--and
the novelist became "Prince Regent James" to all his Richmond friends
from that hour forth.
John R. Thompson was the editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_.
Scholar, poet, and man of most gentle mind, it is not surprising that
in later years, when the old life was war-wrecked, Mr. William Cullen
Bryant made him his intimate friend and appointed him to the office of
literary editor of the _Evening Post_, which Mr. Bryant always held to
be the supreme distinction possible to an American man of letters. I
being scarcely more than a boy studying law in the late fifties, knew
him only slightly, but my impression of him at that time was, that with
very good gifts and a certain charm of literary manner, he was not yet
fully grown up in mind. He sought to model himself, I think, upon his
impressions of N. P. Willis, and his aspiration to be recognized as a
brilliant man of society was quite as marked as his literary ambition.
He was sensitive to slights and quite morbidly apprehensive that those
about him might think the less of him because his father was a hatter.
Socially at that time and in that country men in trade of any kind were
regarded as rather inferior to those of the planter class.
When I knew Thompson better in after years in New York he had outgrown
that sort of nonsense, and was a far more agreeable companion because
of the fact.
[Sidenote: John Esten Cooke--Gentleman]
Chief among the literary men of Richmond was John Esten Cooke. His novel
"The Virginia Comedians" had made him famous in his native state, and
about the time I write of--1858-9--he supplemented it with another story
of like kind, "Henry St. John, Gentleman." As I remember them these were
rather immature creations, depending more upon a certain grace of manner
for their attractiveness than upon any more substantial merit. Certainly
they did not compare in vigor or originality with "Surrey of Eagle's
Nest" or any other of the novels their author wrote after his mind had
been matured by strenuous war experience. But at the time of which I
write they gave him a literary status such as no other Virginian of the
time could boast, and for a living he wrote ceaselessly for magazines
and the like.
The matter of getting a living was a difficult one to him then, for the
reason that with a pride of race which some might think quixotic, he had
burdened his young life with heavy obligations not his own. His father
had died leaving debts that his estate could not pay. As the younger man
got nothing by inheritance, except the traditions of honor that belonged
to his race, he was under no kind of obligation with respect to those
debts. But with a chivalric loyalty such as few men have ever shown,
John Esten Cooke made his dead father's debts his own and little by
little discharged them with the earnings of a toilsome literary
activity.
His pride was so sensitive that he would accept no help in this, though
friends earnestly pressed loans upon him when he had a payment to meet
and his purse was well-nigh empty. At such times he sometimes made his
dinner on crackers and tea for many days together, although he knew he
would be a more than welcome guest at the lavish tables of his many
friends in Richmond. It was a point of honor with him never to accept
a dinner or other invitation when he was financially unable to dine
abundantly at his own expense.
The reviewer of one of my own stories of the old Virginia life, not
long ago informed his readers that of course there never were men so
sensitively and self-sacrificingly honorable as those I had described in
the book, though my story presented no such extreme example of the man
of honor as that illustrated in Mr. Cooke's person and career.
I knew him intimately at that time, his immediate friends being my own
kindred. Indeed, I passed one entire summer in the same hospitable house
with him.
Some years after the war our acquaintance was renewed, and from that
time until his death he made my house his abiding place whenever he had
occasion to be in New York. Time had wrought no change in his nature. He
remained to the end the high-spirited, duty-loving man of honor that I
had known in my youth; he remained also the gentle, affectionate, and
unfailingly courteous gentleman he had always been.
He went into the war as an enlisted man in a Richmond battery, but was
soon afterward appointed an officer on the staff of the great cavalier,
J. E. B. Stuart.
"I wasn't born to be a soldier," he said to me in after years. "Of
course I can stand bullets and shells and all that, without flinching,
just as any man must if he has any manhood in him, and as for hardship
and starvation, why, a man who has self-control can endure them when
duty demands it, but I never liked the business of war. Gold lace on
my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red
and yellow calico with turkey feathers in my headgear to add to the
gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is the
fit work of brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are
organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is
really nothing heroic or romantic or in any way calculated to appeal to
the imagination. As an old soldier, you know how small a part personal
gallantry plays in the machine work of war nowadays."
[Sidenote: How Jeb Stuart Made a Major]
Nevertheless, John Esten Cooke was a good soldier and a gallant one. At
Manassas I happened to see him at a gun which he was helping to work and
which we of the cavalry were supporting. He was powder-blackened and he
had lost both his coat and his hat in the eagerness of his service at
the piece; but during a brief pause in the firing he greeted me with a
rammer in his hand and all the old cheeriness in his face and voice.
On Stuart's staff he distinguished himself by a certain laughing
nonchalance under fire, and by his eager readiness to undertake Stuart's
most perilous missions. It was in recognition of some specially daring
service of that kind that Stuart gave him his promotion, and Cooke used
to tell with delight of the way in which the great boyish cavalier did
it.
"You're about my size, Cooke," Stuart said, "but you're not so broad in
the chest."
"Yes, I am," answered Cooke.
"Let's see if you are," said Stuart, taking off his coat as if stripping
for a boxing match. "Try that on."
Cooke donned the coat with its three stars on the collar, and found it
a fit.
"Cut off two of the stars," commanded Stuart, "and wear the coat to
Richmond. Tell the people in the War Department to make you a major and
send you back to me in a hurry. I'll need you to-morrow."
When I visited him years afterwards at The Briars, his home in the
Shenandoah Valley, that coat which had once been Stuart's, hung upon the
wall, as the centerpiece of a collection of war relics, cherished with
pride of sentiment but without a single memory that savored of animosity.
The gentle, courteous, kindly man of letters who cherished these things
as mementoes of a terrible epoch had as little in his bearing to suggest
the temper of the war time as had his old charger who grazed upon the
lawn, exempt from all work as one who had done his duty in life and was
entitled to ease and comfort as his reward.
XXVI
The old life of the Old Dominion is a thing of the dead past, a memory
merely, and one so different from anything that exists anywhere on earth
now, that every reflection of it seems the fabric of a dream. But its
glamor holds possession of my mind even after the lapse of half a
century of years, and the greatest joy I have known in life has come
from my efforts to depict it in romances that are only a veiled record
of facts.
It was not a life that our modern notions of economics can approve, but
it ministered to human happiness, to refinement of mind, to culture, and
to the maintenance of high ideals of manhood and womanhood. It bred a
race of men who spoke the truth, lived uprightly, and met every duty
without a shadow of flinching from personal consequences. It reared a
race of women fit to be the wives and mothers of such men. Under its
spell culture was deemed of more account than mere education; living was
held in higher regard than getting a living; refinement meant more than
display; comfort more than costliness, and kindliness in every word and
act more than all else.
[Sidenote: A Plantation Modernized]
I know an old plantation where for generations a family of brave men and
fair women dwelt in peace and ministered in gracious, hospitable ways to
the joy of others. Under their governance there was never any thought of
exploiting the resources of the plantation for the sake of a potential
wealth that seemed superfluous to people of contented mind who had
enough. The plantation supported itself and all who dwelt upon it--black
and white. It educated its sons and daughters and enabled them to
maintain a generous hospitality. More than this they did not want or
dream of wanting.
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 substitute rudimentary instruction for all in the
place of real education and culture for a class. 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 peacock 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 god 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 substitution
of a utilitarian smattering for all for the education and culture
of a class 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 pass 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 god 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
emancipationist, John Letcher, to be their governor, voted by heavy
majorities against withdrawal from the Union. In her constitutional
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 assigned 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 horsemen
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 Manassas (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 horsemen 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 passed 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 mass, 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 grass 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 appetite 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 hell," 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 illustration 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 noblest 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.
This had lasted for less than two minutes when my comrades, pursued by
a strong body of Federal cavalry, dashed back again through the picket
post.
As they came on at a full run Fitz Lee saw me, and, slackening speed
slightly, he thrust out his foot and held out his hand--a cavalry trick
in which all of us had been trained. Responding, I seized his hand,
placed my foot upon his and swung to his crupper. A minute later a
supporting company came to our assistance and the pursuing cavalrymen
in blue retired.
The incident was not at all an unusual one, but the memory of it came
back to me years afterwards under rather peculiar circumstances. In 1889
there was held in New York a spectacular celebration of the centennial
of Washington's inauguration as president. A little company of us who
had organized ourselves into a society known as "The Virginians," gave
a banquet to the commissioners appointed to represent Virginia on that
occasion. It so fell out that I was called upon to preside at the
banquet, and General Fitzhugh Lee, then Governor of Virginia, sat, of
course, at my right.
Somewhere between the oysters and the entree I turned to him and said:
"It seemed a trifle odd to me, General, and distinctly un-Virginian, to
greet you as a stranger when we were presented to each other a little
while ago. Of course, to you I mean nothing except a name heard in
introduction; but you saved my life once and to me this meeting means
a good deal."
[Sidenote: Fitz Lee]
In answer to his inquiries I began to tell the story. Suddenly he
interrupted in his impetuous way, asking:
"Are you the man I took on my crupper that day down there by
Dranesville?"
And with that he pushed back his plate and rising nearly crushed my hand
in friendly grasp. Then he told me stories of other meetings with his
old troopers,--stories dramatic, pathetic, humorous,--until I had need
of General Pryor's reminder that I was presiding and that there were
duties for me to do, however interesting I might find Fitzhugh Lee's
conversation to be.
From that time until his death I saw much of General Lee, and learned
much of his character and impulses, which I imagine are wholly undreamed
of by those who encountered him only in his official capacities. He
had the instincts of the scholar, without the scholar's opportunity to
indulge them. "It is a matter of regret," he said to me in Washington
one day, "that family tradition has decreed that all Lees shall be
soldiers. I have often regretted that I was sent to West Point instead
of being educated in a more scholarly way. You know I have Carter blood
and Mason blood in my veins, and the Carters and Masons have had
intellects worth cultivating."
I replied by quoting from Byron's "Mazeppa" the lines:
"'Ill betide
The school wherein I learned to ride.'
Quoth Charles: 'Old Hetman, wherefore so,
Since thou hast learned the art so well?'"
Instantly he responded by continuing the quotation:
"''Twere long to tell,
And we have many a league to go
With every now and then a blow;'
That is to say, I'm still Consul-General at Havana, and I have an
appointment to see the President on official business this morning."
As we were sitting in my rooms at the Arlington and not in his quarters
at the Shoreham, this was not a hint of dismissal, but an apology for
leaving.
The conversation awakened surprise in my mind, and ever since I have
wondered how many of the world's great men of action have regretted
that they were not men of thought instead, and how far the regret was
justified. If Fitz Lee had been educated at Yale or Harvard, what place
would he have occupied in the world? Would he have become a Virginian
lawyer and perhaps a judge? or what else? Conjecture in such a case is
futile. "If" is a word of very uncertain significance.
The story told in the foregoing paragraphs reminds me of another
experience.
When the war ended it became very necessary that I should go to Indiana
with the least possible delay. But at Richmond I was stopped by a
peremptory military order that forbade ex-Confederates to go North. The
order had been issued in consequence of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, and
the disposition to enforce it rigidly was very strong.
In my perplexity I made my way into the office of the Federal chief of
staff of that department. There I encountered a stalwart and impressive
officer, six feet, four or five inches high--or perhaps even an inch
or two more than that--who listened with surprising patience while I
explained my necessity to him. When I had done, he placed his hand upon
my shoulder in comradely fashion and said:
"You didn't have anything to do with Mr. Lincoln's assassination. I'll
give you a special pass to go North as soon as you please."
I thanked him and took my leave.
[Sidenote: A Friendly Old Foe]
In 1907--forty-two years later--some one in the Authors Club introduced
me to "our newest member, Mr. Curtis."
I glanced at the towering form, and recognized it instantly.
"_Mr._ Curtis be hanged," I answered, "I know General Newton Martin
Curtis, and I have good reason to remember him. He is the man who let
me out of Richmond."
Since that time I have learned to know General Curtis well, and to
cherish him as a friend and club comrade as heartily as I honored him
before for his gallantry in war and for his ceaseless and most fruitful
efforts since the war in behalf of reconciliation and brotherhood
between the men who once confronted each other with steel between.
Senator Daniel of Virginia has written of him that no other man has
done so much as he in that behalf, and I have reason to know that the
statement is not an exaggerated one. The kindliness he showed to me in
Richmond when we were utter strangers and had only recently been foemen,
inspired all his relations with the Virginians during all the years
that followed, and there is no man whose name to-day awakens a readier
response of good will among Virginians than does his.
XXIX
Late in the autumn of that first year of war there was reason to
believe that the armies in Virginia were about to retire into the dull
lethargy of winter-quarters' life, and that the scene of active war
was to be transferred to the coast of South Carolina. The Federals
had concentrated heavy forces there and in a preparatory campaign had
seized upon the Sea Islands and their defensive works at Beaufort and
elsewhere. General Lee had already been sent thither to command and
defend the coast, and there seemed no doubt that an active winter
campaign was to occur in that region. I wanted to have a part in it,
and to that end I sought and secured a transfer to a battery of field
artillery which was under orders for the South.
As a matter of fact, the active campaign never came, and for many moons
we led the very idlest life down there that soldiers in time of war ever
led anywhere.
But the service, idle as it was, played greater havoc in our ranks than
the most ceaseless battling could have done.
For example, we were sent one day from Charleston across the Ashley
river, to defend a bridge over Wappoo Cut. We had a hundred and eight
men on duty--all well and vigorous. One week later eight of them were
dead, eight barely able to answer to roll call, and all the rest in
hospital. In the meanwhile we had not fired a gun or caught sight of
an enemy.
On another occasion we encamped in a delightful but pestilential spot,
and for ten days afterward our men died at the rate of from two to six
every twenty-four hours.
During the term of our service on that coast we were only once engaged
in what could be called a battle. That was at Pocotaligo on the 22nd of
October, 1862. In point of numbers engaged it was a very small battle,
indeed, but it was the very hottest fight I was ever in, not excepting
any of the tremendous struggles in the campaign of 1864 in Virginia. My
battery went into that fight with fifty-four men and forty-five horses.
We fought at pistol-shot range all day, and came out of the struggle
with a tally of thirty-three men killed and wounded, and with only
eighteen horses alive--all of them wounded but one.
General Beauregard with his own hand presented the battery a battle
flag and authorized an inscription on it in memory of the event. In all
that we rejoiced with as much enthusiasm as a company of ague-smitten
wretches could command, but it is no wonder that our Virginia
mountaineers took on a new lease of life when at last we were ordered
to rejoin the Army of Northern Virginia, as a part of Longstreet's
artillery.
XXX
[Sidenote: Left Behind]
At the end of the campaign of 1863 we found ourselves unhorsed.
We had guns that we knew how to use, and caissons full of ammunition,
but we had no horses to draw either the guns or the caissons. So
when Longstreet was ordered south to bear a part in the campaign of
Chickamauga, we were left behind. After a time, during which we were
like the dog in the express car who had "chawed up his tag," we were
assigned for the winter to General Lindsay Walker's command--the
artillery of A. P. Hill's corps.
We belonged to none of the battalions there, and therefore had no field
officers through whom to apply for decent treatment. For thirteen wintry
days we lay at Lindsay's Turnout, with no rations except a meager dole
of cornmeal. Then one day a yoke of commissary oxen, starved into a
condition of hopeless anemia, became stalled in the mud near our camp.
By some hook or crook we managed to buy those wrecks of what had once
been oxen. We butchered them, and after twenty-four or thirty-six hours
of continual stewing, we had meat again.
Belonging to no battalion in the corps to which we were attached, we
were a battery "with no rights that anybody was bound to respect," and
presently the fact was emphasized. We were appointed to be the provost
company of the corps. That is to say, we had to build guardhouses and
do all the duties incident to the care of military prisoners.
The arrangement brought welcome occupation to me. As Sergeant-Major I
had the executive management of the military prisons and of everything
pertaining to them. As a lawyer who could charge no fees without a
breach of military etiquette, I was called upon to defend, before the
courts-martial, all the more desperate criminals under our care. These
included murderers, malingerers, robbers, deserters, and men guilty of
all the other crimes possible in that time and country. They included no
assailants of women. I would not have defended such in any case, and had
there been such our sentinels would have made quick work of their
disposal.
[Sidenote: A Gratuitous Law Practice]
The rest, as I was convinced, were guilty, every man of them. But
equally I was convinced that a court-martial, if left to deal with
them in its own way, would condemn them whether guilty or not. To a
court-martial, as a rule, the accusation--in the case of a private
soldier--is conclusive and final. If not, then a very little
evidence--admissible or not--is sufficient to confirm it. It is the
sole function of counsel before a court-martial to do the very little
he can to secure a reasonably fair trial, to persuade the officers
constituting the court that there is a difference between admissible
evidence and testimony that should not be received at all, and finally,
to put in a written plea at the end which may direct the attention of
the reviewing officers higher up to any unfairness or injustice done in
the course of the trial. Theoretically a court-martial is bound by the
accepted rules of evidence and by all other laws relating to the conduct
of criminal trials; but practically the court-martial, in time of war at
least, is bound by nothing. It is a tribunal organized to convict, and
its proceedings closely resemble those of a vigilance committee.
But the proceedings of every court-martial must be reduced to writing
and approved or disapproved by authorities "higher up." Sometimes those
authorities higher up have some glimmering notion of law and justice,
and it is in reliance upon that chance that lawyers chiefly depend in
defending men before courts-martial.
But no man is entitled to counsel before a court-martial. It is only
on sufferance that the counsel can appear at all, and he is liable to
peremptory dismissal at any moment during the trial.
It was under these conditions that I undertook the defense of
TOM COLLINS
Tom was an old jailbird. He had been pardoned out of the Virginia
penitentiary on condition that he would enlist--for his age was one
year greater, according to his account of it, than that at which the
conscription law lost its force. Tom had been a trifle less than two
months in service when he was caught trying to desert to the enemy.
Conviction on such a charge at that period of the war meant death.
In response to a humble request I was permitted to appear before the
court-martial as Tom Collins's counsel. My intrusion was somewhat
resented as a thing that tended to delay in a perfectly clear case, when
the court had a world of business before it, and my request was very
grudgingly granted.
I managed, unluckily, to antagonize the court still further at the
very outset. I found that Tom Collins's captain--who had preferred the
charges against him--was a member of the court that was to try him.
Against that indecency I protested, and in doing so perhaps I used
stronger language than was advisable. The officer concerned, flushed
and angry, asked me if I meant to impugn his honor and integrity.
I answered, in hot blood:
"That depends upon whether you continue to sit as judge in a case in
which you are the accuser, or whether you have the decency to retire
from the court until the hearing in this case is ended."
"Are you a man responsible for his words?" he flashed back in reply.
"Entirely so," I answered. "When this thing is over I will afford you
any opportunity you like, captain, to avenge your honor and to wreak
satisfaction. At present I have a duty to do toward my client, and a
part of that duty is to insist that you shall withdraw from the court
during his trial and not sit as a judge in a case in which you are the
accuser. After that my captain or any other officer of the battery to
which I belong will act for me and receive any communication you may
choose to send."
At this point the presiding officer of the court ordered the room
cleared "while the court deliberates."
Half an hour later I was admitted again to the courtroom to hear the
deliberate judgment of the court that it was entirely legitimate and
proper for Tom's captain to sit in his case.
[Sidenote: Court Martial Evidence]
Then we proceeded with the trial. The proof was positive that Tom
Collins had been caught ten miles in front, endeavoring to make his
way into the enemy's lines.
In answer, I called the court's attention to the absence of any proof
that Tom Collins was a soldier. There are only three ways in which a man
can become a soldier, namely, by voluntary enlistment, by conscription,
or by receiving pay. Tom Collins was above the conscription age and
therefore not a conscript. He had not been two months in service, and by
his captain's admission, had not received soldier's pay. There remained
only voluntary enlistment, and, I pointed out, there was no proof of
that before the court.
Thereupon the room was cleared again for consultation, and a little
later the court adjourned till the next morning.
When it reassembled the judge advocate triumphantly presented a telegram
from Governor Letcher, in answer to one sent to him. It read:
"Yes. I pardoned Collins out of penitentiary on condition of
enlistment."
Instantly I objected to the reception of the despatch as evidence. There
was no proof that it had in fact come from Governor Letcher; it was not
made under oath; and finally, the accused man was not confronted by his
accuser and permitted to cross-examine him. Clearly that piece of paper
was utterly inadmissible as testimony.
The court made short work of these "lawyer's quibbles." It found Tom
Collins guilty and condemned him to death.
I secured leave of the court to set forth my contentions in writing
so that they might go to the reviewing officers as a part of the
proceedings, but I had very little hope of the result. I frankly told
Tom that he was to be shot on the next Saturday but one, and that he
must make up his mind to his fate.
The good clergyman who acted as chaplain to the military prison then
took Tom in hand and endeavored to "prepare him to meet his God." After
a while the reverend gentleman came to me with tears of joy in his eyes,
to tell me that Tom Collins was "converted"; that never in the course
of his ministry had he encountered "a case in which the repentance was
completer or more sincere, or a case more clearly showing the acceptance
of the sinner by his merciful Saviour."
My theological convictions were distinctly more hazy than those of
the clerical gentleman, and my ability to think of Tom Collins as a
person saturated with sanctity, was less than his. But I accepted the
clergyman's expert opinion as unquestioningly as I could, and Tom
Collins confirmed it. When I visited him in the guard-house I found
him positively ecstatic in the sunlight of Divine acceptance which
illuminated the Valley of the Shadow of Death. When I mentioned the
possibility that my plea in his behalf might even yet prove effective,
and that the sentence which condemned him to death the next morning
might still be revoked, he replied, with apparent sincerity:
"Oh, I hope not! For then I must wait before entering into joy! But the
Lord's will be done!"
The next morning was the one appointed for Tom Collins's death. His
coffin was ready and a shallow grave had been dug to receive his body.
The chaplain and I mounted with him to the cart, and rode with him to
the place of execution, where three other men were to die that day.
Tom's mood was placidly exultant. And the chaplain alone shed tears in
his behalf.
[Sidenote: "Death Bed Repentance"]
When the place of execution was reached, an adjutant came forward and
read three death warrants. Then he held up another paper and read it.
It was a formal document from the War Department, sustaining the legal
points submitted in Tom Collins's case, disapproving the finding and
sentence, and ordering the man formally enlisted and returned to duty.
The chaplain fell into a collapse of uncontrollable weeping. Tom Collins
came to his relief with the injunction: "Oh, come, now, old snuffy,
cheer up! I'll bet you even money I beat you to Hell yet."
That clergyman afterward confided to me his doubts of "deathbed
repentances," at least in the case of habitual criminals.
XXXI
In the spring of 1864, the battery to which I belonged mutinied--in an
entirely proper and soldierlike way. Longstreet had returned, and the
Army of Northern Virginia was about to encounter Grant in the most
stupendous campaign of the war. We were old soldiers, and we knew
what was coming. But as we had no horses to draw our guns, and as the
quartermaster's department seemed unable to find horses for us, we
were omitted from the orders for the advance into the region of the
Wilderness, where the fighting was obviously to begin. We were ordered
to Cobham Station, a charming region of verdure-clad hills and brawling
streams, where there was no soldiers' work to do and no prospect of
anything less ignoble than provost duty.
Against this we revolted, respectfully and loyally. We sent in a protest
and petition asking that if horses could not be furnished for our guns,
we should be armed with Enfield rifles and permitted to march with our
battalion as a sharpshooting support.
The request was granted and from the Wilderness to Petersburg we marched
and fought and starved right gallantly, usually managing to have a place
between the guns at the points of hottest contest in every action of the
campaign.
At Petersburg we found artillery work of a new kind to do. No sooner
were the conditions of siege established than our battery, because of
its irregularly armed condition, was chosen to work the mortars which
then for the first time became a part of the offensive and defensive
equipment of the Army of Northern Virginia.
All the fragments of batteries whose ranks had been broken up and whose
officers had been killed, wounded, or captured during that campaign of
tremendous fighting, were assigned to us for mortar service, so that our
numbers were swelled to 250 or 300 men. The number was fluctuating from
day to day, as the monotonous murder of siege operations daily depleted
our ranks on the one hand while almost daily there were additions made
of men from disintegrated commands.
I have no purpose here to write a history of that eight months of siege,
during which we were never for one moment out of fire by night or by
day, but there is one story that arose out of it which I have a mind
to tell.
I had been placed in command of an independent mortar fort, taking my
orders directly from General E. P. Alexander--Longstreet's chief of
artillery--and reporting to nobody else.
Infantry officers from the lines in front--colonels and such--used
sometimes to come to my little row of gun-pits and give me orders in
utter ignorance of the conditions and limitations of mortar firing.
The orders were not binding upon me and, under General Alexander's
instructions, I paid no heed to them, wherefore I was often in a state
of friction with the intermeddlers. After a little I discovered a short
and easy method of dealing with them. There was a Federal fort known
to us as the Railroad Iron Battery, whose commanding officer seemed a
person very fond of using his guns in an offensive way. He had both
mortars and rifled field guns, and with all of them he soon got my
range so accurately that all his rifle shells cut my parapet at the
moment of exploding, and all his mortar shells fell among my pits with
extraordinary precision. In order to preserve the lives of my men I had
to take my stand on top of the mound over my magazine whenever he began
bombarding me. From that point I watched the course of his mortar
shells, and when one of them seemed destined to fall into one of my
little gun-pits, I called out the number of the pit and the men in it
ran into their bomb-proof till the explosion was over.
In dealing with the annoyance of intruding infantry officers, I took
advantage of the Railroad Iron Battery's extraordinary readiness to
respond to the smallest attention at my hands. A shell or two hurled in
that direction always brought on a condition of things which prompted
all visitors to my pits to retreat to a covered way and hasten to keep
suddenly remembered engagements on their own lines.
[Sidenote: Gloaming Visitors]
Once my little ruse did not produce the intended effect. It was after
sunset of a day late in August. Two officers came out of the gloaming
and saluted me politely. They were in fatigue uniforms. That is to say,
they wore the light blue trousers that were common to both armies, and
white duck fatigue jackets that bore no insignia of rank upon their
collars.
At the moment I was slowly bombarding something--I forget what or
why--but I remember that I was getting no response. Presently one of
my visitors said:
"You seem to be having the shelling all to yourself."
I resented the remark, thinking it a criticism.
"We'll see," I said. Then turning to my brother, who was my second in
command, I quietly gave the order:
"Touch up the Railroad Iron Battery, Joe."
Thirty seconds later the storm was in full fury about us, but my
visitors did not seem to mind it. Instead of retiring to the covered
way, they nonchalantly stood there by my side on the mound of the
magazine. Every now and then, between explosions, one of them would ask
a question as to the geography of the lines to our right and left.
"What battery is that over there?"
"What is the Federal work that lies in front of it?"
"What is the lay of the land," etc., etc.
Obviously they were officers new to this part of our line and as they
offered no criticism upon the work of my guns, and gave me no orders,
I put aside the antagonism I had felt, and in all good-fellowship
explained the military geography of the region round about.
Meanwhile, Joe had quietly stopped the fire on the Railroad Iron
Battery, and little by little that work ceased its activity. Finally
my visitors politely bade me good evening and took their leave.
I asked Joe who they were, but he did not know. I inquired of others,
but nobody knew. Next morning I asked at General Gracie's headquarters
what new troops had been brought to that part of the line, and learned
that there had been no changes. There and at General Bushrod Johnson's
headquarters I minutely described my visitors, but nobody knew anything
about them, and after a few days of futile conjecture I ceased to think
of them or their visit.
In July, 1865, the war being over, I took passage on the steamer "Lady
Gay," bound from Cairo to New Orleans. There were no women on board,
but there was a passenger list of thirty men or so. Some of us were
ex-Confederates and some had been Federal soldiers.
[Sidenote: The Outcome of a Strange Story]
The two groups did not mingle. The members of each were polite upon
accidental occasion to the members of the other, but they did not
fraternize, at least for a time--till something happened.
I was talking one morning with some of my party when suddenly a man
from the other group approached as if listening to my voice. Presently
he asked:
"Didn't you command a mortar fort at Petersburg?"
I answered that I did, whereupon he asked:
"Do you remember----" and proceeded to outline the incident related
above.
"Yes," I answered in astonishment, "but how do you happen to know
anything about it?"
"I was one of your visitors on that occasion. I thought I couldn't
be mistaken in the voice that commanded, 'Touch up the Railroad Iron
Battery, Joe.'"
"But I don't understand. You were a Federal officer, were you not?"
"Yes."
"Then what were you doing there?"
"That is precisely what my friend and I were trying to find out, while
you kept us for two hours under a fire of hell from our own batteries."
Then he explained:
"You remember that to the left of your position, half a mile or so away,
there lay a swamp. It was utterly impassable when the lines were drawn,
and both sides neglected it in throwing up the breastworks. Well, that
swamp slowly dried up during the summer, and it left something like a
gap in both lines, but the gap was so well covered by the batteries on
both sides that neither bothered to extend earthworks across it. My
friend and I were in charge of pickets and rifle-pits that day, and
we went out to inspect them. Somehow--I don't know how--we got lost on
the swamplands, and, losing our bearings, we found ourselves presently
within the Confederate lines. To say that we were embarrassed is to
put it mildly. We were scared. We didn't know how to get back, and we
couldn't even surrender for the reason that we were not in uniform but
in fatigue dress, and therefore technically, at least, in disguise.
There was nothing about us to show to which army we belonged. As an
old soldier, you know what that meant. If we had given ourselves up we
should have been hanged as spies caught in disguise within your lines.
In our desperate strait we went to you and stood there for an hour or
two under the worst fire we ever endured, while we extracted from you
the geographical information that enabled us to make our way back to
our own lines under cover of darkness."
At that point he grasped my hand warmly and said:
"Tell me, how is Joe? I hope he is 'touching up' something that responds
as readily as the Railroad Iron Battery did that evening."
From that hour until we reached New Orleans, four days later, there
was no barrier between the two groups of passengers. We fraternized
completely. We told stories of our several war experiences that had
no touch or trace of antagonism in them.
Incidentally, we exhausted the steamer "Lady Gay's" supplies of
champagne and cigars, and when we reached New Orleans we had a dinner
together at the St. Charles hotel, no observer of which would have
suspected that a few months before we had been doing our best to
slaughter each other.
XXXII
[Sidenote: The Beginning of Newspaper Life]
Let me pass hurriedly over the years that immediately followed the end
of the war. I went West in search of a living. In Cairo, Illinois, I
became counsel and attorney "at law and in fact," for a great banking,
mining, steamboating, and mercantile firm, whose widely extending
interests covered the whole West and South.
The work was uncongenial and by way of escaping from it, after I had
married, I removed to Mississippi and undertook the practice of law
there.
That work proved still less to my liking and in the summer of 1870
I abandoned it in the profoundest disgust.
With a wife, one child, a little household furniture, and no money
at all, I removed to New York and secured work as a reporter on the
Brooklyn _Union_, an afternoon newspaper.
I knew nothing of the business, art, or mystery of newspaper making, and
I knew nothing of the city. I find it difficult to imagine a man less
well equipped for my new undertaking than I was. But I had an abounding
confidence in my ability to learn anything I wanted to learn, and I
thought I knew how to express myself lucidly in writing. For the rest
I had tireless energy and a good deal of courage of the kind that is
sometimes slangily called "cheek." This was made manifest on the first
day of my service by the fact that while waiting for a petty news
assignment I wrote an editorial article and sent it in to Theodore
Tilton, the editor, for use. I had an impulse of general helpfulness
which was left unrestrained by my utter ignorance of the distinctions
and dignities of a newspaper office. I had a thought which seemed to me
to deserve editorial utterance, and with the mistaken idea that I was
expected to render all the aid I could in the making of the newspaper,
I wrote what I had to say.
Theodore Tilton was a man of very hospitable mind, and he cared little
for traditions. He read my article, approved it, and printed it as a
leader. Better still, he sent for me and asked me what experience I had
had as a newspaper man. I told him I had had none, whereupon he said
encouragingly:
"Oh well, it doesn't matter much. I'll have you on the editorial staff
soon. In the meantime, learn all you can about the city, and especially
about the shams and falsities of its 'Society' with a big 'S.' Study
state politics, and equip yourself to comment critically upon such
things. And whenever you have an editorial in your mind write it and
send it to me."
The _Union_ had been purchased by Mr. Henry C. Bowen, the owner of the
New York _Independent_, then the most widely influential periodical of
its class in America. Theodore Tilton was the editor of both.
[Sidenote: An Old School Man of Letters]
Theodore Tilton was at the crest of the wave of success at that time,
and he took himself and his genius very seriously. Concerning him I
shall write more fully a little later on. At present I wish to say only
that with all his self-appreciation he had a keen appreciation of other
men's abilities, and he sought in every way he could to make them
tributary to his own success in whatever he undertook. To that end he
had engaged some strong men and women as members of his staff on the
_Union_, and among these the most interesting to me was Charles F.
Briggs, the "Harry Franco" of an earlier literary time, the associate
and partner of Edgar Allan Poe on the _Broadway Journal_, the personal
friend or enemy of every literary man of consequence in his time, the
associate of George William Curtis and Parke Godwin in the conduct
of _Putnam's Monthly_; the coadjutor of Henry J. Raymond on the
_Times_, the novelist to whom Lowell dedicated "The Fable for Critics,"
and whose personal and literary characteristics Lowell set forth with
singular aptitude in that poem. In brief, he was in his own person a
representative and embodiment of the literary life of what I had always
regarded as the golden age of American letters. He talked familiarly of
writers who had been to me cloud-haloed demigods, and made men of them
to my apprehension.
Let me add that though the literary life of which he had been a part was
a turbulent one, beset by jealousies and vexed by quarrels of a bitter
personal character, such as would be impossible among men of letters in
our time of more gracious manners, I never knew him to say an unjust
thing about any of the men he had known, or to withhold a just measure
of appreciation from the work of those with whom he had most bitterly
quarreled.
Perhaps no man among Poe's contemporaries had juster reason to feel
bitterness toward the poet's memory than had Mr. Briggs. Yet during my
intimacy with him, extending over many years, I never heard him say
an unkind word of Poe. On the other hand, I never knew him to fail to
contradict upon occasion and in his dogmatic fashion--which was somehow
very convincing--any of the prevalent misapprehensions as to Poe's
character and life which might be mentioned in his presence.
It was not that he was a meekly forgiving person, for he was, on the
contrary, pugnacious in an unusual degree. But the dominant quality of
his character was a love of truth and justice. Concerning Poe and the
supposed immorality of his life, he once said to me, in words that I
am sure I remember accurately because of the impression they made on
my mind:
"He was not immoral at all in his personal life or in his work. He
was merely _un_moral. He had no perception of the difference between
right and wrong in the moral sense of those words. His conscience was
altogether artistic. If you had told him you had killed a man who stood
annoyingly in the way of your purposes, he would have thought none the
worse of you for it. He would have reflected that the man ought not to
have put himself in your way. But if you had been guilty of putting
forth a false quantity in verse, he would have held you to be a monster
for whom no conceivable punishment could be adequate."
Often Mr. Briggs's brusquerie and pugnacity were exaggerated, or
even altogether assumed by way of hiding a sentiment too tender to be
exhibited. Still more frequently the harshest things he said to his
friends--and they were sometimes very bitter--were prompted, not by his
displeasure with those who were their victims, but by some other cause
of "disgruntlement." On such occasions he would repent him of his fault,
and would make amends, but never in any ordinary way or after a fashion
that anybody else would have chosen.
One morning he came into the editorial room which he and I jointly
occupied. I bade him good-morning as usual, but he made no reply. After
a little while he turned upon me with some bitter, stinging utterance
which, if it had come from a younger man, I should have hotly resented.
Coming from a man of his age and distinction, I resented it only by
turning to my desk and maintaining silence during the entire morning.
When his work was done, he left the office without a word, leaving me to
feel that he meant the break between us--the cause of which I did not at
all understand--to be permanent, as I certainly intended that it should.
But when he entered the room next morning he stood still in the middle
of the floor, facing my back, for I had not turned my face away from
my desk.
[Sidenote: Mr. Briggs Explains]
"Good-morning!" he said. "Are you ready to apologize to me?"
I turned toward him with an involuntary smile at the absurdity of the
suggestion, and answered:
"I don't know what I should apologize for, Mr. Briggs."
"Neither do I," he answered. "My question was prompted by curiosity. It
usually happens that apologies come from the person offended, you know.
Are you going to write on this affair in the Senate, or shall I take
it up?"
From that moment his manner was what it always had been during our
association. Beyond what he had said he made no reference to the matter,
but after our work was finished he, in fact, explained his temper of the
day before, while carefully avoiding every suggestion that he meant to
explain it or that there was any connection between the explanation and
the thing explained.
"What do you think of servants?" he asked abruptly. I made some answer,
though I did not understand the reason for his question or its occasion.
"When I was in the Custom House," he resumed, "I had an opportunity to
buy, far below the usual price, some of the finest wines and brandies
ever imported. I bought some Madeira, some sherry, and some brandy--ten
gallons of each, in five-gallon demijohns--and laid them away in my
cellar, thinking the stock sufficient to last me as long as I lived.
I rejoiced in the certainty that however poor I might become, I should
always be able to offer a friend a glass of something really worthy
of a gentleman's attention. Night before last I asked my daughter to
replenish a decanter of sherry which had run low. She went to the cellar
and presently returned with a look on her face that made me think she
had seen a burglar. She reported that there wasn't a drop of anything
left in any of the demijohns. I sent for some detectives, and before
morning they solved the riddle. A servant girl who had resigned from our
service a week or two before had carried all the wine and brandy--two
bottlefuls at a time--to a miserable, disreputable gin mill, and sold
it for what the thievish proprietor saw fit to give. When I learned the
facts I lost my temper, which was a very unprofitable thing to do. I'm
late," looking at his watch, "and must be off."
Mr. Briggs had a keen sense of humor, which he tried hard to disguise
with a shaggy seeming of dogmatic positiveness. He would say his most
humorous things in the tone and with the manner of a man determined to
make himself as disagreeable as possible.
I sat with him at a public dinner one evening. He took the wines with
the successive courses, but when later some one, on the other side of
the table, lifted his glass of champagne and asked Mr. Briggs to drink
with him, he excused himself for taking carbonic water instead of the
wine, by saying:
"I'm a rigid 'temperance' man."
When we all smiled and glanced at the red and white wine glasses he had
emptied in the course of the meal, he turned upon us savagely, saying:
"You smile derisively, but I repeat my assertion that I'm a strict
'temperance' man; I never take a drink unless I want it."
He paused, and then added:
"Temperance consists solely in never taking a drink unless you want it.
Intemperance consists in taking drinks when some other fellow wants
them."
[Sidenote: Mr. Briggs's Generosity]
He was peculiarly generous of encouragement to younger men, when he
thought they deserved it. I may add that he was equally generous of
rebuke under circumstances of an opposite kind. I had entered journalism
without knowing the least thing about the profession, or trade--if that
be the fitter name for it, as I sometimes think it is--and I had not
been engaged in the work long enough to get over my modesty, when one
day I wrote a paragraph of a score or two lines to correct an error into
which the New York _Tribune_ had that morning fallen. Not long before
that time a certain swashbuckler, E. M. Yerger, of Jackson, Mississippi,
had committed a homicide in the nature of a political assassination. The
crime and the assassin's acquittal by reason of political influence had
greatly excited the indignation of the entire North.
There lived at the same time in Memphis another and a very different
E. M. Yerger, a judge whose learning, uprightness, and high personal
character had made him deservedly one of the best loved and most honored
jurists in the Southwest. At the time of which I now write, this Judge
E. M. Yerger had died, and his funeral had been an extraordinary
manifestation of popular esteem, affection, and profound sorrow.
The _Tribune_, misled by the identity of their names, had confounded the
two men, and had that morning "improved the occasion" to hurl a deal of
editorial thunder at the Southern people for thus honoring a fire-eating
assassin.
By way of correcting the error I wrote and printed an editorial
paragraph, setting forth the facts simply, and making no comments.
When Mr. Briggs next entered the office he took my hand warmly in both
his own, and said:
"I congratulate you. That paragraph of yours was the best editorial the
_Union_ has printed since I've been on the paper."
"Why, Mr. Briggs," I protested, "it was only a paragraph----"
"What of that?" he demanded in his most quarrelsome tone. "The Lord's
Prayer is only a paragraph in comparison with some of the 'graces' I've
heard distinguished clergymen get off at banquets by way of impressing
their eloquence upon the oysters that were growing warm under the
gaslights, while they solemnly prated."
"But there was nothing in the paragraph," I argued; "it only corrected
an error."
"Why, sir, do you presume to tell me what is and what isn't in an
article that I've read for myself? You're a novice, a greenhorn in this
business. Don't undertake to instruct my judgment, sir. That paragraph
was excellent editorial writing, because it corrected an error that
did a great injustice; because it gave important and interesting
information; because it set forth facts of public import not known to
our readers generally, and finally, because you put that final period
just where it belonged. Don't contradict me. Don't presume to argue
the matter. I won't stand it."
With that he left the room as abruptly as he had entered it, and with
the manner of a man who has quarreled and has put his antagonist down.
I smilingly recalled the lines in which Lowell so aptly described and
characterized him in "A Fable for Critics":
"There comes Harry Franco, and as he draws near,
You find that's a smile which you took for a sneer;
One half of him contradicts t'other; his wont
Is to say very sharp things and do very blunt;
His manner's as hard as his feelings are tender,
And a _sortie_ he'll make when he means to surrender;
He's in joke half the time when he seems to be sternest,
When he seems to be joking be sure he's in earnest;
He has common sense in a way that's uncommon,
Hates humbug and cant, loves his friends like a woman,
Builds his dislikes of cards and his friendships of oak,
Loves a prejudice better than aught but a joke;
Is half upright Quaker, half downright Come-Outer,
Loves Freedom too well to go stark mad about her;
Quite artless himself, is a lover of Art,
Shuts you out of his secrets and into his heart,
And though not a poet, yet all must admire
In his letters of Pinto his skill on the liar."
XXXIII
[Sidenote: Theodore Tilton]
When I first knew Theodore Tilton as my editor-in-chief, on the
_Union_, he was in his thirty-fi
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