Part 9 (2/2)

A few markers of the simplest, and a plain tablet now and then where a hero fell or valour was unusually conspicuous, should suffice, for a field is more impressive that lies for the most part in its original rudeness and solitude. At Antietam I found little obtrusive. Sherman's fields on the way to and about Atlanta have not been marred; nor at Franklin and Nashville are the plains parked and obelisked out of recognition. At Bull Run I climbed with a veteran of the signal-service into the top of a high tree, an old war-time station, on the hill near the Henry House. The precarious platform remained.

From such an eyrie in the same grove, perhaps from this same tree, a Southern friend of mine, on the battle-day, caught sight more than two leagues away of the glint of sunlight on cannon and bayonets toward Sudley Springs, and sent timely notice to Beauregard that a Federal column was turning his left. Under my eye the landscape was unchanged, with no smoothings or intrusions to embarra.s.s the imagination in making the scene real. But it was in the Wilderness that I felt especially grateful that the wild thickets for the most part had been let alone. I found at Fredericksburg an old Confederate, one of Mahone's command, and hiring an excellent roadster, we drove on a perfect autumn day first to Spottsylvania Court House, then across country to the Brock road, then home by the Wilderness church and Chancellorsville. On the area we traversed were fought four of our most memorable battles, an area now scarcely less tangled and lonely than when the Federals poured across the Rappahannock into its thickets by the thousand, and were so memorably met. My veteran knew the pikes and the by-paths, and we fraternised with the warmth usual among foemen who at last have become friends. He knew the story well of every wood-path and cross-roads. Certainly I was glad that the rugged acres had undergone no ”improvement,” and that the eye fell so nearly on what the old-time soldiers saw. It so happened it was election-day. There were polling-places at the court-houses of Fredericksburg and Spottsylvania, at Todd's Tavern, and the Chancellor house, names bearing solemn a.s.sociations. The neighbourhoods had come out to vote, and introduced by my comrade, I had some interesting encounters. It was a good climax, when toward the end, near the Chancellor House, we met in the road a patriarchal figure, whitebearded and st.u.r.dy, on his way home from the polls. It was old Talley, whose log-house, in 1862, was the point from which Stonewall Jackson began his sudden rush upon Hooker's right. Talley, then a young farmer, had walked at the General's stirrup pointing out the way. He had interesting things to tell of Stonewall Jackson at that moment when his career culminated. ”What did he seem like?” I queried.

”He was as cool and business-like as an old farmer looking after his fences.” On an old battle-field which had been ill.u.s.trated by an achievement of the Stonewall division especially brilliant, I chanced to meet a grey veteran who had taken part in it, a North Carolinian who had come back to review the scene. We fraternised, of course.

”What did Stonewall Jackson look like?” I said. Stepping close to me, the ”Tarheel” extended his two gnarled forefingers, and pressed between the tips my cheek-bones on either side. ”He had the broadest face across here I ever saw,” he said. Such a physiognomical trait is perhaps indicative of power of brain and will, but I do not recall it among the usual descriptions of Jackson.

Naturally, after surveying much Virginia country once war-swept, as I came to the head of the Shenandoah Valley, I could not miss a visit to Lexington, where repose in honoured graves two such protagonists as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is a beautiful town among low mountains green to the summit, and in the streets not a few lovely homes of the Virginia colonial type, draped with ivy and wisteria. There stand the buildings of Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee University, in the chapel of which lies buried Robert E. Lee, and a short mile beyond is the Virginia Military Inst.i.tute, from which Stonewall Jackson went forth to his fame. The memorial at Jackson's grave is appropriate, a figure in bronze, rugged as he was in face and attire, the image of him as he fought and fell. Different, but more impressive is the memorial of Lee. You enter through the chapel where the students gather daily, then pa.s.sing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where n.o.bly conceived in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as champion in chief of the ”Lost Cause,” but the light on his face is not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to the Military Inst.i.tute. Stonewall Jackson had been for ten years a teacher there. The turf of the parade I was crossing had perhaps felt no footfall more often than his. Two or three hundred pupils, the flower of Virginia youth, were a.s.sembled in battalion, and I witnessed from a favourable point their almost perfect drill. As the sun was about to set, they formed in a far-extending line, with each piece at present.

They were saluting the flag, which now began slowly to descend from, its staff. Lo, it was the flag of the Union. The band played, I thought, with unusual sweetness, the Star-Spangled Banner, and to the music those picked youths of the South, sons and grandsons of the upholders of the right to sever, did all possible honour, on the sod which Stonewall Jackson trod, hard by the grave of Lee, to the symbol of a country united, states now and hereafter in a brotherhood not to be broken! It was a scene to evoke tears of deep emotion, for never before or since has it come home to me so powerfully that the Union had been preserved.

Closing as I do now my record of memories, I feel that the most momentous of the crises through which it has been my lot to pa.s.s is that attending the maintenance of the Federal bond in the United States. a.s.semblies of veterans of the Confederacy and those who address them scout the idea that they fought to preserve negro bondage. A late historian of our Civil War, Professor Paxon, of Wisconsin, holds it to be ”reasonably certain” that in another generation slavery would have disappeared of itself, a contention surely open to dispute. Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it const.i.tute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating pa.s.sionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve!

Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle was that a State could not be coerced,--and that therefore sovereignty lay in the scattered const.i.tuents and not at the centre. The arbitrament of the sword was sharp and swift, and happily for the world it went against them. I well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched and seamed with bewildering spots of colour. The effort was to portray the position of some three hundred independent political units, duchies, princ.i.p.alities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute. It seemed like a pathological chart presenting a face broken out with an unseemly tetter. The land indeed, in those days, was afflicted by a sad political disease. The Germans call it ”_Particularismus_” or ”_Vielstaaterei_,” the breaking up of a nationality into a ma.s.s of fragments. Some on the map were scarcely larger than pinheads, and in actual area hardly exceeded a fair-sized farm. In that time Heine laughed at one of them after this fas.h.i.+on, while describing a journey over it in bad weather:

”Of Buckeburg's princ.i.p.ality Full half on my boots I carried.

Such muddy roads I've never beheld Since here in the world I've tarried.”

The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity of Germany and the character of her people. She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her ma.s.ses, lacking the stimulus of a n.o.ble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without a.s.sociations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion. Spirits like Leasing and Goethe, all but derided patriotism. It scarcely held a place among the proper virtues. The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious, jealous over a petty ”balance of power” and always liable to war. The disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy's imagination was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all that is best in human nature. For a few years, before the adoption of the Const.i.tution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest. In 1787 came the beneficent change. The thirteen and those that followed the thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying in many lands. Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one.

Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the ”Little Englanders,”

once a noteworthy company, succ.u.mbed to a conquering sentiment that England should become a ”great world-Venice,” and the seas no longer barriers, but the highways, through which the parent-state and her brood of dominions, though flung far into many zones, should yet go easily to and fro, not separate nations, nor yet a company bound together by a mere rope of sand, but one. Great nations replaced little states.

Had the South prevailed in the Civil War, there would have been a distinct and calamitous set-back in the world movement. It would have been a reaction toward particularism, and how far might it not have gone? Into what granulations might not our society have crumbled? The South's principle once recognised, there could have been no valid or lasting tie between States. Counties even might have a.s.sumed to nullify, and towns to stand apart sufficient unto themselves. When the thing was doubtful with us, the North by no means escaped the infection. The New York City of Fernando Wood contemplated isolation not only from the Union but from the State of which it was a part. Had the spirit then so rife really prevailed, the map of America to-day might have been no less blotched with the morbid tetter of particularism than that of the Germany of sixty years ago.

Centralisation may no doubt go too far, but in the other extreme may lie the gravest danger, and rus.h.i.+ng thitherward the South was blind to the risk. I stood with all reverence by the graves of the two great men at Lexington. Perhaps no Americans have been in their way more able, forceful, and really high-purposed. But they were misguided, and their perverted swords all but brought to pa.s.s for us and the future the profoundest calamity. I am proud to have been in the generation that fought them down, believing that upholding the country was doing a service to the world. I think of that lofty sentence inscribed upon the memorial of Goldwin Smith at Ithaca, ”Above all nations is Humanity.” Patriotism is not the highest of virtues. It is indeed a vice if it limits the sympathies to a part. Love for the whole is the sovereign virtue, and the patriotism is unworthy which is not subordinate to this, recognising that its only fitting work is to lead up to a love which embraces all.

And now I toss the ”Last Leaf” on my probably over-large acc.u.mulation of printed pages. What I have set down is in no way an autobiography.

It is simply the presentment of the panorama of nearly fourscore momentous years as unrolled before one pair of eyes. Whether the eyes have served their owner well or ill the gentle reader will judge. I hope I have not obtruded myself unduly, and that I may be pardoned as I close, if I am for a moment personal. My eyes have given me notice that they have done work enough and I do not blame them for insisting upon rest. As to organs in general I have scarcely known that I had any. They have maintained such peace among themselves, and been so quiet and deferential as they have performed their functions that I have taken no note of them, having rarely experienced serious illness.

Had Aesop possessed my anatomy, he would have had small data for inditing his fable as to the discord between the ”Members” and their commissariat, and the long generations might have lacked that famous incentive to harmony and co-operation. I venture to say this in explanation of my stubborn optimism, which is due much less to any tranquil philosophy I may have imbibed than to my inveterate eupepsia.

My optimism has not decreased as I have grown old, and I record here as the last word, my faith that the world grows better. I recall with vividness nineteen Presidential campaigns, and believe that in no one has the outlook been so hopeful as now. Never have the leaders at the fore in all parties been more able and high-minded. I have purposed in this book to speak of the dead and not the living. Were it in place for me to speak of men who are still strivers, I could give good reason, derived from personal touch, for the faith I put in men whose names now resound. However the nation moves, strong and good hands will receive it, and it will survive and make its way. Agitation, the meeting of crises, the anxious application of expedients to threatening dangers,--these we are in the midst of, we always have been and always shall be. Turmoil is a condition of life, beneficently so, for through turmoil comes the education that leads man on and up.

We encounter shocks that will seem seismic. But it will only be the settling of society to firmer bases of justice. In our confusions England is our fellow, but a better world is shaping there, though in the earthquake crash of old strata so much seems to totter. And farther east in France, Germany, and Russia are better things, and signs of still better. Levant and Orient rock with violence, but they are rocking to happier and humaner order. What greater miracle than the coming to the front among nations of j.a.pan! Will her people perhaps distance their western teachers and models. Shall we reverse the poet's line to read ”Better fifty years of China than a cycle of the West?” Society proceeds toward betterment, and not catastrophe, as individuals may proceed on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. The troubles of the child, the broken toy, the slight from a friend, the failure of an expected holiday, are mole-hills to be sure, but in his circ.u.mscribed horizon they take an Alpine magnitude. His strength for climbing is in the gristle, nor has he philosophy to console him when blocked by the inevitable. When the child becomes a man his troubles are larger, but to surmount them he has an increment of spiritual vigour, which should swell with pa.s.sing years. He lives in vain who fails to learn to bear and forbear serenely. For human society, and for the individuals that compose it, the happy time lies not behind but before, and I invite the gentle reader to accept with me the wise and kind thought of Rabbi Ben Ezra, now growing trite on the lips of men because we feel it to be true:

”Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be,-- The last of life for which the first was made.

Our times are in His hand Who saith a whole is planned.

Youth shows but half. Trust G.o.d; see all; Nor be afraid.”

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