American Adventures Part 18

Be they haters of the North or not, the old ladies of the South are among its chief glories, and it should be added that another of those glories is the appreciation that the South has for the white-haired heroines who are its mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers, and the unfailing natural homage that it pays them. I do not mean by this merely that children and grandchildren have been taught to treat their elders with respect. I do not mean merely that they love them. The thing of which I speak is beyond family feeling, beyond the respect of youth for age. It is a strong, superb sentiment, something as great as it is subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love and reverence of a proud people for its flag.

Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war. Of these only one spoke with heat. He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon women by soldiers--such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German invasion of Belgium and France--he replied with a great show of feeling that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea. At this my heart sank, for I had treasured the belief that, despite the roughness of war, unprotected women had generally been safe from the soldiers of North and South alike. What was my relief, then, on later receiving from this same young man a letter in which he declared that he had been mistaken, and that after many inquiries in Georgia he had been unable to learn of a single case of such crime. If it is indeed true that such things did not occur in the Civil War--and I believe confidently that it is true--then we have occasion, in the light of the European War, to revise the popular belief that of all wars civil war is the most horrible.

The att.i.tude of the modern South (the "New South" which, by the way, one Southerner described to me as meaning "northern capital and smoke") toward its own "unreconstructed" citizens, for all its sympathy and tenderness, is not without a glint of gentle humor. More than once, when my companion and I were received in southern homes with a cordiality that precluded any thought of sectional feeling, we were nevertheless warned by members of the younger generation--and their eyes would twinkle as they said it--to "look out for mother; she's unreconstructed." And you may be sure that when we were so warned we did "look out." It was well to do so! For though the mother might be a frail old lady, past seventy, with the face of an angel and the normal demeanor of a saint, we could see her bridle, as we were presented to her, over the thought there here were two Yankees in her home--Yankees!--we could see the light come flas.h.i.+ng up into her eyes as they encountered ours, and could feel beneath the veil of her austere civility the dagger points of an eternal enmity. By dint of self-control on her part, and the utmost effort upon ours to be tactful, the presentation ceremony was got over with, and after some formal speeches, resembling those which, one fancies, may be exchanged by opposing generals under a flag of truce, we would be rescued from her, removed from the room, before her forbearance should be strained, by our presence, to the point of breaking. A baleful look would follow us as we withdrew, and we would retire with a better understanding of the flaming spirit which, through that long, b.l.o.o.d.y conflict against overwhelming odds in wealth, supplies, and men, sustained the South, and which at last enabled it to accept defeat as n.o.bly as it had accepted earlier victories.... How one loves a gentle old lady who can hate like that!

In this chapter, when it appeared originally, in "Collier's Weekly," I made the statement that I had seldom spent an hour in conversation with a Southerner without hearing some mention of the Civil War, and that I had heard other Northerners remark upon this matter, and express surprise at the tenacity with which the war holds its place in the foreground of the southern mind.

This, like many another of my southern observations, brought me letters from readers of "Collier's," residing in the South. A great number of the letters thus elicited, as well as comments made upon these chapters by the southern press, have been of no small interest to me. On at least one subject (the question discussed in the next chapter, as to whether the expression "you-all" is ever used in the singular) my correspondents have convinced me that my earlier statement was an error, while on other subjects they have modified my views, and on still others made my convictions more profound. Where it has been possible, and where it has seemed, for one reason or another, to be worth while, I have endeavored, while revising the story of my southern wanderings for this book, to make note of the other fellow's point of view, especially in cases where he disagrees with me.

The following, then, is from a letter written on the stationery of Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee University, and applies to certain statements contained in this chapter:

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a newspaper publisher: "Were I the publisher of a paper, instead of the usual division into Foreign, Domestic, etc., I think I should distribute everything under the following heads: 1. True. 2. Probable. 3. Wanting confirmation. 4. Lies, and be careful in subsequent papers to correct all errors in preceding ones."

Allow me to suggest that your story might, under Mr. Jefferson's category, be placed under "2." Perhaps you went to see "The Birth of a Nation" before you wrote it. It has been my experience that my acquaintances among the F.F.V.'s have been far more interested in whether Boston or Brooklyn would win the pennant than in discussing the Civil War. By the young men of the South the War was forgotten long ago.

This letter has caused me to wonder whether the frequency with which my companion and I heard the Civil War discussed, may not, perhaps, have been due, at least in part, to our own inquiries, resulting from the consuming interest that we had in hearing of the War from those who lived where it was fought.

Yet, after all, it seems to me most natural that the South should remember, while the North forgets. Not all Northerners were in the war.

But all Southerners were; if a boy was big enough to carry a gun, he went. The North almost completely escaped invasion, and upon one occasion when a southern army did march through northern territory, the conduct of the invading troops toward the civilian population (the false Barbara Frietchie legend to the contrary notwithstanding) was so exemplary as to set a record which is probably unequaled in history.[2]

The South, upon the other hand, was constantly under invasion, and the record of destruction wrought by northern armies in the valley of the Shenandoah, on the March to the Sea, and in some other instances, is writ in poverty and mourning unto this day.

[2] See chapter on Colonel Taylor and General Lee.

Thus, except politically, the North now feels not the least effect from the war. But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined--as instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.

So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be studied in school under the heading "United States History," it has not, in southern eyes, become altogether "book history," but is history that lives--in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields, and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.

Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not forget. The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever. If to err is human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same token, attained something like divinity.

Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.

Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in those States which suffered the greatest hards.h.i.+ps. I know, for instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to enter the Ma.s.sachusetts Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and there are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and Stripes. The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the South. Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother's bridal wreath. When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a negro child. However, war had not then broken out in Europe. It would be different now.

A Virginia lady told me of having gone to a dentist in Winchester, Virginia, and having taken her little niece with her. The child watched the dentist put a rubber dam in her aunt's mouth, and then, childlike, began to ask questions. She was a northern child, and she had evidently heard some one in the town speak of Sheridan's ride.

"Auntie," she said, "was Sheridan a Northerner or a Southerner?"

Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist answered for her. "He was a drunken Yankee!" he declared vehemently.

When, later, the rubber dam was removed, the aunt protested.

"Doctor," she reproved, "you should not have said such a thing to my niece. She is from New York."

"Then," returned the unrepentant dentist, "she has heard the truth for once!"

Doubtless this man was an inheritor of hate, like the descendants of one uncompromisingly bitter old Southerner whose will, to be seen among the records of the Hanover County courthouse, in Virginia, bequeaths to his "children and grandchildren and their descendants throughout all future generations, the bitter hatred and everlasting malignity of my heart and soul against the Yankees, including all people north of Mason and Dixon's line."

CHAPTER XIX

"YOU-ALL" AND OTHER SECTIONAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Let us make an honorable retreat.

--AS YOU LIKE IT.

Those who write school histories and wish them adopted by southern schools have to handle the Civil War with gloves. Such words as "rebel"

and "rebellion" are resented in the South, and the historian must go softly in discussing slavery, though he may put on the loud pedal in speaking of State Rights, the fact being that the South not only knows now, but, as evidenced by the utterances of her leading men, from Jefferson to Lee, knew long before the war that slavery was a great curse; whereas, on the question of State Rights, including the theoretical right to secede from the Union--this being the actual question over which the South took up arms--there is much to be said on the southern side. Colonel Robert Bingham, superintendent of the Bingham School, Asheville, North Carolina, has made an exhaustive study of the question of secession, and has set forth his findings in several scholarly and temperately written booklets.

Colonel Bingham proves absolutely, by quotation of their own words, that the framers of the Const.i.tution regarded that doc.u.ment as a _compact_ between the several States. He shows that three of the States (Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island) joined in this compact _conditionally_, with the clear purpose of resuming their independent sovereignty as States, should the general government use its power for the oppression of the States; that up to the time of the Mexican War the New England States contended for, not against, the right to secede; that John Quincy Adams went so far as to negotiate with England with a view to the secession of the New England States, because of Jefferson's Embargo Act, and moreover that up to 1840 the United States Government used as a textbook for cadets at West Point, Rawle's "View of the Const.i.tution," a book which teaches that the Union is dissoluble. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, were, therefore, in all probability, given this book as students at West Point, and consequently, if we would have honest history, we must face the astonis.h.i.+ng fact that there is evidence to show _that they learned the doctrine of secession at the United States Military Academy_.

Colonel Bingham, who, it may be remarked, served with distinction in the Confederate Army, has very kindly supplemented, in a letter to me, his published statements. He writes:

Secession was legal _theoretically_, but practically the conditions on which the thirteen Independent Republics, covering a little strip on the Atlantic coast, came to an agreement, could not possibly be applied to the great inter-Oceanic Empire into which these thirteen Independent Republics had developed.

"Theory is a good horse in the stable, but may make an arrant jade on the journey"--to paraphrase Goldsmith--and the only way in which these irreconcilable differences could be settled was by bullet and bayonet, which settled them right and finally.

Once such matters as these are fully understood in the North, there will be left but one grave issue between North and South, that issue being over the question of whether or not Southerners, under any circ.u.mstances, use the phrase "you-all" in the singular.

"Whatever you write of the South," said our hostess at a dinner party in Virginia, "don't make the mistake of representing any one from this paht of the country, white oh black, educated oh ignorant, as saying 'you-all' meaning one person only."

When I remarked mildly that it seemed to me I had often seen the phrase so used in books, and heard it in plays, eight or ten southern ladies and gentlemen at the table pounced upon me, all at once. "Yes!" they agreed, with a kind of polite violence, "books and plays by Yankees!"

"If," one of the gentlemen explained, "you write to a friend who has a family, and say, according to the northern practice, 'I hope to see you when you come to my town,' you write something which is really ambiguous, since the word 'you' may refer only to your friend, or may refer also to his family. Our southern 'you-all' makes it explicit."

I told him that in the North we also used the word "all" in connection with "you," though we accented the two evenly, and did not compound them, but he seemed to believe that "you" followed by "all" belonged exclusively to the South.

The argument continued almost constantly throughout the meal. Not until coffee was served did the subject seem to be exhausted. But it was not, for after pouring a demi-ta.s.se our hostess lifted a lump of sugar in the tongs, and looking me directly in the eye inquired: "Do you-all take sugah?"

Undoubtedly it would have been wiser, and politer, to let this pa.s.s, but the discussion had filled me with curiosity, not only because of my interest in the localism, but also because of the amazing intensity with which it had been discussed.

"But," I exclaimed, "you just said 'you-all,' apparently addressing me.

Didn't you use it in the singular?"

No sooner had I spoken than I was sorry. Every one looked disconcerted.

There was silence for a moment. I was very much ashamed.

"Oh, no," she said at last. "When I said 'you-all' I meant you and Mr.

Morgan." (She p.r.o.nounced it "Moh-gan," with a lovely drawl.) As she made this statement, she blushed, poor lady!

Being to blame for her discomfiture, I could not bear to see her blush, and looked away, but only to catch the eye of my companion, and to read in its evil gleam the thought: "Of course they use it in the singular.

But aren't you ashamed of having tripped up such a pretty creature on a point of dialect?"

Though my interest in the southern idiom had caused me to forget about the sugar, my hostess had not forgotten.

"Well," she said, still balancing the lump above the cup, and continuing gamely to put the question in the same form, and to me: "Do you-all take sugah, oh not?"