Part 10 (1/2)
In 1835, when a boy fresh from Parley's History of America, the future humorist made a journey from c.u.mberland County to Lynchburg, hearing by the way alarming sounds which the initiated recognized as the report of the blasting of rocks on the ”Jeems and Kanawha Canell.” To the boy, with second-hand memories of Was.h.i.+ngton and his men tramping confusedly about his mind, the noises signified a cannonade and he waited in terrified excitement for the British bullet that was to put him beyond the conflicts of the world, trying to postpone the evil moment by hiding between two large men who were fellow-pa.s.sengers with him. This was in the days when the celebrated ”Canell” was a subject for the imagination to contemplate as a triumph of futurity and an object for hope to feed upon--a period in which the traveller embarked upon a fascinating batteau and spent a week of dreamy beauty in sailing from Lynchburg to Richmond and ten days back to the hill city.
Time was not money in those days, it was vision and peace and color and suns.h.i.+ne and all wherein the soul of man delighteth itself and reveleth in the joy of living. The stream of imagination was no more dammed than the river in which ”shad used to run to Lynchburg,”
showing a highly developed aesthetic taste on the part of the shad. The youthful traveller went to the Eagle Hotel and took a view of Main Street and dared not even wonder if he should ever be big enough to live in Richmond. Rapt soul of youth's dawn, with myriad dreams all to vanish when the sun rises upon the morning!
On his return from an absence of two years in the North the great Ca.n.a.l was completed and, while his early impression of the unparallelled magnitude of the Queen City had suffered revision, his visions of journeying by ca.n.a.l were yet to be realized. At the foot of Eighth Street, Richmond, he took the packet-boat, pa.s.sed under Seventh Street bridge, and with the other pa.s.sengers lingered on deck to see Richmond slowly disappear in the distance. That night the doleful packet-horn, contrasted with his memory of the cheerful, musical note of the old stage-horn, brought to the lad his first realization of the inadequacies of modern improvements.
Ascending the James the traveller had a view of the best of the old Virginia life, its wealth of beauty, its home comfort, its atmosphere of serenity, of old memories, rich and vivid, like the wine that lay cob-webbed in ancestral cellars, of gracious hospitality, of a softly tinted life like the color in old pictures and the soul in old books.
The gentle humorist lived to see that life pa.s.s away from the Old Dominion and all too soon he vanished into another world where, like all true Virginians, he expected to find the old home-life again.
These ca.n.a.l days were in the early d.i.c.kens period, and occasionally the youthful traveller could not resist the temptation to go below and lose himself in those pages which had then almost as potent a charm in their novelty as they have now in their friendly familiarity. But the river-isle, which held an interest in futurity for him because of his intention to found a romance there when he should be ”big enough to write for the papers,” would draw him back to the deck. There was a path across the hills that the pa.s.sengers must follow, disembarking for that purpose. Near Manchester was a haunted house which he looked upon with those ghostly s.h.i.+vers that made a person so delightfully uncomfortable, for he, like the rest of us, did believe in ghosts, whatever he might say to the contrary. There was the ruined mill and, best of all, the Three-Mile Lock, inspiring him with the highest ambition of his life, to be a lock-keeper. Then came Richmond; the metropolis of the world, to the young voyager.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DR. GEORGE W. BAGBY From the portrait in the possession of the family]
Dr. Bagby studied for his profession at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania and from there went to Lynchburg, opening an office where now stands the opera house. Unfortunately for his professional career but happily for the cause of the literature of Virginia life, the office of the _Lynchburg Virginian_ was near, and its editor, Mr. James McDonald, proved a kindred soul to the young physician. In the absences of the editor, Dr. Bagby filled his chair and fell a victim to the fascination with which the Demon of the Fourth Estate lures his chosen to their doom. In Lynchburg he first found his true calling and there, too, he met with his first failure, the demise of the _Lynchburg Express_, of which he was part owner, and which went to the wall by reason of the well-known weakness of genius in regard to business matters.
Upon the collapse of the _Express_ Dr. Bagby went to Was.h.i.+ngton as correspondent for a number of papers, and while there attained distinction as a humorist through the ”Letters of Mozis Addums,”
written for the _Southern Literary Messenger_, of Richmond.
His abiding place is of hazy uncertainty, one of his kinsmen saying--”He didn't live anywhere,” He might as well have dwelt in his own ”Hobgoblinopolis.” His wanderings had taught him the peculiar charm of the Virginia roads of that day, as evidenced by the aspiration of ”Mozis Addums” when contemplating the limitations of his ”Fifty Millions”:
I want to give Virginia a perfect system of county roads, so that one may get off at a station and go to the nearest country-house without breaking his neck, and it would take five hundred millions to do that.
It may be, as the doctor laments, that ”The old Virginia gentleman, All of the olden time,” has pa.s.sed away, the colonial house is modernized, and the ghost, the killing of whom would be ”an enormity far greater than the crime of killing a live man,” has been laid to rest for half a century, but the old scenes and the old-time life come back to us who once knew it, in the pages of the perennial boy who recalls the time when ”me and Billy Ivins and the other fellows set forth with six pine poles and a cymling full of the best and biggest fis.h.i.+ng worms,” to fish in the Appomattox where it ”curves around the foot of Uncle Jim's plantation,” and where there is a patriarchal beech with a tangle of roots whereon the Randolphs of historic note were wont to repose in the days long gone. This fis.h.i.+ng party is under the fair October skies when ”the morn, like an Eastern queen, is sumptuously clad in blue and gold; the sheen of her robes in dazzling sunlight, and she comes from her tent of glistening, silken, celestial warp, beaming with tender smiles.” ”It is a day of days for flatback, provided the moon is right.” But ”Billy Ivins swears that the planetary bodies have nothing to do with fish--it's all confounded superst.i.tion.” So they cast in their hooks, ”Sutherland's best,” and talk about Harper's Ferry and ”old Brown” until one of the party ”thinks he has a nibble” and begs for silence, which at once supervenes out of respect for the momentous interests hanging in the balance. When the excitement is over the frivolous Bagby takes advantage of the relief from suspense to make an exasperating pun, after the manner of a newspaper man, and ”Billy Ivins swears he will kill him for a fool.”
Oh, there were great old times on the Appomattox in the olden days, before its waves had turned battle-red and flashed that savage tint along the river-bank for all coming time.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”AVENEL”
The home of the Burwells, where Dr. Bagby spent many happy days]
A part of the conversation shows us that this fis.h.i.+ng expedition took place in the autumn of 1859, not a year before Dr. Bagby was called to the post of editor of the _Southern Literary Messenger_, taking the place of the poet, John R. Thompson, who was sent to England to lead the forlorn hope of a magazine to represent the Southern cause in London. A banquet was given at Zetelle's restaurant as a farewell to Mr. Thompson and welcome to Dr. Bagby.
The office of the _Messenger_ was in the Law Building, a four-storied structure erected in 1846 on the southeast corner of Capitol Square, fronting on Franklin Street. Here he was hard at work, making the _Messenger_ worthy of its former editors, his predecessor, Mr.
Thompson, Mr. White, of early days, Edgar A. Poe, and a succession of brilliant writers, only less widely known, when the guns before Sumter tempted the new editor to the field, a position for which he was ill fitted as to physical strength, whatever might be the force of his patriotism. He was soon running risks of pneumonia from the effects of over-drilling and the chilling breezes from Bull Run Mountain, and making up his mind ”not to desert, but to get killed at the first opportunity,” that being the most direct route he could think of to the two prime essentials of life, a clean s.h.i.+rt and solitude. He neither deserted nor was killed, but was detailed to write letters and papers for one of the officers, and slept through the fight of the 18th at Mana.s.sas as a result of playing night orderly from midnight to morning.
Under the cloudless sky of the perfect Sunday, the twenty-first, he watched the progress of the battle till the cheer that rang from end to end of the Confederate line told him that the South had won. After midnight that night he carried to the telegraph office the message in which President Davis announced the victory and, walking back through the clear, still night, saw the comet, forerunner of evil, hanging over the field, as if in recognition of a fiery spirit on earth akin to its own. At headquarters on Monday, the 22d, he looked out at the pouring rain and raged over the inaction which kept the victorious army idle on the field of victory instead of following up the advantage by a march into the enemy's Capital, a movement which he thought could have been carried through to complete success.
Having watched over his wounded friend, Lieutenant James K. Lee, until death came with eternal peace. Dr. Bagby was sent with the dead soldier to Richmond and soon afterward was discharged because of ill health, ”and thus ended the record of an unrenowned warrior.”
He returned to his work on the _Messenger_ and the editorial sanctum became the meeting place of the wits of Richmond. It was here that the celebrated Confederate version of ”Mother Goose” was evolved from the conjoined wisdom of the circle and written with the stub of the editorial pencil on the ”cartridge-paper table-cloth,” one stanza dealing with a certain Northern general thus:
Little Be-Pope came on with a lope, Jackson, the Rebel, to find him; He found him at last, then ran very fast, With his gallant invaders behind him.
The various authors were astonished to find their productions in the next issue of the _Messenger_ and were later dismayed when the verses were read at a meeting of the Mosaic Club, each with the name of the writer attached.
While editor of the _Messenger_, Dr. Bagby wrote occasionally for the _Richmond Examiner_, thereby becoming a.s.sociated in a friendly way with its editor, John M. Daniel, whose brilliant and continuous fight upon the administration at Richmond kept him vividly before the public. Though the genial doctor deplored the aggressiveness of the _Examiner_, he could not resist the temptation to employ his trenchant pen in treating of public affairs. This led to his possession of the famous latchkey which ”fitted the door of the house on Broad Street, opposite the African Church,” a key of which he wrote that it ”has its charm,” and certainly one which he made more enchanting to his readers than any other such article has ever proved.
These two men, so different in view-point and expression, so similar in principle and purpose, met in Was.h.i.+ngton in 1861 at Brown's Hotel, that famous old hostelry dear to the Southern heart in the years before the tide of war swept the old Was.h.i.+ngton away forever and brought a new South to take the place of the old plantation life.