Century Magazine 1887 Vol. 12

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T9? CENTU RY ILLUSTRATED AVONTHLY ^lAGAZINE. M(^ISS7,1o October ISSZ T9f CENTURY C9 , NEW-YORK. T. FISHER UNVIN, LONDON. Vol. XXXIK XexaSerzes m.XII.

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INDEX TO THE CENTURY MAGAZINE. VOL. XXXIV. NEW SERIES: VOL. XII. Adams, John, An Incident in the Life of . George Bancroft . With portrait of Oliver Ellsworth, and frontispiece portrait (facing page 323). Alsace and Lorraine. See “Blanc.” Animal Locomotion in the Muybridge Photographs . Talcott Williams... Illustrations from photographs. Apaches, Among the . Frederick Schwatka . Illustrations by A. Brennan, I. R. Wiles, George DeForest Brush, E. J. Meeker, and from photographs. Atkinson, Edward. Low Prices, High Wages, Small Profits; — What makes them? . With charts. 434 356 41 568 Azalia . Illustrations by E. W. Kemble. Joel Chandler I/arris.^/[.Oy 712, 881 Bird-Calls. See “ Sportsman.” Blanc, Louis, Personal Recollections of. With Notes Concern- \ j ING Alsace and Lorraine . yJCarl Blind . 75, 477 With a portrait. Boat-Racing by Amateurs . Henry Eckford . 189 (See also "College Boat-Racing.") British Song, Twelve Years of . Edmund Clarence Sted, nan . . S99 Camera Club of Cincinnati, The . Illustrations from photographs. (See also " Photographer.") Cathedrals. See “ Peterborough ” and “ Ely.” Chemistry of Food and Nutrition, The . Illustrations by W. H. Drake. Divight W, Hnntington .... 729 W. O, Atwater. .59, 237, 397, 733 “Christian Science,” and “Mind Cure” . j, m. Buckley College Boat- Racing and the New London Regatta . Julian Hawthorne ...... Illustrations by W. A. Rogers. Comet, Is it a Piece of a . William Earl Hidden . Illustrations by Henry W. Troy. Constitution, The Framers and Framing of the . John Bach McMaster (See also "Topics of the Time," and "Open Letters.") Crooked John . Hjahnar Hjorth Boyesen ... 418 176 534 746 405

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IV INDEX. Education and Social Progress Ely Cathedral . Illustrations by Joseph Pennell Exile, Notes of a Professional Page T. T. Hunger . 268 Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer 803 E. S. Nadal . 28, 566 Flowers. See ‘‘Wild Flowers.” Food, How IT Nourishes the Body . IH. O. Atwater . 237 Illustrations by W. H. Drake, and from photographs. Food, The Potential Energy OF . O. Atwater . 397 Illustrations by W. H. Drake, J. F. Runge, and from photographs. Food, The Digestibility of . O. Atwater . 733 With diagram and tables. Food. See “ Chemistry.” r 7- 7 . 000 Foot-Ball, The American Game of . Alexander Johnston . 000 Illustrations by Irving R. Wiles. Greely Expedition. See “Kivigtok.” Hand-Car 412, C. P. R . ^ohn Heard, Jr . 867 Illustration by Gilbert Gaul. J.LEN . Harriet Lewis Bradley . 741 Hundredth Man, The. (Conclusion.) . Frank R. Stockton . . . . 30 192, 346, 497, 685, 872 Irving, Washington, A Glimpse of, at Home . Clarence Cook . With frontispiece portrait (facing page 3). . Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Illustrations by Mary Hallock Foote and I. R. Wiles. Jefferson’s (Thomas) Home . John G. Nicolay . With frontispiece portrait and illustrations by Harry Fenn. (See also “ Monticello.”) S3 220 643 Kivigtok, Our, an Episode of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition . .A. W. Greely . 555 Illustrations by Mary Hallock Foote. ( J. J. Nicolay. Lincoln, Abraham : A History . ^ jj^y. Illustrations by Harry Fenn, E. J. Meeker, W. Taber, Gilbert Gaul, and from daguerreotypes and photographs. The Border Conflict . The Attack on Sumner and the Dred Scott Case . The Lincoln-Douglas Debates . . . Lincoln’s Cooper Institute Speech . Lincoln’s Nomination and Election . . . The Secession Movement . i 82 203 369 509 658 819 Meteorite. See “ Comet.” Mind Cure. See “ Christian Science.” Monticello, The Later Years of. . . Illustrations by Harry Fenn. Music, The Sportsman’s . Illustrations by E. Seton Thompson. (See also “Jefferson.”) Muybridge Photographs. See “Animal.” Frank R. Stockton William J. Henderson 654 413 New London Regatta. See “College Boat-Racing.” Peterborough Cathedral . Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer ibi Illustrations by Joseph Pennell. Pharaoh, Finding . Edward L. Wilson . 3 Illustrations by I. R. Wiles, E. J. Meeker, and from photographs by the author. Pharaoh the Oppressor, and his Daughter, in the Light paine . n THEIR Monuments . ) Illustrations from photographs and fac-similes. Photographer, The Amateur . Illustrations from photographs. Poets, British. See “ British.” .Alexander Black . 722 (See also “Camera.”)

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INDEX, I V Page Sister Todhunter’s Heart . h, s. Edwards . 335 Illustrations by E. W. Kemble, Snubbin’ Through Jersey . } ^ Jersey S E Hopkinson Smith ^ . \J.B. Millet Illustrations by George Wharton Edwards, F. Hopkinson Smith, and Oliver H. Perry. Social Progress and Education . ‘ t T Hunger 268 Songs OF the War, The . ; .Brander Matthews. 6io With notes on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” . Julia Ward Hoive . 629 With frontispiece portrait (facing page 483), and autographs of Julia Ward Howe, William Culien Bryant, James R. Randall, and James S. Gibbons. Sportsman’s Music, The . William /, Henderson . 413 Illustrations by E. Seton Thompson. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. See “ Uncle Tom.” Tolstoi, Count, A Visit to . . George Hennan . . With frontispiece portrait (facing page 163). “Uncle Tom” at Home in Kentucky... . James Lane Allen Illustrations by E. W. Kemble, and frontispiece portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe (facing page 803). Whitsun Harp, Regulator . Octave Thanet. . . . Illustrations by E. W. Kemble. Wild Flowers, Among the . John Btirroughs. . , Illustrations by Helena de Kay Gilder and Harry Fenn. ZwEiBAK; OR, Notes of a Professional Exile . E. S. Nadal . 252 852 . . Ill ••• 323 28, 566 POETRY. Amiel. (The “ Journal Intime.”). . . . Angel of Sleep, The . Deserter, The . Desire of Sleep . Divine Paradoxes . Frailty’s Shield . . “ H. H.’s” Grave . His Argument. Ad PIominem . Ideals . If . Interpretation . Irish Mound, From an Ancient . I Shall Find Rest . Israel . Illustrations by Kenyon Cox. Japanese Lover, The Rejected . . . . Keats . Loss AND Gain . Madrigal, The . My Shadow . Noblesse Oblige . Nothin’ to Say . Illustration by Irving R. Wiles. One in Two . Over the Hills . Poseidon . Reformer, The . Sea’s Voice, The . Shakspere, After Reading . Silence . .Robert Underwood Johnson. . 40 .Robert Burns Wilson . 947 .Anthony Morehead . 58 ■ E. R. Sill . . 345 ■ William H Hayne . 368 Edith M. Tho7?ias . 334 .M, Virginia Donaghe . 71 1 . Sarah M. B. Piatt . 880 .Juliet C. Ma7‘sh . 412 Frafices Hodgson Burnett. . . 74 .Richard E, Burton . 818 .Sarah M. B. Piatt . 53 . Robert Btn'ns Wilson . 539 .John Hay . 126 Willia7ti Struthers . . 412 .Robert Bur7is Wilson . no ■ Kate Put7ia77i Osgood . 396 .Samuel Willoughby Dtiffield . 851 Ellen M. H. Gates . 850 Robert Underwood Johnson. . 732 .James Whitco77ib Riley . 554 Sidney Lanier . 417 . Gertrude Hall . 434 Willia7n P7'escott Foster . 266 E. R. Sill . 345 Willia77i Prescott Foster . 266 Charles Edwin Markham ... 276 Stuart Ster7te . 276

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VI INDEX, Solitude . Song of Fleeting Love, A . Sub Pondere Crescit . Sunken Graves . Sunrise at Sea . • . Tide, The Going Out of the . Thou and I . Two IN One . Virgo . Washington, The Name of . When She Comes Home . Wild Ride, The . Wind, AND the Stars, and the Sea, The Woman and Artist . Won . Page Stuart Sterne . 276 .Alice Williams Brotherton . . 75 Thomas Wentivorth Higginson 759 .Aftdrew B. Saxton . 5°^ . William Prescott Foster. ... 266 Helen Gray Cone . 916 .Sidney Lanier . 4^7 .Sidney Lanier . 4^7 .R. J. Philhnck . 539 . George Parso7is Lathrop .... 202 .James Whitcomb Riley . 175 . Louise Imogen Guiney . 945 . William Prescott Foster . 267 . A lice Williams B^’othe^doii . . . 740 Julia C, R. Dorr . 851 BATTLES AND LEADERS OF THE CIVIL WAR. Atlanta, Opposing Sherman’s Advance to . GeneralJoseph E. Johnston. . 585 Illustrations by E. J. Meeker, and from photographs. Atlanta, The Struggle for . General O. O. Hoiuard. . . . 442 (See also “ Sherman.”) Bentonville, The Battle of . (See also “Sherman’s March.”) . Ge7ieral Wade Ha77ipto7t .... 939 Cemetery Ridge, The Question of Command on . Ge7ieral Henry J. Hunt. . . Chattanooga, The Campaign for . Ge7ieral W. S. Rosecra7is. . Illustrations by W. Taber, and from photographs, Chattanooga, The Army of the Cumberland at . Gerieral J. S. Fullerton - Illustrations by W. Taber, W. L. Shepherd, and from photographs. Cipher Dispatch, A Missing Confederate . Ge7ieral Thor7ias Jordan... Cold Harbor. See “ Wilderness.” Crater, Tragedy OF THE . Major M ill7a7n H. Powell. Drawings by W. Taber, W. L. Shepherd, E. J. Meeker, and J. D. Woodward ; maps by Jacob Wells. Crater, A Dash into the . George L. Kthner . Illustrations by W. Taber and J. D. Woodward. (See also “ Petersburg” and “ Stedman.”) Cumberland, The Army of the (See “ Chattanooga. ) Donaldson’s (General) Fortunate Mistake . X E, Eddy . Georgia and the Carolinas, Marching through . Captain Darnel Oakey Illustrations by W. Taber, A. R. Waud, E. W. Kemble. Gettysburg. See “ Lee,” “ Stuart,” ‘‘ Cemetery Ridge,” and « Mosby.” Grant. See “Vicksburg.” 466 129 136 308 760 774 617 917 Hood’s Invasion of Tennessee . Colonel He7iry Sio7te. Illustrations by W. Taber, Harry Fenn, and from photographs. 597 “Lee’s Invasion of Pennsylvania,” a Reply to General Long- j/ian . 150 STREET . 7 Mosby, Colonel, a Reply . General B. //. Robertson.. . . 6i8 Petersburg, The Colored Troops at . General Henry G. Thomas . . .777 Illustrations from paintings, photographs, and by W. Taber. (See also “ Crater” and “ Stedman.”)

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INDEX, vii Page Scott, Robert Nicholson, Lieutenant-Colonel . General H. W, Boynton _ 467 Sherman, General, and the March to the Sea . General W, T. Skerf?ian.^. . 464 (See also Atlanta.”) Sherman’s March from Savannah to Benton ville . General H. W. Slocum . 928 Illustrations by W. Taber, A. R. Waud, E. J. Meeker, and from photographs. Silent Battle, The Cause of a . John B. DeMotte . 617 Songs OF the War, The . Brander Matthews . 619 With notes on the “Battle Hymn of the Repubhc ” . Julia JVard Howe . 629 With frontispiece portrait (facing page 483), and autographs of Julia Ward Howe, William Cullen Bryant, James R. Randall, and James S. Gibbons. Spotsylvania, Hand-to-Hand Fighting at . G. Norton Gallaiuay. . Illustrations by Frank H. Schell, W. Taber, C. W. Reed, and from drawings by the author. Stedman, Fort, Assault and Repulse at . George L. Kilmer _ Illustrations by E. J. Meeker, J. D. Woodward, and from photographs. (See also Crater ” and Petersburg.”) Stuart’s Ride Around the Union Army in the Gettysburg > ^ ^ , Campaign . , ( Colonel John S. Mosby 301 783 151 Tennessee. See “ Hood.” Union Sentiment AkoNG Confederate Veterans . Ge7ieral R, E. Colston . 309 Vicksburg, General Grant on the Terms at . Ge^ieral U. S. Grant . 617 Wilderness, From the, to Cold Harbor . General E. M. Law . Illustrations by Joseph Pennell, W. Taber, Edwin Forbes, A. R. Waud, J. D. Woodward, Harry Fenn, and A. C. Redwood. TOPICS OF THE TIME. Civil Service Reform . . College Expenses . Constitution, The First Century of the. . Defense, An Urgent Measure of National Executive Responsibility . Food . Government, Municipal, Reform in . Government by Guilds, The Problem of. . . (See also “Open Letters.”) History, A New Era in Our . Hopkins, Mark . Immigration. See “Shall Immigration.” Jury System, The . Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America . (See also “ Trees.”) Last Hope of the Mormon, The . Lee, General. See “Wolseley.” Lincoln History, The . Metropolitan Spirit, The . Mormon. See “ Last Hope.” Navy. See “ Defense.” Niagara Reservation, The . Shall Immigration be Restricted? . Soldier and Citizen . South, The Nation’s Recent Debt to the . Teacher, A Great . Trees, Shall We Plant Native or Foreign . Wolseley’s (Lord) Estimate of General Lee . 469, 470 . . . . 470 . ... 791 . . . . 630 .... 153 , ... 157 . ... 470 ... 155 . ... 469 . .. 791 •• 953 ••• 313 ... 951 . .. 472 ... 471 631 954 950 154 791 792 310 OPEN LETTERS. Applause as a Spur to Pegasus . . . Baptism. See “Christian Union and Baptism.” Black Hawk . Blind, ^Education of the. No. I. As Children. IVilliam C. Wilkinson . 316 159 633 E. B. Perry

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INDEX, viii Cartwright, Mrs., The Death of . Franas M, Hayes . Christian Union and Baptism . Herbert H, Hawes ... Christian Union and Pending Public Questions . Wm, Chaimcy Langdon ^ S Edward Everett Hale , , Church Union, from a Unitarian Point of View . ^ Andrew P. Peabody, . . Church Union, from the Baptist Point of View . R- S. MacArthnr . Clay, Henry . Cosmic Day, The . Emerson and Lincoln . Federal Balance, The . Germany, American Students in . Government by the People . Government of Cities, The . Government, City, by Guilds . Henry Clay, the Slashes, and Ashland again Labor and Capital, a Connecticut Experiment Landscape-Gardening . Lincoln and Emerson . Lincoln History, The . Ministerial Bureaux . Ministry of Welcome, A . Municipal Government. See “ Guilds.” New England Emigrant Aid Company, The . . . . Photography and American Art . Secret Societies in Colleges . Ramabai Sarasvati, Pundita . Toynbee Hall, London . Tyler, John . Vassar, Shall Young Men go to . H. M. Jewett, .Edward Eggleston . . Morris B. Crawford . . . . Robert Jones . .Lucy Stone . .John D. Cutter. . . . . .W. A, W . . Washington Gladden . . .John Thorpe . M.D.J. . Washingto7t Gladden . G. F. Krotel . .Eli Thayer . Charles S, Robinson Emily J, Bryant. . R. R. Bowker . Ben. E\ Green . Page ... 318 ... 955 ... 956 ... 314 ••• 315 . ... 474 317,318 , ... 317 . .. 159 . ... 796 .... 475 . ... 794 . ... 477 •• 157 . ... 958 . ... 472 .... 637 .... 159 . ... 798 . . . . 636 . ... 798 . . . . 477 . ... 476 957 .... 797 .... 158 .... 317 . ... 318 BRIC-A-BRAC. Agile Sonneteer, The . Aphorisms from the Quarter . April-Face, The, or the Stub-Tail Mule . Art and Nature. (Drawing by E. W. Kemble) . Auction, Notes on an. (Drawing) . Ballade of the Romantic Poet . Battledoor . Between the Lines . Doubtful, Very . Face to Face . PIard to Suit . Hundredth Man, The . In THE Cafe . In THE Old Days . . Missing Glove, The . Mrs. Piper . OCKLAWAHA, ON THE . Old-fashioned Girl, An . Our Saint . Parting Wish, A . Pin, a . Point D’ALENgoN . Revision . Sea-side Flirtation, A . Slip, A . Study in Black, A. (Drawing) . Transformation . Uncertain . Uncle Esek’s Wisdom . . . ^ . Untangling the Family Yarn. (With drawing by E. Wait a Bit . Whence these Tears . Who Can Tell . . An thmy Morehead . 160 . J. A, Macon . 959 . Thomas Nelson Page . 160 . 959 . E. W. Kemble . 479 . Harrison S. Morris . 960 . ..C.S.P . 480 . Walter Learned . 800 . M. E. W . 800 . . H, W. Atistifi . 800 . A. W. R . 800 . G, J, Wilbur . 640 . T. R, Sulliva7i . 640 . Margaret Va^idegrift . 480 . Winifred Howells . 960 . Mariaft Douglas . 319 . Walter Learned . 479 . James B. Kenyon . 9^0 . Clinton Scollard . 478 . M, F. Butts . ... 479 . Ella Wheeler Wilcox . 480 . Fra7tces Hodgson Bu7'77ett. . . 320 . Esther B. Tiffa7ty . 9^0 . Sa77iuel Mm turn Peck . 800 . W. A. Ketchum . 480 . E, W. Kemble . 799 . A. C. Gordon . 798 . Margaret Va7tdegrift . 320 . 160, 318, 478, 799 W. Kemble.). .Eva M. D. Jarnette . 638 . Je7inie E, T. Doive . 160 . M. Deland . 320 . Ernest Whitney . 320

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Fhe Century Magazine VoL. XXXIV. MAY FINDING THE 8CARAB/EUS - EMBLEM OF IMMORTALITY - ATTENDED BY A GOD. PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR BY MAGNESIUM LIGHT FROM A WALL IN THE ENTRANCE- PASSAGE TO THE TOMB OF SETHI I. IN the neighborhood of three thousand three hundred years ago the land of Egypt, from Goshen to Thebes and beyond, was in an up¬ roar. The king was dead! Rameses II., the pre¬ cocious youth who at the age of ten had joined his warrior- father Sethi I. upon the throne; the ruler whom his people regarded as a god ; the oppressor under whom the Israelites are said to have “ sighed by reason of their bond¬ age”; the great Sesostris of the Greeks, — had breathed his last. The gay and busy life of the cities of the Delta was hushed, and the hundred gates of Thebes were only opened to those who min¬ istered to the necessities of the living or who performed the sacred offices of the priesthood. All street processions, minstrel-bands, and mountebanks fled appalled. The cities which the great architect and artist-king had refounded, — Ra’amses and Pithom, — built by the forced labor of the He¬ brews, were in their meridian splendor. The Ramesseum at Thebes was yet unsurpassed, and the colossal monolith which represented the Copyright, 1887, by The Cen 1887. No. I. PHARAOH. enthroned king was then unbroken. The glori¬ ous quartette of Abou-Simbel, but recently fin¬ ished, sat, as now, smiling at the Nubian sun. But Rameses II., in whose honor, for whose glory, and by whose command all these grand creations were finished, could look upon them no more with mortal eyes. His body was embalmed, and in due season the funeral procession followed. The mum¬ mied king was placed aboard the royal barge, and, attended by the priests and the images of the gods Horus and Isis and Hathor, was floated up the Nile to the Theban city of the Dead — to Biban el-Mulouk, the St. Denis, the Westminster Abbey of the kings, and a great lamentation went up to the skies from stricken Egypt. As the funeral cortege journeyed slowly on, the frantic people of the cities and villages flocked to the quays to render homage to their dead ruler. Even the despised and persecuted Hebrew suspended labor betimes because his cruel overseer had forgotten him. The men rent their garments, the women tore their hair, and all gathered up the dust and threw it upon their heads. Tens of thousands of funeral ofterings were cast into the sacred river, and the gods were called upon to attend the dead throughout the sacred journey. It was a dire day indeed. When the sad company had arrived at the necropolis, all the complicated funeral rites were conducted with priestly ostentation. Then the body of Rameses was sealed in the great sarcophagus which had been cut from the limestone of Biban el-Mulouk. The location of the tomb was well known then, because it had been the habit of the monarch to visit it frequently during its exca¬ vation. More than once had the architect announced URY Co. All rights reserved.

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4 FINDING PHARAOH, that the tomb was ready, but he was as often met with the command to excavate still other vaulted halls and longer passages and side chambers, all to be finished with stuccoed walls adorned by representations in relief of the processions of the gods, of the life and work of the king, and of the scarabseus, the emblem of immortality. Moreover, all were to be richly colored. There is plenty of time for all that and much more before I am ready,” said Raineses, and he returned to his capital. But he died before the work was completed. According to custom, after the burial the doorway to the tomb was walled up, and so disguised by rocks and sand as to make it impossible for any but the priests to discover its whereabouts. And although his original tomb, that of his father Sethi I., and that of his son Menephtah, had long before been discovered, they were empty, and until July, i88i, the real hiding- place of the “ Pharaoh of the Oppression ” was a mighty secret. Then its door was opened, and soon after history in a measure repeated itself. The story of its finding is more romantic than any told in Egypt since Isis gathered the scattered remains of Osiris and buried his head within the alabaster temple at Abydus. For a number of years the acute officials of the Museum of Antiquities at Bulaq had seen funeral offerings and other antiquities brought from Thebes by returning tourists, which they knew belonged to the dynasty of Raineses II., of his father Sethi I., and of his grand¬ father Raineses I. Even scarabees bearing the cartouch of the great king were displayed by the innocent purchasers. This being so, ar¬ gued the clear-headed officials, the mummies of those royal personages must have been dis¬ covered by some one. By whom ? Professor Maspero, the Director-general of the Bulaq Museum, at once organized a detect¬ ive force to help him solve this conundrum. Arrest after arrest was made, and the basti¬ nado was applied to many a callous sole which had never felt even shoe or sandal. The wo¬ men stood by and browbeat the sufferers into silence while they endured the torture, and the men refused all information. In a line of tombs beyond the Ramesseum lived four sturdy Arabs named Abd-er- Rasoul. They supplied guides and donkeys to tourists who desired to visit the ruins of Thebes, and sold them genuine and spuri- pus antiquities. When they found a mummy, it being forbidden by law to sell it, the head and hands and feet were wrenched off and sold on the sly, while the torso was kicked about the ruined temples until the jackals came and carried it away. I purchased a head and hand of one of the brothers amid the dark shadows of the temple at Qurneh. Early in i88i circum¬ stantial evidence pointed to Ahmed Abd-er-Rasoiil as the one who knew more than he would tell. Profes¬ sor Maspero caused his arrest, and he lay in prison at Keneh for some months. He also suffered the basti¬ nado and the browbeating of the women repeatedly; he resisted bribes, and showed no melting mood when threatened with exe¬ cution. His lips told no more than the unfound tomb — and not as much.

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FINDING PHARAOH. S ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF SETHI I. IN b'bAN EL-MULOUK OR THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS. Finally his brother Mohammed regarded the offer of bakhshish,” which Professor Maspero deemed it wise to make, as worth more to him than any sum he might hope to realize from future pillaging, and made a clean breast of the whole a&ir. How the four brothers ever discovered the hidden tomb has remained a family secret.” On July 5th, 1881, the wily Arab conducted Herr Emil Brugsch Bey, curator of the Bulaq Museum, to Deir-el-Bahari and pointed out the hiding-place so long looked for. A long climb it was, up the slope of the western mountain, till, after scaling a great limestone cliff, a huge, isolated rock was found. Behind this a spot was reached where the stones appeared to an expert observer and tomb-searcher to have been arranged “ by hand,” rather than scattered by some upheaval of nature. “There,” said the sullen guide ; and “there” the enterprising Emil Brugsch Bey, with more than Egyptian alacrity, soon had a staff of Arabs at work hoisting the loose stones from a well into which they had been thrown. The shaft had been sunk into the solid limestone to the depth of about forty feet, and was about six feet square. Before going very far, a huge palm-log was thrown across the well and a block and tackle fastened to it to help bring up the debris. When the bottom of the shaft was reached a subterranean passage was found which ran westward some twenty-four feet and then turned directly northward, continuing into the heart of the mountain straight except where broken for about two hundred feet by an ab¬ rupt stairway. The passage terminated in a mortuary chamber about thirteen by twenty- three feet in extent and barely six feet in height. There was found the mummy of King Pha- roah of the Oppression, with nearly forty others of kings, queens, princes, and priests. Not until June last was this most royal mummy released from its bandages. That event is my plea for telling now what I know of the romantic finding and the place thereof. A few months after the finding took place, accompanied by my camera I visited the Bulaq Museum and photographed the en¬ tire “ find.” Emil Brugsch Bey is also an amateur photographer, and we had already fraternized during the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, where the Egyptian section was in his care. Therefore at Biilaq I not only en¬ joyed a rare privilege at his hands, but also his friendly advice and assistance. The photography done, we embarked upon the Khedive’s steamer Beni Soncf for Luxor. There we were met by Professor Maspero and Mohammed Abd-er-Rasoul, and together we visited the scene of the latest drama of the Nile. When we reached the chamber of the dead, the rope which had hoisted the royal mummies from the tomb was made fast to our bodies, was swung over the palm-log, and we were lowered into the depths. As I dangled in mid¬ air and swayed from side to side, the rocky THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL.

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6 FINDING PHARAOH. pieces which I startled from their long slum¬ ber warned those who preceded me to look out below.” At the bottom of the shaft, on the right and left wall of the entrance to the subterranean chamber, were written in black ink some curi¬ ous inscriptions. By whom, no one can more than conjecture. It was the duty of the an¬ cient ‘‘ Inspector of Tombs ” to make frequent visits to the royal dead, to repair the mum¬ my-cases and wrappings, and, if necessary, to remove all to a safer tomb. This handwriting on the wall may have been that of the Pharaonic tomb inspector whose duty it was to make record of every change. Professor Maspero being desirous of having photographs made of these inscrip¬ tions, the little American camera was set for the work, and succeeded in securing them even there in the bowels of the earth. Then, lighting our torch¬ es and stooping low, we proceeded to explore the long passage and the tomb at its terminus. The rough way was scattered with fragments of mummy-cases, shreds of mummy-cloth, bunches of papyrus plant, lotus flowers, and palm-leaf stalks, while here and there a funeral offering was found. After much stumbling we arrived at the inner cham¬ ber where, but a few weeks before, stood or reclined the coflins of so many royal dead. The camera must have a long time for its delicate, difficult work, and so we did not need to hurry. Seated upon a stone which for centuries had served as the pillow of priest or king while wait¬ ing for immortality, Herr Brugsch told me the whole story of his historical “find.” It was a unique inter¬ view. It made such an impression upon my mind that I can repeat the story here from memory, though I do not, of course, claim that the report is verbatim. “ Finding Pharaoh was an exciting experience for me,” said my companion. “ It is true I was armed to the teeth, and my faithful rifle, full of shells, hung over my shoulder ; but my assistant from Cairo, Ahmed Effendi Kemal, was the only person with me whom I could trust. Any one of the natives would have killed me willingly, had we been alone, for every one of them knew better than I did that I was about to deprive them of a great source of revenue. But I ex¬ posed no sign of fear and proceeded with the work. The well cleared out, I descended and began the exploration of the underground passage. “ Soon we came upon cases of porcelain fu¬ neral offerings, metal and alabaster vessels, draperies and trinkets, until, reaching the turn in the passage, a cluster of mummy-cases came into view in such number as to stagger me. “ Collecting my senses, I made the best ex-

Page 13

7 FINDING PHARAOH, of the amiable smile upon me amination of them I could by the light of my torch, and at once saw that they contained the mummies of royal personages of both sexes; and yet that was not all. Plunging on ahead of my guide, I came to the chamber where we are now seated, and there standing against the walls or here lying on the floor, I found even a greater number of mummy-cases of stupendous size and weight. '' Their gold coverings and their polished surfaces so plainly reflected my own excited visage that it seemed as though I was look¬ ing into the faces of my own ancestors. The gilt face on the cofiin Queen Nofretari seemed to like an old acquaintance. I took in the situation quickly, with a gasp, and hurried to the open airiest I should be overcome and the glorious prize still un¬ revealed be lost to science. '' It was almost sunset then. Already the odor which arose from the tomb had cajoled a troupe of slinking jackals to the neighbor¬ hood, and the howl of hyenas was heard not far distant. A long line of vultures sat upon the highest pinnacles of the cliffs near by, ready for their hateful work. The valley was as still as death. Nearly the whole of the night was occupied in hiring men to help remove the precious relics from their hiding-place. There was but little sleep in Luxor that night. Early the next morning three hundred Arabs were employed under my direction — each one a thief. One by one the coffins were hoisted to the surface, were securely sewed up in sail-cloth and matting, and then were carried across the plain of lliebes to the steamers awaiting them at Luxor. “ Two squads of Arabs accompanied each sarcophagus — one to carry it and a second to watch the wily carriers. When the Nile over¬ flow, lying midway of the plain, was reached, as many more, boatmen, entered the service and bore the burden to the other side. Then a third set took up the ancient freight and car¬ ried it to the steam¬ ers. Slow workers are these Egyptians, but after six days of hard labor under the July sun the work was finished. I shall never for¬ get the scenes I wit¬ nessed when, stand¬ ing at the mouth of the shaft, I watched the strange line of GOLD-FACED INNER MUMMY-CASE OF QUEEN holperS wIhIO tllOV AHMES NOFRETARI. PHOTOGRAPHED AT - - THE BULAQ MUSEUM. carried across that HEAD OF PINOTEM II. PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE MUMMY. historical plain the bodies of the very kings who had constructed the temples still stand¬ ing, and of the very priests who had offici¬ ated in them — the Temple of Hatasou near¬ est ; away across from it Qurneh ; further to the right the Ramesseum, where the great granite monolith lies face to the ground ; further south Medinet Abou, a long way be¬ yond the Deir-el-Medineh; and there the twin Colossi, or the vocal Memnon and his compan¬ ion; then, beyond all, some more of the plain, the line of the Nile, and the Arabian hills far to the east and above all; and with all, slowly moving down the cliffs and across the plain, or in the boats crossing the stream, were the sullen laborers carrying their antique burdens. As the Red Sea opened and allowed Israel to pass across dry-shod, so opened the silence of the Theban plain, allowed the strange fu¬ neral procession to pass, — and then all was hushed again. When you go up, you will see it all spread out before you — with the help of a little imagination. “When we made our departure from Luxor, our late helpers squatted in groups upon the Theban side and silently watched us. The news had been sent down the Nile in advance of us. So, when we passed the towns, the peo¬ ple gathered at the quays and made most fran¬ tic demonstrations. The fantasia dancers were holding their Avildest orgies here and there; a strange wail went up from the men; the women were screaming and tearing their hair, and the children were so frightened I pitied them.

Page 14

8 FINDING PHARAOH. PROFESSOR MASPERO, EMIL BRUGSCH BEY, AND MOHAMMED ABD-ER-RASOUL. PHOTOGRAPHED AT THE MOUTH OF THE SHAFT, DEIR-EL-BAHARI. ‘‘ A few fanatical dervishes plunged into the river and tried to reach us, but a sight of the rifle drove them back, cursing us as they swam away. At night fires were kindled and guns were fired. “ At last we arrived at Bulaq, where I soon confirmed my impressions that we had indeed recovered the mummies of the majority of the rulers of Egypt during the eighteenth, nine¬ teenth, twentieth, and twenty-first dynasties, including Raineses II., Raineses III., King Pinotem, the high-priest Nebseni, and Queen Nofretari, all of which you have seen and pho¬ tographed at Biilaq, arranged pretty much as I found them in their long-hidden tomb. And thus our Museum became the third and prob¬ ably the final resting-place of the mummy of the great Pharaoh of the Oppression.” Thus was the story of finding Pharaoh modestly told me by my friend who had dis¬ played such enthusiasm and tact in securing for science what had puzzled science for so long a time to discover. When we ascended from the tomb I grouped my companions at its mouth and once more caused the camera to secure a link of history. Professor Maspero reclined upon the rocks at the right ; Emil Brugsch Bey stood at the palm-log ; and Mohammed was posed in front, holding the very rope in his hand which had served in hoisting royalty from its long-hid¬ den resting-place. Climbing the mountain across the valley I photographed the view on page 5 of the tomb terraces of Biban el-Mulouk, showing the tomb of Sethi I., whose mummy is now at Bulaq.

Page 15

FINDING PHARAOH, The next day the shaft was filled up again, thus closing the door of the empty theater, for the drama was ended, and the actors were gone. I made a long Nile journey after that and photographed many a stone-cut permanent likeness ” of the Michael Angelo of Egypt.” The profile of the southern colossus of the Great Temple at Abou-Simbel has all these centuries retained the beautiful expression left it by the Nubian chisel, and presents a striking resemblance to the photograph of the recently unfolded mummy of the great king. Of this unfolding the world has been told by almost every newspaper in it. When I was at Biilaq, all I could catch of the Sesostris face and form was as it appeared after the last neat work of the Inspector of Tombs had been finished. Since the unfolding, which took place June ist, 1886, the camera of Brugsch Bey has enabled us all to see how Pharaoh looked.” Likewise, the report of Professor Maspero, giving the particulars of his removal of the wrappings, has ever since been a topic of conversation all over the wide world. Only fifteen minutes were occupied in un¬ doing the labor of many days by the careful embalmers. The kingly body had reposed in peace ” at least twice as long as was en¬ joined by the faith of Isis in order to secure immortality. As recently as 1880 it was offered to an American traveler “for a reasonable bakh¬ shish,” but declined because its genuineness was doubted. But no doubt now exists, for “ in black ink, written upon the mummy-case by the high- priest and King Pinotem, is the record testi¬ fying to the identity of the royal contents.” Then “ upon the outer winding-sheet of the mummy, over the region of the breast,” the indisputable testimony is repeated. The cov¬ erings being all removed by the careful hands of Professor Maspero, in the presence of the Khedive and other distinguished persons, Raineses II. appeared. Professor Maspero further reports that The head is long, and small in proportion to the body. 'Fhe top of the skull is quite bare. On the temples there are a few sparse hairs, but at the poll the li^iir is quite thick, forming smooth, straight locks about five centimeters in length. White at the time of death, they have been dyed a light yellow by the spices used in embalmment. The forehead is low and narrow; the brow-ridge prominent ; tlie eyebrows are thick and white ; the eyes are small and close together ; the nose is long, thin, arched like the noses of the Bourbons, and slightly crushed at the tip by the pressure of the bandages. The temples are sunken ; the cheek-bones very prominent; the ears round, standing far out from the head, and pierced like those of a woman for the wearing of ear-rings. The jaw-bone is massive and strong ; the chin very prominent; the mouth small, but thick-lipped, and full of some kind of black paste. voL. xxxrv.— 2. 9 This paste being partly cut away with the scissors, dis¬ closed some much worn and very brittle teeth, which, moreover, are white and well preserved. The mus¬ tache and beard are thin. They seem to have been kept shaven during life, but were probably allowed to grow during the king’s last illness, or they may have grown after death. The hairs are white, like those of the head and eyebrows, but are harsh and bristly, and from two to three millimeters in length. The skin is of earthy brown, spotted with black. Finally, it may be said the face of the mummy gives a fair idea of the face of the PROFILE OF RAMESES II. PHOTOGRAPH OF THE SOUTHERN COLOSSUS AT THE GREAT TEMPLE OF ABOU-SIMBEL. living king. The expression is unintellectual, perhaps slightly animal ; but even under the somewhat gro¬ tesque disguise of mummification, there is plainly to be seen an air of sovereign majesty, of resolve, and of pride. The rest of the body is as well preserved as the head; but, in consequence of the reduction of the tis- sue.s, its external aspect is less life-like. The neck is no thicker than the vertebral column. The chest isbroad ; the shoulders are square ; the arms are crossed upon the breast ; the hands are small and dyed with henna ; and the wound in the left side, through which the embalm¬ ers extracted the viscera, is large and open. The legs and thighs are fleshless; thefeet are long, slender, some¬ what flat-soled, and dyed, like the hands, with henna. The corpse is that of an old man, but of a vigorous and robust old man. We know, indeed, that Raineses II. reigned for sixty-seven years, and that he must have beennearly one hundred years old when he died.” On the same day that the face of the great Sesostris was unwrapped, the mummy of

Page 16

10 FINDING PHARAOH. RAMESES II. IMMEDIATELY AFTER UNWINDING. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY EMIL BRUGSCH BEY. Rameses III. was also revealed and his iden¬ tity established beyond question. And now these old-time kings stand in the glass cases of the Bulaq Museum, in as close companionship with Pinotem and Nebseni as they were when found in their sequestered retreat. Once kings, princes, and priests, monarchs, tyrants, and oppressors, “ equal with the gods,” — they now appear labeled and num- dered as antiquities,” where all who desire may go and face them without fear. When they were first borne to the tomb. their frightened subjects cried to the gods for their entrance into immortality; and one of those gods was Rameses II., represented at Pithom in red syenite, seated in an arm¬ chair between the two solar gods Ra and Turn. But when they were carried back to the Delta, the folds of sand which had for centuries covered their ancient city Zoan Avere being unwrapped by the spade and pick of the Egyptian Exploration Fund,” and their frightened descendants cried unto Allah — the God of Israel ! Edward L. VVilsoiu

Page 17

PHARAOH THE OPPRESSOR, AND HIS DAUGHTER, IN THE LIGHT OF THEIR MONUMENTS. HE ancient Egyptians have placed us greatly in their debt by a science that surpasses ours. Even in the extravagant fancies of childhood over the tales and heroes of the Bible, we never dreamed that some day we might stand face to face with the figure of that “new king over Egypt ” who “ said unto his peo¬ ple, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we : Come on, let us deal wisely with them ; lest they multiply, and it come to pass that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land”; — of that father whose daughter not only spared the weeping babe in the little ark among the flags, but adopted the child, and he became her son, and she named him Moses; — of that royal patron who thus educated him for the public ser¬ vice as a prince in his own house¬ hold ; — and yet of that sov¬ ereign in whose breast the preju¬ dice of race ran so deep that he sought to slay this Moses, his foster-son, the moment he heard the hand of the latter had lifted itself against an Egyptian. Now, upon the reappearance of this venerable monarch on the stage of modern life, one of the questions suggesting themselves as soon as our first surprise is over, is. How does this man of renown bear out his portraits upon the monuments ? Placing his actual features side by side with the faces of the numerous statues and sculptures by which he sought to immortalize himself, are the latter thus found true to their subject ? Do they present faithful likenesses of this very physiognomy before us ? Whatever it may be, the answer to this ques¬ tion will also have a material bearing upon the accuracy of the art of that remote period. A second surprise lies in wait for us. It has often been remarked how the coun¬ tenance of Raineses II., whether upon colos¬ sal monolith or mural carving, together with those of other members of the Ramesside line before and after him, can scarcely have been purely Egyptian ; and the conjecture has as often been hazarded that the type of expression they wear is obviously Semitic. Such a sur¬ mise has had for its foundation not only the narrow retreating forehead and the aquiline nose, but the long head from chin to crown and the entire cast of visage. The strange traits are limited to the Theban race or ruling ETHNIC TRAITS OF AN INDIGENOUS EGYPTIAN. FROM LENORMANT’S "hISTOIRE ANCIENNE DE L’ORIENT.” class, in contradistinction to the race of primi¬ tive inhabitants of the lower Nile valley. Let us turn aside a moment to make this difference clearer by noting how the genuine Egyptians, having a better claim to be re¬ garded as the natives of the country, looked. Though their fac-similcs have been preserved in the monuments all along through the ages, yet some of the best of them have come down to us from the earliest times. One of these is reproduced in illustration i, taken from a remarkable bust treasured in the Louvre. Whether regarded as a work of sculpture, or

Page 18

12 PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 2. PROFILE OF RAMESE3 II. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MUMMY TAKEN UNDER PROFESSOR MASPERO AT BULAQ. as a success in portraiture, or as a creation almost endowed with life, it is a rare attain¬ ment in plastic skill and a rival to the high¬ est art of any age. Professor G. Maspero .sketches the prototype as follows : “ A great effort of the imagination is no longer re¬ quired to recover the figure of an Egyptian of the time of Kheops, who contributed his part to the construc¬ tion of the Pyramids : to-day we have merely to step into tlie Museum and look at the statues in the olden style there brought together. At the first glance of the eye we shall perceive that the artist who produced them sought to effect a strict resemblance in the modeling of the head and members after the person whom he desired to represent ; and yet, neglecting the peculiarities of each in¬ dividual, we may read¬ ily regain the common type of the race. The Egyptian . . . carried a head often too large in proportion to the body, presenting usu¬ ally a spirit of mildness and even of instinctive sadness. The forehead is square, perhaps a trifle low ; the nose short and round ; the eyes are large and wide open; the cheeks filled out ; the lips thick, but not reversed ; the mouth, somewhat wide, bears a smile of resig¬ nation and almost of suffering. . . . And, even in our own day, the simple peasants have retained nearly in every particular the likeness of their ancestors, and such a fellah regards with aston¬ ishment the statues of Khawra or the colossi of the Usertesens, which reproduce lineament by lineament, across the interval of more than four thousand years, the physiognomy of these old Pharaohs.” We have only to compare this precur¬ sory portrait of an Egyptian who lived and died under the Old Empire with the remarkable picture of Rameses II. (2) viv¬ idly repeating a photograph of his mum¬ my’s profile, in order to perceive the dis¬ similarity instantly. The two have not the first feature in common ; in fact, the one is the opposite of the other at every turn, proportion, and measure. Clearly, the great Rameses by these presents is de¬ monstrated to have belonged to the royal Theban race of foreign stock, just as the monuments indicated. Can this foreign stock be traced back to its source? Until modern research began in Egypt the answer to such a question was a positive ‘‘No”; but not long since a monument came to light whose testimony is strikingly confirmed by our mute effigy of the king. Among the ruins of Zoan Mariette Bey found a memorial slab of syenite, carved with a vignette on the upper part and inscribed on the lower portion, which at once became fa¬ mous under the title of “ The Tablet of Four Hundred Years” (3). The subject of the vig¬ nette is a scene representing Rameses the Great offering wine to the god Set in his human form and wearing the white crown, an officer also in adoration standing behind the monarch. The object of the stela is thus revealed to be a recognition on the part of the king of that 4. SPHINX OF ZOAN, BEARING THE PORTRAIT OF THE SHEPHERD KING APOPHIS. FROM "rEVUE ARCHEOLOGIQUE.”

Page 19

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER, 13 Ty phonic Set or Sutekh, and a participation in his worship, who had been the national deity of the Shepherds, at the ancient capital of these rulers. By the date of four hundred years from the king Set Aa-peh-peh Nubti, he uses an era founded upon the reign of one of these Shepherd Kings, a predecessor of Apophis. Furthermore, the officer explains. His Majesty ordered that a great tablet of stone should be made in the great name of his fathers for the sake of setting up the name of the father of his fathers,” apparently from his parent Seti I. back to Set Aa-peh-peh, four centuries before, both named after the same deity ; and thus we are given to understand that Rameses thereby sought to acknowledge and honor the line of the Shepherd Kings as his ancestors. Fortunately, we are to-day able to verify this acknowledgment and relationship in a conclusive, because physical, way. In the same ruins of Zoan Mariette Bey came across four very peculiar sphinxes, on the avenue leading up to the shrine of the temple. Writing to the Vicomte de Rouge, he describes them in the following terms: “You will be struck by the style that characterizes these four sphinxes. The clever chisel which carved the body may, doubtless, have been that of an Egyp¬ tian ; but I dare not say as much in regard to the hand that modeled the face with so peculiar an energy. The sphinxes of Egyptian origin impress us above all by their tranquil majesty. Generally the heads are portraits ; and yet the eye is al¬ ways calm and wide open, the mouth always smiling, the contours of the visage always rounded ; and especial¬ ly you observe that the Egyptian sphinxes al¬ most never abandon the grand head-dress with spreading wings, which harmonizes so well with the quiet unity of the monument. Here, how¬ ever, you are far from recognizing that type. The head of the Sphinx of Zoan is of an art with which I am really at a loss for aught to com¬ pare (4). The eyes are small, the nose is strong and arched though at the same time some¬ what flat, the cheeks are large while marked by prominent bones, the chin is a projecting one, and the mouth at¬ tracts notice by the manner in which it falls at the corners. The whole visage sympa¬ thizes with the rudeness of the features making it up ; and the bushy mane encircling the head, to such extent as almost to bury it, im¬ parts a still more re¬ markable aspect to the monument. On behold¬ ing these strange fig¬ ures we perceive that we have under our eyes the products of an art not purely Egyptian, and also not exclusively foreign, and, accord¬ ingly, we conclude that the sphinxes of Avails [Zoan] may \vell excite the immense interest of dating from the time of the Hyksos [Shepherd Kings] themselves. Upon the right shoulder of each one of our four sym¬ bolical sphinxes inscriptions, which had been graven there, have been chiseled out ; but the name of the deity Sutekh still remains upon the head, then follows the title ‘ the beneficent god,’ then the illegible car- touches of the king, and the whole recalls so well, by the manner in which the inscriptions are disposed, by the length of the lines, by the style of the hieroglyphics surviving, the legend of Apophis upon the colossus of Ra-smenkh-ka [a statue of a seated Pharaoh found near by], that we cannot hesitate to read the same leg- 3. TABLET OF FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. FROM ‘‘ REVUE ARCHEOLOGIQUE.”

Page 20

14 FUARAOH AND BIS DAUGHTER. end upon the new monuments. According to the Sal- lier papyrus, Apophis reared a temple to the god Sutekh; and we cannot doubt that our sphinxes are owing to the piety of this king toward the deity of his nation, nor can we refrain from the thought that the sacred inclosure which these monuments were intended to embellish was the site of the temple of Sutekh at Avaris [Zoan], . . . And if, as every indication leads us to suppose, Apophis is the Pharaoh of Ge7iesis, it was this Apophis who raised Joseph to the rank of a minister. And, these sphinxes of Zoan being con¬ temporary with Joseph, can it be possible they have the signal honor of owing their origin to the son of Jacob personally, who would have the ordering of their execution ? ” We are now ready to make the verifica¬ tion. The Tablet of Four Hundred Years and these sphinxes were discovered not far apart. Raineses the Great was the author of the tablet confessing descent from the Shep¬ herds, and to-day we possess the features of the latter copied by the sun : the Shepherds were the authors of the Zoan sphinx¬ es, to which they imparted their own faces. Let us compare the two, the profile of the sphinx, as above (4), with the profile of the king in illustration ' ■ - 2. They are parallel ! Both have the ' . same roundly retreating brow, the same arched nose, the same promi¬ nent lips, the same projecting chin, the same high cheek-bones, the same hollow cheeks — what have they not exactly alike ? They are a startling match. An eminent scholar, the I'lev- erend H. G. Tomkins, once wrote of the sphinx : What a front is this ! full of gnarled strength. The brows are knit with anxious care ; the full but small eyes seem to know il ’vV - • , no kindly light ; the nose, of fine profile Sih - ‘ curve, yet broad in form, has its strongly chiseled nostrils depressed in accordance ' with the saddened lines of the lower cheek. The lips are thick and prominent, but not with the unmeaning fullness of the negro; quite the opposite. The curve is fine, the ‘Cupid’s bow’ perfect which defines so boldly the upper outline : the channeled and curved upper lip has even an expression of proud sensitiveness, and there is more of sorrow than of fierceness in the drawn-down angles of the mouth.” But if we could throw the lion’s mane of the sphinx around the head of the proud and lion-hearted though aged king, this descrip¬ tion would apply equally well to him, would it not? The family resemblance is so complete that one might be tempted to suspect the sphinx of really bearing the portrait of Rameses him¬ self, rather than that of some Shepherd king. But, unhappily for such a suspicion, Rameses II. once, having found a similar sphinx at the site of Pithom or having removed one from Zoan, actually engaged in the discreditable work of appropriating it to himself by trans¬ forming the head of the Shepherd into an image of his own (5). The alteration consisted mainly in removing the shaggy mane of the lion in order to substitute the grand head¬ dress with spreading wings,” a reduction which leaves the head too small for the body, while the outlines of the countenance remain almost untouched in the stolen monument. However, Rameses II. did inscribe his name on the front of the Sphinx of Apophis at Zoan, which he did not otherwise injure, and upon other sphinxes of the Shepherds where he added the title Friend ” or ‘‘ Beloved of Set ” ; while upon various monuments recently un¬ covered on the same site by Mr. W. M. Flin¬ ders Petrie, he is delineated in the act of offering to Sutekh, who in one instance wears the white crown as on the Tablet of Four Hundred Years, but in two instances is un¬ crowned and long-eared. SHEPHERD SPHINX ADAPTED TO THE HEAD OF RAMESES II. FROM A PUBLICATION OF THE “ EGYPT EXPLORATION FUND.” Such a verification is more than satisfactory. We are fully convinced that this tall king, so superhumanly towering as to be frightful to his enemies, rightfully iDelonged to the ruling rather than to the native race of Egypt ; and, strange though it be, we allow his claim of blood-relation to those invaders, the Hyksos- Shepherds, whose expulsion from the Delta required the entire strength of the seventeenth Theban dynasty expended in a war of eighty- years. Here lies the secret of that uniform, peculiar, superior cast of physiognomy run¬ ning through all the countenances of the Ramesside line, a line ever famous for being uncommonly handsome. And who were these Shepherds ? whence did they enter Egypt ? Such questions have confounded the wise ever since the revival of learning. The origin of the Shepherds has been referred to the pastoral ranges on the

Page 21

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. IS ' 6. RAMESES’ FATHER, SET? I. FROM A MONUMENT, FIGURED IN ROSELLINI'3 “ MONUMENTI STORICI.” east of Egypt, to the Negeb, to the land of the Amorites, to the coast of the Philistines, to the hill of the Jebusites, and especially to the cities of Phoenicia. But grave objections lie against all these conjectures ; and the more the ethnic type of the race is studied, the far¬ ther north and east, into Asia, its original home is carried. Some Hittite monuments re¬ cently discovered show a remarkable approach to its general aspect, yet many of the heads of Assyrian kings a still greater coordination. Very striking agreements appear in some de¬ tails of custom, such as wearing a profusion of hair and the fashion in which it is dressed, exhibited in the familiar representations of Nimrod strangling a lion, or the statue of the god Nebo. The latest verdict on these in¬ quiries is that of a distinguished scholar whom America delights to honor. Miss Amelia B. Edwards : “ The question of the Hyksos type remains unan¬ swered. It is neither Egyptian nor Ethiopia nor Semitic. It bears a more Northern stamp. It reminds us that those early Chaldeans, who were driven out by the Elamites under Kudur-nan-khundi, spoke and wrote a Turanian dialect, and that their blood was akin to tliat of the yellow races which we now call Tartar and Mongolian.” When the eighteenth dynasty came to an end with King Haremhebi, the royal line was extinct on the male side. So the nineteenth dynasty was founded by a warrior, Raineses I. ; but he was a usurper, lacking in an es¬ sential qualification — royal blood. His son, Set! I., was also a brilliant con¬ queror; but to the Theban priests and men of learning he, too, was unsatisfactory, because, in like manner, royal blood did not course in his veins, and because he bore the offen¬ sive name of Set. However, if, on the con¬ trary, he was a scion of Shepherd stock, then to us he is a curiosity, from the fact that the Hyksos features of Rameseshis son must have descended through him, and in so doing left on him the typical marks of this mysterious race. How is it ? has he got them too ? Con¬ sult his portrait in illustration 6, and answer accordingly. Neither a long nor a second ex¬ amination is required to perceive in his looks a survival of the Sphinx of Zoan on the one hand, and a prophecy of his offspring on the other. A brow reclining, a languid eye, a nose strongly arched, a mouth of almost voluptuous lips, a deep hollow beneath them that throws a round chin into accent, — all are there. He strikes involuntarily the same attitude of calm contemplation, or even pleasant reverie ; but even in his style of wearing the hair he ap- jDears to affect that odd, superfluous mane of his pastoral ancestors. Though only an out¬ line, this sketch has been chosen above many splendid examples of pictorial carving, for the sake of presenting features and not a scene. Some of the finest bas-reliefs in all Egyptian sculpture have Seti I. for their subject and central figure, imparting the story of his life through the eye rather than through the ear, — artistic object-lessons fairly changing study into enjoyment. A late witness, Monsieur Ch. Blanc, testifies : “Seated upon a round base of a column, we exam¬ ined the noblest bas-reliefs in the world ! Seti was present in his own temple of Abydus. His noble head, at once human and heroic, mild and proud, stood out from the wall and seemed to regard us with a gen¬ tle smile. A wandering ray of sunlight penetrat¬ ed into the temple, and, falling upon the low sali¬ ence of the sculptured figures, gave them a re¬ lief and animation which was almost illusive.” However, so va¬ ried are our resources that to-day we are not dependent on ancient art for an acquaintance with this refined and wor¬ shipful parent of him who forms the object of our inquisitive study. The famous Seti, too, was found among the royal mummies at Dair el-Bahari, along with Thothmes III. the il¬ lustrious, and Raineses II. the conqueror. And when his winding-sheets of mummy-cloth were unwound, and when, for the first time in so many long centuries, the light re-revealed those idiosyncratic features which of old in¬ spired many beautiful reliefs in stone, the merciless camera was also turned upon them, and in that sort of picture which is notori- 7. RAMESES’ FATHER. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN UNDER THE DIRECTION OF PROF. MASPERO AT BULAQ.

Page 22

i6 FHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTEF, ous for never flattering nor ever detracting we have a proof of the very original himself (7), — a proof, by the way, of more than one kind ; a proof which betrays the work of the bas- relief artists, showing how well or ill they ren- 8. TUAA, MOTHER OF RAMESES. FROM LEPSIUS’S " DENKMALER AU3 /EGYPTEN.” dered their princely subject — and a proof of Ramesside blood. In neither of these lines will any one who makes the comparison re¬ quire the help of hints as to points of conform¬ ity or affinity. Rather, the danger lies toward the opposite extreme. The casual examiner will be likely to declare, Difference there is none. Why ! this pretended Set! is merely another photograph of the Rameses mummy- head taken from another direction of view ! ” But Set! shrewdly made up for his own deficiency in the nobility then dominant by marrying a princess of the last or eighteenth dynasty, Tuaa by name. She was descended directly from Thothmes III. and Amenophis III. whose granddaughter she was; and the monumental records acknowledge her as Royal Wife, Royal Mother, Heiress, and Sharer of the Throne.” Her mask, as it were, in illustration 8, reveals another source whence Rameses, her illustrious son, derived some of his ‘^classic type” of countenance, along with the whole of his royal blood. For a work of such high antiquity we are not prepared for a treatment so truly artistic, and productive of so startling an effect. How vividly that sharp pro¬ file contrasts with the adjacent background ! It speaks for itself as preserving an exact ap¬ pearance of a living being, with the utmost fidelity and delicacy. Nay, what trace of an¬ tiquity does it present ? It is not too much to say that it marks a moment of Egyptian Renaissance which so closely approaches the Renaissance of art in Italy that, were its origin unknown, it might be mistaken for a product of that time. Tuaa, however, was preeminently royal, not only in that her father was a king of the eighteenth dynasty, but in that on the mater¬ nal side, her mother, Tii by name, the queen of Amenophis III., was a princess in her own right. Her father was a powerful king, and her mother a notable queen, of Naharaina or Mesopotamia. This information is preserved upon alarge scarabasus, executed under Amen¬ ophis, whose inscription, having the following legend (9), may be translated thus : “ The living Horns, the Strong Bull, crowned by Truth, The Lord of Diadems, establishing laws, pacifier of The Two Countries, great warrior, siniter of the Eastern Foreigners, King of the Upper and Lower Egypt. NEB-MA-RA, Son of the Sun, AMENOPHIS, the ruler of The Thebaid, the Giver of Life : The Great Royal Lady TH, the living one; the name of her father was lUA, The name of her mother was TUAA, Who is the wife of the powerful King, His southern frontiers are to the Kami, His northern are to NAHARAINA.” In the record upon another similar scara- baeus, of the same age, Tii, the living one, is called the marvel, the daughter of the Chief of Naharaina.” Of course we are curious to see how this marvelous princess held forth, if, perchance, the monuments have taken and saved a picture of such a Great Royal Lady ” from the land of Rebekah and Rachel and Leah. And mirabile diciu I they have. It is found among the portraits of the queens in the d'ombs of the Queens, on the west of the river Nile over against Thebes, where her own chamber of sepulture remains intact, together with all its sculptures and paintings, unharmed by fire (10). The family likeness on the maternal

Page 23

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER, side, quite different from that of the Rames- side line in respect of angularity, is here re¬ vealed with intensity. The nose, especially, is straight and pointed; the brow is high and far from continuing the slope of the nose, im¬ plying an intellect of superior order. Though her lips indicate a loving heart, she evidently possessed more of spirit than of gentleness ; while the remarkably exact relations and equal¬ ities of her features must have made her not only a very attractive but an exceedingly beau¬ tiful woman. If Rebekah and Rachel were only half so fair as she, they were well worth a journey away |:o Mesopotamia to win. And, possibly, they were not unlike in another very different respect. It will be remembered that Rachel, on the eve of the furtive departure from Mesopotamia, stole away the images of her father’s gods, which surely would be of no value to her unless she really trusted in them and meant to be true to their service in the land to which she was going. Tii, too, was equally loyal to her father’s idols, and carried the gods of Mesopotamia to Egypt. Being a worshiper of Baal, her example re¬ vived the adoration of the sun, in the religious rites of the royal family at least, leading to endless discord and trouble. Though a wife of Amenophis III., her daughter married his son Khu-en-Aten, who is famous for having discarded the gods of Egypt totally, and (under the influence of Tii?) for becoming a VoL. XXXIV.— 3. ir fanatical worshiper of the sun’s beamy disk. In the enthusiasm kindled by a head wrought in white marble and exhibiting a taste surpris¬ ingly aesthetic, recognized as that of Tii by Mariette (though not by Maspero) after she had reached the proportions of a matronly queen. Monsieur Charmes declares : “ When we stop in admiration before the head of Taia, at Bulaq, we feel ourselves unconsciously driven by her charms ... to forge a whole history, an historical romance, of which her enigmatic personality is the center and inspiration, and to fancy her the chief author of those religious tragedies which disturbed her epoch and left a burning trace wdiich has not yet dis¬ appeared.” Having thus traced the probable origin of Raineses’ ancestors on his father’s side, by the aid of the Tablet of Four Hundred Years, back to Chaldea, and the lineage of his mother, by the aid of the Marriage-record of Amenophis, back to Mesopotamia, he might be regarded in respect to race as an Assyrian rather than an Egyptian, might he not ? Are we aware that a verse exists in the Bible, reading, “For thus saith the Lord God: My people went down aforetime into Egypt to sojourn there. And the Assyrian oppressed them without cause,” which always has been an enigma ? Commen¬ tators, indeed, unanimously say the sojourn in Egypt is here contrasted with the captivity in Assyria; but this leaves the statement in the first clause abruptly suspended, and would characterize a carrying away into captivity in¬ correctly as an ‘‘oppression,” while the very next verse (Is. lii. 4, 5) the discourse proceeds to turn from the Egyptian oppression to the contemporary Babylonian captivity in usual and precise terms: “Now therefore, what have I here, saith the Lord, That my people is taken away for nought?”

Page 24

i8 PHARAOH AND HIS HAUGHTER. In Babylon the captives were treated as col¬ onists and citizens, not as slaves, whereas the real oppression” occurred in Egypt alone. It is impossible to resolve this enigma except by regarding the conception of the prophet as remaining in Egypt and referring to Egypt in both clauses of the verse 4, the last bearing out and explaining the first; and then, when the question is raised, How could the oppressor of Israel in Egypt be an Assyrian ? the answer is ready. Our present investigation has already ANUKEH AND RAMESES. FROM PRI8SE D’AVENNES’ "HISTOIRE DE L'ART EGYPTIEN D’APRES LES MONUMENTS.” shown. Isaiah well understood in what way Raineses the Great was an Assyrian in Egypt, and so did they whom he addressed. And this first-born son of the union between Seti and Tuaa, because inheriting the double royalty of his mother, was instantly hailed as king, and recognized by a fastidious aristocracy as the future sovereign of the land ; and not only as a royal but as a divine being. To the people at large he was the personal representa¬ tion of the divine nature ; they adored him, offered prayers to him, sang hymns of praise to him ; his ministers addressed him in rever¬ ent terms, his princes prostrated themselves in his presence, his wives really worshiped him. And he appears to have believed himself superior to men and even allied to the gods ; for in such groups as that of Abil Kes/iaib, or Pithom, he seated himself between two solar deities, Ra on the one side. Turn on the other^ and made his own image larger than either of theirs ! Indeed, he carried this vanity so far as to represent in certain sculptures Raineses as king burning incense before Raineses a deity. His very name signifies “ Derived from Ra,” nor does he hesitate to assume the titles “ Son of Ra,”^‘Sonofthe Sun.” Hownaturally he cries out, ‘‘ Where art thou, O my father Amen?” And he blushes not to put into the speech of the Supreme Creator such words as these, Thus speaks the father of the gods, to his son who loves him, the first-born of his loins, I am thy father, I have begotten thee like a god ; all thy limbs are supernal.” One expression of this popular conceit relates to his nurture in early life : he was regarded as having been nourished by the vestal divinity Anukeh, whose maternal em¬ brace, as disclosed in illustration i i,he enjoyed and reciprocated by a pressure of the hand, at the same time looking up into his benefactress’s face with filial affection. For observe that the artist has with intention thrown into the feat¬ ures of the goddess that noble “ classical ” pro¬ file of his real mother Tuaa, retaining also in those of Raineses as much as possible of the peculiar mold he developed in after life; both, therefore, are living portraits. The execution of this exquisitely colored intaglio, upon a wall of the temple at Bait el-Wali, dates from the very days of Raineses; its tone is chaste, and its design is carried out to the minutest detail. Both in feeling and in art the original is an advanced attainment in Egyptian effort. It is a composition whose excellence kindles new enthusiasm as a longer study^ ^unfolds its merits. Though the bas-reliefs of this tem¬ ple relate to the opening life and early wars of Rameses, manifestly in this scene, though returning from his first excursion very hun¬ gry and thirsty, he had not yet passed be¬ yond a tender age. At first sight we may not be able to suppress a smile nor restrain the remark. Rather large for a babe ! But, as the Egyptians would no sooner sketch their hero in the weakness of childhood than in the infirmity of old age, he is always upon the monuments attributed with immortal youth, beauty, felicity. Nor were the Egyptians alone in this sort of estimation of their idols : Josephus indulges in a similar vein respecting that infant brought up by Pharaoh’s daughter : “ God did also give him that tallness, when he was but three years old, as was wonderful ; and there was

Page 25

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 19 12. AN EARLY PORTRAIT OF RAME3ES. FROM PRISSE D’AVENNES. nobody so impolite as, when they saw Moses, they were not greatly surprised at the beauty of his countenance, which was so remarkable and natural to him that it detained the spectators, and made them stay longer to look upon him.” Even in boyhood the countenance of Rain¬ eses began to exhibit the cast of his father; and the instant we look upon any one of his early copies we recognize the shape and color of his mature life as in a bud the proph¬ ecy of the open flower. One of these early portraitures is brought out in the next illustra¬ tion (12). A royal urasus in winds about the fillet binding a head-dress on the brow, from which on the left side depends that long artificial tress, recurved at the end, which every prince was bound to wear as long as his father remained still in the land of the living. Around the neck reposes a highly ornamental collar, in part com¬ posed of precious stones, the like of which apparently he never ceased to bear, if we may so judge from his next costume and that of his last portrait in this series. And the pelt of a panther, with its head resting on his left breast and one paw thrown over his right shoulder, half covering his tunic, marks the wearer as already a member of that sacred class of priests called Sam^ more fully detailed in the next figure. All of which, however, fail to con¬ ceal the fresh round form of the lad, and the bright look, the happy expression breaking forth in every feature about to blossom out in the face of the Raineses of the future. As soon as old enough, Raineses began to assist his father in every regal and ritualistic duty — sometimes holding the plate of offer¬ ing, pouring the libation, pronouncing the in¬ vocation, or reciting the hymn of worship, while his father performed the sacred rites ; at other times, in order to learn the science of war, accompanying his valorous parent on military campaigns, and, at length, venturing forth alone to victory. In illustration 13 we behold him engaged in one of these services — pouring out a libation of wine — as set forth by a tablet in the Temple of Abydus, upon which Mr. Villiers Stuart declares “ more care has been lavished than on any¬ thing else in the entire temple ; as a specimen of sculpture it is quite a gem.” In the strength of youth Rameses stands erect before an altar surmounted with flowers, partly shaven as to his head, yet retaining that side-lock which marks him still as a princely minor, and upon which he has lavished a golden clasp, a row of pearls, and a royal basilisk. Beads encircle his neck, and an elaborate collar. Over his shoulder hangs a panther’s skin, which only priests of a certain rank had the right to wear. A leopard-headed buckle secures the apron- strings, and the straps suspending a plate of gold upon which are inscribed the cartouches of the heir to the crown. In his left hand he grasps a papyrus-roll, containing, doubtless, the litany of his worship. But, that counte¬ nance ! How, at this early age, it involves all the elements that are to render it peculiar in manhood, in old age, and even after three and thirty centuries have rolled away, — traits, inherited mainly from the paternal line, the salient chin, the impulsive lips, a nose that would identify its owner quite as well as his name, and the extension of its outline over the brow at scarcely a different angle. But while the backward consanguinity is unmis¬ takable, the forward relationship between this unchangeable bas-relief at Abydus and the veritable personage rendered equally un¬ changeable by the embalmer is also unmistak-

Page 26

20 FRA R A OH ANjD HIS FA UGH TER. able, the only modification being due to the unusual in figure and size, yet the nostrils are burden of many years. refined. The lips are rich in kindliness and When grown to man’s estate and elevated vigor. A serious thoughtfulness seems to per- to the throne, tlie king Raineses lost none of vade the whole visage, as though the king his individuality. This is finely developed in were living over again some trying episode, the head of one among his surpassing images, with its fortunate deliverance, in his past ex- 14. RAMESES THE KING, AT TANIS. FROM LEPSIUS. reproduced in illustration 14, now enriching the Museum at Turin, but obtained early in the present century by the Italian collector Drovetti atTanis in all probability. It pertains to a sitting statue, which ranks as the best one that has come down to us in point of complete form, unblemished preservation, and genuine artistic skill. Even without the tell-tale car- touches of Raineses upon the pilaster at the back, we should be struck instantly by the dis¬ tinction it conveys of its ancient original. He wears a military casque bearing the royal uraeus, and holds in the right hand a crook, emblem of dominion. His large eyes betoken a large soul, a fearless purpose, and a con¬ sciousness of supremacy. I\Tile the nose is perience. Shall we venture a guess as to the scene of that incident ? Can this brave war¬ rior ever cease to brood over that narrow es¬ cape he had in his conflict with the Kheta, afar on the banks of the Orontes ? “ x\nd not one of my princes, not one of my captains of the chariots, not one of my chief men, not one of my knights, was there. My warriors and my chariots had abandoned me. “Thereupon I lifted up my voice: ‘Where art thou, my father Amen? If this means that the father has forgotten his son, behold have I done anything with¬ out thy knowledge, or have I not gone and followed the judgments of thy mouth? Shall it be for nothing that I have dedicated to thee many and noble monu¬ ments? Behold, now, Amen, I am in the midst of many unknown peoples in great numbers. All have

Page 27

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 21 united themselves, and I am all alone; no other is with me ; my warriors and my charioteers have de¬ serted me. I called to them, and not one of them heard my voice. The works of a multitude of men are noth¬ ing ; Amen is better than they. ’ “And my voice found an echo in Hermonthis, and Amen heard it and came at my cry. He reached out his hand to me, and I shouted for joy. He called out to me, ‘ I have hastened to thee, Raineses Mer-Amen. I am with thee. I am he, thy father, the sun-god Ra. My hand is with thee. ’ “All this came to pass. I was changed, being made like the god Monthu. I hurled the dart with my right hand, I fought with my left hand. Not one of them raised his hand to fight; their courage was smitten in their breasts; their limbs gave way. I made them fall into the waters just as the crocodiles fall in. They tumbled down on their faces one after another. Each one as he fell, he raised himself not up again.” A grove of palm-trees now flourishes where the city of Memphis, formerly a brilliant capital of Egypt, once stood. Out of all its magnifi¬ cent structures or splendid monuments only a single example survives the others, either drowned by the inundation of the Nile or by its waters left behind during nine months in the year, or groveling, face downwards, in the mire of a pool during the remaining months. The fellahs C2i\\ this sole remaining inhabitant Abh el-Hawl., The Father of Terror and every traveler to Egypt makes a pilgrimage to the spot to receive an impressive lesson of fallen greatness. It is one of those colossal statues of Raineses II. which its ambitious author scat¬ tered through his kingdom from one end to the other — not in sitting posture, as the last one considered, but originally standing erect, with face to the north, against a pylon of the great Temple of Ptah, of which not a vestige is to be found to-day. The surpassing element in this monolithic image is that of height, be¬ ing about forty-four feet from end to end; though its grandeur of size is paralleled by a majestic grandeur of beauty and style. Again, as illustration 15 well shows, the head so teems with the authentic character of the individual that we cannot tire of admiring it. How very exact the relation of brow to nose ! while the entire face presents just such a contour as, from the mummy, we should suppose the feat¬ ures of Rameses must have had in middle life. When the statue fell to the ground the upper part of the double crown, or pscJieiii., towering above the head, was dashed away, and the feet were broken off; but everything else continues intact — urceus, false beard un¬ der the chin, even down to the royal tides en¬ graved upon a breastplate, and a papyrus-roll held in the left hand. At the feet diminutive images of a prince and a princess, one of whom lifts an arm as if raised in supplication, reaching to the knee, are supposed to recall the peril from fire at Pelusium to himself as well as to his wife and children, in commem- t5. RAMESES THE KING, AT MEMPHIS. FROM PRISSE O'AVENNES.

Page 28

22 FHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. oration of rescue from which, through personal bravery as well as presence of mind and prayer, he reared memorial statues of the whole fam¬ ily before the grand sanctuary in Memphis. As if contemplating this miraculous extrication, the stony face cannot conceal the gratitude and peace of the king upon his second deliv¬ erance. Yetamongthese masterpieces of art from the days of the nineteenth dynasty, one, judging from the fragment persisting to our day, sur¬ passed all others in a very rare element. In those thus far examined realism has been plain to be seen — the fruit of an aim to repeat an act¬ ual face not in the least degree departed from nor fallen short of through inadequate talent. 16. RAMESES THE KING, AT THEBES. FROM " DESCRIPTION DE L'EGYPT.'’ But in this one there are signs of the indul¬ gence of a conception, together with an effort, while remaining faithful to the real, to express a dream of an ideal king. The result is the most beautiful face of Raineses that was ever produced by Egyptian genius. It graced a court in that transcendent monument raised to the glory of the great potentate, the Rames- seum at Thebes. From illustration i6 we may easily separate the two components, one the object intended to be duplicated with whcm we are now familiar, retaining his smile ofself- complpcency, which, perhaps, always flitted around the lips of Raineses ; the other a stamp upon that face of superhuman symmetry, of spiritual delicacy, reaching out after, really catching, that divine nature and dignity which Raineses was believed to share. So success¬ ful were the authors of this statue in their de¬ sign that, as late as our own century when the French savants reached it, they, looking stead¬ fastly thereon, actually thought it the face of a god : “ One could scarcely represent divinity under traits which should better cause it to be respected and cher¬ ished.” From this fragment in its faultless chisel¬ ing and polish, we may only imagine what amount of labor must have been expended upon the whole colossus of rosy syenite. It was the choicest monument, probably, in the grand structure of the Ramesseum. How innocently the messieurs of the French Commission add, “ This morccau of sculpture deserves to be carried to Europe, in order to show to what degree of perfection the Egyptians attained in the art of cutting and finish¬ ing stone.” Presently this morceau Avas conveyed to Eu¬ rope — to the Louvre? No; but to a hall in the British Museum ! Compare this illustra¬ tion, for a moment, with the full-face view, on page lo, of the mummied king. Is there any difference, aside from the contrast between the bloom of manhood and the emaciation of extreme senility ? How many landmarks are common to both — the heavy eyebrows, the face broadest at the cheek-bones, the prom¬ inent nose, the excessive lips, the sharply jut¬ ting chin ! The monument and the monarch agree beyond all anticipation. Our series of representative portraitures of Raineses began Avith one made vivid by the aid of colors; it may, therefore, appropriately end Avith another made as brilliant as a paint¬ ing by never-fading pigments. It occurs at Abu Simbel in Nubia, in the grotto or temple of Hathor. Of course, an illustration (17) in black and AAdiite cannot transmit any con¬ ception of those powerful tints Avhich render the portrait as natural as life itself, and so per¬ fectly real that you Avait to receive some reply to your greeting, or expect the monarch to descend from the Avail and Avelcome you to his royal abode. The surpassing quality here is an intense expression. He is older noAv, equally tranquil, but less gracious and more stem. His complexion is a deep coppery red; his eye is very long, its apple is black, its ball Avhite, its lids OA^ershadoAving ; the nose is Raineses’ OAvn, depressed at the end; Avhile the mouth and chin are equally peculiar. His costume is a military one; a casque of cobalt- blue, enameled Avith studs of gold and orna¬ mented Avith the uraeus, is bound behind by streaming bands. A broad collar adorns the

Page 29

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 23 17. RAMESES THE KING, AT AEU SIMBEU. FROM CHAMPOLLION-LE-JEUNE’S “ MONUMENTS DE L’EGYPTE.” neck, variegated with circles and radiant points in blue, green, yellow, red, and black. The hue of his short-sleeved garment, crushed-straw¬ berry, has again cohie round into the height of fashion, and is rendered highly effective by dominos in black ; you would readily im¬ agine the king might have taken the pattern from Joseph’s coat of many colors. But what sort of grotto or temple or abode is this at which we have arrived ? Here, cer¬ tainly, the king can no longer complain that he is" all alone.” The temple at Bait el-Wali and the imposing Ramesseum are devoted to his glorious achievements; but here, on all sides, upon fagade, walls, pillars, another fig¬ ure is met with; another presence keep him company; another regent reigns conjointly with him on the throne. This sacred abode is consecrated to Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, and the second personage who shares it with him is his beloved wife, the idol and ruler of his heart, Mer-en-Mut Nefer-ari. Miss Ed¬ wards has unfolded the raiso?i (Tetre of the shrine, in most inimitable terms : “ The fagade is a daring innovation. Here the whole front is but a frame for six recesses, from each of which a colossal statue, erect and life-like, seems to be walk¬ ing straight out from the heart of the mountain (18). These statues, three to the right and three to the left of the doorway, stand thirty feet high, and represent Rameses II. and Nefer-ari, his queen. Mutilated as they are, the male figures are full of spirit, and the fe¬ male figures are full of grace. The queen wears on her head the plumes and disk of Hathor. The king is crowned with the pschent, and with a fantastic hel¬ met adorned with plumes and horns. They have their children with them ; the queen her daughters, the king his sons, infants of ten feet high, whose heads just reach the parental knee. “The superb hieroglyphs that cover the faces of these buttresses and the front of this porch are cut half a foot deep into the rock, and are so large that they can be read from the island in the middle of the river. The tale they tell — a tale retold, in many varied turns of old Egyptian style upon the architraves within — is singular and interesting. “‘Rameses, the Strong in Truth, the Beloved of Amen,’ says the outer legend, ‘ made this divine Abode for his royal wife, Nefer-ari, whom he loves.’ “ The legend within, after enumerating the titles of the king, records that ‘ his royal wife who loves him, Nefer-ari the Beloved of Mut, constructed for him this Abode in the mountain of the Pure Waters.’ “ On every pillar, in every act of worship pictured on the walls, even in the sanctuary, we find the names of Rameses and Nefer-ari ‘ coupled and inseparable.’ In this double dedication, and in the unwonted tender¬ ness of the style, one seems to detect traces of some event, perhaps of some anniversary, the particulars of which are lost forever. It may have been a meeting; it may have been a parting ; it may have been a prayer answered, or a vow fulfilled. We see, at all events, that Rameses and Nefer-ari desired to leave behind them an imperishable record of their affection which united them on earth, and which they hoped would re¬ unite them in Amend. What more do we need to know ? We see that the queen was fair, that the king was in his prime. We divine the rest ; and the poetry of the place at all events is ours. Even in these barren solitudes there is wafted to us a breath from the shores of old romance. We feel that Love once passed this way. and that the ground is still hallowed where he trod.” In order to get a better view of this loving pair, let us separate the two statues at the right of the picture, or northern end of the fa¬ cade, from the remainder, and enlarge them as much as possible. This is done in illustra¬ tion 19. The two cartouches of Rameses the King stand over his head in the cornice, and one of them above the head of each statue at its left; the single cartouch of Mer-en-Mut Nefer-ari falls in the middle of the pilaster just at the elbow of the queen, beneath her title The Great Royal Wife,” equivalent to “ Royal Wife, Chief Lady of the land.” Out in the sunlight the wonted smile of the king returns, indicating a condition of happiness without alloy. Observe how remarkably this face, with the attire upon the head, coordi- 18. FACADE OF THE TEMPLE OF HATHOR, AT ABU 8IMBEL. FROM PRISSE D’AVENNEB.

Page 30

24 PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. of maternity. Above the beak of the bird rises a hooded asp, carrying a miniature disk of the sun, always the emblem of a sovereign. A large ear¬ ring peeps from under a sun-bonnet, fringed with gold and falling around her shoulder. In her right hand she holds up a sistrum, or copper bow with cross-bars strung with beads, ornamented by a head of Hathor as a sign that she is a priestess of the highest rank or prophetess of peculiarly sacred character ; while in her left she grasps a scourge as another sign of royal supremacy. In her outline the Egyptian artist manifestly tried to realize a beauty which he was never afterwards called upon to outdo : he has expressed a sweet grace, united with a force of character, quite sufficient to gain and to keep the affections even of a Ra¬ ineses the Great. A variant of her dedication of the temple to him reads, according to Mr. Villiers Stuart : “ To tlie sovereign of the two lands, Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, User- Ma-Ra, Son of the Sun, Beloved of Ra, Lopl of Crowns, Rameses Mer-Amen, his loving Lady, Queen and Princess Nefer- tari has built a temple in the locality of Abbu by the waters. Grant him life for evermore.” 19. TWO STATUES AT RIGHT OF PRECEDING FACADE. THE QUEEN MER-EN-MUT NEFER-ARI AND THE i liro Wing these epithets into a natural succession, His Princess andQueen’’ at once, we may curiously ask. Does the first of these terms nates with both the style and the detail of the Ramesseum statue. Also, closely compare the two countenances of king and queen and note a very apparent kinship lying back of, older than, the relationship of husband and wife. Evidently the love that is now so warm and paramount in their lives is a continuation of an affection never less tender or strong. Upon a pillar deep within the recesses of this grotto, on the left, we may find a more exact delineation of this fair queen, revealing the same secret. Just the same hieroglypdis identify her as the Royal Wife, Great Lady Mer-en-Mut Nefer-ari.” As illustration 20 in¬ dicates, she dons the plumes and horns and disk of the goddess to whom her home is dedicated ; she wears a coronet ; and, not un¬ like some fashionable ladies nowadays, she bears upon her head the livery of a bird, that of a vulture, — in her case, however, a symbol explain the ro¬ mantic attach¬ ment and offer the ground of exaltation to the last ? If so, the revelation is capable of a test which will either confirm or dis¬ prove it. One step backward in her history would be a time when she had not yet assumed the title Mer-en- Mut, ‘‘Beloved of the goddess Mut,”just as her liege-lord was proud to call himself Mer-Amen, “Beloved of Amen,” and his son Mer-en-Ptah, “ Be¬ loved of the deity Ptah.” And such a period is readi - ly recovered. Among the bas-reliefs of West Silsilis 20. RAMESES' ROYAL WIFE, MER-EN-MUT NEFER-ARI, LEPSIUS. GREAT LADY FROM

Page 31

PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 25 this same queen may be observed occupied with the pious task of offering sacrifice to cer¬ tain divinities (illustration 21). Here she is announced to the world as the “ Royal Wife,” and the ‘‘ Great Royal Wife, Lady Ruler of the Two Lands,” etc., while her cartouch reads merely “Nefer-ari.” Her insignia are essen¬ tially the same, the plumes, etc., of Hathor, a coronet, but no urseus, and now she holds a sistrum in each hand high above the altars, upon which libation-jars are standing. As a sistrum-player, ahi-t^ and in the act of per¬ forming certain religious ceremonies before an altar, she again signalizes her member¬ ship in that holy order of priesthood to which only the wives and daughters of kings could belong. Another step backward in her history would be a time when she had not yet attained the position of queen or the title of “ Royal Wife,” but was known simply as ‘‘Princess.” Look¬ ing through the lists of royal daughters born to Rameses, among the troop depicted at Derr we find one little girl portrayed beneath the king, accompanied by his lion and about to dis¬ patch a group of prisoners, who lifts her arms on high and holds a sistrum in one hand, who wears a coronet, and bears the name of “Ne- fer-ari.” On the walls of the Great Temple here at Abu Simbel she also appears, beneath a similar scene, and is recorded as “ Nefer- tari” by name : in illustration 22 is her picture. At first thought it might seem, from the oc¬ currence of Mer-en-Mut Nefer-ari in the com¬ pany of Rameses offering sacrifice on one wall in the Great Temple, and the occurrence of these daughters on another wall of the same temple, that the queen was grown when the princess was young. But on second thought this objection disappears; for this troop of prin¬ cesses is merely a genealogical table, a duplicate of oth¬ ers at Derr and at Thebes, without ref¬ erence to the queen, who is represented upon the walls of both these temples at Abu Simbel as she appeared at sev¬ eral other epochs in her life; and also for the reason that among these vari¬ ous princesses, all alike of about a twelve-year-old size, no less than a whole generation of years must be di¬ al. RAMESES’ GREAT ROYAL WIFE NEFER-ARI. FROM LEPSIU8. VoL. XXXIV.— 4. vided up — they could not all have been exactly twelve years of age at once. Let us estimate that the daughter of Pha¬ raoh th-e Oppressor was not far from sweet sixteen when she found the little waif upon the Nile : at this time she was only the “ Prin¬ cess” Nefer-ari, and the Bible is perfectly accurate in referring to her as “Pharaoh’s daughter.” As Brugsch believes, this occurred in the sixth year of Rameses’ reign, who may then have been six- and- thirty years of age : we know that he had grown-up sons, who were as¬ sisting him in war, when he himself began to rule. On the other hand, votive tablets in our Hathor Temple, dating from the thirty-eighth year of Rameses’ reign, would indicate forty- eight and sixty-eight as the ages of the royal couple when this sacred abode was finished and in constant use. But in two or three or four or more years after her discovery of the ark in the flags by the river’s brink, the “ Princess ” became the king’s peerless consort, and at first was dis¬ tinguished by no other than her former name, the “Royal Wife Nefer-ari”; but, presently, for some reason best known to herself, she added a second appellation, Mer-en-Mut, the basis of the Thermuthis (T-mer-mut) of Greek historians. Here lies the key to the strange procedure of Josephus, who first styles her “Daughter,” then calls her “ Thermuthis,” and finally de¬ scribes her as Co-regent in the administration of affairs. And this very singularly clears up the rec¬ ords of other historians hitherto obscure. One of them, Georgius (Syncellus), calls Rameses “ Amosis Pharao ” — a close approx¬ imation, yet not a perfect echo, “Amosis” hav¬ ing lost an initial R in its transit across the sea and two thou¬ sands of years. Besides, he re¬ lates, “The Daughter of Pha¬ rao, Thermuthis who was also called Pharia.” Ah ! this, too, has a familiar accent, — “ Pharia?” — yet something is missing. What can it be? Again across the great sea and a space of twenty centu¬ ries “Pharia” has lost an initial N : if Georgius’s rec¬ ord were to read 22. RAMESES’ ROYAL DAUGHTER NEFER-ARI. LEPSiUS.

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26 PHARAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER, Nepharia, nothing would be wanting. Thus, according to this authority, the full name of Pharaoh’s Daughter was no less than Ther- muthis-Nefer-ari. Another of them, Cedrenus, tells how the Daughter of Pharao was named ‘‘ Muthidis,” as well as Thermuthis, and Phareis.” Of course, as before this, “ Phareis ” is a reduced survival of Nefer-ari, while “ Muthidis ” stands as a fragment of and so in both combined we have represented about half of the long Egyptian designation Mer-en-Mut Nefer-ari. Artapanus, also, was right, as far as he went, in saying that Pharao’s Daughter bore the name of ‘‘ Merrhis,” which selects the other half of Meri-ybit. By putting the halves pre¬ served by Cedrenus and Artapanus together, we get the whole of Mer-en-Mut after all. Unconscious of all our per¬ plexity in regard to her identity, the Daughter of Pharaoh is si¬ lently waiting for recognition, in life-size and bold relief, upon the walls of Hath- or’s Grotto to¬ es. HEAD OF PHARAOH'S DAUGHTER. ENLARGED day (23). A gen- FROM FIGURE 20. gpirlt liQVeX breathed from any countenance, together with a charm as irresistible to us as it was to the king; and yet she exhibits no lack of intelligence, good sense, wit, or strength. She wears all the grace and majesty of a real queen: a marked refine¬ ment betrays her superiority in rank and race to everything natively Egyptian. The narra¬ tive of Josephus respecting the events which took place after Moses had ceased to be an infant abundantly exhibits Thermuthis as act¬ ive and influential in the government as any queen could be. She certainly exercised the power of veto when, having brought the boy Moses to her father, saying she intended him to be heir to his kingdom, and the great Ram- eses, drawing his daughter’s pet close to his breast and playfully putting the royal diadem on the head of the lad, the latter audaciously dphed it to the ground and trod upon it with his feet, for which act of evil omen the sacred scribe, looking on, made a violent attempt to kill him on the spot — she snatched her dar¬ ling away, and so saved his life a second time. We shall also err if, from the standpoint of our better psychology, judicially condemn- ing the relation here involved, we pronounce it inadmissible. We are in search of facts, re¬ gardless where they may lead ; and we must judge the parties concerned by their standards and circumstances, not by ours. It is already admitted by Pierret, Lenormant, and others that Bint-antha thus became the queen she was; while Wiedemann asserts the same as true, not of Bint-antha only, but of Amen- meri-t and of Neb-taui also. But, if of these three daughters or only of one, why not of Nefer-ari as well ? Reflecting a moment upon the reputed number of the progeny of this great king, one hundred and seventy, — half of whom must have been daughters, — an array unprecedented in the annals of Egypt, we see how difficult a matter it must have been to find royal suitors for the hands of the prin¬ cesses. Rameses was at war with all the world within his reach until there was no king but himself in all his wide domains. Intermarriage was regarded as expedient by the lofty house of Egypt, as the .true , means of keeping its royalty pure and the family perfect. People in the olden times over there reasoned pre¬ cisely as the daughters of Abraham’s brother did, when their mother became defunct by crystallization into a pillar of salt. Isaac, by Abraham’s express direction, and Jacob took wives frorn their own kindred; and when Esau preferred to go out of the lines of con¬ sanguinity and marry Hittite damsels, it was ‘‘a grief to Isaac and Rebekah.” Besides, to¬ ward the end of Egyptian history the Ptole¬ mies were famous for close alliances, and we think it not so very strange only because we have got used to the fact. Rameses the Great was about thirty years old when he began to rule alone, and he reigned sixty-seven years. As Professor Mas- pero says in his report, And so he ought to have been almost a centenarian at death.’* The Scriptures imply that the Pharaoh who had brought the Israelites under the yoke of bond¬ age was sovereign on the throne when Moses was born, we may estimate, with Professor H. Brugsch, in the sixth year of his reign. After this, Moses had time for growing up to adult age, and for retreating into Midian forty years, according to the chronology in our A. V., ere he could return to Egypt with safety. Can there be, therefore, an undercurrent of irony in the words of the Bible where it reads, ‘‘ And it came to pass in process of that the king of Egypt died ” ? Be this as it may, we have, also, the testimony of one profane historian, at least, who records of Sesostris that,having lived to so great age as to lose his sight, he preferred to put an end to his earthly existence rather than allow it to be further prolonged. This last act,” Diodorus continues, was admired by the priests as well as by the other Egyptians, as terminating life in a manner worthy the ac-

Page 33

FHAEAOH AND HIS DAUGHTER. 27 tions of this king.” Accordingly, the walls of his magnificent Ramesseum preserve a bas-relief depicting the apotheosis of this exalted scepter- bearer (24). He is seated as upon a throne still, and, already their equal, he enters the society of the gods, all of whom are engaged in in¬ scribing his name upon the fruits of the Tree of Life. On the left sits Amen-Ra-Tum, the sun, the supreme deity, under the form he as¬ sumes in the lower world where the dead reside. On the right stands Tahut, having the head of an ibis, god of science and all knowledges, scribe to the assembly of the immortals. In the midst and facing the king newly arrived, stands Safekh, the Lady of Writings ” or god¬ dess of letters, who, along with Tahut, carries in the left hand the emblem of perpetuity dur¬ ing millions and millions of years. The double royal cartouch of Rameses II. appears directly over his head ; and even in this outline draw¬ ing of his countenance the artist of more than thirty centuries ago clearly endeavored to trace the very profile which time has dealt so ten¬ derly with and now in these last days has un¬ veiled to our reverent gaze. Even if his royal name had not been offi¬ cially written by the high-priest Pinotem upon his cerements, we would have been able read¬ ily to recognize and safely to identify the Great Rameses from his monographic monuments. JoJm A. Paine, CARTOUCHES OF RAMESES, II.- KING OF THE UPPER AND LOWER COUNTRIES.

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ZWEIBAK; OR, NOTES OF A PROFESSIONAL EXILE.— V. IGHT on the top of my remark that the passion of love, or that simple pas¬ sions of any sort, such as the plays describe, are not to be met with in Zweibak, comes the adorable spin¬ ster Phillis, accompanied by Amyntas, who has been in love with her for years. She is a really fine person, — a tall, full, blonde woman, with a coquetry which ap¬ proaches philanthropy, it is so amiable, so vague and elevated. Her desire to please ex¬ pands itself into a fine and gentle enthusiasm. She has a freedom and a strength of position which would be possible to no other than an American spinster. She is not emancipated, or peculiar, or anything that is unbecoming, but sits by her tea-table like Deborah of old under her palm tree; from this position, in which I have often seen her, she radiates her interest in mankind in general and the male portion thereof in particular. Amyntas has been in pursuit of her for years, if that may be called pursuit, where she does not fly and he scarcely dares follow. The af¬ fair has reached a state of suspended motion. He is quite content to be near her, to listen to the sound of her voice, and to be conscious of her movements. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether her actual presence is necessary to him. I should think he might sit very com¬ fortably in the same room with one of her old dresses. . . . An American should not spend the years of his early and middle life in Europe. When Americans first come abroad, they are very much taken up with associations. These are often so attractive as to make them think they could never weary of such things. A day or two after my first landingin England as a youngster, fifteen years ago, I went with a college friend to the Haymarket Theatre. This was in the time before the hand of the improver had been laid upon that charming abode of Thespis. It was a dingy white-and-gilt old place, stodgy and full of draughts, still redolent of old comedy and of the days of the pit and “ half price.” We sat in the stalls in the second row from the orchestra, and were very near the actors. Our compatriot, Mr. Vezin, who was playing in “ The Man of Airlie,” did us the great kindness to wink at us. I wonder if he was sensible of the effect upon our young minds of his benevolent action. In an instant I felt such “ a man about town.” I was one with the wits of Queen Anne, with Colley Cibber and Barry and Betterton, and the dandies of fifty and a hundred years ago. We were very happy. The next day I went to a levee at St. James's Palace. A beef-eater in the dress of three cen¬ turies ago stood at a turn of the staircase, and, recognizing my black coat, motioned me in the direction of the entree. I was vastly pleased by the man’s deferential manner. His sem¬ blance was in some way familiar to me. I looked again and saw that it was Henry VI IL, no longer proud and valiant as in Holbein’s picture, but contrite in mind, much tutored by the lapse of time and the course of events, having fully adopted the view of the school histories regarding his own actions, and now doing homage to the spirit of democracy in the person of a Yankee diplomate. But one cannot live on associations. One has but a single life and cannot spend that on traditions. Associations and traditions soon weary. I sometimes go and stay at the coun¬ try house of an old lady who has known pretty much every European celebrity of the century and who has entertained many of them under her most hospitable roof. She likes to talk about them. At first it was interesting to listen ; but it has come to bore me sadly. The kind old lady sits discoursing all day upon the past of these eminent people — to me, who am altogether interested in my own future. . . . I begin to want a country badly. I have so long breathed foreign air as to have begun to wonder whether the atmosphere of my own land, like this, is made of oxygen and nitro¬ gen, and whether our piece of ground has as much of the sun, the moon, and the stars as these countries. I am aware that my country is a great one, but I require in my exile an outward and visible sign of the fact. It has altogether too much moral and future great¬ ness. I wish it had more ships of war and bands of music. I would give some tons of moral greatness and, as for the future, would throw in an eon or two, for one smart drummer-boy. A year ago a United States ship of war vis¬ ited the country in which the writer holds a diplomatic appointment. I accompanied my chief on a visit to this ship. We were met at the dock by a steam launch, commanded by a midshipman, a tall youth with delicate and distinct features and a complexion that sug¬ gested ague. He told us he was from south-

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ZWEIBAK; OR, NOTES OF A FROEESSIONAL EXILE, em Ohio. The chief, who is a poet, said he looked like Nelson ; a Nelson from the shores of the Miami seemed a funny notion ; but he did nevertheless. I was expecting nothing and thinking of nothing when the launch reached a hole in the side of the black object we had seen in the offing. We ran up the steps to the deck, which had been hidden from us by the ship’s high walls and which was alive with a numerous company drawn up in the smart¬ est array; the admiral to the front, an ex¬ tremely handsome old man, in uniform of navy blue and brass buttons and white waistcoat, looking very grand and clean and bright and “tarnation mad.” (We should have been there before). There was a violent discharge of mus¬ ketry. My senses were shocked by the sharp rattling reports. The deck swam blushing with ten thousand flowers. In the twinkling of an eye I had been taken, after long absence, to a portion of the territory of my own country. It was her music, from the guns of four hun¬ dred thronging brothers, which tore the morn¬ ing air of that distant shore. It was her most sweet thunder which reverberated among those summer seas. I looked upward and be¬ held the flag floating supremely in its elemen¬ tal blue. I never dreamed they could make such a devil of a noise. The ship’s company went through their manoeuvres ; and then we were shown over the vessel. There was something rather flattering to ourselves, who had been treated with such consideration in the “ damn- your-eyes ” manner in which the officers hissed their orders sidewise to the common sailors, while we, so to speak, strode on superbly over their prostrate necks. It seemed very profes¬ sional and quite the right thing. The admiral asked us to dine with him in his cabin. He also asked the captain. It was particularly pleasant to see that the captain called him “ Sir,” similar instances of just authority and decent subordination being so rare among our countrymen. At dinner the admiral had sev¬ eral times told the colored boy who waited to fill my glass, which the boy was rather slow in doing. At length the admiral himself filled the glass, saying : “ That boy is determined you shan’t have anything to drink.” The mod¬ eration and self-restraint of this impressed me greatly, when I knew that at a word he could have hanged the boy from the yard-arms. The ship’s company were again drawn up to take leave of the minister, who declared to the admiral when about to take the launch that it was the happiest day he had spent in England. As for me, I shall not attempt to describe the lively sentiments toward the grand old admiral I entertained at parting. . . . Iseeby the papers that they have taken up the remains of John Howard Payne, the author of “ Home, Sweet Home,” and carried them to America, the expense of the proceed¬ ing having been borne by an American mil¬ lionaire. Mr. Payne had a very nice grave by the side of the Mediterranean. Why not have let him stay there ? To have taken him up after so long a time and to have carried him such a distance and then for a Washington glee-club to get around him and sing a part- song seems to me to have been of the nature of an indignity. If Mr. Payne was a man of humor and refined sensibilities, as he probably was, I doubt if such a free treatment of him would have been to his taste. There is a notion at home that you may be allowed to do anything, if you will pay for it. And when a rich man wants to do something “ graceful,” it is difficult for the authorities to gainsay him, a rich man with us being a big¬ ger thing than the Government of the United States. I trust that if any soft-hearted million¬ aire proposes to make a contribution to my traveling expenses, he will do so while I am in the flesh, and can come to such a nice place as this and spend it. It seems also that the De¬ partment of State made a somewhat unseason¬ able concession in this matter. There must have been occasions when a leave of absence of sixty days and the necessary time required for transit, with permission to visit the United States, would have been appreciated by Mr. Payne. But to speak seriously, of course if there were people who wished to move Mr. Payne and were ready to pay for the transfer, the government could hardly have refused to assist them to do so. A great department can hardly humor itself with the whims of taste in which an irresponsible itinerant like the writer may indulge himself. My countrymen have recently displayed a great access of necrologic zeal. Some Philadel¬ phians have made a determined eflbrt to get possession of the body of William Penn, and as they are that sort of people who think there isn’t anything you can’t raise with a derrick, they are much surprised that their attempt should have been resisted. On the ground that Pittsburg was named after the elder Pitt, the Common Council of that city recently passed a resolution, requesting Lord Chatham to allow the remains of his ancestor to be re¬ moved there for interment. The great Lord Chatham said, “ If I were an American, I would never lay down my arms! ” By way of a tardy acknowledgement of this famous and magnanimous utterance, I now take this op¬ portunity of saying, “ If I were the Pitt family, I would never give up my grandfather 1 ” E. S. NadaL

Page 36

THE HUNDREDTH MAN* BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of “Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XVII. STULL did not go into the country with his family, for it was necessary for him to remain some time longer in the city, in order to give attention to several branches of his va¬ ried business which had been neglected when his mind and time had been so greatly occu¬ pied by the disturbances at Vatoldi’s. But this occasioned no delay in the opening of his operations against the peace and welfare of Enoch Bullripple. He had no intention of doing anything in his proper person, and his presence was not at all necessary at the scene of action. Without allowing his motives to make any appearance whatever, he had en¬ gaged a competent agent to investigate the title-deeds and original surveys of the Bull¬ ripple farm; and he had found, as he had ex¬ pected to find, that not only was the old man’s tenure of his property a very uncertain one, having depended for its endurance principally upon the fact that no one had ever cared to investigate its validity, but that there was an equal doubt of legal ownership in regard to the farm which he himself had acquired from Mrs. People. Mr. Stull had reason to suspect this when he bought up the mortgages which eventually gave him possession of the farm, but the property came to him so easily he was willing to take the risks in regard to the title. Now it would serve his purpose very well, if, when the time came to push Enoch Bull¬ ripple to the wall, the old man could also see that Mr. Stull was being pushed. That would make it impossible for Enoch or his nephew to suppose that he had anything to do with the matter. But Mr. Stull was an excellent manager and a shrewd business man, and he did not pro¬ pose that the pushing he might receive should hurt him in the least. His present action was not entirely based on his desire to retaliate on the old farmer for the insults and injuries the latter had heaped upon him. If things should turn out as he expected, there was reason to hope that * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. there would be much profit for him in his proposed transactions. The lands in ques¬ tion were not worth very much, looked upon from an agricultural point of view, but it was possible that they might, otherwise, be very valuable. Iron ore in paying quantities had been found in various parts of this region; and Mr. Stull’s observations had led him to believe that the rolling country about Cherry Bridge was as likely to contain iron as any of the places where it had already been found. It would please him very well to form a company and put up a smelting-furnace on some spot convenient to the railroad; but, before he did this, he would like to become the owner of as much valuable mineral land in the vicinity as he could lay his hand upon. If there should be iron on his own farm, he would be very will¬ ing to give up his present hold upon it in order to acquire another which would be firm and secure ; and if the Bullripple property should contain the desirable metal, he would most certainly buy up that property if it should be forced into the market. The agent selected to conduct these in¬ vestigations was exceedingly well adapted to the work ; and, had he not undertaken it, it is doubtful if Mr. Stull could have found any one to whom he would have been willing to intrust it. This individual was Mr. Zenas Turby, who lived in the county town not far from Cherry Bridge, where he engaged in a variety of vocations, most of which had some connection with the law. He collected debts, and took up any odds or ends of legal busi¬ ness which could be attended to by one who was not an actual lawyer. In the course of a long and intrusive life he had picked up a great deal of information, legal and otherwise, which frequently caused him to shine in the light of a useful man. There was one piece of busi¬ ness which most of his neighbors would have been very glad to see him engaged in, and that was an early attendance at his own fu¬ neral. But Mr. Turby had declined for many years to gratify this popular desire, and, al¬ though now over sixty, was so hale and hearty that the prevailing hope in his direction seemed likely to be much deferred. Among his other accomplishments Mr. Stockton. All rights reserved.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN 31 Turby was skilled in the search for iron ore, and this helped in a great degree to make him unpopular. The farmers in this part of the country had no desire to profit by the dis¬ covery of ore on their property. The profit they received from the culture of the surface of their fields was as satisfactory to them as it had been to their fathers, and they did not wish to dig and blast into the bowels of their farms in the pursuit of what might or might not be concealed therein. There were a few who had been shown the errors of this con¬ servatism, but the greater part of them still asserted that they wanted nobody prowling and prying around their farms looking for iron. Even if it should be found, there was at present no furnace in the neighborhood, and, consequently, no immediate demand for the ore; and, more than that, they were un¬ able to rid their minds of their old-fashioned prejudices against allowing other men to come and work upon their lands. Mr. Turby was very well pleased to take up this piece of business for Mr. Stull. There was gain in it, and, besides, all the fighting that would have to l3e done would be against Enoch Bullripple, and Turby liked that. For many years, and in various ways, these two had been pitted against each other, whenever oc¬ casion could be found for such pitting. What¬ ever one believed in politics, religion, or in regard to almost anything else, was doubted or denied by the other, and the fact that they were the two sharpest old fellows in that county was reason enough for their being very sharp against each other. Hitherto Enoch had generally got the bet¬ ter of Zen as Turby, and the latter, therefore, was very zealous in an affair which might give him the upper hand — and a very hard and horny upper hand — of a man who had not failed to get him down whenever it had been possible. The investigations regarding the title-deeds and surveys of the estates in question had been carried on at the county town, and Mr. Turby having made a satisfactory report upon these, it now remained to look into the iron branch of the business before Mr. Stull definitely de¬ termined how he would proceed in the affair. This made it necessary for Zenas Turby to visit the village of Cherry Bridge; and to Cherry Bridge he came. It was on a rainy morning that Mr. Bull¬ ripple, mounted on a great gray horse which would have been plowing in the corn-field had the weather been fair, rode up to the vil¬ lage house of entertainment, and tied his horse under a shed. There were several men sitting in a large covered porch in front of the house, but the first person Enoch saw was Zenas Turby. It cannot be said that in the mind of either of these men there ever arose a de¬ sire for social converse with the other, and yet, whenever they happened to meet, each experienced certain snappy emotions which were not unpleasurable. “You here, Zenas Turby?” said Enoch, as he took his seat in the one vacant wooden arm¬ chair. “ Haven’t seen you in Cherry Bridge for a good while. I thought, perhaps, that sulky of yourn had broke down at last from your havin’ forgot yourself and taken some¬ body in with you.” As he said this Mr. Bullripple smiled, and looked around at the other men sitting in wooden arm-chairs, most of whom being his neighbors returned him an answering grimace of approbation of the little thrust he had given Zenas Turby. The latter did not smile. He was a strong, heavily built man. His face was smooth- shaven, and the little hair he had on his head was curly and of a reddish, sandy hue which made it difficult to perceive whether it was turn¬ ing gray or not. He wore a long black coat, and the rest of his clothes and his hat were black, and he carried a stout cane with a long curved handle, well polished by the use of many years. He did not need this cane, but always took it with him when he drove. On such oc¬ casions he used it as a prodder with which to remind his horse that time is money; and when walking he carried it as a symbol of authority and a punctuator of his remarks. N ow he gave a tap upon the floor which might indicate the opening of a paragraph, and fixing his sharp blue eyes upon his old antagonist, he said: “It’s all very well for you, Enoch Bullripple, to keep on talking about my sulky, for I ex¬ pect there’s been many a time when you’ve wished it held two instead of one, so that you might get a chance of using some other per¬ son’s horse-flesh instead of your own, but I’ve lived long enough to know it’s a sight better for a man that’s got business to attend to to drive about in somethin’ that’ll hold himself and nobody else; so that wherever he goes he won’t be asked to give somebody a lift ■who’s too lazy to walk, or too stingy to keep a horse. My sulky carries me about all right, but it won’t carry nobody else, and this suits me very well, even if it does sometimes come hard on you, Enoch Bullripple.” And the big cane came down on the floor, marking a period apparently very satisfactory to the speaker. Mr. Bullripple grinned. “There’s no man in this county,” said he, “ outside of a lunatic asylum that would see you driving by with an empty four-seated wagon and ask for a lift in it if he didn’t have enough money in his pocket to pay you a little more than common stage

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32 THE HUNDREDTH MAN fare. And I shouldn’t wonder if the reason you stick to a sulky is to keep yourself from the temptation of stagin’ without a license.” At this two or three of the company laughed, and Mr. Turby frowned. But Enoch, not car¬ ing for any reply to this remark, continued to speak. ‘‘ But what brought you up here any way, Zenas?” he said. ‘‘’Tain’t the time of year for collectin’ bills. Did you come to look for iron? I’ve heard you’ve been goin’ into that business.” Now nothing could have angered Mr. Turby more than this remark. Sneers in regard to his narrowness of disposition were not new to him, but he flattered himself that he always suc¬ ceeded in keeping his business a secret until he chose to divulge it. But here, at the very first question, Enoch had hit upon the object of his visit to Cherry Bridge. Whether it’s iron or gold or paper money, it’s none of your business, Enoch Bullripple. That is to say - ” but here he checked him¬ self. He wished to make it very much the business of the other, but that was a matter which must not now be touched upon. “All that I’ve got to say about iron is just this : that there never was a bigger fool than the man who’d go on plowin’ and workin’ his stony old fields and not get enough in any year to pay his honest debts, when all he has to do is to say the word and have a company dig iron out of his hills — and not hurt his fields and pastures nuther — and pay him fifty cents for every load of ore took out. But there are fools of that kind and plenty of ’em, who might live in comfort and send their children to school if they only had sense enough to let other people come and get out of their farms the only thing worth gettin’ out of ’em.” “ It’s one thing,” said Enoch, “ to own land with minerals in it and to go to work and get them minerals and make money on ’em. But it’s altogether another thing to have a man come that p’raps don’t know no more about it than that p’inter dog, and dig here, there, and anywhere, on your farm, and then go off and say that there ain’t iron enough on it to make a horse-shoe, and so spile your chance of sellin’ a part of your land if a com¬ pany ever did come along that wanted to buy it. Nobody wants a fellow huntin’ for iron on his place who’s got a report to sell to the highest bidder.” This was a hard hit, because a story had once been told that a farmer in the neighborhood of the county town had been urged by Mr. Turby to employ him to make a report on the mineral value of his lands, offering as a reason that it would be much better for the owner of a farm if the investigating agent had his in¬ terests at heart instead of those of the would- be purchaser. As the country people of that region had an old-fashioned idea that a report should be a simple statement of facts without reference to the interests of any particular em¬ ployer, this story thickened the cloud that for a long time had shaded Mr. Turby. Zenas frowned and looked steadily at the floor. “ I shouldn’t think,” said he, speaking slowly but very forcibly, “ that a man that goes off on some sort of a shindy in the very busi¬ est part of the year and leaves his farm to take care of itself and go to rack and ruin fur all he knows, ought to have anythin’ to say about what industrious fore-handed people choose to do with their lands.” “A part of what you say, Zenas Turby,” an¬ swered Mr. Bullripple, “ is exactly right, and that is that you shouldn’t think. ’ Thinkin’ is a business that you ain’t suited for. There’s a good many kinds of work that you can do first-rate, but you ought to get somebody else to do your thinkin’. You was just right when you said you shouldn’t think.” At this there was a burst of laughter from the men in wooden arm-chairs ; and Mr. Tur¬ by rose to his feet to make an angry reply. But he was not so quick of speech as was Enoch, and the moment the laughter ceased the latter, also rising, got in ahead of his an¬ tagonist, and remarked : “ I haven’t got no time to stay here any longer palaverin’ about iron lands. But I’ll just say this, Zenas Turby, that it’s a mighty good thing when a farmer gets his place in such a condition that when he wants to go away for a while to attend to some other business, it can run itself.” XVIII. Miss Matilda Stull was very well aware that in her endeavor to get into the Cherry Bridge society she need not depend in the least on her mother. That lady was too glad to get away from the irksome and often em¬ barrassing social demands of the city to wish now for society of any kind. Usually spend¬ ing the summer at some fashionable watering- place, the quiet of this mountain farm-house gave her a sense of delightful repose she had not known for years, and she was entirely sat¬ isfied with the protracted absence of her hus¬ band, who, if he had been upon the scene, would most probably have insisted, as he al¬ ways insisted elsewhere, that she should push to the front of whatever society she might find about her and make herself clearly visible as the wife of J. Weatherby Stull. But the eldest daughter of the house felt that she was quite able to further her own interests in this matter, and, with this view,

Page 39

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 33 she set out on a walk to see Mrs. People. When her father should return she knew that she would be obliged to take the horses and the carriage when she wanted to go about the country, but now it suited her purpose much better to walk. It was easier to meet people, and perhaps to stop and talk with them, when walking than in driv¬ ing in the carriage. She looked upon Mrs. People as the only present thread of connec¬ tion between herself and the Cherry Bridge gentry, and it was her intention to make that good woman understand that it was her duty to impress upon the mind of Mrs. Jus¬ tin the importance of an early call upon the ladies of the Stull family, people of high posi¬ tion who had recently arrived in the neigh¬ borhood. She did not attempt to deceive her¬ self with the notion that anxiety to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Justin was at the bottom of her intended action, but she freely admitted to her own consciousness that through that lady the acquaintance of gentlemen, often a most necessary adjunct in the enjoyment of country life, would probably be made. She was yet some little distance from the Bullripple house, when she met John People, who was coming towards her on the narrow path through the grass at the side of the road. J ohn was in his shirt-sleeves. He wore a broad straw hat, and on his shoulder he carried a hay-rake. His portly and upright figure ap¬ peared so well in this rural guise that Miss Stull could not help wishing for a moment that he were a gentleman disporting himself thus for his own pleasure, instead of being the son of that fat Mrs. People, taking a holiday from his restaurant, and working on the farm. Had she expected no other opportunities of male society during her country sojourn. Miss Ma¬ tilda would have been willing to ramble over the woods and fields with the sturdy John; but, as she had a lively hope of doing some¬ thing better in this line, she now looked upon him only in the light of a possible stepping- stone to some advantageous foothold. “ Good-morning, Mr. People,” she said; “isn’t this a beautiful day?” John returned the salutation, and, taking off his hat, exposed to view his short yellow locks, as smoothly and evenly brushed as Miss Stull had ever seen them at Vatoldi’s. “Are you going to work in the fields ? ” she said presently, as the two stopped. “ I was going,” said John, with an empha¬ sis upon the was ” intending to indicate that such should not be his present purpose if Miss Matilda gave him an opportunity of remain¬ ing in her society. Miss Matilda understood the intonation perfectly, and she hesitated for a moment be- VoL. XXXIV.— 5. fore she spoke. If the mother should happen to be away it might be a good thing to take a walk with the son, and if she could derive no other advantage from the ramble she felt she could obtain from J ohn some additional information in regard to the persons whose acquaintance she desired. “ Is Mrs. People at home ? ” she said, “ and disengaged ? ” “ Oh, yes,” said John, “ and she will be very glad to see you. There’s a lady in the house now, but I don’t think she intends to stay very long.” “ Who is it ? ” asked Miss Stull quickly. “ It is Miss Armatt, the young lady who is staying with Mrs. Justin.” “ Oh, indeed ! ” said Miss Matilda. “ I think I’ll go in and make a little call on your mother. Good-morning.” John stepped aside to let her pass, and over his face there came a shadow of disappoint¬ ment. He did not know exactly what he had expected, but, whatever it might have been, he was not going to get it, and he could not prevent the shadow. “ Won’t you walk with me as far as the gate?” asked Miss Matilda with a smile. “ I don’t always understand the opening of these big gates.” She was not a workman who dropped her chisel and her saw into the dust and chips when¬ ever she did not happen to be using them. When, with another smile, she parted from John at the gate, she stepped very quickly to¬ wards the house. Miss Armatt’s presence there was a rare piece of good fortune, and she was very anxious to arrive before that lady left. Gay had walked over, across the fields, on an errand for Mrs. Justin, who was very glad to give her young friend an object for her morning walk, and thereby secure for her¬ self the uninterrupted company of Mr. Strat¬ ford, who had come, by appointment, to assist her in the auditing of some complicated ac¬ counts of the association of which they both were members. Mrs. People was about half through one of her long statements of facts when Miss Stull appeared, and she and Miss Armatt were made acquainted. The visit of the two young ladies proved to be quite a long one, for Mrs. People was very anxious to talk. Miss Gay did not wish to leave until she had fully attended to her er¬ rand, and Miss Matilda did her best to make herself agreeable without regard to the passage of time. When, at last, Gay said that she pos¬ itively must go, and her business had been promptly brought to a conclusion, Miss Stull discovered that she would not be going out of her way if she should walk over a field or

Page 40

34 THE HUNDREDTH MAN two with her new-made acquaintance, and so they set out together. Mrs. Justin and Stratford, having finished their business, were standing together on the piazza, when the former exclaimed: “ Who’s that coming over the field with Gay?” Stratford looked steadfastly, but at first he was unable to answer. Presently, however, he recognized the young lady whom he had seen at the Bullripple farm, and in regard to whom he had made inquiries of Mrs. People. “ That,” said he, “ is a daughter of J. Weatherby Stull. His family are, at present, at his farm. But it seems rather odd that Miss Armatt should be acquainted with his daugh¬ ter.” Mrs. Justin had never heard anything of J. Weatherby Stull that she liked. It was during the life-time of her husband that Stull had ac¬ quired his present possessions in the neighbor¬ hood, and Mr. Justin had been very indignant at the relentless manner in which Mrs. People had been driven from her home. Even if she had not looked upon the opinions of her hus¬ band as a guide for her own judgments, Mrs. Justin would have despised the things that Mr. Stull had done, and would have despised the man who did them. He had lived very little on his farm after it had come into his posses¬ sion, and, while there, it had never entered into the mind of Mrs. Justin that it was pos¬ sible for her to call upon his family. She had heard that they had again come into the neigh¬ borhood, but although much of her old resent¬ ment at the man’s actions had faded away, she did not consider the Stulls as people with whom she had the least concern ; and had al¬ most forgotten that she had been told of their coming. Mrs. Justin looked gravely at the two young women, who had now stopped and appeared to be talking quite earnestly. “ I don’t under¬ stand it,” she said ; Gay never mentioned the Stulls to me, and that does not look like a recent acquaintanceship. They are evidently taking leave of each other, and yet it seems impossible for them to tear themselves apart.” This difficult deed was, however, accom¬ plished, and while Miss Matilda turned back and took her way across the fields. Gay came hurrying homeward. She threw herself into a piazza chair and made her report, and it was plain enough to her hearers that she had been very favorably impressed by Miss Stull. She’s a very nice girl,” she said, “ and as friendly as she can be. She intended to walk only a little way with me, but we had so much to say that we got almost here before we knew it. I wanted her to corne in and rest herself, but this she would not do, for she seems to be very particular about such things, and said it would not be proper for her to come here before any of this family had called upon her mother and herself. I suppose we ought to call on them as soon as we can,” she continued, turning to Mrs. Justin. I .should think they would be very pleasant neighbors. And what I particu¬ larly like about Miss Stull is that she seems so much fonder of this country than of the fash¬ ionable places she is in the habit of going to.” Mrs. Justin did not immediately answer. She had an instinctive aversion towards any¬ thing that bore the name of Stull, but her conscience would not allow her to believe that the sins of a husband and father should be visited upon a wife and daughter, and she could readily understand that it would be a severe punishment to ladies accustomed to society to find themselves in a country place where their few neighbors would not associate with them. But it is possible that even these conscientious and kindly feelings would not have been sufficient to urge her to an early movement in the direction of her social duties to the new-comers had not a fresh motive come to their assistance. It was evident that Gay had conceived a liking for Miss Stull, and it occurred to Mrs. J ustin that if her young pro¬ tegee could form a friendship with one of her own sex and age, it would interfere very much with that friendship for Mr. Stratford about which she found that she still had some fears, notwithstanding the fact that she had per¬ suaded herself that Gay’s love for Crisman would be invulnerable against all attacks, whether made under the guise of friendship or any other sentiment. She was glad to find that Mr. Stull was not expected to join his family very soon, and that his daughter did not suppose that, when he came, he would stay long. Miss Matilda had heard that there had once been unpleasant feelings between her father and the Justins, and she was a young woman who generally knew what to say and when to say it. If, therefore, there was but little chance of having anything to do with Mr. Stull, it might be well, so reasoned Mrs. J ustin, to call upon his wife and daughter; and if the latter should appear to be the extremely pleasant young lady that Gay thought her to be, a companionship between the two would probably be a desir¬ able thing. Gay’s enthusiasm over this new acquaintance was very encouraging to Mrs. Justin. ‘‘That seems to be her natural dis¬ position,” she thought, “ in regard to friend¬ ships, and it may not mean as much as I supposed it did.” She therefore determined that she would call on the Stulls. But when this decision

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN 35 was announced to Mr. Stratford he gave it a cold approval. It was well enough, he re¬ marked, to be courteous to new-comers, but he had always had a great dislike for Stull himself, and from the little he had seen of his daughter he did not believe that her com¬ panionship was needed by Miss Armatt. But Mrs. Justin laughed — was he such a judge of the nature of girls that he could tell their capabilities and qualities by a glance or two ? XIX. A FEW days after the entrance of Miss Ma¬ tilda Stull into the Justin held of view, Mr. Horace Stratford was driving slowly along one of the by-roads in the neighborhood of Cherry Bridge. It was about the middle of the after¬ noon, and he was starting out on one of those mountain drives with which he varied his hsh- ing and walking experiences. He had allowed his horse to fall into a small jog-trot ; for a sensible man will not drive fast over the or¬ dinary by-road of mountainous neighborhoods when his mind is hxed upon a subject entirely unrelated to roads and driving. Mr. Stratford’s mind was intently hxed upon the subject of his plans and purposes regarding the future welfare of Miss Gay Armatt. His desire to promote this welfare was as strong as ever, and his belief in the justice of his pur¬ poses was unshaken, but his hopes of their success were not quite so bright as they had been. He could not but admit to himself that while he had made upon the mind of this young lady quite as forcible an impression of the value of worthy male companionship as he had expected to make, that impression had not produced the result which he had hoped from it. Miss Gay, indeed, appeared capable of entertaining, at the same time, a true and earnest friendship for one man and a true and earnest love for another man. Thus, while he had gained for himself a most charming and sympathetic friend, Mr. Crisman still retained a loyal lady-love. Now while Stratford had no objection whatever to make for himself a charming friend, that was not the ultimate object of his carefully considered conduct to¬ wards Gay Armatt. If Mr. Crisman’s hold upon the girl were not loosened, it mattered little to her future what hold any one else re¬ tained upon her. Perhaps,” said Stratford to himself, Mrs. J ustin may be right, and the girl,having plighted her word, will stand to her promise through good or evil.” Now this blind constancy was a quality of the soul of which Stratford did not approve. Adherence to the wrong under any circumstances was, in his opinion, un¬ worthy of a true man or woman. If, by any means, by comparison with other men, or by direct study of his character. Gay should discover that her lover was not the man she would have chosen had she deferred her de¬ cision until a little more age and a little more experience had given her better powers of judgment in regard to what a husband should be, then Gay was false to herself, and, in a manner, to Crisman also, if she married him. If Mr. Stratford had been consulted on the subject of the young lady’s action after she had arrived at this conviction, he would have advised a clear and frank statement of her change of views, coupled with a proposition that the engagement be set aside by mutual consent. He truly believed that if women were to do this when they found they had made a mistake in the plighting of their affections, not only would they avert a great deal of future unhappiness, but they would find the matter much easier than they had supposed. The lover might flout and rebel at first, but there were ten chances to one that, if the engagement had existed for any considerable length of time, he would have discovered for himself that the cog-wheels of the attachment did not run smoothly together, and that he would be willing to separate them before they had become worn or injured. It often happens that it is easier for an inferior man to sever his attachment to a superior woman than it is for her to disengage her affections from him. The material of the attachment in the first instance is of poorer quality. But as Stratford was a sensible man, as has before been said, he did not expect any such severe moral action on the part of Gay Armatt. He had hoped no more than that she might gradually grow away from Crisman, and Cris¬ man, consequently, dropping away from her, the engagement would come to an end without any particular effort on either side. But so far as he could now see, nothing of this kind seemed likely to happen. ‘‘ I have not understood,” reflected Stratford, ‘‘the varied powers of sympathetic action which exist in the soul of this young girl. I came to her as a friend, and she has received me as a friend, whereas with Crisman she connects no idea but that of love. Conse¬ quently she has never made any comparison between us. If I wish to make an impression which shall be of the slightest use I must get her to compare me with her lover. At first I thought I was about to succeed in this, but now I have my doubts. She takes him for what he is, and me for what I am, and is per¬ fectly satisfied with us both.” It may be said here that if Mr. Stratford’s abil¬ ity to read the mind of a young girl had been as great as his belief in the obviousness of his

Page 42

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 36 superiority to Crisman, he might not have come to this conclusion. He was in the not unusual position of a person who doubts his ultimate success at the very moment he be¬ gins to succeed. Gay had already compared her lover, and that not favorably, with her friend. Mr. Stratford was so absorbed in his impor¬ tant cogitations that his horse now fell into a contemplative walk, and the two proceeded very slowly. ^‘But,” Stratford continued in his converse with himself, “ I do not wish her to look upon me as a lover. In the first place I am not her lover in the least degree. And, again, I should consider it dishonorable, and entirely opposed to the spirit of my plan, even to ap¬ pear to be her lover. I would like her to look upon me as a man who might be somebody’s lover, and, in that regard, to compare me with Crisman. I would like her to say to herself, ‘ If some one may have the love of a man like Mr. Stratford, who will appreciate her tastes and her aspirations as he will appreciate them, who will sympathize with and help her as he will sympathize with and help her, and who will, in every way, offer her that sufficient com¬ panionship which he will offer her, why may not my lover be such a man ? ’ If I can induce her to ask herself this question, and then seri¬ ously to consider whether or not Crisman is that sort of man, I shall be perfectly satisfied.” Easier were the tasks of tangled skeins and wind- driven feathers set by wicked step-moth¬ ers to forlorn princesses in the olden tales than was the task which this man now proposed to himself. And yet, without the slightest hope of the assistance of a fairy godmother, he steadfastly set his mind upon it. Upon my word,” exclaimed Stratford, speaking out in very decided tones, and draw¬ ing up his horse to a full stop, “ this is exactly like a story in a book ! Only it is too improb¬ able.” What do you mean ? ” asked Gay, who had just emerged upon the road from a broad pathway through the woods. mean,” said Stratford, ‘‘that I was bus¬ ily thinking of you, when you suddenly appear in the most unexpected manner, and in the most unexpected place.” “ The place and the manner are simple enough,” she said. “Mrs. Justin has gone to call on the doctor’s wife, and after that she will drive over to the railroad station to pick up Mr. Crisman, and I thought I would kill the time until they came back by going out to look for rhododendrons, but it must be rather early for them, for I have only found this one little sprig.” And she held up a small cluster of the deli¬ cately tinted pink and white blossoms for which she had been searching. “ It is not too early for them,” said Strat¬ ford, “ but you would be likely to find only straggling bushes along that pathway. It would be difficult for you to go where they are abundant. But why didn’t you visit the doctor’s wife?” He would have been glad to extend the question, but saw no appropriate way of do¬ ing so. “ I don’t care about going to see strangers,” said Gay, “ and as we called upon the Stulls two days ago, I thought that was enough cer¬ emony for me in one week.” “If you will allow me,” said Stratford, “I will say that, however much you may desire to escape from social boredom, it is not right for you to be wandering by yourself in these woods.” Gay laughed. “There is nothing in the world to hurt me except snakes ; and, do you know, I have tried hard to see a snake, but never could. And now tell me how you came to be thinking about me.” “ It may have been,” said Stratford disin¬ genuously, “ that I had some premonition of your appearance, but I don’t believe it. I could not even have imagined that you would be wandering in these woods by yourself, and, really. Miss Armatt, you ought not to do it. But I am delighted to see you, for now I shall ask you to take a drive with me. You will come, will you not?” And as he spoke he stepped down from the buggy. Gay looked at him with a little smile upon her lips. “ May I drive ? ” she said. Her expression as she smiled and spoke, with her head a little on one side as she looked at him, was very youthful and very charming, for Gay when she slid down the straw-stack had not, as she supposed, left all her girlish¬ ness behind her. Bat Stratford was not alto¬ gether pleased. He did not wish to teach her to drive ; he did not want to appear in the character of a tutor of any kind. But he an¬ swered promptly, “ Certainly, you shall do as you choose ; drive or be driven. All that I ask is the pleasure of your company.” “ How easily pleased ! ” said Gay. And almost before he could touch her arm to as¬ sist her, she had stepped into the buggy. “ No,” said Stratford, “you must not sit there. You must sit on the right side. If you drive you must do it properly.” “ That will be delightful,” said Gay, quickly changing her seat. “ I do so like to do things in a regular way.” It did not altogether satisfy Stratford that Gay’s pleasure in the mere act of driving seemed to exclude every other motive for

Page 43

THE HUNDREDTH MAN wishing to accompany him. But he put the reins into her hands, adjusting them with much care, and made her also hold the whip. “ In difficult driving,” he said, “ you should have the whip in your hand, in order that you may touch your horse if he hesitates.” Is this to be difficult driving ? ” asked Gay. “ Yes,” he said. These rough country roads demand constant care and prudence, or you might find yourself in trouble.” “ Oh, I like that ! ” said Gay, settling her¬ self squarely in her seat, ‘‘ and I am going to be awfully particular. Will you jump in ? ” ‘‘ Before I do so,” said Stratford, I must ask you to turn your horse to the right, and separate the wheels on this side. As you are the driver, that is part of your duty to your companion.” Gay laughed as she turned the horse rather more than was necessary on one side. ‘‘ This is just perfect ! ” she exclaimed. I feel as if I were managing everything. Are you quite comfortable, sir ? ” she added when Stratford had taken his seat. “ Go on,” he said, laughing, but quickly ex¬ claimed, Not so fast ! You will dash us to pieces against some stone or stump.” Gay drew in the horse, and then Stratford, in spite of his dislike of appearing on this oc¬ casion in the r61e of a teacher, proceeded to instruct his companion in the art of eluding the rocks, ruts, stumps, and fallen branches with which this seldom-used road was fre¬ quently obstructed. She applied herself with much earnestness to the difficulties of her task, but Stratford, desiring to put an end to this soul- absorbing occupation, which did not suit his purposes, and must, eventually, tire his companion, soon directed her to turn into a road in the woods which would shortly lead into the highway. “You should have told me to beware of these branches,” he said, as he pushed aside a protruding bough. “To be sure I saw them myself, but it is the driver’s place to give warn¬ ing of such things.” “I don’t take much care of you, do I?” said Gay, turning around and looking up into his face with a glance of laughing kindliness. “ I ought to manage things so that you would never have the least bit of a brush or a bounce. There now! ” she cried, as a sweeping branch took off her hat, “ I was thinking so much of you that I forgot myself. Whoa, sir!” Stratford jumped out and picked up the hat, and when he resumed his seat Gay requested him to put it on for her as her hands were so full. “And I am going to ask you,” she said, as Stratford placed the hat on her head, and ad¬ 37 justed, not very awkwardly, an elastic band beneath the thick coil of hair, “if you won’t hold this whip until we get out of the woods. It is really too much for me to have to attend to the reins, the whip, the stumps, the bushes, and you.” When they turned into the broad open road Gay had the pleasure of a mile or two of good rapid driving. During this period of delight they met ap open carriage, drawn by two horses, driven by a coachman, and containing a lady. Gay was so much occupied in keeping her horse exactly midway between the right-hand side of the road and the left-hand wheels of the other vehicle that she could do no more than give a little nod* as she swiftly passed the carriage. Stratford took off his hat, and then remarked to Gay that it was a pity Miss Stull had to drive about the country by herself “ Y es,” said Gay. “ Her mother doesn’t care to be out-of-doors, and she doesn’t like to have her younger sisters with her. She said she would come to take me to drive, and perhaps she is now on her way to our house.” “ Do you wish to turn back ? ” said Stratford. “No, indeed,” she answered. “That was the merest supposition of mine. And besides, even if she does want me, why should I slight your invitation for one from her?” And she gave the horse a little touch of the whip of which she had again taken possession. Gay’s prompt decision was a very gratifying one, but Stratford could not help asking him¬ self if her preference for his company was not due, in some degree, to the fact that she was driving. Presently he made a proposition. “ How would you like,” said he, “for me to take you on a mountain drive ? It will be a novel ex¬ perience for you.” “ I shall like it ever so much,” said Gay, “ and if you want my seat I am quite ready to give it up, for this tight-rein driving has begun to tire my wrists.” “ In the work we have before us,” said Strat¬ ford, “ I shall certainly want the driver’s seat.” They now stopped at a gate by the side of the road, and Stratford having opened it. Gay drove through, and then he took the reins. They passed at a good trot along a cart road which wound through a field of young corn, and leaving this by another gate they emerged upon a wide stretch of grassy hillside, inter¬ spersed with bushes, rocks, and trees. They skirted the base of the hill, following a track that gave some indications of being a road, and which, by a series of gentle ascents, brought them to a forest on the side of a line of low mountains. Here Stratford turned into a wood-road which for some time led them

Page 44

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 38 steadily upward. At a point with which he seemed very well acquainted he turned boldly into the woods, and wound in and out among the trees, which here being principally pines were little encumbered with underbrush, until he emerged upon the open mountain-side, where could be seen no track of wheel or hoof. '‘You did that splendidly,” said Gay. “I can’t imagine how you dared to drive right in among the trees.” “ I have been through that way before, and knew I could find a free passage. And now, my lady, I want to warn you that we are going to leave everything which resembles civilized driving. Do you think you shall be frightened ? ” “ I am sure you will not take me into any dangerous places,” she said. “ There will be no danger whatever,” he answered. “ I shall go nowhere where I have not driven before; and although we shall pass over a great deal of shelving ground, I assure you that we shall not upset.” “If you say it is safe, I am perfectly satis¬ fied,” said Gay. “ Please go on.” Stratford now proceeded at a steady walk along a slight terrace upon the mountain-side which afforded a very good roadway. To the left the vast forest stretched upward, v/hile to the right lay a long green valley closed on three sides, and utterly wild and uninhabited. Very soon they rounded a turn in the mount¬ ain-side, and here the terrace disappeared. The surface of the ground, however, was diver¬ sified by rounded knobs and horizontal shelves of projecting rock, and the general incline, even in the smoother places, was not great. Around and over the inequalities of the ground Stratford steadily made his way, taking advantage of every favoring surface; but, in spite of his carefulness, the buggy sometimes tipped very much to one side. “ You are sure we can’t upset ? ” asked Gay. “ Quite sure,” Stratford replied. “ It would be extremely difficult to overturn a low-hang¬ ing vehicle like this, and everything about the buggy and harness is strong and intended for rough work.” “ It is delightfully exciting,” said Gay, “and I don’t intend to be afraid. The view is get¬ ting better all the time.” “ When we round that next point, just be¬ yond us,” said Stratford, “ we shall have the view I brought you here to see. It is different from anything else in the neighborhood.” Having reached the point indicated, Strat¬ ford stopped, and they looked out on a scene of solemn grandeur. Below them was a deep and vast ravine, through which a dark river of tree-tops seemed to run into the valley they had first seen. Beyond this ravine rose a heavily wooded mountain, and to the right of that, and back of it, stood other mountain peaks, purpled by the distance. Still farther towering high on the left, its eastern side now dark in shadow, stood the loftiest mountain of them all, looking down upon its lower breth¬ ren with a certain stern solemnity, while be¬ tween it and the nearest peak Gay could see, far, far away, a line of light-blue mountain waves against the sky. For a few moments she sat without a word, and then she exclaimed : “ What magnificence ! I never knew we had such mountains near us ! ” “ They are the same mountains we always have in view,” said Stratford, “ only we are on a point where we can see between their broken lines, and not merely look up against them as we generally do.” The spot where they' had stopped was the most available one in the vicinity for a mount¬ ain view, but the ground was very sloping, and even if they had had plenty of time be¬ fore them, Stratford would not have taxed the patience of his horse by requiring him to keep a stationary position there very long. After devoting some minutes to Gay’s intense en¬ joyment of the scene, he told her they must now turn round, and go back; and as this turning round on the mountain-side might excite nervousness in the mind of a lady he proposed to Gay that she should get out while he performed this feat. “ Are you going to stay in ? ” she asked. “ Of course,” he answered. “ Then so am I,” said Gay. Stratford made no further remark, but driv¬ ing upon a projecting knoll, he backed the buggy up on a shelf of rock behind it, and turning the horse, drove down again to the spot where they had been standing. He knew what he was about, and his horse was per¬ fectly trustworthy ; but the knoll was very small, and the downward view from the outer border of it was likely to give one a good idea of the precipitous. Stratford drove a short distance along the mountain- side, and then he drew up his horse. “Now,” said he, “ I am going to give you your choice. We can either go back the way we came, which you know is a long road, or I can drive down the mountain-side, which is not very steep just here, and when we reach the valley we shall find a wood-road which will lead us to that low hill, over there. Having crossed that, we shall soon find ourselves upon one of Mrs. Justin’s farm-roads v/hich will take us directly to the house.” “ Oh, let us go that way, by all means ! ” said Gay. “ It must be ever so much nearer, and after what we have done I am ready for any¬ thing.”

Page 45

THE HUNDREDTH MAN Very good,” said Stratford; and he be¬ gan the descent of the trackless mountain¬ side. He did not go directly down, but wound along in a serpentine way among the rocks, low-growing bushes, and over occasional stretches of coarse grass, which would some¬ times have proved difficult of passage had not the yielding mold given a sure foothold to the horse. Gay was very merry over the va¬ ried contingencies of this novel drive, although she could not refrain from some starts and exclamations when they found themselves go¬ ing straight down some short steep incline with the horse so far beneath the buggy that there seemed to be danger that the vehicle with its occupants would double over upon the steed. Once when the horse, thoroughly well trained in the business of holding back, actually sat down on his haunches. Gay gave a little cry and seized Stratford by the arm. Oh ! ” she exclaimed, instantly relinquish¬ ing her hold, ‘‘ I must not do that or I shall hinder your driving.” Stratford was not afraid of any interfer¬ ence with his driving, but he was a conscien¬ tious man, and essayed no unnecessary slopes for the purpose of encouraging an intuitive reliance. When they reached the valley, and had struck the wood-road, now almost overgrown, which. led through a narrow stretch of forest, Gay gave a sigh of relief. “ I can’t deny,” she said, that it is a com¬ fort to feel that the buggy-wheels and the horse’s feet are on a level with each other. But I would not for anything have missed that mountain drive! It had more of delightful adventure about it than anything that ever happened to me. But I would not have al¬ lowed any other man in the world to drive me where you drove me.” “And let me say to you,” said Stratford, turning towards her, “ that I know no other woman than yourself whom I could have trusted to be brave enough to trust me abso¬ lutely and entirely.” “I like to hear you say that,” said Gay, with an expression that could not be mistaken for anything else than honest earnestness. So far, although these two had spent a good part of the afternoon together, they had had but little conversation except that which had been called forth by the unusual character of the surrounding circumstances, and this con¬ dition of things Stratford thought had lasted quite long enough. He certainly did not re¬ gret the circumstances, because they had pleased Gay, and had brought out in a strong light some interesting points in her disposition. But now he was glad that the rest of their trip would be uneventful. 39 “You are pleased, then,” Stratford said, “ that I think well of you? ” “ Indeed I am I ” exclaimed Gay. “ I am a great deal more than pleased. Do you know,” she continued, “that it seems very strange, in fact, it is absolutely funny, when I think in what a different way I regard you now from that in which I looked upon you when I first knew you. I don’t mind telling you that I liked you ever so much from the first day. Then I used to wish that you were my father, and to think that it would be perfectly charming to have such a father, entirely forgetting that you did not begin to be old enough to be a father to me. After that I wished you were my brother. But that did not last very long, for if you an¬ alyze the relationship of a brother, which I have done, having a very good brother who is a professor in a college out West, you will find that he is wanting in some of the varied qual¬ ities of companionship; at least that is what I discover in my one specimen. Now in you I find no want of the kind.” “Am I to understand,” said Stratford, “ that you have analyzed my character ? ” “ Indeed I have,” she replied. “ In fact, I have done so two or three times.” “ And what is the result ? ” he asked. “ And in what light do you now regard me ? ” “ The result is,” said Gay, “ that it is impos¬ sible to place you in any class. I tried it and utterly failed. So I am going to let you stand all alone, by yourself.” Whatever of approbation there was in Gay’s words or manner, there was nothing to indi¬ cate that she had ever thought of putting him into that class of men, who, not being fathers or brothers, might, upon occasion, make love. “Do you analyze everybody?” he asked. “ Oh, no indeed I ” said Gay promptly. “ Only a very few persons. You more than anybody else.” “ Am I then so very difficult to understand ? ” “ I do not think you would have been,” said Gay, “if I had known you a long time, and had, in a manner, grown up with you ; but, you see, 5'’Ou came upon me so suddenly and swiftly, and I have known you so fast, if you understand that, that I had to look very closely into the matter in order to comprehend it all.” “And do you comprehend it?” he asked. “ I think so,” said Gay. “ And are you satisfied ? ” “ Perfectly,” she answered. Stratford was not perfectly satisfied. “ I wish,” said he, “ that I could have been put among those persons who do not need to be analyzed.” Gay turned upon him suddenly. There was a little frown upon her brow, but when she spoke she could not help smiling. “ You are

Page 46

40 AMIEL, dreadfully grasping,” she said. “Here I have been putting you up higher and higher, on a loftier pedestal every time, and yet you are not satisfied.” “Pardon me,” said Stratford, “but if you had ever analyzed yourself you would not be surprised that I am hard to satisfy.” “Now I wonder what that means!” said Gay. “ Are you going on developing and changing, so that I shall have to analyze you again ? ” “ I hope you will not do it,” he answered quickly, “ if there is any danger of my being placed on a lower pedestal, or perhaps being toppled over altogether.” “ Don’t you be afraid of that,” said Gay, involuntarily laying her hand upon his arm. “ And I’ll tell you one way in which I think of you. I have a feeling that if you were to ask me to do anything I should instantly go and do it. What do you think of that, sir ? ” A thought had come with much promptness to Stratford, and he had said to himself that if he could thoroughly believe what Gay had said, he would impress the seal of happiness and success upon her life by instantly demand¬ ing that she should give up the man who would be to her like a worm at the root of all to which her ardent young soul looked forward. But he did not believe her, at least to such an extent, and he kept this thought to himself. “You do me the greatest honor,” he said, “ by placing such trust in me ; and I wish I could tell you to do something which would make you happy for the rest of your days.” Gay turned and looked at him with an ex¬ pression of inquiry which seemed somewhat foreign to her face, for her desires to know were generally promptly expressed in words. But now she said nothing, and, turning again from Stratford, sat quietly looking out before her. They had now crossed the valley and had reached the top of the rounded hill upon the other side. The day was drawing to a close, and in this exposed position the evening wind came fresh and cool upon them. Gay’s dress was thin, and Stratford, without remark upon the subject, stooped forward, and drew from under the seat a light woolen lap-robe which had hitherto been unneeded. This he placed around Gay’s shoulders, carefully arranging it so as to protect her well from the some¬ what chilly mountain breeze. “Thank you,” said Gay. And then she went on with her thinking. Among the many things which came into the mind of Stratford on their homeward road was the conviction that this mountain drive had occupied more time than he had ex¬ pected it would, and that Crisman must have arrived at least an hour ago at Mrs. Justin’s house. He wondered if Gay was thinking about this, but, if so, she certainly manifested no anxiety upon the subject. Comfortably wrapped up, with her hands folded under her improvised shawl, she nestled quietly in her corner of the buggy as if she were per¬ fectly satisfied with everything that was. Frank R. Stockto7i. (To be continued.) AMIEL. (the “journal intime.”) A FEW there are who to the troubled soul Can lay the ear with that physician-art Which by a whispered accent in the heart Follows the lurking treason that hath stole Into the citadel ; — a few whose scroll Of warning bears our safety, is a chart Of our unsounded seas, and doth impart Courage to hold the spirit to its goal. Of such is Amiel, lonely as a saint, — Or as an eagle dwelling on peaks, in shade Of clouds, which now he cleaves for one wide look At the green earth, now for a circle faint Nearer the sun. Once more has Truth betrayed Secrets to Sorrow not in the sibyl’s book. Robert U^iderwood Johnso7i,

Page 47

AMONG THE APACHES. A CAMP. VoL. XXXIV.— 6. Among the few great Indian tribes that cover vast areas of land and are so numerous in population that they are divided into many petty clans, we find the Apaches of the south-western part of our country holding no small place. The Apaches are di¬ vided into no fewer than seven principal clans, which acknowledge no common chief or chiefs, and have but little sympathy in common, even warring against one another under the stimulus of bribes, — the pitiful pay of a soldier often being sufficient to ally them with their common enemy, the white men, against any of their brothers in blood. The word Apache, converted back into its own language, signifies people^ and is synony¬ mous with many tribal names among savage nations, — as Lacotah or Dakotah with the Sioux, and Innuit with the Eskimo. The first conquest of the Apaches by civiliza¬ tion, imperfect as the conquest was, came from the inroads of the Spaniards who had overrun old Mexico. It was more of a peaceful con¬ quest than those old Gastilians were wont to make, much of it being, through the medium of the Spanish Jesuits, of a religious nature, and so early was this conquest that Santa Fe and Albuquerque, long considered frontier posts, claim priority over St. Augustine, the first city of the Atlantic. One Cabega de Vaca appears to have been their first military conqueror, and they seem fortunate that in him there did not exist in cruelty and tyranny another Cortes or Pizarro. Nor is this comparison Avholly our own, for it is affirmed that the Apaches, singular as it may seem, know of the name and doings of Hernando Cortes, probably through intertribal tradition, and picture him

Page 48

42 AMONG THE APACHES. YUMA APACHE AND FAMILY BUILDING A HOUSE. alongside of de Vaca much to the detriment of the former. In fact, it was explained to me that Cabega de Vaca, meaning a cow’s head, was but the Spanish translation of the Apaches’ name for the first soldier among them, and was th us given because the feast of the cow’s head was then held in reverential esteem. From Spanish rule, with the liberation of Mexico, they passed under the new govern¬ ment, and after the Mexican war with us the resulting boundary ran ruthlessly through the heart of their country, paying less attention to them than to the barren lands which it divided, and which for untold ages had been their home. Nor did the thin sabulous strip known as the Gadsden Purchase ” do more than throw the preponderance of the great tribe upon our shoulders. The diplomatic Apa¬ ches were keen enough to see the new interna¬ tional relations, espe¬ cially as it bore upon them as a people whose reliance for subsistence, arms, ammunition, and clothing rested in no small way upon their success in raids upon the white people ; and from this standpoint they oscillated in friendship or enmity from one side of the border to the other with an alacrity that should rank them high among the diplomates of fame. On one side hung high the fair flag of truce, and on the other, as at half-mast, the black standard of no quar¬ ter; and with such deadly and cruel effect was this alternation made, that we saw the humiliating spectacle of two civilized nations, claiming rank among the nations of the world, sitting in solemn conclave to devise a common plan that would annihilate a batch of breech- clouted bandits whose whole numbers would not have made the hundredth city in either land, and to do this surrendering the highest preroga¬ tive of national sovereignty — the sacredness of their soil — to the soldiery of the other. Once Victorio, a presumptuous and daring chief of Apache land, dared to flaunt the three hawk feathers of his lance in the faces of the eagles of both the North and South; and all conversant with Indian history know how that chief met his tragic death, after being driven weary, exhausted, and hungry across the boundary line into the arms of the Mexi¬ can soldiery, where he and the greater part of MANGAS.

Page 49

AMONG THE APACHES. 43 his band were swept from the face of the earth. Victorio dy¬ ing fearlessly at the front as became a chief. My first visit to Apache land was in 1871. Then the fa¬ vorite route to Ari¬ zona was to round Cape St. Lucas of Lower California, sail through the gulf until the mouth of the Colorado was reached, up which shallow river boats plied and dis¬ tributed passengers for the few river villages and inland points where a scanty popula¬ tion wrested a precarious existence. From the mouth of the Colorado River it was deemed necessary to send through a courier with dispatches to Fort Yuma, distant ninety miles, I believe, by the trail. Three long days we were steaming up the swift, shallow, and tortuous river, and when we did finally reach Yuma we found that our courier, a lithe, active, young Yuma Apache, had slipped across the trail in thirteen hours, or at the rate of about seven miles an hour the whole distance. Dressed in the uniform that their Creator issued to them, with perchance a dangling necklace or armlet of beads to ornament it, and a homeopathic breech-clout, these sinewy deer-hounds of the desert, with fists clinched across their breasts, with a mouth full of mes¬ sages, will keep up a dog-trot,” hour in and hour out, fora time only limited by that which is necessary to reach their objective point, how ever far it may be away, — and this too across valleys carpeted with cactus, and hills and mountains beset with flinty footings. Some of their running feats of endurance are marvelous to relate, and are oftentimes made in a withering heat that makes life in the open field burden¬ some almost beyond bearing to the white man. These Yuma Apaches are the most westerly of the family, living along the Colorado River in its lower part in Arizona, while on the upper part is found the Mojave branch, two sub-clans almost identical in many characteristics. They alone of all the great Apache tribe cremate their dead, a cremation so effectual that it does not cease with the body, but includes all the personal effects, however valuable, even to their wick-c¬ ups ( the universal Ari¬ zona expression for their rude houses). These wickeups (as I notice the spelling in an Arizona journal) are made of a circular row of long lithe brush , bent down toward the center and interwoven into a rough semi-glob¬ ular shape, not un¬ like the half of an egg¬ shell on its rim. Over OLOH8T APACHE ON THE BESERVAT.OH. this is thrown other brush and a light sprink¬ ling of dirt as a protection from the sun’s rays. When these materials are scarce, mud is used as a substitute, the wealthier class being some¬ times supplied with a piece of canvas. Their more permanent abodes are now and then made by digging into a steep dirt bank at an expenditure of muscular energy that one would hardly think possible among any band of Indians showing such squalor and laziness in every other department of life. The dialectic difference in the Yuma and Mojave y\pache pronunciation of their com¬ mon language is not noticeably great, but these again, on the contrary, differ from all the other Apache tribes to an extent apparent to per¬ sons who make no profession to linguistics. Theirs are the harshest and abound the most in guttural inflections of all the dialects of this desert tribe, some of which are toned down to a softness quite pleasant to the ear, although these extremes readily comprehend each other. Once the Yuma and Mojave bands held high rank as warriors among the Apache tribe, but their country being easy of access, they were the first to succumb to civilization, and have gone a long way on that road of extinction which is marked out to those pecul¬ iarly tempered savages who can absorb only BONITO. APACHE RUNNERS.

Page 50

44 AMONG THE APACHES. the vices and but few of the virtues of such a contact. To combat their ailments they have only the usual superstitious rites of a few igno¬ rant “ medicine-men,” and occasionally make use of those heroic and barbarous treatments so common with savages. One of these 1 think may be interesting. A great hole, large enough to receive the body of the invalid in a recumbent position, is dug in the ground. In this excavation a fire is maintained until the ground is heated to its greatest possible ex¬ tent, when the embers and ashes are scraped out. Several layers of damp mud are imme- adorned, and, as far as I casually noticed, there being no difierence between the men and women. Paints and ])igments of all charac¬ ters are eagerly sought for temporary personal ornamentation, theYumas and Mojaves even descending to stove-polish, boot-blacking, and mud. Undoubtedly the latter, in some of its applications, serves a more practical purpose than mere ornamentation. A thin coating of soft clay is matted through the hair and then plastered carefully down upon the skull, until it resembles, when dry, a shining bald head or an inverted earthen bowl. This is left on for two or three days, until it has subserved MEDICINE-MEN. diately used to plaster the walls of this fiery furnace, and the invalid is then placed within and covered up with mud, the head alone protruding. The escaping steam makes the torture endured by the poor wretch, for the thirty-six to forty-eight hours of misery in the prison of baked clay, oftentimes insup¬ portable, and but few survive the severe ordeal. A Mojave squaw, with the Ameri¬ canized name of Polly,” rallied from this terrible inquisition, but it took the kindest treatment for two months under the care of a white physician to save her life. Nearly all the Apaches are addicted to tat¬ tooing, their faces and wrists being usually its purposes of deadly destruction, when the earthy skull-cap is broken with a stick and the beating process continued until every particle of dust is thoroughly eradicated, when the hair is washed with the soft pulp of the root of the Yucca palm, which produces a soapy lather. After this the hair is energetically rinsed and then whipped in the open air until dry. From all this manipulation it emerges as glossy and as soft as silk. This Yucca palm is commonly known as the Spanish bayonet and oftentimes as the soap-weed, the latter name being evidently derived from this peculiar use by the Indians and Mexicans. It is one of the most exten-

Page 51

AMONG THE APACHES, 45 sively common plants of Apache land and named and the Tontos, a clan of central Ari- contiguous countries, and it is well for those zona. Among the Apaches, men are never localities that a commercial use has been found accused of this crime, but, at extremely long for this abundant weed, its pulp, according to and rare intervals, some luckless squaw in a recent experiments, bidding fair to give a very village that has seen more than its share of APACHE FIDDLER AND MAIDEN. fine grade of printing-paper. Thus the vulgar soap-weed that cleanses the outside of the Apache’s head may yet improve its interior through the medium of the jDress. The most barbaric forms of witchcraft have within fairly recent periods been practiced by them, especially by the two bands we have misfortune is accused of these calamities as a witch. Either man, woman, or child can bear witness against the unfortunate, although the highest chief in the vicinity seems to be the proper one to prosecute her. The accusation once lodged, and, of course, as such complaints always are, believed without thought or trial,

Page 52

46 AMONG THE APACHES. the entire village is summoned to the proceed¬ ings, which generally mean an execution. In carrying these on the victim is stripped to her waist and then tied up by her thumbs with strong thongs, her toes barely touching the ground. All of their devilish energies are now bent on extorting a confession from the wretch. Any of those who have had any misfortune, however remote, imaginary, or real, are at per¬ fect liberty to flay the supposed witch with mezquite or willow switches until she faints from exhaustion, or terror and weakness forces a false confession in the vain hope of obtain¬ ing relief from her terrible condition. If she will not thus please them, the whipping is kept up until the executioners themselves are ex¬ hausted, when one by one they leave her to die, which results unless she be lucky enough to liberate herself from the thongs after the last one has departed. Should they wring a confession from her, she is beaten to death with stones and sticks, and all of her property burned, even to her rude house and ruder utensils. On ordinary deaths, these Apaches mourn for a few days in wild plaintive cries that the uninitiated might mistake, at a distance, for the cooing of the turtle-dove. The nearest relatives cut off their hair as close as possible, and their mourning is kept up until the hair grows out. All these latter rites are denied the poor wretch executed for Avitchcraft, but she is still entitled to a burial at the hands of her relatives if they make no display to insult the superstitious dignity of the tribe. There are but few other superstitions that have such disastrous results in their applica¬ tions. It would almost seem that they had some supernatural dread of water, and this in a country where that fluid is conspicuously scarce. Fish never enters into their diet, al¬ though they are not hard to procure, and they repel them in a way that can only be based on superstition. Canoes are never used, although an occasional raft is made to transport effects, in one direction, and, in general, a river is of no more use to them than furnishing drinking water or establishing a flat valley in which they can travel more readily on foot or horseback. In this way all traveling is done, and all house¬ hold effects are transported either on the backs, of horses or of squaws, the women generally predominating. Some of the muscular feats of the latter, while thus engaged, even rival the endurance and strength of the stronger (?) sex, as shown in their runners. A Yuma squaw has been known to carry over three hundred pounds of bulky hay between four and five miles over a mountain road and without stop¬ ping on the Avay. Not much Avas left to the imagination of the story-teller either, as the hay Avas Aveighed on tested scales and the route pursued Avas a Avell-knoAvn measured one. More marvelous cases are heard of oc¬ casionally, but they are not so authentic. Birds are also rejected as food, although they are used in cases of distressing scarcity ; especially the Avild turkey, Avhich stands better in their estimation. Other native articles of diet, on Avhich they yet subsist to a certain extent, are baked inezcal^ the bean of the mez¬ quite tree, the fruit of the giant cactus, and the prickly pear. To furnish them with meat they find extensive variety in the black and Avhite tailed deer, antelope, bear, ground-rats, rattlesnakes, and rabbits (hares). Nothing exists to shoAv that the Apaches were ever cannibals. No part of a slain animal is un¬ used, even the smallest bones being broken open in order to save the marroAv. N o drink-loving old topers ever enjoyed their liquor so much as have the Apaches AAdien- ever they could procure it, a vice, hoAvever, that is rapidly subsiding as the trilDes are con¬ centrated at agencies more directly under the eyes of Avatchful authorities. Mezcal. made from that plant by the Mexicans, found its Avay in days gone by, AAdien popu¬ lation AA'as scattering and the laws lax, into Apache maws Avith every trade and deal- HEAD WAR-CHIEF OF CHIRICAHUA.

Page 53

AMONG THE APACHES, 47 ing between the two races. From corn they make a fermented drink called tiz-wm, which is not as strong as the corn-whisky of civiliza¬ tion, but their peculiar method of drinking it compensates for its lack of strength. For some three days before it has reached its highest point of fermentation not a single piece of food is swallowed. At the end of that period they fill themselves to their utmost capacity with the unclarified tiz-win. Although half starved, it takes but a few moments to make them feel as if they had had a major-general’s rations for six months previous, while the most conspic¬ uous effect is to swell their bump of combat- NAT-TZUCK-EI-EH. iveness to an inordinate degree. If a large number have indulged in this liquor, serious outbreaks and disturbances are almost sure to ensue, especially if other bands of Indians or any whites are near enough for them to reach before this temporary, stimulated combative¬ ness has worn away. In fact, after having, when sober, decided to go upon the war-path, by far the most important preliminary is the manu¬ facture of huge quantities of tiz-win. Its pe¬ culiar composition, and the no less peculiar manner of taking the liquor, gives it a most lasting effect upon the system, and an Indian with his stomach distended with it is said to have ahead of him a six to eight days’ “ spree,” and during all this time his warlike qualities are sure to be most conspicuous. There is much evidence to show that alco¬ holic liquor made from corn is an ancient drink with these people, everything that was neces¬ sary to manufacture it being found in their old ruins, and under circumstances that make such a conjecture not unreasonable. Even in the caves of the old cliff-dwellers of Arizona there have been found cemented deposits of corn so ancient that when disturbed the grains fell from the cob a mass of impalpable powder, leaving the cob, singu¬ larly enough, as fresh as if it had been gathered but the harvest before. To ramble for a mo¬ ment from the main sub¬ ject, in considering the ancient cliff-dwellers of Apache land, — I was not a little surprised to hear of many cliff- villages yet unexplored. An idea prevails that the cliffs and caves of Apache land have been nearly all included in the researches of ar¬ chaeologists and curiosity hunters. An old Apache of San Carlos agency, whose perfect confidence had been won by a government official, spoke of many that he knew had never been inspected and that were full of relics. He wished to conduct his confidant to a place not far distant. He added that only a small part of the remains known to the Apaches had ever been examined. San Carlos agency, on the river of the same name, is the great central point where the Government has gathered from time to time the greater portion of almost all the Arizona bands of Apaches, who are slowly acquiring the arts of peace and will soon be a useful part of the agricultural population of that region. Here from the eastern boundary are bands of the Yumas and Mojaves, of the Tontos and San Carlos Apaches from the central districts, and of the Sierra Blanca tribe from the north-eastern corner, 'fhe only important Arizona band not directly represented are the warlike Chiricahuas, and they are quartered on the reservation of which this agency is the headquarters, — except the leaders, recently surrendered, who have been exiled to Florida. Their partly civilized, partly barbaric agency- life is not uninteresting in some of its aspects, especially while the barbaric element yet pre¬ dominates. The Government has cultivated their martial feelings, and at the same time turned them to its own account, by enlisting the most trusty warriors as soldiers in its own service, and using them as a police and de¬ tective force against one another, and espe¬ cially one tribe against another. No less than three full military companies of these scouts were, until re¬ cently, distributed among the Indians of this great agency ; CHI-HUA-HUA. T'ZOE, OR “peaches."

Page 54

AMONG THE APACHES, 48 and as the white soldiers were at the same time placed at distant points on the boun¬ daries of the reservation, the Indians were thereby lifted a little in their ideas of sover¬ eignty and self-government. In every cluster of wicJzeups,^ and in fact in almost every family, might be found one of these scouts, acting in the interest of the Gov- had gone through all the processes of his trial, there hung over his head a three-years’ sen¬ tence in the penitentiary at Alcatraz within the Golden Gate. Even death has been meted out to offenders by Indian juries. A guard¬ house inclosed less refractory criminals, and through one of its windows peered the face of an Indian sentenced for life. APACHE FULL DRESS. eminent, and forming, in effect, a secret de¬ tective system more efficacious than the de¬ tective bureaus of civilization. While every crime was reported to the white chief-of-scouts, care was taken that the informer should never be known. But not long ago Ki-at-ti-na, the head war-chiel of the Chiricahuas, tired of the monotonous restraint of the military, gathered around him a few of his belligerent band, still footsore from the war-path. They indulged in a preliminary war-dance, and, sending couriers to all likely to join them in an outbreak, im¬ patiently awaited results. The chief’s fleetest courier was a spy, who gave timely warning of all the concerted movements and intentions before an advance was really made. The chief’s first intelligence of the result of his plot was his arrest by the scouts of his own tribe and his arraignment before the authorities at the agency. An Indian accused of any crime is tried be¬ fore a jury of Indians, and when Ki-at-ti-na These Indian soldiers, in all that pertained to arms, ammunition, pay, and rations, were on exactly the same footingas othersoldiers in the service, except that their term of enlistment mightbe variable. A calling of the muster-rolls sounds like that of Hungarian Hussars or Polish Lancers, a deception of the ear that an inspection of the written names would not confirm. Their savage passion for finery and display cropped to the surface in an inordi¬ nate desire for military parade and exhibition, even to the extreme of monotonous drill, but much has been denied them in those par¬ ticulars, as on their primitive stains rests much of their efficacy as scouts against other bands. In one of the last and then one of the most im¬ portant and decisive campaigns waged against the most warlike band of the Apaches, the Chi¬ ricahuas of south-eastern Arizona, all of the friendly Apache scouts were employed and but one company of white troops, and in the con-

Page 55

AMOlVG THE APACHES. 49 test which ensued in the broken mountainous friendship being undoubtedly to throw the defiles of the Sierra Madre of Mexico none of victims off their guard. I visited this spot the white troops were used. Their endurance over a decade later, and some four or five and rapidity of action are superior to that of whitewashed head-boards, encircled by a neat white men, for they literally crawl in the grass fence of native mezquite brush, kindly placed like snakes, and creep and dodge through there by some frontiersmen, were not only the rocks like squirrels in the branches of trees monuments to the dead, but to as foul apiece in their densest foliage. of treachery as was ever perpetrated by one Portraits ofsome of their most famous scouts of the most savage of Indian tribes, are given. Nat-tzuck-ei-eh,a Chiricahuasquaw, It will be seen that Nat-tzuck-ei-eh’s nose was one of the most important against her own tribe in the cam¬ paign into Mexico just alluded to. Even before the main command had started she departed alone and on foot to determine the where¬ abouts of the hostiles in the fast¬ nesses of the Sierra Madre mount¬ ains. On this trip she was absent for about six weeks, unceasingly prosecuting her object. A Chiri- cahua herself, it was evidently her intention to gain the Indian camp, claim that she had been captured by and escaped from the whites, find out all that she could, and then at the first favorable opportunity prove traitor to her tribe. Treach¬ ery is a distinguishing feature of the American Indian, but it is almost wholly a trait turned to account against the enemies of the tribe. Even the lowest Digger In¬ dian has some faint conception of honor in his tribal relations in war, and among some it compares well with, if not exceeding, that among civilized nations, but the Apache seems to have absolutely none. The painstaking labor to which they will go to emphasize their cruel treachery seems almost fiend¬ ish in the extreme. ‘‘Way back in the 50’s ” an emigrant family, wind¬ ing its toilsome way through the burning desert of the Gila valley, on the road to California, found themselves, with an exhausted team, at the bottom of a steep hill, which they vainly essayed to as¬ cend. Aband of Tontos Apaches, bent on some fiendish foray, passing that way, came upon the scene and at once willingly offered their services to carry the effects to the top of the hill. Not only did they do this, but the empty wagon was spared to the ex¬ hausted horses and hauled up by hand. This wonderful act of kindness was terminated by the massacre of the owners on the crest of the 7tiesa^ while all unawares they were reloading their wagon, the only object of the pretended WAR-DRESS IN WARM WEATHER. has been somewhat abbreviated, an old mode of punishment among them for marital in¬ fidelity : a punishment that has been stopped by the authorities along with other cruel practices. In virtue and modesty the eastern Apaches compare favorably with the best of Indians, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of the western tribes. The most important scout in the campaign noted above was one T’zoe, whose translated VoL. XXXIV.— 7.

Page 56

AMONG THE APACHES. name is said to mean “ Peaches,” at least he was known by this lat¬ ter name among the white people of Arizona. T’zoe had long been held in distrust by his tribe, and he de¬ serted them in or¬ der to save his life, which, from their low mutterings and half- concealed threats, he believed to be in dan¬ ger, knowing right well the Indian character, that they waste no time in hearing the argu¬ ments of the one fully accused. Going to the nearest agency, the San Carlos, was a jump ‘‘ from the frying-pan into the fire,” as he was immediately imprisoned, tried, and sentenced to death. The general revolt of his tribe, however, made him more useful to the Government as a guide than as a corpse, and he was spared the latter alternative by accept¬ ing the former, and right well did he do his work. It seemed singularly dramatic that this forced outcast of the tribe, compelled to flee for his life to a place where his life was still in danger, should in so short a time be leading back into their mountain stronghold an army of his kith and kin that destroyed a third of the warriors of their own tribe. While General Crook was in the Sierra Madre mountains on this campaign after the Chiricahuas, many never before imagined sites of ancient races were discovered, and in such vast extent as to be almost bewildering in magnitude. There seemed to be a series of colossal steps or terraces made by man, the lowest of which, near the streams, was evi¬ dently inhabited by these crude and ancient people. On the tops of these hills or mount¬ ains, around whose sides the steps or terraces appeared, and apparently independent of them, were immense and extremely effective fortifi¬ cations, considering the rude weapons they then had, — a sort of rallying point of defense for the people living near the streams. Why these terraces, between the stream where they dwelt and overlooking fortifications where they probably fled in dan¬ ger, should have been constructed it seems hard to conjecture, unless it is possible that they lived near a constantly hostile and active enemy of which they had the greatest fear, and these, although for protection, were their garden-plats or limited grazing-grounds for their goats. An incline would have been as good, and would have cost no such immense outlay of labor in build¬ ing the retaining walls. In many places through these rude structures had protruded the large pines of the country, some of which were two to three feet, or even more, in diameter. Everywhere, often in no small quantities, could be found their pottery, huge stone mortars for grinding corn (called me-iaies in the vernacular of the country), and stone im¬ plements of war, and axes and hatchets. Under the overhanging cliffs were found caves that had once been inhabited, one series of apartments having no fewer than twenty-two rooms. Over one of these rooms was a large granary, capa¬ ble of holding many bushels of grain. Here were corn-cobs, showing great age, mixed with pottery and stone axes. On the walls of GERONIMO. these rooms were hieroglyphics and pictured representations, none of which had been copied or secured. It seems not unreasonable to argue from their cheerless homes and mighty fortifi¬ cations that this was an inferior race of peo¬ ple in the age in which they lived. Even the Apaches who have made these labyrinths of lava their hiding-places superstitiously avoid these old ruins, and perchance this very fact may have saved to science valuable archaeo¬ logical matter when the time comes for the investigation of these strange ancients. Superstitions are shown in their dress and or¬ naments, or rather in the charms which adorn and compose these. The medicine jacket and belt are common to the whole Aj^ache family, and are about the counterpart of similar dresses so common with savages. From the head of the 50 CHATO. KI-AT-TI-NA.

Page 57

AMONG THE APACHES, 51 Chiricahua hangs a single buckskin string about two inches wide and as many feet in length, its upper end braided in the hair. This is ornamented with all the different pieces of shells they can obtain, and for which they seem to have a reverence, while beads and orna¬ ments of silver and other metals help to cover it with an almost solid coating of decorations. Maidens may be distinguished from matrons by the peculiar arrangement of their hair, the former wearing what in their language is called a nah-leeji {^nah-leen strictly interpreted is maiden). It is flat and of a beaver- tail dumb¬ bell shape, covered with red, and closely stud¬ ded with gilt buttons, if procurable, the hair being tied up with this to prevent its flowing over the shoulders as with married squaws. In general, it may be said that the eastern tribes. Sierras Blancas and Chiricahuas, are far finer in dress than those of the western parts, the Yumas and Mojaves, the intermediate tribes of San Carlos and Tontos being also intermediate in dress. Still farther to the east in New Mexico are the Mezcalero and Coyotero Apaches, also very ornamental in dress, but in other respects beyond the ken of this article in their now quiet isolation. The war-dress of these warm-weather war¬ riors, when actually in a campaign, is not so resplendent in buckskin and beads, nor is it so warm. A gorgeous bonnet of three hawk feathers is about the only display, and the rest has a sort of simplicity known only in the Garden of Eden. An old weapon with them was a heavy round stone at the end of a short stick, the two being wrapped and joined in a com¬ mon case of rawhide taken from the tail of a horse or ox so as to be continuous and seamless. This was used like a policeman’s club, and has its counterpart in the Sioux ‘^skull- smasher,” a word which describes it at once. The wild Chiricahuas use the lance, and do some good work with it in a decisive fight. Even the armed warriors use it in killing cat¬ tle and stolen stock to save their ammunition thereby, while some of the most horrible tort¬ ures practiced on their captives by these fiends are inflicted by this instrument. With the intro¬ duction of fire-arms into their warfare fell the shield into disuse. It was a gaudy appendage of the primitive savage, but it exists among the Apaches only as a relic for which they can obtain so much money from the curiosity seeker. They care but little for money, how¬ ever, except to appease a craving for gambling, or to meet immediate wants. They are behind no other savages in their love for the allurements of gambling, and use all sorts of implements, from the most intricate games of cards to the simple throwing of sticks and hoops, and in nearly all of these games their play is one of hazard, in the excitement their horses, rifles, and even the shirts on their backs, changing ownership. Only in their dances do they excel the physi¬ cal energy put forth in their gambling plays. Al'ACME MOTHER AND INFANT. From sunset till sunrise can be heard the beating of their drums and tom-toms, and night after night is it kept up. Old squaws and young children dance until they can stand no longer, and cease from exhaustion and fatigue ; a ces¬ sation of but a few minutes and they are up and at it again. Their medicine dances take place in cases of sickness and distress, to drive away bad spirits or keep them from doing harm. In these the squaws are never allowed to take a part, but in peace, weddings, and feast dances, young and old of both sexes form a conspicu¬ ous part. I'he “ corn dance,” to make that plant productive, is also a monopoly of the medicine-men, while besides all these there exists the war, the conqueror’s, and the chiefs’ dances, varying in type through all the possible motions and gesticulations of the human body. The ages which some of them reach appear surprising, considering their rough mode of life in the past, which seems sufficient to end it rapidly when the physical powers begin to fail. Got-ha, a Sierra Blanca, a once famous warrior of their tribe, is probably eighty ©r ninety years of age, and seems hale and hearty

Page 58

AMONG THE APACHES. yet. Could this old sage of the sandy deserts concentrate the salient points of his life into a volume, it would rival the tales of Daniel Boone or Kit Carson. Age, however, finds only a place in their councils of peace, and young blood rules in times of war, unless some mighty chief, with a record of battles that none can gainsay, bears all before him even in his age. It is a keen appreciation of the eternal fitness of things that has helped them in no small way to hold for so long the mastery of the South-west in peace and in war. One mighty chief of theirs was Cochise, a household word in the literature of Indian depredations. A Chiricahua him¬ self, his success was sufficient to join many bands under his rule, and especially those renegados so common in all Indian warfares and so numerous in every band who will join every revolt without regard to tribe or cause, if the revolt only promise booty and that bloody excitement which their nature craves. For years he was the terror of all in Arizona, and for a long period before his own tribes could be turned against him the sum total of his battles placed him plainly ahead. For savage strategy and barbaric grand tactics he will always be a mark in the annals of Indian warfare, and will be better known as this country set¬ tles up to that extent that it will demand a history of its own. Cochise brave¬ ly acknowledged he was out-generaled once. A military train of a score of wagons, guarded ap¬ parently by only a small platoon of cavalry, bore down through Apache Pass, where Cochise had some two or three hun¬ dred warriors in waiting, and their eyes glis¬ tened with delight as they looked at the chance of an easy capture of the hard bread, molasses, sugar, and tobacco on which they might revel for weeks. They made one wild yelling charge on the train from every quarter, when, instead of savage luxuries, there came from each wagon a blinding, crashing volley from nearly a score of well-armed infantrymen. Cochise’s warriors were sent flying back like surf, and, as they fled up the steep sides of the canon, were picked off like squirrels in a tree. Cochise died some nine or ten years ago a natural death, a singular ending for one who had been so active in the trade of death. How¬ ever much they may have hated him in that frontier land, even their legislature honored him with a conspicuouscounty, showingthat their hatredcould not conscientiously descend into contempt. After Cochise came Victorio, whose fate has been noted. Then Nana led them for a brief period of time, and then came Nachez, son of Cochise, who rules the Chiricahua band. Juh (pronounced Hod) was a noted leader, and met his death in a way that was scarcely heroic. Blindly drunk with mezcal^ he attempted to ride from a Mexican town to his village, his head buried in his hands, and his elbows and the responsibility of getting home resting on the pony’s shoulders. As they crossed a shallow stream, the horse, believing it was his turn, leaned forward for a drink, and Juh was pre¬ cipitated into the water, and there, with his face in that kind of liquor that he had not fol¬ lowed closely enough in his life, he was drowned. Loco is an impor¬ tant chief, he being at one time a medicine¬ man. In a career uniformly good — as savages judge careers — and nowhere brill¬ iant, it is hard to speak further of him in a contracted arti¬ cle. Geronimo, said to be a captured Mexican youth, might be styled the Daniel Webster of the Apache Senate. His advice was always sought on every particular matter of state, and his influence therein was equaled by few before his incarceration in a Florida prison, as the result of the latest and one of the greatest outbreaks under him, which ended with his surrender. Chato, Bonito, Chihuahua, Mangas, andZele form the lesser lights in this list of leaders. Railroads run their double bands of iron through their deserts, mines pour their ores from the sheltering sides of their mountain homes, an inexorable decree has cramped them to a corner of their country, where they now wrest a living from the soil they once trod as masters, and it may be well said that the Apache sun is near the horizon of their nat¬ ional destiny. NACHEZ, SON OF COCHISE. WIFE OF ZELE. Frederick Schwatka.

Page 59

FROM AN ANCIENT IRISH MOUND. ON this lone mound of legend, heaped by hands That have been still from immemorial years, Above their mythic chief, whose vassal lands Forget his name, — so long forgot by tears, — I dream. Below me wrath and ruin are. England’s ally there shook down Philip’s fleet. Here sings 3. young bird like some morning star. The old song’s sorrow makes the new song sweet. Sarah M, B. Piatt. A GLIMPSE OF WASHINGTON IRVING AT HOME. T is now forty years and over since I was a school¬ boy at Tarry town, and when I revisited the place not long ago I was not surprised to find it some¬ what altered. The changes I remarked were, however, only such as might have been looked for in a town so prettily situated and so near New York; and I was pleased to find that the memory of Washington Irving had restrained the hand of improvement from destroying the few objects to which his writings have given an interest, as well as from defacing the sites which tradition or popular imagination has identified with the scenes of his delightful legend. Sleepy Hollow is still very much the same lazy country road it was in the old days when we school-boys wandered along it in the summer afternoons picking blackberries from the wayside vines. Following the turn¬ pike-road down the hill, we come to Beek- man’s mill-pond ; and crossing the pretty stream, the Pocantico, on the bridge over which Ichabod galloped, pursued in his mad flight by the headless horseman, we reach the old Dutch church, surrounded by the graves of many generations — those of the earlier settlers clustering thickly about the church itself, while the newer graves people the rising ground toward the north. It is in this newer portion of the cemetery that Washington Irving lies. His grave is in the middle of a large plot purchased by him in 1853, six years before his death. The stone that marks his grave is a plain slab of white marble on which are engraved his name and date alone, without any memorial inscription. The path that leads to the entrance-gate of the plot is so worn by the feet of visitors that a stranger hardly needs to ask his way to the place. I confess I heard not without a secret pleasure that the relic-hunters so chip and hammer the stone that marks Irving’s grave as to make its frequent renewal necessary. It VoL. XXXIV.— 8. did not seem to me a grievous wrong, nor in any true sense a profanation of the grave, but rather a testimony to the lovableness of Irving’s character, and an evidence of the wide extent of his fame, that, from filling the circle of the educated and refined among his countrymen, has now come to include that lower stratum of our common humanity which has only instinctive and, so to speak, me¬ chanical ways of expressing its feelings. Who is so insensible to the good opinion of his kind as not to think such a trodden path as this that leads to Irving’s grave better than any writ¬ ten line of praise, and the very destruction of his monument, by this reprehensible clipping and chipping, a more enduring testimony to his work than any monument of brass ! It would not have been easy to find a place more in harmony with the associations that gather about Irving’s name as a writer than the spot in which he is buried. Even to-day, with all the changes that have been brought about by the growth of the neighboring settlement, the spirit of peace and quiet that used to brood over the region hovers there undisturbed. Irv¬ ing’s own words, in the “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” describing the grave-yard, the old church, and the stream that plays about its feet, reflect with the faithfulness of a mirror the scene as we behold it to-day. Here is the church, a small building with rough sides of the country-stone, surmounted by a picturesque roof, and with an open bell-tur¬ ret over which still veers the vane pierced with the initials of the Vrederick Felypsen who built the church and endowed it in 1699. In our rambles about the grave-yard we used to find the bricks of light-colored clay, brought from Holland, and of which, so tradition said, the church had been originally built, or which had, at any rate, been largely used in its construction. The church was seldom used, except in the summer-time. On communion Sundays the handsome seventeenth-century J acobean table of oak brought from Holland, where plenty like it may still be found, was set out, as it is to-day, with the plain vessels of silver “ pre-

Page 60

54 WASHINGTON IRVING AT HOME. sented by Queen Anne,” as the formula goes, that used to please my childish taste for things that had about them the flavor of old days. The same budding taste for antiquities led me and some of my school-mates to the old grave-yard, where we hunted up the oldest tombstones, scraping off the moss and lichens to decipher the names and dates, and enjoy¬ ing many a laugh over their carved ornaments, scrolls, and cockle-shells, and sturdy, dew- lapped Dutch cherubs, with their stumpy little wings scored like checker-boards for plum¬ age. Many of these gravestones were said to have been imported from Holland by the early settlers, like the bricks of which the church was built, the table in the church, and much of the furniture to be found in the farm¬ houses of the country-side, chairs and tables, cupboards, and even looking-glasses. The carvings, memorial verses, and scripture-texts upon these tombstones were cut by the more skillful workmen over-seas, and the names and dates were filled in here at home as oc¬ casion called. Even so early as when Mr. Irving wrote the Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” he tells us that the bridge over which Ichabod Crane clattered half dead with fright, pursued by the head¬ less horseman, had long disappeared, and that the present one had been substituted for it, to avert the omen of the tragedy. The banks of the Pocantico above the bridge are greatly changed since those primitive days. They are now cleared of the underbrush that once clothed them so thickly and through which a narrow cow-path made its devious way. The cow-path is now an orderly lane, and the sunlight strikes through tamer leafage on a well-kept turf; for the banks of the pretty stream have been transformed into a rural pleasure-ground, where the plump Ka¬ trinas and spruce Ichabods of to-day may wander and flirt at their will on Sunday after¬ noons. Although Tarrytown retains certain of the features that it had when I first knew it, yet the general character of the place is very dif¬ ferent. When those of us who used to read Washington Irving^s tales and sketches among the scenes in which they are popularly supposed to have been written read them now, in the midst of this combed and curled landscape, set about with overdressed houses, and inhabited by people who regulate their lives by the city clock, we no longer feel the harmony between the printed page and the life about us that we felt then. It was easy, in the old time, to be¬ lieve the story of Ichabod Crane, because the characters described in the tale were just such people as we met daily in the village street, or in the church on Sundays, and Irving has hardly made use of the novelist’s license in portraying them. The brisk little woman who was cook in our boarding-school was Mrs. Van Tassel; and the delicious fragrance of her bread, baked twice a week for us in an old-fashioned brick oven, has power even at this late day to make us forget that she had a temper of her own, of which her red-headed scape-grace of a son stood as much in awe as we. The question with us was, what was her relation to Katrina ? For, to the boyish mind, the facts that she was a Van Tassel, and a native of Tarrytown, were convincing proofs that she belonged to the family of the renowned Baltus, albeit Fortune had played the good lady one of her jade’s tricks in reducing her to the position of cook to a parcel of unruly boys. And where, to-day, could be found such a figure as the weather-beaten deacon in the Dutch church presented when, in his blue coat and brass buttons, and his hair done up in a pigtail, he stood up in front of the pul¬ pit and took the first note of the psalm-tune with a tuning-fork; the parson giving out two lines of each verse at a time, and the congre¬ gation following the precentor’s lead with nasal unanimity ! I came on the scene a little late to get the full benefit of the primitive time; but there was enough simplicity left to stamp the image of the place on my memory as a sleepy neigh¬ borhood, where dreaming was more in fashion than doing. The village itself was a dull Dutch market-town, consisting, in the main, of one long street that lumbered slowly up the hill from the riverside to the’ narrow plateau along which the Albany turnpike runs. There was no communication with the city of New York except by steamboat or by sloop, for the railroad which has since ruined the banks of the most beautiful river in the world was not so much as thought of at that time. In the winter we drove to the city in sleighs. I be¬ lieve no regular stage-coach plied between New York and Tarrytown. Considering how dead the village was, so far as active interests were concerned, we were fortunate as school-boys in having anything to quicken our minds in the history and asso¬ ciations of the region. We became strongly interested in the legendary gossip of the time of the Revolution, much of which centered about Andre; his capture on our side of the river, and his trial and execution at Tappan, directly opposite us, on the other side of the broad Tappan Zee. The tree under which Andre’s captors were sitting, playing cards, when he came up, for so the story ran, still stood in the field by the roadside; although, between the relic-hunters and the lightning, it

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WASHINGTON IRVING AT HOME, had come, when I knew it, to present a rather forlorn appearance. Mr. Irving made good dramatic use of this tree in his Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” but it is likely enough he had not seen it when he wrote the story. Our minds, thus kept awake by living in an atmosphere charged with legendary lore and with local history, were still further inspir¬ ited by living so near to a man of genius who had already made the country-side classic ground by his residence there, and by the legends he had enshrined in the amber of his style. We were not aware, at that time, how slight was Mr. Irving’s acquaintance with the region when he wrote the legend that has made it immortal. When he published the story of Rip Van Winkle he had not visited the Cats- kill Mountains, and he went to Tarrytown for the first time in 1798, when he was fifteen years old, with his dog and gun, for a few days, and it would appear that he did not see the place again for several years — certainly not until some time after ‘‘ The Sketch Book ” had made him famous. Mr. Irving first heard the story of the headless horseman from his brother-in-law, Mr. Van Wart, in Birmingham, at the time of his visit to England in 1819. The two homesick friends fell to talking about old times and scenes, and among the stories that Mr. Van Wart recalled was this one, which so tickled Irving’s fancy that he sat down at once — such was his happy, off-hand way — and rapidly sketched the outline of his story, which he afterward finished in London and sent home to America, to be published, with other stories, as the sixth number of “ The Sketch Book.” He says himself that the story is a mere thread on which to string descrip¬ tions of scenery, and surely all that he wrote came from his heart. He had seen the Hud¬ son for the first time in the full flush of eager boyhood, sailing up the river from New York to Albany, but without stopping anywhere, and the strong impression made upon his mind at that time by the beauty of the scen¬ ery, strengthened a little later by his visit to Tarrytown, was sufficient to root his imagina¬ tion in that region. Years afterward, home¬ sick and discouraged in London, the seed so early sown burst into sudden life; and in that one picture and its companion. Rip Van Win¬ kle, all the landscape was painted breathing warm with life and feeling, but with little more care for detailed resemblance to any one spot than a Claude or a Turner shows. Not far up the Sleepy Hollow road was the little country school-house which we had decided, on no better authority than that of childish imagination, must be the school-house 55 in which Ichabod Crane taught. One day I ventured to ask Mr. Irving if it was really the same, and I can still see the sunshine-smile in his handsome face as he put me by with some quizzical, non-committal answer. Had I been wise, I should have known enough to be content with the credentials furnished by imagination. But children have a very com¬ monplace hunger for facts, and so in my ignorance I exchanged a pleasing certainty for an empty doubt. While I was at school at Tarrytown, Mr. Irving was living on his little Sabine farm of Wolfert’s Roost, which afterward was so widely known as Sunnyside. The place, which origi¬ nally contained ten acres, afterward increased first to fifteen and finally to eighteen acres, lay on the river-bank a few miles below the village, in a neighborhood vaguely known as Dearman’s.” There was no distinct settle¬ ment at this point in my time, but in 1854, the place, having secreted enough population to warrant it, was set off from Tarrytown and incorporated as a village, to which, out of compliment to Mr. Irving, the name of Irving¬ ton was given. Mr. Irving had never been a man of means, and at the time I speak of his early fame as a writer had almost died away. Had I been at school in any other place than Tarrytown, I suspect I should have heard very little about him. But our schoolmaster had named his school the Irving Institute, and had persuaded Mr. Irving, out of his abounding good nature and liking for young folks, to visit the school occasionally at “ Commencement ” time, and give out the prizes. This of course made it necessary to keep us acquainted with Irving’s writings, and there were some of us who found this no ungrateful task. “ The History of New York ” and ‘^The Sketch Book ” we knew by heart. In the village, too, Irving was not without local honors. The new hotel was called the Irving Hotel, the myth-making spirit had already given a local habitation to all the in¬ cidents of the ‘‘ Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and strangers were directed on Sunday to the church where Mr. Irving was a regular attend¬ ant, and where they could study the great man at their leisure. All this, however, was the result of Mr. Irving’s residence in the neighborhood. In New York, to say nothing of the country at large, comparatively little was said about Irv¬ ing. He was reckoned a little old-fashioned, and people’s eyes were turned rather to Long¬ fellow and Hawthorne and Emerson, and to Lowell, the newest risen star. Something of Irving’s literary position in New York at that time was owing, no doubt, to the grudge that existed against him in the

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WASHINGTON ITVING AT HOME. 56 minds of the descendants of the early Dutch settlers, on account of his “ History of New York.” I crossed the ocean not long ago with a member of a New York family whose name is known as honorably as it is widely, and whose members have done good service in many fields of culture. In the long summer days on deck we talked of many things, and naturally enough, both of us being New York¬ ers, we came upon Irving. L was taken aback by the heat with which my companion attacked his name. He frankly expressed his dislike, and when I pressed fora reason, I found it to be that Irving had made New York ridicu¬ lous. The city had a more than respectable early history : it was one highly honorable, and Irving’s book had turned it into irretrievable caricature. It would need a talent as great as his own — for the talent was frankly con¬ ceded — to paint the canvas over again ; it was doubtful, now, if it would ever be done. I could not sympathize in the least with my companion’s view. As I looked at the matter, I thought New Yorkers ought to be much obliged to Irving for having built up so lively a structure on the flat marshland of their early history. And why should not New York have a fanciful early history as well as Rome or England ? We read the stories of the Greek cities as if we believed them ; why should we stick so at our own fabulist and his work — ‘‘the Dutch Herodotus, Diedrich Knicker¬ bocker,” as Mr. John Duer, one of the old Knickerbockers, had the magnanimity to call him ? Is it not likely that the stories of Mene- laus and Helen, of the wooden horse, and of sulking Achilles, were as disagreeable to old Greek and Trojan families as the fables of Van Twiller and Stuyvesant were to the old New Yorkers ? Irving has been called the last of the my- thologists, but it must be admitted that Cable and Craddock are showing delightful skill in work of a similar kind. And the way in which a brilliant, charming, and sympathetic writer has been criticised in New Orleans enables us to understand how Irving was treated in New York. His nephew’s “ Life and Letters ” has some amusing anecdotes relating to the subject. Irving himself treated the mat¬ ter rather lightly, but even he must have had some feeling on the subject, for in his revised edition of the “ History,” he withdrew the original dedication to the New York His¬ torical Society. A distinguished scholar, a member of one of the oldest and most re¬ spectable of the Dutch families, had said, in an address delivered before the Society, speak¬ ing of Irving and his “ History ” : “ It is pain¬ ful to see a mind, as admirable for its exquisite perception of the beautiful as it is for its quick sense of the ridiculous, wasting the riches of its fancy on an ungrateful theme, and its exu¬ berant humor in a coarse caricature.” And to show how deep was the irritation caused by this “ coarse caricature,” which Walter Scott and all the cultivated world of England found so delightful, and which was the foundation of Irving’s fame and fortune, I would record that, while writing this paper, finding myself in the country, away from my books, I asked a member of a family which may surely stand as representative of every¬ thing the Knickerbockers had of best, if in her father’s library — very rich in English lit¬ erature, and in beautiful editions, the envy of the bibliophile — I could not find “ The Sketch Book.” “Well, no,” was the half-amused, half- ashamed reply. “ We have not, I believe, a single work of Irving’s. You know when grandfather lived, and we were young, Irving was taboo But in 1846, after his return from Spain, where he had most acceptably filled the posi¬ tion of Minister, Irving’s sky, which, when all is said, had never been seriously obscured, cleared finally, and took on that mellow beauty which continued to the end of his life. Per¬ haps no incident will serve better to mark the date of the change in Irving’s literary fortunes that the publication of Lowell’s “ Fable for Critics ” : “ Set forth in October, the 31st day, Ill the year ’48, G. P. Putnam, Broadway.” Lowell’s enthusiastic greeting to Irving in this delightful burst of youthful spirits, one of the best characterizations in the poem, begins with an allusion to Irving’s recent return from Spain. In the same year with the publication of the “ Fable for Critics ” began the re-issue of Irv¬ ing’s works by Mr. Putnam, most generous of publishers and kindest of men, whom not even a Napoleon would have found it in his heart to shoot, or if he had, no Charles Lamb would have toasted him for it. The success of this venture was very great. The eyes of the public were again turned upon Irving, and his early triumphs were renewed : no less than two hun¬ dred and fifty thousand volumes of the new issue of his works were sold during his life¬ time. Neither the public honors that were heaped upon him after his return, nor the prosperity thatcame so unexpectedly to reward his literary labors, had any charm to wean Mr. Irving from his taste for the simple pleasures of a country life, his plain house, his old friends, his little study lined with books, his rambles on horse¬ back among the well-known hills and lanes, his vine-trellised piazza (we have no American

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WASHINGTON ITVING AT HOME. name for this distinctively American thing) where he could sit at his ease in the summer evenings and hear the waves of the Hudson River lapping the shore at his feet. Everybody knows the exterior of the cot¬ tage at Sunnyside from pictures, engravings, photographs, or from having himself been one of the hundreds of pilgrims who have visited it. When Irving bought the place, in 1835, there stood upon it a small stone house called Wolfert’s Roost (Roost, rest), from a former owner, W olfert Acker (the name of Acker is still heard in the neighborhood-), who had been one of the Committee of Public Safety, and who had come here to set up his Rest, and take his ease. Mr. Irving called in the ser¬ vices of an architect, Mr. George Harvey, to fit up the cottage for his occupancy, and he was fortunate in finding so sympathetic an assistant. When it was finished, it had not only lost nothing of the character which first struck Irving’s fancy, but it had that air of ‘‘ old times ” about it which is so hard to give to a new place, or even to an old place made over. The architect gave it back comfortable, and suited to Mr. Irving’s needs, yet no less picturesque than it was when he first described it — the ‘‘ little old-fashioned stone mansion, all made up of gable-ends, and as full of angles and corners as an old cocked hat.” The principal external feature was a sub¬ stantial porch, supporting a room overhead, and with a crow-step gable surmounted by a weather-cock. Over the entrance to the porch is a stone bearing the architect’s name and title, George Harvey, Bomr,” an abbreviation for Boumeister,” which Mr. Irving had raked up as Dutch for “ architect.” Every visitor, too, must have remarked the fine growth of English ivy which covers the eastern side of the cottage with a thick mantle of green — so thick, indeed, that the windows of the second story had the look of being cut out of the solid mass of shining verdure. This ivy has grown from a slip brought from Mel¬ rose Abbey and presented to Mr. Irving by his friend Mrs. Renwick. This lady, Mr. Pierre Irving tells us, was a Miss Jeffrey of Lochmaben, Dumfriesshire, Scotland. She was the heroine of Burns’s “ Blue-eyed Lassie,” as well as of another of his songs, “ When first I saw my Jennie’s face.” After Mr. Irving’s return from Spain, in 1846, the services of Mr. Harvey were again called in for an addition to the cottage which should make living in it more comfortable as a permanent dwelling, with better offices and more commodious servants’ quarters, and this work was accomplished as successfully as the other. No material changes were made in the internal arrangement of the older part of the 57 building, but externally, as a whole, the alter¬ ation was very marked : the sky-line was much enlivened by the pagoda-like roof over one portion, which was the subject of some good- natured raillery on the part of Irving’s neigh¬ bors ; and when it was completed the house had a picturesque charm uncommon enough at that time. With the turn in Mr. Irving’s literary fortunes which began at this time everything relating to his personality became of interest to the public, and artists found the cottage at Sunnyside a popular subject for sketches and pictures. The interior of Mr. Irving’s house hardly corresponded with the promise made by the outside. As I remember, it was plainly but comfortably furnished; and, compared with almost any house lived in by a person of Irv¬ ing’s position to-day, would certainly be said to have a bare look. I was particularly struck with this in the parlor, where the only orna¬ ment I remember w^as the portrait of Irving painted in 1820 by Stuart Newton, and of which the head and bust, showing the fur collar of his coat, is engraved in his nephew’s Life and Letters.” If the parlor were somewhat bare, Mr. Irv¬ ing’s study was hardly more attractive. It was a small room, to the right on entering, with windows looking to the south and east ; that facing the east was framed in the ivy of which I have spoken. In the middle of the room was the plain table, always in a state of healthy disorder, at which Irving wrote, and at the north end was an alcove filled with books. As a youngster fond of reading, and with my mind made up as to how the workroom of a famous author ought to look, I was much disappointed at the somewhat uninviting ap¬ pearance of this small chamber. But Irving’s literary work had not been of a nature to make many books necessary, and the writings that have given him his true reputation — the “ History of New York,” and The Sketch Book,” with its followers in the same field — were all written and published before he came to Sunnyside to live. There was nothing in Irving’s surroundings, or in his way of life, to suggest the literary man. His house might have been that of any gentleman bachelor with a happy turn for indolence, with no ex¬ pensive tastes, but with an inborn relish for the simple pleasures of country life. This absence of picturesque or artistic sur¬ roundings, supposing it to have been noticed at all, was quickly forgotten, however, by all who met him, in the charms of his manners, and in the pleasure of listening to his talk. Yet it was not at once seen wherein the charm of his manner lay. No one of the stock epi¬ thets describes him. He had at fifty-seven,

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THE DESERTER. 58 when I first saw him, the unconscious animal spirits of a boy. He could make himself at home with anybody, and put a child, or even a bore, at his ease. His fine face, to which no artist ever did justice, such was its mobil¬ ity of expression, was now all sunshine over his own mirth or that of somebody else, now working with emotion as he recalled old times or spoke of some friend from whom death had separated him, or from whom he had just now parted with little hope to meet again. Easy and natural as were Mr. Irving’s manners, there was a strong individuality behind them : they are reflected in his books, whose limpid style seems so easy to imitate, and yet is be¬ yond the reach of effort. I happened to be with him on one occasion when a young man whom he knew called upon him, and in the course of the conversa¬ tion informed him that he had recently married. Who is the lady ? ” said Mr. Irving; and on hearing the name — “ What ! a granddaughter of Mrs. - , the lady who declined to dance with Washington ? Dear me ! dear me ! Since I have been writing the ‘Life of Washington,’ I have heard of no end of ladies who had danced with Washington, but Mrs. - is the only one I ever heard of who had declined to dance with him ! ” And in the newspapers lately there was a story which might certainly have been true, if it were not. Irving was walking one day in his orchard when a small boy who was prowl¬ ing about accosted him, and with a confiden¬ tial air offered to show him “ the old man’s best tree,” if he would shake it for him ! Irv¬ ing agreed; and “ By George, sir ! if he didn’t actually take me to the very best tree on my place ! ” When I was last at Tarry town, I was visit¬ ing at one of those handsome houses and well-kept places which make the sleepy, slouchy ways of the region, such as it was in my school-boy days, seem more than ever like a dream. My hostess took me to the edge of the velvet lawn, and showed me a rock. “That,” she said, “ we call Irving’s seat. This place, when we bought it, was a farm. It belonged to old Captain S - , and he told us that Mr. Irving used to climb this hill and sit on this rock overlooking the river and the landscape, and Captain S - found it so pleasant to have him come, that he had the rock shaped into a rude seat to make it more comfortable. Here Irving would spread the plaid with which he was accustomed to protect his shoulders and which he used instead of an overcoat in walk¬ ing about, and here he sat with his old farmer friend beside him, and passed the hour in homely chat or alone with his own thoughts.” The last time I saw Mr. Irving in his own house something turned the conversation to the group of American artists — Leslie, Stuart Newton, Allston, and the rest — with whom he was so intimate in London at the time of his first visit. I think what led to his speaking of his friends was my asking him some ques¬ tion about his portrait by Stuart Newton, which, as I have said, hung in the drawing¬ room. After a little, the talk turned on Allston, and he began to speak of him in the tender- est, most affectionate way. “ I was just read¬ ing over one of his letters,” he said; and he rose quickly from his chair and went into his study to fetch it. Returning at once with the letter in his hand, he began to read it, but had not gone far when his recollections over¬ came him, his eyes filled with tears, and exclaiming, “ I can’t bear it,” he threw the letter down on the floor. Recovering him¬ self, he changed the subject, and I presently withdrew. THE DESERTER. Blindest and most frantic prayer. Clutching at a senseless boon. His that begs, in mad despair. Death to come ; — he comes so soon ! Like a reveler that strains Lip and throat to drink it up — The last ruby that remains. One red droplet in the cup. Like a child that, sullen, mute. Sulking spurns, with chin on breast, Of the Tree of Life a fruit. His gift of whom he is the guest Outcast on the thither shore. Open scorn to him shall give Souls that heavier burdens bore : — “ See the wretch that dared not live !” Antho7iy Morehead.

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION. 1.=^ THE COMPOSITION OF OUR BODIES AND OUR FOOD. “Half the struggle of life is a struggle for food.” — Edward Atkinson. “ I have come to the conclusion that more than half the disease which embitters the middle and latter part of life is due to avoidable errors in diet . . . and that more mischief in the form of actual disease, of impaired vigor, and of shortened life, accrues to civilized man ... in England and throughout central Europe from erroneous habits of eating than from the habitual use of alcoholic drink, considerable as I know that evil to be.” — Sir Henry Thompson. “ If we will care for men’s souls most effectively, we must care for their bodies also.” — Bishop R. S. Foster. proportion of the cost of living might be saved A tIH by better economy of h food; how dietary errors ^ ^ I? compare in harmfulness with the use of alcohol; whether, as some urge, our next great reform is to be in our dietetics; and to what extent the spread of the gospel and the perfection of its fruit are dependent upon the food-supply, are questions which it is not my present purpose to discuss. I have quoted the foregoing statements, however, because they come with authority, and because, starting from the widely different standpoints of the economist, the physician, and the divine, the conclusions tally perfectly with those of some studies of my own. Mr. Atkinson cites statistics to show that all but the very few who are especially well-to-do, in this country as in Europe, must expend half or more than half of their earnings for their food ; calls attention to our wastefulness, and urges the need of better economy in the pur¬ chase and use of food-materials. The error which Sir Henry Thompson most seriously de¬ plores is over-eating. ‘‘ It is a failure to under¬ stand, first, the importance of preserving a near equality between the supply of nutriment to the body and the expenditure produced by the activity of the latter; and, secondly, ignorance of the method of attaining this object in prac¬ tice, which gives rise to the various forms of disease calculated to embitter and shorten life.” Bishop Foster, considering, on the one hand, the destitution that prevails, both at home, and especially in some of the countries where missionary effort is put forth so vigor¬ ously, and, on the other, the intimate de¬ pendence of man’s intellectual and spiritual development upon his physical condition, urges that we may hope for the best culture of the Christian graces in the hearts of men * See “ The Food Question in America and Europe ” by only in proportion as adequate nourishment of their bodies is provided for. I have been led to the conclusions that, in this country, many people, not only the well- to-do, but those in moderate circumstances also, use a needless quantity of food ; that part of this excess, however, is simply thrown away, so that the injury to health, great as it may be, is doubtless much less than if all were eaten; that one great fault with our dietaries is an ex¬ cess of meats and of sweetmeats; that even among those who desire to economize there is great pecuniary loss from the selection of ma¬ terials in which the actual nutrients are really, though not apparently, dearer than need be; that many whose means are limited make still more serious mistakes in their choice of food, so that they are often inadequately nourished when they might be well fed at less cost; and, what seems the most painful thing of all, that it is generally the very poor who practice the worst economy in the purchase as well as in the use of their food. The subject concerns the laboring classes in still other ways. Statistics as well as com¬ mon observation bear emphatic testimony to the better condition of the American as com¬ pared with the European workingman in re¬ spect to his supply of the necessaries and comforts of life. Nowhere is this superiority more striking than in the quality and quantity of his food. And the difference in the dietaries of the two is especially marked in the larger amount of potential energy, of capability to yield muscular strength for work and to fulfill other uses in nutrition, which characterizes the food of the American. That the American workman, in many cases at least, turns out more work per day or per year than his Euro¬ pean competitor is a familiar fact. That this superiority is due to more nutritious food as well as to greater intelligence is hardly to be questioned. But the better nourishment of the American wage-worker, as we shall see, Edward Atkinson in this magazine for December, 1886.

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6o THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION is largely due to our virgin soil. With the growth of population and the increasing close¬ ness of home and international competition, his own diet cannot be kept up to its present nutritive standard, nor can that of his poorer neighbor and his foreign brother be brought up nearer to that standard, without better knowl¬ edge and application of the laws of food- economy. Some time since, at the instance of the United States National Museum, and in be¬ half of its food collection, I was led to un¬ dertake a study of the chemistry of foods. This has included with other matter a series of anal¬ yses of some of our common food-materials. To give some of the more practical results of this work, especially as viewed in the light of • late research upon the more general subject of nutrition, is the purpose of the present articles.* A POUND of very lean beef and a quart of milk both contain about the same quantity of actually nutritious materials. But the pound of beef costs more than the quart of milk, and its nutrients are not only diferent in number and kind, but are, for ordinary use, more val¬ uable than those of the milk. We have here an illustration of a principle, or rather of two principles, of fundamental importance in the economy of nutrition : our food-materials con¬ tain nutrients of different kinds and in differ¬ ent proportions, and the nutrients have differ¬ ent functions, different sorts of work to do in •the support of our bodies. Add that it is es¬ sential for our health that our food shall sup¬ ply the nutrients in the kinds and proportions our bodies require, and that it is likewise im¬ portant for our purses that the nutrients be obtained at the minimum cost, and we have the fundamental tenets of our system of food- economy. The greater part of our definite knowledge of these matters comes from chemical study of food-materials, and from experiments in which animals are supplied with food of various kinds and the effects noted. In these latter, the food, the eges/a, solid and liquid, and, in many cases, the inhaled and exhaled air are meas¬ ured, weighed, and analyzed. Hundreds, in¬ deed thousands, of trials have been made with animals of many kinds, and a great number with human beings of both sexes and different ages. The best work has been done during the last two decades, nearly all of it in Europe, and the larger share in Germany. It involves the study of the profoundest problems of chemis- * I am indebted to Professor Baird, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Director of the National Museum, for permission to reproduce here several charts prepared to illustrate the food collection ; nor can I forbear adding that it was through the generosity try, physics, and physiology, the most elabo¬ rate apparatus, and the greatest care and patience of the workers. The labor of days and weeks is often required for a single ex¬ periment of a series, and the result of many series may often be condensed in a very few words. If one seeks famous names in this field he may find them in Liebig, Pettenko- fer, and Voit in Germany; Payen and Claude Bernard in France; Moleschott in Italy ; and Frankland, Playfair, Lawes, and Gilbert in England, and many others. If he questions the practical value of the results, let him see how they are being applied in the construction of dietaries for the common people in Germany, and what they indicate as to the errors of our food-economy at home. If he would see how results of recent research in one country may be ignored, because unknown, by the writers of a different language in another, let him ex¬ amine some of our latest magazine articles and text-books, the names of the authors and pub¬ lishers of which ought to be a guarantee for better things. What we wish to consider now, however, is not the extent of the science, but some of its more important teachings in their applica¬ tions to our daily life. Our task is to learn how our food builds up our bodies, repairs their wastes, yields heat and energy, and how we may select and use our food-materials to the best advantage of health and purse. I begin our study together with a whole¬ some fear of the editor before my eyes, know¬ ing well that back of the courteous hint to make these articles not too abstrusely scien¬ tific there was a repressed warning to avoid the tone and language of the college lecture- room as unsuited to the pages of a magazine. But I must crave a little latitude ; the results of scientific research cannot be explained without some tedious technicalities and dry details. HOW CHEMICAL ANALYSES ARE MADE. If I cannot be interesting, I will be ortho¬ dox, and go back to the Catechism, whose second question is Of what are you made?^’ and the answer, “ The dust of the earth.” The fact that underlies this answer, namely, the identity of the elements of our bodies with those of the material objects around us, is one of the many which chemistry explains. This fact, embodied in the solemn language of the primeval curse, ‘‘ for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” impressed upon us of Messrs. Thurber, Whyland and Co., of New York, in defraying a considerable portion of the pecuniary expense of the analyses hereafter referred to that the latter were made possible.

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION. 6i with our earliest religious teachings, clothed in fantastic imagery by poets, and under¬ stood so vaguely in the science, and dwelt upon so mysteriously in the philosophy of the past, is divested of much of its mystery by the matter-of-fact investigation of the present. The chemistry of to-day tells us of what ele¬ ments and compounds our bodies consist. It gives us at least a glimpse of the ways in which they are framed together by the won¬ derful processes of life, and how they go through the round of growth and fruition, and are by decay resolved again into the forms from which they came. And the research of the past few years has shown us that even this decay is a vital process carried out by living creatures, whose mission is to take off the effete matter and fit it for use again. A friend of mine tells of an editor of a prom¬ inent journal — and a Boston editor at that — who was much surprised to learn that it is pos¬ sible to tell by use of the balance, the com¬ bustion furnace, the filter, and other ap¬ pliances of the chemical laboratory, just what elements and compounds and what propor¬ tions of each make up the air or a mineral, or how much nitrogen there is in muscle or protein in wheat flour. But to the chemist these are the most commonplace, though not al¬ ways the simplest, things. Indeed, our every¬ day handling of food materials often involves processes, though crude ones, of analysis. We let milk stand ; the globules of fat rise in cream, still mingled, however, with water, protein, carbohydrates, and mineral salts. To separate the other ingredients from the fat, the cream is churned. The more perfect this sep¬ aration, i. e., the more accurate the analysis, the more wholesome will be the butter. Put a little rennet into the skimmed milk, and the casein, called in chemical language an albu¬ minoid or protein compound, will be curdled and may be freed from the bulk of the water, sugar, and other ingredientsby the cheese-press. To separate milk-sugar, a carbohydrate, from the whey is a simple matter. One may see it done by Swiss shepherds in their rude Alpine huts. But farmers find it more profitable to VoL. XXXIV.— 9. put it in the pig-pen, the occupants of which are endowed with the happy faculty of trans¬ forming sugar, starch, and other carbohydrates of their food into the fat of pork. The New England boy who on cold winter mornings goes to the barn to feed the cattle, and solaces himself by taking grain from the wheat bin and chewing it into what he calls wheat-gum,” makes, unknowingly, a rough sort of analysis of the wheat. With the crush¬ ing of the grain and the action of saliva in his mouth, the starch, sugar, and other carbohy¬ drates are separated. Some of the fat, i. <?., oil, is also removed, and finds its way with the carbohydrates into the stomach. The tena¬ cious gluten, which contains the albuminoids or protein and constitutes what he calls the gum, is left. When, in the natural order of events, the cows are cared for and the gum is swallowed, its albuminoids enter upon a round of transformation in the boy’s body, in the course of which they are changed to other forms of protein, such as albumen of blood or myosin of muscle ; or are converted into fat, or are consumed with the oil and sugar and starch to yield heat to keep his body warm and give him muscular strength for his work or play. 1 am using such technical terms as protein and carbohydrates and speaking of chemical processes with which daily usage makes us chemists familiar and which the reader will find referred to so often in these articles that I wish him to become familiar with them also. In¬ deed, these things are so much a part of our¬ selves, so intimately connected with our every breath and motion and feeling, with our life and health and strength, that labor spent in learning about them cannot be lost. It will help toward understanding the facts if we note how some of them are found out. To this end I will introduce the reader into a laboratory, being aided in so doing by the illustrations of the chemical laboratory of Wesleyan Univer-

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62 THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION driven out. When it is perfectly dry it is weighed again. The loss in weight represents the quan¬ tity of water in the flour. This heating is con¬ ducted in a drying oven which is kept hot by a gas flame inside the support on which the oven rests. In order to prevent the action of the oxygen of the air upon the flour while it is being dried, we keep a current of hydrogen gas continually passing through it. The ap¬ paratus for generating the hydrogen and forcing it through the flasks is shown in the sity. They show the rooms in which some of the studies whose results are to be described beyond were made, and part of the apparatus actually employed. At one of the desks a student may be seen preparing oxygen. In a little flask he places some chlorate of potash — the material which we use as a medicine for sore throat. This he heats by the flame of a peculiar lamp underneath the flask. The oxygen is given olf as gas and passes through a glass tube which is bent down¬ ward so as to open under the mouth of a glass jar, which latter has been filled with water and inverted over water in a basin. The oxygen bubbles up into the jar, while the water at the same time runs out, and thus the jar is filled with the gas. It looks like ordinary air, but when the experimenter sets fire to a stick of wood, blows out the flame, thrusts the glow¬ ing end in the oxygen, it bursts instantly into a brill¬ iant flame. A piece of phos¬ phorus, kindled and placed in the oxygen, burns with a flame of blinding brightness. And a steel wire burns in this gas even more brilliantly than wood burns in ordinary air. Thus the student learns as he could not from text¬ book or lectures, that oxy¬ gen, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the weight of our bodies, and one-fifth of the weight of air, is the great supporter of combustion. But our special purpose here is to note how chemical analyses are made. Let us take as an example a grain of wheat. It contains water, which we may dry out by heating; organic matter, which may be burned by combining with the oxygen of the air; and mineral mat¬ ters, which remain behind as ashes. The or¬ ganic matter contains fatty or oily substances, starch and other carbohydrates, and protein compounds. The object of the analysis is to separate these ingredients from one another and find what proportion of each is contained in the wheat. To make the analysis, we first grind the grain to flour. To find the proportion of water, we weigh off a small quantity very accurately in a chemical balance and put it in a little glass flask, the weight of which is known, and heat it for a number of hours, until the water is picture. In the large bottles above is sulphu¬ ric acid. This runs down the pipes into the tall narrow glass vessels on the floor. These latter contain zinc. When the acid comes in contact with the zinc, hydrogen gas is devel¬ oped, and passes up by tubes through the top of the drying oven into the flasks. Such de¬ vices as these are necessary if we are to make large numbers of analyses with the greatest accuracy and speed. Like a steam-engine, they seem a little complicated, but the engineer understands his engine, and to the chemist his apparatus seems perfectly simple.

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION 63 We have next to find out how much oily matter the wheat contains. For this purpose we must have some means of getting the oil out, and weighing it. The oper¬ ation is by no means a diffi¬ cult one. Suppose we have a mixture of sugar and sand and wish to find out how much sugar it contains. Sugar dissolves in water, sand does not. If we pour water into the cup containing the mixture, the sugar will dissolve, and if we pour off the water again the sugar will go with it and leave the sand behind. If instead of a cup we put the mixture in a little cloth sack, with meshes so fine that the sand will not pass through, and hold the sack over a dish and pour water into it, the water will dissolve the sugar and percolate through the cloth, carrying the sugar with it into the dish below. If then we boil off the water, the sugar will remain. We make use of an oper¬ ation analogous to this in separating the fat from our wheat. The fatty and oily matters of the wheat dissolve in ether; the starch, gluten, and other ingredients do not. We therefore use ether in place of water for the solvent. Instead of the bag we place the flour in a little glass cylinder (I) having its lower end covered with filter paper. This small tube is put inside a larger one (O) whose lower end is drawn out into a neck like that of a funnel. This neck is then passed through the stopper of a little flask (F). If now we pour ether into the inner tube, it will dissolve the fat, percolate through the filter paper, and fall into the flask below. By passing successive portions of ether through the flour, we shall, after a time, dissolve out all the fat. But this would require a great deal of time and ether, both of which are expen¬ sive. Suppose we had some means by which the ether, after bringing its freight of fat into the flask, could be driven out, leaving the fat behind, caused to return into the inner tube, dissolve another portion of fat and bring it into the flask, and be made to repeat the round again and again. Suppose, furthermore, this operation should be made to go on automatically, and that it could be carried on in several of these pieces of apparatus at once, while the analyst devoted himself to other work. Our analyses would thus be greatly facilitated. Pre¬ cisely this is done in the apparatus at the left of the drying oven in the large picture, which shows the APPARATUS FOR FAT EXTRACTION. chemist putting one of the pieces of ap¬ paratus together. To conduct the opera¬ tion he partly im¬ merses the flask in a cup containing water. Underneath is a lamp with a flame just hot enough to heat the water to a temperature some¬ what below the boil¬ ing point. The ether, which boils at a tem¬ perature much lower than water, changes to vapor and passes up¬ ward between the inner and outer tubes into a long pipe which winds upward through the tank above like the worm of a still. The tank is kept filled with cold water ; the ether vapor is condensed to liquid, falls back upon the flour in the inner tube, dissolves out another portion of fat, carries it into the flask below, and is then once more evaporated, leaving the fat in the flask; and so the same portion of ether keeps on its round, passing up in the form of vapor, coming back as liquid, and bringing fat with it into the flask. When the fat is all extracted the operator takes the appa¬ ratus apart, boils olf the ether once more, and weighs the flask with the fat. Knowing how much the empty flask weighs, he has simply to subtract its weight from that of the flask with the fat in it ; the difference is the weight of the fat. The ways of finding the amount of nitrogen in food materials are of especial interest to us, because we use the nitrogen as a measure of the amount of protein, the most important of the nutritive ingredients. One of the most common of these ways, the soda-lime meth¬ od,” as it is called in the laboratory, is illustrated in pictures herewith. The flour is heated with a mixture of soda and lime in a combustion-tube. The small diagram shows the tube ready for the heating or combus¬ tion,” as it is termed. Connected with the long combustion-tube which holds the flour and

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION 64 soda-lime is a bulb-tube containing a little acid. When the combustion-tube is heated in the furnace, as shown in the larger picture, the nitrogen of the flour is changed to ammo¬ nia, which is caught in the acid in the bulb- tube. When this is done we have only to find the amount of ammonia and calculate from it the amount of nitrogen. The picture of a chemist sitting by the window shows this latter operation. He has poured the contents of the bulb-tube into a dish called a beaker, added a few drops of litmus, which colors the liquid red, and is carefully drawing another liquid containing ammonia from an upright tube, called a burette, into the beaker. When just enough to neutralize the acid has been drawn into the beaker the color suddenly changes from red to purple. The burette is marked so that he knows just how much of the ammonia is required to neutralize the acid not neutral¬ ized by the ammonia from the wheat, and thus the quantity of the latter, and with it the quantity of nitrogen in the Avheat, are known. By such operations as these we are enabled to make analyses of different food materials, of the tissues and fluids of the body, and of other substances as well. THE CHEMICAL ELEMENTS AND COMPOUNDS OF THE BODY. Before entering upon our study of foods it will be well to consider with some detail the composition of the human body. For a brief statement of the elements nothing can serve us better than the accompanying reproduction of some of the case-labels of the food col¬ lection in the United States National Museum at Washington. The figures are as computed by Messrs. E. A. Welch and R. H. Pomeroy, students in this laboratory, who have been at more pains than any one else, so far as I am aware, to use data collated from all available sources. No one has ever made a complete chemical analysis of a human body, but anat¬ omists have made numerous weighings of the different organs, and chemists have analyzed their constituents. From the figures thus ob¬ tained it is possible to make an approximate estimate of the composition of the body of an average man, as is here done. The diagram on the opposite page will help to a clearer idea of the relative proportions of the elements in the body. In the latter the proportions are expressed in percentages, while in the National Museum labels the estimated weights are stated in pounds. These thirteen elements are combined with one another in the body, forming a great vari¬ ety of compounds. Chemists have discovered DETERMINING THE A.AIOUNT OF AMMONIA WHICH CAME FROM THE NITROGEN OF THE WHEAT. more than a hundred different compounds in the bodies of man and other animals. Instead of attempting to enumerate all of them here, it will be more to our purpose to consider some of the principal ones. In doing so we may take advantage of the fact that the compounds in the body and those in the food are very sim¬ ilar, and discuss them together. An ox eats grass and meal and transforms the compounds they contain into meat. We eat meat and wheat and change them into the materials of our bodies. Some of the com¬ pounds in the food are destroyed, others are only slightly changed in these transformations. Water, which consists of the two elements hydrogen and oxygen, is a most important constituent of all animal and vegetable tissues. It makes up about seven-eighths of the whole weight of milk and of the flesh of oysters, one- fourth that of potatoes and very lean meat (muscle), one-third of bread, a little over half of well-fattened beef or mutton, and one-eighth of the weight of flour and meal. The body of an average man would, by the above calcula¬ tion, contain about sixty-one per cent, or three- fifths water. Of the materials of our bodies and of our foods the larger part is combustible, as was the case with the grain of wheat; that is to say, it will be burned if put in the fire. A small residue will, however, remain as ashes. This incom¬ bustible portion includes the so-called mineral matters. These latter consist of the metals potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, and iron, combined with other elements, as oxygen.

Page 71

THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION CHART I.— CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF THE HUMAN BODY. 6S ELEMENTS. The chemical compounds of which our bodies are made up are shown by chemical analysis to consist, mainly, of thirteen elements. Five of these elements are, when uncombined (i. e., each by itself and not united to any other element), gases. They are named : The composition of the bodies of different persons varies greatly with age, size, fatness, etc. The amounts of the several elements in the body of an average healthy man, five feet eight inches high, weighing 156 pounds with, and 148 pounds without, clothing, may be roughly estimated to be, in pounds and hundredths of a pound, somewhat as follows : j. Oxygen, 2. Hydrogen, 3. Nitrogen, 4. Chlorine, 5. Fluorine. The other eight are solid substances. Of these, three are non-metals : 6. Carbon, 7. Phosphorus, 8. Sulphur. The remaining five are metals : 9. Iron, 10. Calcium, 11. Magnesium, 12. Potassium, 13. Sodium. Besides the above thirteen elements, minute quantities of a few others, as silicon, manganese, and copper, are found in the body. Carbon — A Solid. The body of a man weighing 148 pounds would contain about 31 pounds of carbon. The diamond is nearly pure carbon. _ Graphite (the so-called “ black lead ” of lead-pencils), anthracite coal, coke, lamp-black, and charcoal are impure forms of carbon. Carbon exists in combination with other elements in the body, of which it makes about one-fifth the whole weight, and in food. Carbon bums, i. e., combines with oxygen. In this combus¬ tion, heat and force are generated and carbonic acid gas formed. The carbon taken into the body in food combines with the oxygen of the inhaled air, yielding heat to keep the body warm and force, muscular strength, for work. The carbonic acid is given out by the lungs and skin. Carbon thus serves as fuel for the body and is the most important fuel element. Weights of Chemical Elements in the Body of Man weighing 148 Pounds. Oxygen . . . . Carbon . . . Hydrogen . . Nitrogen . . . Calcium. . . . Phosphorus Potassium . . Sulphur . . . . Chlorine . . . Sodium . . . . Magnesium Iron . Fluorine . . . 92.4 pounds 31-3 “ 14.6 « 4.6 2.8 “ 1.4 “ •34 “ .24 .12 “ . 12 .04 .02 .02 A Total 148.00 pounds Hydrogen — A Gas. The body of a man weighing 148 pounds is esti¬ mated to contain about 14^ pounds of hydrogen, which, if set free, would fill about 2600 cubic feet. Hydrogen, when uncombined, is a gas. It is the lightest sub¬ stance known. Combined with oxygen it forms water, of which it constitutes one-ninth of the whole weight. Hydrogen occurs in combination with other elements in the body and in food. Hydrogen, like carbon, unites with oxygen of the inhaled air in the body, thus serving as fuel. The water produced is given off in the respiration through the lungs, and as perspiration through the skin. Phosphorus — A Solid. About I pound and 6 ounces of phosphorus would be found in the body of a man weighing 148 pounds. Phosphorus is a non-metal, light, very inflammable, and so soft that it is easily cut with a knife. Since it burns so readily in air, it is here kept under water. United with oxygen, phosphorus forms what is known as phos¬ phoric acid. This, with lime, makes phosphate of lime. Most of the phosphorus of the body occurs in this form in the bones and teeth, though it is also found in the flesh and blood, and especially in the brain and nerves. Calcium — A Metal. The body of an average man weighing 148 pounds has been estimated to contain some 3 pounds of calcium. Calcium is a metal somewhat similar in appearance to mag¬ nesium or zinc. It is very difficult to obtain free from other elements. United with oxygen it forms lime. This, with phos¬ phoric acid, makes phosphate of lime, the basis of the bones and teeth, in which nearly all the calcium of the body is found. With carbonic acid, it forms carbonate of lime, the chief ingredient of marble and limestone. LABELS FROM CASE OF SPECIMENS, ILLUSTRATING COMPOSITION OF HUMAN BODY, IN FOOD COLLECTION OF NATIONAL MUSEUM. J 0 30 < 30 « OXYGEN CARBON 2LX HYOROOEN- 6.9 NITROGEN ■ S4 CALCIUM 1 It PHOSPHORUS 1 09 OTHER ELEMENTS TOTAL tOO.Opcro«nl DIAGRAM I. ESTIMATED PROPORTIONS OF CHEMICAL ELEMENTS. phosphorus, sulphur, and chlorine. Thus, in bone we have phosphate of lime or calcium phosphate, which consists of calcium, phos¬ phorus, and oxygen; in muscle, potassium phosphate and potassium chloride, the latter a compound of potassium and chlorine, and so on. The mineral matters make about thirty per cent, of the weight of bone, one per cent, of the flesh and blood of animals, and from one-half of one to two per cent, of our ordinary veg¬ etable food materials. The mineral matters constitute about six per cent, of the whole weight of the body of an average man. VoL. XXXIV.— 10. The combustible portion of the body and of the food that nourishes it consists of so- called organic compounds. Since these are the most important substances we shall have to do with in our study of foods and nutrition, we ought to have a tolerably clear understand¬ ing of the nature of at least the principal ones. If from a piece of meat we remove the bone, gristle, and fat as completely as practicable, and subject the remaining “ lean ” (muscle) to chemical analysis, we shall find about one- fourth, or, to speak more accurately, from twenty-two to thirty per cent., of it to consist of organic compounds, the rest being water with a very little mineral matter. Even if all the visible fat is removed, part of this organic matter will consist of fat in microscopic parti¬ cles. The fatter the animal from which the meat comes, the more of these minute parti¬ cles of fat and the less water will there be in the muscle, a fact, by the way, which has the most interesting bearing upon the composi¬ tion of our own bodies, as we shall see later

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66 THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION on. If, however, we assume that the fat and the mineral matter are both out of the way, some very remarkable compounds will re¬ main. The bulk will consist of substances very similar to the albumen or “white” of eggs, and hence called albuminoid — albu¬ men-like — compounds. They are sometimes called proteids, but the name albuminoids is perhaps preferable. Albuminoids in different forms make the basis of blood and muscle. Fresh blood contains blood-albumen and other albuminoids; coagulated blood con¬ tains fibrine. Muscle contains muscle-albu¬ men, and other albuminoids called syntonin and myosin. The last is the chief constituent, except water, of muscle. Many persons are surprised to learn that myosin, instead of be¬ ing the tenacious substance of which muscle is commonly supposed to consist, is in living muscle probably liquid or semi-liquid. How the contractile power of the muscle of an ath¬ lete can be exerted by liquid or semi-liquid matter is one of the unsolved problems of chemical physiology. Albuminoids occur in great variety in plants as well as in animals, but they all consist of the four elements carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, with perhaps a little sulphur or phosphorus. Along with muscle, the meat contains what we call gristle, the substance that bothers us so much when we try to carve with a dull knife. This name, however, is applied to several sub¬ stances, as tendon and cartilage, which, with skin and bone, etc., are called connective tis¬ sues. These tissues consist mainly of com¬ pounds like the collagen of tendon and the ossein of bone. They are very similar to gelatin (glue) and are changed to gelatin on heating with water. They are hence termed gelatin oids. The gelatinoids are thus the principal ingre¬ dients of connective tissue, as albuminoids are the principal ingredients of muscle and blood. The gelatinoids consist of the same elements as the albuminoids ; these two classes differ from the other organic compounds in that they con¬ tain nitrogen, which most of the others do not. In speaking of the ingredients of foods, it is customary to give to both albuminoids and gelatinoids the generic name of protein. Pro¬ tein compounds are the most important of all the ingredients of foods. There is still another class of nitrogenous substances in meat which, though so small in quantity as to be often left out of account, are nevertheless extremely interesting. These are known in the chemical laboratory as cre- atin, creatinin, carnin, etc., and are designated collectively as “ extractives,” because they are extracted from flesh by water, as in the case with beef tea and Liebig’s Meat Extract. Chemists find certain analogies between these extractives from flesh and thein and caffein, the active principles of tea and coffee, which they likewise resemble in their stimu¬ lating effect. The African traveler Rohlfs tells how invigorating he found a little meat extract spread on a piece of dry bread. The familiar fact that dogs that are quiet and sub¬ dued with vegetable food grow fierce on meat is most probably explained as the effect of these same substances. Some people, oftenest those of a fine nervous organization, I pre¬ sume, find in meat a stimulating effect ap¬ proaching that of wine. The extractives are similar to alcohol in that they do not form tissue, flesh, or fat. They have, apparently, no effect as fuel. In brief, they are stimulants rather than nutrients. The extractives give the taste to fresh meat. They impart their savory smell and taste to soups, give roast beef its appetizing odor, and steak its toothsome taste. Our craving for meat is largely due to our fondness for these extractives, as the tastelessness of meat from which they have been removed in making soups bears witness. Indeed, I mistrust that the excessive use of meat, from which the average gourmand — and many of us are veri¬ table gourmands in this respect — suffers so much harm to health, is traceable to the redolence and relish of creatin and other extractives. Though the extractives are dif¬ ferent from true protein compounds, they con¬ tain nitrogen, and we may follow a common usage and class them as protein. The body of an average man will contain about eleven per cent, of albuminoids, a little over six of gelatinoids, and about one of ex¬ tractives, making in all not far from eighteen per cent, of protein. Among the most important organic com¬ pounds of the body and of foods are the fats, of which chemists recognize many different kinds. In the body of man and many other animals, the principal ones are stearin, palmi- tin, and olein. Stearin, which is obtained in large quantities from beef tallow, is much used for candles, because it does not melt readily. Olein, on the other hand, is an oil at ordinal^ temperature, and is a chief ingredient of olive oil. A large part of the fat of the human body con¬ sists of olein. The fats just named consist of the three elements carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. The brain, nerves, and spinal cord contain substances called protagon, lecithin, cerebrin, etc., which, though commonly classed as fats, contain nitrogen and phosphorus, and are there¬ fore known as nitrogenized and phosphorized fats. They have an especial interest because they are believed to be somehow connected with mental activity.

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION 67 The fats make up about sixteen per cent, of the weight of an average man. The other compounds in the body are so small in amount that we might pass them by. One class, however, the carbohydrates, de¬ mand a moment’s notice, because they make up a large part of our food. These include sugar, starch, dextrin, and like substances. The principal ones in the body are glycogen, or liver-sugar, and inosite, or muscle-sugar. They consist of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the same elements as occur in the fats, though not in the same proportions. They constitute only a fraction of one per cent, of the weight of a healthy human body. To recapitulate, the estimated weights of these compounds in the body of an average man weighing 148 pounds, or, with clothing, 156 pounds, may be stated as in the figures below. The percentage composition is set forth more graphically in Diagram 11. DIAGRAM II. — ESTIMATED PROPORTION OF CHEMICAL COM¬ POUNDS IN THE HUMAN BODY. Compounds in the Body of a Man weighing 148 Pounds. Water . 90.0 pounds Protein . 26.6 “ Fats . 23.0 “ Carbohydrates . o.i “ Mineral matters . 8.3 “ Total . 148.0 pounds. Of course I do not mean that this is an ex¬ act statement of the amounts of the compounds in the body of any given man or of an ideal man. These figures, like those above cited for the elements, are simply an attempt to show in a general way in about what proportions the materials probably occur in the body of an ordinary man of average size and weight. The bodies of different people vary widely in com¬ position. The flesh of lean persons has more water, and that of fat persons more fat, in pro¬ portion to the whole weight. A lean man may gain in weight without corresponding gain of muscle or other protein compounds. The store of fat in his body increases. Part of this fat accumulates in adipose tissue next to the skin and in other masses such as we see in meats. Part is disseminated in small particles through the muscles, bones, and other tissues. In studying the tissues of animals we find a considerable proportion of these particles of * This statement is based not only upon observations recorded in memoirs and text-books of physiological chemistry, but also upon a somewhat extended series fat to be so small as to be visible only by aid of a powerful microscope. A piece of muscle in which no fat can be seen with the naked eye may yield a considerable quantity of fat when treated with ether in the apparatus for fat-ex¬ traction. The muscles, bones, and other tissues contain large proportions of water. As the fat accumulates in them, part of the water goes out to make way for it. When, on the other hand, fat is removed from the living tissues, more or less of the water is restored.* Accordingly a gain of weight of the body may mean a gain, not only of a corresponding weight of fat, but of enough more fat to make up for the water that is lost. To “ get stout ” is really to grow fat faster than the scales tell us, and to grow lean is to grow watery. Of course gain of weight of the body may be due to increase of other materials than fat, as in the case of growing animals. So, too, there may be increase of protein wdth loss of fat, as in the muscle of an athlete when in a course of training. PROPORTIONS OF NUTRITIVE INGREDIENTS IN FOOD MATERIALS. Having learned what our bodies consist of, we have next to study the composition of the food by which they are nourished. Viewed from the standpoint of their uses in the nutri¬ tion of man, our food materials may be re¬ garded as consisting of edible material and refuse, and the edible material as made up of water and nutrients. The accompanying adap¬ tation of charts prepared for the food collection of the National Museum summarize what is most necessary to say here about the constit¬ uents of food. We have next to notice the amounts of these ingredients in different food materials. The details will perhaps be best explained by an example. CONSTITUENTS OF SPECIMEN OF SIRLOIN OF BEEF. In flesh, edible portion. In meat as bought, in¬ cluding refuse. Refuse, bones, etc . Per cent. None. 60 20 19 I Per cent. 25 45 15 , oK Water . Protein . Fat . Mineral matters . Total . 100 100 As Stated above, some fat sirloin of beef was found to consist of about one-fourth refuse made in this laboratory but still awaiting publication. It rests upon the assumption that the changes in com¬ position of the tissues of the human body are similar

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68 THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION CHART II.— INGREDIENTS OF FOOD MATERIALS. NUTRIENTS AND NON-NUTRIENTS. CLASSES OF NUTRIENTS. Our ordinary food materials, such as meat, fish, eggs, potatoes, and wheat, etc., consist of: Refuse — as the bones of meat and fish, shells of eggs, skin of potatoes, and bran of wheat. Edible Portion — as the flesh of meat and fish, white and yolk of eggs, wheat flour. The edible substance consists of: Water, Nutritive Ingredients or Nutrients. The principal kinds of nutrients are : 1. Protein, 2. Fats, 3. Carbohydrates, 4. Mineral Matters. The water, refuse, and salt of salted meat and fish are called non-nutrients, because they have little or no nutritive value. The water contained in foods and beverages has the same composition and properties as other water ; it is, of course, indispensable for nour¬ ishment, but is not a nutrient in the sense in which it is here used. In comparing the values of different food materials for nourishment, we may leave the refuse and water out of account and consider only the nutrients. The following are familiar examples of compounds of each of the four principal classes of Nutrients : PROTEIN i a Albuminoids: E. Albumen {white) of eggs ; casein (curd) of milk; myosin^ the basis of mtiscle (lean meat); gluten of wheats etc, b Gelatin o IDS: E, g,. Collagen of tendons; ossein of bones ^ zvhich yield gelatin or glue. Meats and fish contain very small quantities of another class of com¬ pounds called “extractives” (the chief ingredients of beef tea and meat extracts), which contain nitrogen, and hence are commonly classed with ^ protein. FATS \ meat; fat (butter) of milk; \ olive oil; oil of corn^ wheat, etc, CARBOHYDRATES MINERAL MATTERS E, g,. Sugar, starch, cellu¬ lose (woixiy fiber). E. g.. Calcium phos¬ phate, or phosphate of lime ; sodium chloride (common salt). It is to be especially noted that the protein com¬ pounds contain nitrogen, while the fats and carbo¬ hydrates have none. The average composition of these compounds is about as follows : Protein. Fats. Carbohydrates. Carbon . 53 per cent. 76 . 5 per cent. 44 per cent. Hydrogen... 7 “ 12.0 “ 6 “ Oxygen . 24 “ 11.5 “ 5° Nitrogen.... 16 “ None None 100 “ 100.0 100 bone, etc., and three-fourths edible flesh. The edible portion was analyzed and found to con¬ tain, approximately, sixty per cent, of water and forty per cent, of nutrients. Of the nu¬ trients the protein constituted, in round num¬ bers, twenty, the fats nineteen, and the mineral matters one per cent. Such numerical statements, however, are not entirely satisfactory, especially when a number are to be studied at once. Diagram III. (pages 70 and 71), in which the propor¬ tions of the ingredients are indicated by shaded bands, will doubtless be more acceptable. Until within the past dozen years very lit¬ tle attention has been given in this coun¬ try to the chemistry of animal and vegetable products, and most of the work actually done has had reference to their agricultural values. With the exception of analyses of cereals and dairy products we have very few American to those found to take place in the bodies of other animals. It is by no means urged that the quantities of water and fat which thus mutually replace each other are exactly the same, A striking illustration of studies of materials used as food for man, aside from those referred to above as exe¬ cuted in behalf of the National Museum, and a series of investigations of the chemistry of food-fishes made for the United States Fish Commission. Much more work in this di¬ rection, including the more purely scientific study of the constitution of the materials, is, therefore, most pressingly needed. At the same time the analyses at hand, which have been used in compiling the figures of the diagram, will suffice to give a general and, I think, tol¬ erably correct idea of the average composi¬ tion of the materials. In some cases where American analyses are lacking, particularly of vegetable foods, I have used European analyses, of which a large number are on record. I ought to say that different specimens of the same kind of food material may vary the mutual replacement of water and fat may be seen in the case of the lean and the fat mackerel in Part II. of the double-page diagram of composition of food ma¬ terials beyond.

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION widely in composition and that the analyses here given represent averages. Examples of these variations are shown in the cases of oys¬ ters and of mackerel in Part II. of the table. In these, however, the differences are unusu¬ ally wide, although very considerable varia¬ tions are found in other materials, especially in meats. The diagram tells its story plainly, and I need now call attention to but few points. It is interesting to note, in Part I., the differences in the amounts of refuse and edible portion in the different kinds of meats, fish, etc., as they are ordinarily found in the markets. Thus in some of the specimens of beef, as the round steak, the bone and other inedible mate¬ rials amount to only ten per cent, of the whole, whereas in the flounder the refuse amounts to two-thirds, and the edible portion to only one-third, of the whole. The bone, though counted here as refuse, yields, when properly boiled, a considerable quantity of nutritive matter, chiefly in the form of gelatine and fats. Fish, as we buy them in the markets, have on the average a larger proportion of refuse and less edible material than meats. Dairy products and most vegetable foods have very little refuse. In examining the edible portion of the materials, as shown in Part II., it is interest¬ ing to note the wide variations in the pro¬ portions of water and of nutritive substances. In general the animal foods contain the most water and the vegetable foods the most nutri¬ ents, though potatoes and turnips are excep¬ tions, the former being three-fourths and the latter nine-tenths water. Butter, on the other hand, though one of the animal foods, has on the average about nine per cent, of water. The milk from which it is made is not far from seven- eighths water. As stated above, meats have more water in proportion as they have less fats, and vice versd, the fatter the meat the less amount of water in it. Thus, very lean beef (the muscle of a lean animal from which the fat has been trimmed off) may have seventy-eight per cent, of water and only twenty-two per cent, of nutrients. The rather fat sirloin of the dia¬ gram has sixty, and the very fat pork only about ten per cent, of water. The flesh of fish is in general more watery than ordinary meats, that of salmon being five-eighths water; codfish, over four-fifths; and flounder, over six-sevenths. Flour and meal have but little water, and sugar almost none. In examining the proportions of individ¬ ual nutrients, protein, jfats, and carbohydrates, the most striking fact is the difference between the meats and fish, on the one hand, and the vegetable foods on the other. The vegetable foods are rich in carbohydrates, starch, sugar. 69 etc., while the meats have not enough to be worth mentioning. On the other hand the meats abound in protein and fats, of which the vegetable foods usually have but little. Beans and oatmeal, however, are rich in protein, while fat pork has very little. The comparative composition of oysters and milk is worth noting. Both contain about the same total amounts of nutrients, but the proportions are quite different, the oysters having the more protein, and the milk the more fat. Roughly speaking, we may say that there is not a very great deal of difference between the nutritive values of a quart of oysters and a quart of milk. Considering the cost, however, the oysters are far the more expensive food, I have noticed that people in looking over such tables as this sometimes get at first a wrong impression. Thus rice contains about seven-eighths, and potatoes only one-fourth nutritive material. The first inference is that the rice is much more nutritious than pota¬ toes. In one sense this is true; that is to say, a pound of rice contains more than twice as much nutrients as a pound of potatoes. But if we take enough of the potatoes to fur¬ nish as much nutritive material as the pound of rice, the composition and the nutritive val¬ ues of the two will be just about the same. In cooking the rice we mix water with it, and may thus make a material not very different in composition from potatoes. By drying the potatoes they could be made very similar in composition and food value to rice. Taken as we find them, a pound of rice and three and a half pounds of potatoes would contain nearly equal weights of each class of nutri¬ ents and would have about the same nutritive value. FLOUR AND BREAD. The composition of wheat flour and wheat bread are worth notice here. The chief differ¬ ence is in the water, which makes about one- ninth the weight of the flour and one-third that of the bread. Of course different kinds of flour and bread vary widely in composition. The composition of wheat flour here stated is the average of a large number of analyses of American specimens, and doubtless represents very closely the average composition of the flour which people ordinarily buy. The figures for bread are the average of four analyses of loaves purchased at different times at bake¬ ries in Middletown, Connecticut. They agreed very closely in composition with each other and with an excellent specimen of home-made bread. I infer, therefore, that this was better than the average baker’s bread, a supposition confirmed by published analyses of the latter.

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70 DIAGRAM III. NUTRITIVE INGREDIENTS, WATER, AND PERCENTAGES OF THE DIFFERENT CONSTITUENTS Nutritive Ingredients. Non-Nutrients. Protein. Lean of meat. Gluten of luheat, etc., etc. Fats. Fatty and oily s7ibsta7tces. Carbo- Hydrates. Sugar, starch. Mineral Matters. Water. Refuse. Bones, skin, shells, etc. Part I. Meats, Fish, etc., as purchased, including both Edible Portion and Refuse. o _ 10 20 _ 30 40 _ 50 60 _ 70 _ SO _ 90 Beef, side, well fattened. Beef, round, rather lean. Beef, neck . Beef, sirloin, rather fat. . Beef, flank . Mutton, side ^ Mutton, leg . Mutton, loin (chops) . . . Smoked ham . Pork, very fat, salted . , Chicken, rather lean . . . Turkey, medium fatness Flounder, whole . Haddock, dressed . Bluefish, dressed . Brook trout, whole . Cod, dressed . White fish, whole . Shad, whole . Turbot, whole . Mack’l, whole, very fat. Mackerel, whole, lean . . Mack’l, whole, average. Halibut, dressed . Salmon, whole . Eel Salt codfish . Smoked herring . Salt mackerel . . . Canned salmon . . Canned sardines. Lobsters Oysters (in shell) , Hens’ eggs . Where the ingredients amount to less than one-half of one per cent, they are omitted from this table.

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REFUSE IN SPECIMENS OF FOOD MATERIALS. 71 INDICATED BY SHADED DEVICES. Explanations.— Of the different classes of nutritive ingredients or nutrients of food the protein compounds (“muscle-formers”) are the most important in the sense that they alone form the basis of the blood, muscles, tendons, and other nitrogenous tissues of the body. Protein, fats, and carbohydrates of food are all transformed into the fat of the body and all serve as fuel to yield heat and energy (strength) for muscular work. As fuel, one part by weight of fats is estimated to be equivalent to over two parts of protein or carbohydrates. A proper diet will include all the nutrients in proportions fitted to the needs of the user. Part II. Meats, Fish, etc., Edible Portion; Dairy Products; Vegetable Foods. 1 In respect to quantity of nutrients. 2 Mineral matters include salt

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THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION n which often show a much larger percentage of water, sometimes forty per cent, or more. In using the word ‘‘ better” I do not refer to fla¬ vor, color, or texture, but to the proportion of nutrients and water. In making bread, a very little butter or lard and yeast and a good deal of water, by itself or in milk, are added to the flour. In the fermentation of the dough in rising, minor transformations take place in the carbohydrates, the chief being the change of sugar to carbonic acid gas and alcohol. In the baking, the alcohol and gases are mostly driven off, and part of the water goes with it. The chief difference between the flour and bread, therefore, is that the bread is more bulky, the gases having expanded it, and that it contains more water. In other words, in mak¬ ing flour into bread the baker renders it more palatable and increases the bulk and weight, but adds very little nutritive material. For him to manipulate it so as to get the most bulk and weight from the least flour is perfectly natural, and his loaf is apt to contain a large percent¬ age of water and have considerable space in¬ side filled with air and gas. The price of the bread per pound is apt to be twice that of the flour. When the poor man buys his pound loaf of bread of the baker for seven or eight cents he thus gets no more nutritive material than the well-to-do man obtains for three cents in the flour which he has baked at home. But if the poor man’s family have no conven¬ iences for making the bread, there is nothing left for them to do but buy it from the baker. BUTTER AND OLEOMARGARINE. W ITHIN a few years past substitutes for but¬ ter have become a very important article of commerce. The most important of these, oleo¬ margarine, agrees very closely in chemical composition with butter from cows’ milk, the chief difference being that the oleomargarine contains smaller proportions of the peculiar fats, butyrin, etc., which give butter its agree¬ able flavor. It is made by taking beef fat or lard, extracting part of the stearin, a material which is familiarly known in candles, and add¬ ing a small amount of butter to the residue. It is this small quantity of butter which gives the butter-flavor to the whole. As will be explained when we come to con¬ sider the digestibility of foods, the difference in digestibility between butter and oleomargarine is at most too small to be of any considera¬ ble consequence for ordinary use. The nutri¬ tive values of the two are very nearly the same. In fulfilling one of the most important func¬ tions of food, that of supplying heat and mus¬ cular energy, butter and oleomargarine excel in efficiency all, or nearly all, of our other common food materials; at least such is the outcome of th^ best experimental testimony. In appearance and flavor the common kinds of oleomargarine resemble butter so closely that it is difficult even for an expert to distin¬ guish between them. These butter substitutes are manufactured at very low cost, so that they can be sold at retail at about half the price of butter. They are, therefore, food products of large economic importance and of great benefit to that large class of our population whose limited incomes make good dairy butter a lux¬ ury, and, for that matter, to all who need to economize in their living expenses. Like many other manufactured food prod¬ ucts, oleomargarine is liable to be rendered unwholesome by improper materials and meth¬ ods of manufacture. Butter, likewise, is often improperly made and is liable to become un¬ wholesome. In the considerable mass of evidence which has come under my own ob¬ servation there is no indication that butter substitutes, as they are actually sold in our markets, average less wholesome or healthful or are in any way less fit for human food than ordinary butter, though some observers in whose judgment I have confidence are in¬ clined to think that on the whole the advan¬ tage as regards wholesomeness is somewhat in favor of butter. Among the chemists who are recognized as authorities in these matters, both in this country and in Europe, there is very lit¬ tle difference of opinion as to the value of oleo¬ margarine for food. There is, however, a popular prejudice against imitation butter which is very unfort¬ unate, especially for people in moderate cir¬ cumstances and for the poor, whom it is most calculated to benefit. This prejudice, which a new food material very naturally meets, is fostered, and often conscientiously, by repre¬ sentatives of the dairy interest, which fears from imitation butter a damaging competition, though the most accurate statistics show it to be far less serious than is generally believed. On the other hand, the benefit which butter substitutes are calculated to bring is largely prevented, and an immense wrong is done by the very general sale of the imitation under the guise and name and at the price of butter. In a number of States in which the dairy interests are large, the manufacture and sale of butter substitutes has been prohibited by legislative action. In other States laws have been enacted to regulate their sale and pre¬ vent fraud. An attempt was made in Congress to check the manufacture and sale by taxation sufficient to bring their cost nearly up to that of butter. In the law as actually passed, how¬ ever, the tax was very much reduced, so that

Page 79

THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION 73 while it may help toward preventing improper sale of butter substitutes and, by obliging sellers to pay high license fees, may consider¬ ably interfere with their general use, it will not be as effective in excluding them from the markets as was desired. This is a case where mechanical invention aided by science is enabled to furnish a cheap, wholesome, and nutritious food for the people. Legislation to provide for official inspection of this, as of other food products, and to insure that it shall be sold for what it is and not for what it is not, is very desirable. Every rea¬ sonable measure to prevent fraud, here as else¬ where, ought to be welcomed. But the attempt to curtail or suppress the production of a cheap and useful food material by law, lest the profits which a class, the producers of butter, have enjoyed from the manufacture of a costlier article may be diminished, is opposed to the interests of a large body of people, to the spirit of our institutions, and to the plainest dictates of justice.* In discussing the composition of our foods we must consider not only the quantities of nutritive ingredients which they contain, but also the part each one of these classes of nu¬ trients has to perform in the nourishment of the body, and the proportions which are ap¬ propriate for the diet of different persons. The protein compounds, sometimes called muscle-formers,” are the only ones which contain nitrogen. According to the best ex¬ perimental evidence they alone form the basis of blood, muscle, tendon, and other nitroge¬ nous tissues of the body. As these tissues are worn out by constant use they are repaired by the protein of the food. The protein, fats, and carbohydrates are all transformed into fat. They all seem to share; therefore, in the formation of the fat of the body. They all likewise serve as fuel to maintain the heat of the body and to yield muscular energy for its work. Late experiments indicate that in those serving as fuel, one part by weight of fats is equivalent to a little over two parts of either protein or of carbohydrates. The mineral mat¬ ters make up a large part of the bones and teeth, small proportions are contained in the other tissues, and they are necessary for nu¬ trition in various other ways. It is a fundamental principle of food econ¬ omy that the diet should contain nutritive ma¬ terial adapted to the wants of the consumer. *The following is from the late report of the Dairy Commissioner of Connecticut, which comes to hand just as this is being written : “ As a protection to consumers the national law is a failure, and the present tax is too small to benefit our dairies to any appreciable extent; a ten cent tax VoL. XXXIV.— II. A great deal of experimenting and observation have been devoted to the determination of the quantities of protein, fats, and carbohy¬ drates needed for the daily nourishment of in¬ dividuals of different age and sex, at work or at rest, and subject to the varied conditions of life. In Germany, where the subject has been most thoroughly studied, it has come to be commonly accepted that about 4.2 ounces of protein, 2 ounces of fats, and 17.6 ounces of carbohydrates will make a fair daily ration for a laboring man of average weight and doing moderate work. Of course he can get on with less of one if he has more of the oth¬ ers. But there is a minimum below which he cannot go without injury, and his amount of protein should not fall much below the 4.2 ounces per day, though protein, as we shall see later on, is by far the costliest of the nu¬ trients. In animal foods, furthermore, it is usually associated with the so-called extract¬ ives, which have a peculiarly agreeable flavor. In accordance with one of those universal processes of natural selection which science is gradually helping us to understand, the food of the poor is apt to contain too little protein and that of the rich too much. The flesh of codfish contains, aside from water, little else than protein, butter is almost wholly fat, and sugar and starch are carbohy¬ drates. The lean meats are similar to codfish ; fat pork resembles butter, and the chief nutri¬ ent of potatoes and rice is starch. Each of these materials is unfit by itself for nourish¬ ment. Milk, on the other hand, abounds in all the nutrients and is more nearly a “ per¬ fect food,” for those with whom it agrees, than any other animal food material. While meats and fish are rich in protein, and most meats and some fish abound in fats, the vege¬ table foods generally lack protein and fats but have an excess of carbohydrates, of which the meats and fish have none. Beans and pease, however, have a good deal of protein. We have here a very simple chemical ex¬ planation of a usage which, under the promptings of experience or instinct, mankind has almost everywhere come to adopt,: — that of supplementing wheat and corn and rice and potatoes with meats and fish, or, when these are lacking, by beans, pease, or other vegetables rich in protein. There is a sound reason in the Hindu’s practice of eating pulse with rice, in the Irishman’s use of skimmed milk with his potatoes, in the Scotchman’s might more nearly have accomplished what the na¬ tional law was intended to accomplish, but as matters now stand the national law is simply a source of reve¬ nue to the national government, and practically levies a tax on poor people who can ill afford to bear it.”

Page 80

IF, 74 partiality for oatmeal, haddock, and herring, and in the frugal New England diet of cod¬ fish and potatoes and pork and beans. Reserving further consideration of these sub¬ jects for future articles, I may briefly recapitu¬ late some of the main points already considered. FFs/. Our bodies and our foods consist of essentially the same kinds of materials. Secojid. The actually nutritive ingredients of our food may be divided into four classes ; protein, fats, carbohydrates, and mineral mat¬ ters. Leaving water out of account, lean meat, white of egg, casein (curd) of milk, and gluten of wheat consist mainly of protein compounds. Butter and lard are mostly fats. Sugar and starch are carbohydrates. Third, The nutrients of animal foods consist mainly of protein and fats. Those of the vege¬ table foods are largely carbohydrates. The fatter kinds of meat and some species of fish, as salmon, shad, and mackerel, contain con¬ siderable quantities of fat. The lean kinds of meat and such fish as cod and haddock con¬ tain very little fat. Beans, pease, oatmeal, and some other vegetable foods contain con¬ siderable quantities of protein. Fourth. The different nutrients have differ¬ ent offices to perform in the nutrition of the body. The demands of different people for nourishment vary with age, sex, occupation, and other conditions of life. Health and pe¬ cuniary economy alike require that the diet should contain nutrients proportioned to the wants of the user. W, O, Atwater, IF. TF he had known that when her proud fair face A Turned from him calm and slow Beneath its cold indifference had place A passionate, deep woe. If he had known that when her hand lay still. Pulseless so near his own. It was because pain’s bitter, bitter chill Changed her to very stone. If he had known that she had borne so much For sake of the sweet past. That mere despair said, “ This cold look and touch Must be the cruel last.” If he had known her eyes so cold and bright. Watching the sunset’s red. Held back within their deeps of purple light A storm of tears unshed. If he had known the keenly barbed jest With such hard lightness thrown Cut through the hot proud heart within her breast Before it pierced his own. If she had known that when her calm glance swept Him as she passed him by His blood was fire, his pulses madly leapt Beneath her careless eye. If she had known that when he touched her hand And felt it still and cold There closed round his wrung heart the iron band Of misery untold. If she had known that when her laughter rang In scorn of sweet past days His very soul shook with a deadly pang Before her light dispraise. If she had known that every poisoned dart — If she had understood That each sunk to the depths of his man’s heart And drew the burning blood. If she had known that when in the wide west The sun sank gold and red He whispered bitterly, “ ’Tis like the rest; The warmth and light have fled.” If she had known the longing and the pain. If she had only guessed, — One look — one word — and she perhaps had lain Silent upon his* breast. If she had known how oft when their eyes met And his so fiercely shone. But for man’s shame and pride they had been wet — Ah ! if she had but known! If they had known the wastes lost love must cross, — The wastes of unlit lands, — If they had known what seas of salt tears toss Between the barren strands. If they had known how lost love prays for death And makes low, ceaseless moan. Yet never fails his sad, sweet, wearying breath — Ah! if they had but known. Frances Hodgson Burnett.

Page 81

A SONG OF FLEETING LOVE. Love has wings as light as a bird, Guileless he looks, as a dove, of wrong; Whatever his song, be it brief or long. It still has this for an overword : Love has wings ! Though to-day the truant may stay, Though he wooes and sues and sings. Only sorrow to maids he brings ; Pout him and flout him, laugh him away : L(n^e has wings ! Hold your pulses calm, unstirred — Calm and cool as a woodland pool. Let not his song your heart befool ; List, through it all, for the overword : Love has whigs. Alice Willianis Brother ton. PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC. WITH NOTES CONCERNING ALSACE AND LORRAINE. N Louis Blanc France not only lost the last surviving great leader of the time of the Second Republic, but also the ablest expounder of the “ History of Ten Years” of Louis Philippe’s government; the best re¬ cent inquirer into the doings and the real aims of the personages of the Great Rev¬ olution ; and at the same time a man who during all his life had striven to better the lot of the laboring masses. The product of his youth, “ The Organization of Labor,” may be subjected to a legitimate criticism ; the generosity of his aspirations does not admit of any doubt. I first made his acquaintance during a tem¬ porary sojourn in London, in September, 1849. I still see him before me, with most lively recollection, as in his apartment, in Piccadilly, near Hyde Park, he stood with folded arms before the chimney. A very small but well built and even neatly proportioned man ; of almost Napoleonic cast of features, such as may be found among not a few Corsicans ; quite beardless, which in those later revolu¬ tionary days was a rare thing. The glance of his black, somewhat protruding eyes, lustrous, and verging upon a dazzling changefulness ; the thick dark-brown hair long and falling down straight ; the color of the face rather brownish. In spite of the smallness of his stature — for he was not higher than Thiers — an impressive appearance, only diminished in walking by the slightly bent leg. He was clad, rather conspicuously, in a light blue dress-coat with gilt buttons, and a waistcoat with broad flaps, the so-called Robespierre vest. The garb was a reminiscence of the first Revolution. In his intercourse with Englishmen Louis Blanc displayed all his social qualities to great advantage. He was among the very few Frenchmen who spoke and wrote in Eng¬ lish, and who liked to learn from a nation which possesses a noble and powerful litera¬ ture exercising influence all over the world — even as its political power is felt, sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, throughout the inhabited globe. Louis Blanc was in friendly relations with a number of prominent English authors and politicians of the most different party views. I will only name John Stuart Mill, the late Lord Bulwer Lytton, Thackeray, Hepworth Dixon, Thomas Hughes, and Lord Houghton. English affairs he treated, upon the whole, in his letters as a publicist, with great independence, and with an evident de¬ sire to be just in every direction. In society, the smallness of his stature, com¬ bined with the youthfulness of his visage and his habit of shaving the whole face, several times led to very exhilarating scenes. Even many years after his arrival in England, he was repeatedly mistaken for a youngster. A rela¬ tive writing to me from Germany just reminds me of the following laughable, but highly in¬ convenient, incident : ‘‘ Do you remember the dinner at your house, when we all waited so long, and in vain, for Louis Blanc ? Your Irish housemaid had sent the ‘ boy ’ away, say¬ ing that you were engaged ! ” Another din¬ ner had to be arranged, in order to give my German relative a chance of meeting Louis Blanc. When Louis Blanc’s publisher died, and he temporarily found himself rather in fi¬ nancial straits, lectures were arranged for him, at my suggestion, in our St. John’s Wood Athenaeum. ‘‘ Mysterious Personages and Agencies before the French Revolution ” was their title. Quite a crowd of literary and po¬ litical celebrities were expected. By an over-

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC, 76 sight, Louis Blanc, on this his first appearance as a lecturer in the English language, himself almost became a mysterious personage to the distinguished audience, the desk being so high that his head would scarcely have been visi¬ ble ! Fortunately, in the nick of time, a foot¬ stool was provided, on which he stood all the while when speaking. The somewhat con¬ strained attitude imposed upon him thereby perhaps accounts to some extent for the rather formal and academic manner of his delivery. In the French Assembly, too, he had to make use of a stool. His eloquence had altogether something of the pulpit. One might almost fancy that his earliest training (a relative had intended him to become a priest) had left some mark upon him. There was something exceedingly meas¬ ured in his talk as soon as he began to enter upon a serious discussion. His full-sounding utterance, clearly distinct in every syllable, reminded the hearer a little of the southern French amplitude of vocaliza¬ tion. It was matched by the clearness and elegant firmness of , his large and open hand¬ writing. Ah ! ” he would say to hasty admir¬ ers, that is just my misfortune. Don’t you see, it is because my manuscripts are so beau¬ tifully written that they are given to the worst compositors. That is how the many misprints occur, which so vex me ! ” In general intercourse he was the very type of amiability and politeness. Of the most dig¬ nified and exquisite bearing before strangers, he was fond of unbending before friends, of¬ ten showing a hilarity which broke into harm¬ less loud laughter. But never did he inten¬ tionally give pain to any one in conversation by his remarks. As towards the English, so he also felt greatly attracted towards Germans; but he never mastered, or even attempted to study, our tongue. During the Schleswig-Holstein war he gave a public and very useful proof of pro-German sympathy, although he there¬ by offended not a few English fiiends. The most influential section of the public opinion, and the majority of the statesmen of Eng¬ land, were on the Danish side. The Palmer¬ ston ministry sought to form an alliance with Napoleon III. for an armed attack against Germany. It was of the utmost importance to oppose these designs both in London and Paris. For years, the writer of these “ Recollec¬ tions ” had been at the head of a propagan¬ dists National and Democratic Association of Germans in England (“ Society for Ger¬ man Freedom and Union ”) which had made the Schleswig-Holstein question its specialty. Confidential memoranda, written by the two chief leaders of the Schleswig Parliament, but which they dared not even sign for fear of Danish persecution, had repeatedly been transmitted by me to Lord John Russell, the foreign secretary, by way of authentication. In Lord John Russell’s organ, the (then Lib¬ eral) “Globe,” I often took occasion to explain, above my signature, the grievances and aspi¬ rations of the Schleswig-Holstein people, as previously expressed in its three years’ unsuc¬ cessful war of independence (1848-51). Now, Louis Blanc, who during the new national war (1863-64) almost daily came to see me for purposes of information, generously expounded the same views in his letters to the Paris “ Le Temps ” which afterwards were collected in a number of volumes entitled “Lettres sur I’Angleterre.” We Germans really owed him gratitude for that. During all the long years of intimacy with Louis Blanc in England, our political relations always remained undisturbed by the slightest cloud. As a token of his never- changing sen¬ timents, I have before me many volumes of his different works with friendly inscriptions. Once, when I and my wife were for several days as guests in his house at Brighton, I was in¬ formed from abroad that in one of Louis Blanc’s letters to “ Le Temps ” there was a passage unjustly bearing upon German rights in the Rhinelands. It was painful to refer to such a matter at that particular moment. Upon consideration I yet thought it to be best — nay, even a duty — to do so. He was quite unhappy when I addressed the question to him point-blank. He at once fetched all the num¬ bers of “ Le Temps” which he had collected, and declared he was utterly unable to con¬ ceive the reproach. For safety’s sake, with a view to possible contingencies in the future, I, however, entered upon a full discussion of the ideas then held on that subject by most Frenchmen, and formerly, no doubt, also by him. In the course of the con¬ versation he suddenly observed that “ in case of a difference, a question as to the frontier might, after all, be solved by a popular vote.” I replied that “ Germany could never so far forget her dignity as a nation, or her histor¬ ical rights drawn from community of blood and speech, and ancient possession, as to allow a vote to be taken on the question as to whether that portion of her people who dwell on the left side of one of her rivers should continue to form part of the Fatherland!” Louis Blanc easily understood the point, and thus the mat¬ ter was disposed of. Few know how deeply even French De¬ mocracy had been tainted with the ideas of further conquest in the direction of the Rhine. One day a Frenchman of my acquaintance, who semi-officially represented President Jua-

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC. 77 rez and the Mexican Republic in London dur¬ ing the time of the war against the Napoleonic invasion, and with whom I had been on most friendly terms, unexpectedly broke forth in my own house, before German friends, in this way : If once we have the Republic in France, we shall march on the Rhine, even if we were to get all Germany on our back ! ” ( inejne si nous anrions toute V Alleniagne sur le dos.) “ Mind ! ” I replied to him, ‘‘ if once you have her on your back, you will not get her off again easily ! ” During the struggles of the Prussian House of Commons against the budgetless and arbi¬ trary government of Herr von Bismarck, Louis Blanc, in “ Le Temps,” supported the Ger¬ man Progressist and popular parties. Ferdi¬ nand Lassalle, the so-called German ‘‘ revo¬ lutionary agitator” who took sides against the Prussian House of Commons, thus practi¬ cally sustaining Bismarck, confidentially asked Louis Blanc, one day, for a public letter of sympathy with his socialist agitation. It was to be a sort of certificate or pass for Lassalle among our working-classes. At that time Lassalle generally was looked upon as an ex¬ treme Republican aiming at a great social overthrow. For my part, I from the begin¬ ning considered him a mere ambitious Catilin- arian. I thought, nay, I knew, that he, in secret collusion with the government, endeavored to traverse the aspirations of the liberal middle class, so that a despotic kingcraft in the pseu¬ do-socialist Grand Almoner ” style might be established, which would hide its true char¬ acter, like the Second Napoleonic Empire, under democratic phraseology. I expressed this view to Louis Blanc when he asked my advice as to what he should do in reply to Lassalle’s wish. “ Why, he practically acts as an agent of Bismarck, ” I said. I should not wonder if he played the part of a Persigny, aiming at office.” “ Impossible ! ” Louis Blanc replied. Do you mean this seriously ? ” Very seriously,” I answered. In fact, I had given similar warn¬ ing in public by a fly-sheet against Lassalle, under the title, “ A Friendly Word to Ger¬ many’s Workmen, Burghers, and Peasants.” It took some time, however, — indeed, a conver¬ sation of several hours, — before Louis Blanc could be made to understand all the bearings of the case. His. own former intercourse with the captive of Ham still played him an occa¬ sional mental trick in questions of mixed politi¬ cal and social import. Afterwards he said he was grateful for having been prevented from falling into the trap laid for him. The secret dealings of Lassalle with Bis¬ marck were, in later years, revealed by the German Chancellor himself, in a speech in the Reichstag. My own informations had long ago pointed that way. Quite recently a letter has come to light, written by Lassalle to the well-known conser¬ vative and orthodox Professor Huber, whose semi-socialist views had been made use of by Prince Bismarck. In this letter, written during the full flush of his alleged “ revolutionary ” agitation, he begins by saying that he had been a Republican from his youth, but that he would be proud now to bear the banner of a “ Socialist Royalty.” During the rising in Russian Poland, when I was in connection with the diplomatic rep¬ resentative in London of the Secret National Government at Warsaw, Louis Blanc warmly espoused the Polish cause. It was Mazzini who had first introduced Mr. Czwierczakie- witch to me. Through him I learnt before¬ hand the very date on which the intended rising was to begin; and the information turned out quite correct. German advanced Liberals and Republicans strongly favored the Polish cause. Being called to Scotland to address public meetings there at Glasgow, Stirling, and Hawick, I succeeded in bringing about petitions to the English Parliament in support of that cause. Louis Blanc, as may be seen from his Lettres sur I’Angleterre,” took these meetings as a text for his own writings. Some years afterwards, a review in the Lon¬ don ‘‘Athenaeum” endeavored to make out that Louis Blanc had been favorable to a French war on the Rhine, which might lead to a change of frontiers in connection with the Polish question. I at once wrote to him as to how matters stood. He replied : ‘‘Brighton, 20 Grand Parade, 31 Juillet, 1867. “ Mon Cher Ami ; Je vous envoie les deux premiers volumes de mes ‘ Lettres sur PAngleterre.’ Je n’ai malheureusement pas en ce moment, les 3e et 5e vo¬ lumes. J’ai ecrit a mon editeur de Paris de m’en faire tenir quelques exemplaires. J’en mettrai un de c6t6 pour vous, d’autant plus que vous y trouverez trois let¬ tres qui vous concernent. “Je n’ai jamais conseille a Napoleon d’annexer les Provinces rhenanes ; mais j’ai tres-decidement ex¬ prime le d6sir que la France n’abandonnat pas la Pologne, diit-elle pour cela, et a defaut de tout autre moyen, faire la guerre .au roi de Prusse, complice de I’empereur de Russie dans I’egorgement des Polonais. “ La phrase citee dans 1’ Athenaeum est exactement cit^e ; mais le sens en est determine par la conclusion de la lettre d’ou elle est tiree, conclusion que voici. Je copie la traduction anglaise, n’ayant pas I’original sous ies yeux : “Feb. 22, 1863. “ What shall we desire ? What shall we hope ? It rests, perhaps, with the liberal party in Prussia.^!? turn aside the geiiius of conquest while serving the interests of justice with a courage worthy of the cause. The Prussian liberals can do much for Poland — they can do everything, perhaps ; and therefore, at this moment, their responsibility in the eyes of the world is immense. By the military convention, the object of such general

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC. 78 and vehement protests, it is not only Russian Poland that is stricken, but Prussian Poland is outraged. The support of the Polish deputies in the Berlin Parliament cannot therefore be wanting to the German deputies, if the latter will understand that the true interests of their country are indissolubly bound up in this instance with the triumph of justice. Should the energy of their attitude and the potency of their efforts facilitate a re¬ sult that will respond to the sympathies of the friends of freedoin, without exciting their feaj's, they will render an inestimable service to Europe, for which England above all others will entertain an eternal gratitude. May Heaven inspire them ! The question at issue is to se¬ cure for the principle of liberty^ and for it alone ^ the glory of having falsified the prediction falsely ascribed to Kosciusko: Finis Polonice. “ Salut cordial, “Louis Blanc.” I have never advised Napoleon to annex the Rhinelands; but I have very strongly expressed the wish that France should not forsake Poland, even if, for that purpose, and in the absence of any other means, she had to make war against the King of Prussia, the accomplice of the Emperor of Russia in the slaughtering of the Poles.’' This sentence of Louis Blanc, directed as it was against the disgraceful convention concluded between the Prussian King and the Czar, seemed to me to contain a dangerous theory for all that. Would it have been the right thing for Germany to declare war against PTance on account of the annexation of Garibaldi’s birthplace ? If not, what right had Napoleon III., of all rulers, to make war upon the King of Prussia ” — which, after all, could only be done on German ter¬ ritory on the Rhine — for the alleged sake of Poland, but in reality for the purpose of a fresh annexation, similar to that of Savoy and Nice, which was the result of a so-called deliverance of Italy “from the Alps to the Adriatic”? Again, would not a successful war of that kind have riveted the Bonapartist yoke upon France even more firmly ? I discussed these matters repeatedly, and very earnestly, with Louis Blanc. I told him that, in spite of the deep estrangement between Prussia and Southern Germany on account of the war of 1866, all our countrymen would stand shoulder to shoulder as soon as a French army were to move upon our Rhinelands. I said that I would be the first, in such a case, to call out for the laying aside of party divis¬ ions for the purpose of common defense ; and that, moreover, I was convinced of victory be¬ ing on our side. This latter view, especially, was one which Frenchmen of all political de¬ scriptions could with difficulty be brought to accept then. “ For the sake of your own country, for the sake of our common cause of freedom and civ¬ ilization, I pray you to exert yourself with all your power to dispel the illusions in which so many of your countrymen still indulge ! ” I over and over again said to Louis Blanc, to Ledru-Rollin, to Savoye, to Dupont, to Le- fevre, to Fonvielle, to Valentin, and others. And Louis Blanc was brought gradually to comprehend the full extent of the danger of a war with the “ Prussians,” as the French, in their infatuation, would then and long after¬ wards say. In the American war, Louis Blanc advo¬ cated the cause of the Union; at first, some¬ what cautiously, afterwards with growing energy. His caution may partly have arisen in the beginning from a certain desire not to hurt too strongly the deplorable prejudices by which the majority of the governing classes in England were influenced ; the Trent affair, in which we pleaded for America the right of self-preservation, even though its government would no doubt make diplomatic amends to England. Louis Blanc at first gave the rea¬ sons for and against, with great deliberateness in the “ Temps,” and without committing him¬ self. In every English house we had then to fight for the cause of the Republic. A second niotive for Louis Blanc’s caution, in the be¬ ginning, was the delay of an emancipation decree. “ Why not proclaim emancipation at once,” he said, “ and thus strike a mortal blow at the South ? ” Like most of his countrymen, he was not aware of the complex state of political parties in the North. He had not, until then, devoted much study to American affairs. Being fully agreed with him as to the foul blot of slavery, I still could understand, even if I greatly re¬ gretted, the dilatory procedure of President Lincoln’s government.* A spur was, however, required, now and then, to arouse the some¬ times flagging enthusiasm of our friend, whose utterances were closely watched by English¬ men. After a while, he rapidly went ahead, doing right good service to a cause upon which the hopes of the best thinkers of Europe cen¬ tered. I vividly remember the day when the ter¬ rible news of the assassination of President Lincoln reached London. The address of sym¬ pathy which I had forthwith proposed, and signed, in common with Freiligrath, Kinkel, and other Germans of London, was scarcely dispatched to the American embassy when Louis Blanc came to see me. His face bore the evidence of great mental distress. He seemed to think that the cause of the Repub¬ lic itself was once more in danger. On hear¬ ing of our manifestation, he immediately drew up a letter of his own, expressing sympathy * On this point we hope Mr. Blind will read Nico- lay and Hay’s “Abraham Lincoln : A History.” — The Editor.

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC. with the loss experienced by the American nation. The political serfage under which his coun¬ try groaned meanwhile bore heavily upon his national and civic pride. When some signs of a revival of the opposition spirit at last exhib¬ ited themselves, he wrote to a French friend, M. Ferragus, who had visited him in his home, in Melina Place, St. John’s Wood: “ If only you knew what humiliations we have had to swallow as Frenchmen during that long banishment which, if it should con¬ tinue five years longer, will have lasted ex¬ actly a quarter of a century! How sad to hear on foreign soil wherever you present yourself: ^ We pity you; but as to France, how could we pity her ? She has at last found the man that was wanted for her repose and for our own. The French people are a people of chil¬ dren, and, what is worse, of dangerous children. It is well that the means of setting fire to the house has been taken from them. France is not made for freedom ; and she feels this so well herself that she has perished by accom¬ modating herself to servitude. Freedom is only fit for us Englishmen, who are men.’ What torture is comparable to that which such insolent, cruel language inflicts upon a French¬ man living among those who hold it! Now, for twenty years, we have had to drink the cup of such insults to the very dregs.” In the course of the same letter, Louis Blanc says that he always had declared that “ France, in spite of appearances, was always the great and mature nation, the manly nation which, at another epoch, had been the admiration of the world ; that to believe her to be dead was to calumniate her slumber ; and that she would awake prouder, nobler, more powerful than ever.” In the meanwhile, “ exile was for the proscribed a moral agony, the sufferings of which baffle description.^’ Events unfortunately did not justify his fore¬ cast. Instead of working out her internal re¬ vival by the strength of the popular forces, France allowed herself to be led on the war- track, when she only gained her Republican freedom at the expense of necessary defeat. He opposed with all his power, so far as in him lay, Napoleon’s war venture of 1870. Flis acquaintance with Germans in London had enabled him to perceive the tremendous risks which France ran. Not many weeks before the declaration of war, he, with his brother Charles, and a Progressist member of the Prus¬ sian House of Deputies, and Mr. and Mrs. Hep worth Dixon, and a number of other friends, were at dinner in our house. We spoke of the question of a people’s education and its bearing upon political affairs. I shall never forget,” said Charles Blanc, 79 ‘‘how Dumy [Napoleon’s Minister of Pub¬ lic Instruction' one day led me into a side- room of his office, showing me the ‘ Map of Ignorance ’ of our country. The departments in which most people can read and write were in white color; those less advanced, in gray stripes ; those most backward, in black. What a shock it gave me ! So many departments were black — or nearly so. You in Prussia are in that respect far ahead of us.” “ In Germany ! ” I answered. “ Indeed, I thought it was a specially Prus¬ sian institution, this compulsory law of edu¬ cation.” “No; it is the same all over our Father- land ! ” I replied. He seemed to take mentally a note of it. The dinner passed off most pleasantly, un¬ til we spoke of ancient and modern Greece — a theme I thought peculiarly pleasant to him as an enthusiastic admirer of and writer on Hel¬ lenic art and antiquities. Unfortunately, the question of the mixed race — descent of the present Greeks — was broached. Thereupon Charles Blanc all at once flew into a perfect passion, though everybody present was a warm well-wisher of the “greater future” of the Greece of our days. N either for the past nor for the present would Charles Blanc, in spite of the fullest classic and later historical testi¬ mony, admit any alloy in the blood of the Greeks : not a Pelasgian, not a Thracian, not a Phenician, not a Slavonian admixture — nothing but pure “ Hellenic” descent. The conversation grew warm, on his part at least, beyond English custom. One of the ladies was so startled by his energy that she became ill, and had to leave the room. It was as if Charles Blanc — whom his brother in vain endeavored to restrain — were fighting some imaginary foe of his own country. The contrast to his usual amiability was incompre¬ hensible. A nervous electrical storm seemed to have got possession of him. A few days before the declaration of war by Napoleon III. against “Prussia,” we were at dinner in Louis Blanc’s house. A number of Frenchmen, Englishmen, Americans, were present, as well as the late Belgian Consul, M. Delepierre, who in spite of his French name had a very good “ Nether-German ” or Flem¬ ish heart. He was an able and well-known writer on Flemish literature. The question of war or peace was now uppermost in all men’s minds and conversation. Suddenly Charles Blanc, while deprecating war, said he did not mean thereby to give up the right of France to the Rhenish Provinces which we have pos¬ sessed before que nous avons eues^^), “ How long ? ” I asked. He would not enter on the question. I had

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8o PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OE LOUIS BLANC, often found that the best educated Frenchmen were really ignorant of history in that respect, and that they sometimes did not even know how purely German the population of those provinces was in speech.* All the politeness and amiability of Charles Blanc had returned. He acknowledged that he had been wrong. On his saying that France had possessed the Rhinelands before, the Belgian consul had significantly put in the remark : “ And how about the connection of Alsace and Lorraine with Germany in former times ? ” In this way, there was sheet lightning, indi¬ cating coming things, even on occasions of pleasant social intercourse. Louis Blanc, in the meanwhile, strove cease¬ lessly, in his letters to the French press, to warn his country against the declaration of war. At last they would not even hear him any longer in the Liberal opposition press. These are the manuscripts of letters returned to me, un¬ published ! !’ he said one day, pointing out his rejected labor, in great grief. It may not be amiss to bring to recollection that when Napoleon HI. asked for the war- credits, Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Jules Simon, Magnin, Dorian, Steen ackers, as well as Thiers — all men who came to power after Sedan — all voted for the war-credits, in spite of previous op¬ position speeches. Jules Favre, after 1866, — that is to say, after a disruption in the national body of Germany, — had considered France entitled to an “ indemnification,” in the way of a cession of Germany territory ! So did Vic¬ tor Hugo ! At first, Thiers merely objected to the war of 1870 because he thought France was not sufficiently prepared.” Thiers cast his vote against declaration of war, first, last, and ever. After the war was in full course, Louis Blanc, it is true, finally voted against the Treaty of Peace, which involved the cession of territory. This, however, could only signify a personal protest. He knew too well that the sword of France was broken. When the war was over, we again met re¬ peatedly in London and Brighton, where we were together for several weeks in most friendly and intimate intercourse. He had a great deal to tell then as to the Commune insurrection. That rising, in Prince Bismarck’s view, had a legitimate kernel,” overlaid by madness and horror. A further element in the insurrection of the Commune was the desire to save France from a new Royalist teaction, as planned by the Assembly at Bordeaux. Louis Blanc endeav¬ ored to bring about a compromise and an am¬ nesty ; feeling repelled, as he did, on the one * For a dispassionate and interesting account of the early history of Alsace and Lorraine, see “ The French hand, by the wild vagaries of the Commune, and out of sympathy, on the other, with the re¬ actionists of the Assembly, in which he yet had to continue as a member. “ If men like you leave us,” Grevy very justly said to him, “ the reactionists will get free scope ! ” But the wildest attacks were made upon Louis Blanc from both sides. Ultras of the Commune be¬ spattered his character in the most hideous manner. He bore it all quietly. In the conflagration of Paris, which marked the last stage of the reign of the Commune, Louis Blanc lost a great many movables and valuable things, provisionally stored up, dur¬ ing the siege, at a railway station. His most painful loss was that of the manuscript of a new work he intended to bring out : “ The Salons of the Eighteenth Century.” I believe it was founded on the lectures he had formerly given in England on the same subject. The manuscript perished in the flames. Seeing France defeated after a war against which he had in vain protested, and democracy deeply rent by internal divisions, he scarcely alluded to his own personal losses. The cal¬ umnies heaped upon him he repaid by work¬ ing, at the expense of his health, in common with Victor Hugo, Clemenceau, and Camille Pelletan, for an unconditional amnesty of the exiles and prisoners of the Commune. Under Marshal MacMahon’s government I once was in a position to make an early communication to him, from an excellent source, by way of w^arning the Republican party against a lawless surprise. Of this com¬ munication, I believe, he made good use among the advanced Left of the Chamber of Deputies, of which he was the head. On his part, when referring to Gambetta, he expressed himself before me in words of great mistrust towards that highly ambitious leader. He looked upon him as a danger to the Common¬ wealth. So far back as 1872, Louis Blanc showed me the proof, in writing, of a move he had made among the advanced Left against Gambetta’s policy. The paper in question bore the signatures of a number of Louis Blanc’s intimate political associates. My own views in regard to Gambetta’s aspira¬ tions towards personal government ” fully coincided with, if they did not even go much beyond, his own. It was after I had broached this subject, that Louis Blanc, at Brighton,^ suddenly took from the breast-pocket of his coat the paper in question, giving it to me for confidential perusal. Both Louis Blanc and Gambetta having gone now, I can openly bear testimony to a fact which is calculated to shed light on contemporary history. Conquest of Lorraine and Alsace,” by Henry M. Baird, in this magazine for February, 1871,

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PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF LOUIS BLANC. 8i LOL'IS BLANC. (FRO^^ A PORTR.MT BV A. GILBEN.) Louis Blanc felt keenly the manner in which he was neglected when his old friend Grevy became President of the Republic. He was placed under the ban of the Opportunists who now are prepared to crowd flowers upon his tomb. Being fond of England he wished to be sent to London as ambassador. When Challe- mel Lacour was gazetted to that post, Louis Blanc turned his face to the wall to die. He ceased to struggle against terrible infirmities. The painful illness and death of his brother Charles was a blow from which he never re¬ covered. Death, as Victor Hugo said, was, in the case of Louis Blanc, a deliverance. Charles Blanc had died early in 1882. The two brothers were known to be bound up by a fraternal love of extraordinary warmth. It is said that when Louis Blanc, before the Rev¬ olution of 1848, was the object of a murderous attack, Charles, living far away in another part of France, exclaimed almost at the same hour that some dreadful accident must have hap¬ pened tohisbrother — which indeed turned out to be true. Whatever the explanation of this occurrence may be, Dumas made use of the oft-repeated story in his “ Corsican Brothers”; the Blancs being, as before stated, of Corsican descent from the mother’s side. VoL. XXXTV.— 12. Ka7'l Blhid,

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[BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER JVUMBER.\ ABRAHAM LINCOLN : A HISTORY A BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. THE BORDER CONFLICT. WILSON' SHANNON, (AFTER AN ENGRAVING BV T. DONEY.) KANSAS IN CIVIL WAR. them, making their total constituency (if by discard¬ ing the idea of a State line we use the word in a some¬ what strained sense) 5427. This was at the March election, 1855. Of the re¬ maining 2286 actual Kan¬ sas voters disclosed by Reeder’s census, only 791 cast their ballots. That sum¬ mer’s emigration, however, being mainly from the free States, greatly changed the relative strength of the two parties. At the election of October ist, 1855, in which the free-State men took no part, Whitfield, for delegate, received 2721 votes. Bor¬ der Ruffians included. At the election for members of the d'opeka Constitutional Convention, a week later, from which the pro-slavery men abstained, the free- State men cast 2710 votes, while Reeder, their nomi¬ nee for delegate, received 2849. For general service, therefore, requiring no spe¬ cial effort, the numerical strength of the factions was about equal; while on ex¬ traordinary occasions the two thousand Border-Ruf¬ fian reserve lying a little farther back from the State line could at any time easily turn the scale. The free-State men had only their convictions, their intelligence, their courage, and the moral support of the North; the conspiracy had its secret combination, the territorial ofiicials, the legislature, the bogus laws, the courts, the militia officers, the Presi¬ dent, and the army. This was a formidable array of advantages ; slavery was playing with loaded dice. With such a radical opposition of sentiment, both factions were on the alert to seize every available vantage ground. The bogus laws having been enacted, and the free-State men having, at the Big Springs Convention, resolved UT of the antagonistic and contending factions men¬ tioned in the last two chap¬ ters, the bogus legislature and its Border- Ruffian ad¬ herents on the one hand, and the framers and sup¬ porters of the Topeka Con¬ stitution on the other, grew the civil war in Kansas. The bogus legislature numbered thirty-six members. These had only received, all told, 619 legal bond fide Kansas votes; but, what answered their purposes just as well, 4408 Missourians had cast their ballots for ^ Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886. All rights reserved.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN. on the failure of peaceable remedies to resist them to a “ bloody issue,” the conspiracy was not slow to cover itself and its projects with the sacred mantle of authority. Opportunely for them, about this time Governor Shannon, appointed to succeed Reeder, arrived in the territory. Coming by way of the Missouri River towns, he fell first among Border-Ruffian companionship and influences ; and perhaps having his inclinations already molded by his Washington instructions, his early impressions were decidedly adverse to the free-State cause. His reception speech at Westport, in which he maintained the legality of the legislature, and his determination to enforce their laws, de¬ lighted his pro-slavery auditors. To enlist further his zeal in their behalf, a few weeks later they formally organized a “ law-and-order party ” by a large public meeting held at Leav¬ enworth. All the territorial dignitaries were present; Governor Shannon presided; John Calhoun, the Surveyor- General, made the prin¬ cipal speech, a denunciation of the aboli¬ tionists ” supporting the Topeka movement; Chief-Justice Lecompte dignified the occasion with approving remarks. With public opinion propitiated in advance, and the governor of the territory thus publicly committed to their party, the conspirators felt themselves ready to enter upon the active campaign to crush out opposition, for which they had made such elaborate preparations. Faithful to their legislative declaration they knew but one issue, slavery. All dissent, all non-compliance, all hesitation, all mere silence even, were in their stronghold towns, like Leav¬ enworth, branded as abolitionism,” declared to be hostility to the public welfare, and pun¬ ished with proscription, personal violence, expulsion, and frequently death. Of the lynch- ings, the mobs, and the murders, it would be impossible, except in a very extended work, to note the frequent and atrocious details. The present chapters can only touch upon the more salient movements of the civil war in Kansas, which happily were not sanguinary ; if, how¬ ever, the individual and more isolated cases of bloodshed could be described, they would show a startling aggregate of barbarity and loss of life for opinion’s sake. Some of these revolting crimes, though comparatively few in number, were committed, generally in a spirit of lawless retaliation, by free-State men. Among other instrumentalities for execut¬ ing the bogus laws, the bogus legislature had appointed one Samuel J. Jones sheriff of Douglas county, Kansas Territory, although that individual was at the time of his appoint- * Phillips, “Conquest of Kansas,” p. 152, et. seq. t Shannon, order to Richardson, Nov. 27th, 1855. ment, and long afterwards, United States post¬ master of the town of Westport, Missouri. Why this Missouri citizen and Federal official should in addition be clothed with a foreign territorial shrievalty of a county lying forty or fifty miles from his home is a mystery which was never explained outside a Missouri Blue Lodge. A partial solution is afforded in the fact that Jones was apparently a born persecutor, overflowing with zeal for slavery. Whether chosen by accident or design, his fitness to be¬ come the active agent of the conspiracy gives his name and acts a lamentable prominence in Kansas history. A few days after the law-and-order ” meet¬ ing in Leavenworth, there occurred a murder in a small settlement thirteen miles west of the town of Lawrence. The murderer, a pro¬ slavery man, first fled to Missouri, but returned to Shawnee Mission and sought the official protection of Sheriff Jones; no warrant, no examination, no commitment followed, and the criminal remained at large. Out of this inci¬ dent, the officious sheriff managed most in¬ geniously to create an embroilment with the town of Lawrence. Buckley, who was alleged to have been accessory to the crime, obtained a peace- warrant against Branson, a neighbor of the victim. With this peace-warrant in his pocket, but without showing or reading it to his prisoner. Sheriff Jones and a posse of twenty- five Border Ruffians proceeded to Branson’s house at midnight and arrested him. Alarm being given, Branson’s free-State neighbors, already exasperated at the murder, rose under the sudden instinct of self-protection and res¬ cued Branson from the sheriff and his posse that same night, though without other violence than harsh words.* Burning with the thirst of personal revenge. Sheriff Jones now charged upon the town of Lawrence, because that was the stronghold of the free-State men of the territory, the viola¬ tion of law involved in this rescue, though Lawrence immediately and earnestly disa¬ vowed the act. But for Sheriff Jones and his superiors the pretext was all-sufficient. A Bor¬ der-Ruffian foray against the town was hastily organized. The murder occurred November 2ist, the rescue November 26th. November 27th, upon the brief report of Sheriff Jones, demanding a force of three thousand men “to carry out the laws,” Governor Shannon issued his order to the two major-generals of the skeleton militia, “ to collect together as large a force as you can in your division, and repair without delay to Lecompton, and report your¬ self to S. J. Jones, sheriff of Douglas county. ”t The Kansas militia was a myth; but the Bor- Same order to Strickler, same date. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 53.

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84 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. t'NITED STATES ARSENAL, LIBERTY. (REDRAWN FROM PHOTOGRAPHS IN POSSESSION OF COLONEL NATHANIEL GRANT.) der Ruffians, with their backwoods rities and shot-guns, were a ready resource. To these an urgent appeal for help was made; and the leaders of the conspiracy in prompt obedi¬ ence ])lacarded the frontier with inflammatory hand-bills, and collected and equipped compa¬ nies, and hurried them forward to the rendez¬ vous without a moment’s delay. The United States Arsenal at Liberty, Missouri, was broken into and stripped of its contents to supply can¬ non, small arms, and ammunition. In two days after notice a company of fifty Missourians made the first camp on Wakarusa Creek, near Franklin, four miles from Lawrence. In three or four days more an irregular army of fifteen hundred men, claiming to be the sheriff’s posse, was within striking distance of the town. Three or four hundred of these were nominal residents of the territory ; * all the remainder were citizens of Missouri. They were not only well armed and supplied, but wrought up to the highest pitch of partisan excitement. While the gov¬ ernor’s proclamation spoke of serving writs,t the notices of the conspirators sounded the note of the real contest. “ Now is the time to show * Shannon, dispatch, Dec. nth, 1855, to President Pierce. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. IT., p. 63. game, and if we are defeated this time, the ter¬ ritory is lost to the South,” said the leaders.! There was no doubt of the earnestness of their purpose. Ex-Vice-President Atchison came in person, leading a battalion of two hundred Platte county riflemen. News of this proceeding came to the people of Lawrence little by little, and finally, becom¬ ing alarmed, they began to improvise means of defense. Two abortive imitations of the Missouri Blue Lodges, set on foot during the summer by the free-State men, provoked by the election invasion in March, furnished them a starting-point for military organiza¬ tion. A committee of safety, hurriedly insti¬ tuted, sent a call for help from Lawrence to other points in the territory ‘Tor the pur¬ pose of defending it from threatened invasion by armed men now quartered in its vicinity.” Several hundred free-State men promptly re¬ sponded to the summons. The Free-State Hotel served as barracks. Governor Robinson and Colonel Lane were appointed to command. Four or five small redoubts, connected by rifle- pits, were hastily thrown up ; and by a clever t Shannon, proclamation, Nov. 29th, 1855. Ibid., p. 56. t Phillips, p. 168.

Page 91

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, artifice they succeeded in bringing a twelve- pound brass howitzer from its storage at Kansas City. Meantime the committee of safety, ear¬ nestly denying any wrongful act or purpose, sent an urgent appeal for protection to the commander of the United States forces at Fort Leavenworth, another to Congress, and a third to President Pierce. Amid all this warlike preparation to keep the peace, no very strict military discipline 8s On one point especially the Border Ruffians had a wholesome dread. Yankee ingenuity had invented a new kind of breech-loading gun called Sharpe’s rifle.” It was, in fact, the best weapon of its day. The free-State volunteers had some months before obtained a partial supply of them from the East, and their range, rapidity, and effectiveness had been not only duly set forth but highly exaggerated by many marvelous stories throughout the ter- JAMES H. LANE, (BY PERMISSION OF THE STROWBRIDGE LITHOGRAPHING CO.) could be immediately enforced. The people of Lawrence without any great difficulty ob¬ tained daily information concerning the hostile camps. They, on the other hand, professing no purpose but that of defense and self-protection, were obliged to permit free and constant in¬ gress to their beleaguered town. Sheriff Jones made several visits unmolested on their part, and without any display of writs or demand for the surrender of alleged offenders on his own. One of the rescuers even accosted him, conversed with him, and invited him to dinner. These free visits, however, had the good effect to restrain imprudence and impulsiveness on both sides. They could see with their own eyes that a conflict meant serious results. AVith the advantage of its defensive position, Lawrence was as strong as the sheriff’s mob. ritory and along the border. The Missouri backwoodsmen manifested an almost incredi¬ ble interest in this wonderful gun. They might be deaf to the “ equalities ” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence or blind to the moral sin of slavery, but they comprehended a rifle which could be fired ten times a minute and kill a man at a thousand yards. The arrivals from Missouri finally slackened and ceased. The irregular Border-Ruffian squads were hastily incorporated into the skel¬ eton Kansas militia.” The ‘‘posse” became some two thousand strong, and the defenders of Lawrence perhaps one thousand. Meanwhile a sober second thought had come to Governor Shannon. To retrieve some¬ what the precipitancy of his militia orders and proclamations, he wrote to Sheriff Jones, De-

Page 92

86 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. cember 2d, to make no arrests or ^movements unless by his direction. The firm defensive attitude of the people of Lawrence had pro¬ duced its effect. The leaders of the conspiracy became distrustful of their power to crush the town. One of his militia generals suggested that the governor should require the outlaws at Lawrence and elsewhere ” to surrender the Sharpe’s rifles; * another wrote asking him to callout the Government troops at Fort Leav¬ enworth. The governor, on his part, becoming doubtful of the legality of employing Missouri militia to enforce Kansas laws, was also eager to secure the help of Federal troops. Sheriff Jones began to grow importunate. In the Mis¬ souri camp while the leaders became alarmed the men grew insubordinate. I have reason to believe,” wrote one of their prominent men, that before to-morrow morning the black flag will be hoisted, when nine out of ten will rally around it, and march without orders upon Lawrence. The forces of the Lecompton camp fully understand the plot and will fight under the same banner.”! After careful deliberation Colonel Sumner, commanding the United States troops at Fort Leavenworth, declined to interfere without ex¬ plicit orders from the War Department.! These failing to arrive in time, the governor was obliged to face his own dilemma. He hastened to Lawrence, which now invoked his protection. He directed his militia generals to repress dis¬ order and check any attack on the town. In¬ terviews were held with the free- State com¬ manders, and the situation was fully discussed. A compromise was agreed upon, and a formal treaty written out and signed. The affair was pronounced to be a “ misunderstanding”; the Lawrence party disavowed the Branson rescue, denied any previous, present, or prospective organization for resistance, and under sundry provisos agreed to aid in the execution of “ the laws ” when called upon by proper au¬ thority.” Like all compromises, the agreement was half necessity, half trick. Neither party was willing to yield honestly or ready to fight manfully. The free-State men shrank from forcible resistance to even bogus laws. The Missouri cabal, on the other hand, having three of their best men constantly at the gov¬ ernor’s side, were compelled to recognize their lack of justification. They did not dare to ig¬ nore upon what a ridiculously shadowy pre- sharpe’s rifle. (original in possession of the KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) COLONEL E. V. SUMNER. (from a photograph by KEET & GEMMILL.) text the Branson peace- warrant had grown into an army of two thousand men, and how, under manipulation of Sheriff J ones, a question¬ able affidavit of a pro-slavery criminal had been expanded into the casus belli of a free- State town. They consented to a compromise to cover a retreat.” When Governor Shannon announced that the difficulties were settled, the people of Lawrence were suspicious of their leaders, and John Brown manifested his readiness to head a revolt. But his attempted speech was hushed down, and the assurance of Robinson and Lane that they had made no dishonora¬ ble concession finally quieted their followers. There were similar murmurs in the pro-slavery camps. The governor was denounced as a traitor, and Sheriff Jones declared that ‘Gie would have wiped out Lawrence.” Atchison, on the contrary, sustained the bargain, ex¬ plaining that to attack Lawrence under the circumstances would ruin the Democratic cause. But,” he added with a significant oath, boys, we will fight some time! ” Thir¬ teen of the captains in the Wakarusa camp were called together, and the situation was duly explained. The treaty was accepted, though the governor confessed ‘‘ there was a silent dissatisfaction ” § at the result. He or¬ dered the forces to disband ; prisoners were liberated, and with the opportune aid of a furious rain-storm the Border- Ruffian army gradually melted away. Nevertheless the * Richardson to Shannon, December 3d, 1855; Phil¬ lips, “Conquest of Kansas,’’ p. 185. t Anderson to Richardson; Phillips, “ Conquest of Kansas,” p. 210. t Sumner to Shannon, December ist, 1855 ; Phillips, p. 184. % Shannon to President Pierce, December nth, 1855. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 63.

Page 93

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 87 FREE-STATE BATTERY (1856). (REDRAWN FROM A DAOUERREOTYPE IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) ‘‘ Wakarusa war” left one bitter sting to rankle in the hearts of the defenders of Lawrence, a free-State man having been killed by a pro-slavery scouting party. The truce patched up by this Lawrence treaty was of compar¬ atively short duration. The ex¬ citement which had reigned in Kansas during the whole sum¬ mer of 1855, ft^st about the en¬ actments of the bogus legislature, and then in regard to the forma¬ tion of the Topeka Constitution, was now extended to the Amer¬ ican Congress, where it raged for two long months over the election of wSpeaker Banks. In Kansas during the same period the vote of the free-State men upon the Topeka Con¬ stitution and the election for free-State officers under it kept the territory in a ferment. Dur¬ ing and after the contest over the speakership at W ashington, each State legislature became a forum of Kansas debate. The general public interest in the controversy was shown by discussions carried on by press, pulpit, and in the daily conversation and comment of the people of the Union in every town, hamlet, and neighborhood. No sooner did the spring weather of 1856 permit, than men, money, arms, and supplies were poured into the territory of Kansas from the North. In the Southern States also this propagandism was active, and a number of guerilla leaders with followers recruited in the South, and armed and sustained by Southern contributions and appropriations, found their way to Kansas in response to urgent appeals of the Border chiefs. Buford of Alabama, Titus of Florida, Wilkes of Virginia, Hampton of Kentucky, Treadwell of South Carolina, and others, brought not only enthusiastic leadership, but substantial assistance. Both the factions which had come so near to actual battle in the ‘‘ Wakarusa war,” though nominally disband¬ ed, in reality preserved and continued their military organization, — the free-State men through apprehension of danger, the Border Ruffians because of their purpose to crush out opposition. Strengthened on both sides with men, money, arms, and supplies, the contest was gradually resumed with the open¬ ing spring. The vague and double-meaning phrases of the Lawrence agreement furnished the earliest causes of a renewal of the quarrel. Did you not pledge yourselves to assist me as sher¬ iff in the arrest of any person against whom I might have a writ ?” asked Sheriff Jones of Robinson and Lane in a curt note. We may have said that we would assist any proper official in the service of any legal proc¬ ess,” they replied, standing upon their inter¬ pretation.* This was, of course, the original controversy — slavery burning to enforce her usurpation, freedom determined to defend her birthright. Sheriff Jones had his pockets always full of writs issued in the spirit of persecution, though often baffled by the sharp wits and ready resources of the free- State i^eople, and sometimes defied out¬ right. Little by little, however, the latter became hemmed and bound in the meshes of the various devices and proceedings which the territorial officials evolved by hook and crook out of the bogus laws. President Pierce, in his special message of January 24th, declared what had been done by the Topeka movement to be of a revolutionary character ” which would become treasonable insurrection if it reach the length of organized resistance.” Following this came his proclamation of February nth, leveled against “combinations formed to resist the execution of the territorial laws.” Early in May Chief-Justice Lecompte held a term of his court, during which he de¬ livered to the grand jury his famous instruc¬ tions on constructive treason. Indictments were found, writs issued, and the principal free-State leaders arrested or forced to flee from the territory. Covernor Robinson was arrested without warrant on the Missouri River, and brought back to be held in military custody till Septem¬ ber. Lane went East and recruited additional help for the contest. Meanwhile * Holloway, pp. 275, 276. CANNON USED IN THE ATTACK ON LAWRENCE, (ORIGINAL IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.)

Page 94

58 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. GOVERNOR CHARLES ROBINSON IN CUSTODY OF CAPTAIN MARTIN, OF THE KICKAPOO RANGERS.* (FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE IN POSSESSION OF MRS. ROBINSON.) * Governor Robinson being on his way East, the steamboat on which he was traveling stopped at Lexington, Missouri. An unauthorized mob induced the governor, with that gentle persuasiveness in which the Border Ruffians had become adepts, to leave the boat, detaining him at Lexington on the accusation that he was fleeing from an indictment. In a few days an officer came with a requisition from Governor Shan¬ non, and took the prisoner by land to Westport, and afterwards from there to Kansas City and Leavenwortli. Here he was placed in the custody of C’aptain Martin, of the Kickapoo Rangers, who proved a kind jailer, and materially assisted in protecting him from the danger¬ ous intentions of the mob which at that time held J.eavenworth under a reign of terror. Mrs. Robinson, who has kindly sent us a sketch of the incident, writes : “ On the night of the 28th [of May] for greater security General Richardson of the militia slept in the same bed with the prisoner, while Tudge Lccompte and Marshal Donaldson slept just outside of the door of the prisoner’s room. Captain Martin said, ‘I shall give you a pistol to hr&lp protect yourself with if worse comes to worst ! ’ In the early morning of the next day, May 29th, a company of

Page 95

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 89 Sheriff Jones, sitting in his tent at night, in the town of Lawrence, had been wounded by a rifle or pistol ball, in the attempt of some unknown person to assassinate him. The people of Lawrence denounced the deed; but the sheriff hoarded up the score for future revenge. One additional incident served to precipitate the crisis. The House of Representatives at Washington, presided over by Speaker Banks, and under control of the opposition, sent an investigating committee to Kansas, consisting of Wm. A. Howard of Michigan, John Sherman of Ohio, and Mordecai Oliver of Missouri, which, by the examination of numerous wit¬ nesses, was probing the Border- Ruffian in¬ vasions, the illegality of the bogus legislature, and the enormity of the bogus laws to the very bottom. Ex-Governor Reeder was in attend¬ ance on this committee, supplying data, point¬ ing out from personal knowledge sources of in¬ formation, cross-examining witnesses to elicit the hidden truth. To embarrass this damaging exposure. Judge Lecompte issued a writ against the ex-governor on a frivolous charge of con¬ tempt. Claiming but not receiving exemption from the committee, Reeder on his personal responsibility refused to permit the deputy marshal to arrest him. The incident was not violent, nor even dramatic. No posse was summoned, no further effort made, and Reeder, fearing personal violence, soon fled in dis¬ guise. But the affair was magnified as a crowning proof that the free-State men were insurrectionists and outlaws. It must be noted in passing that by this time the territory had by insensible degrees drifted into the condition of civil war. Both parties were zealous, vigilant, and denuncia¬ tory. In nearly every settlement suspicion led to apprehension, apprehension to combi¬ nation for defense, combination to some form of oppression or insult, and so on by easy tran¬ sitions to arrest and concealment, attack and reprisal, expulsion, theft, house-burning, cap¬ ture, murder, andmassacre. From these, again, sprang barricaded and fortified dwellings, camps and scouting parties, finally culminat¬ ing in roving guerilla bands, half partisan, half predatory. Their distinctive characters, however, display one broad and unfailing difference. The free-State men clung to their prairie towns and prairie ravines with all the obstinacy and courage of true defenders of their homes and firesides. The pro-slavery dragoons with one empty saddle came down from the fort, and while the pro-slavery men still slept, the prisoner and his escort were on their way across the prairies to Lecompton in the charge of officers of the United States Army. The governor and other prisoners were kept on the prairie near Lecompton until the loth of Septem¬ ber, 1856, when all were released.” — The Authors. VoL. XXXIV.— 13. parties, unmistakable aliens and invaders, always came from or retired across the Mis¬ souri line. Organized and sustained in the be¬ ginning by voluntary contributions from that and distant States, they ended by levying forced contributions, by pressing ” horses, food, or arms from any neighborhood they ANDREW H, REEDER IN DISGUISE. (FROM PHOTOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) chanced to visit. Their assumed character changed with their changing opportunities or necessities. They were squads of Kansas militia, companies of peaceful emigrants,” or gangs of irresponsible outlaws, to suit the chance, the whim, or the need of the moment. Since the unsatisfactory termination of the ‘^Wakarusa war,” certain leaders of the con¬ spiracy had never given up their project of punishing the town of Lawrence. A pro¬ pitious moment for carrying it out seemed now to have arrived. The free-State officers and leaders were, thanks to Judge Lecompte’s doctrine of constructive treason, under indict- It will interest our readers to know that the former editor-in-chief of The Century, Dr. J. G. Holland, formed a partnership with Dr. Robinson in 1845, and opened with him a hospital in Springfield, Massachu¬ setts. Circumstances, however, .soon led to the dis¬ continuance of this enterprise. — Editor Century.

Page 96

90 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. WM. BLAIR LORD, STENOGRAPHER. JOHN UPTON, SERGEANT-AT-ARMS. MORDECAI OLIVER. WM. A. HOWARD, CHAIRMAN. JOHN SHERMAN. KANSAS INVESTIGATING COMMITTEE. (FROM PHOTOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) ment, arrest, or in flight; the settlers were busy with their spring crops ; while the pro¬ slavery guerillas, freshly arrived and full of zeal, were eager for service and distinction. The former campaign against the town had failed for want of justification ; therefore they now took pains to provide a pretext which would not shame their assumed character as defenders of law and order. In the shoot¬ ing of Sheriff Jones in Lawrence, and in the refusal of ex- Governor Reeder to allow the deputy-marshal to arrest him, they discov¬ ered grave offenses against the territorial and United States laws. Determined also no longer to trust Governor Shannon, lest he might again make peace. United States Mar¬ shal Donaldson issued a proclamation on his own responsibility, on May nth, 1856, commanding law-abiding citizens of the territory ” to be and appear at Lecompton, as soon as possible and in numbers sufficient for the execution of the law.” * Moving with * Memorial, Senate Docs., 3d. Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 74. t Phillips, “ Conquest of Kansas,” p. 289-290. all the promptness and celerity of preconcert, ex-Vice-President Atchison, with his Platte County Rifles and two brass cannon, the Kick- apoo Rangers from Leavenworth and Wes¬ ton, Wilkes, Titus, Buford, and all the rest of the free lances in the territory began to concen¬ trate against Lawrence, giving the marshal in a very few days a posse ” of from five hundred to eight hundred men, t armed for the greater part with United States muskets, some stolen from the Liberty arsenal on their former raid, others distributed to them as Kansas militia by the territorial officers. The governor refused to interfere to protect the threatened town,| though urgently appealed to do so by its citi¬ zens, who after somewhat stormy and divided councils resolved on a policy of non-resistance. They next made application to the marshal, who tauntingly replied that he could not rely on their pledges, and must take the liberty to execute his process in his own time and man- ner.§ The help of Colonel Sumner, command- t Memorial, Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 75. § Ibid., p. 77.

Page 97

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. THE FREE-STATE HOTEL, LAWRENCE, KANSAS. (FROM A PHO¬ TOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) ing the United States troops, was finally in¬ voked, but his instructions only permitted him to act at the call of the governor or marshal.* Private parties who had leased the Free-State Hotel vainly besought the various authorities to prevent the destruction of their property. Ten days were consumed in these negotia¬ tions ; but the spirit of vengeance refused to yield. When the citizens of Lawrence rose on the 2 1 St of May they beheld their town in¬ vested by a formidable military force. During the forenoon the deputy marshal rode leisurely into the town attended by less than a dozen men, being neither molested nor opposed. He summoned half a dozen citizens to join his posse, who followed, obeyed, and assisted him. He as leisurely continued his pretended search and, to give color to his errand, made two arrests. The Free-State Hotel, a stone building in dimensions fifty by seventy feet, three stories high, and handsome¬ ly furnished, previously occupied only for lodging-rooms, on that day for the first time opened its table accommodations to the pub¬ lic, and had provided a free dinner in honor of the occasion. The marshal and his posse, including Sheriff Jones, went among other in¬ vited guests and enjoyed the proffered hos¬ pitality. As he had promised to protect the hotel, the reassured citizens began to laugh at their own fears. To their sorrow they were soon undeceived. The military force, partly rabble, partly organized, had meanwhile moved into the town. To save his official skirts from stain, the deputy marshal now went through the farce of dismissing his entire posse of citi¬ zens and Border Ruffians, at which juncture Sheriff Jones made his appearance, claiming KUINS OF THE FREE-STATE HOTEL. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) 91 the posse ” as his own. He planted a com¬ pany before the hotel, and demanded a surren¬ der of the arms belonging to the free-State military companies. Refusal or resistance be¬ ing out of the question, half a dozen small can¬ non were solemnly dug up from their buried concealment and, together with a few Sharpe’s rifles, formally delivered. Half an hour later, turning a deaf ear to all remonstrance, he gave the proprietors until five o’clock to remove their families and personal property from the Free- State Hotel. Atchison, who had been ha¬ ranguing the mob, planted his two guns before the building and trained them upon it. The in¬ mates being removed, at the appointed hour a few cannon-balls were fired through the stone walls. This mode of destruction being slow and undramatic, and an attempt to blow it up with gunpowder having proved equally unsat- CANNON SURRENDERED AT LAWRENCE, MAY 2IST, 1856. (original in possession of THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) isfactory, the torch was deliberately applied, and the structure given to the flames. t Other squads had during the same time been sent to the several printing-offices, where they broke the presses, scattered the type, and demolished the furniture. The house of Governor Robin¬ son was also robbed and burned. Very soon the mob was beyond all control, and spreading itself over the town engaged in pillage till the darkness of night arrested it. Meanwhile the chiefs sat on their horses and viewed the work of destruction with open delight. If we would believe the chief actors, this was the law-and-order party,” executing the mandates of justice. Part and parcel of the affair was the pretense that this exploit of prairie buccaneering had been authorized by Judge Lecompte’s court, the officials citing in their defense a presentment of his grand jury, de¬ claring the free-State newspapers seditious * Sumner to Shannon, May 12th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3rcl Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. V. t Memorial, Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. VoL II., pp. 73-85.

Page 98

92 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, BREAKING UP A PRO-SLAVERY CAMP. publications, and the Free-State Flotel a re¬ bellious fortification, and recommending their abate incut as nuisances.^' The travesty of American government involved in the trans¬ action is too serious for ridicule. In this inci¬ dent, contrasting the creative and the de¬ structive spirit of the factions, the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts finds its most honorable and triumphant vindication. The whole proceeding was so childish, the misera¬ ble plot so transparept, the outrage so gross, as to bring disgust to the better class of Border Ruffians themselves who were witnesses and accessories. The free-State men have recorded the honorable conduct of Colonel Zadock Jackson of Georgia, and Buford of Alabama, as well as of the prosecuting attorney of the county, each of whom denounced the pro¬ ceedings on the spot.t JEFFERSON DAVIS ON REBELLION. While the town of Lawrence was yet undergoing burning and pillage. Governor Shannon wrote to Colonel Sumner to say that as the marshal and sheriff had finished making their arrests, and he presumed had by that time dismissed the posse, he required a company of LTnited States troops to be sta¬ tioned at Lawrence to secure “ the safety of the citizens in both persons and property,” J asking also a like company for Lecompton and Topeka. The next day the citizens of Lawrence had the opportunity to smother their indignation when they saw the smol¬ dering embers of the Free-State Hotel and the scattered fragments of their printing- presses patrolled and protected ” by the Federal dragoons whose presence they had so vainly implored a few days before. § It was high time the governor should move. The sack of Lawrence had unchained the demon of civil war in good earnest. The guerilla bands with their booty spread over the coun¬ try, and the free-State men rose in a spirit of fierce retaliation. Assassinations, house-burn¬ ings, expulsions, and skirmishes broke out with frightful speed in all quarters. The sud¬ den shower of lawlessness fell on the just and the unjust; and, forced at last to deal out Holloway, p. 334. t Memorial to the President. + Shannon to Sumner, May2ist, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 38. ^ Sumner to Howard, May i6th, 1856. Ibid., p. 37.

Page 99

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 93 equal protection, the governor (June 4th) is¬ sued his proclamation directing military or¬ ganizations to disperse, ‘‘without regard to party, names, or distinctions,”* and empower¬ ing Colonel Sumner to enforce the order.t That careful and discreet officer, who had from the first counseled this policy, at once proceeded to execute the command with his characteristic energy. He disarmed and dis¬ persed the free-State guerillas, — John Brown’s among the earliest, — liberated prisoners, drove the Missourians, including delegate Whitfield and General Coffee of the skeleton militia, back across their State line, and stationed five companies along the border to prevent their return. He was so fortunate as to accomplish all this without bloodshed. “ I do not think,” he wrote, June 23d, “ there is an armed body of either party now in the territory, with the exception perhaps of a few freebooters.”! The colonel found very soon that he was only too efficient and faithful. “ My measures have necessarily borne hard against both par¬ ties,” wrote Sumner to the War Department, “ for both have in many instances been more or less wrong. The Missourians were perfectly satisfied so long as the troops were employed exclusively against the free-State party ; but when they found that I would be strictly impartial, that lawless mobs could no longer come from Missouri, and that their interfer¬ ence with the affairs of Kansas was brought to an end, then they immediately raised a hue and cry that they were oppressed by the United States troops.” § The complaint had its usual prompt effect at Washington. By orders dated June 27th the colonel was super¬ seded in his command, and Brigadier- General P. F. Smith was sent to Leavenworth. Known to be pro-slavery in his opinions, great advan¬ tages were doubtless expected by the conspir¬ acy from this change. But General Smith was an invalid, and incapable of active ser¬ vice ; and so far as the official records show, the army officers and troops in Kansas con¬ tinued to maintain a just impartiality in their dealings with the vexed political quarrel of the day. The removal of Governor Shannon a few weeks after Colonel Sumner once more made Secretary Woodson, always a willing instru¬ ment of the conspiracy, acting governor. It was under this individual’s promptings and proclamation. Shannon being absent from the territory, that Colonel Sumner, before the ar¬ rival of the orders superseding him, forcibly ^ Shannon Proclamation, June 4th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d. Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 47. t Shannon to Sumner, June 4th, 1856. Ibid., p. 45. t Sumner to Cooper, June 23d, 1856. Ibid., p. 50. dispersed the free-State legislature on the 4th of July, as narrated. For this act the cynical Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, was not slow to send the colonel an implied censure, 1| perhaps to justify his removal from com¬ mand; but not a word of reproof went from President or Secretary of State to the acting governor. It has already been stated that for a con¬ siderable length of time after the organization of Kansas Territory the Missouri River was its principal highway of approach from the States. To antislavery men who were unwilling to conceal their sentiments, this had from the very first been a route of difficulty and danger. But now that political strife culminated in civil war, the Missourians established a com¬ plete practical blockade of the river against Northern men or Northern goods. Recently, however, railroads had been pushed forward across Iowa, and the Northern emigration to Kansas little by little found a new route through that State and Nebraska. It was about this time that great conster¬ nation was created in pro- slavery circles by the report that Lane had arrived at the Iowa border with a “ Northern army,” exaggerated into fabulous numbers, and intent upon fight¬ ing his way to Kansas. Parties headed by Lane and others and aggregating some hun¬ dreds had in fact so arrived, and were more or less provided with arms, though they had no open military organization. While spies and patrols were on the lookout for marching companies and regiments, they, concealing their arms, quietly slipped down in detached parties to Lawrence. Thus reenforced and in¬ spirited, the free-State men took the aggress¬ ive, and by several bold movements broke up a number of pro-slavery camps and gatherings. Greatly exaggerated reports of these affairs were promptly sent to the neighboring Mis¬ souri counties, and the Border Ruffians rose almost to a man for a third military invasion of Kansas. Governor Shannon, not yet notified of his removal, reported to General Smith that Lecompton was threatened with an attack. General Smith, becoming himself alarmed, called together all available force for the pro¬ tection of the territorial capital, and reported the exigency to the War Department. All the hesitation which had hitherto characterized the instructions of Jefferson Davis, the Secre¬ tary of War, in the use of troops otherwise than as an officer’s posse, instantly vanished. $ Sumner to Cooper, Aug. i ith, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 58. II Sumner to Cooper, Aug. nth, 1856. Endorsement, Aug. 27th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 59. Vol. XXXIV.— 14.

Page 100

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 94 The whole Kansas militia was placed under the orders of General Smith, and requisitions were issued for two regiments from Illinois and two from Kentucky. “ The position of the insurgents,” wrote the Secre¬ tary, “ as shown by your letter and its inclosures, is that of open rebellion against the laws and constitu¬ tional authorities, with such manifestation of a purpose to spread devastation over the land as no longer justi¬ fies further hesitation or indulgence. To you, as to every •soldier, whose habitual feeling is to protect the citizens •of his own country, and only to use his arms against a public enemy, it cannot be otherwise than deeply pain¬ ful to be brought into conflict with any portion of his fellow-countrymen. But patriotism and humanity alike require that rebellion should be promptly crushed, •.and the perpetration of the crimes which now disturb the peace and security of the good people of the terri¬ tory of Kansas should be effectually checked. You will therefore energetically employ all the means within your reach to restore the supremacy of the law, always endeavoring to carry out your present pur¬ pose to prevent the unnecessary effusion of blood.” * The cold-blooded Secretary, who could read a description of the sack of Lawrence unmoved, had probably cast his eye upon the Platte coun¬ ty battle-call in the “ Weston Argus .Extra,” which formed one of the general’s inclosures. “ So sudden and unexpected has been the attack of the abolitionists that the law-and-order party was un¬ prepared to effectually resist them. To-day the bogus free-State government, we understand, is to assemble at Topeka. The issue is distinctly made up ; either the free-State or pro- slavery party is to have Kansas. . . . Citizens of Platte county ! the war is upon you, and at your very doors. Arouse yourselves to speedy ven¬ geance and rub out the bloody traitors.”! It was perhaps well that the pro-slavery zeal of General Smith was less ardent than that of Secretary Jefferson Davis, or the Amer¬ ican civil war might have begun in Lawrence instead of Charleston. Upon a little fuller in¬ formation and more mature reflection, the gen¬ eral found that he had no need either of the four regiments from Illinois and Kentucky or Border-Ruffian mobs led by skeleton militia generals, neither of which he had asked for. Both the militia generals and the Missourians were too eager even to wait for an official call. ^‘General” Richardson ordered out his whole division on the strength of the ‘‘Argus Extra” and neighborhood reports,J and the entire bor¬ der was already in motion when Acting Gov¬ ernor Woodson issued his proclamation § de¬ claring the territory “ to be in a state of open in¬ surrection and rebellion.” General Smith found it necessary to direct his first orders against the Border-Ruffian invaders themselves. * Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War, to General Smith, Sept. 3d, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34tli Cong. Vol. III., p. 29. t August i8th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., pp. 76-7. t Richardson to General Smith, August i8th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 75. “ It has been rumored for several days,” he wrote to his second in command, “ that large numbers of persons from the State of Missouri have entered Kan¬ sas, at various points, armed, with the intention of at¬ tacking the opposite party and driving them from the territory, the latter being also represented to be in considerable force. If it should come to your knowl¬ edge that either side is moving upon the other with the view to attack, it will become your duty to ob¬ serve their movements and prevent such hostile collisions.” || Lieutenant- Colonel Cooke, upon whom this active field work devolved, because of the gen¬ eral’s ill health, concentrated his little command between Lawrence and Lecompton, where he could to some extent exert a salutary check upon the main bodies of both parties, and where he soon had occasion to send a remon¬ strance to the acting governor that his “ mili¬ tia” was ransacking and burning houses.^ To the acting governor’s mind, such a remon¬ strance was not a proper way to suppress re¬ bellion. He therefore sent Colonel Cooke a requisition to invest the town of Topeka, dis¬ arm the insurrectionists, hold them as prison¬ ers, level their fortifications, and intercept aggressive invaders on “ Lane’s trail ” ; * * all of which demands the officer prudently and politely declined, replying that he was there to assist in serving judicial process, and not to make war on the town of Topeka.t t If, as had been alleged. General Smith was at first inclined to regard the pro-slavery side with favor, their arrogance and excesses soon removed his prejudices, and he wrote an un¬ sparing report of the situation to the War Department. “ In explanation of the position of affairs, lately and now, I may remark that there are more than two op¬ posing parties in the territory. The citizens of the territory who formed the majority in the organization of the territorial government, and in the elections for its legislature and inferior officers, form one party. The persons who organized a State government, and attempted to put it in operation against the authority of that established by Congress, form another. A party, at the head of which is a former Senator from Missouri, and which is composed in a great part ol citizens from that State, who have come into this ter¬ ritory armed, under the excitement produced by re¬ ports exaggerated in all cases, and in many absolutely false, form the third. There is a fourth, composed of idle men congregated from various parts, who assume to arrest, punish, exile, and even kill all those whom they assume to be bad citizens ; that is, those who will not join them or contribute to their maintenance. Everyone of these has in its own peculiar way (except some few of the first party) thrown aside all regard to law, and even honesty, and the territory under their sway is ravaged from one end to the other. . . . Until the day before yesterday I was deficient in force $ August 25ch, 1856. Ibid., p. 80. II Deas,A. A. G.,to Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke, August 28th, 1856. Ibid., p. 85. IF Cooke to Deas, August 31st, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 89. * * Woodson to Cooke, Sept, ist, 1856. Ibid., p. 90. tt Cooke to Woodson, Sept. 2d, 1856. Ibid., p. 91.

Page 101

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. to operate against all these at once ; and the acting governor of the territory did not seem to me to take a right view of affairs. If Mr. Atchison and his party had had the direction of affairs, they could not have ordered them more to suit his purpose.” * All such truth and exposure of the conspir¬ acy, however, was unpalatable at Washing¬ ton ; and Secretary Jefferson Davis, while approving the conduct of Colonel Cooke and expressing confidence in the general, neverthe¬ less curtly indorsed upon his report : “The only distinction of parties which in a military I^oint of view it is necessary to note is that which dis¬ tinguishes those who respect and maintain the laws and organized government from those who combine for revolutionary resistance to the constitutional au¬ thorities and laws of the land. The armed combina¬ tion of the latter class come within the denunciation of the President’s proclamation and are proper subjects upon which to employ the military force.” t Such was the state of affairs when the third governor of Kansas, newly appointed by Pres¬ ident Pierce, arrived in the territory. The Kan¬ sas pro-slavery cabal had upon the dismissal of Shannon fondly hoped that one of their own clique, either Secretary Woodson or Surveyor General John Calhoun, would be made execu¬ tive, and had set on foot active efforts in that direction. In principle and purpose they en¬ joyed the abundant sympathy of the Pierce administration ; but as the presidential elec¬ tion of 1856 was at hand, the success of the Democratic party could not at the moment be endangered by so open and defiant an act of partisanship. It was still essential to placate the wounded antislavery sensibilities of Penn¬ sylvania and other Northern States, and to this end John W. Geary of the Keystone State was nominated by the President and unani¬ mously confirmed by the Senate. He was a man of character and decision, had gone to the Mexican War as a volunteer captain, and had been made a colonel and intrusted with an important command for merit. Afterwards he had served as postmaster, as alcalde, and as mayor of the city of San Francisco in the tur¬ bulent gold excitements of 1848-9, and was again made a funding commissioner by the California legislature. J Both by nature and experience, therefore, he seemed well fitted to subdue the civil commotions of Kansas. But the pro-slavery leaders of the territory were very far from relishing or desiring quali¬ fications of this character. In one of their appeals calling upon the Missourians for “ as¬ sistance in men, provisions, and munitions, that we may drive out the ‘Army of the North,’” * Smith to Cooper, Sept. loth, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 80. tSec. War, endorsement, Sept. 23d, on letter of Gen. Smith to A. G., Sept. loth, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 83. they had given the President and the public a piece of their mind about this appointment. “ We have asked the appointment of a successor,” said they, “who was acquainted with our condition,” with “ the capacity to appreciate and the boldness and integrity requisite faithfully to discharge his duty re¬ gardless of the possible effect it might have upon the election of some petty politician in a distant State. In his stead we have one appointed who is ignorant of our condition, a stranger to our people ; who, we have too much cause to fear, will, if no worse, prove no more efficient to protect us than his predecessors. . . .We cannot await the convenience in coming of our newly appointed governor. We cannot hazard a second edi¬ tion of imbecility or corruption ! ” $ Animated by such a spirit, they now bent all their energies upon concentrating a suf¬ ficient force in Kansas to crush the free-State men before the new governor could interfere. Acting Governor Woodson had by proclama¬ tion declared the territory in a state of “ open insurrection and rebellion,” || and the officers of the skeleton militia were hurriedly enroll¬ ing the Missourians, giving them arms, and planting them in convenient camps for a final and decisive campaign. It was on September 9th, 1856, that Gov¬ ernor Geary and his party landed at Leaven¬ worth. Even on his approach he had already been compelled to note and verify the evi¬ dences of civil war. He had met, fleeing from the territory. Governor Shannon, who drew for him a direful picture of the official inheri¬ tance to which he had come.^ While this in¬ terview took place, during the landing of the boat at Glasgow, a company of sixty Missouri Border Ruffians was embarking, with wagons, arms, and cannon, and with the open declara¬ tion that they were bound for Kansas to hunt and kill abolitionists.” * * Similar belligerent preparations were in progress at all the river towns they touched. At Kansas City the vigi¬ lance committee of the blockade boarded and searched the boat for concealed “abolitionists.” Finally arrived at Leavenworth, the governor saw a repetition of the same scenes, — parades and military control in the streets, fugitives within the inclosure of the fort, and hundreds of minor evidences of lawlessness and a reign of terror. Governor Geary went at once to the fort, where he spent the day in consultation with General Smith. That same evening he wrote to Secretary of State Marcy a report of the day’s impressions which was anything but reassuring — Leavenworth in the hands of armed men committing outrages under the t “Washington Union,” August ist, 1856. $ Gihon, p. 130. ■* II Woodson, Proclamation, August 25th, 1856. Sen¬ ate Docs., 3cl Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 80. U Gihon, p. 104. ** Gihon, pp. 104-5.

Page 102

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 96 shadow of authority; theft and murder in the streets and on the highways; farms plundered and deserted; agitation, excitement, and utter insecurity everywhere, and the number of troops insufficient to compel peace and order. All this was not the worst, however. Deep in the background stood the sinister apparition of the Atchison cabal. “T find,” wrote he, ‘‘ that I have not simply to con¬ tend against bands of armed ruffians and brigands whose sole aim and end is assassination and robbery — infatuated adherents and advocates of conflicting po¬ litical sentiments and local institutions — and evil-dis¬ posed persons actuated by a desire to obtain elevated positions; but worst of all, against the influence of men who have been placed in authority and have em¬ ployed all the destructive agents around them to pro¬ mote their own personal interests at the sacrifice of every just, honorable, and lawful consideration. . . . Such is the condition of Kansas faintly pictured. . . . In making the foregoing statements I have endeavored to give the truth and nothing but the truth. I deem it important that you should be apprised of the actual state of the case; and whatever maybe the effect of such revelations, they will be given from time to time without extenuation.”* Discouraging as he found his new task of administration, Governor Geary grappled with it in a spirit of justice and decision. The day following his interview with General Smith found him at Lecompton, the nominal capital of the territory, where the other territorial of¬ ficials, Woodson, Calhoun, Donaldson, Sheriff J ones, Lecompte, Cato, and others, constituted the ever-vigilant working force of the Atchi¬ son cabal, precisely as had been so truthfully represented to him by General Smith, and as he had so graphically described in his yester¬ day’s letter to Marcy. Paying little heed to their profusely offered advice, he adhered to his determination to judge for himself, and at once issued an inaugural address, declaring that in his official action he would do justice at all hazards, that he desired to know no party and no section, and imploring the people to bury their past strifes, and devote themselves to peace, industry, and the material develop¬ ment of the territory, t As an evidence of his earnestness he simultaneously issued two proc¬ lamations, I one disbanding the volunteer or Missouri militia lately called into service by Acting Governor Woodson, and the other commanding the immediate enrollment of the true citizen militia of Kansas Territory, this step being taken by the advice of General Smith. § He soon found that he could not govern * Geary to Marcy, Sept. 9th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3(i Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 88. t Geary, Inaugural Address, Sept, i ith, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess, 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 116. t Geary, Proclamation, Sept, nth, 1856. Ibid., Vol. II., pp. 93-4. Kansas with paper proclamations alone. His sudden arrival at this particular juncture was evidently an unexpected contretemps. While he was preaching and printing his sage admoni¬ tions about peace and prosperity at Lecompton, and laboring to change the implements of civil war into plowshares and pruning-hooks, the Missouri raid against Lawrence, officially called into the field by Woodson’s proclama¬ tion, was about to deal out destruction to that town. A thousand Border Ruffians (at least two eye-witnesses say twenty-five hundred), led by their recognized Missouri chiefs, were at that moment camped within striking distance of the hated ‘‘New Boston.” Their published address, which declared that “ these traitors, assassins, and robbers must now be punished, must now be taught a lesson they will remem¬ ber,” that “ Lane’s army and its allies must be expelled from the territory,” left no doubt of their errand. This news reached the governor about mid¬ night of his second day in Lecompton. One of the brigadiers of the skeleton militia was apparently in command, and not yet having caught the cue of the governor’s intentions, reported the force for orders, “in the field, ready for duty, and impatient to act.”|| At about the same hour he received a message from the agent he had sent to Lawrence to distribute copies of his inaugural, that the people of that town were arming and prepar¬ ing to receive and repel this contemplated attack of the Missourians. The governor was dumfounded at the information. His prom¬ ises and policy, upon which the ink was not yet dry, were already in jeopardy. Instead of bringing peace his advent was about to open war. In this contingency the governor took his measures with true military promptness. He immediately dispatched to the Missouri camp Secretary Woodson with copies of his inaugu¬ ral, and the adjutant-general of the territory with orders to disband and muster out of service the Missouri volunteers, ^ while he himself, at the head of three hundred dragoons and a light battery, moved rapidly to Law¬ rence, a distance of twelve miles. Entering that town at sunrise, he found a few hundred men hastily organized for defense in the im¬ provised intrenchments and barricades about the place, ready enough to sell their lives, but vastly more willing to intrust their protection to the governor’s authority and the Federal % Geary to Marcy, Sept. 12th, 1856. Ibid., p. 95. II General Heiskell to Geary, Sept, nth and 12th, 1856. Gihon, pp. 136-7. If Geary to Marcy, Sept. i6th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 107.

Page 103

97 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. troops.* They listened to his speech and readily promised to obey his requirements. Since the Missourians had officially re¬ ported themselves to him as subject to his orders, the governor supposed that his in¬ junctions, conveyed to them in writing and print, and borne by the Secretary and the adju¬ tant-general of the territory, would suffice to send them back at once to their own borders, and he returned to Lecompton to take up his thorny duties of administration. But though forewarned by ex- Governor Shannon and by General Smith, the governor did not yet real¬ ize the temper and purpose of either the cabal conspirators or the Border-Ruffian rank and file. He had just dispatched a military force in another direction to intercept and disarm a raid about to be made by a detachment of Lane’s men, when news came to him that the Missourians were still moving upon Lawrence in increased force, that his officers had not yet delivered theirorders, and that skirmishing had begun between the outposts. Menaced thus with dishonor on one side and contempt on the other, he gathered all his available Federal troops, and hurrying for¬ ward posted them between Lawrence and the invaders. Then he went to the Missouri camp, where the true condition of affairs be¬ gan to dawn upon him. All the Border-Ruffian chiefs were there, headed by Atchison in per¬ son, who was evidently the controlling force, though a member of the legislature of the State of Missouri, named Reid, exercised nominal command, f He found his orders unheeded and on every hand mutterings of impatience and threats of defiance. These invading aliens had not the least disposition * Colonel Cooke to Porter, A. A. G., Sept. 13th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. IIL, p. 113. t Wilder, p. 108; Gihon, p. 152. t Colonel Cooke to Porter, Sept. i6th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 121. HOUSE OCCUPIED BY GOVERNOR GEARY. Vol. XXXTV.— 14^. JOHN W. GEARY (l866). (from a photograph by draper & HUSTED.) to receive commands as Kansas militia; they invoked that name only as a cloak to shield them from the legal penalties due their real character as organized banditti. The governor called the chiefs together and made them an earnest harangue. He explained to them his conciliatory policy, read his in¬ structions from Washington, affirmed his de¬ termination to keep peace, and appealed per¬ sonally to Atchison to aid him in enforcing law and preserving order. That wily chief, seeing that refusal would put him in the attitude of a law-breaker, feigned a ready compliance, and he and Reid, his factotum commander, made eloquent speeches calculated to produce submission to the legal demands made upon them.”J Some of the lesser captains, however, were mu¬ tinous, and treated the gov¬ ernor to choice bits of Border- Ruffian rhetoric. Law and violence vibrated in uncertain balance, when Colonel Cooke, commanding the Federal troops, took the floor and cut the knot of discussion in a summary way. I felt called upon to say some words my¬ self,” he writes naively, ap¬ pealing to these militia officers as an old resident of Kansas and friend to the Missourians to submit to the patriotic de¬ mand that they should retire,

Page 104

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 98 assuring them of my perfect confidence in the inflexible justice of the governor, and that it would become my painful duty to sustain him at the cannon’s mouth.” * This argument was decisive. The valiant border chiefs felt will¬ ing enough to lead their awkward squads against the slight barricades of Lawrence, but quailed at the unlooked-for prospect of encountering the carbines and sabers of half a regiment of regular dragoons and the grape- shot of a well-drilled light battery. They ac¬ cepted the inevitable; and swallowing their rage and still nursing their revenge, they con¬ sented perforce to retire and be “ honorably ” mustered out. But for this narrow contin¬ gency Lawrence would have been sacked by of a muster out,” rather than the fine, im¬ prisonment, or halter which the full execution of their design would render them liable to, another detachment of Federal dragoons was enforcing the bogus laws upon a company of free-State men who had just had a skirmish with another detachment of this same invad¬ ing army of Border Ruffians, at a place called Hickory Point. The encounter itself had all the usual characteristics of the dozens of simi¬ lar affairs which occurred during this prolonged period of border warfare — a neighborhood feud ; neighborhood violence ; the appearance of organized bands for retaliation ; the taking of forage, animals, and property; the fortifying of two or three log-houses by a pro- slavery DRAWN BY WILLIAM BREYMAN. LITHOGRAPHED BY J. H. BUFFORD. BATTLE OF HICKORY POINT. (IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) the direct agency of the territorial cabal a second time. Nothing could more forcibly demonstrate the unequal character of the contest between the slave-State and the free-State men in Kansas, even in these manoeuvres and conflicts of civil war, than the companion exploit to this third Lawrence raid. The day before Governor Geary, seconded by the “cannon” argument of Colonel Cooke, was convincing the reluctant Missourians that it was better to accept, as a reward for their unfinished expedi¬ tion, the pay, rations, and honorable discharge * Cooke to Porter, Sept. i6th, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III., p. 122. company then on its way to join in the Law¬ rence attack, and finally the appearance of a more numerous free-State party to dislodge them. The besieging column, some three hundred and fifty in number, had brought up a brass four-pounder, lately captured from the pro-slavery men, and with this and their rifles' kept up a long-range fire for about six hours, when the garrison of Border Ruffians capitu¬ lated on condition of being allowed “ honor¬ ably” to evacuate their stronghold and retire. The casualties were one man killed and several wounded.t t Examination, Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., pp. 156-169.

Page 105

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 99 The rejoicing of the free-State men over this not too brilliant victory was short-lived. Returning home in separate squads, they were successively intercepted by the Federal dragoons acting as a posse to the Deputy United States Marshal,* who arrested them on civil writs obtained in haste by an active member of the territorial cabal, and to the number of eighty-nine f were taken prisoners to Lecompton. So far the affair had been of such frequent occurrence as to have become commonplace — a frontier free fight,” as they themselves described and regarded it. But now it took on a truly remarkable aspect. Sterling G. Cato, one of the pro-slavery territorial judges, had been found by Gov¬ ernor Geary in the Missouri camp drilling and doing duty as a soldier, j: ready and doubtless more than willing to take part in the projected sack of Lawrence. This Federal judge, as open a law-breaker as these Hickory Point prisoners (the two affairs really forming part of one and the same enterprise), now seated himself on his judicial bench and com¬ mitted the whole party for trial on charge of murder in the first degree ; § and at the Octo¬ ber term of his court proceeded to try and condemn to penalties prescribed by the bogus laws some eighteen or twenty of these prisoners, for offenses in which in equity and good morals Captain Wood to Colonel Cooke, Sept. i6tli, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. III.,pp. 123- 126. t Geary to Marcy, October ist, 1856. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 156. t Gihon, p. 158. § Record of examination. Senate Docs., 3d Sess. 34th Cong. Vol. II., p. 169. GENERAL P. ST. GEORGE COOKE (l86l). (from a photograph TAKEN BY WHITEHURST.) DRAWN By WILLIAM BREYMAN. LITHOGRAPHED BY J. H. BUFFORO. IN LECOMPTON PRISON. (IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.)

Page 106

FREE-STATE PRISONERS ON THEIR WAY TO LECOMPTON.

Page 107

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, lOI he was personally particeps crimmis — some of the convicts being held in confinement until the following March, when they were par¬ doned by the governor. * l7iter arma sile7it leges, say the publicists ; but in this particular instance the license of guerilla war, the fraudu¬ lent statutes of the territory, and the laws of Congress were combined and perverted with a Satanic ingenuity in furtherance of this wretched conspiracy. The vigorous proceedings of Governor Geary, the forced retirement of the Missou¬ rians on the one hand, and the arrest and con¬ viction of the free-State partisans on the other, had the effect to bring the guerilla war to an abrupt termination. The retribution had fallen very unequally upon the two parties to the conflict, t but this was due to the legal traps and pitfalls prepared with such artful design by the Atchison conspiracy, and not to the personal indifference or ill-will of the gover¬ nor. He strove sincerely to restore impartial administration; he completed the disband¬ ment of the territorial militia, reenlisting into the Federal service one pro-slavery and one free-State company for police duty. By the end of September he was enabled to write to Washington that ‘‘peace now reigns in Kan¬ sas.” Encouraged by this success in allaying guerilla strife, he next endeavored to break up the existing political persecution and in¬ trigues. It was not long, however, before Governor Geary became conscious, to his great surprise and mortification, that he had been nominated and sent to Kansas as a partisan manoeuvre, and not to institute administrative reforms; that his instructions, written during the presi¬ dential campaign, to tranquillize Kansas by * Gihon, pp. 142-3. Geary, Executive Minutes, Sen¬ ate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. VI., p. 195. + The Kansas territorial legislature, in the year 1859, by which time local passion had greatly sub¬ sided, by law empowered a non-partisan board of three commissioners to collect sworn testimony concerning the ravages of the civil war in Kansas, with a view of obtaining indemnity from the General Government for the individual sufferers. These commissioners, after a careful examination, made an official report, from which may be gleaned an interesting summary in num¬ bers and values of the harvest of crime and destruction which the Kansas contest produced, and which report can be relied upon, since eye-witnesses and participants of both parties freely contributed their testimony at the invitation of the commissioners. The commissioners fixed the period of the war as be¬ ginning about November 1st, 1855, and continuing until about December ist, 1856. They estimated that the en¬ tire loss and destruction of property, including the cost of fitting out the various expeditions, amounted to an aggregate of not less than $2,000,000. Fully one- half of this loss, they thought, was directly sustained by actual settlers of Kansas. They received petitions and took testimony in 463 cases. They reported 41 7 cases as 4 Marcy to Geary, August his “ energy, impartiality, and discretion,” J really meant that after Mr. Buchanan was elected he should satisfy the Atchison cabal. In less than six months after he had come to the territory, clothed with the executive authority, speaking the President’s voice, and representing the unlimited military power of the republic, he, the third Democratic governor of Kansas, was, like his predecessors, in secret and ignoble flight from the province he had so trustfully come to rule, contemned and execrated by his party associates, aban¬ doned and disgraced by the Administration which had appointed him, and without pro¬ tection to guard him from the assault of high¬ wayman or assassin. Humiliating as was this local conspiracy to plant servitude in Kansas, a more aggressive political movement to nationalize slavery in all the Union was about to eclipse it. THE CONVENTIONS OF 1856. In the State of Illinois, the spring of the year 1856 saw an almost spontaneous impulse to¬ ward the formation of a new party. As already described, it was a transition period in politics. The disorganization of the Whig party was ma¬ terially increased and hastened by the failure, two years before, to make Lincoln a Senator. On the other hand, the election of Trumbull served quite as eflectively to consolidate the Democratic rebellion against Douglas in his blind determination to make the support of his Nebraska bill a test of party orthodoxy. Many of the Northern counties formed “ Re¬ publican ” organizations in the two previous years ; but the name was entirely local, while the opposition, not yet united, but fighting in factions against the Nebraska bill, only entitled to indemnity. The detailed figures and values of property destroyed are presented as follows : “Amount of crops destroyed, $37,349.61 ; number of buildings burned and destroyed, 78; horses taken or destroyed, 368 ; cattle taken or destroyed, 533. Amount of property owned by pro-slavery men, $77,- 198.99; property owned by free-State men, $335,- 779.04; property taken or destroyed by pro-slavery men, $318,718.63; property taken or destroyed by free-State men, $94,529.40.” About the loss of life the commissioners say, “ Al¬ though not within our province, we may be excused for stating that, from the most reliable information that we have been able to gather, by the secret warfare of the guerilla system, and in well-known encounters, the number of lives sacrificed in Kansas during the period mentioned probably exceeded rather than fell short of two hundred. . . . That the excitement in the Eastern and Southern States, in 1856, was insti¬ gated and kept up by garbled and exaggerated ac¬ counts of Kansas affairs, published in the Eastern and Southern newspapers, is true, most true ; but the half of what was done by either party was never chroni¬ cled!” — House Reports, 2d Sess. 36th Cong. Vol. III., Part I, pp. 90 and 93. 26th, 1856. Gihon, p. 272.

Page 108

102 ABHAHAM LINCOLN, acknowledged political affinity under the gen¬ eral term of the Anti-Nebraska ” party. In the absence of any existing party ma¬ chinery, some fifteen editors of anti-Ne¬ braska newspapers met for conference at Decatur on the 2 2d of February and issued a call for a delegate State convention of the ^‘Anti-Nebraska party,” to meet at Bloom¬ ington on the 29th of May. Prominent lead¬ ers, as a rule, hesitated to commit themselves by their presence at Decatur. Not so with Mr. Lincoln. He could not attend the delib¬ erations as an editor; but he doubtless lent his suggestion and advice, for we find him among the distinguished guests and speakers at the banquet which followed the business session, and toasts to his candidacy as “ the next United States Senator” show that his leadership had suffered no abatement. The assembled editors purposely set the Bloom¬ ington convention for a somewhat late day in the campaign, and before the time arrived, the political situation in the State was already much more clearly defined. One factor which greatly baffled the calcu¬ lations and forecast of politicians was the ex¬ istence of the Know-Nothing or American party. It was apparent to all that this order or affiliation had during the past two years spread into Illinois, as into other States. But as its machinery and action were secret, and as no general election had occurred since 1854 to exhibit its numerical strength, its possible scope and influence could only be vaguely estimated. Still it was clearly present as a positive force. Its national council had in February at Phila¬ delphia nominated Fillmore and Donelson as a presidential ticket ; but the preponderating Southern membership forced an indorsement of the Kansas-Nebraska act into its platform, which destroyed the unity and power of the party, driving the Northern delegates to a bolt. Nevertheless many N'Srthern voters, indifferent to the slavery issue, still sought to maintain its organization; and thus in Illinois the State Council met early in May, ratified the nom¬ ination of Fillmore for President, and nomi¬ nated candidates for governor and other State offices.* The Democratic party, or rather so much of that party as did not openly repudiate the pol¬ icy and principle of the Kansas-Nebraska act, made early preparations for a vigorous cam¬ paign. The great loss in prestige and numbers he had already sustained admonished Douglas that his political fortunes hung in a doubtful bal¬ ance. But he was a bold and aggressive leader, to whom controversy and party warfare were rather an inspiration than a discouragement. Under his guidance, the Democratic State con- ^ “ History of Illinois,” Davidson and Stuv^, p. 648. vention nominated for governor of Illinois William A. Richardson, late a member of the House of Representatives, in which body as chairman of the Committee on Territories he had been the leader to whom the success of the Nebraska bill was specially intrusted, and where his somewhat unscrupulous parliament¬ ary management had contributed materially to the final passage of that measure. Thus the attitude of opposing factions and the unorganized unfolding of public opinion, rather than any mere promptings or combina¬ tions of leaders, developed the cause of the anti- Nebraska men of Illinois. Out of this condition sprang directly one important ele¬ ment of future success. Richardson’s candi¬ dacy, long foreshadowed, was seen to require an opposing nominee of unusual popularity. He was found in the person of Colonel William H. Bissell, late a Democratic representative in Congress, where he had denounced disunion in 1850, and opposed the Nebraska bill in 1854. He had led a regiment to the Mexican war, and fought gallantly at the battle of Buena Vista. His military laurels easily carried him’ into Congress ; but the exposures of the Mex¬ ican campaign also burdened him with a disease which paralyzed his lower limbs, and compelled retirement from active politics after his second term. He was now, however, once more recov¬ ering; and having already exhibited civic tal¬ ents of a high order, the popular voice made light of his physical infirmity, and his friends declared their readiness to match the brains of Bissell against the legs of his opponents. One piece of his history rendered him spe¬ cially acceptable to young and spirited Western voters. His service in Congress began amid exciting debates over the Compromise meas¬ ures of 1850, when the Southern fire-eaters were already rampant and reckless. Seddon of Virginia, in his eagerness to depreciate the North and glorify the South, affirmed in a speech that at the battle of Buena Vista, “ at that most critical juncture when all seemed lost save honor,” amid the discomfiture and rout of “ the brave but unfortunate troops of the North through a mistaken order,” “ the no¬ ble regiment of Mississippians ” had snatched victory from the jaws of death, t Replying some days later to Seddon’s innuendo, Bis¬ sell, competent by his presence on the battle¬ field to bear witness, retorted that when the 2d Indiana gave way, it was McKee’s 2d Kentucky, Hardin’s ist Illinois, and Bissell’s 2d Illinois which had retrieved the fortunes of the hour, and that the vaunted Mississippi regiment was not within a mile and a half of the scene of action. Properly this was an is¬ sue of veracity between Seddon and Bissell, of t January 23d, 1850; “ Globe,” app. 78.

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ABRAHAM LINCOLN. easy solution. But Jefferson Davis, who com¬ manded the Mississippi regiment in question, began an interchange of notes with Bissell which from the first smelt of gunpowder. Were his reported remarks correct? asked Davis in substance. Bissell answered, repeat¬ ing the language of his speech and defining the spot and the time to which it applied, add¬ ing, I deem it due, in justice alike to myself and the Mississippi regiment, to say that I made no charge against that regiment.” Davis persisting, then asked, in substance, whether he meant to deny General Lane’s official report that “ the regiment of Mississippians came to the rescue at the proper time to save the for¬ tunes of the day.” Bissell rejoined, My re¬ marks had reference to a different time and place from those referred to by General Lane.” At this point both parties might with great propriety have ended the correspondence. Sufficient inquiry had been met by generous explanation. But Davis, apparently determined to push Bissell to the wall, now sent his chal¬ lenge. This time, however, he met his match in courage. Bissell named an officer of the army as his second, instructing him to suggest as weapons “muskets, loaded with ball and buckshot.” The terms of combat do not appear to have been formally proposed be¬ tween the friends who met to arrange matters, but they were evidently understood ; for the affair was hushed up, with the simple addition to Bissell’s first reply that he was willing to award the Mississippi regiment “ the credit due to their gallant and distinguished services in that battle.” The Bloomington convention came togeth¬ er according to call on the 29th of May. By this time the active and observant politicians of the State had become convinced that the anti-Nebraska struggle was not a mere* tem¬ porary and insignificant “abolition” excite¬ ment, but a deep and abiding political issue, involving in the fate of slavery the fate of the nation. Minor and past differences were therefore generously postponed or waived in favor of a hearty coalition on the single dom¬ inant question. A most notable gathering of the clans was the result. About one-fourth of the counties sent regularly chosen delega¬ tions ; the rest were volunteers. In spirit and enthusiasm, therefore, it was rather a mass¬ meeting than a convention; but every man present was in some sort a leader in his own locality. The assemblage was much more representative than similar bodies gathered by the ordinary caucus machinery. It was an earnest and determined council of five or six hundred cool, sagacious, independent thinkers, called together by a great public exigency, led and directed by the first minds of the State. 103 Not only did it show a brilliant array of emi¬ nent names, but a remarkable contrast of for¬ mer antagonisms: Whigs, Democrats, Free- soilers, Know-nothings, Abolitionists; Judd, Yates, Peck, Swett, Trumbull, Davis, Lovejoy, Browning, Codding, Williams, and many more. Chief among these, as adviser and actor, was Abraham Lincoln. Rarely has a deliberative body met under circumstances more exciting than did this one. The Congressional debates at Washington and the civil war in Kansas were each at a cul¬ mination of passion and incident. Within ten days Sumner had been struck down in the Senate, and the town of Lawrence sacked by the guerilla posse of Atchison and Sheriff Jones. Ex-Governor Reeder, of that suffering territory, addressed the citizens of Bloomington and the earliest-arriving delegates on the even¬ ing of the 28th, bringing the very atmosphere of the Kansas conflict into the convention itself. The convention met and conducted its work with earnestness and dignity. Bissell, already designated by unmistakable popular indications, was nominated for governor by acclamation. The candidate for lieutenant- governor was named in like manner. So little did the convention think or care about the mere distribution of political honors on the one hand, and so much, on the other, did it regard and provide for the success of the cause, that it did not even ballot for the remaining candidates on the State ticket, but deputed to a committee the task of selecting and arranging them, and adopted its report as a whole and by acclamation. The more difficult task of draft¬ ing a platform was performed by another com¬ mittee, with such prudence that it too received a unanimous acceptance. It boldly adopted the Republican name, formulated the Repub¬ lican creed, and the convention further ap¬ pointed delegates to the coming Republican national convention. There were stirring speeches by eloquent leaders, eagerly listened to and vociferously ap¬ plauded ; but scarcely a man stirred from his seat in the crowded hall until Mr. Lincoln had been heard. Every one felt the fitness of his making the closing argument and exhortation, and right nobly did he honor their demand. A silence full of emotion filled the assembly as for a moment before beginning his tall form stood in commanding attitude on the rostrum, the impressiveness of his theme and the signifi¬ cance of the occasion reflected in his thought¬ ful and earnest features. The spell of the hour was visibly upon him ; and holding his audi¬ ence in rapt attention, he closed in a brilliant peroration with an appeal to the people to join the Republican standard, to

Page 110

104 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, “ Come as the winds come, when forests are rended ; Come as the waves come, when navies are stranded.” The influence was irresistible; the audience rose and acknowledged the speaker’s power with cheer upon cheer. Unfortunately the speech was never reported; but its effect lives vividly in the memory of all who heard it, and it crowned his right to popular leadership in his own State, which thereafter was never dis¬ puted. The organization of the Republican party for the nation at large proceeded very much in the same manner as that for the State of Illinois. Pursuant to separate preliminary correspondence and calls from State commit¬ tees, a general meeting of prominent Repub¬ licans or anti- Nebraska politicians from all parts of the North, and even from a few bor¬ der slave States, came together at Pittsburgh on Washington’s birthday, February 2 2d. Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania sent the largest contingents ; but around this great cen¬ tral nucleus were gathered small but earnest delegations, aggregating between three and four hundred zealous leaders, representing twenty-eight States and territories. It was merely an informal mass convention; but many of the delegates were men of national char¬ acter, each of whose names was itself a suf¬ ficient credential. Above all, the members caught the inspiration of wisdom from their opportunity; they were cautious, moderate, conciliatory, and unambitious to act beyond the requirements of the hour. They contented themselves with the usual parliamentary rou¬ tine; appointed a committee on national or¬ ganization; issued a call for a delegate convention ; and adopted and put forth a stir¬ ring address to the country. Their resolutions were brief, and formulated but four demands : the repeal of all laws which allow the intro¬ duction of slavery into territories once conse¬ crated to freedom; resistance by constitutional means to slavery in any United States terri¬ tory; the immediate admission of Kansas as a free State, and the overthrow of the present national Administration. In response to the official call embodied in the Pittsburgh address, the first national con¬ vention of the Republican party met at Phil¬ adelphia on the 17th of June, 1856. The character and dignity of the Pittsburgh pro¬ ceedings assured the new party of immediate prestige and acceptance; with so favorable a sponsorship it sprang full-armed into the political conflict. That conflict which opened the year with the long congressional contest over the speakership, and which found its only solution in the choice of Banks by a plurality vote, had been fed by fierce congressional de¬ bates, by presidential messages and proclama¬ tions, by national conventions, by the Sumner assault, by the Kansas war; the body politic throbbed with activity and excitement in every fiber. Every free State and several border States and territories were represented in the Philadelphia convention; its regular and ir¬ regular delegates counted nearly a full thou¬ sand of eager local leaders, full of the zeal of new proselytes. The party was too young and its prospect of immediate success altogether too slender to develop any serious rivalry for a presiden¬ tial nomination. Because its strength lay evidently among the former adherents of the now dissolved and abandoned Whig party, Seward naturally took highest rank in leader¬ ship ; after him stood Chase as the represen¬ tative of the independent Democrats, who, bringing fewer voters, had nevertheless con¬ tributed the main share of the courageous pioneer work. It is, however, a just tribute to their sagacity that they were willing to wait for the maturer strength and riper opportu¬ nities of the new organization. Mr. Justice McLean of the Supreme Bench, an eminent jurist, a faithful Whig, w^hose character happily combined both the energy and the conserva¬ tism of the great West, also had a large follow¬ ing; but as might have been expected, the convention found a more typical leader, young in years, daring in character, brilliant in ex¬ ploit ; and after one informal ballot it nomi¬ nated John C. Fremont of California. The credit of the selection and its successful man¬ agement has been popularly awarded to Fran¬ cis P. Blair, senior, somewhat famous as the talented and powerful newspaper lieutenant of President Jackson; but it was rather an intuitive popular choice, which at the moment seemed so indisputably appropriate as to pre¬ clude necessity for artful intrigue. There was a dash of romance in the per¬ sonal history of Fremont which gave his nomination a high popular relish. Of French descent, bom in Savannah, Georgia, orphaned at an early age, he acquired a scientific edu¬ cation largely by his own unaided efforts in private study; a sea voyage as teacher of mathematics, and employment in a railroad survey through the then wilderness of the Tennessee Mountains, developed the taste and the qualifications that made him useful as an assistant in Nicollet’s scientific explora¬ tion of the great plateau where the Missis¬ sippi River finds its sources, and secured his appointment as second lieutenant of topo¬ graphical engineers. These labors brought him to Washington, where the same Gallic restlessness and recklessness which had ren¬ dered the restraint of schools insupportable brought about an attachment, elopement, and

Page 111

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. i°5 MILLARD FILLMORE. (FROM A DAGUERREOTYPE.) marriage with the daughter of Senator Ben¬ ton of Missouri. Reconciliation followed in good time; and the unexplored great West being Benton’s peculiar hobby, through his influence Fre¬ mont was sent with an exploring party to the Rocky Mountains. Under his command sim¬ ilar expeditions were repeated again and again to that yet mysterious wonderland; and never were the wildest fictions read with more avidity than his official reports of daily adven¬ ture and danger and discovery, of scaling un¬ climbed mountains, wrecking his canoes on the rapids of unvisited rivers, parleying or battling with hostile Indians, or facing star¬ vation while hemmed in by trackless snows. One of these journeys had led him to the Pacific coast when our war with Mexico let loose the spirit of revolution in the then Mexican province of California. With the abandon of a petrel in a storm, Fremont joined his little company of explorers to the insurrectionary faction, organized the revolt, improvised and took command of a mounted regiment, overturned the tottering local Mexi¬ can authority and put her remnant of officials to flight, setting up instead a temporary gov¬ ernment under a declaration of independence. VoL. XXXIV.— 15. With others he skillfully assisted in turning this movement into a conquest of the country for the United States; and when through the famous gold discoveries California was soon afterwards organized and admitted as a new State of the Union, Fremont became for a brief period one of her first United States Senators. So salient a record could not well be with¬ out strong contrasts, and of these unsparing criticism took advantage. High romance was changed to merciless ridicule by thousands of sharp newspaper quills in the savage dissec¬ tions to which presidential candidates are sub¬ jected. Hostile journals delineated Fr^iiont as a shallow, vainglorious, “ woolly-horse,” ‘‘mule-eating,” “free-love,” “nigger-embrac¬ ing” black Republican; an extravagant, in¬ subordinate, reckless adventurer; a financial spendthrift and political mountebank. As the reading public is not always skillful in winnow¬ ing truth from libel when artfully mixed in print, even the grossest calumnies were not without their effect in contributing to his de¬ feat. To the sanguine zeal of the new Re¬ publican party, however, Fremont was for the hour a heroic and ideal leader; for upon the vital point at issue, his antislavery votes and

Page 112

io6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. clear declarations satisfied every doubt and inspired unlimited confidence. However picturesquely Fremont for the moment loomed up as the standard-bearer of the Republican party, future historical interest centers upon the second act of the Philadel¬ phia convention. It shows us how strangely to human wisdom vibrate the delicately bal¬ anced scales of fate ; or rather how inscrutable being scattered among thirteen other names,* The dominating thought of the convention being the assertion of principle, and not the promotion of men, there was no further con¬ test;! and though Mr. Dayton had not re¬ ceived a majority support, his nomination was nevertheless at once made unanimous. Those who are familiar with the eccentricities of nomi¬ nating conventions when in this listless and drift- JOHN C. FREMONT. (FROM A STEEL PLATE IN POSSESSION OF MRS. FREMONT.) and yet how unerring are the far-reaching processes of divine providence. The principal candidate having been selected without con¬ tention or delay, the convention proceeded to a nomination for Vice-President. On the first informal ballot William L. Dayton of New Jersey received 259 votes and Abraham Lincoln of Illinois no; the remaining votes "^For David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, 43 ; Preston King of New York, 9; Charles Sumner of Massachu¬ setts, 36; Thomas PI. Ford of Ohio, 7; Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, 3; Jacob Collamer of Vermont, 15 ; Will¬ iam F. Johnstonof Pennsylvania, 2; Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, 46 ; Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, 7; William Pennington of New Jersey, i ; - Carey of New Jersey, 3; S. C. Pomeroy of Kansas, 8; J. K. Gid- ingmood know how easily an opportune speech from some eloquent delegate or a few adroitly arranged delegation caucuses might have re¬ versed this result; and imagination may not easily construct the possible changes in his¬ tory which a successful campaign of the ticket in that form might have wrought. What would have been the consequences to America and dings of Ohio, 2. The vote in detail for Lincoln was : Maine, i; New Plampshire, 8; Massachusetts, 7; Rhode Island, 2 ; New York, 3 ; Pennsylvania, 1 1 ; Ohio, 2; Indiana, 26; Illinois, 33; Michigan, 5; California, 12. t Mr. T. S. Van Dyke, son of one of the delegates to Philadelphia, kindly writes us : “ Nothing that Mr. Lin¬ coln has ever written is more characteristic than the following note from him to my father just after the

Page 113

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, humanity had the Rebellion, even then being vaguely devised by Southern Hotspurs, burst upon the nation in the winter of 1856, with the nation’s sword of commander-in-chief in the hand of the impulsive Fremont, and Lin¬ coln, inheriting the patient wariness and cool blood of three generations of pioneers and In- dian-fighters, wielding only the powerless gavel of Vice-President ? But the hour of destiny had not yet struck. The platform devised by the Philadelphia convention was unusually bold in its affirma¬ tions, and most happy in its phraseology. Not only did it “deny the authority of Congress, or of a territorial legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal exist¬ ence to slavery in any territory of the United States it further “ Resolved, that the Consti¬ tution confers upon Congress sovereign power over the territories of the United States for their government, and that in the exercise of this power it is both the right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism, — polygamy and sla¬ very.” At Buchanan, recently nominated by the Democratic National Convention in Cin¬ cinnati, it aimed a barbed shaft : “ Resolved, that the highwayman’s plea that ‘ might makes right,’ embodied in the Ostend circular, was in every respect unworthy of American diploma¬ cy, and would bring shame and dishonor upon any government or people that gave it their sanction.” It demanded the maintenance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, of the Federal Constitution, of the rights of the States, and the union of the States. It favored a Pacific railroad, congressional appropria¬ tions for national rivers and harbors ; it af¬ firmed liberty of conscience and equality of rights ; it arraigned the policy of the Admin¬ istration; demanded the immediate admis¬ sion of Kansas as a State, and invited “the affiliation and cooperation of men of all parties, however differing from them in other respects, in support of the principles declared.” The nominees and platform of the Phila¬ delphia convention were accepted by the oppo¬ sition voters of the free States with an alacrity and an enthusiasm beyond the calculation of even the most sanguine; and in November a vote was recorded in their support which, though then unsuccessful, laid the secure foun¬ dation of an early victory, and permanently es¬ tablished a great party destined to carry the country through trials and vicissitudes equal in convention — not for publication, but merely as a pri¬ vate expression of his feelings to an old acquaintance : “ ‘ Springfield, III., June 27, 1856. “ ‘ Hon. John Van Dyke. My Dear Sir : Allow me to thank you for your kind notice of me in the Philadelphia convention. 107 WILLIAM L. DAYTON. (from a photograph by MOSHS E. ERTZ.) magnitude and results to any which the world had hitherto witnessed. In the present year none of the presiden¬ tial honors were reserved for the State of Illi¬ nois. While Lincoln thus narrowly missed a nomination for the second place on the Repub¬ lican ticket, his fellow-citizen and competitor, Douglas, failed equally to obtain the nomina¬ tion he so much coveted as the candidate of the Democratic party. The Democratic national convention had met at Cincinnati on the 2d day of June, 1856. If Douglas flattered himself that such eminent services as he had rendered the South would now find their reward, his disappointment must have been severe. A frequent phenomenon of hu¬ man nature again occurred. While the bene¬ fits he had conferred were lightly estimated or totally forgotten, former injuries inflicted in his name were keenly remembered and re¬ sented. But three prominent candidates, Bu¬ chanan, Pierce, and Douglas, were urged upon the convention. The indiscreet crusade of Douglas’s friends against “ old fogies ” in 1852 had defeated Buchanan and nominated Pierce; now, by the turn of political fortune, Buchan¬ an’s friends were able to wipe out the double score by defeating both Pierce and Douglas. The bulk of the Southern delegates seem to have been guided by the mere instinct of pres¬ ent utility; they voted to renominate Pierce, “‘When you meet Judge Dayton present my respects, and tell him I think him a far better man than I for the position he is in, and that I shall support both him and Colonel Fremont most cordially. Present my best respects to Mrs. V., and believe me. Yours truly, ‘“A. Lincoln.’ ”

Page 114

io8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. because of his subservient Kansas policy, for¬ getting that Douglas had not only begun it, but was their strongest future ally to continue it. When after a day of fruitless balloting they changed their votes to Douglas, Buchanan, the so-called “old fogy,” just returned from the Eng¬ lish mission, and therefore not handicapped by present personal jealousies and heart¬ burnings, had secured the firm adhesion of a decided majority, mainly from the North.* The “ two-thirds rule ” was not yet fulfilled, but at this juncture the friends of Pierce and Douglas yielded to the inevitable, and with¬ drew their favorites in the interest of “ har¬ mony.” On the seventeenth ballot, therefore, and the fifth day of the convention, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania became the unan¬ imous nominee of the Democratic party for President, and John C. Breckinridge of Ken¬ tucky for Vice-President. The famous “ Cincinnati platform” holds a conspicuous place in party literature for length, for vigor of language, for variety of topics, for boldness of declaration ; and yet, strange to say, its chief merit and utility lay in the skill¬ ful concealment of its central thought and purpose. About one-fourth of its great length is devoted to what to the eye looks like a somewhat elaborate exposition of the doc¬ trines of the party on the slavery question. Eliminate the verbiage and there only re¬ mains an indorsement of “ the principles contained in the organic laws establishing the Territory of Kansas and Nebraska” (non¬ interference by Congress with slavery in State and territory, or in the District of Columbia) ; and the practical applicatipn of “ the princi¬ ples ” is thus further defined : “ Resolved, that we recognize the right of the peo¬ ple of all the territories, including Kansas and Nebraska, acting through the legally and fairly expressed will of a majority of actual residents, and whenever the num¬ ber of their inhabitants justifies it, to form a Constitu¬ tion with or without domestic slavery, and be admitted into the Union upon terms of perfect equality with the other States.” We have already seen how deliberately the spirit and letter of “the principle” was vio¬ lated by the Democratic national administra¬ tion of President Pierce, and by nearly all the Democratic Senators and Representatives in Congress ; and we shall see how the more ex¬ plicit resolution was again even more flagrantly * On the sixteenth ballot Buchanan received i68 votes, of which 121 were from the free States and 47 from the slave States; Douglas received 122 votes, of which 49 were from the free States and 73 from the slave States; Cass received 6 votes, all from the free States ; Pierce had been finally dropped on the previous ballot. — “ Proceedings of Cincinnati Convention,” p. 45- t The vote more in detail was : For Buchanan, slave States, Alabama, 9 ; Arkansas, 4 ; Delaware, 3 ; PTor- violated by the Democratic nadonal adminis¬ tration and party under President Buchanan. F or the present, however, these well-rounded phrases were especially convenient ; first, to prevent any schism in the Cincinnati conven¬ tion itself, and, secondly, to furnish points for campaign speeches ; politicians not having any pressing desire, nor voters the requisite critical skill, to demonstrate how they left un¬ touched the whole brood of pertinent queries which the discussion had already raised, and which at the very next national convention were destined to disrupt and defeat the Dem¬ ocratic party. For this occasion the studied ambiguity of the Cincinnati platform made possible a last cooperation of North and South, in the face of carefully concealed mental res¬ ervations, to secure a presidential victory. It is not the province of this work to de¬ scribe the incidents of the national canvass, but only to record its results. At the election of November, 1856, Buchanan was chosen President. The popular vote in the nation at large stood: Buchanan, 1,838,169 ; Fremont, 1,341,264; Fillmore, 874,534. By States Bu¬ chanan received the votes of fourteen slave States and five free States, a total of 174 elec¬ tors ; Fremont the vote of eleven free States, a total of 1 14 electors ; and Fillmore the vote of one slave State, a total of eight electors.! Our recital has carried us forward beyond the regular order of chronological events; we must therefore turn back and once more take up the thread of local political history in the State of Illinois. Among the other work of the Bloomington convention was the nom¬ ination of a full ticket of Presidential electors, at the head of which was placed Abraham Lincoln. While this was a gratifying mark of honor, it was also a somewhat onerous post of duty, involving a laborious campaign of speech-making in support of the Republican presidential ticket. This duty Mr. Lincoln performed with faithful zeal, making about fifty speeches before election. Among the ad¬ dresses which he thus delivered in the differ¬ ent counties, it is interesting to read a frag¬ ment of a speech he made at Galena, Illinois, discussing the charge of “ sectionalism,” the identical pretext upon which the South inaugu¬ rated its rebellion against his administration four years afterward : ida, 3 ; Georgia, 10 ; Kentucky, 12 ; Louisiana, 6 ; Mis¬ sissippi, 7; Missouri, 9 ; North Carolina, 10; South Carolina, 8; Tennessee, 12; Texas, 4; Virginia, 15. Free States, California, 4 ; Illinois, ii; Indiana, 13; New Jersey, 7; Pennsylvania, 27. Total, 174. For Fremont, free States, Connecticut, 6; Iowa, 4; Maine, 8; Massachusetts, 13 ; Michigan, 6; Nevv Hamp¬ shire, 5 ; New York, 35 ; Ohio, 23 ; Rhode Island, 4; Vermont, 5; Wisconsin, 5. Total, 114. For Fillmore, slave State, Maryland, 8.

Page 115

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. You further charge us with being disunionists. If you mean that it is our aim to dissolve the Union, I for myself answer that it is untrue; for those who act with me I answer that it is untrue. Have you heard us assert that as our aim? Do you really believe that such is our aim ? Do you find it in our platform, our speeches, our conventions, or anywhere ? If not, with¬ draw the charge. “ But you may say that though it is not our aim, it will be the result, if we succeed, and that we are therefore disunionists in fact. This is a grave charge you make against us, and we certainly have a right to demand that you specify in what way we are to dissolve the Union. How are we to effect this? “The only specification offered is volunteered by Mr. Fillmore in his Albany speech. His charge is that if we elect a President and Vice-President both from the free States it will dissolve the Union. This is open folly. The Constitution provides that the President and Vice-President of the United States shall be of different States ; but says nothing as to the latitude and longitude of those States. In 1828 Andrew Jackson of Tennessee and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina were elected President and Vice-President, both from slave States; but no one thought of dissolving the Union then on that account. In 1840 Harrison of Ohio and Tyler of Virginia were elected. In 1841 Harrison died and John Tyler succeeded to the presi¬ dency, and William R. King of Alabama was elected acting Vice-President by the Senate ; but no one sup¬ posed that the Union was in danger. In fact, at the very time Mr. Fillmore uttered this idle charge, the state of things in the United States disproved it. Mr. Pierce of New Hampshire and Mr. Bright of Indiana, both from free States, are President and Vice- President, and the Union stands and will stand. You do not pretend that it ought to dissolve the Union, and the facts show that it won’t ; therefore the charge may be dismissed without further consideration. “No other specification is made, and the only one that could be made is, that the restoration of the restric¬ tion of 1820 making the United States territory free territory would dissolve the Union. Gentlemen, it will require a decided majority to pass such an act. We, the majority, being able constitutionally to do all that we purpose, would have no desire to dissolve the Union. Do you say that such restriction of slavery would be unconstitutional, and that some of the States would not submit to its enforcement ? I grant you that an unconstitutional act is not a law; but I do not ask and will not take your construction of the Constitution. The Supreme Court of the United States is the tribunal to decide such a question, and we will submit to its decisions ; and if you do also, there will be an end of the matter. Will you ? If not, who are the disunionists, you or we ? We, the majority, would not strive to dis¬ solve the Union; and if any attempt is made it must be by you, who so loudly stigmatize us as disunionists. But the Union, in any event, will not be dissolved. We don’t want to dissolve it, and if you attempt it we won’t let you. With the purse and sword, the army and navy and treasury in our hands and at our com¬ mand, you could not do it. This government would be very weak indeed if a majority with a disciplined army and navy and a well-filled treasury could not preserve itself, when attacked by an unarmed, undisciplined, unorganized minority. All this talk about the dissolu¬ tion of the Union is humbug, nothing but folly. We do not want to dissolve the Union; you shall not.” * With three presidential tickets in the field — with the Democrats seeking the election of * Galena “Advertiser,” copiedinto the Illinois “ State Journal,” August 8th, 1856. tFor President, Buchanan (Dem.), 105,344; Fre- VOL. XXXIV.— 16. 109 Buchanan and Breckinridge, the Americans, or Know-Nothings, asking votes for Fillmore and Donelson, and the Republicans making pros¬ elytes for Fremont and Dayton — the political campaign of 1856 was one of unabated activ¬ ity and excitement. In the State of Illinois the contest resulted in a drawn battle. The American party held together with tolerable firmness in its vote for President, but was largely disintegrated in its vote on the ticket for State officers. The consequence was that Illinois gave a plurality of 9164 for Buchanan, the Democratic candidate for President, while at the same time it gave a plurality of 4729 for Bissell, the Republican candidate for gov¬ ernor, t Half victory as it was, it furnished the Illinois Republicans a substantial hope of the full tri¬ umph which they achieved four years later. About a month after this election, at a Repub¬ lican banquet given in Chicago on the loth of December, 1856, Abraham Lincoln spoke as follows, partly in criticism of the last annual message of President Pierce, but more espe¬ cially as an unsleeping leader and prophet sounding a new battle-call and pointing out the rising star of promise : “We have another annual presidential message. Like a rejected lover making merry at the wedding of his rival, the President felicitates himself hugely over the late presidential election. He considers the result a signal triumph of good principles and good men, and a very pointed rebuke of bad ones. He says the peo¬ ple did it. He forgets that the ‘people,’ as he com¬ placently calls only those who voted for Buchanan, are in a minority of the whole people by about four hun¬ dred thousand votes — one full tenth of all the votes. Remembering this, he might perceive that the ‘ rebuke ’ may not be quite as durable as he seems to think — that the majority may not choose to remain perma¬ nently rebuked by that minority. “ The President thinks the great body of us Fre- monters, being ardently attached to liberty, in the ab¬ stract, were duped by a few wicked and designing men. There is a slight difference of opinion on this. We think he, being ardently attached to the hope of a sec¬ ond term, in the concrete, was duped by men who had liberty every way. He is the cat’s-paw. By much drag¬ ging of chestnuts from the fire for others to eat, his claws are burnt off to the gristle, and he is thrown aside as unfit for further use. As the fool said of Kmg Lear, when his daughters had turned him out-of-doors, ‘ He’s a shelled peascod.’ [That’s a sheal’d peascod.] “ So far as the President charges us ‘with a desire to change the domestic institutions of existing States,’ and of ‘doing everything in our power to deprive the Con¬ stitution and the laws of moral authority,’ for the whole party on belief, and for myself on knowledge, I pro¬ nounce the charge an un mixed and unmitigated false¬ hood. “ Our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion can change the govern¬ ment practically just so much. Public opinion, on any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate. That ‘central idea’ in our polit- mont (Rep.), 96,180; Fillmore (Am.), 37,451. For Governor, Richardson (Dem.), 106,643; Bissell (Rep.), 111,372; Morris (Am.), 19,241.

Page 116

no KEATS. ical public opinion at the beginning was, and until re¬ cently has continued to be, ‘ the equality of men.’ And although it has always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady prog¬ ress towards the practical equality of all men. The late presidential election was a struggle by one party to discard that central idea and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right in the abstract, the workings of which as a central idea may be the per¬ petuity of human slavery and its extension to all coun¬ tries and colors. Less than a year ago the Richmond ‘ Enquirer,’ an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase ‘State equality,’ and now 'the President, in his mes¬ sage, adopts the ‘ Enquirer’s ’ catch-phrase, telling us the people ‘have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States. ’ The President flatters himself that the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so indeed it is, so far as the mere fact of a presidential election can inaugurate it. To us it is left to know that the majority of the peo¬ ple have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will. All of us who did not vote for Mr. Bu¬ chanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But in the late contest we were divided be¬ tween Frdmont and Fillmore. Can we not come to¬ gether for the future ? Let every one who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not and shall not be a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he has done only what he thought best, let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be by¬ gones ; let past differences as nothing be ; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old ‘ central ideas ’ of the Republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us, God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare that ‘ all States as States are equal,’ nor yet that ‘ all citizens as citizens are equal,’ but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that ‘ all men are created equal.’ ” * * Illinois “ State Journal,” December i6th, 1856. [We are indebted for much valuable aid in preparing the Kansas illustrations to Judge F. G. Adams, Sec¬ retary of the Kansas State Historical Society. — Ed. C. M.] KEATS. Death hath his fancies, and why not ? A king So great as he must have his royal whim, — Sometimes a fool, sometimes the wailing string Of some slain minstrel’s harp, must humor him. There was a youthful singer once, a soul Loved of the gods, and hence not loved of men. Who sang too well, and, shame to say, the whole Small race of songsters rose against him then. And all the critics too — like daws that peck Some lustrous jewel from its golden set¬ ting — Beaked his fair lines, so, hastening on to wreck The fragile bark that every flaw was fretting. Love, also, with his barbed baby spear Racked all the chambers of his heart with anguish ; But bravely through it all, more strong and clear. Went up his matchless song that would not languish. And all so well he pleased the sable king. Though many a famous bard sang at his call. That straight he sent his messenger to bring This tortured soul which pleased him best of all. So Keats was brought, and when his strain beguiled The sad-faced king and his brave company To strange, unwonted tears — Death kindly smiled. Approving his unequaled minstrelsy. And when at times his watchful eye could trace The swiftly passing spasm of fierce pain Which swept across the minstrel’s pallid face. He quickly cried, Thy songs were not in vain ; Fixed in the world’s large memory they shall live. Undying as that beauty to whose shrine Thy kneeling soul brought all thou hadst to give; All things of which thy heart once dreamed are thine : ‘‘ As thou didst leave them they shall picture thee Both to thine own and far-off other lands. And while men sing, thy name shall never be Forgotten in their songs.” And so he stands, A fair-formed image of immortal youth Breasting the steep hillside of life’s endeavor; A white-robed herald of eternal truth Shouting a message from the gods forever. Robert Burns Wilson.

Page 117

WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. OLLY ANN SHINAULT was mending the Clover Bend ferry-boat. The ferry¬ boat was nothing more than an old scow, leaky and un¬ ruly. Lum, Polly Ann’s hus¬ band, meant to mend it that morning ; but Lum was scouring the bottom after a stray mule. So Polly Ann had pounded the head of the hatchet on the handle — they have a natural tendency to part and go their separate ways in a Southern yard — and was patching the leaks herself. They said at the Bend that Polly Ann was “ pow’ful handy.” She was a handsome young woman. Some blending of French and Span¬ ish blood from the earliest Arkansas travelers had given her the mass of purple-black hair under her man’s hat, the clear olive of her skin, her velvet black eyes, and delicate profile. Her eyelashes were long and thick and curled at the ends. Long eyelashes and small features are not uncommon in Arkansas faces. Did Polly Ann smile, she showed a rarer beauty, even little teeth, white as milk. But Polly Ann seldom smiled, being a silent, serious creature whose own husband felt a trifle in awe of her. Her primitive repairs completed, she straight¬ ened her bent shoulders, clasped her hands be¬ hind her neck, and looked about her. When she stood she was tall and erect as a young cypress. Her eyes spanned the Black River flowing at her feet, and took in, without noting, the whitewashed walls of the mill, the store, and the score or two of houses that go with an Ar¬ kansas cotton plantation. The time was early in November. The cotton was ready for pick¬ ing, and flakes of white spattered the brown fields. The yards were frowsy with stalks of gimson weed and withered grass. The great cypress forest shut in the cleared space like a wall. The scene was monotonous, yet about it was something somber and vast, a loneliness that the presence of the few low-browed houses seemed to mark rather than lessen. A little spiral of smoke drifting above a chimney here and there, some pigs dotting the sandy road, a few riderless horses patiently drooping their noses against the fence rail before the store, were the only signs of habitation. Behind Polly Ann lay the canebrake and the forest. The water mirrored the Shinault cabin with its one wee window and “stick and dirt” chimney. During the war (not so far back by many years, that November day, as now) escaped prisoners used to hide in the canebrake. After the war runaway convicts from the stockade at Powhatan found shelter there sometimes, and then the cane would be crushed by the leaps of panting hounds; and many a night had Polly Ann shuddered, listening to the dogs baying, and picturing the wretch crouched among the sodden grasses. Plenty of grim traditions hung, heavy as its own miasma, over the cypress swamp. Not a rod away was the bare spot, dented by cypress knees, where Old Man Bryce’s cabin stood un¬ til the guerillas murdered him and his wife and burned their bones under their home. A whole company of guerillas had dangled from the sycamore limbs for that murder. The shape¬ less green in front of the store had been the scene of bloody quarrels. Down by the river bank, on the little knoll which the spring cov¬ ered with wild flowers. Bud Boas had killed his partner. Boas was tried and acquitted; but his own conscience was not so lenient as men. As the slain man fell he had flung out his hand, touching Boas’s cheek. Ever since, the unhappy slayer had been haunted by a touch. He would wake from sleep, screaming that he felt the hand. At his work, at home, at camp- meetings even, where he would go in the vain hope of eluding his persecutor,. the tortured man might spring up, wildly rubbing his face, and rush away, or fall in convulsions horri¬ ble to see. From no other cause than this ghostly touch, he had seasons of drinking hard, but it was said that liquor could not blunt his senses. Boas’s cabin was near the Shinaults’ ; and this afternoon while Polly Ann stood looking, she saw his limp figure in butternut jeans slip through the store doorway and creep along the bank. Years ago Boas had been an exception¬ ally tall and strong man, bringing a backwoods¬ man’s stature, muscle, and ruddy tan from the Tennessee mountains; now his stooping shoul¬ ders and lank chest matched the sickly pallor of his face, with its hollow cheeks and restless, faded eyes. Approaching the shore, he hailed Polly Ann with a “ Whoo — op!” She got into the scow and pushed ofl*. She paddled as easily as an Indian. Meanwhile Boas had been joined by another man, who drew the boat up on the beach, saying, “ How’s all, Polly Ann ? ”

Page 118

II2 WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. Polly Ann had not seen him until he spoke ; and she flushed a little, as though from sur¬ prise. “ You come back, Whitsun Harp ? ” said she. “ Got back yistiddy,” the man replied. He had a slow full voice, with a kind of severe melody in its cadence not in the least like the high-pitched Arkansas drawl. Whitsun Harp was a head shorter than Boas. He wore a blue flannel shirt, and brown jean trousers tucked into high boots, all quite whole and clean. His compact, powerful frame was not of the Arkansas type any more than his dark, square, resolute face ; yet, in the phrase of the region, he had been “ born and raised on the Black River bottom.” At first glance, one could see a resemblance between him and the young woman, — not a likeness of feature, but of manner and expres¬ sion ; both had the same direct, serious gaze, the same slow speech, and the same proud bear¬ ing. When Polly Ann reddened. Harp grew paler. The men stepped into the boat, and Polly Ann greeted Boas : “ Howdy, Mr. Boas ?” My health’s mighty triflin’,” answered Boas ; ‘‘someway, I’m puny all the time; sorter mis’ry in my ches’ ; some days I feel pow’ful weak, caynt skeercely walk. Ora she ’lows she’ll send fer Dr. Vinson, but I don’t guess it’s no use.” “ Doctors does good sometimes,” said Polly Ann. “ Say, Polly Ann,” said Harp, “ I heerd tell you ail’d los’ a mewl.” “ Lum’s went ayfter it,” said Polly Ann ; “we missed it Monday, an’ we waited an’ waited fer it to come back, an’ it did’nt, so Lum he’s went ayfter it. Lum ’lows it’s stole, he ’lows some cotton-picker toled it off.” “ Looks like,” assented Boas; “ them cotton- pickers is mighty ornery folks.” Harp asked a few questions, short and to the point ; and when the boat landed he drew Polly Ann aside, while Boas stooped to mend a dilapidated shoe with a rag. “ Polly Ann,” said Harp, “ I come to see ye. I’ll tend to yo’ mewl. Ye know I ar’ turned regerlater.” “ I’ve heerd tell on’t.” “ Wa’al, hit’s so. I aim to mek these yere pyarts mo’ decenter. Polly Ann, this yere’s a turrible mean kentry, drinkin’ an’ sw’arin’ an’ fightin’ an’ devilment er all kin’s o’ goin’ on ! An’ the chil’en bein’ raised to drink an’ fight an’ die jes like we uns ; Polly Ann, hit ain’t right ! An’ thar ain’t no need fer it to be, neether. I be’n in other settlements. They ain’t like we all ; they’ve got brick chimbleys, an’ battened heouses, an’ a school-heouse whar they kin hev preachin’, stiddier hevin’ it in a loft like we all. We mought, too, but we’re so triflin’ we caynt mek a riffle.” “ Looks like,” agreed Polly Ann politely. “ Yit how to holp it ? I’d lay an’ study the hull night through, Polly Ann, studin’ ’beout hit. The mo’ I studied the wuss it looked. Wa’al — it war ayfter ye taken up with Lum an’ war merried, hit come preachin’ Sunday, an’ I went ter preachin’. ’Twar the best out at preachin’ I ever heerd. All ’beout calls. God called some on us one way an’ some a tother, but we wuz all called ter his sarvice. An’ I says ter myself, ‘ Lord, how ar’ I called ? I ar’ the bes’ blacksmith in the bottom, but I caynt talk wuth a shuck.’ An’, Polly Ann, a voice said back, cl’ar’s a boat- whistle : ‘ Whit¬ sun Harp, ye caynt talk folks decent, but ye kin lick ’em decent. They need a regerlater yere mo’n a preacher.’ I jes growed cole all over, fur I war walkin’ all by my lone self en the bottom, not a critter ’reoun’ ’cept hoegs. ‘ Lord,’ says I ter the sky, ‘ they’ll kill me shore, if I turn regerlater an’ lick ’em. An’ w’at’ll maw do then ? ’ So I went home tur¬ rible troubled in my mind. Polly Ann, w’en I got home maw was in one ur ’er spells, an’ afore sundown she war dead. Thet war the Lord A’mighty’s answer to my hesitatin’. Ayfter thet I went ter.wuk. Fust I sarved notice on them men thet got drunk reg’lar Saturday nights at the store. Then I licked them thet persisted in wrong-doin’. I licked ole Skirey fer oppressin’ the pore; an’ I evened it up by licHn’ two niggers thet wudn’t do a fair day’s wuk fer their wages. I licked Sol Looney fer fightin’ with his wife, an’ I licked a right smart fer stealin’ — thetar’ ’beout all.” “ Law me,” said Polly Ann, admiring him, “ but, Whitsun, don’ they fight ye ? Folks don’ like ter be licked.” “ They’ve got to fight or be licked — one. Mos’ times I ar’ too spry fer ’em an’ take their knives an pistils ’way. They did shoot a shoot at me wunst, but hit missed.” Polly Ann’s dark eyes were shining through a mist of eagerness, and her lip quivered as she said : “ But they mought hit ye ! ” “Yes,” said Harp quietly, while something gentle and unusual relaxed his features, a look at once patient and sad ; “ wa’al, ef they didn’t kill me, I wud go on jes the same, an’ ef hit did — I ain’t no wife nur babies ter grieve ayf¬ ter me, an’ I reckon the Lord kin tek keer Clover Bend some other way.” Polly Ann drew a deep breath. “ Looks like ’twuz a call! ” said she. “’Tis a call, shore,” said Harp solemnly; “I waynted ter tell ye so’s ye wud know the truth ’beout it, folks lyin’ so ginerally. It’s no dif-

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. fer ter me 'beout the res’, but I waynted you ter know bekase — we uns played tergether w’en we wuz little tricks, an’ I alius tole ye everythin’, ye remember.” She remembered. Perhaps she remembered more, for her cheeks grew red, and her brown fingers were clasped together so tightly that they made dents in the knuckles. An’,” continued Harp very gently, ef I shud hev ter do suthin’ thet ye moughtn’t like, hit’s ’kase I hev ter an’ not my seekin’ — bein’ called. Ye’ll consider thet thar, Polly Ann ? ” “ I don’t guess ye’ll ever do nuthin’ ye don’ hole ter be right, Whitsun Harp.” Thankee, Polly Ann,” said Harp. He al¬ most timidly touched her hand, holding it for a second in a loose clasp. Then he strode away without a glance at Boas. The latter rose di¬ rectly and joined Polly Ann. Did Whitsun Harp say onythin’ ’beout Lum ter ye?” said Boas. “ Naw,” said Polly Ann; “ w’at fer shud he?” Boas seemed to have a difficulty in speak¬ ing; he had to clear his throat twice before he could say : “ Wa’al, fact is, Polly Ann, he’s heerd tell — wa’al, lies ’beout Lum like he be’n too much ter the store an’ dances an’ sich like tricks, an’ Whitsun he ’lows Turn’s triflin’ an’ — he’s warned him.” “ Warned — Lum ? ” cried Polly Ann. “ Said like he’d lick ’im, ef he don’ quit,” replied Boas with primitive directness. He laid the tips of his fingers on her sleeve, and his face grew earnest. “ Fer the good Lord’s sake, Polly Ann, don’ ye let Lum mad Whitsun ! Nary man en this bottom kin stan’ agin him. Ye know Steve Elder, how big he is? He done stole a pa’r boots at the store. Whitsun he seen it, but he never let on ; but w’en this yere Steve comes fer his acceount he fin’s at the bottom, ‘ One pa’r boots, so much. Putt down by Whitsun Harp.’ W’en he read thet ’ar he never opened ’is mouth. Jespaid. He knowed he didn’t stan’ up agin Whitsun.” All the while Boas talked he was scanning Polly Ann’s face to see the effect of his words. “ Thar war a circus feller too. He brung a mighty ornery, mean show ter the Bend, and Whitsun warned him not ter show thet ar show agin ; but he pitched ’is tent an’ wuz marchin’ ’reoun’ in front, a puttin’ on doeg, w’en up comes Whitsun, an’ he says, ‘ Didn’t I warn ye not ter show yo’ durned ondecent show yere ? ’ sez ’e. An’ he slapped up thet ar feller an’ flung him ’cross a log an’ pulled his belt ’reoun’ an’ yanked out ’is pistil an’ flung hit cl’ar ’n’ ’cross the road an’ licked thet ar circus feller tell he hollered. An’ ye ’member ole Skirey thet he guv the bud to, spiter him an’ ’is two sons. He knocked the big un down, an’ the little one lit a shuck mighty spry. An’ who killed the mad dog with a hammer ? An’ who held the wild hoeg by the tail tell Mark Lady cud stick ’im ? — them two men off their bosses . en the cane, an’ their guns empty ! Naw, naw, Polly Ann, don’ let Lum mad Whitsun ! An’ ’tain’t lickin’s thets mos’ ter fear.” His woful eyes turned from Polly Ann’s face in a fleeting, shrinking, indescribable glance towards the river bank — “ they mought git — ter — fight- in’!” ‘‘ I ain’t feered fer Lum ef they do,” said Turn’s wife haughtily. But no sooner had the well-meaning threat- ener gone than she ran into the cabin, shut the door, and flung her proud head on the table, in a passion of tears. Lum Shinault came home by moonlight. His wife had saved his supper, and he stretched his legs out beneath the white oil-cloth with a sigh of content. My, my, my 1 ” said Lum in his soft, pleas¬ ant voice, “talk ’beout cookin’ I Polly Ann, ye allers git thar with both feet. Fried pork an’ sop an’ taters an’ pie an’ light bread 1 Ony¬ thin’ mo’ ter foller?” A faint smile lifted the comers of Polly Ann’s mouth. She knew her gifts, and ap¬ preciation is sweet. “ I reckon,” Lum con¬ tinued, “ hit meks a differ eatin’ en a purty room. This yere’s a right purty room, Polly Ann.” He looked about the room, and she looked at him. The room was poor and bare enough, with its log walls and uneven floor ; but the big cotton-stuffed pillows on the bed shone out of the dusk ; there was a clock on the rude mantelpiece, a red cushion on the black and gilt rocking-chair, and a log thicker than a man’s body was blazing in the fire-place. The flames, rather than the sickly gleam of the grease lamp, lighted the room and Lum Shi- nault’s face. He was of low stature and slight, and in the firelight he made one think of a terra-cotta figure, he was so all of a color, hair, skin, and clothes all the same, whitish- brown. But he had sparkling brown eyes and a sensitive mouth that could shut firmly. “ Did ye fin’ the mewl ? ” said his wife. “Not a hide nur a ha’r er the blamed crit¬ ter,” answered Lum cheerfully, “but I seen a big gang er turkeys. Reckon I shot one, but I cudn’t fin’ hit.” “ Whitsun Plarp wuz yere ; he ’lows he’ll fin’ the mewl fer us.” Lum whistled. His meal being finished, he got up and stood close to his wife. She had knotted a scarlet handkerchief about her throat, which suited her olive skin and black hair. Lum slid his arm around her waist. “Ye ar’ turrible good-lookin’, Polly Ann,” said he smil-

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. ing half wistfully ; ‘‘ I sot a heap er store by ye/’ She neither accepted nor repulsed the caress; merely stood, her hands clasped before her, absently gazing at the fire. His arm fell; but in a second he put out his hand again, to finger softly a stray lock of hair. ‘‘ An’ Bud Boas, he was yere too,” said Polly Ann ; “ he ’lows ye’d bes’ be keerful kase Whitsun’s mad at ye. He ’lows yo’ too triflin’. ” An’ / ’low Whitsun Harp’s too meddlin’ ! ” cried Lum, opening his brown eyes angrily. “ W’at bus’ness ar’ hit er his’n ? I don’ rent er him. ’Tain’t his plantation. To my no¬ tion, Whitsun hed orter be run off this yere place ! ” He’s did a heap er good yere,” said Polly Ann — was it the firelight, Lum wondered, that made her cheeks so red? — ‘‘ Look at the fightin’s an’ drinkin’s he’s stopped! Thar ain’t be’n a man killed yere sence he turned reg- erlater.” “ Thar’ll be one killed mighty quick though ef he don’ quit projickin’ ’roun’ an’ lickin’ folks permiscus’.” Polly Ann laid her hand on her husband’s arm, looking down at him, for she was taller than he. Lum,” she said solemnly, “ he is called, Whitsun is. They caynt hurt him till his work’s did. Don’ ye say anythin’ agin ’im, Lum.” Lum’s frown turned into a broad grin. “ Oh, laws ! called ter lick folks ? Ef thet ain’t the durndest trick 1 ” “But he is,” she insisted; “he’s hed signs an’ tokens. Don’ go agin ’im, Lum.” “ Wa’al, honey,” said Lum easily, “ I ain’t purportin’ ter go agin ’im. He’s too big a b’ar fer me ter tackle.” Polly Ann turned away abruptly. Lum looked after her, all the light-hearted care¬ lessness gone out of his face. “ ’Pears like I jes cudn’t please her nohow, ” he thought while he busied himself clearing the table. Lum had the habit of helping his wife about the house ; he had acquired it helping his mother, Lum’s father being “ triflin’.” At the same time Polly Ann was thinking : “ He won’ fight hisself or run enter no dan¬ ger, but he’ll sick the rest on, an’ him stan’ by.” She hardly noticed how deftly Lum wiped the dishes and brushed out the room. “ Be ye too tired ter listen ter a leetle music, honey ? ” he said when he had put the broom behind the door. “ Naw,” said Polly Ann, trying to smile, “ I don’t guess I’m ever too tired fer music.” Faint as the smile was, Lum welcomed it and took down his violin with a brighter face. He played a long while; at first, simple melodies of the plantation and the camp¬ meeting; then, as his thoughts drifted into other memories, they took their own shape in music rude as his life, but weird and sad like the cypress brake. Lum was born a musician. He had a wonderful ear but the scantiest knowledge, most of which came from a strolling violinist who had the swamp fever in Lum’s cabin and left a book of songs for payment. Lum learned the songs by heart. They were as commonplace as possible, but the ideas, worn shabby through the handling of generations, were new and splendid to Lum. Why not? They could not have been any fresher to him if they had just been discovered. They lifted and adorned his notion of love. They aided the ever-increasing power which his wife exercised over his imagination. He thought of her in their language, which had a dignity and charming tenderness quite lack¬ ing in the speech of his birthplace where a man “ took up with a girl and married her,” making no more ado about it ; the song words were so pretty and kind-sounding, it was like kissing a girl to say them. Lum was too shy to say them himself. Once he ventured to call Polly Ann “ Darling,” instantly blushing up to his eyes. She did not seem to mind, neither did she seem pleased. It was the way in which she always met her husband’s af¬ fection. This passive endurance of his love had come to have a kind of terror for Lum. He could not understand his wife. To go back to the beginning, — as Lum did to-night on his violin strings, — he had married Polly Ann out of compassion. He was in the field when Old Man Gooden fell dead in a fit of apoplexy. He helped Polly Ann carry her father into the house, and he witnessed her passionate, dumb agony. Lum had a soft heart, unfettered ex¬ cept by a few rustic attentions to a certain pretty widow on the plantation. Mistress Savannah Lady. When he beheld Polly Ann’s desolate condition his heart melted. “ Nary kin nigher’n the Sunk Lan’s,” mused Lum, “hit’s turrible hard. An’ she sot sich store by her paw, an’ he muched* her so. They sorter kep’ ter theyselves, too, I don’t guess they wuz the socherbel kin’. Nary un waitin’ on ’er neether, ’less hit ar’ Whitsun Harp. Ef he don’ merry her, I reckon I hed orter. ’Tain’t no mo’n neighborly.” Whitsun making no sign, he carried out his intention. Polly Ann assented gravely, almost silently, to whatever he proposed. Nothing was easier than to rent a cabin and a pair of mules from the Northern men who had bought the plan¬ tation, and settle down “ to raise a crop.” * To much ; Arkansas for to pet, to caress, to make much of.

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WHITSUN HARP. REGULATOR. Polly Ann, after the first outburst, put her grief stoically away and only worked the harder. Polly Ann’s father came from the “Sunk Lands,” that mysterious region cre¬ ated by the great Lisbon earthquake, an island in the swamps, half the year cut off from the world, forgotten except by a few traders. Un¬ til she was fifteen she had lived the solitary life of the people and grown up in their Indi¬ an-like reticence. When she was fifteen, her mother died and her father took her to Clover Bend. She was now twenty-three years old, and she had been married hardly five months. Lum was a man of the lowlands, who inher¬ ited French instincts of sociability and liked idling about and gossiping. He took his new relations lightly at first, but soon his wife’s stronger nature fascinated him. She awak¬ ened all the ardor and tenderness in him, this beautiful, silent, haughty, patient wo¬ man. “ She ar’ fairer nur the flowers,” quoted Lum from the songs ; “ an’ she’s got a right smart er sense too,” he added in the vernac¬ ular. He declared his wife’s superiority with much frankness. “ Law me,” said he to Boas, — it was a few days later, and they sat on the store counter, indulging in the unpre¬ tending luxury of brown sugar and crackers, — “ law me, Polly Ann’s wuth a hull crap er ///U Ye’d orter see the plunder she’ve bought, pickin’ cotton — ” “ Wa’al, then,” interrupted Boas, dropping his customary mild, plaintive drawl to a lower key, “ w’y fur be ye so possessed ter cavoort ’reoun’ with Savannah Lady ? ” “ Me ! ” exclaimed Lum. “ Yes, jesjK^?//,” repeated Boas with an anx¬ ious gaze into Lum’s scarlet face. “ They ’lows like ye taken up with ’er. Boy, ye hadn’t or¬ ter be agwine on thet way! Nur ye hadn’t orter come yere, fiddlin’ an’ carryin’ on, an’ yo’ wife ter home, by her lone self, studyin’ an’ grievin’ — ” “ Polly Ann don’ grieve,” said Lum rather sullenly ; “ leastways she don’ grieve ayfter nohow. In co’se I mean,” he went on quickly, “ she ar’ grievin’ fer her paw.” “ In co’se,” said Boas. There was a pause. “ An’ ez regardin’ Mistress Lady,” Lum said finally, giving the full prefix with dignity, — on ordinary occasions one would only say “ Mis’ ” in Arkansas, — “ we uns wuz raised together an’ natchelly have frien’ly feelin’s. But ef ye ar’ ’lowin’ thet I even her or ary nother lady ter Polly Ann ye ar’ a long sight outer yo’ reckonin’, thet’s all. I knaw I taken her ter the singin’ school the fiddler hed ; but Polly Ann never’d go thar ter sing¬ in’, kase — wa’al, Polly Ann jes natchelly cayn’t sing, cayn’t cotch a tune. An’ ez fer me goin’ ter the store an’ drinkin’, I disre- member how often I done come yere; but I knaw I never got drunk onywhar, not the least bit on earth. But I ain’t purportin’ to be goin’ yere ter fiddle nights. Bud Boas, never no mo’. Folks ain’t got no call ter say I don’ ruther stay by Polly Ann than ony¬ whar nelse.” “ Thet’s so,” said Boas. “ I knawed they wuz lyin’.” Lum did not tell Boas that he only went to the store because he thought Polly Ann did not care to see him home, and his heart was sore. He could not say that, since it would seem like complaining of Polly Ann. But Boas’s caution set him thinking; gossip must be loud to rouse that haunted soul from its dream of pain. “ Thet thar’s w’at Whit Harp hez heerd, dad burn him,” growled Lum, “ an’ blame my skin ef I don’ b’lieve thet ar Savannah ar’ jes foolin’ with me fur ter tol on Steve Morrow.” Which it happened was precisely the case. Savannah wanted to marry the stockman. Morrow, and she used Lum to help her, not at all sorry to make Polly Ann jealous, if she could, as well as Morrow. “ Ain’t thet thar jes like the critter ? ” said Lum with perfect good humor; “it’s a rig on me an’ Steve though.” Yet he felt a queer resentment against Harp — a resentment not diminished by the sight of his lost mule munching cotton stalks in his own field. “ Whitsun fetched ’im,” Polly Ann explained. It seemed to Lum that she spoke as though proud of Harp’s success. Lum, the best-tempered man on the planta¬ tion, ground his teeth. “ I sw’ar I hate thet thar Whitsun Harp ! ” he was thinking. The next time that he saw Harp was mail day. Twice a week a rider brought the mail to Clover Bend. The post-office was in the store, just as the court-room was, whenever the majesty of the law was invoked or a jail needed. The store had a wide platform the right height to serve instead of a horse block. Savannah Lady rode up to the plat¬ form as Whitsun came through the door. She was a pretty, kittenish, fair little woman, and her hair, which was of a lovely reddish-brown color, had a trick of escaping in little ringlets and blowing round her white neck. After all, there was no great harm in her ; but to Harp she was the embodiment of all that was dan¬ gerous and alluring in woman. • Lum was on the platform so near that com¬ mon gallantry required him to help her alight. Somehow she stumbled, so he held her for a second by the elbows. Harp, black as night, watched her recover herself, laugh, blush, and flutter into the store. He strode up to Lum. “ Lum Shinault,” said he in a low tone and very deliberately, “ ef ye don’ quit yo’ ornery triflin’ ways I’ll lick ye 1 ”

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. ii6 “ Then I’ll kill ye, shore’s death, Whitsun Harp ! ” Lum gasped, choked with passion. Whitsun only gave him a steady gaze and turned on his heel. Lum felt himself despised. A week went by. Polly Ann was conscious of a change in Lum. Though kind as ever, his shy caresses were no longer offered. He worked harder and seldom went to the store, “ an’ he jis’ studies the plum w’ile,” said Polly Ann. One day Mrs. Boas came over to ask Lum to get some quinine and whisky at the store for Boas. He hed one er ’is spells,” — so the poor wife always named Boas’s fits of terror,— “ an’ he run out en the woods an’ got soppin’ wet an’ cotched cole an’ ’pears like hit gits a leetle mucher all the w’ile.” After Lum was gone Polly Ann bethought herself of some corn which should be ground, and that it was grinding day at the mill. Like the store, the mill was a versatile and accommo¬ dating establishment, ginning cotton, sawing wood, or grinding corn with equal readiness. So saddling the big gray horse, which was at once her dowry and her inheritance, she led him to the ferry and paddled boat, horse, and woman across the stream. The Clover Bend ferry was deserted, but it was accustomed to de¬ sertion, being conducted on Southern princi¬ ples : if you came when the ferryman was away you must wait until he got back, that was all. Polly Ann saw Lum’s wagon-box boat on the sand, and riding up the bank she perceived Lum himself walking through the cypress brake. “ Cypress Swamp,” or the “ Black River bottom,” is like a dry river channel winding through the higher land. When the spring overflow comes the lustrous green water rushes among the tree trunks, and the high land be¬ comes a multitude of islands and peninsulas; but most of the year the channel is dry, and in autumn the cypress boughs spread a soft russet carpet on the ground; the hackberry, maples, live-oaks, and holly-trees which min¬ gle with the cypress splash the foliage with splendid hues, the sunlight filters through the branches and prints shifting shadows of the vines masking the thorn-trees, or turns the red berries into dots of flame. Then the cypress brake is beautiful. But Lum Shinault was not thinking of its beauty. Pie was walking slowly, his head sunk between his shoulders. “ Studyin’ ! ” said Polly Ann. Lum looked up. The silhouette of a horse’s head had fallen across his path. A sun-bonnet was bent over the mane. The bonnet hid the woman’s face, but that ringlet of dazzling hair, floating under the cape, could only belong to one person. Horse and rider stopped. So did the footman. His shadow spread out gigantic on the ground. Then both shadows were blended together as if in an embrace. Did Polly Ann grow angry? Not in the least; she could see too well. “ W’ats got Savannah Lady ? ” said she; “looks like Lum was guvin’ ’er w’isky an’ holdin’ uv ’er.” This, indeed, was what he was doing. For once there was no guile about Savannah’s acts; Lum had served her turn. Young Mor¬ row had spoken, and she was on her way to buy her wedding finery when she was seized with a chill; but she still rode on, clinging to her horse’s neck, until she met Lum. He gave her some whisky. Now by an evil chance, at this moment, Whitsun Harp must needs enter the scene on a gallop. He saw the shadows, he saw the bright head on Lum’s shoulder, the little hands clutching Lum’s arm. A shower of cypress boughs whirled in the air; a pawpaw branch snapped, wrenched away by a furious hand ; and Lum lifted his eyes to see Whitsun’s face. “ I tell ye, yo’ mistaken ! ” shouted Lum. “ It’s too late for talking now,” said Whit¬ sun, deep and low. He jumped off his horse and caught Lum by the throat. The smaller man was like a baby in his grip. Lum, writhing and strug¬ gling in an impotent fury of rage and shame, hardly felt the blows. Suddenly the hand at his throat released him so suddenly that he was hurled to the ground; he heard his wife’s voice, shrill with anger: “Whitsun Harp, w’at ye doin’ ter my man ? ” He sat up, his brain swimming, specks of fire and blood floating in the air; but there was Whitsun standing empty-handed, and Polly Ann’s face over the gray’s head. “ I didn’t aim ye shud ever knaw on ’t, Polly Ann,” said Whitsun, “ I cudn’t holp it, hit hed ter be did.” “ I’ll never fergive ye en this worl’, Whitsun Harp!” said Polly Ann. Lum put his hands on the tree near him and got to his feet. He leaned on the tree and steadied his choked and shaking voice enough to say, “ Look a yere, Whitsun Harp, I’ll kill ye fer this.” Harp did not glance toward him; he took one step forward as though he would speak to Polly Ann, but at her gesture of repulsion he turned silently and mounted his horse. On horseback, he reined in his horse, and looking at Polly Ann, said again, “I cudn’t holp it,” before he galloped away. Savannah was shivering and crying. “ Y{\X.you ary lick. Savannah? ” said Lum. “ Naw, naw,” sobbed she. “ Oh, Lum, oh. Mis’ Shinault, ’twa’n’t my fault! I war jes sick. Whitsun’s heerd lies on me ’n’ Lum. I’m goin’

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. “THEN i’ll kill YE, SHORE’S DEATH.” ter be merried ter Steve Morrow nex’ week. Fer the Lord’s sake, don’ tell ’im; he wudn’t never speak ter me agin ! I done my best ! I pulled Whitsun’s arm.” For all his misery Lum burst into a bitter laugh. Muster hendered Whitsun a heap, yon holdin’ on,” said he. ‘Won go ’long home. Sa¬ vannah, an’ don’ be skeered er we uns tellin’; jes tek keer ye don’ let on nuthin’ yo’self — never min’ w’at happens!” vSomething in his face checked her answer; she was scared, and glad to ride away. 'Fhe husband and wife were left alone to¬ gether. Lum looked at Polly Ann, who was very pale. Ye come jes in time, Polly Ann,” said he. I wudn’t o’ b’lieved ye’d a taken it, Lum Shinault,” said she bitterly, “ with yo’ knife on too. Pull yo’ belt ’reoun’ 1 ” VoL. XXXIV.— 17. Mechanically, Lum put his hand to his belt, which had been twisted so that the knife was in the back. “ I done forgot ’beout the knife,” muttered Lum, reddening ; “ thet ar’s a favor- yte trick er Harp’s.” Then, in a second, he added : I ain’t goin’ ter tek hit, Polly Ann.” She said nothing. ‘We don’ b’lieve me,” cried Lum. “ ’Tain’t no use talkin’,” said she wearily. “ I’ll hev it out with ’im. Ye ’low I’m a or¬ nery, triflin,’ pusillanimous — ” “ Whar’s the use callin’ yo’self names ? ” in¬ terrupted Polly Ann. “ I don’ wan ter yere no mo’ ’beout it. Reckon Boas’ll waynt ’is w’is- ky onyhow. Thar ’tis un’er the gum-tree.” Lum looked at his wife with imploring eyes and quivering mouth ; at that moment he was longing to fling his arms about her and sob out

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ii8 WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR, POLLY ANN. his shame on her breast. Poor Lum’s grand¬ father was a Frenchman. Polly Ann did not look at him, but went on arranging her bag of corn ; all Lum could see was the profile of her sun-bonnet — thereis noth¬ ing sympathetic about a sun-bonnet. Bes’ git on ter the mill ef Iwaynt apone er bread terday,” said Polly Ann. Be back ter dinner, Lum.” She rode on a little way and stopped. ‘‘ I’m goin’ ter hev a plum good din¬ ner fer ye, Lum,” she called back. “ Thankee, Polly Ann,” said Lum. He watched her until the trees hid horse and rider. Polly Ann ’lows thar ain’t no trou¬ bles men persons cayn’t cure with eatin’ an’ drink- in’,” said he; drinkin’,” — he eyed the whisky bottle lying at the foot of the gum-tree, — naw, thar ain’t ony comfort fer me en thet ar. I’m en a hole, an’ thar’s jes one way outen hit. No good talkin’ ter Polly Ann, she’s sot. ’Twud on’y pester her. Oh, my Lord, ain’t it hard ! “ I wisht I cud hev kissed her jes wunst,” he said, after a while, “ on’y fer ter say good-bye. How soft her cheek wuz ! An’ thar war a little blue vein jes un’er the ear. Wa’al, hit won’ mek no differ ter her, but I wisht — ” He walked on slowly until he came to the boat on the sand. He could see his own cabin. He remembered the day that he brought Polly Ann to it — his wedding-day. He crawled into the boat, lay down in the stern, and cried like a child. PART II. Polly Ann’s good din¬ ner waited in vain. Lum did not come. Yet she was sure that, while at the well drawing water, she had seen his figure through the window. She blew the horn. She called at the top of her voice. Finally she went to the shed to see if the horse was gone. Gone he was, and there was a piece of brown wrapping-paper, such as they used at the store, tacked on to a log and directed to “ Mistris Shinalt.” She took it down, turned it over, and saw a single sentence, written in pencil, in cramped, care¬ ful letters: Darling Polly an i taken your

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WHITSUN HARP, Hoss fer a Errant i wunt be bak your Lovin Husban. C. Shinalt.” Law me ! ” said Polly Ann, he mought hev come in, anyhow. An’ the dinner’s plum spiled.” She was wretched over the morning’s work, but she did not feel alarmed, having no be¬ lief in Lum’s courage ; and when she discov¬ ered that the gun was gone, she merely thought that he meant to shoot squirrels. But Lum was seeking other game. His er¬ rand was to kill Whitsun Harp. The smol¬ dering jealousy and resentment of weeks had burst into a flame that was shriveling his heart. He had been beaten before his wife, his wife who valued strength and bravery beyond everything. And Whitsun, whom she praised because he was so strong and brave, had beaten him. How many times had she praised Whitsun to his face. Like enough she had wanted the regulator all along, and had only taken up with Lum because Whitsun didn’t speak — girls did such things Lum knew from the songs. Here was the secret of her being so quiet and sad and of that queer way she had with her that made him feel farther away, in the same room, than he did thinking of her, miles off, in the bottom. “ I never cud much her like I cud t’other gells,” thought Lum ; I alius hed ter study on’t afore I cud putt my arm ’reoun’ her waist. Reckon I sorter s’picioned, inside, thet it pestered her. Pore Polly Ann ! ” It was like Lum to feel no anger, only compassion, for his wife. Hit’s bad fer her too — turrible bad,” he pondered ; ef it’s me gits killed up she caynt hev no mo’ truck wi’ him, an’ ef it’s him she’ll natchally hate the sight er me ! Wa’al, she won’ be pestered with it; I’ll go off on the cotton-boat afore sundown. All through this wide work I’ll wandern, my love,” said Lum, his thoughts unaffectedly shaping themselves in the words of his songs. They did not cause him to waver in his purpose ; he knew Polly Ann’s notions of manly honor too well. Old Man Gooden shot a man once. Paw hed ter shoot him,” Polly Ann ex¬ plained ; he spatted paw en the face.” “ An’ ef a feller spatted me, wud I hev ter shoot him ? ” Lum had asked, amused by her earnestness, for this was before he passed the careless stage of his marriage. ‘‘ Wudn’t ye waynt fer ter shoot ’im ? ” said Polly Ann, fixing her beautiful grave eyes on his smiling face. REGULATOR. 119 Wa’al, I shudn*t crave it,” said Lum. But ye wud, Lum, ye shoot him ! ” “ Mabbe — ef I cudn’t run away,” answered Lum, and he had laughed at her face over that speech. He did not laugh now, riding with his bruised throat and aching shoulders, and the gun slung across his saddle-peak. Him or me,” groaned Lum ; hit’s him or me — one ! Thar ain’t no tother way! ” He was riding through the bottom lands above the mill. The entire bottom was like an innocent jungle with its waving green un¬ dergrowth of cane. Pigs were rooting under the trees, and the heads of cattle rose above the cane, turning peaceful eyes of satisfied appetite upon Lum’s reckless speed. There was no reason for haste, really, out¬ side the relief which motion gives to a per¬ turbed soul, for Lum knew that Whitsun was buying a horse of a farmer up on the bayou, and would have to return by the same road. But he did not slacken his pace until he came on a man riding more leisurely. The man hailed him, and he saw Boas. W’y, I wuz at yo’ heouse,” said Lum, ‘‘an’ Mis’ Boas ’lowed ye wuz en bed.” “ So I war,” said Boas in a weak, high voice, ‘‘ but — I got up — I got up ! ” BUD BOAS.

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120 WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR. Toby shore, toby shor$,” said Luiii sooth¬ ingly. He saw the man could barely keep in his saddle for trembling and that his features were ghastly; but Lum had the humblest Southern¬ er’s innate politeness ; it was not deemed good manners in Clover Bend to take notice of any¬ thing singular in Boas’s appearance or conduct; there was one unhappy explanation always ready. Lum, through his daze of anguish, felt a prick of pity for this miserable being who had done many a kindness to Lum’s mother in his unhaunted days. He stretched out his arm and supported Boas by the elbow. Oh, I’m peart enough,” said Boas; “ I waynter tell ye suthin’, Lum.” The younger man resigned himself with inward impatience to a slower gait. ‘‘ This yere’s a sightly kentry, Lum, ain’t it ? ” said Boas, gazing about him, but I ain’t repinin’ ter leave it.” Be ye gwine ter Texas ? ” Farder’n Texas, boy. Dr. Vinson was over an’ he tole me — naw, Lum, ye don’ need ter say yo’ sorry, I know ye ar’. Ye be’nlike a son ter me sence ever ye wuz a little trick aiF played with my boys. Ye wuz the least little trick er all. Ye ’member ’em, Lum, sich peart, likely boys they wuz, an’ they all died up an’ nary un ter home, peaceable like ; Mat an’ Tobe drownd- ed, an’ Mark thro wed from his hoss. All on ’em ayfter — ye know w’at — all three en one year, ev’ry chile we’d got. Ora an’ me. Hit Avar hard ter endure, Lum, turrible hard.” It war so,” said Lum. Wa’al, they’re all on ’em gone. An’ I’ll be gone, too, afore long. I ain’t repinin’. Lum, ye never heerd me talk on’t; I cudn’t b’ar ter speak; but, somehow, ’pears like ’twud ease my min’ a bit ter tell ye suthin’ er my feelin’s, Lum ; ef I hedn’t er be’n so mortal skeered er meetin’ up with Grundy, I’d a killed myse’f a long spell back, I wud so. I’m wore out. Boy, ef so be yo’ tempted ter fight, ’mind yo’se’f er me ! I killed Grundy Wild, killed ’im fair too ; but. Lord ferguv me, I done Avent enter thet ar fight aimiP ter kill. I ’Ioav thet Avar hoAV he got ’is holt on me. Fer he’s never lef ’ me sence. Fust I Avudn’t guv in. ‘ Be thet ar all the harntin’ ye kin mek out ? ’ sez 1. But hit kep’ a cornin’ an’ a cornin’, never no differ, tell hit crazied me, Lum ! Nur thet Avarn’t the wust on it. The Avust Avar bein’ skeered the hull Av’ile, ’spectin’ an’ dreadin’ never no tell. “ Did ye never hev a door a squeakin,’ Lum ? A squeakin’ door ar’ a mighty little trick; ’tain’t nuthin’, ye may say ; but ye’ll be a settin’ an’ thet thar door’ll squeak an’ stop, an’ then it’ll squeak agin, an’ then not, an’ then squeak an’ squeak an’ squeak tell ye git up, SAv’arin’ mad, an’ shet the door. Lum, I cudul sJiet the door ! I taken ter drinkin’, but I cudn’t git so drunk thet I’d not feel thet thar cole han’ er his’n a fiap flabbin’ on my face. Hit’s Avore me out. At las’ I jes give up ; an’, my Lord ! ’peared like his soul fa’rly enjyed trompin’ on me, r’arin’ an’ chargin’ like twuz a Avil’ hog! Oh, my Lord! “be vk on his side?” my Lord ! ” The man shook in his saddle Avith the horror of his recollections. But he con¬ trolled himself enough to go on, though the sen¬ tences came in pants. “Then I ’membered — thet thar tex’ — an eye fer an eye an’ a tooth fer a tooth. Hit come ter me — cud I on’y SAvap a life Aviththe Lord fer Grundy’s — then it mought be he Avud tek Grundy offen me an’ — let me die en peace. I don’ ax no mo’.” He stopped, gasping and coughing Avhile Lum held him. Lum Avas deeply touched ; he Avas not a whit moved from his intention; but he was touched, and he felt a somber sense of comradeship, thinking, “ Mabbe I’ll knoAv how ye feel, ter- morrer.” Boas continued : “ An’, Lum, Av’ile I Avar study in’ an’ prayin’, ‘ Lord, let thy pore sinful sarvint Avipe the blood-guiltiniss offen his soul an’ not hev ter die

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I2I WmTSUiY REGULATOR. skeered!’ Lum, I heerdthem Case boys frum the hills talkin* outside. They wuz come ter borry my bateau. . They wuz ayfter Whitsun Harp, bekase he’d prommused the big un, Ike, a lickin’ fer beatin’ Ole Man Bryce outen ’is cot¬ ton. They wuz ’lowin’ ter pick a fight wi’ him an’ kill him. I peeked outer a crack an’ seen ’em. Two hed guns, an’ all three hed knives. So I tole Ora ter tell ’em we ’lowed ter use our own boat. But they got a bateau farder down, an’ I seen ’em enthe river, so I hed Ora row me over an’ I borried Looney’s boss, it bein’ so easy — an’ I’m agwine ter warn ’im. The river twists so, an’ thar’s a right smart er groun’ ’tween Young Canes whar he ar’ an’ the water, I kin’ git thar fust, easy — Say, little tricks, w’at ye bellerin’ fer ? ” The road had passed a little clear¬ ing, made in Arkansas fashion by burning down the trees. The cabin in the center had no win¬ dow, and the door was open, showing three particularly dirty children who were all crying together. The oldest stuck a shaggy white head out to say, Hit’s fer maw ? ” Whar’s yer maw done gone ? ” She’s done gone ’ith Mr. Harp fer ter see Aunt Milly Thorn, kase Uncle Tobe Thorn done lick er hide offen er,” said the child, evi¬ dently repeating an older tongue’s story. I sended three men ayfter er, but she ain’t come back, an’ we uns is hungry. Oh dear, maw ! maw ! ” Hush, hush, honey,” said Boas, trembling, whar did the men come from ? ” ‘‘ They come from a boat, an’ they axed fer Mr. Harp, an’ they said they wud fotch maw back in the boat. Will ye fotch maw ? ” Ter Tobe Thorn’s,” screamed Boas, clutch¬ ing Lum’s arm; d’ye onnerstan’, Lum? Thet’s ’cross the big bayou, the heouse on the bank; they kin cut ’cross en the bateau, an’ the road goes ’way off t’other side. I cayn’t do hit, Lum, the Lord don’ mean ter parden me ! An’ pore Whitsun — ” shaking Lum’s arm in his uncontrollable agitation — Lum, mabbe its ’tended fer you ter save ’im ! Yo’ boss never makes a blunder. Ye knaw the bottom, an’ ye kin ride through the brake fast — fast ! ” Lum turned a dull, deep red ; he felt him¬ self suffocating with passion ; he saw his re¬ venge lost, and with it everything else. Yet he could not wrench his last hope from this hunted, desperate, dying creature. And Boas had been kind to his mother. “ Lum, ye will do hit,” pleaded Boas, “ I knaw ye don’ bear no good will ter Harp, but, God A’mighty, he’s a human critter, ye won’ see ’im murdered w’en ye kin save ’is life ! Ye cayn’t be so hard-hearted ! Oh, Lum, do it ter save me, ter holp me outen the hell I be’n en fer five year! ” Yes,” said Lum, I’ll go fer you, Boas.” VoL. XXXIV.— 18. His face was as white as Boas’s, but Boas could not see ; he pushed his helper by the shoulder to hurry him, panting, Go ’long, then, fast, fer God’s sake I God bless ye, boy, ye’ll save two men stidden one. How he rides, an’ I useter ride thet way — ” The children cried, and he went to them ; Lum was out of sight in the high cane. The young fellow rode furiously. Beneath that pleasant green sea lay pronged roots and logs and ugly holes. Thorn-trees stretched out their spiked limbs, wild grape-vines flung their beautiful treacherous lassos on the breeze, and pawpaw saplings, stout enough to trip a horse, were ambushed in the cane. Through them all crashed the brave gray, leaping, dodging, beating down the cane with his broad chest, and never slackening his speed. It looked like a frantic race through the wilderness, but, with the woodman’s instinct, the rider, leaving the perils below to the beast’s sure eyes, was really guiding him on an invisible course. At last Lum drew rein before another clear¬ ing. He could see Thorn’s cabin and women in the “ gallery,” and, riding along the shore, nearer and more distinct, the figure of a man on horseback, plainly Whitsun Harp. Lum galloped up to him. The regulator carried pistols in the holsters of his old cavalry saddle ; the barrel of one flashed out as Lum approached. ^‘Ye ain’t no call ter be skeered er shouted Lum. Not this time. Look out fer the Case boys — thar, on the bateau! They’re a cornin’ ! ” “ Shucks ! ” said Whitsun. He gave Lum a long and keen glance which apparently satis¬ fied him, for he addressed himself at once to the more imperative danger. In fact, the Case boys were landing. Ike, the tallest, he to whom the “ lickin’ ” had been promised, stood up in the boat, as the keel grated on the sand, and hailed Lum : “ Say, Lum Shinault, moosey outer yere, we hain’t no gredge agin you / ” W’at mought ye hev come fer then ? ” said Lum sarcastically. Ter guv thet thar - regerlater a show ter lick Ike, ef he darst,” called the second brother. I darst,” Whitsun replied with his usual composure ; “ jes come on over ! ” The broth¬ ers consulted ; then Lum was hailed again : “ Lum Shinault, git outen the road ! ” The road’s free,” said Lum. “ Yo’ mighty brash orderin’ folks outen the road ! ” ‘‘ Dad burn ye, be ye on his side ? ” Looks like,” replied Lum indifferently ; “ onyhow, ef ye waynt a fight ye kin hev hit ! ” ‘‘ They all won’ fight,” said Whitsun. Nor did they. The third Case boy (while

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122 WHIT'S UN HARP, REGULATOR. the others were bending to their oars) yelled : A man so mean ’s you, Whit Harp, hed or- ter be shot ’twixt the cross er the gallowses, an’ we’ll do hit yit ! ” And the big Ike informed Lum that he was ‘‘let off” on account of the women in the cabin ; but not one of them lifted his gun. Safe out in the river, they threw back a shower of threats and oaths, but nothing more solid. “ They’re pusillanimous cusses,” remarked Harp. Then he drew nearer Lum, looking actually embarrassed. “ I cayn’t mek you out rightly, nohow, Columbus Shinault,” said he. “ Naw,” said Lum scornfully, “ nor I cayn’t mek myself out. Look a yere, Whit Harp, I come enter this yere bottom ter kill you.” Whitsun nodded gravely, making a little affirmative noise in his throat, exactly as he might have done to a remark about the weather. “ An’ I wild hev killed ye or be’n killed up myself — one, ef I hedn’t met up with Bud Boas. ’Tain’t no differ how he stopped me; he done hit, he sent me on his errant ter ye — ter warn ye; an’ w’at’s mo’, so longer ’s he lives ye ain’t nuthin’ ter fear from me. But w’en he’s done gone — look out!” He would have wheeled his horse, but Harp caught the rein, saying “ Stop 1 w’at sorter trick’s all this ? W’at fer did ye stop fer Bud Boas ? Did he — did he skeer ye with his ghost ?” Lum laughed harshly, in sheer bitterness of soul : “ A dozen ghosts wudn’t a stopped me. I don’ hole by ghosts nohow.” “ Then w’y did ye go ? ” None of us are above wishing to be justi¬ fied, and there is a peculiar zest in overturning our enemies’ false notions of us. Lum never would have proffered an explanation, but there may have been a grim comfort in letting Whit¬ sun see his real self. He replied quietly, “ I come ter holp Boas.” “ How’d thet holp ’im ? ” “ ’Kase he war purportin’ ter warn ye his- self. He ’lowed efhe cud jes save some un’s life — a sorter swap like fer the one he taken, thet ar ghos’ w’at harnts ’im mought quit.” “ Did the ghost say so ? ” “ I don’ hole by ghosts, I tell ye. Naw, it’s jes a idy. So’s the ghost a idy, ter my min’. But hit’s plum fixed in ’is head jes strong’s scripter. An’ I reckon t’wull be like he ’lows t’willbe — so. He ’lowed efhe cud save ye from bein’ killed up er hev me, then the ghost ’ud let up an’ he cud die in peace.” “ Toby shore. An’ hit war thet away ? An’ thet tbar’s w’y ye won’ fight me — kase the life won’ be saved then an’ the sperrit mought cum back ?” Lum shrugged his shoulders : “ I guess.” Whitsun’s stolid face worked as he cried : “ Blame my skin ef I kin mek ye out onyhow! Ye ain’t no sich feller like I wuz ’ceountin’ ye ter be 1 ” The blood rushed to Lum’s forehead with a sudden sense of the uselessness of this late recognition, a sudden fury of pain. “Ye hev foun’ hit out too late, Whitsun Harp,” he cried ; “ ye shamed me afore Polly Ann, an’ ye shamed her too, lickin’ her husband jes bekase ye wuz the bigges’ an’ stronges’, an’ ye wuz too dumb ter see thet thar triflin’ critter, Savannah, war jes sick with a chill, an’ I wuz guvin’ on her w’isky.” “ An’ wuz them lies ’beout you an’ her ? ” “ Ax her, ” said Lum, overcome by irrita¬ tion ; “ I don’ want no mo’ truck ’ith ye, Whit Harp, w’ile Boas is ’live. Let go 1 ” “Jes er minute mo’, Lum. I ain’t agoin’ ter fight with ye ayfter this ev’nin’. An’ ef I done ye wrong I’ll ondo hit yit.” The hand on Lum’s bridle dropped, and the gray leaped forward; Lum’s farewell words hurled behind: “ Ye cayn’t ondo hit ; all ye kin do ar’ ter fight me, an’ ye shell J ” “ Ef I mistaken him,” muttered Whitsun, who hardly seemed to hear, so absorbed was he in his own train of thought, “ ef — how cud hit a be’n — me bein’ called ? ” Boas was waiting at the cabin. He thanked and blessed Lum, but the poor fellow’s heart was too sore to be thus eased. He must go back to Polly Ann, who despised him. It never oc¬ curred to him to try to lift himself a little in his wife’s opinion by telling the story of the after¬ noon; he felt too sure that Polly Ann would not believe in any real intention of his to fight Harp, and would think that he welcomed any excuse. If only the Case boys had fought, if somebody’s blood, no matter whose, had been spilled! “ Cells is alius a cravin’ fer folks ter be killin’ each other,” mused Lum. “ Polly Ann wud feel a heap pearter ef I hed a fust-rate title ter a ghost er my own. But now I never’ll hev no show, not the leas’ bit on earth ! ” Polly Ann received him with great kind¬ ness, saying nothing of the spoiled dinner or the delayed supper and twice-made coffee. After supper she herself brought him the vi¬ olin. But he put it aside, saying: “Tek hit ’way, I don’ feel like fiddlin’ ! ” He had scarcely touched his supper. “Ye feelin’ puny, Lum ? ” said Polly Ann timidly. He only shook his head and went out, forgetting his hat. Her kindness jarred on his sick soul; this morning he had yearned for it because this morning he had a conviction that she would not despise him long or grudge him, afterward, a last caress. But now — “ I’m so low down en her min’ she cayn’t holp pityin’ me,” thought Lum. Degraded in his own eyes and in hers, and uncertain how long before Sa¬ vannah’s giddy tongue might be released from

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR, the fear that tied it and make his humiliation the latest joke for the store, Lum’s whole na¬ ture seemed to collapse. He shunned the Clo¬ ver Bend people ; he even shunned his wife, spending days in the woods shooting, or pick¬ ing cotton, and taking a lunch into the field. At night, supper over, he would go out and be gone until late. Many a night did Polly Ann pretend to be sleeping when Lum stepped softly across the floor. He never had been drinking; and he did not cross the river, for Polly Ann, always watching at the window, could see that the boats were not moved. One night she followed him. All that he did was to wander restlessly among the hills. She saw him make wild gestures; once she heard a groan. Then she crept back to bed and cried, poor woman, whether for him or for herself, who knows ? She began to be frightened. She saw Harp at a distance, and once he crossed the river and paid a long call on Boas; so that she did not connect any possible remorse with her hus¬ band’s gloom. How could she imagine that he was ceaselessly and poignantly regretting his not being a murderer ? The only place where Lum was anything like his old self was in Boas’s cabin. Boas was dying, but very peacefully. The visions which had tortured his life away were gone. He had no more dread of them. Thanks to Lum, he told his wife. He told her nothing else, but that was enough to arouse her grati¬ tude. She would not pain him with questions, but she thought no harm of questioning Polly Ann. ‘‘ D’ye ’low Lum done seen Grundy an’ druv him ’way ? ” she asked in tones of awe. Law me. Mis’ Shinault, but hemus’ hev grit! ” Grit? — poor Lum! But Polly Ann, who was superstitious, did have a vague and ap¬ palling theory that in some way Boas might have transferred Grundy to Lum. Yet, were she right, it was not natural for Lum to take such evident comfort in Boas’s society, going there every day, and taking his violin, although he never lifted the bow at home. Boas had little to say ; what he had was about the time when his lost boys were children. He would lie for hours, quite patient, quite content, watching his wife at her simple tasks or hear¬ ing Lum play. He often smiled. It was a pa¬ thetic sight to see how this man, who had not known peace for so long, seemed actually to revel in mere immunity from dread. “ ’Pears like I cudn’t git enough er jes restin’,” he would say. He suffered very little physically. It isn’t so much that his lungs are gone,” the doctor had said; all his organs seem used up. It’s more a death from exhaustion than any¬ thing else.” November passed. Early in December Boas died. Lum saw him only a few hours before the event. He had never alluded to the past horror, but to-day he said : “ Lum, I be’n hav¬ in’ a cur’is dream. ’Beared like I war haulin’ logs alonger Grundy Wild, like we useter. An* we uns war hevin’ sich a pleasan’ time. Plit war purty weather, an’ we uns didn’t ’pear ter hev no bad feelin’s ’twixt us, an’ Grundy he war a laffin’ an’ pokin’ fun, an’ me, I war laf- fin’, too, kase ye know them tricks er his’n an’ quar contraptions, an’ nary un ’membered nuthin’ er thet ar bad time. I war a laffin’ w’en I waked up. Lum, we uns war right good frien’s wunst, an’ hits quar but I ar’ a feelin’ them ole frien’ly feelin’s now agin. Hit’s like the res’ war jes a bad dream. I ain’t skeered no mo’ er meetin’ up with Grundy, Lum.” Not long afterward he fell asleep, and he may have wakened with Grundy, for he did not waken in this world. There was a great gathering at the funeral. To this day the widow talks about it with doleful pride : ’Twar the vurry bigges’ an’ the gran’es’ buryin’ the Bend ever seen. A hun’erd an’ sixty-two, big an’ little, looked at the co’pse. I ceounted.” Whitsun Harp came to the funeral. It so happened that when Lum first saw him they were both standing at the grave. The open grave was between them. Polly Ann saw Lum’s moody countenance brightened by a fierce light. Harp did not seem to see Lum or any one ; his composed and melancholy gaze went past their heads over the forlorn little field with its rail fence and high gray grass waving above the unmarked mounds. The ser¬ vices ended, the people slowly walked down the path which their own footsteps had made through the grass. Polly Ann kept close to Lum. He edged himself up to Whitsun. They spoke together in a low tone, but Polly Ann had the ears of an Indian ; she caught two fragments of Lum’s sentences : Nuthin’ now ter hender,” and “ Down en th’ bottom, by the little bayou.” ^ There were people with the Shinaults as far as the ferry, and afterward there were the widow and two cousins to escort home. One of the cousins, intent on having a comfortable gos¬ sip about the dead man with some one not too near him for free discussion, returned with Lum. So she gave Polly Ann no chance to see her husband alone, and was still rock¬ ing and talking in the black and gilt rocking- chair when he came in and took down his gun. I’m goin’ fer a shoot, Polly Ann,” said he. He had crossed the threshold, but he came back and kissed his wife on both cheeks, be¬ fore the cousin. The cousin giggled; but Polly Ann remembered that he had not kissed her before in three weeks. I fear that her visitor found her an ungracious hostess. The instant

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WHITSUN HARP, REGULATOR, she was free, she ran to the shore. Lum’s boat was gone, but Boas’s little boat had been left near the ferry ; in this she rowed over to Clover Bend. At first she hesitated on the other shore, but presently she ran at the top of her speed. She had heard a single shot. Thar wud er be’n two^' her white lips kept muttering; ‘‘ thar wuz on’y one ! ” She ran past the mill, past the pasture, down into the swamp. It was the same cypress brake through which Lum had ridden with Boas, three weeks before; but it was another scene to-day. One of the wood fires, so common in autumn, had shorn the ground of the green cane and all the undergrowth that hides the weird ugliness of the cypress roots. Now, bared of every tender disguise of vine or moss, the hideous things, in their grotesque and distorted semblance of human form, seemed demon dwarfs crouching over their fires; while +he cypress knees bore an uncanny resemblance to the toes of incompletely buried giants. Out of this huddle of monstrous shapes rose the cypress-trees, unmarred by knot or branch until high, high above a rider’s head, some slim and erect like stately young maidens, others of enormous girth, brother giants to those that the earth refused to cover. Some were as smooth and glossy white as dead bones. The fire had eaten out their life. Charred logs were tumbled over the ground, and the cypress boughs were ashes whence rose a cloud of smoke under hurrying feet. Polly Ann ran on farther and farther into the ruined forest. She could see the shining of water. A log had fallen across the road. No, oh God! it was no log, it was a man, it was Whitsun Harp lying on his face, shot dead from behind. Another woman might have screamed. Polly Ann only knelt down beside the man who had loved her all his youth, and very gently turned his face to the sun. He who so seldom smiled now wore a pleasant, dreamy smile on his lips. The mur¬ derer had taken such sure aim that death did not even interrupt the murdered man’s thought. Then, at last, Polly Ann understood her husband. This was what he was studying. Without a moan or cry her body swayed forward like a broken tree and fell beside Harp’s. But she did not lose consciousness ; she knew the voice that called her name, and she staggered to her feet. Lum was standing in the road, his face ashen-white and his gun shaking in his hands. She ran to him with a great sob and threw herself against his breast. Run 1 run ! ” she gasped, “ they’ll cotchye I Tek the boat ; the river’s bes’ I ” Fer w’y must I run ? ” said Lum. Though he was so agitated, so excited, he seemed rather like a man overcome by some unexpected sight of horror than one who fears for himself ‘‘You” — began Polly Ann; she clutched the barrel of his gun. It was cold to the touch. “ Ye hav’n’t fired hit off! ” screamed she. “ Naw,” said Lum, “ I seen ye weepin’ over Whitsun Harp ; ye ’low / killed him 1 ” “ Ye looked so — skeered ! ” I war skeered — pow’ful skeered. Kase, Polly Ann, I lef’ home ’ith my min’ sot on killin’ thet thar dead man, but I didn’t do hit. Hark’ ter me, afore him lyin’ thet away ye don’ b’lieve I cud lie. Lemme tell ye the hull truth.” Then he told, with the conciseness of strong emotion, how Boas had saved him in the first place, and how, as long as Boas lived, he could not renew his attempt. “ But, ter- day,” said he, I war free agin. I cud show ye I war a man’s much ez Harp. I spoken ter him at the buryin’.” — He shuddered. — “I ’p’inted this yere place. He tole me ter come ter the store fust, an’ then ef I wanted he’d come yere. I done wen’ ter the store. And he war thar. Afore ’em all, he stepped up an’ begged my pardin’. ‘ Mr. Shinault knows w’at fer,’ he says, an’ then he thanked mefer ‘ savin’ ’ on his life — he putt hit like thet — an’ tole the hull story. ‘ An’ now,’ sezee, ‘ I don’t guess ye keer fer my comp’ny down en the bottom.’ Then he holes out his han’, an’ I taken it, an’ he said, ‘ Ye won’ keep no gredge agin me no mo’, will ye, you nor yo’wife? ’ an’ I said ‘ Naw,’ an’ he went away, an’ I never seen him agin tell I seen you settin’ by him, an’ him dead. Polly Ann, ye do b’lieve me.” Polly Ann was sobbing, but she nodded. “ Abe Davis, he war with me, but he went on the high road, an’ I comedown yere fer a shoot, so I’d hev some squirrels to tote home. We heerd the shoot, but folks is alius shootin’ in the bottom. We mought er cotched of ’em ef we’d come straight down : I don’t guess they’ll ever cotch ’em now. Thar’s too many ter s’spicion.” Lum judged rightly. Among the dozen men who had cause to hate Whitsun, Justice (a somewhat unwieldy personage in the bot¬ tom) never could find enough evidence against any one to take action. Whitsun’s murderer was never punished, to Clover Bend’s know¬ ing; he was never even pursued. Lum knelt down as Polly Ann had done by the dead man’s side ; he looked up at his wife with love and pity beyond his expression. “Yes, he’s done gone shore, dearie,” he said slowly ; “ I wisht he warn’t. He war a better man nor me.” Polly Ann only sobbed. “Wud ye — wud ye like ter — ter say good¬ bye ter him afore I holler on Tobe? I’ll step over yander ter look fer ’im.”

Page 131

WJIITSUN HARF, FEGULATOF. 125 “ LUM KNELT DOWN AS POLLY ANN HAD DONE.” Then Polly Ann looked up. She read his thoughts. ‘‘ Lum,” said she, ‘‘come yere ! ” He came. “Ye ’low thet I set store by Whitsun, too gre’t store, mor’n I done by you ? ” “He war yo’ kin’, honey, I don’ mean ter ter trow it up agin ye — ye ’lowed I war triflin’.” “ Lum, Lum, don’ say the word,” cried she, ^^do7i't! I don’ know how ter tell ye; but ’twaz yoit alius, alius, even w’en ye hedn’t nary thought fer me an’ wuz waitin’ on Savannah Lady. I fit agin hit, I done my bes’ ter brung my min’ ter Whitsun, fer he — he axed me an’ he war so good, so brave, the bes’ an’ faith- fulles’ — but I didn’t do it, kase my min’ war VoL. XXXIV.— i8^. so sot on you. An’ then we uns wuz married, an’ ye didn’t set no gre’t store by me fer a right smart. An’ I wuz so lonesome, an’ paw war gone, an’ I grieved. An’ then w’en ye sor¬ ter — sorter began ter hev a — a differ en yo’’ feelin’s I war frettin’ an’ takin’ on bekase ye warn’t like Whitsun, an’ kase ye wud let ’im dare ye an’ prommus ye lickin’s an’ not tek it up. Oh Lum, I war a fool, but ’twar alius 3^ou. VVhitsim knows it war alius you.” “ Yes, honey, yes, my darlin’, I onnerstan’,” said Lum softly, gathering her into his arms with a full heart. In that supreme moment they both forgot all the world but themselves. But Whitsun, lying in the sunlight at their feet, was smiling still. Octave Thanet,

Page 132

Page 133

ISRAEL. WHEN by Jabbok the patriarch waited To learn on the morrow his doom, And his dubious spirit debated In darkness and silence and gloom, There descended a Being with whom He wrestled in agony sore. With striving of heart and of brawn, And not for an instant forbore Till the East gave a threat of the dawn; And then, as the Awful One blessed him. To his lips and his spirit there came. Compelled by the doubts that oppressed him. The cry that through questioning ages Has been wrung from the hinds and the sages, “Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy Name!” Most fatal, most futile of questions ! Wherever the heart of man beats. In the spirit’s most sacred retreats. It comes with its somber suggestions. Unanswered forever and aye. The blessing may come and may stay. For the wrestler’s heroic endeavor. But the question, unheeded forever. Dies out in the broadening day. In the ages before our traditions. By the altars of dark superstitions. The imperious question has come; When the death-stricken victim lay sobbing At the feet of his slayer and priest. And his heart was laid smoking and throbbing To the sound of the cymbal and drum On the steps of the high Teocallis; When the delicate Greek at his feast Poured forth the red wine from his chalice With mocking and cynical prayer;

Page 134

128 ISRAEL, When by Nile, Egypt worshiping lay And afar, through the rosy, flushed air The Memnon called out to the day; Where the Muezzin’s cry floats from his spire; In the vaulted Cathedral’s dim shades, Where the crushed hearts of thousands aspire Through art’s highest miracles higher, This question of questions invades Each heart bowed in worship or shame; In the air where the censers are swinging A voice, going up with the singing. Cries, “Tell me, I pray Thee, Thy Name!” No answer came back, not a word. To the patriarch there by the ford; No answer has come through the ages To the poets, the seers, and the sages. Who have sought in the secrets of science The name and the nature of God, Whether cursing in desperate defiance Or kissing his absolute rod — But the answer which was and shall be, “ My name ! nay, Avhat is it to thee ? ” The search and the question are vain. By use of the strength that is in you. By wrestling of soul and of sinew The blessing of God you may gain. There are fights in the far-gleaming heaven That never will shine on our eyes. To mortals ’twill never be given. To range those inviolate skies. The mind whether praying or scorning That tempts those dread secrets shall fail. But strive through the night till the morning And mightily shalt thou prevail. John Hay J-EROAE iN-THt 15ESERT

Page 135

THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. S a duty to the liv¬ ing and to the dead, I avail myself of the opportunity here afforded to perpetuate testi¬ mony concerning the strategy and grand tactics of that wonderful campaign of Chat¬ tanooga in which the battle of Chickamauga was an inevitable incident. In the performance of this peculiar duty, it is a relief to know that, thanks to Congress and to Colonel R. N. Scott, the publication of reports, correspond¬ ence, orders, and dispatches relating to these events will soon be made in a forthcoming volume of the “ Records of Union and Con¬ federate Armies during the Rebellion,” which will enable an interested public to verify the accuracy of what I shall state.* On October 30th, 1862, at Bowling Green, Kentucky, I assumed command of the troops which had been under the able and consci¬ entious Major-General D. C. Buell. They consisted of the' Fourteenth Army Corps and such reenforceraents as had joined it previous to the battle of Perryville, Kentucky, which drove the Confederates advancing under Bragg, back into Tennessee. There were, in all, 10 divisions of infantry, about 34 batteries of ardllery, and some 18 regiments of gallant but untrained cavalry. The Army of the Cumberland was molded out of these by organizing the infantry and ar¬ tillery into grand divisions: the right under Major-General A. McD. McCook; the center under Major-General George H. Thomas; and the left under Major-General Thomas L. Crit¬ tenden. The cavalry was under General D. S. Stanley, an experienced chief. There was a pioneer brigade, formed by details from the infantry, under the chief engineer, and inspec¬ tor general’s and topographical staffs for corps, division, and brigade service, detailed from offi¬ cers of the line. Through interchanges, the mus¬ kets of each brigade were reduced to a single caliber; and battle-flags were prescribed to dis¬ tinguish corps, divisions, and brigades on the battle-field and march. With this army, under instructions from * Colonel Robert N. Scott died on March 5th of pneumonia. He had been ill only a week. In 1878 lie was assigned to the duty of compiling the records of the war, which he performed with signal ability and Major-General Halleck, General-in-Chief, I was to Go to East Tennessee, driving the rebels out of Middle Tennessee.” It was November. The autumn rains were near at hand. East Tennessee was 150 miles away, over the Cumberland Mountains. It had been stripped of army supplies by the Confederates. We had not wagons enough to haul supplies to subsist our troops fifty miles from their depots, as had just been demon¬ strated in their pursuit of Bragg, after Perry¬ ville. Hence our route to East Tennessee must be by the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, or within less than fifty miles right or left of it. The shortest and best line lies through that gap in the mountains where all the drainage of East Tennessee breaks through and flows westward from Chattanooga, forty miles by river, into Middle Tennessee at Bridgeport. [See map, page 133]. In the first week of November the Army of the Cumberland, therefore, proceeded to Nashville, and as soon as it was prepared to do so, Dec. 26th, began its movement for Chattanooga, distant 15 1 miles. Meanwhile, the enemy under Bragg concentrated at Mur¬ freesboro’, 32 miles from Nashville. The op¬ posing armies met on the bloody field of Stone’s River, December 30th, and after a contest of four days, in which twenty per cent, of its brave officers and men were killed and wounded, the Army of the Cumberland took Murfreesboro’. The Confederates retired to Duck River, 32 miles south, and established a formidable in¬ trenched camp across the roads leading south¬ ward at Shelbyville. Another intrenched camp was constructed by Bragg 18 miles south of Shelbyville at Tullahoma, where the McMinn¬ ville branch intersects the main Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. The winter rains made the country roads impassable for large military operations. Our adversary’s cavalry outnumbered ours nearly three to one. It occupied the corn regions of Duck and Elk rivers. Ours had to live in regions exhausted of supplies, to watch and guard the line of the railroad which supplied us — 32 miles to Nashville, and the Louisville and Nashville Railway for 185 miles farther northward to Louisville. We lost many of our animals for want of long forage. Mean- impartiality. His loss will be keenly felt by students of war history who, like ourselves, have had the bene¬ fit of his scholarly counsel and unfailing courtesy. — Editor.

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130 THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. while we hardened our cavalry, drilled our infantry, fortified Nashville and Murfreesboro’ for secondary depots, and arranged our plans for the coming campaign upon the opening of the roads, which were expected to be good by the ist of May, 1863. General Burnside, commanding the Depart¬ ment of the Ohio, including Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky (with headquarters at Cincin¬ nati), sent his next in command, Major-Gen¬ eral George L. Hartsuff, to arrange for his forces to cooperate with ours for the relief of East Tennessee, which, though largely Union in sentiment, was now occupied by the enemy under General Buckner. I explained to Hartsuff my plan, the details of which I gave to no other. It was briefly : Fzrs^. We must follow the line of the Nash¬ ville and Chattanooga Railway. Second. We must surprise and manoeuvre Bragg out of his intrenched camps by mov¬ ing over routes east of him to seize the line of the Nashville and Chattanooga Railway in his rear; beat him if he fights, and follow and dam¬ age him as best we can, until we see him across the Tennessee. Third. We must deceive him as to the point of our crossing the Tennessee, and securely es¬ tablish ourselves on the south side. Fourth. We must then manoeuvre him out of Chattanooga, get between him and that point, and fight him, if possible, on ground of our own choosing, and if not, upon such ground as we can. Fifth. Burnside must follow and guard the left flank of our movement, especially when we get into the mountains. His entrance into East Tennessee will lead Bragg’s attention to Chattanooga and northward, while we cross below that point. Sixth. Since our forces in rear of Vicksburg would be endangered by General Joseph E. Johnston, if he should have enough troops, we must not drive Bragg out of Middle Tennessee until it shall be too late for his command to reenforce Johnston’s. Bragg’s army is now, apparently, holding this army in check. It is the most important service he can render to his cause. The Con¬ federate authorities know it. They will not order, nor will Bragg venture to send away any substantial detachments. In fact, he is now holding us here by his nose, which he has inserted between our teeth for that purpose. We shall keep our teeth closed on his nose by our attitude, until we are assured that Vicks¬ burg is within three weeks of its fall. General Hartsuff reported this to Burnside, and advised me of their assent to the plan and to concurrent action. The news that Vicksburg could not hold out over two or three weeks having reached us, we began our movements to dislodge Bragg from his intrenched camp on the 24th of June, 1863. It rained for seventeen consecutive days. The roads were so bad that it required four days for Crittenden’s corps to march seven¬ teen miles. Yet, on the 4th of July, we had possession of both the enemy’s intrenched camps, and by the 7th, Bragg’s army was in full retreat over the Cumberland Mountains into Sequatchie valley, whence he proceeded to Chattanooga, leaving us in full possession of Middle Tennessee and of the damaged Nashville and Chattanooga Railway, with my headquarters at Winchester, fifty miles from our starting-point, Murfreesboro’. This move¬ ment was accomplished in fifteen days, and with a loss of only 586 killed and wounded. From Winchester by railroad to Chatta¬ nooga is about sixty-nine miles. By wagon roads it is much greater. To pass over this distance, greater than from the Rappahan¬ nock to Richmond, Virginia, with intervening obstacles far more formidable, was our great¬ est work. In front of us were the Cumberland Mountains. Beyond them was the broad Ten¬ nessee River, from 400 to 900 yards wide. On the north side of it, beyond the Cumberland Mountains, lay Sequatchie valley, 3 or 4 miles wide and 60 miles long. East of that, W aldron’s Ridge, the eastern half of the Southern Appa¬ lachian range, cut from the Cumberlands by the Sequatchie. At the eastern base of this ridge flows the Tennessee above Chattanooga, from 400 to 600 yards wide. On the south of the Tennessee tower the cliffs of Sand Mountain, 600 or 700 feet high. Beyond that broad, flat, wooded top is Trenton valley, 40 or 50 miles long, ascending southerly to the top of the plateau ; and east of it the long frowning cliffs of Lookout Mountain, a thousand feet above this valley, stretch northward to the gap at Chattanooga with not a single road of ascent for 26 miles, and not another until Valley Head, 40 miles southward from Chattanooga. The task before us was : First. To convince General Bragg, a wary and experienced officer, that we would cross the Tennessee at some point far above Chat¬ tanooga. This required time and serious movements. Second. Meanwhile, without attracting his attention, to repair the Nashville and Chat¬ tanooga Railway to Bridgeport on the Ten¬ nessee. Third. To subsist our troops and accumu¬ late twenty days’ rations at Stevenson, without allowing him to get the faintest intimation of our intentions and doings. Fourth. To construct a large pontoon bridge train, bring it and the pioneer brigade for-

Page 137

THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA, 131 ward by rail to the vicinity of Stevenson, wholly concealed from the enemy’s knowl¬ edge, and have the men trained to lay and take up bridging. Fifth, Our movement must be delayed un¬ til the new corn is fit for horse-feed ; because when we cross the river and go into the mount¬ ains, our trains must carry twenty days’ rations and ammunition enough for two great battles. We have not trains to carry anything beyond this, and hence feed for our animals must be obtained from the coming corn crop of the country into which we are going, or our campaign will be a failure. Sixth, When we cross the Tennessee, we must so move as to endanger Bragg’s com¬ munications by rail and oblige him, for their protection, to fall back far enough to give us time and space to concentrate between him and Chattanooga and, if possible, to choose our own battle-ground ; for doubtless he will fight us with all the force he can assemble. How all this was done we have not space to tell. Nor can we relate how it came to pass that the Army of the Cumberland had to pro¬ ceed on its perilous mission alone, unaided, unassisted, either by our Army of the Ten¬ nessee, unemployed since the surrender of Vicksburg, or by the activity of the Army of the Potomac, which might have kept Lee from sending Longstreet to fight us; or by the Department of the Gulf, which, instead of threatening the enemy’s Gulf coast to keep troops from going to Bragg, by a useless ex¬ pedition to Texas, had given bonds, so to speak, not to molest them ; or b^y Burnside’s command, which was so far away to the north of us that, in the hour of need, with forty thousand men of all arms, he could do nothing to help us. I only repeat that we were ordered forward alone, regardless alike of the counsels of com¬ manders, the clamors of the press, the prin¬ ciples of military art and science, and the interests of our country. Of all this the corps commanders of the Army of the Cumberland and myself were well aware. They knew that the Secretary of War, without reason or jus¬ tice, was implacably hostile to me. They knew more. They knew that those great loyal gov¬ ernors, Curtin of Pennsylvania, Andrew of Massachusetts, and Yates of Illinois, offered seven regiments of two years’ veterans, who were willing to reenlist on condition that they should go as mounted infantry to the Army of the Cumberland; that General Lovell H. Rousseau bore a letter to Secretary Stanton, explaining how very important would be the services of such a body of men in guarding the long and exposed line of our communications, soon to be lengthened by our advance to Chat¬ tanooga ; that this line must be guarded ; that every such mounted man in that move would give us three infantry men at the front. They knew that when the Secretary had read my let¬ ter, he rudely said to General Rousseau : I would rather you would come to ask the com¬ mand of the Army of the Cumberland, than to ask reenforcements for General Rosecrans. He shall not have another d - d man.” On the 4th of August, General Halleck tel¬ egraphed me : “Your forces must move forward without further de¬ lay. You will daily report the movement of each corps till you cross the Tennessee.” On the 6th, after full consideration and con¬ sultation with my corps commanders, I re¬ plied : “ My arrangements for beginning a continuous move¬ ment will be completed, and the execution begun, by Monday next. . . . It is necessary to have our means of crossing the river completed and our supplies pro¬ vided to cross sixty miles of mountain, and sustain our¬ selves during the operations of crossing and fighting, before we move. To obey your order literally would be to put our troops at once into the mountains on nar¬ row and difficult roads destitute of pasture and forage and short of water, where they would not be able to manoeuvre as exigencies may demand, and would cer¬ tainly cause ultimate delay and probably disaster. If, therefore, the movement which I propose cannot be regarded as obedience to your order, I respectfully re¬ quest a modification of it, or to be relieved from the command.” The War Department did not think it pru¬ dent to relieve me, and therefore gave consent in terms sufficient to convict it of reckless ignorance, or worse. But we were soldiers. We moved to our work with every energy bent on insuring its success. On the loth of August our move¬ ment began. On the 14th all our corps were crossing the Cumberlands. It required six or seven days. The movement appeared as if directed toward Knoxville, but it was really to concentrate near Bridgeport and Stevenson. Crittenden crossed the Cumberlands into Sequatchie valley and made a bivouac many miles long ; sent Van Cleve’s division with our left wing cavalry to Pikeville ; ordered two infantry brigades to cross W aldron’s Ridge by roads some miles apart, and to bivouac in long lines on its eastern edge, in sight of observers from the opposite side of the river, who would take them for strong advances of heavy col¬ umns of troops of all arms. This appearance was confirmed by the boldness of our cavalry and mounted infantry, which descended into the valley of the Tennessee and drove every¬ thing across to the enemy’s side of the river. The other corps were concealed in the forests north and west of Stevenson. The pontoon bridge train came down from Nashville by rail on the 24th of August, and the pioneers took it away out of observation,

Page 138

THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. 132 practiced laying and taking up pontoonbridges until the 29th, when they laid a bridge across the Tennessee at Caperton’s, ten miles below Bridgeport, in four and a half hours. It was 1254 feet long, and the work was done at the rate of 4.6 feet per minute. Meanwhile, to prepare for sustaining our army at Chattanooga, I contracted with great railway bridge-building firms to rebuild the railway bridge at Bridgeport, over 2700 feet long, in four weeks, and the Running Water Bridge, three spans, 17 1 feet each, to be done within two weeks thereafter; and ordered Cap¬ tain Edwards, Assistant Quartermaster, to have constructed, with all dispatch, five flat- bottomed stern- wheel steamboats of light draft, to run on the Tennessee between Bridgeport and Chattanooga. Our first bridge was ready, August 29th, and the Twentieth Corps was ordered across it to Valley Head, the south end of Trenton valley, forty miles south of Chattanooga. Thence a road leads down the eastern slopes of Lookout, by Alpine, into Broom town valley, whence there are roads toward the Northern Georgia railway line and to Rome. This heavy corps of all arms, so far south of Bragg’s position at Chattanooga, made him uneasy. But when Thomas, after crossing, moved with his corps up Trenton valley in the same direction, with all his train, Bragg became still more anxious. Then came Crittenden following Thomas with merely an unostentatious column in observa¬ tion on the direct road to Chattanooga. This movement portended mischief and it was strong enough to do plenty of it. As a prudent commander, Bragg could not afford to leave us forty miles south of his position, to get quietly down and concentrate between him and Atlanta. Bragg was reluctant to leave his stronghold Chattanooga, and yet he yielded to his appre¬ hensions. On the 8th he slowly retired south¬ ward, giving out rumors that he would go back to Rome or to Atlanta. On Sept. 9th Critten¬ den’s leading division entered Chattanooga. On the afternoon of the same day our cavalry and infantry, from the north side of the river, crossed over into town. The cavalry moved out to see if the enemy had gone. He was be¬ yond Rossville and behind Missionary Ridge, but not far away. To keep up Bragg’s appre¬ hensions, McCook was ordered, without exposing his command, to appear advancing. On the 12th Thomas crossed over Lookout, up Johnson’s Pass and down Cooper’s, putting his command in snug defensive position at its foot. Crittenden had moved his whole corps into Chattanooga over the road at the north end of Lookout, but was ordered not to push out into danger. On the loth the story of Bragg’s retreat to Atlanta was found to be false, and, behind our cavalry and mounted infantry, Crittenden’s infantry moved cau¬ tiously out. By the 12th, I found that the enemy was concentrating behind Pigeon Mountain near Lafayette. When Crittenden’s reconnaissance in force, of the 12th and 13th, showed the rear of Bragg’s retiring columns near the Chicka- mauga, I instantly ordered him to move west¬ ward within supporting distance of Thomas as speedily and secretly as possible. At the same time orders were dispatched to McCook to join Thomas at the foot of Cooper’s Gap with the utmost celerity.* Our fate now depended, first upon prompt concentration, and next, on our choosing our own battle-ground, where our flanks would be protected and where we could have full use of our artillery. Everything indicated that the enemy must soon attack us. Bragg issued his order for it, dated September i6th, 1863, in which he says to his command, ‘‘ You have been amply reenforced.” Yes! The Confed¬ erate authorities had wisely given Bragg every man they thought it possible to spare, from Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mis¬ sissippi. Even the prisoners paroled at Vicks¬ burg contributed to strengthen him. Our command received none from our au¬ thorities, who had abundant force at their dis¬ position. About the loth of September, aroused by fear of consequences. General Halleck be¬ gan telegraphing orders for reenforcements, but we were involved in the mountains and be¬ yond reach, and it was entirely too late for any useful results ; but it was a confession that sup¬ port ought to have been ordered at the proper time, and might serve for ulterior operations after our fate was decided. At last, on the i8th, McCook’s corps came within reach of the enemy, who was then mov¬ ing through the gaps in the Pigeon Mountain to attack us. Over the tree-tops we saw clouds of dust moving toward our left. Bragg wanted to get between us and Chattanooga. We had no time to lose. The whole Twentieth Corps came down the mountain, and Thomas, with three of his di¬ visions, was ordered to move north-eastward through the forests by lines of fires, until his command was placed across the Reed’s Bridge road and the more westwardly roads leading to Chattanooga via Rossville. Crittenden and McCook were to follow when the enemy’s plan developed. Eight o’clock on the morning of September 19th found Thomas and his wearied men in * For additional maps and pictures relating to the battles of Chickamauga and Chattanooga, see The Century Magazine for April, 1887. — Editor.

Page 139

THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. 133 position. Before 9 the fighting began. Critten¬ den, with Palmer and Van Cleve, moved on the Lafayette road toward Thomas’s right. The enemy soon abandoned his attempts on our left, and concentrated toward our cen¬ ter. Johnson’s division was ordered from McCook to Thomas; Van Cleve was driven, and Davis’s division gave ground. General Negley was sent to Van Cleve’s position at 5 p. M., and Sheridan earlier to help Davis. The fight raged. The enemy went back and the day closed. The corps commanders came to my headquarters. They said they had fought superior numbers. They were cool, experienced commanders; they had been in many bloody battles ; their opinions had great weight. I saw that the morrow was likely to be more bloody and decisive than that day. I determined the new line, so that there should be the least possible moving of the tired troops, and that it should be short enough to give us seven brigades in reserve. All but one had been in action that day. Thomas must hold the left to the last extremity. If beaten, he must retire on Rossville and Chattanooga. Pie must send his trains there at once. He had the four divisions of his own corps (the Fourteenth), Johnson’s from the Twentieth and Palmer’s from the Twenty-first Corps. Granger, with three brigades of the Reserve Corps, was in rear of his left at Rossville. This was all of our whole army on the field, save ten brigades. But the defense of our left was the defense of our army and of Chattanooga. On the 20th, short- VoL. XXXIV.— 19. ly after daylight, I examined Thomas’s whole line, and at 6 o’clock he wrote that he would like to have his right division ( Negley ’s) to place on his extreme left. I ordered General Crittenden to send General Wood to replace Negley in the line. At 9 o’clock I found Wood in line of battle half a mile in rear of Negley. He said that he had understood that his order was to suppo7't Negley, not to relieve him, and pro¬ ceeded to do what should have been done at least a half hour before. Meanwhile the bat¬ tle had begun on Thomas’s left. It moved toward the right. Heavier and heavier rolled the musketry and thundered the cannon. Cap¬ tain Willard came from Thomas and asked for Negley. He had been waiting to be relieved, but now, at last, he went filing out of the woods by his left. Van Cleve was ordered farther to the north-east; McCook had had the most repeated and emphatic orders to keep his troops closing to the left. At II o’clock, Major Kellogg came from Thomas, who wished to know if he could have Brannan. I replied : Yes; tell him to dispose of Brannan, who has only one brigade in line, and to hold his position, and we will reenforce him, if need be, with all the right”; and said to Major Bond, of my staff, If Brannan goes out, Wood must fill his place. Write him that the commanding general directs him to close to the left on Reynolds and support him.” Major Kellogg went to Brannan and gave him the order to move his command toward the left.

Page 140

134 THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. Brannan’s skirmishers being driven in at this time, he consulted Reynolds, who said : Under the circumstances, stay and send General Thomas word you are being at¬ tacked, and ask him if, under such circum¬ stances, you shall leave.” To this message General Thomas replied : ‘‘No, by no means.” When an orderly handed Wood his order “ to close on Reynolds and support him,” his skirmishers, on Opdycke’s front, were being driven. Without seeking explanations from Brannan or Reynolds, and without notifying me (I was in the open field not 600 yards from him), he drew his command out of the line. Jeff. C. Davis, under orders to keep closed to the left, moved in to fill Wood's place, and his two brigades were struck by Longstreet, who, with a column “brigade front” and five lines deep, assaulted that part of the line and drove it out of place. Sheri¬ dan’s three brigades were ordered to the break, but had only force enough to break a line or two, and were obliged to withdraw. Watching the unavailing eftbrt of Sheridan to stem the tide, I observed the long line of Longstreet’s wing coming from the south-east in line of battle, outreaching our right by at least a half mile. I ordered Davis and Sheri¬ dan to fall back northward and rally on the Dry valley road at the first good point for defense, leaving most of my staff to aid in rallying these troops; and with my chief-of- staff, senior aide, and a few orderlies pro¬ ceeded over toward the rear of our center, directing such of Van Cleve’s broken rear of column as I met to join Sheridan on the Dry valley road. In view of all the interests at stake, I decided what must be done. Halting at a road coming from the west and leading eastward toward the rear of our left, I said to General Garfield and Major Bond : “ By the sound of the battle over to the south-east, we hold our ground. Our greatest danger is, that Longstreet will follow us up on the Dry val¬ ley road over yonder to the west of us. Post, with all of our commissary stores, except those of the Twenty-first Corps, is over that ridge, not more than two or three miles from the Dry valley road. If Longstreet advances and finds that out, he may capture them. This would be fatal to us. If he comes this way he will turn the rear of our left, seize the gap at Rossville, and disperse us. To provide against what may happen : — “ FTst. Sheridan and Davis must have re¬ newed orders to resist the enemy’s advance on the Dry valley road ; “ Second. Post must be ordered to push all our commissary trains into Chattanooga and securely park them there ; “ Thh'd. Orders must go to Mitchell to ex¬ tend his cavalry line obliquely across that ridge, connect with the right of Sheridan’s posi¬ tion on this valley, and cover Post’s trains from the enemy until they are out of danger ; Fourth. Orders must goto Spears’s brigade, now arrived near there, to take possession of the Rolling-mill bridge across Chattanooga Creek, put it in good order, hold it until Post arrives with his trains, then turn the bridge over to him, and march out on the Rossville road and await orders ; “ Fifth. Wagner in Chattanooga must have orders to park our reserve artillery defen¬ sively, guard our pontoon bridge across the Tennessee, north of the town, and have his men under arms ready to move as may be required ; “ Sixth. General Thomas must be seen as to the condition of the battle and be informed of these dispositions. “ General Garfield, can you not give these orders ? ” I asked. Garfield answered : “ Gen¬ eral, there are so many of them, I fear I might make some mistake ; but I can go to General Thomas for you, see how things are, tell him what you will do, and report to you.” “ Very well. I will take Major Bond and give the orders myself I will be in Chattanooga as soon as possible. The telegraph line reaches Ross¬ ville, and we have an office there. Go by Sheri¬ dan and Davis and tell them what I wish, then go to Thomas and telegraph me the situation.” I dispatched my orders, by messenger, to Mitchell and Post, gave them in person to Spears and Wagner, and awaited Garfield’s re¬ port, which, dated 3.45 p. m. from the battle¬ field, reached me at 5 p. m., saying: “We are intact after terrific fighting, getting short of ammunition, and the enemy is going to as¬ sault our lines once more. Our troops are in good spirits and fighting splendidly.” I ordered Garfield by dispatch to tell Thomas to use his discretion at the close of the fight whether to stop on the ground he occupied or to retire on Rossville, and said that I would send ammunition and troops accordingly. Thomas used that discretion and retired to Rossville, where our troops halted, and, in spite of their condition, wearied with three days and a night of marching and fighting, were by ii o’clock in fair defensive position. I ordered up ammu¬ nition and rations. On the next morning, Mon¬ day, the 2ist, our lines at Rossville were recti¬ fied, and advantageous positions were taken to receive the enemy if he desired to attack us. After reconnoitering a few points, he found us there and desisted from further efforts. We were now concentrated between the enemy and Chattanooga, with ammunition to fight another battle. During the day I selected the defensive lines our command would occupy

Page 141

THE CAMPAIGN FOR CHATTANOOGA. 135 CHATTANOOGA FROM THE NORTH SIDE OF THE TENNESSEE — LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN IN THE DISTANCE; CAMERON HILL NEAR THE RIVER. (FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH BY LINN.) around Chattanooga, directed the manner of retiring from Rossville and of taking positions on these lines, to which the heads of columns were guided by staff and engineer officers. The troops began quietly to withdraw at lo o’clock p. M., and on Tuesday morning, Sep¬ tember 2 2d, they were intrenching the lines for holding permanent possession of the objective point of our campaign. It will be remembered that we started for Chattanooga from Murfreesboro’, on the 24th of June, 1863. The direct distance by rail is 1 19 miles. To the battle-ground of Chicka- mauga is 20 miles farther, or 139 miles. We dislodged our adversary from two strongly fortified camps; crossed the Cumberland Mountains, the Tennessee River, Sand Mount¬ ains and Lookout Mountain; fought the battle of Chickamauga; and on the 22d of September, just ninety-two days from starting, we held Chattanooga, for the possession of which at any time within the previous two years we would willingly have paid all that it had cost. In a note to Halleck, dated from the Ex¬ ecutive Mansion, September 21st, 1863, Presi¬ dent Lincoln, speaking of this possession, says : “ If held, with Cleveland inclusive, it keeps all Ten¬ nessee clear of the enemy and breaks one of his most important railroad lines. To prevent these conse¬ quences, so vital to his cause that he cannot give up the effort to dislodge us from the position thus bring¬ ing him to us, and saving us the labor, expense, and hazard of going further to find him, and giving us the advantage of choosing our own ground and preparing it to fight him upon. The details must, of course, be left to General Rosecrans, while we furnish him the means to the utmost of our ability. . . . If he can only maintain the position, without more, the rebellion can only eke out a short and feeble existence, as an animal may sometimes with a thorn in his vitals.” In presence of the facts I have just stated, and in view of all their marchings, combats, and bloody battles to get possession of Chat¬ tanooga, can the reader be made to believe that the Army of the Cumberland and its commander were likely to abandon or fail to hold it ? * W. S. Rosecrans. ^ The records will show [but without data by which Confederate maps of the battle show the enemy’s might be estimated the relative strength of regiments, line of battle on the morning of the 20th of September : — Ed.] that at the battle of Chickamauga Bragg had Front line, 6,880 yards long; second line, 3,310 yards 184 regiments and 20 battalions of infantry, 34 regi- long. Our front line, 3,400 yards long; second line, ments of cavalry, 47 batteries of artillery ; and that we 1,750 yards long. (Granger’s three brigades, three had only 133 regiments of infantry, 18 regiments of miles away, not included.) — W. S. R. cavalry, and 35^ batteries.

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THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. east side of Lookout Mountain, and after¬ wards approaching our front in solid lines of battle. Batteries of artillery hurried into posi¬ tion ; staff officers galloped over the field far¬ ther up the valley, and, in the direction of Rossville, great clouds of dust, like the pillar of cloud by day,” marked the advance of other unseen masses of troops. Bragg’s army was on its feet again, and an¬ other battle seemed imminent. Late that day General Bragg sent General Grade to Rose- crans requesting an exchange of prisoners. In a conversation with Major Bond, aide-de-camp to General Rosecrans, General Grade asked him what opinion prevailed among our men as to which army had the advantage in the operations that ended in the battle of Chicka- mauga and the occupation of Chattanooga, saying that this was a mooted question in Bragg’s camp. Major Bond replied that there had been no time in the past two years that we would not have given for the possession of Chattanooga all that it had cost, and he added, I believe we have got it.” After a pause General Grade remarked, Well, that is so.” As the flag of truce that came with this message approached our lines, all who saw it believed that it brought a demand from Bragg for the surrender of Chattanooga. A rumor that the demand had been made and refused quickly spread through our camp, and all the troops now eagerly waited for the opening gun of Bragg’s attack. But the battle was not to be. Bragg, having drawn his lines as close around Chattanooga as seemed prudent, sat down with his army, and began working with the spade not less energetically than the Army of the Cumberland. For many days, within the range of each other’s artillery, the two armies dug as though each was preparing the ON the night of September 20th, 1863, after two days of furious fighting, and after a loss of 1 6, 1 7 9 men, nearly one-third its strength, the Army of the Cumberland withdrew from Chickamauga to Rossville, not quite four miles in the rear, and there stood in line of battle all the next day. But an attack was not made. The enemy had dashed against the Rock of Chickamauga,” and had been bro¬ ken in pieces. Two-fifths of the men of Bragg’s army had been killed or wounded. Rossville was held till the night of the 21st, when the Army of the Cumberland withdrew to positions in and around Chattanooga. The non-com¬ batants of the town, in great alarm, had taken flight to the hills across the river, or had sought in their cellars refuge from the danger of an impending battle. Every church, public build¬ ing, and available house had been taken for hospital purposes, for our wounded soldiers filled the town, more than nine thousand hav¬ ing been brought in from Chickamauga. As soon as the divisions were in the posi¬ tions assigned to them, the muskets were stacked and ax, pick, and spade were grasped. Day and night the work of fortification went on ; trees were felled, houses were torn down, trenches were dug, epaulements for batteries rose from the ground in a single night, and the hills within our line grew into strong breast¬ works and impregnable fortresses. Looking from the signal station on Lookout Mountain down into the valley two thousand feet below, one could see myriads of boys in blue, like great ants, burrowing in the ground and throw¬ ing up hills of dirt. As Rosecrans, with his staff, rode along the lines, his troops greeted him with cheers that proclaimed the spirit of victors. Off to the south, Bragg’s army could be seen, swarming through Rossville gap, and spreading over Missionary Ridge and the

Page 143

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA, 137 grave of the other. After it became apparent that Bragg would not fight at Chattanooga, it was thought that he might cross the river above, threaten our lines of communication with the rear, and thus repeat, on the north side, the manoeuvre of Rosecrans. Longstreet advised such a movement; Bragg did not approve it, preferring to adopt the plan of starving us out. On September 24th a brigade that had held the point of Lookout Mountain was withdrawn. Bragg at once took possession, and sent Long- street’s corps over into Lookout valley. He also extended his pickets down the south bank of the river, nearly to Bridgeport, our base of supplies. This cut us off from the river and the roads on its north and south banks, and left us but one open road to the rear, — if the sixty miles of unused way over Waldron’s Ridge and through Sequatchie valley could be called a road, inasmuch as in places it was only the bed of winter torrents, or slashes on the mountain sides. Over this, for a time, we might haul supplies ; but we were in a state of semi-siege. Within a few days the trees within our lines had been cut down, for use in the fortifications, or for fuel, and even the arbors that had been put up to protect officers and men from the sickening heat of a September sun were sac¬ rificed for fuel. Coffee had to be boiled, though its drinkers broiled. There had been but little rain since early in July. The earth was parched and blistered. Leaves had dried up on the trees, and all grass had withered and turned gray. The moving of men and animals stirred up blinding clouds of dust which every breeze sent whirling through the camps. The troops were longing for rain, the chaplains were praying for it. With the first week in October the rains came, and it was a question whether the deep and sticky mud was not more objectionable than the dust. The hilly, barren country north of the river — the only country we could reach — could not furnish supplies enough for the poverty- stricken inhabitants the war had left. Our whole army was therefore obliged to depend for every ration and every pound of forage on the mules that hauled the army wagons over the sixty miles of horrible road from Bridgeport. On its line some of the hills were so steep that a heavy army wagon was almost a load going up, and, now that the rains were falling, that part of it in the little valleys had become so soft and cut up that a lightly loaded wagon would sink up to the axles. In one instance, a wagon having sunk till its bed rested on the mud, the driver did not, as usual, beat his mules and swear; he simply sat on a rock by the wayside, looked at the wretch¬ ed animals, and cried, VoL. XXXIV.— 20. In the third week of the occupation of Chattanooga, no one, from commanding gen¬ eral down, any longer expected or even thought of an attack. Both armies had almost ceased their excavations. Missionary Ridge, summit, side, and base, was furrowed with rifle-pits and studded with batteries. The little valley of Chattanooga was dammed up with earth¬ works, and Lookout Mountain, now a mighty fortress, lifted to the low-hanging clouds its threatening head, crowned with siege guns. Since the 5th of October the guns of Mis¬ sionary Ridge had been daily growling and barking at our forts on the left, while great shells came tumbling down from Lookout, like meteors shooting from the sky. Our own guns savagely sent back shot for shot, sowing them thickly on the sides of mountain and ridge. The two lines of pickets were not more than three hundred yards apart ; but on the picket line it was peaceful and calm, for, by common consent, there was no picket fir¬ ing. For it is inhuman to shoot the man into whose eyes one can look, even if he be an enemy. The pickets were there to watch, and not to kill. Quietly they sat at the little “ go¬ pher pits,”chaffing and sending back and forth boisterous jokes, while perhaps shrieking mes¬ sengers of death, unheeded and unnoticed, flew over their heads. On a still night, stand¬ ing on the picket line, one could hear the old negro song ‘‘ Dixie,” adopted by the Confeder¬ acy as their national music; while from our line came in swelling response, “ Hail Columbia ” and “ The Star-Spangled Banner.” With a glass Bragg’s headquarters on Missionaiy Ridge, even the movement of his officers and order¬ lies, could be seen ; while those on the ridge or on Lookout Mountain could bring into view our whole camp. By daylight our troops could be counted, our reveille heard, our roll-call noted, our scanty meals of half rations seen — the last without envy. And we were not only heard and seen, but the enemy’s signal flag on Lookout talked, over our heads, with the signal flag on Missionary Ridge. The fall rains were beginning, and haul¬ ing was becoming each day more difficult. Double teams could draw not much more than half loads. Quartermasters could not send mules to the front fast enough to take the place of those that were worked to death. Ten thou¬ sand dead mules walled the sides of the road from Bridgeport to Chattanooga. In Chatta¬ nooga the men were on less than half rations. Guards stood at the troughs of artillery horses to keep the soldiers from taking the scant sup¬ ply of corn allowed these starving animals. In¬ deed, so slight was the allowance of forage that many horses died of starvation, and most of the survivors grew too weak for use in pulling

Page 144

138 THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. battle: or CHATTANOOGA., NOV. ^3.24^25, 1863. SCALE OF miles" ' - { - 1 t— ^ 2^aiionaZ Woi<ks » — — Confederate TYbr^& REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION FROM "tHE MILITARY HISTORY OF ULYSSES S. GRANT," BY GENERAL ADAM BADEAU. N. Y. ; D. APPLETON & CO. the lightest guns. Men followed the wagons as they came over the river, picking up the grains of corn and bits of crackers that fell to the ground. Yet there was no murmur of dis¬ content. Before Rosecrans had advanced from Tulla- homa, he had urged the authorities at Washing¬ ton to send him reenforcements, and to cause such operations to be made in other fields as would prevent reenforcements from being sent to Bragg. To his entreaties they turned a deaf ear. Indeed, they were then about persuaded that Bragg was depleting his army by sending reenforcements to General Lee in Virginia ; and they compelled Rosecrans to cross the Tennessee River with an insufficient force. The battle of Chickamauga dispelled such ideas, and caused great alarm. In haste they ordered General Sherman to move at once with the Fifteenth Army Corps from the vicin¬ ity of Vicksburg to Chattanooga, and sent by rail the Eleventh Corps and Twelfth Corps, —

Page 145

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. 139 fifteen thousand men, — under command of General Hooker, from the Army of the Poto¬ mac. Early in October Hooker reached N ash- ville, and as his men could not be fed in Chattanooga, they were temporarily strung along the railroad from Nashville to Bridge¬ port. Ever since Longstreet got into Lookout valley, Rosecrans had been making prepara¬ tion to drive him out. A small stern-wheel steamboat was built at Bridgeport ; a captured ferry-boat, reconstructed, was made an avail¬ able transport ; and material for boats and pon¬ toons, or either, with stringers and flooring for bridges, was prepared at Chattanooga as rap¬ idly as possible, at an improvised saw-mill. But the plan finally adopted was conceived and worked out by General William F. Smith, Chief Engineer of the Army of the Cumber¬ land. On the 20th of October, after having been fully matured, it was submitted, and was warmly approved by Thomas, who had suc¬ ceeded Rosecrans, and who at once gave or¬ ders to General Smith, General Hooker, and others to carry it into execution with all pos¬ sible expedition. October i6th the Military Division of the Mississippi was created. General Grant was placed in command, with directions to pro¬ ceed at once to Chattanooga and take per¬ sonal charge of operations. While en route for that point, he telegraphed from Louis¬ ville, Kentucky, on the 19th, relieving General Rosecrans and placing General Thomas in command. The same day he telegraphed to General Thomas : — “ Hold Chattanooga at all hazards. I will be there as soon as possible. Please inform me how long your present supplies will last, and the prospect of keeping them up.” General Thomas responded : “Two hundred and four thousand and sixty-nine rations in store; 96,000 to arrive to-morrow, and all trains were loaded which had arrived at Bridgeport up to the 1 6th inst., probably 300 wagons. We will hold the town till we starve’.” General Grant reached Chattanooga the evening of the. 23d. The next day, in com¬ pany with Generals Thomas and Smith, he rode to Brown’s Ferry. There General Smith’s plan was explained to him. He heartily ap¬ proved it, and directed that its execution be proceeded with. Everything necessary for the movement being in readiness it was com¬ menced with the greatest possible haste and secrecy on the night of the 26th. After mid¬ night, fourteen hundred picked men from Ha- zen’s and Turchin’s brigades, under command of Brigadier-General Hazen, quietly marched to the river bank at Chattanooga ; the rest of the troops of these two brigades, with three batteries of artillery under Major John Men¬ denhall, crossed the river and marched over Moccasin Point to a place near Brown’s Fer¬ ry, where, under cover of the woods, they waited the arrival of General Hazen’s force. The success of this expedition depended on surprising the enemy at Brown’s Ferry. It was known that he had there 1 000 infantry, 3 pieces of artillery, and a squadron of cavalry, while Longs treet’s corps was not far oft'. At 3 o’clock in the morning, 52 pontoons, filled with Hazen’s 1400 men, and under the direc¬ tion of Colonel T. R. Stanley, i8th Ohio In¬ fantry, noiselessly started down the river on the nine-mile course to Brown’s Ferry. There was a full moon, but the light was dimmed by floating clouds and by a fog rising from the water. Oars were used till the first picket fire of the enemy was approached ; then the boats were steered close to the right bank, and al¬ lowed to float with the current. On top of Lookout a signal torch was seen flashing against the sky. Was it possible that the movement had been discovered, and that Lookout was telling Missionary Ridge ? No ; there were the pickets sitting around their fires on the south bank, unaware that fourteen hundred boys in blue were floating by within a stone’s throw. Not a gun had yet been fired, — not an alarm given. The boats still hugged the right bank. Brown’s Ferry was reached at break of dawn. Suddenly the oars were put into use, and before the enemy could make out the sounds, the boats were rowed to the left bank. The pickets on guard greeted them with a volley of musketry, and then fell back on their reserves. The four¬ teen hundred men quickly and in perfect order occupied the crest of a hill, and began to throw up light breastworks. But they had not proceeded far in this work when the enemy appeared and made a fruitless effort to drive them from the hill. In the mean time, the boats were bringing over the river the rest of the two brigades that had marched to the north ferry landing. When the transfer had been accomplished, the boats were used in the con¬ struction of a pontoon bridge, which was fin¬ ished by 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and over which Mendenhall’s artillery crossed. Work was impeded early in the day by shots from the guns on Lookout Mountain. In accordance with the general plan. Gen¬ eral Hooker, at daylight on the morning of Oc¬ tober 27th, crossed the river at Bridgeport with the Eleventh and Geary’s division of the Twelfth Corps, and moved along the direct road to Brown’s Ferry by the base of Raccoon Mountain. He brushed away the enemy’s pickets and light bodies of skirmishers, and moved cautiously, as he knew Longstreet was in Lookout valley, and might at any moment

Page 146

140 THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. appear to oppose his advance. It was his part to open and hold the river road, to co¬ operate with the Chattanooga force, and to protect the pontoon bridges from attacks that would almost certainly be made by Longstreet. At 5 o’clock in the afternoon, the head of his column reached a point about one mile from the ferry, up Lookout valley; and here his command went into camp, excepting Geary’s division, which was left three miles in tlie rear, in a position covering the ferry. These move¬ ments were made in plain view of the enemy on Lookout Mountain, who evidently did not realize their importance or design in time to oppose them with good prospects of success. A short distance from the ferry, up the little valley of Lookout, was Longstreet, with his troops. Down below, near its mouth, his old enemy Hooker, with troops fresh from the Army of the Potomac, had just thrown down the gage of battle. From the commencement of the war these opposing forces had confront¬ ed each other in Virginia. Both had left their respective armies in Virginia to reenforce armies in the West, one moving on the north¬ ern half, the other on the southern half of a circle over two thousand miles in circumfer¬ ence, and by a sort of affinity had come face to face in this far-off valley at the foot of Lookout Mountain. Longstreet did not hesi¬ tate to accept the challenge. When he dis¬ covered Hooker’s object, he did not even wait the light of day to repeat his old tactics. The night of the 27th was clear and the air crisp. The moon shone brightly from before midnight till morning. Hooker’s troops were sleeping soundly after their hard march of nearly twenty-five miles, when Longstreet’s men came crowding down the valley. An hour past midnight a terrific onslaught was made on Geary’s division. It was assaulted on three sides. Artillery in the valley and on Lookout opened a severe fire. Our men, who slept in line of battle, sprang to their feet at the first shot of a sentinel. The contest lasted forthree hours, till Longstreet’s line was broken and his men driven from the field. It was Longstreet’s intention to crush Geary ; then, with his whole force, to attack General How¬ ard’s Eleventh Corps, nearly three miles away. In order to hold Howard where he was, and to prevent him from sending assistance to Geary, he had sent a smaller column to move round his camp, and, almost in its rear, to oc¬ cupy a steep hill nearly two hundred feet high. General Howard ordered Colonel Orland Smith, with his brigade, to carry the hill. In gallant response a magnificent charge was made up the steep side, and the enemy was driven from the barricades on top at the point of the bayonet. Longstreet, routed at every point, retreated up the valley, leaving it as the moon’s pale light was fading over the hills and giving place to the coming brightness of day. Four hundred and twenty of our men, and many more of the enemy, were killed and wounded. Hooker thus gained Lookout valley; the siege of Chattanooga was raised; the “ cracker line ” was opened ! Hooker’s troops were truly messengers of glad tidings. In their wake followed hundreds of wagons, well filled with commissary stores, while the little Bridgeport steamer, loaded down to the guards, pushed its way up the river. The credit of this result is chiefly due to General W. F. Smith, Chief Engineer of the Army of the Cumberland, who conceived the plan of operations, and under whose directions it was mostly carried out. A failure in any part of the combined movements would have re¬ sulted seriously, perhaps disastrously. Fore¬ knowledge on the part of the enemy would have enabled him to thwart it. So secretly had material been prepared and movements made, that none of the thousands in camp at Chat¬ tanooga, save a very few officers, were aware of anything unusual being done, till, on the 28th, they were awakened by the roar of artil¬ lery and the rattling roll of musketry coming over from Lookout valley. The raising of the siege of Chattanooga, by opening up the river and the road on its south bank, was determined upon by the commanding officers of the Army of the Cumberland soon after the occupation, though the plan of operations was adopted later, but before General Grant came to Chattanooga. There being no longer any need for Long¬ street in Lookout valley, Bragg sent him, with his corps, to Knoxville for the purpose of driving out Burnside and regaining possession of East Tennessee. The authorities at Wash¬ ington became greatly concern ed for Burnside’s safety, and urged Grant to send assistance. But this he could not then do. Troops could not be spared from Chattanooga,.nor could Bragg be attacked in his stronghold till the arrival of Sherman with the Fifteenth Corps. But Burn¬ side held out against the attacks of Longstreet, and the situation at Chattanooga remained un¬ changed, except that supplies were constantly coming, and the men and the horses were get¬ ting in condition for active work. On November 15th, General Sherman reached Chattanooga in advance of his troops. The next day, with General Grant, General Thomas, and General Smith, he rode over the hills to a point from which he could get a good view of the north end of Missionary Ridge. This appeared to be unoccupied by the enemy, as far back as Tunnel Hill. General Grant, having here pointed out the ground, explained to General Sherman his plan of operations,

Page 147

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. and gave him instructions for carrying out the part assigned to him. General Grant’s plan, in brief, was to turn Bragg’s right. General Grant selected his old army — the Army of the Tennessee, now under com¬ mand of General Sherman — to open the bat¬ tle, to make the grand attack, and to carry Missionary Ridge as far as Tunnel Hill. The Army of the Cumberland was simply to get into position and cooperate with General Sher¬ man ; in fact, only to protect his right while he was doing this work. General Grant well knew the men whom he had thus honored; he had commanded them at Donelson, Pitts¬ burg Landing, and Vicksburg. He knew there were no better soldiers, and they came fresh from Vicksburg, bearing with them the prestige of victory. When he was explaining his plan to General Sherman, he said that the men of Thomas’s army had been so demoralized by the battle of Chickamauga, that he feared they could not be got out of their trenches to assume the offensive, and that the Army of the Cumberland had been so long in the trenches, that he wanted his troops to hurry up to take the offensive first.^ after which he had no doubt the Cumberland Army would fight well. The men of the Army of the Cumberland gave most hearty welcome to their brethren of the Army of the Tennessee, who had marched from the far-off Mississippi to their assistance ; but they were rather envious of them on account of the special distinction that had been given them and the glory that awaited them. They could not help feeling disappointed at not having been called on to do wlmt they thought should have been their peculiar work. The army so close in front was their old adversary. They had driven it from the Ohio across the States of Kentucky and Tennessee ; they had grappled with it in battle at Perry ville, at Stone’s River, and Chick¬ amauga. Here was a grand opportunity to fin¬ ish the battle of Chickamauga. Here was an opportunity for an effective, dramatic, and de¬ cisive conclusion. N o battle-field in our war, none in the wars of history, where large armies were engaged, was so spectacular, or so well fitted for a dis¬ play of soldierly courage and daring as the amphitheater of Chattanooga. Late on the night of November 2 2d asentinel who deserted from the enemy was brought to General Sheri¬ dan, and informed him that Bragg’s baggage was being reduced, and that he was about to fall back. On account of these indications and reports. General Grant decided not to wait longer for General Sherman’s troops to come up, but to find out whether Bragg was in fact withdrawing, and, if so, to attack him at once. Therefore, at 1 1 o’clock on the morning of the 23d, he directed General Thomas to drive in the enemy’s pickets,” and feel his lines for the purpose of finding out whether he still held in force. Thus General Grant was about to change his plans. He was compelled to de¬ part from his original purpose, and was obliged to call on troops of the Army of the Cumber¬ land to make the first offensive movement. General Thomas ordered General Granger, commanding the Fourth Corps, “ to throw one division of the Fourth Corps forward in the di¬ rection of Orchard Knob, and hold a second division in supporting distance, to discover the position of the enemy, if he still remained in the vicinity of his old camp.” Orchard Knob is a rough, steep hill, one hundred feet high, covered with a growth of small timber, rising abruptly from the Chatta¬ nooga valley, and lying about half way be¬ tween our outer pits and the breastworks of logs and stones. At its western base, and extending for a mile beyond, both north and south of the hill, were other rifle-pits, hid in part by a heavy belt of timber that extended about a quarter of a mile from the foot of the hill into the plain. Between this belt of timber and our lines were open fields in which there was not a tree, fence, or other obstruction, save the bed of the East Tennessee Railroad. On the plain were hundreds of little mounds, thrown up by our own and the enemy’s pickets, giving the appearance of an over¬ grown prairie-dog village. At noon General Grant, Assistant Secretary of War Dana, General Thomas, Generals Hooker, Granger, Howard, and other distin¬ guished officers stood on the parapet of Fort Wood, facing Orchard Knob, waiting to see this initial movement, — the overture to the battle of Chattanooga. At half-past twelve. Wood’s division, supported by Sheridan, marched out on the plain, in front of the fort. It was an inspiring sight. Flags were flying; the quick, earnest steps of thousands beat equal time. The sharp commands of hundreds of company officers, the sound of the drums, the ringing notes of the bugle, companies wheel¬ ing and counter-marching and regiments get¬ ting into line, the bright sun lighting up ten thousand polished bayonets till they glistened and flashed like a flying shower of electric sparks, — all looked like preparations fora pag¬ eant, rather than for the bloody work of death. Groups of officers on Missionary Ridge looked down through their glasses, and the enemy’s pickets, but a few hundred yards away, came out of their pits and idly stood looking on, unconcernedly viewing what they supposed to be preparations for a grand review. But at half-past one o’clock the advance was sounded.

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142 THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA, At once Wood’s division, moving with the steadiness of a machine, started forward. Not a straggler or laggard was on the field, and, what was probably hardly ever before seen, drummers were marching with their compa¬ nies, beating.the charge. General Howard, who had just come from the East, remarked to an officer: ‘‘Why, this is magnificent! Is this the way your Western troops go into action ? They could not go on dress parade better.” Now the enemy realized, for the first time, that it was not a review. His pickets fell back to their reserves. The reserves were quickly driven back to the main line. Firing opened from the enemy’s advanced rifle-pits, followed by a tremendous roll of musketry and roar of artillery. Men were seen on the ground, dot¬ ting the field over which the line of battle had passed. Ambulances came hurrying back with the first of the wounded. Columns of puffy smoke arose from the Orchard Knob woods. A cheer, faint to those on the parapet of Fort Wood, indicated that the boys in blue were carrying the breastworks on the Knob 1 A sharp, short struggle, and the hill was ours. The capture of Orchard Knob, with the ad¬ vancing of our lines half way to Missionary Ridge, had a most important bearing on the struggle at Chattanooga. It caused Bragg the same evening to withdraw Walker’s division from Lookout Mountain, and transfer it to Mis¬ sionary Ridge, for the purpose of strengthening his center and right, thus weakening his forces on Lookout Mountain, and rendering less doubtful the result of an assault on that strong¬ hold, — not yet contemplated. It also gave Gen¬ eral Thomas a much more advantageous posi¬ tion from which to cooperate with General Sherman the next day, and one from which the movements of the enemy in the valley between the Knob and Ridge could be better observed. And it showed the commanding general that the men of the Army of the Cumberland, who, against great odds, fought and held the field at Chickamauga, had not been rusted out by nine weeks of burial in enervating earthworks. While Granger’s troops were fighting at Or¬ chard Knob, part of General Sherman’s force was still at Brown’s Ferry. The crossing was rendered slow and difficult because the pon¬ toon bridge was frequently broken by logs and small rafts set afloat up stream by the enemy. In the afternoon all the divisions had crossed, except Osterhaus’s, when another break in the bridge occurred, and several pontoons were carried down stream. It was found that this could not be repaired before night, or in time for Osterhaus to join Sherman in his move¬ ment against Missionary Ridge. Osterhaus was, therefore, ordered to report with his di¬ vision to General Hooker, and the place of his division, temporarily separated from the Fif¬ teenth Corps, was filled by Davis’s division of the Fourteenth Corps, Army of the Cumber¬ land. About 4 o’clock in the afternoon of November 23d, when it became certain that Osterhaus would be attached to Hooker’s command. General Thomas directed Hooker to make a demonstration against Lookout Mountain the next morning, and, if the dem¬ onstration showed it could be carried, to pro¬ ceed to take it. Later in the day, orders to the same effect came to General Hooker from General Grant. The success at Orchard Knob, and the breaking of the bridge at Brown’s Ferry, caused this radical change to be made in Grant’s plans. Yet he still held to the chief feature, which was to turn Bragg’s right. The morning of November 24th opened with a cold, drizzling rain. Thick clouds of mist were settling on Lookout Mountain. At day¬ break Geary’s division, and Whitaker’s brigade of Cruft’s division, marched up to Wauhatchie, the nearest point at which Lookout Creek, swelled by recent rains, could be forded, and there crossed at 8 o’clock. The heavy clouds of mist reaching down the mountain side hid the movement from the enemy, who was ex¬ pecting and who was well prepared to resist a crossing at the Chattanooga road below. As soon as this movement was discovered, the enemy withdrew his troops from the sum¬ mit of the mountain, changed front, and formed a new line to meet our advance, — his left resting at the palisade, and his right at the heavy works in the valley, where the road crossed the creek. Having crossed at Wau¬ hatchie, Whitaker’s brigade, being in the ad¬ vance, drove back the enemy’s picket^, and quickly ascended the mountain, till it reached the foot of the palisade. Here, firmly attach¬ ing its right, the brigade faced left in front, with its left joined to Geary’s division. Geary now moved along the side of the mountain, and through the valley, thus covering the crossing of the rest of Hooker’s command. In the mean time Grose’s brigade was engag¬ ing the enemy at the lower road crossing, and Woods’s brigade of Osterhaus’s division was building a bridge, rather more than half a mile farther up the creek. Geary, moving down the valley, reached this point at ii o’clock, just after the bridge was finished, and as Osterhaus’s division and Grose’s brigade were crossing. Hooker’s command, now unit¬ ed in the enemy’s field, was ready to advance and sweep round the mountain. His line, hang¬ ing at the base of the palisades like a great pen¬ dulum, reached down the side of the mountain to the valley, where the force that had just crossed the creek was attached as its weight. Now, as, at the command of Hooker, it swung

Page 149

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. 143 forward in its upward movement, the artillery of the Army of the Cumberland, on Moccasin Point, opened fire, throwing a stream of shot and shell into the enemy’s rifle-pits at the foot of the mountain, and into the works thickly planted on the White House ” plateau. At the same time the guns planted by Hooker on the west side of the creek opened on the works which covered the enemy’s right. Then fol¬ lowed a gallant assault by Osterhaus and Grose. After fighting for nearly two hours, step by step up the steep mountain side, over and through deep gutters and ravines, over great rocks and fallen trees, the earthworks on the plateau were assaulted and carried, and the enemy driven out and forced to fall back. He did so slowly and reluctantly, taking ad¬ vantage of the rough ground to continue the fight. It was now 2 o’clock. A halt all along the line was ordered by General Hooker, as the clouds had grown so thick that a further advance was impracticable, and as his ammu¬ nition was almost exhausted and more could not well be supplied. Ammunition wagons could not be brought up the rough mountain side. But all of the enemy’s works had been taken. Hooker had carried the mountain on the east side, and had opened communication with Chattanooga. His right was at the palisades, his left in the valley near the mouth of Chattanooga Creek, and he commanded the enemy’s line of defensive works in Chattanooga valley. In the morning it had not been known in Chattanooga, in Sherman’s army, or in Bragg’s camp, that a battle was to be fought. In¬ deed, it was not definitely known even to General Grant ; for Hooker was only ordered to make a demonstration, and, if this showed a good chance for success, then to make an attack. Soon after breakfast, Sherman’s men at the other end of the line, intent on the north end of Missionary Ridge, and Thom¬ as’s men in the center, fretting to be let loose from their intrenchments, were startled by the sound of artillery and musketry firing in Lookout valley. Surprise possessed the thou¬ sands who turned their anxious eyes toward the mountain. The hours slowly wore away ; the roar of battle increased, as it came rolling around the point of the mountain, and the anxiety grew. A battle was being fought just before and above them. They could hear, but could not see how it was going. Finally, the wind, tossing about the clouds and mist, made a rift that for a few minutes opened a view of White House plateau. The enemy was seen to be in flight over the open ground, and Hooker’s men were in pursuit ! Then went up a mighty cheer from the thirty thousand in the valley, that was heard above the battle by their comrades on the mountain. At 2 o’clock Hooker reported to General Thomas and informed him that he was out of ammunition. Thomas at once sent Carlin’s brigade from the valley, each soldier taking with him all of the small ammunition he could carry. At 5 o’clock Carlin was on the moun¬ tain, and Hooker’s skirmishers were quickly supplied with the means of carrying on their work. As the sun went down, the clouds rolled away, and the night came on clear and cool. A grand sight was old Lookout that night. Not two miles apart were the parallel camp¬ fires of the two armies, extending from the summit of the mountain to its base, looking like great streams of burning lava, while, in between, the flashes from the muskets of the skirmishers glowed like giant fireflies. The next morning there was silence in Hooker’s front. Before daylight eight adven¬ turous, active volunteers from the 8 th Ken¬ tucky Infantry scaled the palisades and ran up from the highest point the Stars and Stripes. The enemy had stolen away in the night. Although General Grant had twice changed his original plan, first in the movement from the center, then in the reconnaissance and re¬ sulting attack on Lookout Mountain, he still adhered to his purpose of turning Bragg’s right, and made no change in the instructions given to General Sherman, except as to the time of attack. Every necessary preparation for cross¬ ing Sherman’s troops had been made secretly, under direction of General W. F. Smith ; one hundred and sixteen pontoons had been placed in North Chickamauga Creek, and in ravines near its mouth, and many wagon loads of “ balks ” (stringers) and chess (flooring) had been hid near by. An infantry and a cavalry bri¬ gade from the Army of the Cumberland took possession of the country just north of the riv¬ er before this work began. Not a citizen, loyal or disloyal, nor a soldier, save those working on the bridge material, was allowed to enter or leave the territory. Before dark on the evening of November 23d, General Sherman had his troops well massed and hid behind the hills on the north side of the river oppo¬ site the end of Missionary Ridge. After dark General Brannan, Chief of Artillery of the Army of the Cumberland, planted fifty-six guns on the low foot hills on the north bank of the river, to cover Sherman’s crossing and to protect the pontoon bridge when laid. Everything now being in readiness for the movement, at midnight General Giles A. Smith’s brigade entered the pontoons, floated out of North Chickamauga Creek, and was rowed to the south bank of the river. Land¬ ing quietly, he surprised and captured the enemy’s pickets, and secured a firm foothold.

Page 150

144 the army of the CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. The pontoons were sent across the river, and with these and the small steamboat brought up from Chattanooga, General Morgan L. Smith and General John E. Smith’s divisions were ferried over the river. As soon as these troops had been landed, work was commenced on the pontoon bridge, which was skillfully laid under the supervision of General W. F. Smith. The bridge was 1350 feet in length, and was completed by 1 1 o’clock in the morn¬ ing, when General Ewing’s division and Sher¬ man’s artillery crossed. At i o’clock, just as Hooker was rounding the front of Lookout Mountain, the roar of his battle stirring the blood of the veterans of the Army of the Ten¬ nessee, General Sherman gave the command. Forward ! ” His three divisions (composing the Fifteenth Corps, under command of Gen¬ eral Frank P. Blair) advanced in three col¬ umns in echelon : on the left General Morgan L. Smith, following Chickamauga Creek, Gen¬ eral John E. Smith having the center, and General Ewing the right. One brigade of General Jefferson C. Davis’s division of the Army of the Cumberland was left at the bridge, and the other two were held in reserve between that point and the ridge, ready to move in any direction. At 3:30 General Sher¬ man took the hill which was supposed to be the north end of the ridge. Soon afterwards one of his brigades took another hill a little in advance. These two hills were separated by a deep depression from the heavily fortified Tunnel Hill, on which Bragg’s right flank rested and which was Sherman’s objective point. General Grant thought that Sherman might take this position before Bragg could concen¬ trate a large force to oppose him. As it was now too late in the day to attempt an assault on Tunnel Hill, Sherman threw up strong de¬ fensive works, and settled down for the night. At 4 o’clock he was vigorously attacked ; but the enemy was handsomely repulsed, and Sherman still held the ground he had taken. None of the men of the Army of the Cum¬ berland, who for nine weeks were buried in the trenches at Chattanooga, can ever forget the glorious night of the 24th of November. As the sun went down, the clouds rolled up the mountain, and the mist was blown out of the valley. Night came on clear, with the stars lighting up the heavens. But there followed a sight to cheer their hearts and thrill their souls. Way off to their right, and reaching skyward. Lookout Mountain was ablaze with the fires of Hooker’s men, while off to their left, and reaching far above the valley, the north end of Missionary Ridge was aflame with the lights of Sherman’s army. The great iron crescent that had, with threatening aspect, so long hung Over them, was disappearing. The only thought that dampened their enthu¬ siasm was that the enemy was being destroyed on the flanks, while they were tied down in the center, without a part in the victories. But late that night General Grant, thinking that General Sherman had carried Tunnel Hill, and acting in that belief, gave orders for the next day’s battle. General Sherman was di¬ rected to attack the enemy at early dawn, and Thomas to cooperate with him, either by attacking the rifle pits in front, or by mov¬ ing to the left, as might be determined by the result of Sherman’s movement, and Hooker to hold himself in readiness to advance into Chattanooga valley, provided he could, with a small force, hold the Summertown road, — the road that zig-zagged from Chattanooga valley to the summit of the mountain. Early the next morning, when General Grant learned that the ridge had not been carried as far as Tunnel Hill, and that Lookout Moun¬ tain had been evacuated, he suspended oper¬ ations which had been ordered, except in so far as General Sherman was concerned. Hooker was directed to come down from the mountain, and press forward on the road leading to Rossville; to carry the pass at that point, and then to operate on Bragg’s left and rear. Bragg’s army was now concentrated on Missionary Ridge, and in the valley at the east foot. Cheatham’s and Stevenson’s divis¬ ions had been withdrawn from Lookout Moun¬ tain the night of the 24th, and, marching all night, were seen at dawn the next morning moving along the summit of Missionary Ridge, on the way to reenforce Bragg’s right. For sev¬ eral hours after daylight, the flowing of this steady stream of troops continued. Early in the morning of the 25th, General Grant and General Thomas established their headquarters on Orchard Knob, a point from which the best view of the movements of the whole army could be had. At sunrise General Sherman commenced his attack. The gallant General Corse moved, with his brigade, down into the ravine, and up the fortified hill held by the enemy. General Morgan L. Smith on the left, and Colonel J. M. Loomis on the right, moved along the east and west base of the ridge, — all having strong reserves. Corse se¬ cured a high crest within three hundred feet of the enemy’s works. From here he made an assault, was driven back, and again returned to the assault. Severe fighting continued for over an hour, during which time Corse, though he could make no impression on the enemy’s works, retained the ground he had taken, de¬ spite a furious assault made upon him. General Smith gained the left spur of the ridge, and was abreast of the tunnel and railroad embank¬ ment. At 10 o’clock General Corse, having

Page 151

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. 145 THE BATTLE OF LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN. (SEE ALSO PICTURES IN THE APRIL CENTURY. This picture shows the Union troops fighting in the woods near the cliffs of Point Lookout. Early in October Jeiferson Davis visited Lookout Mountain with ( General Bragg. As they approached the edge of the cliff, Bragg, been badly wounded, was carried off the field. About 2 o’clock two reserve brigades from the right were ordered up to assist in making another assault. In passing over an open field, well up on the side of the ridge, they were attacked in the right rear by a large body of the enemy, that had formed in the railroad gorge, and whose appearance had been hid from view by thick brush and undergrowth. The sudden¬ ness of the attack disconcerted them, and they fell back in disorder across the open field, but VoL. XXXIV.— 21. with a wave of the hand, alluded to “the fine view”; where¬ upon Major Robert W. Wooley, who had little faith in the mili¬ tary outlook, exclaimed to a brother officer, but so that all could hear: “ Yes, it’s a fine view, but a bad prospect.” — Editor. halted and re-formed in the edge of the woods. After this, it appearing to be impossible for General Sherman to take the enemy’s works, operations ceased. General Grant being determined to turn Bragg’s right, and seeing that General Sher¬ man could make no progress, at lo o’clock withdrew General Howard’s two divisions from General Thomas’s left and sent them to reen¬ force General Sherman. Later in the day General Baird’s division was withdrawn from

Page 152

146 THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. General Thomas’s right and was likewise sent to General Sherman. Thomas’s command had been heavily drawn upon. Including Davis’s, four divisions of the Army of the Cumberland had been sent to Sherman, and he then had more than one-half of all the troops operating at Chattanooga. Having more than he could handle at the north end of the ridge, he sent Baird’s division back to Thomas, and it went into position on the left, in the place that had been occupied by Howard’s command. While Sherman was engaging the enemy. Hooker was coming down from Lookout Mountain, and pushing for Rossville. He was detained three hours at Chattanooga Creek, while a bridge that the retreating enemy had burned was being rebuilt. As soon as the stringers were laid. General Osterhaus’s division crossed, and rapidly advanced to Rossville, where, after a severe skirmish, it captured a large quantity of stores, wagons, and ambu¬ lances. As soon as he had taken Rossville, Hooker moved against the south end of Mis¬ sionary Ridge. The ridge was quickly carried, and, sweeping northward. Hooker soon came upon Stewart’s division, posted on the summit, and behind the earthworks which the Army of the Cumberland had thrown up the day after Chickamauga. Cruft’s division assaulted and carried the works, thus having the good fortune of retaking the works they themselves had constructed. It was by this time nearly sundown. Hooker reached the south ^nd of the ridge too late in the day to relieve the press¬ ure on Sherman, who was at the north end six miles off. Bragg’s right had not been turned. Success had not followed Sherman’s move¬ ment. The battle as planned had not been won. Late on this memorable afternoon, there was an accident — an accident like the charge at Balaklava; though, unlike this theme for poet¬ ry, it called for greater daring, and was attended by complete success, and yielded most impor¬ tant results, for it led to the complete shatter¬ ing of the enemy’s army, and drove him from the field. On Orchard Knob, and opposite the center of Missionary Ridge, were four divis¬ ions of the Army of the Cumberland. On the left was Baird’s division ; then Wood’s and Sheridan’s divisions occupying the lines which, two days before, they had taken in their mag¬ nificent advance ; on the right was Johnson’s division, — all under the personal command of ITomas. It was past 3 o’clock. General Sher¬ man had ceased operations. General Hooker’s advance had not yet been felt. The day was dying, and Bragg still held the ridge. If any movement to dislodge him was to be made that day it must be made at once. At half¬ past three o’clock, an attack was ordered by General Grant. He had changed his plan of battle. At once orders were issued that at the firing, in rapid succession, of six guns on Orchard Knob, Thomas’s whole line should instantaneously move forward, Sheridan’s and Wood’s divisions in the center, Sheridan to be supported on the right by Johnson, and Wood on the left by Baird’s divisions. This demon¬ stration was to be made to relieve the pressure on Sherman. The only order given was to move forward and take the rifle-pits at the foot of the ridge. In Sheridan’s division, the order was, As soon as the signal is given, the whole line will advance, and you will take what is before you.” Between Orchard Knob and Missionary Ridge was a valley, partly covered with a small growth of timber. It was wooded in front of the right of Baird’s and of the whole of Wood’s division. In front of Sheridan’s and Johnson’s it had been almost entirely cleared. At the foot of the ridge were heavy rifle-pits, which could be seen from Orchard Knob, and ex¬ tending in front of them for four and five hun¬ dred yards, the ground was covered with felled trees. There was a good plain for both direct and enfilading fire from the rifle-pits, and the approaches were commanded by the enemy’s artillery. At this point the ridge is five or six hundred feet high. Its side, scored with gul¬ lies, and showing but little timber, had a rough and bare appearance. Halfway up was another line of rifle-pits, and the summit was furrowed with additional lines and dotted over with epaulements, in which were placed fifty pieces of artillery. The art of man could not have made a stronger fortress. Directly in front of Orchard Knob, and on the summit of the ridge, was a small house, where Bragg had established his headquarters. At twenty minutes before four, the signal guns were fired. Suddenly twenty thousand men rushed forward, moving in line of battle by brigades, with a double line of skirmishers in front, and closely followed by the reserves in mass, The big siege guns in the Chatta¬ nooga forts roared above the light artillery and musketry in the valley. The enemy’s ri¬ fle-pits were ablaze, and the whole ridge in our front had broken out like another ^tna. Not many minutes afterwards our men were seen working through the felled trees and other obstructions. Though exposed to such a terrific fire, they neither fell back nor halted. By a bold and desperate push they broke through the works in several places, and opened flank and reverse fires. The enemy was thrown into confusion, and took precipi¬ tate flight up the ridge. Many prisoners and a large number of small arms were captured. The order of the commanding general had now been fully and most successfully carried

Page 153

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. 147 ' ' ' out. But it did not go far enough to satisfy these brave men, who thought the time had come to finish the battle of Chickamauga. There was a halt of but a few minutes, to take breath and to re-form lines ; then, with a sud¬ den impulse, all started up the side of the ridge. Not a commanding officer had given the order to advance. The men who carried the muskets had taken the matter into their owm hands, had moved of their own accord. Officers, catching their spirit, first followed, then led. There was no thought of protecting flanks, though the enemy’s line could be seen, stretching beyond on either side ; there was no thought of support, or reserves. As soon as this movement was seen from Orchard Knob, Grant quickly turned to Thomas, who stood by his side, and I heard him angrily say : Thomas, v ho ordered those men up the ridge ? ” lliomas replied, in his usual slow, quiet manner : I don’t know; I did not.” Then addressing General Gordon Granger, he said : Did you order them up. Granger?” ''No,” said^Granger; "they started up without orders. When those fellows get started, all hell can’t stop them.” General Grant said something to the effect that somebody would suffer if it did not turn out well, and then, turning round, stoically watched the ridge. He gave no further orders. As soon as Granger had replied to Thomas, he turned to me, his chief-of-staff, and said : " Ride at once to Wood and then to Sheridan, and ask them if they ordered their men up the ridge, and tell them, if they can take it, to push ahead.” As I was mounting. Granger added : " It is hot over there, and you may not get through. I shall send Captain Avery to Sheri¬ dan, and other ofticers after both of you.” As fast as my horse could carry me, I rode first to General Wood, and delivered the message. " I didn’t order them up,” said Wood ; " they started up on their own account, and they are going up, too ! Tell Granger, if we are sup¬ ported, we will take and hold the ridge ! ” As soon as I reached Genenil Wood, Captain Avery got to General Sheridan, and delivered his message. " I didn’t order them up,” said Sheridan; "but we are going to take the ridge.” He then asked Avery for his flask and waved

Page 154

148 THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. BRIGADIER-GENERAL U. S. GRANT. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN EARLY IN THE WAR. LENT BY MR. O. HUFELAND.) it at a group of Confederate officers, standing just in front of Bragg’s headquarters, with the salutation, ‘‘ Here’s at you! ” At once two guns — the Lady Breckinridge” and the “ Lady Buckner” — in front of Bragg’s headquarters were fired at Sheridan and the group of offi¬ cers about him. One shell struck so near as to throw dirt over Sheridan and Avery. “ Ah ! ” said the General, “that is ungenerous; I shall take those guns for that ! ” Before Sheridan re¬ ceived the message taken by Captain Avery, he had sent a staff officer to Granger, to in¬ quire whether “ the order given to take the rifle-pits meant the rifle-pits at the base, or those on the top of the ridge ? ” Granger told this officer that “ the order given was to take those at the base.” Conceiving this to be an order to fall back, the officer, on his way to Sheridan, gave it to General Wagner, com¬ manding the Second Brigade of the division, which was then nearly half way up the ridge. Wagner ordered his brigade back to the rifle- pits at the base, but it only remained there till Sheridan, seeing the mistake, ordered it for¬ ward. It again advanced under a terrific fire that was raking the lower part of the ridge. The men, fighting and climbing up the steep hill, sought the roads, ravines, and less rugged parts, dlie ground was so broken that it was impossible to keep a regular line of battle. At times their movements were in shape like the flight of migratory birds, — sometimes in line, sometimes in mass, mostly in V-shaped groups, with the points towards the enemy. At these points regimental flags were flying, sometimes drooping as the bearers were shot, but never reaching the ground, for other brave hands were there to seize them. Sixty flags were ad-

Page 155

THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND AT CHATTANOOGA. 149 vancing up the hill, in the faces of its defend¬ ers. Bragg was hurrying large bodfes of men from his right to the center. They could be seen coming along the summit of the ridge in double-quick time. Cheatham’s division was being withdrawn from Sherman’s front. Bragg and Hardee were at the center, doing their ut¬ termost to encourage their troops, and urging them to stand firm and drive back the advanc¬ ing enemy, now so near the summit — indeed, so near that the guns, which could not be suf¬ ficiently depressed to reach them, became use¬ less. Artillerymen were lighting the fuses of shells, and bowling them by hundreds down the hill. The critical moment arrived when the summit was just within reach. At six dif¬ ferent points, and almost simultaneously, Sher¬ idan’s and Wood’s divisions broke over the crest, — Sheridan’s first, near Bragg’s headquar¬ ters ; and in a few minutes Sheridan was be¬ side the guns that had been fired at him, and claiming them as captures of his division. Baird’s division took the works on Wood’s left almost immediately afterwards; and then J ohnson came up on Sheridan’s right. The ene¬ my’s guns were turned upon those who still remained in the works, and soon all were in flight down the eastern slope. Baird got on the ridge just in time to change front, and oppose a large body of the enemy moving down from Bragg’s right to attack our left. After a sharp engagement, that lasted till dark, he drove the enemy back beyond a high point on the north, which he at once occupied.* The sun had not yet gone down, Missionary Ridge was ours, * Governor John A. Martin, of Kansas, colonel of the 8th Kan¬ sas Volunteers, of Willich’s brigade. Wood’s division, in a letter to General Fullerton dated November i6th, i886j describes the charge as follows: “When the advance on Mission Ridge was ordered, on November 25th, my regiment went out directly from Orchard Knob. General Willich, in communicating to me the orders received, distinctly stated that we were directed to take the line of Confederate works at the foot of the hill. We reached these works without serious difficulty, the losses being very small. Shortly after, we emerged from the woods into the open field, and were charging the Confederate works on the double-quick ; the soldiers there threw down their arms, and, holding up their hands, in token of surrender, jumped to our side. I had ridden my horse to this line, and, on reaching it, halted my regiment behind the enemy’s intrenchments. Dismounting, I ran forward to the little huts that were built by the Confederates, on the plateau just back of their line, with a view of ascertaining what the situation was. I had seen, as soon as I reached the first line of works, as did every soldier in the command, that it was impossible for the troops to remain there long. The line was within easy range of the musketry on the summit of the ridge, and was raked by the artillery fire on the projecting points of the ridge on either side. Reaching the foot of the ridge east of the plateau, I found the position there fairly well protected, — that is, not so easily reached, either by the musketry or artillery of the enemy, — and I at once ran back to near where my regiment had been halted. Just as I got there General Willich came up, and I said to him, ‘ We can’t live here, and ought to go forward.’ He gave me directions to move ahead, and I at once ordered my regiment forward. By that time, or about that time, it seemed to me that there was a simultaneous advance of many of the regiments m different parts of the line, and I got the impression that possibly orders had been communicated for an advance on the ridge, which I had not received; hence I hurried my regiment forward as_ rapidly as possible. When I reached the foot of the ridge again, with the regiment, my orderly came up with my horse, and I mounted it, as my adjutant did his. The advance to the ridge was as rapid as the nature of the ground would permit ; and I think, from the position I occupied, I had a fair opportunity to see what was going on, not only immediately above me, but to the right and VOL. XXXIV.— 22. and Bragg’s army was broken and in flight ! Dead and wounded comrades lay thickly strewn on the ground ; but thicker yet were the dead and wounded men in gray. Then fol¬ lowed the wildest confusion, as the victors gave vent to their joy. Some madly shouted ; some wept from very excess of joy; some gro¬ tesquely danced out their delight, — even our wounded forgot their pain, to join in the gen¬ eral hurrah. But Sheridan did not long stop to receive praise and congratulations. With two brigades he started down the Mission Mills road, and found, strongly posted on a second hill, the enemy’s rear. They made a stout resistance, but by a sudden flank move¬ ment he drove them from the heights, and captured two guns and many prisoners. The day was succeeded by a clear moonlight night. At 7 o’clock General Granger sent word to General Thomas that by a bold dash at Chickamauga Crossing, he might cut off a large number of the enemy now supposed to be leaving Sherman’s front, and that he pro¬ posed to move in that direction. It was mid¬ night before guides could be found, and then General Sheridan again put his tired and well- worn men in motion. He reached the creek just as the rear guard of the enemy was cross¬ ing, and pressed it so closely that it burned the pontoon bridge before all its troops were over. Here Sheridan captured several hundred pris¬ oners, a large number of quartermaster’s wag¬ ons, together with caissons, artillery, ammuni¬ tion, and many small arms. In this battle, Sheridan’s and Wood’s divis- left. I was impressed with the idea, I know, that a sharp rivalry had sprung up between several regiments, including my own, as to which should reach the summit first. Another idea, I remem¬ ber distinctly, which impressed me, was that the different regi¬ ments had assumed the form of a triangle or wedge — the advance point in nearly every case being the regimental battle-flag. I have always believed that my own regiment made the first break in the enemy’s lines on the summit of Mission Ridge; but the difference between the break thus made by the 8th Kansas and the progress made by one or two regiments of Hazen’s brigade on our right and the 25th Illinois of our own brigade, was ex¬ ceedingly brief. “ But that the first break in the enemy’s lines was made in front of our division, I have not the slighest doubt. After we passed through the Confederate works, and while the men were rushing with great enthusiasm after the fleeing Confederates, who were running down the hill on the other side, my attention was direct¬ ed to the right, where, at the point of a knob, I saw other troops were still engaged in a fierce struggle with the Confederates, who were yet in force behind their works ; and while thus, for a mo¬ ment, watching the progress of the fight to the right, a Confeder¬ ate battery on a point to the left of our position was swung round, and poured a fire directly down our line. Immediately I ordered my bugler to sound the recall, and began forming all the troops I could gather at that point, with a view of moving to the left to clear the enemy’s works in that direction. I had assembled prob¬ ably a hundred men, when suddenly the whole Confederate line, both to the right and left, gave way before the furious attack of our troops, and was soon in full retreat through the woods and down the roads to the rear. “ I have stated, hastily, some of my impressions of the battle, but the principal point which, in my judgment, should always be made prominentis the fact that Mission Ridge was fought without orders from the commander-in-chief. I remember, too, and this only con¬ firms what I have said, that shortly after the battle was over Gen¬ eral Granger rode along our lines, and said, in a joking way, to the troops, * I am going to have you all court-martiaJed ! You were or¬ dered to take the works at the foot of the hill, and you have taken those on top ! You have disobeyed orders, all of you, and you know that you ought to be court-martialed! ’ ’’ — Editor.

Page 156

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. ISO ions — the two center assaulting divisions — took 31 pieces of artillery, several thousand small arms, and 3800 prisoners. In that one hour of assault they lost 2337 men in killed and wounded, — over twenty per cent, of their whole force ! On the northern end of the ridge. General Sherman lost in his two days^ MEMORANDA ON Lee’s Invasion of Pennsylvania ” — A Reply to General Longstreet. General Longstreet’s article on Gettysburg in the February Century is notable for its mistakes as well as for its attitude toward General Lee and others. First. The statement that General Lee passed over more deserving officers from other States in order to give the command of his corps to Virginians is an un¬ worthy attack upon a man who was as singularly free from such prejudices as he was from self-seeking, either during the war or after it. Lee said in a letter to President Davis, October 2d, 1862: “ In reference to commanders of corps with the rank of lieu¬ tenant-general, of which you request my opinion, I can confi¬ dently recommend Generals Longstreet and Jackson, in this army. My opinion of the merits of General Jackson has been greatly enhanced during this expedition. He is true, honest, and brave ; has a single eye to the good of the service, and spares no exertion to accomplish his object. Next to these two officers I consider General A. P. Hill the best commander with me. He fights his troops well and takes good care of them. At present I do not think that more than two commanders of corps are nec¬ essary for this army.” This was Lee’s judgment after a campaign in which both the Hills and McLaws had served, and long be¬ fore there was any question of making either of them a lieutenant-general. It would be about as just to ac¬ cuse Lee of undue partiality to Georgia in making Long¬ street his senior lieutenant, as it is to accuse him of par¬ tiality to Virginia in selecting A. P. Hill rather than D. H. Hill or McLaws for the command of his third corps. Second. In regard to the battle of Gettysburg : the first day’s fight was brought on unexpectedly to Lee. In the absence of Stuart he was not aware of the prox¬ imity of the Federal army. The first day’s operations were very successful. Two of the seven infantry corps of the Federal army were virtually demolished, having been defeated and driven in disorder completely from the field, leaving many killed and wounded and several thousand prisoners to the victors. Third. It was at the close of this day’s work that General Lee, in view of its results, and of the indica¬ tions it gave of the position of the Federal army, decided to follow up the fight. General Longstreet ad¬ vised a movement across Meade’s front to threaten his left and rear. Such a movement would have been dif¬ ficult in the absence of Stuart ; it could not have been executed in the then position of the army with suffi¬ cient promptness to surprise Meade ; and if success¬ ful it simply would have forced the Federal army back to some position nearer Baltimore and Washington where the issue of battle was still to be tried. General Longstreet begs the question when he assumes that Meade would then have been obliged to attack at a dis¬ advantage. General Lee decided that this plan did not promise as good results as to follow up the partial vic¬ tory already gained. More than one-fourth of the Fed- fighting 1697 in killed and wounded. Of these, 126*8 were in his own three divisions. During the night the last of Bragg’s army was withdrawn from Missionary Ridge, and Chattanooga from that time remained in un¬ disputed possession of the Union forces. J. S. Eullerton. THE CIVIL WAR. eral army was beaten. (Of the First and Eleventh Corps that had numbered 20,931 on June 30th, not 5700 were in line on July 2d.) That army was not concen¬ trated, and hours must elapse before its full strength could be marshalled for battle. The absent portions would reach the field jaded by forced marches to meet the depressing news of the defeat of their comrades. Doubt and uncertainty would prevail, increased per¬ haps by the fact that the present Federal commander was so new in his place. Lee’s troops were much bet¬ ter up, only Pickett’s division and Law’s brigade be¬ ing out of reach. Not to press the Union army was to lose the greater part of the advantage of the first day’s victory. The Federals would soon recover from their depression if not pressed, and his own troops would be disappointed. Lee believed if he could at¬ tack early on the second day he would have but part of the Federal army to deal with, and that if he could repeat his success of the first day the gain would be great. He therefore determined upon attack. On the night of the 1st (not on the forenoon of the 2d, as Gen¬ eral Longstreet has it) he decided, after a conference with Ewell and his division commanders, to make the attack early next day from his right with Longstreet’s two divisions that were within reach, this attack to be supported by Hill and Ewell. (See Ewell’s and Early’s reports; Early’s paper in “ South. Hist. Papers,” Vol. IV., p. 241 ; and Long’s ^‘Memoirs of Lee.”) Fourth. General Longstreet would have us infer that he was not ordered by General Lee to attack early on the second day; but that his memory is at fault on this point has been abundantly shown by Generals Fitz Lee, Pen¬ dleton, Early, Wilcox, and many others. No testimony on this point is more direct and conclusive than that of General A. L. Long, then military secretary to Gen¬ eral Lee. He says in his recently published “ Memoirs of R. E. Lee ” (page 277), that on the evening of the 1st, when General Lee had decided not to renew the attack on Cemetery Hill that day, he said (in Long’s presence) to Longstreet and Hill, “Gentlemen, we will attack the enemy in the morning as early as practica¬ ble.” Long continues : “ In the conversation that suc¬ ceeded he [Lee] directed them to make the necessary preparations and be ready for prompt action the next day.” Long shows plainly that General Lee’s design was to attack the troops in front before the whole Fed¬ eral army could get up, and he describes graphically the impatience Lee showed next morning, as early as 9 A. M., at Longstreet’s delay. General Longstreet is wrong, too, in giving the impression that his divisions were 15 or 20 miles away on the night of the l st, for in his official report he says that “ McLaws’ division. . . reached Marsh Creek, 4 miles from Gettysburg, a little after dark, and Hood’s division [except Low’s

Page 157

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. brigade] got within nearly the same distance of the town about 12 o’clock at night.” Hood says he was with his staff “in front of the heights of Gettysburg shortly after daybreak” on the 2d and his troops were close behind. Kershaw (of McLaws’ division) says in his official report that on the ist of July they “marched to a point on the Gettysburg road some two miles from that place, going into camp at 12 p. M.” General Longstreet, to explain his delay, besides the above reasons scrapes together a number of others, — such as the presence of some Federal scouts and pickets west of the Emmettsburg road, the movement of Sickles’s rear-guard, along that road, the presence of one of General Lee’s engineers (who had been sent to give information, not to command his corps). No time need be wasted on these. The fact is that General Longstreet, though knowing fully the condi¬ tion of things on the night of the 1st, knowing that Lee had decided to attack that part of the Federal army in his front, knowing that every hour strength¬ ened Meade and diminished the chances of Confederate success, and knowing that his corps was to open the bat¬ tle and deliver the main assault, consumed the time from daylight to nearly 4 P. M. , on J uly 2d, in moving his troops about four miles, over no serious obstacle, and in get¬ ting them into battle. Meantime on the Federal side Hancock’s corps, which had camped three miles from Gettysburg, reached the field by 6 or 7 A. M. ; Sickles’s two brigades that had been left at Emmettsburg came up by 9 A. M. ; the rear of the Fifth Corps by midday, and the Sixth Corps, after a march of 32 miles in 30 hours, by 2 p. M. Had Longstreet attacked not later thTan 9 or 10 A. M., as Lee certainly expected. Sickles’s and Hancock’s corps would have been defeated before part of the Fifth and the Sixth Corps arrived. Little Round Top (which, as it was, the Fifth Corps barely managed to seize in time) would have fallen into Confederate possession ; and even if nothing more had been done this would have given the field to the Confederates, since the Federal line all the way to Cemetery Hill was untena¬ ble with Round Top in hostile hands. Fifth. That Longstreet’s attack when made was poor¬ ly seconded by the other corps may be true, and thus another chance of winning a complete victory on July 2d was lost, but this does not change the fact that the first and great opportunity of that day for the Confederates was lost by Longstreet’s delay. Sixth. Victory on the third day was for the Confed¬ erates a far more difficult problem than on the second, but it was still within their reach. But one need not be surprised at the failure of Pickett’s attack after reading in this article of the hesitation, the want of confidence and hearty cooperation, with which General Longstreet directed it. Lee never intended that Pickett, Pettigrew, and Trimble should fight unsupported by the remainder of the army. He expected “ that with proper concert of action ... we should ultimately succeed.” (Lee’s report.) Longstreet was directed to use his whole corps, and when he felt embarrassed by the Federal forces on or near the Round Tops he was given a di¬ vision and a . half from A. P. Hill’s corps with power to call for more. General Long says : “ The original intention of General Lee was that Pickett’s attack should be supported by the divisions of McLaws and Hood, and General Longstreet was so ordered.” (“ Memoirs of Lee,” page 294. See also statements of Colonels Venable and Taylor, “ Four Years with Gen¬ eral Lee,” page 108.) Lee’s efforts for a concerted attack were ineffectual. Pickett was overwhelmed not by troops in front but by those on his flanks, espe¬ cially by those on his right flank, where Wilcox was sent forward too late to be of use, and where he was too weak to have effected much at best. Y et Longstreet did not use any part of Hood’s and McLaws’ divisions to support Pickett, or to make a division in his favor, or to occupy the troops on his flank which finally de¬ feated him. These divisions were practically idle ex¬ cept that one of Hood’s brigades was occupied in driv¬ ing off the Federal cavalry which made a dash on that flank. Longstreet, in a word, sent forward one-third of his corps to the attack, but the remainder of his troops did not cooperate. And yet he reproaches Lee for the result ! McDonogh, Md., February 16, 1887. ^ Allan. Stuart’s Ride around the Union Army in the Gettysburg Campaign. It is generally agreed by Southern writers that the battle of Gettysburg was the result of an accidental collision of armies. General I./ee in effect says in his report of the campaign that his failure was due to his ignorance of the movements of the enemy ; and the ab¬ sence of a portion of the cavalry under Stuart, or rather its separation from the army, is assigned as the primary cause of its failure by .General Long, the biographer of General Lee, and by General Longstreet in the Febru¬ ary Century, 1887. Both ignore the fact that Stuart left with General Lee, under command of General Bev¬ erly H. Robertson, a larger body of cavalry than he took with him. General Long charges that Stuart’s ex¬ pedition around Hooker was made either from “ a mis¬ apprehension of orders or love of the eclat of a bold raid” (which, of course, implies disobedience) ; and General Longstreet, while admitting that Stuart may have acted by authority of Lee, says that it was under¬ taken against his own orders, which were to cross the Potomac at Shepherdstown, west of the Blue Ridge. That General Lee was greatly embarrassed by want of intelligence of the movements of the enemy was not due to the lack of cavalry ; and Stuart is not responsi¬ ble for the inefficient manner in which he was served. When it was determined that Stuart should take three brigades of cavalry to join Ewell on the Susque¬ hanna and leave his other two to perform outpost duty for the army in Virginia, General Lee was in the Shen¬ andoah Valley with the corps of Hill and Longstreet. The latter was holding the gaps and Stuart was guard¬ ing the approaches to them east of the Ridge. Hence Stuart came under Longstreet’s orders. Hooker’s headquarters were in Fairfax, with his army spread out like a fan — his left being at Thoroughfare Gap and his right on the Potomac at Leesburg. On returning from a scout, I reported to Stuart the scattered condition of Hooker’s corps, and he determined, with the approv¬ al of General Lee, to pass around, or rather through, them, as the shortest route to Ewell. There was an op¬ portunity besides to inflict much damage and to cut off communication between Washington and the North. I have lately discovered documents in the archives of the War Department that set at rest the question of Stuart’s alleged disobedience of orders, and show that General Longstreet then approved a plan which he now

Page 158

MEMOjRANDA on the civil war. IK2 condemns as “a wild ride around the Federal army.” He directed Stuart to pass around rear of the enet?iy in preference to crossing west of the Ridge, in order to prevent disclosing our designs.* Under date of June 22d, 7:30 p. M., he writes to General Lee : “ I have forwarded your letter to Gen¬ eral Stuart, with the suggestion that he pass by the <?«- emy's rear if he thinks he may get through.” Up to the morning of June 25th it was perfectly practicable for Stuart to have done so. In accordance with Lee’s and Longstreet’s instructions, Stuart with¬ drew from the front on the evening of the 24th to pass around Hooker, leaving Robertson about Middleburg with three thousand cavalry and two batteries of artillery to observe the enemy. Stuart’s success depended upon preserving the statiis qtw of the Federal army until he could get through it. Hooker was on the defensive wait- ing for his adversary to mcwe. It did not seem to occur to General Longstreet that the march of the infantry down the Shenandoah Valley would disclose all to the enemy that the cavalry would have done. It was no fault of Stuart’s that he was foiled by events which he could not control. When on the morning of the 25th he reached Hooker’s rear, he found his whole army moving to the Potomac and all the roads occupied by his troops. This compelled a wide detour, and instead of crossing the river in advance of the enemy, as he expected, he was two days behind him. Thus all communication was broken with General Lee and Ewell. The march of Hill’s and Longstreet’s corps on the day before had been in full view of the signal stations on Maryland Heights and was telegraphed to Hooker, who made a corresponding movement. On the morning of June 26th the enemy disappeared from Robertson’s front and crossed the Potomac. In that event his instructions from Stuart were, “ to watch the enemy and harass his rear — to cross the Potomac and follow the army, keeping on its right and rear,” and ** to report anything of importance to Lieutenant-Gen¬ eral Longstreet, with whose position you will commu¬ nicate by relays through Charlestown. ” * “ Headquarters, Millwood, June 22, 1863, 7 p.m. Maj.- Gen’l J. E. B. Stuart, Comdg. Cavalry. General: General Lee has inclosed to me this letter for you to be forwarded to you provided you can be spared from my front, and provided I think that you can move across the Potomac without disclosing our plans. He speaks of you leaving via Hopewell Gap and passing by the rear of the enemy. If you can get through by that route, I think that you will be less likely to indicate what our plans are than if you should cross by passing to our rear. I forward the let¬ ter of instnictions with these suggestions. Please advise me of the condition of affairs before you leave and order General Hamp¬ ton — whom I suppose you will leave here in command ' — to report to me at Millwood either by letter or in person, as may be most agreeable to him. Most respectfully, J. Longstreet, Lieutenant- General. — N. 'B. I think that your passage of the Potomac by our rear at the present moment will in a measure disclose our plans. You had better not leave us, therefore, unless you can take the proposed route in rear of the enemy. J. Longstreet, Lieuten¬ ant-General.” Headquarters, 22d June, 1863. Major-General J. E. B. Stuart, Commanding Cavalry. General : I have just received your note of 7:45 this morning to General Longstreet. I judge the efforts of the enemy yesterday were to arrest our progress and ascertain our whereabouts.^ Perhaps he is satisfied. Do you know where he is and what he is doing ? I fear he will steal a march on us and get across the Potomac before we are aware. If you find that he is moving northward, and that two brigades can guard the Blue Ridge and take care of your rear, you can move with the other three into Maryland and take position on General Ewell’s right, place yourself in communication with him, guard his flank and keep him informed of the enemy’s movements, and collect all the supplies you can for the use of the army. One column of General Ewell’s army will probably move toward the Susquehanna by the Emmettsburg route, another by Chambers- burg. Accounts from him last night state that there was no en¬ emy west of Fredericktown. A cavalry force (about one hundred) Robertson retired to the mountain gaps and re¬ mained until the afternoon of the 29th, when he was re¬ called to the army by a courier from General Lee. At night on the 27th General Lee heard, through a scout at Chambersburg, of Hooker’s advance. As no informa¬ tion of it had come from the cavalry he had left in Hook¬ er’s front in Virginia, he thought that Hooker was still there. He immediately issued an order for the concen¬ tration at Gettysburg, and sent for Robertson’s com¬ mand, that had been left, he says, to hold the mountain passes as long as the enefuy remained south of the Poto¬ mac! It had staid there three days after they had gone. As Stuart had been ordered to Ewell on the Susque¬ hanna, it could not have been expected that he should also watch Hooker on the Potomac. Stuart’s instruc¬ tions to divide the cavalry and take three brigades with him to Ewell, on the Susquehanna, were peremptory; he was only given discretion as to the point of crossing the Potoinac. It was therefore immaterial, so far as giv¬ ing information to General Lee was concerned, whether he crossed east or west of .the ridge. In either event they would have been separated and out of communi¬ cation with each other. General Lee must then have relied on Robertson or nobody to watch Hooker. Instead of keeping on the right of the army and in close contact with the enemy, as Stuart had ordered, Robertson’s command marched on the left by Mar- tinsburg and ^id not reach the battle-field. When General Lee crossed the Potomac, he left General Robertson between him and the enemy. By July 3d he had so manoeuvred that Lee was between him and the enemy. Stuart had ridden around General Plooker while Robertson was riding around General Lee. If, in accordance with Stuart’s instructions, Rob¬ ertson had promptly followed on the right of the army when the enemy left, it would have been ready and concentrated for attack ; a defensive battle would have been fought, and Gettysburg might have been to South¬ ern hearts something more than a Glorious field of grief.” Washington, Feb. 9, 1887. John S. Mosby, guarded the Monocacy Bridge, which was barricaded. You will, of course, take charge of Jenkins’sbrigade and give him necessary instructions. All supplies taken in Maryland must be by authorized staff-oflicers for their respective departments, by no one else. They will be paid for or receipts for the same given to the own¬ ers. I will send you a general order on this subject, which I wish you to see is strictly complied with. I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, R. E. Lee, General.” On the following day General Lee wrote as follows: “ Head¬ quarters, Army of Northern Virginia, June 23d, 1863, 5 p. m. Major-General J. E. B. Stuart, Commanding Cavalry. Gen¬ eral: Your notes of 9 and 10:30 a. m. to-day have just been re¬ ceived. ... If General Hooker’s army remains inactive you can leave two brigades to watch him and withdraw with the three others, but should he not appear to be moving northward, I think you had better withdraw this side of the mountain to-morrow night, cross at Shepherdstown next day and move over to Fred- encktown. You will, however, be able to judge whether you can pass around their army without hindrance, doing them all the damage you can, and cross the river east of the mountains. In either case, after crossing the river, you must move on and feel the right of Ewell’s troops, collecting information, provisions, etc. Give instructions to the commander of the brigades left behind to watch the flank and rear of the army and (in event of the en¬ emy leaving their front) retire from the mountains west of the Shenandoah, leaving sufficient pickets to guard the passes, and bringing everything clean along the valley, closing upon the rear of the army. As regards the movements of the two brigades of the enemy moving toward Warrenton, the commander of the brigades to be left in the mountains must do what he can to coun¬ teract them ; but I think the sooner you cross into Maryland, af¬ ter to-mon-ow, the better. The movements of Ewell’s corps are as stated in my former letter. Hill’s first division will reach the Potomac to-day, and Longstreet will follow to-morrow. Be watchful and circumspect in all your movements. I am very respectfully and truly yours, R. E. Lee, General.”

Page 159

TOPICS OF THE TIME. Executive Responsibility. IN this centennial year since the framing of the Fed¬ eral Constitution — “the most wonderful work,” as Gladstone has styled it, “ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man” — nothing could be more timely and fortunate than the occur¬ rence of incidents in the administration of the govern¬ ment which pointedly demonstrate the wisdom of its distribution of powers. The closing weeks of the Forty- ninth Congress were fruitful of such illustrations. Throughout its existence this body seemed strangely devoid of any sense of responsibility to the people. The Democrats controlled the popular branch, and their leaders in the House should have been prompt in responding to the wise suggestions of their President, especially in the urgent matter of reforming the tariff, and thus reducing the surplus. Democrats in each branch should have welcomed the opportunity to sig¬ nalize the restoration of their party to power by a revival of its traditional principles, particularly those which restrict within proper limits the prerogatives of the general government, the undue enlargement of which was becoming a source of danger. The Repub¬ licans, as the minority, were not expected to attempt the initiation of any policy, but they were none the less bound because they were out of power to treat upon their merits questions which might arise, and to throw their influence in favor of economy and efficiency. Each party violated its obligations to its constitu¬ ents. With only a very few exceptions, the Republicans in the House twice cast their votes against even the consideration of a measure aiming at tariff reform ; and, despite the most binding pledge of their party plat¬ forms, enough Democrats joined the minority on this point to make it a majority, and thus prevent any legislation to reduce the surplus. This pledge broken, there were found Democrats ready to violate still another by championing extravagant measures as a proper way of getting rid of the surplus. A House committee, of whose fifteen members nine were Demo¬ crats, reported a bill which came to be known as “ the Pauper Pension Bill,” and which, had it become a law, must inevitably have added tens of millions of dollars to the annual expenses of the government for a generation to come. This committee even had the assurance, when its course was challenged, to attempt justification by the demagogic plea that, from the standpoint of “ money expediency ” alone, “ the sur¬ plus will be best restored to the people in the manner proposed by this bill,” inasmuch as “no bonded inter¬ est or huge monopolies can claim it as their own,” and “ it will go among the people in small amounts and will be spent in their midst.” The bill received the support of every Republican in the House and of enough Democrats to give it more than a two-thirds vote, while it passed the Senate without a division. Meanwhile Congress had committed another piece of folly. A bill appropriating ten thousand dollars of the money raised by taxation for the support of the general government to buy seeds for some farmers in Texas, who were in want through a long- continued drought, slipped through the House, and was passed by the Senate with its eyes open, eleven out of eighteen Democrats supporting it, although its grossly unconsti¬ tutional nature was forcibly pointed out by Mr. Haw¬ ley, of Connecticut, a Union soldier and a Republican, who has stoutly defended State rights more than once of late. Both these bills, bad in themselves and even worse as precedents, went to the President. Senators and representatives had thus done their part toward committing the country to one measure which would in all probability add hundreds of thousands of names to the pension roll, and to another which would help to overthrow the constitutional restrictions upon the powers of the Federal government. They had done this, too, without the slightest sense of personal re¬ sponsibility being manifested by the overwhelming majority of those who had voted for the bills. In his admirable exposition of the Constitution, which so wonderfully vindicates his prevision. Story points out that “unity in the Executive is favorable to energy, promptitude, and responsibility.” After alluding to the bad effect of dividing the power among several persons. Story enforces this feature of superior responsibility in the single Executive. “ liis responsibility,” he says, “is more direct and efficient, as his measures cannot be disguised, or shifted upon others ; and any abuse of authority can be more clearly seen, and carefully watched, than when it is shared by numbers.” Else¬ where, in vindicating the bestowal upon the President of a qualified negative on legislation through the veto. Story remarks that “ the power is important, as an ad¬ ditional security against the enactment of rash, imma¬ ture, and improper laws,” Story’s language could not have fitted the case bet¬ ter if he had foreseen, half a century before, what was to happen in the year 1887. They were “ rash, imma¬ ture, and improper laws ” which Congress had tried to enact, passed with scarcely a pretense of discussion in either branch. The responsibility for their passage was so “ disguised ” that any senator or representative could “ shift upon others ” his share. But when they went to the single Executive, the situation was imme¬ diately revolutionized. Now there was one man whose responsibility was “ direct and efficient.” The Pau¬ per Pension Bill would become the law of the land, and commit the government permanently to a radical and unjustifiable departure in legislation regarding Union soldiers, unless within ten days after he received it the President should return it to Congress with his objec¬ tions. The public appreciated the exigency, and the press appealed to the President for a veto. Union sol¬ diers of high character and standing, hostile to the bill, who would have despaired of affecting either the Sen¬ ate or the House, where abuse of authority was “ shared by numbers, ” wrote to the Executive with assurance that their words would be duly weighed. For days the

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TOPICS OF THE TIME. 1 54 attention of the country was fixed upon the incumbent of the White House, and he was made to realize that, if the bill should become a law, the country would hold him alone more responsible than both branches of Congress together. Primarily, of course, it is to the Constitution, which created a single Executive and invested him with a qualified negative upon legislation, that we owe our escape from the Pauper Pension Bill folly and from the vicious Texas Seed Bill precedent, for without these provisions the measures would inevitably have become laws. But the constitutional possibility of thus defeating the schemes would have been of no avail if the man who enjoyed this power had not employed it. The President of the United States as an official possessed the prerogative of vetoing the bills, but it was Grover Cleveland the man who exercised a veto power which the President of the United States need not have em¬ ployed, and which many another man in the place would not have employed. In concluding his discussion of the Executive depart¬ ment, Story declares his conviction that “ it will be found impossible to withhold from this part of the Constitu¬ tion a tribute of profound respect, if not of the liveliest admiration,” but he adds that in order to realize public expectation it is essential that the man who occupies the office be “ one who shall forget his own interests and remember that he represents, not a party, but the whole nation.” If he had consulted his own interests in a narrow personal sense, Mr. Cleveland would have signed the pension bill. It is notorious that self-inter¬ est was a potent motive with the average senator and representative who supported it. “ The soldier vote ” was supposed to be behind the measure, and in all the States north of the Potomac only three congressmen out of both parties in both Houses were recorded against it. As the representative of a party solely, Mr. Cleve¬ land would have signed the bill. Democratic congress¬ men insisted that a veto would hurt the prospects of the Democracy in Indiana and other close States where it wants to gain votes. But Mr. Cleveland examined the bill with great care, and became convinced that it was a thoroughly bad measure. He perceived that “ the race after the pensions offered by this bill would not only stimulate weakness and pretended incapacity for labor, but put a further premium on dishonesty and mendacity.” He believed that ‘‘ the probable increase of expense would be almost appalling.” He held that the measure would “have the effect of disappointing the expectation of the people, and their desire and hope for relief from war taxation in time of peace.” Pie concluded that the interests of the whole nation required him to with¬ hold his approval. The Texas Seed Bill called for no such display of moral courage as the pension issue, but it offered an opportunity, no less striking, for enforcing a similar lesson, which Mr. Cleveland is to be commended for improving. The pension bill proposed to assist, through the Federal government, those old soldiers in the North “ who are willing to be objects of simple charity and to gain a place upon the pension roll through alleged dependence.” The seed bill proposed to relieve, through the Federal government, some suffering farm¬ ers in a Southern State. It was more than a chance coincidence that the two bills were in the President’s hands at the same time. They represented a long-grow¬ ing tendency, which was fast coming to pervade both sections of the country, and which needed to be repro¬ bated in a way that would impress both sections. The twin vetoes served this purpose almost ideally. Their force was strengthened by Mr. Cleveland’s use in the later message of a most telling phrase, one destined to a long and useful life : “ The lesson should be constantly enforced though the people support the government f the gover7ime7it should 7iot support the people.''^ Mr. Cleveland has made some unpardonable errors and committed some grievous faults since he became President, but he has gone far to atone for them by the manly way in which he met the responsibility that a demagogic Congress devolved upon him in these measures of legislation. The great danger which threatened this nation when Congress met for its last session was the drift toward paternalism, the disposi¬ tion to seek aid from the Federal treasury, the decay of the ancient American spirit of self-reliance. That this danger has already so largely vanished is due chiefly to Mr. Cleveland’s wise and courageous use of the veto power in behalf of what he so well calls “the sturdiness of our national character.” The Nation’s Recent Debt to the South. The North fought to save the Union because it be¬ lieved that it would be better for all the States, South and North alike, that they should continue for all time one nation. The Union was preserved, and for years its members have again stood upon an equality in the government of the country. Southern men who vainly sought by force of arms to establish the right of se¬ cession have sat in Congress beside Northern men who shared in overthrowing that claim on the field of battle. They have voted together for generous pen¬ sions to soldiers of the Union army, and an ex-officer of the Confederate service now presides over the Ex¬ ecutive Department which includes the Pension Bu¬ reau, while the present head of that Bureau was an officer on the Union side. The vote in the House on passing the Pauper Pen¬ sion Bill over the veto brought into strong relief the advantage which the North already reaps from having the South back in the Union. While the measure was in the President’s hands, many old Union soldiers, Republicans as well as Democrats, besought him to disapprove it. “ It originated with claim agents and professional pension- seekers,” wrote a western Massa¬ chusetts veteran, “ and is not the cry or plea of the great body of veterans.” “ I constantly meet with sol¬ diers, privates as well as officers, who repel with deep feeling the assumption that they desire more money in return for the purely patriotic service they gave the country,” wrote General J. D. Cox, of Ohio, a Repub¬ lican ex-governor, in urging Mr. Cleveland not to approve the bill. “I think the President justified in vetoing such a bill as this,” said General Joshua L. Chamberlain, of Maine, another Republican ex-gover¬ nor, “ and believe he will be supported by the sentiment of the country.” No candid person who watched the expression of public opinion can doubt that the Presi¬ dent’s course in this matter was approved by the sober

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TOPICS OF THE TIME, 155 second thought of the North, including the great mass of self-respecting and self-reliant veterans themselves. The President was not only ‘‘ supported by the sen¬ timent of the country,” as General Chamberlain pre¬ dicted he would be, but his veto was sustained by Congress. It was, however, only through the votes of “the States lately in rebellion” that the action of Con¬ gress was made to conform with the sentiment of the country. This is rendered plain at a glance by the fol¬ lowing summary of the vote on passing the bill over the veto ; Yeas. Nays. From the eleven seceding States . 7 71 From the rest of the country . 168 54 Total vote. . i75 125 In other words, if the question whether the Presi¬ dent’s veto should stand had been submitted to the representatives of those States only which adhered to the Union, Mr. Cleveland would have been over¬ ruled, more than three to one, and a bill would have become a law which, in the opinion of such a Union soldier as General Chamberlain, “ offers an incentive to fraudulent claims, which degrade the deserving, and to too ready a resort to a plea of dependency, demor¬ alizing to manliness.” That there were cast on the right side twenty-four more votes than were necessary to sustain the veto was due to the fact that the States which sought to secede from the Union joined in de¬ ciding the issue. “ The only cry they [the great body of veterans] have now,” said the western Mas¬ sachusetts soldier from whose letter to the President we have quoted, “is that you will spare them the honor of having served their country because they loved her, and not as mere bounty and pension seek¬ ers.” That honor has been spared the Northern soldiers, but only through the help of Southern rep¬ resentatives, many of whom fought against them a quarter of a century ago. In a broad and elevated view it may well be doubted whether history has ever recorded a sweeter triumph for the victors in a righteous cause than men like Gen¬ eral Cox and General Chamberlain have thus lived to witness. They fought to keep the South in the Union, and they have survived to see the honor of the North¬ ern soldier preserved from the taint which dema¬ gogues and claim-agents would have cast upon it through the votes of the Southern men in Congress. Looking back over the history of the nation, we can now see that the civil war was inescapable. The view of the Constitution in which the South had been edu¬ cated rendered an attempt at secession inevitable, and as Webster said in his famous 7th of March speech, “peaceable secession is an utter impossibility.” Or, as Lincoln put it in his second inaugural : “ Both par¬ ties deprecated war ; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive ; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” That the time would come when the South would rejoice that the war ended as it did, and when the North would find itself indebted to the South for efficient help in secur¬ ing the good government of the reunited nation, was also inevitable ; but it might well have been expected that it would not come till after the generation which fought the war had passed from the stage. Less than a quarter of a century, however, has sufficed. The New South frankly confesses its satisfaction with the issue of the struggle for secession ; the New North has now been brought to realize its indebtedness to the South for indispensable help in maintaining good government. Such champions of the Union cause twenty-five years ago as General Bragg of Wisconsin, Colonel Morrison of Illinois, General Warner of Ohio, and Mr. Curtin, the “War Governor” of Pennsylvania, spoke in de¬ fense of the President’s veto during the debate in the House, and at its conclusion the veto was sustained, in part through the votes given by men like them from the North, but chiefly through the votes of men who came from the States which once sought to disrupt the Union. Fair-minded Northern men thus see that they owe to the South this arrest of the pension craze and of the alarming drift toward paternalism which the Pauper Pension Bill typified. The confession of this indebtedness is the epitaph upon the grave of section¬ alism in American politics. The Problem of Government by Guilds. An “Open Letter,” on another page, grapples with the problem of municipal reform in a courageous fash¬ ion. It is not to be wondered at that thoughtful men, confronting the extravagances and abuses that seem to have intrenched themselves in most of our city governments, and observing that the dispersion of one swarm of the vermin that infest our city-halls and court-houses only makes room for another and hun¬ grier swarm, should be reaching out after some radical reforms in the methods of government. They are not at all mistaken in supposing that the case is becom¬ ing critical ; they are justified in bestowing upon it patient and anxious thought. The typical citizen is too much inclined to exult over the material gains of a “ triumphant democracy,” and to ignore the chronic villainy of his city government. It is a little curious that this New York merchant, pondering the question of municipal government, should have hit upon the same device as that which the great German philosopher, Hermann Lotze, has been proposing. Lotze deplores the haste and passion with which “ the antiquated forms of companies, guilds, and corporations ” were swept away in the rush of the revolutionary movements that ushered in “ the modern era,” and declares that they ought to have been transformed, not abolished. The most es¬ sential fault of modern society is, he declares, “ its low estimation of the corporate element.” “ Of course,” he argues, “ we do not want to go back to corporations for the subsistence of which we can find no even plausi¬ ble reason, in order to accumulate privileges for which there is still less any conceivable rightful claim ; but on the one hand, a living bond between those who are really connected would maintain the discipline which we so greatly need, but which yet we cannot enforce by means of general laws ; on the other hand, such combinations, representing partly the most important callings (agidculture, manufactures, commerce, art, and science), partly the special local interests of different districts, — would form the true unities, the representa¬ tives of which, by equilibration of the interests of each, would cover the wants of the whole.” Can it be true that the mediaeval communities held, in these ancient craft-guilds and fraternities, a form of social organization which it was unwise to destroy, and to which we would do well to return ? Wise or unwise,

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TOPICS OF THE TIME, 156 their destruction was inevitable. Not merely for the economical reason that they obstructed the free move¬ ment of labor from one occupation to another, but still more for the political reason that they furnished no soil in which the sentiment of nationality could take root, they must have been abolished. The “ notion of a citizen of the State,” of which Lotze speaks rather slightingly, but which is the one great conception of modern times, needed to be planted and nurtured in the minds of men. When the member of the guild found himself the citizen of the State, his horizon was widened, and his thoughts were enlarged. There was reason then, underneath the rashness and passion which Lotze deplores, and by which the guilds were destroyed. Reason there almost always is, even in the blind fury of the populace. Wickliffe denounced the guilds, and Bacon stigmatized them as “fraternities of evil.” It was the Zeit Geist who said that they must go, and they went. But it is not at all certain that they may not return. Many customs, fashions, social forms have been pushed aside by one age and taken up by another. The organization of government by guilds was ob¬ structive to liberty five hundred years ago, but it might be conservative of liberty to-day. At any rate the prop¬ osition is worth considering. Two of the reasons urged by our correspondent for this reform seem to be cogent. That it would break the connection between municipal government and na¬ tional politics, and that it would give all classes of the people a voice in the municipal government, seems probable. Both these results are greatly to be desired. The root of most of the evils of city government is in partisan politics and in the mischiefs which either accompany or flow therefrom. It is doubtful whether city politics will ever be permanently divorced from na¬ tional politics unless some such radical reorganization as is here suggested can be effected ; and it is pretty certain that until municipal government can be sepa¬ rated from national politics, the vilest elements of our cities will generally bear rule. Doubtless under the plan proposed, the machine politicians would make strenuous attempts to capture the several guilds; nev¬ ertheless the desire of each guild to be represented by its ablest men, and to secure by this means the pro¬ tection of its own interests, would greatly interfere with the schemes of the office-seekers. The other result promised — the fair representation of every class of citizens in the city government — is equally desirable, and under such a plan it would prob¬ ably be secured. The enormous preponderance of some classes in our municipal councils is now notorious; and there are large classes, and these the most intelligent and capable of government, that are now rarely rep¬ resented in these councils. Any scheme which would bring them into an active participation in the manage¬ ment of municipal affairs deserves to be patiently studied. It is almost certain that a city council, chosen ac¬ cording to this plan, would be incomparably superior, intellectually and morally, to those which are usually found in our council chambers. Several practical difficulties suggest themselves. The classification of the voters might not be easily accom¬ plished. In the smaller cities, especially, it would not be possible to give to each separate trade its repre¬ sentatives, for the number of trades and professions is great, and the number of those practicing some of these trades and professions is small. It would be necessary, therefore, to combine those of several differ¬ ent, though related, vocations into one guild — as, for example, the metal-workers might include blacksmiths, tinsmiths, boiler-makers, etc. ; and the guild of in¬ struction the clergy, the teachers, the authors, etc. The arrangement of these classes would be attended with some difficulty; nevertheless, the problem is not hopeless. The serious question is whether the representatives of these guilds would act unitedly for the public wel¬ fare, or whether their devotion to the interests of their several classes would not lead them to sacrifice the in¬ terests of society. Would the feeling that Lotze curi¬ ously deprecates, the sentiment of loyalty to the state or the municipality, be strong enough to hold in check the class feeling to which the system makes direct ap¬ peal? Could these representatives of guilds and classes agree together to promote the general good of the com¬ munity? The danger would be that those who now give up to party what was meant for mankind would then make the same debasing surrender to the interests of their guild. The misery of that state into which we are now fallen results from the fact that public spirit is overborne by private greed and party passion; would not the same causes continue to operate under every possible form of political organization? In a government by guilds the obvious method by which these evil tendencies could find expression would be the device that is known among the politicians as log¬ rolling. There might be combinations among guilds, by which some would help others and receive help in return, at the expense of the rest. It is scarcely nec¬ essary to say that this kind of abuse is prevalent un¬ der existing conditions. Everybody knows the way in which appropriations for internal improvements are secured in Congress and the way in which the tariff is adjusted. Something of the same nature often oc¬ curs in municipal governments.' There is log-rolling in the interest of wards, as well as of States and sections. The only question is whether this organization of gov¬ ernment by guilds would not foster these corrupt and selfish methods. Obviously, the guilds whose num¬ bers would be largest and whose interests are most closely related — the various guilds of wage-laborers — might, by combination, control the government. It is possible that they could do as much now, if they knew their power, and there are signs of such an issue ; but the adoption of the scheme which we are considering would offer new facilities for an enterprise of this na¬ ture. Under any form of political organization selfish men will behave selfishly; but there are some political meth¬ ods that offer larger opportunity and more encourage¬ ment than others for the exercise of the virtues of public spirit and patriotism ; and the question to be determined is whether the organization by guilds would have this effect. Some of the more obvious objections have been suggested above, rather for the sake of elicit¬ ing discussion than with the design of pronouncing against the measure. In fact, the discussion of any branch of this subject cannot fail to do good, as it will call attention to the crying evils that exist. But there is a more immediate and practical reform now “in sight,” which we shall discuss in a future number.

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OPEN LETTERS. Food. Few of those who toil for moderate returns will take exception to Mr. Edward Atkinson’s conclusion, that half the cost of living is the price of materials for food; their grocers and butchers have long since convinced them of that. But the reader who prides himself upon sometimes being thoughtful must be able to recall certain discouraging moments in his early housekeep¬ ing days, when ignorance of the laws of nutrition and the economy of foods had led him into extravagance and waste ; perhaps he is quite aware that ignorance and extravagance and waste followed his purchases home to his kitchen and his table, and there became not only a drain upon his modest purse but a sapper of his health and vitality. Very probably, too, he in time ceased to grow thoughtful over the subject, and continued to walk the path his ignorance trod out. There seemed no other path. Now make our supposed buyer not a reader, and not thoughtful, and only a common laborer, his purse not merely modest, but well nigh empty, and you have come face to face with the portentous problem of the hour. Some one has, in effect, said that certain forms of religious doctrine bore thorns and bitter fruit, and not rose leaves and sweetness, for the simple reason that their founders’ digestive organs were impaired. We 157 may neither agree nor disagree with this, but if we were to become prophetic, and were to call it a truth of coming generations, that our civilization came to its downfall through the neglect of its wise men to teach its poor how to live^ we would not be treading entirely upon air. For what can we expect in the fu¬ ture from the sons and daughters of men and women who starve while we in ignorance lay waste the fruits of the earth? We are glad to know of the site of ancient Troy and the presence of sodium in the stars, but to make plenty where want now cries for bread, to teach the poor to live well on the half of what they now starve upon, to shame anarchy with universal sweet bread and strength-giving foods, — we might with advantage barter many of our boasted wonders for this. No one has gone so far upon this road as Professor Atwater, of the Wesleyan University, Middletown, whose series on “The Chemistry of Foods and Nutri¬ tion ” is begun in this number. He has studied food and nutrition as no other student in this country has studied it. Pie has had one of the rewards of patient endeavor, inasmuch as his success is beyond all ques¬ tion. What he has found no one can afford to ignore. Plis discoveries are like the discovery of a new food- producing earth, since he can teach us to double the value of this. OPEN LETTERS. City Government by Guilds. WHAT is the cause of the failure of municipal government in our larger cities ? It is useless to disguise the fact that it has failed. In most of the cities government is becoming corrupt, inefficient, burden¬ some to an intolerable degree. It cannot be that the majority of the people wish to have it so. Doubtless the root of the evil is the indifference and neglect of the honest citizens ; yet the question arises whether the present forms of municipal organization do not discour¬ age and prevent the active participation of the best citi¬ zens, and whether other methods might not secure this desirable result. Our present methods of nomination for office were devised when we were a rural people, and they still an¬ swer very well for that portion of our population. But we are rapidly changing the character of our social life, and concentrating our population in commercial and industrial centers ; and these social changes make a change in our political methods indispensable. If the political unit of a democratic government must always be a geographical one, and if we must always vote by wards or districts for municipal officers, then the voters are almost certain to range themselves ac¬ cording to party lines, and national politics will com¬ plicate and disturb municipal elections. Is there not a better way ? Would it not be possible to group the people of New York by occupations, and allow them then, by guilds, to elect their representa¬ tives to the city council ? Some of our citizens have now their trades-unions. Might not the whole city be organ¬ ized into trades-unions, to each of which representation VoL. XXXIV.— 23. in the city government should be allowed in proportion to its membership ? The census enumerates the males of lawful age according to their vocation. These might be grouped into one hundred guilds, more or less, and each allowed one or two or three representatives in a city council, which council should elect a mayor with full power to appoint and remove heads of departments. This coun¬ cil should also make appropriations and frame city ordinances. There should be a guild hall, where all elections should be held. Each guild should have al¬ lotted to it one or two days in the year for its meetings and one day for its election. If the membership were so large as to cause delay at a single ballot-box, the list of members might be divided alphabetically, — A to G; — H to N, etc., — and thus several ballot-boxes might be brought into use. The records of each guild could be kept at the guild hall. Each guild should control its own membership and canvass its own elec¬ tions. It seems to me that such a method of electing a city government would shut out partisanship, and give to the very lowest classes an opportunity not now en¬ joyed to exercise their right of suffrage intelligently. Can we expect a man who cannot read to judge wisely of the qualifications of the candidates nominated for the office of mayor ? He does know his fellows, and of his companions he can select the best. Have we not expected too much of our humble voters ? Could not a man see one Step ahead of him who could not see from the bottom to the top of the political ladder ? This method of voting would emancipate the lower classes from the domination of professional politicians.

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OPEN LETTERS. 158 The ’longshoremen would no longer be mere retainers of some shyster lawyer or rum-seller, but would have the privilege and the duty of selecting one or more of their own class to represent their craft and its inter¬ ests. The entire guild would watch the official course and conduct of its representatives and hold them to account. But what, in the meantime, has become of their quondam leader, the lawyer ? He has retired to his own guild and dropped to the bottom, helpless and harmless. The rum-seller, too, in his own guild would have a voice in the selection of one of its members to represent its interests ; but never more could that fra¬ ternity alone have the whole city council under its control. A man’s associates, whether he is professional man, merchant, or artisan, are more likely to know what his qualifications are than are his neighbors, residing in the same ward. The voter in the city knows very few of his neighbors. Geographical divisions are, there¬ fore, purely artificial ; it would be better to sweep them away, and substitute for them the existing lines of so¬ cial organization. In a word, let us take men as we find them, already harnessed in business or occupa¬ tion, and require them thus grouped to perform their political duties, instead of calling on them once a year on election day to break ranks, scatter, and vote as a mob. John D. Cutter. New York, Feb. 5th, 1887. Toynbee Hall, London. AN INTERESTING SOCIAL EXPERIMENT. One of the most interesting features of London of to-day is the work of the “ West End ” among the poor of the “ East End,” and chiefly in this the Uni¬ versity settlement housed at Toynbee Hall, Commer¬ cial Road, Whitechapel, next to that center of work¬ ing religion, St. Jude’s Church. The Rev. Samuel A. Barnett, rector of St. Jude’s, whose name is known to all students of charity organization, is also senior warden of Toynbee Hall, and his assistant, the Rev. T. C. Gardiner, is sub-warden. With them are fifteen or twenty men, most of them graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, some of them busy in the city, others men of leisure and wealth, — all of them giving more or less of their time to the work of making the lives of the East End poor more wholesome and beautiful than they could be without such help. The hall is named after Arnold Toynbee, one of the scholars of Balliol College, Oxford, who had inter¬ ested himself deeply in social questions, and through whose efforts in great part the Cooperative Congress was invited to Oxford in 1881. He was a reader in political economy in his college and its bursar or business man, so that he had both a theoretical and practical knowledge of economics, and his interest in the subject was therefore two-sided. When Henry George’s lectures attracted so much attention in Eng¬ land, Toynbee thought that some features or results of them should be counteracted, and he therefore ar¬ ranged to give two lectures at St. Andrew’s Hall, London, in which he discussed the betterment of the condition of the working classes from his point of view. The audience, I was told, was a curiously mixed one, containing a good many from the social stratum to which Toynbee belonged, as well as the workingmen hearers whom he particularly invited ; and among the latter there was a decided undercurrent of criticism and not a little interpellation of the speaker. In the course of the lectures he had confessed that his own class was largely responsible for the discontent among the working classes, and he said frankly that the evil would not come to an end until “we ” were will¬ ing to live for and if necessary to die for “ you.” He was frail ; the lectures had excited him greatly ; and at the close of the last he fell back in his chair fainting. He was taken to the house of friends in the country, and there died. His sudden end threw a halo of pathos upon his lectures and his work, and when the University men decided to start this colony in London the buildings became a memorial to him. His family is well known in London for its devotion to philan¬ thropic work, and several of his brothers and sisters are still active in the work to which he gave his life. Toynbee Hall had its actual origin in Oxford. In the spring of 1884, a few months after Toynbee’s death, Mr. Barnett read a paper at a small meeting in St. John’s College, in which he shadowed forth his idea of what a colony of University men might do for industrial centers such as East London. The paper, though read to a small knot of men, was published and soon won its way, and a small group of University men made an experiment in associated life at a disused public-house, under Mr. Barnett’s guidance and help, when the suc¬ cess of the experiment justified a permanent home. The friends of Arnold Toynbee, who had been anxious to erect some memorial of his work and enthusiastic self-devotion, provided most of the funds for a lecture- hall, and the cost of the rest of the buildings was defrayed by a company formed for this purpose, which raised about 0,000 on the security of the freehold land, bearing interest at 4^ per cent. Toynbee Hall, while a memorial to Arnold Toynbee, is also a monument to Samuel A. Barnett, whose ideas it embodies. One enters from the Commercial Road through the ordinary English gateway into a sort of quadrangle, on one side of which is the residence part of Toynbee Hall, and on the other a lecture-hall which is filled nearly every evening for some purpose or other with East End people. This latter building is also used as a general headquarters for organized charity in the district, including, for instance, the office of the Beaumont Trust, from which the People’s Palace, prophesied in Kingsley’s “ Alton Locke,” and made almost real in Walter Besant’s “ All Sorts and Con¬ ditions of Men,” is now rising into solid fact. The East London Antiquarian Society, the Adam Smith Club, the Toynbee Natural History Society, the Edu¬ cation Reform League, the Pupil Teachers’ Debating Society, the Toynbee Shakespeare Club, the Students’ Union, and still other organizations, hold their meet¬ ings in Toynbee Hall or in St. Jude’s school next door. The hall is as beautiful a club-house as one would wish at the West End itself, and certainly no more charming host could be found through Belgravia and May- fair than the junior warden. Each man has his room or suite of rooms, as he would have at college, and the charming drawing-room, with comfortable and cozy furniture and beautiful adornments, forms a general gathering-place for the club-men and their guests. We had “afternoon tea” there, in strange contrast with the surroundings of poverty and squalor in the

Page 165

OPEN LETTERS. streets about, and here Mr. Gardiner told us some¬ thing of the practical work of the colony and its diffi¬ culties. Four evenings of the week are devoted, in the lecture- room opposite, to courses of lectures respectively on history, physiology, astronomy, and English Liter¬ ature, the fee being one shilling for each complete course. Another evening there is a concert, and always on Saturday evening a “popular ” lecture. The sixth evening of the week is given to a social reception in the drawing-room of the club-house, where the men of Toynbee Hall are assisted by friends from the West End in receiving and entertaining the poor people of the neighborhood. The difficulties of mingling classes are, after all, much the same in England as at home. There is a good deal of human nature everywhere. I asked Mr. Gardiner what kind of people proved the best entertainers. He replied that those who were popular at the West End were popular at the East, and there was, indeed, great difficulty in getting the right sort of people, because they were so much in de¬ mand in their own class of “ society.” Some practiced “ entertainers,” as they call them, could interest easily eight or ten of the poorer people, whereas others could take care of only one or two. The chief difficulty to overcome was the narrow sphere in which the poorer people did their thinking and their talking, and the whole purpose of these receptions, and of much of the other work, was to broaden the mental horizon of these people, and give them more and pleasanter things to think and talk about outside of the narrow circle of their tenement-house or neighborhood gossip. These men were hoping to accomplish much through the “na¬ tional teachers,” — young men and women selected from the ranks of trades-people and the like, without much culture themselves, but who could be made the means of spreading the wider life among their pupils when they came to teach. To this end they organized reading-parties, as was the fashion at the universities, for those who showed special interest in the weekly lectures, and one or two of their best outdoor men were charged with forming cricket and tennis clubs and other outdoor circles, to broaden the life of their protegh in those directions. The classes and reading-parties are organized into groups, each under the management of an Honorary (unpaid) Secretary. One group comprises one class studying the Old Testament, another studying moral philosophy, a course of Sunday afternoon lectures on the Ethics of the Ancient and Modern World, three classes in Victorian literature (one entirely of women), one in English history, two in political economy. A second group includes reading-parties on Mazzini, Ruskin, and literature, to each of which admission is by election, and classes in French, German, and Latin. Another group covers the physical sciences and in¬ cludes an ambulance class. A fourth comprises sing¬ ing-classes, instruction and entertainment for deaf and dumb, drawing-classes, elementary evening classes for boys, lantern illustrations in geography for boys, musical drill for boys, and several classes in short¬ hand. A fifth provides instruction and practice in carpentering, in wood-carving and in modeling, both for boys and men. The work of Toynbee Hall is in the right direction, and, moreover, it is justified not only by its results but 159 by the enjoyment which men have in the doing of it. “ I could not give up this East End work,” said one of them to. me; “ I could not live my life in content away from the people I have learned to know and love here.” R. R. Bowker. Notes. LINCOLN AND EMERSON. Before our editorial in the April Century on “Lin¬ coln and Lowell” was published, Mr. Lowell had added another to his sayings concerning the martyr President, in his speech at Chicago on the evening of Washington’s Birthday, in which he referred to Lin¬ coln as, “on the whole, the most remarkable statesman of all times.” In this connection it should be noted that while Em¬ erson did not write in verse of Lincoln, yet in prose he divides with Lowell the honor of early appreciation and fortunate characterization. In “ Miscellanies ” will be found an essay entitled “American Civilization,*” which, according to a note by Mr. Cabot, is “part of a lecture delivered at Washington, January 31st, 1862, it is said, in the presence of President Lincoln and some of his Cabinet, some months before the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation.” Mr. Lincoln may have been present, but his secretaries have no memorandum showing the fact, and the Washington papers of the next day throw no light on the subject: in fact, Mr. Emerson’s son now believes that Lincoln was probably not present. The lecturer praised the “angelic virtue” of the Ad¬ ministration, but urged emancipation ; and at the close of this essay, as printed, is a supplement commending the President for his proposal “ to Congress that the Govern¬ ment shall codperate with any State that shall enact a gradual abolishment of slavery.” Next comes his ad¬ dress on the Emancipation Proclamation, in which the President is greatly praised for his moderation, fairness of mind, reticence, and firmness. “All these,” Emerson says, “have bespoken such favor to the act, that, great as the popularity of the President has been, we are begin¬ ning to think that we have underestimated the capacity and virtue which the Divine Providence has made an instrument of benefit so vast. He has been permitted to do more for America than any other American man,” etc. After this, in the same volume, comes Emerson’s brief but memorable essay on the death of Lincoln, in which he says : “ Pie is the true history of the Ameri¬ can people in his time. Step by^step he walked before them ; slow with their slowness, quickening his march by theirs, tlie true representative of this continent; an entirely public man ; father of his country, the pulse of twenty millions throbbing in his heart, the thought of their minds articulated by his tongue.” Again, in the essay on “ Eloquence ” (“ Essays and Social Aims ”), Emerson praises the Gettysburg speech, and in the essay on “ Greatness ” in the same volume he gives Lincoln as an example of the “ great style of hero ” who “ draws equally all classes ” : “ His heart was as great as the world, but there v-as no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.” Since the publication of the reference to the death of Black Hawk given in the “ Life of Lincoln,” in the December Century, the authors have learned that Black Hawk was not buried on the bank of the Mis¬ sissippi, as certain authorities have stated, but on the Des Moines river, and without unusual honors.

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BRIC-A-BRAC. The Agile Sonneteer. HOW facile ’tis to frame the sonnet ! See : An “ apt alliteration ” at the start; Phrase fanciful, turned t’other-end-to with art; And then a rhyme makes ist and 4th agree. Ee words enough,— so this next quatrain we Will therefore rhyme to match. Here sometimes “ heart ” Comes in, as “ hot ” or throbbing,” to impart A tang of sentiment to our idee. Then the sextette, wherein there strictly ought To be a kind of winding up of things ; Only two rhymes (to have it nicely wrought). On which it settles, lark-like, as it sings. And so ’tis perfect, head and tail and wings. ‘‘Lacks something? ” Oh, as usual, but a thought. A^ithony Morehead. Wait a Bit. When Johnny came a-courting, I thought him overbold. For I was but a young thing. And he no’ very old. And though I liked him well enough, I sent him on his way. With, “ Wait a bit, bide a bit. Wait a week and a day ! ” When Johnny passed me in the lane, And pleaded for a kiss, And vowed he’d love me evermore For granting of the bliss ; Although I’d liked it ower well, I ran from him away. With, “Wait a bit, bide a bit, Wait a week and a day ! ” When Johnny fell a-ranting. With, “ Jenny, be my wife ? ^ And vowed I never should regi*et. However long my life ; Although I liked it best o’ all, I turned from him away. With, “ Wai^a bit, bide a bit. Wait a week and a day ! ” Oh, Johnny was a ninny. He took me at my word ! And he was courting another. The next thing that I heard. Oh, what a ninny was Johnny, To mind me when I’d say, “ Wait a bit, bide a bit. Wait a week and a day ! ” Heigh-ho, I’ve met my Johnny, I gin him a blink o’ my eye. And then he fell a-raving. For want o’ my love he’d die ! I ne’er could be so cruel. So I set the wedding-day. With, “ Haste a bit, nor waste a bit. There’s danger in delay ! ” Jennie E. T, Dowe, The April-Face ; or. The Stub-tailed Mule. (an idyl of a RICHMOND STREET-CAR.) All up the street at a stately pace The maiden came with her April-face, And the roses I’d paid for, — upon her breast, Were white as the eggs in a partridge-nest. While behind her — the driver upon his stool - Tinkled the bell of the street-car mule. “Going to walk up the street? ” I said ; She graciously bowed her beautiful head. “Then I’ll walk too ; ’t’s a lovely day” — Thus I opened the ball in my usual way. “Do you see the car behind?” inquired The April-face, “I’m a trifle tired.” I urged a walk; ’twas a useless suit! She gently waved her parachute ; 1 he stub-tailed mule stopped quick enow ; I handed her in with a stately bow. And the bell rang out with a jangled quirk. As the stub-tailed mule went off with a jerk. Three men as she entered solemnly rose. And quietly trampled their neighbors’ toes ; A dudish masher left his place. And edged near the girl with the April-face, Who sat on the side you’d call “ the lee ” (With the same sweet smile she’d sat on me). The day ^yas lovely; mild the air ; The sky like the maiden’s face was fair ; The car was full, and a trifle stale (Attached to the mule with the stubby tail) ; Yet the maiden preferred the seat she hired To the stroll with me ; for I made her tired. And now when the maiden walks the street With another’s flowers, and a smile so sweet, / wave to the driver upon his stool. And stop the stub-tailed street-car mule, While I purchase a seat with half my pelf; For it makes me a trifle tired myself. Tho7nas Nelson Page. Uncle Esek’s Wisdom. Profuseness is not liberality, any more than nig¬ gardliness is economy.. There isn’t enough bad luck in the w’orld, all to¬ gether, to ruin one real live man. Man is a two-legged animal, whose ruling passion is to dicker and to be an alderman. No MAN ever got rid of a lie by telling it; it is sure to come home, sooner or later, to hobnob with its author. The world owes the most of its civilization to the Bible, and the looking-glass. He who thinks he can’t win is quite sure to be right about it, for he has already lost. The man who can do four things fairly well will find four men who can do each one of the four things better, and thus his occupation is gone. Uncle Esek,

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LEO TOLSTOI

Page 168

The Century Magazine. VoL. XXXIV. JUNE, 1887. No. 2. them for comment and pass by the third ; and it may seem strange to pass by the one which Historical claims imposed Canterbury moreentirely than the others — indeed, more upon us as our first cathedral: and were entirely than any cathedral in the country — they consistently respected we should go next keeps Its pristine form. to York, or Winchester perhaps, or Durham. Norvvich keeps unaltered that Norman But the guiding-threads of interest are many ground-plan which eyery where else has been and at times conflicting : and now the architec- conspicuously changed ; keeps all the lower tural strand may well be followed for a while, parts of Its interior as originally built, and Peterborough’s history is deyoid of wide keeps Its splendid central tower. But this yery significance. It was not a cathedral till long treedom from mutations has made it in one after its many-dated fabric was finished as we way less interesting than its riyals,and in one see it to-day; it stood apart from the main way less characteristic too. The yariety which currents of national life; its influence albeit comes from the touch of successiye genera- great, was almost wholly local ; and its annals tions, from the contrasting beauty of succes- are marked by few famous names or conspic- siye styles, seems more interesting than unity uous happenings. But its fabric, though built to all eyes saye the serious student’s. And it as a mere abbey-church — a merepriyate place was so often wrought in the cathedrals of of worship for Benedictine monks— bears England that it is one of the chief character- comparison with the yery greatest. Its scheme istics which oppose them to their fellows else- giyes proof of the enormous extent of monas- vvhere. Peterborough and Ely haye diyerser tic wealth and pride and power ; and the yery charms, a richer historic voice, and a more many dates which mark its execution prove Copyright, 1887, by The Century Co. All rights reserved.

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164 at PETERBORO UGH. This Norman abbot, Thorold, chastised Peterborough as vigorously as AVilliam had expected. He ruled for twenty-eight years, “ a master of the goods of the abbey and a scan¬ dal to the church.” And, “ being a soldier by choice and a monk for convenience and emolument,” and knowing himself well hated within his own walls, he brought thither a troop of men-at-arms and built them a castle close by the church’s side. When this castle was destroyed is not exactly known; but its site is traced in a mound called the Tout-hill, which rises, overshadowed by great trees, to the south of the cathedral and to the eastward of the bishop’s — once the abbot’s — palace. In 1107 Ernulph, the prior of Canterbury, was promoted to be abbot at Peterborough. Later he was made bishop of Rochester, and in all times and places was a mighty and per¬ sistent builder. We have already seen the remnants of his work at Canterbury, and at how long such influences were potently work. The Abbey, at first called Medeshamstede, was founded by Peada,the first Christian king of Mercia, less than sixty years after the land¬ ing of St. Augustine. Its church was finished by his successor and dedicated to St. Peter. The pope granted the brotherhood extraordi¬ nary privileges ; the king endowed it with some four hundred square miles of land ; and for two hundred and fifty years it lived and prospered greatly. But then its buildings were utterly swept away by Danish rovers, and their eighty-four indwellers were slaughtered to a man. A full century passed ere, in 972, the mon¬ astery was refounded, reHidowed, and re¬ christened Peter’s-borough. Edgar was then king, and Dunstan primate; and the Benedic¬ tines, whom they so greatly favored, were naturally placed in the new establishment. This, the second church, was also troubled and laid under tribute by the Danes, though not destroyed. But the most interesting chapter in its history connects it with those later days when Danes and Englishmen joined m a last resistance to the Norman interloper and when Hereward ruled the Camp of Refuge ” in the neighboring Isle of Ely. Hereward’s story, made so familiar by the touch of modern romance-writers, rests but upon long subsequent and dubious traditions. Yet their very sur¬ vival and their richness of detail prove at least that he must have been a valiant leader and one whom the popular imagi¬ nation held very dear. And our own mood grows so sympathetic when we read that we hardly care to ask for his¬ tory’s exact decisions. We like to believe in his midnight vigil at Peterborough’s altar ; and we are probably right in believing that a little later he came with his band of outlaws — monks, peasants, and soldiers, Englishmen and Danes — and despoiled that altar and the whole church of St. Peter, carrying off its treas¬ ures to prevent their falling into the grasp of the advancing Norman. Their guardians were inclined to favor English¬ men, not Normans ; yet so high-handed an act could not fail to seem sacrilegious in their eyes, and they resisted it as best they might. Hereward burned their homes and drove them forth, but, it seems, without needless cruelty ; for when William’s fighting abbot came in his turn, he found the hospital still stand- iiig over the head of a single invalid old cto?r“>,’Rewo.ch™r o?"‘ Mdi?”’ brother. D D. Transept. E. 10. Place of Mary Stuart’s tomb. ii. Tomb of Catherine of Aragon.

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PETERBOROUGH. 165 Rochester such still stand to-day. But here he speaks only through tradition ; the dor¬ mitory, the refectory, and the chapter-house he built have utterly disappeared. ir. Ihe second church stood unchanged by any Norman hand until 1116, when, like its predecessor, it was wholly swept away by fire. In 1117 the present structure was begun. John of Sais was abbot, but whom he had for architect we know not; nor are the later chronicles of Peterborough any¬ where illumined by those citations of an artist’s name which give Canterbury’s • such a vivid charm. Under John of Sais the choir was built in part, and it seems to have been finished under Mar¬ tin of Bee; for he brought his monks into the new struct¬ ure “ with much pomp” in 1 140, and a consecration im¬ plies at least the choir’s complete- ne.ss. The central tower was erected soon after 1155; and this in its turn implies that the transepts and a por¬ tion of the nave must have been standing to support it. And thereafter the work seems to have gone on slowly westward. Slight differ¬ ences in construction and design mark its suc¬ cessive stages ; but the same general scheme persists till we come almost to the western wall. Jt is easy to see that more than once the original plan was altered for the increase of size and splendor. The nave had already been given two bays more than were at first in¬ tended before a second change of scheme added still another space, which, as it has a lateral projection beyond the main line of the aisle-walls, is called a western transept. In this the pure simple Norman style is no longer used, but a later, lighter, richer version of round-arched design, — that '' transitional ” style which served to prepare the way for ‘‘pointed” fashions. And when we cross the threshold and look at the outside of the west¬ ern wall, we see still another step in develop¬ ment. I do not mean when we look at that huge arched portico which our illustration shows, but at the veritable wall of the church behind it as seen on page 168. d'his shows only pointed arches, though its inner face is built with round. Evidently the great change of style had come about while it was being WESTERN TOWERS OF THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE CLOISTERS. raised ; and its constructors, true to the spirit of their age, had abandoned the old manner as quickly as they could. For the “ unity ” of their work as a whole they did not care, — only for the harmony of such portions as a single glance might cover. Their idea was evidently to build some such facade as we shall see at Wells and Salisbury, with tall towers on either hand and projecting buttresses in front. But ere the task was accom¬ plished a new hand took control. Again the design was changed, and again for the sake of greater grandeur. One of the planned-for towers was finished no further than necessity compelled for the safety of the front; and the other, though now conspicuous with four corner pinnacles, is still much lower than it should have been. And the buttresses re-

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i66 PETERBOROUGH, mained unbuilt while another entire fagade was thrown out, with the three majestic arches, the small flanking towers, and the windowed gables that we see to-day. Many sins did its builder perpetrate in || 1 1 1; the working of his ‘ J ! i purpose. On the ground they can be very clearly under¬ stood, and here I may at least refer to them. For they show that the mediaeval architect, even in the best of periods,” was sometimes led by purely aesthetic aims to sacrifice the _ stability, the ration- ^ ality, and the truth ” of his constructions. And the lesson is interesting in view of Mr. Ruskin’s dog¬ ma, that such sacrifice was first commit¬ ted by Renaissance artists, and learned from them by modern men to our archi¬ tectural undoing. VIEW EASTWARD THROUGH THE GATE FROM THE MAIN DOOR OF THE CATHEDRAL. To begin with, this ‘‘majestick front of columel work ” does not sustain the out¬ ward thrust of the nave arcade as buttresses would have done, and as to the eye it purports to do. Its vaulted roof impinges upon the west wall, of course; but its tall clustered piers stand free, and unassisted could not even bear their own weight and the weight of their arches. Vast arches such as these may seem well able to support themselves, even though they rise eighty-one feet above the ground; may look like mammoth branching trees and seem^ to stand as a tree stands, by natural elasticity. But in truth their stones bear downward with as great a weight as though differently ar¬ ranged, — or, more exactly, bear oiihuard with enormous lateral pressure. Even assisted as they are by the towers on either hand, they have not really stood, in the true meaning of the word. Only a hundred and fifty years after they were built the western wall seems to have thrown too much weight upon them, its own towers suffering from the lack of buttresses, do counteract this danger there was raised within thecentral arch, up to halfits height, that closed porch or parvise which, though charming in itself and very scientifically used, mars the harmony of the fa9ade and spoils its grand simplicity. And to-day all the arches are con¬ spicuously out of the perpendicular, though the whole fabric has been braced and tied to¬ gether in ingenious ways ; and some say that there is even a need that the entire work should be taken down for reconstruction. And had it been solidity itself, it would still not have been a rational piece of work. It not only lacks structural affinity with the church, but deliberately misrepresents it to the eye. Professing with its three arches to express the three longitudinal divisions of the nave, it leads us to believe that the aisles lie some 65 feet apart, while in fact they are separated by a space of but 46. Nor, again, are the arches, like those of Rheims or Amiens, a true devel¬ opment and glorification of the doors that lie within them. They are independent in station as in structure, and have absorbed all the dignity they should have shared with the portals proper. It is a screen, this front, and not a true front or even a true portico ; and a screen which bears false witness to the work behind it. Moreover, its general design, con¬ sidered simply for itself, has been sacrificed to the preeminence of the arches. The gables

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PETERBORO UGH. 167 are too small and delicate to match with them, and the flanking towers too insignificant. In truth, no doors, no gables, and no towers could have been built to keep them fitting company. Given arches of this size, the rest of the composition could not but be made to suffer. Yet even thus, as writes our excellent local guide,* it raises ideas which no building even of extraordinary size could adequately satisfy.” Any possible interior would seem too small and low for its magnificent predict- ings. And do not these facts prove that it is not rational., as every architectural work should be, accoraing to those theories and principles which it is always well to bear in mind ? But he must be a pedant thrice over, who, when he stands face to face with Peterborough, can bear them in mind for its condemning. Gothic art would have been a thing far inferior to the thing it was had this been the normal way in which its great church-fronts were built, did this architect’s practice translate its funda¬ mental rules of composition and canons of construction. We are quite content that there should have been but one such architect, and that he should have built but one such facade — yet how glad that he did build this, abnor¬ mal, eccentric, even irrational though its beauty be ! There is absolutely nothing like it else¬ where; and there are few things in any place, however superior in all that goes to make ar¬ chitecture good as well as entrancing and im¬ posing, which can dare to rival it for majestic grace and almost supernatural effectiveness. Strangely enough, not only the name of its constructor but even the name of the ab¬ bot who employed him is unknown. Nothing identifies or dates the fabric save the voice of its own Early- English style which points to the first half of the thirteenth century. Some be¬ lieve that French genius must have been at work upon it ; and it certainly bears more like¬ ness to current French than to current English products. But I cannot quite think that any Frenchman, even away from home, would ever have designed in so unscholastic, so overfree a fashion. And the sculptured details are hardly rich enough {o have been born of Gallic inspi¬ ration. It seems to me rather the work of some exceptionally brilliant Englishman, who had seen the great portals of France and had wished to surpass them, but who ended by producing something wholly new, — something superior to his models in audacity, in freshness of impulse, and in pictorial charm, but far infe¬ rior in good sense, in true architectural balance and harmony of design, and in decorative finish. A very great artist he must have been; but there were better architects alive in France. Had * Thomas Craddock : “A General, Architectural, and Monastic History of Peterborough Cathedral.” Michael Angelo done his architectural work in the thirteenth century he might well have built some such a portico as this ; and yet we do not even know the name or nationality of the ambitious, unfettered, reckless, but divinely gifted man who seems to have expressed him¬ self once and for all at Peterborough. IV. Strange indeed is the contrast when we pass into the old Norman nave beneath this portico and through the transitional ” tran¬ sept, with its slender pillars, its rich capitals, its arches- — round, indeed, but light and grace¬ ful — its high vaulted roof, and its wealth of zig¬ zag decoration. Strange, indeed, and well able to convince us that what we vaguely call ''me¬ diaeval art” was not one art but many arts, of the most widely divergent details, features, and proportions, aiming at the most widely different ideals, and potent to suggest the most alien emotions. Here is again beauty, truly, but neither the grace, the lightness, nor the aspiring lines which so splendidly show themselves outside ; no elaboration of minor parts, as in the "tran¬ sitional ” work, and very little decoration. The plainly fluted capitals and the sparse zigzags of the arch-moldings give scarce a first faint prediction of that "cut work and crinkle-cran- kle” which to old John Evelyn summed up the qualities of mediaeval work. This work is strong to massiveness, plain almost to baldness, — Titans’ work, immense, austere, and awful. To the men of Evelyn’s day, and also to the men of late mediaeval days, it doubdess seemed barbaric. But it is not this, and it is not even primitive, archaic, though so tremendous, stern, and simple. It is too grand in its air for barbaric work which is never more than grandiose; too dignified; and too refined despite its lack of delicate detail. And it has the distinctly non-archaic quality of perfect self-possession, — that air of repose which always marks a complete and never a tentative stage of architectural development. It shows no trace that its builders were un¬ certain of just what they wished to do, or, if certain, were unable to achieve it. Primitive though it may look by contrast with richer, lighter structures, it is in truth the final per¬ fected effort of a style which had known a growth of centuries’ duration. It exactly and pmpletely expresses the aims and ideals of its own race of builders. It is true that we may think the nave far too narrow for its length. But this is a ques¬ tion for mere taste to settle. If the proportions of the ground-plan are out of keeping with our ideas of perfect beauty, the fact implies no

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PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL — THE WEST FRONT.

Page 174

FETERBORO UGH, 169 such lack of skill in the management of the chosen forms and features as would a want of harmony and proportion in the construction proper. And though this construction might have been ornamented into richer charm, its design, I say, could not have been improved upon unless the designer’s ideal had been altered too. Nor should we forget that the want of sculptured detail was once supplied by ornament in color, covering every part of the vast interior. Mere theoretic judgment tells us this, and we see it clearly proved in the western tran¬ sept. Here the fundamental forms are the same, but their proportions are all changed. Doubtless the result seems much more charm¬ ing to most modern eyes; but it should be recognized as the result of different aims, and, moreover, of their incomplete attainment. Here lightness, grace, delicacy, and the expres¬ sion of altitude were desired, and these were things which could not be perfectly attained until the pointed arch should come and bring the chance for dominant vertical lines. So this work may in one sense be considered primitive, archaic, — for it is tentative, not final. It is, in a word, anticipatory Gothic; but the earlier work is complete and perfect Norman. Excepting only as regards the roof of the central alley. The aisles alone are vaulted ; the broad middle space is covered with boards that now are slightly canted on either side, but once were flatly laid. Whether such a ceiling came by choice or by necessity, there can hardly be a modern eye to like it save for its historic interest. It still preserves its painted decoration from a very early though uncertain day, — small figure-designs enframed in loz¬ enge-like patterns ofblack. When the walls were painted too, it wore, of course, a less painfully alien look than it does to-day, contrasted with the stony whiteness of everything below. But even then its woodenness must have been ap¬ parent, and must have seemed but a pauper finish to such gigantic strength of pier and arch and wall. And its flatness, giving too strong an emphasis to lateral dimensions, was out of harmony with all the rest. Only a huge and massive semicircular vault could have carried out the ideal the walls so perfectly ex¬ press. Yet we cannot but believe that its own builders really found it satisfactory ; for there is none of that preparation for a possible later vault which we almost invariably find when a great nave on the continent chances to be ceiled flat with wood. The great half-col¬ umns which rise between the arches are not vaulting-shafts, but run straight up to the ceil¬ ing without true capitals, and were evidently built to bear its rafters only. VoL. XXXIV.— 25. V. The choir and transepts, as has been said, are earlier than the nave but essentially at one with it in their design. The transepts have a single aisle to the eastward and a painted wooden ceiling apparently even ear¬ lier than the nave’s and still undisturbed in its first flatness. The central alley of the choir was finished with a semicircular apse, but the aisles were stopped flat at the beginning of its curve. In Early-English days an independent chapel seems to have been thrown out at the end of each aisle ; and in Perpendicular days the whole end was transformed, as our plan will show. Very boldly, yet beautifully, some nameless architect at the end of the fifteenth century met the need for more altar-accommodation at the east end of the church without destroying his Norman predecessor’s work. Across the whole width of the church he built a single great undivided one-storied apartment, rising as high as the roof of the choir-aisles. The ends of these aisles were pulled down, giving free access and an open view from either side. But the central apse was left projecting into what, after a lapse of four centuries, is still called the “ new building.” It was partly re¬ modeled in detail and overlaid with Perpen¬ dicular ornament ; but the architect had too much confidence in the fundamental success of his scheme to care to obliterate all signs of his borrowings and piecings. A Norman string-course still remains amid the late de¬ tails, and also many traces which the weather had made upon the wall while it was still an external wall, and even one or two of the iron fastenings which had held the shutters in the lower range of openings. Seen from the interior of the choir, this lower range of openings is found to have had its arch-heads changed into pointed shapes and filled with a rich fringe of tracery, through which the eye passes to the elaborate new building.” But the two upper ranges rising above the roof of this still keep their round arches, though filled with tracery for the recep¬ tion of glass. This remodeling is in the Deco¬ rated style, and was done some hundred years before the ‘^new building” was itself construct¬ ed. And, indeed, there is no part of the church which does not sIioav the trace of constant, per¬ sistent alterations of a similar kind. Art grew too vitally and vigorously in those ages for any generation to be quite content with what its forefathers had bequeathed. If nothing im¬ portant remained to be built, there was always something which might be re-touched into har¬ mony with current tastes. The development of glass was perhaps the most potent factor in

Page 175

PETERBOROUGH. of stone. And often again we shall find similar evidence of how the English love of wood persisted even in those days when vaults had most clearly proved their greater charm and fitness. The exterior of the east end is wonderfully picturesque, with its light, low, square Perpen¬ dicular building crowned with a rich parapet and statues, and its old Norman apse raising two ponderous round-arched tiers above. And as thence we pass along the north side through the beautifully planted church-yard, we find a succes¬ sion of pictures which will hardly be surpassed elsewhere. The west front, too, rises in superb isolation above the broad green close before it; and, if we stand farther off, in the market-place of the town, above a beautiful gateway built by the Normans but largely changed by later hands. But it is only such near views as these which are really fine at Peterborough. The town lies flat, and gives but a flat site to the church ; and the church is itself so low, and crowned with so stunted a central tower and so insignificant a group of western turrets, that from a dis¬ tance it makes no very effective picture. Two years ago, when our illustrations were drawn, it had no central tower whatever. The great man w'ho made the portico was not the only Peter¬ borough architect who thought more, or knew more, of effectiveness than of stability in building. The Norman tower was raised on such inadequate supports that, at least as early as the year 1300, it cried aloud for recon¬ struction. So it was taken down, and the sub¬ structure strengthened. The great arches which opened from the nave and the choir into the crossing were rebuilt in pointed shapes ; and though their mates on either side above the transepts were left intact, pointed ‘‘bearing arches ” were built solid into the superincum¬ bent walls. Then a low tower was placed above them, with a wooden lantern, which was removed in the last century. TWO BAYS OF THE NAVE. the work of never-ceasing change; but the mere desire for what was thought a better beauty played, too, a considerable role. The “ new building ” is an extremely beau¬ tiful example of Perpendicular art in its con¬ struction and in its details as well as in the boldness, yet good sense, of its arrangement ; and its lovely, daring fan-vault shows in most interesting contrast with the work of those early builders who scarce ventured upon vaults at all. But we are not yet on the true birth- ground of the Perpendicular style, and once more may pass it briefly over. The ceiling of the choir is a rich fifteenth- century vault ; but, nevertheless, it is not built

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PETERBORO UGH. But during many recent years it had been known that the tower was again insecure. Its pillars were bent and bulging, and the arches of transepts and choir were visibly strained. To prevent such a catastrophe as befell the tower of Chichester cathedral not long ago, the whole work was again pulled down, and more completely than before. When I saw it in 1885 the great angle-piers with their four arches were again in place, having been rebuilt from the very rock beneath the church; the old stones, carefully kept and numbered, having been replaced with as much fidelity as entire firmness could permit. Doubtless a shrinkage of the soil, conse¬ quent upon the draining of the adjacent fens, has contributed somewhat to that dislocation of the fabric which, even in the very ends of choir and transepts, is apparent to the most careless eye. But a great deal, too, must be laid to the account of their builders’ want of thought or lack of knowledge. It was singu¬ lar to hear how superficial had been the foun¬ dations of so vast a work; and singular to see how poor the actual substance of its ap¬ parently Titanic piers. Portions of the casing of the choir-piers had been removed for need¬ ful patching; and could one call these great architects good builders ” when a pier eleven feet in diameter, and bearing such tremendous weight, was seen to have but a nine-inch-thick skin of cut and cemented stone and a loose core of what hardly deserved a better name than rubbish ? One could well credit one of the architects in charge of the repairs when 171 he said that, but for the extraordinary tough¬ ness of the white Barnack stone, the whole fabric must long ago have twisted, torn, and wrenched itself asunder. And not only poor, but overdaring methods of construction had contributed to the insecu¬ rity of the tower. At Norwich the great angle- piers are 10 feet in diameter and 45 feet in height, and the arches between them have a span of 23 ; but at Peterborough this span is 35 feet, while the piers are 52 feet high, and only 7 in diameter. VII. It would be hard to exaggerate the wealth or the renown of this monastery during all those ages when it was popularly called the Golden Borough.” The pope had decreed that any ‘Gslander” who might be prevented from visiting St. Peter’s at Rome could gain the same indulgence by visiting St. Peter’s here ; and so great in consequence grew the sanctity of the spot that all pilgrims, even though of royal blood, put off their shoes be¬ neath the western gateway of the close. Many precious relics, too, the monastery owned, — chief among them the famous ‘‘ incorruptible” arm of St. Oswald, the Northumbrian king. But the castigation of Reforming years was as signal as had been the reverence of Cath¬ olic generations. Henry left the church in¬ tact, divided up its revenues with the new cathedral chapter he established, and made its time-serving abbot the first bishop of the see. But the Cromwellites all but obliterated THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE MARKET-l'LACE.

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PETERBORO UGH, 172 THE CATHEDRAL IN 1885. (FROM THE SOUTH.) the monastic buildings and all but ruined the church itself. Its splendid glass was entirely shattered, its great silver-mounted reredos was broken into fragments, and its monuments and carvings were mutilated or destroyed. The vast picture of Christ and the Apostles on the ceiling of the choir was used for target-practice, and the soldiers did their daily exercising in the nave. Even the actual fabric was attacked, and one arch of the portico pulled down. Later this arch was rebuilt with the old stones, and the whole church was repaired. But repair meant partial ruin too. The church was patched and pieced with materials taken from the domestic structures; and even the beautiful Early-English lady-chapel which projected from the northern transept was de¬ stroyed to the same end. Little remains within the church to give it an interest apart from its architectural interest proper. Yet one can still find two tombs that vividly bring back the past. Singularly enough they are the tombs of two famous women, both uncrowned queens — alike in their misfortunes, though most unlike in all besides. Mary Stuart was beheaded at Fotheringay, eleven miles west of Peterborough, and buried be¬ neath the pavement of the south choir-aisle. As we stand over her empty grave she seems a more real figure than in the crowded mau¬ soleum at Westminster whither her son re¬ moved her disparted bones. The other tomb, beneath the flagging of the north choir-aisle, still holds its tenant, — Catherine of Ar¬ agon. Thanks to the Puritan, nothing does her honor save the simplest name and date upon the stone — unless, indeed, we may credit the tale which says that Henry raised the church to cathedral dignity in answer to her death-bed prayer that she might be given a monument fitting for a queen. The monastic buildings once covered a space four times as great as that which was covered by the church itself. But scanty enough are the fragments which report of them. A splendid Early-English gateway gives ac¬ cess to the bishop’s palace on the right hand of the western close as we approach. The dwelling itself is largely modernized, yet it is picturesque and keeps some portions of the old abbots’ home. Opposite, across the close, built into the modern grammar-school, is a charming apse — all that remains of the Norman chapel of St. Thomas of Canterbury. South of the church the cloisters are but frag¬ mentary, many-dated ruins. The vast arches of the old infirmary stretch uselessly across a narrow path or are built, very usefully, into the walls of the canons’ modern houses. And over a wide distance other fragments may be traced, with much interest when one is on the

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PETERBOROUGH CATHEDRAL — NORTH SIDE IN 1885.

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174 FETERBORO UGH. spot, though not with much significance in print. The ruin has been far completer than at Canterbury ; and, though charming in its way, Peterborough’s picture of united old and new is far less lovely than the mother-church’s. VIII. The town of Peterborough, offspring and creature of the monastery, has no independ¬ ent civic history to tell. Nor has it any great interest for the eye, being but a commonplace little provincial center of some ten thousand inhabitants. On market-days, however, its streets are agreeably full of life and bustle; and the market-place, opposite the close and the cathedral’s western front, is prettily car¬ peted by a hundred white and blue umbrellas. To the eastward lies the fen-country, flat and treeless still, though reclaimed into fertility from its quondam estate of bog and mist and bisecting muddy stream. Near at hand its details are unlovely; but from the top of the cathedral, the vast level space has some¬ thing of the sea’s serene nobility. To the westward of the town lies a charming, rolling, wooded country, watered by a dainty river and set thick with great estates and tiny vil¬ lages and very ancient rural churches. The most interesting village is Castor, RECONSTRUCTING THE TOWER. (KRO.M THE CHOIR.^

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WHEN SHE COMES HOME. ns which tells its Roman origin by its mere name as well as by the relics of its camp. It is not pretty and tree-grown like most of its neigh¬ bors ; but on the top of its low, bleak, bare hill stands one of the finest small Norman churches in all England, cruciform in plan and still keeping its central tower. This seemed to me more beautiful in design than the greater tower at Norwich; and it is of much historic value, if we are right in believing that it was built by the same hands which constructed Peterborough, and that it shows what may well have been the pattern of Peterborough’s own tower in its earliest days. M. G. va?i Rensselaer. WHEN SHE COMES HOME. WHEN she comes home again ! A thousand ways I fashion, to myself, the tenderness Of my glad welcome: I shall tremble — yes; And touch her, as when first in the old days I touched her girlish hand, nor dared upraise Mine eyes, such was my faint heart’s sweet distress. Then silence: And the perfume of her dress: The room will sway a little, and a haze Cloy eyesight — soulsight, even — for a space: And tears — yes; and the ache here in the throat. To know that I so ill deserve the place Her arms make for me ; and the sobbing note I stay with kisses, ere the tearful face Again is hidden in the old embrace. Ja77ies Whitcomb Riley.

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COLLEGE BOAT-RACING. HE course at New London is four miles straight away ; and ex¬ cept that there is a tide, which makes impossible any accurate comparison of the times” made in different years, there is not a better course in the country, or probably in the world. The first rowing regatta that I ever witnessed was a single-scull race, at Con¬ cord, Mass., about a quarter of a century ago. The distance was half a mile and return ; and the start was from the old red bridge. It was a hot, bright day, — a Fourth of July, I think. The first to appear was Sam Hoar, in his skiff. The Pickerel. It was a flat-bottomed craft, about ten feet long, by two feet in greatest width : short outriggers, and straight ash oars. Sam was a slender, wiry boy of fifteen ; as he came pulling up to the start, with a long, lithe stroke, he was greeted with applause from the crowd assembled on the bridge, — the Grand Stand for the occasion, — which he acknowledged with a grin. He seemed quite at ease, both with his boat (which I believe he had built) and with himself : and everybody wished him well, though nobody expected him to win. There were three or four other contestants, but the only other that I can remember was Wilkie James. Wilkie was the favorite against the field ; he was strong and robust, with superb chest and arms, and he had a new varnished keel boat, very light and graceful ; he wore a crimson silk kerchief on his head, and, ex¬ cept for a perceptible nervousness, looked all over a winner. His stroke was different from Sam’s, — it was short and vicious, and more rapid than the other, and I, for one, could en¬ tertain not the slightest doubt that it would easily bear him to victory. I was glad of this, for I was very fond of Wilkie ; but I was also sorry, for I had a great regard for Sam, and added to that was the sympathy which one always feels for the smaller boy in a fight. The next moment, the entire Grand Stand was delirious with excitement. Mr. Sanborn, in a stentorian voice, had given the word “ Go ! ” and the boats were off. Grace Mitchell, her lovely face flushing with emotion, screamed aloud, and frantically waved both her parasol HEADQUARTERS OF COLUMBIA FRESHMEN ON THE THAMES.

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COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG, and her handkerchief at Sam, who had caught the water first, and was doing well; Maggie Plumley, her glorious eyes fixed steadfastly upon Wilkie, uttered not a sound, but it seemed to me that her look, could Wilkie but have seen it, would have carried him to the front with the flight of a hawk. All the boys were shouting themselves hoarse. Meanwhile Wil¬ kie, in his eagerness to settle the matter off¬ hand, had missed the water with his left oar, and his right had wrenched the boat out of her course. His efforts to straighten her jerked the left oar out of the rowlock ; and before he could get it in place again, Sam was unmis¬ takably ahead. Both of them were already some distance down the river ; and the three or four other contestants, falling behind, ob¬ structed our view of the leaders. Several of the spectators, including Willis, the champion runner of the school, had taken their places along the bank of the stream, and were run¬ ning abreast with the boats, waving their arms and hats, and shouting madly, ‘‘ Go it, Sam ! ” “ Stick to him, Wilkie ! ” but which was in front, we of the Grand Stand could not tell. All was a wild, blind turmoil of enthusiasm, suspense, and outcry; in the midst of which I caught a glimpse of Sam pulling his long stroke with apparent ease, and of Wilkie dig¬ ging his oars desperately into the water, and steering somewhat wildly. Of the other boats, two had fouled each other, and a third oars¬ man had caught a crab and upset himself, and was swimming ruefully ashore. The flag on the distant turning-stake hung downwards heavily in the still, sunny air. Who was that who was even now turning it? He wore a white ker¬ chief, yes, it was Sam ! and he was already stretching out for home when Wilkie came up and turned after him. Would the leader be overtaken ? Most of us thought he would be : but Grace was clapping her hands and laugh¬ ing wildly in triumph ; and Maggie’s cheeks were crimson, her delicate lips were pressed together, and her charming eyebrows were contracted in a frown of anxiety and disap¬ pointment. On came the competing boats; and now it was evident that the wearer of the crimson scarf was hopelessly behind. His great strength and his varnished boat and the fact that he was the most popular fellow in school, could not give Wilkie the race ; for there was Sam, lithe and easy as ever, rowing in a dozen lengths ahead. When he passed the line, and backed round his boat so as to face the cheer¬ ing crowd on the bridge, he was a boy to be envied, even leaving Grace out of the question entirely. Wilkie did not finish the course; he pulled aside, and landed on the bank in a state of great dejection, for he had shared the gen¬ eral anticipation as to the result. This race, VoL. XXXIV.— 26. 177 perhaps the most exciting to me of all that I have witnessed, proved that skill, and not superior strength, is the essential element in oarsmanship ; and that the long, swinging body-stroke that Sam rowed was, easy as it looked, much more effective than the short, jerky arm-stroke adopted by Wilkie. Think¬ ing over the matter by the light of the practi¬ cal experience of later years, I have inclined to the suspicion that Sam, in addition to hav¬ ing some familiarity with the art of rowing, had been doing a little quiet “ training ” for the race. He certainly looked remarkably cool and comfortable at the finish, whereas Wilkie was deeply flushed. That was twenty- five years ago : it does not seem nearly so long. And yet Sam, maintaining his winning stroke through life, has reached the winning- post of the Bar, as formerly on the regatta. Wilkie, after having been wounded in the front of the gallant charge at Fort Wagner, has since gone to another world : while as for Grace and Maggie, I make no doubt that they have long been the objects of the adora¬ tion of loving husbands, as they were then of romantic school-boys, and have sons as tall and hardy as were the victor and the van¬ quished of that summer-day’s boat-race. But, as I sit here and remember them all, I can almost fancy that we are all young again together. Regatta-rowing is a modem luxury; it was unknown forty-five years ago, and less than a generation has passed since it attained any considerable vogue. It is the best substitute ever devised for the old Olympic and Isthmian games. Of late years, the mechanical appli¬ ances have been greatly and ingeniously im¬ proved, until one would almost think that the boats might row themselves. The crews, per¬ haps, have not improved quite in the same ratio ; but the issues are still tried on their merits, and the boys make fast time. The simplicity, the primitive methods, and some¬ thing of the Spartan zeal of the old times are gone ; but other good things have taken their place. It may be said now, as before, the races are rowed by gentlemen, for gentlemen (and ladies) ; and we may be confident that — in spite of certain tendencies which will be no¬ ticed further on — this will always continue to be the case. It is a glorious sport, beneficial alike to the outer and to the inner man ; and, notwithstanding the easy witticism which is every year lavished upon it, it is fully worth the time and importance given to it by its disciples. At Harvard, in 1863, the newly entered Freshman Class heard much about the famous Caspar Crowninshield crew, which had de¬ feated Yale at Lake Quinsigamond, making

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COLLEGE BOAT--RACLNG, 178 under nineteen minutes for the three miles with a turn. And this was really good time, even compared with what is done nowadays. The “ turn ” occupied at least twenty seconds; there were only six oars in the boat ; the oars were straight (instead of having spoon-shaped blades as at present), and the boats lacked much of the lightness and good modeling they have attained since. Moreover, thereis no tide on Lake Quinsigamond, whereas the tide runs from two to three miles an hour on the Thames at New London. Finally, the art of rowing was then in its infancy in this country, and the science of training was not even born. At all events, Caspar Crowninshield and his men, if not giants in reality, were so in our eyes, and apparently their victory had dis¬ couraged Yale, for no race between the uni¬ versities had taken place since that day. In 1863, however, a challenge from Yale was received, based (as we afterwards found out to our cost) upon a very reasonable hope of winning. The challenge was accepted with enthusiasm, and with a confidence at least equal to that of the challengers ; for the (then) Sophomore Class of ’66 thought great things of itself, and really did contain an unusual num¬ ber of muscular young men. There were Fred Crowninshield (brother of the heroic Caspar), Charley MacBurney, Ned Clarke, and (unless I am mistaken) Bob Peabody, — all from this same redoubtable ’66. Then there was Hora¬ tio Curtis, the Hercules of the University. I suppose no man ever was or will be so strong as we thought Curtis was. We firmly believed that he could have thrashed Moli- neaux. Now Molineaux was the college professor of athletics of that date. He was a gentleman of color, and an ex-prize¬ fighter ; at least, he had once fought in the prize-ring, and it was understood that he had been victorious; though I am not so clear as to that matter now as I was then. He was certainly a clever boxer, and a man of most agreeable and cheerful manners ; his weight was about one hundred and ninety pounds, and his biceps, besides being as hard as a hickory log, measured eighteen inches in cir¬ cumference. A blow from that arm might have made a hole in a steam boiler: but Molineaux was lazy, and he was fat; and one theory was, that Curtis would first ‘‘wind” him, by dint of superior activity, and then go in and finish him as opportunity might serve. It was a daring conception, and is mentioned here only in order to afford a measure of the popular reverence for Curtis. The autumn term was spent in exercising in the gymnasium and in trying men for the crew. Besides Curtis, there were few or no rowing men in ’65, and the Freshmen, though containing some material that promised well for the future, was as yet immature ; while as for the Senior Class, they had grown up dur¬ ing a period when athletics had fallen into dis¬ use. So the choice was practically confined to Horatio Curtis and to the Class of ’66. Blaikie was one of the best-known athletes of those days, but he had not yet received his diploma as a bachelor of oarsmanship ; he could put up the ninety-six-pound dumb¬ bell — we used to go down to the gymna¬ sium to see him do it — but he lacked the quickness and elasticity needed for the boat. He was a ’66 man, and so was Tom Nelson, who, by natural constitution, was a rival of Curtis himself, if he were not even bet¬ ter than he; but he was as indolent as he was strong, and never could be induced to take regular exercise in the gymnasium or to row, if he could avoid it. Ned Fenno was strong enough, and was a zealous gym¬ nast, but he was not handy with his oar; and Wilkinson, in addition to being one of the wittiest and most charming fellows in the col¬ lege, was superbly developed, and as active as a cat; but he was not then thought to be superior to some others, though, a couple of years later, he proved himself equal to the best. The second-rate men were put together in the Class crew of ’66; and the Freshmen formed a practice-crew of their own, making use of the old lapstreak which had conquered in i860. I remember little of the constitution of this crew, except that Harry Parker pulled bow and Bill Ellis stroke, but I have not forgotten how we blistered our hands and barked our knuckles ; or that we caught many crabs, and occasionally steered into the bridge, and carried off an outrigger or two. At that epoch, and for a good many years afterwards, it was the custom of American crews to dispense with coxswains, and for the bow-oar to steer by pressing his feet against a yoke attached to wires, which extended the length of the boat, and were made fast to the rudder. There was a Yankee ingenuity and economy in this device, and with practice, the steering was remarkably accurate; but after all, it is better that some person in the boat shouldkeep a constant eye to the boat’s course, and that that person should have nothing to do or to think of but steer. Of course, this is still more the case with an eight-oar than with a six-oar, and when (as generally hap¬ pens) the coxswain weighs less than a hundred pounds, he is not worth considering. Our boat-housing arrangements were primi¬ tive. The boat-house was a long shed, built on tiles over the water and destitute of a floor. A narrow platform ran around the walls in¬ side, about half-way above the water, and the

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COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG, boat was suspended at the same level by ropes running through pulleys attached to the roof. After we had assumed the proper boating- costume, — an old pair of trousers and a rag¬ ged undershirt, — we lowered the boat into the water, and then let ourselves down into her, hand under hand, by the rope. Our re¬ turn was accomplished by an inversion of these proceedings. It was not always agree¬ able scrambling up that rope, with blistered hands, after a long row; and occasionally a feeble brother would stick half-way, and have to be dragged up by the neck and shoulders. A new boat — a shell ” — was bought for the University crew. This craft was the object of our respectful admiration. She was built of cedar, and polished, and was about fifty feet long, and she looked, with her shining spoon oars, as if she could win anything. She would have appeared very rude alongside of the ships they build nowadays, made of paper, with slid¬ ing seats, pivoted rowlocks, and stretchers to fit the soles of the feet. As regards the paper, we came to that ourselves in the course of two or three years ; but the sliding seats were long after our time. They were first invented, I believe, by some ingenious single-scull oars¬ man, whose name I have forgotten. I should like to know precisely how much difference they make in the time of a boat. Not many seconds, probably. They lengthen the stroke, of course ; but, on the other hand, they make it slower. The spurting stroke in those days used to go up as high as forty-eight to the minute, and be pulled through at that. At present, forty or forty-two is the maximum; and as the strength with which the oar is dragged through the water has not increased in the same ratio as the distance through which it is dragged, the gain must be limited. Perhaps it is greater in the case of the single¬ scull than of the eight-oar. But there can be no doubt that the comfort of the oarsman in his seat is much augmented. We used to suf¬ fer a great deal in that way, and nothing in the way of cushions or paddings was a relief. Not much in the way of practice on the river was accomplished that first autumn : we set ourselves to building up our muscles in the gymnasium. This was a circular building with a conical glass roof at the eastern end of the Delta. The Delta (where the great football contest between the Sophomore and Freshman classes used to be held, and where base-ball was played) has vanished now in all but name, and, for aught I know, the old gymnasium has disappeared also. It was nothing to com¬ pare in point of luxury and completeness, with the elaborate structure which Mr. Augustus Hemenway has since erected ; but some of us contrived to get pretty strong there. There 179 were rings, weights, bars, clubs and dumb¬ bells, and there was a bowling-alley in the rear. The dressing-rooms of the four classes were at different parts of the rotunda, those of the Freshman and the Sophomores being farthest removed from each other. Twice or thrice a week, in the evening, a lot of the Freshman would assemble to be instructed by Molineaux. We stood in a circle, and our burly instructor took his place in the midst, and drilled us in calisthenics. It did not amount to much, if the truth must be told, and it was continued only during the first month or two of each year. After that, the boys were allowed to do as they pleased. But Molineaux was always ready for a chat or a laugh, and he was very popular with us all. His great forte was taking the dimensions of our chests and arms, and writing them down in a book. This ceremony was performed at least once a week for every one in the gymnasium class, and we soon knew to a fraction the girth and biceps of all the athletes in college. What an arm Bill Poor had! but was not Farnham’s about as large? If Jim Hoyt and John Greenough were to fight, which would come out ahead ? If Tom Ward would only consent to row, what a bow-oar he would make 1 Will Ed. Perkins the Fresh-Sophomore go on the crew ? Pie measures sixteen and a half, and they say he used to row at Exeter. Such were the speculations of our tender minds in that far-off time. I dare say similar conversations take place now. What a happy time it was 1 how pleasant to see our muscles grow, and to feel our powers increase, and to believe that, in time, we could become the equal of any gymnast that ever lived! Rowing- weights were not invented until two years later. They were considered a grand discovery. I understand that a much more realistic contrivance has taken their place since, so that the chief difference between row¬ ing with them and rowing in a boat is, that there is no chance in the former case of get¬ ting a ducking. Our arrangement consisted of a handle attached to a rope, which was passed over a pulley, and had a fifty-pound weight fastened at the other end. Then we sat down on a low stool, and tugged away. Perhaps we made up in diligence some part of what they lacked in mechanism. I remem¬ ber that Richards, in his winter training for the crew, used to pull on his weight for two solid hours at a stretch ; and his back and shoulders were a spectacle for the gods. After half an hour or so, a little puddle of sweat would begin to form on the floor between each man’s knees. The parallel bars was an¬ other favorite exercise of the rowing-men. We used to go through the various dips one

Page 185

i8o COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG, after another, until our pectoral muscles came to resemble those of the statues in the Vati¬ can at Rome ; and the triceps, at the back of the arm, got so tough that we could ‘‘ dip ” fifty or sixty times in succession with ease. Altogether, by the time spring came round, we doubted whether any amount of boating would give us exertion enough to make us feel comfortable. With the. spring time the training began : the walking, the running, the rowing, and above all the dieting. Rare beef and mutton, potatoes, bread, spinach, and one pint of liquid a day. A canter of three or four miles before breakfast, a longer walk and run later in the day, and at least twelve miles of hard rowing. They say now that we overdid it ; but I don’t know. The diet, especially the sudden and almost total deprivation of liquids, may have been a mistake ; it had a tendency to make the men feverish and irritable, and to impair their appetites. Young fellows, most of them under twenty, lose weight too rapidly under such circumstances. As regards the exercise, however, I greatly question whether we ex¬ ceeded wise limits, or even reached them. With plenty of sleep, and plenty of food, a healthy man ought to be able to row hard six hours a day (two hours at a stretch thrice re¬ peated), and be all the better for it. Some¬ thing like that is the only sure recipe for win¬ ning crews. It will even counteract, so far as anything can, the evil effects of a bad stroke ; because, in the first place, it will insure the men rowing ‘‘ together,” and secondly, be¬ cause it will develop and toughen the requi¬ site muscles. This latter point is too much neglected. Those large muscles below the shoulders should be as hard as oak. I remem¬ ber examining Bill Simmons after the Har¬ vard-Oxford four-oared race in 1869. He was well set-up all over, an admirably proportioned man, but these particular muscles were phe¬ nomenal. And yet he was not a man of strong vitality, and he had been ill during the greater part of his English training. But it is the ten¬ dency now, and to some extent it was so then, to put form ” before everything else. You are given endless lessons how to hold your hands, how to feather your oar, how to get forward and back in exactly the same style ; and meanwhile the essential matter, that the boat should be made to go fast, and to keep going fast, for four miles, is lost sight of. But if you put six or eight solid and sensible men into a boat, and let them clearly understand that their object must be to throw the weight of their bodies as much as possible into that portion of the stroke where they have the best purchase upon the oar ; and if you explain to them that they must not dip their oars into the water one instant later than it can begin to do good, nor keep it in one instant after it has ceased to do good ; and that the oars must remain in the air as short a time as pos¬ sible; if you can get them thoroughly pos¬ sessed of these three or four fundamental principles, and keep them up to it, then you need not bother to teach them anything else. They will learn the refinements themselves. Or if they don’t it is no great matter. It is impossible for eight men to both pull and look exactly alike. Each man will have (within certain limits) his own peculiar way of getting the most work out of himself. If you force him to adopt any one else’s way, that of the stroke-oar for instance, the appearance of the crew as a whole may be more harmonious, but the pace of the boat will suffer. One or two or three men perhaps will be doing their best ; but the rest will be shirking in one way or another. This fellow with the long arms will not get forward far enough ; he with the short arms will overreach himself ; and so on. Let the crew take long and repeated pulls to¬ gether, however, and sooner or later they will instinctively and inevitably so accommodate their various styles to one another as to pro¬ duce the best general result, and they will ac¬ quire the endurance without which no style is of much avail. This truth was impressed upon me many years ago, when I saw for the first time the famous Ward crew of professionals. This was undoubtedly the best six-oared crew that ever sat in a boat. They came down to Boston to take part in the Fourth of July regatta on the Charles River or Back Bay course ; and our own University crew of that year were their only noticeable competitors. We extended the courtesies of our new boat-house to them, and they staid with us about a week. Our early impressions of them were not especially favor¬ able. They were rather a rough-looking set; they were shabbily clad ; they did their pull¬ ing in dirty old red and blue flannel shirts; they did not seem to take much stock in bath¬ ing, or even in rubbing down. The boat they brought with them was not a particularly won¬ derful affair. As they did not strip, we had no opportunity to critically examine their devel¬ opment ; they appeared to be a lean and wiry lot ; but their average weight was hardly equal to that of our University crew, though their average age was a good deal more. But what chiefly struck us was the circumstance that they did not seem to know how to row. Their appearance when in motion was ragged and inharmonious. ‘‘They’re not together,” was our general verdict; and our own crew was so beautifully together that we had little doubt as to the issue of the race. “ They can’t win

Page 186

COLLEGE BOAT-RACING, with that stroke/’ we said. Not but what, in¬ dividually, they pulled well enough and hard enough ; the trouble was that each man main¬ tained his individuality. There was vigor, but not science. Instead of fearing them, we were rather amused at them, and a little sorry for them ; for were they not poor men, to whom the loss of a race meant, not loss of glory merely, but of the means of livelihood as well ? Possibly some of us may have gone so far as to think that our fellows would act gracefully in letting them get ahead just at the finish, after having shown to every one’s satisfaction that they could beat them if they chose. As it turned out, however, there was no ne¬ cessity for putting these compassionate designs into execution. Perhaps the Ward brothers rowed in bad form; but it was abundantly clear, before the race was half over, that they could have pulled four miles while we were pulling three. And the worst of it was that they could not be induced to exert them¬ selves ; but, after an initial spurt, during which they appeared more like tigers than men, they paddled along at their ease, and passed the goal leaders by a few lengths only, instead of by two or three minutes ; and it was evident, at the close, that they had not had half ex¬ ercise enough to give them an appetite for supper ; while our men had been tugging their hearts out all along. Nor must it be forgot¬ ten that the University crew of that year was one of the best, if not the best, that Harvard ever sent forth; and that it beat the Yales without difficulty at Lake Quinsigamond the same summer. What was the secret of the Ward brothers’ victory ? In the first place, they were stronger and tougher than our men, — a strength which they attained by constant hard work in the boat; and secondly, they neglected the aesthetic and graceful side of the matter, and devoted themselves exclu¬ sively to rowing each one with all his might. Of course their oars all entered and left the water simultaneously; of course they all ap¬ plied the lift” at the same moment ; but apart from this, the bow-oar’s style of getting his work in appeared quite different from that of the stroke oar ; and number three was unlike both. Good rowing is like good acting; it can be attained only by constant rehearsals. Practice, practice, practice, together and con¬ tinually ; and then you will row like one man and yet retain your separate individualities at the same time. This terrible experience with the Ward brothers was subsequent to a still more humil¬ iating one with Wilbur Bacon’s famous Yale crew. Rumors of this crew came to us betimes ; marvelous tales of their strength, their methods of training, and the appalling rapidity of their i8i stroke. One of their men was reported as hav¬ ing complained that water was too easy for him to row on; he wanted some more solid and resisting medium to pull his oar through. As for training, they ran five miles straight up hill before breakfast every morning, ate raw meat exclusively, and drank nothing at all ; and they rowed sixty strokes to a minute. Doubtless these were exaggerations ; but after all deduc¬ tions were made, Wilbur Bacon’s crew had enough left not only to beat us easily, but to make remarkably good time over the course, far better than that of any other college crew, up to that date. And they did this with one of the ugliest and most wasteful strokes I have ever seen. So bad was it, indeed, that the re¬ porter we sent up to New Haven to spy out the enemy, came back jubilant, and declared that there would be no race at all ; such a stroke as Yale’s was hardly worth while rowing against. And, as a matter of fact, that year’s victory and the victory of the next year (with the same crew) probably did Yale more harm than the most overwhelming defeat would have done ; because their stroke was really bad in principle, and being nevertheless subse¬ quently adopted by Yale as the correct one, led to six consecutive defeats more or less severe. The men sat huddled up, with bowed backs, and pulled entirely with their arms. Wilbur Bacon’s men, being of entirely excep¬ tional strength and thoroughly trained, won in spite of this drawback ; but if they had added the strength of their bodies to that of their arms, there is no telling what they might have done. There was great talk in those days — and I believe there has been ever since — about the transcendent merits of the ‘‘ Harvard Stroke.” Where did the Harvard stroke come from, and what is it ? Was it the stroke rowed by Cas¬ par Crowninshield in the ’fifties ? Was it the stroke of the English university ? Was there any secret about it, unfathomable by any but Harvard men ? Taking the record of all the university races rowed since 1852, I make out that Harvard has won 15 times, and Yale, or some other university, 13 times. This is very far from establishing the superiority of the Harvard stroke over all others. I greatly doubt whether the Harvard stroke has any distinct and real existence, and I think that the sooner that idea is adopted, the better for Harvard, and for the art of rowing in general, will it be. Back and arms straight — catch at the begin¬ ning — such are the traditions. But, beyond certain limits, no hard and. fast rules can be given. Each man must be allowed to find out for himself how he can best put his whole strength into his stroke ; and then the constant practice of the crew together must teach each member of it how to maintain his own best

Page 187

i82 COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG, form, and yet so accommodate it to the others, that each may help all, and all each. Let the aim be, not to row the Harvard stroke, or the Yale stroke, or the Oxford or Cambridge stroke, but to make fast time, and then, before long, we shall begin to have races that are races and not processions ; and the winning crew will win because it contains the strong¬ est and best trained men, not because its stroke has this or that or the other title. A little more common sense, a little less theo¬ rizing, a great deal less self-conceit, those are some of the things essential to good rowing in our colleges. The better time two crews make, the more nearly alike will their style be found to be, as may be seen every year in the Ox¬ ford- Cambridge race ; and the moral of that fact is so patent that there is no need of fur¬ ther expatiation upon the matter. Between 1873 and 1881, I saw most of the English university races; and the difference between the crews, so far as stroke and style went, was too insignificant to be taken into account. The difference between them as regards time was never more than a few seconds, and once they pulled a dead heat. As a rule the heavier crew won. The course there is a little over four miles, and the currents and eddies and the windings of the river are against good re¬ sults ; nevertheless, the times made during the last ten years are better than the best at New London, where the conditions are the most favorable that can be conceived. The men themselves, on the other hand, appear for the most part inferior to our own in strength and muscular development. Stronger men than Wilbur Bacon, or Will Simmons, or even Pen¬ rose, are seldom or never seen in English university crews. New London in June and July is a lovely town ; and during the Regatta week it is full of jolly bustle and brilliance. The body of the town lies a mile or two within the mouth of the river, on the western bank ; though there is a straggling line of villas along the road to the Pequot House which commands a view of the Sound and of the Long Island shore. On the eastern bank, stands Groton monu¬ ment, a granite pillar that reminds Bostonians of their own Bunker Hill. In the broad harbor are anchored scores of yachts, as neat as a lady’s dressing-case ; others are tacking up and down, and tugs, steamboats, and number¬ less smaller crafts hasten to and fro. The huge clumsy ferry-boat that conveys the Shore Line railroad trains from one bank to another ever and anon makes its lumbering trips across the river; and sharp-nosed, dapper steam-yachts, with backward-sloping masts and funnels, slide up and down with heavy rollers diverging in their wake. Beyond the Shore Line railway. the river pursues a nearly straight course northward, with an average breadth of rather less than half a mile. The finish of the race (when rowed down stream) is at Winthrop’s Point, a promontory jutting out into the river just east and north of the city; the start is at Bartlett Point, four miles up. The course is marked by flags, whose positions at the mile points are determined by measurements taken on the ice during the winter : standing with a spy-glass, at either end of the course, you can see them all accurately aligned. Along the western margin of the stream runs the New London and Northern railroad, which seems to have been constructed for the especial pur¬ pose of aflbrding a moving view of the race from start to finish. The only untoward place is at the two-mile flag, where the rocky prom¬ ontory of Mamacoke lifts itself stupidly be¬ tween the regatta train and the crews. As this is the point where the closest races are won and lost, we have an additional instance of the fact that nothing in this world is perfect. As the time for the race draws near, New London puts on its gaudiest attire, and rouses into a bustling and uproarious life, which must seem strange to its older inhabitants. For it is one of the oldest New England towns, and had already preserved the placid tenor of its existence for several years before it became a prominent depot of the whaling interest, sixty or more years ago. Then was its ample har¬ bor crowded — not with gay and graceful craft of the New York Yacht Club, as at present, but with dingy and oily whalers, drop¬ ping in with the tide from a four years’ cruise around the Horn, and into the North Pacific, and with their holds overflowing with oil enough to fill all the lamps of the New World. They were passed by others, setting out on their long cruise, some never to return, but destined to leave their oaken ribs, and the bones of their crews, miles deep beneath the surface of the distant sea, lower even than the great leviathan himself durst venture. Then the streets were noisy with the bustle, not of pleasure but of business; and the sun¬ burnt faces of the passers-by belonged not to athletic college youths, trained in slender racing-shells, but to hardy mariners, familiar with the whale-boat and the harjDoon, who had confronted death and deadly peril a thousand times. And the female element of those days was represented, not by lovely girls, laughing in silk and muslin, and fluttering in the crim¬ son and blue ribbons of the colleges of their choice; but by lean and sober matrons, ac¬ customed to long months and years of loneli¬ ness; and some in black garments, whose loneliness would never know relief. Little thought they of railways or regattas ; life for

Page 188

COLLEGE EOAT-EACIJVG. them was anxious and severe ; and it was joy- enough if, at the end, when old age came, they could see their weather-beaten husbands be¬ side them, and their children round about, and know that there was money enough in the strong-box to eke out the remainder of their days. People are still alive in the old town who have seen those times ; but they must often feel as if they were walking in a dream. Here are the same streets, the same harbor, the same hilly shores, many of the same houses ; yet all is changed ; hardly can they recognize the home of their youth. Where did these ferry-boats and huge beam-engine steamers come from ? Who built those new piers and wharves ? What means this rumble and shriek of trains ? And during what night did these fine hotels sprout up like mushrooms, their gables waving with flags, and their lobbies thronged with clamorous guests ? The noisy thoroughfare of the town is broad and brilliant ; the shops which line it on either side are rainbow-hued with every sort of badge and decoration that the enthusiasm of college youth can be sup¬ posed to covet. Here are crimson and blue hats, jerseys, and sack-coats ; dresses for Har¬ vard girls and dresses for Yale girls; sashes, ribbons, bonnets, banners, and rosettes ; Har¬ vard cigars and Yale cigars; nothing, in short, that is not either Yale, or Harvard, or Columbia. And the sidewalks are crowded with old graduates and young graduates, with freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and even with boys who are still looking for¬ ward with hope and fear to their entrance examinations. If there be any one there who is not either a past, present, or prospective college man, he must wish he were, or be in¬ clined to pretend that he is. It is a singular spectacle,— enlivening, comical, pathetic; a sort of Vanity Fair of youth and fun, with the dim past on one side and the mysterious fu¬ ture on the other. Some of these young fellows will make longer voyages than to the antipodes, and bring home larger game than whales. Some of these pretty girls will expe¬ rience sadder tragedies than the drowning of a husband, a father, or a son. But now it is all ‘‘ Hurrah for Harvard ! Hurrah for Yale ! and the deuce take the hindmost ! ” Farther up the street stand handsome villas and country residences, with stretches of green lawn in front of them, and flag-staffs on their cupolas, with flags afloat. From within comes the sound of music, singing, and laughter, and perhaps, if one listen closely, of the popping of champagne corks and the click of billiard balls. The porches and verandas are bright¬ ened by the fresh dresses of girls and the summer suits of fashionable young gentlemen ; 183 and here, there, and everywhere, the one topic of conversation is the race. But if you ven¬ ture into the side streets, you will find com¬ parative solitude and silence. The few people whom you meet seem scarcely alive to the importance of what is going on elsewhere. It reminds the traveled spectator of the Carnival time at Rome, when only the Corso goes mad, and all other thoroughfares are silent and sober even beyond their usual wont. Many pretty walks lie outside the town ; but the prettiest, perhaps, is along the southern bank of the river, toward Mamacoke ; and the visitor to New London, with leisure on his hands, can hardly do better than to make a journey thither. Starting from the railway-station you pass out byway of Main street. Though everything is neat and well-preserved, many of the houses are evidently old; their broad hip-roofs and thick bulging eaves do not belong to the archi¬ tecture of this century. Alternating with these are brand-new villas of the modem Queen Anne type, and other houses which can only be described as American, and are destitute of any describable features whatever. For the first half-mile of the way, the road passes along the side of a creek, above the sloping bank of which the rears of the houses are uplifted on stout piles, as if they had pulled their skirts up out of the mud, and revealed an array of dirty legs, — of which, however, their decorous fronts betray no suspicion. The creek itself is pic¬ turesque with old rotten boats, lying strand¬ ed and half-submerged ; an occasional tug lounges in to rest and smoke its pipe after its day’s work; and even a dainty steam-yacht will condescend to pick its way between the groups of plebeian shipping, like a fine lady poking her aristocratic nose into a tenement court. Beyond the head of the creek, and so overshadowed with the heavy foliage of trees as to be scarcely visible from the road, appears a substantial elderly mansion. It stands on a slight eminence above the road, and thick grass grows tall and untrimmed all around it. It ought to be haunted, and probably it is; but fearing a rebuff, the present writer ab¬ stained from seeking information on the mat¬ ter. The answers to such questions are as well left to the imagination. Farther along, the road passes into open country, beautifully diversi¬ fied with hills, wooded regions, and cultivated fields. A gradual ascent reveals a wide pros¬ pect, including the town behind, the river, and the high banks of the opposite shore. Nearly parallel with the road, but much nearer the water, lies the railway; and beyond it, jutting out into the stream, is Mamacoke. Striking over the fields and crossing the track, we come- in front of the rocks, clothed with trees and

Page 189

COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG. 184 bushes, and scampered over by flocks of sheep. It is almost an island, being joined to the main land only by a narrow strip of low-lying ground. From its summit one can see up and down the v/hole length of the course ; and a mile or so higher up stream, on the opposite bank, is the crimson-roofed cottage used as the Harvard quarters ; and further still is the clus¬ ter of whitewashed buildings occupied by Yale. If it be late in the afternoon, you may see one or both of the crews out for practice, accom¬ panied each by an active little steam-launch containing the “ coach ” and four or five im¬ mortals who have won glory in previous boat¬ ing contests. In attendance, likewise, though at a more respectful distance, is the steamier Manhaiiset^ which, with stalwart Captain Jim Smith at the helm, occupies its leisure time in affording interested persons opportunity to study the styles of the contestants. The crews, however, are none too anxious to be seen; they are as shy as a new boy in his first day at school. And if they are reluctant to reveal themselves prematurely to the general public, it is impos¬ sible to overstate the anxiety with which each shuns any risk of being spied upon by the other. They will even forego a pull rather than be seen pulling by a rival eye. What is the reason of this excessive coyness ? Suppose Harvard did see Yale taking a prac¬ tice pull, or vice versa, what harm would it do ? Would it paralyze the powers of the ob¬ served persons ? Would it, when the day of the race came, prevent the better men from winning ? Why are the times ’’ made in practice so carefully concealed, as if they were murder secrets? Nay, why does each crew cause it to be believed that its time is ten or twenty seconds slower than it really is ? Why do they intimate that one or other of their men is suffering from severe indisposi¬ tion ? Why do they give it out that they are dissatisfied with their boat? Why are these and a score of similar misleading statements circulated, until, by the time the two crews are side by side at the starting-point, waiting for the word, a credulous person might sup¬ pose that both were certain to break down before they could reach the first mile flag? What, in short, and to use plain language, is the object and are the benefits of all this lying and jockeying ? Surely it cannot be possible that these young gentlemen, representatives of the best blood and culture of their country, not to mention athleticism, — surely we are not to believe that they can allow themselves to be influenced by pecuniary, by mercenary, considerations ? Surely they do not put forth their strength and pledge the honor of their universities, for money ? Professional oarsmen, as we knew, row for money : to win a race means, for them, to put so many thousand dollars into the pock¬ ets of themselves and of their friends. We find no fault with them for that (though we are sorry that so noble a sport should be prostituted to such uses) because it is their livelihood. We may even shrug our shoulders if it turns out to have been settled beforehand that the bet¬ ter crew should not win. But that our own sons, the inheritors of our names, should ap¬ proach even within measurable distance of such transactions would be very unwelcome news indeed. What are the facts ? The facts are that the betting on these races, among the undergrad¬ uates themselves, and leaving outside persons out of the account, has grown to such pro¬ portions, and is increasing year by year at such a rate, that every man in the crews has a re¬ sponsibility imposed upon him which he has no right to accept, and which tends to distort his views as to what the race is really being rowed for. Theoretically, he rows for the glory of Harvard or of Yale; but practically, he rows because his friends (and possibly he him¬ self, likewise, though I trust the rule still pre¬ vails that forbids any member of a crew to lay a wager of any sort) have put up all their spare cash, and a good deal of cash that is not to spare, on the result. It is for the sake of this money that they misrepresent the truth, prevaricate, invent fables, and resort to all manner of underhand and shrewd devices. If they win, no doubt it is their university and not the dollar bills that are nominally cheered; but if they lose, they have to bemoan not only the dimmed luster of Harvard or of Yale, but the empty pocket-books of those who pinned their faith to them. And money means so much to college boys on an allowance, and with their vacation in front of them, that al¬ though they may be very sorry in the abstract for Yale or for Harvard, their most pressing and palpable grief is not unconnected with a much more sordid and less honorable cause. Harvard or Yale may win next year; but what is poor Jones or Smith to do, who has lost all his quarter’s allowance, and has not settled his hotel bill ? And let it not be forgotten, furthermore, that either Harvard or Yale is bound to win every year (unless Colunibia does), and that the losers will then have pre¬ varicated and fabled to no purpose. And fi¬ nally, very little is really gained by all this elaborate deception. The boy who cries wolf so often is at length not believed on any terms ; and we have learned to discount these stories about the condition of the crews just as we discount them in the case of professionals. A gentleman who cheats another out of his money, or attempts to do so, by leading that

Page 190

COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG. other to believe what is not true, continues to bear his title only by courtesy; and he will have to give unmistakable evidences of amendment before gentlemen will again re¬ ceive him on equal terms. I am far indeed from saying or thinking that any university race ever has been or will be rowed otherwise than on its merits ; but anything that savors however remotely of professionalism cannot be given too wide a berth. Honest men will never suspect dishonor in these young fellows ; but there are rascals enough who will agree that a man who has staked all he possesses upon an event will employ any available means to protect himself against loss ; and it is the duty of honorable men to avoid the ap¬ pearance of evil. rowed. And even if the prophets prove cor¬ rect, defeat will be no worse, nor victory any less sweet, if it has been expected beforehand. It is a rare privilege, too, — the opportunity to do one’s utmost for no other reward than the parsley crown. It is a privilege which comes seldom in after life, as these young gentlemen will discover in due time. There is another word to say about profes¬ sional trainers. They are very honest and worthy persons, no doubt, but they have no business with a university crew ; and the re¬ sult last year, when Yale won under the ad¬ ministration of Mr. Robert Cook, shows that they are by no means indispensable. But even if they were indispensable, they ought not to be employed. We are not going to become HARVARD HEADQUARTERS. But can betting on the university races be stopped ? That is not to be expected ; but it can be enormously diminished, and that by no one else than by the crews themselves. If they will dispense with all disguises and sub¬ terfuges, and let themselves be known for just what they are, neither more nor less, then bet¬ ting will lose nine-tenths of its impetus. Nor will the pleasurable elements of legitimate un¬ certainty as to the result ever be absent ; for, however apparent it may seem that one of the crews is superior to the other, there are a dozen possibilities that this anticipation may be defeated when the race actually comes to be rowed. One man may overtrain ; another may catch a crab ; the stroke may turn out more effective than it looked; or the crew that had never done itself justice in practice may awaken under the spur of actual competition, and surprise its friends and strike aghast its enemies. No race is ever won until it has been VoL. XXXIV.— 27. professional oarsmen ourselves, and we do not need to learn what they can teach us. More¬ over, they can teach us very little. The chief advantage that a professional oarsman pos¬ sesses over an amateur is, that he does nothing but row, and therefore (other things being equal) he becomes more skillful and enduring. But this endurance and skillfulness cannot be taught ; it must be acquired in the same way that the professional acquired it, by doing and thinking of nothing else. He can no more im¬ part it than he can impart the color of his hair, or the tone of his voice. And as it is al¬ ways true that it is not necessary for a good critic to be a good artist in that which he criticises, it follows that though an amateur coach may not be able to row as well as a professional, he may nevertheless be able to give just as sound instruction, and indeed much better. For the amateur will probably be more intelligent and cultivated than the professional,

Page 191

1 86 COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG. THE RACE, FROM and cultivation and intelligence are exempli¬ fied in nothing more than in the power they give to conceive an ideal and to explain it. But this is not all. Association with profes¬ sionals, even with the best of them, tends to lower the social and moral tone. He is in the position of a guide, philosopher, and friend, and the young men who submit themselves to his tutelage will be liable to adopt his views on other matters besides mere oarsmanship and diet. They are at an age when suscepti¬ bility to impressions is at its maximum, and experience is at its minimum, and they will easily take color from an older companion ; they will not so easily rid themselves of it af¬ terwards. It needs no seer to tell us where a great deal of the shyness and smartness which has of late characterized the policy of th^ crews before a race comes from. There is a decidedly professional flavor about it. Again, as regards diet, professional advice is not to be trusted. Their knowledge of phys¬ iology and hygiene is purely empirical, and is derived, moreover, mainly from experiments on themselves. But no two men can with ad¬ vantage train exactly alike ; especially no men under twenty, who are much more readily de¬ pressed and stimulated than are older persons. An amateur will have broader and more lib¬ eral views in this direction, and is also likely to be better informed as to the latest conclu¬ sions of science upon the points in question. But the main thing, after all, is the abstract, not the utilitarian, aspect of the matter. It is not good, it is not respectable, to stoop to conquer. Use with all your might the means and weapons proper to your station ; but do not, even with the certainty of gaining an ad¬ vantage, condescend to receive help from any lower level. If you cannot row the race in twenty minutes without professional assistance, then be content to row it in twenty-six or even in thirty. All that is necessary is that you should do your very best. I was as patriotic, in my time, as any other Harvard man of my acquaintance, and I do not know that I have

Page 192

COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG. 187 THE OBSERVATION TRAIN. lost any of my old interest in the welfare and reputation of my university ; and yet, so long as Harvard employs a professional coach, I shall never regret to see her lose the race. Indeed, if professional guides and methods continue to be used, the college races will soon lose all their interest for that portion of the public whose good opinion is worth having. During all this disagreeable fault-finding, we have been sitting on the summit of Mam- acoke ; and now there is barely time left to see the race. How shall we see it ? We may either remain here, or hereabouts, or we may get aboard the Manhanset ; or we may go to the Grand Stand, or on the Observation Train. If we are wise, we will adopt the latter course. The view from the bank or from the Grand Stand is partial only, and the more exciting the part that we see, the greater is our de¬ sire to see that part which is invisible to us. The Manhanset suffers under the serious draw¬ back of being forbidden to approach within two hundred yards of the last boat in the race; and it is impossible, from that distance, to know which crew is leading, unless the lead be a very commanding one. But the train shows us the relative position of the boats at nearly every half-mile of the course : we can see what each man is doing at each moment, and enjoy a conspicuous view of the river and everything on it. The cars are platform cars, and tiers of seats are built up on them, rising one above another, so that every one has an unobstructed outlook : only, if we can get a place on the central car, we shall be more likely than in any other to remain just oppo¬ site the boats during the race. The depot is overflowing with a hurrying, excited, laughing, shouting, brilliant crowd. The boys and girls are decked out in blue and crimson finery ; they carry flags of silk or cot¬ ton, as the case may be ; and the peddlers of screeching tin horns drive a roaring trade. As the cars fill up, row after row, the clamor of talk and outcry increases, and becomes a

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i88 COLLEGE BOAT-RACLNG, ceaseless refrain; and belated persons run and drop their oars into the rowlocks. Therc, anxiously to and fro, and make hurried and the last man is in; and off they glide to Ae vehement appeals to the ticket collectors to starting-point. And Yale, where is she? Oh, be allowed to get where they do not be- they are embarking from the raft; and they long. As we sit on the front row of the central too pull up to the flag, dark blue every man. car, two young undergraduates, standing on Two dories are moored on a line with the the platform in front of us, converse eagerly post ; in each sits a man whose duty it is to over our heads with three young ladies on hold the stem of the racer in position, waiting the row behind us : we hear all they say, but, the word. They are in position, all is ready ! though they evidently enjoy saying it, it No : wait a moment. Off come the blue and amounts to just nothing at all. They wager crimson jerseys, over the wearers heads, and their fellows will win ; they are afraid the are tossed to their launches ; and the bronzed other fellows may win; the Yale coxswain is backs and arms of all those stout young fel- going to steer without his shoes; the Harvard lows are exposed for the last time to the sun. stroke has parted his hair in the middle; if How the muscles swell and shift beneath the the wind doesn’t change, the course will be as smooth skin, as the men handle their oars, and smooth as glass; if the tide is high enough, reach forward! How active and tireless they the eel-grass won’t matter; the race is certain look! And how their hearts are beating, and not to begin on time — it never does; they their teeth set! Now, silence, and listen for hope our car will stop just opposite the finish; the word. No, we could not hear it; and ^ they wonder whether the winning crew will could, the boats would be off before it reached break the record. In the midst of this con- our ears. So there is nothing to do but to versation, the first whistle blows, and there is watch — ha! they are off! i r • a general stampede of the people remaining Oft, amidst a roar of voices, a deafening on the platform. The trumpet merchant blows screech of steam whistles and tin horns, a a horrid blast on his last tin horn, and a mo- thunder of guns, pistols, and cannon; oft, ment after sells it at a sacrifice to the last amidst waving flags and fluttering handker- enthusiast who is unprovided with one; the chiefs, and cheers, and laughter, and screams car moves, and a group of people in the next of hysteric girls, and cat-calls of frantic urmei- car give the first cheer. As the train moves graduates. They are off; but they hear nothing out of the depot, we catch a glimpse of the and see nothing of the wild confusion and up- long array of gay dresses and waving flags; roar that welters around them. Eachman’seyes and beyond, through a gap between two sheds, are in the boat ; each man strives to combine we see a brief panorama of the river, with a iron self-control with frantic exertion. Keep thousand vessels decked with streamers and crowded with spectators ; and other crowds are massed along the banks, and every upright object carries a banner, — except only Groton monument, which stands tall and gray and undecorated above the scene, and takes no part in the excitement and suspense. As we slowly pass the long dingy facade of the fac¬ tory, clusters of workmen gather in the win¬ dows and doorways, and stare stolidly at our rainbow array. Still onward we go, until at length we leave the railway buildings and the ugly coal-dump behind us, and the broad sweep of the river breaks upon our view. There is the Grand Stand, a mass of shifting color : there is the course, defined by the throng of yachts and small boats and big steamers crowding up to its straight limits, and dispersing thence to either shore. The start is to be from this end, so here we pause. Where are the crews? They have not got into their boats yet. Yes, there comes the Harvard launch, with the men on board, and their boat towing behind. Now the launch stops, and the boat is brought alongside. We can see the crimson jerseys, as one by one their wearers step cautiously into their places.

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BOAT^RACING BY AMATEURS. time ! pull ! lift her ! we are gaining ! we are losing ! Steady, boys ! there are four miles in front of you ; space enough to win and lose. The little coxswain keeps his eye on the ap¬ proaching flag, and the tiller-ropes are taut. Together, row ! pull ! pull ! And behind them stream along the surging steamers, crowded with men like flies ; and our train, too, moves forward, keeping pace with them as they go. One of them has forged ahead, — which is it ? Never mind, the others have quickened their stroke, — they draw up again. There are three miles yet, well rowed! a gallant race! There is an old lady on the bench beside us, and the tears are streaming down her face, and then she laughs and waves her hand. She is the mother of one of those struggling young fellows ; he is the darling of her heart, and there is no telling yet whether he will win or lose. And above, there is an elderly gentle¬ man with a detective camera; he too has a 189 boy in one of the crews, and he has come with the intention of photographing him in the moment of victory. But he has forgotten all about that, and is waving his camera madly in the air, under the impression, probably, that it is a flag ; and he is yelling himself hoarse. Well, both crews cannot win ; one must suffer defeat. And see ! one of them has a long lead now, and it is increasing with every stroke. They are holding themselves well in hand. The others are doing their utmost, but they cannot close up the gap. Two miles ! Three miles ! What a race ! The end is near ; they all gather themselves up for the final effort. Break the record! ye winners! Defeat, but not disgrace, ye losers ! And so, with glisten¬ ing bodies, and heaving lungs, and straining muscles, and bending oars, they fly past the judge’s boat, first one, then the other; and another year’s regatta is lost and won. Julian Hawtho7'ne. BOAT-RACING BY AMATEURS. HE evils of introducing the professional element into amateur athletics are so great — they are so obvious to those who have dipped into matters of the kind without losing their faculty of criticism in the enthusi¬ asm natural to the pursuit — that the first, the healthful instinct is to cry. Away with it all ; give young men their heads ; let them go to work without professional guidance and solve the problem as they best can by themselves ! This is, however, the dictum of persons like ourselves who are no longer in the actual fight and can afford to assume an impartial and most wise attitude toward the contest, swayed as we are by considerations entirely different from those which met us when, boys in red and blue, we were of the battle. Could we, however, become young again by virtue of some witch-potion and enter col¬ lege once more with all the ignorance, liveli¬ ness, and ambition to succeed at whatever cost which we find to our surprise in the undergrad¬ uates of the present day, would we act so very differently after all ? Would we not be charmed as of old by big, useless muscles in the men of our college class who practice daily at the dumb¬ bells, and prefer unwieldy giants to smaller men with muscles less startling but far greater will-power to punish themselves in a contest ? And when it came to preparations for a boat- race against a college with which rivalry, if VoL. XXXIV.— 28. not exactly deadly, was a tradition of long standing, would it be in us to refrain from securing what advice was possible from pro¬ fessionals who make oarsmanship their means of livelihood ? Probably not. Certainly while rowing had a precarious existence at Ameri¬ can colleges, and there was no large body of graduate oarsmen on whom to lean for advice and from whom to beg the arduous and un¬ grateful services of a ‘‘coach,” it was only human that professionals should be paid to look after the stroke and diet of the crews. Professionals were at least kept out of the boat. There is no record like that of the Brasenose Oxford four in 1824, which contained two col¬ lege men, a professional, and an outsider of attainments unrecorded by the muse of history^ To the impetuosity of youth rather than the professional element we may ascribe what¬ ever there is bad in the betting that goes on at college races in the United States. “ Boys will be boys ” is a remark which enjoys a perennial popularity in all ages and all lands. The same may be said of the spies that are sent out by two colleges to note the proficiency and faults of the rival crew: it springs from boyishness more than anything else; it is the act of half¬ men who a few years earlier were reading dime novels, daubing their cheeks with red clay, and lassoing their elders and betters in the sem¬ blance of buffalo, or shooting each other with arrows, in the semblance of red men. The precautions taken by each crew, not to allow the other side to see them at their best, may

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190 BOAT-RACING BY AMATEURS. be confidently set down to man’s inborn love of outdoing his fellow by sly means as well as by the exercise of power. Every collegian is a Joey Bagstock, who hugs himself if he feels that he is “ devilish sly.” Over here Yale College appears to have led off in 1833 with local races, and about New Haven there are legends of doughty crews who ‘^astonished the natives” at fairs and Fourth of July festivities in rural communities of Con¬ necticut, New York, and Massachusetts before the year 1843, when Yale formed a regular boat-club. Harvard followed next year, and in August of 1852 the two colleges met in New Hampshire on the lonely waters of Win- nipiseogee. As these universities increased in size and other colleges began to take a hand in boat- racing, the professional element could not be kept out, for this reason : four years is a short period in which to form good athletes, and few men could afford to give themselves up to any kind of athletics each year of the college course. Hence it was not possible, even if it were in all respects the better method, to put four or six men in a boat and let them row and row until they settled down to a “ telling ” stroke without “ good form,” but effective in getting the boat through the water. The “ Hillsdales” or “Sho-Wae-Cae-Mettes,” or some crew of amateurs from fresh water or the backwoods, could and did employ this very natural fashion of perfecting themselves, and sometimes with astonishing success, particu¬ larly when they had to compete with college crews — trained, it is true, but not always wisely trained, and in any case compelled by their studious life to sacrifice many hours which otherwise could have been employed in prac¬ tice. It has been found, however, that crews of this description cannot compete with col¬ lege men who are well trained, if the latter can have a tithe of the practice in the boat secured to the former by long residence in one locality near good rowing-grounds. Science, intelligence, and especially “ good form ” do tell in all save peculiar circumstances when rowing men are considered, just as they do when soldiers are under consideration. It is a question of drill. The species of rowing crews of which the famous Ward four is the most conspicuous example of success depend for their triumphs on a life-time spent in follow¬ ing the water and rowing together. Such a preparation is almost out of the question among amateurs ; without it and in default of rigid coaching they can be beaten by the oarsmen of the poorest clubs, who are physically the weakest of oars. In college communities it is practically out of the question. The record of the Oxford and Cambridge contests is instructive on this point, for it shows how much can be done on very inadequate water by a thorough system of drill, which commences at the preparatory schools long be¬ fore college is reached and is continued with increasing care as regards “form” and diet. At Eton and Harrow the boat clubs struggle with each other; at Oxford and Cambridge the crews of the several colleges are in con¬ stant rivalry ; finally, out of all these crews the flower of the rowing men is picked to form the ’Varsity eight. Everything in the record of university boating goes to prove that intelli¬ gence, science, “ good form,” are the watch¬ words of success among amateurs. From an¬ other point the English record explains well enough how it is that American crews in Great Britain have scored few victories. Where have we in the United States amateurs or even college oarsmen who can pass through so many years of steady drill in the boat as Oxford or Cambridge men ? The latter may be rowing with comrades who were fellow-oars at Eton seven years or more before. There remains nothing, then, but the best kind of drill to fashion the raw material of American college youth in the course of six months into tolerable similarity of stroke; for unless this is done, defeat is certain. The writer has more than once undergone the agony of trying to shape a crew composed of young men in various walks of life, of various stature and strength, and filled with very differ¬ ent kinds of conceit, into a harmonious whole which should get the boat through the water at the quickest rate possible. The conclusion he came to was that each man should be taken in hand separately and forced to learn exactly the stroke of the stroke-oar; say by exercising him along with the stroke in a pair-oar, but discarding him at once if he is found too stupid or too headstrong to conform. If the club is large enough to contain a choice of good ma¬ terial, this can be done. No combination row¬ ing should be allowed until it has been at¬ tended to. Rowing does not differ from other exercises in which united effort is absolutely necessary. Very often, indeed, it is the most experienced oar in a crew who does most to lose the race. He is wedded to his own ideas, or perhaps only to his own habits. Often he cannot learn another stroke even if he be will¬ ing, and his powerful efforts along lines differing slightly from those of him who sets the stroke impede the gait, imperceptibly, but very effectu¬ ally, and in obvious cases cause the boat to roll. This is particularly observable when it comes to race- day ; for then the old Adam rises in him, evoked by the excitement of the occasion. Even when the coach allows the crew to sit in the boat, it is questionable whether at first long, wearying pulls, during which the

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BOAT-I^ AGING minds of the oarsmen wander and their sev¬ eral faults become hardened in them, are of use. It is better to make them paddle a lit¬ tle way and stop them — no matter how the ardent spirits among them may chafe, no matter how much cursing and grumbling is heard in the dressing-room afterwards. The great point is to teach them how to apply their strength all in the same way — at the same moment is of course. And the reason is simple. The Ward brothers bobbed every which-way, it is true, but by long practice the vicious bobbing of one was counteracted by the vicious bobbing of the other. One yawed over the side this way, but another yawed over the other. It is true that drill deadens the enthusiasm and makes some men spirit¬ less; but the coach who is worth his salt knows when to apply the stimulus of enthu¬ siasm, and, having first made machines of his crew, to spur them into putting their heart along the absolute lines he has obviously, however slowly, chalked out. If I am not mistaken, this is the way Mr. Robert Cook went to work. He did not neg¬ lect practice ; but he first studied the ques¬ tion, went where the best stroke obtainable at that time was rowed, took of that stroke whatever he thought good, and on his return to Yale played the autocrat with the utmost success. The oarsman who would not row his stroke had to get out of the boat; and in New Haven, that nest of petty politics and secret society nonsense, great was the to-do he raised by his arbitrary proceedings. But he beat Harvard every time, and the cackling of the old ladies with boy’s faces, and some¬ times with masculine gray hair, who potter about the undergraduate politics in Yale, was all drowned in the hurrahs of victory. In a less perfect way the same was true of Mr. Wilbur Bacon, the Yale stroke who achieved a series of victories at an earlier period. For his time he rowed the best stroke there was — short, it is true; with the body, it is true; mostly arm-work, it is true. But then every¬ body used their arms too much at that period, when the slide, gradually evolving itself from a pair of well-greased breeches that rubbed -up and down a long seat made so that the grain of the wood ran fore and aft, was turn¬ ing into a thin board running on oiled run¬ ners — an American invention quickly taken up in England and never discarded since. If the old idea that putting college men into a boat and making them row ten miles a day without sharp coaching is no longer ten¬ able, still less is it possible to deny the merits of the sliding seat. Hanlan could never have BY AMATjSGjRS. J91 made the time he has without this Yankee notion. It is now frequently balanced on glass balls that permit it to move with the least possible friction as the oarsman stretches for¬ ward to grasp the water. The sliding seat equalizes the men in the boat who differ one fiom the other in length of trunk and limbs, permitting a man with a short reach to slide a little further than another with long arms, so to catch the water at the same angle and pull through a stroke of the same length. Without the slide no amount of rowing to¬ gether would equalize the stroke : the short man would have to catch later or finish later than the long man, the result of which is, of course, unsteadiness in the boat and dimi¬ nution of speed; for racing craft are so nar¬ row that the blow of the blade as it takes water and the jerk as it leaves the surface are enough to give a lurch which causes the oars on the other side to foul at some point on the recover. The sliding seat is based on the common- sense reasoning that the legs are furnished with muscles far more powerful than any other por¬ tion of the body. Which would you prefer to be hit with — the fist of a pugilist, or the foot of a Frenchman skilled in the curious and ex¬ tremely unfashionable science of the savaie ? The latter with his heels can kill a man with one blow far more certainly, far more easily, than the former with his knuckles. Those great thigh and calf muscles contain a power little suspected by the average man. W ell, the sliding seat enables the sculler to apply a very large fraction of that immense power to the blades of his oars, and, using the nearly unyielding water as the points of resistance to the longer arms of his fulcrum, to shoot the narrow hull like a javelin propelled from a throwing stick. The gain in swiftness is not a gain in picturesqueness. Look at Hanlan ‘‘loafing doubled up ” over his sculls, reaching far for¬ ward with his hands, and catching the water far back of his seat. Then the bow twangs. His knees were under his breastbone just now, and his thighs and calves (they are not particu¬ larly big) were almost touching each other. Down go these levers, and the boat jumps like a trout you have inadvertently jogged while trying to tickle him into your hand. Then Hanlan gathers together in the same lazy, un- picturesque way — what ! he’s done it again 1 You turn away and remark to yourself that if he can keep up that sort of thing for twenty minutes, nobody unprovided with these new¬ fangled rowing-tanks, slides, swivel oar-locks, and wind-boards can hope to stay near him in a race. Henry Eckford,

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN/ BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of “Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “ The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XX. M5 Matilda Stull, who really was on her way to invite Miss drive with her, was when that young lady, in company with Mr. Stratford, rapidly passed her on the road. She turned quickly, and looked back at them, saying to herself : Is it possible that I have been mistaken, and that that is the man she is engaged to ? I don’t understand it, for they certainly told me that the one I saw in the carriage with Mrs. Justin is named Crisman, and that he comes up every Saturday, on account of the engagement. But that doesn’t look like it, I must say ! And this is Saturday afternoon too ! ” In all matters which pertained to love, en¬ gagements, or marriage Miss Matilda took a deep and abiding interest, and in this affair, so immediately within her observation, her in¬ terest was greater than usual. The apparent complications of it which had suddenly arisen in her extremely active mind, which needed but very slight impulses to set it working in matters of this sort, puzzled her exceedingly. She could not bring herself to give up her visit to Mrs. Justin’s house, where she might hope to lay hold of some clew to this mystery. It was plain that Gay could not drive with her, but she saw no reason why she should not re¬ turn Mrs. Justin’s call, although her mother was not with her. That lady was as likely to be indisposed one day as another, and she could not afford to let the acquaintanceship she desired depend upon Mrs. Stull’s disposi¬ tions or indispositions. If that Mr. Crisman were coming to-day, she knew the hour when he should arrive, and determined to plan her own drive so as to reach the house when he should be there. Mr. Stratford and Gay Ar- matt would be back by that time, and when she saw them all together she could judge for herself how matters stood. Miss Stull drove about the country for some time, and when the proper hour arrived, she directed her coachman to turn the horses to¬ wards the Justin house. There she found the lady of the mansion and Mr. Crisman, seated upon the broad piazza. Mrs. Justin received the young lady very cordially, and was on the point of stating that Gay had gone for a walk, but would certainly be back in a very short time, when Miss Matilda remarked that she supposed she might not see Miss Armatt as she had met her driving with Mr. Stratford, but that she had come all the same, because this was a call not only from herself but from her mother, who was extremely grieved that she was not able to make it in person. At the intelligence thus conveyed by Miss Matilda the soul of Mrs. Justin was smitten by a sudden chill, and the face of Mr. Cris¬ man grew stem and dark. This gentleman had been annoyed when he reached the house and found that Gay was not there to meet him, and had been talking to Mrs. Justin about the propriety of that young lady keeping her watch properly set and regulated, and carrying it with her when she went out for a walk, so that she would know when she ought to return to the house. But now, when he learned that she had not gone for a walk at all but was out driving with Stratford, his mind was a good deal darker than his face. He said nothing, but his eyes flashed angrily on Mrs. Justin. That lady glanced at him, caught the flash, and knew instantly that he believed she had told him a falsehood. “ I did not know,” she said, addressing Miss Stull, that Miss Armatt had gone driving. Mr. Stratford must have called for her while I was away, and they will doubtless return pres¬ ently. And, before I forget it, Miss Stull, did your mother engage that washerwoman I rec¬ ommended to her? If she does not suit, there is another one who might answer, but she lives at a greater distance.” During the discussion upon washerwomen which followed, Mr. Crisman arose, went into the house, and began to stalk up and down the parlor. A good deal of conversation, mostly on domestic subjects, now took place between Mrs. Justin and her visitor, and, to the great regret of both, it was not interrupted by the arrival of Gay and Mr. Stratford. Miss Matilda stayed just as long as it was * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. Stockton. All rights reserved.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN possible to extend her visit; and this extension was encouraged by her hostess, who did not at all wish to be left alone with Crisman. Gay had done a very foolish and Avrong thing in going away on this Saturday afternoon with Mr. Stratford, and it was she who should make the explanations and bear the reproaches. At last Miss Stull felt bound to admit to herself that the evening was coming on rapidly, and that she could not Avith propriety stay any longer, and so departed, disappointed. She had seen very little of Mr. Crisman, she had not made the acquaintance of Mr. Stratford, and she had learned nothing definite in regard to the engagement. She had seen enough, how¬ ever, to make her believe that everything Avas not right, and that that young man Avho Avas walking so heavily about the parlor Avas very angry. This convinced her that he was really the engaged man, but she was sorry, very sorry indeed, that the couple in the buggy had not arrived before she left. The heavens were kind to Mrs. Justin. She had not returned to the house after seeing Miss Stull to her carriage — and it must be ad¬ mitted that she did not hasten that return — when Stratford and Gay drove up over the grass, coming from the back of the house. The horse had no sooner stopped than Gay inquired of Mrs. Justin if Mr. Crisman had arrived, and on being told that that gentleman had been there some time and was now in the parlor, she bade Mr. Stratford a hasty fareAvell, skipped out of the buggy, and hurried into the house. As she hastened past Mrs. Justin, that lady felt assured that although Gay might be very anxious to meet her lover, her con¬ science as well as her affection had a good deal to do with the exceeding alacrity with which she Avent into the house. ‘‘ I had no idea,’' said Mrs. Justin to Strat¬ ford, “that you and Gay Avere going off to drive this afternoon.” “ Nor had I,” he ansAvered. “ I picked her up on the road. We had a most delightful drive.” “ It may prove anything but delightful to Gay,” said Mrs. Justin. Stratford smiled. “I am very sorry,” he said, “ that upon this subject you and I should so frequently differ, both in our desires and our expectations.” “ And I am also very, very sorry,” said the lady. And then Mr. Stratford drove away at sup¬ per time without being invited to stay to supper. This unusual omission was not due to want of hospitality or to resentment on Mrs. Justin’s part. That lady did not desire an aAvkward situation at her evening meal, and Stratford understood her feelings perfectly. That supper was indeed an awkAvard meal, but not as Mrs. Justin had expected it to be. She had looked forward to sitting at table with a black-broAved and scowling lover upon Avhom the sweetness and kind attention of tAvo ladies would make but very faint impression. Instead of that, only she and Gay had supper together ; that is to say, they sat at table to¬ gether, but neither of them ate much. When Mr. Stratford had driven away, and Mrs. Justin had gone into the house after a stroll among the shadoAvs on the lawn suffi¬ ciently prolonged to give Mr. Crisman time to get over the brunt of his indignation, she met Gay on the piazza, and immediately asked where Mr. Crisman Avas. “ I don’t knoAv,” said Gay, her voice a little shaken either by emotion or shortness of breath. “ I haven’t seen him at all. Jane says he went out of the house and down the steps of the back piazza just as Mr. Stratford and I drove round to the front, and that she thought he went into the garden. I ran out there, and have been looking for him everywhere. What do you suppose has become of him ? Can it be that he is angry with me, and has gone away ? ” Mrs. Justin turned pale, and her paleness was reflected in the face of Gay. “ Come into the library,” said the older lady. And they went into the darkening room and sat down together on a lounge. Now Mrs. Justin spoke to her young friend more plainly than she had ever spoken before. She opened her anxious heart to her, and with earnest affection explained to the young girl the danger she Avas in. Gay listened with a tear or two but with no words. When Mrs. Justin had finished. Gay asked : “ Do you think he Avill come back to-night ? ” “I have no doubt of it” said the other. “ He has probably gone for a long walk, Avhich Avill cool off his anger; and when he comes back, my dear, it Avill be your duty to see that he has occasion to take no more such Avalks.” Then the two Avent out to supper. About half-past nine that evening a boy be¬ longing to the tavern at Cherry Bridge came to the Justin house bringing two letters. One was for Miss Armatt, and one was for Mrs. Justin, and they Avere both Avritten by Mr. Cris¬ man, Avho, the boy said, had taken his supper at the tavern and Avould stay there that night. Gay, who had been reading and waiting and listening all the evening, took her letter in her hand but did not open it. The pallor on her face when instead of her lover there came this missive was not at all of the reflected sort. “ I think I will go up into my room and read it,” she said. And taking a lamp, she went upstairs. Mrs. Justin sent word to the boy that

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN lie need not wait for answers, and then she sat and looked at her letter a long time before she opened it. She was so much averse to a correspondence with Mr. Crisman that once she made up her mind to tear up his letter and refuse to take part in a very unpleasant quarrel which she had earnestly endeavored to avert. But she knew that this would not be just, and she could not but believe that if she read Mr. Crisman’s letter and treated him with courtesy, she might thereby be of great service to Gay. Having come to this determination, she tore open the letter and read it. At the opening words her face began to redden, and as she went on the crimson glow increased. When she finished, the color died out of her face, and she leaned back in her chair and looked out between the parted curtains of the window into the dark night with an expression of som¬ ber sternness which was very unusual upon Mrs. Justin’s lovely countenance. For a long, long time she sat thus ; and it was after twelve o’clock when Gay came quietly into the room. Mrs. Justin started with surprise. ‘‘Why, Gay,” she exclaimed, “ I did not expect you downstairs again ! ” Gay made no answer, but advanced to the table with two letters in her hand, one open, and the other folded and addressed. Her hair was somewhat tumbled, as if her fingers had been in it; but her dress was unchanged, and she evidently had had no thought of retiring. “ Here is a letter,” said Gay, laying the one which was folded and addressed upon the table, “ which I should like to have sent to Mr. Crisman as early as possible in the morn¬ ing. I have ended our engagement.” Mrs. Justin rose to her feet, her amazed eyes fixed on Gay. “ My letter is not sealed,” said Gay, “ and you can read it if you like. But I think it would be better if you read his letter first.” Mrs. Justin put out her hand for the letter which Crisman had written, and took it as though it were something hot which she feared to touch. She looked at Gay, and then she looked at the letter. Then she read a line or two, and put it down. “ I cannot. Gay,” she said ; “ I cannot read it.” It was Gay who had been hard-stricken, but her nature was young and strong. She bore her blow. better than Mrs. Justin bore the one she had received. “You need not read it,” she said. “ It would only pain you. I can tell you in a few words what is in it. He upbraids me cruelly for what he calls my faithlessness, and after saying a great deal for which there is no cause whatever, he orders me to write him a letter asking his forgiveness for what I have done, and promising never to do again the things with which he has charged me. If I do not write such a letter and send it to him immediately, he declares that everything shall be at an end between us. In my answer I told him that his charges had no foundation at all, and that I would never write the letter he demanded. Did I do right?” Mrs. Justin’s face was flushed, not only by the words which Gay had spoken to her but by a hot recollection of the letter which she herself had received, in which Mr. Crisman had indignantly charged her with treachery and falsehood, with having encouraged and assisted the attentions of Mr. Stratford during the absence of Gay’s rightful lover, and with having made him believe that Gay was out walking by herself when of course she knew that she was driving with that other man. Never was there a woman who attached more solemn importance to an engagement or promise than did Mrs. Justin. Never was there a woman who looked with more horror upon the breaking of a compact upon which two loving hearts had entered, and yet she stretched out her arms to Gay, and pressing the girl to her bosom, she said: “You did right, exactly right ! ” XXI. When Mr. Crisman, before breakfast the next morning, received Miss Armatt’s letter, its effect upon him was to renew the anger which a night’s sleep had somewhat sobered down. When he had written to her he had formed no conjectures in regard to her recep¬ tion of his letter. He meant all that he had written, and his only desire and intent was that Gay should thoroughly understand what he meant. He had not cared to anticipate what she would do when she read it ; but when he found what she had done, a most stubborn indignation took possession of him. His na¬ ture was one which hardened quickly beneath the sun of angry passion, and when this hap¬ pened, neither rain, nor kindly warmth, nor the dews of night, nor any blessed breeze, could penetrate its crust. “ Very well,” he said, as he tore up Gay’s letter, “ she loses more than I do.” And then he went to breakfast. The only resolve which Mr. Crisman now made was to the effect that every one should be made to understand that his engagement with the Armatt girl was broken off, and that he was not in the least crushed by the event. He had come prepared to spend a week at Cherry Bridge, having made arrangements by which his vacation came earlier in the season than usual. He had sent his baggage to the

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN tpem without saying anything to Mrs. Jus¬ tin about it, preferring first to inform Gay of his intended stay in the neighborhood, and thus give Mrs. Justin an opportunity of invit¬ ing him to spend a week at her house. If she did not do so, he would stay at the tavern. But, although he had told no one of his in¬ tentions, he determined to make no change in them. This was a good place to hunt and fish, and he would stay here and hunt and fish for a week. Then he would go and spend the other week of his vacation in sailing, as he had planned. He liked sailing better than anything else, but having decided to give up half his holidays to the country in which Gay was staying, he would not allow her conduct to influence his plans in any way. If, in the course of his sojourn here. Gay should come to feel that she ought to be ashamed of her¬ self, he would then determine what he would do. But this was to be entirely her own affair. Not one step would he take to lift her out of the pit into which she had deliberately thrown herself. If she chose to climb out and come to him — but he stopped here; he would make no promises, and offer no hopes, even in his own mind. He was obstinately angry. On that Sunday afternoon Mr. Stratford walked over to the Justin house. He would have preferred not to go, but there were reasons why he thought it would be better for him to do so. Mrs. Justin had not treated him with her customary cordiality on the evening be¬ fore, and he did not wish to appear to resent this by omitting his usual Sunday call. He had reason to believe, if he judged from noth¬ ing but Mrs. Justin’s words, that he would not find the family atmosphere altogether bright and agreeable, but he did not feel himself jus¬ tified in staying away on that account. If he found a storm there, or the signs of one, he would know that he was the cause of it, and there was no reason why he should shrink from his share of the rains and winds. He was rounding the foot of an abrupt hill which lay on the extreme boundary of the Bullripple farm when he suddenly came upon a man who was making a shallow ex¬ cavation in the soil with a small pickaxe. It was such an uncommon thing to find any one in this part of the country working in the fields on Sunday, that Stratford was quite surprised at the sight. In a moment, however, he per¬ ceived that this was not an ordinary laborer, but an elderly man dressed in black, who was, apparently, interested in geology. “ Good afternoon,” said Stratford. The man turned suddenly, and his face showed plainly that, whatever he might be looking for, it was not company. Stratford could not imagine why the man should object to being seen digging for specimens of rock, fish worms, or anything else, unless it was on account of doing so on Sunday. He took no notice of the forbidding expression, and in¬ quired pleasantly what there was to be found on this hillside. Nothing,” said the man, dropping his lit¬ tle pick. “ There’s nothing at all in land like this, either inside of it or on top of it. I live in this county, though not in this stony part, and I like to know what kind of soil we’ve got in one place and another. But this land ain’t worth the trouble of scratching it.” ‘‘ It does not appear to me in that light,” said Stratford. ‘‘ The pasturage is fair, and the crops in the valley lands are very good.” Oh, yes,” said the man. And as he spoke he kicked some stones and loose earth into the hole he had made. “ Some of the land is good enough for crops, but there is nothing in it that is really worth anything.” “ I suppose you are alluding to ores,” said Stratford. ‘‘ From what I have observed in sections of the country where iron is found, I should think there might be ore of that kind here.” “ Humph! ” said the man. ‘‘You might dig here for ten years, and you wouldn’t find no iron except what was worn off your shovels and picks. Good-day to you.” And taking up his pickaxe and a stout grape-vine cane which lay on the ground, the man walked away to¬ wards the village. Stratford continued on his way, but in a few moments he stopped and looked back. The man was carrying, the little pickaxe un¬ der his coat. Stratford smiled as he went on. “ I cannot imagine,” he said to himself, “why he should have been so disturbed at my seeing him. He could not have been stealing any¬ thing, for there is nothing here to steal. I am afraid that after going to church this morning he intended going fishing this afternoon. He chose a very poor place, however, in which to look for bait.” Stratford was met by Mrs. Justin before he reached the house. “I saw you coming over the hill,” she said; “ I want to have a little talk with you before you go in.” And then, as the two walked down to the bank of the creek, she said: “Your work is accomplished. The engagement between Gay Armatt and Mr. Crisman is broken.” “ What I ” exclaimed Stratford. And for a moment he felt a pang of contrition. He had greatly desired to see this engagement broken off, but it was a shock to be suddenly told that there had been a rupture, and that he had made it. But Mrs. Justin’s next words were positively astounding.

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ig6 THE HUNDREDTH MAN. “ I would not have told you this so ab- ment to continue. But I shall never cease to ruptly,” she said, “ if I had not intended to grieve that my friend chose to take the part also say that I am very glad that everything that he has played in this affair.” is at an end between these two.” “ Knowing you as I do,” said Stratford, ‘‘ I ‘‘ You doubly amaze me ! ” cried Stratford, am quite sure that I like you better for that “ Is it possible I have converted you ? ” opinion.” “ Not a bit of it,” promptly answered Mrs. A meeting between the girl whose engage- Justin. “ You were wrong, wrong, absolutely ment of marriage had suddenly been broken wrong in what you did. You had no more off and the man who had been the cause of right to come between those two than you such fracture must naturally be an awkward had to try to come between any other man or one, and feeling this very strongly Stratford woman, either engaged or married. It so hap- was not anxious for an immediate interview pens that you have done a good thing, but with Gay. If he had known what serious con- you deserve no credit for it. You did not know sequences had followed his mountain ride with Mr. Crisman ; you merely had a prejudice Gay he would have postponed for a day or against him, and for no reason but this you two his visit to this house. Thoughts of this endeavored to make a girl forswear herself.” awkwardness may have come into the mind of “ A strong statement,” remarked Stratford. Mrs. Justin also, but if they did she allowed “ None too much so,” continued the lady, them no weight. “ I have come to believe that what you did “ Gay is in the house,” she said, “ and you has had a most excellent result, but, for all may as well see her at once. You know how that, it was a very wrong thing to do ; it was the matter stands, and it will not be pleasant a crime. Now that Mr. Crisman is out of the or wise for any of us to put ourselves m stiff way, everything is free and open to you, and or constrained positions.” in the course of time I suppose that you and When Stratford took Gay by the hand and Gay will be married. I have no doubt that looked into her face he saw that she had had you will both be very happy, and that neither a hard blow, one that might have crushed her of you could possibly have made a better if, at the same time that it wounded her, it had match. But, for all that, you ought never to not aroused the most emboldening sentiments look back upon the part you have played of self-respect and just resentment. She was without sorrow and repentance.” not a girl who would parade an affliction or • “ I wish to heaven,” exclaimed Stratford, misfortune by retiring on account of it from “ that the words I have spoken to you about the society of her ordinary friends and asso- Miss Armatt and myself could be believed! ciates. Nor was she one who would care to But I suppose this is too much to expect, and conceal a trouble from those who took an in- we need say no more about it. If you do not terest in her life and happiness. She was aware object, I should like to know how this thing that Stratford knew what had happened, for happened, and what is the present state of she had asked Mrs. Justin to tell him, and as affairs.” this was the most important event of her life, “ As you are a party very much interested,” not even excepting her engagement, she could said Mrs. Justin, “of course you ought to not bring herself to avoid the subject with know all about it.” And then she went on to Stratford, whom she believed to be her true tell him what had happened. She repeated friend, and whose mind she knew must be oc- the substance, as she had heard it, of Gris- cupied with it. As he probably understood man’s letter to Gay ; told him what Gay had that their innocent drive had brought about written in answer; and how she had heartily the catastrophe, and as she believed that no supported the girl in her resolution. blame should attach to him, she wished him In regard to the letter which she herself to see that she intended to visit him with no had received from Crisman, and which had punishment, negative or positive. She did not done more to show her the true character of know much and had never thought much of the man than even what he had written to the way in which the world is in the habit of Gay, she said but little. If she had told what forming its opinions, but her good sense and that letter contained she would have had good experience were quite sufficient to show her reason to fear that Stratford would have thrown what kind of opinion might easily be formed the young man into Cherry Creek, or that he in a case like this, where the former lover had would have been thrown into that stream him- torn himself away and where the engagement- self. breaker continued in favor; and she was very “ I cannot be too glad,” said Mrs. Justin, in desirous that that part of the world repre¬ conclusion, “ that the man, before it was too sented by Stratford should not have a mis- late, showed us his true character, and that he taken opinion. himself made it impossible for the engage- “ You know,” she said, as soon as they had

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN taken their seats, “ that Mr. Crisman and I are no longer engaged ? ” ‘‘ I have heard it,” said Stratford. “ It was all very sudden and unexpected,” she continued. ‘‘ I have been greatly dis¬ tressed, and Mrs. Justin also, and we are not ourselves at all. But we hope our friends will not find fault with us any more than we find fault with them.” As she said this Stratford looked steadfastly at her, but made no answer. I don’t care to talk about this any more than I can help,” she continued, and all that we can do is to wait, and hope for the best.” What is the best ? ” asked Stratford. “ The best thing that could possibly happen,” said Gay, “ is for us to find ourselves able to come together on our old ground, when every¬ thing can be so easily explained. Mr. Crisman knows, as every one knows, that I always have been, and am now, perfectly loyal to him.” This assertion greatly surprised Stratford, and in his heart he did not believe it. “ I do not understand you,” he said. How can you be loyal to him when you have seen fit to break your engagement to him } ” “ I don’t know that I can exactly explain myself,” she said, but I want to make it un¬ derstood that while I am not willing to be engaged to Mr. Crisman so long as he holds the position he has taken, I have never turned aside from any of my promises ; and when I find him as he was a week ago he will find me exactly what I was then. Is that plain ? ” And she looked with anxious inquiry at Stratford. '' Oh, yes, quite so,” he said to her. But he said to himself that Crisman could never be to her the same man that he was a week ago. He saw her object: she wished to establish the fact that there had been no unfaithfulness on her part. Here now was an opportunity to do a thing which Stratford considered righteous, honor¬ able, and kind. Here was a chance to tell this girl that she had done all that the world and her conscience called upon her to do ; that after what had happened, the loyalty of which she spoke could be but a thing of principle with¬ out feeling; that the reasons which prompted her to break off the engagement were just as strong reasons why she should never think of it again, and that, setting arguments and words aside, she should embrace, with all the force of her nature, this opportunity of escaping a ruined life. But he said nothing of all this. He was a brave man, and an able one, but he shrank from the task of doing what he thought to be his duty. He did not believe he could give her the counsel he wished to give, and at the same time maintain the position he wished to keep. ‘‘ It will be better,” he thought, '' that she VoL. XXXIV.— 29. should find out these things for herself, and I am sure she will do it. And, besides, she has Mrs. Justin to back her.” U nder the circumstances, the hours could not be expected to pass in a cheery way ; and, soon after supper, Mrs. Justin and Stratford found themselves sitting alone in a very quiet house. ‘‘ I cannot quite understand Miss Armatt’s demeanor,” said he. ‘‘If she is deeply grieved at the dissolution of her engagement, I should expect more evident signs of distress ; and, on the other hand, if she is glad of her great de¬ liverance, I should think she would let that be seen. As it is, it would be very difficult to classify her apparent emotions.” “ I believe,” said Mrs. Justin, “ that Gay does not thoroughly understand herself. As far as I am able to judge, her mind is now occupied in assuring her that she has always stood by her promises, and that her steadfast fidelity gave her a right to break with a man who insisted that she should admit that she was not true to her given word.” “ So long as she reasons,” said Stratford, “ the state of the case is perfectly satisfactory. But what surprises me more than anything else is the readiness with which you accept the situation. I should have supposed that no matter how bitter the quarrel between these young people, you would have hoped to see them reconciled and the engagement re¬ newed.” “ I am quite willing to admit,” said she, “ that it is not at all like me to feel the satis¬ faction and thankfulness that I do feel in knowing that Gay is not to marry Mr. Crisman. But this is a very unusual case, and my con¬ science fully justifies me.” And then, in her mind, she added : “ If you could have read Mr. Crism all’s letter to me you would not wonder at my feelings.” XXII. There was not at this period a more ardent match-maker in the country than Mrs. People. For a long time she had been much dissatis¬ fied with the condition and prospects of her son John. For one thing, he was growing up to be an old bachelor, and she was opposed, on principle, to old bachelors. To be sure, it was a very fortunate thing for her that her brother Enoch belonged to this class, for otherwise it is not at all probable that she would have been at that time the mistress and director of the household; but the principle remained unchanged. Mr. People was not much more than twenty-one when he married her; and here was John, who in four short years would be thirty, still single. It was plain enough she thought that he was beginning to be a man of

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN 198 importance in his business, for otherwise old Vatoldi would never have allowed him to manage his affairs all by himself during the late disturbances. His having a vacation, too, showed that things were getting to be better with him ; and what was next to be expected was an increase of salary. Taking all these matters together, it was as clear as the light of day in Mrs. People’s mind that John should lose no time in getting married. And here was Matilda Stull ; and if anybody knew of a better match for J ohn than she was, Mrs. People would like to see that girl, be she black haired or brown, a foreigner or a native- born American, produced at once. It was not only that Miss Stull was a very pretty girl, and very well dressed, and one with whom John was deeply in love, but there was an eminent propriety in marriage between the heir of her house and that of Stull, which loomed up in a gigantic form in the mind of Mrs. People. If John married Matilda, the farm on which he was born would, in the course of time, come into his possession; and this, from Mrs. People’s point of view, was the most desirable thing that could possibly happen. She would sit, in one hand a table-knife with its blade half-ground away by repeated sharpenings, and in the other a partly peeled potato, and muse upon the happiness, the ab¬ solute felicity, which would be hers when the old farm should belong to John. To buy back this estate appeared to her a simple impossi¬ bility ; to get it for nothing by means of this marriage would be a grand stroke indeed. Many were the plans she formed while the potato waited to be peeled. She would go and live with J ohn, for it was not likely that that city girl knew anything about housekeep¬ ing or the management of a dairy. And yet as she, Mrs. People, could not expect to live forever, it would- be necessary that her son’s wife should learn how to manage his house¬ hold affairs. Matilda, for thus the good woman already thought of her prospective daughter- in-law, should do some things, and thus grad¬ ually learn the duties of her position. She could begin by washing up the tea things and feeding the chickens. In course of time she might be able to take charge of the churning, although Mrs. People very much doubted if that girl could ever produce such butter as she now set before her son. On the other hand, it would be very hard for her to leave her brother Enoch, who was getting somewhat oldish now, and must some¬ times feel a little stiff in his joints, although he never mentioned anything of the sort. She had lived a long time with her brother, and in some respects he had become as necessary to her as she was to him. And yet, how would it be possible for her to give up that desire of her life, to live once more in the house and on the farm to which Mr. People had taken her as a bride ? These conflicting feelings troubled her greatly, and she would sometimes sit and muse upon them much longer than was condu¬ cive to the regularity of the dinner hour. One day, however, a consoling thought came to her. It was possible, nay it was even more, it was very probable, that Matilda had in her com¬ position a good deal of spice, and not only such spice as ginger, cinnamon, and cloves, but pepper, and good hot red pepper, too, if Mrs. People knew anything about the outward signs of a woman’s disposition. Now, this peppery disposition might make the situation of a mother-in-law in John’s home a very un¬ pleasant one, and it might be well, therefore, that she should remain in her present very comfortable position in her brother’s house. It was truly comforting to the mind of Mrs. People to settle this vexing question by re¬ flecting that in all probability Matilda would be too peppery to live with ; and the remainder of the potato was peeled. It was not so easy, however, for John Peo¬ ple himself to settle the question of Matilda Stull. He was now having opportunities for forwarding his suit which a short time before he would not have believed possible. He was living near fields through which Miss Stull walked and wandered, and where she had actually allowed him to walk and wander with her. He had nothing to do, and could walk and wander when he pleased. But the days of his vacation were rapidly passing, and he had done nothing decisive yet. At any mo¬ ment he might expect to hear that the altera¬ tions at Vatoldi’s had progressed so far that it was necessary for him to go to the city and take charge of aftairs. If he could again be alone with Miss Stull, and could make up his mind to show her the state of his feelings, he believed he ought to do it. In the city he had worshiped her from afar, and had never be¬ lieved that there was the slightest chance of possessing her; but here in the country, where people were ever so much more the equals of each other, he had worshiped her at a distance of a foot, or perhaps eighteen inches ; and if a young lady was willing to walk with a young man through fields and gates so close as that, John thought that young man ought to be greatly encouraged, and might feel justified in speaking out his mind. In regard to what old Stull might say, in case of a favorable reply from the daughter, John was not over-sanguine. It was true that now, being a partner in the concern, although with a very small share of the profits, it might

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN be possible that Mr. Stull would turn a favor¬ able eye upon a connection which would, in a way, make the whole business a family af¬ fair. But, in spite of this encouraging thought, if John had been compelled at this time to make his proposals to the father instead of the daughter, he would have calmly resigned him¬ self to perpetual bachelorhood. But, should he be accepted by Miss Stull, he would wait and bear to any extent. John’s mind was in this condition when, one fine morning, Miss Matilda paid a visit to the Bullripple household. To John and his mother she came like an angel with white wide- spreading wings ; to old Enoch she appeared as an uppish young woman with a cattle-irri¬ tating parasol; and to Mr. Stratford, who regarded her from his window, she was an enigma. He knew who she was, but he could not imagine why she should come to that house and sit with John People under the great tree in the front yard. Miss Stull had really called upon Mrsf People, but that sa¬ gacious mother had sent John to say that she would be out in a very few minutes, and had told him that he must entertain the visitor until she came. Mrs. People was devoured by desire to know the object of Miss Stull’s visit, but she restrained herself for the love of John. It was a heroic sacrifice, but she made it, and for ten minutes sifted sugar over a mass of bread dough without knowing what she did. Miss Stull was very desirous that Mrs. Peo¬ ple should come out; she wanted to ask her a lot of questions ; but she did not betray any impatience towards John. The young man might be useful to her, particularly in the way of making her acquainted with Mr. Strat¬ ford, if the chance should occur. Miss Ma¬ tilda wished very much to know the handsome gentleman she had seen driving with Gay Ar- matt. She had not supposed when she came to this part of the country that she should find such a man as that. She was therefore very gracious to John, and asked him so many questions about the present composition of the Bullripple household that the young man was obliged to say a good deal about Strat¬ ford, and could not have failed to present him had he made his appearance. When she had waited just as long as she could, having, in the meantime, made her dough all cake, Mrs. People came out, and John was constrained to walk away reluctantly, to give the young lady an opportunity of stat¬ ing her business to his mother. He did not go very far, however, but busied himself about the wood-yard, from which point, with his face ever turned towards the object of his devo¬ tion, no matter how he might move and re¬ volve, he held himself ready, the instant the conference should be over, to accompany Miss Stull to the gate and to go with her as far over our continent as she would permit. What Miss Stull came to find out was the true state of things in the Justin house. Was Miss Gay engaged to the young man who was walking about in the parlor without her, or to Mr. Stratford, whom she had seen driving with her.^^ In what business was this Mr. Crisman, and was he related to Mrs. Justin ? Was Mr. Stratford rich? Was Mrs. Justin entirely satisfied with Gay’s match ? All these things, and a number of other points. Miss Stull had hoped to learn from Gay; but having failed to see that young lady, and not being able to wait until her call was returned, she had made a swoop upon Mrs. People. After some very thin talk about butter and eggs. Miss Stull found it easy to introduce the subject she had at heart. Mrs. People had also a subject at heart which she wished to introduce, and in order to get at it she rushed with haste and freedom into the subject pre¬ sented by her visitor. She told Miss Stull so much, in fact, that that young lady turned pale with surprise, and then pink with delight, at being the recipient of such startling informa¬ tion. Mrs. People had been at Mrs. Justin’s house, and as that lady was desirous that it should be generally known that Mr. Crisman was no longer engaged to Miss Armatt, she had informed Mrs. People of the fact, and that good woman had easily possessed herself of as much of the detail of the event as Mrs. Jus¬ tin judged proper to give her. This informa¬ tion, rapidly and generously garnished from the resources of her own mind, Mrs. People laid before Miss Stull. The interview was protracted so long that John’s ingenuity was greatly taxed to keep himself busy in view of the couple under the tree. When Miss Matilda rose to go, thus interrupting an abruptly introduced maternal panegyric of the manager of Vatoldi’s, her mind was filled with a pleasing consciousness that there was in this neighborhood a city gentleman, handsome and stylish, and not engaged to be married. What advantage to herself she expected to result from this Miss Stull might not have been able to state in clear mid convincing terms. But it was a great sat¬ isfaction to a person of her temperament to know that the facts were as they were. John was with her before she reached the gate, and opened it for her. Then she stopped. Isn’t there some way, Mr. People,” she said, by which I can go home across the fields instead of walking by the side of this monotonous road ? ” “ Oh, yes,” said John, “ but there are fences

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200 THE HUNDREDTH MAN in the way, and draw-bars would have to be taken down.” And isn’t there anybody,” she continued, who can take down those bars ? ” To hear this question, and to see at the same time the meaning little smile on the face of the young lady who asked it, suffused John’s soul with more actual joy than it had ever be¬ fore known. Yes, indeed, there was somebody who could not only take down bars, but who would tear away walls, fill up ditches, and slay bulls, if necessary. John did not say this, but his manner indicated it. As they walked across the fields. Miss Ma¬ tilda’s spirits were very lively, and her manner was very cordial. She had no idea of alluring this happy fly into her web, but she desired to make of him a thread-carrier, so to speak, who would take out beyond her present sphere of action those finely spun inducements by which she hoped to draw to herself the larger and brighter flutterer upon whom her eyes were fixed. John now lived with Mr. Stratford, and through him her very limited circle of acquaint¬ ance here might be enlarged by the addition of this gentleman. She considered it her right to know every presentable man who might find himself within the limits of her social range. Miss Stull also hoped to make Mr. Stratford comprehend through John what an exceed¬ ingly desirable thing it would be to become acquainted with her. But her methods towards this end had only the effect of causing John to feel that she was a more charming, desirable, and gracious superior being than even she herself had ever supposed it possible for her to become. On his side he was emboldened to a point of courage he had not imagined he could reach. Before they had gone three-quar¬ ters of the distance through a clover field, John determined to make his ‘sentiments known. He would not ask her plumply if she would marry him, as if she were a mere country girl, but he would show her his glowing soul. Had she not with the sweet words and enrapturing smiles of angels deliberately set it on fire? And was it not due to her that she should see that it had kindled ? ^‘Another set of bars!” exclaimed Miss Matilda, as they approached the fence. ‘‘ Oh, dear, Mr. People, what a deal of trouble I am putting you to I ” “Trouble! ” exclaimed the sturdy John. “ I wish I could take down every bar that you might meet with through your whole — ” “ Way home,” quickly interpolated Miss Matilda. “ That is just what I want you to do. You are so strong and seem to understand these fences so well.” “That is not the point,” said John, as he seized a rail and jerked it from its sockets. “ Other people might be able to take down bars — ” “ Yes,” interrupted Matilda; “ Mr. Stratford, for instance. He has lived so much in this country that I suppose he knows all about such things.” “ It isn’t the being able to do it,” said John, looking intently into the face of the young lady, “ it is the wanting to do it.” Miss Matilda smiled upon him. “ It is very good of you,” she said, “ to be willing to do for other people what they cannot do for themselves. Now, if I were walking here alone I could never lift those heavy rails, and would have to crawl through the fence, or to climb over it as best I might.” “If I had my way,” exclaimed John, for¬ getting in his excitement as he walked by Miss Matilda that it was necessary to put up the bars he had taken down, “ there should never be in the way of your feet a stick, a stone, a clod, a lump, not so much as a piece of gravel.” “ Those things must be expected,” said the young lady with demure triteness. “ Oh, no, they needn’t be!” cried John in quick and fervid tones. “ They need never be known at all, if there is one ever ready to brush and hurl them away; to make your paths as smooth — as smooth as roses.” “ Which are not smooth,” said Miss Matilda, “ at least not when they are used to make a path of. That reminds me that at our house there are a lot of rose bushes, and some of them have flowers on yet, but mother and I both think that they are a poor kind of rose bushes, and that if we are to come up here in the summer time we might as well have some good ones planted. Do you know the names of some good roses that would grow here ? Perhaps, if you don’t, Mr. Stratford could tell you. City men are so apt to know the names of good kinds of things.” “ I am a city man myself,” said John in a tone somewhat different from that in which he had just spoken, “ and I’ll get you all the roses you will ever want.” “ I don’t want you to get them,” said she. “ I only want the names of them. And there is another thing I would like to ask you about. How do you make grass grow ? Mother and I think there ought to be a great deal more of it about the house, but the farmer who lives there don’t seem to understand how to plant it.” With well-plied questions concerning the adornment of their country home Miss Ma¬ tilda engaged the attention of her companion until they had reached the last fence. Then she turned and held out her hand.

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201 THE HUNDREDTH MAN. “ Good-bye, Mr. People,” she said. “ There are now no other obstructions between me and the house, and I will not make you go any farther.” There is an obstruction. Miss Stull,” said John very earnestly, ‘‘ an obstruction to my every joy, which — ” ‘‘ Oh, yes, I know,” quickly interrupted Miss Matilda ; those dreadful waiters who boy¬ cotted your place. It must be an awful ob¬ struction, but it is bound to disappear in time, if you stand up boldly. Father has talked about it, and he says so. He is very fond of Vatoldi’s, and he says we must go there again as soon as things are all right. Good-bye, Mr. People.” And, with one of her pretty smiles, she tripped away. Regarding the state of affairs from John’s point of view it was quite evident that angelic beings have their disadvantages, for their beau¬ tiful wings enable them to keep just out of one’s reach without feeling at all compelled to flee the company of the one who wishes to reach them. On the other hand. Miss Matilda, in her character of web-maker, discovered that a fly who may be sent out to inveigle other insects is apt to become entangled in a very trouble¬ some and apparently hopeless manner in the subtile threads with which he has been in¬ trusted. This young lady, however, troubled herself very little about John’s condition. She liked to see a young man in this sort of involvement, especially when she herself had produced it, and her only regret in the present case was that the young man probably could not prove as useful as she had expected him to be. The most important object of her life at the pres¬ ent moment was to become acquainted with Mr. Stratford. It made her positively angry to think that she did not know him, and that she saw no way open by which she could be¬ come acquainted with him. She had called twice at the house where he lived, and acci¬ dent had not favored her. She made a visit at Mrs. Justin’s at a time when he was ex¬ pected there, but she had not met him. She had hoped to know him through Gay Armatt, but she was now in trouble and could not be expected to do much in the way of introduc¬ ing gentlemen. Miss Matilda’s acute mind had discovered what sort of person was Mrs. People, and she was afraid to allow that good- hearted but exceedingly open-natured woman to know that she positively wished for the ac¬ quaintance of Mr. Stratford. Had she done this Miss Stull might have expected to be placed in a very undesirable position by the irrepressible frankness of Mrs. People. John had been her chief dependence, but she was now very much afraid that she would not be able to make use of him. He had become so addled that he could not understand any hints of her desires, and she was even afraid that if she should succeed in making him understand what she wanted the numskull would actually refuse to make her acquainted with a man who might prove to be a rival. There was nothing to be done but to de¬ pend upon herself ; and as Miss Stull was quite used to this sort of dependence, she was not long in forming a plan. She must meet the man by accident. In a country place like this, where people wandered about as they pleased, this ought not to be a difficult matter; and as Mr. Stratford had probably by this time heard of her, and as he knew of course that she had heard of him, they would not meet as positive strangers, and a chance encounter might be worked up to advantage. Miss Matilda was rather fond of sketching, and although she had but small ability as an artist, she was extremely clever in a general way, and could so arrange her slight artistic gifts that they made a very good show. The weather being now quite suitable for outdoor sketching. Miss Stull arrayed herself in a most becoming and appropriate costume, and with a sketch-book and little camp-stool under one arm, and a large umbrella with a long, pointed handle over her right shoulder, repaired to a pleasant spot at the foot of the hills, where some very goodviewscould be had, and close by which she had sometimes observed, from a distance, that a sportsman occasionally passed on his way to the trout streams on the higher grounds. The sketcher did not immediately select a spot at which to begin her work. She rambled about a good deal, and looked about a good deal, in order to see what suitable thing there was in view which might be drawn. At last she decided upon a distant view which includ¬ ed a path that led through the Bullripple farm towards the village. Miss Matilda was a lucky young woman, especially when she put her own shoulder to her wheel of fortune, and she had scarcely sketched in the outlines of some rocks and gentle eminences when she saw coming to¬ wards her, among these outlines, a gentleman with a fishing-rod upon his shoulder. For some minutes she kept her eyes fixed upon her paper, and then, giving a little shrug to her shoulders and looking up at the sunlit sky, she put down her book and picked up the umbrella, which lay, closed, on the ground by her side. The pointed end of the long handle she now endeavored to thrust into the ground, but she found this a difficult per¬ formance. In one place the soil seemed veiy hard, in another there was long, tangled grass,

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202 THE HA ME OF WASHINGTON. and, after a jab or two, she decided that she would not like to sit there. After some delib¬ eration, with her back to the object she in¬ tended to draw, she selected another spot, but here she found a large stone just under the surface of the ground. Having quarried on this for some moments, she stopped and be¬ gan fanning herself with her handkerchief. Such exertion was certainly very unusual with her, and she stood, panting a little. The man must now be very near. In less than a minute she heard a step, and a gentleman^s voice said to her : Allow me, miss, to plant your umbrella for you.” She turned quickly and saw, not Mr. Strat¬ ford, but Mr. Crisman. She knew him the moment she saw him, and was now truly sur¬ prised, for she had supposed that when he had ended his engagement he had also ended his visit to these parts. But her soul did not shrink with disappointment. This was a very handsome young fellow, and she would be delighted to know the ex-lover of Gay Armatt, about whom she had had so much curiosity and so much doubt. With an ingenuous smile she accepted his offer, and the strong arm of Mr. Crisman soon fixed the handle of the umbrella in the ground as firmly as if it had been the mast of a boat. Frank R. Stockton. THE NAME OF WASHINGTON. [Read before the Sons of the Revolution, New York, February 22, 1887.] Sons of the youth and the truth of the nation, — Ye that are met to remember the man Whose valor gave birth to a people’s salvation,— Honor him now ; set his name in the van. A nobleness to try for, A name to live and die for — The name of Washington ! Calmly his face shall look down through the ages — Sweet yet severe with a spirit of warning; Charged with the wisdom of saints and of sages ; Quick with the light of a life-giving morning. A majesty to try for, A name to live and die for — The name of Washington ! Though faction may rack us, or party divide us, And bitterness break the gold links of our story. Our father and leader is ever beside us. Live and forgive ! But forget not the glory Of him whose height we try for; A name to live and die for — The name of Washington ! Still in his eyes shall be mirrored our fleeting Days, with the image of days long ended; Still shall those eyes give, immortally, greeting Unto the souls from his spirit descended. His grandeur we will try for ; His name we’ll live and die for — The name of Washington ! George ParsoJis Lathrop.

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[BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER NUMBER.] ABRAHAM LINCOLN : A HISTORY * BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. THE ATTACK ON SUMNER, AND THE DRED SCOTT CASE. CONGRESSIONAL RUFFIANISM. HE official reports show that the proceedings of the American Congress, while in the main conducted with becoming propriety and decorum, have occasion¬ ally been dishonored by angry personal altercations and scenes of ruffianly violence. These dis¬ orders increased as the great political strug¬ gle over the slavery question grew in intensity, and they reached their culmination in a series of startling incidents. Charles Sumner, one of the Senators from the State of Massachusetts, had become con¬ spicuous, in the prevailing political agitation, for his aggressive and radical antislavery speeches in the Senate and elsewhere. The slavery issue had brought him into politics ; he had been elected to the United States Sen¬ ate by the coalition of a small number of Free-soilers with the Democrats in the Massa¬ chusetts legislature. This question, therefore, became the dominant principle and the key¬ note of his public career. He was a man of profound culture, of considerable erudition in the law, of high literary ability, and he had attained an enviable social eminence. Though of large physical frame and strength, the combative quality was almost totally lacking in his organization, a lack, however, which was fully compensated by a moral fearless¬ ness that led him to give free utterance to his convictions. In this spirit he joined unreservedly in the exciting Senate debates, provoked by the rival applications from Kansas for her admission as a State. On the 19th and 20th of May, 1856, he delivered an elaborate speech in the Sen¬ ate, occupying two days. It was one of his greatest efforts, and had been prepared with his usual industry. In character it was a philippic rather than an argument, strong, direct, and aggressive, in which classical il¬ lustration and acrimonious accusation were blended with great effect. It described what he called “ the crime against Kansas ” ; and the excuses for the crime he denominated the apology tyrannical, the apology imbecile, the apology absurd, and the apology infamous. ‘‘ Tyranny, imbecility, absurdity, and infamy,” he continued, “all unite to dance, like the weird sisters, about this crime.” In the course of this speech he alluded, among others, to Senator Butler of South Carolina, and in reply to some severe strictures by that Senator dur¬ ing preceding debates indulged in caustic per¬ sonal criticism upon his course and utterance, as well as upon the State of South Carolina, which he represented. “With regret,” said Sumner, “I come again upon the Senator from South Carolina [Mr. Butler], who, omnipresent in this debate, overflowed with rage at the simple suggestion that Kansas had applied for ad¬ mission as a State ; and with incoherent phrases dis¬ charged the loose expectoration of his speech, now upon her representative and then upon her people. There was no extravagance of the ancient parliament¬ ary debate which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make, with so much of passion, I am glad to add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberra¬ tion. But the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure — with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accu¬ racy, whether in stating the Constitution or in stating the law, whether in details of statistics or the diver¬ sions of scholarship. He cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.” Butler was not present in the Senate on either day : what he might have said or done, had he been there, can only be conjectured. The immediate replies from Douglas and others were very bitter. Among pro-slavery members of both Houses there was an under-current of revengeful murmurs. It is possible that this hostile manifestation may have decided a young member of the House, Preston S. Brooks, a nephew of Senator But¬ ler, to undertake retaliation by violence. Ac¬ quainting Edmundson, another member, with his design, he waited on two different occa¬ sions at the western entrance to the Capitol grounds to encounter Mr. Sumner, but with¬ out meeting him. On the 2 2d ofMay, two days after the speech, Brooks entered the Senate Chamber on the same errand. The session had been short, and after adjournment Sumner remained at his desk, engaged in writing. The sessions were at that time held in the old Senate Chamber, All rights reserved. Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886-7.

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204 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 9. Sumner’s desk. 15. Where Brooks sat. X. Where Sumner fell. now occupied by the Supreme Court. The seats were arranged in semicircles, with a railing to separate them from a narrow lobby or open space next the wall; a broad aisle ran from the main door to the desk of the presiding officer. Mr. Sumner’s seat was in the outside row next to the railing, at the second desk to the right from the entrance and the main aisle. Occu¬ pied with his work, Mr. Sumner did not notice Mr. Brooks sitting across the aisle to his left, and where in conversation with a friend he was manifesting his impatience that a lady seated near Mr. Sumner did not take her departure from the chamber. Almost at that moment she probably arose and went out, for quickly afterwards Brooks got up and advanced to the front of Sumner’s desk. The fact attracted the attention of Brooks’s friend; he was astonished, amid the bitterness of party feeling, to see a South Carolina Representative talk to a Massa¬ chusetts Senator. His astonishment was quick¬ ly corrected. Leaning upon the desk and ad¬ dressing Sumner with a rapid sentence or two, to the effect that he had read his speech, that it was a libel upon his absent relative, and that he had come to punish him for it, Brooks be¬ gan striking him on the head with a gutta¬ percha walking-cane, of the ordinary length and abqut an inch in diaineter. Surprised, blinded, and stunned by the blows, Sumner’s first instinct was to grapple with his assailant. This effort, however, was futile ; the desk was between them, and being by his sitting posture partially under it, Sumner was prevented from rising fully to his feet until he had by main strength, in his strug¬ gles, wrenched it from its fastenings on the floor. In his attempt to follow Brooks they became turned, and from between the desks moved out into the main aisle. By this time, through the repetition of the heavy blows, and loss of blood, Sumner became unconscious. Brooks, seizing him by the coat-collar, con¬ tinued his murderous attack till Sumner, reel¬ ing in utter helplessness, sank upon the floor beside the desk nearest the aisle, one row nearer the center of the chainber than his own. The witnesses variously estimated the number of blows given at from ten to thirty. Two principal wounds, two inches long and an inch deep, had been cut on the back of Sumner’s head ; and near the end of the at¬ tack, Brooks’s cane was shivered to splinters. There were perhaps ten or fifteen persons in the chamber, and after the first momentary pause of astonishment half a dozen started to interfere. Before they reached the spot, however, Mr. Keitt, another South Carolina member of Congress, came rushing down the main aisle, brandishing his cane, and with imprecations warning lookers-on to “let them alone.” Among those hastening to the rescue, Mr. Morgan arrived first, just in time to catch and sustain the Senator as he fell. Another bystander, who had run around outside the railing, seized Brooks by the arm about the same instant ; and the wounded man was borne to an adjoining room, where he was cared for by a hastily summoned physician. Among Mr. Sumner’s friends the event cre¬ ated a certain degree of consternation. The language which provoked the assault, what¬ ever might be thought of its oftensive character, was strictly parliamentary, uninterrupted either by the chair or by any member. The assault itself was so desperate and brutal that it implied a vindictiveness deeper than mere personal revenge. This spirit of bullying, this resort to violence, had recently become alarm¬ ingly frequent among members of Congress, especially as it all came from the pro-slavery party. Since the beginning of the current ses¬ sion, a pro- slavery member from 'Virginia had assaulted the editor of a Washington newspa¬ per; another pro-slavery member, from Arkan¬ sas, had violently attacked Horace Greeley on the street; a third pro-slavery member, from California, had shot an unoffending waiter at Willard’s Hotel. Was this fourth instance the prelude of an intention to curb or stifle free congressional debate? It is probable that this question was seriously considered at the little caucus of Republican Senators held that night at the house of Mr. Seward. The Re¬ publicans had only a slender minority in the Senate, and a plurality in the House; they could do nothing but resolve on a course of parliamentary inquiry, and agree on an atti¬ tude of defense. Sumner’s colleague, Mr. Wilson, made a very brief announcement of the occurrence to the Senate on the following day, and it at once became apparent that the transaction would assume an almost strictly party char-

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A HISTORY, acter. As no Democratic Senator proposed an inquiry, Mr. Seward moved for a committee of investigation; upon which Mason of Vir¬ ginia proposed that the committee should be elected by ballot. The result was that no Re¬ publican was chosen upon it ; and the com¬ mittee reached the conclusion that it had no 205 tenancing the assault, and of the act of Keitt in his personal interference. But the necessary two-thirds vote for the expulsion of Brooks could not be obtained ; a vote of censure was therefore passed by a large majority. The dis¬ cussion of the report and resolutions occupied the House several days, and whatever effort CHARLES SUMNER. power in the premises, except to report the occurrence to the House. In the House the usual committee from the three parties was raised, resulting in two reports. The minor¬ ity, sustained by the vote of sixty members, pleaded a want of jurisdiction. The majority recommended the expulsion of Brooks, and expressed disapprobation by the House of the course of his colleague Edmundson in coun- VoL. XXXIV.— 30. members made to disguise their motives, their actions, either of condemnation or of excuse, arose in the main clearly enough from their party relations. Under the forms of parlia¬ mentary debate, the South and the North were breathing mutual recrimination and de¬ fiance. The public of both sections took up' the af¬ fair with equal party zeal. From the North

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2o6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: great N orth — an d they are a great people — speak of me as a bad man, you will do me the justice to say that a blow struck by me at this time would be followed by a revolu¬ tion, and this I know.” Under the state of pub¬ lic sentiment then prevail¬ ing at the South, it would have been strange if the ex¬ traordinary event and the following debate had not provoked other similar affairs. Mr. Sumner’s col¬ league, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts, in his speech characterized the assault as brutal, mur¬ derous, and cowardly.” For this language Brooks sent him a challen ge. W il- son wrote a reply declin¬ ing the encounter, but in the same letter announc¬ ing that I religiously believe in the right of self- defense, in its broadest sense.” One of the sharpest de¬ nunciations of the assault was made by Burlingame, a Massachusetts Repre¬ sentative. I denounce it,^’ he said, in the name of the Constitution it vio¬ lates. I denounce it in the name of the sovereignty came resolutions of legislatures, outbursts of of Massachusetts, which was stricken down indignation in meetings and addresses, and by the blow. I denounce it in the name the denunciation of Brooks and his deed in of humanity. I denounce it in the name of the newspapers. In the South the exactly op- civilization, which it outraged. I denounce it posite sentiment predominated. Brooks was in the name of that fair play which bullies and defended and eulogized, and presented with prize-fighters respect.” For this, after some canes and pitchers as testimonials to his efforts had been made by mutual friends to valor. When the resolution of censure had patch up an amicable understanding. Brooks been passed, he at once resigned his seat in sent him also a challenge. Mr. Burlingame the Flouse, and, going home to his constitu- accepted the challenge, and his second desig- ents, was immediately reelected. Within three nated Clifton House in Canada as the ren- weeks he reappeared at the bar of the House, dezvous and rifles as weapons. Burlingame with a new commission from his governor, at once started on the journey ; but Brooks and was sworn in and continued his service declined to go, on the excuse that his life as before. The somewhat arrogant address would not be safe on such a trip through the which preceded his resignation contained North. the remarkable intimation that much more Broadened into national significance by all serious results might have grown out of the these attendant circumstances, the Sumner incident. ‘^No act of mine,” he said, ‘‘on assault became a leading event in the great my personal account shall inaugurate revolu- slavery contest which was being fought out tion; but when you, Mr. Speaker, return to between the South and the North. It might your own home, and hear the people of the well rank as one of the episodes of the civil PRESTON S. BROOKS.

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207 A HISTORY. war then raging in Kansas, out of which it had in reality grown, and with which it was intertwined in motive, act, and comment. In result the incident was extremely damag¬ ing to the South, for it tended, much more than any single Border- Ruffian crime in Kan¬ sas, to unite hesitating and wavering opinion in the North against the alarming flood of lawlessness and violence, which as a rule found its origin and its defense in the ranks of the pro-slavery party. Certainly no phase of the transaction was received by the North with such popular favor as some of the bolder avowals by Northern Representatives of their readiness to fight, and especially by Burlin¬ game’s actual acceptance of the challenge of Brooks. Readers of a later generation will naturally wish to know what further befell Senator Sum¬ ner. The shock of the attack, and the serious wounds he received, produced a spinal mal¬ ady, from which he rallied with great difficulty, and only after severe medical treatment and years of enforced abstinence from work. As the constituents of Brooks sent him back to the House, so also the legislature of Massa¬ chusetts, in January, 1857, with but a few dis¬ senting votes, reelected Sumner to a new sen¬ ANSON BURLINGAME. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM SHAW.) atorial term, beginning the 4th of March. He came to Washington and was sworn in, but within a few days sailed for Europe, and dur¬ ing the greater part of the long interim between that time and the succeeding presidential cam¬ paign his seat in the Senate stood vacant. It was on the 4th of June, i860, that he again raised his voice in debate. Some changes had occurred ; both Butler and Brooks were dead ; * the Senate was assembled in its new hall in the north wing of the Capitol exten¬ sion. But in the main the personnel and the spirit of the pro-slavery party still confronted him. ‘‘Time has passed,” he said, “but the question remains.” A little more than four years before, he had essayed to describe “The Crime against Kansas”; now, in an address free from offensive personalities but more unsparing in rhetoric and stronger in historical arraignment, he delineated what he named the “Barbarism of Slavery.” Picturing to ourselves the orator, thecircumstances,and the theme, we can comprehend the exaltation with which he exclaimed in his exordium : HENRY WILSON. (FROM K PHOTOGRAPH BY HOYT.) “ Slavery must be resisted not only on polit¬ ical grounds, but on all other grounds, whether social, economical, or moral. Ours is no holi¬ day contest; nor is it any strife of rival fac¬ tions — of White and Red Roses ; of theatric Neri and Bianchi; but it is a solemn battle between Right and Wrong, between Good and Evil. . . . Grander debate has not occurred in our history, rarely in any history ; nor can this debate close or subside except with the triumph of Freedom.” * P. S. Brooks died January 27th, 1857; A. P. Butler died May 25th, 1857.

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2o8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: With this speech Sumner resumes his place as a conspicuous figure and an indefatigable energy in national politics and legislation, tire¬ less in attacking and pursuing slavery until its final overthrow. THE BRED SCOTT DECISION. Deep and widespread as hitherto had been the slavery agitation created by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and by the conse¬ quent civil war in Kansas, an event entirely unexpected to the public at large now sud¬ denly doubled its intensity. This was the an- DRED SCOTT. nouncement, two days after Buchanan’s inau¬ guration, of the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Dred Scott case. This celebrated case had arisen as follows : Two or three years before the Nebraska Bill was thought of, a suit was begun by a negro named Dred Scott, in a local court at St. Louis, Missouri, to recover his and his family’s free¬ dom from slavery. He alleged that his master, one Dr. Emerson, an army surgeon, living in Missouri, had taken him as his slave to the military post at Rock Island in the State of Illinois, and afterwards to Fort Snelling, situ¬ ated in what was originally Upper Louisiana, but was at that time part of Wisconsin Terri¬ tory, and now forms part of the State of Min¬ nesota. While at this latter post Dred Scott, with his master’s consent, married a colored woman, also brought as a slave from Missouri, and of this marriage two children were born. All this happened between the years 1834 and 1838. Afterwards Dr. Emerson brought Dred Scott and his family back to Missouri. In this suit they now claimed freedom, because during the time of residence with their master at these military posts slavery was there prohibited by positive law ; namely, at Rock Island by the ordinance of 1787, and later by the Constitu¬ tion of Illinois; at Fort Snelling* by the Mis¬ souri Compromise act of 1820, and sundry other acts of Congress relating to Wisconsin Territory. The local court at St. Louis before which this action was brought appears to have made short work of the case. It had become settled legal doctrine by Lord Mansfield’s decision in the Somersett case, rendered four years before HARRIET, WIFE OF DRED SCOTT. our Declaration of Independence, that ‘‘ the state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only positive law. . . . It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.” The learned chief-justice therefore ordered that Somersett, being claimed as a Virginia slave brought by his master into England, and attempted to be carried away against his will, should be discharged from custody or restraint, because there was no positive law in England to sup¬ port slavery. The doctrine was subsequently modified by another English chief-justice, Lord Stowell, in 1827, to the effect that ab¬ sence of positive law to support slavery in England only operates to suspend the mas¬ ter’s authority, which is revived if the slave voluntarily returns into an English colony where slavery does exist by positive law. The States of the Union naturally inherited and retained the common law of England, and the principles and maxims of English jurispru-

Page 214

A HISTORY. 209 ROGER B. TANEY, CHIEF-JUSTICE U. S. SUPREME COURT. dence not necessarily abrogated by the change of government, and among others this doctrine of Lord Mansfield. Unlike England, however, where there was no slavery and no law for or against it, some of the American States had positive laws establishing slavery, others pos¬ itive laws prohibiting it. Lord Mansfield’s doc¬ trine, therefore, enlarged and strengthened by American statutes and decisions, had come to be substantially this: Slavery, being contrary to natural right, exists only by virtue of local laAV ; if the master takes his slave for permanent res¬ idence into a jurisdiction where slavery is pro¬ hibited, the slave thereby acquires a right to his freedom everywhere. On the other hand. Lord Stowell’s doctrine Avas similarly enlarged and strengthened so as to allow the master right of transit and temporary sojourn in free States and territories Avithout suspension or for¬ feiture of his authority over his slave. Under the someAvhat complex American system of government, in Avhich the Federal Union and the several States each claim sovereignty and independent actioirAvithin certain limitations, it became the theory and practice that tOAvard each other the several States occupied the at¬ titude of foreign nations, Avhich relation Avas governed by international laAv, and that the principle of comity alone controlled the recog¬ nition and enforcement by any State of the law of any other State. Underthis'theory, the courts of slave States had generally accorded freedom to slaves, even Avhen acquired by the laws of a free State, and reciprocally the courts of free States had enforced the master’s right to his slave Avhere that right depended on the laAvs of a slave State. In this spirit, and conforming to this established usage, the local court of Mis¬ souri declared Dred Scott and his family free. The claimant, loath to lose these four human “ chattels,” carried the case to the Supreme Court of the State of Missouri, where at its

Page 215

210 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: JOHN McLEAN, ASSOCIATE JUSTICE U. S. SUPREME COURT, March term, 1852, it was reversed, and a decree rendered that these negroes were not entitled to freedom. Three judges formed the court, and two of them joined in an opinion bearing internal evidence that it was prompted, not by considerations of law and justice, but by a spirit of retaliation growing out of the in¬ eradicable antagonism of freedom and slavery. “Every State,” says the opinion, “has the right of determining how far, in a spirit of comity, it will re¬ spect the laws of other States. Those laws have no intrinsic right to be enforced beyond the limits of the State for which they were enacted. The respect allowed them will depend altogether on their conformity to the policy of our institutions. No State is bound to carry into effect enactments conceived in a spirit hostile to that which pervades her own laws. . . . It is a humil¬ iating spectacle to see the courts of a State confiscating the property of her own citizens by the command of a foreign law. . . . Times now are not as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made. Since then not only individuals but States have been possessed with a dark and fell spirit in relation to slavery, whose gratification is sought in the pursuit of measures whose inevitable consequence must be the overthrow and destruction of our Government. Under such circumstances it does not behoove the State of Missouri to show the least countenance to any meas¬ ure which might gratify this spirit. She is willing to assume her full responsibility for the existence of slav¬ ery within her limits, nor does she seek to share or divide it with others.” ^ To this partisan bravado the third judge replied with a dignified rebuke : “ As citizens of a slave-holding State,” said he in his dissenting opinion, “we have no right to complain of our neighbors of Illinois, because they introduce into their State Constitution a prohibition of slavery ; nor has any citizen of Missouri who removes with his slave to Illinois a right to complain that the funda¬ mental law of the State to which he removes, and in which he makes his residence, dissolves the relation between him and his slave. It is as much his own voluntary act as if he had executed a deed of eman¬ cipation. . . . There is with me nothing in the law relating to slavery which distinguishes it from the law on any other subject, or allows any more accommodation to the temporary public excitements which are gath- * Scott, J., 15 Mo. R., pp. 582-6.

Page 216

A HISTORY. 2II SAMUEL NELSON, ASSOCIATE JUSTICE U. S. SUPREME COURT. ered around it. . . . In this State it has been recog¬ nized from the beginning of the government, as a correct position in law, that a master who takes his slave to re¬ side in a State or territory where slavery is prohibited thereby emancipates his slave. [Citing cases.] . . . “ But the Supreme Court of Missouri, so far from standing alone on this question, is supported by the decisions of other slave States, including those in which it may be supposed there was the least disposition to fa¬ vor emancipation. [Citingcases.] . . . Times may have changed, public feeling may have changed, but princi¬ ples have not and do not change ; and in my judgment there can be no safe basis for judicial decision but in those principles which are immutable.” * These utterances, it must be remembered, occurred in the year 1852, when all slavery agitation was supposed to have been forever settled. They show conclusively that the calm was superficial and delusive, and that this * Gamble, J. 15 Mo. R., pp. 589-92. t The declaration in the case of Dred Scott vs. John F. A. Sandford was filed in the clerk’s office of tlie Circuit Court of the United States for the district of deep-reaching contest was still, as before the adjustment of 1850, actually transforming the various institutions of society. Gradually, and as yet unnoticed by the public, the motives dis¬ closed in these opinions were beginning to con¬ trol courts of justice, and popular discussion and excitement were not only shaping legisla¬ tion, but changing the tenor of legal decisions throughout the country. Notlong after the judgment by the Supreme Court of Missouri, Dred Scott and his family were sold to a man named Sandford, who was a citizen of New York. This circumstance af¬ forded a ground for bringing a similar action in a Federal tribunal, and accordingly Dred Scott once more sued for freedom, in the United States Circuit Court at St. Louis. t Missouri on the second day of November, 1853. The trespass complained of is alleged to have occured on the first day of January, 1853. [Records Supreme Court United States.]

Page 217

212 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: BENJAMIN R. CURTIS, ASSOCIATE JUSTICE U. S. SUPREME COURT. The case was tried in May, 1854, and a decree rendered that they were negro slaves, the lawful property ” of Sandford. As a final ef¬ fort to obtain justice, they appealed by writ of error to the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest judicial tribunal of the nation. Before this court of last resort the case was argued a first time in the spring of 1856. The country had been for two years in a blaze of political excitement. Civil war was raging in Kansas ; Congress was in a turmoil of parti¬ san discussion; a presidential election was im¬ pending, and the whole people were anxiously noting the varying phases of party politics. But few persons knew there was such a thing as the Dred Scott case on the docket of the * At the first hearing Mr. Montgomery Blair argued the case for Dred Scott, and Senator Geyer of Mis¬ souri and ex- Attorney-General Reverdy Johnson of Maryland for the claimant. At the second hearing Mr. Blair and Mr. George T. Curtis of Boston argued the case on behalf of Dred Scott, and Mr. Geyer and Mr. Johnson again made the argument for the claim¬ ant. All of them performed the service without com¬ pensation. t“The court will not decide the question of the Supreme Court ; but those few appreciated the importance of the points it involved, and sev¬ eral distinguished lawyers vol¬ unteered to take part in the argument.* Two questions were presented to the court : First, Is Dred Scott a citizen entitled to sue ? Secondly, did his residence at Rock Island and at Fort Snelling, under the various prohibitions of slavery existing there, work his free¬ dom ? The Supreme Court was composed of nine justices ; namely. Chief- Justice Taney and Associate Justices Mc¬ Lean, Wayne, Catron, Daniel, Nelson, Grier, Curtis, and Campbell. There was at once manifested among the judges not only a lively interest in the questions presented, but a wide difference of views as to the manner of treating them. Consultations of the Supreme Court are always shrouded in inviolable secrecy, but the opinions afterwards published indicate that the political aspects of slavery which were then convulsing the country from the very first found a cer¬ tain sympathy and reflection in these grave judicial delibera¬ tions. The discussions yet turned upon certain merely technical rules to be applied to the plead¬ ings under review ; and ostensibly to give time for further examination, the case was postponed and a re-argument ordered for the next term. It may, however, be suspected that the near¬ ness of the presidential election had more to do with this postponement than did the exi¬ gencies of the law. t The presidential election came, and Mr. Buchanan was chosen. Soon after, the court again met to begin its long winter term ; and about the middle of December, 1856, the Dred Scott case was once more elaborately argued. Again occupying the attention of the court for four successive days, as had also been done in the first hearing, the eminent counsel, after Missouri Compromise line, — a majority of the judges being of opinion that it is not necessary to do so. (This is confidential.) The one engrossing subject in both houses of Congress and with all the members is the presidency; and upon this everything done and omitted, except the most ordinary necessities of the country, depends.” [Judge Curtis to Mr. Ticknor, April 8th, 1856. Curtis, “Life of B. R. Curtis,” Vol. I., p. 180.]

Page 218

A HISTORY. passing lightly over mere technical subtleties, discussed very fully what was acknowledged to be the leading point in the controversy ; namely, whether Congress had power under the Constitution to prohibit slavery in the Fed¬ eral territories, as it had done by the Missouri Compromise act and various other laws. It was precisely the policy, or impolicy, of this and similar prohibitions which formed the bone of contention in party politics. The question of their constitutional validity was certain to take even a higher rank in public interest. When after the second argument the judges took up the case in conference for decision the majority held that the judgment of the Missouri Federal tribunal should simply be affirmed on its merits. In conformity to this view, Mr. Justice Nelson was instructed to pre¬ pare an opinion to be read as the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States. Such a paper was thereupon duly written by him, of the following import : It was a question, he thought, whether a temporary residence in a free State or territory could work the emanci¬ pation of a slave. It was the exclusive province of each State, by its legislature or courts of jus¬ tice, to determine this question for itself. This determined, the Federal courts are bound to follow the State’s decision. The Supreme Court of Missouri had decided Bred Scott to be a slave. In two cases tried since, the same judg¬ ment had been given. Though former decisions had been otherwise, this must now be admitted as “ the settled law of the State,” which, he said, “ is conclusive of the case in this court.” This very narrow treatment of the points at issue, having to do with the mere lifeless machinery of the law, was strikingly criticised in the dissenting opinion afterwards read by Mr. Justice McLean, whose reply, by way of anticipation, may properly be quoted here. He denied that it was exclusively a Missouri question. ‘‘ It involves a right claimed under an act of Con¬ gress and the Constitution of Illinois, and which cannot be decided without the consideration and con¬ struction of those laws. . . . “ Rights sanctioned for twenty-eight years ought not and cannot be repudiated, with any semblance of justice, by one or two decisions, influenced, as de¬ clared, by a determination to counteract the excitement against slavery in the free States. . . . Having the same rights of sovereignty as the State of Missouri in adopting a constitution, I can perceive no reason why the institutions of Illinois should not receive the same consideration as those of Missouri. . . . The Mis¬ souri court disregards the express provisions of an act of Congress and the Constitution of a sovereign State, both of which laws for twenty-eight years it had not only regarded, but carried into effect. If a State court may do this, on a question involving the liberty of a human being, what protection do the laws afford? ” Had the majority of the judges carried out their original intention, and announced their VoL. XXXIV.— 31. 213 decision in the form in which Mr. Justice Nel¬ son under their instruction wrote it,* the case of Bred Scott would, after a passing notice, have gone to a quiet sleep under the dust of the law libraries. A far different fate was in store for it. The nation was then being stirred to its very foundation by the slavery agitation. The party of pro-slavery reaction was for the moment in the ascendant ; and as by an irre¬ sistible impulse, the Supreme Court of the United States was now swept from its hither¬ to impartial judicial moorings into the danger¬ ous seas of politics. Before Judge Nelson’s opinion was sub¬ mitted to the judges in conference for final adoption as the judgment of the court, a move¬ ment seems to have taken place among the members, not only to change the ground of the decision, but also to greatly enlarge the field of inquiry. It is stated by one of the par¬ ticipants in that memorable transaction (Mr. Justice Campbell) that this occurred: “Upon a motion of Mr. Justice Wayne, who stated that the case had created public interest and expecta¬ tion, that it^ had been twice argued, and that an im¬ pression existed that the questions argued would be considered in the opinion of the court.”! He further says that “ The apprehension had been expressed by others of the court, that the court would not fulfill public expectation or discharge its duties by maintaining si¬ lence upon these questions ; and my impression is, that several opinions had already been begun among the members of the court, in which a full discussion of the case was made, before Justice Wayne made this proposal.”! The exact time when this movement was begun cannot now be ascertained. The mo¬ tives which prompted it can be inferred by recalling contemporaneous political events. A great controversy divided public opinion whether slavery might be extended or should be restricted. The Missouri Compromise had been repealed to make such an extension pos¬ sible. The terms of that repeal were purposely couched in ambiguous language. Kansas and Nebraska were left “ perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.” Whether under the Con¬ stitution slavery could be excluded from the Federal territories was affirmed by Northern and denied by Southern Bemocrats. North¬ ern and Southern Bemocrats, acting together in the Cincinnati National Convention, had ingeniously avoided any solution of this dif¬ ference. A twofold interpretation had enabled that party to elect Mr. Buchanan, not by its own ’^Campbell to Tyler, “Life of Taney,” pp. 383-4. t Ibid. p. 384. t Ibid. p. 384.

Page 219

214 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: popular strength, but by the division of its opponents. Notwithstanding its momentary success, unless it could develop new sources of strength the party had only a precarious hold upon power. Its majority in the Senate was waning. In Kansas free-State emigration was outstripping the South in numbers and checkmating her in border strife. According to present relative growth in sectional repre¬ sentation and sectional sentiment, the balance of power was slowly but steadily passing to the North. Out of this doubt and difficulty there was one pathway that seemed easy and certain. All the individual utterances from the Demo¬ cratic party agreed that the meaning of the words subject to the Constitution ” was a question for the courts. This was the original compact between Northern and Southern Democrats in caucus when Douglas consented to repeal. Douglas, shorn of his prestige by his defeat for presidential nomination, must ac¬ cept conditions from his successful rival. The Dred Scott case afforded the occasion for a decision. Of the nine judges on the Supreme Bench seven were Democrats, and of these five were appointed from slave States. A better opportunity for the South to obtain a favorable dictum could never be expected to arise. A declaration by the Supreme Court of the United States that under the Constitu¬ tion Congress possessed no power to prohibit slavery in the Federal territories would by a single breath end the old and begin a new political era. Congress was in session and the political leaders were assembled at Washing¬ ton. Political topics excluded all other con¬ versation or thought. Politics reddened the plains of Kansas ; politics had recently dese¬ crated the Senate chamber with a murderous personal assault; politics contended greedily for the spoils of a new administration ; poli¬ tics nursed a tacit conspiracy to nationalize slavery. The slavery sentiment ruled society, ruled the Senate, ruled the Executive Man¬ sion. It is not surprising that this universal influence flowed in at the open door of the national hall of justice, — that it filtered through the very walls which surrounded the consulting-room of the Supreme Court. The judges were, after all, but men. They dined, they talked, they exchanged daily per- A striking example may be found in the utterance of Attorney-General Cushing of the retiring Pierce administration, in a little parting address to the Su¬ preme Court, March 4th, 1857: “ Yours is not the gauntleted hand of the soldier, nor yours the voice which commands armies, rules cabinets, or leads senates; but though you are none of these, yet you are backed by all of them. Theirs is the external power which sustains your moral authority ; you are the incarnate mind of the political body of the nation. In the complex institutions of our country sonal and social courtesies with the political world. Curiosity, friendship, patriotism, led them to the floors of Congress to listen to the great debates. Official ceremony called them into the presence of the President, of legis¬ lators, of diplomats. They were feasted, flat¬ tered, questioned, reminded of their great opportunity, tempted with the suggestion of their supreme authority.* They could render their names illustrious. They could honor their States. They could do justice to the South. They could perpetuate their party. They could settle the slavery question. They could end sectional hatred, extinguish civil war, preserve the Union, save their country. Advanced age, physical feebleness, party bias, the political ar¬ dor of the youngest and the political satiety of the eldest, all conspired to draw them under the insidious influence of such considerations. One of the judges in official language frankly avows the motive and object of the majority of the court. ‘‘The case,” he wrote, “in¬ volves private rights of value, and constitu¬ tional principles of the highest importance, about which there had become such a differ¬ ence of opinion that the peace and harmony of the country required the settlement of them by judicial decision.” t This language betrays the confusion of ideas and misconception of authority which tempted the judges beyond their proper duty. Required only to decide a question of private rights, they thrust them¬ selves forward to sit as umpires in a quarrel of parties and factions. In an evil hour they yielded to the demands of “ public interest,” and resolved to “ fulfill public expectation.” Mr, Justice Wayne “pro¬ posed that the Chief- Justice should write an opinion on all of the questions as the opinion of the court. This was assented to, some re¬ serving to themselves to qualify their assent as the opinion might require. Others of the court proposed to have no question, save one, discussed.”! The extraordinary proceeding was calculated to touch the pride of Mr. Jus¬ tice Nelson. He appears to have given it a kind of sullen acquiescence. “ I was not pres¬ ent,” he writes, “ when the majority decided to change the ground of the decision, and as¬ signed the preparation of the opinion to the Chief- Justice ; and when advised of the change I simply gave notice that I should read the you are the pivot point upon which the rights and lib¬ erties of all, government and people alike, turn; or, rather, you are the central light of constitutional wis¬ dom around which they perpetually revolve. Long may this court retain the confidence of our country as the great conservators, not of the private peace only, but of the sanctity and integrity of the Constitution.” — [Nat. Int., March 5th, 1857.] t Wayne, J., Opinion in the Dred Scott case, 19 Howard, pp. 454-5. t Campbell to Tyler, “ Life of Taney,” p. 384.

Page 220

A HISTORY, opinion I had prepared as my own, and which is the one on file.”* From this time the pens of the other judges were busy, and in the inner political circles of Washington the case of Dred Scott gradually became a shadowy and por¬ tentous cause celebre. The first intimation which the public at large had of the coming new dictum was given in Mr. Buchanan’s inaugural. The fact that he did not contemplate such an announcement until after his arrival in Washington f leads to the inference that it was prompted from high quarters. In congressional and popular discussions the question of the moment was at what period in the growth of a territory its voters might exclude or establish slavery. Referring to this Mr. Buchanan said : “ It is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, be¬ fore whom it is now pending, and will, it is under¬ stood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” The popular acquiescence being thus in¬ voked by the presidential voice and example, the court announced its decision two days after¬ wards, — March 6th, 1857. The essential char¬ acter of the transaction impressed itself upon the very form of the judgment, if indeed it may be called at all by that name. Chief-Justice Taney read the opinion of the court. Justices Nelson, Wayne, Daniel, Grier, Catron, and Campbell each read a separate and individual opinion, agreeing with the Chief-Justice on some points, and omitting or disagreeing on others, or arriving at the same result by differ¬ ent reasoning, and in the same manner differ¬ ing from one another. The two remaining associate justices, McLean and Curtis, read emphatic dissenting opinions. Thus the col¬ lective utterance of the bench resembled the speeches of a town meeting rather than the decision of a court, and employed two hun¬ dred and forty printed pages of learned legal disquisition to order the simple dismissal of a suit. Compared with the prodigious effort the result is a ridiculous anti-climax, reveal¬ ing the motive and animus of the whole affair. The opinion read by Chief- Justice Taney was long and elaborate, and the following were among its leading conclusions : * Nelson to Tyler, “ Life of Taney, p. 385. t “ Mr. Buchanan was also preparing his inaugural address with his usual care and painstaking, and I cop¬ ied his drafts and recopied them until he had prepared it to his satisfaction. It underwent no alteration after he went to the National Hotel in Washington, except that he there inserted a clause in regard to the question then pending in the Supreme Court, as one that would dispose of a vexed and dangerous topic by the high¬ est judicial authority of the land.’^ — [Statement of James Buchanan Henry (President Buchanan's pri- 215 That the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States do not include or refer to negroes otherwise than as property; that they cannot become citizens of the United States nor sue in the Federal courts. That Dred Scott’s claim to freedom by reason of his residence in Illinois was a Missouri question, which Missouri law had de¬ cided against him. That the Constitution of the United States recognizes slaves as prop¬ erty, and pledges the P'ederal government to protect it ; and that the Missouri Compromise act and like prohibitory laws are unconstitu¬ tional. That the Circuit Court of the United States had no jurisdiction in the case and could give no judgment in it, and must be directed to dismiss the suit. This remarkable decision challenged the at¬ tention of the whole people to a degree never before excited by any act of their courts of law. Multiplied editions were at onceprinted,{ scattered broadcast over the land, read with the greatest avidity, and earnestly criticised. The public sentiment regarding it immediate¬ ly divided, generally on existing party lines — the South and the Democrats accepting and commending, the North and the Republicans spurning and condemning it. The great anti¬ slavery public was not slow in making a practi¬ cal application of its dogmas : that a sweeping and revolutionary exposition of the Constitu¬ tion had been attempted when confessedly the case and question had no right to be in court ; that an evident partisan dictum of national judges had been built on an avowed partisan decision of State judges ; that both the legis¬ lative and judicial authority of the nation had been trifled with ; that the settler’s sover¬ eignty ” in Kansas consisted only of a South¬ ern planter’s right to bring his slaves there ; and that if under the property ” theory the Constitution canies slavery to the territories, it would by the same inevitable logic carry it into free States. But much more offensive to the Northern mind than his conclusions of law were the language and historical assertions by which Chief-Justice Taney strove to justify them. “ In the opinion of the court,” said he, “ the legisla¬ tion and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither vate secretary) in Curtis’s “ Life of Buchanan,” Vol. H., p. 187.] t “ It may not be improper for me here to add that so great an interest did I take in that decision, and in its principles being sustained and understood in the commonwealth of Kentucky, that I took the trouble at my own cost to print or have printed a large edition of that decision to scatter it over the State ; and unless the mails have miscarried, there is scarcely a member elected to the Legislature who has not received a copy with my frank.” — [Vice-President Breckinridge, Frankfort speech, December, 1859.]

Page 221

2i6 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument. It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in relation to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the Con¬ stitution of the United Stated was framed and adopted. But the public history of every European nation dis¬ plays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. 1 hey had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations ; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.” Quoting the provisions of several early slave codes, he continues : “ They show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they then looked upon as so far below them in the scale of created beings that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as un¬ natural and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage. And no distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.” Referring to the Declaration, which asserts that all men are created equal, he remarks : “ The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so under¬ stood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration ; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the dis¬ tinguished men who framed the Declaration of Inde¬ pendence would have been utterly and flagrantly incon¬ sistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received uni¬ versal rebuke and reprobation.” He then applies the facts thus assumed, as follows : “ The only two provisions which point to them and include them treat them as property, and make it the duly of the Government to protect it ; no other power in relation to this race is to be found in the Constitu¬ tion. ... No one, we presume, supposes that any change in public opinion or feeling in relation to this unfortunate race, in the civilized nations of Europe or in this country, should induce the court to give to the words of the Constitution a more liberal construction in their favor than they were intended to bear when the instrument was framed and adopted.^ . . . It is not only the same in words, but the same in meaning, and delegates the same powers to the Government, and reserves and secures the same rights and privileges to the citizen ; and as long as it continues to exist in its present form, it speaks not only in the same words but with the same meaning and intent with which it spoke when it came from the hands of its framers and was voted on and adopted by the people of the United States.” This cold and pitiless historical delineation of the bondage, ignorance, and degradation of the unfortunate kidnapped Africans and their descendants in a by-gone century, as an immutable basis of constitutional interpreta¬ tion, was met by loud and indignant protest from the North. The people and press of that section seized upon the salient phrase of the statement, and applying it in the present tense, accused the Chief-Justice with saying that ‘‘ a negro has no rights which a wdiite man is bound to respect.’^ This was certainly a dis¬ tortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusa¬ ble, in view of the literal and unbending rigor with wdiich he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the Declaration of Independence. His un¬ merciful logic made the black before the law less than a slave ; it reduced him to the status of a horse or dog, a bale of dry-goods or a block of stone. Against such a debasement of any living image of the Divine Maker the resentment of the public conscience of the North was quick and unsparing. Had Chief-Justice Taney’s delineation been historically correct, it would have been never¬ theless unwise and unchristian to embody it in the form of a disqualifying legal sentence and an indelible political brand. But its man¬ ifest untruth was clearly shown by Mr. J ustice Curtis in his dissenting opinion. He reminded the Chief-Justice that at the adoption of the Constitution : “In five of the thirteen original States colored per¬ sons then possessed the elective franchise, and were among those by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. If so, it is not true in point of fact that the Constitution was made exclusively by the white race, and that it was made exclusively for the white race is in my opinion not only an assumption not warranted by anything in the Constitution, but contradicted by its opening declaration that it was or¬ dained and established by the people of the United States for themselves and their posterity; and as free colored persons were then citizens of at least five States, and so in every sense part of the people of the United States, they were among those for whom and whose posterity the Constitution was ordained and established.” Elsewhere in the same opinion he says : “ I shall not enter into an examination of the exist¬ ing opinions of that period respecting the African race, nor into any discussion concerning the meaning of those who asserted in the Declaration of Independ¬ ence that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pur¬ suit of happiness. My own opinion is, that a calm com¬ parison of these assertions of universal abstract truths, and of their own individual opinions and acts, would

Page 222

A HISTORY, 217 not leave these men under any reproach of inconsist¬ ency ; that the great truths they asserted on that sol¬ emn occasion they were ready and anxious to make effectual, wherever a necessary regard to circumstances, which no statesman can disregard without producing more evil than good, would allow ; and that it would not be just to them, nor true in itself, to allege that they intended to say that the Creator of all men had endowed the white race exclusively with the great natural rights which the Declaration of Independence asserts.” Mr. Justice McLean, in his dissenting opin¬ ion, completes the outline of the true histori¬ cal picture in accurate language : “I prefer the lights of Madison, Hamilton, and Jay, as a means of construing the Constitution in all its bearings, rather than to look behind that period into a traffic which is now declared to be piracy, and punished with death by Christian nations. I do not like to draw the sources of our domestic relations from so dark a ground. Our independence was a great epoch in the history of freedom ; and while I admit the Government was not made especially for the colored race, yet many of them were citizens of the New England States, and exercised the rights of suffrage when the Constitution was adopted, and it was not doubted by any intelligent person that its tendencies would greatly ameliorate their condition. “ Many of the States on the adoption of the Constitu¬ tion, or shortly afterward, took measures to abolish slavery within their respective jurisdictions; and it is a well-known fact that a belief was cherished by the leading men. South as well as North, that the institu¬ tion of slavery would gradually decline until it would become extinct. The increased value of slave labor, in the culture of cotton and sugar, prevented the real¬ ization of this expectation. Like all other communi¬ ties and States, the South were influenced by what they considered to be their own interests. But if we are to turn our attention to the dark ages of the world, why confine our view to colored slavery ? On the same principles white men were made slaves. All slavery has its origin in power and is against right.” To the constitutional theory advanced by the Chief- Justice, that Congress cannot exer¬ cise sovereign powers over Federal territories, and hence cannot exclude slave property from them, Justices McLean and Curtis also op¬ posed a vigorous and exhaustive argument, which the most eminent lawyers and states¬ men of that day deemed conclusive. The his¬ torical precedents alone ought to have deter¬ mined the issue. “ The judicial mind of this country. State and Fed¬ eral,” says McLean, “has agreed on no subject within its legitimate action with equal unanimity as on the power of Congress to establish territorial govern¬ ments. No court, State or Federal, no judge or states¬ man, is known to have had any doubts on this question for nearly sixty years after the power was exercised.” And Curtis adds : “Here are eight distinct instances, beginning with the first Congress, and coming down to the year 1848, in * The ownership of Dred Scott and his family passed by inheritance to the family of a Massachusetts Re¬ publican member of Congress. The following telegram, copied from the “ Providence Post ” into the “ Wash¬ ington Union,” shows the action of the new owner: which Congress has excluded slavery from the territory of the United States ; and six distinct instances in which Congress organized governments of territories by which slavery was recognized and continued, beginning also with the first Congress, and coming down to the year 1822. These acts were severally signed by seven Pres¬ idents of the United States, beginning with General Washington, and coming regularly down as far as Mr. John Quincy Adams, thus including all who were in pub¬ lic life when the Constitution was adopted. If the practi¬ cal construction of the Constitution, contemporaneously with its going into effect, by men intimately acquainted with its^^history from their personal participation in framing and adoptingit, and continued by them through a long series of acts of the gravest importance, be en¬ titled to weight in the judicial mind on a question of construction, it would seem to be difficult to resist the force of the acts above adverted to.” DOUGLAS AND LINCOLN ON DRED SCOTT. Manifestly, when the trained and informed intellects of the learned judges differed so radically concerning the principles of law and the facts of history applicable to the Dred Scott question, the public at large could hardly be expected to receive the new dog¬ mas without similar divergence of opinion. So far from exercising a healing influence, the decision widened immensely the already seri¬ ous breach between the North and the South. The persons immediately involved in the liti¬ gation were quickly lost sight of ; * but the constitutional principle affirmed by the court was defended by the South and denounced by the North with zeal and acrimony. The Republican party did not further question or propose to disturb the final judgment in the case ; but it declared that the Dred Scott doc¬ trines of the Supreme Court should not be made a rule of political action, and precisely this the South, together with the bulk of the Northern Democrats, insisted should be done. A single phase of the controversy will serve to illustrate the general drift of the discussion throughout the Union. Some three months after the delivery of the opinion of the court. Senator Douglas found himself again among his constituents in Illinois, and although there was no political campaign in progress, current events and the roused state of public feeling seemed to require that he should define his views in a public speech. It marks his acute¬ ness as a politician that he already realized what a fatal stab the Dred Scott decision had given his vaunted principle of Popular Sov¬ ereignty,^’ with which he justified his famous repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had ever since argued that congressional prohibi¬ tion of slavery was obsolete and useless, and “ St. Louis, May 26 [1857]. Dred Scott with his wife and two daughters were emancipated to-day by Taylor Blow, Esq. They had been conveyed to liim by Mr. Chaffee for that purpose.”

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2i8 ABRAHAM LINCOLN: that the choice of slavery or freedom ought to be confided to the local territorial laws, just as it was confided to local State constitu¬ tions. But the Dred Scott decision announced that slaves were property which Congress could not exclude from the territories, add¬ ing also the inevitable conclusion that what Congress could not do a territorial legisla¬ ture could not.* Difficult as this made his task of reconciling his pet hobby with the Dred Scott decision, such was his political boldness, and such had been his skill and success in sophistry, that he undertook even this hopeless effort. Douglas therefore made a speech at Spring- field, Illinois, on the 12th of June, 1857, in which he broadly and fully indorsed and commended the opinion of Chief- Justice Taney and his concurring associates, declar¬ ing that “Their judicial decisions will stand in all future time, a proud monument to their greatness, the admi¬ ration of the good and wise, and a rebuke to the par¬ tisans of faction and lawless violence. If unfortunately any considerable portion of the people of the United States shall so far forget their obligations to society as to allow the partisan leaders to array them in vio¬ lent resistance to the final decision of the highest ju¬ dicial tribunal on earth, it will become the duty of all the friends of order and constitutional government, without reference to past political differences, to organ¬ ize themselves and marshal their forces under the glorious banner of the Union, in vindication of the Constitution and supremacy of the laws over the ad¬ vocates of faction and the champions of violence.” Proceeding then with a statement of the case, he continued : “The material and controlling points in the case, those which have been made the subject of unmeasured abuse and denunciation, may be thus stated: ist. The court decided that under the Constitution of the United States, a negro descended from slave parents is not and can not be a citizen of the United States. 2d. That the act of March 6th, 1820, commonly called the Mis¬ souri Compromise act, was unconstitutional and void before it was repealed by the Nebraska act, and con¬ sequently did not and could not have the legal effect of extinguishing a master’s right to his slave in that territory. While the right continues in full force under the guarantees of the Constitution, and cannot be di¬ vested or alienated by an act of Congress, it necessarily remains a barren and a worthless right, unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regula¬ tions and local legislation, prescribing adequate reme¬ dies for its violation. These regulations and remedies must necessarily depend entirely upon the will and wishes of the people of the territory, as they can only be prescribed by the local legislatures. Hence the great principle of popular sovereignty and self-government is sustained and firmly established by the authority of this decision.” It is scarcely possible that Douglas con¬ vinced himself by such a glaring 7i07i sequitur ; but he had no other alternative. It was a des¬ perate expedient to shield himself as well as he might from the damaging recoil of his own * 19 Howard, pp. 450-1. temporizing statesmanship. The declaration made thus early is worthy of historical notice as being the substance and groundwork of the speaker’s somewhat famous “Freeport doc¬ trine,” or theory of “ unfriendly legislation,” to which Lincoln’s searching interrogatories drove him in the great Lin coin- Douglas de¬ bates of the following year. Repeated and amplified at that time, it became in the eyes of the South the unpardonable political heresy which lost him the presidential nomination and caused the rupture of the Democratic National Convention at Charleston in the summer of i860. For the moment, however, the sophism doubtless satisfied his many warm partisans. He did not dwell on the dangerous point, but trusted for oratorical effect rather to his ren e wed appeals to the popular prejudice against the blacks, so strong in central Illinois, indorsing and emphasizing Chief-Justice Taney’s asser¬ tion that negroes were not included in the words of the Declaration of Independence, and arguing that if the principle of equality were admitted and carried out to its logical results, it would necessarily lead not only to the abolition of slavery in the slave States, but to the general amalgamation of the two races. The Republican party of Illinois had been greatly encouraged and strengthened by its success in electing the State officers in the pre¬ vious autumn ; and as their recognized leader and champion, Lincoln made a reply to this speech some two weeks later, June 26th, 1857, also at Springfield. Though embracing other topics, the question of the hour, the Dred Scott decision, was nevertheless its chief sub¬ ject. The extracts here presented from it will give the reader some idea of its power of statement and eloquence : “ And now,” said Mr. Lincoln, “ as to the Dred Scott decision. That decision declares two propositions — first, that a negro cannot sue in the United States courts ; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit slavery in the territories. It was made by a divided court — dividing differently on the different points. Judge Douglas does not discuss the merits of the de¬ cision, and in that respect I shall follow his example, believing I could no more improve on McLean and Curtis, than he could on Taney. He denounces all who question the correctness of that decision, as offer¬ ing violent resistance to it. But who resists it? Who has, in spite of the decision, declared Dred Scott free, and resisted the authority of his master over him? Judicial decisions have tvyo uses — first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and, secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use they are called ‘precedents ’ and ‘authorities.’ We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the par¬ ticular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument it¬ self. More than .this would be revolution. But we

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A HISTORY. think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it over¬ rule this. We offer no resistance to it. Judicial decis¬ ions are of greater or less authority as precedents according to circumstances. That this should be so, accords both with common sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession. If this impor¬ tant decision had been made by the unanimous concur¬ rence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments through¬ out our history, and had been in no part based on as¬ sumed historical facts which are not really true ; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re¬ affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the pub¬ lic confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.” Rising above ail questions of technical con¬ struction to the broad and universal aspects of the issue, Mr. Lincoln continued : “The Chief- Justice does not directly assert, but plainly assumes as a fact, that the public estimate of the black man is more favorable now than it was in the days of the Revolution. This assumption is a mis¬ take. In some trifling particulars the condition of that race has been ameliorated; but as a whole, in this country, the change between then and now is decid¬ edly the other way; and their ultimate destiny has never appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years. In two of the five States — New Jersey and North Carolina — that then gave the free negro the right of voting, the right has since been taken away ; and in a third — New York — it has been greatly abridged ; while it has not been extended, so far as I know, to a single additional State, though the number of the State^'dias more than doubled. In those days, as I understand, masters could, at their own pleasure, emancipate their slaves ; but since then such legal re¬ straints have been made upon emancipation as to amount almost to prohibition. In those days, legis¬ latures held the unquestioned power to abolish slavery in their respective States; but now it is becoming quite fashionable for State constitutions to withhold that power from the legislatures. In those days, by common consent, the spread of the black man’s bond¬ age to the new countries was prohibited ; but now Congress decides that it will not continue the prohibi¬ tion, and the Supreme Court decides that it could not if it would. In those days, our Declaration of Inde¬ pendence was held sacred by all, and thought to in¬ clude all ; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed and hawked at, and torn, till if its framers could rise from their graves they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the the¬ ology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house, they have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him ; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key ; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places ; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of 219 mind and matter can be produced to- make the impos¬ sibility of his escape more complete than it is. . . . “There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate amalga¬ mation of the white and black races ; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon the chances of his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can by much drumming and repeating fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He therefore clings to this hope as a drown¬ ing man to the last plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in, from the opposition to the Dred Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of Independence includes all men, black as well as white, and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only be¬ cause they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes. He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal ; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands, without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal and the equal of all others. “ Chief- Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family; but he and Judge Douglas argue that tlie authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argu¬ ment comes to just nothing at all by the other fact that they did not at once or ever afterwards actually place all white people on an equality with one another. And this is the staple argument of both the Chief-Jus¬ tice and the senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain, unmistakable language of the Declaration. “ I think the authors of that notable instrument in¬ tended to include all men ; but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal — equal with ‘ certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious un¬ truth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influ¬ ence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that * all men are created equal ’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, as, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling-block to all those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should reappear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.”

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JACK. By the author of “The Gates Ajar,” “The Madonna' of the Tubs,” etc. ACK was a Fairharbor boy. This might be to say any of several things ; but it is at least sure to say one, — he was a fisherman, and the son of a fisherman. When people of another sort than Jack’s have told their earthly story through, the biography, the memorial, the obituary remains. Our poet, preacher, healer, politician, and the rest pass on to this polite sequel which society has ordained for human existence. When Jack dies, he stops. We find the fisherman squeezed into some corner of the accident column : “Washed overboard,” or “ Lost in the fog,” and that is the whole of it. He ends just there. There is no more Jack. No fellow-members in the Society for Something- or- No thing pass resolutions to his credit and the consolation of his family. N o funeral dis¬ course is preached over him and privately printed at the request of the parishioners. The columns of the religious weekly to which he did not subscribe contain no obituary sketches signed by the initials of friends not thought to be too afflicted to speak a good word for a dead man. From the press of the neighboring city no thin memorial volume sacred to his virtues and stone-blind to his defects shall ever issue. Jack needs a biographer. Such the writer of this sketch would fain aspire to be. Jack was born at sea. His father was bring¬ ing his mother home from a visit at a half- sister’s in Nova Scotia, for Jack’s mother was one of those homesick, clannish people who pine without their relations as much as some of us pine with them; and even a half-sister was worth more to her in her fanciful and fee¬ ble condition than a whole one is apt to be to bolder souls. She had made her visit at her half-sister’s, and they had talked over receipts, and com¬ pared yeast, and cut out baby things, and turned dresses, and dyed flannel, and gone to prayer meetings together; and Jack’s mother was coming home, partly because Jack’s father came for her, and partly because he happened to come sober, which was a great point, and partly because the schooner had to sail, which was another, — she was com¬ ing home, at all events, when a gale struck them. It was an ugly blow. The little two- masted vessel swamped, in short, at midnight of a moonlit night, off the coast, just the other side of seeing Cape Ann light. The crew were picked up by a three-master, and taken home. Aboard the three-master, in fright and chill and storm, the little boy was born. They always put it that he was born in Fairharbor. In fact, he was bom rounding Eastern Point. “ The toughest place to be borned in, this side o’ Torment,” Jack’s father said. But Jack’s mother said nothing at all. Jack’s father kept sober till he got the mother and the child safely into the little crumbling, gray cottage in half of whose mea¬ ger dimensions the family kept up the illusion which they called home. Then, for truth com¬ pels me, I must state that Jack’s father went straightway out upon what, in even less obscure circles than his, it is customary to call “ a tear.” There seems to be something in the savage, incisive fitness of this word which has over¬ ridden all mere distinctions of class or culture, and must ultimately make it a classic in the language. “ I’ve stood it long as I ken stand, and I’m goin’ on a tear, — I’m a-goin’ on a netariial tear,” said Jack’s father to his oldest dory-mate, a fellow he had a feeling for, much as you would for an oar you had handled a good many years; or perhaps a sail that you were used to, and had patched and watched, and knew the cracks in it, and the color of it, and when it was likely to give way, and whereabouts it would hold. In fact, that proved to be, in deed and truth, an eternal tear for Jack’s father. Drunk as a fisherman could be, — and that is say¬ ing a good deal, — he reshipped that night, knowing not whither nor why, nor indeed knowing that the deed was done ; and when he came to himself he was twelve hours out, on his way to the Banks of Newfoundland; and the young mother, with the baby on her arms, looked out of the frosty window over the foot of her old bedstead, and watched for him to come, and did not like to tell the neighbors that she was short of fuel. She was used to waiting — women are; Fairharbor women always are. But she had never waited so long before. And when, at the end of her waiting, the old dory-mate came in one night and told her that it hap¬ pened falling from the mast because he was not sober enough to be up there. Jack’s mother said she had always expected it. But

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JAC/C 221 she had not expected it, all the same. We never expect trouble, we only fear it. And she had put the baby on the edge of the bed, and got upon her knees upon the floor, and laid her face on the baby, and tried to say her prayers, — for she was a pious little wom¬ an, not knowing any better, — but found she could not pray, she cried so. And the old dory- mate told her not to try, but to cry as hard as she could. And she told him he was very kind; and so she did. For she was fond of her husband although he got drunk ; because he got drunk, one is tempted to say. Her heart had gone the way of the hearts of drunkards’ wives ; she loved in proportion to her misery, and gave on equation with what she lost. All the woman in her mothered her husband when she could no longer wifely wor¬ ship him. When he died she felt as if she had lost her eldest child. So, as I say, she kneeled with her face on the baby, and cried as if she had been the blessedest of wives. Afterward she thought of this with self-reproach. She said one day to the old dory-mate: When my trouble came, I did not pray to God. I’d ought to have. But I only cried at Him.” Jack had come into the world in a storm, and he began it stormily. He was a big, roar¬ ing baby, and he became a restless boy. His mother’s gentle and unmodified femininity was helpless before the problem of this wholly masculine little being. She said Jack needed a man to manage him. He smoked at six; he lived in the stables and on the wharves at eight; he came when he got ready, and went when he pleased; he obeyed when he felt like it, and when he was punished, he kicked. Once, in an imaginative moment, he bit her. She sent him to pack mackerel, for they were put to it to keep soul and body together, and he brought home such habits of speech as even the Fairharbor woman had never heard. From her little boy, her baby, — not yet old enough to be out of short trousers, and scarcely out of little sacks, had he been yoi^rs, my Lady ; at the pretty age when one still fastens lace collars round their necks, and has them under shelter by dark, and hears their prayers, and challenges the breath of heaven lest it blow too rudely on some delicate form¬ ing fiber of soul or body — from her little boy, at eight years old, the mother first learned the abysses of vulgarity in a seaport town. It must be admitted that her education in this respect had been defective. She had al¬ ways been one of the women in whose pres¬ ence her neighbor did not speak too carelessly. But Jack’s mother had the kind of eyes which do not see mire, — the meek, religious, deep-blue eye which even growing sons re- VoL. XXXIV.— 32. spect while they strike the tears from it. At his worst Jack regarded her as a species of sacred fact, much like heaven or a hymn. Some¬ times on Sunday nights he staid at home with her ; he liked to hear her sing. She sang Rock of Ages, in her best black alpaca with her work- worn hands crossed upon the gingham apron which she put on to save the dress. But ah, she said. Jack needed a man to manage him. And one day when she said this, in spite of her gentle unconsciousness, or because of it, the old dory-mate to whom she said it said he thought so too, and said if she had no objection he would like to be that man. And the Fairharbor widow, who had never thought of such a thing, said she didn’t know as she had ; for nobody knew, she said, how near to starving they had come ; and it was something to have a sober man. So, on this reasonable basis. Jack acquired a step-father, and his step-father sent him straightway to the Grand Banks. He meant it well enough, and perhaps it made no difierence in the end. But J ack was a little fellow to go fishing, — only ten. His first voyage was hard; it was a March voyage; he got badly frostbitten, and the skipper was rough. He was knocked about a good deal, and had the measles by himself in his berth ; and the men said they didn’t know they had brought a baby to the Banks, for they were very busy ; and Jack lay and cried a little, and thought about his mother, and wished he hadn’t kicked her, but forgot it when he got well. So he swaggered about among the men, as a boy does when he is the only one in a crew, and aped their talk, and shared their grog, and did their hard work, and learned their songs, and came home with the early stages of moral ossi¬ fication as well set in upon his little heart as a ten-year-old heart allows. The next voyage did not mend the matter ; nor the next. And though the old dory-mate was an honest fellow, he had been more suc¬ cessful as a dory-mate than he was as a step-father. He and Jack did not ‘‘ get on.” Sometimes Jack’s mother wondered if he had needed a man to manage him ; but she never said so. She was a good wife, and she had fuel enough, now; she only kissed Jack and said she meant it for the best, and then she went away and sang Rock of Ages to the tune of Martyn, very slow, and quite on the wrong key. It seemed to make her feel better, poor thing. Jack sometimes wondered why. When he was twelve years old he came home from a winter voyage one night, and got his pay for his share, — boy’s pay, yet, for a boy’s share ; but bigger than it used to be, — and did not go home first, but went rollicking off with a crowd of Portuguese. It was a Sun-

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222 JACK, day night, and his mother was expecting him, for she knew the boat was in. His step-father expected him too,— and his money; and Jack knew that. His mother had been sick, but Jack did not know that; she had been very sick, and had asked for him a great deal. There had been a baby, — born dead while its father was off-shore after cod, — and it had been very cold weather; and something had gone wrong. At midnight of that night some one knocked at the door of the crumbling cottage. The step¬ father opened it; he looked pale and agi¬ tated. Some boys were there in a confused group ; they bore what seemed to be a life¬ less body on a drag, or bob-sled ; it was Jack, dead drunk. It was the first time, — he was only twelve, — and one of the Fairharbor boys took the pipe from his mouth to explain : He was trapped by a Forty gee, and they’ve stole every cent of him, ’n kicked him out ’n lef’ him, stranded like a monk-fish, so me and the other fellers we borryed a sled and brung him home, for we thought his mother’d rather. He ain’t dead, but he’s jest as drunk as if he was sixty ! ” The Fairharbor boy mentioned this circum¬ stance with a kind of abnormal pride, as if such superior maturity were a point for a com¬ rade to make note of. But Jack’s step-father went out softly and shut the door, and said : “ Look here, boys, — help me in with him, will you? Not that way. His mother’s in there. She died an hour ago.” And so the curse of his heredity came upon him. She never knew, thank Heaven. Her knowledge would have been a kind of terri¬ ble fore-omniscience, if she had. She would have had no hope of him from that hour. Her experience would have left her no illusions. The drunkard’s wife would have educated the drunkard’s mother too ‘‘liberally” for that. She Avould have taken in the whole scope and detail of the future in one midnight moment’s breadth, as a problem in the higher mathemat¬ ics may rest upon the width of a geometrical point. But she did not know. We say — I mean, it was our fashion of saying — that she did not know. God was merciful. She had asked for Jack, it seemed, over and over, but did not complain of him for not coming; she never complained of Jack. She said the poor boy must have staid somewhere to have a pleasant time ; and she said they were to give her love to him, if he came in while she was asleep. And then she asked her husband to sing Rock of Ages for her, because she did not feel very strong. He couldn’t sing, — more than a hali¬ but, poor fellow; but he did not like to disap¬ point her, for he thought she looked what he called “miser’ble”; so he sat down by the bed and raised his hoarse, weather-beaten voice to the tune of Martyn, as best he could, and mixed up two verses inextricably with a line from “ Billy’s on the Bright Blue Sea,” which he added because he saw he must have some¬ thing to fill out, and it was all he could think of, — but she thanked him very gently, and said he sang quite well ; and said once more that he was to give her love to Jack; and went to sleep afterward ; and, by and by, they could not wake her to see her boy of twelve brought to her drunk. The curse of his heredity was upon him. We may blame, we may loathe, we may won¬ der, we may despair; but we must not forget. There were enough to blame without remem¬ bering. Jack, like all drunkards, soon learned this. In fact, he did not remember it very well himself, — not having been acquainted with his father; and never sentimentalized over him¬ self nor whined for his bad luck, — but owned up to his sins, with the bluntness of an honest, bad fellow. He was rather an honest fellow, in spite of it all. He never lied when he was sober. If the curse of his ancestry had come upon him, its compensatory temperament came too. Jack had the merry heart of the easy drinker. Born wdth his father’s alcoholized brain- cells, poor baby, endowed with the narcotined conscience which this species of parentage bequeaths, he fell heir to the kind of attract¬ iveness that goes with the legacy. He was a happy-go-lucky fellow. Life sat airily on him. He had his mother’s handsome eyes dashed with his. father’s fun (for she couldn’t take a joke, to save her) ; he told a good story ; he did a kind deed ; he was gen¬ erous with his money when he had any, and never in the least disturbed when he hadn’t. He was popular to the dangerous extent that makes one’s vices seem a kind of social intro¬ duction, and not in Jack’s circle alone, be it said. Every crew wanted him. Drunk or sober, as a shipmate he was at par. It was usually easy for him to borrow. The fellows made up his fines for him, there was always somebody to go bail for him when he got be¬ fore the police court. Arrested perhaps a half dozen times a year in his maddest years, he never was sent to the House in his life. There were always people enough who thought it a pity to let such a good fellow go to prison. He had — I was going to say as a matter of course he had — curly hair. One should not omit to notice that he was splendidly tat¬ tooed. He was proud, as seamen are, of his brawny arms, dashed from wrist to shoulder with the decorative ingenuity of his class. Jack had gesthetic views of his own, indeed, about his personal allowance of indigo. He

Page 228

JACJ^. 223 had objected to the customary medley of anchors, stars, and crescents, and exhibited a certain reserve of taste, which was rather interesting. On his left arm he bore a very crooked lighthouse rising from a heavy sea; he was, in fact, quite flooded along the bicipi¬ tal muscle with waves and billows, but nothing else interfered with the massive proportions of the effect. This was considered a masterly design, and Jack was often called upon to push up his sleeve and explain how he came by the inspiration. Upon the other arm he wore a crucifix, ten inches long ; this was touched with blood-red ink ; the dead Christ hung upon it, lean and pitiful. Jack said he took the crucifix against his drowning. It was an uncommonly large and ornate crucifix. Jack was a steady drinker at nineteen. At twenty-five he was what either an inexperi¬ enced or a deeply experienced temperance missionaty would have called incurable. The intermediate grades would have confidently expected to save him. Of course he reformed. He would not have been interesting if he had not. The unmiti¬ gated sot has few attractions even for seafar¬ ing society. It is the foil and flash, the by-play and side-light of character that “ lead us on.’^ Jack was always reforming. After that night when he was brought home on the bob-sled, the little boy was as steady and as miserable as he knew how to be for a long time ; he drew the unfortunate inference that the one involved the other. By the time his mother’s grave was green with the scanty Fairharbor church-yard grass, — for even the sea- wind seems to have a grudge against the very dead for choosing dry graves in Fairharbor, and scants them in their natural covering, — by that time rank weeds had overgrown the sorrow of the homeless boy. He and his step-father “ got on ” less than ever now, as was to be expected ; and when one day J ack announced with characteristic candor that he was going to get drunk, if he went to Torment for it, the two parted company ; and the crumbling cot¬ tage knew Jack no more. By and by, when his step-father was drowned at Georges^Jack borrowed the money for some black gloves and a hat-band. He had the reputation of be¬ ing a polite fellow ; the fisherman spelled it t-o-n-y. Truth to tell, the old dory-mate had wondered sometimes on Sunday afternoons if he had been the man to manage Jack ; and felt that the main object of his second mar¬ riage had been defeated. Jack, as I say, was always reforming. Every temperance society in the city had a hand at him. They were of the old-fashioned, easy type which took their responsibilities comfort¬ ably. They held him out on a pair of moral tongs and tried to toast his misdemeanors out of him, before a quick fire of pledges and badges ; and when he tumbled out of the tongs, and asked the president and treasurer why they didn’t bow to him in the street when he was drunk, or why, if he was good enough for them at the lodge-room, he wasn’t good enough to shake hands with before folks on the post-office steps, or propounded any of those ingenious posers with which his kind are in the habit of disturbing the benevolent spirit, they snapped the tongs to, and turned him over to the churches. These touched him gingerly. They invited him into the free pews, — a dismal little row in the gallery, — sent him a tract or two, and asked him a few well-meant and very confus¬ ing religious questions to which Jack’s replies were far from satisfactory. One ardent per¬ son, a recent convert, coaxed him into a weekly prayer-meeting. It was a very good, honest, uninteresting prayer-meeting, and there were people sitting there beside him with clean lives and clear faces whose motives Jack was not worthy to understand, and he knew enough to know it. But it happened to be a foreign mission prayer-meeting, devoted to the Burmese field; which was, therefore, be it said, not so much an argument against foreign missions, as a deficient means of grace to the fisherman. Jack was terribly bored. He ran his hands through his curls, and felt for his tobacco, and whispered to the young convert to know if there weren’t any waits in the play so a man could get out without hurting any¬ body’s feelings. But just then the young con¬ vert struck up a hymn, and Jack staid. He liked the singing. His restless, hand¬ some face took on a change such as a windy day takes on toward dusk, when the breeze dies down. When he found they were singing Rock of Ages, he tried to sing it too, — for he was a famous tenor on deck. But when he had sung a line or two, — flash! down in one of the empty pews in front, he saw a thin old lady with blue eyes, sitting in a black alpaca dress with her hands clasped on her gingham apron. ‘‘ That’s my mother. Have I got the jim- jams ? ” asked this unaccustomed worshiper of himself. But then he remembered that he was sober. He could sing no longer after this, but bowed his head and looked into his old felt hat, and wondered if he were going to cry, or get religion. In point of fact, he did neither of these things, because a very old church- member arose just then, and said he saw a poor castaway in our midst to night, and he besought the prayers of the meeting for his soul. Jack stopped crying. He looked hard at the old church-member. He knew him ; had

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224 JACX. always known him. The fisherman waited till that prayer was through, — it was rather a long prayer, — and then he too sprang to his feet. He looked all around the decorous place ; his face was white with the swift passion of the drinking man. I never spoke in meetin’ in my life,” said Jack in an unsteady voice. “ I ain’t religious. I drink. But I’m sober to-night, and I’ve got something to say to you. I heard what that man said. I know him. He’s old Jim Crownoby. I’ve always know’d Jim Crownoby. He owns a sight of property in this town. He’s a rich man. He owns that block on Black street. You know he does. You can’t deny it. Nor he can’t neither. All I want to say is, I’ve got drunk in one of them places of his, time again ; and if there ain’t anybody but him to pray for my soul, I’d rather go to the devil.” Jack stopped short, jammed on his hat, and left the meeting. In the shocked rustle that followed, some one had the tact to start “ Rescue the Perishing,” as the fisherman strode down the broad aisle. He did not go again. The poor young convert followed him up for a week or two, and gave him an expen¬ sive Testament, bought out of an almost invis¬ ible personal income, in vain. I’ve no objections to you,” said Jack can¬ didly; “ I’m much obliged to ye for yer polite¬ ness, sir. But them churches that sub-leases to a rum-seller, I don’t think they onderstand a drinkin’ man. Hey ? Well, ain’t he their big¬ gest rooster, now ? Don’t he do the heft of the prayin’, and the tallest of their crowin’, consequent ? Thought so. Better leave me go, sir. I ain’t a pious man ; I’m a fisherman.” Fishes,” said Jack, is no fools.’^ He gave voice to this remark one day in Boston, when he was twenty- five years old. He was trying to entertain a Boston girl ; she was not familiar with Fairharbor or with the scenery of his calling ; he wanted to interest her; he liked the girl. He had liked a good many girls, it goes without saying; but this one had laid upon the fisherman — she knew not how, he knew not why, and what man or woman of us could have told him ? — the power that comes not of reason, or of time, or of try¬ ing, or of wisdom, or of rightness, but of the mystery to which, when we are not speaking of Jack, we give the name of love. It seems a sacrilege, admit, to write it here, and of these two. But then, again, it would be easy to be wrong. The study of the relativity of human feeling is a delicate science ; it calls for a fine moral equipment. If this were the high-water mark of nature for Jack — and who shall say ? — the tide shall have its sacred due, even down among those weeds and in that mud. He liked that girl, among them all, and her he thought of gently. He had known her a long time; as much as three months. When the vessel came into Boston to sell halibut, he had a few days there, drifting about as fishermen do, homeless and reckless ; dashing out the wages just paid off, in ways that some¬ times he remembered and sometimes he for¬ got, and that usually left him without a dollar toward his next fine when he should be wel¬ comed by the police court of his native city on returning home. Jack thought, I say, gravely of this girl. He never once took her name in vain among the fellows, and she had not been a very good girl either. But Jack reflected that he was not very good himself, if you came to that. His downright, honest nature stood him in stead in this moral distinction ; there was al¬ ways a broad streak of generosity in him at his worst; it goes with the temperament, we say, and perhaps we say it too often to give him half the credit of it. She was a pretty girl, and she was very young. She had told Jack her story, as they strolled about the bright Boston streets on comfortable winter evenings; when he took her to the variety show, or to the oyster-shop, and they talked together. Jack pitied her. Perhaps she deserved it ; it was a sad little story — and she was so very young ! She had a gentle way, with Jack; for some reason, God knows why, she had trusted him from the first, and he had never once been known to disturb her trust. That was the pleasant part of it. On this evening that we speak of, Jack was sober. He was often sober when he had an evening to spend with the Boston girl; not always — no ; truth must be told. She looked as pretty as was in her that night ; she had black eyes and a kind of yellow hair that Jack had never seen crinkled low on the forehead above black eyes before ; he thought her as fine to look at as any actress he ever saw ; for the stage was Jack’s standard of the magnifi¬ cent, as it is to so niany of his sort. The girl’s name was Teen. Probably she had been called Christine once, in her country home; she even told Jack that she had been baptized. “ I wasn’t myself,” said Jack ; “ I roared so, they darsen’t do it. My mother got me to church, for she was a pious woman, and I pummeled the parson in the face with both fists, and she said she come away, for she was ashamed of me. She ahvays said that chris¬ tenin’ wasn’t never legal. It disappointed her, too. I was an awful baby.” “ I should think likely,” said Teen with can¬ dor Do you set much by your mother ? ” She’s dead,” said Jack in a subdued voice.

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JACK. 225 “l ain’t religious. I DRINK.” Teen looked at him; she had never heard him speak like that. I ’most wished mine was,” said the girl ; “ she’d ’a’ b’en better off — along of me.” ‘‘ That’s so,” said Jack. The two took a turn in silence, up and down the brightly lighted street ; their thoughts looked out strangely from their marred young faces ; they felt as if they were in a foreign country, jack had meant to ask her to take a drink, but he gave it up; he couldn’t, somehow. Was you always a fisherman ? ” asked Teen, feeling, with a woman’s tact, that some¬ body must change the current of the subject. I was a fisherman three generations back,” Jack answered her; '^horned a fisherman, you bet ! I couldn’t ’a’ b’en nothin’ else if I’ddrown- dedforit. It’s a smart business. You hev to keep your wits about you. Fishes is no fools.” Ain’t they ? ” asked the girl listlessly. She was conscious of failing in conversational brill¬ iancy; but the truth was, she couldn’t get over what they had been saying : it was always un¬ fortunate when she remembered her mother. Jack began to talk to her about his business again, but Teen did not reply; and when he looked down at her to see what ailed her, there were real tears rolling over her pretty cheeks. Why, Teen ! ” said Jack. '' Leave go of me. Jack,” said Teen, “and let me get off; I ain’t good company to-night. I’ve got the dumps. I can’t entertain ye. Jack. VoL. XXXIV.— 32^ And Jack — don’t let’s talk about mothers next time, will we ? It spoils the evenin’. Leave go of me, and I’ll go home by my own self. I’d rather.” “ I won’t leave go of you!” cried Jack with a sudden blazing purpose lighting up all the corners of his soul. It was a white light, not un¬ holy ; it seemed to shine through and through him with a soft glow like a candle on an altar. “ I’ll never leave go of you. Teen, if you’ll say so. I’d rather marry you.” “ Marry me ? ” said Teen. “Yes, marry you. I’d a sight rather. There, now! It’s out with it. What do you say to that. Teen ? ” Teen wiped away the tears that fell for her mother with one slow finger-tip. A ring on her finger glistened in the light as she did this. She saw the sparkle, tore off the ring and dashed it away; it fell into the mud, and Avas trodden out of sight instantly. Jack sprang gallantly to pick it up. “ Don’t you touch it ! ” cried the girl. She put her bared hand back upon his arm ; the ring had left a little mark upon her finger; she glanced at this, and up into Jack’s hand¬ some face ; he looked very kind ! “Jack, dear,” said Teen softly, “I ain’t fit to marry ye.” “ You’re fitter’n I be,” answered Jack man¬ fully. Teen sighed; she did not speak at once : other tears came now, but these Avere

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226 JACK ROCK OF AGES ! tears for herself and for Jack. Jack felt this, after his fashion ; they gave him singular con¬ fusion of mind. “ I wouldn’t cry about it, d'een. You needn’t have me if you don’t want to.” But 1 want to, Jack.” Honest ? ” Honest it is. Jack.” “ Will ye make a good wife. Teen ? ” asked Jack, after some unprecedented thought.

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JACK. ril try, Jack.” “ You’ll never go back on me, nohow ? ” “ I ain’t that sort! ” cried the girl, drawing herself up a little. A new dignity sat upon her with a certain grace which was beautiful to see. “ Will you swear it, d een ? ” If you’d rather, Jack.” \V hat’ll you swear by, now ? ” asked Jack. \ oil musi: swear by all you hold holy.” What do 1 hold holy ? ” mused d'een. VV ill you swear,” continued Jack seriously, will you swear to me by the Rock of Ages ? ” \Mio’s that ? ” asked the girl. ‘‘ It’s a hymn-tune. 1 want you to swear me by the Rock of Ages that you’ll be that you say you will, to me. Will you do it, Teen ? ” ‘‘ Oh, yes,” said Teen, I’ll do it. Where shall we come acrost one ? ” I guess I can find it,” Jack replied. I can find ’most anything I set out to.” So they started out at random, in their reck¬ less fashion, in the great city, to find the Rock of Ages for the asking. Jack led his companion hither and yon, peering into churches, and vestries, and mis¬ sions, and wherever he saAv signs of sacred things. Singing they heard abundantly in the gay town; songs, merry, mad, and sad; but not the song for a girl to swear by, that she would be true wife to a man who trusted her. Wandering thus, on the strange errand whose pathos was so far above their own dream or knowledge, they chanced at last upon the place, and the little group of people known in that part of Boston as Mother Mary’s meeting. The girl said she had been there once, but that Mother Mary was too good for her; she was one of the real kind. Everybody knew Mother Mary, and her husband ; he was a par¬ son. d'hey were poor folks themselves. Teen said, and understood poor folks, and did for 227 them all the year round, not ciearing out like rich ones when it came hot weather, but stood by ’em. Teen said. They kept the little room open, and it you wanted a prayer you went in and got it, just as you’d call for a drink or a supper; it was always on hand for you, and a kind word sure to come with it, and you al¬ ways knew where to go for ’em ; and Mother Mary treated you like folks. She liked her. Teen said. If she’d been a different girl, she’d have gone there of a cold night all winter. But Teen said she felt ashamed. “ I guess she’ll have what I’m after,” said Jack. “ She sounds like she would. Let’s go in and see.” So they went into the quiet place, among the praying people, and stood staring, for they felt embarrassed. Mother Mary looked very white and peaceful ; she was a tall, fair woman; she wore a black dress with white about the bosom; it was a plain, old dress, much mended. Mother Mary did not look rich, as Teen had said. The room was filled with poor creatures gathered about her, like her children, while she talked with them and taught them as she could. She crossed the room immediately to \yhere the young man stood, with the girl be¬ side him. ''We’ve come,” said Jack, "to find the Rock of Ages.” He drew d'een’s hand through his arm, and held it for a minute; then, moved I'y some fine instinct mysterious to himself, he lifted and laid it in Mother Mary’s own. " Explain it to her, ma’am,” he said; " tell her, won’t you ? I’m going to marry her if she’ll have me. I want her to swear by some¬ thin’ holy she’ll be a true wife to me. She hadn’t anything particularly holy herself, and the holiest thing I know of is the Rock of Ages. I’ve heard my mother sing it. She’s dead. We’ve been huntin’ Boston over to¬ night after the Rock of Ages.” THE CRUMBLING COTTAGE.

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228 JACK. shame his promised wife before these people. Swear by that., you’ll be true wife to me ? ” ‘‘I swear it, Jack,” sobbed Teen. ‘‘If thafs the Rock of Ages, I swear by it, though I was to die for it, I’ll be an honest wife to you.” “ Come back when you’ve got your license,” said Mother Mary, smil¬ ing through her tears, “and my husband will marry you if you want him to.” “ We’ll come to-mor¬ row,” Jack answered gravely. “Jack,” said Teen in her pretty way, — for she had a very pretty way, — “if I’m an honest wife to you, will you be kind to me ? ” She did not ask him to swear it by the Rock of Ages. She took his word for it, poor thing. Women do. TEEN AND HER BABY- Mother Mary was used to the pathos of her sober work, but the tears sprang now to her large and gentle eyes. She did not speak to Jack, — could not possibly, just then; but, de¬ laying only for the moment till she could com¬ mand herself, she flung her rich, maternal voice out upon the words of the old hymn. Her hus¬ band joined her, and all the people present swelled the chorus. “ Rock of Ages, cleft for me ! Let me hide myself in thee ; Be of sin the double cure ; Cleanse me from its guilt and power.” They sang it all through, — the three verses that everybody knows, — and Jack and Teen stood listening. Jack tried to sing himself ; but Teen hid her face, and cried upon his arm. “ Thou must save,” sang the praying peo¬ ple; “Thou must save, and thou alone!” The strain died solemnly ; the room was quiet ; the minister yonder began to pray, and all the people bowed their heads. But Mother Mary stood quite still with the girl’s hand trembling in her own. “Swear it. Teen?” Jack bent down his curly head and whispered; he would not Mother Mary’s hus¬ band married them, next day at the Mission meeting; and Mother Mary sat clown at the melodeon in the cor¬ ner of the pleasant place, and played and sang Toplady’s great hymn for them, as Jack had asked her. It was his wedding march. He was very sober and gentle, — almost like a better man. Teen thought him the hand¬ somest man she had ever seen. “ Oh, I say. Teen,” he nodded to her as they walked away, “ one thing I forgot to tell you, — I’m reformed.” “ Are you, Jack ? ” “ I f I ever drink a drop again, so help me — ” But he stopped. “ So help you. Rock of Ages ? ” asked the new-made wife. But Jack winced; he was honest enough to hesitate at this. “ I don’t known’s I’d darst — tJiat'^ he added ruefully. “ But I’m reformed. I have lost all hanker for liquor. I shall never drink again. You’ll see. Teen.” Teen did see, as was to be expected. She saw a great deal, poor thing. Jack did not drink, — for a long time; it was nearly five months, for they kept close count. He took her to Fairharbor, and rented the old half of the crumbling cottage where his mother used

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JACK, to sit and watch for him on long, late evenings. The young wife did the watching now. They planted some cinnamon rose-bushes by the doorsteps of the cottage, and fostered them affectionately. Jack was as happy and sober as possible to begin with. He picked the cin¬ namon roses and brought them in for his wife to wear. He was proud to have a home of his own ; he had not expected to ; m fact he had never had one since that night when his mother said they were to give her love to him, if he came home while she was asleep. He had beaten about so, sleeping for the most part in his berth, and sailing again directly; he had never had any place, he said, to hang his winter clothes in; closets and bureaus seemed treasure-houses to him, and the kitch¬ en-fire a luxury greater than a less good-look¬ ing man would have deserved. When he came home, drenched and chilly, from a winter voy¬ age, and Teen took the covers off, and the fiery heat of the coals leaped out to greet him, and she stood in the rich color, with her yellow hair, young and fair and sweet as any man’s wife could look, and said she had missed him, and called him her dear husband. Jack even went so far as to feel that Teen was the luxury. He treated her accordingly ; that was at first. He came straight home to her; he kept her in flour and fuel ; she had the little things and the gentle words that women need. Teen was very fond of him. This was the first of it, — I was going to say this was the worst of it. All there was of Teen seemed to have gone into her love for Jack. A part of Jack had gone into his love for Teen. Teen was very happy, to begin with. The respectable neighbors came to see her, and said, “We’re happy to make your acquaintance.” Nobody knew that it had not always been so that Teen’s acquaintance would have been a source of social happiness. And she wrote to her mother that she was married ; and her mother came on to make her a little visit ; and Teen cried her soul out for joy. She was very mod¬ est and home-keeping and loving; no wife in the land was truer than this girl he had chosen was to the fisherman who chose her. Jack knew that. He believed in her. She made him happy; and therefore she kept him right. All this was at first. It did not last. Why should we expect that, when we see how little there is in the relation of man and woman which lasts ? If happy birth and gentle rearing, and the forces of what we call education, and the silken webs of spun refinements, are so strained in "the tie which requires two who cannot get away from each other to make each other happy, how should we ask, of the law of chances, the miracle for Teen and Jack ? 229 There was no miracle. No transubstantia- tion of the common bread to holy flesh was wrought upon that poor altar. Their lot went the way of other lots, with the facts of their history dead against them. Trouble came, and poverty, and children, and care, and distaste. Jack took to his old ways and his wife to the tears that they bring. The children died ; they were poor sickly babies who wailed a little while in her arms, and slipped out because there wasn’t enough to them to stay. And the gray house was damp. Some said it was diphtheria; but their mother said it was the will of God. She added. Might his will be done ! On the whole she was not sorry. Their father struck her when he was in liquor. She thought if the babies lived they might get hurt. A month before the last one was born she showed to Jack’s biographer a bruise across her shoulder, long and livid. She buttoned her dress over it with hasty repentance : “ Maybe I’d oughtn’t to have told,” she said. “ But he said he’d be kind to me.” Jack was very sorry about this when he was sober. He kissed his wife, and bought a pair of pink kid shoes for the baby ; which it never grew large enough to wear. I am not writing a temperance story, only the biography of a fisherman, and a few words will say better than many how it was. Alco¬ holized brain-cells being one of the few be¬ quests left to society which the heirs do not dispute, J ack went back to his habits with the ferocity that follows abstinence. Hard luck came. Teen was never much of a house¬ keeper; she had left her mother too early; had never been taught. Things were soggy, and not always clean ; and she was so busy in being struck and scolded, and in bearing and burying babies, that it grew comfortless beside the kitchen fire. The last of the illusion which had taken the name of home within the walls of the crumbling half-cottage withered out of it, just as the cinnamon roses did the summer J ack watered them with whisky by a little emotional mistake. A worse thing had happened too. Some shipmate had “ told ” in the course of time ; and Teen’s pre-matrimonial story got set adrift upon the current — one of the cruelest currents of its kind — of Fairharbor gossip. The respectable neighbors made her feel it, as only respectable neighbors do such things. Jack, raging, overheard her name upon the wharves. Teen had been “ that she said she would to him. He knew it. No matron in the town had kept her life or heart more true. In all her sickness and trouble and slackness, and in going cold or hungry, and in her vivid beauty that none or all of these things could quench. Teen had carried a sweet dignity of

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230 JACK, her own as the racer in the old Promethean festival carried the torch while he ran against the wind. Jack knew, — oh, yes, he knew. But he grew sullen, suspicious. When he was drunk he was always jealous ; it began to take that form. When he was sober he still ad¬ mired his wife ; sometimes he went so far as to remember that* he loved her. When this happened, Teen dried her eyes, and brushed her yellow hair, and washed up the kitchen floor, and made the coflee, and said to the grocer when she paid for the sugar : My husband has reformed.” One night Jack came home unexpectedly; a strange mood sat upon him, which his wife did not find herself able to classify by any of the instant and exquisite perceptions which grow, like new faculties, in wives. He had been drinking heavily when he left her, and she had not looked for him for days ; if he sailed as he was, it would be a matter of weeks. Teen went straight to him ; she thought he might be hurt; she held out her arms as she would to one of her children ; but he met her with a gesture of indifference, and she shrank back. ‘‘She’s here,” said Jack. “ Mother Mary’s in this d - town. I see her.” “ I wish she’d talk to you,” said Teen, say¬ ing precisely the wrong thing by the fatal in¬ stinct which so often possesses drunkards’ wives. “ You do, do you ? ” quoth Jack. “ Well, I don’t. I haven’t give her the chance.” He crushed on his hat and stole out of the house again. But his mood was on him yet ; the differ¬ ence being that his wife was out of it. He sulked and skulked about the streets alone for a while; he did not go back to the boys- just then, but wandered with the apparent aimless¬ ness in which the most tenacious aims are hidden. Mother Mary and her husband were holding sailors’ meetings in the roughest quar¬ ter of the town. There was need enough of Mother Mary in Fairharbor. A crowd had gathered to hear the novelty. Fairharbor sea¬ men were none too used to being objects of consideration ; it was a matter of mark that a parson and a lady should hire a room from a rich fish-firm, pay for it out of their own scanty pockets, and invite one in from deck or wharf, in one’s oil-clothes or jumper, to hear what a messmate of Jack’s called “a high-toned prayer.” He meant perhaps to convey the idea that the petition treated the audience politely. Jack followed the crowd in the dark, shrink¬ ing in its wake, for he was now sober enough not to feel like himself. He waited till the last of the fellows he knew had gone into the place and then crept up on tiptoe, and put his face against the window of the salt-cod ware¬ house where the little congregation was gath¬ ered, and looked in. The room was full and bright. It wore that same look of peace and shelter which he remembered. Mother Mary stood as she had stood before, tall and pale in her black dress with the white covering on her bosom. Her husband had been speaking to the fishermen, and she, as Jack put his gnarled hand to his excited eyes, and his eyes to the window-glass, turned her face full about, to start the singing. She seemed to Jack to look at him. Her look was sad. He felt ashamed, and cowered down below the window-sill. But he wanted to hear her sing, — he had never heard anybody sing like Mother Mary, — and so he staid there for a little while, curled against the fish-house. It began to rain and he was pretty wet; but Jack was in his jumper, and a ragged old jumper at that; he knew he was not so handsome as he used to be; he felt that he cut a poor figure even for a drunken fisherman; all the self-respect that life had left him shrank from letting Mother Mary see him. Jack would not go in. A confused no¬ tion came to him, as he crouched against the warehouse, in the showers, that it was just as well it should rain on him ; it might wash him. He pushed up his sleeves, and let the rain fall on his arms. He found an old Cape Ann tur¬ key box there was lying about, turned it edge¬ wise so that one ragged knee might rest upon it, and thus bring his eye to a level with the window-sill, while yet he could not be seen from within. So he crouched listening. The glimmer from the prayer-room came across the fisherman’s bared right arm, and struck the crucifix. Jack had the unconscious atti¬ tude of one sinking, who had thrown up his arms to be saved. The Christ on the crucifix looked starved and sickly. Jack did not no¬ tice the crucifix. At this moment. Mother Mary’s yearning voice rang out above the hoarse chorus of the fishermen, whose weather-ragged and rever¬ ent faces lifted themselves mistily before her, as if they had been the countenance of one helpless man : “ Rock of Ages, cleft for me ! “ Oh, my God ! ” cried Jack. It was the next day that some one told Mother Mary, at the poor boarding-house where she staid, that a woman wanted a few words with her. The visitor was I'een. She was worn and wan and sobbing with exciffe- ment. Her baby was soon to be born. She did not look as if she had enough to eat. She had come, she said, just to see Mother Mary,

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JACK. just to tell her, for Jack never would tell himself, but she was sure her husband had reformed ; he would never drink again ; he meant to be a sober man; and Mother Mary ought to know she did it, for she did, God bless her ! “ I’ve walked all this way to bless you for myself,” said Teen. I ain’t very fit for walkin’ nor I can’t afford a ferry-ticket, for he didn’t leave me nothin’ on this trip, but I’ve come to bless you. My husband borne to your meetin’. Mother Mary, by himself. Jack did. He never goes to no meetin’s, — nobody could¬ n’t drove him ; but he come to yours, because he says you treat a man like folks, and he wouldn’t go inside, for he’d b’en drinkin’ and he felt ashamed. So he set outside upon a box behind the winder and he peeked in. And he said it rained on him while he set peekin’, for he wanted to get a look at you. And he come home and told me, for we’d had some words beforehand, and I was glad to see him. I was settin’ there and cryin’ when he come. ‘ I wouldn’t. Teen,’ says he, ‘ for I’ve seen Mother Mary, and I’m reformed,’ says he. So he told me how he set upon the box and peeked. He says you looked straight at him. He says you stood up very tall and kind of white. He says you read something out of a book, and then you sang to him. He says the song you sang was Rock of Ages, and it made him feel so bad I had to cry to see him. He come in and he got down on the lounge against our window, and he put his hand acrost his eyes and groaned like he was hurted in an accident. And he says, ' Teen, I wished I was a better man.’ And I says, ^ Jack, I wished you was.’ And he says, ^ I lost the hanker when I heard her sing the Rock of Ages, and if I lost the hanker, I could swear off.’ So I didn’t answer him, for if I says ‘ do swear off,’ he’d just swear on, — they won’t, you know, for wives. But I made him a cup of coffee, for I didn’t know what else to do, and I brought it to him on the lounge, and he thanked me. ‘ Teen,’ he says, ‘ I’ll never drink a drop again, so help me. Mother Mary ! ’ And then he kissed me, for they don’t, you know, after you’ve been married. And he’s gone out haddockin’, but we parted very kind. And so I come to tell you, for it mayn’t be many days that I could walk it, and I’ve been that to him as I said I should, and I thought you’d better know.” “ Y ou’ ve had no breakfast,” answered Moth¬ er Mary, ‘‘ and you’ve walked too far. Here, stop at the Holly Tree as you go home; get a bowl of soup; and take the ferry back. There, there ! don’t cry quite so hard. I’ll try to stay a little longer. I won’t leave town till Jack comes in. It takes the Rock of Ages to cure the hanker. Teen. But I’ve seen old¬ 231 er men than he is stop as if they had been stopped by a lasso thrown from heaven. If there’s any save in him,” added Mother Mary below her breath, he shall have his chance, this time.” He went aboard sober, and sober he staid. He kept a good deal by himself and thought of many things. His face paled out and refined, as their faces do, from abstinence; the ghost of his good looks hovered about him ; he mended up his clothes; he did a kind turn to a messmate now and then ; he told some excellent clean stories, and raised the spirits of the crew ; he lent a dollar to a fellow with the rheumatism who had an indebtedness to liquidate for medicine. When he had done this, he remembered that he had left his wife without money, and said aloud: ‘‘That’s a - mean trick to play on a woman.” He had bad luck, however, that trip; his share was small ; he made seven dollars and twenty-seven cents in three weeks. This was conceded by the crew of the fishing-schooner (her name was the Destiny ) to be because Jack had, “ sworn off” It is a superstition among them. One unfamiliar with the lives of these men will hammer cold iron if he thinks to per¬ suade them that rum and luck do not go to¬ gether ; or that to “ reform ” does not imply a reduction of personal income. You might as well try to put the fisherman’s fist into a Honiton lace jumper, as the fisherman’s mind into proportion upon this point. Therefore Jack took his poor trip carelessly ; it was to be expected ; he would explain it to Mother. Mary when he got in. He drank noth¬ ing at all ; and they weighed for home. When Jack stepped off the Destiny, at Zephaniah Salt & Co.’s wharf at Fairharbor, after that voyage, clean, pale, good-natured, and sober, thinking that he would get shaved before he hurried home to Teen, and wishing he could pay the grocer’s bill upon the way, and thinking that, in default of this, he would start an account at the market, and carry her a chop or a sausage, in fact thinking about her with an absorption which resembled con¬ sideration if not affection, — suddenly he caught her name upon the wharves. It may have been said of accident, or of the devil, — God knew; they may have been too drunk to notice Jack at the first, or they may have seen and scented from afar the bad blood they stirred, like the hounds they were. It will never be told. The scandal of these places is incredibly barbarous; but it is less than the barbarity of drinking men to a man who strikes out from among themselves, and fights for his respectability. The words were few, — they are not for us, — but they were enough to do the deed. Jack

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JACK. 232 was quite sober. He understood. They as¬ sailed the honor of his home, the truth of his wife ; they hurled her past at her and at him¬ self; they derided the trust which he had in her in absence ; they sneered at the “ reformed man ’’whose domestic prospects were — as they were ; they exulted over him with the exulta¬ tion in the sight of the havoc wrought, which is the most inexplicable impulse of evil. Everybody knew how hot-blooded Jack was; and when the fury rushed red over his face painted gray by abstinence, there was a smart scattering upon the wharves. His hand clapped to his pockets ; but his was an old, cheap, rusty pistol (he had swapped a Bible and his trawls for it once, upon a spree, and got cheated); it held but one cartridge, and his wrist shook. The shot went sputtering into the water, and no harm came of it. Jack jammed the pistol back into his pocket; he glared about him madly, but had his glare for his pains; the men were afraid of him; he was alone upon the wharf. It can hardly be said that he hesitated. Would that it could. Raving to himself, — head down, hands clenched, feet stumbling like a blind man’s, — the fisherman sank into the first open door he staggered by, as a seiner pierced by an invisible swordfish sinks into the sea. He had fifteen such places to pass before he reached his house. His chances were — as they were — at best. He drank for half an hour — an hour — a half more — came out, and went straight home. It was now night of a P'ebruary day. It had not been a very cold day ; a light, clean snow had fallen, which was thawing gently. Jack, looking dimly on through his craze, saw the light of his half of the gray cottage shin¬ ing ahead; he perceived that the frost was melted from the v/indows. The warm color came quietly down to meet him across the fresh snow ; it had to him in his delirium the look of a woman’s eyes when they are true, and lean out of her love to greet a man. He did not put this to himself in these words, but only said : “ Them lamps look like she used to, — curse her ! ” and so went hurtling on. He dashed up against the house, as a bow¬ sprit dashes on the rocks, took one mad look through the unfrosted window, below the half-drawn curtain, and flung himself against the door, and in. His wife sat there in the great rocking-chair, leaning back; she had a pillow behind her and her feet on the salt-fish box which he had cov¬ ered once to make a cricket for her, when they were first married. She looked pale and pretty, — very pretty. She was talking to a visitor who sat upon the lounge beside her. It was a man. Now, Jack knew this man well; it was an old mess-mate; he had sworn off, a year ago, and they had gone different ways ; he used to be a rough fellow ; but people said now you wouldn’t know him. “ I ain’t so drunk but I see who you be, Jim,” began the husband darkly; I’ll settle With you another day. I’ve got that to sg,yto my wife I’d say better if we missed your com¬ pany. Leave us by ourselves ! ” “ Look here. Jack,” Jim flashed good-hu¬ moredly, “ you’re drunk, you know. She’ll tell you what I come for. You ask her. Seein’ she wasn’t right smart, — and there’s them as says she lacked for victuals, — my wife sent me over here with a bowl of cranberry sass, so help me Heaven.” I’ll kill you some other evenin’. Leave us be ! ” cried Jack. ‘‘We was settin’ and talkin’ about the Reform Club when you come in,” objected Jim, with the patience of an old friend. “We was won¬ derin’ if we couldn’t get you to sign. Jack. Ask her if we wasn’t. Come, now ! I wouldn’t make a fool of myself if I was you, Jack. See there. You’ve set her to cryin’ already. And she ain’t right smart.” “ Clear out of my house ! ” * thundered J ack. “ Leave us be by ourselves ! ” “I don’t know’s I’d ought to,” hesitated Jim. “ Leave us be ! or I won’t leave yoi^ be a d - minute longer ! Ain’t it my house ? Get out of it ! ” “ It is, that’s a fact,” admitted the visitor, looking perplexed; “ but I declare to Jupiter I don’t know’s I’d oughter leave it, the way things look. Have your senses. Jack, my boy ! J/ave your senses ! She ain’t right smart.” But with this Jack sprang upon him, and the wife cried out between them, for the love of mercy, that murder would be done. “ Leave us be ! ” she pleaded, sobbing. “ Nothin’ else won’t pacify him. Go, Jim, go, and shut the door, and thank her, for the cran¬ berry sarse was very kind of her, and for my husband’s sake don’t tell nobody he wasn’t kind to me. There. That’s right. There.” She sank back into the rocking-chair, for she was feeble still ; and looked gently up into her husband’s face. All the tones of her agitated voice had changed. She spoke very low, and calmly ; as if she gathered her breath for the first stage of a struggle whose nature she solemnly under¬ stood. She had grown exceedingly pale. “ Jack, dear ? ” softly. * Such peculiarities of Jack’s pronunciation as were attributable to his condition will not be reproduced here.

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JACK. 233 “ Ill give ye time,” he answered with an om¬ inous quiet. Tell yer story first. Out with it! ” “ I haven’t got nothin’ to tell, Jack. He brought the cranberry sarse, for his wife took care of me, and she was very kind. And he set a little and we was talkin’ about the club, just as he says we was. It’s Mother Mary’s club. Jack. She’s made Jim secretary, and she wanted you to join, for I told her you’d reformed. Oh, Jack, I told her you’d re¬ formed !— Jack, Jack I Oh, Jack! What are you goin’ to do to me ! What makes you look like that ?, — Jack, Jack, Jack I ” Stand up here ! ” he raved. He was past reason, and she saw it ; he tore off his coat and pushed up his sleeves from his tattooed arms. “You’ve played me false, I say; 'I trusted ye, and you’ve tricked me. I’ll teach ye to be the talk upon the wharves another time when I get in from Georges’ ! ” She stood as he bade her, tottered and sank back ; crawled up again, holding by the wooden arm of the rocking-chair, and stretched one hand out to him, feebly. She did not dare to touch him ; if she had clung to him, he would have throttled her. When she saw him rolling up his sleeves, her heart stood still. But Teen thought : “ I will not show him I’m afraid of him. It’s the only chance I’ve got.” The poor girl looked up once into his face, and thought she smiled. “ Jack ? Kcar Jack ! ” “ I’ll teach ye ! I’ll teach ye ! ” “ Oh, wait a moment. Jack. For the love of Heaven, — stop a minute! I’ve been that I said I’d be to you, since we was mar¬ ried. I’ve been an honest wife to you, my boy, and there’s none on earth nor heaven as can look me in the eye and darst to say I haven’t. I swore to ye upon the Rock of Ages, Mother Mary witnessin’, — why. Jack! ” her voice sank to infinite sweetness, “have ye forgotten? You ain’t yourself, poor boy. You’ll be so sorry. I ain’t very strong, yet, — you’d feel bad if you should hit me, — again. I’d hate to have you feel so bad. Jack dear, don’t. Go look in the other room, before you strike again. Ye hain’t seen it yet. J ack, for the love of mercy ! — Jack ! Jack ! ” “ Say you’ve played me false, and I’ll stop. Own up, and I’ll quit. Own up to me, I say ! ” “ I can’t own up to you, for I swore you by the Rock of Ages ; I swore ye I would be an honest wife. You may pummel me to death, but I’ll not lie away them words I swore to ye ... by that, . . . Jack, for the love of Heaven, don’t ye. Jack ! For the way you used to feel to me, dear, dear Jack! For the sake of the babies we had, . . . and you walked beside of me, to bury ’em! Oh, for VoL. XXXIV.~33. God’s sake. . . . Jack I .. . Oh, you said you’d be kind to me. . . . Oh, ye’ll be so sorry ! For the love of pity ! For the love of God! Not the pistol! Oh, for the Rock of - .” But there he struck her down. The butt end of the weapon was heavy enough to do the deed. He struck, and then flung it away. Upon his bared arm, as it came crashing, the crucifix was spattered red. He stood up stupidly and looked about the room. The covers were off the kitchen stove, and the heart of the coals blazed out. Her yellow hair had loosened as she fell, and shone upon the floor. He remembered that she spoke about the other room, and said of something yonder, that he hadn’t seen it yet. Confusedly he won¬ dered what it was. He stumbled in and stared about the bedroom. It was not very light there, and it was some moments before he perceived the cradle, standing straight across his way. The child waked as he hit the cra¬ dle, and began to cry, stretching out its hands. He had forgotten all about the baby. There had been so many. “ You’d better get up. Teen,” he said as he went out ; “ it’s cryin’ after you.” He shut the door and staggered down the steps. He hesitated once, and thought he would go back and say to her : “ What’s the use of layin’ there ? ” But he thought better, or worse, of it, and went his way. He went out and reshipped at once, lingering only long enough to drink madly on the way, at a place he knew where he was sure to be let alone. The men were afraid of Jack, when he was so far gone under as this. Nobody spoke to him. He went down to Salt Brothers’ wharf, opposite Salt & Co.’s, and found the I) are devil about to weigh. She was short by one hand, and took him as he was. He was surprised to find himself aboard when the next sun went down ; he had turned in his bunk and was overheard to call for Teen, ordering her to do some service for him, testily enough. “ Oh,” he muttered, “ she ain’t here, is she ? Be blasted if I ain’t on the Daredevil!' He was good for nothing, for a matter of days, and silent or sullen for the trip. It had been a very heavy spree. He fell to, when he came to himself, and fished desperately; his luck turned, and he made money; he made seventy-five dollars. They were gone three weeks. They had a bitter voyage, for it was March. They struck a gale at Georges’, and another coming home. It snowed a great deal, and the rigging froze. The crew were

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JACIC 234 uncommonly cold. They kept the steward cooking briskly, and four or five hot meals a day were not enough to keep one’s courage up. They were particular about their cooking, as fishermen are, and the steward of the Z>are- devil was famous in his calling. But it was conceded to be unusually cold, even for March, at Georges’. One must keep the blood racing, somehow, for life’s sake. Whisky flowed fast between meals. Jack was observed not to limit himself. “ It was for luck,” he said. Take it through, it was a hard trip. The sober men — there were some — looked grim and pinched; the drinkers ugly. ‘‘ It’s a hound’s life,” said a dory-mate of Jack’s one day. His name was Rowe — Rowe Salt; he was a half-brother of Jim’s. But Jim was at home. And Teen, of course, was at home. Jack had not spoken of her; he had thought of her, — he had thought of nothing else. God knows what those thoughts had been. When Rowe spoke to him in this fash¬ ion, Jack looked hard at him. I’ve been thinkin’ ef it disobligated a fel¬ ler,” he said. Hey ? ” asked Rowe. If you was treated like folks ; but you ain’t. You’re froze. You’re soaked. You’re wrecked. Your nets is stole. You’re drove off in the fog. You’re drownded, and you lose your trawls. If you swear off, you miss your luck. It’s dirty aboard. Folks don’t like the looks of you. There’s alwers a hanker in the pit o’ your stomick. When you get upon a tear you don’t know what you — do to — folks.” Jack stopped himself abruptly, and leaned upon his oar; they were trawling, and the weather grew thick. Rowe,” he said, staring off into the fog, “ did ye ever think we was like fishes, us Fair- harbor folks ? ” “ I don’t know’s I hev,” said the dory-mate, staring too. Well, we be, I think. We live in it and we’re drownded in it, and we can’t get out on’t, — we can’t get out. We look like ’em too. I’ve thought about that. Some of us look like haddock. You’ve got the halibut look your¬ self. Skipper, he’s got the jib of a monk-fish, — you ken see it for yourself. There’s a man I messed with, once, reminded me of a scul- pin. I guess I’d pass for a lobster, myself, — for color, anyhow. We take it out someways, each on us. Don’t ye know the look the women folks have when they get old and have gone hungry ? You can tell by the build of a boy which way he’ll turn out, — halibut way, or hake, or mebbe mackerel if he’s sleek and little. It’s a kind of a birth-mark, I shouldn’t won¬ der. There’s no gettin’ out on’t, no more’n it out of you. Sometimes I used to think - “ Good Lord ! ” cried Jack. He laid down his oar again, and the dory wheeled to star¬ board sharply. ‘‘ Rowe Salt, you look there ! you tell me if you see a woman yonder on the water ! ” “You’ve got the jim-jams. Jack. Women folks don’t walk at Georges. I can’t see nothin’ nowhere, but it’s thick as - ” “ It’s thick as hell,” interrupted Jack, “ and there’s a woman walkin’ on the water, — Lord ! don’t you see her ? Lord ! her hair is yeller hair, and it’s streamin’ over her, — don’t you see her ? She’s walkin’ on this devilish fog to¬ wards the dory, — Teen ? Teen ! There ! Lord save me, Rowe, if I didn’t see my wife come walkin’ towards us, us settin’ in this dory. — Hi-i-igh r I’ll swear off when I get home. I’ll tell her so. I hate to see such things. “ You see, Rowe,” Jack added presently, — for he had not spoken after that, but had fallen grimly to work. It was ten below and the wind was taking the backward spring for a bitter blow ; both men, tugging at their trawls through the high and icy sea, were suffering too much to talk, — “ye see we had some words before I come aboard, and she warn’t right smart. The baby can’t be very old. I don’ know how old it is. I was oncommon drunk; I don’t re¬ member what I did to her. I’m afraid I hit her, — for I had some words with her. I wished I was at home. She won’t tell nobody. She never does. But I’m set to be at home and tell her I’ve sworn off. I’ve got money for her this trip too; I’m afraid she’s in a hurry for it.” After this outburst of confidence. Jack seemed to cling to his dory-mate; he followed him about deck, and looked wistfully at him. Jack had begun to take on the haggard look of the abstainer once again. The crew thought he did not seem like himself. He had stopped drinking, abruptly, after that day in the fog, and suffered heavily from the weather and from exposure. “I say, Rowe,” he asked one day, “if any¬ thing was to happen, would you jest step in and tell my wife I didn’t believe that yarn about her ? She’ll know.” Now it befell, that when they were rounding Eastern Point, and not till then, they bespoke the Destmy^ which was outward bound, and signaled them. She drew to speaking dis¬ tance, and her skipper had a word with the master of the Daredevil^ but he spoke none too loud, and made his errand quickly, and veered to his own course, and the two boats parted company, and the Daredevil came bustling in. They were almost home. It was remembered afterward that Jack was badly frostbitten upon that voyage ; he looked badly; he had strange ways; the men did not

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JACK. 235 know exactly howto take him. He was over- No, I vow I won’t. Let me go. I’ve done heard to say : my share of this. Let me up on deck ! I want ‘‘ / ain’t a-goin’ to go to Georges’ again.” the air! ” Rowe Salt overheard this, after the skipper won’t let you up on deck — so help me ^ _ of the Destmy had signaled and tacked. Jack till you tell 1 ” was sitting aft alone, when he said it, looking Let me off. Jack, let me off! ” seaward. He had paid little or no attention me zuho it was, I say I to the incident of the Destiny, but sat staring, '' Lord in heaven, the poor devil don’t know, plunged in some mood of his own which seemed — he really don’t.” as solitary, as removed from his kind and from I thought you would ha’ fold me, Rowe,” their comprehension, as the moods of mental said Jack with a smile, — his old winning smile, disorder are from the sane. that had captivated his messmates all his life. So then, with such dexterity as the ignorant '' 1 w/7/tell you ! ” cried Rowe Salt with an man could muster, Salt got his friend below, oath of agony. “ You killed your wife. You on some pretext, and stood looking at him murdered her. She’s dead. Teen ain’t to home helplessly. She’s dead.” ‘‘ You don’t look well, Rowe,” Jack sug¬ gested pleasantly. “Jack,” said his dory-mate, turning white enough, “ I’ll make no bones of it, nor mince nothin’, for somebody’s got to tell ye, and they said it must be me. There’s a warrant after ye. The sheriff’s on the tug betwixt us and the wharf. She’s layin’ off of the island, him aboard of her.” “ I never was in prison,” faltered Jack. “ The boys have always bailed me.” “ ’Tain’t a bailin’ matter, Jack, this time.” “ What did you say ? ” “ I said it wasn’t a bailin’ business. Some¬ body’s got to tell you.” Jack gazed confidingly up into his friend’s face. “ What was it that I done, old boy ? Can’t ye tell me ? ” “ Let the sheriff tell you. Ask the sheriff. I’d rather it was the sheriff told you. Jack.” “Tell me what it is I done, Rowe Salt; I’d telljj/^^/.” He looked puzzled. “The sheriff knows more about it nor I do,” begged the fisherman ; '' don’t make an old messmate tell you.” “All right,” said Jack, turning away. He had now grown very quiet. He pleaded no more, only to mutter once : “ I’d rather heard it from a messmate.” Rowe Salt took a step or two, turned, stopped, stirred, and turned again. “ You killed somebody, then, if you will know.” “ Killed somebody ? ” “ Yes.” “ I was drunk and killed somebody ? ” “ Lord help you, yes.” “ I hope,” hoarsely — Look here. Salt, I hope Teen wo7id Jmoiv. “ I say, Rowe,” after a long pause, '' who was it that I killed? ” “ Ask the sheriff.” “ W’ho was it that I killed ? ” “ The skipper’ll tell you, mebby. I won’t. They made way for him at this side and at that, for he sprang up the gangway, and dashed among them. When he saw them all together, and how they looked at him, he stopped. A change seemed to strike his pur¬ pose, be it what it might. “Boys,” said Jack, looking all about, “ye won’t have to go no bail for me. I’ll bide my account, this time.” He parted from them, for they let him do the thing he would, and got himself alone in¬ to the bows, and there he sank down, crouch¬ ing, and no one spoke to him. The Daredevil rounded Eastern Point, and down the shining harbor, all sails set, came gayly in. They were almost home. Straightway there started out upon the win¬ ter sea a strong, sweet teiior, like a cry. It was Jack’s voice, — everybody knew it. He stood by himself in the bows, back to them, singing like an angel or a madman, — some said this; some said the other, — “ Rock of Ages, cleft for me ! Let me hide myself in thee; . . . Thou must save, and thou alone. . . When I soar to worlds unknown, See thee on thy judgment throne,” sang Jack. With the ceasing of his voice, they divined how it was, by one instinct, and every man sprang to him. But he had leaped and gained on them. The waters of Fairharbor seemed them¬ selves to leap to greet him as he went down. These that had borne him and ruined him buried him as if they loved him. He had pushed up his sleeves for the spring, hard to the shoulder, like a man who would wrestle at odds. As he sank, one bared arm thrust above the crest of the long wave, lifted itself toward the sky. It was his right arm, on which the cru¬ cifix was stamped.

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JACX, 236 White and gold as the lips and heart of a lily, the day blossomed at Fairharbor one June Sunday, when these things were as a tale that is told. It was a warm day, sweet and still. There was no wind, no fog. The harbor wore her innocent face. She has one ; who can help believing in it, to see it ? The waves stretched themselves upon the beach as if they had been hands laid out in benedic¬ tion ; and the colors of the sky were like the expression of a strong and solemn countenance. So thought Mother Mary, standing by her husband’s side that day, and looking off from the little creature in her arms to the faces of the fishermen gathered there about her for the service. It was an open-air service, held upon the beach, where the people she had served and loved could freely come to her — and would. They had sought the scene in large numbers. The summer people, too, strolled down, distant and different, and hung upon the edges of the group. They had a civil wel¬ come, but no more. This was a fisherman’s affair; nobody needed them; Mother Mary did not belong to them. “ The meetin’s ours,” said Rowe Salt. ‘‘ It’s us she’s after. The boarders ain’t of no account to her.” His brother Jim was there with Rowe, and Jim’s wife, and some of the respectable women neighbors. The skipper of the Daredevil was there, and so were many of Jack’s old mess¬ mates. When it was understood that Mother Mary had adopted Jack’s baby, the news had run like rising tide, from wharf to wharf, from deck to deck, — everybody knew it, by this time. Almost everybody was there, to see the baptism. The Fairharbor fishermen were alert to the honor of their guild. They turned out in force to explain matters, sensitive to show their best. They would have it understood that one may have one’s faults, but one does not, therefore, murder one’s wife. The scene in the annals and the legends of Fairharbor was memorable, and will be long. It was as strange to the seamen as a leaf thrown over from the pages of the Book of Life, in¬ scribed in an unknown tongue of which they only knew that it was the tongue of love. Whether it spoke as of men or of angels, they would have been perplexed to say. Into her childless life, its poverty, its strug¬ gles, its sacrifices, and its blessed hope. Mother Mary’s great heart took the baby as she took a man’s own better nature for him ; that which lay so puny and so orphaned in those wild lives of theirs, an infant in her hands. Jack’s baby. Jack's baby and Teen’s, as if it had been anybody’s else baby, was to be baptized like folks.” Jack’s baby, poor little devil, was to have his chance. The men talked it over gravely ; it affected them with a respect one would not anticipate, who did not know them. They had their Sun¬ day clothes on. They were all clean. They had a quiet look. One fellow who had taken a little too much ventured down upon the beach, but he was hustled away from the chris¬ tening and ducked in the cove, and hung upon the rocks to dry. One must be sober who helped to baptize that baby. This was quite understood. They sang the hymn, Jack’s hymn and Teen’s : of course they sang the Rock of Ages, and Mother Mary’s husband read ‘Hhe chapter ” to them, as he was used, and spoke with them ; and it was so still among them that they could hear each wave of the placid sea beat evenly as if they listened to the beating of a near and mighty peaceful heart. Mother Mary spoke with them herself a little. She told them how she took the child, in despair of the past, in hope of the future ; in pain and in pity, and in love; yearning over him, and his, and those who were of their inheritance, and fate, their chances, and their sorrows, and their sins. She told them of the child’s pure heart within us all, which needs only to be mothered to be saved ; which needs only that we foster it, to form it; which needs that we treat it as we do other weak and helpless things, whether in ourselves or in another. What was noble in them all, she said, was to them like this lit¬ tle thing, to her. It was a trust. She gave it to them, so she said, as she took the baby, here before their witnessing, to spare him from their miseries, if she might. They were touched by this, or they seemed to be ; for they listened from their souls. We’d oughtertake off our hats,” somebody whispered. So they stood uncovered before the minister, and Mother Mary ; and Jack’s poor baby. The sacred drops flashed in the white air. Dreamily the fishermen heard the sacred words : ‘‘ In the name of the Father : And of the Son : And of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” But no one heard the other words, said by Mother Mary close and low, when she received the child into her arms again, and bowed her face above it : My S071, I take thee for the sake and for the love of thy father^ and of thy mother. Be thou their holy ghost." But the fishermen, used not to understand her, but only to her understanding them, per¬ ceiving that she was at prayer, they knew not why, asking of Heaven they knew not what, the fishermen said : Amen. Amen. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION. II. “ These problems, which are of such great importance for physiology, for medicine, and for social economy, cannot be solved without untiring patience and very considerable means.” — VoiL ^E eat to live.” The eating of bread and meat is a simple matter, but the ways in which the differ¬ ent constituents of the food perform their offices in the maintenance of life are problems as profound as any with which physical science has to deal. The works of nature culminate in man. In his organism her operations are most complex and recondite. The laws which regulate our physi¬ cal being are discovered but slowly and by the most ingenious and profound research. Those which govern the nutrition of our bodies have been shrouded in mystery which only the in¬ vestigation of later time has begun to unveil. But, here as elsewhere, the crude and often fantastic theories of the past are being grad¬ ually replaced by the more certain knowledge of the present. In the previous article we noticed the chemi¬ cal composition of the human body and of the food by which it is nourished. It appeared that our bodies and our food both are com¬ posed of the same chemical elements, and that the compounds of these elements which chem¬ ical analysis reveals in the food are likewise very similar to the compounds of which our bodies are composed. This, indeed, we should expect from the very fact that the body is made of the food. The reproduction below of a chart from the previous article of this series describes the principal constituents of our foods. The pro¬ portions of the several ingredients in a number of food-materials are shown in Diagram III. of the previous article. But the food does more than to furnish the material of which the body is built up. As our tissues, muscle and tendon, bone and brain, are continually worn out with work and thought and worry, it is with the ingredients of food that they are repaired, and it is our food that supplies the fuel by whose consumption the heat and strength of the body are maintained. Ingredients of Food-materials. NUTRIENTS AND NON-NUTRIENTS. CLASSES OF NUTRIENTS. Our ordinary food-materials, such as meat, fish, eggs, potatoes, wheat, etc., consist of: Refuse: E. g.y the bones of meat and fish, shells of eggs, skin of potatoes, and bran of wheat. Edible Portion: E. g.y the flesh of meat and fish, whites and yolk of eggs, wheat flour. The edible substance consists of : Water, Nutritive Ingredients or Nutrients. The principal kinds of nutrients are : 1. Protein, 3. Carbohydrates, 2. Fats, 4. Mineral Matters. The water and refuse are called non-nutrients. The water contained in foods and beverages has the same composition and properties as other water, and it is, of course, indispensable for nourishment, but is not a nutrient in the sense in which the word is here used. The following are familiar examples of compounds of each of the four principal classes of nutrients : PROTEIN Albuminoids : Albumen (white) of eggs ; casein ( curd ) of milk ; myosin y the basis of muscle ( lean meat); gluten of wheats etc. b Gelatinoids : Collagen of tendons; ossein of banes; which yield gel¬ atin or glue. FATS ^ meat; fat (butter) of milk ; \ olive oil; oil of corn ^ wheat, etc. CARBOHYDRATES E. g., sugar, starch, cellu^ lose (woody fiber). MINERAL MATTERS E. g., calcium phos¬ phate, or phosphate of lime ; sodium chloride ( commo7i salt). It is to be especially noted that the protein compounds contain nitrogen, while the fats and carbo¬ hydrates have none. Meats and fish contain very small quantities of a class of compounds called “ ex¬ tractives ” (the chief ingredients of beef tea and meat extract), which contain nitrogen, and hence are com¬ monly classed with protein. The albuminoids and gelatinoids are sometimes called proteids.

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JIOJV FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. 238 The physiological chemistry of to-day looks upon the body as a sort of machine. Food is the raw material; heat, muscular strength, and other forms of energy are the products. But this does not exactly express the idea; for both the machine and its products come from the transformation of the food, and furthermore, the body is continually consuming not only food but its own substance also, in order to generate heat to keep itself warm, and muscu¬ lar and intellectual energy to do its own work. The particular question I wish to speak of now is this : What parts do the several classes of nutrients of food, the protein, fats, carbohy¬ drates, etc., play in the nutrition of the body ? Or, to put it in another way, of what constitu¬ ents of the food are flesh and fat made up, what ones supply us with warmth and muscu¬ lar strength, and what are the chemical trans¬ formations which our nutriment continually undergoes in supplying our bodily wants ? These transformations belong to what the phys¬ iologists are teaching us to call metabolism. It is a part of this subject of metabolism that we have now to consider. When we know what are the kinds and amounts of nutritive substances our bodies need and our food- materials contain, then and not till then shall we be able to adjust our diet to the demands of health and purse. The ways in which the body makes use of its food are found out by experiments made with living animals, with pigeons, geese, rab¬ bits, dogs, sheep, goats, oxen, horses and many others, including men. The experimenting of the last few years, particularly, has been very ex¬ tensive, and has brought extremely important results. To give a brief account of some of these researches and their principal results as applied to the nutrition of man is the object of this article. Will the reader first permit a few technical statements which seem necessary by way of introduction ? If we could follow the course of a molecule of the protein of the meat we eat from the time when, after being digested, it is taken into the blood, and carried and stored in the arm as muscle and afterwards consumed; if we were gifted with vision acute enough to trace the journeyings and transformations of a par¬ ticle of the fat of the same meat or of the starch of the bread eaten with it, until it is deposited as fat in the muscle or in adipose tissue, or is disintegrated and united with the oxygen of the inhaled air, yielding warmth or strength, the answer to our questions as to how the dif¬ ferent nutrients do their work might be made very plain. But vitally important as these processes are, near as they are to us, parts as they are of us, they have been almost entirely beyond our ken until late experimental re¬ search has found a practicable way for learn¬ ing about them. This way of finding how food is used consists in the comparison of the in¬ come with the outgo of the body. The body creates nothing for itself, either of material or energy ; all must come to it from without. Every atom of carbon, hydro¬ gen, phosphorus, or other elements; every mole¬ cule of protein, carbohydrates or other com¬ pounds of these elements, is brought to the body with the food and drink it consumes and the air it breathes. Like the steam-engine, it simply uses the material supplied to it. Its chemical compounds and its energy are the compounds and the energy of the food trans¬ formed. The science of nutrition as it is taught to¬ day has this marked peculiarity, that it is a matter of definite quantities of income and expenditure, measured in terms of chemical elements and compounds, and of heat and mechanical energy. It is based upon a kind of chemical book-keeping, and the accuracy of its teaching is, in a certain sense, propor¬ tional to the accuracy with which the accounts are kept. The items of the account are obtained from experiments with living organisms, with animals fed upon different food-materials, un der circumstances and with appliances which render feasible the accurate measurement of income and outgo. DAILY INCOME AND EXPENDITURE OF THE BODY. — METABOLISM. Food, drink, and oxygen of inhaled air con¬ stitute the income of the body. Part of this material is transformed into blood, muscle, fat, bone, and other tissues. The rest, together with the materials worn out with use, undergo still further chemical transformations. The com¬ pounds thus formed are finally given off from the body and constitute its outgo, or expendi¬ ture of material. A small part of the food passes through the alimentary canal undigested and is excreted by the intestine. The larger part is digested, taken into the blood, and distributed through the body. Some of it is used to build up tis¬ sues, as in the case of the growing child ; some is used to repair the tissues that are being con¬ tinually disintegrated ; but ultimately the oxy¬ gen brought from the air through the lungs unites with the carbon and hydrogen of the food or of the tissues consumed, forming car¬ bonic acid and water, while the nitrogen with part of the carbon and hydrogen forms urea and similar products. The urea and allied compounds escape by way of the kidneys, the carbonic acid is given off by the lungs and skin, and the water by the lungs, skin, and

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. 239 kidneys. So, since tissues are made up of the food, practically all of the digested protein, fats, and carbohydrates finally leave the body as urea, carbonic acid, and water. Let us take, for instance, the case of an or- dinaiy man, say a mechanic or a day-laborer, doing a fair amount of manual work. Let us suppose him to have a diet of beefsteak, bread, potatoes, butter, and water. To simplify the calculations, we will leave out the tea, colfee, salt, etc., and take enough of the bread and potatoes to make up for the milk, sugar, and other materials which he would ordinarily con¬ sume. Such quantities as the following would supply the necessary nutrients for a day : ■ Beefsteak (lean and free from bone) .... 8 ounces. Bread . 20 “ Potatoes . 30 “ Butter . I “ Water . 37 “ Total food and drink. . (6 pounds) 96 ounces. With these six pounds of food and drink he would consume about 30 ounces of oxygen from the air inhaled during the twenty-four hours, making a total income not far from 126 ounces, or 7^ pounds. But in our chemical balancing of income and expenditure the calculations are made, not in terms of meat and bread and butter, but of protein, fats, carbohydrates, etc. It may be drawn up as below : I give weights in grams as well as in ounces, since we shall find the grams convenient in subsequent calcula¬ tions. The experiments I am about to describe are based upon the principle involved in this sup¬ posed case. A large number of most important ones have been performed in Germany, in nu¬ merous agricultural experiment stations with animals and, in Munich, with men as well. EXPERIMENTS FOR STUDYING THE LAWS OF NUTRITION. The hurried visitor in Munich, after seeing the treasures of painting and sculpture in the Old and the New Pinakothek and the Glypto- thek, is apt to drive to the statue of Bavaria, outside the town. In doing so he will very likely pass a house — it is a square, gray, and somewhat gloomy building just across the street from the Crystal Palace — which to the chemist, the physiologist, the agriculturist, and the student of political and social science is of no little interest, for here lived and labored for many years the great philosopher Liebig, who is, more than any other man, the father of the science we are studying. Going on across the Marien Platz with its quaint Renaissance buildings and out through the Sendlinger gate, he passes along the Findling Strasse. On the right, just beyond the gate, is a brick building which the artistic traveler will not be apt to notice, but which to those interested in our present subject is full of attraction. It is the Physiological Institute of the university. In it are the laboratory and respiration apparatus where Pettenkofer, Voit, and others have con¬ ducted some of the most important researches in this department of science. If the reader wished to see how some of the facts of modern science are found out, I should hardly know of a more interesting place to which to take him than this. Coming in through the hallway, we have, on the right, the apartments of the Hausmeister^ who is at once the chief janitor and the me¬ chanic of the establishment, and on the left, ASSUMED DAILY INCOME AND EXPENDITURE OF THE BODY OF AN AVERAGE MAN DOING A MODERATE AMOUNT OF MUSCULAR LABOR. Income. Outgo. Materials. Weights^ Materials. Weights, Expressed in ounces. ll 1 Expressed 1 in ounces. Expressed in grams. * 1 Carbohydrates . 1 Mineral matters . Water of food and drink . Oxygen of inhaled air . Total . .4.2 2.0 17.6 0.8 71.4 30.2 126.2 118 56 500 24 2024 855 3577 From f Respiratory products digested 1 excreted through , Carbonic acid . . food and { lungs and skin ...\ inhs-lcd 1 c T T f oxygen [ Excreted by k.dneys{ wSr^ matters Water otherwise excreted . Undigested matters (water free) . Total . 38.8 12.7 1.2 0.7 71.4 1.4 1100 361 34 20 2024 38 126.2 3577 * One pound, avoirdupois, 453.6 grams; one ounce, 28.35 grams.

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240 now FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY, rooms for the assistants and for some of the laboratory work, while a stairway leads to the lecture and apparatus rooms above. A door in front opens into the main working-room, which is fitted up like an ordinary chemical laboratory. At different desks assistants and students are at work, and we perhaps see the burly form of the Diener^ the laboratory ser¬ vant, with whom a large number of experiments have been made. At the left is a room supplied with a number of curious-looking cages. In one maybe a dog, in another a goose, and in a third a number of rats, all being used for feeding-trials of one kind or another. In the rear are the balance- room, the study of Professor Voit, director of the establishment, and, what is most interesting of all to us, the respiration apparatus. Before explaining the respiration experi¬ ments, which are somewhat complicated, let me describe a simpler experiment, taking one actually made to study the effect of protein in the form of lean meat, i. ^., muscle. The question was this : From a given quan¬ tity of the protein ofmuscular tissue, how much will be digested by a healthy man, and will the quantity digested suffice to maintain the supply of protein in his body ? In other words, will the man gain or lose protein, or will he simply hold his own on this diet ? The subject was a medical student. The ex¬ periment lasted three days. F or protein he ate very lean beefsteak. This contained, along with the protein, a little fat (the fat was trimmed out as carefully as practicable, but nevertheless minute particles remained about and within the muscular fibers of the meat), and mineral matters, besides, of course, considerable water. The diet consisted of the beefsteak cooked with butter, seasoned with pepper, salt, and Worcestershire sauce, and taken with water, beer, and wine. Leaving the other materials out of account, as they did not essentially affect the results, the food contained 1 200 grams, about 2 pounds 10 ounces, of the lean meat, and 30 grams, or a little over an ounce, of butter per day. The total quantity of nitrogen in the food was about 38 grams daily, of which over 37 grams were digested. It is mainly upon this nitrogen that the experiment hinges. One of the hard-fought questions of physi¬ ological chemistry has been whether or not all of the nitrogen given off from the body (aside from that which is undigested) is ex¬ creted by the kidneys. But it is now pretty well settled that this is the only way by which any considerable quantity leaves the body. If then we know how much nitrogen is digested and taken into the circulation and how much is withdrawn in this way, we have an easy means of determining whether the stock of nitrogen in the body is gaining or losing. If I put m.ore money in the bank than I draw out, my balance on the books shows an increased amount to my credit; but if I take out more than I put in, my deposit grows smaller. In like manner the balance of income and outgo of nitrogen shows whether the body is gaining or losing nitrogen. Now for this purpose we may regard the compounds of the body, exclusive of water and mineral matters, as belonging to two classes — protein compounds and fats. And numerous as the protein compounds are, the proportion of nitrogen is nearly the same in all, and we may take the protein of muscle as representing the whole class. For every gram of nitrogen there will be just about 6^ grams of protein, and for every gram of protein there will be about 4^ grams of muscle, tendon, and the like in meat. Accordingly, for every gram of nitrogen there will be (6^x 4^) about 27 grams of muscle, exclusive of fat. The question, then, may be put thus : On the diet of 2 pounds and 10 ounces of lean meat and an ounce of butter per day, was the store of protein in this man’s body increased or decreased ? In other words, so far as mus¬ cular tissue was concerned did he gain or lose or hold his own ? Here are the figures: INCOME AND OUTGO OF DIGESTED NITROGEN IN EX¬ PERIMENT WITH A MAN ON DIET OF LEAN MEAT. Total nitrogen . per day . 38. 5 grams. Nitrogen . kidneys “ “ 37.2 “ Balance, stored in the body “ ‘‘ 1.3 grams. That is to say, this young, vigorous man, a student, at his ordinary occupations, study¬ ing in his room, listening to lectures at the university, working several hours each day in the laboratory, walking a little for exercise, and living on a diet of protein with a very little fat, gained nitrogen at the rate of 1.3 grams per day. These 1.3 grams of nitrogen represented about 8.2 grams of protein or 35 grams (i^ ounces) of muscle gained per day during the three days of the experiment. In other words, so far as the lean flesh in his body was concerned he just a little more than held his own. But what about the fat of his body — did he gain or lose ? Did the protein and fat of the meat and butter suffice still further to supply him with heat and muscular energy, or did he consume some of the fat previously stored in his body ? The only way to answer the question is to measure exactly all of the income and the outgo of the body — the food and drink on the

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HOPV FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. 241 PHYSIOLOGICAL INSTITUTE. MUNICH one hand, and on the other, all of the products excreted, solid, liquid, and gase¬ ous. This involves measuring and analyz¬ ing each one of the materials which made up the food and drink, and at the same time all of the products excreted by the intestines, kidneys, lungs, and skin. In brief, we must, with the rest, measure the compounds given off as vapor or gas. With them, the ac¬ count of income and outgo will be complete. But this means that we must measure analyze the inhaled and exhaled air. THE RESPIRATION APPARATUS. and PROFESSOR PETTENKOFER. (from a photograph by F, MULLER.) VoL. XXXIV.— 34. The respiration apparatus is a device for measuring the respiratory products. Many forms have been devised, from one in which the products of respiration of a piece of mus¬ cle taken from a just-killed animal can be measured, the respiratory process being main¬ tained by artificial circulation of blood through the muscle, to one in which an ox may be kept for days or weeks, and the composition of the inhaled and exhaled air likewise determined. A very interesting form is that used by the French experimenters, Regnault and Reiset. This is a small chamber of glass, inside of which the animal is placed, some rather com¬ plicated appliances being used to continually renew the supply of oxygen and remove the carbonic acid and other products of respira¬ tion. But from insufficient ventilation and other minor difficulties, this form of apparatus has not quite sufficed for satisfactory experiments, especially with the larger animals and with man. By far the most satisfactory apparatus is that invented by Professor Pettenkofer of Munich. This, to my notion, is one of the most interesting devices of modern experi-

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242 HOJV FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. pettenkofer’s respiration apparatus. mental science. The first one was built through the munificence of the King of Ba¬ varia. The peculiar features of this apparatus are that the subject of experiment, be it a dog, an ox, or a man, is in a comfortable, well-venti¬ lated room, and that the air, which passes through it in a continuous current, is measured and is analyzed both before it goes in and after it comes out. We can thus tell just what the animal has added to it, in other words, what material has been given off as gas or vapor from the body. The arrangements do not provide for estimating all the respiratory products with absolute exactness, but they suf¬ fice for reasonably accurate results. The form used for experiments with man consists of a chamber — a salon^ it is called ; as a matter of fact it is an iron box — through which a cur- DETAIL DRAWING OF ABOVE. rent of air is drawn by a large pump, the lat¬ ter being worked by an engine. The salon of the large apparatus at Munich is made of plates of iron, similar to boiler-iron, and is in the form of a cube about eight feet each way. It has glass windows, and a door large enough to admit a man. The large en¬ graving herewith shows the apparatus as it is now arranged. On the left is the chamber in which the man under experiment stays; near are a table holding apparatus for analyz¬ ing the air before and after it passes through the chamber, and a large meter for measuring the quantity of air which passes through. In an adjoining room is the machinery by which the current of air is pumped through the ap¬ paratus. The smaller sketch explains the work¬ ing in more detail. The air enters the chamber at its left side and passes out on the right through the large pipe P P, into the large meter M, in which it is measured. A small tube, t t, takes from the pipe P P a portion of the air which has been passed through the chamber and contains the products of respiration into two small meters, m m, where it is measured, and through the apparatus on the table T, where it is analyzed. A simi¬ lar small tube, P P, brings air for analysis from the outside of the apparatus, taking it from the left of the chamber

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. 243 where it enters the latter and carrying it into two other small meters (not shown in this sketch), where it is measured, and through apparatus, also not shown here, by which it is analyzed. In the larger engraving the four small meters and apparatus for analyz¬ ing the air are shown on the table between the chamber and the large meter. Compari¬ sons of the quantity and composition of the air which has passed through the chamber with the outside air show what the man has imparted to the air in breathing, and thus tell the amounts of the products of respiration. The food and drink and the solid and the liquid products of its consumption in the body are at the same time meas¬ ured, weighed, and analyzed, and thus all of the items of income and outgo of the body are determined. The first man to enter the respira¬ tion apparatus for experiments upon himselt, I believe, was Professor Ranke of Munich, who has described his experiences in his book on ‘‘The Nu¬ trition of Man” (“Die Ernahrung des Menschen ”), as well as in special memoirs. He tells us that in trials in which he took no food the fasting was somewhat disagreeable, but far less painful than many would think. “ I found myself at the end of the first 24 hours entirely well; at the end of the second 24 hours without food or drink, during which sleep had been disturbed, the head was somewhat heavy and there was an oppressiveness in the stomach and considerable weakness; but the sen¬ sation of hunger, . . . which was strongest about 30 hours after the last food was taken, . . . did not appear any more.” In the greater number of Professor Ranke’s experiments he took a reasonable amount of food. The diet was simple, and consisted of such materials as lean meat, bread, white of egg, starch, sugar, butter, etc., and was found to serve the purpose very well. After some experience a ration was arranged which cor¬ responded very well in composition with that used by ordinary working people, and was at the same time not at all unacceptable. When a number of experiments with Professor Ranke had been completed, several series were made with other persons. One of these latter series I will briefly describe. The subject was a strong, healthy mechanic, a watchmaker, 28 years old and weighing about 156 pounds. Three experiments were made, each occupying 24 hours. In the first. it the man took nothing but a little meat extract, n salt, and water, and did no work. In the h second, he had a liberal allowance of palatable h food, but still remained at rest. In the third, e he had the same diet as in the second, but 5- worked hard at turning a lathe for nine hours, n so that he was thoroughly tired at night, i- During the daytime of the first two experi- e ments, I should say, he read, cleaned a PROFESSOR VOIT. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH 13 V F. MULLER.) * watch, and otherwise occupied himself to while away the time, making, however, very 5 little muscular effort. t The three experiments, then, show the ef- 1 fects of fasting and rest, food and rest, and f food and muscular exercise upon the income 1 and outgo of this man’s body. We will note ^ only very briefly some of the details of the - experiments, the full accounts of which fill many pages. The diet of the first experiment consisted of: Meat extract, 12.5 grams (a little less than one-half ounce). Salt, 15. 1 grams (a little over one-half ounce). Water, 1027.2 grams (about a quart). The day’s ration of the second trial included a third of a pound of lean meat, a pound of bread, a little over a pint of milk, and about a quart of beer, and other materials as follows :

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244 IfOJV FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY, day’s food IxN second experiment. Meat, lean beef. . 140 grams. Egg albumen (white of egg) 42 “ Bread. Milk. . Beer . . Lard , Butter., vStarch. Sugar. Salt. . . Water The diet of the third experi¬ ment was essentially the same as that of the second, except that the man drank a little more water. The income included, besides the food and drink, the oxygen consumed from the inhaled air. The estimated quantities were : Oxygen used m 24 Hoit7's. First experiment, fasting and at rest, 779 grams. Second experiment, liberal ration and at rest, 709 grams. Third experiment, liberal ration and at work, 1006 grams. The final balance-sheets of the experiments, which show the details of income and outgo in terms of the chemical ele¬ ments, carbon, nitrogen, etc., are too extensive to be reported here. That for each experiment would nearly fill one of these pages, but as some readers may be curious to see what they are, I give the principal data in abbrevi¬ ated form.* Daily Income and Expenditure of Chemical Element.'?. Carbon. Hydrogen. Nitrogen. Oxygen. Experiment with n 0 food Grains. Grams. Grams. Grams. (except meat extract) and no work : Income . 2.4 115-I 1.2 1698.4 Outgo . 209.5 221.6 12.5 2301 .4 Loss . 207.1 106.5 ”-3 603.0 Experiment with liberal ration of meat, milk, bread, etc., and no work : Income . 315-5 270.9 19-5 2712.9 Outgo . 275-7 248.2 19-5 2630.2 Gain . . 39-8 22. j 0.0 82.7 Experiment with liberal ration, as in preced¬ ing experiment, and hard work: Income . 309.2 297.7 19-5 3232-5 Outgo . 330 -3 304-9 19-5 3246.5 Loss . 27.1 7-2 0.0 14.0 MOLESCHOTT. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY C. LE LIEURE.) But we wish to know what quantities of flesh and fat the man gained or lost under these different conditions of food and fasting, labor and rest. The figures just cited are for the chemical elements of which the protein and fats are composed. Knowing the propor- * The accuracy of these experiments has been occa¬ sionally called in question, especially on the ground that with the possible sources of error, so complete an accuracy in the balance-sheet is in itself suspicious. That some of the chemical work involved in the re¬ searches of which these form a part might have been performed by more nearly perfect methods is doubtless true, but I believe that experience in the Munich labora¬ tory and careful examination of the published details of the researches must convince the most exacting physio¬ logical chemist that such criticisms are without founda¬ tion. As regards the chief subject of criticism, which is connected with the question of “ nitrogen balance,” it will suffice to say that the tendency of the latest in¬ vestigations has been to very decidedly confirm the correctness of the assumption on which the Munich re¬ sults are based, i. e.^ that practically all the digested nitrogen is excreted by the kidneys. And certainly all the men I have known among those who have worked in the Munich laboratory regard the complete accu¬ racy above alluded to as the result of careful and thoroughly reliable work.

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY, tions of the elements in each compound, it is easy, from the figures for the elements, to estimate the quantities of the compounds. Omitting details of the calculations * the results are given in the balance-sheet of compounds herewith. Regarding the carbohydrates, how¬ ever, I should explain that since the body has extremely little of its own, and those of the food are consumed, they are left out of account in the experiment without food,and the amounts received and consumed in the experiments with food are taken as balancing one another. The protein gained or lost was mainly from the muscles and similar tissues, or what we may call flesh as distinguished from fat. Tak¬ ing the figures for protein and fats gained and lost as shown in the last line of the balance- sheet of income and expenditure of com¬ pounds, changing grams to ounces, and as¬ suming that with each ounce of protein would be water, etc., enough to make the equivalent of ounces of lean flesh, i. <?., muscle, tendon, etc., we have this final result of the trials ; the quantities, as before, are those gained or lost in one day: OUTCOME OF THE EXPERIMENTS AS REGARDS INCREASE OR DECREASE OF LEAN FLESH AND FAT WITHIN THE BODY. Lean flesh ( muscle t eic.). Fats. No food, no work, loss . II ounces none none ounces 2 Liberal diet, no work, gain . Liberal diet, hard work, loss . That is to say, fasting, and without muscu¬ lar labor, the man lived upon the tissues of his body, and consumed daily a trifle less than three-quarters of a pound of muscle, and with this nearly half a pound of the fat previously stored in his body. With plenty of food, and still resting, he neither gained nor lost lean flesh, but gained 2^ ounces of fat in a day. And when he set himself to hard muscular * The calculations, based upon accepted principles of physiological chemistry, are too complex for this place. They are to be explained in detail in a book on VoL. XXXIV.— 35. 245 work, with the same amount of food, he likewise held his own so far as lean flesh was concerned, but lost two ounces of fat. The body used for its support protein and fats, in each case, and carbohydrates when it had them. When the nutrients were not supplied in food, it consumed a little protein and a good deal more fat from its own store. With a ration which sufficed to exactly main¬ tain its protein without gain or loss, the body gained fat when it had only a little more than its own muscular work to perform (that in¬ cluded in breathing, keeping the blood in circulation, etc.), and lost fat again when this work was increased by manual labor. If we had only these experiments to judge from, we might infer that muscular energy comes from consumption of fat, and that the special work of the protein of the food is to repair the wastes and make up for the wear and tear of the protein of the body; and this would be true as far as it goes. But, of course, many other experiments and of many differ¬ ent kinds are needed to settle these questions. The majority of the most useful ones, thus far, have been made with other animals than man. For experiments with dogs, geese, and other small animals a small respiration apparatus on the plan of Professor Pettenkofer’s has been devised by Professor Voit. In studying the laws of animal nutrition the most convenient organism, for many purposes, is that of the dog. The dog thrives upon both animal and vegetable foods, utilizes large quan¬ tities of food to advantage or endures long fasting with patience, and makes ready re¬ sponses by changes of bodily condition to changes in the food. In reading the accounts of the famous feeding-trials conducted by Bis- chofif and Voit, one is surprised to see what control they obtained of the organisms of the dogs experimented with. By altering the kinds and quantities of food constituents, Voit was able either to reduce both the flesh (protein) and the fat of the animal’s body or to increase this general subject now in preparation. Students may find them in the original (German) memoirs in which the experiments are described. INCOME AND EXPENDITURE OF CHEMICAL COMPOUNDS BY BODY OF MAN. Fasting. No work. j Liberal ration. No work. Liberal ration. Hard work. Protein. Fats. Carbo¬ hydrates. Protein. Fats. Carbo¬ hydrates. Protein. Fats. Carbo¬ hydrates. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Grams. Income . 7 0 none 122 117 332 122 117 352 Outgo . 78 216 none 122 52 332 122 173 352 Gain,-1- or loss — . —71 — 216 none 0 +65 0 1 0 —56 0

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.246 JIOJV FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY, both flesh and fat, or to reduce the one or to increase the other. Indeed, the manipulations effected in this way seemed almost equivalent to getting into the tissues and directly remov¬ ing or adding flesh, or fat, at will. The princi¬ ples thus learned from experiments with the dog and other animals apply in the main, though not in all the details, to the nutrition of man. But I must beware of burdening the reader with details, a danger he will appreciate when I say that the experiments of the last twenty years are numbered by hundreds and even thousands, and that the literature of the sub¬ ject is so voluminous that few specialists even are able to handle it. I will endeavor to very briefly summarize a few of the main results. I do not know how to do this better than in the following chart, which was prepared for the Food Collection of the National Museum. Uses of Food in the Body. Food supplies the wants of the body in several ways. Food furnishes : 1. The material of which the body is made. 2. The material to repair the wastes of the body, and to protect its tissues from being unduly consumed. Food is consumed as fuel in the body to : 3. Produce heat to keep it warm. 4. Produce muscular and intellectual energy for the work it has to do. The body is built up and its wastes are repaired by the nutrients. The nutrients also serve as fuel to warm the body and supply it with strength. Ways in which the Nutrients are Used in THE Body. The Protein of food < 'forms the nitrogenous basis of blood, muscle, sinew, bone, skin, etc. is changed into fats and carbo¬ hydrates. is consumed for fuel. The Fats of food are stored in the body as fat. are consumed for fuel. The Carbohydrates of food are changed into fat. are consumed for fuel. The Mineral matters of food ' are transformed into the mineral matters of bone and other tissues. are used in various other ways. Like all attempts to tell a long story in a few words, it omits many important details and gives incomplete expression to the facts which it states. Thus, regarding the use of the nutri¬ ents as fuel,” although their elements com¬ bine with oxygen as those of the coal and wood do in the stove, the process, as it actu¬ ally goes on in the body, is far more complex and less completely understood. In saying that food yields muscular and intellectual en¬ ergy the statements do not explain how this is done, nor has science yet given an at all complete explanation of these wonderful phe¬ nomena. Nor do these statements include the important fact that the fats, protein, and other substances stored in the body are used like those of the food. But the chart includes what it is most important for our present purpose to remember, and we shall have occasion to make further explanations in another place. Translating the statements of this chart into ordinary language, it means that, when we eat meat and bread and potatoes and other kinds of food, our bodies use the nutritive ingre¬ dients in different ways. Thus the myosin, which is the principal nutritive ingredient of muscle (lean meat), the casein (curd) of milk, the albumen (white) of egg, and the gluten of bread are all albuminoids or protein com¬ pounds, and are transformed into muscle, ten¬ don, and other nitrogenous materials in our bodies. The protein compounds are sometimes called flesh-formers, which is all very well so far as it goes, but does not go far enough. They, and they alone, form flesh (/. <?., nitrog¬ enous tissue), it is true, but they do a good deal more. They are also transformed into fat and carbohydrates in our bodies, and they are consumed as fuel to yield us heat and mus¬ cular strength. But our meat always contains more or less fat. This may be taken up by the body and stored as fat within the muscle, bone, and adi¬ pose or other tissues, and so retained for a time as a part of the body-fat ; but the bulk of the fat of the food serves as fuel, and that which has been stored in the body is consumed for the same purpose when occasion demands. Thus the man in the experiments above de¬ scribed lived on the fat previously stored in his body when he took no food ; laid up fat when he had a liberal ration and did no work ; and drew upon the accumulated store again when he did hard muscular work with the same ration. The fat of milk, of butter, and of the fatty and oily materials in bread, corn meal, and other foods is like that of meat, stored as body-fat and used for fuel. Vegetable foods, such as flour, meal, pota¬ toes, and the like, contain a great deal of starch, sugar, and other carbohydrates. When these are taken into the body they are to some extent converted into fats, but their main use seems to be to serve for fuel. In serving as fuel the carbohydrates protect the fats and protein from being consumed. In like manner the fats may protect protein from consumption. In short, the nitrogenous compounds of muscle, tendon, bone, and other parts of the framework of the body and of the blood are

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Jiotv FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. made of the protein of the food. We get the ^at of our bodies not only from the fats but from the protein, and probably from the car¬ bohydrates, starch, sugar, etc., of our food. Other animals, dogs, sheep, swine, and geese, transform carbohydrates into fats, and there is every reason to believe that man is endowed with the same faculty. We use all these classes of nutrients, protein, fats, and carbohydrates, as sources of warmth and muscular strength. Our bodies, when they are in a healthy con¬ dition, contain a reserve of protein and fat which is drawn upon if food is lacking, or if there is extra muscular work to be done or ex¬ tra cold to be endured. And whether the food supply is rightly adapted to the demands of the body or not, its tissues are continually con¬ sumed to supply its wants and are as constantly rebuilt from the food. The old notion that the whole body is made over once in seven years is wrong, however. Some parts are used up and renewed very rapidly, others very slowly. Such, at any rate, are the teachings of the most careful research as they are understood by the investigators who seem best qualified to judge. ADAPTATION OF THE DIET TO THE DEMANDS OF THE BODY. The further details of the ways in which food is used in nutrition will naturally come in with the explanations in succeeding arti¬ cles. But there are one or two more points which perhaps I ought to speak of now. One is, that the body requires a proper supply of each of the different kinds of nutrients for healthful nourishment. The proper supply of neither can be cut off without injury. The protein can, to be sure, do some of the work of the fats and the carbohydrates. In the lack of plenty of vegetable food to furnish starch and sugar, for instance, we may get on pretty well for a while with meat, which has no carbohydrates, the protein and fat of the meat taking their place as fuel. The Lapland¬ ers and Esquimaux have extremely little vege¬ table food and consume enormous quantities of meat, and especially of fat meat, blubber, and what not. But their diet is hardly adapted to either the wants or the digestive apparatus of people of temperate climates. Ordinary peo¬ ple need considerable carbohydrates, and no amount of protein can fully supply their place. But while the protein can to some extent serve in place of the carbohydrates and fats, these latter cannot replace the protein. The Esquimaux can live on meat, but neither men nor other animals can long thrive upon a diet of fat, or sugar, or starch without protein. The reason is that protein has a kind of work to do in building up the muscle, tendon, and 247 other tissues which the fats and carbohydrates cannot perform. Hence, we must have a certain amount of protein in our food or our bodies will suffer for the lack of it, and the more work there is to do, the greater the wear and tear of muscle and tendon, the more liberal must be the supply of protein as well as of other nutrients. The effect of one-sided diet is very well illustrated in some experiments by Professor Ranke. They were made in the respiration apparatus at Munich, and belonged to the series of which I have already spoken. After he had studied the changes that went on in his body when fasting, he proposed to him¬ self these questions : What will be the effect of a diet of protein with very little fat and no carbohydrates on the one hand, and of a diet of fats and car¬ bohydrates without protein on the other ? In other words, how will the composition of the body be affected by food rich in protein and con¬ taining little else, and how will the store of fat and protein be altered by leaving the protein out of the food and living on the other nutrients ? For the diet of protein, he took lean meat, with butter and a little salt, essentially the same diet as was used by the student in the experiment described above. He had found himself able to eat 2000 grams of the lean meat in the course of the day, but in this ex¬ periment, which lasted 24 hours, he ate only ^^33 (about 4 pounds) of meat and with it 70 grams of fat, 30 grams of salt, and 3371 grams (nearly 3 quarts) of water. With¬ out going into the details, suffice it to say, that, according to Professor Ranke’s calcula¬ tions, his body lost 15.1 grams of fat and at the same time gained 113 grams of protein during the day of the experiment. In the other ex¬ periment, which likewise continued for 24 hours, the food consisted of 150 grams of fat, 300 grams of starch, and 100 grams of sugar, an even less appetizing mixture perhaps than the lean meat and butter for an exclusive diet, but yet one which, if put together with proper culinary skill, makes a cake that can be swal¬ lowed. ^ This time he lost 51 grams of protein and gained 91.5 grams of fat. The results of these two experiments may be recapitulated thus : On the diet consisting chiefly of The body Protein (lean meat, etc.), gained protein (muscle, etc.) and lost fat. Fats and carbohydrates (starch and sugar). lost protein and gained fat. This is just what we might expect. But it is interesting to have the facts and figures to

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248 HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. show exactly what did take place, and other experiments make it safe to say that if either the quantities of food or the condition of Pro¬ fessor Ranke’s body had been different, the re¬ sults would have been different also. Thus in the first experiment if he had eaten less meat he would have stored less protein; indeed, with a small enough ration he would have lost both protein and fat, and it seems probable that if he had not been a rather fat person he would not have lost fat so readily on the protein diet. Experiments confirm and to some extent explain the fact so well attested by general experience, that a mixed diet is best for ordi¬ nary people in health. Professor Ranke found that when he did no muscular labor, his body neither gained nor lost ; that, in other words, he just about “ held his own ” with food, con¬ taining per day : Protein. Fats. Carbohydrates. 100 grams (3.5 oz.) 100 grams 240 grams (8.5 oz.) Professor Voit estimates as a fair allowance for a laboring-man doing a moderate amount of muscular work : Protein. Fats. Carbohydrates. 1 18 grams (4. 2 oz. ) 56 grams (2 oz. ) 500 gi*ams ( 1 7.6 oz. ) For reasons to be given later, I think that to fairly meet the demand of the average American laboring-man (I mean the mp whose labor is done with his muscles ; brain¬ workers who have little muscular exercise need less food, I suppose) a more liberal allowance than Voit makes for laboring-men in Germany is needed. The American working-man ” is better paid, has more and better food, and does more work than his European brother. I should be inclined to quantities more like the following for the nutrients in the daily food of an average man doing manual work: Protehi. Fats. Carbohydrates. For moderate work 125 grs. (4.4 oz). 125 grs. 400 grs. (14.4 oz). For hard work 150 grs. (5.2 oz). 150 grs. 400 grs. Men at very severe work may often need much more than the most liberal of these ra¬ tions allows, while men, and especially women, of sedentary habits and elderly people are be¬ lieved to usually require considerably less than the smallest figures indicate. Statistics collected in the United States im¬ ply that the quantity of food consumed by many people whose occupations involve only light muscular labor approaches very near to the largest of these standards, and often con¬ siderably exceeds it. Indeed, a large array of facts lately gathered very strongly support the teaching of physicians that the failure to fit the food to the demands of the body, and especially the excessive consumption of cer¬ tain kinds of food, are the sources of untold injury to health and happiness. But I am get¬ ting ahead of my subject. THE COST AND VALUE OF ABSTRACT RESEARCH. One can hardly realize, until he has found out by personal experience, the amount of la¬ bor, care, and patience, as well as learning and skill, that are required for such investigations as these I have described. Professor Voit tells us that he has often worked with a servant three or four hours each day during an experiment in simply preparing the meat to be used for the food, in freeing it from fat and connective tissues so as to have as nearly pure protein as possible. In describ¬ ing a series of experiments he says, ‘‘We give only the more important observations, in order to enable the reader to judge of the correct¬ ness of our conclusions, and omit the details of the analyses, which would swell the article too much.” The article fills 1 1 5 royal octavo pages and is only one of scores by this one experimenter and his immediate associates. At the agricultural experiment station at Weende, Germany, where the celebrated feed¬ ing-trials by Henneberg, Stohmann, and others with domestic animals were conducted, one of the assistants once told me a bit of experience with the respiration apparatus. As the result of a long series of observations, it appeared that something was out of order. What the trouble was Professor Henneberg could not find out. One day he happened to hear some one speak of the loss of weight of coal when exposed to the air. It occurred to him that a little coal-tar or some similar material, I have forgotten ex¬ actly what it was, had been used in the inte¬ rior of the apparatus, and that perhaps this, like coal, might undergo such chemical changes as to develop gases and cause the trouble. This proved to be the case. The gentleman who related the incident added, “We have been at work now six years with the respiration appa¬ ratus and think we have just got where we can obtain satisfactory results with it.” There is a popular idea that the results of scientific dis¬ covery, at least such as are most useful to peo¬ ple at large, can be turned out like pig-iron or cotton cloth, — so much in a given time, and with no great labor. Nothing could be more contrary to the facts. To many people, a large part of the re¬ search made in the lines of which I have been speaking would appear so abstract and theo¬ retical as to have but very little “ practical ” use. But as a matter of fact, the very things that seem most abtruse are of fundamental importance in the solution of the weightiest

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY. 249 problems of chemistry, physiology, hygiene, lectual work to do or are subject to great nerv- and social science. In this practical, pushing ous strain. In support of this it has been claimed county of ours, especially, the idea is current that brain-work increases the amount of phos- that the profoundest studies, whether in phys- phorus used up in the body and given off by ical science or in other departments of human it, just as muscular work increases the quan- knowledge, are very appropriate and opa- tity of carbon burned and excreted, mental for philosophers and for institutions But the compounds that make up the brain devoted to abstpct research, but not of much and nerves consist of the same elements as account for ordinary use. Coupled with this those in other organs, though the proportions is the notion that our higher educational in- are different; the phosphorized fats occur in stitutions should be places for the teaching of other parts of the body as well as in the brain • things already known, and that it is not par- cerebrin, a compound especially characteristic ticularly necessary for them to engage in the of the brain, contains no phosphorus ; and the discovery of new truth. The more rapidly most careful experimenting has thus far failed these impressions are done away with, and to establish any definite connection between the more^ generally and generously abstract the amounts of intellectual work done and research in all departments of knowledge is phosphorus excreted. cuUivated, the better it will be for our thought The value of phosphorus as food for the and for our morals, and the sooner shall we brain and nerves is frequently and strongly ad- get the information that will most help com- vocated in advertisements of medicines and mon folks m the ordinary struggles of daily medicinal foods containing it, and these are “ T r ■, largely prescribed by the most eminent mem- Is it not a Significant fact that when we come bers of the medical profession, whose wis- to the study of even so preeminently plain and dom in so doing I by no means presume to practical a subject as the food question, one question. But the theory that phosphorus has which affects as many people, and affects them more to do, or is more necessary than carbon as seriously in health and purse if not in mor- or nitrogen or other elements, in the produc- als, as any of the great problems that are agi- tion of intellectual energy is one to which I have tatmg the thought of the time, we must seek the never heard a physiological chemist of repute fundamental data of our studies in the learned express his adherence, and in the writings of and piofound research of foreign universities ? the experimental physiologists whose opinions are most valued by their fellow-specialists it is THE SOURCES OF INTELLECTUAL ENERGY. _ conspicuous by its absence. PHOSPHORUS AND THOUGHT. _ FISH AS history of the theories of the connection BRAIN-FOOD. between phosphorus and thought and of the _ , . , ^ ’ value of fish as food for the brain has some i HAT the labor of the brain is just as depend- rather curious phases, ent upon food and the substances formed from Few utterances of modern writers have had It m the body as the labor of the hands, there such a world-wide currency as the expression IS hardly room for doubt, but just what chem- Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke” (‘'Without ical elements or compounds, if any, are more phosphorus, no thought”). One meets it every- concerned than others in mental or nervous where and with it the notion, though generally exercise is a problem yet unsolved. in very crude form, that thought is somehow A great many people have the idea that produced by phosphorus. A German gentle- thought IS especially dependent upon phos- man of great intelligence told me he had often phorus, and coupled with this is the widespread seen people who supposed that thought was belief that the flesh of fish is particularly rich accompanied by something in the brain akin m phosphorus, and is hence especially valu- to phosphorescence, like the glow of a phos- able for brain-food. phorus match in the dark. I have been led to that connects thought with think that the phrase has done more than phosphorus more than with other elements anything else to spread the idea, though the appears to rest upon the fact that certain idea could hardly have become so prevalent compounds, protagon, lecithin, etc., which if there were not something to nourish it. contain phosphorus and are called phosphor- What that something is I do not know, unless ized fats, are^ more abundant in the brain and it be the natural query in every mind which nerves than in other parts of the body. From the theory seems to answer. The expression this it has been inferred that mental effort and has been attributed to various authors. An ar- nervous excitement involve the using up of tide in the last edition of the “ Encyclopedia large amounts of these substances, and that Britannica ” credits it to Buchner. It is due, I hence phosphorus compounds ought to be es- believe, to Moleschott, and occurs in his “Lehre pecially good for people who have much intel- der Nahrungsmittel” (“ Doctrine of Foods”).

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2 50 FOOD NO UR. Of the early leaders of the movement which is sometimes called Materialism and which has so greatly influenced the thought of our time, Moleschott, Vogt, and Buchner were among the most prominent. Forty years or so ago, Moleschott was a pfivat docent — tutor, we should call it — in the University of Heid¬ elberg, and an aspirant for higher academical honors. He was a man of ability as an inves¬ tigator and writer. His genius was manifested in a controversy with Liebig in which he gained no little repute, and in other writings in which his views were set forth not only with remarkable force, but in a way which was par¬ ticularly irritating to the metaphysicians and especially to the theologians of the more or¬ thodox way of thinking. Heidelberg at that time was not so liberal in its theology as it has since become, and — I give the account as it was given me by one of the professors now there — young Moleschott’s heterodoxy suf¬ ficed to deprive him of the liberty of teaching in the university and, as a not unnatural con¬ sequence, obtained for him a call to a profes¬ sorship in another university, that of Zurich in Switzerland. In course of time he was called to Italy, where, as Professor of Physiology in the University of Turin, and later in the Uni¬ versity of Rome, he has achieved still greater fame in science, and has also played an im¬ portant role in statesmanship, both as the holder of a ministerial portfolio and as sena¬ tor of Italy. I remember very well a remark regarding his famous expression just referred to, which was made to me by Professor Moleschott in the course of a conversation not many years ago. It accords so well with what he had said in print that I think it will be no breach of con¬ fidence to mention it here. Remembering the suggestion of another well-known physiolo¬ gist, that he had used it simply to illustrate and give point to the doctrine that thought and other mental operations are a function of matter, and thus stir up his ultra-conservative opponents, excite discussion, and propagate his tenets, I asked him what led him to make the statement in that form. He replied that of course he did not mean that intellectual energy was specifically dependent upon the consumption of phosphorus (indeed, that was clearly set forth in his writings at the time), and added with a smile, Did you ever read - ? ” referring to an Italian book on the use of language. I was forced to confess that I had not, to which he replied, ‘‘There is a great deal in the way of putting things.” The saying served its purpose wonderfully even if, in its circulation, a shade of meaning has been added to it which it was not intended to convey. Not every man can penetrate to TSHES THE BODY. the depths of human sentiment and coin from the common thought that is gathered there a phrase which will pass current everywhere and carry a doctrine with it. Like Grant’s “ Let us have peace” and Napoleon’s “ Providence is on the side of the strongest battalions,” Moleschott’s “ Ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke” was a scintillation of genius. If a current story is true, the idea that fish is especially good for brain-food can be traced to the elder Agassiz, though, for aught I know, it may be older. The story is that, years ago, Agassiz, who was then in the zenith of his fame and whose persuasive skill was scarcely inferior to his scientific genius, made an ad¬ dress in Massachusetts in behalf of a fish commission, and, with other considerations in its favor, urged that fish was very valuable for brain-food and that fish culture was hence peculiarly demanded by the marked intellect¬ ual activity of the people of that State. It would be superfluous to add that since that time fish culture has not languished in Mas¬ sachusetts. A gentleman well known in American sci¬ ence tells me that he once asked Agassiz what led him to this idea about fish as food, and that he replied, “ Dumas [the French chemist] once suggested to me that fish contained consider¬ able phosphorus and might on that account be especially good for food, and you know the old saying, ‘ Without phosphorus, no thought.’ I simply put the two together.” Later, Mark Twain took up the idea and expressed it as follows (in “The Galaxy”): “Young Author. — ‘Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat — at least, with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair, usual average, I should judge that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.’” As a vehicle for carrying the idea every¬ where and “keeping it before the people” the efficiency of Mark Twain’s joke was su¬ perlative. And aside from the intrinsic self- propagating power of the combination of joke and theory there was the widespread notion that phosphorus is the thought-produc¬ ing element to help it. It would be hard to find conditions more favorable for the spread of a theory than were thus provided for this one of fish as nutriment for the brain. Coupled with the notion that phosphorus is the specific thought-element, it has coursed around the world. Mr. E. G. Blackford, Fish Commissioner of N ew York and, I understand, the largest dealer in fish on this side of the Atlantic, assures me

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HOW FOOD NOURISHES THE BODY, of his belief that the theory materially increases the demand for fish as food. I have heard the same from other fish dealers, who say, Why, you know fish is good brain-food.” Indeed, it is really amusing, if one takes the trouble to notice, how many people will use the same expression, or one very much like it, if the subject is suggested. The theory is squarely adopted by some very prominent writers on foods, and is sometimes taught in schools, rhe Rev. Ram Chandra Bose, well known in Europe and America as one of the most learned of the Hindu converts to Christianity, tells me that if one were to visit any of the great colleges in Calcutta and put to its ad¬ vanced pupils the question, ‘Why are the Ben¬ galese intellectually superior to the other races of India ? ’ the reply would be, ‘ Because they eat fish.’ The belief that fish is rich in phos¬ phorus, and hence serves to strengthen the brain more than other kinds of food do, is current among educated natives and their English teachers.” Even if fish were richer in phosphorus than meats or other food-materials this would not establish its superiority for the nutrition of the brain or the production of intellectual energy. But there is no proof of any especial abun¬ dance of phosphorus in fish. On the contrary, an extended series of analyses in this labora¬ tory have revealed proportions of phosphorus in the flesh of our ordinary food fishes differ¬ ing in no important degree from those which have been found to occur in the flesh of the other animals used for the food of man. Perhaps some of the readers of this will put me down for an iconoclast, as did a most highly esteemed friend, who bade me, and with all candor and seriousness, to beware of thus ruth¬ lessly attempting to uproot an old and impor¬ tant ^ belief. But possibly they will have the charity to leave me a humble place in their consideration if I add that there is, after all, a way in which fish may make a very useful part of the diet of brain- workers. Physiologists tell us that the way to provide for the welfare of the brain is to see that the rest of the body is in good order, that, in other words, the old proverb of “ a sound mind in a sound body ” is sound doctrine. And they are getting to tell us further that one way in which brain-work is hindered is by bad dietary habits, as, for instance, overloading the digestive organs by taking too much food. Of the vice of overeating (a vice which we Amer¬ icans by no means monopolize) a consid¬ erable part, in this country at least, and I think in England and among well-to-do people on the Continent of Europe also, is the vice of fat-eating. We are a race of fat-eaters. If any one doubts this, I think the statistics to be shown in a succeeding article will convince him, unless he is ready to deny the practi¬ cally unanimous testimony of such facts as I have been able to gather. It comes about very naturally and is really due to the fertility of our soil, the consequent abundance of food, and the toothsomeness of food-materials rich in fatty matters. The result of this is that the quantity of fat in the average Amercan’s diet¬ ary is very large indeed, mainly because of the large amounts of meats, butter, and lard consumed, and is far in excess of the demands of his body, unless he is engaged in very severe muscular work or exposed to extreme cold, or both. For people with sedentary oc¬ cupations, including the majority of brain¬ workers, this simply means charging the organ¬ ism with the burden of getting rid of an excess of material. This excess, the physiologists and physicians assure us, is detrimental. If the reader will take the trouble to look at Diagram III. of the previous article of this series, he will see that the flesh of fish contains less fat than ordinary meats. Some kinds, like salmon, mackerel, white-fish, and shad, are quite fat, but the flesh of cod, haddock, bass, blue-fish, perch, flounder, indeed the majority of our most common food fishes, has ex¬ tremely little of fatty and oily matters. Now it seems to me very reasonable to as¬ sume that brain- workers and other people who do not have a great deal of muscular exercise may very advantageously substitute fish in the place of a portion of the meat which they would otherwise consume. I am very well aware that such hygienic advice might come more appropriately from a physician than from a chemist, and am therefore glad to be able to quote from no less an authority than Sir Henry Thompson, who urges “ the value of fish to the brain-worker ”on the ground that it“ contains, in smaller proportion than meat, those mate¬ rials which, taken abundantly, demand much physical labor for their complete consumption, and which, without this, produce an unhealthy condition of body, more or less incompatible with the easy and active exercise of the func¬ tions of the brain.” Perhaps I ought to add that the studies of the constitution of the flesh of fish in this laboratory, referred to above, as well as similar investigations elsewhere, show that, so far as the nutritive qualities are concerned, the only con¬ siderable difference between fish and ordinary meats is in the proportions of oily and fatty matters and water. The flesh of the fish has water where meats have fat. W, O. Atwater,

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI. HE visit to the Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoi which forms the subject of the present paper was made in the latter part of the month of June, 1886; but it had been planned nearly a year before that time at one of the convict mines in Eastern Siberia, and was the result of a promise which I made to a number of Count Tolstoi’s friends and ac¬ quaintances who were then, and are still, in penal servitude in the vast lonely wilderness of the Trans-Baikal. My first knowledge of the fact that thb*e were friends and acquaint¬ ances of the Russian novelist among the po¬ litical convicts at the Nertchinsk mines came to me in the shape of a request that I would carry a copy of his ‘‘ Ispoved,” or Confession, to one of his friends, a lady, who was serving out a sentence of twelve years’ penal servitude at the mines of Kara. The book w^s under the ban of the ecclesiastical censor ; its publi¬ cation and circulation in Russia had been ab¬ solutely forbidden, and the copy which I was requested to deliver was in manuscript. How it had found its way in spite of censors, inquis¬ itors, official package-openers, house-searchers, body-searchers, baggage-examiners, police- officers, and gendarmes to the remote East Siberian village where I was asked to take charge of it I do not know ; but there it was, a silent but convincing proof of the futility of repressive measures when directed against hu¬ man thought. It showed that the Government had not been able to keep a forbidden book even out of the hands of its own political convicts, living under strict guard in a penal settlement of the Trans-Baikal, five thousand miles from the fertile brain in which the pro¬ scribed ideas had their origin. I consented, of course, to take charge of the manuscript, and in less than three months I had made the acquaintance not only of the lady for whom it was destined, but of many other political exiles in Eastern Siberia who had either known the great Russian author personally or had at some time been in cor¬ respondence with him. All of these exiles were very desirous that upon my return to European Russia I should see Count Tolstoi and describe to him the working of the exile sys¬ tem and the life of political convicts at the mines and in the penal settlements of the Trans- Baikal. They seemed to have the impression that he was more or less in sympathy with their aims and hopes, if not with their methods, and that the information which I could give him would strengthen that sympathy, and perhaps change his attitude toward the Government from one of passive resistance to one of active and un¬ compromising hostility. This belief in the possibility of enrolling Count Tolstoi among the active enemies of the Government was founded, so far as I could judge, mainly upon the fact, known even to the exiles in Siberia, that most of his later writings had been pro¬ hibited by the censor. The conclusion drawn from that fact was that the author had at¬ tacked the Government, or at least had openly expressed his disapproval of its political meth¬ ods. The conclusion, however, was erroneous. If these exiled revolutionists had been able to get and read Tolstoi’s later books and articles, they would have seen at once that the sup¬ pressed literature was obnoxious to the eccle¬ siastical rather than to the civil po\ver, and that the very corner-stone of Tolstoi’s religious and social philosophy is non-resistance to evil. Most of these revolutionists, however, had been many years in prison or in exile; they had had no means of following closely the development of Tolstoi’s ideas, and they were misled by a superficial resemblance between his views and theirs with regard to property and social or¬ ganization, and by the attitude of hostility which the Government had taken toward his later writings. Believing, however, as they did, that he was wavering on the brink of open revolt, and that a little more provocation would cause him to throw the weight of his forceful personality and powerful influence against the despotism which they hated, they urged me to see him and tell him all that I knew about Russian administration in Siberia and about the treatment of the political exiles. They also turned over to me a ghastly nar¬ rative in manuscript of the ‘‘hunger strike”* of four educated women in the Irkoutsk prison, — one of them the sister of the well-known Rus¬ sian publicist and political economist, V. V. Vo- rontsof, — and made me promise that I would give the document to Tolstoi to read. I took the manuscript and gave the promise, and un- *A “hunger strike,” in the language of Russian prisons, means organized voluntary self-starvation, un¬ dertaken by the prisoners as a last desperate protest self-imposed torture, against intolerable treatment, and continued until the prison authorities yield to the strikers’ demands, or the strikers themselves break down or die under the

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI 253 der these circumstances my visit to the great Russian novelist was planned. Many months elapsed before I returned to European Russia, and when at last I found ray self once more in Moscow, I learned that Count Tolstoi had left the city and was spend¬ ing the summer on his estate near the village ofYasnaya Polyana [Anglice Clearfield], in the province of Tula. On the i6thof June I took the late evening train southward over the Moscow- Kursk railroad,and reached the town of Tula early the following morning. Count 1 olstoi’s estate is situated about ten miles from the town, on the old turnpike road from Mos¬ cow to Kursk. There is a railway station nearer to it than Tula, but express trains do not stop there, and I was obliged, therefore, to find some other means of conveyance to my destination. Selecting from the throng of droshky drivers at the railway station one in whose face there was an attractive expression of mingled shrewdness and good-humor, I called him to me and asked him if he knew Count Tolstoi. Know our Bahrin ! ” he ex¬ claimed with a broad smile and the half-ca¬ ressing, half-deferential manner of the Russian peasant who has been accustomed to associate upon terms of permitted equality with his su¬ periors. How is it possible not to know the Graf? Why, he is ours ! — he lives in Yasnaya Polyana, only fifteen versts from here.” ‘‘ Is there an inn or a post station in Yasnaya Polyana where I can go ? ” I inquired. No,”replied the droshky driver ; ‘‘but why go to an inn? You can stay with the Count; he is a plain, simple man \sofsem prostoi] ; he always shakes hands with me when I go there, and he works in the fields just like a common muzhik. He is a good man, our Bahrin ; he will be glad to have you stay with him.” It seemed to me that it would be rather awk¬ ward, if not an unwarrantable presumption, for a stranger to go directly to Count Tolstoi’s house, satchel in hand, as if to stay a week, but there did not seem to be any alternative; and trusting that the necessities of the case would be a sufficient apology for any apparent presumption, I made an agreement with the droshky driver for transportation to Yasnaya Polyana, and at 10 o’clock we rolled out of Tula upon the broad white turnpike which leads to Orel and Kursk. It was a bright, sunshiny June morning ; the atmosphere, cleared and freshened by recent rain, was full of fragrance and ozone; and as we reached the summit of a high hill behind the town, I looked out with delight over a vast cultivated landscape rising in places through splendid slopes of vivid green to dark ridges of forest, sinking again into deep sequestered valleys where clusters of brown thatched houses VoL. XXXIV.— 36. hid themselves in clumps of olive foliage, and finally stretching away on the left to the dis¬ tant horizon in one vast undulating expanse of growing wheat. Far or near there was not a fence, nor a wall, nor even a hedge to break with stiff rectangles the vast flowing outlines of the picture ; nor could there anywhere be seen a single isolated house, barn, or granary. Only the high state of cultivation to which the land had been brought, and occasionally the green or golden dome of a village church, calling attention to a modest cluster of thatched cottages nestling under it in a clump of trees, showed that the beautiful picturesque coun¬ try was inhabited. The roadside was bright with daisies, cranebill, poppies, and wild mus¬ tard ; the warm air was laden with the per¬ fume of clover, and yellow butterflies zigzagged in eccentric flight from flower to flower as if half intoxicated by the rich fragrance and yet unable to discover its source. Here and there beside the road ragged peasants, armed with short iron sledge-hammers, were sitting in a group on the ground near a conical pile of broken stone, cracking large water-worn peb¬ bles which they held between their huge, shape¬ less, cloth-bandaged feet ; and now and then we overtook a bare-headed, bare-footed peas¬ ant woman, with tucked-up skirts, trudging homeward from the market-place in Tula, with her purchases in a gray bag or hanging from a long pole carried over one shoulder. About ten versts from Tula, in a shallow valley beside a brook, we came suddenly upon one of those scenes which are so characteristic of Russian life and Russian country roads in the early spring and summer. It was a group of bogomoltsi,” or pilgrims, who had been resting and eating their lunch of black rye- bread and tea beside the road under the shade of a clump of trees. They were all women, and as we passed they sprang to their feet, picked up their long walking-poles, tied their tea-kettles and tin cups to their girdles, shoul¬ dered their gray linen bags, and trudged away from their smoldering camp fire, as if ashamed to have been seen in the act of yield¬ ing to such a weakness of the flesh as a desire for rest and food. They were nearly all women past middle age ; their coarse, ragged, dust- whitened attire, basket sandals, and bandaged legs were evidences of extreme poverty; and their hard, sun-burned features were as stolid and expressionless as if they had never had a thought beyond the gratification of mere ani¬ mal impulses; and yet these God-worship¬ ers,” forsaking homes, families, and friends, had walked across half the empire, and were bound for the great Troitskaya monastery, _ the Canterbury of Russia, — forty-five miles beyond Moscow. For weeks they had not

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254 A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI changed their clothing, eaten a substantial should have supposed that we were taking “ a meal or slept in a bed, and for weeks to come short cut ” through the woods to some peas- they would trudge wearily along the highways ant village. The road had not been graveled, of Russia in scorching heat and drenching and was muddy from recent ram; the grass rain ready to do all, bear all, and suffer all, under the forest trees was long, choked by if at last they might press their faces to the weeds, and mingled with wild flowers ; and cold stone floor of the Cathedral of the Trinity, there was not the slightest evidence anywhere drink out of the holy well of Saint Sergius, of care, cultivation, or pride in the appearance and pray before the massive silver shrine in of the grounds. About two hundred yards from which the relics of that holy man repose, the gateway the road turned suddenly to the During the months of May and June — and rightandstoppedabruptlyatoneendofaplam, in fact throughout the summer — there are white, rectangular, two-story house of stuccoed thousands of such parties of pilgrims on the brick standing among the trees in such aposi- march in all parts of the empire. Some are tion that it could not be seen from the road at bound for the catacombs of Saint Anthony, in a greater distance than thirty or forty yards. Kiev some for the ancient monastery of Saint It would be hard to imagine a simpler, barer, Valamo, on Lake Ladoga; some for the holy less pretentious building. It hadneitherpiazzas shrines of Novgorod the Great ; some for the nor towers nor architectural ornaments of any monastery of Solovetsk, on the bleak arctic kind; there were no vines to soften its hard rect- coast of the White Sea; and a few for the angular outlines or relieve the staring whiteness holy places of far-away Jerusalem. To a cas- of its flat walls; and its front door, which looked ual observer in the streets of Moscow these so much like a side or back door that I did not wandering “ bogomoltsi ” and “ stranniki ” dare to knock at it, was situated nearer the end seem at times to compose a quarter of the pop- than the center of the fa9ade, and was reached ulation of the city. by a flight of steps and a small square platform As we left behind us one by one the black- of gray, uncut paving-stones with grass growing and-white barred posts which mark the long in the chinks. versts between stations on a Russian post- At the end of the house where the road road, the heat of the sun grew more and more stopped there was a croquet ground of bare, oppressive, and the blinding reflection ofitsver- hard-trodden earth, and on a bench beside it, tical rays from the white unshaded turnpike in the shade of a tree, sat a lady m a broad- became more and more insupportable, until brimmed, summer hat, reading. Not feeling sure my head and eyes ached with the heat and the that what I saw was the front of the house, and glare. I was just about to ask my driver if we dreading the awkwardness of knocking at what were not almost there when he gathered up his might prove to be the kitchen or dining-room reins, turned into what seemed to be an old door, I crossed the croquet ground, apolo^zed wood-road leading away from the turnpike on to the lady for interrupting her reading, and m- the right in the direction of an inclosed forest, quired if the Count was at home. She replied and said, “ Na konets daiekheli,”— “At last that she believed he was, and, asking me to fol- we have arrived.” I looked eagerly around low her, she entered the house, requested me to for the imposing baronial mansion which I had be seated in a small reception-room, and then, pictured to myself as the country home of the turning to an open door in a wooden partition, great author, who was at the same time a she called in English, “ Count, are you there . wealthy Russian noble; but, with the excep- A deep voice from the other side of the parti¬ tion of a little cluster of thatched log-houses on tion replied, “Yes.” “A gentleman wishes to the crest of a sloping ridge about a mile away, see you,” she said, and then, without waiting for I could not see a sign of human habitation. a response, she returned to the croquet grouiw. “ Where is the Count’s house ? ” I inquired. There was the sound of a moving chair m the “ It is over there in the woods,” replied the adjoining room, and in a moment Count Tol- driver, pointing with his whip ; “ you can’t see stoi appeared at the door. I had heard not a it until you get close to it. Here is the gate little from his friends with regard to his eccen- of the park,” he added, as, skirting the edge of tricities in the matter of dress; I had been shown a mud-hole, we turned again to the right and photographs of him m peasant garb, and I did passed between two high and evidently ancient not therefore expect to see a man clothed m brick columns, which were hollow on the inner soft raiment ; but I was hardly prepared, nev- side, as if to afford places of shelter for gate- ertheless, for the extreme unconventionality ot keepers or sentinels. Nothing, except these col- his attire. umns and an artificial but long-neglected pond The day was a warm and sultry one; he which glimmered between the trees on the left, had just returned from work m the fields, and indicated that we were in a park or upon the his apparel consisted of heavy calfskin shoes, premises of a wealthy Russian landowner. I loose, almost shapeless, trousers of the coarse

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI 25s homespun linen of the Russian peasants, and a white cotton undershirt without collar or neckerchief. He wore neither coat nor waist¬ coat, and everything that he had on seemed to be of domestic manufacture. But even in this coarse peasant garb Count Tolstoi was a striking and impressive figure. The massive proportions of his heavily molded frame were only rendered the more apparent by the scantiness and plainness of his dress, and his strong, resolute, virile face, deeply sunburned by exposure in the fields, seemed to acquire added strength from the feminine arrange¬ ment of his iron-gray hair, which was parted in the middle and brushed back over the temples. Count Tolstoi’s features may be best described in Tuscan phrase as “ molded with the fist and polished with the pickaxe,” and the impression which they convey is that of independence, self-reliance, and unconquer¬ able strength. The face does not seem at first glance to be that of a student or a speculative thinker, but rather that of a man of action ac¬ customed to deal promptly and decisively with perilous emergencies, and to fight fiercely for his own hand, regardless of odds. The rather small eyes deeply set under shaggy brows are of the peculiar gray which lights up 111 excitement with a flash like that of drawn steel ; the nose is large and prominent with a singular wideness and bluntness at the end ; the lips are full, and firmly closed; and the outlines of the chin and jaws, so far as they can be seen through the full gray beard, only give additional emphasis to the expression of virile strength, which is the distinguishing characteristic of the large, rugged face. In the book which has been translated into English by Isabel F. Hapgood, and pub¬ lished in New York under the title of “ Child¬ hood, Boyhood, and Youth,” Count Tolstoi refers to the pain which he felt at the early age of six years when his mother was obliged to confess that he was a homely boy. I fancied,” he says, ‘‘ that there was no happi¬ ness on earth for a person with such a wide nose, such thick lips, and such small gray eyes as I had ; I besought God to work a miracle, to turn me into a beauty, and all I had in the present or might have in the future I would give in exchange for a handsome face.” But there is something better and higher in Count Tolstoi’s face than mere beauty or reg¬ ularity of feature, and that is the deep impress of moral, intellectual, and physical power. He stood for an instant on the threshold as if surprised to see a stranger, but quickly ad¬ vanced into the room with outstretched hand, and when I had briefly introduced myself he expressed simply but cordially the great pleas¬ ure and gratification which he said it gave him to receive a visit from a foreigner, and espe¬ cially from an American. I explained to him that my call was the result partly of a promise which I had made to some of his friends and admirers in Siberia, and partly of a desire to make the personal acquaintance of an author whose books had given me so much pleasure. What books of mine have you read ? ” he asked quickly. I replied that I had read all of his novels, including “ War and Peace,” Anna Karennina,” and “ The Cossacks.” ’ ‘‘ Have you seen any of my later writings ? ” he inquired. No,” I said ; they have all, or nearly all, appeared since I went to Siberia.” '' Ah ! ” he responded, then you don’t know me at all. We will get acquainted.” At this moment my ragged and generally unpresentable droshky driver, whose existence I had wholly forgotten, entered the door. Count Tolstoi at once rose, greeted him cor¬ dially as an old acquaintance, shook his hand as warmly as he had shaken mine, and asked him with unaffected interest a number of ques¬ tions about his domestic affairs and the news of the day in Tula. It was perhaps a trifling incident, but I was not at that time as well acquainted as I now am with Count Tolstoi’s ideas concerning social questions, and to see a wealthy Russian noble, and the greatest of living novelists, shaking hands upon terms of perfect equality with a poor, ragged, and not overclean droshky driver whom I had picked up in the streets of Tula was the first of the series of surprises which made my visit to Count Tolstoi memorable. When the droshky driver, after inquiring affectionately with re¬ gard to the health of the Countess and of all the children, had taken his departure. Count Tolstoi excused himself for a moment and re¬ turned to the apartment out of which he had come, leaving me alone. The room where I sat was small and nearly square, and seemed to serve a double purpose as a reception-room and a hall. Two of its walls were of white plaster; the third consisted of one side of a large oven covered with glazed tiles, and the fourth was formed by an un¬ painted wooden partition pierced by a . door which opened apparently into Count Tolstoi’s library or work-room. The floor was bare ; the furniture, which was old-fashioned in form^, consisted of two or three plain chairs, a deep sofa, or settle, upholstered with worn green morocco, and a small cheap table without a cloth. Three pairs of antlers were fastened against the walls, and upon one of them hung an old slouch hat and a white cotton shirt similar to that which Count Tolstoi had on. There was a marble bust in a niche behind the settle, but the only pictures which the

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256 A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI room contained were a small engraved por¬ trait of Dickens and another of Schopenhauer. It would be impossible to imagine anything plainer or simpler than the room and its con¬ tents. More evidences of wealth and luxury might be found in many a peasant’s cabin in Eastern Siberia. Before I had had time to do more than glance hastily about me, Count Tolstoi reappeared in the act of belting around his waist, with a wide black strap, a coarse gray blouse, or tunic, of homespun linen, which he had put on in the adjoining room. Then seating himself beside me, he began to question me about the journey to Siberia from which I had just returned, and I — mindful of my promise to the exiles — be¬ gan to tell him what I knew about Russian administration and the treatment of political convicts. It soon became evident that he was not to be surprised, or shocked, or aroused by any such information as I had to give hini. He listened attentively, but without any mani¬ festation of emotion, to my descriptions of exile life, and drew from the storehouse of his own experience as many cases of administra¬ tive injustice and oppression that were new to me as I could give that were new to him. ^ He was evidently familiar with the whole subject, and had with regard to it well-settled views which were not to be shaken by a few addi¬ tional facts not differing essentially from those that he had previously considered. I finally asked him whether he did not think that re¬ sistance to such oppression was justifiable. That depends,” he replied, ‘‘ upon what you mean by resistance ; if you mean persuasion, argument, protest, I answer yes ; if you mean violence — no. I do not believe that violent resistance to evil is ever justifiable under any circumstances.” He then set forth clearly, eloquently, and with more feeling than he had yet shown, the views with regard to man’s duty as a member of society which are contained in his book en¬ titled “ My Religion,” and which are further explained and illustrated in a number of his recently published tracts for the people. He laid particular stress upon the doctrine of non- resistance to evil, which, he said, is in accord¬ ance both with the teachings of Christ and the results of human experience. He declared that violence, as a means of redressing wrongs, is not only futile, but an aggravation of the original evil, since it is the nature of violence to multiply and reproduce itself in all direc¬ tions. The revolutionists,” he said, “ whom you have seen in Siberia, undertook to resist evil by violence, and what has been the result ? Bitterness, and misery, and hatred, and blood¬ shed ! The evils against which they took up arms still exist, and to them has been added a mass of previously non-existent human suffer¬ ing. It is not in that way that the kingdom of God is to be realized on earth.” I cannot now repeat from memory all the arguments and illustrations with which Count Tolstoi enforced his views and fortified his position ; but I still remember the eloquence and earnestness with which they were pre¬ sented, and the deep impression made upon me by the personality of the speaker. The ideas themselves were not new to me; I had repeatedly heard them discussed in literary circles in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tver, and Kazan ; but they never appealed to me with any real force until they came from the lips of a strong, sensitive, and earnest man who believed in them with passionate fervor. For a long time I did not suggest any diffi¬ culties or raise any objections ; but at last I made an effort to escape from the enthrallment of Count Tolstoi’s strong personal influence by proposing to him questions which would neces¬ sitate the application of his general principles to specific cases. It is one thing to ask a man in a general way whether he would use vio¬ lence to resist evil, and quite another thing to ask him specifically whether he would knock down a burglar who was about to cut the throat of his mother. Many men would say yes to the first question who would hesitate at the second. Count Tolstoi, however, was con¬ sistent. I related to him many cases of cruelty, brutality, and oppression which had come to my knowledge in Siberia, and at the end of every recital I said to him, “ Count Tolstoi, if you had been there and had witnessed that transaction, would you not have interfered with violence?” He invariably answered, No.” I asked him the direct question whether he would kill a highwayman who was about to murder an innocent traveler, provided there were no other way to save the traveler’s life. He replied, If I should see a bear about to kill a peasant in the forest, I would sink an axe in the bear’s head ; but I would not kill a man who was about to do the same thing.” There finally came into my mind a case which, al¬ though really not worse than many that I had already presented to him, would, I thought, appeal with peculiar force to a brave, sensitive, chivalrous man. Count Tolstoi,” I said,‘‘ three or four years ago there was arrested in one of the provinces of European Russia a young, sensitive, culti¬ vated woman named Olga Liubatovitch. I will not relate her whole history ; it is enough to say that, inspired by ideas which, even if mis¬ taken, were at least unselfish and heroic, she, with hundreds of other young people of both sexes, undertook to overturn the existing sys¬ tem of government. She was arrested, thrown

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI 257 into prison and after being kept for a year in « No,” I said, “ because I did not see it done • solitary confinementshe was exiled to Siberia by but I have it from two eye-witnesses one of administrative process. You perhaps know — them a lady in whose statements I put implicit or if you do not know, I can tell you — what trust, and the other an officer of the exile ad- hardships and sufferings and humiliations a ministration. They saw it and they told me ” young girl must undergo who is sent to Siberia Again he was silent. Finally, ignoring my alone by ‘ etape ’ with a common criminal direct question as to what he personally would party. You can imagine the state of nervous have done in such a case. Count Tolstoi said excitement, the abnormal mental and emo- ‘‘ Even under such circumstances violence tional condition, to which she is brought by would not be justifiable. Let us analyze that months of riding m spnngless telegas ; by be- situation carefully. I will grant, for the sake mg compelled to yield to the demands of na- of argument, that the local governor who or- ture under the eyes of a soldier, and by sleeping dered the act of violence was an ignorant man for weeks on the hard benches and in the foul a cruel man, a brutal man — what you will * air of ‘ etapes ’ swarming with vermin. In this but he probably had an idea that he was do' abnormal mental and emotional condition Olga ing his duty; he probably believed that he was Liubatovitch reached the town of Krasnoy- enforcing a law of the Government to which arsk in Eastern Siberia. She had up to this he owed obedience and service. You suddenly time been permitted to wear her own dress and appear and set yourself up as a judge in the herown underclothing; butat Krasnoyarsk the case; you assume that he is not doing his local governor directed that she should put on duty,— that he is committing an act of unjus- the dress of a common convict. She refused tifiable violence,— and then, with strange in¬ to do so upon the ground that administrative consistency, you proceed to aggravate and exiles had the nght to wear their own clothing, complicate the evil by yourself committing and that if convict dress had been obligatory, another act of unjustifiable violence. One she would have been required to put it on wrong added to another wrong does not before she left Moscow. The local governor make a right; it merely extends the area of msisted upon obedience to his order, and Miss wrong. Furthermore, your resistance, in order Liubatovitch persisted in refusal. I do not to be effective,— in order to accomplish any- know the reason for her obstinacy, but as con- thing,— must be directed against the soldiers victs are not always supplied with new clothing, who are committing the assault. But those and are sometimes compelled to put on gar- soldiers are not free agents ; they are subject to ments which have already been worn by others military discipline and are acting under orders and which are foul and full of vermin, it is not which they dare not disobey. To prevent the difficult to suggest a number of good reasons execution of the orders you must kill or maim for objecting to such a change. The chief of two or three of the soldiers — that is, kill or police and the officer of the convoy were finally wound the only parties to the transaction who V, presence, and are certainly innocent, who are manifestly act- that of half a dozen other men, three or four ing without malice and without evil intention, soldiers seized the poor girl and attempted to Is that just ? Is it rational ? But go a step take off her clothes. She resisted, and there further: suppose that you do kill or wound followed a horrible scene of violence and un- two or three of the soldiers ; you may or may availing self-defense. Her lips were cut in the not thus succeed in preventing the completion contest and her face covered with blood, but of the act against which your violence is a pro- she continued to resist as long as she had test; but one thing you certainly will do, and strength. In spite of her cries, appeals, and that is, extend the area of enmity, injustice, and struggles,she was finally overpowered, stripped misery. Every one of the soldiers whom you naked under the eyes of six or eight men, and kill or maim has a family, and upon every such forcibly reclothed in the coarse convict dress, family you bring grief and suffering which Now,” I said, '' suppose that all this had oc- would not have come to it but for your act curred 111 your presence; suppose that this bleed- In the hearts of perhaps a score of people you ing, defenseless, half-naked girl had appealed rouse the anti-Christian and anti-social emo- to you for protection and had thrown herself tions of hatred and revenge, and thus sow mto your arms ; suppose that it had been your broadcast the seeds of further violence and daughter — would you still have refused to in- strife. At the time when you interposed there terfere by an act of violence ? ” was only one center of evil and suffering. By He was silent. His eyes filled with tears as your violent interference you have created half his imagination pictured to him the horror of a dozen such centers. It does not seem to me such a situation, but for a moment he made Mr. Kennan, that that is the way to bring no reply. Finally he said, '' Do you know ab- about the reign of peace and good-will on solutely that that thing was done ? ” earth.” ^ ^ b

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258 A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI My curiosity as to the extent to which Count Tolstoi would go in the application of his general principles to specific cases was entirely satisfied. The answer to this reason¬ ing, from the point of view of sociology, is ob¬ vious, but it was not my purpose to object, ^ or argue, more than might be necessary to bring out Count Tolstoi’s views in their full strength. Further conversation was prevented by a summons to lunch, which was served in a large, cheerful, sunny room in the second story. This part of the house, so far as plain¬ ness and simplicity are concerned, was per¬ fectly in harmony with the part that I had already seen. The floor was bare ; the furni¬ ture was homely and old-fashioned ; the win¬ dows were hung with simple white muslin curtains without lambrequins or unnecessary drapery ; and the whitewashed, walls were re¬ lieved only by a few oil portraits in faded gilt frames, which evidently represented ancestors and dated from the last century. At lunch I met, for the first time. Count Tolstoi’s large family, which consisted of the Countess, a stately, dark-eyed, dark-haired lady, who must in her youth have been ex¬ tremely beautiful ; the eldest son, who had re¬ cently been graduated from one of the Russian universities; the eldest daughter, a girl per¬ haps twenty years of age; two bright-faced nieces, and three or four younger children. There were also present a young man in a highly ornamented peasant costume, worn evidently from caprice or in imitation of the Count, and two ladies of middle age whose relations to the family I could not determine, but who were probably nothing more than friends and converts to the Tolstoi philosophy. The lunch passed quickly with bright, spontaneous conversation, in which all joined without the least appearance of formality or restraint, and in the course of which Count Tolstoi himself manifested more boyishness and gayety than I had yet given him credit for. When we had risen from the table he pro¬ duced and proceeded to sell at auction to the highest bidder a richly embroidered towel, the work of a peasant woman, which, he said, had been brought to him as a present, but which he was unwilling to accept because the giver was very poor and really in need of the money that the towel represented. Amid general laughter Count Tolstoi’s son and I, who were the principal bidders, ran the price up by suc¬ cessive offers of five kopeks more to two rou¬ bles and a half, when the auctioneer, with non¬ professional candor, declared that that was too much ; that the American traveler in the course of the bidding had offered two roubles, which was about what the towel was worth, and that consequently it was his duty to award it to him. Young Tolstoi, with mock indigna¬ tion, protested against the unfairness of that sort of an auction, but his motion for a new trial was overruled on the novel ground that the towel belonged to the auctioneer, who therefore had an unquestionable right to knock it down to any bidder whom he chose. His son laughingly acquiesced in the ruling, and the merry group which had gathered abput the auctioneer dispersed. I had not yet had a favorable opportunity to show Count Tolstoi the manuscript em¬ bodying the narrative of the ‘‘hunger strike ” in the Irkoutsk prison, which I had promised the political exiles in the Trans-Baikal that I would give to him. Upon our return to the little reception-room on the first floor, I raised again the question of the treatment of the political convicts in Siberia, and, as an illus¬ tration of some of my statements, I handed him the manuscript. It was a detailed history of the voluntary self-starvation of four political convicts, all educated women, in the prison at Irkoutsk. This “hunger strike,” which took place in December, 1884, lasted sixteen days, and brought all of the women very near to death. It was undertaken as the last possible protest against what they regarded as intoler¬ able cruelty. The narrative was written by Madame Rossikova, one of the “hunger strik¬ ers,” and was smuggled out of the prison by an administrative exile who occupied a cell near hers, and who succeeded in opening communication with her at night by means of a cord, with a small weight attached, which he swung within reach of her window. I shall in a subsequent paper give a translation of this narrative, and I need only say here that it is a detailed account of perhaps the most des¬ perate “ hunger strike ” recorded in the annals of Russian prisons. Count Tolstoi read three or four pages of the manuscript with a gradually clouding face, and then returned it to me. Flis manner and his subsequent conversation conveyed to my mind the impression that he was already over¬ burdened with a consciousness of human rnis- ery, and that he shrank from the contemplation of more suffering which he was powerless to relieve, and which could not change his views with regard to the principles that should gov¬ ern human conduct. “ I have no doubt,” he said, “ that the cour¬ age and fortitude of these people are heroic, but their methods are irrational, and I cannot sympathize with them. They resorted to vio¬ lence, knowing that they rendered themselves liable to violence in return, and they are suffer¬ ing the natural consequences of their mistaken action. I cannot imagine,” he continued, “ any darker conception of hell than the state

Page 264

A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI of some of those unfortunate people in Si¬ beria, whose hearts are full of bitterness and hatred, and who, at the same time, are abso¬ lutely powerless even to return evil for evil. If,” he added after a moment’s pause, ‘‘ they had only changed their views a little, — if they had adopted the course which seems to me the only right one to pursue in dealing with evil, — what might not such people have done for Russia ! Mine is the true revolution¬ ary method. If the people of the empire re¬ fuse, as I believe they should refuse, to render military service,— if they decline to pay taxes , to support that instrument of violence, an army, — the present system of government cannot stand. The proper way to resist evil is to absolutely refuse to do evil either for one’s self or for others.” But,” I said, surprised by this advocacy of a revolutionary method which seemed to me utterly impracticable and visionary, ‘‘ the Government forces its people to render mili¬ tary service and pay taxes — they must serve and pay or go to prison.” “ Then let them go to prison,” he rejoined. The Government cannot put the whole pop¬ ulation in prison ; and if it could, it would still be without material for an army and without money for its support.” ^'But,” I objected, ''you cannot get the whole people to act simultaneously in this way. If you were let alone, you could perhaps convert a few hundred thousand peasants to your views ; but do you think that you would be let alone ? As soon as your teaching be¬ gan to be dangerous to the stability of the state it would be suppressed. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you succeeded in con¬ verting a quarter of the population ; the Gov¬ ernment would draw soldiers enough from the other three quarters to put that one quarter in prison or in Siberia, and there would be an end of your propaganda and your revolution. It seems to me that the first thing to be done is to obtain freedom of action — peaceably if possible, forcibly if necessary. You cannot persuade, nor teach, nor show people how they ought to live, if some other man holds you by the throat and chokes you every time you open your mouth or raise your hand. How are you ever going to get your propa¬ ganda under way ? ” " But do you not see,” replied the Count, " that if you claim and exercise the right to resist by an act of violence what you regard as evil, every other man will insist upon his right to resist in the same way what he regards as evil, and the world will continue to be filled with violence ? It is your duty to show that there is a better way.” " But,” I objected, " you cannot show any¬ thing if somebody smites you on the mouth every time you open it to speak the truth.” " You can at least refrain from striking back,” replied the Count; "you can show by your peaceable behavior that you are not gov¬ erned by the barbarous law of retaliation, and your adversary will not continue to strike a man who neither resists nor tries to defend himself. It is by those who have suffered, not by those who have inflicted suffering, that the world has been advanced.” I said it seemed to me that the advance- rnent of the world had been promoted not a little by the protests — and often the violent and bloody protests — of its inhabitants against wrong and outrage, and that all history goes to show that a people which tamely submits to oppression never acquires either liberty or happiness. " The whole history of the world,” replied the Count, " is a history of violence, and you can of course cite violence in support of vio¬ lence ; but do you not see that there is in hu¬ man society an endless variety of opinions as to what constitutes wrong and oppression, and that if you once concede the right of any man to resort to violence to resist what he regards as wrong, he being the judge, you authorize every other man to enforce his opinions in the same way, and you have a universal reign of violence ? ” " If, on the other hand,” I said, "oppression is advantageous to the oppressor, and if he finds that he can oppress with impunity and that nobody resists, when is he likely to stop oppressing ? It seems to me that the peace¬ able submission to injustice which you advo¬ cate would simply divide society into two classes : tyrants, who find tyranny profitable, and who therefore will continue it indefinitely, and slaves, who regard resistance as wrong, and who will therefore submit indefinitely.” Count Tolstoi, however, continued to main¬ tain that the only way to abolish oppression and violence is to refuse absolutely to do vio¬ lence regardless of provocation. He said that the policy of passive resistance to evil which he advocated as a revolutionary method is in complete harmony with the character of the Russian peasant, and he referred to the wide and rapid spread of religious dissent in the empire as showing the chance of success which such a policy would have in spite of repressive measures. After some further conversation Count Tol¬ stoi proposed that we should take a walk, and I assented. A short distance from the house we met Miss Tolstoi, the Count’s eldest daugh¬ ter, dressed as a peasant girl, on her way home from the fields where she had been raking hay with the village girls of Yasnaya Polyana.

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26o A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI The peasant dress of bright scarlet, cut low in the neck all around, the braided hair, and the strings of large colored glass beads which hung in festoons over her breast, changed her ap¬ pearance so completely that I did not recog¬ nize her until her father called her by name. It appeared that she shared his views with re¬ gard to manual toil, and was accustomed to work in the fields of any poor neighbor who was in need of assistance. Count Tolstoi him¬ self had spent the morning in spreading manure over the land of a poor widow who lived near his estate, and would have devoted the after¬ noon to the same occupation but for my visit. '' I believe,” he said, ‘That it is every man’s duty to labor for others who need assistance, and to work at least a part of every day with his hands. It is better to actually labor for and with the poor in their particular employ¬ ment, than it is to work in your own higher and possibly more remunerative intellectual field and then give the poor the results of your labor. In the one case you not only help the people who need help, but you set the poor and the idle an example; you show them that you do not regard even their prosaic toil as beneath your dignity, and you thus teach them self-respect, industry, and contentment with their lot. If, on the other hand, you work exclusively in your own higher intellectual field and give the poor the results of your labor, as you would give alms to a beggar, you encourage idleness and dependence; you establish a social class distinction between yourself and the recipient of your alms ; you break down his self-respect and self-reliance, and you inspire him with a longing to escape from the hard conditions of his own life of daily physical toil, and to share your life, which he thinks is easier than his; to wear your clothes, which seem to him better than his, and to gain admission to your social class, which he regards as higher than his. That is not the way to help the poor or to promote the brotherhood of man.” “ If I admit,” I said, “ that it is man’s high¬ est duty to do good to others, and that he owes only a secondary duty to himself and to his family, I cannot dispute the soundness of your reasoning. If I accept your premises I leave myself no ground to stand on in an ar¬ gument ; but, waiving that point, the charac¬ teristic of your scheme that strikes me most forcibly is its utter impracticability. Given the present organization of society and the ex¬ isting traits of human character, it seems to me that a man who practices non-resistance, and who devotes his life to the good of others, simply sacrifices himself and his family without any commensurate gain to the world, because nobody else acts upon the same principles.” “ You say,” rejoined Count Tolstoi, “ that if you admit my premises you leave yourself no ground to stand on in an argument ; but why should you not admit my premises ? You must admit my premises. If every man should do good to every other man instead of evil, the condition of things would be better than it is now, would it not ? The state of society in which every man shall do good instead of evil is a thing to be hoped for and worked for, is it not ? Then why do you say that I am impracticable when I hope and work for the realization of a social state which you your¬ self admit is desirable ? If we are ever to reach that desirable social state somebody must make a beginning, must he not ? Somebody must take a step in that direction and show that it is possible to live so ? What if the pres¬ ent organization of society and the existing traits of human character do make such a step difficult — that has no bearing on my personal duty. The question is not what is easy, but what is right. There is nothing sacred or nec¬ essarily immutable about the present organiza¬ tion of society and the existing traits of hunian character. They are the results of man’s activity, and by man’s activity they can be changed. I believe that they ought to be changed, and I am doing what I can to change them.” Count Tolstoi then related with great full¬ ness of detail the history of his change of at¬ titude toward the teaching of Christ, and the steps by which he was brought to see that that teaching, rightly understood, furnishes a reasonable solution of some of the darkest problems of human life. He based upon it not only his opposition to resistance as a means of overcoming evil, but his hostility to courts of justice, established churches, class distinctions, private property, and all civil and ecclesiastical organization in existing forms. His frequent references to the New Testa¬ ment, and his insistence on the precepts of Christ as furnishing the only rule for the right government of human conduct, might lead one to regard Count Tolstoi as a devout and orthodox Christian, but, judged by a doctrinal standard, he is very far from being so. He rejects the whole doctrinal frame¬ work of the Christian scheme of redemption, including original sin, atonement, the triune personality of God, and the divinity of Christ, and has very little faith in the immortality of the soul. His religion is a religion of this world, and it is based almost wholly upon terrestrial considerations. If he refers frequently to the teachings of Christ, and accepts Christ’s pre¬ cepts as the rules which should govern human conduct, it is not because he believes that Christ was God, but because he regards those precepts as a formal embodiment of the high-

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI 261 est and noblest philosophy of life, and as a revelation, in a certain sense, of the Divine will and character. He insists, however, that Christ’s precepts shall be understood — and that they were intended to be understood — literally and in their most obvious sense. He will not recognize nor tolerate any softening or modification of a hard commandment by subtle and plausible interpretation. If Christ said,‘‘ Resist not evil,” he meant resist not evil. He did not mean resist not evil if you can help it, nor resist not evil unless it is unbearable; he meant resist not at all. How unflinchingly Count Tolstoi faces the logical results of his system of belief I have tried to show. We wandered aimlessly about his estate, talking and arguing, nearly the whole after¬ noon ; I do not remember where we went ; I cannot remember anything that I saw ; I was conscious only of the stream of ideas, argu¬ ments, and illustrations which flowed unceas¬ ingly from his mind into mine, and the emotions which were roused by it, and by the strong, earnest, lovable personality of the man himself Late in the afternoon we were compelled by a summer shower to take refuge in the house, and Count Tolstoi invited me into his work¬ room. It was very small, not much larger than an ordinary bedroom, and the cell of a her¬ mit could hardly have been less luxurious. It contained no furniture except a narrow iron bedstead, a single plain wooden chair, and a small table of stained pine covered with worn green morocco. There was a portrait over the table of a well-known Russian dissenter named Siutaief, and around the walls were book-shelves filled with books, mostly in paper covers, but I could see nothing else to distinguish Count Tolstoi’s library from a room in the house of any well-to-do peasant. “ I receive many letters,” said the Count, opening a drawer in the table,** from people in America who have read my * Confession ’ and * Religion ’ — here is one and he put into my hands a letter from some man living in a village in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, informing the Count that he — the writer — and many of his fellow-villagers had long practiced the prin¬ ciples advocated in ** My Religion ” ; that they ** confessed the truth as it is in Jesus,” and that they had recently organized a church. ** Now,” said the Count, ** what do you think of that letter ? You see he doesn’t understand; he thinks that he cannot have religion without a church. I wrote him that he didn’t need a church in order to live rightly.” At this moment there entered the room a young man shabbily dressed in the garb of a common peasant, who brought to Count Tol¬ stoi the day’s mail from the neighboring village. VoL. XXXIV.— 37. I took the man to be a servant employed about the stables, and did not rise from my seat. I was greatly surprised therefore when Count Tolstoi introduced him to me as Mr. F., one of his friends and co-workers. He proved to be an educated gentleman, a graduate of one of the Russian universities, and the most consistent and thorough-going of Count Tol¬ stoi’s disciples. He carried the latter’s principles in fact to the utmost limit of logical applica¬ tion. He had no property, no home, not even a settled place of abode. He worked con¬ stantly for others, and refused absolutely to re¬ ceive any compensation except food, clothing, and shelter. Even these necessities of life he accepted not as payment for his labor, but merely as things which every man is bound to give every other man if they are needed. He toiled wherever he thought his work would be most useful ; when he needed clothes, he asked some peasant woman to make them for him ; when he was hungry, he went to the nearest house for food ; and when night came, he slept under any roof where he happened to be. In short, he devoted his life to society at large, and society at large supported him. He paid no taxes, refused to take out a passport, ignored the Government in every way, and was liable to arrest at any moment as a vagrant. If he had been arrested, he would have persisted in his refusal to pay taxes which might be used to support an army, and would have gone quietly, if not contentedly, to prison. Could there be a more perfect illustration of altruistic principles carriedunflinchingly to theirlogical conclusion ? Among the letters and packages brought from the post-office by this young man was a copy of the English translation, published in New York, of Count Tolstoi’s book entitled ** My Religion.” It was the first time he had seen it in its English dress, and he expressed a curiosity to know whether or not the trans¬ lation, which had been made through the French, was a good one. He brought out the original manuscript, which bore evident traces of much handling and copying, and we com¬ pared three or four pages of it with the trans¬ lation. The author seemed to be satisfied, and said, ** The ideas are apparently all there.” The conversation then turned upon foreign editions of his books, and he said that he had recently received from the American publish¬ ers of one of his novels an offer of a royalty, upon condition that he should allow that firm to call theirs the authorized edition of his works. He had written them, he said, that he did not recognize nor believe in contracts or agreements, and that he did not desire to have anything to do with the foreign sale of his novels. He spoke slightingly, almost contempt¬ uously, of his works of fiction, and seemed

Page 267

262 A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI. to regard them for the most part as monu¬ ments of misdirected energy. He had great difficulty, he said, in getting his religious ideas before the Russian people on account of the attitude of hostility taking toward them by Pobedonostsef, the Procureur of the Holy Synod, and by the ecclesiastical censor. I told him that I had seen many lithographed and hektographed copies of his later writings in circulation in St. Petersburg and Moscow. “Yes,” he replied; “the Government will not allow me to print them, but it cannot suppress them altogether. Sometimes it proscribes my ideas in one form and allows them to be printed in another. It refused me permission to publish in the form of an argument the ideas contained in ^ Ivan Durak ’ (‘ Ivan the Fool’). I recast them in the form of a short story for the common people, and the censor passed them without objection. I was forbid¬ den to print my ^ Ispoved ’ (‘ Confession ’), but the ecclesiastical authorities finally printed it themselves in their own ‘ Orthodox Review,’ with an elaborate refutation of my heresies by a prelate of the church. I am told,” he added with a smile, “ that in the public libraries the only leaves of the ^ Orthodox Review ’ that are cut are those on which my ^ Confession ’ is found.” Our conversation was interrupted at this point by the announcement of dinner. Count Tolstoi of course made no change in his dress ; I was unable to make any change in mine even had I felt disposed to do so, and the ladies alone showed a disposition to respect the established conventionalities of life in the mat¬ ter of apparel. The dinner was simple, informal, and in every way enjoyable. The conversation, as at lunch, was bright and unconstrained, and Count Tolstoi himself in particular seemed to participate with keen zest in the laughter, raillery, and badinage of the younger people. His relations with his children, whenever I saw them together, were everything that such relations should be — cordial, sympathetic, and affectionate. After dinner the family again separated. The young man who had brought the mail from the post-office, and one of the two ladies whom I supposed to be visiting disciples of * Through the courtesy of Mr. W. P. Garrison of the New York “ Nation,” I have been permitted to make the following extracts from a letter written to him in English by Count Tolstoi under date of Mos¬ cow, March 25th, 1886: “ I have received your letter and the books you sent me. I thank you very much for both. To be informed of the existence of such a pure Christian personality as was your father has been a great joy to me. I have not yet had the time to read the whole book, but the Declaration of Non-Resistance, that I had looked over, is, in my opinion, an era in the history of humanity. This Declaration, as it has been composed nearly half a century ago, fully expresses the sentiments we pro- the Count, had a philosophic symposium in his work-room, where I found them later in the evening, reading and discussing one of his unpublished manuscripts. The Countess Tolstoi invited me to drink tea in her sitting- room, and there we were soon afterward joined by the Count, who brought in with him a large lap-board, an open box, or tray, containing shoemaker’s instruments and ap¬ pliances, and an unfinished pair of shoes. Seating himself quietly in a good light, he laid the board across his knees, took up one of the shoes, and began to put on a heel, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the author of “Anna Karennina,” and the owner of an estate worth six hundred thousand rou¬ bles, to spend his evenings in cobbling. I had already been surprised so many times that day that my nervous organization had nearly ceased to respond to that sort of emotional stimulation ; but the discovery that Count Tolstoi was a shoemaker had still enough piquancy and grotesqueness about it to excite a faint thrill of wonderment. I seated myself directly opposite him, where I could occasion¬ ally facilitate his labor by handing him the necessary implements, and he discoursed learnedly upon shoemaking as an art, and explained to me the fine points of workman¬ ship involved in putting on a heel and the ex¬ treme difficulty of trimming a sole neatly with¬ out cutting the “ upper.” He seemed to feel more honest pride in his ability to make a shoe than in his ability to write “ War and Peace” or “The Cossacks”; but after watch¬ ing the progress of his labor for half an hour with an unprejudiced, if an uncritical, eye, I decided, with all respect for the versatility of his talent, that I would rather read one of his novels than wear a pair of his shoes. After some further talk upon the art of shoemaking, accompanied by practical illus¬ trations, Count Tolstoi turned the conversation to America, and began to ask me questions about people and things there that interested him. He said that he regarded William Lloyd Garrison as one of the most remarkable men that America had produced,* and he called my attention to an engraved portrait of the great fess now and which will be professed by the whole mankind, because they express God’s eternal law unto men, revealed by Christ, and which is to be fulfilled. (Chap. V. 18 Matt.). . . . Does the Society of Non- Resistance exist yet ? And where is its organ and who are its members ? It is strange of me to make this last question ; the Society of Non-Resistance is not an exceptional society, but is, in fact, the only church which was founded by Christ, and which never can end. My question properly means : Are there people who profess the true faith, and who boldly accuse the errors of false Christians who acknowledge Govern¬ ment, and violence which is inseparable with it ? ”

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI, antislavery agitator which hung near the win¬ dow in the room where we were sitting. He said he had sent to the United States for the biography of Garrison by Oliver Johnson, and had read it with great interest ; but he thought the author had not given prominence enough to Garrison’s views with regard to non-resist¬ ance, and had shown a disposition to treat them in a deprecatory way, as if they were something to be apologized for. In his (Count Tolstoi’s) opinion, the fact that Garrison was, at one time at least, a non-resistant, did him more honor perhaps than any other fact in his history. The Count also spoke with warm respect and admiration of Theodore Parker, whose '' Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion” he regarded as the most remarkable effort of the American mind in that field. In the courseof furtherconversationhe said he thought it deeply to be regretted that America had in two particulars proved false to her traditions. “ In what particulars ? ” I inquired. In the persecution of the Chinese and the Mormons,” he replied. '‘You are crushing the Mormons by oppressive legislation, and you have forbidden Chinese immigration.” “ But,” I said, “ have you ever heard what we have to say for ourselves upon these questions ? ” “ Perhaps not,” he answered; “ tell me.” I then proceeded to give him the most ex¬ treme anti-Chinese views that have ever pre¬ vailed upon the Pacific coast, and to draw as dark a picture as I could of the economic condition of a once prosperous and happy State “ ruined by Chinese cheap labor.” “Well,” he said when I had finished, “is that all ? ” “ All ! ” I exclaimed. “ Isn’t that enough ? Suppose the Chinese should come to Califor¬ nia at the rate of a hundred thousand a year; they would simply crush our civilization on the Pacific coast.” “Well,” rejoined the Count coolly, “what of it ? The Chinese have as much right there as you have.” “ But would you not allow a people to pro¬ tect itself against that sort of alien invasion ? ” I asked. “ Why alien ? ” said the Count. “ Why do you make a distinction between foreigners and countrymen ? To me all men are brothers, no matter whether they are Russians or Mexi¬ cans, Americans or Chinese.” “ But suppose,” I said, “ that your Chinese brethren come across the sea in sufficient num¬ bers to reduce you to slavery; you would probably object to that.” “ Why should I?” rejoined the Count with quiet imperturbability. “ Slavery is working for others — all I want is to work for others.” I abandoned the discussion. To argue with 263 a man who would not resist enslavement by a Chinese was as unprofitable as to discuss sur¬ gery with a man who would not admit the desirability of relieving suffering and saving life. I allowed the Mormon question to go by default. In fact, I did not see upon what ground I could defend anything against an antagonist who would neither give me stand¬ ing room nor allow me to use any of the weap¬ ons in my armory. Later in the evening something was said which brought up the subject of civil govern¬ ment, and that in turn led to a discussion of punishment in general and capital punish¬ ment in particular. Count Tolstoi, as might have been expected, was opposed to both, and in the course of the conversation he said that shortly after the assassination of Alexan¬ der II. and the trial and sentence of the as¬ sassins, he wrote a letter to the present Tsar, making an appeal in behalf of the condemned regicides, setting forth the wrongfulness of taking human life, even by due judicial proc¬ ess, and imploring the Tsar not to begin his reign with murder. He sent this letter by a friend to Pobedenostsef, the Procureur of the Holy Synod, who had been the tutor of Alex¬ ander III., and was supposed to have great influence over him, and besought Pobeden¬ ostsef to lay the letter before the Tsar with a favorable recommendation. He received from Pobedenostsef in reply what he described to me as “a terrible letter” \uzhasnoe pismoe\, in which the writer said that he approved of the death sentence pronounced upon the murder¬ ers of Alexander II., that he did not sympa¬ thize with appeals for mercy based upon such considerations as those which Count Tolstoi urged, and that he must therefore decline to bring the letter to the Tsar’s attention. He closed by saying, “Your religion is a religion of weakness and sentimentality, but there is a religion of authority and power ” [st/ i vlast], I could see by Count Tolstoi’s manner while relating this incident that he had been deeply disappointed by the result of his inter¬ cession, though why he should have expected any other result it is hard to understand. The circumstance furnishes an illustration of what seems to me a weakness — or, if that word be too harsh, a peculiarity — which distinguishes Russian character as a whole, and which is to me one of the most noticeable features of the character and the philosophy of Count Tol¬ stoi. I cannot think of any better word to describe that peculiarity than “ childishness,” although that word has also a depreciatory sig¬ nificance which renders it objectionable, and which I should like in this case to reject. I mean that the Russian, as a rule, has a child¬ ish faith in the practicability and the speedy

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264 ^ VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI realization of plans, hopes, and schemes which an American, under precisely similar circum¬ stances, would regard as visionary and quix¬ otic, and would therefore throw aside as having no bearing on his present conduct. When this national trait is united, as it is in the Russian character, with a boundless capac¬ ity for self-sacrifice, it brings about results which, to the American mind, are simply be¬ wildering and astonishing. This characteristic which I have called “ childishness ” is no less apparent in the reasoning and the activity of the Nihilists than in the doctrines and the eccentric practices of Count Tolstoi. It was as childish for the Nihilists to suppose that they could attain their objects by assassinat¬ ing the Tsar as it was for Count Tolstoi to suppose that he could save them from punish- . ment for that act by urging such considerations as the barbarity and sinfulness of the death penalty upon a government which had already shot or hanged fifteen or twenty men for politi¬ cal offenses of far less gravity. Both the Nihil¬ ists and Count Tolstoi answered affirmatively the question, Is the object to be attained de¬ sirable ? ” and then both proceeded at once to act, regardless of the equally important ques¬ tion, Is the proposed method practicable?” The Russian seems to throw himself with a sort of noble, generous, but childish enthusi¬ asm into the most thorny path of self-denial and self-sacrifice, if he can only see, or think that he sees, the shining walls of his ideal golden city at the end of it. He takes no account of difficulties, heeds not the suggestions of prudence, cares not for the natural laws which limit his powers, but presses on, with a sublime confidence that he can reach the ideal city because he can see it so plainly, and because it is such a desirable city to reach. From Count Tolstoi, striving to bring about the millennium by working for others and sacrific¬ ing himself, down to the poor pilgrims by the roadside, striving to better their characters and atone for their sins by laborious pilgrim¬ ages to holy shrines, there is manifested this same national characteristic — the disposition to seek desirable ends by inadequate and im¬ practicable methods. I had had no favorable opportunity during the day to ascertain Count Tolstoi’s views with regard to modern science, but late in the after¬ noon such an opportunity presented itself in the course of a discussion of heredity as a factor in social problems. I said it seemed to me that in considering the possibility of eradicating evil by altruistic conduct and non-resistance he did not give the facts of heredity enough weight. He re¬ plied that he did not belie ve in inherited total de¬ pravity, and that as for Darwinism he regarded it as a ‘‘ great deception ” \bolshoi obman\ “ I do not pretend,” he said, “ to be well informed upon the subject of development; but I am told that a Russian scientist, named Danilefski, has written a book which will com¬ pletely demolish the Darwinian theory.” It was evident from this remark that Count Tol¬ stoi had no adequate conception of the cumu¬ lative strength of the mass of evidence which now supports the theory of development, and I did not therefore pursue the subject. Callers soon afterward came in, and, although Count Tolstoi did not discontinue his shoemaking, the conversation soon became general, and was directed to subjects of local interest. At 1 1 o’clock it became necessary for me to return to the railway station, and I bade good-bye, with sincere regret, to a man whom I had known only one day, but for whom I had already come to feel an almost affectionate re¬ spect. His theories of life and conduct seemed to me nobly, generously, and heroically wrong, but for the man himself I had, and could have, only the warmest respect and esteem. It has of course been impossible, within the limits of such a paper as this, to give even the substance of a conversation which lasted many hours, and which ranged over the whole field of human conduct. I am conscious that in what I have written, from memory and from fragmentary notes, I have failed to do even partial justice to Count Tolstoi’s arguments, to his eloquence, and to the deep, earnest sincerity which pervaded them, and which impressed me more than all else. I hope, however, that I have at least reported him fairly and understanding^. Count Tolstoi is perhaps at the present time the most generally talked of and widely read author in Russia. His books and pam¬ phlets circulate by tens of thousands among the educated classes, and by millions among the peasants ; his theories of life are bitterly attacked and sometimes warmly defended in the Russian periodical press, and his religious ideas are discussed in the luxurious homes of the wealthy nobles and in the cottages of the peasants, and from the capital of the empire to the mines of Kara. The fifth collection of his works, in twelve volumes, has just been published in St. Petersburg, and up to July last there had been sold nearly three million copies of his tracts for the common people. What permanent effect, if any, his teaching and his example will have upon the course of events in Russia it is impossible as yet to pre¬ dict. Thus far the results are unimportant, and the verdict of educated society is adverse to the philosopher and to his philosophy. I am not at all sure, however, that the results would long continue to be unimportant if the Govern¬ ment should allow Count Tolstoi’s propagan-

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A VISIT TO COUNT TOLSTOI da to get fairly under way. There is no doubt that his teachings are, to a certain extent, in harmony with the character of the Russian peasant ; and that he spoke the simple truth when he said to me, “ The muzhik is not natu¬ rally aggressive nor combative, but he is capable of passive resistance to an almost un¬ limited extent.’' Both of these facts are illus¬ trated by the history of Russian dissent, and particularly by the springing up in various parts of the empire of such sects as the Non- Tax-payers,” the Hiders,” and the ‘‘ Fol¬ lowers of Siutaief.” All of these sects hold views closely analogous to those of Count Tol¬ stoi, and they hold them with a tenacity which neither prison nor exile can conquer. Siberia is full of people who have been banished for religious heresies which they could not be per¬ suaded nor forced to relinquish, and the num¬ ber of dissenters in the empire is now about fourteen millions. If Count Tolstoi were al¬ lowed to sow the seeds of his doctrines broad¬ cast in this fertile soil, it might possibly change to a very considerable extent the course of Russian history ; but, as I have before said, he will not be permitted to do so. Nearly all of his later writings have been prohibited by the censor, in whole or in part, and if, not¬ withstanding these repressive measures, his religious heresy should gain adherents enough to make it dangerous, or even troublesome, to the state, it would be stamped out with im¬ prisonment and exile, as scores of such dan¬ gerous heresies have been stamped out before. The question most frequently put to me in St. Petersburg and Moscow after my return from Yasnaya Polyana was, Did Count Tol¬ stoi impress you as sincere and in earnest ? ” There seemed to be a prevalent belief that he was merely amusing himself with shoemak¬ ing, field-labor, and tract-writing, and that there was behind it all no real sincerity of conviction. In support of this belief it was urged that Count Tolstoi’s practice did not in all respects accord with his preaching; that he pretended to regard his works of fiction as useless, if not pernicious, and yet superin¬ tended the publication of a fifth edition of them; and that he opposed private property and preached against money-getting, and yet continued to hold his estate and to take the proceeds from the sales of his books. In reply to these attacks upon Count Tol¬ stoi’s sincerity it may be said that if there is any discrepancy between his preaching and his practice it arises from the fact that he is acting under restraint. It is an open secret in Russia that all of Count Tolstoi’s family do not share his religious belief, and that in the attempt to put his ideas into practice he is obliged to choose between two lines of conduct, each of which involves evil and suffering, not only to himself but to others. Under such circumstances he has chosen what seems to him the least wrong alternative, and has made his practice conform to his preaching just so far as he can without bringing upon himself and upon others a greater evil than that grow¬ ing out of his admitted inconsistency. It is therefore ungenerous, if not unjust, to attack him upon this ground, since he is precluded by the very nature of the case from making any defense. In an authorized interview recently pub¬ lished in a Russian journal. Count Tolstoi refers to this subject as follows, in language whose graphic idiomatic simplicity and vigor can only be suggested in a translation : “People say to me, ‘Well, Lef Nikolai vitch, as far as preaching goes, you preach ; but how about your prac¬ tice? ’ The question is a perfectly natural one; it is al¬ ways put to me, and it always shuts my mouth. ‘ You preach,’ it is said, ‘ but how do you live ? ’ I can only reply that I do not preach — passionately as I desire to do so. I might preach through my actions, but my actions are bad. That which I say is not preaching; it is only my attempt to find out the meaning and the significance of life. People often say to me, ‘ If you think that there is no reasonable life outside the teach¬ ings of Christ, and if you love a reasonable life, why do you not fulfill the Christian precepts ? ’ I am guilty and blameworthy and contemptible because I do not fulfill them; but at the same time I say, — not in justi¬ fication, but in explanation, of my inconsistency, — Com¬ pare my previous life with the life I am now living, and you will see that I am trying to fulfill. I have not, it is true, fulfilled one eighty-thousandth part, and I am to blame for it ; but it is not because I do not wish to fulfill all, but because I am unable. Teach me how to extricate myself from the meshes of temptation in which l am entangled,— help me,— and I will fulfill all. I wish and hope to do it even without help. Con¬ demn me if you choose, — I do that myself, — but con- denin me, and not the path which I am following, and which I point out to those who ask me where, in my opinion, the path is. If I know the road home, and if I go along it drunk, and staggering from side to side, does that prove that the road is not the right one? If it is not the right one, show me another. If I stagger and wander, come to my help, and support and guide me in the right path. Do not yourselves confuse and mislead me and then rejoice over it and cry, ‘ Look at him ! He says he is going home, and he is floundering into the swamp ! ’ You are not evil spirits from the swamp ; you are also human beings, and you also are going home. You know that I am alone, — you know that I cannot wish or intend to go into the swamp, — then help me ! My heart is breaking with despair be¬ cause we have all lost the road ; and while I struggle with all my strength to find it and keep in it, you, in¬ stead of pitying me when I go astray, cry triumphantly, ‘ See ! He is in the swamp with us ! ’ ” Never, it seems to me, was there written a simpler, franker, more sincere confession of in¬ consistency than this, and never was there a more eloquent and touching appeal for sym¬ pathy, encouragement, and support. George Keii7ia7i,

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SONGS OF THE SEA. POSEIDON. METHOUGHT I wandered through those caverns dim Beneath the Adriatic, — sea-girt halls Where ocean’s sceptered monarch, stem and grim, Sits’ on his throne, beneath the crystal walls ; Forever all that mighty palace hums 'With the sea’s voice, its dull, reverberant knell Sounds through the passages, as from a shell Pressed to the listening ear a murmur comes. Through those vast halls for many a spacious hour I walked, methought, till, on a sudden, lo. Harsh thunder, and, anon, the sea-god’s car Blazing with light, and on its seat of power, Poseidon, angry-eyed, with bodeful brow. Rode through the gloom of ocean, summoned far. SUNRISE AT SEA. How soft a light from yonder east is thrown Across this waste of sea, Saturnian, A glow as tender as when time began ; Though here there is no other creature known, Save deep blue sea and deep blue sky alone. And the rain-burdened clouds’ slow caravan, The sea and sky, forgetful here of man. Talk each to each in measured monotone. Once in the year a stray ship passes by — Still presses on the multitudinous host Of billows, dark beneath the lonely sky. Summoned ere night to bathe some distant coast. Thus o’er earth’s desert places, eve and morn. From the pale lips of heaven, God’s smile is borne. THE sea’s voice. Around the rocky headlands, far and near. The wakened ocean murmured with dull tongue, Till all the coast’s mysterious caverns rung With the waves’ voice, barbaric, hoarse and drear. Within this distant valley, with rapt ear, I listened, thrilled, as though a spirit sung. Or some gray god, as when the world was young, Moaned to his fellow, mad with rage or fear. Thus in the dark, ere the first dawn, methought. The sea’s deep roar and sullen surge and shock Broke the long silence of eternity. And echoed from the summits where God wrought. Building the world, and ploughing the steep rock With ploughs of ice-hills harnessed to the sea.

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SONGS OF THE SEA. 267 II. The sea is never quiet, east and west, The nations hear it, like the voice of fate, . Within vast shores its strife makes desolate. Still murmuring, ’mid storms that to its breast Return, as eagles screaming to their nest. Is it the voice of worlds and isles that wait. While old earth crumbles to eternal rest. Or some hoar monster calling to his mate ? O ye, that hear it moan about the shore. Be still and listen ! that loud voice hath sung. Where mountains rise, where desert sands are blown ; And when man’s voice is dumb, forevermore Twill murmur on, its craggy shores among, • Singing of gods, and nations overthrown. THE WIND AND THE STARS AND THE SEA. The wind and the stars and the sea, What song can be sung of these three. With words that are written in lines? Ah, God of the stars and the- sea. The voice of the song, it should be The voice of the wind in the pines. The voice of the song, it should be The voice of the coast of the sea, Stepmother and wrecker of ships; As deep and as hoarse as the tune Bleak Labrador sings to the moon, With rocky and cavernous lips. The wind and the stars and the sea. The Arctic night knoweth the three; No other sojourner it hath. Save death and these three from of old, To whose abode throned in the cold. No living thing knoweth the path. There nothing to grieve or rejoice E’er lifts up the sound of its voice _ A world ere the birth of a soul; A thousand long ages speed by. Still glimmer the stars in the sky. Still whistles the gale from the Pole. Amid the unharvested plains, The blossomless land where death reigns. The wind sings of doom and of graves: It sings of the days when the world Shall crumble to sand, and be whirled Like dust in the teeth of the waves. Where ice-mountains thunder and crash. Where frozen waves gurgle and dash, Where love never came with its tears Like a lost world’s desolate cry. Shrills sea- wind to sea and to sky. And only the ear of God hears. Willia7n Prescott Foster.

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. “ There is nothing great in this world but man, and nothing great in man but mind.”— William Hamtlto7t, lERE is a certain exhila- as it rests on facts it may possibly have too ration of thought in Amer- brief a history to justify its conclusion. Kant ica — compounded per- and Hegel and Lessing formulated theories haps of our dry, stimulating of history — substantially alike-— that point air, our sense of achieve- to the perfection of human society ; but in ment as a nation, the ra- doing so, they not only ran counter to^ the pidity and multiplicity of ordinary thought of men but to the habitual our inventions, and the expression of the greatest minds. The highest increase of wealth — that induces the belief forms of human thought are the epic poem that we are on the true highway of prog- and the tragedy ; but the epic is always ress, and that nothing can prevent us from based on a remote age, and is a picture of past reaching the goal of social perfection. If the and faded glory. Eden is at the beginning, average American sentiment on this subject and all after it is lapse ; the heroic period lies were reduced to a single voice and note, it far back ; the gods mingled with men in re- would be a whoop of satisfaction at having mote ages, and Olympus is now vacant j glory emerged from the woods in which humanity and virtue and achievement are found in early has hitherto wandered, and of confident ex- days that have passed not to return. It is ultation in having found a straight path in an easy to set this down to reverence, and to the open country to the celestial city — whatever demand made by imaginative genius for a clear the conception of that may be. I propose field ; but underneath such play of the mind that we separate ourselves from these worthy there may be detected the conviction that the fellow-citizens who draw their data from the present is less worthy than the past. So in factories and the prairies, the newspapers and tragedy, which always turns on failure to the halls of Congress, and endeavor to throw cope with circumstances, man goes down un- a somewhat broader light upon the subject, der evil and the pressure of the forces of It is possible that history, philosophy, and a nature. The accord yielded to tragedy as study of man himself have more to say upon the height of human expression is not merely the question of human progress than any of its literary and artistic, except as art is regarded chance phases or the voices of the present as truth, but is granted because it is a true picture of human life. W e refuse to accept It is quite true that the conviction of a tragedy unless it is thoroughly tragical ; and steady advancement of humanity toward an again not for artistic reasons, but because we ideal of perfection has gained nearly univer- demand the truth of life. When a writer in sal lodgment in the modern mind, but the tragic fiction softens his conclusion, and grounds of it are little understood. In the let lives, or Lear regains his crown, or when religious world it is based on the bare word he carries the good and the evil along his of Revelation, without much intelligent con- pages side by side — the history of each in¬ ception of the process, and is lifted into the volved in that of the other — and at the clouds of ecstatic vision ; it is not, however, close draws a separating line between good false nor in vain. In the world of semi-phi- and evil fortune, we pronounce it weak and losophy it is chiefly based on the signs of the untrue to life. It may not be untrue to spirit- times, which is somewhat like sailing by the ual faith, but it does not describe the course winds instead of the stars. In the world at of things in this world. The tragedy that in- large it is based on material changes, with little volves the noble Hamlet, the pure Ophelia, heed of the fact that even adamant crumbles, the weak Poloiiius, and the criminal Kmg and The idea of human progress toward the goal Queen brings all to a common ruin. High in- of an ideal perfection is of recent origin. Al- tention and sweet innocence cannot disentp- ways latent, perhaps, in the inmost recesses gle themselves from the net of evil in which of man's nature, it has entered but feebly into they are inevitably caught. Dante made Vir- his thoughts, is distinctly absent from the great gil his leader and master, but the world re¬ minds except in rare cases, and only within a verses the relation and sets the somber and century has it found full expression in philoso- awful critic above the amiable Mantuan. The phy,wherealoneithasintellectual justification, theology of Milton, like his cosmology, has But even here it is a modern idea, and so far passed away, but his great epic stands not

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS, because of the dignity of his verse, but through the tremendous sense of evil wrought into it, and which is still felt to be real. The hold that such authors as Juvenal and Lucian and Rabelais and Swift retain is not due to the Jceenness of their wit, but to their truthfulness ; and Thackeray is accorded a more stable place in literature than is given to Dickens, because he goes deeper into the heart of society, — one depicts evil institutions; the other shows us the weakness of humanity itself, and we sadly acquiesce in his impeachment. So it is not the weird skill of Hawthorne that puts him at the head of modern writers of fiction, but the searching light in which he sets the forces of evil as they move on to inevitable doom. The vital and enduring books do not blur virtue, but they do not present it as surely tri¬ umphant. I do not refer to the Sacred Books, into which a higher set of truths enter and where we find the story of human life drawn out at fuller length, but to the literature of this present world. We find, indeed, in all great books hope, and a deep sense that virtue will be crowned ; but these hopes and convictions are subordi¬ nated to the sternness, the apparent vanity, the weakness of human life. They are subdued in their tone ; if they exult, it is with a cadence or hint of question, and often the triumph comes after the failure — with funereal pomp and amidst the scenery of another world. It is the chorus of spirits that sounds the notes of cheer while Ate and Nemesis weave the body of the play. My point is this : that we do not find in the greater forms of thought that cer¬ tainty of a good outcome for man, either as an individual or collectively, that we gather from the voices of the day. The reasons for this somewhat doubtful look at the future of humanity — found in the great masters of thought — spring out of their pro¬ found sense of the weakness and frailty of man. They saw him invested by powers with which he cannot cope ; these powers are inexorable and continue while man passes away before them. They also recognized the reality of evil, involving a doom not to be escaped, and linking generations together with cumulative force and increasing certainty of penalty. Regarding man as a frail being who rises, flourishes, decays, and passes away, and society as a macrocosm of which man is the typical microcosm, they as¬ signed to them a common fate. A nation might flourish and come to glory, but it must decay as man does. They saw also a tendency in history to repeat itself ; and the history of no nation, in its external aspect, justifies the hope of permanent perfection. They saw that the very conditions of progress in prosperity and wealth involve pride and presumption and self- indulgence that end in ruin; — the theme of VoL. XXXIV.— 38. 269 serious comedy and of the great moralists. They saw that as the life of man and of society grows complex, it outmasters human wit and that defeat steals in through one of the many doors; — the theme of tragedy, and the source by reaction of idyllic poetry that praises simplic¬ ity. They were governed also by a still pro¬ founder influence : they saw man involved in nature — drawn from its bosom, under its laws, conformed to it in the order of his life — and in nature they found no real progress, but only a round and a return to the starting-point; they found in it only fixed laws — a necessity that admitted a brief play of seemingly free powers, but ended the process in inexorable doom. Man is no exception and, however far he may go or high he may reach, he is still moving in a circle of destiny, and must at last lie down in the weakness and silence of death. Such have been the governing thoughts of the great thinkers. Plato built an ideal repub¬ lic, but confessed that it must at last perish under the frailty of human nature. Idealist as he was, he did not distinguish between the life of the individual and the corporate life of so¬ ciety ; man was humanity. These prevailing conceptions are not to be disregarded. The opposite, or rather correct¬ ing, conceptions have not yet found secure recognition. Freedom is not yet established above necessity, and will not be so long as we cherish a material and agnostic philosophy, and regard freedom as a thing to be conven¬ iently taken for granted though all the facts are interpreted to the contrary. The question if man be not wholly involved in nature and its laws, is the Hougoumont of the Waterloo that is now raging in philosophy; if won by the materialist, this age at least will see no prog¬ ress beyond rapid material changes, and the main question will be to reduce friction to the lowest possible degree, — that is, to extract from nature’s grasp and get into our own the great¬ est possible amount of force, — force being all we know or have to deal with. The idea that humanity may have a destiny that is not typified in the individual, that history has a philosophy which is not wholly identical with the worldly experience of man, is yet a mere theory. The old and strongly presumptive idea that society is the macrocosm of which man is the microcosm is not yet separated into its proper proportions of truth and error. Thought still gravitates — and with profound- est reasons — toward man’s consciousness of himself as a subject-being in the world, depicted perhaps nowhere so well as in Job, the Greek Plays, Hamlet, and the writings of Pascal, and it rises with difficulty into the late-dawning conceptions of his dominion and ability to conquer circumstance and to build himself

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL FROGEESS. 270 and society into enduring forms. There is no more wholesome and needful lesson for this presumptuous age to learn than that its dis¬ position and ruling thought do not accord with the largest thought of the world. We find in the wisest of men a common and steady dis¬ position to glorify the past, to criticise the pres¬ ent, and to distrust the future ; — these three things men trained in the school of human life always have done, and will continue to do. In¬ stinctive habits like these have a rational basis. The shallow critic says that to glorify the past is weak and untrue ; to criticise the present is morbid ; to distrust the future is cowardly. But still the poets will go on singing the praises of the past, glorifying the conquest of Ca¬ naan and not the last brush with the Philis¬ tines, King Arthur and not the campaign of the Soudan ; the moralists will still lay their rough hands upon the present order ; the wise and far-sighted will still look anxiously into the future and listen to their own thoughts rather than to the Fourth-of-July orators. These instinctive tendencies are capable of a high interpretation and have a profound use that quite outweighs any seeming inaccuracy of thought. It would be a misfortune if men did not think in these ways. Our sense of the past is made what it is in order to strengthen our hold upon good already achieved; our criticism of the present is a perpetual judg¬ ment-throne by which the evil is separated from the good ; our distrust of the future is the ex¬ pression of the conscious weakness of man and of his proneness to err — the echo in our hearts of his repeated history on the earth ; it is the wise humility of man as conscious of himself ; it makes him cautious, careful, vigi¬ lant. It is well and even necessary to believe in progress and to hope for it, but checks are put upon thought and hope lest they breed overconfidence and vain presumption. The goal of progress is first to be discovered, and then reached by achievement. The things to be done before it is gained are many and great, and can only be wrought in humility and faith and “ sad sincerity.” Under such thoughts, let us raise the question whether much that is now deemed progress is really such, or, indeed, enters at all into a true conception of progress; whether, in fact, the changes that are called by this name are not a part of the old round of vanity through which men have walked from the beginning. Change, and that chief¬ ly of a material sort, is the chief feature of the present conception of progress ; and the process is one of friendly conflict with nature — to get power away from her into our own hands. As nature is now reduced mostly to force, the conflict is mainly at this point, — to reduce friction, and use leverage with the greatest advantage. Hence the multiplicity of our inventions and their wide application to life — all designed to get this force of na¬ ture at work for us with the least expenditure of our own force, or with an expenditure only of brain-force. I do not say that this is not the very thing that man ought to do, — a chief part of his present vocation in the world. But let him remember meanwhile that he is simply toiling in the round of nature, and that what man wrests from nature will be reclaimed by it unless it is firmly held in the grasp of his moral and spiritual nature, and lodged in a higher and more retentive world; if not, the jealous fingers of nature will reach after its stolen force and draw it back into itself. A patent cut-off is not secure be¬ cause it lies in the archives of the Capital and is described in a book ; it is safe and perma¬ nent only as it is cherished by men who hold a true theory of the philosophy of human life; and this philosophy is not one of mere use and convenience, but is something far higher and has a different purpose. Progress in this world of mechanical achievement is not progress except as it is associated with and presided over by certain very rigid forces known as moral and spiritual. This prog¬ ress has not in itself the slightest power to advance mankind an inch toward its proper destiny. It may be indeed the revolution of the car-wheel that bears the traveler on, but it is not the force that carries him. If we sink ourselves in nature, and turn life into a use of mechanical forces, nature will out¬ wit us, and steal back the Promethean fire. There would be no need of words of criti¬ cism and caution before the great achieve¬ ments of physical science, if it were not for the fact that prevailing philosophy and con¬ ception favor, and play into, and simply inter¬ pret this material life. The steam-engine is something to be thankful for, but when the philosophy of human life is made one with the expansion of steam, fierce explosion or unresist¬ ing cooperation may be anticipated. I assume as unquestionable the prevalence of a materi¬ alistic and agnostic philosophy — the one be¬ cause it is the other — seen everywhere, seen more in the life and conversation of men than in books, and yet literature is full of it, — run¬ ning out into pessimism on one side and into an easy optimism on the other. I refer to it only to direct attention to the fact that, coin¬ cident with its prevalence, no apparent prog¬ ress is being made in the higher lines of life as revealed in art and literature; and also to the fact of a diversion from the true methods and ends of education. Without attempting to play the connois-

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EDUCATION AND SOCIAL FEOGEESS. seur in art, I venture to say that its chief motive at present is to represent French peas¬ ants in the greatest possible variety of nat¬ ural attitudes — admirable work and quite worthy of being done as a by-play, and some¬ times, as in Millet, rising into the religious ; but where are the pictures that set the blood on fire with noble purpose, or haunt the mind with their mysterious suggestion of eternal truth ? What canvas now breathes inspiration ? Where are the marbles that are gods to us in their awful purity and power ? What great musical compo¬ sition has been produced since the phrase ag¬ nostic cdcmo. into use ? I acknowledge the power of the W agnerian compositions, but it is the power of nature, and not of the spirit. Music is by far the most significant and revealing of the arts. No electrometer is more sensitive than is music in its revelation of the character and scope of human thought ; and what is present composition revealing ? Harmony, sweet and intricate enough, but “the diapason closing full in man ” we seldom hear from the modem composer, and our hungry hearts turn back to the men of old for the inspirations without which we cannot live. We miss in art nobil¬ ity, breadth, power, inspiration, and find in¬ stead infinite carefulness and skill — a perfect transcript of nature, but it is a direct tran¬ script ; the paper is laid upon nature, and its forms are traced through. But if this is art, why is not the image of nature on the retina of the eye as good ? We can all look for our¬ selves and take the skill for granted. I assume that there is no true art but such as passes through the brain and heart of man, and that it becomes art because the man sees and feels the meaning of nature. But if nature is re¬ garded simply as a play of mechanical forces, a mere arrangement of parts, art will only ex¬ press so much. If no other idea is seen in nature, no other idea will be seen in the mar¬ ble or on the canvas, or heard in the music. Passing to literature, we find books in abun¬ dance and none too many. N ever were there so good books in special departments, — as theology, natural science, philosophy, history, social economy, medicine, and jurisprudence. But when we come to that form of literature where genius has play, — the literature in which the author is the interpreter of society, hears its voices, catches and repeats its spirit, — we are forced to confess that within twenty years we detect not only a loss of power but of the secret of power. The fault is subtle but real, hard to detect, but proved by the fact that one seldom reads a novel of the day twice, or gathers the present fiction on one’s shelves, or quotes from it; no one dreams of calling it classic. Yet it is admirable work in many ways — carefully wrought, excellent in style, 271 and, it must be confessed, true in a certain way to human nature. The American girl and business man blush with shame as they turn the truthful pages, but — and here is the test — they are not converted; and for the simple reason that the author simply describes them and does not appeal to them. He is no more earnest and high-minded than they are, and takes about the same view oflife, with only some variation of taste and fitness. At bot¬ tom they believe in nearly the same things ; both reflect the age and its spirit, — an age of outsides, of phenomena and presentments, pro¬ vincial in time while cosmopolitan in tone, a sectional age without beginning or end, with¬ out cause why or end whither, without basis in eternity or sense of eternal truths — the re¬ flection, in short, of a materialistic philosophy and, by consequence, devoid of faith and so driven to a mere use of the world. If the universe, man and society included, is a mere play of mechanical forces, all we have to do is to watch the forces as they unfold under in¬ exorable necessity. And this is what literature seems to be doing under the phrase Eealism, Realistic it is, but it is an external realism, photographic, without personal conviction. The characters described are pen-pictures and not brain and heart creations. Hence they do not greatly interest us, nor do they move us at all. If we look to literature for signs of progress, we do not find them. The poets are gray-headed, and the novelists whose imaginary characters are vital beings in the world of fancy are no more. Or if now and then some rare and sweet pages stay in our minds and breed noble suggestions, they come from those who have not been caught by the pervasive spirit of materialism. It may seem that I exaggerate the influence of this spirit ; but I need only to say in vindication that the philosophy of an age governs its thought, shapes its life, and expresses itself in its art and literature. The world — wisely so, without doubt — is homogeneous in its thought, and may be trusted to be steadily working out some good end. Just now it is making a de¬ tour from the grand highway of progress into a by-path of materialism, led by philosophers who are very sure that if they can master mat¬ ter they have compassed the universe ; — a detour quite well to make if only to find out, as we are beginning to do, that matter is noth¬ ing but points of force, — a detour quite well to make if it leaves us with enough humility to send us back to the highway where philosophy still lingers, and humbly to inquire of it what force is. Return we shall from this Egyptian sojourn and bring away much valuable infor¬ mation, but we shall leave behind us most of the art and literature wrought there.

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272 EDUCATION AND SOCIAL FEOGEESS. I deprecate the suspicion that I am about to plunge into the depths of pessimism, as I go on to question if certain changes in meth¬ ods of education are in the line of true prog¬ ress, and also to trace in bodies of scholars something of this same materialistic taint of which I have spoken. I do not purpose to enter upon the vexed question of the study of Greek, but will only say that so long as the study of Greek is con¬ fined to the grammar, without reference to the literature and philosophy of the Greek plays, its utility will be doubted. It would be so with Hamlet were it used simply as an ex¬ ercise in syntax. I refer instead to a tendency to specialization in study, with a strong lurch toward physics, and to certain methods be¬ coming common that leave out the chief factor in education; namely, the inspiring presence and power of the teacher. First, a preliminary word. It is vain to re¬ sist the call of the age as to the kind of trained men it requires. If mines are to be opened and worked, miners must be educated. It is also difficult to resist the spirit of the age, and to give to education any other complexion than that reflected by the times. One univer¬ sity falls in, and its crowded. halls compel the rest to follow, — not stopping to consider that this is a reversal of the relations between the university and the people. When an age says, “We do not want ethics, we want science,” ethics is the very thing it most needs. It would be well if the universities were strong enough to say, “ Ethics you shall have or nothing”; and the answer would be rational, for, however it may be with the individuals who require the opening of mines and the re¬ fining of petroleum, society requires a science that is grounded in ethics and philosophy, since in these lie its destiny. It requires no very keen eye to perceive that a materialistic philosophy has laid its grasp upon education and is dragging it toward it¬ self and setting it at work in its vain round. Things and their uses, physical laws and their methods, the transmutation of substances, — such are the things of which the age thinks, and its demand upon the university is, “ Give us the men who will serve in these ways.” Little fault is to be found with the age — it is doing what it is set to do — nor with its demand for trained men to aid it, but surely it should be left with the university to decide upon the kind and method of training, and to reserve for itself that judicial estimate of the needs of society that belongs to it by virtue of its na¬ ture as an educator. It will never become un¬ true, though it may be for a time forgotten, that a broadly trained man is worth more to society than one trained as a specialist. Nor will it ever cease to be true that no man is well trained for the uses of society who is not trained in philosophy, in ethics, in social science, and in the humanities. Nor will it ever fail to be true that education is nine parts inspiration and one part drill ; or stating it otherwise, that the chief factor in education is the teacher ; that being given, the study, as it is called, may easily be arranged as to its details. I do not deny that great improvements have been made in education since some of us were catechised — often with woful results — on the grammar of Homer without so much as being told that Homer was a great poet, much less wherein his greatness consisted. Personally, I may say, I supposed while in college that Homer was read because he bore out the assertions of the Greek grammar. To get the Iliad under the grinding heel of the grammar was my vain struggle and the only effort required of me ; but the shout of Achilles as it rang over the wind-swept plains of Ilium — that I never heard ; the Castalian fount — I learned its topography, but I never drank from it ; the muses — I knew their names, but their mystic dance I never traced ! It is some¬ what different in these later days, and now a student is informed of the distinctive char¬ acteristics of .^schylus and Sophocles and Euripides. But with all the improvements there is a tendency to specialization that looks away from the ideal of education, so that we are getting admirably informed men instead of comprehensive thinkers, — that is, servants and tools of society instead of its masters and guides. When a university gives to society a trained man who can develop a mine, or re¬ move crops according to the best rule of economics, it renders a certain valuable ser¬ vice; but unless it has also trained this man to think on the question. What is a mine for ? or. What is the relation of crops to social welfare ? it has not met its vocation as an educator. It is to be doubted, therefore, if this tendency to specialization — favored and fed by an elective system — is genuine prog¬ ress. It seems rather a servile play into the hands of a clamorous age bent on securing the greatest possible amount of material change. The age cries, “ Teach us how to get a living,” — a cry to which the university should pay but little heed, heeding instead the profonnder call that issues from all the ages and from the deep heart of humanity itself, “ Teach us how to live ! ” To think, to reason, to feel nobly, to see the relations of things, to put the ages together in their grand progress, to trace causes, to prophesy results, to discern the sources of power, to find true beginnings instead of unknowable causes, to perceive the

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EDUCATION AND moral as governing the intellectual and both as dominating the material, to discern the lines along which humanity is moving and dis¬ tinguish them from the eddies of the day, — such is the end of education. To provide society with the greatest number of specially trained workers in special fields is to turn the university into a shop. Again, admitting great improvements in education, I question if the change of relation between teacher and pupil is in the line of true progress. Heaven forbid that the rela¬ tion of the past should be reestablished. If there is a nightmare of youthful recollection that the years fail to dispel, it is the vision of a college tutor of thirty years ago. While the chilling dignity and antipodal distance have largely passed away, there is distance of an¬ other sort, and a tendency to methods that defeat the end of the relation. I refer to the increasing tendency to rely upon examina¬ tions and the consequent separation between teacher and pupil. More and more is the ex¬ amination used to test proficiency, — frequent, searching, thorough, if a student passes he is considered educated. And so he is, if education is a drill instead of an inspiration ; if education consists in a knowledge of text-books, and not in the instruction of a living man. I protest against turning education either into a martinet process or a frequently recurring judgment- day. The main, I might almost say the en¬ tire, feature of education is the sympathetic and inspiring contact of a fit teacher with young minds. So a lioness trains her whelps; so a mother rears her children; so Socrates and Dr. Arnold educated young men. The tendency to throw the student upon the text¬ book and to test him by examinations is a departure from education just in the degree it removes him from a fit teacher. I grant it is the proper method if the only object of education is to provide capitalists with trained servants for opening their mines and mixing their chemicals. But if the object of education is to secure men who shall think for capitalists and dominate them by the logic of a sound and lofty philosophy, and to inspire society with high conceptions of character and con¬ duct, then the present tendency is not in the right direction. Such education is not gained except by personal inspiration, through per¬ sonal contact. The imparted spirit in educa¬ tion, as in the church, is by the laying on of hands. That is a fine passage of Platons in which he speaks of the gentle and pleasant and approving manner in which Socrates re¬ garded the words of the young men,” and goes on to say in the words of Phaedo, — “ I was close to Socrates, on his right hand, seated on a sort of a stool, and he on a couch which SOCIAL FTOGEESS. 273 was a good deal higher. Now he had a way of playing with my hair, and then he smoothed my head, and pressed the hair upon my neck, and said ‘to-morrow, Phsedo, I suppose that these fair locks of yours will be severed for Phaedo was under a vow. Here is a teacher who repeats and perpetuates himself in his pupil. 1 am not pleading for the old recitation- room with its perfunctory drill and childish marking system, but instead, for a free, full, con¬ fiding, and almost constant intercourse between pupil and teacher. The main point in educa¬ tion is the teacher. The tendency at present is to select him because of his proficiency in his department, with less and less disposition to regard any other qualifications. Give us for a teacher in our college the best mathematician or linguist or chemist, — such is the demand, with small inquiry on other points. Does he believe anything ? has he a heart ? is he capable of human emotions? has he the wit of insight? is he noble, brave, large, aspiring, devoted, rev¬ erent ? These are minor, omitted considera¬ tions. And indeed, if education is a drill, and examinations do the work, and if the aim is to provide servants for capitalists, these things are quite superfluous. I do not deny before practical educators, who are often shut off from pursuing their own better ideals, the wisdom of the examination. It is a practical world we are in, and education is a thing of methods ; but to erect the examination into a test and main feature of education, turning, as it does, chiefly upon knowledge of the text¬ book, is to take away from it what I will call its human element. The examination may be necessary under the system and in view of the end now held up, but it is not a lovely spec¬ tacle, preceded, as it is, by a process the name of which is an indignity and a condemnation — cramming. On what principle of education can such a process be justified ? But it is recognized and almost called for by the present methods. If familiarity with the text-books is the main thing, and examinations are the test, cramming is the sure correlate and is even invited. And so a hundred well- crammed students meet a teacher who does not greatly alter his function or character in becoming a de¬ tective of deftly concealed formulae and tough passages, tucked in the sleeves and otherwise hid as if by a Chinese card-player. Indeed, the whole affair is Chinese, — formal, childish, soulless. When education turns upon and is determined by an examination instead of daily and almost hourly contact with a wise, sym¬ pathetic, inspiring teacher, it provokes these irrational methods and defeats itself at every point. It has not even the excellencies of the military drill, for a soldier learns the manual however unwillingly he goes through it, but a

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274 EDUCATION AND student left largely with his text-book — the teacher a rarely appearing phantom except at examinations, where he sits clothed in the black robes of Rhadamanthus to determine if the cramming has been sufficient, — this is neither drill nor education, but is rather akin to the commercial processes in which the young men will soon be engaged — a process of rapid inflation and soon following dis¬ gorgement. It is no surprise that athletics are the inspiring theme in our colleges, when the possible finer enthusiasms are quenched by such methods as these. It is the first duty of scholars to lift them¬ selves above their age and to search it with judicial scrutiny. If there is weakness or fault or faulty tendency, it is their business to detect it. No man can or should separate himself from his age ; least of all should the scholar seek such isolation — either in the past, sigh¬ ing for that which cannot come again, or in the future, longing for that which cannot yet come. But while the scholar should preemi¬ nently live in his age and even yield to it in a measure, — remembering that it is a step in the march of the Eternal Providence, — it should be in a way far different from that of the masses who always sink themselves in their age, and conceive of progress only as an ulti- mating of the present idea or force. What thought to-day has place in the American mind beyond that of developing its physical resources ? The scholar should recognize this, but he should also recognize far more. He should see that material progress is but trav¬ eling in the old round of vanity whose sure phases have been fixed over and over again in history. He should see that the masses re¬ quire higher conceptions than they assume for themselves; that while they do the immedi¬ ate work of their day, they should be led and stimulated in the harder and loftier lessons of life. As a scholar he should understand that his vocation is to labor for those great, cor¬ rective principles of truth and virtue and rea¬ son that men do not readily heed and obey. Hence, there is no sadder sight than that of education bending and shaping itself to the demands of a low utilitarianism. When the university departs from its vocation of rearing scholars who shall think for the age and guide its thought and lead it to act on solid princi¬ ples, and instead furnishes a set of specialists to do the intellectual drudgery of the day, it falls away from the line of true progress ; this is not an advance, but a capitulation. Special¬ ists there must be; physical science must have full and due regard ; every page of the book of nature must be turned, but let these specialists and students of science be also scholars who have been taught in the broader schools of SOCIAL EEOGEESS. philosophy and of humanity, for in these are found the secret laws that determine social destiny. The chief aim of the American university at present should be to produce scholars who shall be able to see the full significance of the idea that lies at the foundations of the Ameri¬ can nation and in the fulfillment of which runs the true line of its progress. I refer to the democratic idea — or, as plainly stated by Mr. Lowell, democracy, stated by him with epi¬ grammatic insight, but drawn out into philo¬ sophical fullness, traced to its divine origin, set in its historic relations, and applied to the de¬ tails and institutions of our government by Dr. Mulford, in his work — “ The Nation.” It has so happened that, for the first time in the world, this democratic idea with its associate idea of federation has been wrought into na¬ tional form on this continent. Christianity, the doctrine of evolution when properly ^ in¬ terpreted, and history have yielded a practical, working form of this idea. Christianity teaches nothing unless it teaches the self-sovereigiity of man. Evolution crowns its process with man who acts in freedom and holds his des¬ tiny in his own hands. History ends its records of struggle with tyranny in a nation that at last is actually governing itself. From these three conspiring and cooperative sources do we get what I have called the democratic and federative idea, and now hold it in actual re¬ alization. In the perfecting of it lie the desti¬ nies of the nation, and through it runs the line of progress. The apostle of this idea is the scholar, for he alone can take in its immense significance and direct its fulfillment. This idea must be accepted and held and applied in the light of its sources. The irrefragable proof, the persistent life, the power of Christianity, lie in the fact that in its very nature and substance it is composed of this idea of self-sovereignty; it is the gift of Christianity to the social life of humanity. I am quite aware that Christianity has not been so apprehended, but when it is delivered from ecclesiasticism on one side and from dog¬ matism on the other — as is fast being done — the world will behold in it a philosophy of hu¬ man society that it cannot fail to accept. The doctrine of evolution as it is now coming to be interpreted by philosophy, is a deliverance from that sense of necessity which has brooded over humanity from the beginning — the ad¬ umbration of the nature from which man has hardly yet escaped and a birth into freedom and self-sovereignty. History, as the record of ethnology, jurisprudence, and institutions, illustrates the steps by which the great purpose of the ages has advanced toward its ideal of man as a self-governing being.

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EDUCATION AND We do not as a nation yet apprehend the peculiar and wholly exceptional position that we occupy. As one who stands in the sun may be in darkness, so we look at this wondrous spectacle of a nation ideal in its structure, di¬ vine in its conception, the perfect fruit of evolving history, in a dull, matter-of-fact way, and we take Mr. Matthew Arnold at his word when he tells us that we happen to have good institutions ! Even so the solar system happens to be orderly and stable ; so a tree happens to yield fruit. Mr. Arnold is quite well pleased with our institutions, and thinks his England would do well to adopt them. Were he the critic he might be, he would lash us with scorn for our dullness before the meaning of our in¬ stitutions. For the democratic idea supple¬ mented by federation, and realized in a nation and a history such as ours, is an absolute nov¬ elty in the annals of the world. It is as truly the necessary and foreordained outcome of the history of humanity as the birth of a child is the product of gestation. The democratic idea, or self-sovereignty, is the eternal and ab¬ solute principle of government ; the principle of federation is that which renders it practica¬ ble — its clothing body, not, as Mr. Arnold says, its clothes, but its vital, working organism. Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Scherer tell us that ‘‘democracy is only a form of government,” — so difficult is it even for great men to appre¬ hend the secret of history and the nature of man. Democracy worked by the federative principle is the exact solution that a pure rea¬ son would have worked out at the beginning, having at hand the contents of human nature. It stands in exactly the same relation to gov¬ ernment in which man stands to the process of development, — the purposed end, the per¬ fect, fixed product of the whole process. This ideal of a nation is being realized on this continent. Many have stood on Pisgah and viewed the promised land, but our feet press its borders, and our lips taste its clusters. SOCIAL PROGRESS, 275 Here, then, in the development of this ideal, lie the lines of progress ; here is the field of the American scholar ; here is the vocation of the American university. Its main question should be, How shall it train its men so as to best fit them to conduct and develop this mighty enterprise of a self-governing, feder¬ ated nation ? The question nearly answers itself, — first, by a spontaneous negative; not by training men in special ways for the special errands of material industry, for the destinies of the nation do not lie there. It must educate its men through those studies in which there is revealed the sources of our national life, and still more in those studies that reveal its prin¬ ciples, and must guide their development and application to society. This nation is founded in the nature of man, and hence man must be studied, and not merely as an animal, but also as a moral being. This nation is founded on morals, and on hardly anything else; it rests on morals and feeds on morals, nor does it live by any other bread; hence the university should teach ethics. This nation is an evolution of human history ; hence the university should teach history in its broad sense, ethnology, institutions, religions, environments, events, indeed, but as related to causes. The age is analytic ; the university should be synthetic. In brief, the chief aim of the university should be to send out men who are thoroughly grounded in the philosophy of the nation, who understand the deptlis from which it has been drawn, and the secret forces by which it may be guided. Its work lies aside from the ten¬ dency to specialization and skill in material lines, and looks toward those broad studies that may be summed up as philosophy. To know man, to understand society, to serve the nation with self-sacrificing intelli¬ gence,— this is the vocation of the scholar; and the university must heed the requirement to educate him accordingly. T, T, Munger,

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SOLITUDE. I LOVE thee, O thou Beautiful and Strong, Invisible comrade, mute, sweet company. More dear than friend or lover ! But to thee My fondest hopes, my fairest dreams belong Forevermore 1 Amid the world’s gay throng I yearn for thy soft arms that lovingly Soothe all the" fevered wounds once fretting me. At thy deep heart there springs the fount of song Whose drops shall cool my burning lips athirst, — At thy swift beck within my sight arise, (Their bonds of silence and dim darkness burst,) All my beloved dead, with shining eyes, — At thy blest hand, by starlit paths untrod. My soul draws near unto the face of God! SILENCE. Ay, and thee, too, who wield’st a power divine. Greater than loudest speech or fairest lay 1 The dead, millions on millions, own thy sway, In realms where suns to rise no more, decline. Thine is the lover’s sweetest rapture, thine The deepest cup of grief or joy, that aye The lips of mortal tasted, thine — yet stay How may I name thee, with what sound so fine It shall not snap thy life’s frail, golden thread ? O Solitude and Silence, bid me learn A little of your greatness I Long are fled The lesser gods of life, now let me turn To ye alone, to ye in worship come. The accents of this faltering tongue grown dumb ! Shiart Stertie, AFTER READING SHAKSPERE. Blithe Fancy lightly builds with airy hands Or on the edges of the darkness peers, Breathless and frightened at the Voice she hears ; Imagination (lo I the sky expands) Travels the blue arch and Cimmerian sands, — Homeless on earth, the pilgrim of the spheres. The rush of light before the hurrying years. The Voice that cries in unfamiliar lands. Men weigh the moons that flood with eerie light The dusky vales of Saturn — wood and stream But who shall follow on the awful sweep Of N eptune through the dim and dreadful deep ? Onward he wanders in the unknown night. And we are shadows moving in a dream. Charles Edwin Markhain.

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FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. N the 2d of May, 1864, a group of officers stood at the Confederate signal sta¬ tion on Clark’s Mountain, Virginia, south of the Rap- idan, and examined closely through their field glasses the position of the Fed¬ eral army then lying north of the river in Cul¬ peper county. The central figure of the group was the commander of the Army of North¬ ern Virginia, who had requested his corps and division commanders to meet him there. Though some demonstrations had been made in the direction of the upper fords, General Lee expressed the opinion that the Federal army would cross the river at Germanna or Ely’s. Thirty-six hours later General Meade’s army. General Grant, now commander-in¬ chief, being with it, commenced its march to the crossings indicated by General Lee. The Army of the Potomac, Avhich had now commenced its march towards Richmond, was more powerful in numbers than at any previous period of the war. It consisted of three corps: the Second (Hancock’s), the Fifth (Warren’s), and the Sixth (Sedgwick’s); but the Ninth (Burnside’s) acted with Meade throughout the campaign. It was thoroughly equipped, and provided with every appliance of modern warfare. On the other hand, the Army of Northern Vir¬ ginia had gained little in numbers during the winter just passed and had never been so scantily supplied with food and clothing. The equipment as to arms was well enough for men who knew how to use them, but commissary and quartermas¬ ter’s supplies were lament¬ ably deficient. A new pair of shoes or an overcoat was a luxury, and full rations would have astonished the stomachs of Lee’s ragged Confederates. But they took their privations cheerfully. and complaints were seldom heard. I recall an instance of one hardy fellow whose trou¬ sers were literally ^Svorn to a frazzle,” and would no longer adhere to his legs even by dint of the most persistent patching. Unable to buy, beg, or borrow another pair, he wore instead a pair of thin cotton drawers. By nursing these carefully he managed to get through the win¬ ter. Before the campaign opened in the spring, the quartermaster received a small lot of cloth¬ ing, and he was the first man of his regiment to be supplied. I have often heard expressions of surprise that these ragged, barefooted, half-starved men would fight at all. But the very fact that they remained with their colors through such privations and hardships was sufficient to prove that they would be dangerous foes to encounter upon the line of battle. The morale of the army at this time was excellent, and it moved forward confidently to the grim death- grapple in the wilderness of Spotsylvania with its old enemy, the Army of the Potomac. General Lee’s headquarters were at Orange Court House ; of his three corps, Longstreet’s was at Gordonsville, Ewell’s was on the Rapidan, above Mine Run, and Hill’s on his THE WILDERNESS TAVERN IN 1884. (Si^E MAP, PAGE 279.) VoL. XXXIV.— 39.

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278 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR, left, higher up the stream. When the Federal across the turnpike, and communicated his army was known to be in motion. General Lee position to General Lee, who was on the Plank prepared to move upon its flank with his whole road with Hill’s column. He was instructed force, as soon as it should clear the river and to regulate his movements by the head of begin its march southward. The route selected Hill’s column, whose progress he could tell by THE ARMY OF THE POTOMAC CROSSING THE RAPIDAN AT GERMANNA FORD, MAY 4TH, 1864. (BY EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) by General Grant led entirely around the right of Lee’s position on the river above. His passage of the Rapidan was unopposed, and he struck boldly out on the direct road to Richmond. Two roads lead from Orange Court House down the Rapidan towards Fredericksburg. They follow the general di¬ rection of the river, and are almost parallel to each other, the Old turnpike ” nearest the river, and the ‘‘ Plank road ” a short dis¬ tance south of it. The route of the Federal army lay directly across these two roads, along the western borders of the famous Wilderness. About noon on the 4th of May Ewell’s corps was put in motion on the Orange turnpike, while A. P. Hill, with two divisions, moved parallel with him on the Orange Plank road. The two divisions of Longstreet’s corps, en¬ camped near Gordonsville, were ordered to move rapidly across the country and follow Hill on the Plank road. Ewell’s corps was the first to find itself in the presence of the enemy. As it advanced along the turnpike on the morn¬ ing of the 5th, the Federal column was seen cro.ssing it from the direction of Germanna Ford. Ewell promptly formed line of battle the firing in its front, and not to bring on a general engagement until Longstreet should come up. The position of Ewell’s troops, so near the flank of the Federal line of march, was anything but favorable to a preservation of the peace, and a collision soon occurred which opened the campaign in earnest. BATTLES IN THE WILDERNESS. General Warren, whose corps was passing when Ewell came up, halted, and turning to the right made a vigorous attack upon Edward Johnson’s division, posted across the turnpike. J. M. Jones’s brigade, which held the road, was driven back in confusion. Steuart’s brigade was pushed forward to take its place. Rodes’s division was thrown in on Johnson’s right, south of the road, and the line, thus reestab¬ lished, moved forward, reversed the tide of bat¬ tle, and rolled back the Federal attack. The fighting was severe and bloody while it lasted. The lines were in such proximity at one point in the woods that when the F ederal troops gave way, the 146th New York regiment threw down its arms and surrendered in a body.

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THE WILDERNESS. From surveys under the direction of BV’t Brig.-Gen. N. Michler, Maj. of Engineers. Union works are marked Confederate works are marked SCALE OF ONE MILE. :OOK'S tORD 'MINE FORD ;^^BlacI^m\th ‘.Sjlop' - siYimm irdonfl-; mm vDownW^^^i^ K;4,'’;He^dont ‘B$0l ••’.■A'-Jv-r; Sii m k0 piaiii/pj &>Vxochman>

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FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. Ewell’s entire corps was now up, — J ohnson’s division holding the turnpike, Rodes’s divis¬ ion on the right of it, and Early’s in reserve. So far Ewell had only been engaged with War¬ ren’s corps, but Sedgwick’s soon came up from the river and joined W arren on his right. Early’s division was sent to meet it. The battle ex¬ tended in that direction, with steady and de¬ termined attacks upon Early’s front, until cution of his plan to swing past the Confed¬ erate army and place himself between it and Richmond, offered the expected opportunity of striking a blow upon his flank while his troops were stretched out on the line of march. The wish for such an opportunity was doubt¬ less in a measure “ father to the thought ” expressed by General Lee three days before, at the signal station on Clark’s Mountain. DISTRIBUTING AMMUNITION UNDER FIRE TO WARREn’S FIFTH CORPS, MAY 6tH. (by a. R. WAUD, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) nightfall. The Confederates still clung to their hold on the Federal flank against every effort to dislodge them. When Warren’s corps encountered the head of Ewell’s column on the 5th of May, General Meade is reported to have said : “ They have left a division to fool us here, while they con¬ centrate and prepare a position on the North Anna.” If the stubborn resistance to Warren’s attack did not at once convince him of his mistake, the firing which announced the ap¬ proach of Hill’s corps along the Plank road, very soon afterwards, must have opened his eyes to the bold strategy of the Confederate commander. General Lee had deliberately chosen this as his battle-ground. He knew this tangled wilderness well, and appreciated fully the advantages such a field afforded for concealing his great inferiority of force and for neutralizing the superior strength of his antag¬ onist. General Grant’s bold movement across the lower fords into the Wilderness, in the exe- Soon after Ewell became engaged on the Old turnpike, A. P. Hill’s advance struck the Federal outposts on the Plank road at Parker’s store, on the outskirts of the Wilderness. These were driven in and followed up to their line of battle, which was so posted as to cover the junction of the Plank road with the Stevens- burg and Brock roads, on which the Federal army was moving toward Spotsylvania. The fight began between Getty’s division of the Sixth Corps and Heth’s division, which was leading A. P. Hill’s column. Hancock’s corps, which was already on the march for Spotsyl¬ vania by way of Chancellorsville, was at once recalled, and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon was ordered to drive Hill out of the Wilderness.” Wilcox’s division was thrown in to Heth’s support, and Poague’s battalion of artillery took position in a little clearing on the north side of the Plank road, in rear of the Confed¬ erate infantry. But there was little use for artillery on such a field. After the battle was

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J^JiOM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. SECOND DAY OF THE WILDERNESS, MAY 6tH — LOOKING FROM THE LACY HOUSE, HEADQUARTERS OF GRANT, MEADE AND WARREN, TOWARD PARKER’s STORE. (BY EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) ’ fairly joined in the thickets in front, its fire might do as much damage to friend as to foe; so it was silent. It was a desperate struggle between the infantry of the two armies, on a field whose physical aspects were as grim and forbidding as the struggle itself It was a bat¬ tle of brigades and regiments rather than of corps and divisions. Officers could not see the whole length of their commands, and could only tell whether the troops on their right and left were driving or being driven by the sound of the firing. It was a fight at close quarters too, for as night came on, in those tangled thickets of stunted pine, sweet-gum, scrub-oak, and cedar the approach of the opposing lines could only be discerned by the noise of their passage through the underbrush or the flashing of their guns. The usually silent Wilderness had suddenly become alive. The angry flash¬ ing of the musketry and its heavy roar, mingled CAPTURE ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAY 6tH, BY THE CONFEDERATES, OF A PART OF THE BURNING UNION BREASTWORKS ON THE BROCK ROAD. (BY A. R. WAUD, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.)

Page 287

202 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. VIEW FROM NEAR THE WILDERNESS TAVERN, LOOKING TOWARD THE BATTLE-FIELD — 2 P. M., MAY 7TH. (BY EDWIN FORBES, FROM HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) with the yells of the combatants as they swayed to and fro in the gloomy thickets, realized to the full the poetic battle-picture of “ Beal an Duine ” — “ As all the fiends from heaven that fell Had raised the banner cry of hell.” Death wasbusy, and hereaped more laurels than either Lee or Grant. General Alexander Hays, of Hancock’s corps, was among the killed. When the battle closed at 8 o’clock. Gen¬ eral Lee sent an order to Longstreet to make a night march, so as to arrive upon the field at daylight the next morning. The latter moved at i a. m. of the 6th, but it was daylight when he reached the Plank road at Parker’s store, three miles in rear of Hill’s battle-field. During the night the movements of troops and preparations for battle could be heard on the Federal line, in front of Heth’s and Wilcox’s divisions, who had so far sus¬ tained themselves against every attack by six divisions under General Hancock. But they were thoroughly worn out. Their lines were ragged and irregular, with wide intervals, and in some places fronting in different directions. Expecting to be relieved during the night, no effort was made to re-arrange and strengthen them to meet the storm that was brewing. As soon as it was light enough to see what little could be seen in that dark forest, Han¬ cock’s troops swept forward to the attack. The blow fell with greatest force upon Wil¬ cox’s troops south of the Orange Plank road. They made what front they could and renewed the fight, until the attacking column overlap¬ ping the right wing, it gave way, and the whole line rolled up ” from the right and retired in disorder along the Plank road as far as the position of Poague’s artillery , which now opened upon the attacking force. The Federals pressed their advantage and were soon abreast of the BRIGADIER-GENERAL MICAH JENKINS, C. S. A., KILLED MAY 6tH, 1864. (FROM A TINTYPE.)

Page 288

283 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR, artillery on the opposite side, their bullets flying across the road among the guns where General Lee himself stood. For a while matters looked very serious for the Confederates. General Lee, after sending a mes¬ senger to hasten the march of Long- street’s troops and another to prepare the trains for a movement to the rear, was assisting in rallying the disordered troops and directing the fire of the artillery, when the head of Longstreet’s corps appeared in double column, swinging down the Orange Plank road at a trot. In per¬ fect order, ranks well closed, and no stragglers, those splendid troops came on, regardless of the confusion on every side, pushing their steady way onward like “a river in the sea ” of confused and troubled human waves around them. Kershaw’s di¬ vision took the right of the road, and, coming into line under a heavy fire, moved obliquely to the right (south) to meet the Federal left, which had “swung round” in that direction. The Federals were checked in their sweeping advance and thrown back upon their front line of breastworks, where they made a stubborn stand. But Kershaw, urged on by Long- street, charged with his whole com¬ mand, swept his front, and captured the works. Nearly at the same moment, Field’s divis¬ ion took the left of the road, with Gregg’s brigade in front, Benning’s behind it. Law’s next, and Jenkins’s following. As the Texans in the front line swept past the batteries where General Lee was standing, they gave a rous¬ ing cheer for “ Marse Robert,” who spurred his horse forward and followed them in the charge. When the men became aware that he was “ going in ” with them, they called loudly to him to go back. “ We won’t go on unless you go back ” was the general cry. One of the men dropped to the rear, and taking the bridle turned his horse around, while General Gregg came up and urged him to do as the men wished. At that moment a mem¬ ber of his staff (Colonel Venable) directed his attention to General Longstreet, whom he had been looking for, and who was sitting on his horse near the Orange Plank road. With evi¬ dent disappointment, he turned off and joined General Longstreet. The ground over which Field’s troops were advancing was open for a short distance, and fringed on its farther edge with scattered pines beyond which the dense Wilderness growth began. The Federal troops had entered the BRIGADIER-GENERAL JAMES S. WADSWORTH, MORTALLY WOUNDED MAY 6th, 1864. DIED MAY 8tH. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) pines and were advancing with apparently resistless force, when Gregg’s eight hundred Texans, regardless of numbers, flanks, or sup¬ ports, dashed directly upon them. There was a terrific crash mingled with wild yells, which set¬ tled down into a steady roar of musketry. In less than ten minutes one-half of that devoted eight hundred were lying upon the field dead or Avounded; but they had delivered a staggering blow and broken the force of the Federal ad¬ vance. Benning’s and Law’s brigades came promptly to their support, and the whole swept forward together. The tide was flowingthe other way now. It ebbed and flowed many times that day, strewing the Wilderness with human wrecks. Law’s brigade captured a line of log breastworks in its front, but had held them only a few moments when their former owners came back to claim them. They were rudely re¬ ceived and driven back to a second line several hundred yards beyond, which was also taken. This advanced position was attacked in front and on the right from across the Orange Plank road, and Law’s Alabamians “ advanced back¬ wards ” without standing on the order of their going, until they reached the first line of logs, now in their rear. As their friends in blue still insisted on claiming their property and were ad-

Page 289

284 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR, THE BURNING WOODS, MAY 6tH— RESCUING THE WOUNDED. (BY A. R. WAUD, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) vancing to take it, they were met by a counter charge and again driven beyond the second line. This was held against a determined at¬ tack in which the Federal General Wadsworth was shot from his horse as he rode up close to the right of the line on the Plank road. The position again becoming untenable by reason of the movements of Federal troops on their right, they retired a second time to the works they had first captured. And so, for more than two hours, the storm of battle swept to and fro, in some places passing several times over the same ground, and settling down at length almost where it had begun the day before. About 10 o’clock it was ascertained that the Federal left flank rested only a short distance south of the Orange Plank road, which offered a favorable opportunity for a turning move¬ ment in that quarter. General Longstreet at once moved Mahone’s, Wofford’s, Anderson’s, and IJavis’s brigades, the whole under General Mahone, around this end of the Federal line. Forming at right angles to it, they attacked in flank and rear, while a general advance was made in front. So far the fight had been one of anvil and hammer. Ringing blows had been given and received, and both sides were bruised and bleeding from their effects. But this first display of the tactics of battle at once changed the face of the field. The Federal left wing was rolled up in confusion towards the Plank road and then back upon the Brock road, which was its chief outlet towards Spotsylvania. This partial victory had been a compara¬ tively easy one. The signs of demoralization and even panic among the troops of Hancock’s left wing, who had been hurled back by Ma¬ hone’s flank attack, were too plain to be mis¬ taken by the Confederates, who believed that Chancellors ville was about to be repeated. General Longstreet rode forward and prepared to press his advantage. Jenkins’s fresh brigade was moved forward on the Plank road to re¬ new the attack, supported by Kershaw’s divis¬ ion wdiile the flanking column should come into position on its right. The latter were now in line south of the road and almost parallel to it. Longstreet and Kershaw rode with General Jenkins at the head of his brigade as it pressed forward, when suddenly the quiet which had reigned for some moments was broken by a few scattering shots on the north of the road, which were answered by a volley from Ma¬ hone’s line on the south side. The firing in their front, and the appearance of troops on the road whom they failed to recognize as friends through the intervening timber, had drawn a single volley, which lost to them all the fruits of the splendid work they had just done. Gen¬ eral Jenkins was killed and Longstreet seri-

Page 290

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. ously wounded by our own men. The troops who were following them faced quickly towards the firing and were about to return it; but when General Kershaw called out, ‘‘They are friends!” every musket was lowered, and the men dropped upon the ground to avoid the fire. The head of the attack had fallen, and for a time the movements of the Confederates were paralyzed. The hand of fate seemed to be in it. The same thing had happened to Stonewall Jackson, in this same Wilderness, just one year before. General Lee came forward and di¬ rected in person the disposition of the troops for a renewal of the attack, but the change of commanders rendered necessary by the fall of Longstreet,andthe resumption of the thread of operations that had fallen from his hands, oc¬ casioned a delay of several hours, and then the tide which “taken at the flood leads on to fortune” had ebbed, and the Confederates only received hard knocks instead of a brill¬ iant victory. When at 4 o’clock an attack was made upon the Federal line along the Brock road, it was found strongly fortified and stub¬ bornly defended. The log breastworks had taken fira during the battle, and at one point separated the combatants by a wall of fire and smoke which neither could pass. Part of Field’s division captured the works in their front, but were forced to relinquish them for want of support. Meanwhile Burnside’s corps, which had reenforced Hancock during the day, made a vigorous attack on the north of the Orange Plank road. Law’s (Alabama) and Perry’s (Florida) brigades were being forced back, when, Heth’s division coming to their assist¬ ance, they assumed the offensive, driving Burn¬ side’s troops beyond the extensive line of breast¬ works constructed previous to their advance. ^ The battles fought by Ewell on the Old turn¬ pike and by A. P. Hill on the Plank road, on the 5th of May, were entirely distinct, no con¬ nected line existing between them. Connection Avas established with Ewell’s right by Wilcox’s division, after it had been relieved by Long- street’s troops on the morning of the 6th. While the battle was in progress on the Orange Plank road, on the 6th, an unsuccessful attempt Avas made to turn EAvell’s left next the river, and heavy assaults Avere made upon the line of Early’s division. So persistent Avere these at¬ tacks on the front of Pegram’s brigade, that other troops Avere brought up in rear to its support, but when the offer Avas made to re¬ lieve it, the men rejected the offer and said they needed no assistance. Late in the day General EAvell ordered a movement against the Eederal right Aving, sim¬ ilar to that by Avhich Longstreet had “ dou¬ bled up ” Hancock’s left in the morning. Two brigades, under General John B. Gordon, moved out of their Avorks at sunset, and lapping the right of Sedgwick’s corps made a sudden and determined attack upon it. Taken by sur- VOL. BREASTWORKS (BY XXXIV.— 40. OF HANCOCK'S CORPS ON THE BROCK ROAD — MORNING OF MAY 7TH. EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.)

Page 291

286 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. OUT OF THE WILDERNESS, SUNDAY MORNING, MAY 8tH — THE MARCH TO SPOTSYLVANIA. (by EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) prise, the Federals were driven from a large portion of their works with the loss of six hun¬ dred prisoners, — among them Generals Sey¬ mour and Shaler. Night closed the contest, and with it the battle of the Wilderness. When Lee’s army had appeared on the flank of the Federal line of march on the 5 th of May, General Grant at once had faced it and en¬ deavored to push it out of the way. His strong¬ est eflbrts had been directed to forcing back the Confederate advance on the Orange Plank road, which, if successful, would have enabled him to complete his plan of “ swinging past ” that army and placing himself between it and Richmond. On the other hand, Lee’s princi¬ pal effort had been to strike the head of Grant’s column a crushing blow where it crossed the Plank road, which would force it from its route and throw it in confusion back into the Wil¬ derness. Both had failed. What advantages had been gained by the two days’ fighting re¬ mained with the Confederates. They held a position nearer the Federal line of march than when the battle began, and had inflicted losses incomparably heavier than they had them¬ selves sustained. Both sides were now strongly intrenched, and neither could well afford to at¬ tack. And so the ytb of May was spent in skir¬ mishing, each waiting to see what the other would do. That night the race for Spotsyl¬ vania began. General Lee had been informed by ‘‘Jeb” Stuart of the movement of the Fed¬ eral trains southward during the afternoon. After dark the noise of moving columns along the Brock road could be heard, and it was at once responded to by a similar movement on the part of Lee. The armies moved in paral¬ lel columns separated only by a short interval. Longstreet’s corps (now commanded by R. H. Anderson) marched all night and arrived at Spotsylvania at 8 o’clock on the morning of the 8th, where the ball was already in motion. Stuart had thrown his cavalry across the Brock road to check the Federal advance, and as the Fed¬ eral cavalry had failed to dislodge him, War¬ ren’s corps had been pushed forward to clear the way. Kershaw’s, Humphreys’, and Law s brigades were at once sent to Stuart’s assist¬ ance. The head of Warren’s column was forced back and immediately commenced intrenching. Spotsylvania Court House was found occupied by Federal cavalry and artillery, which retired vvithout a fight. The Confederates had won the race. BATTLES OF SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE. The troops on both sides were now rapidly arriving. Sedgwick’s corps joined Warren s, and in the afternoon was thrown heavily against Anderson’s right wing, which, assisted by tlie timely arrival of Ewell’s corps, repulsed

Page 292

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. the attack with great slaughter. Hill’s corps (now under General Early) did not arrive un¬ til the next morning, May 9th. General Lee’s line now covered Spotsylvania Court House, with its left (Longstreet’s corps) resting on the Po River, a small stream which flows on the south-west — Ewell’s corps in the center, north of the Court House, and Hill’s on the right, crossing the Fredericksburg road. These posi¬ tions were generally maintained during the battles that followed, though brigades and di¬ visions were often detached from their proper commands and sent to other parts of the field to meet pressing emergencies. 287 to equalize matters somewhat before they reached the works, they might become untena¬ ble against such heavy and determined attacks. A lull of several hours succeeded the failure of the second attack, but it was only a breath¬ ing spell preparatory to the culminating effort of the day. Near sunset our skirmishers were driven in and the heavy, dark lines of attack came into view one after another, first in quick time, then in a trot, and then with a rush to¬ wards the works. The front lines dissolved be¬ fore the pitiless storm that met them, but those in rear pressed forward, and over their dead and dying comrades reached that portion of No engagement of importance took place the works lield by the Texas brigade. These I tlie otn. which wa.s .<=;npnf in rr _ _ ^ on the 9th, which was spent in intrenching the lines and preparing places of refuge from the impending storm. But the loth was a field day.” Early in the morning it was found that Hancock’s corps had crossed the Po above the point where the Confederate left rested, had reached the Shady Grove road, and was threatening our rear, as well as the trains which were in that direction on the Old Court House road leading to Louisa Court House. General Early was ordered from the right with Mahone’s and Heth’s divisions, and, moving rapidly to the threatened quarter, attacked Hancock’s rear division as it was about to recross the Po _ driving it with severe loss, through the burn¬ ing woods in its rear, back across the river. Meanwhile General Grant was not idle else¬ where. He had commenced his efforts to break through the lines confronting him. The first assault was made upon Field’s division of Longstreet’s corps and met with a complete and bloody repulse. Again at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the blue columns pressed forward to the attack, and were sent back torn and bleeding, leaving the ground covered with their dead and wounded. Anticipating a renewal of the assaults, many of our men went out in front of their breastworks, and, gathering up the muskets and cartridge-boxes of the dead and wounded, brought them in and distributed them along the line. If they did not have repeat¬ ing-rifles, they had a very good substitute — sev¬ eral loaded ones to each man. They had no reserves, and knew that if they could not suffi¬ ciently reduce the number of their assailants gallant fellows, now reduced to a mere hand¬ ful by their losses in the Wilderness, stood manfully to their work. Their line was bent backward by the pressure, but they continued the fight in rear of the works with bayonets and clubbed muskets. Fortunately for them, Anderson’s brigade had cleared its own front, and a portion of it turned upon the flank of their assailants, who were driven out, leaving many dead and wounded inside the works. While this attack was in progress on Field’s line, another, quite as determined, was made farther to the right, in front of Rodes’s division of Ewell’s corps. Doles’s brigade was broken and swept out of its works with the loss of three hundred prisoners. But as the attacking force poured through the gap thus made, Daniel’s brigade on one side and Steuart’s on the other drew back from their lines and fell upon its flanks, while Battle’s and Johnston’s brigades were hurried up from the left and thrown across its front. Assailed on three sides at once, the Feder- als were forced back to SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE. SPOTSYLVANIA TAVERN, NEAR (both FROM WAR-TIME THE COURT 1 PHOTOGRAPHS.)

Page 293

288 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR.

Page 294

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. 289 the works, and over them, whereupon they constructed a short distance in rear so as to broke in disorderly retreat to their own lines, cut off this salient. ’ n,Jn day was rainy and disagreeable. After the artillery had been withdrawn on and no serious fighting took place. There were the night of the nth. General Tohnson dis- moyements, however, along the Federal lines covered that the enemy was concentrating in fr3fhe'fro iTof T n ' withdrawal his front, and, convinced that he would be^at- r. Longstreet s corps. Late in tacked in the morning, requested the imme- the afternoon under the impression that Gen- diate return of the Ltillery that had been eral Grant had actually begun another flanking taken away. The men in the trenches were f ^ n center, which was the attack, when at dawn on the morniim of dense column emerged fron/the the hues, and that everything should be m pines half a mile in front of the salient and They came on, to use General Johnson’s words, in great disorder, with a narrow front, but extending back as far as I could see.” Page’s battalion of artillery, which had only been or¬ dered back to the trenches at 4 o’clock in the morning, were just arriving and were not in position to fire upon the attacking column, which offered so fair a mark for Under this order, General Long, Ew¬ ell’s chief of artil¬ lery, removed all but two batteries from the line of General Edward Johnson’s division, for the reason given, that they were ‘Glifiicult of access.” Johnson’s division held an el¬ evated point some¬ what advanced from the general line, and known as ‘‘the salient” [or “Bloody Angle”; seemapj,thebreast- works there making a considerable an¬ gle, with its point towards the enemy. This point had been held because it was a good position for artillery, and if oc¬ cupied by the ene¬ my would com¬ mand portions of our line. Such pro¬ jections on a de¬ fensive line are always dangerous if held by infantry alone, as an attack upon the point of the angle can only be met by a diverg- ing file; or if attacked on either face, the troops hold¬ ing the other face, unless protected by works in rear (as were some of the Confederates), are more exposed than those on the side attacked. But with sufficient artillery, so posted as to sweep the sides of the angle, such a position may be very strong. To provide against contingencies, a second line had been laid off and partly VIEWS OF CONFEDERATE INTRENCH- MENTS AT SPOTSYLVANIA. (from war-time PHOTOGRAPHS.)

Page 295

290 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. THE UNION POSITION AT SPOTSYLVANIA, MORNING OF MAY lOTH, AS SEEN FROM THE REAR OF HANCOCK S LINES. (by EDWIN FORBES, FROM HIS SKETCH MADE AT 1 HE TIME.; artillery. The guns came only in time to be captured. The infantry in the salient fought as long as fighting was of any use ; but de¬ prived of the assistance of the artillery, Avhich constituted the chief strength of the position, they could do little to check the onward rush of the Federal column, which soon overran the salient, capturing General Johnson himself, 20 pieces of artillery, and 2800 men — almost his entire division. The whole thing happened so quickly that the extent of the disaster could not be realized at once. Hancock’s troops, who made the assault, had recovered their formation, and, extending their lines across the works on both sides of the salient, had resumed their ad¬ vance when Lane’s brigadeofHill’scorps, which was immediately on the right of the captured works, rapidly drew back to the unfinished line in rear, and poured a galling fire upon their left wing, which checked its advance and threw it back with severe loss. General Gordon, whose division (Early’s) was in reserve and under orders to support any part of the line about the salient, hastened to throw it in front of the advancing Federal col¬ umn. As the division was about to charge. General Lee rode up and joined General Gordon, evidently in¬ tending to go forward with him. Gordon re¬ monstrated, and the men, seeing his inten¬ tion, cried out, Gen- union hospital at alsop’s eral Lee to the rear ! ” sedgwick’s body was which was taken up all along the line. One of the men respectfully but firmly took hold of the bridle and led his horse to the rear, and the charge went on. The two moving lines met in rear of the captured works, and after a fierce struggle in the woods the Federals were forced back to the base of the salient. But Gordon’s division did not cover their whole front. On the left of the salient, where Rodes’s division had connected with J ohnson’s, the attack was still pressed with great deter¬ mination. General Rodes drew out Ramseur’s brigade from the left of his line (a portion of Kershaw’s division taking its place), and sent it to relieve the pressure on his right and re¬ store the line between himself and Gordon. Ramseur swept the trenches the whole length FARM-HOUSE, NEAR THE BROCK ROAD, TO WHICH GENERAL BROUGHT, MAY 9TH. (FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 296

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR, of his brigade, but did not fill the gap, and his right was exposed to a terrible fire from the works still held by the enemy. Three brigades from Hill’s corps Avere ordered up. Perrin’s, which was the first to arrive, rushed forward through a fearful fire and recovered a part of the line on Gordon’s left. General Perrin fell dead from his horse just as lie reached the Avorks. General Daniel had been killed, and Ramseur, though painfully Avounded, remained covered by the salient and the adjacent Avorks. Every attempt to advance on either side Avas met and repelled from the other. The hostile battle-flags Avaved over different portions of the same Avorks Avhile the men fought like fiends for their possession. It Avas Avar to the knife and the knife to the hilt.” The very mouth of hell seemed to have opened, and death Avas rioting in its sulphurous fumes. During the day diversions were made on both mccool’s farm-house, within the “bloody angle.” (from a war-time photograph.) in the trenches Avith his men. Rodes’s right being still hard pressed, Harris’s (Mississippi) and McGoAA^an’s (South Carolina) brigades Avere ordered forward and rushed through the blinding storm into the Avorks on Ramseur’s right. The Federals still held the greater part of the salient, and though the Confederates Avere unable to drive them out, they could get no farther. Hancock’s corps, Avhich had made the attack, had been reenforced by Upton’s division of the Sixth Corps and one-half of Warren’s corps, as the battle progressed. Artillery had been brought up on both sides, the Confederates using every piece that could be made available upon the salient. Before lo o’clock General Lee had put in every nian that could be spared for the restora¬ tion of his broken center. It then became a matter of endurance Avith the men themselves. All day long and until far into the night the battle raged Avith unceasing fury, in the space sides, to relieve the pressure in the center. An attack upon Anderson’s (Longstreet’s) corps by Wright’s Sixth Corps (SedgAvick having been killed on the 9th) Avas severely repulsed, Avhile, on the other side of the salient. General Early, Avho Avas moving Avith a part of Hill’s corps to strike the flank of the Federal force engaged there, met and defeated Burnside’s corps, Avhich Avas advancing at the same time to attack his own (Early’s) Avorks. Whilk the battle Avas raging at the salient, a portion of Gordon’s division was busily en¬ gaged in constructing a new and shorter line of intrenchments in rear of the old one, to Avhich Ewell’s corps retired before daylight on the 13th. The five days of comparative rest that followed the terrible battle of the 12th Avere never more Avelcome than to our Avea- ried men, aaLo had been marching and fighting almost Avithout intermission since the 4th of

Page 297

292 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. mm Kt • ' -T Xy ^ - ;X .KeJly^ NORTH ANNA. Union works Confederate w i'Qu%lesV^Mill^ ■•®^.Cady^i^ f.-l^^iftoirery: May. Their comfort Avas materially enhanced, too, by the supply of coffee, sugar, and other luxuries to which they had long been stran¬ gers, obtained from the haversacks of the en¬ emy who had been killed in their front, or in the Federal lines when they were abandoned. It was astonishing into what close places a hungry Confederate would go to get some¬ thing to eat. Men would sometimes go out under a severe fire, in the hope of finding a full haversack. It may seem a small matter to the readers of war history ; but to the viake7's of it who were in the trenches, or on the march, or engaged in battle night and day for weeks without intermission, the supply of the one ar¬ ticle of coffee, furnished by the Army of the Potomac to the Army of Northern Virginia, was 11 ot a small matter, but did as much as any other material agency to sustain the spir¬ its and bodily energies of the men, in a cam¬ paign which taxed both to their utmost limit. Old haversacks gave place to better ones, and tin cups now dangled from the accouter¬ ments of the Confederates, who at every rest on the march or interval of quiet on the lines could be seen gathered around small fires, pre¬ paring the coveted beverage. In the interval from the 12th to the i8th, our army was gradually moving east to meet corresponding movements on the other side. Longstreet’s corps was shifted from the left to the extreme right, beyond the Fredericks¬ burg road. Ewell’s corps still held the works in rear of the famous salient, when on the morning of the i8th a last effort was made to force the lines of Spotsylvania at the only point where previous efforts had met with even partial success. This was destined to a more signal failure than any of the others. Under the fire of thirty pieces of artillery, which swept all the approaches to Ewell’s line, the attacking force was broken and driven back in disorder before it came well within reach of the muskets of the infantry. After the fail¬ ure of this attack, the sidling” movement, as the men expressed it, again began, and on the

Page 298

293 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. UNION ENGINEER CORPS PREPARING THE ROAD ASCENDING FROM THE PONTOON BRIDGE AT JERICHO MILLS. (FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.) afternoon of the 19th Ewell’s corps was thrown round the Federal left wing to ascertain the extent of this movement. After a severe en¬ gagement, which lasted until night, Ewell with¬ drew, having lost about nine hundred men in the action. This seemed a heavy price to pay for information that might have been otherwise obtained, but the enemy had suffered more se¬ verely, and General Grant was delayed in his CONFEDERATE TRENCHES AT CHESTERFIELD BRIDGE ON THE NORTH ANNA, HALF A MILE ABOVE THE RAILROAD BRIDGE. (see map, previous page.) from a war-time photograph. VoL. XXXIV.— 41. turning movement for twenty-four hours. He, however, got the start in the race for the North Anna: Hancock’s corps, leading off on the night of the 20th, was followed rapidly by the remainder of his army. THE RACE FOR THE NORTH ANNA. On the morning of the 21st Ewell’s corps moved from the left to the right of our line, and later on the same day it was pushed southward on the Telegraph road, closely followed by Longstreet’s corps.* A. P. Hill brought up the rear that night, after a sharp brush ” with the Sixth Corps, which was in the act of retiring from its lines. Lee had the inside track this time, as the Telegraph road on which he moved was the direct route, while Grant had to swing round on the arc of a circle of which this was the chord. About noon on the 2 2d the head of our column reached the North Anna, and that night Lee’s army lay on the south side of the river. We had won the second heat and secured a good night’s rest besides, when the Federal army appeared on the other side in the forenoon of the 23d. * Swinton and others state that T.ongstreet moved on the night of the 20th, followed by Ewell. This is an error. — E. M. L.

Page 299

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. 294 GENERAL GRANT AND STAFF AT BETHESDA CHURCH. (SEE MAP, PAGE 296.) GENERAL GRANT IS SITTING WITH HIS BACK TO THE SMALLER TREE. (FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.) Warren’s corps crossed the river that after¬ noon without opposition at Jericho Ford, four miles above the Chesterfield bridge on the Telegraph road; but as it moved out from the river it was met by Wilcox’s division of Hill’s corps, and a severe but indecisive engagement ensued, the lines confronting each other in¬ trenching as usual. Meanwhile a small earth¬ work, that had been built the year before, covering the approaches to the bridge on the Telegraph road and now held by a small de¬ tachment from Kershaw’s division, was at¬ tacked and carried by troops of Hancock’s corps, the Confederates retiring across the river with the loss of a few prisoners. It did not seem to be General Lee’s pur¬ pose to offer any serious resistance to Grant’s passage of the river at the points selected. His, lines had been retired from it at both these points, but touched it at Ox Ford, a point intermediate between them. Hancock’s corps, having secured the Chesterfield bridge, crossed over on the morning of the 24th, and, extending down the river, moved out until it came upon Longstreet’s and Ewell’s corps in position and ready for battle. The Sixth Corps (General Wright) crossed at Jer¬ icho Ford and joined Warren. The two wings of Grant’s army were safely across the river, but there was no connection between them.

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FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. Lee had only thrown back his flanks and let them in on either side, while he held the river between; and when General Grant at¬ tempted to throw his center, under Burnside, across between the ford and the bridge, it was very severely handled and failed to get a foothold on the south side. A detach- Turning quickly, I caught a glimpse of some¬ thing blue disappearing behind a pile of earth that had been thrown out from the railroad cut some distance in front. Taking one of the muskets leaning against the works,, I waited for the reappearance of my friend in blue, who had taken such an unfair advantage THE PENNSYLVANIA RESERVES RESISTING A CONFEDERATE ATTACK NEAR BETHESDA CHURCH, JUNE 2D. (by EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) ment from Warren’s corps was sent down on the south side to help Burnside across, but it was attacked by Mahone’s division, and driven back with heavy loss, narrowly escap¬ ing capture. General Grant found himself in what may be called a military dilemma. He had cut his army in two by running it upon the point of a wedge. He could not break the point, which rested upon the river, and the attempt to force it out of place by striking on its sides must of necessity be made without much concert of action between the two wings of his army, neither of which could reenforce the other without crossing the river twice; while his opponent could readily transfer his troops as needed, from one wing to the other, across the narrow space between them. The next two days were consumed by Gen¬ eral Grant in fruitless attempts to find a vulner¬ able point in our lines. The skirmishers were very active, often forcing their way close up to our works. The line of my brigade crossed the Richmond and Fredericksburg railroad. It was an exposed point, and the men sta¬ tioned there, after building their log breast¬ work, leant their muskets against it and moved out on one side, to avoid the constant fire that was directed upon it. As I was pass¬ ing that point on one occasion, the men called to me, “ Stoop ! ” At the same moment I received a more forcible admonition from the whiz of a minie-ball, close to my head. of me. He soon appeared, rising cautiously behind his earthwork, and we both fired at the same moment, neither shot taking effect. This time my friend didn’t “ hedge,” but com¬ menced reloading rapidly, thinking, I suppose, that I would have to do the same. But he was mistaken ; for, taking up another musket, 1 fired at once, with a result equally surpris¬ ing to both of us, he probably at my being able to load so quickly, and I at hitting the mark. He was found there wounded, shortly after¬ ward, when my skirmishers were pushed for¬ ward. It was my first and only duel, and jus¬ tifiable, I think, under the circumstances. On the morning of May 27th General Grant’s army had disappeared from our front. During the night it had folded its tents like the Arab and as quietly stolen away,” on its fourth turning movement since the opening of the campaign. The Army of the Potomac was al¬ ready on its march for the Pamunkey River at Hanovertown, where the leading corps crossed on the morning ofthe 27th. Lee moved at once to head off his adversary, whose ad¬ vance column Avas now eight miles nearer Rich¬ mond than he was. In the afternoon of the 28th, after one of the severest cavalry engage¬ ments of the war, in which Hampton and Fitz Lee opposed the advance of Sheridan at Hawes’s Shop, the infantry ofboth armies came up and again confronted each other along the Totopotomoy, a small creek flowing into the

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296 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. Bowles ih-f Butlcr/ii'ji Bgylcs^ 'M0&. Gibbon Tucker- fliundr? JbShtr, ’'%C^owardin'- •- \ f MaUh^i|^-'’7 ¥r RiWffiOT, :t,~. >''*^yr'.’^eui^ ^WvGaines Thomt ’Stewart'^' 'V'/o.-Watta'^l’^^V COLD HARBOR. Nlartin ak-4 From surveys under the direction of B’v’t Brig. -Gen N. Michler. Maj. of Engineers, and B'v’t Lieut.-Col. P S Michie. Capl of Engineers. Jarkerf glSumner’sJS^* Bridgel‘''^<V^.'\. * Union works arc marked Confederate works arc marked |^,^^lexander’s^ SCALE OF ONE MILE.

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FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. Pamunkey from the south. Here the Confed¬ erate position was found too strong to be at¬ tacked in front with any prospect of success, and again the sidling ” movements began — this time towards Cold Harbor. BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR. Sheridan’s cavalry had taken possession of Cold Harbor on the 31st, and it had been promptly followed up by two corps of infan¬ try. Longstreet’sand a part of Hill’s corps, with accomplished with small loss, and had the effect of holding these two corps in his front and preventing their cooperation in the at¬ tack at Cold Harbor, which had been ordered for the next day. Early in the morning of the 2d, I was or¬ dered to move with my own and Anderson’s brigades, of Field’s division, to reenforce the line on the right,” exercising my own discretion as to the point where assistance was most needed. Alter putting the troops in motion, I rode along the line, making a personal inspec- VIEW OF UNION BREASTWORKS ON THE COLD HARBOR LINE, JUNE 1ST. (BY EDWIN FORBES, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) Hoke’s and Breckinridge’s divisions,* were thrown across their front. The fighting began on the Cold Harbor line, late in the afternoon of the I St of June, by a heavy attack upon the divisions of Hoke and Kershaw. Cling- man’s brigade on Hoke’s left gave way, and Wolford’s on Kershaw’s right, being turned, was also forced back; but the further progress of the attack was checked and the line partly restored before night. By the morning of the 2d of J Line, the opposing lines had settled down close to each other, and everything promised a repetition of the scenes at Spotsylvania. Three corps of Grant’s army (General W. F. Smith’s divisions Eighteenth Corps having arrived from Dre wry’s Bluff) now confronted the Confederate right wing at Cold Harbor, while the other two looked after Early’s (Ewell’s) corps near Bethesda Church. In the afternoon of June 2d, General Early, per¬ ceiving a movement which indicated a with¬ drawal of the Federal force in his front, attacked Burnside’s corps while it was in motion, strik¬ ing also the flank of Warren’s corps, and cap¬ turing several hundred prisoners. This was * Breckinridge came from the Valley and joined Lee’s army at the North Anna, with about 2700 men. tion as I went. Pickett’s division, the first on our right, held a strong position along the skirt of a wood, with open fields in front, and neededno strengthening, Theleft ofKershaw’s division, which was the next in order, was equally strong ; but on calling at General Kershaw’s quarters I was informed of the particulars of the attack upon his own and Hoke’s divisions the evening previous, and requested by him to place my troops as a sup¬ port to his right wing, which had been thrown back by the attack. On examining the line I found it bent sharply back at almost a right angle, the point of which rested upon a body of heavy woods. The works were in open ground and very unfavorably located to resist an attack as well from their location as their shape. Hie right face of the angle ran along a slope, with a small marshy stream behind and higher ground in front. The works had evidently been built just where the troops found themselves at the close of the fight the evening previous. Convinced that under such assaults as we had sustained at Spotsylvania our line would Eloke had just arrived from Petersburg. Pickett’s division had also joined its corps at the North Anna.

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298 FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. be broken at that point, I proposed to cut off the angle by building a new line across its base, which would throw the marshy ground in our front and give us a clear sweep across it with our fire from the slope on the other side. This would not only strengthen but shorten the line considerably, and I proposed to General Kershaw to build and occupy it with my two brigades that night. Meanwhile the enemy was evidently con¬ centrating in the woods in front, and every in¬ dication pointed to an early attack. Nothing could be done upon the contemplated line dur¬ ing the day, and we waited anxiously the com¬ ing of night. The day passed without an attack. I was as well satisfied that it would come at dawn the next morning as if I had seen Gen¬ eral Meade’s order directing it. That no mis¬ take should be made in the location of the works, I procured a hatchet, and accompanied by two members of my staff, each with an arm¬ ful of stakes, went out after dark, located the line, and drove every stake upon it. The troops were formed on it at once, and before morning the works were finished. Artillery Avas placed at both ends of the new line, abreast of the in¬ fantry. General Kershaw then withdrew that portion of his division which oc¬ cupied the salient, the men having leveled the works as far as possible before leaving them. Our troops were under arms and waiting, when with the misty light of early morning the scattering fire of our pickets who now occupied the abandoned works in the angle an¬ nounced the beginning of the attack. As the assault¬ ing column swept over the old works a loud cheer Avas given, and it rushed on into the marshy ground in the angle. Its front covered little more than the line ot my OAvn brigade of less than a thousand men ; but line followed line until the space inclosed by the old salient became a mass of Avrithing humanity, upon Avhich our artillery and musketry played Avith cruel effect. I had taken position on the slope in rear of the line and Avas carefully noting the firing of the men, Avhich soon became so heavy that I feared they Avould exhaust the cartridges in their boxes before the attack ceased. Send¬ ing an order for a supply of ammunition to be brought into the lines, I went doAvn to the trenches to regulate the firing. On my Avay to them I met a man, belonging to the 15th Alabama regiment of my brigade, running to the rear through the storm of bullets that swept the hill. He had left his hat behind in his retreat, Avas crying like a big baby, and was the bloodiest man 1 ever saAv. “ Oh, Gen¬ eral,” he blubbered out, I am dead ! I am killed ! Look at this ! ” shoAving his Avound. He Avas a broad, fat-faced felloAV, and a minie- ball had passed through his cheek and the fleshy part of his neck, letting a large amount of blood. Finding it was only a flesh-Avound, I told him to goon ; heAvas not hurt. He looked at me doubtfully for a second as if questioning my veracity or my surgical knoAvledge, I don’t EXTREME RIGHT OF THE CONFEDERATE LINE, COLD HARBOR. (from a war-time PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 304

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR, know which ; then, as if satisfied with my diag¬ nosis, he broke into a broad laugh, and, the tears still running down his cheeks, trotted off, the happiest man I saw that day. On reaching the trenches, I found the men in fine spirits, laughing and talking as they fired. There, too, I could see more plainly the terrible havoc made in the ranks of the assault¬ ing column. I had seen the dreadful carnage in front of Marye’s Hill at Fredericksburg, skill during the attack on the 3d, reaching not only the front of the attacking force, but its flanks also, as well as those of the support¬ ing troops. ^ While we were busy with the Eighteenth Corps on the center of the general line, the sounds of battle could be heard both on the right and left, and we knew from long use what that meant. It was a general advance of Grant’s whole army. Early’s corps below BRASS COEHORNS ON THE UNION LINE, COLD HARBOR. (BY A. R. WAUD, AFTER HIS SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) and on the old railroad cut” which Jackson’s men held at the Second Manassas; but I had seen nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder. When the fight ended, more than a thousand men lay in front of our works either killed or too badly wounded to leave the field.* Among them were some who were not hurt, but remained among the dead and wounded rather than take the chances of go¬ ing back under that merciless fire. Most of these came in and surrendered during the day, but were fired on in some instances by their own men (who still held a position close in our front) to prevent them from doing so. The loss in my command was fifteen or twenty, most of them wounded about the head and shoul¬ ders, myself among the number. Our artillery Avas handled superbly during the action. Ma¬ jor Hamilton, chief of artillery of Kershaw’s division, not only cooperated with energy in strengthening our line on the night of June 2d, but directed the fire of his guns with great * From the close range of the artillery and mus¬ ketry, there must have been a much greater proportion of these than usual. I estimated the whole loss of the Eighteenth Corps, which made the attack, at between Bethesda Church was attacked without success. On our right, where the line extended towards the Chickahominy, it was broken at one point, but at once restored by Finygan’s (Florida) brigade, with heavy loss to Hancock’s troops who were attacking there. The result of the ac¬ tion in the center, which has been described, presents a fair picture of the result along the en¬ tire line, — a grand advance, a desperate strug¬ gle, a bloody and crushing repulse. Before 8 o’clock A. M. on the 3d of June the battle of Cold Harbor Avas over, and Avith it Grant’s “ overland campaign ” against Richmond. When General Grant Avas appointed to the command of the Union armies and established his headquarters Avith the Army of the Poto¬ mac, Ave of the Army of Northern Virginia kneAv very little about his character and capac¬ ity as a commander. Even old army ” offi¬ cers, Avho Avere supposed to knoAv all about any one Avho had ever l)een in the army before the Avar, seemed to knoAv as little as anybody else. 4000 and 5000. — E. M. L. [The Official Records show that the losses of that corps at Cold Harbor aggre¬ gated 3019. — Editor.]

Page 305

FROM THE WILDERNESS TO COLD HARBOR. The opinion was pretty freely expressed, how¬ ever, that his Western laurels would wither in the climate of Virginia. His name was asso¬ ciated with Shiloh, where it was believed that he had been outgeneraled and badly beaten by Albert Sidney Johnston, and saved by Buell. The capture of Vicksburg and the battle of Chattanooga, which gave him a brilliant reputation at the North, were believed by the Confederates to be due more to the weak¬ ness of the forces opposed to him and the bad generalship of their commanders than to any great ability on his part. That he was bold and aggressive, we all knew, but we believed that it was the boldness and aggressiveness that arises from the consciousness of strength, as he had generally managed to fight his battles with the advantage of largely superior numbers. That this policy of force would be pursued when he took command in Virginia, we had no doubt; but we were not prepared for the unparalleled stubbornness and tenacity with which he per¬ sisted in his attacks under the fearful losses which his army sustained at the Wilderness and at Spotsylvania. General Grant’s method of conducting the campaign was frequently dis¬ cussed among the Confederates, and the uni¬ versal verdict was^that he was no strategist and that he relied almost entirely upon the brute force of numbers for success. Such a policy is not characteristic of a high order of general¬ ship, and seldom wins unless the odds are over¬ whelmingly on the side of the assailant. It failed in this instance, as shown by the result at Cold Harbor, which necessitated an entire change in the plan of campaign. What a part at least of his own men thought about General Grant’s methods was shown by the fact that many of the prisoners taken during the campaign com¬ plained bitterly of the ‘‘ useless butchery ” to which they were subjected, some going so far as to prophesy the destruction of their army. He fights!” was the pithy reply of President Lincoln to a deputation of influential politi¬ cians who urged his removal from the com¬ mand of the army. These two words embody perfectly the Confederate idea of General Grant at that time. If, as the mediaeval chron¬ iclers tell us, Charles Martel (the Hammer) gained that title by a seven days’ continuous battle with the Saracens at Tours, General Grant certainly entitled himself to a like dis¬ tinction by his thirty days’ campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor. General Lee held so completely the admi¬ ration and confidence of his men that his con¬ duct of a campaign was rarely criticised. Few points present themselves in his campaign from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor upon which criticism can lay hold, when all the circum¬ stances are considered. His plan of striking the flank of Grant’s army as it passed through the Wilderness is above criticism. Fault can be found only with its execution. I'he two divisions of Longstreet at Gordonsville, and Anderson’s division of Hill’s corps left on the Upper Rapidan, were too widely separated from the rest of the army, and, as the event proved, should have been in supporting dis¬ tance of A. P. Hill on the Orange Plank road on the afternoon of the 5th of May. That he did not strike Grant a damaging blow when he had him at such disadvantage on the North Anna may seem strange to those who had wit¬ nessed his bold aggressiveness at the Wilder¬ ness and on other fields. He was ill and con¬ fined to his tent at the time; but, as showing his purpose had he been able to keep the sad¬ dle, he was heard to say, as he lay prostrated by sickness, We must strike them a blow ; we must never let them pass us again.” * What¬ ever General Lee did, his men thought it the best that could bedoneunderthecircumstances. Their feeling towards him is well illustrated by the remark of a ragged rebel” who took off his hat to the general as he was passing and re¬ ceived a like courteous salute in return : God bless Marse Robert! I wish he was emperor of this country and I was his carriage-driver.” The results of the overland campaign” against Richmond, in 1864, cannot be gauged simply by the fact that Grant’s army found itself within a few miles of the Confederate capital when it ended. It might have gotten there in a much shorter time and without any fighting at all. Indeed, one Federal army under General Butler was already there, threatening Richmond, which was considered by the Con¬ federates much more secure after the arrival of the armies of Lee and Grant than it had been before. Nor can these results be measured only by the losses of the opposing armies on the battlefield, except as they affected the morale of the armies themselves ; for their losses were about proportional to their relative strength. So far as the Confederates were concerned, it would be idle to deny that they (as well as Gen¬ eral Lee himself) were disappointed at the re¬ sult of their efforts in the Wilderness on the 5th and 6th of May, and that General Grant’s constant ‘‘ hammering ” with his largely su¬ perior force had to a certain extent a depress¬ ing effect upon both officers and men. It’s no use killing these fellows; a half dozen take the place of every one we kill,” was a common remark in our army. We knew that our resources of men were exhausted and that the vastly greater resources of the Federal Government, if brought fully to bear, even in this costly kind of warfare, must wear us out ^ Statement of Colonel Venable of General Lee’s staff.— E. M. L.

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HAArn-TO-JIANn FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA, in the end. The question with us (and one often asked at the time) was, How long will the people of the North, and the army itself, stand it ? W e heard much about the demor¬ alization of Grant’s army and of the mutter- ings of discontent at home with the conduct of the campaign, and we verily believed that their patience would soon come to an end. So far as the fighting qualities of our men were concerned, they were little if at all im¬ paired by the terrible strain that had been put upon them. Had General Lee so ordered, they would have attacked the Federal army, after the battle of Cold Harbor, with the same 301 though perhaps a more quiet courage than they had displayed on entering the campaign thirty days before. The Army of Northern Virginia was so well seasoned and tempered that, like the famous Toledo blade, it could be bent back and doubled upon itself, and then spring again into perfect shape. It may justly be said of both armies that in this terrible thirty days’ struggle their courage and endurance were superb. Both met foe- men worthy of their steel,” and battles were fought such as could only have occurred be¬ tween men of kindred race, and nowhere else than in America. E. M, Law. HANCOCK'S CORPS ASSAULTING THE WORKS AT THE “bLOODY ANGLE." HAND-TO-HAND FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. BY THE HISTORIAN OF THE SIXTH CORPS. General HANCOCK’S surprise and capture of the larger portion of Edward Johnson’s division, and the capture of the sali¬ ent at Spotsylvania Court House on the 1 2th of May, 1864, accomplished with the Second Corps,” have been regarded as one of the most brilliant feats of that brilliant soldier’s career ; but without the substantial assistance of General Wright, grand old John Sedgwick’s worthy successor, and the Sixth Corps, a defeat as bitter as his victory was sweet would have been recorded against the hero of that day. VoL. XXXIV.— 42. The storm which had set in early in the af¬ ternoon of the nth of May continued with great severity, and but little rest was obtained during the night. Soon after dark, however, a remarkable change in the weather took place, and it became raw and disagreeable; the men gathered in small groups about half-drowned fires, with their tents stretched around their shoulders, while some had hastily pitched the canvas on the ground, and sought shelter beneath the rumpled and dripping folds. Others rolled themselves up, and lay close to

Page 307

302 HAND-TO-HAND FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. todd’s tavern in war-time, (from a photograph.) the simmering logs, eager to catch a few mo¬ ments’ sleep ; many crouched about, without any shelter whatever, presen ting a pitiable sight. Throughout the day some skirmishing and sharpshooting had occurred, but this had been of a spasmodic character, and had elicited no concern. About dusk the Sixth Corps moved to a position on the right and rear of the army. The stormy night was favorable to Hancock’s movement, and about lo o’clock he put his troops in motion, marching to a point on the left of the Sixth Corps’ former position in the neighborhood of the Brown house, massing his troops in that vicinity. At the beginning of the campaign the Army of the Potomac had been reorganized into three infantry corps — the Second (Hancock), the Fifth (Warren), and the Sixth (Sedgwick, now Wright). The Ninth (Burnside) served as an independent command until May 24th, when it was permanently attached to Meade’s army. A cavalry corps under Sheridan com¬ pleted the organization. General Grant’s or¬ ders to Hancock were to assault at daylight on the 12th in cooperation with Burnside on his left, while Wright and Warren were held in readiness to assault on his right. The Con¬ federate army was composed of three corps — Longstreet (now R. H. Anderson) on their left, Ewell in the center, and A. P. Hill on the right. The point to be assaulted was a salient of field works on the Confederate center, af¬ terwards called the ‘‘ Bloody Angle.” It was held by General Edward Johnson’s division. Here the Confederate line broke off at an an¬ gle of ninety degrees, the right parallel, about the length of a small brigade, being occupied by General George H. Steuart’s regiments. This point was a part or continuation of the line of works charged and carried by Gen¬ eral Upton on May ioth,andwas considered to be the key to Lee’s position. Just as the day was breaking, Barlow’s and Birney’s divisions of Hancock’s corps pressed for¬ ward upon the unsuspecting foe, and leaping the breastworks after a hand-to-hand conflict with the bewildered enemy, in which guns were used as clubs, possessed themselves of the intrench- ments. Over 3,000 prisoners were taken, in¬ cluding General Johnson and General Steuart. Twenty Confederate cannon became the per¬ manent trophies of the day, 12 of them belong¬ ing to Page, and 8 to Cutshaw. Upon reaching the second line of Lee’s works, held by Wilcox’s division, who by this time had become apprised of the disaster to their comrades, Hancock met with stern re¬ sistance, as Lee in the meantime had been hurrying troops to Ewell from Hill on the right, and Anderson on the left, and these were sprung upon our victorious lines with such an impetus as to drive them hastily back towards the left of the salient.* GENERAL EMORY UPTON. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) * General Grant (“ Personal Memoirs,” p. 231 ) says : to remain there. . . Burnside accomplished but little “ Burnside on the left had advanced up east of tlie on our left of a positive nature, but negatively a great salient to the very parapet of the enemy. Potter, com- deal. Pie kept Lee from reenforcing his center from manding one of his divisions, got over, but was not able that quarter. ” — Edi'J'OR.

Page 308

HAND-TO-HAND FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. 303 UPTON’s brigade at the “bloody angle.” (by frank H. SCHELL, AFTER DRAWINGS BY G. N. GALLOWAY.) As soon as the news of Hancock’s good and ill success reached army headquarters, the Sixth Corps — Upton’s brigade being in advance — was ordered to move with all possi¬ ble haste to his support. At a brisk pace we crossed a line of intrenchments a short dis¬ tance in our front, and, passing through a strip of timber, at once began to realize our nearness to the foe. It was now about 6 o’clock, and the enemy, reenforced, were mak¬ ing desperate efforts to regain what they had lost. Our forces were hastily retiring at this point before the concentrated attack of the enemy, and these with our wounded lined the road. We pressed forward and soon cleared the Avoods and reached an insidious fen, cov¬ ered with dense marsh grass, where we lay down for a few moments awaiting orders. I cannot imagine how any of us survived the sharp fire that swept over us at this point — a fire so keen that it split the blades of grass all about us, the minies moaning in a furious con¬ cert as they picked out victims by the score. The rain was still falling in torrents, and held the country about in obscurity. The com¬ mand was soon given to my regiment, the 95th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Captain Mac- farlain commanding, — it being the advance of Upton’s brigade, — to “rise up,” whereupon with hurrahs Ave went forward, cheered on by Colonel Upton, Avho had led us safe through the Wilderness. It Avas not long before we reached an angle of Avorks constructed Avith great skill. Immediately in our front an abatis had been arranged consisting of limbs and branches interwoven into one another, forming footlocksof the most dangerous character. But there the Avorks Avere, and over some of us Avent, many never to return. At this moment Lee’s strong line of battle, hastily selected for the Avork of retrieving ill fortune, appeared through the rain, mist, and smoke. We received their bolts, losing nearly one hundred of our gallant 95th. Colonel Upton saAv at once that this point must be held at all hazards ; for if Lee should recover the angle, he would be enabled to sweep back our lines right and left, and the fruits of the morning’s victory Avould be lost. The order Avas at once given us to lie down and commence firing ; the left of our regiment rested against the Avorks, AATile the right slightly refused rested upon an ele¬ vation in front. And now began a desperate and pertinacious struggle. Under cover of the smoke-laden rain the enemy Avas pushing large bodies of troops for-

Page 309

304 HAND-TO-HAND FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. GENERAL GRANT RECONNOITERING THE CONFEDERATE POSITION AT SPOTSYLVANIA COURT HOUSE. (BY C. W. REED, AFTER A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) Mr. Reed, the artist, belonged to Bigelow’s 9th Massachusetts where General Grant made his observation. At the time, the oth battery, which, with a battery of the 5th Regular Artillery, was Massachusetts Volunteers were crossing the road from the left holding the Fredericksburg road (see map, page 288) at the place toward the right of the line. — Editor.

Page 310

HAND-TO-HANn FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. 305 ward, determined at all hazards to regain the lost ground. Could we hold on until the re¬ mainder of our brigade would come to our as¬ sistance ? Regardless of the heavy volleys of the enemy which were thinning our ranks, we stuck to the position, and returned the fire until the 5th Maine and the 121st New York of our brigade came to our support, while the 96th Pennsylvania went in on our right \ thus reen¬ forced, we redoubled our exertions. The smoke, which was dense at first, was intensified by each discharge of artillery to such an extent that the accuracy of our aim became very uncertain, but nevertheless we kept up the fire in the supposed direction of the enemy. Meanwhile they were crawling forward under cover of the smoke, un¬ til, reaching a certain point, and raising their usual yell, they charged gallantly up to the very muzzles of our pieces and reoccupied the Angle. Upon reaching the breastwork, the Confed¬ erates for a few moments had the advantage of us, and made good use of their rifles. Our men went down by the score ; all the artillery horses were down; the gallant Upton was the only mounted officer in sight. Hat in hand, he bravely cheered his men, and begged them to hold this point.” All of his staff had been either killed, wounded, or dismounted. At this moment, and while the open ground in rear of the Confederate works was choked with troops, a section of Battery C, 5th United States Artillery, under Lieutenant Richard Metcalf,* was brought into action and increased the carnage by opening at short ^ This is, I believe, the only instance in the history of the war of a battery charging on breastworks. It was commanded by Lieutenant James Gilliss, and was attached to the Second Corps. Sergeant William E. Lines, one of only two survivors of the section that went in on that day, and who commanded the right gun of that section, has given the writer the following facts relative to the matter. He says : “After the capture of the Confederate works, we were put in position just under the hill near the small pine-trees so much spoken of. We fired a few rounds of solid shot. Of course we could not see the Confederate line, but we elevated our guns so as to clear our own infantry. While we were waiting, a staff officer with a Sixth Corps badge rode up to Lieutenant Gilliss, and I could see they had some argument or dis¬ pute, for the officer soon went away. Directly another officer rode up to Gilliss, and the same sort of colloquy took place, the officer evidently wanting Gilliss to do something that the latter would not do. This officer rode away. In a very short time General Wright, who then'commanded the Sixth Corps, rode up to Gilliss, and had a moment’s conversation with him. Lieutenant Metcalf then came over to the first section, and gave the command, ‘ Limber the guns,’ ‘ drivers mount,’ ‘cannoneers mount,’ ‘caissons rear,’ and away we went, up the hill, past our infantry, and into position. The staff officer who led us was shot before we got into position. I have often thought it was owing to that fact that we got so close to the enemy’s works. We were a considerable distance in front of our infantry, and of course artillery could not live long under such a fire as the enemy were putting through there. Our VoL. XXXIV.— 43. range with double charges of canister. This staggered the apparently exultant enemy. These guns in the maze of the moment were run up by hand close to the famous Angle, fired again and again, and were only aban¬ doned when all the drivers and cannoneers had fallen. The battle was now at white heat. The rain continued to fall, and clouds of smoke hung over the scene. Like leeches we stuck to the work, determined by our fire to keep the enemy from rising up. Captain John D. Fish of Upton’s staff, who had until this time performed valuable service in conveying ammunition to the gunners, fell, pierced by a bullet. This brave officer seemed to court death as he rode back and forth between the caissons and cannoneers with stands of canister under his “ gum ” coat. Give it to them, boys ! I’ll bring you the canis¬ ter,” said he; and as he turned to cheer the gun¬ ners, he fell from his horse, mortally wounded. In a few moments the two brass pieces of the 5th Artillery, cut and hacked by the bullets of both antagonists, lay unworked with their muz¬ zles projecting over the enemy’s works, and their wheels half sunk in the mud. Between the lines and near at hand lay the horses of these guns, completely riddled. The dead and wounded were torn to pieces by the canis¬ ter as it swept the ground where they had fallen. The mud was half way to our knees, and by our constant movement the fallen were almost buried at our feet. We now backed off from the breastwork a few yards, abandoning men went down in short order. The left gun fired nine rounds. I fired fourteen with mine, and was as¬ sisted in the last four rounds by an officer of a Vermont regiment, and by another from the 95th Pennsylvania, both of whom were shot. The effect of our canister upon the Confederates was terrible : they were evidently try¬ ing to strengthen their first line from the second when we opened on them, and you can imagine the execution at that distance. When Lieutenant Metcalf and myself could no longer serve the guns, we withdrew. Our sec¬ tion went into action with 23 men and i officer — Lieu¬ tenant Metcalf. The only ones who came out sound were the lieutenant and myself. Every horse was killed, 7 of the men were killed outright, 16 wounded; the gun carriages were so cut with bullets as to be of no further service. ... 27 balls passed through the lid of the limber chest while Number Six was get¬ ting out ammunition, and he was wounded in the face and neck by the fragments of wood and lead. The sponge bucket on my gun had 39 holes in it, being per¬ forated like a sieve. The force of the balls can be imag¬ ined when I say that the bucket was made of one- eighth inch iron. One curious circumstance on the morning we captured the works [May 12th] was, that musketry shots seemed to make such a slight noise ; in¬ stead of the sharp bmg of the shot, it was a dull thud. This may have been an important aid to our success, as the [first] firing of the enemy’s skirmishers did not alarm their men in the breastworks.” — G. N. G. It is also claimed that a section of Brown’s Rhode Island battery was run up to the breastworks in a similar manner. — Editor.

Page 311

IIAND-TO-ITANn FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA. 306 for a while the two twelve-pounders, but still keeping up a fusillade. We soon closed up our shattered ranks and the brigade settled down again to its task. Our fire was now directed at the top of the breastworks, and woe be to the head or hand that appeared above it. In the meantime the New Jersey brigade, Colonel W. H. Penrose, went into action on our right, and the Third Brigade, General Eustis’s, was hard at work. The Vermont brigade, under Colonel Lewis A. Grant, that had been sent to Barlow’s assistance, was now at the Angle, and General Wheaton’s brigade was deep in the struggle. The Second and Third Divisions of the Sixth Corps were also ready to take part. It will thus be seen that we had no lack of men for the defense or capture of this posi¬ tion, whichever it may be termed. The great difficulty was the prescribed limits of the Angle, around which we were fighting, which precluded the possibility of getting more than a limited number into ac¬ tion at once. At one time our ranks were crowded in some parts four deep by reenforce¬ ments. Major Henry P. Truefitt, command¬ ing the 119th Pennsylvania, was killed, and Captain Charles P. Warner, who succeeded him, was shot dead. Later in the day Major William Ellis, of the 49th New York, who had excited our admiration, was shot through the arm and body with a ramrod during one of several attempts to get the men to cross the works and drive off the enemy. Our losses were frightful. What remained of many differ¬ ent regiments that had come to our support had concentrated at this point, and had planted their tattered colors upon a slight rise of ground close to the Angle, where they staid during the latter part of the day. To keep up the supply of ammunition pack mules were brought into use, each animal car¬ rying three thousand rounds. The boxes were dropped close behind the troops engaged, where they were quickly opened by the officers or file-closers, who served the ammunition to the men. The writer fired four hundred rounds of ammunition, and many others as many or more. In this manner a continu¬ ous and rapid fire was maintained, to which the enemy replied with vigor for a while. Finding that we were not to be driven back, the Confederates began to use more discretion, exposing themselves but little, using the loop¬ holes in their works to fire through, and at times placing the muzzles of their rifles on the top logs, seizing the trigger and small of the stock, and * The stump of one of these trees is preserved in Washington. In his official report, Brigadier- General Samuel McGowan, who commanded a brigade in Wil¬ cox’s Confederate division, says : “To give some idea of the intensity of the fire, an oak-tree twenty-two inches elevating the breech with one hand sufficiently to reach us. During the day one of our bat¬ teries took position behind us, sending shell after shell close over our heads, to explode inside the Confederate works. In like man¬ ner Coehorn mortars eight hundred yards in our rear sent their shells with admirable pre¬ cision gracefully curving over us. Sometimes the enemy’s fire would slacken, and the mo¬ ments would become so monotonous that something had to be done to stir them up. Then some resolute fellow would seize a fence rail or piece of abatis, and, creeping close to the breastworks, thrust it over among the enemy, and then drop on the ground to avoid the volley that was sure to follow. A daring lieu¬ tenant in one of our left companies leaped upon the breastworks, took a rifle that was handed to him, and discharged it among the foe. In like manner he discharged another, and was in the act of firing a third shot when his cap flew up in the air, and his body pitched headlong among the enemy. On several occasions squads of disheartened Confederates raised pieces of shelter tents above the works as a flag of truce ; upon our slacking fire and calling to them to come in, they would immediately jump the breastworks and surrender. One party of twenty or thirty thus signified their willingness to submit; but owing to the fact that their comrades occasionally took advantage of the cessation to get a volley into us, it was some time before we concluded to give them a chance. With leveled pieces we called to them to come in. Springing upon the breastworks in a body, they stood for an instant panic-stricken at the terrible array before them; that momentary delay was the signal for their destruction. While we, with our fingers press¬ ing the trigger, shouted to them to jump, their troops, massed in the rear, poured a volley into them, killing or wounding all but a few, who dropped with the rest and crawled in un¬ der our pieces, while we instantly began firing. The battle, which during the morning raged with more or less violence on the right and left of this position, gradually slackened, and atten¬ tion was concentrated upon the Angle. So continuous and heavy was our fire that the head logs of the breastworks were cut and torn until they resembled hickory brooms. Several large oak-trees, which grew just in the rear of the works, were completely gnawed off by our converging fire, and about 3 o’clock in the day fell among the enemy with a loud crash.* Towards dusk preparations were made to in diameter, which stood just in rear of the right of the brigade, was cut down by the constant scaling of musket-balls, and fell about 12 o’clock Thursday night, injuring by its fall several soldiers in the ist South Carolina regiment.” — Editor.

Page 312

IIANn-TO-ITANI) FIGHTING AT SPOTSYLVANIA, relieve us. By this time we were nearly ex¬ hausted, and had fired three to four hundred rounds of ammunition per man. Our lips were encrusted with powder from ‘‘biting car¬ tridge.” Our shoulders and hands were coated with mud that had adhered to the butts of our rifles.* The troops of the Second Corps, who were to relieve us, now moved up, took our posi¬ tion, and opened fire as we fell back a short distance to re-arrange our shattered ranks and get something to eat, which we were sadly in need of. When darkness came on we dropped from exhaustion. About midnight, after twenty hours of con¬ stant fighting, Lee withdrew from the contest, leaving the Angle in our possession. Thus closed the battle of the second day at Spotsylvania. On the 13th, early in the day, volunteers were called for to bury the dead. The writer volunteered to assist, and with the detail moved to the works near the Angle, in front of which we buried a number of bodies near where they fell. We were exposed to the fire of sharpshooters, and it was still raining. We cut the name, company, and regiment of each of the dead on the lids of ammunition boxes which we picked up near by. The inscriptions were but feebly executed, for they were done with a pocket knife. This work ended, we went close up where we had fought on Thursday and viewed the spot appropriately called the “ Slaughter Pen,” or “ Bloody Angle.” * Our pieces at times would become choked with burnt powder, and would receive the cartridge but half way. This fact, however, did not interfere with their discharge. — G. N. G. 307 A momentary gleam of sunshine through the gloom of the sky seemed to add a new horror to the scene. Hundreds of Confeder¬ ates, dead or dying, lay piled over one another in those pits. The fallen lay three or four feet deep in some places, and, with but few excep¬ tions, they v/ere shot in and about the head. Arms, accouterments, ammunition, cannon, shot and shell, and broken foliage were strewn about. With much labor a detail of Union soldiers buried the dead by simply turning the captured breastworks upon them. Thus had these unfortunate victims unwittingly dug their own graves.t The trenches were nearly full of muddy water. It was the most horrible sight I had ever witnessed. The enemy’s defenses at this point were elab¬ orately constructed of heavy timber, banked with earth to the height of about four feet; above this was placed what is known as a head log, raised just high enough to enable a mus¬ ket to be inserted between it and the lower work. Pointed pine and pin-oak formed an abatis, in front of which was a deep ditch. Shelves ran along the inside ledges of these works (a series of square pits) and along their flank traverses which extended to the rear; upon these shelves large quantities of “ buck and ball” and “ minie ” cartridges were piled ready for use, and the guns of the dead and wounded were still pointing through the aper¬ tures, just as the men had fallen from them. G, No7‘to7i Galloway. t The Confederate General McGowan officially says : “ The trenches on the right in the bloody angle ran with blood and had to be cleared of the dead bodies more than once.” — Editor. FORCES AND LOSSES IN THE WILDERNESS CAMPAIGN. From a careful examination of the Official Records the total effective strength of Grant’s army at the be¬ ginning of the Wilderness campaign is estimated at about 118,000, and that of Lee’s army at about 61,000 of all arms. On June ist, at and about Cold Harbor the Army of the Potomac numbered, “ present for duty,” 103,875. The Eighteenth Corps, from the Army of the James, added to the army on the same date about 10,000 men. The strength of Lee’s army at Cold Harbor is no¬ where authoritatively stated. This also applies to the Confederate losses from the Wilderness to Cold Llarbor. The losses in battle of the Union army, as denoted by the revised tables prepared by the late Colonel Robert N. Scott, may be summarized as follows : Killed. Wounded. Captured or missing. j Total. The Wilderness . 2,246 12,037 3,383 17,666 Spotsylvania Court House . 2,725 13,416 2,258 18,399 3,986 North Anna and Totopotomoy. 591 2,734 661 Cold Harbor . 1,844 9,077 1,816 12,737 625 Sheridan’s first expedition . 64 337 224 Sheridan’s second expedition . . . 150 741 625 1,516 Grand total from the Wilder¬ ness to the James River . . . 7,620 38,342 8,967 54,929

Page 313

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. A Missing Confederate Cipher Dispatch. On the 6th of April, 1887, a statue of General A. S. Johnston, who fell at Shiloh twenty-five years before, was unveiled in the Metarie Cemetery at New Orleans. Among those present at that interesting ceremony was the Confederate ex-President, Mr. Jefferson Davis. Being called upon, he spoke in his usual controversial vein, including these words : On the field of Shiloh he [Johnston] made but one mis¬ take. He had planned that battle and had sent me a telegram, — which was lost, — which described it just as it was fought — the only battle in the world’s his¬ tory that was fought as the general expected.” In effect this is but a re-averment of a story first broached in his ‘‘ Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government,” and repeated orally in one or more pub¬ lic addresses. In his book (Vol. II., p. 57) Mr. Davis gives the full text of a telegram from General John¬ ston to himself dated April 3d, 1862, which he describes as explaining the proposed Confederate “order of movement” upon Pittsburg Landing, and the conclud¬ ing paragraph of which is in these words : “ Hope en¬ gagement before Buell can form junction.” This was immediately followed, on the same page, with a tele¬ gram which he says he sent on the 5th of April, to wit, “ General A. S. Johnston : Your dispatch of yes¬ terday received. I hope you will be able to close with enemy before his two columns meet.” This is presented, however, by Mr. Davis not as the answer to the telegram of the 3d of April, but to “ one in cipher ” of the 4th of April, which he declares is lost, thus strangely overlooking the fact that the clos¬ ing words of his own dispatch are too clearly the echo of those of Johnston’s telegram of April 3d not to be his answer thereto, as is made indisputable by the his¬ tory of that telegram. As after the 29th of March, 1862, General Johnston really exercised no active command over the army at Corinth, he either had not found it necessary to pro¬ vide himself with the means of cipher communication with the Richmond authorities or had mislaid them. Be this as it may, after the conference with Beauregard and the corps commanders at the quarters of the former, on the morning of April 3d, when Beauregard ex¬ plained his plan of battle, which General Johnston ap¬ proved, the latter, wishing to inform Mr. Davis of the forward movement, wrote the dispatch of that date. To secure the transmission of it with essential secrecy he sent it to Beauregard for translation into a dictionary cipher (based upon Webster’s school dictionary, three columns to the page) which that general had for such communications with his government. That transla¬ tion I give as it exists in General Beauregard’s official telegram book in its regular order of date as follows : “ Corinth, April 3d, 1862, 3 p. m. “To THE President, Richmond, Va. “ General Buell 132. R. 5 — 166 L 26 — 250. M 20 — 250 R g — 239 M32 — 111M28 — Columbia 43 M 6 — Clifton 252 M 6. — 218 M. 26. Mitchell 32. R. 22 — 124. R. 32. — 276 R 27 — 248 M, I — 250 R. 9 — 59 R. 17 — 108 — M. 20 — 109. R. 16 — 175 R 6 ed — 109 R. 18 — 252. M 6 — 174 L. 28 — 31 M. 10 — 69. L. 12 — Pittsburg — 84 M. 4 — III. M. 28 — Bethel — 156 M. 4 — 37 M. 20 — iii. M 28 Corinth — 210 M. 16 iii M. 28 — Burnsville — 63 R. 25 — 252 R. II — 169. L 12 — Monterey — 174. R. 14 — Pitts¬ burg. Beauregard, 221 R. 10 — 132 R. 5 — 56, M. 14 — Polk 150. M. 7 — Hardee, 48. M: 3 — Bragg 213 M. 6 — 276. M. 22. Breckinridge 210 M. 16 — 126 M. 4 — 92. R. 18 — 32. M.28 — Buell 44. M. 13 — 109 M. 6 — 146. L. 20 — (Signed) “ A. S. Johnston, “ Geyieral C. S. yl.” After translation the original was returned to Gen¬ eral Johnston, among whose papers it was found and published by Mr. William Preston Johnston, in the biography of his father, as well as by Mr. Davis, but on the part of the son, altogether unwittingly of the fact that it was the translation of the very cipher dis¬ patch whose loss Mr. Davis had deplored, for the rea¬ son, as he imagined, that it was not only the plan of battle as Johnston had devised, but as he had fought it. On the other hand, the son adduces it as “clearly” showing that zV was the plan of battle as his father had originally devised, but not as he had fought it ; “ doubt¬ less,” as he naively suggests, “in deference to General Beauregard’s opinion in the matter, and for reasons which seemed sufficient at the time. ” In that biography this dispatch appears without the evidence of the hour of its transmission, and is thus and otherwise made to do duty inconsistent with the fact of that hour, to wit, 3 P. M. Here is the text of it as printed both by Mr. Davis and by Mr. W. P. Johnston : “ Corinth, April 3d, 1862. “ General Buell in motion 30,000 strong, rapidly from Columbia by Clifton to Savannah. Mitchell behind him with 10,000. Confederate forces — 40,000 — ordered for¬ ward to offer battle near Pittsburg. Division from Bethel, main body from Corinth, reserve from Burnsville, con¬ verging to-morrow near Monterey on Pittsburg. Beaure¬ gard second in command, Polk the left, Bragg the center, Hardee the right wing, Breckinridge the reserve. Hope engagement before Buell can form junction. “To THE President, Richmond.” Mr. Davis admits that he has vainly sought to res¬ urrect the alleged missing cipher dispatch of the 4th of April. In other words, the original of no such pa¬ per was among the very full files of official papers left by General Johnston ; though it is a fact that they were so full as to be worth ten thousand dollars after the war to the United States government. But Johnston’s papers did contain the telegram of the 3d of April — really the only cipher dispatch that was transmitted. The alleged tenor of the telegram of April 4th makes it improbable, I may add, that any dispatch revealing the plan of battle was sent. The text of the cipher telegram of the 3d of April disposes of two myths : the one born of the bad mem¬ ory of Mr. Davis as to its scope and tenor ; the other, begotten in the brain of the son by an ill-grounded criti¬ cism on the part of the Comte de Paris, to the effect that the attack should not have been made, as it was, in three deployed lines parallel with the line of the en¬ emy, but with the three corps moving in columns of attack perpendicularly to the Federal line, each corps having its own reserve. Turning his back square upon the fact that he had just been laboriously seeking to show that his father, not Beauregard, had planned the manner of the battle as well as of the march. Colonel

Page 314

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. Johnston here claimed that his father had originally ordered the attack just as the Comte de Paris fancied it should have been ordered, but “ doubtless ” had been persuaded out of it by Beauregard — thus, mops consilii, contradicting the very claim he had just put forth that his father had designed the tactics of the battle, which therefore was unachieved because of his death. Should there be a shred of doubt left in regard to the true history of General Beauregard’s controlling influence and part in bringing about the Shiloh cam- paign, that, it seems to me, must disappear before the following telegraphic dispatch, which was sent while General Johnston was marching toward Corinth for the concentration urged by Beauregard : “ Decatur, March 15th, 1862. “ To General G. T. Beauregard: “ Have you had the south bankof the Hatchee examined near Bolivar? I recommend it your attention. It has, besides other advantages, that of being farther from en¬ emy’s base. '‘A. S. Johnston.” That is to say, as near to the date of the battle of Shiloh as three weeks, General Johnston had regarded it as most advantageous that the Confederate concen¬ tration should take place not so near to the enemy’s base as Corinth, but fully fifty miles away to the north¬ westward, behind the Hatchee River, and covering Memphis, according to his Bowling Green memoran¬ dum of February 7th, 1S62, ready in case of defeat to retire into that town and there await a siege and capture. These are not the views, I submit, of a general who within a week thereafter would repair to Corinth with the plan of an offensive campaign fully rounded in his mind ready for execution within a fortnight, but of one bent solely upon the defen¬ sive ; views precisely consonant with his proffer of the command to Beauregard, and to withdraw his head¬ quarters from the immediate vicinage of Confederate forces. Thomas Jordan. Union Sentiment among Confederate Veterans. The ovation to Mr. Henry W. Grady on his return to Atlanta proved how truly he expressed the feelings of his people in his New England Society speech. This feeling is not confined to the new generation who were too young to take part in the war, but it is also the well-nigh universal sentiment of the veterans who fought for the “ Lost Cause.” For my part, it is now several years since I became convinced that it is an inestimable blessing, not only to the whole country, but especially to ns of the South, that the war ended in the removal of the incubus of slavery and the con¬ solidation of the entire nation under one flag and one 309 government. We can hardly doubt that if the Union had been broken up into three or four confederacies (as it would have been after its prestige was once de¬ stroyed), they would have felt toward each other as France, Germany, Austria, and Russia feel at this day. Theresult would have been vain attempts to maintain a durable balance of power, continual wars, conscription, standing armies, fortifications and custom-houses on every frontier, and burdens far more grievous than those under which all Europe is now groaning. The Southern Confederacy (or confederacies), being inferior in population and resources, would have felt these bur¬ dens far more than the others. None of these new nationalities would have been strong enough to com¬ mand the respect of the great European powers, which would have made America the field of their intrigues and conquests, as was attempted in Mexico under Maximilian. Instead of that, we have the grandest country and the most magnificent destinies ever vouch¬ safed to any people. We could not realize this while the bitterness of defeat was still fresh in our hearts, but a quarter of a century has produced a vast change in the Southern mind. An old adage says : Wise men change their opinions sometimes — fools never; and the great popular heart is almost always wise. One thing especially should make us proud — it al¬ ways gave me pleasure to boast of it when in Europe — audit is this: After passing through the most gigan¬ tic struggle that any country ever underwent, not a drop of blood was shed after the heat of conflict had ceased. Not even banishment was inflicted upon any of the vanquished, the result being that instead of cre¬ ating an Ireland in the South we are now one people, united as one man for the defense and the honor of our whole country. These opinions, formed even before I left America to follow a military career abroad, were confirmed and intensified by seeing the condition of the European masses, taxed without mercy and made “ food for pow¬ der” to maintain or modify the “balance of power.” Yet if they were only my individual ideas, I would hardly feel justified in proclaiming them ; but I will state that in the last few years I have expressed these views to hundreds of my former brother-soldiers, and that of all those, only one failed to give them the most hearty approval — and he had been a very prominent political leader, but not much of a soldier. I have therefore good grounds for asserting that the Southern veterans who fought the wvlt are a unit in their desire for peace and harmony and the maintenance of the restored Union, now and forever. jR. E. Colston, For7nerly Brigadier-General, C. S. A. Washington, February 17th, 1887.

Page 315

TOPICS OF THE TIME. Lord Wolseley’s Estimate of General Lee. ROMPTED by the appearance of General Long’s “ Memoirs of Robert E. Lee,” Lord Wolseley has followed in the trail of the expert reviewers who allude to a new book as an excuse for enlarging the subject with the fruits of their own study and observation. His critique is printed in “Macmillan’s Magazine” for March, and is worthy of general perusal for two rea¬ sons : It affords a view (from the English standpoint) of the war of secession and the best-known Southern chieftain ; and although it has little to say that is im¬ portant or true with regard to General Lee, it sheds a flood of light on the military learning and mental strategy of the most conspicuous general in the British army. No people are better acquainted with Lee’s merits as a soldier than the Army of the Potomac. They admire also those traits of character which endeared him to his fellow-Confederates. So if Northerners cannot assist Lord Wolseley in placing him on an equal pedestal with that of Washingto7tf it is from no contempt of his abilities. The chief reason is the fact that Washington labored to create a Union of States and that Lee, with sorrow, but with greater love for a particular State, labored to divide the Union. But now that the Union he would yet have been glad to see preserved, is preserved. General Lee is for the whole country an American hero.* In 1862 Lord Wolseley was a visitor at General Lee’s headquarters, where he undoubtedly had opportunities of taking a studious interest in Confederate persons and affairs. He assures us frequently in the course of his paper that he has been a student of our war, and the following sentiment, alone, would point to such study as a duty for a man in his responsible position, since he says that “ the mjluence which the result of this Con¬ federate war is bound to exercise tipon man's future history will seem very great." Lord Wolseley’s enthusiasm for Lee springs from personal knowledge, for he says that Lee “ is stamped upon my memory as a being apart and superior to all others^ in every way." But it is fortunate for Lee’s fame that the admiration of his countrymen. North and South, rests upon solid facts, and not, as in Lord Wolseley’s case, upon misconception of his charac¬ ter and ignorance of the leading events of his career. It is remarkable also that with all his admiration Lord Wolseley has not allowed his opinions to be influ¬ enced by those of his hero, even where Lee might be supposed to be an authority ; nor consulted Lee’s orders and reports for clews to his motives in strategy and battle. He would seem also to have imitated the traditional reviewer who found it bad method to read a book before criticising it, for certainly he has not leaned heavily on General Long for information. * In his recent speech at Nashville, Senator John Sherman, re¬ ferring to the losses and sacrifices of the war, said in part: “ The courage, bravery, and fortitude of both sides are now the pride and heritage of us all. Think not that I come here to re¬ proach any man for the part he took in that fight, or to revive in For convenience let us catalogue some of the points in which Lord Wolseley differs from General Lee and other esteemed authorities ; 1. At the outset he says that any ^^unprejudiced outsider will admit the sovereign rights both historical and legaly which each State possessed under the Con¬ stitution to leave the Union whe7i its people thought fit to do so." But General Lee thought differently. In a letter to his son dated January 23d, 1861 (see General Long’s “ Memoirs,” page 88), General Lee says : “ Secession is nothing but revolution. The franiers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom, and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken by every member of the Confederacy at will. It is intended for ' perpetual union,’ so expressed in the preamble, and for the establishment of a government, not a compact, which can only be dissolved by revolu¬ tion or the consent of all the people in convention assem¬ bled. It is idle to talk of secession.” 2. As I study the history of the secession warf says Lord Wolseley, presumably with a wink at the Muse of History, these [Lee and Lincoln] seem to me the two men 7uho influenced it most." Whatever parallel might be drawn between the na¬ tive integrity and manliness of Lincoln and of Lee, it has been accepted hitherto that Lincoln was the chief executive on one side, and that Lee, shrinking from the responsibilities of civil war, “ save,” as he writes, “ in the defense of my native State,” devoted his ener¬ gies to the command of the Army of Northern Virginia, while other Southerners of great abilities wielded the executive power, and other Southern generals, whose services Lee was great enough to admire, worked faith¬ fully under the executive power, like Lee himself, for the common cause. The early victories that nerved the Southern heart for great sacrifices were won by other men. Lee’s first service in the field, in West Virginia, though wisely conservative in view of the difficulties, was a public disappointment. Later he fell heir to John¬ ston’s good beginnings at Seven Pines, in which action the latter was severely wounded. Though almost a fruitless battle, it checked McClellan’s aggressive policy, so that Lee had to do at the outset with an enemy whose ardor had subsided; who, in fact, was more con¬ cerned about his own safety and “ a change of base ” than about the capture of Richmond. Lee’s daring cam¬ paign in the Seven Days’ fighting was no compliment to General McClellan, though Lord Wolseley remem¬ bers that Lee expressed greater admiration for Mc¬ Clellan than for any other Union general. From this time on Lee was, without question, the chief prop to the military confidence of the South ; but he was respon¬ sible only for the leadership of the Army of Northern Virginia, until — and now comes a fact for which Lord Wolseley should have the credit of accuracy — the heart of any one the triumph of victory or the pangs of defeat. ... No man in the North questions the honesty of purpose or the heroism with which the Confederates maintained their cause, and you will give credit for like courage and honorable motives to Union soldiers, North and South.”

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TOPICS OF he “ was given the command over all the Confederate armies a month or two only before the final collapsed' 3. Lord Wolseley with superfluous inaccuracy strips Mount Vernon of its historical associations and moves them up the Potomac to General Lee’s home of Arling¬ ton, which he describes as “ General Washington' s beautiful property " and as “ the cherished home of the father of the United States." 4. With calm fatuity he mentions a Confederate folly" which led to a serious evil, namely, the enlistjnent of soldiers for only nmety days and he adds that “ Lee, who understood war, pleaded in favor of the engage7ne7it being for the term of the war, but he pleaded in vam." It is true that Lincoln issued a call for three-months men, but at that time Virginia was disregarding the “call of Abraham”; nor is there any record that Lee made an opportunity to plead with Lincoln on the subject. Lee was soon after busy with the organization of the forces of the State of Virginia, that were required to enlist for twelve months or for the war. Most of them favored the longer term be¬ cause public as well as military opinion favored it, and public opinion at the South was inexorable. Anybody who entered the Southern army was in effect enlisted for as long as he could get about and shoot. 5. Lord Wolseley recalls that in describing to him the constitution of his army General Lee most deplored the fact that the politicians insisted upon the officers being elected by their men. In this his lordship would appear still to have one leg on the Federal side of the line, for such things were done at the North. In Virginia, as General Lee’s orders show, all field-officers were ap¬ pointed, “ in conformity to the ordinance of the conven¬ tion,” by the “ Governor and Council.” In fact, after the demand for field-officers had been met, there were no professional soldiers left in Virginia to fill the cap¬ taincies, even if it had been desired to do so by appointment. 6. He states that Lee in two months “ created a little army of ^o, goo ?nen," though Lee’s report to Governor Letcher of June 15 th — seven days after the State troops had been transferred to the Confederate authorities — estimates the Virginia forces at, surely, 35,000, and possibly 40,000. This error would be trivial but for the aberration to which it leads, for with this army of 50,000 in his mind. Lord Wolseley adds that“/« another 77tonth this army at Bull Run gained a 00771-^ plete victory, over the Northerit invaders, who were driven back across the Poto77iac like he7'ds of frighte7ted sheep." The Union soldiers who were there remem¬ ber the precipitation. But Confederates will wonder whether his lordship, in omitting to state that John¬ ston and Beauregard led the Confederates to that vic¬ tory, intended to imply that the credit belonged to General Lee. Lord Wolseley will surely pardon a lit¬ tle doubt as to the meaning of his omissions when the fog of uncertainty so completely shrouds his explicit information. Nor was it the army that Lee had created which fought the battle of Bull Run. The State troops were scattered at points between Norfolk and West Virginia, and were blended with forces from other Southern States. Of the 50 regiments in the armies of Johnston and Beauregard, only 20 were Virgin¬ ians. 7. Lord Wolseley offers a novel reason for the fail- THE TIME. 31 1 ure to follow up the Bull Run victory by seizing Wash¬ ington. He ascribes it to political co7isiderations at Richmond," where the politicians, as he conceives, were ^iigs-gcd in an “ attempt to allay the angry feelings of the Noi'th," while the dogs of war were being held in. Lord Wolseley evidently has not read the writings of Johnston, Beauregard, and Davis on this subject, or he would know that the political power in Richmond ascribed the failure to the dilatoriness of the generals, while they, on their part, claimed that there was a lack of resources for such an enterprise. 8. In some places Lord Wolseley ’s aim is more wild than in others, but he sweeps the whole horizon in the remark that “ a battle to the Confederates 77ieant a new supply of everythmg aii army required. It may be truthfully said that, practically, the Goverfiment at Washi7igto7i had to provide aitd pay for the arms aiid equipmeiit of its ene77iies." To be sure, there was con¬ siderable exchange of the materials of war, and in the East, Lee’s army got rather more than its share ; but in the West the Confederates had to make the Eastern reckoning more than good. The Federals were waste¬ ful of clothing, and the Confederates were economical by dint of bitter want that drove them even to the dead. Union soldiers did not covet the threadbare raiment of the Confederates, or find much use for their equip¬ ments, unless the surrendered muskets and cannon had been made by Federal means or, as often happened, were of the newest English brand. 9. “ What most strikes the regular soldier f contin¬ ues his lordship, “ hi these caiiipaigns of General Lee is the inefficient 77ianner in which both he and his opponents were often served by their subordinate coinmaTiders." If General Wolseley might have had another conversa¬ tion with General Lee, after the war, that magnani¬ mous chieftain would have told him something about Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet, D. H. Hill, Ewell, A. P. Hill, “ Jeb ” Stuart, and scores of other able subor¬ dinates who were maimed or killed in the perform¬ ance of brilliant deeds. Only one opinion, we believe, prevails either North or South with respect to Lee’s army: It was a splendid body of fighters, surprisingly well officered. 10. Lord Wolseley has cultivated the belief that Lee’s strategy and tactics were always “ everythmg that could be desired, up to the moment of victory, but thei'e his action seemed to stop abruptly." True, the Confeder¬ ates were not Titans. They seemed never to be wound up for more than a week or more of hard marching on scant rations, followed by two or three days of contin¬ uous battle, usually against superior numbers, which left them at the end without fresh reserves. After a terrible and exhausting victory a longing for rest seemed to over¬ come them. General Lee could not furnish physical strength to his men from his own sinews, but he did know how to fight them to a shadow and then how to keep them going on something that from the other side of the line looked like very thin hope. Once, as Lord Wolseley recollects, but with vagueness as to its events, there were seven days of continuous fighting near Rich¬ mond. Lee with sublime daring dashed his columns time and again upon McClellan’s superior but separated forces. His losses were frightful, but the bravery and energy displayed by his troops were tremendous, and possibly might have proved fatal to his cause if McClellan had assumed the aggressive after Malvern

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312 TOPICS OF THE TIME, Hill instead of retiring six miles to a secure position grappled for the death-struggle from the Wilderness at Harrison’s Landing. to Appomattox were sufficiently “regular” as regards II. Yet Lord Wolseley exclaims: Was ever an discipline, experience, and valor army so hopelessly at the mercy of another as that of 14. With Lord Wolseley ’s historical method, an McClella^i when he began his retreat to Harrison's anecdote or two is sufficient data for such a state- Landing after the Seven Days' fighting rotiftd Rich- ment as this : “ The usual proportion thro7ighout the mondP" For succinct ignorance, there is something war between the con te^tding sides m each action ranged unexampled in this statement. Malvern Hill was a fivm about twice to three times more Federals than there staggering repulse to Lee’s exhausted infantry, who ivere Confederates engaged." His lordship would ap- were not able to confront McClellan at Harrison’s pear to be unaware that there were Western battles Landing until the third day after that battle. And even in which almost equal numbers fought terrible battles then Lee withdrew, as he says, on account of “ the with surprisingly equal losses. But to confine our condition of our troops.” McClellan was well-nigh im- examination, with him, to the Eastern armies, the lec- pregnable at Harrison’s Landing. If Lee had been able ords tell us that, save at Antietam, Lee always had on to get at him there, the military situation would have im- the field of battle within a fourth or a third as many men proved, for the Confederates could not long stand such as his opponent, and that when he was the aggressor destructive fighting as “the Seven Days’.” ButLeepre- he was clever enough as a soldier to strike his blow ferred to leave McClellan in his camp security resting at with forces superior to the wing or detachment smitten ; the outer gate of Richmond, while he started in the oppo- as witness Gaines’s Mill and the blow on the Eleventh site direction to bowl over Pope and startle Washington. Corps at Chancellor sville. When Grant begari his 12. Equally remarkable for visionary confidence is Wilderness “ campaign of attrition,” the Army of the Lord Wolseley’s next question, “ What commander Potomac was for once twice as large as the Army of could wish to have his foe in a ‘ tighter place ' than Burn- N or them Virginia, and, considering the relab ve advan- side was in after his disastrous attack tipon Lee at Fred- tages of assault and defense and the steel-like temper ericksburg? " Lee has explained in his reports, in ef- of the Confederates, Grant’s army was none too large feet, that he was so much pleased with the tight boot for the job. But his lordship condenses his opinion Burnside was wearing, so long as Burnside was the of those veteran armies in this complaisant simile . aggressor, that he had no thought of exchanging foot- ‘‘ A trial heat between two jockeys mounted on un- gear with his enemy, as he surely would have done if trained horses may be interesting, but no 07ie would ever he had attacked Burnside within range of the Union quote the performance as an mstance of great racing cannon on Stafford Heights, across the river. So se- speed." cure was Burnside at the town that when it was pro- 15* repeating Lincoln s playful rep y to t e nian posed, on deciding to recross the river, to keep hands who wanted the President’s opinion of the number on Fredericksburg the council of officers believed that of Confederates in the field, which Lord Wolseley does 10,000 men was a sufficient force for the purpose. ‘‘ with reference to the relative numbers employed on With less particularity but more discretion. Lord both sides f the drift of Lincoln s humor would have Wolseley concludes the subject with the remark, been more apparent if his lordship had stated a fact in both instances the Northern commander got safely which has interested students of the “ Seven Days away, and other similar instances could be mentioned." fighting.” The day before the battle of Gaines s Mill 13. “ The critical military student of this war," says Lincoln telegraphed to McClellan acknowledgment of his lordship, with a fine compliment to himself, ^^will, three dispatches received the day before, and added, / think, agree that from first to last the cooperation of “The later one of 6.15 P. M. suggesting the proba- even one army corps of regular troops would have given bility of your being overwhelmed by 200,000, and complete victory to whichever side it fought on." There talking of where the responsibility will belong, pains is something in this suggestive of Gilbert and Sulli- me very much.” But McClellan on July nth, when van’s “modern major-general.” Inasmuch as this was safely encamped at Harrison’s Landing, returned to an American war, it had to be fought in the American the subject with this : “ Prisoners all state that I had way. As neither side had a standing army of any im- 200,000 men to fight. A good deal more ^^^^n two to portance, each side must create an army out of nearly one, and they knowing the ground.” Lincoln did not raw material. But there are those who remember that need the after-testimony of the Confederate records to American “raw material ” once battled with “regular” convince him that this was nonsense; and he must troops, during the scrimmage of I77^» again have been aiming at that unique incident wren le at New Orleans in 1815, and that the “regulars” Whenever one of our generals engages did not then complain of the inferiority of their a rebel aimy he reports that he has encountered a force foes. McClellan’s army had a splendid division of tivice his strength. Now I know we have half a mill- regulars, well officered, that did good service, but ion of soldiers in the field, so I am bound to believe the their deeds do not shine brighter than those of the rebels have twice that number.'^ ^ volunteers on either side. It was not the need of “reg- 16. But the most surprising of Lord o se ey s ular ” troops which prolonged the war, but the equality conclusions on the Confederate war pertains o of grit, and daring, and skill, and devotion to ideas. Lee’s ^fiaults," such as his ^softness of leait, is Lord Wolseley cannot “ blind himself to the hyperbole “ devotion to duty ^ and great respect for obedience, of writers who refer to these armies as the finest that [w’hich] seem at times to have made iim too su have ever existed." It is true that they were not handled vient to those charged with the civil government oj in the “regular” European fashion; for the rough, his country"; also his appearing to lave forgo en wooded country over which they fought would not that he was the great Revolutionary chief engaged m a permit ; but will he deny that the two armies which great Revolutionary war" when “ the South could only

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TOPICS OF THE TIME, hope to win under the rule of a Military Dictator! In other words, his lordship is disappointed that General Lee, after obeying the commands of his native State to fight for a new constitution and government, did not prove a traitor to the trust reposed in him. After this confession of the character Lord Wolseley would have preferred to find when he visited General Lee, if. his lordship’s shade (when there is no longer waging or studying of war) should seek to renew the acquaint¬ ance with the calm spirit that bowed its head, in honor, at Appomattox, it is to be feared the insulted chieftain would exclaim : “ Insatiate Englishman, will not one Benedict Arnold suffice ? ” 17. Lord Wolseley has as little sympathy with Gen¬ eral Lee’s real virtues as with his illusory “ faults.” Apparently he is far away from any possible compre¬ hension of a great leader raised up to command wisely and unselfishly an army of democratic freemen. Nor can he appreciate how General Lee would feel, to know that the most famous English general of the time has written about him as though there were only one side to the civil war, and that the Confederate ; and only one soldier on that side, and he Robert E. Lee. Landscape-Gardeners Needed for America. The architectural profession, we are told, is already crowded, and bids fair soon to be so overcrowded that even creative ability will find it hard to make a path for itself, and executive intelligence will be a drug in the market. Demand strictly limits supply in this art at least ; whenever it comes to pass that there are not enough architectural commissions to “go round,” some aspirants will be compelled to turn to other tasks. But, fortunately, the demand for the services of a sister-profession seems to be fast outgrowing existent sources of supply. Our landscape architects are very few, and we are yearly awakening to a clearer recog¬ nition of our need for them. As yet we do not recognize it half clearly or half generally enough. But it is only a few years since the case was even worse with the architects themselves, — in their true estate as differentiated from the “ builder.” And ideas develop rapidly in America — wants and wishes define and extend themselves with marvelous celerity when once a first faint prompting has been felt. Therefore that young American will be wise in his generation who takes note of current signs and now begins to fit himself to answer the imperious call that will soon be made upon the art of the landscape- architect, — or, to use the older, equally dignified, and exacter term, the landscape-gardener. It is interesting to remember that— far as it lags behind to-day in the number of its professors and in the degree of public interest which attends it — this art showed earlier promise of vitality in America than ar¬ chitecture. Downing wrote excellently of landscape almost forty years ago, when certainly no American had written well of brick and stone ; did admirable landscape work when our building was at its very worst; and published helpful illustrations of schemes of planting side by side with the most helpless and hideous designs for cottages and villas. The Central Park, which was planned in the ’fifties, when Rich¬ ardson was still at college, may be called — considering the difficulties of the site, and allowing for the incom- VOL. XXXIV.— 44. 313 plete way in which first intentions have been carried out — almost as great a work of art as any Richardson created. But the public, now so quick to recognize suc¬ cess in the one art, did not then, and does not now, really appreciate success in the other. As a consequence, a hundred aspirants are ready and eager to tread in Mr. Richardson’s footsteps, while the path which the success of Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux ought to have made tempting remains almost untrodden by younger feet. If we name these artists, Mr. Parsons, and but one or two others, we name all who are known by repute, it appears, even to those architects who are seeking help, — certainly all who stand visibly before the public as professed landscape-gardeners, anxious to work, as the landscape-gardener always should work, hand in hand with the architect. Yet how vast is our need for the ministrations of such men. How immense is the number and how various the nature of the tasks which should no more be intrusted to the gardener-artisan than should the construction of public buildings and beautiful homes to the carpenter or mason. A whole huge continent has been so touched by human hands that over a large part of its surface it has been reduced to a state of un¬ kempt, sordid ugliness ; and it can be brought back into a state of beauty only by further touches of the same hands, more intelligently applied. Public parks are yearly being laid out in our larger towns. Our customary schemes of village building call imperatively for the landscape-artist’s help. And there is an ever¬ growing demand for country homes of a more sumptu¬ ous sort, where the best of architects can but imper¬ fectly do his work if he must do it quite alone. Look at the chateaux of France, for instance ; at the older country homes of England; at the villas and palaces of Italy, and we see how intimate a union of the two arts produced their magnificent charm. We find it hard to decide where the work of the architect ended, the work of the gardener began. But we find it easy enough to imagine how infinitely less would be the impressiveness of the architect’s work had not the gardener’s been as good, — had he not set off and em¬ phasized constructed beauty by making nature beau¬ tiful about it, and helped to connect and unify the two by an intermediate arrangement of terraces, fountains, balustrades, and more or less formal plantings. Let it not be supposed that because the landscape- architect works with and in deference to nature, he can trust the light of nature to teach him how to work. The training he needs is as long and as serious as that needed by the architect, and even more varied in its character. He must begin — since his work so emphatically demands good taste — by cultivating him¬ self in every possible way, and especially by cultivat¬ ing his powers of observation and that feeling for natural beauty which comes by effort quite as often as by birth. He must study botany, — must acquaint him¬ self not only with the aspect but with the habits and needs and idiosyncrasies of all sorts of plants, and in particular of all sorts of trees and shrubs. He must know of soils and drains and exposures and fertilizers, and all such matters, as the practical agriculturist knows of them. He must study architecture in a gen¬ eral but not a superficial way. He must travel widely, — in his own land to see how nature works towards beauty, and in older lands to see how men have worked

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OPEN LETTERS, 3H with her materials and with architectural materials towards the same great end. He must go through a term of pupilage in a busy office like Mr. Olmsted’s to learn how the new problems of our own day may be met, how complicated are the considerations which affect any large problem, and how fully it must be worked out on paper before a spade is lifted. He must cultivate patience and imaginative power, — for his works will grow very slowly to completeness, and their final estate will be scarcely foreshadowed in their first. And he must cultivate tact, — the art of dealing with men, — even more diligently, perhaps, than the intending architect must ; for he will have to meet and often “ manage ” not only the client and the artisan, but the architect himself. All this is slow work and costly work. But most of it will be found pleasant w^ork, provided pleasant is not thought a synonym for easy. And once well accom¬ plished it will open a delightful life, an ample outlet for the broadest and deepest artistic endowment, and, we believe, a surely prosperous career. The day is very certainly at hand when the gardener-artisan must and will be relegated to his proper place, — beside the builder ; and wise, we repeat, will be the youth who will then have fitted himself to stand in this artisan’s former place, — beside the architectural artist. OPEN LETTERS. Church Union.* FROM A UNITARIAN POINT OF VIEW. The simple truth seems to be that Christian Unity exists in America now, for any one who wants it. Those people have it who were born, out-of-doors, in the open-air freedom of the Christian church, and those also who, having been born in one or another Egypt or closed tabernacle, have had the courage to go out into the freedom of the world of God. This would never be doubted, but that, as I dare say you have seen, people not used to the freedom of the open air are at first a little puzzled by it. It is somewhat as, on your summer “outing,” you have seen people who have been so much shut up in the winter that they do not at first enjoy the strong light of the sea-shore or the open pastures. But, indeed, they soon learn. Most people really want Christian Unity. I observe that most of your correspondents do. But some people are hand-tied, and, may be, tongue-tied, by some old shred of what is called a symbol, written in a dead language and in another time, which they are expected by somebody to sub¬ scribe in good faith. So you may see a boy on the sea-shore who wants to go into the ocean, but does not, because he is afraid to wet his clothes. But when there is any real Christian work to do these people almost always strip off enough rags to be able to plunge into God’s own infinite sea, and help the others who are doing it. At first, very likely, some stickler, or Pharisee, insists on a formula to say who may come and help and who may not. The word “ Pharisee ” means sectarian or lover of division. But once past this reef at the harbor’s mouth, when they are all out on the infinite ocean, the initial difficulty is all forgotten. I belong to a society which had to meet many times before it could adjust the delicate balance of its formula. It discussed, even to a syllable, the language of its constitution. Finally, all w’ere happily agreed, and it went to work. It has now been at work for nearly a generation. New members have joined it, eagerly, without so much as asking what w'as the lan¬ guage of its constitution. If they did ask, they would * See Professor Shields on “The United Churches of the United States,” Centurv for November, 1885 ; also subsequent Open Letters from ministers of various denominations. not learn. For I have put away my copy so carefully that I do not know where it is, and the secretary’s was burned in the Boston Fire; but fortunately he does not know that. There are no other copies. The society itself, all the same, does good work for God and for man, every day. It is judged by its fruits, as every¬ thing else is judged and must be judged, in the heav¬ ens above or in the earth beneath. And yet no man can tell in words what are the conditions of membership. Any one who wants Christian Unity in America at the end of the nineteenth century has simply to walk out of his own house and go to work with other men in some enterprise which the good God wishes to have carried through. He wrill find all the unity he wants. This is nobly illustrated in the charity or¬ ganization societies which are now at work in all the larger cities of the country. A man may enter any one of these charity organi¬ zation societies, whether he be Arminian, Baptist, Cal¬ vinist, “ Disciple,” Episcopalian, Free-Baptist, Greek, Gentile,or Galilean, Hicksite,Independent or orthodox Friend, Jew, Karaite, or Coptic, Lutheran, Methodist, New-Church, orthodox, Presbyterian, Roman Catho¬ lic, or Reformer, Sandemanian, or Supralapsarian, Trinitarian, Unitarian, or Universalist ; or, indeed, if he be one of those Variorum or Wild-Cat come-outers, the unorganized and un-creeded believers in Xavier, Yahveh, orZinzendorf, or Et-cetera himself, who bring up the alphabet of the older and the younger churches. All these people are eagerly welcomed in any of these practical organizations. Dr. Wayland’s rule was, is, and will be, the only working rule. “ Can they cast out the devils?” he used to ask. If they could, he did not push his questions further. Before the charity organization has been running three months these people are at work together, without a thought of the verbal or technical formulas by which, on occasion, they could divide into their several companies. It is easy to say that the work of the church is bet¬ ter done by its several sections wffien they keep up a strict organization among themselves, and each lets the other sections severely alone. But this is only “ say so,” and Americans are not ready or apt to believe it. They have read their own history enough to understand the lesson taught in the twelve years between 1775 and 1787, when Massachusetts governed herself, and kept

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OPEN LETTERS. up her own army and navy; when New York did the same, and Virginia the same. The common enemies were not kept at bay as they are by the United States. Now there are so many common enemies that the United Church may well wish to act as a unit in the business of advancing against them and securing the advance of God’s Kingdom. I suppose it was Dean Stanley who, in England, first of all, devised that real Union of the Church for one purpose, which was brought about when a commission of members, from every communion, united for the Revision of the Bible. The objective result, an improved English Bible, is a great reward for that enterprise. But the great truth, that the church can unite for such a purpose, is a result still nobler. There is no lack of similar enterprises which the United Church can undertake in America. This of charity organization is one, and the result, in the harmony and good-fellowship which it brings about, is admirable. Such work might be pushed a great deal further, and will be. Take Castle Garden, to-morrow, for an instance. There will arrive there, probably, one or two thousand exiles from Europe, perhaps five or ten thousand. If by good luck they are Mormons, they will be met at the landing by kind, intelligent, and skillful agents, who know they are coming and where they are going, who are on friendly terms with the officials, who are experienced in the whole matter. Within three hours, perhaps, of their arrival, without one hitch or jerk, they will all be on their route, under competent super¬ intendence, to their new homes. But what if, by bad luck, they are not Mormons ? What if it chance that they are only “ Christians ” ? Nay, — it may happen, — by bad luck that they are only sons and daughters of the good God. Is there not in the Christian church of America intelligence enough, love enough, tenderness enough, resolution enough, to treat these poor people as well as if they happened to swear by Joseph Smith’s Bible, or to believe it? And if the Christians of a dozen different communions chose to unite, to maintain at Castle Garden a minis¬ try of welcome, such as the Mormon church alone does choose to maintain there, does any one believe that the difference between Ultra-Montanism and ultra- montanism will prevent the two extremes of Chris¬ tianity even from harmonizing in such an enterprise? Or if this reader, by good or bad fortune, as he may consider it, does not live in the city where The Cen¬ tury is published, let him lay down this journal and look in the Police- Report in the daily paper of the city nearest to him. It is certain that he will read the names of one, two, or three poor creatures who have been sent, on the yesterday, to the nearest blouse of Correction. Would he not return to his Century the more cheerfully if he knew, as he does not, that there was waiting at the court which sentenced these poor criminals an official minister, sustained by the United churches of that city, simply and only to go to the families of the criminals, and to make sure that pun¬ ishment does not fall where it is least deserved. There is a place where Christianity, pure and simple, may be at work every day, without the slightest danger of quarrel about symbol or formula. Such are my reasons for saying that when people want Christian Unity they can find it by going 315 out-of-doors. But if they prefer to live in their tab¬ ernacles or badger-skins, they will probably not find it. Edward E. Hale. Christianity in the concrete, as believed and pro¬ fessed by the various sects calling themselves Chris¬ tians, consists of Divine truth on its manward side. Divine truth on its Godward side, and the forms and observances by which Divine truth is made efficient for man’s moral and spiritual well-being. Under the first head we must of course include the attributes of God so far as man is affected by them, the relation of Jesus Christ to man, the consequences of moral good and evil, and the eternal life of the soul. These all have an essential bearing upon character, furnishing man with adequate reasons for doing, and, still more, for be¬ coming and being all that is just and true, pure and good. God’s attributes are motives to trust and love, praise and prayer, obedience and service. Christ in the divineness of his humanity shows all that man can fully know of God, and all that he must be in order to make his own humanity in any humble measure Di¬ vine ; and by his sacrificial life and death he in the intensity of his love makes the strongest possible ap¬ peal to man’s emotional nature in persuading him to repentance, virtue, and holiness. The certainty of retri¬ bution not only works upon man’s hope and fear, but — what is of ineffably more importance — it affixes to moral distinctions the seal and sanction of Omnipotent Wisdom and Love, thus making the characteristics of the right and the wrong not arbitrary and mutable, but intrinsic and indelible. The eternal life alone can attach their true value to objects of desire and pursuit in the present life, so as to give the due preponderance to the interests of man’s moral and spiritual nature over those of his brief and precarious earthly being. As to these truths there is a virtual and — when techni¬ cal terms are excluded — even a verbal agreement among persons belonging to widely different Christian bodies. It might not seem so at first view. Thus the several creeds of Christendom give statements as to the nature of Christ that appear mutually inconsistent and ir¬ reconcilable ; but yet the phrase “ Divine humanity ” expresses all that Christ can ever be to man in this world, and embodies what is felt and owned by those of every name who are conscious of Christian disciple- ship. So, too, the human side of all the various theories of the atonement resolves itself into this, — that there is between the deserts even of the penitent and believ¬ ing soul and the pardon and blessedness for which it hopes an immeasurable distance, an impassable chasm, which can be spanned and filled in only by the mercy of God as revealed and manifested in Christ. Still further, Christians, however far apart they seem, agree in defining the Christian character as consisting in the soul’s vital union with Christ, in fine, in its con¬ scious Christlikeness. Now this Christlikeness those who possess it cannot but recognize in every section of the visible church, and with equal distinctness and with equal beauty of holiness in Ritualists and Quak¬ ers, Calvinists and Unitarians, Romanists and Swe- denborgians. What is common to them all is what they have received from Christ, and this common part of their Christianity is confessedly the greatest part, — that without which the soundest belief or the most

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OPEN LETTERS. 316 truly apostolic ritual would be utterly worthless. Why should not then the possession of this common element of Christlikeness constitute a bond of union that should far transcend in strength all separating dogmas and rituals ? As to the Godward aspects of Divine truth there are and there probably always will be irreconcilable antag¬ onisms. This is the case in philosophy. From Thales till now many of the strongest minds of our race have made it their specialty; the theories have been innu¬ merable; but in this entire field there is not a single principle or proposition established beyond contro¬ versy. The reason is that philosophy has for its scope a realm which no human mind can comprehend. In this sense the Godward side of Divine truth corresponds to the philosophy of mind and of the universe. Its subjects transcend the capacity of the human intellect. They are infinite and many-sided, while man can take in but a finite portion of a single aspect ; and who knows but that his errors may often be partial truths, and falsities only because he makes them universal ? But these separating doctrines, though worthy and ennobling themes for speculation, have no shaping power over character. Thhs the triune conception of God — not without a philosophical basis — cannot be an aid to devotion. Every Christian, however he may formulate his theory of the Divine nature, worships God and prays to him as Father, Redeemer, and Sanc¬ tifier. So there is, no doubt, profound truth in Christ’s words, “No one knoweth the Son but the Father ; ” but there is no possible way in which a dogma pro¬ fessing to solve this mystery can enhance or diminish the reverence, trust, and love which we owe to Christ. As to the atonement, there may have been government¬ al reasons, so to speak, on God’s part for the death of Christ ; but no theory concerning them can add to or take from the fervor with which he who has received the atonement, in looking at the cross, exclaims with his whole heart, “ Herein is love,” and expresses the mandate of that love in the simple and sweet words of the old hymn; “ Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.” As to the ritual of religion we can hardly expect agreement, so long as there remain several tenable theories as to the authority from which that ritual is to be derived, whether from the Scriptures, or from the church, and if from the church, at what age or from what branch of it. But that outward forms, however important, are unessential, is manifest from the fact that the spiritual influences that can come only from Christ have come through very diverse mediums, and with manifestly equal genuineness, to some through the open Bible, to others through the preaching of the Word, to this person through parental example, to that through sacraments and holy rites, to many im¬ mediately, as to all the rest mediately, from the Spirit of God, which has avenues of entrance to every soul. Now the union possible and desirable among Chris¬ tians is not the ignoring of differences in dogma or in ritual. Each theory of the philosophy of religion has its own natural and accustomed dialect, which its be¬ lievers may fittingly prefer in the services of Christian worship ; and attachment to the ritual which has been the special medium of spiritual benefit is as inevitable as home-love in a well-ordered family. But the union which is both desirable and practicable is, first, a heartfelt recognition, without abatement or reservation, of the Christian estate of all who manifest a genuine Christlikeness ; secondly, a cordial readiness, on the part of those of every Christian name, to work to¬ gether in all means and measures for the advance¬ ment of Christian righteousness; and thirdly, union in worship whenever and wherever the interest of the common faith may be best promoted by such union, or must of necessity suffer detriment by the multipli¬ cation of separate churches beyond the capacity of the worshipers to sustain them honorably and usefully. A. P. Peabody, Applause as a Spur to Pegasus. I LIGHTED the other day upon these things in my reading. Byron writes to Murray, his publisher : “ Dec. 10, jSig. I have finished the third Canto [of ‘ Don Juan ’ ], but the things I have read and heard discourage all further publication, — at least for the present. “ Feb. 7, 1820. I have not yet sent off the Cantos, and have some doubt whether they ought to be pub¬ lished, for they have not the spirit of the first. The outcry has not frightened but it has hurt me, and I have not written co7t amore this time.” Moore, biographer of Byron, relates : “ So sensitive, indeed, — in addition to his usual abundance of this quality, — did he at length grow on the subject, that when Mr. W. Bankes, who succeeded me as his visitor, happened to tell him one day that he had heard a Mr. Saunders (or some such name), then resident at Venice, declare that in his opinion Don Juan” was all Grub-street,’ such an effect had this disparaging speech upon his mind (though coming from a person who, as he himself would have it, was ‘ nothing but a — salt-fish seller ’), that for some time after, by his own confession to Mr. Bankes, he could not bring himself to write another line of the poem, and one morning, opening a drawer where the neg¬ lected manuscript lay, he said to his friend, ‘ Look here, this is all Mr. Saunders’s Grub-street.’ ” Mr. Ruskin has in his “ Arrows of the Chace ” a striking passage about the intolerably depressing ef¬ fect experienced by his friend Turner, the painter, from the disparagement with which his efforts in art were met by the public. As for Byron, in the particu¬ lar case of his “Don Juan ’’one might perhaps well wish that his sense of discouragement had been sufficient to prevent altogether the finishing of the poem, splendid as is the iridescence of genius that plays over the sur¬ face of that dark and miasmatic water. Still, the illus¬ tration serves all the same. Immediate appreciation is a great stimulus to production, a stimulus which only the greatest can miss and yet go on successfully producing. Shelley, I remember, dashed, dazed, browbeaten by his ill fortune with the public, obliged to be his own publisher, or at least to defray himself the expense of his publishing, exclaimed, in a fit of despondent self¬ reassurance, of despairing triumph, over his “ Adonais ” completed, “ This, let the critics say what they will, this at least, I know, is poetry.” How much costly and exhausting effort in sustaining himself for the

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OPEN LETTERS, great task of poetical creation underlies expressions such as that from a genius such as Shelley ! Webster testified that he never before spoke in an atmosphere of such sympathy and appreciation as braced him on the occasion of his Reply to Hayne. That atmosphere was no doubt an indispensable con¬ dition of the supremely triumphant effect of the speech. Who that has read the memorabilia of that remarkable man, Robert Hall, but has noticed how his pulpit oratory was fed and supported by the praise that surrounded him. It takes a man enormously buoyant with self-esti¬ mation, like Wordsworth, for example, to do without the help of present appreciation and sympathy. And under the inspiration of applause Wordsworth would have written better poetry than he did, merely and sheerly persistent through that inextinguishable sense in him of his own genius which was at once the strength and the weakness of this least inspired of all real poets. I, for my part, should like to know what the result would have been in the case of Walter Scott, had he lost for a term of years his standing with the reading public. Scott was a vastly courageous man, and he had quantity and reserve of animal spirits, the fruit of health and temperament, on which to draw for self- support against a slack time in his popularity. But I feel sure that heaviness of heart would have clogged that joyous play of the great brain had the sense haunted him that he was writing what no one would praise. Almost ten years of his early manhood Tennyson was voiceless, chilled, as would seem, from singing, by the neglect or the contempt with which his poems had been received. Fortunately he lives long enough to outlive several of those reactions and vicissitudes of alternate challenge and acclamation which assure at length the poet’s fame. How it enhances one’s estimation of the majesty of Milton, his genius and his character, that, “ unchanged to hoarse or mute,” he could go on, amid the ribald noise of the Restoration, to chant the great symphony of the ‘‘Paradise Lost.” This, with a contemporary authority in letters like Waller to say of his work : “The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath pub¬ lished a tedious poem on the Fall of Man; if its length be not considered a merit, it hath no other ” ; and with, no matter whom, to express the “general feeling of his age” in saying, “That ‘ Paradise Lost’ of Milton which some are pleased to call a poem ” ! Well, what of it all ? Shall we agree together to praise more, that we may have more to praise ? Doubt¬ ful wisdom. There is, in fact, praise enough bestowed, and dispraise enough. The trouble is that these, both of them, get famously ill distributed. What remedy ? None. To admire wisely is one of the last triumphs of wisdom. There is at least nothing for us, but to be as wise here as possible and do our utmost to make others so. Our authors will have to get on as best they can with what chance praise, fit or unfit, falls to them. Let each man and woman live and write, as far as possible, in hope to deserve the fame that God him¬ self pronounces lastly on each deed, and other hope of fame surmount and forget. William C. Wilkinson. John Tyler. Mr. James O. Harrison, on “ Henry Clay,”in The Century for December, 1886, page 182, says : “ It is well known that Mr. Tyler signalized his ad¬ ministration by betraying the confidence of the Whig psrty, by which he had been elected Vice-President. Suspicions and rumors were soon afloat that Mr. Tyler would not be true to the platform on which he was elected, and . . . these suspicions were absolutely con¬ firmed by his own subsequent action, ” etc. Messrs. Nicolay and Hay, in The Century for Jan¬ uary, 1887, page 393, say: “After the treachery of Tyler had turned the victory of the Whigs to dust and ashes,” etc. Certain facts should be recalled to the attention of your readers, in connection with the above erroneous statements, as follows : First. There was no “ platform,” and none was in¬ tended or implied. Second. The “ Whig party ” did not nominate Har¬ rison and Tyler. The Harrisburg Convention which nominated these candidates, December 7th, 1839, was known at the time to be a joint convention of Wliigs and Democrats, in which the Democrats accepted Har¬ rison, while the Whigs accepted Tyler. It would be as just to accuse Harrison of “ treachery ” to the Demo¬ crats as to accuse Tyler of “ treachery ” to the Whigs. The case was one of pure political bargain, in which each side took its chances. Third. Harrison and Tyler were agreed as to the state in which affairs were when they were elected. After Harrison’s death, when Tyler became President, an entirely new state of affairs came up, in which Tyler not only had the right, but was bound to follow his Democratic principles, even to the disappointment of his Whig allies. Ben. E. Green. Dalton, Georgia. The Cosmic Day. AN OBJECTION ANSWERED. The objection made to the adoption of a Cosmic Day, “ that it would be impossible for us to associate noon with 7 o’clock instead of 12,” as stated in a recent number of The Century, is altogether fanciful and has no basis in fact. This assertion rests on no mere theory, but on actual personal experience. The Turks have a theory that the sun sets at the same time throughout the year, and that the apparent difference from day to day is but a popular delusion. Accord¬ ingly they have called sunset 12 o’clock, and begin reckoning the hours of the day from that point. Watches, to be correct, have, of course, to be changed every day, and are regulated by the muezzin’s sunset call to prayer. On first coming to Turkey, it seemed as if we should never become so accustomed to this anomalous method of reckoning time as to adopt it mentally as our own. But a residence of only a few months has shown how easy it is to adapt one’s self to prevailing customs, even when so entirely contrary to those we have been born and bred in as is this method of chronology, and now it seems as natural to look for our noonday meal

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bric-A-brac. 318 at about 7 o’clock as six months ago it did to expect it at 12. Without any thought of former times and sea¬ sons, we breakfast (at this time of year) at 2 o’clock, take tea at 12, and if mindful of the proverbial recipe for acquiring health, wealth, and wisdom, go “ early to bed ” at 4 and rise at i. Unless the opponents of the adoption of the Cosmic Day can bring forward some more valid objection than the alleged difficulty of associating certain periods or certain acts with certain names of hours, their objec¬ tions may, in the language of pleading, be dismissed as “ frivolous, irrelevant, and impertinent,” on the tes¬ timony of actual experience. H. M. Jewett. SiVAS, Asia Minor. The Death of Mrs. Cartwright. On page 522 of the number for February there is a note on the death of Mrs. Cartwright. The meeting re¬ ferred to was in charge of the Rev. Hardin Wallace, now a resident of California. By request of the Rev. John P. Brooks, editor of the “ Banner of Holiness,” I was at Bethel Chapel as a reporter for that paper, and I wrote the account of “ Mother ” Cartwright’s won¬ derful death for that paper. Permit me again to state the facts of her death as I witnessed it all, seated as I was not more than six feet in front of her, and with my eyes upon her at the mo¬ ment. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon. Some ten persons had spoken, or given their “ testimony.” She was not called upon to speak, but was about to rise from her seat, when the Rev. Mr. Wallace re¬ quested her not to rise, and turning to the congregation said, “We will now listen while Mother Cartwright gives her testimony.” She spoke of her long and ardu¬ ous life as the wife of an itinerant Methodist Episco¬ pal minister, of the goodness of God, of the joy and peace she then enjoyed, and with much feeling con¬ cluded by saying, “The past three weeks have been the happiest of all my life ; I am waiting for the char¬ iot.” I wrote her words as she spoke them. The meet¬ ing continued in a quiet way, others speaking for about twenty-five minutes longer, when I observed that Mother Cartwright leaned her head on the shoulder of Mrs. Huett, who sat beside her, and as she did so. closed her eyes. I arose and stepped to her seat, opened the window, and found her dead. Then it was that the Rev. Mr. Wallace said, “The chariot has arrived.” Yours truly, Francis M. Hayes, Pastor Methodist Episcopal Church, Colfax, Illinois. “Shall Young Men go to Vassar ? If not, Why not?” A CORRESPONDENT of ours fails to appreciate the force of Mr. C. S. Percival’s open letter with the above title in The Century for January. After stating that Smith, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Wellesley are too expensive for the poor, and at the most can only accommodate a limited number of students, she asks what is to become of the Western girl who has college aspirations, with not a single college for women west of the Alleghanies or south of Pennsylvania? Is she, she asks, to rest in the hope that time may bring to her grandchildren what she herself had craved, or ought she to bless, with reasonable men, the colleges that have thrown open their doors to women ? In an article on “Ashland, the Home of Henry Clay,” in The Century for December, 1886, Mr. Charles W. Coleman, Jr., suggests that Mr. Clay may have called his home Ashland in tender memory of Ashland, his native place in Virginia. A correspond¬ ent informs us, however, that Mr. Clay’s birthplace was called Slash Cottage, and was not given the name of Ashland until many years after the Kentucky Ash¬ land received its name. Another correspondent writes that Mr. Clay did not study law with Francis Brooke, but with his brother, Robert Brooke, who was afterward Attorney- General of Virginia, and subsequently a governor of that State. The correspondence that Mr. Coleman refers to was with Francis Brooke, and not with Governor Brooke, as Mr. Coleman states. For “ of all times,” read “ of our times,” in the quotation from the report of Mr. Lowell’s speech, in the May Century. BRIC-A-BRAC. Uncle Esek’s Wisdom. The world has had but few teachers ; a score of men have furnished us all the wisdom and philosophy we possess. The man who knows but little, and tells only what he knows, is a hard man to bother in a cross-examination. It takes the evidence of two or three witnesses to prove a man’s virtues, but one is enough to fasten his vices upon him. The reason why there is so little real friendship in the world is because most of the compacts are based upon policy rather than upon principle. A WEAK man is harder to steer than a vicious one, — he won’t take the bits. Pity is treacherous ; most of it is a secret satisfac¬ tion that I am not so badly off as you are. A LAZY man in a great hurry is very amusing ; he is continually stepping on himself. If we ever do reach the top round of the ladder, we shall find it a dreadfully cold and lonesome place. Whoever reasons from the heart will make many blunders, but none that will not be forgiven. The line between folly and wisdom is often an im¬ aginary one, and men are often seen traveling along with one foot on each side of it. A GREAT deal of learning single precept of wisdom. has been lost, but not one Uncle Esek.

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£RIC-A-BJiAC. 319 Mrs. Piper.^ Mrs. Piper was a widow — “ Oh, dear me ! This world is not at all,” she said, “ the place it used to be ! Now my poor husband, he was such a good man to provide — I never had the leastest care of anything outside ! But now. Why, there’s the cow, A constant care, and Brindle’s calf I used to feed when small, And those two Ayrshire heifers that we purchased in the fall — Oh, dear ! My husband sleeping in the grave, it’s gloomy being here ! The oxen Mr. Piper broke, and four steers two year old. The blind mare and the little colt, they all wait to be sold ! For how am I to keep ’em now ? and yet how shall I sell ? And what’s the price they ought to bring, how can a woman tell ? Now Jacob Smith, he called last night, and staid till nine o’clock, And talked and talked, and talked and talked, and tried to buy my stock; — He said he’d pay a higher price than any man in town ; He’d give his note, or, if I chose, he’d pay the money down. But, there ! To let him take those creeturs off, I really do not dare ! For ’tis a lying world, and men are slippery things at best ; My poor dear husband in the ground, he wasn’t like the rest ! But Jacob Smith’s a different case ; if I would let him, now. Perhaps he’d wrong me on the horse, or cheat me on a cow; And so I do not dare to trust him, and I mean to answer ‘ No.’ ” Mrs. Piper was a widow — “ Oh, dear me ! A single woman with a farm must fight her way,” said she. “ Of everything about the land my husband always knew; I never felt, when he was here, I’d anything to do ; But now, what fields to plow. And how much hay I ought to cut, and just what crops to sow, And what to tell the hired men, how can a woman know ? Oh, dear ! With no strong arm to lean upon, it’s lonesome being here ! Now- Jacob Smith, the other night, he called on me again. And talked and talked, and talked and talked, and staid till after ten ; He said he’d like to take my farm, to buy it or to lease — I do declare, I wish that man would give me any peace ! For, there ! To trust him with my real estate I truly do not dare ; For, if he buys it, on the price he’ll cheat me underhand ; And, if he leases it, I know he will run out the land ; And, if he takes it at the halves, both halves he’ll strike for then. It’s risky work when women folk have dealings with the men ! And so I do not dare to trust him, and I mean to answer ‘ No.’ ” Mrs. Piper was a widow — “ Oh, dear me ! Yet I have still some mercies left; I won’t complain,” said she. “ My poor, dear husband knows, I trust, a better world than this ; ’Twere sinful selfishness in me to grudge him heaven’s bliss ! So now, I ought to bow Submissively to what is sent — not murmur and repine ; The hand that sends our trials has, in all, some good design. Oh, dear! If we knew all, we might not want our buried lost ones here ! And Jacob Smith, he called last night, but it was not to see About the cattle or the farm, but this time it was me I He said he prized me very high, and wished I’d be his wife, And if I did not he should lead a most unhappy life. He did not have a selfish thought, but gladly, for my sake. The care of all my stock and farm he would consent to take — And, there ! To slight so plain a Providence I really do not dare ! Pie’ll take the cattle off my mind, he’ll carry on the farm — I haven’t since my husband died had such a sense of calm ! I think the man was sent to me — a poor lone woman must. In such a world as this, I feel, have some one she can trust; And so I do not feel it would be right for me to answer ‘ No.’ ” Marian Doteglas,

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320 Point d’Alen^on. bric-A-brac. Whence these Tears ? Soft hair, soft hands, soft eyes — sometimes If some caprice should move her To pleasure in soft lace or silk. (Ah, no, not in lover ! ) Soft voice, soft smile, soft languid air, Pink palms as soft — as satin (She’s so made up of this and lace. One surely must put that in). Soft heart? Well, really, who can say. Where in that bodice slender. There could be room for anything So foolish and so tender ? Hearts must have room to beat, you see, When something sets them throbbing ; Gould you imagine that corsage ^ Moved by soft sighs or sobbing? The Modiste whose thrice mystic lot It was in this — to glove her. Clasped all her dainty graces far, Far closer than a lover. She moves, and with the dear frou-frou Of trailing silks and laces There floats a fragrance as of flowers Fresh from sweet, untrod places. She must have culled them wet with dew ; You almost wish she’d tarry ^ A moment more. My friend, it’s but Edouard Pinaud a Paris. Her little mouchoir — Point d’Alen9on — A gage d"* amour ^ its calling, But ah! too filmy fine a web For love’s sweet, hot tears falling. Jabots and loops and daintiest frills Fill all her mental spaces; And when she wears her tenderest look She’s dreaming of old laces. The lace’s mist about her throat. The lace her hand caresses As soft it falls light fold on fold On all her charming dresses. And after all, perhaps it is — (How would the odd thought strike her? ) The fitting setting for her life. Since it is rather like her. If it is Life — this filmy web? (One strives in vain to con it) ’Tis Life — or Lace that never had A pattern woven on it. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Who Can Tell ? Who can tell when the winter is coming ? Who can tell when the summer is going? We go to sleep when the asters are blooming, We wake, and we find it snowing. Who can tell when the winter is going? Who can tell when the summer is coming? We go to sleep when the tempests are blowing. We wake, and the bees are humming. Ernest Whitney. One learned in Love’s art Instructed me, Naught moved a maiden’s heart Like jealousy. So, when from Constance’ eyes in vain I sought To win a kindlier glance, I looked askance Where, at her ’broidery frame, sweet Cecil wrought. I looked, and lo ! mine eyes Were fastened there — I swore such art was wise — (The maid was fair !) Why should I turn, I said, to Constance’ frown Should this my cunning stir But wrath in her ? At Cecil’s feet I laid my homage down 1 But mark my cruel fate. My wounded heart — She said I’d come too late 1 I cursed the art ; For, when to Constance once again I turned. Such was her jealousy She’d none of me. And all my proffered love she lightly spurned. Margaret Deland. Uncertain. A LITTLE Pegasus Will make a greater fuss Than one of thrice his size ; He will not pull his load; He will not keep the road ; You cannot make him wise. “Come 1 ” with asperity, I say, “ and pull for me My van of comic verse.” He hangs his shaggy head. And sighs to me instead, “I’d rather draw your hearse! ” “ Where is that Sentiment For which you last were sent? ” I ask impatiently. Up go his heels, and off. And back he brings a scoff Or foolish jest to me. I never can foresee What he will bring to me. Nor where he’ll choose to balk. I scarcely dare at all To ride him, lest I fall — ’Tis safer far to walk ! Yet — little elfin steed. Useless in time of need. Uncertain at all times ; Restive, and rough, and wild, How often you’ve beguiled Dull pain away with rhymes. “A poor thing, but mine own ” ; Then leave me not alone ; A foolish dream is mine Of mounting you some night For a wild, distant flight Where stars unnumbered shine. Margaret Vandegrift.

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ENGRAVED BY T. JOHNSON

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The Century Magazine. VoL. XXXIV. JULY, 1887. No. 3. EARLY every season I make the acquaintance of one or more of our new flowers. It takes years to exhaust the botanical treasures . . of 3,ny one considerable neighborhood, unless one makes a dead set at It, like a,n herbalist. One likes to have his floral acquaintances come to him easily and naturally, like his other friends. Some pleasant occasion should bring you together. You meet in a walk, or touch elbows on a picnic under a tree, or get acquainted on a fishing or camping- out expedition. What comes to you in the way of birds or flowers while wooing only the large spirit of open-air nature seems like special good fortune. At any rate, one does not want to bolt his botany, but rather to prolong the course. One likes to have something in reserve, something to be on the lookout for on his walks. I have never yet found the orchid called Calypso, a large, variegated purple and yellow flower. Gray says, which grows in cold, beautiful, and very rare. Calypso, you know, was the nymph who tell m love with Ulysses and detained him seven years upon her island, and died of a broken heart after he left her. I have a keen desire to see her in her floral guise, reigning over some silent bog, or rising above the moss of some dark glen in the woods, and would gladly be the Ulysses to be detained at least a few hours by her. I will describe her by the aid of Gray, so that it any of my readers come across her they rnay know what a rarity they have found. She may be looked for in cold, mossy, boggy places m our Northern woods. You will see a low flower somewhat like a lady’s-slipper; that IS, with an inflated sac-shaped lip, the petals and sepals much alike, rising and spreading, the color mingled purple and yellow, the stem, or scape, from three to five inches high, with but one leaf,— that one thin and slightly heart-shaped, with a stem which starts from a solid bulb. That is the nymph of our boggy solitudes, waiting to break her heart for any adventurous hero who may penetrate her domain. Several of our harmless little wild-flowers have been absurdly named out of the old mythologies , thus, Indian cucumber root, one of Thoreau's favorite flowers, is named after the sorceress Medea, and is called ‘Tnedeola,” because it was at one time thought to possess rare medicinal properties; and medicine and sorcery have always been more or less con¬ founded in the opinion of mankind. It is a pretty and decorative sort of plant, with, Avhen perfect, two stages or platforms of leaves, one above the other. You see a whorl of five or six leaves, a foot or more from the ground, which seems to bear a standard with another whorl of three leaves at the top of it. The small, colorless, recurved flowers shoot out from above this top whorl. The whole expression of the plant is singularly slender and graceful. Sornetimes, probably the first year, it only attains to the first circle of leaves. This is the platform from which it will rear its flower column the next year. Its white, tuberous root is Copyright, 1887, by The Century Co. All rights reserved.

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324 AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS, Whether or crisp and tender, and leaves in the mouth distinctly the taste of cucumber, not the Indians used it as a relish as we do the cucumber, I do not know. Still another pretty flower that perpetuates the name of a Grecian nymph, a flower that was a new find to me last summer, is the Arethusa. Arethusa was one of the nymphs who attended Diana, and was by that goddess turned into a lountam, that she might escape the god of the river Alpheus, who became desperately in love with her on seeing her at her bath. Our Arethusa is one of the pret¬ tiest of the orchids, and has been pursued through many a marsh and quaking-bog by her lovers. She is a bright pink-purple flower an inch or more long, with the odor of sweet violets. The sepals and petals rise up and arch over the column, which we may call the heart of the flower, as if shielding In Plymouth county, Massachusetts, where the Arethusa seems common, I have heard it called Indian pink. But I was going to recount my new finds. One sprang up in the footsteps of that destroying angel. Dynamite. A new railroad cut across my tramping- ground, with its hordes of Italian laborers and its mountains of giant-powder, etc., was enough to banish all the gentler deities forever from the place. But it did not. Scarcely had the earthquake passed when, walking at the base of a rocky cliff that had been partly blown away in the search for stone for two huge abutments that stood near by, 1 beheld the debris at the base of the cliff draped and festooned by one of our most beautiful foliage plants, and one I had long been on the lookout for, namely, the climbing fumitory. It was growing everywhere in the greatest profusion, affording by its tenderness, delicacy, and grace the most striking contrast to the destruction the black giant had wrought. The power that had smote the rock seemed to have called it into being. Probably the seeds had lain dormant in cracks and crevices for years, and when the catastrophe came, and they found themselves in new soil amid the wreck of the old order of things, they sprang into new life, and grew as if the world had been created anew for them, as, in a sense, it had. Certainly, they grew most luxuriantly, and never was the ruin wrought by powder veiled by more delicate lace-like foliage.* The panicles of drooping, pale flesh-colored flowers heightened the effect of the whole. This plant is a regular climber ; has no extra appendages for that purpose, and does not wind, but climbs by means of its * Strange to say, the plant did not appear in that locality the next season, and has never appeared since. Per¬ haps it will take another dynamite earthquake to wake it up.

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AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS. 325 Yellow Snapclrag^on. youngleaf-stalks, which lay hold like tiny hands or hooks. The end of every branch is armed with a multitude of these baby hands. The flowers are pendent and swing like ear jewels. They are slightly heart-shaped, and when ex¬ amined closely look like little pockets made of crumpled silk, nearly white on the inside, or un¬ der side, and pale purple on the side toward the light, and shirred up at the bottom. And pock¬ ets they are in quite a literal sense, for, though they fade, they do not fall, but become pockets full of seeds. The plant is a perpetual bloomer from J uly till killed by the autumn frosts. The closely allied species of this plant, the dicentra (Dutchman’s breeches and squirrel com), are much more common, and are among our prettiest spring flowers. I have an eye out for the white-hearts (related to the bleed¬ ing-hearts of the gardens, and absurdly called ‘‘ Dutchman’s breeches ”) the last week in April. It is a rock-loving plant, and springs up on the shelves of the ledges or in the debris at their base as if by magic. As soon as bloodroot has begun to star the waste, stony places, and the first swallow has been heard in the sky, we are on the lookout for dicentra. The more northern species, called ‘‘squirrel corn” from the small golden tubers at its root, blooms in May, and has the fragrance of hyacinths. It does not affect the rocks, like all the other flowers of this family. My second new acquaintance the same season was the showy lady’s-slipper. Most of the floral ladies leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods; only the stemless one leaves hers on dry ground before she reaches the swamp, commonly under evergreen trees, where the carpet of pine needles will not hurt her feet. But one may penetrate many wet, mucky places in the woods before he finds the prettiest of them all, the showy lady’s-slipper, — the prettiest slipper, but the stoutest and coarsest plant; the flower large and very showy, white, tinged with purple in front; the stem two feet high, very leafy, and coarser than bear-weed. Report had come to me through my botanizing neighbor, that in a certain quaking sphagnum bog in the woods, the showy lady’s- slipper could be found. The locality proved to be the marrowy grave of an extinct lake or black lady’s-smock, or wild rocket.

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326 AMO NG THE WILD-FL 0 WEES. tarn. On the borders of it the white azalea was in bloom, fast fading. In the midst of it were spruces and black ash and giant ferns, and low in the spongy, mossy bottom, the pitcher plant. The lady’s-slipper grew in little groups and companies all about. Never have I beheld a prettier sight, — so gay, so festive, so holiday-looking. Were they so many gay bonnets rising above the foliage, or were they flocks of white doves with purple-stained breasts just lifting up their wings to take flight, or were they little fleets of fairy boats, with sail set, tossing on a mimic sea of wild weedy growths ? Such images throng the^ mind on recalling the scene, and only faintly hint its beauty and animation. The long, erect, white sepals do much to give the alert, tossing look which the flower wears. The dim light, too, of its secluded haunts, and its snowy purity and freshness, contribute to the impres¬ sion it makes. The purple tinge is like a stain of wine which has slightly overflowed the brim of the inflated lip or sac and run part way down its snowy sides. This lady’s-slipper is one of the rarest and choicest of our wild-flowers, and its haunts and its beauty are known only to the few. Those who have the secret guard it closely, lest their favorite be exterminated. A well-known botanist in one of the large New Eng¬ land cities told me that it was found in but one place in that neighborhood, and that the secret, so far as he knew, was known to but three persons, and was carefully kept by them. Coming away with my treasures, my hat fairly brushed the nest of the red-eyed vireo, which was so cunningly concealed, such an open secret, in the dim, leafless underwoods, that I could but pause and regard it. It was suspended from the end of a small, curving sapling, was canopied by one or two large leaves, was flecked here and there by some whitish substance so as to blend it with the gray mottled boles of the trees, and, in the dimly lighted ground-floor of the woods, was sure to escape any but the most prolonged scrutiny. It was not so much hidden as it was rendered invisible by texture and position with reference to light and shade. A few summers ago I struck a new and beautiful plant, in the shape of a weed that had only recently appeared in that part of the country. I was walking through an August meadow when I saw, on a little knoll, a bit of most vivid orange, verging on a crimson. I knew of no flower of such a complexion frequenting such a place as that. On investiga¬ tion, it proved to be a stranger. It had a rough, hairy, leafless stem about a foot high, surmounted by a corymbose cluster of flowers or flower heads of dark vivid orange color. The leaves were deeply notched and toothed, very bristly, and were pressed flat to the ground. The whole plant was a veritable Esau for hairs, and it seemed to lay hold upon the ground as if it was not going to let go easily. And what a flery plume it had ! The next day, in another field a mile away, I chanced upon another. On making inquiry, I found that a small patch or colony of the flowers had appeared that season, or first been noticed that season, in a meadow well known to me from boyhood. They had been cut down with the grass in early July, and the first week in August had shot up and bloomed again. I found the spot aflame with them. Their leaves covered every inch of the surface where they stood, and not a spear of grass grew there. They were taking slow but complete possession ; they were devouring the meadow by inches. The plant seemed to be a species of hieracium, or hawkweed, or some closely allied species of the composite family, but I could not find it mentioned in our botanies.* A few days later, on the edge of an adjoining county ten miles distant, I found, prob¬ ably, its headquarters. It had appeared there a few years before, and was thought to have * I have since learned that the plant is Hieracuim aurantiaciim from Europe, a kind of hawkweed, and that it has recently appeared in other parts of this State (New York) and New England. MEADOW BEAUTY.

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AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS, 327 W/ escaped from some farmer’s door-yard. Patches of it were appearing here and there in the fields, and the farmers were thoroughly alive to the danger and were fighting it like fire. Its seeds are winged like those of the dandelion, and it sows itself far and near. It would be a beauti¬ ful acquisition to our midsummer fields, supplying a tint as brilliant as that given by the scarlet poppies to English grain fields. But it would be an expensive one, as it usurps the land completely. Parts of New England have already a midsummer flower nearly as brilliant and probably far less aggres¬ sive and noxious, in meadow beauty, or rhexia, the sole northern genus of a family of tropical plants. I found it very abundant in August in the country bordering on Buzzard’s Bay. It was a new flower to me, and I was puzzled to make it out. It seemed like some sort of scarlet evening-primrose. The parts were in fours, the petals slightly heart-shaped and convoluted in the bud, the leaves bristly, the calyx-tube pro¬ longed, etc.; but the stem was square, the leaves opposite, and the tube urn-shaped. The flowers were mT I u 1 VT yu vS'\'^d an inch ^cross, and bright purple or scarlet. It grew in large patches in dry, sandy fields, making the desert gay with color; and also on the edges of marshy places. It eclipses any nower ot the open fields known to me farther inland. When we come to improve our wild prden, as recommended by Mr. Robinson in his book on wild gardening, we must not forget the rhexia. ^ Our sea-coast flowers are probably more brilliant in color than the same flowers in the

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328 AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS, interior. I thought the wild rose on the Massachusetts coast deeper tinted and more fragrant than those I was used to. The steeple-bush, or hard-hack, had more color, as had the rose-gerardia and several other plants. But when vivid color is wanted, what can surpass or equal our cardinal-flower ? There is a glow about this flower as if color emanated from it as from a live coal. The eye is baffled and does not seem to reach the surface of the petal ; it does not see the texture or material part as it does in other flowers, but rests in a steady, still radiance. It is not so much something colored as it is color itself. And then the moist, cool, shady places it affects, usually where it has no floral rivals, and where the large, dark shade needs just such a dab of fire. Often, too, we see it double, its reflected image in some dark pool heightening its effect. I have never found it with its only rival in color, the monarda or bee-balm, a species of mint. Farther north, the cardinal-flower seems to fail, and the monarda takes its place, growing in similar localities. One may see it about a mountain spring, or along a meadow brook, or glowing in the shade around the head of a wild mountain lake. It stands up two feet high or more, and the flowers show like a broad scarlet cap. The only thing 1 have seen in this country that calls to mind the green grain fields of Britain splashed with scarlet poppies may be witnessed in August in the marshes of the lower Hudson, when the broad sedgy and flaggy spaces are sprinkled with the great marsh-mallow. It is a most pleasing spectacle, — level stretches of dark great flag or waving marsh-grass kindled on every square yard by these bright pink blossoms like great burning coals fanned in the breeze. The mallow is not so deeply colored as the poppy, but it is much larger, and has the tint of youth and happiness. It is an immigrant from Europe, but it is making itself thoroughly at home in our great river meadows. The same day your eye is attracted by the mallows, as your train skirts or cuts through the broad marshes, it will revel with delight in the masses of fresh bright color afforded by the purple loosestrife, which grows in similar localities, and shows here and there like purple bon¬ fires. It is a tall plant, grows in dense masses, and affords a most striking border to the broad spaces dotted with the mallow. It, too, came to us from over seas, and first appeared along the Wallkill, many years ago. It used to be thought by the farmers in that vicinity

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AMONG THE WILDMLQWERS, 329 that its seed was first brought in wool imported to this country from Australia, and washed in the Wallkill at Wal¬ den, where there was a woolen factory. This is not probable, as it is a European species, and I should sooner think it had escaped from cultivation. If one were to act upon the suggestions of Robinson’s “ Wild Garden,” already alluded to, he would gather the seeds of these plants and sow them in the marshes and along the slug¬ gish inland streams, till the banks of all our rivers were gay with these brilliant exotics. Among our native plants, the one that takes broad marshes to itself and presents vast sheets of color is the marsh milkweed, far less brilliant than the loose¬ strife or the mallow ; still a missionary in the wil¬ derness, lighting up many waste places with the humbler tints of the purple. One sometimes seems to discover a familiar wild-flower anew by coming upon it in some peculiar and striking situation. Our columbine is at all times and in all places one of the most exquisitely beautiful of flowers ; yet one spring day, when I saw it growing out of a small seam on the face of a great lichen-covered wall of rock, where no soil or mold was visi¬ ble, — a jet of foliage and color shooting out of a black line on the face of a perpendicu¬ lar mountain wall and rising up like a tiny fountain, its drops turning to flame-col¬ ored jewels that hung and danced in the air against the gray rocky surface, — its beauty became something magical and audacious. On little narrow shelves in the rocky wall the corydalis was bloom¬ ing, and among the loose bowlders at its base the bloodroot shone conspicu¬ ous, suggesting snow rather than any¬ thing more sanguine. Certain flowers one makes special expeditions for every season. They are limited in their ranges, and must gener- VoL. XXXIV.— 46.

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330 AMONG THE WILDMLOWERS, ally be sought for in particular haunts. How many excursions to the woods does the delicious trailing arbutus give rise to ! How can one let the spring go by without gathering it himself when it hides in the moss ! There are arbutus days in one’s calendar, days when the trailing flower fairly calls him to the woods. With me, they come the latter part of April. The grass is greening here and there on the moist slopes and by the spring runs ; the first furrow has been struck by the farmer ; the liverleaf is in the height of its beauty, and the bright constellations of the bloodroot shine out here and there ; one has had his first taste and his second taste of the spring and of the woods, and his tongue is sharpened rather than cloyed. Now he will take the most delicious and satis¬ fying draught of all, the very essence and soul of the early season, of the tender brooding days, with all their prophecies and awaken¬ ings, in the handful of trailing arbutus which he gathers in his walk. At the mere thought of it, one sees the sunlight flooding the woods, smells the warm earthy odors which the heat liberates from beneath the dry leaves, hears the mellow bass of the first bumble-bee. Rover of the underwoods,” or the finer chord of the adventurous honey-bee seeking store for his empty comb. The arriving swallows twitter above the woods ; the first chewink rustles the dry leaves ; the northward bound thrushes, the hermit and the gray-cheeked, flit here and there before you. The robin, the sparrow, and the bluebird are building their first nests, and the first shad are making their way slowly up the Hudson. Indeed, the season is fairly under way when the trailing arbutus comes. Now look out for troops of boys and girls going to the woods to gather it ! and let them look out that in their greed they do not exterminate it. Within reach of our large towns the choicer spring wild-flowers are hunted mercilessly. Every fresh party from town goes about as if bent upon the destruction of the species. One day, about ten miles from one of our Hudson River cities, there got into the train six young aaxrcL:,

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AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS. 331 women loaded down with vast sheaves and bun¬ dles of trailing arbutus. Each one of them had enough for forty. They had apparently made a clean sweep of the woods. It was a pretty sight, — the pink and white of the girls and the pink and white of the flowers ! and the car too was suddenly filled with perfume, — the breath of spring loaded the air, but I thought it a pity to ravish the woods in that way. The next party probably made a still cleaner sweep, and because a handful was desirable, thought an armful proportionately more so; till, by and by, the flower will be driven from those woods. Another flower that one makes special excur¬ sions for is the pond lily. The pond lily is a star, and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expedition to her haunts, and the gathering her when she rocks upon the dark secluded waters of some pool or lakelet, are the crown and summit of the floral expeditions of summer. It is the expedition about which more things gather than almost any other : you want your boat, you want your lunch, you want your friend or friends with you. You are going to put in the greater part of the day ; you are going to picnic in the woods, and indulge in a green thought in a green shade.” When my friend and I go for pond lilies, we have to traverse a distance of three miles with our boat in a wagon. The road is what is called a back road,” and leads through woods most of the way. Black Pond, where the lilies grow, lies about one hundred feet higher than the Hudson, from which it is separated by a range of rather bold wooded heights, one of which might well be called Mount Hymettus, for I have found a great deal of wild honey in the forest that covers it. The stream which flows out of the pond takes a northward course for two or three miles, till it finds an open¬ ing through the rocky hills, when it makes rapidly for the Hudson. Its career all the way from the lake is a series of alternating pools and cascades. Now a long, deep, level stretch, where the perch and the bass and the pickerel lurk, and where the willow-herb and the royal osmunda fern line the shores ; then a sudden leap of eight, ten, or fifteen feet down rocks to another level stretch, where the water again loiters and suns itself ; and so on through its adventurous course till the hills are cleared and the river is in sight. Our road leads us along this stream, across its rude bridges, through dark hemlock and pine woods, under gray, rocky walls, now past a black pool, then within sight or hearing of a foaming rapid or fall, till we strike the outlet of the long level that leads to the lake. In this we launch our boat and paddle slowly upward over its dark surface, now pushing our way through half-submerged tree-tops, then ducking under the trunk of an overturned tree which bridges the stream and makes a convenient way for the squirrels and wood-mice, or else forcing the boat over it when it is sunk a few inches below the surface. We are traversing what was once a continuation of the lake; the forest floor is as level as the water and but a few inches above it, even in summer; it sweeps back a half mile or more, densely covered with black ash, red maple, and other deciduous trees, to the foot of the rocky hills which shut us in. What glimpses we get, as we steal along, into the heart of the rank, dense, silent woods ! I carry in my eye yet the vision I had on one oc¬ casion, of a solitary meadow lily hanging like a fairy bell there at the end of a chance opening where a ray of sunlight fell full upon it and brought out its brilliant orange against the dark

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AMOJVG THE WILD-FLOWERS, 332 green background. It appeared to be the only bit of bright color in all the woods. Then the song of a single hermit-thrush immediately after did even more for the ear than the lily did for the eye. Presently the swamp-sparrow, one of the rarest of the sparrows, was seen and heard ; and that nest there in a small bough a few feet over the water proves to be hers WATER LILIES AND MARSH-MALLOWS. — in appearance, a ground bird’s nest in a bough, with the same four speckled eggs. As we come in sight of the lilies, where they cover the water at the outlet of the lake, a brisk gust of wind, as if it had been waiting to surprise us, sweeps down and causes every leaf to leap from the water and show its pink under side. Was it a fluttering of hundreds of wings,

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AMONG THE WILD-FLOWERS. 333 or the clapping of a multitude of hands ? But there rocked the lilies with their golden hearts open to the sun, and their tender white petals as fresh as crystals of snow. AVhat a queenly flower indeed, the type of unsullied purity and sweetness ! Its root, like a black, corrugated, ugly reptile, clinging to the slime, but its flower in purity and white¬ ness like a star. There is something very pretty in the closed bud making its way up through the water to meet the sun, and there is something touching in the flower closing itself up again after its brief career, and slowly burying itself beneath the dark wave. One almost fancies a sad, regret¬ ful look in it as the stem draws it downward to mature its seed on the sunless bottom. The pond lily is a flower of the morning; it closes a little after noon, but after you have plucked it and carried it home, it still feels the call of the morning sun, and will open to him if you give it a good chance. Coil their stems up in the grass on the lawn, where the sun’s rays can reach them, and sprinkle them copiously. By the time you are ready for your morning walk, there they sit upon the moist grass, almost as charmingly as upon the wave. Our more choice wild-flowers, the rarer and finer spirits among them, please us by their individual beauty and charm ; others, more coarse and common, delight us by mass and profusion ; we regard not the one, but the many, as did Wordsworth his golden daflbdils : “ Ten thousand saw I at a glance Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” Of such is the marsh-marigold, giving a golden lining to many a dark, marshy place in the leafless April woods, or marking a little water-course through a greening meadow with a broad line of new gold. One glances up from his walk, and his eye falls upon something like fixed and heaped-up sunshine there beneath the alders, or yonder in the freshening field. In a measure, the same is true of our wild sunflowers, lighting up many a neglected bushy fence corner or weedy roadside with their bright, beaming faces. The evening prim¬ rose is a coarse, rankly growing plant ; but, in late summer, how' many an untrimmed bank is painted over by it with the most fresh and delicate of canary yellow ! We have one flower which grows in vast multitudes, yet which is exquisitely delicate and beautiful in and of itself; I mean the houstonia, or bluets. In May, in certain parts of the country, I see vast sheets of it; in old, low meadow bottoms that have never known the plow, it covers the ground like a dull bluish or purplish snow which has blown unevenly about. In the mass it is not especially pleasing; it has a faded, indefinite sort of look. Its color is not strong and positive enough to be effective in the mass, yet each single flower is a gem of itself. The color of the common violet is much more firm and pronounced; , and how many a grassy bank is made gay with it in the mid- May days ! We have a great TRAILING ARBUTUS.

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AIL TV’S SHIELD, 334 variety of violets, and they are very capricious as to perfume. The only species which are uniformly fragrant are the tall Canada violet, so common in our Northern woods, — white, with a tinge of purple to the under side of its petals, — and the small white violet of the marshy places; yet one summer I came upon a host of the spurred violet in a sunny place in the woods which filled the air with a delicate perfume. A handful of them yielded a perceptible fragrance, but a single flower none that we could detect. The Can¬ ada violet very frequently blooms in the fall, and is more fragrant at such times than in its earlier blooming. I must not forget to mention that delicate and lovely flower of May, the fringed poly gala. You gather it when you go for the fragrant, showy orchis, — that is, if you are lucky enough to find it. It is rather a shy flower, and is not found in every woods. One day we went up and down through the woods looking for it, — woods of mingled oak, chestnut, pine, and hemlock, — and were about giving it up when suddenly we came upon a gay company of them beside an old wood-road. It was as if a flock of small rose-purple butterflies had alighted there on the ground before us. The whole plant has a singularly fresh and tender aspect. Its foliage is of a slightly purple tinge, and of very delicate texture. Not the least interesting feature about the plant is the concealed fertile flower which it bears on a subterranean shoot, keeping, as it were, one flower for beauty and one for use. John Burroughs. FRAILTY^S SHIELD. Look what arms the fenceless wield, — Frailest things have frailty’s shield ! Cockle-boat outrides the gale That has shred the frigate’s sail ; Curlew skims the breaker’s crest ; Swings the oriole in its nest ; Flower a single summer bred Lightly lifts its jaunty head When is past the storm whose stroke Laid the pride of centuried oak ; Where with fire the soil was bathed The white trefoil springs unscathed. Frailest things have frailty’s shield : Here a fly in amber sealed ; There a bauble, tossed aside Under ancient lava- tide. Meets the musing delver’s gaze. Time the king’s memorial lays. Touching it with sportive staff. But spares Erotion’s epitaph. Frailest things have frailty’s shield. Guarded by a charm concealed ; So the gaunt and ravening wild Softens towards the weanling child. And along the giddy steep Safe one glideth, blind with sleep. Art thou mighty ? — Challenged Fate Chooseth thee for wrestling mate ! Art thou feeble ? — Fate disarmed. Turning, leaveth thee unharmed. Thou that bendest shalt not break ; Smiling in the tempest’s wake. Thou shalt rise, and see around How the strong ones strew the ground ; Saving lightness thou didst wield, — Frailest things have frailty’s shield ! Edith M. Thomas.

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SISTER TODHUNTER’S HEART. BY THE AUTHOR OF ‘'ELDER BROWN’S BACKSLIDE” AND “TWO RUNAWAYS.” HERE was an unusual ex- with money awarded her at the county fair citement in Sweetwater, for preserves and pickles, and had turned The new preacher, a young and re-turned until it was equally worn all over, man of fine parts, accompa- smiled placidly upon Mrs. Bailey’s watered nied by his wife, had arrived silk that she wore when she was a bride, and a few days before, delivered upon the bombazine gown that Mrs. Buckner a most effective sermon, inherited from her mother, and felt thoroughly and had been called upon comfortable. And Mrs. Buckner’s little straw with the promptness common to country com- bonnet, that had been in fashion twice in the munities where isolation renders local curiosity fifteen years of its service, rested easy upon her unbearable after twenty-four hours. The lady of own artificial knot of hair when she beheld the parsonage, whose husband was but lately a Mrs. Culpepper’s Leghorn flare-front head- theological student and now engaged for the gear, and noted the corkscrew iron-gray curls first time upon regular pastoral labors, came pinned around the severe brow of Colonel from the city, and dressed in a manner that Ledbetter’s wife just as they had been on state was bound to win her the admiration or the occasions for twenty years, hatred of half the village. Already that grand. This feeling of comfort was greatly strength- interchangeable jury common to all communi- ened by the fact that Parson Riley’s wife wore ties was sitting upon her case. The term is used a plain dark close-fitting gown of some flexible in a figurative sense, for the inquest was con- material without ornamentation, and that her ducted from yard to yard, window to window, hair was brushed back without any attempt at and even across the one street along which thefashionablearrangementsthey feared would Sweetwater was congregated. Wherever two or crush them. Then the little lady moved about three were gathered together and two of the among them with her sweetest smiles, and the three happened to be of the cradle-rocking or- nicest tea, and a little notice for each of her derofsociety. Parson Riley’s wife was the theme, guests. She had observed what an “elegant The climax was reached in the case when young woman” was Mrs. Buckner’s Samanthy, Parson Riley’s wife sent out modest little notes justbackfrom Wesleyan College in Macon; and inviting about twenty matrons to take tea with Mrs. Brown’s son Tom was “ handsome enough her the next day. Then the jury let the main to be governor.” As for Mrs. Culpepper’s baby, question pass while it resolved itself into com- why, it was “ just too lovely for anything.” She mitteesof one,each of which began with almost captured a very large-hearted woman entirely frantic anxiety to look into the question of dress, when she whispered to Mrs. Bailey that her Adaptation became the order of the day, for no husband was the finest-looking man she had time remained for new garments, even if Sweet- seen in Sweetwater, — “ excepting my Phil, you watercould have furnished them. Twentyladies know,” she added. And this loyalty only sank drew out from their hiding-places twenty bon- the compliment deeper. Then she hurried off nets of varied shapes, ages, and designs; twenty for a pencil, and begged Mrs. Colonel Ledbet- ladies shook to the breeze the camphored folds ter to give her her recipe for making the scup- of twenty bombazines, alpacas, and venerable pernong wine she had heard so much praised, silks ; and twenty pairs of hands went to work and she laid her book in the dear old lady’s lap with needles, thread, hot irons, stain-eradica- and wrote it as dictated. In an hour Parson tors, and all the household help that could Riley’s wife was by unanimous consent estab- be mustered, to turn the water of ancient re- lished at the head of Sweetwater, and could af- spectability into the wine of modern style as ford to take the company in to see her lace cur- outlined in stray magazines and described by tains, baby and baby dresses, and all the little the occasional town visitor. bric-k-brac that had been showered upon her So it was, then, that when Sweetwater, as very as a bride, — without awakening a single jeal- properly represented by its leading ladies, as- ous feeling. sembled in Parson Riley’s modest little parlor But a storm was brewing, and its first mut- and gazed upon itself in all its glory, a some- terings were heard when Mrs. Culpepper what satisfied air settled over it. Poor faded thoughtlessly mentioned “ Sister Todhunter.” little Mrs. Brown in her dingy alpaca, which “ Sister Todhunter ? ” said Parson Riley’s everybody knew she bought nine years before wife, looking from one to the other, a puzzled

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336 SISTER TODHUNTER'S HEART. “l WANT TO SPEAK ABOUT MRS. TODHUNTER.” expression shadowing her pretty face ; have I met Sister Todhunter ? Dear me, can I have made a mistake after all ? She had tried so hard to please everybody, and here was trou¬ ble at the first move. ‘‘ No, my dear,” said Mrs. Culpepper promptly ; it was I who made the mistake.” But poor Mrs. Riley noted the ominous look upon the faces of several and the glances they exchanged. I am sure,” she said earnestly, I would have been glad to have had Sister Todhunter if I had known in time. Does she live in the village ? ” “ No, dear,” said Mrs. Colonel Ledbetter; “ she is a disagreeable old thing who lives out on her farm about a mile from here. You have¬ n’t lost anything by not knowing her.” Mrs. Ledbetter was a power in the land, and her iron-gray curls shook in a dangerous and threatening manner as she declared herself. “ She is sometimes pleasant, to be sure, but if it wasn’t for her husband, poor man, who married her out of pity, although she was only a ‘ cracker ’ and he a man of education and standing, she wouldn’t be noticed.” “ I think,” said poor faded little Mrs. Brown meekly, ‘‘ that Sister Todhunter has a good

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SISTER TODHUNTER^S HEART. 337 heart, and I’m sure she always treated me stepped forward quickly and extended his kindly.” hand. “ And who wouldn’t ? ” interposed Mrs. Cul- My dear madam, I am glad to meet you,” pepper, laughing. ‘‘You see some good in he said, a smile kindling on his handsome everybody, Sallie, and everybody sees some face. She looked at him suspiciously, gave him in you. But as for Sister Todhunter, she is her left hand, and said : better at long range.” “ Howdye ! ” Presently there was a movement among the “ I hope you are well, madam ? ” ladies, and soon Parson Riley’s wife, the re- “ Toler’ble,” she replied. And then she cipient of twenty kisses and as many warm turned her back and moved off with an ele- handshakes, was left alone with her empty phantine amble. cups and the memory of Sister Todhunter. “ So this is Sister Todhunter,” thought Par¬ son Riley. “ Well, I shall have trouble here.” jj The men sat down, and the conversation began. Colonel Todhunter proved to be When Parson Riley heard the description courtly, almost womanly, in his manners, but of his wife’s tea-party from her own lips, told his few opinions were ventured with a diffi- with many a smile and an occasional sigh, his dence most painful, and the parson was glad first resolution was to call upon Colonel Tod- when the time came to say good-day. He hunter and his wife. So it was that early next was about to mount his mare again when the morning he saddled his patient mare and colonel, who had followed him out, touched ambled out to the Todhunter farm. his arm. As Parson Riley approached the little cot- “ I want to speak to you on a private mat- tage, he saw sitting on the steps a man with ter,” he said softly. “Suppose we walk a his chin in his hands. The first thing that im- little.” So arm and arm they moved off. pressed him was the air of extreme dejection “ I want to speak about Mrs. Todhunter,” about the individual, an air that had become said the gentle voice again. “ To tell you more marked after he had dismounted and the truth. Parson, I am leading a life here advanced toward the house. Rousing himself that is almost unbearable, and I think you from his reveries, the individual rose slowly can help me. and fixed a pair of tired, watery blue eyes upon “ Mrs. Todhunter is a violent woman, Par- the parson. The clothes he wore were broad- son, — I use the term advisedly ; she is a vio- cloth, but they were faded now, and stained lent woman, and unless I can bring about a down the front with tobacco juice ; and they marked change in her character, I do not shone with a polish evidently acquired, like know what I shall do. She uses language to- good nianners, through long wear. ward me that is altogether unchristian-like and “ This is Colonel Todhunter, I believe,” said unbecoming. And worse ; when she gets one the visitor, holding out his hand. “ I am the of her spells upon her, she assaults me with Rev. Mr. Riley.” The gentleman in the anything nearest at hand. Only this morning polished^ suit held the proffered hand as he I received several blows from her broom that replied, in a singularly low and sweet voice: have nearly lamed me. Parson,’^ — they had “You’re the new parson, I reckon. You reached the friendly shelter of the bam by this will have to speak louder ; I am a little deef.” time, and the colonel straightened up a little, “ Yes,” said the parson, elevating his voice, while his eyes actually glittered, — “ I am tired “ How is your family ? ” of this dog’s life, and I want your assistance. I “ What did you say ? ” inquired the low, think if Mrs. Todhunter is formally reported musical voice, while the blue eyes brightened to the church, and humiliated, it will bring a little. about a change.” Parson Riley’s face .showed How is your family ? ” his surprise, and the colonel added at once, “ Oh, very well, I believe. Come in and “ I have had this in mind a long time, and set down.” He led the way slowly, with a once I brought the matter to the mind of Par- slight limp, toward the little porch. As they son Thompson, who preceded you, — a worthy ascended the steps Parson Riley caught sight man, but timid. He would not move in the of the figure of an enormous woman in a calico matter. Now, will you ?” Parson Riley was dress and a white apron, that loomed up in young and combative, the doorway. She carried in her hand a “I will,” he said promptly, broom ; and a broad, square, almost fierce “ What ? ” The deaf man placed his hand face with small black eyes was turned upon to his ear. ^ ‘‘ I will,” shouted the parson. “ Sister Tod- “ ’Mandy,” said the colonel gently, “ this hunter shall be disciplined.” The colonel is the new parson.” “ The new parson ” looked pleased. VoL. XXXIV.— 47.

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SISTER TODHUNTER^S HEART 338 I was a church-member myself once,” he said softly, ‘‘ but this eternal quarrel drove me out. I could not break bread feeling as I do toward Mrs. Todhunter.” His chin trembled. He filled his cheeks with wind and blew it out under the pressure of his emotion. “ You cannot imagine to what an extent this perse¬ cution has gone. Why, sir, there have been times when I considered my life in danger. I am not a dissipated man,” he continued, resting his blue- veined hand upon the parson^s shoulder and turning the blue eyes earnestly upon him, “ but of course I take a julep now and then, — you understand; habits of an old-time Georgia gentleman, — and sometimes I have taken too much. I admit that Mrs. Todhunter has had some provocation in that direction, but not enough. Parson, to justify her in regarding me as a dog.” His breast heaved convulsively. ‘‘ A woman,” said the young man firmly, touched by the pathos and emotion of his dignified companion, “ has no right to strike her husband except in the defense of her life.” ‘‘ Hey ? ” Colonel Todhunter cupped his left ear deftly with the transparent hand. “ I say a woman has no right to strike her husband - ” Why, bless your soul, Parson, that’s a small matter, a very small matter indeed ! ” A sad smile flitted across the lips of the speaker. “ A very small matter.” He fixed his eyes upon his companion with a sudden resolution. Why, do you know, Mrs. Todhunter came near smothering me, only last week ? ” Smothering ? ” “ Hey ? ” “ Came near smothering you ? ” “ Yes, sir. To tell the truth. Parson, I was a little mixed, — had taken a little too much, you understand. Had been camping out a week down at Bloomley’s mill with Colonel Ledbetter and others, fishing, and drank a lit¬ tle too much. Unfortunat’ly I came home a little under the influence of stimulants, and found Mrs. Todhunter on fire about the cot¬ ton being in the grass. As I was preparing to lie down, being also ill, Mrs. Todhunter, with her superior strength and weight, forced me between the mattresses and sat down on me. And there she sat. Parson, three hundred pounds, and it a July day, and knitted all the afternoon. ‘ I’ll sweat that whisky out er you,’ she says ; and she did. The perspi¬ ration that exuded from my pores soaked through the mattress and dripped on the floor. I do not know how I lived through it.” He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his fore¬ head, to which the memory of his sufferings had actually brought the moisture. “ When will you move in the matter ? ” he asked more cheerfully. “ At once.” “ Hey ? ” At once. I’ll have her up next Sunday — ” Parson Riley paused. The vast presence of Sister Todhunter had passed around the corner of the barn. There was a painful si¬ lence of about two seconds, and then her voice arose. “ So,” she said loudly, with her eye on the colonel, who started as though shot, ^^so! This is your game, is it ? tellin’ lies on your wife to every stranger that comes along. I’ll teach you better manners, if I have to break every bone in yer soft, cowardly body.” She made a rush at her offending lord, which he easily and promptly avoided by stepping briskly away, leaving his late companion to hold the field as best he might. “ Madam,” said Parson Riley, raising his hand as if about to ask a benediction, — it was his most impressive attitude, — ‘‘ I be¬ seech you to remember that this gentleman is your husband and that you are a member of my church - ” “ What have you got to do with hit, you little chick’n-eatin’ thing you ? ” She had turned upon him with war in her eye and war in her whole make-up generally. “ A pretty sort er parson you air, ain’t yer, han gin’ roun’ decent women’s houses list’nin’ ter lies an’ slanders. Oh, I know what he wants ; he wants ter git me up ’fore Moun’ Zion Church. He tried hit on ole Thompson, but he daresn’t move er peg. I tole him, an’ I tell you, ef they have me up ’fore Moun’ Zion, hit’ll be er bad day fur Moun’ Zion.” She shook her clinched fist at him. Parson Riley was half Irish, a little Welsh, and the rest American. Besides, he was young and inexperienced. ‘‘ Your case will be up next Sunday morn¬ ing. You can come or not, as you please.” He said this with a somewhat unclerical but very natural emphasis, and, turning on his heels, left the spot. The last words he heard were^ ‘‘ I ain’t ’feard o’ you ner all the Moun’ Zions in the world.” As Parson Riley mounted his mare. Colonel Todhunter crawled through the hedge a few yards off, looked cautiously around, secured his pipe from the porch, and went back silently the way he came. A smile forced itself upon the lips of the young preacher, and a little far¬ ther down the road he laughed outright. III. Sunday morning brought an enormous crowd to Mount Zion Church, as the village

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SISTER TODHUNTER^S HEART. edifice was called. This was natural, as on that day the Presiding Elder was to deliver a sermon, and a visit from the Presiding Elder of the district always drew a crowd. But the fact noised about throughout the land, that Sister Todhunter had been summoned and was to be tried, also operated powerfully as an assembling factor, and many people who had long neglected their church duties put in an appearance. Farmers for miles around came bringing their wives and daughters in their wagons. Young men in buggies with their sweethearts were numerous, and the grove about the church was full of vehi¬ cles and “ tied-out stock ” when service time arrived. About ten o’clock a sudden movement around the doorway indicated that preaching was about to begin, and the congregation filed slowly within, the men to the left, the women to the right. Parson Riley, sitting in the pul¬ pit with the portly form of Elder Hamlin be¬ side him, watched with an abiding interest the faces of the comers. When the last was in and settled, he heaved a deep sigh of relief, — Sis¬ ter Todhunter was not present; she was go¬ ing to remain at home and let the trial go by default. He did not know Sister Todhunter! Elder Hamlin at last arose, his red counte¬ nance glowing like a beacon above the sea of faces, and in a voice like a trumpet’s opened the meeting with prayer. He asked Divine blessing upon Mount Zion, Sweetwater, and the remainder of the world, invoking a helping hand for “ the b-r-r-r-a-v-e young soldier of the cross ” who had ‘^come among these peo¬ ple to battle for the right,” and upon “the young woman, just buddin’ into matoority,” who had “ come to share his trials and minis¬ ter with him.” His prayer concluded with an appeal in behalf of the erring sister whose wrong-doings they were about to consider. “ May she be led to see the error of her way,” he said, “ an’ turn her feet into the strait an’ narrow path.” And he thanked the Lord for the assurance given in those lines which declare that while Ihe lamp holds out to burn The viles’ sinner may return.” Elder Hamlin ceased, and amid the shuffling of feet that followed the deep “ Amen ” which rolled from the prompt “ Amen corner ” back into the dilatory recess beyond the last post, the congregation resumed their seats. Then Parson Riley stepped forward, and in the clear debating-society tones his wife loved so well, read the opening hymn : “ From Greenland’s icy mountains, From India’s coral strand.” 339 Elder Buckner stood up in advance of the congregation and raised the tune in a strong baritone that at once sprang out boldly and challenged the whole assembly. He was in¬ stantly pursued and overtaken by Mrs. Cul¬ pepper’s soprano, and Mrs. Buckner’s sweet contralto soon found an entering place. After her came the deep bumble-bee bass of Col¬ onel Ledbetter, who adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses as he came in. This was the customary opening. No one in Sweetwater would have dreamed of invading the melody with any sort of a voice until Elder Buckner, Mrs. Culpep¬ per, Mrs. Buckner, and Colonel Ledbetter had obtained a fair start. Any one so impru¬ dent would have drawn the attention of the whole congregation upon himself. But the quartette well under way, everybody was at liberty to rush in ; and so on this occasion, soon, borne aloft by the united voices of the entire congregation, the grand old melody sailed out and swept far away down the pine aisles into the peaceful Sabbath heart of the woodlands. The last tone died away — as usual it was the deep hum of Colonel Ledbetter’s bass, which refused to be quieted for a while. Then the congregation sank into their seats, and Elder Hamlin stood up and delivered a pow¬ erful sermon upon the wife and her true posi¬ tion. Then came the long-looked-for moment. Parson Riley had descended from the pul¬ pit to state the business of the hour, which every one awaited with feverish impatience, when a form filled the doorway, and Sister Todhunter, in holiday attire of red silk, black lace, and a great flower ladened flare-front bonnet, stood before him. As by instinct everybody knew she was there, and every head save one was turned toward her. She paused long enough to survey the crowd contemptuously, then with a great waddle she marched up the aisle, took a chair out from under little Major Brown almost before he could vacate it, placed its back against the pulpit, and sat down. “ Now,” she said, looking at Parson Riley while she adjusted the folds of her dress, “ go on with yer lies ; I’m ready.” Parson Riley turned pale and then red. Some of the thought¬ less young people snickered, and there was a general stir of expectation. Colonel Ledbetter, without unbending a particle of his enormous and ever-blooming dignity, looked at Major Brown and winked with both eyes. Brown put his hand over his mouth and coughed violently. But the parson soon rallied, and turning to the congregation said firmly: “ Brothers and sisters, for such you are in the holy union of the church, and I trust soon to say in the affection born of joint and

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340 SISTER TODHUNTER'S HEART self-sacrificing labors, I have a painful duty to perform this morning, one that I fain would avoid, but - ” Oh, shucks, say what yer got ter say and don’t palaver so much.” This, of course, came from Sister Todhunter. He paused a second for the new sensation to subside, and without looking at her he continued : “ It is a duty, and of such there can be no avoidance without guilt.” Very pretty. B’en all the week er learnin’ hit ? ” I am called upon to present to you this morning an erring sister,” he continued, link¬ ing his hands together and bowing them be¬ fore him palms downward while he rocked back upon his heels and brought his. toes to the ground again, “ who, not satisfied with vio¬ lating at home the proprieties of the domestic circle and the commands and precepts of the Scriptures, has come into the house of the Lord defiant and rebellious, with sneers upon her lips and contempt for his minister and his people in her heart. The evidence of this lat¬ ter is before you ; of the former, her husband, a gentleman whom you all know, will speak.” Colonel Todhunter was sitting on the front seat at the elbow of Parson Riley, his chin upon his shirt-front, and deep dejection written in every line of his face. There was also a pallor there. He was probably the only per¬ son in the church who had not seen or heard his wife enter. The parson was forced to rouse him with a touch. “ Get up. Colonel,” he said, and state your case.” Hey ? ” The parson motioned to a spot in front and then to the sea of expectant faces turned toward him. He understood, and sidled along with his white face to the crowd, his blue eyes searching every bench, until he reached the place indicated; then he folded his poor white hands together and drew a long breath of relief: Sister Todhunter was not in sight. He opened his mouth to speak, when an event occurred that threw the crowd present into the most intense excitement. In moving to the front Colonel Todhunter came within four or five feet of his wife, to whom his back was half turned. He had just satis¬ fied himself that he was secure, and had said “ I,” when Sister Todhunter leaned forward, extended her crooked-handled umbrella its full length, deftly hooked it in the collar of her husband’s coat, and with one jerk landed him backward and head-first into her lap. So sud¬ den was the act, so utterly unexpected, that everybody for an instant paused and gazed in open-mouthed astonishment. Then those in the rear tumbled over each other for better positions, and big Elder Hamlin rushed to the colonel’s assistance. The angry woman met the rescuer with such energy that his alarmed neighbors were compelled to lead him outside and pour water on his head. In the mean time Major Brown, Colonel Ledbetter, Elder Buckner, Mr. Culpepper, and others were struggling to release Colonel Tod¬ hunter, whose convulsive play of legs and awful expression of face indicated approach¬ ing dissolution. The united strength of six men was sufficient at last to effect this, and the colonel, all breathless, arose. “ Are you hurt much. Colonel ? ” shouted good Mrs. Buckner, who had crowded to the front. With one hand on his head and the other struggling for his handkerchief, which was in the wrong coat-tail pocket, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, he replied softly : “ I had only a little hair left, gray hair, madam ; I fear she has pulled that out too.” The hubbub was indescribable, and every¬ body was crowding to the front. Parson Riley waved them back. Sit down,” he shouted. ‘‘ We can’t do anything so long as you stand up ! ” All dropped back into their seats, except about a dozen of the most trustworthy and dignified churchmen around the refractory sister, who with a strong grip on the edge of her chair was holding her position, while she talked to the men nearest her. ^^You think yerself mighty smart, don’t yer ? ” she said, catching Parson Riley’s eye. “ An’ yer wife — my ! ain’t she stuck up, with her lace curtains an’ tea-parties ! Too proud ter invite me^ but not too proud ter invite old Jane Gramby, whose boy stole a mule.” There was a shriek in the audience, and Mr. Gramby, standing near, hurried to his wife. “ An’ there’s Tom Culpepper. He^s er pretty nice one to be settin’ hissef up fur er church-cleaner. I saw him pass my house so drunk las’ week he didn’t know if he was goin’ home er cornin’ back.” Again the thought¬ less giggled. Tom Culpepper’s habits were certainly unfortunate. An’ there’s Brother Spikes. He’s er good han’ ter weed out er church, ain’t he ? An’ his cotton in the grass so bad that yer can’t see hit from the road.” Again a subdued applause from the great audience. “ This is simply outrageous,” said Brother Spikes to Mr. John Edgerly hotly; ‘‘that woman ought to be ducked.” “ Ought she, indeed! ’’said Sister Todhunter, catching the remark. “ Then you better git John Edgerly ter help you. His gra’ma was ducked for tattlin’, en I reckon he’ll know how ter go about hit.” This terrible dig drew all eyes upon Edgerly, and he turned as red as a turkey-comb.

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SISTER TODHUNTER'S HEART. 341 “another fierce struggle ensued at the wagon.” Madam,” said Colonel Ledbetter, advanc¬ ing to a prominent position in all the dignity and confidence of his high standing in Sweet¬ water, I trust you will let your old friend ad¬ vise you.” “ When did you come ter be my old friend ? ” she replied with terrible sarcasm. ^‘Was hit when yer charged me twelve per cent, for the loan of er hundred dollars, or was hit when you made me pay for er hundred bushels of corn because my mule et five ? ” Taking his hat and cane, the colonel walked outside and sat down on a stump. Gentlemen,” said Parson Riley suddenly, VoL. XXXIV.— 47*. seeing his force rapidly falling away, “the only thing to do is to carry her out and send her home. If you will all take hold we can carry her out quickly.” The men were ready for any escape from the merciless lashing the woman was giving them. With a rush they seized her, chair and all, she fighting desperately, and bore her outside. After a brief rest, during which the assaulting party repaired damages, they lifted her again and made for the wagon. The rail fence furnished her a hold when they tried tc> lift her over, and it became necessary to take it down. Then another fierce struggle ensued at the wagon. Finding herself overmatched,.

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342 SISTER TODHUNTER^S HEART Put him out, put him out er Moun’ Zion too ! Don’t yer hear him er cussin’ back there ? ” Elder Plamlin had retired to the bank, and was denouncing the whole race of obstreperous women, but not swearing. His one oath was confessed in open meeting aft¬ erward, and willingly forgiven. This, however, was Sister Todhunter’s last effort. She was seized with a collapse on reaching home, and begged to be placed on the grass. There sitting, she declared that death was near, and begged them to leave her. Her husband came up and ministered to her, and she was heard to ask Billy to lead her to the well, as she wanted to jump in and end her misery ; and Billy told her he wished she would. Then the committee returned. It transpired afterward that Sis¬ ter Todhunter rallied enough to go into the house, and, in a sudden return of her passion, slammed the door on the neck of Colonel Todhunter, who incautiously looked in, and held him a prisoner until a mutual understanding was effected. As may be well un¬ derstood, the terms were not liberal for Colonel Todhunter. “ ELDER HAMLIN OVERBOARD.” Sister Todhunter gave vent to a shrill scream that brought Colonel Todhunter to her side in repentance and alarm. He attempted to soothe her, but she was no sooner lifted into the wagon than she kicked the dash-board off and seized him by the ear. It took the ef¬ forts of the crowd again to release him. Elder Hamlin, who had recovered his wind and ral¬ lied, here climbed into the wagon with the oth¬ ers to help hold her, while the rest hitched up her mules. Then, led by Billy, her ten-year- old son, who had watched the proceedings in sullen silence, the strange load moved off, a delegation accompanying it to keep things straight. As they crossed the creek, Sister Tod¬ hunter by a sudden movement managed to throw Elder Hamlin overboard. He stood up in the water and swore a great round oath that horrified everybody. But Sister Todhunter laughed hysterically. IV. Of course Sister Todhunter was summarily expelled from the church. The affair furnished Sweetwater with a sensa¬ tion for several weeks, but by and by it grew to be an old topic, and Sister Todhunter could venture into town upon her shopping without attracting universal attention and comment. She was a cash customer, a fact that helped wonderfully to gain herdefenders, and, besides, many people regarded her as victorious in the church fight, and enjoyed the way she laid about her. But there was no friendship be¬ tween the female side of Sweetwater and Sister Todhunter. She had talked too plainly. Reader, did you ever see a baby fade away without apparent cause, baffling the oldest physicians and wringing the very life from its mother, hour by hour, day by day ? — watch its poor little face grow old and pinched, and its great eyes grow brighter until they seemed

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SISTER TODHUNTERE HEART 343 to burn like candle-flames in the empty sock¬ ets ? So faded the little babe that nestled in the depths of its soft nest when the parson’s wife showed the assembled matrons of Sweet¬ water her laces and curtains in the shadowed room back of the parlor. Day by day the mother sat in her low rocker, her tender eyes upon the wasting form, a fever in her own brain, and a weight upon her heart that had driven out every tear-drop and left her power¬ less to weep. By day and by night she sat there, bathing the babe in the dry grief of despair. The little frame lay bared before — legs of a thimble’s thickness, with the skin crumpled upon them, arms that were the arms of a doll, and hands that scarce checked the light that fell upon them when the mother lifted them again and again in her mute despair. The doctor had yielded up hope : save one or two, the neighbors, worn out, had with¬ drawn \ and to-day, the day of which I write, the mother sat waiting for the rustle of the angel’s wing. As there she sat; suddenly the doorway was darkened, and Sister Todhunter from the mountain of her awful presence looked down upon the scene. “ Why hain’t you sent fur me ? ” she said bluffly. Parson Riley’s wife looked up and then back again. She did not comprehend that she was addressed. Sister Todhunter looked at the baby. Then she ran her hands under it gently and raised it, pillow and all. ’Twas but a feather’s weight. The mother yielded meekly, and fastened her eyes anx¬ iously upon the great rescuer who had arrived. Is there any hope ? ” she asked humbly. Hope ? ” Sister Todhunter gave her a look of scorn. I .should say so ! I’ve seen many er sicker kitten ’n this git well. Go git me some mullein.” Mullein ?” '' Yes, mullein. Don’t yer know mullein when you see hit ? ” Parson Riley’s wife shook her head sadly. I have never seen any,” she said. ^'Well, go an’ tell the cook ter bring me some. Lord, what sorter women will the nex’ set be! Never seen mullein! ” But the mother was gone, and the lady who had been keeping her company turned up her nose and silently followed her. The cook had heard of mullein, fortunately, which grows wild in all Georgia, and soon appeared with some. “ So,” said Sister Todhunter contentedly when she saw it. Now go make some strong tea outer hit. Make hit with milk.” The cook hurried away. Everybody seemed to gain life when Sister Todhunter took command. The^ tea soon arrived, and the new nurse administered a couple of teaspoonfuls. He can’t retain anything a moment,” said the mother; it is no use to torture him any more.” ‘‘ Will yer hush ? ” Sister Todhunter almost shouted the question. ‘‘ Don’t yer reck’n I’ve seen er sick baby ’fore now ? ” Parson Riley’s wife ‘‘ hushed ” and became a mute observer. The child retained the food, and presently Sister Todhunter gave it more. The second time its eyes were fixed upon the cup, and its little lips were feebly raised to meet it. It drank half a cupful, then turned its face on Sister Todhunter’s broad knee and slept. Seeing this, a great hope grew in its mother’s heart and peered like an imprisoned spirit through her anxious eyes. Metaphoric¬ ally she began to lean upon the vast figure by her side, which seemed so confident and re¬ sourceful. “ Lay down,” said Sister Todhunter bluntly, looking up into the face fixed so hungrily upon “the terms were not liberal for colonel todhunter.” hers. The young woman’s eyes grew wistful and beseeching. I can’t sleep,” she said, and my baby dying.” Sister Todhunter gave her a peculiar look. “ Of all the fools ! ” she began, then changed her mind. ‘‘ Lay down right there on the bed

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344 SISTER TODHUNTER^S HEART. I’VE SEEN MANY ER SICKER KITTEN ’N THIS GIT WELL.’’ an’ watch me. The baby ain’t er dyin’.” And moved by some strange power, the mother obeyed. The baby slept. One, two, three, four hours passed. Then it waked. The warm mullein and milk was ready, and it drank again. Again it slept. And the mother lying there silently drifted away into dreamland too, for the first time in many days, and slept the sleep of exhaustion. Thus Parson Riley found them in the al¬ most soundless twilight, when, hurrying back from the deathbed of a distant friend who had sent for him, he tiptoed into the room. If he had been confronted with Beelzebub him¬ self, he could not have been more astonished. He gazed upon the sleeping wife and burly nurse in whose broad lap slumbered the little one he loved better than life, but whom, as he rode homeward through the lonely pine-lands, he had yielded up to its Maker. His face flushed. The woman raised one hand, swept a glance over the two sleepers, and then motioned to the door. Parson Riley bent his head and noiselessly passed out. He stood among the jasmines at his gate, with his pale face turned up to the blue sky which seemed so near him there, making no sounds and it seemed to him as he waited that a mystery was unfurled about him, and he grew and broadened under its touch. Still the suns glided by, but the child lived — lived and grew strong. One day Colonel Todhunter drove the mules up to the front

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POEMS BY E. R. SILL, door and halted them. Sister Todhunter placed the infant in its mother’s lap and said : “ Keep him on mullein and milk a while longer. He’s all right now.— Shet up!” she added, seeing the mother’s eyes fill with tears and her bosom heave ; an’ if yer need me, sen’ down.” “ You saved my child,” sobbed Parson Riley’s wife, ‘‘ and I’ll pray for you always.” Me saved him ! That’s er pretty thing fur er preacher’s wife ter say I The Lord did it, chile, — the Lord and his mullein tea.” She nearly crushed the life out of Parson Riley in her hurry to get out. “ Madam,” he began, seizing one of her hands. “ Shet up 1 ” she replied, snatching it away. He looked at her beseechingly. “ Won’t you let me thank you ? ” he said; and — won’t you let me say something about that other matter ? ” She laughed. Not now. Parson. I’m goin’ home, an’ the Lord knows how I will find things there, fur ’twixt Billy and Mr. Todhun¬ ter the chances fur ther goin’ wrong is the 345 bes’ in the worl’. But, Parson, you can study on supp’n. When yer go ter turn ernother woman out of er church, don’t yer go ter the neighbors fur her character, nor ter her hus- ban’, if he happens ter be a triflin’ kind er man; but come straight to headquarters. Trouble and worry sometimes sorter crusts over er woman’s heart, so that ev’ybody can’t see hit. Parson, but hit’s there all the same.” She got upon the block and clambered into the wagon, where in deafness sat her liege lord. Good-bye, Parson,” she said, as they drove off. “ I’m glad ther baby’s mendin’. Keep him on mullein tea.” The parson lifted his hat. “ God bless you, madam,” he said tearfully. He watched them as they rolled down the lane. The wheel struck a stump. Did anybody ever see sech er man ? ” he heard her shout. Gimme them lines I ” He saw the colonel rock violently as the reins were wrenched out of his hands, and then he saw his patient little hairless head with its broad ears settle down between his shoulders again. Presently a turn in the road hid them from sight. H. S. Edwards, POEMS BY E. R. SILL. THE REFORMER. Before the monstrous wrong he sets him down _ One man against a stone- walled city of sin. For centuries those walls have been a-building; Smooth porphyry, they slope and coldly glass The flying storm and wheeling sun. No chink. No crevice lets the thinnest arrow in. He fights alone, and from the cloudy ramparts A thousand evil faces gibe and jeer him. Let him lie down and die : what is the right. And where is justice, in a world like this ? But by and by, earth shakes herself, impatient; And down, in one great roar of ruin, crash Watch-tower and citadel and battlements. When the red dust has cleared, the lonely soldier Stands with strange thoughts beneath the friendly stars. DESIRE OF SLEEP. IT is not death I mean. Nor even forgetfulness. But healthful human sleep. Dreamless, and still, and deep. Where I would hide and glean Some heavenly balm to bless. I would not die ; I long To live, to see my days Bud once again, and bloom. And make amidst them room For thoughts like birds of song. Out-winging happy ways. I would not even forget : Only, a little while — Just now — I cannot bear Remembrance with despair; The years are coming yet When I shall look, and smile. Not now — oh, not to-night I Too clear on midnight’s deep Come voice and hand and touch ; The heart aches overmuch — . Hush sounds I shut out the light 1 A little I must sleep.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN* BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of “Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XXIII. HILE Mr. Crisman was engaged in set¬ ting up Miss Stull’s sketching umbrel¬ la, that young lady looked upon him with much more interest than she regarded the work which he was doing for her. He was certainly a hand¬ some young man, and in some respects pleased her better than did Mr. Stratford. Mr. Cris¬ man, too, proved fully equal to the exigencies of this chance meeting. He was naturally chatty and sociable, and having become in¬ tensely bored during his companionless stay at the Cherry Bridge tavern, he was delighted at this legitimate opportunity of assisting and of talking to a very pretty young lady. He did not hesitate to ask questions or to offer sug¬ gestions in regard to the sketching business, and in her answers to these Miss Matilda man¬ aged, with much deftness, to inform him who she was and where she lived, and also to make him aware that she knew who he was. Crisman delayed his walk, and watched the sketching for some time, but at last he took up his rod. He asked her if she was coming again to this place to sketch, and she answered : Of course, if I do not finish this to-day I must work on it to-morrow.” When she came again on the morrow, she found Mr. Crisman there. ‘‘ I thought I would come over,” he said, “ and see how you were getting along with the picture.” And that was all the reason or pre¬ tense he deemed it necessary to give for his presence. Miss Stull liked this. It showed there was no nonsense about the young man ; and she greeted him very pleasantly. Although she had known him but such a very short time, and although their introduction consisted of nothing but the words she herself had spoken concerning their respective identities, Mr. Cris¬ man possessed the present qualification which in her eyes raised him above all other young men in the world : he was there. He staid with her a full hour, during which the drawing made little progress, but the ac¬ quaintanceship made much. John People was a simple-minded young man, while Mr, Cris¬ man was, in many ways, extremely sharp-wit¬ ted; yet Miss Matilda drew from the latter twenty times more information in regard to the persons of their mutual knowledge than she had ever been able to extract from the former. They barely mentioned Gay, for Mr. Crisman did not wish to talk about her, and Miss Stull did not think it wise to do so ; but they discussed Mrs. Justin and Mr. Stratford very thoroughly, and when Mr. Crisman had finished his analy¬ sis of the character of the gentleman, Miss Stull began to perceive how very kind chance had been in sending her the fisherman she did not expect instead of the one she had been looking for. Mr. Crisman then proceeded to give his companion a pretty good account of himself ; and as this was a subject it always pleased him to talk of, he dwelt upon it to a considerable extent. He omitted all allusion to the original cause of his visits to this neighborhood, con¬ tenting himself with stating that he was at present staying here to fish and shoot, — that is, if he could ever find anything to shoot, — and that in a few days he was going on a yachting expedition, which would fill up the remainder of his vacation. Mr. Crisman walked home with Miss Stull, carried her stool and her umbrella, went into the house, and was presented to her mother as a friend of Mrs. Justin. There was something extremely frank and straightforward in the conduct of Mr. Crisman. There seemed to him nothing strained or unusual in his making the acquaintance of the Stull family in this in¬ formal manner, and he showed a readiness to enter into any intimate social relations to which he might be invited. Mrs. Stull liked the absence of that stiffness which she often noticed in the society which her husband compelled her to enter, and, altogether, these three persons, each of whom was beginning to feel somewhat lonely in this country neighborhood, were very well satisfied with the new acquaintanceship. Miss Stull sat by herself that evening, after her mother had gone to bed, and seriously pondered upon Mr. Crisman. She knew better * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. Stockton. All rights reserved.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN than any one who merely looked upon her, that not only were the months and years pass¬ ing by her, but that a very good proportion of them had already passed, and that the period had arrived when she should begin to think seriously of some young man or other. As far as she could judge, Mr. Crisman fulfilled all her requirements. Personally he was entirely satisfactory, and, although she did not suppose he was rich, he had told her he was in a very good business, and she felt sure of this, for otherwise, in her opinion, the engagement of Gay Armatt would never have been allowed. In fact, this engagement was a strong recom¬ mendation to Miss Stull. It was as though his preliminary examinations had been passed, and she might therefore take him at a much more advanced stage of friendship than a person who had not thus been proved. That the engagement had been broken off did not trouble her at all. From what she had seen, she attributed it entirely to Mr. Stratford’s agency, and if the girl preferred to marry that man instead of Mr. Crisman, she. Miss Matilda, was quite satisfied. That her father would approve of Crisman she was not at all sure, but then her father disapproved of so many things it would not do to consider him always. If she should become engaged to this gentleman, she her¬ self would see to it that the marriage took place at the proper time ; and as she saw no good reason for any objection on the part of her parent, she felt quite sure that the name of J. Weatherby Stull would be signed to such checks as might be needed at the beginning of housekeeping. As to the future. Miss Ma¬ tilda was very hopeful. She was the principal child of the family, and she did not believe that her father would dare to divert perma¬ nently from her any portion of her rightful share in his property. Having thought over this matter for nearly two hours, she determined, unless subsequently she saw some reason for changing her mind, that she would marry Mr. Crisman, and that she must lose no time in making very good use of her present exceptional opportunities. During the next few days, several admirable methods for enjoying the scenery and the air of the country about Cherry Bridge were sug¬ gested by Mr. Crisman. He believed these to be original suggestions, not perceiving that they were produced by the adroit and quiet working of Miss Matilda’s mind upon his own. There was nothing accidental about these walks and drives; Mr. Crisman came boldly to Mrs. Stull’s residence, and boldly stated what he came to propose. Miss Stull found that the remaining days of Mr. Crisman’s vacation were not sufficient for the completion of her work, and she resolved to extend his stay at Cherry Bridge. For the day on which he was to join his yachting friends she proposed an excursion to a somewhat dis¬ tant point of interest which she would never see unless she had some one like Mr. Crisman to accompany her. At first he declared that it was impossible for him to go on this excur¬ sion, but subsequently telegraphed to his friends requesting them to postpone for a day their start for the yacht trip. On his return from his drive with Miss Stull he found a tele¬ gram informing him that wind, tide, and friends with limited time wait for no man, and that the yachting party had sailed. Now there was no reason why Mr. Crisman should not spend the rest of his . vacation at Cherry Bridge ; and there he spent it, and for the greater part of the time in the society of Miss Stull. On his side Mr. Crisman had no serious thoughts in connection with this very pleasant companionship. He enjoyed it, but he never expected anything to come of it. He expected to marry Gay Armatt, and would not have been surprised at any time to receive a note from Mrs. Justin stating that it would be in the interest of all parties if he should call at her house and see Gay, who was beginning to look at the matter in dispute between them in a different light from that in which she had first regarded it. He had not the slightest idea of making any conciliatory propositions himself ; his nature was too obstinate for this; and he believed, besides, that anything in the way of “ knuckling down ” on his part would be in¬ jurious as a precedent to the matrimonial rela¬ tions he proposed to establish. He was very willing that the people at the J ustin house should see that he was not pining away on account of the rupture of the engagement, and that he did not even have to leave Cherry Bridge in order to find agreeable companionship. And thus he wound his merry way among the subtile threads which Miss Matilda spread about him, sometimes breaking away in this di¬ rection or that, imagining the while that he was as free as a bird in the air, but carrying with him, all unknown to himself, attachments strong enough to bring him back whenever Miss Matilda wished to draw him to her. As his holidays approached their close, the lady dexterously tightened and strengthened his bonds, until one day he found himself so en¬ wrapped and secured that he could not fly, nor run, nor walk, save at the will of his captor ; he was so skillfully bound, in fact, that he could not even wish to flutter. He was engaged to be married to Miss Matilda Stull. When he discovered this fact, it was natural that Mr. Crisman should experience some sud¬ den emotions ; one of these was an emotion of

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN 348 vanity : how quickly had he conquered this fine girl! He could not but think of what so lately had been, — Miss Matilda could not prevent that backward glance of his eyes, — but the thoughts of what had been were overpowered by the thoughts of what existed now. All those fond feelings towards Gay which had been cooled and hardened by his jealousy and his anger. Miss Matilda had warmed into strong glow and directed towards herself One thing very potent in preventing Crisman from look¬ ing backward was the remembrance that never had Gay given that value to his utterances which had been so earnestly accorded them by Matilda. That deft spinner had actually spun her web over his heart. He loved her. He felt that she exactly suited him, and pay¬ ing no thought to peculiarity of circumstances nor to hastiness of action, he was proud and happy that he had won this girl. When all this had been settled and these two were pledged to each other for life. Miss Ma¬ tilda enjoined upon her lover strict secrecy for the present. Nothing was to be made public until the parties should meet in the city in the autumn, and then the lady would herself at¬ tend to the announcement of the engagement to her father. She felt quite sure she would be able to make him look upon the matter in a proper light ; when this was done, all else would be easy. And then she allowed Mr. Crisman to depart. Miss Stull’s next move was to inform Gay Armatt, as soon as possible, of what had hap¬ pened. This was not in accordance with the injunctions of secrecy which she had imposed upon Mr. Crisman, but she considered it a necessary step, and did not hesitate to make it. Until Gay had been positively assured that her lover had gone from her forever, Matilda could not feel safe. Miss Matilda had not seen her young friend since she had met her in the buggy with Mr. Stratford. Mrs. Justin, having heard that Crisman was still in the neighborhood, said nothing about it to Gay, but endeavored to keep her, as much as possible, at home, in order that there might be no accidental and undesirable meeting. Stratford, too, thought it would be wise at this time to leave the trout streams and the woods to the supposed irate young man, and he paid a short visit to the sea-shore. About what Crisman might do or say, should he meet Stratford, the latter attempted to form no supposition ; but he desired above all things to avoid scandal re¬ garding Gay, and therefore went away. Miss Matilda had noticed this state of affairs, and thought that matters had been managed very wisely ; but now that Mr. Crisman had gone, there was no reason why Miss Armatt should be kept any longer in se¬ clusion and. ignorance, and she determined to see her. It is true that Miss Stull did not owe the Justin house a visit, the debt being the other way. But in the country, she argued, social rules may sometimes be set aside ; and happening to be driving that way, she stopped in to see Gay. It had been so long, she explained, since she had heard from her that she feared she might be ill. It was during this interview that Miss Matilda allowed Gay to suspect, and at last actually admitted to her, that she was engaged to Crisman. “ I did not intend, my dear,” said Miss Stull, “to tell you this at present, but the secret has come out almost without my know¬ ing it. This is a queer world, isn’t it, dear ? People pair off this way, and then they find they have made a mistake and they pair off that way. But, so long as we are all the hap¬ pier for it, we ought to be very glad. And now, my dear Gay, I want you to understand that both you and Mrs. Justin owe us a visit — I’ll be generous and won’t count this — and if you don’t pay it very soon you’ll find us standing on our dignity. So now you see what you have to expect. Good-bye, and I’m very sorry Mrs. Justin is not at home.” Gay remained standing by the chair from which she had risen when her visitor took her leave. Since the actual confession, and while Miss Matilda spoke her few concluding words, Gay had not opened her lips; and now she remained struck by a heavy pain, the nature of which she did not understand. She had sent this man away, and she ought to have known him well enough to comprehend that he would not return ; why, therefore, should she feel pain at what he had done ? A man who could so quickly turn his affections upon another could not be worthy of her. Why, therefore, should she now feel pain ? He had treated her as no man should treat a woman; she had declined to be longer engaged to him ; and he had gone to another woman. Pier pride, her reason, her womanly self-re¬ spect, stood by her to comfort and support her. But, in spite of all support and comfort, she did feel pain. XXIV. John People had been summoned by Mr. Stull to the city, the alterations at Vatoldi’s having reached a stage where the daily super¬ vision of the manager was necessary. In the course of a week or so, however, John con¬ trived to arrange matters in such a way as to give himself two days in which to visit Cherry Bridge. He informed Mr. Stull that there were some affairs he wished to attend

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN to which the somewhat unexpected conclusion of his holiday had forced him to neglect. He did not say that this neglected business was a proposition of love to Mr. StulPs daughter, but such was the fact. John fully determined that before he left his native fields again he would boldly lay the state of his heart before Miss Stull, and find out how she regarded him. For the first day after his arrival in the coun¬ try John wandered over the fields, along the roads, and in every place where he thought it might be possible to encounter Miss Matilda accidentally. But, Mr. Crisman having re¬ cently left, that young lady had gladly given herself a rest from country strolling, and John met her not. A visit to her house naturally suggested itself to his mind, but this course was repugnant to him. In the first place, he thought if he went to the Stull house every¬ body would know what he went for, and that he could not endure. Then again, he could not be sure of seeing Miss Matilda alone in her home, and even if he had this good for¬ tune, he felt that in a room or on a piazza he could not speak to her as freely and eloquently as if he were with her in the open fields. On the second morning the pensive resig¬ nation on his brow deepened mto positive trouble, for it now seemed quite probable to him that fate had decreed that he should visit Miss Matilda at her home. How he should do this, at what time he should go there, how he should demean himself, what primary rea¬ son he should give for his visit, were questions which greatly preyed upon his mind. Wan¬ dering slowly along the verdant banks of Cherry Creek, he lifted up his eyes, and be¬ held Miss Gay Armatt approaching him. Instantly there came into his mind a happy thought. He had met Miss Armatt several times, both at his uncle's house and at Mrs. Justin’s, and, by his mother’s report, he knew her to be a most kind and good young woman. ‘‘ Now, why should she not help me?” was John’s happy thought. ‘‘ I don’t mind telling her just what is the matter, and if she is as kind as they say she is, it will be easy enough for her to get Matilda to take a walk with her and so give me all the chance 1 want.” Having come up with the young lady, John took off his hat, bade her good- morning, and stopped. Gay raised her eyes towards him as she returned his salutation, and John thought that the lady probably did not feel very well. She was not looking her best. He made some inquiries about Mrs. Justin which had the effect of arresting Miss Armatt’s steps ; and then, finding that he could think of no other prefatory remarks, John perceived that it would be necessary for him to say im¬ mediately what he had to say. VoL. XXXIV.— 48. ‘‘ Excuse me, miss,” said he, for taking your time, but I want to ask you something, and I hope you are not in a hurry.” “ I am in no hurry at all,” said Gay. ‘‘ Is there anything I can do for you ? ” This question helped him very much. ‘‘ Oh, yes, indeed,” he said, “ there is something you can do for me. It may seem very queer to you. Miss Armatt, for me to stand here and plump things out to you in this way ; but the fact is there’s no time to be lost, and what I don’t do to-day can’t be done at all ; at least there is no likelihood of it. It will amaze you a good deal, I have no doubt, when you hear me say — and I must own that I’m amazed to hear myself say it out freely this way — that I am in love.” “ In love ! ” exclaimed Miss Gay, and there came into her face a quick look which startled John. It seemed to him as though she might bound into the bushes and flee from his sight like a deer. Could it be possible that this young lady thought that he was about to make an amatory proposal to her ? “It is Miss Stull I’m in love with,” said John quickly, “and I’m pretty sure I’ll never get a chance to let her know it if somebody don’t help me, and so I thought I’d ask you, thinking if you wouldn’t do it for my sake, which would be natural enough, not knowing me very well, you might do it for my mother’s, who looks on you and Mrs. Justin as her most valued neighbors.” It had been days since Gay had smiled, but she could not help smiling now. “ I am always glad to do anything neighborly,” said she, “ but this seems very odd. Does your mother wish you to marry Miss Stull ? ” “She just builds on it,” answered John, “ and I want you to know. Miss Armatt, that although this thing might look out of the way to any outside party, there’s a good deal more reason for it than anybody except just two or three has any idea of. Miss Stull is the daugh¬ ter of a rich man, and I am only the manager at Vatoldi’s. But there are things that I can’t tell you, but which will come out some day, that make matters a good deal more even be¬ tween us than you would be likely to think. And I don’t doubt, either, that old Stull will come round all right when the affair has been settled between me and his daughter, and has run on long enough to get seasoned.” “ But what would you have me to do with it ? ” asked Gay. “ It’s just this,” said John : “This is the last day I have got to stay here, for I don’t know how long, and I am bound to tell her before I sleep to-night. Now, I can’t go to her house to tell her. Miss Aimatt. Upon my word I can’t ! If I was to meet her mother or those

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN two young sisters, it would drive every word out of my mind. But on the green grass and under the blue sky I could tell her all I feel and think. And that is what I want to get a chance to do. Now, if you would ask her to take a walk with you this afternoon, and I was to fall in with you, and you’d think of some reason or other for being obliged to go home and leave us two there, then you’d be doing for me more than any woman on earth could do except Matilda herself, if she be so minded to say the word I want her to say.” Gay stood and looked upon the ground. This was all very unpleasant and embarrass¬ ing. Here was a young man whom she had heard of as a Very good and deserving young man, who had been so unhappy as to fall in love with Matilda Stull. She did not thor¬ oughly understand the relative social condi¬ tions of the two, but she knew that one was a rich young lady, and the other was the son of Mrs. People. These situations in life ap¬ peared quite incongruous to Gay, but she only thought of them in connection with her won¬ der that this love of the young man had ever been suffered to grow up. In regard to the present and important phase of the question, there was but one thing to think of, and that was that Miss Stull was already engaged. And yet Gay could not say this to John People. She had not told Mrs. Justin, nor Mr. Stratford, nor any one, for it was not only the pledge of secrecy which prevented her from telling of this engagement ; had she been free to speak, she could not have told any one that the man who but a few weeks before had been her lover had now promised to marry another woman. “ Now you see. Miss Armatt,” said John, it is a very simple thing I ask of you. Won’t you be kind enough to do it for me ? ” There was that in the tone and voice and look of John People which was so honest, and withal so tender, that it touched Gay’s heart. There could be no doubt that this man was truly in love. Would her conscience permit her to let him hurl himself against that cold steel wall which he adored, and in which he fancied he saw a reflection of himself? ‘‘ It is a very hard thing,” thought Gay, “ for me to have to do this. It is just the same as if I were refusing him for Matilda Stull. Peo¬ ple ought to attend to these things for them¬ selves. And yet I know, and he doesn’t know. Ought I to let him go on in this blind way ? It would be too cruel.” ‘‘ Mr. People,” she said, if I were you, I think I would not carry this matter any fur¬ ther. Indeed, I would not.” John looked at her very steadily, and a lit¬ tle of the ruddiness seemed to fade out of his face. “ AVhy do you say that, Miss Armatt ? Have you any reason to think that I ought not to speak to her ? ” “Yes,” said Gay, “and a very good reason. I can’t explain it to you, but — ” “ Now, Miss Armatt,” interrupted John, with eager haste, “ I understand what you mean, but you are not right. You don’t know Miss Stull as I do. And even if things were as un¬ equal between us as they look to be, — and upon my word. Miss Armatt, I tell you they are not, — it wouldn’t make any difference to her. I’ve walked with her, and I’ve talked with her, and if you could have heard her, you would know what I know. And be¬ sides,” he added, throwing into his voice a tone of strong entreaty, “ I want to have this settled. I can’t live this way any longer. Even if she didn’t mean all she seemed to mean, and if she didn’t care about what I said, I want to know it. Perhaps if she thinks I am too forward, I might be able to make her un¬ derstand that there have been changes. Things are not exactly as they used to be. You see. Miss Armatt, all I ask is, just help me to see her ; only let me talk to her.” “ Mr. People,” said Gay, looking at him very earnestly, and with a certain tenderness in her voice, “ I really would not try to see Miss Stull. It will be much better for you to give it all up at once. I know that you can never be anything to her.” “ You knowl ” cried John. “ Do you really mean that ? ” “I mean it,” she said; “most earnestly and truly I mean it. You ask me to help you, and there is no way in the world in which I can help you so well as to keep you from going one step farther.” “ Miss Armatt,” said John, his voice a little broken, “ do you know anything which gives you the right to say that ? ” “ Yes, I do,” answered Gay, “ and it would be wicked and cruel in me not to say so. I am very, very sorry for you, Mr. People, but it would be of no use at all for you to go to Matilda Stull, and you ought not to do it.” John stood looking upon the ground; then he raised his eyes. “No use at all ? ” he said. “ Not one bit,” answered Gay. “ I positively know it.” John’s breast heaved, and he turned to one side. Then he held out his hand. “ I am much obliged to you. Miss Armatt,” he said. And he went away. Gay stood and looked after him. Never again could that young man walk under blue skies and over green fields with the woman he loved. If he had ever done anything of the kind, all that was left to him now was to look back upon it.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN And she, herself? She must look back too. She walked on a few steps, and then she sat upon a stone. ‘‘ It is too hard,” she said to herself, that this should be brought to me from both sides. It is too much ! ” And, putting her face into her hands, there burst from her the first tears she had shed since she became a woman. XXV. Mr. Zenas Turby had not been very suc¬ cessful in his search for iron on the farm of Enoch Bullripple. He had found strong evi¬ dences of the existence of the ore on the lands of Mr. Stull, but the deposits did not seem to extend themselves in the direction of the Bullripple hills and fields. When Mr. Turby returned to his county town, after the Sunday on which Mr. Stratford had seen him making his investigations, he wrote Mr. Stull a report of the result of his searches, and it was very plain to him from the reply which he received that this report was not at all satisfactory to his employer. Mr. Stull was a man of business as well as a man of feeling, and while he would have been very glad to see Enoch Bullripple ousted from his farm and to possess himself of the same, he did not care to go into this transac¬ tion solely from motives of revenge ; he wished also to derive some direct advantage from it. The question of the tenure of the lands was a very simple one. Mrs. People’s husband and Enoch had each bought their farms from the heir of an old farmer who had been one of the earliest settlers of Cherry Bridge. The sale had been perfectly satisfactory to all par¬ ties, and Enoch had paid in full for his farm, but Mr. People had never been able to do this, and therefore it was that Mr. Stull, desiring a country place in a picturesque region for his growing family, had found it possible to buy up the mortgage against said farm, to oust the People family, and to possess himself of the property. During the last few years, however, it had become known that the old farmer be¬ fore mentioned had had other heirs besides the one who sold the farms to Mr. People and Enoch Bullripple ; but as these heirs lived in the West, and probably did not know that their relative had owned this mountain prop¬ erty, and if they did, were not likely to enter into litigation for their share of the compara¬ tively small value of the farms, the sandy foundations of this real estate transaction were considered to be quite sound enough for ordi¬ nary intents and purposes. Now, Mr. Stull looked upon the matter in this light : If his land and that of old Enoch 351 were rich in iron ore, he wished to possess himself of it all on a secure tenure, and would, therefore, gladly take measures to have the distant heirs come forward and prove their claims, and cause the property to be put upon the market, whereupon he would buy it, will¬ ingly sacrificing what he had paid before for the sake of the larger gain. But if this should prove to possess no mineral wealth, its agri¬ cultural value was not sufficient to make him desirous of buying it again, and he was per¬ fectly willing to trust his good fortune and his lawyer to hold possession of it. Nor was the fact that Mr. Turby had found iron on his farm sufficient to induce Mr. Stull to take the measures he had meditated. If he could not have Enoch Bullripple’s land, and perhaps some adjoining properties, so as to form a large tract which would be worth working, Mr. Stull did not care to go into the iron ore business. Therefore it was that Turby’s re¬ port was not satisfactory to him. Now, the energetic Zenas had hoped for himself a very fair profit from this piece of business, and he was loath, therefore, to see it dropped. Perceiving more plainly than he had perceived it before that he ought to find iron ore on the land of Enoch Bullripple, he determined to do it, if the thing were possible. He thereupon made another visit to Cherry Bridge; and as Enoch and his sister were sitting down to dinner on a pleasant summer day, they both saw the tax collector and ama¬ teur professor of applied geology busy at work near the top of a little hill not a half mile from their window. “ Confound that sneak of a Zenas Turby ! ” exclaimed Enoch, rising to his feet. “ I’ve a mind to take my gun and blow off the top of his head ! He knows I’ve told him not to come scratchin’ here at my land. He thinks he’s so far away we can’t see him.” Mrs. People was not in a happy humor. It had not been very long since she had been told by her son John, just before he had left her for the city, that the brilliant hopes she built upon the basis of a Stull-People combi¬ nation had come to naught, and must be al¬ lowed to vanish utterly. It was very hard for her to bear a blow like this, and her custom¬ ary expression of outreach in g good-nature had changed to one of mild ill-humor. The vision of herself as the central figure in her old homestead, or at least only declining to assume that position from the fact that Matilda Stull might prove a disagreeable daughter to live with, had been a very dear one to her. She had seen it by day and by night ; while making pies, at the working of butter, and even during the intricate processes of the preserving of plums and the concoction of

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN. currant-jelly. To give it up was like a spoon¬ ful of brine in a custard pudding. The worst thing about Mrs. People’s ill- humors, which were of very rare occurrence, was the fact that no one could tell in what di¬ rection they would vent themselves. Like a howitzer strapped to the back of a mule, they were as likely to be directed against friend as foe. Now, what in the name of common sense, Enoch,” said she, ‘‘ are you workin’ yourself up into such tantrums for ? If Zenas Turby finds iron on your land, how’s that goin’ to hurt you ? What with the rains one year, and the drought the next, and the chicken-pip reg’lar every spring, there ain’t much else you get off it. If he finds ore, it’s yours and not his. So what’s the use of jumpin’ up that way and pullin’ the table-cloth all crooked ? ” Enoch sat down, but he kept his eye fixed on Zenas, who was now engaged in filling up a hole he had made in the ground. When this had been done, he gathered some large flat stones and made a little pile of them near the place where hehad dug his hole. Markin’ the spot, eh ? ” said Enoch to himself, for he thought it not wise to make any further re¬ marks on it to his sister. “ What is he doin’ that for ? ” There now came into the shrewd old mind of Mr. Bullripple, as he watched the intruder disappear across the fields, a suspicion that those people out West, who it had been ru¬ mored ought to have had a voice in the giv¬ ing of a title to this land, might have commis¬ sioned Zenas Turby to examine into the value of the property and find out whether or not it was worth fighting for. This supposition disturbed the mind of Enoch, for although he had declined to believe in the alleged claims of the far-away heirs, and had very strong faith in the virtue of possession when it related to land that had been bought and paid for, it was natural enough that he should be troubled by any actual evidence that an attack might be made upon the validity of his land deeds. Even if Turby were merely searching for ore in the interests of some one who desired to open mines on his land, Enoch was dissatisfied. He had been told, years before, by a scientific friend of Mr. Stratford that there was no prob¬ ability that his land contained iron, and he would have had no faith in the value of any propositions which might be made to him on the subject. When he had finished his dinner, Enoch put on his hat and went out. Now, if you meet Mr. Turby,” said Mrs. People, don’t you bother him. If he can find anythin’ that’s worth havin’ on this place, I’m sure I’d like to see him do it ! I always told you, Enoch, that you took the poorest farm, and let Mr. People have the one that was ever so much better. Of course I was glad enough of that at the time, but if you’d been a little sharper, you’d got the best farm, and you and me would have been livin’ on it now, and that Stull man would have had this dried-up place. Mr. People was very sharp.” Enoch said nothing about his having pre¬ ferred a farm for which he felt he could pay, leaving to his brother-in-law the larger one for which it would be very difficult to pay, and went out over the fields. He walked straight to the spot where Turby had been digging, and stood and looked at it, and with a sharp-pointed stone he began to turn up the loose soil. When he had scratched out the most of it, he looked into the bottom of the hole. “ It may be,” thought he, that that rocky stuff has got some iron in it ; and, at any rate, I’m dead sure that old Zenas is goin’ to bring somebody here to look at it.” Mr. Bullripple, in a reflective mood, stood kicking the loose earth and stones back into the hole. Then he suddenly pulled his soft felt hat down over his right brow. A broad grin illumined his countenance, and with rapid steps he started for home. In about half an hour he returned, pushing before him a heav¬ ily loaded wheelbarrow. When he reached the little pile of stones, he took from the barrow a spade and a pickaxe, and began vigorously to deepen the hole which Mr. Turby had made, throwing most of the excavated soil into the wheelbarrow, which had been emptied of all its contents. When the hole was deep enough, he nearly filled it with said contents, and then, throwing in some soil, he smoothed up the place and made it look very much as it had done when Turby left it. Then Enoch took away his tools and his barrow, dumping the soil the latter contained into a hollow at some little distance, and returned to his house. All that afternoon, no matter what else he might be doing, Mr. Bullripple kept an eye on the spot where he and Mr. Turby had been working. Nobody came to it, however, and the next morning he found himself obliged to go to the village. He left the spot in question in charge of his sister, telling her that if, dur¬ ing his absence, she saw anybody go there to dig, she must put on her bonnet and hurry over there to see what they got out of the ground. As Mrs. People always possessed a lively curi¬ osity to know what people might get out of the ground, or out of anything else, she will¬ ingly accepted this charge. When Mr. Bullripple arrived at the Cherry Bridge tavern, he found there Zenas Turby, who was ostensibly visiting the village for the purpose of collecting some debts.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN ‘‘ How d’ye do, Turby ? ” said Enoch. “ Still keepin’ up your right, I see, to the name of ‘ Old Scratch! ’ ” What do you mean ? ” said the other. “ I mean,” said Enoch, “ that you’re still goin’ round, scratchin’ up people’s land to see what’s under the grass. I do sometimes think that the ground-hogs must owe you somethin’ and that you’re tryin’ to levy on ’em.” As usual, there were several village loungers in the room, and among these it was quite natu¬ ral that Enoch’s remark should raise a laugh. “ Humph 1 ” growled Turby. When I get anybody levied on either for not payin’ what he owes, or else for holdin’ what he don’t own, it isn’t goin’ to be a ground-hog, mind, I tell you.” Now, look here, Zenas,” said Mr. Bullrip- ple, seating himself astraddle of a chair with his arms over its back, “it does make me laugh to see you come huntin’ and grubbin’ about my land to find iron ore when every¬ body knows there isn’t any there.” “ Confound your land 1 ” said Turby. “What do I care about it ? ” And taking his big cane in his hand, he rose to depart. “ Care about it I ” shouted Enoch in a tone which arrested the steps of the collector. “ I should say you cared lots about it. Perhaps you will hardly believe me,” he said, turning round to the company, “ but it’s as true as preachin’ that I saw Zenas Turby yesterday diggin’ away in one of my fields as if he was after a gold mine. Now, I believe it’s nothin’ but contrariness that makes him do that. I’ve told him, over and over again, that there ain’t no ore there, and jus’ to prove that I am wrong, he’s tryin’ to find it ; but he’s found himself to be the worst mistook man in this county, in spite of all he says he knows about mines and ores, and that sort of thing.” Mr. Turby’s rugged face was turned se¬ verely upon Enoch. “ Mistook, eh ? ” he growled. “ That’s all you know about it ! I don’t mind say in’ that I make it my business to know what sort of land there is in every part of this county, and I don’t make no mis¬ takes nuther. And, to prove it, I say there is iron on Enoch Bullripple’s place. I don’t say there’s enough of it to make the land worth anything, which everybody knows it isn’t now ; but it’s there, for all that.” Enoch laughed derisively. “ Itis easy enough to say that,” he cried, “but you couldn’t show me a piece of ore on my land as big as a hick¬ ory nut. I dare you to do it.” Enoch’s contemptuous tone was veiy^ irri¬ tating to Mr. Turby. “ Now, to show you and the rest of these people what sort of fool you are, Enoch Bull- ripple, I’ll jus’ take you over to your own farm 353 and let you see the ore that you haven’t got sense enough to know is there till I come to p’int it out to you. And anybody can come along that chooses.” “All right! ” said Enoch. “ If you want a chance to show you don’t know anythin’, I’m ready to give it to you.” And he went out to his horse. Mr. Turby’s sulky was tied near by, and the tavern loungers did not mind a walk of a mile or so to find out which was the fool, Zenas Turby or Enoch Bullripple. Enoch called upon Pat, the stable-man, to come along and bring a spade and pickaxe, for he did not wish, he said, that Mr. Turby should fail in the search because his own little pick would not grub deep enough. The party proceeded by the road for a con¬ siderable distance, and then they tied their horses to a fence and went over the fields until they came to the spot where Zenas had been digging. “ There’s iron ore here,” he said, “ for I found it myself just about this spot.” “ You have a great eye for spots,” said Enoch, assuming to take no notice of the little pile of stones, “ and you can dig here jus’ as well as anywhere, for you won’t find nothin’.” “We’ll see about that,” said Zenas. “You can begin there,” turning to Pat and pointing to the place where the soil had been disturbed. Pat made a blow with his pick, and scat¬ tered some loose dirt and stones ; then again he brought down the heavy implement, and its point penetrated to some distance into the earth, where it appeared to fasten itself. The stout Pat gave a dexterous double-twist and jerked it out, and low upon its point there hung an old and somewhat rusty flat-iron. Everybody started with surprise, and then there was a yell of laughter. “ Upon my word ! ” shouted Enoch, “ my sile has got iron in it, after all ! Go ahead, Pat ! ” The laughing Irishman went ahead with right good will, and in a few moments he brought out of the hole a piece of old chain, two or three horseshoes, and several pieces of broken stove-pipe. Everybody was in a roar of delight except Mr. Turby, who stood purple-red and furious. “ I’ll pay you for this, you, Bullripple ! ” he said, shaking his fist at his old enemy. And without another word, he marched away. If his anger had not dulled his usually sharp wits, he might have stopped long enough to show that there really was iron in the soil. But the boisterous derision of the little party made him forget everything else. “ Good-bye, Zenas,” shouted Enoch after him. “ I’ll give in that you are right and I am

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN, wrong. Nobody can say now that there ain’t no iron on my land, for you’ve come here yourself and p’inted it out.” And a fresh burst of laughter followed the retreating Turby. Enoch now related with much glee how he had planned out and created this novel min¬ eral deposit ; how he had gone to the village in the hope that he could find Turby and stir him up to come and get himself caught in this trap. And then the jubilant little company departed, to tell to whomsoever they could find to listen this capital joke upon an old curmudgeon whom nobody liked. “ Ef iver he ses oiurn ore agin,” said the jo¬ vial Pat, “ it’s shure there’ll be somebody to fetch him a bit of a sthove-poipe, and axin him ef that’s the sort he’s afther.” The first person to whom Enoch had the chance to tell the tale was his sister, whom he met as he was leading his horse homeward across the fields. Mrs. People had seen the men on the hill, and, true to her promise and her curiosity, had hurried off to find out what they were going to dig up. Rapid progress was impossible for her, and she did not arrive in time ; but Enoch’s story so warmed her with delight that the clouds and fogs that had come up on account of the Matilda Stull disappoint¬ ment melted and vanished away, and the dis¬ position of Mrs. People again dwelt under its natural sunny sky. Mr. Turby drove directly home to his county town, and on the way he turned over this matter in his mind. He had made a blun¬ der in allowing to slip from him in his anger the admission that he had found iron ore on the Bullripple farm. But, after all, the case was not as bad as it might be. The result of the joke would be to cause those giggling fools to believe that there was no ore there, and that suited him exactly. But he would make Enoch Bullripple pay for his trick ; and the first stroke in this present labor of hate would be to write to Mr. Stull and inform him that, having made renewed investigations on the Bullripple farm, he had found large deposits of iron. ‘‘ If that stirs him up,” said Mr. Turby to himself, to start out fresh ag’in after that land, he’s the man to git it. And when he’s got it, it’ll be my turn to do the grinnin’ ! ” xxvi. When Horace Stratford returned from the sea-shore to his summer home on the Bullrip¬ ple farm, his mind was in a state of uncertainty which was not usual to it. This was occasioned by doubts in regard to the proper conduct of his relations with Gay Armatt. Everything was now very different from what it had been. In his former intercourse with her the two had been separated by a barrier which protected them both, and, while it separated them, act¬ ually gave them a sense of freedom in their social relations which they could not have felt had they not always been able to see that the engagement with Crisman stood between them. That barrier no longer existed, and Stratford could not but ask himself if Gay and he could continue to move in close parallel lines with¬ out a bar between them. Would not their lines be ever liable to meet ? Would not the world wonder if they did not meet? Would not Gay herself wonder ? But he was not at all willing to create an effectual barrier of space by removing his line to a great and safe distance from that of Gay. He knew nothing of the new bonds into which Mr. Crisman had entered, and he had not that faith in the absolute sundering of his re¬ lations with Gay which he would have liked to have. If the two should come together, — the one a little lonely, still loyal as far as principle could go, and always apt to be tender-hearted, and the other repentant of his brutal folly, and with renewed desire to possess that treasure on which he had turned his back, — Stratford would be very fearful of the consequences. And if those consequences should be a reengage¬ ment, the last condition of Gay would be far worse than the first, for she would take a man whom she knew to be unworthy of her, and this step would give his unworthiness peculiar advantages in their future life. Looking at the matter in this light, it was plain enough that Gay should not be left to feel the want of that companionship to which she had been accustomed during this bright summer, and to miss that support and stimu¬ lation which Stratford had given her almost ever since he had known her, and which, in his opinion, had been productive of such good results. He could not forget that the devil finds some mischief still for idle minds as well as for idle hands, and he wished that Gay’s mind should be worthily and industriously engaged with something which should not be Crisman. If Stratford had been asked why he had not before considered the possibility of this dilem¬ ma, he would have answered that the present state of affairs came about much more sud¬ denly than he had expected. He had be¬ lieved that Gay would gradually be led to see her false position, and as the problems of the case formed themselves, the solutions would also appear. But now there was no time for the natural growth of solutions. They must be artificially constructed, and Stratford felt the task a very difficult one. If he could have been taken into the confidence of Miss Matilda

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN Stull, his mind would have been very much easier. In this mental condition Stratford went to visit Mrs. Justin, and when he had been ten minutes in the company of Gay, all his doubts and uncertainties regarding his proper course of action were dissipated. This was in conse¬ quence, first, of the girl’s demeanor, for she met him with the same frank and earnest friendliness which she had shown to him on the last day they had met. “ She has not changed in regard to me,” he said to himself, “ and why should I change in regard to her ? ” In the second place, Stratford was affected by the girl’s appearance. There was some¬ thing of sadness about her, and while he could not determine exactly how this sadness showed itself, he could see that it was there. She had lost none of her bloom, her freshness, or her beauty ; but, apart from her friendliness and her delight in meeting him again, she was not exactly the same Gay. “ Poor child ! ” thought Stratford, “ she has been touched more deeply than I supposed, and I must do what I can for her.” Therefore it was that the next morning the old readings were recommenced on the piazza ; and therefore it was that on many days after¬ wards Stratford staid to dinner, and often to supper ; and that the beautiful country freely yielded its pleasures, sometimes to the three of them, and sometimes to the two. Stratford was very anxious to see the full joyousness of Gay’s nature assert itself. He thought it due to her character that there should disappear from her demeanor as soon as possible all vestige of regret for a step which her own good sense and high honor had impelled her to take. He knew nothing of that second blow, that revelation of the fact that not only had she no lover, but that she never had had a lover. To be affianced now to Matilda Stull, Crisman must always have been false to her. So thought Gay Armatt. The full joyousness did not appear, but Gay entered with great earnestness and hearty good will into everything that Stratford pro¬ posed, whether it were study or pleasure. She had not known before how much restraint she had been used to put upon herself in her in¬ tercourse with this friend. She now knew that not only had there been a good deal of re¬ straint, but that it had all disappeared. As the days passed on, she became Stratford’s disci¬ ple. No one ever more thoroughly believed in a master than she believed in him. With the exceedingly friendly intimacy which resulted from all this, Mrs. Justin did not interfere. She had thought Stratford’s course wrong in the beginning, and she thought it wrong now. She did not believe 355 it was right in a man who had just broken off a match to step forward so promptly to turn the rupture to his own advantage. And yet she could not deny to herself that no greater good could have happened to Gay than her de¬ livery from Crisman. And neither could she believe that any possible good could now come to the girl which would be greater than a mar¬ riage with Stratford. She had opposed that which she believed to be evil which was being done that good might come of it, and the good had come in spite of her opposition. She now considered that she had done enough. She would oppose no more. It was on a warm morning, well forward in August, that Stratford was very much sur¬ prised by a visit from Arthur Thorne. It was such an unusual, in fact such an unheard-of thing for Thorne to make a visit without either being invited or announcing his inten¬ tion, that Stratford did not attempt to con¬ ceal his astonishment when he met his friend. “ I thought you would be somewhat amazed,” said Mr. Thorne, as he took a seat on the Bullripple porch and fanned himself with his straw hat, “ but I didn’t suppose your emotion would really injure your constitution, and as I wanted to come, I came. I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I get a little cooled off.” In a few minutes Mr. Thorne became more comfortable, and then he settled himself back in the big wooden arm-chair, and asked his friend for a pipe. ‘‘A pipe!” exclaimed Stratford. “You don’t mean to say you smoke ! ” “ Yes, I do,” said Thorne. “ Why shouldn’t I smoke ? In fact, I like to smoke. The fam¬ ily don’t object to it out here, do they ? ” “ Of course nobody objects to it,” said the other, “ but I must admit that I am surprised to find that you want to smoke, and espe¬ cially a pipe.” Stratford brought the pipe and one for him¬ self, and the two friends composed themselves for a chat. “ I can talk so much better when I am smoking,” said Arthur. “ That is a new thing, isn’t it ? ” remarked Stratford. “ Rather newish,” said his friend. “ And indeed there seems to be a tendency towards newishness with me. Now, I am well aware that it isn’t proper for me to come here with¬ out knowing whether you want me or not, or even writing to' let you know I intended to do it. But I just took it into my head to come, and here I am. If it is not entirely con¬ venient for you to have me, I can go to the tavern in the village. I dare say it is a very good tavern.”

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356 ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. Convenient ! ” said Stratford. Of course it is entirely convenient. Here is the room which you had before, all ready for you.” ‘‘ That is very good of you,” said Thorne, and I don’t mind in the least telling you why I came down here, or up, whichever it is. It is all on account of Miss Armatt. I never had anything take possession of me as that girl has ! I have tried to be proper about it, but it’s of no use. In fact, I am tired of being proper. It doesn’t pay. Sometimes it makes me sick to see everything straight and proper about me, for I am just the other way myself. I have worked hard at one thing, and I have worked hard at another ; that doesn’t help me at all ; I am thinking of her all the time. — Then I sat down, and said to myself: ‘This trying to do the right thing is all stuff and nonsense. There is Stratford ; he doesn’t trouble himself about anything of the sort, and he is happy. If he likes a girl, he makes himself agreeable to her, he spends his time with her, and he carries out his theo¬ ries. It doesn’t make any difference to him that she is engaged to be married to some one else ; now, why should it make a difference to me ? I cannot expect to make myself agree¬ able to her, nor to spend my time with her, and I have no theories to carry out, but I can go there and look at her again.’ And that I determined to do. Now, I know very well that even this is not right ; that it is unjust to myself, and unjust to the man who is engaged to Miss Armatt. But, as I said before, I am tired of doing right. That sort of thing doesn’t help me any. It simply gives me the worst of everything and puts me in the back¬ ground; and I have made up my mind to drop it. Of course this is all very astonishing to you, Stratford, but I determined to be quite frank and open with you, and let you see everything just as it stands.” Stratford drew a long breath. “ I wish to be perfectly frank and open withjr^??/,” he said, “ and therefore deem it my duty to tell you that Miss Armatt is not under promise to marry any one. Her engagement with Mr. Crisman has been broken off.” “ Good Heavens ! ” exclaimed Thorne, springing up so suddenly that his chair fell backward on the porch. Fi'ank R. Siockton. (To be continued.) ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. T is now nine years since the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge, taken in Cali¬ fornia, surprised the world by challenging all received conceptions of animal mo¬ tion. Their subsequent publication in “The Horse in Motion,” in 1882, constitutes the most con¬ siderable record on the subject hitherto acces¬ sible. In the interval since their appearance, it has become clear that what was at first pre¬ sented as altering the portrayal of living move¬ ment was in reality an important addition to the instruments of scientific research, by ex¬ tending observation along a path where the limits of human sense had barred advance. For the past four years the University of Pennsylvania, chiefly through the efforts of Dr. William Pepper, its Provost, has furnished Mr. Muybridge the apparatus and the scien¬ tific supervision requisite to widen the record and extend the research of instantaneous pho¬ tography into the method and mechanism of animal motion. Whether animals should be drawn as they appear in the camera is still judice; but there is no question whatever that in no other way can they be seen for the studv of their locomotion. We see with a camera whose drop-shutter winks in a thirtieth of a second, but on whose plate impressions last for from a sixteenth to an eighth of a second, so that moving objects for any space they cover in this time appear either as blurred, like the shimmer of a turning wheel, or continuous, like the circle left by a whirling and lighted stick. To read this rec¬ ord takes the brain an appreciable fraction of time — at least one five-hundredth of a second. If the four feet of a quadruped are in con¬ sideration, there is the absolute dead-wall that when a leg moves there are five points to think about together and the mind can only carry four objects at once in consciousness — as more than one confused observer has found in trying to catch and carry the sequence of footfalls in the slowest walk of horse or cow. These limits of brain and eye, not in what is unseen but in what is seen, are less easy to appreciate and accept as fundamental than those with which we are more familiar. That we cannot see under a certain size or beyond a certain distance, that the retina makes no accounting of the photographic dark beyond the violet and knows naught of the heat dark this side the red, that in the world of unheard sound about us some notes we cannot hear because they are too high and some because

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VoL, XXXIV.— 49.

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358 ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. CHILD WALKING AND CRAWLING UPSTAIRS. they are too low, that we live in a world of odors of which to our grave loss we smell a bare hundredth part of what a healthy dog smells, — these limitations we daily act upon, and the use of all instruments of precision rests upon them. The use of instantaneous pho¬ tography in reading the secret of motion was as much the introduction of a new instru¬ ment of precision to supply the lack of sense as the use of the microscope, and had the same limitations in its application. More was claimed than was meet, and less admitted than was true, of the revelations of Mr. Muybridge. Art is one long convention which accepts the ordinary impressions of sense in interpreting nature. Flowers, like everything else that is lovely in the visible world,” says Mr. John Rus- kin, are only to be seen rightly with the eyes which the God who made them gave us, and neither with microscopes nor spectacles.” The artist responds to science, not in her discoveries, but in their influence in changing the general and average perception of nature. Landscape art has not been altered by geological discov¬ eries, but their collective influence has created an atmosphere in which an artist breathes un¬ easily if he has put slate debris at the foot of a basalt cliff. The real discovery which Mr. Muybridge made was, therefore, the addition of a new method of research, which put before the eye what it could not see unaided. To obtain the results of this new method through a complete and consecutive series of observations, carried on with a definite purpose under a scientific direction as proposed by the University of Pennsylvania, required in an abundant measure both time and money. The late Mr. J . B. Lippincott, of Philadelphia, whose interest in the lower animals had shown itself by his repeated gifts to the veterinary depart¬ ment of the university, was much interested in the investigation, and liberally advanced the preliminary expenses. Additional ad¬ vances were made by a committee of five guar¬ antors, under the stipulation that the scientific conduct of the work should rest in the hands of the university through a commission ap¬ pointed from its faculties to supervise the work. When the work, begun four years ago, was completed, $30,000 had been expended, and 100,000 plates exposed; and the final results, as reproduced by a photo-gelatine process, extend, in the completed work, through 781 folio sheets, presenting over 20,000 positions assumed by men, women, and children, draped and nude, and by birds and animals in mo¬ tion. Human action is extended through all the round of work and play, for both sexes and all ages; the Zoological Garden was dmwn upon for animals, the university hos¬ pital for instances of disease, and the entire field of athletic action was covered by uni¬ versity students, some of them record- breakers.” The photographs of moving animals taken in this work nearly equal all others, while those taken by Mr. Muybridge cover¬ ing a series of motions automatically timed are many fold the successive exposures ever made elsewhere. The merest beginner can spring a drop- shutter so as to obtain a single exposure of a moving object. To secure a series of such pic¬ tures accurately divided in time and evenly distributed in space is a difierent matter, and can be achieved only by successively exposing difierent plates or exposing successive portions of the same plate. The latter has been the favorite method of Monsieur E. J. Marey, the French investigator in this field, who whirls a perforated disk over an instantaneous plate before which the object is moving. This is the principle of the zoetrope, but with the plate where the eye is in the toy tind with the slit whirling, instead of the painted ring of figures. When a man turns a somersault before this apparatus, the developed plate shows him flinging himself in successive positions across it, as each successive slit in the perforated disk lets in a new image as it passes. A “ battery” of cameras in a row, tripped in sue-

Page 363

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE cession as the object moves before them, has been the method usually employed in this country. In the familiar illustrations taken in California, each camera was exposed by a thread which the moving horse broke as he went across the field. In the present researches, an electric circuit worked by a chronometric apparatus opened and closed each shutter. The studio through which this great defile of life-studies passed was a fenced space open to the sky. A screen, before which the object moved, reticulated in small squares of 2 inches and large ones of 19^ (5 and 50 centimeters), whose net-work appears on the background of some illustrations, faced a “ battery” of from 12 to 24 cameras. At right angles stood an¬ other row, arranged perpendicularly, and for many movements a third set was employed. Each act was therefore raked fore and aft as well as registered in passage, and was often covered from top to bottom besides. Sloping white screens threw up ” the under lights. Beyond all, there was above neither roof, glass, nor sky-light, nothing but the clear and open sky. For photography which has to do with the human figure, so rarely exposed to the frank, kindly, and searching light of the heavens, this is a difference, not of degree, but of kind. There is no mirror, no reflector for diffusing a perfect light like the perfect arch of the sky. To one familiar with work from the model, and knowing the chill and steady north light of the studio and the life-class, dead to changes, there was full suggestion in this long succession of studies and poses in the complete light of day, com¬ plex, intricate, but full of teaching in form, in motion, in texture, and in color. It will be a broad service to art if the study of these photographs suggests to some one the possi¬ bility of putting under the searching sky work from the life. It would change its motifs as landscape art has been transfigured by a like translation to the haven and heaven of nature. Minute photographs were taken by the cam¬ eras in action, and were enlarged from the small representations of beast or bird to the illustrations used in this article, which picture but portions of the original plates. Full light, careful manipulation, and perfect lenses ena¬ bled these enlargements to be made without distortion, replacing the silhouettes which are the usual and familiar result of instantaneous work by prints distinct, defined, and determi¬ nate. A new device, opened and closed by the automatic action of an electric circuit, reduced the exposures to a point apparently much be¬ low any previous record. Careful calculation tends to show that the exposures of a number of plates must have been less than 2000 ^ second, and not impossibly as low as -g-goTT* MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS, 359 practical work, however, to of a second proved fully short enough to catch the phase of a stride of a horse, and of a second was used for most of the slower movements. No clock can measure these brief intervals, but a tuning-fork, keyed to one hundred vibrations in the second, left its tell-tale dots on a moving cylinder where the opening circuit which tripped the cameras made their marks. It is possible that elements of error as to time exist in such a method absent from M. Marey’s, but they are counterbalanced for popular ex¬ position by better pictorial results. The great body of records secured by these methods makes no such special revelation as Mr. Muybridge’s earlier photographs. The attitudes which amazed the world then were accepted by most, as they were by Mr. George E. Waring in an article in The Century for July, 1882,* as settling the manner, method, and mechanism of progression by the horse and dog. But, now that a broader record is presented, there is tolerably certain to be something of a reaction to the more familiar views of move¬ ment. The wet-plates of a decade ago gave simple outlines and not rounded pictured Greater skill and care in manipulation, and more numerous examples, make it clear to any one who examines the photographs pre¬ sented here, that the impression of automatism left by the earlier illustrations disappears in these later views of motion. The character of the stride, certain simple facts in the sequence of footfalls, and the alternation of support were reasonably well conveyed ; but less ap¬ parent manifestations, which convey both the character of the individual animal and the characteristics of each motion, disappeared in the dense shadows of the earlier silhouettes. If, as Mr. Waring said of them five years ago, ‘‘ the testimony of the zoetrope, and, later, of the zoopraxiscope, has silenced all skepticism, and one can no longer hesitate to concede the truth and simplicity of what at first seemed complicated and absurd,” still, I take it that no one who had ridden a horse or loved a dog but felt a certain outraged sensibility in being assured that creatures whose footfalls, the slip and swell of whose shoulders, and the gather¬ ing arch and spring of whose back had an individuality all their own, as distinct as the pressure of a friend’s hand or the tone of his voice, were four-legged machines chiefly oc¬ cupied in balancing on one toe, straining a pastern to breaking, or gathering their legs in a disorderly bundle on their stomachs. These photographs, taken under more favorable con¬ ditions, give each of the remarkable positions * “ The Horse in Motion,” by George E. Waring, Jr. Century, Vol. 24, p. 381.

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360 ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS, which repetition has made familiar and to which even repetition can scarcely reconcile us ; but they are given with subtle variations, with change and alteration, with departures from the automatic sequence first suggested, Avhich show how individual is the movement, not merely of each species, but of each animal. The University Commission intrusted to Dr. Harrison Allen, emeritus professor of phy¬ siology in the university and a comparative anatomist of high rank, the work of studying the Horse in Motion,” led its author to assert that in the work of propulsion and support the fore limb “ does more than its share of both offices.” Dr. Allen offers a different theory. These rounded photographs of the play and action of muscle suggest that the history of animal movement is the development of the rear limbs for use as a spring and source of energy and of the fore limbs as a basis of support. For the race-horses, the fore limbs are vaulting poles. To them, when the hind-quarters have given RUNNING STRAIGHT HIGH JUMP. the entire series, with the view of eliciting and illustrating the laws of animal motion and muscular action shown by it. Dr. Allen has published his conclusions as a preface to the memoir on the series, in which will also appear the results reached by other investigators. These conclusions somewhat redeem the un¬ aided human eye from failure to catch the principle of animal locomotion. The apparent spring from the fore foot, which was the most conspicuous revelation of the photographs of their powerful impulse, he passes ; on them he balances; and from them he moves on to the next gathering launch of his haunches. Through generations of adaptation, the slender, “ clean ” fore leg has become a straight but springy col¬ umn of support. The great muscular system of the shoulder is, in Dr. Allen’s view, little able to give the leg impulse, and is arranged for sup¬ port about the firm shoulder-bones which hug the spine — the horse has no collar-bone to smash like a bow bent beyond its limits, as his

Page 365

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE FHOTOGRAPHS. 361 rider’s does when both go headlong in an ugly cropper. These muscles catch and diffuse the shock with which a horse in his forward stride lands on his fore legs. Each joint, which rolls so simply with smooth surfaces in animals less highly organized for speed, has become in the horse tongued and grooved at elbow, wrist, and knuckle, — to apply to shoulder,” ‘‘ knee,” and “ pastern ” joints their human analogues, — the fore hoof has widened to a larger support than the hind, largest of all in draught-horses, where the fore feet are the fulcrum on which the push of the hind-quarters turns, until the straight elastic column is equal to its task, breaking, if at all, at the springy joint whose flex carries off the shock of impact even in the rushing descent in the figure on page 367. The breathless instant which every child knows on a rocking-horse, and which any one of vivid memory for childhood will recall, when doubt conies whether this time rocker and rider are not going to pitch forward on their noses, and the settling back in safety on the hind rockers, illustrate very fairly the swing by which a horse passes from stride to stride — with the advantage in the horse that he swings his hind rockers forward as his body launches on past the perpendicular support of the fore leg, until this too has passed from under the center of gravity and the hind legs are ready in place to offer support for the next stride. For this impulse, the hind-quarter riv¬ ets into the back-bone, whose lumbar vertebrae can double like a curving spring under the pull of the great system of muscles whose sheath¬ ing swell is so plainly apparent in the figure on page 367 as the horse flings his weight over the hurdle. How far this spring of the loins can go stands graphically forth in the figure on page 367. The buck, first with one foot and then with both, the return to the ground, and the vicious lash behind, fall well short of half a second; but there is timeinthis to show at once how rigid and how flexible is this mechanism. Or, as Dr. Allen says, with a sci¬ entific elegance and accuracy no layman can hope to equal in touching at a safe remove upon this frequent object of the paragraph er’s pen, “ The excursus of the hind legs is de¬ pendent upon the flexibility of the lumbar ver¬ tebrae.” So, too, as an elastic bow suddenly and strongly bent has a tendency to spring to one side and another, the horse’s rear limbs, taken as a whole, tend to spring out ; and it is this spread outward of the stifle or upper joint

Page 366

PIGEON, FLYING. -o’.

Page 367

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. 363 AMERICAN EAGLE, FLYING. and bend inward of the back or knee ” which gives the ‘‘ stifle action ” whose presence is accepted as the sign of speed present or to be transmitted. In a dog moving at full speed, the back, in furnishing these impulses, doubles like a bent bow, giving those curious foreshortened curves which at swift intervals turn a coursing hound in all appearance to a rolling ball as one rides hard behind; and in more than one instance these photographs show that the impulse of the hind legs is strong enough to keep the fore legs busy through two or three steps as the dog goes balancing forward, shot on by the curving spring of back-bone, haunch, and hind leg. Such a view of animal movement has its support. Dr. Allen urges, to summarize his views, in the circumstance that the earliest progression was by the hind legs alone, still apparent in the kangaroo, and yet more striking in the earliest animals. If the path by which vertebral movement has developed be followed, a regular sequence appears, be¬ ginning with lizards like the salamander, whose legs are spread straight out on each side and move independently. By de¬ grees and by pairs, first back and then fore, the legs of quadrupeds turn downwards until they have gone through all the successive angles, and reach in man the possibility of fore and aft extension. Just as a series of angles can be drawn beginning with the reptile prone and moving up by a growing angle until man stands at a right angle with the ground, so the legs spread flat in lizards of an early type slowly crook down until they are bent under the crocodile, extend straight down, bent a quarter circle around, below higher quadrupeds, and can at last be placed in a direct line with the trunk in man. Fer THROWING A TWENTY-POUND ROCK.

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364 ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. contra.^ the bird, which is a slip backwards, a no thoroughfare ” in the ascending series of creation, bends its wings upward to the re¬ verse angle of the quadruped. All the progress of specialized motion, as it grows from the simplicity of the hop, through the leap, the canter, the run, the trot, an artificial gait, and reaches in the walk the most intricate of all natural motions, preserves lift and impulse in the figure on page 366, such a swing of the rider as suggests that the fore leg as it left the ground has given an impulse of its own. May it not be that while the hind¬ quarters in a sense overcome inertia, and start the stride, the muscular office of the fore¬ quarters is to preserve it ? But apart from scientific results whose full measure can be known only after the careful BASEBALL-THROWING. from hind-quarters and the spring-balance and moving support of fore. This theory of animal motion being a re¬ action from the first position assumed on the subject, it is not impossible that the ultimate decision will rest somewhere between. With¬ out assuming to pass upon an issue whose decision requires special training, I question whether any one who has felt, under the edges of his saddle-leathers, the powerful action of a horse’s fore-quarters at high speed will be ready to admit that these surging muscles merely stiffen and hold in place the bending fore leg. An observant eye will catch also. study by many investigators of these plates, they have an interest of their own in the light they give the ordinary observer, and still more the artist, upon the usual facts of nature. Flight is a daily puzzle, and the instantaneous photographs of the pigeon and the American eagle (pp. 362, 363) tell more of the secrets of flight than any group of illustrations accessi¬ ble outside of a special paper or two in ‘‘ trans ¬ actions.” The sharp stroke and long recover” which has revolutionized college boating be¬ cause it used speed and a sharp catch ” where force was exerted, and wasted none of the en¬ ergy of action in hasty preparation, is apparent

Page 369

ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. 365 in the oarage through the air of each of these birds. In every flying-machine, the recover ” is all the battle. The lifting stroke is easily dealt, but to get the wing back has over¬ taxed the invention of two centuries devoted to the problem. In the bird, through all the period in which the pinion is brought for¬ ward for recovery, — and this occupies three- fifths of the time employed in the acts, — the wing slides along tail-end down, front edge raised, and the bird passes up kite-fashion on the impulse which the stroke has given. The real recover only begins when the head has been almost hidden by the arched and hood¬ ing wing, and then — every feather whirled about like the slats of a Venetian blind by a single pull of the muscle lying at the quill-pits — the wing is thrown over the head by a single twist of wrist and elbow : feathers are only finger-nails, ready for the next stroke. Up to this point the bird has been rising. Here for an instant it drops, to begin rising again with the next stroke, giving the wavy line of progression, apparent in the series, but lost to the eye in the straight path a pigeon usually seems to follow. The flight in these photographs is nowhere swift. As it is, moving slowly, the downward rush of the pigeon’s wing, catching the air in a curving line like a propeller flange, has out¬ stripped the speed of an instantaneous plate. The bird in this flight is moving through the VoL. XXXIV.— 50. twelve views only a yard or so (one meter) in of a second, — about thirteen feet a second, or a mile in a little over seven minutes. A pigeon under favorable circumstances is equal not to ten but to sixty and eighty miles an hour. The constant habit in drawing a wing is to present it as a plane of simple form and curve, which a wing never is, and to overlook the separate action of the long quill-feathers. The Japanese do neither. The rudest sketch of bird-flight made in Japan by an artisan rather than an artist, which can be picked up for a few cents, gives the wing its double screw curve and opens the moving feathers, which, at every stroke, turn back¬ wards and forwards. To find an eagle whose ragged and opening feathers give the impres¬ sion of life and action apparent in the figure on page 363, we must turn back to the vigorous eagle whose spreading wings fill the space on the coins of an early Ptolemy. Ragged, unkempt, and weak as the great bird was from long confinement when he winged his brief flight across this field with neither ‘‘ the pride nor ample pinion that the Theban eagle bears,” there is still about the stretch and sweep of these great vans, their easy curve and sharp recover, such suggestion of free flight as it would be hard to match in any drawing, familiar though the subject be and tried of scores of pencils. The lesson of this extended series illustrat¬ ing animal motion is in the lower animals one

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366 ANUIAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS, trained eye misses both al¬ together. All are recorded in this accurate portraiture. The complete transforma¬ tion of figure which takes place in batting, from Figs. I to 8 on page 365, is work¬ ed in three-quarters of a sec¬ ond. When we speak of ner¬ vous energy transmitted at a speed of 90 feet (30 me¬ ters) a second or a muscle contracting in from to To"o ^ second, the state¬ ment furnishes a shallow conception of the rapidity with which the trained and coordinated muscles of the human trunk and arms go through the myriad changes which are needed in some act which familiarity has brought to the edge of automatism. Yet in these swiftly changing relations are hidden the secret and revelation of living action as it is. It were bald error, open to ridicule, to suggest that the notation of the pho¬ tograph can compare with the study of these changes in the living figure ; but the data furnished by these se¬ ries of photographs give ma¬ terial for the study of the altering positions of action akin to, and, within just limit and in its proper place and station, comparable with the familiar knowledge obtained by the study of artistic anatomy carried on in the only method in which its lessons can be adequately acquired. It is well to be mindful of the value of the records here presented and provided on a still larger scale by these researches of the Uni¬ versity of Pennsylvania, because a sense of surface and of the precise forces at work be¬ neath it is one of the broad marks of differ¬ ence which separate modern sculpture, if a few examples be excepted, from ancient. The eye grows accustomed to what it sees fully, frequently, and in freedom. Its capacity for appreciation — turning aside from the point of view involved in production to a more gen¬ eral and generous attitude towards art — grows by what it feeds upon. Limited as is the teach¬ ing and narrow the lesson given by these sharply defined shadows of action caught and crystal¬ lized by the camera, they are still broad enough to suggest, I venture to say, a somewhat new measure and method of criticism for much hith¬ erto overlooked and little understood by recep- of mechanism rather than form ; in man it is one rather of form than of mechanism. There is no one of the plates given in this article, for in¬ stance, if the figure on page 360 be excepted, in which a new attitude is presented. There, the sharp ingathering of all four limbs, in a man¬ ner which suggests the cramped legs of a racer between strides, varies widely from the conven¬ tional type of a running jump, which represents the jumper as shooting over the bar, bent, but with arms and legs straight. The others, vig¬ orous as they are in their speaking attitudes, give no new positions; but they emphasize the difficulty of exactly catching and fixing, without the memoranda offered by photo¬ graphs like these, the successive changes of pose and muscle which the simplest physical act brings about or the new posture in which it leaves the body. The series on page 364 cover in time a half second from first to last, and the alterations in posture, which modify so wholly the profile of the figure, are sep¬ arated from each other by a tenth of a sec¬ ond each. The trained eye misses much of the rapid swell and subsidence of muscle and flex of trunk in these brief intervals ; the un-

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ANIMAL LOCOMOTION IN THE MUYBRIDGE PHOTOGRAPHS. 367 tive but untrained laymen ; and art, if it is to succeed at all, must be built up on a broad foundation of lay appreciation. Its plant withers or grows to distorted shapes, if it is denied this soil in deep and well-cultivated measure. The resemblance between the last figure on page 363 and the familiar Mercury of John of Bologna is a trite matter, interest¬ ing, but not important of itself. But I question greatly if, in this most suggestive series, any one will follow from the start in putting the stone the changes which final¬ ly launch the twenty-pound weight, without a new sense, not merely of the light, airy, and splendid figure so long admired, which the sculptor of the Renaissance poised on the breath of the west wind, but of the truth and vigor with which that masterpiece sug¬ gests and expresses swift, con¬ tinuous, and powerful motion. In that appreciative anxiety to admire the right thing at all pain and hazard to past predilection which is at once the curse, characteristic, and, in due season, let one hope, promise, of the present aver¬ age American attitude to¬ wards most art, the training of perception in such matters as these is indispensable to progress in public taste. Suggestions of this order, although nowhere else linked to so remarkable and typical an example, run through the instances of more swift and violent and therefore less fa¬ miliar action in the photo¬ graphs of the running, straight high jump (page 360), and of the back somersault (page 361). In the jump, as in put¬ ting the heavy weight, the models in each case were uni¬ versity students whose success in contests was the best test of their fit proficiency, a circum¬ stance of which the reader can scarcely fail to be sensible, even before he is informed of the fact. The running high jump, involving a high lift rather than a far throw of the body, is less rapid than most violent exertions. From first to last one second elapses for all the il¬ lustrations. With this time the subject is often enough attempted by clever English draughts¬ men; but even here where the camera has least relatively to tell, there is fresh sugges¬ tion in the fashion, already touched upon, in which the gathering of the legs and arms fol¬ lows the same act in the mid-stride of four- footed animals ; and the straight line in which the body shoots towards the ground, tense as a crucifix, gives sense of movement not easily surpassed. But if the jump is slow, the somersault is not. The span of time, from the instant the ground is left until the feet touch the ground again, is less than half a second ; and in this space the body has been whirled around in air through the & i ti JUMPING A HURDI.E — SADDLE. moving arc of a ball shot forward, twisting as it goes. The advance of instantaneous photography in recent years, not less than the excellence of the method employed in this inquiry, has its best measure in the figures of a gray mare taking a hurdle in a single easy flight, smooth and straight as a swallow’s (page 366). The im¬ pulse for this leap has already been given before this series opens. Its character, the swelling strain of the hind-quarters, is better caught in another leap (page 367). The seven exposures which carry the mare from the time

Page 372

368 DIVINE PARADOXES. CANTER-BARE-BACK. her hind feet leave the ground until her fore legs catch it again cover a bare third of a second to each interval). The twenty- one feet of the leap from hind hoof to hind hoof are passed in half a second. So far as mere po¬ sition and outline go, this is an old story, but the modeling, the balance, and the action are all new, and all dependent for interest on eva¬ nescent phases only apparent to the camera’s supersensitive plate. The rigid swell of the powerful muscles which sheathe the thigh and give the lift to both leaps lasts, at longest, less than one-tenth of a second, and yet on the proper portrayal of this rests the vraisem- blance of the flight, the ocular persuasion of a force exerted equal to its successful doing (page 367). M. Taine has somewhere said that human progression lost the possibility of grace when the yielding arch of the foot was shod with the stiff-soled and heeled boot of modern life. Something akin to this will occur at the contrast between the flexile changing grace of the leap bare-back and the same spring in a saddle. The rigid pad of leather and wood, light as it may be, is a bar to free and common action by horse and rider. The full meaning of this shines in each figuring of the horse and his nude bare-back rider on this page. The slender youthful rider and his horse give us again the Greek seat of the frieze of the Parthenon, with its drooping hand and swaying motion, its simplicity of outline, of treatment, and of poise. Nor can I better emphasize and express the value and worth of these photographs of living motion in directing criticism and stimulating apprecia¬ tion, than by saying that so well trained an observer and conscientious a critic as the late Mr. Charles C. Perkins, in his Historical Hand-book of Italian Sculpture,” did not hesi¬ tate to say of Donatello’s equestrian statue, at Padua, of Eramos di Narni, that “it shows the closest study of nature in all but one par¬ ticular; namely, that the horse moves by lift¬ ing his two right legs simultaneously from the ground.” “This error, common to other sculp¬ tors, both ancient and modern,” as Mr. Perkins writes, is the position caught above ; and it is the position selected by keener and better- trained eyes than Mr. Perkins’s, — the position of Verocchio’s colossal bronze of Colleoni at Venice; of more than one of the figures in the Panathenaic procession ; of the statue of Balbus found at Pompeii ; and of that matchless sem¬ blance of a matchless man, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. Talcott Williams. [The illustrations in this article are taken by permission from “Animal Locomotion,” an electro-photo¬ graphic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements, by Eadweard Muybridge, published under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania.] DIVINE PARADOXES. IT seems impossible to understand How Joy and Sorrow may be hand in hand Yet God created when the Earth was born The changeless paradox of Night and Morn. Willia m H. Hay tie.

Page 373

[BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER NUMBER.} THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY.* BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. lutions, and devised legislation to further their intrigues. J By the middle of February, under their inspiration, a bill provid¬ ing for a convention to frame a State constitution was perfect¬ ed and enacted. The governor immediately sent the legislature his message, reminding them that the leading idea of the organic act was to leave the actual bo?id fide inhabitants of the territory “perfectly free to form and regulate their domes¬ tic institutions in their own way,” and vetoing the bill because “the legislature has failed to make any provision to submit the constitution when THE LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION. framed to the consideration of the people for their ratification or rejection.” § The govem- ^PHEyeari857bringsusto adecided change or’s argument was wasted on the predeter- in the affairs of Kansas, but to no less mined legislators. They promptly passed the remarkable occurrences. Active civil war grad- act over his veto. ually ceased in the preceding autumn, — a The cabal was in no mood to be thwarted, result due to the vigorous and impartial ad- and under a show of outward toleration, if not rninistration of Governor Geary and the ar- respect, their deep hostility found such means rival of the inclement winter weather. of making itself felt that the governor began to On the evening of the day the legislature receive insult from street ruffians, and to be- met (January 12th, 1857), the pro-slavery come apprehensive for his personal safety. In party held a large political convention, in such a contest he was single-handed against which it was confessed that they were in a the whole pro-slavery town of Lecompton. hopeless minority in the territory, and the gen- The foundation of his authority was gradually eral conclusion was reached that it was no sapped; and finding himself no longer sus- longer worth while to attempt to form a slave tained at Washington, where the private ap- State in Kansas, t Many of its hitherto ac- peals and denunciations of the cabal were tive leaders immediately and definitely aban- more influential than his ofiicial reports, he doned the struggle. ^ But the Missouri cabal, wrote his resignation on the day of Buchanan’s intrenched in the various territorial and county inauguration, and a week later left the terri- ofiices, held to their design, though their labors tory in secrecy as a fugitive. Thus, in less now assumed a somewhat different character, than three years, three successive Democratic They denounced Governor Geary in their reso- executives had been resisted, disgraced, and t January I2th, 1857, Wilder, Annals of Kansas, p. Overthrown by the political conspiracy which ii3.Bell, Speech in Senate, March i8th, 1858. Appen- the territory; and Kansas had indeed dix to Cong. Globe, p. 137. become, in the phraseology of the day, “ the t Geary to Marcy, January 19th, 1857. Senate Docs., graveyard of governors.” 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Voi. VI., Ex. Doc. 17, p. i^i. T'kI i v ^ $ Geary, Veto Message, February i8th, 1857. Senate . / Kansas imbroglio was a political scan- Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. VI., Ex. Doc. 17, p. ^f such large proportions, and so clearly ^^7- threatened a dangerous schism in the Demo- "" Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886-7. All rights reserved. BUILDING IN WHICH THE LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION WAS DRAWN.

Page 374

37° THE LINCOLiY-DOUGLAS DEBATES. JAMES BUCHANAN, PRESIDENT, 1857-61. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) cratic party, that the new President, Buchanan, and his new Cabinet, proceeded to its treat¬ ment with the utmost caution. The subject was fraught with difficulties not of easy solution. The South, to retain her political supremacy, or even her equality, needed more slave States to furnish additional votes in the United States Senate. To make a slave State of Kansas, the Missouri Compromise had been repealed, and a bogus legislature elected and supported by the successive Missouri invasions and the guerrilla war of 1856. All these devices had, however, confessedly failed of their object. Northern emigration and antislavery senti¬ ment were clearly in possession of Kansas, and a majority of voters stood ready upon fair occasion to place her in the column of free States. It had become a game on the chess¬ board of national politics. The moving pieces stood in Missouri and Kansas, but the

Page 375

THE LINCOLN- DOUGLAS DEBATES. 371 players sat in Washington. In reality it was a tional fame, who had been senator and Sec- double game. There was plot and imder-plot. retary of the Treasury. Walker, realizing fully Beneath the struggle between free States the responsibility and danger of the trust, and slave States were the intrigue and de- after repeated refusals finally accepted upon ception carried on between Northern Dem- two distinct conditions : first, that General GOVERNOR ROBERT J. WALKER. ocrats and Southern Democrats. The Kansas- Nebraska act was a double-tongued statute, and the Cincinnati platform a Janus-faced banner. Momentary victory was with the Southern Democrats, for they had secured the nomination and election of President Buchanan, a “Northern man with Southern ])rinciples.” Determined to secure whatever prestige could be derived from high qualification and 23arty influence, Buchanan tendered the va¬ cant governorship of Kansas to his intimate personal and political friend, Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, a man of great ability and na- Harney should be “ put in special command in Kansas with a large body of troops, and especially of dragoons and a battery,” * and retained there subject to his military direc¬ tions until the danger was over; and second, that he “ should advocate the submission of the constitution to the vote of the people for ratification or rejection.” t This latter had now become a vital point in the political game. The recent action of the territorial legislature and Geary’s already * Walker to Cass, July I5tli, 1857. Senate Docs., ist Sess. 35tli Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 32. + Walker to Cass, Dec. 15th, 1857. Ibid., p. 122.

Page 376

372 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. FKEDEKICIC P. STANTON. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) mentioned veto message were before the President and his Cabinet.* But much more important than this move of the Kansas pieces was the prior de¬ termination of prominent Washington players. During the Kansas civil war and the Presidential campaign of the previous year, by way of offset to the Topeka constitution, both Senator Douglast and Senator Toombs f wrote and introduced in the Senate bills to enable Kansas to form a State constitu¬ tion. The first by design, and the second by accident, contained a clause to sub¬ mit such constitution, when formed, to a vote of the people. Both these bills were considered not only by the Senate Committee on Territories, of which Douglas was chairman, but also by a caucus of Democratic senators. Said Senator Bigler : “ It was held, by those most intelligent on the subject, that in view of all the difficulties sur¬ rounding that Territory, [and] the danger of any e.xperiment at that time of a popular vote, it would be better that there should be no such provision in the Toombs bill ; and it was my understanding, in all the intercourse I had, that that convention would make a constitu¬ tion and send it here without submitting it to the popular vote.”§ This Toombs bill was, after modifi¬ cation in other respects, adopted by Douglas, and duly passed by the Sen¬ ate ; but the House with an opposition majority refused its assent. All these prelimi¬ naries were well known to the Buchanan Cabinet, and of course also to Douglas. It is fair to assume that under such circum¬ stances Walker’s emphatic stipulation was de¬ liberately and thoroughly discussed. Indeed, extraordinary urging had been necessary to induce him to reconsider his early refusals. Douglas personally joined in the solicitation. 1| Because of the determined opposition of his own family. Walker had promised his wife that he would not go to Kansas without her consent; and President Buchanan was so anxious on the point that he personally called on Mrs. Walker and persuaded her to waive her objections. ^ Under influences like these Walker finally accepted the appointment, and the President and Cabinet accepted his condi¬ tions without reserve. He wrote his inaugural address in Washington, using the following language : * Geary to INIarcy, Feb. 21st, 1857. Senate Docs., ist Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. VI., Ex. Doc. 17, p. 178. t March 7th, 1856. f June 25th, 1856. <5 Bigler, Senate Speech, Dec. 9th, 1857. Globe, Part I., p. 21. See also Bigler, Senate Speech, Dec. 21st, 1857. Globe, Part I., p. 113. “ I repeat then as my clear conviction that unless the convention submit the constitution to the vote of all the actual resident settlers, and the election be fairly and justly conducted, the constitution will be and ought to be rejected by Congress.” He submitted this draft of his inaugural to President Buchanan, who read and approved the document and the promise. Secretary Cass wrote his official instructions in accord¬ ance with it. On Walker’s journey West he stopped at Chicago and submitted his inaugu¬ ral to Douglas, who also indorsed his policy.** The new governor fondly believed he had re¬ moved every obstacle to success, and every possibility of misunderstanding or disapproval by the Administration, such as had befallen his predecessors. But President Buchanan either deceived him at the beginning, or betrayed him in the end. With Governor Walker there was sent a new territorial secretary. Woodson, who had II Douglas, Milwaukee Speech, October 13th, i860. IT Walker, Testimony before the Covode Committee. Reports of Committees H. R. ist Sess. 36th Cong., Vol. V., pp. 105, 6. Douglas, Milwaukee Speech, October 13th, i860.

Page 377

THE LINCOLN’-DOUGLAS DEBATES. so often abused his powers during his repeated service as acting governor, was promoted to a more lucrative post to create the vacancy. Frederick P. Stanton, of Tennessee, formerly a representative in Congress, a man of talent and, as the event proved, also a man of cour¬ age, was now made Secretary. Both Walker and Stanton being from slave States, it may be presumed that the slavery question was con¬ sidered safe in their hands. Walker, indeed, entertained sentiments somewhat more valu¬ able to the South in this conjuncture. He be¬ lieved in the balance of power; he preferred that the people of Kansas should make it a slave State ; he was “ in favor of maintaining the equilibrium of the government by giving the South a majority in the Senate, while the North would always necessarily have a majority in the House of Representatives.” * Both also entered on their mission with the feelings entertained by the President and the Democratic party ; namely, that the free-State men were a mis¬ chievous insurrectionary faction, willfully dis¬ turbing the peace and defying the laws. Gradu¬ ally, however, their personal observation con¬ vinced them that this view was a profound error. Governor Walker arrived in the Territory late in May, and it required but short investi¬ gation to satisfy him that any idea of making Kansas a slave State was utterly preposterous. Had everything else been propitious, climate alone seemed to render it impossible. But popular sentiment was also overwhelmingly against it; he estimated that the voters were for a free State more than two to one.f All the efforts of the pro-slavery party to form a slave State seemed to be finally abandoned. If he could not make Kansas a slave State, his next desire was to make her a Democratic State. “ And the only plan to accomplish this was to unite the free-State Democrats with the pro-slavery party, and all those whom I re¬ garded as conservative men, against the more violent portion of the Republicans.”! He therefore sought by fair words to induce the free-State men to take part in the election of delegates to the constitutional convention. His inaugural address, quoting the President’s instructions, promised that such election should be free from fraud and violence; that the delegates should be protected in their delib¬ erations ; and that if unsatisfactory, ‘‘ you may by a subsequent vote defeat the ratification of the constitution.” § This same policy was a few weeks later urged * Walker, Testimony, Covode Committee Report, p. 109. tWalker to Buchanan, June 28th, 1857. Covode Committee Report, p. 115. t Walker, Testimony, Covode Committee Report, p. 107. VoL. XXXIV.— 51. 373 at Topeka, where a mass meeting of the free- State men was called to support and instruct another sitting of the insurrectionary ” free- State legislature elected under the Topeka constitution. The governor found a large as¬ semblage, and a very earnest discussion in progress, whether the ‘‘legislature ” should pur¬ sue only nominal action, such as would in substance amount to a petition for redress of grievances, or whether they should actually or¬ ganize their State government, and pass a com¬ plete code oflaws. The moderate free-State men favored the former, the violent and radical the latter course. When their mass meeting ad¬ journed, they proceeded to the governor’s lodgings and called him out in a speech, in which he renewed the counsels and promises of his inaugural address. “ The legislature,” said he, “ has called a convention to assemble in September next. That constitution they will or they will not submit to the vote of a majority of the then actual resident settlers of Kansas. If they do not submit it, I will join you, fellow-citizens, in lawful opposition to their course. And I cannot doubt, gentlemen, that one much higher than I, the Chief Mag¬ istrate of the Union, will join you in that op¬ position.”! | His invitation to them to participate in the election of a convention produced no ef¬ fect ; they still adhered to their resolve to have nothing to do with any affirmative proceed¬ ings under the bogus laws or territorial legis¬ lature. But the governor’s promise of a fair vote on the constitution was received with favor. “ Although this mass convention,” re¬ ports the governor, “ did not adopt fully my advice to abandon the whole Topeka move¬ ment, yet they did vote down by a large ma¬ jority the resolutions prepared by the more violent of their own party in favor of a com¬ plete State organization and the adoption of a code of State laws.” If the governor was gratified at this result as indicative of probable success in his official ad¬ ministration, he rejoiced yet more in its signifi¬ cance as a favorable symptom of party politics. “ The result of the whole discussion at Topeka,” he reports, “ was regarded by the friends of law and order as highly favorable to their cause, and as the commencement of a great movement essential to success ; viz., the sep¬ aration of the free-State Democrats from the Republicans, who had to some extent hereto¬ fore cooperated under the name of the free- State party.” ** Another party symptom gave vS Walker, Inaugural, May 27th, 1857. Senate Docs . , 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. ii. il Walker, Topeka 'Speech, June 6th, 1857, in “Washington Union ” of June 27th, 1857. Walker to Cass, July 15th, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 27.

Page 378

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 374 the governor equal, if not greater, encourage¬ ment. On the 2d and 3d of July the “ National Democratic” or pro-slavery party of the Terri¬ tory met in convention at Lecompton. The leaders were out in full force. The hopelessness of making Kansas a slave State was once more acknowledged, the governor’s policy indorsed, and a resolution against the submission of the constitution to a vote of the people was laid on the table as a test vote by a vote of forty- two to one.” * The governor began already to look upon his counsels and influence as a turning-point in national destiny. Indeed,” he writes, “it is universally admitted here that the only real question is this : whether Kansas shall be a conservative, constitutional. Demo¬ cratic, and ultimately free State, or whether it shall be a Republican and abolition State; and that the course pursued by me is the only one which will prevent the last most calamitous result, which, in my opinion, would soon seal the fate of the republic.” t In his eagerness to reform the Democratic party of Kansas, and to strengthen the Dem¬ ocratic party of the nation against the assaults and dangers of “ abolitionism,” the governor was not entirely frank ; else he would at the same time have reported, what he was obliged later to explain, that the steps taken to form a constitution from which he hoped so much were already vitiated by such defects or frauds as to render them impossible of pro¬ ducing good fruit. The territorial law ap¬ pointing the election of delegates provided for a census and a registry of voters, to be made by county officers appointed by the territorial legislature. These officers so neglected or failed to discharge their duty, that in nearly half the organized counties of the interior no attempt whatever was made to obtain the census or registration ; | and in the counties lying on the Missouri border, where the pro¬ slavery party was strong, the work of both was exceedingly imperfect, and in many in¬ stances with notorious discrimination against free-State voters. While the disfranchised counties had a comparatively sparse popula¬ tion, the number of voters in them was too considerable to be justly denied their due representation. § The apportionment of dele¬ gates was based upon this defective registra¬ tion and census, and this alone would have given the pro-slavery party a disproportionate power in the convention. But at the election * Walker to Cass, July I5tli, 1857. Senate Docs., ist Sess. 35tli Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 29. t Walker to Cass, July 15th, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 30. t F. P. Stanton’s Speech, Philadelphia, February 8th, 1858. $ “ These fifteen counties in which there was no reg¬ istry gave a much larger vote at the October election, of delegates on the 15th of June, the free- State men, following their deliberate purpose and hitherto unvarying practice of non-con¬ formity to the bogus laws, abstained entirely from voting. “The consequence was that out of the 9250 voters whose names had been registered . . . there were in all about 2200 votes cast, and of these the successful candi¬ dates received 1800.” || “The black Republicans,” reported the gov¬ ernor, “ would not vote, and the free-State Democrats were kept from voting by the fear that the constitution would not be submitted by the convention, and that by voting they committed themselves to the proceeding of the convention. But for my inaugural, circu¬ lated by thousands, and various speeches all urging the people to vote, there would not have been one thousand votes polled in the Territory, and the convention would have been a disastrous failure.” U But this was not the only evil. The appor¬ tionment of the members of the territorial legislature to be chosen the ensuing autumn was also based upon this same defective regis¬ try and census. Here again disproportionate power accrued to the pro-slavery party, and the free-State men loudly charged that it w^as a new contrivance for the convenience of Missouri voters. Governor Walker publicly deplored all these complications and defects; but he counseled endurance, and constantly urged in mitigation that in the end the people should have the privilege of a fair and direct vote upon their constitution. That promise he held aloft as a beacon-light of hope and redress. This attitude and policy, frequently reported to Washington, was not disavowed or discouraged by the President and Cabi¬ net. The governor, however, soon found a storm brewing in another quarter. When the news¬ papers brought copies of his inaugural ad¬ dress, his Topeka speech, and the general report of his Kansas policy back to the Southern States, there arose an ominous chorus of protest and denunciation from the whole tribe of fire-eating editors and poli¬ ticians. What right had the governor to intermeddle ? they indignantly demanded. What call to preach about climate, what busi¬ ness to urge submission of the constitution to popular vote, or to promise his own help to defeat it if it were not submitted; what author- even with the six months’ qualification, than the whole vote given to the delegates who signed the Lecompton constitution on the 7th November last.” — [Walker to Cass, December 15th, 1857. Senate Docs., ist Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 128.] II F. P. Stanton, Speech, Philadelphia, F'eb. 8th, 1858. i[ Walker to Buchanan, June 28th, 1857. Report Covode Committee, p. 118.

Page 379

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. ity to pledge the President and Administration to such a course ? The convention was sover¬ eign, they claimed, could do what it pleased, and no thanks to the governor for his imper¬ tinent advice. The Democratic State Conven¬ tion of Georgia took the matter in hand, and by resolution denounced Walker’s inaugural address, and asked his removal from office. The Democratic State Convention of Missis¬ sippi followed suit, and called the inaugural address an unjust discrimination against the rights of the South, and a dictatorial intermed¬ dling with the high public duty intrusted to the convention. Walker wrote a private letter to Buchanan, defending his course, and adding : “ Unless I am thoroughly and cordially sustained by the Administration here, I cannot control the con¬ vention, and we shall have anarchy and civil war. With that cordial support the convention (a majority of whose delegates I have already seen) will do what is right. I shall travel over the whole Territory, make speeches, rouse the people in favor of my plan, and see all the delegates. But your cordial support is in¬ dispensable, and I never would have come here, unless assured by you of the cordial cooperation of all the Federal officers. . . . The extremists are trying your nerves and mine, but what can they say when the con¬ vention submits the constitution to the people and the vote is given by them ? But we must have a slave State out of the south-western Indian Territory, and then a calm will follow ; Cuba be acquired with the acquies¬ cence of the North; and your Administration, having in reality settled the slavery question, be regarded in all time to come as a re-signing and re-sealing of the constitution. ... I shall be pleased soon to hear from you. Cuba! Cuba I (and Porto Rico, if possible) should be the countersign of your Administration, and it will close in a blaze of glory.” * The governor had reason to be proud of the full and complete reendorsement which this appeal brought from his chief. Under date of July 1 2th, 1857, the President wrote in reply : “ On the question of submitting the constitution to the bond fide resident settlers of Kansas I am willing to stand or fall. In sustaining such a principle we can¬ not fall. It is the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill ; the principle of popular sovereignty ; and the principle at the foundation of all popular government. The more it is discussed the stronger it will become. Should the convention of Kansas adopt this principle, all will be settled harmoniously, and with the blessing of Providence you will return triumphantly from your arduous, important, and responsible mission. The stric¬ tures of the Georgia and Mississippi conventions will then pass away and be speedily forgotten. In regard to Georgia, our news from that State is becoming better every day; we have not yet had time to hear much from Mississippi. Should you answer the resolutions of the latter, I would advise you to make the great principle of the submission of the constitution to the bond fide residents of Kansas conspicuously prominent. On this you will be irresistible.” t The delegates to the constitutional conven¬ tion, chosen in June, met according to law ^ Walker to Buchanan, June 28th, 1857. Report Covode Committee, pp. 117-119. 375 at Lecompton, September 7th, and, having spent five days in organization, adjourned their session to October 19th. The object of this recess was to await the issue of the general election of October 5th, at which a full territorial legislature, a delegate to Congress, and various county officers were to be chosen. By the action of the free-State men this election was now made a turning-point in Kan¬ sas politics. Held together as a compact party by their peaceful resistance to the bogus laws, emigration from the North had so strengthened their numbers that they clearly formed a ma¬ jority of the people of the Territory. A self- constituted and self-regulated election held by them for sundry officials under their Topeka constitution revealed a numerical strength of more than seven thousand voters. Feeling that this advantage justified them in receding from their attitude of non-conformity, they met in convention toward the end of August, and while protesting against the “ wicked apportionment,” resolved that ‘‘ whereas Gov¬ ernor Walker has repeatedly pledged himself that the people of Kansas should have a full and fair vote, before impartial judges, at the election to be held on the first Monday in October, ... we the people of Kansas, in mass convention assembled, agree to partici¬ pate in said election.” | Governor Walker executed his public prom¬ ises to the letter. A movement of United States troops to Utah was in progress, and about two thousand of these were detained by order until after election day. Stationed at ten or twelve different points in the Territory, they served by their mere presence to overawe dis¬ order, and for the first time in the history of Kansas the two opposing parties measured their strength at the ballot-box. The result was an overwhelming triumph for the free- State party. For delegate in Congress, Ran¬ som, the Democratic candidate, received 3799 votes; Parrott, the Republican candi¬ date, 7888, — a free-State majority of 4089. For the legislature, even under the defective apportionment, the council stood 9 free-State members to 4 Democrats, and the House 24 free-State members to 15 Democrats. That the pro-slavery cabal would permit power to slip from their grasp without some extraordinary effort was scarcely to be ex¬ pected. When the official returns were brought from the various voting-places to the govern¬ or’s office, there came from Oxford, a single precinct in Johnson county, a roll of paper, 40 or 50 feet long, containing names as thickly t Buchanan to Walker. July 12th, 1857. Report Covode Committee, p. 112. t Wilder, p. 133.

Page 380

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 376 as they could be written,”* and a large part of which were afterward discovered to have been literally copied from an old Cincinnati directory. This paper purported to be a re¬ turn of 1628 votes for the ii pro-slavery can¬ didates for the legislature in that district, and if counted, it would elect 8 members of the House and 3 of the council by a trifling majority, and thereby change the political complexion and power of the legislature. In¬ spection showed the document to be an at¬ tempt to commit a stupendous fraud; and after visiting the locality (“a village with six houses, including stores, and without a tav¬ ern ”)t and satisfying himself of the impossi¬ bility of such a vote from such a place. Gov¬ ernor Walker rejected the whole return from Oxford precinct for informality, and gave certificates of election to the free-State candi¬ dates elected as appeared by the other regular returns. A similar paper from McGee county with more than 1200 names was treated in like manner.^ Judge Cato issued his writ of mandamus to compel the governor to give certificates to the pro-slavery candidates, but without success. The language of Governor Walker and Secretary Stanton in a proclama¬ tion announcing their action deserves remem¬ brance and imitation. “ The consideration that our own party by this de¬ cision will lose the majority in the legislative assembly does not make our duty in the premises less solemn and imperative. The elective franchise would be ut¬ terly valueless, and free government itself would receive a deadly blow, if so great an outrage as this could be shielded under the cover of mere forms and technicalities. We cannot consent in any manner to give the sanction of our respective official positions to such a transaction. Nor can we feel justified to relieve ourselves of the proper responsibility of our offices, in a case where there is no valid return, by submitting the question to the legislative assembly, and in that very act giving the parties that might claim to be chosen by this spurious vote the power to decide upon their own election.” $ The decisive free-State victory, the Oxford and McGee frauds, || and the governor’s fear¬ less action in exposing and rejecting them, called forth universal comment; and under the new political conditions which they re- * Stanton, Speech at Philadelphia, F ebruary 8th, 1 858. t Walker, Proclamation, October 19th, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 103. t Ibid., pp. 104-6. $ Walker, Proclamation, October 19th, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Ex. Doc. 8, p. 104. 11 The ingenuity which evolved 1600 Kansas votes from an old Cincinnati directory and 1200 more from an uninhabited county, was not exhausted by that pro¬ digious labor. The same influences, and perhaps the same manipulators, produced a companion piece known by the name of the “ candle-box fraud.” At the elec¬ tion of January 4th, 1858, for officers under the Le- compton constitution, the returns from Delaware vealed, created intense interest in the further proceedings of the Lecompton Constitutional Convention. That body reassembled accord¬ ing to adjournment on the 19th of October. Elected in the preceding June without any participation by free-State voters, the mem¬ bers were all pro-slavery, and were presided over by John Calhoun (the same man who, as county surveyor of Sangamon county, Illi- ^ nois, employed Abraham Lincoln as his dep¬ uty in 1832). At the June election, while he and his seven colleagues from Douglas county were yet candidates for the convention, they had cir¬ culated a written pledge that they would sub¬ mit the constitution to the people for ratifica¬ tion. This attitude was generally maintained by them till the October election. But when by that vote they saw their faction overwhelmed with defeat, they and others undertook to maintain themselves in power by an unprece¬ dented piece of political jugglery. Calhoun, who was surveyor-general of the Territory, employed a large number of subordinates, and was one of the most able and unscrupulous leaders in the pro-slavery cabal. A large ma¬ jority of the convention favored the establish¬ ment of slaver)^; only the question of a popular vote on ratification or rejection excited con¬ troversy. An analysis shows that the principle of del¬ egated authority had become attenuated to a remarkable degree. The defective registration excluded a considerable number (estimated at about one-sixth) of the legal voters. Of the 9250 registered, only about 2200 voted, all told. Of these 2200, only about 1800 votes were given for the successful candidates for delegate. Of the whole 60 delegates alleged to have been chosen, “but 43,” says a Com¬ mittee Report, “participated in the work of the convention. Ses¬ sions were held without a quorum, and the yeas and nays often show that but few above thirty were pres¬ ent. It is understood, and not denied, that but 28 of these — less than half of a full house of 60 — decided the pro-slavery or free-State question ; and upon the question of submission of their work to the will of the people, the pro-slavery party carried the point by a majority of two votes only. It was quite in keeping Agency underwent such suspicious handling that an investigating commission of the Legislature, by aid of a search-warrant, found them secreted in a candle-box buried under a wood-pile near Calhoun’s “ Surveyor- General’s office” at Lecompton. A forged list of 379 votes had been substituted for the original memoran¬ dum of only 43 votes cut from the certificate of the judges; the votes on the forged list being intended for the pro-slavery candidates. During the investiga¬ tion Calhoun was arrested, but liberated by Judge Cato on habeas corpus^ after which he immediately went to Missouri, and from there to Washington. The details and testimony are found in House Com. Reports, ist Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. III., Report No. 377.

Page 381

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, 377 with the character of this body and its officers to find the journal of its proceedings for the last days miss¬ ing.” Their allotted task was completed in a short session of about three weeks ; the convention adjourned November 7th, 43 of the 50 dele¬ gates present having been induced to sign the constitution. When the document was pub¬ lished the whole country was amazed to see what perversity and ingenuity had been em¬ ployed to thwart the unmistakable popular will. Essentially a slave-State constitution of the most pronounced type, containing the declaration that the right of property in slaves is before and higher than any constitutional sanction,” it made the right to vote upon it depend on the one hand on a test oath to “ support this constitution ” in order to repel conscientious free-State voters, and on the other hand on mere inhabitancy on the day of election to attract nomadic Missourians ; it postponed the right to amend or alter for a period of seven years ; it kept the then ex¬ isting territorial laws in force until abrogated by State legislation ; it adopted the late Ox¬ ford fraud as a basis of apportionment ; it gave to Calhoun, the presiding officer, power to make the precincts, the judges of election, and to decide finally upon the returns in the vote upon it, besides many other questionable or inadmissible provisions. Finally the form of submission to popular vote to be taken on the 2ist of December was prescribed to be, “con¬ stitution with slavery ” or “ constitution with no slavery,” thus compelling the adoption of the constitution in any event. There is a personal and political mystery underlying this transaction which history will probably never solve. Only a few points of information have come to light, and they serve to embarrass rather than aid the solution. The first is that Calhoun, although the friend and protege of Douglas, and also himself personally pledged to submission, came to the governor and urged him to join in the new programme as to slavery, — alleging that the Administration had changed its policy, and now favored this plan, — and tempted Walker with a prospect of the Presidency if he would concur. W alker declared such a change impossible, and indig¬ nantly spurned the proposal, f The second is that one Martin, a department clerk, was, after confidential instructions from Secretary ^ Minority Report, Select Com. of Fifteen. Report No. 377, page 109, Vol. III., H. R. Reports, ist Sess. 35th Cong. This “ missing link,” no less than the remaining portion of the journal printed in the proceedings of the investigating committee, is itself strong circumstantial proof of the imposture underlying the whole transac¬ tion. Many sections of the completed constitution are not even mentioned in the journal: it does not contain Thompson and Secretary Cobb, of Buchan¬ an’s Cabinet, sent to Kansas in October, osten¬ sibly on department business ; that he spent his time in the lobby and the secret caucuses of the convention. Martin testifies that these Cabinet members favored submission, but that Thompson wished it understood that he was unwilling to oppose the admission of Kansas “ if a pro-slavery constitution should be made and sent directly to Congress by the conven¬ tion.” f A wink was as good as a nod with that body, or rather with the cabal which con¬ trolled it; and after a virtuous dumb-show of opposition, it made a pretense of yielding to the inevitable, and acted on the official suggestion. This theory is the more plausible because Mar¬ tin testifies further that he himself drafted the slavery provision which was finally adopted.§ The third point is that the President inexcus¬ ably abandoned his pledges to the governor and adopted this Cobb-Thompson-Calhoun contrivance, instead of keeping his word and dismissing Calhoun, as honor dictated. This course becomes especially remarkable in view of the fact that the change did not occur un¬ til after Walker’s rejection of the fraudulent Oxford returns, which action placed the legis¬ lative power of the Territory in the hands of the newly elected free-State legislature, as al¬ ready related. On the same day (October 2 2d, 1857) on which Walker and Stanton issued their proclamation rejecting the fraudulent re¬ turns, President Buchanan wrote another high¬ ly commendatory letter to Governor Walker. As it has never before been published, its full text Avill have special historical interest. “Washington City, 22d October, 1857. “ My Dear Sir : I have received your favor of the tenth instant by Captain Pleasonton and am rejoiced to learn from you, what I had previously learned from other less authentic sources, that the convention of Kansas will submit the constitution to the people. It is highly gratifying that the late election passed off so peacefully ; and I think we may now fairly anticipate a happy conclusion to all the difficulties in that Terri¬ tory. Your application for a month’s leave of absence has been granted to commence after the adjournment of the convention. During its session your presence will be too important to be dispensed with. I shall be glad to see you before you publish anything. The whole affair is now gliding along smoothly. Indeed, the revulsion in the business of the country seems to have driven all thoughts of ‘ bleeding Kansas ’ from the public mind. When and in what manner anything shall be published to revive the feeling, is a question of serious importance. I am persuaded that with every passing day the public are more and more disposed to the submission clause of the schedule, and the authen¬ ticity of the document rests upon the signatures and the certificate of John Calhoun. t Walker, Testimony. Report Covode Committee, p. no. j: Martin, Testimony. Report Covode Committee, P- 159- ^ Report Covode Committee, pp. 170-1.

Page 382

378 THE LINCOLN-DO UGLAS DEB A TES. do you justice. You certainly do injustice to Harris, the editor of the ‘ Union. ’ In the beginning I paid some attention to the course of the paper in regard to your¬ self, and I think it was unexceptionable : I know he stood firm amidst a shower of abuse from the extrem¬ ists. I never saw nor did I ever hear of the communi¬ cation published in the ‘Union’ to which you refer, and Harris has no recollection of it. I requested him to find me the number and send it to me ; but this he has not done. He is not responsible in any degree for the non-publication of the letters to which you refer.* I knew nothing of them until after the receipt of yours ; and upon inquiry I found their publication had been prevented by Mr. Cobb under a firm conviction that they would injure both yourself and the Administra¬ tion. Whether he judged wisely or not I cannot say, for I never saw them. That he acted in fairness and friendship I have not a doubt. He was anxious that General Whitfield should publish a letter and prepared one for him, expecting he would sign it before he left. He sent this letter after him for his approval and sig¬ nature ; but it has not been returned. I know not what are its contents. General W. doubtless has the letter in his possession. Beyond all question, the motives of Mr. Cobb were proper. Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Bache have just left me after a half hour’s very agreeable conversation. Mrs. Walker desires me to inform you the family are all well and sends her love. “ From your friend, very respectfully, “James Buchanan. “ Hon. Robert J. Walker.”! The question naturally occurs, for whom did Calhoun speak when he approached Gov¬ ernor Walker, offering him the bribe of the Presidency and assuring him that the Admin¬ istration had changed its mind ? That was be¬ fore, or certainly not long after, the probable receipt of this letter in Kansas, for the gov¬ ernor left the Territory (November 1 6th) about one week after the adjournment of the Le- compton convention. The question becomes still more pressing owing to Governor Walker’s testimony that when he reached Washington, ^Hhe President himself distinctly and emphat¬ ically assured me that he had not authorized anybody to say that he had approved of that [Lecompton]programme.”| On whose author¬ ity, then, did Calhoun declare that the Admin¬ istration had changed its mind ? This query brings us to another point in President Buchanan’s letter of October 2 2d, in which he mentions that Secretary Cobb, of his Cabinet, had without his knowledge sup¬ pressed the publication of certain letters in the Washington Union.” These were, as we learn elsewhere, § the letters in which some of the Kansas pro-slavery leaders repeated their declaration of the hopelessness of any further contest to make Kansas a slave State. Why this secret suppression by Secretary Cobb ? There is but one plausible explanation of this whole chain of contradictions. The con¬ clusion is almost forced upon us that a Cabinet intrigue, of which the President was kept in ignorance, was being carried on, under the very eyes of Mr. Buchanan, by those whom he him¬ self significantly calls “ the extremists,” — a plot to supersede his own intentions and make him falsify his own declarations. As in the case of similar intrigues by the same agents a few years later, he had neither the wit to perceive nor the will to resist. The protest of the people of the Territory against the extraordinary action of the Le- compton convention almost amounted to a popular revolt. This action opened a wide door to fraud, and invited Missouri over to an invasion of final and permanent conquest. Governor Walker had quitted the Territory on his leave of absence, and Secretary Stanton was acting governor. “The people in great masses,” he says, “ and the legislature that had been elected, with almost an unanimous voice called upon me to convene. the legisla¬ ture, in order that they might take such steps as they could to counteract the misfortune which they conceived was about to befall them in the adoption of this constitution. ”|| As already stated, Stanton had come to Kansas with the current Democratic prejudices against the free- State party. But his whole course had been frank, sincere, and studiously impartial, and the Oxford fraud had completely opened his eyes. “ I now discovered for the first time to my entire satisfaction why it was that the great mass of the people of the Territory had been dissatisfied with their government, and were ready to rebel and to throw it off.”^ Hav¬ ing, like Walker, frequently and earnestly as¬ sured the people of their ultimate right to ratify or reject the work of the convention, he was personally humiliated by the unfairness and trickery of which that body was guilty. Un¬ der the circumstances he could not hesitate in his duty. By proclamation he convened the new legislature in extra session. The members respected the private pledge * “Dr. Tebbs and General Whitfield a month since Dr. Tebbs’s letter. I shall in due time expose that left very strong letters for publication with the editor transaction.” — [R. J. Walker to James Buchanan, of the ‘Union’ which he promised to publish. His October, 1857. Extract.] breach of this promise is a gross outrage. If not pub- + For this autograph letter and other interesting lished immediately our success in convention materi- manuscripts, we are indebted to General D untan S. ally depends on my getting an immediate copy at Walker, a son of the governor, now residing in Wash- Lecompton. My friends here all regard now the ington, D. C. ‘Union’ as an enemy and encouraging by its neu- ! Report Covode Committee, p. iii. trality the fire-eaters not to submit the constitution. $ John Bell, Senate Speech, March i8th, 1858. Very well, the facts are so clear that I can get along |1 Stanton, Philadelphia Speech, Feb.8lh, 1858. without the ‘Union,’ but he had no right to suppress ^ Ibid.

Page 383

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, 379 they had given him to engage in no general legislation ; but provided by law for an inves¬ tigation of the Oxford and McGee frauds, and for an election to be held on January 4th, 1858 (the day fixed by the Lecompton con¬ stitution for the election of State officers and a State legislature), at which the people might vote for the Lecompton constitution or against it. Thus in course of events two separate votes were taken on this notorious document. The first, provided for in the instrument it¬ self, took place on the 21st of December, 1857. Detachments of troops were stationed at several points ; the free-State men abstained from voting; the election was peaceable; and in due time Calhoun proclaimed that 6143 ballots had been cast for the constitution with slavery,” and 589 for the constitution with no slavery.” But the subsequent legisla¬ tive investigation disclosed a gross repetition of the Oxford fraud, and proved the actual majority, in a one-sided vote, to have been only 3423. The second election occurred on January 4th, 1858, under authority of the legis¬ lative act. At this election the pro-slavery party voted for the State officers, but in its turn abstained from voting on the constitu¬ tion, the result being, — against the Lecompton constitution, 10,226; for the Lecompton con¬ stitution with slavery, 138 ; for the Lecompton constitution without slavery, 24.* * * § This emphatic rejection of the Lecompton constitution by a direct vote of the people of Kansas sealed its fate. We shall see further on what persistent but abortive efforts were made in Congress to once more galvanize it into life. The free-State party was jubilant ; but the pro-slavery cabal, foiled and checked, was not yet dismayed or conquered. For now there was developed, for the first time in its full proportions, the giant pro-slavery intrigue which proved that the local conspiracy of the Atchison- Missouri cabal was but the image and fraction of a national combination, find¬ ing its headquarters in the Administration, first of President Pierce, and now of President Bu¬ chanan; working as patiently and insidiously as the order of Jesuits in the Church of Rome, through successive efforts to bring about a practical subversion of the whole theory and policy of the American government. It linked the action of Border Ruffians, presidential as¬ * Under an Act of Congress popularly known as the “ English Bill,” this same Lecompton constitution was once more voted upon by the people of Kansas on August 2d, 1858, with the following result: for the proposition, 1788; against it, 11,300.— [Wilder, pp. 186-8.] t Cass to Stanton, December 2d, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Doc. 8, p. 112. t Cass to Stanton, December 8th, 1857. Ibid., p. 1 13. § Cass to Denver, December 1 1 th, I % 7* Ibid.,p. 120. pirants, senates, courts, and cabinets into effi¬ cient cooperation; leading up, step by step, from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, through the Nebraska bill, border conquest, the Dred Scott decision, the suppression of the submission clause in the Toombs bill, and the extraordinary manipulation and machinery of the Lecompton constitution, toward the final overthrow of the doctrine that all men are created equal,” and the substitution of the dogma of property in man ; toward the judi¬ cial construction that property rights in, hum an beings are before and above constitutional sanction, and that slavery must find protection and perpetuity in States as well as in Terri¬ tories. The first weather-sign came from Washing¬ ton. On the day after Acting Governor Stanton convened the October Legislature in special session, and before news of the event reached him. Secretary Cass transmitted to him ad¬ vance copies of the President’s annual mes¬ sage, in which the Lecompton constitution was indorsed in unqualified terms, t A week later he was admonished to conform to the views of the President in his official con¬ duct. J At this point the State Department became informed of what had taken place, and the acting governor had short shrift. On De¬ cember I ith Cass wrote to J. W. Denver, Esq. : ‘‘You have already been informed that Mr. Stanton has been removed from the office of Secretary of the Territory of Kansas and that you have been appointed in his place.” Cass further explained that the President “ was surprised to learn that the secretary and act¬ ing governor had, on the 1st of December, issued his proclamation fora special session of the territorial legis¬ lature on the 7th instant, only a few weeks in advance of its regular time of meeting, and only fourteen days before the decision was to be made on the question submitted by the convention. This course of Mr. Stanton, the President seriously believes, has thrown a new element of discord among the excited people of Kansas, and is directly at war, therefore, with the peaceful policy of the Administration. For this reason he has felt it his duty to remove him.” § Walker, already in Washington on leave of absence, could no longer remain silent. He was as pointedly abandoned and disgraced by the Administration as was his subordinate. In a dignified letter justifying his own course, which, he reminded them, had never been criti¬ cised or disavowed, he resigned the governor¬ ship. “ From the events occurring in Kansas as well as here,” he wrote, “ it is evident that the question is passing from theories into practice ; and that as gov¬ ernor of Kansas I should be compelled to carry out new instructions, differing on a vital question from those received at the date of my appointment.^ Such instructions I could not execute consistently with my views of the Federal Constitution, of the Kansas and

Page 384

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, 380 Nebraska bill, or with my pledges to the people of Kansas.” “ The idea entertained by some that I should see the Federal Constitution and the Kansas- Nebraska bill overthrown and disregarded, and that, playing the part of a mute in a pantomime of ruin, I should acquiesce by my silence in such a result, espe¬ cially where such acquiescence involved, as an immedi¬ ate consequence, a disastrous and sanguinary civil war, seems to me most preposterous.” * The conduct and the language of Walker and Stanton bear a remarkable significance when we remember that they had been citi¬ zens of slave States and zealous Democratic partisans, and that only hard practical experi¬ ence and the testimony of their own eyes had forced them to join their predecessors in the political graveyard.” The ghosts on the banks of the Styx,” said Seward, constitute a cloud scarcely more dense than the spirits of the departed governors of Kansas, wander¬ ing in exile and sorrow for having certified the truth against falsehood in regard to the elections between Freedom and Slavery in Kansas.” t THE REVOLT OF DOUGLAS. The language of President Buchanan’s an¬ nual message, the summary dismissal of Act¬ ing Governor Stanton, and the resignation of Governor Walker, abruptly transferred the whole Lecompton question from Kansas to Washington ; and even before the people of the Territory had practically decided it by the respective popular votes of December 21st, 1857, and January 4th, 1858, it had become the dominant political issue in the Thirty-fifth Congress, which convened on December 7th, 1857. The attitude of Senator Douglas on the new question claimed universal attention. The Dred Scott decision, affirming constitutional sanction and inviolability for slave property in Territories, had rudely damaged his theory. But we have seen how in his Springfield speech he ingeniously sought to repair and rehabilitate “ popular sovereignty ” by the sophism that a master’s abstract constitu¬ tional right to slave property in a Territory was a “ barren and a worthless right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appro¬ priate police regulations,” which could only be supplied by the local territorial legisla¬ tures ; and that the people of Kansas thus still possessed the power of indirect prohibi¬ tion. To invent and utter this sophism for home consumption among his distant constituents on the 1 2th of June (a few days before the Lecompton delegates were elected), and in so unobtrusive a manner as scarcely to attract * Walker to Cass, Dec. 15, 1857. Senate Docs., ist Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Doc. 8, pp. 131, 130. t Seward, Senate Speech, April 30th, 1858. a ripple of public notice, was a light task compared with that which confronted him as Senator, at the meeting of Congress in De¬ cember, in the light of John Calhoun’s doings and powers, of the scandal of the Oxford fraud, and of the indignation of Northern Democrats against the betrayal of Walker and Stanton. One of his first experiences was a personal quarrel with Buchanan. When he reached Washington, three days before the session, he went to the President to protest against his adopting the Lecompton constitution and sending it to Congress for acceptance. Bu¬ chanan insisted that he must recommend it in his annual message. Douglas replied that he would denounce it as soon as it was read. The President, excited, told him to remember ‘‘ that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without be¬ ing crushed. Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives,” added he. “ Mr. President,” re¬ torted Douglas, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.” J In the election of Mr. Buchanan as Presi¬ dent the South had secured a most important ally for the work of pro-slavery reaction. Trained in the belief that the South had hitherto been wronged, he was ready on every occasion to appear as her champion for re¬ dress ; and the Southern politicians were now eager to use his leadership to make their views of public policy and constitutional duty acceptable to the North. Mediocre in talent and feeble in will, he easily submitted to con- ' trol and guidance from a few Southern leaders of superior intellectual force. In his inaugural, he sought to prepare public opinion for obedi¬ ence to the Dred Scott decision, and since its publication he had undertaken to interpret its scope and effect. Replying to a memorial from certain citizens of New England, he declared in a public letter, Slavery existed at that period, and still exists in Kansas, under the Constitution of the United States. This point has at last been finally decided by the highest tribunal known to our laws. How it could ever have been seriously doubted is a mystery.” § In the same letter he affirmed the legality of the Lecompton convention, though he yet clearly expressed ' his expecta¬ tion that the constitution to be framed by it would be submitted to popular vote for “ ap¬ probation or rejection.” But when that convention adjourned, and made known its cunningly devised work, the whole South instantly became clamorous to secure the sectional advantages which lay in its t Douglas, Milwaukee Speech, October 13th, i860. $ Buchanan to Silliman and others, Aug. 15th, 1857. Senate Docs., 1st Sess. 35th Cong., Vol. I., Doc. 8,p. 74.

Page 385

THE LINCOLN-^DOUGLAS DEBATES, 381 exist.” Domestic institutions ” was defined to mean slavery. Free to form and regulate their domestic institutions ” — the phrase employed in the Kansas-Nebraska act — was construed to mean a vote to continue or discontinue slavery. And “if any portion of the inhab¬ itants shall refuse to vote, a fair opportunity to do so having been presented, .... they alone will be responsible for the consequences.” “ Should the constitution without slavery be adopted by the votes of the majority, the rights of prop¬ erty in slaves now in the Territory are reserved. . . . These slaves were brought into the Territory under the Constitution of the United States and are now the property of their masters. This point has at length been finally decided by the highest judicial tribunal of the country.”* However blind Buchanan might be to the fact that this extreme in¬ terpretation shocked and alarmed the sentiment of the North; that JOHN CALHOUN. (FROM A PAINTING BY D. c. FABRONius, AFTER A if iiiado bofore tho Hto presidential PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY, OWNED BY JOSEPH LEDLIE, ESQ.) • • i i t 1 /- -i campaign it would have defeated technical regularity, its strong affirmance of the his own election ; and that if rudely persisted “ property ” theory, and the extraordinary in, it might destroy the Democratic ascend- power it gave to John Calhoun to control ency in the future, the danger was obvious the election and decide the returns. This cind immediately vital to Douglas. His sena- powerful reactionary movement was not lost torial term was about to expire. To secure a upon Mr. Buchanan. He reflected it as un- reelection he must carry the State of Illinois erringly as the vane moves to the change of in 1858, which had on an issue less pro- the wind. Long before the meeting of Congress, nounced than this defeated his colleague the Administration organ, the “ Washington Shields in 1854, and his lieutenant Richard- Union,” heralded and strongly supported the son in 1856. But more than this, his own new departure. When, on the 8th of December, personal honor was as much involved in the President’s annual message was trans- his pledges to the voters of Illinois as had mitted and read, the Lecompton constitution, been that of Governor Walker to the voters as framed and submitted, was therein warmly of Kansas. His double-dealing caucus bar- indorsed and its acceptance indicated as the gain had thus placed him between two fires, — future Administration policy. party disgrace at Washington and popular clis- The language of this message discloses with grace in Illinois. In such a dilemma his choice what subtle ingenuity words, phrases, defini- could not be doubtful. At all risk he must tions, ideas, and theories were being invented endeavor to sustain himself at home, and plied to broaden and secure every coigne He met the encounter with his usual adroit- of vantage, every conquest of the pro-slavery ness and boldness. Assuming that the Presi- reaction. An elaborate argument was made dent had made no express recommendation, to defend the enormities of the Lecompton he devoted his speech mainly to a strong constitution. The doctrine of the Silliman argument of party expediency, repelling with- letter, that “slavery exists in Kansas under out reserve and denouncing without stint the the Constitution of the United States,” was work of the Lecompton convention. assumed as a conceded theory. “In emerg- gtand by the doctrine,” said he, “that leaves the ing irom the condition of territorial depend- people perfectly free to form and regulate their institu- ence into that of a sovereign State,” the people tions for themselves, in their own way, and your party might vote “ whether this important domestic irresistible in power. Abandon institution should or should not continue to * Buchanan, Annual Message, Dec. 8th, 1857. VoL. XXXIV.— 52.

Page 386

382 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. that, great principle, and the party is not worth sav¬ ing, and cannot be saved after it shall be violated. I trust we are not to be rushed upon this question. Why shall it be done ? Who is to be benefited ? Is the South to be the gainer? Is the North to be the gainer ? Neither the North nor the South has the right to gain a sectional advantage by trickery or fraud. . . . But 1 am told on all sides, ‘Oh! just wait; the pro¬ slavery clause will be voted down.’ That does not obviate any of my objections; it does not diminish any of them. You have no more right to force a free-State constitution on Kansas than a slave-State constitution. If Kansas wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it ; if she wants a free-State constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up. Do you suppose, after the pledges of my honor, that I would go for that princi¬ ple and leave the people to vote as they choose, that I would now degrade myself by voting one way if the slavery clause be voted down, and another way if it be voted up? I care not how that vote may stand. . . . Ignore Lecompton; ignore Topeka; treat both those party movements as irregular and void; pass a fair bill — the one that we framed ourselves when we were acting as a unit ; have a fair election — and you will have peace in the Democratic party, and peace throughout the country, in ninety days. The people want a fair vote. They will never be satisfied without it. . . . But if this constitution is to be forced down our throats in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and insult, I will resist it to the last.”'’^ President Buchanan and the strong pro¬ slavery faction which was directing his course paid no attention whatever to this proposal of a compromise. Shylock had come into court to demand his bond, and would heed no pleas of equity or appeals to grace. The elec¬ tions of December 21st and January 4th were held in due time, and with what result we have already seen. John Calhoun counted the votes on January 13th, and declared the Lecompton constitution with slavery ” duly adopted, prudently reserving, however, any announcement concerning the State offi¬ cers or legislature under it. This much ac¬ complished, he hurried away to Washington, where he was received with open arms by the President and his advisers, who at once proceeded with a united and formidable effort to legalize the transparent farce by Congres¬ sional sanction. On the second day of February, 1858, Presi¬ dent Buchanan transmitted to Congress the Lecompton constitution, received from J. Calhoun, Esq.,” and duly certified by him¬ self.” The President’s accompanying special message argues that the organic law of the Territory conferred the essential rights of an enabling act; that the free-State party stood in the attitude of willful and chronic revolu¬ tion ; that their various refusals to vote Avere a sufficient bar to complaint and objection; that the several steps in the creation and work ^ Douglas, Senate Speech, Dec. 9th, 1857. of the Lecompton convention were regular and legal. “ The people of Kansas have, then, ‘ in their own way,’ and in strict accordance with the organic act, framed a constitution and State government, have sub¬ mitted the all-important question of slavery to the people, and have elected a governor, a member to represent them in Congress, members of the State legislature, and other State officers. They now ask ad¬ mission into the Union under this constitution, which is Republican in form. It is for Congress to decide whether they will admit or reject the State which has thus been created. For my own part I am decidedly in favor of its admission and thus terminating the Kansas question.” The vote of January 4th against the con¬ stitution he declared to be illegal because it was ‘‘held after the Territory had been pre¬ pared for admission into the Union as a sovereign State, and when no authority ex¬ isted in the territorial legislature which could possibly destroy its existence or change its character.” His own inconsistency was light¬ ly glossed over. “ For my own part, when I instructed Governor Walker in general terms, in favor of submitting the constitution to the people, I had no object in view ex¬ cept the all-absorbing question of slavery. ... I then believed, and still believe, that under the organic act the Kansas convention were bound to submit this all-important question of slavery to the people. It was never, however, my opinion that independently of this act they would have been bound to submit any portion of the constitution to a popular vote, in order to give it validity.” To the public at large, the central point of interest in this special message, however, was the folloAving dogmatic announcement by the President : “ It has been solemnly adjudged by the highest judi¬ cial tribunal known to our laws that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is, therefore, at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina. Without this, the equality of the sovereign States composing the Union would be violated, and the use and enjoy¬ ment of a territory acquired by the common treasure of all the States would be closed against the people and the property of nearly half the members of the Confederacy. Slavery can, therefore, never be prohib¬ ited in Kansas except by means of a constitutional pro¬ vision, and in no other manner can this be obtained so promptly, if a majority of the people desire it, as by admitting it into the Union under its present constitu¬ tion.” In the light of subsequent history this ex¬ treme pro-slavery programme was not only wrong in morals and statesmanship, but short¬ sighted and fool-hardy as a party policy. But to the eyes of President Buchanan this latter view was not so plain. The country was ap¬ parently in the full tide of a pro-slavery reaction. He had not only been elected Presi¬ dent, but the Democratic party had also re-

Page 387

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. covered its control of Congress. The presid¬ ing officer of each branch was a Southerner. Out of 64 members of the Senate, 39 were Democrats, 20 Republicans, and 5 Americans. Of the 237 members of the House, 131 were Democrats, 92 Republicans, and 14 Ameri¬ cans. Here was a clear majority of 14 in the upper and 25 in the lower House. This was indeed no longer the formidable legislative power which repealed the Missouri Compro¬ mise, but it seemed perhaps a sufficient force to carry out the President’s recommendation. His error was in forgetting that this apparent popular indorsement was secured to him and his party by means of the double construction placed upon the Nebraska bill and the Cin¬ cinnati platform, by the caucus bargain be¬ tween the leaders of the South and the leaders of the N orth. The moment had come when this unnatural alliance needed to be exposed and in part repudiated. The haste with which the Southern leaders advanced step by step, forced every issue, and were now pushing their allies to the wall was, to say the least, bad management, but it grew logically out of their situation. They were swimming against the stream. The leading forces of civilization, population, wealth, com¬ merce, intelligence, were bearing them down. The balance of power was lost. Already there were 16 free States to 15 slave States. Min¬ nesota and Oregon, inevitably destined also to become free, were applying for admission to the Union. Still, the case of the South was not hope¬ less. Kansas was apparently within their grasp. Existing law provided for the forma¬ tion and admission of four additional States to be carved out of Texas, which would cer¬ tainly become slave States. Then there re¬ mained the possible division of California, and a race for the possession of New Mexico and Arizona. Behind all, or, more likely, be¬ fore all except Kansas, in the order of desired events, was the darling ambition of President Buchanan, the annexation of Cuba. As United States Minister to England, he had publicly declared, that if Spain refused to sell us that coveted island, we should be justified in wrest¬ ing it from her by force ; * as presidential candidate he had confidentially avowed, amid the first blushes of his new honor, If I can be instrumental in settling the slavery ques¬ tion upon the terms I have mentioned, and then add Cuba to the Union, I shall, if Presi¬ dent, be willing to give up the ghost, and let Breckinridge take the government.” t Thus, * Ostend Manifesto, Oct. 9th, 1854. t Senator Brown to Adams, Tune i8th, 1856. Am. Conflict, Vol. I., p. 278. t Oflicial proceedings, pamphlet. 383 even excluding the more problematical chances which lay hidden in filibustering en¬ terprises, there was a possibility, easily demon¬ strable to the sanguine, that a decade or two might change mere numerical preponderance from the free to the slave States. Nor could this possibility be waved aside by any affec¬ tation of incredulity. Not alone Mr. Bu¬ chanan, but the whole Democratic party was publicly pledged to annexation. Resolved,” said the Cincinnati platform, “ that the Dem¬ ocratic party will expect of the next Admin¬ istration that every proper effort will be made to insure our ascendency in the Gulf of LIFE-MASK OF STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS, TAKEN BY LEONARD W. VOLK. Mexico ”; while another resolution declaring sympathy with efforts to regenerate ” Cen¬ tral America was no less significant. | But to accomplish such marvels, they must not sit with folded hands. The price of sla¬ very was fearless aggression. They must build on a deeper foundation than presidential elec¬ tions, i3arty majorities, or even than votes in the Senate. The theory of the government must be reversed, the philosophy of the repub¬ lic interpreted anew. In this subtler effort they had made notable progress. By the Kansas- Nebraska act they had paralyzed the legis¬ lation of half a century. By the Dred Scott decision they had changed the Constitution and blighted the Declaration of Independence. By the Lecompton trick they would show that

Page 388

384 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS. in conflict with their dogmas the public will was vicious, and in conflict with their intrigues the majority powerless. They had the Presi¬ dent, the Cabinet, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and, by no means least in the immediate problem, John Calhoun with his technical investiture of far-reaching authority. The country had recovered from the shock of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, mid rewarded them with Buchanan. Would it not equally recover from the shock of the Lecompton constitution ? It was precisely at this point that the bent bow broke. The great bulk of the Democratic party followed the President and his Southern advisers, even in this extreme step ; but to a minority sufficient to turn the scale, the Le¬ compton scandal had become too offensive for further tolerance. In the Senate, with its heavy Democratic majority, the Administration easily secured the passage of a bill to admit Kansas with the Le¬ compton constitution. Out of eleven Demo¬ cratic Senators from free States, only three — Douglas of Illinois, Broderick of California, and Stuart of Michigan — took courage to speak and vote against the measure. In the House of Representatives, however, with a narrower

Page 389

THE LINCOLN^DOUGLAS DEBATES. margin of political power, the scheme, after an exciting discussion running through about two months, met a decisive defeat. A formi¬ dable popular opposition to it had developed itself in the North, in which speeches and let¬ ters from Governor Walker and Secretary Stan¬ ton in denunciation of it were a leading feature and a powerful influence. The lower House of Congress always responds quickly to currents of public sentiment ; but in this case it caught direction all the more promptly because its members were to be chosen anew in the en¬ suing autumn. However much they might have party subordination and success at heart, some of them felt that they could not defend before their antislavery constituencies the Oxford frauds, the Calhoun dictatorship, the theory that slave property is above constitu¬ tional sanction, and the dogma that Kansas is therefore at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South Carolina.” When the test vote was taken on April ist, out of the 53 Democratic representatives from the free States 3 1 voted for Lecompton ; but the re¬ maining 22,* joining their strength to the opposition, passed a substitute, originating with Mr. Crittenden of the Senate, which in substance directed a resubmission of the Le¬ compton constitution to the people of Kan¬ sas ; — if adopted, the President to admit the new State by a simple proclamation; if re¬ jected, the people to call a convention and frame a new instrument. As the October vote had been the turning- point in the local popular struggle in the Territory, this adoption of the Crittenden- Montgomery substitute, by a total vote of 120 to 1 12 in the House of Representatives, was the culmination of the National intrigue to secure Kansas for the South. It was a nar¬ row victory for freedom ; a change of 5 votes would have passed the Lecompton bill and admitted the State with slavery, and a con¬ stitutional prohibition against any change for seven years to come. With his authority to control election returns, there is every reason to suppose that Calhoun would have set up a pro-slavery State legislature, to choose two pro-slavery senators, whom in its turn the strong Lecompton majority in the United States Senate would have admitted to seats; and thus the whole chain of fraud and usur¬ pation back to the first Border-Ruffian inva¬ sion of Kansas would have become complete, legal, and irrevocable, on plea of mere formal and technical regularity. * From California, i ; Illinois, 5; Indiana, 3; New lersey, i ; New York, 2; Ohio, 6; Pennsylvania, 4. For Lecompton : California, i ; Connecticut, 2 ; In¬ diana, 3 ; New Jersey, 2; New York, 10; Ohio, 2; Pennsylvania, ii. VoL. XXXIV.— 53. 3^5 Foiled in its main object, the Administration made another effort which served to break somewhat the force and humiliation of its first and signal defeat. The two houses of Congress having disagreed as stated, and each having once more voted to adhere to its own action, the President managed to make enough con¬ verts among the anti-Lecompton Democrats of the House to secure the appointment of a committee of conference. This committee de¬ vised what became popularly known as the English bill,” a measure which tendered a land grant to the new State, and provided that on the following August 3d the people of Kan¬ sas might vote ‘‘proposition accepted” or “proposition rejected.” Acceptance should work the admission of the State with the Le¬ compton constitution, while rejection should postpone any admission until her population reached the ratio of representation required for a member of the House. “ Hence it will be ar¬ gued,” explained Douglas, “in one portion of the Union that this is a submission of the con¬ stitution, and in another portion that it is not.” The English bill became a law; but the people of Kansas once more voted to reject the “ prop¬ osition ” by nearly ten thousand majority. Douglas opposed the English bill as he had done the Lecompton bill, thus maintaining his attitude as the chief leader of the anti-Lecomp¬ ton opposition. In proportion as he received encouragement and commendation from Re¬ publican and American newspapers, he fell under the ban of the Administration journals. The “Washington Union” especially pursued him with denunciation. “ It has read me out of the Democratic party every other day at least, for two or three months,” said he, “ and keeps reading me out ; and, as if it had not succeeded, still continues to read me out, using such terms as ‘traitor,^ ‘renegade’ ‘de¬ serter,’ and other kind and polite epithets of that nature.” He explained that this arose from his having voted in the Senate against its editor for the office of public printer ; but he also pointed out that he did so because that journal had become pro-slavery to the point of declaring “ that the emancipation acts of New York, of New England, of Pennsylvania, and of New Jersey were unconstitutional, were outrages upon the right of property, were viola¬ tions of the Constitution of the United States.” “The proposition is advanced,” continued he, “ that a Southern man has a right to move from South Carolina with his negroes into Illi¬ nois, to settle there and hold them there as slaves, anything in the constitution and laws of Illinois to the contrary notwithstanding.” Douglas further intimated broadly that the President- and Cabinet were inspiring these editorials of the Administration organ, as part

Page 390

THE LINCOLN--DOUGLAS DEBATES. 386 and parcel of the same system and object with which they were pushing the Lecompton con¬ stitution with its odious “ property ” doctrine ; and declared, if my protest against this inter¬ polation into the policy of this country or the creed of the Democratic party is to bring me under the ban, I am ready to meet the issue.”* He had not long to wait for the issue. The party rupture was radical, not superficial. It was, as he had himself pointed out, part of the contest for national supremacy between slav¬ ery and freedom. From time to time he still held out the olive-branch of an accommo¬ dation, and pointed wistfully to the path of rec¬ onciliation. But the reactionary faction which ruled Mr. Buchanan never forgave Douglas for his part in defeating Lecompton, and more especially for what they alleged to be his treachery to his caucus bargain, in refusing to accept and defend all the logical conse¬ quences of the Dred Scott decision. THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. The anti- Lecompton recusancy of Douglas baffled the plotting extremists of the South and created additional dissension in the Democratic ranks; and this growing Demo¬ cratic weakness and the increasing Repiibli-' can ardor and strength presaged a possible Republican success in the coming Presidential election. While this condition of things gave national politics an unusual interest, the State of Illinois now became the field of a local contest which for the moment held the atten¬ tion of the entire country in such a degree as to involve and even eclipse national issues. In this local contest in Illinois, the choice of candidates on both sides was determined long beforehand by a popular feeling, stronger and more unerring than ordinary individ¬ ual or caucus intrigues. Douglas, as author of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, as a formidable Presidential aspirant, and now again as leader of the anti-Lecompton Democrats, could, of course, have no rival in his party for his own Senatorial seat. Lin¬ coln, who had in 1854 gracefully yielded his justly won Senatorial honors to Trumbull, and who alone bearded Douglas in his own State throughout the whole anti-Nebraska struggle, with anything like a show of equal political courage and intellectual strength, was as inev¬ itably the leader and choice of the Republi¬ cans. Their State convention met in Spring- field on the 1 6th of June, 1858, and, after its ordinary routine work, passed with acclama.- tion a separate resolution, which declared “that Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the Republicans of Illinois for the * Douglas, Senate Speech, March 22d, 1858. United States Senate as the successor of Stephen A. Douglas.” The proceedings of the convention had consumed the afternoon, and an adjournment was taken. At 8 o’clock that same evening, the convention having reassembled in the State-house, Lincoln ap¬ peared before it, and made what was perhaps the most carefully prepared speech of his whole life. Every word of it was written, every sentence had been tested; but the speaker delivered it without manuscript or notes. It was not an ordinary oration, but, in the main, an argument, as sententious and axiomatic as if made to a bench of jurists. Its opening sentences contained a political prophecy which not only became the ground¬ work of the campaign, but heralded one of the world’s great historical events. He said : “ If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object and con¬ fident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. ‘ A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not ex¬ pect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ulti¬ mate extinction ; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawfiil in all the States, old as well as new. North as well as South.” t Then followed his demonstration, through the incidents of the Nebraska legislation, the Dred Scott decision, and present political theories and issues, which would by and by find embodiment in new laws and future legal doctrines. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the language of the Nebraska bill, which declared slavery “ subject to the Constitution,” the Dred Scott decision, which declared that “ subject to the Constitution ” neither Congress nor a temtorial legislature could exclude slavery from a Territory, — the argument presented point by point and step by step with legal precision the silent subver¬ sion of cherished principles of liberty. “ Put this and that together,” said he, “ and we have another nice little niche, which we may ere long see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to ex¬ clude slavery from its limits. . . . Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States. ... We shall lie down,” continued the orator, “pjleasantly t Lincoln-Douglas Deba'tes, p. i.

Page 391

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 387 dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free ; and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.” His peroration was a battle-call : Our cause then must be intrusted to and conducted by its own undoubted friends, those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the na¬ tion mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then to falter now ? — now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent ? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm we shall not fail. Wise counsels may ac¬ celerate or mistakes delay it, but sooner or later the victory is sure to come.” Lincoln’s declaration that the cause of slav¬ ery restriction “ must be intrusted to its own undoubted friends ” had something more than a general meaning. We have seen that while Douglas avowed he did not care “ whether slavery was voted down or voted up ” in the Territories, he had opposed the Lecompton constitution on the ground of its non-sub¬ mission to popular vote, and that this op¬ position caused the Buchanan Democrats to look upon and treat him as an apostate. Many earnest Republicans were moved to strong sympathy for Douglas in this attitude, partly for his help in defeating the Lecompton in¬ iquity, partly because they believed his action in this particular a prelude to further political repentance, partly out of that chivalric gener¬ osity of human nature which sides with the weak against the strong. In the hour of his trial and danger many wishes for his success¬ ful reelection came to him from Republicans even of national prominence. Greeley, in the *See Hollister, “ Life of Colfax,” pp. 119-22. tj. Watson Webb to Bates, June 9th, 1858. MS. t Wentworth to Lincoln, April 19th, 1858. MS. § It is interesting to compare with Lincoln’s a letter from Greeley to a Chicago editor on the same subject : “New York, July 24th, 1858. “ My Friend : You have taken your own course — don’t try to throw the blame on others. You have re¬ pelled Douglas, who might have been conciliated and attached to our own side, whatever he may now find it necessary to say, or do, and, instead of helping us in other States, you have thrown a load upon us that may probably break us down. You knew what wa» the almost unanimous desire of the Republicans of other States ; and you spurned and insulted them. Now go ahead and fight it through. You are in for it, and it does no good to make up wry faces. What I have said in the ‘Tribune ’ since the fight was resolved on, has been in good faith, intended to help you through. If Lincoln would fight up to the work also, you might get through — if he apologizes, and retreats, he is lost, and all oth¬ ers go down with him. His first Springfield speech (at New York “Tribune” as well as in private letters, made no concealment of such a desire. Burlingame in a fervid speech in the House of Representatives called upon the young men of the country to stand by the Douglas men. It was known that Colfax and other influen¬ tial members of the House were holding con¬ fidential interviews with Douglas, the object of which it was not difficult to guess. * There were even rumors that Seward intended to interfere in his behalf. This report was bruited about so industriously that he felt it neces¬ sary to permit a personal friend to write an emphatic denial, so that it might come to Lincoln’s knowledge.! On the other hand, newspapers ventured the suggestion that Lin¬ coln might retaliate by a combination against Seward’s Presidential aspirations. Rival politicians in Illinois were suspicious of each other, and did not hesitate to com¬ municate their suspicions to Lincoln.J Per¬ sonal friends, of course, kept him well informed about these various political under-currents, and an interesting letter of his shows that he received and treated the matter with liberal charity. “ I have never said or thought more,” wrote he, “ as to the inclination of some of our Eastern Repub¬ lican friends to favor Douglas, than I expressed in your hearing on the evening of the 21st April, at the State Library in this place. I have believed — do believe now — that Greeley, for instance, would be rather pleased to see Douglas reelected over me or any other Republican ; and yet I do not believe it is so because of any secret arrangement with Douglas — it is because he thinks Douglas’s superior position, reputation, ex¬ perience, and ability, if you please, would more than compensate for his lack of a pure Republican position, and, therefore, his reelection do the general cause of Republicanism more good than would the election of any one of our better undistinguished pure Republi¬ cans. I do not know how you estimate Greeley, but I consider him incapable of corruption or falsehood. He denies that he directly is taking part in favor of Douglas, and I believe him.t^S Still his feeling con¬ stantly manifests itself in his paper, which, being so the convention) was in the right key; his Chicago speech was bad ; and I fear the new Springfield speech is worse. If he dare not stand on broad Republican ground, he cannot stand at all. That, however, is his business; he is nowise responsible for what I say. I shall stand on the broad anti-slavery ground, which I have occupied for years. I cannot change it to help your fight ; and I should only damage you if I did. You have got your Elephant — you would have him — now shoulder him ! He is not so very heavy, after all. As I seem to displease you equally when I try to keep you out of trouble, and when, having rushed in in spite of me, I try to help you in the struggle you have unwisely provoked, I must keep neutral, so far as may be here¬ after. Yours, (Signed) “ Horace Greeley. “J. Medill, Esq., Chicago, (very) Ill. “What have I ever said in favor of ‘Negro equal¬ ity ’ with reference to your fight ? I recollect nothing. ” The above is from a manuscript copy of Greeley’s letter, and the authors cannot vouch for its literal accu¬ racy, though it bears internal evidence of genuineness.

Page 392

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 388 extensively read in Illinois, is, and will continue to be, a drag upon us. I have also thought that Governor Seward, too, feels about as Greeley does ; but not be¬ ing a newspaper editor, his feeling in this respect is not much manifested. I have no idea that he is, by¬ conversation or by letter, urging Illinois Republicans to vote for Douglas. “ As to myself, let me pledge you my word that neither I nor any friend, so far as I know, has been setting stake against Governor Seward. No combina¬ tion has been made with me, or proposed to me, in relation to the next presidential candidate. The same thing is true in regard to the next governor of our State. I am not directly or indirectly committed to any one ; nor has any one made any advance to me upon tlie subject. I have had many free conversations with John Wentworth; but he never dropped a remark that led me to suspect that he wishes to be governor. Indeed it is due to truth to say that while he has uni¬ formly expressed himself for me, he has never hinted at any condition. The signs are that we shall have a good convention on the 1 6th, and I think our prospects generally are improving some every day. I believe we need nothing so much as to get rid of unjust sus¬ picions of one another.” * While many alleged defections were soon disproved by the ready and loyal avowals of his friends in Illinois and else where, there came to him a serious disappointment from a quar¬ ter whence he little expected it. Early in the canvass Lincoln began to hear that Crittenden of Kentucky favored the reelection of Doug¬ las, and had promised so to advise the Whigs of Illinois by a public letter. Deeming it well- nigh incredible that a Kentucky Whig like Crittenden could take such a part against an Illinois Whig of his own standing and service, to help a life-long opponent of Clay and his cherished plans, Lincoln addressed him a pri¬ vate letter making the direct inquiry. “ I do not believe the story,” he wrote, “ but still it gives me some uneasiness. If such was your inclination, I do not believe you would so ex¬ press yourself. It is not in character with you as I have always estimated you.”t Crittenden’s reply, however, confirmed his worst fears. He said he and Douglas had acted together to oppose Lecompton. For this Douglas had been assailed, and he thought his reelection was necessary to rebuke the Buchanan ad- ministration.f In addition Crittenden also soon wrote the expected letter for publication, in which phraseology of apparent fairness covered an urgent appeal in Douglas’s be- half§ In the evenly balanced and sensitive con¬ dition of Illinois politics this ungracious out¬ side interference may be said to have insured Lincoln’s defeat. While it gave him pain to be thus wounded in the house of his friends, he yet more deeply deplored the inexcusable * Lincoln to Wilson, June ist, 1858. MS. t Lincoln to Crittenden, July ytb, 1858. Mrs. Cole¬ man, “ Life of Crittenden,” Vol. II., p. 162. t Crittenden to Lincoln, July 29th, 1858. Ibid.,p. 163. blunder of weak and blind leaders whose mis¬ placed sympathy put in jeopardy the success of a vital political principle. In his convention speech he had forcibly stated the error and danger of such a step. “ How can he [Douglas] oppose the advances of slavery ? He don’t care anything about it. His avowed mission is impressing the public heart ’ to care nothing about it. . . . For years he has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into the new Territories. Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them w'here they can be bought cheapest ? And unq.uestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia. He has done all in his power to reduce the whole question of slavery to one of a mere right of property. . . .Now as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas’s position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle so that our great cause may have assistance from his great abiUty, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle, But clearly he is not now with us — he does not pretend to be — he does not promise ever to be.” || Lincoln in no wise underrated the severity of the political contest in which he was about to engage. He knew his opponent’s strong points as well as his weak ones — his energy, his adroitness, the blind devotion of his follow¬ ers, his greater political fame. “Senator Douglas is of world-wide renown,” he said. “All the anxious politicians of his party, or who have been of his party for years past, have been looking upon him as certainly at no distant day to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face post-offices, land- offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, charge-ships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. And as they have been gazing upon this attractive picture so long, they cannot, in the little distraction that has taken place in the party, bring them¬ selves to give up the charming hope ; but with greedier anxiety they rush about him, sustain him, and give him marches, triumphal entries, and receptions, beyond what even in the days of his highest prosperity they could have brought about in his favor. On the con¬ trary, nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disad¬ vantages all taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principle, and upon principle alone. ” IT Douglas and his friends had indeed entered upon the canvass with an unusual flourish of trumpets. Music, banners, salutes, fireworks, addresses, ovation, and jubilation with enthu¬ siasm genuine and simulated, came and went in almost uninterrupted sequence; so much of thecioise and pomp of electioneering had not been seen since the famous hard-cider campaign of Harrison. The ‘‘ Little Giant,” as he was proudly nicknamed by his adherents, arrived $ Crittenden to Dickey, Aug. ist, 1858. Ibid., p. 164. j| Lincoln -Douglas Debates, p. 4. IT Idncoln, Springfield Speech, j'uly 17th, 1858. De¬ bates, p. 55.

Page 393

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 389 in Illinois near midsummer, after elaborate preparation and heralding, and made speeches successively at Chicago, Bloomington, and Springfield on the 9th, i6th, and 17th of July. The Republicans and their candidate were equally alert to contest every inch of ground. Mr. Lincoln made speeches in reply at Chi¬ cago on the loth and at Springfield on the evening of Douglas’s day address; and in both instances with such force and success as fore¬ shadowed a fluctuating and long-continued struggle. For the moment the personal presence of Douglas not only gave spirit and fresh indus¬ try to his followers, but the novelty impressed the indifferent and the wavering. The rush of the campaign was substituting excitement for inquiry, blare of brass bands and smoke of gun¬ powder for intelligent criticism. The fame and prestige of the “ Little Giant ” was beginning to incline the vibrating scale. Lincoln and his intimate and political advisers were not slow to note the sign of danger; and the remedy devised threw upon him the burden of a new responsibility. It was decided in the coun¬ cils of the Republican leaders that Lincoln should challenge Douglas to joint public de¬ bate. There is no need to reproduce here the chal¬ lenge sent by Lincoln on July 24th and the cor¬ respondence in which Douglas proposed that they should meet at the towns of Ottawa, Free¬ port, Jonesborougl-^ Charleston, Galesburg, Quincy, and Alton, each speaker alternately to open and close the discussion ; Douglas to speak one hour at Ottawa, Lincoln to reply for an hour and a half, and Douglas to make a half hour’s rejoinder. In like manner Lincoln should open and close at Freeport, and so on alter¬ nately. Lincoln’s note of J uly 31st accepts the proposal as made. “Although by the terms,” he writes, “as you propose, you take four openings and closes to my three, I accede and thus close the arrangement.” Meanwhile each of the speakers made independent ap¬ pointments for other days and places than these seven ; and in the heat and dust of mid¬ summer traveled and addressed the people for a period of about one hundred days, frequently making the necessary journeys by night, and often making two and sometimes even three speeches in a single day. To the combat of intellectual skill was thus added an ordeal of physical endurance.* Lincoln entered upon the task which his party friends had devised with neither bra¬ vado nor misgiving. He had not sought these public discussions ; neither did he shrink from them. Throughout his whole life he appears Last year in the Illinois canvass I made just 130 speeches.” — [Douglas, Wooster (O.) Speech.] This to have been singularly correct in his esti¬ mate of difficulties to be encountered and of his own powers for undertaking them. Each of these seven meetings, comprising both the Republican and Democratic voters of the neighboring counties, formed a vast, eager, and attentive assemblage. It needed only the first day’s experience to show the wisdom of the Republican leaders in forcing a joint discussion upon Douglas. Face to face with his competitor, he could no longer successfully assume airs of superiority, or wrap himself in his Senatorial dignity and prestige. They were equal spokesmen, of equal parties, on an equal platform, while applause and encouragement on one side balanced applause and encouragement on the other. In a merely forensic sense, it was indeed a battle of giants. In the whole field of Amer¬ ican politics no man has equaled Douglas in the expedients and strategy of debate. Lack¬ ing originality and constructive logic, he had great facility in appropriating by ingenious restatement the thoughts and formulas of others. He was tireless, ubiquitous, unseiza- ble. It would have been as easy to hold a globule of mercury under the finger’s tip as to fasten him to a point he desired to evade. He could almost invert a proposition by a plausible paraphrase. He delighted in enlarg¬ ing an opponent’s assertion to a forced infer¬ ence ridiculous in form and monstrous in dimensions. In spirit he was alert, combat¬ ive, aggressive; in manner, patronizing and arrogant by turns. Lincoln’s mental equipment was of an en¬ tirely different order. His principal weapon was direct, unswerving logic. His fairness of statement and generosity of admission had long been proverbial. For these intellectual duels with Douglas, he possessed a power of analysis that easily outran and circumvented the “Little Giant’s ” most extraordinary gymnastics of ar¬ gument. But, disdaining mere quibbles, he pur¬ sued lines of concise reasoning to maxims of constitutional law and political morals. If we may borrow a comparison from the combats of the Roman arena, Douglas was a gladiator who fought with the net and trident of party catchwords, while Lincoln carried the helmet, sword, and buckler of logic and principle. Both speakers used plain words and pithy sen¬ tences. Platitude and declamation could not have held the crowds that listened to them hour after hour in sun and rain. Douglas was always forcible in statement and bold in asser¬ tion; but Lincoln was his superior in quaint originality, aptness of phrase, and subtlety of was between July Qtli and November 2d, 1858, just one hundred days, exclusive of Sundays.

Page 394

THE LINCOLN-^DOUGLAS DEBATES, 390 definition; and oftentimes Lincoln’s philo¬ sophic vision and poetical fervor raised him to flights of eloquence which were not possible to the fiber and temper of his opponent It is, of course, out of the question to abridge the various Lincoln- Douglas discussions of which the text fills a good-sized volume. Only a few points of controversy may be stated. Lincoln’s convention speech, it will be remembered, declared that in his belief the Union could not endure permanently half slave and half free, but must become all one thing or all the other. Douglas in his first speech of the campaign attacked this as an invitation to a war of sections, declaring that uniformity would lead to consolidation and despotism. He charged the Republicans with intent to abolish slavery in the States ; said their opposition to the Dred Scott decision was a' desire for negro equality and amalga¬ mation ; and prescribed his principle of pop¬ ular sovereignty as a panacea for all the ills growing out of the slavery agitation. To all this Lincoln replied that Republi¬ cans did not aim at abolition in the slave States, but only the exclusion of slavery from free Territories ; they did not oppose the Dred Scott decision in so far as it concerned the freedom of Dred Scott, but they refused to accept its dicta as rules of political action. He repelled the accusation that the Republi¬ cans desired negro equality or amalgamation, saying : “There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equal¬ ity ; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, — the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Doug¬ las he is not my equal in many respects — certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual en¬ dowment ; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man.” * In return he pressed upon Douglas his charge of a political conspiracy to nationalize slavery, alleging that his don’t care ” policy was but the convenient stalking-horse under cover of which a new Dred Scott decision would make slavery lawful everywhere. “ It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution * Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 75. t Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 82. t Lincoln-Douglas Debates, pp. 233-4. neitlier Congress nor the territorial legislature can do it. When that is decided and acquiesced in, the whole thing is done. This being true, and this being the way, as I think, that slavery is to be made national, let us consider what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end. In the first place, let us see what influence he is exerting on public sentiment. In this and like communities public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sen¬ timent goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pro¬ nounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” t “The Democratic policy in regard to that institution will not tolerate the merest breath, the slightest hint, of the least degree of wrong about it. Try it by some of Judge Douglas’s arguments. He says he ‘don’t care whether it is voted up or voted down ’ in the Ter¬ ritories. I do not care myself, in dealing with that ex¬ pression, whether it is intended to be expressive of his individual sentiments on the subject, or only of the national policy he desires to have established. It is alike valuable for my purpose. Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery, but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it ; because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong. He says that upon the score of equality slaves should be allowed to go into a new Territory, like other prop¬ erty. This is strictly logical if there is no difference between it and other property. If it and other prop¬ erty are equal, his argument is entirely logical. But if you insist that one is wrong and the other right, there is no use to institute a comparison between right and wrong. You may turn over everything in the Democratic policy from beginning to end, whether in the shape it takes on the statute book, in the shape it takes in the Dred Scott decision, in the shape it takes in conversation, or the shape it takes in short maxim¬ like arguments — it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything wrong in it. “ That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the begin¬ ning of time ; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘ You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” t As to the vaunted popular sovereignty prin¬ ciple, Lincoln declared it “the most arrant quixotism that was ever enacted before a community. . . . Does he mean to say that he has been devoting his life to securing to the people of the Territories the right to exclude slavery from the Territories ? If he means so to say, he means to deceive; because he and every one knows that the decision of the Supreme Court, which he approves and makes especial ground of attack upon me for disap-

Page 395

THE LINCOLN-HO UGLAS DEBATES. proving, forbids the people of a Territory to exclude slavery. This covers the whole ground from the settlement of a Territory till it reaches the degree of maturity entitling it to form a State constitution. So far as all that ground is concerned, the Judge is not sustaining popular sovereignty, but absolutely oppos¬ ing it. He sustains the decision which declares that the popular will of the Territories has no constitutional power to exclude slavery during their territorial ex¬ istence.” * By no means the least interesting of the many points touched in these debates is Lin¬ coln’s own estimate of the probable duration of slavery, or rather of the least possible pe¬ riod in which ultimate extinction ” could be eftected, even under the most favorable cir¬ cumstances. “ Now at this day in the history of the world,” said he, in the Charleston debate, “ we can no more fore¬ tell where the end of this slavery agitation will be than we can see the end of the world itself. The Nebraska-Kansas bill was introduced four years and a half ago, and if the agitation is ever to come to an end, we may say we are four years and a half nearer the end. So too we can say we are four years and a half nearer the end of the world ; and we can just as clearly see the. end of the world as we can see the end of this agitation. The Kansas settlement did not conclude it. If Kansas should sink to-day, and leave a great vacant space in the earth’s surface, this vexed question would still be among us. I say then there is no way of putting an end to the slavery agita¬ tion amongst us, but to put it back upon the basis where our fathers placed it, no way but to keep it out of our new Territories — to restrict it forever to the old States where it now exists. Then the public mind will rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate ex¬ tinction. That is one way of putting an end to the slavery agitation. “The other way is for us to surrender and let Judge Douglas and his friends have their way and plant slavery over all the States ; cease speaking of it as in any way a wrong ; regard slavery as one of the com¬ mon matters of property and speak of negroes as we do of our horses and cattle. But while it drives on in its state of progress as it is now driving, and as it has driven for the last five years, I have ventured the opinion, and I say to-day, that we will have no end to the slavery agitation until it takes one turn or the other. I do not mean to say that when it takes a turn toward ultimate extinction it will be in a day, nor in a year, nor in two years. I do not suppose that in the most peaceful way ultimate extinction would occur in less than a hundred years at least ; but that it will oc¬ cur in the best way for both races, in God’s own good time, I have no doubt. ”t But the one dominating characteristic of Lincoln’s speeches is their constant recurrence to broad and enduring principles, their unre¬ mitting effort to lead public opinion to loftier and nobler conceptions of political duty ; and nothing in his career stamps him so distinct¬ ively an American — “ the first American,” as Lowell has so happily named him — as his constant eulogy and defense of the philo¬ sophical precepts of the Declaration of In- ^ Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 56. t Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 157. t Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 225. 391 dependence. The following is one of his in¬ dictments of his political opponents on this point : “At Galesburg the other day, I said, in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independ¬ ence did not include negroes in the term ‘all men.’ I re-assert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding senti¬ ment that the term ‘ all men ’ in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendency and per¬ petuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect ‘ a self-evident lie ’ rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a per¬ fect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief-Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his friends everywhere to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief ! to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresist¬ ible current, whither they know not?” t In the joint debates, however, argument and oratory were both necessanly hampered by the inexorable limit of time. For the full development of his thought, the speeches Lincoln made separately at other places af¬ forded him a freer opportunity. A quotation from his language on one of these occasions is therefore here added, as a better illustra¬ tion of his style and logic, where his sublime theme carried him into one of his more im¬ passioned moods : “ The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the Confederacy, twelve of which were slave¬ holding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slave-holding communi¬ ties. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a pro¬ vision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was the conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war. Now if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers

Page 396

392 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. of the Republic have taken a step calculated to dimin¬ ish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity ? These communities, by their representatives in old Independ¬ ence Hall, said to the whole world of men : ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understand¬ ing of the justice of the Creator to his creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all his creatures, to the whole great fam¬ ily of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children, and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none but Anglo- Saxon white men, were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land ; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the tem¬ ple of liberty was being built. “Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence ; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions ; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me — take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever — but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for * Lincoln’s Lewiston Speech, August 17th, 1858. Chicago “ Press and Tribune.” t See questions and answers below. t A local nickname by which the southern or pro¬ slavery portion of Illinois was familiarly known. $ Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 68. II Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 87. t DOUGLAS’S QUESTIONS AND LINCOLN’S ANSWERS. “ Question i. ‘ I desire to know whether Lincoln to¬ day stands, as he did in 1854, in favor of the uncon¬ ditional repeal of the fugitive-slave law.’ Answer. I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the fugitive-slave law. Q. 2. ‘I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to-day, as he did in 1854, against the admis¬ sion of any more slave States into the Union even if the people want them.’ any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity — the Declaration of American Independence.” * THE FREEPORT DOCTRINE. What has been thus far quoted has been less to illustrate the leading lines of discussion, than to explain more fully the main historical incident of the debates. In the first joint dis¬ cussion at Ottawa, in the northern or anti¬ slavery part of Illinois, Douglas read a series of strong antislavery resolutions which he er¬ roneously alleged Lincoln had taken part in framing and passing. He said : “ My object in reading these resolutions was to put the question to Abraham Lincoln this day whether he now stands and will stand by each article in that creed and carry it out. ... I ask Abraham Lincoln these questions t in order that when I trot him down to lower Egypt 1 1 may put the same questions to him.”$ In preparing a powerful appeal to local prej¬ udice, Douglas doubtless knew he was han¬ dling a two-edged sword ; but we shall see that he little appreciated the skill with which his antagonist would wield the weapon he was placing in his hands. At their second joint meeting at Freeport, also in northern Illinois, Lincoln, who now had the opening speech, said, referring to Doug¬ las’s speech at Ottawa : “ I do him no injustice in saying that he occupied at least half of his reply in dealing with me as though I had refused to answer his interrogatories. I now propose that I will answer any of the interrogatories, upon condition that he will answer questions from me not exceeding the same number. I give him an oppor¬ tunity to respond. The judge remains silent. I now say that I will answer his interrogatories, whether he answers mine or not ; and that after I have done so, I shall propound mine to him.” H Lincoln then read his answers to the seven questions which had been asked him, and proposed four in return, the second one of I do not now, nor ever did, stand pledged against the admission of any more slave States into the Union. Q. j. ‘I want to know whether he stands pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a constitution as the people of that State may see fit to make.’ ' I do not stand pledged against the admission of a new State into the Union with such a constitu¬ tion as the people of that State may see fit to make. Q. 4. H want to know whether he stands to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.’ A. I do not stand to-day pledged to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Q. S- ‘I desire him to answer whether he stands pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different States.’

Page 397

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, 393 which ran as follows : “ Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the formation of a State constitution ? ”* To comprehend the full force of this inter¬ rogatory, the reader must recall the fact that the ‘‘popular sovereignty’’ of the Nebraska bill was couched in vague language, and qualified with the proviso that it was “ sub¬ ject to the Constitution.” The caucus which framed this phraseology agreed, as a compro¬ mise between Northern and Southern Demo¬ crats, that the courts should interpret and define the constitutional limitations, by which all should abide. The Dred Scott decision declared in terms that Congress could not prohibit slavery in Territories nor authorize a territorial legislature to do so. The Dred Scott decision had thus annihilated “ popular sover¬ eignty.” Would Douglas admit his blunder in law, and his error in statesmanship ? He had already faced and partly evaded this dilemma in his Springfield speech of 1857, but that was a local declaration and occurred before his Lecompton revolt, and the ingeni¬ ous sophism then put forth had attracted little notice. Since that time things had materially changed. He had opposed Lecompton, be¬ come a party recusant, and been declared a party apostate. His Senatorial term was clos¬ ing, and he had to look to an evenly balanced if not a hostile constituency for rejection. The Buchanan administration was putting forth what feeble strength it had in Illinois to insure his defeat. His Democratic rivals were scrutinizing every word he uttered. He stood before the people to whom he had pledged his word that the voters of Kansas might regulate their own domestic concerns. They would tol¬ erate no j uggling nor evasion. There remained no resource but to answer Yes^ and he could conjure up no justification of such an answer except the hollow subterfuge he had invented the year before. 1 do not stand pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different States. Q. 6. ‘I desire to know whether he stands pledged to prohibit slavery in all the Territories of the United States, north as well as south of the Missouri Com¬ promise line.’ I am impliedly if not expressly pledged to a belief in the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in all the United States Territories. Q. 7. ‘I desire him to answer whether he is op¬ posed to the acquisition of any new territory unless slavery is first prohibited therein.’ A. I am not generally opposed to honest acquisi¬ tion of territory ; and, in any ^ven case, I would or would not oppose such acquisition accordingly as I might think such acquisition would or would not ag- ravate the slavery question among ourselves.” — Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 88.] VoL. XXXIV.— 54. Lincoln clearly enough comprehended the dilemma and predicted the expedient of his antagonist. He had framed his questions and submitted them to a consultation of shrewd party friends. This one especially was the sub¬ ject of anxious deliberation and serious disagree¬ ment. Nearly a month before, Lincoln in a private letter accurately foreshadowed Doug¬ las’s course on tjiis question. “ You shall have hard work to get him directly to the point whether a territorial legislature has or has not the power to exclude slavery. But if you suc¬ ceed in bringing him to it — though he will be compelled to say it possesses no such power — he will instantly take ground that slavery can¬ not actually exist in the Territories unless the people desire it, and so give it protection by territorial legislation. If this offends the South, he will let it offend them, as at all events he means to hold on to his chances in Illinois.” There is a tradition that on the night preceding this Freeport debate Lincoln was catching a few hours’ rest, at a little railroad center named Mendota,to which place the converging trains brought after midnight a number of excited Republican leaders, on their way to attend the great meeting at the neighboring town of Freeport. Notwithstanding the late hour, Mr. Lincoln’s bedroom was soon invaded by an improvised caucus, and the ominous question was once more brought under consideration. The whole drift of advice ran against putting the interrogatory to Douglas; but Lincoln persisted in his determination to force him to answer it. Finally his friends in a chorus cried out, “ If you do, you can never be Sena¬ tor.” “ Gentlemen,” replied Lincoln, “ I am killing larger game; if Douglas answers, he can never be President, and the battle of i860 is worth a hundred of this.” When Lincoln had finished his opening speech in the Freeport debate, and Douglas in his reply came to interrogatory number two, which Lincoln had propounded, he an¬ swered as follows : ^LINCOLN’S QUESTIONS. « Question i. If the people of Kansas shall, by means entirely unobjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State constitution, and ask admission into the Union under it, before they have the requisite number of inhabitants according to the English bill, — some 93,000, — will you vote to admit them ? Q. 2. Can the people of a United States Territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the formation of a State constitution ? Q. j. If the Supreme Court of the United States shall decide that States cannot exclude slavery from their lim¬ its, are you in favor of acquiescing in, adopting, and following such decision as a rule of political action ? Q. 4. Are you in favor of acquiring additional ter¬ ritory, in disregard of how such acquisition may affect the nation on the slavery question? ” — [Lincoln-Doug¬ las Debates, p. 90.]

Page 398

394 THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. “ The next question propounded to me by Mr. Lin¬ coln is, Can the people of a Territory in any lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from their limits, prior to the formation of a State constitution ? I answer emphati¬ cally, as Mr. Lincoln has heard me answer a hundred times from every stump in Illinois, that in my opinion the people of a Territory can, by lawful means, exclude slavery from their limits, prior to the formation of a State constitution. Mr. Lincoln knew that I had an¬ swered that question over and over again. He heard me argue the Nebraska bill on that principle all over the State in 1854, in 1855, and in 1856, and he has no excuse for pretending to be in doubt as to my position on that question. It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a Territory un¬ der the Constitution, the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it, as they please, for the rea¬ son that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere, unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police regulations can only be established by the local legislature, and if the people are opposed to slavery they will elect representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduc¬ tion of it into their midst. If, on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favor its extension. Hence, no matter what the decision of the Supreme Court may be on that abstract question, still the right of the peo¬ ple to make a slave Territory or a free Territory ^s per¬ fect and complete under the Nebraska bill. I hope Mr. Lincoln deems my answer satisfactory on that point.” * The remarkable theory here proposed was immediately taken up and exhaustively dis¬ cussed by the leading newspapers of all parts of the Union, and thereby became definitely known under the terms ‘‘ unfriendly legislation’^ and “ Freeport doctrine.” Mr. Lincoln effect¬ ually disposed of it in the following fashion in the joint debate at Alton: “ I understand I have ten minutes yet. I will employ it in saying something about this argument Judge Doug¬ las uses, while he sustains the Dred Scott decision, that the people of the Territories can still somehow exclude slavery. The first thing I ask attention to is the fact that Judge Douglas constantly said, before the decision, that whether they could or not, was a question for the Supreme Court. But after the court has made the de¬ cision he virtually says it is not a question for the Su¬ preme Court, but for the people. And how is it he tells us they can exclude it? He said it needs ‘police regu¬ lations,’ and that admits of ‘unfriendly legislation.’ Although it is a right established by the Constitution of the United States to take a slave into a Territory of the United States and hold him as property, yet unless the territorial legislature will give friendly legislation, and, more especially, if they adopt unfriendly legisla¬ tion, they can practically exclude him. Now, without meeting this proposition as a matter of fact, I pass to consider the real constitutional obligation. Let me take the gentleman who looks me in the face before me, ahd let us suppose that he is a member of the territo¬ rial legislature. The first thing he will do will be to swear that he will support the Constitution of the United States. His neighbor by his side in the Territory has slaves and needs territorial legislation to enable him to enjoy that constitutional right. Can he withhold the leg¬ islation which his neighbor needs for the enjoyment of a right which is fixed in his favor in the Constitution of the United States, which he has sworn to support? Can he withhold it without violating his oath ? and more especially, can he pass unfriendly legislation to violate his oath ? Why this is a monstrous sort of talk about the Constitution of the U nited States ! There has never been so outlandish or lawless a doctrine from the mouth of any respectable man on earth. I do not believe it is a consti¬ tutional right to hold slaves in a Territory of the United States. I believe the decision was improperly made, and I go for reversing it. Judge Douglas is furious against those who go for reversing a decision. But he is for legislating it out of all force while the law itself stands. I repeat that there has never been so monstrous a doc¬ trine uttered from the mouth of a respectable man.” The announcement and subsequent defense by Douglas of his Freeport doctrine” proved, as Lincoln had predicted, something more im¬ portant than a mere campaign incident. It was the turning-point in Douglas’s political fortunes. With the whole South, and with a few promi¬ nent politicians of the North, it served to put him outside the pale of party fellowship. Com¬ pared with this his Lecompton revolt had been a venial offense. In that case he had merely contended for the machinery of a fair popular vote. This was the avowal of a principle as obnoxious to the slavery propaganda as the unqualified abolitionism of Giddings or Love- joy. Henceforth all hope of reconciliation, atonement, or chance of Presidential nomina¬ tion by the united Democratic party was out of the question. Before this, newspaper zealots had indeed denounced him for his Lecompton recusancy as a traitor and renegade, and the Administration had endeavored to secure his defeat; now, however, in addition, the party high-priests put him under solemn ban of ex- communication. How they felt and from what motives they acted is stated with singular force and frankness in a Senate speech, soon after the Charleston convention, by Senator J. P. Benjamin of Louisiana, one of the ablest and most persistent of the conspirators to national¬ ize slavery, and who, not long after, was one of the principal conspirators and actors in the great Rebellion : “ Up to the years 1857 and 1858 no man in this na¬ tion had a higher or more exalted opinion of the char¬ acter, the services, and the political integrity of the senator from Illinois [Douglas] than I had. . . . Sir, it has been with reluctance and sorrow that I have been obliged to pluck down my idol from his place on high, and to refuse to him any more support or confi¬ dence as a member of the party. I have done so, I trust, upon no light or unworthy ground. I have not done so alone. The causes that have operated on me have operated on the Democratic party of the United States, and have operated an effect which the whole future life of the Senator will be utterly unable to ob¬ literate. It is impossible that confidence thus lost can be restored. On what ground has that confidence been forfeited, and why is it that we now refuse him our support and fellowship? I have stated our reason to day. I have appealed to the record. I have not fol¬ lowed him back in the false issue or the feigned trav¬ erse that he makes in relation to matters that are not nowin contest between him and the Democratic party. ^ Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 95. t Lincoln-Douglas Debates, p. 234.

Page 399

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES. 395 The question is not what we all said or believed in 1840 or in 1856. How idle was it to search ancient precedents and accumulate old quotations from what Senators may have at different times said in relation to their principles and views. The precise point, the direct arraignment, the plain and explicit allegation made against the Senator from Illinois is not touched by him in all of his speech. “ We accuse him for this, to wit : that having bar¬ gained with us upon a point upon which we were at issue, that it should be considered a judicial point; that he would abide the decision ; that he would act under the decision, and consider it a doctrine of the party ; that having said that to us here in the Senate, he went home, and under the stress of a local election, his knees gave way ; his whole person trembled. His adversary stood upon principle and was beaten ; and lo ! he is the candidate of a mighty party for the Presi¬ dency of the United States. The Senator from Illinois faltered. He got the prize for which he faltered; but lo ! the grand prize of his ambition to-day slips from his grasp because of his faltering in his former con¬ test, and his success in the canvass for the Senate, purchased for an ignoble price, has cost him the loss of the Presidency of the United States.” ^ The Senatorial canvass in Illinois came to a close with the election on the 2d of No¬ vember and resulted in a victory for Douglas. The Republicans, on their State ticket, polled 125,430 votes ; the Douglas Democrats, 121,- 609 ; the Buchanan Democrats, 5071. By this plurality the Republican State officers were chosen. But in respect to members of the leg¬ islature the case stood differently, and when in the following January the Senatorial election took place in joint session of the two Houses, Douglas received the vote of every Democrat, 54 members, and Lincoln the vote of every Republican, 46 members, whereupon Douglas was declared elected Senator of the United States for 6 years from the 4th of March, 1859. The main cause of Lincoln’s defeat was the unfairness of the existing apportionment, which was based upon the census of 1850. A fair apportionment, based on the changes of population which had occurred, would have given northern Illinois a larger representation ; and it was there the Republicans had recruited their principal strength in the recent transfor¬ mation of parties. The Republicans estimated that this circumstance caused them a loss of 6 to 10 members. But the unusual political combinations also had a large influence in the result. Lincoln, in an Ohio speech made in the following year, addressing himself to Kentuckians, thus sum¬ marized the political forces that contributed to his defeat : “ Douglas had three or four very distinguished men of the most extreme antislavery views of any men in the Re¬ publican party expressing their desire for his reelection to the Senate last year. That would of itself have ^ Benjamin, Senate Speech, May 22d, i860. t Lincoln, Cincinnati Speech, Sept. 17th, iSw. De¬ bates, p. 263. t Lincoln to Judd, Nov. 15th, 1858. seemed to be a little wonderful, but that wonder is heightened when we see that Wise of Virginia, a man exactly opposed to them, a man who believes in the divine right of slavery, was also expressing his desire that Douglas should be reelected ; that another man that may be said to be kindred to Wise, Mr. Breckin¬ ridge, the Vice-President, and of your own State, was also agreeing with the antislavery men in the North, that Douglas ought to be reelected. Still to heighten the wonder, a Senator from Kentucky, whom I have always loved with an affection as tender and endearing as I have ever loved any man, who was op¬ posed to the antislavery men for reasons which seemed sufficient to him and equally opposed to Wise and Breckinridge, was writing letters to Illinois to secure the rejection of Douglas. Now that all these conflict¬ ing elements should be brought, while at daggers’ points with one another, to support him, is a feat that is worthy for you to note and consider. It is quite probable that each of these classes of men thought, by the reelection of Douglas, their peculiar views would gain something; it is probable that the antislavery men thought their views would gain something ; that Wise and Breckinridge thought so too, as regards their opinions ; that Mr. Crittenden thought that his views would gain something although he was opposed to both these other men. It is probable that each and all of them thought they were using Douglas, and it is yet an unsolved problem whether he was not using them all.”t After a hundred consecutive days of excite¬ ment, of intense mental strain, and of unremit¬ ting bodily exertion, after speech-making and parades, music and bonfires, it must be some¬ thing of a trial to face at once the mortifi¬ cation of defeat, the weariness of intellectual and physical reaction, and the dull common¬ place of daily routine. Letters written at this period show that under these conditions Mr. Lincoln remained composed, patient, and hope¬ ful. Two weeks after election he wrote thus to Mr. Judd, a member of the legislature and chairman of the Republican State Central Committee ; “ I have the pleasure to inform you that I am con¬ valescent and hoping these lines may find you in the same improving state of health. Doubtless you have suspected for some time that I entertain a personal wish for a term in the United States Senate; and had the suspicion taken the shape of a direct charge I think I could not have truthfully denied it. But let the past as nothing be. For the future my view is that the fight must go on. The returns here are not yet completed, but it is believed that Dougherty’s vote will be slightly greater than Miller’s majority over Tracy. We have some hundred and twenty thousand clear Republican votes. That pile is worth keeping together. It will elect a State Treasurer two years hence. “ In that day I shall fight in the ranks, but I shall be in no one’s way for any of the places. I am especially for Trumbull’s reelection ; and, by the way, this brings me to the principal object of this letter. Can you not take your draft of an apportionment law and carefully revise it till it shall be strictly and obviously just in all particulars, and then by an early and persistent effort get enough of the enemies’ men to enable you to pass it ? I believe if you and Peck make a job of it, begin early and work earnestly and quietly, you can succeed in it. Unless something be done, Trumbull is inevita¬ bly beaten two years hence. Take this into serious consideration.” t

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LOSS AND- GAIN. 396 On the following day he received from Mr. Judd a letter informing him that the funds sub¬ scribed for the State Central Committee did not suffice to pay all the election bills, and asking his help to raise additional contribu¬ tions. To this appeal Lincoln replied : “Yours of the 15th is just received. I wrote you the same day. As to the pecuniary matter, I am will¬ ing to pay according to my ability, but I am the poorest hand living to get others to pay. I have been on expenses so long without earning anything that I am absolutely without money now for even household expenses. Still, if you can put in $250 for me towards discharging the debt of the com¬ mittee, I will allow it when you and I settle the pri¬ vate matter between us. This, with what I have al¬ ready paid, and with an outstanding note of mine, will exceed my subscription of $500. This, too, is exclu¬ sive of my ordinary expenses during the campaign, all which being added to my loss of time and business, bears pretty heavily upon one no better off in world’s goods than I ; but as I had the post of honor, it is not for me to be over-nice. You are feeling badly — ‘ And this too shall pass away.’ ‘ Never fear.’ ” ^ The sting of personal defeat is painful to most men, and it was doubtless so to Lincoln. Yet he regarded the passing struggle as some¬ thing more than a mere scramble for office, and drew from it the consolation which all earnest workers feel in the consciousness of a task well done. Thus he wrote to a friend on November 19th as follows: “ You doubtless have seen ere this the result of the election here. Of course I wished, but I did not much expect, a better result. ... I am glad I made the late race. It gave me a hearing on the great and dura¬ ble question of the age, which I could have had in no other way ; and though I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten, I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of liberty, long after I am gone.” t ^ Lincoln to Judd, Nov. i6th, 1858. t Lincoln to Dr. Henry, Nov. 19th, 1858. MS. t Lincoln to Asbury, Nov. 19th, 1858. Note. — In the next number will be given an acco To these one other letter may be added, showing his never-failing faith in the political future. To a personal friend in Quincy, Illi¬ nois, who had watched the campaign with un¬ usual attention, Lincoln wrote that same day: “Yours of the 13th was received some days ago. The fight must go on. The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats. Douglas had the ingenuity to be sup¬ ported in the late contest, both as the best means to break down and to uphold the slave interest. No ingenuity can keep these antagonistic elements in harmony long. Another explosion will soon come.”t Douglas was also greatly exhausted by the wearing labors of the campaign ; but he had the notable triumph of an assured reelection to the Senate and the congratulations of his enthusiastic friends to sustain and refresh him. Being an indefatigable worker, he was already organizing a new and more ambi¬ tious effort. Three weeks after election he started on a brief tour to the Southern States, making speeches at Memphis and New Or¬ leans, of which further mention will be made in the next chapter. Perhaps he deemed it wise not to proceed immediately to Wash¬ ington, where Congress convened on the first Monday of December, and thus to avoid a direct continuance of his battle with the Buchanan Administration. If so, the device proved ineffectual. The President and his partisans were determined to put the author of the Freeport doctrine ” under public ban, and to that end, when Congress organized, one of the first acts of the Senate majority was to depose Douglas from his place as chairman of the Committee on Territories, which he had held in that body for eleven years. nt of Lincoln’s Ohio speeches, his Cooper Institute h, etc. LOSS AND GAIN. If the June rose could guess If the wild lark could feel Before the sunbeam wooed her from the bud. When first between two worlds he caroled clear. And reddened into life her faint young blood. Voicing the ecstasy of either sphere, What blight should fall upon her loveliness. What apathy of song should o’er him steal. What darkness of decay, what shroud of snow — What broken accents and what faltering wing — Would the rose ever blow ? Would the lark ever sing ? Alas, and yet alas. For glory of existence that shall pass! For pride of beauty and for strength of song I Yet were the untried life a deeper wrong. Better a single throb of being win, Than never to have been 1 Kate Piit7iam Osgood.

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THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. THE CHEMISTRY AND ECONOMY OF FOOD. III. “ Besides the . . . chemical elements, there is, in the physical world, one agent only, and this is called energy. It may appear, according to circumstances, as motion [heat], chemical affinity, cohesion, electricity, light, mag¬ netism ; and from any one of these forms it can be transformed into any of the others.” — Fr. Mohr. “ I have here a bundle of cotton, which I ignite ; it burns and yields a definite amount of heat ; precisely that amount of heat was abstracted from the sun, in order to form that bit of cotton ; . . . every tree, plant, and flower grows and flourishes by the grace and bounty of the sun. But we cannot stop at vegetable life, for this is the source ... of all animal life. In the animal body vegetable substances are brought again into contact with their beloved oxygen, and they burn within us as a fire burns in a grate. This is the source of all animal power, ... all terrestrial power is drawn from the sun.” — Tyndall. “ All are but parts of one stupendous whole. Whose body Nature is, and God the Soul; That changed thro’ all, and yet in all the same. Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent. Spreads undivided, operates unspent.” — Pope. ITHOUT doubt the two most fruitful ideas which our century has developed are those of evolution and the conservation of en¬ ergy. The latter principle was, I believe, first clearly and definitely set forth in 1837,* just half a century ago, by Dr. Mohr, in the words quoted above. During the years since then, the astronomers and geologists and physicists have been learn¬ ing and explaining to us how the energy, whose primordial source in our solar system is the sun, warms and lights our planet ; how it is stored in coal and petroleum and wood ; and how it is transformed into the heat of the furnace, the light of the lamp, the mechanical power of steam, or into electricity and then into light or heat or mechanical power again. The same energy from the sun is stored in the protein and fats and carbohydrates of food, and the physiologists to-day are telling us how it is transmuted into the heat that warms our bod¬ ies and into strength for our work and thought. The potential energy of food may appear in still other forms ; — in light, in certain animals, in the “ light of the fire-fly lamp,” for instance, and even as electricity, in the animal body. * In an article in the “Zeitschrift fur Physik und verwandte Wissenschaften,” a journal published in Vienna. It is an interesting fact that these fifty years of unprecedentedly active and brilliant research have only confirmed, while explaining in detail, the principle thus laid down by a young and comparatively unknown German chemist. And it is a striking illustration of During the epidemic of strikes in the spring of 1886, a church was being built in this city (Middletown, Conn.). When the brick walls were partly laid, the hod-carriers struck for higher pay. The master mason, a man of re¬ sources, let them go and got a steam-engine in their place. The brick and the mortar which had been carried up the ladders by Hibernian muscle were lifted by engine and windlass. The work which had beep done through the consumption of meat and potatoes in the one case, was accomplished by the combustion of coal in the other, but the underlying principle was the same in both. In each case there was conversion of one form of energy into another. The food which the hod-carriers ate, and the coal which was burned under the boiler, each contained a certain amount of potential energy. That of the food reappeared in the contractile power of muscle, that of the coal in the ex¬ pansive power of steam. Before the invention of matches, blacksmiths used to start their fires with iron heated by hammering. The heating of the iron was a case of the conversion of one form of energy into an¬ other. The muscular energy of the blacksmith’s arm was transformed into the mechanical en¬ ergy of the descending hammer; when the hammer struck, the energy was imparted to the iron, where it was transmuted into heat, and the iron became red-hot. The energy came from the blacksmith’s food. the lack of appreciation with which new ideas are often received, that Dr. Mohr’s article, which contained this great generalization of modern science, was refused by “ Poggendorff’s Annalen,” the leading German journal of physical science, before it was published in the Aus¬ trian journal above named. Dr. Mohr, it is true, did not prove the theory experimentally.

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THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. 398 Just how all the potential energy of the food is disposed of in the body, experimental science has not yet told us. But it is certain that part ofit is converted into heat and part into the me¬ chanical energy exerted by the muscles. Some ofit may be transformed into electricity. There is no doubt that intellectual activity, also, is somehow dependent upon the consumption of material which the brain has obtained from the food, but just what substances are con¬ sumed to produce brain and nerve force, and how much of each is required for a given quan¬ tity of intellectual labor, are questions which the chemist’s balance and the respiration- apparatus do not answer. ENERGY AND THE UNITY OF THE UNIVERSE. The introductory chapter of a German treatise on cattle-feeding explains the nebular hypothesis, a procedure which is perfectly ra¬ tional when we consider that the profitable feeding of cattle is simply the economical man¬ agement of matter and energy in living organ¬ isms, and that the nebular theory helps us, better than anything else, to understand how the forms of matter and of force which we have to do with have come to be what they are. That the materials which compose this solid globe, the waters on its surface, the at¬ mosphere around it, the things that live upon it, the planets with which it courses round the sun, the sun itself, and all the innumerable hosts of heavenly bodies that make up the material universe, are of common origin, is a doctrine familiar to us all. That in this ma¬ terial universe there are two things, and two things only, matter and energy, has come to be another of the accepted dicta of physical science. And current metaphysics goes a step farther and resolves matter itself into manifes¬ tations of energy. It is this energy which pervades the universe. It comes to us in the light of the farthest star, which, though traveling with almost incon¬ ceivable rapidity, requires uncounted years for its journey hither. A reserve supply was accumulated in our sun, untold ages ago, and he has given and is constantly giving it to the earth as heat and light. In the geo¬ logic past it has accumulated in subterranean stores of coal, and it is now and all the while being used to build up every plant and animal that lives and grows upon the surface of our earth. The coal and wood we burn, our food, the reserve material of our bodies, are, like the sun, our reservoirs of latent energy. This energy which, transmuted into the ex¬ pansive power of steam, impels the ship, draws the railway train, turns the wheels of industry ; which, in the telegraph, can ‘‘put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes” ; and which so conveniently transports men, their works, and their thoughts from one corner of the world to the other that the nations are all becoming one, is the same which, stored in the grass of the field or in the grain of wheat, gives the ox his strength, the race-horse his swiftness, and man his power of muscle and brain. Such are the grand conceptions which advancing knowledge brings us. This energy is in the cyclone that devas¬ tates the land, as in the cooling zephyr of a summer’s eve ; it is in the awful rolling of the thunder and in the lightning’s flash, as in the rustle of the leaves and the gentle cooing of the dove. It is in the tramping of armed hosts, the roar of artillery, and the carnage of battle, as in the soft caress and tender lullaby with which the mother sings and soothes her babe to sleep. I often think that the greatest creation of human genius is the medieval cathedral. If this be so, and if the grandest music is that which floats through the cathedral aisles, if the loveliest transformations of the sunbeams pe in the dim religious light that enters through its stained glass windows, if the holiest thoughts are those of its worshipers; the power that lifted the stones of the cathedral into their places, the light that reveals its grandeur and its beauty, the thought that planned its archi¬ tecture and composed its music, the vibrations on which its music floats, the motions and the voices of those who bend “ en murmurant sous le vent des cantiques Comme au souffle du nord un peuple de roseaux,” and who, in responsive adoration, express the sentiments of its worship, are all, in one way or another, the products of that energy which once existed in space, rested for eons in the central orb of our system, and part of which, coming to us in those things which we designate as food, abides for a time in our own bodies and our own brains, to give us life and power and thought. Says Professor Tyndall, in speaking of the law of conservation of energy : “ Waves may change to ripples, and ripples to waves, magnitude may be substituted for number, and num¬ ber for magnitude, asteroids may aggregate to suns, suns may resolve themselves into florae and faunae, and florae and faunae melt in air, the flux of power is eter¬ nally the same. It rolls in music through the ages, and all terrestrial energy, the manifestations of life, as \yell as the display of phenomena, are but the modula¬ tions of its rhythm.” Nor does he exaggerate, I think, in saying further : “ Presented rightly to the mind, the discoveries and generalizations of modern science constitute a poem

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THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. 399 more sublime than has ever yet been addressed to the intellect and imagination of man. The natural philos¬ opher of to-day may dwell amid conceptions which beggar those of Milton. So great and grand are they, that in the contemplation of them a certain force of character is requisite to preserve us from bewilder¬ ment.” But, after all, this statement of a physical law is only the scientific form of the poetic thought expressed in the words of Pope quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Another poet, and one, it seems to me, whose soul was more exquisitely attuned to the harmonies of Nature than any other, has clothed this sentiment in still finer habiliment of words : “ And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, ® Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought. And rolls through all things.” Wordsworth. What are the relations of this physical en¬ ergy, whose flux is eternally the same,” to the Supreme Power that “ impels all thinking things” and rolls through all things,” and though changed through all ” is “ yet in all the same,” it is the office of the metaphysician and the theologian rather than the chemist to discuss. But as physicists have found that all the forms of physical energy are really one, and chemists are aspiring to the proof that the different elements of which matter is com¬ posed are merely modifications of one primor¬ dial form, so I cannot forbear the conception, I might almost say belief, that one day the advance of knowledge will bring men to feel that the ideas thus framed in words by scien¬ tist and poet are one, not only with each other, but with the sentiment embodied in the words of an older and grander poet : “ O Lord, how great are thy works ! and thy thoughts are very deep. . . . But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. . . . Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. ... If I ascend up into heaven, thou are there : if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. “ If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; “ Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.” Indeed, unless I wrongly apprehend the ten¬ dency of the speculation of our time, it is de¬ cidedly in this direction. In a late essay on “ Religion, a Retrospect and Prospect,” * Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us that ‘‘ amid the mys¬ teries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that we are ever in * The Nineteenth Century. Vol. XV. presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” Such leaders of thought as Professors Lotze in Germany and Bowne in this country, and many other metaphysicians with them, teach that the things that we call matter are only forms of action of energy and that this energy is God immanent in the universe. And in his most ex¬ hilarating lectures on ‘‘The Idea of God,” Mr. John Fiske says: “ Instead of the force which persists let us speak of the Power which is al¬ ways and everywhere manifested in phenom¬ ena. . . The everlasting source of phenomena is none other than the infinite Power that makes for righteousness ” ; and again : “ The infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other than the living God.” In adopting these conceptions, then, which do away with the conflict between science and religion by making them one in origin and spirit; which teach us that even in the use of our daily bread we are linked to the Power whom we are taught to pray to give it to us ; which help us to understand that without his knowledge, because without his action, not even the sparrow falls to the ground ; and which help us to realize that the plainest and homeliest things that concern the welfare of our fellow-creatures are worthy of our most serious study and our profoundest thought; we are only following the current philosophy of the time. That we do not think of these things every time we eat our bread and meat is very well, but such things are worth thinking of once in a while. If they were not, life would not be worth living. But I am wandering far afield and must come back to my subject. AMOUNTS OF POTENTIAL ENERGY IN FOOD-MATERIALS. Modern physical science has taught how to measure the potential energy in combustible materials. The apparatus used is called a calo¬ rimeter, and the energy is measured by the amount of heat produced in burning the sub¬ stances with oxygen, the equivalent of the heat in terms of mechanical energy being quite definitely known. The amounts of po¬ tential energy in different food-materials have been measured in this way. Chemists and physiologists have thought for a long while that when the food is con¬ sumed in the body it must yield the same quantity of energy as when burned in the calo¬ rimeter. In both cases it is burned with oxy¬ gen, although the process in the body is far less simple than in the calorimeter. A number of years ago. Professor Frankland, of London, determined the heats of combustion of differ-

Page 404

DIAGRAM IV. POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. 'calories in the nutrients in one pound of each FOOD-MATERIAL. Beef, round, rather lean . . . . Beef, neck . Beef, sirloin, rather fat . Beef, flank, very fat . Beef, side, well fattened . . . . Mutton, leg . Mutton, shoulder . Mutton, loin (chops) . Mutton, side, well fattened Smoked ham . Pork, very fat . Flounder . Cod . Haddock . Bluefish . Mackerel, rather lean . Mackerel, very fat . Mackerel, average . Shad . Salmon . Salt cod . Salt mackerel . Smoked herring . Canned salmon . Oysters . . . Hens’ eggs . Cows’ milk . Cows’ milk, skimmed . Cheese, whole milk . Cheese, skimmed milk . . . . Butter . Oleomargarine . Wheat flour . Wheat bread . Rye flour . Beans . Pease . Oatmeal . Com (maize) meal . Rice . Sugar . Potatoes . Sweet potatoes . Turnips . 807 1108 1173 2750 1463 1142 1281 1755 1906 i960 3452 286 310 331 404 430 1026 696 750 967 416 1364 1343 1036 229 760 308 176 2044 1166 3691 3679 1655 1278 1614 1519 1476 1830 1616 1627 1798 427 416 139 These estimates are for the nutritive ingredients in one pound of edible substance free from bone and refuse. The figures are based upon the quantities of nutrients, protein, fats, and carbohydrates, as shown by a limited number of analyses; and the quantities of energy as indicated by experiments with the calorimeter and respiration-apparatus. • In making these estimates, a gram of protein is assumed to contain 4 . i Calories ; a gram of carbohydrates the same, and a gram of fats, 9 . 3 Calories. The food-materials with the most fat, such as butter and very fat meats, have the most potential energy, while those which have little fat and consist mainly of water, like lean meat, fish, milk, potatoes, and turnips, have but little energy. ■B These comparisons are for a pound of the whole edible substance of each material, including both water and nutrients. If we were to leave the water out of account and take enough of each to make a pound of actual nutrients, the differences in energy would, of course, be much less. But even if we were to compare equal weights of actually nutritive material, the differences would still be very wide. Butter and sugar have each very little water ; butter is nearly all fat, and sugar is a carbohydrate. The potential energy of butter is more than double that of sugar. Calculated on the dry basis, the veg¬ etable foods, which consist largely of carbohydrates, would have less energy than meats which contain considerable fat. The potential energy represents simply the fuel- value of the food, and hence is only an incomplete measure of its whole nutritive value. Besides serving as fuel, our food has other uses, one of which is, if possible, still more important, namely, that of forming and repairing the tissues of the body, the parts of the machine. This latter work is done by the protein, which has comparatively little potential energy. Pro¬ tein is the chief nutrient of lean meat and fish. These have, therefore, a high nutritive value, although their energy is comparatively small. (See Diagram III. of first article of this series.)

Page 405

THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. 401 PROFESSOR EDWARD FRANKLAND. ent food-materials, and his results have since been taken by many chemists and physiolo- * The previous articles of this series have described the different kinds of nutrients of foods. Myosin (lean) of meat, white of egg, casein (curd) of milk, gluten of wheat, etc., are protein compounds. Fat of meat, but¬ ter, and oil of corn and wheat are fats. Starch and sugar are carbohydrates. Since these German researches are very recent and have not yet been made accessible to English readers, I could hardly expect to be excused if I did not give at least an inkling of the details. Here is Dr. Rubner’s summary of some of the main results of several long series of experiments, the descriptions of which occupy several hundred pages. ISODYNAMIC VALUES FOR ONE HUNDRED PARTS OF FAT. NuMtive substances, water-free. A s determined by direct experiments with animals. A s determmed by calorimeter. Myosin . 225 213 Lean meat . 243 235 Starch . 232 22Q Cane sugar . 234 233 Grape sugar ... . 256 255 The quantities of the several substances, lean meat, myosin (the chief protein compound of lean meat), starch, etc., are those which were found to yield the same amounts of heat when burned in tlie calorimeter, or to render the same service as fuel when consumed in the body of the animal, as 100 grams of fat. This explanation of the meaning of the expression “ isody¬ namic values for 100 parts offat” needs a little qualifica¬ tion to make it perfectly correct, but it is as accurate as I can well make it without going into a discussion too abstruse for the pages of a magazine, and it is really accurate enough for our purpose. The figures mean, then, that the dogs in the respiration -apparatus obtained, VoL. XXXIV.— 55. gists as the standard for their fuel-values when they are used for food, although with a certain amount of reserve, because of the lack of j^roof that the heat generated in the calorimeter is an accurate measure of the energy developed by the same materials in the body. The actual demonstration that this is the case, has been reserved for the refinements of later research. Within a short time past, feeding-trials with animals in the respiration-apparatus have shown the proportions in which the several classes of nutritive ingredients of food do one another’s work in serving as fuel in the body, and more extended experiments, with improved forms of the calorimeter, have given very ac¬ curate measurements of the amounts of poten¬ tial energy in the same materials. The respira¬ tion experiments have been made with dogs, in the Physiological Institute in Munich, by Dr. Rubner, who has also made an extended series with the calorimeter. The largest num¬ ber of the experiments Avith food-materials in the calorimeter, however, have been conducted by Professor Stohmann, of the University of Leipsic, and his assistants. The results of ex¬ periments with the respiration-apparatus and with the calorimeter agree with most remarka¬ ble closeness. In supplying the body with fuel, the protein, fats, and carbohydrates* replaced on the average, as much heat to keep their bodies warm and energy for the work their muscles had to do, from 243 grams of lean meat (L e., meat enough to furnish 243 grams of nutritive material after the water had been driven out), as they obtained from 100 grams of fat, while 235 grams of the lean meat, burned to equivalent products in the calorimeter, would yield the same amount of heat as the 100 grams of fat. Considering the great difficulties in experimenting with live animals, these two isodynamic values, 243 by the respiration- apparatus and 235 by the calorimeter, agree very closely indeed. But with starch, the results by the two metliods, 232 and 229, are still closer, while with ordinary table sugar and grape sugar they are as good as identical. Taking our ordinary food-materials as they come, and leaving out slight difierences due to the difierences in digestibility, etc.. Dr. Rubner has made the follow¬ ing general estimate of the amounts of energy in one gram of each of the three principal classes of nutrients. The Calorie, which is the unit commonly employed in these calculations, is the amount of heat which would raise the temperture of a kilogram of water one degree centigrade (or a pound of water 4 degrees Fahrenheit). Instead of this unit of heat we may use a unit of me¬ chanical energy, for instance the foot-ton, which is the force that would lift one ton one foot. One Calorie nearly corresponds to 1.53 foot-tons. POTENTIAL ENERGY IN NUTRIENTS OF FOOD. Calories. Foot-tons. In one gram of protein . 4.1 6-3 In one gram of fats . 9-3 14.2 In one gram of carbohydrates . 4-T 6-3 These figures mean that when a gram (one twenty- eighth of an ounce) of fat, be it the fat of the food or

Page 406

402 THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. each other in almost exact proportion to their heats of combustion. That the living body should thus be proved to use its food with such perfect chemical economy is certainly interest¬ ing and important. It is one more fact to add to the long lists that are bringing the functions of life more and more within the domain of ordinary physical and chemical law. The diagram of ‘‘ Potential Energy of Food” herewith indicates the amounts of potential energy in different food-materials. The estimates are for one pound of each material; that is to say, for one pound of edible substance, freed from refuse, as for in¬ stance, meat without bone or the shell-con¬ tents of eggs. It is of course to be understood of this series (May Century), the reason be- that the materials vary in composition and that comes clear. The very lean meat consists most- these figures represent averages merely. In ly of water, which has no potential energy, while fact, both the analyses of the food-materials the very fat meat has extremely little water and and the researches upon the potential energy is composed mainly of fat, which has more po¬ of the nutrients are as yet far too limited in tential energy than any other nutrient. The By these calculations, a pound of wheat flour contains as much energy, to be converted into the heat which a laboring man needs to keep his body warm, and muscular strength to do his work, as two pounds of lean beef free from bone, while a pound of very fat pork is equal to over four pounds, and a pound of but¬ ter to nearly five pounds of the very lean beef. That is, the quantities of latent energy in lean beef, flour, fat pork, and butter, are to each other as one, two, four, and five. That these food-materials should differ so greatly in fuel- value may, at first sight, seem a little strange. But when we compare the com¬ position of the very fat and the very lean meat, as shown in Diagram III. of the first article extent to be entirely satisfactory. The dia¬ gram is like a map of a new country, based upon the first explorations; in the main cor¬ rect, but in need of more complete surveys to make it accurate in all its details. body-fat, is consumed in the body, it will, if its poten¬ tial energy be all transformed into heat, yield enough to warm a kilogram of water nine and three-tenths de¬ grees of the centigrade thermometer, or, if it be trans¬ formed into mechanical energy such as the steam-engine or the muscles use to do their work, it will furnish as much as would raise one ton fourteen and two-tenths feet or fourteen and two-tenths tons one foot. A gram of protein or carbohydrates would yield a little less than half as much energy as a gram of fat. In other words, when we compare the nutrients in respect to their fuel-values, their capacities for yielding heat and mechanical power, an ounce of protein of lean meat or albumen of egg is just about equivalent to an ounce of sugar or starch ; and a little over two ounces of either would be required to equal an ounce of the fat of meat or butter or body-fat. The potential energy in the ounce of protein or carbo¬ hydrates would, if transformed into heat, suffice to raise the temperature of one hundred and thirteen pounds of water one degree Fahrenheit, while an ounce of fat, if completely burned in the body or in the calorimeter, would yield as much heat as would warm over twice that weight of water one degree. The calculations of Diagram IV. are based upon the figures just given for the potential energy of each nutrient. The figures used for the quantities of each nutrient in each food- material of Diagram IV. are the same as those on which Diagram III. of the first article of this series is based. difference between the very fat meat and the wheat flour is not due so much to difference in their proportions of water, for they have nearly the same, but rather to the fact that flour con¬ sists largely of starch, which has relatively little potential energy. Butter and oleomargarine lead all the other materials in their quantities of energy. The fat of butter is slightly inferior in this respect, weight for weight, to the fat of meat, the proportions as found by experiment being as 92 to 94, nearly. I fear I have not yet made quite clear just what these statements and the figures in the diagram actually mean. A pound of wheat flour is computed to yield energy equal to 1656 calories or 2534 foot- SMALL RESPIRATION-APPARATUS IN THE MUNICH PHYSIOLOGICAL INSTITUTE. This apparatus, which is, in principle, identical with the large apparatus described in the previous article oAhis series, was devised by Prof. Voit, and intended for experiments with dog^ gee^, and other small animals. Its object is to provide for analysis of the air before and after it has breathed by the animal, and thus show what products of respiration the animal has imparted to it. The box in which the animal is kept is made of glass. Through this box a constant current of air is drawn and rneasured by the large meter on the table. A small portion of this, however, is drawn through two of the small meters by which it is measured, and through apparatus on the table by which it is analyzed. Air taken from outside the box is at the same time drawn through the other two small meters and apparatus on the table, and thus measured and analyzed in like manner.

Page 407

403 THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. tons. But this of course does not mean that if the pound of flour were made into bread, it would enable our blacksmith, if he should eat it, to lift 2534 tons of iron to a height of one foot, or the hod-carrier to carry a ton of bricks to the height of 2534 feet. He could do only a small fraction of this work with his loaf of bread. Only a very small proportion of the whole energy of the food is made available for exter¬ nal muscular work, such as the hod-carrier’s lifting, the blacksmith’s hammering, or other manual labor; the most of it is transformed into heat. A considerable quantity is used for the interior work of the body, breathing, keep¬ ing the blood in circulation, digestion, etc., but a large part of this is transformed into heat before it leaves the body. I'hus the mechan¬ ical energy imparted to the blood by the mus¬ cles of the heart is changed to heat by the friction of the blood against the vessels through which it circulates. Indeed, there is an old theory that it is this friction that gives the body its heat. The heat generated in the body, by the com¬ bustion of food and otherwise, is continually given off by radiation. With plenty of clothing we can retain enough to keep ourselves warm even in a cold day. Too much clothing may so interfere with radiation as to make us un¬ comfortably warm. The amount of heat pro¬ duced in the body is so large that it has been calculated that, if there were no way for it to escape, there would be enough in an average well-fed man to heat his body to the temper¬ ature of boiling water in thirty-six hours. We have a very familiar illustration of the production of heat along with muscular energy in the heating of our bodies when we exercise our muscles. We cannot transform the energy of our food into muscular force without trans¬ muting part of it into heat at the same time. In the body, indeed, as with the steam-engine, but a small part of the energy of the fuel is transformed into mechanical power for work. But the body is more economical in this respect than the best steam-engine; that is to say, it gets more power for work from the same amount of energy in its fuel. It has been estimated that while the most efficient steam-engines cannot get more than one-eighth of the energy, of their fuel in the form of mechanical power, the body can get one-fifth. Some calculations, in¬ deed, make a far more favorable showing for the animal as compared with the machine in respect to economy in the use of fuel for work. Professor von Gohren, as the result of elabo¬ rate computations, reckons that A horse may transform 'xz per cent. An ox “ “ 43 “ - A man “ “ 53 “ “ CALORIMETER. The calorimeter here shown is a late form devised by Prof. Stohmann. Within is a small cylinder, S, in which the substance to be tested is burned, being- mixed for this purpose with materials furnishing oxygen. This cylin¬ der IS surrounded by a cylindrical cover, and is contained in a larger cylinder, W, holding water. The heat from the burning substance is com¬ municated to the water, and is measured by the rise in temperature as shown by the thermometer. Outside of the cylinder holding the water are two concentric cylinders, A, A, holding air which acts as a non-conductor of the heat. The air-cylinders are surrounded by a larger cylinder con¬ taining water, which, in its turn, has a covering of felt, the object being to guard against the influence of changes of temperature of the outer air. The further devices for protecting the interior apparatus from gain or loss of heat, igniting the inner mixture in the inner cylinder and measuring the heat produced by the combustion, need not be described here. The whole apparatus is about eighteen inches wide and a little over three feet high. of the whole potential energy of his food into energy for mechanical work. More research is needed, however, before entirely satisfactory calculations of this sort can be made. But to come back to the energy in our hod- carrier’s pound of flour. If four-fifths are trans¬ formed into heat in his body and only one-fifth into muscular force for work, this would give him 500 foot-tons of muscular energy. But when he climbs the ladder with his hod of bricks he must carry his body and the hod up and down again ; the power his muscles use to lift their load is not applied directly but through

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404 THE POTENTIAL ENERGY OF FOOD. a complex system of levers in his limbs, and much of the power is used in other ways ; so that the amount of lifting of bricks bears a very small proportion to the total energy of the food. Just as I am writing this, the last volume of the transactions of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences comes to hand, with a communication from Dr. Rubner, giving account of some new and extremely interesting experiments in this direction. I hope the fact that one object of these articles is to report the latest news from the field of abstract research will excuse at least a brief reference to the main results. The experi¬ ments were in continuation of those mentioned above, and, like them, were made with dogs in the respiration-apparatus. One principle which they bring into clear relief is the remarkable economy with which the animal organism uses its material when the supply is limited, and the positive wastefulness it practices when the food-supply exceeds the demand. The dogs had very little room to move about inside the apparatus and of course made very little muscular exertion. Hence they needed but little protein to make up for the wear of muscle, and, practically, the main demand of their bodies was for fuel to yield heat to warm their bodies and strength for the very little work their muscles had to do. When they fasted, they consumed the fat and protein from the store in their bodies. How rigidly economical they were in this draft upon their previously accumulated capital was shown in the way that the consumption of fuel was affected by the temperature of the room. The interior temper¬ ature of the body remained very nearly the same, at ‘‘ blood-heat,” all the while, as indeed it must, or the dogs would have died. In cold days more heat was radiated from the body than in warm, more was needed to supply its place, and * Physiologists have observed that the consumption of fuel in the body sometimes varies with the tempera¬ ture and sometimes does not, and have been at a loss to explain the apparent discrepancies in their experi¬ mental results. These experiments help toward an explanation. But the interesting point is, not simply that the facts are learned, but that they are learned by studying the subject from the standpoint of the poten¬ tial energy of the food. Previously, the accounts have, so to speak, been drawn up in terms of protein, carbo¬ hydrates, and fats, and the balances have been difficult to calculate and still more difficult to explain. But in the experiments of which I have just been speaking, all the figures were reduced to terms of potential energy of the food and body-substance consumed or stored. The results were calculated in Calories, and the balancing of the accounts was thus made simple, and the expla¬ nation plain. Of course I do not mean to say that we have thus suddenly come upon a complete explanation of the whole subject. This is simply an improvement of meth¬ ods based on clearer understanding of principles and leading to clearer and more accurate results. It is, in short, the old story of clearing up an old mystery by use more material was consumed. When the room was warmer the body burned less fuel. And the quantities consumed marked the changes of temperature with a delicacy almost compar¬ able with that of the thermometer. When the dogs had just food enough to supply their needs they used it with similar economy. In other words, when the income was equal to the necessary expenditure it was used as sparingly as the sums taken from the cap¬ ital had been. When the food-supply was made larger, part of the extra material was stored in the body as fat and protein, but at the same time the daily consumption increased. That is to say, when their income was more liberal, they laid part of it by, but at the same time al¬ lowed their current expenses to increase. It has been found by numerous experiments that when the nutrients are fed in large excess the body may continue for a time to store away part of the extra material, but after it has accumulated a certain amount it refuses to take on more, and the daily consumption equals the supply even when this involves great waste. With the large income, the body continues for a time to add to its capital, but finally it comes to spend as much as it gets, and in so doing practically throws away what it cannot profitably use. Dr. Rubner’s dogs showed, in still another way, their economy of fuel when the supply was limited, and wastefulness when they had more than they needed. The same animal that adjusted its consumption of fuel so accu¬ rately to the temperature of the air as long as the amount did not exceed its need, used it with no apparent regard to the temperature, whether warm or cold, as soon as the supply of food exceeded the necessary demand.* This all seems very simple and natural. So the laws of nature always do when we have discovered and begin to understand them. of a new and rational idea. As such, as well as for stronger reasons, it is of interest. It is so easy to magnify the importance of any new discovery, and so hard to avoid going too far in draw¬ ing inferences from it, that I am inclined to put in an¬ other word of caution here. For instance, from the experiments above described one would infer that the food-ingredients yield strength for muscular labor in exact proportion to their heats of combustion. But the dogs in the respiration-apparatus performed no mus¬ cular work except that inside their bodies for respira¬ tion, keeping the blood in circulation, etc., and though we naturally assume that if they had used their muscles for exterior work, such as running or working a tread¬ mill, the muscular energy yielded by the food would have been likewise equal to its potential energy, and though the other known facts make this assumption entirely probable, the experiments do not absolutely prove it. The production of muscular strength is a problem which is still but partly solved. Still I think it is reasonably safe to say that, in general, the foods that have the most potential energy are the ones that yield, not only the most heat to keep the body warm, but also the most strength for muscular work.

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CROOKED JOHN. 405 There are numerous homely, practical ways in which these principles may be applied. I well remember how the sensible and thrifty New England people among whom my boy¬ hood was spent used to talk about ‘‘ hearty victuals,” and how prevalent were the doc¬ trines tha,t “ a hard-working man wants real hearty food,” and that children ought to have hearty food, but not too hearty.”. With these eminently orthodox tenets the science of nutrition in its newest developments is in fullest accord. But there always used to be an unsatisfactory vagueness about them. I never could make out exactly what were ‘‘ hearty ” foods, and in just what their hearti¬ ness consisted. It has since occurred to me that these words express one of the ideas which the unerring sense and instinct of man have wrought out of his long experience, but have waited for science to put into clear and defi¬ nite form. The synonym with which our sci¬ ence defines this idea is energy. Hearty foods are those in which there is an abundance of potential energy. The lumbermen in the Maine forests work intensely in the cold and snows of winter and in the icy water in the spring. To endure the severe labor and cold, they must have food to yield a great deal of heat and strength. Beans and fat pork are staple articles of diet with them, and are used in very large quantities. The beans supply protein to make up for the wear and tear of muscle, and they, and more especially the pork, are very rich in energy to be used for warmth and work. Icannotvouchforthefollowing,whichhasjust struck my eye in a daily paper, but, if it is true, the workmen were sound in their physiology : “ A lot of woodchoppers who worked for IVLr. S - in H stopped work the other day, and sent a spokes¬ man to their employer, who said that the men were satisfied with their wages and most other things, but didn’t like ‘ your fresh meat ; that’s too fancy, and hain’t got strength into it.’ Mr. S - gave them salt pork three times a day, and peace at once resumed its sway.” The use of oily and fatty foods in arctic re¬ gions is explained by the great potential en- ergy of fat, a pound of which is equal to over two pounds of protein or starch. I have been greatly surprised to see, on looking into the niatter, how commonly and largely the fatter kinds of meat are used by men engaged in very hard labor. Men in training for athletic contests, as oarsmen and foot-ball teams, eat large quantities of meat. I have often queried why so much fat beef is used, and especially why mutton is often recommended in prefer¬ ence to beef for training diet. Both the beef and the mutton are rich in protein, which makes muscle. Mutton has the advantage of containing more fat along with the protein, and hence more potential energy. Perhaps this is another case in which experience has led to a practice, the real grounds for which have later been explained by scientific research. The Germans have, in their vernacular, hit closer to the principle here explained than we. Their scientific expression for energy is Kraft, In their folk-tongue the word for nourishing, strength-giving, is krdftig. When, as a new¬ comer, I first looked for a boarding-place in a German city, I was amused at the recurring as¬ surances from would-be hosts and hostesses, that their fare was krdftig. With the abundance that crowns even the humble board at home, I had not learned how much that word and the idea it carried could mean in less favored lands. W. O. Atwater. CROOKED JOHN. HE Von Cravens had once been a great family ; but reckless liv¬ ing had ruined them. They were large, handsome men, with blue eyes and a distinguished bearing. No end of stories were told in the valley of their bright sayings and their foolhardy deeds. Some of their observations, I regret to say, were not for ears polite. Colonel Von Graven, who, with his son Har¬ old, was now the only bearer of the name, was understood to have been a lady-killer in his day. When his dignity thawed out over a glass^ of toddy, he had been known to make allusion to his adventures in that line; and when the judge gave him a dig in the ribs and called him a gay old boy, he did not resent it. VoL. XXXIV.— 56. Harold, the colonel’s son, was a regular dare-devil. They called him “ the girls’ Har¬ old,” because he had such a taking way with women. Nobody could hold a candle to him on the dancing-floor; and the colonel rubbed his hands and chuckled when he saw him take to love-making as a duck does to water. Ah, yes, he made havoc in the hearts of the girls in those days — mere lad as he was. Then it was that one fine day in the spring there was a log-jam in the river. The water rose several feet an hour, and there was a roar in the air as of a hundred chariots. Two men had gone to the bottom in trying to break the jam, and it seemed sure death for the third and the fourth. The cataract thundered below, and the yellow foam flew high over the tree-tops. The

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CROOKED JOHN, 406 spray blew like a drenching rain into the faces of the thousand people who stood with their heartsin their throats, trembling for their homes. Then in the midst of the terror a cheer went up \ nobody knew why. It was a lad of six¬ teen who came sauntering through the throng. It was the girls who cheered him. ‘‘ Harold ! ” cried they, “ Harold ! He can break the log-jam ! He can save the valley ! ” They had scarcely uttered the cry, when the boy had snatched an axe from somebody and run into the middle of the river. With the agility of a squirrel he jumped from log to log, and, enveloped in a cloud of spray, climbed the great heap of lumber at the brink of the cata¬ ract which dammed the stream. His quick eye detected in an instant where the log was that held the heap. One, two, three swift strokes — the heap began to creak ! He flung the axe away, and bounded with daring leaps in the direction of the shore. But the mass was now moving. He stumbled — fell between two logs ; scrambled up again, fell again; and God knows what happened; but in a minute he was pulled out with a boat-hook, unconscious, and hopelessly injured. They sang his praises for a day, and then forgot him. ‘‘ Brave Harold, noble Harold,” said the young girls ; but he was no longer the hero of the balls ; he made no more havoc in maiden hearts. His father sent him to a watering-place in France, traveled with him from Carlsbad to Wiesbaden and from Wiesbaden to the Pyre¬ nees, and wasted the last remnant of his for¬ tune consulting famous physicians ; yet Harold was and remained a cripple. It nearly broke the old man’s heart when his beautiful boy came home pale and hollow-eyed, and with that misshapen form. My poor boy,” he would say, in a voice full of yearning pity, holding out his arm to the cripple ; and then suddenly, as the boy rushed toward him, he would cry in agony : “ Go away from me, child.” It was terrible to Harold to be treated thus by his father. But it was still more terrible when his father was gone and he had not a soul in the world who cared for him. They said in the valley that it was his son’s twisted form that killed the colonel. He was never the man he had been from the day he saw the deformity. When his father was dead, Harold’s first thought was to go to America ; but when the estate was settled, it was found that the colonel had left just enough to pay for his burial. His son was penniless, and had to stay where he was. He was invited around to dinner by his father’s old friends; and the judge and the sheriff occasionally sent him some copying, just to keep him from starving. Thus he kept on for a year, until he began to perceive that he was wearing out his welcome. His melancholy pleased no one ; and he often had to go without his dinner. Hunger then stim¬ ulated his wit, and the hungrier he was, the more amusing he grew. He enlarged his ac¬ quaintance, and got more dinners. He told stories, and when his stock was exhausted, he invented new ones. People laughed and ap¬ plauded him, and he cursed himself, and went on inventing. After a while, he grew so accus¬ tomed to this life that he made no more plans; his own future ceased to interest him. But deep in his heart smoldered a fire which threat¬ ened at times to break forth in flame. He felt a savage desire to fling his glass into the face of his coarse host, who sat there, bent upon de¬ basing him in return for the food he gave him ; to jump up on the table and in burning words give vent to his deep contempt for himself and the shallow-hearted, shallow-brained peo¬ ple who presumed to kick and pat him as they would a dog. He yearned to do some tremen¬ dous deed, merely to rehabilitate his self-re¬ spect. He felt at the bottom of his soul, amid all his self-contempt, a proud sense of superior¬ ity to those who degraded him by their galling benefits. Some day, before he died, he might surprise them. His soul was not crippled, whatever his body might be, and there were great deeds yet slum¬ bering in the Von Graven soul. Another year slipped by, and Harold still dined and told stories. The stories were mostly about himself; the tremendous things he yearned to do, somehow, fired his fancy, until it seemed as if he had already done them. He began to get a bad name in the valley. He lies as fast as a horse trots,” said the people. His stately name seemed no longer to fit him. One mocking nickname after another attached itself to him; and before he was aware of it, he was known throughout the parish as Crooked John.” He resented the name at first, but people only laughed at his wrath, and at last he forgot to be angry. But from that time it seemed as if his head sank deeper down between his shoulders; his brilliant eyes grew dull. Ragged tufts of beard grew un¬ heeded upon his chin. His head seemed to grow bigger in proportion to his frame, and his arms and legs thinner. He looked like an ugly gnome. Every vestige of his boyish beauty was gone. And still, it might happen yet, at the dinner table, when the wine had made him forget his degradation, his fancy was again kindled, and the light of happier days shone in his features. Then people forgot how ugly Crooked John was, and they laughed and

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CROOKED JOHN, applauded his droll sarcasms and his bold inventions. ^^Now tell us, Crooked John,” the jovial host would exclaim as the laughter subsided, ‘‘ how much of that was lies and how much truth.” ‘‘ Half-and-half,” Harold would answer; and in violently restraining his anger, he would move his face with strange contortions which provoked fresh bursts of laughter. He was a jolly dog, that Crooked J ohn — ha ! ha ! ha ! there wasn’t his beat for fun on this side the moun¬ tains. ‘‘Wait,” thought Harold bitterly, “ my hour will come yet. Wait, and I will show you who I am.” II. One morning in June Harold was walking along the river. The lark was singing, and the sky was steeped in sunshine. The pines perspired, and the smell of resin and fresh leaves drifted through the air. There was rarely any one at the river at this time of day, and Harold loved solitude. He was about to throw himself down under a big pine, when he saw a girl sitting motionless upon a stone, leaning against the trunk of the tree. Her head was thrown a lit¬ tle back, as if she were gazing into the sky ; but as he came nearer he saw that she was blind. The sun touched the loose hair at her temples, and made it shine like gold. The hair was of strong growth and richly yellow, and made the delicate face look smaller than it was. It seemed to Harold, as his eyes rested upon her, that she looked as he had imagined the angel did, of whom his mother had told him, who kept watch over him in his childhood. The shy, half-startled look, as she listened to his footsteps, and the little tremor in her voice as she asked, “ Who is it ? ” touched him. “ I am Harold von Graven,” he answered quietly ; and as she rose to go he added, “ I shall not harm you.” She seated herself hesitatingly on the stone, and let her aimless glance wander into space. “ I can’t think what has become of grand¬ mother,” she said after a while; “she told me to sit here till she came back.” “ And won’t you allow me to keep you com¬ pany till she returns?” She did not answer, but sat again leaning backward with her hands folded in her lap. “Your voice is pleasant,” she said with strange abruptness. “ I think you are a good man.” Those words brought the tears into his eyes; they were the first kind words he had heard since his father died. He seated himself at the girl’s feet and chatted about the birds, the crops, and the fishing. He learned that she lived with her grandmother in a little cottage up on the hillside, that her father and mother were dead, and that she had recently come from a neighboring parish. When finally he rose to leave her, he was lighter hearted than he had ever been since his misfortune. He could scarcely tear himself away from the girl; he lingered, walked a few steps, and returned. Why was his heart so light in her presence ? The answer flashed upon him, — it was because she could not see him. From that time forth he never let a day pass without seeing Helen. Her sweet, placid face with the large sightless eyes followed him like a haunting melody. When terrible thoughts op¬ pressed him and he was tempted to curse his fate, he hastened to her, and the dark thoughts fled before the light of her countenance. When he had expended the last remnant of his self- respect in all sorts of buffoonery to please his exacting patrons, he fled to her as to a haven of refuge. Her smile was like a healing bath. Flis crushed manhood arose again in the breath of her pure presence. The happy look that suddenly illuminated her features at the sound of his footsteps sent a thrill of joy through him. It was the most precious experience his barren life had afforded him. His bent and crooked form seemed to grow tall and erect the moment he passed her threshold ; he held his head high, as it behooved a Von Graven, and spoke with the free and happy daring for which the Von Gravens had been famed. The promise of his youth bloomed into fulfill¬ ment; life opened wide and glorious before him, and he marched fearlessly from achievement to achievement, from deed to deed. All the mis¬ ery and degradation of the present were but as a remote menace, which hung about the hori¬ zon, and which he fought back by the warmth and vehemence of his eloquence. But when he passed out into the summer night, it grew dark again within him. He wished that the whole world had been blind, or eternally steeped in darkness. III. “ Wpiat is your highest wish, Helen ? ” he said to her one day, as they were seated to¬ gether on the river-bank. “ How can you ask ? ” she queried in a sweet, hushed voice. “ I have but one wish, and that will never be fulfilled.” “ What is it ? ” he asked anxiously. “ It is that I may get my sight back,” she answered wistfully. “ But do not let us speak of it; it only makes me sad.” “Yes, do let us speak of it. Why do you wish so much to get your sight back ? ” A deep blush spread over her neck and face. “ Do not ask me about that, Harold,” she whispered hurriedly.

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4o8 crooked JOHN. “ But I wish to know, Helen,” he insisted, the grandmother alone. He begged her, for She raised her head and turned her large, God’s sake, not to tell Helen of his deformity, sightless eyes toward him. or mention his nickname m her presence. It is because I wish to see you^ Harold,” The agitation, in his manner and the distress she said with strange solemnity. m his voice impressed the old woman, and she The stickwhichhe held inhis hand snapped, promised what he asked. She then began to and the pieces dropped between his knees. For whimper, in her wonted fashion, about the bad a long while he did not speak. When again times and the hard lot of the poor. ^ I am he lifted his face, it was ashy pale. His mouth a-pegging down hill, sir,” said she, looking up twitched a little before he gained control of it. from her spinning-wheel ; ‘‘ I shall soon be un- ‘‘ But I might disappoint you, Helen,” he der the sod. What will there then be for the began unsteadily ; ‘‘ I might not at all look as little lass but the poor-house ? If she only you imagine I do. Would it not then be bet- had her sight, sir — then she could take care ter to remain blind ? ” of herself ; for she is smart enough, God bless “ Oh, you should not tease me so cruelly,” her ! and she has uncommon sense. But to be she cried. I know how you look, as well as on the parish, — a sensitive thing like her, it if I had seen you a thousand times.” will be misery, sir; it’ll be misery.” “ How do I look ? ” he asked hoarsely. She gave him a quick, warning glance as He was determined to drain the bitter cup Helen entered, and he understood that he was to the dregs. iiot to allude to the melancholy topic. You are tall and beautiful,” she answered. The girl was pale, and there was a shyness with touching enthusiasm ; “ you have a reck- in her greeting which took him aback, less fling in your walk, and your hair curls She blushed and moved her hands nervously, densely about your temples. You have the Something new and strange had come between kind of eyes which win the hearts of the girls, them. The old happy unconcern was gone, full of light and reckless roguishness. You The anxiety in her manner, as after a brief need not deny it, sir,” she went on, with inno- talk of indifferent things he rose to go, was cent archness, “ I sha’n’t be jealous; I sha’n’t pitiful. It was all she could do to hold back ask how many love-affairs you’ve had.” her tears; and he heard her sobs and the grand- Each of her words stabbed him to the very mother’s soothing murmur, the moment he was heart ; he clenched his teeth to smother a cry out of the door. He guessed that his hope had of pain. She sat smiling with sweet confidence, come true, and what had once been his hap- absorbed in her happy vision. piness became now a burden, an agonizing “ Do you know,” she continued, “ how I dilemma. How gladly he would have opened found out how you looked ? I did not ask his arms to her and said : “ Helen, my dar- grandmother, because I did not wish to know ling, I love you.” But the very touch of him it all at once ; but I wanted to have something would have revealed his deception, and she to wonder about in my long leisure, something would have shrunk back from him, crying, to fill the empty darkness about me ; and so Who are you ? ” I thought out, feature by feature, how you It was his lost, youthful self she loved; it looked. And whenever my fancy stopped, I was Harold von Graven, the daring, beauti- only said half aloud to myself, ‘ Harold von ful lad,— it was not Crooked John. And Graven,’ and there was such a proud ring in yet — and yet — could she not learn to love the name that my fancy leaped forward again ; Crooked John? Ah, if it had not been for and I knew at once how a Harold von Graven the beautiful Harold von Graven, perhaps she must look.” might have loved Crooked John. If he had He could endure it no longer. His soul, only had the courage to say to her : “ I lost my stretched upon the rack, writhed with exqui- health, my strength, my youth to save this val- site pain. With groping hands he seized hold ley from destruction. I am a misshapen crip- of a low-hanging branch above him and pulled pie who has none in the world but you to love, himself up. His limbs seemed numb and dead. Can you not, in your mercy, give one little gram and his gait unsteady. A strange irresponsibil- of love to solace my miserable life? ’ if he had ity, as of beginning intoxication, took posses- had the courage to speak thus, I say, perhaps sion of him. He moved away ; but he did not she would, out of the abundance of her worn- know where he was going. Thought seemed anly pity, have dropped a tear upon the memory an intolerable vexation. He was weary — of the beautiful Harold von Graven, and loved weary unto death. Crooked John. But now — it was too late! But his great, heroic deed, — not the long- forgotten one, but the one he had cherished For a week, perhaps, he did not see her, for the future with defiant tenderness ; the one and when he called the next time, he found wherewith he meant to shame the paltry crowd

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CROOKED JOHN, that mocked and humiliated him, — might not that give her a glimpse at the proud Von Graven soul that dwelt in his miserable form; might not that win him the admiration which in a woman’s heart nestles so close to her love ? This possibility filled his soul, haunting him by day and by night. He was like one eager for martyrdom, spying anxiously for a chance to throw away his life gloriously. For he faced, without quailing, the thought of death as a final vindication ; he was quite content to sac¬ rifice his life to his sweet revenge. It occurred to him at times, amid his manifold torturing doubts, that the premeditation of the sacrifice, and its interested motive, robbed it of its sub¬ limity ; that, in fact, it was nothing but a kind of exalted vanity. And yet, this deep hun¬ ger for praise, for recognition, for love, which gnawed like a sleepless worm at his heart, why was it sordid, why ignoble ? No daring ambi¬ tion invades a narrow, commonplace soul. No feverish craving for greatness disturbs the slug¬ gish repose of a sordid, earth-clogged creature. Crooked John was poor company at dinner in those days, and the judge complained loudly that he had turned his birthday party into a funeral. He had told solemn stories which had made every one feel depressed. When he left, early in the evening, the judge swore he would give him a piece of his mind the next time he saw him. The fact was. Crooked John felt ill at ease now among the gay feasters. Whenever he met Helen’s grandmother carrying bundles of fagots upon her back, he scrutinized her face anxiously to see if it was true, as she said, that Death already had her in his clutch. ‘‘ I am a-pegging down hill, sir,” was the melancholy refrain of her lamentations ; and when I am dead, sir, there is nothing for the little lass but the poor-house.” This thought of Helen in the poor-house — the shy, delicate girl in that miserable house, surrounded by coarse and degraded creatures — was potent enough to divert his mind from his own troubles. He pondered and pondered, and only involved himself in a perplexing maze of doubts and conflicting sentiments. He quite forgot about his heroic deed in his anxiety for Helen. He must save her — yes, he must save her from a doom that would be worse than death. If she were only not so helpless ; if she could only see ! If she could see I But who knew whether her blindness was incurable? He sprang up from his bed and began wildly to pace the floor of his narrow room, as this idea struck him, that Helen might regain her sight. The next morning he walked eleven miles to the county physician and begged him, as if by chance, and Avithout mentioning his name, to examine Helen’s eyes. He waited breathlessly for the result down at the river-bank. When, at 409 the end of half an hour, the physician emerged from the hut. Crooked J ohn anxiously scanned his features. “ Will she see ? ” he cried; ^‘will she see ? ” That depends,” answered the doctor. “ The disease is in the retina. The nerve is sound. An operation might restore her sight.” “ And can you perform that operation ? ” No, I should not like to risk it. There is but one man in Norway who could do it — Professor L - , in Christiania.” “But how can we get him here ? ” “ Money will bring him here. If you wish, I will write him about the case.” “ Money ? How much ? ” “ Perhaps a hundred dollars.” “ A hundred dollars ! ” Crooked J ohn dropped down upon a stone and gazed hopelessly out over the river. A hundred dollars ! How could a poor sick weak¬ ling ever hope to earn a hundred dollars ? He got five cents a sheet from the judge for his copy¬ ing. How long would it take him at that rate to make a hundred dollars ? He cut a piece of birch-bark from a tree and began to reckon. He covered it all over with figures, and quite forgot about the doctor’s presence. ^ “Two years,” he murmured sadly, raising his eyes from the birch-bark; “ two years.” v. For two years people scarcely saw Crooked John. He called upon Helen yet, but not as often as before. Some said he was ill ; others, that he had gone mad. Yet late at night Crooked John might have been seen hurrying breathlessly along the highway with large rolls of paper under his arms. He wrote late and early, night and day. Not only from the judge did he procure copying, but from the new colonel and the sheriff. He looked gaunt and haggard ; his cheeks were yellowish pale and sunken. The writer’s cramp tortured him until his right arm was almost paralyzed. Then he practiced for a long while, and learned to write with his left hand. He lived much of the time in a half-dazed condition, working on indefatigably, and only conscious of one pur¬ pose, — to have Helen’s sight restored, to save her from the poor-house. Every penny he earned he hoarded up with a miser’s glee, and pulled out the bag every night from his mat¬ tress, sewing it up carefully again after having counted his gains. He begrudged himself the little that he needed to keep body and soul to¬ gether, and was content, as long as hunger did not disable him before he had finished his work. One night — it was about two years after his last meeting with Crooked John — the doctor was sitting in his study. There was a sound

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410 CROOKED JOHN. of footsteps in the hall, — shuffling, uncertain footsteps, — and a wary hand seemed to be groping for the door-knob. The doctor arose and opened the door. Ah, Crooked John ! ” said he, in amazement. You out so late at night, Crooked John ? ’’ Crooked John stood panting at the door. It was some time before he was able to speak. He held his hands tightly clasped under his chest, as if they were guarding something pre¬ cious that was hidden there. Sit down,” said the doctor, pushing him gently into a chair ; you are ill, I see ; you wish to consult me.” “ No — no,” answered Crooked John, with a bewildered look ; I am not ill.” ^‘What then can I do for you?” asked the doctor. The cripple, casting anxious glances about the room, began to unbutton his coat and waistcoat. He took out a big bag, and put it on the table before the doctor. “ Count that,” he said, undoing the string, and taking up a handful of copper and silver money. It is a hundred dollars.” But what am I to do with it ? You don’t owe me anything.” “ You said it would cost a hundred dollars.” “ What would cost a hundred dollars ? ” “To give Helen her sight back.” The doctor stood speechless; then he grasped the cripple’s hand and pressed it warmly. “ Mr. Von Graven,” he said, “ I bow myself in the dust before you.” In about a week the famous professor came. Crooked John had planned to stand outside and peep in through the window, so as to get the first glimpse of Helen’s face when she should open her eyes upon the daylight. He had found courage to face the thought that he must van¬ ish from her life. But one parting glimpse he must have of her sweet face, radiant with hap¬ piness, as she emerged into the sunlight from her long night. This must be the reward of his labor. He had seen the picture in the old family Bible of Christ restoring the sight of the blind, and he imagined the professor did it in very much the same way. As it happened, however, on the day when the operation was to take place, he was too ill to leave his bed. A fever was raging in his veins. His strength seemed utterly exhausted. The old peasant woman in whose house he lived made tea out of medicinal herbs and gave it to him. But she could not still the raging intensity of thought that like a maelstrom whirled within his brain. The magnitude of his sacrifice be¬ gan to show upon him. In restoring the light to Helen, he had quenched the light of his own life. What would existence be to him without her? A long groping through dusky solitudes, with the cold breath of Death in his face. The ideal of him which she loved — how could he have the heart to destroy it ? How could he ever walk up to her, ugly and misshapen as he was, and say : “ I am the one whom you love — I am Harold von Graven ! ” Would she be¬ lieve him ? Would she not rather turn away from him with loathing ? And could he sur¬ vive her disgust — would he not sink into the earth before her look of scorn ? From the depth of his woe he cried out to God, pray¬ ing for death. But the torturing thoughts re¬ turned and returned, and neither threat nor prayer would keep them away. He saw him¬ self standing before her, in the glory of youth and strength, wooing her, and accepting with manly happiness her willing surrender. But behind this beautiful youth stood a crooked little dwarf who pushed himself forward and said to Helen : “ This man, Harold von Gra¬ ven is dead — can you not love his brother. Crooked John ? ” But Helen always said : “ If he is dead, then I will love him dead, as I loved him living.” And the dwarf. Crooked John, stole out of sight weeping, and saying: “Yes, let us love him dead.” For he did love him He loved the daring and beautiful youth that was dead, and in the depth of his heart he would rather *suf- , fer an endless misery than displace him with his present miserable self in Helen’s affection. He was his own rival, and barred himself his own road to happiness. He despaired in his love; and yet was loved. It was a terrible paradox. But the heroic deed by which he had hoped to win her ! Alas, he was too weak now to dream of heroic deeds. Resignation, dull and dreary resignation — that was all that was in store for him. If he had only seized his opportunity for greatness while it was yet day ; but the night cometh when no man can work. And yet, had he but known it ! his great deed was done. But Crooked John did not know it. He had been lying thus for a week, perhaps trembling on the verge of madness, when a note was sent him by the county physician, saying that Helen had regained her sight. She was constantly asking for him, with much anxiety, though she did not know that she owed her sight to him. The doctor begged him to go to her, as any anxiety at this time might affect her eyes and even plunge her back into dark¬ ness. He had scarcely finished reading the note, when he tumbled out of bed and with reeling senses began to dress. It took him a long while ; again and again he lay down on the floor and seemed on the point of losing consciousness. It was about eight o’clock in the evening when he stood under the sky and

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CROOKED JOHN. breathed in the sharp autumnal air. The moon was bright overhead, and the stars sparkled in the nocturnal blue. He tottered along the highway ; fell down, and rose again. He scarcely knew how he reached the river-bank; but at end of about three hours he found himself sitting on the ground in the midst of the under¬ brush that grew close up to the walls of the cottage. A heavy dew was falling, and he shiv¬ ered with cold. The consciousness of being near to Helen made him tremble, half with joy and half with fear. Should he go to her ? Should he speak to her ? All the dreadful anticipa¬ tions of his fever fancies crowded in upon him. No, he could not go to her. But if Helen should lose her sight again, from grief at her not seeing him! It was only for this that she had wished to see — that she might see him. But if she saw him ! An agonizing dread shot through him like a fiery arrow. The disap¬ pointment, the horror which the sight of him would inspire, might not that too prove dan¬ gerous to her — might not that too deprive her of her sight ? The question seemed benumbing — overwhelming. He could not answer it. Yet, whether it was well for Helen to see him or not, he could not go away with¬ out seeing Helen. He took hold feebly of the alder-bushes and raised himself up ; then tot¬ tered over to the nearest window. It was close to the ground, and he could look in with¬ out difficulty. Before the hearth, upon which a fire was burning, sat the old grandmother, with Helen’s head resting in her lap. She was strok¬ ing the girl’s hair and talking soothingly to her. “Dinna cry, lassie,” she was saying, ‘‘he will come yet; crying will put out thy pretty eyes again, just as we have got ’em bright and capa¬ ble.” “No one cares for me, granny; and I can¬ not help but cry.” “ Shame on thee, lassie, shame ! If he dinna care for thee, dost tha think he would ha’ workit himself to death to give thee thy sight back again ? ” “ Granny! ” The girl sprang up with a joyous cry. Her face was as if transfigured. Radiance, rapture, the enchanting certainty of being loved, shone out of her dark, sea-blue eyes, imparting to them a strange, touching beauty. “ O granny ! ” she cried, sinking down at the old woman’s feet ; “ why did you not tell me ? ” “ Dinna be so workit up about it, lassie,” said her grandmother evasively; “wait till tha hast seen him.” “ I always thought of him as beautiful,” said Helen, staring radiantly into the fire ; “but it matters not now whether he be beautiful or not, I shall love him — love him — love him, even though he be ugly and crooked as a gnome.” 411 She gave a little start as she uttered the words, and pressed her hands suddenly over her eyes. “ They hurt me, granny,” she said. “ It. is the fire, lassie. Go out into the star¬ light. That is soft, and good for poor eyes.” Oh, the blessed relief! The removal of the torturing doubt which had held him so long in its clutch was so sudden that it bewildered him. He could not at once adjust his mind to it. And yet in the midst of his darkness there is a great luminous spot, which grows and grows until it fills his soul with light. He staggers away from the window in a blissful intoxica¬ tion, and places himself in front of the door. The moonshine pours down upon him, and his shadow stretches, black and grotesque, over the grass. With his eyes fixed upon the door, he stands trembling, burning, shivering. His blood surges and throbs in his ears. The door is opened, and Helen becomes visible against the dusk within. He takes a step forward. Merciful God, she must see him now ! With a cry he tumbles toward her and clasps her in his arms. “ Helen, beloved ! Look at me, hideous though I am ! I am not afraid now.” She strains her eyes, she rubs them desper¬ ately ; she lifts them to the stars. A look of terror passes over her countenance. “ O Harold,” she shrieks, “ I cannot see you ! ” It is as if the night had suddenly engulfed him ! It grows black before his eyes ; but in the far distance there is a blood-red stripe as of dawn. After a while, through the mists that inwrap his consciousness, comes a vague blissful sensation. Soft fingers glide caressingly over his face; soft lips are warmly pressed against his lips. His body grows light as air; and he floats upward — upward through sun¬ lit space. Stars shoot with dizzying speed across the sky, drawing long luminous trails behind them. He rises — rises ever upward through the shining void. The world grows dim beneath his feet. Well-nigh an hour had passed when her grandmother opened the door and found Helen sitting upon the grass, holding in her arms a pale and shriveled form. She started forward and saw by the light of the moon that it was Crooked John. His face seemed strangely calm, except for a strained expression about his mouth. She stooped down in terror and put her hand upon his forehead. Crooked John was dead. “ May God bless thee, my poor lad,” whis¬ pered the old woman devoutly, “ and give thee peace.” Hjalmar H. Boyes€7i,

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IDEALS. There is but one bird sings like that! From Paradise it flew, Out to the world, with wavering plumage gay, When on creation’s glad, awakening day The morning wore the dew. It is not nightingale or lark. Oh, a diviner bird ! In moon-touched forests, sweet with night and dew. In dawn-stirred meadows, when the Spring goes through. Its voice was never heard. Its nest? In boughs of fadeless bloom, Nowhere that we can see. The winds have never found it, and the rain Of wasting autumns beat the leaves in vain On that immortal tree. Its age — its country? No man knows. Bom for the world’s delight. No bird that goes through splendors of the dawn. Or homeward comes, down quiet twilights drawn, Has wings for such far flight. Can no one find it ? All the world Is seeking it — afar. Each in his turn has cried, ‘‘Lo, it is mine!” Oh, bitter-sweet ! Still is the joy divine Farther than flower from star. Jtiliet C. Marsh, THE REJECTED JAPANESE LOVER.* WHERE golden-red the lush persimmon grows. Where dusk-green sway the pine- boughs dreamfully, I choose, my love, I choose at night for thee, With fervent vows, a fragrant-petaled rose — White as camellias of the isle, whence blows A spice- wind o’er the blissful, deep-blue sea. And where the long-necked storks feed, tempest-free. On sweet palm-buds or ebon-glossy sloes ! I place it ’neath thy porch within a vase. To tell, love, how my heart for thee beats true, And of thy heart to beg a tender grace, When, wistfully, at dawn I pass thy door. Yet what see I, there, dying in the dew ? My rose, outcast, that whispers — “ Hope no more !” William Struthers. * In Japan it is etiquette for a lover to select some choice plant and place it, at night, in a vase or flower¬ pot that hangs suspended by three slender chains from the veranda of such dwellings as possess one or more marriageable daughters. Should his suit be favored, the floral gift is watered and carefully tended ; but if, on the contrary, his advances are coldly received by the maiden, or if her kinsfolk object to the alliance, the plant is found withered and forsaken in the garden-walk the following morning. W, S.

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THE SPORTSMAN’S MUSIC. BOB WHITE. NO sportsman worthy of the name is igno¬ rant of the calls of the various game birds ; and no sportsman who makes an art of his recreation and is ambitious to succeed is unable to imitate those calls with telling effect. Game birds are not silly noddy-birds that sit to be shot at, and the hunter’s skill and ingenuity must be exercised to bring them within his reach. Many species of birds, wonderfully shy, when once startled by a shot, will take wing and fly to great distances, making it impracticable for any sportsman made of human clay to follow them. A knowl¬ edge of their calls often enables him to entice them back, and to get shot after shot until he proudly carries away as trophies of his skill the whole assembly. Perhaps there is little love of nature in this ; but no sportsman will deny that his knowledge of the language of the birds has made him more profoundly con¬ scious of the beauties of the world in which he lives. In the summer season the quail is filled with domestic dreams, and is engaged in watching the growth of his downy family under the protection of his beautiful mate. At that season of the year the quail’s voice is rich and mellow. It has all the full, rounded sweetness of the flute-note mingled with the penetrating, tender quality of the oboe. A mu¬ sician who thoroughly understood the value of the modern tonalities, who is keen to perceive the key in which an air was pitched, would say at once that the three notes of which this call is composed were suggestive of boldness and triumph as well as of love ; that they were certainly the song of a proud, happy, and affectionate father. At first thought the mind flashes to the •conclusion that so beautiful a call should be VoL. XXXIV.— 57. easily expressed in the notation commonly used for music. But there is nothing in nature that resembles music. The succession of sustained sounds which composes a melody is not heard. The peculiarity of the songs of all birds is that they never sustain notes. There is a con¬ stant po7'ta7ne7ito^ or sliding of the sound, which blends one note into another, just as is done in human conversation, making a succession that may be pleasing, but is not melody. The Rev. Mr. Haweis, in his interesting book, “ Music and Morals,” says : What has she [nature] done for the musician ? She has given him sound, not music. Nowhere does there fall upon his ear, as he walks through the wide world, such an arrangement of consecu¬ tive sounds as can be called a musical subject, or theme, or melody. . . . The cuckoo, who often sings a true third, and sometimes a sharp third or even a fourth, is the nearest approach to music in nature.’^ This being the case, it is with a profound sense of the impossibility of doing justice to the call of the quail — or that of any other bird — in musical notes that I here write his summer song in the common notation, as well as I can give it : Allegro mod. [-5 - ^ - 1 1 — r-r J F - 1 1 r ^ ' ^ \ In the winter, when the birds are full-grown and are gathered in coveys, when the hunting season has begun, you will hear another and equally beautiful call from the quail. After your intelligent dog has pointed, and you have flushed the covey and flashed out your message of destruction to the brown ranks, the birds will scatter in every direction. For a long time there will be silence, and you will wonder what has become of the quail. Be patient, and soon you will hear the splendid bugle-call of the leader as he sounds what may be called the ‘‘ assembly.” It is the sum¬ mons by which the scattered birds are informed of the chosen rendezvous for the covey. It is similar to the other in some respects. Here it is in musical notation : r9 - ^1 - n ^1 - . # r •f frPy J ■^1 J M ' 0 J- - V Lid ^ — J — - This call the quail continues ad Hbituiii. The summer call is only given once, when an interval of silence always follows. This second call is sharper and more metallic in tone than

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414 THE SPORTSMAN'S MUSIC. the other, though it is given at about the same tempo, a moderate allegro. I know of no in¬ strument upon which these calls can be per¬ formed except that somewhat vulgar one known as the “human whistle.” The flute and clarinet cannot give the blending effect, which, as I have said, is never absent from bird-calls. The violin can attain this, of course, but it has not the proper quality of tone. The human whistle, however, can imitate this and all other bird- whistles with such finish as to deceive the bird himself The writer knows one or two sportsmen who, after shooting into a flushed covey of quail, wait a short time, and then begin whistling the “ assembly.” They rarely fail to collect the birds at a short distance from them, and thus save much walk¬ ing. In the summer the quail is much less wild than in the winter, and the writer has frequently enticed one across a ten-acre field by simply answering him every time he sounded his “ Ah, Bob White.” Next to the quail’s, perhaps the most strik¬ ing call is the clear, penetrating whistle of the yellow-leg snipe. In the month of September, when the sedges and mud flats are rich in those morsels that tempt the appetites of all the gaU'mago family ; when after some easterly storm you will see dowitches and sand-pipers, curlews and willets, killdeer and ring-necked plover whirling through the misty air in wild confusion, — then you will hear the resonant notes of the yellow-leg echoing clear above all the other calls of the snipe. The eager sportsman is lying concealed behind his “blind” of brush and marsh grass, with his gun poised, ready for action. In front of him are spread out his decoys, standing each on its one wooden leg in the shallow water. Soon the yellow-legs, whose shrill notes have been heard, come swooping down toward the counterfeit birds. Just as they are about to “pitch,” the sportsman fires both barrels in rapid succession into the thickest part of the wisp. Three or four birds fall dead, one or two more are hopelessly wounded, and the rest sail away at a rapid pace. The moment he has fired the sportsman begins to whistle, imi¬ tating as nearly as he can the call of the birds. If he is expert and knows how to make the notes reach to a distance, he will soon see the fleeing wisp of snipe whirl around and come back in his direction. But it is when the gunner is hunting for English snipe or Virginia rail and has no de¬ coys with him that he has an opportunity to try his skill as a yellow-leg whistler. He is watching the sagacious movements of his dog, when suddenly, clear as the notes of a silver flute, the call of the yellow-leg drops from the sky. With a word the dog is called in to heel, and the sportsman sinks into the tall reeds. Then he begins to whistle. The snipe replies. The gunner answers him again. The bird slowly circles over the water, gradually drop¬ ping lower and frequently whistling. Sud¬ denly he pauses in the middle of his circular flight, and, throwing up his tail, descends al¬ most perpendicularly and with startling rapid¬ ity toward an inviting point of mud. Within a few feet of the earth two or three quick flaps of the wings break his fall ; and the next mo¬ ment you will see him standing erect and alert, his keen eyes glancing in every direction, as if wondering where the other snipe can be. Now the wise sportsman stops trying to imi¬ tate the bird’s call, and devotes his attention to approaching within gunshot. He takes a roundabout course, bending low behind the reeds, until he has come to within thirty-five yards of the snipe. Then he rises up and boldly walks forward at a rapid gait. The bird is so startled that for a moment he sits motionless gazing at his approaching enemy. The gunner has gained four or five yards be¬ fore the bird is up and off. The yellow-leg is an easy bird to hit and dies quickly, so that the man who approaches to within thirty-five yards gets a good shot. I give, as nearly as I can, the call of the yellow-leg in musical notes : UPLAND PLOVER.

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THE SPORTSMAHS MUSIC, Closely akin to this call is that of the up¬ land or grass plover. This splendid game bird haunts the grassy fields, where the openness of the ground is his protection. He is wild at all times and can rarely be approached with¬ out resort to artifice of some kind. In some parts of the country it is customary to hunt plover with a horse and wagon, as the birds will permit a vehicle to advance within easy distance of them. From this mere hint at their Avildness one would say that the imita¬ tion of their call is of little value. So it is for the purpose of enticing birds to come within gunshot a second time. But I have known an expert old gunner, well hidden in marsh grass, to whistle a plover down into the meadows, beside a pond, when the bird was apparently bound for a more distant point. There is, however, another use to which the clever whis¬ tler may turn his talent. On some moonlight night in August, when you are standing on the piazza of your cottage by the sea down in New Jersey, when you are trying to count the glittering ripples that dance along the track of the moonbeams, suddenly you will hear dropping out of the clear, starry sky that wonderful bell-like call, so short, sharp, and tremulous that it thrills the bosom of the sportsman. If you can imagine some instru¬ ment which would combine all the qualities of flute and a silver bell, like the famous Caro¬ lus ” at Antwerp, then you can conceive the exquisite purity of tone which is the chief characteristic of the plover’s call. The old sportsman who hears it in an August night knows at once that the plover are beginning to hasten southward. He will stand upon his piazza and imitate it as best he can, — no man can do it perfectly, — and the result will often be that he will call down some of the passing birds into the neighboring fields, where, if he will rise before the sun, he will find them in the cool, gray dawn. The mel¬ ody of the plover’s call is precisely the same as that of the yellow-leg snipe. It consists 415 usually, however, of only three pairs of notes, given out with such shortness and rapidity as to sound almost like a trill. Careful attention will analyze the call into something like this : Q ■ - -g - ^ ✓ 4j 2 - d \>]J I 1 1 The difficulty of imitating the yellow-leg’s call is great, but imitating this one is so much more difficult that very few sportsmen ever attain anything like proficiency. Another pretty and somewhat plaintive call is that of the spotted sandpiper, commonly known as the “ teeter.” The value of this call to the gunner is very small, as the bird can be reached without enticing him, and is a sorry specimen of game Avhen obtained. Still, the call is so peculiar that I have often amused myself by carrying on a monotonous conversation with these wee birds in their own limited language. Here is the call : To give it anything like its proper effect, it should be made as shrill as possible, — the notes having a peculiar thinness, — and each tone should slide upward nearly a half-tone at the end. This wearisomepeeping maybe heard in the summer-time along the banks of small streams where the birds build their nests. The woodcock, too, has a call, although it is seldom heard. It consists ofa rapid but faint twittering uttered by the bird just before he springs into flight. Few sportsmen are so fortunate as to approach near enough to the bird to hear it. This call it is absolutely impossible to express in musical notation. A bird which .has a charmingly sweet and plaintive call is the meadow-lark. This bird does not belong to the family of game, nor can he be coaxed near the gunner by imitat¬ ing his call. In many parts of the country ENGLISH SNIPE.

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THE SPORTSMAHS MUSIC. 416 where game is scarce, this bird is eagerly sought by hunters, as his flesh is white and tender, and he has a straight, rapid flight, which makes him capital practice for a quail- shooter. His call, which is exceedingly strong and can be heard, for a long distance, has a pretty rocking motion that makes it very pleas¬ ant to hear on a summer morning. This is it : } _ 0 _ r • - J a A •Lu . w 1 1 , J r, 1 1 rrT — t % — 1 - y — — The English snipe has a call which is only heard when the bird is startled and springs into flight. This call is not a whistle, but an unmusical squeak. It resembles in sound the syllable ’scape ! ’scape ! Written in musical notes it would be something like this : ’.scape, 'scape. The bird when rising rarely utters this cry more than once, occasionally twice. I do not know that it is ever heard more than twice. The Virginia rail, a bird which sportsmen along the New Jersey coast are fond of shoot¬ ing, has a call which is musical and peculiar. The birds are not killed in great numbers, but afford excellent sport. If you happen to be on the New Jersey coast about the middle of September, throw a stone into the calamus reeds at the head of some pond. If any rail are there, you will hear a faint cry of kek, kek.” You can imitate this cry by playing pizzicato or plucking with your finger on the D string of a violin below the bridge. As nearly as it can be given in musical nota¬ tion, it is like this : pizzicato. kek, kek, kek ; kek, kek. The willet, a member of the snipe family, has a call or note which may be easily imi¬ tated, and is often effective in recalling the bird when he appears to be on his way to the ends of the earth. • Mr. J. L. Bright told the writer of the peculiar manner in which he dis¬ covered the willet’s call, and how he immedi¬ ately used it with good results. Some years ago, when good sport could be found at Long Branch, Mr. Bright was shooting snipe on the beach near the outlet of a small pond. He was shooting from a blind over decoys, in the usual manner. The weather was misty, and there was a strong south-easterly wind. Sud¬ denly five willet came out of the pond, pass¬ ing immediately over Mr. Bright’s head at no great height. They were out of gunshot be¬ fore he had time to recover from his astonish¬ ment. As they passed over him, however, he heard them uttering a sound which was easily imitated. He produced the same sound at once, without much hope of making the birds hear it or of its having any effect. The birds, however, did hear it, circled about, and came back within easy gunshot, when he killed three of them. The sound was a combination of humming and whistling. If you will take a medium note, such as this. and hum it and whistle it as loudly as possi¬ ble, both at the same time, you will produce CANADA GOOSE.

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POEMS BY SIDNEY LANIER, the sound by which the willet betrayed them¬ selves to Mr. Bright. There is one more splendid call of which I wish to speak. It is the honk of the Canada goose. On a drizzly October day, when the ducks are migrating southward in great flocks, you will suddenly hear that weird, unnatural, and powerful cry. It rings out above the rushing of the wind with a clarion peal that goes straight to the sportsman’s heart. Per¬ haps, as a musician, the writer ought to say that the call of the goose, being a major ninth, is harsh and discordant; but considered as a part of the wintry and often tempestuous weather which the bird seems to love, I can¬ not look upon it as anything but singularly harmonious and appropriate. Unfortunately for the goose, it can be imitated to perfection, and the unhappy birds frequently meet their end by paying too much heed to its deceptive notes. One instance of peculiar interest has come to the writer’s knowledge. The de¬ stroyers in this case were Captain Walter S. Green, of Life Saving Station No. 5, Long Branch, and Mr. Bright, who has been before mentioned. These two shooters live on oppo¬ site sides of a large pond, and are on the con¬ stant watch for birds of any kind that may come in from the sea to rest. Early one morning Mr. Bright heard a distant but vig¬ orous honking. He soon saw a flock of seven geese flying in toward the pond. Quickly get¬ ting his gun and some heavy cartridges, he hastened down to the edge of the pond, keep¬ ing himself hidden behind a heavy hedge. As soon as he had selected his position, he ut¬ tered a vigorous honk, to which the leader of the incoming flock responded. Flying low, they sailed majestically in over the opposite shore, a hundred and fifty yards away from Mr. Bright. They were evidently weary, and anxious to settle down in the smooth waters 417 of the pond. Suddenly out of the tall marsh grass on the shore opposite Mr. Bright, two puffs of blue smoke and two booming reports rolled out. The leader of the flock folded his wings and fell to the ground dead. Mr. Bright then knew for the first time that Captain Green was at hand. The birds swerved from their course and flew toward Mr. Bright, who easily killed the second bird. Both he and Captain Green did not cease honking, and the birds, after going away to a considerable distance, sailed back again, passing over Mr. Bright’s head at some height. With his heavy gun he killed two of them, when they circled and swept across the pond, where Captain Green killed two more. The remaining bird, which had been wounded by scattering shot, made a hard struggle to rise to a safe height. Captain Green hastily slipped in a cartridge and took a long shot. A few feathers fell from the bird, and he flew across the pond. Mr. Bright then got a long shot at him, breaking his wing and bringing him down. The call of the goose can be imitated by giving the first note in a hoarse, guttural tone, and the second in a strident falsetto. The notes are something like these : Ha - - onk ! In closing it must be stated that musical characters do not perfectly represent the calls of any of the birds mentioned, but they give an approximate idea of them. It must be re¬ membered that there is always more or less sliding or blending of tones in these calls. In that of the yellow-leg snipe, the first three or four intervals are not as great as semitones, though I have written them so because we have no smaller intervals in modern music. W, L Henderson, POEMS BY SIDNEY LANIER. THOU AND I. TWO IN ONE. SO one in heart and thought, I trow. That thou might’st press the strings and I might draw the bow. And both would meet in music sweet. Thou and I, I trow. ONE IN TWO. I SAID to myself Which is L which yon ? Myself made answer to myself, Lo, you are I and I am you, Yet are we twain, we two. I’ll sleep, I’ll sleep, and dream a sweet death for trouble ; I’ll sleep. I’ll sleep, and dream that my heart beats double. More than twice one, beyond all measure more, — Doth count this singular two of thee and me. VoL. XXXIV.— 58.

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‘‘CHRISTIAN SCIENCE^’. AND “MIND CURE.”* BY THE AUTHOR OF “FAITH-HEALING AND KINDRED PHENOMENA.^’ HIRTY years ago the phrases Christian Science and Mind Cure, in thesense now attached to them, were unknown ; to-day in the press, in conversation, in literature, and especially in discussions relating to health and disease, and to the more occult phenomena of human nature, they frequently occur. To many they have no definite mean¬ ing, and long conversations are carried on con¬ cerning them in which the most diverse views are maintained, ending in confusion and con¬ tradiction, because those who converse have not a uniform conception of the signification of the terms. Some declare Christian Science and Mind Cure to be the same ; others stoutly deny this, and seek to establish a radical distinction. Some represent Christian Science as a great advance upon ordinary Christianity ; others denounce it as but refined Pantheism ; while many more brand both Christian Science and Mind Cure as delusion, a reaction from the uncompromising materialism of the age. Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Eddy, President of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, claims to have been the first to use the phrase “ Christian Science.” “ It was in Massachusetts, in the year 1866, that I discovered the Science of Metaphysical Healing, which I afterwards named Christian Science. The discovery came to pass in this way. During twenty years prior to my discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause; and in the January of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was Mind, and every effect a mental phenomenon.” Mrs. Eddy further states that about the year 1862 her health was failing rapidly, and she “ employed a distinguished mesmerist, Mr. P. P. Quimby — a sensible, elderly gentleman, with some advanced views about healing. . . . There were no Metaphysical Healers then. The Science of Mental Healing had not been discovered.” Whether or not Mrs. Eddy is indebted for her ideas to Mr. Quimby has since been the subject of heated discussion; for the short time which has elapsed since the “ discovery ” has been long enough for the development of several rival schools, which have engen¬ dered toward one another as much intensity of feeling as the odiu7n theologicwn and odhun niedicu7n combined. Speaking of her rivals. Mrs. Eddy modestly observes, “ Some silly publications, whose only correct or salient points are borrowed, without credit, from ‘ Sci¬ ence and Health,’ would set the world right on Metaphysical Healing, like children thrum¬ ming a piano and pretending to teach music or criticise Mozart.” The history of the discovery is of sufficient importance to be given. “ The cowardly claim that I am not the originator of my own writ¬ ings, but that one P. P. Quimby is, has been legally met and punished. ... Mr. Quimby died in 1865, and my first knowledge of Chris¬ tian Science, or Metaphysical Healing, was gained in 1866. . . . When he doctored me I was ignorant of the nature of mesmerism, but subsequent knowledge has convinced me that he practiced it.” Mrs. Eddy says that after hav¬ ing been for many years a sufferer from chronic diseases, she met with an accident which pro¬ duced, according to physicians, a fatal injury. They gave her up to die, and declared that she would not live till noon. She replied that she would be well at that time. Her pastor called after service and found her busy about the house. One of her assistants says that “ while she knew that she was healed by the direct and gracious exercise of the divine power, she was indisposed to make an old-time miracle of it.” After three years’ meditation she concluded that her recovery was in accordance with gen¬ eral spiritual laws, capable of being known and clearly stated. She then began to teach and write; though prior to the expiration of the three years, namely, in 1867, she taught a purely metaphysical system of healing to, as she says, “ the very first student who was ever so instructed since the days of the Apostles and the primitive Church.” Her essays were circulated among her students privately. In 1870 she copyrighted her first pamphlet, but did not publish it till six years afterwards. In 1876 she organized the Christian Scient¬ ist Association, and in 1879, at a meeting of that association, she organized a Church, “ a Mind Healing Church, without creeds, called the Church of Christ.” To the pastorate of this she accepted a call, and was ordained a. D. 1881. The college flourishes, the church has an assistant pastor, and Mrs. Eddy re¬ ceives so much patronage as a teacher as to compel the publication of the following : “ The authoress takes no patients, and has no time for medical consultation.” *See this magazine for June, 1886, and March, 1887.

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^^'CHRISTIAN SCIENCE^' AND ‘‘MIND CURE: Practitioners, who of course are not obliged to waste much time upon such sordid things as anatomy, physiology, or materia medica, are prepared with great rapidity. The primary class in Christian Science Mind Healing in¬ cludes twelve lessons. In the first week six of these are given. The term continues only about three weeks, and the charge for tuition is $300. The normal class requires six lectures. Grad¬ uates from the primary class are advised to practice at least one year before entering this class, and for these six lectures they must pay $200. There is also a class of Metaphysical Obstetrics which requires only six lectures, for which $100 must be paid. In addition to these there is a class in Theology, including six lectures on the Scriptures, for which $200 must be paid. The largest discount to an in¬ digent student is $100 on the first course. Husbands and wives, if they enter together the primary class, may pay $300 ; but, enter¬ ing at different times, must pay the regular price, and must do that for all other courses, payment being made strictly in advance. It is obvious, therefore, that the benefits of the Mind Cure cannot be applied to commercial transactions ; and that 800 material dollars, exclusive of board, are required to master the Science of Metaphysical Healing, — unless one were to say that the national bank notes are merely material symbols of an immaterial and impalpable essence. Considering the short time that has elapsed since the ‘‘discovery,” the number of practi¬ tioners, as advertised in one of their magazines, is very large. Sixty-six are women, and twenty- nine men; and all but five of the men appear to be associated with their wives in the practice of the profession. There are also Christian Sci¬ ence institutes and colleges advertised ; two in New York, four in Chicago, one in Milwaukee, one in Brooklyn, and one in Colorado. The other institutions do not charge so large a sum as Mrs. Eddy. Some of them agree to give suffi¬ cient instruction for $25 to justify the would-be practitioner in beginning. Others communi¬ cate all they know, with the privilege of meet¬ ing for conversation once a month for a year, on payment of $100. They give diplomas, valued according to the standing of the re¬ spective schools. Impostors also have arisen, so that Mrs. Eddy has notified the public that all persons claiming to have been her pupils, who cannot show diplomas legally certifying to that effect, are preferring false claims. THEORY. By a careful examination of the works of those who have written upon this subject, in¬ cluding Evans, Grimke, Stuart, Arens, Tay- 419 lor, Baldwin, Hazzard, Nichols, Marston,etc., and by conversation with Mental Healers, Christian Scientists, and their patients, I have ascertained that most of them concur with Mrs. Eddy in the fundamental principles of the system, and that where they diverge it is upon minor points. Her hypothesis is that “the only realities are the Divine Mind and its ideas. . . . That erring mortal views, misnamed rnind^ produce all the organic and animal action of the mor¬ tal body. . . . Rightly understood, instead of possessing sentient matter, we have sensa¬ tionless bodies. . . . Whence came to me this conviction in antagonism to the testimony of the human senses ? From the self-evident fact that matter has no sensation ; from the com¬ mon human experience of the falsity of all material things; from the obvious fact that mortal mind is what suffers, feels, sees ; since matter cannot suffer.” The method of Mrs. Eddy’s reasoning may be seen in the following extracts : “ The ineradicable belief that pain is located in a limb which has been removed, when really the sensa¬ tion is believed to be in the nerves, is an added proof of the unreliability of physical testimony. . . . Elec¬ tricity is not a vital fluid, but an element of mortal mind, — the thought-essence that forms the link be¬ tween what is termed matter and mortal mind. Both are different strata of human belief. The grosser sub¬ stratum is named matter. The more ethereal is called htmian mind,, which is the nearer counterfeit of the Immortal Mind, and hence the more accountable and sinful belief. . . . You say, ‘ Toil fatigues me.’ But what is this yon or 7ne ? Is it muscle or mind ? Which one is tired and so speaks ? Without mind, could the muscles be tired ? Do the muscles talk, or do you talk for them ? Matter is non-intelligent. Mortal mind does the talking, and that which affirms it to be tired first made it so.” Having adopted a theory, she does not shrink from its logical sequences : “ You would not say that a wheel is fatigued ; and yet the body is just as material as the wheel. Setting aside v/hat the human mind says of the body, it would never be weary any more than the inanimate wheel. Un¬ derstanding this great fact rests you more than hours of repose.” Her most frequently repeated assertions are such as these : “ God is supreme ; is mind ; is principle, not per¬ son ; includes all and is reflected by all that is real and eternal ; is Spirit, and Spirit is infinite ; is the only sub¬ stance; is the only life. Man was and is the idea of God ; therefore mind can never be in man. Divine Science shows that matter and mortal body are the illusions of human belief, which seem to appear and disappear to mortal sense alone. When this belief changes, as in dreams, the material body changes with it, going wher¬ ever we wish, and becoming whatsoever belief may decree. Human mortality proves that error has been engrafted into both the dreams and conclusions of material and mortal humanity. Besiege sickness and death with these principles, and all will disappear. ” As these doctrines are unquestionably in substance such as have been held by certain

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420 ^‘CB-jRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ‘‘MIND CURE. metaphysicians in past ages, Mrs. Eddy feels called upon to answer those who make that charge : ** Those who formerly sneered at it as foolish and eccentric now declare Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, certain German philosophers, or some unlearned mesmerist, to have been the real originators of Mind Healing. Emerson’s ethics are models of their kind; but even that good man and genial philosopher partially lost his mental faculties before his death, showing that he did not understand the Science of Mind Healing, as elaborated in my ‘ Sci¬ ence and Health’; nor did he pretend to do so.” Sickness, then, is a dream of falsity, to be antagonized by the metaphysical healer, men¬ tally, and audibly when it may be necessary. Mrs. Eddy’s theories are her religion, and her Science — so called — is based upon the religious principles which she holds. One of Mrs. Eddy’s former students, named Arens, for whom she entertains a strong spir¬ itual antipathy, has published a volume called “ Old Theology in its Application to the Heal¬ ing of the Sick.” In the introduction he writes : “ It will be unnecessary to ask the reader for charita¬ ble criticism when I say that I make no claims to being a ripe scholar, and that my knowledge of the English language is very imperfect. The truths set forth in this volume have been expressed as clearly as possible, con¬ sidering the disadvantages under which I have labored, one of which is the poverty of words in the English language to express spiritual thoughts. It has been found necessary to employ close punctuation, and in some instances to disregard some rules of grammar and rhetoric, in order to give the requisite shade of thought.” The mental difficulty in understanding him arises from his incompetency as a writer. His reflection upon the poverty of the English lan¬ guage is another form of confessing his ignor¬ ance of it ; and his disregard of the rules of grammar and rhetoric does' not result from his difficulty in giving shades of thought, but from his lack of knowledge of the language. Mrs. Eddy thus described him in 1883 : “ When he entered the class of my husband, the late Asa G. Eddy, in 1879, he had no knowledge whatever, and claimed none, as can be shown under his own sig¬ nature, of Metaphysics or Christian Science. . . . While teaching him my system of Mental Healing, his motives and aims and the general constitution of his mind were found so remote from the requirements of Christian Science, that his teacher despaired of impart¬ ing to him a due understanding of the subject. Per¬ haps it was to meet this great want without remedying it, and cover his lack of learning, that he committed to memory many paragraphs from my works, and is in the habit of repeating them in his attempts to lecture. He, who now proclaims himself a professor in the sol¬ emn department that he assumes as a jay in borrowed plumes, was the most ignorant and empty-minded scholar I ever remember of examining.” That his earlier work consists largely of passages taken from Mrs. Eddy’s writings, and that it is as a whole in every respect in¬ ferior to them, is the simple statement of a fact. He has, however, acquired considerable rep¬ utation, and has a constituency. Before ad¬ vancing the fundamental principles of his system, he attempts to show the inconsist¬ encies of medical science in the following passage : “ Materia medica teaches that mercury cures, also that mercury kills ; that ipecac causes vomiting, and that an overdose checks it, etc.; these are contradic¬ tions in theniselves. A rule that can be contradicted is not demonstrable, and therefore not truth. If one and one made two only occasionally, and at other times made three or more, it would be no fact or rule, be¬ cause not demonstrable, and no dependence could be placed upon it. If from a science (truth) it is found that mercury cures, it would be found that the more of that so-called necessary quality taken into the sys¬ tem, the better it would be for the patient ; such would be the result from a perfect rule or from truth.” Here is an example of his style : “ Suppose I should be walking past a house, and a pane of glass should fall from an upper window cut¬ ting me and causing my death ; the glass was made and placed by life, and life broke it and caused it to fall. My life brought me here from Prussia and carried me by the house at the time that happened ; therefore life was the cause of my death, and, strange as it may seem, is the cause of all action.” From this profound (?) reasoning he con¬ cludes : “If life is the cause of all action it must be the cause of sickness. . . . Thought is the first product of life, and as the thought is so will the action be. Life cannot act contrary to the thoughts which are become beliefs or opinions, that is, which have taken root or are become attached to it, unless it acts unconsciously.” Mrs. Eddy sued this Dr. Arens for infring¬ ing her copyright, and got judgment against him, so that he was compelled to destroy a large edition of one of his pamphlets. Dr. Arens has established a university in the city of Boston, incorporated a year or two ago, called the “ University of the Science of Spirit.” It confers the following degrees: “F. D.,” Defender of the Faith, and S. S. D.,” Doctor of the Science of Spirit. The charge for instruction in the general course is one hundred dollars. These courses are somewhat pretentious. The first treats the “ Scientific Basis of Theology,” “ the Difference between God and the Universe,” etc., and, proceeding through twenty-one theological points, con¬ cludes by setting forth “ the First Step in Immortality,” and How to Destroy Sick¬ ness.” The second course discusses “ Theos, Chaos, and Cosmos”; gives a theory of the creation of the universe down to the creation of the “ first material human body,” which it treats under ‘‘its outline and quality; the necessity for respiration; the first conscious¬ ness of existence ; the separation of male and female ; the origin of self-will and its results.” And finally, “ the beginning of sickness and trouble.” Dr. Marston treats “God, Man, Matter,

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“CJIRISTIAN SCIENCE” AND “MINE CURE.” 421 Disease, Sin and Death, Healing, Treatment, and Universal Truth.” In his book he states that the mental healer does not care by what medical name the distress is known ; it may be nervousness, dyspepsia, asthma, fever, — words all alike to him, since the effects they denote are simply reflections or registers of wrong thinking.” In illustrating this he says : “ A case may be cited to illustrate the meaning : A middle-aged man who has suffered many years with chronic rheumatism, until it is torture for him to move, has also an excitable temper, a despotic will, and is so intolerant that he cannot abide opposition, but flies into a towering rage if he is crossed. He has had many physicians who ascribe the painful inflammation of his joints to an improper secretion of uric acid; and his nervousness and irritability are easily accounted for by the prolonged suffering he has endured. Tliis case presents the same conditions to the mental healer, but his conclusions are different. To him the bodily trouble is a reflection or effect of lack of mental ease; and the unamiable nature results from a dominant feeling that other people are enemies seeking to oppose the poor man’s wishes and thwart his plans. In treating the case, the doctor addresses remedies to the disturbed secretions which are an effect, while the mental healer directs his to the primary cause, which is fear.” His cure is reduced to its simplest form as follows : ‘‘ The senses say matter can suffer pain; God says matter is insensible. The senses declare a man sick ; God says the real man knows nothing of disease.” Under the head of Sin and Death he says : “ Scientific Christianity does not recognize the definition of theology, but holds that, strictly speaking, there is no sin.” He finally describes the cure thus : “ A mental cure is the discovery made by a sick person that he is well.” W. F. Evans, a voluminous writer, formerly an evangelical minister, then a Swedenborgian, and now a mental healer, remarks: “ The process is essentially a spiritual work ; it is held that there is a part of us that is never sick, and this part is me^itally worked upon so as to control the sick personas consciousness, this destroys the sickness, for mind cures matter. A disciple of this school is sick — no, he is not sick, for that is something which he will not admit ; he has a belief that he is sick ; he then says mentally to the rebellious body, ‘ What are you ? You have no power over me ; you are merely the covering given to me for present purposes ; it is an error to sup¬ pose that I am sick ; I recognize the great truth that I myself, my individuality, my personality, my mind, can¬ not be sick, for it is immortal, made in the image of God ; when I recognize the existence of that truth there is no room left for the existence of error ; two things cannot occupy one and the same place ; error cannot ex¬ ist in the same place with truth, therefore error is not in existence; hence I am not sick.’ ” Mrs. Grimke, the author of “ Personified Unthinkables,” says : “ Now, rheumatism or pneumonia, etc., are verbal expressions for unthinkables, just as 2-}-2=:5 is a verbal expression for a lie. By means of the picturing faculty, both of the individual and of those about him, the out¬ ward manifestation of the unthinkable will express it¬ self upon the body just as surely as the magic-lantern will reflect the picture inserted between the light and the lenses when the proper conditions are met. . . . The problem of Health, then, would be how to cultivate and keep clean and healthy pictures in the mind. Health would then be an essential part of the ego. Man would be a strict unity, not a trinity, of Intellect, Body, and Morals. And the absolutely necessary postulates of this Unity would be Infinite Mind, Freedom, and Eternal Life.” There are those who in their own opinion have reached a greater elevation than either the Christian Scientists or the Mind Curers, “ and profess to heal by the transfer of psychic energy.” The chief practitioner in this sphere informed me that the relative rank of these sciences is, i. The lower grade — the mere physical system. 2. What is called animal magnetism. 3. The mind cure. 4. The spirits (when they are good spirits). 5. In¬ cluding all that is good in the others, he places in the supertiaL He claimed that there has been in all ages an order called the Inspirati^ who practiced this method, and offered to make me a Knight of that order. This will suffice until it fails to attract patients, when, no doubt, a sixth order, that of the Ettipyrean^ will be devised. Some of the Christian Scientists have attempted to construct a technical language, which, when translated, shows that they attach as much importance to learned terms as does any form of the material science that they de¬ nounce. “ Gnosis. — The ‘Spiritual Understand¬ ing,’ the ‘Immediate Intuition.’ Vir. — The God in Man. Harmatia. — Oft-the-trackness. Homo. — The Creature of God. Ego. — The Homo as he is. Nemo. — The Homo as he sees himself. Entheasm. — Direct communication with God. N IHILOID. — Like unto nothing, the proper name of .disease, disorder, discomfort. Yoga. — Concentration of Thought. Dama. — Subjugation of Sense. Karma. — Law of Cause and Effect. Maya. — Illusion, ‘ Mortal Mind,’ False Beliefs. — Chaos, The Habitat of Hum¬ bug.” Most of these terms appear to have had an oriental origin, and are as valuable in affecting the ordinary mind as chloride of sodium for salt, capsicum for pepper, and H^O for water. They serve also to make it appear that the Science is difficult, and that large fees for in¬ struction are reasonable. They make use of certain forms of expres¬ sion which savor more strongly of cant than any phrases that have ever been used by religious sects. They use the word “ belief” in speaking of a disease, or even of a defect of character. A lady, talking with a practi¬ tioner of this school of a mutual acquaintance, said she thought her selfish. “Yes,” replied the Christian Scientist, “ I believe she has a strong belief in selfishness.”

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422 ‘^CHRISTIAN SCIENCE^' AND ‘^MIND CURE: To a patient who had every symptom of a torpid liver another healer of the school said, ‘‘ It is unfortunate that you have such a belief in bile.” To which the astonished patient, new to the Science, replied that he thought any one would have the same belief who had the same kind of liver. PRACTICE. The manner in which Christian Science antagonizes dreams of falsity is interesting, whether the theories be accepted or not. First. Both the patient and the metaphys¬ ical healer must be taught that “ Anatomy, Physiology, Treatises on Health, sus¬ tained by what is termed material law, are the hus¬ bandmen of sickness and disease. It is proverbial that as long as you read medical works you will be sick. . . . Clairvoyants and medical charlatans are the prolific sources of sickness. . . . They first help to form the image of illness in mortal minds, by telling patients that they have a disease ; and then they go to work to destroy that disease. They unweave their own webs. . . . When there were fewer doctors, and less thought was given to sanitary subjects, there were bet¬ ter constitutions and less disease.” Second. Diet is a matter of no importance. We are told that the simple food our forefathers ate assisted to make them healthy ; but that is a mis¬ take. Their diet would not cure dyspepsia at this period. With rules of health in the head, and the most digestible food in the stomach, there would still be dyspeptics.” Third. Exercise is of no importance. “ Because the muscles of the blacksmith’s arm are strongly developed, it does not follow that exercise did it, or that an arm less used must be fragile. If matter were the cause of action, and muscles, without the cooperation of mortal mind, could lift the hammer and smite the nail, it might be thought true that hammer¬ ing enlarges the muscles. But the trip-hammer is not increased in size by exercise. Why not, since muscles are as material as wood and iron ? ” Fourth. A proper view of Mrs. Eddy’s pub¬ lications is, however, of great importance. “ My publications alone heal more sickness than an unconscientious student can begin to reach. If patients seem the worse for reading my book, this change may either arise from the frightened mind of the physician, or mark the crisis of the disease. Perseverance in its perusal would heal them completely.” Fifth. “ Never tell the sick they have more courage than strength. Tell them rather that their strength is in proportion to their courage. . . . Instruct the sick that they are not helpless victims ; but that, if they only know how, they can resist disease and ward it off, just as positively as they can a temptation to sin.” Sixth. In preparing to treat patients the healer must strengthen and steady his own mind. “ Be firm in your understanding that Mind governs the body. Have no foolish fears that matter governs, and can ache, swell, and be inflamed from a law of its own ; when it is self-evident that matter can have no pain or inflammation. ... If you believe in inflamed or weak nerves, you are liable to an attack from that source. You will call it neuralgia, but I call it Illusion. .... When treating the sick, first make your men¬ tal plea in behalf of harmony, . . . then realize the absence of disease. . . . Use such powerful eloquence as a Congressman would employ to defeat the passage of an inhuman law.” Seventh, You are fortunate if your patient knows little or nothing, for ‘‘ a patient thor¬ oughly booked in medical theories has less sense of the divine power, and is more diffi¬ cult to heal through Mind, than an Aboriginal Indian who never bowed the knee to the Baal of civilization.” Eighth. See that the minds which sur¬ round your patient do not act against your influence by continually expressing such opin¬ ions as may alarm or discourage. ... You should seek to be alone with the sick while treating them.” Ninth. Bathing and rubbing are of no use. “ Bathing and rubbing to alter the secretions, or re¬ move unhealthy exhalations from the cuticle, receive a useful rebuke from Christian Healing. . . . John Quincy Adams presents an instance of firm health and an adherence to hygienic rules, but there are few others.” Tenth. What if the patient grow worse ? “ Suppose the patient should appear to grow worse. This I term chemicalization. It is the upheaval pro¬ duced when Immortal Truth is destroying erroneous and mortal belief. Chemicalization brings sin and sick¬ ness to the surface, as in a fermenting fluid, allowing impurities to pass away. Patients unfamiliar with the cause of this commotion, and ignorant that it is a fav¬ orable omen, may be alarmed. If such is the case, ex¬ plain to them the law of this action.” Eleventh. Subtle mental practices are rec¬ ommended. “ I will here state a phenomenon which I have ob¬ served. If you call mentally and silently the disease by name, as you argue against it, as a general rule the body will respond more quickly ; just as a person re¬ plies more readily when his name is spoken ; but this is because you are not perfectly attuned to Divine Science, and need the arguments of truth for re¬ minders. To let Spirit bear witness without words is the more scientific way.” This is further modified : “You may call the disease by name when you ad¬ dress it mentally ; but by naming it audibly^ you are liable to impress it upon the mind. The Silence of Science is eloquent and powerful to unclasp the hand of disease and reduce it to nothingness.” Twelfth. Some of the things that are tiot to be done : “ A Christian Scientist never gives medicine, never recommends hygiene, never manipulates. He never tries to ‘focus mind.’ He never places patient and practitioner ‘ back to back,’ never consults ‘ spirits,’ nor requires the life history of his patient. Above all, he cannot trespass on the rights of Mind through ani¬ mal magnetism.” The foregoing rules for practice are taken from Mrs. Eddy’s different v/orks. The difference between the views of Mrs. Eddy and those who diverge from her is su¬ perficial, though neither she nor they will

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ‘‘MIND CURES admit it. Mrs. Kate Taylor, in Selfhood Lost in Godhood,” referring to Mrs. Eddy’s large work, says : “ It can be read with profit by any who are seeking truth with sincerity, and with no tendency to become biased.” She also says that she was formerly a member of the Christian Science Association, and “learned that limitations are not conducive to growth, and that, as Emerson truly says, ‘ God always disappoints monopolies,’ ” and frankly gives her opinion of those denounced by her former preceptor. “The so-called mal-practitioners and mesmerists therein mentioned, on thorough investigation, — not only by myself, but in company with others who seek to be liberal-minded and to give Truth its due wher¬ ever it exists, — I find to be simply those who have separated themselves from the Association, that they might pursue their own convictions of right, and step out of the regular ranks of stereotyped terms to let their thoughts find expression in their own words.” The chief point of departure in Mrs. Tay¬ lor’s theories from those of Mrs. Eddy is in the value attached to a knowledge of the preceding life of the patient. “ Physical disease has many different causes. The physician treating a patient is often narrowed in his efforts to do good, because of some hidden moral or mental cause, some underlying fear, some sorrow, some inherited proclivity, some wrong unforgiven, some trait of character, some past occurrence which has tinged, perhaps almost unconsciously, the whole tenor of a life. It is not necessary that a person’s in¬ nermost sacred thoughts and life be unveiled, as the physician does not expect, neither does he like, to re¬ ceive confidences, unless, indeed, they are given vol¬ untarily with a feeling of trust. Some word or hint, though, to the physician would often aid materially. . . . The treatment consists in a vigorous holding of the patient to his right of soul-growth, unobstructed and retarded by physical defects. ... In answer to the question, ‘ Is it prayer ? ’ I would first quote Victor Hugo’s definition of prayer, — ‘Every thought is a prayer ; there are moments when, whatever be the at¬ titude of the body, the soul is on its knees,’ — and then answer. Yes, it is prayer. Prayer the old interpretation begs the Father to change the un¬ changeable, while prayer with the new interpretation lifts the beggar to a comprehension that he himself has omitted to take the gifts already prepared for him from the foundation of the world.” She gives this advice to the sick : “ Eradicate all thoughts of physiology, drugs, laws of health, sickness, and pain, and know that God is the only panacea, — divine love the only medicine. . . . Seek the help of a Christian Healer. . . . Judge him not unjustly, . . . neither be in opposition, for his is a good motive. . . . While under his treatment obey any natural impulse, without fear of consequence. Remem¬ ber ! without fear. This does not mean to be foolhardy in the beginning, — unless the cure should be almost instantaneous, — but advance gradually. ... If you have a time during the treatment when you should feel worse, do not be discouraged. . . . Look forward. . . . One little secret it is well to know. . . . Deny every thought of sickness every time it enters your mind. . . . Never use will-power, mistaking it for divine Truth.” Also Mrs. Stuart teaches the importance of a knowledge of the previous life : 423 “A man came to me from Erie, Penn., with what was called by different M. D’s softening of the brain and Bright’s disease of the kidneys. After questioning him, I found his trouble dated back to the Chicago fire. Now he was not conscious of any fear, was in no per¬ sonal danger for himself or family. But he was in that atmosphere of mental confusion and terror all through the city. He was cured by treatment on that point and nothing else. A woman came to me who had suffered five years with what the doctors called rheumatism. I happened to know that the death of a child had caused this effect. By silently erasing that picture of death and holding in its place an image of Life, eternal Life, she was entirely cured in twenty minutes.” SPECIMEN TREATMENTS. Mental treatment is that which the meta¬ physical healer is supposed to be giving the patient when she sits silently before him for a period longer or shorter according to her judgment of the necessities of the case. Some of the practitioners have revealed the thoughts which constitute a mental treatment, so that if truth is an element of their system, we can speak confidently upon this part of it. “ I said to him mentally : ‘You have no disease ; what you call your disease is a fixed mode of thought arising from the absence of positive belief in absolute good. Be stronger,’ I said, ‘ you must believe in abso¬ lute good; I am looking at you, and I see you a beau¬ tiful, strong spirit, perfectly sound. What makes you think yourself diseased? You are not diseased; the shadow of a doubt is reflected on your feet, but it has no real existence. There, look down yourself and see that it is gone. Why, it was a mere negation, and the place where you located it now shows for itself as sound as the rest of your body. Don’t you know that imperfection is impossible to that beautiful creature, your real self? Since there is no evil in all the universe, and since man is the highest expression of good amidst ubiquitous Good, how can you be diseased? You are not diseased. There is not an angel in all the spheres sounder or more divine than you.’ Then I spoke out aloud : ‘ There now,’ I said, ‘ you won’t have that pain again.’ As I said it there was a surge of convictio7i tM'ough me that see7ned to act 07t the blood-vessels of 7ny body aTid made 77ie tmgle all overP — Helen Wilmans. To this treatment I shall refer in elucidat¬ ing the causes of the phenomena. Dr. Evans controverts some of Mrs. Eddy’s theories : “ To modify a patient’s thinking in regard to himself and his disease, we employ the principle of suggestion or positive affiT^natioTi — not mental argument, as it is sometimes called, for argument creates doubt and re¬ action. No sick man was ever cured by reasoning with him, mentally or verbally. It is the business of the man who kTiows the truth, not to argue, but to ajfir7}i. ... No mtelligeTtt practitioner of the mind cure will ignore wholly all medical science. . . . The phreno- pathic system is not necessarily antagonistic to other methods of cure, as the various hygienic regulations, and even the use of the harmless specific remedies.” He repudiates Mrs. Eddy’s ideas about the personality of God, and says : “ It is not necessary to deny the personality of God. . . . Neither is it necessary to deny the personality and persistent individuality of the human spirit.”

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CHILIS TIAN SCIENCE AND ‘^MIND CURES 424 He also flatly denies Mrs. Taylor’s theories, saying, “The selfhood is not lost in God- hood.” “ It is not necessary to tell a man dy¬ ing of consumption that he is not sick, for that is not true.” He says that one may or may not use the imposition of hands in heal¬ ing the sick. As an example of Christian Science super¬ stition exceeding anything attempted by the most ignorant advocates of patent Faith Heal¬ ing, read the following, taken verbatim^ ital¬ ics, small caps, etc., from a text-book on Mind Cure, issued by the President of the “New York School of Primitive and Practical Chris¬ tian Science,” who states that his school will be free from “ eccentricity, pretension, and fanaticism ” ! “ PRAYER FOR A DYSPEPTIC. “ Holy Reality ! We BELIEVE in Thee that Thou art EVERYWHERE present. We really believe it. Blessed Reality we do not pretend to believe, think we believe, believe that we believe. WE BELIEVE. Be¬ lieving that Thou art every where present, we believe that Thou art in this patient’s stomach, in every fibre, in every cell, in every atom, that Thou art the sole, only Reality of that stomach. Heavenly, Holy Reality, we will try not to be such hypocrites and infidels, as every day of our lives to affirm our faith in Thee and then immediately begin to tell how sick we are, for¬ getting that Thou art everything and that Thou art not sick, and therefore that nothing in this universe was ever sick, is now sick, or can be sick. Forgive us our sins in that we have this day talked about our back¬ aches, that we have told our neighbors that our food hurts us, that we mentioned to a visitor that there was a lump in our stomach, that we have wasted our valu¬ able time which should have been spent in Thy service, in worrying for fear that our stomach would grow worse, in that we have disobeyed Thy blessed law in thinking that some kind of medicine would help us. We know. Father and Mother of us all, that there is no such a thing as a really diseased stomach, that the disease is the Carnal Mortal Mind given over to the World, the Flesh, and the Devil ; that the mortal mind is a twist, a distortion, a false attitude, the HARMA- TI A of Thought. Shining and Glorious Verity, we rec¬ ognize the great and splendid FACT that the moment we really believe the Truth, Disease ceases to trouble us, that the Truth is that there is no Disease in either real Body or Mind ; that in the Mind what see77is to be a disease is a False Belief, a Parasite, a hateful Ex¬ crescence, and that what happens in the Body is the shadow of the LIE in the Soul. Lord, help us to be¬ lieve that ALL Evil is Utterly Unreal; that it is silly to be sick, absurd to be ailing, wicked to be wailing, atheism and denial of God to say ‘I am sick.’ Help us to stoutly affirm with our hand in Your hand, with our eyes fixed on Thee that we have no Dyspepsia, that we never had Dyspepsia, that we will never have Dyspepsia, that there is no such thing, that there never was any such thing, that there never will be any such thing. Amen.” — Hazzard. It is claimed by all the Christian Science and Mind Cure practitioners that they can operate upon patients at a distance. “ There is no space nor time to mind. A person in St. Louis may be near to me while I am in New York. A person in the same room may be very distant. Sit down and think about the person you wish to affect. Think long enough and strong enough and you are sure to reach him.” — Hazzard. “ The following is a case of heart disease which I cured without having seen the patient. ‘ Please find enclosed a check for five hundred dollars, in reward for your services that can never be repaid. The day you received my husband’s letter I became conscious for the first time in forty-eight hours. My servant brought my wrapper, and I arose from bed and sat up. . . . The enlargement of my left side is all gone, and the doctors pronounce me rid of heart disease. I had been afflicted with it from infancy. It became or¬ ganic enlargement of the heart and dropsy of the chest. I was only waiting and almost longing to die, but you have healed me. How wonderful to think of it, when you and I have never seen each other.’ ” — Eddy. One of them says : “ Remember that every thought that you think vyill be transferred to the persons thought of if you think long enough and strong enough.” — Hazzard. This of course surpasses the love powders that are sold among the colored people and the ignorant, as it is necessary to purchase and administer them, which is sometimes considerable trouble. The practical directions to attain this power are as follows : “How to ‘concentrate.’ i. Look at an object on the ceiling ten minutes; think of that object alone. 2. Write a proposition on a sheet of paper, as ‘ God is the only reality.’ Think it for ten minutes with your eyes fixed upon the paper. 3. Begin to think of a subject, and give a dollar to the poor for every tinie your mind wan¬ ders. How to ‘ subjugate.’ Forget yourself, forget the world, forget you have a body, forget you have any business or friends. Empty your mind of its contents. Be a man of one idea. Get out of yourself.” — Hazzard. The rules for absent treatment are : “I. Seat yourself alone. Let the room be silent, 2. Subjugate your senses to all else but your thought. 3. Fix your thought upon the patient. 4. Picture him in your mind. 5. Go through the treatment. ” — Hazzard. “ The patient may be in three different ways. He may be sympathetic ; that will help you greatly. He may be apathetic ; that is not so good, but better than the next. He may be antipathetic, hostile ; then say not a word, but sileittly ‘ give it to him ’ till he becomes less ‘cantankerous ’ and more Christlike.” — PIazzard MIND CURERS VCrSUS FAITH HEALERS, MESMERISTS, ETC. Mrs. Eddy speaks of Mesmerism in this way : “ Mortal mind, acting from the basis of sensuous be¬ lief in matter, is animal magnetism. ... In propor¬ tion as you understand Christian Science you lose animal magnetism. ... Its basis being a belief and this belief an error, animal magnetism, or mesmerism, is a mere negation, possessing neither intelligence nor power. . . . An evil mind at work mesmerically is an engine of mischief little understood. . . .Animal mag¬ netism, clairvoyance, mediumship, and mesmerism are antagonistic to this Science, and would prevent the demonstration thereof. . . . The Mesmeriser produces pain by making his subjects believe that he feels it; here pain is proved to be a belief without any adequate cause. That social curse, the mesmerist, by making his victims believe they cannot move a limb, renders it im-

Page 429

SCIENCE^^ AND ^‘MIND CURE: possible for them to do so until their belief or under¬ standing masters his.” Of Spiritualism : “ Spiritualism with its material accompaniments would destroy the supremacy of Spirit.” And of Clairvoyance specifically : ‘‘ Clairvoyance investigates and influences mortal thought only. . . . Clairvoyance can do evil, can ac¬ cuse wrongfully, and err in every direction.” Of Faith Cure : “It is asked, -Why are faith cures sometimes more speedy than some of the cures wrought through Chris¬ tian Scientists ? Because faith is belief, and not under¬ standing; and it is easier to believe than to under¬ stand Spiritual Truth. It demands less cross-bearing, self-renunciation, and Divine Science, to admit the claims of the personal senses, and appeal for relief to a humanized God, than to deny those claims and learn the divine way, drinking his cup, being baptized with his baptism, gaining the end through persecution and purity. Millions are believing in God, or Good, with¬ out sharing the fruits of goodness, not having reached its Science. Belief is ^mental blindness, if it admits Truth without understanding it. It cannot say with the Apostle, ‘ I know in whom I have believed. ’ There is even danger in the mental state called belief, for if Truth is admitted but not understood, error may enter through this same channel of ignorance. The Faith cure h»is devout followers, whose Christian practice is far in advance of mere theory.” Marston, speaking of change in the in¬ verted thought of the sick person, says : “ Since a change of the inverted thought of the sick person is all that can be produced by extraneous in¬ fluence, the treatment of a professional Plealer is not the only means of securing it. While a majority of cases are affected in that way, there are well-attested instances to show that anything that will enable the sick person to change his thought may put him in a condition to receive spiritual healing. A text from Scripture or some other writings may be brought to his mind with such force as to do this, or some sudden event may startle him out of his chronic delusion. It is in this way alone that we can account for cures that seem to result from prayer, a resort to relics, charms, and other things believed to possess peculiar virtue. This is why good results follow any one of the thousand absurd acts, by the performance of which superstitious and credulous people seek to be restored to health.” Mrs. Kate Taylor remarks: “The question is often asked. In what does the Christian Science healing differ from the faith cure ? In the faith cure the patient must have faith; in Christian Science that is not necessary ; patients have frequently been helped or entirely cured, without knowing they were being treated. . . . No great faith is necessary on the part of the patient ; but it will ex¬ pedite his recovery if he take interest enough in the method by which he is being healed to read suitable books on the subject, and converse profitably with the healer. . . . Prayer to a personal God affects the sick like a drug that has no efficacy of its own, but borrows its power from human faith and belief. The drug does nothing because it has no intelligence.” TESTS OF THE THEORY. First Test. If their principles be true, food should not be necessary. Mrs. Eddy affirms this : VoL. XXXIV.— 59. ^ “ Gustatory pleasure is a sensuous illusion, an illu¬ sion that diminishes as we understand our spiritual being and ascend the ladder of Life. This woman learned that food neither strengthens nor weakens the body,— that mind alone does this. . . . Teach them that their bodies are nourished more by Truth than bv food.” ^ Then, finding herself unable to silence the testimony of the senses, she endeavors to cir¬ cumvent it thus : “Admitting the common hypothesis, that food is requisite to sustain human life, there follows the necessity for another admission, in the opposite direc¬ tion, — namely, that food has power to destroy life, through its deficiency or excess, in quality or quantity. This is a specimen of the ambiguous character of all material health-theories. They are self-contradictory and self-destructive, — ‘ a kingdom divided against itself, that is brought to desolation.’ If food preserves life, it cannot destroy it. The truth is, food does not affect the life of man ; and this becomes self-evident when we learn that God is our only life. Because sin and sickness are not qualities of Soul or Life, we have hope in immortality ; but it would be foolish to venture be¬ yond our present understanding, foolish to stop eating, until we gain more goodness and a clearer compre¬ hension of the living God. In that perfect day of un¬ derstanding, we shall neither eat to live, nor live to eat.” When they dispense with food because “ mortal mind ” is under the influence of an illusion concerning it, — absurdly supposing ^‘that food supports life,” — and continue to live with the accidents of the human body sustained entirely by the divine “ substance ” of which they speak, they will furnish a dem¬ onstration which will utterly destroy every remaining illusion of mortal mind. But so long as they eat, they are either voluntarily perpetuating an illusion, or demonstrating that they are wrong in their notions. If they are in such a low stage as to be compelled to eat when it would not be necessary if they were in a higher plane, they may, for the same reason, be compelled to use drugs. Second Test. They deny that drugs, per se, as taken into the human system, have any power. “ Christian Science divests material drugs of their imaginary power. . . . The uselessness of drugs, the emptiness of knowledge, the nothingness of matter and its imaginary laws, are apparent as we rise from the rubbish of belief to the acquisition and demonstration of spiritual understanding. . . . When the sick re¬ cover by the use of drugs, it is the law of a general belief, culminating in individual faith that heals, and according to this faith will the effect be.” — Eddy. Surely the mind needs healing that could invent the following absurdity : “ The not uncommon notion that drugs possess absolute, inherent curative virtues of their own involves an error. Arnica, quinine, opium, could not produce the effects ascribed to them except by imputed virtue. Men think they will act thus on the physical system, consequently they do. The property of alcohol is to intoxicate; but if the common thought had endowed it simply with a nourishing quality like milk, it would

Page 430

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND ‘‘MIND CURE: 426 produce a similar effect. A curious question arises about the origin of healing virtues, if it be admitted that all drugs were originally destitute of them. We can conceive of a time in the mental history of the race when no therapeutic value was assigned to certain drugs, when, in fact, it was not known that they pos¬ sessed any. How did it come to pass that comnion thought, or any thought, endowed them with healing virtue, in the first place? Simply in this way: Man finding himself unprotected, and liable to be hurt by the elements in the midst of which he lived, forgot the true source of healing, and began to seek earnestly for material remedies for disease and wounds. The desire for something led to experiments ; and with each trial there was associated the hope that the means applied would prove efficacious. Then what was at first an earnest hope came at length to be a belief; and thus, by gradual steps, a belief in the contents of the entire pharmacopoeia was established.” — Marston. It is true that in many cases the effect of a medicine is to be attributed entirely to the imagination, or to the belief that it will have such and such effects ; but the statement of such extreme positions as these shows the ir¬ rationality of the theories upon which they are based. According to the above, if it were generally believed that alcohol were unintoxi¬ cating and nourishing and bland, as milk, it would be an excellent article with which to nourish infants ; and, on the other hand, if it were generally believed that milk were intoxi¬ cating, all the influences of alcohol would be produced upon those who drank it. If the pub¬ lic could only be educated to believe alcohol to be nourishing, the entire mammalian genus might be nursing their offspring upon alcohol with equally good results. No insane asylum can furnish a more transparent delusion. That drugs produce effects upon animals has been demonstrated beyond the possibility of contradiction, and that, too, when the ani¬ mals did not know that they were taking drugs; and small doses have produced not the slightest effect, while large doses — the animals in each case not knowing that they were taking medicines — have produced great effect, and do so with uniformity. Also the ef¬ fect of medicines upon idiots and unconscious infants is capable of exact demonstration. Allied to the effect of drugs is that of poisons, almost every drug having the effect of a poison if taken in excess. Some poisons, however, are of such a character that the smallest possible dose may be attended with fatal results. In the case of animals, poisons introduced into the system without the knowl¬ edge of the animals do their work effectually. Strychnine carefully introduced into a piece of meat so small that a cat will swallow it whole, will in a very short time show its ef¬ fects. The instinct of the animal will cause its rejection if there be the slightest possibility . of perceiving it ; but if sufficient means be taken to keep the animal from knowing that it is taking anything except meat, it will swallow the meat, and the poison will do its work. These facts are admitted by the advocates of Christian Science and Mind Cure, and the absolute lunacy of their theories is seen in the manner in which they attempt to account for the effects. ‘‘ If a dose of poison is swallowed through mistake, the patient dies, while physician and patient are expecting favorable results. Did belief cause this death? Even so, and as directly as if the poison had been intentionally taken. . . . The few who think a drug harmless, where a mistake has been made in the prescription, are un¬ equal to the many who have named it poison, and so the majority opinion governs the result.” — Eddy. “ It is said that arsenic kills ; but it would be very difficult for any one to prove how it kills ; since per¬ sons have had all the symptoms of arsenic poisoning without having taken any arsenic ; and again, persons have taken arsenic and did not die. . . . Suppose you take a child that knows nothing about arsenic, and administer the usual dose, the child will probably die, but I will show you that the arsenic was not the cause of the death. . . . Here you may say, ‘ What had the life of the child to do with the action, the child not knowing anything about arsenic?’ We will admit that the child was ignorant of the nature of the poison, but all who are educated in physiology and materia medica know that it kills, therefore the thought, al¬ though unconscious to the child, was hereditary in its life. It is, indeed, a universal thought admitted as a fact in every life or soul. A thought is a product of life and is action, and this thought, produced and accepted by life, acts upon the life of the child and produces uncon¬ sciously a confusion therein. This confusion produces a fear ; this fear in the child’s life heats the blood and causes the first conscious action.” — Arens. “The effects of various experiments, with chemicals and medicine, upon cats and dogs, are studied most minutely by distinguished scientific men, and the re¬ sults witnessed published to the world with a presump¬ tion of wisdom and profundity of learning that carry the conviction to most minds that the properties of such drugs, and their effects upon the human system, have been forever established. And Materia Medica falls back upon these so-called demonstrations of Science as absolutely indisputable proofs of its Theories. Now it never seems to have occurred to them that all the effects witnessed of such experimenting might be accounted for on the basis of Thought, and with the view of investigating the subject to establish a totally opposite explanation; and to show that Mind acting on Matter could account for all their facts, the follow¬ ing experiments have been recently made : The object of the experiments was a dog, a noble thoroughbred, of great sagacity and intelligence. The first experiment con¬ sisted in conveying commands to him entirely through mind. Not a word was spohen, but his mistress would say to him mentally, — ‘ Carlo, come here,’ or ‘ Carlo, lie down,’ and although the thought might have to be repeated mentally a number of times, yet it would reach him, and sometimes he would respond almost immediately. Second experiment : One day his mas¬ ter discovered an appearance to which he gave the name Mange. All the dogs around were having it. It was catching, — Dr. So-and-So had pronounced it mange, and prescribed a mixture of Sulphur and Cas¬ tor Oil, etc., which was to be applied extemally in such a way that Carlo, in attempting to remove the prepara¬ tion with his tongue, would get a dose into his system. But here the mistress interposed, and insisted that Carlo should be subjected wholly to mental treatment. The result was entirely satisfactory. The appearance vanished as it came. Again the experiment of placing Carlo entirely under the intelligence of his master’s

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^^CHjRISTIAiY science AND ‘‘MIND CURE: mind and thoughts for a certain period was tried, and compared with the effects of leaving him wholly under his mistress’s mind. In the former case he soon exhib¬ ited every symptom of dyspepsia and indigestion in every form to which the master was subject, and in a very marked degree. But under the thought of the mistress, every symptom and appearance vanished at once. He soon attained a perfection of physical con¬ dition which constantly attracted the notice of every one. Experiments of this kind were carried much further, and can be by any one who wishes to test the matter for themselves. In all the instances just men¬ tioned, the physical condition of the dog responded to the mind under whose influence it chanced to be. Love and Fear {especially fear) are the most marked char¬ acteristics of the animal mind. The instances are in¬ numerable where the instinct of the animal surpasses the reason of man in detecting the kindly thought, or the thought of harm, toward itself. When a scientific experimenter gives a drug to a dog, it is done with a perfect certainty in his mind that disorder, derange¬ ment of the system, suffering, etc., in some form or an¬ other, are sure to follow. A fear corresponding to the thought of the man instantly seizes upon the dog, and various results do ioWow. The experimenter notes them down and then proceeds to try his drug on dog number 2, all the while holding in his mind an image of the results of experiment number i, expecting to see similar results. In all probability he sees them.” — Stuart. ^ Third Test, Extraordinary accidents to the body. Whatever may be said of the power of thought in the production of ordinary disease, the effects of accidents to persons who are entirely unconscious when they occur, as the sleeping victims of railroad disasters, are facts which, if they do not terminate human life at once, require the aid of surgery. Mrs. Eddy says : “ The fear of dissevered bodily members, or a belief in such a possibility, is reflected on the body, in the shape of headache, fractured bones, dislocated joints, and so on, as directly as shame is seen in the blush rising to the cheek. This human error about physical wounds and colics is part and parcel of the delusion that matter can feel and see, having sensation and substance.” It is confessed, however, that very little progress has been made in this department : “ Christian Science is always the most skillful sur¬ geon, but surgery is the branch of its healing that will be last demonstrated. However, it is but just to say that I have already in my possession well-authen¬ ticated records of the cure, by mental surgery alone, of dislocated hip-joints and spinal vertebrae.” But records, to be well authenticated, require more than an assertion. And the records may be authentic, and what they contain may never have been thoroughly tested. As they affirm that ‘‘bones have only the substance of thought, they are only an appearance to mortal mind ” ; and if their theories be true at all, they should be able to rectify every result of accident to * Mrs. Stuart in the foregoing passage is only a little more ab¬ surd than Mrs. Eddy. “ The preference of mortal mind for any method creates a demand for it, and the body seems to require it. You can even educate a healthy horse so far in physiology that he will tak]b cold without his blanket; whereas the wild animal, left to his instincts, sniffs the wind with delight” The connection of this 427 the body as readily and speedily as diseases originating within the system. Fourth Test, Insanity. It is a well-estab¬ lished fact that blows upon the head produce insanity. It is equally well established that surgery in many cases is able to remove the difficulty by an obviously physical readjust¬ ment, where the surgeon himself cannot be positive what the effect will be until after the experiment, and the victim has no knowledge whatever upon the subject. During the late war, a negro was wounded in the head by the explosion of a shell. He wandered about for several years, to all appearance a driveling idiot, when certain surgeons took an interest in his case, and concluded that the removal of a piece of the skull which had been driven in and pressed upon the brain, might restore his reason. Knowing that no damage could be done to his mind by the operation, they per¬ formed it, and were almost appalled when, after the lapse of so many years, as they lifted the piece of skull and removed the pressure upon the brain, the light of intelligence re¬ turned to the eye of the man, who said, “ We were at Manassas yesterday; where are we to-day ? ” A similar case, where there had been delirium alternating with coma for a week, occurred in March last. The transient effect of stimulants upon per¬ sons who have been in a state of dementia apparently for along time, is also well known. Mrs. Eddy upon this subject directs practi¬ tioners to tell the moderately sick man, that he suffers only as the insane suffer, from a mere belief. The only difference is that insanity implies be¬ lief in a diseased brain, while physical ailments (so called) arise from belief that some other portions of the body are deranged. . . . The entire mortal body is evolved from mortal mind. A bunion would produce insanity as perceptible as that produced by congestion of the brain, were it not that mortal mind calls the bun¬ ion an unconscious portion of the body. Reverse this belief, and the results would be different.” It may be readily admitted that if a man be¬ lieved his mind was in his foot, and believed it was out of order, he might be crazy. But in selecting the bunion for an illustration, Mrs. Eddy was not so wide of the mark as she might have been. Nearly twenty years ago, while listening to the lectures of Dr. C. E. Brown-Sequard, before the physicians of Brooklyn, I heard him give the following case: A youth (fourteen years old) went to bed perfectly sane, nor had he ever had a symptom of insanity. The next morning when he arose and stepped upon the floor he became a maniac. With great difficulty he was replaced quotation with what goes before shows that the horse does not take cold, in the opinion of Mrs. Eddy, because, having been ac¬ customed to the blanket, his system is so weakened that he will take cold without it ; but because the training of the said horse has been such that he is led to believe that if the blanket is not on he will take cold !

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‘‘CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND “MIND CURE: 428 upon the bed, and the moment he touched it he was sane. During the morning he made sev¬ eral attempts to rise, always with the same result. A physician was called, who in his ac¬ count of the case says : “ When sitting up in his bed he drew on his stockings ; but on put¬ ting his feet on the floor and startling up^ his countenance instantly changed^ the jaw beca?jie violently convulsed f etc. He was pushed back on the bed, was at once calm, looked surprised, and asked what was the matter. Inquiry showed that he had been fishing the preced¬ ing day, but had met with no accident. His legs were examined minutely, but nothing unusual was seen ; but, says the physician, ‘‘ On hold¬ ing up the right great toe with 7ny fi7iger a7id thu7nb to examme the sole of that foot, the leg was d7'aw7i up and the 77iuscles of the jaws were sudde/ily convulsed, a7id 07i releashig the toe these effects instantly ceased! After further ex¬ periment, an irritated point, so small as to be scarcely visible, was taken away by the cut¬ ting of a piece of skin, and ^ the strange sen¬ sation was gone and never returned.’’ * Post-mortem examinations which exhibit the degeneration of the brain structure are of no importance in the eyes of these professors of dreams. Fifth Test. The perpetuation of youth and the abolition of death should also be within the range of these magicians. Baldwin, of Chicago, says : “ Man should grow younger as he grows older ; the principle is simple. ‘ As we think so are we ’ is stereo¬ typed. Thoughts and ideas are ever striving for external expression. By keeping the mind young we have a per¬ fect guarantee for continued youthfulness of body. Thought will externalize itself; thus growing thought will ever keep us young. Reliance on drugs makes the mind, consequently the body, prematurely old. This new system will make us younger at seventy than at seventeen, for then we will have more of genuine phil¬ osophy.” Mrs. Eddy meets this matter in the style of Jules Verne : The error of thinking that we are growing old, and the benefits of destroying that illusion, are illustrated in a sketch from the history of an English lady, pub¬ lished in the London ‘ Lancet. ’ Disappointed in love in early years, she became insane. She lost all calculation of time. Believing that she still lived in the same hour that parted her from her lover, she took no note of years, but daily stood before the window, watching for his coming. In this mental state she remained young. Hav¬ ing no appearance of age, she literally grew no older. Some American travelers saw her when she was sev¬ enty-four, and supposed her a young lady. Not a wrin¬ kle or gray hair appeared, but youth sat gently on cheek * This case can be found ( No. 44) in “ Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System,” by Brown-S^quard; published, i860, in Phila¬ delphia. Also in Holmes’s “Annals of Surgery,” vol. 3. P- 330- A similar account can be found on insanity produced and brow. Asked to judge her age, and being unac¬ quainted with her history, each visitor conjectured that she must be under twenty.” That the above should be adduced as proof of anything would be wonderful if the person adducing it had not previously adopted a the¬ ory which supersedes the necessity of all dem¬ onstration. It is important to notice that if the belief had anything to do with it, this amaz¬ ing result grew from the belief in a falsehood. She did not live in the same hour that parted her from her lover ; she believed that she did, and, according to Mrs. Eddy, this belief of a falsehood counteracted all the ordinary conse¬ quences of the flight of time. But the delusion among the insane that they are young, that they are independent of time and of this world, is very common ; and the most painfully paradoxical sights that I have ever witnessed have been men and women, toothless, denuded of hair, and with all the signs of age, — ‘‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” — some of them declar¬ ing that they were young girls and engaged to be married to presidents and kings and even to divine beings. These delusions in some instances have been fixed for many years. Having had an official connection with an insane asylum for two years, I had more opportunities than were desired for conversing with persons of this class. In the case adduced by Mrs. Eddy, granting it to be true, and admitting that the state of the mind may have had some effect, it is of no scientific importance; for the number who show no signs of age until fifty, sixty, or even seventy years have passed, is by no means small in the aggregate; we meet them everywhere. One of the most astute observers of human nature, himself a physician, solemnly warned a gentleman that if he continued to sleep only four hours out of twenty-four, he would die before he was fifty years of age. “What do you suppose my age to be now? ” said the gentleman. “Thirty,” said the physi¬ cian. “I am sixty-nine,” was the reply, which proved to be the fact. Mrs. Eddy, not content with this case, con¬ tinues : “ I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A lady of eighty-five whom I knew had a return of sight. Another lady at ninety had new teeth, — incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar.” Such instances as these are not uncommon, but are generally a great surprise to the persons four years after a boy trod on a piece of glass, which was entirely relieved by removing from a point near the ball of the big toe a trifling piece of glass. What is called the nervous temperament or condition is of importance.

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‘^CHmSTIAN SCIENCE themselves, and unconnected with any delu¬ sion as to the flight of time. They are simply freaks of nature. There is a flattening of the eye which comes on with advancing years, and necessitates the use of glasses. Many persons who have few signs of age, retain the color of the cheek, have lost no teeth, and whose natural force is not abated, find that their eyes are dim. According to these metaphysical healers this is not necessary, but I have observed that a number of them say nothing about being themselves compelled to use glasses. Much is made of one case of a metaphys¬ ical healer, who, after using glasses fifteen years, threw them away, and can now read even in the railroad cars without them. Such cases of second sight have occurred at intervals always, and under all systems, and sometimes when the progress of old age had been so great that the persons had suffered many infirmities, and had but a few months left in which to “ see as well as ever they did in their lives.” Some famous actors and actresses, without the use of pigments, dyes, or paints, and not¬ withstanding the irregular hours and other accidents of their professional life, have main¬ tained an astonishing youthfulness of appear¬ ance down to nearly three-score years and ten. John Wesley at seventy-five, according to testimony indubitable and from a variety of sources, not only presented the appearance of a man not yet past the prime of life, but, what is more remarkable, had the undiminished en¬ ergy, vivacity, melody and strength of voice which accompany youth. Nor at eighty-five had he exhibited much change. In the city of Chicago there resides a professional man nearly seventy years of age, whose teeth, com¬ plexion, color, hair, voice, and mind show no signs of his being over forty-five years of age. Henry Ward Beecher, the January before his death, could write to his oldest brother that he had no rheumatism, neuralgia, sleeplessness, or deafness, was not bald, and did not need spectacles. Meanwhile it is impossible not to suppose that the case as described by Mrs. Eddy has been greatly exaggerated. That some Ameri¬ cans who saw her at the age of seventy-four supposed her to be under twenty, is to be taken cum grano sails I As for death, if the theories of these roman¬ tic philosophers be true, it should give way ; if not in every case, at least in some. It is ,said that there are hundreds of persons in Boston who believe that Mrs. Eddy will never die. Joanna Southcott, who arose in England in 1792, made many disciples, by some esti¬ mated at one hundred thousand, who believed that she would never die ; but unfortunately ANE ‘‘MIND CURE! 429 for their credulity she succumbed to the in¬ evitable decree. Sixth Test. It might be easily shown, also, that if these theories are true, clothes, so far as sustaining warmth and life are concerned, are superfluous, and that fire itself is unnecessary. CONCLUSION. In endeavoring to ascertain the causes of the recoveries which undoubtedly occur when the patient is under the supervision of Chris¬ tian Scientists and Mind Curers, it would be a blunder to omit the testimony of Mrs. Eddy as to her experiments with homeopathy. She says that she has attenuated common table salt until there was not a single saline property left; and yet with one drop of that in a goblet of water, and a teaspoonful adminis- tevtd every three hours, she has cured a patient sinking in the last stage of typhoid fever. De¬ scribing a case of dropsy given up by the faculty, she says that after giving some medi¬ cines of high attenuation, she gave the patient unmedicated pellets for a while, and found that she continued to improve. Finally she induced the patient to give up her medicine for one day, and risk the effects. After trying this, she informed Mrs. Eddy that she could get along two days without the globules ; but on the third day had to take them. She went on in this way, taking unmedicated pellets, with oc¬ casional visits from Mrs. Eddy, and employing no other means was cured. Thus Mrs. Eddy says she discovered that mind was potent over matter and that drugs have no power. It is not to be inferred from the above that homeopathic remedies, which have been mod¬ ified by the discoveries made and the experi¬ ence attained since the time of Hahnemann, are generally powerless. That question is not essential to this inquiry. But the con¬ fession of Mrs. Eddy that her experiments were the means of teaching her that mind and not matter effects the cure, will be re¬ garded by all who do not accept her theories as containing the principal key to the problem. She made the common error of generalizing from a few particulars, and ever since has en¬ deavored to test facts by theory instead of making facts the test. Because she found a supposed mental cause adequate to a cure in a few cases, she. leaped to the wild conclusion that all causes are mental. Yet it would be an error to lose sight of the specific elements in the practice of Christian Science and the various forms of Mind Cure as a profession. The patients who are treated by these practi¬ tioners have, to begin with, the vis medicatrix 7iaturcB, which is the final element in every cure, known and recognized to be such by the

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^^dTjRISTIAJV SCIENCE^' AND ‘‘MIND CURE: 430 leaders of the medical profession for a long period of time. Sir John Forbes, M. D., one of the most eminent regular physicians of Eng¬ land, says of the regular practice in his famous article on homeopathy : “ First, that in a large proportion of the cases treated by allopathic physicians, the disease is cured by nature, and not by them. Second, that in a lesser but still not a small proportion, the disease is cured by nature in spite of them ; in other words, their interference re¬ tarding instead of assisting the cure. Third,^ that in, consequently, a considerable proportion of diseases it would fare as well or better with patients if all reme¬ dies — at least all active remedies, especially drugs — were abandoned.” Even so long ago as Sydenham’s time, he said, I often think more could be left to Na¬ ture than we are in the habit of leaving to her; to imagine that she always wants the help of art is an error and an unlearned error too.” Sir John Marshall, F. R. S., in opening the session of the London University Medical School in 1865, said, “ The vis medicatrix naturce is the agent to employ in the healing of an ulcer, or the union of a broken bone ; and it is equally true that the physician or sur¬ geon never cured a disease ; he only assists the natural processes of cure performed by the intrinsic conserva¬ tive energy of the frame, and this is but the extension of the force imparted at the origination of the individ¬ ual being.” Under the Mind Cure this force of nature is still at work, and in the great number of self-limited diseases which tend to recovery, it is left. free from all error of practitioners. If it loses any advantages which the introduc¬ tion of the proper drugs might give, it is saved from the consequences of the administration of the wrong ones. The number of instances in which the pre¬ scriptions interfere with nature is so great that Dr. Paris wrote, many years ago, “ The file of every apothecary would furnish a volume of instances where the ingredients of the pre¬ scription were fighting together in the dark.” This is especially true of the diseases of chil¬ dren. The late Dr. Marshall Hall said, “ Of the whole number of fatal cases of diseases in infancy, a great proportion occur from the in¬ appropriate or undue application of exhaust¬ ing remedies.” Further, those who are treated by the Mind Curers in many cases derive benefit from the freedom of diet, air, and exercise allowed. They are told to pay no attention to symp¬ toms, think nothing whatever about their dis¬ eases, and not talk about them ; to eat, sleep, drink, and act as nearly as possible as if they were well ; and in a large majority of chronic diseases, this is all that is needed to produce a return to health. They have also the benefits of faith and imag¬ ination ; as they are taught to imagine healthy. vigorous organs, and their whole bodies in the condition of health, and with such men¬ tal pictures to drive away all consciousness of symptoms, they summon to their aid that most potent of all influences, a calm and fearless mind. The presence of the practitioner and her methods greatly contribute to this calm¬ ing influence. “ She enters with a cheerful air and, without taking your hand or approaching your bed, seats herself and asks you to tell her all your symptoms. [She may, however, belong to the class which will not allow any description of symptoms.] She receives your budget of ailments calmly, without one expression of sympa¬ thy, for she has none, considering all your nialadies as an illusion or dream from which it is her divine mis¬ sion to awaken you. You are made to feel, immediately, that there is little of consequence in all that you have been telling her. She then relapses into a silence of ten or fifteen minutes, in which her kind face wears a resolute expression, making it almost stern. . . . After this silent treatment she speaks to you in the most en¬ couraging manner, endeavoring to call you away from yourself to the contemplation of spiritual truth.” A point of difference between the Faith Healers and Mind Curers is worthy of ob¬ servation. The Faith Healers require the pa¬ tient to have faith; the Mind Curers make a boast of the fact that faith is not necessary. A close analysis, however, shows that this boast is vain. Before they are sent for there is usually some faith, and often much, combined with a distrust of other systems. This was, as some of their authorities affirm, the case when they began. Sufficient time has elapsed to develop a constituency who employ no other methods. If there were no faith, there must be a distrust of other forms of practice, or there would be no reason for turning to the new. Where there is no faith on the part of the patient, usually his friends believe, and have induced him to make the experiment. Thus he is surrounded by an atmosphere of faith which is so impor¬ tant that all the writers attach great weight to it. “ Friends and attendants who are believers in Men¬ tal cure, and know what sort of a mental atmosphere is favorable to restoring health, may do much to help the metaphysician in his work. But, unfortunately, this is seldom the case ; and the friends are usually igno¬ rant on the subject, and innocently burdening the inva¬ lid with just that kind of hurtful sympathy which keeps him under a cloud of depression. When such is the case, their absence is more helpful than their presence, and it is desirable to be alone with the pa¬ tient while treating him.” — JMarston. Some go even so far as to say that they should be, if possible, removed from the society of those who do not believe. But a favorable atmosphere exists to some extent among those who have induced an un¬ believing invalid to send for a mental healer. Assuming that the healer has arrived, it is easy to see how faith is engendered. She takes her seat, and after a few unimportant questions becomes silent. The thoughts that wander

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‘‘ClfJ^ISTIAiy SCIENCE^^ AND ^^MIND CUEEr through the mind of the invalid, as told me by a patient of thorough intelligence, an alumnus of one of the first universities of this country, were such as these: “ Can there be anything in this ? I don’t believe there is, and yet a great many people are believing in it, and some most wonderful cures have taken place. There is Mrs. - . I hiow that she was given up to die by our best physicians, and I knoiv that she is well.” Then the eye will wan- derto the face of the metaphysician, who seems looking at far-off things and wrestling with some problem not yet solved, but of the cer¬ tainty of the solution of which she has no doubt. Sometimes the practitioners cover their eyes, and this in many temperaments would add to the effect. The fifteen minutes pass and leave the unbeliever passive, as a quotation in a former part of the article de¬ scribes it, “ less cantankerous.” The encouraging words of the healer on departing are not without effect, differing as they do from the uncertain or the preternat- urally solemn forthgivings, or the ill- concealed misgivings, of many ordinary physicians. There are no medicines to take, no symptoms to watch, and only the certainty of recovery to be dwelt upon. ’Whatever the appetite calls for is to be eaten without anxiety as to the con¬ sequences, and if there be no appetite there is to be no eating and no anxiety as to the re¬ sult of abstinence. The effect of the treatment having been pleas¬ ant, the patient rather longs than otherwise for the next day to come, and the next. If the dis¬ ease be one that under ordinary circumstances would require an operation, the dreadful im¬ age of the surgeon’s knife no longer appalls the patient’s mind. The invalid discovers that he does not die, that he sleeps a little better; cer¬ tainly he is not aroused to take medicine, and there is no fear that he will take cold ; he feels decidedly better at the next visit, and now faith is not only born, but turned into sight. His friends assure him that he is better, and he tells them that he is so. Perhaps the most potent cause in awakening faith is the sublime audacity displayed by the practitioner who dares to dispense with drugs, manipulation, hygiene, prayer, and religious ceremony. That spectacle would infallibly pro¬ duce either such opposition and contempt as would result in the termination of the ex¬ periment, or faith. It is impossible to be in a negative position in its presence, where the re¬ sponsibilities of life and death are assumed. As for “ absent treatments,’^ these are based on the theory that to think of another entirely and abstractedly occasions a spiritual presence of that other. “ Distance is annihilated, and his living image and inner personality seem to stand before us, and what we say to it we say to him.” These persons catch up and incorporate with their theories the as yet immature investiga¬ tions of the Society for Psychical Research, in which it is claimed that a sensitive subject can form in the mind a distinct mental picture or idea of words and letters which had been in the mind of an agent. Healers endeavor to extend those phenomena so as to make them annihilate space; and, according to them, '' it is as easy to affect a person in the interior of Africa by a mental influence, as in the same room.” Here they affiliate with the whole mass of superstitions which accumulated in the early history of the human race, and reappear in cer¬ tain temperaments in each generation. Whether such a thing as thought-transference exists, there is not space here to inquire; nor is it nec¬ essary, for the effects of the “absent treat¬ ment,” so called, can all be accounted for without any such assumption. The patients thus treated kiww or they do not know that they are being treated. When they know, there is nothing to explain, for it is the same as if the patient and practitioner were in each other’s presence. All the mental operations, as well as the original force of na¬ ture, proceed under the conviction that they are being treated by a mental healer. If they do not know, the entire field of coincidence and the vis medicatrix natui'ce remain invio¬ late; and to determine that there is any con¬ nection between the alleged treatment and the change in the condition of the patient would require a vast number of cases and detailed coincidence of time and symptom, for which these practitioners do not display ability, and for which, on their own testimony, they have had no opportunity. Indeed, their theories are such as to make all investigation superflu¬ ous and tedious. The case upon which Mrs. Eddy appears to rely is described thus: “ The day you received my husband’s letter I became conscious for the first time in forty-eight hours.” What can this prove ? What evidence is there that she would not have become conscious if the letter had never been written ? If she were ever to come out of an unconscious state and recover, it must be at some time. The coincidence of Mrs. Eddy’s receiving a letter from the hus¬ band does not show any connection between the two facts, for such letters have been sent and the patients have died. To my personal knowledge her treatments have failed, and her predictions have not been fulfilled, the patient dying in excruciating agony. Instances which have occurred, and can be reproduced at any time, of the attempted absent treatment of persons who 7iever existed^ are numerous; for

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432 ^‘CHRISTIAN SCIENCE there is not one of this class of healers that cannot be so imposed upon. This is sufficient to raise a powerful presumption that the spirit¬ ual presence which they evoke, and to which they speak, is ‘‘ such stuff as dreams are made of.” It is not to be denied that they make many cures, more than any bungler or extremist of any school using drugs would expect. But their failures are numerous, and, like the faith healers, they never publish these. Compelled, however, to admit this, the chancellor of the University of the Science of Spirit says : Our inability to heal instantaneously as they (Jesus and the Apostles) are recorded to have done, is at¬ tributable to our deficiency in the realization of the doc¬ trine. While we claim that our theory of healing is applicable to all diseases, we do not claim to possess sufficient understanding in it at the present time to heal all diseases instantaneously, neither would we now guarantee to cure certain diseases, such as cancer or con¬ sumption in the last stages. Of one thing, however, we are confident, i. e., that we can do more good in all cases of illness than can be done with any other theory, or with materia medica.” — Arens. They are rather more successful than the faith healers for this reason: with the faith healers it is generally either an instantane¬ ous cure, or none at all. And an instantaneous cure cannot be made to apply to a great many cases, and what is supposed to be such is very frequently a delusion followed by a complete relapse. The Christian Scientists, however, and their congeners make many visits and give nature a much better opportunity with¬ out the destruction of the patient’s faith in them by a failure at a critical juncture; thus it happens that the proportion of recoveries is more numerous. The principal practical element has been more or less recognized and employed by the greatest physicians of every school through the whole history of medical practice, as well as by quacks and superstitious pagan priests. ‘‘ The History of Medical Economy during the Mid¬ dle Ages,” by George F. Fort, contains numer¬ ous illustrations of this subject, though adduced for another purpose, and, unlike many other treatises, giving the authorities with the most painstaking accuracy. Dr. Rush, of whom Dr. Tuke says that few physicians have had more practical experience of disease, says : “ I have frequently prescribed remedies of doubtful efficacy in the critical stage of acute diseases, but never till I had worked up my patients into a confidence bor¬ dering upon certainty of their probable good effects. The success of this measure has much oftener answered than disappointed my expectations.” The British and Foreign Medical Review” for January, 1846, whose editor was Sir John Forbes, contained an article written by him¬ self which encourages ‘‘ the administration of ’ AND ^‘MIND CURES simple, feeble, and altogether powerless, non¬ perturbing medicines, in all cases in which drugs are prescribed pro forma^ for the satis¬ faction of the patient’s mind, and not with the view of producing any direct remedial effect.” “ Physic and Physicians,” published in 1839, speaking of the celebrated and extraordinarily successful Dr. Radcliffe, who died in 1714, and was the founder of the Radcliffe Library at Oxford University, says that he paid par¬ ticular attention to the mind of the patient under his care, and had been heard to say that he attributed much of his success and eminence to this circumstance. There is a very good anecdote illustrating his views upon this subject: “ A lady of rank consulted Radcliffe in great distress about her daughter, and the doctor began the investi¬ gation of the case by asking, ‘ Why, what ails her ? ’ ‘Alas ! doctor,’ replied the mother, ‘ I cannot tell ; but she has lost her humor, her looks, her stomach ; her strength consumes every day, and we are appre¬ hensive that she cannot live.’ ‘ Why do you not marry her ? ’ said Radcliffe. ‘Alas ! doctor, that we would fain do, and have offered her as good a match as ever she could expect.’ . ‘ Is there no other that you think she would be content to marry ? ’ ‘Ah, doctor, that is that troubles us ; for there is a young gentleman we doubt she loves, that her father and I can never consent to.’ ‘ Why, look you, madam,’ replied Radcliffe gravely, ‘ then the case is this : your daughter would marry one man, and you would have her marry another. In all my books I find no remedy for such a disease as this.’ ” This principle has also been employed by certain priests and clergymen of every sect. A young woman, a teacher, was, as she be¬ lieved and as her friends supposed, at the point of death. Her physician was not quite cer¬ tain that she was as ill as she seemed, and re¬ quested the pastor to assist him in breaking up her delusion that she must die. He at¬ tempted it, but she refused to hear him, and loaded him with messages for her friends, and especially for her class in the Sunday School. As he was about to bid her farewell, he said that he would return in the afternoon; she said that she would like him to pray with her, but that it was useless to pray for her recovery. Having in view her hearing what he had to say, he prayed in such a way as to break the spell and make her believe that she would re¬ cover ; as he did this, the morbid symptoms of approaching death gave way, and she is still living. Another case was still more remarkable. A woman, ill and bedridden, conceived a high regard for the piety and intelligence of her pastor. He entered her room and in a loud and solemn voice said, “ I command you to arise ! ” Involuntarily she arose and resumed the duties of housekeeping, which after the lapse of ten years she still performs. A Roman Catholic priest, of high position

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‘‘CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND “MIND CURES in his church, told the writer that he thought he had saved scores of lives by refusing to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, which led the patients to say “ Father - does not think I am going to die/’ In 1832, when the cholera raged in Norfolk, Virginia, Dr. Buzzell, a physician of great local celebrity, lived there. He was driving night and day, and on one occasion was sum¬ moned to see a stalwart negro who was ap¬ parently in the state of collapse. Instead of beginning at once to medicate him, he accused him of shamming, denounced and derided him in every possible way for calling him when he was at work night and day, driven almost to death. Then, putting on the appearance of intense excitement, he procured a switch and began to thrash the negro very severely. The more he groaned, and the more he said he was dying, the more Dr. Buzzell thrashed him, and with his threatenings and beatings brought on such a tremendous reaction that the man recovered. In a visit to a branch of the Oneida Com¬ munity at Wallingford, in 1856, I asked Mrs. Miller, the sister of John H. Noyes, the founder of the community, what they did if any of the inmates became ill, as they repudiated medi¬ cines. She said they had very little sickness. “ But, have I not heard of an epidemic of diphtheria among you ? ” She said there had been, but by their treatment they saved every case. “ What was that treatment ? ” “ It was treatment by criticism.” “ How was it applied ? ” So soon as a person was taken ill, a committee was appointed who went into the room and sat down, paying no attention to the patient ; they began at once to speak about him or her, criticising the patient’s pe¬ culiarities, bringing every defect to the surface, and unsparingly condemning it.” Mrs. Miller added that no one could endure this more than an hour. The mental and moral irrita¬ tion was so great that they began to perspire and invariably recovered. The universal effi¬ cacy of this method may well be doubted, for many persons live in such an atmosphere that if that treatment would Save them, they would never die ; while others are so callous to all criticism that the remedy would be without effect. The nervous “ temperament ” or condition of the healer appears to be of no special importance ; that is, it is of importance only in the same sense that it is to salesmen, pub- * “ In practice it seems to be more difficult to success¬ fully treat one’s self than to treat another person. The reason for this is that, when personally under the in¬ fluence of supposed disease, the appeal of the senses is more forcible than when the deception shows itself in another. But that one can conquer the results of his own inverted thinking, there is not the slightest VoL. XXXIV.— 60. 433 lie speakers, school teachers, lawyers, sea' cap¬ tains, detectives, military leaders, physicians, and all who impress themselves upon others. I have seen successful healers thin and tail; others short and fat; some pale, others florid; some intelligent, others unintelligent; some intellectual, more only intelligent; some in good health, others diseased; one of the best was so feeble as to seem on the verge of death.* The specimen mental treatment given on page 423 shows how the practitioner worked herself up to the point ; and it is easy to fancy how forcibly she spoke when a surge of con¬ viction that seemed to act on all the blood¬ vessels of her body and made her tingle all over, went through her ; and it is equally easy to imagine the effect upon the patient. The relation of the Mind Cure movement to ordinary medical practice is important. It emphasizes what the most philosophical physi¬ cians of all schools have always deemed of the first importance, though many have neglected it. It teaches that medicine is but occasion¬ ally necessary. It hastens the time when pa¬ tients of discrimination will rather pay more for advice how to live, and for frank declara¬ tions that they do not need medicine, than for drugs. It promotes general reliance upon those processes which go on equally in health and disease. But these ethereal practitioners have no new force to offer ; there is no causal connection between their cures and their theories. What^ty believe has practically nothing to do with their success. If a new school were to arise claiming to heal diseases without drugs or hygiene, or prayer, by the hypothetical odylic force invented by Baron Reichenbach, the effects would be the same, if the practice were the same. Recoveries as remarkable have been occur¬ ring through all the ages, as the results of men¬ tal states and nature’s own powers. They will not be able to displace either the skilled surgeon or the educated physician; for their arrogant and exclusive pretensions are of the nature of a craze.” Most sensible per¬ sons will prefer a physician who understands both the mind and the body ; who can be a “father confessor” to the sick man, relieving him of the responsibility of treating himself, quieting his mind, strengthening him by hope, and stimulating him by his personal presence; one who, understanding the mineral, plant, occasion to doubt. . . . We must not, however, make the mistake of supposing that he who would attempt to bring healing to others must first be sound him¬ self. . . . The effect of a treatment depends not on its length, but on the condition of the healer who exercises it, and the dynamic power of the thought exerted.” — Marston.

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434 AJV INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF lOHN ADAMS. and animal substances included in the materia medica,can assist nature, interfering only when absolutely necessary and certainly safe; too learned and honest, when not knowing what to do, ever to do he knows not what. They will also prefer a physical! who can re¬ lieve their pains when incurable, smooth their pathway to the inevitable end, or, when he has the happiness to see them convalescent, will be able to give them such hygienic hints as may prevent a recurrence of the malady, or save them from something worse. The verdict of mankind, excepting minds prone to vagaries on the borderland of insan¬ ity, will be that pronounced by Ecclesiasticus more than two thousand years ago : “The Lord hath created medicines OUT OF THE earth; AND HE THAT IS WISE WILL NOT ABHOR THEM. My SON, IN THY SICKNESS BE NOT NEGLIGENT; BUT PRAY UNTO THE Lord, and he will make thee WHOLE. Leave off from sin, and order THY hands aright, AND CLEANSE THY HEART FROM ALL WICKEDNESS. ThEN GIVE PLACE TO THE PHYSICIAN, FOR THE LORD HATH CREATED HIM : LET HIM NOT GO FROM THEE, FOR THOU HAST NEED OF HIM. There is a time when in their hands THERE IS GOOD SUCCESS. FOR THEY SHALL ALSO PRAY UNTO THE LORD, THAT HE WOULD PROSPER THAT WHICH THEY GIVE FOR EASE AND TO PROLONG LIFE.’' OVER THE HILLS. “ /^VER the hills fair pastures lie Beneath a softer, sunnier sky ; From balmy woods more freshly green To sweeter songs of birds unseen The roused echoes make reply. “The men are gentler: there might I Be happy yet — could I but fly From this my story’s tedious scene Over the hills ! ” O human Child ! on this rely : Over the hills no rarer dye. No richer bloom, no brighter sheen! Nothing but this that still hath been : Space where you still may stand and sigh, “ Over the hills! ” I. M. Buckley. Gertrude Hall. AN INCIDENT IN THE N the spring-time of i8i8, I passed a long afternoon in the company of the second President of the United States and his fam¬ ily in the parlor of his home at Quincy; and on that occasion the patri¬ arch, then three or four years younger than I am now, displayed one side of his character in so strong a light that I am not willing to omit making a record of it. John Adams had striking faults, and he wore them on the outside, where they could be seen of all men. He whites of his own character with simplicity and unreserve : “ I have looked into myself,. and I see weakness enough; but I see no timidity, no meanness, nor dishonesty there.” His grandson and biographer countsamong his weaknesses, quick temper and talkativeness. LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS. often carried to indiscretion. Jefferson, after a seven months’ intimacy with him in London and Paris, writes to Madison : “ He is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him.” And in the same letter he dwells on the merits of one about eight years his senior: “ He is disinterested, profound, accurate in judgment, except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment, and so amiable that you will love him, if ever you be¬ come acquainted with him.” His vanity, it may be added, sometimes showed itself in impatience at the superiority of another; but if he could occasionally write disparagingly of some of his great contempora¬ ries, he has in his moments of reflection scat¬ tered along the way honorable tributes to their powers and their services.

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AJV INCIDENT IN THE As a consequence, the popular imagination has never shaped for itself an image of the man in an idealized form ; nor has he as yet nestled himself so closely in the public affection as Jef¬ ferson seemed to predict for him ; but when the services which he has rendered his coun¬ try are summed up, he is found to hold a most honorable place among its ablest statesmen. His political sympathies were, from the morning twilight of our Union, on the side of the people. In the year before the forma¬ tion of our present Constitution, he wrote : “It has ever been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. If it is impossible, I would still say, let us try the experiment, and preserve our equality as long as we can.” Industry was his fixed habit ; as a lawyer he prepared his cases most thoroughly ; and he took this habit with him into public life, greatly to the advantage of his country in his various negotiations. He was brave and fear¬ less, but his head, his heart, and his hands” were ever guiltless of the crime of provoking ” war. Human life on earth he held to be a most desirable stage of being, and of his own share in it he says : It has been sweet and happy on the whole, and calls for gratitude to my Maker and Preserver.” In the early months of 1796, while his nom¬ ination for the Presidential chair was as yet un¬ certain, his mind turned upon other public duties besides those of an executive character. If I had eloquence, or humor, or irony, or satire, or the harp or the lyre of Amphion, how much good could I do to the world ! ” When he doubted his nomination to the Presidency, he turned his mind for consola¬ tion to the very course which his son, John Quincy Adams, adopted after defeat as a can¬ didate for rejection. He writes : “ If Mr. Jefferson should be President, I believe I must put up as a candidate for the House. I feel some¬ times as if I could speechify among them. If I were in that house I would drive out of it some demons that haunt it. At times there are false doctrines and false jealousies predominant there, that it would be easy to exorcise.” John Adams did not begin the controversy with Hamilton. In January, 1793, when both Houses were making strict inquisition into the management of the treasury, Adams claims for Hamilton that which is due from a generous nation to a faithful servant. ‘‘ I presume,” he says, “ his character will shine the brighter.” Before the close of Washington’s Adminis¬ tration John Adams made remarks, which amount to an assertion, that the Constitution was already so perfectly established by Wash- LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS. 435 ington that the system of government intro¬ duced by him could not be departed from by any one, whoever it might be, who should be elected his successor. His exact words are : “ If Jay or even Jefferson should be the man, the government will go on as well as ever. Jefferson could not stir a step in any other system than that which is begun.” John Adams refused to believe that there was any necessity of a third term of service, as President, by Washington, saying : “ There is no more danger in the change than there would be in changing a member of the Senate, and whoever lives to see it will own me a prophet.” Happily for the country, and for the estab¬ lishment of republican institutions, Washington inflexibly persisted in setting the example of moderation which is needed for the safety of our institutions. At one time of his life John Adams was in the closest contact with Franklin, whose imper¬ turbable tranquillity of manner fretted the im¬ pulsive nature of his younger fellow-laborer. A collision between them took place in Paris, whither Adams repaired with commissions as superb as ever were intrusted to a single diplo¬ matist ; for he was made sole minister to form with Great Britain the treaty of peace with the independent United States of America, and the sole minister plenipotentiary from the United States to the same power with the special pur¬ pose of forming a treaty of commerce between the two nations. To those commissions were soon added full powers as minister to Holland. The use to be made of these accumulated trusts would be of the very highest importance to his country, and, it may be said, to man¬ kind. The time had not arrived for opening negotiations for peace, which formed one ob¬ ject of his mission ; and inactivity was hateful to him. From Paris, where for the moment he had nothing to do, he sent letters to Con¬ gress proposing a new and rougher manner of dealing with the government of the king of France, and involved himself in the discussion of questions that more properly belonged to the American legation in France. Congress was thus led to question whether it was wise to intrust to one man the sole negotiation of peace for a country extending so far, and com¬ posed of so many States ; and it substituted a commission representing the several sections of the country. Accordingly, Adams, the fav¬ orite of New England, received as his col¬ leagues Jay and Franklin of the central States, and Laurens of South Carolina. Adams him¬ self has given expression to his exquisite pain at the decrease of his dignity, to which at the moment it was impossible for him to recon¬ cile his feelings ; while, as a question of public

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436 AN INCIDENT IN THE policy and interest, he readily acknowledged that Congress had acted wisely. But while he gave the approval of his judgment to the change, he has himself recorded the intensity of his disappointment and mortification ; and he could never reconcile his mind to a cordial acceptance of Franklin as his associate in the negotiation, and could never do justice to the services which Franklin rendered in bringing about the peace. Each of the two wrote to Congress of the conduct of the other ; but it was certainly J ohn Adams who began the ob¬ noxious representations; Franklin did but avert erroneous impressions which might otherwise have been harmful and abiding. Nor would Adams ever see the wisdom with which Franklin opened the negotiation for peace and carried it forward almost to com¬ pletion. In i8i8, Andrews Norton, then the librarian of Harvard College, was preparing for the “North American Review” an article on the life and writings of Benjamin Franklin. His own special studies had been those of theology. He was a man of singular purity of mind and integrity of character, reserved m his manners, retreating from general society, and not courting familiar intercourse even with other officers of the university ; yet capable of strong attachments, and in his own circle con¬ fiding, affectionate, and generous. Moreover, he was the strongest possible assertor of the rights of the individual to absolute freedom of mind, and permitted no one to interfere with his own exercise of the right. He did not sur¬ render his judgment to party prejudices. For example, he treated the character of J efterson with a candor that was not common among the New England Federalists of that day, and on one occasion publicly vindicated Jefferson’s private character against recklessly false asper¬ sions. In his writings he showed more care for the distinct presentment of his own opinions than zeal for making proselytes. The Harvard students of that day gave him the palm as the ablest writer among the younger generation of the Harvard graduates then residing in Cam¬ bridge. At this period of his life he was diligently revolving in his own mind the character and career of Franklin. Various stories adverse to Franklin’s conduct in negotiating the treaty of peace in 1783, had from the time of ratifica¬ tion circulated through Massachusetts. The tribute of John Adams to the merits of Frank¬ lin in the negotiation was inadequate; but stories unfavorable to Franklin, which passed from one to another, and in the transit had been enlarged and molded into very homely and clear English words of reprobation, were falsely and without any authority attributed to LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS. John Adams. Their total want alike of his authority and of truth was not known, and they still went from mouth to mouth as the emphatic language of John Adams himself. It very naturally and most properly occurred to Andrews Norton, who, ill as he thought of Franklin’s character, was too wise to accept rumor as the herald of historic truth, to repair to Quincy and ascertain the conduct of Frank¬ lin in the negotiation with Great Britain from the ex-President himself. One day, in the season preceding the sum¬ mer of 1818, he invited me to accompany him in an excursion to Quincy. I joyfully accepted the invitation, and we drove across the country from Cambridge to the homestead of John Adams. On the way he detailed to me some of the points most unfavorable to Franklin which had circulated through Massachusetts under the pretended authority of Adams. We arrived early in the afternoon. The venerable ex-President received us cordially in the parlor of his homestead at Quincy ; and so did the wife of his youth, the accomplished woman now known to the world by the pub¬ lication of two volumes of her own letters, and two more of letters which she received from her husband. Several younger persons, seemingly their grandchildren, came in and went out as occasion served, and it was plain that the aged man was thoroughly well ministered to by youthful attendants whose whole demeanor was marked by reverence and affection. A more respectable or a more lovely family group, of which the head is an octogenarian, can hardly be conceived of. I was presented as one who before many days was to embark for purposes of study at a German university. With a frankness which did not at all clash with the welcome of my reception, the venerable man broke out in somewhat abrupt and very decisive words against educating young Americans in Euro¬ pean schools, insisting, and from a certain point of view very correctly, that a home ed¬ ucation is the best for an American. Mr. Norton soon entered upon the errand on which he came, by leading conversation to the career and character of Franklin. The ex-President listened and answered ; but not one single word unfavorable to Franklin fell from his lips. His visitor pushed his inquiries, striving to come nearer to details ; but still Adams had not a word of evil to say of his former colleague. With no man in his life had he had so vexatious a rivalry. There at his side sat a scholar of varied culture, in the opening years of manhood, of great ability, a very skillful writer, of the highest repute for integrity of character and fidelity to his con¬ victions, prepared to accept views unfavorable

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AN INCIDENT IN THE to the character and statesmanship of Franklin, and through the North American Review” able to present them to the American public as final truth. But, to every renewed question¬ ing, Adams in his answers steadfastly put the inquiries aside, and uttered not one word that in the least reflected on the public or private character of Franklin. Presently the tea-table was spread in the middle of the room, and my friend and I sat down with the family. It was indeed a great privilege for one just out of college to sit at table with the venerated man under whose colossal courage and inspiring eloquence the nien of the Congress of 1776, who had not the gift of speaking in public, confidently sheltered themselves. He did not look younger than the record of his birth indicated, but he was hale and vigorous ; and as I sat near him I could not but notice that he carried his full cup of tea to his lips as safely as any one around him, without spilling a drop from tremor. The table was spread with the neatness and simplicity that prevailed at that day in New England homes. Could a foreigner have looked inandseen the second President of the United States at his sufficient but simple and unos¬ tentatious meal, the central figure in the group of his own family, it must have been confessed that his manner of life presented a perfect pattern for a republican chief magistrate in retirement. When we had arisen from the table and were preparing to depart, the honored states¬ man, standing upright in the family group^ spoke to us a few words. He cursorily referred to the official letter of Franklin, then our min¬ ister in France, to Robert R. Livingston, at that time our secretary for foreign affairs, in which Franklin had sketched his character and complained of his conduct.* He then added that for a long time after the letter was written he had known nothing about it, but when it came to his knowledge he printed in the Boston Patriot ” all that he had to say in reply; and he referred Mr. Norton to his articles in that paper respect¬ ing Franklin. With that reference he closed the conversation. * The words of Franklin to which Adams referred are as follows : “ If I were not convinced of the real inability of this court to furnish the further supplies we asked, I should suspect these discourses of a per¬ son in his station might have influenced the refusal ; but I think they have gone no further than to occasion a suspicion that we have a considerable party of anti- Gallicans in America, who are not tories, and conse¬ quently to produce some doubts of the continuance of our friendship. As such doubts may hereafter have a bad effect, I think we cannot take loo much care to remove them ; and it is, therefore, I write this, to put you on your guard (believing it my duty, though I know that I hazard by it a mortal enmity), and to cau- LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS. 437 In the communications to the “ Boston Patriot” on the career and character of Franklin, which were then referred to, the treatment of Franklin is unfair, and, from having been written too much from memory, is not altogether accurate. But its very bitter inculpations are tempered by concessions like these: ‘‘Mr. Jefferson has said that Dr. Franklin was an honor to human nature; and so indeed he was.” And again : “Mr. Frank¬ lin, after all, and notwithstanding all his faults and errors, was a great and eminent benefac¬ tor to his country and mankind.” The impression left upon my mind by the interview was, that while Adams at the time of active antagonism might be ready to treat an adversary roughly, there remained on his mind no enduring malice ; and when those who seemed to him to have wronged him had passed away from the world, he had no igno¬ ble desire to wreak revenge on their memory, but impartially left their controversies to the jurisdiction of history. This article was undertaken simply to pre¬ serve the record of an interview with ex- Presi¬ dent Adams, where he showed a noble refusal to recall his strifes with the greatest of his rivals. But let us not leave him without a word on his administration of affairs, both foreign and domestic, during his four years’ service, and on his relations with the man by whom he was superseded as President. As to the initiation of the alien and sedition laws, John Adams writes : “I recommended no such thing in my speech. Congress, however, adopted both these measures. I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them.” After they were passed he made no scruple about giving effect to them, especially the sedition law, believing that they were “ constitutional and salutary, if not necessary.” The international result, which forms the glory of the administration of our foreign affairs while confided to John Adams, was the restoration of friendly relations between the United States and France. The first at¬ tempt at negotiation had been a failure; but revolutions had succeeded each other in Paris, tion you respecting the insinuations of this gentleman against this court, and the instances he supposes of their ill-will to us, which I take to be as imaginary as I know his fancies to be, that Count de Vergennes and myself are continually plotting against him, and em¬ ploying the news-writers of Europe to depreciate his character, etc. But, as Shakspere says, ‘trifles light as air,’ etc. I am persuaded, however, that he means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, abso¬ lutely out of his senses.” — Benjamin Franklin to Robert R. Livingston, in the edition of Franklin’s Works, by Jared Sparks, Vol. IX., pp. 534-5.

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AJV INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS. 438 and Adams was encouraged by Washington to renew the attempt at an agreement. On this point of reconciliation with France, Wash¬ ington spared no effort to support, encourage, and assist his successor. Receiving in a letter from Lafayette assurances that the Executive Directory of France were disposed to an ac¬ commodation of all differences between the United States and France, Washington, on Christmas day of 1798, answered : “ I would pledge myself, that the government and people of the United States will meet them heart and hand at a fair negotiation; having no wish more ardent than to live in peace with all the world, pro¬ vided they are suffered to remain undisturbed in their just rights.” Being further confirmed in his expectations by a letter which he received from Joel Bar- low to the like effect, and which, as he thought, could not have been written without the priv¬ ity of the French Directory, Washington, in a note to President Adams, not only favored bringing on a negotiation upon an open, fair, and honorable ground, but offered himself to be the intermediary channel of communication for restoring peace and tranquillity between the United States and France upon just, hon¬ orable, and dignified terms. He was sure that the renewal of negotiations with France was the ardent wish of all the friends of the ris¬ ing American empire. Talleyrand, who, it will be remembered, knew the people of the United States from his own residence among them, gave, through the American minister at the Hague, the invitation to prepare the way for friendly intercourse, and Adams resolved at once to continue the negotiation for which Talleyrand had so urgently smoothed the way. Oliver Ellsworth had been distinguished in public service for two and twenty years. In* earlier life he was placed by Connecticut on its bench, but he was soon set apart for ser¬ vice connected with the United States; in 1777 he became a delegate to the Continen¬ tal Congress. He served as a member of the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States; and there he more than any other shaped the policy which alone could have reconciled the great States and the small ones, and bound them both equally to the Union by reciprocal concessions. He too it was who, in the convention which framed our Constitution, joined with Sherman and successfully entreated that body to bar and bolt the doors of the United States against paper money, so that the prohibition was made perpetual and placed beyond the ca¬ prices of transient assemblies, by establishing it as one of the conditions of the Constitution itself. When the Constitution was referred to the several States, Ellsworth, in Connecticut, explained its character to the convention of his State, and eminently assisted in securing full heartiness in its adoption. In the great work of carrying the Constitution into effect, the law for the organization of one of the three great departments of government is emphatically his work. He alone, or almost alone, framed the bill under which the de¬ partment of the judiciary was organized; and it is worthy of remark, though I believe now for the first time noticed, that that law which Ellsworth had laboriously framed with the minutest attention to every detail gave no warrant for the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States to try any citizen for the offenses enumerated in the fatal Sedi¬ tion act. Washington did not leave the chair of state till he had appointed Oliver Ells¬ worth the Chief Justice of the United States. The first French mission which Adams had instituted arrived in Paris at a period in the revolution when the faction which for the time held control was willing to slight the overtures of the government of the United States; and, from a just self-respect, John Adams was unwilling to institute a second mission except after the most positive assur¬ ances that the mission would be heartily wel¬ come. Adams, having received the amplest assurances from Talleyrand, the French min¬ ister of foreign affairs, through Murray, the American minister in Holland, that an Amer¬ ican commission would be welcomed by France with the most perfect respect and cor¬ dial regard, and having the encouragement of Washington to proceed, wisely determined to renew the negotiation. Throwing aside his first thought of sending no one but the American minister through whom Talleyrand had sent his pressing invitation, he deter¬ mined to constitute a mission of three. To im¬ part to it the highest dignity, he named as its chief Oliver Ellsworth, who, as the head of the judiciary department, was a coordinate in dignity with John Adams himself. At the side of Ellsworth he placed William Richard¬ son Davie, of North Carolina, a man of en¬ ergy, a soldier in the war of our revolution, during which he had served with honor as a cavalry officer in the legion of Pulaski, an able member of the convention which framed our Federal Constitution, a favorite of his State, where he had just been elected governor. With them he joined Murray, through whom Talleyrand had invited the mission. Oliver Ellsworth, though the delicate state of his health required careful attention, dared to sail through the specially rough storms of midwinter of 1799-1800 to Lisbon, and to en¬ counter an almost equally severe voyage from Lisbon to a bay near Corunna. At Bergos, in

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AJV INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS, old Castile, they were met by a courier who brought from Talleyrand assurances that they would be received in Paris with an eagerness of cordiality. Arriving in Paris on the second of March, they were gladly welcomed by Tal¬ leyrand, and from their first arrival to the end of the mission nothing was wanting in the friendli¬ ness with which they were met and the respect and courtesy with which they were treated. N o tirne was lost in entering upon the negotiations. Joseph Bonaparte, the eldest brother of the First Consul, was placed at the head of the French delegation. The labor on the American side was mainly done by Oliver Ellsworth ; and after more than six months of labor, 1800, the treaty of peace, so fraught with present and prospective advantage to the United States, was signed. It defined and asserted the rights of neu¬ trals. It was agreed that the flag of the nation shall protect the merchandise of the ship, with the exception only of contraband of war, and that contraband was strictly limited. Another part of the treaty was of inestimable value to the United States ; they in their hour of distress in the revolutionary war had bound themselves to protect France in all her possessions in the West Indies. This guarantee was generously renounced. Finally, the restoration of cordial¬ ity between France and the United States opened the way for the next Administration to negotiate for the acquisition of Louisiana. Shortly after the signing of the treaty, the American envoys prepared to leave Paris to embark for America. The French government resolved to give them on their departure the clearest proof of the enduring good-will of France for the Amer¬ ican republic. It chanced that Joseph Bona¬ parte, who was the richest of the family, possessed a magnificent country seat at Mor- fontaine, which lies some leagues from Paris on the road to Havre. There, on their way, at the chateau of Joseph Bonaparte, under whose lead the treaty with the United States had been concluded on the part of France, the American ministers were invited to be the guests at a fare¬ well festival before their embarkation. The American envoys arrived at the village of Morfontaine about two o’clock in the after¬ noon, and found there a large number of the French magistrates already assembled. At four o’clock Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul of France, who in November of the former year had overthrown the Council of Five Hundred and made himself the First Consul; in Febru¬ ary, 1800, draping in mourning all standards and flags throughout the French republic, had announced to the French army in a gen¬ eral order that “ the memory of Washington is dear to all freemen of the two worlds”; in 439 May had led an army with heavy artillery across the great St. Bernard; had entered Milan on the 2d of June, and after gaining on the 14th of that month a victory at Ma¬ rengo, of which the fame rung through not Europe only but the world, had in the follow¬ ing July returned to Paris, and two days be¬ fore this banquet had completed the treaty for the retrocession of Louisiana from Spain to France; and in less than thirty months more was to change the history of the world by trans- . ferring Louisiana, even to the Pacific Ocean, to the United States, — entered the chateau amidst salutes from artillery and bands of music. During the evening the castle and adjacent buildings were brilliantly illuminated. The approval of the treaty by the First Consul, of which assurance was formally given about eight in the evening, was followed by the fir¬ ing of cannon. After this the guests, about 150 in number, were seated at tables in three large halls. To the largest of them the name was given of the ‘‘ Hall of Union.” It was superbly decorated with wreaths and numerous inscrip¬ tions commemorating the Fourth of July, 1776, and other days famous for important actions in America during their struggle for independ¬ ence. The initial letters of France and Amer¬ ica were inscribed in many places. The city of Philadelphia which was then the seat of the Federal Congress, and Havre de Grace which was the port for the embarkation of the American ministers, were represented with an angel on the wing from Havre de Grace to Philadelphia, bearing an olive branch. The second hall was called the “ Hall of Washing¬ ton,” and was adorned with his bust and the French and American flags standing side by side. The third hall was called “ The Hall of Franklin,” whose bust was its ornament. All the decorations were specially designed to commemorate the independence of the United States and French liberty. In that spirit the First Consul, Napoleon, then just thirty-one years of age, gave as the first toast : “ The mem¬ ory of those who have fallen in the defense of French and American liberties.” The second toast was proposed by the Third Consul, Le¬ brun : “ The union of America with the powers of the North to enforce respect for the liberty of the seas.” Last of all, Cambaceres, the Sec¬ ond Consul, in honor of the President of the United States, proposed “The successor of Washington.” After supper there was a brill¬ iant and ingenious display of fireworks in the garden. Next followed an exquisite concert of music; and about midnight the private theater was opened for the performance of two short comedies, in which the best of the actors and actresses from Paris played the parts. At the conclusion of one of the plays a song com-

Page 444

440 AN INCIDENT IN THE LIFE OF JOHN ADAMS, plimentary to the United States was sung ; and thus the evening came to an end. To Chief Justice Ellsworth, the chief guest of the evening and the principal American negotiator of the treaty, his success brought highest honor ; but the price at which he pur¬ chased it was his life. He fell a martyr in the service of his country and of peace. His suf¬ ferings in the long and terrible voyages which he had made in the winter across the ocean, and again from Portugal to the borders of France, and his prompt and continued assi¬ duity in the negotiation of the treaty, wrecked his constitution. Unable at that season of the year to return to America, he was forced at once to send home the resignation of his post as Chief Justice of the United States. At a later day he was able to return to his country and to take some easy part in affairs ; but for him, who more than any other had assisted to restore relations of friendship between France and the United States, and prepare the way for the cession of Louisiana to his country, the rest of life was but a slow and lingering passage through infirmities to the tomb. At this cost peace and pleasant relations were restored between France and the United States. The establishment of good feeling in the for¬ eign relations of this country, and especially with France, constitutes the crowning glory of the Administration of John Adams. Just before retiring from office, he wrote to a friend : ‘‘ After the 3d of March I am to be a private citi¬ zen. I shall leave the State with its coffers full, and the fair prospects of a peace with all the world smil¬ ing in its face, its commerce flourishing, its navy glorious, its agriculture uncommonly productive and lucrative. O my country ! May peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.” The picture is' not too favorably drawn. I have repeatedly heard Albert Gallatin, Jeff- erson^s Secretary of the Treasury, assert that, before going out of office, John Adams had set¬ tled every difficult question, so that Jefferson as he entered upon office embarked upon the smoothest sea, with no winds but prosperous ones to fill his sails, with not a wave to dis¬ turb the public quiet. A similar train of thought beams through Jefferson’s inaugural address, when he declares that he finds “ this government, the world’s best hope, the strong¬ est government on earth, in the full tide of successful experiment.” War measures being at an end, the army reduced, the alien and sedition laws dead, do¬ mestic tranquillity and prosperity established, the first object of Jefferson in negotiating with France could be the cession of Louisiana to the United States. The retirement of John Adams from the Federal city in the early morning of the 4th of March was not the act of a runaway ; he never wanted courage, but he was obliged to vacate the President’s mansion before the morning of the 4th of March, 1801 ; and the Federal city was then a hew settlement in the woods, with scarcely five hundred inhabitants, with not one good hotel, and as there was no member of his cabinet in a house which could receive the departing President as a guest, he had nothing better to do than to start for his own home. Jefferson almost immediately sent him the homage of his high consideration and respect ; and Adams, only twenty days after Jefferson had entered upon the office of Presi¬ dent, wrote to him ; “This part of the Union is in a state of perfect tranquillity, and I see nothing to obscure your prospect of a quiet and prosperous administration, which I heartily wish you.” The life of John Adams was prolonged be¬ yond the period which any other President has reached. In earlier life he and Jefferson had stood together in Congress, when the one spoke with overwhelming power for national independence and the other wrote the decla¬ ration of it with matchless felicity. When Jefferson and Adams met in Eu¬ rope, they were equally engaged in carrying on negotiations for their country; and the intimacy between them was such that each of them gave his portrait to the other. When, in an advanced age, they had both retired to private life, after years of rivalry and contest for the highest honor in the gift of the United States, Adams could not submit to any permanent estrangement between them, and they soon found themselves engaged in the most inti¬ mate private correspondence. . The morning of the jubilee of our Declaration of Independ¬ ence found both of them still alive ; and as Adams on that day, at the age of ninety-one, became aware he was dying, his last words were: Jefferson still lives.” But Jefferson, the younger man, had gone a few hours before him. George Bancroft.

Page 445

ENGRAVED EY T. JOHNSON, FROM MINIATURE BY JOHN TRUMBULL THE YALE SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS. VoL. XXXIV.— 6i.

Page 446

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA.^ ON the i8th of March, 1864, Grant and at ‘This verging to a common center.” “Like Sherman were together at Nashville, yourself,” he writes to Grant, “ you take the Grant, havingreceived promotion, immediately biggest load, and from me you shall have thor- set out for Washington, and Sherman accom- ough and hearty cooperation.” panied him as far as Cincinnati. That meet- As soon as Sherman returned to Nashville, ing and journey are of interest. They involve he began organizing his three armies. He the thorough discussion and planning of event- made his calculations so as to protect most ful campaigns. Men of different callings dif- faithfully one line of supply which runs through fer in their conception and execution of plans. Louisville, Nashville, and Chattanooga, guard- Soldiers like Grant and Sherman consider first ing it against enemies within and without his the forces at their disposal, and next a plan boundaries, and against accidents. ^ He seg- of operations. Grant had now under his gen- regated the men of all arms for this protec- eralcharge all the Union armies,— the Army tion. Block-houses andintrenchments were put of the Potomac, under Meade; that of the at bridges and tunnels along the railway. Lo- Ohio, near Knoxville, under Schofield; that comotives and freight cars were gathered in, of the Cumberland, under Thomas, near Chat- and a most energetic force of skilled railroad tanooga; that of the Tennessee, under Me- men put at work or held in reserve under capa- Pherson, scattered from Huntsville, Alabama, ble chiefs. to the Mississippi; that of the Gulf, under Now, when this vital work was in progress. Banks, in Louisiana ; besides subordinate de- through which sufficient supplies for 100,000 tachments, under Steele and others, in Arkansas men were protected and through which large and farther west. depots of surplus stores were accumulated. Grant took the whole field into his thought. Sherman had, besides the large guards of his He made three parts to the long, irregular line line, enough more men to count upon for an of armies, which extended from Virginia to effective field force, — 50,000 with Thomas, Texas. He gave to Banks the main work be- 35,000 with McPherson, 15,000 with Schofield, yond the Mississippi; to Sherman the middle making a total of 100,000. part, covering the hosts of McPherson, Thom- And, indeed, this fact gratified him ; for had as, and Schofield; and reserved to himself the not sundry people, two years before, held him remainder. The numbers were known, at least up as worthy of special distrust because he on paper; the plan, promptly adopted, was sim- had declared that two hundred thousand men pie and comprehensive : Break and keep bro- would be required to hold and push success- ken the connecting links of the enemy’s fully this very line of operations ? Finally his opposing armies; beat them one by one ; unite country, through Grant, had intrusted to him for a final consummation. Sherman’s part was the means and the men that he requiied. plain. Grant’s plan, flexible enough to embrace A few changes of organization were made, his own, afforded him “infinite satisfaction.” Slocum’s corps, the Twelfth, andmine, the Eley- It looked like “ enlightened war.” He rejoiced enth, were consolidated, making a newTwenti- * A paper on the Atlanta campaign, by General Joseph E. Johnston, will appeal in the Century magazine for August. — Editor.

Page 447

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 443 eth, and Hooker was assigned to its command. I went at once to Loudon, East Tennessee, to take the Fourth Corps and relieve General Gor¬ don Granger, to enable him to have a leave of absence. Slocum was sent to Vicksburg, Mis¬ sissippi, to watch from that quarter the great river; while Hooker, Palmer, and myself, under Thomas, were to control the infantry and artil¬ lery of the Army of the Cumberland. In a few days I moved Wagner’s, afterward Newton’s, division and T. J. Wood’s of my new corps to Cleveland, East 'Pennessee. Rations, clothing, transportation, and ammunition came pouring in with sufficient abundance, so that when or¬ ders arrived for the next movement, the 3d of May (1864), my division commanders, Stan¬ ley, Newton, and Wood, reported everything ready. This very day Schofield’s column, com¬ ing from Knoxville, made its appearance at Cleveland. There was now the thrill of prep¬ aration, a new life everywhere. Soldiers and civilians alike caught the inspiration. The Unionists, of whom there were many in East Tennessee, were glad, but the Confeder¬ ates grew pale with apprehension. TUNNEL HILL. Ringgold and Catoosa Springs, Georgia, were the points of concentration for Thomas’s three corps. We of his army were all in that neighborhood by the 4th of May. It took till the 7th for McPherson to get into Villanow, a few miles to the south of us. Schofield mean¬ while worked steadily southward from Cleve¬ land, East Tennessee, through Red Clay, toward Dalton, Georgia. The reader should know that Chattanooga, Cleveland, and Dal¬ ton were united by railway lines. These lines form an almost equilateral triangle. Dalton, its south-east vertex, was the center of the Confed¬ erate army, under Joseph E. Johnston. Pushing out from Dalton, toward us at Catoosa Springs, Johnston occupied the famous pass through Taylor’s Ridge, Buzzard’s Roost Gap, and part of the ridge itself; and held, for his extreme outpost in our direction. Tunnel Hill, near which our skirmish line and his had first ex¬ changed shots. His northern lines ran athwart the base of the triangle, somewhere between Dalton and Red Clay. Johnston had, according to his official return for April, a force of 52,992. At Resaca, a few days later, after the corps of Polk had joined him, it numbered 71,235. Our three field ar¬ mies aggregated then, in officers and men, 98,- 797, with 254 pieces of artillery. The Confed¬ erate commander had about the same number of cannon. McPherson had thus far brought to Sherman but 24,465 men. When the Army of the Cumberland was in line, facing the enemy, its left rested near Ca¬ toosa SpringSjits center at Ringgold, the railway station, and its right at Leet’s Tan-yard. My corps formed the left. Catoosa Springs was a Georgia watering-place, where were several large buildings, hotel and boarding-houses, amid undulating hills, backed by magnificent mountain scenery. Here, the morning of the 6th, I met Thomas and Sherman. Sherman had a habit of dropping in and explaining in a happy way just what he proposed. He at first intended that Thomas and Schofield should simply breast the enemy and skirmish with him on the west and north, while McPherson, coming from Alabama, was to strike the At¬ lanta railroad at least ten miles below Resaca. McPherson failing in getting back from fur¬ lough some of his troops, was not now deemed strong enough to operate alone ; hence, in¬ stead, he was brought to Chattanooga and sent thence to Villanow, soon after to pass through the Snake Creek Gap of Taylor’s Ridge, all the time being kept near enough the other armies to get help from them in a case of emergency. By this it was ardently hoped by Sherman that McPherson might yet succeed in getting upon Johnston’s communi¬ cations near Resaca. Thomas here urged his own views, \vhich were to give Schofield and McPherson the skirmishing and demonstra¬ tions, while he (Thomas), with his stronger army, should pass through Snake Creek Gap and seize Johnston’s communications. He felt sure of victory. Sherman, however, hesitated to put his main army twenty miles away beyond a mountain range on the enemy’s line, lest he should thereby endanger his own. He could not yet afford an exchange of base. Still, in less than a week, as we shall see, he ran even a greater risk. But who shall criticise and condemn ? In the game of war, as in other games, the risks usually increase with the ex¬ citements of the struggle.

Page 448

444 THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. GENIiKAL WILLIAM T. SHERMAN AT ATLANTA. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) Early in the day, May 7th, the Fourth Corps, arranged for battle, was near a small farm-house in sight of Tunnel Hill. Two di¬ visions, Stanley’s and Newton’s, abreast in long, wavy lines, and the other. Wood’s, in the rear, kept on the (jid vive to prevent any sur¬ prises, particularly from the sweep of country to the north of us. The front and the left of the moving men were well protected by infan¬ try skirmishers. It was a beautiful picture — that army corps, with arms glistening in the morning light, ascending the slope. By 8 o’clock the few rifle-shots had become a con¬ tinuous rattle. First we saw far off, here and there, puffs of smoke, and then tlie gray horse¬ men giving back and passing the crest. Sud¬ denly there was stronger resistance, artillery and musketry rapidly firing upon our advance. At 9 o’clock the ridge of Tunnel Hill bristled with Confederates, mounted and dismounted. A closer observation from Stanley's field-glass showed them to be only horse artillery and cavalry supports. In a few moments Stanley’s and Newton’s men charged the hill at a run and cleared the ridge, and soon beheld the enemy’s artillery and cavalry galloping away. “ The ball is opened,” Stanley called out, as I took my place by his side to study Taylor’s Ridge and its rocky face,” which was now in plain sight. We beheld it, a craggy eleva¬ tion of about five hundred feet, extending from a point not far north of us, but as far as the eye could reach southward. I ts perpendicular face presented a formidable wall, and its Buzzard’s Roost Gap, already made terrible by a former bloody trial of arms, afforded us no favorable door of entrance. DALTON. Thomas’s three corps. Palmer occupying the middle and Hooker the right,were now marched forward till my men received rifle-shots from the heights. Palmer’s a shower of them from the de¬ fenders of the gap, and Hooker’s a more worri¬ some fusillade from spurs of the ridge farther south. Thomas could not sit down behind this

Page 449

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 445 formidable wall and do nothing. How could he retain before him the Confederate host? Only by getting into closer contact. On the 8th, 1 sent Newton some two miles northward, where the ascent was not so abrupt. He succeeded by rushes in getting from cover to cover, though not without loss, till he had wrested at least one-third of the “ knife edge ” from those resolute men of gray. Quickly the observers of this sharp contest saw the bright signal flags up there in motion. Stanley and Wood gave Newton all possible support by their marksmen and by their efforts to land shells on the ridge. The enemy’s sig¬ nals were near to Newton. He tried hard, but failed, to capture them. In the night two pieces of artillery, after much toil, reached the top, and soon cleared away a few hundred yards more of this territory in bloody dispute. On the 9th of May, Thomas put forth a triple ef¬ fort to get nearer his foe, notwithstanding some of us thought we were quite near already. First, Stanley’s division reconnoitered that Buzzard’s mouth into the very ‘‘ jaws of death,” till it drew the fire from newly discovered batteries, and set whole lines of Confederate musketry-supports ablaze. At this time I had a narrow escape. Stanley, Captain Knifihn of his staff, several other officers, and myself were in a group, watching a reconnaissance. All sup¬ posed there were no Confederate sharpshoot¬ ers near enough to do harm, when whiz came a bullet which passed through the group ; Knif- fin’s hat was pierced, three holes were made in my coat, and a neighboring tree was struck. Thomas made a second effort. Palmer sent Morgan’s brigade up one of the spurs south of the gap. It encountered the hottest fire, and suffered considerable loss in killed and wounded. One regiment, the 66th Illinois, drove back the enemy’s first line, and, like Newton’s men, came within speaking distance of their opponents. Here arose the story, to the effect that a witty corporal proposed to read to them the President’s Emancipation Procla¬ mation, and that they kept from firing while he did so. Still farther south, through Hooker with the Twentieth Corps, and almost beyond our hearing, Thomas made his third push. Fifty in this action were reported killed, and a larger number wounded, and among them every regimental commander engaged. Simi¬ larly, but with easier approaches than ours, Schofield kept Johnston’s attention at the east and north. Such was the demonstration, while McPherson was making his long detour through Villanow, Snake Creek Gap, and out into Sugar Valley. He found the gap unoccu¬ pied ; and so, with Kilpatrick’s small cavalry detachment ahead, followed closely by Dodge’s Sixteenth Corps with Logan’s Fifteenth well closed up, he emerged from the mountains on the morning of the 9th, at the eastern exit. Immediately there was excitement — the cavalry advance stumbled upon Confederate cavalry, which had run out from Resaca to watch this doorway. Kilpatrick followed up the retreating Confederates with dash and per¬ sistency, till they found shelter behind the deep- cut works and guns at Resaca. In plain view of these works, though on difficult ground, Logan and Dodge pressed up their men, un¬ der orders from McPherson to drive back the enemy and break the railroad.” And pray, why were not these plain orders carried out? McPherson answers in a letter that night sent to Sherman : They [probably Polk’s men] displayed considerable force and opened on us with artillery. After skirmishing [among the gulches and thickets] till nearly dark, and finding that I could not succeed in cutting the railroad before dark, or in getting to it, I de¬ cided to withdraw the command, and take up a position for the night between Sugar Val¬ ley and the entrance to the gap.” At the first news, Sherman was much vexed, and declared concerning McPherson’s failure to break the enemy’s main artery : Such an opportunity does not occur twice in a single life, . . . still he was perfectly justified by his orders.” Our commander, believing that Johnston would now speedily fall back to Resaca, at once changed his purpose. Leaving me at Rocky Face with the Fourth Corps and Stone- man’s small division of cavalry to hold our line of supply, Sherman pressed after McPher¬ son the armies of Thomas and Schofield. But Johnston was not in a hurry. He terrified me for two days by his tentative movements, till our skirmishing amounted at times almost to a bat¬ tle. But the night of the 12 th of May, he made off in one of his clean retreats. At dawn of the 13th, the formidable Buzzard’s Roost Gap was open and safe, and our men passed through. Stoneman rushed into the village of Dalton from the north, and the Fourth Corps, eager and rapid, kept close to the chasing cavalry. Not far south of Dalton we came upon a bother¬ some Confederate rear guard, which made our marching all that long day slow and spas¬ modic, yet before dark of the same, my com¬ mand had skirted the eastern slope of Taylor’s Ridge for eighteen miles, and joined skirmishers with Sherman, who was already with McPher¬ son abreast of Resaca. Thus we ended the com¬ bats of Tunnel Hill and Dalton, and opened up Resaca. RESACA. As soon as Johnston reached the little town of Resaca, he formed a horse-shoe-shaped line, somethinglike ours had been at Gettysburg. He

Page 450

FROM “ THE MOUNTAIN CAMPAIGNS IN GEORGIA; OR, WAR SCENES ON THE W, & A.” PUBLISHED BY THE WESTERN & ATLANTIC R. R. CO.

Page 451

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 447 rested Polk’s corps on the Oostenaiila River; placed Hardee’s next, running up Milk Creek; and then curved Hood’s back to strike the Connasauga River. After the Confederates had thrown up the usual intrenchments, and put out one or two small advanced forts with cannon, the position was as strong as Marye’s Heights had been against direct attack. We spent a part of the 14th of May creeping up among the bushes, the rocks, and the ravines. Early that morning, while this was going on, Sherman, who had worked all night, was sitting on a log, with his back against a tree, fast asleep. Some men marching by saw him, and one fellow ended a slurring remark by : A pretty way we are commanded ! ” Sherman, awakened by the noise, heard the last words. “ Stop, my man,” he cried ; while you were sleeping last night, I was planning for you, sir; and now 1 was taking a nap.” Thus, fa¬ miliarly and kindly, the general gave repri¬ mands and won confidence. McPherson rested his right upon the Oos- tenaula River, opposite Polk. My impression is that Palmer and Hooker came next ; and then that brave young officer, Cox, command¬ ing the Twenty-third Corps, against a storm of bullets and shells, swung his divisions round to follow the bend in the enemy’s line. I watched the operation, so as to close upon his left. T. J. Wood’s division moved up in a long line, with skirmishers well out, and then Stan¬ ley’s carried us to the railway. Stanley’s chief of artillery arranged two or three batteries to keep the enemy from walking round our un¬ protected left. The air was full of screeching shells and whizzing bullets, coming uncom¬ fortably near while line after line was adjust¬ ing itself for the deadly conflict. Our fighting at Resaca did not effect much. There might possibly have been as much accomplished if we had used skirmish lines alone. In Mc¬ Pherson’s front, Logan had a battery well placed, and fired till he had silenced the trou¬ blesome foes on a ridge in his front ; then his brave men, at a run, passed the ravine and secured the ridge. Here Logan intrenched his corps; and Dodge, abreast of him, did the same. Afterward, McPherson seized an¬ other piece of ground across Camp Creek, and held it. The evening of the 14th, a vigorous effort was made by Polk to regain this out¬ post, but he was repulsed with loss. The detailed account gives great credit to Charles R. Woods, Giles A. Smith, andj. A. J. Lightburn. 100 prisoners and 1300 Confeder¬ ates Iio7's de co7jibat are on Logan’s list. This work forced Johnston to lay a new bridge over the Oostenaula. The divisions of Absalom Baird, R. W. Johnson, Jeff C. Davis, and John Newton plunged into the thickets and worked their way steadily and bravely into the reen¬ trant angles on Hardee’s front. On Scho¬ field’s field, one of his divisions, Judah’s, had a fearful struggle, losing six hundred men ; the others, coming to its help, captured and se¬ cured a part of the enemy’s intrenchments. Plood assailed my left after 3 p. m. The front attack was repulsed, but heavy columns came surging around Stanley’s left. Everybody, bat¬ tery men and supporting infantry, did wonders; still, but for help promptly rendered, Sher¬ man’s whole line, like the left of Wellington at Waterloo, would soon have been rolled up and displaced. But Colonel Morgan of my staff, who had been sent in time, brought up Williams’s division from Hooker’s corps as quickly as men could march. Stanley’s brave artillerymen were thus succored before being forced to yield their ground, and Hood, disap¬ pointed, returned to his trenches. The next day, the 15th, came Hooker’s attack. He ad¬ vanced in a column of deployed brigades. Both armies watched with eager excitement this pas- sage-at-arms — the divisions of Butterfield, Wil¬ liams, and Geary were here. They seized some trenches and cheered, but were stopped before a sort of lunette holding four cannon. The Confederates were driven from their trenches ; but our men, meeting continuous and deadly volleys, could not get the guns till night. A color-bearer, Hess, of Colonel Harrison’s bri¬ gade, while his comrades were retiring a few steps for better cover of the ground, being chagrined at the defiant yell behind him, un¬ furled his flag and swung it to the breeze. He was instantly killed. A witness says : “ There were other hands to grasp the flag, and it came back, only to return and wave from the very spot where its former bearer fell.” A Southern writer, who watched this contest, says: “ On came the enemy, cheering loudly, and confi¬ dent that their superior numbers would insure them success. They approached to within fifty yards of the line, firing rapidly on our men ; a sheet of fire, a deaf¬ ening roar, which sounded like the eruption of a vol¬ cano, was the answer ; and the dead and wounded lay piled up before our works.” While the main battle was in progress, Dodge had sent a division under the one- armed Sweeny to Lay’s Ferry, a point below Resaca. Under the chief engineer. Captain Reese, he laid a bridge and protected it by a small force. Sweeny, being threatened by some Confederates crossing the river above him, feared that he might be cut off from the army, so that he suddenly drew back about a mile iDe- yond danger. On the 1 5th,however,he made an¬ other attempt and was more successful ; termed a bridge-head beyond the river, threw over his whole force, and fought a successful battle against Martin’s Confederate cavalry, before

Page 452

THE CATTLE OE KESACA, GEORGIA. (FROM “ THE MOUNTAIN CAMPAIGNS IN GEORGIA, ETC.” PUBLISHED BY THE WESTERN & ATLANTIC R. R. CO.)

Page 453

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. Walker’s infantry, which was hastily sent against him from Calhoun, could arrive. Be¬ sides Sweeny’s division, Sherman dispatched a cavalry force over the pontoons, instructing them to make a wider detour. The operations in this quarter being successful, there was noth¬ ing left to the Confederate commander but to withdraw his whole army from Resaca. This was effected during the night of the 15th, while our weary men were sound asleep. At the first peep of dawn, Newton’s skirmishers sprang over the enemy’s intrenchments to find them abandoned. ADAIRSVILLE. In the ensuing pursuit, Thomas, crossing the river on a floating bridge, hastily con¬ structed, followed directly with the Fourth and the Fourteenth corps. Stanley had some sharp fighting with Stew¬ art’s Confederate division, which was acting as Johnston’s rear guard. It was, in fact, a running skirmish, that lasted till evening, at the close of which we encamped for the night near the enemy’s empty works at Calhoun. Mean¬ while, McPherson had been marching on parallel roads to the right toward Rome, Georgia, Jeff. C. Davis’s division from Thomas’s army sweeping farther still to the right, and Schofield, accompanied by Hooker, to the left toward Cassville. Our enemy between these columns, with his entire force, made a brief stand on the 17th of May at Adairsville, and fortified. About 4 p. M. Newton and Wood, of my corps. Wood on the right, found the resistance con¬ stantly increasing as they advanced, till New¬ ton’s skirmishers, going at double-time through clumps of trees, awakened a heavy opposing fire. A little after this, while I was watching the developments from a high point, Sherman with his staff and escort joined me. Our showy group immediately drew upon it the fire of a battery, shells bursting over our heads with indescribable rapidity. Colonel Morgan’s horse was very badly lamed; Fullerton, the adjutant- general, was set afoot, and several horses of the escort killed or crippled. Captain Bliss, of Newton’s staff, had one shoulder-strap knocked off by a fragment, badly bruising him. The skirmishing of Newton and Wood kept increas¬ ing. In fact, both parties, though desiring to avoid a general battle, nevertheless reenforced, till the firing amounted for a time to a real engagement. It had not been discontinued at sunset, and it was not till after 9 o’clock that the rattling of the musketry had di¬ minished to the ordinary skirmish, and the ^ It was Sunday morning when my friend E. P. Smith, of the Christian Commission, afterward Commissioner of Indian Affairs, was ringing the church bell at Kings- VOL. XXXIV. — 62. 449 batteries had ceased, except an occasional shot, as if each was trying to have the last gun. The losses in my command in this combat were about two hundred killed and wounded. The morning of the i8th found the works in front of Adairsville with few reminders that an army had been there the night before. Hooker and Schofield had done the business. Johnston’s scouts during the night brought him word that a large Federal force was already far beyond his right near Cassville, threatening his main crossing of the river; and also that McPherson was camping be¬ low him at McGuire’s Cross-roads, and that our infantry (Davis’s division) was already in sight of the little town of Rome, where, under a weak guard, were foundries and important mills. We began now to perceive slight evi¬ dences of our opponent’s demoralization. I captured a regiment and quite a large number of detached prisoners. The whole number taken, including many commissioned officers, was about four thousand. The rapidity of the repairs of the badly broken railroad seemed miraculous. We had hardly left Dalton before trains with ammu¬ nition and other supplies arrived. While our skirmishing was going on at Calhoun, the locomotive whistle resounded in Resaca. The telegraphers were nearly as rapid. The lines were in order to Adairsville the morn¬ ing of the 1 8th. While we were breaking up the State arsenal at Adairsville, caring for the wounded, and bringing in Confederate prisoners, word was telegraphed from Resaca that bacon, hard-bread, and coffee were already there at our service. Johnston, by his speedy night work, passed on through Kingston, and formed an admira¬ ble line of battle in the vicinity of Cassville, with his back to the Etowah River, protecting the selected crossing. This was his final halt north of that river, so difficult with its mountain banks. Johnston remained here to obstruct and dispute our way one day only, for Schofield and Hooker had pen¬ etrated the forests eastward of him so far that Hood, still on Johnston’s right, insisted that the Yankees were already beyond him in force. U pon this report, about which there has since been much controversy, Johnston ordered a prompt withdrawal. The morning of the 21st of May, bright and clear, showed us a country picturesque in its natural features, with farm and woodland as quiet and peaceful as if there had been no war. So Sherman, taking up his headquarters at Kingston, a little hamlet on the railway, gave to his armies three days’ rest.* ton. The rope unexpectedly caught his trousers near his shoe and rent them sadly from bottom to top. Sher¬ man, being just then disturbed by the ringing, sent a

Page 454

450 THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA, MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN A. LOGAN. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) A glance at the map [page 446J shows the Etowah flowing nearly west thirty miles from Allatoona to Rome. Sherman’s headquarters at Kingston were midway. While the armies were resting, the right (Davis’s division) at Rome, the left (Schofield and Hooker) near Cartersville, and the remainder at Kings¬ ton, the railroad and telegraph lines were re¬ paired to Kingston; baggage, temporarily guard to arrest the supposed “bummer.” So my friend, in spite of indignant protest, was marched to Sherman’s ante-room and kept under guard for an hour. Then, in that plight, being admitted to his presence, Sherman looked up from his writing and asked abruptly : abandoned, came back to officers and men; necessary supplies, at the hands of smiling quar¬ termasters and commissaries, now found us. The dead were buried, the sick and wounded made more comfortable, and everybody got his mail and wrote letters home. Meanwhile Sherman and his army commanders were en¬ deavoring to find the location of their enemy. Johnston was holding the pass of Allatoona “What were you ringing that bell for? ” “ For service. It is Sunday, General,” Smith re¬ plied. “Oh ! is it?” answered Sherman. “ Didn’t know it was Sunday. Let him go.”

Page 455

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA, 451 strongly, and probably rested his right at that natural fort¬ ress, and extended his army along the ridge of Allatoona Creek toward the south-west, possibly to Lost Mountain, where that stream rises. He was picketing a parallel ridge in front of his line, along another creek, the Pumpkin Vine. This is substantially where we found this able and careful enemy ; only he pushed a little to the left and forward as we came on, till Hardee was at Dallas, and Hood at New Hope Church. Our march was resumed the morning of the 24th of May, Thomas crossing his own pontoons south of Kingston ; Hooker, though contrary to the plan, went in advance of Schofield’s column over a bridge at Milam’s, east of Kingston ; Davis being at Rome, went straight forward from that place; and Mc¬ Pherson did the same from his position, laying his bridges so as to take the road to Van Wert. Stoneman’s divis¬ ion of cavalry, fording the river above Schofield, cov¬ ered the left. Garrard’s di¬ vision was near McPherson and Davis, while McCook’s cleared the front for the cen¬ ter. The Avhole country be¬ tween the Etowah and the Chattahoochee over which we marched appeared deso¬ late enough. Sometimes there were old pine forests, half cleared, with tall burnt and black¬ ened stumps ; very few openings and very few farms, and those few small and poor; other parts covered with trees having dense under¬ brush, which the skirmishers had great diffi¬ culty in penetrating. The instant one left the ordinary hog-backs ” he plunged into deep ravines or ascended abrupt steeps. There was much loose, shifting soil on the hills, also many lagoons and small streams bordered with treacherous quicksands. NEW HOPE CHURCH. Very soon on the first day, the usual skir¬ mishing with the cavalry began, but there was not much delay. Hooker, coming into Thomas’s road the next morning, the 25th, led CONFEDERATES DRAGGING GUNS UP KENESAVV MOUNTAIN. (from the “valentine,” published by the WESTERN & ATLANTIC R. R. CO.) our column, taking the direct road toward Dallas. It was showery all day, and one can imagine the disheartening effect of this unfa¬ vorable weather on men and animals as they toiled over roads growing constantly worse. To relieve the situation as much as possible and keep well closed up, Thomas had my corps take advantage of country roads to the right, that would bring us into Dallas by the Van Wert route. McPherson and Davis had already come together at Van Wert. Now,, suddenly, Geary’s division found a bridge over Pumpkin Vine Creek on fire, and hostile cav~ airy behind it. The cavalry soon fled, and the bridge was repaired. Hooker, thinking there was more force in that quarter, pushed up the road toward New Hope Church. He had gone but a short distance before he ran upon one of Hood’s brigades. It was an outpost of

Page 456

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 452 Stewart’s division, put there to create delay. Hooker soon dislodged this outpost and moved on, driving back the brigade through the woods, till he had come upon the enemy’s main line. The sound of cannon speedily drew Sher¬ man to the point of danger. He immediately ordered the necessary changes. Williams’s di¬ vision, having passed on, faced about and came back. Butterfield’s hastened up. These, each forming in parallel lines, promptly assaulted Hood’s position. Again and again Hooker’s brave men went forward through the forest only to run upon log barricades, which were so thoroughly manned by the enemy, and so protected by well-posted artillery, that to take them under a galling fire was impossible. Of course, this meant for Hooker a succession of bloody repulses. The heaviest shower of the day, accompanied with lightning and thunder, was going on during these awful charges. I received word, turned to the left by the first opportune road, and deployed Newton’s di¬ vision to the right of Hooker by 6 p. m. The remainder ofmy command came up over roads deep with mud and obstructed by wagons. In the morning all the troops were on hand. Any attempt to sketch the ghastly pictures of that terrible night would fail. The nearest house to the field was filled with the wounded. Torch¬ lights and candles lighted up dimly the in¬ coming stretchers and the surgeons’ tables and instruments. While the doctors could stand on their feet or move their arms, their arduous work was unceasing. The very woods seemed to moan and groan with the voices of sufferers not yet brought in. McPherson, with Davis for his left, took position at Dallas, having Logan on his right, and Garrard’s cavalry still beyond. There must have been a gap of three miles between Mc¬ Pherson and us. Schofield was badly injured by the fall of his horse in that black forest while finding his way during the night to Sherman’s bivouac, so that for a few days Cox took his command. Cox, with his T wenty-third Corps, and Palmer with his (the Fourteenth), swung in beyond me, as my men were moving up carefully into their usual positions in line of battle. Now the enemy kept strengthening his trench-barricades, which were so covered by thickets that at first we could scarcely detect them. As he did, so did we. No regiment was long in front of Johnston’s army without hav¬ ing practically as good a breastwork as an engineer could plan. There was a ditch before the embankment and a strong log revetment behind it, and a heavy “ top-log ” to shelter the heads of the men. I have known a regi¬ ment, in less than an hour after it reached its position, with axes and shovels to shelter itself completely against musketry and artillery. Pickett’s mill. It would only weary the reader’s patience to follow up the struggle step by step from New Hope Church to the Chattahoochee. Still, these were the hardest times which the soldiers ever experienced. It rained continu¬ ously for seventeen days; the roads, becoming as broad as the fields, were a series of quag¬ mires. And, indeed, it was difficult to bring enough supplies forward from Kingston to meet the needs of the army. Sherman began to pass his armies to the left. First, I was sent with two divisions to attempt to strike Johnston’s right. I marched thither Wood’s division, supported by R. W. Johnson’s, and connected with the army by Cox on my right. At Pickett’s Mill, believing I had reached the extreme of the Confederate line, at 6 p. m. of the 27th I ordered the assault. AVood en¬ countered just such a position as had Hooker at New Hope Church, and was similarly re¬ pulsed, suffering much loss. R. AV. Johnson’s division was hindered by a side-thrust from the hostile cavalry, so that Ave did not get the full benefit of his forward push. AVe believed that we should otherwise have lodged at least a brigade beyond Hindman’s Confederate di¬ vision. But we did, however, what was most important: Ave Avorked our men all that Aveary night in fortifying. The Confederate command¬ er Avas ready at daylight to take the offensive against us at Pickett’s Mill, but did not, be¬ cause he found our position and Avorks too strong to Avarrant the attempt. AVith a foot bruised by the fragment of a shell, I sat that night among the Avounded in the midst of a forest glade, Avhile Major Howard of my staff led regiments and brigades into the new position chosen for them. General R. AV. J ohn- son had been wounded. Captain Stinson of my staff had been shot through the lungs, and a large number lay there, on a sideling slope by a faint camp-fire, Avith broken limbs or dis¬ figured faces. It Avas a mute protest against the business of Avar. DALLAS. The next day, the 28th, McPherson made an effort to AvithdraAv from Dallas, so as to pass beyond my left; but as Hardee at the first move quickly assailed him with great fury, he prudently advised further delay. This battle Avas the reverse of mine at Pickett’s Mill. The enemy attacked mainly in columns of deployed regiments along the front of Dodge’s and Lo¬ gan’s corps, and Avas repulsed with a dreadful loss, Avhich Logan estimated at two thousand. Now, necessity pressing him in every direc¬ tion, Sherman, mixing divisions someAvhat along the line, gradually bore his armies to

Page 457

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 453 MAJOR-GENERAL JAMES B. McPHERSON, KILLED JULY 22D, 1864. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) the left. The ist of June put Stoneman into Allatoona, and on the 3d, Schofield’s infantry was across the railroad near Ackworth, hav¬ ing had a severe and successful combat en route. PINE TOP. Being now far beyond Johnston’s right, and having seized and secured the Allatoona Creek from its mouth to Ackworth, Sherman was ready, from Allatoona as a new base, to push forward and strike a new and heavy blow, when, to his chagrin, in the night of the 4th of June, Johnston abandoned his works and fell back to a new line. This line ran from Brush Mountain to Lost Mountain, with Pine Top ” standing out in a salient near the middle. He also held an out-post in front of Gilgal Church abreast of Pine Top. Slowly, amid skirmishes and small combats, for the most part in dense woods, we continuously advanced. On my front we seized the skir¬ mish-holes of the enemy, made epaulements for batteries there, and little by little extended our deep ditches or log-barricades close up to and abreast of Johnston’s. As we settled down

Page 458

454 the struggle to steady work again, McPherson was near Brush Mountain, having pushed down the railroad. F. P. Blair’s corps (the Seventeenth) from Huntsville, Alabama, had now joined him, making up for our losses, which were al¬ ready, from all causes, upward of nine thousand. This accession gave heart to us all. Thomas was next, advancing and bearing away toward Pine Top, and Schofield coming upagainstthe salient angle near Gilgal Church. To tell the work of these two opposing hosts in their new position is a similar story to the last. There was gallant fighting here and there all along the lines. Here it was that my batteries, opening fire under the direct instruction of Sherman, drove back the enemy from the ex¬ posed intrenchments on Pine Top. It was at this time that General Polk was killed. Mc¬ Pherson, by overlapping Hood, skirmished heavily, and captured the 40th Alabama regi¬ ment entire. Schofield, brushing away the cavalry, penetrated between Lost Mountain and Gilgal Church, put his artillery on a prom¬ inent knoll, and, with rapid discharges, took Hardee in reverse. MUD CREEK. That night, the i6th of June, Johnston again went back to a new line, already pre¬ pared, just behind Mud Creek. Our troops, being on the alert, followed at once with great rapidity. Just where the old lines joined the new (for Johnston’s right wing was un¬ changed), I saw a feat the like of which never elsewhere fell under my observation. Baird’s division, in a comparatively open field, put forth a heavy skirmish-line, which continued such a rapid fire of rifles as to keep down a corresponding hostile line behind its well-con¬ structed trenches, while the picks and shovels behind the skirmishers fairly flew, till a good set of works was made four hundred yards off and parallel to the enemy’s. One of my brigades (Harker’s), by a rush, did also a brave and unusual thing : it captured an intrenched and well-defended line of the enemy’s works and took their defenders captive. Again, another (Kirby’s brigade), having lost Bald Hill in a skirmish, retook it by a gallant charge in line, under a hot fire of artillery and infantry, and intrenched and kept it. gulp’s farm. Hood, who had been massed opposite Mc¬ Pherson, made a forced night-march, and sud¬ denly appeared on the other flank fronting Schofield and Hooker. With his known method of charging and firing, he delivered there a desperate attack on the 2 2d of June. EOR ATLANTA. He was, after a hard battle, repulsed with heavy loss. This was the “ Battle of Culp’s Farm.” Here it was that Hooker received a reproof from Sherman for an exaggerated report, which inferentially, but wrongly, blamed Schofield. Hooker was ever after in¬ censed at Sherman. KENESAW. Again, by the gradual pressure against Johnston’s right and left, Sherman forced him to a new contraction of his lines. This time it was the famous Kenesaw position which he assumed. With his right still at Brush Mountain, he extended a light force over the crest of the Kenesaws, and placed a heavier one along the southern slope, reach¬ ing far beyond the Dallas and Marietta road. He drew back his left and fortified. The whole line was stronger in artificial contriv¬ ances and natural features than the ceme¬ tery at Gettysburg. The complete works, the slashings in front, and the difficulties of the slope toward us under a full sweep of infan¬ try and of artillery cross-fire made the position in itself next to impregnable. For reasons similar to those which in¬ fluenced Lee to strike twice for Little Round Top, Sherman ordered an assault here with the hope of carrying the south slope of Kenesaw, or of penetrating at some weak point of John¬ ston’s long front. Schofield, well southward, advanced and crossed Olley’s Creek, and kept up enough fire and effort to hold a large force in his front. McPherson, on the left, did the same, quite a serious engagement being sus¬ tained by Logan’s coqDS straight against the unascendable mountain. Logan’s losses from the trenches in his front, and from artillery that raked his men as they advanced, were very heavy. Seven regimental commanders fell from death or w'ounds. But the dreadful battle, hard to describe, was left to Thomas. He commanded two attacks, one opposite Confederate Loring’s left, the other in front of Cheatham. Newton’s division led my at¬ tack, and Davis that of Palmer. Like Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, the movement was preceded by a heavy cannonade. Then our skirmishers sprang forward and opened ; and quickly the enemy’s skirmish-line was drawn back to their main work. Harker, commanding one brigade, led his column rapidly over the open ground. Wag¬ ner did the same on Harker’s left, and Kim¬ ball put his brigade in close support. The enemy’s fire was terrific, the missiles passing and crossing and filling the valley. Our men did not stop, unless struck, till they had gained the edge of the felled trees ; a few penetrat-

Page 459

THE STRUGGLE EOR ATLANTA. ed, to fall close to the enemy’s parapet ; but most sought shelter behind logs and rocks, in rifle-holes, or depressions of the ground. Harker, moving with them, cheered on his men; when they were forced to stop, he rallied them again and made a second vigorous ef¬ fort, in which he fell mortally wounded. Davis’s effort was like Newton’s; he met the same withering fire from rifle-balls and shells. But his men managed to make a shelter, which they kept, close up to the hostile works. Here they stayed and intrenched. Among those who fell were brigade commanders Colonel Daniel McCook and Colonel Harmon. Our losses in this assault were heavy indeed, and our gain was nothing. We realized now, as never before, the futility of direct assaults upon in¬ trenched lines which were already well pre¬ pared and well manned. SMYRNA CAMP GROUND. Plainly there was now nothing left for Sherman to do but to send his left army (Mc¬ Pherson’s) to follow up the right (Schofield’s), across Olley’s Creek, and force his cavalry to Sandtown and the Chattahoochee far below Johnston’s force. The first sign, namely, 455 McPherson’s . starting, and Schofield’s bold¬ ness, set the Confederates again in motion. The morning of the 3d of June, Sherman turned his spy-glass to the Kenesaw crest, and saw our pickets ‘^crawling up the hill cautiously.” The strong works, from which so many blows distressful to us had been dealt, were found vacant. Johnston had made new breastworks six miles below, at Smyriic^ Camp Ground, and another complete set, by the labor of slaves and new levies, where the railway crosses the Chattahoochee. Thomas, taking up the pur¬ suit, followed his enemy through Marietta and beyond. My command skirmished up to the Smyrna works- during the 3d. The next day Sherman paid us a Fourth of July visit. He SCENE OF GENERAL McPHERSON’s DEATH, ON THE EAST SIDE OF ATLANTA. (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS.) 32-pounder cannon set in a granite block for a base now marks the spot of General McPherson’s death. A large pine stands within a few feet of the monument which faces a partly improved roadway that is called McPherson Avenue.

Page 460

456 THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA, JULY 22D. Fuller’s division (of the Sixteenth Corps) rallying to hold their ground after being forced back by the first charge of the Confederates in their flank attack. (From the painting by James E. Taylor.) could not at first believe that J ohnston would make another stand north of the river. How¬ ard,” he said to me, you are mistaken; there is no force in your front ; they are laughing at you ! ” We were in a thinnish grove of tall trees, in front of a farm-house. Well, Gen¬ eral,” I replied, let us see.” I called Stanley, whose division held the front. “ General, dou¬ ble your skirmishers and press them.” At once it was done. The lines sped forward, captur¬ ing the outlying pits of the enemy, and took many prisoners ; but a sheet of lead instantly came from the hidden works in the edge of the wood beyond us, and several unseen bat¬ teries hurled their shot across our lines, some of them reaching our grove and forcing us to retire. Sherman, as he rode away, said that I had been correct in my report. While we kept the Confederates busy by skirmishing and bat¬ tery firing, a set of demonstrations to the north and south of us finally resulted in gaining cross¬ ings of the river at Roswell, Soap Creek, Pow¬ ers’s and Paice’s ferries. The first effected was by Schofield pushing out from Soap Creek boats loaded with men, crossing quickly, and surprising the Confeder¬ ate cavalry and cannon in his front. This was done on the 9th of July. As soon as Johnston knew of it, he left those grand works near the river, burned his bridges, and hastened his retreat to Atlanta. The weather had become good, and there was great animation and manifest joy on our side. It was gratifying to escape from such fastnesses and dismal forests as those which had hampered us for over a month, and we now firmly believed that the end of the campaign was sure. Our armies made a right wheel — Thomas, on the pivot, taking the shortest line to Atlanta; McPherson, on the outer flank, coming by Roswell to Decatur, with Schofield between. PEACH TREE CREEK. As the several columns were crossing the famous Peach Tree Creek my corps was divided. I was sent, with Stanley and Wood, to connect with Schofield, causing a gap of two miles. Newton remained Thomas’s left ; on Newton’s right was Ward ; next, Geary ; then, Williams; last. Palmer’s corps; all, hav¬ ing crossed over, were stretched out along the creek. There was at that point but little open

Page 461

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 45 r ground, mostly woodland, and very uneven movement was severely wounded. Wheeler with cross-ravines. had here made a desperate and successful J list at this time, much to our comfort and stand ; and soon after, in the evening, that to his surprise, Johnston was removed, and division (Cleburne’s) which was taken from Hood placed in command of the Confederate Newton’s sorely handled front was brought army. Johnston had planned to attack Sher- hither and put into the trenches, in order to man at Peach Tree Creek, expecting just such make secure the right of Hood’s line. The a division between our wings as we made. Bald Hill was an important outpost. Hood endeavored to carry out the plan. A. P. Stewart had Polk’s corps, and Cheatham took Hood’s. Hardee on the right and Stewart battle of Atlanta. on his left, in lines that overlapped Newton’s The 21st, a fearfully hot day, was spent by position, at 3 o’clock of the 20th of July, all in readjustment. Thomas brought his three struck the blow. They came surging on corps forward, near to the enemy. The gap through the woods, down the gentle slope, in my lines closed as we neared the city, with noise^and fury like Stonewall Jackson’s Schofield filled the space between the Fourth men at Chancellorsville. As to our men, (mine) and Logan’s corps. McPherson, to get some of them were protected by piles of rails, a better left, ordered Blair to seize Bald Hill, but the most had not had time to barricade. General Force, of Leggett’s division, sup- Ste wart’s masses advanced successively from ported by Giles A. Smith, who now had his right, so Newton was first assailed. His Gresham’s place, charged the hill and carried rifle and cannon, firing with utmost steadiness it, though with a heavy loss. No time ran to and incessantly, soon stopped and repulsed waste till this point was manned with batteries the front attack ; but whole battalions went protected by thick parapets and well secured far east of him into the gap before described, by infantry supports. Thomas, behind the creek, was watching; he Atlanta appeared to us like a well-fortified turned some reserved batteries upon those citadel with outer and inner works. After Confederate battalions, and fired his shells Thomas had beaten him. Hood resolved to into the thickets that bordered the deep creek, give up the Peach Tree line; so, after dark, he sweeping the creek’s valley as far as the can- drew back two corps into those outer works, non could reach. This was sufficient ; in his Hardee, however, was destined to a special own words, it relieved the hitch.” The duty. About midnight he gathered his four di- hostile flankers broke back in confusion. In visions into Atlanta: Bate led the way ; Walk- succession, Ward, Geary, Williams, and Palmer re¬ ceived the on-coming waves, and though their ranks were shaken in places, they each made a strong resistance, and soon rolled the Confed¬ erates back, shattered and broken. Hardee would have resumed the assault, but an order from Hood took away a whole division (Cle¬ burne’s), for McPherson was too rapidly approaching Cheatham and the defenses of Atlanta from the east. The battle of the 20th did not end till Gresham’s division, on McPherson’s left, had gone diagonally toward Atlanta, sweeping the hostile cavalry of Wheel¬ er before it past the Augusta railroad, and skirmishing up against an open knob de¬ nominated Bald Hill. Gresham, himself a fine officer, during his brisk VoL. XXXIV.— 63. FROM " THE MOUNTAIN CAMPAIGNS IN GEORGIA ; OR WAR SCENES ON THE W. & A.' PUBLISHED BY THE WESTERN &. ATLANTIC R. R. CO.

Page 462

BATTLE OE ATLANTA, JULY 22D, 1864— THE CONTEST ON BALD IIILLC 4TH DIVISION, 15TH CORPS, IN THE FOREGROUND. (FROM THE PANORAMA OF “ATLANTA ’ IN xMINNEAPOLlS. )

Page 463

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA, 459 er came next ; Cleburne, having now left the vicinity of Bald Hill (for he was soon to go beyond it), followed; then came Maney in rear. They pushed out far south and around Gresham’s sleeping soldiers; they kept on eastward till Hardee’s advance was within two miles of Decatur, and his rear was nearly past Sherman’s extreme left. There, facing north, he formed his battle front; then he halted on rough ground, mostly covered by forest and thicket. He had made a blind night-march of fifteen miles; so he rested his men for a sufficient time, when, slowly and confidently, the well-disci¬ plined Confederates in line took up their forward movement. Suc¬ cess was never more assured, for was not Sherman’s cavalry well out of the way, breaking a rail¬ road and burning bridges at and beyond Decatur? And thus far no Yankee except a chance pris¬ oner had discovered this Jackson¬ ian march ! The morning showed us empty trenches from Bald Hill to the right of Thomas. We on the 2 1 St, toward Atlanta. Dodge remained for the night with head of column a mile or more in rear of Blair’s general line. Fuller’s division was nearest Blair’s left, and Sweeny’s not far from the Augusta railroad, farther to the north. McPherson spent the night with Sweeny. His hospitals and main supply trains were between Sweeny and the front. About midday Mc¬ Pherson, having determined to make a stronger left, had set Dodge’s men in motion. They quickly closed again on Atlanta, skirmishing as we went. McPherson’s left was, however, near enough already, a single valley only lying between Blair’s position and the outer defen¬ sive works of the city. The Sixteenth Corps (Dodge), having sent a detachment under Gen¬ eral Sprague to hold Decatur, to support the cavalry and take care of sundry army wagons, a thing successfully accomplished, had marched. marched, as usual, by fours, and were in long column pursuing their way nearly parallel to Hardee’s battle front, which was hidden by the thick trees. Now danger threatened: at the first skirmish shots Dodge’s troops halted and faced to the left and were in good line of battle. The Confederate divisions were advancing : fortu¬ nately for Dodge, after the firing began ITar- dee’s lines nearing him had to cross some open fields. McPherson was then paying a brief visit to Sherman near the Howard house. The attack was sudden, but Dodge’s veterans, not much disturbed, went bravely to their work. It is easy to imagine the loud roar of artillery 1. EFFECT OF THE UNION FIRE ON THE POTTER HOUSE, AT¬ LANTA. 2. VIEW OF THE CONFEDERATE LINE AT THE POTTER HOUSE, LOOKING EASTWARD. 3. VIEW OF THE CONFEDERATE DEFENCES OF ATLANTA, LOOK¬ ING NORTH-WEST. (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS.)

Page 464

460 THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. BATTLE OF ATLANTA, JULY 22D — RECAPTURE FROM THE CONFEDERATES OF DE GRESS’S BATTERY. 1. The view is west toward Atlanta ; the Confederates in capturing the battery charged along the Georgia Railroad from the rolling- mill (see map, page 457), and took advantage of the cover of the railroad embankment and cut. and the angry sounds of musketry that came to Sherman and McPherson when the sudden assault culminated and extended from Dodge to Blair’s left. McPherson mounted, and gal¬ loped off toward the firing. He first met Logan and Blair near the railway; then the three sepa¬ rated, each to hasten to his place on the battle¬ line. McPherson went at once to Dodge; saw matters going well there ; sent off aides and orderlies with dispatches, till he had but one or two men left with him. He then rode for¬ ward to pass to Blair’s left through the thick forest interval. Cheatham’s division was just approaching. The call was made, Surrender ! ” But McPherson, probably without a thought save to escape from such a trap, turned his horse toward his command. He was instantly slain, and fell from his horse. One of his or¬ derlies was wounded and captured; the other escaped to tell the sad news. Our reenforce¬ ments were on the way, so that Cheatham was beaten back. While the battle raged, McPher¬ son’s body was brought to Sherman at the Howard house. I wrote next day: “We were all made sad yesterday by the death of General McPherson, — so young, so noble, so promising, already commanding a depart¬ ment ! ” I closed my report concerning him thus : “ His death occasioned a profound sense of loss, a feeling that his place can never be completely filled. How valuable, how precious the country to us all, who have paid for its preservation such a price ! ” Logan immedi¬ ately took the Army of the Tennessee, giving his corps to Morgan L. Smith. As soon as Hood, from a prominent point in front of At¬ lanta, beheld Hardee’s lines emerging from the thickets of Bald Hill, and knew by the smoke and sound that the battle was fully joined, he hurried forward Cheatham’s divis¬ ion to attack Logan all along the east front of Atlanta. At the time, I sat beside Schofield and Sherman near the Howard house, and we looked upon such parts of the battle as our glasses could compass. Soon we saw the line of Logan broken, with parts of two batteries in the enemy’s hands. Sherman put in a cross-fire of can¬ non, a dozen or more, and Logan organized an attacking force that swept away the bold

Page 465

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA, 461 BATTLE OF ATLANTA, JULY 22D — RECAPTURE FROM THE CONFEDERATES OF DE GRESS’S BATTERY. II. The recapture was made by troops of Logan’s Fifteenth Corps. Confederates by a charge in double time. Blair’s soldiers repulsed the front attack of Cheatham’s and Maney’s divisions, and then, springing over their parapets, fought Bate’s and Maney’s men from the other side. The battle continued till night, when Hood again yielded the field to Sherman and withdrew. The losses on both sides in this battle of Atlanta were probably nearly even — about four thousand to each. Our gain was in morale. EZRA CHURCH. Sherman now drew his half-circle closer and closer, and began to manoeuvre with a view to get upon the railways proceeding southward. The Army of the Tennessee was assigned to me by the President, and I took command on the 27th of July, while it was marching around by the rear of Schofield and Thomas, in order to throw itself forward close to Atlanta on the south-west side, near Ezra Church. Skirmishing briskly. Dodge was first put into line facing the city; next, Blair, be¬ side him ; last, Logan, on the right, making a large angle with Blair. He was not at night (This picture is a reproduction from the Panorama of Atlanta.) quite up to the crest of the ridge that he was to occupy. In the morning of the 28th he was moving slowly and steadily into position. About 8 o’clock Sherman was riding with me through the wooded region in rear of Logan’s forces, when the skirmishing began to increase, and an occasional shower of grape cut through the tree-tops and struck the ground beyond us. 1 said : ‘‘ General, Hood will attack me here.” ‘H guess not — he will hardly try it again,” Sherman replied. I said that I had known Hood at West Point, and that he was indomitable. As the signs in¬ creased, Sherman went back to Thomas, where he could best help me should I need reenforce¬ ment. Logan halted his line, and the regi¬ ments hurriedly and partially covered their front with logs and rails, having only a small protection while kneeling or lying down. It was too late for intrenching. With a terrifying yell. Hood’s men charged through the forest. They were met steadily and repulsed. But in the impulse a few Confederate regiments passed beyond Logan’s extreme right. Four regiments came from Dodge; Inspector- General Strong led thither two from Blair, armed with repeat-

Page 466

THE STRUGGLE FOR ATLANTA. 462 ing rifles; and my chief of artillery placed sev¬ eral batteries so as to sweep that exposed flank. These were brought in at the exact moment, and after a few rapid discharges, the repeating rifles being remarkable in their execution, all the groups of flankers were either cut down or had sought safety in flight. This battle was prolonged for hours. We expected help from Morgan’s division of Palm¬ er’s corps, coming back from Turner’s Ferry ; but the Confederate cavalry kept that in check. Our troops here exhibited nerve and persist¬ ency; Logan was cheerful and hearty and full of enthusiasm. He stopped stragglers and sent them back, and gave every needed order. Blair was watchful and helpful, and so was Dodge. After the last charge had been re¬ pelled I went along my lines, and surely I felt proud and happy to be intrusted with such brave and efficient soldiers. Hood, again hav¬ ing lost three times as many as we, withdrew within his fortified lines. Our skirmishers cleared the field, and the battle of Ezra Church was won ; and with this result I contented myself. One officer, who was a little panic- stricken, ran with the first stragglers to Sher¬ man, and cried substantially, as I remember : You’ve made a mistake in McPherson’s suc¬ cessor. P". very thing is going to pieces ! ” Sher¬ man said: “Is General Howard there?” “ Yes, I suppose he is.” “ Well, I’ll wait before taking action till I hear from him ! ” So Sher¬ man sustained and trusted me, and I was con¬ tent. Of General Logan, who has so recently gone from us, I wrote, after this battle : “ Major-General Logan was spirited and energetic, going at once to the point where he apprehended the slightest danger of the enemy’s success. His decision and resolution animated and encouraged his officers and men to hold on at all hazards.” JONESBORO’. For a month. Hood kept to a defensive at¬ titude, and, like a long storm, the siege opera¬ tions set in. Sherman worked his right, with block after block, eastward and southward. Scho¬ field and part of Thomas’s command had passed beyond me, digging as they halted. Every new trench found a fresh one opposite. The lines were near to¬ gether. Many, many officers and men were slain or wounded, and sent back to the hospitals. Dodge, while reconnoiter- ing, was badly hurt ; Ransom took his corps, and Corse a division in it. Hook¬ er, already vexed at Sherman, was in¬ censed at my assign¬ ment, resigned, and went home. Slocum came to command the Twentieth Corps. Palmer, having a controversy concerning his sen¬ iority, left the Fourteenth Corps, and Jeff. C. Davis took his place. Hazen passed from a brigade in the Fourth (Stanley’s) to M. L. Smith’s division of Logan’s corps. F. P. Blair, in a report, condensed the work of his corps, which exemplifies the whole, in these words : “ The command was occupied for twenty-eight days in making approaches, digging rifle-pits, and erecting batteries, being subjected day and night to a galling fire of artillery and musketry. ” Sherman now having his supplies well up, beginning the night of the 25th of August, in¬ trenched Slocum’s strong corps across his railroad communication to defend it ; then made another grand wheel of his armies. Schofield this time clung to the pivot. My command described an arc of twenty-five miles’ radius aiming at Jonesboro’, while Thomas followed the middle course. Both southern railways were to be seized, and the stations, bridges, culverts, rails, and ties to be destroyed. Preceded by Kilpatrick, we made the march rapid enough considering the endless plague THE “calico house,” GENERAL SHERMAN’s HEADQUARTERS IN ATLANTA — ALSO FOR SEVERAL MONTHS A HOSPITAL. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 467

THE STRUGGLE EOR ATLANTA. 463 of the enemy’s horse artillery supported by Wheeler’s cavalry, and the time it took us to break up the West Point railroad. At Renfro Place we were to encamp the night of the 30th of August. Finding no water there, and also hoping to secure the Flint River bridge, six miles ahead, I called to Kilpatrick for a squadron. He sent me Captain Estes, a most energetic young man,and the horsemen needed. I asked Estes if he could keep the enemy in in motion. He gave a sanguine reply, and loped off at the head of his men. Wheeler’s rear-guard was surprised, and hurried toward the river. Hazen’s infantry followed, forget¬ ting their fatigue in the excitement of pursuit. We reached the bridge as it was burning, ex¬ tinguished the fire, crossed over in the dusk of the evening under an increasing fire from hostile cavalry and infantry, but did not stop till Logan had reached the wooded ridge be¬ yond, near Jonesboro’. The command was soon put into position, and worked all night and during the next morning to intrench, and build the required bridges. Hood had sent Hardee by rail, with perhaps half of his com¬ mand, to hold Jonesboro’. My Confederate classmate, S. D. Lee, who had had the imme¬ diate assault at Ezra Church, here appeared again, commanding Cheatham’s corps. At 3 p. M. the 31st, the Confederates came on with the usual vigor, but were met by Logan and Ransom, and thoroughly repulsed. Hood now abandoned Atlanta, and managed to unite with Hardee. Thomas, joining my left flank, fought mainly the battle of the ist of September. During this rest Blair and Logan went home on leave of absence; the field-force of the Army of the Tennessee was consolidated into two corps, Osterhaus temporarily com¬ manding the Fifteenth, and Ransom the Seven¬ teenth. Thomas went to Nashville, Wagner’s division was sent to Chattanooga, and Corse’s division to Rome. Colonel Tourtelotte had a small detachment at Allatoona Pass. Hood had been threatening for some time to break Sherman’s long line of communica¬ tion and supply. Sherman could not divine where the blow would fall. He was already arranging for a campaign southward; but he wanted Grant’s formal sanction, and he wished to make proper provision for Hood. At last, the 2d of October, Hood had passed on his way back beyond the Chattahoochee. Sherman had waited for this till he was sure that the first attempt against his line would be south of the Etowah. Now, leaving one corps, Slocum’s, at Atlanta, he followed Hood with the remainder of his force. Hood stopped near Dallas, and sent French’s division to take the garrison of Allatoona and the depots there. From the top of Kenesaw, Sherman communicated with Corse, who had joined Tourtelotte at Allatoona, and taken command. The popular hymn, Hold the Fort,” was based upon the messages between these chiefs and the noble defense that the garrison suc¬ cessfully made against a whole Confederate division. Sherman was coming, and French, MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN M. CORSE, WHO “ HELD THE FORT ” AT ALLATOONA. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) several times repulsed with great loss, with¬ drew, and joined Hood at New Hope Church. Taking up his northward march. Hood avoided Rome and aimed for Resaca. Scho¬ field was warned, and got ready to defend Chattanooga, while Sherman now made forced marches so as to overtake his enemy and force him to battle. Finding us on his heels. Hood, picking up two or three small garri¬ sons, but leaving untouched those that showed great pluck, like that of the resolute Colonel Clark R. Wever at Resaca, rushed through Sugar Valley and Snake Creek Gap, choking it with trees. My command following rapidly through the pass (October i6th), cut away or threw the gap-obstructions to the right and left, and camped close up to Hood’s rear-guard. He again refused battle, and we pursued him beyond Gaylesville, Alabama. Between Gay- lesville and Rome, General Ransom, a gallant and promising young officer, died from over- Avork and exposure due to our forced marches. Taking advantage of a rich country, Sher¬ man recuperated his men and moved slowly back to the Chattahoochee. Now, with the full consent of Grant, he hastened his prepar¬ ations for his grand march to the sea. O. O. Howard,

Page 468

CONFEDERATE CAMP, CITY HALL SQUARE, ATLANTA. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN WHEN THE CAMP WAS OCCUPIED BY THE 2D MASSACHUSETTS. GENERAL SHERMx\N AND THE MARCH TO THE SEA.”* Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York, December 2 2d, 1886. My Dear Sir: I beg to 'acknowledge receipt of your es¬ teemed favor of the 20th instant, and trust you will pardon me if I adhere to my former con¬ clusion not to attempt a magazine article on any war event. I do not profess the skill or patience of an historian, but only to be a witness before the great tribunal of the world, of scenes which I have witnessed or events in which I have shared. Of these I have testified fully in the two volumes of memoirs first published by the Appletons in 1875, and republished in 1885 in the form of a second edition, cor¬ rected and enlarged. In these volumes I be¬ lieve I have recorded fully and truthfully all that seemed necessary, all at least that I pur¬ pose to do. Taking, for example, the March to the Sea,” to which you refer, I am sure I have given in the second volume every mate¬ rial fact of that feature of the civil war, which has to the public the charm of an epic because of its seeming novelty, its mysterious progress, and its glorious result — much of which was dis¬ puted at first, but is now more than confirmed by General Grant in his immortal ‘‘ Personal Memoirs.” Even my second edition was in the hands of the printers before I had seen General Grant’s words in manuscript or print, so that our joint testimony must stand the test of time. True, many an orator in his safe office at the North had proclaimed his purpose to cleave his way to the sea. Every expedition which crossed the Ohio River in the early part of the war headed for the sea, but things were not ripe * Our readers will be interested in the above letter received by us from General Sherman in response to a request for an account of the Atlanta Campaign, and printed with his approval. They will also be glad to till the Western army had fought, and toiled, and labored down to Atlanta. Not till then did a ‘‘ March to the Sea” become practicable and possible of grand results. iVlone I never measured it as now my eulogists do, but coupled with General Thomas’s acts about Nashville, and those about Richmond directed in person by General Grant, the March to the Sea” with its necessary corollary, the march north¬ ward to Raleigh, became vastly important, if not actually conclusive of the war. Mr. Lincoln was the wisest man of our day, and more truly and kindly gave voice to my secret thoughts and feeling when he wrote me at Savannah from Washington under date of December 26, 1864: “ When you were about leaving Atlanta for the At¬ lantic coast I was anxious, if not fearful ; but feeling that you were the better judge, and remembering ‘ nothing risked, nothing gained,’ I did not interfere. Now the undertaking being a success, the honor is all yours ; for I believe none of us went further than to acquiesce ; and taking the work of General Thomas into account, as it should be taken, it is indeed a great success. Not only does it afford the obvious and im¬ mediate military advantages, but in showing to the world that your army could be divided, putting the stronger part to an important new service, and yet leaving enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole, Hood’s army, it brings those who sat in darkness to see a great light. But what next ? I sup¬ pose it will be safer if I leave General Grant and your¬ self to decide.” So highly do I prize this testimonial that I preserve Mr. Lincoln’s letter, every word in his own handwriting, unto this day; and if I know myself, I believe on receiving it I ex¬ perienced more satisfaction in giving to his overburdened and weary soul one gleam of satisfaction and happiness, than of selfish know that we have since so far overcome General Sher¬ man’s reluctance as to induce him to prepare a paper on The Grand Strategy of the War,” which will ap¬ pear in the magazine within a few months. — Editor.

Page 469

GENERAL SHERMAN AND THE ^^MARCH TO THE SEAS 465 pride in an achievement which has given me among men a larger measure of fam.e than any single act of my life. There is an old maxim of war, that a general should not divide his forces in the presence of an enterprising enemy, and I confess that I felt more anxious for General Thomas’s success than my own, because had I left him with an insufficient force it would have been adjudged ungener¬ ous and unmilitary in me ; but the result, and Mr. Lincoln’s judgment after the event, dem¬ onstrated that my division of force was liberal, leaving to Thomas enough to vanquish the old opposing force of the whole. Hood’s anny,” and retaining for myself enough to march to the sea, and thence north to Raleigh, in com¬ munication with the old Army of the Potomac which had so long and heroically fought for Richmond ; every officer and soldier of which felt and saw the dawn of peace in the near approach of their comrades of the West who, having finished their task, had come so far to lend them a helping hand if needed. I hon¬ estly believe that the grand march of the Western army from Atlanta to Savannah, and from Savannah to Raleigh, was an important factor in the final result, the overwhelming victory at Appomattox, and the glorious tri¬ umph of the Union cause. All the leading facts have been published by General Grant, by myself, and by General J. D. Cox, and I prefer to leave others to fill out the episodes which give life and interest to the picture. I certainly commend The Century Maga¬ zine forks enterprise in collecting in a durable form many of these episodes, all varying more or less in describing the same event, or series of events, according to the tone and temper of the writer, the more valuable by reason of their variance, because every hon¬ est man sees things from a different stand¬ point, and can only write earnestly what he personally believes. The time is also oppor¬ tune because the safety of the country cannot now be imperiled by jealousies and hatreds perfectly natural in the midst of horrid war; and therefore I again express my entire satis¬ faction with the course of your magazine in collecting from the witnesses while living their personal testimony, — every article of which I have read, in common with millions of our people. These will crystallize into his¬ tory, the leading facts and results of which are already pretty well established, whilst the minor affairs Avill remain the subject of song and story to the survivors, who are fast giving place to new men, who, if wise, will profit by our mistakes and be thankful that we of 1861-5 caught the buffets of war, which otherwise would surely have fallen on them. The civil war is long since over, and though VoL. XXXIV.-- 64. bitter and terrible beyond the poAver of ex¬ pression in words, its events seem to me as the memory of a dream ; therefore, so far as I am concerned it must rest. One single fact about the March to the Sea” unknown to me was revealed by General Grant in his “ Memoirs,” Vol. II., page 376 : “ I was in favor of Sherman’s plan from the time it was first submitted to me. My chief of staff, however, was very bitterly opposed to it, and as I learned sub¬ sequently, finding that he could not move me, he ap¬ pealed to the authorities at Washington to stop it.” I had been acquainted Avith General John A. Rawlins, General Grant’s chief of staff,” from the beginning of the Avar. He Avas ahvays most loyal and devoted to his chief, an enthu¬ siastic patriot, and of real ability. He Avas a neighbor of General Grant in Galena at the breaking out of the Avar, a lawyer in good practice, an intense thinker, and a man of ve¬ hement expression ; a soldier by force of cir¬ cumstances rather than of education or prac¬ tice, yet of infinite use to his chief throughout the Avar and up to the hour of his death as Sec¬ retary of War, in 1869. General Rawlins Avas enthusiastically devoted to his friends in the Western army, with, which he had been asso¬ ciated from Cairo to Vicksburg and Chatta¬ nooga, and doubtless, like many others at the time, — October, 1864, — feared that I Avas about to lead his comrades in a “ wild-goose chase,” not fully comprehending the objects aimed at, or that I on the spot had better means of ac¬ curate knoAvledge than he in the distance. He did not possess the magnificent equipoise of General Grant, nor the confidence in my mili¬ tary sagacity which his chief did, and I am not at all surprised to learn that he Avent to Washington from City Point to obtain an order from the Pres¬ ident or Secretary of War to compel me Avith an army of sixty-five thousand of the best soldiers which America had ever produced to remain idle Avhen an opportunity Avas offered such as never occurs twice to any man on earth. Gen¬ eral RaAvlins AA^as right according to the light he possessed, and I remember Avell my feeling of uneasiness that something of the kind ?night happen, and how free and glorious I felt Avhen the magic telegraph Avas cut, Avliich prevented the possibility of orders of any kind from the rear coming to delay or hinder us from fulfill¬ ing Avhat I kneAv Avas comparatively easy of execution and Avassure to be a long stride to¬ ward the goal Ave Avere all aiming at — victory and peace from Virginia to Texas. He Avas one of the many referred to by Mr. Lincoln Avho sat in darkness, but after the event saAv a great light. He never revealed to me the doubts he had had. With best Avishesfor your continued prosper¬ ity and success, I am, sincerely your friend, W. T Sherman,

Page 470

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. The Question of Command on Cemetery Ridge. TN the March Century Mrs. Warren publishes a X letter of General Warren, written soon after the battle of Gettysburg, showing that General Meade’s orders to him on the afternoon of July 2d were to look, not specifi¬ cally to Round Top, as I have stated, but — a much wider mission — to the left of the army. I regret that I did not see that letter before writing my brief account, in which I dwelt less on General Warren’s services than I would otherwise have done, because they were so universally recognized. The duty confided to him was a very responsible one, and, as the result shows, could not have been intrusted to better hands. The quick¬ ness with which he comprehended the threatened dan¬ gers in all their magnitude, when a simple incident revealed them to him as it would have done to few oth¬ ers, the apt measures he adopted to avert them, and, above all, the promptitude — his leading characteristic — with which he acted, saved both the Round Tops to us, disconcerted the enemy’s plans, and proved Gen¬ eral Warren to be what he was, one of the ablest and most meritorious of our generals. In the same Century General F. A. Walker of General Hancock’s staff comments on my expressed be¬ lief that, had my instructions for the cannonade of July 3d been carried out by Captain Hazard, com¬ mander of the artillery of the Second Corps, the Con¬ federate assault would not have reached our lines ; and considers this “ a very severe impeachment ” of General Hancock’s conduct of his artillery. I fully appreciate and honor the motive of General Walker’s courteous criticism, and his very kind references to myself, but he writes under misapprehensions which are wide¬ spread and misleading, and which, as they place me in a false position, I beg leave to explain. He says: “In the first place, two antagonistic theories of author¬ ity are advanced. General Hancock claimed that he com¬ manded the line of battle Cemetery Ridge. General Hunt in substance alleges that General Hancock com¬ manded the infantry of that line, and that he himself commanded the artillery. “ Winfield S. Hancock did not read his commission as constituting him a major-general of infantry, nor did he believe that a line of battle was to be ordercdby military specialists. He knew that by both law and reason the de¬ fense of Cemetery Ridge was intrusted to him, subject to the actual, authentic orders of the commander of the Army of the Potomac, but not subject to the discretion of one of General Meade’s staff-officers. . . “ So much for the questionof authority. On the question of policy there is only to be said that a difference of opin¬ ion appears ... as to what was most expedient in a given emergency.’’ General Hancock’s claim that he commanded all the troops of every description posted on his part of Ceme¬ tery Ridge is perfectly valid. It cannot be disputed, and I never questioned it. But all commands must be exercised subject to the established principles for the government of armies. Under these, commanders of special arms issue their own orders direct to their subordinates serving with army corps, who must sub¬ mit them to the corps commanders with whom they serve. The latter, being supreme on their own lines, can modify or countermand these orders, but by do¬ ing so they make themselves responsible for the re¬ sult. Thus all conflicts or theories as to authority are avoided. Our “ Regulations” (Scott’s), adopted in 1821, reads : “ The superior officer of the corps of engineers, or of the artillery, serving with one of the army corps . . . will receive the orders of the commandant thereof, to whom the said superior officer of engineers or of artillery ■will communicate any orders he may receive from his own particular commandant-in-chief, attached to general headquarters.’’ Separate paragraphs provided rules for the military ** staff” and administration, — the latter including the supply departments. “ Staff-officers ” are forbidden to give orders except in the names of their generals. From this rule administrative officers are specially exempted, their chiefs directing their respective de¬ partments in their own names, but subject to the con¬ trol of their generals, with whom they serve. All these regulations are essential to the manage¬ ment of a large army, but are only partly applicable to a two-company post, the school in which most of our officers both of the war-office and of the regiments were trained. So in the “ Regulations ” of 1861-3, they were all condensed into one short paragraph : “ Staff officers, and commanders of artillery, engineers, and ordnance, report to their immediate commanders the state of the supplies and whatever concerns the service under their direction, and receive their orders ; and com¬ municate to them the orders they receive from their su¬ periors in their own corps.” Closely examined, this is correct ; but it is obscure and misleading. It lumps together officers of the staff and of administration as “ staff-officers,” and so connects them with those of the special arms as seem¬ ingly to confirm the erroneous idea that engineer officers are staff-officers and of course that artillery offi¬ cers must be the same. It is an odd notion, which could not find a lodgment in any other army than our own, that an artillery commandant-in-chief, a “ corps com¬ mander” himself to all intents and purposes, and pro¬ vided with a staff of his own, is “one of the staff- officers ” who runs about a battle-field carrying “the actual and authentic orders” of the general-in-chief to other zox:^% commanders. A “staff-officer” is an officer below the rank of brigadier, attached to the person or headquarters of a general as his aide or assistant. To illustrate the general principle as to the service of the special arms, I quote from the “ Instructions of Frederick the Great” to his artillery. He was him¬ self, by the way, an “artillery specialist ” of the high¬ est order, yet I have never heard it suggested that this unfitted him for “ ordering a line of battle.” He was also a disciplinarian of the sternest school, yet he “almost preached insubordination ” in order to reduce to a minimum the mischief that meddling with the artillery by any general, even the general-in-chief, might occasion. He says :

Page 471

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. “ It sometimes happens that the general in command, or some other general, is himself forgetful, and orders the fire to be opened too soon, without considering what injurious consequences may result from it. In such case the artillery officer must certainly obey, but he should fire as slowly as possible, and point the pieces with the ut¬ most accuracy, in order that his shots may not be thrown away. As to the other question, that of policy, each general must decide it for himself, and General Hancock presumably acted according to his best judgment in the emergency suddenly presented to him when the cannonade opened. I do not know his reasons for countermanding my orders, and therefore cannot dis¬ cuss them, even were I disposed to do so. As to the hypothetical case presented by General Walker, the possible effect of the enemy’s cannonade on the viorale of the troops, and his question, “ Who was the better judge. General Hunt or General Hancock ? ” I may be permitted to reply, that a corps commander ought to be, so far as his own corps is concerned. It is, how¬ ever, one of the necessary duties of an artillery com¬ mander to study the qualities of the other arms, for these must be considered in organizing and distribut¬ ing the artillery, and are, as we see in this very case, important elements in determining its service. I had studied the Army of the Potomac, believed in its high qualities, and when, for special reasons, I instructed our batteries to withhold their fire for a given period, I knew the severity of the trial to which I was subject¬ ing all the troops. I knew, also, that while the batter¬ ies would be the direct object of the enemy’s fire, their men must stand idle at the guns and bear its full fury, while the infantry, lying on the reverse slope of the ridge and out of the enemy’s sight, would be partly sheltered from it. Yet I felt no misgiving as to the fortitude of my cannoneers, and no doubt as to that of the infantry. I think I was justified by the event, for the troops on General Hancock’s line where my instructions were not followed, and those on General Newton’s line (on Hancock’s immediate left), where they were followed, were in equal “ heart and courage ” for the “fearful ordeal of Longstreet’s charge.” The object of my orders, however, was to spare them this ordeal altogether by breaking up the charge be¬ fore it reached our lines. Had my orders been fully carried out, I think their whole line would have been — as half of it was — driven back before reaching our position, and this would have given us our only chance for a successful counter-attack. As it was, the splen¬ did valor of Pickett’s division alone enabled the Con¬ federates, although defeated, to preserve their inoi'ale intact. Henry J. Hunt. A Just Man and a Great Historical Work. In the recent death of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert N. Scott of the Third Artillery, well known in connec¬ tion with his work of compiling the War Records, the nation has met with a loss which is in many respects irreparable. It is not too much to say that no one now living possesses the intimate knowledge which Colonel Scott had gathered of the numerous disputed and still partly obscured points of our war history. The loss would be less if he had left written notes of his conclusions and of the records which sustained 467 them. Fortunately, however, the extended work upon which he was engaged — much greater, of its kind, than any Government has heretofore undertaken — is more advanced than many who have watched it since its inception suppose it to be. Robert Nicholson Scott was born at Winchester, Tennessee, January 21st, 1838. His father was a widely known Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, and a man of untiring energy and great ability. In 1857, while with his father in San Francisco, young Scott was appointed second lieutenant in the Fourth Infantry. He was then nineteen years of age. Older officers under whom he served say that he was a marked man with them from the first. While full of life and sociability, there was a gravity, a large- mindetlness, and a mature judgment manifested in the discharge of all duties committed to him that attracted the attention of his superiors. In November, 1861, he joined the Army of the Potomac with the rank of captain. He was engaged in the siege of Yorktown, was wounded at Gaines’s Mill, and was brevetted Major for gallant conduct in that engagement. From June, 1863 to September, 1864 he was senior aide-de- camp to Major-General Halleck. He was lieutenant- colonel of volunteers on General Halleck’s staff, and on duty with that officer at the headquarters of the army and the Military Division of the James until July, 1865. He went with General Halleck to the Pa¬ cific coast as adjutant-general of the Military Division of the Pacific, and served there with that officer until 1869, when he accompanied him to the Military Divis¬ ion of the South, where he served with him until 1872. It was during this long service with General Halleck, throughout which he held the most confidential rela¬ tions with that officer, that he gained a knowledge which no other man of his rank, and few of any rank, acquired of the secret history of the war. A great part of Halleck’s most confidential correspondence with Lincoln, Stanton, and the chief officers of the army is in the handwriting of Colonel Scott. On the 1st of January, 1878, he was ordered to Washington to take charge of the work of compiling the War Rec¬ ords. He was the author of a digest of military laws which is now the accepted authority to the time of its date. In addition to his duties in compiling the rec¬ ords, he was twice called on to assist in revising army regulations. He was assigned as the military secre¬ tary of the joint commission of the two Houses of Congress for the reorganization of the army under the Burnside bill, and at the time of his death was a member of a board to untangle, re-arrange, and re¬ vise the present compilation of army regulations. This wide range of duties performed under, or in asso¬ ciation with, officers of great prominence, made him more generally known among those of high rank than almost any other officer of equal age and position. To this distinction can be added, as a crowning glory, that he gained and held the unqualified respect and cordial esteem of all. To rich and varied stores of the most confidential knowledge concerning the moving reasons and forces which operated about the great headquarters, and of the real personal and official relations of those in command, Colonel Scott added severe, continuous, and methodi¬ cal study. To guide him and give effect to his work he was possessed of thorough impartiality, unswerving

Page 472

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR, 468 fidelity to the trust imposed in him, and a courage which forbade even hesitation upon the question of doing exact justice without fear of the powerful, or fa¬ vor to friends. He was devoted to his work. For over nine years he scarcely left it. His days of recrea¬ tion were very few, and were taken at long intervals. He not only gave his office hours to his task, but his nights at home as well. With the eagerness of an ex¬ plorer, he pursued every clew which threw new light on the records. He spared no pains of research which promised to make any chapter of military history more complete. It is absolutely certain that he has never withheld a paper of any kind found in the records which, if added, would change the history by so much as a hair’s breadth. It was such qualifications, and such use of them, that now give value to the great work which he has left. The progress of this work is of national interest. The general examination of the immense mass of records, both Union and Confederate, in possession of the Gov¬ ernment has been completed, and the material which properly belongs to the plan of the work has been se¬ lected, copied, and chronologically arranged. Of this selected material, that part relating to operations up to January i, 1865, has been divided into chapters and volumes according to the plan of Colonel Scott, and this plan has received the formal approval of the Sec¬ retary of War. As adopted, it really fixes the arrange¬ ment of the material already gathered, covering the operations of the closing six months of the war. The mass of records which have been examined filled scores of rooms in the War Department, and sev¬ eral large buildings besides. The records embrace the files of the War Department proper, and of the adjutant- general’s office, engineer’s office, ordnance office, and of the offices of the provost-marshal general, quartermas¬ ter-general, and commissary-general. The files of the adjutant-general’s office, in addition to the records there made during the war, embrace all the records of the several departments, districts, military posts, etc., as w'ell as those of all the armies, corps, divisions, bri¬ gades, and regiments. Besides all these, there are the corresponding records of the Confederate Government. The examination of this immense collection has been most thorough. Besides his own force, a large num¬ ber of clerks in the office of the adjutant- general have been employed in the preliminary sifting and arrang¬ ing. The work began ip the summer of 1874, under Secretary Belknap, an appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars having been made to enable the Secretary of War “ to have copied for the public printer all reports, letters, telegrams, and general orders not heretofore copied or printed, and properly arranged in chronological order. ” Both .Secretary Belknap and Adjutant-General Town¬ send took great interest in the matter, as have all of their successors. The second year the appropriation was in¬ creased to fifty thousand dollars. The work was pushed with vigor, the best men in the War Department being assigned to it. A great collection of telegrams sent and received, and battle reports, both Union and Con¬ federate, were selected and printed in volumes ready for the compiler. When Colonel Scott took charge, in January, 1878, much valuable preliminary work had been done, and the true magnitude of the undertaking began to appear. He at once organized a most efficient force, and began again at the very beginning. All col¬ lected material was compared with originals, and the many omissions inseparable from preliminary exami¬ nations of such immense masses of records were sup¬ plied. He entered into correspondence with all offi¬ cers yet alive whose records seemed incomplete, for the purpose of obtaining originals which might have been retained. No paper written since the war has been allowed a place ; but all original papers have been accepted, and, where the owners desired, copied and returned. Through the efficient services of Gen¬ eral Marcus J. Wright, the agent of the War Depart¬ ment for the collection of Confederate records. Colonel Scott received a great mass of material, and through his own efforts much more was gathered, until, con¬ sidering the circumstances attending the dissolution of the Confederacy, the collection of Confederate rec¬ ords, including field-maps, is surprisingly complete. Upon this immense collection of official material Colonel Scott had worked without intermission for nearly ten years. As a result, its examination is com¬ plete, and the material to be printed will make about fifty volumes. As several of these contain two or three parts, the total number of separate volumes will be about eighty. A large collection of maps has been made, covering the operations of both sides for the entire period of the war. These will appear in atlas form. Twenty-five separate volumes have been printed and issued of the operations from 1861 to January 20th, 1863. Fifteen other separate volumes, up to and in¬ cluding (nominal) Volume XXV., are stereotyped and ready for the index. The volumes for the rest of 1863 are, with one exception, ready for the printer. Of the operations for 1864, which run over to January 15th, 1865, and are embraced in Volumes XXXII. to XLIV., three are ready for the printer, four more are ready for final revision, and the plan and scope of the remaining six, including the subjects for each chapter, have been adopted. To close the work of compilation there remains only the arrangement of the material already collected for the period from January, 1865, to the disbandment of the armies. It is fortunate that two men remain who have been active workers with Colonel Scott from the first, and who are thoroughly acquainted with his methods and plans. These are his chief clerk, Mr. J. S. Moodey, who has had special charge of the valuable indexes, and Mr. J. W. Kirkley, of the adjutant-general’s office. There is also great reason for congratulation that the work has advanced so far toward completion. As it stands, it will endure as a fitting monument to an able, faithful, and impartial soldier. P. S. — Since the above lines were written, Lieu¬ tenant-Colonel Henry M. Lazelle of the 23d Infantry has been ordered to assume the duties of compiler. Colonel Lazelle was born in Massachusetts, and was graduated from the Military Academy in 1855. Dur¬ ing the war he was assistant commissary-general of prisoners until October, 1863, when he became colonel of the i6th New York Cavalry. Since the war he has been on staff duty on the frontier and in Indian cam¬ paigns, and from 1879 to 1882 commandant of cadets at West Point; and he was detailed to witness the movements of the British troops in India. His recent detail was that of inspector-general of the Depart¬ ment of the Columbia. He has been an excellent officer in a varied line of duties. II. V. Boy 71 ton

Page 473

TOPICS OF THE TIME. A New Era in our History. Beyond question the feature of the national admin¬ istration since the 4th of March, 1885, which has en¬ gaged the largest share of public attention has been its attitude toward the civil service. This very significant fact marks the opening of a new era in our history, an era in which, for the first time, the proper conduct of the government. Federal, State, and municipal, assumes the first rank among political questions. The United States as a nation started with a Constitu¬ tion which challenges the fresh admiration of each new generation of Americans, and with methods of adminis¬ tration well suited to the small population of a thinly settled region on the eastern slope of the continent. In local affairs as a rule the town-meeting excellently served all the purposes of the community at a time when there were only about half a dozen cities, and the present metropolis itself, then barely ahead of Philadelphia, had but thirty- three thousand people. The young Republic had scarcely reached its majority before there came an¬ other war with England, and the “ era of good feeling ” which succeeded was soon disturbed by the first Nullifi¬ cation mutterings of the rising storm over the extension of the slave power. There were brief periods, as notably upon the introduction by Andrew Jackson of the spoils system in 1829, when statesmen found time and se¬ cured attention for the consideration of vital questions concerning governmental methods ; but all the while, and more and more with the passage of the years, much as they tried to conceal it from themselves, people were chiefly concerned with the more fundamental question as to whether the Union itself were to endure. At last came the four years^ struggle to determine whether the Government should survive. That ended, there ensued a long and most engrossing controversy to decide how “the fruits of the war” could most surely be garnered, and how the relations of the reconstructed States to the reconstituted Union should permanently be adjusted. Meanwhile the nation had been growing from less than four millions of people to more than fifty ; cities of great size had sprung up in what a century before had been a wilderness ; nearly a quarter of the pop¬ ulation had drifted into the cities and large towns ; the office-holders of the Federal government alone had become an army more than one hundred thousand strong ; old methods had been outgrown and become antiquated; new questions of administration, previ¬ ously undreamed of, had arisen in national, state, and municipal affairs alike. The salvation of the Republic from the danger threatened by secession was no sooner assured than far-sighted men pointed out a fresh peril to its perpetuity. The war, which so largely widened the scope of government operations and increased the number of office-holders, greatly aggravated the evils which men like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun had pre¬ dicted as certain to come when that most immoral of dogmas, “To the victor belong the spoils,” was adopted by both political parties as an article of faith. The late Thomas A. Jen ekes, who unhappily died in 1875, a dozen years too soon to witness the triumph of his principles, must always be remembered for having possessed the insight to detect the danger, the wisdom to perceive the cure, and the persistence to extort attention from a reluctant Congress in the troublous years of the Andrew Johnson administra¬ tion. Looking back to that stormy period and recall¬ ing the grave character of the reconstruction disputes, which culminated in the impeachment of the President, the country can better appreciate the force of the man, who, coming from the smallest State of the Union, secured a hearing for civil-service reform in 1866. But it was scarcely more than a hearing that even Mr. Jenckes could secure, and he could not long keep the public ear. The slave had been freed ; he was soon after enfranchised; but “the negro question” still re¬ mained the engrossing one. The attitude of the Fed¬ eral government toward the States which had attempted secession was a subject of constant discussion for years after their Senators and Representatives again sat in Congress, and the frequent recourse to the use of Fed¬ eral troops for the settlement of disputes in State capi¬ tals made the condition of the South the overshadowing subject of national attention. An experiment in the direction of carrying out the ideas of which Mr. Jenckes had been the apostle was made during Grant's admin¬ istration, but although it received the hearty support of many thoughtful men, it never gained a strong hold upon the general public. There was always something else which the politicians insisted, and made the peo¬ ple believe, was the main issue. When Congress killed the experiment in 1874 by refusing the modest sum required to keep it going, only a small element felt any indignation, or, indeed, had any pronounced feeling on the subject either way. Mr. Hayes rightly declared, in his letter accepting the Republican nomination for the Presidency in 1876, that the plank regarding civil-service reform in the party platform was “ of paramount importance,” and during his Administration the subject secured more general attention than ever before. But two great events were needed to make the proper conduct of the Government the most prominent question of the day. One was a proof, so startling as to impress the dullest mind, of the danger to the Republic which lurked in the spoils system. This was furnished by the assassination of Garfield at the hand of a disap¬ pointed office-seeker. The other event was a change in the control of the Government without the dreaded ruin to national interests and prosperity. In 1881 the nation was made to feel the necessity of reform ; in 1887 it sees that it can give its well-nigh un¬ divided attention to the consideration of reform, and it is evidently going to do so, not merely so far as Federal offices are concerned, but State and municipal offices and administration as well.

Page 474

470 TOPICS OF THE TIME, Reform in Municipal Government. The passage by Congress early in 1883 of the Pen¬ dleton bill, applying the competitive principle to the minor places in the Washington Departments and in the chief custom-houses and post-offices of the country, was the corner-stone of a system which it is already certain will ultimately be developed throughout the Federal government. The contemptible failure of the feeble attempts in the Forty-ninth Congress to repeal the Pendleton law and to starve out the civil-service commission show that the reform “has come to stay.” The public is far ahead of Congress in this matter. The changed tone of those newspapers which have always ridiculed the new system shows that they recog¬ nize their defeat. Experience has spoiled all their old arguments. There was the “ college graduate ” bogy, for instance. If we were to have examinations for ad¬ mission to the service, it was declared “ only college graduates would stand any show,” and the young man who had never been beyond the common school “would be nowhere.” Statistics showing that more than four-fifths of the successful contestants were men who had received only a common-school education have effectually disposed of this ad captandiiin plea, and the other clap-trap appeals to prejudice have fared no better. The old-time champions of the spoils system in the Federal government virtually confess their defeat, and the success of the competitive system in the State governments and chief cities of New York and Massachusetts assures its ultimate adoption by other States and municipalities. Another reform no less important is now to be achieved. What is commonly called civil- service re¬ form, so far as it has hitherto been carried in Federal, State and city governments, is chiefly a system for procuring good clerks, whose competency has been established by a competitive test. This is a matter of great importance, because it is fundamental. With the entrance to the service properly arranged, it is only a question of time when the whole service will be con¬ ducted upon sound principles. But this is only one phase of the great undertaking involved in a thorough¬ going reform of governmental methods. In a popular government the health of the body politic depends upon pure elections. The theory of the fathers was that when an office, like that of congressman, was to be filled, the people of a district would look about to see who was the fittest man to represent them, and elect him with¬ out the necessity of his doing anything in the matter. Cases are still known where the theory is carried into practice. A dozen years ago certain citizens of a Western Massachusetts district, disgusted with the ring which dictated the course of the dominant party, nominated President Seelye of Amherst College as an independent candidate for Congress, and elected him. His only connection with the canvass was to write a letter in reply to the notification of his nomination, consenting to be voted for. It was in the days when postage stamps were a cent higher than now, and Mr. Seelye used to say that his campaign expenses were only three cents — the cost of the stamp which he placed upon his letter of acceptance. In New York City now, it costs a man from $5000 to $10,000 to run for Congress. In other words, he must pay out beforehand the salary for one, if not both, of the years oi the term. If he aspires to a position on the bench, 1 e must expend in advance of the election $10,000 or ^15,000 for one of the lower courts ; per¬ haps $20,00 3 for a place in the Supreme Court. If he is ambitiou , to become mayor, he must be willing to contribute zs large a sum as $24,000. These are only samples of ;he astonishing facts as to “ assessments ” which Mr. William M. Ivins, who has enjoyed excep¬ tional oppo: tunities for learning the truth, made pub¬ lic in his S4 eech to the Commonwealth Club not long ago. Mr. ins showed exactly how the system works ; how the “ n achines ” which have been built up control on election lay a well-disciplined force of 45,000 men, or one-fifth )f the entire voting population, all of whom are under pay and have a pecuniary interest in the re¬ sult. Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, in a speech at the succeed¬ ing meeting of the same club, presented the remedies, which he found in removing the necessity for assess¬ ments, by having the ballots printed and distributed by the city and at the city’s expense, thus doing away with the army of machine workers at the polls ; in limiting by law the expenditures of candidates ; and in enact¬ ing a statute similar to the English “ Corrupt Practices Act,” forbidding bribery and undue influences of all kinds and fixing penalties. The speeches of Mr. Ivins and Mr. Bishop, which were printed in full, attracted the notice not merely of the New York public, but of intelligent people through¬ out the country. The press of other cities appreciated that they must anticipate, where they have not already begun to suffer, the same evils unless a halt were called in New York ; the rural press realized that the country cannot escape the introduction of similar abuses if they are allowed to remain permanently in the cities. College Expenses. The commencement season brings its usual supply of newspaper articles on the inordinate expense of ed¬ ucation in our modern colleges. In this case, as in so many others, the supply of articles meets a general de¬ mand. It is not easy for a father to foot enormous bills for his son at college with any patience, when he remembers the narrow fund which carried him through college, or for want of which he was compelled to give up the idea of going to college altogether. The news¬ paper article not only states his feeling in vigorous English, but gives him a tangible foundation for his feeling. It meets his case, and the case of countless others, too exactly not to find favor in their eyes. And so the newspapers brim with notes of the “ average cost ” of going through this college and that, and with reflections on the extravagance which is encouraged by the methods of the modern college life. There are, however, certain correctives which should go with the annual statistics. An average may be mathematically true, and yet al¬ together delusive. “ I make a statement that the average age of my friends is 20 years. If my friends are 18, 19, 20, 21, and 22 years of age, the average 20 is a useful and true expression. If, however, they are 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30, it is less useful ; and if they are 4 of them 10 years old and i of them 60, the average 20 is still numerically correct, but it is absurd and un¬ truthful in the impression it gives.” The last case is quite parallel with the “ averages ” of the expenses of

Page 475

TOPICS OF THE TIME, classes at the various American colleges, as they are annually published in the newspapers. The few ex¬ travagant students are able to do so much more effec¬ tive work at their end than the gi'eat body of the stu¬ dents can do at theirs, that the “ average ” goes up to a figure whiph is quite misleading. Meantime, in the teeth of all the averages, the great body of the students go on as their fathers did, and, even at those colleges which are selected as the most expensive of all, there is always a smaller body of students who are working their way through college and showing that the ‘‘ aver¬ age ” has no real relation to the question. There is not a college in America from which poverty alone need debar a student ; there is not one from which he may not graduate, provided he has that amount of abil¬ ity which will make a college education a benefit, and provided, also, he is willing to work before and through his course, and deny himself, as was the custom in our fathers’ days. It is this last custom which is going out of existence ; and that is enough to show that the root of the evil does not lie in the college, but in the home. The very par¬ ents who speak so bitterly of the encouragement given to young men’s extravagance by the modern college life have carefully trained their sons for just the life which they have found. Usually men in moderate circumstances, they have never compelled their sons to earn a dollar in their lives, or to know the cost or value of money, or to deny themselves anything within their reach, or to do anything except spend money when a favorable opportunity offered. The sons, pass¬ ing for the first time beyond the father’s eye, and able to plead circumstances which parents cannot deny from personal knowledge, are in a fair position to deplete the paternal pocket-book, and have never been trained to refrain from improving such an opportunity. It is not for his own selfish gratification that the son joins this or that college society, or takes all the college papers, or “ goes with the nine ” to watch an inter¬ collegiate game in another college town, or does any of the other things for which his father has to pay, — not at all ; it is only because he would be ostracized in college if he refrained from such indulgences. Such are the statements which accompany the periodical petitions for checks ; and the father, finding it easier to curse col¬ lege extravagance than to take the trouble of ascer¬ taining the true state of the case, continues his mis- training of the boy by paying his bills until, at the end of the college course, the son is turned loose upon the world, to find at last what a dollar really means. In nine cases out of ten, the student’s self-control, if it led to a refusal to be enticed into unnecessary expen¬ ditures, would be simply ignored by the other students of his college. There are always cliques which would ignore himself as well; and, to this extent, the dreaded ‘‘ taboo ” might be endured. But this difficulty is purely subjective; it is in the student himself, and its roots are in his home-training. If he has come to college to cultivate or value the society of such cliques, the penalty has an effective force; if he has been trained to undervalue or ignore the pen¬ alty, it has no power over him. When he yields to it and writes home that he “must have” money for this, that, or the other purpose, the father who supplies this demand is cultivating further the son’s vanity, and 471 further preparing vexation of spirit for himself. For him to pay the money and thus increase the evil, while he considers it the unperformed duty of the col¬ lege authorities to suppress all the societies, expel the editors of all the college papers, and abolish the inter¬ collegiate games, is merely another example of the decadence of American home-life and discipline. The father expects the college to do for the son what the home no longer does for him ; he sends the college flab¬ by material, and expects the material to be turned into such strong, self-poised, self-controlled manhood as the American home once furnished to the college. If the children’s teeth are set on edge, it is largely because the fathers have eaten sour grapes. There can be little doubt that two- thirds of the material now sent to college would be bettered by being put into a workshop of some kind for two years between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The spread of comfort among the people has been steadily in¬ creasing the number of those who can spare their sons the necessity of work even through their years of early manhood; and we have not yet come to un¬ derstand the full measure of the injury which is thus done to the character of the boy. At the same time, the colleges have been developing in a direction which gives greater and still greater freedom to the student, and thus brings into constantly greater prominence the evils resulting from the modern American system of home-training. To check the college in its natural course of development, to demand that it shall cease its proper work and attend to wrapping the student in cotton-wool and keeping him from the temptations incident to every really manly life, would be merely to make permanent and irreparable the damage which is being done to young American manhood. Things must be worse before they can be better. American parents must learn that education is not an affair of books alone ; that it is not complete when so many books have been finished and so many term-bills paid ; that a true education consists even more largely in the training of the character and of the will than in book -knowledge. When American homes send to American colleges boys who have been trained to dis¬ criminate between the accidents of life and its essen¬ tials, the complaints of college extravagance will disappear, and a good many other evils will go with them. The Metropolitan Spirit. The current year has been remarkable for its con¬ spicuous proofs that matters aesthetic and scholarly are taking a wider and deeper hold upon the people of the leading American city. New York is becoming metro¬ politan not merely in intention, but in fact. The metro¬ politan spirit is abroad in society, and the year 1887 will be memorable for the long step then taken in ad¬ vancing our gigantic community in the right direction. The city has never been behind in religious and char¬ itable exertion ; of late years its politics have been not a little improved, and the work of purification was never, more active than now, nor ever was urged more strongly and directly toward fundamental re¬ forms. But the artistic revival of a dozen or fifteen years ago has had a sudden fruition within the last year or two that goes along with a revival in all

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OPEN LETTERS, 472 aesthetic matters and should be especially noted for encouragement and example. The recent celebration of the centennial of an impor¬ tant date in the history of Columbia College has drawn public attention to an institution which shows abun¬ dant signs of rejuvenation. The college is still a college in name, but its tendency toward a genuine university establishment is emphasized in many ways ; notably in the conduct of its library, which, in its printed treasures and in its lecture courses, is a college in itself, the benefits of which are wisely and gen¬ erously extended with few restrictions to the entire community. The dinner to James Russell Lowell, Charles Wald- stein, and the trustees of the American School of Clas¬ sical Studies at Athens, was an event in line with the general movement ; and it is evident that the proper endowment of this school is sure to follow soon. The Metropolitan Museum has shared in the aesthetic gen¬ erosities of the time, and has received some splendid legacies and gifts. There is already the surety, also, of the generous endowment of a new and highly im¬ portant scheme for the direct advancement of Amer¬ ican art, in all its branches. Along with these signs of the times have come annual exhibitions of special interest — exhibitions which proclaim that the new generation of painters and sculptors have something in them beside suggestion and promise. The prosperous and growing Free Library scheme, and the Tilden bequest to the same general purpose, are a part of the new movement. It is evident that New York is yearly becoming a better city to live in. The Lincoln History. The current installment of the Life of Lincoln and History of his times reaches and includes an account of the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Although Lincoln had for years been opposed to Douglas in political discussions, the great struggle between these giants of debate did not occur till in 1858 they simul¬ taneously appealed to the people of Illinois for elec¬ tion to the United States Senate. The readers of the Life will fully appreciate the necessity felt by the authors to record amply and clearly the occurrences in Kansas, in Congress, and in the Supreme Court which led up to the political situation of 1858 and the celebrated canvass of that year in Illinois. This mo¬ mentous debate, which sent Douglas to the Senate and Lincoln to the White House, cannot be fully under¬ stood, in all its subtleties of argument and allusion, by those who are unfamiliar with the political events of immediately preceding years. The Life, which will certainly lose nothing in interest as it approaches more nearly the war period, will deal in August with Lincoln’s Ohio speeches and the Cooper Institute speech, and in September with Lin¬ coln’s nomination and election. OPEN LETTERS. Labor and Capital. A CONNECTICUT EXPERIMENT. IF Mr. Walter Besant wishes to see a workingmodel of the “ Palace of Delight ” so movingly described by him in that “ impossible story ” of his which bears the preposterous title, “All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” let him cross the ocean and visit the thrifty Connecti¬ cut town of Bridgeport. The novelist’s notion is that the chief trouble with the working people is their lack of pleasure ; and that pleasure enough is within their reach, cheap and wholesome, if they only knew where and how to find it. His theory is, therefore, that the philanthropist who can show the poor how to enjoy themselves is a better friend than the one who can in¬ crease their income; that he who can make one innocent pleasure grow where there was none before is a greater benefactor than he who puts two dimes into a purse where there was one before. Therefore he would turn the efforts of those who seek to improve the con¬ dition of the people in our cities toward the problem of brightening their lives by providing them with social amusements, or, better, toward the task of teaching them how to amuse themselves. That this kind of philan¬ thropy, like every other, will cost something, his fable teaches; but his contention is that money and effort expended along this line will produce the best results. What Mr. Besant would see, if he came to Bridge¬ port, is a beautiful building, nearly ready for occupa¬ tion, somewhat less magnificent than the airy nothing of his creation, and bearing the less ambitious desig¬ nation of “Seaside Institute.” It stands near Seaside Park, in the western suburb of the city, directly across the street from the factory of the Warner Brothers, by the side of which it has grown as the honeysuckle grows upon the cornfield wall, — the flower drawing its beauty and its fragrance froih the same kindly soil that nour¬ ishes and ripens the grain. The Warner Brothers are manufacturers of corsets, and they employ about one thousand women of various sorts and conditions, most of them young and unmarried. A bright, comely, wholesome-looking company of young women they are; four or five hundred of them might be picked out who, judging their intelligence by their faces, would not look out of place in the chapel at Smith, Wellesley, or Vassar. The average weekly wage of this thousand is about seven dollars each, — a larger amount than women in such callings generally earn, — which indicates that the dealings of the firm with its employees are not wholly regulated by competition. For a long time these employers have been study¬ ing the problem of the working-girl, and trying to find out how they could best improve her condition. They knew that a large share of the earnings of these girls must go for board and room-rent ; that it was possible for few of them to afford any but narrow, ill-lighted, ill-ventilated, unwarmed lodgings, and that no cheer¬ ful and comfortable place was open to them in which they might spend their leisure hours. They knew that the presence of so many of these girls in the skating- rinks and on the streets in the evening was due, in large part, to the fact that they had nowhere else to

Page 477

OPEN LETTERS, 473 go. They knew, moreover, that the kind of food fur¬ nished in such boarding-houses as they must patronize was in many cases inferior and unwholesome. Under such conditions it is not strange that the working-girls of the cities often develop abnormal appetites, and vicious tastes, and rude manners ; the wonder is that so many of them keep their health unbroken and their characters unsullied. And these men of good-will, studying with what seems to be a sincere philanthropy the welfare of the thousand women by whose labor they are accumulating their fortune, determined to build for them, if not a “ Palace of Delight,” at least a Hall of Comfort, in which shelter and care and companion¬ ship and opportunities of wholesome diversion and of mental cultivation should be freely furnished them. This “ Seaside Institute ” will cost the builders about forty thousand dollars. It is a shapely building externally — no mere barracks, but a well-proportioned and winning structure, seventy-five feet square and three stories in height, proclaiming in its very form the presence of other than “economical” motives. In the basement is a large refectory, with kitchen attached, in which the best of plain food will be furnished at cost. Those who wish will be permitted to order by the card; a glass of milk for a cent, or a cup of coffee at the same price, indicate the scale of the charges. An experienced and popular caterer tells me that the actual cost of the food is not more than this — that the project is feasible from this point of view. Those girls who wish may obtain regular board at this refectory, at prices not to exceed two dollars and a half a week. It is hoped that the charge may be less than this. “The food will be prepared,” say the proprietors, “ by experienced cooks, and served in the best manner. ” The value of this provision for the comfort and health of the girls can be estimated only by those who have tested the cooking of the average cheap boarding¬ house. To be permitted to sit down in a bright and airy room, at a clean and prettily furnished table, to a well-cooked meal, will seem to many of these young women a foretaste of Paradise. In the determination to make this part of their plan serviceable to their em¬ ployees, the proprietors will not haggle about the cost. If the refectory should not quite pay expenses, the bill of fare will not be cheapened, but the deficiency will be provided for. The floor above is entered from the street by a wide porch which opens into a generous hall, on the left of which is a reception and conversation room, connecting by sliding doors with a music-room in the rear. Back of this is an ample lavatory with numerous bath-rooms — a most sumptuous provision for the com¬ fort of the girls, and one which they are sure to appre¬ ciate. On the right of the hall is the great reading- room or common-room, a spacious and beautiful apartment, and in the rear of this, and communicating with it, the library, surrounded by low cases whose shelves will be filled with books for the use of the girls. Here, too, will be found numerous writing- tables and full supplies of writing-materials. An easy stairway leads to the second floor. The first apartment on the right of the hall is a room to be furnished with sewing-machines, where the girls will be able to do their own sewing. Farther on are two or three class-rooms, in which evening classes will be taught in any branches which the young women may VoL. XXXIV.— 65. desire to study. The plan is to permit them to organ¬ ize these classes for themselves, in any branch in which they may desire instruction, — singing, penman¬ ship, book-keeping, type-writing, stenography, fancy needlework, or whatever they wish; for all classes so organized, containing a certain number, teachers will be provided. The other side of this story is occu¬ pied by a large assembly-room, seating five or six hun¬ dred, with stage and anterooms, in which lectures, concerts, and entertainments of all kinds may be given to the inmates. It is hoped that they will take Mr. Besant’s hint with respect to the use of this room, and learn how to furnish with these facilities a large part of their own diversion. Several pianos will be located in different parts of the building, on which students of music will be per¬ mitted to practice. A competent matron will be put in charge of the Institute, to whose wisdom the general management will be largely intrusted. The whole build¬ ing is warmed by steam and lighted by electricity. The design is to furnish an attractive and delightful home for these young women during all the hours when they are not at work or asleep. The question about lodgings has been considered by the Messrs. Warner, but they havQ not been satisfied of the wisdom of fur¬ nishing these. It is possible that they may yet need lodging-houses in the neighborhood of the Seaside In¬ stitute ; but at present they are not convinced that it may not be better for their women to keep their rooms in private families. The proprietors have found by in¬ vestigation that half of their employees live within half a mile of the factory, so that the Institute will be eas¬ ily accessible to most of them. Several rooms in the third story will be furnished as lodgings into which any of the women who are ill, or temporarily without homes, may be received, under the matron’s care. “ All of the benefits afforded by the establishment,” say the proprietors, “ will be substantially free, except food, which will be furnished at or below cost. All the women who are in the employ of Warner Brothers will be entitled to any of the educational, literary, musical, and social privileges that may be furnished. ” There has been a question whether a small fee, say one dollar a year, might not secure a more general and freer use of the privileges of the Institute; whether the girls would not more readily avail themselves of a provision which was not entirely gratuitous. If any such charge should be made, it would be nominal, and only for the purpose of extending the benefits of the Institute. Another feature of the institution is thus described by one of the proprietors : “We shall have connected with the building a savings bank, in order to encourage our hands to save some portion of their earnings. I have long since learned that what one earns has little to do with what he saves. One with an income of ten thou¬ sand dollars is no more likely to lay aside a portion of his earnings than one with an income of one thousand. The principle of saving is either inherited, or it must be cultivated, and it is to encourage this principle that this branch of the institution will be established. This privilege will be extended to all our help, male and female.” Every employee who deposits two dollars a month is also promised that a half-dollar will be added to the deposit by the employers ; and interest will be paid on all deposits, besides the bonus allowed. It is evident that a considerable amount will be re-

Page 478

OPEN LETTERS. 474 quired to pay the operating expenses of this institution, and although this will be taken, at present, from the profits of the business, it is not to be left unprovided for in the event of a change in the proprietorship ; for a sum of money is being set apart as a permanent fund for the endowment of the Institute, that it may go on doing its beneficent work after its proprietors have passed to their reward. .In these days, when the hearts of the compassionate are torn by so many harrowing tales of man’s inhuman¬ ity to working-women, it is pleasant to be able to set forth the good deeds of these two chivalrous employers. Under the law of competition, which always pushes the weakest to the wall, women are the slaves of the labor market. They have not learned to combine; they have no power to resist the oppression of conscienceless cap¬ ital ; the price of their labor is therefore fixed by the most rapacious employers. Against them the iron law of wages,” in its bitterest sense, is continually being en¬ forced. By a logic which is as inexorable as the gi-ave, their compensation tends to starvation-point, nor does any merely “ economical ” force appear for their de¬ liverance. The less they receive, the less they are able to earn ; the labor-force in them is weakened by their impoverishment. The pictures that Helen Campbell has been showing us of the “ Prisoners of Poverty ” in New- York exhibit the natural result of unrestrained competition. If the women who work are to be rescued from their wretchedness, it must be done by the ap¬ pearance on their behalf of such knightly employers as these, who decline to build their fortunes upon the woes of women, and who determine to share their gains with those who have helped to gather them. Of course all this is donein sheer despite of the economical maxims. In the thought of such employers,** business is business,” and something more : it is opportunity ; it is steward¬ ship; it is the high calling of God. Not being omnis¬ cient I cannot pretend to discern all the motives of these employers, nor have they shown in my presence any dis¬ position to make any parade of their philanthopy ; but I visited their manufactory, by the side of which is planted this fair flower of their charity, and I have seen with my eyes what they are trying to do, and the thing which appears is this : that these two men are working as studiously, as resolutely, as patiently to improve the condition of their employees as they are to enlarge their fortunes. I believe that the one purpose lies as near their hearts as the other. Are they alone in this ? By no means. The number of those employers who find the vocation of the captain of industry to be a humane and a benign vocation is steadily growing. It was never growing so fast as it is to-day. The past two years, with all their strifes and turmoils, have wrought wonders in this realm. It begins to be evident enough that no organization of industry is stable and productive which does not bring in good¬ will as one of the working forces. It is just as true of industry as of art, that “ He that shuts Love out, in turn shall be Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie Howling in outer darkness.” The age of the soulless money-maker is passing ; the new nobility is coming to its own. It may be asked whether a higher justice, if not a true charity, would not require these employers to distribute directly in wages the money which they are devoting to this institution. I do not think so. They are giving their employees more than the market rate of wages for such service ; and this institution will be wonth far more to these women than the money which it costs would be if it were divided among them. The aggregate amount of comfort, of enjoyment, of health, and of welfare which this institution will produce will be indefinitely greater than they could purchase for themselves with the same sum. This is due, in part, to economical causes ; for comfort is a commodity that like most other commodities can be far more cheaply pro¬ duced on the large scale. The benefits of cooperative housekeeping, after which a generation of burdened housekeepers have struggled in vain, are secured for these employees by the good providence of their employer. There are moral reasons, also, for prefer¬ ring this method of distribution; for many of these beneficiaries would not, in their present state of mind, be likely to receive any real benefit from an increase of wages ; a little more candy, a few more ribbons, an additional number of evenings in the skating-rink or the cheap theater would tell the story of their added income. They need, most of all, higher tastes, simpler enjo)nnents, and habits of frugality; and the Seaside Institute is intended to lead them gently toward these higher things. When they have found this kingdom, many things can be added unto them. Washington Gladden. Christian Union. FROM THE BAPTIST POINT OF VIEW. The recent articles in The Century on the general subject of Christian union have been in a high degree interesting and instructive. He must be a very blind observer of ** the signs of the times ” who does not dis¬ cover strong tendencies toward a closer union among all denominations of Christians. At the New York State Baptist Pastors’ Conference held last fall at Pough¬ keepsie, a unanimous resolution was passed expressing this desire in explicit and emphatic terms. No body of Christians is more earnest than is the great Baptist denomination — numbering in the United States its millions — in offering the prayer of our Lord : ** That they all may be one.” By no formal appointment do I represent the denomination in this ** Open Letter ” ; but I am quite sure that I do not misrepresent its spirit and efforts. Three facts seem very plain to many at this time. First. The great denominations are drawing nearer together in their forms of service. Churches which have not a liturgy, in the technical sense of that term, are adopting more elaborate forms of worship than they formerly used. On the other hand, some churches, which come into the category of liturgical churches, are omitting, in some of their services, some of their usual forms. In some of the revival or ** mission ” services everything which once distinguished liturgical churchesis wanting. One might think in attendingthese services that he was at one of Mr. Moody’s meetings. These ** missions ” are themselves an illustration of the tendency here named. They are simply** revivals,” as the term has been used for generations among the more fervent Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists. The Roman church adopted them in forms adapted to

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OPEN LETTERS. their other methods of work; and some Episcopal churches have now come into the line of work long followed by other bodies. The same unifying tendency is seen in services in connection with the reception of new members and in preparation for the observance of the Lord’s Supper. This two-fold modification of services indicates progress along the line of union ; it is prophetic of greater progress soon to be made. It is greatly wise in every way. The oldest forms of creed, prayer, litany, chant, and hymn are the property of no one denomination. To claim a monopoly in their use is to manifest hopeless ignorance and unpardon¬ able bigotry. As well might one claim a monopoly of the sunshine or the evening breeze. Second. The different denominations to-day have es¬ sential union. At present organic union is undesirable. It is possible only by making dangerous compromises. A union which is possible only to those who believe any¬ thing or nothing to secure it, is bought at too dear a price. Honest convictions must be respected. Better that men differ honestly than agree by being indiffer¬ ent to all creeds. Essential union is possible and ac¬ tual to-day among the great majority of our Protestant churches. There are to-day wider differences among some of the branches of the Roman church than be¬ tween some of the different churches in our great Prot¬ estant host. There are churches in this city, not Roman, of the same name, which differ more widely in spirit and life than do certain other churches bearing differ¬ ent denominational names. Rationalism and Roman¬ ism, in many of their distinctive features, may be found under the same church name and authority. Here is organic but not essential union. When churches of different names work along the line of their honest convictions of the teachings of God’s word, they have essential union ; coming near to their common Lord, and coming near to lost men, they come genuinely near to one another. Such union is worth much. An or¬ ganic union, secured by concessions, compromises, and concealments of honest convictions, is a positive dam¬ age to all concerned. Third. Christian union, both essential and organic, is greatly retarded because many Christians refuse to accept the plain teaching of God’s word, and the con¬ clusions of the highest scholarship regarding the sub¬ jects and the act of baptism. Baptists hold that Christ alone can make laws for his church ; and that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice. They be¬ lieve that this word teaches with unmistakable clear¬ ness that believers are the only subjects of baptism, and that baptism is the immersion of believers into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If the Bible does not clearly teach these truths, what truths does it clearly teach? More explicit are its utterances on these subjects than regarding the divinity of Christ, or any article in the orthodox creeds. As a matter of fact, there are in this country to-day millions who cannot ac¬ cept sprinkling or pouring as baptism. But all men, al¬ ways and in all places, accept immersion as baptism; not to accept it, is not to accept baptism. If ever there is or¬ ganic union it will be at the baptistery. Baptists care little for the mode of baptism. The person to be bap¬ tized may kneel in the water, and be baptized forward; or he may stoop until the water flows over his head ; or he may be baptized backward. But Baptists insist upon baptism. They cannot accept a substitute for the 475 act honored by the audible or visible presence of each Person in the Trinity when Jesus was baptized ; hon¬ ored in this respect as was no other act of obedience in our Lord’s life. The so-called “ Teaching of the Apostles ” does not call anything baptism but immer¬ sion. It gives directions for baptism, and then, when the conditions of baptism are wanting, although we find them always possible, it gives permission for something else, not called baptism. This “ teaching” Baptists alone live up to ; it is especially their docu¬ ment. Their views the highest scholarship indorses. Lexicographers such as Donnegan, Schleusner, Greenfield, Stourdza, Liddell and Scott, Robinson, Wahl, Grimm, Wilke, and many more distinctly and emphatically affirm that baptize, which is properly a Greek word, means to dip, to immerse, to plunge. Such religious teachers as Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, Archbishop Leighton, Wesley, Conybeare, and Dean Stanley say that immersion was the original mode. Such commentators as Chalmers, Zwingle,Ewald, De Wette, Meyer, Godot, Alford, Plumptre, Bishop Elli- cott, and many more, representing various churches and countries, say in substance that same thing. Such his¬ torians of our Lord’s ministry and of the apostolic church as Mosheim, Neander, G. A. Jacobs, Geikie, Pressense, Conybeare and Howson, Lewin, Dean Stanley, Edersheim, Farrar, Weiss, Hagenbach, and Dollinger, and such recent learned theologians as Luthardt, Van Oosterzee, Schmidt, Dorner, and Rothe, agree substantially with the learned Dr. Schaff when he says, “ Immersion, and not sprinkling, was unques¬ tionably the original form.” Luther, Dr. Wall, Neander, Olshausen, and Professor Lange agree with Dr. Hanna when he says, “ Scripture knows nothing of the bap¬ tism of infants.” If scholarship can prove anything, it has established the Baptist position regarding the sub¬ jects and the act of baptism. The point I make is this : All are agreed on immer¬ sion as baptism ; all cannot agree on anything else. All can be baptized without doing violence either to con¬ viction or to conscience. High Roman, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist and other authorities can be cited — and their exact words given — to prove all these statements regarding the teaching of the highest scholarship; and the plain teaching of the Bible to the unlearned is in harmony with the conclusions of the highest scholarship. Baptists have no option but to be separate so long as others refuse to follow Christ in baptism. If a pastor in any of the churches not Bap¬ tist were to teach and practice our views, he would be driven out. What then could he do but be separate from his former brethren ? If others than Baptists will not do what conviction and conscience permit them to do, it is certain that they do not much desire union. Surely in such a case the charge of bigotry and schism does not lie at the door of Baptists. We shall con¬ tinue to pray, “ that they all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me, . . . that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” R. .S’. Mac Arthur. Calvary Baptist Church, New York. American Students in Germany. Now that multitudes of American college graduates annually migrate to Berlin, Leipzig, Gottingen, and Strasburg, it may not be out of place to call attention

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OPEN LETTERS. 476 to some widespread misapprehensions concerning the charms and advantages of life in a German univer¬ sity town. No impression concerning Germany is more wide¬ spread than that the cost of living there is exceedingly cheap. This is always a potent argument in deciding students of limited means in favor of life in Germany. This is certainly, however, a wrong impression, as far as it applies to the expenses of the American student in Germany as compared with his expenses at most of our colleges. A few figures will put the facts in the most definite shape. In Leipzig, which is prob¬ ably the cheapest city in the German empire, the aver¬ age price of the boarding-houses which rank as good — though their fare would be counted rather scant and poor in America — is about twenty-five dollars a month, for room, fuel, and board. In Berlin the best board¬ ing-houses set somewhat better tables than those of a corresponding grade in Leipzig, but their prices are much higher. Many German students, it is true, subsist upon much less, but how they do so must be to an American an insoluble mystery, unless there be a marvelous potency of nourishment in beer. There are also Americans who keep soul and body together at rates considerably lower than those mentioned. But in a good many such cases it is perfectly apparent that these students are working with only half their native force. The writer is cognizant of several cases in which men broke down entirely either during their stay in Germany or shortly after their return, their failure of health being almost un¬ questionably due to lack of proper diet and self-care while abroad. Cheap German living is not adapted to an American constitution. As far as the social life of Germany is concerned, the American student must in the main content him¬ self with an outside view. The ideal German house¬ hold into which he is to be received as one of the family, and whose members are to devote themselves to teaching him the language, is a pure illusion, or at best a boarding-house where he joins with a tableful of his countrymen in speaking poor German. In fact, the presence of a host of English-speaking people in every prominent German city is a serious hindrance to the facility with which the American might otherwise learn the language and assimilate himself to the man¬ ners and customs of the country. It is probably bet¬ ter, however, to submit to this hindrance than to refuse, as some do, to mingle at all with those who speak English ; for, in so doing, one loses the opportunity to become acquainted with many of the finest rep¬ resentatives of English and American learning. The students who gather from America and England in Gottingen, Leipzig, and Berlin, are, in the main, a choice representative company. Not even in America itself can one gain so comprehensive a view of the ed¬ ucational work of our nation, as by mingling in a Ger¬ man university town with students from almost every State of the Union. A great mistake of fully half the American students in Germany is that they have fixed upon no definite department of study before coming, or, if they have done so, have not prepared themselves sufficiently at home to undertake it to advantage in the university. As is well known, the German student, on entering university, decides what his profession is to be, and se¬ lects his studies accordingly. The thorough drill of the Gymnasium or Realschule has fitted him for the in¬ dependent study demanded of him in the university. Now the American just out of college has not only the difficulty of the language to cope wdth ; he finds fully as great a difficulty in the lecture system and in the use of books of reference. He has had no adequate training for the work he must do, and he is pretty sure to end his first semester, if not his first year, in a state of almost hopeless confusion. I think no American can listen to many courses of lectures in a German university without becoming convinced of the superiority of the better class of American college professors in the art of instruction. Except in the occasional interviews of the Seminar, the German professor has none of that training which comes from meeting the intelligent questions of a clever class. An American professor learns in the course of a few years’ experience to feel the pulse of his class, as it were, and to know in an instant whether he has made himself understood. Many of the most famous German professors, on the other hand, elaborate with tedious detail the simplest matters, and sometimes merely hint at the explanation of real difficulties. They are for the most part closely confined in their lectures to what they have carefully prepared beforehand, and any occasion to think or to answer on the spur of the moment is pretty sure to throw them into confusion. With some brilliant exceptions, remarkable for their clearness, systematic arrangement, and beauuty of lan¬ guage, they pay no attention to the ‘‘art of putting things,” their style frequently being execrable. One thing that greatly annoys the American student in Germany is the lack of such library privileges as he can enjoy in the best colleges at home. Not but that the German libraries are very large and complete, but their availability is so limited by various restrictions as well as by the lack of comprehensive and accessible catalogues, that in despair many American students soon give up trying to obtain books. I have purposely spoken only of certain disappoint¬ ments and disadvantages which the American student is likely to experience in Germany. Of the delightful sensation of personal freedom from all rules and re¬ straints, and the powerful inspiration to independent study which he also experiences, as well as of the enor¬ mous debt of gratitude w’hich American scholarship owes to the German university, it is needless to speak — as, indeed, it would be difficult to speak in too glow¬ ing terms. Mo7'ris B. C^'awford. Photography and American Art.* There is a great deal that is worth watching in American Art at the present time; and one of these things is the effect of photography upon art, — not merely the effect of the Muybridge revelations, which *“Book of American Figure Painters,” with introduction by Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. “The Blessed Damozel,” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with drawings by Kenyon Cox. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. “She Stoops to Conquer,” a comedy by Dr. Goldsmith, with drawings by Edwin A. Abbey, decorations by Alfred Parsons, in¬ troduction b3’^ Austin Dobson. New York: Harper & Bros. “A Book of the Tile Club,” with sketch of the club, by F. Hop- kinson Smith and Edward Strahan. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. “The Art Review,” Vol. I., Nov., '86, to May, ’87. New York: George F. Kelly, 59 Carmine sUeet.

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OPEN LETTERS. 477 though of great value may easily be overdone as as¬ sistants to the artist; not merely the general and un¬ doubted effect of all photography from nature — an jeffect extended and made more intimate by the spread of amateur photography; not merely the general diffusion of art instruction and influence by means of photographic copies of the old masters, etc.; not merely the great and important use of photography in wood¬ engraving, but also the growing use of photography in various reproductive methods, and the effect of their use upon illustration in particular, and upon current art in general. The success of Elihu Vedder’s ‘‘ Omar Khayyam,” and of William H, Low’s “ Lamia ” in previous years, was the occasion of such volumes in the last season as the “ Book of American Figure Painters,” and Kenyon Cox’s “ Blessed Damozel ” ; — possibly such success may also have had something to do with the book form in which Edwin Abbey’s illustrations of “ She Stoops to Conquer ” were brought out. These photographic processes have, therefore, become a strong factor in American art development, and have given the opportunity to publishers to employ our better ar¬ tists upon continuous series of congenial subjects ; as well as to present to the public good-sized reproduc¬ tions of unrelated original designs, either made for the purpose or already completed, as in the “ Book of Amer¬ ican Figure Painters.” This volume, though its pictures are not of uniform merit, deserves the attention of the connoisseur. Kenyon Cox has not yet surpassed his “ Evening ” in this collection. Here, too, are Dewing’s exquisite “ Days,” Winslow Homer’s “ Lost on the Grand Banks,” and Bunker’s “Dozing Tar” — with examples of La Farge, Wyatt Eaton, Vedder, Julian Weir, Eastman Johnson, Volk, Dielman, Shirlaw, Millet, Chase, and other painters of ability. A better collection is easily imaginable, — but single pictures in this gallery are worth the cost of the whole sumptuous volume. The “ Blessed Damozel ” of Cox, it is natural for each critic to assume, is not the “ Blessed Damozel ” of the poet; and we find moreover, in this series, that tendency to stick too closely to the model, which is this artist’s danger ; but we find also a keen and unusual decorative and pictorial sense, as well as un¬ doubted evidences of imagination. Mr. Abbey is in¬ debted to the actinic, and other processes in which photography comes into play, in the preparation of his illustrations for “ She Stoops to Conquer,” a work as near perfection in its illustrative and artistic qualities in its own line as contemporaneous art can show. The delightfully illustrated “ Book of the Tile Club ” also owes much of its attractiveness to the photographic processes. If we were not speaking especially of the photographic side of the subject, we should like to en¬ large upon the art qualities displayed in the covers of all the four books here mentioned ; but instead will call attention to the extremely successful use of the photogravure in the new American “Art Review,” whose bound volumes are an invaluable storehouse of current American art. Notes. THE NEW ENGLAND EMIGRANT AID COMPANY. To THE Editor: There are what I regard as grave errors in relation to Kansas, in the life of Lin¬ coln, in your April number, which I would gladly cor¬ rect in your columns without delay. But you inform me, in your note of the 25th inst., that it would be some time before a reply could appear. ■ I beg leave, therefore, to say that these errors are partly refuted in some lectures which I gave by re¬ quest of the Worcester Society of Antiquity. In its “Proceedings for 1886” an abstract of these lectures has been published. A much more full and elaborate refutation will appear in the book which I am now writing, to be called “The History of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and its Influence, through the Kansas Contest, upon our National History.” It is my purpose to have this book ready for the reader by the end of the present year. Eli Thayer. . Worcester, Mass., April 30, 1887. THE GOVERNMENT OF CITIES. The plan of John D. Cutter, in the May Century, to better the government of cities by securing in the City Council members elected by guilds which represent various business interests, to be complete should in¬ clude a representation from the house-mothers. The home-makers represent the largest and, in a sense, the most important of all the interests. The women who compose it are preeminently law-abiding and orderly. Their chief occupation is the care of the children and of the family. Hence, all their interests are opposed to everything that endangers the peace and well-being of the whole community. Any change in the form of city government which looks to its improvement should include women, with the right to vote. More than thirty years ago Wendell Phillips said, “ The suffrage of women has much to do with the gov¬ ernment of great cities.” Has not the time fully come when it should be brought in as an added power on the side of law and order ? Lticy Stone. A CORRESPONDENT objects to the phrase, “Treeless and birdless,” in a poem on Dakota recently printed in The Century. He writes that many ten-acre groves have been planted, and that the Territory is noted for its birds. In the “ General Recollections of Louis Blanc,” by Karl Blind, on page 80 of the May number, the sen¬ tence : “ Thiers cast his vote against declaration of war, first, last, and ever,” ought to read thus: “ Finally, Thiers practically voted for ‘ the war by way of granting the supplies, like the other members of the Opposition.’ ”

Page 482

BRIC-A-BRAC. Uncle Esek’s Wisdom. Vanity perhaps has made more people polite, and even endurable, than has any one of the virtues. Man may not reach perfection, but he can reach for it ; this is all that is required of him. Be a man first, and then you can be a gentleman at your leisure. We seem to have four kinds of people : those who are moving forward; those who are on the move backward ; those who are standing still ; and those who are going to start in some direction soon. The strongest intimacies we see are between knaves and fools ; a fool never gets higher than to admire cunning in his associate. There is many a heart that dwells in its soul, like a hermit in his cell, its own sad and sorrowing con¬ fessor. If a man has real merit, there is nothing that will bring him into notice so well as abuse. The man who is vain of his wealth only proves that he thinks more of his money than of himself. There are very many people who stand ready to sacrifice their lives, and their neighbors’ lives too, in defense of their creed, who are willing to let their religion shift for itself. A JEST is often a weak and silly thing, a witticism a cold and cruel thing, but a joke is ever the fun of humor. All genuine truth is orthodox. As LONG as temptations exist, man will hunt for them. Mentally, morally, and physically, man is com¬ posed of all things good, bad, and indifferent ; he is a kind of a human rag-bag. To BE a good critic, a man must have all the intrin¬ sic elements of a good author ; and yet, while we have but few good authors, even the solitudes and waste places teem with critics. Beware of the still man ; he is getting your size, and concealing his own. The wisdom of the past has come to us in sentences, not pages. If it were not for our passions, our reason would be almost impotent. • Success don’t impose itself upon any one; those who win must reach for things, and at the same time cul¬ tivate their grip. All the real wits and humorists are a sedate people ; their wit and humor is worked out soberly, with line and plummet. Any man who has any one of the virtues strongly developed has a coloring of them all in his character. U^icle Esek. Our Saint. The one I sing was born and bred Ere proud Queen Fashion’s whims had led A single maid to vex her head O’er pug or poodle ; Her form was lithe, her face was fair. Her laugh was blithe and debonair. Her voice was sweet, — her favorite air Was “Yankee Doodle.” She used to play an old spinet, The same is in existence yet Amid the dust and cobwebs set High in our garret ; And oft she spun from dawn till gloom In some quaint, low, be-gabled room ; She loved the fabric of her loom Nor scorned to wear it. In stately minuet or reel. With large-bowed slippers, high of heel. Hers was the step that roused the zeal In hearts of gallants : Folk high and lowly both to please. To make bright niots and repartees. To bake, to brew, — she numbered these Among her talents. Whene’er she passed in quilted gown Along the highways of the town. Small wonder that the swains bowed down In admiration ; And when a handsome stranger bore The fair one from her father’s door. Why marvel that the jealous swore From sheer vexation? A day more gay was seldom seen Than her bright wedding-day, I ween ; And she, — she bore herself a queen In look and motion. And when, with him she loved, she led The wedding-dance, more light her tread Than any barque that ever sped O’er wave of ocean. The broidered bodice that she wore While footing it along the floor Has lain for fifty years and more In some dark chest hid ; And he whose arm around it stole. Sought while yet young the starry goal, A grief which she has, patient soul. Long in her breast hid. Her eyes are dim, her voice is faint. And yet she never makes complaint ; One more serene and like a saint I have to yet see Than she who in the corner sits And dozes, while she knits and knits Her little nephew’s socks and mitts, — My great-aunt Betsy. Clinton Scot lard.

Page 483

BRIC-A-BRAC. 479 NOTES AT AN AUCTION. I. The auctioneer. 2. The confident bidder. 3. Indifferent. 4. Hired. 5. Disappointed. A Parting Wish. We bade each other a long adieu, With looks and tones regretful. “Whatever happens,” I sadly said, “We never shall be forgetful.” “ Ah, never ! ” replied my faithful friend, “ Our past is a pleasant story. And oh, I hope we shall meet again This side of the crematory! ” M, F. Butts. On the Ocklawaha. Though perfumes scent the air. And skies are soft and blue. Though shores be fresh and fair, I long for you, for you. I sigh for cold gray skies. And the chill sleet slanting through. It is fair — but I close my eyes And I long for you, for you. Walter Learned.

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480 BRIC-A-BRAC, A Pin. Oh, I know a certain woman who is reckoned with the good, But she fills me with more terror than a raging lion would. The little chills run up and down my spine whene’er we meet, Though she seems a gentle creature and she’s very trim and neat. And she has a thousand virtues and not one acknowledged sin, But she is the sort of person you could liken to a pin. And she pricks you, and she sticks you, in a way that can’t be said — When you seek for what has hurt you, why, you cannot find the head. But she fills you with discomfort and exasperating pain — If anybody asks you why, you really can’t explain. A pin is such a tiny thing,— of that there is no doubt,— Yet when it’s sticking in your flesh, you’re wretched till it’s out ! She is wonderfully observing — when she meets a pretty girl She is always sure to tell her if her “ bang ” is out of curl. And she is so sympathetic : to her friend, who’s much admired. She is often heard remarking, “ Dear, you look so worn and tired I ” And she is a careful critic; for on yesterday she eyed The new dress I was airing with a woman’s natural pride. And she said, “ Oh, how becoming ! ” and then softly added, “ It Is really a misfortune that the basque is such a fit.” Then she said, ‘‘ If you had heard me yestereve, I’m sure, my friend, You would say I am a champion who knows how to defend.” And she left me with the feeling — most unpleasant, I aver — That the whole world would despise me if it had not been for her. Whenever I encounter her, in such a nameless way She gives me the impression I am at my worst that day. And the hat that was imported (and that cost me half a sonnet) With just one glance from her round eyes becomes a Bowery bonnet. She is always bright and smiling, sharp and shining for a thrust — Use does not seem to blunt her point, nor does she gather rust — Oh ! I wish some hapless specimen of mankind would begin To tidy up the world for me, by picking up this pin. Ella Wheeler Wilcox. A Slip. A BROOKLET and a pretty maid o’er mossy stones went tripping. And then the pretty maiden said, “ I’m awful ’fraid of slipping.” The saucy brooklet laughed aloud, as it ran o’er a bowlder. And whispered, “ She’d have surely slipped if he''d been here to hold her.” W. A. Beicham. In the Old Days. Battledoor. “ The opinion which men entertain of antiquity is a very idle thing, and almost incongruous to the word ; for the old age and length of days of the world should in reality be accounted an¬ tiquity, and ought to be attributed to our own times, not to the youth of the world which it enjoyed among the ancients; for that age, though with respect to us it be ancient and greater, yet with regard to the world it was new and less.” — Bacon. In the old days, when you and I were young, Before the story was told, and the song was sung. You spoke, it seems to me now, in another tongue. In the old days, before we were grown so wise. When gladness meant the same to uS as surprise, You looked at me with other, with truer eyes. Merry-hearted maidens four. Laughing, play at battledoor; And my heart, the shuttlecock. To and fro they nimbly knock. Maggie, Fannie, Hattie, Kate — How their bright eyes scintillate. As the poor, bewildered thing Back and forth they gayly fling ! Ha! ’tis lodged in Fannie’s hair; Scarce a moment nestles there. When away it bounding flies. Lighting plump in Hattie’s eyes. In the old days, when life was martial and grand, Before we had learned to reckon and understand. You clasped my hand with another, a warmer hand. In the old days ? Ah, what is this I have sung ? Were they old days, when grief spoke an unknown tongue ? These are the old days — those, the lost, were the young. Margaret Vandegrift. Now in Katie’s kerchief hides ; Then, abashed and blushing, glides, (Battledoor is full of slips Bouncing straight to Maggie’s lips. Merry-hearted maidens four. Playing thus at battledoor. Cease, oh 1 cease, my heart to knock. Poor, bewildered shuttlecock 1 C. S. P. THE DE VIHNB PRESS, PRINTERS, NEW YORK.

Page 485

PHOTOGRAPHED BY J. J, HAWES. ENGRAVED BY C. A. JULIA WARD HOWE. POWELL.

Page 486

MIDSUMMER HOLIDAY NUMBER. The Century Magazine. VoL. XXXIV. AUGUST, 1887. No. 4. The stillness of the Patriarch’s studio had been broken by a loud knock announcing Brushes and the Scribe. The Patriarch had just returned from a sketching-tour in Hol¬ land. At the present moment the blue smoke from three corn-cob pipes filled the cozy in¬ terior, and drifted up in uneven lines to the skylight. “Very charming, my dear fellow,” said Brushes, critically examining the Patriarch’s color-sketch of some Dutch luggers reflected in the canal, with the spires of Dordrecht in the distance ; “ but why tramp the earth in search of the picturesque when Berkshire, the Long Island Coast, and Jersey are right at your door ? Some good art begins at home.” The Patriarch leaned back in his chair, looked sidewise at his Academy picture of San Giorgio, nearly completed, incredulously closed one eye, and blew a cloud of Lone Jack through the window. Brushes took possession of the greater part of a divan covered with skins, and continued : “ Furthermore, see how you travel. Crowded into a stufly state-room or packed into a Pull¬ man. This done, you think you have reached all the luxury of the century, and yet here within a mile of us, in fact at the foot of this very street, are half a dozen floating comforts, each one of which contains more actual lux¬ ury to the square yard than a fleet of Cunard- ers — I mean an ordinary canal-boat.” Up to this time the Scribe, the proprietor of the third pipe, had kept silent. “What sort of a canal-boat. Brushes? An excursion-yacht with silk cushions, red and white striped awnings, and a tea-kettle in the stern with a tin whistle ? ” “ No, your imaginative quill,” replied Brush¬ es; “a plain white-painted, three-hatched, and poop-cabined canal-boat with two mules ahead and a rudder behind ; a skipper to steer, his wife to help cook, and a deck-hand for¬ ward to ‘snub’* her in the locks and take a line to the tow-path. See here,” he con¬ tinued, springing from the lounge, seizing a piece of charcoal, and reversing a canvas; “here’s your regulation canal-boat,” and he sketched in the outline of Noah’s ark without the traditional house. “ Over this flat deck I * An expression used by canal-boatmen, meaning to check the impetus of boats on entering a lock. Copyright, 1887, by The Century Co. All rights reserved.

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484 SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. mean to rig an awning, on movable legs, to ac¬ commodate low bridges. Down this forward hatch I throw a broad staircase leading into the hold. When you get down into it you will find an interior about seventy feet long, eighteen feet wide, with a ceiling some nine feet high, beamed and bracketed like a Vene¬ tian banquet-hall, and furnished like a gallery with three great skylights for air and light. This is your Grand Salon. Up under the bow, between the bracing timbers of the boat, are your butler’s pantry and a place for your Allegretti, with its ice and provender. Next to it, divided by partitions of straw mat¬ tings and curtains, are your dressing-rooms. ^‘Now cover the floor of the iDoat with mattings overlaid with India rugs; hang the walls with tapestries and studio stuff; place against them some cabinets, and divans serving as beds by night and lounges by day; build amidships and under the larger hatch your dining-table; move in a lot of studio properties, antique chairs, hanging-lamps, old water-jars, pottery, and brass, with some linen, glass, and china; get a good cook and a com¬ petent steward, and you have a craft com¬ pared to which Cleopatra’s barge was an Indian dug-out.” It was evident that neither the Scribe nor the Patriarch saw these possibilities. “You don’t believe it? Come with me, then, in the morning, and pick out a boat. It is exactly the month to make the trip. We The Patriarch was not convinced, but his curiosity conquered. The three agreed to meet the daily North River tow on its arrival at Coen ties Slip, New York city, the next morn¬ ing, and the sum of all the adventures growing out of that decision will be found in the suc¬ ceeding pages. “ Too narrow,” said Brushes, peering down the half-lifted hatch of a Lake Champlain boat; “ what we w^ant is an Erie boat. Our canal is the Raritan. There are ik) bridges that do not swing, and a twenty-foot laker can slip through any lock without scratching her paint.” Before noon Brushes had traveled over the decks and slid down the hatches of half the boats in the basin. Some were too low^ ; others under charter ; one was full of potatoes ; an¬ other loaded with a miscellaneous cargo of chairs, cheese, bales of straw, and w'ooden ware; a few \vere loaded with grain, and only one or two empty. “ Say, Cap,” yelled out a red-shirted, straw- hatted skipper from the cabin window ofacanal- boat, “ Dusenberry’s got a boat jes suit you. Regular long-waister, she is. No thwart tim¬ bers, hatches more’n ten feet across, and a daisy of a kitchen and cabin. She is hauled out at Hoboken. Dusenberry’s been paintin’ on her.” What’s her name ? ” “The Seth G. Cowles S In ten minutes the party had crossed the ferry, Brushes forging ahead, and the Scribe WHARF RATS. want an outing, and New Jersey, with its his¬ toric associations, quaini houses, and flat stretches of marsh and water, is Holland all over again, even to the windmills.” “’Tis well,” said the Scribe, “and we will wire Scraps to join us at Perth Amboy, and if your floating Oriental coal-bin is unendura¬ ble, we will make a tent of the awning, unload the furniture, and camp out at the first lock.” and the Patriarch catching their breath three blocks behind. There was no mistaking the boat. She lay high and dry on the mud¬ flats, with her name in gold letters freshly painted across her stern. The nautical eye of Brushes took in her points at a glance. He was heard to say, Twenty foot beam; wide hatches ; flush deck ; cabin well aft ; bow high ; and tight as a drum.” Dusenberry came up.

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SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 485 paint-brush in Imnd, and confirmed Brushes’ ing ferries began to take an interest in the favorable opinion. The price was agreed upon, proceedings ; so did the wharf rats, who fringed and all arrangements completed to deliver her the hatches till the last moment, at the foot of East Thirty-first street, at high Brushes sent his ’cello, the Scribe his guitar, water, a few days later. while Scraps brought his voice. Before night The succeeding two days were spent in the the Cowles had developed from a canal-boat THE GRAND SALON. construction of an awning with a patent up- and-down folding movement ; making a stair¬ case with protecting railings ; fitting up a but¬ ler’s pantry, with racks for dishes, shelves for groceries, and the like. Each man had his duties. All carpenter work and fittings were, of course. Brushes’. The Patriarch had charge of the decoration, tapestry, furniture, studio properties, etc. ; the Scribe, the crockery, glass, kitchen-ware, and domestic comforts; while Scraps, who had rushed in hot haste from Perth Amboy, was a committee of one for provisions and stew¬ ard’s supplies in general. Under the Scribe’s care came also the selection of a steward. At the end of the second day he produced a light- colored mulatto, all collar and shoes, with the bow of a folding jack-knife and the man¬ ners of a diplomate. His name was Moses. The eventful day and the Cowles came in at about the same hour; for, with the economical habits of her distinguished commander,Captain Dusenberry, she swung in at daylight, so as to gain half a day on her charter; and before the Patriarch had broken the shell of his egg at breakfast, word came that the Coiules was along¬ side of the string-piece, and ready for cargo. Later the same day the furniture and fittings were on board, and crowds from the neighbor- grub to a butterfly Venetian barge. Even Cap¬ tain Dusenberry, who had uneasily watched the transformation from his seat beside the tiller, was heard to say to his wife : ‘‘ Marthy, old Seth looks like a circus.” To him, as to the boatmen, lockmen, drivers, and others of their sort, who clambered on board, at invi¬ tation or without it, many times a day during the trip, the floating studio was a veritable wonder ; an accumulation of much that was rich, strange, and beautiful to them, and of many rare objects of art at Avhich they could only express astonishment — not always com¬ plimentary. About a quarter of the hold, un¬ der the forward deck, had been curtained oft' for the use of the steward, and for the storage of his supplies ; and a corner of this space near the stairs, which led down the forward hatch, was reserved as a dressing-room. An open space under the stern hatch, separated from the salon by heavy old draperies of satin and embroidered silk, through which the light from the after-hatch shed a soft illumination, was reserved for the storage of personal baggage, extra cots for expected friends, elaborate mos¬ quito nettings, sketching traps, and art mate¬ rials enough to last the whole summer. Thus the entire central portion of the hold, a space of sixty or seventy feet, became the salon, and

Page 489

486 SNUBBIN' THROUGH JERSEY. MAKING UP THE TOW. upon its adornment and convenient arrange¬ ment all the assembled taste and experience were centered. The walls from floor to ceiling were cov¬ ered with old tapestries, and upon them were hung rare etchings, delf plaques, brass sconces, and choice pictures. There was still plenty of room to tack up sketches as fast as made. At intervals, along the sides, Venetian church- lamps, a censer or two, and some richly hued marine lanterns were suspended from the dark, heavy beams which upheld the deck and served as a magnificent ribbed ceiling, low and agree¬ able in tone, and beautiful in its curved lines. At the farther end of the salon was built a per¬ manent table of generous dimensions, placed longitudinally, which served as a dining-table, and which became, between meals and in the evening, a common center across which were ex¬ changed the adventures of the day and the plans for the morrow. About it were grouped a num¬ ber of carved and ornamented antique arm¬ chairs of large pattern, each one of which was to its neighbor a stranger from a strange land. Holland, Spain, Italy, Mexico, England, and Plymouth Rock jogged elbows, and trod under their feet prayer-rugs from Smyrna, Bokhara, and Hindostan. The coal-stained floor, and the battered keelson, upon which had been dumped many a ton of anthracite, carefully scrubbed and cleansed, were covered through¬ out the length of the boat with fresh, clean China matting. The cots along the side were perfectly disguised as divans, and brought into tone ” by a judicious use of Turkish and In¬ dia rugs, camel’s-hair blankets, etc. A carved oaken chest, of the thirteenth century, served as a sideboard, and from the opposite side an English high chest- of- drawers of two hundred years ago flaunted its brass handles. A Jap¬ anese bronze vase, as high as the back of an old-fashioned chair, richly ornamented in re¬ lief with tangled gods and sacred snakes, de¬ graded from the splendor for which it was deservedly intended, now served as a deposi¬ tory for smoking materials. Nearby an old-fash¬ ioned writing-desk, always open, presented a continual opportunity for communication with the unfortunates in the outside world, — above it a shelf or two of well-used favorites (chief among them the Patriarch’s Dante and the Bhagavata Gita), with the current magazines^ and a few light publications of the year. An easel or two, colored silk draperies at the main hatch to diffuse the light, bracketed and swing¬ ing lamps at convenient intervals, and brass, plaques to catch wandering rays, completed the interior.

Page 490

SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. Let go your bow line ! ” sang out the cap¬ tain of the tug Yoimg America, getting up the boats for the night’s tow. The crew sprang literally as one man, reenforced by the Scribe, who had sailed a yacht to Mt. Desert and felt his position. However, despite the Scribe’s assistance, the Coia/es swung clear, and floated out into the East River to join a group of empty coal-boats forming a part of the great tow bound for Perth Amboy and the entrance of the Raritan Canal at New Brunswick. It was near the close of an August day. A gen¬ tle breeze fluttered the apron around the top of the awning and scattered over the deck the loose leaves of an unguarded portfolio. The Yoimg America, with her miscellaneous assortment of canal-boats, dodged here and there across the river, now stopping at New¬ town Creek, and then at several wharves on the Brooklyn side, and so on under the bridge to the Erie Basin. Each addition to the tow brought its complement of wharf rats, evidently attracted by the unusual appearance of the Cowles. They boarded the craft from all sides, hung their legs over the main hatch, and made themselves entirely at home with everything within reach. “ Hey, Jimmy,” said one of a group lying flat over the rim of the hatch with their legs spread out like the ribs of a Japanese fan, “ ain’t them daisy chromos ? Say, mister, wot’s 487 object lesson, he explained that it was a can in which the girls in Holland carried milk, — can at each end of a shoulder rest, — some¬ times walking a mile or two to a market. Huh, full o’ beer it wouldn’t get half that far,” was what he got for his pains. Another producedawetbase-ballandbegged Scraps to catch his curves. Another scaled a post and ran the length of the awning, skip¬ ping every other brace, and at the end falling into the arms of Dusenberry, who dropped him over the high stern and nearly into the lap of an old woman who was peeling potatoes for the evening meal on the deck of a lower canal- boat. The main tow for Raritan is made up at Communipaw Flats. Here the harbor tugs bring the boats from their various docks. The loaded boats are placed in the center, and the light ones outside. It is the business of the tow-master to see that all the expected boats are accounted for, in proper places, and that the whole tow is well made up. He has quarters on the wharf-boat, an old craft with a house on deck, anchored on the flats, and is a power in his way. It was long after dark when the main tow shunted her charge, includ¬ ing the Cowles, alongside the wharf-boat, and then, with a parting salute, melted into the gloom. The night was intensely dark. Against the overcast sky the lights on the Brooklyn NEW BRUNSWICK: THE COAL DOCKS. the brass jug ? ” The Patriarch had with in¬ finite pains brought the battered and patched article from Dordrecht, and on the present oc¬ casion it stood on the sideboard in the salon, filled with flowers. Seizing the chance of an Bridge sparkled like a huge necklace of dia¬ monds, and the ferry-boats flew about like fireflies. At the wharf-boat were one or two dim lanterns, and near the bow of each ca¬ ll aler was a lantern of uncertain hue, but in-

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488 SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY “them fellers never does no work.’ tended to be white. A short distance up stream an enormous double-decked tug lay in wait like a huge monster, its two white lights at the mast-heads describing dizzy curves as she rolled about. Now and then her open furnace doors illuminated the tow from end to end, investing the figures of the ir.en as they moved about with the appearance of unearthly and intangible beings. When fairly off, the life on the boats assumed a new phase. The majority were empty coal-boats, — ‘‘Chunkers” from Mauch Chunk, or “ Skukers ” from “Schuyl¬ kill Haven,” — and each one carried a crew of two; among the thirty boats in the tow fully one-half had on board the wives and children of the captains. Suddenly, all over the tow fires were lighted in the little coal stoves on deck, and the evening meal, put off until under way, was in preparation. Odors were wafted to the Coiules that bespoke a feast some¬ where to windward. The awn¬ ing, aglow with the light from the hatches, became a shining mark, attracting all the boys and men of the tow. The men said little, but the boys made up for any inattention of this kind. “ Say, Billy,” said one who until then had been silent, “them fellers never does no work.” At last the deck was deserted, the hatches were pulled over so as to keep out the damp and yet admit a draft, and in a few moments all was dark and quiet. “ Come, boys, tumble out and come up on deck and see Hol¬ land.” It was Scraps in his pa¬ jamas. The tow was approaching Perth Amboy, where Moses an¬ nounced coffee on deck. The. Raritan finds its sinuous way through broad green salt mead¬ ows that stretch off like soft carpets until they meet the clay beds and tangled woods of the Jersey shore. It was indeed Hol¬ land; the same flat landscape and long stretches of green marsh. One constantly expected a windmill to appear on the sedge, or the spires and crooked tiled roofs of a Dutch village. In the morning light the tow was a busy and interesting scene. The boats at the head were ar¬ ranged six abreast, the strongest among the loaded ones being selected to take the strain of the cables from the tug-boat. The rest fell in behind, the bow of each one being brought snug under the stern of the boat ahead and securely made fast. To prevent the tow from spreading, cables were stretched from the bow of each boat to the stern of its immediate neighbors, and so the whole mass was held fast, but with sufficient play to admit of easy motion when swung by the current or twisted by the tug. Here was a community which spent the sum¬ mer months traveling. Germans, Hungarians, Canadian French, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Maine Yankees made up its population. At an early hour in the morning the families were eating their ham and eggs and sipping boiled coffee, seated with their children on the deck houses or the water barrels, or perhaps on the dusenberry’s kitchen.

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SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 489 slanting hatches through which the coal is each hull can be loaded at the same time at dumped into the hold. On one boat the different wharves. woman was hanging out the wash, on another Scraps had found at the head of the tow a the men were mending harness and splicing boat of unusual interest. The cabin and the the tow-ropes. The latter boat evidently came tiller were protected from the sun by a red- LOCKING THROUGH. from some far-off point where the teams were not provided by the canal company, for it car¬ ried two big mules of its own in a huge box amidships. Boats belonging to the coal com¬ pany were all low, long, and narrow, and often without any cabins or accommodations for the crew of two. On their bows were painted the numbers by which their movements were traced. The Chunkers " were frequently of the ‘‘ lemon-squeezer’^ pattern. This craft is best understood by imagining two square- stern ed boats brought together stern to stern and fastened so by bolts and chains. In nar¬ row canals they are turned in sections, and VoL. XXXIV.— 67. and- white striped awning with a scalloped edge, stretched across portable posts. The diminutive windows were curtained with em¬ broidered muslin. On the cabin room were sofa cushions, a rocking-chair, and a small work-table, and in the canvas hammock slung between the posts Avas a girl. Her father, a grizzled old canal dog, had swabbed his decks while the fire was coming up, and was now frying the steak and potatoes. Later in the day they visited the Cowles. The girl Avas about eighteen, dressed in clean calico. Her sun-bonnet, pushed back, hung behind her neck. Her abundant black hair was gathered

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SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. 490 straight back into a knot. She had a well- the tow fairly within the bight than the tow- rounded and gracefully robust figure, and master begins breaking it up. The boats are arms like those of an antique statue. Alto- in turn shunted into the lock by a steam win d- gether she was totally unlike any preconceived lass. Once in the lock the boat finds its team notions of what would be found on a canal of four mules, tandem, waiting on the tow- AT TEN MILE LOCK. boat. Her father owned his boat and the mules, which had been left at New Brunswick on the down trip. In the summer they carried freight, and in the winter lived on a little farm in the mountains. The mother was dead, and this girl was her father’s only deck-hand. She could snub ” a boat like a man, or steer one into a lock with a touch that would not have cracked an egg. The tows always take advantage of the tide, and on this particular day a breeze up the river added its modicum of power. No stop was made until New Brunswick was reached. As soon as the tow was made fast, the Patriarch and the Scribe went ashore in search of a tow-rope, which the over-cautious Captain Dusenberry omitted to include in his outfit, to engage a team, and to pay the towage up the canal. This town is the headquarters of the canal traffic. Here are the company’s offices, and just beyond is the first lock. The mule stables where the teams were kept, the boarding-houses for the men, and the grocery, hardware, and fancy goods stores were to¬ gether along the water-front. The canal fol¬ lows the left bank of the river. No sooner is path in charge of a driver. If there are not enough teams to go around, there is nothing to do but to wait until one comes down with a boat bound out, and gets its feed and a half-hour’s rest before starting back. It was for the purpose of making sure of a team, and a lively one, that the Patriarch and the Scribe visited the company’s offices. The mission was accomplished, the authorities were enter¬ tained on board the Cowles, and about noon Dusenberry, assuming command, gave word to the tow-boy, and started the four white mules. A day’s work for a team is four¬ teen miles, and therefore Ten Mile Lock, 2^ miles above Bound Brook station, was to be the end of the day’s journey. Without inci¬ dent and without danger, save the brief period when the Scribe essayed to steer, the boat slid along at the average rate of about three miles an hour. Every turn in the canal developed something worth sketching. Constantly the mules were halted, and the Cowles made fast to the heel path out of the way of passing boats. From the high deck the canal seemed to be running up-hill, and the river much farther beneath than it actually was. The

Page 494

SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. 491 motion of the boat was like that of an Indian canoe well paddled. It is an ideal way to travel. Here is a highway which the travel¬ ing world has abandoned. No dust, no noise, no hurry, no train-boy; stopping when you like ; plenty of pure air; and for fresh vege¬ tables you have only to run out a plank, and go ashore to the nearest farm-house. What time will you lunch, gentlemen ? ” said Moses as he passed the milk punch. This was a matter to be considered once for all, for the daily routine must be laid out. Now,” was the reply; ‘‘ and after this coffee on deck at eight, breakfast at twelve, something quiet at four, and dinner at eight. To-day give us a broiled chicken and a lettuce salad.” Yesser, but there ain’t no lettuce.” Plenty of it in sight,” said the Patriarch, pointing with his cigarette-holder to a Jersey farm. ‘‘ Whoa, there! ” said Scraps. The leader of the team pricked up its ears and stopped, the boat shot ahead until her headway was spent, and then hugged the bank. Loaded with instructions to buy anything that was edible, Moses took his way across a field and through an orchard, swinging a basket in either hand. In half an hour he returned with lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, milk, egg¬ plant, and three spring chickens. Once more the mules took up the slack, and after an hour of patient plodding, the bridge across the Rar¬ itan at Bound Brook hove in sight. Passing the Cowles found convenient spiles sunk in the heel path; and there, within two hundred yards of fresh milk and new butter, the second night was spent. In the morning the regular routine began. First a plunge overboard into the cool water, then coffee and rolls. Then sketching ashore or on board, or perhaps a brisk turn along the tow path. After breakfast a siesta, or a nap on deck under the awnings. In the evening after dinner a chat, a smoke, and a long night’s rest, with the pure country air to expand the lungs and foster the appetite. W ith the next day’s run, to Kingston, a more picturesque country was entered. Afar off peach orchards were descried. At the rail¬ road stations and at the locks baskets were piled high, en route to the New York markets. The canal from Kingston to Trenton is lined with picturesque spots. The tow path at Prince¬ ton runs for miles along the bottom of a steep bank from the top of which beautiful old trees cast their shadows half way to the opposite bank. It is like a cultivated park. The drivers and their mules linger in the grateful shade, reluctant to hasten on to the barren open fields and dusty roads which mark the approach to Trenton. The canal forms a Y at Trenton. The right branch is the “ Feeder ’’carrying the water from the Delaware River to supply the canal. Brushes had a brother-in-law half a mile through the lock and around three gentle beyond Trenton who had been watching for curves they came in sight of the whitewashed the Cowles for a week. This relative had buildings and willows of Ten Mile Lock, the a garden filled with pease and late aspara- first station on the canal. gus, and a cook who could bake a ham with Just beyond the lock at the end of the crib such exceeding toothsomeness that Brushes

Page 495

OPENING THE GATES.

Page 496

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 493 WATCHING THE “ CIRCUS BOAT ” AT KINGSTON. insisted upon altering the course of the Cowles at once. In fact, the ham was baked and waiting. Won’t take us half an hour,” he urged; ‘‘canal skirts his melon bed.” But Dusen- berry objected. He didn’t know nothin’ about this “Feeder” — guessed it didn’t have no basins to turn around in. He wouldn’t be responsible for the boat anyhow. If Mr. Brushes wanted the tiller, it was his’n. In this dilemma Brushes interviewed a native, who declared that two miles up, at a quarry, there was a basin where the Cowles could “ go round a-humpin’.” This being settled, the Patriarch stepped ashore and arranged for an extra team of mules and a tow-boy. The Cowles swung through the narrow bridge, and the voyage of discovery and adventure began. “ How far is this ham ? ” “ One mile from the railroad bridge,” replied Brushes. Just then Scraps came tumbling up the stairway armed with a sheet of Whatman paper and a palette. He took in the pictur¬ esque water-front at a glance, flattened him¬ self out on the deck, and began washing-in some old rookeries on the opposite bank. A group surrounded him, and the subject of the detour was soon forgotten. What differ¬ ence did it make ? One canal was as good as another! Let her go through to the end, and, if there was no turning room, hitch the mules to the rudder post and come home backwards 1 Be it said to the credit of Dusenberry that through the vicissitudes which followed this decision he stuck to his tiller manfully, — that when the forward flag-pole carried away the fire-alarm telegraph wire and started half the bells in Trenton ringing two minutes thereafter, he still preserved an Egyptian gravity of counte¬ nance. Every foot of the canal was a aqua hicognita to him. The gates were handled difer- ently, the snubbing-posts were set farther apart, and the locks were much narrower and shorter. But after the first bridge was passed he pre¬ pared himself for the worst, although his mind was constantly filled Avith visions of the boat wedged between a swinging draAv and the left bank, with her upper deck awash while her keel quietly rested in the Jersey mud. When the telegraph wire snapped he merely dodged its whirling end as it whipped past his head, and said between his teeth to Martha, “ This foolishness ain’t goin’ to last. They’ll butt down a drawbridge next. Marthy, any set of fellers who will git a man into a hole like this for a ham ought to be drownded ” ; and then, in a lower voice, “ and I guess they will.”

Page 497

494 SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. A STERN VIEW, Scraps worked away like mad, spattering his color around and smearing a whole tube of Chinese white on the clean deck in his hurry to catch a sky tint before the curve of the canal ruined his perspective. The Patri¬ arch smoked away contentedly from amid the cushions under the awning, and enjoyed the splendor of the setting sun and the ragged line of the potteries with their conical chim¬ neys silhouetted against the brilliant sky. The Scribe, in a moment of enthusiasm, was book¬ ing the log. The only uneasy man aboard was Brushes. He paced the deck continually, took soundings with his eye, and when the big laker barely scraped through a narrow draw¬ bridge with half an inch to spare, he followed with quickened step the protecting fender down her whole length until the boat swung clear and the danger was passed. Finally he mounted the bow and swept the long canal with his glass. Low, rambling, old-fashioned houses with red roofs; modern high-peaked gables; moss-covered, slanting, shingled tops; houses with trees, and houses bare as Sahara — houses of all kinds and periods. Melon patches in an advanced state of cultivation, and gar¬ dens overrun with pease and belated aspara¬ gus galore. All these and more rose to view as the perspective became distinct, passed in review, and were lost in the afternoon glow. The sturdy team, which had already done twenty-two miles, bent mulefully to their work and kept the tow-line taut as a fiddle¬ string, and yet no sign of the brother-in-law’s. Then it was that Moses, ever patient, with providing watchfulness peered up the hatch, sidled up to the bow watch, and said, “ Did I understand you to say they was to be a baked ham for dinner ? ” Brushes fixed his eye on him for a moment, restrained an im¬ precation, and watched a red roof with high chimneys evolve itself from amid a grove of chestnuts. In another moment an uncertain pathway wandered out from a row of white palings, turned down to the water’s edge, and sprawled itself over a small wooden dock, on the extreme end of which sat a solitary darky fishing. Is dat you. Mass’ Brushes ? The boss been waitin’ for you a week.” Yes ; who are you ? ” Jim.” “ Where’s your master ? ” “ Tuck sick and gone Saratogy wiff de chillen.” ‘‘ Who’s at home ? ” “ Ain’t nobody at home, sir ! House locked up, and de key ober to de drug-store.” Brushes shut his glass, walked to the hatch, and said in a voice like a commodore : ‘‘ Moses ! ”

Page 498

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. “ Yesser,” came rumbling up the reply, fol¬ lowed instantly by that darky. You needn’t wait dinner for that ham.” The tow-line slackened and wavered. Du- senberry went forward, passed a snubbing-rope to the tow-boy, who slipped the noose over a stump. Dusenberry gradually paid out the rope as it tightened around a cleat. The wet hawser held fast, and the Cowles rested. The red-headed tow-boy clambered up and over the bow and approached the group, hat in in hand. Do any of you gents know where you are goin’ ? ” Certainly, going to turn around.” Where ? ” The silence that followed was painful. Cer¬ tainly not here in a canal half her length ? Where then ? Perhaps higher up. Perhaps at the next bridge, but nobody had any positive data. The tow-boy had never seen but one laker go through the Feeder,” and she stuck in the mud at Scudder’s Falls and staid all winter. The bridge-tender, called in for con¬ sultation, thought the Cowles a little mite ” longer than that laker. He re¬ membered they had to lock her down into the Delaware, in the spring, to get shunt on her. Du¬ senberry had no advice. He didn’t know nawthin’ about this old mud-drain anyhow, and didn’t want to. He could stay all win¬ ter, — underpay. Made no differ¬ ence to him. It was a peculiarity of the Pa¬ triarch’s that he sometimes rose to the occasion. Indeed, there was a suspicion among his brother artists that his early youth had not been altogether spent in the recesses of his studio. Rumor had it that before art claimed him for her own he had so far dallied with commerce and trade as to have taken charge of a merchantman. There was one man who had even asseverated boldly that he had seen him in pea-jacket and tarpau¬ lins and other habiliments none the less honorable. His title of Patriarch ” was not conferred upon him by reason of his extreme age or whitened locks, for only with great difficulty could any tell¬ tale hairs be found to mark the trail of fifty summers, but rather on account of his varied experi¬ ences and early occupations. Calling the Scribe he disap¬ 495 peared among a group of natives on the bank, interviewed them closely, clambered back, and announced his intention of trying the basin at the quarry and then at Scudder’s P'alls. In an hour more both points had been reached, measured, and passed. The Cowles was too long by a quarter. The situation now became critical. Here they were in a ninety-five-foot boat afloat in a seventy-five-foot canal, and no basin nearer than the Delaware. To go backwards was an utter impossibility, for it was hardly within power to keep the Cowles off the bank or to pass the bridges even with the full use of her rudder. To go forward was ruinous. Be¬ sides, the team was tired out. Gentlemen,” said the Patriarch, “there is but one chance left, — the timber basin at Titusville.” Again the steady, patient little team bent to their traces. The cry of the tow-boy rang out, and Dusenberry’s horn, warning the passing “Chunker,” was heard along the canal. Past many beautiful farms, under the high trestle- bridge on the Bound Brook route, down the long straight line of the canal, and over¬ looking the Delaware Valley, with the purple ‘ SHE COULD SNUB A BOAT LIKE A MAN.

Page 499

496 SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. ENTERING THE LOCK AT NIGHT. mountains beyond, and up to the white swing¬ ing-bridge at Titusville, glided the Cowles. The bridge opened, and she slid into the still waters of the basin. The twilight had now settled down. On either side stood the good people of the little town looking with astonish¬ ment upon the stately laker with her white awnings, under which hung the Chinese lan¬ terns just lighted. The Patriarch’s voice woke the crowd to consciousness. ‘‘ Can we turn our boat here ? ” “ How long be ye ? ” came a voice from the bank. “ Ninety-five feet over all.” For a moment there was a dead silence. Then came bounding over the water : Yes, if you fellows can tote her.” But the Patriarch did not lose his grip. His eye ran over the curved line of the basin, caught sight of a mooring-spile near the bank, and in a moment the helm was put hard down, and the Cowles gently rubbed her nose against its oozy bark. Swinging himself clear, he alighted in the tall grass of the water’s edge and made fast a line to a cross tie on the railroad track which skirts the canal. Then all hands were ordered forward, and the boat moved quietly along until her bow sank into the soft edge. ‘‘ Now take that line aft lively,” sung out the Patriarch, “ and make it fast to the stern cleat, and pay out to the tow-boy, and don’t start the mules till I get aboard.” Ay, ay, sir ! ” came a voice from the deck. At this juncture a new dif¬ ficulty presented itself. A line of coal-loaded Chunkers ” was turning the low point above and making straight for the Cowles^ which now lay almost at right angles across the canal. Hold on with that team — slack up, slack up!” thundered the Patriarch. ‘‘ What the - are you doing with that ‘circus boat,’ blocking up this gangway?” came a return voice. But the Patriarch had no time for explanations. In an instant he was on the Cowles's bow, along her deck, and over her stern. She was aground, her rudder blade hard back, and the rudder post lifted. Between her and the bank was a skirting of soft marsh grass. If this grass had an equally soft mud bottom there was just one chance in a dozen that a long pull and a strong pull might lift her stern clear and slide her into deep water. He decided to take it. Amid the choice impreca¬ tions of the “ Chunker ” fleet the Patriarch calmly unhooked their mules, doubled up his own team, impressed into service a second tow- boy, and gave the order, “ Now, all together ! ” Two whips cracked simultaneously. A yell went up from the row of open mouths on the Cowles ; the tow-line whizzed through the water; the mules bent forward almost to their knees ; the boat careened, staggered, and shiv¬ ered ; and the line straightened out like a bar of iron. Suddenly there came a cry from the tow-path. When the dust cleared away a pile of mules was heaped up in a sand bank, and two tow- boys were tangled in a tow-line. The rope had parted ! In the momentary silence that followed some one broke out in a loud laugh. It was Dusenberry 1 jF. HopkmsoJi Smith. J. B. Millet. “JESSIE.”

Page 500

THE HUNDREDTH MAN* BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of ‘‘Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “ The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XXVII. HEN ArthurThorne jumped up so sud¬ denly on hearing the surprising announce- mentthatGayArmatt was not en gaged tobe married to any one, the noise made by his falling chair brought Mrs. People hurrying to the porch. “ Why, how do you do, Mr. Thorne ? ” she exclaimed. I hadn’t the least notion in the world that you was here, and if you’ve been trying to tilt back in that chair I wonder you didn’t break your neck ! The hind legs is too straight* up and down. I’m very glad to see you here again, though Mr. Stratford never told me a word of your cornin’, and I’ll have your room ready for you in ten minutes.” To these remarks Mr. Thome made no re¬ ply, but stood looking at Stratford. He was a man notable for his courteous manners to every one, but his mind was so completely occupied with what he had just heard that he scarcely noticed that Mrs. People was talking to him. After a very searching gaze directed upon Mr. Thorne, that good woman stepped inside the front door, and beckoned to Stratford. The latter excused himself to his visitor, who was still standing in blank staring astonish¬ ment, and went into the house. He was very glad to do so, for conversation with Thorne in his present state of mind and Mrs. People near by, was not to be desired. Mrs. People conducted Stratford into an inner room, and closed the door. If I was you,” she said quickly, “ I’d take him upstairs jus’ as soon as I’ve put on the clean sheets and pillow-cases, and I’d have him in bed be¬ fore his chill comes on. Of course he brought it with him, for there’s nothin’ of the kind here, but this mountain air often does bring ’em out dreadful sudden, when the system is full of malariousness. It won’t do to give him any quinine till he’s got through with his fever, and I’m no hand to be recommendin’ mus¬ tard plasters and hot foot soaks before there’s any real reason for usin’ ’em; but what I’ll * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. VoL. XXXTV.— 68. make for him, and bring it up to his room al¬ most as soon as you’ve got him tucked in com¬ fortable, is a big bowl of hot quassia tea. Mr. People, when he was livin’, used to say that there was nothin’ that suited more of the dif¬ ferent chronic things that he was afflicted with than quassia tea. It’s bein’ such a good hon¬ est bitter is one of its strong p’ints, and Mr. People has told me often, when he took it for some of his more triflin’ complaints, that he forgot he had anythin’ the matter with him but a taste in his mouth. So I’ll put the quas¬ sia on to draw, and then I’ll take Maria right up to his room, and we’ll get it ready.” Stratford did not interrupt Mrs. People in these remarks, for they amused him, and he was very willing, moreover, not only to give his friend time to tranquilize his mind some¬ what but to get an opportunity to arrange his own ideas. But he now told Mrs. People that Mr. Thorne needed no medicine whatever, but was merely a little disturbed in his mind by something that had occurred. “ Disturbed ! I should think ! ” said the kind- hearted woman. And if he’s lost all his money I hope you’ll tell him, Mr. Stratford, that as long as he’s a friend of yours there’s always a room for him here, and the board may run on for a year, if he likes.” Stratford thanked her, and went out to meet his friend. ‘‘ Let us go under that big tree,” he said, ‘‘ where we can talk more at our ease.” When they reached the big tree Stratford took a seat, motioning his friend to another; but Thorne remained standing. Do you mean to tell me,” said he, “ that Miss Armatt is perfectly free, and disengaged? ” “Yes,” replied Stratford, “ that is what I said.” “ Well, then,” asked Thorne, “ what reason is there why I should not pay my addresses to her ? ” “ There are two very strong reasons,” said Stratford. “ One is that it would be heartless in any one to address a girl whose sensitive nature has just received a very severe shock in the breaking off of an engagement ; and in the second place it would be very bad policy both as regards Miss Armatt and yourself. Stockton. All rights reserved.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN, 498 But from what I know it is not at all certain that Crisinan has lost all his chances. Were he to repent and return, and there is no rea¬ son why he should not do this if he is not an absolute ass, I should be very much afraid of the result. With a girl of Miss Armatt’s prin¬ ciples it would be much easier to reneAV a former engagement than to make a fresh one. Any attempt now to enlist her affections would throw her mind into such disturbance that, were that man to return, he would find her troubled mental condition greatly to his advantage.” Thorne snapped his fingers impatiently. For these reasons,” he said, ‘‘ I suppose you are now keeping away from her.” ‘^The reasons have nothing to do with me,” said Stratford. As you very well know, I have no intention of addressing her, and my object is, as it has been, to bring her mind into such a condition that the element of re¬ gard for Crisman must necessarily be elimi¬ nated from it.” Thorne stood for some moments steadily gazing at his friend. Then he said : “ Strat¬ ford, that may all be very well, but it seems to me that I am the one who should under¬ take the task of encouraging and helping this young girl in the way you speak of. I have an object in it, which you say you have not. I have heard you speak of carrying her over the gap which the success of your plans might create. Very well then, let me carry her over. I shall not drop her on the other side, as you say you intend to do.” My dear boy,” said Stratford, with a smile, ‘‘you couldn’t doit. You don’t know her, and she does not know you. In many respects you are strangers to each other, and it will be utterly impossible for her to have that confi¬ dence in you, and I may say that regard for you, which is absolutely necessary in this case. It would be impertinent, and utterly unjusti¬ fiable, for me or any one else to attempt to arrange Miss Armatt’s future for her. I have simply endeavored to avert from her an evil which she did not understand, and I hope I have succeeded. With anything further than that I have nothing to do ; but I will say, as I have said before, that it would delight me very much to see her married to such a man as you. And, by the way, I wish you would sit down.” Mr. Thorne did not move. “ Stratford,” said he, “ you are very difficult to understand, and I don’t pretend to be able to do it; but you have said two things with which I agree. One is that it would be wrong to address the lady openly at this time; and the other is that my comparatively slight acquaintance with her places me under a very great disad¬ vantage. This I shall endeavor as soon as possible to remove. I shall try to know her, and let her know me. I came into these parts solely to see her ; I shall remain for the pur¬ pose of becoming thoroughly acquainted with her; that is all; and I shall do no more until the proper time comes. It is a good first step, and I am glad you suggested it to me.” Stratford did not immediately reply, but presently he said : “ Then I am to have you here with me ? ” “No,” said Thorne, “that would not be well. You are very kind, and so is that good woman. But I shall not be satisfied to stay here. I shall wish to feel perfectly independ¬ ent. I shall go to the hotel in the village. There is one there, I believe? ” “There is no hotel,” said Stratford; “there is nothing but a tavern, and I am sure it won’t suit you at all. It will be much better for you to stay here.” “ You are very good indeed,” said Thorne, “ but I prefer the tavern. I left some baggage at the station, and I will have it sent there. Good-bye.” Stratford rose, and took his extended hand. “I suppose I shall see you again,” said he. “ Oh, yes,” said Mr. Thorne. “No doubt we shall meet often.” And he strode away. “ He don’t believe in me,” thought Stratford. “ And he is wonderfully changed.” The next day Mr. Thorne made a formal call at Mrs. Justin’s house. He saw both the ladies, and although there was no trace of the fact in their manner, neither of them was glad to see him. Gay thought that he would prove an interruption to the course of reading that she and Mr. Stratford were carrying on to¬ gether; and Mrs. Justin could not but imagine, remembering Mr. Thorne’s letter to her, that in some way he had heard of the broken en¬ gagement, and, considering the field open, had come to pay his addresses to Gay. Of this she did not at all approve, for, after what had happened, there was only one man she favored as a husband for her young friend. She would not have Gay tossed about like a shuttlecock from this man to that. Mrs. Justin was not long left to conjecture upon this subject. Mr. Thorne took an early opportunity of speaking to her privately. He informed her that his feelings and aspirations in regard to Miss Armatt remained the same as when he had previously communicated with her by letter; and that having recently heard that the young lady’s affections were now dis¬ engaged, he desired, at the proper time and season, to endeavor to win those affections ; but that he was very well aware that any such attempt would be useless and reprehensible at present. All he now wished was to obtain Mrs.

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN Justin’s consent, as the young lady’s friend and guardian, to visit her and make her as thoroughly acquainted with him as possible. Mrs. Justin might feel assured that more than this he would not do during his present stay in the vicinity. To all this Mrs. Justin could make no out¬ ward objection, although she did not like it at all. She knew Mr. Thorne to be a perfectly hon¬ orable man, and therefore felt justified in invit¬ ing him to visit her frequently during his stay ; but she gave him no encouragement whatever, stating that she did not feel that she had any right to say or do anything which could be construed to affect in any way Miss Armatt’s prospects of the kind alluded to. I wished to make my object and inten¬ tions plain to you, madam,” said Thorne, with¬ out leaving anything to conjecture ; and if, after hearing me, you permit me to visit your house, it is all I ask.” ‘‘ He is too horribly correct,” thought Mrs. Justin, when Thorne had gone, and in this case nothing could be worse than that, for it gives me no opportunity to oppose him.” When Mrs. Justin next saw Stratford she expressed her impatience with this visit of his friend Thorne. ‘‘ He is a thoroughly good fellow,” she said, but I do not want him to interfere with you.” Mrs. Justin,” said Stratford, his brows con¬ tracting as he spoke, am I never to expect to be believed by you regarding my intentions towards Gay Armatt ? ” ‘‘ I do not wish to believe what you have said to me about them,” she answered, ^‘and I earnestly hope that you will say nothing more of the kind. You ought to marry Gay Armatt for your own sake, for everybody’s sake, but above all for her sake. It would be cruel, positively cruel, for you to drop her now.” “I do not wish to say anything,” said Stratford, “ which might give rise to unpleas¬ ant feelings between us, but I will merely re¬ assert, entirely for my own satisfaction, that I do not intend to marry Gay Armatt.” ‘H should be grieved indeed,” said Mrs. Jus¬ tin, if any unpleasant feelings should arise between us, but I will say, entirely for my own satisfaction, that you can’t help it.” And with that she left him. XXVIII. When the alterations at Vatoldi’s had reached that stage at which John People could personally carry out the manifold directions and plans of Mr. Stull, the work went on rap¬ idly, and it was not long before the famous restaurant, greatly enlarged, and very much improved, opened its doors again to the pub- 499 lie. The boycotting campaign having come to an end, it was very easy to secure a corps of trained waiters, nearly all the old ones being eager to return to their former positions, and being no longer under the influence of the con¬ tumacious Bencher they were perfectly willing to renounce all aspirations in the direction of coat-tails. But against any future trouble of this kind Mr. Stull had fully provided. The employees were all very well paid, but each man signed a printed contract by which he agreed that a certain percentage of his wages should be held back and forfeited in case of dismissal for mis¬ conduct, the most important breach of rule be¬ ing any attempt to redress grievances by other means than those stated in the contract. Mr. Stull had given a great deal of time and thought to the construction of an agreement, which, while it offered good men inducements to en¬ ter his service, would make it a losing business for them if they attempted to interfere with his methods of regulating the establishment. All these arrangements, with many others tending to place Vatoldi’s on a higher pedestal than it had yet stood upon, were carefully carried into effect by John People, whose conferences with his superior not only took place every afternoon, but frequently occupied a large por¬ tion of the evening. An increase of custom quickly greeted the re-opening of the res¬ taurant, and Vatoldi’s soon became a more crowded and fashionable resort than it had ever been before. When all this had been accomplished, Mr. Stull thought himself entitled to a holiday, and repaired to his farm near Cherry Bridge, where he could not only take some country air but look into the business with which Mr. Turby had been intrusted. It might seem a little odd to those who were not well ac¬ quainted with Miss Matilda Stull that she should have chosen the time of her father’s coming for a visit of herself and her mother to the city; but Miss Matilda never allowed the coming or going of any one to interfere with her plans; and, although she had not formed this plan until she had heard of her father’s intention, she declared it to be abso¬ lutely necessary that she should go to town to confer with mantua-makers, in preparation for the autumnal season. As she could not go alone, her mother, of course, must accompany her. The absence of his wife and daughter at the time of his arrival at his farm did not at all disturb the mind of Mr. Stull, who, having come to the country for a holiday, was not averse to a few days’ freedom from interrup¬ tion to thought and action. To be sure, his two younger daughters remained, but these

Page 503

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 500 were little girls who had learned how pleas¬ ant it was not to interfere with their father’s occupations. Mrs. Stull had now been made acquainted with her daughter’s engagement, and it was, therefore, in the handsome rooms of the Stull city mansion that Mr. Crisman paid his fre¬ quent visits to his lady-love during her stay in town. John People, once more behind his cash¬ ier’s desk, and behind, indeed, nearly every¬ thing else in the establishment, deepened the lines of pensive resignation on his brow. The gentle roll in his gait became more than ever indicative of a determination to go ahead and do his duty, no matter how much care and trouble weighed upon him. All his hopes in the direction of Miss Stull had entirely de¬ parted. When Gay Armatt had told him that it was positively useless for him to speak a word of love to Miss Stull, he had gone away believing her absolutely and entirely. Of a truthful nature himself, he could appreciate truth when it was told to him by such a girl as Gay, and told as she told it. He had come to town fully convinced that Matilda Stull could be to him no more than an occasional customer in the restaurant over which he presided. He took from an inner recess of his pocket- book a two-dollar note, in the corner of which were some initials and a date; and placing this in the money drawer, he repaid himself with two dollars in silver. It gave him a sad pleasure a few minutes afterwards to give this note, with other change, to a lady who was paying her bill. Thrown into the vortex of metropolitan circulation there was no reason to suppose he would ever see it again. Not only did John thus snap asunder the only actual link between him and Miss Stull, but, like the practical man that he w^as, he resolved, if possible, to teach himself that he must turn away from looking after her, and in order to do this he must learn to look steadfastly in another direction. Therefore it was that with steadfast heart and resolute eyes he looked at Miss Burns. Miss Burns was a young lady who stood behind the gentlemen’s fumishing-goods coun¬ ter of a large dry-goods store directly oppo¬ site Vatoldi’s. John had bought cravats and gloves of her, and she, in turn, had taken many a meal at V atoldi’s. There were those of her companions who asserted that she thus sacrificed economy to convenience, because there were other restaurants, not far distant, where she could have been served more cheaply. Miss Burns liked Vatoldi’s, and John had reason to believe that she also liked him, for in the two years during which they had interchanged patronage he had found frequent opportunities of making himself agreeable to her, and she had shown that he was agreeable. She was a girl of pleasant appearance, although a trifle over-thin ; but John liked thin girls, and until his regard for Miss Stull began to crystallize itself into yearn¬ ing, his occasional intercourse with Miss Burns had been exceedingly pleasant to him. But for months and months he had almost for¬ gotten her. For her there was no corner in the refrigerator, nor any corner in his heart. This change of manner had been noticed by Miss Burns, and for some time before the troubles began at Vatoldi’s, she had been forced to admit that it would have been just as well for her to study economy at the expense of convenience, and to take her midday meal at the restaurants frequented by her compan¬ ions. But lately she had had a desire to view the renewed glories of Vatoldi’s, and had sev¬ eral times visited the place. John had noticed her, and once had spoken to her, but there was that in his manner which showed the young woman that even this attention she owed entirely to his memory. But, as has been said, John had come to the determination to occupy his saddened eyes by turning them in the direction of Miss Burns. It was about this time that there was brought to the restaurant a quantity of very choice clams. These were of such unusually attractive ap¬ pearance that John bethought himself of ex¬ hibiting some of them on a long inclined shelf near his desk, on which were occasionally displayed some extraordinary fine specimens of fish, flesh, or fowl. To this work he de¬ voted some comparatively leisure moments of the morning. As he arranged them on the shelf, his meditative soul began to in¬ fluence his hands, and he formed the clams into letters, and gradually into words. He soon became much interested in his work, and se¬ lecting the smallest of the shell-fish, and care¬ fully placing them, he formed a sentence in clams, which, in large letters, ran the whole length of the shelf. It read : “Gone are all the hopes I cherished.’^ Stepping back, J ohn gazed at his work with much satisfaction, and several of the waiters remarked upon it with approbation. “You might have anew piece of poetry there every day,” said one. J ohn smiled sadly. His desire for poetic se¬ lections was now very limited. A little before one o’clock that day there en¬ tered into Vatoldi’s Miss Matilda Stull. She was shopping in that region, and she wanted her luncheon. She expected, of course, that she would see John People there, but that made

Page 504

THE HUNDREDTH MAN, no difference to her ; she had no intention of deserting her favorite restaurant because this young man happened to be the manager of it. She was well aware that she had led him by a very short string during the period in which she had hoped to make use of him, but she did not believe that here, in his place of business, he would presume upon that familiar intercourse which in the country is allowed among per¬ sons of different classes. If, however, anything of the kind should occur, she knew well how to treat it ; and she entered Vatoldi’s with all freedom and confidence. The room was well filled, but she had not made three steps within the door before John saw her. A thrill went through him, and he stooped to conceal the consequences of it which appeared in his face. In a mcynent, however, he raised himself, and went on with his duties, keeping his eyes upon the work before him. He did not dare to look at her, for fear she would not recognize him, and that would be a jagged wound. It would be bet¬ ter for her to think he had not seen her. At any rate he must have time to grasp the situ¬ ation, — a very unexpected one to him, for he had supposed the lady to be in the country. But it was not long before he found it im¬ possible to avoid raising his eyes in her di¬ rection, and as he did so he met her glance. With a very slight smile which bore no sign of friendship, but merely indicated that ac¬ quaintance which, in the way of business, one might have with another, she beckoned him to her. Surprised and very much embarrassed by this action, John went to her. “Mr. People,” she said, “how do you do? I would like to have the clams in those first three words,” pointing as she spoke, “for my luncheon. Will you please have them stewed for me ? ” John turned and gazed somewhat blankly at the sentence he had formed. “ ‘ Gone are all’ won’t make a full stew,” he said. “ Those clams are very small.” “They will be quite enough,” said Miss Stull. “ Please order them cooked.” There was a look which accompanied this injunction that would have convinced John, if he had needed convincing, of the absolute truth of what Gay Armatt had said to him. He turned without speaking, and walking to the shelf, gathered up, with his own hands, the clams which spelled “ Gone are all.” He handed them to an attendant, and ordered them stewed for the lady at the table opposite, and then stepped back to his desk, his heart like a clam within him. In about five minutes he raised his eyes at the opening of the door, and he beheld Miss Burns entering. He looked at her for a mo¬ 501 ment, and then his blood, which apparently had been greatly occupied elsewhere, came up into his face. He stood more erect, his whole body seemed to stiffen, and with a sud¬ den resolve he walked to the new-comer, who sat behind Miss Stull, and much nearer the door. “ Miss Burns,” said he, “ we have some very fine clams to-day. Will you let me have a stew made for you ? ” Gratified by this attention. Miss Burns im¬ mediately gave her assent. John now quickly stepped to the shelf, threw aside the last two letters of his sentence, and gathering up the clams which formed “ the hopes I cherish,” sent them to be stewed. Miss Burns, following John’s movements, saw the words before the clams were swept together, and, stooping, fumbled with the but¬ tons of one of her boots. The waiter thought the stew would be a large one, but he made no remark. There was something in John’s eye which showed that he meant what he did. Miss Stull, who was waiting for her stew, and had turned half around when John left the desk, saw the whole proceeding. It brought upon her face a smile, a very different one from that which had last been there, and a very good smile for John People. XXIX. On the day of his arrival at his farm Mr. Stull drove over to the county town, and had an interview with Zenas Turby. That ener¬ getic collector of debts and facts had made a very favorable report in regard to the iron on the Bullripple farm ; and Mr. Stull now also received valuable information concerning the Western heirs to the farms held by himself and Enoch. These persons had been made ac¬ quainted by Mr. Turby ’s letters with the loss and injustice they had sustained, and of the fact that although the property in question was not very valuable, it was quite certain, if the affair were properly managed, that they could come into their rights without expensive process of law ; the case being so plain that the parties in possession would probably not think it worth while to resist the setting aside of the illegal transfer and the immediate sale of the property with a rightful division of the proceeds. “ They must think,” said Mr. Stull, “ that the parties in possession are very great fools to give up what they have paid for without mak¬ ing a fight for it ; but if it is to our advantage to appear foolish, let us do so by all means. I am perfectly willing to decline to throw good money after bad in defending my title, and as

Page 505

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 502 to that man Bullripple, I imagine there will not be much trouble in making him take the same position, for I don’t believe he can afford to go to law about it.” Not he,” sneered Mr. Turby. When he can pay his taxes he is doing very well.” “ What we have to do now,” said Mr. Stull, is to have the matter legally arranged as quickly as possible, and the sale ordered. I shall then buy both tracts.” ‘‘You will get them cheap,” said Turby, “ for there’s nobody in these parts who will care to bid against you.” Mr. Stull wanted, of course, to get the land as cheaply as possible, having already paid for part of it; but as the amount paid had not been very large, he would have preferred to lose that, and to give a fair average price for the two farms, rather than to hold one of them by a tenure which would make it impossible for him to dispose of it justly, and unadvisable to invest any money in its improvement and development. His business sagacity had never before allowed him to buy property to which he could not receive a good title, but the op¬ portunity to become possessed of the late Mr. People’s farm for a small sum had been a tempting one, and had caused Mr. Stull to close the bargain and take his chances as to future settlement with heirs who might or who might not turn up. His chance now, he thought, was very good, and even if the land should not be valuable from a mineral point of view, he would be glad to have a large and extensive country place in this picturesque region. “ I will see Bullripple myself,” he said to Turby. “ I think I can make him understand that his wisest course will be to step aside and make no opposition. And, by the way, you can mention to those Western people that it might be well for them to offer some induce¬ ments to the parties in possession to vacate their claims. Considering that we have paid our money, they ought to do that.” “ I’ll put that to them,” said Turby, “ and if they agree, it ought to help persuade that thick-headed Bullripple to step out.” The next morning Mr. Stull called upon Enoch, and appeared before him in the light of an injured man. His sense of injury, how¬ ever, was mingled with a solemn dignity which forbade any violence of expression. He told Enoch of the information he had received concerning the Western heirs, and then he added : “You have brought me, sir, into a very annoying predicament; a situation, I may say, which is unworthy of me.” “ I’d like to know what I had to do with it ? ” asked Enoch. “ You had a great deal to do with it,” re¬ plied Mr. Stull, with lofty severity. “ You were apparently a man of probity in this vicinity, and you were the alleged owner of a property which had been acquired at the same time and in the same way as that which had be¬ longed to your brother-in-law, and which I bought. With your example before my eyes, there was no reason why I should hesitate to pay my money for that land.” “ Considering how little you paid,” said Enoch, “ I don’t think you had any reason to hesitate.” “ That land, sir,” continued Mr. Stull, with¬ out attention to the last remark, “ as I am now informed, does not belong to me any more than this land belongs to you. But I have not come here to make reproaches. There are some losses which my self-respect teaches me to accept and say nothing about. I am here simply to know what you intend to do in the matter. If it is carried to the courts, I have no case, and you have no case. That will simply be a great expense and much annoyance, and the loss of the land the same as if we had not gone to law. Now I consider that the proper, the honorable, and the honest course is for me and for you to accept the situation, to cease to insist upon an ownership in lands for which we have not paid all the rightful owners, and to accept whatever terms said owners are willing to offer us. Now, sir, do you intend to join me in this just and honor¬ able course ? Or do you propose to act in a stubborn and litigious manneq and so bring trouble and expense upon all concerned ? ” Mr. Bullripple sat with his eyes half shut and fixed upon the ground. “ It may be,” he thought, “ that this land has iron in it after all.” Then he replied to Mr. Stull. “ I can’t say,” said he, “ upon a suddint this way, jus’ exactly what I’ll do. But I do declare it doesn’t look a bit like you to give up this way jus’ as soon as the thing is mentioned.” “ When I am right,” said Mr. Stull, with much loftiness, “ I never give up ; but when I am wrong, I deem it my duty to do so without delay, and I hope, sir, that you will see that it is also your duty as well as your interest.” “ Well, Mr. Stull,” said Enoch, rising, and taking two strides with his hands in his pock¬ ets. “ I’ll think it over, and see what is best to be done. And I guess the first thing to be done is to wait till we hear something positive from those fellows in the West.” “ I have said all I have to say,” said Mr. Stull. And he took his leave. “ Bullripple is too stupidly obstinate to agree with anybody,” he said to himself as he walked away, “ but if I give in, he’ll have to.” Enoch was a good deal more disturbed by Mr. Stull’s Information than he had appeared

Page 506

THE HUNDREDTH MAN to be. He had heard of these Western heirs, but had never put much faith in them, and he had believed, moreover, that his possession would in time give him a valid title which would be good against all claims. But he had never given himself any trouble to ascertain the existence or non-existence of other claim¬ ants, and had taken no legal measures, in fact, to protect himself in case claims should be brought. Nothing, however, so disturbed his faith in the strength of his tenure of his farm as the fact that Mr. Stull had admitted that the title to his own farm was not a good one. He had never liked Stull, and since his discovery of the ownership of Vatoldi’s he had had a thor¬ ough contempt for the man. But he knew him to be an unusually astute business man, and when Mr. Stull stated that his title to a piece of property was not good, there was as much reason to believe that he had thoroughly ex¬ amined the case and was correct in his view of it, as there was to believe that he never would have made the admission if it were pos¬ sible to avoid it. But Enoch’s belief in Mr. Stull’s business sagacity went still further. “ That pie-man,” he thought, “ is pushin’ this thing, and he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t expect to make somethin’ out of it. If there wasn’t no more of it than what he told me, he’d jus’ keep quiet and let other people do what had to be done. Yes, sir,” he said aloud to himself, after he had taken a few meditative turns with his hands in his pockets, there’s more in this thing than he wants me to see. It may be iron, and it may be something else ; but, whatever it is, the pie-man is on the grab for it.” Mr. Bullripple thought over this matter all the rest of the day and a good part of the night; and in the morning he laid the subject before Mr. Stratford. That gentleman listened with much attention ; he was always interested in Enoch and his concerns. But before he could form any opinion in regard to the case, Mr. Bullripple, who was one of those persons who ask counsel of others for the purpose of having their own decisions supported, pro¬ ceeded to give his views. ‘‘ Of course I can’t tell,” said he, exactly what that Stull is after, but I’ve given my brains a good badgerin’, and I’ve pretty well made up my mind that when the whole thing is settled, it’ll be Stull that’s got these two farms, and not them Western men. And when that’s happened, I may as well get ready to walk, for he hates me wuss than he hates the devil.” “Why should that be? ” asked Mr. Strat¬ ford, surprised. Oh, well,” said Enoch, “ he and I once 503 had a little business together, and I got the better of him. It’s not a thing I can talk about ; but it made him hate me ; there’s no gettin’ ’round that.” Remembering all that Enoch had told him at Vatoldi’s about his being in search of a rat in a hole; and assuming, for he had never been so informed, that this search had been successful, it was not difficult for Mr. Stratford to put this and that together. He reflected that Enoch, who was always very free-spoken about his affairs, had never told him the re¬ sult of his hunt for the rat, and had just ad¬ mitted that he had had a piece of private business with Mr. Stull of which he could not speak, and it was natural that in Mr. Strat¬ ford’s mind said Stull and said rat should merge themselves into the same personality. This conclusion surprised Stratford very much. If Enoch had been earnestly looking for some one, it was tolerably certain that there was some one to look for, and he knew no reason why that some one should not be Mr. Stull. Stratford knew the man but slightly, and cared little for what he knew. It was, therefore, a matter of small concern to him that the bank president sold oyster stews, but it was a mat¬ ter of very great concern that Enoch had dis¬ covered the fact. This old farnier was a man whose character and methods deserved care¬ ful study. “ Now this is the way I’ve worked it out,” continued Enoch. “ If what Stull says is so, and I’m inclined to believe it is, for he wouldn’t come to any man and tell him that he didn’t fairly own any particular thing, if there was the least chance in the world of his keepin’ it without fairly ownin’ it, then I’m of the opinion that the quicker somethin’ is done the better.” “ What would you do ? ” asked Stratford. “ What I’d do,” said Enoch, “ would be this: I’d go straight out West, and see them other heirs. I’d look into their claims and see how good they was. It wouldn’t cost much to do that. Then, if everything was all straight. I’d jus’ ask ’em what they’d take for their claims. If they had any sense at all they’d rather take a middlin’ fair price down in cash than to go to a lot of trouble and perhaps have the land sold for mighty little. I think I could put all that before ’em so’s they could see it. Then I’d come home and go to somebody, — say to you, Mr. Stratford, — and borry the money I’d have to pay down; I’d be mighty keerful, too, to hunt up any other heirs, if there was any, and buy up their claims. When that was all done, I’d take the same law steps that them fellows would ’a’ took, and when the case was settled, the property needn’t be sold to divide the money, for

Page 507

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 504 there’d only be one owner to the whole of it, and that would be me. When I’d got the deed all safe in my possession, I’d give the man who lent me the money — he’d have to trust me till then — a mortgage on the whole property. Then there couldn’t be no turnin’ out of house and home. I’d go -on here the same as ever, payin’ a fair and reg’lar interest on the mortgage. And as for Stull, if he likes that place, he could just live there as long as he liked, and I’d put the rent high enough to cover the interest I’d have to pay on the two places. If he didn’t want to do that, he might go, and that farm could easily be sold for enough to pay off the whole mortgage. Now, isn’t that a pretty straight and even plan ? With all the iron left out, too, for that’s a thing I don’t believe in.” Stratford laughed. “ It certainly is an in¬ genious plan, and may hold together. If I were you, I’d try it. I fear there are some weak points in your scheme, but they may not prevent its success. At all events, you would lose nothing by the trial, and I should be very sorry indeed to see this farm taken from you.” Well, sir,” said Enoch, “ that’s what you’d do if you was me. Now then, bein’ yourself, would you advance me the money, and then take a mortgage on the land for it ? ” “ Yes,” said Mr. Stratford, “if the facts are what you suppose them to be, and all the heirs are willing to sell out their claims. I’ll advance the money.” “ Good ! ” cried Mr. Bullripple, slapping one hard palm with the other. “ And now I’ll see if I can’t match farm work ag’in’ pie- bakin’.” “ Enoch,” said Mr. Stratford, with a smile, “ you said too much that time.” “ Perhaps I did,” said the old farmer, “but slips don’t count.” As he walked away Mr. Stratford felt more than ever convinced that if Enoch Bullripple, instead of being driven from his farm by the revengeful Stull, should succeed, without loss to himself or to any one, in making that lofty personage pay him rent for his present coun¬ try-seat, he would add very much to his pre¬ vious claims to be considered a hundredth man. It was not the old farmer’s cleverness and natural cunning that Stratford considered in this connection ; it was his willingness, as shown in his extraordinary conduct at Vatol- di’s, to throw himself, for the purpose of gain¬ ing his ends, into a position which nobody else would be likely to think of, or be cour¬ ageous enough to take, which made our friend imagine that, in all probability, his search for a man, entirely unique and exceptional, had, at last, met with success. XXX. Gay Armatt did not find the presence of Mr. Thorne in the Cherry Bridge neighbor¬ hood that interruption to her studies and daily pursuits which she had supposed it would be. Her expectations had been that Mr. Stratford would find it necessary to give so much of his time to his friend that very little of it would be left for her. Of course there were studies and a good many daily pursuits which could very well be carried on without the presence of Mr. Stratford, but this did not suit Miss Gay. She had become accustomed to Strat¬ ford’s helpful counsel and to the pleasure of his society. She liked them, and she did not wish to give them up. She was sitting at the feet of a master, and it would have greatly grieved her had circumstances compelled her to rise. But Arthur Thorne did not prove to be such a circumstance. On the contrary, he was scrupulously careful not to interfere with the life which Gay was now leading. Stratford determined to go on with his visits to Mrs. Justin and his intercourse with Gay as if Thorne had not been there ; while the younger man determined that his intercourse with Gay should be largely influenced by the fact that Stratford was there. It was not his object to endeavor to supplant Stratford; this he knew he could not do ; all he hoped was to make himself known, and perhaps favorably known, to the woman he loved. If then Stratford held to his word, his opportunity might come; at all events, he would not be a stranger to Gay Armatt. That point in Stratford’s argu¬ ment had made a strong impression on him. It was Thome’s custom to walk over from the Cherry Bridge tavern in the afternoon, and often in the evening, and if he could talk or walk with one or both of the ladies, or play croquet with them, or do for them anything which they might wish him to do, he was very glad. If it happened that Stratford were there, and it often did so happen, Thorne showed no indisposition to join in any general occupation, though he avoided thrusting him¬ self into any special one. He took the goods the goddesses gave, and was very thankful. Mrs. Justin noticed all this, and though she really wished Mr. Thorne would stay away, she could not help honoring him for his thoughtful and courteous conduct. His visits could not be pleasant to her, favoring, as she did, a union between Stratford and Gay, but no man that she knew could have brought upon himself under similar circumstances so small a taint of unpleasantness. Gay did not know Mr. Thorne’s object in coming to the house, but she soon found that,

Page 508

THE HUNDREDTH MAN as far as she was concerned, his coming made no difference. This was very pleasant, and made her look upon the gentleman, especially at croquet, as an agreeable addition to their little circle. She could not but see, too, al¬ though it did not strike her mind as soon as it did that of Mrs. Justin, how he refrained from putting himself in those paths which she and Mr. Stratford were wont to walk together. For that she liked Mr. Thorne better than for anything else. As the days went on, the ladies of the Jus¬ tin household began to appreciate the fact that two gentlemen friends were better than one, because the little vacancies and gaps which must occasionally be left by one of them could almost always be tilled by the other. A more useful and agreeable second man than Mr. Thorne could scarcely be found. In most cases he was perfectly able to take the place of first man, and yet he was always willing to fall into the subordinate position. This indicated mental endowments of a kind very rare and very valuable. Though Mr. Stratford was a frequent visitor at the Justin house, he did not come every day, and sometimes, of a morning, Arthur Thorne would stand and lean against the rail¬ ings of the shady piazza where Gay was in the habit of doing her reading and studying, which, by the way, had become much more of a habit than in the early summer. At such times he did not stay very long, nor say very much, but it cost him an effort, which only a strong man could have given, to tear himself away and leave Gay undisturbed with her books. Several times Mrs. Justin noticed this proceeding, and she could not refrain from giving Mr. Thorne her unqualified admira¬ tion. On one of these occasions Thorne remarked to Gay : I wish very much, Miss Armatt, that there was something inside the vast scope of human knowledge which I could help you to study. There ought to be something, but I don’t believe there is.” Gay smiled. “ I expect there are ever so many things,” she said, ‘‘ that you could teach me from beginning to end.” Thorne shook his head. No,” said he, your studies are extensive enough already, and there is nothing I would undertake to teach except law ; and in that, of course, you would take no interest.” I am not so sure of that,” said Gay. There are a great many things about law which a woman ought to know, especially those things which particularly concern her, and of which I am totally ignorant.” ‘‘And would you like to know them?” ea¬ gerly asked Thorne. VoL. XXXIV.— 69. 505 “ Certainly,” answered Gay. “The object of my life, Mr. Thorne, is to know.” As she said this a little shade of darkness crept into that young face, which Thorne had never seen there before. It was so slight a shade that most persons would not have no¬ ticed it, but Thorne marked it, and referred it to the fact that a little while ago this young person had another object in life, which, in a tangible and acknowledged form, did not now exist. “ If you will allow me. Miss Armatt,” he said, “ it will give me very great pleasure to in¬ dicate to you some points of law which I really think you ought“to understand, and without a knowledge of which, I do not hesitate to say, I believe no person should be called thoroughly educated. I can write out the points to which it would be well to direct your attention, and give you authorities and references which you can make use of if you like. Then you can look into the subject at your convenience, and I can always furnish you with any books you may want.” “ You are very kind indeed, Mr. Thome,” said Gay, “ and I think your suggestion a sen¬ sible and practical one. There are many gen¬ eral principles of law, and particular applica¬ tions too, which I am sure would be of use to me, and which I really ought to know if I ever expect to call myself well informed. It would be entirely too much for you to write out sub¬ jects and references, as you are so good as to suggest, and I would not ask you to put your¬ self to so much trouble ; but if you could talk over the matter with me when it is perfectly convenient to you, I should be very much obliged indeed. It wouldn’t interfere at all with my other work, for I have plenty of spare time.” As Gay said this she had a consciousness that she was conferring a favor, and that it was pleasant to confer it. She was entirely honest in the expression of her desire to know something of the laws under which she lived; but she also felt that Mr. Thorne was a young man of such kindly disposition that it was a kindness to him to give him an opportunity to be kind. Mr. Thorne was charmed. He went away to his room in the Cherry Bridge tavern, and set himself to work to prepare from the re¬ sources of his very extensive information a concise but comprehensive summary of some of the fundamental principles of law which everybody ought to know, and also of such specific points as women in particular ought to know. The work interested him greatly, and it was not until his lamp burned out that night that he laid down his pen. Early the next morning he hired a horse and

Page 509

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 506 rode over to the county town, where he asked the privilege from a lawyer to make abstracts from some of his legal books. It was several days before Arthur Thorne had prepared to his satisfaction his ground plan of the legal education of Gay Armatt. When it was finished he betook himself to the Justin mansion with his papers in his pocket, determined on no account to obtrude the mat¬ ter upon her attention did not a favorable op¬ portunity present itself. His opportunity came immediately. He found Gay and Mrs. Justin sitting together, and the young lady received him with un¬ usual cordiality. “ I hope, Mr. Thorne,” she said, “ that you have come prepared to talk law. I have thought of no less than four things that I want to ask you immediately, although I suppose you will wish to begin with Magna Charta, or some such foundation-stone.” “ I am quite ready,” he said, pulling out his papers, ‘‘and Magna Charta can wait. Now, what are your four points? ” Mrs. Justin had been told by Gay of the proposed plan of legal instruction, and she had not favored it. It would give Thorne too many advantages, and besides, she thought that Gay was working too hard already. But her young friend set aside all her objections. These things would be but trifles, she de¬ clared, and even were it otherwise, she had never felt so much like work in her life. Mrs. Justin had not withdrawn her objec¬ tions, but after a little talk with Mr. Thome she withdrew herself, and left the two to set¬ tle the four points. When, that evening, she told Mr. Stratford of Gay’s new course of study he did not object. “ It seems rather an odd thing to do,” he said, “but then Gay Armatt is somewhat of an odd young lady, and as for Arthur Thorne, although he is generally most oddly proper, I have found that, upon occasion, he can be properly odd.” Mrs. Justin shrugged her shoulders, “ I do not like it at all,” she said. “ I think I do,” replied Stratford. “ A cer¬ tain amount of knowledge of that kind will be very useful to Miss Armatt, and Thorne is just the man to give it to her.” “ He is just the man who should not give it to her,” quickly replied Mrs. Justin. “ Hor¬ ace Stratford, you are either blind or wickedly foolish.” “ My dear friend,” said Mr. Stratford, “ I wish that I could make you understand that I am neither.” “ That you can easily do,” said Mrs. Justin, “ by marrying Gay.” And there the conver¬ sation stopped. Not every day, but still often. Gay and Arthur, with a great deal of earnest inter¬ est on each side, pursued their legal studies. It was but a slight skeleton of a course of study, but it was one calculated to place a woman in a position of intelligence with re¬ gard to her relations with her fellow-beings which would give her great advantages over other women who did not occupy that posi¬ tion. To Gay it was all very pleasant; it helped and satisfied her desire to make her¬ self thoroughly well informed and cultured. To Arthur Thorne it was heaven. The weeks passed on, and touches of red and yellow began to appear here and there in the foliage, while the days became so percep¬ tibly shorter that those who drove out in the afternoon frequently came home under the twinkling light of the evening star. The ac¬ customed intercourse of Stratford and Gay continued without a change, except that it now received from Mrs. Justin certain favor¬ ing impulses which, before, she had not been wont to give it ; and the occasional intercourse of Gay and Thorne became more friendly and easy, in spite of the absolute want of en¬ couragement shown to it by Mrs. Justin. Had any one appeared in the neighborhood of Cherry Bridge and declared that at any season of the year in any part of that country there was the slightest trace of malaria, he would probably have fared badly. Mrs. People would have been glad to scratch the skin from his defaming face, and if no one, in fact, should offer to him personal injury, he would have been so borne down with contempt and con¬ demnation that he would have yearned to flee to some region the pride of whose people in their healthy surroundings he had not shocked. Mrs. Justin was very prudent concerning public opinion. Upon no account would she say a word against this general belief in the healthfulness of the neighborhood. But in her own mind she now began to be of the opin¬ ion that Gay Armatt was suffering from some sort of malarial influence. She was not at all the same girl she was when she came to that Cherry Bridge country. Her mental activity was as great as ever, but she could now be tired by a moderate walk, or even a very long drive. There were other indications of an un¬ satisfactory state of health, which were not generally noticeable, but easily perceived by the quick eye of Mrs. Justin. At first she at¬ tributed Gay’s apparent decrease in physical stamina to her studies, but she soon gave up that idea. The work done by her young friend was not enough to injure any healthy person of her years, and it was intermingled with constant recreation and outdoor life. There was something too much of it, and it

Page 510

THE HUNDREDTH MAN might occasionally have made Gay appear a little weary. But the effects of study were not sufficient to account for the symptoms Mrs. Justin noticed. The village doctor was called in, and he prescribed a tonic, but this was of no benefit ; and therefore it was that Mrs. J ustin privately made up her mind that there were in the at¬ mosphere malarial influences to which Gay was peculiarly susceptible, and that she would not .be better until she should go away. If Gay had moped, or had been lowspirited, or had shown any symptoms of retrospective melancholy, Mrs. Justin would have attrib¬ uted her condition to the broken engagement. But there was nothing of the kind. Gay had behaved admirably after her great trial. She had kept up her spirits, and it was only in phys¬ ical action that she showed any decrease in strength and activity. This state of mind Mrs. Justin attributed in great degree to the influence of Mr. Stratford. There was no pos¬ sible doubt of the fact that Gay could not so constantly associate with him without discov¬ ering by contrast the inferiority ?«.nd unworthi¬ ness of the man who had left her. Having determined that Gay’s health de¬ manded a complete change of scene and air, Mrs. Justin also considered it her duty to bring about that change without loss of time; she therefore made the necessary prepara¬ tions to go to her winter home in New York. Gay expected at the end of her Cherry Bridge sojourn to spend some time with her relatives in Maryland, but this Mrs, Justin would not allow. The country at this season was evi¬ dently no place for Gay ; she must go to the city. In the course of a week the J ustin house was closed, and Gay and its owner had de¬ parted for New York. Mr. Thorne had already gone home. He had not had so many of those delightful inter¬ views with Gay as he would have liked to have, and he had not taught her a quarter as much law as he would have wished to teach her. But he had seen her frequently, and his course had been so well begun that it would be easy to take it up at any time ; and, on the whole, Mr. Thorne was well satisfied ; nay, more, he was warmed and exhilarated by his sojourn at Cherry Bridge. To give himself this special holiday he had broken away from his profes¬ sional pursuits and had left his business in the hands of an associate. But he did not in the least reproach himself for this departure from his usual habits of life. Nothing could be wiser than to give a few weeks to the further¬ ance of an object which was more important to him than any other object could possibly be. Mr. Stratford remained at the Bullripple farm. The partridge season had begun, and 507 there was no reason why he should not stay in the country as long as he had hitherto been accustomed to stay. It was true that the region seemed more lonely than in former years when he had been there by himself, and he thought he was a little tired of the country. But it would have been ridiculous for him to have hurried away after Mrs. Justin and Gay. He promised himself, however, and indeed he had said as much to the ladies, that he would not stay among the mountains very long. His promise to himself was partly based on con¬ viction that Gay’s future happiness might de¬ pend in a greater degree on his presence in the city than it had lately depended on their companionship out here. What sudden expos¬ ure to her former peril might there occur he did not know. One afternoon Stratford came, with his gun and his setter dog Felix, to the rail fence on the top of the little eminence from which he and Gay had once watched the sunset. He seated himself on the top rail of the fence, and thoughtfully gazed over the landscape towards the western sky. Suddenly his eyes fell upon two persons emerging from the grove of sugar- maples on the level ground beneath him. It was Miss Matilda Stull and a gentleman, whom, to his astonishment, he speedily recognized as Mr. Crisman. They did not come up towards him, but turned away, walking along the bot¬ tom of the hill. Their very intimate manner as they moved away, hand in hand, gave as¬ surance that they had not noticed Stratford, and the very intimate converse in which they were evidently engaged gave good reason for their not noticing anything but themselves. Stratford could scarcely explain to himself why the appearance of these two persons, for whom he had such slight regard, should have such a sudden and disturbing effect upon him. He had heard from Mrs. People that Miss Stull and her mother had returned to the farm, but he had known nothing of Crisman’s presence in the neighborhood. It was simply impossi¬ ble to doubt the relations of these two young persons to each other. The expres.sion of their faces, and their whole demeanor and action, showed that they were lovers. Nothing should have given Stratford greater satisfaction than this. If Crisman were in love with that young w'oman down yonder. Gay’s peril was over. But, instead of a thnll of pleas¬ ure, Stratford felt a shock. FI is soul was filled with a startling conviction that his work was done ; that he had carried Gay Armatt over the gap ! Slowly, and without noticing the world be¬ neath his feet, or the sky above him, Stratford descended from the fence and walked home¬ ward. (To be continued.) Fra7ik R. Stockton.

Page 511

SUNKEN GRAVES. '"PHIS summer eve I wander where the dead J- Sleep out the centuries which roll o’er- head, And question who they were that laid them down, Unwakeful, at this last inn of the town. Till an emotion, unexpressed as yet. Swells in my bosom like a vast regret. There was a day when all this church-yard street Throbbed at the passing of the mourner’s feet ; There was a time when every ended year Brought unforgetful ones to drop a tear. What now is left, save that the grasses grow A little ranker since they dewed them so ? There is the sky ; and just as faint and far Swims through the twilight deeps the evening star. And there the mountain juts into the night. Mantled with green, and canopied with white ; While yonder orb, before it sinks to rest, Slants these long moonbeams from the darken¬ ing west. There too, a bird, upon a tree’s long limb. Has built her nest without a thought of him Within whose grave the maple’s spreading root Unawed adventures to intrude its foot. Above whose breast the summer’s dewy tears Have lightly sifted for uncounted years. None live who knew him. There are none to say Where lived, whom loved, what wrought, when passed away. This one who, doubtless, had the daily care And hourly travail of his soul to bear. But sleeps with none to marvel o’er him save The stranger musing by his sunken grave. Would t/iey remember ? Could I break their rest Who sleep, far-scattered from the east to west. And with such question from the earthly gloom Could vex the dreamless slumber of the tomb. Would they recall what pulseless lump of clay. Void of the spirit, here was laid away ? Dead are the dead : nor could there come reply. They could not answer to the call; but I — I and the living answer ! Breath by breath Some hope we cherished trembles to its death ; Some fond illusion of the spirit dies. And fades the glory of our summer skies. The hope, the vision, lay we well at rest; We scatter lilies on each quiet breast; We say at heart, with mute lips stricken dumb For grief of sad to-morrows ere they come: Within this grave our sun of life is set ! Never shall we this day or grief forget ! ” Then go our ways. . . . But when our spirits pass Through glebes unconquered from their native grass. And, swift and sweet our quickened senses get A perfume rarer than the violet, We never dream that all this verdure waves Above our hopes’ long-lost and sunken graves. Andrew B. Saxton,

Page 512

{BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER NUMBER.] LINCOLN’S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH, AND OTHER POLITICAL EVENTS OF i8sg-6o. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY.* BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. LINCOLN’S OHIO SPEECHES. When Lincoln, in opening the senatorial campaign of Illinois, declared that the Repub¬ lican cause must be intrusted to its own undoubted friends who do care for the result, he displayed a much better understanding of the character and aims of his opponent than those who, not so well informed, desired the adoption of a different course. Had the wishes of Greeley and others prevailed, had Douglas been adopted by the Illinois Republicans, the party would now have found itself in a fatal dilemma. No sooner was the campaign ended than Douglas started on a tour to the South, and began making speeches apparently de¬ signed to pave his way to a nomination for President by the next Democratic National Convention. Realizing that he had lost ground by his anti-Lecomptonism, and especially by his Freeport doctrine, and having already felt in the late campaign the hostility of the Bu¬ chanan Administration, he now sought to re¬ cover prestige by publishing more advanced opinions indirectly sustaining and defending slavery. Plitherto he had declared he did not care whether slavery was voted down or voted up. He had said he would not argue the question whether slavery is right or wrong. He had adopted Taney’s assertion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence. He had asserted that uniformity was impos¬ sible, but that freedom and slavery might abide together forever. But now that the elec¬ tion was over, and a new term in the Senate secure, he was ready to conciliate pro-slavery opinion with stronger expressions. Hence, in a speech at Memphis, he cunningly linked togeth¬ er in argument unfriendly legislation, slavery, and annexation. He said : “ Whenever a territory has a climate, soil, and pro¬ duction making it the interest of the inhabitants to encourage slave property, they will pass a slave code.” Wherever these preclude the possibility of slavery being profitable, they will not permit it. On the sugar plantations of Louisiana it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the croc¬ odile. He would say that between the negro and the crocodile, he took the side of the ne¬ gro \ but between the negro and the white man, he would go for the white man. The Almighty has drawn the line on this continent, on the one side of which the soil must be cultivated by slave labor; on the other by white labor. That line did not run on 360 and 30' [the Missouri Compromise line], for 360 and 30' runs over mountains and through valleys. But this slave line, he said, meanders in the sugar fields and plantations of the South, and the people living in their different localities and in the territories must determine for themselves whether their ‘‘middle bed” is best adapted to slavery or free labor. Referring to annexation, he said our des¬ tiny had forced us to acquire Florida, Louisi¬ ana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. “We have now territory enough, but how long will it be enough ? One hive is enough for one swarm of bees, but a new swarm comes next year and a new hive is wanted.” Men may say we shall never want anything more of Mexico, but the time would come when we would be compelled to take more. Central America was half-way to California and on the direct road. The time will come when our destiny, our institutions, our safety will compel us to have it. “ So it is,” con¬ cluded he, “ with the island of Cuba. . . . It is a matter of no consequence whether we want it or not ; we are compelled to take it, and we can’t help it.”t When Douglas reached New Orleans on his trip he, in another long speech, substantially repeated these declarations and, as if he had not yet placed himself in entire harmony with Southern opinion, he added a sentiment almost as remarkable as the “ mud-sill ” theory of Hammond, or the later “ corner-stone ” doc¬ trine of Stephens : “ It is a law of humanity,” said he, “a law of civili¬ zation, that whenever a man or a race of men show themselves incapable of managing their own affairs, they must consent to be governed by those who are capable of performing the duty. It is on this principle that you establish those institutions of charity for the support of the blind, or the deaf and dumb, or the insane. In accordance with this principle, I assert that the negro t Douglas, Memphis speech, Nov. 29th, 1858. Mem¬ phis “ Eagle and Enquirer.” All rights reserved. Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886-7.

Page 513

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 510 race, under all circumstances, at all times, and in all countries, has shown itself incapable of self-govern¬ ment.” * Once more, in a speech at Baltimore, Doug¬ las repeated in substance t what he had said at Memphis and New Orleans, and then in the beginning of January, 1859, he reached Wash¬ ington and took his seat in the Senate. Here he now began to comprehend the action of the Democratic caucus in deposing him from the chairmanship of the Committee on Terri¬ tories. His personal influence and prestige among the Southern leaders were gone. N either his revived zeal for annexation, nor his ad¬ vanced views on the necessity for slave labor restored his good-fellowship with the extremists. Althoiigh, pursuant to a recommendation in the annual message, a measure was then pend¬ ing in the Senate to place thirty millions in the hands of President Buchanan with which to negotiate for Cuba, the attitude of the pro¬ slavery faction was not one of conciliation, but of unrelenting opposition to him. Toward the close of the short session this feeling broke out in open demonstration. On February 23d, while an item of the appro¬ priation bill was under debate. Senator Brown, of Mississippi, said he wanted the success of the Democratic party in i860 to be a success of principles and not of men. He neither wanted to cheat nor be cheated. Under the decision of the Supreme Court the South would demand protection for slavery in the Territories. If he understood the senator from Illinois, Mr. Douglas,he thought a Territorial legislature might by non- action or by unfriendly action rightfully exclude slavery. He dissented from him, and now he would like to know from other senators from the North what they would do : “ If the Territorial legislature refuses to act, will you act ? If it pass unfriendly acts, will you pass friendly ? If it pass laws hostile to slavery, will you annul them and substitute laws favoring slavery in their stead ? ... I would rather,” concluded he, “see the Democratic party sunk, never to be resurrected, than to see it suc¬ cessful only that one portion of it might practice a fraud on another.”! Douglas met the issue, and defended his Freeport doctrine without flinching. The Democracy of the North hold, said he, that if you repudiate the doctrine of non-interven¬ tion, and form a slave code by act of Con¬ gress, where the people of a Tenitoiy refuse it, you must step off the Democratic platform. “ I tell you, gentlemen of the South, in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry * Douglas, New Orleans speech, Dec. 6th, 1858. Pamphlet. t Douglas, Baltimore speech, Jan. 5th, 1859. Pam¬ phlet. t Brown, Senate speech, Feb. 23d, 1859. Globe, p. 1241, seg. any one Democratic State of the North on the platform that it is the duty of the Federal Government to force the people of a Territory to have slavery when they do not want it.”§ The discussion extended itself to other Senators; Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, Clay, of Alabama, Mason, of Virginia, and Gwin, of California, seconded the demands and arguments of Brown; while Pugh, of Ohio, Broderick, of California, and Stuart, of Michi¬ gan, came to the help and defense of Doug¬ las and non-intervention. Several Republicans drifted into the debate on behalf of the posi¬ tion and principles of their party, which of course differed from those of both Brown and Douglas. The discussion was continued to a late hour, and finally came to an end through mere lapse of time, but not until an irrepar¬ able schism in the Democratic party had been opened. Silence upon so vital an issue could not long be maintained. In the following June, an Iowa friend wrote to Douglas to inquire whether he would be a candidate for the presidential nom¬ ination at the coming Charleston convention. Douglas replied that party issues must first be defined. If the Democracy adhered to their former principles, his friends would be at lib¬ erty to present his name. “If, on the contrary,” continued he, “it shall be¬ come tlie policy of the Democratic party, which I can¬ not anticipate, to repudiate these their time-honored principles, on which we have achieved so many patri¬ otic triumphs, and in lieu of them the convention shall interpolate into the creed of the party such new issues as the revival of the African slave-trade, or a Con¬ gressional slave-code for the Territories, or the doc¬ trine that the Constitution of the United States either establishes or prohibits slavery in the Territories be¬ yond the power of the people legally to control it, as other property — it is due to candor to say that, in such an event, I could not accept the nomination if tendered to me.” II We must leave the career of Douglas for a while to follow up the personal history of Lin¬ coln. The peculiar attitude of national politics had in the previous year drawn the attention of the whole country to Illinois in a remarka¬ ble degree. The senatorial campaign was hardly opened when a Chicago editor, whose daily examination of a large list of newspaper exchanges brought the fact vividly under his observation, wrote to Lincoln : “ You are like Byron, who woke up one morning and found himself famous. People wish to know about you. You have sprung at once from the position of a capital fellow, and a leading lawyer in Illinois, to a national reputation. ”1f $ Douglas, Senate speech, Feb. 23d, 1859. Globe, p. 1247. II Douglas to Dorr, June 22d, 1859. Baltimore “Sun,” June 24th, 1859. ^ Ray to Lincoln, July 27th, 1858. MS.

Page 514

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. The compliment was fully warranted; the personal interest in Lincoln increased daily from the beginning to the end of the great de¬ bates. The Freeport doctrine and its effect upon the Democratic party gave these discus¬ sions both present significance and a growing interest for the future. Another friend wrote him, a few days after election : “ You have made a noble canvass, which, if unavail¬ ing in this State, has earned you a national reputation, and made you friends everywhere.” ^ That this was not the mere flattery of par¬ tial friends became manifest to him by other indications; by an increased correspondence filled with general commendation, and par¬ ticularly by numerous invitations to deliver speeches in other States. The Republican Central Committee of New Hampshire wrote him that if Douglas came, as was expected, to that State, they desired Lincoln to come and answer him. The Central Committee of Min¬ nesota wished him to come there and assist in their canvass. There was an incessant com¬ motion in politics throughout the whole North, and as the season progressed, calls came from all quarters. Kansas wanted him ; t Buffalo wanted him;‘| Des Moines wanted him; § Pittsburg wanted him; || Thurlow Weed tel¬ egraphed : “ Send Abraham Lincoln to Albany immediately.”^ Not only his presence, but his arguments, ideas, and counsel were in de¬ mand. Dennison, making the canvass for gov¬ ernor of Ohio, asked for a report of his debates for campaign ‘‘ material.”** That men in all parts of the Union were thus turning to him for help and counsel was due, not alone to the publicity and credit he had gained in his debates with Douglas in the previous year; it grew quite as much out of the fact that by his sagacity and courage he had made himself the safest, as well as the most available, rallying-point of the Republi¬ can party and exponent of Republican doctrine. The Lecompton quarrel in the Democratic party had led many prominent Republicans on a false trail. In Douglas’s new attitude, developed by his Southern speeches and his claim to re-admission into regular Democratic fellowship, these leaders found themselves at fault, discredited by their own course. Lincoln, on the contrary, not only held aloft the most aggressive Republi¬ can banner but stood nearest the common party enemy, and was able to offer advice to all the elements of the Republican party, free from any suspicion of intrigue with foe or fac- * David Davis to Lincoln, Nov. 7th, 1858. MS. tDelahay to Lincoln, March 15th, 1859. MS. t Dorsheimer to Chase, Sept. 12th, 1859. MS. § Kasson to Lincoln, Sept. 13th, 1859. MS. II Kirkpatrick to Lincoln, Sept. 15th, 1859. MS. 511 tion. The causes of his senatorial defeat thus gave him a certain party authority and lead¬ ership, which was felt if not openly acknowl¬ edged. On his part, while never officious or obtrusive, he was always ready with season¬ able and judicious suggestions generous in spirit and comprehensive in scope, and which looked beyond mere local success. Thus he wrote from Springfield to Hon. Schuyler Col¬ fax, July 6th, 1859 : “ I much regret not seeing you while you were here among us. Before learning that you were to be at Jacksonville on the 4th, I had given my word to be at another place. Besides a strong desire to make your personal acquaintance, I was anxious to speak with you on politics a little more fully than I can well do in a letter. My main object in such conversation would be to hedge against divisions in the Republican ranks generally, and particularly for the contest of i860. The point of danger is the temptation in differ¬ ent localities to ‘ platform ’ for something which will be popular just there, but which, nevertheless, will be a firebrand elsewhere, and especially in a national con¬ vention. As instances, the movement against foreign¬ ers in Massachusetts ; in New Hampshire, to make obedience to the fugitive slave law punishable as a crime ; in Ohio ‘ to repeal the fugitive slave law ; and ‘squatter sovereignty,’ in Kansas. In these things there is explosive matter enough to blow up half a dozen national conventions, if it gets into them; and what gets very rife outside of conventions is very likely to find its way into them. What is desirable, if possible, is that in every local convocation of Republicans a point should be made to avoid everything which will disturb Republicans elsewhere. Massachusetts Re¬ publicans should have looked beyond their noses, and then they could not have failed to see that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North¬ west. New Hampshire and Ohio should forbear tilt- ing against the fugitive slave law in such way as to utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to the Constitution itself Kansas, in her con¬ fidence that she can be saved to freedom on ‘ squat¬ ter sovereignty,’ ought not to forget that to prevent the spread and naturalization of slavery is a national concern, and must be attended to by the nation. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond our noses ; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall disagree. I write this for your eye only; hoping, however, if you see danger as I think I do, you will do what you can to avert it. Could not suggestions be made to leading men in the State and Congressional conventions, and so avoid, to some ex¬ tent at least, these apples of discord? ” * * * § By this time Colfax was cured of his late coquetting with Douglas, and he replied : “ The suggestions you make have occurred to me. . . . Nothing is more evident than that there is an am¬ ple number of voters in the Northern States, opposed to the extension and aggressions of slavery and to Democratic misrule, to triumphantly elect a President of the United States. But it is equally evident that making up this majority are men of all shades and gradations of opinion, from the conservative who will scarcely defend his principles for fear of imperiling peace, to the bold radical who strikes stalwart blows IT Weed to Judd, Oct. 21st, 1859. MS. Dennison to Trumbull, July 21st, 1859. MS. * Partly printed in Hollister, “ Life of Colfax,” p. 146. We are indebted to Mrs. Colfax for the full manuscript text of this and other letters.

Page 515

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 512 regardless of policy or popularity. How this mass of mind shall be consolidated into a victorious phalanx in i860 is the great problem, I think, of our eventful times. And he who could accomplish it is worthier of fame than Napoleon or Victor Emanuel. ... In this work, to achieve success, and to achieve it with¬ out sacrifice of essential principle, you can do far more than one like myself, so much younger. Your counsel carries great weight with it; for, to be plain, there is no political letter that falls from your pen which is not copied throughout the Union.”* This allusion was called out by two letters which Lincoln had written during the year ; one declaring his opposition to the waning fallacy of know-nothingism, and in which he also defined his position on fusion.’' Refer- ing to a provision lately adopted by Massa¬ chusetts to restrict naturalization, he wrote : “ Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State ; and it is no privilege of mine to scold her for what she does. Still, if from what she has done, an inference is sought to be drawn as to what I would do, I may, without impropriety, speak out. I say then, that, as I understand the Massachusetts provision, I am against its adoption in Illinois, or in any other place where I have a right to oppose it. Understand¬ ing the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them. I have some little notoriety for commiserating the oppressed condition of the negro ; and I should be strangely inconsistent if I could favor any project for curtailing the existing rights of white men, even though born in different lands, and speaking different languages from myself. As to the matter of fusion, I am for it, if it can be had on Republican grounds ; and I am not for it on any other terms. A fusion on any other terms would be as foolish as unprincipled. It would lose the whole North, while the common enemy would still carry the whole South. The question of men is a different one. There are good patriotic men and able statesmen in the South whom I would cheer¬ fully support, if they would now place themselves on Republican ground, but I am against letting down the Republican standard a hair’s breadth.”! The Other was a somewhat longer letter, to a Boston committee which had invited him to a festival in honor of Jefferson’s birthday. “ Bearing in mind that about seventy years ago two great political parties were first formed in this coun¬ try; that Thomas Jefferson was the head of one of them, and Boston the headquarters of the other, it is both curious and interesting that those supposed to descend politically from the party opposed to Jeffer¬ son, should now be celebrating his birthday, in their own original seat of empire, while those claiming po¬ litical descent from him have nearly ceased to breathe his name everywhere. . . . “ But, soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation. One would state with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propo¬ sitions of Euclid are true ; but nevertheless he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the defin¬ itions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small show of success. One dashingly calls them ‘glittering generalities.’ Another bluntly calls them ‘self-evident lies.’ And * Colfax to Lincoln, July 14th, 1859. MS. t Lincoln to Canisius, May 17th, 1859. others insidiously argue that they apply only to ‘ superior races. ’ These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect, — the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads plotting against the people. They are the van-guard — the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation ; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves ; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. All honor to Jeffer¬ son — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”! Lincoln’s more important political work of the year 1859 was the part he took in the canvass in the State of Ohio, where a governor was to be chosen at the October election, and where the result would decide not merely the present and local strength of the rival candi¬ dates, but also to some extent indicate the prospects and probabilities of the presidential campaign of i860. The Ohio Democrats had called Douglas into their canvass, and the Republicans, as soon as they learned the fact, arranged that Lincoln should come and answer him. There was a fitness in this, not merely because Lincoln’s joint debates with him in Illinois in the previous summer were so successful, but also because Douglas in nearly eveiy speech made since then, both in his Southern tour and elsewhere, alluded to the Illinois campaign, and to Lincoln by name, especially to what he characterized as his political heresies. By thus everywhere making Lincoln and Lincoln’s utterances a public target, Douglas himself, in effect, pro¬ longed and extended the joint debates over the whole Union. Another circumstance added to the momentary interest of the general dis¬ cussion. Douglas was by nature aggressive. Determined to hold his Northern followers in the new issues which had grown out of his Freeport doctrine, and the new antagonisms which the recent slave code debate in the Senate revealed, he wrote and published in “Harper’s Magazine” for September, 1859, a long political article beginning with the as¬ sertion that “ under our complex system of government it is the first duty of American statesmen to mark distinctly the dividing-line between Federal and Local authority.” Quot¬ ing both the paragraph of Lincoln’s Spring- field speech declaring that “ a house divided against itself cannot stand,” and the paragraph from Seward’s Rochester speech, announcing t Lincoln to Pierce and others, April 6th, 1859.

Page 516

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 513 HOUSE IN WHICH JOHN BROWN WAS BORN, TORRINGTON, CONNECTICUT. (REDRAWN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH LENT BY F. B. SANBORN, ESQ.) the irrepressible conflict,” Douglas made a long historical examination of his own theory of “ non-intervention ” and popular sover¬ eignty,” and built up an elaborate argument to sustain his own course. The novelty of this appeal to the public occasioned general inter¬ est and varied comment, and the expedient seemed so ingenious as to excite the envy of Administration Democrats. Accordingly, At¬ torney-General Black, of President Buchan¬ an’s Cabinet, at the request of friends,” wrote, printed, and circulated an anonymous pamphlet in answer, in which he admitted that Douglas was not the man to be treated with a disdainful silence,” but characterized the ‘‘ Harper ” essay as an unsuccessful effort at legal precision ; like the writing of a judge who is trying in vain to give good reasons for a wrong decision on a question of law which he has not quite mastered.” Douglas, in a speech at Wooster, Ohio, criticised this per¬ formance of Black’s. Reply and rejoinder on both sides followed in due time; and this war of pamphlets was one of the prominent polit¬ ical incidents of the year. Thus Lincoln’s advent in the Ohio cam¬ paign attracted much more than usual notice. He made but two speeches, one at Columbus, and one at Cincinnati, at each of which places Douglas had recently preceded him. Lincoln’s addresses not only brought him large and appreciative audiences, but they obtained an unprecedented circulation in print. In the main, they reproduced and tersely re-applied the ideas and arguments developed in the senatorial cam- VoL. XXXIV.— 70. paign in Illinois, adding, however, searching comments on the neAver positions and points to which Douglas had since advanced. There is only space to insert a few disconnected quo¬ tations : ‘ ‘ N ow, what is J udge Douglas’s popular sovereignty ? It is as a principle no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor any body else has a right to object. . . . “ If you will read the copyright essay, you will dis¬ cover that Judge Douglas himself says, a controversy between the American Colonies and the Government of Great Britain began on the slavery question in 1699, and continued from that time until the revolution ; and, while he did not say so, we all know that it has continued with more or less violence ever since the revolution. . . . “ Take these two things and consider them together ; present the question of planting a State with the insti¬ tution of slavery by the side of a question of who shall be governor of Kansas for a year or two, and is there a man here, is there a man on earth, who would not say the governor question is the little one, and the slavery question is the great one ? I ask any honest Democrat if the small, the local, the trivial and temporary ques¬ tion is not. Who shall be governor ? while the durable, the important, and the mischievous one is, Shall this soil be planted with slavery ? This is an idea, I suppose, which has arisen in Judge Douglas’s mind from his pe¬ culiar structure. I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him. He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him. . . “ The Dred Scott decision expressly gives every citi¬ zen of the United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States Territories. And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying too, that the people of the Territory could law¬ fully drive slavery out again. When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurd-

Page 517

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. SH JOHN BROWN. (from A PHOTOGRAPH BY J. W. BLACK & CO.) ity ; no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be. . . . “The Judge says the people of the Territories have the right, by his principle, to have slaves if they want them. Then I say that the people in Georgia have the right to buy slaves in Africa if they want them, and I defy any man on earth to show any dis¬ tinction between the two things — to show that the one is either more wicked or more unlawful ; to show on original principles, that the one is better or worse than the other; or to show by the Constitution, that one differs a whit from the other. He will tell me, doubtless, that there is no Constitutional provision against people taking slaves into the new Territories, and I tell him that there is equally no constitutional provision against buying slaves in Africa. . . . “ Then I say, if this principle is established, that there is no wrong in slavery, and whoever wants it has a right to have it; that it is a matter of dollars and cents ; a sort of question how they shall deal with brutes ; that between us and the negro here there is no sort

Page 518

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. of question, but that at the South the question is be¬ tween the negro and the crocodile ; that it is a mere matter of policy ; that there is a perfect right accord¬ ing to interest to do just as you please — when this is done, where this doctrine prevails, the miners and sappers will have formed public opinion for the slave- trade. . . . “ Public opinion in this country is everything. In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to tlie extent I have stated. There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it. Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro every¬ where as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insid¬ ious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening under these teachings, will be ready for all these things ; and you will receive and support, or submit to, the slave- trade revived with all its horrors, a slave-code en¬ forced in our Territories, and a new Dred Scott de¬ cision to bring slavery up into the very heart of the free North. “ This Government is expressly charged with the duty of providing for the general welfare. We believe that the spreading out and perpetuity of the institution of slavery impairs the general welfare. We believe — nay, we know, that this is the only thing that has ever threatened the perpetuity of the Union itself. . . . I say we must not interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists, because the Consti¬ tution forbids it, and the general welfare does not re¬ quire us to do so. We must not withhold an efficient fugitive slave law, because the Constitution requires us, as I understand it, not to withhold such a law. But we must prevent the outspreading of the institution, be¬ cause neither the Constitution nor the general welfare requires us to extend it. We must prevent the revival of the African slave-trade, and the enacting by Con¬ gress of a Territorial slave-code. We must prevent each of these things being done by either congresses or courts. The people of these United States are the rightful masters of iDOth congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”! The Ohio Republicans gained a decided suc¬ cess at the October election. Ascribing this result in a large measure to the influence of * Lincoln, Columbus speech. Sept. i6th, 1859. De¬ bates, pp. 243-254. t Lincoln, Cincinnati speech. Sept. 17th, 1859. De¬ bates pp. 267-268. t Parsons and others to Lincoln, Dec. 7th, 1859. De¬ bates, preface. § Lincoln to Parsons and others, Dec. 19th, 1859. Debates, preface. II The preface to this third edition contains a letter from Douglas, alleging that injustice had been done him because, “ the original reports as published in the ‘Chicago Times,’ although intended to be fair and just, were necessarily imperfect, and in some respects er¬ roneous ; ” charging at the same time that Lincoln’s 515 JOHN brown’s cap. (ORIGINAL IN POSSESSION OK THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.) Lincoln’s speeches, the State Executive Com¬ mittee resolved to publish in cheap book form the full Illinois Joint Debates and the two Ohio addresses, to serve as campaign material for the ensuing year. “ We regard them,” wrote the committee to Lincoln, “ as luminous and triumphant expositions of the doc¬ trines of the Republican party, successfully vindicated from the aspersions of its foes, and calculated to make a document of great practical service to the Republican party in the approaching Presidential contest.” t Lincoln, thanking them for the flattering terms of their request, explained in his reply : “ The copies I send you, are as reported and printed by the respective friends of Senator Douglas and my¬ self at the time — that is, his by his friends, and mine by mine. It would be an unwarrantable liberty for us to change a word or a letter in his, and the changes I have made in mine, you perceive, are verbal only, and very few in number. I wish the reprint to be precisely as the copies I send, without any comment whatever.” $ The enterprise proved a success beyond the most sanguine expectations. A Columbus firm undertook the publication, itself assuming all pecuniary risk. Three large editions were sold directly to the public, without any aid from or any purchase by the committee, — the third edi¬ tion containing the announcement that up to that date, June i6th, i860, thirty thousand copies had already been circulated. || speeches had been revised, corrected, and improved. To this the publishers replied : “ The speeches of Mr. Lincoln were never ‘ revised, corrected, or improved ’ in the sense you use those words. Remarks by the crowd which were not responded to, and the reporters’ insertions of ‘cheers,’ ‘great applause,’ and so forth, which received no answer or comment from the speaker, were by our direction omitted, as well from Mr. Lincoln’s speeches as yours, as we thought their perpetuation in book form would be in bad taste, and were in no man¬ ner pertinent to, or a part of, the speech.” t * Douglas to Follet, Foster & Co., June 9th, i860. Debates, third edition, preface. t Ibid., Follet, Foster & Co. to Douglas, June i6th, i860. ONE OF JOHN brown’s PIKES. (ORIGINAL IN POSSESSION OF THE KANSAS HISTORICAL SOCIETY.)

Page 519

5i6 LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. IwC/ in - v£) |tM? RrTe^otyofe Cd.p^^J.okn o . '^lyO £)/eJ '/|(^ Njt'wj^oi-k J?pT'.ye % %■ 4m ;i •oOl nj^Xtvy t) ' ^ so?* 1 0 mi harper’s ferry, and Lincoln’s view of JOHN brown’s raid. x4nd now there occurred another strange event which, if it had been specially designed as a climax for the great series of political sensations since 1852, could scarcely have been more dramatic. This was John Brown’s inva¬ sion of Harper’s Ferry in order to create a slave insurrection. We can only understand the transaction as far as we can understand the man, and both remain somewhat enig¬ matical. Of Puritan descent, John Brown was born in Connecticut in the year 1800. When he was five years old, the family moved to Ohio, at that time yet a comparative wilderness. Here he grew up a strong, vigorous boy of the woods. His father taught him the tanner’s trade ; but a restless disposition drove him to frequent changes of scene and effort when he grew to manhood. He attempted surveying. He became a divinity student. He tried farm¬ ing and tanning in Pennsylvania, and tanning and speculating in real estate in Ohio. Cattle¬ dealing was his next venture; from this to sheep-raising; and by a natural transition to the business of a wool-factor in Massachusetts. This not succeeding, he made a trip to Europe. Returning, he accepted from Gerrit Smith a tract of mountain land in the Adirondacks, where he proposed to found and foster col¬ onies of free negroes. This undertaking proved abortive, like all his others, and he once more went back to the wool business in Ohio. Twice married, nineteen children had been born to him, of whom eleven Avere living when, in 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska bill plunged the country into the heat of politi¬ cal strife. Four of his sons moved away to the new Territory in the first rush of em¬ igrants; several others went later. When the Border Ruffian hostilities broke out, John Brown followed, Avith money and arms con¬ tributed in the North. AVith his sons as a nucleus, he gathered a little band of fifteen to tAventy adventurers, and soon made his name a terror in the laAvless guerilla Avar- » ^ * J • '' J**^***** ' . '^W GRAVE OF JOHN BROWN, NORTH ELBA, N. Y. (REDRAWN FROM A PHOTOGRAPH LENT BY GEORGE BALDWIN, ESQ.)

Page 520

LINCOLN'S COOPER fare of the day. His fighting was of the prevailing type, justifiable, if at all, only on the score of defensive retaliation, and some of his acts were as criminal and atro¬ cious as the worst of those committed by the Border Ruffians.* His losses, one son mur¬ dered, another wounded to the death, and a third rendered insane from cruel treatment, are scarcely compensated by the transitory notoriety he gathered in a few fool-hardy skirmishes. These varied experiences give us some¬ thing of a clew to his character : a strong will ; great physical energy; sanguine, fanatical tem¬ perament ; unbounded courage, and little wis¬ dom ; crude, visionary ideality ; the inspiration of biblical precepts and Old Testament hero- worship ; and ambition curbed to irritation by the hard fetters of labor, privation, and en¬ forced endurance. In association, habit, lan¬ guage, and conduct he was clean, but coarse ; honest, but rude. In disposition he min¬ gled the sacrificing tenderness with the sac¬ rificial sternness of his prototypes in Jewish history. He could lay his own child on the altar without a pang. The strongest element of his character was religious fan¬ aticism. Taught from earliest childhood to ^‘fear God and keep his commandments,” he believed firmly in 'the divine authen¬ ticity of the Bible, and memorized much of its contents. His favorite texts became literal and imperative mandates ; nay, more, he came to feel that he bore the commission and enjoyed the protection of the Almighty. In his Kansas camps he prayed and saw vis¬ ions; believed he wielded the sword of the Lord and of Gideon ; had faith that the an¬ gels encompassed him.t He desired no other safeguard than his own ideas of justice and his own convictions of duty. These ideas and convictions, however, refused obedience to ac¬ cepted laws and morals, and were mere fantas¬ tic and pernicious outgrowths of his religious fanaticism. His courage partook of the reck¬ lessness of insanity. He did not count odds. ‘^What are five to one?” he asked; and at another time he said, “ One man in the right, ready to die, will chase a thousand.” Perhaps he even believed he held a charmed life, for he boasted that he had been fired at thirty times and only his hair had been touched. In per- * On the night of May 24-25, 1856, five pro-slavery men living on Pottawatomie Creek, in Kansas, were mysteriously and brutally assassinated. The relatives and friends of the deceased charged John Brown and his band with these murders, which the relatives and friends of Brown persistently denied. Plis latest biog¬ rapher, however, unreservedly admits his guilt: “ For some reason he [John Brown] chose not to strike a blow himself ; and this is what Salmon Brown meant when he declared that his father ‘was not a participa- VOL. XXXIV.— 71. INSTITUTE SPEECH, 517 sonal appearance he was tall, slender, with rather a military bearing, in garb half deacon, half soldier.J He had an impressive, half-per¬ suasive, half-commanding manner. Pie was always very secretive, affected much mystery in his movements, came and went abruptly, was direct and dogmatic to bluntness in his conversation. His education was scant, his reading limited; he wrote strong phrases in bad orthography. If we may believe the inti¬ mations from himself and those who knew him best, he had not only acquired a passionate hatred of the institution of slavery, but had for twenty years nursed the longing to become a liberator of slaves in the Southern States. To this end he read various stories of insur¬ rections, and meditated on the vicissitudes, chances, and strategy of partisan warfare. A year’s border fighting in Kansas not only suddenly put thought into action, but his personal and family sacrifices intensified his visionary ambition into a stern and inflexible purpose. It is impossible to trace exactly how and when the Harper’s Ferry invasion first took practical shape in John Brown’s mind, but the indications are that it grew little by little out of his Kansas experience. His earliest collisions with the Border Ruffians occurred in the spring and summer of 1856. In the au¬ tumn of that year the United States troops dispersed his band, and generally suppressed the civil war. In January, 1857, we find him in the Eastern States, appealing for arms and supplies to various committees and in various places, alleging that he desired to organize and equip a company of one hundred minute- men, who were “ mixed up with the people of Kansas,” but who should be ready on call to rush to the defense of freedom. This appeal only partly succeeded. From one commit¬ tee he obtained authority as agent over certain arms .stored in Iowa, the custody and control of which had been in dispute. From another committee he obtained a portion of the clothing he desired. From still other sources he received certain moneys, but not sufficient for his requirements. Two circumstances, how¬ ever, indicate that he was practicing a decep¬ tion upon the committees and public. He entered into a contract with a blacksmith, in Collinsville, Connecticut, to manufacture him tor in the deed.’ It was a very narrow interpretation of the word ‘ participator ’ which would permit such a denial ; but it was no doubt honestly made, although for the purpose of disguising what John Brown’s real agency in the matter was. He was, in fact, the originator and performer of these executions, although the hands that dealt the wounds were those of others.” — F. B. Sanborn, “ Life and Letters of John Brown,” pp. 263-4. t Redpath, “ Life of John Brown,” p. 48. t Sanborn, ki “ Atlantic,” April, 1872.

Page 521

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 1000 pikes of a certain pattern,* to be com¬ pleted in 90 days, and paid $550 on the con¬ tract. There is no record that he mentioned this matter to any committee. His proposed Kan¬ sas minute-men were only to be one hundred in number, and the pikes could not be for them ; his explanation to the blacksmith, that they would be a good weapon of defense for Kan¬ sas settlers, was clearly a subterfuge. These pikes, ordered about March 23d, 1857, were without doubt intended for his Virginia inva¬ sion; and in fact the identical lot, finished after long delay, under the same contract, were shipped to him in September, 1859, and were actually used in .his Harper’s Ferry at¬ tempt. The other circumstance is that, about the time of his contract for the pikes, he also, without the knowledge of committees or friends, engaged a worthless adventurer, named F orbes, to go West and give military instruction to his company, — a measure neither useful nor prac¬ ticable for Kansas defense. These two acts may be taken as the first preparation for Harp¬ er’s Ferry. But merely to conceive great enterprises is not to perform them, and every after-step of John Brown reveals his lamentable weak¬ ness and utter inadequacy for the heroic role to which he fancied himself called. His first blunder was in divulging all his plans to Forbes, an utter stranger, while he was so careful in concealing them from others. F orbes, as ambitious and reckless as himself, of course soon quarreled with him, and left him, and endeavored first to supplant and then betray him. Meanwhile, little by little. Brown gathered one colored and six white confederates from among his former followers in Kansas, and assembled them for drill and training in Iowa; t four others joined him there.| These, together with his son Owen, counted, all told, a band of twelve persons engaged for, and partly informed of, his purpose. He left them there for instruction during the first three months of the year 1858, while he himself went East to procure means. At the beginning of February, 1858, John Brown became, and remained for about a month, a guest at the house of Frederick Douglass, in Rochester, New-York. Immedi¬ ately on his arrival there he wrote to a prom¬ inent Boston abolitionist, T. W. Higginson: “ I now want to get, for the perfecting of by far the most important undertaking of my whole/ life, from $500 to $800 within the next sixty days. I have written Rev. Theodore Parker, George L. Stearns, and F. Sanborn, Esquires, on the subject.” $ Correspondence and mutual requests for a conference ensued, and finally these Boston friends sent Sanborn to the house of Gerrit Smith, in Peterboro, New-York, where a meeting had been arranged. || Sanborn was a young man of twenty- six, just graduated from college, who, as secretary of various Massachu¬ setts committees, had been the active agent for sending contributions to Kansas. He arrived on the evening of Washington’s birthday,, February 22d, 1858, and took part in a coun¬ cil of conspiracy, of which John Brown was the moving will and chief actor.U Brown began by reading to the council a long document which he had drafted since his stay in Rochester.** It called itself a “ Pro¬ visional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” which, as it ex¬ plained, looked to no overthrow of States or dissolution of the Union, but simply to “ amendment and repeal.” It was not in any sense a reasonable project of government, but simply an ill-jointed outline of rules for a pro¬ posed slave insurrection. The scheme, so far as any comprehension of it may be gleaned from the various reports which remain, was. something as follows : Somewhere in the Virginia mountains he would raise the standard of revolt and liber¬ ation. Enthusiasts would join him from the free States, and escaped blacks come to his. help from Canada. From Virginia and the contiguous and neighboring slave States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, fugitive slaves, with their families, would flock to his camps. He would take his supplies, provisions, and horses by force from the neighboring planta¬ tions. Money, plate, watches, and jewelry would constitute a liberal safety or intelli¬ gence fund.” ft For arms, he had 200 Sharps- rifles, and 200 revolvers, with which he would “ He was exhibiting to a number of gentlemen, who put in, as the one here has, so that they could be un¬ happened to be collected together in a druggist’s shipped in case of necessity.” — Blair, Testimony be- store, some weapons which he claimed to have taken fore Investigating Committee, pp. 12 1-2. from Captain Pate in Kansas. Among them was a t Realf Testimony, p. 91. Mason Report, 36th Cong, two-edged dirk, with a blade about eight inches long, ist Sess. Senate Reports, Vol. II. and he remarked that if he had a lot of those things f Ibid., pp. 91-94. to attach to poles .about six feet long, they would be $ “Atlantic,” July, 1872, p. 51. a capital weapon of defense for the settlers of Kansas. 1| Sanborn, “Life and Letters of John Brown,” . . . VTien he came to make the contract, he wrote p. 438. it to have malleable ferrules, cast solid, and a guard to If “ Atlantic,” July, 1872, p. 52. be of malleable iron. . . . After seeing the sample ** Sanborn in “Atlantic,” March, 1875, p. 329. he made a slight alteration. One was, to have a screw tf Mason Report, Appendix, p. 55*

Page 522

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 519 arm his best marksmen. His ruder followers, and even the women and children, he would arm with pikes to defend fortifications. He would construct defenses of palisades and earthworks. He would use natural strong¬ holds ; find secret mountain-passes to connect one with another ; retreat from and evade at¬ tacks he could not overcome. He would main¬ tain and indefinitely prolong a guerilla war, of which the Seminole Indians in Florida and the negroes in Hayti afforded examples. With success, he would enlarge the area of his occu¬ pation so as to include arable valleys and low¬ lands bordering the Alleghany range in the slave States \ and here he would colonize, gov¬ ern, and educate the blacks he had freed, and maintain their liberty. He would make cap¬ tures and reprisals, confiscate property, take, hold, and exchange prisoners, and especially secure white hostages and exchange them for slaves to liberate. He would recognize neutrals, make treaties, exercise humanity, prevent crime, repress immorality, and observe all es¬ tablished laws of war. Success would render his revolt permanent, and in the end, through “ amendment and repeal,” abolish slavery. If, at the worst, he were driven from the moun¬ tains he would retreat with his followers through the free States to Canada. He had 12 recruits drilling in Iowa, and a half-executed contract for 1000 pikes in Connecticut;* * * § furnish him $800 in money and he would begin operations in May. This, if we supply continuity and arrange¬ ment to his vagaries, must have been approx¬ imately what he felt or dreamily saw, and outlined in vigorous words to his auditors. His listening friends were dumfounded at the audacity as well as heart-sick at the hopeless¬ ness of such an attempt. They pointed out the almost certainty of failure and destruc¬ tion, and attempted to dissuade him from the mad scheme ; but to no purpose.t They saw they were dealing with a foregone con¬ clusion ; he had convoked them, not to ad¬ vise as to methods, but to furnish the means. All reasonable argument he met with his rigid dogmatic formulas, his selected proverbs, his favorite texts of Scripture. The following, preserved by various witnesses as samples of his sayings at other times, indicate his reason¬ ing on this occasion : Give a slave a pike and you make him a man. I would not give Sharps rifles to more than ten men in a hundred, and then only when they have learned to use them. A ravine is better than a plain. Woods and mountain-sides can be held by resolute men against ten times their force. Nat Turner, with fifty men, held Virginia five weeks ; the same number, well organized and armed, can shake the system out of the State.’'! “ A few men in the right, and knowing they are right, can overturn a king. Twenty men in the Alleghanies could break slavery to pieces in two years.” “ If God be for us who can be against us ? Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” $ One of the participants relates, that — ‘‘When the agitated party broke up their council for the night, it was perfectly plain that Brown could not he held back from his purpose.” II The discussion of the friends on the second day (February 23d) was therefore only whether they should aid him, or oppose him, or remain indifferent. Against every ad¬ monition of reason, mere personal sympathy seems to have carried a decision in favor of the first of these alternatives. “ You see how it is,” said the chief counsellor, Gerrit Smith ; “ our dear old friend has made up his mind to this course and cannot be turned from it. We cannot give him up to die alone; we must support him.”U Brown has left an exact statement of his own motive and expectation, in a letter to Sanborn on the following day. “ I have only had this one opportunity in a life of nearly sixty years. . . . God has honored but com¬ paratively a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty and soul-satisfying rewards. ... I expect nothing but to endure hard¬ ness, but I expect to effect a mighty conquest, even though it be like the last victory of Samson.” ** Nine days later Brown went to Boston, where the conspiracy was enlarged and strengthened by the promises and encourage¬ ments of a little coterie of radical abolitionists, ft Within the next two months the funds he de¬ sired were contributed and sent him. Mean¬ while Brown returned West, and moved his company of recruits from Iowa, by way of Chicago and Detroit, to the town of Chatham, in Canada West, arriving there about the ist of May. By written invitations, Brown here called together what is described as “ a quiet convention of the friends of freedom,” to per¬ fect his organization. On the 8th of May, 1858,. they held a meeting with closed doors, there being present the original company of ten or * Blair Testimony, Mason Report, pp. 12 1-5. t Sanborn in “ Atlantic,” March, 1875, P-329- t Redpath, “ Life of John Brown,” p. 206. § Sanborn in “ Atlantic,” July, 1872, p 52. II Sanborn in “Atlantic,” March, 1875, p. 329. IT Sanborn, “ Life and Letters of John Brown,” p. 439. Sanborn, “Atlantic,” July, 1872, p. 53. ft “ Meantime I had communicated his plans at his request to Theodore Parker, Wentworth Higginson, and Dr. Howe, and had given Mr. Stearns some gen¬ eral conception of them. . . . No other person in New England except these four was informed by me of the affair, though there were many who knew or suspected Brown’s general purposes. . . . Brown’s first request, in 1858, was for a fund of $1000 only; with this in hand he promised to take the field either in April or May. Mr. Stearns acted as treasurer of this fund, and before the first of May nearly the whole amount had been paid in or subscribed.” — Sanborn, “ Atlantic,” April, 1875, pp. 45fi“7-

Page 523

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH, 520 eleven white members and one colored, whom Brown had brought with him, and a some¬ what miscellaneous gathering of negroes res¬ idents of Canada. Some sort of promise of secrecy was mutually made ; then John Brown, in a speech, laid his plan before the meeting. One Delaney, a colored doctor, in a response, promised the assistance of all the colored people in Canada.* The provis¬ ional constitution drafted by Brown at Roch¬ ester was read and adopted by articles, and about forty-five persons signed their names to the Constitution,” for the “ proscribed and oppressed races of the United States.” Two days afterward, the meeting again convened for the election of officers, John Brown was elected Commander-in-chief by acclamation ; other members were by the same summary method appointed Secretary of War, Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and two of them members of Congress. The election of a President was prudently postponed. This Chatham convention cannot claim con¬ sideration as a serious deliberative proceeding. John Brown was its sole life and voice. The col¬ ored Canadians were nothing but spectators. The ten white recruits were mere Kansas adven¬ turers, mostly boys in years and waifs in so¬ ciety, perhaps depending largely for livelihood on the employment or bounty, precarious as it was, of their leader. Upon this reckless, drift¬ ing material the strong despotic will, emotional enthusiasm, and mysterious rhapsodical talk of John Brown exercised an irresistible fasci¬ nation ; he drew them by easy gradations into his confidence and conspiracy. The remain¬ ing element, John Brown’s son in the Chat¬ ham meeting, and other sons and relatives in the Harper’s Ferry attack, are of course but the long educated instruments of the father’s thought and purpose. With funds provided, with his plan of gov¬ ernment accepted, and himself formally ap¬ pointed commander-in-chief. Brown doubtless thought his campaign about to begin ; it was however destined to an unexpected interrup¬ tion. The discarded and disappointed adven¬ turer Forbes had informed several prominent Republicans in Washington City that Brown was meditating an unlawful enterprise; and the Boston committee, warned that certain arms in Brown’s custody, which had been con¬ tributed for Kansas defense, were about to be flagrantly misused, dared not incur the pub¬ lic odium of complicity in such a deception and breach of faith. The Chatham organiza¬ tion was scarcely completed when Brown received word from the Boston committee * Realf Testimony, Mason Report, p. 99. t Stearns to Brown, May 14th, 1858; Howe, Testi¬ mony, Mason Report, p. 177. that he must not use the arms (the 200 Sharps rifles and 200 revolvers) which had been intrusted to him, for any other purpose than for the defense of Kansas.! Brown hur¬ ried to Boston ; but oral consultation with his friends confirmed the necessity for postpone¬ ment; and it was arranged that, to lull sus¬ picion, he should return to Kansas and await a more favorable opportunity. He yielded assent, and that fall and winter performed the exploit of leading an armed foray into Mis¬ souri, and carrying away eleven slaves to Can¬ ada — an achievement which, while to a certain degree it placed him in the attitude of a pub¬ lic outlaw, nevertheless greatly increased his own and his followers’ confidence in the suc¬ cess of his grand plan. Gradually the various obstacles melted away. Kansas became paci¬ fied. The adventurer Forbes faded out of sight and importance. The disputed Sharps rifles and revolvers were transferred from commit¬ tee to committee, and finally turned over to a private individual to satisfy a debt. He in turn delivered them to Brown without any hampering conditions. The Connecticut black¬ smith finished and shipped the thousand pikes. The contributions from the Boston committee swelled from one to several thousands of dol¬ lars. The recruits, with a few changes, though scattered in various parts of the country, were generally held to their organization and prom¬ ise, and slightly increased in number. The provisional Constitution and sundry blank commissions were surreptitiously printed, and captains and lieutenants appointed by the sig¬ nature of John Brown “ Commander-in-chief,” countersigned by the Secretary of War.” Gradually, also, the Commander-in-chief re¬ solved on an important modification of his plan; that, instead of plunging at once into the Virginia mountains, he would begin by the capture of the United States armory and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Two advantages seem to have vaguely suggested themselves to his mind as likely to arise from this course: the possession of a large quantity of govern¬ ment arms, and the wide-spread panic and moral influence of so bold an attempt. But it nowhere appears that he had any conception of the increased risk and danger it involved, or that he adopted the slightest precaution to meet them. Harper’s Ferry was a town of five thousand inhabitants, lying between the slave States of Maryland and Virginia, at the confluence of the Potomac and the Shenandoah rivers, and where the united streams flow through a pic¬ turesque gap in the single mountain-range called the Blue Ridge. The situation possesses none of the elements which would make it a defensible fastness for protracted guerilla war-

Page 524

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 521 fare, such as was contemplated in Brown’s plan. The mountains are everywhere ap¬ proachable without difficulty; are pierced by roads and farms in all directions ; contain few natural resources for sustenance, defense, or concealment ; are easily observed or con¬ trolled from the plain by superior forces. The town is irregular, compact, and hilly ; a bridge across each stream connects it with the oppo¬ site shores, and the Government factory and buildings, which utilized the water-power of the Potomac, lay .in the lowest part of the point of land between the streams. The Balti¬ more and Ohio Railroad crosses the Potomac bridge. On the 4th of July, 1859, John Brown, under an assumed name, with two sons and another follower, appeared near Harper’s Ferry, and soon alter rented the Kennedy Farm, in Mary¬ land, five miles from the town, where he made a pretense of cattle-dealing and mining; but in reality collected secretly his rifles, revolvers, ammunition, pikes, blankets, tents, and mis¬ cellaneous articles for a campaign. His rather eccentric actions, and the irregular coming and going of occasional strangers at his cabin, created no suspicion in the neighborhood. Cautiously increasing his supplies, and gath¬ ering his recruits, he appointed the attack for the 24th of October; but for some unexplained reason (fear of treachery, it is vaguely sug¬ gested,) he precipitated his movement in ad¬ vance of that date. From this point the oc¬ currences exhibit no foresight or completeness of preparation, no diligent pursuit of an intelli¬ gent plan, nor skill to devise momentary ex¬ pedients; only a blind impulse to act. On Sunday evening, October i6th, 1859, Brown gave his final orders, humanely direct¬ ing his men to take no life where they could avoid it. Placing a few pikes and other im¬ plements in his one-horse wagon, he started with his company of eighteen followers at eight o’clock in the evening, leaving five men behind. They cut the telegraph wires on the way, and reached Harper’s Ferry about eleven o’clock. He himself broke open the armory gates, took the watchmen prisoners, and made that place his headquarters. Separating his men into small detachments, he took possession of, and at¬ tempted to hold, the two bridges, the arsenal, and the rifle-factory. Next he sent six of his men five miles into the country to bring in several prominent slave-owners and their slaves. This was accomplished before day¬ light, and all were brought as prisoners to Brown at the armory. With them they also brought a large four-horse farm wagon, which he now sent to transfer arms from his Kennedy farm to a school-house on the Maryland side of the Potomac, about one mile from the town. Meanwhile, about midnight of Sunday, they detained the railroad train three hours, but finally allowed it to proceed. A negro porter was shot on the bridge. The town began to be alarmed. Citizens were captured at various points, and brought to swell the number of pris¬ oners at the armory, counting forty or fifty by morning. Still, not until daylight, and even until the usual hour of rising on Monday morning, did the town comprehend the na¬ ture and extent of the trouble. What, now, did Brown intend to do ? What result did he look for from his movement thus far ? Amid his conflicting acts and contradic¬ tory explanations, the indications seem clear only on two or three points. Both he and his men gave everybody to understand without reserve that they had come not to kill or destroy, but only to liberate the slaves. Soon, also, he placed pikes in the hands of his black prisoners. But that ceremony did not make soldiers of them, as his favorite maxim taught. They held them in their hands with listless indifference, remain¬ ing themselves, as before, an incumbrance in¬ stead of a reenforcement. He gave his white prisoners notice that he would hold them as hostages, and infonned one or two that, after daylight, he would exchange them for slaves. Before the general fighting began, he endeav¬ ored to effect an armistice or compromise with the citizens, to stop bloodshed, on condition that he be permitted to hold the armory and retain the liberated negroes. All this warrants the inference that he expected to hold the town, first, by the effect of terror; secondly, by the dis¬ play of leniency and kindness; and supposed that he could remain indefinitely, and dictate terms at his leisure. The fallacy of this scheme became quickly apparent. As the day dawned upon the town and the truth upon the citizens, his situation in a military point of view was already hopeless, — eighteen men against perhaps 1000 adults, and these eighteen scattered in four or five different squads, without means of mutual support, communication, or even contingent orders! Gradually, as the startled citizens became certain of the insignificant numbers of the as¬ sailants, an irregular street-firing broke out between Brown’s sentinels and individuals with firearms. The alarm was carried to neighboring towns, and killed and wounded on both sides augmented the excitement. Tradition rather than definite record asserts that some of Brown’s lieutenants began to comprehend that they were in a trap, and advised him to retreat. Nearly all his eulo¬ gists have assumed that such was his original plan, and his own subsequent excuses hint at this intention. But the claim is clearly unten¬ able. He had no means of defensive retreat, —

Page 525

522 LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. no provisions, no transportation for his arms and equipage, no supply of ammunition. The suggestion is an evident afterthought. Whether from choice or necessity, how¬ ever, he remained only to find himself more and more closely pressed. By Monday noon the squad in the rifle- works, distant one mile from the armory, had been driven out, killed, and captured. The other squads, not so far from their leader, joined him at the armory, minus their losses. Already he was driven to take refuge with his diminished force in the engine-house, a low, strong brick building in the armory yard, where they barricaded the doors and improvised loop-holes, and into which they took with them ten selected prison¬ ers as hostages. But the expedient was one of desperation. By this movement Brown lit¬ erally shut himself up in his own prison, from which escape was impossible. A desultory fire was kept up through doors and loop-holes. But now the whole country had become thoroughly aroused, and sundry military companies from neighboring towns and counties poured into Harper’s Ferry. Brown himself at length realized the hopeless¬ ness of his position, and parleyed for leave to retreat across the river on condition of his giv¬ ing up his prisoners ; but it was too late. Pres¬ ident Buchanan also took prompt measures ; and on Monday night a detachment of eighty marines from the Washington navy-yard, un¬ der command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, of the United States army, the same who after¬ ward became the principal leader of the Con¬ federate armies in the Rebellion, reached the scene of action, and were stationed in the arm¬ ory yard so as to cut off the insurgents from all retreat. At daylight on Tuesday morning Brown was summoned to surrender at discre¬ tion, but he refused. The instant the officer left the engine-house a storming-party of ma¬ rines battered in the doors ; in five minutes the conflict was over. One marine was shot dead in the assault ; Brown fell under severe sword and bayonet wounds, two of his son’s lay dead or dying, and four or five of his men were made prisoners, only two remaining unhurt. The great scheme of liberation built up through nearly three years of elaborate conspiracy, and de¬ signed to be executed in defiance of law, by individual enterprise with pikes, rifles, forts, guerilla war, prisoners, hostages, and plunder, was, after an experimental campaign of thirty- six hours, in utter collapse. Of Brown’s total force of twenty-two men, ten were killed, five escaped, and seven were captured, tried, and hanged. Of the townspeople, five had been killed and eight wounded. While John Brown’s ability for military leadership is too insignificant even for ridicule. his moral and personal courage compelled the admiration of his enemies. Arraigned before a Virginia court, the authorities hurried through his trial for treason, conspiracy, and murder, with an unseemly precipitancy, almost calcu¬ lated to make him seem the accuser, and the commonwealth the trembling culprit. He ac¬ knowledged his acts with frankness, defended his purpose with a sincerity that betokened honest conviction, bore his wounds and met his fate with a manly fortitude. Eight years before, he had written, in a document organiz¬ ing a band of colored people in Springfield, Massachusetts, to resist the fugitive slave law : “ Nothing so charms the American people as personal bravery. The trial for life of one bold, and to some extent successful, man, for defend¬ ing his rights in good earnest, would arouse more sympathy throughout the nation than the accumulated wrongs and sufferings of more than three millions of our submissive colored population.” Even now, when mere Quixotic knight-errantry and his own positive violation of the rights of individuals and society had put his life in forfeit, this sympathy for his boldness and misfortune came to him in large measure. Questioned by Governor Wise, Sen¬ ator Mason, and Representative Vallandig- ham about his accomplices, he refused to say anything except about what he had done, and freely took upon himself the whole responsi¬ bility. He was so warped by his religious train¬ ing as to have become a fatalist as well as a fanatic. All our actions,” he said to one who visited him in prison, even all the follies that led to this disaster, were decreed to happen ages before the world was made.”"^ The gloomy philosophy of Calvin is the key which unlocks the mysteries of Brown’s life and deeds. He was convicted, sentenced, and hanged on the 2d of December. Congress met a few days afterward, and the Senate appointed an investigating committee to inquire into the seizure of the United States armory and ar¬ senal. The long and searching examination of many witnesses brought out with sufficient distinctness the varied personal plottings of Brown, but failed to reveal that half a dozen radical abolition clergymen of Boston were party to the conspiracy ; nor did they then or afterward justify their own conduct by showing that Christ ever counseled treason, abetted conspiracy, or led rebellion against established government. From beginning to end, the whole act was reprehensible, and fraught with evil result. Modern civilization and republican government require that beyond the self-de¬ fense necessary to the protection of life and limb, all coercive reform shall act by authority of law only. * Sanborn in “Atlantic,” Dec., 1875, p. 718.

Page 526

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 523 Upon politics the main effect of the Harper’s Ferry incident was to aggravate the temper and increase the bitterness of all parties. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi; Mason, of Virginia; and Fitch, of Indiana, democratic members of the Senate investigating committee, sought dili¬ gently but unsuccessfully to find grounds to hold the Republican party at large responsible for Brown’s raid. They felt obliged to report that they could not recommend any legislation to meet similar cases in the future, since the “ invasion ” of Virginia was not of the kind mentioned in the Constitution, but was sim¬ ply the act of lawless ruffians, under the sanc¬ tion of no public or political authority.” * Collamer, of Vermont, and Doolittle, of Wis¬ consin, Republican members of the committee, in their minority report, considered the affair an outgrowth of the pro-slavery lawlessness in Kansas. Senator Douglas, of Illinois, how¬ ever, apparently with the object of still further setting himself right with the South, and aton¬ ing for his Freeport heresy, mkde a long speech in advocacy of a law to punish conspiracies in one State or Territory against the govern¬ ment, people, or property of another; once more quoting Lincoln’s Springfield speech, and Seward’s Rochester speech as containing revolutionary doctrines. In the country at large, as in Congress, the John Brown raid excited bitter discussion and radically diverse comment, — some execrating him as a deserved felon, while others exalted him as a saint. His Boston friends particularly, who had encouraged him with either voice or money, were extravagant in their demonstra¬ tions of approval and admiration. On the day of his execution religious services were held, and funeral bells were tolled. Some eighteen hundred years ago,” said Thoreau, “ Christ was crucified ; this morning, perchance. Cap¬ tain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links.” t The road to heaven,” said Theodore Parker, •Ts as short from the gallows as from a throne; perhaps, also, as easy.” Emerson, using a yet stronger figure, had already called him “ a new saint, waiting yet his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.” | Amid this conflict of argument, public opinion in the free States gravitated to neither extreme. It accepted neither the declara¬ tion of the great orator Wendell Phillips, that the lesson of the hour is insurrection,”§ nor the assertion of the great lawyer Charles * Mason Report, p. 18. f Redpath, “ Echoes of Harper’s Ferry,” p. 41. t Cooke’s Life of Emerson, p. 140. $ Lectureat Brooklyn, November ist, 1859. “Echoes of Harper’s Ferry,” p. 43. O’Conor, that slavery ‘‘ is in its own nature, as an institution, beneficial to both races.” |1 This chapter would be incomplete if we neglected to quote Mr. Lincoln’s opinion of the Harper’s Ferry attempt. His quiet and common-sense criticism of the affair, pro¬ nounced a few months after its occurrence, was substantially the conclusion to which the average public judgment has come after the lapse of a quarter of a century : “ Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized. What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty- eight years ago, in which at least three times as many lives were lost as at Flarper’s Ferry? You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclu¬ sion that Southampton was ‘ got up by Black Repub¬ licanism.’ In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general or even a very extensive slave insurrection is possible. The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained. The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it. The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels ; but there neither are nor can be supplied the indispensable connecting trains. “ Much is said by Southern people about the affec¬ tion of slaves for their masters and mistresses ; and a part of it, at least, is true. A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favorite master or mistress, would divulge it. This is the rule ; and the slave revolution in Hayti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances. The gunpowder plot of British history, though not connected with slaves, was more in point. In that case, only about twenty were admitted to the secret; and yet one of them, in his anxiety to save a friend, betrayed the plot to that friend, and, by conse¬ quence, averted the calamity. Occasional poisonings from the kitchen, and open or stealthy assassinations in the field, and local revolts extending to a score or so, will continue to occur as the natural results of slavery; but no general insurrection of slaves, as I think, can happen in this country for a long time. Whoever much fears or much hopes for such an event, will be ^alike disappointed. . . . “ John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves re¬ fused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, cor¬ responds with the many attempts related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusi¬ ast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown’s attempt at Har¬ per’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same. The eagerness to cast blame on old England in 'the one case, and on New England in the other, does not disprove the sameness of the two things.” If The aggravation of partisan temper over the Harper’s Ferry incident found a manifestation 11 Letter to Committee of Merchants, December 20th, 1859. “ Echoes of Harper’s Ferry,” p. 299. If Lincoln, Cooper Institute speech, Feb. 27th, i860.

Page 527

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH, 524 in a contest over the Speakership in the House of Representatives as prolonged and bitter as that which attended the election of Banks. In the Congressional elections of 1858, following the Lecompton controversy, the Democrats had once more lost control of the House of Representatives; there having been chosen 113 Republicans, 93 Administra¬ tion Democrats, 8 an ti-Lecompton Democrats, and 23 South Americans, as they were called; that is, members, mainly from the slave States, opposed to the Administration.* This XXXV I th Congress began its session three days after the execution of John Brown, and the election of a Speaker was the first work of the new House of Representatives. The Republicans, not having a majority, made no caucus nomination; but John Sherman, of Ohio, had the largest following on the first ballot, and thereafter received their united ef¬ forts to elect him. At this point a Missouri member introduced a resolution declaring : “ That the doctrines and sentiments of a certain book called ‘ The Impending Crisis of the South — How to Meet it,’ purporting to have been written by one Hin¬ ton R. Helper [of North Carolina], are insurrection¬ ary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquillity of the country, and that no member of this House who has indorsed and recommended it, or the compend from it, is fit to be Speaker of this House.” t This resolution was aimed at Sherman, who with some seventy Republicans of the previous Congress had signed a circular in¬ dorsing and recommending the book upon the general statement that it was an antislavery work, written by a Southerner. The book ad¬ dressed itself to non-slaveholding Southern whites, and was mainly made up of statistics, but contained occasional passages ofintolerant and vindictive sentiment against slaveholders. Whether it could be considered insurrection¬ ary ” depended altogether on the pro-slavery or antislavery bias of the critic. Besides, the author had agreed that the obnoxious passages should not be printed in the compendium which the Republicans recommended in their circular. When interrogated, Mr. Sherman replied that he had never seen the book, and that ‘‘ I am opposed to any interference whatever by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave’ in the slave States.” But the disavowal did not relieve him from Southern enmity. The fire-eaters seized the pretext to- charge him with all manner of ‘‘ abolition ” intentions, and by violent debate and the ut¬ terance of threats of disunion, made the House a parliamentary and almost a revolu- * Tribune Almanac, i860. f Globe, December 5th, 1859, p. 3. t Lincoln to McNeill, April 6th, i860. Lamon, “ Life of Abraham Lincoln,” p. 441. tionary babel for nearly two months. Certain appropriations were exhausted, and the treas¬ ury was in sore need of funds. Efforts were made to adopt the plurality rule, and to choose a Speaker for a limited period ; but every such movement was resisted for the purpose of de¬ feating Sherman, or rather, through his defeat to force the North into unconditional submis¬ sion to extreme pro-slavery sentiment. The struggle, nominally over an incident, was in reality over a policy. On January 30th, i860, Mr. Sherman with¬ drew his name, and the solid Republican vote was given to William Pennington of New Jer¬ sey, another Republican, who, on February ist, was elected Speaker by 1 17 votes, 4 oppos¬ ing members having come to his support. The South gained nothing by the obstruction¬ ist policy of its members. During the long con¬ test, extending through forty-four ballots, their votes were scattered among many candidates of different factions, while the Republicans maintained an almost unbroken steadiness of party discipline. On the whole, the principal results of the struggle were to sectionalize parties, more completely ripen Southern senti¬ ment toward secession, and combine waver¬ ing voters in the free States in support of Re¬ publican doctrines. Lincoln’s cooper institute speech. Among the many invitations to deliver ad¬ dresses which Lincoln received in the fall of 1859, was one from a committee asking him to lecture in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, in a course then in progress there, designed for popular entertainment. I wrote,” said Lin¬ coln, ‘‘ that I could do it in February, pro¬ vided they would take a political speech, if I could find time to get up no other.” | “ Your letter was duly received and handed over to the committee,” was the response, ‘‘ and they accept your compromise. You may lecture at the time you mention, and they will pay you $200. I think they will arrange for a lecture in New York also, and pay you $200 for that.” § Financial obstacles, or other reasons,brought about the transfer of the engagement to a new committee, II and the invitation was repeated in a new form : “The Young Men’s Central Republican Union of this city (New York) very earnestly desire that you should deliver what I may term a political lecture during the ensuing month. The peculiarities of the case are these: A series of lectures has been determined upon. The first was delivered by Mr. Blair, of St. Louis, a $ Jas. A. Briggs to Lincoln, November ist, 1859. MS. II Jas. A. Briggs in New York “ Evening Post,’* August 16th, 1867.

Page 528

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. short time ago ; the second will be in a few days, by Mr. Cassius M. Clay, and the third we would prefer to have from you rather than any other person. Of the audience I should add that it is not [that] of an ordinary political meeting. These lectures have been contrived to call out our better, but busier, citizens who never attend political meetings. A large part of the audience will also consist of ladies.”* Lincoln, however, remained under the im¬ pression that the lecture was to be given in Brooklyn, and only learned after he reached New York to fulfill his engagement that he was to speak in the Cooper Institute.f When, on the evening of F ebruary 2 7 th, 1 860, he stood be¬ fore his audience, he saw not only a well-filled house, but an assemblage of listeners in which were many whom, by reason of his own modest estimate of himself, he would have been rather inclined to ask advice from than to offer instruc¬ tion to. William Cullen Bryant presided over the meeting; David Dudley Field escorted the speaker to the platform; ex-Governor King, Horace Greeley, James W. Nye, Cephas Brainerd, Charles C. Nott, Hiram Barney, and others sat among the invited guests. “ Since the days of Clay and Webster,’’ said the “ Tribune ” next morning, no man has spoken to a larger assemblage of the intellect and mental cul¬ ture of our city.” Of course the presence of such a gathering was no mere accident. Not only had Lincoln’s name for nearly two years found constant mention in the newspapers, but both friendly and hostile comment had coupled it with the two ranking political leaders in the free States — Seward and Doug¬ las. The representative men of New York were naturally eager to see and hear one who, by whatever force of eloquence or argument, had attracted so large a share of the public attention. We may also fairly infer that, on his part, Lin¬ coln was no less curious to test the effect of his words on an audience more learned and critical than those collected in the open-air meetings of his Western campaigns. This mu¬ tual interest was an evident advantage to both; it secured a close attention from the house, and insured deliberation and emphasis by the speaker, enabling him to develop his argu¬ ment with perfect precision and unity, reach¬ ing perhaps the happiest general effect ever attained in any one of his long addresses. He took as his text a phrase uttered by Senator Douglas in the late Ohio campaign, — Our fathers, when they framed the govern¬ ment under which we live, understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now.” Lincoln defined “ this question,” with a lawyer’s exactness, thus : * C. C. Nott to Lincoln, February 9tb, i860. MS. t Lincoln to McNeill, April 6th, i860. Lamon, “ Life of Abraham Lincoln,” p. 441. VoL. XXXIV.— 72. 525 “ Does the proper division of local from Federal authority, or anything in the Constitution, forbid our Federal Government to control as to slavery in our Federal Territories ? Upon this Senator Douglas holds the affirmative, and the Republicans the negative. This affirmation and denial form an issue, and this issue — this question — is precisely what the text de¬ clares our fathers understood ‘better than we.’ ” From this ‘‘precise and agreed starting- point ” Lincoln next traced with minute his¬ torical analysis the action of “ our fathers ” in framing “ the government under which we live,” by their votes and declarations in the Con¬ gresses which preceded the Constitution, and in the Congresses following which proposed its twelve amendments and enacted various Terri¬ torial prohibitions. His conclusions were irre¬ sistibly convincing. “The sum of the whole is,” said he, “that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitu¬ tion, twenty-one — a clear majority of the whole — certainly understood that no proper division of local from Federal authority, nor any part of the Constitu¬ tion, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal Territories; while all the rest probably had the same understanding. Such unques¬ tionably 'was the understanding of our fathers who framed the original Constitution ; and the text affirms that they understood the question ‘ better than we.’ . . . It is surely safe to assume that the thirty-nine framers of the original Constitution and the seventy-six mem¬ bers of the Congress which framed the amendments thereto, taken together, do certainly include those who may be fairly called ‘ our fathers who framed the government under which we live.’ And so assum- ing, I defy any man to show that any one of them ever, in his whole life, declared that in his under¬ standing any proper division of local from Federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal government to control as to slavery in the Federal Territories. I go a step further. I defy any one to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century), declare that in his understanding any proper division of local from Fed¬ eral authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the Federal Territories. To those who now so declare, I give, not only ‘ our fathers who framed the govern¬ ment under which we live,’ but with them all other living men within the century in which it was framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them. “ Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so would be to discard all the lights of current ex¬ perience — to reject all progress, all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opin¬ ions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand ; and most surely not in a case, whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.” If any part of the audience came with the expectation of hearing the rhetorical fireworks of a Western stump-speaker of the “half-horse, half-alligator” variety, they met novelty of an unlooked for kind. In Lincoln’s entire address

Page 529

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 526 he neither introduced an anecdote nor essayed a witticism; and the first half of it does not contain even an illustrative figure or a poeti¬ cal fancy. It was the quiet, searching exposi¬ tion of the historian, and the terse, compact reasoning of the statesman, about an abstract principle of legislation, in language well-nigh as restrained and colorless as he would have employed in arguing a case before a court. Yet such was the apt choice of words, the easy precision of sentences, the simple strength of propositions, the fairness of every point he as¬ sumed, and the force of every conclusion he drew, that his listeners followed him with the interest and delight a child feels in its easy mastery of a plain sum in arithmetic. With the sympathy and confidence of his audience thus enlisted, Lincoln next took up the more prominent topics in popular thought, and by words of kindly admonition and protest addressed to the people of the South, showed how impatiently, unreasonably, and unjustly they were charging the Republican party with sectionalism, with radicalism, with revolution¬ ary purpose, with the John Brown raid, and kindred political offenses, not only in the ab¬ sence of any acts to justify such charges, but even in the face of its emphatic and constant denials and disavowals. The illustration with which he concluded this branch of his theme could not well be surpassed in argumentative force. “ But you will not abide the election of a Republi¬ can President ! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union ; and then you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us ! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, ‘ Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer !’ To be sure what the robber demanded of me — my money — was my own ; and I had a clear right to keep it ; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own ; and the threat of death to me to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.” But the most impressive, as well as the most valuable, feature of Lincoln’s address was its concluding portion, where, in advice directed especially to Republicans, he pointed out in dispassionate but earnest language that the real, underlying conflict was in the difference of moral conviction between the sections as to the inherent right or wrong of slavery, and in view of which he defined the proper duty of the free States. “ A few words now,” said he, “ to Republicans. It is exceedingly desirable that all parts of this great Con¬ federacy shall be at peace and in harmony one with another. Let us Republicans do our part to have it so. Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ilJ temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can^ what will satisfy them. “Will they be satisfied if the Territories be uncon¬ ditionally surrendered to them ? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us the Territo¬ ries are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrec¬ tions are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insur¬ rections ? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections ; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation. “The question recurs. What will satisfy them ? Simply this : We must not only let them alone, but we must,, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but witli no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone ; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never de¬ tected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them. “ These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them ? This, and this only : cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated; we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Sen¬ ator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits,, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us. “ I am quite aware they do not state their case pre¬ cisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, ‘Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery. ’ But we do let them alone — have never disturbed them ; so that, after all, it is what we say which dissatisfies them. They will continue tO' accuse us of doing until we cease saying. “ I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our free-State constitutions. Yet those constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis than do all other sayings against it, and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these constitutions will be demanded and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a Ml national recognition of it, as a legal right and a social blessing. “ Nor can we justifiably withhold this on any ground, save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object tO' its nationality — its universality ! if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlarge¬ ment. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right ; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full re¬ cognition, as being right ; but thinking it wrong as we do, can we yield to them ? Can we cast our votes with their view and against our own ? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Page 530

LINCOLN'S COOPER ** Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation ; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in the free-States ? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and ef¬ fectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophis¬ tical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored, contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man, such as a policy of ‘ don’t care,’ on a question about which all true men do care, such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists ; reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washing¬ ton did. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by men¬ aces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” The smiles, the laughter, the outbursts of applause which greeted and emphasized the speaker’s telling points, showed Mr. Lincoln that his arguments met ready acceptance. The next morning the four leading New York dailies printed the speech in full, and bore warm tes¬ timony to its merit and effect. “ Mr. Lincoln is one of nature’s orators,” said the “Tribune,” “using his rare powers solely to elucidate and convince, though their inevitable effect is to delight and electrify as well. We present herewith a very full and accurate report of this speech ; yet the tones, the gestures, the Idndling eye, and the mirth-provoking look defy the reporter’s skill. The vast assemblage fre¬ quently rang with cheers and shouts of applause, which were prolonged and intensified at the close. No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” * A pamphlet reprint was at once announced by the same paper; and later, in the Presiden¬ tial campaign, a more careful edition was pre¬ pared and circulated, to which were added co¬ pious notes by two members of the committee under whose auspices the address was deliv¬ ered. Their comment, printed in the preface, is worth quoting as showing its literary value un¬ der critical analysis. “No one who has not actually attempted to verify its details can understand the patient research and his¬ torical labor which it embodies. The history of our earlier politics is scattered through numerous journals, statutes, pamphlets, and letters ; and these are defect¬ ive in completeness and accuracy of statement, and in indices and tables of contents. Neither can any one who has not traveled over this precise ground appreciate the accuracy of every trivial detail, or the self-denying impartiality with which Mr. Lincoln has turned from the testimony of ‘ the fathers ’ on the general question of slavery, to present the single question which he discusses. From the first line to the last, from his prem- * “ New York Tribune,” February 28th, i860. t Pamphlet edition with notes and preface by Charles C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, i860. INSTITUTE SPEECH. 527 ises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning, and without the stiffness which usually accompanies dates and details. A single, easy, simple sentence of plain Anglo-Saxon words contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify, and which must have cost the author months of inves¬ tigation to acquire.” t From New York Lincoln went to fill other engagements to speak at several places in New England, where he met the same enthu¬ siastic popular reception and left the same marked impression, especially upon the more critical and learned hearers. They found no little surprise in the fact that a Western poli¬ tician, springing from the class of unlettered frontiersmen, could not only mold plain strong words into fresh and attractive phraseology, but maintain a clear, sustained, convincing ar¬ gument, equal in force and style to the best ex- mnples in their college text-books. More interesting, however, than the experiences of those who listened to him are the comments of Lincoln himself on the methods by which he acquired his powers as an orator. A clergy¬ man who was among his auditors on one of these occasions has recorded the following as among his statements in a conversation he held with him in a railroad car : “ ‘ Ah ! that reminds me,’ he said ‘ of a most extra¬ ordinary circumstance, which occurred in NewPIaven, the other day. They told me that the professor of rhetoric in Yale College — a very learned man, isn’t he ? ’ ‘Yes, sir, and a very fine critic too. ’ ‘ Well, I sup¬ pose so ; he ought to be at any rate — they told me that he came to hear me, and took notes of my speech, and gave a lecture on it to his class the next day ; and, not satisfied with that, he followed me up to Meriden the next evening, and heard me again for the same pur¬ pose. Now, if this is so, it is to my mind very extra¬ ordinary. I have been sufficiently astonished at my success in the West. It has been most unexpected. But I had no thought of any marked success at the East, and least of all that I should draw out such com¬ mendations from literary and learned men ! ’ . . . “ ‘ That suggests, Mr. Lincoln, an inquiry which has several times been upon my lips during this conversa¬ tion. I want very much to know how you got this unusual power of “ putting things. ” It must have been a matter of education. No man has it by nature alone. What has your education been ? ’ “‘Well, as to education, the newspapers are correct — I never went to school more than six months in my life. But, as you say, this must be a product of culture in some form. I have been putting the question you ask me to myself while you have been talking. I say this, that among my earliest recollections, I remember how, when a mere child, I used to get irritated when anybody talked to me in a way I could not understand. I don’t think I ever got angry at anything else in my life. But that always disturbed my temper, and has ever since. I can remember going to my little bedroom, after hearing the neighbors talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out what was the ex¬ act meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it ; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until

Page 531

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH, 528 I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend. This was a kind of passion with me, and it has stuck by me, for I am never easy now, when I am handling a thought, till I have bounded it north and bounded it south and bounded it east and bounded it west. Perhaps that accounts for the charac¬ teristic you observe in my speeches, though I never put the two things together before.’ “ ‘ Mr. Lincoln, I thank you for this. It is the most splendid educational fact I ever happened upon. This is genius, with all its impulsive, inspiring, dominating power over the mind of its possessor, developed by education into talent, with its uniformity, its perma¬ nence, and its disciplined strength, always ready, always available, never capricious — the highest possession of the human intellect. But, let me ask, did you not have a law education ? How did you prepare for your pro¬ fession ? ’ “ ‘ Oh, yes ! I “ read law,” as the phrase is ; that is, I became a lawyer’s clerk in Springfield, and copied te¬ dious documents, and picked up what I could of law in the intervals of other work. But your question re¬ minds me of a bit of education I had, which I am bound in honesty to mention. In the course of my law-reading I constantly came upon the word demonstrate. I thought at first that I understood its meaning, but soon became satisfied that I did not. I said to myself, “ What do I do when I demonstrate more than when I reason or prove ? How does demonstration differ from any other proof? I consulted Webster’s Dictionary. That told of “ certain proof” “ proof beyond the possibility of doubt; ” but I could form no idea of what sort of proof that was. I thought a great many things were proved beyond a possibility of doubt, without recourse to any such extraordinary process of reasoning as I understood “ demonstration ” to be. I consulted all the dictionaries and books of reference I could find, but with no better results. You might as well have de¬ fined blue to a blind man. At last I said, “ Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means ; ” and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father’s house, and staid there till I could give any proposition in the six books of Euclid at sight. I then found out what “ demonstrate ” means, and went back to my law studies.’ “ I could not refrain from saying, in my admiration at such a development of character and genius com¬ bined, ‘Mr. Lincoln, your success is no longer a mar¬ vel. It is the legitimate result of adequate causes.’ ” * It must be borne in mind that the report of the foregoing conversation was not written until more than four years after it took place. While the main facts and ideas are doubtless given with reasonable fidelity, anything like verbal accuracy in recording Mr. Lincoln’s phraseology is not to be presumed. Those acquainted with his style can see that the lan¬ guage is clearly that of his interviewer, though the latter has evidently reproduced the main current of the conversation. We have in Mr. Lincoln’s own handwriting the affirmance of one of the facts mentioned and discussed. In a brief sketch of his early life which he wrote after his first nomination, to serve as memo¬ randa for a campaign biographer, stands this modest sentence ; he speaking of himself in the third person : He studied and nearly * The Rev. J. P. Gulliver in N. Y. “ Independent,” Sept. 1st, 1864. mastered the six books of Euclid since he was a member of Congress.” In the frank explana¬ tion made in the interview quoted from, we are let more into the motives and details of this and other of his educational experiences, and, despite the verbal defects of the report, we discern the strong qualities and diligent methods by aid of which he attained such rare excellence in argument and oratory. THE CHARLESTON CONVENTION. The great political struggle between the North and the South, between Freedom and Slavery, was approaching its culmination. The irrepressible conflict ” had shifted uneas¬ ily from caucus to Congress; from Congress to Kansas ; incidentally to the Supreme Court and to the Congressional election sin the various States; from Kansas it had come back with re¬ newed intensity to Congress. The next stage of development through which it was des¬ tined to pass was the Presidential election of i860, where, necessarily, the final result would depend largely upon the attitude and rela¬ tion of parties, platforms, and candidates as selected and proclaimed by their National conventions. The first of these National conventions was that of the Democratic party, long appointed to meet at Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23d, i860. The fortunes of the party had greatly fluctuated. The repeal of the Missouri Com¬ promise had brought it shipwreck in 1854; it had regained victory in the election of Bu¬ chanan, and a majority of the House of Rep¬ resentatives in 1856; then the Lecompton imbroglio once more caused its defeat in the Congressional elections of 1858. But worse than the victory of its opponents was the irrec¬ oncilable schism in its own ranks — the open war between President Buchanan and Senator Douglas. In a general way the Southern de¬ mocracy followed Buchanan, while the North¬ ern democracy folio wed Douglas. Y et there was just enough local exception to baffle accurate calculation. Could the Charleston Convention heal the feud of leaders, and bridge the chasm in policy and principle ? As the time ap¬ proached, and delegation after delegation was chosen by the States, all hope of accommoda¬ tion gradually disappeared. Each faction put forth its utmost efforts, rallied its strongest men. Each caucus and convention only ac¬ centuated and deepened existing differences. When the convention met, its members brought not the ordinary tricks and expedients of poli¬ ticians with carte blanche authority, but the precise formulated terms to which their con¬ stituencies would consent. They were only messengers, not arbitrators. The Charleston

Page 532

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH Convention was the very opposite of its immediate predecessor, the Cincinnati Con¬ vention. At Cincinnati, concealment and am¬ biguity had been the central thought and purpose. Everybody w^as anxious to be hood¬ winked. Delegates, constituencies, and lead¬ ers had willingly joined in the game of cheat and be cheated.” Availability, har¬ mony, party success, were the paramount objects. No similar ambiguity, concealment, or bar¬ gain w^as possible at Charleston. There was indeed a whole brood of collateral issues to be left in convenient obscurity, but the central questions must not be shirked. The Lecomp- ton quarrel, the Freeport doctrine, the prop¬ erty theory, the slave-State ” dogma, the Con¬ gressional slave code proposal, must be boldly met and squarely adjusted. Even if the dele¬ gates had been disposed to trifle with their constituents, the leaders themselves w^ould tol¬ erate no evasion on certain cardinal points. Douglas, in his Dorr letter, had announced that he would suffer no interpolation of new issues into the Democratic creed. In his pamphlet reply to Judge Black he repeated his deter¬ mination with emphasis. “ Suppose it were true that I am a presidential as¬ pirant ; does that fact justify a combination by a host of other presidential aspirants, each of whom may ima¬ gine that his success depends upon my destruction, and the preaching a crusade against me for boldly avowing now the same principles to which they and I were pledged at the last presidential election? Is this a sufficient excuse for devising a new test of political or¬ thodoxy ? . . . I prefer the position of Senator or even that of a private citizen, where I would be at lib¬ erty to defend and maintain the well-defined principles of the Democratic party, to accepting a presidential nomination upon a platform incompatible with the principle of self-government in the Territories, or the reserved rights of the States, or the perpetuity of the Union under the Constitution.” * This declaration very clearly defined the issue on one side. On the other side it was also formulated with equal distinctness. Jef¬ ferson Davis, already recognized as the ablest leader of the Buchanan wing of the Demo¬ cratic Senators, wrote and submitted to the United State Senate, on February 2d, i860, a series of resolutions designed to constitute the Administration or Southern party doctrines, which were afterward revised and adopted by a caucus of Democratic Senators, t These resolutions expressed the usual party tenets ; and on two of the controverted points asserted dogmatically exactly that which Douglas had stigmatized as an intolerable heresy. The fourth resolution declared — ’^Douglas’s Reply to Black. Pamphlet, Oct., 1859. t Jefferson Davis, Senate speech. Globe, May 17th, i860, p. 2155. t Halstead, Conventions of i860. 529 “ That neither Congress nor a Territorial legislature, whether by direct legislation or legislation of an in¬ direct and unfriendly character, possesses power to an¬ nul or impair the Constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common Territories, and there hold and enjoy the same while the Territorial condition remains.” — Globe, March 1st, i860, p. 935. While the fifth resolution declared — “ That if experience should at any time prove that the judiciary and executive authority do not possess means to insure adequate protection to constitutional rights in a Territory, and if the Territorial government shall fail or refuse to provide the necessary remedies for that purpose, it will be the duty of Congress to sup¬ ply such deficiency.” Party discipline was so strong among the Democrats that public expectation looked somewhat confidently to at least a temporary agreement or combination which would en¬ able the factions, by a joint effort, to make a hopeful presidential campaign. But no prog¬ ress whatever was made in that direction. As the clans gathered at Charleston, the notable difference developed itself, that while one wing was filled with unbounded enthusiasm for a candidate, the other was animated by an earnest and stubborn devotion to an idea. Douglas was the pivot individual *of the Charleston Convention,” wrote an observant journalist; ‘‘every delegate was for or against him; every motion meant to nominate or not nominate him; every parliamentary war was Iro or con Douglas.” J This was the surface indication, and, indeed, it may be said with truth, it was the actual feeling of the North¬ ern faction of the Democratic party. Douglas was a genuinely popular leader. He had the power to inspire a pure personal enthusiasm. He had aroused such hero-worship as may be possible in modern times and in American politics. Beyond this, however, the Lecompton controversy, and his open persecution by the Buchanan Administration, made his leadership and his candidacy a necessity to the Northern Democrats. With Southern Democrats the feeling went somewhat deeper. Forgetting how much they owed him in the past, and how much they might still gain through him in the future, they saw only that he was now their stumbling- block, the present obstacle to their full and fin¬ al success. It was the Douglas doctrine, squat¬ ter sovereignty, and “ unfriendly legislation,” rather than the man which they had come to oppose, and were determined to put down. Any other individual holding these heresies would have been equally obnoxious. They had no candidate of their own ; they wor¬ shiped no single leader; but they followed a principle with unfaltering devotion. They clung unswervingly not only to the property

Page 533

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 530 th.Qoryi but advanced boldly to its logical sequence, — Congressional protection to slav¬ ery in the Territories. Of the convention’s preliminary work little is worth recording, — there were the clamor and protest of contesting delegations and small fire of parliamentary skirmishes, by which fac¬ tions feel and measure each other’s strength. Caleb Cushing was made permanent chair¬ man, for the triple reason that he was from Massachusetts, that he was the ablest presiding officer in the body, and was for the moment filled with blind devotion to Southern views. The act¬ ual temper of the con vention was made manifest by the ready agreement of both extremes to join battle in making the platform before proceed¬ ing to the nomination of candidates. The usual committee of one member from each State was appointed, and to it was referred the deluge of resolutions which had been showered upon the convention. Had an amicable solution of the slavery issue been possible, this platform committee would have found it, for it labored faithfully to accomplish the miracle. But after three days and nights of fruitless suggestion and persua¬ sion, the committee re-appeared in conven¬ tion. Upon four points they had come to either entire or substantial agreement. In addition to formally re- affirming the Cincinnati plat¬ form of 1856, they advised the convention to favor, I. The faithful execution of the fugi¬ tive slave law. 2. The protection of natural¬ ized citizens. 3. The construction of a Pacific railroad. 4. The acquisition of the Island of Cuba. But upon the principal topic, the ques¬ tion of slavery in the Territories, they felt compelled to report that even an approximate unanimity was impossible. In undisguised sorrow they proceeded to present two radically different reports. The convention, not yet in the least realizing that the great Democratic party had suffered fatal shipwreck in the se¬ cret caucus-room, listened eagerly to the re- * MAJORITY REPORT. “ Resolved, That the platform adopted at Cincin¬ nati be affirmed, with the following resolutions : “ Resolved, That the Democracy of the United States hold these cardinal principles on the subject of slavery in the Territories : First. That Congress has no power to abolish slavery in the Territories. Second. That the Territorial legislature has no power to abolish slavery in any Territory, nor to prohibit the introduction of slaves therein, nor any power to exclude slavery there¬ from, nor any power to destroy or impair the right of property in slaves by any legislation whatever. “ Resolved, That it is the duty of the Federal Govern¬ ment to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property on the high seas’, in the Territories, or wherever else its constitutional authority extends.” t MINORITY REPORT. “ Resolved, That we, the Democracy of the Union, ports and explanatory speeches of the majority and minority of the committee. The majority report * planted itself squarely upon the property theory and Congressional protection. Mr. Avery, of North Carolina, said it was presented in the name of 17 States with 127 electoral votes, every one of which would be cast for the nominee. He argued that in occupying new Territories Southern men could not compete with emigrant-aid societies at the North. These could send a voter to the Territories for the sum of $200, while it would cost a Southern man $1500. Secure political power by emigration, and permit the Territo¬ rial legislatures to decide the slavery question, and the South would be excluded as effectually as by the Wilmot proviso. Cuba must be ac¬ quired, and the flag of this great country must float over Mexico and the Central American States. But if you apply this doctrine of pop¬ ular sovereignty, and establish a cordon of free States from the Pacific to the Atlantic, where in the future are the South to emigrate ? They asked the equal right to emigrate with their property, and protection from Congress during the Territorial condition. They would leave it to the people in convention assem¬ bled, when framing a State constitution, to determine the question of slavery for them¬ selves. They had no purpose but to have a vexed question settled, and to put the Demo¬ cratic party on a clear, unclouded platform, not a double-faced one — one face to the North and one face to the South. Henry B. Payne, of Ohio, presented and defended the report of the minority. t It as¬ serted that all questions in regard to property in States or Territories are judicial in their character, and that the Democratic party will abide by past and future decisions of the Su¬ preme Court concerning them. Mr. Payne explained that while the majority report was supported by fifteen slave and two free States, | representing 127 electoral votes, the minority in convention assembled, hereby declare our affirm¬ ance of the resolutions unanimously adopted and de¬ clared as a platform of principles by the Democratic Convention at Cincinnati in the year 1856, believing that Democratic principles are unchangeable in their nature when applied to the same subject-matters; and we recommend as the only further resolutions, the following : Resolved, That all questions in regard to the rights of property in States or Territories arising under the Constitution of the United States are judicial in their character, and the Democratic party is pledged to abide by and faithfully carry out sucji determination of these questions as has been, or may be made by the Supreme Court of the United States.” t Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, California, Oregon.

Page 534

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. report was indorsed by fifteen free States,* rep¬ resenting 176 electoral votes. He argued that, by the universal consent of the Democratic party, the Cincinnati platform referred this question of slavery to the people of the Terri¬ tories, declaring that Congress shall in no event intervene one way or the other, and that all controversies shall be settled by the courts. Now the proposition of the majority report is to make a complete retraction of those two cardinal doctrines of the Cincinnati platform. The Northern mind has become thoroughly imbued with this great doctrine of popular sovereignty. You cannot tear it out of their hearts unless you tear out their heart-strings themselves. “ I repeat, that upon this ques¬ tion of Congressional non-intervention we are committed by the acts of Congress, we are com¬ mitted by the acts of National Democratic Conventions ; we cannot recede without per¬ sonal dishonor, and, so help us God, we never will recede ! " Between these extremes of recommendation another member of the platform committee — Benjamin F. Butler, of Massachusetts — pro¬ posed a middle course. He advocated the simple re-affirmance of the Cincinnati plat¬ form. If it had suffered a double interpreta¬ tion, so had the Bible and the Constitution of the United States. But beyond serving to con¬ sume time and amuse the convention, Mr. Butler’s speech made no impression. The real tournament of debate followed, between William L. Yancey, of Alabama, and Senator Pugh, of Ohio. It turned out in the end that Mr. Yancey was the master-spirit of the Charleston Con¬ vention, though that body was far from enter¬ taining any such suspicion at the beginning. In exterior appearance he did not fill the por¬ trait of the traditional fire-eater. He is de¬ scribed as “ a compact middle-sized man, straight-limbed, with a square-built head and face, and an eye full of expression ; ” a very mild and gentlemanly man, always wearing a genuinely good-humored smile, and looking as if nothing in the world could disturb the equanimity of his spirits.” t Pie had, besides, a marvelous gift of persuasive oratory. He was the Wendell Phillips of the South, for, like his Northern rival, he was a bom agitator. Above all his colleagues, he was the brain and soul and irrepressible champion of the pro-slavery reaction throughout the Cotton States. He was ^ Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota. Massachusetts presented a separate report through Mr. Butler, but her electoral vote is included in Mr. Payne’s estimate. t Plalstead, The Conventions of i860, pp. 5, 48. S3I tireless and ubiquitous ; traveling, talking, writ¬ ing, lecturing, animating every intrigue, direct¬ ing every caucus, making speeches and draft¬ ing platforms at every convention. To defend, propagate, and perpetuate African slavery was his mission. He was the ultra of the ultras, ac¬ cepting the institution as morally right and divinely sanctioned, desiring its extension and inclined to favor, though not then himself ad¬ vocating the re-opening of the African slave- trade. He held that all Federal laws prohibit¬ ing such trade ought to be repealed so that each State might decide the question for it¬ self Still more, Mr. Yancey was not only an agitator and fire-eater, but for years an insidious, persevering conspirator to pro¬ mote secession. Occupying such a position, he was naturally the champion of the Cotton States at Charleston. The defense of the ultra demands of the South was by common consent devolved upon him,| and it was understood long beforehand that he was prepared with the principal speech from that side. ^ In full consciousness of the fact that he and his colleagues were then at Charleston with a predetermination to force a programme of dis¬ ruption expressly designed as a prelude to in¬ tended disunion, Mr. Yancey stood up and with smiling face and silvery tones assured his hear¬ ers that he and his colleagues from Alabama were not disunionists per se. Then he pro¬ ceeded with his speech. Only its key-note was new, but the novelty was of startling import to Northern delegates. The Northern Democrats, he stated, were losing ground and fallingbefore their victorious adversaries. Why ? Because they had tampered with, and pandered to, the antislavery sentiment. They had admitted that slavery was wrong. This was surrendering the very citadel of their argument. They must re¬ form their lines and change their tactics. They must come up to the high requirements of the occasion and take anew departure. The remain¬ der of his speech was an insinuating plea for the property doctrine and Congressional inter¬ vention, for which the galleries and conven¬ tion rewarded him with long and earnest ap¬ plause. Even if the great Southern agitator’s speech had been wanting in point and elo¬ quence, success was supplied by the unmis¬ takable atmosphere and temper of this great Charleston audience. The more astute of the Douglas delegates were struck with the dismay of a new revela- t “ The leadership at Charleston, in this attempt to divide and destroy the Democratic party, was intrusted to appropriate hands. No man possessed the ability, or the courage, or the sincerity in his object for such a mission in a higher degree than the gifted Yancey.” — Douglas, Senate speech. May i6th, i860; Appendix to Congressional Globe, page 313.

Page 535

532 LINCOLN'S COOPER tion. Their cause was lost — their party was gone. Senator Pugh, of Ohio, resented the dic¬ tation of the advocates of slavery in a warmth of just indignation. He thanked God that at last a bold and honest man had told the whole truth of the demands of the South. It was now before the country that the South did de¬ mand an advanced step from the Democratic party. He accurately traced the downfall of the Northern Democracy to her changing and growing exactions. Taunted with their weak¬ ness, they were now told they must put their hands on their mouths and their mouths in the dust. “ Gentlemen of the South,” said Mr. Pugh, “ you mistake us — we will not do it.” Such language had never been heard in a Democratic National Convention, and the hall was as still as a funeral. This was Friday night, the fifth day of the convention. '‘A crisis ” had long been whispered of as the skeleton in the party closet. It seemed to be at hand, and in a parliamentary uproar the “ question ” was vehemently demanded, but the chairman skillfully managed at length to secure an adjournment. The “ crisis ” had in reality come on Thurs¬ day night, in the committee-room, in the hope¬ less first double report of its platform com¬ mittee. The dissolution of the convention did not take place till the Monday following. A great party, after a vigorous and successful life of thirty years, could not die easily. The speeches of Avery and Payne, of Yancey and Pugh, on Friday, were recognized as cries of defiance, but not yet accepted as moans of despair. On Saturday morning. President Buchanan’s lieutenant, Bigler, of Pennsylva¬ nia, essayed to ride the storm and steer to a Southern victory. But he only succeeded in securing a recommittal of both platforms to * SECOND MAJORITY REPORT. Resolved^ That the platform adopted by the Dem¬ ocratic party at Cincinnati be affirmed with the follow¬ ing explanatory resolutions : “ First. That the government of a Territory organized by an act of Congress is provisional and temporary, and, during its existence, all citizens of the United States have an equal right to settle with their property in the Territory without their rights, either of person or property, being destroyed or impaired by Con¬ gressional or Territorial legislation. “ Sccoiid. That it is the duty of the Federal Govern¬ ment in all its departments, to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property in the Territories, and wherever else its constitutional authority ex¬ tends. “ Third. That when the settlers in a Territory having an adequate population, form a State constitution, the right of sovereignty commences, and, being consum¬ mated by admission into the Union, they stand on an equal footing with the people of other States, and the State thus organized ought to be admitted into the Fed¬ eral Union, whether its constitution prohibits or rec¬ ognizes the institution of slavery.” INSTITUTE SPEECH. the committee. Nothing, however, was gained by the manoeuvre. Saturday afternoon the committee once more reported the same dis¬ agreement in slightly changed phraseology;* two antagonistic platforms, presenting the same sharp difference of principle — one de¬ manding Congressional intervention, the other insisting upon Congressional non-intervention. Then the parliamentary storm was unloosed for the remainder of that day with such fury that the chairman declared his physical in¬ ability to continue a contest with six hundred gentlemen as to who should cry the loudest, and threatened to leave the chair. On Mon¬ day, April 30th, the seventh day of the conven¬ tion, a final decision was reached. By a vote of 165 to 138, the convention voted to substitute the minority report for that of the majority ; in other words, to adopt the Douglas non¬ intervention platform. The explosion was near, but still delayed, and the Cotton-States delegates sat sullenly through a tangle of routine voting. Finally, the ques¬ tion was put on Butler’s proposition to adopt the Cincinnati platform pure and simple. This was the red flag to the mad bull. Mississippi declared that the Cincinnati platform was a great political swindle on one half the States of the Union; and from that time on, though a large affirmative vote sustained the proposi¬ tion (237^ to 65), the Cotton States ceased to act as a part of the convention. As soon as a lull in the proceedings permitted, Mr. Yancey put in execution his programme of demand, disruption, disunion, and rebellion, labored for through long years, and announced by himself, with minute distinctness, three months before.! Led by the Alabama dele¬ gation, the Cotton States, — Alabama, Missis¬ sippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, Tex- SECOND MINORITY REPORT. “ I. Resolved^ That we, the Democracy of the Union, in convention assembled, hereby declare our affirmance of the resolutions unanimously adopted and declared as a platform of principles by the Dem¬ ocratic Convention at Cincinnati, in the year 1856, be¬ lieving that democratic principles are unchangeable in their nature when applied to the same subject- matters ; and we recommend as the only further resolutions the following : “ Inasmuch as differences of opinion exist in the Democratic party as to the nature and extent of the powers of a Territorial legislature and as to the powers and duties of Congress under the constitution of the United States over the institution of slavery within the Territories : “ 2. Resolved, That the Democratic party will abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States on the questions of constitutional law.” t “ To obtain the aid of the Democracy in this con¬ test, it is necessary to make a contest in its Charleston Convention. In that body Douglas’s adherents will press his doctrines to a decision. If the State-Rights men keep out of that convention, that decision must

Page 536

LINCOLN'S COOPER INSTITUTE SPEECH. 533 CALEB CUSHING. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) as, and Arkansas, — with protests and speeches, with all the formality and ‘‘ solemnity ” which the occasion allowed, seceded from the Charles¬ ton Convention, and withdrew from the delib¬ erations of Institute Hall. That same Monday night the city of Charles¬ ton held a grand jubilee. Music, bonfires, and inevitably be against the South, and that either in di¬ rect favor of the Douglas doctrine, or by the indorse¬ ment of the Cincinnati platform, under which Douglas claims shelter for his principles.” “ The State-Rights men should present in thatconvention their demands for a decision, and they will obtain an indorsement of their demands, or a denial of these demands. If indorsed, we shall have a greater hope of triumph within the VoL. XXXIV.— 73. extravagant declamation held an excited crowd in Court-house Square till a late hour; and in a high- wrought peroration Yancey prophesied, with all the confidence and exultation of a triumphant conspirator, that ‘‘perhaps even now the pen of the historian was nibbed to write the story of a new revolution.” Union. If denied, in my opinion, the State-Rights wing should secede from the convention, and appeal to the whole people of the South, without distinction of parties, and organize another convention upon the basis of their principles, and go into the election with a candidate nominated by it, as a grand constitutional party. But in the presidential contest a black Repub¬ lican may be elected. If this dire event should happen.

Page 537

IS IT A PIECE OF A COMET? 534 in my opinion the only hope of safety for the South is in a withdrawal from the Union before he shall be inaugu¬ rated ; before the sword and treasury of the Federal Government shall be placed in the keeping of that party. I would suggest that the several State legislatures should by law require the governor, when it shall be made mani¬ fest that the black Republican candi¬ date for the Presidency shall receive a majority of the electoral vote, to call a convention of the people of the State, to assemble in time to provide for their safety before the 4th of March, 1861. If, however, a black Republican should not be elected, then, in pursuance of the policy of making this contest with¬ in the Union, we should initiate meas¬ ures in Congress which should lead to a repeal of all the unconstitutional acts against slavery. If we should fail to obtain so just a system of legislation, then the South should seek her in¬ dependence out of the Union.” — Speech of W. L. Yancey before the Alabama Democratic Convention, Jan¬ uary, i860. The authors copy this declaration of Mr. Yancey from a campaign pam¬ phlet issued by the central committee of the Douglas party, in Washington, in i860. They have been unable to find the original newspaper report, but the corroboration and fulfillment of the plot here indicated are found in the offi¬ cial proceedings of the Alabama Con¬ vention and the Alabama Legislature. The convention on January 13th, i860, expressly instructed its delegation at Charleston to secede in case the ultra-Southern doctrines were not incorporated in the National Democratic platform, and sent Mr. Yancey as a delegate to execute their instructions, which he did as the text states. The Alabama Legislature, on its part, passed a joint res¬ olution, which the governor approved, February W. L. YANCEY. (FRO.M A PHOTOGRAPH BY COOK.) 24th, i860, providing “that upon the election of a President advocating the principles and action of the party in the Northern States calling itself the Republican party,” the governor should forthwith call a convention of the State. This convention was duly called after the election of Lincoln, and passed the secession ordinance of Alabama. IS IT .A PIECE OF A COMET? “ Of star-dust and star-pilgrimages ” — HERE has recently come into my possession tJie nhUh iron meteorite whose fall to the earth has been ob¬ served. It is, moreover, the first meteorite which seems to evidence a direct connection with a star- shower. The mass acquires still further in¬ terest from the fact that it is presumably a fragment of the famous comet of Biela. A brief account of this celestial wanderer will doubtless be of interest to the readers of The Century, in which magazine the essays of the astronomer Langley have recently appeared. Astronomers have waited patiently for the fall to the earth’s surface, at the time of the periodical star-showers, of something tangible, but until now they have waited in vain. In looking over a considerable amount of astronomical literature, only one record can be found of the falling of a body to the earth at such a time; this was near Paris, on the loth of xYpril, 1 094, when many shooting-stars w^ere seen, and a very large one was said to have been found on the ground as a glowing sub¬ stance.” From the 24th to the 29th of November, 1885, the earth was passing through a train of meteors that proceeded from the constel¬ lation Andromeda, and once formed a part of Biela’s comet. These meteors are now known to astronomers as Andromedes or Bielids. The

Page 538

IS IT A PIECE OF A COMET? 535 FIGURE I. THE MAZAPIL METEORITE; NATURAL SIZE. maximum of this shower occurred on the 27th, while it was yet broad daylight over America, and at an hour corresponding to ii a. im. at Mazapil, Mexico. Thus, at the time of the fall of this meteorite, ten hours after the max¬ imum number of meteors was observed, the earth was meeting with only the stragglers of the train. It cannot be doubted that the cos- mical dust proceeding from the disintegration of Biela’s Comet wholly enveloped the earth and was seen as meteors from every part of it. Such was the magnificence of the celestial phenomenon that in some parts of the East¬ ern Continent uneducated people believed there would be no stars left in the sky. Of the countless host of meteors which crossed the earth’s path on this 27th of No¬ vember, only one is as yet known to have reached the earth’s surface, and this fell near the village of Mazapil, in the state of Zacatecas, Mexico (see map. Fig. 2), at about 9 o’clock in the evening. It is of the rare iron-nickel variety, and weighs ten and a quarter pounds troy. Fig. i shows it in natural size, full view. This meteorite was presented to me by Sr. Jose A. y Bonilla, Director-Professor of the Zacatecas Observatory, who received it, five days after its fall, from the ranchman who saw it descend from the heavens. This ranchman

Page 539

536 IS IT A PIECE OF A COMET? related the strange occurrence as follows (translated from the Spanish) : “ It was at about 9 o’clock on the night of Novem¬ ber 27th, when I went out to the corral to feed certain horses ; suddenly, I heard a loud sizzing noise, exactly as though something red-hot was being plunged into cold water, and almost instantly there followed a some¬ what loud thud. At once the corral was covered with a phosphorescent light, while suspended in the air were small luminous sparks as though from a rocket. I had not recovered from my surprise before I saw this lu¬ minous air disappear, and there remained on the ground only such a light as is made when a match is rubbed. A number of people came running toward me from the neighboring houses, and they assisted me in quieting the horses, which had become very much excited. We all asked each other what could be the matter, and we were afraid to walk in the corral for fear of being burned. When, in a few moments, we had recovered from our fright we saw the light disappear, and bring¬ ing lanterns to look for the cause, we found a hole in the ground and in it a ball of light. We retired to a distance, fearing it would explode and harm us. Look¬ ing up to the sky, we saw from time to time exhalations or stars, which soon went out without noise. We re¬ turned after a little, and found in the hole a hot stone which we could barely handle ; this on the next day, we saw, looked like a piece of iron. All night it rained stars, but we saw none fall to the ground, as they all seemed to be extinguished while yet very high up.” Upon further inquiry we learn that there was no explosion or detonation heard, and that the mass penetrated the earth only to a depth of twelve inches. This very circumstantial account leads us to believe that this meteorite is the first one to be secured and preserved that has come to the earth during a star-shower. That no explosion or loud detonation ac¬ companied the fall, as is usually the case, is paralleled by similar occurrences at Wold Cottage, in Yorkshire, England, on Decem¬ ber 13th, 1795, and at Ghent, in Flanders, on June 7th, 1855 ; also at Stalldalen in Swe¬ den, on the 28th of June, 1876, when a num¬ ber of meteorites fell, and it was remarked that ‘‘while the luminous meteor and explo¬ sions were noted over nearly all Sweden, they were not observed at the locality of the fall.” Perhaps never, previous to this fall at Maza- pil, were such peculiar phenomena observed. The phosphorescent light, seen in the air and on the ground, has special significance, and was probably caused by surface fusion, due to friction with the atmosphere, and by the detached matter falling along with the mete¬ orite as an incandescent powder. The oft-ex¬ pressed wish that we might have one of these meteoroids from the star-streams to handle and to analyze and thus to learn something of its history, seems now to be gratified; and the remark of Professor Langley “ that the advance of science is much more likely to show the kernel or nucleus of the comet is but some large meteorite ” is seemingly proved. Further¬ more, that there is no material difference be¬ tween shooting-stars — great or small — seems now established. If these meteors are small — no larger than pebbles — they would be entirely volatilized in their journey through the earth’s atmosphere; but if they were larger, only the outer portion would be con¬ sumed, and the mass would strike the earth. That they are solids is plainly shown by their luminosity. That they are not liquified gases, as has been suggested, is clearly proved by the absence of the necessary surrounding pressure so essential to such a condition. As to the light seen, the following may have a bearing on that observation: On May 26th, 1751, two masses of iron (now preserved in the Imperial Cabinet at Vienna), weighing 16 and 71 pounds, whose surfaces resemble the Mazapil iron in a marked degree, fell near Hraschina, in Croatia, in daylight. A vapory cloud survived the fall for fully an hour, before being entirely dissipated. Had this cloud been seen at night, it might have been phosphores¬ cent like the luminous air which followed the Mazapil meteorite. The crust on this mass of iron is very inter¬ esting, and on all meteorites is an ever-pres¬ ent and uniform characteristic. Its black color and lines of flow are due to superficial fu¬ sion while the mass is whirling and rotating in its rapid flight. Ordinarily the crust is very thin — say the fiftieth of an inch — and is rarely over one-tenth of an inch ; fusion is written in unmistakable terms in every part of it. Of special interest is Fig. 3, as showing the flow of the melted crust over a projecting edge of the meteorite’s surface. The hollowed depres¬ sions are unusually well marked. They have often been compared to thumb-marks, and are probably due to the scooping action of the air which the meteorite enters, at first, with

Page 540

IS IT A PIECE OF A COMET? 537 enormous speed. When we consider the thin dark crust of this mass of celestial iron, we can¬ not refrain from comparing it to the soil of this earth, which is really all of earth men know. With all the record of the rocks, we cannot yet claim acquaintance with more than the one-three-hundredth of the earth’s thickness; or far less proportionally than is the shell to the egg. Wishing to show the internal structure of the Mazapil iron, the writer had a slab sawed from the side opposite to that shown in Fig. i, and this surface being acted upon by dilute nitric acid resulted in the appearance shown in Fig. 4 (natural size). These markings are known as the figures of Widmanstatten, and are peculiar to meteoric irons ; they serve as a means of ready identification of such masses. This map¬ like plan resembles much that of a city, and is in strange contrast to the meteorite’s rough exterior. The cause of these lines is the select¬ ive affinity of the metal molecules and the ex¬ trusion of the rejected matter; or, in other words, these lines show the uniform crystalli¬ zation of the mass ; which process of arrange¬ ment is always a purifying one. A complete chemical analysis of the meteo¬ rite of Mazapil merits a place here, if only as a comparison with the iron meteorites of other dates. Mr. James B. Mackintosh, E. M.,of the Lehigh University, detached with no little dif¬ ficulty a compact and unoxidized portion of the mass which was free from the associated graphite and obtained the following results, — iron, 91.26% ; nickel, 7.84% ; cobalt, 0.65% ; phosphorus, 0.30%, with traces of carbon, sulphur, and chlorine. Strangely, this com¬ position pertains to the majority of meteoric irons, as if it were the normal composition of this class of celestial bodies. With very slight differences (often less than one per cent.) the iron meteorites which were seen to fall have this same composition. With the spectroscope the Bielid meteors were seen to be rich in carbon and iron. The above analysis substantiates beautifully the spectroscopic tests. The Mazapil iron has large compact nodules of carbon in the form of graphite (black-lead). Eleven of these nod¬ ules can be seen extruding from the surface ; one is nearly an inch in diameter. While this feature is interesting in the extreme, it is not unique, since several of the meteoric irons contain included carbon in nodular form. We are thus led to think that this earth and the meteorites are all of one common parent¬ age, especially as we find in the meteorites no¬ thing new or strange. To be sure the iron, nickel, and cobalt are uncommon terrestrial occurrences, but these elements are found on the earth, in a metallic condition, in basaltic and other plutonic rocks which are closely re¬ lated to the stony meteorites. As to the place of impact, or the spot on this mass which struck the earth first, the abrasion was very slight. The resistance of theearth’sat- mosphere — which we move through as though it were nothing — offered, as it were, a buffer, which reduced the speed of the meteorite to little more than that which would be due to FIGURE 3. CRUST ON METEORITE. (MAGNIFIED TWO DIAMETERS.) gravitation alone. Had the mass simply fallen a few hundred feet, it could have hardly re¬ ceived less damage. I have thus treated of the fall, crust, inter¬ nal structure, and composition of this new me¬ teorite, and will now ask the reader to look to the probable origin of its parental comet. Al¬ lowing it to be a fragment of a comet does not help us very far on the track of its ances¬ try, yet to show where comets most probably have their birthplace would be an endeavor to state the full pedigree of this meteorite. Some astronomers hold that comets are the scavengers of space ” and have accreted their mass and motion by the simple laws of gravi¬ tation and of chemical affinity ; but that they had their origin within some sun seems equal¬ ly as probable, especially, when we study their debris in the form of meteorites. We have the evidence from Daubree and others that meteorites are absolutely identical in structure with terrestrial products, such as are found only deep beneath the surface. They were formed, it is certain, under such conditions of high temperature and tremendous pressure as only can exist deep within the mass of a planet or a sun.” Graham and others have shown that iron meteorites contain such quan¬ tities of gases, as indicate an origin in a region occupied by hydrogen in a state of great chemical activity, convincing us that such me¬ teorites have brought to us across the stellar

Page 541

/ / i IS IT A PIECE OF A COMET? FIGURE 4. WIDMANSTATTEN FIGURES OF THE MAZAPIL METEORITE. depths the material matter of some fixed star or sun. Therefore, as Mr. Proctor has conjectured,* there remains no other reasonable explanation save that meteor flights are products of some sort of planetary ejection or rejection, which was effected while a planet was in a sun-like stage. He writes : “ Our sun is the only case of a sun-like body we can inquire into ; we are forced to the ques¬ tion, ‘ Can he eject solid bodies ? ’ Those who imagine the eruption prominences of the sun to be what they seem to be — jets of glowing gas — may be disposed to answer in the nega¬ tive. But may they not indicate the tracks of denser bodies not themselves visible because the spectroscope will not show bodies near the sun which shine with the spectral colors ? It may doubtless be the case that of ejected mete¬ oric bodies far the greater number return to the sun-like orb which expelled them, but if only one flight, or part of an outburst, escapes from the sun in a year, of how many thousands of such flights has he been the parent in the ^ Letter to Editor N. Y. “ Tribune.” Sept. 20th, 1886. An iron-nickel meteorite, weighing one hundred and .seven pounds, was announced, in the American Journal of Science of last June, as having been seen to fall on March 27th, 1886, in Johnson county, Arkan¬ sas ; thus making the tenth mass of meteoric iron whose date of fall is a matter of record. It is also necessary to state that “ it appears ques¬ tionable whether the 4th, 5th, and 6th in the list of iron meteorites seen to fall should be included, since no record of their fall has been published.” The list past countless ages ? Each flight would have been a comet and each component body a meteor, and thus we would have an explana¬ tion of such phenomena.” But before accepting this plausible idea of Mr. Proctor’s as final, we must bring our¬ selves to believe that a celestial body has the power within itself to expel a part of itself be¬ yond the sphere of its own attraction. If, in conclusion, the fall of this meteorite shall be confirmed in all its interesting details at a recurrence of the Bielids, and the fact be established that it is in truth a piece of Biela’s Comet, then its scientific importance could not be overestimated. Its close identity with the metallic meteorites of known fall, and of ac¬ cidental discovery, would place them all in the same category of similar origin, and thus we could think of this class of meteorites as having come from some particular sun-system of stellar space ; while for the stony meteorites, in their several varieties, — consistently with this thought — we would seek an origin in other regions of that infinite deep from which dust, starborn, comes to us as comets. Williatn Earl Hidden. if thus corrected would be as follows : 1st, Hraschina, Croatia, May 26th, 1751 ; 2d, Charlotte, Dickson County, Tennessee, Aug. ist, 1835; 3d, Braunau, Bohemia, July 14th, 1847; 4th, Nedagolla, India, Jan. 23d, 1870; 5th, Rowton, England, April 20th, 1876; 6th, Mazapil, Mexico, Nov. 27th, 1885; 7th, Johnson County, Arkansas, March 27th, 1886. The doubtful ones being those of Tabarz, Saxony ; Victoria-West, Africa; and Nejed, Arabia. — W. E. H.

Page 542

I SHALL FIND REST. A LITTLE further on — There will be time — I shall find rest anon: Thus do we say, while eager youth invites Young hope to try her wings in wanton flights, And nimble fancy builds the soul a nest On some far crag; but soon youth’s flame is gone — Burned lightly out — while we repeat the jest With smiling confidence, — I shall find rest A little further on. A little further on I shall find rest ; half-fiercely we avow When noon beats on the dusty field and care Threats to unjoint our armor, and the glare Throbs with the pulse of battle, while life’s best Flies with the flitting stars : the frenzied brow Pains for the laurel more than for the breast Where Love soft-nestling waits. Not now, not now. With feverish breath we cry, I shall find rest A little further on. A little further on I shall find rest : half-sad, at last, we say. When sorrow’s settling cloud blurs out the gleam Of glory’s torch, and to a vanished dream Love’s palace hath been turned, then — all depressed. Despairing, sick at heart — we may not stay Our weary feet, so lonely then doth seem This shadow- haunted world. We, so unblest. Weep not to see the grave which waits its guest; And feeling round our feet the cool, sweet clay. We speak the fading world farewell and say: Not on this side — alas ! — I shall find rest A little further on. Robe7't B tints Wilson. VIRGO. VIRGIN august! come in thy regal state With soft majestic grace and brow serene; Though the fierce Lion’s reign is overpast The Summer’s heart is all thine own as yet. And all untouched thy robe of living green By the rude fingers of the northern blast, lily brooding smile holds hint of no regret For waning suns or dread of autumn keen; In full fruition is thy beauty set Amid thy sheaves, the glad earth’s crowned queen. Where shall we find, O royal maid, thy peer ! Not thine the fickle brightness of the Spring, Nor the false splendor of the dying year; No need hast thou to go a-borrowing New charm from change: thy still perfection leaves No charm so perfect as its golden rest; And through thy slumbrous noons and mel¬ low eves. Lulled by the harvest-scented airs that sing Of garnered Summer and her labors blest. We dreaming count the slow, sweet hours that pass As diamond dust within Time’s magic glass. And sigh in full content thy perfect praise : There is no joy but calm — the calm of August days 1 " R. J. Philbrick.

Page 543

“MARSE PEYTON'! SEEM LIKE I WA’n’T NEVER GWINE TER GIT YER.” (PAGE 544.)

Page 544

AZALIA. By the author of “ Uncle Remus,” “ Little Compton,” etc. I. ISS Helen Osborne Eustis, of Boston, was very much astonished one day in the early fall of 1873 to re¬ ceive a professional visit from Dr. Ephraim Buxton, who for many years had been her father’s family physician. The astonishment was mutual, for Dr. Buxton had expected to find Miss Eustis in bed, or at least in the attitude of a patient, whereas she was seated in an easy-chair, be¬ fore a glowing grate, — which the peculiarities of the Boston climate sometimes render nec¬ essary even in the early fall, — and appeared to be about as comfortable as a human being could well be. Perhaps the appearance of comfort was heightened by the general air of subdued luxury that pervaded the apartment into which Dr. Buxton had been ushered. The draperies, the arrangement of the little affairs that answer to the name of bric-k-brac, the adjustment of the furniture — everything — conveyed the impression of peace and repose; and the chief element of this perfect harmony was Miss Eustis herself, who rose to greet the doctor as he entered. She regarded the phy¬ sician with eyes that somehow seemed to be wise and kind, and with a smile that was at once sincere and humorous. Why, how is this, Helen ? ” Dr. Buxton exclaimed, taking off his spectacles and star¬ ing at the young lady. ‘‘ I fully expected to find you in. bed. I hope you are not impru¬ dent.” ‘‘ Why should I be ill, Dr. Buxton? You know what Mr. Tom Appleton says ? ‘ In Boston, those who are sick do injustice to the air they breathe and to their cooks.’ I think that is a patriotic sentiment, and I try to live up to it. My health is no worse than usual, and usually it is very good,” said Miss Eustis. “You certainly seem to be well,” said Dr. Buxton, regarding the young lady with a pro¬ fessional frown ; “ but appearances are some¬ times deceitful. I met Harriet yesterday — ” “Ah, my aunt!” exclaimed Helen, in a tone calculated to imply that this explained everything. “ I met Harriet yesterday, and she insisted VoL. XXXIV.— 74. on my coming to see you at once, certainly not later than to-day.” Miss Eustis shrugged her shoulders and laughed, but her face showed that she appre¬ ciated this manifestation of solicitude. “ Let me see,” she said reflectively; “ what was my complaint yesterday ? We must do justice to Aunt Harriet’s discrimination. She would never forgive you if you went away without leaving a prescription. My health is so good that I think you may leave me a mild one.” Unconsciously the young lady made a charming picture as she sat with her head drooping a little to one side in a half-serious, half-smiling effort to recall to mind some of the symptoms that had excited her aunt’s alarm. Dr. Buxton, prescription-book in hand, gazed at her quizzically over his old- fashioned spectacles; seeing which Helen laughed heartily. At that moment her aunt en¬ tered the room — a pleasant-faced but rather prim old lady, of whom it had been said by some one competent to judge, that her in¬ quisitiveness was so overwhelming and so important that it took the shape of pity in one direction, patriotism in another, and be¬ nevolence in another, giving to her life not the mere semblance, but the very essence of usefulness and activity. “ Do you hear that. Dr. Buxton ? ” cried the pleasant-faced old lady somewhat sharply. “Do you hear her wheeze when she laughs ? Do you remember that she was threatened with pneumonia last winter ? and now she is wheezing before the winter begins I ” “ This is the trouble I was trying to think of,” exclaimed Helen, sinking back in her chair with a gesture of mock despair. “ Don’t make yourself ridiculous, dear,” said the aunt, giving the little clusters of gray curls that hung about her ears an emphatic shake. “ Serious matters should be taken seriously.” Whereat Helen pressed her cheek gently against the thin white hand that had been laid caressingly on her shoulder. “ Aunt Harriet has probably heard me say that there is still some hope for the country, even though it is governed entirely by men,” said Helen, with an air of apology. “ The men cannot deprive us of the winter climate of Boston, and I enjoy that above all things.”

Page 545

AZALIA. 542 Aunt Harriet smiled reproachfully at her niece, and pulled her ear gently. “ But, indeed. Dr. Buxton,” Helen went on more seriously, the winter climate of Boston, fine as it is, is beginning to pinch us harder than it used to do. The air is thinner, and the cold is keener. When I was younger — very much younger — than I am now, I remember that I used to run in and out, and fall and roll in the snow with perfect impunity. But now I try to profit by Aunt Harriet’s example. When I go out, I go bundled up to the point of suffocation, and if the wind is from the east, as it usually is, I wear wraps and shawls in¬ doors.” Helen smiled brightly at her aunt and at Dr. Buxton, but her aunt seemed to be dis¬ tressed, and the physician shook his head dubiously. You will have to take great care of your¬ self,” said Dr. Buxton. ‘‘You must be prudent. The slightest change in the temperature may send you to bed for the rest of the winter.” “ Dr. Buxton is complimenting you. Aunt Harriet,” said Helen. “You should drop him a curts’y.” Whereupon the amiable physician, seeing that there was no remedy for the humorous view which Miss Eustis took of her condition, went further and informed her that there was every reason why she should be serious. He told her, with some degree of bluntness, that her symptoms, while not alarming, were not at all reassuring. “ It is always the way. Dr. Buxton, ” said Helen, smiling tenderly at her aunt; “I be¬ lieve you would confess to serious symptoms yourself if Aunt Harriet insisted on it. What an extraordinary politician she would make ! My sympathy with the woman suffrage move¬ ment is in the nature of an investment. When we women succeed to the control of affairs, I count on achieving distinction as Aunt Har¬ riet’s niece.” Laughing, she seized her aunt’s hand. Dr. Buxton, watching her, laughed too, and then proceeded to write out a prescription. He seemed to hesitate a little over this ; seeing which, Helen remonstrated : “Pray, Dr. Buxton, don’t humor Aunt Harriet too much in this. Save your physic for those who are strong in body and mind. A dozen of your pellets ought to be a year’s supply.” The physician wrote out his pre¬ scription and took his leave, laughing heartily at the amiable confusion in which Helen’s drollery had left her aunt. It is not to be supposed, however, that Miss Eustis was simply droll. She was unconven¬ tional at all times, and sometimes willful, — inheriting that native strength of mind and mother- wit which are generally admitted to be a part of the equipment of the typical Ameri¬ can woman. If she was not the ideal young woman, at least she possessed some of the attractive qualities that one tries — some¬ times unsuccessfully — to discover in one’s dearest friends. From her infancy until near the close of the war she had had the advan¬ tage of her father’s companionship, so that her ideas were womanly rather than merely feminine. She had never been permitted to regard the world from the dormer-windows of a young ladies’ seminary, in consequence of which her views of life in general, and of man¬ kind in particular, were orderly and rational. Such indulgence as her father had given her had served to strengthen her individuality rather than to confirm her temper, and, though she had a strong and stubborn will of her own, her tact was such that her willfulness appeared to be the most natural, as well as the most charming thing in the world. Moreover, she possessed in a remarkable degree that buoy¬ ancy of mind that is more engaging than mere geniality. Her father was no less a person than Charles Osborne Eustis, the noted philan¬ thropist and abolitionist whose death, in 1867, was the occasion of quite a controversy in New England — a controversy based on the fact that he had opposed some of the most virulent schemes of his co-workers at a time when abolitionism had not yet gathered its full strength. Mr. Eustis, in his day, was in the habit of boasting that his daughter had a great deal of genuine American spirit — the spirit that one set of circumstances drives to provinciality, another to patriotism, and an¬ other to originality, Helen had spent two long winters in Europe without parting with the fine flavor of her originality. She was exceedingly mod¬ est in her designs, too, for she went neither as a missionary nor as a repentant. She found no foreign social shrines that she thought worthy of worshiping at. She admired what was genuine, and tolerated such shams as obtruded themselves on her attention. Her father’s connections had enabled her to see something of the real home-life of England, and she was delighted, but not greatly sur¬ prised, to find that, at its best, it was not greatly different from the home-life to which she had been accustomed. The discovery delighted her because it con¬ firmed her own broad views ; but she no more thought it necessary to set about aping the social peculiarities to be found in London drawing-rooms than she thought of denying her name or her nativity. She made many interesting studies and comparisons, but she

Page 546

AZALIA, 543 was not disposed to be critical. She admired many things in Europe which she would not have considered admirable in America, and whatever she found displeasing she tolerated as the natural outcome of social or climatic conditions. Certainly the icjea never occurred to her that her own couj'‘‘try was a barren waste because time had not set the seal of antiquity on its institutions. On the other hand, this admirable young woman was quick to perceive that much information as well as satisfaction was to be obtained by regarding various European peculiarities from a strictly European point of view. But Miss Eustis’s reminiscences of the Old World were sad as well aspleasant. Herjourney thither had been undertaken in the hope of restoring her father’s failing health, and her stay there had been prolonged for the same purpose. For a time he grew stronger and better, but the improvement was only tempo¬ rary. He came home to die, and to Helen this result seemed to be the end of all things. She had devoted herself to looking after his com¬ fort with a zeal and intelligence that left noth¬ ing undone. This had been her mission in life. Her mother had died when Helen was a little child, leaving herself and her brother, who was some years older, to the care of the father. Helen remembered her mother only as a pale, beautiful lady in a trailing robe, who fell asleep one day, and was mysteriously carried away — the lady of a dream. The boy — the brother — rode forth to the war in 1862, and never rode back any more. To the father and sister waiting at home, it seemed as if he had been seized and swept from the earth on the bosom of the storm that broke over the country in that period of dire confusion. Even Rumor, with her thou¬ sand tongues, had little to say of the fate of this poor youth. It was known that he led a squad of troopers detailed for special service, and that his command, with small knowledge of the country, fell into an ambush from which not more than two or three extricated them¬ selves. Beyond this all was mystery, for those who survived that desperate skirmish could say nothing of the fate of their companions. The loss of his son gave Mr. Eustis additional in¬ terest in his daughter, if that were possible; and the common sorrow of the two so strength¬ ened and sweetened their lives that their affec¬ tion for each other was in the nature of a perpetual memorial of the pale lady who had passed away, and of the boy who had perished in Virginia. When Helen’s father died, in 1867, her mother’s sister. Miss Harriet Tewksbury, a spinster of fifty or thereabouts, who, for the lack of something substantial to interest her. had been halting between woman’s rights and spiritualism, suddenly discovered that Helen’s cause was the real woman’s cause ; whereupon she went to the lonely and grief-stricken girl, and, with that fine efficiency which the New England woman acquires from the air and inherits from history, proceeded to minister to her comfort. Miss Tewksbury was not at all vexed to find her niece capable of taking care of herself. She did not allow that fact to pre¬ vent her from assuming a motherly control that was most gracious in its manifestations and peculiarly gratifying to Helen, who found great consolation in the all but masculine energy of her aunt. A day or two after Dr. Buxton’s visit, the result of which has already been chronicled^ Miss Tewksbury’s keen eye detected an in¬ crease of the symptoms that had given her anxiety, and their development was of such a. character that Helen made no objection when her aunt proposed to call in the physician again. Dr. Buxton came, and agreed with Miss Tewksbury as to the gravity of the symptoms, but his prescription was oral. “ You must keep Helen indoors until she is a little stronger,” he said to Miss Tewksbury, “ and then take her to a milder climate.” Oh, not to Florida ! ” exclaimed Helen promptly. “ Not necessarily,” said the doctor. Please don’t twist your language. Dr. Buxton. You should say necessarily not.” “ And why not to Florida, young lady ? ” the doctor inquired. ^‘Ah, I have seen people that came from there,” said Helen ; “ they were too tired to talk much about the country, but something in their attitude and appearance seemed to sug¬ gest that they had seen the sea-serpent. Dear Doctor, I have no desire to see the sea- serpent.” “ Well, then, my dear child,” said Dr. Bux¬ ton soothingly, “ not to Florida, but to nature’s own sanitarium, the pine woods of Geor¬ gia. Yes,” the doctor went on, smiling as he rubbed the glasses of his spectacles with his silk handkerchief, “ nature’s own sanitarium. I tested the piney woods of Georgia thoroughly years ago. I drifted there in my young days. I lived there, and taught school there. I grew strong there, and I have always wanted to go back there.” “ And now,” said Helen, with a charmingly demure glance at the enthusiastic physician, you want to send Aunt Harriet and poor Me forward as a skirmish line. There is no anti¬ dote in your books for the Ku Klux.” “ You will see new scenes and new people,” said Dr. Buxton, laughing. “ You will get new ideas ; above all, you will breathe the fresh

Page 547

AZALIA, 544 air of heaven spiced with the odor of pines. It will be the making of you, my dear child.*’ Helen made various protests, some of them serious and some droll, but the matter was practically settled when it became evident that Dr. Buxton was not only earnestly, but enthusi¬ astically in favor of the journey ; and Helen’s aunt at once began to make preparations. To some of their friends it seemed a serious under- takingindeed. The newspapers of that day were full of accounts of Ku Klux outrages, and of equally terrible reports of the social disorgani¬ zation of the South. It seemed at that time as though the politicians and the editors, both great and small, and of every shade of belief, had determined to fight the war over again — instituting a conflict which, though bloodless enough so far as the disputants were concerned, was not without its unhappy results. Moreover, Helen’s father had been noted among those who had early engaged in the crusade against slavery, and it was freely pre¬ dicted by her friends that the lawlessness which was supposed to exist in every part of the col¬ lapsed Confederacy would be prompt to select the representatives of Charles Osborne Eustis as its victims. Miss Tewksbury affected to smile at the apprehensions of her friends, but her preparations were not undertaken without a secret dread of the responsibilities she was assuming. Helen, however, was disposed to treat the matter humorously. “ Dr. Buxton is a lifelong Democrat,” she said; ‘^consequently he must know all about it. Father used to tell him he liked his medi¬ cine better than his politics, bitter as some of it was ; but in a case of this kind, Dr. Bux¬ ton’s politics have a distinct value. He will give us the grips, the signs, and the pass- words, dear aunt, and I dare say we shall get along comfortably.” II. They did get along comfortably. Peace seemed to spread her meshes before them. They journeyed by easy stages, stopping awhile in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, and in Washington. They staid a week in Rich¬ mond. From Richmond they were to go to Atlanta, and from Atlanta to Azalia, the little piney-woods village which Dr. Buxton had recommended as a sanitarium. At a point south of Richmond, where they stopped for breakfast. Miss Eustis and her aunt witnessed a little scene that seemed to them to be very interesting. A gentleman wrapped in a long linen traveling-coat was pacing restlessly up and down the platform of the little station. He was tall, and his bearing was distinctly military. The neighborhood peo¬ ple who were lounging around the station watched him with interest. After a while a negro boy came running up with a valise which he had evidently brought some dis¬ tance. He placed it in front of the tall gen¬ tleman, crying out in a loud voice : “ Here she is, Marse Pejyton” then stepped to one side and began to fan himself vigorously with the fragment of a wool hat. Fie grinned broadly in response to something^th^tall gen¬ tleman said, but, before he could make~a 'Suitr^ able reply, a negro woman, fat and motherly- looking, made her appearance, puffing and blowing and talking. “ I declar’ ter gracious, Marse Peyton! seem like I wa’n’t never gwine ter git yer. I belt up my head, I did, fer to keep my eye on de kyars, en it look like I run inter all de gullies en on top er all de stumps ’twix’ dis en Marse Tip’s. I des tuck’n drapt eve’ything, I did, en tole um dey’d hatter keep one eye on de dinner-pot, kase I ’blige ter run en see Marse Peyton off.” The gentleman laughed as the motherly- looking old negro wiped her face with her apron. Her sleeves were rolled up, and her fat arms glistened in the sun. “ I boun’ you some er deze yer folks ’ll go off en say I’m ’stracted,” she cried, “but I can’t he’p dat ; I bleeze ter run down yer to tell Marse Peyton good-bye. Tell um all howdy fer me, Marse Peyton,” she cried, “all un um. No difference ef I ain’t know um all — ’tain’t gwine ter do no harm fer tell um dat old Jincy say howdy. Hit make me feel right foolish in de head w’en it come ’cross me dat I use ter tote Miss Hallie ’roun’ w’en she wuz a little bit er baby, en now she way down dar out’n de work ’mos’. I wish ter de Lord I uz gwine ’long wid you, Marse Pey¬ ton 1 Yit I speck, time I got dar. I’d whirl in en wish myse’f back home.” The negro boy carried the gentleman’s valise into the sleeping-coach, and placed it opposite the seats occupied by Helen and her aunt. Across the end was stenciled in white the name “ Peyton Garwood.” When the train was ready to start the gentleman shook hands with the negro woman and with the boy. The woman seemed to be very much affected. “ God-A’mighty bless you, Marse Peyton, honey!” she exclaimed, as the train moved off, and as long as Helen could see her she was waving her hands in farewell. Both Helen and her aunt had watched this scene with considerable interest, and now, when the gentleman had been escorted to his seat by the obsequious porter, they regarded him with some curiosity. He appeared to be about thirty-five years old. His face would have been called exceedingly handsome, but for a

Page 548

AZALIA. scar on his right cheek, and yet, on closer in¬ spection, the scar seemed somehow to fit the firm outlines of his features. His brownbeard emphasized the strength of his chin. His nose was slightly aquiline, his eyebrows were a trifle rugged, and his hair was brushed straight back from a high forehead. His face was that of a man who had seen rough service and had enjoyed it keenly — a face full of fire and resolution, with some subtle suggestion of tenderness. “ She called him ‘ Master,’ Helen,” said Miss Tewksbury after a while, referring to the scene at the station ; did you hear her? ” Miss Tewksbury’s tone implied wrathfulness that was too sure of its own justification to assert itself noisily. ‘‘ I heard her,” Helen replied. ‘^She called him Master, and he called her Mammy. It was a very pleasing exchange of compliments.” Such further comment as the ladies may have felt called on to make — for it was a mat¬ ter in which both were very much interested — was postponed for the time being. A passen¬ ger occupying a seat in the farther end of the coach had recognized the gentleman whose valise was labeled “ Peyton Garwood,” and now pressed forward to greet him. This pas¬ senger was a very aggressive-looking person. He was short and stout, but there was no sug¬ gestion of jollity or even of good humor in his rotundity. No one would have made the mistake of alluding to him as a fat man. He would have been characterized as the pudgy man; and even his pudginess was aggressive. He had evidently determined to be dignified at any cost, but his seriousness seemed to be perfectly gratuitous. Gener’l Garwood ? ” he said in an im¬ pressive tone, as he leaned over the tall gen¬ tleman’s seat. Ah ! Goolsby ! ” exclaimed the other, ex¬ tending his hand. “ Why, how do you do ? Sit down.” Goolsby’s pudginess became more apparent and apparently more aggressive than ever when he seated himself near General Garwood. W ell, sir, I can’t say my health’s any too good. You look mighty well yourse’f, Gener’l. How are things?” said Goolsby, pushing his traveling-cap over his eyes, and frowning as if in pain. “ Oh, affairs seem to be improving,” General Garwood replied. ‘‘ Well, now, I ain’t so up and down certain about that, Gener’l,” said Goolsby, settling himself back, and frowning until his little eyes disappeared. “ Looks like to me that things git wuss and wuss. I ain’t no big man, and I’m ruther disj’inted when it comes right down to politics, but, blame me, if it don’t look to 54S me mighty like the whole of creation is driftin’ ’round loose.” ‘L4h, well,” said the general soothingly, a great many things are uncomfortable; there is a good deal of unnecessary irritation grow¬ ing out of new and unexpected conditions, but we are getting along better than we are willing to admit. We are all fond of grumbling.” That’s so,” said Goolsby, with the air of a man who is willing to make any sacrifice for the sake of a discussion ; that’s so. fiut I tell you we’re havin’ mighty tough times, Gener’l — mighty tough times. Yonder’s the Yankees on one side, and here’s the blamed niggers on t’other, and betwixt and betweenst ’em a white man’s got mighty little chance. And then, right on top of the whole caboodle, here comes the panic in the banks, and the epizooty ’mongst the cattle. I tell you, Gen¬ er’l, it’s tough times, and it’s in about as much as an honest man can do to pay hotel bills and have a ticket ready to show up when the conductor comes along.” General Garwood smiled sympathetically, and Goolsby went on : Here I’ve been runnin’ up and down the country tryin’ to sell a book, and I ain’t sold a hunderd copies sence I started — no, sir, not a hunderd copies. Maybe you’d like to look at it, Gener’l,” continued Goolsby, stiffening up a little. ‘‘ If I do say it myself, it’s in about the best book that a man ’ll git a chance to thumb in many a long day.” “ What book is it, Goolsby ? ” the general inquired. Goolsby sprang up, waddled rapidly to where he had left his satchel, and returned, bringing a large and substantial-looking volume. It’s a book that speaks for itself any day in the week,” he said, running the pages rapidly between his fingers ; it’s a history of our own great conflict — ‘The Rise and Fall of the Rebellion,’ by Schuyler Paddleford. I don’t know what the blamed publishers wanted to put it ‘ Rebellion ’ for. I told ’em, says I, ‘ Gentlemen, it’ll be up-hill work with this in the Sunny South. Call it “ The Conflict,” ’ says I. But they wouldn’t listen, and now I have to work like a blind nigger splittin’ rails. But she’s a daisy, Gener’l, as shore as you’re born. She jess reads like straight along from cover to cover without a bobble. Why, sir, I never know’d what war was till I meandered through the sample pages of this book. And they’ve got your picture in here, Gener’l, jest as natural as life — all for five dollars, in cloth, eight in liberry style, and ten in morocker.” General Garwood glanced over the speci¬ men pages with some degree of interest, while Goolsby continued to talk.

Page 549

546 AZALIA. ‘‘Now, betwixt you and me, Gener’l,” he went on confidentially, “ I don’t nigh like the style of that book, particular where it rattles up our side. I wa’n’t in the war myself, but blame me if it don’t rile me when I hear out¬ siders a-cussin’ them that was. I come mighty nigh not takin’ holt of it on that account, but ’twouldn’t have done no good, not a bit. If sech a book is got to be circulated around here, it better be circulated by some good Southron— a man that’s a kind of antidote to the pizen, as it were. If I don’t sell it, some blamed Yankee ’ll jump in and gallop around with it. And I tell you what, Gener’l, betwixt you and me and the gate-post, it’s done come to that pass where a man can’t afford to be too plegged particular; if he stops for to scratch his head and consider whether he’s a gentleman, some other feller ’ll jump in and snatch the rations right out of his mouth. That’s why I’m a-paradin’ around tryin’ to sell this book.” “ Well,” said General Garwood in an en¬ couraging tone, “ I have no doubt it is a very interesting book. I have heard of it before. Fetch me a copy when you come to Azalia again.” Goolsby smiled an unctuous and knowing smile. “ Maybe you think I ain’t a-comin’,” he exclaimed, with the air of a man who has invented a joke that he relishes. “ Well, sir, you’re getting the wrong measure. I was down in ’Zalia Monday was a week, and I’m a-goin’ down week after next. Fact is,” con¬ tinued Goolsby, rather sheepishly, “ ’Zalia is a mighty nice place. Gener’l, do you happen to know Miss Louisa Hornsby? Of course you do! Well, sir, you might go a week’s journey in the wildwood, as the poet says, and not find a handsomer gal then that. She’s got style from away back.” “ Why, yes 1 ” exclaimed the general in a tone of hearty congratulation, “ of course I know Miss Lou. She is a most excellent young lady. And so the wind sits in that quarter ? Your blushes, Goolsby, are a happy confirma¬ tion of many sweet and piquant rumors.” Goolsby appeared to be very much embar¬ rassed. He moved about uneasily in his seat, searched in all his pockets for something or other that wasn’t there, and made a vain effort to protest. He grew violently red in the face, and the vivid color gleamed through his closely cropped hair. “ Oh, come now, Gener’l 1 ” he exclaimed. “ Oh, pshaw 1 Why — oh, go ’way 1 ” His embarrassment was so great, and seemed to border so closely on epilepsy, that the gen¬ eral was induced to offer him a cigar and invite him into the smoking-apartment. As General Garwood and Goolsby passed out,. Helen Eustis drew a long breath. “ It is worth the trouble of a long journey to behold such a spectacle,” she declared.. Her aunt regarded her curiously. “Who would have thought it ? ” she went on. “ A Southern secessionist charged with affability^ and abook-agent radiant with embarrassment.’" “ He is a coarse, ridiculous creature,” said Miss Tewksbury sharply. “ The affable general, Aunt Harriet ? ” “ No, child ; the other.” “ Dear aunt, we are in the enemy’s coun¬ try and we must ground our prejudices. The book-agent is pert and crude, ^ but he is not coarse. A coarse man may be in love, but he would never blush over it. And as for the affable general — you saw the negro woman cry over him.” “ Poor thing I ” said Miss Tewksbury, with a sigh. “ She sadly needs instruction.” “Ah, yes I that is a theory we should stand to, but how shall we instruct her to run and cry after us ? ” “ My dear child, we want no such disgust¬ ing exhibitions. It is enough if we do our duty by these unfortunates.” “ But I do want just such an exhibition. Aunt Harriet,” said Helen seriously. “ I should be glad to have some fortunate or unfortu¬ nate creature run and cry after me.” “ Well,” said Miss Tewksbury placidly^ “ we are about to ignore the most impressive fact, after all.” “ What is that. Aunt Harriet ? ” “ Why, child, these people are from Aza¬ lia, and for us Azalia is the center of the universe.” “ Ah, don’t pretend that you are not charmed, dear aunt. We shall have the pleasure of meeting the handsome Miss Hornsby, and probably Mr. Goolsby himself — and certainly the distinguished general.” “ I only hope Ephraim Buxton has a clear conscience to-day,” remarked Miss Tewksbury with unction. “ Did you observe the attitude of the gen¬ eral towards Mr. Goolsby, and that of Mr. Goolsby towards the general ? ” asked Helen,, ignoring the allusion to Dr. Buxton. “ The line that the general drew was visible to the naked eye. But Mr. Goolsby drew no line. He is friendly and familiar on principle. I was reminded of the ‘ Brookline Reporter,’ which alluded the other day to the London ‘ Times’ as its esteemed contemporary. The affable general is Mr. Goolsby’s esteemed contemporary.” “ My dear child,” said Miss Tewksbury^ somewhat anxiously, “ I hope your queer con¬ ceits are not the result of your illness.” “No; they are the result of my surround-

Page 550

AZALIA, ings. I have been trying to pretend to myself ever since we left Washington that we are traveling through a strange country, but it is a mere pretense. I have been trying to verify some previous impressions of barbarism and shiftlessness.” ‘‘ Well, upon my word, my dear,” exclaimed Miss Tewksbury, “ I should think you had had ample opportunity.” “ I have been trying to take the newspaper view,” Helen went on with some degree of earnestness, ‘‘ but it is impossible. We must correct the newspapers. Aunt Harriet, and make ourselves famous. Everything I have seen that is not to be traced to the result of the war belongs to a state of arrested devel¬ opment.” Miss Tewksbury was uncertain whether her niece was giving a new turn to her drollery, so she merely stared at her ; but the young lady seemed to be serious enough. “ Don’t interrupt me. Aunt Harriet. Give me the opportunity you would give to Dr. Barlow Blade, the trance medium. Everything I see in this country belongs to a state of ar¬ rested development, and it has been arrested at a most interesting point. It is picturesque. It is colonial. I am amazed that this fact has not been dwelt on by people who write about the South.” “ The conservatism that prevents progress, or stands in the way of it, is a crime,” said Miss Tewksbury, pressing her thin lips to¬ gether firmly. She had once been on the plat¬ form in some of the little country towns of New England, and had made quite a reputa¬ tion for pith and fluency. ‘^Ah, dear aunt, that sounds like an ex¬ tract from a lecture. We can have progress in some things, but not in others. We have progressed in the matter of conveniences, comforts, and luxuries, but in what other di¬ rections ? Are we any better than the people who lived in the days of Washington, Jeffer¬ son, and Madison? Is the standard of moral¬ ity any higher now than it was in the days of the apostles ? ” Don’t talk nonsense, Helen,” said Miss Tewksbury. We have a higher civilization than the apostles witnessed. Morality is pro¬ gressive.” ‘‘Well,” said Helen, with a sigh, “it is a pity these people have discarded shoe-buckles and knee-breeches.” “ Your queer notions make me thirsty, child,” said Miss Tewksbury, producing a silver cup from her satchel ; “ I must get a drink of water.” “ Permit me, madame,” said a sonorous voice behind them; and a tall gentleman seized the cup and bore it away. 547 “ It is the distinguished general ! ” ex¬ claimed Helen in a tragic whisper, “ and he must have heard our speeches.” “ I hope he took them down,” said Miss Tewksbury snappishly. “ He will esteem you as a sympathizer.” “ Did I say anything ridiculous. Aunt Har¬ riet ? ” “ Dear me ! you must ask your distinguished general,” replied Miss Tewksbury triumph¬ antly. General Garwood returned with the water and insisted on fetching more. Helen observed that he held his hat in his hand, and that his attitude was one of unstudied deference. “ The conductor tells me, madame,” he said, addressing himself to Miss Tewksbury, “ that you have tickets for Azalia. I am going in that direction myself, and I should be glad to be of any service to you. Azalia is a poor little place, but I like it well enough to live there. I suppose that is the reason the conductor told me of your tickets. He knew the information would be interesting.” “Thank you,” said Miss Tewksbury with dignity. “ You are very kind,” said Miss Eustis with a smile. General Garwood made himself exceedingly agreeable. He pointed out the interesting places along the road, gave the ladies little bits of local history that were at least entertain^ ing. In Atlanta, where there was a delay of a few hours, he drove them over the battle-fields, and by his graphic descriptions gave them a new idea of the heat and fury of war. In short, he made himself so agreeable in every way that Miss Tewksbury felt at liberty to challenge his opinions on various subjects. They had numberless little controversies about the rights and wrongs of the war, and the per¬ plexing problems that grew out of its results. So far as Miss Tewksbury was concerned, she found General Garwood’s large tolerance some¬ what irritating, for it left her no excuse for the employment of her most effective arguments. “ Did you surrender your prejudices at Ap¬ pomattox ? ” Miss Tewksbury asked him on one occasion. “ Oh, by no means; you remember we were allowed to retain our side-arms and our saddle- horses,” he replied, laughing. “ I still have my prejudices, but I trust they are more impor¬ tant than those I entertained in my youth. Cer¬ tainly they are less uncomfortable.” “Well,” said Miss Tewksbury, “ you are still unrepentant, and that is more serious than any number of prejudices.” “ There is nothing to repent of,” said the general, smiling, a little sadly as Helen thought, “it has all passed away utterly. The best we

Page 551

AZALIA. 548 can do is that which seems right, and just, and necessary. My duty was as plain to me in 1861, Avhen I was a boy of twenty, as it is to¬ day. It seemed to be my duty then to serve my State and section; my duty now seems to be to help good people everywhere to restore the Union and to heal the wounds of the war.” ‘‘I’m very glad to hear you say so,” ex¬ claimed Miss Tewksbury in a tone that made Helen shiver; “ I was afraid it was quite other¬ wise. It seems to me that if I lived here, I should either hate the people who conquered me, or else the sin of slavery would weigh heavily on my conscience.” “ I can appreciate that feeling, I think,” said General Garwood, “ but the American conscience is a very healthy one — not likely to succumb to influences that are mainly malarial in their nature; and even from your point of view some good can be found in American slavery.” “ I have never found it,” said Miss Tewks¬ bury. “You must admit that but for slavery the negroes who are here would be savages in Africa. As it is they have had the benefit of more than two hundred years’ contact with the white race. If they are at all fitted for citi¬ zenship, the result is due to the civilizing in¬ fluence of slavery. It seems to me that they are vastly better off as American citizens, even though they have endured the discipline of slavery, than they would be as savages in Africa.” Miss Tewksbury’s eyes snapped. “ Did this make slavery right?” she asked. “ Not at all,” said the general, smiling at the lady’s earnestness. “ But at least it is some¬ thing of an excuse for American slavery. It seems to be an evidence that providence had a hand in the whole unfortunate business.” But in spite of these discussions and con¬ troversies, the general made himself so thor¬ oughly agreeable in every way, and was so thoughtful in his attentions, that by the time Helen and her aunt arrived at Azalia they were disposed to believe that he had placed them under many obligations, and they said so; but the general insisted that it was he who had been placed under obligations, and he declared it to be his intention to discharge a few of them as soon as the ladies found themselves comfortably settled in the little town to which Dr. Buxton had banished them. III. Azalia was a small town, but it was a com¬ paratively comfortable one. For years and years before the war it had been noted as the meeting-place of the wagon-trains by means of which the planters transported their produce to market. It was on the highway that led from the cotton plantations of middle Georgia to the city of Augusta. It was also a stopping-place for the stage-coaches that carried the mails. Azalia was not a large town, even before the war, when, according to the testimony of the entire community, it was at its best, and it cer¬ tainly had not improved any since the war. There was room for improvement, but no room for progress, because there was no necessity for progress. The people were contented. They were satisfied with things as they existed, though they had an honest, provincial faith in the good old times that were gone. They had but one regret, — that the railroad station, four miles away, had been named Azalia. It is true, the station consisted of a water-tank and a little pigeon-house where tickets were sold, but the people of Azalia proper felt that it was in the nature of an outrage to give so fine a name to so poor a place. They derived some satisfaction, however, from the fact that the world at large found it necessary to make a distinction betAveen the two places. Azalia was called “ Big Azalia,” and the railroad sta¬ tion was known as “ Little Azalia.” Away back in the forties, or perhaps even earlier, when there was some excitement in all parts of the country in regard to railroad building, one of Georgia’s most famous ora¬ tors had alluded in the legislature to Azalia as “ the natural gateway of the commerce of the Empire State of the South.” This fine phrase stuck in the memories of the people of Azalia and their posterity, and the passing traveler, since that day and time, has heard a good deal of it. There is no doubt that the figure was fairly applicable before the rail¬ ways were built, for, as has been explained, Azalia was the meeting-place of the wagon- trains from all parts of the State in going to market. When the cotton-laden wagons met at Azalia they parted company no more un¬ til they had reached Augusta. The natural result of this was that Azalia, in one way and another, saw a good deal of life — much that was entertaining, and a good deal that was exciting. Another result was that the people had considerable practice in the art of hospi¬ tality ; for it frequently happened that the comfortable tavern, which Azalia’s commer¬ cial importance had made necessary at a very early period of the town’s history, was full to overflowing with planters accompany¬ ing their Avagons and laAvyers traveling from court to court. At such times the Avorthy townspeople would come to the rescue, and offer the shelter of their homes to the belated Avayfarer.

Page 552

AZALIA, 549 There was another feature of Azalia wor¬ thy of attention. It was in a measure the site and center of a mission — the headquar¬ ters, so to speak, of a very earnest and patient effort to infuse energy and ambition into that indescribable class of people known in that region as the piney- woods tackies.” Within a stone’s- throw of Azalia there was a scattering settlement of these tackies. They had settled there before the revolution, and had remained there ever since, unchanged and unchangeable, steeped in poverty of the most desolate de¬ scription and living the narrowest lives possi¬ ble in this great Republic. They had attracted the attention of the Rev. Arthur Hill, an Epis¬ copalian minister, who conceived an idea that the squalid settlement near Azalia afforded a fine field for missionary labor. Mr. Hill estab¬ lished himself in Azalia, built and furnished a little church in the settlement, and entered on a career of the most earnest and persevering charity. To all appearances his labor was thrown away, but he was possessed by both faith and hope, and never allowed himself to be disheartened. All his time, as well as the modest fortune left him by his wife, who was dead, was devoted to the work of improv¬ ing and elevating the tackies, and he never permitted himself to doubt for an instant that reasonable success was crowning his efforts. He was gentle, patient, and somewhat finical. This was the neighborhood towards which Miss Eustis and her aunt had journeyed. For¬ tunately for these ladies. Major Haley, the ge¬ nial tavern-keeper, had a habit of sending a hack to meet every train that stopped at Little Aza¬ lia. It was not a profitable habit in the long run, but Major Haley thought little of the profits so long as he was conscious that the casual traveler had abundant reason to be grateful to him. Major Haley himself was a native of Kentucky, but his wife was a Geor¬ gian, inheriting her thrift and her economy from a generation that knew more about the hand-loom, the spinning-wheel, and the cot¬ ton-cards than it did about the piano. She admired her husband, who was a large, fine- looking man, with jocular tendencies, but she disposed of his opinions without ceremony when they came in conflict with her own. Under these circumstances it was natural that she should have charge of the tavern and all that appertained thereto. General Garwood, riding by from Little Azalia, whither his saddle-horse had been sent to meet him, had informed the major that two ladies from the North were coming in the hack, and begged him to make them as comfortable as possible. This information Major Haley dutifully carried to his wife. VoL. XXXIV.— 75. “ Good Lord ! ” exclaimed Mrs. Haley, “ what do you reckon they want here ? ” “ I’ve been a-studyin’,” said her husband thoughtfully. “ The gener’l says they’re cornin’ fer their health.” Well, it’s a mighty fur cry for health,” said Mrs. Haley emphatically. “ I’ve seen some monst’ous sick people around here ; and if anybody ’ll look at them tackies out on the Ridge yonder, and then tell me there’s any health in this neighborhood, then I’ll give up. I don’t know how in the wide world we’ll fix up for ’em. That everlastin’ nigger went and made too much fire in the stove and tee- totally mint my light-bread ; I could ’a’ cried, I was so mad ; and then on top er that the whole dinin’-room is tore up from top to bottom.” Well,” said the major, we’ll try and make ’em comfortable, and if they ain’t comfortable it won’t be our fault. Jest you whirl in and put on some of your Greene county style, Maria. That’ll fetch ’em.” It may fetch ’em, but it won’t feed ’em,” said the practical Maria. The result was that when Helen Eustis and her aunt became the guests of this poor little country tavern, they were not only agree¬ ably disappointed as to their surroundings, but they were better pleased than they would have been at one of the most pretentious car¬ avansaries. Hotel luxury is comfortable enough to those who make it a point to appreciate what they pay for ; but the appointments of luxury can neither impart nor compensate for the lack of the atmosphere that mysteri¬ ously conveys some impression or reminiscence of home. In the case of Helen and her aunt, this impression was conveyed and confirmed by a quilt of curious pattern on one of the beds in their rooms. ‘‘ My dear,” said Miss Tewksbury, after making a critical examination, ^‘your grand¬ mother had just such a quilt as this. Yes, she had two. I remember the first one was quite a bone of contention between your mother and me, and so your grandmother made two. I declare,” Miss Tewksbury continued, with a sigh, it quite carries me back to old times.” It is well made,” said Helen, giving the stitches a critical examination, and the col¬ ors are perfectly matched. Really, this is some¬ thing to think about, for it fits none of our theories. Perhaps, Aunt Harriet, we have ac¬ cidentally discovered some of our long-lost relatives. It would be nice and original to substitute a beautiful quilt for the ordinary strawberry mark.” Well, the sight of it is comforting, any¬ how,” said Miss Tewksbury, responding to the half-serious humor of her niece by pressing

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AZALIA. 550 her thin lips together and tossing her gray ringlets. As she spoke, a negro boy, apparently about ten years old, stalked unceremoniously into the room, balancing a large stone pitcher on his head. His hands were tucked beneath his white apron, and the pitcher seemed to be in imminent danger of falling, but he smiled and showed his white teeth. “ I come fer ter fetch dish yer pitcher er water, ma’m. Miss ’Ria say she speck you lak fer have ’im right fresh from de well.” “ Aren’t you afraid you’ll drop it ? ” said Miss Eustis. “ Lor,’ no’m ! ” exclaimed the boy, empha¬ sizing his words by increasing his grin. I been ca’um dis away sence I ain’t no bigger dan my li’l’ buddy. Miss ’Ria, she say dat w’at make I so bow-legged.” ‘‘ What is your name ? ” inquired Miss Tewksbury, with some degree of solemnity, as the boy deposited the pitcher on the wash- stand. ‘‘ Mammy, she say I un name Willum, but Mars Maje en de turrer folks, dey des calls me Bill. I run’d off en sot in de school -’ouse all day one day, but dat mus’ ’a’ been a mighty bad day, kaze I ain’t never year um say wherrer I wuz name Willum, er wherrer I wuz des name Bill. Miss ’Ria, she say dat ’tain’t make no diffunce w’at folks’ name is, long ez day come w’en dey year turrer folks holl’in’ at um.” “ Don’t you go to school, child ? ” Miss Tewksbury inquired, with dignified sympathy. “ I start in once,” said William, laughing, ‘‘ but mos’ time I git dar de nigger man w’at do de teachin’ tuck’n snatch de book out’n my han’ en say I got ’im upper-side down. I tole ’im dat de onliest way w’at I kin git my lesson, en den dat nigger man tuck’n lam me side de head. Den atter school bin turn out, I is hide myse’f side de road, en w’en dat nig¬ ger man come ’long, I up wid a rock en I fetched ’im a clip dat mighty nigh double ’im up. You ain’t never is year no nigger man holler lak dat nigger man. He run’d en tole Mars Peyt. dat de Kukluckers wuz atter ’im. Mars Peyt. he try ter quile ’im, but dat nigger man done gone ! ” Don’t you think you did wrong to hit him ? ” Miss Tewksbury asked. Dat w’at Miss ’Ria say. She say I oughter be shame er myse’f by good rights; but w’at dat nigger man wanter come hurtin’ my feelin’ fer w’en I settin’ dar studyin’ my lesson des hard ez I kin, right spang out’n de book, en spozen she wuz upper-side down, wa’n’t de lesson in dar all de time, kaze how she gwine spill out ? ” William was very serious, — indeed, he was indignant, — when he closed his argument. He turned to go out, but paused at the door and said : “ Miss ’Ria say supper be ready ’mos’ To’ you kin turn ’roun’, but she say ef you too tired out she’ll have it sont up.” William paused, rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, smacked his mouth, and added : I gwine fetch in de batter-cakes myse’f ! ” Miss Tewksbury felt in her soul that she ought to be horrified at this recital ; but she was grateful that she was not amused. “ Aunt Harriet,” cried Helen, when William had disappeared, “ this is better than the sea¬ shore. I am stronger already. My only regret is that Henry P. Bassett, the novelist, is not here. The last time I saw him he was mop¬ ing and complaining that his occupation was almost gone because he had exhausted all the types — that’s what he calls them. He de¬ clared he would be compelled to take his old characters and give them a new outfit of emo¬ tions. Oh, if he were only here ! ” I hope you feel that you are in some sense responsible for all this, Helen,” said Miss Tewksbury solemnly. ‘‘ Do you mean the journey. Aunt Harriet, or the little negro ? ” “ My dear child, don’t pretend to misunder¬ stand me. I cannot help feeling that if we had done and were doing our whole duty, this — this poor negro — Ah, well ! it is useless to speak of it. We are on missionary ground, but our hands are tied. Oh, I wish Elizabeth Map- pis were here ! She would teach us our duty.” She wouldn’t teach me mine. Aunt Har¬ riet,” said Helen seriously. ‘‘ I wouldn’t give one grain of your common sense for all that Elizabeth Mappis has written and spoken. What have her wild theories to do with these people? She acts like a man in disguise. When I see her striding about delivering her harangues, I always imagine she is wearing a pair of cow-hide boots as a sort of stimulus to her masculinity. Ugh! I’m glad she isn’t here.” Ordinarily, Miss Tewksbury would have de¬ fended Mrs. Elizabeth Mappis, but she remem¬ bered that a defense of that remarkable woman, as remarkable for her intellect as for her cour¬ age, was unnecessary at all times, and, in this instance, absolutely uncalled for. More¬ over, the clangor of the supper-bell, which rang out at that moment, would have effectu¬ ally drowned out whatever Miss Tewksbury might have chosen to say in behalf of Mrs. Mappis. The bell-ringer was William, the genial lit¬ tle negro whose acquaintance the ladies had made, and he performed his duty with an unc¬ tion that left nothing to be desired. The bell

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AZALIA. 551 was so large that William was compelled to use both hands in swinging it. He bore it from the dining-room to the hall and thence from one veranda to the other, making fuss enough to convince everybody that those who ate at the tavern were on the point of enjoy¬ ing another of the famous meals prepared under the supervision of Mrs. Haley. There was nothing in the dining-room to invite the criticism of Helen and her aunt, even though they had been disposed to be critical ; there was no evidence of slatternly management. Everything was plain, but neat. The ceiling was high and wide, and the walls were of dainty whiteness, relieved here and there by bracket-shelves containing shiny crock¬ ery and glass-ware. The oil-lamps gave a mel¬ low light through the simple but unique paper shades with which they had been fitted. Above the table, which extended the length of the room, was suspended a series of large fans. These fans were connected by a cord, so that when it became necessary to cool the room, or to drive away the flies, one small negro, by pulling a string, could set them all in mo¬ tion. Over this dining-room Mrs. Haley presided. She sat at the head of the table, serene, cheer¬ ful, and watchful, anticipating the wants of each and every one who ate at the board. She invited Helen and her aunt to seats near her own, and somehow managed to convince them, veteran travelers though they were, that hospitality such as hers was richly worth pay¬ ing for. I do hope you’ll make out to be comfort¬ able in this poor little neighborhood,” she said, as the ladies lingered over their tea, after the other boarders — the clerks and the shop-keep¬ ers — had bolted their food and fare. “I have my hopes and I have my doubts. Gen¬ eral Garwood says you’re come to mend your health,” she continued, regarding the ladies with the critical eye of one who has had some¬ thing to do with herbs and simples, “and I’ve been tryin’ my best to pick out which is the sick one, but it’s a mighty hard matter. Yet I won’t go by looks, because if folks looked bad every time they felt bad, they’d be some mighty peaked people in this world, off and on. William, run and fetch in some hot batter- cakes.” “ I am the alleged invalid,” said Helen. “I am the victim of a conspiracy between my aunt ^ here and our family physician. Aunt Harriet,what do you suppose Dr. Buxton would say if he knew how comfortable we are at this moment ? I dare say he would write a letter and order us off to some other point.” “ My niece,” said Miss Tewksbury, by way of explanation, “has weak lungs, but she has never permitted herself to acknowledge the fact.” “Well, my goodness!” exclaimed Mrs. Haley, “ if that’s all, we’ll have her well and sound in a little or no time. Why, when I was her age, I had a hackin’ cough and a rackin’ pain in my breast night and day, and I fell off till my own blood kin didn’t know me. Everybody give me up, but old Miss Polly Flanders in Hancock, right j’inin’ county from Greene, she sent me word to make me some mullein tea and drink sweet milk right fresh from the cow, and from that day to this I’ve never know’d what weak lungs was. I reckon you’ll be mighty lonesome here,” said Mrs. Haley, after William had returned with a fresh supply of batter-cakes, “ but you’ll find folks mighty neighborly, once you come to know ’em. And, bless goodness ! here’s one of ’em now. Howdy, Emma Jane ? ” A tall, ungainly-looking woman stood in the door of the drawing-room leading to the kitchen. Her appearance showed the most ab¬ ject poverty. Her dirty sun-bonnet had fallen back from her head and hung on her shoul¬ ders. Her hair was of a reddish-gray color, and its frazzled and tangled condition suggested that the woman had recently passed through a period of extreme excitement; but this sugges¬ tion was promptly corrected by the wonderful serenity of her face — a pale, unhealthy-looking face, with sunken eyes, high cheek-bones, and thin lips that seemed never to have troubled themselves to smile ; a burnt-out face that had apparently surrendered to the past and had no hope for the future. The Puritan simplicity of the woman’s dress made her seem taller than she really was, but this was the only illusion about her. Though her appearance was uncouth and ungainly, her manner was unembarrassed. She looked at Helen with some degree of interest, and to the latter it seemed that misery, hopeless but unabashed, gazed ^ at her with a significance at once pathetic and appalling. In response to Mrs. Haley’s salutation, the woman seated herself in the doorway and sighed. “You must be tired, Emma Jane, not to say howdy,” said Mrs. Haley, with a smile. The woman raised her right hand above her head and allowed it to drop helplessly into her lap. “ Ti-ud ! Lordy, Lordy ! how kin a pore creetur’like me be ti-ud ? Hain’t I thes nat- ally made out’n i’on ” “Well, I won’t go so fur as to say that, Emma Jane,” said Mrs. Haley, “ but you’re mighty tough. Now, you know that yourself ” “Yes’n — yes’n. I’m made out’n i’on. Lordy, Lordy 1 I thes natally hone fer some un ter come along an’ tell me what makes me

Page 555

AZALIA. 552 h’ist up an’ walk away over yan’ ter the rail- mon run of folks. But she’s rnighty worry- road track an’ set thar tell the ingine shoves some. She pesters melots mor n I ever let on. by. I wisht some un ud up an’ tell me what “The poor creature! exclaimed Miss makes me so restless an’ oneasy, ef it hain’t Tewksbury, “ I am truly sorry for her tru y ’cause Tm hongry ; I thes wisht they would, sorry.” ^ • j tt i t <■ Passin’ on by, Isez ter myself, .s’I,‘ Emma Jane “Ah! so ami, said Helen. Iproposeto Stucky,’ s’l, ‘ ef you know what’s good fer your see more of her. I am interested in ]ust such wholesome,’ s’I,‘ you’ll sneak in on Miss Haley, people.” „ u i n i i<;f ’cause you’ll feel better,’ s’l, ‘ ef you don’t no “ Well, ma am, said Mrs. Haky dryly, if more’ll tell ’er howdy,’ s’l. Lordy, Lordy ! I you like sech folks, it’s a thousand pities you ve dunnerwhat ud ’come er me ef I hadn’t a come here, for you’ll git a doste of em. Yes m, bin made out’n i’on.” that you will ; a doste of ’em that 11 last you “ Emma Jane,” said Mrs. Haley, in the as long as you live, if you live to be one ot tone of one who is humoring a child, “ these the patrioks. And you nee’nter be sorry for ladies are from the North.” Emma Ja.ne Stucky neither. Jest as you see “ Yes’n,” said the woman, glancing at Helen her now, jesso she s been a-goin on fer tw OTty and her aunt with the faintest expression of year, an’ jest as you see her now, jesso shes pity, “ yes’n, I hearn tell you had comp’ny. been a-lookm’ ev’ry sence anybody around Hit’s a mighty long ways fum this, the North, here has been a-knowin her. „ -j hain’t it Miss Haley — a long ways fuder’n “ Her history must be a pathetic one, said Tennissy ? Well, the Lord knows, I pity urn Miss Tewksbury ryith a sigh, fum the bottom of my heart, that I do — “ Her what, ma am? asked Mrs. Haley, a-bein’ such a long ways fum home.” “ Her history, the story of her life, responded “ The North is ever so much further than Miss Tewksbury. “ I daresay it is very touch- Tennessee,” said Helen pleasantly, almost un- ing.” , . , , tt i << consciously assuming the tone employed by “ W'ell, ma’am,’ said Mrs. Halej^ Emma Mrs Haley; “ but the weather is so very cold Jane Stucky is like one of them theie dead there that we have to run away sometimes.” pines out there in the clearin’. If you had a “ You’re right, honey,” said Mrs. Stucky, stack of almanacs as high as a hoss-rack, you hugging herself with her long arms. “ I wisht couldn’t pick out the year she was young and I could run away fum it myself. Ef I wa’n’t sappy. She must ’a’ started out as a light d made out’n i’on, I dunner how I’d stan’ it. knot, and she’s been a-gittin_ tougher year m Lordy! when the win’ sets in from the East an’ year out, till now shes tougher n t e hit in about runs me plum destracted. Hit toughest. No’m,” continued Mrs. Hdey, re¬ kills lots an’ lots er folks, but they hain’t made plying to an imaginary argument, I am t out’ll i’on like me.” . predijiced agm the poor creetur — Lord While Mrs. Stucky was describing the yig- knows I am t. If I was, no yittels would orous constitution that had enabled her to she git from me — not a scnmption. survive in the face of various difficulties, and “ I never saw such an expression on a hu- in spite of many mishaps, Mrs. Haley was en- man countenance, said Helen.^ Her eyes gaged in making up a little parcel of victuals, will haunt me as long as I live. This she handed to the woman. “Bless your soul and body, child, e. - “Thanky-do! thanky-do, ma’am! Me an’ claimed Mrs. Haley; “if you re going to let my son ’ll set down an’ wallop this up, an’ say that poor creetur’s looks pester you, you 11 be thanky-do all the time, an’ atter we’re done worried to death, as certain as the wor d- we’ll wipe our mouves an’ say thanky-do.” There’s a hunderd in this settlement jest like I reckon you ladies ’ll think we’re mighty her, and ther’ must be more n that, old an queer folks down here,” said Mrs. Haley, with an air of apology, after Mrs. Stucky had retired, but I declare I can’t find it in iny heart to treat that poor creetur’ out of the way. I set and look at her sometimes, and I wish I may young, ’cause the children look to be as old as the’r grannies. I reckon maybe you ain’t used to seein’ piney-woods tackies. Well, ma’am, you wait till you come to know ’em, and if you are in the habits of bein’ ha’nted cHid 'looiC 3/L ricr sorriG tiiTicSj ciiili j. vvion x c^y j i « i j. i * never budge if I don’t come mighty nigh cry- by looks, you’ll be the wuss ha nted mortal m in’. She ain’t hardly fittin’ to live, and if she’s this land, ’less’n it’s ’em that s got the spemt- fittin’ to die, she’s lots better off than the com- rappin’s after ’em.” zr (To be continued.) Joel Chandler Hams.

Page 556

I CAME PER TER FETCH DISH YER PITCHER ER WATER.” (Page 550.) VoL. XXXIV.— 76.

Page 557

ENGRAVED BY CHARLES STATE. DRAWN BY IRVING R. WILES. nothin’ to say.

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NOTHIN^ TO SAY. l^OTHIN’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say! — Girls that’s in love, I’ve noticed, ginerly has their way! Yer mother did, afore you, when her folks objected to 7//e _ Yit here / am, and here jw/ air! and yer mother — where is she? You look lots like yer mother : Purty much same in size; And about the same complected; and favor about the eyes. Like her, too, about Uvm' here, because she couldn’t stay ; It’ll ’most seem like you was dead like her! — but I hain’t got nothin’ to say! She left you her little Bible — writ yer name acrost the page — And left her ear-bobs fer you, ef ever you come of age. I’ve alius kep’ ’em and gyaurded ’em, but ef yer agoin’ away — Nothin’ to say, my daughter ! Nothin’ at all to say ! You don’t rickollect her, I reckon ? No; you wasn’t a year old then! And flow yer — how old air you ? Why, child, not '‘twenty ! ” When ? And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile ? and you want to git married that day ? ... I wisht yer mother was livin’ ! — but — I hain’t got nothin’ to say ! Twenty year ! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found ! There s a straw ketched onto yer dress there — /// bresh it off — turn round. (Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away !) Nothin’ to say, my daughter ! Nothin’ at all to say ! James Whitcomb Riley. OUR KIVIGTOK. AN EPISODE OF THE LADY FRANKLIN BAY EXPEDITION. S name was Jens Edwards, and he was an Innuit, that is to say, a man ; for with more than Saxon pride the Eskimo has always claimed his own to be the race of the world. He was born in 1843. He died in his kayak at sea, as had his father before him. That he met his death while striving for game to feed his starving comrades, slowly dying on the bleak, barren bluff of Sabine, is why I tell you the story of his life, and how he was our Kivigtok. The incidents of early years were gathered partly from his own words, but the general outlines came from my surgeon and from the Danish officials at Upernivik. His birthplace was on the little island of Proven, one of the small outposts of the Royal Danish Trade, around which cluster the Es¬ kimos of the West Greenland coast. The long arctic night, which at Proven is unbroken by sun for over ten weeks, gives ample time for improvement ; and beside a knowledge of printed text, the gentle Danish priest had taught Jens the doctrines of the catechism,, and had attuned his voice to the fervent Es¬ kimo hymns, weird chants of praise which seem very outbursts of the soul, and which make such a strong impression on European minds. It may be that religious feeling is largely a part of the Eskimo nature, or perhaps that school and church are as much diversion as duty, and so are welcomed as glad and happy breaks in the monotony of continual darkness, or eternal sunshine. In such manner, at all events, were the winters of Jens Edwards’ childhood passed. The lavish care and affection always shown by the Greenlanders to their children had been peculiarly his. His father rehearsed to him the old Innuit tales and traditions, which ever turned on those sports and labors that were to be the end and aim of his life, the

Page 559

556 OUR KIVIGTOK. OL'R LAST SIGHT OF THE “ PROTEUS.” hunt of the bear and seal, and the journeys to the fabled inland country, habited by reindeer and conjurers. In early spring, when want came and famine threatened, he had with un¬ broken fast followed in stealthy tread his father from his sledge to the seal-net, and when skill and fortune gave a JVeitsik, had learned how to flay deftly its skin and separate from the rich, dark meat the thick creamy layers of solid blubber, which with the hairy pelt could be bartered with the Coloni-bestyrcr for scant supplies of bread and coffee. In summer days, when plenty reigns and strength abides, when the polar sun for many weeks gives life and vigor to all nature, he had learned while yet a mere child the rudi¬ ments of kayaking. This dangerous craft is gradually dying out in Greenland, and only the brighter and more ambitious boys acquire it. Practice must com¬ mence at a tender age, and must be continued assiduously. Jens had a pride and delight in the art, such as was unusual in his settlement. For those who have never seen a kayak I will imperfectly describe it as a shuttle-shaped boat, consisting of a wooden frame- work, which is fastened together generally by seal¬ skin thongs, and over which is stretched a covering of tanned seal-skin as neatly and tightly as in the sheep-skin of a drum-head. The skin covering is so well tanned, and it is so deftly sewn together with sinew thread by the Eskimo women, that no drop of water finds its way through skin or seam. The use of seal thong in uniting the stanchions gives great strength and equal elasticity, allowing with impunity great shocks which otherwise would destroy so frail a structure. The boat is usually some fifteen feet long, and from its central point gently curves upward — from a width of twenty and a depth of ten inches — to pointed ends. Both prow and stern are carefully armed with a thin molding of wal¬ rus ivory, which is a protection to the skin covering when the hunter, spinning through the water, strikes small ice, or, in landing, so throws forward and upward his kayak that boat and man slide easily and safely up the edge on to the level surface of a floe. The only opening is a circular hole with a bone or wooden ring, its size being strictly limited to the circumference of the hips of the largest hunter who is to use it. A waterproof combination jacket and mit¬ ten of oil-tanned seal-skin is worn by the hunter, who tightly laces the bottom to the

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OUR KIVIGTOK, ring, so that no water can enter the kayak. Thus equipped, the Innuit hunter faces seas which would swamp any other craft, and plunges safely through the heaviest surf. A single oar, with a blade at each end, in skill¬ ful and trained hands propels this unballasted, unsteady craft with great rapidity, and it moves through the water at a rate varying from five to ten miles an hour, according to the character of the sea and the exigency of the occasion. The oar properly handled enables an expert to rise to the surface, if, as happens at times, the boat is overturned. The kayak of the Eskimo is probably un¬ surpassed in ingenuity by the boating devices of any other savage people of the globe. Its essential points of lightness, buoyancy, and structural strength are marvelously well adapt¬ ed to the varying and dangerous conditions under which an Eskimo provider seeks his sea game. This tiny craft with all hunting gear weighs scarcely 50 pounds, and will carry a load of some 200 pounds besides its occupant. In a few short summers Jens became one of the most expert kayakers of his settlement, and as years rolled on he timidly passed from the quiet water of the adjoining inlet to the broader expanses of Salmon Fiord, and later boldly ventured in search of seal into the open sea, which beats, often with turbu¬ lent and furious force, against the battling crags stretching northward from Proven to meet the majestic cliff of Sanderson’s Hope. Before he was fifteen, a proud and happy boy, he brought from the sea, trailing after his kayak, a seal caught by harpoon and bladder, and was received with feast and ceremony as a hunter among hunters. In such wise was he trained and grew to manhood, and it was known that a more active and clever youth could not be found in Proven. His obliging disposition and his expertness in various kinds of handicraft made him a useful man to the colony, and as an underworkman he could easily have had a place in the Royal Trade, the dream and crown of many a Greenlander’s life. But Jens was made of better stuff. His father just then perished, as does many an Eskimo hunter, while chasing the seal in the treacherous waters and among the arctic ice of Baffin’s Bay. It may be that, unable to turn his frail kayak in heavy seas and strong winds, he strove against them until he became completely exhausted, and the elements prevailed and he perished. Per¬ chance, having struck a large seal or lanced a white whale, the excited hunter failed to throw the bladder, and with his kayak caught by the encircling coils of seal thong, was dragged to death by the game he had struck. At all events, the father, fasting, as do all good VoL. XXXIV.— 77. 557 hunters in Greenland when seeking the seal at sea, went forth and never returned. Jens then determined to assume that place in the settlement which is upheld by force of custom as the most honorable for a Green¬ lander, and so became a provider. This term in Greenland means that a man, to the best of his ability, shall follow the pro¬ fession of a hunter in the sea, until physically disabled or succeeded by an able-bodied son. All Eskimos are land hunters, but hunting on the sea, from its great dangers, demands sound judgment, great physical strength, marked activity, and continuous practice. The death of his father, as it occurred at sea, was not without its influence as to his decision. It may be that in those children of the ice there is a touch of that same fatalism which is found among the sons of the desert, for in Green¬ land the son is bound to brave and defy the powers which have caused his father’s death; and if in storm or ice that father has perished at sea, so much more the reason that the son by his skill as a kayaker should well acquit himself in the same calling. As years passed by, Jens took to himself a wife — not after the old Greenlandic fashion of infant betrothal and forced marriage, but by the Christian law which was more in keeping with his gentle spirit and early training. In all these years he was the same helpful, industrious Jens who sought with earnest zeal to do his duty to his family and the village. No matter how late the spring, how early the autumn, or how hard the winter, his hut was never found without its oil or meat, brought from the sea by Jens’s patient skill and un¬ erring lance. When famine threatened in hard seasons, he of all never sought aid from the Trade. Only at such times he denied bread and coffee to his own, for his great, warm heart, touched by the misery around, gave to his starving fellows the blubber which would have bought these luxuries. In these years he heard much of Hans Hen¬ drik, Avho had written in Eskimo text his life, telling of his travels into the far north with Kane, Hayes, and Nares to lands where the inland ice was scarcely known, where reindeer Avere plentiful, and Avhere even the musk-ox, the famous and traditional umimak, was to be found straying down to the sea from the fertile valleys of the interior. These travels of Hans served long as win¬ ter talk for all Greenland, as in the gossip of its long arctic night is told and retold all that has been done or said in years through¬ out its thousand miles of inhabited coast. So the seed sown by his father’s tales was fruc¬ tified by the adventures of Hans. Then came to the country the forerunner of our

Page 561

OUR KIVIGTOK. 553 expedition, a skillful doctor, who spent much time with the natives, who learned to drive a dog-team, and like an Innuit ran after the sledge, who talked of the far north and prom¬ ised game and adventures for Jens and good Danish coin for the family if he would go with him and his, the coming year. So it was that Jens Edwards, with tears in his eyes but courage in his heart, came one day to our little launch, in Proven, and, saying farewell to weeping wife and babes, sailed up the ice¬ bound coast to Upernivik and us. As he came on board the Proteus^ he stood before me a true Greenlander, — alert, active, and nimble in kayak or boat, in handling the oar, in throwing the lance, or using the gun ; yet in other movements he showed that awk¬ wardness which always comes in the use of untrained muscles. He was short, even for an Eskimo, being scarcely five feet in height. His complexion and general physiognomy struck me as distinctly Mongolian, of a shade between the Chinese and the Japanese. His coal-black hair was coarse and plentiful, and his black eyes were set in almond-shaped ori¬ fices. His face was broad and beardless, his nose flat, and his head very large, with neck short and thick. To a broad, full chest, stout arms and legs, were united small, well-formed hands and feet, the latter diminutive and shapely enough for a lady. He brought his fateful kayak and all needful weapons for sea- chase, which received his unceasing care and attention. His agreement bound him for duty as dog-driver and hunter and for such other cheerful service as I might exact, and in return he or his family was to receive twenty-five dol¬ lars in American gold each month. He was further to receive good and sufficient food and clothing, and in case of death in service I was to attempt to procure a pension for his family. He was pledged by the Royal Inspector to be honest, truthful, industrious, and faithful. I found him always busy and helpful, the most truthful being I have ever known, honest to the core, and faithful unto death. So he sailed northward, and stood as one of us at Conger that eventful August day, watching the Fi'oteus^ as departing she forced her way slowly through the grinding pack and, vanishing from sight, left us isolated dwellers on the utmost verge of the world. The sun left us at Conger the middle of October, but the monotonous routine of arctic life had long before been entered on. The continued dark¬ ness, the utter solitude of external nature, the unvarying round of duties, the constant sight of the same faces and the sound of the same voices, had their effect on even the least impressionable man, and called for unusual strength of will to meet them undisturbed. But to our emotional Eskimos the trial was greater. It is true they had from childhood undergone the hardships of an arctic winter, but in that northern hamlet of Proven, on the darkest day the noonday sun yet came within five degrees of the horizon, and gave such twi¬ light as permitted regular labor and exercise at midday. , In early December Jens had varying spells of marked cheerfulness and of moody depres¬ sion. At times he came to see and talk with me, a liberty I always encouraged, though it seemed to him a great one, from an idea, ever present in those simple minds, as to the exalted station of a governor or inspector. In plain, simple phrases, a quaint broken mixture of English and Eskimo, he talked of wife and children, whom he had left, who were so dear to his heart, so far from his sight. His wish to see, to know of them, was so strong that I re¬ pented at times of having ever offered the shining gold which influenced at least the Danish governor to favor his coming. December 13th came, a dull morning, the sky hidden by dense masses of low, leaden clouds, which with the rising temperature gave sure signs of coming snow. The air, though fairly warm for Grinnell Land, at a temperature below zero thirty degrees, was yet raw and chill¬ ing, being full of little spiculae of falling frost, which fast fills the beard, covers the face and eyebrows, and glues together the eyelids. At such times a faint breath of air is. only needed to cover you, from chin to forehead, with a mask of ice, which thickens with incredible rapidity. The dry, cold air of yesterday, which, inhaled, excitesthe inner membranes like spark¬ ling wine, had given place to-day to a moist, damp medium, which benumbed and stupefied, instead of vivifying. A taste of the coming storm, a mere glance at the leaden sky, had been quite enough for the officers on rising, and they quickly gathered around our cheer¬ ful oak table, whose bright silver and snowy linen gave some zest to our morning meal. As we somberly ate, for the hundredth time we looked askant at each other, and wondered if the pallid tint of yellowish white came from the bleaching, impending darkness, or from illness, and if our own was like to other faces. We had hardly finished our meal when the orderly. Sergeant Brainard, knocked at the door and told me that Jens was gone. “ Gone where ? ” I asked. No one knows, sir, but Eskimo Frederik says he has gone.” I found that the cook had heard him rise and wash at seven o’clock, but no one had since seen him. Sergeants Rice and Brainard were at once ordered to search for tracks near the house.

Page 562

OUR KIVIGTOK, In order that no chance should fail, and be¬ fore the general parties should start, the trail must be found. To that end I directed them, each with a man, to take torches, and going east a quarter of a mile, to separate and travel in opposite half-circles until they met west of the stations or found J ens’s footsteps. If all had gone at one time or in an ordinary manner, the faint trail would have been obscured, and could have been picked up only with great difficulty. As it was, Sergeant Rice found triple tracks on the Dutch Island path, two of which were yet clear in the recent-fallen frost, and of a person traveling toward the straits. Follow¬ ing them, he found that one turned- back, evi¬ dently the trail of Frederik, who had before looked for Jens, but who, being without torch or lantern, could not see the footprints. Rice, sending back word that the trail had been found, and requesting a dog-sledge, continued on the track, accompanied by Private Whist¬ ler, whose zeal had led him to go without or¬ ders or even proper clothing. The dog-sledge left at once, under charge of the surgeon, with Sergeant Brainard and Eskimo Frederik. Rice found a good road for about two miles, — the beaten track over the paleocrystic floes, which daily was trodden by us, and which somehow intuitively in the beginning had been marked out toward home and friends — to the sunny and much-loved south. By the time Dutch Island was reached the flaming turpentine torch was nearly empty, and at the end of the beaten path, where Jens had turned to the tortuous, winding maze of tangled ice-foot, it cast its glaring light only long enough to show that our Eskimo had turned toward the north and darkness, rather than toward the south and Proven. The course to the northeast led to Cape Beechy, the nearest point to Greenland, and he doubt¬ less thought some time and in some unknown way he might pass the wild waste of rough ice, and with the rising coast of his native land find too, through its magic inland country, his home and loved ones. How should the trail be farther followed ? To return for a lantern was to lose time and perhaps lose the man, who might even then be perishing from cold. To go on without light was almost impossible, for so utter the darkness, so dense the falling haze of frost, that even the active, quick-eyed Jens had often fallen in the good road. As they turned back it occurred to Rice that in his outer pocket was a bit of candle which at times he used when noting the tide, his daily duty. Lighting the candle, they found the tracks and went slowly on, experiencing many a fall in the chaotic masses of rough broken ice. In 559 a mile’s travel the candle was relighted a dozen times, and as Rice was about waiting for the sledge he got a bad fall, by which he discov¬ ered, to his dismay, that he had not only lost the candle but had also disabled his right arm. While they were searching for the candle, the dog-sledge with fresh torches came up, and the surgeon, finding that Rice could walk, sent him back to the station under the care of the ill-clad Whistler. The doctor hurried on after Brainard and the sledge, and finally, near St. Patrick Bay, the party overtook Jens walking moodily on, heeding no cries, and turning no glance back¬ ward until he was reached and touched. Even then he would not talk, but silently took what was offered and fell into his wonted place be¬ hind the upstanders, at the rear of the sledge. Jens had gone nearly a dozen miles before he was caught. Clothed only for the warm quar¬ ters he had left, he had gone into the darkness and cold bare-handed and without a taste of food, and now took, as ‘^good the gods pro¬ vided,” the fur mittens and plain bread his captors had brought with them. The march in, which would have been slow and tedious from the roughness of the ice alone, was prolonged by the failing torch, which drove them to shore, where the high land and steep cliff had to be followed to insure their safe return. It had been, to begin with, the darkest of our two months of sunless days, but to add to their trouble a thick snow commenced fall¬ ing, blinding and delaying them further. By good fortune no wind came, or they would have perished to a man. Two hours or more steady work brought them to the grounded floebergs and broken ice- foot at Dutch Island, huge masses of polar ice, at first forced high on the shelving shore in com¬ pact shape, and then broken and twisted into endless confusion by the heavy tides. It was no easy task, in utter darkness and falling snow, to wind a way through yawning clefts, or to climb the crests which must be scaled to reach the inner harbor. The island passed, they struck the beaten path, where the eager dogs, with keen instinct keeping the trail on their wonted road, took up their best pace for home. The station was but a scant half-mile distant, when loud calls from the side of the road caused a halt. It seemed that Rice, under Whistler’s charge, had made slow progress homeward, and that after a time Whistler had begun talking extravagantly. At first Rice thought it was done to distract his mind from pain and to lessen the distance of travel. Soon, however, he found that Whistler was light-headed, a state evidently resulting from the extremely benumbing influence of the damp,

Page 563

OUR KIVIGTOK. 560 chilly air. Whistler had left the station too thinly clad, without orders, having been ani¬ mated by excessive zeal for the search, which he did not realize would entail so long an ab¬ sence. Rice soon found that in place of hav¬ ing help from Whistler he must extend aid to him. Suffering great pain from his shoulder and entirely unable to use one arm, he hardly knew what course to pursue. It had com¬ menced snowing, and he felt if he left Whist¬ ler and made his way for help to the station, the man would wander from the way, and cer¬ tainly perish before help could come. By coax¬ ing and by force, now asking aid which Whistler could not give but which would keep him by his side, and again sharply ordering him to move on when he inclined to stop and stray. Rice managed to bring him within a mile of the station. From that point he could get him along only by pushing and pulling, and with great difficulty could he restrain him from rushing wildly into the outer rough ice, which lined the road. The doctor and Brainard soon brought the freezing man to the sledge, and were placing him on it, when Jens’s brooding heart, which had driven himself out into darkness and death, was moved by a touch of nature, and he at once said, If he rides, he freezes ; he must run behind the sledge.’’ Only this speech came from his lips during his inward journey, and his wise advice brought Whistler safely to the house, though wild in words and actions, and numb near to death. Eager hands took off the stiff garments, melted the masses of ice which bound fast beard and hair, and chafed the chilled limbs till new life and vigor filled his veins. Rice’s shoulder was soon cared for, a bad sprain, but no fracture, being found on examination. As soon as quiet and order were restored, I at once had Jens brought to my room. It seemed to me that in dealing with a savage, simple nature it was well to avoid delay, which could but end in bad results by giving him time to conjure up false ideas as to what harm would come to him. I had no idea of using threats or blame. The affair had al¬ ready given much physical pain to two of my men, temporarily disabling both and nearly causing the death of one ; but what was that to a man who deliberately turned his back on light, warmth, plenty, and comfort, to risk darkness, cold, want, and death ? I had known how Eskimo Peter had left Hayes, and, wandering from his brig in Foulke Fiord, had perished near the inland ice along the barren shores of Prudhoe Land. The tricks of wily Hans Hendrik were then thought to have caused this desertion, marked by fatal results. The same Hans, a dog-driver of Captain Stephenson’s, in our very harbor had gone forth to quit his party ; but, as he said, not to give pain to his good captain, he dug a hole in the snow a short mile from the ship and let himself be found. The harsh treatment which Peter feared and Hans feigned to fear could not be in question with us. Jens and his fellow had been treated with great kindness and marked consideration. Mindful of the advice given by the Royal In¬ spector of North Greenland, I had charged all the men to avoid any jesting or even the semblance of fun with these Eskimos, but to try and show that naught save gentle words and kind thoughts could come from us to them. These orders the men had rigidly obeyed. I allowed no one to remain in the room with us, so as to spare Jens’s feelings, and in the hope that being man to man I might thus the better gain his heart and confidence. I gave him a glass of brandy — the great favor in Greenland, where scJmapps cannot be sold to the natives. He drank it, as by order from the Governor.” I gave him some figs — a great delicacy among Greenlanders : he did not wish to take them. Tears sprang to his eyes as he told me he was bad and I was good, and he asked me to take them again. He at length ate one or two, after his simple, hearty, “ dank you,” which he had ever used as an acknowledgment of the least favor. Slowly could I draw from him any word as to why he had gone, as to what of good could come to him, and what other than harm to us who had ever done that which was right and good to him and his. I gained little from him that day other than that he sought the inland coun¬ try of Greenland and wanted to be a Kivigtok. Day by day he visited me, coming always when I was alone, seating himself in his hum¬ ble, timid, deprecating way, and telling me in a touching, hesitating manner of his home and wishes, of his wife and tiny babes, on the little island far to the south, whom he was destined never again to see. In the mean time I, fear¬ ful of another flight, had put a quiet guard over him by telling the hourly observers to ask his aid always when he was not at the table or in his bed. He was always glad to do a favor, and in this way his whereabouts was known hourly. I had learned, too, from Crantz and Rink what a Kivigtok was. Among the beliefs germain to Greenlanders is one which a century and a half of christian¬ izing influences has been unable to eradicate. The cause of this failure is not far to find, for in this civilized country of ours exists a simi¬ lar belief, which is openly admitted by some, and a strain of which is to be found in nearly all — that of clairvoyance. This sense the Eskimos usually call na-lus-sa-er-u-nek^ and

Page 564

OUR KIVIGTOK. 561 the individual possessing it is called na-lus-sa- er-u-tok^ which signifies that there exists noth¬ ing of which the possessor is not conscious. This gift, through an intuitive knowledge of nature’s hidden laws, enables them to accom¬ plish their will by methods unkno-ivn to com¬ mon minds. A Kivigtok is a man who has fled mankind and through a solitary life amid nature’s sur¬ roundings has acquired this gift of clairvoy¬ ance, — learned to understand the speech of birds and animals, and acquired information as to the foundation of the world. Men usually be¬ come Kivigtoks owing to unjust treatment by others or owing to a tongue-lashing by kindred or home-mates which leads them to desire re¬ venge. As Jens had no fear of us nor any fault with his treatment, I could not think the usual causes could be identical with that which drove him away, and after a time my idea was con¬ firmed. It seemed that the simple, natural man did not — as indeed who of us does ? — know him¬ self He came north, not so much that he might keep the wolf from his humble door as that he might have a glimpse of that beautiful country which his father had told him could be found inland, where reindeer and musk¬ oxen were plentiful, where meat and skins were in abundance, and the willow and the birch grew to giant trees. He had never before left wife or child for more than a few short days, and he knew not how strongly entwined around his heart were the tendrils of love which bound him to them. The going of the ship had in a way awakened him, but an active life, running after the sledge or hunting game, had saved him from himself until the long arctic night with little work and idle hours had given him time for thought and caused in his heart irre¬ pressible longings. Twenty years earlier, in the days of the great war, I had seen cold, stern men from the hard, harsh north, who blanched not in bat¬ tle’s heat, feared no foe, and stood at no fatigue, in strange wise waste slowly away, falling sick unto death for lack of face and voice that had been left behind in their burn¬ ing zeal for our country’s cause. In a manner it seemed wonderful then, but to see this child of the ice thus pine away was a new revelation to me. Savage or civilized, Eskimo or Cau¬ casian, in arctic snows or torrid sands, where Love’s true flame has once burned the heart ever yields obedience to its master touch. But as to his reason for choosing this way of returning home, as to what end he hoped to gain by seeking cold and darkness, hunger and desolation, I did not at that time know. The cause was learned later from a narration of one bright experience of his tender years that he recalled with great delight. The epi¬ sode had made a deep impression on him not only through the pleasure of that season, but from its after-effect upon his mind and heart. The dull life of a hard, arctic winter always gives way to a certain joy and merriment as the sun comes north, and Nature replaces by a garb of green her winter shroud of white. The providers of Proven, among whom Jens’s father stood high, found it good that they should go that spring into the adjoining fiord to hunt reindeer. The skillful women of the hamlet had done their best with needle and sinew, with thong and skin, so that the umiaks^ or wornen’s boats, were stanch and water-tight. The tents and household goods were duly col¬ lected and piled into large boats. The old peo¬ ple and y oun g children , exempt from hard work, arranged themselves comfortably between the benches, while the young women, lusty and strong, plied busily their oars and followed at a more leisurely pace after the slender kayaks, which far in advance skimmed over the calm waters of the inlet with great speed. The fiord, at first open to the sea, by a gentle curve changed into a broad land-locked sheet of smooth water, studded with small isles. Its gray crags rose as sheer precipices on each side, fringed and bordered with banks and drifts of the winter’s snow. Far away to the eastward the vanishing point of the steep cliffs seemed ever to meet the blue waters, but as they rowed on the bordering land on each side yet rose abrupt and stern. At places, as they passed along, the air resounded with screams and cries of wild sea-fowl that nesting on the high ledges resented this intrusion on their native haunts. As the midnight sun, in its cir¬ cling course, just dipped to kiss the sharp, gray crest of the barren crags, there rose far to the southeast, illumined by its rays, a faint white line which severed the blue of the sky from its sister color of the sea. It was the first glimpse of the inland ice, that mysterious barrier which the old men said stood only between the hard bar¬ ren peninsula of Svarte Huk and the land of the Inlanders, the Tiineks and the mountain elves. With Innuit patience they rowed on, and a few hours later pitched their seal-skin tents on the shelving ground which led up from the sea into the inland valleys. Here, to Jens’s de¬ light, he saw the famous green trees of which he had heard, — dense copses of willow as thick as his thumb and as high as his head. If nature has denied fair woodlands and green trees to Greenland, and contents herself with casting scant stores of dead drift-wood along its rocky shores, none the less has God im¬ planted in the Innuit strong feelings of delight and pleasure in the tiny shrubs which form its native forests.

Page 565

OUR KIVIGTOK, 562 Their summer encampment was made be¬ side the clear, cold stream which winter and summer flows from the glacier’s front down to the fiord. The main valley was a finely sheltered one, and in many places willow copses were sufficiently abundant to afford ample fuel for cooking their simple repast. The upturned umiaks, supported at either end by low rock walls, sheltered some of the party, while others were better provided with skin tents, which, stretched over poles, were kept in place by large stones rolled on the outer edge of the tent itself. These tents were pitched on the same spot, and were secured by the same lichen-covered stones as had been those of their ancestors for many ages. And of one circle Jens’s father said to him, Here my father and my father’s father have stood up their tents, as now I place mine.” For many weeks these summer tents stood near the head of the fiord, serving as a general encampment. In small parties the hunters, with women and boys, took long journeys into the deep, extensive valleys, up toward the inland ice and westward into Svarte Huk Peninsula. Scant luggage had they, only such as was needful to secure and dress the game. The glacial lakes and streams gave water, and when reindeer failed, an occa¬ sional ptarmigan served as food, or under dire stress of hunger the arctic hare was eaten. When good fortune came and one or more deer were killed, camp was at once made at the first fit place, until hunger was satisfied and rest enjoyed. The women with their skuning-knives soon separated the hide from the meat. Some stretched deftly out the raw hides, that they might be scraped and thus quickly dry in the constant sun, while others gathered scanty fuel from the nearest copses, and soon over a cheery fire their slices of rein¬ deer meat were broiling on flat, heated stones, which answered equally for cooking and serv¬ ing dishes. When all were filled with food the pipe came forth, solace to savage as to civilized men, and then were told tales of the reindeer and seal hunt, and traditions of the fair inland country peopled by wizards. When the hour for sleep came a pile of rocks broke the wind which swept downward from the ice to the sea, and with no shelter but the sky they slept until well rested for the next day’s hunt. The mor¬ row saw the men and boys searching other val¬ leys, while the patient women, broad belt over forehead, carried large loads of meat and skin to their summer camp. One day they followed up a broad valley which reached to the very edge of the inland * The Supreme Being of the ancient Greenlanders was Tornarsuk, but after the advent of Christianity ice. On each side the gentle slopes of green led up to high, precipitous crags, inaccessible to man or beast. At the head of the valley a projecting spur of the glacial ice-cap rose, a sheer wall of solid ice, hundreds of feet above a fertile nook of grass, mosses, and willows, where a herd of reindeer was feeding. Hemmed in by crag and ice, the whole band fell into their hands. The hunters had walked far, and throwing up a low wall of sod and stones, they camped by their game. The glacial brooks gave purest water, and dead bits of willow mixed with dry turf served for fuel. Their simple meal soon done, they lay down, warm and content, on the fresh reindeer skins, under the shadow of the towering ice cliffs. To the sky above them, like a frozen Niagara, rose the glacial front, a sheer precipice of opaque white marked only in spots with a delicate rosy tinge. Its snowy purity was greatly intensified, as one looked upward, by the bright sunlight, and by its contrast with the perfect blue of the arching sky. At the glacier’s base five small streams, one from a deep cave of cobalt blue, bubbled forth, finding their way over the piles of polished stones and through the masses of reddish moss and green turf plowed up by the advanc¬ ing ice. Then Jens’s father talked with them of the inland ice and the country beyond. When my father was a boy,” he said, where now yonder solid wall of ice rises high above us was a fertile valley. Leading far to the south over a gentle slope, it united to the great broad vale which leads down to the sea and looks on the fiord of Omenak where the neitsik leaps and white whales sport and play. Other green valleys stretched to this one from the east, through which the fat reindeer in our long summer day came down from the fair inland country to snuff the air of the sea and taste its brine. Here in those days of yore from far and near the Innuits came for game, and the hunters of Proven and Omenak, from southern and northern fiords, met there in a friendly way. Where then a hundred reindeer roamed, we search in vain for one.” But how is it,” said Jens, “ that this broad valley has been filled in and covered with these mountains of ice, which cut us off from the eastern vales and southern seas ? ” It is that Tornarsuk* wanted these green valleys as pasture for the reindeer and great umimak (musk-ox), fit game for his friends.” “ But there is naught here save snow and ice,” answered Jens. ‘‘The deer and umimak cannot feed on ice.” “ You see only the outer wall, and not the inner valleys,” said his father. “This lofty he was degraded to the position of devil. Many yet cling secretly to the old belief.

Page 566

OUR KIVIGTOK. ice is but a narrow barrier which separates the fertile hunting-grounds from our barren peninsula. When Tornarsuk needs more ground he spreads outward this inland ice, leaving the fertile valleys behind it, where roam and feed his game.” * What Tornarsuk once takes never comes back to us. The rein¬ deer long since were of the coast, but now they stay in those valleys, and those we kill are only small bands which stray downward through the ice fiords. As now the umimak, so in time the reindeer will be his, and to us at last will remain only the barren coast and the icy sea with its game. To his friends those good things, to us that which remains.” “ And who are his friends ? ” said the boy. ‘‘ Since remote ages, from Innuit father to son, has been handed down this legend, — and as my father told it to me, so I tell it again to you, — that whosoever boldly lays down his goods and weapons and bravely turning his back on the outer world flees fasting into waste and desert places, to him as a friend shall Tornarsuk come. He shall become a Kivigtok. The strongest bear, the largest whale, the most ferocious walrus shall fall vic¬ tim to his lance. The reindeer shall not dis¬ tance him in speed, and even the great umimak that once roamed over these valleys shall fall an easy prey to him. He shall swim like the seal, he shall run as the deer, he shall climb as the umimak, and no harm shall come to him. He shall live to such age that even a Greenlander cannot count the generations which shall come and go in his time. And more, he shall know all things both on sea and land, in the fair inland country and on the barren coast. He shall know the speech of birds, and beast, and fish, and that which they can do he also shall be able to do. And the coming and going of his enemy he shall know, so that he can scare the seal which he would strike or the deer he would shoot. That which he can do against his enemy, the same can he do for his friend. But to see these wonders, to have these powers, it is needful with brave heart, telling none and speaking no word, for the Innuit hunter to go forth fasting and fearing not. In this way only can one be a Kivigtok.” All too soon for young J ens the sun sank at midnight below the level sky, and with com¬ ing darkness and cold the return to home and Proven was begun. The heavy loads of dried meat and skins of the slaughtered deer were packed by the women at the encampment, ^ This idea of grassy valleys within the precincts of the inland ice and frequented by reindeer, has not only taken firm hold on the Eskimo mind, but has been advocated by distinguished men. Nordenskiold, in his remarkable journeys over the inland ice, hoped to find such spots. The theory was first advanced, I 563 and the umiaks, carefully examined, were once more launched and loaded. Two days later the deeply laden boats were drawn up on the island rocks amid yelping dogs and excited natives, who crowded around to welcome the hunters and learn what game had come to Proven and them. The reindeer hunt was end¬ ed, but never did the youth forget the green ravines with willow copses, the fertile valleys, and the active deer, and then sprang up in his heart a growing longing to look beyond the edge of the shining ice into the beautiful inland country and its fabled people. So my simple- hearted native had hoped to reach the inland country and become a Kivigtok, sacrificing himself that his heart might be made glad by visions of wife and babes, whom he so longed for. As soon as a knowledge of the real grief came to me, I told him he should go to wife and babes, but it would be better to wait the sun and a ship than to try again the peril¬ ous way across ice and snow, in cold and darkness. Though I had rightful claim to a service of two years, yet I would send him to Proven by the coming ship. The slow days came and went, and he was again bright, cheery, and busy, and long be¬ fore the returning sun gave a crimson color at noon to the southern sky, he was roaming over the snow-clad hills, hunting the arctic hare and the snowy ptarmigan. March and the sun came to us together in that arctic land, and life and work were ours anew. It was then Jens’s lot to go northward and strive to force a way through and over that ancient ice which covers the Polar Sea, and holds within it, well guarded, the secrets of the utmost north. In the great danger which came there to his party, when, adrift on a floating pack in the Po¬ lar Sea, a fierce storm drove them northward, he was cool, calm, and helpful. But once he saw a curious neitsik raising his head above the water. He ran to the edge of the ice, and, calling the pet name “ Poosie, Poosie,” stood trembling with tears in his eyes till the seal sank. The common seal of Proven, it recalled to him in that dark hour his distant wife and children. The ensuing year passed quickly and pleas¬ antly at Conger. In quarters amiable, docile, and obliging, he was as sociable as his broken English would permit, and made himself a general favorite; He was always ready for all field-work, whether far or near. His rifle was his constant companion, and many a musk-ox, believe, by Mr. Whymper some twenty years since. My own discoveries of such valleys in Grinnell Land show the probability of similar places in Greenland, at points where the physical conditions are favorable, say in the great fiords of the east coast.

Page 567

OUR KIVIGTOK. seal, or hare came to us as the fruit of his chase. He delighted to slay the musk-ox, the fam¬ ous umimak, extinct in Danish Greenland, but the more talked of that it lives only in tra¬ dition. The missing ship of the second year gave him no apparent uneasiness. Although he had counted on its coming and his going, his face showed no sorrow as it failed to come. That he remained so quietly and contentedly would have seemed ominous to me, had not my faith in him rested on a sure and sound basis. He had said to me that he would wait the coming of the ship, and his word once given, his actions were beyond the shadow of a doubt. When once he had promised to bide the tinie, his great loyalty to truth and duty bade him never to show by face or feature that he re¬ pented his word. With us at Conger he watched and waited for a ship already at the bottom of the sea. The hour of our retreat came, and we struggled fully four hundred miles along that barren, desolate coast. To-day the fierce north wind, massing the heavy pack, drove us to shore; to-morrow the strong south¬ west gale made a narrow lane for our passage, in which contending floes, crowding, made movement perilous; fog stopped, and fast¬ forming ice embayed; strong currents and heavy tides alternately beached us or dashed our boats, caught in the pitiless pack, against the dangerous ice-foot. But still we strove on, facing all, enduring all, overcoming all. At last we reached Cape Hawks, and from the opposing headland, looking southward to Sabine, saw alternate floes and wide water lanes affording easy passage for any arctic ship. Then doubts and fateful forebodings came to us, but none the less we pressed on. Another day saw us beset, fast bound by heavy floes cemented by new ice. In due time, dropping useless gear, with boat and sledge we tried the southern shore. Vain effort, for when by patient toil and great dangers we were at the very shore, the heavy gales, as if in mockery of man’s power, drove us again and again far seaward. For over thirty days we struggled over the floating pack before persistent efforts landed us with scant food upon a rocky headland. During ail this trying season our Kivigtok was always cheerful, ever ready with oar or pike, with gun or kayak, to do that which he could. On ancient floes his sounding-pike always found the ice which, cut through, gave needful water from the lakes. On our darkest days his patient efforts with gun and kayak brought many pounds of meat to strengthen and encourage us. Through the dreary autumn, ill-fed and shivering with cold, he and his fellow-native. with Long, our hunter, spent long, cheer¬ less days of feeble arctic twilight watching and hunting the seal which might save us. He was the same brave Jens through the terrible arctic night when for over five months no ray of sun entered our wretched hut. On Christ¬ mas day, when others sang songs of praise, he too raised his voice in an Eskimo hymn, learned in his boyhood days from the good priest. When, after five days’ travel through storm and cold and darkness, he and Rice were driven exhausted back from the icy chan¬ nel that cut them off from the eastern shore, for the first time his heart failed and cour¬ age deserted him. But with rest, again came hope and courage, and he followed the daily, but too often fruitless, hunt. What if with growing bodily weakness his hand trembled, knowing that a score of lives depended on his aim ? His was the ball which checked at the water’s edge the polar bear till Long’s unerr¬ ing aim sent a bullet through his head. When later, scarce able to walk, he missed the oo-sook, he feebly said his heart was broken. Yet still he hunted, and with a bright smile he knelt by me that eventful morn, and clasping my hand warmly said with gentle voice, Good-bye, commander! I will do the best I can.” A thousand times they had looked out across those barren floes, across that icy sea for food and help, and a thousand times had they been disappointed. N ow both J ens and Long called out oo-sook at the same moment, for far out on a floe, slow-moving to the south, lay a huge mass, the bearded seal of Greenland. He was basking on the floe in the bright sunlight. The seal’s slumber broke now and then, and he raised his head with a quick, startled look, which died slowly away as he fell again into his troubled sleep. For a long time the two men, — Caucasian and Innuit, — well concealed be¬ hind a hummock, patiently watched the sleep¬ ing seal on the drifting floe, which between tides and currents took a devious course. Again and again it seemed about touching the outer fringe of slush and young ice, so that the hunters could reach the floe and se¬ cure the game. This was the safe, indeed the only prudent course. At last the floe seemed to be starting south, and Jens’s patient pru¬ dence was ended. He would try the kayak. It was dangerous beyond doubt. Young ice abounded, and its touch meant death. If his father perished at sea, was it not by storm and stress of weather? Why should he fear, with this calm, smooth water, this blue sky, and the bright sunlight ? Had he not risked young ice before, — was he not a kayaker, an Innuit, and a provider ? Were not his com¬ rades starving and dying a few scant miles to the westward, and had he not told the com-

Page 568

OUR KIVIGTOK. 5^5 mander that he would do his best ? The oo-sook meant life and health for them all, those starv¬ ing men, who, if not Innuits, might well be so. If Sergeant Long thought best not, it was that Long, though a hunter, was no kayaker. He would go, and his comrades should be saved. Deftly and noiselessly the kayak was launched, and skillfully he seated himself in the frail craft. The first pool was passed, the first floe gained, and, as silently he drew up his VoL. XXXIV.— 78. kayak, he turned and smiling waved a farewell message to his comrade, the white hunter, who stood anxious and silent marking his progress. With equal skill he again launched the kayak, and a few strokes carried him within a few rods of the longed-for floe. But suddenly the prow sinks and the stern rises — the fatal ice cuts the skin ! In vain he plies the double- ended oar, for the filled kayak springs forward

Page 569

NOTES OF A PROFESSIONAL EXILE, 566 only to turn and sink with its inert hunter, within a dozen yards of life and safety. The sun shone yet brightly, the smooth waters sparkled, the seal slipped into the sea, and then — the only sign of life to the white hunter was a dusky raven, which silently and swiftly sped toward Sabine. The sea had claimed its own, and as his father before him, so went to rest and peace the Innuit, our Kivigtok. A. W, Greely, NOTES OF A PROFESSIONAL EXILE. T surprises Americans to see how youthful men of ad¬ vanced years often are in Europe. It is not uncom¬ mon to find two or three generations of beaux who are to every intent and purpose contemporaries. There is here at this time a handsome young gentleman ; his father, Lord R - , a brilliant person, also handsome; and his grandfather, who is not disposed to hide his light under a bushel. It puts one in mind of the state of society described in the Old Testament when Lamech, Cush, Phut, and Ramah were about the world at the same time. Cush, in this case Lord R - , is at the Springs at eight in the morning, dressed very bravely and floridly, bunching the girls, and walking the length of the shaded avenue with one or another pretty woman full of gay laughter and conversation. He is much more bent on amusement than either of his contemporaries. Phut, his son, or Lamech, his father. But I have just met with the most extreme instance that I have ever known of a sprightly man of advanced years. I should not have expected such an exhibition would have been pleasant, but it was truly delightful. It was at tea with my English friends across the street. I observed in the corner an old gentleman whom I heard say to somebody — in jest, as it afterward appeared — that he was sixty- five. He looked older. He was presently made to sing a song. It was about the light that is in woman’s eyes. He seemed to know all about these eyes, and to have been himself a considerable sufferer from their ravages. He sang with an uncertain quaver, but with a vivacity of expression truly surprising, in which was apparent his exultation in his present freedom from this source of disturbance, to¬ gether with a lively appreciation of the en¬ thrallment and subjection of the rest of us. I said, ‘‘That is an uncommonly sprightly man of sixty-five.” They told me he was ninety. It was a novel and delightful performance. He addressed himself personally to the males who had been asked to this tea, shaking his head with a rather dreadful vivacity, and with a rollicking humor warbling at us his convic¬ tion that the light above mentioned would be our “undo-o-ing.” . . . Some friends who have lived a great deal in France have an apartment in the Loui- sen Strasse. One sits about so much here in gardens and on piazzas, having coffee and lis¬ tening to music, that one is rather bored with outdoors, and is surprised to find how pleas¬ ant it is to be inclosed by four walls and a ceiling. I feel as if I had just discovered what nice things lamps are. But the drawing-room of these friends of mine would be a particularly attractive one anywhere; it has the bright hospitality of good society on the continent; it is easy to fall into, and hard to keep out of. They are Americans, of a family which has performed for the callow infancy of our giant State much honorable service. But they live very little in America; they prefer France. Their daughter, a convent-bred young thing, has scarcely even seen America. She is elegant, hoiden, and charming. She asks if you will have tea. You say “ No,” with the decision of a man who has little confidence in his firmness of purpose. To which she answers: “Well, don’t be cross 1 ” and, running to the side¬ board, returns, and (with her dog under her arm) holds out some bonbons, and tells you to take such a one. She then resumes some piece of superior needlework, at which she is evidently clever. She is on terms of perfect equality with her mother, of whom she seems the younger sis¬ ter, and appropriates the larger share of the talk, running on all the while with pert sallies. Her opinions, which are shrewd and sound enough, she advances smartly. She has an attractive figure. But what pleases you most about her is that she is so completely a product of the old world, and has to such a degree the impress of the elegant and perfect life of good society on the continent. She is the child of the convent, and has caught from her little playmates the essence of their young natures. And yet, I be¬ lieve that the success she will no doubt have at home (the family are on their way to Amer¬ ica) will be for her pretty face rather than her fine manners. My impression is that the graces communicated by the best European society are not appreciated, or are, at any rate, over¬ looked in the United States. One might have thought that the rarity of these qualities would

Page 570

NOTES OF A PROFESSIONAL EXILE. have given distinction to the persons possess¬ ing them. But I believe this not to be the case. Manners, no matter how fine, must exist in a sufficient mass to be familiar to society at large before they will be admired. This young girl’s especial pet is just now a monkey, which I usually find sitting on its young mistress’s lap. It is of a very small spe¬ cies ; but its little face, scarcely larger than a half-dollar, is full of thought and expression. Its eyes are very bright and active. You may sit and see it reflect, which it does most obviously. The quality of its thought seems to be a lively melancholy. This is its habitual state of mind ; its eyes emit continually gleams of a vivacious sad¬ ness. It will now and then jump from its perch, and abruptly and in an inconsequent manner seize Fido’s tail, which it will as abruptly let go to resume its place and pursue, upon Miss Emily’s knee, the thread of its reflections. Did we, I wonder, sit upon a bough some millions of years ago thinking such sad thoughts ? . . . The sitting-room they have given me here is certainly not dear, from the English or Amer¬ ican point of view. It is good-sized, plainly but freshly and agreeably furnished, and always clean and neatly kept. It opens upon a well- cared-for flower-garden, filled with the com¬ mon German flowers, acaules, stock-gillies, anemones, primroses, and has beyond the Zweibak lawns and foliage. When I come into it in the morning for breakfast, I find it full of light and sweet air, which are novelties to those whose spring and winter have been passed in town lodgings. It is sufficiently re¬ tired, and yet within easy call of people whom I see passing in the street which divides my flower-plots from the Kurhaus gardens; some of whom, more sociable than the rest, look in at my windows for a word or two, but do not stop to pay me a visit. I try to fill my morn¬ ings with reading or writing, and thus give the day a little substance and character. Yesterday morning I took with me a trans¬ lation of Dante’s Purgatory, to read in the prettily wooded gardens back of the Kurhaus. I came upon the two young daughters of a French family staying here. This family, I am told, is very ancient ; their name is that of one of the most interesting characters in the Purgatory. I asked the girls whether they sup¬ posed they were related to this personage. They said they did not know. The indifference which people m Europe often show to these matters is surprising to Americans, but is nat¬ ural. I do not doubt it is the same family ; the people are from the part of France to which the man mentioned by Dante belonged. The young ladies were interested enough, however, when the conversation turned upon the gossip of the place, engagements, and the like. It was 567 a striking association, that of “ the mount that rises highest o’er the wave,” and of the five hundred years which have elapsed since the poet went thither with Virgil, with these misses in bright print gowns among the pretty shades of the Zweibak gardens. . . . There are some hills, mountains you might call them, to the west of the town. Sometimes I walk in their direction about sundown, at which time their sides wear some fine colors. These mountains, a broad and well-cultivated plain, a flock of sheep met on the roadway, a few solitary kine driven by peasants, and here and there a little hamlet with its tinkling belfry, and a sweet and ample light over the whole, make up an agreeable view. I like the scenery about here better than most European scenery, far better than the pampered and petty scenery of England. But I miss everywhere I have been on this continent the sentient energy of nature in America, the dexterous and pliant mind which I saw in that country as a boy, and which I find again as often as I return there, the dazzling sword-play with which that invincible soul rains upon the underlying evening world the pride of its transcendent life. It is one of my regrets that my life has been passed away from that nature. I say that what I saw in American scenery as a boy I find again whenever I return to it. During a short visit home a few summers ago I went to spend the night with some friends who live near West Point. It was upon a day such as is common in our semi-tropical sum¬ mers. I had taken a late afternoon train from New York, and on arriving had but ten min¬ utes in which to dress for dinner. My host had given me a room facing to the south. There was an airy and graceful combination of hills in view. I had little leisure to look out, but could see them as they ran upward in pur¬ ple waves and filled the sky with their irreso¬ lute azure pathway ; there lived among them a birdlike flight of outline, which soared, but did not depart, which, although infinitely eva¬ nescent, did not vanish, but remained. This scene, lying in the benign splendors of the golden South, and fraught with the fairest tropic color, bloomed beyond my open window. A business errand took me northward along the Housatonic. The train follows for hours the line of the mountains, which run north¬ ward in waves, broken at long intervals, as if swept upward by the winds. I found those mountains as I had known them before. I saw them from the car window, pondering in their lucent bosoms memories pure, vast, sedate, profound, in unison with the dewy stars and the streams that rest for a moment in the midst of the meadows, and seem to say, ‘‘We also remember.” E. S. Nadal.

Page 571

LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS WHAT MAKES THEM? HE minds of many persons have been and are greatly disturbed because there has been in recent years a great reduction in the prices of nearly all the leading articles of commerce, the prin¬ cipal decline dating substantially from the year 1873. This decline in prices began soon after the war in the United States, but the general decline in all countries on a specie basis may be dated from 1873. By whatever standard prices are measured (and there are many carefully compiled tables), the average is found to be lower at the present time than at any period since a date anterior to the year 1850, in which year the great sup¬ ply of gold from California, and a little later that from Australia, began to affect the volume of the money metals of the world. In most of the discussions of the money question this great fall in prices has been treated as if it were a misfortune, and it is often held that any measure of legislation ought to be adopted which might tend to check it. Is not this a very partial and one-sided view of the subject ? Some one has wisely and wittily said that “it does not much matter what happens to the millionaire — how is it with the million?” If it shall appear that out of this great re¬ duction in prices the millions have gained higher wages ; that hundreds of thousands of families have gained better homes and greater comfort in life ; while those who have suffered temporary loss have been only the rich who have been incapable of adjusting themselves to the new conditions, or the unskilled poor who have been unable to grasp the greater opportunities for welfare which invention has offered them, then may we not come to the conclusion that diminished profits and low prices are merely the complement of higher wages and lower cost, and are, therefore, most certain indications of general progress from poverty to welfare, yet still leaving the prob¬ lem open, how to help the unskilled poor ? It will be remembered that it has been sta¬ ted that so far as the great mass of the people of this and of other lands are concerned, about one-half the cost of living is the price paid for the materials for food, the cost of food to common laborers who have families to sup¬ port being as a rule much more than one-half their income. The question of interest to those who as¬ sume to be strictly working classes^' is not so much what the price of the necessi¬ ties of life may be, as it is how many portions of food, fuel, and clothing each one can buy at the retail shops in which they deal, and how good a shelter each one can procure for one day’s or one year’s earnings. In other words, what is, or what has been, the value of a day’s labor when converted into the commodities which are necessary to existence ? If these so-called “ working classes ” have steadily gained in the purchasing power of their wages or salaries, while farmers, who num¬ ber (not including farm laborers) 250 in each 1000, have also prospered during this period when prices have been falling and profits have been diminishing, then the economic history of the last 25 years may be presented in an entirely new aspect. In such case, instead of attempting to check the fall in prices by tam¬ pering with the standard of value or by other empirical devices “ for making money plenty,” it may be expedient to hold on to what has been gained and to fight it out on this line, even if several more years of so-called depres¬ sion should follow this determination, these recent years of so-called depression having ac¬ tually been years of greatest progress. Since the end of the civil war in 1865, and yet more since the so-called panic of 1873, there has been greater progress in common welfare among the people of this country than ever before. It has been the period in which there has been the greatest application of science and invention to the production and distribution of food that ever occurred in any single generation in the history of this or any other country ; and food is the prime necessity of material life. I n order to sustain this proposition, it is neces¬ sary to establish a standard of subsistence. This can be done with respect to the materi¬ als which are required for food, clothing, and fuel. Rent cannot be so surely included in this standard, because the conditions of shelter vary so much in different parts of the country and in different cities. The cost of the materials for food, of materi¬ als for clothing, boots and shoes, and of fuel, probably represents about seventy per cent, of the cost of living on the part of well-to-do mechanics, railway employees, or of other per¬ sons in analogous occupations who may be considered in the average position of working people. All these elements of life have de-

Page 572

LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS 569 dined very greatly in their prices in the period under consideration. In some regions rents have declined, in others they have been sta¬ tionary; in crowded cities they have either advanced in some small measure, or else the apartments hired for a given sum of money have not been equal to those previously oc¬ cupied. So far as I have been able to com¬ pare rents, however, either those paid to a landlord or the rental value of premises owned by the occupant, there has not been, on the average, much variation from the rule affect¬ ing commodities in the period under consider¬ ation. The standard portions of food, cloth, boots and shoes, and fuel which are made use of in the subsequent computation of the purchas¬ ing power of a day’s or of a year’s wages, have been established in the following manner : FOOD. formly quoted, the prices used in making up the general standard are those given for salt and smoked meats. In the same way the price of potatoes has been taken as a standard for the variation in the price of all green vegetable food or roots. Jll A V • • A. — One Ration per Day. % to I lb. meat, poultry or fish, varying according to kind and quality, costing on average. . M to % pints milk. I to oz. butter . K to ^ oz. cheese. I egg every other day . ^ to I lb. bread . 2^ Vegetables and roots . 2 2j^' Sugar and syrup . 2 Tea and coffee . i | SaltjSpice, fruit, ice, and sundries 1% 2 25 cts. B. — 400 Rations. 200 lbs. corned beef. 100 lbs. salt pork. 100 lbs. smoked ham. 100 quarts milk. 30 lbs. butter. 20 lbs. cheese. 17 doz. eggs. I barrel flour. % barrel corn meal. 20 bushels potatoes. 80 lbs. sugar. 4 lbs. tea. 8 lbs. coffee. $6 worth assumed at - all dates. $100 Standard portion of cloth for I year : 10 yards medium brown cotton. 10 “ standard ginghqpi. 10 “ 36-in. bl’ched shirting. 20 “ printed calico. 10 “ 4-0Z. woolen flannel, or worsted dress g’ds. 5 “ 16-OZ. cassimere. 5 “ Kentuckyjean-satinet, or light cassimere. Standard of boots and shoes for I year: 2 pairs men’s heavy boots. Standard of fuel for i year: tons anthracite coal, or its equivalent in bituminous coal or wood. By comparing data gathered by myself with other data gathered by several State Bureaus of the Statistics of Labor, it has been fairly established that the average food-supply of mechanics and adult factory operatives in the Eastern and Middle States cost in 1880, ’81, and ’82 substantially 25 cents per day, and con¬ sisted of very nearly the proportions of differ¬ ent kinds of food given in Table A. The consumption of dairy products, sugar, tea and coffee given, is probably greater than in other parts of the country; but if a de¬ duction of 2 cents per day be made for this, it then becomes necessary to add 3 cents per day (probably more) to account for the known average consumption of wine, beer, and spirits. (60,000,000 at 3 cents per day average comes to $657,000,000.) Recent computations put the cost of liquor to consumers $700,000,000. Although the actual consumption of food, cloth, and fuel may not in any single case have corresponded identically with these standards, yet it may be safely assumed that the propor¬ tions are correct, and that the variation in the prices of what has been actually consumed will have corresponded to the variation in the prices of these standard articles and quantities. For convenience in computation the small quantities of the single ration of food have been extended so as to cover 400 portions, which may be taken as the consumption of one year by one adult, 35 rations being added for extras. Table A. — Standard of a single day’s ration, with its average cost in 1880, ’81, and ’82. Table B. — Standard of 400 rations, or i year’s supply for i adult with 35 extra rations. It is assumed that^ the prices of meat, fish, and poultry, fresh or salt, will have varied substantially with the variations in salt and smoked meats, and as the prices of the latter are more uni- VOL. XXXIV.— 79. In establishing the average cost of a day’s portion of the above, the prices given in Vol. XX. of the U. S. Census, in 10 shops east and 10 shops west of Buffalo, 1860-1880, have been averaged for each year designated. These prices have been verified from other sources of information. Prices of dry goods have been veri¬ fied fully. Prices for 1885 and ’86 have been derived from typical establishments and from market reports. The average of 1885 and ’86 was probably less than the estimate used. CLOTHING. By a computation made by the undersigned when engaged in the compilation of the Cen¬ sus of the cotton manufacture of the United States in 1880, it appeared that if all the fibers of cotton, wool, silk, and flax, imported or raised, were carried through the factories and then converted into clothing, carpets, and other forms for final use, with the imports of textile fabrics added, the average consump¬ tion of textile fabrics by the people of this country in that year was substantially $30 worth per head, of which about $25 worth was for clothing. It being impossible to set up a standard of the exact cost of clothing, certain quantities of cotton and woolen cloth have been taken which are a little above the average consumption of the whole country. In a final computation, cloth is converted in¬ to clothing at the ratio of three parts materials, and two parts for manufacturing and distrib¬ uting. In this computation I have made great use of the XXth Volume of the United States Census. It was prepared by Mr. Joseph D. Weeks, and is of the greatest value in sta¬ tistical research. BOOTS, SHOES, AND FUEL. The standard of boots and shoes, and of fuel is of necessity somewhat arbitrary. It has been set at two pairs of men’s heavy boots, as

Page 573

570 LOW PLAICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROEITS: — the equivalent of a customary supply, and one and one-half tons of coal per adult per year; it being assumed that, as the prices of these quantities have varied, actual use and cost will have varied. The quantities assigned to this specific standard of subsistence have risen and fallen in the following proportions, the figures rep¬ resenting so many cents per day for each standard portion, and the lines representing the relative variation at different periods. Cost of standard portions of materials for food, for clothing, boots and shoes, and fuel, per day, in each year as designated. Mato-ials for Food, i860 22^0 CtS. 1865 38M. “ 1870 33 “ 1875 1880 2SA?t. “ 1885 \ 1886 \ 22 CtS. Est. Add two-ffths for conversion Materials for Clothing. into Clothing. 4iVi) CtS. ioi¥d “ — 6.U 5i% “ *^100 — 7A,8, 4i% “ — 6*^ 4 Aft) “ — Si^ SA'i, “Est. " Stott Boots and Shoes. i860 I Aft, CtS. 1865 2 “ 0 00 lAft,- “ 1875 1-1% “ 1880 “ 1885 ) 1886 \ 1% “ Est. Clothing and Boots and Shoes. Fuel. CtS. - 2TftftT ma ,87 8% “ mm 8 — 3 mma 7-% “ - 2^% 6% “ — 2f(^ Est. am It is doubtless true that the goods reported upon in the several shops from whose reports the prices have been derived, may have varied somewhat in quality ; but the questions put by Mr. Weeks were in such form that in nearly every case the prices are given for specific qualities of each kind of food, as for instance : Flour, grade “ extra family ” ; coffee, “ Rio, roasted ” ; sugar, several grades — I have selected a medium ; tea, “ Oolong, or good black,” etc. , etc. These prices, taken from 20 shops — lo east and lo west — have been aver- aged, and the results compared with other price-lists, many of which the writer has himself procured. It may be objected that this standard portion is only the one which is customarily consumed by each adult in the families of well-to-do mechanics or factory operatives in the Eastern or Middle States, and that it may not be a fair measure of those who are above this class or of those who are much below them. This may be admitted ; but neverthe¬ less all prices of the necessities of life must have varied substantially as these standard portions have varied. Moreover this final fall in the prices of products at their final point of consumption could not have occurred had not the prices of the metals, of the machinery, and of the whole mechanism of production and distribution also fallen. Sometimes prices of invested capital have fallen even in greater measure than the prices of the products. It is only here and there that any important article like timber can be found, which having’ become more scarce, has either maintained its price throughout the period, or is even a little higher now than it was in i860. If, then, all prices have fallen and all profits have diminished while wages have risen, each subject to temporary fluctuation and varia¬ tion, must we not seek for deeper causes for the changes in the conditions of society and in the relations of men to each other than are commonly assigned in the explanation of such phenomena ? I now submit adequate proof of the facts. The subsequent table gives the purchasing power of wages at different dates, when con¬ verted into standard portions of food, cloth, and fuel as established. The quantities represented in these tables are assumed to have been established on the basis of actual consumption of a well-to-do mechanic in New England in the period of 1880, ’81, and ’82. If we convert the money assigned to each portion of food, fuel, cloth¬ ing, etc., into 400 portions corresponding to I year’s consumption, with a margin of 10 per cent, for extras, we get the following results : COST FOR ONE YEAR. ONE PERSON. Food for one adult . $100 Materials for clothing . 16 Boots and shoes . 7 Fuel . Q FOUR PERSONS. Food for four adults * . $400 Materials for clothing . 64 Boots and shoes . 28 Fuel . 36 * Or for man and wife, one child over 12, and two under 12.

Page 574

WHAT MAKES THEM? 571 Gain in the purchasing power of wages, measured by the number of portions of the materials for food, cloth¬ ing, boots and shoes, and fuel, which one year’s work would buy at different periods : 300 working days to one year. Each portion consisting of the same quantities and corresponding to the daily consumption of mechanics in New England and in the Middle States, as determined by close inquiry on the part of Bureaus of Labor Statistics, and of the undersigned. Class I. — Specially Skilled Men: Foremen, Overseers, Boss Blacksmiths, Carpenters, etc.. Customarily Earning $3.00 to $5.00 per Day at the Present Time. A verage, A verage, per Cost of Year. per day. year, 300 days. day's portion. Purchasing power in nufnber of portiotis. i860 $2.45 $735-00 30-i^(f(j cts. 2374 1865 3.57 1071.00 551^(1 “ 1920 1870 4-34 1302.00 43'Auf ** 3000 1875 4.14 1242.00 ' 38^^ “ 3210 1880 4.14 1242.00 33i% " 3737 1885 1 Probably higher than Est. 30 cts. Not less 1886 ] in 1880 or less 1 than 4000 The portions consist of uniform quantities of the same kinds of food, cloth, etc., and fuel bought at retail prices. The wages from i860 to 1880, inclusive, are averaged from a large number of returns contained in Vol. XX. of the U. S. Census, compiled by Joseph D. Weeks. Class II. — Average Mechanics, Engineers, Blacksmiths, Carpenters, Machinists, and Painters CONNECTED WITH ESTABLISHMENTS REPORTED IN VOL. XX. OF THE CENSUS 1865 TO 1880 Inclusive. Year. A v'ge, per day. A v'ge, per year. Cost of portioti. I i860 $1.56 $468 . 00 30^,po cts. 1572 1865 2.34 702 . 00 SSM “ 1261 1870 2.43 747.00 43 “ 1716 1875 2.29 687.00 38M, “ 1776 1880 2.26 678.00 33 “ 2040 188s ) 1886 5 Est. 2.40 720 . 00 Est. 30 cts, or less. Est. 2400 Purchasing power. Class III. — All the Operatives, Except Foremen and Overseers, in ioo Establispiments Reporting the Wages of their Working People under More than 1200 separate . Titles: Bricks, Marble, Furniture, Agricultural Implements, Tin Ware, Stoves, Boots, Hats, Cars, Wagons, Flour and Saw Mills, Iron, Paper, and Textiles, Employing Men, Women, and Children, from 20 to 2000 in Each. A verage. A verage. Cost of uniform portions. Year. per day. per year. food, cloth, and fuel. i860 $1-33 $399,00 30-ftf(r cts. 1865 1.88 564.00 55m- “ 1870 1.94 582.00 43 A? 1880 1. 71 51300 33n% “ 1885 ( 1886 1 Est. 1.80 540 . 00 Est. 30 cts. or less Purchashig power in nmnber 0/ portions. 1290 1013 1337 1372 1543 1800 Class IV. — Laborers, Computed Separately, Connected with above Establishments. A verage. A verage. Cost of uniform portions. Year. per day. per year. food, cloth, and fuel. i860 $1.01 $303.00 3oA^i cts. 1865 156 468 . 00 S5-fiftr “ 1870 1.58 474.00 43A='o- “ 1875 1-38 414.00 381^?^ “ 1880 1-34 402.00 33-ft)V “ 1885 \ 1886 5 Est. 1.40 420 . 00 Est. 30 cts. or less Purchasing power in number of portions. 980 840 1090 1070 1210 1400

Page 575

Increased Purchasing Power, of One Year’s Wages Compared by Per Centage of Gain on Each Class. 572 ZOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS: — The cost of making and trimming, or of converting the cloth into clothing, would be for converting these specific quantities : For one adult . For four adults . $4^ These elements constitute on the average seventy per cent, of the expenditure of a fam¬ ily such as has been taken as an example. We may add For rent . . . eighteen to twenty per cent . . $37-50 $150 For sundries . . .twelve to ten per cent. . . 20.50 82 Totals . . . .per adult, $200; per family, $800 If we take the example of a mechanic sus¬ taining himself, wife, one child over twelve years, and two under twelve counted as one adult, an average family of five persons counted as four adults, an expenditure of $800 per year would call upon the head of the fam¬ ily to earn $2.67 per day for three hundred working days in the year. It will be remarked that this standard has been reached theorehcally , on the basis of facts derived from observations entirely inde¬ pendent of the actual statistics of the family expenditure gathered by Commissioner Carroll D. Wright, as Chief of the National Bureau of Labor Statistics, and also of Massachusetts. On comparing these theoretic estimates with these statistics, they are found to correspond so closely with the actual facts gathered from many families, as to sustain the substantial accuracy of the proportions ofthe cost of living, the price of food being exactly one-half. In the returns which have been made use of in compiling the tables given in this trea¬ tise, there are doubtless reports of prices of goods which do not exactly correspond to others either in kind or quality ; but so rnany returns have been averaged as to eliminate this cause of error. I have made many compu¬ tations on single returns of prices in special places procured by myself, and I find that the proportional variations correspond so closely to the average of all as to establish the stand¬ ard conclusively. In fact, the reduction in the cost of subsist¬ ence and the increase in the purchasing power of wages in the East have been greater than in the West, and greater than the average of the whole country, doubtless owing to the^ equal¬ izing force of the railroads in diminishing the cost of food. I may give one example for which I have collated all the figures myself in order to verify the compilations of the Census. In this example I have taken the year 1866 as a starting point, and a cotton-mill as the ex¬ ample. It is not a fair year to show an average in other arts, because the conditions of the cotton manufacture were very uncertain dur-

Page 576

WHAT MAKES THEM? 573 ing that year ; and it was also in the year 1866 that the most malignant effect upon prices and wages, worked by the substitution of legal ten¬ der notes in place of coin, was experienced in the United States. I have, however, selected a year in which the work was continuous dur¬ ing that year as well as during the year 1885. The average earnings of all the hands in the factory through the year 1866 were . 83 cents per day. In 1885 . 103 “ “ “ The product of each hand in pounds of cloth was in 1866, 7 pounds per day. In 1885 . 13.34 “ “ “ The cost of labor in the pound of cloth was in 1866 . 11*85 cents. In 1885 . 7.67 “ The cost of the standard portion of food, clothing, and fuel (substituting three cords of wood for the customary portion of anthracite coal, because this factory was in a position where wood at that time was cheaper) was Daily portion of food, clothing, and fuel in 1866, cost . 57*82 cents per day. In 1885 . 30.97 “ “ “ The purchasing power of 300 days’ wages converted into these standard portions was in 1866 . 430 portions. In 1885 . 1000 “ It will be remembered that the price of food is about one-half the price of life to the class of persons represented in this example. Other examples have been computed by my¬ self from private data in respect to the condi¬ tion of operatives in woolen-mills and machine shops. They show the same law ; but as the condition of the woolen-mill and the machine shop was somewhat better in 1866 than that of the cotton-mill, the ratio of progress is more nearly that of the average of the whole country than is shown in this particular ex¬ ample. One ver}^ curious point is brought into no¬ tice by an analysis of the average food ration of the American workman. All the pork could be spared, and yet the daily ration would be more than ample. The waste of this country is an excess of fat rather than an excess of any other part of the food consumed. We have often heard ‘‘ the American frying-pan ” de¬ nounced; but this is, I think, the first time that it has been subjected to a scientific con¬ demnation. In a rough and ready way it takes five pounds of Western corn to make a pound of pork. Even the hogs do not consume their whole ration; they waste a part of it. The proportion is sub¬ stantially one thousand pounds of Indian corn to a barrel of pork weighing two hundred pounds. In this conversion nearly all the starch and all the protein are wasted, and the fat which is left is not required for use. The necessary deduction is this, that the conversion of corn into pork is an absolute and total waste of nutritious food. Far better that corn should be converted into beef, or even burned for fuel (often a very economical expedient for settlers), rather than to be ex¬ pended in this way. A curious question arises in this connection. If the world were convinced that the Jews were right, and that pork ought not to be eaten; or if the American world were con¬ vinced that all the pork that is eaten is wasted, what would be the effect on the American farmers ? Having submitted this part of the problem to Professor Atwater, he makes the following remarks thereon : “ Taking your figures for quantities of shelled corn and dressed pork, and the most reliable data I can find for their composition, I obtain the following figures : GAIN AND LOSS OF NUTRIENTS AND POTENTIAL ENERGY IN CONVERSION OF CORN INTO PORK. Nutrients. Potential Energy. Protein. Fats. Carbo¬ hydrates. Pounds. Pounds. Pounds. Calories. In 1000 lbs. of corn . 100 45 680 16,400,000 In 200 lbs. of pork . . 18 85 3,900,000 Loss or gain . . . 82 loss 40 gain 680 loss 12,500,000 “ In other words, the fat is increased by 40 pounds, and to offset this there is a loss of 82 pounds of pro¬ tein and 680 pounds of carbohydrates. Estimated in potential energy, the loss makes over three-fourths of the whole. “ According to the best data at hand, and your ra¬ tion agrees with them, our ordinary dietaries contain an excess of carbohydrate (sugar, starch, etc.) and a very large excess of fat. The ‘ condensing of corn into pork,’ which we hear of as ‘ useful to save cost of transportation and handling,’ means — First. Practically throwing away a lot of protein, the most valuable of the food ingredients, and with it a large amount of carbohydrates. “ Second. The conversion of part of the other nutri¬ ents into fats, so as to increase our already great ex¬ cess of this material.” This may seem a somewhat trifling matter. Let us see. Assuming that the product of this country, at its market value for final consumption or export, cannot exceed $200 worth per person, $600 worth for each group of three of whom one is occupied for gain, or $1000 worth for each average family of 5 persons, it may be assumed that not exceeding 10 per cent., or $20 worth a year per capita, can be saved, and added to the capital of the country, how-

Page 577

ZOIV PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMAII PROFITS: — ever such capital may be owned individually ; 5 to 6 per cent., or $io to $12 a year, must be set aside to meet all forms of taxation, national, state, and municipal. There remains $168 $ 1 70 a year, which constitutes the wage fund, it being manifest that the source of all wages, earnings, taxes, and profits must be the annual product, whatever that product may be. If these sums per year be reduced to por¬ tions per day, the wages or earnings of each person amount to a fraction over 46 cents per day, or $1.38 for every day in the year, in¬ cluding Sundays, secured by one person in three of the population who constitute the working forces. Profits amount to a fraction under 5)^ cents per day ; taxes to a fraction over 3 cents. The cost of the excess of fat and sugar in the standard ration is 7 cents out of 25. If this were saved and applied to shelter, the housing of the working people would be solved. There cannot be more to be divided than all there is. The whole question, therefore, of relative welfare and poverty consists in the manner in which this product is divided. The only way in which any great gain can be made is by increasing the quantity of prod¬ uct while decreasing the amount of capital and the hours or intensity of the work required in production, or else saving what is now wasted. Any other method of distribution that could be brought about might not very greatly improve the condition of any very large number of persons. This will be made apparent by a few figures. If the sums given constitute all the money’s worth there is to be divided, then by so much as some gain more must others gain less. The limit of all that is produced is the limit of all that can be divided. The working group of this country, as I have stated, is substantially a group of three. One person in each three is occupied for gain, sustaining two others. If that part of the prod¬ uct which is now saved were divided equally among those who do the work, it would add only about 15 cents a day to the income of each one, or $54.75 each year. In the pres¬ ent population of about sixty million, the num¬ ber who are engaged in gainful occupation is twenty million. If the whole sum saved and added to capital were divided among this force equally at $54.75 each, it would repre¬ sent a little more than $1,095,000,000. Suppose this sum now saved were equally divided, — is it not true with regard to a very large proportion of those who do the work that the measure of their income is also the measure of their expen diture ? Could this equal division then be made without leading to an increased consumption rather than to addi¬ tional savings on the part of the many ? If so, the next year’s product of the whole country would suffer for lack of capital. It sounds like a paradox, but it may nevertheless be true that the faculty for making money,” as it is called, — that is to say, the instinct that leads to accumulation on the part of the few, — is absolutely necessary to the comfortable sub¬ sistence of the many. Disparity in the posses¬ sion and direction of capital is apparently neces¬ sary to its effective use — a big capital in the hands of a master is like a big steam-engine directed by a competent engineer : each com¬ passes three or four times as much product as the small capital held by many persons, or the small steam-engines, each wasting fuel, can accomplish. It may not be the disparity be¬ tween rich and poor which is the sole cause of discontent. The disparity in the conditions is very much greater, and is increasing more rapidly among those who constitute the working classes ” themselves, in the narrow use of that term, than any possible disparity between the capitalist classes and the working classes can ever be; that is to say, the disparity of the aggregate income, class by class, is greater. The capitalists are working under an imperative law of diminishing profits. The workmen who do the work intelligently and skillfully are progressing under an imperative rule by which their wages are increased while the purchasing power of their wages is yet more increased. Is there not perhaps a more subtle but very potent cause of discontent disclosed by the great disparity in the progress of ^vorking people themselves to the exclusion of capi¬ talists, than can be found in the disparity of fortunes or in the possession of capital saved ? In the following table the relative progress of four classes whose condition has been fully analyzed is graphically pictured, each class compared to the other by the relative percent¬ age of their gain since i860. No. I. Foremen, overseers, boss blacksmiths, and carpenters or other workmen of special skill and ap¬ titude. No. II. Average mechanics, engineers, blacksmiths, carpenters, machinists, painters, and the like. No. III. Average workmen or women, in 100 fac¬ tories or workshops listed under more than 1200 titles, bricks, marble, furniture, tools, stoves, boots and shoes, hats, cars, wagons, textiles, iron works, paper-mills, etc. No. IV. Common laborers connected with the same establishments. The variation in the respective condition in these classes is shown by the number of por¬ tions of food, fuel, boots, and materials for clothing which one year’s earnings would purchase in each of the years designated. The actual working of these changes can

Page 578

WHAT MAKES THEM? be better observed by a different form of dia¬ gram which gives the facts in relation to all the mechanics covered by class II. The malignant effect of war and paper jSSo money is shown by the rapid rise in prices, while wages slowly followed. After the war wages fell slowly, but prices fell rapidly. 188S-6 On the resumption of specie payments, wages again began to rise — prices continued to fall, and in 1885-6 the purchasing power of a day’s work was greater than it ever had been before. In order that the full import of these figures may be comprehended; the following table is given including a computation of rent on the best data which can be found. It will also be observed, however, that while work has been continuous since 1873 or 1865 for all men of special skill and aptitude (with very rare exception for some short and excep¬ tional period), and while work has also been continuous and well paid for every intelligent mechanic or artisan who has chosen to control his own affairs and to make his own bargains, it has been much less continuous for many classes of factory operatives of a lower grade, and it has been absolutely intermittent with respect 575 to great numbers of common laborers. One of the penalties which society must pay for the application of science and invention to the useful arts is this temporary displacement of unskilled laborers from the occupa- tions in which their work had been pre- 4000 viously required, but which is no longer required when some new machine or improvement renders it unnecessary. On the other hand, without these ap¬ plications of science to agriculture and to manufactures, the normal increase of population would without question tend 2400 to outrun the means of subsistence. It therefore follows that by their applica¬ tion, while the few are for a time left 1800 behind in the race, the many gain in wel¬ fare; the means of subsistence rapidly outrun the increase of population, and the many are thus enabled to enjoy better and better conditions of life. Thus the problem of ‘‘ progress and poverty ” marches alongside the actual progress fro7n poverty. This problem of ‘‘progress a7id poverty” calls for the urgent attention of the student and the statesman in order to abate the great disparity of condition which becomes more conspicu¬ ous the more the general progress is assured. This special branch of the subject cannot be treated within the limits of the present treatise, but may be taken up at a future day. Wages. some of the theories which have been . set up in the endeavor to explain the fall in prices since 1873. , . Subsequent to the year 18 co, +H+«+H» power of and either accompanying or wages, perhaps caused in part by the very sudden and very great addition of gold to the volume of the money metals of the world, there was a great ad¬ vance in the prices of all the necessities of life, subject, of course, to temporary fluctua¬ tions. This period of general advance in prices culminated in the years 1872 and 1873, reductions in the prices of cotton and of some othe’r articles having begun before. Since 1873 a great and general reduction of prices has taken place the world over. What has been called depression has been more common than activity in commerce. These long periods of depression have affected nearly all commercial and manufacturing countries alike, without much apparent regard to their system of taxation ; to their standard of value, whether it has been based on gold only, on silver only, or on both metals; or whether the standard of value has been a paper substitute for true money.

Page 579

576 LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS: — By a comparison of the average of all these elements of the cost of living, rent being computed and estimating “sundries ” at lo per cent, of the whole, the relative importance of each element may be compre- jS6o io j88o me. census data verified by other authorities. Food, per day . 22^s_ ^ 38-^2^, average 2918^50- cents _ _ _ Clothing, per day . 7-Aft) ® “ 9iVd‘ “ Rent, per day . ^ 8-j^^o “ 7'i^(r “ 1 Fuel, per day . '2. ^^ ® “ SiyD' “ — Sundries, per day . “ ■ Total . 56-i^V cents Proportion of rent paid on land, assuming house and land equal value . cents L.— . Elements of the cost of living in New England in 1885 and ’86, based on the prices of the same quantities of the same articles computed above, mainly from census figures. Prices ascertained by the writei on a narrower field than that covered by the census. Food, per day Clothing . Rent . Fuel . Sundries . . . . 42-18^ cents 42i¥(r “ Total reduction in 1885-6 . 13‘^cfe’ cents L— — — — > According to Prof. Atwater’s analysis, the ration of food made use of in the above computations is 40 per cent, in excess of what is needed. All the pork, and one-half the sugar or one-half the potatoes could be spared. This reduction in the quantity of food would reduce the present cost of this ration from 22 to 1 5 cents per day. If the sum thus saved in food were expended for shelter, the whole question of providing better dwelling places might be solved. On this basis the proportions would be : Total . Average, i860 ® 1880, inclusive Estimate, 1885 and 1886 . 22 cents 7 2-1% “ 4-i¥o “ Food, per day . ^5 cents Clothing, per day . Rent . ^4 Fuel . “ Sundries . ‘‘ Total cost of subsistence per day . 42‘i^u^j cents The importance of the food question could not, I think, be more clearly enforced. It happens that during this period, dating from 1873, all the important changes in legis¬ lation respecting legal tender have occurred, yet the great international commerce of the world has proceeded in its customary way, be¬ cause it is not possible to apply acts of legal tender to international exchanges; therefore this branch of commerce has been conducted on a solid basis of a given weight of the metal gold. But notwithstanding the stability of the gold standard of international commerce, great fluctuations have occurred, and periods of de¬ pression have affected international com¬ merce as well as the domestic commerce of many countries. Since 1873 Germany has displaced silver from its function of legal tender ; the Latin Union soon ceased the coinage of silver; the United States have resumed specie payment upon a gold basis ; Italy has also resumed specie payment. All these changes have doubt¬ less tended to the use of gold as the unit of value of full legal tender among the so-called civilized countries of the world. Yet all these changes combined have required the substitu¬ tion of gold for other forms of money only in the bank reserves of Germany and in the sub¬ treasury of the United States. Silver has not been demonetized anywhere. It is still money in a true sense in England, Germany, and France, as well as in India, Africa, and South America. The only change brought about by legislation has been in the substitution of a single kind of money as full legal tender, for two kinds. But it has been assumed by many writers of repute that these changed conditions in acts of legal tender must have caused a steady and slow, but unceasing appreciation in the value of gold as compared to all other commodities, silver included. On the other hand, it is held by many li¬ ters of repute that the vast store of gold which

Page 580

577 WHAT MAKES THEM? has been added to the money metal of the world since 1850 has not only actually depreci¬ ated gold, but has also caused a yet greater depreciation in the value of silver, under the well-established rule that a substitution of a better article for common use may displace a substance of a poorer kind, and may cause the latter kind to lose a part of its value, even if the product of the latter be very much less in proportion than that of the former. Such are the facts in regard to gold and sil¬ ver. The addition of gold since 1850 has been vastly greater than the addition of silver. The computed production of gold, 1849 to 1 884, inclusive, has been $3,882,97 5 ,000. That of silver, $2,250,375,000. This reference to the money metals is sec¬ ondary to the main purpose of calling atten¬ tion to an entirely different class of price-mak¬ ing factors. Under the conditions which have been presented, the battle of the standards has been waged with great virulence; but, perhaps, in consequence of this contest too little atten¬ tion has been given to the really great forces which have been in action, and which have caused the reduction in prices which are so apparent. The discussion of what I call the price-mak¬ ing factors will be mainly limited to the con¬ ditions which prevailed in the United States. For this reason, since 1865 there has been no war and no great preparation for war to alter the influence of the forces which make for peace and plenty. In Europe, on the other hand, actual wars, or enormous preparations for war, have altered all the conditions. The change in prices in this country since i860 must, of course, be in part attributed — First, For a limited period to the forced circulation of paper substitutes for money which depreciated in value. Second. To the restoration of the value of the previously depreciated paper to the standard of the only legal unit of value in this country, — to wit, the dollar made of gold. No writer or observer of any repute has ever contested the fact that the rapid substitution of legal-tender notes for coined money always causes the depreciation of such notes and an increase in prices, as will be made apparent in the diagram previously given. This sudden change in the standard of value is very different from the slow and steady ad¬ dition of a very small annual percentage of precious metal to the previously existing stock, however large the volume of such addition of metal may appear to be when computed sep¬ arately, year by year.* In the tables which I have given, the malig- * It has been for many years about half per cent, of gold and half per cent, of silver, which has been added VoL. XXXIV.— 80. nant effect of the substitution of depreciated legal-tender notes for true money is made ap¬ parent by the much more rapid rise in prices than in wages or earnings from i860 to 1865, thereby greatly diminishing the purchasing ^ power of labor. Since that difficulty has been surmounted in part or wholly, the purchasing power of labor has greatly increased, gaining steadily the nearer the specie standard has been attained, and gaining yet more steadily the more closely it has been adhered to. It may well be asked, if the reduction in the prices of the necessities of life could be at¬ tributed to a scarcity of gold, would not wages or earnings — that is, the price of labor — have been reduced in the same proportion ? May it not be held that labor in the con¬ crete form of commodities, or, as we might say, in passive form of commodities, could not be reduced in price by any such cause as a scarcity of gold without labor in the active form of work in the production of commodi¬ ties being also reduced in price ? If the true cause of the reduction in prices has been an appreciation or rise in the value of the metal gold, would it not of necessity have happened that the price of labor would have been af¬ fected in the same way ? Would not the price of real estate have also been affected in the same way ? Again, if the cause of the reduction in prices had been an increased scarcity of gold, would not capital, when measured by the gold standard, have been able to secure to itself a constantly increasing rate of interest or income ? Now it happens that, in the United States, in so far as the specie standard of value has been departed from has the purchasing power of labor become less, while the earning power of capital has become greater; conversely, in the exact measure that the specie standard has been adhered to and sustained has the purchasing power of labor become greater, and the earning power of capital less. Important as the settlement of the contest between those who sustain the double stand¬ ard of gold and silver with the advocates of the single gold standard admittedly is, yet it is held that the battle of the standards cannot be settled without a full consideration of all the other factors which tend to alter prices to which reference is made in this article. Although the war of the Rebellion required the work directly or indirectly of one in three of all men of arms-bearing age throughout the country, yet during this period there was no decrease in the production of articles neces¬ sary to subsistence, with the single exception year by year to the existing volume according to the es¬ timates of Henri Cernuschi.

Page 581

57S LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS:- of cotton. This fact gives evidence of the vast progress which must have been made in the application of science and invention to all the useful arts. The abnormal demands of >var counterbalanced in some degree the influences of the substitution of paper pronLT^^ money ; yet the prices of all commodities very rapidly, while wages advanced mucn slowly. After the war, production gained ately and enormously on population in re¬ spect to food, fuel, metals, and fibers. Wages ceased to advance in rates by the measure of money, but the money ceased to depreciate. The armies of both parties in the conflict were absorbed in the pursuits of industry within less than a year from the end of the war. In spite of this increase in the supply of labor, as soon as the policy of the govern¬ ment began to tend toward the resumption of specie payments, on or about 1870, although the prices of both commodities and labor be¬ gan to decline in their nominal rates, yet, on the other hand, the purchasing power of wages — that is, the absolute wages of labor _ began to increase with great rapidity. The value of a day’s labor to him who exerted it, yielded more and more of the necessities and comforts of life as the years went by. Pres¬ ently wages began to advance again, but prices continued to decline. In a previous number of The Century, I Jiave given a table showing the increased prod¬ uct of railway mileage and of property insured against fire between 1865 and 1885. Objec¬ tion has been taken to the date of 1865 as the starting-point, upon the ground that in that year the country had not surmounted the dif¬ ficulties and retardation of the civil war. In the year 1870, however, all the causes of re¬ tardation growing out of the war had been removed, and the country was fairly headed toward the resumption of specie payments which took place on the ist of January, 1879. A table showing our progress since 1870 is therefore given now: Gain in Population, Protection, Wealth, and Savings 1870 to 1885 and on Some Items to 18S6. To 1885 Population . 48 1885 Production of grain . 85 1885 Consumption of cotton . 86 1885 Consumption of wool . 88 1 885 Production of hay . 100 1885 Deposits in savings-banks of Massachusetts. . 102 1885 Production of cotton . 108 1886 Deposits in savings-banks of Massachusetts. .115 1S85 Production of iron . 143 1885 Insurance of property against loss by fire. . . . 160 1885 Miles of railroad . 168 1886 Miles of railroad . 192 1 886 Production of iron . 200 In considering these relative gains, it will be observed that they represent a constant gain in the means of subsistence oyer population — that with the exception of the increase in personal wealth, which is indicated by the increase in the amount of property insured against loss by fire, they represent the progress of the million in the means of common welfare rather than of the millionaire in personal wealth, and that they give testimony to the beneficent law of progress from poverty. While wages have risen, the earning power of capital has decreased. The actual reduction in the earning power of capital, considered simply by itself, may be represented by the current rate of interest; the discount on the very best commercial paper at four or six months’ date at different periods may be taken as a standard of the actual earning power of capital. Prior to the financial panic of 1857, almost all the staple manufactures of this country were sold on 6, 8, 10, and sometimes 12 months’ credit. After the commercial panic of 1857, and up to 1861 at the opening of the war, the current credit was four months. During the war, and up to about 1870, the traffic of the people was mainly conducted on a cash basis. personal credit being rendered very uncertain by the variation in the value of paper substitutes for money. The instruments of exchange con¬ sisted of the depreciated notes of the United States. Bills of goods were rendered on ten to thirty days ; but commercial notes disappeared almost wholly from the market. Since 1870 there have been many variations in the customs of trade. In some kinds of business, notes have been given for actual pur¬ chases; in others none such have been given, but money has been borrowed in other ways ; as, for instance, the large manufacturing cor¬ porations of the east have borrowed their working capital upon notes of the corporation, indorsed or guaranteed either by their officers or by the commission houses selling their

Page 582

579 WHAT MAKES THEM? goods, such notes being negotiated in the open market at four or six months, or placed in savings-banks. From 1848 to i860 the writer kept a record of transactions by himself or by his associates in manufacturing corporations. The average rate of discount paid in the open market by the corporations enjoying the highest credit during this period was eight per cent., subject to very considerable fluctuations.. From^ i860 to 1869, inclusive, the rates of discount varied greatly with the circumstances of each case. The war and the continued issue of legal- tender notes rendered any standard of little moment. Railway corporations issued bonds at long date, at rates of interest from 7 to 8 per cent.: even as high as 10 per cent, was paid by railroad corporations of great strength and sound credit. In 1870 the slow restora¬ tion of specie payment began. Up to 1873, the year of panic, the rate of interest on the best manufacturing notes was on the average six and one-half per cent. After the panic of 1873 ended, up to the ist of January, 1879, five per cent, was the rate. Since the restoration of the specie stand¬ ard at the latter date, down to the present time, the fluctuations in the rate of discount on the very best commercial notes have been 3 to 5 per cent.; and by the actual record of a broker doing a very large business, they have averaged 4 per cent, on 6 months’ paper. By the kindness of Mr. Lyman J. Gage, of Chicago, I have obtained the rates of discount on commercial paper at that point. They are about the same in their proportion, having been reduced from an average of 10 per cent, or over, to an average of 5 per cent, or less between the dates i860 and 1886. On West¬ ern farm mortgages the change has been much greater. Twenty-five years ago rates as high as 25 per cent, were paid on mortgages of Western land, on what has proved to be ex¬ cellent security. The rate now charged is seven per cent, and even less. This immense abundance of capital seeking investment, and the equalization of the rates of interest between the East and the West, may be attributed more to the railway service and to the reduction in freight charge than to any other single factor affecting the interest of capital. The whole country has become a close neighborhood, each part sustaining the other, so that the distribution of capital has become more and more uniform throughout the country, except in States whose public credit is still bad. So long as the public credit is bad in any community, the rate of interest on private capital will be very high. The effect of changes in the railway service is witnessed by the following table : Merchandise or freight traffic of all the railways of the United States in 1885. Authority, ‘‘Poor’s Rail¬ way Manual,” 1886. Tons moved . 437j040>099 Tons moved i mile . 49>^ 5 ^>^94)4^9 Charge for service . $5I9>^90>992 Rate per ton per mile . cents Twenty-seven trunk lines which separately or in combination center in Chicago from the West, or con¬ nect Chicago with the Eastern seaboard : Tons moved . 185,320,709 Tons moved i mile . 25,125,076,247 Charge for service . $219,872,732 Rate per ton per mile . cents All other lines : Tons moved . 251,719,390 Tons moved i mile . 24,026,818,222 Charge for service . $299,818,260 Rate per ton per mile . cents Measure of this service per head of population and per family. Lines. Tons per person, per year. Distance hauled. Charge pr. perso7i Ch'rge per family efs persons. 27 trunk lines . All others . Tons. 4TW(r Miles. 136 $3.68 5.26 $18.40 26.30 Totals . . . . $8.94 $44.70 The average charge per ton per mile, on the 27 trunk lines in the years 1865-68, inclusive, exceeded that of 1885 by cents. At this rate of excess ap¬ plied to the whole traffic of the United States, all other lines having made a greater reduction, so far as the data can be had the sum saved in the year 1885 was $803,633,477 as compared to 1865-68. The whole service of all the railroads in 1885 con¬ sisted in moving 42 pounds a day of food, fuel, fibers, and fabrics a distance of iii>^ miles for each man, woman, and child of the population, or 1470 pounds a week for a family of 5. The average charge to each person was a fraction under 2^ cents per day, or 87^ cents per week for each family of 5. The common highways are open to all who do not choose to subject themselves to the alleged monopoly of the railways. One man with a one-horse cart could probably haul 1470 pounds miles in a 7 days’ journey — i day devoted to rest. What would it cost? In considering this reduction in the charge on railways, it must be remembered that a very large portion of these railways built since 1865 have taken the place of the wagon roads, or of what are known in the West as “ dirt roads,” so that the saving to the people of the United States by the mere existence of the new roads, whatever they may charge, is much greater than the mere reduction of their charges since they came into existence ; but the latter saving is so big that anything else may be disregarded. Reduced to the unit of the individual, the saving in the cost of railway service amounts to $13.67 per head of the population each year, or a fraction under $60 a year for every family of 5 persons. This sum would have paid

Page 583

580 LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS: — all the taxes which have been assessed through¬ out this period by the people of the United States for national, state, county, city, and town expenditures, including that part of the taxa¬ tion which has been applied to the reduction of debts, whether national, state, or municipal. Or we may put this in another way. A sum, representing the saving of the last four years only as compared to the rates of 1865-68, would doubtless have sufficed to cover the cash cost of the construction of the 100,000 miles of new railway built between Jan. i, 1865, and Jan. i, 1887, at an average cost of $30,000 per mile. In a previous article in The Century it has been demonstrated that all our present crops, or products from land which is under the plow, omitting those which are derived from pasturage, have been derived from a little over 300,000 square miles of land. Now between the dates January i, 1865, and January i, 1887, more than 100,000 miles of railway have been constructed. If we lay out a strip of land only 5 miles in width, alongside each of these new lines, it would cover an area of 10 miles by 100,000, or 1,000,000 square miles of land, — three times as much as is now under the plow, of which every acre has been brought within less than five miles, of a railway since the year 1865. While these great price-making factors have been working out their just results in the United States, the charge for moving food across the sea by steamships has been re¬ duced in almost as great a measure. The substitution of the screw for the side-wheel, the construction of large vessels made of steel, and the use of the compound engine of two cylinders, now supplemented by the triple compound, the opening of the Suez Canal, and other new forces applied to distribution, have altered all the conditions in Europe as well as in this country. Only a passing reference can be made in this article to other price-making factors. This department has been very fully treated in a recent pamphlet by Mr. Wm. Fowler, LL. B., whose article upon the alleged appreciation of gold, lately published by the Cobden Club, is one of the most satisfactory treatises yet issued. Among the other forces which have tended to reduce prices during the last twenty years, is the Bessemer process for making steel, since supplemented by the basic process,” which latter process has brought the phosphoric iron mines of Germany into full production, previously almost useless ; the application of gas for fuel; the use of natural gas for the same purposes in this country ; improvements in agriculture in the use of the buggy-plow, the gang-plow, etc., the self-binder attached to the reaper ; such improvements in all the tex¬ tile arts that one operative now performs all the textile work that could be done by two or more twenty-five years ago ; the improve¬ ments in the use of machine tools applied to all arts ; and the like. In point of fact, it is not too much to say that one-half as much capital as was required to do the general work of life in 1865 will now suffice to aid labor in compassing the same amount of product. That is to say, it took twice as many dollars^ worth of capital to accomplish a given product 20 or 25 years since as is now needed. On the other hand, the owner of the capital is now compelled, whether he will or not, to be sat¬ isfied with one-half the income on each unit or dollar’s worth of the present capital, if he trusts only to his capital for his means of living. Even in the matter of the use of gold, refer¬ ence might be made to the economy brought about in banking and exchange; the use of the telegraph and the like; the saving of time in the transportation of commodities : all of which subjects are fully treated in Mr. Fowler’s essay. In fact, if all the changes which have been worked by the elimination of time and distance from the conduct of affairs were to be consid¬ ered, it would require a volume instead of an article to picture them. It thus appears that, while the purchasing power of a day’s or year’s labor has increased since i860 from 40 to 70 per cent, ac¬ cording to the grade or skill of the workman, and from 66 to 108 per cent, since 1865, and while the earning power of capital, con¬ sidered without regard to the skill of its owner, has diminished absolutely one-half and rel¬ atively at least 75 per cent, since i860, there have yet been periods when it has been difficult for many workmen to find work, when also capital could not find employment, and when there was want in the midst of abundance. Can these faults in the present forms and methods of society be remedied by legislation, by cooperation, by profit-sharing, or by the state assuming more and more the control and direction of the forces of capital ? These are questions which demand an answer. That there has been grave discontent on the part of labor, and a want of that true com¬ prehension of what may rightly be called the claims of labor ” on the part of many capital¬ ists, may not be denied. What are some of the causes of this discon¬ tent, and how shall admitted wrongs be righted ? It is a matter of common knowledge that the application of machinery in special arts often causes the displacement of the craftsman, the hand- worker, or the common laborer who has been trained in that art, and who finds it

Page 584

WHAT MAKES THEM? difficult to adjust himself to new conditions. This fact, which has been a matter of common observation in single arts, has affected nearly all the arts of life in the last 25 years more profoundly than ever before. There have been single great inventions, like the applica¬ tion of steam, which have gravely altered the conditions of society ; but there have probably never been so many applications of science and invention to the common arts of life as have been applied in the present generation, nor has any single one ever been so potent in modifying and changing all the conditions of society as the sinking of time and distance in the fraction of a cent a ton on a mile of railway. In this country, where these great new forces have been more free to act than in any other, there are certain facts which must be admitted by every one competent to observe. Leaving wholly out of view the transfer of property already saved from one person to another in the gambling operations of the stock exchange, such incidents being of no material conse¬ quence except to those who engage in them, we may observe — First. That the direction and use of capital are becoming more and more a matter of scientific training, as the margin of profit in every art comes to a less and less fraction of the product made or distributed. The mer¬ chant adventurer has gone the same way with the craftsman and his apprentice — he has disappeared with the removal of the mys¬ teries of trade. Second. Although great fortunes have be¬ come more conspicuous, their number is very small, and their aggregate amount is yet smaller in proportion to the amount and great number of moderate fortunes which are not conspicuous but which are steadily increasing. TJiird. Adjacent to every city are suburbs or neighboring towns which are filled with comfortable dwellings of moderate size, which give evidence of comfort and welfare steadily increasing on the part of an increasing portion of those who perform the practical work of the country. These are the dwelling-places of their respective owners or occupants, who are not capitalists in any sense, but who have as¬ sured to themselves an abundant subsistence, a home, and a safe position in the community. Fourth. While great bonanza farms are conspicuous, they are also few in number; the increase in small farms is very rapid; and perhaps the increase has been yet more rapid compared to what it had been before agricul¬ tural machinery, science, and invention had come nearer to the farm. Fifth. By comparison with this rapid prog¬ ress not only of those who are in a position 581 of wealth, but of the vast number who, although not making great savings, are living year by year more comfortably, better housed, better clothed, and better fed, the bad condition of the very poor, and the more uncertain position of the common laborer whose opportunity for work is intermittent, becomes more apparent and therefore demands urgent attention. If such are the facts which are disclosed by the actual observation of the conditions of men, and confirmed by the deductions drawn from them in this and other cities, do we not find in the very gain in the purchasing power of wages a cause of an increasing disparity in the conditions of those who class themselves as “ working people,” in a limited sense ? and may not this be one of the grave causes of dis¬ content, even though all have made some prog¬ ress ? Is it not apparent that while the very poor are proportionately no more numerous, and the ratio of common laborers to others is no greater, yet within the lives of men who are not yet beyond middle age, great numbers among the workmen themselves have seen those who started on nearly the same plane, and who m i860 could earn but little more than their fel¬ lows, yet in 1885 and ’86, raised far above them in their condition, although still classed as fel¬ low-workmen ? To him who has had the capacity, either mental, mechanical, or manual, to take advan¬ tage of the opportunity afforded by science and invention, has been given the greatest progress ; while from him who has not the mental or manual aptitude to adjust himself to the new conditions, has been taken even the . opportunity for common labor which he en¬ joyed before. Do we not witness in the various organiza¬ tions of labor, so called, an attempt to equal¬ ize this growing disparity ? It is often claimed that “ equal work is entitled to equal pay ” ; but the difference in the quality of the work may not be overlooked. The attempt is made to control the hours of labor by various artificial methods. In respect to minors, and possibly in respect to women so long as they do not vote, such laws may be necessary. Other at¬ tempts are made by establishing stated lists of prices, by limiting the quantity of work to that done by any one man, by limiting the number of apprentices, and by other similar methods, to equalize the material conditions of men. But all these efforts fail wholly or partly^ An equal quantity of work measured only by the time devoted to it or by the act¬ ual amount of work required in it, never has and never will secure equal results. It is not in the nature of things. It is the efficiency of labor that tells, not the quantity or time. One man will waste more leather in a given

Page 585

LOW PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS: — 582 time by want of aptitude or skill in its use than another man will convert into good and useful boots and shoes. Profit may be defined as the margin which mind gains over muscle. This is as true of the higher gain in skillful work when done by the piece as in the use of capital already saved. The result of all these artificial methods to control conditions which rest upon individual capacity, when even partly enforced, is to level down the earnings of the industrious and the capable to the plane of the unskillful or lazy. When this truth dawns upon the mind of the discontented, then the trade organization or association soon changes its course and be¬ gins to promote the development of individual capacity ; it becomes a common school in so¬ cial science ; its members soon find out what a really beneficent force may be developed by organizing labor. I have endeavored to present the great price- making forces which have been evolving progress from poverty during the present gen¬ eration, and I may again repeat what I have often had occasion to state. The necessary conclusions to which we are led are — First. When organized capital is placed at the service of labor, it becomes more and more effective, while in amount it diminishes in ratio to product. It therefore secures to its own use a diminishing portion of, or profit from, an in¬ creasing product. This is the economic law, so called, of diminishing profits. Second. Organized labor, when each mem¬ ber is left free to avail himself of every oppor¬ tunity which capital, science, and invention place at his disposal, secures to itself an in¬ creasing share of an increasing product or its equivalent in money. Third. As capital and labor become more under the control of common intelligence they cannot help becoming more closely al¬ lied ; under these conditions high wages or large earnings in money, or in what money will buy, become the necessary result or reflex of the low cost of production. Fourth. A low cost of production accom¬ panied by high wages is most fully assured by the application of science and invention to all the arts of production and distribution. Pau¬ per labor, so called, may be dreaded only by those who possess pauper intelligence. The competition which is really to be courted and emulated is that which is represented by the art schools of France, the weaving schools and the like of Germany, the trade schools and the industrial schools which have spread more rapidly in England in recent years than they have in this country. Skill and intelligence, free from the burden of standing armies and of war taxes, may command the commerce of the world. The present population of the globe is com¬ puted at about 1,400,000,000; of these only about 400,000,000 belong to what may be called the machine-using nations. 1,000,000,- 000 do their work by hand, or by the use of rude tools guided by the hand. In a peaceful contest for commerce with these nations, who will win ? Certainly that nation will not win which obstructs the import of the crude products which are all that these non-machine-using nations can give in ex¬ change for what they need, by imposing heavy taxes upon such products when they enter the ports of our country. But when all has been accomplished which can be done by law or by association, or by the repeal of obstructive acts, there will still remain centers of pauperism in our cities; they exist mainly among those of foreign birth who cannot adjust themselves to the new con¬ ditions to which they are subjected. There will also continue to be periods when com¬ mon laborers will find it difficult to obtain work. How shall we meet these admitted faults ? Is there any other way than by adapt¬ ing the methods of common-school education more nearly to the necessities of life ? If it is true that one cannot permanently help either men or women who cannot help themselves, is it not equally true that classes in society in considerable numbers cannot be raised from a state of dependence upon others, except by the development of each member of such class to a knowledge of some art by which he can sustain himself, even if it be only a training in the application of the hand itself to useful work ? Nine-tenths of the occupations of the people of this country in point of number still depend upon the individual capacity, the mental de¬ velopment, the mechanical aptitude, or the manual dexterity of each person. Only one in ten is occupied in a great factory where the conduct of the work depends upon the minute subdivision of labor. Does not this fact bear witness to the neces¬ sity of promoting the development of the individual in order that common welfare may be attained by every man, woman, and child in the community? What can the state do for its citizens in helping them to obtain subsistence, if the people who constitute the state are themselves incapable of sustaining their own families un¬ der present conditions ? Neither the state nor the nation possesses property. The state only controls the prop¬ erty of its citizens by right of eminent domain. It can take property under due process of law

Page 586

WHAT MAKES THEM? 583 for public use, with compensation to him who The profit or loss of this great nation turns owns it. It can tax all property in order on the price of a daily glass of lager beer, to maintain governments. It may tax all When this article is read, five cents a day, property in order to perform certain useful more or less, to each inhabitant of the country functions which, by common consent, the state will represent $1,095,000,000 worth of prod- can perform in its corporate capacity better uct, which may be either saved or wasted than the citizens can in their individual capac- according to the measure of the intelligence ity. But the state as state has no productive of each person. The profit which might be power, and it is upon the annual product that represented by this sum of money may be all depend alike. diminished one-half by the ignorance of legis- ' In. this country at the present time there is lators who take no cognizance of the facts of andean be no lack of most abundant product, life when framing the statutes by which they We waste every year enough to sustain an- undertake to regulate and control an organ- other nation half as numerous, if not equal in ism which yet makes its way steadily onward number. The mechanism of distribution is more with greater or less effort, whatever maybe than ample ; yet there is want in the midst of the system of laws by which its progress is plenty. either helped or hindered. Progress poverty is the common rule. These computations are submitted for what ‘‘ Progress and poverty ” is the marked excep- they are worth. They are probably as near to tion, conspicuous and dangerous. In one sense the facts as it would be in the power of any every man is his brother’s keeper. If he ne- private student to bring them, whose oppor- glects his duty and cares not for his neighbor, tunity for study or for treating these questions the tax-gatherer, at least, will find him out and is very limited. will compel him to do at the greatest cost what In the attempt to comprehend the laws of perhaps he might have accomplished at the social science by reading and studying treatises least cost, had he himself realized his own re- upon political economy, the writer long since sponsibility. met the difficulty which would be apt to occur There is one thing no man can invent, and to a business man, — to wit, the necessity for a that is a form of society in which the rights, statement of accounts and a trial balance. In whether of the rich or of the poor, shall not the attempt to make such a statement and to be accompanied by corresponding duties, balance the accounts of one class with another. He who treats these economic problems with- and of one branch of industry with another, out taking the moral and ethical side of life he has himself come to certain conclusions into consideration may rightly be called a which coincide very closely with the modern representative of “ a dismal science.” But it teaching of political science, by no means follows that we must seek to The science of life does not consist in reconstruct humanity in our effort to form faire^ or letting alone. There are many ob- society. The subject of economic science is jects which may be better attained by the state, man as he now is, with all his faults, his sel- town, or city undertaking them than they could fishness, and his failings. . It was said of old if left to individual or corporate enterprise, time that surely the wrath of man shall praise There are many others which it is often pro- thee.” Might not the prophet of the present posed to have the state assume, which are ut- affirm with equal insight, The power which terly beyond the functions of the state in its makes for righteousness compels not only corporate capacity to manage, the enlightened self-interest of man, but his Among the prime factors which make or very selfishness, to work out the progress of mar material prosperity there are grave differ- humanity ? ” ences. The conclusion of the writer is, like The commerce of the world now turns from that of all the economists whose works have one side of the globe to the other on a mar- any standing among men, that tampering with, gin of a cent on a bushel of grain, a dollar a or debasing the standard of value is the most ton of metal, a quarter of a cent a yard on a malignant fraud which the government can textile fabric, or the sixteenth of a cent a pound perpetrate. The cost of substituting paper on sugar. The cube of coal, as I have before notes for true money under the stress of war stated, which would pass through the rim of a added without question to the cost of the civil quarter of a dollar, when used in connection war as much as the whole sum of outstanding with the compound engine will drive a ton of debt yet unpaid. The most beneficent factor food and its proportion of the steamship two in the lowering of prices and in raising wages miles on its way from the producer to the con- has been the extension of the railway system sumer ; by the invention of the triple com- and the reduction in the charge for the service, pound, one-fourth even of this fuel has been Vanderbilt was the typical railroad man of his saved. day ; he was also the great communist of his

Page 587

584 ^OlV PRICES, HIGH WAGES, SMALL PROFITS: — time, because he reduced the cost of moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles to so small a sum that it can hardly be measured in a loaf of bread, at a margin of profit to himself and his associates which is now less than the value of the empty barrel at the end of the line. The heavy taxes which we are now paying are but a slight burden upon the people ; so long as they can be applied to the payment of the pub¬ lic debt, they may be justified, however un¬ scientifically and injudiciously the acts for collecting them may be framed. Whatever may be the opinions or theories of each reader upon these various problems upon which every voter in a free country must pass whether he will or no, it is held that there can be no true solution unless it is based upon facts. It has been the purpose of the writer in this series of Century articles to give these facts rather than to present his own theories ; to ask questions rather than to attempt to an¬ swer them. It may now be suitable to submit a very few examples proving how the rule of diminishing prices, decreasing profits, and diminishing cost of labor has been consistent with the gen¬ eral rise in the rates of wages and in their purchasing power. This principle would of necessity be deduced from all the tables which have already been submitted ; but a few specific examples may be a matter of curious interest, and will fully sustain it. EXAMPLES OF REDUCTIONS IN PRICE — REDUCTION IN COST OF LABOR — RISE IN RATE OF WAGES AND INCREASE IN PURCHASING POWER OF WAGES. Standard Cotton Sheeting. Cost of Labor per Eammgs per Year. Price per Yard. Yard. Year. Purchasing Power in Food, Cloth, and Fuel. i860 8.17 cts. 0.095 Cts. 0 0 0 669 1865 0 10 I. 501 « 234.00 420 1870 14-33 “ .. 1.425 “ 275.00 632 1875 9.79 “ 1.314 “ 280,00 721 1880 7.40 “ 0.093 “ 260 . 00 782 00 00 6.55 “ .. 0.095 “ 284 . 00 . . 1014 Suit of Furniture for a Bedroom. i860 .. $35.00 $12.00 $456.00 .. 1473 1865 55.00 18.00 678.00 1217 1870 33-00 II .00 687 .00 1578 00 28.00 10.00 723.00 1868 1880 20.00 8.00 723 .00 2175 One Dozen Steel Axes, Day Wage, Rations Food Only per Day. Day's Wage. Rations Food Only. i860 1865 $11.00 20.50 $2.28 3.12 $1.70 .. 2.27 6.25 s-39 1870 14.50 2.93 2.35 6.41 1875 11.50 2 46 2.17 6.00 1880 8.50 2.04 2.26 8.76 In this example the prices of food in the same county have been computed as a standard. A PIORSE-RAKE. Year. Price. Labor Cost. Day's Wage. Ration Food Only. 1865 $35.00 -- $3-36 $1.93 .. 4-53 1870 32.00 2.87 2.12 5-54 00 28 . 00 2.53 1.90 5 92 1880 24 . 00 2.10 1.76 7.01 Compiled from Vol. XX. U. S. Census by Joseph D. Weeks ; computed by Edward Atkinson, and veri¬ fied by comparison with other authorities. Could space be spared me, examples of the same kind could be added from almost every industry to which modern machinery has been applied, but these must suffice. Edward Atkinson.

Page 588

OPPOSING SHERMAN’S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA* PRESIDENT Davis trans¬ ferred me from the Department of Mississippi to the command of the Army of Ten¬ nessee by a tele¬ gram received December i8th, 1 863, in the camp of Ross’s brigade CONFEDERATE BATTLE-FLAG, ADOPTED BY GENERAL q£ CaVaLv Hear J. E. JOHNSTON IN 1861, -ARED FIELD WITH BLUE -p. , ^ T ST. ANDREW’S CROSS EDGED WITH WHITE, BEAR- BoltOn. I aS- IN^GAS^MANV STARS AS THERE WERE CONFEDERATE mand at Dalton on the 27th, and received there, on the ist of January, a letter from the President dated De¬ cember 23d, purporting to be ‘instructions.” In it he, in Richmond, informed me of the encouraging condition of the army, which “ induced him to hope that I would soon be able to commence active operations against the enemy,” — the men being “tolerably” well clothed, with a large reserve of small arms, the morning reports exhibiting an ef¬ fective total that exceeded in number “ that actually engaged on the Confederate side in any battle of the war.” Yet this army itself had lost in the recent campaign at least 25,000 men in action, while 17,000 had been transferred from it in Longstreet’s corps, and two brigades had been sent to Mississippi; so that it was then weaker by 40,000 men than it was when “ en¬ gaged on the Confederate side ” in the battle of Chickamauga, in the September preceding. In the inspections which were made as scon as practicable, the appearance of the army was very far from being “ matter of much congratu¬ lation.” Instead of a reserve of muskets there was a deficiency of six thousand and as great a one of blankets, while the number of bare feet was painful to see. The artillery horses were too feeble to draw the guns in fields, or on a march, and the mules were in similar condi¬ tion; while the supplies of forage were then very irregular, and did not include hay. In conse¬ quence of this, it was necessary to send all of these animals not needed for camp service to the valley of the Etowah, where long forage could be found, to restore their health and strength. The last return of the army was of Decem¬ ber 20th, and exhibited an effective total of less than 36,000, of whom 6000 were without arms and as many without shoes. The President impressed upon me the importance of recover¬ ing Tennessee with an army in such numbers and condition. In pages 548-9 of his volume, “The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Gov¬ ernment,” he dwells upon his successful efforts to increase its numbers and means adequately. After the strange assertions and suggestions of December 23d, he did not resume the sub¬ ject of military operations until, in a letter of February 27th to him through his staff- officer. General Bragg, I pointed out the necessity of great preparations to take the offensive, such as large additions to the number of troops, an ample supply of field transportation, subsist¬ ence stores, and forage, a bridge equipage, and fresh artillery horses. This letter was acknowl¬ edged on the 4th of March, but not really re¬ plied to until the 12th, when General Bragg wrote a plan of campaign which was delivered tome on the i8th by his secretary. Colonel Sale. It prescribed my invasion of Tennessee with an army of 75,000 men, including Longstreet’s corps, then near Morristown, Tennessee. When necessary supplies and transportation were collected at Dalton, the additional troops, ex¬ cept Longstreet’s, would be sent there; and this army and Longstreet’s corps would march to meet at Kingston, on the Tennessee River, and thence into the valley of Duck River. Being invited to give my views, I suggested that the enemy could defeat the plan, either by attacking one of our two bodies of troops on the march, with their united forces, or by advancing against Dalton before our forces there should be equipped for the field ; for it was certain that they would be able to take the field before we could be ready. I proposed, therefore, that the additional troops should be sent to Dalton in time to give us the means to beat the Federal army there, and then pur¬ sue it into Tennessee, which Avould be a more favorable mode of invasion than the other. General Bragg replied that my answer did not indicate acceptance of the plan proposed, and that troops could be drawn from other points only to advance. As the idea of advanc¬ ing had been accepted by me, it was evidently his strategy that was the ultimatum. I telegraphed again (and also sent a confi¬ dential officer to say) that I was anxious to take the offensive with adequate means, and to represent to the President the actual dis- * For other articles, pictures, and map relating to the Atlanta campaign, see The Century for July. VoL. XXXIV.— 81.

Page 589

S86 OPPOSING SHERMAN’S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. GENERAL JOHN B. HOOD, C. S. A. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) parity of forces, but without result. The above is the substance of all said, written, or clone on the subject of Mr. Davis’s pages 548-9, before the armies were actually in contact, with odds of 10 to 4 against us. The instruction, discipline, and spirit of the army were much improved between the ist of January and the end of April, and its numbers were increased. The efforts for the latter object brought back to the ranks about five thousand of the men who had left them in the rout of Missionary Ridge. On the morning report of April 30th the totals were: 37,652 infantry, 2812 artillery with 112 guns, and 2392 cavalry. This is the report as corrected by Major Kin- lock Falconer, assistant adjutant- general, from official records in his office. General Sherman had assembled at that time an army of 98,797 men and 254 guns; but before the armies actually met, 3 divisions of cavalry under Generals Stonem an, Garrard, and McCook added 10,000 or 12,000 men to the number. The object prescribed to him by Gen¬ eral Grant was to move against Johnston’s army, to break it up, and to get into the inte¬ rior of the enemies’ country as far as he could, inflicting all the damage possible on their war resources.” The occupation of Dalton by General Bragg had been accidental. He had encamped there for anight in his retreat from Missionary Ridge, and had remained because it was ascertained next morning that the pursuit had ceased. Dal¬ ton is in a valley so broad as to give ample room

Page 590

OPPOSING SHERMANS ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. 587 for the deployment of the largest American guard of cavalry. This was repeated on the army. Rocky-face, which bounds it on the 6th. On the 7th it moved forward, driving our west, terminates as an obstacle, three miles cavalry from Tunnel Hill, and taking a posi- north of the railroad gap, and the distance from tion in the afternoon in front of the railroad Chattanooga to Dalton around that north end gap, and parallel to Rocky-face (see map, next exceeds that through the railroad gap less than page) — the right a mile south of the gap, and a mile ; and a general with a large army, com- the left near the Cleveland road, ing from Chattanooga to attack an inferior Until that day I had regarded a battle in the one near Dalton, would follow that route and broad valley in which Dalton stands as inev- find in the broad valley a very favorable field, itable. The greatly superior strength of the Mr. Davis descants on the advantages I Federal army made the chances of battle alto- had in mountains, ravines, and streams, and gether in its favor. It had, also, places of ref- General Sherman claims that those features uge in case of defeat, in the intrenched pass of the country were equal to the numerical of Ringgold, and in the fortress of Chatta- difference between our forces. I would have nooga; while we, if beaten, had none nearer gladly given all the mountains, ravines, rivers, than Atlanta, 100 miles off, with 3 rivers inter- and woods of Georgia for such a supply of vening. General Sherman’s course indicating artillery ammunition, proportionally, as he had. no intention of giving battle east of Rocky- Thinking as he did, it is strange that he did face, we prepared to fight on either side of the not give himself a decided superiority of act- ridge. For that object, A. P. Stewart’s division ual strength, by drawing troops from his three was placed in the gap, Cheatham’s on the crest departments of the Cumberland, the Ten- of the hill, extending a mile north of Stewart’s, nessee, and the Ohio, where, accord¬ ing to Secretary Stanton’s report of 1865, he had 119,000 men, fit for duty. The country in which the two armies operated is not rugged; there is noth¬ ing in its character that gave advan¬ tage to the Confederates. Between Dal¬ ton and Atlanta the only mountain in sight of the railroad is Rocky-face, which aided the Federals. The small military value of mountains is indicated by the fact, that in the Federal attack on June 27th our troops on Kennesaw suffered more than those on the plain. Major-General Gilmer, chief engi¬ neer, in the previous winter wisely had made an admirable base for our army by intrenching Atlanta. As a road leads from Chattanooga through Snake Creek Gap to the rail¬ road bridge at Resaca, a light intrench- ment to cover 3000 or 4000 men was made there; and to make quick com¬ munication between that point and Dal¬ ton, two rough country roads were so improved as to serve that purpose. On the 1st of May I reported to the Administration that the enemy was about to advance, suggesting the trans¬ fer of at least a part of General Polk’s troops to mv command Then the major-general w. h. t. walker, c. s. a., killed near Atlanta, K . , ^ ’ JULY 22D, 1864. (from A PHOTOGRAPH.) cavalry with convalescent horses was ordered to the front, — Martin’s division to and Bate’s on the west and extending a mile observe the Oostenaula from Resaca to Rome, south of the gap. Stevenson’s was formed across and Kelly’s little brigade to join the cavalry the valley east of the ridge, his left meeting on the Cleveland road. Cheatham’s right; Hindman in line with Stev- On the 4th the Federal army, including the enson and on his right ; Cleburne behind Mill troops from Knoxville, was at Ringgold. Next Creek and in front of Dalton. Walker’s divLs- day it skirmished until dark with our advanced ion was in reserve.

Page 591

FROM "the mountain CAMPAIGNS IN GEORGIA; OR, WAR SCENES ON THE W. & A." PUBLISHED BY THE WESTERN & ATLANTIC R. R. CO.

Page 592

OPPOSING SHERMAN'S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA, Cantey with his division arrived at Resaca that evening (yth) and was charged with the defense of the place. During the day our cavalry was driven from the ground west of Rocky-face through the gap. Grigsby’s brigade was placed near Dug Gap, — the remainder in front of our right. About 4 o’clock p. M. of the 8th, Geary’s division of Hooker’s corps attacked two regiments of Reynolds’s Arkansas brigade guarding Dug Gap. They were soon joined by Grigsby’s brigade on foot. The in¬ creased sound of musketry indicated so sharp a conflict that Lieutenant-General Hardee was requested to send Granbury’s Texan bri¬ gade to the help of our people, and to take command there himself. These accessions soon decided the contest, and the enemy was driven down the hill. A sharp engagement was occurring at the same time on the crest of the mountain, where our right and center joined, between Pettus’s brigade holding that point and troops of the Fourth Corps attacking it. The assailants were repulsed, however. The vigor of this attack suggested the addition of Brown’s brigade to Pettus’s. On the 9th a much larger force assailed the troops at the angle, and with great deter¬ mination, but the Federal troops were defeated with a loss proportionate to their courage. Assaults as vigorous and resolute were made at the same time on Stewart and on Bate, and were handsomely repulsed. The Confederates, who fought under cover, had but trifling losses in these combats, but the Federal troops, fully exposed, must have lost heavily — the more because American soldiers are not to be driven back without severe losses. General Wheeler had a very handsome affair of cavalry near Varnell’s Station, the same day, in which he captured 100 prisoners, including a colonel, 3 captains, 5 lieutenants, and a standard. General Sherman regarded these actions as amounting to a battle. Information had been received of the arrival of the Army of the Tennessee in Snake Creek Gap, on the 8th. At night on the 9th General Cantey reported that he had been engaged with those troops until dark. Lieutenant-General Hood was dispatched to Resaca with three divisions immediately. The next morning he reported the enemy retiring, and was recalled, with orders to leave two divisions midway between the two places. Spirited fighting was renewed in and near the gap as well as on the northern front. The most vigorous of them was made late in the day, on Bate’s division, and repulsed. At night information was re¬ ceived from our scouts near the south end of Rocky-face, that the Army of the Tennessee was intrenching in Snake Creek Gap, and next morning reports were received which indicated VoL. XXXIV.— 82. 589 a general movement of the Federal army to its right, and one report that General McPherson’s troops were moving from Snake Creek Gap towards Resaca. General Polk, who had just reached that place with Loring’s division, was charged with its defense. General Wheeler was directed to move next morning with all the available cavahy around the north end of Rocky-face, to learn if a gen¬ eral movement of the enemy was in progress. He was to be supported by Hindman’s divi¬ sion. In this reconnaissance, General Stone- man’s division of cavalry was encountered and driven back. The information gained confirmed the reports of the day before. Before 10 a. m. of the 13th, the Confeder¬ ate army moved from Dalton and reached Resaca just as the Federal troops approach¬ ing from Snake Creek Gap were encountering Loring’s division a mile from the station. Their approach was delayed long enough by Loring’s opposition to give me time to select the ground to be occupied by our troops. And while they were taking this ground, the Fed¬ eral army was forming in front of them. The left of Polk’s corps occupied the west face of the intrenchment of Resaca. Hardee’s corps, also facing to the west, formed the center. Hood’s, its left division facing to the west and the two others to the north-west, was on the right, and, crossing the railroad, reached the Connesauga. The enemy skirmished briskly with the left half of our line all the afternoon. On the 14th spirited fighting was main¬ tained by the enemy on the whole front, a very vigorous attack being made on Hindman’s division of Hood’s corps, which was hand¬ somely repulsed. In the meantime General Wheeler was directed to ascertain the position and formation of the Federal left. His report indicating that they were not unfavorable to an attack, Lieutenant-General Hood was di¬ rected to make one with Stewart’s and Steven¬ son’s divisions, strengthened by four brigades from the center and left. He was instructed to make a half change of front to the left to drive the enemy from the railroad, the ob¬ ject of the operation being to prevent them from using it. The attack was extremely well conducted and executed, and before dark (it was begun at 6 p. m.) the enemy was driven from his ground. This encouraged me to hope for a more important success; so General Hood was directed to renew the fight next morning. His troops were greatly elated by this announcement, made to them that evening. On riding from the right to the left after nightfall, I was informed that the extreme left of our line of skirmishers, 40 or 50 men, had been driven from their ground, — an eleva¬ tion near the river, — and received a report

Page 593

590 OPPOSING SHERMANS ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. from Major-General Martin that Federal troops were crossing the Oostenaula near Lay’s Ferry on a pontoon bridge — two divisionshav¬ ing already crossed. In consequence of this, Walker’s division was sent to Lay’s Ferry im¬ mediately, and the order to General Hood was revoked; also. Lieutenant- Colonel S. W. Presstman, chief engineer, was directed to lay a pontoon bridge a mile above the railroad, and to have the necessary roadway made. Sharp fighting commenced early on the 15th, and continued until night, with so much vigor that many of the assailants pressed up to our intrenchments. All these attacks were repelled, however. In General Sherman’s language, the sounds of musketry and cannon rose all day to the dignity of a battle. Soon after noon intelligence was received from Major-General Walker, that the report that the enemy had crossed the Oostenaula was untrue. Lieutenant-General Hood was therefore again ordered to assail the enemy with the troops he had commanded the day before. When he was about to move forward, positive intelligence was received from Gen¬ eral Walker that the Federal right was actually crossing the Oostenaula. This made it neces¬ sary to abandon the thought of fighting north of the river, and the orders to Lieutenant General Hood were countermanded, but the order from corps headquarters was not sent to Stewart promptly, and consequently he made the attack unsustained, and sufered before being recalled. The occupation of Resaca being exceed¬ ingly hazardous, I determined to abandon the place. So the army was ordered to cross the Oostenaula about midnight, — Hardee’s and Polk’s corps by the railroad and trestle-bridges, and Hood’s by that above, on the pontoons. General Shennan claims to have surprised us by McPherson’s appearance in Snake Creek Gap on the 9th, forgetting that we dis¬ covered his march on the 8th. He blames McPherson for not seizing the place. That officer tried the works and found them too strong to be seized. General Sherman says that if McPherson had placed his whole force astride the railroad, he could have there easily with¬ stood the attack of all Johnston’s army. Had he done so '^all Johnston’s army” would have been upon him at the dawn of the next day, the cannon giving General Sherman intelli¬ gence of the movement of that army. About twice his force in front and three thousand men in his immediate rear would have over¬ whelmed him, making a most auspicious be ginning of the campaign, for the Confederates. General Sherman has a very exaggerated idea of our field works. They were slighter than his own, because we had most inadequate supplies of intrenching tools. Two events at Resaca were greatly magnified to him. He says that on the 13th McPherson’s whole line took possession of a ridge overlooking the town, and that several attempts to drive him away were repulsed with bloody loss. The fact is, near night of the 14th, 40 or 50 skirmishers in front of our extreme left were driven from the slight elevation they occupied, but no attempt was made to retake it ; and — Hooker’s corps had also some handsome fighting on the left, capturing a 4- gun in¬ trenched battery.” From our view, in the morning of the 15th, Major-General Steven¬ son advanced 4 guns some 80 yards and be¬ gan to intrench them. General Hood had their fire opened at once. A ravine leading from the Federal line within easy musket- range enabled the Federal troops to drive away the gunners ; but their attempt to take off the guns was frustrated by the Confeder¬ ate musketry. So the pieces remained in place, and fell into the possession of Hooker’s corps on the 1 6th, after we abandoned the position. The Confederate army was compelled to abandon its position in front of Dalton by General Sherman’s flank movement through Snake Creek Gap, and was forced from the second position by the movement towards Calhoun. Each of these movements would have made the destruction of the Confeder¬ ate army inevitable in case of defeat. In the first case the flank march was protected completely by Rocky-face Ridge ; in the sec¬ ond, as completely by the Oostenaula. A numerical superiority of more than 2 to i made those manoeuvres free from risk. Gen¬ eral Sherman thinks that the impracticable nature of the country which made the pas¬ sage of the troops across the valley almost impossible, saved the Confederate army. The Confederate army remained in its position near Dalton until May 13th, because I knew the time that would be required for the march of 100,000 men through the long defile be¬ tween their right flank near Mill Creek Gap and the outlet of Snake Creek Gap ; and the shortness of the time in which 43,000 men could march by two good roads direct from Dalton to Resaca; and the further fact that our post at Resaca could hold out a longer time than our march to that point would require. Mr. Davis and General Sherman exhibit a strange ignorance of the country between Dal¬ ton and Atlanta. Mr. Davis describes moun¬ tain ridges offering positions neither to betaken nor turned, and a natural fortress eighteen miles in extent, forgetting, apparently, that a fortress is strong only when it has a garrison strong enough for its extent; and both forget that, except Rocky-face, no mountain is visible from the

Page 594

OPPOSING SHERMAN^ S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. 591 road between Dalton and Atlanta. That coun¬ try is intersected by numerous practicable roads, and is not more rugged than that near Baltimore and Washington, or Atlanta and Ma¬ con. When the armies confronted each other, the advantages of ground were equal, and un¬ important, both parties depending for protec¬ tion on earthworks, not on ridges and ravines. In leaving Resaca I hoped to find a favorable position near Calhoun, but there was none; and the army, after resting 18 or 20 hours near that place, early in the morning of the 17 th moved on 7 or 8 miles to Adairs ville, where we were joined by the cavalry of Gen¬ eral Polk’s command, a division of 3700 men under General W. H. Jackson. Our map rep¬ resented the valley in which the railroad lies as narrow enough for our army formed across it to occupy the heights on each side with its flanks, and therefore I intended to await the enemy’s attack there ; but the breadth of the valley far exceeded the front of our army in order of battle. So another plan was devised. Two roads lead southward from Adairs ville,— one directly through Cassville ; the other fol¬ lows the railroad through Kingston, turns to the left there, and rejoins the other at Cassville. The interval between them is widest opposite Kingston, where it is about seven miles by the farm roads. In the expectation that a part of the Federal army would follow each road, it was arranged that Polk’s corps should engage the column on the direct road when it should arrive opposite Kingston, — Hood’s, in position for the purpose, falling upon its left flank in the deployment. Next morning, when our cavalry on that road reported the right Federal column near Kingston, General Hood was instructed to move to and follow northwardly a country road a mile east of that from Adairsville, to be in position to fall upon the flank of the Federal column when it should be engaged with Polk. An order announcing that we were about to give battle was read to each regiment, and heard with exultation. After going some three miles. General Hood marched back about two, and formed, his corps facing to our right and rear. Being asked foran explanation, he replied that an aide-de-camp had told him that the Federal army was approaching on that road. Our whole army knew that to be impossible. It had been viewing the enemy in the opposite di¬ rection every day for two weeks. General Hood did not report his extraordinary disobedience — as he must have done had he believed the story upon which he professed to have acted. The time lost frustrated the design, for success depended on timing the attack properly. Mr. Davis conceals the facts to impute this failure to me, thus : The battle, for causes which were the subject of dispute, did not take place. . . . Instead of his attacking the divided columns of the enemy, the united Federal columns were preparing to attack him.” There was no dispute as to facts. An attack, except under very unfavorable circumstances, being impossible, the troops were formed in an excellent position along the ridge immediately south of Cassville, an ele¬ vated and open valley in front, and a deep one in rear of it. Its length was equal to the front of Hood’s and Polk’s and half of Hardee’s corps. They were placed in that order from right to left. As I rode along the line while the troops were forming. General Shoup, chief of artil¬ lery, pointed out to me a space of 150 or 200 yards, which he thought might be enfiladed by artillery on a hill a half mile beyond Hood’s right and in front of the prolongation of our line, if the enemy should clear away the thick wood that covered it and establish batter¬ ies. He was desired to point out to the offi¬ cer who might command there some narrow ravines very near, in which his men could be sheltered from such artillery fire, and to remind him that while artillery was playing upon his position no attack would be made upon it by , infantry. The enemy got into position soon after our troops were formed and skirmished until dark, using their field-pieces freely. Dur¬ ing the evening Lieutenant-Generals Polk and Hood, the latter being spokesman, asserted that a part of the line of each would be so en¬ filaded next morning by the Federal batteries established on the hill above mentioned, that they would be unable to hold their ground an hour; and therefore urged me to abandon the position at once. The matter was discussed perhaps an hour, in which time I became apprehensive that as the commanders of two- thirds of the army thought the position un¬ tenable, the opinion would be adopted by their troops, which would make it so. There- • fore I yielded. Lieutenant-General Hardee, whose ground was the least strong, was full of confidence. Mr. Davis says (“Rise and Fall,” page 533) that General Hood asserts, in his report and in a book, that the two corps were on ground commanded and enfiladed by the enemy’s batteries. On the contrary, they were on a hill, and the enemy in a valley where their batteries were completely commanded by ours. They expressed the conviction that early the next morning batteries would open upon them from a hill Ihen thickly covered with wood and out of range of brass field-pieces. The army abandoned the ground before daybreak and crossed the Etowah after noon, and encamped near the railroad. Wheeler’s cavalry was placed in observation above, and Jackson’s below our main body.

Page 595

OPPOSING SHERMANS ADVANCE TO ATLANTA, 592 No movement of the enemy was discovered until the 2 2d, when General Jackson reported their army moving towards Stilesboro’, as if to cross the Etowah near that place, and crossing on the 23d. On the 24th Hardee’s and Polk’s corps encamped on the road from Stilesboro’ to Atlanta south-east of Dallas, and Hood’s four miles from New Plope Church, on the road from Allatoona. On the 25th the Federal army was a little east of Dallas, and Hood’s corps was placed with its center at New Hope Church, Polk’s on his left and Hardee’s prolonging the line to the Atlanta road, which was held by its left. A little before 6 o’clock in the afternoon Stewart’s division in front of New Hope Church was fiercely attacked by Hooker’s corps, and the action continued two hours without lull or pause, when the assail¬ ants fell back. The canister shot of the 16 Confederate field-pieces and the musketry of 5000 infantry at short range must have inflicted heavy loss upon General Hooker’s corps, as is proved by the name “ Hell Hole,” which. Gen¬ eral Sherman says, was given the place by the Federal soldiers. Next day the Federal troops worked so vigorously, extending their intrench- men ts to wards the railroad, that they skirmished very little. The Confederates labored strenu¬ ously to keep abreast of their work, but in vain, from greatly inferior numbers and an insignifi¬ cant supply of intrenching tools. On the 27th, however, the fighting rose above the grade of skirmishing, especially in the afternoon, when at half-past 5 o’clock the Fourth Corps and a division of the Fourteenth attempted to turn our right, but the movement, after being impeded by the cavalry, was met by two regi¬ ments of our right division (Cleburne’s) and the two brigades of his second line brought up on the right of the first. The Federal formation was so deep that its front did not equal that of our two brigades ; consequently those troops were • greatly exposed to our musketry — all but the leading troops being on a hillside facing us. They advanced until their first line was within 25 or 30 paces of ours, and fell back only after at least 700 men had fallen dead in their places. When the leading Federal troops paused in their advance, a color-bearer came on, and planted his colors 8 or 10 feet in front of his regiment, but was killed in the act. A soldier who sprang forward to hold up or bear off the colors was shot dead as he seized the staff. Two others who followed successively, fell like him, but a fourth bore back the noble emblem. Some time after nightfall, the Con¬ federates captured above two hundred prison¬ ers in the hollow before them. General Sherman does not refer to this combat in his ^‘Memoirs,” although he dwells with some exultation upon a very small affair of the next day at Dallas, in which the Con¬ federates lost about 300 men killed and wounded, and in which he must have lost more than ten times as many. In the afternoon of the 28th, Lieutenant- General Hood was instructed to draw his corps to the rear of our line in the early part of the night, march around our right flank, and form it facing the left flank of the Federal line and obliquely to it, and attack at dawn — Hardee and Polk to join in the battle succes¬ sively as the success on the right of each might enable him to do so. We waited next morning for the signal, — the sound of Hood’s musketry, — from the appointed time until 10 o’clock, when a message from that officer was brought by an aide-de-camp to the effect that he had found R. W. Johnson’s division in¬ trenching on the left of the Federal line and almost at right angles to it, and asked for in¬ structions. The message proved that there could be no surprise, which was necessary to success, and that the enemy’s intrenchments would be completed before we could attack. The corps was therefore recalled. It was ascer¬ tained afterwards that after marching eight or ten hours Hood’s corps was then at least six miles from the Federal left, which was but a musket-shot from his starting-point. The extension of the Federal intrenchments towards the railroad was continued industri¬ ously to cut us off from it or to cover their own approach to it. We tried to keep pace with them, but the labor did not prevent the des¬ ultory fighting, which was kept up while day¬ light lasted. I n this the great inequality of force compelled us to employ dismounted cavalry. On the 4th or 5th of June the Federal army reached the railroad between Ackworth and Allatoona. The Confederate forces then moved to a position carefully marked out by Colonel Presstman, its left on Lost Mountain, and its right of cavalry beyond the railroad and some¬ what covered by Noonday Creek, a line much too long for our strength. On the 8th the Federal anny seemed to be near Ackworth, and our position was con¬ tracted to cover the roads leading thence to Atlanta. This brought the left of Hardee’s corps to Gil gal Church, Polk’s right near the Marietta and Ackworth road and Hood’s corps massed beyond that road. Pine Mountain, a detached hill, was held by a division. On the nth of June the left of the Federal army was on the high ground beyond N oonday Creek, its center a third of a mile in front of Pine Moun¬ tain and its right beyond the Burnt Hickory and Marietta road. In the morning of the 14th General Hardee and I rode to the summit of Pine Mountain to decide if the outpost there should be main-

Page 596

OPPOSING SHERMAN'S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. 593 CHARACTER OF THE BATTLE-FIELD OF NEW HOPE CHURCH. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) tained. General Polk accompanied us. After we had concluded our examination and the abandonment of the hill had been decided upon, a few shots were fired at us from a bat¬ tery of Parrott guns a quarter of a mile in our front ; the third of these passed through Gen¬ eral Polk’s chest, from left to right, killing him instantly. This event produced deep sorrow in the army, in every battle of which he had been distinguished. Major-General W. W. Por¬ ing succeeded to the command of the corps. A division of Georgia militia under Major- General G. W. Smith, transferred to the Con¬ federate service by Governor Brown, was charged with the defense of the bridges and ferries of the Chattahoochee, for the safety of Atlanta. On the i6th Hardee’s corps was placed on the high ground east of Mud Creek, facing to the west. The right of the Federal army made a corresponding change of front by which it faced to the east. It was opposed in this manoeuvre by Jackson’s cavalry, as well as 2500 men can resist 30,000. The angle where Hardee’s right joined Loring’s left was soon found to be a very weak point, and on the 17th another position was chosen, in¬ cluding the crest of Kennesaw, which Colonel Presstman prepared for occupation by the 19th, when it was assumed by the army. In this position two divisions of Loring’s corps oc¬ cupied the crest of Kennesaw from end to end, the other division being on its right, and Hood’s corps on the right of it, Hardee’s extending from Loring’s left across the Lost Mountain and Marietta road. The enemy approached as usual, under cover of successive lines of intrenchments. In these positions of the two armies partial engagements were sharp and incessant until the 3d of July. On the 21st the extension of the Federal line to the south which had been protected by the swollen condition of Noses Creek, compelled the transfer of Hood’s corps to our left, Wheeler’s troops occupying the ground it had left. On the 2 2d General Hood reported that Hind¬ man’s and Stevenson’s divisions of his corps, having been attacked, had driven back the Federal troops and had taken a line of breast¬ works, from which they had been driven by the artillery of the enemy’s main position. Subsequent detailed accounts of this affair prove that after the capture of the advanced line of breastworks, General Hood directed his two divisions against the enemy’s main line. The slow operation of a change of front under the fire of the artillery of this main line, sub¬ jected the Confederates to a loss of one thousand men — whereupon the attempt was abandoned, either by the general’s orders or the discretion of the troops. On the 24th Hardee’s skirmishers were at¬ tacked in their rifle-pits by a Federal line of battle, and on the 25th a similar assault was made upon those of Stevenson’s division. Both

Page 597

594 OPPOSING SHERMANS were repulsed, with heavy losses to the assail¬ ants. In the morning of the 27th, after a cannon¬ ade by all its artillery, the Federal army assailed the Confederate position, especially the cen¬ ter and right — the Army of the Cum.berland advancing against the first, and that of the Tennessee against the other. Although suffer¬ ing losses out of all proportion to those they inflicted, the Federal troops pressed up to the Confederate intrenchments in many places, maintaining the unequal conflict for two hours and a half, with the persevering courage of American soldiers. At 11:30 a. m. the attack had failed. In General Sherman’s words : “About 9 o’clock A. M. of the day appointed, June the 27th, the troops moved to the assault, and all along our lines for ten miles a furious fire of artillery and musketry was kept up. At all points the enemy met us with determined courage and in great force. ... By 1 1:30 the assault was over, and had failed. We had not broken the Confederate line at either point, but our assaulting columns held their ground within a few yards of the rebel trenches and there covered them¬ selves with parapet. McPherson lost about 300 men, and Thomas nearly 2000.^’ [He reports 1580. See Report of Com. on Conduct of War — Supplement.] Such statements of losses are incredible. The Northern troops fought very bravely, as usual. Many fell against our parapets, some were killed in our trenches. Most of this bat¬ tle of 2)4 hours was at very short range. It is not to be believed that Southern veterans struck but 3 per cent, of Thomas’s troops in mass at short range, or per cent, of McPherson’s — and if possible still less so that Northern soldiers, inured to battle, should have been defeated by losses so trifling as never to have discouraged the meanest soldiers on record. I have seen American soldiers (North¬ ern men) win a field with losses ten times greater proportionally. But argument apart, there is a witness against the estimates of N orth- ern losses in this campaign, in the 10,036 graves in the Military Cemetery at Marietta, of sol¬ diers killed south of the Etowah. Moreover, the Federal dead nearest to Hardee’s line lay there 2 days, during which they were frequently counted — at least 1000; and as there were 7 lines within some 300 yards, exposed 2}4 hours to the musketry of 2 divisions and the canister shot of 32 field-pieces, there must have been many uncounted dead; the counted would alone indicate a loss of at least 6000. As to the “ assaulting columns holding their ground within a few yards of the rebel trenches and there covering themselves with parapet,” it was utterly impossible. There would have been much more exposure in that than in mounting and crossing the little rebel ‘‘ para¬ pet”; but at one- point 75 yards in front of Cheatham’s line, a party of Federal soldiers. ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. » finding themselves sheltered from his missiles- by the form of the ground, made a “ parapet there which became connected with the main work. As the extension of the Federal intrenched line to their right had brought it nearer to Atlanta than was our left, and had made our position otherwise very dangerous, two new po¬ sitions for the army were chosen, one 9 or 10 miles south of Marietta, and the other on the high ground near the Chattahoochee. Col¬ onel Presstman was desired to prepare the first for occupation, and Brigadier- General Shoup,. commander of the artillery, was instructed to strengthen the other with a line of redoubts devised by himself. The troops took the first position in the morning of the 3d, and as General Sherman was strengthening his right greatly, they were- transferred to the second in the morning of the 5th. The cavalry of our left had been supported in the previous few days by a di¬ vision of State troops commanded by Major- General G. W. Smith. As General Sherman says, it was really a continuous battle lasting from June loth to July 3d.” The army occupied positions about Marietta 26 days, in which the want of artil¬ lery ammunition was especially felt ; for, in all those days we were exposed to an almost incessant fire of artillery as well as musketry — the former being the more harassing, because it could not be returned ; for our supply of artillery ammunition was so small that we were compelled to reserve it for battles and serious assaults. In the new position, each corps had two pon¬ toon bridges laid. Above the railroad bridge the Chattahoochee had numerous good fords. General Sherman, therefore, directed his. troops to that part of the river, 10 or 15 miles above our camp. On the 8th of July two of his corps had crossed the Chattahoochee and intrenched themselves. Therefore the Confed¬ erate army also crossed the river on the 9th. About the middle of June Captain Grant of the engineers was instructed to strengthen the fortifications of Atlanta materially, on the side towards Peach Tree Creek, by the addition of redoubts and by converting barbette into embrasure batteries. I also obtained a promise of seven sea-coast rifles from General Maury, to be mounted on that front. Colonel Presst¬ man was instructed to join Captain Grant with his subordinates, in this work of strength¬ ening the defenses of Atlanta, especially be¬ tween the Augusta and Marietta roads, as the enemy was approaching that side. For the same reason a position on the high ground looking down into the valley of Peach Tree Creek was selected for the army, from which.

Page 598

OPPOSING SHERMAN^ S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. it might engage the enemy if he exposed him¬ self in the passage of the stream. The position of each division was marked and pointed out to its staff-officers. We learned on the 17 th that the whole Fed¬ eral army had crossed the Chattahoochee; and late in the evening, while Colonel Presst- man was receiving from me instructions for the next day, I received the following telegram of that date : “ Lieutenant-General J. B. Hood has been commis¬ sioned to the temporary rank of general under the late law of Congress. I am directed by the Secretary of War to inform you that, as you have failed to arrest the advance of the enemy to the vicinity of At¬ lanta, and express no confidence that you can defeat or repel him, you are hereby relieved from the com¬ mand of the Army and Department of Tennessee, which you will immediately turn over to General Hood. “ S. Cooper, Adjutant and Inspector-General.” Orders transferring the command of the army* to General Hood were written and pub¬ lished immediately, and next morning I re¬ plied to the telegram of the Secretary of War : “ Your dispatch of yesterday received and obeyed — command of the Army and Department of Tennessee has been transferred to General Hood. As to the al¬ leged cause of my removal, I assert that Sherman’s army is much stronger compared with that of Tennes¬ see, than Grant’s compared with that of Northern Virginia. Yet the enemy has been compelled to ad¬ vance much more slowly to the vicinity of Atlanta than to that of Richmond and Petersburg ; and pen¬ etrated much deeper into Virginia than into Georgia. Confident language by a military commander is not usually regarded as evidence of competence.” General Hood came to my quarters early in the morning of the 18th, and remained there until nightfall. Intelligence was soon received that the Federal army was marching towards Atlanta, and at his urgent request I gave all necessary orders during the day. The most important one placed the troops in the position already chosen, which covered the roads by which the enemy was approaching. After transferring the command to General Hood I described to him the course of action I had arranged in my mind. If the enemy should give us a good opportunity in the pas¬ sage of Peach Tree Creek, I expected to attack him. If successful, we should obtain impor¬ tant results, for the enemy’s retreat would be on two sides of a triangle and our march on one. If we should not succeed, our intrench- ments would give us a safe refuge, where we could hold back the enemy until the promised State troops should join us ; then, placing them on the nearest defenses of the place (where there were, or ought to be, seven sea-coast rifles, sent us from Mobile by General Maury), I would attack the Federals in flank with the 595 three Confederate corps. If we were success¬ ful, they would be driven against the Chatta¬ hoochee below the railroad, where there are no fords, or away from their supplies, as we might fall on their left or right flank. If unsuccessful, we could take refuge in Atlanta, which we could hold indefinitely ; for it was too strong to be taken by assault, and too ex¬ tensive to be invested. This would win the campaign, the object of which the country supposed Atlanta to be. At Dalton, the great numerical superiority of the enemy made the chances of battle much against us, and even if beaten they had a safe refuge behind the fortified pass of Ring- gold and in the fortress of Chattanooga. Our refuge, in case of defeat, was in Atlanta, 100 miles off, with 3 rivers intervening. There¬ fore victory for us could not have been de¬ cisive, while defeat would have been utterly disastrous. Between Dalton and the Chatta¬ hoochee we could have given battle only by attacking the enemy intrenched, or so near intrenchments that the only result of success to us would have been his falling back into them, while defeat would have been our ruin. In the course pursued our troops, always fighting under cover, had very trifling losses compared with those they inflicted, so that the enemy’s numerical superiority was reduced daily and rapidly ; and we could reasonably have expected to cope with them on equal ground by the time the Chattahoochee was passed. Defeat on the south side of that river would have been their destruction. We, if beaten, had a place of refuge in Atlanta — too strong to be assaulted, and too extensive to be invested. I had also hopes that by the break¬ ing of the railroad in its rear the Federal army might be compelled to attack us in a position of our own choosing, or forced into a retreat easily converted into a rout. After we crossed the Etowah, five detachments of cavalry were successively sent with instructions to destroy as much as they could of the railroad between Chattanooga and the Etowah. All failed, be¬ cause they were too weak. Captain James B. Harvey, an officer of great courage and sagac¬ ity, was detached on this service on the nth of June and remained near the railroad several weeks frequently interrupting, but not strong enough to prevent, its use. Early in the campaign the impressions of the strength of the cavalry in Mississippi and East Louisiana given me by Lieutenant-Gen¬ eral Polk, just from the command of that de¬ partment, gave me reason to hope that an adequate force commanded by the most com- *I have two reports of the strength of the army besides that of April 30th, already given : i. Of July ist, 39,746 infantry, 3855 artillery, and 10,484 cavalry; total, 54,085. 2. Of July loth, 36,901 infantry, 3755 artillery and 10,270 cavalry; total, 50,926. — J. E. J.

Page 599

OPPOSING SHERMAN'S ADVANCE TO ATLANTA. 596 patent officer in America for such service (General Forrest) could be sent from it for the purpose. I therefore made the suggestion to the President directly, June 13th and July i6th, and through General Bragg on the 3d, 12th, 1 6th, and 26th of June. I did so in the confi¬ dence that this cavalry would serve the Con¬ federacy far better by insuring the defeat of a great invasion than by repelling a mere raid. In his telegram of the 17 th, Mr. Davis gave his reasons for removing me, but in pages 556 to 561 of the ‘‘Rise and Fall” he gives many others, most of which depend on misrepre¬ sentations of the strength of the positions I occupied. They were not stronger than Gen¬ eral Lee’s ; indeed, my course was as like his as the dissimilarity of the two Federal com¬ manders permitted. As his had increased his great fame, it is not probable that the people who admired his course condemned another similar one. As to Georgia, the State most in¬ terested, its two most prominent and influ¬ ential citizens, Governor Joseph E. Brown (now Senator) and General Howell Cobb, remonstrated against my removal. The assertions in Mr. B. H. Hill’s letter quoted by Mr. Davis do not agree with those in his oration delivered in Atlanta in 1875. He said in it: “ I know that he (Mr. Davis) consulted General Lee fully, earnestly, and anxiously before this perhaps unfortunate re¬ moval.” That assertion is contradicted by one whose testimony, is above question — for in Southern estimation he has no superior as gen¬ tleman, soldier, and civilian — General Hamp¬ ton. General Lee had a conversation with him on the subject, of which he wrote to me : “ On that occasion he expressed great regret that you had been removed, and said that he had done all in his power to prevent it. The Secretary of War had recently been at his headquarters near Petersburg to consult as to this matter, and General Lee assured me that he had urged Mr. Seddon not to remove you from command, and had said to him that if you could not command the army we had no one who could. He was earnest in expressing not only his regret at your removal, but his entire confidence in yourself.’^ Everything seen about Atlanta proved that it was to be defended. We had been strengthening it a month, and had made it, under the circumstances, impregnable. We had defended Marietta, which had not a tenth of its strength, 26 days. General Sher¬ man appreciated its strength, for he made no attack, although he was before it about six weeks. I was a party to no such conversations as those given by Mr. Hill. No soldier above idi¬ ocy could express the opinions he ascribes to me. Mr. Davis condemned me for not fighting. General Sherman’s testimony and that of the Military Cemetery at Marietta refute the charge. I assert that had one of the other lieuten¬ ant-generals of the army (Hardee or Stewart) succeeded me, Atlanta would have been held by the Army of Tennessee. r r- r 7 ^ MAP OF hood’s invasion OF TENNESSEE.

Page 600

THE LEVEE AT NASHVILLE, LOOKING DOWN THE CUMBERLAND. (FROM A WAR-TIME PHOTOGRAPH.) HOOD’S INVASION N September 28th, 1864, less than four weeks from the day the Union forces occupied Atlanta, Gen¬ eral Sherman, who found his still uncon¬ quered enemy. General Hood, threatening his communications in Georgia, and BRIDGE OVER THE CUMBERLAND AT NASHVILLE. tliat formid¬ able raider. General Forrest, playing the mis¬ chief in Tennessee, sent to the latter State two divisions — General Newton’s of the Fourth Corps, and General J. D. Morgan’s of the Fourteenth — to aid in destroying, if possi¬ ble, that intrepid dragoon. To make assurance doubly sure, the next day he ordered General George H. Thomas, his most capable and ex¬ perienced lieutenant, and the commander of more than three-fifths of his grand army, ‘‘ back to Stevenson and Decherel ... to look to Tennessee.” No order would have been more unwelcome to General Thomas. It removed him from the command of his own thoroughly organized and harmonious army, 60,000 veterans, whom he knew and trusted, and who knew and loved him, and relegated him to the position of su¬ pervisor of communications. It also sent him to the rear, just when great preparations were making for an advance. But, as often happens, VoL. XXXIV.— 83. OF TENNESSEE. what seemed an adverse fate opened the door to great, unforeseen opportunity. The task of expelling Forrest and reopening the broken communications was speedily completed; and on the 17th of October General Thomas wrote to General Sherman: I hope to join you very soon.” The latter, however, had other views, and the hoped-for junction was never made. On the 19th he wrote to General Thomas: “ I will send back to Tennessee the Fourth Corps, all dismounted cavalry, all sick and wounded, and all incumbrances whatever, except what I can haul in our wagons. ... I want you to remain in Tennessee and take command of all my [military] division not actually present with me. Hood’s army may be set down at forty thousand (40,000) of all arms, fit for duty. . . . If you can defend the line of the Tennessee in my ab¬ sence of three (3) months it is all I ask.” With such orders, and under such circum¬ stances, General Thomas was left to play his part in the new campaign. General Hood, after a series of daring ad¬ ventures, which baffled all Sherman’s calcula¬ tions (^Mie can turn and twist like a fox,” said Sherman, and Avear out my army in pursuit”), concentrated his entire force, except Forrest’s cavalry, at Gadsden, Alabama, on the 2 2d of October; while General Sherman established his headquarters at Gaylesville, — a ‘^posi¬ tion,” as he wrote to General Halleck, “very good to watch the enemy.” In spite of this “ watch,” Flood suddenly appeared on the 26th at Decatur, on the Tennessee River, 75 miles northwest of Cxadsden. This move was a com¬ plete surprise, and evidently “ meant business.”

Page 601

HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. 598 The Fourth Corps, numbering about 12,000 men, commanded by Major-General D. S. Stanley, was at once ordered from Gaylesville, to report to General Thomas. Its leading di¬ vision reached Pulaski, Tenn., a small town on LIEUTENANT-GENERAL N. B. FORREST, C. S. A. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) the railroad, about 40 miles north of Decatur, on the I St of November, where it was joined four days later by the other two. Making a slight though somewhat length¬ ened demonstration against Decatur, General Hood pushed on to Tuscumbia, 45 miles west. Here he expected to find — what he had weeks before ordered — ample supplies, and the railroad in operation to Corinth. But he was doomed to disappointment. Instead of being in condition to make the rapid and tri¬ umphant march with which he had inflamed the ardor of his troops, he was detained three weeks, a delay fatal to his far-reaching hopes. Placing one corps on the north side of the river at Florence, he worked and waited for supplies and for Forrest, who had been play¬ ing havoc in West Tennessee, and was under orders to join him. Convinced now of Hood’s serious intentions, General Sherman also ordered the Twenty- third Corps, ten thousand men, under command of Major-General J. M. Schofield, to report to General Thomas. Reaching Pulaski, with one division on the 14th of November, General Schofield, though inferior in rank to Stanley, assumed command by virtue of being a de¬ partment commander. The whole force gath¬ ered there was less than 18,000 men; while in front were some 5000 cavalry, consisting of a brigade of about 1500, under General Croxton, and a division of some 3500, under General Edward Hatch, the latter being fortunately intercepted while on his way to join Sherman. The Confederate army in three corps (S. P. Lee’s, A. P. Stewart’s, and B. F. Cheatham’s) began its northward march on the 19th of No¬ vember, in the midst of weather of great sever¬ ity. It rained and snowed and hailed and froze, and the roads were almost impassable. Forrest had come up, with about 6000 cavalry, and led the advance with indomitable energy. Hatch and Croxton made such resistance as they could; but on the 22d, the head of Hood’s column was at Lawrenceburg, some 16 miles due west of Pulaski, and on a road running direct to Columbia, where the rail¬ road and turnpike to Nashville cross Duck River, and where there were less than 800 men to guard the bridges. The situation at Pulaski, with an enemy nearly three times as large fairly on the flank, was anything but cheering. Warned by the reports from Gen¬ eral Hatch, and by the orders of General Thomas, who, on the 20th, had directed Gen¬ eral Schofield to prepare to fall back to Co¬ lumbia, the two divisions of General J. D. Cox and General Wagner (the latter Newton’s old division) were ordered to march to Lynnville — about half-way to Columbia — on the 2 2d. On the 23d, the other two divisions, under General Stanley, were to follow wdth the wagon trains. It w^as not a moment too soon. On the morning of the 24th, General Cox, who had pushed on to within nine miles of Columbia, was roused by sounds of conflict away to the west. Taking a cross-road, leading south of Columbia, he reached the Mount Pleasant pike just in time to interpose his infantry be¬ tween Forrest’s cavalry and a hapless brigade, under command of Colonel Capron, which was being handled most unceremoniously. In another hour, Forrest would have been in pos¬ session of the crossings of Duck River; and the only line of communication with Nashville would have been in the hands of the enemy. General Stanley, who had left Pulaski in the afternoon of the 23d, reached Lynnville after dark. Rousing his command at i o’clock in the morning, by 9 o’clock the head of his col¬ umn connected with Cox in front of Columbia — having marched 30 miles since 2 o’clock of the preceding afternoon. These timely move¬ ments saved the army from utter destruction. When General Sherman had finally deter¬ mined on his march to the sea, he requested General Rosecrans, in Missouri, to send to Gen¬ eral Thomas two divisions, under General A. J. Smith, which had been loaned to General Banks for the Red River expedition, and were

Page 602

HOOD'S INVASION OF 7ENNESSEE. 599 MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN M. SCHOFIELD. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) now repelling the incursion of Price into Missouri. As they were not im¬ mediately forthcoming, General Grant had ordered General Rawlins, his chief-of-staff, to St. Louis, to direct, in person, their speedy embarkation. Thence, on the 7th, two weeks before Hood began his advance from Flor¬ ence, General Rawlins wrote to Gen¬ eral Thomas that Smith’s command, aggregating nearly 14,000, would begin to leave that place as early as the loth. No news was evermore anxiously awaited or more eagerly welcomed than this. But the promise could not be fulfilled. Smith had to march entirely across the State of Missouri; and instead of leaving St. Louis on the loth, he did not reach that place until the 24th. Had he come at the proposed time, it was General Thomas’s intention to place him at Eastport, on the Tennessee River, so as to tlireaten Hood’s flank and rear if he advanced. With such disposition, the battles of Franklin and Nashville would have been rele¬ gated to the category of events which never come to pass.” But, when Smith reached St. Louis, Hood was threatening Columbia ; and it was an open question whether he would not reach Nashville before the reenforcements from Missouri. As fast as the Union troops arrived at Co¬ lumbia, in their hurried retreat from Pulaski, works were thrown up, covering the approaches from the south, and the trains were sent across LIEUTENANT-GENERAL B. F. CHEATHAM, C. S. A. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) the river. But the line was found to be long than the small force could hold; and the river could easily be crossed, above or below the town. Orders were given to withdraw to the north side on the night of the 26th, but a heavy storm prevented. The next night the crossing was made, the railroad bridge was burned, and the pontoon boats were scuttled. It was an all-night job, the last of the pickets crossing at 5 in the morning. It wasnow the fifth day since the retreat from Pulaski began, and the little army had been exposed day and night to all sorts of weather except sunshine, and had been almost continually on the move. From desert¬ ers it was learned that Hood’s infantry num¬ bered 40,000 and his cavalry, under Forrest, 10,000 or 12,000. But the Union army was sjowly increasing by concentration and the arrival of recruits. It now numbered at Co¬ lumbia about 23,000 infantry and some 5000 cavalry — of whom only 3500 Avere mounted. General J. H. Wilson, who had been ordered by General Grant to report to General Sher¬ man, and of whom General Grant wrote, ‘H believe he will add fifty per cent, to the ef¬ fectiveness of your cavalry,” had taken com¬ mand of all General Thomas’s cavalry, which was trying to hold the fords east and west of Columbia. In spite of every opposition, Forrest sue-

Page 603

6oo HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. AIAJOR-GENERAL JAMES H. WILSON. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) ceecled in placing one of his divisions on the north side of Duck River before noon of the 28th, and forced back the Union cavalry on roads leading toward Spring Hill and Frank¬ lin. At I o’clock on the morning of the 29th General Wilson became convinced that the enemy’s infantry would begin crossing at day¬ light, and advised General Schofield to fall back to Franklin. At 3:30 the same morn¬ ing General Thomas sent him similar orders. Daylight revealed the correctness of Wil¬ son’s information. Cheatham’s corps, headed by Cleburne’s division, — a division unsur¬ passed for courage, energy, and endurance by any other in the Confederate army, — before sunrise was making its way over Duck River at Davis’s Ford, about five miles east of Colum¬ bia. The weather had cleared, and it was .a bright autumn morning, the air full of invig¬ orating life. General Flood in person accom¬ panied the advance. When General Schofield was informed that the Confederate infantry were crossing, he sent a brigade under Colonel P. Sidney Post, on a reconnaissance along the river bank, to learn what was going on. He also ordered General Stanley to march with two divisions, Wagner’s and Kimball’s, to Spring Hill, tak¬ ing the trains and all the reserve artillery. In less than half an hour after receiving the order. Stanley was on the way. On reaching the point where Rutherford Creek crosses the Franklin Pike, Kimball’s division was halted, by order of Gen¬ eral Schofield, and faced to the east to cover the crossing against a possible attack from that quarter. In this posi¬ tion Kimball remained all day. Stan¬ ley, with the other division, pushed on to Spring Hill. Just before noon, as the head of his column was ap¬ proaching that place, he met ^‘a cav¬ alry soldier who seemed to be badly scared,” who reported that Buford’s division of Forrest’s cavalry was ap¬ proaching from the east. The troops were at once double-quicked into the town, and the leading brigade, deploying as it advanced, drove off the enemy just as they were expect¬ ing, unmolested, to occupy the place. As the other brigades came up, they also were deployed, forming nearly a semicircle, — Opdycke’s brigade stretching in a thin line from the rail¬ road station north of the village to a point some distance east, and Lane’s from Opdycke’s right to the pike be¬ low. Bradley was sent to the front to occupy a knoll some three-fourths of a mile east, commanding all the approaches from that direction. Most of the artillery was placed on a rise south of the town. The trains were parked within the semicircle. MAJOR-GENERAL JACOB D. COX. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 604

HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. 6oi From Spring Hill roads radiate to all points, the turnpike between Columbia and Frank¬ lin being there intersected by turnpikes from Rally Hill and Mount Carmel, as well as by numerous dirt roads leading to the neighbor¬ ing towns. Possession of that point would not only shut out the Union army from the road to Nashville, but it would ef¬ fectually bar the way in every direction. Stanley’s arrival was not a moment too soon for the safety of the army under Schofield, and his prompt dispositions and steady courage, as Avell as his vig¬ orous hold of all the ground he occu¬ pied, gave his little command all the moral fruits of a victory. Hardly had the three brigades, num¬ bering, all told, less than 4000 men, reached the positions assigned them, when Bradley was assailed by a force which the men declared fought too well to be dismounted cavalry. At the same time, at Thompson’s Station, three miles north, an attack was made on a small wag¬ on train heading for Franklin ; and a dash was made by a detachment of the Con¬ federate cavalry on the Spring Hill sta¬ tion, northwest of the town. It seemed as if the little band, attacked from all points, was threatened with destruction. Bradley’s brigade was twice assaulted, but held its own, though with consider¬ able loss, and only a singleregiment could be spared to reenforce him. The third assault was more successful, and he was driven back to the edge of the village, Bradley himself receiving a disabling wound while rallying his men. In attempting to follow up this tempo¬ rary advantage, the enemy, in crossing a wide corn-field, was opened upon with spherical case-shot from eight guns, posted on the knoll, and soon scattered in considerable confusion. These attacks undoubtedly came from Cle¬ burne’s division, and were made under the eye of the corps commander. General Cheat¬ ham, and the army commander. General Hood. That they were not successful, especially as the other two divisions of the same corps, Brown’s and Bate’s, were close at hand, and Stewart’s corps not far off, seems unaccount¬ able. Except this one small division deployed in a long thin line to cover the wagons, there were no Union troops within striking distance ; the cavalry were about Mount Car¬ mel, five miles east, fully occupied in keep¬ ing Forrest away from Franklin and the Harpeth River crossings. The nearest aid was Kimball’s division, seven miles south, at Ruth¬ erford Creek. The other three divisions of in¬ fantry which made up Schofield’s force — Wood’s, Cox’s, and Ruger’s (in part) — were still at Duck River. Thus night closed down upon the solitary division, on whose boldness of action devolved the safety of the whole force which Sherman had spared from his march to the sea to breast the tide of Hood’s invasion. MAJOR-GENERAL A. J. SMITH. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) When night came, the danger rather increased than diminished. A single Confederate bri¬ gade, like Adams’s or Cockrell’s or Maney’s, — veterans since Shiloh, — planted square across the pike, either south or north of Spring Hill, would have effectually prevented Schofield’s retreat, and daylight would have found his whole force cut off from every avenue of escape by more than twice its numbers, to assault whom would be madness, and to avoid whom would be impossible. Why Cleburne and Brown failed to drive away Stanley’s one division before dark ; why Bate failed to possess himself of the pike south of the town ; why Stewart failed to lead his troops to the pike at the north ; why For¬ rest, with his audacious temper and his enter¬ prising cavalry, did not fully hold Thompson’s Station or the crossing of the West Flarpeth, half-way to Franklin : these are to this day disputed questions among the Confederate commanders; and it is not proposed here to discuss them. The afternoon and night of November 29th, 1864, may well be set down in the calendar of lost opportunities. The he¬ roic valor of those same troops the next day, and their frightful losses, as they attempted to

Page 605

6o2 HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, retrieve their mistake, show what might have been. By 8 o’clock at night — two hours only after sunset, of a moonless night — at least two corps of Hood’s army were in line of battle facing the turnpike, and not half a mile away. The long line of Confederate camp-fires burned brightly, and their men could be seen, standing around them, or sauntering about in groups. Now and then a few would come almost to the pike and fire at a passing Union squad, but without provoking a reply. General Schofield, who had remained at Duck River all day, reached Spring Hill about 7 p. ]\r., with Ruger’s division and Whitaker’s brigade. Leaving the latter to cover a cross-road a mile or two below the town, he started with Ruger about 9 p. m. to force a passage at Thompson’s Station, sup¬ posed to be in the hands of the enemy. At II p. M. General Cox arrived with his division, and soon after Schofield returned to Spring Hill with the welcome news that the way was open. From Thompson’s Station he sent his engineer officer. Captain Wm. J. Twining, to Franklin, to tele¬ graph the situation to General Thom¬ as, with whom all communication had been cut off since early morn¬ ing. Captain Twin- in g’s dispatch shows most clearly the critical condi¬ tion of affairs. “The general says he will not be able to get farther than Thompson’s Sta¬ tion to-night. . . . He regards his sit¬ uation as extremely perilous _ Think¬ ing the troops un¬ der A. J. Smith’s command had reached Franklin, General Schofield directed me to have them pushed down to Spring Hill by daylight to¬ morrow.” This was Tuesday. The day before. General Thomas had tele¬ graphed to Gen¬ eral Schofield that Smith had not yet arrived, but would be at Nashville in three days — that is, Thurs¬ day. The expectation, therefore, of finding him at Franklin, was like a drowning man’s catch¬ ing at a straw. J list before midnight Cox started from Spring Hill for Franklin, and was ordered to pick up Ruger at Thompson’s Station. At i a. m. he was on the road, and the train, over five miles long, was drawn out. At the very outset, it had to cross a bridge in single file. So difficult was this whole movement, that it was 5 o’clock in the morning before the wagons were fairly under way. As the head of the train passed Thompson’s Station, it was attacked by the Confederate cavalry, and for a while there was great consternation. Wood’s division, which had followed Cox from Duck River, was marched along the east of the pike, to ]3rotect the train, and the enemy were speedily driven off. It was near daybreak when the last wagon left Spring Hill. Kimball’s divis¬ ion followed Wood’s, and at 4 o’clock Wag¬ ner drew in his lines, his skirmishers remain¬ ing till it was fairly daylight. The rear-guard

Page 606

HOOD'S INVASIOH OF TENNESSEE. 603 was commanded by Colonel Emerson Op- dycke, who was prepared, if necessary, to sac¬ rifice the last man to secure the safety of the main body. So efficiently did his admirable brigade do its work, that, though surrounded by a cloud of the enemy’s cavalry, which made frequent dashes at its lines, not a strag¬ gler nor a wagon was left behind. The ground was strewn with knapsacks, cut from the shoulders of a lot of raw recruits, weighed down with their unaccustomed burden. The head of the column, under General Cox, reached the outskirts of P'ranklin about the same hour that the rear-guard was leaving Spring Hill. Here the tired, sleepy, hungry men, who had fought and inarched, day and night, for nearly a week, threw up a line of earthworks on a slight eminence which guards the southern approach to the town, even be¬ fore they made their coffee. Then they gladly dropped anywhere, for the much-needed forty winks.” Slowly the rest of the weary column, regiment after regiment of worn-out men, filed into the works, and continued the line, till a com¬ plete bridge-head, from the river bank above to the river bank below, encircled the town. By noon of the 30th, all the troops had come up, and the wagons were crossing the river, which was already fordable, notwithstanding the recent heavy rainfalls. The rear-guard was still out, having an occasional bout with the enemy. The Columbia Pike bisected the works, which at that point were built just in front of the Carter house, a one-story brick dwelling west of the pike, and a large gin-house on the east side. Between the gin-house and the river, the works were partly protected in front by a hedge of osage orange, and on the knoll, near the railroad cut close to the bank, were two batteries belonging to the Fourth Corps. Near the Carter house was a considerable thicket of locust trees. Except these obstructions, the whole ground in front was entirely unobstructed and fenceless, and, from the works, every part of it was in plain sight. General Cox’s division of three brigades, commanded that day, in order from left to right, by Colonels Stiles and Casement and General Reilly, occupied the ground between the Columbia Pike and the river above the town. The front line consisted of 8 regiments, 3 in the works and i in reserve for each of the brigades of Stiles and Casement, while Reilly’s brigade nearest the pike had but 2 regiments in the works, and 2 in a second line, with still another behind that. West of the pike, reaching to a ravine through which passes a road branching from the Carter’s Creek Pike, was Ruger’s division of two bri¬ gades — the third, under General Cooper, not having come up from J ohnsonville. Strickland’s brigade, of 4 regiments, had 2 in the works and 2 in reserve. Two of these regiments, the 7 2d Illinois and 44th Missouri, belonged to A. J. Smith’s corps, and had reported to General Schofield only the day before. A third, which was in reserve, the 183d Ohio, was a large and entirely new regiment, having been mustered into service only three weeks before, and join¬ ing the army for the first time on the 28th. Moore’s brigade, of 6 regiments, had 4 in the works and 2 in reserve. Beyond Ruger, reaching from the ravine to the river beloAV, was Kimball’s division of the Fourth Corps, — all veterans, — consisting of three brigades com- VIEVV OF THE WINSTEAD HILLS WHERE HOOD FORMED HIS LINE OF BATTLE. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) The right, of Wagner’s Union brigade, in the advanced position (see map, previous page), was posted behind the stone wall in the foreground. The Columbia Pike is shown passing over the hills on the left of the picture.

Page 607

Carter house (under steeple). Gin-house. Roper’s Knob THE BATTLE-FIELD OF FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE, LOOKING NORTH FROM GENERAL CHEATHAM’s HEADQUARTERS. (FROM A FHOTOGRAPH BY L. T. SHULL.)

Page 608

HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. 605 manded by Generals William Grose and Walter C. Whitaker and Colonel Kirby. All the troops in the works were ordered to report to General Cox, to whom was assigned the command of the defenses. General Wood’s division of the Fourth Corps had gone over the river with the trains; and two brigades of Wagner’s division, which had so valiantly stood their ground at Spring Hill and covered the rear since, were halted on a slope about half a mile to the front. Opdycke had brought his bri¬ gade within the works, and held them massed, near the pike, behind the Carter house. Besides tlie guns on the knoll, near the railroad cut, there were 6 pieces THE CARTER HOUSE, FROM THE SIDE TOWARD THE TOWN. dark fringe of chestnuts along the river bank, far across the Columbia Pike, the colors gayly fluttering and the muskets gleaming brightly, and advancing steadily, in perfect order, dressed on the center, straight for the works. Meantime, General Schofield had retired to the fort, on a high bluff on the other side of the river, some two miles away, by the road, and had taken General Stanley with him. From the fort, the whole field of oper¬ ations was plainly visible. Notwith¬ standing all these demonstrations, the two brigades of Wagner were left on the knoll where they had been halted, and, with scarcely an apology for works to protect THE CARTER HOUSE, FROM THE CONFEDERATE SIDE. FRONT VIEW OF THE CARTER HOUSE. (from PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN IN 1884. ) in Reilly’s works; 4 on Strickland’s left; 2 on Moore’s left, and 4 on Grose’s left — in all, 26 guns in that part of the works, facing south, and 12 more in reserve, on or near the Columbia Pike. As the bright autumn day, hazy with the golden light of an Indian summer atmos¬ phere, wore away, the troops who had worked so hard looked hopefully forward to a pros¬ pect of ending it in peace and rest, prepara¬ tory either to a night march to Nashville, or to a reenforcement by Smith’s corps and Gen¬ eral Thomas. But about two o’clock, some suspicious movements on the hills a mile or two away — the waving of signal flags and the deployment of the enemy in line of battle — caused General Wagner to send his adjutant- general, from the advanced position where his two brigades had halted, to his command¬ ing general, with the information that Hood seemed to be preparing for attack. In a very short time the whole Confederate line could be seen, stretching in battle array, from the VoL. XXXIV.— 84. them, had waited until it was too late to retreat without danger of degenerating into a rout. On came the enemy, as steady and resist¬ less as a tidal wave. A couple of guns, in the advance line, gave tjiem a shot and galloped back to the works. A volley from a thin skir¬ mish line was sent into their ranks, but with¬ out causing any delay to the massive array. A moment more, and with that wild ‘Hebei yell” which, once heard, is never forgotten, the great human wave swept along, and seemed to ingulf the little force which had so sturdily awaited it. The first shock came, of course, upon the two misplaced brigades of Wagner’s division, which, through some one’s blunder, had re¬ mained in their false position until too late to retire without disaster. They had no tools to throw up works ; and when struck by the resistless sweep of Cleburne’s and Brown’s divisions, they had only to make their way, as best they could, back to the works. In that wild rush, in which friend and foe were inter¬ mingled, and the piercing “rebel yell” rose

Page 609

6o6 HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, high above the Yankee cheer,” nearly seven hundred were made prisoners. But, worst of all for the U nion side, the men of Reilly’s and Strickland’s brigades dared not fire, lest they should shoot down their own comrades, and the guns, loaded with grape and canister, stood silent in the embrasures. With loud shouts of “ Let us go into the works with them,” the triumphant Confederates, now more like a wild, howling mob than an organized army, swept on to the very works, with hardly a check from any quarter. So fierce was the rush that a number of the fleeing soldiers — officers and men — dropped exhausted into the ditch, and lay there while the terrific contest raged over their heads, till, under cover of darkness, they could crawl safely inside the intrenchments. On Strickland’s left, close to the Columbia Pike, was posted one of the new infantry regi¬ ments. The tremendous onset, the wild yells, the whole infernal din of the strife, were too much for such an undisciplined body. As they saw their comrades from the advance line rushing to the rear, they too turned and fled. The con¬ tagion spread, and in a few minutes a disor¬ derly stream was pouring down the pike past the Carter house toward the town. The guns were abandoned and the works for a consid¬ erable space deserted — only to be occupied a moment later by Cleburne’s and Brown’s men, who swarmed into the gap. At this critical juncture. Colonel Emerson Opdycke, who, un¬ ordered, had brought his command within the works, seeing the fearful peril, ordered forward his well-disciplined brigade, which, deploying BRIDGE AT FRANKLIN OVER THE HARI’ETII RIVER — LOOKING UP-STREAM. The left of the picture is the north bank of the stream ; Frank¬ lin is upon the south bank. Fort Granger, where General Scho¬ field had his headquarters, occupied the site of the buildings on the north bank. as it advanced, was soon involved in as fierce a hand-to-hand fight as ever soldiers engaged in. The regiments which formed Reilly’s sec¬ ond line had remained steadfast, and also ral¬ lied to the work. A large part of Conrad’s and Lane’s men, as they came in, though wholly disorganized, turned about and gave the enemy a hot reception. Opdycke’s horse was shot under him, and he fought on foot at the head of his brigade. General Cox was everywhere present, encouraging and cheering on his men. General Stanley, who, from the fort where he had gone with General Schofield, had seen the opening clash, galloped to the front as soon as possible and did all that a brave man could until he was painfully wounded. Some of Opdycke’s men manned the abandoned guns in Reilly’s works ; others filled the gap in Strickland’s line. These timely movements first checked and then repulsed the assaulting foe, and soon the entire line of works was re-occupied, the enemy sul¬ lenly giving up the prize which was so nearly won. Stewart’s corps, which was on Cheatham’s right, filling the space to the river, kept abreast of its valiant companion, and, meeting no obstacle, reached the works near the Union left before Cheatham made the breach at the Columbia Pike. Owing to the peculiar for¬ mation of the field, the left of Stewart’s line was thrown upon the same ground with the right of Cheatham’s; the two com¬ mands there became much FRONT VIEW OF THE GIN-HOUSE. The line of the Union works ran in front of, and only a few feet dis¬ tant from, the Gin-house ; in 1886 a faint depression along the edge of the field still indicated the position. Near the tree seen in the lower pic¬ ture there is a round, deep hollow which also afforded protection to the Union soldiers. The lower pic¬ ture was taken from the same point on the pike, looking a little to the right, as the view of “ The Carter House, from the Confederate side,” on page 605. VIEW OF THE GIN-HOUSE, FROM THE PIKE.

Page 610

HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. intermingled. This accounts for so many of some distance east of the town, with the evident General Stewart’s officers and men being purpose of getting at Schofield’s wagons. But killed in front of Reilly’s and Casement’s he reckoned without his host. Hatch and regiments. Croxton, by General Wilson’s direction, fell Where there was nothing to hinder the upon him with such vigor that he returned to Union fire, the muskets of Stiles’s and Case- the south side, and gave our forces no further ment’s brigades made fearful havoc ; while the batteries at the railroad cut plowed furrows through the ranks of the advancing foe. Time after time they came up to the very works, but they never crossed them except as prisoners. More than one color-bearer was shot down on the parapet. It is impossible to exag¬ gerate the fierce energy with which the Confederate soldiers, that short November afternoon, threw them¬ selves against the works, fighting with what seemed the very mad¬ ness of despair. There was not a breath of wind, and the dense smoke settled doAvn upon the field, so that, after the first assault, it was impos¬ sible to see at any distance. Through this blinding medium, assault after assault was made, several of the Union officers declaring in their reports that their lines received as many as thirteen distinct attacks. Between the gin-house and the Co¬ lumbia Pike the fighting was fierc¬ est, and the Confederate losses the greatest. Here fell most of the Con¬ federate generals, who, that fateful afternoon, madly gave up their lives — Adams and Quarles, of Stewart’s corps — Adams’s horse astride the works, and himself pitched headlong into the Union lines. Cockrell, of the same corps, was severely wounded. In Cheatham’s corps, Cle¬ burne and Cranberry were killed near the pike. On the west of the pike Strahl and Gist were killed, and Brown was severely wounded. Gen¬ eral G. W. Gordon was captured by Opdycke’s brigade, inside the works. The heaviest loss in all the Union regiments was in the 44th Mis¬ souri, the advance-guard of Smith’s long-ex¬ pected reenforcement, which had been sent to BRIGADIER-GENERAL EMERSON OPDYCKE. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) trouble. At nightfall the victory was com¬ plete on every part of the Union lines. But desultory firing was kept up till long after dark here and there on the Confederate side, though with little result. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, as the Confed¬ erate lines were forming for their great assault, General Schofield, in reply to a telegram from General Thomas, asking him if he could ‘‘hold Hood at Franklin for three days longer,” re¬ plied, “ I do not think I can. ... It appears to me I ought to take position at Brentwood at once.” Accordingly General Thomas, at 3:30, directed him to retire to Brentwood, which he Columbia on the 27th, and was here stationed did that night, bringing away all the wagons on the right of the raw regiment, which broke and ran at the first onset of the enemy. Quickly changing front, it held its ground, but with a loss of 34 killed, 37 wounded, and 92 miss¬ ing, many of the latter being wounded. In the 7 2d Illinois, its companion, every field- officer was wounded, and the entire color- guard, of I sergeant and 8 corporals, was shot down. Its losses were 10 killed, 66 wounded, and 75 missing. While this infantry battle was going on, Forrest had crossed the river with his cavalry and other property in safety. Among the spoils of war were 33 Confederate colors, captured by our men from the enemy. The morning found the entire infantry force safe within the friendly shelter of the works at Nashville, where they also welcomed the veterans of A. J. Smith, who had just arrived from Missouri. Soon after, a body of about five thousand men came in from Chattanooga, chiefly sluggards of Gen¬ eral Sherman’s army, too late for their proper commands. These were organized into a pro¬ visional division under General J. B. Steedman,

Page 611

6o8 HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. and were posted between the Murfreesboro’ Pike and the river. Cooper’s brigade also came in after a narrow escape from capture, as well as several regiments of colored troops from the railroad between Nashville and Johnson- ville. Their arrival completed the force on which General Thomas was to rely for the task he now placed before himself — the destruction of Hood’s army. It was an ill-assorted and heterogeneous mass ; not yet welded into an army, and lacking a great proportion of the outfit with which to undertake an aggressive campaign. Horses, wagons, mules, pontoons, everything needed to mobilize an army, had to be obtained. At that time they did not exist at Nashville. The next day Hood’s columns appeared be¬ fore the town, and took up their positions on a line of hills nearly parallel to those occupied by the Union army, and speedily threw up works, and prepared to defend their ground. Probably no commander ever underwent two weeks of greater anxiety and distress of mind than General Thomas during the inter¬ val between Hood’s arrival and his precipitate departure from the vicinity of Nashville. The story is too painful to dwell upon, even after the lapse of 23 years. From the 2dofl)ecem- ber until the battle was fought on the 15th, the general-in-chief did not cease, day or night, to send him from the headquarters at City Point, A^a., most urgent and often most uncalled-for orders in regard to his op¬ erations, culminating in an order on the 9th relieving him, and directing him to turn over his command and to report himself to General Schofield, who was assigned to his place ; an order unprecedented in military annals, but which, if unrc- voked, the great captain would have obeyed with loyal single-heartedness. This order, though made out at the Adjutant-Gen¬ eral’s office in AVashington, was not sent to General Thomas, and he did not know of its existence until told of it some years later by General Halleck, at San Francisco. He felt, however, that something of the kind was impending. General Halleck dispatched to him, on the morning of the 9th : Lieutenant-General Grant expresses much dissatisfac¬ tion at your delay in attack¬ ing the enemy.” His reply shows how entirely he un¬ derstood the situation : I feel conscious I have done everything in my power, and that the troops could not have been gotten ready before this. If General Graiit should o?'der me io he 7'elievc(l.^ I will submit without a mimnurl As he was writing this, — 2 o’clock in the afternoon of December 9th, — a terrible storm of freez¬ ing rain had been pouring down since day¬ light, and it kept on pouring and freezing all that day and a part of the next. That night General Grant notified him that the order relieving him — which he had divined — was suspended. But he did not know who had been designated as his successor, nor the humiliating nature of the order. With this threat hanging over him; with the utter impossibility, in that weather, of making any movement; with the prospect that the labors of his whole life were about to end in disap¬ pointment, if not disaster, — he never, for an instant, abated his energy or his work of prep¬ aration. Not an hour, day or night, was he idle. MAJOR-GENERAL PATRICK R. CLEBURNE, C. S. A., KILLED AT FRANKLIN, NOVEMBER 30, 1864. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 612

HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, 609 Nobody — not even his most trusted staff-offi¬ cers — knew the contents of the telegrams that came to him. But it was very evident that some- r.IEUTENANT-GENERAL S. D. LEE. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) thing greatly troubled him. While the rain was falling and the fields and roads were ice-bound, he would sometimes sit by the window for an hour or more, not speaking a word, gazing steadily out upon the forbidding prospect, as if he were trying to will the storm away. It was curious and interesting to see how, in this gloomy interval, his time was occupied by matters not strictly military. Now, it was a visit from a delegation of the city government, in regard to some municipal regulation ; again, somebody whose one horse had been seized and put into the cavalry ; then, a committee of citizens, begging that wood might be fur¬ nished, to keep some poor families from freez¬ ing; and, of evenings. Governor Johnson — then Vice-President elect — would unfold to him, with much iteration, his fierce views con¬ cerning secession, rebels, and reconstruction. To all he gave a patient and kindly hearing, and he often astonished Governor Johnson by his knowledge of constitutional and interna¬ tional law. But, underneath all, it was plain to see that General Grant’s dissatisfaction keenly affected him, and that only by the proof which a successful battle would furnish could he hope to regain the confidence of the general-in-chief. So when, at 8 o’clock on the evening of December 14th, after having laid his plans before his corps commanders, and dismissed them, he dictated to General Halleck the telegram : “ The ice having melted away to¬ day, the enemy will be attacked to-morrow morning,” he drew a deep sigh of relief, and for the first time for a week showed again something of his natural buoyancy and cheer¬ fulness. He moved about more briskly ; he put in order all the little last things that re¬ mained to be done ; he signed his name where it was needed in the letter-book, and then, giving orders to his staff-officers to be ready at 5 o’clock the next morning, went gladly to bed. The ice had not melted a day too soon; for, while he was writing the telegram to General Halleck, General Logan was speed¬ ing his way to Nashville, with orders from General Grant which would have placed him in command of all the Union forces there assembled. General Thomas, fortunately, did not then learn this second proof of General Grant’s lack of confidence; and General Logan, on reaching Louisville, found that COLONEL JOHN OVERTON’s HOUSE, GENERAL HOOD’s HEADQUARTERS BEFORE NASHVILLE.

Page 613

6io HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. VIEWS OF FORT NEGLEV ON THE LEFT OF THE UNION INTRENCHMENTS, NASHVILLE, BETWEEN THE FRANKLIN AND NOLENSVILLE PIKES. (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS.) The lower picture shows a casemate protected with railroad iron. The hills in the distance were the Confederate center and left at the opening of the fight. the work intended for him was already done — and he came no farther. At the very time that these orders were made out, at Washington, in obedience to General Grant’s directions, a large part of the cavalry was un¬ mounted; two divisions were absent securing horses and proper outfit ; wagons were unfin¬ ished and mules lacking or unbroken ; pon¬ toons unmade and pontoniers untrained ; the ground was covered with a glare of ice which made all the fields and hillsides impassable for horses and scarcely passable for foot-men. The natives declared that the Yankees brought their weather as well as their army with them. Every corps commander in the army protested that a movement under such conditions would be little short of madness, and certain to re¬ sult in disaster. A very considerable reorganization of the army also took place during this enforced de¬ lay. General Stanley, still suffering from his wound, went North, and General T. J. Wood, who had been with it from the beginning, suc¬ ceeded to the command of the Fourth Corps. General Ruger, who had commanded a divis¬ ion in the Twenty- third Corps, was also dis¬ abled by sickness, and was succeeded by Gen¬ eral D. N. Couch, formerly a corps commander in the Army of the Potomac, and who had recently been assigned to duty in the Depart¬ ment of the Cumberland. General Wagner was retired from command of his division, and was succeeded by General W. L. Elliott, who had been chief of cavalry on General Thomas’s staff in the Atlanta campaign. General Ken¬ ner Garrard, who had commanded a cavalr}'' division during the Atlanta campaign, was as¬ signed to an infantry division in Smith’s corps. In all these cases, except in that of General Wood succeeding to the command of the Fourth Corps, the newly assigned officers were entire strangers to the troops over whom they were placed. On the afternoon of the 14th of December General Thomas summoned his corps com¬ manders, and, delivering to each a written

Page 614

HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, 6ii order containing a detailed plan of the battle, went with them carefully and thoroughly over the whole ground, answering all questions and explaining all doubts. Never had a commander a more loyal corps of subordinates or a more devoted army. The feeling in the ranks was one of absolute and enthusiastic confidence in their general. Some had served with him since his opening triumph at Mill Springs; some had never seen his face till two weeks before. But there was that in his bearing, as well as in the proud security of his old soldiers, which inspired the new-comers with as abso¬ lute a sense of reliance upon him as was felt by the oldest of his veterans. The plan, in general terms, was for General Steedman, on the extreme left, to move out early in the morning, threatening the rebel right, while the cavalry, which had been placed on the extreme right, and A. J. Smith’s corps were to make a grand left wheel with the entire right wing, assaulting and, if possible, overlapping the left of Hood’s position. The Fourth Corps was to form the pivot for this

Page 615

6i2 HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. wheel, and to threaten and perhaps attack Montgomery Hill; while Gen¬ eral Schofield was to be held in reserve, near the left center, for such use as the exi¬ gency might develop. It was not daylight, on the morning of the 15th of December, when the army began to move. In most of the camps, reveille had been sounded at 4 o’clock, and by 6 every¬ thing was ready. It turned out a warm, sunny, winter morning. A dense fog at first hung over the valleys and completely hid all movements; but by 9 o’clock this had cleared away. General Steed man, on the extreme left, was the first to draw out of the defenses, and to assail the enemy, at their works between the Nolensville and Murfreesboro’ pikes. It was not intended as a real attack, though it had that effect. Two of Steedman’s brigades, chiefly colored troops, kept two divisions of Cheatham’s corps constantly busy, while his third was held in reserve ; thus one Confed¬ erate corps was disposed of. Lee’s corps, next on Cheatham’s left, after sending two brigades to the assistance of Stewart, on the right, was held in place by the threatening position of the garrison troops, and did not fire a shot during the day. Indeed, both Cheatham’s and Lee’s corps were held, as in a vise, between Steed- man and the Fourth Corps. Lee’s Corps was unable to move or to fight. Steedman main¬ tained the ground he occupied till the next morning, with no very heavy loss. When, about 9 o’clock the sun began to burn away the fog, the sight from General Thomas’s position was inspiring. A little to the left, on Montgomery Hill, the salient of the Confederate lines, and not more than six hun¬ dred yards distant from Wood’s salient, on Lawrens Hill, could be seen the advance line of works, behind which an unknown force of the enemy lay in wait. Beyond, and along the Hillsboro’ Pike were stretches of stone wall, with here and there a detached earthwork, through whose embrasures peeped the threat¬ ening artillery. To the right, along the valley of Richland Creek, the dark line of Wilson’s advancing cavalry could be seen slowly mak¬ ing its difficult way across the Avet, swampy, stumpy ground. Close in front, and at the foot of the hill, its right joining Wilson’s left, was A. J. Smith’s corps, full of cheer and en¬ terprise, and glad to be once more in the open field. Then came the Fourth Corps, whose left, bending back toward the north, was hid¬ den behind Lawrens Hill. Already the skir¬ mishers Avere engaged, the Confederates sloAvly falling back before the determined and steady pressure of Smith and Wood. By the time that Wilson’s and Smith’s lines Avere fully extended and brought up to Avithin striking distance of the Confederate Avorks, along the Hillsboro’ Pike, it Avas noon. Post’s SOUTHWEST FRONT OF THE CAPITOL AT NASHVILLE. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) Near the base of the first column is seen in the distance the flag of Fort Negley.

Page 616

HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. brigade of Wood’s old division (now com¬ manded by General Sam Beatty), which lay at the foot of Montgomery Hill, f^ull of dash and enterprise, had since morning been re¬ garding the works at the summit with covet¬ ous eyes. At Post’s suggestion, it v/as deter¬ mined to see which party wanted them most. Accordingly, a charge was ordered — and in a moment the brigade was swarming up the hillside, straight for the enemy’s advanced work. For almost the first time since the grand assault on Missionary Ridge, a year before, here was an open field where everything could be seen. From General Thomas’s headquar¬ ters everybody looked on with breathless sus¬ pense, as the blue line, broken and irregular, but with steady persistence, made its way up the steep hillside against a fierce storm of musketry and artillery. Most of the shots, however, passed over the men’s heads. It was a struggle to keep up with the colors, and, as they neared the top, only the strongest were at the front. Without a moment’s pause, the color- bearers and those who had kept up with them. Post himself at the head, leaped the parapet. As the colors waved from the summit, the whole line swept forward and was over the works in a twinkling, gathering in prisoners and guns. Indeed, so large was the mass of prisoners that a few minutes later were seen heading toward our own lines, that it was feared by a number of officers at General Thomas’s headquarters that the assault had failed and that the prisoners were Confeder¬ ate reserves who had rallied and retaken the works. But the fear was only momentary; for the wild outburst of cheers which rang across the valley told the story of complete success. Meanwhile, farther to the right, as the op¬ posing lines neared each other, the sound of battle grew louder and louder, and the smoke thicker and thicker, until the whole valley was filled with the haze. It was now past noon, and, at every point, the two armies were so near together that an assault was inevitable. Hatch’s division of Wilson’s cavalry, at the ex¬ treme right of the continuous line, was con¬ fronted by one of the detached works which Hood had intended to be ‘‘impregnable”; and the right of McArthur’s division of A. J. Smith’s infantry was also within striking dis¬ tance of it. Coon’s cavalry brigade was dis¬ mounted and ordered to assault the work, while Hill’s infantry brigade received similar orders. The two commanders moved for¬ ward at the same time, and entered the work together. Colonel Hill falling dead at the head of his command. In a moment the whole Con¬ federate force in that quarter was routed, and fled to the rear, while the captured guns were were turned on them. VoL. XXXIV.— 85. 613 With the view of extending the operations of Wilson’s cavalry still farther to the right, and if possible gaining the rear of the enemy’s left, the two divisions of the Twenty-third Corps, which had been in reserve near Lawrens Hill, were ordered to Smith’s right, while orders were sent to Wilson to gain, if possible, a lodgment on the Granny White Pike. These orders were promptly obeyed, and Cooper’s brigade on reaching its new position got into a handsome fight, in which its losses were more than the losses of the rest of the Twenty- third corps during the two days’ battle. But though the enemy’s left was thus rudely driven from its fancied security, the salient at the center, being an angle formed by the line along Hillsboro’ Pike and that stretching toward the east, was still firmly held. Post’s successful assault had merely driven out or captured the advance forces. The main line remained intact. As soon as word came of the successful assault on the right. General Thomas sent orders to General Wood, com¬ manding the Fourth Corps, to prepare to attack the salient. The staff-officer by whom this order was sent did not at first find General Wood ; but seeing the two division command¬ ers whose troops would be called upon for the work, gave them the instructions. As he was riding along the line, he met one of the brigade commanders — an officer with a reputation for exceptional courage and gal¬ lantry — who, in reply to the direction to pre¬ pare for the expected assault, said, “You don’t mean that we’ve got to go in here and attack the works on that hill ? ” “ Those are the orders,” was the answer. Looking earnestly across the open valley, and at the steep hill beyond, from which the enemy’s guns were throwing shot and shell with uncomfortable frequency and nearness, he said, “Why, it would be suicide, sir; perfect suicide.” “ Nev¬ ertheless, those are the orders,” said the officer; and he rode on to complete his work. Before he could rejoin General Thomas, the assault was made, and the enemy driven out with a loss of guns, colors, and prisoners, and the whole line was forced to abandon the works along the Hillsboro’ Pike, and fall back to the Granny White Pike. The retreating line was followed by the entire Fourth Corps, as well as by the cavalry and Smith’s troops; but night soon fell, and the whole army went into bivouac in the open fields wherever they chanced to be. At dark. Hood, who at 12 o’clock had held an unbroken, fortified line from the Murfrees¬ boro’ to the Hillsboro’ Pike, with an advanced post on Montgomery Hill, and five strong re¬ doubts along the Hillsboro’ Pike, barely main¬ tained his hold of aline from the Murfreesboro’

Page 617

HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, 614 Pike to the Granny White Pike, near which, on two large hills the left of his army had taken refuge, when driven out of their redoubts by Smith and Wilson. These hills were more than two miles to the rear of his morning position. It was to that point that Bate, who had started from Hood’s right when the assault was first delivered on the redoubts, now made his way amidst, as he say^, streams of stragglers, and artillerists, and horses, without guns or caissons — the sure indications of defeat.” General Hood, not daunted by the reverses which had befallen him, at once set to work to prepare for the next day’s struggle. As soon as it was dusk, Cheatham’s whole corps was moved from his right to his left; Stewart’s was retired some two miles and became the center; Lee’s also was withdrawn, and became the right. The new line extended along the base of a range of hills, two miles south of that occupied during the day, and was only about half as long as that from which he had been driven. During the night, they threw up works along their entire front, and the hills on their flanks were strongly fortified. The flanks were also further secured by return works, which prevented them from being left “ in the air.” Altogether, the position was naturally far more formidable than that just abandoned. At early dawn the divisions of the Fourth Corps moved forward, driving out the oppos¬ ing skirmishers. The men entered upon the work with such ardor that the advance soon quickened into a run, and the run almost into a charge. They took up their positions in front of the enemy’s new line, at one point coming within 250 yards of the salient at Overton Hill. Here they were halted, and threw up works, while the artillery on both sides kept up a steady and accurate fire. Steed- man also moved forward and about noon joined his right to Wood’s left, thus completing the alignment. On his way to the front Gen¬ eral Thomas heard the can¬ nonading, and, as was his cus¬ tom, rode straight for the spot where the action seemed heav¬ iest. As he was passing a large, old-fashioned house, his atten-. tion was attracted by the noise of a window closing with a slam as emphatic as that which the poet Hood has celebrated in rhyme. Turning to see the cause of this wooden exclamation, he was greeted by a look from a young lady, whose expression at the moment was the reverse of angelic. With an amused smile, the general rode on, and soon forgot the incident in the excitement of battle. But this trifling event had a sequel. The young lady, in process of time, became the affectionate and faithful wife of an officer then serving in General Thomas’s army, — though he did not happen to be a witness of this episode. The ground between the two armies for the greater part of the way from the Franklin to the Granny White Pike is low, open, crossed by frequent streams running in every direction, and most of the fields were either newly plowed or old cornfields, and so, heavy, wet, and mud¬ dy from the recent storms. Overton’s Hill, Hood’s right, is a well-rounded slope, the top of which was amply fortified, while hills held by the left of his line just west of the Granny White Pike are so steep that it is difficult to climb them, and their summits were crowned with formidable barricades, in front of which were abattis and masses of fallen trees. Be¬ tween these extremities the works in many places consisted of stone walls covered with earth, with head logs on the top. To their rear were ample woods, sufficiently open to enable troops to move through them, but thick enough to afford good shelter. Artillery was also posted at every available spot, and good use was made of it. The morning was consumed in the move¬ ments referred to. Wilson’s cavalry, by a wide detour, had passed beyond the extreme Confederate left, and secured a lodgment on THE CAPITOL, NASHVILLE, Strong” works, set with cannon, inclosed the foundations of the Capitol. Cisterns within the building held a bountiful supply of water. Owing to its capacity and the massiveness of the lower stories, the Capitol was regarded as a citadel, in which a few thousand men could maintain themselves against an army.

Page 618

HOOD^S INVASION OF TENNESSEE, 615 the Granny White Pike. But one avenue of mortal. This slight hesitation and the disabling escape was now open for Hood — the Frank- of Post were fatal to the success of the assault, lin Pike. General Thomas hoped that a The leader and animating spirit gone, the line vigorous assault by Schofield’s corps against slowly drifted back to its original position, los- Hood’s left would break the line there, and ing in those few minutes nearly 300 men ; while thus enable the cavalry, relieved from the the supporting brigade on its left lost 250. necessity of operating against the rebel flank, Steedman had promised to cooperate in this to gallop down the Granny White Pike to its assault, and accordingly Thompson’s brigade junction with the Franklin, some six or eight of colored troops was ordered to make a dem- miles below, and plant itself square across the onstration at the moment Post’s advance be- only remaining line of retreat. If this scheme gan. These troops had never before been in could be carried out, nothing but capture or action and were now to test their mettle, surrender awaited Hood’s whole army. There had been no time for a reconnaissance. Meantime, on the national left. Colonel when this order was given, else it is likely a Post, who had so gallantly carried Mont- way would have been found to turn the enemy’s gomery Hill the morning before, had made a extreme right flank. The colored brigade careful reconnaissance of Overton Flill, the moved forward against the works east of the strong position on Hood’s right. As the re- Franklin Pike and nearly parallel to it. As suit of his observation, he reported to General they advanced, they became excited, and what Wood, his corps commander, that an assault was intended merely as a demonstration was would cost dear, but he believed could be unintentionally converted into an actual as- made successfully; at any rate he was ready sault. Thompson, finding his men rushing to try it. The order was accordingly given, forward at the double-quick, gallantly led and everything prepared. The brigade was them to the very slope of the intrenchments. to be supported on either side by fresh troops But, in their advance across the open field, the to be held in readiness to rush for the works continuity of his line was broken by a large the moment Post should gain the parapet. The fallen tree. As the men separated to pass it, bugles had not finished sounding the charge, the enemy opened an enfilading fire on the when Post’s brigade, preceded by a strong exposed flanks of the gap thus created, with line of skirmishers, moved forward, in perfect telling effect. In consequence, at the very silence, with orders to halt for nothing, but to moment when a firm and compact order was gain the works at a run. The men dashed most needed, the line came up ragged and on. Post leading, with all speed through a broken. Meantime Post’s assault was repulsed, shower of shot and shell. A few of the and the fire which had been concentrated skirmishers reached the parapet; the main on him was turned against Thompson. Noth¬ ing was left, therefore, but to with¬ draw as soon as possible to the origi¬ nal position. This was done without panic or confusion, after a loss of 467 men from the three regiments com¬ posing the brigade. When it was seen that a heavy assault on his right, at Overton Hill, was threatening, Hood ordered Cle¬ burne’s old division to be sent over to the exposed point, from the ex¬ treme left, in front of Schofield. About the same time, General Couch, commanding one of the divisions of the Twenty-third Corps, told Gen¬ eral Schofield that he believed he could carry the hill in his front, but doubted if he could hold it without assistance. The ground in front of General Cox, on Couch’s right, also line came within twenty steps of the works, offered grand opportunities for a successful when, by a concentrated fire of musketry assault. Meantime, the cavalry, on Cox’s and artillery from every available point of the right, had made its way beyond the extreme enemy’s line, the advance was momentarily left flank of the enemy, and was moving checked, and, in another instant. Post was northward over the wooded hills direct to the brought down by a wound, at first reported as rear of the extreme rebel left.

Page 619

6i6 HOOD'S INVASION OF TENNESSEE. General Thomas, who had been making a reconnaissance, had no sooner reached Scho¬ field’s front than General McArthur, who com¬ manded one of Smith’s divisions, impatient at the long waiting, and not wanting to spend the second night on the rocky hill he was occupying, told Smith that he could carry the high hill in front of Couch, the same which Couch himself had told Schofield he could carry, and would undertake it unless forbidden. Smith silently acquiesced, and Mc¬ Arthur set to work. Withdrawing McMillen’s (his right) brigade from the trenches, he marched it by the flank in front of General Couch’s position, and with orders to the men to fix bayonets, not to fire a shot and neither to halt nor to cheer, until they had gained the enemy’s works, the charge was sounded. The gallant brigade, which had served and fought in every portion of the South-west, moved swiftly down the slope, across the narrow val¬ ley, and began scrambling up the steep hill¬ side, on the top of which was the redoubt, held by Bate’s division, and manned also with Whitworth guns. The bravest onlookers held their breath, as these gallant men steadily and silently approached the summit, amid the crash of musketry and the boom of the artil¬ lery. In almost the time it has taken to tell the story, they gained the works, their flags were wildly waving from the parapet and the unmistakable cheer, “ the voice of the Amer¬ ican people,” as General Thomas called it, rent the air. It was an exultant moment; but this was only a part of the heroic work of that afternoon. While McMillen’s brigade was preparing for this wonderful charge. Hatch’s division of cavalry, dismounted, had also pushed its way through the woods, and had gained the top of two hills which commanded the rear of the enemy’s works. Here, with in¬ credible labor, they had dragged, by hand, two pieces of artillery, and, just as McMillen began his charge, opened on the hill where Bate was, up the opposite slope of which the infantry were scrambling. At the same time, Coon’s brigade of Hatch’s division with re¬ sounding cheers, charged upon the enemy and poured such volleys of musketry from their repeating rifles as I have never heard equaled. Thus beset on both sides, Bate’s people broke out of the works, and ran down the hill to¬ ward their right and rear, as fast as their legs could carry them. It was more like a scene in a spectacular drama than a real incident in war. The hillside in front still green, dotted with the boys in blue swarming up the slope ; the dark background of high hills beyond; the lowering clouds; the waving flags; the smoke slowly rising through the leafless tree- tops and drifting across the valleys ; the won¬ derful outburst of musketry; the ecstatic cheers ; the multitude racing for life down into the valley below, — so exciting was it all, that the lookers-on instinctively clapped their hands, as at a brilliant and successful trans¬ formation scene, as indeed it was. For, in those few minutes, an army was changed into a mob, and the whole structure of the rebel¬ lion in the South-west, with all its possibilities, was utterly overthrown. As soon as the other divisions farther to the left saw and heard the doings on their right, they did not wait for orders. Everywhere, by a common impulse, they charged the works in their front, and car¬ ried them in a twinkling. General Edward Johnson and nearly all his division and his artillery were captured. Over the very ground where, but a little while before. Post’s assault had been repulsed, the same troops now charged with resistless force, capturing 14 guns and 1000 prisoners. Steedman’s colored brigades also rallied, and brought in their share of prisoners and other spoils of war. Every¬ where the success was complete. Foremost among the rejoicing victors was General Steedman, under whose command were the colored troops. Steedman had been a life-long Democrat and was one of the delegates, in i860, to the Charleston convention, at which ultimately Breckinridge was nominated for President. As he rode over the field, imme¬ diately after the rout of the enemy, he asked, with a grim smile, as he pointed to the fleeing hosts, ‘‘ I wonder what my Democratic friends over there would think of me if they knew I was fighting them with ‘ nigger ’ troops ? ” It is needless to tell the story of the pursuit, which only ended, ten days later, at the Ten¬ nessee River. About a month before. General Hood had triumphantly begun his northward movement. Now, in his disastrous retreat, he was leaving behind him, as prisoners or de¬ serters, a larger number of men than General Thomas had been able to place at Pulaski to hinder his advance — to say nothing of his terrific losses in killed at Franklin. The loss to the Union army, in all its fighting, — from the Tennessee River to Nashville and back again, — was less than six thousand killed, wounded, and missing. At so small a cost, counting the chances of war, the whole North¬ west was saved from an invasion that, if Hood had succeeded, would have more than neu¬ tralized all Sherman’s successes in Georgia and the Carolinas : saved by the steadfast la¬ bors, the untiring energy, the rapid combina¬ tions, the skillful evolutions, the heroic courage and the trem.endous force of one man, whose name will yet rank among the great captains of all time. Henry Stone.

Page 620

MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. General Donaldson’s Fortunate Mistake. PRIOR to the battle of Nashville, Major-General James L. Donaldson (who won honors in the Mexi¬ can war, and who died in the spring of 1886) was quar¬ termaster under General Thomas. He once told me the following incident. Having occasion to purchase mules for the army, he ordered a person in whom he had confidence to visit the contiguous Northern States, inadvertently saying to him, “ Buy as many as you can ” — not sup¬ posing he would be able to secure more than a few thousand at the most. Some weeks afterward, just before the attack upon Hood’s army, General Donald¬ son, on meeting his agent, inquired how many mules he had been able to secure. To the amazement of the general, he was informed that iwefity thousand or more had been obtained. Upon which the astonished general exclaimed, “ I am a ruined man ! I shall be court-martialed and driven from the army for not lim¬ iting you in the purchase. You have procured many times more than I had any idea or intention of pur¬ chasing ; but the fault is mine, not yours. I ought to have been particular in my orders.” In an extremely disheartened state he went to his home, believing that such a thoughtless act on his part could not be over¬ looked by the commanding general. He had scarcely reached his house before a messen¬ ger came from General Thomas with an order for Gen¬ eral Donaldson to come immediately to headquarters. This seemed to be the sealing of his fate, and in a state of trepidation bordering on frenzy he appeared before General Thomas, whom he found in a mood, apparently, of great depression. Soon after Donaldson had entered his presence General Thomas said, “ Don¬ aldson, how many mules have you ? ” With some per¬ turbation he replied, “ Upwards of twenty-five thou¬ sand.” “ Twenty-five thousand, the general. “ Is it possible that you have this num¬ ber ? Donaldson, accept my most heartfelt thanks ; yo7i have saved this arniy ! I can now have transpor¬ tation, and can fight Hood, and will do so at once.” H. Eddy, General Grant on the Terms at Vicksburg. The following letter, dated New York, November 30, 1884, not hitherto printed, was addressed to Gen¬ eral Marcus J. Wright, Agent of the War Department for the collection of Confederate Records, by whose per¬ mission it is here printed from the original manuscript : Dear Genp:ral : Herewith I send you General Pemberton’s account of the surrender of Vicksburg. As the written matter is “ Copy,” and supposing you have what it has been copied from, I do not return it, though I will if you inform me that you want it. A gentleman from Philadelphia sent me the same matter I return herewith, last summer. I probably left the paper at Long Branch, but do not know cer¬ tainly. All there is of importance in the matter of the surrender of Vicksburg is contained in the correspond¬ ence between General Pemberton and myself. The fact is. General Pemberton, being a Northern man commanding a Southern army, was not at the same liberty to surrender an army that a man of Southern birth would be. In adversity or defeat he became an object of suspicion, and felt it. Bowen was a Southern man all over, and knew the garrison of Vicksburg had to surrender or be captured, and knew it was best to stop further effusion of blood by surrendering. Pie did all he could to bring about that result. Pemberton is mistaken in several points. It was Bowen that proposed that he and A. J. Smith should talk over the matter of the surrender and submit their views. Neither Pemberton nor I objected; but we were not willing to commit ourselves to accepting such terms as they might propose. In a short time those officers returned. Bowen acted as spokesman. What he said was substantially this : the Confederate Army was to be permitted to march out with the hon¬ ors of war, carrying with them their arms, colors, and field batteries. The National troops were then to march in and occupy the city, and retain the siege guns, small arms not in the hands of the men, all pub¬ lic property remaining. Of course I rejected the terms at once. I did agree, however, before we separated, to write Pemberton what terms I would give. The cor¬ respondence is public and speaks for itself. I held no council of war. Hostilities having ceased, officers and men soon became acquainted with the reason why. Curiosity led officers of rank — most all the general officers — to visit my headquarters with the hope of getting some news. I talked with them very freely about the meeting between General Pemberton and myself, our correspondence, etc. But' in no sense was it a council of war. I was very glad to give the garri¬ son of Vicksburg the terms I did. There was a cartel in existence at that time which required either party to exchange or parole all prisoners either at Vicksburg or at a point on the James river within ten days after captures or as soon thereafter as practicable. This would have used all the transportation we had for a month. The 7nen had behaved so well that I did not want to humiliate them. I believed that consider atio7i for their feelings would 7nake them less dangerous foes during the co7itinuance of hostilities, and better citizens after the war was over. I am very much obliged to you. General, for your courtesy in sending me these papers. Very truly yours, U. S. Gi'ajit. The Cause of a Silent Battle. In the interesting articles upon the Civil War which have appeared in The Century, reference has been made (page 764, March, and page 150, May, 1885) to the supposed effect of the wind in preventing, as in the case of the heavy cannonading between the Merrimac and Congress, the transference of sound-waves a distance of not over three and one-half miles over water ; and

Page 621

6i8 MEMORANDA ON THE CIVIL WAR. at another time, during the bombardments of the Con¬ federate works at Port Royal, a distance of not more than two miles. “The day was pleasant,” says the observer, “ and the wind did not appear tmnsually strong^ Yet “ people living in St. Augustine, Florida, told me afterward that the Port Royal cannonade was heard at that place, 150 miles from the fight.” It occurs to me that the effect of the wind is greatly exaggerated in these instances. Plow an ordinary breeze could “ carry all sounds of the conflict away from people standing within plain sight of it ” and yet carry the same sound 150 miles in the opposite direc¬ tion, is rather too strongly opposed to scientific fact to remain on record undisputed. In all of these cases, is it not probable that the vary¬ ing density of the air had much more to do with this strange acoustic opacity than the wind ? These statements call to mind the prevalent belief that fog, snow, hail, and rain, indeed any conditions of the atmosphere that render it optically opaque, render it also acoustically opaque ; which up to the time of Mr. Tyndall’s experiments in the English Channel, off Dover, had scarcely been questioned. His tests made in 1873-74 proved conclusively, as is now well known, that on clear days the air may be composed of differently heated masses, saturated in different de¬ grees with aqueous vapors, which produce exactly the deadening effects described above. I submit as a case in point a similar effect, and its explanation as furnished by Mr. R. G. H. Kean to Professor Tyndall, and considered by the latter of suf¬ ficient value to find a place in his published works : “ On the afternoon of June 28, 1862, I rode, in company with General G. W. Randolph, then Secretary of War of the Confede¬ rate States, to Price’s house, about nine miles from Richmond, the evening before General Lee had begun his attack on McClel¬ lan’s army, by crossing the Chickahommy about four miles above Price’s, and driving in McClellan’s right wing. “ The battle of Gaines’s Mill was fought the afternoon to which I refer. The valley of the Chickahominy is about one and a half miles wide from hill-top to hill-top. Price’s is on one hill-top, that nearest to Richmond; Gaines’s farm, just opposite, ison the other, reaching back in a plateau to Cold Harbor. “ Looking across the valley I saw a good deal of the battle, Lee’s right resting in the valley, the Federal left wing the same. My line of vision was nearly in the line of the lines of battle. I saw the advance of the Confederates, their repulse two or three times, and in the gray of the evening the final retreat of the Fed¬ eral forces. I distinctly saw the musket-fire of both lines, the smoke, individual discharges, the flash of the guns. I saw bat¬ teries of artillery on both sides come into action and fire rapidly. Several field-batteries on each side were plainly in sight. Many more were hid by the timber which bounded the range of vision. “ Yet looking for nearly two hours, from about five to seven p. M. on a midsummer afternoon, at a battle in which at least fifty thousand men were actually engaged, and doubtless at *east one hundred pieces of field-artillery, through an atmosphere optically as limpid as possible, not a single sound 0/ the battle was audi¬ ble to General Randolph and myself. I remarked it to him at the time as astonishing. “ Between me and the battle was the deep, broad valley of the Chickahominy, partly a swamp shaded from the declining sun by the hills and forest in the west (my side). Part of the valley on each side of the swamp was cleared : some in cultivation, some not; Here were conditions capable of providing several belts of air, varying in the amount of watery vapor (and probably in tem¬ perature), arranged like laminae at right angles to the acoustic waves as they came from the battle-field to me.” John B. De Motte. De Pauw University, Indiana. A Reply to Colonel Mosby by General Robertson. In the May number of The Century Colonel John S. Mosby has seen proper to make mention of my command in the cavalry of the Army of Northern Vir¬ ginia during the Gettysburg campaign; and as a means of defending General J. E. B. Stuart from an imaginary attack has misrepresented a portion of Gen¬ eral Stuart’s cavalry. Colonel Mosby knows very lit¬ tle of Stuart’s character if he supposes that so true a soldier would have silently passed over such disobedi¬ ence of orders as Colonel Mosby imputes to me. The fact that Colonel Mosby has “ lately discovered docu¬ ments in the archives ” at Washington, which are to “ set at rest ” something that has not been set in motion, will not excuse him for attempting in 1887 to prove by argument that Stuart in 1863 did not know whether I had obeyed his orders in the Gettysburg campaign. The orders left with me by General Stuart, dated June 24th, were exactly obeyed by me, to his entire satisfaction as well as to that of General R. E. Lee. These orders embraced the duty of holding Ashby’s and Snicker’s gaps, to prevent Hooker from interrupt¬ ing the march of Lee’s army ; and “ in case of a move by the enemy on Warrenton,” to counteract it if pos¬ sible. I was also ordered when I withdrew from the gaps to “ withdraw to the west side of the Shenan¬ doah,” to cross the Potomac where Lee crossed, and to “ follow the army, keeping on its right and rear.” The only road by which the orders (which particu¬ larly specified the avoidance of “ turnpikes ” on ac¬ count of the difficulty and delay of shoeing horses) could be complied with, carried my command to Mar- tinsburg ; at which place, and not in the gaps of the mountains, as Colonel Mosby insinuates, a courier from General Lee met me. My command was hurried from there to Chambersburg and thence by forced march, on the night of July 2d, to Cashtown, where it arrived at about 10 A. M. on July 3d. Ascertaining at Cashtown that General Pleasonton was moving from Emmettsburg directly on the baggage and ammuni¬ tion trains of General Lee’s army, which were exposed to his attack without defense of any kind, I pressed forward with my command and intercepted the advance of General Pleasonton, under the command of Major Samuel H. Starr. A severe and gallant fight was made at Fairfield, in which Major Starr of the 6th United States Regular Cavalry was wounded and captured with a large portion of his staff, while his regiment was severely damaged. Adjutant John Allan and three others of the 6th Virginia Cavalry were killed, 19 were wounded, and 5 were reported missing. That fight at Fairfield, on the last day of the fight¬ ing at Gettysburg, refutes the imputation intended by Colonel Mosby to be conveyed in his remark that my command “ did not reach the battle-field.” From that fight at Fairfield I was ordered by Gen¬ eral R. E. Lee to cover his wagon trains, and in obeying the same, my command was engaged in repeated skirmishes, particularly at Funkstown and Plagerstown, after which it returned to Virginia, — the last command that recrossed the Potomac. If there existed the least ground for Colonel Mosby’ s statements, there would be found among the reports of general officers some reference to the imputed dere¬ liction of duty on my part. As no such reference is made, and no imputation of disobedience of orders in¬ timated, it may be assumed that neither Stuart nor Lee had any reason to complain of my command. B. H. Robertson.

Page 622

THE SONGS OF THE WAR. NATIONAL h)min is one of the things which cannot be made to order. No man has ever yet sat him down and taken up his pen and said, “I will write a national hymn,” and composed either words or music which the nation was will¬ ing to take for its own. The making of the song of a people is a happy accident, not to be accom¬ plished by taking thought. It must be the result of fiery feeling long confined, and suddenly find¬ ing vent in burning words or moving strains. Sometimes the heat and the pressure of emotion have been fierce enough and intense enough to call forth at once both words and music, and to weld them together indissolubly once and for all. Almost always the maker of the song does not suspect the abiding value of his work ; he has wrought unconsciously, moved by a power within ; he has written for immediate relief to himself, and with no thought of fame or the future ; he has builded better than he knew. The great national lyric is the result of the conjunction of the hour and the man. Monarchs cannot command it, and even poets are often powerless to achieve it. No one of the great national hymns has been written by a great poet. But for his one immortal lyric, neither the author of the Marseillaise ” nor the author of the Wacht am Rhein ” would have his line in the biographical dic¬ tionaries. But when a song has once taken root in the hearts of a people, time itself is powerless against it. The flat and feeble Partant pour la Syrie,” which a filial fiat made the hymn of imperial France, had to give way to the strong and virile notes of the “ Marseillaise,” when there was need to arouse the martial spirit of the French in 1870. The noble measures of “ God Save the King,” as simple and dignified a national hymn as any country can boast, lift up the hearts of the English people ; and the brisk tune of the British Grenadiers ” has swept away many a man into the ranks of the re¬ cruiting regiment. The English are rich in war tunes ; and the pathetic Girl I left behind me” encourages and sustains both those who go to the front and those who re¬ main at home. Here in the United States we have no “ Marseillaise,” no ‘‘ God Save the King,” no ‘‘ Wacht am Rhein”; we have but ‘‘Yankee Doodle” and the “Star-spangled Banner.” More than one enterprising poet. and more than one aspiring musician, has volunteered to take the contract to supply the deficiency ; as yet no one has succeeded. “Yankee Doodle” we got during the Revo¬ lution, and the “ Star-spangled Banner ” was the gift of the war of 1812; from the Civil War we have received at least two war songs which, as war songs simply, are finer than either of these, — “ John Brown’s Body ” and “ Marching through Georgia.” Of the purely lyrical outburst which the war called forth, but little trace is now to be de¬ tected in literature except by special students.* In most cases neither words nor music have had vitality enough to survive a quarter of a cent¬ ury. Really, indeed, two things only survive, one Southern and the other Northern, one a war-cry in verse, the other a martial tune : one is the lyric “ My Maryland,” and the other is the marching song “John Brown’s Body.” The origin and development of the latter, the rude chant to which a million of the sol¬ diers of the Union kept time, is uncertain and involved in dispute. The history of the for¬ mer may be declared exactly; and by the courtesy of those who did the deed — for the making of a war song is of a truth a deed at arms — I am enabled to state fully the cir¬ cumstances under which it was written, set to music, and first sung before the soldiers of the South. MY MARYLAND. The despot’s heel is on thy shore, Maryland ! His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland ! Avenge the patriotic gore That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle-queen of yore, Maryland ! My Maryland ! Hark to an exiled son’s appeal, Maryland ! My Mother-State, to thee I kneel ! Maryland ! For life and death, for woe and weal, Thy peerless chivalry reveal. And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel, Maryland ! My Maryland ! Thou wilt not cower in the dust, Maryland ! Thy beaming sword shall never rust, Maryland ! Remember Carroll’s sacred trust. Remember Howard’s warhke thrust And all thy slumberers with the just, Maryland ! My Maryland ! * Note that reference is here made to the songs, not to the general poetry of the war.

Page 623

620 THE SONGS OF THE WAR. Come ! ’Tis the red dawn of the day, Maryland ! Come with thy panoplied array, Maryland ! With Ringgold’s spirit for the fray. With Watson’s blood at Monterey, With fearless Lowe and dashing May, Maryland ! My Maryland ! Dear Mother, burst the tyrant’s chain, Maryland ! Virginia should not call in vain, Maryland ! She meets her sisters on the plain. Sic Semper! ’Tis the proud refrain That baffles minions back amain, Maryland ! Arise, in majesty again, Maryland ! My Maryland ! Come, for thy shield is bright and strong, Maryland ! Come, for thy dalliance does thee wrong, Maryland ! Come to thine own heroic throng, Stalking with liberty along. And chaunt thy dauntless slogan-song, Maryland ! My Maryland ! I see the blush upon thy cheek, Maryland ! For thou wast ever bravely meek, Maryland ! But lo ! there surges forth a shriek ; From hill to hill, from creek to creek, Potomac calls to Chesapeake, Maryland ! My Maryland ! Thou wilt not yield the Vandal toll, Maryland ! Thou wilt not crook to his control, Maryland ! Better the fire upon thee roll. Better the shot, the blade, the bowl. Than crucifixion of the soul, Maryland ! My Maryland ! I hear the distant thunder-hum, Maryland! The Old Line bugle, fife and drum, Maryland ! She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb I Huzza ! She spurns the Northern scum ! She breathes I She burns ! She’ll come ! She’ll come ! Maryland ! My Maryland ! (Perhaps there is no need now for even a line of good-natured deprecation of some of the terms used in this song, overwrought and inaxcurate as they are. As but few, North or South, have ever seen the entire poem, it is printed here in full from the author’s manu¬ script. Its lines show plainly enough that they owe their being to a white-heat of emotion. It is valuable, therefore, historically, as a rec¬ ord of the feelings of the hour in the South, although not of the facts of the hour either in Baltimore or at the North.) My Maryland ! ” was written by Mr. J ames R. Randall, a native of Baltimore, and now residing in Augusta, Georgia. The poet was a professor of English literature and the

Page 624

THE SONGS OF THE WAR. 621 classics in Poy dras College at Pointe Coupee, on the Fausse Riviere, in Louisiana, about seven miles from the Mississippi ; and there in April, 1861, he read in the New Orleans ‘‘ Delta” the news of the attack on the Massachusetts troops as they passed through Baltimore. This account excited me greatly,” Mr. Randall writes in answer to my request for information; “I had long been absent from my native city, and the startling event there inflamed my mind. That night I could not sleep, for my nerves were all unstrung, and I could not dismiss what I had read in the paper from my mind. About midnight I rose, lit a candle, and went to my desk. Some powerful spirit appeared to possess me, and almost involuntarily I proceeded to write the song of ‘ My Maryland.’ I remember that the idea appeared to first take shape as music in the brain — some wild air that I cannot now recall. The whole poem was dashed off rapidly when once begun. It was not com¬ posed in cold blood, but under what may be called a conflagration of the senses, if not an inspiration of the intellect. I was stirred to a desire for some way linking my name with that of my native State, if not ‘ with my land’s language.’ But I never expected to do this with one single, supreme effort, and no one was more surprised than I was at the wide¬ spread and instantaneous popularity of the lyric I had been so strangely stimulated to write.” Mr. Randall read the poem the next morning to the college boys, and at their suggestion sent it to the Delta,” in which it was first printed, and from which it was copied into nearly every Southern journal. “ I did not concern myself much about it,” Mr. Randall adds, but very soon, from all parts of the country, there was borne to me, in my remote place of residence, evidence that I had made a great hit, and that, what¬ ever might be the fate of the Confederacy, the song would survive it.” Published in the last days of April, 1861, when every eye was fixed on the border States, the stirring stanzas of the Tyrtsean bard appeared in the very nick of time. There is often a feeling afloat in the minds of men, undefined and vague for want of one to give it form, and held in solution, as it were, until a chance word dropped in the ear of a poet suddenly crystallizes this feeling into song, in which all may see clearly and sharply reflected what in their own thought was shapeless and hazy. It was Mr. Randall’s good fortune to be the instrument through which the South spoke. By a natural reaction his burning lines helped ‘‘to fire the Southern heart.” To do their work well, his words needed to be wedded to music. Unlike the authors of the VoL. XXXIV.— 86. “ Star-spangled Banner ” and the “ Marseil¬ laise,” the author of “ My Maryland ” had not written it to fit a tune already familiar. It was left for a lady of Baltimore to lend the lyric the musical wings it needed to enable it to reach every camp-fire of the Southern armies. To the courtesy of this lady, then Miss Hetty Cary, and now the wife of Professor H. Newell Martin, of Johns Hopkins University, I am indebted for a picturesque description of the marriage of the words to the music, and of the first singing of the song before the South¬ ern troops. The house of Mrs. Martin’s father was the headquarters for the Southern sympathizers of Baltimore. Correspondence, money, cloth¬ ing, supplies of all kinds went thence through the lines to the young men of the city who had joined the Confederate army. “ The enthusiasmof the girls who worked and of the ‘ boys ’ who watched for their chance to slip through the lines to Dixie’s land found vent and inspiration in such patriotic songs as could be made or adapted to suit our needs. The glee club was to hold its meeting in our parlors one evening early in June, and my sister. Miss Jennie Cary, being the only mu¬ sical member of the family, had charge of the programme on the occasion. With a school¬ girl’s eagerness to score a success, she resolved to secure some new and ardent expression of feelings that by this time were wrought up to the point of explosion. In vain she searched through her stock of songs and airs — nothing seemed intense enough to suit her. Aroused by her tone of despair, I came to the rescue with the suggestion that she should adapt the words of ‘ Maryland, my Maryland,’ which had been constantly on my lips since the appearance of the lyric a few days before in the South. I produced the paper and began declaiming the verses. ‘ Lauriger Horatius!’ she exclaimed, and in a flash the immor¬ tal song found voice in the stirring air so perfectly adapted to it. That night, when her contralto voice rang out the stanzas, the re¬ frain rolled forth from every throat present without pause or preparation; and the en¬ thusiasm communicated itself with such effect to a crowd assembled beneath our open win¬ dows as to endanger seriously the liberties of the party.” “ Lauriger Horatius ” has long been a favorite college song, and it had been intro¬ duced into the Cary household by Mr. Burton N. Harrison, then a Yale student. The air to which it is sung is used also for a lovely German lyric, “ Tannenbaum, O Tan- nenbaum,” which Longfellow has tran.slated “ O Hemlock Tree.” The transmigration of tunes is too large and fertile a subject for me

Page 625

622 THE SONGS OF THE WAR, to do more here than refer to it. The taking of the air of a jovial college song to use as the setting of a fiery war-lyric may seem strange and curious, but only to those who are not familiar with the adventures and transformations a tune is often made to undergo. Hopkinson’s Hail Columbia !” for exam¬ ple, was written to the tune of the President’s March,” just as Mrs. Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic” was written to ‘‘John Brown’s Body.” The “Wearing of the Green,” of the Irishman, is sung to the same air as the “ Benny Havens, O ! ” of the W est-Pointer. The “ Star- spangled Banner” has to make shift with the second-hand music of “ Anacreon in Heaven ” ; while our other national air, “Yankee Doodle,” uses over the notes of an old English nursery rhyme, “ Lucy Locket,” once a personal lam¬ poon in the days of the “ Beggars’ Opera,” and now surviving in the “ Baby’s Opera” of Mr. Walter Crane. “ My Country, ’tis of Thee,” is set to the truly British tune of “ God Save the King,” the origin of which is doubtful, as it is claimed by the French and the Germans as well as the English. In the hour of battle a war- tune is subject to the right of capture, and, like the cannon taken from the enemy, it is turned against its maker. To return to “ My Maryland ” : a few weeks after the welding of the words and the music, Mrs. Martin with her brother and sister went through the lines, convoying several trunks full of military clothing, and wearing concealed about her person a flag bearing the arms of Maryland, a gift from the ladies of Baltimore to the Maryland troops in the Confederate army. In consequence of reports which were borne back to the Union authorities, the ladies were forbidden to return. “We were living,” so Mrs. Martin writes me, “in Virginia in exile, when, shortly after, the battle of Ma¬ nassas, General Beauregard, hearing of our labors and sufferings in behalf of the Mary¬ landers who had already done such gallant service in his command, invited us to visit them at his headquarters near Fairfax Court House, sending a pass and an escort for us, and the friends by whom we should be ac¬ companied. Our party encamped the first night in tents prepared for us at Manassas, with my kinsman. Captain Sterrell, who was in charge of the fortifications there. We were serenaded by the famous Washington Artillery of New Orleans, aided by all the fine voices within reach. Captain Sterrell expressed our thanks, and asked if there were any service we might render in return. ‘ Let us hear a woman’s voice,’ was the cry which arose in response. And, standing in the tent-door, under cover of the darkness, my sister sang ‘My Maryland!’ This, I believe, was the birth of the song in the army. The refrain was speedily caught up and tossed back to us from hundreds of rebel throats. As the last notes died away, there surged forth from the gathering throng a wild shout — ‘ We will break her chains ! She shall be free I She shall be free 1 Three cheers and a tiger for Maryland ! ’ And they were given with a will. There was not a dry eye in the tent, and, we were told the next day, not a cap with a rim on it in camp. Nothing could have kept Mr. Randall’s verses from living and growing into a power. To us fell the happy chance of first giving them voice. In a few weeks ‘ My Maryland ! ’ had found its way to the heart of our whole people, and become a great national song.” I wish I could call as charming and as strik¬ ing a witness to set forth the origin of “John Brown’s Body.” The genesis of both words and music is obscure and involved. The raw facts of historical criticism — names, places, dates — are deficient. The martial hymn has been called a spontaneous generation of the uprising of the North — a self-made song, which sang itself into being of its own accord. Some have treated it as a sudden evolution from the inner consciousness of the early sol¬ diers all aglow with free- soil enthusiasm ; and these speak of it as springing, like Minerva from the head of Jove, full-armed and mature. Others have more happily likened it to Topsy, in that it never was born, it growed ; and this latter theory has the support of the facts as far as they can be disentangled from a maze of fiction and legend. A tentative and con¬ jectural reconstruction of the story of the song is all I dare venture upon ; and I stand cor¬ rected in anticipation. In 1856 Mr. William Steffe, of Philadelphia, was requested by a fire-company of Charles¬ ton, South Carolina, to write an air to a series of verses, the chorus of which began, “ Say, bummers, will you meet us ? ” After the air had served its purpose, a new set of words was fitted to it, and it went on its way as a camp-meeting hymn, “ Say, brothers, will you meet us ? ” In the four years between the composing of the tune and the outbreak of the war, the camp-meeting hymn had time to become pop¬ ular throughout the North. Probably — al¬ though I have not been able to verify the supposition — “ Say, brothers, will you meet us ? ’’(like “ Dixie,” from which it was soon to part company) served as an air for Lincoln- and-Hamlin campaign songs in the canvass of i860. Certainly the tune was familiar enough

Page 626

THE SONGS OF THE WAR. 623 in New England by the time Lincoln was in¬ augurated. John Brown had been hanged in Decem¬ ber, 1859. The feeling which that execution called forth in Massachusetts found relief in a meeting at Faneuil Hall. A recent writer has recorded his recollection of that evening, and of the crowd of boys and youths parading the streets of Boston and singing to a familiar air a monotonous lament of which the burden was “ Tell John Andrew, Tell John Andrew, Tell John Andrew John Brown’s dead!” A little more than a year later came the news of the shot against the flag at Sumter. Some memory of this street song seems to have survived, and to have combined chemically with the tune of Say, brothers, will you meet us ? ” the time of which was modified to a march; and in this way ‘‘John Brown’s Body ” came into being. It was the song of the hour. There was a special taunt to the South in the use of the name of the martyr of abolition, while to the North that name was as a slogan. As the poet — a prophet again, for once — had written when John Brown was yet alive, though condemned to death : “ But, Virginians, don’t do it 1 for I tell you that the flagon. Filled with blood of old Brown’s offspring, was first poured by Southern hands ; And each drop from old Brown’s life-veins, like the red gore of the dragon. May spring up a vengeful fury, hissing through your slave- worn lands I And old Brown, Osawatomie Brown, May troiible you more than ever, when you’ve nailed his coffin down ! ” * If one may rely fully on Major Bosbyshell, to whose interesting paper in the “ Grand Army Scout” I am indebted for much valu¬ able suggestion, the song was put together by a quartet of men in the Second Battalion (“ Tigers ”), a Massachusetts command quar¬ tered at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, in April, 1861, — just at the time when “ My Mary¬ land ” was getting itself sung at the South. This quartet, with many others of the “ Tigers,” enlisted in the Twelfth Massachusetts Volun¬ teers, commanded by Colonel Fletcher Web¬ ster. Beyond all question it was the Webster regiment which first adopted “John Brown’s Body ” as a marching song. The soldiers of this regiment sang it as they marched down Broadway in New York, July 24th, 1861, on their way from Boston to the front. They sang it incessantly until August, 1862, when Colonel Webster died, and when the tune had * Stedman in “ Jobi"^ Brown of Osawatomie.” been taken up by the nation at large, and hun¬ dreds of thousands of soldiers were marching forward to the fight with the name of John Brown on their lips. There was a majestic simplicity in the rhythm like the beating of mighty hammers. In the beginning the words were bare to the verge of barrenness. There was no lack of poets to fill them out. Henry Howard Brow¬ nell, the singer of the “ Bay Fight ” and the “ River Fight,” skillfully utilized the accepted lines, which he enriched with a deeper mean¬ ing. Then Mrs. Howe wrote her “ Battle Hymn of the Republic,” perhaps the most resonant and elevated of the poems of Amer¬ ican patriotism, t Of late the air has been taken again by Mr. William Morris, poet and socialist, decorator and reformer, as the one to which shall be sung his eloquent and stir¬ ring “March of the Workers.” Curiously enough, the history of “Dixie” is not at all unlike the history of “John Brown’s Body.” “ Dixie” was composed in 1859, by Mr. Dan D. Emmett, as a “ walk- around ” for Bryant’s minstrels, then perform¬ ing at Mechanics’ Hall in New York. Mr. Emmett had traveled with circuses, and had heard the performers refer to the States south of Mason and Dixon’s line as “ Dixie’s land,” wishing themselves there as soon as the North¬ ern climate began to be too severe for those who live in tents like the Arabs. It was on this expression of Northern circus performers, “ I wish I was in Dixie,” that Mr. Emmett constructed his song. The “ walk-around ” hit the taste of the New York play- going public, and it was adopted at once by various bands of wandering minstrels, who sang and danced it in all parts of the Union. In the fall of i860 Mrs. John Wood sang it in New Orleans in John Brougham’s bur¬ lesque of “ Pocahontas,” and in New Orleans it took root. Without any authority from the composer, a New Orleans publisher had the air harmonized and arranged, and he issued it with words embodying the strong Southern feeling of the chief city of Louisiana. As from Boston “John Brown’s Body ” spread through the North, so from New Orleans “Dixie” spread through the South; and as Northern poets strove to find fit words for the one, so Southern poets wrote fiery lines to fill the measures of the other. Of the sets of verses written to “ Dixie,” the best, perhaps, is that by General Albert Pike, of Arkansas, who hap¬ pens, by a fortuitous chance, to have been a native of Vermont. With Republican words “ Dixie ” had been used as a campaign song t See page 629.

Page 627

g/ /Lf^^ ^ / q/ Luup^;^:-^ A-«ss-*!/C_ /a-, >^V.„ — /1«?^»^ ^''^-O^c - 'U<^ ■s . xJt-v^ ^T-'ty'^ ( h^yp t^y-yz^ / ^ t^L- yQ '^t-— /^^--^^,^i_- <^4S2-T_/C_ .

Page 628

THE SONGS OF THE WAR. 625 in i860; and it was perhaps some vague remembrance of this which prompted Lin¬ coln to have the air played by a band in Washington in 1865, a short time after the surrender at Appomattox, remarking that as we had captured the rebel army we had cap¬ tured also the rebel tune. From New Orleans also came another of the songs of the South, the “ Bonnie Blue Flag.” Mr. Randall writes me that Dixie ” and the “ Bonnie Blue Flag ” were the most popular of Southern songs. Like Dixie,” the ‘‘ Bonnie Blue Flag ” came from the theater. The tune is an old Hibernian melody, the “Irish Jaunting Car.” The words were writ¬ ten by an Irish comedian, Harry McCarthy, and the song was first sung by his sister. Miss Marion McCarthy, at the Varieties Theater, in 1861. It was published by Mr. A. E. Black- mar, who writes to a friend of mine that Gen¬ eral Butler “ made it very profitable by fining every man, woman, or child who sang, whis¬ tled, or played it on any instrument, $25,” besides arresting the publisher, destroying the sheet music, and fining him $500. In Louisiana, of course, there was also the “Marseillaise.” “The Creoles of New Or¬ leans,” Mr. Cable writes me, “ followed close by the Anglo-Americans of their town, took up the ‘ Marseillaise ’ with great enthusiasm, as they have always done whenever a war spirit was up. They did it when the British invaded Louisiana in 1814. It was good enough as it stood ; they made no new adap¬ tations of it, but sang it in French and Eng¬ lish (I speak of 1861), ‘ dry so,’ as the South¬ ern rustics say. ‘Dixie ’ started with the first mutter of war thunder. ... I think the same is true of ‘ Lorena.’ This doleful old ditty started at the start, and never stopped till the last musket was stacked and the last camp-fire cold. It was, by all odds, the song nearest the Confederate soldier’s heart. It was the ‘ Annie Laurie ’ of the Confederate trenches.” Nowadays it is not a little difficult to de¬ tect in the rather mushy sentimentality of the words of “ Lorena,” or in the lugubrious wail of its music, any qualities which might ac¬ count for the affection it was held in. But the vagaries of popular taste are inscrutable. Dr. Palmer’s vigorous lyric, “ Stonewall Jackson’s Way,” written within sound of the cannona¬ ding at Antietam, was so little sung that Mr. Randall thought it had not been set to music. I have, however, succeeded in discovering two airs to which it was sung, — one published by Mr. Blackmar, and the other the familiar “ Duda, duda, day.” The Northern equivalent of “Lorena” is to be sought among the songs which made a lyric address to “Mother,” and of which “Just before the Battle, Mother,” may be taken as a type. “ Mother, I’ve Come Home to Die,” was sung with feeling and with humor by many a gallant fellow who is now gathered at the bivouac of the dead. Mr. George F. Root, of Chicago, was both the author and composer of “Just before the Battle, Mother,” as he was also of the “ Battle Cry of Freedom,” and of “ Tramp, Tramp, Tramp ; the Boys are Marching.” It is difficult to say which one of these three songs was the most popu¬ lar ; there was a touch of realistic pathos -in “ Just before the Battle, Mother,” which brought the simple and unpretending words home to the hearts of the men who had girded on the sword and shouldered the musket. Yet captivity was not seldom more bitter to bear than death itself, and this gave point to the lament of the soldier who sat in his “ prison¬ cell ” and heard the tramp, tramp, tramp of the marching boys. Probably, however, the first favorite with the soldiers in the field, and certainly the song of Mr. Root’s which has the best chance of surviving, is the “Bat¬ tle Cry of Freedom.” It was often ordered to be sung as the men marched into action. More than once its strains arose on the battle¬ field and made obedience more easy to the lyric command to rally round the flag. With the pleasant humor which never deserts the American, even in the hard tussle of war, the gentle lines of “ Mary had a Little Lamb ” were fitted snugly to the tune ; and many a regi¬ ment shortened a weary march or went gayly into action, singing, “ Mary had a little lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, Shouting the battle cry of freedom; And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go. Shouting the battle cry of freedom.” Now the song is sure of immortality, for it has become a part of those elective studies which are the chief gains of the college cur¬ riculum. At the hands of the American col¬ lege boys, “ Rally round the Flag ” can get a renewed lease of life for twenty-one years more — or forever. A boy is your true con¬ servative ; he is the genuine guardian of an¬ cient rites and customs, old rhymes and songs; he has the fullest reverence for age — if so be it is not incarnated in a “Prof.” or a “Prex.” Lowell, in declaring the antiquity of the New World, says that “ we have also in America things amazingly old, as our boys, for exam¬ ple.” And the taking of the “ Battle Cry of Freedom ” by the colleges is only the fair ex¬ change which is no robbery ; for, as we have seen, it was from the college that the air of “ Lauriger Horatius ” was taken to speed the

Page 629

626 THE SONGS OF THE WAR. FAC-SIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH OF WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. heated stanzas of “ My Maryland.” Another college song, — if the digression may be par¬ doned, — the ‘‘ Upidee-Upida,” to which we so wickedly sing the quatrains of Longfellow’s Excelsior,” I have heard rising sonorously from the throats of a stalwart regiment of German Lajidwchr in the summer of 1870, as they were on their way to the French fron¬ tier — and to Paris. Although they came at the beginning of the war, “John Brown’s Body” and the “Bat¬ tle Cry of Freedom ” have been sung scarcely more often than “ Marching through Georgia,” which could not have come into being until near the end of the fight. Now that the war has been over for twenty years and more, and the veteran has no military duty more harassing than fighting his battles o’er, “ Marching through Georgia ” has become the song dear¬ est to his heart. The swinging rhythm of the tune and the homely directness of the words gave the song an instant popularity, increased by the fact that it commemorated the most striking episode of the war, the march to the sea. “ Marching through Georgia ” was writ¬ ten and composed by the late Henry C. Work. In his history of “ Music in America,” Pro¬ fessor Ritter refers to Stephen C. Foster, the composer of “ Old Folks at Home,” as one who “ said naively and gently what he had to say, without false pretension or bombastic phrases”; and this praise may be applied also to Work, who had not a little of the folk-flavor which gives quality to Foster. Like Foster, Work was fond of reflecting the rude negro rhythms ; and some of his best songs seem like actual echoes from the cotton-field and levee. “Wake, Nicodemus,” “Kingdom Com¬ ing,” and “ Babylon is Fallen ” have this savor of the soil, — sophisticated, it may be, and yet pungent and captivating. I have heard it suggested that “ Marching through Georgia ” was founded on a negro air, and also that it is a reminiscence of a bit of the “Rataplan” of the “ Huguenots.” It is possible that there is a little truth at the bottom of both of these stories. The “ Huguenots ” was freqently per¬ formed at the New Orleans Opera House be¬ fore the war, and many a slave must have heard his young mistress singing and playing selections from Meyerbeer’s music; and it may be that Work, in turn, overheard some negro’s rambling recollection of the “Rata¬ plan.” This is idle conjecture, however ; the tune of “ Marching through Georgia ” is fresh and spirited; and it bids fair — with “John Brown’s Body ” — to be the chief musical legacy of the war. Work was also the author and composer of two other songs which had their day, “ Drafted into the Army ” and

Page 630

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Page 631

628 THE SONGS OF THE WAR, Brave Boys are They.” The latter has had the honor of being sung of late by Mr. Cable, who heard first at a Southern camp-fire from the lips of a comrade the chorus of Northern origin, equally apt in its application in those troublous times to the homes on either side of Mason and Dixon’s line : “ Brave boys are they, Gone at their country’s call ; And yet — and yet we cannot forget That many brave boys must fall.” It was in the dark days of 1862, just after Lincoln had issued the proclamation asking for three hundred thousand volunteers to fill up the stricken ranks of the army and to carry out the cry which urged it On to Richmond,” that Mr. John S. Gibbons wrote “We are coming, Father Abraham, Three hundred thousand more,” a lyric which contributed not a little to the bringing about of the uprising it declared. The author of this ringing call to arms was a Hicksite Quaker, — with a reasonable leaning, however, toward wrath in cases of emergency,” as his son-in-law, Mr. James H. Morse, neatly puts it, in a recent letter to me. He joined the abolition movement in 1830, when he was barely twenty years old. Three years later he married a daughter of Isaac T. Hopper, the Quaker philanthropist. For a short time he was one of the editors of the Anti-Slavery Standard,” and, like many of the Quakers of his school, he was al¬ ways ardent in the cause of negro freedom. At the outbreak of the war, Mrs. Gibbons and her eldest daughter went to the front, and they served in the hospitals until the end. While they were away the riots of ’63 oc¬ curred, and their house in New York was sacked, Mr. Gibbons and the two younger daughters taking refuge with relatives in the house next door but one, and thence over the roofs to Eighth Avenue, where Mr. Joseph H. Choate had a carriage in waiting for them. The house was singled out for this attention because it had been illuminated when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, — on which occasion it had been daubed and defiled with coal tar. At the request of Mr. Morse, Mr. Gibbons has put on paper an account of the circum¬ stances under which he wrote “We are com¬ ing, Father Abraham,” and from this I am privileged to quote. It must be premised that Mr. Gibbons, although he had written verse — as who has not ? — was best known as a writer on financial topics: he has published two books about banking, and he was for a while the financial editor of the “ Evening Post.” In 1862, after Lincoln had issued his call for vol¬ unteers, Mr. Gibbons used to take long walks alone, often talking to himself. “ I began to con over a song,” he writes. “ The words seemed to fall into ranks and files, and to come with a measured step. Directly would come along a company of soldiers with fife and drum, and that helped the matter amaz¬ ingly. I began to keep step myself — three hun-dred thou-sand more. — It was very nat¬ ural to answer the President’s call — we are coming — and to prefix the term father. Then the line would follow ‘We are coming, Father Abraham,’ and nothing was more natural than the num¬ ber of soldiers wanted. ‘ Three hundred thousand more. ’ ‘We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.’ “ Where from ? Shore is the rhyme wanted.” Just then Mr. Gibbons met “a Western regiment — from Minnesota, it was — and the line came at once in full, ‘ From Mississippi’s winding stream, and from New England’s shore.’ “ Two lines in full . . . Then followed — how naturally ! ‘We leave our plows and workshops, our wives and children dear, ‘With hearts too full for utterance, with but a silent tear.’ “ And so it went on, word by word, line by line, until the whole song was made.” When it was written, only one slight verbal altera¬ tion was made, and tlien it was printed in the “ Evening Post ” of July i6th, 1862. It is interesting to note that it was in the “ Even¬ ing Post” of May 29th, 18 19, nearly half a cen¬ tury before, that another famous patriotic poem had first been published — Drake’s “ Ameri¬ can Flag.” Mr. Gibbons’s song appeared anonymously, and its authorship was ascribed at once to Bryant, who was then the editor of the “Evening Post.” At a large meeting in Boston, held the evening after it had appeared, it was read by Josiah Quincy as “ the latest poem written by Mr. Wm. C. Bryant.” One of the Hutchinson family set it to music, and they sang it with great effect. A common friend told Jesse Hutchinson that the song was not by Bryant but by Mr. Gibbons. “ What — our old friend Gibbons ? ” he asked in reply. It is said that when assured that his old friend Gibbons was the real author of the song, Jesse Hutchinson hesitated thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “Well, we’ll keep the name of Bryant as we’ve got it. H e’s better known than Gibbons.” The stirring song was

Page 632

THE SONGS OF THE WAR, 629 set to music by several other composers, most of whom probably supposed that it was Bryant’s. I find in a stray newspaper cutting an account of Lincoln’s coming down to the Red Room of the White House one morning in the summer of 1864, to listen with bowed head and patient pensive eyes while one of a party of visitors sang “We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.” A rattling good war song which has kept its hold on the ears of the people is ‘‘ When Johnny comes Marching Home,” written in 1863 by “ Louis Lambert.” Behind this pseu¬ donym was hidden Mr. P. S. Gilmore, the projector of the Boston “Peace Jubilee,” and the composer afterward of a more ambi¬ tious national hymn, which has hitherto failed to attain the popularity of its unpretending predecessor with the rousing refrain. It is re¬ lated that after the performance of “ Glory to God on High,” from Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, on the first day of the Jubilee, an old soldier of the Webster regiment took occasion to shake hands with Mr. Gilmore and to proffer his congratulations on the success of the un¬ dertaking, adding that for his part what he had liked best was the piece called the “ Twelfth Massachusetts.” At the Boston Peace Jubilee, and again at the Centennial Exhibition, there was oppor¬ tunity for the adequate and serious treatment of the war tunes which have survived the welter and turmoil of the actual strife; but the occasion was not improved. Little more has been done than a chance arrangement of airs in the clap-trap manner of Jullien’s “ British Army Quadrilles.” The “ Centennial March” which Richard Wagner wrote for us was the work of a master, no doubt, but it was per¬ functory, and hopelessly inferior to his resplen¬ dent “ Kaiser March.” The German composer had not touch of the American people, and as he did not know what was in our hearts, we had no right to hope that he should give it expression. The time is now ripe for the musician who shall richly and amply develop, with sustained and sonorous dignity, the few simple airs which represent and recall to the people of these United States the emotions, the doubts, the dangers, the joys, the sorrows, the harassing anxieties, and the final triumph of the four long years of bitter strife. The composer who will take “John Brown’s Body” and “ Marching through Georgia,” and such other of our war tunes as may be found wor¬ thy, and who shall do unto them as the still living Hungarian and Scandinavian composers have done to the folk-songs of their native land, need not hesitate from poverty of ina- terial or from fear of the lack of a responsive audience. The first American composer who shall turn these war tunes into mighty music to commemorate the events which called them forth, will of a certainty have his reward. Brander Matthews, NOTE ON THE “BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.” [At the request of the Editor, Mrs. Howe has prepared the sub¬ joined account of the circumstances attending the origin of the “ Battle Hymn of the Republic.”] In December, 1861, the first year of our Civil War, I made a journey to Washington in company with Dr. Howe, Governor and Mrs. John A. Andrew, and other friends. I remember well the aspect of things within what might then have been termed “the de¬ batable land.” As our train sped on through the darkness, we saw in vivid contrast the fires of the pickets set to guard the line of the railroad. The troops lay encamped around the city, their canton¬ ments extending to a considerable distance. At the hotel, officers and their orderlies were conspicuous, and army ambulances were constantly arriving and de¬ parting. The gallop of horsemen, the tramp of foot- soldiers, the noise of drum, fife, and bugle, were heard continually. The two great powers were holding each other in check, and the very air seemed tense with expectancy. Bull Run had shown the North that any victory it might hope to achieve would be neither swift nor easy. The Southern leaders, on the other hand, had already learned something of the determined temper and persistent resolve of those with whom they had to cope. The one absorbing thought in Washington was the army, and the time of visitors like ourselves was VoL. XXXIV.— 87. mostly employed in visits to the camps and hospitals. Such preaching as we heard was either to the soldiers or about them and the issues of the war. Such prayers as were made were uttered in stress and agony of spirit, for the war itself was a dread sorrow to us. It happened one day that, in company with some friends, among whom was the Rev. James hreeman Clarke, I attended a review of our troops, at a distance of several miles from the city. The manoeuvres were interrupted by a sudden attack of the enemy, and in¬ stead of the spectacle promised us, we saw some reen¬ forcements gallop hastily to the aid of a small force of our own, which had been surprised and surrounded. Our return to the city was impeded by the homeward marching of the troops, who nearly filled the highway. Our progress was therefore very slow and to beguile the time, we began to sing army songs, among which the John Brown song soon came to mind. Some one re¬ marked upon the excellence of the tune, and I said that I had often wished to write some words which might be sung to it. We sang, however, the words which were already well known as belonging to it, and our singing seemed to please the soldiers, who surrounded us like a river, and who themselves took up the strain, in the intervals crying to us : “ Good for you.” I slept as usual that night, but awoke before dawn the next morning, and soon found myself trying to

Page 633

630 TOPICS OF THE TIME. weave together certain lines which, though not entirely suited to the John Brown music, were yet capable of being sung to it. I lay still in the dark room, line after line shaping itself in my mind, and verse after verse. When I had thought out the last of these, I felt that I must make an effort to place them beyond the danger of being effaced by a morning nap. I sprang out of bed and groped about in the dim twilight to find a bit of paper and the stump of a pen which I remem¬ bered to have had the evening before. Having found these articles, and having long been accustomed to scribble with scarcely any sight of what I might write in a room made dark for the repose of my infant children, I began to write the lines of my poem in like manner. (I was always careful to decipher these lines within twenty-four hours, as I had found them per¬ fectly illegible after a longer period. ) On the occasion now spoken of, I completed my writing, went back to bed, and fell fast asleep. A day or two later, I repeated my verses to Mr. Clarke, who was much pleased with them. Soon after my return to Boston, I carried the lines to James T. Fields, at that time Editor of the “Atlantic Monthly.” The title, “ Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was of his devising. The poem was published soon after in the rnagazine, and did not at first receive any especial men¬ tion. We were all too much absorbed in w^atching the progress of the war to give much heed to a copy of verses more or less. I think it may have been a year later that my lines, in some shape, found their way into a Southern prison in which a number of our sol¬ diers^ were confined. An army chaplain who had been imprisoned with them came to Washington soon after his release, and in a speech or lecture of some sort, de¬ scribed the singing of the hymn by himself and his companions in that dismal place of confinement. Peo¬ ple now began to ask who had written the hymn, and the author’s name was easily established by a refer¬ ence to the magazine. The battle hymn was often sung in the course of the war, and under a great variety of circumstances. Among other anecdotes, I have heard of its having once led a “ forlorn hope ” through a desperate encounter to a successful issue. The wild echoes of the fearful struggle have longsince died away, and with them all memories of unkindness between ourselves and our Southern brethren. But those who once loved my hymn still sing it. In many a distant Northern town where I have stood to speak, the song has been sung by the choir of some one of the churches before or after my lecture. I could hardly believe my ears when, at an entertainment at Baton Rouge which I shared with other officers of the New Orleans Exposition, the band broke bravely into the John Brown tune. It was scarcely less surprising for me to hear my verses sung at the exposition by the colored people who had invited me to speak to them in their own department. A printed copy of the words and music was once sent me from Constantinople, by whom, I never knew. But when I visited Roberts College, in the neighborhood of that city, the good professors and their ladies at parting asked me to lis¬ ten well to what I might hear on my way down the steep declivity. I did so, and heard, in sweet, full cadence, the lines which scarcely seem mine, so much are they the breath of that heroic time, and of the feel¬ ing with which it was filled. Julia Ward Howe. TOPICS OF An Urgent Measure of National Defense. Aside from the construction of ships and fortifica¬ tions, to which there is reason to believe that the next Congress will give serious attention, the most pressing question of national defense relates to the na¬ val persomtel. Not that our officers and blue-jackets are of inferior quality: far from it. Given the materials nec¬ essary for training in modern war, and our naval force, as far as it goes, will challenge comparison with any of its rivals. The difficulty is not that it is inefficient, but that it is insufficient. It is a mere nucleus, a navy on a peace footing. Alike in the Revolution, when our enemy had a powerful navy, and in the Civil War, when he had no navy at all, the Government felt from the outset to the close the urgent want of a large body of trained man-o’-war’s-men. Men were gradually en¬ listed, but the absence of a previous enrollment made it difficult and expensive to get them, and the absence of a previous training deferred the period of their effi¬ ciency until long after they were got. In accordance with that sound maxim of American policy which forbids the maintenance of a large stand- THE TIME. ing force, our regular army will probably never exceed twenty or thirty thousand men, and our regular navy ten or twelve thousand. But the army makes up for its small size by an ample reserve, composed of a well- organized, well-equipped, and well-trained militia. If a war should break out to-morrow, it would be easy to put into the field, in the course of a fortnight, from fifty to one hundred thousand men, officered, armed, and, to some extent, trained for war. They would be raw troops, no doubt, but they would still be troops : all the pre¬ liminary work — the enrollment, by which the Govern¬ ment could lay hands on them immediately, the ar¬ rangement in working organizations, the elementary training — would have been provided for beforehand, and when the crisis came, would be an accomplished fact. The navy, on the other hand, upon which the coun¬ try must place its first reliance for defence, whose forces are always scattered, and whose statutory num¬ ber, of seven thousand five hundred seamen, falls short of actual peace requirements, is absolutely without a provision for enlargement. In our population of sixty millions there is not a single individual known to the

Page 634

TOPICS OF Navy Department by name, residence, or occupation, — and much less is there any organization, — upon whom or upon which it could call in an emergency to perform duty in ships of war. Plenty of men there doubtless are who would be glad to offer their services, and who might in the course of time be enlisted, assigned to duties, and made available for purposes of training ; but the enlistment and assignment of any large num¬ ber would take two months at least, and the training would require a month or two more. During the four months thus consumed, a properly prepared enemy would have destroyed all our construction-yards and naval stations, to say nothing of our commerce and our commercial cities. To remedy this glaring defect, a plan must be pre¬ pared which shall receive the substantial approval of the mercantile and maritime community on the one hand, and of the Government on the other ; for these are the two forces whose cooperation is necessary to insure success. Its two underlying features are the enrollment of volunteers from the merchant service, the fishing fleet, and the yacht squadrons, as officers, petty officers, and seamen of the United States Naval Reserve; and secondly, their training from time to time, for short periods — three weeks or a month at the most — in regularly commissioned ships of war, organized, if pos¬ sible, as a squadron of evolutions. The volunteers should receive compensation while actually in service, and, the period of training finished, they should be free to return to their vocations, retaining their con¬ nection with the service by a permanent registration. The details of the plan require careful deliberation, but they present no serious difficulties, and call for no great outlay. Registers opened at the commercial seaports should be inscribed with the names of those desiring to associate themselves with the naval reserve. The Navy Department should devote to the work some of the modern ships of which its home squadron will shortly be composed, with selected officers in sufficient numbers to provide for the instruction of the volunteers. The latter, wearing the uniform of the service, and subject to its regulations, would perform their tour of duty at periods that would cause the least possible interruption of their ordinary occupations. The plan would not make sailors out of landsmen, but that would not be its object. The volunteers, be¬ ing seafaring men, already know half their business, and they would be given an opportunity to learn the other half, — the handling of weapons, the routine and discipline of a ship of war, and the intelligent use of its manifold mechanical appliances. The adoption of such a plan would enable the Government, at the first sign of war, to fit out at once all the ships laid up at its yards, instead of marking time while its squadrons returned from distant stations, or, worse still, while Congress deliberated upon the best method of mobil¬ izing a force that was not yet organized, trained, or even recruited. Certainly no measure of national defence is more reasonable or practical than this, and there is none that calls more urgently for immediate action. The Niagara Reservation. Few public measures, based upon considerations other than those of economic benefit, have met with such wide-spread and hearty approval as has greeted THE TIME. 631 the establishment of the Niagara Reservation. No question involving simply the public’s chances of future pleasure can have a greater interest than the question. What now is to be done with this property which the people of the State of New-York hold in trust for the people of all the world ? Entrance-fees have already been abolished, and many eyesores and incumbrances in the shape of mills and fences and vulgar places of amusement have al¬ ready been removed. But it will easily be under¬ stood that a great deal of further work — and of a constructive as well as of a destructive character — will be required if the Reservation is to show that its owners appreciate its value and the responsibility which its possession lays upon them. We are sorry to say that there is no immediate prospect of this work being undertaken. That is, no money has yet been appropriated by the Legislature to begin it. But the Board which has the Reservation in charge has accepted the plan of improvement suggested by the landscape artists to whose consideration the matter was submitted;* and we think it only needs that the outlines of this plan should be laid before the public to excite a strong wish that it shall as soon as possi¬ ble be put in execution. Seldom, we think, has a task of the kind been approached in a spirit which so unites common sense with artistic feeling, and so carefully holds the balance true between what is due to the property itself and what is due to the persons who will visit it. The problem was by no means an easy one to master. Its very first theoretic stages were, indeed, simple enough. Of course, as Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux begin by saying, it is desirable “ that whatever is done shall tell toward a general result that shall be lastingly satisfactory, nothing being wasted on matters of temporary expediency”; and of course this means that preparation must be made for the presence of even greater crowds of visitors than have been in the habit of assembling in the past. Again, it is obvious that “ the greatest good of the greatest number ” is the one aim to be kept in view. The rights of local prop¬ erty-owners have already been made to yield to it; and to it must be subordinated also the privileges of individual tourists in so far as they seem likely to conflict with general enjoyment. Up to this point no great difficulty presented itself. But then to decide what really is the greatest good in such a case, and, this having been settled, so to elab¬ orate a plan of improvement that it might be thor¬ oughly well secured, but that individual privileges might be interfered with no more than strict neces¬ sity compelled, and in such a manner as to excite the least possible feeling of constraint in the most selfish of tourists — these were matters which de¬ manded the exercise of patient thought, clear judg¬ ment, wise foresight, and that practical knowledge which could only have grown from long experience with similar problems. As revealed in their lucid, full, and logical statement, * “ General Plan for the Improvement of the Niagara Reser¬ vation.” New York: Martin B. Brown, 40 & 51 Park Place. 1887. (A pamphlet containing the report addressed to the Hon. William Dorsheimer, President of the Board of Commissioners of the State Reservation at Niagara, by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Landscape-architects ; and a large map of the property as it will appear if remodeled in accordance. )

Page 635

632 TOPICS OF THE TIME. Messrs. Olmsted and Vaux’s primary idea is that the greatest good which they can secure to their clients is the enjoyment of natural scenery in as pure and una¬ dulterated an aspect as the decent, safe, and comfortable accommodation of great throngs of visitors will permit. That is to say, people will in future be expected to come to Niagara to look at Niagara, not to picnic or to play^ and not to gaze at mountebanks, or peep-shows, or “ gal¬ leries of art,” or collections of natural curiosities. And they will be shown it as nearly as possible as nature made it, neither desecrated nor, in the cant sense, “ im¬ proved,” and under the beams of the sun and moon, but never again of colored calcium-lights. Its beauty and its wonderfulness are to be given the freest chance to speak to our emotions, while the petty and discord¬ ant tones of humanity’s creations are as much as pos¬ sible to be suppressed. And, with keen artistic taste, this rule is so extended as to war against all artificial accentuation of natural charms, all deliberate empha¬ sizing of natural impressions. Every opportunity will be given the visitor to see all there is to see, but no ef¬ fort will be made to enhance astonishment, to excite amazement, or to stimulate mere curiosity. Surely these decisions are wise. So, also, is the cog¬ nate decision that, as the more artificial features fill the eye the less will be the effect of natural feat¬ ures,” no object or arrangement “of an artificial char¬ acter should be allowed a place on the property, no matter how^ valuable it might be under other circum¬ stances, and no matter at how little cost it may be had, the presence of which can be avoided consistently with the provision of necessary conditions for making the enjoyment of the natural scenery available.” Those objects and arrangements which, in the pursu¬ ance of this end, cannot be avoided will be only too numerous, and will be only too conspicuous despite the care that will be taken to make them unobtrusive in both form and color. Roads and walks must be con¬ structed in greater numbers than they exist to-day, if all other portions of the surface are to be guarded as carefully as they should be — much more carefully, that is, than they have been in the past. Standing and turning places for carriages must be laid out. Abun¬ dant seats and various bridges and stairways are of course a necessity. Shelters must be built contain¬ ing ample accommodations for the guardians of the place and for the comfort of the greatest possible crowds of visitors. Especially when the narrowness of the long belt which forms the Reservation is considered, do we feel how wise, therefore, is the judgment which would exclude all other objects save those which nature in¬ tended the ground to bear ; not only all appliances for “amusement,” but all works of art, all exotic ornamen¬ tal trees and shrubs, all “decorative ” flower-beds,— everything that could further interfere with the natural aspect of the place or (quite as important a point) could attract the eye to details when it should be con¬ templating broad general effects. Another thing which this precept obliges (and which the comfort of the great body of visitors also necessi¬ tates) is that there shall be no places of entertainment, or of more than temporary shelter except at the very entrance of the Reservation, and that stringent care shall be taken to prevent the monopolizing of attract¬ ive spots by picnic parties and the littering of the ground with sandwich-papers, soda-water bottles, and tomato-cans. Vast numbers of people — sometimes as many as ten thousand a day — come every summer for a brief look at the Falls, who neither would nor could come were they obliged to refresh and rest themselves at the village hotels. For these, and their babies and baskets, ample and even luxurious accom¬ modation will be provided in a large (but low) recep¬ tion-building at the entrance to the Reservation in the Upper Grove, and in adjacent half-open pavilions. But beyond these buildings no carrying of food will be permitted, and nowhere else will it be supplied. The hardship resulting from this rule will be very small, for the distance from the site of the old eating- house on Goat Island to the new reception-rooms or to the village hotels is scarcely greater than a ten minutes’ walk will cover. In truth, it will be no hardship but a positive benefit to the average unthink¬ ing tourist if he is thus persuaded to rest and refresh himself before he does his sight-seeing. The good sense shown by another decision is per¬ haps less immediately obvious, but is quite as evident when the reasons for it are studied in the report and by the aid of the map. Involving as they do calcula¬ tions with regard to the numbers who are likely to visit the Reservation in future years, statements as to the insecurity of certain portions of the water-front, descriptions of the lay of the ground in various direc¬ tions, and a balancing of the relative claims of accom¬ modation and of natural beauty, these reasons are far too long and complicated to be quoted here. But they clearly show, we repeat, the wisdom of the decision that the carriage-drives and halting-places, both on the mainland and on Goat Island, shall be kept a little away from the shore, and that the best points of view shall be approachable only on foot. Nor is the hard¬ ship which this decision may seem to involve much more than an apparent one. To make some thirty paces on foot is but a small exertion for the able-bod¬ ied, and wheeled chairs are to be supplied for the use of invalids. The greatest good of the greatest number will be promoted by this arrangement almost more than by any other that is proposed. One or two additional intentions may be noted. All hazardous points along the brink will be rendered as safe as possible, and carefully guarded against over¬ crowding. All plantings will be made with native trees in desirable variety, more regard being paid to permanent than to speedily effective results ; and they will be so arranged as to screen off the vil¬ lage from the Reservation, while allowing constant views or glimpses of the water from all the roads and paths. The shore line above the falls will be re¬ stored to naturalness of aspect and protected against the encroachment of the water in inconspicuous ways. The present staircase to the Cave of the Winds will be retained for immediate use ; but as the recession of the cliff will eventually necessitate its removal, it is advised that at some future day a shaft and tunnel con¬ taining an elevator should be built, the entrance to be placed some fifty feet from the edge of the bank, further to reduce the inconveniences and expenses which hitherto have afflicted the tourist, a cheap om¬ nibus-service will be established, and modest guide- posts will direct pedestrians. This then, in its main outlines, is the scheme for the execution of which we hope the next Legislature will

Page 636

OPEN LETTERS. 633 be asked to vote sufficient funds. Of course not every¬ thing which it suggests need be done at once; but with regard to some things there is the greatest necessity for immediate action. It is especially desir¬ able, for instance, that the new drives on Goat Island should be at once constructed, for those which exist are so insufficient that visitors are seriously incon¬ venienced, and many intervening stretches of ground are month by month more seriously injured by tram¬ pling feet. But the truth is that there is scarcely a yard of the entire Reservation which does not need treatment of some sort — either for alteration or for conservation ; and as all the work requires much time for its completion, none of it can be begun too soon. Even after it is, so to say, completed, much ad¬ ditional time must elapse before its full results will be apparent, for a landscape-artist must wait years for his labors to finish themselves after he has finished upon the soil the plan he had sketched on paper. The main thing, therefore, is, to begin. But when once we have begun, the main thing will be to remember through all coming years that the property must not only be made, but kept, what its wisely chosen name implies, — a piece of nature defended as strictly as possible against all intrusion of artificiality. As such it will have no more room for certain kinds of beauty to display themselves than for any kind of ugliness. To try to prettify it with fountains and statues, and exotic shrubs and brilliant flower-beds, would be as unwise, as inartistic, and as vulgar almost, as to try to add to its at¬ tractions by merry-go-rounds and menageries, and illuminations, and ice-cream stalls. One feels sure that the Reservation will never again wear that disgrace¬ ful resemblance to a country fair-ground which it has worn so long. But we wish one could feel just as sure that it will never be made into a park or a garden or a pleasure-ground of any kind, even the most sumptuously “ aristocratic.” We wish too that it were entirely certain, that if the year of Queen Victoria’s jubilee is indeed to be signal¬ ized by the forming of a Government Reservation on the Canada shore, this too will be planned and man¬ aged in accordance with this general idea. The views from the Canada bank are much more extensive and imposing than those from our own. There is all the greater reason, therefore, why their effect should not be lessened b/ “ ornamental ” park-like foregrounds, or forced into unworthy rivalry with the attractions of places of amusement and bodily refreshment. OPEN LETTERS. Education of the Blind. NO. I. AS CHILDREN. Notwithstanding the attention given to this subject during the past two or three decades by able and philanthropic persons, and the excellent>work in certain directions and within certain limits now done in many of our State institutions, the matter is still but very imperfectly understood, even by those who make it a specialty, and scarcely at all by the general public. Yet it is one of almost universal interest. There are, comparatively speaking, but few families in this or any other country which are not sooner or later, directly or indirectly, called upon to exercise their thoughts and sympathies in behalf of some afflicted member, friend, or acquaintance, for whom, in their ignorance of possibilities and precedents, they entertain the most exaggerated compassion, the most needlessly doleful and hopeless ideas. The experience and observation of many years en¬ able me to speak with definite, vivid, personal know¬ ledge upon this theme; and though I have by no means the intention, nor perhaps the ability, to formulate a complete system of study and trainingfor those deprived of sight, I may possibly, by a few practical suggestions, throw a little light into some darkened existences, ren¬ der less appalling the roar of life’s battle to some about entering it under fearful disadvantages, or show a gleam of hope to the heavy heart of some discouraged mother, who sees her child, in all the glad bright promise of the future which her fond maternal pride has pictured in advance, entombed alive in midnight blackness, blighted with the curse of useless, joyless dependence — for such its fate appears to her. If I can succeed in giving aid or comfort to any of these, my labor will be repaid tenfold. The chief difficulty in the past, and perhaps an una¬ voidable one in the way of more satisfactory results in the education of the blind as a class, has been that most of the theorizing and experimenting, as well as the practical work in this direction, has been done by see¬ ing persons, who are never wholly able to divest their minds of certain prejudices and misapprehensions with regard to those under their charge, nor to enter fully into their real condition and actual needs. Many of them have been intelligent and earnestly devoted to their task, and a few have really hit upon some very rational projects and ingenious contrivances to ameli¬ orate the condition and add to the comfort of their pu¬ pils and proteges ; but the majority have been led astray by erroneous conceptions of the state with which they had to deal, which rendered their best-meant en¬ deavors fruitless ; while no small number have been fantastic dreamers or pig-headed hobbyists, erratic cranks of every description, who have either used this form of philanthropy as an easy means of gaining a livelihood, or have regarded the unfortunates under their charge as only important in the light of suitable and legitimate subjects for every variety of experi¬ ment, psychological and physical, from fanatical, mo¬ nomaniac piety, to hydropathy. Some of the theories put in practice, in defiance of common sense, by men whom the state supports and the public applauds, would be boundlessly ludicrous, if their results were not pitifully sad. For instance, the superintendent of a large and richly endowed in¬ stitution for the blind at Naples maintains that all sightless persons should be kept in utter ignorance of sight ; that in justice and mercy they should never be allowed to know what they miss, — that is, should never be permitted to meet, either in their specially prepared

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OPEN LETTERS. 634 literature or conversation, any reference whatever to light, color, or any purely visible phenomena; in short, should never be told of anything which they cannot themselves hear, taste, or touch ; should live in vast cloister-like asylums, supported by charity, strangers to every experience of actual life — pictures, scenery, sight itself, to them unknown, even by name. Follow¬ ing this theory out to its logical conclusion, it is diffi¬ cult to comprehend how any brain outside a madhouse could conceive it, still less harbor it for a moment ; yet upward of three hundred wretches are to-day being edticated^ as it is termed, in accordance with this theory. Another superintendent of a similar establishment in Germany told the writer, not long since, that ‘‘prayer and Christian resignation” were the only things of value which the blind could learn or prac¬ tice ; that for them, as for the lepers of old, life in this world was over, and it was their duty and privilege to fit themselves early for the next ; that any effort to change their condition materially, besides being en¬ tirely fruitless, would be equivalent to rebellion against the restrictions of their divinely appointed sphere. In his establishment, therefore, the chief and only impor¬ tant exercise of the pupils was to kneel regularly every half-hour at the stroke of a bell and mutter through a lot of senseless prayers, learned by rote, to render them more contented with their lot and resigned to its necessary limitations, as was claimed by their judi¬ cious instructor, who, like many others, was entirely satisfied with divine restrictions for other people. In America the conditions, prospects, and educa¬ tional opportunities of this numerically important class are of course incalculably superior to those in Europe. There the outlook, even to the casual ob¬ server, is hopeless and heart-rending ; here it presents many elements of encouragement. Our sound national common sense helps us to take the lead in this, as in most practical matters ; but we have still very much to test and demonstrate. An important source of misunderstanding and con¬ sequent mismanagement in dealing with the blind, especially as children, is the exaggerated sympathy and commiseration felt and exjDressed toward them by par¬ ents, teachers, and others. Those to whom total dark¬ ness is synonymous with mental depression, vague terror, and utter physical helplessness, naturally sup¬ pose that never to see the light at all must mean posi¬ tive, poignant, perpetual misery. To them it would, for a time at least; and they cannot realize how com¬ pletely circumstances alter cases. The blind child knows nothing of this feeling, and never would, if it were not dinned into his ears by the stupid, over-offi¬ cious kindness of those about him. He is accustomed to his condition, has pretty much forgotten or has never known any other, and lives his life contentedly enough within its necessary limitations, unconscious of any lack, save when reminded of it by some practical diffi¬ culty to be overcome, or, far often er and more painfully, by the injudicious remarks and demeanor of others. Many a day that for him would have passed cheerfully, filled with play or study, without a thought of his misfortune, is embittered and made wretched by a few ill-timed, ill-chosen words from some well-meaning friend or curious neighbor. For he is, as a rule, abnormally sensitive upon this score; and though it should be his aim and that of his guardians to over¬ come this tendency, it cannot be done by continually and heedlessly irritating the sore spot. Let him alone ; treat him and think of him as if he were not different from other children, and he will become far less so than you suppose. Assume that he is to feel, think, and enjoy as others do, and he will surprise you by the clearness of his perceptions, the accuracy of his intuitions, and the thoroughness of his participation in things which you had supposed were wholly beyond his scope. Help him to forget or ignore rather than to realize and lament his infirmity; not by anxiously avoiding every subject that has any con¬ nection with sight, but by tacitly granting that he has other not necessarily inferior means of obtaining the same impressions of the outer world as yourself, which is approximately true. You will thus greatly contribute not only to his practical well-being and personal com¬ fort, but to his good opinion of your own tact. It may be here remarked that the sufferer from blindness or other bodily affliction is always able to gauge the taste and breeding of those he meets by the length of time it takes them to get round to this, for him, disagree¬ able topic. With the coarse, illiterate man, it is the first and about the only thing spoken of ; others arrive at it by more or less ingenious colloquial meanderings, displaying a rude curiosity behind a flimsy veil of every degree of transparency. Comparatively few succeed in overlooking it altogether, and these are proportionally appreciated. Fred Douglas is reported to have said : “ I regard Mr. Lincoln as the finest gentleman I ever met, for he is the only one who never directly or indirectly reminded me of my color,” a pregnant and suggestive remark, well worth a sec¬ ond thought. Another terrible obstacle to the proper develop¬ ment of the blind is the overweening caution of their friends for them, and the unreasonable, incredulous distrust of their capabilities which they must meet on every hand, and either combat, with all but superhu¬ man energy, or succumb to, as they, alas, too often do. One is reminded of a man who has all his life long taken the same local paper, till he has come to live in and swear by it, and finds it impossible to believe that his neighbor, who subscribes for a rival sheet, can be posted upon current events, or capable of judging of anything, merely because his communication with the world is through a different medium. Those who have all their lives been in the habit of depending upon sight for everything, from the study of philosophy and the Scriptures to the tying of a shoestring, cannot seem to understand that hearing and touch may with practice be made to serve nearly all purposes about as well, and some very much better. For example, be¬ cause they cannot find the door of their own parlor at first trial if the lamp suddenly goes out, they consider it incredible that a person without sight can go all over a large city alone as independently and safely as they; yet he finds it just as hard to believe or under¬ stand that they can tell, through the glass of a closed window, how many persons are in a passing carriage, or whether the gas is lighted, from the other side of the room. Both judge from limited personal expe¬ rience, a very unreliable criterion when applied to things outside its range. The fact is that the blind child, if given a chance, will discover or develop

Page 638

OPEN LETTERS, means to do nearly everything that others do, in its own way and with somewhat more trouble, it is true, but well enough for all practical needs and for its own satisfaction. If not hemmed in at every turn, antici¬ pated in every wish and effort, warned against and prevented from making every self-reliant attempt, the sightless child will gradually attain to an independence as natural and necessary to his well-being as it is mar¬ velous to his over-anxious friends. Here, again, leave him to himself; let him meet his own necessities, find his limitations, test and train his powers. Let him hunt his own lost playthings, even if he be slow about it, and your tender patience be tried almost beyond bearing by the spectacle. Let him grope for them ; the next time it will not take half so long, and in ten years he will find a dropped coin or cuff-button as quickly as you can. Let him help himself at table, at the toilette, and on all occasions as others do. Let him go alone, not only over house and grounds, which many think so wonderful, but on the streets of town or city, wherever he pleases and others of his age are allowed to go. Encourage him to compete with them in all they undertake, whether physical or intel¬ lectual, and he will very likely astonish you often by excelling them. In a word, help him to independence, the first essential of his happiness, the corner-stone of his life’s edifice, the key-note of its harmony. Fortunate indeed is he who, when entering earth’s lists, the odds against him doubled, his own forces crippled by such an infirmity, finds himself blessed in a mother with brains as well as heart, who can curb maternal fondness and fears in accordance with a far¬ sighted plan for his good. To the credit of such a mother and for the encouragement of others like her who may be beginning a similar task, the writer may be permitted to state in support of the above as¬ sertions that, thanks to such a judicious training, he was able, without either memory of or aid from sight and without material assistance from any institution or corps of teachers, to compete fairly and successfully with his boyhood companions, not only in the different grades of the public-school and the higher branches of academical study, but in most of the bodily exer¬ cises and sports, such as swimming, skating, running, rowing, etc.; to ride horseback alone anywhere within ten miles of his suburban home ; in short, to take an enjoyable part in nearly every occupation and amuse¬ ment entered into by other boys ; later, to travel alone over the greater part of this country and Europe, to wander through the streets of many foreign cities, enjoying their difierent languages and customs. Though this required, no doubt, a closer attention and a greater keenness and alertness of the faculties than the average person would have needed to exer¬ cise, it was not therefore less beneficial or pleasur¬ able, and was certainly done with as great freedom, safety, and comfort, and as few mishaps or inconven¬ iences as fall to the lot of an ordinary traveler. Only another proof of the old saying that there is more than one road to Rome and more than one means to an end, if one searches with a will. The question is often asked : By what means does a person unable to see find his way from place to place, or know when to turn a corner, or even keep on the sidewalk, etc ? That some such power is possessed, to a greater or less degree, by most blind people, is well 63s known; but just what it is or ho*v far it may be car¬ ried, few understand ; and even among those using it, to whom it is a matter of course, a simple every-day experience, few, if any, have succeeded in analyzing it satisfactorily. Though the faculty is as difficult to ex¬ plain clearly to those not gifted with it as would be the perception of the difference in colors or as sight itself to the blind, I will try to give some little idea of it for the benefit of those wishing to learn for themselves or others. It does not consist, as is sometimes fancied, in the skillful use of a cane or the exact memory of distances, though these are minor aids. It results from the union of hearing and the sense of touch, both trained to ex¬ traordinary delicacy and habituated to unusual services, coming to form a sort of sixth sense, as instinctive, in¬ stantaneous, and trustworthy in its activity as any of the familiar five. To illustrate: If you walk rapidly along a quiet street, listening carefully to your footsteps, you will notice that the solid buildings and walls close to the sidewalk give back a distinct echo, which instantly ceases at the openings and crossings. This to the blind is equivalent to light and shadow, and is in its crudest beginnings the first element in the “ sixth sense ” above mentioned. Again, if you walk slowly, in the dark, up against a wall or closed door, you will feel, just before striking it, upon the delicate nerves of the exposed portion of the face a slight sensation like that which might be produced by an infinitely fine and light gossamer veil. It is caused by the increased compression or resistance of the elastic air when forced up against one solid body by the ap¬ proach of another. Repeat the experiment, and you find that the same thing is noticeable at a greater dis¬ tance than at first. This is the germ of the second element already spoken of. These two perceptions, blended into one consciousness and trained to perfec¬ tion by long years of practice, enable one to become aware at a considerable distance of any obstacle in his path, to determine the size and approximate shape of objects he is passing, to tell the height of a wall without touching it; in short, to take cognizance of any and all landmarks necessary in making his way or finding a given locality. This faculty, based upon simple though generally unfamiliar natural laws, is, in some of its many forms of application, the source of most of the seemingly re¬ markable feats performed by sightless persons in this connection; and it is with them so habitually in use, so much a part of daily life, that its exercise is instinc¬ tive and unconscious, and the blind scarcely realize that others employ a different process to arrive at the same results. It is susceptible of almost immeasurable de¬ velopment. The writer has known a number besides himself who could count the shade-trees when riding at full gallop along the middle of the street, tell the difference between a close or open fence, the distance of buildings from roadways, etc. The position of cor¬ ners, gateways, and the like are much more easily learned. In walking, everything is of course much nearer, and the difficulty is greatly diminished. So every change in sidewalk or fence, every inequality beneath the feet or smallest post by the wayside, is a guide, as definite and trustworthy as are buildings or signboards to him who sees. The only things which seriously interfere with the

Page 639

OPEN LETTERS. 636 exercise of this faculty are a high wind, which prevents the differences in atmospheric density being perceived, and a constant monotonous noise, like the clatter of machinery or the rapid roll of wheels over a hard road, by which all echo is drowned. These make the real darkness. Hence, though many are able to ride with ease and safety, I never knew one who could drive in a carriage at all, and I do not think that will ever be feasible. I will also say that wheelbarrows, trucks, etc., left in the way by careless boys, are the blind man’s bane. They make no noise, and have no voice of echo in them, nor are they high enough to give warning of their presence to any exposed portion of the skin ; but humble and unpretentious though they are, they may prove a grievous cause of stumbling in the path of the peaceable pedestrian. Save for these hindrances, which after all are no worse than being tied to a candle half of one’s life, one may make sight quite easy to be dispensed with in most matters. Courage then, heartsick mother, de¬ spondent youth ! The greater the odds, the more tempting the victory. Arouse ambition ; strive, not to equal, but to excel what others do with better chances ; at first in the little commonplaces of life, later in its more important work. What has been done can be ; and what never has been done is not there¬ fore impossible, but is rather the more worth doing. Edward B. Ferry. Ministerial Bureaux. In most of the great Protestant communions in the United States much complaint is heard of a failure to utilize the ministerial forces. On the one side is a great array of vacant churches, on the other a multi¬ tude of unemployed ministers. Churches are begging for teachers, and preachers are praying for churches, and there seems to be no way of bringing the demand and the supply together. In the statistics of one re¬ ligious body now before us, out of a total of 4016 churches, 941 are reported vacant ; and out of a total of 3796 ministers, 1137 are “not in pastoral work.” A large proportion of these last are employed as teachers, or as journalists, or in the work of benevolent societies, or in some other calling ; nevertheless it is certain that several hundreds of them are available for the supply of the 941 vacant churches, if only the proper adjustments could be made. What a misfor¬ tune that so many flocks should be shepherdless, while there are so many shepherds searching for flocks ! A state of things quite similar exists in nearly all the Protestant denominations. The Methodists alone escape the reproach. It is their boast that every minis¬ ter who desires to work is furnished with a field of la¬ bor, and that every church wishing a pastor is sup¬ plied. Over against the confessed disadvantages of their system, arising out of its imperfect adaptation to work in the larger cities, this great fact must be set. Some degree of freedom and flexibility may well be sacrificed to secure so perfect an economy of force. It is not likely, however, that any of the other denomina¬ tions will adopt the itinerant system ; it is much more likely that the Methodist church will relieve its string¬ ency by important modifications ; but it is a question often asked whether some advisory agency might not be contrived that would bring the idle ministers and the empty pulpits into communication ; and whether, in this way, the advantages of the itineracy could not be secured without suffering its drawback. In the Protestant Episcopal church the bishop ful¬ fills precisely this function ; and it is probable that he accomplishes as much in this direction as is possible under any system which leaves to the local church un¬ limited power in the choice of its minister. The num¬ ber of unemployed clergymen and of vacant parishes is smaller in this church than in any of the non-episco- pal churches, and this is a strong reason for episcopal supervision. “ A church without a bishop ” has, beyond a doubt, many advantages; the liberty which it boasts is a great good ; whether it more than compensates for the lack of episcopal oversight and direction is a question into which we do not propose to enter ; we only wish to point out that the polity which the non-epis- copal churches deliberately renounce works well in the matter now under consideration. It has been proposed in some of the non-episcopal churches that each local ecclesiastical body — synod, or presbytery, or conference — appoint from its own members a ministerial bureau or committee of minis¬ terial exchange, to serve as a medium of communica¬ tion between ministers wanting churches and churches wanting ministers. One of the most distinguished of the Presbyterian ministers, the Rev. Dr. Crosby, of New-York, forcibly urged this plan in a lecture at the New Haven Theological Seminary. “The church,” he says, “ should have an organized system of bringing together unemployed ministers and vacant pulpits, by which, in a quiet way, consistent with the dignity of the church and the self-respect of ministers, churches will be able to act intelligently, without the pernicious practice of candidating. A committee should be in¬ trusted with the delicate matter, — a committee of expe¬ rienced and judicious men appointed by the chief ecclesiastical body of the district, and to this committee churches should apply, and on this committee minis¬ ters should rely.” This plan seems entirely rational and feasible ; can any one suggest a serious objection to it? How great would be the gain, if the ministers who are now writ¬ ing and traveling hither and thither in search of work, and the churches that are reaching out blindly after pastors, could be introduced to one another by some such judicious committee ! No flaw appears in this reasoning, yet when the method is tried it does not succeed. The great Northern Presbyterian church, to which Dr. Crosby belongs, has made full experi¬ ment with it, and with discouraging results. This church would seem to possess, in its centralized organ¬ ization and its admirable discipline, better facilities for the working of such a scheme than most of the other non-episcopal churches can command, yet a strenuous effort, continued through several years, to put it into operation, almost wholly failed. The presbyterial and synodical committees of supply were duly organized, and announced themselves as ready to mediate be¬ tween vacant churches and idle pastors, but they have had little to do. Neither ministers nor churches re¬ sorted to them ; the evil against which they were to provide is not abated ; the “ hungry sheep ” still “ look up and are not fed ” ; the starving shepherds still wait in the market-place because no man has hired them. The result of this experiment indicates, in the

Page 640

OPEN LETTERS. words of a late temperate report on the subject, that neither churches nor ministers can be brought, by any new form of machinery, to leave their concerns in other hands than their own. The committees are left idle, while the parties transact their business for them¬ selves.” The reasons of the reluctance of churches and minis¬ ters to avail themselves of such an agency does not imme¬ diately appear. Is it partly a result of an overstrained independence — an excessive jealousy of ecclesiastical control ? Is it due to a fear that the committee thus appointed would learn to domineer over the churches ? Such an apprehension seems altogether irrational. The Episcopal churches appear to have preserved all their liberties of choice: they avail themselves constantly of the good offices of the bishop in the selection of their rectors ; but it is probable that they are as free in their action as the churches of any other communion. The danger that an advisory com¬ mittee, appointed by themselves year by year, would usurp authority over the churches in this mat¬ ter, seems to be exceedingly remote. The fear of los¬ ing liberty sometimes degenerates into a ludicrous apprehension. “ Give me liberty or give me death ! ” is a heroic sentiment, no doubt; but the man who prefers to die in the woods rather than surrender the liberty of finding his own way out by inquiring at the door of the wood-chopper’s cabin, is a cheap variety of hero. So far as the clergy are concerned, this unwilling¬ ness to make use of the ministerial bureau arises prob¬ ably from a different cause. The larger number of these vacant churches are weak churches, and the unemployed minister hesitates to ask advice of such a committee lest they should commend him to one of these places where the labor is abundant and the support meager. To re¬ fuse such an opening would be ungracious ; to accept it would imply a degree of self-denial to which he has not attained. Therefore he thinks it more prudent to keep his own counsel and conduct his own negotiations. If such are the reasons which operate to dissuade the pastorless churches and the churchless parsons from availing themselves of this sensible provision for their mutual benefit, it is to be hoped that they may be reconsidered. A slight accession of common sense and consecration would be likely to make both parties willing to receive advice, and to agree upon some plan by which the neglected vineyards and the waiting la¬ borers may be brought together. In the absence of such a plan much labor of this na¬ ture falls on those who are already overworked. Home Missionary secretaries and superintendents in all the new States are necessarily burdened with such cares, in behalf of the feebler churches. Yet even they might be relieved to a considerable extent by the cooperation of local committees. Every pastor of a prominent church, East or West, by no consent of his own, finds himself regularly installed as a ministerial bureau. 637 No small share of his time is consumed in mediating between idle ministers and vacant churches. If this work could be organized and subdivided, much relief would be afforded to a few very busy men. In some of our larger cities local bureaux of tempo¬ rary supply have been established. Ministers on their vacations, and ministers without charge, resort to these bureaux ; and churches of the vicinity, needing supplies for their pulpits, make application during the week and take whatever is sent then on Sunday morning. Such a bureau may be a great convenience at times ; but, considered as a benevolent institution, its indirect results are questionable. The value of such an agency cannot be estimated until it is known to what extent the churches are encouraged by its presence to neglect or delay the settlement of pastors, and to rely upon a hand-to-mouth provision for their pulpits which saves them considerable money; and also to what extent restless ministers in distant towns are led to resign their pulpits and make pilgrimages to the places where the bureaux offer employment. The comparison is rude, and may seem invidious ; but, if things sacred may be likened to things profane, the establishment of such an agency may be said to operate, to some extent, like the opening of a soup-kitchen ; and the wisest philan¬ thropists are now agreed that the effects of free soup- kitchens are not salutary. Washington Gladdest. Landscape-Gardening. To THE Editor of The Century: Allow me to thank you for your‘‘ Landscape-Garden¬ ers Needed for America,” in your “Topics of the Time,” for June. The so-called landscape-gardener is in many cases not as intelligent as an ordinary every-day laborer ; his object seems to be to have as many narrow and contorted walks as possible where they are not needed, to plant many trees and shrubs in the most inappropriate places, to make ridiculously- shaped beds, and to plant them with but one object, — to use as many plants as possible without regard to suitability. It is surely worth the attention not only of those engaged in the business, but of gentlemen who have country houses, to consider at least the fundamental features of landscape-work and landscape-art. There can be no stereotyped plans for the embellishment of grounds; each domain calls for different treatment and different grouping. The natural surroundings should be the first con¬ sideration, instead of being, as now, often ignored. Unfortunately, we have but few good works which treat this important subject in a right manner; but, in spite of all this malpractice and ignorance, it is evident that we are progressing, though slowly. John Thorpe^ Secretary of the New-York Horticultural Society. VoL. XXXIV.— 88.

Page 641

bric-A-brac. Untangling the Family Yarn. Being clerk of the School-Board, it was one of my duties in June to take the school-census of all under twenty-one, at the rate of three cents a head. Having lately attended a Baptist “ big meeting,” I roughly estimated the babies in the district at about a thousand, not counting the other infants-in-law, who frisked and flirted, and disturbed the sleepers of the church. On a hot July day, having tangled and untied myself over and again in the network of highways and by¬ ways of a negro settlement, I approach a cabin, the fac-simile of a hundred others. A wooden chimney, crowned with a barrel, “ larther ” propped against it, and a tub of water stationed on a convenient shelf, in readiness to “ squench ” the fre¬ quent blaze prone to burst out with small warning, a pig-sty close at hand, the inevitable lyehopper sup¬ ported by the friendly “ chimbley,” a row of stunted “ squintch ” bushes answering the purpose of a clothes¬ line for the family linen, and a pole tall as a flag-staff topped with an inverted bottle. This I found was a scare-hawk, companion to the scare-crow that stood in the corn-patch attired in ragged guano-bags and with a wooden musket. There is a henhouse with a dirt roof on which green things are growing, and various semblances of out¬ houses and airy shelters in which confinement it would be cruelty to animals. There is a vine patch on one side, and a bench where an old negro man, evidently “ on guard ” to watch and protect the melons, is comfortably snoozing. Two little dogs run out, barking and snapping like mad at my horse’s heels. The doorway instantly fills with a family group ranging from the height of a jug, up to mammy herself with the shiny fat baby in arms. Only the rolling white eyeballs and the ivory teeth make a mark against the dark background. The old man slowly rises to a sitting posture, rest¬ ing his chin on the top of a crutch, and calls in the dogs. “ How ’r’ y’ uncle ? ” I say, meaning business. ‘‘ Gim¬ me names ’n’ ages, ’f you please; ’min a hurry.” “ Sarvant, marster ; how you do yo’self, sah ? I’se po’ly, thank de Lord.” He stares me respectfully in the face a moment ; then breaks out, “ Geecraminy ! Ain’t dat Mars’ Jack Gunsby? ” “That’s my name,” I growl. “ Great-day-in-de-mornin’ ! I’se old Unc’ Buck which was head man ter Mars’ Eugeems Gunsby. Thought I rickernized dat hoa’se voice ob de Gunbyzizes soon uz I heerd yer cussin’ dem dogs, en I’d know dem hooked fambly nozizes en keen black eyes like gimblet- zizes wharsomever I see ’em.” Be it understood that “zizes” is a choice form of the plural affected by Uncle Buck on occasions where great elegance of language is desired. “ Here, Betty; fetch a cheer for Mars’ Jack, — datnew cheer fum upstar’s, en sho yer bresh de dus’ offen it. Lan’ sakes ! How yer is done growed ! Got moustarch- ers ; he ! he ! ” “Tell yer what. Mars’ Jack, dem Gunbyzizes war a pow’ful fine nation o’ quality. Rale top o’ de pot. Many’s de silber dollar I’se had flung me when yo’ pa come a-gallinuppin’ on his coal-black mar’. Done all his co’tin’ at Mars’ Eugeemziz ; owned de bes’ trac’ o’ lan’ in Spotsylvany ; never eben knowed all his own niggers ; more’n two hundred. He meet a nigger in de road, ‘ Who you b’long ter, boy ? ’ “ ‘ Hi, marster ! dunno yer own nigger ? ’ “ Den he laff en fling a quarter. ‘ Go ’bout yer biz- ness den ; yer don’t ’longst in no road.’ He ! he ! ” What could I do but laugh myself at this glorifica¬ tion of my ancestors, and fumble in my own limp pocket-book for a stray quarter. “ Now, Uncle Buck ; the ages of your children ? ” “ Arter votes. Mars’ Jack? Dey tells me votes dun riz ter two dollar en thutty cent.” “No; I’m after those who can’t vote. How many in your family under twenty-one? ” “ Well, less see; I b’lieve dars some sebenteen ur twenty. Dars nine ars; want de gals too?” “Want all.” “Dars Ham, Sham, en Jacob in comp’iment ter Norah en de Ark ; den I ’menced on de ’postles, — Mat, Mark, Jake, en John, Betsann en Vilet. Lord Vorrint, he drawed up wid ager en got thro wed back ; en dars Wise en Foolish is ’bout de bes’ leetle yoke o’ steers, en Gundy en de bell-cow - ” “ Stop ! stop! Leave out the cattle ; I’m only after folks this time.” “ Prezackly, Mars’ Jack; thought yer wanted de whole fambly, sah. Den yer ’ll have ter scuze Jake en John, caze dem’s de two leetle coon dogs; t’oth’rs is all human cre’tur’s ; I leetermody forgot Peter.” “ Give me Peter’s age.” “ Peter ? ” “Yes, Peter.” “ Peter mighty nigh old uz I is. He born in old slave times.” “Then Peter is over twenty-one ? ” “ Oh, yes, sah ; Peter was Tildy’s ar. I b’en had fo’ wimmen-folks, en all on em’s got der diffunt batches o’ ars en gals likewise.” “ Uncle Buck, call up your flock, and I’ll count heads.” But with great dignity Betty was ordered to “ fetch the fambly Bible.” It proved to be a battered copy of “ Bacon’s Abridgment”; and after examining the hiero¬ glyphics on the fly-leaves, I preferred the unwritten page of nature. “ Come here, boy,” I said sternly to a grinning con¬ glomeration of eyeballs and wooliness, dressed in a single tattered garment. “What’s your name ? ” “ Binjy, sah.” I wrote down “ Binjy.” “ Age ? ” “ D’n’o’, sah ! ” This produced an outcry from Betty. “ Dunno yer own aige, Binjy? En yer be’n ter school two whole endtirin^ sections I Yer ain’t wuthy ter have a’ aige.” Binjy hung his head and put part of his hand in his mouth.

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BRIC-A-BRAC. 639 “ Let me see your teeth, boy. There ! that’s wide enough ; I’m not going inside. Let me see : four miss¬ ing, three snuggled. You are half-past nine ! ” “ Fo’ Gord, dat’s so ! Nuver knowed yer could calker- late de aiges o’ cre’tur’s by der teeth ; scuzin’ ’twere beastizizes. Now run home, en tell yer mammy yer aige ’fo’ yer fergit it, Binjy.” “ Isn’t he your child ? ” “ Lan’ o’ Moses, Mars’ Jack ! I ’clar’ ter gracious, dat nigger ’longst ter Vianna back dar in decle’rin’, en dat sumtious chile knowed it, when he gint you dem ginerations.” “Oh, well,” I say hastily, erasing the “ginera¬ tions ” of Binjy so heedlessly jotted down, “ let us be¬ gin again. Give me the age of Shem.” “ Sham, Mars’ Jack ? ” “Yes, Shem.” “ I disremember how old Sham are. I speck Sham ’bout forty year’ old.” “ Confound Sham ! Give me Ham.” “ Ham, Mars’ Jack? ” “Yes, Ham’s age.” “ Betty, how old you speck Ham are ? I reckon Ham ’bout forty year’ old.” “ The deuce he is ! I tell you, old man, I only want those under twenty-one.” “ Den I speck yer don’t want Jacob’s aige nother, caze dem three ars is twins.” With a sigh of resignation, I at last extract seventeen names from the parents, “ all humans,” Betty assures me, with their literary attainments pretty generally represented by zero, as Uncle Buck’s notion of educa¬ tion was “a little figgerin’ to keep folks fum a-cheatin’ on ’em,” and that “book lamin’ sp’iled a fiel’-han’ en¬ tirely. One little gal could write, but not read. “ How is that, Uncle Buck ? ” “ Dunno, Mars’ Jack ; but dar ’tis. De paper is all wroten ober wid marks, en dat what I say ; nobody

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BRIC-A-BRAC, 640 is got sense nuff ter read little Betsann’s writin’, no more ’an she can’t read it her own self.” When I inquire after “ Mozizes ” attainments, I am informed, “He dade, sah,” and four other “ars ” are also cast out as born in slave-times. Poky proved to be a “ boarder.” “ En a mons’ous troublesome member o’ de fambly, Mars’ Jack, seein’ she’s a’ idgit. Her mammy wuks out by de day, en Betty ’lowed she’d make a sight o’ cash money by talcin’ bo’ders. De chile’s mammy counted on she was gwine ter pay a fo’th o’ de sumac crap for de year’s bode ; but Betty, she mighty sharp on a bargain, en Betty ’low de crap mought not fetch a fo’th, en stifli- cated in de bargain how she would charge forty cent a mont’. Den Vianna, she bought a mighty strong bar¬ rel o’ fish fur fifty cent, en when pay-day come, ’tis a bucket o’ fish, whar I en Betty jest could eat to keep fum wastin’ vittles, en a bag o’ sumac here, en a peck o’ taters dar, en some long-handle, godes, en seed butter beans, en one ten-cent piece, en Betty so confused in her min’ she can’t tell wher she make ur loss by de business. Vianna gwine ter try ter run in a row o’ cabbages en some injuns on Betty next mont’ ; but Betty done ’clar’ fo’ Gord, she ain’t gwine ter ’cept o’ no mo’ fish ner garden projuice scuzin’ ’tis meat ur money. “ Dis speckerlation o’ Betty’s ’minds me o’ gwine huntin’ in old slave times wid de oberseer’s son, dat bow-la’ged Sampson. He say we was gwine in cahoots. I furnish’ my yaller coon dog, en he furnish’ de gun; en de dog treed de coon, en dat Sampson he shoot him, en went off wid de game, en I come long back home wid de cahoots.” “Now, just give me your occupation. Uncle Buck) and then the direction to the nearest neighbor — the shortest way.” “ My perfession, Mars’ Jack, am fustly, deacon o’ de church; thirdly, millerin’; nextly, a hoe hand.” “ Millering ? What mill do you run ? ” “ I be’n runnin’ de cider-mill for dem Biggerzizes nigh ’on three year next July, Mars’ Jack. ’Spected yer knowed dem Biggerzizes, Mars’ Jack; dey is rale quality.” “ Certainly, all right; now for the next house, and the nearest way.” “Yer mus’ go down de lane tell yer come acrost some drubbares, but don’t go thu no bares, en gullong tell yer come ter de paff; but dat paff is old Kizzizes spring paff ; en a right smart while ’fo’ yer git ter a mons’ous big mud puddle, yermus’ turn ter delef ’-ban’ paff en den - ” “How? ” “Well, yer see dat poplar-tree down de road whar de lightnin’ strek? ” “ Yes. ” “Well, yer mustn’t go nigh dat tree; dar’s a little paff to de cuppin, too, wdiar yer mustn’t take, en dat windin’ paff down de hill is de spring paff, en 3mr gwine come to Jim Crow’s medder bares, en yer must jes’ keep long de paff tell - ” “Which path must I take? I don’t understand.” “Good Lordy mussy ! Mars’ Jack, I see I can’t learn yer no sense. So Betty better jest gullong en show yer de way, sence I kin no better do.” liva M. De Jarnette. In the Cafe. What! Galopin is dead, you say? Why, he was with us yesterday ; His face was like a rose in bloom ; His laugh the lightest in the room; His wit — Poor Galopin! Ah, out/ Cdtait, inon cher, tm bel esprit ! And now, to-night, you say he lies. The seals of death upon his eyes. His lips for evermore at rest, The crucifix upon his breast. Poor Galopin ! Quelle farce pour lui. Plus gros farceur de tout Paris! He hurried off; it was, you know. His night upon the “ Figaro ” ; See! Through the print his spirit shines ! Ah, v/hen the angels read these lines. The talk of all the town he’ll be. If there’s a town au Paradis. You saw the chamber in its dress Of lilies and of lilacs, — yes. The tapers, lace — I know their ways — The carnival at Pere-la-Chaise ! For all the earth I would not see That earth in their diablerie! Work made and killed him. Even so. He goes as it were best to go. The dead ride fast. Ami, fill up ! A Galopin ! The stirrup-cup ! And now to work ! Ah, cher, if he Had mourned for us — he had esprit! T. P. Sullivan. The Hundredth Man. The May-day brought the welcome monthly guest. Its pages breathing song and scent of flowers ; What fairy-land e’er granted such a quest, — A century of joy in three short hours ! I read with pleasure constantly increased. The prose, the verse, old Egypt’s buried past. But as the rarest viands crown the feast. Kept Stockton’s charming story till the last. And when I’d read it through, to reverie I gave myself (you’ve doubtless done the same). And wondered what the outcome was to be. And what the (thus far) hidden hero’s name. For study all who’ve stepped upon the scene, Their characters, thoughts, habits closely scan, You’ll find it very difficult, I ween. To choose there your ideal hundreth man. But it may be that, shunning prying eyes. Within the green-room of the author’s brain The hero lurks, and all attempt defies Of those who would his mystery profane. Yet I’m no prophet, and presume in naught To penetrate the gifted Stockton’s plan. But I confess I’m haunted by this thought, — What if a woman be the hundredth 7na7i ? G. J. Wilber. THE DE VINHE PRESS, PRINTERS, NEW YORK.

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Page 645

The Century Magazine. VoL. XXXIV. SEPTEMBER, 1887. No. 5. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S HOME. DESK ON WHICH THE DECLARATION OP INDEPENDENCE WAS WRITTEN. FROM A DRAWING BY THOMAS JEFFERSON. OF the many American multitudes who as¬ sembled on the Centennial Fourth of July to hear the reading of the Declaration of Independence, every individual knew that it was written by Thomas Jefferson. Scarcely one in a million, however, was aware that that occasion was also very near the centennial an¬ niversary of his first occupation of his once famous homestead of Monticello. While the date and the authorship of the Declaration have become fixed stars in historical fame, in one hundred years after the signing, and in fifty years after the death of the illustrious au¬ thor, the popular knowledge concerning Jef¬ ferson’s place of birth and Jefferson’s homehad shrunken to the dimensions and substance of a dim tradition. To a brief attempt at reviv¬ ing that tradition, the following pages are devoted. Peter Jefferson, the father of the author of our Declaration, married into the D Huge¬ ness branch of the Randolph family, and he and young William Randolph of Tuckahoe, in the year 1735, feeling that they had their fortunes to make, concluded to ‘‘go West” ; that is, they left the old tide- water setdements on the James River, and went to join two or three other pioneers as first settlers in the country now forming the county of Albemarle, Virginia. It would not be considered much of a “move” in our day, as it was less than a hundred miles of a bee-line, and took them only to the first outlying chain of the Allegha- Copyright, 1887, by The CeN' nies, known at that point as the South-west Mountains, some twenty odd miles eastward of the Blue Ridge. Nevertheless, they found here a comparative wilderness, and what was essential, plenty of unoccupied land. Of this circumstance they took immediate advantage; their natural highway had led them up the Rivanna, an affluent of the James River flow¬ ing from the North-west; and probably hesita¬ ting to put the barrier of even a low moun¬ tain chain permanently between themselves and the old settlements, they determined to locate on the eastern slope of this chain. Young Randolph “patented” a tract of 2400 acres lying on the Rivanna; and young Peter Jefferson, a few days later, like him “pat¬ ented” a tract of about 1000 acres, lying just west of his friend’s. Both tradition and docu¬ ments record that when Peter Jefferson came to examine his new estate he failed to find a situation to his liking whereon to build his cabin, which should, according to his hopes and the fashion of the period, in due time grow into a manorial hall of baronial amplitude and aspect. He mentioned his difficulty to his friend Randolph, who furnished a ready expe¬ dient to cure it. Land being abundant, build¬ ing sites ought not to be scarce ; so reasoning, he quickly supplied the want by giving Peter a deed to four hundred acres of his own tract, the purchase-money, or consideration, being “Henry Weatherbourne’s biggest bowl of arrack punch.” This additional four-hundred-acre tract seems to have furnished the coveted building lot ; though, looking at the landscape from an elevation, the spot finally chosen has nothing specially to recommend it over a dozen other points of ridges which run down toward the river. On one of these points he built a story- and-a-half weather-boarded house, with cen¬ tral hall, four square rooms, garret chambers ruRY Co. All rights reserved.

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644 THOMAS JEFFERSON'S HOME. above them, and huge outside chimneys at each end. As the custom of that day required that every ambitious homestead should have a distinctive name, Peter Jefferson christened his estate ‘‘ Shadvvell,” after Shadwell street, London, where his wife’s mother was born. On this place and in this house was born, one of a family of eight children, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and third President of the United States. Here he lived as a child, boy, and man, with but temporary interruptions, twenty-seven years. When he left it, it was to move to Monticello, the home of his own special choice, prepara¬ tion, and care, within an evening stroll of his birthplace, where, with occasional absence, for more than half a century, as congressman, au¬ thor, governor, diplomate, cabinet minister, politician, Vice-President, President, philoso¬ pher, and octogenarian, he found his highest delight in that most engrossing of human occupations, the ever- beginning and never- ending task of creating an ideal home. For a boy born in a wilderness, Jefferson enjoyed remarkable advantages in early youth, growing out of the fact that the frontier was as yet so near the parent colony. Good Eng¬ lish tuition at five, Latin, Greek, and French at nine, regular classical studies at fourteen, and a college course at seventeen, fall to the lot of few American backwoods boys. Trap¬ ping quails and shooting wild turkeys, deer¬ stalking, fox-hunting, and horse-racing, do not figure to any extent as his biographical ex¬ ploits. Jefferson the boy is a book-worm — Jefferson the youth is the petted member of an exclusive coterie, social, aristocratic, and literary. The accomplishments and courtly habits of the town efface all the strong charac¬ teristics of the country lad, or rather, soften them down and leave them but two in num¬ ber, — the keen zest of horsemanship and a true love of nature — the pure and passionate admiration of plant and blossom, of rock and stream, of fresh air and blue sky’ These are the legacy of the forest; all else he learns from books and the social traditions which drift from the Old World to the New. Yet such is the strength of Nature’s influences that by these two slender threads she held this nursling of society and made him the apostle and bulwark of that primitive equality he abandoned, against the pretensions and claims of caste and privilege to the favors of which he largely owed the development, if not the awakening, of his genius. But if Jefferson enjoyed early advantages he was also burdened with early cares. The death of his father, when he was but fourteen, left him head of the family. Out of the prac¬ tical needs of the home at Shadwell probably grew the dream, no less than the actual real- MONTICELLO, THE EAST PORTICO.

Page 647

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S HOME. 645 MONTICELLO, FROM THE RIVANNA RIVER. ization, of the future home on Monticello. It is of course impossible to guess how and where his plans began ; we only know that their gradual development covered a period of some seven¬ teen years, and note the circumstances which rendered their accomplislnnent possible. At his father’s death Jefferson inherited the home farm of Shad well, and so much of the other farms and lands originally patented by Peter Jefferson, — and now respectively named “ Monticello, Tufton, Pantops, Pouncey’s,” etc., — as amounted in the aggregate to about nineteen hundred acres. He also inherited about thirty slaves, as a working force to till such portion of these lands as were under cul¬ tivation. Aristocratic families and manorial estates were the fashion and the pride of the Virginia gentry. But, fashion aside, the care of the family, the lands, and especially the slaves, of itself necessarily required some con¬ siderable homestead ” establishment. The old, square, weather-boarded house at Shad- well, though quite sufficient for Peter Jeffer¬ son and his bride of nineteen, with perhaps a neighborhood of a dozen settlers, was probably deemed both too small and too antiquated for a large family, comprising marriageable sons and daughters, among a greatly increased population of neighbors. Shadwell stood on a hill or point rising from the north bank of the Rivanna. Some two miles beyond the stream to the south-west lay the “Little Mountain,” Italianized by Jeffer¬ son into “ Monticello,” with probably his ear¬ liest studies in that language. Seeing this Lit¬ tle Mountain so constantly the chief object in the homestead landscape, it is no wonder that it became to him successively, first the boy’s wonderland of exploration, then the youth’s haunt of recreation and study, and lastly the inviting and propitious locality of early man¬ hood’s domestic ambitions. It must be re¬ membered of Jefferson, that though he stood six feet two inches high, and possessed a strong physical vitality, yet he was cast in the feminine rather than in the masculine mold. Instead of the athletic sports of hunting and horse-racing, the harsh excitement of cards and personal broils, he shrank away to the more solitary and quiet pursuits of books and music, the writing of rhymes and dancing with village belles. The poetic and artistic tem¬ perament dominated not only his youth, but his entire life.

Page 648

646 THOMAS JEFFERSON'S HOME. MONTICELLO, WEST FRONT. He seems from the beginning to have ap¬ propriated the Little Mountain to himself for his own uses. Probably this feeling of personal ownership came to him even in boyhood, as by right of discovery and exploration. Tradi¬ tion makes it the scene of his first and closest friendship. He and his college friend, after¬ wards his brother-in-law, Dabney Carr, found here a favorite oak, whose inviting shade they made a resort for pastime and study. They finally became so attached to this spot that they made a mutual promise, the survivor should bury the other at the foot of this tree ; and upon Dabney Carr’s early death Jefferson fulfilled the romantic pledge. This incident is said to have originated the little cemetery on the slope of Monticello, where the dust of Thomas Jefferson now lies in its last repose. Jefferson’s biographies give no concise in¬ formation when the idea of planting a home¬ stead on the Little Mountain first took definite form or entered upon practical execution. In his earliest published letter, written at seven¬ teen to his guardian, he gives as a reason in favor of going to college : “ In the first place as long as I stay at the Mountain, the loss of one- fourth of my Time is inevitable, by Company’s coming here and detaining me from School. And likewise my Absence will in a measure put a Stop to so much Company, and by that means lessen the Expenses of the Estate in House-keeping.” At this date Shadwell was still the homestead ; and whether by the phrase the Mountain ” he referred to Monticello or to the range of which it formed a part is not clear. To college he went, for the period of two years, and after college to a course of five years’ law study, making together a seven years’ sojourn at Williamsburg, the colonial capital and metropolis. But during these seven years he habitually spent his vacations — the summer months — at Shadwell. That he gave near the close of this period his indi¬ vidual attention to the minutest details of domestic management is evidenced by his be¬ ginning in 1766, his twenty-third year, to keep a garden-book, which with unavoidable inter¬ ruptions was continued by him until within two years of his death, a total record of fifty- eight yeai's^ stored, among other things, with farming and gardening memoranda, — an over¬ whelming proof of his extraordinary interest in and devotion to his home ” life. During this college period he had his first love affair — his unsuccessful courtship of Rebecca Burwell — an experience which, judging from his letters,

Page 649

THOMAS JEFFERSON^ S HOME, 647 stirred his sympathetic nature to its profound- variety of fruit trees to be planted on the south- est depths. What airy shapes and radiant possi- east slope of the mountain. This was not on bilities his Spanish Castle” on Monticello may the level or building spot; and the necessary have assumed during the pendency of this grand clearing must have been made before that question, may well be left to the imagination year. “ Towards fall,” says his biographer, of any aspiring, sentimental wooer. His biog- he erected a brick story-and-a-half building rapher mentions, too, that during these vaca- containing one good-sized single room — the tions a gallop on horseback during the day same structure which now forms the south- and a twilight walk to the top of Monticello eastern ‘ pavilion ’ at the extremity of the south at evening were the habitual recreations with terrace of the mansion.” Elsewhere we find which he relieved the constraint of his twelve that this story-and-a-half brick ‘‘pavilion” to fifteen hours of daily study. was twenty feet square in size. It must have been about the time of his An untoward accident hastened the work entering upon the serious work of his life, the on the new homestead. On the first day of beginning of his actual law practice in 1767, February, 1770, the family house at Shadwell at twenty-four years of age, that he also be- was burned. Nearly all its contents were also gan the serious task of preparing his Little destroyed, the principal loss in Jefferson’s eyes Mountain for his future homestead. His being his papers and books, which latter he proper period of expansion, ideally and prac- estimated at $1000 cost value. Not only his tically, had now come. More than all, the ex- law books, but his records and notes of cases penses of the college and law student were he had prepared for court, everything in the ended, and his labors as a practitioner began shape of written memoranda, except the “gar- to bring an available compensation. Shadwell den-book,” the preservation of which was long was but a little hill or ridge on the north bank unknown, went up in flame. The servant who of the River Rivanna: Monticello was in reality brought him the news in breathless haste had as well as in name a little mountain, nearly but one consoling item of information — “they six hundred feet high, lying just south of the had saved his fiddle And here at this point Rivanna, which at this point (near Charlottes- of time we find the only moment of wavering ville, Albemarle County, Virginia) cuts its in his affection for his Little Mountain. He channel through the outlying range of the says in a letter to his friend Page : “ If this Alleghanies known as the South-west Moun- conflagration, by which I am burned out of a tains. On the north-east, Monticello has a home, had come before I had advanced so steep rocky base, Avashedbythe Rivanna; on far in preparing another, I do not know but the south-west it is joined, by a gap of perhaps I might have cherished some treasonable two-thirds its height, to Carter’s Mountain, a thoughts of leaving these my native hills.” somewhat higher and sharper peak; on the However unpromising Monticello may have other sides the ascent is more gradual. It is seemed about this time, its further improve- yet covered, in the main, by a dense growth ment was probably crowded with all possible of timber, mainly of hard-wood deciduous speed, and not without an object. A second trees. The top of the mountain is gently courtship was crowned with success ; and on rounded, appearing at a little distance as the first day of January, 1772, Jefferson was regular as the large end of an egg. It is more than probable that the spare hands among Jefferson’s thirty slaves em¬ ployed the leisure days of several years, first in clear¬ ing a road to the summit; secondly in making the sum¬ mit perfectly level ; and lastly in preparing the place and the foundations for the build¬ ings, and as an essential pre¬ requisite, in digging a Avell, which still, except in times of drought, furnishes good water in abundance. The “ garden-book ” al¬ ready mentioned furnishes the record that in the spring of the year 1769 he caused a THE TOMB OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.

Page 650

THOMAS JEFFERSON^ S HOME. 648 married to a beautiful, accomplished, and wealthy widow, Mrs. Martha Skelton. One of the curious incidents in the life of this curious man was the termination of the bridal tour, — a winter trip of a hundred miles through the snow, over country roads, ending in a horseback ride up the steep mountain side of Monticello, their arrival at the single- roomed story-and-a-half brick pavilion, the only part of the house yet finished, late at night, tired, cold, and hungry, to find the fires all out, and family and servants locked in profound sleep. A chance half-bottle of wine found behind some books on a shelf was the only good cheer at hand to add to their own overflowing gayety and happiness. There was pressing need now that the new THE MAIN STAIRWAY. home should grow and improve; but the new need also brought new resources. The bride’s inheritance, a year later, doubled the family possessions. Of prime importance was the fact, that as the number of slaves was now nearly two hundred the home¬ stead might draw an ample supply of labor¬ ers. It is estimated that during this period of his life Jefferson’s income amounted alto¬ gether to about $5000 per annum — $2000 from his farms and the labor of his slaves, and $3000 from his law practice, so that the where¬ with for prosecuting his manorial schemes on his Little Mountain probably for the time seemed ample and secure. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that under all these stimu¬ lating influences, his projects should become somewhat too elaborate and visionary. Some fragmentary notes published by his biogra¬ pher show that he meditated a small cemetery, with wall, evergreens, antique gothic temple, pedestals with urns, pyramid of rough rock- stone; the spring on the north side of the park to be embellished by a cascade, a tem¬ ple, or a grotto, with a statue, inscriptions, a concealed aeolian harp, moss couch, and other devices. For the general grounds, ornamental trees, vines, and flowers, with ornamental domestic animals, no less than a preserve or, rather, an asylum for wild animals — with a buck-elk or a buffalo to be “ monarch of the wood.” Very practical is his list of native shrubs, trees, and flowers, designed to orna¬ ment the lawn and immediate surroundings of the house. It did not require much time or experience to bring even an enthusiastic inno¬ vator like Jefferson to simple and economical theories. Gardens are peculiarly worth the attention ofan American,” he writes afterwards, “ because it is the country of all others where the noblest gardens maybe made without ex¬ pense. We have only to cut out the supera¬ bundant plants.” Whatever his theories of the beautiful may have been at that time, he did not permit them to usurp and exclude the useful. The published pages from his garden book ” for 1772 and 1774 would satisfy the most rigid market gardener. They include also many items of fruit trees and grapes, not neglecting some native vines transplanted for experi¬ ment from the woods of Monticello itself. An ill wind, too, had just now blown him good luck. An organized effort to introduce extensive wine culture, undertaken by some Italian gardeners for a Virginia company of which Jefferson was a member, had failed and been abandoned, and he was now able to ob¬ tain the skilled labor of these Italians for the improvement of Monticello. Under their man¬ agement, as the “garden book” shows, seeds

Page 651

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S HOME. 649 MONTICELLO, THE HALL. not only went into the ground, but, what was more to the point, vegetables came to the table. All this shows that the work of preparing, building, and finishing the Little Mountain homestead was going on with vigor at this time, though its progress in detail cannot be traced. The stormy days of the Revolution here intervene, and we see only that memora¬ ble picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and hear the solemn peals of the old bell Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.” It is not until the labor and care of twelve years had brought it to its first period of com¬ pletion that we obtain a short description of Monticello. Mr. Jefierson first moved there in 1770. In 1782 the Marquis de Chastellux paid Jefferson a visit, and in his book of trav¬ els thus mentions the home of his distinguished host : “ After ascending by a tolerably commodious road for more than half an hour, we arrived at Monticello. Tins house, of which Mr. Jefferson was the architect, and often one of the workmen, is rather elegant, and in the Italian taste, though not without fault : it consists of one large square pavilion, the entrance of which is by two porticoes ornamented with pillars. The ground- floor consists^ of a very lofty saloon, which is to be decorated entirely in the antique style ; above it is a library of the same form ; two small wings, with only a VoL. XXXIV.— 90 ground-floor and attic story, are joined to this pavilion, and communicate with the kitchen, offices, etc., which will form a kind of basement story over which runs a terrace. . . . We may safely aver that Mr. Jefferson is the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” Then the delighted marquis goes off into an enthusiastic description of his host, his remarkable political career, and his amiable family, giving us also the results of Jefferson’s project of an animal park : ‘‘ Mr. Jefferson amused himself by raising a score of these animals (deer) in his park ; they are become very familiar, which happens to all the animals of America ; for they are in general much easier to tame than those of Europe. He amuses himself by feeding them with Indian corn, of which they are very fond, and which they eat out of his hand.” But Monticello was now for a long period deprived of the fostering care of its master. A heavy affliction fell upon him in the death of his wife ; and being for the third time ten¬ dered an appointment to Europe by Congress, he accepted it. Various delays prevented his sailing until 1784, when he left the home¬ stead to the charge of overseers and servants. Five years later, on the 23d of December, 1789, these servants enjoyed a great gala-day,

Page 652

THOMAS JEFFETSOAT^s HOME. following a carriage in a sort of triumphal procession from Shadwell up the mountain road to the top of Monticello, almost bearing the owner in their arms into the dear old home, and looking with admiring wonder upon the two tall young ladies, one of seventeen and one of eleven, who had gone away mere children and playmates. Jefferson’s note-book of his European trav¬ els was full of observations, suggestions, and diagrams, doubtless intended for use on the homestead on his return. Their practical ap¬ plication was, however, destined to be yet de¬ ferred for some years. Hardly had he landed on his return from France, when he was met by President Washington’s letter summoning him into the first cabinet under the Constitu¬ tion, as Secretary of State. This public em¬ ployment kept him away from home so much of his time that no essential improvements or changes were begun until after his resignation in January, 1794. Once more, now, bent on retirement from public life, Jefferson took up his broken and unfinished task of spinning his ideal web of a home life of tranquil happiness. From the pen of another visitor, the French exile Due de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, we have a graphic pen-picture of the Monticello of the second period, June, 1796 : “ The house stands on the summit of the mountain, and the taste and arts of Europe have been consulted in the formation of its plan. Mr. Jefferson had com¬ menced its construction before the American revolu¬ tion ; since that epocha his life has been constantly engaged in public affairs, and he has not been able to complete the execution of the whole extent of the proj¬ ect which it seems he had at first conceived. That part of the building which was finished, has suffered from the suspension of the work, and Mr. Jefferson, who two years since resumed the habits and leisure of private life, is now employed in repairing the dam¬ age occasioned by this interruption, and still more by his absence ; he continues his original plan, and even improves on it by giving to his buildings more eleva¬ tion and extent. He intends that they shall consist only of one story crowned with balustrades ; and a dome is to be constructed in the center of the struc¬ ture. The apartments will be large and convenient ; the decoration both outside and inside simple, yet reg¬ ular and elegant. Monticello, according to its first plan, was infinitely superior to all other houses in America in point of taste and convenience ; but at that time Mr. Jefferson had studied taste and the fine arts in books only. His travels in Europe have supplied him with models ; he has appropriated them to his design ; and his new plan, the execution of which is already much advanced, will be accomplished before the end of next year, and then his home will certainly deserve to be ranked with the most pleasant mansions in France and England. “Mr. Jefferson’s house commands one of the most extensive prospects you can meet with. On the east side, the front of the building, the eye is not checked by any object, since the mountain on which the house is seated commands all the neighboring heights. On the right and left the eye commands the extensive val¬ ley that separates the Green, South, and West moun¬ tains from the Blue Ridge, and has no other bounds but these high mountains of which on a clear day you discern the chain on the right upwards of a hundred miles, far beyond the James River ; and on the left as far as Maryland on the other side of the Potomac. . . . On this mountain and in the surrounding valleys on both banks of the Rivanna, are situated five thousand acres of land which Mr. Jefferson possesses in this part of Virginia. Eleven hundred and twenty only are cultivated. The land, left to the care of the stewards, has suffered as well as the buildings from the long absence of the master ; according to the custom of the country it has been exhausted by successive culture. ... At present he is employed with activity and perseverance in the management of his farms and buildings ; and he orders, directs, and pursues in the minutest details every branch of business relative to them. I found him in the midst of the harvest from which the scorching heat of the sun does not prevent his attendance. His negroes are nourished, clothed, and treated as well as white servants could be. As he cannot expect any assistance from the two small neigh¬ boring towns every article is made on his farm ; his negroes are cabinet-makers, carpenters, masons, bricklayers, smiths, etc. The children he employs in a nail factory, which yields already a considerable profit.” We have thus seen how Monticello gradually grew up, following perhaps a general and undefined proj¬ ect from the beginning, and yet modified from time to time by the increased means, knowledge, experi¬ ence, taste, and observation of its founder. It was a sim¬ ple story-and-a-half brick house when he brought his bride to it that dreary win¬ ter’s night in 1772. Since then he had been congress- MONTICELLO, FIREPLACE AND DUMB-WAITER.

Page 653

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S HOME. 651 MONTICELLO, THE BALL-ROOM IN THE DOME. man, governor, minister plenipotentiary, and Secretary of State, had traveled at home and abroad, had reared his children, and was now confronted with the care and protection of the second generation. In the interim Monticello had become, first a plain Italian villa with a library on the second floor, and now again with a new transformation, a network of build¬ ings dominated by a spreading country man¬ sion of twenty rooms, with two Greek porti¬ coes, and an octagonal dome, with very solid brick walls, strong frame-work, good floors, a great profusion of elaborate trimmings, and full of the quaint and strongly original devices and inventions of his own. Designed by no architect, unless he could be called one, no order or style could exclusively claim it, nor is it probable that any architect of that or our day would willingly make it a model, in either general design or curious details. But to Jefferson it must have been not only a castle, stronghold, refuge, but a very temple of art ; in short, his own peculiar world, in a certain sense created by and for himself. He con¬ sidered himself now once more master of his time and his inclinations, the owner of five thousand acres of land and one hundred and fifty slaves. He was already over fifty years old, a principal figure in the history of his epoch, the cherished member of a wide circle of friends, the authoritative head and center of a numerous family group. Above all, Monti¬ cello had been triply sanctified by the domestic events of birth, death, and marriage. If he had given the tender and constant solicitude of a quarter of a century to this dream of an ideal home, it must have seemed to be on the point of practical realization as nearly as human hopes ever reach fruition. Some such feelings doubtless prompted a vig¬ orous administration of his estates and urgent efforts for the final completion of his house during the two years from 1794 to 1796. Once more drawn, however, into the resistless and swelling stream of national politics, he became Vice-President of the United States from 1797 to 1801, and finally President from 1801 to 1809. No doubt delighted by this final and crown¬ ing mark of his country’s esteem, it must nevertheless have cost him a pang to find once more his busy personal work of household

Page 654

THOMAS JEFFERSON^S HOME, 652 improvement broken in upon by absorbing and vexatious public duties. But there was some relief in the fact that the seat of govern¬ ment had in 1800 been brought much nearer to his home by the transfer of the capital to Washington. Either in his car¬ riage, his one-horse chair,” or in the saddle, he could JEFFERSON S CHAIR AND WRITING-TABLE. make thejourneytoor from Monticello in three days. As compared with former periods of absence, this was almost like living at home. With similar facility he could send seeds, cut¬ tings, or plants, or transmit personal directions to the family or his overseers. He now adopted the habit of making each year one or two prolonged visits to Monticello, and these coming in the spring and fall, — the farmer’s working seasons, — the homestead may, not¬ withstanding his general absence, be said to have been practically under its master’s super¬ vision. Had he now been content to pursue merely the completion of his plans and work, he would probably have fared better in the end. But in this situation, instead of curtailing them, Jefferson seems rather to have extended and multiplied the labors and business of his homestead and estates. The published remi¬ niscences of his overseer state that it was now that he improved the terraced garden on the side of the mountain some two acres in area. There was a small grist-mill on the Rivanna, but the neighborhood became ambitious and wanted a larger one. In the eyes of the coun¬ try people, a President of the United States, receiving a salary of $25,000, was a Croesus and Aladdin combined. Jefferson, with his fondness for mechanical improvement and his proclivity for economical enterprise, did not in all probability need much persuasion. He built the mill, a large four-story building, with four runs of stones, at a heavy expense. It was a point of great pride with him that he had always been, and would always remain, a farmer. His connection with a company for wine culture has already been mentioned. He had at various times introduced into the coun¬ try such new seeds and plants as he thought of great prospective value, — upland rice, olive- trees, the cork oak, etc., etc. He now im¬ ported merino sheep and other domestic animals. He not only invented a new form of mold-board, making a great improvement in the then com¬ monly used plow, but led the way in the employment of other improved farming implements, notably a seed-drill and a threshing machine. At the beginning of the Revolution, many patriots in Virginia and others of the American States had determined to abstain resolutely from the impor¬ tation, purchase, and use of British goods and manufact¬ ures, and to practice and foster home produc¬ tion. The seven-years war continued as a necessity what was begun as a virtue. Amid these and succeeding events, the intelligence and mechanical and inventive genius of Jef¬ ferson himself made his homestead and estates probably more than ordinarily self- dependent. It was in this way that he gathered about himself, among his slaves and servants, the skilled laborers, out of whose combined

Page 655

THOMAS JEFFERSON'S HOME. Jefferson’s bedroom. handiwork rose the fair structure of Monticello. It almost grew out of the soil. From the bricks which yet compose its walls, to the nails which yet unite its wood- work, including much of its furniture, and even that characteristic append¬ age of the period, the state carriage, Monticello was in its essential components an honest and genuine article of home manufacture. Not alone for the master and master’s family ; for to this combination and cooperation of farm and forge, of manor and mill, of architect and artisan, of land-owner and land-tiller, between one and two hundred human beings looked with right and reliance for daily work and daily bread, during at least two generations. After having served the eight years of his presidential office, Jefferson retired to this his chosen refuge, the creation of his own thought and industry, of much of his own personal handiwork, and spent yet seventeen long years in what with wise forethought and man¬ ful persistence he had indeed made “the dearest spot on earth.” Under his own vine 653 and fig-tree, in his own house and his own gar¬ den, sitting in the refreshing shade of the trees he had himself planted, plucking the flowers and fruits he had himself reared, he talked wisdom to his gray-headed neighbors and contemporaries, gave kindly instruction and admonition to inquiring youths and students, or led his joyous and romping grandchildren through their juvenile games. American an¬ nals can present few pictures of so long enjoyed and so perfect a fruition of a labor of love. Bright and alluring as it is, the picture also presents painful shadows. He plucked his own domestic roses with bleeding fingers. The wounds of a bitter partisan conflict galled him ; the persecutions of visitors and letter-writers worried him; and at last a hopeless bank¬ ruptcy brought him to the humiliating knowl¬ edge that the bread he ate was no longer that of his own earning. Driven to extremities by the necessity of paying a security-debt of $20,000 which he had indorsed, he applied to the legislature of Virginia in the last year of his life, to be allowed to dispose of his property by lottery. “ If it is permitted in my case,” he writes, “ my lands here alone, with the mills, etc., will pay everything, and will leave me Monticello and a farm free. If refused, I must sell everything here, perhaps considerably in Bedford, move thither with my family, where I have not even a log hut to put my head into.” The privilege asked was finally granted, but so tardily that it wrung from him, like a groan of anguish, the sentence, “ I count on nothing now. I am taught to know my standard.” As so often happens, the lottery scheme failed through popular apathy. But the pub¬ lic sympathy was to some extent aroused, and citizens of New York, of Philadelphia, and of Baltimore sent him contributions amounting in the aggregate to $16,500. This relief, though inadequate, was yet sufficient to justify his belief that Monticello would be saved to his daughter. In this hope he died July 4th, 1826, having occupied Monticello as a home just six years more than half a century and was buried in the little graveyard he had planned nearly three-quarters of a century before. J. G. Nicolay.

Page 656

THE LATER YEARS OF MONTICELLO. into this country, and which still keeps his memory a dark, luxuriant green. It was easy for me, with this famous mansion ever before me, and in this Jeffersonian at¬ mosphere, where there is so much to see and so much to hear of Monticello and its belong¬ ings, to bring before my mind the home of Jefferson as it stood at the time of his death. We have seen how Monticello gradually grew to be a spacious and imposing mansion, but I think it is not generally known with what pleasure and zeal Jefferson brought his mind to bear, not only upon the development of his somewhat grand ideas in regard to a home, but upon the most minute and peculiar THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA AT CHARLOTTESVILLE. (DESIGNED BY JEFFERSON.) During the sum¬ mers of five or ^ six years, my favorite study, when the days were fine ones, has been under the shade of some large trees, from which, across the valley of the Rivanna River, and distant about a mile as a wild bee would fly, I have had a beautiful view of the rounded slopes of Monticello sur mounted by the great trees which still stand around the old home of the man who for¬ mulated for us our national idea. There is something in the air of the country here¬ abouts which continually suggests Thomas Jefferson. The fields and woods around me once formed one of his plantations; the friends with whom I staid are his descend¬ ants ; I took my evening smoke in an arm¬ chair — Paris-made, with little brass ornaments on the arms — which once belonged to him; and this paper was written on a small table with four curious wings, which can be spread out at the sides to hold books of reference, that was used by Mr. Jefferson as a writing-stand, and on which yet remain some blots of ink which declared their independence of his pen. Many of the neighboring estates still bear the names he gave them, some Latin and some Greek, such as “ Lego ” and Pan Op- timus — the latter now corrupted to Pantops; and here and there on the sides of the hills grows the Scotch broom which he introduced contrivances for convenience and adorn¬ ment. He drew plans and made estimates for nearly everything that was built or constructed on his place. He calculated the number of bricks to be used in every part of his buildings ; and his family now possess elaborately drawn plans of such bits of household furnishing as curtain valences” and the like. Many of his ideas in regard to building and fur¬ nishing he brought with him from France; but more of them had their origin in his brain. There were no bedsteads in his house, but in every chamber there was an alcove in the wall in which a wooden framework was built which supported the bed. His own sleeping-arrange¬ ments during the lifetime of his wife were of a very peculiar nature ; in the partition between two chambers was an archway, and in this

Page 657

THE LATER YEARS OF MONTICELLO. 655 IN THE UNIVERSITY GROUNDS. These walls are one brick thick. The winding form is taken for supposed economy of material. archway was -- the double bed ; one chamber was Mr. Jefferson’s room, and the other was his wife’s dressing-room; when he arose i W) morning he got out of bed into his own room, and Mrs. Jeffer¬ son got out into her room. After his wife’s death her room became his study, and the partition wall between it and the library being taken down, the whole was thrown into the present large apartment. Over the archway in which the bed is placed is a long closet reached by a step-ladder placed in another closet at the foot of the bed. In this was stored in summer the winter clothes of the family, and in winter their summer habiliments. At the other side of the arch there is a small door, so that persons going from one room to the other had no need to clamber over the bed. In the smaller chamber, when it became his study, stood Mr. Jefferson’s writing- chair, which was made to suit his peculiar needs ; the chair itself was high- backed, well rounded, and cushioned, and in front of it extended a cushioned platform, on which Mr. J efferson found it very pleasant to stretch his legs, be¬ ing sometimes troubled with swellings of the smaller veins of these limbs. The writing- table was so made that it could be drawn up over this platform, legs, and all, and pushed down when it was not in use. The top of this table turned on a pivot ; on one side of it were his writing materials. and on the other was the little apparatus by which he made copies of all his letters. By his side was another revolving table, on which his books of reference lay, or were held open at proper an¬ gles. Nearhim also stood a pair of large globes; and, if he wished to study anything outside of this world, he had in the room two long tele¬ scopes mounted on brass tripods. Convenient also were his violins, one a Cremona, and the other the bass-viol saved from the Shadwell fire. Besides the book-shelves and the somewhat simple furniture of the library, there were a number of oddly contrived little closets, in which were stored his multitudinous manuscripts. There is a writing-table now in the possession of the family, which was frequently used by Mr. Jefferson, and which is very in¬ geniously contrived. Two of its four legs are hollow, and in these run rods resting upon springs by which the table can be easily ele¬ vated, the other two legs being also extensible, but in a different way. When Mr. Jefferson was tired of writing in a sitting position, he could stand up, and raise this table to the desired height. When he wished to use it as a reading- stand, the top could be inclined at any angle, and a strip of brass was brought into use to keep the books and papers from sliding off. Opening from the library was a large room inclosed with glass, which was intended for a conservatory, but was used by Mr. Jefferson IN THE COLONNADE OF THE UNIVERSITY.

Page 658

6s6 THE LATER YEARS OF MONTICELLO. IN CHARLOTTESVILLE. as his work-room. There he had a work¬ bench, with all sorts of carpenter’s tools, with which he constructed a great many of the small conveniences he invented. The house was not richly furnished, al¬ though it contained all that was needed, Mr. Jefferson’s chief attention in the way of adornment being given to that which would be permanent; — the floor, for in¬ stance, of the large semi-octagonal room back of the great hall was made of fine cherry and beech laid in a handsome pat¬ tern, and is still in perfect condition. But many of the visitors of distinction from this country and foreign lands, who used to flock to this hospitable mansion, never saw these beautiful floors, for J efiferson fre¬ quently entertained the most distinguished company long before his house was finished, when the doors were made of unplaned boards, the floors of loose planks, and the walls unplastered. Over the door of the western front was the clock, which had one face for the por¬ tico and another for the hall. I am told that a clock-maker was brought over from Germany to make this clock, and another for the University, and that he afterwards started a flourishing business in Charlottes¬ ville. The weights of this clock, which ran eight days, were cannon-balls suspended by chains in the front corners of the hall, and descending into the cellar through holes in the floor. As one of these balls made its weekly journey down the wall, it touched, and turned over, the first thing every morning, a metal plate, on which was painted the day of the week. There was a weather-vane on top of the house, but as Mr. Jefferson did not care to

Page 659

THE LATER YEARS OF MONTICELLO, ^S1 go out at all hours and in all kinds of weather to see which way the wind was blowing, this vane was connected by a rod with a dial under the roof of the porch, so that it was only neces¬ sary to step outside the door and look up at this dial to see to what quarter the hand upon it was pointing. Another very curious contrivance was a little dumb-waiter, not more than six inches wide, which ran from the wine-cellar to the dining-room, its upper opening being covered with a movable panel in the wood-work of the mantel-piece. In this dumb-waiter were two shelves, each one large enough to contain a bottle of wine ; the butler put these in place in the cellar, and when the master wanted them he pulled them up. Not only in his house, but in its grounds, Jefferson’s ingenuity gave itself full scope. In order that every one might take whatever degree of exercise inclination or the weather made desirable, several roundabouts ” were laid out on the varying surface of the moun¬ tain. These were walks or roads which en¬ vironed the house, one being of quite mod¬ erate length, and not far from the mansion, while the longest was several miles in extent, in one part running by the banks of the River Rivanna at the base of the mountain. Here one could walk or drive around and around, always amid fair scenery, and sometimes reaching points from which could be had the most lovely views of far-stretching plains and mountains. These grounds were abundantly enjoyed by Jefferson’s numerous friends, especially perhaps those from Europe, who were not accustomed to see art so pleasantly commingled with Avhat must have appeared to them as the wildest na¬ ture. Jefferson w'as a very systematic man, and could always be relied upon to appear at meal¬ time, but one day dinner was long kept wait¬ ing for his visitor, M. Volney, and himself, who were out walking. It afterwards appeared that the two philosophers had been detained by the labor of damming up a little stream in order that they might design a picturesque waterfall. A portrait of Jefferson by Kosciusko used to hang in the room occupied by Mrs. Randolph, the oldest daughter, a flattering in¬ scription, placed beneath it by the artist, having banished it from the more public apartments. What became of this portrait is not known. The entrance hall, in which stood, very ap¬ propriately on opposite sides, busts of Jeffer¬ son and Alexander Hamilton, is a somewhat remarkable apartment. It is the largest room in the house, and is as high as the dome. There is a railed gallery in it which connects the chambers in the upper part of the building. It has been supposed that there was to have been a staircase in this hall, communicating with this gallery; but none was ever built, VoL. XXXIV.— 91. access to the gallery and the upper rooms be¬ ing obtained by small and inadequate stairways in inside passages. The walls of the hall were adorned not only with horns of elk and moose, interspersed with Indian and Mexican weap¬ ons and implements, but with great bones of mastodons, and other fossil remains, and with huge specimens of native minerals. The whole collection is calculated to produce a very American impression on a foreign visitor. Indoors and out, wherever one might wan¬ der through the apartments or grounds of this delightful home, one could not fail to perceive that the mind or the hand of Thomas Jeffer¬ son was at the bottom of everything. He thought nothing so large or so small that his ingenuity or his care need not be exercised upon it. With his own hands he made all the plans for the buildings of the University of Virginia, and he has left behind him the carefully prepared drawings of a gate-latch which he invented. Jefferson’s hope that his only surviving child would be left the mistress of Monticello was not fulfilled. The times were hard, and, although after his death all the estates were sold, the debts were not paid, and Mrs. Ran¬ dolph was obliged to leave this happy Little Mountain,” which was never again occupied by Jefferson’s descendants. The first purchaser of Monticello was a Dr. Barclay, who was afflicted with the moT'us mul- ticaulis disease, and he cut down many of the beautiful trees about the house, some of them exotics, for the purpose of planting a mulberry grove, — the leaves of which were to feed the silk-worms which were to become the inhab¬ itants of the halls and chambers of the Jeffer¬ sonian mansion. But his cocoons proving to be anything but golden, the doctor gave up his silken dreams and sold the estate. The next purchaser, Captain Levy, kept the house in good condition ; but the civil war and the litigations among his heirs, which con¬ tinued for some fifteen years after the captain’s death, had a depressing effect upon the beau¬ ties of Monticello. If it had been a modern- built house it would have gone to wreck and ruin; but Jefferson built it to stay; and, although it suffered very much, especially in regard to shutters, window-sashes, and water¬ spouts, and although the terraced walks which stretched over the two lines of out-buildings connecting the main building with the pavil¬ ions were destroyed, and were replaced by or¬ dinary roofs, the whole establishment has been put in excellent order by the present owner, a nephew of Captain Levy, and is now as sound and substantial a country mansion as it ever was. There is a modern air about its furnishings and fittings which is not Jefferso¬ nian, but the house is still Monticello.

Page 660

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 658 But Jefferson^s orchards and terraced gar¬ dens, the serpentine flower-borders on the west¬ ern lawn, to which came yearly contributions from the Jardin des Plantes of Paris, and the beautiful “roundabout” walks and drives have all disappeared ; while in the little graveyard on the mountain-side, around the simple mon¬ ument erected to the memory of the “ Author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia,” lie the bones of five generations of his descendants, in the only ground they inherited from him. Although Thomas Jefferson died owing much money, no shadow of debt now rests upon his fame. Having no son, his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, became, at an early age, the general manager of his estates; and, at the death of his grandfather, Mr. Ran¬ dolph — then living at Edge Hill, a large neigh¬ boring estate, which had come by original grant to the Randolph family — set himself to work to pay Mr. Jefferson’s debts. In this la¬ bor of love he was assisted by his daughters, who established a school, which soon became a noted one, for the sole purpose of helping their father pay what was due to the creditors of their great ancestor. Their efforts were en¬ tirely successful, for many years did not elapse before every cent was paid. Frank R, Stocktofi, \BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER NUMBER.] LINCOLN’S NOMINATION AND ELECTION. ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY.* BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. THE BALTIMORE NOMINATIONS. HOUGH the compact voting body of the South had retired from the Charleston Conven¬ tion, her animating spirit yet remained in the numbers and determination of the anti-Doug¬ las delegates. When on Tuesday morning, May I St, the eighth day, the convention once more met, the Douglas men, with a view to making the most of the dilemma, resolved to force the nomination of their favorite. But there was a lion in the path. Usage and tra¬ dition had consecrated the two-thirds rule. Stuart, of Michigan, tried vainly to obtain the liberal interpretation, that this meant “ two- thirds of the votes given,” but Chairman Cush¬ ing ruled remorselessly against him, and at the instance of Howard, of Tennessee, the convention voted (141 to 112) that no person should be declared nominated who did not receive two-thirds of all the votes the full convention was entitled to cast. This sealed the fate of Douglas. The Elec¬ toral College numbered 303 ; 202 votes therefore were necessary to a choice. Voting for candidates was duly begun, and continued throughout all the next day (Wednesday, May 2d). Fifty-seven ballots were taken in all; Douglas received 145 on the first, and on several subsequent ballots his strength rose to 152^4. The other votes were scattered among eight other candidates with no near approach to agreement.* The dead-lock having become unmistakable and irremediable, and the nomination of Doug¬ las under existing conditions impossible, all parties finally consented to an adjournment, especially as it became evident that unless this were done the sessions would come to an end by mere disintegration. Therefore, on the tenth day (May 3d), the Charleston Conven¬ tion formally adjourned, having previously resolved to reassemble on the i8th of June, in the city of Baltimore, with a recommendation that the several States make provision to fill the vacancies in their delegations. Mr. Yancey and his seceders had mean¬ while organized another convention in St. Andrew’s Hall. Their business was of course to report substantially the platform rejected by the Douglasites, and for which rejection they had retired. Mr. Yancey then explained to them that the adoption of this platform was all the action they proposed to take until the “ rump democracy ” should make their nom¬ ination, when, he said, “ it may be our privi¬ lege to indorse the nominee, or our duty to proceed to make a nomination.” Other seced- ^ The first ballot stood : Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, 145 ; Janies Guthrie, of Kentucky, 35 Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York, 7; R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia, 42 ; Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, 12 ; Joseph Lane, of Oregon, 6; Jefferson Davis, of Mis¬ sissippi, i}4j Isaac Toucey, of Connecticut, Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, i. ^ Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, 1886-7. All rights reserved.

Page 661

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 659 ers were more impatient, and desired that something be done forthwith ; but as the ses¬ sions were continued to the second and third day, their overflowing zeal found a safety- valve in their speeches. Mr. Yancey’s pro¬ gramme prevailed, and they also adjourned to meet again in Richmond on the nth of June. • At the time of the disruption, rumors were current in Charleston that the movement, if not prompted, was at least encouraged and sus¬ tained by telegrams from leading senators and representatives then at their Congressional du¬ ties in Washington. As the day for reassem¬ bling in Baltimore drew near, the main fact was abundantly proved by the publication of an ad¬ dress, signed by Jefferson Davis, Toombs, Iver¬ son, Slidell, Benjamin, Mason, and some four¬ teen others, in which they undertook to point out a path to union and harmony in the Demo¬ cratic party. They recited the withdrawal of eight States at Charleston, and indorsed the step without qualification. ‘‘We cannot re¬ frain,” said the address, “ from expressing our admiration and approval of this lofty mani¬ festation of adherence to principle, rising superior to all considerations of expediency, to all trammels of party, and looking with an eye single to the defense of the constitutional rights of the States.” They then alleged that the other Democratic States remained in the convention only to make a further effort to secure “ some satisfactory recognition of sound principles,” declaring, however, their determi¬ nation also to withdraw if their just expectation should be disappointed. The address now urged that the seceders should defer their meeting at Richmond, but that they should come to Baltimore and endeavor to effect “ a reconciliation of differences on a basis of prin¬ ciple.” If the Baltimore Convention should adopt “ a satisfactory platform of principles,” — and their votes might help secure it, — then cause of dissension would have ceased. “ On the other hand,” continues the address, “ if the convention, on reassembling at Baltimore, shall disappoint the just expectations of the remain¬ ing Democratic States, their delegations can¬ not fail to withdraw and unite with the eight States which have adjourned to Richmond.” The address, in another paragraph, explained that the seventeen Democratic States which had voted at Charleston for the seceders’ plat¬ form, “ united with Pennsylvania alone, com¬ prise a majority of the entire electoral vote of the United States, able to elect the Demo¬ cratic nominees against the combined opposi¬ tion of all the remaining States.” This was a shrewd and crafty appeal. Un¬ der an apparent plea for harmony lurked an insidious invitation to Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, Tennessee, Ken¬ tucky, California, Oregon, and Pennsylvania to join the seceders, reconstruct the Demo¬ cratic party, cut off all the “ popular sover¬ eignty ” recusants, and secure perpetual as¬ cendency in national politics through the consolidated South. The signers of this ad¬ dress, forgetting their own constant accusation of “ sectionalism ” against the Republicans, pretended to see no impropriety in proposing this purely selfish and sectional alliance. If it succeeded, their triumph in the Union was irresistible and permanent; if it failed, it served to unite the South for secession and a slave confederacy. If any Democrat harbored a doubt that the proposed reconciliation meant simply a reunion on the Davis- Yancey platform, the doubt was soon removed. In the Senate of the United States, Jefferson Davis was press¬ ing to a vote his caucus resolutions, submitted in February, to serve as a model for the Charleston platform ; and this brought on a final discussion between himself and Douglas. Davis had begun the debate on the yth of May by a savage onslaught on “ Squatter Sovereignty ” — a fallacy, he said, fraught with mischief more deadly than the fatal upas, because it spread its poison over the whole Union.* Douglas took up the gauntlet, and, replying on May 15th and i6th, said he could not recognize the right of a caucus of the Sen¬ ate or the House to prescribe new tests for the Democratic party. Senators were not chosen for the purpose of making platforms. That was the duty of the Charleston Conven¬ tion, and it had decided in his favor, platform, organization, and least of all the individual, by giving him a majority of fifty votes over all the other candidates combined. He reprobated the Yancey movement as leading to dissolu¬ tion and a Southern confederacy. The party rejected this caucus platform. Should the majority, he asked, surrender to the minority ? t Davis, replying on the 17th, contended that Douglas had on the Kansas polim^ of the Ad¬ ministration put himself outside*the Demo¬ cratic organization. He desired no divided flag for the party. He preferred that the sen¬ ator’s banner should lie in its silken folds to feed the moth ; “ but if it impatiently rustles to be unfurled in opposition to ours, we will plant our own on every hill. ”J Douglas retorted, and again attacked the caucus dictation. Why, he asked, are all the great measures for the public good made to give place to the emergency of passing some abstract resolutions on the sub¬ ject of politics to reverse the Democratic plat- * Globe, May 7th, i860, p. 1940. f Globe, May 15th and l6th, i860. Appendix, p. 312. t Globe, May 17th, i860.

Page 662

66o LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION form, under supposition that the representatives of the people are men of weak nerve who are going to be frightened by the thunders of the Senate Chamber ? * Davis rejoined, that they wanted a new article in the creed because they could not get an honest construction of the platform as it stands. “ If you have been beaten on a rickety, double-construed plat¬ form, kick it to pieces, and lay one broad and strong, on which men can stand.” “We want nothing more than a simple declaration that negro slaves are property, and we want the recognition of the obligation of the Federal Government to protect that property like all other.” t A somewhat restrained undertone of personal temper had been running through the debate, and Jefferson Davis could not resist an expression of contempt for his op¬ ponent. “ The fact is,” said he, “ I have a declining respect for platforms. I would sooner have an honest man on any sort of a rickety platform that you could construct, than to have a man I did not trust on the best plat¬ form which could be made.” Douglas promptly called attention to the inconsistency of Davis’s method of forcing his resolutions with one breath and avowing his indifference to a platform with another, espe¬ cially as Yancey and his followers had seceded on the platform and not on the man; but he did not press his adversary to the wall, as he might have done, on the insincerity which Davis’s sneer exposed. He was hampered by his own attitude as a candidate. Douglas, who had received a hundred and fifty votes at Charleston, and who expected the whole at Baltimore, could not let his tongue wag as freely as Davis, who had received only a vote and a half at Charleston, and could count on none at Baltimore; else he might have de¬ nounced him on the score of patriotism. For Jefferson Davis, like Yancey, only not so constantly, and like so many others of that secession coterie, blew hot and cold about disunion as occasion demanded. This same debate of May 17 th furnished an instructive example. • In the beginning of the day’s discussion Davis indulged in a repetition of the old alarm- cry : “ And so, sir, when we declare our tenacious adher¬ ence to the Union, it is the Union of the Constitution. If the compact between the States is to be trampled into the dust ; if anarchy is to be substituted for the usurpation which threatened the Government at an earlier period; if the Union is to become powerless for the purpose for which it was established, and we are vainly to appeal to it for protection, — then, sir, con¬ scious of the rectitude of our course, and self-reliant within ourselves, we look beyond the confines of the Union for the maintenance of our rights.”! * Globe, May 17th, i860. t Globe, May 17th, i860, p. 2155. But after Douglas had made a damaging exposure ofYancey^s disunion intrigues, which had come to light, and had charged their animus on the Charleston seceders, Davis changed his tone. He said there were not more than seventy-five men in the lodges of the Southern Leagues. He did not think the Union was in danger from th&m. “ I have great confidence,” said he, “ in the strength of the Union. Every now and then I hear that it is about to tumble to pieces; that somebody is going to introduce a new plank into the platform, and if he does, the Union must tumble down; until at last I begin to think it is such a rickety old platform that it is impos¬ sible to prop it up. But then I bring my own judg¬ ment to bear, instead of relying on witnesses, and I come to the conclusion that the Union is strong and safe, — strong in its power as well as in the affections of the people.” $ The debate made it very plain that it was not reconciliation but domination which the South wanted. So in due time (May 25th) the Jef¬ ferson Davis resolutions, affirming the “ prop¬ erty” theory and the “ protection” doctrine, were passed by a large majority of the Demo¬ cratic senators. When the Charleston Convention proper reassembled at Baltimore, it was seen that the programme laid out by Jefferson Davis and others in their published address had been duly adopted. The seceders had met at Rich¬ mond, taken a recess, and now appeared at Baltimore making application for readmission. But some of the States that withdrew at Charleston had sent contesting delegations, and it resolved itself into tangled rivalry and quarrel of platforms, candidates, and delega¬ tions all combined. For four days a furious debate raged in the convention during the day, while rival mass-meetings in the streets at night called each other “ disorganizers,” “ bolters,” “ traitors,” “ disunionists,” and “ ab¬ olitionists.” When Douglas, before a test-vote was reached, sent a dispatch suggesting that the party and the country might be saved by dropping his name and uniting upon some other candidate, his followers suppressed the dispatch. On the fifth day at Baltimore the Demo¬ cratic National Convention underwent its sec¬ ond “ crisis,” and suffered its second disruption. This time, also, the secession was somewhat broadened; Chairman Cushing resigned his seat, and Virginia, North Carolina, Ten¬ nessee, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and California withdrew wholly or in part to join the States which had gone out at Charleston. For the present the disunion extremists were keeping their scheme too well masked to estab¬ lish clearly its historical record. But the signs t Globe, May I7tli, i860, p. 2151. $ Globe, May 17th, i860, p. 2156.

Page 663

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 66i and footprints of their underplot are evident. Here at Baltimore, as at Charleston, and as on every critical occasion, Mr. Yancey was conspicuously present. Here, as elsewhere, he was no doubt persistently intriguing for dis¬ union in secret while ostentatiously denying disunion purposes in public. But little remained to do after the disrup¬ tion at Baltimore, and that little was quickly done. The fragments of the original conven¬ tion continued their session in the Front- street Theatre, where they had met, and on the first ballot nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President by an almost unanimous vote. The seceders organized, under the chairman¬ ship of Caleb Cushing, in Maryland Institute Hall, and also by a nearly unanimous ballot nominated as their candidate for President, John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky. Then Mr. Yancey, who in a street mass-meeting had de¬ clared that he was neither for the Union per se nor for disunion per se, but for the Consti¬ tution,* announced that the Democracy, the Constitution, and, through them, the Union were yet safe. A month prior to the reassembling of the Charleston Rumps above described, Balti¬ more had already witnessed another Presi¬ dential convention and nomination, calling itself peculiarly National,” in contradistinc¬ tion to the sectional ” character which it charged upon the Democratic and Republi¬ can parties alike. This was a third party, made up mainly of former Whigs whose long- cherished party antagonisms kept them aloof from the Democrats in the South and the Republicans in the North. In the South, they had been men whose moderate antislavery feelings were outraged by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the Lecompton trick. In the North, they were those whose tra¬ ditions and affiliations revolted at the extreme utterances of avowed abolitionists. In both regions many of them had embraced Know- nothingism, more as an alternative than from original choice. The Whig party was dissolved; Know-nothingism had utterly failed — their only resource was to form a new party. In the various States they had, since the defeat of Fillmore in 1856, held together a minority organization under names differing in different localities. All these various factions and fragments sent delegations to Baltimore, where they united themselves under the des¬ ignation of the Constitutional Union Party. They proposed to take a middle course be¬ tween Democrats and Republicans, and to allay sectional strife by ignoring the slavery question. Delegates of this party, regular and irregu- * Halstead, The Conventions of i860. lar, from some twenty-two States, convened at Baltimore on the 9th of May. John J. Crit¬ tenden, of Kentucky, called the meeting to order, and Washington Hunt, of New York, was made both temporary and permanent chairman; They adopted as their platform a single resolution declaring in substance that they would “ recognize no other political prin¬ ciple than the Constitution of the country, the Union of the States, and the enforcement of the laws.” They had no reasonable hope of direct success at the polls in November; but they had a clear possibility of defeating a pop¬ ular choice, and throwing the election into the House of Representatives; and in that case their nominee might stand on high vantage- ground as a compromise candidate. This pos¬ sibility gave some zest to the rivalry among their several aspirants. On their second bal¬ lot, a slight preponderance of votes indicated John Bell, of Tennessee, as their favorite, and the convention made his nomination unani¬ mous. Mr. Bell had many qualities desirable in a candidate for President. He was a states¬ man of ripe experience, and of fair, if not brill¬ iant, fame. Though from the South, his course on the slavery question had been so moderate as to make him reasonably acceptable to the North on his mere personal record. He had opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compro¬ mise and the Lecompton outrage. But upon this platform of ignoring the political strife of six consecutive years, in which he had him¬ self taken such vigorous part, he and his fol¬ lowers were of course but as grain between the upper and nether mill-stones. This party becomes historic, not through what it accomplished, but by reason of what a portion of it failed to perform. Within one year from these pledges to the Constitution, the Union, and the enforcement of the laws, Mr. Bell and most of his Southern adherents in the seceding States were banded with others in open rebellion. On the other hand, Mr. Everett and most of the Northern members, together with many noble exceptions in the border slave States, like Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, supported the Government in the war with patriotic devotion. LINCOLN NOMINATED AT CHICAGO. • In recognition of the growing power and importance of the great West, the Republican National Convention was called to meet in Chicago on the i6th of May. The former Pres¬ idential canvass, though resulting in the de¬ feat of Fremont, had nevertheless shown the remarkable popular strength of the Republican party in the country at large ; since then, its double victory in Congress against Lecompton,

Page 664

662 LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION and at the Congressional elections over the rep¬ resentatives who supported Lecompton, gave it confidence and aggressive activity. But now it received a new inspiration and impetus from the Charleston disruption. Former possibility was suddenly changed to strong probability of success in the coming Presidential election. Delegates were not only quickened with a new zeal for their principles ; the growing chances spurred them to fresh efforts in behalf of their favorite candidates. Those who had been prominently named were diverse in antece¬ dents and varied in locality, each however pre¬ senting some strong point of popular interest. Seward, of New York, a Whig of preeminent fame ; Chase, of Ohio, a talented and zealous antislavery Democrat, an original founder of the new party; Dayton, of New Jersey, an old Whig high in personal worth and political service ; Cameron, of Pennsylvania, a former Democrat, now the undisputed leader of an in¬ fluential tariff State; Bates, of Missouri, an able and popular antislavery Whig from a slave State ; and last, but by no means least in pop¬ ular estimation, Lincoln, of Illinois. The idea of making Lincoln a Presidential candidate had occurred to the minds of many during his growing fame. The principle of natural selection plays no unimportant part in the politics of the United States. There are always hundreds of newspapers ready to “ nail to the mast-head ” the name of any individual which begins to appear frequently in dispatches and editorials. A few months after the close of the Lincoln- Douglas debates, and long before the Ohio speeches and the Cooper Institute address, a warm personal friend, the editor of an Illinois newspaper, wrote him an invitation to lecture, and added in his letter : “ I would like to have a talk with you on political matters, as to the policy of announcing your name for the Presidency, while you are in our city. My partner and myself are about addressing the Republican ed¬ itors of the State on the subject of a simultaneous announcement of your name for the Presidency.” * To this Lincoln replied : “As to the other matter you kindly mention, I must in candor say I do not think myself fit for the Presi¬ dency. I certainly am flattered and gratified that some partial friends think of me in that connection ; but I really think it best for our cause that no concerted ef¬ fort, such as you suggest, should be made.”t A much more hopeful ambition filled his mind. Notwithstanding his recent defeat, he did not think that his personal contest with Douglas was yet finished. He had the faith and the patience to wait six years for a chance to repeat his political tournament with the “Little Giant.’’ From his letter quoted in a * Pickett to Lincoln, April 13th, 1859. MS. f Lincoln to Pickett, April i6th, 1859. MS. previous chapter we know he had resolved to “fight in the ranks” in i860. From an¬ other, we know how generously he kept faith with other Republican aspirants. “ If Trumbull and I were candidates for the same office you would have a right to prefer him, and I should not blame you for it; but all my acquaintance with you induces me to believe you would not pretend to be for me while really for him. But I do not understand Trumbull and myself to be rivals. You know I am pledged not to enter a struggle with him for the seat in the Senate now occupied by him ; and yet I would rather have a full term in the Senate than in the Presi¬ dency.” X This spirit of fairness in politics is also shown by the following letter, written apparently in response to a suggestion that Cameron and Lincoln might form a popular Presidential ticket : “ Yours of the 24th ult. was forwarded to me from Chicago. It certainly is important to secure Pennsyl¬ vania for the Republicans in the next Presidential con¬ test ; and not unimportant to also secure Illinois. As to the ticket you name, I shall be heartily for it after it shall have been fairly nominated by a Repub¬ lican National Convention ; and I cannot be committed to it before. For my single self, I have enlisted for the permanent success of the Republican cause ; and for this object I shall labor faithfully in the ranks, unless, as I think not probable, the judgment of the party shall assign me a different position. If the Republicans of the great State of Pennsylvania shall present Mr. Cam¬ eron as their candidate for the Presidency, such an in¬ dorsement of his fitness for the place could scarcely be deemed insufficient. Still, as I would not like the pub¬ lic to know, so I would not like myself to know, I had entered a combination with any man to the prejudice of all others whose friends respectively may consider them preferable.” § Not long after these letters, at some date near the middle of the winter of 1859-60, the leaders of the Republican party of Illinois met at Springfield, the capital of the State, and in a more pressing and formal manner requested him to permit them to use his name as a Presidential candidate, more with the idea of securing his nomination as Vice-Pres¬ ident than with any farther expectation. To this he now consented. His own characteris¬ tic language, however, plainly reveals that he believed this would be useful to him in his future senatorial aspirations solely, and that he built no hopes whatever on national pre¬ ferment. A quarrel was going on among rival aspirants to the Illinois governorship, and Lincoln had written a letter to relieve a friend from the imputation of treachery to him in the recent senatorial contest. This act of jus¬ tice was now used to his disadvantage in the scramble for the Illinois Presidential delegates, and he wrote as follows : “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me not to be nominated on the national ticket ; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the t Lincoln to Judd, Dec. 9th, 1859. MS. $ Lincoln to Frazer, Nov. 1st, 1859. MS.

Page 665

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 663 Lincoln's letter to pickett, concerning the presidency, (from a photograph furnished by Robert mcReynolds.) Illinois delegates. What I expected when I wrote the letter to Messrs. Dole and others is now happening. Your discomfited assailants are most bitter against me ; and they will for revenge upon me, lay to the Bates egg in the South, and to the Seward egg in the North, and go far towards squeezing me out in the middle with nothing. Can you not help me a little in this mat¬ ter in your end of the vineyard ? ” * The extra vigilance of his friends thus in¬ voked, it turned out that the Illinois Republi¬ cans sent a delegation to the Chicago Conven¬ tion, not only full of personal devotion to Lincoln, but composed of men of the highest standing, and of consummate political ability, and their enthusiastic efforts in his behalf among the delegations from other States contributed largely to the final result. The political campaign had now so far taken shape that its elements and chances could be calculated with more than usual accuracy. The Charleston Convention had been disrupted on the ist of May, and adjourned on May 3d; the nomination of John Bell by the Constitu¬ tional Union party occurred on May 9th. The Chicago Convention met on May i6th; and while there was at that date yet great uncer- ^ Lincoln to Judd, Feb. 9th, i860. MS. Also printed in a pamphlet. tainty as to whom the dissevered fragments of the Democratic party would finally nominate, little doubt existed that both the Douglas and Buchanan wings would have candidates in the field. With their opponents thus divided, the plain policy of the Republicans was to find a candidate on whom a thorough and hearty union of all the elements of the opposition could be secured. The party was constituted of somewhat heterogeneous material; a lin¬ gering antagonism remained between former Whigs and Democrats, protectionists and free-traders, foreign-born citizens and Know- nothings. Only on a single point could all hitherto agree, — opposition to the extension of slavery. But little calculation was needed to show that at the November polls four doubtful States would decide the Presidential contest. Buchanan had been elected in 1856 by the vote of all the slave States (save Maryland), with the help of the free States of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and California. Change the first four or even the first three of these free States to the Republican side, and they, with the Fremont States of 1856, would elect the President against all the others com-

Page 666

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 664 billed. The Congressional elections of 1858 demonstrated that such a change was possible. But besides this, Pennsylvania and Indiana were, like Ohio, known as October States,” because they held elections for State officers in that month ; and they would at that early date give such an indication of sentiment as would forecast their November vote for President, and exert a powerful, perhaps a decisive, influence on the whole canvass. What candidate could most easily carry New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois, became therefore the vital question among the Chicago delegates, and especially among the delegates from the four pivotal States themselves. William H. Seward, of New York, was nat¬ urally the leading candidate. He had been longest in public life, and was highest in official rank. He had been governor of the greatest State of the Union, and had nearly completed a second term of service in the United States Senate. Once a prominent Whig, his antece¬ dents coincided with those of the bulk of the Republican party. His experience ran through two great agitations of the slavery question. He had taken important part in the Senate discussions which ended in the compromise measures of 1850, and in the new contest growing out of the Nebraska Bill his voice had been in every debate from “ Repeal ” to “ Lecompton.” He was not only firm in his antislavery convictions, but decided in his utterances. Discussing the admission of Cali¬ fornia, he proclaimed the “ higher law ” doc¬ trine* in 1850; reviewing Dred Scott and Lecompton, he announced the ‘‘irrepressible conflict ” t in 1858. He had tact as well as tal¬ ent; he was a consummate politician, as well as a profound statesman. Such a leader could not fail of a strong following, and his supporters came to Chicago in such numbers, and of such prominence and character, as seemed to make his nomination a foregone conclusion. The delegation from New York worked and voted throughout as a unit for him, not merely to carry out their constituents’ wishes, but with a personal zeal that omitted no exertion or sac¬ rifice. They showed a want of tact, however, in carrying their street demonstrations for their * “ It is true indeed that the national domain is ours. It is true it was acquiredby the valor and with the wealth of the whole nation. But we hold, nevertheless, no ar¬ bitrary power over it. We hold no arbitrary authority over anything, whether acquired lawfully or seized by usurpation. The Constitution regulates our steward¬ ship ; the Constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the Constitution which regu¬ lates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part, of the common heritage of man¬ kind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the uni¬ favorite a little to excess ; they crowded to¬ gether at the Richmond House, making that hotel the Seward headquarters, with some¬ what too much ostentation ; they marched every day to the convention with music and banners and badges ; and when any mention was made of doubtful States, their more head¬ long members talked altogether too much of the campaign funds they intended to raise. All this occasioned a reaction, — a certain mental protest among both Eastern and Western delegates against what have in later days come to be characterized as “ machine ” methods. The positive elements in Seward’s charac¬ ter and career had developed, as always hap¬ pens, strong antagonisms. Having many enthusiastic friends, he had also very active and decided opponents. One of the earliest symptoms of this among the delegates at Chicago was the existence of a strong un¬ dercurrent of opposition to his nomination. This opposition was as yet latent, and scat¬ tered here and there among many State delegations, but very intense, silently watch¬ ing its opportunity, and ready to combine upon any of the other candidates. The op¬ position soon made a discovery : that of all the names mentioned, Lincoln’s was the only one offering any chance for such a combination. It needed only the slightest comparison of notes to show that Dayton had no strength save the New Jersey vote ; Chase little outside of the Ohio delegation; Cameron none but that of Pennsylvania, and that Bates had only his Missouri friends and a few in border slave States, which could cast no electoral vote for the Republi¬ cans. The policy of the anti-Seward delegates was therefore quickly developed, namely, to use Lincoln’s popularity as a means to defeat Seward. The credit of the nomination is claimed by many men, and by several delegations, but every such claim is wholly fictitious. Lincoln was chosen not by personal intrigue, but through political necessity. The Republican party was a purely defensive organization ; the South had created the crisis which the new party was compelled to overcome. The verse. We are his stewards, and must so discharge our trust as to secure in the highest attainable de¬ gree their happiness.” — William H. Seward, Senate speech, March nth, 1850. + “ Shall I tell you what this collision means ? They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irre¬ pressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave¬ holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” — Sew¬ ard, Rochester speech, October 25th, 1858.

Page 667

LINCOLN’S NOMLNATLON AND ELECTLON. 665 JOHN C. BRECKINRIOGE, NOMINEE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE BUCHANAN WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. (FRO.M a DAGUERREOTYPE TAKEN ABOUT 185O. LENT BY ANSON MALTBY.) The ascendency of the free States, not the personal fortunes of Seward, hung in the balance. Political victory at the ballot-box or a vital transformation of the institutions of government was the immediate alternative before the free States. Victory could only be secured by help of the electoral votes of New Jersey, Pennsyl¬ vania, Indiana, and Illinois. It was therefore a simple problem : What candidate could carry these States? None could answer this question so well as their own delegates, and these, when interrogated, still further reduced the problem by the reply that whoever else could, Seward certainly could not. These four States lay on the border land next to the South and to slavery. Institutions inevitably mold public sentiment ; and a certain tender¬ ness toward the property ” of neighbors and friends infected their people. They shrunk from the reproach of being “abolitionized.” They would vote for a conservative Republi¬ can ; but Seward and radicalism and higher law ” would bring them inevitable defeat. Who, then, could carry these doubtful and pivotal States ? This second branch of the question also found its ready answer. The contest in these States would be not against a Territorial slave code, but against popular sovereignty’^; not with Buchanan’s candidate, but with Douglas ; and for Douglas there was only a single antagonist, tried and true, — Abraham Lincoln. Such, we may reasona- VoL. XXXIV.— 92. bly infer, was the substance of the discussion and argument which ran through the caucus- rooms of the delegates, day and night, during the i6th and 17th of May. Meanwhile the Seward men were not idle ; having the large New York delegation to begin with, and count¬ ing the many positive committals from other States, their strength and organization seemed impregnable. The opposing delegations, each still nursing the chances of its own candidate, hesitated to give any positive promises to each other. At midnight of May 17th, Horace Greeley,* one of Seward’s strongest opponents, and perhaps better informed than any other single delegate, telegraphed his conclusion that the opposition to Governor Seward cannot concentrate on any candidate, and that he will be nominated.” t Chicago was already a city of a hundred thousand souls. Thirty to forty thousand visitors, full of life, hope, ambition, most of them from the progressive group of incircling North-western States, and strung to the high¬ est tension of political excitement, had come to attend the convention. Charleston had shown a great party in the ebb-tide of dis¬ integration, tainted by the spirit of disunion. Chicago exhibited a great party springing to life and power, every motive and force compelling cooperation and growth. The rush and spirit of the great city, and the * Greeley sat in the convention as a delegate for Oregon. t Greeley to the N. Y. “ Tribune,” May 17th, i860. JOSEPH LANE, NOMINEE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE BUCHANAN WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

Page 668

666 LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION enthusiasm and hope of its visitors, blended and reacted upon each other as if by laws of chemical affinity. Something of the freshness and sweep of the prairie winds exhilarated the delegates and animated the convention. GEORGE ASHMUN, OF MASSACHUSETTS. (from a photograph by not.m.-\n.) No building in the city of Chicago at that time contained a hall with sufficient room for the sittings of the great assemblage. A temporary frame structure, which the com¬ mittee of arrangements christened The Wigwam,’’ was therefore designed and erected for this especial use. It was said to be large enough to hold ten thousand persons, and whether or not that estimate was entirely ac¬ curate, a prodigious concourse certainly gath¬ ered each day within its walls. The very first day’s session (May i6th) dem¬ onstrated the successful adaptation of the structure to its uses. Participants and spectators alike were delighted with the ease of ingress and egress, the comfortable division of space, the perfection of its acoustic qualities. Every ce¬ lebrity could be seen, every speech could be heard. The routine of organization, the choice of officers and committees, and the presen¬ tation of credentials were full of variety and zest. Governor Edwin D. Morgan, of New York, as Chairman of the National Repub¬ lican Committee, called the convention to order; and when he presented the historic name of David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, for temporary chairman, the faith of the audience in the judgment of the managers was already won. The report of the committee on organ¬ ization in the afternoon made George Ashmun^ of Massachusetts, a most skillful parliamenta¬ rian, ready in decision and felicitous in his phrases, the permanent presiding officer. One thing was immediately and specially manifest: an overflowing heartiness and deep feeling pervaded the whole house. No need of a claque^ no room for sham demonstration here ! The galleries were as watchful and earnest as the platform. There was something genuine, elemental, uncontrollable in the moods and manifestations of the vast audience. Seats and standing-room were always packed in advance, and, as the delegates entered by their own separate doors, the crowd easily distinguished the chief actors. Blair, Giddings, Greeley, Evarts, Kelley, Wilmot, Schurz, and others were greeted with spontaneous ap¬ plause, which, rising at some one point, grew and rolled from side to side and corner to corner of the immense building, brightening the eyes and quickening the breath of every inmate.* With the second day’s proceedings the in¬ terest of delegates and spectators was visi¬ bly increased, first by some sharp-shooting speeches about credentials, and secondly by the main event of the day, — the report from the platform committee. Much difficulty was expected on this score, but a little time had smoothed the way with an almost magical effect. The great outpouring of delegates and people, the self-evident success of the gathering, the harmonious, almost joyous, beginning of the deliberations in the first day’s session, were more convincing than logic in solidifying the party. These were the premonitions of success ; before the signs of victory all spirit of faction was fused into a generous glow of emulation. The eager convention would have accepted a weak or defective platform ; the committee, on the contrary, reported one framed with re¬ markable skill. It is only needful to recapitu¬ late its chief points. It denounced disunion, Lecomptonism, the property theory, the dog¬ ma that the Constitution carries slavery to Territories, the reopening of the slave-trade, the popular sovereignty and non-interven¬ tion fallacies, and denied the authority of Congress, of a Territorial legislature, or of any individuals to give legal existence to slav¬ ery in any Territory of the United States.” It opposed any change in the naturalization laws. It recommended an adjustment of import duties to encourage the industrial interests- of the wffiole country. It advocated the im¬ mediate admission of Kansas, free homesteads One of the authors was a spectator at all the ses¬ sions of the convention, and witnessed the scenes in the Wigwam which he has endeavored to describe.

Page 669

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 667 to actual settlers, river and harbor improve¬ ments of a national character, and a railroad to the Pacific Ocean. Bold on points of common agreement, it was unusually successful in avoid¬ ing points of controversy among its followers, or offering points for criticism to its enemies. It is not surprising that Charleston and Chi¬ cago should furnish many striking contrasts. At the Charleston Convention, the principal personal incident was a long and frank speech from one Gaulden, a Savannah slave-trader, in advocacy of the reopening of the African slave-trade.* In the Chicago Convention, the exact and extreme opposite of such a theme created one of the most interesting of the announces the right of all men to “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The conven¬ tion was impatient to adopt the platform with¬ out change; several delegates urged objections, one of them pertinently observing that there were also many other truths enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. ‘‘Mr. President,” said he, “ I believe in the ten commandments, but I do not want them in a political platform.” Mr. Giddings’s amendment was voted down, and the antislavery veteran, feeling himself wounded in his most cherished philosophy, rose and walked out of the convention. Personal friends, grieved that he should feel offended, and doubly sorry that the general THE WIGWAM AT CHICAGO IN WHICH LINCOLN WAS NOMINATED. debates. The platform had been read and received with tremendous cheers, when Mr. Giddings, of Ohio, who was everywhere eager to insist upon what he designated as the “ primal truths ” of the Declaration of Inde¬ pendence, moved to amend the first reso¬ lution by incorporating in it the phrase which * I tell you, fellow-Democrats, that the African slave- trader is the true Union man [cheers and laughter]. I tell you that the slave-trading of Virginia is more im¬ moral, more unchristian in every possible point of view, than that African slave-trade which goes to Africa and brings a lieathen and worthless man here, christian¬ izes him, and sends him and his posterity down the stream of time to enjoy the blessings of civilization. . . It has been my fortune to go into that noble old State to buy a few darkies, and I have had to pay from $1000 to $2000 a head, when I could go to Africa and buy harmony should be marred by even a single dissent, followed Mr. Giddings, and sought to change his purpose. While thus persuading him, the discussion had passed to the second resolution, when Mr. George William Curtis, of New York, seized the chance to renew sub¬ stantially Mr. Giddings’s amendment. There better negroes for $50 apiece. . . I advocate the re¬ peal of the laws prohibiting the African slave-trade, because I believe it to be the true Union movement. I do not believe that sections whose interests are so dif¬ ferent as the Southern and Northern States can ever stand the shocks of fanaticism unless they be equally balanced. I believe that by reopening this trade, and giving us negroes to populate the Territories, the equilibrium of the two sections will be maintained.” — Speech of W. B. Gaulden, of Georgia, in the Charles¬ ton Democratic National Convention, May ist, i860.

Page 670

668 LINCOLN’S NOMINATION AND ELECTION HANNIBAL HAMLIN. were new objections, but Mr. Curtis swept them away with a captivating burst of oratory. I have to ask this Convention,’^ said he, whether they are prepared to go upon the record before the country as voting down the words of the Declaration of Independence ? . . . I rise sim¬ ply to ask gentlemen to think well before, upon the free prairies of the West, in the sum¬ mer of i860, they dare to wince and quail before the assertions of the men in Philadel¬ phia, in 1776 — -before they dare to shrink from repeating the v/ords that these great men enunciated.” This was a strong appeal, and took the convention by storm,”* writes a recording jaurnalist. A new vote formally embodied this portion of the Declaration of Independence in the Republican platform ; and Mr. Giddings, overjoyed at his triumph, had already returned to his seat when the plat¬ form as a whole was adopted with repeated and renewed shouts of applause that seemed to shake the wigwam. The third day of the convention (Friday, May 1 8th) found the doors besieged by an excited multitude. The preliminary business was disposed of, — the platform was made, — and every one knew the balloting would be¬ gin. The New York delegation felt assured of Seward’s triumph, and made an effort to have its march to the convention, with ban¬ ners and music, unusually full and imposing. It proved a costly display; for while the New York ‘‘irregulars ” were parading the streets, the Illinoisans were filling the wigwam : when the Seward procession arrived, there was little room left except the reserved seats for the delegates. New York deceived itself in an- * Halstead, “Conventions of i860,” p. 13S. Other respect: it counted on the full New England strength, whereas more than half of it had already resolved to cast its vote else¬ where. This defection in advance practically insured Seward’s defeat. New York and the extreme North-west were not sufficiently strong to nominate him, and in the nature of things he could not hope for much help from the conservative middle and border States. But this calculation could not as yet be so accu¬ rately made. Caucusing was active up to the very hour when the convention met, and many delegations went to the wigwam with no definite programme beyond the first ballot. What pen shall adequately describe this vast audience of ten thousand souls ? the low, wave¬ like roar of its ordinary conversation ; the roll¬ ing cheers that greeted the entrance of popular favorites ; the solemn hush which fell upon it during the opening prayer ? There was just enough of some unexpected preliminary vvTan- gle and delay to arouse the full impatience of both convention and spectators; but at length the names of candidates were announced. This ceremony was still in its simplicity. The more recent custom of short dramatic speeches from conspicuous and popular orators to serve as electrifying preludes, had not yet been in¬ vented. “ I take the liberty,” said Mr. Evarts, of New York, “ to name as a candidate to be nominated by this convention for the office of President of the United States, William H. Seward.” “ I desire,” followed Mr. Judd, “ on GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

Page 671

669 LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION. WILLIAM M. EVARTS. (FROM AN OIL-PAINTING BY THOMAS HICKS. 1867.) behalf of the delegation from Illinois, to put in nomination as a candidate for President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, of Illi¬ nois.” Then came the usual succession of possible and alternative aspirants who were to be complimented by the first votes of their States, — Dayton, Cameron, Chase, Bates, Coll- amer, McLean. The fifteen minutes required by this formality had already indisputably marked out and set apart the real contestants. The complimentary ” statesmen were lustily cheered by their respective State delegations; but at the names of Seward and Lincoln, the whole wigwam seemed to respond together. There is something irresistibly exciting in the united voice of a great crowd. For a moment the struggle appeared to resolve it¬ self into a contest of throats and lungs. Indi¬ ana seconded the nomination of Lincoln, and the applause was deafening. Michigan sec¬ onded the nomination of Seward ; the New York delegation rose eii masse, waved their hats, and joined the galleries in a shout which doubled the volume of any yet given. Then a portion of the Ohio delegates once more seconded Lincoln, and his adherents, feeling themselves put upon their mettle, made an effort. ‘‘ I thought the Seward yell could not be surpassed,” wrote a spectator; 'TDut the Lincoln boys were clearly ahead, and, feeling their victory, as there was a lull in the storm, took deep breaths all round, and gave a con¬ centrated shriek that was positively awful, and accompanied it with stamping that made every plank and pillar in the building quiver.” * The tumult gradually died away, and bal¬ loting began. Here we may note another contrast, dhe Charleston Convention was reactionary and exclusive; it followed the two- thirds rule. The Chicago Convention was pro¬ gressive and liberal ; it adopted majority rule. Liberal even beyond this, it admitted the Ter¬ ritories and border slave States, containing only a minority or fraction of Republican sen¬ timent, to seats and to votes. It was throwing a drag-net for success. Under different circum¬ stances, these sentimental delegations might have become powerful in intrigue ; but, dom- ^ Halstead, ‘‘Conventions of i860,” p. 145,

Page 672

LINCOLN'S NOMINA TIOJV ANN ELECTION 670 inated as they were by deeper political forces, they alforded no distinct advantage to either candidate.* Though it was not expected to be decisive, the very first ballot foreshadowed accurately the final result. The complimentary ” can¬ didates received the tribute of admiration from their respective States. Vermont voted for Collamer, and New Jersey for Dayton, each solid, t Pennsylvania’s compliment to Cam¬ eron was shorn of six votes, four of which went at once for Lincoln. Ohio divided her compliment, 34 for Chase, 4 for McLean, and at once gave Lincoln her 8 remaining votes. * These sentimental delegations were; Maryl^^i'»cl> 1 1 \ Delaware, 6 ; Virginia, 22 ; Kentucky, 23 ; Texas, 6 ; Kansas, 6; Nebraska, 6; District of Columbia, 2. Total, 82 votes. Of these the leading candidates re¬ ceived as follows : 1st ballot . Seward, 30. .Lincoln, 21 2cl “ “ 35.. “ 30 “ •. . “ 33 ■■ “ 43 Missouri might be counted in the same category ; but, as she voted steadily for Bates through all the bal¬ lots, she did not in any wise influence the result. t Each State cast a vote equal to double the number of its Electoral College. Missouri voted solid for her candidate. Bates, who also received a scattering tribute from other delegations. But all these compliments were of little avail to their recipients, for far above each towered the aggregates of the leading candidates : Seward, 173^^ ; Lincoln, 102. In the grounds well of suppressed excitement which pervaded the con¬ vention there was no time to ana¬ lyze this vote ; nevertheless, dele¬ gates and spectators felt the full force of its premonition; to all who desired the defeat of Seward it pointed out the winning man with unerring certainty. Another little wrangle over some disputed and protesting delegate made the audi¬ ence almost furious at the delay, and “ Call the roll ! ” sounded from a thousand throats. A second ballot was begun at last, and, obeying a force as sure as the law of gravitation, the former complimentary votes came rushing to Lincoln. The whole 10 votes of Collamer, 44 from Cameron, 6 from Chase and McLean, were now cast for him, followed by a scatter of additions along the whole roll-call. In this ballot Lincoln gained 79 votes, Seward only ii. The faces of the New York delegation whit¬ ened as the balloting progressed and as the torrent of Lincoln’s popularity became a river. The result of the second ballot was: Se¬ ward, 18414 ; Lincoln, 18 1 ; scatter¬ ing, 99 When the vote of Lin¬ coln was announced, there was a tremendous burst of applause, which the chairman prudently but with difficulty controlled and silenced. The third ballot was begun amid a breath¬ less suspense; hundreds of pencils kept pace with the roll-call, and nervously marked the changes on their tally-sheets. The Lincoln figures steadily swelled and grew. V otes came to him from all the other candidates, — 4j4 from Seward, 2 from Cameron, 13 from Bates, 18 from Chase, 9 from Dayton, 8 from Mc¬ Lean, I from Clay. Lincoln had gained 50^^, Seward had lost 4^. Long before the official tellers footed up their columns, spectators and delegates rapidly made the reckoning and knew the result: Lincoln, 231 ; Seward, 180. Counting the scattering votes, 465 ballots had been cast, and 233 were necessary to a choice; only votes more were needed to make a nomination. A profound stillness suddenly fell upon the JOHN BELL, NOMINEE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL UNION PARTY. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.)

Page 673

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 671 wigwam; the men ceased to talk and the ladies to flutter their fans ; one could distinctly hear the scratching of pencils and the ticking of telegraph instruments on the reporters’ tables. No announce¬ ment had been made by the chair; changes were in order, and it was only a question of seconds who should speak first. While every one was leaning forward in intense '' expectancy, Mr. Cartter sprang upon his chair and reported a change of four Ohio votes from Chase to Lincoln. There was a moment’s pause, — a teller waved his tally- sheet toward the skylight and shouted a name, — and then the boom of a cannon on the roof of the wigwam announced the nomination to the crowds in the streets, where shouts and salutes took up and spread the news. In the convention the Lincoln river now became an inundation. Amid the wildest hurrahs, delegation after delegation changed its vote to the victor. A graceful custom prevails in orderly American conventions, that the chairman of the vanquished delegation is first to greet the nominee with a short address of party fealty and promise of party sup¬ port. Mr. Evarts, the spokesman for New York, essayed promptly to perform this courteous office, but was delayed a while by the enthusiasm and confusion. The din at length subsided, and the presiding offi¬ cer announced that on the third ballot Abra¬ ham Lincoln, of Illinois, received 364 votes, and “ is selected as your candidate for Presi¬ dent of the United States.” Then Mr. Evarts, in a voice of unconcealed emotion, but with admirable dignity and touching eloquence, speaking for Seward and for New York, moved to make the nomination unanimous. The interest in a National Convention usu¬ ally ceases with the announce¬ ment of the prin¬ cipal nomination. It was only aft¬ erward that the delegates realized how fortunate a selection they . made by adding Hannibal Ham¬ lin, of Maine, to the ticket as can- . didate for Vice- President. In¬ deed, this was even more true of Mr. Lincoln. For the moment WIDE AWAKES. EDWARD EVERETT, NOMINEE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL UNION PARTY. their chief self-congratulation was that they had secured the doubtful vote of the conser¬ vative States. Or rather, perhaps, might it be said that it was hardly the work of the dele¬ gates — it was the concurrent product of popular wisdom. Political evolution had with scientific precision wrought the survi¬ val of the fittest.” The weary delegates leav¬ ing Chicago on the various homeward-bound railroad trains that night, saw that already the excitement and enthusiasm of the convention was transferred from the wigwam to the country. “ At every station where there was a village, until after 2 o’clock, there were tar-barrels burning, drums beating, boys carrying rails, and guns great and small banging away. The weary passengers were allowed no rest, but plagued by the thundering of the cannon, the clamor of drums, the glare of bonfires, and the whooping of the boys, who were delighted with the idea of a candidate for the Presidency who thirty years before split rails on the Sangamon River — classic stream now and for evermore — and whose neighbors named him ‘honest.’ ” * LINCOLN ELECTED. Thus the Presidential canvass in the United States for the year i860 began with the very ^ Halstead, “ Conventions of i860,” p. 154.

Page 674

672 LINCOLN’S NOMINATION AND ELECTION. HERSCHEL V, JOHNSON, CANDIDATE FOR VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE DOUGLAS WING OK THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) unusual condition of four considerable parties, and four different candidates for President and Vice-President. In the order of popular strength, as afterward shown, they were : First. The Republican party, which at the Chicago Convention had nominated as its can¬ didate for President, Abraham Lincoln, of Illi¬ nois, and for Vice-President, Hannibal Hamlin, of Maine. Its animating spirit was a belief and declaration that the institution of slavery was wrong in morals and detrimental to society ; its avowed policy was to restrict slavery to its present limits in the States where it existed in virtue of local constitutions and -laws. Second. The Douglas wing of the Democratic party, which at Bal¬ timore nominated Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois, for Pres¬ ident, and whose candidate for Vice- President was Her- schel V. Johnson, of Georgia.* It de¬ clared indifference as to the moral striction or extension. Its avowed policy was to permit the people of a Territory to decide whether they would prevent or establish slav¬ ery, and it further proposed to abide by the decisions of the Supreme Court on all ques¬ tions of constitutional law growing out of it. Thh'd. The Buchanan wing of the Demo¬ cratic party, which at Baltimore nominated John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, for Presi¬ dent, and Joseph Lane, of Oregon, for Vice- President. Its animating spirit was a belief and declaration that slavery was morally right and politically beneficial ; its avowed policy was the extension of slavery into the Territories, and the creation of new slave States, whereby it might protect and perpetuate itself by a pre¬ ponderance, or at least a constant equality, of political power, especially in the Senate of the United States. As one means to this end, it proposed the immediate acquisition of the island of Cuba. Fourth. The Constitutional Union party, which in its convention at Baltimore nomi¬ nated John Bell, of Tennessee, for President, and Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, for Vice-President. It professed to ignore the question of slavery, and declared that it would recognize no political principle other than “the Constitution of the Country, the Union of the States, and the enforcement of the Laws.” The first, most striking feature of the four¬ sided Presidential canvass which now began, was the personal pledge by every one of the candidates of devotion to the Union. Each of the factions was in some form charging disunion motives or tendencies upon part or all of the others; ^ Benjamin Fitzpatrick, of Alabama, had been nominated at Baltimore, but hedeclined thenomination, and the Na¬ tional Committee substituted the name of Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia. right or wrong of slavery, and indif¬ ference to its re¬ STATE-HOUSE IN WHICH WAS LINCOLN’S OFFICE DURING HIS CAMPAIGN.

Page 675

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION but each indignantly denied the allegation as to itself. To leave no possible doubt, the written letters of acceptance of each of the candidates emphasized the point. Lin¬ coln invoked ‘‘the inviolability of the Con¬ stitution, and the perpetual union, harmony, and prosperity of all.” Douglas made his pledge broad and full. “ The Federal Union,” wrote he, “ must be preserved. The Con¬ stitution must be maintained inviolate in all its parts. Every right guaranteed by the Con¬ stitution must be protected by law in all cases where legislation is necessary to its enjoyment. The judicial authority, as provided in the Con¬ stitution, must be sustained, and its decisions implicitly obeyed and faithfully executed. The laws must be administered, and the constituted authorities upheld, and all unlawful resistance to these things must be put down with firm¬ ness, impartiality, and fidelity.” “ The Consti¬ tution and the equality of the States,” wrote Breckinridge, “ these are the symbols of ever¬ lasting union. Let these be the rallying cries of the people.” Bell declared that, if elected, all his ability, strength of will, and official in¬ fluence should be employed “ for the mainte¬ nance of the Constitution and the Union against all opposing influences and tenden¬ cies.” Even President Buchanan, in a little campaign speech from the portico of the Ex¬ ecutive mansion, hastened to purge himself of the imputation of suspicion or fear on this point. He declared that neither of the Demo¬ cratic conventions was “ regular,” and that therefore every Democrat was at liberty to vote as he thought proper. For himself, he pre¬ ferred Breckinridge. The Democratic party, when divided for the moment, “ has always closed up its ranks, and become more power¬ ful even from defeat. It will never die whilst the Constitution and the Union survive. It will live to protect and defend both.” * No progress was made, however, toward a reunion of the Democratic party. The Buchanan faction everywhere waged unrelent¬ ing war on Douglas, both in public discussion and in the use of official patronage. The con¬ test was made with equal obstinacy and bitter¬ ness in the Northern and the Southern States. Douglas, on his part, was not slow to retaliate. He immediately entered on an extensive cam¬ paign tour, and made speeches at many of the principal cities of the Northern States, and a few in the slave States. Everywhere he stigmatized the Breckinridge wing of the Democracy as an extremist and disunion fac- * G. T. Curtis, “ Life of Buchanan,” Vol. 11., p. 294. t “ In my opinion there is a mature plan throughout the Southern States to break up the Union. I believe the election of a Republican is to be the signal for that attempt, and that the leaders of the scheme desire the election of Lincoln so as to have an excuse for dis- VOL. XXXIV.— 93. 673 tion,t charging that it was as obnoxious and dangerous as the Republicans. Whatever be his errors, it must be recorded to his last¬ ing renown that he boldly declared for main¬ taining the Union by force. At Norfolk, Virginia, the question was put to him in writ¬ ing. “ I answer emphatically,” replied Douglas, “ that it is the duty of the President of the United States, and all others in authority un¬ der him, to enforce the laws of the United States passed by Congress, and as the courts expound them, and I, as in duty bound by my oath of fidelity to the Consti¬ tution, would do all in my power to aid the Government of the United States in maintain¬ ing the supremacy of the laws against all re¬ sistance to them, come from what quarter it might. In other words, I think the President, whoever he may be, should treat all attempts to break up the Union by resistance to the laws, as Old Hickory treated the nullifiers in 1832.”! All parties entered upon the political can¬ vass with considerable spirit; but the chances of the Republicans were so manifestly supe¬ rior that their enthusiasm easily outran that of all their competitors. The character and ante¬ cedents of Mr. Lincoln appealed directly to the sympathy and favor of the popular masses of the Northern States. As pioneer, farm- laborer, flat-boatman, and frontier politician, they saw in him a true representative of their early if not their present condition. As the successful lawyer, legislator, and public de¬ bater in questions of high statesmanship, he was the admired ideal of their own aspirations. The popular fancy seized upon his personal characteristics as effective symbols of their zealous partisanship. While the Illinois State Republican Con¬ vention was in session at Decatur (May loth), about a week before the Chicago Convention, the balloting for State officers was interrupted by the announcement, made with much mys¬ tery, that “an old citizen of Macon County ” had something to present to the convention. When curiosity had been sufficiently aroused, John Hanks, Lincoln’s fellow-pioneer, and a neighbor of Hanks were suddenly marched into the convention, each bearing upright an old fence-rail, and displaying a banner with an inscription to the effect that these were two rails from the identical lot of three thousand which, when a pioneer boy, Lincoln had helped to cut and split to inclose his father’s first farm in Illinois, in 1830. These emblems union. I do not believe that every Breckinridge man is a disiinionist, but I do believe that every disunion- ist in America is a Breckinridge man.” — Douglas, Baltimore speech, September 6th, i860. t Douglas, Norfolk speech August 25th, i860.

Page 676

674 LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION ^h. /?to 6?L£S^^jCtCzji> or^ tLc\j^ /hi jL^^TZ jy.y>v Lly>-n^J^Zcr>^^ /Lz^iLj ctT DI^ fh^yOyCdT^^' Ii> aN^ tyu.//Px'Pc^^Pi.-£*y^ CT^ (^pi^y-J ^2^v^-e»V ^^?Co y^ui-y'»-al2C3 /i/yUJL^ ^ '’^-Qyyy^-.^cr^ ^ Ct/y^ LAy^^iyiy oJZ^^ J d/)^ /O-Wx-^rvo ! yy~»,/^TZuiLt/ /dAy^y'Z..>Cytyiyi clZZyu^ FAC-SIMILE OF LINCOLN’S LETTER OF ACCEPTANXE. of his handiwork were received by the con¬ vention with deafening shouts, as a prelude to a unanimous resolution recommending him for President. Later, these rails were sent to Chicago ; there, during the sittings of the National Republican Convention, they stood in the hotel parlor at the Illinois headquarters, lighted up by tapers, and trimmed with flowers by enthusiastic ladies. Their history and cam¬ paign incidents were duly paraded in the newspapers, and throughout the Union Lin¬ coln’s ancient and local sohdquet of “ Honest Old Abe ” was supplemented by the national epithet of “ The Illinois Rail-splitter.’’ Of the many humors and peculiarities of the cam- ^ We condense the following account of the origin of the ‘‘ Wide Awakes ” from memoranda kindly fur¬ nished us by Mr. William P. Fuller, one of the editors of the Plartford “ Courant ” in i860, Major J. C. Kin¬ ney, at present connected with the paper, and General Joseph R. Hawley, the principal editor, now United States Senator from Connecticut, and who in i860 marched in the ranks in the first “ Wide Awake ” parades. The Wide Awake” organization grew out of the first campaign meeting in Hartford on February 25th, i860 — State election campaign. Hon. Cassius M. Clay was the speaker, and after the meeting was escorted to the Allyn House by a torch-light parade. paign, one feature deserves special mention. Political clubs, for parades and personal cam¬ paign work, were no novelty ; now, however, the new expedients of a cheap yet striking uniform and a half-military organization were tried with marked success. \Vhen Lincoln made his New England trip, immediately after the Cooper Institute speech, a score or two of active Republicans in the city of Hartford appeared in close and orderly ranks, wearing each a cap and large cape of oil-cloth, and bearing over their shoulders a long staff, on the end of which blazed a brilliant torch¬ light. This first Wide Awake ” * Club, as it called itself, marching with soldierly stejD, Two of the young men who were to carry torches, D. G. Francis and H. P. Blair, being dry-goods clerks, in order to protect their clothing from dust and the oil liable to fall from the torches, had prepared capes of black cambric, which they wore in connection with the glazed caps commonly worn at the time. Colonel George P. Bissell, who was marshal, noticing the uniform, put the wearers in front, where the novelty of the rig and its double advantage of utility and show attracted much attention. It was at once proposed to form a campaign club of fifty torch-bearers with glazed caps and oil-cloth capes instead of cambric ; the torch¬ bearing club to be “ auxiliary to the Young Men’s Republican Union.” A meeting to organize formally

Page 677

LINCOLN’S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 67s and military music, escorted Mr. Lincoln, on the evening of March 5th, from the hall where he addressed the people, to his hotel. The device was so simple and yet so strik¬ ingly effective that it immediately became the pattern for other cities. After the cam¬ paign opened, there was scarcely a county or village in the North without its organized and drilled association of Wide Awakes,” immensely captivating to the popular eye, and forming everywhere a vigilant corps to spread the fame of, and solicit votes for, the Repub¬ lican presidential candidate. On several oc¬ casions twenty to thirty thousand Wide Awakes ” met in the larger cities and marched in monster torch-light processions through the principal streets. His nomination also made necessary some slight changes in Mr. Lincoln’s daily life. His law practice was transferred entirely to his partner, and instead of the small, dingy office so long occupied by him, he was now given the use of the Governor’s room in the State- house, which was not needed for official business during the absence of the legisla¬ ture. This also was a room of modest propor¬ tions, with scanty and plain furniture. Here Mr. Lincoln, attended by only his private sec¬ retary (Mr. Nicolay), passed the long summer days of the campaign, receiving the constant stream of visitors anxious to look upon a real presidential candidate. There was free access to him; not even an usher stood at the door; any one might knock and enter.- His immedi¬ ate personal friends from Sangamon County and central Illinois availed themselves largely of this opportunity. With men who had known him in field and forest he talked over the in¬ cidents of their common pioneer experience with unaffected sympathy and interest, as though he were yet the flat-boatman, sur¬ veyor, or village lawyer of the early days. The letters which came to him by hundreds, the newspapers, and the conversation of friends, kept him sufficiently informed of the progress of the campaign, in which personally he took a very slight part. He made no addresses, wrote no public letters, held no conferences. Political leaders several times came to make campaign speeches at the Republican wig- was appointed for March 6th; but before the new uniforms were all ready, Abraham Lincoln addressed a meeting in Hartford on the evening of March 5th. After his speech, the cape- wearers of the previous meeting with a number of others who had secured their uniforms escorted Mr. Lincoln to the hotel. The club was formally organized on the following night. Mr. William P. Fuller, city editor, had, in noticing this meeting for organization, written in the “ Courant ” of March 3d : “ The Wide Awakes. — The Republican club-room last evening was filled as usual with those who are going to partake in the great Republican triumph in this State in April next,” etc., warn in Springfield. But, beyond a few casual interviews on such occasions, the great presi¬ dential canvass went on with scarcely a pri¬ vate suggestion or touch of actual direction from the Republican candidate. It is perhaps worth while to record Lincoln’s expression on one point, which adds testimony to his general consistency in political action. The rise of the Know-nothing or American party, in 1854-5 (which was only a renewal of the Native- American party of 1844), has been elsewhere mentioned. As a national or¬ ganization, the new faction ceased with the defeat of Fillmore and Donelson in 1856 ; its fragments nevertheless held together in many places in the form of local minorities, which sometimes made themselves felt in contests for members of the legislature and county officers; and citizens of foreign birth contin¬ ued to be justly apprehensive of its avowed jealousy and secret machinery. It was easy to allege that any prominent candidate be¬ longed to the Know-nothing party, and at¬ tended the secret Know-nothing lodges ; and Lincoln, in the late senatorial, and now again in the presidential, campaign, suffered his full share of these newspaper accusations. We have already mentioned that in the cam¬ paign of 1844 he put on record, by public resolutions in Springfield, his disapprobation of, and opposition to. Native- Americanism.* In the later campaigns, while he did not allow his attention to be diverted from the slavery discussion, his disapproval of Know- nothingism was quite as decided and as pub¬ lic. Thus he wrote in a private letter, dated October 30th, 1858 : “ I understand the story is still told and insisted upon that I have been a Know-nothing. I repeat what I stated in a public speech at Meredosia, that I am not, nor ever have been, connected with the party called the Know-nothing party, or party calling them¬ selves the American party. Certainly no man of truth, and I believe no man of good character for truth, can be found to say on his own knowledge that I ever was connected with that party.” t So also in the summer of i860, when his candidacy for President did not permit his writing public letters, he wrote in a confiden¬ tial note to a friend : etc. The name “ Wide Awakes ” was here applied to the Republican Young Men’s Union, torch-bearers in¬ cluded; but at the meeting of March 6th, the torch- bearers appropriated it by making it the distinctive title to their own special organization, which almost imme¬ diately, there as elsewhere, swallowed up the names and the memberships of other Republican clubs. Just one year after they escorted Mr. Lincoln in their first parade, he was inaugurated President of the United States. ^ Compare The Century, Jan., 1887, p. 396. t Lincoln to Edward Lusk, Oct. 30th, 1858. MS.

Page 678

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 676 “ Yours of the 20th is received. I suppose as good or even better men than I have been in American or Know-nothing lodges ; but, in point of fact, I never was in one, at Quincy or elsewhere . And now a word of caution. Our adversaries think they can gain a point if they can force me to openly deny the charge, by which some degree of offense would be given to the Americans. For this reason it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the charge.” * His position on the main question involved was already sufficiently understood ; for in his elsewhere quoted letter of May 17th, 1859, he had declared himself against the adoption by Illinois, or any other place where he had a right to oppose it, of the recent Massachusetts constitutional provision restricting foreign- born citizens in the right of suffrage. It is well to repeat the broad philosophical principle which guided him to this conclusion : Understand¬ ing the spirit of our institutions to aim at the elevation of men, I am opposed to whatever tends to degrade them.” t As the campaign progressed the chances of the result underwent an important fluctuation, involving some degree of uncertainty. The Democratic disruption, and the presence of four tickets in the field, rendered it possible that some very narrow plurality in one or more of the States might turn the scale of victory. Calculating politicians, especially those be¬ longing to the party hitherto in power, and who had enjoyed the benefits of its extensive Federal patronage, seized eagerly upon this possibility as a means of prolonging their official tenure, and showed themselves not un¬ willing to sacrifice the principles of the general contest to the mere material and local advan¬ tage which success would bring them. Accordingly, in several States, and more notably in the great State of New York, there was begun a quiet but unremitting effort to bring about a coalition or fusion,” as it was termed, of the warring Democratic fac¬ tions, on the basis of a division of the spoils which such a combination was hoped to be able to secure. Nor did the efforts stop there. If the union of the two factions created the probability, the union of three seemed to in¬ sure certainty, and the negotiations for a coa¬ lition, therefore, extended to the adherents of Bell and Everett. Amid the sharp contest of ideas and principles which divided the coun- * Lincoln to Hon. A. Jonas, July 21st, i860. MS. t Lincoln to Dr. Theodore Canisius, May 17th, 1859. + “ I will give you my opinion as to fusion. I think that every man [jzV] who believes that slavery ought to bebanished from thehalls of Congress, and remanded to the people of the Territories subject to the Constitution, ought to fuse and act together ; but that no Democrat can, without dishonor, and forfeiture of self-respect and principle, fuse with anybody who is in favor of inter¬ vention, either for slavery or against slavery. Lincoln try, such an arrangement was by no means easy ; yet in a large voting population there is always a percentage of party followers on whom the obligations of party creeds sit lightly. Gradually, from talk of individuals and spec¬ ulations of newspapers, the intrigue proceeded to a coquetting between rival conventions ; where the formal proceedings encountering too much protest and indignation, the scheme was handed over to standing committees, who could deliberate and bargain in secret. It must be stated to the credit of Douglas, that he publicly rejected any alliance not based on his hobby of non-intervention ” ; J but the committees and managers cared little for the disavowal. In due time they perfected their agreement that the New York electoral ticket (numbering 35) should be made up of ad¬ herents of the three different factions in the following proportion: Douglas, 18; Bell, 10; Breckinridge, 7.§ This agreement was carried out, and the fusion ticket thus constituted was voted for at the presidential election by the combined opponents of Lincoln. In Pennsylvania, notwithstanding that Douglas disfavored the scheme, an agreement or movement of fusion also took place ; but in this case it did not become complete, and was not altogether carried out by the parties to it, as in New York. The electoral ticket had been nominated by the usual Democratic State con¬ vention (March ist) prior to the Charleston disruption, and, as it turned out, about one- third of these nominees were favorable to Doug¬ las. After the disruption, the Douglasites also formed a straight, or Douglas, electoral ticket. In order to unite the two wings at the October State election, the Executive Committee of the original convention recommended (July 2d) that the electors first nominated should vote for Douglas if his election were possible; if not, should vote for Breckinridge. A subse¬ quent resolution (August 9th) recommended that the electors should vote for either Doug¬ las or Breckinridge, as the preponderance of Douglas or Breckinridge votes in the State might indicate. On some implied agreement of this character, not clearly defined or made public, the Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell factions voted together for governor in Octo¬ ber. Being beaten by a considerable majority at that election, the impulse to fusion was and Breckinridge might fuse, for they agree in prin¬ ciple. I can never fuse with either of them, because I differ from both. I am in favor of all men acting to¬ gether who are opposed to this slavery agitation, and in favor of banishing it from Congress forever ; but as Democrats we can never fuse, either with North¬ ern abolitionists, or Southern bolters and secession¬ ists.” — Douglas, speech at Erie, Penn., “N. Y. Trib¬ une,” October 3d, i860, p. 4. $ Greeley, “American Conflict,” Vol. I., p. 324.

Page 679

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION. 677 greatly weakened. Finally the original Dem¬ ocratic State Committee rescinded (October 12th) all its resolutions of fusion, and the Douglas State Committee withdrew (October 1 8th) its straight Douglas ticket. This action left in the field the original electoral ticket nominated by the Democratic State conven¬ tion at Reading prior to the Charleston Con¬ vention, untrammeled by any instructions or agreements. It was nevertheless a fusion ticket in part, because nine of the candidates (one- third of the whole number) were pledged to Douglas. What share or promise the Bell fac¬ tion had in it was not made public. At the presidential election it was voted for by a large number of fusionists ; but a portion of the Douglasites voted straight for Douglas, and a portion of the Bell men straight for Bell.* In New Jersey also a definite fusion agree¬ ment was reached between the Bell, Breck¬ inridge, and Douglas factions. An electoral ticket was formed, composed of 2 adherents of Bell, 2 of Breckinridge, and 3 of Douglas.t This was the only State in which the fusion movement produced any result in the elec¬ tion. It turned out that a considerable frac¬ tion of the Douglas voters refused to be trans¬ ferred by the agreement which their local managers had entered into. They would not vote for the two Bell men and the two Breck¬ inridge men on the fusion ticket, but ran a straight Douglas ticket, adopting the three electors on the fusion ticket.| By this turn of the canvass the 3 Douglas electors whose names were on both tickets were chosen, but the remainder of the fusion ticket was defeated, giving Lincoln 4 electoral votes out of the 7 in New Jersey. Some slight efforts towards fusion were made in two or three other States, but accomplished noth¬ ing worthy of note, and would have had no influence on the result, even had it been con¬ summated. All these efforts to avert or postpone the great political change which was impending were of no avail. In the long six years’ agi¬ tation popular intelligence had ripened to conviction and determination. Every voter substantially understood the several phases of the great slavery issue, its abstract morality, its economic influence on society, the intrigue of the Administration and the Senate to make Kansas a slave State, the judicial status of slavery as expounded in the Dred Scott de¬ cision, the validity and the effect of the fugi¬ tive-slave law, the question of the balance of political power as involved in the choice be¬ tween slavery extension and slavery restric- * The vote in Pennsylvania stood : Lincoln, 268,030 ; Breckinridge (nominally), 178,871; Douglas, 16,765; Bell, 12,776. tion, — and reaching beyond even this, the issue so clearly presented by Lincoln whether the States ultimately should become all slave or all free. In the whole history of American politics the voters of the United States never pronounced a more deliberate judgment than that which they recorded upon these grave questions at the presidential election in No¬ vember, i860. From much doubt and uncertainty at its beginning, the campaign swept onward through the summer months, first to a proba¬ bility, then to an assurance of Republican success. In September the State of Maine elected a Republican governor by 18,000 majority. In October the pivotal States gave decisive Republican majorities : Pennsylva¬ nia 32,000 for governor, Indiana nearly 10,000 for governor, and Ohio 12,000 for State ticket and 27,000 on congressmen. Politicians generally conceded that the vote in these States clearly foreshadowed Lincoln’s election. The prophecy not only proved cor¬ rect, but the tide of popular conviction and enthusiasm, rising still higher, carried to his support other States which were yet consid¬ ered uncertain. The presidential election occurred on No¬ vember 6th, i860. In seventeen of the free States — namely, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indi¬ ana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, California, and Oregon — all the Lincoln electors were chosen. In one of the free States (New Jersey) the choice resulted in 4 electors for Lincoln and 3 for. Douglas, as already explained. This assured Lincoln of the votes of 180 presidential electors, or a majority of 57 in the whole electoral college. The 15 slave States were divided between the other 3 candidates. Eleven of them — Alabama, Ar¬ kansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisi¬ ana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas — chose Breckin¬ ridge electors, 72 in all. Three of them — Ken¬ tucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — chose Bell electors, 39 in all; and one of them — Missouri — Douglas electors, 9 in number, which, together with the 3 he received in the free State of New Jersey, gave him 12 in all; the aggregate ofall the electors opposed to Lincoln being 123. The will of the people as expressed in this popular vote was in due time carried into exe¬ cution. As the law prescribes, the presidential electors met in their several States on the 5th of December, and cast their official votes according to the above enumeration. And on t Greeley, “American Conflict,” Vol. I., p. 328. t Greeley, “American Conflict,” Vol. I., p. 328.

Page 680

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 678 the 13th of February, 1861, the Congress of the United States in joint session made the official count, and declared that Abraham Lincoln, having received a majority of the votes of presidential electors, was duly elected President of the United States for four years, beginning March 4th, 1861. One feature of the result must not be omitted. Many careless observers felt at the time that the success of Lincoln was due en¬ tirely to the fact of there having been three opposing candidates in the field ; or, in other words, to the dissensions in the Democratic par¬ ty, which divided its vote between Breckinridge and Douglas. What merely moral strength the Democratic party would have gained had it remained united, it is impossible to es¬ timate. Such a supposition can only be based on the absence of the extreme Southern doc¬ trines concerning slavery. Given the presence of those doctrines in the canvass, and no hy¬ pothesis can furnish a result different from that which occurred. In the contest upon the questions as they existed, the victory of Lin¬ coln was certain. If all the votes given to all the opposing candidates had been concen¬ trated and cast for a fusion ticket,” as was wholly or partly done in five States, the re¬ sult would have been changed nowhere ex¬ cept in New Jersey, California, and Oregon; Lincoln would still have received but 1 1 less, or 169 electoral votes — a majority of 35 in the entire electoral college. It was a contest of ideas, not of persons or parties. The choice was not only free, but distinct and definite. The voter was not, as sometimes happens, compelled to an imperfect or partial expression of his will. The four platforms and candidates offered him an unusual variety of modes of political ac¬ tion. Among them the voters by undisputed constitutional majorities, in orderly, legal, and unquestioned proceedings, chose the can¬ didate whose platform pronounced the posi¬ tive and final popular verdict that slavery should not be extended, and whose election unchangeably transferred the balance of power to the free States. BEGINNINGS OF REBELLION. Disunion was not a fungus of recent growth in American politics. Talk of disunion, threats of disunion, accusations of intentions of dis¬ union, lie scattered rather plentifully through the political literature of the country from the very formation of the Government. In fact, the present Constitution of the United States was strenuously opposed by large political factions, and, it may almost be said, succeeded by only a hair’s-breadth. That original oppo¬ sition perpetuated itself in some degree in the form of doubts of its duration and prophecies of its failure. The same dissatisfaction and restlessness resulted in early and important amendments, but these did not satisfy all dis¬ senters and doubters. Immediate and pro¬ found conflict of opinion sprang up over the administration and policy of the new Govern¬ ment ; active political parties and hot discus¬ sion arose, the one side proclaiming that it was too strong, the other asserting that it was too weak, to endure. Before public opinion was well consolidated, the war of 1812 produced new complaints and new opposition, out of which grew the famous Hartford Convention. It has been charged and denied, that this was a movement of dis¬ union and rebellion. The exact fact is not important in our day ; it is enough that it was a sign of deep political unrest and of shallow public faith. Passing by lesser manifestations of the same character, we come to the event¬ ful nullification proceedings in South Carolina in the year 1832. Here was a formal legisla¬ tive repudiation of Federal authority with a reserved threat of forcible resistance. At this point disunion was in full flower, and the terms nullification, secession, treason, rebel¬ lion, revolution, coercion, constitute the cur¬ rent political vocabulary. Take up a political speech of that period, change the names and dates, and the reader can easily imagine him¬ self among the angry controversies of the winter of i860. Nullification was half-throttled by Jackson’s proclamation, half- quieted by Clay’s compro¬ mise. But from that time forward the phrase¬ ology and the spirit of disunion became a constant factor in congressional debate and legislation. In 1850, it broke out to an extent and with an intensity never before reached. This time it enveloped the whole country, and many of the wisest and best statesmen believed civil war at hand. The compromise measures of 1850 finally subdued the storm; but not till the serious beginning of a secession move¬ ment had been developed and put down, both by the general condemnation of the whole country, and the direct vote of a union ma¬ jority in the localities where it took its rise. Among these compromise acts of 1850 was the admission of California as a free State. The gold discoveries had suddenly filled it with pop¬ ulation, making the usual probation as a Terri¬ tory altogether needless. A considerable part of the State lay south of the line of 36°, 30', and the pro-slavery extremists had demanded that it should be divided into two States — one to be a free, and the other to be a slave State — in order to preserve the political balance be¬ tween the sections, in the United States Senate. This being refused, they not only violently op¬ posed die compromise measures, but organized

Page 681

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION ANN ELECTION a movement for resistance in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi, demanding redress, and threatening secession if it were not ac¬ corded. A popular contest on this issue fol¬ lowed in 1851 in these States, in which the ultra-secession party was signally overthrown. It submitted sullenly to its defeat; leaving how¬ ever, as always before, a considerable faction unsatisfied and implacable, only awaiting a new opportunity to start a new disturbance. This new opportunity arose in the slavery agi¬ tation, beginning with the repeal of the Mis¬ souri Compromise in 1854, and ending with the election of Lincoln. During this six years’ controversy, disunion was kept in the back¬ ground because the pro-slavery party had con¬ stant and sanguine hopes of ultimate triumph. It did not despair of success until the actual election of Lincoln, on the 6th of November, i860 ; consequently, even in the Southern States, as a rule, disunion was frowned upon till near the end of the presidential campaign, and only paraded as an evil to be feared, not to be desired. This aspect, however, was superficial. Un¬ der the surface, a small but determined dis¬ union conspiracy was actively at work. It has left but few historical traces; but in 1856 distinct evidence begins to crop out. There was a possibility, though not a probability, that Fremont might be elected President; and this contingency the conspirators pro¬ posed to utilize by beginning a rebellion. A letter from the governor of Virginia to the governors of Maryland and other States is sufficient proof of such an intent, even with¬ out the evidence of later history. “ Richmond, Va., Sept. 15th, 1856. Dear Sir : Events are approaching which address themselves to your responsibilities and to mine as chief Executives of slave-holding States. Contingencies may soon happen which would require preparation for the worst of evils to the people. Ought we not to admon¬ ish ourselves by joint counsel of the extraordinary duties which may devolve upon us from the dangers which so palpably threaten our common peace and safety ? When, how, or to what extent may we act, separately or unitedly, to ward off dangers if we can, to meet them most effectually if we must ? “ I propose that, as early as convenient, the govern¬ ors of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Caro¬ lina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee shall assemble at Raleigh, N. C., for the purpose generally of con¬ sultation upon the state of the country, upon the best means of preserving its peace, and especially of pro¬ tecting the honor and interests of the slave-holding States. I have addressed the States only having Democratic Executives, for obvious reasons. “ This should be done as early as possible before the presidential election, and I would suggest Mon¬ day, the 13th of October next. Will you please give me an early answer, and oblige, “Yours most truly and respectfully, “ Henry A. Wise. “ His Excellency Thomas W. Ligon, “ Governor of Maryland.” 679 If any explanation were needed of the evi¬ dent purpose of this letter, or of the proposed meeting, it may be found in the following from Senator Mason, of Virginia, to Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, who was at the time Secretary of War under President Pierce : “ Selma, near Winchester, Va., “ Sept. 30th, 1856. “ My Dear Sir : I have a letter from Wise, of the 27th, full of spirit. He says the governors of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Louisiana have already agreed to rendezvous at Raleigh, and others will — this in your most private ear. He says, further, that he had officially requested you to exchange with Vir¬ ginia, on fair terms of difference, percussion for flint muskets. I don’t know the usage or power of the de¬ partment in such cases, but if it can be done, even by liberal construction, I hope you will accede. Was there not an appropriation at the last session for converting flint into percussion arms ? If so, would it not furnish good reason for extending such facilities to the States ? Wrginia probably has more arms than the other South¬ ern States, and would divide, in case of need. In a letter yesterday to a committee in South Carolina, I give it as my judgment, in the event of Fremont’s election, the South should not pause, but proceed at once to ‘immediate, absolute, and eternal separation.’ vSo I am a candidate for the first halter. “ Wise says his accounts from Philadelphia are cheering for Old Buck in Pennsylvania. I hope they be not delusive. Vale et Salute [sic]. “J. M. Mason. “Colonel Davis.”* In these letters we have an exact coun¬ terpart of the later and successful efforts of these identical conspirators conjointly with others, to initiate rebellion. When the Sena¬ torial campaign of 1858 between Lincoln and Douglas was at its height, there was printed in the public journals of the Southern States the following extraordinary letter, which at once challenged the attention of the whole reading public of the country, and became known by the universal stigma of “ The Scar¬ let Letter.” In the light of after events it was both a revelation and a prophecy : “ Montgomery, June 15th, 1858. “Dear Sir*. Your kind favor of the 15th is received. I heartily agree with you that [no] general movement can be made that will clean out the Augean stable. If the Democracy were overthrown, it would result in giving place to a greater and hungrier swarm of flies. “ The remedy of the South is not in such a process. It is in a diligent organization of her true men for prompt resistance to the next aggression. It must come in the nature of things. No national party can save us ; no sectional party can ever do it. But if we could do as our fathers did — organize ‘ committees of safety’ all over the Cotton States (it is only in them that we can hope for any effective movement) — we shall fire the Southern heart, instruct the Southern mind, give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by one organized concerted action, we can precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution. “ The idea has been shadowed forth in the South by Mr. Ruffin ; has been taken up and recommended in the ‘Advertiser ’ (published at Montgomery, Ala¬ bama), under the name of ‘ League of United Southern- * Victor, “American Conspiracies,” p. 520.

Page 682

68o LINCOLN'S NOMINATION ANN ELECTION ers,’ who, keeping up their old party relations on all other questions, will hold the Southern issue para¬ mount, and will influence parties, legislatures, and statesmen. I have no time to enlarge, but to suggest merely. In haste, yours, etc., “Wm. L. Yancey. “To James Slaughter, Esq.”'^ The writer of this Scarlet Letter ” had long been known to the country as a promi¬ nent politician of Alabama, affiliated with the Democratic party, having once represented a district of that State in Congress, and of late years the most active, pronounced, and con¬ spicuous disunionist in the South. In so far as this publication concerned himself, it was no surprise to the public ; but the project of an organized conspiracy had never before been broached with such matter-of-fact confidence. t * Quoted in Appendix to Globe for 1859-60, p. 313. t As an evidence of the disunion sentiment com¬ bination which lay like smoldering embers under the surface of Southern politics, it is instructive to read a hitherto unpublished letter from Governor Henry A. Wise, of Virginia, to a gentleman in Phila¬ delphia, for a copy of which we are indebted to Gen¬ eral Duncan S. Walker. The other letter of Wise — previously quoted — shows us his part and interest in the proposed conspiracy against Fremont ; but the erratic governor had, after the lapse of nearly two years, become an anti-Lecompton-Douglasite, and was ready to give confidential warning of designs with which he was only too familiar. As this was written nearly three weeks before Yancey’s “Scarlet Letter,” its concurrent testimony is of special significance: “ Richmond, Va., May 28th, 1858. “To Wm. Sergeant, Esq. “ My Dear Sir: I write to you almost from a sick¬ bed. I am just up out of a two weeks’ bedridden ill¬ ness, and am very weak. Mr. Forney’s letter does not surprise me, for the suggestions and queries are natural and necessary, and to me not at all offensive or disagree¬ able. Yet I would not go before the public at this time with such a correspondence as it calls for. The present aspect of politics is gloomy enough. It is well to define what it is. The Kansas question has not been the cause of a split in the Democratic party. It has only been the pretext for a development of dissension which previously existed. The truth is that there is in the South an organized, active, and dangerous faction, embracing most of the Federal politicians, who are bent upon bringing about causes of a dissolution of the Union. They desire a united South, but not a united country. Their hope of embodying a sectional antag¬ onism is to secure a sectional defeat. At heart, they do not wish the Democracy to be any longer national, united, or successful. In the name of Democracy they propose to make a nomination for i860, at Charleston ; but an ultra nomination of an extremist ; on the slav¬ ery issue alone; to unite the South on that one idea; and on that to have it defeated by a line of sectional¬ ism which will inevitably draw swords between fanatics on one side and fire-eaters on the other. Bear it in mind, then, that they desire to control a nomination for no other purpose than to have it defeated by a line of sections. They desire defeat, for no other end than to make a pretext for the clamor of dissolution. This must be borne in mind in order to understand why it is that the argument of splitting the Democracy has not only no weight with them for desisting from their madness, but is the very stimulus which pricks them on to the extreme of designed defeat, so it be purely An almost universal condemnation by the public press reassured the startled country that the author of this revolutionary epistle was one of the confirmed fanatics who were known and admitted to exist in the South, but whose numbers, it was alleged, were too insig¬ nificant to excite the most distant apprehension. The letter was everywhere copied, its author denounced, and his proposal to precipitate the Cotton States into a revolution ” held up to public execration. Mr. Yancey immediately printed a statement deploring the betrayal of personal confidence in the publication, and to modify J the obnoxious declaration by a long and labored argument. But in the course of this explanation he furnished additional proof of the deep conspiracy disclosed by the “ Scar- sectional. This you see is their only hope. What will be their scheme of action? To pack the Charleston Convention with fire-eating disunionists from the South, and with Lecompton Democrats of the North — to nominate a Southern Lecomptonite, purposely to be defeated by a sectional vote ! The Adminis¬ tration don’t or won’t see this, and an Administration organization cannot prevent it, perhaps, if it did or would see it. What then ? The only hope is in the anti-Lecomptonite Democrats, North and South. I have no doubt we can beat them on the Lecompton issue in Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Maryland. The Lecomptonites have in fact the pap-fed office-holders alone in the free States North and West, but they will send their whole force and ten times more to Charleston. What have our friends to do, then ? Why, to adhere to the national Democracy, the Union-saving Democracy, to save Democracy itself from maladministration. We must claim our identity, and never let go the party. We must organize, and send all our forces to Charleston. The con¬ sequence will probably be that every Northern, West¬ ern, and Middle State will be split. They will be divided, and, like New York in the Cincinnati Convention, be neutralized and count nothing. Or the Lecomptonites will be counted entirely out. In either event, a minor¬ ity, a combined Southern and office-holding minority, will nominate at Charleston. It will then be time enough for the anti-Lecomptonite Democrats to decide not to abide by a nomination so made. What, then, if they do not? Why, they may return to their respective States, appeal to the people who still abide a national platform, and still desire to preserve the Union, and, in their respective States, make their own nominations. This may save the North from absorption by black- Republicanism, may throw the election into the House of Representatives, and save the Union. I see no other course. The word now should be silent, quiet, active organization, with a preconcerted understancling as to ultimate action. Let us be earnestly conservative ; maintain party relations until forced to separate action, and when forced, be prepared to save and not destroy the country and the party. “ This is crude, I know, but you may fill the skeleton with muscle and nerve. Show this to Mr. Forney as my general view, and beg him not to publish it at this time at all events. “ All are well except myself. Love to all. “Yours truly, Henry A. Wise.” MS. t“ I am a secessionist and not a revolutionist, and would not ‘ precipitate ’ but carefully prepare to meet an inevitable dissolution.” — Yancey to Pryor. “ Rich¬ mond South,” copied in “National Intelligencer,” Sept. 4th, 1858.

Page 683

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION 68i let Letter.” He made mention of A well- considered Southern policy, a policy which has been digested, and understood, and ap¬ proved by the ablest men in Virginia, as you yourselves must be aware,” to the effect that while the Cotton States began rebellion, Vir¬ ginia and the other border States should re¬ main in the Union,” where, by their position and their counsels, they would form a protect¬ ing barrier to the proposed separation. In the event of the movement being successful,” he continued, in time Virginia and the other border States that desired it could join the Southern Confederacy.” Less uncertainty than ordinary hung over the final issue of the presidential campaign of i860. To popular apprehension the election of Lincoln became more and more probable. The active competition for votes by four pres¬ idential tickets greatly increased his chances of success ; and the verdict of the October elections appeared to all sagacious politicians to render his choice a practical certainty. San¬ guine partisans, however, clung tenaciously to their favorites, and continued to hope against hope, and work against fate. This cir¬ cumstance produced a deplorable result in the South. Under the shadow of impending de¬ feat the Democrats of the Cotton States made the final months of the canvass quite as much a threat against Lincoln as a plea for Breck¬ inridge. This preaching of secession seemed to shallow minds harmless election buncombe ; but when the contingency finally arrived, and the choice of Lincoln became a real event, they found themselves already in a measure pledged to resistance. They had vowed they would never submit ; and now, with many, the mere pride of consistency moved them to adhere to an ill-considered declaration. The sting of defeat intensified their resentment, and in this irritated frame of mind the secession demagogues among them lured them on skill¬ fully into the rising tide of revolution. In proportion to her numbers, the State of South Carolina furnished the largest contin¬ gent to the faction of active conspirators ; and to her, by a common consent, were accorded the dangers and honors of leadership. Since conspiracies work in secret, only fragmentary * Victor, History of Southern Rebellion,” Vol. I., p. 203. t “ Executive Department, “Unionville, So. CA.,Oct. 5th, i860. “ His Excellency Governor Moore. “ Dear Sir : The great probability, nay almost cer¬ tainty of Abram Lincoln’s election to the Presidency, renders it important that there should be a full and free interchange of opinion between the Executives of the Southern, and more especially the Cotton States, and •w’hile I unreservedly give you my views and the prob¬ able action of my State, I shall be much pleased to hear from you ; that there may be concert of action, VoL. XXXIV.— 94. proofs of their efforts ever come to light. Though probably only one of the many early agencies in organizing the rebellion, the follow¬ ing circular reveals in a startling light what labor and system were employed to fire the Southern heart” after the November election : “ Charleston, Nov. 19th, i860. “ Executive Chamber, ‘The i860 Association.’ “ In September last, several gentlemen of Charles¬ ton met to confer in reference to the position of the South in the event of the accession of Mr. Lincoln and the Republican party to power. This informal meet¬ ing was the origin of the organization known in this community as ‘ The i860 Association.’ “ The objects of the Association are : First. To conduct a correspondence with leading men in the South, and by an interchange of informa¬ tion and views prepare the slave States to meet the impending crisis. “ Second. To prepare, print, and distribute in the slave States, tracts, pamphlets, etc., designed to awaken them to a conviction of their danger, and to urge the necessity of resisting Northern and Federal aggression. “ Third. To inquire into the defenses of the State, and to collect and arrange information which may aid the Legislature to establish promptly an effective mili¬ tary organization. “To effect these objects a brief and simple Consti¬ tution was adopted, creating a President, a Secretary, and Treasurer, and an Executive Committee, specially charged with conducting the business of the Associa¬ tion. One hundred and sixty-six thousand pamphlets have been published, and demands for further supplies are received from every quarter. The Association is now passing several of them through a second and third edition. “ The conventions in several of the Southern States will soon be elected. The North is preparing to soothe and conciliate the South by disclaimers and overtures. The success of this policy would be disastrous to the cause of Southern Union and Independence, and it is necessary to resist and defeat it. The Association is preparing pamphlets with this special object. Funds are necessary to enable it to act promptly. ‘ The i860 Association ’ is laboring for the South, and asks your aid. “ I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, “ Robert N. Gourdin, “ Chairman of the Executive Committee.” * The half-public endeavors of ‘‘The i860 Association ” to create public sentiment were vigorously seconded by the eftbrts of high official personages to set on foot concerted official action in aid of disunion. In this also, with becoming expressions of modesty. South Carolina took the initiative. On the 5th of October, Governor Gist wrote a confiden¬ tial letter,t which he dispatched by a secret which is so essential to success. Although I will con¬ sider your communication confidential, and wish you so to consider mine so far as publishing in the newspapers is concerned, yet the information of course will be of no service to me unless I can submit it to reliable and leading men in consultation for the safety of our State and the South ; and will only use it in this way. It is the desire of South Carolina that some other State should take the lead, or at least move simultaneously with her. She will unquestionably call a convention as soon as it is ascertained that a majority of the elect¬ ors will support Lincoln. If a single State secedes, she will follow her. If no other State takes the lead. South

Page 684

682 LINCOLN^ S NOMINATION AND ELECTION agent to his colleagues, the several gover¬ nors of the Cotton States, whom the bearer. General S. R. Gist, visited in turn during that month of October. Governor Gist wrote that, in view of the almost certain election of Lin¬ coln, it became important to have a full and free interchange of opinion between the South¬ ern States, that concert of action might be ob¬ tained. It was the desire of South Carolina that some other State should take the lead. She would unquestionably call a convention. If a single State secedes, she will follow her. If no other State takes the lead. South Caro¬ lina will secede (in my opinion) alone, if she has any assurance that she will be soon fol¬ lowed by another or other States ; otherwise it is doubtful.” Carolina will secede (in my opinion) alone, if she has any assurance that she will be soon followed by an¬ other or other States ; otherwise it is doubtful. If you decide to call a convention upon the election of a ma¬ jority of Electors favorable to Lincoln, I desire to know the day you propose for the meeting, that we may call our convention to meet the same day if pos¬ sible. If your State will propose any other remedy, please inform me what it will probably be, and any other information you will be pleased to give me. “ With great respect and consideration, “ I am yours, etc., Wm. H. Gist. “ Governor Thos. O. Moore.” MS. * “ Executive Department, “Raleigh, N. C., Oct. i8th, i860. “ Dear Sir : I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your favor of the 5th, which reached me on the 1 2th inst. “ In compliance with your request, I will give as accurately as it is in my power to do the views and feelings of the people of North Carolina upon the im¬ portant subject of your communication. “ Political differences and party strife have run so high in this State for some years past, and particularly during the past nine months, that anything like una¬ nimity upon any question of a public nature could scarcely be expected ; and such is the case with the one under consideration. Our people are very far from being agreed as to what action the State should take in the event of Lincoln’s election to the Presidency. Some favor submission, some resistance, and others still would await the course of events that might fol¬ low. Many argue that he would be powerless for evil with a minority party in the Senate, and perhaps in the House of Representatives also ; while others say, and doubtless with entire sincerity, that the placing of the power of the Federal Government into his hands would prove a fatal blow to the institution of negro slavery in this country. “None of our public speakers I believe have taken the ground before the people that the election of Lin¬ coln would, of itself, be a cause of secession. Many have said it would not, while others have spoken equivocally. “ Upon the whole I am decidedly of opinion that a majority of our people would not consider the occur¬ rence of the event referred to as sufficient ground for dissolving the union of the States. For which reason I do not suppose that our Legislature, which will meet on the 19th prox., will take any steps in that direction — such for instance as the calling of a convention. “ Thus, sir, I have given you what I conceive to be the sentiment of our people upon the subject of your The responses to this inquiry given by the Executives of the other Cotton States were not all that so ardent a disunionist could have wished, but were yet sufficient to prompt him to a further advance. The adjoining State of North Carolina was first to reply.* ‘‘Our people are very far from being agreed as to what action the State should take,” wrote Governor Ellis; “ some favor submission, some resistance.” He intimated that no convention would be called, and that the State would not secede, but on the other hand added, “ I do not think North Carolina would become a party to coercion.” Louisiana sent an equally lukewarm answer. t Governor Moore said, while he believed in the right of secession for just cause, he would not advise it, and did not letter, and I give it as an existing fact, without com¬ ment as to whether the majority be in error or not. “ My own opinions, as an individual, are of little moment. It will be sufficient to say, that as a States Rights man, believing in the sovereignty and reserved powers of the States, I will conform my actions to the action of North Carolina, whatever that may be. To this general observation I will make but a single quali¬ fication — it is this : I could not in any event assent to, or give my aid to a political enforcement of the monstrous doctrine of coercion. I do not for a mo¬ ment think that North Carolina would become a party to the enforcement of this doctrine, and will not there¬ fore do her the injustice of placing her in that posi¬ tion, even though hypothetically. “ With much respect, I have the honor to be, “ Your obt. servt., “ John W. Ellis. “ His Excellency William H. Gist, “ Governor of So. Carolina.” MS. t “Alexandria, La., 26th October, i860. “ His Excellency Governor Gist. “Dear Sir: Your favor of the 5th inst. was re¬ ceived a few days ago at this place. I regret my ina¬ bility to consult with as many of our leading citizens as I wished, but I will not delay in replying any longer. You will [of course] consider my letter as private, ex¬ cept for use in consultation with friends. “ I shall not call a convention in this State if Lincoln is elected, because I have no power or authority to do so. I infer from your letter that an authority has been vested in you by your Legislature to call a con¬ vention in a specified contingency. Our Legislature has taken no action of that or any similar kind. That body will meet in regular annual session about the middle of January; but it is not improbable that I may con¬ sider it necessary to convene it at an earlier day, if the complexion of the Electoral Colleges shall indicate the election of Lincoln. “ Even if that deplorable event shall be the result of the coming election, I shall not advise the secession of my State, and I will add that I do not think the peo¬ ple of Louisiana will ultimately decide in favor of that course. I shall recommend that Louisiana meet her sister slave-holding States in council to consult as to the proper course to be pursued, and to endeavor to effect a complete harmony of action. 1 fear that this harmony of action, so desirable in so grave an emer¬ gency, cannot be effected. Some of the Cotton States will pursue a more radical policy than will be pala¬ table to the border States, but this only increases the necessity of convening the consultative body of which I have spoken. I believe in the right of secession for

Page 685

LINCOLN'S NOMINATION AND ELECTION think the people of Louisiana would ultimately decide in favor of that course. The answer of Mississippi was a little more radical.* Gov¬ ernor Pettus replied that both politicians and people seemed willing to do anything to pre¬ vent that State from passing under the Black Republican yoke. He thought Mississippi would call a council of the Southern States, and if that council should advise secession, just cause, of which the sovereignty must itself be the judge. If therefore the General Government shall at¬ tempt to coerce a State, and forcibly attempt the exer¬ cise of this right, I should certainly sustain the State in such a contest. “ There has never been any indication made by Lou¬ isiana, or by any public body within her limits, of her probable course in the event of an election of a Black Republican President, and she is totally unprepared for any warlike measures. Her arsenals are empty. While some of her sister States have been preparing for an emergency, which I fear is now imminent, she has been negligent in this important matter. ‘‘ If coming events should render necessary the con¬ vocation of the Southern Convention, I shall endeavor to compose the representation of Louisiana of her ablest and most prudent men, if the power shall be vested in me to appoint them. Plovvever, I presume the Leg¬ islature will adopt some other course in the appoint¬ ments. The recommendations of such a body assembled in such a crisis must necessarily carry great weight, and if subsequently ratified and adopted by each State by proper authority, will present the South in united and harmonious action. “ I have the honor to be your Excellency’s obt. servt., “Thos. O. Moore.” MS. Macon, Oct. 26th, i860. “ PI IS Excellency Gov. Gist. “ Dear Sir : Your letter of Oct. 5th was handed me by General Gist. Having but few moments to reply, I write this more to acknowledge its receipt than to reply to its contents. Our friends in this State are will¬ ing to do anything they may have the power to do to prevent the State from passing under the Black Re¬ publican yoke. Our people know this, and seem to approve such sentiments, yet I do not believe Missis¬ sippi can move alone. “ I will call our Legislature in extra session as soon as it is known that the Black Republicans have carried the election. I expect Mississippi will ask a council of the Southern States, and if that council advise seces¬ sion, Mississippi will go with them.^ If any State moves, I think Mississippi will go with her. I will write at length from Jackson. Yours respectfully, “John J. Pettus.” MS. t“ Executive Department. “ Milledgeville, Ga., Oct. 31st, i860. “ PIis Excellency W. H. Gist. “ Dear Sir : I have the honor to acknowledge die receipt of your favor by the hand of General Gist, with whom i have had a free interchange of opinions. In the event of the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Pres¬ idency I have no doubt that Georgia will determine her action by a convention of the people, which will probably be held before the 4th day of March next. Her legislature, which convenes here next Wednesday, will have to determine on the time when the conven¬ tion shall be held. My opinion is that the people of Georgia will, in case of the election of Lincoln, decide to meet all the Southern States in convention and take common action for the protection of the rights of all. 683 she would go with them. Mississippi would not move alone, but if any State moved, she would go with her. Georgia hung in a more un¬ certain balance, t Governor Brown answered he had no doubt Georgia would determine her action by a convention ; that he favored retaliatory legislation, and thought the people would be inclined to wait for an overt act. Alabama, her governor replied, J did not con- Events not yet foreseen may change their course and might lead to action on the part of Georgia without waiting for all the Southern States, if it should be found necessary to her safety. I have handed General Gist a copy of my message on our federal relations, which will be sent to our legislature on the first day of the session. I send only the forms from the press as it is just being put in type. I may make some immaterial alterations before it is completed. If your State re¬ mains in the Union, I should be pleased that she would adopt such retaliatory measures as I recommend in the message, or others which you may determine to be more appropriate. I think Georgia will pass retaliatory laws similar to those I recommend, should Lincoln be defeated. Should the question be submitted to the people of Georgia, whether they would go out of the Union on Lincoln’s election without regard to the ac¬ tion of other Sates, my opinion is they would determine to wait for an overt act. The action of other States may greatly influence the action of the people of this State. This letter is not intended for publication in the newspapers, and has been very hastily prepared. “ I have the honor to be your Excellency’s “Obt. servt., “Joseph E. Brown.” MS. t “ Executive Department, “ Montgomery, Ala., Oct. 25th, i860. “ His Excellency W. H. Gist. “ Dear Sir : Your letter of the 5thinst. was handed me a few days since by General Gist. I fully concur with you in the opinion that Lincoln will be elected President, and that a full and free interchange of opin¬ ion between the Executives of the Southern States, and especially of the Cotton States, should be had as to what ought to be done and what will be done by them to protect the interest and honor of the slave-holding States in the event he should be elected. “ My opinion is, that the election of Lincoln alone is not sufficient cause for a dissolution of the Union ; but that fact, when taken in connection with the avowed objects and intentions of the party whose candidate he is, and the overt acts already committed by that party in nullifying the fugitive-slave law, and the enactment of personal liberty bills in many of the non-slave- holding States, with other acts of like kind, is sufficient cause for dissolving every tie which binds the Southern States to the Union. “ It is my opinion that Alabama will not secede alone, but if two or more States will cooperate with her, she will secede with them; or if South Carolina or any other Southern State should go out alone and the Federal Government should attempt to use force against her, Alabama will immediately rally to her rescue. “ The opinions above expressed are predicated upon observation and consultation with a number of our most distinguished statesmen. The opinion thus expressed is not intended as a positive assurance, but is my best impression as to what will be the course of Alabama. Should Lincoln be elected, I shall certainly call a convention under the provisions of the resolu¬ tions of the last General Assembly of the State. The convention cannot be convened earlier than the first

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LINCOLN'S NOMINATION ANN ELECTION 684 sider the election of Lincoln in itself sufficient cause for disunion ; but, taken in connection with other objects and acts of the North, it was. In his opinion she would not secede alone, but would cooperate with two or more Southern States ; or would rally to the aid of South Carolina in resisting coercion. He in¬ tended calling a convention as soon as prac¬ ticable. Florida, though the last to respond, was loudest in her eagerness to embark in the revolt.* Governor Perry wrote : Florida is ready to wheel into line with the gallant Pal¬ metto State, or any other Cotton State or States in any course which she or they may in their judgment think proper to adopt.’’ He suggested that she might be unwilling to lead off, but would most assuredly coop¬ erate or follow the lead of any single Cotton State. Two agencies have thus far been described as engaged in the work of fomenting the re¬ bellion : the first, secret societies of individuals, like ‘‘ The i860 Association,” designed to ex- Monday in February next, and I have fixed upon that day (in my own mind). The vote of the electors will be cast for President on the 5th day of December, after which it will require a few days to ascertain the result. Thirty days’ notice will have to be given after the day upon which the delegates to the convention will be elected, and the convention is required to convene in t\yo weeks after the election. This is not a matter of discretion with me, but is fixed by law. I regret that earlier action cannot be had, as it may be a matter of much importance that all the States that may deter¬ mine to withdraw from the Union should act before the expiration of Mr. Buchanan’s term of service. ‘‘ The facts and opinions herein communicated you are at liberty to make known to those with whom you may choose to confer, but they are not to be published in the newspapers. “ I have had ^ full and free conversation with General Gist, the substance of which is contained in this letter. He will, however, give it to you more in detail. It is ny opinion that all the States that may determine to take action upon the election of Lincoln should call a convention as soon as practicable after the result is known. With great respect, your obt. servt. “A. B. Moore.” MS. ^ “ Executive Department, Nov. 9th, i860. “ His Excellency Gov. Gist. “ Dear Sir : Your communication of the 5th ultimo reached me per last mail under cover from General States Rights Gist, with an explanatory note from that gentleman in relation to the subject-matters thereof. “ The rnode employed by your Excellency to collect authoritatively the views of several of the Executives of the Southern States as to their plan of action in the event of the election of Lincoln, commends itself cite the masses and create public sentiment ; the second, a secret league of Southern gov¬ ernors and other State functionaries, whose mission it became to employ the governmen¬ tal machinery of States, in furtherance of the plot. These, though formidable and dangerous, would probably have failed, either singly or combined, had they not been assisted by^ a third of still greater efficacy and certainty. This was nothing less than a conspiracy in the very bosom of the National Administration at Washington, embracing many United States Senators, Representatives in Congress, three members of the President’s Cabinet, and nu¬ merous subordinate officials in the several Ex¬ ecutive departments. The special work which this powerful central cabal undertook by com¬ mon consent, and successfully accomplished, was to divert Federal arms and forts to the use of the rebellion, and to protect and shield the re¬ volt from any adverse influence, or preventive or destructive action of the General Govern¬ ment. warmly to my judgment. Concert of action can alone be arrived at by a full and free interchange of opinion between the Executives of the Cotton States, by whom it is confidently expected that the ball will be put in motion. “We are in the midst of grave events, and I have in¬ dustriously sought to learn the public mind in this State in the event of the election of Lincoln, and am proud to say Florida is ready to wheel into line with the gallant Palmetto State, or any other Cotton State or States in any course which she or they may in their judgment think proper to adopt, looking to the vindication and maintenance of the rights, interests, honor, and safety of the South. Florida may be unwill¬ ing to subject herself to the charge of temerity or immodesty by leading off, but will most assuredly cooperate with or follow the lead of any single Cotton State which may secede. Whatever doubts I may have entertained upon this subject have been entirely dissi¬ pated by the recent elections in this State. “Florida will most unquestionably call a convention as soon as it is ascertained that a majority of the elec¬ tors favor the election of Lincoln, to meet most likely upon a day to be suggested by some other State. “ I leave to-day for the capital, and will write you soon after my arrival, but would be pleased in the mean time to hear from you at your earliest conven¬ ience. “If there is sufficient manliness at the South to strike for our rights, honor, and safety, in God’s name let it be done before the inauguration of Lincoln. “ With high regard, I am yours, etc., “M. S. Perry. “Direct to Tallahassee. “ P. S. I have written General Gist at Union C. H.” MS.

Page 687

THE HUNDREDTH MAN* BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of “Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XXXI. I " sugar maples were yet I I . ^ in a glow of crimson ; the V hillsides were yet green ; the sunshine was yet warm and cheering, when Mr. Stratford an- - nounced to Mrs. People his intention of returning to his city home. It’s a good deal earlier than you’ve ever gone yet,” said she, ‘‘and I’m very sorry for it. But it’s not to be wondered at, for you’d find it very lonely here with everybody away, and even Enoch himself gone out West, which is a thing he never did before, and which I hope won’t end by his becomin’ an emigrant, for I’m sure I don’t want to go into any such wild country, or indeed into any country at all, except here, which I’m sure' is a good enough place for anybody ; and why Enoch shouldn’t be satisfied to stay where he is, with everything comfortable around him, and crops as good as his neighbors’, and plenty to eat and drink, I can’t see for the life of me. If you knew the Stull fam’ly now, they might be some company for you ; but then, ag’in, I don’t s’pose you could git much out of ’em. Old Stull himself has gone back to town, and the two little girls have gone to school, but that Stull young woman and her mother are here ag’in, and, what’s more, that Mr. Crisman, who Miss Armatt gave the sack to, is here too and courtin’ Miss Matilda as if he was tryin’ to ketch a train. Well, well,” continued the good woman, corrugating her brow as the memory of broken schemes came to her, “ things don’t always turn out as they’re wanted to, but I don’t mind sayin’ it to you, Mr. Stratford, that if I’d ever turned out to be that girl’s mother-in-law, I couldn’t have lived with her, which would have had its advantages in one way, for then I’d ’a’ lived here, and not there, which would ’a’ suited me better, for I don’t want to leave Enoch, and if John had got the old place I’d been satisfied and asked no more; and, although Mrs. Stull is her own mother, the best I can wish for her is that she won’t have to live with her, which, considerin’ what kind of man he must be which Miss Gay and Mrs. Justin had to give his walkin’ papers * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. to, won’t be exactly what people mean when they talk about a heaven on earth.” When Stratford returned to New York, thoroughly convinced of Mr. Crisman’s new attachment, his mind, instead of being in a state of certainty and decision, was in a con¬ dition of very great uncertainty, in regard to what he would do, and of very great indecision as to what he ought to do. Gay being free from Crisman, as she surely was, his appointed work was done; and what excuse could he make to himself for continuing that work ? That dangerous space over which he had pro¬ posed to carry the young fellow-being in whom he had taken so great an interest had proved narrower than he had supposed it would be, and was already crossed. The vision of Arthur Thorne standing on the opposite bank proved this. Whatever might or might not happen to Gay from Thorne’s love of her, the girl had no present need of Horace Stratford. This was all clear and plain enough, and yet Stratford did not say to himself that his work being done he would step aside. “ I will see her first,” he thought, “ and then I will decide upon my plan of action.” The next morning after his arrival in the city, he went to Mrs. Justin’s house. Gay bad gone out, but Mrs. Justin was delighted to see him. “ I was afraid,” she said, “ that this fine weather would keep you in the country, and it is very encouraging to see you make your appearance so soon. And as for Gay, I am glad to say that her condition is improved. To be sure, she eats very little, she is easily tired, and she will not take medicines, but since she came to the city she is brighter and shows more interest in things. And I am quite sure,” said Mrs. Justin, looking steadfastly at Stratford, “ that your exchange of the pleas¬ ures of the shooting season for premature town life will have a beneficial effect upon her.” There was point to this remark, for Stratford was an earnest sportsman, and it had hitherto been his custom to invite some of his friends to Cherry Bridge during the shooting season. “ I shall be very glad,” said he, “ if in any way I can be of benefit to Miss Armatt.” “ Don’t be so cold and fomial ! ” exclaimed the lady. “ Why don’t you look at the matter in a natural and sensible light? Gay has Stockton. All rights reserved.

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686 THE HUNDREDTH MAN. missed you, and will be ever so glad to meet you again, and you know that I shall be more than glad to see you together again. Do you know why she is brighter and more cheerful than she was ? ” “ On account of the change to the city air, I suppose,” he answered. ‘‘ That is often of as much advantage as change to country air.” It is nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Jus¬ tin. As soon as I decided that she was to come with me to town and not to make her expected visit to Maryland, she began to brighten. I know she wants to see her sister, but I also know that she wishes very much more to be with you, and if she had gone home she probably would have staid there until she began her post-collegiate course. But now that her health obliges her to be here with me, and, consequently, with you, her conscience is satisfied, and she is happier.” Stratford made no reply, but turned to a window and looked out. “ Of course you have heard,” said Mrs. Justin, after a short silence, that Mr. Cris- man is paying attention to Miss Stull. I had the news from Mrs. People, who wrote to me about my winter supply of poultry, and in¬ serted the item as a bit of flavoring. She says he is there every week.” ‘‘ I have heard that,” said Stratford. I must admit,” continued the lady, that when I received this news I was mortified that a man could so quickly turn from our Gay to Matilda Stull. And yet, upon think¬ ing it over, I believe that we ought to feel rather satisfied than otherwise. Knowing as I do that Mr. Crisman is totally unworthy of Gay, I cannot but feel somewhat pleased that he has been able to compensate himself for any injury he may imagine he received at our hands.” Mrs. Justin arose, and stood beside Strat¬ ford. Our old ships are now all behind us, and burned,” she said, ‘‘ and I pray for the most favoring winds to fill the new s^ils which shall bring Gay and you together. Now, don’t say anything! That is one of the remarks to which no answer is required.” When Stratford called the next day he was received by Gay in the library, a room which Mrs. Justin now almost entirely surrendered to her young friend. The light from the high, wide window fell full upon the young girl as she arose, bright-eyed, to greet her visitor. AVhen Gay reseated herself upon the soft- cushioned chair, the action showed a change in her which was instantly noticed by Stratford. The Gay Armatt of the old days at Cherry Bridge had never reclined. She was a girl who sat up straight, who moved quickly, whose presence suggested youthful vigor and activity. Stratford drew a low chair near her and placed it so that he could face her as they talked. Whatever might be her present lack of strength or vitality, it had not aftected her beauty. Never had she seemed so charming to the eyes of Stratford. Her morning dress of blue may have relieved the delicate color in her cheek, and brought out the pure white¬ ness of her neck and wrists, and the happy light in her eyes may have given something of its brightness to the smile upon her perfect lips, and even her unwonted languor may have infused new grace into that half-reclining figure ; but, whatever were the reasons, Strat¬ ford now sat before a woman whose beauty fully satisfied him. He had always given due appreciation to Gay’s personal attractions, but heretofore he had felt that there was something wanting, some little touch, he knew not what. That touch had now been given. Do you see this ? ” said Gay, holding up a book which had been lying open and face downward upon a little table at her side. Perhaps you are not familiar with this style of literature. It is what is popularly called a novel.” I am very familiar with novels,” said Stratford, and I have read that one.” And I have read those,” said Gay, point¬ ing to a pile of books on the floor by the win¬ dow, “ and all of them in a little more than a week. I expected that by this time I should be working away in superheated mathematics and that sort of thing, but Mrs. J ustin has put an interdict on study. I do scarcely anything but read novels and look at clothes. When¬ ever we go out we always go to shops, and, al¬ though we don’t buy much, we have all sorts of things spread out and wonder how they would look made up. Mrs. Justin says that clothes cogitation is very restful to the mind.” “ Does your mind need rest ? ” asked Strat¬ ford. ‘‘ I don’t know,” said Gay. “ My body seems to need a good deal of it, and Mrs. Justin says I must show no favoritism; one must have just what the other gets. You see, I have given up thinking for myself; Mrs. Justin does that for me now.” “ I did not suppose,” said Stratford, that you would ever allow any one to do your thinking for you.” Oh, dear me I ” exclaimed Gay, ‘‘ you don’t know how nice it is! You ought to try it. By the way,” she added, with a quick start of animation, “will you let me do some think¬ ing for you ? ” “ It will be something entirely novel to me,” said Stratford, “ and I should like it as a bit of experience.”

Page 689

THE HUNDREDTH MAN, Well, then,” said Gay, please empty your mind of everything in it, and I will fill it for you. You are now thinking as follows : Here is a girl, or I should say a young woman, who is not feeling as much like an English spar¬ row as she did during the summer, but who is quite as well and quite as strong as a good many people who work or study or slave in all sorts of ways all day long, and a great part of the night besides. She has a friend, a dear friend, who is one of the noblest women on earth, and who is just as good and lovely as it is possible for any woman to be, but who has, in spite of all this, a blot upon her char¬ acter. This is that she is too kind. It is a white blot, and a very beautiful one to look at, but still it is a blot, and it interferes with her ability to make the young person I am thinking of do what she ought to do. She lets this white blot spread itself over her so¬ ber judgment and several of her other good qualities, and she tells this young person that she must not do anything all day that is in the least bit like work or study. Now, I know this is all wrong. That girl would be a great deal happier, and it would be ever so much better for her in every way, if she were to shut up the novel she is reading, and stop short without knowing Avhat happens next or how it ends, and apply herself to matters that are of importance and value ; and if she takes up again those things which are the real object of her life she will become as much in¬ terested in them as she used to be, and will pay no attention to those little tired feelings which soon grow up into incurable laziness if one is not very careful. Now, I shall talk to that young person and make her see these things as I do. I don’t think it will be at all difficult. I shall tell her that if she continues in her present indolent condition she will get rusty in the studies she has been working at this summer, and if she goes backward in¬ stead of keeping straight on, as I am sure her soul is longing to do, I really do not know what will become of her. I am quite certain she will take my advice, because she has the greatest confidence in my judgment. And in¬ deed, considering how I have helped her and counseled her, and in all sorts of ways been of the greatest good and service to her, she must be horribly stupid if she don’t know by this time that what I advise she ought to do. There is another reason, too, why I should advise her. If I sit and look at her reading novels and neglecting her duties and cultivat¬ ing habits of laziness, and say nothing about it, I shall make her think that, though I must disapprove of what she is doing, I am keep¬ ing quiet merely because she is not quite well, and ought to be treated like a child or an in¬ 687 valid. Now, I know that this will grieve her very much, and so I shall speak out, and tell her that she ought to take up her work just where she put it down when she left Cherry Bridge, and I shall also tell her that when I can — that is to say, of course, not so often as I used to do in the country, but at times when it will not interfere with anything else I want to do — I will come and help her, and give her little hints about all sorts of things just as I did when we were in the country together. And now, sir,’' said Gay, who by this time was sit¬ ting up straight in her chair, her face slightly flushed and every trace of languor gone, “how do you like your train of thought ? ” While Gay had been speaking, Stratford had sat gazing upon her. He had heard nearly all she had said, but some phrases here and there had escaped his attention because his mind was so busily at work for itself. “ Do I love this beautiful girl ? ” he asked himself, as Gay’s words gave to his mind a vision of one who extends her hands to a friend without intend¬ ing or knowing that those outstretched arms may, instead, receive a lover. As Stratford thus sat, thinking and listening, one of his arms hung over the side of his low chair, and as he unconsciously moved his hand his fingers touched a bow of ribbon on one of the folds of Gay’s dress which lay upon the floor. Entirely unnoticed by her, he took an end of the ribbon between his thumb and fin¬ ger and gently held and pressed it. This Avas on Gay ; it Avas a part of her ; it Avas a link be¬ tween him and that beautiful creature flushing and Avarming before him. Through that bit of blue ribbon might pass an electric thrill Avhich should change his being and make him blind to extended hands, seeing only outstretched arms. He crumpled the ribbon in his fingers, his blood flowed quicker, and his eye greAv brighter. “ I could loA^e her,” he said to himself. Gay Avent on talking. She Avas making him know noAv hoAV much she depended on him, and how desirous she was for his society. She Avas sitting erect, and therefore nearer to him, but her eyes Avere fixed upon his face, and she knew not that he held her ribbon. “ I could love her,” he repeated to himself Then his mind stopped, and began to Avork backward. “ But if I do love her,” he thought, “ I shall never love myself again. I have sworn that I Avould do this thing, and that I Avould go through it Avithout blame or blemish ; and, to me, the purest love of this girl Avould be blame and blemish.” He dropped the ribbon from betAveen his fingers, and placed his hand upon the arm of his chair. “ And noAv, sir,” said Gay, “ how do you like your train of thought ? ”

Page 690

688 THE HUNDREDTH MAN Stratford answered slowly. “ I am not sure,” he said, ‘‘but that it might be of advantage for you to take up your studies again ; at least to a moderate extent. At any rate, as you so much desire it, it may be well to make the trial. Of course I shall be much pleased to drop in here from time to time and give you all the assist¬ ance that I can.” Then, after some inquiries in regard to Mrs. Justin, and some messages for her, he took leave of Gay, and went away with a cold face and a hot and troubled heart. “ My work is done,” he said to himself. “ Yes,” he reasserted, as he clenched his list, “ it is done, done, done ! ” When Mrs. Justin returned home, she dis¬ approved entirely of what Gay told her Mr. Stratford had advised. Indeed she spoke a little petulantly about it. “ I cannot imagine what he could have been thinking of,” she said. “ Instead of being well enough to study, you seem to me to be less able to endure any sort of work than you were some days ago. I shall allow no studying; you may be sure of that.” Gay was lying back in the library chair, her novel in her lap, open at the same pages which had been turned down on the table when Stratford had left her an hour before. “ You mustn’t find fault with Mr. Stratford,” she said. “ I advised him to advise me as he did, and I told him I hoped he would some¬ times come and help me in the old way. He said he would, and I don’t think he minded the trouble at all. I don’t think he minded much, either way. He is always very good.” “Gay,” said Mrs. Justin, “have you been talking a very great deal ? Why do you close your eyes that way while you speak to me ? ” “ I don’t know,” said Gay. “ I can’t explain exactly how I feel. I am not hungry; I can’t think of anything in particular that I care for. I have been trying to rouse myself up by think¬ ing how I am wasting my time, but I don’t be¬ lieve I care just now whether I am wasting my time or not. I don’t know exactly why, but this • world seems to me an aimless sort of place.” Mrs. Justin gazed tenderly and kindly on the face of her young friend. “ But it would be an easy matter, my dear,” she said, “ to make the world full of purpose.” “ I suppose so,” answered Gay, closing her eyes again as she languidly clasped her hands above her head. XXXII. Vatoldi’s was now enjoying what might be called a regenerated success. The total cessation of business during the alterations had given the public time to forget all about the boycotting troubles as well as the deca¬ dence of the establishment during the admin¬ istration of Enoch Bullripple, while the great improvements now seen in the restaurant brought it not only its old customers but an abundance of new ones. The cooks, in their caps, baked, boiled, and broiled with enthusiasm and content ; the waiters, in their jackets and aprons, gave solicitous attention to the desires of every comer; and John Peo¬ ple stood behind his new desk, with his form as round, his carriage as upright, and his hair as smoothly brushed as of yore. But upon his brow there was more of cheerfulness and less of resignation. Some of this change arose from the fact that John was now a partner in the concern — a partner in a very small degree in fact, but still a partner; and it was not neces¬ sary to be so much resigned when what he did was partly for his own benefit. It is probable, although John would not have admitted it, that his increase of cheerfulness was due in a greater degree to his total loss of Matilda Stull. John’s attachment to this young lady had been very wearing upon him. When hope lent him no assistance his progress was slow and painful, and when she gave him a help¬ ing hand she carried him along entirely too fast; he lost his breath, his legs became weak. It was well for him that he was stopped in time; now his breath was full and regular, his pace moderate, and his legs were strong. There was a new refrigerator, and in one corner there frequently stood a plate contain¬ ing a plump, fat, mutton-chop, a piece of ten¬ derloin, or a choice veal- cutlet; seldom did it hold a sweet-bread or bit of dainty game, for Miss Burns was the owner of a vig¬ orous appetite and a moderate purse. This young lady was now an habitual customer of Vatoldi’s. There was something about the place which made a meal in any other restau¬ rant extremely unsatisfactory to her; and if, for any reason, a day passed without her com¬ ing there, John was sure to drop in at the store and inquire about her health. Miss Burns enjoyed more than the ordinary advantages of Vatoldi’s, for John made it his business to see that her preference for that place was not detrimental to her fortune. From the amount due on the little bill which she presented to him he invariably deducted a certain percentage. To this the young lady frequently demurred and shook her head, but John, who had always something else to do, and who was not in the habit of talking much to customers at the desk, passed over her ob¬ jections with a smile and gave his attention to the something else. Miss Burns would have demurred still more, had she known that John never failed to make up the deficit in her pay¬ ments out of his own pocket. She ought to have supposed this, but young ladies who are

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THE HUNDREDTH MAN, thinking of Johns do not always think of everything else. The time came, however, when John felt that he must explain this financial method; and one evening, when the diners at Vatol- di’s had all finished their meals, he called on Miss Burns at her boarding-house. “ 1 am sorry,” said John, when he had ex¬ plained the object of his visit, “ that you ever thought it worth while to say anything about those little discounts, for the matter is really of no consequence at all. You see, I have a share in the business.” “ Oh, yes,” said Miss Burns, “ I always sup¬ posed that.” Yes,” said John, ‘‘and people have thought I owned a good deal bigger part of it than is really the truth. But that’s neither here nor there, and don’t hurt anybody. Now it is to my interest to make the restaurant as pleasant a place as I can to everybody, and if I have any particular friend who finds it convenient to come there. I’m sure I ought to make it pleasant for her. And I leave it to yourself to say if it is not pleasanter to feel that you’re partly taking lunch with a friend — not entirely, for perhaps you wouldn’t do that, but partly — than to always sit down to an out-an-out bought meal ? ” Miss Burns was crocheting an afghan. It was a good-sized one, big enough to cover a lounge which would be long enough for a gentleman to lie down upon. She got the wools at cost price from the store in which she was employed, and could, therefore, afford to make a nice large afghan. It^had three plain dark green stripes, and two Roman stripes of bright and variegated colors. She was working on one of the Roman stripes now. “ That would be very nice,” she said, “ if one came to visit, but then you know I don’t come to visit you.” John was about to ask, “Not even partly?” but, being a slow speaker, he had time to think that it would not do to intimate anything like that. “ And you know,” continued Miss Burns, working a thread of dark blue into her stripe, “ that it isn’t right to have a gentleman regu¬ larly giving you things, especially your daily food ; though, of course, you only do it partly ; but that is what it comes to.” John passed his hand over his brow, and then turning his chair so as more directly to face Miss Burns, he put his right elbow upon the table at which they sat, and, intently gaz¬ ing into her face as she spoke, he said : “ I am sorry your mind is made up in such a way that you don’t like to accept a little hospital¬ ity from a friend, not because of what it is, for it really amounts to nothing at all, but only VoL. XXXIV.— 95. 689 because it comes regular. But what would you say to a friend who would give you not only part of your lunch, but all of it ? And not only your lunch, but your breakfast and din¬ ner, and a supper too if you were inclined that way ; and not only week days, but Sundays, and every day ; and who would give you, be¬ sides, every frock you wore, your shoes, your bonnets, gloves, umbrellas, and trimmings, and everything needful from hair-pins to cloaks ?” As John spoke thus, Miss Burns’s complex¬ ion, which was usually a little pallid, began to assume the hue of some pale pink wool which lay in her basket, but she did not speak, nor look up from her work, and John went on : “ And what would you say if, every time you wanted anything, whether it was to wear, or to eat, or to use in a house, or for sickness or health, or for journeys, or for friends in trouble, or for your own pleasures and joys and comforts, you went to this friend and you took them from him ? ” Miss Burns’s complexion had been gradually changing from the color of the pink wool to that of a ball of ashen gray hue which also lay in the basket. A sickening fear came over her that she might have mistaken the significance of John’s words. “ Do you mean Providence ? ” she asked. “No, me,” said John. The color of the brightest scarlet in Miss Burns’s basket now flushed into her face. “ That would be very nice,” she presently said; and no Berlin wool could be softer than her tone. John People was a straightforward man of business with a conscience, and when every¬ thing had been satisfactorily arranged between Miss Burns and himself, he deemed it his duty to inform his principal that he was going to be married. Seldom before had Mr. Stull been so thoroughly angry. J ohn had been forgiven for the sins of his uncle and had been again taken into dignified favor, but the vile and treach¬ erous action which he now proposed raised against him the wildest storm of Mr. Stull’s indignation. What would a secret be worth — an overwhelmingly important secret — in the hands of a newly married man ! With John as a bachelor — and Mr. Stull expected that his sense of honor and duty to his employer would keep him such — the secret was safe ; but with a young wife secrecy might as well be blown to the winds and the bank president advertise in the daily papers that he was pre¬ pared to furnish the public with refreshments at his restaurant known as Vatoldi’s. John’s intentions might be honorable, but his wife would worm the secret out of him, and the world would soon know all. Better that John

Page 692

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 690 should die than marry ! Had Mr. Stull lived two hundred years before, he would have slain his manager on the spot. This blow to Mr. Stull was aggravated by the fact that his mind was beginning to assume its normal condition of august tranquillity. All his branches of business were now proceeding to his entire satisfaction, and Enoch Bullrip- ple, the only present thorn in his side, promised soon to become an insignificant prickle. The Western heirs of the Cherry Bridge farms had been informed of the nature of their claims, and Mr. Turby, who desired to act as their agent as well as Mr. Stull’s, had written to them that there was every reason to believe that the matter could be settled with but little loss of time, and the sale of the property or¬ dered for the benefit of the heirs. Mr. Stull’s plans were all made. He would buy both farms, not in his own name, but in that of a Mineral Development Company which he would organize. In the course of time this purchase would probably prove a good invest¬ ment. Enoch Bullripple would be ejected from the farm he now held, but, as he pos¬ sessed Mr. Stull’s secret, his subsequent treat¬ ment must be’ very prudently managed. Mr. Stull owned some W estern lands, and he would sell Enoch Bullripple a small tract of these, se¬ curing himself by mortgage. He would then, if necessary, assist the old man to go out there and settle. The motive for this great generosity would be ascribed to Mr. Stull’s interest in John People. With Enoch Bullripple out in Idaho, and under obligation, Mr. Stull would feel that he had punished the cunning villainy of the old farmer without endangering his secret. But now John’s announcement had banished every trace of august tranquillity. Mr. Stull’s anger almost overcame him. Anathemas, re¬ proaches, and denunciations crowded to his lips, but in the midst of his indignation he felt the necessity for prudence. Even so faithful a worm as John might turn. “ I shall say nothing to you now,” he growled; ‘‘ I will speak about this another time.” It would have been utterly impossible for Miss Matilda Stull to choose a more unsuit¬ able moment than the evening of that day in which to announce to her father her engage¬ ment to Mr. Crisman. Mr. Stull was in the library of his spacious city mansion, a room furnished with everything that the library of a gentleman of wealth and culture should con¬ tain. The books on the shelves were most ad¬ mirably selected, many of them being imported expressly for Mr. Stull, as he declined to in¬ troduce reprints into his library. The furniture was heavy and elegant. The walls, the floors, the windows, showed that the room had been furnished with thoughtful taste. Even those things with which a gentleman solaces himself in the intervals of study were not for¬ gotten : on a pair of stag’s horns over the man¬ telpiece hung a number of handsome pipes, and an eastern jar filled with tobacco stood beneath them ; through the glass doors of a buffet which stood in a corner could be seen decanters and glasses; and between two framed engravings of hunting-scenes hung a pair of fencing-foils and wire masks ; while from a nick¬ el-plated hook was suspended flat against the wall a large hammock of rare and beautiful workmanship which might be stretched to another nickel-plated hook in the opposite wall. Yet in spite of all these appurtenances of elegant and comfortable studiousness, this was a room to be looked at, but not used. Mr. Stull was content to own his books ; he did not care to read them, and the cases were always locked. He did not smoke, and the pipes on the stag’s horns had never been used. He tasted wine or spirits only on rare occasions, and not a drop of their contents had ever been poured from the decanters in his buffet. He was not a fencer, and the foils and masks were fastened to the wall. He was a man who did not lounge, and the hammock on the hook was never stretched to the oppo¬ site wall. The room was furnished so as to appear as Mr. Stull thought a gentleman’s library and study ought to appear, but he used no part of it except a small table under a gas-light, with a drawer in which he kept writing materials, and a leather-covered chair which always stood before it. In this chaii», and at this table, sat Mr. Stull when his daughter entered the room. Paper lay before him, and he had a pen in his hand, but he was not writing; he was sav¬ agely thinking, and endeavoring to form a plan of action in regard to John People. Miss Matilda saw that her father was in a very bad humor, and yet she did not hesitate in her purpose. She had not come to ask anything of her august parent; she had come to tell him something. Mr. Stull looked up darkly, and encountered the somewhat petite but extremely well-formed features of Miss Matilda, upon which an ex¬ pression of calm determination seemed to have been set and screwed. Without a preface, and with no sign of embarrassment, she briefly announced the fact that she and Mr. Charles Crisman, now in business in the mercantile house of Irkton, Perrysteer & Co., had made an engagement to marry each other. Mr. Stull pushed back his chair with an im¬ precation which seldom fell from his dignified lips. What do you mean ? ” he exclaimed. I mean exactly what I have said,” an¬ swered his daughter Matilda.

Page 693

THE HUNDREDTH MAN Now rose J. Weatherby Stull in his wrath. In one day two persons, wholly dependent on him for everything they had in the world, had come to him and declared their intention of making unlawful marriages, for to him a mar¬ riage against his will was unlawful. To the first offender he had, as yet, said nothing or done nothing ; but in this case, no caution, no pru¬ dence was necessary, and he launched upon his daughter the paternal thunder. He bade her never to mention to him again this stranger of whom she had spoken. He forbade her ever to speak to, or to write to, or even to think of, said stranger; and he ordered her to her room, there to remain until he had determined how she should be punished, and where she should be sent to be cured of this most unnatural, most disrespectful, and most atrocious folly. Miss Stull declined to do any of these things. Mr. Stull arose. Do you wish me to take you by force to your room ? Am I to be driven crazy by members of my family and by hirelings ? Am I to hear twice a day that these dependents upon me intend, without my permission, and against my will, to marry?” Was the other one John People ? ” asked Miss Matilda. Mr. Stull sat down as if he had been shot. ^‘John People! ” he gasped. ‘AVhat is he to me ? ” He manages your restaurant,” calmly re¬ plied his daughter, ‘‘ and I have reason to believe that he wants to marry.” Mr. Stull sat and looked steadfastly at his daughter. Not a word did he speak, and it might almost be said not a thought did he think. His involuntary muscles and functions went on with their work, but every faculty, physical or mental, over which he ordinarily exercised volition was at a standstill. In only one way did he give any evidence of his or¬ dinary reasoning powers. He presently turned to look towards the library door. Oh, that’s all right,” said Miss Matilda. “I shut it when I came in. I intended to speak of this restaurant business before long,” she went on to say, ‘‘ and I may as well do it now as at any other time, for it is a matter which concerns Mr. Crisman and myself as much as it does you. I began to suspect you had some¬ thing to do with Vatoldi’s when you used so often to urge mother and me to go there, and made a point of it especially on those days when you knew we were going shopping with the carriage. Mother never thought anything about it, but it struck me that you wouldn’t take so much interest in a place of that sort if you didn’t make something out of it. At first I supposed you had merely put some money into the concern, but I got into the habit of watching you when you were sitting 691 in your regular place at the upper end of the room where you could see everything, and if ever a man looked like the proprietor of an establishment, you looked like the proprietor of Vatoldi’s. I remember one day that two young men came in and sat down with their hats on, and John People was so busy he didn’t see them; but you looked at him just as you look at our two little girls in church, and the instant he caught your eye you told him, just as plainly as if you had spoken, to attend to those two men, which he immediately did. And then, when the strike began there, and the boycotting, and all that sort of thing, and I saw how you were troubled, that stamped and sealed the matter in my mind. I knew very well that you would never concern nor worry yourself so much about a business that didn’t belong to you. Still I didn’t know whether you were only a partner or sole pro¬ prietor, but when I saw John People up in the country this summer, I asked him if the res¬ taurant belonged to one person or a firm, and he answered, ‘ One person,’ and immediately changed the conversation. He had no idea what his words meant to me, but he might just as well have said, ^Your father is the proprietor.’ I kept this little bit of knowledge entirely to myself, knowing it would come of use some day. I think it is the first really val¬ uable possession I ever acquired entirely by my own exertions, and I am sure it comes in very well now. If you had not shown so much objection to my marriage with Mr. Crisman, I should not have mentioned it at present. But I should have spoken of it before long, so it does not matter. I won’t say anything more this evening, but will leave- you to think over the subject of my engagement. I will say, though, that Mr. Crisman is a very genteel and stylish young gentleman, and that mother is entirely satisfied with him. You know the house he is in is one of the best in the city, and there isn’t a speck of fault of any kind to be found with him. As to money, he can make it fast enough if he is properly helped.” With this remark Miss Matilda left the room. What was in Mr. Stull’s mind during the next three days nobody knew. Even his wife, although she saw that the soul of her consort was a storm-center of passion, heard nothing from him except an occa.sional thunder-clap of indignation concerning her complicity in Matilda’s engagement. That there was some reason greater than this for the wrath that raged within him was plain enough to her, but she had no idea what it was, and her daughter would not tell her. To Miss Matilda, her father spoke not a word during this period. He ignored her. He did not even look at her. In fact he had

Page 694

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 692 very little to say to any one. When he was at home he shut himself up for the greater part of the time in his library, and when John came to him at the bank he spoke as few words as possible, and made no allusion to his manager’s intended marriage. John was content to wait awhile for his employer’s decision, but he had determined, no matter what that decision might be, that he would marry Miss Burns. But Matilda was of a different turn of mind. She was not willing to wait more than three days for a decision concerning her affairs. At the end of that time she went to her father’s study, where she knew he had shut himself up. When she entered she closed the door quickly behind her and stood by it, her hand still on the knob. Her father on seeing her sprang so suddenly to his feet that he nearly overturned the table before him. Now, don’t shout out anything, father,” she said, for old Miss Manderson is in the parlor with mother, and if you begin that way I shall just open the door, and if she hears you abusing your daughter the whole church will soon know it. As you w^on’t speak to me, I have come to speak to you. I have been thinking over this matter, and I have worked out in my mind the very best things that you can do. In the first place, you must give up that restaurant business; it isn’t fair to me, nor to Mr. Crisman, nor to mother and the girls, nor to yourself, for that matter, that you should keep it any longer. The secret is sure to be found out, and very soon, if John People gets married, which I know he will, and think he ought to, besides, for the young w^oman is very suitable. I have bought things of her several times in order- to find out what sort of person she is. If that restaurant matter is made public while you are still in the business it will ruin us all as far as society is concerned, and you have no right to bring anything of that kind upon Mr. Grisman and me, to say nothing of your wife and two young daughters. I don’t want to seem hard, but I have got to speak the truth. If it is found out after you are out of the business it will be bad enough, but it will be a different affair. I know very well that in this city it doesn’t matter much what a man has been, but it matters very much indeed what he is. You can either sell out to John People, or to somebody else, and take a mortgage on what he can’t pay cash for, so you will still have an income from the place without having any¬ thing to do with it. And the sooner you get rid of it, the safer and better it will be for us all.” During this speech Mr. Stull had remained standing, and at two or three points his lips and face had moved as if the provocation to speak had been stronger than the resolution he had taken to hold no converse with this un¬ natural daughter; but, as was usually the case with him, his resolution triumphed, and he re¬ mained sternly silent. No one but his daughter Matilda could have forced a communication of any kind upon him, but he knew well that un¬ less he was willing to take the consequences of a very disagreeable scene, — which he was not, — he would be obliged to listen to her. There was another reason why, in spite of the rage which boiled within him, he stood and listened to his daughter : he was keenly inter¬ ested in what she was saying. Miss Matilda continued: “ As for Mr. Cris¬ man and me, the best thing to do is to con¬ sider that matter as settled, because, having made up my mind to marry him, of course I shall do it. If you ever intend to give me any money at all, there can be no better way to do it than to let Mr. Crisman have it, and put it into his business and be made a partner. He told me that the ‘ Co.’ is composed of per¬ sons belonging to the house who have been taken in, in that way, and he says a partner¬ ship is open to him whenever he has the money. That will not only help me to become a rich woman, but will also give me a position in society, for being the wife of a partner in a leading mercantile firm is very different from being the wife of a mere salesman. And you know that my position in society will be as much to you and all the family as it is to me. That is all I have to say, and if you have made up your mind not to speak to me for a week, I don’t object to waiting for the three or four days that are left; but if it is for a longer time than that, you’d better wMte to me what you decide to do. And now I’ll go and send somebody to see if they can clean the carpet of that ink which you didn’t know you spilled when you jumped up so suddenly.” XXXIII. On several occasions, moderately near each other, Mr. Stratford went to see Gay Armatt, and, together, they took up the old books and studies. But the reading and the discussing did not go on in the old way. Gay had lost her interest in her work and in her future, and seemed to have forgotten that she had had aspirations. If study did not actually tire her or bore her, at least the earnest enthusiasm with which she used to pursue it was entirely gone. Stratford was not slow to see this, and gradually, and always with a sufficient reason, he lengthened the intervals between his visits to Gay; and then, taking advantage of stand¬ ing invitations from some of his old friends, he went on a visit of a few weeks to Boston and Cambridge. He was glad to go. Not only did he tell himself that his work with Gay was done, but

Page 695

THE HUNDREDTH MAN. she now told him, though not in words, that such work as he had been doing was done. The friends whom he visited did not find him quite the lively companion he used to be, and this proved to them that summers and autumns spent in sparsely settled mountain regions are not beneficial to the spirits of a man. One afternoon in Cambridge he was invited to at¬ tend a Thursday tea given by the young ladies of the Harvard Annex, which invitation he promptly declined. The friend who had pro¬ posed to accompany him was much surprised. “ I thought you took an interest in the higher education of girls,” she said, and would like to see what we are doing at the Annex.” “ That is all very true in the past tense,” he answered, “ but you really cannot expect a person always to take the same interest in a thing.” Mr. Arthur Thorne, however, made it a point to visit at Mrs. Justin’s house as often as he could find any reasonable excuse for so doing. He saw a good deal of Gay, and, in a measure, his society interested her. He gave her no law lessons, nor did he talk upon any subject fifteen seconds after he fancied that she had lost interest in it, striving always to find out what would best please her. He was often able to engage her attention pleasantly, and after a time she became rather glad to see him. Every day he grew more and more in love with her, but of this Gay knew nothing. Had she been any one but herself, or even had she been truly herself, she might have seen it, but just now her mental as well as her physical powers were working slowly and feebly. Mrs. Justin perceived plainly enough that Thorne’s love for Gay was becoming devotion, and this knowledge greatly troubled her. But there was nothing for her to do. She could not, with any show of reason, throw obstacles in the way of the young man’s visits, for she had no right to constitute herself the guardian of Mr. Stratford’s interests, and these interests formed the only possible reason why Arthur Thorne’s course should in any way be ob¬ structed. If she could have used obstacles at all, they would have been piled up in the pres¬ ent path of Mr. Stratford, who was wandering away from what was most desirable, just, and right, not only for himself but for Gay, and even for poor Mr. Thorne, who was blindly and ardently striving for something which she was quite certain he could never possess. One afternoon when Mr. Thorne called he was told that Miss Armatt was not well, and was confined to her room ; and the next day, and the next, and a good many days after¬ ward, and often several times a day, he came and made inquiries, but he could not see her. 693 There was something the matter with Gay, believed to be malarial, which greatly pros¬ trated her, but the disease was one in which the attending physician found very little of what might be called pronunciation. The ma¬ laria, which is so generally believed to be at the bottom of all disorders which do not as¬ sume definite and recognizable forms, declined to put forth any point which might advanta¬ geously be laid hold of To add to this diffi¬ culty in the way of the physician. Gay would do nothing to assist him. All his appeals for cooperation on her part were totally unavail¬ ing, Food, medicine, and other agents for re¬ storing health and strength had proved of so little service that after having lost her interest in them she seemed also to have lost interest in the efiect they were designed to produce. Mrs. J ustin gave up all other pursuits of her life and devoted herself to the nursing of Gay. The relatives in Maryland were written to, and the married sister came to the city, but was obliged soon to return to her home and her family of small children. Other doctors were called in to consult with Gay’s attending physi¬ cian, but still that sly, cunning, and malicious malaria refused to come forth from the roots of Gay’s energy and life, among which it ap¬ peared to have intwined and intrenched itself Stratford came home from Boston, and on him fell not only the heavy weight of sorrow at the sad condition of his young friend, but sundry sharp stings from his own conscience and an amount of reproach and condemnation from Mrs. Justin for which he was not at all prepared. The time had passed, she believed, for ordinary censure or admonition. Stratford ought to be made to feel that on him alone depended Gay’s restoration to health. ‘‘ Whatever else is the matter with Gay,” she said, ‘T believe that her life is now ebbing away from her because she does not care for it. This world is empty to her. You made it empty, and you can fill it. Even now, if you become to her what you used to be, and give her the hopes which I am sure you once gave her, I believe she will want to live.” Stratford was much moved. I cannot be¬ lieve,” he said, that what you say is true. But even if it were true, and Gay’s life de¬ pended on me, I could not save her as you propose without being false to her and false to myself” Mrs. Justin looked almost angrily at him for a moment. Then,” she said, you should not have taken from her the man who did love her.” Stratford walked home, his heart chilled and pained. The first thought that had come to him after Mrs. Justin’s last words was that it was better that Gay should die than to be mar-

Page 696

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 694 ried to such a man as Crisman. But now he asked himself: Was it better? Hard, coldrea- son did not deny him her support, but the sup¬ port was neither cheering nor bracing. ^‘Can it be true,’^ the other question came to him again and again, that I am the only one who can make her care to live ? ” He had believed that Arthur Thorne could be such a one ; but now, when things were coming to him very bare and true and sharp, he could not say to himself that he had unreservedly hoped that Arthur Thorne, or any other man, would take Gay Armatt wholly to himself. There is a selfishness that sometimes lives within our noblest impulses without our know¬ ing it. Some sudden burst of light may make the impulse transparent and show us the little hard stone lying at the heart of it. Some such light now broke upon Stratford, but he saw nothing plainly. All that was clear to him was that he must assert again and again : I will be true to myself, and, thereby, true to her ! ’’ Two days after this, when Arthur Thorne came as usual in the afternoon to Mrs. Justin’s house, he met Stratford, who was just leaving. You cannot see Mrs. Justin,” said the lat¬ ter; she has been up the greater part of the night, and is now asleep.” “ How is Miss Armatt ? ” asked Arthur. They tell me she is weaker to-day than she was yesterday,” answered Stratford. “And that is what they said yesterday,” said Thorne. “ Yes,” said Stratford ; and turning away his face, he made a step towards the door. Arthur laid his hand upon his arm. “ Tell me,” he said, in words low-spoken but trem¬ bling with force, “ can it be that I am never to see her again ? ” Stratford turned and put his hands upon his friend’s shoulders and looked for a mo¬ ment in his face. Then he said, speaking slow¬ ly : “I have been to see her physician this morning, and I am convinced he has given up all hope of a rally of her strength. My dear boy, 1 am afraid that you will never see her again.” And with that he v.’ent away, leaving Arthur standing in the hall. The two men were not rivals: they loved each other and were now especially drawn together; but it was impossible for Stratford to talk longer with Arthur. The half-hour before, Mrs. Justin had come to him, and, putting a cold white hand in his, had said: “ We must think no more about those things of which we have been talking. It is now too late.” She did not say, “ even for you,” but there was that in her large sad eyes which carried these words straight into his heart. Arthur Thorne stood in the hall until a maid-servant came to him ; and knowing so well who he was and why he came, she gently told him that the nurse, who was preparing some broth for Miss Gay just now, would stop on her way upstairs, and might be able to tell him something about her. And she opened the drawing-room door and left him. Without answer, Arthur walked into the room, and, after a few steps, stopped, his eyes upon the floor. He was waiting for no one ; he expected no one ; he stood there without a purpose; he knew nothing in the world but that he should never see Gay again. This young man was truly, powerfully, over¬ whelmingly in love. Since he had not been able to see Gay, he had loved her more than when he had been with her. His soul reached out toward her with an agony of craving that only a wildly loving heart can understand. His love was based upon no hopes, no expec¬ tations, no purposes; it had nothing to do with the future, nothing to do with the past; it was, simply, that now, this very moment, he loved her; his soul lived in her. And now he knew that never again should he hear her voice, never look into her eyes, never see her, in life again ! His blood ran fire and ice. He knew it was true that, although she was not dead, she had gone from him. He had no rights; he was nothing to her; he had never made himself anything to her. Why should any one allow him to see her again ? To all intents and pur¬ poses he was an outside stranger. He would never see her again ! Suddenly his body trembled. His right hand stretched itself open, and then shut close and tight. His soul rose up in rebellion. This thing could not be. Heaven and earth might say so, but he would not admit it. It must be that he should again see Gay. She was not his Gay, but she possessed him wholly and utterly. He must see her again in life, were it only one glance at a tip of a curl of her hair. Arthur Thorne was the most conventional of men, but down about him fell his conven¬ tionality as if it had been shaken to pieces by an earthquake. He put his hat upon a chair ; he listened ; he knew exactly what he was about ; every faculty rushed to the aid of the one action for which he now lived. He knew where Gay was. Mrs. Justin had told him of the large bright room at the back of the house adjoining the young girl’s chamber, where, upon a lounge from which she could look out at the sky, she lay through the livelong day, thinking less, eating less, living less, as each day passed on. “ It may be this is the one moment,” Arthur said to himself, “ in which I can see her. The nurse will come up, Mrs. Justin may awake, the relatives are expected. Now ! ”

Page 697

THE HUNDREDTH MAN With noiseless steps he passed along the hall, then up the one flight of softly carpeted stairs to a door with a portiere partly drawn across it. He looked through the narrow open¬ ing into the large bright room in which of late his thoughts had so constantly dwelt. And, O Heavens ! there was Gay, upon a lounge, close to the window, the sunlight falling on the soft folds of her lightly tinted dress and on the bright colors of a shawl thrown partly over her. It was Gay ! He saw her! The young girl lay perfectly motionless, her face slightly turned toward the window, her half-open eyes gazing out into the bright air but looking upon nothing. Her beautiful face was not changed in contour ; all the roundness and softness and delicacy of outline were there, but the color had faded away. Her light- brown almost golden hair curled and waved, as of old, upon her forehead, and a mass of it was thrown to one side upon a cushion on which her head was resting. Her little hands were clasped together under her shawl, and they were very thin, and her form under its soft drapery was thin and weak and almost done with everything. Gay, herself, was nearly done with every¬ thing. It was not a malady of the soul or of the affections which had prostrated this young girl, and under which her life was wasting. It was, indeed, that malignant and subtle spirit of disease for which the doctors had been seeking, and which would, long ago, have come forth, its head bowed for the death-stroke, had Gay brought up her forces against it. But she brought up none. Medicine and skill can do nothing without the assistance of vital force, and the only warfare in which Gay’s young soul was able to engage seemed directed against the vital forces. All that would sustain her body or her mind had become repulsive to her. Her soul had ceased to be hungry, and the ex¬ ample of her soul was followed by her body. This girl had been true to every normal im¬ pulse of her nature. She had had a purpose in life, noble, intellectual, of high aim. But this had not been all. She had loved. Thus stood her woman’s nature, equipped for the battle of life. But love had been taken from her, roughly and suddenly, and the manner of its taking had been such that it had gone, abso¬ lutely and utterly. There had been nothing to take the place of this love. The warmest, truest friendship could not do it. Already a true friendship, unripened into love, had shown its powerlessness. What was left was a half-soul ; and girls like Gay, with half-souls, die. Gay was in a dream. It was a day-dream, although not one which sprang from her own volition. She was too weak for that now. Whatever came into her mind wandered there of its own accord ; and the dream that now 695 came to her was one of earlier days, of the days when her life began to fill with purpose and meaning, and yet days that were so near they scarcely seemed to belong to the past. Into this dream came all her youth and hap¬ piness ; and so came love. But it was not a vision of flowing streams and bending shades, of warm-tinted sunset skies, of the majesty of mountains, or the wide-spreading verdure of the fields. No kindred soul breathed to her words of high intent and stirring hope. She wandered in thoughtless bright content with the young Charlie she first had known and loved. The moonlight of their walks fell upon city squares and parks. I'hey talked and laughed in the midst of walls and windows, cold ceilings and unyielding floors, but the spirit of young love made these as delicate of tint and tone, as odorous of perfume, and as soft of footfall as white clouds in the clear blue sky, the tender blossoms of the grape, and the soft grass upon the fields. This was the early, fresh, and blossom love, and as it first showed the signs of woman’s life within her, so memory, wandering freely, went back to it and sat beside it, finding it purer, sweeter, more enduring than all else. And thus the young girl lay, knowing no present and no future; lost even to all the past except that she was simply happy, and held the boy, Charlie, by the hand. Suddenly she felt a touch upon her shoul¬ der. A man was kneeling by her. “ I could not help it,” he said. I saw you, and I could not keep myself from coming to you. Will you not speak to me, dear Gay?” She slowly turned her head toward him, and her large eyes opened wide, but in them was no surprise, no questioning. Just now dreams were to her like real life, and real life like a dream. She wondered not at either. Mr. Thorne,” she said, in a voice very low and perfectly calm. “Yes,” said Arthur, his words trembling with passionate emotion which he was strug¬ gling to subdue, “'it is I, and I came to tell you — Heaven has given me this chance, and I must tell you quickly. O Gay, I love you 1 I have loved you almost ever since I knew you ! And now, dear Gay, it nearly kills me — ” The poor fellow could not speak his mind. His fine sensibilities would not suffer him to say to Gay that he could not let her die with¬ out knowing that he loved her. But this is what he meant. Gay looked at him very steadily and quiet¬ ly. Her mind was going back. “Was that the reason that you taught me law? ” she said. “ It was the reason I lived,” said Arthur. “It was the reason for everything I thought, and everything I did. O Gay, perhaps I

Page 698

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 696 ought to have told you before, but then I did not think — and afterward came the time when there was no opportunity. But now I have this one chance. I know that you may not care anything about me, but I could not help it ! I must come and tell you how I love you, love you, love you ! ” As he spoke tears came into his eyes, and some of them rolled down his cheeks. Gay looked at him with more interest than she had looked at anything for days, but her manner was still very quiet and apparently untouched by any emotion. “ Do you know,” said she, “ that I am not going to live ? ” Thorne did not answer, but the expression that came into his face showed, even to the listless mind of Gay, that he knew it. “ It is a great pity,” she said, her large eyes still fixed upon him, ‘‘ that you should feel this way now.” I feel so now,” he said, and I shall feel so always. It don’t make any difference what happens, I shall feel so all my life — always — forever ! ” Gay still looked at him, but said nothing. Suddenly his manner changed. O Gay ! ” he exclaimed in a tone of al¬ most wild importunity, ^Svhy will you die ? It is too terrible, too dreadful ! Why will you not do everything to make yourself live ? They tell me you do not fight against Death. Why will you not rouse yourself up and fight against it ? For the sake of everybody who loves you — for the sake of this beautiful world — for your own sake, dear Gay ? ” She looked at him for a moment, a slight shade of uncertainty upon her brow. For weeks she had received from Mrs. Justin, from her doctor, from her attendants and friends, the most earnest and anxious entreaties to bat¬ tle against Death, but there was nothing in Gay’s nature to give response to these prayers, and day by day they fell upon her ear colder and more commonplace. But the words spoken by Arthur Thorne, coming from him, and in this way, and at this time, and with something behind them of which her mind took cognizance but did not act upon, seemed altogether different and novel. What do you mean ? ” she asked. Arthur did not answer. The words that came to him were too many, too ordinary, too weak. Ilis eyes fell upon a tall heavy flask, the sight of which struck a pang to his heart. He knew it well. It contained a strengthening and revivifying cordial which had been ordered by Gay’s doctor, and which Arthur, at Mrs. Jus¬ tin’s request, had procured for her. This he had done more than a week before, and as it now stood between him and the light it told the tale of this young girl’s surrender. Its con¬ tents could scarcely have been tasted. Arthur arose, and approached the table. Fie did not speak; he could scarcely shape his thoughts. The power of this remedy, upon which so much hope and reliance had been placed, had never been tried. Somewhere there was a cruel sin. Fie had made himself well aware of the nature of the cordial, for it concerned Gay. Pouring a small quantity of the liquid into a glass, he again knelt by the side of the young girl. ‘‘ Will you not drink this ? ” he said. It will help you to fight Death. Dear Gay, do not refuse it ! ” And he held the glass toward her. She looked steadily into his eyes, and upon her lips came a smile, faint and shadowy ; but no fainter nor more shadowy than the interest in life and this world that awoke within her. “ If you wish it so much, I will try,” she said. ‘‘But you will have to raise my head.” With the glass in one hand, Arthur passed the other beneath her head. Her soft masses of silky hair enveloped his hand, and some of it fell over his wrist. It was Gay’s head that lay in his open palm, warm, round, and heavy. She could not lift it; he it was who should raise it! Every fine hair that touched him seemed to send an electric thrill throughout his soul and body; it belonged to that dear Gay whom he loved. Slowly and gently he raised her, and placed the glass to her lips. She drank it, and then he tenderly lowered her head and drew out his hand from her hair. Gay turned her eyes toward him with a full, earnest gaze. “ Thank you,” she said, “ and I think you had better take some of it yourself. You are very pale.” That she should say it was enough. He rose to his feet, poured out a glassful of the cordial and drank it. Then he came back to the lounge. “ Do you feel better ? ” she said. For a few moments Arthur could not speak, and, when he did, his voice was husky and slightly tremulous. That she should think of him 1 “ Dear Gay,” he said, “ will you not let them give it to you ? Think of this dear world, and do not die. And now I must go. Perhaps I have staid too long. But I have seen you 1 I have told you I ” She drew out from under the ihawl one of her thin little hands, and Arthur clasped it in both of his own. He was about to press upon it a passionate kiss, but with a sudden effort he restrained himself. He had told her; that was all; and he had no right to touch her with his lips. His eyes filled with tears, and he left the room. When the nurse, who had experienced delay-

Page 699

S NUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. ing difficulties in the preparation of a delicacy with which she designed to tempt whatever lingering trace of appetite might yet remain with her young charge, heard above her the quick closing of the front door, she exclaimed : “ There ! that gentleman has gone ! But I can’t say I’m sorry. It’s a harder thing to answer his questions now than it ever was before.” An hour or two afterward she said to Mrs. Justin : I wish that young gentleman had staid, for I know it would have pleased him wonderful to hear that Miss Armatt took three tablespoonfuls of the broth I made her. How she suddenly came to have all that appetite I can't imagine.” 697 Gay was then sleeping, and when she awoke Mrs. Justin was sitting by her side. The eyes of the young girl instinctively moved towards the window, outside of which the air was still bright with the light of day; but suddenly she turned them on her friend. Dear,” she said, “ don’t you want to give me some of that drink Mr. Thorne poured out for me ? ” Mr. Thorne! ” exclaimed Mrs. Justin. ‘‘That is it,” said Gay, glancing towards the table. “ He was very good, and I am glad I took it.” Erank R. Stockton. (To be continued.) SNUBBIN’ THROUGH JERSEY. II. first attempt to turn the Cowles at Titusville had failed dismally. At the critical moment and when the Cowles was within an arm’s measure of turning her full length, the line had parted, blocking the whole traffic of the canal, and filling the air with the pungent objections of the Patriarch quietly, closely examining her stern, “ I could handle her.” Behind the locker in Dusenberry’s private cabin aft was an ordinary loo-foot tape-line. The Patriarch took one bank of the basin and one end of the line and Scraps the other. Less than the boat’s length below, careful measure¬ ment showed the canal slightly wider than where the Cowles lay aground. At this point the unwelcome difference of three feet was reduced to two. The Patriarch now crawled along on his knees, plunged his arm under the water, and felt carefully the muddy edge of the yielding earth bank. The profanity of the half a score of captains, who, from chunker, skuker, and barge expressed in English, terse if not elegant or pious, their condemnation of a “passel of fools who would try to sail a grain- boat over a ten-acre lot.” “ If she was three feet shorter,” remarked VoL. XXXIV.— 96.

Page 700

SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. 698 impeded chunker fleet temporarily ceased, and a curious and expectant crowd of natives fol¬ lowed his movements with attention. “ Here we are ! ” he shouted, springing to his feet. Get out another line, warp her down, and run her nose in here. The musk¬ rats have done it. Here’s a ‘cave-in ’ as deep as a well.” Later in the evening when Dusenberry, seated on his cabin top, smoked his pipe in the moonlight, with the bow of the Cowles turned toward Trenton and the tow-lines coiled on deck for the morning start, he was overheard to remark to his wife between the puffs : “ Marthy, queer kind of canalin’ this, rootin’ round in musk-rat holes. Never knowed RAISING THE UPPER GATE. them varmints wuz good for anything before ’cept to skin, and they ain’t.” Then he leaned forward and whispered, “ We might have done worse than winterin’ here. Guess the pay would ’a’ held out.” The morning that broke over the pretty village of Titusville was one to be remembered. A sound sleep, a plunge in the cool basin, and a cup of coffee on deck before the sun had crept up the hill far enough to get a good look at the Cowles, refreshed everybody. Nor was the sun all alone in his anxiety to see the show-boat. The people turned out. One man sent down half a cartload of ice. Another brought milk, another berries, and a fourth a request from a bevy of pretty girls timidly eying the awnings and flags from a bridge beyond, that they be allowed to come aboard before starting. Will the artistic eyes gathered around the charming table in the cozy saloji, with the sunlight sifting in through the awning over¬ head, ever forget the oval face with the brown eyes framed in the Gainsborough hat, and how daintily she poured tea from that old Satsuma pot covered with pink and yellow peonies, which the Scribe treasured ? Were not the rugs spread on deck and the cush¬ ions piled high, and was not the Scribe’s guitar handed up, and do they not often hear now in the stillness of their studios the soft voices blending with the gurgling plash of the water about the bow and the cry of the tow-boy as he urges his rested mules back to Trenton? Finally, is it not a tradition that this digression up a feeder, although not on the original programme, left behind it some of the most lasting impressions of this most eventful expedition? But Trenton hove in sight. Before even the outlying bridges were reached there could be seen the dense smoke of its many chimneys clouding the summer sky, while the roar of constantly passing trains heard afar off* be¬ spoke its busy life. Our tow-boy was not an engaging-look¬ ing boy to contemplate. Since his first ap¬ pearance on deck the previous afternoon he had remained at the end of his tow-line and steadily cared for his team. At this dis¬ tance he presented a travel-stained, bedraggled aspect. The remnant of a slouch hat clung to one ear, a shock of red hair slanted like a thatched roof over the other. His shirt, trousers, and cowhide shoes presented a series of patches as varied as a sample card. Over all these was ground and smeared and plas¬ tered the red dust of his native State. The Scribe had regarded the patient, plod¬ ding form of the tow-boy for some hours. As he looked now and then over his book from his easy-chair under the awning in the after¬ noon light, he could see him a cable’s length ahead, now walking, now riding, now, again, resting, stretched out full length on the near mule’s back, with his head reclining on the crupper of the harness, and his feet hooked in the hames and collar, fast asleep. “Boys,” said he, after some reflection, “that tow-boy doesn’t have much comfort in life. Let’s invite him to dinner.” Whether it was owing to the novelty of the idea, or the old spirit of Bohemianism and good fellowship that characterized the group, — and, for that matter, all other such groups the

Page 701

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 699 world over, — or whether their individual kindly sympathy prompted the courtesy, is not known \ but it is a fact that Brushes instantly called Moses and ordered an¬ other plate at table, and that the Patriarch and Scraps proceeded at once to carry out the Scribe’s idea. He came up to the side of the boat, and looked up with an air of wonderment that was delightful. He warn’t rigged for comp’ny. Chuck him a bottle of beer and a sandwich. He warn’t hungry. But that didn’t suit the Scribe. He must slack up his tow-line, tie that team by the willows, and come aboard now while the soup was hot. Well, if you crowd me,” he said ; though you kin see I ain’t fitten.” When, however, he descended the broad staircase into the hold and caught sight of the rich interior, with its softened light from many colored lamps and lanterns, and the luxu¬ riousness everywhere apparent, then the din¬ ner-table, with its re¬ freshing linen and masses of wild flowers filling the center, he slid down upon the nearest divan with the remark : Gosh hang ! but you fellers hev slickened her up ! ” After that nothing could move him. He would have a pipe if there was one handy, but he didn’t want no wittles.” Whether it was the mild stimulant of the Lone Jack, or the per¬ fect equality and good fellowship that surround¬ ed him and Avas stead¬ ily maintained, Avhich broke down his reserve. WAITING FOR THE TOW TO MAKE UP.

Page 702

SNUB BIN I THROUGH JERSEY. 700 is not worth deciding ; but thus be it said, that the Scribe interested him at once in his profound ignorance of the genus mule. “ Guess you never lived with mules,” said Monahan. “When you come to have them by yer fifteen years you finds them out.” Then followed some revelations based upon personal observations. To the world in general the mule is a stubborn, vicious, and unintellectual beast, not safe abaft the beam. No one credits the animal with ambition, character, or any feelings akin to human moods; but to all this the driver em¬ phatically objected. “'Kick? why, of course; I slacked up the line to slide by. I was on the mule. First I knew, we was all five of us in the water, the four mules scared to death, and the yacht and the schooner havin’ a swearin’ match. I yanked the string that slips the hook in the whiffietree, set free the mules, and got ’em all out. Then I joined sides with the schooner.” It was Monahan’s opinion that canaling was healthy if people would walk enough to keep well. He often made two fourteen-mile trips a day, and one day within a week had done thirty-eight miles with a light boat, starting at ON THE BORDER OF AN OVERFLOW. it is the way they talk, same as a dog’s tail. They won’t kick you if you treat them decent. I have had them white ones more ’n five years, and never a cross word out of ’em. That old wheeler knows as much as I do. When I’m asleep on his back, and we cornin’ to a bridge, he ups and lets drive with his heels, much as to say, ‘Who’s runnin’ this team ? ’ Nights I always sleep on the long stretches, ’cause I know he’ll slack up and drop the line for a boat to pass when he sees a light near to. He follows me ’round like a dog.” “ How did you do it ? ” “ Reckon he remembers how I fished him out of the drink one night. Some galoots from down river, goin’ through in a small yacht, anchored and went to bed. I guess they was the first crowd ever anchored in the canal. I came along with an old schooner called the TeiJipest.^ full of coal, bound for New Haven. five o’clock in the morning. The drivers were all ages, from twelve years up. They got thirty dollars a month and board through the season. They put up at any station where they hap¬ pened to be, and were on call in turn. It might be that they had only time to feed the team be¬ fore starting on another lift. Each driver had the entire care of his team and harnesses. His own rest and sleep must be taken in snatches. No, they didn’t count much on things between meals. The braying of one of the impatient teams put an end to the interview, and, with profuse thanks, the guest hurried to pick up the slack line. It is a short run from Trenton down to Bordentown, and for the most part devoid of particular interest from a picturesque point of view. The tow-path is splendidly kept up, and through the trees a short distance away the Delaware glimmered in the sunlight. As

Page 703

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 701 the canal approaches Bordentown it widens out into a basin of considerable size. Several small ponds lead out of it. On their banks two or three busy shipyards, where scows are built, find their place. Along a tongue of land ex¬ tending into the basin was a group of small picturesque houses, completely in character with the place. They faced on the narrow lane. At the back door of each house was a landing with one or two skiffs tied to posts, and the water lapping the lower step. Off to the right of the company’s office are the stables; for this, like New Brunswick, is one end of the Raritan canal. One more deep lock and the Delaware is before the voyager. There was every reason why the deck should be occupied by an anxious and expectant group as the Cowles neared Bordentown. Every square acre of this lovely village is historical ground. Here in the good old days Benjamin Franklin spent a night. Here lived Joseph Bonaparte, the elder brother of Napoleon I., sometime king of Naples and of Spain; Prince Lucien Murat; Judge Joseph Hopkinson, the author of “ Hail, Columbia,” and his father. Judge Francis Hopkinson, the signer; Com¬ modore Stewart, known as Old Ironsides ” ; Parnell’s mother now resides there ; and here lived Tom Paine, and the family of Yturbide, the Mexican emperor, who passed several months here a short time after the husband and father met his death at the hands of his own people in Padilla. High up, overlooking the winding canal and the gently curving Delaware, is the bluff, or real¬ ly promontory, near which Bonaparte built his mansion. The noble trees fringing the wood- crowned height could still be seen from where the Cowles was moored ; but the grand old house, with its richly carved doors, ample stair- way, generous library, and dining-room en¬ riched with ornaments and bits of furniture from the Luxembourg, has long since passed out of the memory of any but the oldest in¬ habitants. In the quaint streets of the old-fashioned town can now be found the sloping roof and dormer-windows of the Murat house, where Madame Murat taught school in the days of their poverty ; and farther on the old Hopkin¬ son mansion, where for the first time, to the accompaniment of the harpsichord, was heard the strains of the national anthem. The whole-souled hospitality for which the town has been noted for more than a century Avas not wanting, and half an hour after the boat had been made snug and safe Avith her boAv-line over a Avharf-post and the stern-line to one of the mooring spiles, the entire party Avere booked for a game at tennis, a drive through the suburbs, and unlimited invita¬ tions to break bread in a dozen houses at once. The Patriarch and Brushes, by reason of their kinship Avith some of the earlier settlers, felt instantly at home, and prepared to make eA^erybody else so. Extra Chinese lanterns Avere unpacked and hung on deck ; some rich silks and Venetian embroideries throAAUi over the standing easels; the ’cello AA^as re-strung; an extra dozen of plates and an equal number of

Page 704

702 SNUB BIN’ THROUGH JERSEY. CAPTAIN DUSENBERRY. cups and saucers were purchased, that Moses might catch his breath between soup and fish; all the brass jars and pottery filled with such wild flowers and tall grasses as could be hastily gathered; smoking jackets, old pipes, well-worn slippers, and like bachelor traps and trappings tucked under divans and behind the furniture, and the whole interior, by a cunning touch here and there,was transformed into a lady’s boudoir. Moses was in his element. Ices revolved around on deck, served in after-dinner coffee saucers, followed by relays of cake (Borden- town brand) on a Delft plaque. Punch was brewed down in the salon in an Imari bowl, and ladled out in small Venetian cups of a varied and difficult pattern, but yet of a cer¬ tain homogeneousness of form and style when not seen too close together. Maidens in the freshest of summer costumes reclined on the Turkish divans. Up on deck, in out-of-the-way places, far forward or aft, behind the apron of the awning and other such secluded spots, couples were tucked away and only discovered by the red spark of a cigar or the ringing laugh that told the story of the night. If the stately dames who graced the drawing-rooms of the olden time could have looked down upon the fair faces and forms of their descendants, they would not have be¬ lieved in the degeneracy of the times. During all this festivity there was one grim, solitary figure who sat like a Sphinx. He moved only once, and that when a lantern fell from a slat in the awning above, rolling its candle at his feet. Then he rose from his seat beside the useless tiller, ground the taper under his heel, and stealthily dropped the harmless Japanese decoration overboard. “ They’ll blow us up, be gosh ! they will,” he said. Wish they’d take them women folks and get out and let a man sleep. Here it is after midnight. Marthy, if they don’t stop this racket I’ll begin swabbin’ the decks, I will, be gosh ! and drown some on ’em.” Dusenberry’s murderous intent was, how¬ ever, never carried out. It is true he swabbed the decks; but not until the gray dawn had broken into dappled gold were the sleepy in¬ mates of the grand salon awakened by the tramp of his bare feet overhead striking the deck like a wet fish. Then the swash of his bucket scattered the water through the half¬ open hatches, and roused the inmates. Moses,” came from a divan far aft, go up on deck and tell the captain to be careful of his water. Regular mill-stream pouring down my back ! ” And Moses,” called out another, this time the Scribe, “ bring me a bath towel, and let down the awning-apron, and put out the ladder. I’m going to have a dip over¬ board.” So am I,” returned the Patriarch, spring¬ ing from his couch. In less time than it takes to tell it, all four heads were bobbing about like corks in the cool water of the canal, after Avhich they all wormed up the straight ladder, were rubbed THE lock-tender’s ASSISTANT.

Page 705

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 703 down like race-horses, and in five minutes thereafter were taking their coffee from the fragrant pot over which Moses presided. This was always on deck in the open air and sunlight, from a low table convenient to cush¬ ions and rugs, and within reach of every man’s outstretched arm. Victim of a Pullman buffet car, all dust and waiter! inhabitant of a White Star saloon cabin. hangings curtaining off the after-part of the hold, and reappear with an easel, which he placed in a favorable light under the hatch. Then he tiptoed back and returned with a canvas and palette. He whispered to the Scribe: “Look at that girl’s head — regu¬ lar Titian ! Tell Brushes to keep on until I get an outline of it. Please don’t move, my lady ; you are positively delightful.” THE DESERTED HOUSE. with its air full of carbonic acid and its table rack- worn and empty! do you know what it is to breakfast on deck in the soft morning air^ with the fleecy clouds overhead, the shimmer and plash of water among the cool of sedge and lily pads, and the green fields before you fringed and backed by dark cedars ? Of course you don’t, and never did. Misguided traveler! return to the ways of your ancestors ! Try a canal-boat. By nine o’clock sundry friends who had helped make the previous night merry were hailed, welcomed, and escorted up the gang¬ plank and down into the salon. Breakfast was served in due course without a protest from Moses, who, assisted by “ Marthy,” struck from this Jersey rock not only water, but other liquids and solids not referred to in the original text. Then the music was hunted up, and Brushes drew his bow across his ’cello, and guests and hosts sank into easy-chairs or threw themselves on the divans as the symphonies of Beethoven filled the interior. It was then that Scraps was seen to start from his seat, disappear quietly behind the silk But she did move, only to strike a more charm¬ ing pose, and so did the entire group. Then the symphony ceased, and soon two more easels bore down like a battery upon the lovely head with its arching eyebrows and golden hair, and thus the early morning hours slipped away. PIeading a procession consisting of five or six coal-boats, two oil-boats, and a two-masted schooner, the Coiulcs pulled out in the cool hours of the next morning with all flags set to the breeze. From Bordentown up to Trenton is a steady lift. The first lock has a rise of four¬ teen feet, and the next two are very nearly as high. On the right bank the heavy trains puffed up the grade, and on the other, shaded by the lofty wide-spreading willows and con - stantly tempted by the grassy green bank, al¬ most within reach, the patient mules plodded along in the red dust. For three miles the bank behind the tow-path is very high and compactly built, with willows thickly planted, a veritable bulwark against the Delaware, which sweeps along a short distance away. In the spring the river comes up to the very banks, and is a constant source of danger. At

Page 706

704 SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. such times the path-walker is on duty day and night, plugging the smallest holes with sod, filling in where the rain has started a gully, and building the bank higher where it has washed away. In ordinary times each walker has a stretch of fourteen miles to watch. He walks down the tow-path one day and back on the heel-path the next, with a shovel or pick with which to make re¬ pairs, or armed with a scythe to trim the briers, ivies, and elders. His worst enemy is the musk-rat, whose holes, running far into the bank, may at any moment make an outlet and become a dangerous break. Against these ravages the company supply a special guardian in the person of the ratter. The whole length of the canal is divided up among several men who make it their business to trap musk-rats all the year round. They use an ordinary steel trap without teeth, which they set as near as possible in the path of the main entrance or regularly used track to the rat-hole. The men are paid wages by the day, and the noses and tails are re¬ deemed by the company at fifteen cents once a month. The pelts belong to the ratter, and are cured by him, to be sold later at an aver¬ age of about eighteen cents each. Any rat trapped within a mile of the canal is a legiti¬ mate catch, and a day’s work is from ten to fifteen. What harm can a rat do a mile away ? ” asked Scraps. He may come over here any fine morn¬ ing, and if he don’t, his children will. You can’t count on a rat till he is skinned. I have been trapping them thirteen years, and I don’t know all their ways yet. Sometimes they are too cunning to go within ten feet of a man’s track, and other times they will walk into a bag and lie down.” A RATTER. Then, as a special favor, he produced from the lock-house a white musk-rat caught by him and stuffed by the same hand, in an attitude which the animal never could have assumed when alive, and which was suggestive of the three- toed sloth in the museum. What I don’t understand,” said the ratter, as he fondled a pile of pelts, is, why any animal wastes so much backbone in tail.” As no one was prompt with a solution of this, word was given to the tow-boy, and the slack line was taken up. The canal below Trenton is considerably discolored by chemicals, mostly iron, which are poured into it from the works on the banks, but on the high level where the feeder comes in, the water is comparatively pure. The boys from the potteries which stretch along the tow-path towards Princeton make full use of their opportunities. The Cowles was in luck, and approached this quarter during the noon hour. ‘‘ Hey, Micky,” said an urchin, as he poised on a post ready for a dive, ‘‘ look at de circus ! ” “ ’Tain’t no circus ; that’s a likeness boat,” said Micky. Another one offered to chip in and buy the occupants some long pants, while a compan¬ ion of his, dripping with water, offered to swim out and lick the cook for four cents. Moses went below, and the opportunity passed. Dur¬ ing this running fire the windows in the pot¬ teries were crowded with heads, and each head had something to say. The canal literally swarmed with boys of all ages, colors, and pro¬ ficiency in swimming. They ran ahead of the boat, took a long dive, and came up in time to catch the tow-rope, or perhaps one would

Page 707

SNUBBIN^ THROUGH JERSEY. 705 get astride of the rudder-blade, when instantly others plunged in, made a race for him, seized him and each other by any available limb, and hung on in a bunch or strung out in the wake with the boat under full headway. But the approach of a propeller, one of the line which sends through one boat each way daily on the way to Baltimore or New York, quickly scat¬ tered the boys, and in a few minutes the shadows deepened and the blue vanished from the sky, a procession of coal-boats, each with its green light forward, passed silently in review and disappeared around the bend. Against the dark background nothing could be seen of the mules, but in the water, reversed, were their reflections perfectly outlined. As the boats approached they seemed to take on an unusual size, and with it an air of dignity. A NEIGHBOR NEAR KINGSTON. Cowles was outside the city and fast ap¬ proaching green fields and grateful shade. Long before the afternoon had gone, a halt for the night was made near a picturesque clump of willows which partly obscured a deserted house. Its storm-beaten eaves were almost overtopped by the weeds which luxuri¬ ated in a tangled garden. Atop the broken palings of the fence an ivy and a trumpet- vine found their devious paths, and along the bank which once skirted the walk blossomed a profusion of pink, black, and white holly¬ hocks. The team was sent ahead to the next station, with orders to call at nine the follow¬ ing day. Sketching-traps were fished out, and everybody was at work. The Scribe gathered the blossoms, Moses started off afield with a basket on each arm, and in twenty minutes the was deserted save by “Marthy ” and her lord. On deck, after dinner, as the long VoL. XXXIV.— 97. There was something impressive m their silent, steady advance, as one after another their lights came into view, approached, and passed. The boatmen were silent. The man at the helm, attracted by the unusual illumination on the Cowles, in a low tone called his mate, or spoke to his wife, and said no more. Wearied with steering all day in the hot sun, and an¬ ticipating an all-night’s run with a bare chance of hitting the tow at Ncav Brunswick the next morning, the men paid little attention to any¬ thing else than the work before them or the necessity of resting while opportunity offered. Early in the procession a detached team passed, the whiffletree chains clanking against the stones, and the tow-boy singing to himself as he rode by, seated sidewise on the rear mule, with his back to the canal. He’s happy.” You bet,” came from the darkness, into

Page 708

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY, 706 which the Scribe’s remark had penetrated. No more teaming to-night; I’ve cast two shoes on the leader and broken a trace, and there ain’t no smith nearer than Kingston.” Suddenly, at a distance through the trees shone a strong, steady light somewhat higher than the others; then the first rays of the moon caught something white moving in the tree- tops, and in a moment more the tall masts of a schooner, with topsails bunched, appeared against the brightening sky. As she passed close to the Cowles,^ the Patriarch, Brushes, and the Scribe vaulted aboard, intending Brushes, we’ll get on the next boat we meet and ride back.” Twenty minutes later a light boat ap¬ proached. and as she passed, the trio, relying on their welcome, hastily transferred their per¬ sons. As the shining awning of the Cowles again came in sight, the Scribe pointed it out to the puzzled boatman. Then instantly it was all clear to him. “ Bin down along advertising; where do you show next ? ” Just as the party clambered on board and bade the Mary Ann- good-night, Dusenberry disappeared in his cabin, saying, Marthy, these fellows been AlANNliD BY CHILDREN. to get off at the next bridge, wherever that was, and walk back on the heel-path. It proved to be the schooner JVave, which had loaded with coal at Philadelphia for Bridge¬ port. Why did they go through the canal ? It was more convenient. Running day and night, the passage is made in thirty-six hours. AVasn’t it partly because they were afraid to trust the old hulk outside the capes ? That had something to do with it. How far was Kingston ? Five miles. How far to the next bridge? Four miles. How could the gentle¬ men get off? Couldn’t unless they’d swim. The boat was deeply loaded and had to be kept in the middle of the canal. All right,” said off snaking some peach orchard. There’ll be ’ll ofticer aboard here next, and we’ll have to swear they was in bed. If the Lord ever gets us back to old Erie, I don’t want any more side shows in mine.” Just before sunrise next morning the rum¬ bling of a thunder-storm and the pattering of heavy drops on the deck overhead brought every one to his feet to lash the awning and make things secure. The two after-hatches were closed. The forward one was tilted in the direction of the storm, and with the flies of an old tent, an abundance of cord, and a few screw eyes, a canvas fence as high as the shoul¬ ders was built about the gangway to keep

Page 709

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. THE BOW OF THE “TERROK.” the rain from blowing in. Dusenberry had his hands full with his own awning, his bird¬ cages, and Marthy in terror of the thunder. No use leaving here to-day,” said the Patri¬ arch, as he and the Scribe prepared for their plunge in the drizzle. “ This is our first gray day, and we must make the most of it. Here’s a haunted house and no end of stuff within reach.” There was no dissenting opinion, and Dusenberry was therefore ordered to send word by the next passing boat, countermand¬ ing the order for the team. “ We can run down in the night,” added Brushes. While breakfast was being served in a sheltered spot aft, the hatches were lifted to air the salon. Marthy as usual improved the opportunity to make up the divans and put things to rights. The withered flowers were thrown away and the vases replenished with fresh ones. Moses cleaned and trimmed the lamps, took account of stock, filled the pitcher with ice-water, and then busied himself with the breakfast dishes. The forenoon was spent in watching the clouds, tinkering, writing letters, and overhauling sketches made on the trip. Scraps was busy with pen-and-ink drawings intended for reproduction. The Patriarch, sud¬ denly alarmed lest all the glory of the unique interior should some day vanish like the flame from a candle, started an elaborate pastel, and Brushes, sharing his fear, laid in one corner of the boat in water-colors. When the rain ceased, nature was again at the mercy of the brush and pencil, and the knights made the most of it. From the deck the most picturesque of the pass¬ ing boats were hastily sketched. One appeared to be manned by children. On the top of the house were two little girls, and peeping over the edge of an empty, painted box, evidently kept for the purpose, was a third. The helms¬ man was a boy, who ate his lunch as he swung the tiller. On another boat the helpmate was doing the family washing, in spite of the weather. The commander’s pride in his craft 707 was evident. Everything shone in fresh paint of decided hues. The rudder-blade was deep blue and the tiller striped with yellow and brown. Across her square stern in white let¬ ters on a black ground, festooned with filigree, was painted her name, the Terror. Towards night the sun broke through, and the day ended in a brilliant display of cloud scenery. With the first patch of blue sky word was sent by a passing chunker to have the team up at eight o’clock that evening. While at dinner the voice of Dusenberry was heard in conver¬ sation with the tow-boy. “You fellows going down along to-night ? ” came from the tow-path. “They say they be,” said Dusenberry. “ Where will you tie up ? ” “ Somewhere this side of York ; I ain’t mak- in’ no plans.” “ Ten Mile Lock? ” inquired the persistent driver, anxious to know what his trip was to be. “ Give it up,” said Dusenberry ; “ this is good enough for me.” After a brief silence the gentle ripple of the waves pushed up by the square nose of the Cowles indicated that she was once more under way. The landscape by night was that of a new country. Before the moon rose it required a keen eye to follow the shore, and a practiced hand to keep the boat off the bank. Steering a canal-boat seems easy, but it is sometimes harder than it looks. An empty boat, eight feet out of water, with an awning to catch BELOW PRINCETON.

Page 710

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. 708 ABOVE THE LOCK AT KINGSTON. every breath of air, will give a strong man plenty of exercise. In the darkness the lights behind on the bridges where the country roads cross the canal glowed like stars low down on the horizon. Suddenly the Cow/es rounded a bend, and a bright light seemed to shoot from a clump of dark trees. “ Blow your horn, blow your horn ! ” yelled the tow-boy. How was I to know this was a bridge,” grumbled Dus- enberry as Marthy finished a long blast, and gathered breath for another. A moment more and a stream of yellow light from the bank illumined the whitewashed bridge as it swung upstream. The Cowles grazed the end, bumped heavily against the heel-path bank, and headed around for the next stretch. The rising moon solved Dusenberry’s severest perplexities. A bridge a mile off was in plain sight. Under the railroad bridge at Princeton Junction, by the beautiful farms which stretch up to the col¬ legiate town a mile or two to the left and on towards Kingston, the Cowles went at a good pace. The moonlight completely disguised fa¬ miliar scenery, and when the tow-boy slacked up to let the boat run into the lock at Kingston, no one recognized the place. Sometime after midnight, while the Scribe, who had volunteered to relieve Marthy, was taking a trick at the helm, the low white buildings of Ten Mile Lock appeared. The Cowles found a place at the crib among a number of boats heading in both directions, and made fast. The lights on deck were extinguished, the two after¬ hatches closed, and all was (piiet for the night. Par away astern somewhere among the Roman candles and empty packing-boxes, in the di¬ rection of Dusenberry’s cabin, came a sound of no uncertain meaning. “Brushes,” said the Scribe, as he adjusted his mosquito-net, “ his snore is worse than his war-cry.” Early in the morning the lock-tender came on board with the mail, which he had thoughtfully gathered at the Bound Brook post-office, some three miles off. Moses returned to the lock-house in his com¬ pany, and long before the heat of the day three hundred pounds of ice were stored in the re¬ frigerator, and with it fresh vegetables, blue¬ berries, chickens, and all that could be spared from a passing butcher’s wagon. It was the middle of the forenoon before the team was summoned. One more run would end at New Brunswick ; the next morning would dawn with the Cowles at New York, and the outing at an end. But there was no escape. The charter of the boat ran out the next day, and she must not only be handed over to her owners promptly, but delivered empty. Without spe¬ cial interest the hours passed, until about five

Page 711

SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. o’clock the high railroad bridge at New Bruns¬ wick loomed up in the distance. Had the New York tow gone? No, the huge tug was made fast to the coal- wharf and near by her boats enough to make up a tow. Nothing now re¬ mained but to await the ebb tide. ‘‘ Brushes,” said the Scribe, as the great tow fell into line on its way towards New York from New Brunswick, Dusenberry has just interviewed me as to what this expedition is all about. He says we hain’t showed nowhere, nor give no concerts, nor pulled teeth, nor 709 eling coal don’t help one’s temper or one’s appreciation of the Venus of Milo. Dusen¬ berry isn’t so bad as he seems. When Moses broke the Delft plaque yesterday and was about to throw the pieces overboard, Dusen¬ berry caught them on the fly, and he and Marthy have been all the afternoon trying to stick them together with flour-paste as a dec¬ oration for her kitchen.” “Verily some good seed has fallen on ap¬ parently stony ground,” mused the Patriarch, half aloud. WILLOWS NE.\R PRINCETON. distributed no hand-bills, nor asked nobody to subscribe to no book ; we hain’t sold no ancient things ’cept we did it at night, and he and Marthy has w^atched and nothin’s gone over the side, and he should like to know, now we are p’inted for home, what we started for, and whether we got it, and whether it’s any fault of his’n if we hain’t.” “ Tell him,” said the Patriarch, who was stretched out on the deck watching the sun¬ set clouds mirrored in the still waters of the widened river, “ tell him our sole object is to improve our digestive apparatus, our breath¬ ing apparatus, and our ability to sleep eight hours at a stretch, and that if he would laugh more and grumble less it would not be half so hard for him to swing his tiller, and twice as easy for him to be agreeable to his neighbors.” “ Make allowance for his early training,” chimed in Scraps. “ Driving mules and shov- “ And that isn’t all,” continued Scraps. “ Only to-day as I lay dozing on my divan I overheard Dusenberry tell Moses that he guessed next w^eek the old girl (that is, the Cowles ) w^ould look naked enough after the stuff was h’isted out of her, and that this trip had kind o’ spiled him for canalin’.” “ Oh, ye bric-a-brac gods,” piously rejoined the Patriarch, intoning his voice. “Another convert.” A general comparison of notes and obser¬ vations follo\ved. Brushes said he also had remarked that Dusenberry had acquired of late a habit of assorting the wild flowers that daily came aboard, and had made one corner of Marthy’s kitchen fresh and cheery with field daisies and fragrant water-lilies. The Patriarch, being pressed, admitted that he had caught him examining intently the wTong side of a Turkish rug and speculating with Marthy

Page 712

yio SNUB BIN' THROUGH JERSEY. as to the possibility of her duplicating it the next winter. The Scribe chimed in that it was catching, and that he had detected the tow- boy tying dandelions to his hat-band, and braiding the mule’s tail. All agreed, how¬ ever, that the captain was undergoing a posi¬ tive change of heart. This became certain when below New Brunswick the Cowles was crowded out of her position and forced on the outside of the main tow to take during the preceding three weeks were re¬ claimed, assorted, and packed away. A subdivi¬ sion of colors and brushes and an interchange of sketches took place. Fragile lanterns and the more delicate silks and hangings were packed in convenient drawers. The great Sypher chest was filled with the extra rugs and cushions, and the smaller and more breakable bric- ^-brac bestowed inside the original studio cases under the after-hatch. THE “ COWLES ” IN HARBOR AT TEN MILE LOCK. unprotected the thumping around the Ro7ner. When this occurred, the deck and salon waited as usual for the sulphurous smell which generally followed any expression of Dusen- berry’s opinions to his fellow-boatman on oc¬ casions like this, concluding with an ardent wish for the immediate consignment of the whole load of second-hand truck to a climate warmer and more remote. Judge, then, of their surprise when this came sifting down the open hatches. “ Get out that fender. Get it out, gol darn you, and get aft with it — quick. Want to smash something, do you ? What do you think we’ve got aboard here, anyhow, — potatoes or baled hay, — that you’re kicking ’round like a loose mule ? You break something and you’ll find out ! Why, be gosh, we’ve got teacups and sassers aboard here worth morehr your whole mud scow, mules and all.” The expedition was nearing its end. This was seen everywhere. Sketches which had been tacked up for a day to dry and left per¬ manently to decorate were slid into portfolios. The book-shelves were dismantled and each occupant claimed his own. Knickknacks, pipes, tobacco-pouches, slippers, caps, and painting- jackets which had been used indiscriminately It was evident that the beauty of the interior still possessed the occupants like a spell ; and as each man removed from its place some rare object which had gone to make up the unique salon, he felt a pang as though ashamed of the work he was engaged in. At last the tall spire of Trinity could be seen outlined against the morning sky, and the great bank of yellow fog hanging like a cloud over the city. The tow broke up into sections. One to Gowanus, another to Newtown Creek, and a third to Redhook. The Cowles under special tow glided up to her dock at East Thirty-fourth street, the home of the wharf rat and the dock tramp. As she neared her berth a man could be seen climbing a tall spile. Presently he waved his hat and shouted through his hand : “ What boat’s that ? ” The Seth G. CowlesC returned Dusen- berry. “ All right. Cap ; your owner’s been waiting for you for a week. You’re chartered to take a load of lime to Sands Point, and you got to hustle ’round and get your truck out or you’ll lose it.” Later in the day three furniture wagons toiled up the ascending grade of Thirty-first street. From their sides and ends protruded

Page 713

GRA VE. the tops and arms of antique chairs, loose bits of rugs, brass lamps, mattresses, rolls of mat¬ ting, cooking utensils, boxes, barrels, crates, pictures, canvases, easels, and awning-poles. They were followed by four individuals who seemed to act as a body-guard. Three of these 7ir wore knickerbockers ; the fourth a sombrero of unusual size. All were sunburnt to a light chocolate brown. As the procession disap¬ peared over the brow of the hill, it left the im¬ pression on the mind of the observer that the party was homeless but had rescued its traps. E. HopJzinson Smith. J. B. Millet. “H. H.’S” GRAVE. God, for the man who knew Him face to face Prepared a grave apart, a tomb unknown. Where dews drop tears, and only winds make moan, And white archangels guard the narrow space. God gives to His beloved sleep ; the place Where His seer slept was set remote, for rest. After the forty years of desert quest. The Sinai terrors, and the Pisgah grace. So, clear-eyed priestess, sleep ! remembering not The fiery scathe of life, nor trackless years ; Not even Canaan’s sun-kissed, flowery meads. God shields, within His hollowed hand, the spot Where brooding peace rebukes unquiet tears. She sleepeth well who hath wrought such noble deeds ! M, Virghiia Donaglie. THE GRAVE OF “ H. H.” (HELEN JACKSON) ON CHEYENNE MOUNTAIN, COLORADO. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY C. L. GILLINGHAM.)

Page 714

[BEGUiV IN THE AUGUST NUMBER.] AZALIA. By the author of “ Uncle Remus,” “ Little Compton,” etc. TV. Mrs. STUCKY, making her way homeward through the gather¬ ing dusk, moved as noiselessly and as swiftly as a ghost. The soft white sand beneath her feet gave forth no sound, and she seemed to be gliding forward, rather than walking, though there was a certain awkward em¬ phasis and decision in her move¬ ments suggesting something alto¬ gether human in their suggestions. The way was lonely. There was no companionship for her in the whis¬ pering sighs of the tall pines that stood by the roadside, no friendliness in the constellations that burned and sparkled overhead, no hospitable suggestion in the lights that gleamed faintly here and there from the win¬ dows of the houses in the little settlement. To Mrs. Stucky all was commonplace. There was nothing in her surroundings as she went towards her home to lend wings even to her superstition, which was eager to assert itself on all occasions. It was not much of a home to which she was making her way — a little log-cabin in a pine thicket, surrounded by a little clearing that served to show how aimlessly and how hopelessly the lack of thrift and energy could assert itself. The surroundings were mean enough and squalid enough at their best, but the oppressive shadows of night made them meaner and more squalid than they really were. The sun, which shines so lavishly in that region, ap¬ peared to glorify the squalor, show¬ ing wild passion-flowers clambering along the broken-down fence of pine-poles, and a wisteria vine running helter-skelter across the roof of the little cabin. But the night hid all this completely. A dim, vague blaze, springing from a few charred pine-knots, made the darkness visible in the one room of the cabin, and before it, with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, sat what appeared to be a man. He wore neither coat nor shoes, and his hair was long and shaggy. ‘‘ Is that you, Bud ? ” said Mrs. Stucky. Why, whokl you reckon it wuz, maw ? ” replied Bud, looking up with a broad grin that was not at all concealed by his thin sandy beard. A body’d sorter think, ef they ’uz

Page 715

AZALIA, ter ketch you gwine on that a-way, that you ’spected ter find some great somebody er nuth- er a-roostin’ in here.” Mrs. Stucky, by way of responding, stirred the pine-knots until they gave forth a more satisfactory light, hung her bonnet on the bed¬ post, and seated herself wearily in a rickety chair, the loose planks of the floor rattling and shaking as she moved about. “ Now, who in the nation did you reckon it wuz, maw ? ” persisted Bud, still grinning placidly. “ Some great somebody,” replied Mrs. Stucky, brushing her gray hair out of her eyes and looking at her son. At this. Bud could contain himself no longer. He laughed almost uproariously. “ Well, the great Jemimy 1 ” he exclaimed, and then laughed louder than ever. “ Wher’ve you been ? ” Mrs. Stucky asked, when Bud’s mirth had subsided. Away over yander at the depot,” said Bud, indicating Little Azalia. “An’ I fotch you some May-pops too. I did that ! I seed ’em while I wuz a-gwine ’long, an’ I sez ter myself, sezee,^ You jess wait thar tell I come’longback, an’ I’ll take an’ take you ter maw,’ says yee.” Although this fruit of the passion-flower was growing in profusion right at the door, Mrs. Stucky gave this grown man, her son, to un¬ derstand that May-pops such as he brought were very desirable indeed. “ I wonder you didn’t fergit ’em,” she said. “ Who ? me ! ” exclaimed Bud. “ I jess like fer ter see anybody ketch me fergittin’ ’em. Now I jess would. I never eat a one nuther — not a one.” Mrs. Stucky made no response to this, and none seemed to be necessary. Bud sat and pulled his thin beard and gazed in the fire. Presently he laughed and said : “ I jess bet a boss you couldn’t guess who I seed — now I jess bet that.” Mrs. Stucky rubbed the side of her face thoughtfully and seemed to be making a tre¬ mendous effort to imagine who Bud had seen. “ ’Twer’n’t no man en ’twer’n’t no Azalia folks. ’Twuz a gal.” “ A gal ! ” exclaimed Mrs. Stucky. “ Yes’n, a gal, an’ ef she wa’n’t a zooner you may jess take an’ knock my chunk out.” Mrs. Stucky looked at her son curiously. Her cold gray eyes glittered in the firelight as she held them steadily on his face. Bud, conscious of this inspection, moved about in his chair uneasily, shifting his feet from one side to the other. “ ’Twer’n’t no Sal Badger,” he said, after a while, laughing sheepishly ; “ ’twer’n’t no Maria Matthews, ’twer’n’t no Lou Hornsby, an’ ’twer’n’t no Martha Jane AVilliams, nuther. VoL. XXXIV.— 98. 713 She wuz a bran’-new gal, an’ she went ter the tavern, she did.” “ I’ve done saw ’er,” said Mrs. Stucky placidly. “ You done saw ’er, maw! ” exclaimed Bud. “ Well, the great Jemimy I What’s her name, maw ? ” “ They didn’t call no names,” said Mrs. Stucky. “ They jess sot thar an’ gormandized on wafiles an’ batter-cakes, an’ didn’t call no names. Hit made me dribble at the mouf the way they went on.” “ Wuz she purty, maw ? ” “ I sot an’ looked at um,” Mrs. Stucky went on, “ an’ I ’lowed maybe the war moughter come betwixt the old un an’ her good looks. The t’other one looks mighty slick, but, Lordy 1 She hain’t nigh ez slick ez that ar Lou Horns¬ by; yit she’s got lot’s purtier motions.” “ Well, I seed ’er, maw,” said Bud, gazing into the depths of the fireplace. “ Atter the ingine come a-snortin’ by, I jumped up behind the hack whar they puts the trunks, an’ I got a right good glimp’ un ’er, an’ ef she hain’t purty then I dunner what purty is. What’d you say her name wuz, maw ? ” “ Lordy, jess hark ter the creetur I Hain’t I jess this minute hollered an’ tole you that they hain’t called no names ? ” “ I ’lowed maybe you moughter hearn the name named an’ then drapt it,” said Bud, still gazing into the fire. “ I tell you what, she made thet ole hack look big, she did ! ” “ You talk like you er start crazy, Bud,” ex¬ claimed Mrs. Stucky, leaning over and fixing her glittering eyes on his face. “ Lordy, what’s she by the side er me ? Is she made out’n i’on ? ” Bud’s enthusiasm immediately vanished, and a weak flickering smile took possession of his face. “ No’m — no’m ! that she hain’t made out’n i’on. She’s lots littler’n you is — lots littler. She looks like she’s sorry.” “ Sorry 1 What fer ? ” “ Sorry fer we all.” Mrs. Stucky looked at her son with amaze¬ ment not unmixed with indignation. Then she seemed to remember something she had forgotten. “ Sorry fer we all, honey, when we er got this great big pile er tavern vittles ? ” she asked with a smile, and then the two fell to and made the most of Mrs. Haley’s charity. At the tavern Helen and her aunt sat long at their tea, listening to the quaint gossip of Mrs. Haley, which not only took a wide and enter¬ taining range, but entered into details that her guests found extremely interesting. Miss Tewksbury’s name reminded Mrs. Haley of a Miss Kingsberry, a Northern lady, who had

Page 716

714 AZALIA. taught school in middle Georgia, and who had ‘‘writ a sure enough book,” as the genial landlady expressed it. She went to the trouble of hunting up this “ sure enough ” book, a small school dictionary, and gave many remi¬ niscences of her acquaintance with the author. In the small parlor, too, the ladies found General Garwood awaiting them, and they held quite a little reception, forming the acquaintance, among others, of Miss Lou Hornsby, a fresh-looking young woman who had an exclamation of surprise or a grimace of wonder for every statement she heard and for every remark that was made. Miss Hornsby also went to the piano and played and sang “Nelly Gray” and “Lily Dale” with a dramatic fervor that could only have been acquired in a boarding-school. The Rev. Arthur Hill was also there, a little gentle¬ man whose side-whiskers and modest deport¬ ment betokened both refinement and sensi¬ bility. He was very cordial to the two ladies from the N orth, and strove to demonstrate the liberality of his cloth by a certain gayety of manner that was by no means displeasing. He seemed to consider himself one of the links of sociability, as well as master of ceremonies, and he had a way of speaking for others that suggested considerable social tact and versa¬ tility. Thus, when there was a lull in the con¬ versation, he started it again, and imparted to it a vivacity that was certainly remarkable, as Helen thought. At precisely the proper moment, he seized Miss Hornsby and bore her off home, tittering sweetly as only a young girl can, and, the others following the exam¬ ple thus happily set, left Helen and her aunt to themselves, and to the repose that tired travelers are supposed to be in need of. They were not long in seeking it. “ I wonder,” said Helen, after she and her aunt had gone to bed, “ if these people really regard us as enemies ? ” This question caused Miss Tewksbury to sniff the air angrily. “ Pray, what difference does it make ? ” she replied. “ Oh, none at all,” said Helen. “ I was just thinking. The little preacher was tremen¬ dously gay. His mind seemed to be on skates. He touched on every subject but the war, and that he glided around gracefully. No doubt they have had enough of war down here.” “ I should hope so,” said Miss Tewksbury. “ Go to sleep, child; you need rest.” Helen did not follow this timely advice at once. From her window she could see the constellations dragging their glittering pro¬ cession westward, and she knew that the spirit of the night was whispering gently in the tall pines, but her thoughts were in a whirl. The scenes through which she had passed and the people she had met were new to her, and she lay awake and thought of them until at last the slow-moving stars left her wrapped in sleep, a sleep from which she was not aroused until William shook the found g^tions of the tavern with his melodious bell, informing everybody that the hour for breakfast had arrived. Shortly afterwards, William made his appear¬ ance in person, bringing an abundance of fresh, clear water. He appeared to be in ex¬ cellent humor. “ What did you say your name is?” Helen asked. William chuckled, as if he thought the question was in the nature of a joke. “ Pm name’ Willum, ma’m, en my mammy, she name’ Sa’er Jane, en de baby, she name’ Phillypeener. Miss ’Ria, she say, dat baby is de likelies’ nigger baby w’at she y’ever been see sence de war, en I speck she is kaze Miss ’Ria aintbeen talk dat away ’bout eve’y nigger baby w’at come ’long.” “ How old are you ? ” Miss Tewksbury in¬ quired. “ I dunno’m,” said William, placidly. “ Miss ’Ria, she says I’m lots older dan w’at I looks ter be,en I speck dat’s so, kaze mammy say dey got ter be a runt ’mongst all folks’s famblies.” Helen laughed, and William went on : “ Mammy say ole Miss gwine come see you all. Mars Peyt’ gwine bring ’er.” “ Who is old Miss ? ” Helen asked. Will¬ iam gazed at her with unfeigned amazement. “ Dunner who ole Miss is ? Lordy ! you de fus’ folks w’at aint know ole Miss. She Mars Peyt’s own mammy, dat’s who she is, en ef she come lak dey say she cornin’, hit’ll be de fus’ time she y’ever sot foot in dish yer tavern less’n ’twuz indurance er de war. Miss ’Ria say she wish ter goodness ole Miss ’ud sen’ word ef she gwine stay ter dinner so she kin fix up somepin n’er nice. I dunno whe’er Miss Hal- lie cornin’ er no, but ole Miss cornin’, sho, kaze I done been year um sesso.” “ And who is Miss Hallie? ” Helen inquired, as William still lingered. “ Miss Hallie — she — dunno’m, ceppin’ she des stays dar ’long wid um. Miss ’Ria say she mighty quare, but I wish turrer folks wuz quare lak Miss Hallie.” William staid until he was called away, and at breakfast Mrs. Haley imparted the informa¬ tion which, in William’s lingo, had sounded somewhat scrappy. It was to the effect that General Garwood’s mother would call on the ladies during their stay. Mrs. Haley laid great stress on the statement. “ Such an event seems to be very interesting,” Helen said rather dryly. “ Yes’m,” said Mrs. Haley, with her pecul¬ iar emphasis, “ it ruther took me back when

Page 717

AZALIA, I heard the niggers talkin’ about it this morn- in’. If that old lady has ever darkened my door, I’ve done forgot it. She’s mighty nice and neighborly,” Mrs. Haley went on, in re¬ sponse to a smile which Helen gave her aunt, but she don’t go out much. Oh, she’s nice and proud — Lord, if pride ’ud kill a body, that old ’oman would ’a’ been dead too long ago to talk about. They’re all proud — the whole kit and b’ilin’. She mayn’t be too proud to come to this here tavern, but I know she aint never been here. The preacher used to say that pride drives out grace, but I don’t believe it, because that ’ud strip the Garwoods of all they’ve got in this world ; and I know they’re just as good as they can be.” ‘‘ I heard the little negro boy talking of MissHallie,” said Helen. ‘‘Pray, who is she?” Mrs. Haley closed her eyes, threw her head back, and laughed softly. “ The poor child ! ” she exclaimed. “ I de¬ clare I feel like cry in’ every time I think about her. She’s the forlomest poor creetur the Lord ever let live, and one of the best. Some¬ times, when I git tore up in my mind, and begin to think that everything’s wrong- end foremost, I jess think of Hallie Garwood, and then I don’t have no more trouble.” Both Helen and her aunt appeared to be interested, and Mrs. Plaley went on : “ The poor child was a Herndon — I reckon you’ve heard tell of the Virginia Herndons. At the beginning of the war she was married to Ethel Garwood, and, bless your life, she hadn’t been married mor’n a week before Ethel was killed. ’Twa’n’t in no battle, but jess in a kind of skirmish. They fotch him home, and Hallie come along with him, and right here she’s been ev’ry sence. She does mighty quare. She don’t wear nothin’ but black, and she don’t go nowhere less’n it’s somewheres where there’s sickness. It makes my blood run cold to think about that poor creetur. Trouble hits some folks and glances off, and it hits some and thar it sticks. I tell you what, them that it gives the go-by ought to be monst’ous proud.” This was the beginning of many interesting experiences for Helen and her aunt. They managed to find considerable comfort in Mrs. Haley’s genial gossip. It amused and instructed them, and at the same time gave them a standard, half-serious, half-comical, by which to measure their own experiences in what seemed to them a very quaint neighborhood. They managed in the course of a very few days to make themselves thoroughly at home in their new surroundings, and, while they missed much that tradition and literature had told them they would find, they found much to excite their curiosity and attract their interest. 715 One morning, an old-fashioned carriage, drawn by a pair of heavy-limbed horses, lum¬ bered up to the tavern door. Helen watched it with some degree of expectancy. The cur¬ tains and upholstering were faded and worn, and the panels were dingy with age. The negro driver was old and obsequious. He jumped from his high seat, opened the door, let down a flight of steps, and then stood with his hat off, the November sun glistening on his bald head. Two ladies alighted. One was old, and one was young, but both were arrayed in deep mourning. The old lady had an abundance of gray hair that was combed straight back from her forehead, and her features gave evi¬ dence of great decision of character. The young lady had large, lustrous eyes, and the pallor of her face was in strange contrast with her somber drapery. These were the ladies from Waverly, as the Garwood place was called, and Helen and her aunt met them a few moments later. “ I am so pleased to meet you,” said the old lady, with a smile that made her face beautiful. “ And this is Miss Tewksbury. Really, I have heard my son speak of you so often that I seem to know you. This is my daughter Hallie. She doesn’t go out often, but she insisted on coming with me to-day.” “ I’m very glad you came,” said Helen, sit¬ ting by the pale young woman after the greet¬ ings were over. “ I think you are lovely,” said Hallie, with the tone of one who is settling a question that had previously been debated. Her clear eyes from which innocence, unconquered and un¬ dimmed by trouble, shone forth, fastened them¬ selves on Helen’s face. The admiration they expressed was unqualified and unadulterated. It was the admiration of a child, but the eyes were not those of a child. They were such as Helen had seen in old paintings, and the pa¬ thos that seemed part of their beauty belonged definitely to the past. “ I lovely?” exclaimed Helen in astonish¬ ment, blushing a little. “ I have never been accused of such a thing before.” “You have such a beautiful complexion,” Hallie went on placidly, her eyes still fixed on Helen’s face. “ I had heard — some one had told me — that you were an invalid. I was so sorry.” The beautiful eyes drooped, and Hallie sighed gently. “ My invalidism is a myth,” Helen replied, somewhat puzzled to account for the impres¬ sion the pale young woman made on her. “ It is the invention of my aunt and our family physician. They have a theory that my lungs are affected and that the air of the pine-woods will do me good.”

Page 718

7i6 AZALIA. ‘‘ Oh, I hope and trust it will,” exclaimed Hallie, with an earnestness that Helen could trace to no reasonable basis but affectation. “ Oh, I do hope it will. You are so young — so full of life.” “ My dear child,” said Helen, with mock gravity, “ I am older than you are — ever so much older.” The lustrous eyes closed, and for a moment the long, silken lashes rested against the pale cheek. Then the eyes opened and gazed at Helen appealingly. “ Oh, impossible ! How could that be ? I was sixteen in 1862.” Then,” said Helen, you are twenty-seven, and I am twenty-five.” “ I knew it — I felt it ! ” exclaimed Hallie, with pensive animation. Helen was amused and somewhat interested. She admired the peculiar beauty of Hallie, but the efforts of the latter to repress her feelings, to reach, as it were, the results of self-efface¬ ment, were not at all pleasing to the Boston girl. Mrs. Garwood and Miss Tewksbury found themselves on good terms at once. A course of novel-reading, seasoned with reflection, had led Miss Tewksbury to believe that Southern ladies of the first families possessed in a large degree the Oriental faculty of laziness. She had pictured them in her mind as languid creatures, with a retinue of servants to carry their smelling-salts, and to stir the tropical air with palm-leaf fans. Miss Tewksbury was pleased rather than disappointed to find that Mrs. Garwood did not realize her idea of a Southern woman. The large, lumbering carriage was something, and the antiquated driver threatened to lead the mind in a some¬ what romantic direction, but both were shabby enough to be regarded as relics- and remind¬ ers rather than as active possibilities. Mrs. Garwood was bright and cordial, and the air of refinement about her was pro¬ nounced and unmistakable. Miss Tewksbury told her that Dr. Buxton had recommended Azalia as a sanitarium. Ephraim Buxton ! ” exclaimed Mrs. Gar¬ wood. ‘‘ Why, you don’t tell me that Ephraim Buxton is practicing medicine in Boston? And do you really know him ? Why, Ephraim Buxton was my first sweetheart ! ” Mrs. Garwood’s laugh was pleasant to hear, and her blushes were worth looking at as she referred to Dr. Buxton. Miss Tewksbury laughed sympathetically but primly. It was quite romantic,” Mrs. Garwood went on, in a half-humorous, half-confidential tone ; Ephraim was the school-teacher here, and I was his eldest scholar. He was young and green and awkward, but the best-hearted. the most generous mortal I ever saw. I made quite a hero of him.” Well,” said Miss Tewksbury, in her matter- of-fact way, “ I have never seen anything very heroic about Dr. Buxton. He comes and goes and prescribes his pills like all other doctors.” Ah, that was forty years ago,” said Mrs. Garwood, laughing. ‘‘A hero can become very commonplace in forty years. Dr. Buxton must be a dear, good man. Is he married ? ” ‘‘No,” said Miss Tewksbury. “He has been wise in his day and generation.” “ What a pity ! ” exclaimed the other. “ He would have made some woman happy.” Mrs. Garwood asked many questions con¬ cerning the physician who had once taught school at Azalia, and the conversation of the two ladies finally took a range that covered all New England, and, finally, the South. Each was sur¬ prised at the remarkable ignorance of the other ; but their ignorance covered different fields, so that they had merely to exchange Sfacts and information and experiences in order to entertain each other. They touched on the war delicately, though Miss Tewksbury had never cultivated the art of reserve to any great extent. At the same time there was no lack of frankness on either side. “ My son has been telling me of some of the little controversies he had with you,” said Mrs. Garwood. “ He says you fairly bristle with arguments.” “ The general never heard half my argu¬ ments,” replied Miss Tewksbury. “ He never gave me an opportunity to use them.” “ My son is very conservative,” said Mrs. Garwood, with a smile in which could be de¬ tected a mother’s fond pride. “ After the war, he felt the responsibility of his position. A great many people looked up to him. For a long time after the surrender we had no law and no courts, and there was a great deal of confusion. Oh, you can’t imagine ! Every man was his own judge and jury.” “ So I’ve been told,” said Miss Tewks¬ bury. “ Of course you know something about it, but you can have no conception of the real condition of things. It was a tremendous up¬ heaval coming after a terrible struggle, and my son felt that some one should set an exam¬ ple of prudence. His theory was, and is, that everything was for the best, and that our peo¬ ple should make the best of it. I think he was right,” Mrs. Garwood added with a sigh, “ but I don’t know.” “ Why, unquestionably ! ” exclaimed Miss Tewksbury. She was going on to say more; she felt that here was an opening for some of her arguments, but her eyes fell on Hallie, whose pale face and somber garb formed a

Page 719

AZALIA, curious contrast to the fresh-looking young woman who sat beside her. Miss Tewksbury paused. “ Did you lose any one in the war ? ” Hallie was asking softly. I lost a darling brother,” Helen re¬ plied. Hallie laid her hand on Helen’s arm, a beautiful white hand. The movement was at once a gesture and a caress. ‘‘ Dear heart ! ” she said, you must come and see me. We will talk together. I love those who are sorrowful.” Miss Tewksbury postponed her arguments, and, after some conversation, the visitors took their leave. ^^Aunt Harriet,” said Helen, when they were alone, “ what do you make of these peo¬ ple ? Did you see that poor girl and hear her talk ? She chilled me and entranced me.” ‘‘ Don’t talk so, child,” said Miss Tewksbury ; they are very good people, much better people than I thought we should find in this wilderness. It is a comfort to talk to them.” “ But that poor girl,” said Helen. She is a mystery to me. She reminds me of a figure I have seen on the stage or read about in some old book.” When Azalia heard that the Northern ladies had been called on by the mistress of Waverly, that portion of its inhabitants which was in the habit of keeping up the forms of sociability made haste to follow her example, so that Helen and her aunt were made to feel at home in spite of themselves. General Garwood Avas a frequent caller, ostensibly to engage in sec¬ tional controversies with Miss Tewksbury, which he seemed to enjoy keenly; but Mrs. Haley observed that, when Helen Avas not visi¬ ble, the general rarely prolonged his discussions Avith her aunt. The Rev. Arthur Hill also called Avith some degree of regularity, and it Avas finally under¬ stood that Helen Avould at least temporarily take the place of Miss Lou Hornsby as or¬ ganist of the little Episcopal church in the tackey settlement, as soon as Mr. Goolsby, the fat and enterprising book agent, had led the fair Louisa to the altar. This wedding occurred in due time, and was quite an event in Azalia’s social history. Goolsby Avas stout, but gallant, and Miss Hornsby made a tolerably handsome bride, notAvithstanding a tendency to giggle when her deportment should have been dig¬ nified. Helen furnished the music. General Garwood gave the bride away, and the little preacher read the ceremony quite impressively, so that, Avith the floAvers and other favors, and the subsequent dinner, Avhich Mrs. Haley called an infair,” the occasion Avas a very happy and successful one. 717 Among those Avho Avere present, not as invited guests, but by virtue of their unimpor¬ tance, Avere Mrs. Stucky and her son Bud. They Avere followed and flanked by quite a number of their neighbors, who gazed on the festal scene with an impressive curiosity that cannot be described. Pale-faced, wide-eyed, statuesque, their presence, interpreted by a vivid imagi¬ nation, might have been regarded as an omen of impending misfortune. They stood on the outskirts of the wedding company, gazing on the scene apparently Avithout an emotion of sympathy or interest. They Avere there, it seemed, to see Avhat neAv caper the tOAvns- people had concluded to cut, to regard it sol¬ emnly, and to regret it Avith grave faces Avhen the lights were out and the fantastic proces¬ sion had drifted aAvay to the village. The organ in the little church was a fine in¬ strument, though a small one. It had belonged to the little preacher’s Avife, and he had given it to the church. To his mind, the fact that she had used it sanctified it, and he had placed it in the church as a part of the sacrifice he felt called on to make in behalf of his religion. Helen played it Avith uncommon skill — a skill born of a passionate appreciation of mu¬ sic in its highest forms. The Rev. Mr. Hill listened like one entranced, but Helen played unconscious of his admiration. On the out¬ skirts of the congregation she observed Mrs. Stucky, and by her side a young man with long sandy hair, evidently uncombed, and a thin stubble of beard. Helen saw this young man pull Mrs. Stucky by the sleeve and di¬ rect her attention to the organ. Instead of looking in Helen’s direction, Mrs. Stucky fixed her eyes on the face of the young man and held them there, but he continued to stare at the organist. It Avas a gaze at once mourn¬ ful and appealing — not difterent in that re¬ spect from the gaze of any of the queer people around him, but it affected Miss Eustis strangely. To her quick imagination, it sug¬ gested loneliness — despair, that Avas the more tragic because of its isolation. It seemed to embody the mute, pent-up distress of Avhole generations. Somehow^ Helen felt herself to be playing for the benefit of this poor creature. The echoes of the wedding-march sounded grandly in the little church, then came a softly played interlude, and finally a solemn bene¬ diction, in which solicitude seemed to be giving happiness a sweet warning. As the congrega¬ tion filed out of the church, the organ sent its sonorous echoes after the departing croAvd - — echoes that Avere taken up by the Avhispering and sighing pines and borne far into the night. Mrs. Stucky did not go until after the lights were out, and then she took her son by the hand, and the two Avent to their lonely cabin

Page 720

AZALIA. 718 not far away. They went in and soon had a fire kindled on the hearth. No word had passed between them, but after awhile, when Mrs. Stucky had taken a seat in the corner and lit her pipe, she exclaimed : “ Lordy ! what a great big gob of a man ! I dunner what on the face er the yeth Lou Hornsby could ’a’ been a-dreamin’ about. From the way she’s been a-gigglin’ aroun’ I’d ’a’ thought she’d ’a’ sot her cap fer the giner’l.” I say it ! ” said Bud, laughing loudly. Whatter you reckon the giner’l ’ud ’a’ been a-doin’ all that time ? I see ’er now, a-gigglin’ an’ a-settin’ ’er cap fer the giner’l. Lordy, yes ! ” ‘‘ What’s the matter betwixt you an’ Lou ? ” asked Mrs. Stucky grimly. ‘‘ ’Taint been no time senst you wuz a-totin’ water fer her ma, an’ a-hangin’ aroun’ whilst she played the mu¬ sic in the church thar.” Bud continued to laugh. “ But, Lordy ! ” his mother went on, I reckon you’ll be a-totin’ water an’ a-run- nin’ er’n’s fer thish y er Y ankee gal what played on the orgin up thar jess now.” Well, they haint no tellin’,” said Bud, rub¬ bing his thin beard reflectively. She’s mighty- spry ’long er that orgin, an’ she’s got mighty purty han’s an’ mighty nimble fingers, an’ ef she ’uz ter let down her ha’r, she’d be plum ready ter fly.” She walked home wi’ the giner’l,” said Mrs. Stucky. “ I seed ’er,” said Bud. “ He sent some yuther gals home in the carriage, an’ him an’ the Yankee gal went a-walkin’ down the road. He humped up his arm this away, an’ the gal tuck it, an’ off they put.” Bud seemed to enjoy the recollection of the scene, for he repeated, after waiting awhile to see what his mother would have to say — Yes, siree ! she tuck it, an’ off they put.” Mrs. Stucky looked at this grown man, her son, for a long time without saying anything, and finally remarked with something very like a sigh : ‘‘ Well, honey, you neenter begrudge ’em the’r walk. Hit’s a long ways through the san’.” “ Lordy, yes’n ! ” exclaimed Bud with some¬ thing like a smile; ‘‘ it’s a mighty long ways, but the giner’l had the gal wi’ ’im. He jess humped up his arm, an’ she tuck it, an’ off they put.” It was even so. General Garwood and Helen walked home from the little church. The road was a long but a shining one. In the moonlight the sand shone white, save where little drifts and eddies of pine-needles had gathered. But these were no obstruction to the perspective, for the road was an avenue, broad and level, that lost itself in the distance only because the companionable pines, inter¬ lacing their boughs, contrived to present a background both vague and somber — a back¬ ground that receded on approach, and finally developed into the village of Azalia and its suburbs. Along this level and shining highway Helen and General Garwood went. The carriages that preceded them, and the people who walked with them or followed, gave a sort of processional pomp and movement to the gal¬ lant Goolsby’s wedding — so much so, that if he could have witnessed it, his manly bosom would have swelled with genuine pride. ‘‘ The music you gave us was indeed a treat,” said the general. ‘‘It was perhaps more than you bargained for,” Helen replied. “ I suppose everybody thought I was trying to make a display, but I quite forgot myself. I was watching its effect on one of the poor creatures near the door — do you call them tackies ? ” “ Yes, tackies. Well, we are all obliged to the poor creature — man or woman. No doubt the fortunate person was Bud Stucky. I saw him standing near his mother. Bud is famous for his love of music. When the organ is to be played. Bud is always at the church, and sometimes he goes to Waverly and makes Hallie play the piano for him while he sits out on the floor of the veranda near the window. Bud is quite a character.” “ I am so sorry for him,” said Helen gently. “ I doubt if he is to be greatly pitied,” said the general. “ Indeed, as the music was for him, and not for us, I think he is to be greatly envied.” “ I see now,” said Helen, laughing, “ that I should have restrained myself” “ The suggestion is almost selfish,” said the general gallantly. “ Well, your nights here are finer than music,” Helen remarked, fleeing to an imper¬ sonal theme. “ To walk in the moonlight, with¬ out wraps and with no sense of discomfort, in the middle of December, is a wonderful experi¬ ence to me. Last night I heard a mocking¬ bird singing, and my aunt has been asking Mrs. Haley if watermelons are ripe.” “ The mocking-birds at Waverly,” said the general, “ have become something of a nui¬ sance under Hallie’s management. There is a great flock of them on the place, and in the summer they sing all night. It is not a very pleasant experience to have one whistling at your window the whole night through.” “Mrs. Haley,” remarked Helen, “says that there are more mocking-birds now than there were before the war, and that they sing louder and more frequently.” “ I shouldn’t wonder,” the general assented.

Page 721

AZALIA. “ Mrs. Haley is quite an authority on such matters. Everybody quotes her opinions.” I took the liberty the other day,” Helen went on, ‘‘ of asking her about the Ku Klux.” And pray, what did she say ? ” the gen¬ eral asked with some degree of curiosity. Why, she said they were like the shower of stars — she had ^ heard telP of them, but she had never seen them. ^ But,’ said I, ‘ you have no doubt that the shower really occurred ! ’ ” Her illustration was somewhat unfortu¬ nate,” the general remarked. ‘‘ Oh, by no means,” Helen replied. “ She looked at me with a twinkle in her eyes and said she had heard that it wasn’t the stars that fell, after all.” Talking thus, with long intervals of silence, the two walked along the gleaming road un¬ til they reached the tavern, where Miss Eustis found her aunt and Mrs. Haley waiting on the broad veranda. ‘‘ I don’t think he is very polite,” said Helen, after her escort had bade them good-night and was out of hearing. He offered me his arm, and then, after we had walked a little way, suggested that we could get along more comfortably by marching Indian file.” Mrs. Haley laughed loudly. Why, bless your innocent heart, honey ! that aint nothin’. The sand’s too deep in the road, and the path’s too narrer for folks to be a-gwine along yarm- in-arm. Lord! don’t talk about perliteness. That man’s manners is somethin’ better’n per¬ liteness.” Well,” said Helen’s aunt, “ I can’t imag¬ ine why he should want to make you trudge through the sand in that style.” ‘‘It is probably an output of the climate,” said Helen. “ Well, now, honey,” remarked Mrs. Haley, “if he ast you to walk wi’ ’im’, he had his reasons. I’ve got my own idee,” she added with a chuckle. “ I know one thing — I know he’s monstrous fond of some of the Northron folks. Aint you never hearn how, endurin’ of the war, they fotch home a Yankee soldier along wi’ Hallie’s husband an’ buried ’em side by side ? They tell me that Hallie’s husband an’ the Yankee was mighty nigh the same age an’ had a sorter favor. If that’s so,” said Mrs. Haley, with emphasis, “then two mighty likely chaps was knocked over on. account of the everlastin’ nigger.” All this was very interesting to Helen and her aunt, and they were anxious to learn all the particulars in regard to the young Fed¬ eral soldier who had found burial at Waverly. “ What his name was,” said Mrs. Haley, “ I’ll never tell you. Old Prince, the car¬ riage driver, can tell you lots more’n I can. He foun’ ’em on the groun’ an’ he fotch ’em 719 home. Prince use to be a mighty good nig¬ ger before freedom come out, but now he aint much better’n the balance of ’em. You all’ill see him when you go over thar, bekaze he’s in an’ out of the house constant. He’ll tell you all about it if you’re mighty perlite. Folks is got so they has to be mighty perlite to niggers sence the war. Yit I’ll not deny that it’s easy to be perlite to old Uncle Prince bekaze he’s mighty perlite hisself. He’s what I call a high-bred nigger.” Mrs. Haley said this with an air of pride, as if she were in some measure responsible for Uncle Prince’s good breeding. V. It came to pass that Helen Eustis and her aunt lost the sense of loneliness which they had found so oppressive during the first weeks of their visit. In the people about them they found a never-failing fund of entertainment. They found in the climate, too, a source of health and strength. The resinous odor of the pines was always in their nostrils; the far, faint undertones of music the winds made in the trees were always in their ears. The pro¬ vinciality of the people, which some of the political correspondents describe as distress¬ ing, was so genuinely American in all its forms and manifestations, that these Boston women were enabled to draw from it now and then a whiff of New England air. They rec¬ ognized characteristics that made them feel thoroughly at home. Perhaps, so far as Helen was concerned, there were other reasons that reconciled her to her surroundings. At any rate, she was reconciled. More than this, she was happy. Her eyes sparkled, and the roses of health bloomed on her cheeks. All her movements were tributes to the buoyancy and energy of her nature. The little rector found out what this energy amounted to, when, on one occasion, he proposed to accompany her on one of her walks. It was a five-mile excursion, and he returned, as Mrs. Haley expressed it, “ a used-up man.” One morning, just before Christmas, the Waverly carriage, driven in great state by Uncle Prince, drew up in front of the tavern, and in a few moments Helen and her aunt were given to understand that they had been sent for in furtherance of an invitation they had accepted to spend the holidays at Waverly. “ Ole Miss would ’a’ come,” said Uncle Prince, with a hospitable chuckle, “but she sorter ailin’, en Miss Hallie, she dat busy dat she aint skacely got time fer ter tu’n ’roun’ ; so dey tuck’n sont atter you, ma’am, des like you wuz home folks.” The preparations of the ladies had already been made, and it was not long before they

Page 722

720 AZALIA. were swinging along under the green pines in the old-fashioned vehicle. Nor was it long before they passed from the pine forests and entered the grove of live oaks that shaded the walks and drives of Waverly. The house itself was a somewhat imposing structure, with a double veranda in front, supported by immense pillars, and surrounded on all sides by magnifi¬ cent trees. Here, as Helen and her aunt had heard on all sides, a princely establishment had existed in the old time before the war — an establishment noted for its lavish hospital¬ ity. Here visitors used to come in their car¬ riages from all parts of Georgia, from South Carolina, and even from Virginia — some of them remaining for weeks at a time, and giv¬ ing to the otherwise dull neighborhood long seasons of riotous festivity which were at once characteristic and picturesque. The old days had gone to come no more, but there was something in the atmosphere that seemed to recall them. The stately yet simple architec¬ ture of the house, the trees with their rugged and enormous trunks, the vast extent of the grounds — everything, indeed, that came un¬ der the eye — seemed to suggest the past. A blackened and broken statue lay prone upon the ground hard by the weather-beaten basin of a fountain long since dry. Two tall granite columns that once guarded an immense gate¬ way supported the fragmentary skeletons of two colossal lamps. There was a suggestion not only of the old days before the war, but of antiquity — a suggestion that was intensi¬ fied by the great hall, the high ceilings, the wide fireplaces, and the high mantels of the house itself. These things somehow gave a weird aspect to Waverly in the eyes of the visitors, but this feeling was largely atoned for by the air of tranquillity that brooded over the place, and it was utterly dispersed by the heartiness with which they were welcomed. Here we is at home, ma’am,” exclaimed Uncle Prince, opening the carriage door and bowing low ; en yon’ come ole Miss en Miss Hallie.” The impression which Helen and her aunt received, and one which they never succeeded in shaking off during their visit, was that they were regarded as members of the family who had been away for a period, but who had now come home to stay. Just how these gentle hosts managed to impart this impression, Helen and Miss Tewksbury would have found it hard to explain, but they discovered that the art of entertaining was not a lost art even in the piney woods. Every incident, and even ac¬ cidents, contributed to the enjoyment of the guests. Even the weather appeared to exert itself to please. Christmas morning was ush¬ ered in with a sharp little flurry of snow. The scene was a very pretty one, as the soft white flakes, some of them as large as a canary’s wing, fell athwart the green foliage of the live oaks and the magnolias. ‘‘ This is my hour ! ” exclaimed Helen en¬ thusiastically. “ We enjoy it with you,” said Hallie simply. During the afternoon the clouds melted away, the sun came out, and the purple haze of Indian summer took possession of air and sky. In an hour the weather passed from the crisp and sparkling freshness of winter to the wistful melancholy beauty of autumn. This,” said Hallie gently, ‘‘ is my hour.” She was standing on the broad veranda with Helen. For reply, the latter placed her arm around the Southern girl, and they stood thus for along time, their thoughts rhyming to the plaintive air of a negro melody that found its way across the fields and through the woods. Christmas at Waverly, notwithstanding the fact that the negroes were free, was not greatly different from Christmas on the Southern plan¬ tations before the war. Few of the negroes who had been slaves had left the place, and those that remained knew how a Christmas ought to be celebrated. They sang the old- time songs, danced the old-time dances, and played the old-time plays. All this was deeply interesting to the gen¬ tlewomen from Boston; but there was one incident that left a lasting impression on both, and probably had its effect in changing the future of one of them. It occurred one even¬ ing when they were all grouped around the fire in the drawing-room. The weather had grown somewhat colder than usual, and big hickory logs were piled in the wide fireplace. At the suggestion of Hallie, the lights had been put out, and they sat in the ruddy glow of the firelight. The effect was picturesque indeed. The furniture and the polished wain¬ scoting glinted and shone, and the shadows of the big brass andirons were thrown upon the ceiling, where they performed a witch’s dance, the intricacy of which was amazing to behold. It was an interesting group, representing the types of much that is best in the civiliza¬ tion of the two regions. Their talk covered a great variety of subjects, but finally drifted into reminiscences of the war — reminiscences of its incidents rather than its passions. ^‘1 have been told,” said Miss Eustis, ‘Hhat a dead Union soldier was brought here dur¬ ing the war and buried. Was his name ever known ? ” There was a long pause. General Garwood gazed steadily into the fire. His mother sighed gently. Hallie, who had been resting her head against Helen’s shoulder, rose from her chair and glided from the room as swiftly as a ghost.

Page 723

AZALIA, 721 “ Perhaps I have made a mistake,” said Helen in dismay. “ The incident was so strange - ” ‘‘ No, Miss Eustis, you have made no mis¬ take,” said General Garwood, smiling a lit¬ tle sadly. “ One moment - ” He paused, as if listening for something. Presently the faint sound of music was heard. It stole softly from VoL. XXXIV.— 99. the dark parlor into the warm firelight as if it came from far away. ‘‘ One moment,” said General Garwood. It is Hallie at the piano.” The music, without increasing in volume, suddenly gathered coherency, and there fell on the ears of the listening group the notes of an air so plaintive that it seemed like the break-

Page 724

722 THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. ing of a heart. It was as soft as an echo and as tender as the memories of love and youth. “We have to be very particular with Hal- lie,” said the general, by way of explanation. “ The Union soldier in our burying-ground is intimately connected with her bereavement and ours. Hers is the one poor heart that keeps the fires of grief always burning. I think she is willing the story should be told.” “Yes,” said his mother; “else she would never go to the piano.” “ I feel like a criminal,” said Helen. “ How can I apologize ? ” “ It is we who ought to apologize and ex¬ plain,” replied General Garwood; “ you shall hear the story, and then neither explanation nor apology will be necessary.” Joel Charidler Harris, (To be continued.) THE AMATEUR HE subtle alchemy of the hobby has never worked more interesting results than in the case of the amateur photographer. That gentle madness which has given a trite¬ ness to the phrase “ en¬ thusiastic amateur,” is especially engaging in the person of one who has succumbed to the curious contagion of the camera. And there is something so communicable in this enthu¬ siasm, that it behooves no one to regard the phenomenon with- disrespectful flippancy. Who is to know that his best friend has not been taken down over night ? In the street a man feels a hand upon his shoulder, and is served by Banks or Temple with a moral subpoena for a sitting. Once acquired, the photographic passion is easily gratified. The inventive genius of the century seems to have conspired for its en¬ couragement. The daintiest devices in wood and brass, the coyest lenses, the airiest tripods, the snuggest carrying-cases, — all seem espe¬ cially endowed with that peculiar quality which tempts one who has straddled a new hobby to plant the spurs impetuously. A few years ago matters were very different. The keynote of amateur photography, the “ dry-plate,” has been supplied within eight or ten years, since the dry-plate process, though in use for more than a decade, was not brought to trust¬ worthy perfection until it had undergone several seasons’ trial. There were, indeed, “wet- plate amateurs,” and there are to-day some who follow the example of many profes¬ sionals in adhering to the older methocl. But amateur photography now practically means dry-plate photography. It was the amateur who welcomed the dry-plate at a time when the professional was yielding it only a cautious tolerance. Why he welcomed it may scarcely require explanation. PHOTOGRAPHER. The principle of the wet-plate process is suggested by its name. The glass negative- plate is coated with collodion, exposed in the camera Avhile wet, and developed at once. This implies the presence of appliances within a short distance of the place where the expos¬ ure is made. • In order to make views out-of- doors the photographer was obliged to carry an outfit which in these times would look lugubri¬ ously elaborate. I have seen a “ home-made ”■ amateur wet- plate apparatus, made very in¬ geniously of telescoping boxes, with an eye¬ hole at the top, an arm-hole at each side, an orange-light window in the front (for all the tinkering with the moist plate had to be done without white, actinic light), and the whole,, with its trays, baths, solutions in bottles, etc.^ could be reduced to a relatively small bundle. When the dry-plate arrived it became pos¬ sible to do away with all this ponderous machinery. The dry-plates, bought ready pre¬ pared, can be kept for months before use, and for months again after exposure before they are developed — a phenomenon of which the wonder is always new. Thus one may cany a camera with him through Europe, pack up the exposed plates, and, unless some custom¬ house official, to the amateur’s unspeakable despair, insists upon opening a few of the pack¬ ages to discern the meaning of their ominous weight, develop them all on his return home. This element of portability is not the onl}r feature of the dry-plate process which had an immediate influence upon the development of amateur photography. A capacity for rapid work was from the outset an important char¬ acteristic of the process. By continued experi¬ ment the sensitiveness of the gelatine film with which the plates are coated was from time to time increased, until now an exposure for the two-hundredth part of a second is sufficient to* secure an adequate negative. The value of this achievement is wider than the field of the amateur. Within the few years during- which instantaneous work has been possi-

Page 725

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. 723 A STREET BAND. (TAKEN FROM A THIRD-STORY WINDOW BY J. WELLS CHAMPNEY. ble, both science and art have increased their obligations to the camera. Every one remem¬ bers the burst of merriment and wonder that greeted Mr. Muybridge’s pictures of the horse in motion. The motion of a sound-jarred lamp- flame, the flight of a cannon-shot, the fork¬ ings of lightning, and a thousand other phe¬ nomena have been dexterously photographed. Through this medium both the naturalist and the surgeon have gained a better knowledge of muscular action. One anatomist uses the rapid plate to settle the long-standing dispute as to whether, in the twirling of the fist, the tilna or the radius moves the more ; another fastens with bee’s-wax upon the line of a model’s spine a row of glistening Christmas- tree balls, and then takes a dozen impressions within a second while the model is walking away from the operator. It is in this manner that instantaneous photography has made it¬ self invaluable to students in many depart¬ ments of knowledge, students who, while they are in a sense amateur photographers, make professional use of the product. A novel result of the instantaneous process is seen in the camera without legs. There is only one way to get along without a tripod,” said a well-known New York photographer. “ You must focus, and for this purpose a stick, inserted in the bottom of the camera and rest¬ ing in the ground, might be used.” After being assured by excellent authorities that the idea was absurd, Mr. William Schmid, of Brooklyn, N. Y., made the first of the detective” cam¬ eras. Mr. Schmid is neither a professional photographer nor a mechanic, but a musician. Let me say behind a respectful parenthesis that most of the improve¬ ments in modern photog¬ raphy have been discov¬ ered or instituted by amateurs. Working only for pleasure and attain¬ ment, the amateur thinks nothing of a risk. He in¬ dulges in most unortho¬ dox measures, violating recognized rules of pro¬ cedure, and with bewil¬ dering impunity. Then, the amateur blunders. To blunder is to discover, though it is infinitely more pleasurable to have the other fellow do the discovering. With his client waiting without to learn the result of the sit¬ ting, the professional can¬ not afford to discover at this price. The “ detective ” solved several problems. Focusing, which is a simple matter of arithme¬ tic, was accomplished with a lever. In order to discover the field of the lens and the situa¬ tion of the image on the plate, a small camera obscura was fitted in the front of the box ; and a perforated disk of black rubber made the ex¬ posure in a space of time ranging between the thirty-fifth and the one-hundred- and-thirtieth part of a second. Nothing connected with photography has proved so fascinating as this “ detective ” camera. Disguised in a small, inconspicuous box, which might readily be taken for a professional hand- satchel, it is indeed a witch-machine,” as it was named last summer by an astonished resident of the Tyrol, when, under its inventor’s arm, it was winking its way through some of the quaintest towns of Europe. In the open air nothing is closed against the “ detective.” In the rigging of a tossing ocean steamer, or in a crowd on the Bowery, it is always prepared, with one eye open and the other shut. Frag¬ ments of street scenery, little genre bits in out-of-the-way corners, tableaux in rustic or town life, requiring instant capture, all impossible to the ordinary camera, are caught by the detective ” in their very effervescence. In the hands of police offi¬ cials the detective ” has justi¬ fied its name. It has already several times figured in court proceedings, and may well be regarded with uneasiness by those whose face is not their A “home-made” WET-PLATE OUTFIT.

Page 726

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. 724 MABEL. (taken BY ALEXANDER BLACK.) fortune. An English detective is described as having disguised himself as a bootblack and hidden a camera in a foot-box, with results very gratifying to the Police Department and very bewildering to the rogues. Several varieties of the detective,” or port¬ able, camera are in the market. Then there is the “ vest camera,” consisting of a false vest in which one of the false buttons forms the neck of the lens. For stealing portraits the arrangement is very ingenious, and ought to prove a valuable assistant to the caricaturist. The pictures, though small, are sometimes sur¬ prisingly good. Again, a German has secreted a camera in the hat. An ostensible ventilating aperture in the front is the eye-hole of the lens. For larger and more serious work the port¬ able camera is, of course, inadequate. Prob¬ ably the favorite size of camera with experi¬ enced amateurs is the camera fitted for 5x8 inch plates. The size has, after all, little to do with the value of the result. Wisdom dictates the utility of a modestly small camera at the outset. In sizes larger than 5x8 inches, or x8^ inches, — another useful size, — plates become somewhat expensive playthings. The discovery that negatives can be made with gelatine- coated paper, which is placed on roll¬ ers and reeled, panorama-like, at the back of the camera, has opened up interesting possi¬ bilities to the photographer. Vastly more important than the precise size of the box is the character of the lens, upon which the quality of the photograph is wholly dependent. In his selection of a lens every shrewd amateuris careful; but as every shrewd amateur is not shrewd when he buys his first lens, it is not inadvisable to emphasize at all times the prudence, whatever the cost of the outfit, of spending at least half of the sum on

Page 727

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. the lens; to sa)^ two-thirds of the sum would be stating a better rule. But out-of-door apparatus is no bugbear to the amateur. So far as the camera and its im¬ mediate appliances go, no difficulty is com¬ monly found in getting just what is needed, provided the buyer does not stake his happi¬ ness on the first camera that is shown him, without looking over the series of later inven¬ tions. Photography indoors and the processes of the dark-room have not so many ready¬ made features as picture- making in the open air. The dark-room problem must be solved 725 of the plates is deferred until the evening (a com¬ mon practice), the precautions for excluding light will be to a great extent unnecessary. Whether simply or elaborately treated, the dark-room is certain to remain a ‘‘ matter in difference” between the photographer and the head of the domestic bureau. Whether he has an apartment dedicated to his uses, or an im¬ promptu den evolved from the bath-room and an assortment of blankets and shawls, the am¬ ateur incurs a liability to feminine displeasure, and must find his own way of offering propiti¬ ation. In case the photographer is of the other sex (a possibility of which the chances ON THE MIAMI CANAL. (TAKEN BY J. D. SMITH.) at the very beginning. The photographer must find some place in the house from which all light can be excluded, and where there is, if possi¬ ble, running water. “ I would like photography a good deal better,” said a Boston lawyer the other day, ‘^if my attic ceiling didn’t slope so suddenly.” It is not so much that attics are apt to have a forty-five degree emphasis, as that the absorbed operator, working with a dim light, forgets all about the slope. A per¬ manent dark-room is probably the exception among amateurs, who are generally able to find a room or the corner of a room which may be pressed into service during the time developing is going on. If the development daily become interestingly greater), woman’s superiority over the domestic forces upon which it is necessary to rely will come into play to her benefit. In making pictures indoors, the illumina¬ tion, instead of being managed by nature, as out-of-doors, must be managed by the pho¬ tographer. In the house, unless the amateur has a roof-opening of some sort, securing the ‘Top light” of the professional, portraits and groups must be made with only the side light of windows. This unfavorable angle of light must be overcome by the use of reflectors, which may consist of an adjustable white screen, or have the unpremeditated pictur-

Page 728

726 THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. ROSE OF SHARON. (TAKEN BY GEORGE B. WOOD.) esqueness of a sheet thrown over a clothes- horse. One of the first enterprises an amateur essays is the photographing of an interior. In this way he characteristically begins at the most difficult end of the art. Nothing is more precarious than photographing an interior. The windows, which supply the light, are the source of the greatest anxiety, since they them¬ selves generally require only the short expos¬ ure given a landscape, while the dim interior demands an exposure perhaps fifty times as long. To overcome this difficulty, windows coming within the range of the lens must be covered carefully until a sufficient exposure has been given to the rest of the room. The cap is then replaced, the window coverings re¬ moved, and a short exposure given the whole. An interior may often be photographed to advantage by gas-light. The chief obstacle in the way of success by this method is that of keeping the source of light out of the range of the lens. Several hours may be required to make a satisfactory negative, but the result will be an ample reward. A New York pub¬ lisher, who can show a handsome series of negatives, once undertook to photograph his library by gas-light. So that there might be no possibility of intrusion, he did not set his camera until ten o’clock in the evening, and concluded to leave the cap off for two hours. On that night his daughter was going to an evening party. He asked her when she would be home. At twelve o’clock, sir,” she re¬ plied with readiness. There was obviously no

Page 729

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. reason why the publisher should sit up ; his daughter understood the cap arrangement thoroughly. Maggie,” he said, when you come home you will find my camera set in the library. Go in and put on the cap and turn off the gas.” The next day the publisher developed the plate. It was a complete fail¬ ure, horribly over-exposed; scarcely an object was discernible. Maggie ! ” called the pub¬ lisher from the door of his den, in tones that forbade equivocation, what time did you get home? ” “ At — three o’clock, sir,” said Maggie. Portraits and all amateur indoor pictures are liable to have this characteristic of deep shad¬ ows, so repugnant to the business photographer. 727 bicyclist screws a jaunty, elfin camera upon the cross-bar of his wheel ; the canoeist stows one in his locker. Transparencies and lantern slides are read¬ ily made from negatives, and are a special hobby with many amateurs. Chicago has formed a Lantern Slide Club, evidently with a view to cooperation in this particular field. We shall doubtless soon hear of Composite Clubs, since composite portraiture has com¬ pletely subjugated the amateur. A thrill of excitement is occasionally caused by the an¬ nouncement that some one has photographed in color; the truth being that some one has a new scheme for the photographing of color. ON THE WAY FROM SCHOOL. (TAKEN BY WILLIAM SCHMID.) Yet these are the strong lights and shades the artist loves. The effect is warmer, more indi¬ vidual, than in the so-called well-lighted ” portrait or interior. I have seen portraits that left a little too much to the imagination ; there is a happy mean. In many other respects amateur work has its own special charm. Freed from the commer¬ cial necessities which fetter the professional, the amateur need have nothing but the princi¬ ples of art for guidance. In this delicious liberty he well may be, and is, envied by those who must yield something to the whim of the buyer, and who have a hard fight with the Philistines in every effort to elevate the standard of their art. The amateur has an opportunity to infuse individuality into his products, — one is expert at portraiture ; another at landscape ; a third is noted for his city t3''pes and localities; a fourth takes up with natural-history subjects ; a fifth with yachts and water views; the Isochromatic, orthochromatic, or axioscotic photography, as we may agree to term it, has drawn a great deal of attention of late from all who for any reason are interested in pho¬ tography. The Germans have made great prog¬ ress in the farhen-empfiudliche (“ color- sensi¬ tive ”) methods. In the United States science and art have been placed under obligations to Mr. Ives, of Philadelphia, who has completely mastered the hitherto insurmountable difficulty of gaining in a photograph the relative color values of the objects photographed. A New York physician, the windows of whose house overlook the East River from the bluff on the east side of the city, is too busy to go after subjects, but lets his subjects, like his patients, come to him. At the window of an upper room in his house he has a camera set with a drop-shutter, — used for instan¬ taneous work, — carefully adjusted. From his easy-chair in the consulting-room on the lower floor he can look out on the river, can see the

Page 730

728 THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. PORTRAIT OK A CHILD. (TAKEN 13Y ALEXANDER BLACK.) plebeian river craft crawling and smoking upon the water, and every afternoon may watch the self-important Sound steamers churning their Avay past the indifferent small fry of the stream. When one of these autocrats of the Sound or some other floating object of importance looms within the range of the lens, the doctor may touch an electric button near his inkstand, and upstairs at the window that little shutter- guillotine bites off a square inch of light, which carries the image to the sensitive plate at the back of the camera. After office hours the doctor goes up and takes out the plate. The curiously diverse personnel of amateur photography * includes a large number of act¬ ive physicians. It is worthy of note that the profession of medicine seems to foster the cul¬ tivation of hobbies. How great a debt art owes to the fact that Dr. Haden began playing with the etching needle ! Some of our prominent Eastern merchants have gone into photog¬ raphy in a characteristically sumptuous way, fitting up luxurious sky-light rooms, and add¬ ing to the dark-room equipment every mechan¬ ical comfort money may buy. A Massachusetts parson, who loves to drive a decorously fast team, has a cluster of prints illustrating the charming region through which he makes his Monday tours. A Brooklyn Court stenogra¬ pher can reveal the vagaries of the police station and the Black Maria. It is, perhaps, not essential to the unity of this sketch that I should mention, as illustrating a phase of the subject, a hospital steward at the Sandwich Islands who took up with photography for the purpose of practicing on the leprosy patients; or the Canadian sheriff who added the tortures of an unwilling pose to the misery of a batch of prisoners who were about to be hanged ! The rapid growth of amateur photography is forcibly indicated by the number and size of the amateur photographic societies. All the large and many of the smaller cities have now one or more associations of this sort. Many New York amateurs are associated with the Photographic Section of the American Institute. The Columbia College Amateur Photographic Society finds a leading spirit in Professor Chandler. The Society of Amateur Photographers, of New York, organized four years ago, is now a large and prosperous or¬ ganization, holding annual exhibitions and awarding diplomas for the best examples of work in different fields. The Society’s infiuence has had the effect of elevating the artistic stand¬ ard not only of amateur photography, but of photographic art in general. At the semi¬ monthly meetings the members discuss with frankness the experiments they have made, relate their mild vicissitudes, describe their blunders and the resultant discoveries. No one is ashamed that he should have made mis¬ takes. An amateur who had no failures would be regarded as a sort of artistic snob. As an off-set to this variety, where it exists, there is generally the humorous fellow whose plates always either fog ” or frill,” whose prints freckle, and who, when he insists on silver¬ ing ” his own paper, gets a little nitrate of silver on the end of his nose, where it prompt¬ ly blushes brown on meeting the sun, and can only be removed, if it must be removed at once, with pumice-stone or sand-paper. The ‘‘ Field Day” has become an institution with the amateur societies, and woe to the sen¬ sitive who get in the path of one of these armed bodies ! On these excursions the member with the detective ” usually has his best sport in practicing on the other members, who, at the moment of a photographic crisis, are not always so impressive as they themselves could wish. What a flow of “ developer ” after one of these country tours ! Far into the night, per¬ haps, the trays are rocking, and the lanterns dimly flickering; and in quarters, mayhap, * The Tzar is said to be one of the growing cony Great Britain, has acquired much expertness with the pany of Russian amateurs ; the Prince of Wales, Presi- camera, and royal sanction has elsewhere, it seems, dent of the Amateur Photographic Association of been very heartily given.

Page 731

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER, 729 that were hard to secure and duly transform, house, certainly not the well-regulated hotel Country-side and sea-shore know the amateur of the future, will neglect to incorporate in its photographer, his practices, and his needs. We table of attractions, Improved Dark-room cannot believe that the country boarding- for Amateur Photographers.” Alexander Black. THE CAMERA CLUB OF CINCINNATI. One evening in January, 1884, in response to a circular letter of invitation issued by Mr. Gilmore and the writer, some eight or ten amateurs met at the house of the former in Cincinnati and determined to form the Cam¬ era Club. After some discussion of the subject and a luncheon, washed down by a cool bev¬ erage which Cincinnati thinks she can make better than Milwaukee, a committee on organi¬ zation was appointed, and we adjourned sub¬ ject to the call of our chairman, a worthy doc¬ tor of medicine, Avhen our committee should be ready to report. After some ineffectual ef¬ forts to ascertain what the older clubs formed for a similar purpose had done, our committee decided to ‘‘ go it alone,” and proceeded to draw a constitution and by-laws providing for officers, members, meetings, excursions, and lantern-exhibitions, the exclusion of pro¬ fessional photographers, the admission of others, males, interested in the gentle art of light-writing, and further providing for many minor matters which have long since been forgotten by the framers of that organic law of the club. So much having been accom¬ plished, we had a second meeting at a law of- rice in Fountain Square, and the Camera Club there came into an actual, if not a legal, exist¬ ence — it having been decided not to apply for the statutory articles of incorporation. The constitution provided for an election of officers by ballot and upon notice, but the club at once proceeded to an election by acclama¬ tion ; and although the constitution was thus shattered within a few moments of its adop¬ tion, the Camera Club has flourished and pros¬ pered and grown to a membership of some fifty persons, who meet from time to time in a well-fitted club-room, and have lantern shows and excursions whenever they see fit. IN THE LANE AT SHORT HILL. (TAKEN BY DWIGHT W. HUNTINGTON.) VoL. XXXIV. — 100.

Page 732

730 THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. The club-room is on the top floor of a large building on Fourth street. There is no eleva¬ tor, and the stairways are high — but the rent is low.* Climbing the stairways, we enter a large room well lighted by three windows and a sky-light on its northern side. The camera, the screens, the head-rests, and the tables lit¬ tered with lenses, plate-holders, and printing- frames give the room the appearance of a photographic gallery. The many pictures on the walls, however, are the pictures of amateurs. Technically they rival the best professional work, but in subject they are entirely differ¬ ent; for the professional must necessarily con¬ sider what is salable ; the amateur need only consider what is picturesque. The professional, traveling for a railway company, for example, will secure as many rails and telegraph-poles as possible ; the amateur in going over the same ground will leave the railway out. A large frame on the club-room wall con¬ tains the prize pictures of the field contest of 1885. Another frame contains a number of pictures of an old mill on the Kentucky River, from the same negative, but printed on differ¬ ent kinds of paper, showing a variety of the modern printing processes. The dark-room adjoins the gallery and is large and spacious. It is well lighted with two windows glazed with ruby glass and screened by yellow curtains. Beneath the windows there is a long sink with several faucets flanked by small barrels of Hypo” and alum and numer¬ ous shelves containing the necessary chemicals and many trays and glass graduates. On a table are the scales, and a gas stove with its kettles for making the hot solutions.” The dark-room is approached by means of double doors with an intervening dark lobby, so that members can go in or out without ad¬ mitting a single ray of white light. The image formed on the plate can, as we have observed, be developed at any time. The latent image is developed by pouring upon the plate any one of the number of sim¬ ple chemical solutions, the receipts for which come with the plates. This must be done in the semi-darkness of the dark-room, as the plate is, of course, still sensitive to light. The actinic ray of light, it has been ascertained, is that farthest from the ray of heat, and the red ray has but little effect upon the sensitive plates. In the rosy twilight of the dark-room, the plates (which perhaps have received an image months ago in Florida or California) are placed in trays and the developing solu¬ tion poured on. In a few seconds the picture begins to appear. First come the sky, the * The club has since taken quarters with the Society of Natural History — the fixtures are the same. water, and the lighter objects, and these are soon followed by the deeper shadows of the foliage. It is an interesting process and smacks, indeed, of necromancy. In the month of February, when the Camera Club was but a month old, the great floods in the Ohio Valley came. The river at Cincin¬ nati reached the highest point it has ever at¬ tained, and came rushing through the streets of the city, bringing ruin and destruction to many houses and families, but affording a rare opportunity for a photographic contest be¬ tween the amateurs and their professional brethren. Every camera in town was at the river fron t, or cruising about the flooded streets ; and it is but fair to state that the work of the amateurs on this occasion compared favorably with that of the professionals. The amateurs, too, being ready with their instantaneous shut¬ ters, secured the only animated picture of that remarkable event. Since the organization of the Camera Club the regular meetings have been well attended. Almost any day at noon several members may be found in the dark-room developing j^lates or instructing each other in the magic of the photographic, art. Early in the summer of 1884 we had our first annual outing. A small river steamboat, the Silver Slar, was chartered, and at eight o’clock left the wharf with a jolly and enthu¬ siastic crowd, notwithstanding a dark and gloomy morning. As we steamed away down the placid stream which divides the North from the South, the smoke hung low upon the river; it seemed to grow darker and threat¬ ened rain. The camera-boxes and tripods re¬ mained unpacked on the cabin floor, and we sat about in groups and “ talked about the weather.” Wake up, boys,” said the secre¬ tary ; “ I never yet saw the day I couldn’t make a picture.” “Yes,” said his companion, “ we made some good pictures of the flood while it was raining.” “ The plates are so sensitive,” remarked the professor, “ that with a large stop I have no doubt we may get some instantaneous pictures, for the river, you know, reflects most of the light.” Then our artist claimed there was a softness about pictures made under a cloudy sky and that the sun made sharp and disagreeable con¬ trasts, and a younger member disrespectfully remarked, in an undertone, something about sour grapes. But as the secretary was recog¬ nized as an authority, his confidence was re¬ assuring ; we accepted the situation, and were soon at work. A passing steamboat, with its dense clouds of black smoke waving astern, caused a scram¬ bling for the forward deck, and one camera

Page 733

THE AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER. 731 retary, by means of a pneumatic tube and shut¬ ter, had succeeded in including himself in most of his pictures. A fair sample of his work is his Quail-shooting in Kansas.” In this auto¬ photograph ” (if I may coin a word) the sec¬ retary stands in the foreground of his picture and iiis dogs are pointing the birds, some of which a moment later, upon the closing of the camera-shutter, fell to the guns. The secretary declares that next year he will shoot a bird and photograph it in the air before it falls; and no doubt he will, for he has already in practice ‘‘bagged” the fragments of a clay pigeon. “The Diver” is a clever instantaneous shot made by a club- man who went down by the sea. This picture is not only remarkable for the short time in which it was taken, but it is a beautiful bit of landscape, with some salt- grass and two boats in the middle distance and a few sloops lying at anchor just beyond, — a little out of focus perhaps, but for that reason all the more sketchy and artistic. A MOUNTAIN RANCH. (TAKEN BY H. F. FARNY.) went overboard, but was fortunately rescued. A picnic boat, with flying flags and crowded decks, was the occasion of a similar scene; but as none of her portraits have ever appeared in the club-room, it is fair to presume that the light was insufficient, the aim bad, or something happened in the hurry of the moment. The secretary, avoiding the crowded deck, erected his tripod by a cabin window, and secured an instantaneous picture of some fishing-boats as our steamboat passed them. The artist sat upon the forward deck smok¬ ing his cigar and scanning the banks of the river for some unusually picturesque spot. A bit of country road on the Kentucky shore having caught his eye, he persuaded the committee of arrangements to make a land¬ ing, and our little craft was soon made fast among some drift-wood and willows. The artist, with his servant-model carrying his Blair box, climbed the steep river bank to the picturesque roadway. Some sought the shaded path on the hillside, others remained among the wil¬ lows on the shore. The Silve?'- Star was ordered to cruise about within easy range while the secretary gave the professor some practical lessons in instantaneous pho¬ tography, and near¬ ly every drop-shut¬ ter in the ranks was let fly at her. At noon we landed at Short Hill, a fine old country - seat owned by one of the club-men, who, with his two young boys, met us at the landing. Our lun¬ cheon was served upon the lawn, and before we had fin¬ ished eating, the “engineer” had a clever group which he entitled “ The Club at Work,” and which, upon the screen, won the plaudits of the audience at the lantern exhibi¬ tion last winter. In the afternoon we continued our cruise to the mouth of the Great Miami, and at evening returned well laden with some¬ thing over a hundred exposed plates, most of which made fine negatives. During the summer many of the club-men left the city, and all made good use of their cameras. In the autumn the travelers returned with many pictures of many places. The sec¬ The artist wandered away to the far North¬ west and brought back, besides his color sketches, many photographs of Indians, cow¬ boys and plain-men, ranches, prairie, bad¬ lands, sage-bush, and everything, in fact, which an artist could see in the wilds of Montana. One member returning from Newport brought many pictures of the sea, yachts under full sail, armed vessels of the navy, craft of all sorts, and charming marine pictures which would delight a painter. Others came from Lake George and the Adirondacks, with grand

Page 734

732 NOBLESSE OBLIGE. views of lake and mountain with foregrounds full of summer friends and picturesque coaches and canoes. In the autumn and winter others who went to the South returned with the light- writings of a Southern sun, including an occasional drop- shutter ” picture from the hotel window. In the winter the club had its first lantern exhibition. For weeks prior to that event the club-rooms were a scene of activity, the members all being engaged in reducing their negatives to small positives on glass for ex¬ hibition on the screen. A committee of judges, having with the aid of a lantern tested the hundreds of slides offered, selected enough for an evening’s entertainment, to which the friends of the club were invited, and one of the mem¬ bers described the pictures as they were thrown upon the screen. All the slides exhibited were made by club-men from their own negatives. Upon our second outing several detective cameras made their appearance, and they have become a popular and very fatal weapon, and there will probably be many persons at our next lantern show who are unaware that they have had their pictures taken. Such is an outline of the history and more important doings of the Camera Club. Since this article was written the American Clubs have arranged for an interchange of their lantern exhibitions, and the London Club annually exchanges two hundred lantern pic¬ tures for a similar number from the Associated American Clubs. Dwight W. Huntmgton . THE DIVER. (TAKEN BY JOHN L. STETTINIUS.) NOBLESSE OBLIGE. WHAT is diviner than the peace of foes ! He conquers not who does not conquer hate. Or thinks the shining wheels of heaven wait On his forgiving. Dimmer the laurel shows On brows that darken ; and war-won repose Is but a truce when heroes abdicate To Huns — imfabling those of elder date Whose every corse a fiercer warrior rose. O ye that saved the land ! Ah yes, and ye That bless its saving! Neither need forget The price our destiny did of both demand — Toil, want, wounds, prison, and the lonely sea Of tears at home. Oh, look on these. And yet — Before the human fail you — quick 1 your hand ! Robert Underwood JoJmson.

Page 735

THE DIGESTIBILITY OF FOOD. THE CHEMISTRY OF FOODS AND NUTRITION. IV. “We live upon, not what we eat, but what we digest.” — Meinert. “ Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both.” — Macbeth. E have been talking of the different kinds of nutritive substances of food and the ways in which they nourish our bodies, but have thus far omitted one of the very important factors of their nutritive value, their di¬ gestibility. The value of food for nutriment depends not only upon how much of nutrients, protein and fats and the like, it contains, but also upon how much of these the body can digest and use for its support. The question of the digestibility of foods is very complex, and I have noticed that the men \ who know most about the subject are gener¬ ally the least ready to make definite and sweep¬ ing statements concerning it. One of the most celebrated physiologists of the time, an investi¬ gator who has, I suppose, devoted as much ex¬ perimental study to this particular subject as any man now living, declares that, aside from the chemistry of the process, and the quanti¬ ties of nutrients that may be digested from different foods, he is unable to affirm much of anything about it. The contrast between this and the positiveness with which many people discourse about the digestibility of this or that kind of food, is very marked and has its moral. One source of confusion is the fact that, what people commonly call the digestibility of food includes several very different things; some of which, as the ease with which a given food-material is digested, the time required for the process, the influence of different sub¬ stances and conditions upon digestion, and the effects upon comfort and health, are so de¬ pendent upon individual peculiarities of differ- * We are hearing a great deal of late about poisons in food containing protein compounds, such as the casein of milk and the myosin of lean meat and fish. The protein compounds are prone to decay, that is, to be decomposed by the action of the ferments called bacteria or microbes. In certain forms of decom¬ position, substances of a more or less poisonous nature, called ptomaines, are formed from protein. It appears to be in this way that poisonous compounds are formed in cheese, meats, etc. While the true digestive ferments, such as the ptyalin of saliva and pepsin of gastric juice, are very different from the ferments just spoken of, yet microbes exist in the digestive apparatus of even the VOL. XXXIV. — lOI- 102. ent people, and so difficult of measurement, as to make the laying down of hard and fast rules impossible. Why it is, for instance, that some persons are made seriously ill by so wholesome a material as milk, and others find that certain kinds of meat, of vegetables, or of sweetmeats, “ do not agree with them,” neither chemists nor physiologists can exactly tell. Late inves¬ tigations, however, suggest the possibility that the ferments in the digestive canal may, with some people, cause particular compounds to be changed into injurious and even poisonous forms, so that it may sometimes be literally true that “ one man’s meat is another man’s poison.”* But digestion proper, by which we under¬ stand the changes which the food undergoes in the digestive canal in order to fit the digest¬ ible portion to be taken into the blood and lymph and do its work as nutriment, is essen¬ tially a chemical process. About this a great deal has been learned within a comparatively few years, so that here again we have many important facts that have not yet got into cur¬ rent literature. In explaining about them per¬ haps it will not be out of the way to repeat some of the things we learned in studying chemistry and physiology. We will start with the facts that the first thing the body does with the food is to digest it; that the digestion is done in that long irregular shaped piece of ap¬ paratus — laboratory is perhaps a better word — which consists of mouth, oesophagus, stom¬ ach, and intestines, and which is called the ali¬ mentary canal ; that it is next converted into blood ; that to get into the blood it must pass through the sides, the walls, of this canal ; and that it is only after the food has been digested healthiest people, and within a short time past it has been found that poisonous compounds, formed proba¬ bly by the action of microbes, often occur within our bodies. The natural inference — it is not positively proved, I think — is that there may be cases in which the protein of certain kinds of food is thus transformed into injurious substances while passing through the alimentary canal. Perhaps this is the reason why cer¬ tain persons cannot endure milk without pain or nau¬ sea, and it is not impossible that many of the cases in which one kind of food or another causes sickness, may, in the light of future research, be attributed to such fermentations within the body.

Page 736

734 THE DIGESTIBILITY OF FOOD. and has worked its way into the blood and lymph that it can be distributed through the body and made into tissue, stored for future use, or burned for fuel. I doubt if most of us realize what an amount of chemical activity the stomach and intestines must put forth, what a wonderful laboratory that must be which transforms our food into the constituents of blood. The average man swallows, say, six pounds of food and drink, meat, potatoes, bread, coffee, milk, water, and what not, per day. Every twenty-four hours, then, all the solid substance, all the protein, fats, carbohydrates, and min¬ eral matters of this quantity of food, except the small portion that passes through the ali¬ mentary canal undigested, must be either dis¬ solved or divided into such minute particles as to be able to get through the microscopic passages that permeate the walls of the ali¬ mentary canal, and thus find their way to the blood. THE CHEMISTRY OF DIGESTION. Professor Maly very aptly compares food to ore, and the nutriment we digest from it to the metal extracted from the ore. In the chemical laboratory we sometimes separate a metal from the earthy matters with which it is mingled by pulverizing the ore, putting it in a flask, pouring acids upon it, and stirring the v/hole together. The acids dissolve the metal, leaving a residue of earthy matters un¬ dissolved. To separate the dissolved materi¬ als from the residue, we pour the whole upon a paper filter. The solution runs through the interstices of the paper into a dish below, leaving the undissolved residue in the filter. Something analogous to this takes place in the digestion of food. Instead of the metal and earthy matters of the ore, we have the digestible and the undigestible constituents of meat, or bread, or other food. The grinding is done, not by pestle and mortar, but by the teeth; the digestive juices are the solvents; in the place of the flask the dissolving is done in the digestive apparatus, the stomach and intestine. Finally, the digested material has to pass, not through a filter, but through the porous walls of these last organs. The changes which the digestive juices cause are manifold. The saliva with its ptyalin transforms the insoluble starch of bread and potatoes into soluble sugar. The pepsin of the gastric juice supplied by the stomach and the tyrpsin of the pancreatic juice which comes from the pancreas, convert the myosin of meat, the casein of milk, the albumen of egg, the gluten of wheat, and other protein compounds of the food into soluble peptones. The gall acts upon the oily and fatty matters. besides doing other duties. As the food in process of digestion is gradually propelled along the intestine, still another fluid, the in¬ testinal juice, acts upon it. In these and other ways more or less perfectly understood, the digested matters are either dissolved or otherwise altered so that they can filter into the blood (though the process is different from ordinary filtration), and be thus conveyed to all parts of the body. In the first of the quotations at the be¬ ginning of this article, a German student of food-economy gives terse expression to the fact that we are nourished by that part of the food which is actually digested. To judge ac¬ curately of the nutritive value of our food, then, we must know how much of each nutri¬ ent will be digested. This is a matter that can be determined more or less accurately by experiment. But a great deal of labor is needed to make the experiments accurate, the line of research is new, the methods are not yet per¬ fectly matured, and the results thus far ob¬ tained, though interesting and valuable when taken together, are still very far from com¬ plete. The side questions, such as differences in the digestive apparatus of different persons, the effects of exercise and rest, or the mode of preparation of the food, and of the flavoring materials and beverages taken with it, tend to complicate the problem and make satisfac¬ tory results still harder to obtain. Yet even here experimental research has something to tell us. The ways in which the experiments to test the digestibility of foods are made are very in¬ genious and interesting. Physiologists use the salivary glands or stomach or intestine of a living animal much as chemists do their bot¬ tles and retorts and test tubes. One easily gets into the way of regarding an animal as simply an organism manifesting certain reactions un¬ der given conditions, and in not a few Euro¬ pean laboratories a janitor is readily induced by the price of a few months’ supply of beer, or a student by his scientific ardor, to take this same altruistic view of his own physical organ¬ ism. In the German laboratories, particularly, one finds not only the needed apparatus, but, what is no less important, trained assistants and servants, so that he is relieved of much of the time-consuming and disagreeable detail of ex¬ perimenting, which is so much of an obstacle with us. THE QUANTITIES OF DIGESTIBLE SUBSTANCES IN FOOD. The first of our questions may be put in this way : What proportion of each of the nu¬ trients in different food-materials is actually

Page 737

THE DIGESTIBILITY OF FOOD. 735 digestible ? In a piece of meat, for instance, what percentages of the total protein and fats will be digested by a healthy person, and what proportion of each will escape digestion ? The proportions of food-constituents di¬ gested by domestic animals has been a matter of active investigation in the European agricult¬ ural experiment stations during the past twenty years. Briefly expressed, the method consists in weighing and analyzing both the food con¬ sumed and the intestinal excretion. Since the latter represents the amount of food undigested, if we subtract it from the whole amount taken into the body the difference willbe the amount digested. Such experiments upon human subjects, however, are rendered much more difficult by the fact that in order that the digestibility of each particular food-material may be deter¬ mined with certainty, we must avoid mixing it with other materials. Hence the diet during the experiments must be so plain and simple as to make it extremely unpalatable. An ox will live contentedly on a diet of hay for an indefinite time, but for an ordinary man to subsist a week on meat or potatoes or eggs is a very different matter. No matter how pala¬ table such a simple food may be, at first, to a man used to the ordinary diet of a well-to-do community, it will almost certainly become re¬ pugnant to him after a few days. In conse¬ quence, the digestive functions are disturbed, and the accuracy of the trial is impaired, a fact, by the way, which strikingly illustrates the importance of varied diet in civilized life. For instance, in one of a series of experi¬ ments conducted in the physiological labora¬ tory at Munich, by Dr. Rubner, the subject, a strong, healthy Bavarian laborer, lived for three days upon bread and water, a diet, the monot¬ ony of which was much more endurable than one of meat or fish or almost any other single food-material would have been. He was able to eat 1185 grams (about 2 lbs. and 10 oz.) of bread per day. This contained 670 grams of carbohydrates, mainly starch, of which only about 5 grams, or a little less than one per cent., escaped digestion. In this case, therefore, about 99 per cent, of the carbohydrates of the bread was digested. The bread contained 81 grams of protein, of which 13 per cent, was undigested and 87 per cent., or ^ of the whole protein, digested. The quantity of fatty mat¬ ters in the bread was too small to permit an accurate test of their digestibility. In an¬ other series, conducted by myself in the same laboratory, the digestibility of meat in the form of beefsteak, and of fish, haddock, was tested. The subject, a medical student, con¬ sumed less than two pounds of meat per day, and though it was cooked with butter, pepper, salt, and onions, so as to make it to his taste, “ ex¬ traordinarily well flavored,” it was very diffi¬ cult for him to swallow it the second day, and required still greater effort the third. The di¬ gestion, however, seemed to be normal, and all but about one per cent, of the protein was digested.* Other trials with meat have brought similar results, and it is reasonably safe to say that when a healthy person, with sound digest¬ ive organs, eats ordinary meat or fish in proper quantity, all or nearly all of the protein is digested. Some of the fats of meat, however, seem to fail of digestion. The number of accurate experiments of this kind is still very small. Some sixty or therea¬ bouts have been reported. N early all have been made within ten years past, and the majority in one laboratory, that of the University of Munich. Most of the subjects have been men with healthy digestive organs, two or three laboratory servants, a soldier, several medi¬ cal students, and a few others. Several have been made, however, with children of a few families. All but a very small number have been conducted in Germany. Digestibility of Nutrients of Food-7naterials. Of the total amounts of protein, fats, and carbohydrates, the following per¬ centages were digested : In the food-materials below. Protem. Fats. Carbo¬ hydrates. Meats and fish . Practically all 79 to 92 96 93 to 98 9* f Eggs . Milk . 88 to 100 ? Butter . Oleomargarine . Wheat bread . 81 to 100 99 97 96 92 82 Corn (maize) meal . Rice . 89 84 86 9 ? Pease . ? Pntatnp'; . 74 72 \ Beets . 9 Some of the main results are summarized in the tabxilar statement herewith, and set forth graphically in the diagram on page 736. As there appears to be good ground for believing that income cases in which the smaller per¬ centages were digested the conditions were not entirely normal, I have omitted them in mak¬ ing the calculations for the table and diagram. Thus, in the diagram it is assumed that all of the protein of milk is digestible, though in some experiments part was left undigested. The methods of experimenting do not permit abso¬ lute accuracy, and the results with different persons and with different specimens of the same food-material vary somewhat. The great¬ est errors in the estimates in the table and chart are probably in the fats, which may be more completely digested than the figures imply. * Zeitschrift fiir Biologic, XV. and XXIV.

Page 738

PROPORTIONS OF NUTRIENTS DIGESTED AND NOT DIGESTED FROM FOOD-MATERIALS BY HEALTHY MEN. Protkin. Percentages utdicated by Shaded Bands. Fats. Myosin of muscle ( lean meat), Fatty and oily matters : e. g.. Casein ( curd ) of milk, White Fat of meat, Butter, Oil of of e"g. Gluten of wheat, etc. wheat and maize, etc. CARBOHYDRATES. Starch, Sugar, Cellulose, etc. Mineral Matters. Phosphates, Chlorides, etc. ■ Digestible. Undigestible. Beef, round, rather Beef, sirloin, rather Pork (bacon), very Haddock Mackerel Hens’ eggs Cows’ milk Cheese Butter Oleomargarine Digestible. Undigestible. Digestible. Undigestible. 0 10 W 30 40 Wheat bread, average . . Bl’k bread, rye, German Pease Corn (maize) meal .... Rice Potatoes PROTEIN. FATS. CARBOHY- DRATE.S. MINERAL MATTERS. cd Ui PROTEIN. FATS. CARBOHY¬ DRATES. MINERAL MATTERS. WATER. Total. •1^’ Total. Undiges¬ tible. j Total. t • S'" Total. Total. Total. s'" psr ct. prret. per ot. perct. perct. perct. I>er cl. I^rct. perct. per ct. perct. perct. per ct. per ct. per ct. perct. Beef, round . 23.0 0.0 9.0 0.9 0.0 0.0 1-3 66.7 f very fine .... 8.9 1.3 I.O 75-2 0.8 0-3 14.6 Beef, sirloin . 20.0 0,0 ig.o 1.9 0.0 0.0 I.O 60.0 Wheat 1 medium ... 11.6 2.1 0.8 72.2 1.8 0.4 15.0 Pork, very fat . 3-0 0.0 80.5 6.0 6-5 10.0 flour, j coarse, whole Haddock . 17. 1 0.0 0-3 0.0 0.0 1.2 81.4 1 wheat . IC.9 2.7 1.8 71.7 5-3 1.2 14.4 Mackerel . 18.8 0.0 8.2 0.8 0.0 0.0 1.4 71.6 |W'heat bread, average 8.9 1.2 1.9 55-5 0.6 I.O 32.7 Hens’ eggs . 13.4 0.0 II. 8 2.4 0.7 0.0 I.O 74.1 [Black hre.ad . 6.1 1.6 48.6 5-3 43-8 Cows’ milk . 3.4 0.0 3.7 4.8 0.0 87.4 Pea*?!* . . . I 8 e-7 R Cheese, whole milk.. . 27.1 0.0 35.5 0.9 2-3 0.0 3-9 31 2 [Corn (maize) meal. . . . 9.1 3-2 1.2 3-8 57*° 71.0 2.3 25 1.6 14.5 Butter . I.O 87.5 1.7 0.5 2.0 Rice . Oleomargarine . 0.4 87.2 ' 3-3 0.0 2.1 10.3 [Potatoes . 7*4 2.0 0.5 0.2 21.3 lie I.O 7S-5 Sugar . 0.3 96.7 0.0 0.8 2.2 Turnips . 1.0 0.3 0.2 6.9 1-3 0.7 91.2

Page 739

THE DIGESTIBILITY OF FOOD. Though the experimental data are as yet very meager, so much so that no account is taken of the digestibility of the food-materials in the estimates for potential energy in the previous article, nor for estimates of dietaries in suc¬ ceeding ones, the figures here given are prob¬ ably not far out of the way as indicating the proportions digested by healthy persons. The amounts of fat in the vegetable foods are so small that the experiments do not tell ex¬ actly what proportions are digested. The meats and fish contain practically no carbohydrates. The digestibility of the carbohydrates (sugar) of milk was not determined, those of the veg¬ etable foods, except the beets . were almost com¬ pletely digested. That the protein of cows’ milk should be so much less completely digested than that of meat seems a little strange. Chil¬ dren have been found to digest a little more than adults, though the difference is not large. Thus Dr. Camerer, a German experimenter, found his boys and girls, of from 2 to 12 years of age, digested from 91 to 97 per cent, of the protein of cows’ milk, while grown men in ex¬ periments by Dr. Rubner digested from 88 to 94 per cent. But in experiments in which milk and cheese were eaten together by a man, the laboratory servant of Dr. Rubner’s experiments, all or nearly all of the protein of both was di¬ gested. Dr. Rubner suggests an explanation of the more nearly complete digestion of the milk when taken with cheese than when taken by itself alone. When taken into the stomach without anything else, cows’ milk is apt to coagulate in large lumps which resist the ac¬ tion of the digestive juices. The particles of cheese, if finely chewed and mixed with the milk, would prevent the formation of such large lumps, and it would thus be more readily and completely digested. This seems very reasonable. The percentage of fats of milk di¬ gested was practically the same with adults as with children. It is worth noting that in these experiments both children and adults digested only about half of the mineral salts of the milk. Why so much of the fats of the meat, from a twelfth to a fifth, should have failed to be di¬ gested, it is not easy to say. Much has been said and written about the relative digestibility of butter and oleomar¬ garine. The only actual comparative tests on record are a series made with a man and boy by Professor Mayer, in Holland. In these from 97.7 to 98.4 per cent, of the fat of the butter and from 96.1 to 96.3 per cent, of the fat of the oleomargarine were digested. The aver¬ age difference was 1.6 per cent, in favor of the butter. Certain possible sources of error in such experiments make it a question whether the digestion was not in fact more nearly complete than even these figures make it. 737 An interesting series of experiments in arti¬ ficial digestion conducted by Dr. R. D. Clark, in behalf of the New York Dairy Commis¬ sion, though of course not affording a definite measure of the process as it actually goes on in the body, accords with the very natural suppo¬ sition that, in ease, and perhaps in complete¬ ness of digestion, oleomargarine would rank between butter and the fat of ordinary meat. In chemical composition oleomargarine stands between meat-fat and butter. It will be remembered that oleomargarine is made from beef-fat and lard by removing from them part of the stearin, which counts as the least digestible ingredient, and adding a little butter and sometimes oil, as cotton-seed oil. The bulk of all these fatty substances, meat-fat, butter, and oil, consists of the same or nearly the same kinds of fat, the meat-fat having the more stearin. The butter, however, contains small quantities, seven percent, or thereabouts, of peculiar fats, butyrin, caproin, etc., which give it its flavor and which are thought by some to make it more easily digestible, espe¬ cially by persons whose digestion is enfeebled by lack of digestive juices or otherwise. In the excitement over oleomargarine leg¬ islation, the discussion of the relative digesti¬ bility of butter and butter substitutes has been made very active by the importance of its bearing upon their comparative values for nutriment, and many statements have been made as to the effect of the chemical compo¬ sition of the peculiar butter-fats and the con¬ sequent chemical changes in the process of digestion and assimilation in the body. It is interesting to compare the very positive infer¬ ences which some writers upon the subject draw from experimental investigations, with the very guarded expressions of opinion made by the authors of the same investigations in their writings and in personal conversation. The facts at hand and the general impression of special students of these subjects, so far as I have observed, are to the effect that prob¬ ably, for healthy persons, the difference be¬ tween butter and oleomargarine in ease and in completeness of digestion would be at most very slight, but that for people with enfeebled digestion and for infants, butter may, perhaps, at times, have the advantage. When we consider that the quantity of but¬ ter which one would naturally use on a slice of bread would, roughly speaking, be about as large as that of the fat which would remain in a corresponding slice of lean, juicy beef af¬ ter the larger particles of fat had been trimmed off, it is hard to believe that the difference in digestibility or nutritive value between the butter and the same quantity of oleomargarine could be of very great moment.

Page 740

THE DIGESTIBILITY OF FOOD. 738 Some of the food- materials referred to in the table on page 735 and in the diagram as meat, bread, and milk, have been tested, each by several experiments with more than one person. With others, as eggs, com-meal, rice, pease, and potatoes, only a single trial has been made. Doubtless, extended series of tests would give averages differing more or less from these figures. Another thing that makes the results a little uncertain is that some of the food-materials may perhaps be more completely digested when taken in small quantities with other materials, in the ordinary way, than when so much of them is eaten and without any other food. These and other sources of slight error make more extended experiments very desirable. I should add that the figures for mackerel, in the diagram, are only estimates, based upon experiments with haddock (the only kind of fish that has been tested experimentally), and with meats. EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES UPON THE DIGESTION OF FOOD. The estimates in the table and diagram apply to the quantifies of nutrients digested, from wholesome and properly cooked and masticated food, by healthy persons. But the ease and time of digestion and the fitness of the digested matters for the user, are likewise very important considerations, and these as well as the proportions digested are more or less affected by the preparation of the food, the quantity consumed, and the materials eaten and drunk with it ; by exercise and sleep ; and by the bodily condition or peculiarities of di¬ gestive function of the person. The effect of the preparation of food, espe¬ cially of its cooking, is one of the many topics about which one can write with a freedom and fluency inversely proportional to his under¬ standing of the known facts. The chief under¬ lying principle is the same as in*the dissolving of the ore of which I spoke above. If the par¬ ticles of ore are large, the acid will act upon them very slowly. Stirring would hasten the solution of the soluble materials. Time would be needed for those that were slow to dissolve. So in the digestion of food, we cut our meat into small pieces and chew it into still finer ones ; and the grains of wheat, which we cannot well chew, are first ground in the mill. Milk requires neither cooking nor chewing. Its nutrients are either already in solution or in very minute particles, it has no starch to be changed into sugar by the ptyalin or saliva, its only carbohy¬ drate, milk sugar, being already a sugar and soluble; and we accordingly drink it raw. Or¬ dinary meats are found by experiment to be digested as readily or even more readily when taken raw than when cooked, provided they are properly masticated, /. ^., finely chewed. But we like their taste better, and hence are more in¬ clined to masticate them properly, when well cooked. Some interesting experiments on the rapid¬ ity of digestion of meats cooked and uncooked, and of milk, have been lately conducted by Herr Jensen, in the laboratory of the Univer¬ sity of Tubingen. To test the effect of cook¬ ing, he took lean beef, chopped it fine, and separated the tendons and other connective tissue as completely as he could. A portion was left raw, other portions were boiled, and still others were roasted. Of the boiled and roasted portions, some were rare, or, as Herr Jensen called them, “half done,” and others well done. The raw, half done, and well done portions were tested by artificial digestion with pepsin, by experiments in the stomach of a dog, and by experiments in the stomach of a healthy man. In the experiments by artificial digestion Herr Jensen put the meat in glass tubes, poured a solution containing pepsin upon it, and kept the tubes with their contents in a warm place, at about the temperature of the body, for twenty-four hours, stirring the mix¬ tures from time to time, thus imitating the operation that goes on in the stomach. The dog with which the experiments were made had metal tubes permanently inserted through the skin into the stomach, which could be opened or kept closed with a stopper at will. (I may remark in passing that a dog thus pro¬ vided with a stomachic fistule is regarded as a very convenient item in the list of appliances of a physiological laboratory, and my limited observation of the behavior of the animals has left with me the decided impression that such ways of being useful to the world in their day and generation are much less distasteful to them than many anti-vivisectionists would have us think.) The meat was inclosed in a cloth, in¬ serted through the tube, and removed after the desired time. In the experiments with the man, a laboratory servant, the food was taken into the stomach when the latter was empty, and, after digestion for the desired time, withdrawn by a stomach-pump. The experiments all told nearly the same story. The raw meat was digested more read¬ ily than the cooked. In the trial by artificial digestion the residues unaltered by the pepsin were smallest with the raw meat and largest with that which had been most thoroughly cooked by boiling or roasting. In those with the man, the digestion was completed in dif¬ ferent lengths of time, as set forth in the fig¬ ures herewith, which I translate from Jensen’s report.

Page 741

739 THE DIGESTIBILITY OE FOOD. The beef was digested in Raw . 2 hours. 2>4 “ 3 3 4 IBoilcd ** half done** . Boiled ** well done** . Roasted ** half done** . Poasted ^*well done** . In like manner, boiled milk required a some¬ what longer time for digestion than milk not boiled. These results and those of other experiments, though not to be taken as an exact measure of the digestibilities of the substances in a healthy stomach, are still the more worthy of confidence because they accord with the chem¬ istry of the subject. But we must remember that they apply only to what takes place in the stomach; while the normal process of digestion goes on in the intestine after the food has left the stomach. Some kinds of meat are very tough when raw and are made more tender by cooking. This is due, in part at least, to changes in the so- called connective tissue. The connective tis¬ sue of bone, tendons (‘‘gristle ”), hoofs, etc., is disintegrated and changed into gelatine or glue by steaming or boiling. In like manner, the minute portions of this material that are dis¬ tributed through the meat, are softened and lose their tenacity, and thus tough meat is often made tender. But to do this, and to cook meat sufficiently, requires less heat and less outlay for fuel than many people suppose. A great saving can often be made by use of proper devices for cooking, as I hope to explain at an¬ other time. Vegetable foods often require cooking to fit them for use. This is especially true of starchy foods, such as grains, wheat, corn, etc.; beans and pease ; and potatoes. The starch is con¬ tained in cells. The outer covering of the cell is cellulose (woody-fiber), the material which con¬ stitutes the fiber of cotton and linen and which is used to make cloth and paper. If the par¬ ticles of ore above referred to were incased with material which the acids could not easily penetrate, they would be very slow to dissolve. The digestive juices of the human body act very slowly upon cellulose, and for this reason the starch of raw potatoes or uncooked grain would be difficult of digestion. But in cooking, the little sacs of starch are burst open and the starch itself undergoes more or less chemical change, so that the ptyalin and other agents convert it much more readily into sugar or other digestible forms. But to get at the mat¬ ter of the changes of food in cooking requires more discussion of the chemical principles in¬ volved than would be proper here. In biief, so far as animal foods are concerned. cooking is mainly a device to gratify the pal¬ ate, but many vegetable foods require heating, with or without water, to fit them for use by man. As to the effect of the quantity of food upon the proportion digested, the experiments at hand seem to point to the interesting conclu¬ sion that when a moderate amount is taken, it is digested more completely than a very large or, at times, even a very small quantity. So, likewise, a moderate amount of water seems favorable, while too much has been found to interfere with digestion. A great deal is said and written about the effect exerted upon the digestion of food by food- adjuncts, such as spice, mustard, and other flavoring materials ; beef-tea and meat- extract ; tea, coffee, chocolate, and similar beverages ; and alcoholic drinks. Instead of venturing an opinion upon the subject which is rather physiological than chemical, I may more appropriately quote one of the latest authori¬ tative utterances upon the subject. Professor Forster, a well-known experimenter, in speak¬ ing of what the Germans call Genus S7nittel — appetizers is perhaps the nearest corresponding word we have — the materials which we take with our food either for their own agreeable flavor or to improve the flavor of the food, and which are often supposed to help the di¬ gestion, — says in substance as follows :* “There is no doubt that the human digestive appara¬ tus can be excited to activity in various ways with Geit~ iissmittel, including such as are used by man in a refined civilization, at the beginning and end of his meals, e.g.^ meat broth, salt and salt condiments like caviar, cheese, etc. . . . We know that when brought into contact with the mucus membrane of the stomach and intestines of a living animal, they cause the filling of the blood-ves¬ sels and secretion of the digestive juices. Sugar and salt are hardly brought into the mouth before they ex¬ cite abundant effusion of saliva. Indeed, the same effect is produced even by the sight or smell of savory foods, and some of the well-tasting substances may act upon the digestive apparatus audits glands by simply being taken into the blood circulation. Thus I have observed experimentally a rich secretion of gall after an injection of a solution of sugar into a vein (vena mesenterica). . . . Itisvery natural to infer from this that the work of digestion will go on belter with the aid of such condi¬ ments than without them, in two ways : either more nutriment might be digested from the same food, or, if there were no increase ui the amount digested, it might be digested more quickly with their help, which would likewise be a gain. . . . But, important as this may seem to physiologists, it is of minor consequence with healthy persons. Thus, in experiments made with a man under my direction, meat which had been treated with water [to remove the ‘ extractives ’ which give meat its flavor and which are the chief constituents of beef-tea and meat-extract] and was so tasteless as^ to be eaten in any considerable quantity only with diffi¬ culty, the quantity digested and observed to pass into * In the volume on “Ernahrung and Nahrungsmit- tel,” of Pettenkofer and Ziemssen’s “ Handbuch der Hygiene,” the latest standard German work on these subjects.

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740 WOMAN AND ARTIST. the circulation was as large as with the same weight of meat roasted in the ordinary way ; and both Bischoff and Hofmann have found that meat-extract taken with bread or with a mixed diet did not materially affect the digestion. And in experiments by Fliigge with a mixed diet so tasteless as to make it, when continued some time, extremely repugnant, so that great effort was re¬ quired to eat it, the digestion seemed to be unaffected thereby. ‘‘ For the sick and convalescent, on the other hand, the effect of these appetizers upon the digestion is of great importance, especially where the digestive appara¬ tus has been for a time more or less inactive and requires stimulating. Thus the observations of Kem- merich show the usefulness of bouillon and meat-extract in case of enfeebled digestion.” In the case of the ore there must be plenty of acids or it cannot dissolve. If the supply of digestive juices is insufficient, the food can¬ not digest. The chief use of these food- ad¬ juncts would seem to be to stimulate the production of digestive juices. The results of later experimental research and the teachings of the physiologists whose opinions are most valued among their fellow-specialists seem, so far as I can gather, to be in the same line with the statements here quoted. It would thus appear that, while the materials which we call appetizers may often be very helpful where di¬ gestion is enfeebled, they are, for healthy peo¬ ple, superfluous and without special effect upon the utilization of food in the body. As regards the stronger stimulants, especially alcohol, the same class of physiologists, so far as I can gather from their writings and from personal conversation, are, in general, rather cautious in speaking of its effect upon digestion, but are nevertheless inclined to believe that it does under some circumstances help the digestion of food. There are experiments which indicate that alcohol, taken into the stomach in con¬ siderable quantities, may retard gastric diges¬ tion while it remains there, but that, on the other hand, it has a stimulating action upon the secretion of the digestive juices, so that it may materially aid digestion. Indeed, just as I write, a German journal brings account of late experiments by Gluzinski which accord with this view. That, when taken in moder¬ ate quantities, alcohol should thus help weak digestion, would, unless I err, be quite in ac¬ cord with the best experimental testimony and with a common opinion of experimenters. Some of our strong temperance friends would hardly second Paul’s advice to Timothy to use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,” but the experimental physiologists seem to side with Paul. But, decidedly as thoughtful spe¬ cialists may reject the extreme statements of some temperance agitators, many of them are very emphatic in their declarations concern¬ ing the danger of excessive use of alcohol and the evil which results from it. Regarding the effect of moderate exercise just after eating, observations differ, some ex¬ periments indicating that muscular labor re¬ tards digestion, others that it does not. During sleep digestion has been found to be diminished. To consider the connection between the men¬ tal and physical condition and digestion would take us too far from our present purpose. To recapitulate. In considering the digesti¬ bility of food we have to take into account (i) the quantity digested, and (2) the ease and time of digestion. As regards the quantities digested from reasonable amounts of ordinary food- materials by healthy people, the best experi¬ mental evidence indicates that : First. The protein of our ordinary meats and fish is very readily and completely digest¬ ible. Second. The protein of vegetable foods is much less digestible than that of animal foods. Of that of potatoes and beets, for instance, a third or more may escape digestion and thus be useless for nourishment. Third. Much of the fat of animal food may at times fail of digestion. Fourth. The carbohydrates, starch, sugar, etc., which make up the larger part of vegeta¬ ble foods, are very digestible. Fifth. The animal foods have in general the advantage of the vegetable foods, that they contain more protein, and that their pro¬ tein is more digestible. Sixth. The quantities digested appear to be less affected by flavor, flavoring materials, and food-adjuncts than is commonly supposed. Concerning the ease and time of digestion, and consequent comfort and health, the lack of accurate experimental data renders it more difficult to make concise statements. Cooking and other conditions are very important. V ery much depends upon the individual peculiari¬ ties of diferent people. W. O. Atwater. WOMAN AND ARTIST. T THOUGHT to win me a name A Should ring in the ear of the world ! — How can I work with small pink fists .About my fingers curled ? Then adieu to name and to fame ! They scarce are worth at the best One touch of this wet little, warm little mouth With its lips against my breast. Alice Williams Brother ton.

Page 743

HELEN. ASKED Helen if I could speak to her one moment. This was on Monday. Helen was in the hall — fastening a string around a bundle of magazines. Close by stood Elisabeth Stubbs, our parlor-maid, with a basket. The basket contained a com¬ plete military suit and the very miscellaneous costume in which I attended to our furnace fire. “ No, Harry,” said Helen, hurriedly, I’m late now.” The house jarred with the closing of the street door. Helen was not a violent person. She was gentle as a lamb ; but a lamb with seven magazines to distribute, and belated for a dress-rehearsal, cannot be compared to a lamb under ordinary circumstances. Tuesday afternoon I made a second attempt. ‘‘ Helen,” I said, very decidedly, I wish to ask you a question.” We were again in the hall. Helen still wore the bonnet. I do not think she slept in it, although she always ap¬ peared with it on her head at breakfast. A bundle of German plays, very much out of the bind¬ ing, replaced the magazines. That afternoon the military dress, my furnace suit, and Mil¬ dred Smith’s brother’s dress-coat were to fig¬ ure among other costumes before the Tuesday German Club. Elisabeth Stubbs acted as dressing-maid in the green-room, and gra¬ ciously told me later that my furnace suit looked awful funny on Miss Mildred Smith, who was some kind of a soap-man, and that the most beautiful part of the play was almost spoiled by young Mr. Smith, who came home and wanted his coat because he was going away in the train, and if it hadn’t been for his mother he would have gone right on to the stage and asked for it, and that he was just horrid because he had to go off without it, and that Miss Helen told Miss Mildred that her brother Harry wouldn’t have made any fuss at all. Naturally Helen paid less attention to me this afternoon than the day before. In fact she did not seem to notice my presence, but re¬ peated her role as she put on her gloves, and went out of the house saying, ‘‘ Ich habe nur das eine Wort, ich liebe Sie.” Wednesday I chose the hour of 7 p. m., judging that would be a moment of respite between the engagements of the day and the evening. I opened the parlor door and said — not very pleasantly — “ Helen ! I wish you’d stop long enough to tell me - ” In the room sat a circle of ladies ; one of them was saying, “ I think each of the eight vice-presidents should pledge herself to twelve suits.” Helen, with abookand a pencil in her hand, quietly shut the door in my face. What’s in the parlor, Jane ?” I asked the cook. “Don’t yerknow, Mister Harry? ’’said Jane. “Sure it’s the Injins as comes the first Wed¬ nesday in every month.” Aunt Charlotte, warming her feet by the kitchen-range, ex¬ plained, “It is the Indian meeting, Hany; something Helen has an interest in. I believe she is one of the vice-presidents, and chairman of the Press Committee.” “ I told yer as how it was the Injins,” came from the sink; “ yer country aint treated thim well; there’s a whole pile of illigajit little pink papers about ’em up in Miss Helen’s room. Fine names these chieftains got! — some of ’em much as three and four inches long.” “You didn’t want the parlor just now, did you, Harry dear ? ” continued Aunt Charlotte. “ I think you had better look at the furnace ; the ladies used to meet in the church vestry, but it was too cold and damp; you know it’s half under ground, Harry.” “Yes,” I said. “ The sexton never built the fire until just before the meeting began, and I know it must have been colder there than in any Indian wigwam — that is why we thought the ladies had better meet here. You don’t want your sister to take cold, Harry dear ? ” “No; I did not want any of them to take cold.” Thursday I went down early to breakfast, determined to have my question answered. Elisabeth Stubbs, wearing an injured ex¬ pression, stopped her work to inquire if Miss Helen were a Nihilist. It appeared that the postman had made this suggestion to our maid¬ servant. My sister sat at the breakfast-table — her bonnet on. The pile of letters before her gave me a clew to the postman’s attempted joke. Envelopes long, square, narrow, broad, white, blue, brown, buff; postmarks indicat¬ ing remote towns in the United States ;• post¬ marks from Canada, England, France, Japan ; a journal from Heidelberg, and a postal from Constantinople. Helen held communica¬ tions with all parts of the world ; she knew people everywhere; she belonged to several

Page 744

742 HELEN, * societies whose work was carried on entirely through correspondence; she also wrote for various periodicals — the manuscripts were often returned, thereby largely increasing her mail. They were not returned, be it under¬ stood, from lack of merit ; even Aunt Charlotte and I considered them good, and we were no exception to the rule of unappreciative families. My sister lo*oked at me absently — told me to order a barrel of flour sent that morning to the St. Margaret Orphan Asylum, asked Aunt Charlotte if she had slept well, and then hurriedly ran over a page of her note-book : “Nine to ten, French reading; ten to eleven, see about Soldiers’ Monument; eleven to twelve, buy gingham for asylum; twelve to one. Diet mission; two to four, read paper at club ; then see sick woman, tell people about change of place, and collect Magazine-club fees.” Here I will explain that Helen was secre¬ tary of a club called “ The Bohemians.” There were one hundred members, men and women, clever, charming, delightful people. They read “papers,” and talked on various art topics, and it was a great honor to be of them. One of their Bohemian ways was an occasional uncer¬ tainty as to the next place of meeting, and upon H elen rested the responsibility of informing one hundred people where this next place would be. This explains the brief little memoran¬ dum of “Tell people about change of place.” “ Six to seven, dinner; seven to eight, look over early history of the Jews in Venice; eight to eleven, Shakspere Club; eleven to twelve, find play for reform school ; — and oh, Harry,” concluded my sister, “ do you know of any play suitable for boys — something bright and interesting, with no love-making ? ” I did not. “ Helen,” said Aunt Charlotte mildly, “ I notice you never leave any time between your hours. I m.ean, time to go from one place to another. I am afraid you walk very fast on the street. I was watching you the other day, and it seemed to me as if your head were a long distance in front of your feet. It is very inelegant for a woman to get a bad gait.” I did not dare ask my question that day, neither did I Friday nor Saturday, — the last of the week being always very crowded, — and as for Sunday, there was morning and evening service, and Sunday-school, and the organ to play at the Old Ladies’ Home, and several sick people to visit. No city pastor with a number of outlying mission parishes could be more occupied. Aunt Charlotte suggested that if I were very anxious to ask Helen any¬ thing, I should join her Sunday-school class, that being composed of boys of all ages, whom Helen encouraged in conversation. Three months brought no answer to my question. We lived in a perfect jumble of ideas: door-bell always ringing, parlor always full of strange people, all kinds of clubs meet¬ ing in the library, all kinds of things given in. the house — bazars, readings, concerts, cha¬ rades, operettas, cooking-class, Sunday-school teachers’ meetings, art exhibitions, loan ex¬ hibitions, auctions of club-books, and come¬ dies and tragedies in foreign tongues. The maids in the kitchen joined in this intellectual dissipation. Aunt Charlotte, teaching Elisa¬ beth Stubbs a few geographical notions, was told three times in one evening that Cape Horn was the capital of Brazil. By way of explana¬ tion, Elisabeth added that her mind was on her Sunday-school lesson, that she had the whole book of Daniel to learn, and that next week she should have all of Corinthians and Axes! Jane did not aspire to books, but, hav¬ ing lost a distant relative, indulged in the ele¬ gance of a black crape bonnet, without which she would not even venture as far as the cor¬ ner letter-box. Neither would she use her Christmas present, a nice brown silk umbrella. Being in mourning, how could she ? To keep* things pleasant, we gave her a black silk one. Aunt Charlotte and I, in our narrow sphere,, grew dizzy and tired and worried. One day at lunch came the beginning of a crisis; some¬ thing queer about Helen’s head caught my at¬ tention. Either her bonnet was growing smaller, or her head bigger, or both. Aunt Charlotte- also noticed it; she put on her glasses, and said, “ Helen, some one has certainly cut off the front of your bonnet; it is the smallest thing I ever saw on a woman’s head.” Helen replied that her bonnet was just the same as it always had been, and if we were coming to the Japanese tea, we had better come between five and six, as then the lanterns would be lighted, and that was the pleasant¬ est time for meeting people. By means of Japanese screens, umbrellas, rugs, divans, fans, and fancies, the first floor of an old-fashioned mansion was transformed into a Japanese tea-house. It was a place of fascinating color, brilliant with lanterns, and mysterious with hidden perfume. A Japanese- page opened the door, Japanese maidens received the American money, and the be¬ wildered guest passed from sunlight into lantern-light. More fair maidens in beautiful Japanese dress greeted him; Japanese tea was served in Japanese cups on Japanese trays, ac¬ companied by sugar in Japanese bowls, and, to make the charm greater, the wearers of the- rich foreign dresses moved and talked and smiled with irresistible American grace. Aunt Charlotte and I, very much impressed, came home to a more substantial tea by our New”

Page 745

HELEN. 745 England fireside. Helen was always careful to give us something particularly nice on those occasions when she could not give us her so¬ ciety. Of late she had been so much occupied that her little surprises had taken the form of canned goods. This evening we had canned apricots ; a pot of white primroses stood on the table. Elisabeth Stubbs remarked, ‘‘ Miss Helen said if I forgot everything else I was to remember the flowers, it being Mr. Harry’s birthday.” There was also a very shining brass lion in repousse work on the mantel, with a card bearing Many happy returns of the day.” “ It’s very effective, don’t you think so, dear ? ” said my aunt, only I do not ap¬ prove of Helen’s doing such things. It seems as if hammering must hurt the head. She hasn’t the proper kind of hammer, I believe. It is certainly very noisy work, though she always hammers down cellar. Don’t you think it rather hard work for a woman, Harry ? ” I said it seemed to me about as hard as hammering a board fence together. ‘‘ I know you think Helen does too many things,” said Aunt Charlotte, but you need not speak in that tone, especially after she has been so thoughtful about your birthday. And she has so much on her mind, poor child ! She has everything on her mind. I can’t help worrying about her. How much do you think a woman can bear ? ” I said, judging from Helen, I should sup¬ pose a woman’s power of endurance was limidess. Aunt Charlotte gave me a look of reproach. Harry,” she said, ‘‘ don’t you think that Sisters of Charity live a good life ? ” This was an unexpected turn of conversa¬ tion. I said I did not see the connection ; that I thought they were foolish women. “ They are not considered so in the Roman Catholic Church,” replied my aunt with dig¬ nity, ‘‘ and I am sure your sister leads a far more self-sacrificing and higher life than even a Carmelite nun.” I said I hoped she did — which comment my aunt left unnoticed, and continued, mus¬ ingly : The nuns do everything by the hour — two hours’ meditation, two hours’ prayer, two hours’ lying on a wooden bed, two hours’ this, and two hours’ that — and all for the salvation of their own souls; whereas your sister also does everything by the hour, but she works for the whole world.” “ Excluding the family,” I said, and I fear I said it in a very unpleasant way. The brass lion looked ready to tear off my head, and my aunt seemed so deeply distressed that I recon¬ sidered and modified my judgment. Elisabeth Stubbs came in for the dishes. Aunt Charlotte took out her silk rug, and I opened my books. Do you belong to any men’s clubs, where they write papers ? ” asked my aunt. I said I did not belong to anything but the church choir. “ Then you don’t know what men write about. I notice, in Helen’s club, the ladies always write about things that happened sev¬ eral thousand years before Christ. It seems a long time ago.” The fire blazed merrily on the hearth, the brass lion took on a more friendly expression, our little family altercation had left us feeling perhaps more at peace with each other than an amiable dish of family sweetmeats. In my heart I thought there never was a sweeter, dearer girl than my sister Helen. The prim¬ roses smiled on the table. I believe the Ger¬ man name for primrosemeansKey of Heaven,” said my aunt, and she snipped an old black neck-ribbon into inch pieces. It was at this peaceful moment that a sound came through the house — a sound that can mean so much, and so little, — life, death, a fortune, a valentine, or a beggar, — the ring¬ ing of the street bell. If you please, Mr. Harry,” said Elisabeth, coming in very much out of breath, “ it’s Miss Helen come home, and something has happened to her.” On the hall sofa lay a figure in a blue crape dress embroideredwithhugesilver storks. From her hair hung silver bells and silver fans. The long flowing sleeves of crape swept the carpet. This was Helen. By her side stood a figure in crimson, woven with wonderful golden flowers; golden flowers and fans nodded in her hair. This was Mildred Smith. At a respectful dis¬ tance stood the cabman, looking as mystified as if he had been driving in his black and earthly carriage two white-winged heavenly angels. ‘‘ I will go for the doctor, sir,” he said in a. subdued tone ; and I gave him the address. Aunt Charlotte came trembling behind me. You remember I told you her head looked large at lunch, Harry ! ” ‘‘ It is not her head. Aunt Charlotte,” said Mildred, it is the way her hair is arranged. You know we had to wear a good deal of hair for the dress. We were in the carriage coming home, and suddenly Hejen said, H can’t think ! I don’t know where I am ! ’ and then she fell back and wouldn’t speak, and when we got here she couldn’t move.” “ I am sure her head is larger than usual,” said Aunt Charlotte ;- “ it looks all distorted.” It’s the hair,” said Mildred. I haven’t any head,” said Helen, open¬ ing her eyes ; “ I have a large block of wood on my shoulders — it is a square block - ” She closed her eyes, and I. carried her up stairs.

Page 746

744 HELEN. The world did not end. I think it limped a little for a time. In the back hall stood a half-packed barrel of clothing intended for the Navajo Indians. I finished packing it, put¬ ting in a few extra things that fell in my way, and started it for Mexico. I engaged a colored boy by the day to carry notes. I filled out one hundred ‘‘ Bohemian ” postals, thereby notifying the club concerning the next place of meeting. I met the managers of the St. Margaret Orphan Asylum, of the Old Ladies’ Home, and of several minor associations, and made over to them small accumula¬ tions of money found in as many envelopes labeled and locked in Helen’s desk. I sent a niessage to Elisabeth Stubbs’s Sunday-school teacher, begging her to excuse our maid from preparing elaborate lessons, as we needed all her mind at home. In the meantime Aunt Charlotte fell ill from anxiety, and in search of a nurse I went from Morning street to Vesper street. At the last house on Vesper street I found a Mrs. Newman, an accommo¬ dating woman, who did not object to sitting behind a screen when Aunt Charlotte was not feeling strong enough to see her in the room. As for Helen, she remained during several days in a stupor, thereby giving us an opportunity to arrange her affairs; then she opened her eyes and said she wished to have a sentence fixed on her forehead, this being, she explained, the custom of the dwellers on the Euphrates before the fall of Babylon. She wished Mildred Smith to print it with charcoal on brown wrapping-paper. Mildred Smith began to cry when I asked her to do this, and said she couldn’t print, her hand trembled so, and that she didn’t know what sort of a sentence I wanted, and that perhaps Helen was going to die. Aunt Charlotte thought we* might find something in Helen’s note-books. Mrs. New¬ man, behind the screen, suggested timidly a verse of Scripture. “ Print something,” I said, going back to Mildred ; “ it doesn’t much matter what.” Mildred printed in trembling letters the word “ Helen,” and we fastened it upon her forehead. Helen ” — many a time we looked at that name, wondering if the Helen we knew would ever come back out of the multitudinous forms and fancies which seemed to replace her. Throughout all those strange weeks my sis¬ ter would not allow the removal of this bit of brown paper. It was as if she wished to pre¬ serve some clew to her own identity. As Aunt Charlotte said, Poor Helen was always tak¬ ing notes, and now she had taken a note on herself.” Aside from the one continual feeling that her head was a square block of wood, my sister seemed to suffer no pain, and her tem¬ perature and pulse were unaffected. She talked incessantly — not wildly — but in a quite low tone, as if she were reciting. Sometimes she described herself as a Chinese pagoda, with bells on every story ; sometimes she was a large paper bag, containing ounce- packages and pound-packages ; then she would suddenly become a bass-viol or a Polish ex¬ ile ; and I remember at this stage she told me that she wished to play Chopin well, and there¬ fore she must be filled with the sufferings of his country! Helen had taken a tremendous overdose of mental food, which the brain, in self-defense, was gradually throwing off. As long as she continued to talk, we had only to wait pa¬ tiently ; but there would come a moment when this great supply of thought would be so di¬ minished as to leave a great emptiness, and this emptiness must be at once tenderly treated and judiciously fed, or the difference between extreme high pressure and want of pressure would be fatal. The delicate question was, of what should this mental gruel consist. It must be simple, soothing, and not likely to excite any train of deep thought. One day there came a sudden silence in the room. Helen had ceased talking. Her eyes were fastened upon me with a hungry, eager look. I sat down by the bed, and said quietly and gently, in a matter-of-course way, and feeling very sure of myself: “ Sing a Song of Sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie — When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.’* It was an unfortunate selection. Helen, to my amazement, instead of being gradually lulled to sleep, interrupted me in a startled way, with a touching weakness in her voice, as if its strength were spent. “ The pie represents the earth; the top of the pie is the sky; when the pie was opened, means the break of day, and then the birds begin to sing ; the king is the sun — ” And thus she rambled on from Mother Goose rhymes, by way of German fairyland and Norse legends, to the m3^steries of ancient mythology. The doctors came and went. Mildred, Aunt Charlotte, and I sat helpless in Helen’s briglit little sitting-room. Mrs. Newman waited be¬ hind the screen. That strange atmosphere which creeps over a house in supreme mo¬ ments crept into ours. The light that fell shyly in through the half-closed blinds did not seem like light; the children’s voices coming up from the street were not like children’s voices; we were in a far-away, shut-off place of sus¬ pense and dread. We seemed unknown to ourselves. Mildred sat pale and motionless.

Page 747

HELEN, I looked at her, and wondered would she also have this strange affliction ? Would all of Hel¬ en’s set have it ? Must they also pay this terrible price for their love of humanity and human advancement ? Was it love, pure and simple ? Was it not a folly, a fashion ? A verse ran through my mind, ‘‘ Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” What did that mean ? Had it any connection with the philanthropic women of the day? Helen had worked with all her might. She had lived two days in one. I do not think she did it from ambition or from fashion; she did it from a sort of neces¬ sity. She was in the whirl of the time and the customs of the time. It would have been use¬ less to stop her, for she could not stop. I went back in my thoughts to the days when good Queen Bertha spun among her maidens. Was that a wiser and better time when women spun, when women gathered at the village fountain, morning and evening? Were they happier than the women who gather to-day around centers of art and of science ? Physically they were stronger. Was not that time of quiet, simple life a time of physical development, as to-day is a time of mental development ? Might there not be a period coming later in history when both develop¬ ments would be united and perfected ? or was something wrong ? was it all wrong, or was nothing wrong ? From Helen’s room came disconnectedly the words — pre- Adamite — realism — high art — symbolisms — unities. Then the dread¬ ed silence. We looked at each other. “ Quick, Mildred,” I said nervously, ‘‘ give me something to say — something to repeat over and over.” I cannot think of anything,” said Mildred, helplessly. Aunt Charlotte was even more helpless. Mrs. Newman came out from her screen, and with an evident professional feel¬ ing that she must come to our aid, whispered, ‘‘ There’s that lovely hymn, ‘ Sister, thou wert mild and lovely.’ ” ^‘Something monotonous — something like counting,” I said to Mildred, appealingly; and Mildred, opening a cookery-book, pointed out “ one-two-three-four cake.” “ Flelen used to make it,” she said with a sob; ‘H don’t believe it will excite her.” We took turns for two days in repeating at Helen’s bedside, “ One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs.” There was sense enough in the words to connect them, they touched on no dangerous topic, their monotony was perfect, and under their ceaseless repetition Helen fell asleep, quietly asleep, like a child. 745 I walked wearily out to the sitting-room, and, taking Mildred’s hand, began to pass my own slowly over it as I had been doing for Flelen, and I began, -‘One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs.” Mildred, gently withdrawing her hand, said : How tired you are ! ” They darkened the room, made me lie dowm, and left me. I dropped asleep, still repeating. One cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs.” The world gained rather than lost by my sister’s illness. She awoke from the sleep into which we at last lulled her with fresh energies and a mind ready to plan new methods for ben¬ efiting mankind, and while waiting strength to execute these plans her fingers fashioned an elaborate silk quilt, wfliich brought a fabu¬ lous price at a charity-fair. Aunt Charlotte and I looked on in awe and wonder and admiration. ‘‘ There is one comfort,” said my aunt; she isn’t the kind to have things twice, so she will not have that sickness again. She never had the mumps or the measles but once; you know some children have them several times. I’ve been thinking, Harry dear, perhaps the Lord meant for women like her never to stop; perhaps they are needed just now to hold up the world. They seem to me like the early martyrs ; only, instead of being burned at the stake, they are being consumed in life’s fire ; but they are too exalted to notice what is happening to them,” — Aunt Charlotte’s eyes shone, — there’s something grand about it, Harry dear!” As I had not considered Helen or any of her friends in the light of the early martyrs, I looked at Aunt Charlotte anxiously and said I feared her imagination was growing exalted. “ Well, I don’t know,” said my aunt, I can’t help thinking about the other w^orld. I sup¬ pose it is wicked; but there’s been so much said lately about ‘ going right on ’ studying languages and giving concerts and sketching and helping people, just the same as here. It wouldn’t be my heaven, but it might be Helen’s — only I do want her to have a quiet place to rest in first 1 ” Then, as if shocked by this familiar handling of a sacred subject, my aunt hastily opened a hymn-book, and said she knew it wasn’t right to say such things; and I, watching her, wondered vaguely if Helen would ever find time to answer the question I tried to ask so long ago — for the question still waits its answer. Harriet Lewis Bradley.

Page 748

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION. N the nth of June, 1776, the Continental Congress, then sitting at Philadel¬ phia, chose two committees to perform two pieces of important work. One was to draw a declaration of independence ; the other was to frame articles of perpetual union. The Committee on the Declaration finished their work and gave it to the world on July 4th, 1776; the Committee on Articles of Confed¬ eration reported a plan four days later; but it was not till March ist, 1781, that the articles were finally adopted. The government that went into effect on that day was bad from beginning to end. There was no executive, no judiciary, and only the likeness of a legislature. Congress consisted of one house presided over by a president chosen each year by the delegates from among their number. The delegates could not be more than seven nor less than two from any State, were elected yearly, and could serve but three years in any term of six. On the floor of Congress all voting was done by States, and the assent of nine was neces¬ sary to declare war, to make peace, to coin money, to pass any ordinance of the least im¬ portance. To such trivial questions as came up from day to day, — when should the house rise; who should be geographer for the next year? — the assent of the majority of the States was enough, and it was a white day whereon six did not make a majority. To this body the States had given a few pow¬ ers, and had given them grudgingly as of neces¬ sity. Congress had power to declare war, make peace, issue bills of credit, keep up a navy and army, contract debts, enter into treaties of commerce and alliance, and settle disputes between the members of the confederation. But it could not enforce a treaty nor a law when made, nor impose any restriction on com¬ merce, nor lay a tax of any kind for the purpose of raising a revenue. Bad as the articles were, they were made worse yet by the provision that to amend them required the consent of each one of the thirteen members of the Union. The evils of this system were not slow to appear. Acting on States, and not on individ¬ uals, Congress never secured a hold on the people, was always looked on as a revolution¬ ary body, and was treated, first with indiffer¬ ence, and then with contempt. The large vote needed to pass a weighty measure often made it impossible to legislate at all. Two States, Georgia and Rhode Island, were seldom represented. Of the eleven oth¬ ers more than eight were rarely present, and Congress was thus forced to adjourn again and again for want of a quorum. Repeatedly these adjournments covered a space of thirteen consecutive days. As nine of the eleven States had but two delegates each, the powers of Con¬ gress passed into the hands of three men, who, by their negative votes, could defeat any meas¬ ure requiring the assent of nine. Lacking power to enforce its acts. Congress made treaties which the States set at naught, called for money which the States never paid, and saw article after article of the confederation broken in the most defiant way. The States were forbidden to wage war and make treaties. Yet Georgia waged war and made a treaty with the Creeks. The States were forbidden to keep troops in time of peace. Yet Penn¬ sylvania sent troops that drove the Connecticut settlers from the valley of Wyoming; Massa¬ chusetts raised an army and put down Shay’s rebellion. The States were forbidden to enter into compacts. Yet Maryland and Virginia made a com pact ; Pennsylvania and Ne w J ersey set bounds to Delaware. Indeed, Congress itself was more than once driven to exercise powers to which, by the articles, it had no right whatever. Having no power to manage trade. Con¬ gress could not, by commercial restrictions, force Great Britain to enter into a trade treaty. British goods came over in immense quantities, the balance of trade turned against us, and, to settle the balance, the coin of the country went over to England in boxes and barrels. The States, deprived of a circulating medium, put out paper money; with paper money came tender laws and force acts, and in Massachu¬ setts open rebellion against the commonwealth. Many of these evils had long been felt. In¬ deed, the Articles of Confederation were not in force before it was proposed to amend them. The Hartford Convention of 1780 urged the States to suffer Congress to tax them accord¬ ing to population and spend the revenue so raised in paying the interest on the public debt. Congress accordingly asked for such an amendment, and twelve States consented. But Rhode Island would not, and it failed. Again a little while and Congress asked for specific duties and a permanent revenue, and again

Page 749

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION 747 twelve States consented. But this time New York stood out, and the second proposed amendment was a failure. At last, made des¬ perate, Congress asked for power to regulate trade for twenty-five years. Once more twelve States consented. Once more New York re¬ fused. Once more the attempt to amend the articles was a failure. Then, every other means having been tried. Congress approved the call already sent out for a convention of the States at Philadelphia. Such a convention had twice been asked for. New York wanted one in 1782 ; Massa¬ chusetts was equally eager in 1785. But the origin of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 goes back to the action of a joint com¬ mission which sat at Mount Vernon in March, 1785. There were then no concerted regula¬ tions between Maryland and Virginia touch¬ ing the jurisdiction and navigation of the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. Trouble had arisen in consequence, and the commission had been chosen to frame a com¬ pact that would serve as a remedy. But they had not been very long at work when they saw that common duties and common princi¬ ples for explaining the meaning of commercial laws and settling disputes about the currency were just as necessary as well-defined rights on the river and bay. With these things, however, the commissioners had no right to meddle. Yet they ventured to draw up a supplementary report setting forth the need of legislation on the currency, the duties, and commerce in general, and urging the appointment each year of two commissioners to aiTange such matters for the next year. Maryland readily accepted the report, and asked Delaware and Pennsylvania to come into the scheme. But Virginia went further, and asked all the States to a trade convention at Annapolis in September, 1786. New York and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia alone attended, spent two days in dis¬ cussing the low state of trade and commerce, in lamenting theiiwvant of powers, and then called a new convention, to meet at Philadelphia in May, 1787. This was the call that Congress approved in February, 1787; and it was high time, for seven States had already chosen dele¬ gates. Virginia was first to act, and sent up her seven most noted citizens. J efferson was then minister to France; Patrick Henry and Rich¬ ard Plenry Lee would not serve; but in their places came George Washington and James Madison, Edmund Randolph, the governor, George Mason, George Wythe, John Blair, and James McClurg, a professor in William and Mary College. Ne w J ersey came next, and on N o vember 2 3d chose William Livingston, eleven times her governor; William Paterson, ten times her attorney-general; David Brearley, her chief- justice, and William Houston, her delegate to Congress. Houston fell sick, and Jonathan Dayton took his place. Scarce a month went by but the name of some State was added to the list. In December came Penn¬ sylvania; in January came North Carolina; in February came Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. South Carolina and Georgia came in April, and Connecticut in May. New Hampshire would gladly have acted promptly, but her treasury was empty, her delegates could not bear the cost of the journey themselves, and the convention was half through its work when John Langdon and Nicholas Gilman appeared in her behalf. Rhode Island alone refused to attend. The day chosen for the meeting of the con¬ vention was the second Monday in May, which, in that year, fell on the 14th of the month. But so tardy were the delegates in setting out, and so great were the hindrances met on the way, that the 25th of May came before seven States were present in the State- house. This made a quorum. The conven¬ tion at once called Washington to the chair, chose William Jackson secretary, appointed a committee to prepare rules, and adjourned, to meet again on the 28th. Nine States then an- svv^ered to their names. The doors were then closed, a solemn pledge of secrecy was laid on the members, and thenceforth for many years what took place in the convention was never fully known. The delegates thus bound to secrecy were assuredly a most remarkable body of men. Hardly one among them but had sat in some famous assembly, had signed some famous document, had filled some high place, or had made himself conspicuous for learning, for scholarship, or for signal services rendered in the cause of liberty. One had framed the Albany plan of union ; some had been mem¬ bers of the Stamp Act Congress of 1765; some had signed the Declaration of Rights in 1774; the names of others appear at the foot of the Declaration of Independence, and at the foot of the Articles of Confederation; two had been presidents of Congress ; seven had been, or were then, governors of States ; twenty-eight had been members of Congress ; one had commanded the armies of the United States ; another had been Superin¬ tendent of P'inance ; a third had repeatedly been sent on important missions to England and had long been minister to France. Nor were the future careers of many of them to be less interesting than their past. Wash¬ ington and Madison became Presidents of the

Page 750

748 THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF- THE CONSTITUTION. United States; Elbridge Gerry became Vice- President ; Charles Cotesvvorth Pinckney and Rufus King became candidates for the presi¬ dency, and Jared Ingersoll, Rufus King, and John Langdon candidates for the vice-presi¬ dency; Hamilton became Secretary of the Treasury; Madison, Secretary of State; Ran¬ dolph, Attorney- General and Secretary of State, and James McHenry, a Secretary of W ar ; Ellsworth and Rutledge became Chief- Justices; Wilson and John Blair rose to the supreme bench ; Gouverneur Morris, and Ells¬ worth, and Charles C. Pinckney, and Gerry, and William Davie became ministers abroad. Others less fortunate closed their careers in misery or in shame. Hamilton went down before the pistol of Aaron Burr; Robert Mor¬ ris, after languishing in a debtor’s prison, died in poverty; J ames Wilson died a broken-hearted fugitive from justice; Edmund Randolph left the cabinet of Washington in disgrace; Will¬ iam Blount was driven from the Senate of the United States. Blount sat for North Carolina, and with him were Alexander Martin, a soldier of the Rev¬ olution, Richard Dobbs Spaight, a native of Ireland, Hugh Williamson, and William Da¬ vie. South Carolina sent Pierce Butler, John Rutledge, and the two cousins, Charles and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Butler was an Irishman, was descended from the Dukes of Ormond, and, when the Revolution opened, was a major in the 29th Regiment of Foot. The 29th was one of the regiments stationed at Boston and furnished the soldiers who did the shooting in the famous Boston massacre. Disgusted at the treatment of the colonists, and convinced that justice was on their side, he threw up his commission when the war opened, joined the continental army, fought through the war, and then settled in South Carolina. Another man of Scotch-Irish an¬ cestry was John Rutledge. He too had been educated abroad, had studied law at the Tem¬ ple, and had been sent at the age of twenty- six to the Stamp Act Congress of 1765. Nine years later he sat in the first Continental Con¬ gress, and was pronounced by Patrick Henry the most eloquent speaker in that body. Fear¬ less, resolute, a man of fine parts, he was un¬ questionably the foremost man South Carolina produced till she produced Calhoun. Georgia sent up William Houston, William Pierce, a Virginian, William Few, and Abra¬ ham Baldwin, a Connecticut man. The Con¬ necticut delegation was, as a whole, the ablest on the floor. Save Benjamin Franklin, no man who came to the convention had made for himself so instructive and so useful a career as Roger Sherman. He was a man of the peo¬ ple. Born near Boston, he got his education at the common school, and was early appren¬ ticed to a shoemaker. His apprenticeship over, he set out on foot, with his tools on his back, for New Milford in Connecticut. There he kept store and read law till he was admitted to the bar, when he moved to New Haven. At New Haven he rose rapidly in the estima¬ tion of his townsmen, was made treasurer of Yale College, represented the town in the legislature, and when New Haven became a city, was chosen first mayor, and remained mayor for the rest of his life. He was fourteen times sent to the legislature. He was twenty- three years a judge. Connecticut elected him to the Congress of 1774, and reelected him repeatedly till he died. He signed the Decla¬ ration of Rights in 1774; the Declaration of Independence, which he was one of the com¬ mittee to write; and the Articles of Confedera¬ tion, which he helped to frame. With him came William Samuel J ohnson and Oliver Ellsworth. Johnson had been a judge and a member of Congress ; but he enjoyed a distinction rarer still, for he was a scholar of high rank. Indeed, the fame of his learning reached England, where Oxford made him a Doctor of Laws, and the Royal Society a member. Massachusetts sent up Caleb Strong, N athan- iel Gorham, a rich Boston merchant, Elbridge Gerry, a signer and a member of Congress, and Rufus King, a congressman and a fierce hater of slavery. Alexander Hamilton, John Lan¬ sing, and Robert Yates represented New York. Yates and Lansing were men of ability; but they held the narrow and selfish views then so prevalent in New York State, became mere ob- tructionists in the convention, and when they could not succeed in setting up State-rights government, left the convention and went home. The departure of Yates is much to be lamented, for, while he staid, he was busy taking notes of the debates and proceedings. Five men came from Delaware, — Gunning Bedford, Jr., Richard Bassett, Jacob Broome, George Read, who signed the Declaration, and John Dickinson, who would not. The largest delegation was that from Pennsylvania. On her list are the names of Jared Inger¬ soll, who led the bar, and whose father had been driven from New England for trying to serve as Stamp agent in 1765, George Clymer, another signer, Thomas Fitz Simons, a great merchant, Robert and Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Mifflin, a general of the Revolution, a member of Congress, and once a member of the infamous Conway Cabal, James Wilson, a Scotchman and the best-read lawyer in the convention, and Benjamin Franklin. Mary¬ land sent up Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer, Daniel Carroll of Carrollton, John Mercer, Luther Martin, and James McHenry.

Page 751

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION 749 It is a sure sign of the high respect in which this famous body of men was held, that not one word was uttered by the people against their secret sessions. Profound secrecy, it was said, could not be kept by men who quarreled. Secrecy was kept, and this meant that the dele¬ gates were of one mind on all F ederal measures. Had the world, it was asked, ever beheld such a sight ? When before had a people without strife and without bloodshed deputed a band of patriots, that would have adorned the best days of Greece and Rome, to cure the evils of its government? That evils existed was lamentable ; but they were unavoidable. The Confederacy was like a hut or a tent put up in time of war and fit for the needs of war. But peace was come, and it was now time to build a suitable and durable dwelling, with tight roof, substantial bolts, and strong bars, to shield the States from every kind of harm. The simile of a house and a roof was a favorite, and was used again and again. The United States was like an old man and his wife who with thirteen sons landed in Amer¬ ica. There they built a spacious dwelling and lived happily for several years. But the sons grew weary of the company of their parents, and each put up a cabin for himself near their old home. At once trouble began. One had implements of husbandry stolen ; another lost a crop ; a third had his sheep eaten by the wolves ; a fourth nearly died of cold from the roof of his cabin being blown away ; a fifth saw his flock swept off by floods. At last twelve of the brothers met on a plain and resolved to ask their father to take them back. He did so gladly, and the old house, mended and en¬ larged, was made more beautiful than ever. The thirteenth son stood out, and, after three years, hanged himself by his garters in the woods. This son was Rhode Island. His flocks, in the language of the simile, were indeed being eaten by wolves. Wholly given over to the party of Shays, the party of legal-tender acts, of force acts, of paper money, the State had sent no delegates to Philadelphia and was not at any time represented in the convention. This contempt for the wishes of the country was warmly resented. She was denounced as the cause of the failure of the impost. To her charge was laid the suffering of the soldiers in the Revolutionary War, the heavy taxes, the bank¬ rupt treasury, the poverty of the whole nation. Let her, it was said, never again be suffered to defeat a Federal measure. Drop her from the Union. Turn her out from the company of States. Or, better still, apportion her to Massachusetts and Connecticut. Vermont would more than take her place. As the 4th of July drew near, the governor of New Jersey was said to have expressly ordered that no VoL. XXXIV.— 103. more than twelve cannon be fired, and no more than twelve toasts drunk. At Trenton and a few places elsewhere this was done. The convention, it was asserted, was deter¬ mined that Rhode Island should be consid¬ ered out of the Union. The government about to be set up would hold her responsible for a fair share of the Federal debt, and would first seek by gentle means to collect it. But, if these failed, the sum would be taken from her by force. As to what this new and vigorous govern¬ ment would be, the people made all manner of guesses. Many plans, it was thought, had been talked of. One was said to keep the form but not the spirit of democracy; another parted the States into three republics ; another gave a strong executive power without even the semblance of a popular constitution. The convention was accused by some of having a plan to set up a king. A constitution, the knowing ones asserted, had been made, titles, orders, and social distinctions established, and a commission would soon be sent to offer the crown to the Bishop of Osnaburgh, the second son of King George. This idle tale was more than half believed, and each post brought let¬ ters to the delegates begging to know if it were true. The answer invariably was,“ While we cannot affirmatively tell you what we are doing, we can negatively tell you what we are not doing; we never once thought of a king.^’ For our knowledge of what they did think of doing we are indebted to the journals of the convention, to the notes taken down by Yates and Madison, and to the “ Genuine Informa¬ tion ” of Luther Martin. From these sources it appears that the serious work of the conven¬ tion was opened by Randolph on the morning of Tuesday, the 29th of May. In a speech of great force he summed up the weak points of the Articles of Confederation, showed how un¬ suited they were to the needs of the country, and urged all present to join in setting up a strong national government. As apian of such a government, he read fifteen resolutions which the Virginia delegate had framed while waiting for the convention to assemble. This, which came in time to be known as the Virginia plan, provided that there should be a national executive, a national legislature, a national judiciary and council of revision ; that the executive should be chosen by the legislature and be ineligible a second time ; that the legislature should consist of two branches, with power to coerce refractory States and veto all State laws contrary to the Articles of Union; that the people should choose the members of the first branch ; that the first branch should choose the members of the second from men nominated by the legisla-

Page 752

750 THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION tures of the States ; that the representation of each State should be proportioned to the in¬ habitants on its soil or to the share it bore of the national expenses; that the judiciary should be elected by the national legislature; that the executive and the judges should form a council to revise all laws before they went into force; that provisions should be made for admitting new States, for amending the Articles of Union, for assuring to each State a republican form of government and a right to its soil. The resolutions read and explained, Ran¬ dolph moved a committee of the whole on the state of the Union, and to the committee the Virginia plan was sent. No sooner was this done than Charles Pinckney of South Caro¬ lina presented a second plan for a constitu¬ tional government. This too went to the committee, was never heard of again, and is now hopelessly lost. Next day the Virginia plan came formally before the committee, and during two weeks was carefully debated. Each resolution was taken up. Some were amended, some were dropped, and others put in their stead. But the feeling of the delegates seemed to be that there should be an executive, legislative, and judicial branch of government ; that the leg¬ islature should consist of two houses; and that the members of one should be elected by the people. When the number of the executive and the way of choosing came up, there were almost as many opinions as States on the floor. Some wanted an executive of three, one from each part of the country; some were for a single executive with a council of revision ; some for a single executive without a council of revision. He was to be elected directly by the people. He was to be chosen by electors, or by State legislatures ; by the State gov¬ ernors ; by one branch of the national legisla¬ ture ; by both branches on a joint ballot ; by both branches on a concurrent vote ; he was to be chosen by lot. For three days no other business was done. It was then determined that the executive should be chosen as the national legislature decided, should hold office seven years, and should not be reelected. This decision was reached on Monday, the 4th of J une. The debates up to this time had been most amicable. But, before the week ended, the delegates began to wrangle, sec¬ tional spirit began to appear, and those lines which again and again divided the convention before it rose became plainly visible. There were parties made up of individuals and par¬ ties made up of States. There were men who wished for a Federal government not much unlike that they were trying to better, and there were men who did not want a confeder¬ acy at all. There were men eager to see a centralized government set up, and men in¬ sisting that State sovereignty should be care¬ fully maintained. There were the Southern States against the Northern States, the com¬ mercial States against the agricultural States ; and what proved far more serious still, there were the great States against the small. Out of these party divisions came in time the three compromises of the Constitution. The fear in which the little States stood of the great secured the compromise giving represen¬ tation to States. The hatred felt by the slave States for the free caused the second compro¬ mise, giving representation to slaves. The jealousy between States agricultural and States commercial brought about the third compro¬ mise, on the slave-trade and commerce. The great States were Massachusetts, Penn¬ sylvania, and Virginia; New York, New Jer¬ sey, and Delaware were the small. The great States were for a strong national government on the Virginia plan ; the little States were for the old confederation mended and im¬ proved, and made their first firm stand on Sat¬ urday, the 9th of June. The second resolution of the Virginia plan, that suffrage in the na¬ tional legislature ought to be in proportion to wealth or free inhabitants, had been postponed, and this, on motion of Paterson, of New Jer¬ sey, was now taken up. The convention, he said, had no power to make a national government. Congress had assembled them to amend the Articles of Con¬ federation. The articles were, therefore, the proper basis for all proceeding. Bad as they might be in some ways, they were excellent in others. They acknowledged the sovereignty of the States, treated them all alike, and gave to each the same vote and the same weight when assembled in Congress. On no other plan could a confederacy of States be main¬ tained. Representation as proposed, represen¬ tation in proportion to wealth or numbers, looked fair in the face ; but it was unfair and unjust at heart. Suppose it adopted, suppose the States to send delegates to the first branch according to the sums of money they paid to the Board of Treasury, and see what would happen. Virginia would have sixteen votes and Georgia one. Was this just ? Was it safe ? Did any one think New Jersey would risk her independence, her sovereignty, her well-being in a Congress in which she had but five votes whileVirginiahad sixteen ? There was no more reason for giving a State paying a large quota more votes than a State paying a small quota, than there was for giving a rich man more votes at the polls than a poor man. New Jer¬ sey would never confederate on such a plan. She would be swallowed up. She would rather submit to a despot than to such a fate.

Page 753

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION. 751 The great States took a different view. It was true, they admitted, that each State was sovereign, and that all were therefore equal. It was also true that each man is naturally a sovereign over himself, and that therefore all men are naturally equal. But could he keep this sovereignty when he became a member of a civil government ? He could not. Neither could a State keep her sovereignty when she became a member of a Federal government. All government came from the people. Equal numbers of people ought therefore to have an equal number of representatives, and different numbers of people a different number of rep¬ resentatives. The people, not the States, were to be represented. And did any one think that 150 Pennsylvanians should have no more rep¬ resentation than 50 Jerseymen ? Six States thought not, and voted that in the first branch representation should be according to some equitable ratio. An equitable ratio was next decided to be the rule by which, in April, 1783, Congress fixed the quotas of the States. This rule was that quotas should be laid according to the whole number of free white inhabitants of both sexes, of every age, occupation, and condition, and three-fifths of all other persons save Indians not taxed. The small States had lost the day. But they were not discouraged, and, led on by Con¬ necticut, made a stout fight for an equal vote in the Senate. Again they were defeated, again population was made the basis of represen¬ tation, and, this done, the committee hurried on to the consideration of the remaining resolu¬ tions of the Virginia plan. By the 13th of June they had all been passed ; the committee had reported them to the House, and the House was about to name a day for considering the report, when Paterson rose and asked leave to bring in a totally different plan. Alarmed at the strong display of national feeling, the del¬ egates from Connecticut and New Jersey, Delaware and New York, with Luther Martin of Maryland, had framed a plan and chosen Paterson to lay it before the convention ; a plan which Hamilton well described as “ pork still, with a little change of the sauce.” Congress was to consist of a single House, with power to regu¬ late trade and commerce, and raise a revenue by duties on imports, postage on letter and newspajDer, and stamps on paper and vellum. There was to be an executive of several per¬ sons not eligible to a second term and remov¬ able by Congress at the request of a majority of the governors of the States. There was to be a supreme court, uniform laws of natural¬ ization, and, when necessary, requisitions on the States for money, according to the rule of April, 1783 ; officers were to be sworn to sup¬ port the constitution, and the constitution and its laws and treaties were to be “ the supreme law of the land.” This plan, it was said, had two great merits, — it fully agreed with the powers of the conven¬ tion ; it would be gladly accepted by the peo¬ ple. These were important ; for the duty of the convention was not to frame such a gov¬ ernment as might be best in theory, but such as the people expected and would approve. If the Confederation was really so bad, let the convention say so, go home, and get power to make such a government as they wished. But to assume such power was not to be justified on any ground. If, as some held, the Confedera¬ tion had fallen to pieces, if no general govern¬ ment really existed, then the States were once more independent sovereignties, and should stand on the footing of equal sovereignties. All then must agree or none could be bound. If the Confederation did exist, then by the terms of the articles no change could be made without the consent of all. This was the nature of all treaties. What had been unanimously done must be unanimously undone. It was said that the great States consented to this equality, not because it was just, but because, at the time, it was expedient. Be it so. Could they, therefore, take back that assent ? Could a donor resume his gift without the leave of the donee? It was now the turn of the great States to make an attack, and they did so vigorously. Wilson drew a long comparison between the Virginia plan and the Jersey plan. By the Vir¬ ginia plan there were to be three branches of government; by the Jersey plan but one. By the Virginia plan the people were to be repre¬ sented ; by the J ersey plan the States. By the one a majority of the people would rule; by the other a minority. The Virginia plan provided for a single executive ; the Jersey plan for an executiveof many. The Virginia plan provided for a negative on the laws of the States ; the Jersey plan for the coercion of the States. Madison demanded to know in what respect the Jersey plan was better than the old articles. It could not prevent violations of the laws of nations, nor of treaties, nor prevent encroach¬ ments on the Federal authority, nor trespasses of the States on each other, nor secure inter¬ nal tranquillity, nor give good governments to the States, nor guard the Union from the in¬ fluence of foreign powers. It could cure none of the evils that had long grown intolerable. Hamilton, who liked neither of the plans, now read to the committee his own thoughts on the best form of republican government. The supreme legislature, as he called it, was to consist of two branches, — the Assembly and the Senate. Members of the Assembly were to be chosen by the people for three years.

Page 754

752 THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION Members of the Senate were to be elected by- electors chosen by the people and serve as long as they behaved well. The executive was to be one man chosen by electors for good behavior. He was to have a veto on all laws about to be passed, was to conduct war when once begun, make treaties with the leave of the Senate, and appoint the heads of the departments of war, finance, and foreign af¬ fairs without consulting any one. There was to be a supreme judiciary, and in each State there were to be courts to try all matters of general concern. State laws contrary to the laws and Constitution of the United States were to be void. To prevent, if possible, such being passed, the general government was to appoint the governors of the States. The committee had now before them the Vir¬ ginia plan, the South Carolina plan, the New Jersey plan, and the thoughts of Hamilton on government, which he distinctly declared were thoughts, and nothing more. But they gave no heed to any schemes save those sent in by Virginia and New Jersey. The question, therefore, at once became which of the two should be reported. We must, said the State- rights party, report the J ersey plan. Our powers are limited, and this is the only plan that comes within them. Our powers, said the Virginia party, extend to everything or to nothing. We are free to support any plan and to reject any plan. The people are bowed down under in¬ tolerable burdens. They look up to this con¬ vention with fond hopes, and expect from it a government that will cure the ills of which they complain. A strong national government alone can do so, and such a government the Virginia plan will give them. The committee heartily agreed to this, voted the Jersey plan inadmissible, rose, and reported the Virginia plan to the convention. This much settled, the debating went smoothly on for a week. Put in good humor by the adoption of their plan, the great States now began to make some idle concessions to the small. The word “ national ” occurred twenty-six times in the resolutions, was hate¬ ful to the little States, and was therefore gra¬ ciously dropped. But the questions that took up the time of the convention till the last of June were : Should the legislature consist of one branch or two ? Should there be one executive or three ? Should the members of the first branch be twenty-five years old or thirty? Should the members of the second branch serve for nine years, for seven years, for five years, during good behavior? Then was reached that question which never once came up for discussion without provoking a violent display of sectional feeling and a long and rancorous debate. The question was. Should suffrage in the legislature be according to the rule established by the Articles of Con¬ federation, or according to some other ? Defenders of the State-rights theory as¬ serted that the general government ought to act on States, and not on individuals. The States were sovereign. Being sovereign, they were equal, and being equal, they ought to have equal votes. If the large States did indeed have the same interests as the small, there could be no harm in giving equal suffrage to all. If the great States did not have the same interests as the small, then unequal suffrage would be dangerous to the last degree. Once given votes in proportion to population or to wealth, it would be all the same whether the delegates were chosen by the people or by the legislatures. The great States would combine ; the little States would be enslaved. The defenders of the Virginia plan pro¬ nounced these fears and reasons absurd. It was the great States that fell out and the small ones that combined. This had always been the case in the Old World, and it would be so in the New. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and Virginia could never combine. They were far apart. Their manners, customs, religions, were unlike. They had nothing common even in trade. They were, however, rich, populous, and would surely be called on to bear the largest part of the cost and burdens of the government about to be set up. If, therefore, they consented to equal¬ ity of suffrage, they would be outvoted, and their money and their property would be com¬ pletely at the mercy of the little States. Between these two contending parties now appeared for the first time a party of compro¬ misers, made up chiefly of Connecticut men. Both the State-rights and the Virginia party went, they held, too far. One looked on the States as so many separate political societies ; the other looked on the people as one great political society of which the States were merely districts of people. The truth was the States did exist as political beings, and a government to be good and lasting must be formed for them in their political capacity as well as for the individuals composing them. The well-being of each was to be considered. The true plan was, therefore, to give the people representation in the one branch and the States representation in the other. New York, New Jersey, and Dela¬ ware were in no mood for a compromise and would hear nothing of such a plan. But the great States had their way, and voted that in the first branch representation ought to bear some proportion to the population of the States. This was final. Thenceforth no attempt was ever made to set it aside. Greatly elated, the compromisers now re¬ doubled their efforts, and insisted that, in the

Page 755

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION, 753 second branch, the voting should be by States. But the defenders of the Virginia plan again flew into a passion, another rancorous debate took up two days, and when the vote was finally reached, the ballot stood five to five. Never before had the members been so angry, nor the speeches so personal and bitter. Reflections, recrimination, taunts, threats of secession, were heard on every side. In this pass, at the sugges¬ tion of Cotesworth Pinckney, the whole matter of representation was sent to a grand committee, and the convention adjourned for three days. But the debates in the committee of eleven were as stormy as the debates in the committee of the whole. Again a compromise was offered and again it was refused. You propose, said the State-rights party to the Virginia party, to consent to an equal representation in the second branch of the legislature, if we will consent to an unequal representation in the first. We will not. This is merely offering, after a bitter struggle to put both your feet on our necks, to take one off if we will quietly suffer the other foot to remain. But we know well that you cannot keep even one foot on unless we are willing, and we know well that, having one firmly planted, you will be able to put on the second when you please. Riches will come to you ; population will come to you, and with them power. Will you not then force from us that equality of representation in the sec¬ ond branch which you now deny to be our right, and yield only from necessity? You tell us that you will enter into a solemn compact with us not to do so. But did you not years ago en¬ ter into a solemn compact with us, and are you not now treating it with the utmost con¬ tempt ? Do you think that while we see you wantonly violate one, we will meekly enter into another ? Franklin most happily was a member of the committee, and brought his colleagues in time to a better mind and persuaded them to agree to a report. This recommended that each State should be given one representative in the first branch of the legislature for every forty thousand inhabitants, and that in the second branch each State should have an equal vote. As the price of the concession by the great States, it was insisted that all money bills should originate in the first branch and not be amended in the second, and that no money should be drawn from the treasury ex¬ cept by bills originating in the first branch. Thus was the first compromise ended. The report, indeed, did not pass the convention for two weeks, and then by a close vote. But it was not again disputed that in the second branch the States should have an equal vote. Meanwhile, the committee of the whole took up the report in detail. The clause fixing representation at one to forty thousand was recommitted, and reported back with the pro¬ vision that in the first House of Representa¬ tives there should be fifty-six members, and that for the future representation should be based on wealth and population. The provis¬ ion of one representative for forty thousand inhabitants was dropped as too unsafe. It would enable the West in time to outvote the East. By making a general and not a specific rule, the East would keep the government in its own hands, take care of its own interests, and deal out representation in safe proportion to the West. Butwealth and population were ever chang- ing,and to find this change Randolph proposed an estimate and a census. The idea seemed a good one. There were, however, below the Mason and Dixon line thousands of human be¬ ings who might with equal justice be consid¬ ered as population or as wealth. They could be bought and sold, leased and mortgaged, given away, or bequeathed by will. They held no property-, acquired no estates, and to the delegates from the North and East seemed to be o'f no more account in the South than a black horse or a black ox in New England. They insisted, therefore, that slaves should be looked on as property. By the delegates from the South, however, a slave was held to be a man, for by doing so they hoped to increase their representation. No sooner, then, was it moved to take a census, than Williamson moved that the census should be of all free whites and three-fifths of all others. Instantly the old division of great States and little States disappeared, and the conven¬ tion was parted on the new basis of North and South. On the one hand were Delaware, South Carolina, and Georgia, demanding that slaves should have an equal representation with the whites ; on the other hand were Mas¬ sachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, de¬ manding that slaves should not be represented at all. Between the two, but leaning more to¬ wards the North, were Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. New York was no longer represented. Yates and Lansing, enraged at the passage of the Connecticut compromise, had gone home in a huff. Hamilton could no longer vote, and New York ceased to be con¬ sidered a member of the convention. The labor of slaves, such was the argument of delegates from the South, is as productive and as valuable in South Carolina as the labor of freemen in Massachusetts. They put up the value of land; they increase the amount of imports and exports ; they may, in emergency, be turned into soldiers and used for defense ; they ought, therefore, in a government set up chiefly for the protection of property and to be

Page 756

754 the framers AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION supported by property, to have equal repre¬ sentation with the whites. What, said their opponents, is the principle of representation ? It is an expedient by which an assembly of certain men chosen by the peo¬ ple is put in place of the inconvenient meet¬ ing of all the people. Suppose such a meeting to take place in the South, would slaves have a vote ? They would not. Why, then, should they be represented ? Had a master in Vir¬ ginia a number of votes in proportion to the number of his slaves ? He had not. Why, then, if there is no slave representation in the States legislature, should there be slave representa¬ tion in the national legislature? What, in plain language, did it mean Pit meant that the man from South Carolina who went to the coast of Africa and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity dragged away his fellow- creatures from their dearest connections and damned them to the most cruel bondage, should have more votes, in a government formed for the protection of the rights of man, than a citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who viewed such a nefarious practice with horror. Between the two was a third party, made up of men holding a variety of views. One could not consider the negro equal to the white ; yet the negro was a man, was a part of the whole population, and ought to have some representation. Another thought the Continental rule of three-fifths about right. A third was for giving slaves representation in the second branch but not in the first. They could do nothing, however, in the way of com¬ promise, and, when a vote on the resolution for a census was taken, every State present answered No» Matters were now just where they were when the report of the committee was pre¬ sented. But . they did not long remain so. Gouverneur Morris, in an evil hour, moved that taxation should be in proportion to repre¬ sentation. In the form of direct taxation the motion passed. Upon this a Southern member cried out that an attempt was being made to deprive the South of all representation of her blacks, and warned the convention that North Carolina would never confederate unless she had at least a three-fifths representation for her slaves. The threat was indeed formidable. What¬ ever form of government the convention might frame would, it was well known, have to be submitted to the States for approval. It had long seemed doubtful whether enough would approve to enable any plan to go into opera¬ tion. Rhode Island had refused to join the convention. The delegates from New York had gone home disgruntled. Massachusetts was not to be counted on. Were North Car¬ olina added to the number, the convention might as well break up, for their labors could accomplish nothing. To appease her, therefore, the lost resolution for a census of whites and three-fifths of the blacks was again moved, and the whole mat¬ ter of slavery was once more before the con¬ vention. How it should be settled was for the South to say, for of the ten States present the North could command but four. The South decided on a compromise, and the compro¬ mise offered was, to proportion representation according to direct taxation, and both repre¬ sentation and direct taxes according to popu¬ lation, counting as population all free whites and three-fifths of the negroes. When the bal¬ lot was taken North Carolina and Georgia voted yea ; South Carolina was divided, and the second compromise was accepted. On the 1 6th of July the report of the com¬ mittee containing the two compromises came before the convention. The day was a great one, for on the vote then taken hung the fate of the Constitution. On one part of the report the States had been divided into the great against the small. On another part they had taken sides as the slaves against the free. But the vote was now on the whole report, and the States were forced to take their stand ac¬ cordingly. The four little States supported it because of the compromise giving equal rej)- resentation in Senate. Two of the large States opposed it for the same reason, and were joined by South Carolina and Georgia, who still insisted on a full representation of slaves. Massachusetts was divided, for King and Gorham stoutly refused to support any plan of government that gave recognition and en¬ couragement to slavery. Everything there¬ fore turned on the vote of North Carolina, who, to save the Constitution, deserted the great States, joined with the small, and the report passed by five votes to four. Now each party grew very angry. Ran¬ dolph was for an adjournment, that the great States might have time to decide what steps to take next, and that the small States might arrange some plan of conciliation. He was sharply answered by Paterson that it was high time to adjourn, and to adjourn sme die. The rule of secrecy ought to be taken off and the people consulted. As for conciliation, the small States would never conciliate except on the basis of equality of representation. The indignation of the members from the great States at this was extreme, and early the next morning a number of them met to con¬ sider what to do. It was clear that the little States were fixed in their opposition. They had again and again asserted that they would

Page 757

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION 755 never give way, and they were still showing a front as determined as ever. Since, then, this partition of the convention into two fixed and opposite opinions seemed inevitable, the duty of the great States was, some said, quite plain. They represented the majority of the people of the United States. Let them, then, make ready a plan of government of their own. If the small States agreed to it, well and good. If not, so much the worse for them. Others were for yielding, though, by so doing, they did give way to a minority rule. But the conference came to nothing, and when the hour for the meeting of the convention arrived the members went to their seats in no amiable frame of mind. The next ten days were spent in distributing power between the States and the general government; in determining how the judges should be appointed; where impeachments should be tried ; what jurisdiction the Supreme Court should have ; howmany senators should be given to each State ; whether a man must own land before he could be eligible to Con¬ gress, to the Supreme Bench, to the executive office ; in what manner the Constitution should be ratified. This done, the Jersey plan, the South Carolina plan, and the twenty-three resolutions of the convention on a national government, were sent on July 26th to a com¬ mittee with instructions to report a constitu¬ tion. The convention then adjourned for two weeks. On the committee were Gorham, Ells¬ worth, James Wilson, Randolph, and John Rutledge. Of their doings nothing is known save that, when the convention assembled on the morning of Monday, August 6th, each member was given a copy of a draft of the Constitution, neatly printed on a broadside. The type was large. The spaces between the lines were wide, that interlineations might be made, and the margin broad for noting amend¬ ments. A few of these broadsides have been preserved and, when compared with the Con¬ stitution, show that the amendments were many and important. The draft provided that the President should be chosen by Congress, should hold office during seven years, and should never, in the whole course of his life, have more than one term; the Constitution intends the President shall be chosen by a body of electors, and puts no limit to the num¬ ber of his terms. By the draft he was given a title and was to be called His Excellency”; the Constitution provides for nothing of this kind. By the draft he could be impeached by the House of Representatives, but must be tried before the Supreme Court; by the Con¬ stitution he must, when impeached, be tried before the Senate. By the one he need not be a native of the United States; by the other he must. The one made no provision for a Vice-President; the other does. The one pro¬ vided that members of Congress should be paid by the States that sent them ; the other pro¬ vides that they shall be paid out of the national treasury. In the draft, senators were forbid¬ den to hold office under the authority of the United States till they had been one year out of the Senate; the Constitution makes no such requirement. By the draft. Congress was to have power to emit bills of credit, to elect a treasurer of the United States by ballot, to fix the property qualifications of its members, to pass navigation acts, and to admit new States if two-thirds of the members present in each House were willing; none of these pow¬ ers are known to the Constitution. The draft provided but one way of making amendments; the Constitution provides two. Nothing was said in the draft about the passage of ex post facto laws, about the suspension of the habeas corpus, about granting patents to inventors and copyrights to authors, about presidential electors, or about exclusive jurisdiction over an area ten miles square. Provision was made for a clumsy way of settling quarrels between States concerning jurisdiction and domain. As soon as the delegates had read their broadsides the work of the revision began. To the government was now given the name, United States of America.” The legislature was called “ The Congress,” — the first branch the ‘‘ House of Representatives,” and the sec¬ ond branch the “ Senate.” The executive was named the ‘‘ President.” Power to emit bills of credit was stricken out. An attempt to limit representation to free inhabitants failed. An attempt to secure the return of fugitive slaves succeeded. A long series of resolutions giving Congress power to regulate affairs with the Indians ; • set up temporary governments for new States ; grant charters of incorporation ; establish a university ; give a copyright to au¬ thors; encourage discoveries; advance the useful arts; have exclusive jurisdiction over the seat of government; provide for de¬ partments of war, marine, finance, com¬ merce, domestic affairs, foreign affairs, and State; assure the payment of the public debts; guarantee the right of habeas cor¬ pus and the liberty of the press; prevent the quartering of troops on the people in time of peace ; and give a privy council to the President, were readily agreed to. In¬ deed, but little debate was provoked till the fourth and sixth sections of the seventh arti¬ cle were reached. These sections forbade Congress to lay a tax on articles exported from any State, or to tax slaves imported, or to hinder the importa-

Page 758

756 THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION tion of slaves in any way whatever, or pass a navigation act, unless two-thirds of the mem¬ bers present in each house were willing. So much as related to a tax on exports was quickly disposed of. Southern members, indeed, pro¬ tested. They declared that if the power to tax exports was not given to the general gov¬ ernment it would remain with the States ; that if it remained with the States, those agricultural would be at the mercy of those commercial; that the whole South would be made tributary to the North. But their fears were pronounced unreasonable, the power was not given to Congress, and another relic of the political economy of the ancients was swept away for¬ ever. So much as related to taxing and hin¬ dering the importation of slaves had been put in to please South Carolina and Georgia. Ex¬ cept these two, every State was willing and eager to stop the importation of slaves. But the con¬ vention was reminded that the staples of South Carolina and Georgia were indigo and rice ; that these could not be raised without slave labor; that the toil in the rice swamp and the indigo field was more than even the brawniest negro could long endure ; that, if they could not bring in negroes from abroad, their indus¬ try and their property were gone; and that, sooner than submit to this, they would quit the Union. The moment, therefore, that Luther Martin moved that the fourth section be so changed that the importation of slaves could be taxed. South Carolina declared that she would never agree to it. If the men from other States thought she would, they were greatly mistaken; they were, indeed, simply standing in their own light. Let the South have more slaves, and more rice, more indigo, more pitch and tar would be produced, and the more pro¬ duced, the more for the ships of the New Eng¬ land men to carry. In this demand for the free importation of slaves, South Carolina was joined by Connecticut. Ellsworth and Sher¬ man both declared that the clause ought to be left as it was. The old Confederation had not meddled with slavery, and they did not see any reason why the new one should. What enriched a part of the Union, enriched the whole, and as to what enriched them, the States were the best judges. That slavery could enrich any land was flatly denied. Wherever it existed, Gouver- neur Morris asserted, the arts languished and industry fell into decay. Compare New England, it was said, with Georgia ; compare the rich farms and prosperous villages of Penn¬ sylvania with the barren and desolate wastes of Maryland and Virginia, and see what a dif¬ ference it made whether a land was cultivated by freemen or by slaves. The wealth, the strength, the prosperity of the country de¬ pended on the labor of whites, and there could be no white labor where slavery existed. Convinced of this truth, Maryland and Vir¬ ginia had forbidden slaves to be carried to their ports. North Carolina had done almost as much. But all this would be useless if South Carolina and Georgia were free to bring in as many as they chose. Already the settlers in the growing West were clamorous for slaves to till their new lands, and would fill that country with negroes if they could be had through South Carolina. But did any one suppose they would stop when every farmer had a full supply? Were not slaves to be represented ? Were not five negroes to be counted as three whites ? Would not the political power of the South increase with the increase of her slaves ? Here, then, was a new incentive for a free importa¬ tion, a new encouragement to the traffic. More than, this, slavery corrupted manners, turned masters into petty tyrants, and was utterly in¬ consistent with the principles of the American Revolution and dishonorable to the American character. All this, it was admitted, might be so. But honor, religion, humanity, had nothing to do with the question. The question was, Shall or shall not the Southern States be parties to the Union ? With the slave-trade prohibited. South Carolina, for one, never would. To this it was answered. If two States will not take the Constitution, if the importation of slaves is taxed, there are other States that will not take the Constitution if the importation of slaves is not taxed. The exemption of slaves from duty when every other import is taxed, is an in¬ equality to which the commercial States of the North and East will not submit. At this point Gouverneur Morris proposed that the taxation of exports, of slaves imported, and the question of a navigation act, should be sent to a committee. They were, he said, fit subjects for “ a bargain among the North¬ ern and Southern States.” Sherman, and Ran¬ dolph, and Pinckney, and Ellsworth, and a dozen more thought so too, and the fourth and fifth sections went to a committee of five. The sixth section soon followed them. This provided that no navigation act should be passed without the assent of two-thirds of the members present in each house, and was as hateful to the East as a restriction on the im¬ portation of slaves was to the South. The committee, therefore, had not been long in session before it was apparent that the New England States, despite the sentiments they held on slavery, were ready to make just such a bargain as Morris proposed. If the South would consent to strike out the sixth section and give Congress power to pass navigation

Page 759

THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION 757 acts, the East would consent to the importa¬ tion of slaves for a limited time. The South did consent. The bargain was struck, and the committee advised that the sixth section should be stricken out ; that the fifth should be left as it was, and that the fourth should be so changed that the importation of slaves should not be forbidden before 1800. Having obtained so much, the South wanted more, and insisted that the time should be ex¬ tended till 1808. The East readily agreed, and so made good their parts of the bargain. It now remained for the South to do likewise ; but the South began to object. Much was said about being in the minority, about being bound hand and foot, about having Southern trade at the mercy of the ship-owning States. If a majority of Congress could pass a naviga¬ tion act, the New Englanders would shut out foreign ships, get all the carrying- trade of the country for themselves, and then demand ruinous prices for carrying tobacco, rice, and indigo to Europe. Congress ought not to have any power over trade. The most, therefore, that the South would yield was that a two- thirds vote should be necessary for the exercise of this power. The Eastern States protested that the re¬ striction must be taken off ; that it would ruin them not to be able to defend themselves against foreign regulations. If the new gov¬ ernment were to be so fettered as to be unable to relieve the commerce of the Eastern States, what motive could there be for them to join it? Disunion was to be lamented ; but, if it came, the South would be the chief sufferer. The majority of the Southern members had been put in good humor by the two conces¬ sions of the East, that exports should not be taxed and that slaves should be imported till 1808, and by their influence the third com¬ promise was carried. The convention then went on for a week striking out words here, putting in resolutions there, and bringing the draught nearer and nearer the Constitution as we now have it. On the last day of August the postponed sections and the parts of committee reports not acted on were sent to a committee of eleven. This committee reported from time to time till Sep¬ tember 8th, when all that had been done was sent to a committee on arrangement and style. Saturday, the 15th, their work was accepted and ordered to be engrossed. On that day, as the question was about to be put for the last time, the delegates who disliked the Con¬ stitution began to make excuses for withhold¬ ing their support. Mason lamented that a bare majority of Congress could pass a navigation act, and moved that no such act should be passed prior to 1808. But nothing came of it. VoL. XXXIV.— 104. Randolph asked that the State conventions to which the Constitution was to be submitted might submit amendments to a second Federal convention. Mason approved this. The Con¬ stitution, he said, had been formed without the knowledge of the people. It was not right to say to them. Take this or nothing. A second convention would know their wishes. Gerry named nine features which he especially dis¬ liked. Alarmed at this opposition, Franklin spent Sunday in preparing a little speech to be read to the dissenters. But, when Monday came, when the members were in their seats, and the Constitution, ready for signature, lay upon the table, he found himself too weak, and James Wilson read the paper for him. He was, he said, an old man, and had often, in the course of a long life, been forced to change opinions he was once sure were right. As he grew older, therefore, he had learned to doubt his own judgment and to pay more respect to the judgments of others. Steele in one of his dedi¬ cations told Pope that the only difference be¬ tween the Church of England and the Church of Rome in their opinion on the certainty of their doctrine was this : The Church of Rome was infallible ; the Church of England was never in the wrong. Fie had heard of a cer¬ tain French lady who, in a quarrel with her sister, said : “ I do not know how it is, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is al¬ ways in the right.” Doubting his own opinion, he agreed to the Constitution with all its faults, if it had any. He had expected no better, and he was not sure that it was not the best. He hoped that each member who still had objec¬ tions would do likewise, doubt a little of his own infallibility and sign the document. As a good form he would propose, “ Done in convention by the unanimous consent of the States present, etc.” Gouverneur Morris drew up this form, in hopes that men who would not sign as individuals would sign as State delegates. He gave it to Franklin to bring before the convention, thinking that, supported by him, it would have great weight. As soon as Wilson had finished reading, Gorham rose and moved that the ratio of rep¬ resentation be changed from one for every forty thousand to one for every thirty thousand. No debate followed, and as Washington was about to put the question, he expressed a hope that the change would be made. The smallness of the proportion of representatives had always seemed to him an objectionable part of the plan. The change was made, the form of ratifica¬ tion proposed by Morris was carried, the jour¬ nals and papers deposited in the hands of the President, and towards evening the members

Page 760

758 THE FRAMERS AND THE FRAMING OF THE CONSTITUTION. began to sign. Sixteen refused. Luther Mar¬ tin had followed the examples of Yates and Lansing, had quit the convention and gone home to Maryland in disgust. Gerry feared a civil war ; Randolph was convinced the con¬ sent of nine States could never be obtained; Mason was sure they were about to set up a monarchy or a tyranny, he did not know which, and none of them would sign. The rest of the sixteen carefully kept out of the room. Washington was first to sign. When he had done so, the other delegates went up one after another in the geographical order of their States, beginning with the East. Hamilton alone signed for New York. As the Southern mem¬ bers were affixing their names, Franklin, look¬ ing towards the President’s chair, on the back of which was cut a sun, said to those about him that painters had found it difficult to distinguish a rising from a setting sun. I have,” said he, “often and often in the course of the session, and the solicitude of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.” When the convention rose that evening, it rose never to sit again. As early as possible on the i8th of Septem¬ ber, Major Jackson, the Secretary, set out for New York to lay the Constitution, the ac¬ companying resolutions of the convention, and the letter of Washington before Congress. But that body was not to be the first to re¬ ceive it. The legislature of Pennsylvania was in session, and to it the Constitution was read on the morning of the i8th. Copies were at once given to the printers in the city, and on the 19th, long before Major Jackson reached New York, the people of Phila¬ delphia were reading it in the “Packet,” the “Journal,” and the “ Gazetteer.” Septem¬ ber 20th, the documents were laid before Congress and the next day were published in the newspapers at New York. Meanwhile such delegates to the conven¬ tion as were members of Congress were hurry¬ ing back to New York; and well they might, for in Congress the enemies of the Constitu¬ tion were many and strong. The delegation from New York opposed it to a man; and with them were joined Nathan Dane, William Grayson of Virginia, and R. H. Lee. Con¬ gress, they held, could give no countenance to the Constitution. That document was a plan for a new government. A new govern¬ ment could not be set up till the old Confed¬ eration had been pulled down, and to pull down the Confederation was not in the power of Congress, tor that body could not destroy the government by whose authority it owed existence. The answer was that Congress had sanctioned the convention, and that, if it could sanction the call for the convention it could sanction the work the convention did. But Lee and his followers would not listen to argument, and on September 26th he moved that a bill of rights and a long list of amend¬ ments should be added to the Constitution. He would have no Vice-President, more con¬ gressmen, more than a majority to pass an act regulating commerce, and a council of state to be joined with the President in making all appointments. Congress, however, would not seriously consider his amendments, and the next day it was moved that the Constitution be sent to the executives of the States, to be by them submitted to their respective legisla¬ tures. Instantly it was moved to add the words, “in order to be by them submitted to a convention of delegates to be chosen agreeably to the said resolution of the con¬ vention,” and the motion was carried. It was now quite clear that neither party could have all that it wanted. The Federalists wished to send the Constitution to the States by the unan¬ imous vote of Congress; but this they could not do so long as the delegates from New York held out. The anti-Federalists wished to send it to the States without one word of approval ; but this they could not do unless the Federalists consented. When, therefore. Congress met on the 28th, each party gave up something. The anti-Federalists agreed to unanimity; the Federalists agreed to with¬ hold all marks of approval. The amendments offered by Lee on the 26th, and the vote on the 27th, were then expunged from the jour¬ nal, and the Constitution, the letter of Wash¬ ington, and the resolution of the convention, were sent to the States. Twenty hours later the legislature of Pennsylvania called a State convention to consider the Constitution. By the provisions of that instrument the ratification by nine States was to put it in force. Before the year closed Delaware and Penn¬ sylvania and New Jersey had done so. Georgia and Connecticut followed in January, 1788. In February came Massachusetts with nine amendments. In April came Maryland, and in May South Carolina with four amendments. In June New Hampshire ratified with twelve amendments, and the list of nine States was complete. “ The Good Ship Constitution,” as the Federalists delighted to call that instru¬ ment, was now fairly launched. “The New Roof” was up, finished, and firmly sup¬ ported by nine stout pillars, and, while the re¬ joicings over its completion were still going on, news came that it was to be upheld by two pillars more. Virginia and New York had ratified. Virginia offered twenty amendments

Page 761

SUB POND ERE CRESCIT, and a bill of rights ; the amendments offered by New York numbered thirty-two. Nowhere else had the contest been so long and so bitter. In some States the people disliked the Constitution because the liberty of the press was not secured, because there was to be no trial by jury in civil cases, be¬ cause the name of God was not to be found in it, because there was to be no more rota¬ tion in office, because there was no bill of rights, because there was no religious qualifi¬ cation for office, because there were to be slave representation and the importation of slaves for one-and-twenty years. But in New York the Constitution was hated from begin¬ ning to end. Nor would the convention ratify it till the Federal members solemnly agreed that the States should be invited to a new Federal convention, to which it should be submitted for amendment. Clinton accord¬ ingly issued the call. But the States most happily did not favorably respond. Some malcontents of Pennsylvania did, indeed, hold a convention at Harrisburg in September, 1788, and there drew up some amendments which they referred to the convention called by New York. But of this action, also, nothing came. September 13th, 1788, Congress fixed upon the first Wednesday in January, 1789, as the day for choosing presidential electors, the first Wednesday in February for the meet¬ ing of the electors, and the first Wednesday in March as the day the Constitution was to become law. Five weeks later the Congress of the Confederation expired ignominiously for want of a quorum. 759 As yet the Constitution was without amendments. But the first session had not closed when Virginia sent in a petition beg¬ ging Congress not to rise till action had been taken on those offered by the States. Madi¬ son accordingly drew up and presented to the House nine amendments, which are almost identically the nine suggested by the minority of the Pennsylvania convention in an address to their constituents. Of these in time the House made seventeen. Of the seventeen the Senate made twelve, and of the twelve, the States adopted ten, Avhich were declared in force December 15th, 1791. Another was added in 1798, and still another in 1804; after which, though many were offered, none were accepted till the close of the Civil War. The amendments proposed by the first Con¬ gress removed, in great part, the objections of the anti-Federalists, and the two States that were still refractory began to show signs of giving way. In November, 1789, North Car¬ olina consented to join the Union. But six months passed, and Rhode Island held out. Then, when the United States was about to treat her as a foreign power, when the revenue laws were about to be enforced against her, when it seemed likely that a great exodus of her most worthy citizens would take place, the Federalists carried the ratification of the Con¬ stitution by a vote of 34 to 32. But the victory was not with them alone, for their opponents added a long bill of rights and twenty amend¬ ments, which, it was jeeringly said elsewhere, was more than one for each town in the State. John Bach McMaster, SUB PONDERE CRESCIT. CAN this be he whose morning footstep trod O’er the green earth as in a regal home ? Whose voice rang out beneath the sky’s blue dome Like the high utterance of a youthful god ? Now with wan looks and glance that seeks the sod Across the twilight fields I see him roam With sad face, lusterless as ocean-foam. And shoulders bowed, as shrinking from the rod. O, lift the old-time light within thine eyes ! Let loose the pristine passion from thy tongue ! Strength grows with burdens ; make an end of sighs ; Let thy thoughts soar again, their mates among; And as yon oriole’s eager matins rise Abroad once more be thy strong anthem flung ! Tho7nas Wentworth Higginson.

Page 762

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. ROBABLY at no other time during the war was there a better opportunity for a successful operation than at the springing of the mine in front of Petersburg, July 30th, 1864. While many think that the failure on that occasion was attributable to the weak¬ ness of General Ledlie and his division, it would appear, when all the circumstances are considered, that all the blame cannot be laid at their door. The first attempt to capture Petersburg was made on June loth, a few days after the re¬ pulse at Cold Harbor. General Butler, who confronted Beauregard at Bermuda Hundred, on the previous day sent General Gillmore with 3000 infantry, and General Kautz with 1500 cavalry, to surprise General Wise, who held the Petersburg defenses with his brigade and a small force of militia. Early on J une i oth Gillmore found the intrenchments east of the town fully manned and withdrew. Kautz approached Petersburg from the south-east, flanked the intrenchments at the Jerusalem plank-road, and advanced to the city reservoir (see map, page 765) where a show of force was made which decided General Kautz to withdraw. During the day Wise was reen¬ forced by Dearing’s brigade of cavalry. On the evening of June 12th began Meade’s movement from Cold Harbor to the James. The Fifth Corps, crossing the Chickahominy at Long Bridge, took a position to cover the White Oak Bridge and the roads from Rich¬ mond, between White Oak Swamp and Mal¬ vern Hill. On the 13th the Second Corps passed through Charles City Court House and reached the James below Wilcox’s Landing. The Sixth and Ninth corps arrived there on the 14th. The Second Corps crossed in boats from Wilcox’s Landing during the night of June 14th, the day that the Fifth reached Charles City Court House. On the 15th and i6th the three other corps crossed by a ponton-bridge, touching the south bank 2 miles north of Fort Powhatan, where the river was 2100 feet wide. General W. F. Smith embarked the Eight¬ eenth Corps at White House, June 13th, and arrived at Point of Rocks during the night of the 14th. The next morning General Smith advanced on Petersburg with 16,000 men. Late on the 1 5th he assaulted the outer line of works and carried them from redans 5 to 1 1 (see map, page 765). During the night Lee reenforced Wise with Hoke’s division and a part of Edward Johnson’s division. Early the same evening Hancock’s Second Corps came to the assistance of General Smith. On the 1 6th the Ninth Corps arrived and took posi¬ tion on the left of the Second Corps. Early on that day Egan’s brigade captured redan 12; later, the Second Corps, assisted by two brigades of the Eighteenth Corps on the right and a similar force of the Ninth on the left, captured redans 4,13, and 14. At dawn on the 17th General Potter’s division of the Ninth Corps carried the enemy’s line for a mile south of redan 1 4. During the night Beauregard with¬ drew to a new line, which was immediately intrenched, and reenforcements from General Lee began to pour in. On the 1 8th assaults were made by the Second, Ninth, and Fifth corps, in that order counting from the Hare house, afterward Fort Stedman, toward the left.

Page 763

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. 761 The Ninth Army Corps, under General Burn¬ side, gained by these last assaults an advanced position beyond a deep cut in the railroad with¬ in one hundred and thirty yards of the enemy’s main lines. In rear of that advanced position was a deep hollow, where work could be car¬ ried on entirely out of sight of the enemy. A few days after gaining this position Lieu¬ tenant-Colonel Henry Pleasants, who had been a mining engineer and who belonged to the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers, composed for the most part of miners from the upper Schuyl¬ kill coal region, suggested to General Potter, commander of the Second Division of the Ninth Corps, the possibility of running a mine under one of the enemy’s forts in front of the deep hol¬ low. This proposition was submitted to General Burnside, who approved of the measure, and work was commenced upon it on the 25th of June. If ever a man labored under disadvan¬ tages, that man was Colonel Pleasants. In his testimony before the Congressional Com¬ mittee on the Conduct of the War, he said : “ The work was commenced at 12 o’clocknoon,onthe twenty-fifth day of June, 1864. I saw General Burnside the night previous, and commenced the mine right off the next day. . . . My regiment was only about four hundred strong. At first I employed but a few men at a time, but the number was increased as the work pro¬ gressed, until at last I had to use the whole regiment — non-commissioned officers and all. The great difficulty PETERSBUKG. I had was to dispose of the material got out of the mine. I found it impossible to get any assistance from any¬ body ; I had to do all the work myself. I had to remove all the earth in old cracker- boxes ; I got pieces of hick¬ ory andnailed on the boxes in which we received our crackers, and then iron- cladded them with hoops of iron taken from old pork and beef barrels. . . . Whenever I made applica¬ tion I could not get any¬ thing, although General Burnside was very favor¬ able to it. The most im¬ portant thing was to ascer¬ tain how far I had to mine, because if 1 fell short of or went beyond the proper place, the explosion would have no practical effect. Therefore I wanted an accurate instrument with which to make the neces¬ sary triangulations. I had to make them on the fur¬ thest front line, where the enemy’s sharp-shooters could reach me. I could not get the instrument I wanted, although there was one at army headquar¬ ters, and General Burnside had to send to Washington and get an old-fashioned theodolite, which was given to me. . . . General Burn¬ side told me that General Meade and Major Duane, chief engineer of the Army General Butler’s lines extended from Port Walthall on the Appomattox to the western end of Far¬ rar’s Island on the James. There wa?a ponton-bridge connecting Deep Bottom with Jones’s Neck, and two bridges connecting Point of Rocks with the south bank of the Appomattox. These facilitated the transfer of troops from Petersburg to Deep Bottom and back again, by which movement a part of Lee’s force was drawn from Petersburg preliminary to the Union assault at the crater. — Editor.

Page 764

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER, 762 of the Potomac, said the thing could not be done — that it was all clap-trap and nonsense ; that such a length of mine had never been excavated in military operations, and could not be ; that I would either get the men smothered, for want of air, or crushed by the falling of the earth ; or the enemy would find it out and it would amount to nothing. I could get no boards or lumber supplied to me for my operations. I had to get a pass and send two companies of my own regi¬ ment, with wagons, outside of our lines to rebel saw¬ mills, and get lumber in that way, after having pre- the powder on the 23d of July, 1864. With proper tools and instruments it could have been done in one-third or one-fourth of the time. The greatest delay was occasioned by taking the material out, which had to be car¬ ried the whole length of the gallery. Every night the pioneers of Colonel Pleasants^ regi¬ ment had to cut bushes to cover the fresh dirt at the mouth of the gallery ; otherwise the enemy could have observed it from 400 Feet. trees inside his own lines. The main gallery was 5 feet in length. The left lateral gallery was 37 feet in length and the right lateral 38 feet. The magazines, 8 in number, were placed in the lateral galleries — 2 at each end a few feet apart in branches at nearly right angles to the side galleries, and 2 more in each of the side galleries similarly placed by pairs, situated equidistant from each other and the end of the galleries. It had been the intention of Gen¬ eral Grant to make an assault on the ! m so 60 40 so 0 100 200 SOO Horizontal Scale. Plan. DETAILS OF THE MINE. P9rtical Scale. 10 20 30 40 SO Feet. Profile. FifE. Union, fVorks. Section ^ Main Gallerj. viously got what lumber I could by tearing down an old bridge. I had no mining picks furnished me, but had to take common army picks and have them straight¬ ened for my mining picks. . . . The only officers of high rank, so far as I learned, that favored the enter¬ prise was General Burnside, the corps commander, and General Potter, the division commander.” Notwithstanding the adverse circumstances at the outset. Colonel Pleasants had the whole mine, lateral galleries and all, ready to put in enemy’s works in the early part of July; but the movement was deferred in consequence of the work on the mine, the completion of which was impatiently awaited. As a diversion Han¬ cock’s corps and two divisions of cavalry had crossed to the north side of the James at Deep Bottom and had threatened Richmond. A part of Lee’s army was sent from Petersburg to checkmate this move, and when the mine was

Page 765

7^3 THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. ready to be sprung Hancock was recalled in lar to the enemy’s line by the ‘ right companies on the l,.sle\oP.ter;bu,g When the ™i„a„>s,.ady for the explosives General Meade requested — ’ - 1 - to 8 6 i- 2 0 so Scale General Burnside to submit a plan of attack. This was done in a letter dated July 26th, 1864, in which General Burnside said : . It is altogether prob¬ able that the enemy are cog¬ nizant of the fact that we are mining, because it is men¬ tioned in their papers, and they have been heard at work on what are supposed to be shafts in close proximity to our galleries. But the rain of night before last has, no doubt, much retarded their work. We have heard no sound of workmen in them either yesterday or to-day ; and nothing is heard by us in the mine but the ordinary sounds of work on the surface above. This morning we had some apprehension that the left lateral gallery was in danger of caving in from the weight of the batter¬ ies above it and the shock of their firing. But all possible precautions have been taken to strengthen it, and we hope to preserve it intact. The placing of the charges in the mine will not involve the necessity of making a noise. It is therefore probable that we will escape discovery if the .oN mine is to be used within two or three days. It is, nevertheless, highly important, in my opinion, that the mine should be exploded at the earliest possible moment consistent with the gen¬ eral interests of the campaign. I state to you the facts, as nearly — as I can, and in the absence of any knowledge as to the meditated movements of the army, I must leave you to judge the proper time to make use of the mine. But it may not be improper for me to say that the advantages reaped from the work would be but small if it were exploded with¬ out any cooperative movement. “My plan would be to explode the mine just before day¬ light in the morning or at about five o’clock in the afternoon. Mass the two brigades of the • colored division in rear of my first line, in columns of division, — ‘double-columns closed in mass,’ — the head of each brigade resting on the front line, and as soon as the explosion has taken place, move them forward, with instructions for the division to take half distance, and as 60 DIAGRAM OF THE CRATER. emy’s works as rapidly as possible ; and the leading regiment of the left brigade to execute the reverse movement to the left, moving up the enemy’s line. The remainder of the col¬ umns to move directly towards the crest in front as rapidly as possible, diverging in such a way as to enable them to de- Fcet column of regiments, the right column making as nearly as possible for Ceme¬ tery Hill; these columns to be followed by the other di¬ visions of the corps as soon as they can be thrown in. This would involve the necessity of relieving these divisions by other troops be¬ fore the movement, and of holding columns of other troops in readi¬ ness to take our place on the crest, in case we gain it, and sweep down it. It would, in my opinion, be ad¬ visable, if we succeed in gaining the crest, to throw the colored ! division right into the ' town. There is a neces¬ sity for the cooperation at least in the way of artillery, by the troops on our right and left. Ot the extent of this you will necessarily be the judge. I think our chances of success, in a plan of this kind, are more than even. ... I pro¬ pose to put in each of the eight magazines from twelve hundred to fourteen hundred pounds of powder ; the magazines to be connected by a trough of powder instead of a fuse. I would suggest that the powder train be parked in a woods near our ammu¬ nition train, about a mile in rear of this ' place. Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce, chief ^ quartermaster,will furnish Captain Strang with a guide to the place. I beg also to re¬ quest that General Benham be instructed to send us at once eight thousand sand-bags, to be used for tamping and other purposes.” With a view of making the attack, the divis- ion of colored troops, under General Edward Eerrero, had been drilling for several weeks, General Burnside thinking that they were in better condition to head a charge than either of the white divisions. They had not been in any very active service. On the other hand. nv.nv^no iwx uw.- V... — - ^ * - - - - soon as the leading regiments of the two brigades pass white divisions had performed very ardu- nrrV» fl-»A rrarfc in line, tlic Icadinsf regi- - • • ■' ■* * — * — through the gap in the enemy’s line, the leading regi¬ ment of the right brigade to come into line perpendicu- * The Fourteenth New York Heavy Artillery (serv¬ ing as infantry) which led the assault had little over three hundred duty men present. It had entered the campaign at the Wilderness 1800 strong. It was di¬ vided into three battalions led by five field-officers and twelve captains. The morning of the explosion its ous duties since the beginning of the cam¬ paign * and before Petersburg had been in colonel led the brigade, and there was no other field- officer present, the last major having been killed in the charge of June 17th ; only two of the t-welve captains remained. Other regiments of the division were cor¬ respondingly weak. — Editor.

Page 766

764 THE TEA GEE V OF THE CRATER. such proximity to the enemy that no man could raise his head above the parapets without being fired at. They had been in the habit of using every possible means of covering themselves from the enemy’s fire. General Meade objected to the use of the colored troops, on the ground, as he stated, that they were a new division, and had never while there the message was received from General Meade that General Grant disap¬ proved of that plan, and that General Burn¬ side must detail one of his white divisions to take the place of the colored division. This was the first break in the original plan. There was then scarcely twelve hours, and half of that at night, in which to make this change — and no possible time in which the white RESERVOIR HILL, WHERE KAUTZ’s ADVANCE WAS STOPPED, JUNE lOTH. - , j - - - (SEE PAGE 760, AND MAP, PAGE 705.; been under fire, while this was an operation requiring the very best troops. General Burn¬ side, however, insisted upon his programme, and the question was referred to General Grant, who confirmed General Meade’s views, although he subsequently said in his evi¬ dence before the Committee on the Conduct of the W ar : “ General Burnside wanted to put his eolored divis¬ ion in front, and I believe if he had done so it would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his objections to that plan. General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front (we had only one division) and it should prove a fail¬ ure, it would then be said, and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front.” The mine was charged with only 8000 pounds of powder, instead of 14,000 as asked for, the amount having been reduced by order of General Meade ; and while awaiting the decision of General Grant on the question of the colored troops, precise orders for making and supporting the attack were issued by Gen¬ eral Meade. In the afternoon of the 29th of July, Gen¬ erals Potter and Willcoxmet together at Gen¬ eral Burnside’s headquarters, to talk over the plans of the attack, based upon the idea that the colored troops would lead the charge, and troops could be familiarized with the duties expected of them. General Burnside was greatly disappointed by this change; but he immediately sent for General Ledlie, who had been in command of the First Division only about six weeks, and upon his arrival each of the three command¬ ers of the white divisions presented reasons why his division should 7iol lead the assault. General Burnside determined that they should '' pull straws,” and Ledlie was the (to him) unlucky victim. He, however, took it good- naturedly, and, after receiving special instruc¬ tions from General Burnside, proceeded with his brigade commanders to ascertain the way to the point of attack. This was not accom¬ plished until after dark on the evening before the mine was to be exploded. The order of attack, as proposed by General Burnside, was also changed by direction of General Meade, with the approval of General Grant. Instead of moving down to the right and left of the crater of the mine, for the purpose of driving the enemy from their in- trenchments, and removing to that extent the danger of flank attacks. General Meade directed that the troops should push at once for the crest of Cemetery Hill. The approaches to the Union line of in- trenchments at this particular point were so

Page 767

FACSIMILE ENLAFGEMENT OF A PART OF THE OI F.CiAL J.AP OF THE PETERSBURG CAMPAIGN- Union works are indicated bv the letter U, and by Roman nnmernis VIII IX, etc. ; ^Confederate works by the letter C, and tlie redoubts of the first Confederate line by Arabic numerals, 5, 6, etc. VoL. XXXIV.— 105.

Page 768

766 CRATER. THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. PROFILE OF THE GROUND BETWEEN THE CRATER AND THE MOUTH OF THE MINE. — I. (FROM A RECENT SKETCH.) well covered by the fire of the enemy that they were cut up into a network of covered ways almost as puzzling to the uninitiated as the catacombs of Rome.* Upon General Ledlie’s return from the front orders were issued, and the division was formed at midnight. Shortly afterwards it advanced through the covered ways, and was in position sometime before daybreak, behind the Union breastworks, and immediately in front of the enemy’s fort, which was to be blown up. The orders were that Ledlie’s division should ad¬ vance first, pass over the enemy’s works, and charge to Cemetery Hill, four hundred yards to the right, and approached by a slope com¬ paratively free from obstacles ; the next divis¬ ion (VVillcox’s), as soon as the First Division should leave the works, was to advance to the left of Cemetery Hill, so as to protect the left flank of the First Division; and the next division (Potter’s) Avas to move in the same way to the right of Cemetery Hill. The Ninth Corps being out of the way, it was intended that the Fifth and the Eighteenth corps should pass through and follow up the movement. 3:30 A. M. Ledlie’s division was in posi¬ tion, the Second Brigade, Colonel E. G. Mar¬ shall in front, and that of General W. F. The writer of this article was serving as Judge- Advocate of Ledlie’s division, and also performed the duties of aide-de-camp to General Ledlie at the time of the explosion. When the orders were published for the movement, he and Lieutenant George M. Randall, also of the regular army and aide-de-camp to General Ledlie, were informed that they must accompany the advance troops in the attack, but that the volunteer Bartlett behind it, the men and officers in a feverish state of expectancy, the majority of them having been awake all night. Day¬ light slowly came, and still they stood with every nerve strained prepared to move for¬ ward the instant an order should be given. Four o’clock arrived, officers and men began to get nervous, having been on their feet four hours; still the mine had not been ex¬ ploded. It was at this time that General Led¬ lie directed me to go to General Burnside and report to him that the command had been in readiness to move since 3:30 a. m., and to in¬ quire the cause of the delay of the explosion. I found General Burnside in rear of the Fourteen-gun battery, delivered my message, and received in reply from the general that there was some trouble with the fuse dying out, but that an officer had gone into the gallery to ignite it again, and the explosion Avould soon take place.f ^ I returned immediately, and just as I ar¬ rived in rear of the First Division the mine was sprung. It Avas a magnificent spectacle, and as the mass of earth Avent up into the air, carrying Avith it men, guns, carriages, and tim¬ bers, and spread out like an immense cloud as it reached its altitude, so close Avere the Union staff would remain with General Ledlie, all of whom did so, during the entire engagement, in or near a bomb-proof within the Union lines. — W. H. P. t Sergeant lienry Rees entered the mine and found that the fuse had died out at the first splicing. He cut the fuse above the charred portion; on his Avay out for materials he met Lieutenant Jacob Douty, who assisted in making a fresh splice, which was a success. — Editor. CRATER. PROFILE OF THE APPROACH TO THE CRATER, AS SEEN FROM A POINT SOUTH-EAST OF THE MOUTH OF THE MINE. (FROM A RECENT SKETCH.)

Page 769

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. 767 UNION BREASTWORKS. MOUTH OF THE MINE. PROFILE OF THE GROUND UETWEEN THE CRATER AND THE MOUTH OF THE MINE.— II. lines that the mass appeared as if it would de¬ scend immediately upon the troops waiting to make the charge. This caused them to break and scatter to the rear, and about ten minutes were consumed in re-forming for the attack."^ Not much was lost by this delay, however, as it took nearly that time for the cloud of dust to pass off. The order was then given for the advance. As no part of the Union line of breastworks had been removed (which would have been an arduous as well as hazardous undertaking), the troops clambered over them as best they could. This in itself broke the ranks, and they did not stop to re-form, but pushed ahead towards the crater, about one hundred and thirty yards distant, the debris from the explosion having covered up the abatis and chevaiix-de-frise in front of the enemy’s works. Little did those men anticipate what they would see upon arriving there : an enormous hole in the ground about 30 feet deep, 60 feet wide, and 170 feet long, filled with dust, great blocks of clay, guns, broken carriages, project¬ ing timbers, and men buried in various ways — some up to their necks, others to their waists, and some with only their feet and legs pro¬ truding from the earth. One of these near me was pulled out, and he proved to be a second lieutenant of the battery which had been blown up. The fresh air revived him, and he was soon able to walk and talk. He was very grateful and said that he was asleep when the explosion took place, and only awoke to find himself wriggling up in the air ; then a few seconds afterwards he felt himself descending, and soon lost consciousness. The whole scene of the explosion struck every one dumb with astonishment as we ar¬ rived at the crest of the debris. It was impos¬ sible for the troops of the Second Brigade to move forward in line, as they had advanced; * Immediately following the explosion the heavy guns all along the line opened a severe artillery fire. and, owing to the broken state they were in, every man crowding up to look into the hole, and being pressed by the First Brigade, which was immediately in rear, it was equally impos¬ sible to move by the flank, by any command, around the crater. Before the brigade com¬ manders could realize the situation, the two brigades became inextricably mixed, in the desire to look into the hole. However, Colonel Marshall yelled to the Second Brigade to move forward, and the men did so, jumping, sliding, and tumbling into the hole, over the debris of material, and dead and dying men, and huge blocks of solid clay. They were followed by General Bartlett’s brigade. Up on the other side of the crater they climbed, and while a detachment stopped to place two of the dismounted guns of the battery in posi- MAJOR-GENERAL ROBERT B. POTTER. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 770

768 THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. THE CRATER, AS SEEN FROM THE CONFEDERATE SIDE. (FROM A SKETCH MADE BY A CONFEDERATE ARTILLERY OFFICER ON THE MORNING OF THE EXPLOSION, AND BEFORE THE CONFEDERATE COUNTER ASSAULT.^ tion on the enemy’s side of the crest of the crater, a portion of the leading brigade passed over the crest and attempted to re-form. It was at this period that they found they were being killed by musket-shots from the rear, fired by the Confederates who were still occu¬ pying the traverses and intrenchments to the right and left of the crater. These men had been awakened by the noise and shock of the explosion, and during the interval before the attack had recovered their equanimity, and when the Union troops attempted to re-form on the enemy’s side of the crater, they had faced about and delivered a fire into the backs of our men. This coming so unexpectedly caused the forming line to fall back into the crater. Had General Burnside’s original plan, pro¬ viding that two regiments should sweep down inside the enemy’s line to the right and left of the crater, been sanctioned, the brigades of Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett could and would have re-formed and moved on to Cemetery Hill before the enemy realized fully what was intended ; but the occupation of the trenches to the right and left by the enemy prevented re-formation, and there being no division, corps, or army commander present to give orders to other troops to clear the trenches, a formation under fire from the rear was something no troops could accomplish. After falling back into the crater a partial formation was made by General Bartlett and Colonel Marshall with some of their troops, but owing to the precipitous walls the men could find no footing except by facing inwards, digging their heels into the earth, and throw¬ ing their backs against the side of the crater, or squatting in a half-sitting, half-standing posture, and some of the men were shot even there by the fire from the enemy in the trav¬ erses. It was at this juncture that Colonel COLONEL HENRY PLEASANTS. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 771

THE TEA GEE V OE THE CRATER. Marshall requested me to go to General Lecl- lie and explain the condition of affairs, which he knew that I had seen and understood per¬ fectly well. This I did immediately. AVhile the above was taking place the enemy had not been idle. He had brought a battery from his left to bear upon the position, and as I started on my errand, the crest of the cra¬ ter was being swept with canister. Special 769 ing no person present with authority to change the programme to meet the circumstances. Had a prompt attack of the troops to the right and left of the crater been made as soon as the leading brigade had passed into the crater, or even fifteen minutes afterwards, clearing the trenches and diverting the fire of the enemy, a success was inevitable, and particularly would this have been the case on the left of the cra- THE CONFEDERATE LINE AS RECONSTRUCTED AT THE CRATER. (FROM A DRAWING MADE BY LIEUTENANT HENDERSON AFTER THE BATTLE.) attention was given to this battery by our artillery, but for some reason or other the enemy’s guns could not be silenced. Passing to the Union lines under this storm of canister, I found General Ledlie and a part of his staff ensconced in a protected angle of the works. I gave him Colonel Marshall’s message, ex¬ plained to him the situation, and Colonel Marshall’s reasons for not being able to move forward. General Ledlie then directed me to return at once, and say to Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett that it was General Burnside’s order for them to move forward immediately. This message was delivered. But the firing on the crater now was incessant, and it was as heavy a fire of canister as was ever poured continuously upon a single objective point. It was as utterly impracticable to re-form a bri¬ gade in that crater as it would be to marshal bees into line after upsetting the hive; and equally as impracticable to re-form outside of the crater, under the severe fire in front and rear, as it would be to hold a dress parade in front of a charging enemy. Here, then, was the second point of advantage lost by there be- ter, as the small fort immediately in front of the Fifth Corps, was almost, if not entirely, abandoned for a while after the explosion of the mine, the men running away from it as if they feared that it was to be blown up also. Whether General Ledlie informed General Burnside of the condition of affairs as reported by me I do not know; but I think it likely, as it was not long after I had returned to the crater, that a brigade of the Second Division (Potter’s) under the command of Brigadier- General S. G. Griffin advanced its skirmishers and followed them immediately, directing its course to the right of the crater. General Griffin’s line, however, overlapped the crater on the left, where two or three of his regiments sought shelter in the crater. Those on the right passed over the trenches, but owing to the peculiar character of the enemy’s works, which were not single, but complex and in¬ voluted and filled with pits, traverses, and bomb-proofs, forming a labyrinth as difficult of passage as the crater itself. This broke up the brigade, which, meeting the severe fire of canister, also fell back into the crater, which

Page 772

770 THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. was then full to suffocation. Every organization melted away, as soon as it entered this hole in the ground, into a mass of human beings clinging by toes and heels to the almost perpendicular sides. If a man was shot on the crest he fell and rolled to the bottom of the pit. From the actions of the enemy, even at this time, as could be seen by his moving columns in front, he was not exactly certain as to the intentions of the Union commander; he appeared to think that possibly the mine explosion was but a feint and that the main attack would come from some other quarter. He, however, massed some of his troops in a hollow in front of the crater, and held them in that position. Meantime General Potter, who was in rear of the Union line of intrenchments, being convinced that something ought to be done to create a diversion and distract the enemy’s attention from this point, ordered Colonel Zen as R. Bliss, commanding his First Brigade, to send two of his regiments to support General Griffin, and with the remainder to make an attack on the right. Subsequently it was arranged that the two regiments going to the support of General Griffin should pass into the crater, turn to the right and sweep down the enemy’s lines. Colonel Bliss was partly success¬ ful, and obtained possession of some two or three hundred yards of the line, and one of the regiments advanced to within twenty or thirty yards of the battery whose fire was so severe on the troops ; but it could make no further head¬ way for lack of support — its progress being impeded by slashed timber, while an unceasing fire of canister was poured into the men. They therefore fell back to the enemy’s traverses and intrenchments. At the time of ordering forward Colonel Bliss’s command General Potter wrote a dispatch to General Burnside, stating that it was his opinion, from what he had seen, and from the reports he had received from subordinate officers, that too many men were being forced in at this one point ; that the troops there being in confusion, it was absolutely necessary that an attack should be made from some other point of the line, in order to divert the enemy’s attention and give time to straighten out our line. To that dispatch he never received an answer. Orders were, however, being constantly sent to the three division commanders of the white troops to push the men forward as fast as could be done, and this was, in substance, about all the orders that were received by them during the day up to the time of the order for the withdrawal. When General Willcox came with the Third Division to support the First, he found the latter and three regiments of his own, together with the regiments of Potter’s Second Division which had gone in on the right, so completely filling up the crater that no more troops could be gotten in there, and he therefore ordered an attack with the remainder of his division on the works of the enemy to the left of the crater. This attack was successful, so far as to carry the intrenchments for about one hundred and fifty yards; but they held them only a short time. Previous to this last movement I had again left the crater and gone to General Ledlie, and had urged him to try to have something done to the right and left of the crater — saying that every man who got into the trenches to the right or left of it used them as a means of escape to the crater, and the enemy was reoccupying them as fast as our men left. All the satisfaction I received was an order to go back and

Page 773

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER, tell the brigade commanders to get their men out and press forward to Cemetery Hill. This talk and these orders, coming from a commander sitting in a bomb-proof inside the Union lines, were disgusting. I returned again to the crater and delivered the orders, which I knew beforehand could not possibly be obeyed ; and I told General Ledlie so before I left him. Upon my return to the crater, I devoted my attentions to the movements of the enemy, who was evidently making dispo¬ sitions for an assault. About two hours after the explosion of the mine (7 o’clock) and after I had returned to the crater for the third time. General Ferrero, commanding the colored division of the Ninth Corps, received an order to advance his divis¬ ion, pass the white troops which had halted, and move on to carry the crest of Cemetery Hill at all hazards. General Ferrero did not think it advisable to move his division in, as there were three divisions of white troops al¬ ready huddled together, so he reported to Col¬ onel Charles G. Loring, of General Burnside’s staff, who requested Ferrero to wait until he could report to General Burnside. General Ferrero declined to wait, and then Colonel Loring gave him an order, in General Bum- side’s name, to halt without passing over the Union works, which order he obeyed. Colonel Loring went off to report to General Burnside, came back, and reported that the order Avas peremptory for the colored division to advance at all hazards. The division then started in, moved by the left flank, under a most galling fire, passed around the crater on the crest of the debris, and all but one regiment passed beyond the crater. The fire upon them was incessant and severe, and many acts of personal hero¬ ism were done here by officers and men. Their drill for this object had been unques¬ tionably of great benefit to them, and had they led the attack, fifteen or twenty minutes from the time the debris of the explosion had settled would have found them at Cemetery Hill, before the enemy could have brought a gun to bear on them. But the leading brigade struck the enemy *A field-officer of one of the colored regiments [Lieutenant-Colonel John A. Bross] seized a stand of United States colors as he saw his men faltering when they first met the withering fire of the enemy, and mounting the very highest portion of the crest of the crater, waved the colors zealously amid the storm of shot and canister. The gallant fellow was soon struck to the earth. While this was taking place, an amusing occurrence happened in the crater. As the colored column was moving by the left flank around the edge of the crater to the right, the file-closers, on account of the narrow¬ ness of the way, were compelled to pass through the mass of white men inside the crater. One of these file- 771 which I had previously reported as massed in front of the crater, and in a sharp little action the colored troops captured some two hundred prisoners and a stand of colors and recaptured a stand of colors belonging to a white regiment of the Ninth Corps. In this almost hand-to- hand conflict, the colored troops became some¬ what disorganized, and some twenty minutes were consumed in re-forming; then they made the attempt to move forward again. But, un¬ supported, subjected to a galling fire from bat¬ teries on the flanks and from infantry fire in front and partly on the flank, they broke up in disorder and fell back to the crater, the ma¬ jority passing on to the Union line of defenses, carrying with them a number of the white troops Avho were in the crater and in the enemy’s intrenchments.* Had any one in authority been present when the colored troops made their charge, and had they been supported, even at that late hour in the day there would have been a possibility of success ; but when they fell back and broke up in disorder, it was the closing scene of the tragedy. The rout of the colored troops was followed up by a feeble attack from the enemy, more in the the way of a reconnaissance than a charge ; but the attack was repulsed by the troops in the crater and the intrenchments connected therewith, and the Confederates retired. It was now evident that the enemy did not fear a demonstration from any other quarter, as they began to collect their troops for a de¬ cisive assault. On observing this, I left the crater and reported to General Ledlie, whom I found seated in a bomb-proof with General Ferrero, that some means ought to be devised for withdrawing the mass of men from the crater without exposing them to the terrific fire which was kept up l)y the enemy ; that if some shovels and picks could be found, the men in an hour could open a covered Avay by Avhich they could be withdrawn ; that the enemy was making every preparation for a de¬ termined assault on the crater, and, disorgan¬ ized as the troops were, they could make no permanent resistance. Not an implement of any kind could be found, indeed the prop- closers was a massively built, powerful, and well-formed sergeant, stripped to the waist — his coal-black skin shining like polished ebony in the strong sunlight. As he was passing up the slope to emerge on the enemy’s side of the crest, he came across one of his own black fellows who was lagging behind his company, evidently with the intention of remaining inside the crater, out of the way of the bullets. He was accosted by the sergeant with “None obyo’ d — n skulkin,’ now,” with which remark he seized the culprit with one hand, and, lifting him up in his powerful grasp by the waistband of his trousers, carried him to the crest of the crater, threw him over on the enemy’s side, and quickly fol¬ lowed.— W. H. P.

Page 774

772 THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. osition was received with disfavor. Matters remained in statu quo until about 2 p. m., when the enemy’s anticipated assault was made. OUTER WORKS OF FORT SEDGWICK. night preparations and their fearful morning’s work. While the hours were thus wasted in the time and means necessary to extricate the human mass from its now perilous position, the enemy, having taken advantage of our in¬ activity to mass his troops, was seen to emerge from the bushes which grew in the swale be¬ tween the hill on which the crater was situ¬ About 9:30 A. M. General Meade had given positive orders to have the troops withdrawn from the crater. To have done so, under the severe fire of the enemy, would have produced a stampede, which would have endangered the Union lines, and might possibly have communicated itself to the troops that were massed in rear of the Ninth Corps. General Burnside thought, for these and other reasons, that it was possible to leave his command there until nightfall, and then withdraw it. There was no means of getting food or water to them, for which they were suffering. The midsummer sun shone upon their heads until waves of moisture produced by the exhalation from this mass slowly arose in perceptible hori¬ zontal layers; wounded men died there begging piteously for a drink of water — a drop of which was not to be had, for the men had long since drained their canteens. Soldiers extended their tongues to dampen their parched lips until they seemed to hang from their mouths like those of thirsty dogs, and yet they were kept waiting in this almost boiling cauldron, suf¬ fering with thirst and worn out with their all- BOMB-PROOFS INSIDE FORT SEDGWICK. ated and that of the cemetery. On account of this depression they could not be seen by our artillery, and hence no guns were brought to bear upon them. The only place where they could be observed was from the crater. But there was no serviceable artillery there, and no sufficiently organized infantry force to offer resistance when the enemy’s column pressed forward. All in the crater who could possibly hang on by their elbows and toes lay flat against its conical wall and delivered their fire ; but not more than a hundred men at a time could get into position, and these were only armed with muzzle-loading guns, and in order to re -load, they were compelled to face about and place their backs against the wall. FORT SEDGWICK, KNOWN AS “ FORT HELL,” OPPOSITE THE CONFEDERATE FORT MAHONE, KNOWN AS “ FORT DAMNATION.” (FROM PHOTOGRAPHS.)

Page 775

THE TRAGEDY OF THE CRATER. 773 The enemy's guns suddenly ceased their long-continued and uninterrupted fire on the crater, and the advancing column charged in the face of feeble resistance offered by die Union troops. At this stage they were perceived by our artillery, which opened a murderous fire, but too late. Over the crest and into the crater they poured, and a hand-to-hand conflict ensued. It was of short duration, how¬ ever; crowded as our troops were, and without organization, resistance was vain. Many men were bayoneted at that time — some probably that would not have been, except amid the heat and excitement of battle. About 87 offi¬ cers* and 1652 men of the Ninth Corps were captured, the remainder retiring to our own lines, to which the enemy did not attempt to advance. In the engagements of the 17th and i8th of June, in order to obtain the position held by the Ninth Corps at the time of the explo¬ sion, the three white divisions had 29 officers and 348 men killed; 106 officers and 1851 men wounded; and 15 officers and 554 men missing — total, 2903. From the 20th of June to the day before the crater fight of July 30th these same divisions lost in the trenches 12 officers and 231 men killed; 44 officers and 851 men wounded; and 12 men missing — total, 1 150. These casualities were caused by picket and shell firing, and extended pretty evenly over the three divisions. The whole of General Willcox’s division was on the line for thirty days or more without relief. General Potter’s and General Ledlie’s divisions had slight reliefs, enabling those officers to draw some of their men off at intervals for two or three days at a time. In the engagement of July 30th, the four divisions of the Ninth Corps had 52 officers and 376 men killed ; 105 officers and 1556 men wounded ; and 87 officers and 1652 men missing (captured) — total, 3828.! It was provided in General Meade’s order for the movement that the cavalry corps should make an assault on the left. Two divis¬ ions of the cavalry were over at Deep Bottom. They could not cross the river until after the * General William F. Bartlett was among the cap¬ tured. Earlier in the war he had lost a leg, which he replaced with a patent cork leg. While he was standing in the crater, a shot was heard to strike with the peculiar thud known to those who have been in action, and the general was seen to totter and fall. A number of officers and men immediately lifted him, when he cried out, “ Put me any place where I can sit down.’’ “ But you are wounded. General, aren’t you ? ” was the inquiry. “ My leg is shattered all to pieces,” said he. Second Corps had crossed, so that it was late in the day before they came up. Indeed, the head of the column did not appear before the offensive operations were suspended. As Gen¬ eral James H. Wilson had been ordered to be in readiness, and in view of the unavoidable delay of General Sheridan, orders were sent to Wilson not to wait for General Sheridan, but to push on himself to the Weldon railroad. But the length of the march prevented suc¬ cess; so no attack was made by the cavalry, except at Lee’s Mills, where General Gregg, encountering cavalry, drove them away in order to water his horses. The Fifth Corps and the Eighteenth Corps remained inert during the day, excepting Tur- SIDES AND EDGE OF TWO BULLETS THAT MET POINT TO POINT AT THE CRATE;R — THE SIDES FROM PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE ORIG¬ INAL IN MAJOR Griffith’s museum at the crater. ner’s division of the Eighteenth, which made an attempt on the right of the crater, but it happened to be just at the time that the col¬ ored troops broke up ; so his command was thrown into confusion, and fell back to the trenches. In this affair the several efforts made to push troops forward to Cemetery Hill were as fu¬ tile in their results as the dropping of hand¬ fuls of sand into a running stream to make a dam. With the notable exception of General Robert B. Potter, not a division commander was in the crater or connecting lines, nor was there a corps commander on the immediate scene of action ; the result being that the sub¬ ordinate commanders attempted to carry out the orders issued prior to the commencement of the action, when the very first attack de¬ veloped the fact that a change of those plans was absolutely necessary. Williani H Powell. “ Then you can’t sit up,” they urged, “ you’ll have to lie down.” “ Oh, no ! ” exclaimed the general, “ if's only my coi'k leg thafs shattered ! ” — W. H. P. t General Meade reported the losses of his army in the assault on the crater at 4400 killed, wounded, and missing, all except about 100 being in the Ninth Corps. General Mahone states that the number of prisoners taken was iioi. The loss in Lee’s army is not fully re¬ ported. Elliott’s brigade lost 677, and that was proba¬ bly more than half of the casualties on the Confederate side.— Editor. VoL. XXXIV.— 106.

Page 776

THE DASH INTO THE CRATER. ^^HE story of the clash into the Peters- I burg crater and the struggle there, with ^ the thrilling experiences of the men en¬ gaged, is too broad for one witness to cover, but the record of one regiment will convey a fair idea of what the battle was. The selection of troops to lead the assault was settled on the eve of the movement, but the plans and pur¬ poses for the day were not communicated to any soldier below the rank of field-officer. There were indications of a forward movement that the privates could well interpret, such as orders for extra rations, the concentration of troops, and the massing of lines of battle close to the enemy’s works in front of Cemetery Hill. The honor of leading the assault came by rotation to Colonel E. G. Marshall’s brigade. During the night his regiments were marched to a posi¬ tion about twenty rods from the mine, where a single breastwork, an old Confederate work, turned, lay between them and the fort. The con¬ dition of this work was not pointed out to the men, nor was any notice given them of what would occur or what was expected in the emer¬ gency before them. The men dozed and rested a couple of hours before daylight, awaiting devel¬ opments. Suddenly the earth trembled, and a black pyramid shot into the air, so close that it seemed as though in spreading after the upward force was spent it would fall on and crush those nearest. It was so startling that the first two lines of men broke, for it was be¬ lieved to be an earthquake or a Confederate mine sprung upon us. No one believed that a Confederate fort was so near. The 14th New York Heavy Artillery, to which I be¬ longed, formed the third line, and was Colonel Marshall’s own regiment. With two lines in front and the familiar presence of their own commander to encourage them, these men re¬ mained comparatively steady, although there was confusion for a brief spell. Just how far this confusion set back the movement will be seen from the experiences of the first moments. Lieutenant Thomson, of Company B, was thrown into a mudhole by the shock, and just as he came up blinded and bespattered before his astonished soldiers, the call rang out,“ For¬ ward!” Forward meant across those breast¬ works in front, and these were as high as a man’s shoulder. There were no steps or lad¬ ders, and this unlucky lieutenant scraped the mud from his eyes, repeated the orders, and climbed up the logs, for the works at the time were more like a high terrace wall than a field breastwork. Some of the men put bayonets into the wall and made steps, and a few stood on the top and lent hands to their fellows. When twenty men of Company B had joined their lieutenant on the works, he ordered them to align, but Colonel Mar¬ shall called out, “No time for that. Lieuten¬ ant; go for the crest.” So it stood with the whole regiment, and but a handful were ready at the first jump. These charged in companies, by the flank. Our artillery opened at once and shells went screaming overhead, and puffs and clouds of smoke from the shell and from the yawning pit made by the explosion obscured the view and added to the confusion. About one hundred and fifty men were close to Colonel Marshall and the colors, and more came straggling on as fast asthey could get over the works, and the grand dash was made by this handful. At the crater a slanting pit was open, and on each side of it the Confederates were now alert, although they were not cool enough for action. In the pit, powder smoke issued from the crevices ; guns were seen half buried ; the heads or limbs of half-buried men wriggled in the loose earth. The command came again, “Go ahead ! ” There was a sec¬ tion of the exploded work remaining, and here and in the breastworks alongside men were seen. In front, beyond the hole, a Con¬ federate battery was firing into the pathway from our works, and a shot cut a man of Com¬ pany C in two. The men in the pit and near it surrendered or ran away and the flag of the 14th New York Heavy Artillery was planted on the site of the old fort. The en¬ emy on the flanks and beyond came to their senses at sight of this flag and opened with bullets. Our men saw that all around them

Page 777

THE DASH INTO THE CRATER. 775 were superior numbers, and even from the rear they received a fire, for there were traverses running toward our own lines that sheltered men while firing across the plateau and, re¬ versely, into the crater. Still the determination was to push on, and a dash was made for the second breastwork. Here the Confederates made a stand. Some of our men got so close that guns were clubbed, and Sergeant James S. Hill of Company C took a regimental battle-flag by force. The fire from all sides was hot, and the men fell back to the old fort and into the crater. It seemed now to those on the spot that the best thing to do was to defend the breach as a basis for forward movements, for there were Confederates all about, possibly in numbers sufficient to recapture it. Colo¬ nel Marshall and some of his officers and men got the old cannon into position and opened on the Confederates that were near¬ est.* By this time other regi¬ ments had come up, and the 2d Pennsylvania Heavy Artil¬ lery, of our brigade, joined in this work. General Hartranft came in with a command, and when he saw the action of Marshall’s men, called out. Three cheers for the 14th !” Thebrigades following Marsh¬ all’s moved against the breast¬ works on the flanks of the crater, but they had to face artillery and muskets at every step, and as the lines broke the men inevitably came to the crater. There were now on the scene detachments from several commands without a su¬ preme commander. Offi¬ cers and men alike called for definite purposes and orders. Our brigade had entered the breach and could not advance until the flanks were cleared. The brigades sent after us to clear the flanks had been beaten off and had taken refuge in the pit. Difficulties increased every second, because the Confederates grew bolder and their fire began to tell. Every fresh advance from our supports was anxiously watched, but in the end despairing curses went up because the unsuccessful columns fell back and packed the overcrowded hole. The wounded men came into the pit in preference to going to our own lines, because the way back was swept by the enemy. After the first hour the scene in the crater was terrible. Refugees found that shots fell there as Avell as outside, and many who came in looking for safety met disaster. The last rally was when the colored divis- ion moved out from our works in splendid or- RELICS IN THE CRATER MUSEUM. I. Musket-barrel with bullet-hole at the muzzle. 2. Musket hurst by two bullets meeting in the barrel, a bullet having entered the muzzle as the gun was discharged. 3. Musket struck by six bullets, one embedding itself in the barrel near the bayonet. 4. Musket bent after having been cocked and capped. 5. Musket- stock covered with blood, found in a bomb-proof. 6. Sword found in a bomb-proof. 7. Broken sword. 8. Lining of a cartridge- box. 9. Canteen perforated by bullets. 10. Shovel having bul¬ let-holes, found on the Union picket line in front of the crater. II. Frying-pan having bullet-holes; taken out of the crater. they found charge. It a worse fate was believed der, which prom¬ ised us success. Growlers were now put to shame, and the most of the men fell into line, to go forward. Some few declared that they would neverfollow ^‘nig¬ gers” or be caught in their company, and started back to our own lines but were promptly driven forward again. Then the colored troops broke and scat¬ tered, and pande¬ monium began. The bravest lost heart, and the men who distrusted the negroes vented their feelings free¬ ly. Some colored men came into the crater, and there than death in the among the whites that the enemy would give no quarter to ne- * In the section of the fort not destroyed by the ex- ing the lulls in action, not entering the crater proper, plosion were rifle cannon, dismounted. Here portions But we could overlook the whole scene when not dis- of my company and of other companies remained dur- tracted by the rush of sensations. — G. L. K.

Page 778

THE DASH INTO THE CRATER. 776 groes, or to the whites taken with them, and so to be shut up with blacks in the crater was equal to a doom of death. The officers began to scheme for a retreat. At the time there were one general of division and four brigade commanders on the spot, — R. B. Potter, E. G. Marshall, S. G. Griffin, W. F. Bartlett, and John F. Hartranft. Orders came to withdraw the men, but the space between the hole and our works was commanded at every point by Confederate artillery and sharp-shooters. The road was corduroyed with bodies of the fallen. The commandant of the First Battalion of the 14th Regiment, Captain Houghton, Companv L, proposed to lead his men back, but they all preferred to remain, and the general officers advised all hands to wait. One plan was to send for spades, and have two parties at work at either end digging a ditch for passage. An¬ other was to wait until nightfall. Both plans were cut short by the action of the enemy. Two or three small parties advanced on the crater, and were repulsed; yet reenforcements were coming up, and it was evident that the spot must be abandoned. Captain Houghton watched the men who attempted to cross back to the works and saw that a gun throwing case-shot did most of the damage to the re¬ treat. After a discharge of this gun he started and passed its range before another discharge came. In crossing the space he found it planted so thick with the fallen that he could not avoid stepping on them. As soon as he reached the works, he directed a sharp musketry fire upon the points whence the hot¬ test Confederate fire came and partly silenced it, so that a few more men got home safely. Colonel Marshall and General Bartlett were among those who remained in the crater and were captured. The experiences of these men at capture must be told from recollections of survivors after a long captivity ending with the war. It has been positively asserted that white men bayoneted blacks who fell back into the cra¬ ter. This was in order to preserve the whites from Confederate vengeance. Men boasted in my presence that blacks had thus been dis¬ posed of, particularly when the Confederates came up. Many of the prisoners died in Andersonville, and it is impossible to get good accounts of the closing moments, the time of hand-to-hand work between whites and blacks in the crater and the Confeder¬ ates who came in. A man who kept tally when the bodies in the hole were buried by the enemy recorded one hundred and forty- seven white and black Union soldiers found in the pit itself. Some of them may have been mortally wounded outside, and some were killed by shots falling into the crater. Sergeant Hill, our comrade who captured the Confederate flag, met death that morning, and a medal of honor was awarded for his action. This flag is now in the War Department collection fully identified on the record. There were many scenes here to move the strongest hearts. When the debris of the ex¬ plosion was in the air men’s bodies could be distinguished, and of course it flashed upon every mind that a horrible fate had overtaken fellow-men. On one of the elevations in the crater, a Confederate was seen struggling with his head and shoulders buried and held fast. Our men attempted to relieve him, but were driven away by Confederate bullets. On each side of the hole were counter- shafts about fifty feet deep standing open. Down one of these a Confederate had fallen and lay there alive and moaning, but there was no means for his relief at hand. These counter-shafts had been run perpendicularly and abandoned. The Confederate prisoners stated that the fort was full of men that night, for our movements in front had been noticed, and an assault was expected and preparations had been made to receive it. The explosion, however, was wholly unexpected. The wisdom of selecting the Ninth Corps for the assault has been questioned by high authority. The quality of men for this kind of work depends on their present spirit, com¬ monly called the morale. This condition is easily affected and is an uncertain quantity among the very best troops. Three points may be noted as to the spirit of our corps at the time, and the same would be true of the other corps of the army. First, there was a feeling that the soldiers had been pushed per¬ sistently into slaughter-pens, from the Wilder¬ ness down, and needlessly sacrificed by such methods. Second, there was a determination to rebel against further slapdash assaults. Third, the strongest element of all, as affect¬ ing the general spirit, was the all-powerful ambi¬ tion to take Petersburg and end the struggle. It was universally felt by the men in the breach that the explosion of the mine was a means to that end. But the first assaulting columns would not go on and seize the crest without supports, and these supports did not come. There was not an instant from the moment of the explosion up to the time when the negroes came on that the whites would not have rallied to a man and risked everything in a combined and well-directed charge upon the crest. The men knew that success lay in a strong move¬ ment, and they refused to go out in weak de¬ tachments. George L. Kilmer.

Page 779

THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG. GUIDON OF THOMAS’S BRIGADE OF THE COLORED DIVISION — SHADED PARTS, GREEN ; THE FIELD, WHITE. "I^AST of Petersburg, on high ground, protrud¬ ing like the ugly horn of a rhinoceros, stood the Confederate earth¬ work, fortified as a bat¬ tery, which we under¬ mined and exploded July 30th, 1864. It did a good deal of goring before we destroyed it. Its position ena¬ bled the garrison to throw a somewhat enfilading fire into our lines, under which many fell, a few at a time. For some time previous to the explosion of the mine it was determined by General Burn¬ side that the colored division* should lead the assault. The general tactical plan had been given to the brigade commanders (Colonel Sigfried and myself), with a rough outline map of the ground, and directions to study the front for ourselves. But this latter was im¬ practicable except in momentary glimpses. The enemy made a target of every head that appeared above the work, and their marksman¬ ship was good. The manner of studying the ground was this : Putting my battered old hat on a ramrod and lifting it above the rampart just enough for them not to discover that no man was under it, I drew their fire ; then, stepping quickly a few paces one side, I took a hasty observation. We were all pleased with the compliment of being chosen to lead in the assault. Both officers and men were eager to show the white troops what the colored division could do. We had acquired confidence in our men. They believed us infallible. We had drilled certain movements, to be executed in gaining and occupying the crest. It is an axiom in military art, that there are times when the ardor, hope¬ fulness, and enthusiasm of new troops not yet rendered doubtful by reverses or chilled by defeat, more than compensate, in a dash, for training and experience. General Burnside, for this and other reasons, most strenuously urged his black division for the advance. Against his most urgent remonstrance he was over¬ ruled. About IIP. M., July 29th, a few hours before the action, I was officially informed that the whole plan had been changed, and our division would not lead. We were then bivouacking on our arms in rear of our line, just behind the covered way leading to the mine. I returned to that biv¬ ouac dejected and with an instinct of disaster for the morrow. As I summoned and told my regimental commanders, their faces expressed the same feeling. I considered it unnecessary to inform the captains that night, and they were allowed to sleep on. Any striking event or piece of news was usu¬ ally eagerly discussed by the white troops, and in the ranks military critics were as plenty and perhaps more voluble than among the offi¬ cers. Not so with the blacks ; important news such as that before us, after the bare announce¬ ment, was usually followed by long silence. They sat about in groups,^^ studying,” as they called it. They waited, like the Quakers, for the spirit to move; when the spirit moved, one of their singers would uplift a mighty voice, like a bard of old, in a wild sort of chant. If he did not strike a sympathetic chord in his hear¬ ers, if they did not find in his utterance the exponent of their idea, he would sing it again and again, altering sometimes the words, or more often the music. If his changes met general acceptance, one voice after another would chime in; a rough harmony of three parts would add itself; other groups would join his, and the song became the song of the command. The night we learned that we were to lead the charge the news filled them too full for ordinary utterance. The joyous ne¬ gro guffaw always breaking out about the camp-fire ceased. They formed circles in their company streets and were sitting on * There was but one division of colored troops in the Army of the Potomac — the Fourth Division of the Ninth Corps — organized as follows : Brigadier-General Edward Ferrero, commanding division. First Brigade : Colonel Joshua K. Sigfried (of the 48th Penn.); 27th U. S. colored troops, Lieu¬ tenant-Colonel Charles J. Wright; 30th U. S. colored troops, Colonel Delevan Bates ; 39th U. S. colored troops. Colonel Ozora P. Stearns ; 43d U. S. colored troops. Lieutenant- Colonel H. Seymour Hall. Second Brigade : Colonel Henry Goddard Thomas, 19th U. S. colored troops ; 19th U. S. colored troops, Lieutenant¬ Colonel Joseph G. Perkins ; 23d U. S. colored troops. Colonel Cleaveland J. Campbell ; Battalion of six com¬ panies 28th U. S. colored troops, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles S. Russell ; 29th U. S. colored troops, Lieu¬ tenant-Colonel John A. Bross ; 31st U. S. colored troops, Lieutenant-Colonel W. E. W. Ross. This made a division of only nine regiments, divided into two brigades, yet it was numerically a large divis¬ ion. The regiments were entirely full, and a colored deserter was a thing unknown. On the day of the action the division numbered 4300, of which 2000 belonged to Sigfried’s brigade and 2300 to mine. — H. G. T.

Page 780

778 THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG. the ground intently and solemnly study¬ ing.” At last a heavy voice began to sing, “ We-e looks li-ike me-en a-a marchin’ on, we looks li-ike men-er-war.” Over and over again he sang it, making slight changes. The rest watched him intently; no sign of approval or disapproval escaped their lips, or appeared on their faces. All at once, when his refrain had struck the right response in their hearts, his group took it up, and shortly half a thou¬ sand voices were upraised. It was a pictur¬ esque scene, — these dark men, with their white eyes and teeth and full red lips crouching over a smoldering camp-fire, in dusky shadow, with only the feeble rays of the lanterns of the first sergeants and the lights of the candles dimly showing through the tents. The sound was as weird as the scene, when all the voices struck the low E ” (last note but one), held it, and then rose to ^^A” with a portamento as sono¬ rous as it was clumsy. Until we fought the battle of the crater they sang this every night to the exclusion of all other songs. After that defeat they sang it no more. About 3 A. M. the morning of the battle we were up after a short sleep under arms. Then came the soldiers’ hasty breakfast. Never fight on an empty stomach ” was a proverb more honored in that army than any of Solomon; for the full stomach helped the wounded man to live through much loss of blood. This morning our breakfast was much like that on other mornings when we could not make fires : two pieces of hard-tack with a slice of raw, fat salt pork between — not a dainty meal, but solid provender to fight on. By good fortune I had a bottle of cucumber pickles. These I distributed to the officers about me. They were gratefully accepted, for nothing cuts the fat of raw salt pork like a pickle. We moist¬ ened our repast with black coffee from our canteens. The privates fared the same, bar¬ ring the luxury of the pickle. We had been told that the mine would be fired at 3:45 a. m. But 4 o’clock arrived, and all was quiet. Not long after that came a dull, heavy thud, not at all startling; it was a heavy smothered sound, not nearly so dis¬ tinct as a musket-shot. Could this be the mine ? No; impossible. There was no charg¬ ing, no yells, neither the deep-mouthed bass growl of the Union troops, nor the sharp, shrill, fox-hunting cry of the Confederates. Here was a mine blown up, making a crater from 150 to 200 feet long, 60 wide, and 30 deep, and the detonation and the concussion were so inconsiderable to us, not over a third of a mile away, that we could hardly believe the report of a staff-officer, back from the line, that the great mine had been exploded. At about 5:30 A. M. a fairly heavy musketry fire from the enemy had opened. Shortly after, as we lay upon our arms awaiting what orders might come, a quiet voice behind me said, “ Who commands this brigade ? ” ‘‘I do,” I replied. Rising, and turning toward the voice, I saw General Grant. He was in his usual dress : a broad-brimmed felt hat, and the ordinary coat of a private. He wore no sword. Colo¬ nel Horace Porter, his aide-de-camp, and a single orderly accompanied him. Well,” said the general, slowly and thoughtfully, as if communing with himself rather than ad¬ dressing a subordinate, why are you not in ? ” Pointing to the First Brigade just in my front, 1 replied, My orders are to follow that bri¬ gade.” Feeling that golden opportunities might be slipping away from us, I added, Will you MAJOR-GENERAL EDWARD FERRERO, COMMANDING THE COLORED DIVISION. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 781

779 THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG. give me the order to go in now ? ” After a moment’s hesitation he answered, in the same slow and ruminating manner, No, you may keep the orders you have.” Then, turning his horse’s head, he rode away at a walk. Fifteen minutes later an aide to the division commander gave us the order and we moved into the covered-way, my brigade following Sigfried’s. This was about 6 a. m. For an hour or more we lay here inactive, the musketry grow¬ ing quicker and sharper all the time. A heavy cannonad¬ ing opened. We sat down at first, resting against the walls of the covered-way. Soon, however, we had to stand to make room for the constantly increasing throng of wounded who were being brought past us to the rear. Some few, with flesh-wounds merely, greeted us with such jocu¬ larity as, I’m all right, boys ! This is good for a thirty days’ sick-leave !” Others were plucky and silent, their pinched faces telling the ef¬ fort they were making to suppress their groans ; others, with the ashy hue of death already gathering on their faces, were largely past pain. Many, out of their senses through agony, were moaning or bellowing like wild beasts. We stood there over an hour with this endless procession of wounded men passing. There could be no greater strain on the nerves. LIEUTENANT CHRISTOPHER PENNELL. (from a photograph.) lant Fessenden of the 23d regiment. Ayres and Woodruff of the 31st dropped, killed, within a few yards of Fessenden. Liscomb of the 23d then fell to rise no more ; and then Hackiser of the 28th and Flint and Aiken of the 29 th. Major Rock wood of the 19th then mounted the crest and fell back dead, with a cheer on his lips. N or were these all ; for at that time hundreds of heroes “ carved in ebony ” fell. These black men com¬ manded the admiration and respect of every beholder on that day. The most advantageous point for the purpose, about eight hundred feet from the crater, having been reached, we leaped from the works and endeavored to make a rush for the crest. Captain Mar¬ shall L. Dempcy, and Lieutenant Christopher Pennell, of my staff, and four white orderlies with the brigade guidon accompanied me, closely followed by Lieutenant- Colonel Ross, leading the 31st regiment. At the instant of leaving the works Ross was shot down ; the next officer in rank. Captain Wright, was shot as he stooped over him. The men were largely without leaders, and their organization was destroyed. Two of my four orderlies were wounded; one,flag in hand; the remaining two sought shelter when Lieutenant Pennell, res- Every moment changed the condition from cuing the guidon, hastened down the line out- that of a forlorn hope to one of forlorn hope- side the pits. With his sword uplifted in his lessness. Unable to strike a blow, we were right hand and the banner in his left, he sought sickened with the contemplation of revolting forms of death and mutilation. Finally, about 7:30 a. m., we got the order for the colored division to charge. My bri¬ gade followed Sigfried’s at the double-quick. Arrived at the crater, a part of the First Bri¬ gade entered. The crater was already too full; that I could easily see. I swung my col¬ umn to the right and charged over the ene¬ my’s rifle-pits connecting with the crater on our right. These pits were different from any in our lines — a labyrinth of bomb-proofs and magazines, with passages between. My bri¬ gade moved gallantly on right over the bomb- proofs and over the men of the First Division.* As we mounted the pits, a deadly enfilade to call out the men along the whole line of the parapet. In a moment, a musketry fire was focused upon him individually, whirling him round and round several times before he fell. Of commanding figure, his bravery was so con¬ spicuous, that, according to Colonel Weld’s testimony, a number of his (Weld^s) men were shot because, spell-bound, they forgot their own shelter in watching this superb boy, who was an only child of an old Massachusetts clergyman, and to me as Jonathan was to David. Two days later, on a flag of truce, I searched for his body in vain. He was doubt¬ less shot literally to pieces, for the leaden hail poured for a long time almost incessantly about that spot, killing the wounded and mutilat- from eight guns on our right, and a murderous ing the dead; and he probably sleeps among cross-fire of musketry decimated us. Among the unknown whom we buried in the long deep the officers, the first to fall was the gal- trench we dug that day. t * Major Van Buren’s testimony, “ Report of Com- I saw a striking instance of this. A stretcher-bearer, mittee on the Conduct of the War,” Vol. I. seeing that the trousers-pocket of a soldier long dead t While the contemplation of one death so softens the contained part of a plug of tobacco, deliberately cut it heart, the sight of the myriad dead of a battle-field out, and, taking a chew with an air of relish, transferred blunts the sensibilities. During the burial of the dead, the rest to his own pocket.— H. G. T.

Page 782

Page 783

THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG. The men of the 31st making the charge were being mowed down like grass, with no hope of anyone reaching the crest, so I ordered them to scatter and run back. The fire was such that Captain Dempcy and myself were the only officers who returned, unharmed, of those who left the works for that charge.* We were not long back within the honey¬ comb of passages and bomb-proofs near the crater before I received this order from the division commander: Colonels Sigfried and Thomas, if you have not already done so, you will immediately proceed to take the crest in your front.” My command was crow'ded into the pits, already too full, and were sand¬ wiched, man for man, against the men of the First Division. They were thus partly sheltered from the fire that had reduced them coming up ; but their organization was almost lost. I had already sent word to General Burnside by Major James L. Van Buren of his staff, that unless a movement simultaneous with mine was made to the right, to stop the enfilading fire, I thought not a man would live to reach the crest ; but that I w^ould try another charge in about ten minutes, and I hoped to be sup¬ ported. I then directed the commanders of the 23d, 28th, and 29th regiments to get their commands as much together and sepa¬ rated from the others as possible in that time, so that each could have a regimental folio w^- ing, for we were mixed up wdth white troops and each other to the extent of almost paralyz¬ ing any effort. We managed to make the charge, how^ever. Colonel Bross of the 29th leading. The 31st had been so shattered, was so diminished, so largely without officers, that I got what was left of them out of the w'ay of the charging column as much as possible. This column met the same fate in one respect as the former. As I gave the order, Lieuten¬ ant-Colonel John A. Bross, brother of Lieu¬ tenant-Governor Bross, of Ohio, taking the flag into his own hands, w'as the first man to leap from the works into the valley of death below. He had attired himself in full uniform, evidently with the intent of inspiring his men. He had hardly reached the ground outside the works before he fell to rise no more. He was conspicuous and magnificent in his gallantry. The black men followed into the jaw^s of death, and advanced until met by a charge in force from the Confederate lines. The report of the Confederate General Bush- rod Johnson, to which I have had access, says that the Confederate troops in this charge were the first brigade of Mahone’s division, with the 25th and 49th North Carolina and the 26th * My brigade guidon, which Lieutenant Pennell held when killed, was captured by Private John W. Niles, Company D, 41st Virginia, was stored in Richmond, VoL. XXXIV.— 107. 781 and part of the 17th South Carolina regiments. It was no discredit to what was left of three regiments that they were repulsed by a force like that. I lost in all 36 officers and 877 men; total, 913. The 23d Regiment entered the charge with 18 officers; it came out with 7. The 28th entered with ii officers, and came out with 4. The 31st had but 2 officers for duty that night. The First Brigade worked its way through the crater, and was halted behind the honey¬ comb of bomb-proofs. Here the 43d charged the intrenchments, capturing a Confederate flag and recapturing a Union stand of colors and a few prisoners. Owing to the crowded condition of the bomb-proofs, it was impos¬ sible to get the rest of the brigade on. Too much praise cannot be awarded to the bravery of officers and men ; the former fearlessly led, while the latter as fearlessly followed, through a fire hot enough to cause the best troops to falter. But few of the field-officers escaped. Colonel Delevan Bates fell, shot in the face. Major Leeke stood, urging the men on, with the blood gushing from his mouth. Adjutant O’Brien fell, shot through the heart. Captain Wright of the 43d Regiment himself captured a Confederate stand of colors and 5 prisoners, and brought them in. Lieutenant-Colonel Wright with two bullet wounds retained the command of his regiment. Colonel Sigfried concludes his official report thus: “ Had it not been for the almost impassable crowd of troops of the other divisions in the crater and in¬ trenchments, Cemetery Hill would have been ours without a falter on the part of my bri¬ gade.” Nor was the giving way a willing movement on the part of the colored troops. One little band, after my second charge was repulsed, defended the intrenchments we had won from the enemy, exhibiting fighting qualities that I never saw surpassed in the war. This hand¬ ful stood there without the slightest organ¬ ization of company or regiment, each man for himself, and impelled by his individual in¬ stinct, until the enemy’s banners waved in their very faces. Then, and not till then, they made a dash for our own lines, and that at my order. Speaking of this stand. General Burnside says in his official report : “ But not all of the col¬ ored troops retired ; some held the pits behind which they had advanced, severely checking the enemy until they were nearly all killed.” The engagement was over. We not only had been four times cut to pieces, but repulsed. The enemy having retaken their former lines, the troops, black and white, in the crater were and there retaken by our troops when we entered that city on April 3d, 1865, and is now stored in the War Department. — H. G. T.

Page 784

THE COLORED TROOPS AT PETERSBURG. 782 cut off from our army. Squads there occasion¬ ally made a dash for our lines, but as many fell as reached them safely. By direction of offi¬ cers in the crater the men began a covered-way toward our lines (that is, a deep trench running somewhat diagonally between the two lines with all the dirt thrown toward the enemy’s side, so that a man passing along it was almost shel¬ tered from musketry fire). Another, by di¬ rection of General Burnside, had been started from our lines to meet it. This was the situa¬ tion when the enemy made their last charge on the crater. Its inmates had repelled three charges. They were weak, exhausted, and suf¬ fering from want of water. They succumbed, and most of them fell into the hands of the enemy. Of this last scene in the battle the Confederate General Bushrod R. Johnson, commanding the opposing forces at that point, says in his official report : “Between ii and 12 A. M. a second unsuccessful charge liaving been made by Wright’s brigade of Ma- hone’s division, I proceeded to concert a combined move¬ ment on both flanks of the crater. . . A third charge a little before 2 p. m. gave us entire possession of the crater and adjacent lines. This charge on the left [our right] and rear of the crater was made by Sanders’s bri¬ gade of Mahone’s division, the 6ist North Carolina of Hoke’s division, and the 17th South Carolina of this division. . . These movements were all conducted by General Mahone, while I took the 22d and 23d South Carolina into the crater and captured 3 colors and 130 prisoners. Previous to this charge the inces¬ sant firing kept up by our troops on both flanks and in rear had caused many of the enemy to run the gaunt¬ let of our cross-fires in front of the breach, but a large number still remained unable to advance, and perhaps afraid to retreat.” Thus ended in disaster what had at first promised to be a grand success. We were back within our old lines and badly cut up. We had inflicted a heavy, but by no means equal, loss on the enemy. A ridiculous little incident happened di¬ rectly after these terrible scenes which helped us all to forget for a moment our wretchedness. My cook, an elderly African, was a most abom¬ inable and unerring destroyer of raw material, and when called to account his usual reply was : De meat was so tough, sah, I done parbiled a little fust, sah”; so his camp com¬ panions nicknamed him Old Parbile.” It was now noon; we had had our breakfast at 3 a. m. Being hungry, I sent several times for Old Parbile,” and finally dispatched a giant ser¬ geant, Adam Laws, with instructions to bring Parbile ” at the point of the bayonet if nec¬ essary. In due time I heard the sergeant’s mighty voice uplifted with, Git up you dar!” and simultaneously a hearty peal of laughter rang along our dejected line. Turning, I saw poor Parbile ” writhing along on his knees in an agony of fear. In one hand he had a tin pail with my dinner, and in the other he held a palm-leaf fan to shield himself from anticipated missiles of the enemy. The ser¬ geant was accelerating his speed with the muz¬ zle of his gun and with a Hurry up dar now, de cunnul will be lovin’ glad to see yo’ ! ” Nothing could have been happier in its effect on the whole command than this trifling in¬ cident, and the scanty ill-cooked meal was the better for the sauce. Hejiry Godda7'd Thomas. INTERIOR OF THE CONFEDERATE FORT MAHONE, KNOWN AS “FORT DAMNATION.” (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.)

Page 785

SOME MEN OF THE SECOND CORPS WHO FOUGHT AT PETERSBURG. \ ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN. TO follow the history of the siege of Peters¬ burg in outline, one should picture the Union army creeping closer and closer to the last citadel of the Confederacy. The com¬ mander of that citadel was Lee in person, and with him was a host of veterans. As months rolled by, our line of investment grew from a short streak on the east side of the town, in June, 1864, to avast intrenched camp with lines sixteen to twenty miles long in the spring of 1865, when the final contests took place. This remarkable attenuation of the line of the Union besiegers involved the weakening of the line at every point, for reenforcements did not come forward as rapidly as there was need of them. During the autumn and winter of 1864-5 corps, the Ninth, now com¬ manded by Parke, held the original posi¬ tion first occupied the June previous. Here the Stars and Stripes had been planted by the desperate charges, made by Hancock’s Second and Burnside’s Ninth corps, imme¬ diately on the arrival of the army before the town. After the mine fiasco, July 30th, 1864, the operations of the army were confined to the single object of securing Lee’s lines of com¬ munications south and south-west of the town. In August a lodgment was secured on the Weldon railroad, running into North Caro¬ lina, compelling the Confederates to use the wagon road for some miles. The right of the Union army was pushed forward on the north bank of the James, and in September General Ord took Fort Harrison, one of the outworks of Richmond. In October and November movements were made against the wagon roads between the Weldon railroad and the South Side railroad south and west of Peters¬ burg, and the Confederate positions covering the latter railroad were attacked with some success. It was the completion of this work of cutting the South Side road that Grant was entering upon when the spring campaign was opened by the initiative of Lee. At the time of which I shall particularly write, — March, 1865, — the eve of the forward movement ending at Appomattox, we could muster but one rank deep on the front line. The Confederates, being on interior lines, could concentrate rapidly. The reader of history has doubtless wondered, as many of us were wont to wonder at the time, why Lee made no attempt during that long siege to break out through the investing columns. Or if not Lee, then his men, for they were cooped up there and all but starving, within sight of plenty. Whenever Confederate soldiers came out from their sheltered camps on the heights and ridges to relieve pickets and guards, their eyes could follow the winding track of our military railway far away to City Point, and could the more readily mark its course by the great stacks of boxes of bread and barrels of meat, sugar, and coffee stored at points convenient to the forts that now dotted the region from the South Side around east and north to the Appomattox River. Such sights might well have created in half- famished men the desperation which goads to recklessness. But to all outward appear¬ ance there was nothing to indicate the forging of fiery bolts to be hurled upon our unsuspect¬ ing pickets and garrisons. As the mild spring¬ time came on, a truce was made between the outposts, and a long and bloody campaign of murderous picket-firing ceased for a season. Soldiers of either army basked in the sun, lying peacefully upon the warm sand-bags that topped out the ramparts. This cheering situ¬ ation was of about ten days’ duration, and the cause of it the fact that the troops that had so long been opposed to us in the trenches were at this time relieved, and a new command, John B. Gordon’s corps, came to occupy the line. These men introduced the picket truce, and that truce it was that paved the way for Gor¬ don’s night sortie at Fort Stedman on the 25th of March. The ground now occupied by the Ninth Corps had been fought for most desperately

Page 786

784 ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN. by Lee at the opening of the investment. It was really his second line of defense as originally planned, and he had been forced away from it back to an interior line on the heights commanding the town and commanding all the railroads so important to the Confederacy. To this last ditch our Ninth Corps batteries and trenches held him. Our works were under Lee’s guns, but were so strong that the poundings they got made little im¬ pression, and open assault on them Avas simply fool¬ hardy. Hence Ave held on there Avhile the movable left Aving closed in and tightened the grip. In stratagem, hoAvever, the South hacl a chance, and a point so gained Avoiild open to greater things. The First Division of the Ninth Corps, led by Gen¬ eral O. B. Willcox, occupied trenches and forts from Cemetery Hill to the Appomattox. The fort directly fa.cing Cemetery Hill Avas Morton, a bastioned Avork, high and impregnable. The next doAvn the line, on loAver ground and quite under the best guns Lee had on the crest, Avas Haskell, a small field redoubt mount¬ ing six rifled guns and holding a small infantry garrison. Eighty rods farther Avas Fort Steelman, a stronger Avork than Haskell, but not Avell commanded from Cemetery Hill. Two hundred rods from Steelman Avas Fort McGil- very, near the river and out of range of Lee’s heavy ordnance. In front of Haskell, Avoods, marshes, and a sluggish stream completely obstructed the passage of men and guns from the enemy’s Avorks eastAvard, but at Stedman, where the lines A\'ere but forty rods apart, the ground of both lines and all betAveen Avas solid and feasible for rapid movements of bodies of every arm of service, even to cavalry, and so here Avas a road that a master-stroke might open. Stedman and Haskell Avere garrisoned by the 14th NeAV York Heavy Artillery Avith muskets, the 3d NeAv Jersey Battery of rifled cannon, and a detachment of the ist Connecticut Heavy Artil¬ lery Avith Cohorn mortars. The men of this Connecti¬ cut detachment also carried muskets. The headquarters of the 14th Avere at Stedman, Avhere our leader. Major George M. Randall, U. S. A., had command. The acting major of the Second Battalion commanded at Fort Haskell. This officer was Charles H. Houghton, a vol¬ unteer of 1861, and now a veteran. Houghton had just returned from a furlough at the time of the surprise, and Avhile at home in the North, aAvay from the bustle of trench warfare, he had had a clear Adsion of things on the line. To his mind, then, it seemed an easy mat¬ ter for the Confederates to make a sortie from Ceme¬ tery Hill. Accordingly, as soon as he reached the front, he increased vigilance all around, doubled the pickets and guards, and ordered the fort under arms at 4 o’clock each morning. The morning of March 25th Avas heavy and foggy, a good one for sound sleeping, and therefore just the time for a movement of surprise. Fort Has¬ kell stood on a knoll overlooking the rifle-pits of the picket line. The Avork Av^as guarded by tAvo roAvs of abatis, and at the gap Avhere the pickets filed out and in the outer sentinel Avas on duty. The man Avho served the last Avatch that morning on this outer post Avas Private Hough, Company M, 14th Regiment. Soon after Hough Avent on post at 3 o’clock, the sergeant of the

Page 787

ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT EORT STEDMAN, 785 guard came out on his rounds. This officer was unac¬ countably nervous and kept consulting his watch, and in a short time started back to the fort to order reveille sounded. It lacked fifteen minutes of the time appointed by Houghton’s spe¬ cial order. The ser¬ geant’s watch was fast, and he didn’t know exactly how it stood, but con¬ cluded it was bet¬ ter to be too early than too late,” The -call sounded and ■aroused the garri- •son, and it proved to be three-quarters of an hour earlier than had been cus¬ tomary on this line for months. When the sergeant went into the fort. Hough looked to the front and saw blue-lights flash up along the picket-pits. He also heard the sound of chopping on the lines between Sted- man and the Con¬ federate works on its front. He hal¬ looed to the second sentinel, whose post was at the bridge across the moat, and again an alarm was called out in the fort. Hough then advanced down the picket trail toward the outposts, and as he did so some guns boomed in Stedman, and the muffled sounds of fighting were heard from that work. Some quiet strokes had been given there, for a handful of daring Confederates were in posses¬ sion, and Stedman’s guns were being turned on friends. The foremost of the Confederate sur- prisers — for bands of them were at it in ear¬ nest — had gotten through the picket and abatis guards in front of our companion fort, and all the serious mischief of the day was to come from that initial stroke. The reason of the enemy’s easy surprise has never been made public. It was caused by poker and whisky. There was a game, with the usual accompaniinent, going on all night in the quarters of a staff- officer of MAJOR-GENERAL JOHN B. GORDON — NOW GOVERNOR OF GEORGIA. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) the garrison troops, and the sport was cut short in part by the play of cold steel.* Some of the men supposed to be on Avatch Avere huddled around that fascinating board, and so but one man was on the outlook along the front of the fort. The pickets Avere some fifteen yards distant, and they had all been silenced by stratagem. Confederates, under pretense of surrender, had approached the scattered pits simultaneously, and, after a short parley, had pounced upon their Avould-be benefactors and disarmed them to a man. The first point had been gained, and the blue-lights that Hough had seen from Fort Haskell Avere signals to announce this fact to the Confederate leaders and reserves. Now two men craAAled along the ground toward Stedman, meeting the ’ My authority is a commissioned officer Avho said he was taking part in the game. — G. L. K.

Page 788

ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN 786 solitary sentinel at the ditch. This guard dis¬ covered the intruders when it was too late to shoot, but he put a bayonet through one as¬ sailant. The other Confederate knocked the brave guard senseless, and that opened the way to Stedman, and, in fact, to the Union lines, without a shot or serious alarm. A hun¬ dred men now passed in to the guns and went prowling about, si¬ lencing with noise¬ less knife or bayo¬ net every man they could find awake or asleep,* A strange face looked in at the poker players’ hut, and the gamblers dropped their cards and cups and reached for weap¬ ons. The stranger vanished, but be¬ fore those aston¬ ished men could get ready for defense more of the intrud¬ ers came up, and in a straggling free fight there in the dark many of the garrison were killed or taken. The enemy now controlled Stedman, and in a few moments re¬ versed its guns. It was this melee and the guns that were being fired on reversed range which had startled Hough as he passed from Fort Haskell toward the picket- lines. Between the fort and pickets was a long slope, and on this slope Hough met a column of men moving stealthily up to surprise Haskell. The party was in two ranks, and had filed into our lines through the gap in front of Stedman, and was moving upon us unopposed, for they were be- ween us and our pickets. These Confederates supposed that they were approaching the rear of the little fort, and were moving very confi¬ dently, expecting an easy triumph. They should have gone through Fort Stedman itself, and then swung around to our rear, but they had miscalculated the situation. Three howitzers double-shotted with grape were trained upon the ground where they boldly marched, and if some traitor had divulged their secret move¬ ment hours in advance the doomed column could not have been at greater disadvantage than they now were by the chances of war. ^ I led the burial detail after the fight, and here re¬ cord what I authenticated at the time as to the manner of their death. — G. L. K. Hough, unseen by the enemy, ran back to the fort to advise the gunners. But the sergeant’s erratic watch had anticipated him and had done telling service. The garrison was ready, — do¬ ing a rehearsal, as it were, with the infantry along the parapets, the gunners at their pieces. Hough confirmed our suspicions, and we had not long to wait. As the assailants neared the abatis we could hear their steps and whispers. Wait,” said Major Houghton, wait till you see them, then fire.” A breath seemed an age, for we knew nothing of the numbers before us. Finally, the Confederate leader whispered to his men, Steady ! We’ll have their works. Steady, my men ! ” Our nerves rebelled, and like a flash the thought passed along the parapet, Now ! ” Not a word was spoken, but in perfect concert the cannon belched forth grape and our muskets were discharged upon the hapless band. It was an awful sur¬ prise for the surprisers, and fifty mangled bodies lay there in the abatis, victims of a guide’s blunder and the fate of battle. But this repulse did not end it; the survivors closed up and tried it again. Then they split into squads and moved on the flanks, keeping up the by-play until there were none left. Daylight now gave us perfect aim, and their game was useless. This storming-party was of picked men, and Southern authority states that not a man ever returned to the Confeder¬ ate camps to tell the story which I now relate. They had risked and met annihilation. This bloody and eflectual repulse of the as¬ sailants at Haskell was a grand thing for the INTERIOR OF FORT STEDMAN. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) The fort was named after Colonel Griffin A. Stedman of the nth Connecticut, who was mortally wounded in front of Petersburg on August 5th, 1864.

Page 789

ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN 787 cause, but proved to be a sort of a boomerang for ourselves just there in the fort. We had roused the tiger’s fierceness by doing our work too well, as it were, for the capture of Fort Haskell at the outset was absolutely essential to the success of the Confederate sortie. The Confederate plan was far-reaching, and it will be in place to quote here a letter from General Jubal Early to the writer concerning the views General Lee had of the military sit¬ uation, with the Union army securely planted before Petersburg. General Early says: “ A short time before I was detached from the army confronting Grant, near Cold Harbor (1864), General Lee stated to me that it was necessary to do something to defeat Grant’s army before it reached the James, for if it succeeded in so doing, the operations would become a siege, and then it would be a mere question of time as to the fate of Richmond. In the month of August, 1864, he detached a division of infantry and one of cavalry to Culpeper Court House under General R. H. Anderson, and he informed me that his object was to induce Grant to detach troops from his army, and if he succeeded in that he would make further de¬ tachments, with the view of causing the siege of Rich¬ mond and Petersburg to be raised in the same manner that Richmond had been relieved of the threatening position of McClellan’s army in August, 1862.” This programme had been adhered to by the Confederates, without, however, loosening the Union hold onthe Appomattox and James. “ About the 15th of March, 1865 [General Early con¬ tinues], I went out to General Lee’s headquarters near Petersburg, and he then informed me that unless the progress of Sherman’s army in North Carolina could be arrested he (Lee) would be compelled to withdraw from the defenses of Richmond and Petersburg in the direction of Danville, and he desired that with the remnant of my command I should hold south-western Virginia on his left, so as to protect the lead-mines and salt-works in that region. I presume, therefore, that finding Sherman’s progress could not be arrested, the assault of March 25th was a desperate effort to break Grant’s lines. General Lee’s entire force at that time was very little over 30,000, as I was informed.” Topographical considerations made the ground at Fort Stedman the point best suited for Lee’s initial stroke. But beyond Stedman toward the railway and the bluffs, where the heavy Union guns were planted, was low ground and plains. Now, if Stedman and all the works north of it to the river were cut away by the enemy, so long as Fort Haskell remained intact it projected our line into the center of the vast open space which must necessarily become the main field of action. This work then would be close on the flank of Confederate columns while passing through the breach at Stedman, and for some distance m their movements against our interior lines, and this position would enable her guns to sweep the invaders with grape and case for a long interval before their great objective on the rear bluffs should be reached. The stun¬ ning blow given to the great movement by the men of Haskell occurred just as a di¬ vision of Confederates which had filed into the works at Stedman had started on a rapid conquest along the trenches toward Fort McGilvery. We could see from Haskell the flashing of rifles as these men moved on and on through the camps of the parapet guards. Another division, encouraged by the success of the first, started also from Stedman along the breastworks linking our two forts. This division aimed to take Haskell in the right rear. At the very outset, this last movement met with momentary check, for it fell upon two concealed batteries and two Massachu¬ setts regiments now under arms. Meanwhile there was a lull around Haskell ; but it was of short duration, for it Avas so light that the enemy could observe from his main line every point on the scene of conflict. He opened on Haskell with Stedman’s guns, and also with his own in front. Our little garrison di¬ vided, one half guarding the front parapet, the remainder rallying along the right wall to meet the onslaught threatened by the division com¬ ing against it from Stedman. At this juncture. Major Woerner, a veteran German artillerist and commander of the 3d New Jersey Battery, came into the fort and took charge of the artil¬ lery. He placed one piece in the right rear angle, where the embrasure admitted the work¬ ing of it with an oblique as well as a direct range. The venturesome Confederate column had borne down all opposition, and with closed- up ranks came bounding along. At a point thirty rods from us the ground was cut by a ravine, and from there it rose in a gentle grade up to the fort. Woerner’s one angle gun and about 50 muskets were all we could summon to repel this column, and there were probably an even 60 cannon and 1000 mus¬ kets at Stedman and on the main Confeder¬ ate line concentrating their fire upon Haskell to cover this charge.* The advancing troops reserved their fire. Our thin line mounted the banquettes, — the wounded and sick men load¬ ing the muskets, while those with sound arms stood to the parapets and blazed away. The foremost assailants recoiled and scattered. This success again stirred up the tiger. The Confederate forts opposite to us gave us a re¬ sponse more fierce than ever, and a body of sharp-shooters posted within easy range sent us showers of minies. The air was full of shells, and on glancing up one saw, as it were, a flock of blackbirds with blazing tails beating about in a gale. At first the shells did not ex¬ plode. Their fuses were too long, so they fell intact, and the fires Avent out. Sometimes they * In an artillery duel shortly before this Ave counted twenty-four mortar bombs in the air at once with path¬ way directly over the fort. — G. L. K.

Page 790

788 ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN. rolled about like foot-balls, or bounded along pole had been shot away, and the post colors the parapet and landed in the watery ditch, were down. To make matters still worse, one But when at last the Confederate gunners got of our own batteries, a long-range siege-work the range, their shots became murderous. We away back on the bluff near the railroad, began held the battalion flag in the center of the to toss shell into the fort. We were isolated, as right parapet, and a shell aimed there exploded on the mark. A sergeant of the color company was hoisted bodily into the air by the con¬ cussion. Strange to say, he was unharmed, but two of his fellow-sergeants were killed, and the commandant, Houghton, who stood near the flag, was prostrated with a shattered thigh. This was all the work of one shell. Before the wounded major could be removed, a second shell wounded him in the head and in the hand, — three blows in as many minutes. The charging column was now well up the slope, and Major Woerner aided our muskets by some well-directed case-shot. Each check on this column by our effective firing was a spur for the Confederates at a distance to in¬ crease the fury of their fire. They poured in solid shot and case, and had twelve Cohorn mortar batteries sending bombs, and of these Haskell received its full complement. Lieuten¬ ant Tuerk,of Woerner’s battery, had an arm torn off bv a shell while he was sighting that angle gun. Major Woerner relieved him, andmounted the gun-carriage, glass in hand, to fix a more de¬ structive range. He then left the piece with a corporal, the highest subordinate fit for duty, with instructions to continue working it on the elevation just set, while he himself went to prepare another gun for closer quarters. The corporal leaped upon the gun-staging and was brained by a bullet before he could fire a shot. The Confederate column was preceded, as usual, by sharp-shooters, and these, using the blockhouses of the cantonments along the trenches for shelter, succeeded in getting their bullets plumb into the fort, and also in gaining command of our rear sally-port. We took up the planks from the bridge stringers over the moat and began to think of our bayonets. All of our outside supports had been driven off, and not a friendly musket, sword, or cannon was within a quarter of a mile or more of us, and we were practically surrounded. The flag- all could see ; our flag was from time to time, by shot and casualties as I have related, de¬ pressed below the ramparts, or if floating was enveloped in smoke; we were reserving our little stock of ammunition for the last emer¬ gency, the hand-to-hand struggle Avhich seemed inevitable. The rear batteries inter¬ preted the situation with us as a sign that Has¬ kell had yielded or was about to.* Our leader, Houghton, was permanently disabled, but Randall, the commander of the regiment, had escaped from his captors in Fort Steelman before daylight, and hacl worked his way along a blind trench to Haskell. He joined us shortly after Houghton fell. He had our regimental colors wrapped around him under a private’s jacket. Randall now called for a volunteer guard to sally forth and make a demonstration to show our friends outside that the old flag was still there. Fort Haskell’s color-bearer, Kiley, and eight men responded to the call. Randall led the way across a bridge stringer, and the flag was flaunted in the eyes of the astounded Confederates who hung about the rear of the fort. Better than all, the standard * message to this effect was taken to one of the distant siege -batteries, with the request to fire upon us. The commandant refused. — G. L. K.

Page 791

ASSAULT AND REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN. 789 waved conspicuously in vie wofour second line. Four of the guard were hit, one mortally, but the fire in the rear ceased. The assaulting column from Stedman now broke under the fire of our muskets and W oer- ner’s well-aimed guns. But the men found some shelter behind the infantry parapets along which they moved, and also in the deep trenches and among the breastwork huts, while the boldest came within speaking distance and hailed us to surrender. The main body hung back beyond canister range, near the ravine at the base of the slope. Our bullets could reach there. Major Woerner at last held his fire, having all the pieces loaded with grape. Suddenly a great number of little parties or squads of three to six men each, arose with a yell from their hidings down along those connecting parapets, and dashed toward us. The parapets joined on to the fort, and on these the Confederates leaped, intending thus to scale our walls. But Woerner had anticipated this. The rear angle embrasure had been contrived for the emergency. The major let go his grape. Some of the squads were cut down, while oth¬ ers ran olf to cover, and not a few passed on beyond our right wall to the rear of the work and out of reach of the guns. With this the aggressive spirit of that famous movement melted away forever. The sortie was a failure, and daylight found the invaders stalled in the breach. They could not advance; death or capture awaited them where they lay ; and in order to return to their own lines they must run the gauntlet of guns which had cross and enfilading range over the only way of retreat. The combat now changed, but was none the less exciting in the new phase than it had been thus far. The roar of cannon had waxed louder and louder as the gunners on each side sighted the true situation. As the infantry movements ceased, the artillery duel became terrific. It was the ground for such engage¬ ments, and had witnessed hundreds, but never on such a scale as this. The whole space of roll¬ ing surface between our front line and the second on the bluff near the railroad, was dom¬ inated by the enemy’s guns on his main line. When the Confederate infantry columns disap¬ peared from around Haskell, all those guns opened upon this field where the morning’s manoeuvres had been made. Our guns back on the bluff, and at Fort Morton, the work next south of Haskell, took part, and swelled the cannonade to a deafening warfare of Titans. The air was full of flying balls and shells clash¬ ing and bursting far above us and raining frag¬ ments. The Confederates opened with all their available pieces on little Haskell, and it now became impossible for us to move safely within the fort. Every man must have been ground VoL. XXXIV.— 108. to earth had we been forced away from the sheltering walls and parallels. I'he terre-plein^ or open surface, offered no shelter whatever, for mortar-bombs came upon us almost perpen¬ dicularly. Tents, timbers, gun-carriages were flattened to earth. The exterior surfaces of the fort fared no better. The heaviest guns pounded away to reduce it by battering, and their projectiles plowed the embankments, tossing the logs and sand-bags as though they were feathers. The Confederate problem of the day was reduced to the silencing of Has¬ kell, and it was the target of more guns than had been concentrated upon one point during the siege. Here, for once, after all the prosy months of stupid carnage, was a realization of the grand and the terrible in war. It was now no longer a question of forging ahead for Gordon, the dashing leader of the sor¬ tie, — but of getting back out of the net into which he had plunged in the darkness. A cordon of fortified batteries commanded all the ground whereon his ranks were spread, and our artillery reserves stationed between the main batteries created an unbroken chain of cannon barring him from the railway. Sup¬ porting these guns was a solid line of infantry just gathered hastily from the left, and cover¬ ing every avenue of advance. The way of re¬ treat was back over the ridge before Stedman. This was swept by two withering fires, for Fort Haskell commanded the southern slope of the ridge and McGilvery the northern. With either slope uncovered the retreat would be comparatively easy and safe for Gordon, and the Haskell battery was the one at once able to effect the severest injury to his retreat¬ ing ranks, and apparently the easiest to silence. The rifle and mortar batteries and sharp-shoot¬ ers in our front took for a target the right for¬ ward angle of Haskell, the only point from which Woerner could reach that coveted slope. A murderous fire was poured into this angle, and the Confederate troops in Stedman began to scramble back to their own lines. Woerner removed his ammunition to the magazine out of reach of the bombs that were dropping all about the gun. His men cut time-fuses below and brought up the shell as needed. The brave major mounted the breastworks with his glass and signaled to the gunner for every discharge, and he made that slope between Stedman and the Confederate salient (Colquitt’s) a pen of fearful slaughter. The whole mind sickens at the memory of it, for the victims were not fighting, but were struggling between death and home. Suddenly an officer on a white horse rode out under the range of Woerner’s gun and attempted to rally the panic-stricken mass. He soon wheeled about, followed by some three hundred men. He drew them back

Page 792

ASSAULT AJVJD REPULSE AT FORT STEDMAN, 790 out of range, halted, and formed for a charge to silence that fatal gun. The movement was distinctly observed by us in Haskell, and Woer- ner continued to pound away at the slope, while the infantry once more formed on the parapets. The storming-party moved direct on our center, as if determined now to avoid contact with the guns of either angle. But our muskets were well aimed, and the new ranks were thinned out with every volley. The party crossed the ravine, and there the leader fell, shot through the head. Many of his men fell near him, and the last spasm of the Confed¬ erate assault was ended. Gradually the fire on both sides slackened, and the Confederates who were still within our lines laid down their arms. The battle had lasted four hours, and about 8 o’clock the Union reserves under Hartranft advanced and reoccupied the lines.* Randall, the commander ousted from Sted- man, and a band of his followers had left our fort some time before the counter-assault, and they went into their old quarters at the head of the advancing reserves. Randall claimed and secured the right of reoccupancy with his own men. Outside spectators of this fight won¬ dered that any man in Haskell survived. Ma¬ jor Houghton was borne away at once on a stretcher, and as he passed the various head¬ quarters was greeted with cheers and congrat¬ ulations. The garrison of the work was sparse, about one hundred and fifty men. They had all been on duty around the sheltered guns and the parapets, spots purposely protected and the safest in the fort. But, as it was. Major Woerner says he slipped many times that morn¬ ing in the blood that covered his gun-staging. The story of resistance to Gordon’s surprise, aside from that already told, is brief. The men in Haskell alone stood up to their posts, and held on from beginning to end, remaining in orderly action under their officers’ commands. The surprise was complete at all points be¬ tween Haskell and McGilvery, and the whole brigade was thrown back under much demor¬ alization. General N. B. McLaughlen,thecom- " General Gordon, during an interview had with him by the writer, in 1878, stated that his purposes in making this assault had been “ to roll up the Union line ” from left to right, beginning with P^ort Haskell, and as soon as he saw that Plaskell could not be si¬ lenced he determined to withdraw. He did not do this immediately because he required Lee’s sanction. The Union counter-assault, as it had been called, did not expel him nor hasten his movement, but simply de- mander, was captured near Stedman while trying to rally the scattering troops. At Mc- Gilv-ery the Confederates made one attempt, but the admirable work of Major Roemer’s artillery repulsed them effectually. In the trenches and smaller outworks near Fort Sted- ' man the struggle was short and one-sided, and before daylight the Confederates had gained all the ground they held during the morning. The impression made upon our men elsewhere than at Haskell was that the enemy counted on a complete surprise all around, but when they saw how it failed at one point they be¬ came disheartened, and would not advance until that one point yielded. Three times the leaders put their men boldly upon Haskell, and the other columns watched the result. Conspicuous failure here disheartened the bravest, and their fighting valor waned before they abandoned the captured lines. The con¬ test was really so much harder than had been expected that only a determined few came to the point of facing our guns at close quarters. This account of the left flank at Stedman covers all that was done m defense of our line that morning excepting what was accom¬ plished by artillery from our rear batteries at long range. All else was straggling and inef¬ fectual. Had this battle occurred at another time than at the wind-up of the war it would have a larger space in history. The men of three army corps could see this fight. An old schoolmate, who was on the outside where he could look down upon us, greets me when we meet with the salutation, There is a man who went through hell alive! ” Fort Haskell was the size of an ocean steamer’s deck, and one may imagine that scores of cannon and hundreds of rifles playing upon such a space for hours would make it a hot spot. During the engagement, I was stationed in four different positions in the work, and saw every phase of the conflict. As soon as it ended, I went with reenforcements to Stedman, and got notes on the course of events there, both from Confed¬ erate prisoners and from my own comrades.t George L. Kilmer. stroyed and captured such of his command as had not retreated. Henry W. Grady, an intimate friend and companion of the general, who was present at this interview, subsequently stated that General Gordon always gave this version of the fight and desired it to stand so in history. t The entire loss of the Union army in the operations of March 25th is estimated at about 2200, and that of the Confederate army at nearly 4000. — Editor.

Page 793

TOPICS OF THE TIME. The First Century of the Constitution. HE month of September, 1887, naturally suggests the completion of the work of the Convention of 1 787, just a hundred years ago, in its successful formation of the Constitution of the United States. The difficul¬ ties which attended the Convention’s work are detailed elsewhere in this number of The Century by a distin¬ guished historian, and a discussion of an important feature of it occurs in two Open Letters, one by a lawyer of Indiana, and the other by one of our leading historical students. It may be well for us, with the light of a century’s practical experience of the Con¬ stitution, at the end of which that instrument fits the new nation as comfortably as in 1 789, to consider what the difficulties of the Convention would have been if it had been called upon to frame, with prophetic vis¬ ion, a Constitution for the United States of 1887. The strongest argument which the “ Federalist,” and the defenders of the new Constitution in the State con¬ ventions, could advance in favor of ratification and in justification of the expectation of the practical success of the Constitution, was the comparatively small size of the country. Hamilton, in the “ Federalist,” lays down this rule : “ The natural limit of a republic is that dis¬ tance from the center which will barely allow the representatives of the people to meet as often as may be necessary for the administration of public affairs.” He estimates the length of the country, from north to south, at 868^ miles, and its breadth at 750, adding this comfortable comparison : “ It is not a great deal larger than Germany ... or than Poland before the late dismemberment.” In another place he says : “ If there be but one government pervading all the States, there will be, as to the principal part of our commerce, but one side to guard, — the Atlantic coast.” With what feelings would he and the Convention have set about their work, if they could have realized that they were in reality framing a scheme of government for a coun¬ try which was to stretch from north latitude 25° to 49°, and from the 67th to the 125th degree of west longitude, 2600 miles by 1600 through the center, to say nothing of Alaska, in itself two-thirds the size of the country of which Hamilton was speaking ? That the commerce for which they were caring was to whiten the waters of both the Pacific and the Atlantic, of the Gulf of Mexico as well as of the Great Lakes ? That the Congress which they were providing was to deal with an internal commerce greater than all the for- eigji commerce that the country has ever known; with a manufacturing capital of $2,800,000,000 and an an¬ nual product of $5,400,000,000; with a population of 60,000,000, instead of 4,000,000 ? That the time would come when a member of Congress would be compelled to travel 6500 miles in going to the Federal Capital and returning to his State ? It is a fortunate thing for the United States that the Convention which framed its Constitution knew nothing of the future, and de¬ voted its care and energies to the establishment of a government for the country which it knew. The Convention sent forth the instrument which it had framed to meet the future, and the most marvel¬ ous feature of its first century of trial has been its apparently inexhaustible power of accommodating itself to the growth and changing necessities of the people. Its judiciary system has expanded in its ter¬ ritorial jurisdiction from thirteen districts to sixty; its Presidential office has had control of a million of armed men; its imports have risen from $22,000,000 to $640,000,000, and its exports from $20,000,000 to $720,000,000; steam, electricity, and all the other forces Avhich modern civilization has harnessed for the service of man, have altered the life and needs of the people ; and still the national government estab¬ lished by the Constitution remains unchanged in sub¬ stance. The natural divergence of its lines has brought larger and still larger fields within their scope ; the few employees of 1 789 have increased in number until they are an army ; but the Treasury officer of 1 789, if he could examine the organization of to-day, would still be able to trace clearly the lines of the original formation, though he might be bewildered in the effort to follow out all the ramifications by which the system has met the requirements of later development. The case is the same in every department of the national system: it has developed, but it has not changed. The Convention of 1787 could hardly have provided a more satisfactory system for 1887 if, with prophetic vision, it had been able to forecast the needs of 1887 and adapt its work to those needs. Nations, like individuals, can live but one day at a time, and their business is to live that day as wisely, honestly, and justly as may be; not to essay the part of a Providence, and attempt to legislate for millions yet unborn. They cannot legislate for posterity : they can only provide the molds into which following generations must be poured ; and, unless those molds are wise, just, and honest for the generation which makes them, they will assuredly be broken by some succeeding generation, or they will compress and mar the whole life of the people. In this sense, we, who stand on the threshold ojf the second century of the Constitution, are as actually constitution-makers as the members of the Convention of 1787* Let it be our care to make our institutions wise, just, and honest for the people of 1887, and to hate and repudiate every proposition that savors of dishonesty or of injustice, however it may seem to our temporary advantage, knowing that we are thus doing all that man can do for the people of 1987. A Great Teacher. The teachers of men are many ; the teachers of young men are few. To turn the faculties of a mature mind to the education of youth is something willingly undertaken by many, but success does not depend upon willingness or knowledge, or even enthusiasm. The art of teaching is a gift and an inspiration equally

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TOPICS OF THE TIME. 792 with poetry and music. In the vast majority of even good teachers, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that they become accommodated in their own minds to the minds of their pupils. Sympathy being the es¬ sential requisite, they unconsciously fall into the habit and scope of thought of their students, — “ subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” It is the fatal tendency in teaching to shrink towards the capacity of those taught — a tendency that able teachers resist by constant watchfulness and severe studies. When a great man gives himself to teaching young men, and successfully resists this tendency, and when also he has the gift or genius for teaching, we have that rarest of men — a great teacher. This century has fur¬ nished two eminent examples : Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and Dr. Hopkins, of Williams College. There have been other great teachers, but these two men pre¬ eminently wear these marks, — greatness and genius in their work. Dr. Arnold taught boys, but he kept even with his own powers, and was as great as if he had spent his days at Oxford or in Parliament. Dr. Hopkins taught young men, but it is difficult to con¬ ceive of him as greater in any other possible sphere. The success of each is due to the fact that they pre¬ served the full measure of their mental powers, and at the same time had the faculty of laying powerful hold of the young mind. A great mind, enlisting young men, and drawing them by the secret charm and power of his divine gift up to himself without descending in his own mental habit to them, — such was Dr. Hopkins. It would not be quite correct to say that Dr. Hop¬ kins had a theory of teaching. Great men do not work by theories. He taught spontaneously, out of his own nature ; and here lay the value of his work. Pie carried into the class-room the free action of his own mind and also its total action. Many men are able to do this who fail as teachers, but Dr. Hopkins possessed the knack of bridging the space between his own lofty thought and the mind of the pupil, and so getting him up to his own level. This is true teach¬ ing — inducing in the pupil the thought and feeling of the teacher. But Dr. Hopkins did far more to get his pupils to share in his thought and ideas : he taught them to think in the same fashion. It was not a prime or even a subordinate purpose with him to induce his pupils to agree with his opinions. He rather aimed to get them to thinking in a certain way. His idea was that if he could arouse the nature of the man to the full, and start him into vigorous natural action, he would think safely. Plence he taught principles, and, above all, the nature of man. Scholasticism, formal logic, dogma — these were remote from his methods, as they were re¬ mote from himself. “Know thyself” is the heathen phrase which die put to a use that carried his pupils to the heights of Christian morality. It is for this reason that his teaching and his pupils wear the plain marks of freedom and catholicity. It was also a distinguishing mark of Dr. Hopkins’s instruction that it had a peculiarly germinant quality. Teaching by principles and by the nature of man, and avoiding a too close deduction, his pupils were left free to develop in their own way. Dr. Hopkins taught the catechism for many years, but the students carried away more of their teacher’s breadth and rationality than of the dogmas of the Confession. It was a characteristic of his teaching that it had a directing rather than a binding influence. Room was left in it for growtli, for variation, and adaptation to new conditions. He founded no school of philosophy, but did the better work of grounding young men in the fundamental principles of thought and feeling and con¬ duct. If his teaching had a specialty, it consisted in unifying truth ; the truth of one realm was the truth of all realms. Thus a well-taught pupil stood with the whole earth under his feet and all heaven above his head. Dr. Hopkins’s long life was spent in one of the most rural parts of New England, and one of the most re¬ mote from the centers of culture. Shut in between the Hoosac range on the east, and the Taconic on the west, miles of untouched forest on every side, in a little village that clustered about the college as cottages nes¬ tled at the foot of a friendly castle, he drew to himself, like a medieval teacher, pupils from all parts of the country, kept them about him for four years, and sent them out, stamped with his impress, to the towns and cities to repeat in themselves what he had taught them, and to convey far and wide something of the keenness of thought, of moral earnestness, and relig¬ ious wisdom which they had learned and felt in him. Such a life is at once great in its humility and in the breadth and power of its influence. Shall we Plant Native or Foreign Trees ? The relative value for planting in America of native and foreign trees is a question of wide and deep and of rapidly increasing interest; yet it is one to which the public has scarcely begun to give the atten¬ tion it deserves. As the destruction of our native for¬ ests progresses, planting for the sake of timber must be ever more largely engaged in; and this destruc¬ tion cannot but progress with considerable rapidity, even though the legislation which is so greatly to be desired as a check upon it should soon be brought to bear. Year by year, too, it becomes more desirable that the worn-out fields of our Eastern States should be put to arboricultural service, and that the settlers on the prairies of the West should be accurately in¬ formed as to what trees they may best set out. And as our love for art increases we shall wish to do even more than we are doing now in the v/ay of private and public planting for ornamental purposes. In short, there is no American who is not interested, directly or indirectly, in the question as to the kinds of trees which are best adapted to American uses. The extent to which we have hitherto planted foreign trees is probably ignored by a great majority of our readers. Not indeed in very earliest years, but ever since the first advent among us of the nursery-gardener we have given them the preference, in our more thickly settled districts, over trees of native origin. The first nurserymen were Europeans, and brought both their stock of knowledge and their stock of plants from the Old World ; and even when their knowledge had ex¬ tended itself their stock remained largely the same; for, from some inexplicable reason, a great many spe¬ cies of European trees may be far more easily raised, and therefore more cheaply and profitably sold, than our own. Thus the private planter, getting his mate¬ rials from nursery gardens, has generally been led to

Page 795

TOPICS OF THE TIME, 793 choose foreign trees. Again, those who first began to plant on a large scale with an eye to economic results — to the production of timber — were inspired by Eng¬ lish examples, and naturally selected those species whose utility had been proved by centuries of experi¬ ence. So when ornamental planting over large areas was undertaken, what more natural than that the landscape-gardener should most often try to reproduce European successes and guide himself by the recom¬ mendations of those European books which were his only printed helpers ? The result has been that the foreign representatives of many important genera are as familiar to American eyes in populous districts as their native cousins, and in certain cases — in the case, for instance, of the willow, of the spruce, and of the horse-chestnut — are much more familiar. Signs of a change in practice may now be perceived. A few years ago it was impossible to buy American trees in any quantity in any nursery, but now they may more easily be had and are more often chosen. Still, the comparatively recent introduc¬ tion of novel species from Asia has added to the exotic temptations of the purchaser, and even now, we are told, “ where one native tree is planted in Massachu¬ setts, five foreign trees are planted here.” * It will easily be guessed that this is not a desir¬ able state of things. But how deplorable a state of things it really is, few understand as yet, save those who have specially studied the behavior of foreign trees upon American soil. Such study has been carefully carried on by more than one scientific observer during a number of years, and of late an effort has been made to test the value here, as sources of timber supply, of many of the species which had made the best records in their native habitat. Of course all observers do not agree upon all points, and of course it is too soon yet to decide dogmatically with regard to many imported species. But with regard to many others the evidence is practically conclusive and of a most unfavorable sort. Take, for instance, the Norway spruce (A dies ex- celsa), which all through the Northern and Eastern States has been planted in such numbers for so many years that it can surely be said to have been fairly tested. It is a most remunerative tree to nurserymen, and a most tempting one to planters — easily raised and transplanted, and growing with remarkable rapidity and great beauty of form while young. But in the pamphlet just quoted. Professor Sargent says that its general introduction into our plantations “ must, never¬ theless, be regarded as a public misfortune. ... In spite of its early promise, it must be acknowledged to be a complete failure in eastern America. It has passed its prime here, and is almost decrepit before it is half a century old ; it will never produce timber here, and it becomes unsightly just at that period of life when trees should be really handsome in full and free de¬ velopment.” The most cursory glance at the condition of this tree in the neighborhood of New York will prove that it is not unsuited to the climate of Massa¬ chusetts only. The Central Park is disfigured by hundreds of half-dead specimens which are not yet * “ Some Additional Notes upon Trees and Tree-planting in Mas¬ sachusetts.” By C. S. Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard College. (Reprinted from the Annual Report of the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture.) Boston : Wright and Potter. 1886. half grown ; and even where the soil is better, ragged, blackened forms almost invariably prove a want of health and vigor. Again, Mr. Robert Douglas, of Waukegan, Ill., one of the oldest and most widely known nurserymen in the country, writes! that he has never seen a Norway spruce in the East fifty years old that was not failing in its upward development, or one in the West forty years old ; and that when he went purposely to Canada to examine a large number which he had seen planted forty-nine years before (believing that they might have done especially well in a north¬ ern climate), he found that not one was living, and that many which had been planted in later years w^ere al¬ ready failing. And he adds, that he speaks with a sense of responsibility, as he has ‘‘grown more Nor¬ way spruces than any man in America and than all other men in America.” As it is with this favorite conifer, so it seems to be with many others almost as often planted. The Scotch pine (Pmics sylvestns), for example, will bear more exposure than any other tree, and will sooner make an effective “ wind-break.” It is therefore invaluable in certain positions to planters on the prairies; but as regards long life and the production of timber, Mr. Douglas pronounces it “ an abject failure ” in any part of the country where he has ever seen it, and his words are fully confirmed by the Massachusetts report. With deciduous trees the case is similar. Neither the foreign lindens nor the foreign ashes are long-lived in this country. The sycamore maple (Acer pseudo- plata7ius) — so widely cultivated abroad for its valua¬ ble timber — grows rapidly at first, as is the way with many other European trees, but seems likely to prove quite worthless at least for economic purposes. Of the European oak ( Que7rus 7'obiir) Professor Sargent writes : “ Tens of thousands of these trees have been planted in this State during the last century, but it is now almost impossible to find anywhere a healthy specimen more than thirty years old, while all the older trees have now almost entirely disappeared from the neighborhood.” These few instances are examples of a number more which might be given of the proved unfitness of Eu¬ ropean trees to withstand our climate. With other species, as has been said, the question still remains an open one ; and with others, again, the evidence seems distinctly favorable. The white willow of Europe ( Salix alba) not only flourishes, but has become thor¬ oughly naturalized, in New England, and is of greater economic value than any native species. Though as much as this cannot be said of any other European tree, the English elm { Uhims cauipestris) does thor¬ oughly well and affords by its very different habit a desirable contrast to our native elms, while the Nor¬ way maple ( Acer plata7toides) and the European larch ( Larix eiiropcEa) also promise to thrive. In such cases the needs of the landscape-gardener justify their con¬ tinued cultivation, even though related native species may be still better fitted to supply us with timber. As the climate of eastern Asia is much more like our own than that of Europe, one is not surprised to find the trees which have been brought thence giving, as a whole, a better account of themselves. Their chief value is for ornament and shade, but from these points tin one of a number of letters recently published in the “ Philadelphia Press.”

Page 796

OPEN LETTERS, 794 of view some of them are very precious acquisitions. The curious gingko-tree, which has a beauty all its own, is now largely planted in the streets of Washington and is perfectly hardy as far north as Massachusetts. The paulownia, so interesting in form, so valuable for shade, and so splendid in its spring bloom, thrives in all the cities of the Middle States ; and its masses of purple flov/ers appearing every now and then in the wild woods of Maryland show that there at least it has made itself perfectly at home. Of the ailantus it is hardly necessary to speak. Despite the disagreeable odor of its blossoms, it is one of the most valuable of all trees for city planting — growing very rapidly, affording a wide expanse of shade, being free from insects, and keeping the freshness of its foliage unin¬ jured through the heats and dusts of summer. But it is not our present aim to weigh the evidence for and against this tree or that. What we desire is simply to show that such evidence has already been collected in a considerable body ; that it is the duty of every experienced planter still further to inform the public ; and that it is for the interest of every intend¬ ing planter that he should consider carefully before he buys his stock. Yet we feel justified in adding to these general statements a word of strong recommendation in favor of native as against foreign, or at least as against European, trees. At the best the latter are un¬ certain in almost every case, while the former have an inborn and a well-proved title to be trusted. The most successful ornamental planting that has ever been done in America shows its results in the streets of such towns as Stockbridge, Great Barrington, Salem, and New Haven, and was the work of men who went to the for¬ est and not to the nursery for their infant elms and maples. Certainly our more recently planted parks offer small promise of a like maturity of beauty, with their European oaks and ashes, their Scotch and Aus¬ trian pines, in almost as deplorable a state as their Nor¬ way spruces. When not ornamental but economic plantations are in question, past experience tells very strongly against European trees, while the evidence of recent experiment with native trees — as in the plan¬ tations of indigenous conifers in eastern Massachusetts — is of the most encouraging kind. OPEN LETTERS. Centennial Considerations. Two Views of the Relation between the State and the General Government. I. GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE. IF a small community can govern itself, and do it bet¬ ter than others can govern it, a larger community composed of like individuals can do the same, and so any still larger community of like individuals, even to the largest. There is no reason why a government by the peo¬ ple, through their representatives, should not wisely and well govern the inhabitants of a whole continent, provided the people are sufficiently civilized to enable those occupying the various parts of it to govern them¬ selves. This will appear more clearly the more accurately we distinguish what are the proper functions of gov¬ ernment, and all that is necessary for it to do. The only warrant for the existence of government of any kind is, that it makes possible for the people a greater degree of happiness than would be possible without it. In the earlier stages of civilization, war is the chief business of the government, and success in war is the chief good, and to it all else is made subser¬ vient. When civilization has advanced somewhat, it is found that in some degree each individual should be protected from aggression by other individuals, and then the power of government is, to some extent, ex¬ erted for that purpose ; and as civilization progresses, this purpose increases in importance as compared with the other, and could we imagine wars entirely to cease, it would be the only necessary function of government. From our position in relation tS other nations, and from our strength as compared with those on this conti¬ nent, the danger from aggressions by other nations is exceedingly small, and the probability of any resort to arms, unless we are the aggressors, is very remote, so that the preventing of aggressions by other nations has come to be with us of comparatively small impor¬ tance. Our government should every year become less military and more industrial ; that is, less occupied with the duty of preventing foreign aggressions, and more occupied with preventing the aggressions of individuals on each other, and promptly and sufficiently repressing the wrongs done by such aggressions. This, the paramount duty of government, has been very imperfectly performed in the past, and there is little reason to hope that it will be better done in the near future. Much of this imperfection is due to the low standard of the average morality of the people. But is not more of this imperfection the result of our govern¬ mental machinery not being adapted to the performance of this duty ? Can it be performed efficiently so long as the national and State governments coexist, and each is expected to perform undefined and undefinable parts of this duty ? When our national government was formed, slavery existed in most of the States, and presented an insuper¬ able objection to any arrangement by which the people of the whole country could be intrusted with unlimited power over any part of it. The part of the people among whom slavery existed, and who intended to re¬ tain it, would not, and could not, consent that the part among whom it did not exist should regulate the re¬ lations between master and slave. Where these rela¬ tions existed, laws were required which would not have been tolerated elsewhere, and it was only by the agency of the State governments that slavery could be continued. For the repression of crime and for dealing with the criminal class, the single agency of the nation would be more efficient than the one compounded of the nation and the several States, each acting separately. There are as many criminal codes defining crimes and the mode of dealing with them, and with the criminal class, as there are States, and to them is added the code of the nation. Whatever is properly a criminal act in one locality

Page 797

OPEN LETTERS. should be so in every place in the nation, and the criminal laws with the mode of enforcing them which would be the best possible in any subdivision would be the best in every subdivision. How to prevent the ingress of paupers from abroad, and how to deal with those here, would be problems more easily solved through the single than through the complex agency. There are many matters which in the near future will need regulation. Among these may be mentioned the relation of employers and employees ; gambling in stocks, grain, etc. ; the extent to which accumulations of wealth in the hands of individuals or corporations shall be permitted ; what restraints shall be imposed on monopolies of every kind ; whether there should be a limit, and what one, upon the right to acquire and hold lands. With these and like questions the State governments are incompetent to deal, for if one State legislated effectually as to any such matters, its only effect would be to drive from its territory those who regarded themselves as injuriously affected by such action, and they would seek a State where there had been no such legislation. As to matters with which each of the civil codes of the States deal. Why should there be different land tenures, why different rules of descent and distribution of decedents’ estates, different laws as to wills, as to marriage and divorce, as to parent and child, as to guardian and ward, as to contracts, as to corporations, etc., etc. ? Why should there be as many different modes of administering justice? Why should that be held to be just in the courts of a State which is held unjust in the courts of the nation, or in the courts of other States ? why a right enforced, if claimed against a citi¬ zen of the same State as the claimant, and denied as against a citizen of another State ? If there was but one code of laws and one judiciary, that of the nation, justice would be the same in every locality, and the rights and duties of the individual and all aggregates of individuals would be alike every¬ where within the national limits. Is there any reason why this should not be ? The tendency has been in the direction of the exer¬ cise of larger powers by the nation and restrictions on the power of the States. Except as to a few matters, this has not been the result of changes in written con¬ stitutions, or conscious action on the part of the people. The nation, through its courts, from time to time, has asserted jurisdiction not given by the Constitution, as understood at and soon after its adoption. As in¬ stances may be mentioned the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1806, that the courts of the nation had no jurisdiction of a controversy between a citizen of one State and a corporation of another State, if any of the stockholders of the corporation were not citizens of the last State. This ruling was repeat¬ edly followed; but in 1844 the court overruled all these cases, and asserted the jurisdiction over all such con- * Without any desire to inject counter-arguments into the arti¬ cle, an exception may be taken to this very essential portion of it. Four “instances of the exercise of doubtful or prohibited pow¬ ers ” are here assigned, but at least three of them are quite irrel¬ evant. (i) Admiralty law, like equity, is “judge-made law’’: the Constitution merely gives Federal courts “ Admiralty juris¬ diction,” leaving the judges to work out the jurisdiction for them¬ selves. The change of ruling in 1851 was therefore clearly pro¬ vided for, and made possible by, the Constitution itself. (2) The power to pass a general election law is explicitly given to Con¬ 795 troversies, without reference to the citizenship of the stockholders. It is under this later ruling that the courts have assumed jurisdiction over all matters in which the railroad, telegraph, and other great corpora¬ tions are interested. The same court, in 1825, ruled that courts of the nation had no jurisdiction over any navigable waters except where the tide ebbed and flowed, and repeatedly so decided until 1851, when it asserted jurisdiction over the great lakes, and in 1857 extended it over all navigable rivers. Now Congress has but to declare any locality navigable water, and legislate in regard to it, and the courts of the nation hold that Congress has not exceeded its powers. Congress has assumed a supervision of elections, it has declared certain promises to pay to be money and a legal tender, and the courts of the nation affirm its power. It is unnecessary to multiply instances. As to no matter has the nation exercised a doubtful or pro¬ hibited power, but in a short time such power has been recognized as belonging to it, and a new reading given to the Constitution as the proper warrant for it.’^ The small powers still exercised by the States over railroads and telegraph lines will probably soon be taken from them and absolute control of them be as¬ sumed by the nation, and this with the approval of the people. For they feel that it is almost intolerable that the rights of these great corporations should change with the passage from State to State ; and this feeling will grow until it finds expression in legislation by the nation, and its assumption of entire control. The nation has assumed the power to make regula¬ tions for the preservation of the health of the people, and for the extirpation and prevention of cattle-plagues, etc., and there is no limit to the powers it will exer¬ cise for such purposes whenever it is deemed proper by the people. Public education is likely soon to be declared a mat¬ ter of national concern, and if the people so wish, the nation will take charge of it and exclude the States. This will probably be, in the future, the history of every matter which equally interests and affects the whole people. Why should it not be so ? Why should not all law¬ making be done by the nation ? Why should not all general laws operate alike everywhere within the nation, making the rights and duties of each individual, and of all aggregates of individuals, the same in all places ? It may be asked. How can the nation deal with the matters which are of interest only in particular local¬ ities ? The answer is that, under proper general regu¬ lations and restraints, all such matters should be placed witliin the control of minor subdivisions. Each county, each city, or other subdivision, should be given full power over whatever affects only the people of the subdivisions. If the State governments should cease to exist, the only class which would suffer would be the office-holders. Almost, if not quite, half of the great army of office-holders could be disbanded, and a gress by the Constitution, within well defined limits, and those limits have been carefully respected. (3) The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of the constitutionality of legal-tender paper currency has not been received with unanimous or enthusiastic applause. At best it is but permissive, and the decision of but one branch of the government. When we shall have a Congress which will issue legal-tender paper in time of peace, and a Presi¬ dent who will not veto the act, the “ instance ” will be a fair one ; until then, nil dicimus. — Editor.

Page 798

OPEN LETTERS. 796 like part of the great sum now yearly paid to this army would be saved to the people. Is there a single duty performed by the State gov¬ ernments, or any of them, which could not be done as well, or better, by the government of the nation ? If not, why should the State governments continue to exist? Why not dispense with them, erase the State lines, make of the whole population one people, gov¬ erned by one code of laws, and have in reality a govern¬ ment “ of the people, by the people, for the people”? Lafayette, Ind. Robert Jones. II. THE FEDERAL BALANCE. On the deck of a westward-bound Atlantic steamer, one breezy September day, some years ago, I was asked by a distinguished gentleman, who had indeed been an English cabinet minister, to recommend some book from which he might get a rudimentary knowl¬ edge of the system of government in the United States. “ For,” said he, “ we don’t understand you. We can¬ not see why your vast size does not lessen cohesion and make you fall apart ; nor do we understand why you will not go to pieces in the dangerous process of electing a chief magistrate.” Of course I pointed out to him the fact that the President had neither the power nor the responsibility of an English prime- minister, and, in short, that ours was not a parliamen¬ tary government. This surprised him, and he replied with frankness : “Ah! we do not understand you.” But on thinking over the words of this right honor¬ able and very intelligent gentleman, I have to confess that one of the dangers that he pointed out was a real one. So long as a hope of party advantage prevents the legislature of the country from agreeing upon some authoritative board of arbitration in case of a difference regarding an electoral count between the two Houses of Congress, the national peace will be threatened when¬ ever we have to pass the ordeal of electing a chief ruler. Against the danger from incohesion I urged the good fortune of our Federal system — that the central govern¬ ment was relieved of severe strain by the localization of a great part of our legislative work. Massachusetts, with her Puritan history, regulates all matters pertain¬ ing to morals and manners — all matters that have to do with the degree and character of civilization — by her local legislature. Louisiana, with her French antece¬ dents, is allowed to respect her traditions and those sentiments that are the slow growth of generations, and to evolve a civilization on her own soil, in her own way. The danger which this English statesman saw in the vast extent of our country and the heterogeneity of its people would be a real one, if it were possible for a body of Pennsylvania Presbyterians and Massachusetts Puritans to organize a party to make Sunday laws for New Orleans. It would be real if reformers could not pass a law regulating the liquor traffic in Maine with¬ out consulting the representatives from Nevada, Ar¬ kansas, and the Bourbon district of Kentucky. This notion of a lack of stability in the American govei'nment from the heterogeneousness of its people is an old one with Englishmen. In 1759, not to men¬ tion any earlier example, there came to this country the Rev. Andrew Burnaby, afterward Archdeacon of Leicester, who entered the colonies by way of York River and journeyed to the northward as far as the Piscataqua. When the American opposition to English schemes for taxing the colonies had raised the whirl¬ wind, he published in 1773 his “ Travels Through the Middle Settlements in North America.” In this he ventures to make some forecasts. He does not think that the colonies can ever be voluntarily associated in one government, “ for fire and water,” says he, “ are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America. Nothing can exceed the jealousy and emulation which they possess in regard to each other.” “ Indeed,” he says in another place, “it ap¬ pears to me a doubtful point, even supposing all the colonies of America were to be united under one head, wffiether it would be possible to keep in due order and government so wide and extended an empire.” The trouble with Burnaby’s forecast is a trouble with all such predictions. It is impossible to take into ac¬ count beforehand all the elements of a complex prob¬ lem. Among a good many elements here which he did not foresee is the Federal system, which is more the offspring of fortunate accident than of wise statesmanship. The centrifugal jealousy of the sev¬ eral colonies, with their separate histories, local senti¬ ments, and particular interests, offered resistance to the centralizing theories of statesmen ; the result was not a perfect balance between central and local govern¬ ments, but an adjustment that has proved itself to be most useful and truly conservative. Railroads, news¬ papers, telegraphs, and the abolition of slavery have made us much more homogeneous than we were. But differences of climate and productions, of inland and sea-coast location, of mountain and plain, of local his¬ tory, derivation, and traditional sentiment, will hap¬ pily intervene to prevent our falling into a flat uni¬ formity of character. And society will advance more rapidly and more safely if each State is allowed to work out its own destiny by the attrition of the forces that make up its life. Among these forces history and tra¬ dition are everywhere of the strongest. To all time New England will show traces of the town-commu¬ nity, independent-church, and common-land systems of her infancy ; Virginia must on the other hand grow by counties, for there every county has its traditions of the ancestors who administered justice on the bench of magistrates in the county court, and who now and then maintained the old notions of gentlemanliness by notifying royal governors of their unwillingness to sit with a man, no matter how high in court favor, who was of doubtful integrity. Louisiana again will cast her history into the mold of a territory checkered off into parishes, as that of Delaware is into hundreds. I do not discuss the Federal system with any appre¬ hension of danger that in any proximate time a serious attempt will be made to change the skeleton of the government. Any arguments for or against a radical change in our system can have only an academic in¬ terest. It is hard to abolish organized history by enact¬ ment. Political vis inertiep. is too great. Even among an idealistic people like the French, so great a change could be wrought only by the devastations of some great social upheaval. Our danger is of a different sort. The Federal system offers a barrier to many respectable movements for social reform, where reforms seek the aid of law, and there is always a temptation to take a short cut by appealing to Congress. There are temper¬ ance reformers, for example, who think that if they can

Page 799

OPEN LETTERS. prohibit the making of spirits by a clause in the Consti¬ tution of the United States they will dry up the foun¬ tains of evil. There are labor-reformers, anti-monopo¬ lists, and anti-divorce reformers who believe that the easiest way to achieve their ends is to get sweeping enactment by Congress. Even so cautious a paper as the New York “ Evening Post ” has advocated the passage of a uniform marriage law. Reformers are prone to for¬ get the impotence of law when it is not reenforced by public sentiment. Nor is it to be expected that a special reformer, consecrated to one cause the importance of which is naturally magnified in his own eyes, should be publicist enough to understand that every load of this sort put upon the Federal government is a disturb¬ ance of adjustment in a system that is strong enough to hold a great and growing empire only so long as its balance is maintained. Civilizing work must in the main be done locally. A short leverage is highly advantageous in the distribution of funds. A better illustration of the necessity for cherishing the independence of local communities can hardly be found than the evil harvest reaped by all attempts to govern the city of New York at Albany. City bills are oil-wells for the local legislator, who knows that con¬ stituencies on the lakes will hardly ever inquire why the streets of the metropolis are voted to corporations, and its funds wasted on fruitless jobs. Pennsylvania, in making laws for capital and la¬ bor, keeps her eyes on the multitudinous miners and toilers in car-shops, blast-furnaces, and rolling-mills, with their trades-unions, sometimes their Molly Ma¬ guires. The conditions are very different in South Carolina, where the planter often hires a negro laborer at a stipulated price “ with board,” which board means a peck of meal and a definite ration of bacon for each week, to be cooked and eaten at the pleasure of the working man, who also is content to add to this allowance any “ luxuries ” at his own expense. All such questions, in so vast a country, ought to be handled on the ground in the light of local customs ; any attempt to regulate them from Washington would produce an unheard-of crop of demagogism and cor¬ ruption. How poorly the central government of a re¬ public can administer local affairs is shown in the abuses of the reconstruction period and in the calami¬ ties of the District of Columbia. The Federal arrangement which came to us by the good fortune of the diversity of interest and character of the thirteen colonies, is now in process of application with deliberate purpose to the British Empire, which will have its American and its Australian confederation. One day it will have, perhaps, an East Indian system of a similar sort. The hold of Great Britain on her col¬ onies has not been weakened but visibly strengthened by the gift of local autonomy to remote provinces. The laws for Scotland are virtually made by the Scotch members before they are finally adopted by the British Parliament. And the only apparent solution to the Irish difficulty will be in some similar division of power between the local and the imperial authority. The moral for us on this side is that we must keep the imperial government of the United States for im¬ perial purposes, that it may be strong and free to deal with the collective interests of a vast empire, liable some day to become yet greater by the force of gravitation and absorption ; and that we ought to resist the best re- VoL. XXXIV.— IC9. 797 form in the world if its ends can only be achieved by re¬ ducing the liberty of the States to deal with questions of manners, morals, minor commerce, and local interests. Rdward Eggleston. Pundita Ramabai Sarasvati.* This distinguished high-caste Brahmin woman is the daughter of a Marathi priest who suffered persecu¬ tion for educating the women of his family. But, re¬ tiring to the seclusion of the Ganga-mul, their studies were continued amid the sublimities of nature, which have left their impress on Ramabai’s mind. At the age of sixteen years Ramabai was left an orphan, and three years later, fully convinced of the importance of woman’s education, she traveled under the protection of her brother across India, urging in all places the emancipation and education of women. Arrived at Calcutta, the older pundits paid her homage, and the title of Sarasvati was conferred upon her. The sim¬ plicity of her manners and her earnest, eloquent arguments won distinction at home and commanded attention abroad. In her travels Ramabai had mingled freely with the people, disregardful of caste, not elect¬ ing to be the leader of a new sect, but everywhere seeking truth for truth’s own sake and inspiring others with the same wholesome ambition. After a short ill¬ ness her brother died, and six months later she married a Bengalese gentleman — a Sanscrit scholar and a pleader-at-law, the man of her own choice. His death in less than two years after marriage left her at twenty- four years of age to face the future as a Hindu widow. Again she sought the rostrum. Two particular meas¬ ures now filled her mind, — the introduction of women physicians and the preparation of widows for teach¬ ers in girls’ schools. The plans now taking shape in India for the establishment of hospitals and the in¬ vesture of women physicians are believed to have had their origin in the faithful labors of Ramabai. The fruit¬ age of her efforts for girls’ schools has also appeared. In the city of Poona, Ramabai formed a society of the leading Brahmin ladies, called Arya Mahila Somaj, for the encouragement of the education of women, with branch societies in the cities she visited. Poona now has not only primary schools for girls, but also two high schools ; Bombay has two or three high schools, and Calcutta has the Victoria school, from which wo¬ men may enter the university. To acquaint herself with better methods of advanc¬ ing her work, Ramabai went to England. Another book in native language to speak in her absence was her part¬ ing gift to India. In England, whither her fame had preceded her, Ramabai was warmly received. Professor Max Muller and other Oxford professors approved her scholarship, and she was appointed to the chair of Sans¬ crit in the Woman’s College at Cheltenham. Here she remained until February, 1886, when her cousin. Dr. Joshee, also a Plindu Brahmin lady of high caste, took the degree of doctor of medicine at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, and the Pundita extended her travels to “ this holy land of America.” That a Hindu woman should leave her country and journey alone beyond the seas, could not be without a tinge of romance * See also “ The High-caste Hindu Woman,” by Ramabai, with an introduction by Dean Rachel L. Bodley, of Woman’s Medical College, Philadelphia.

Page 800

bric-A-brac. 798 or a spirit of lofty courage and consecration. In this in¬ stance it was the latter, and even the heart of this reso¬ lute woman, who had twice crossed the kingdom of India, would have quailed had she not trusted in him who led Abraham forth to find riches, honor, and power. The conversion of Ramabai to Christianity illustrates her sincerity of soul and her love of truth. Having re¬ nounced Brahminism and not yet accepted Christianity, her marriage ceremony was performed by a civil magis¬ trate. Withother progressive Hindus, Ramabai accepted Theism as an advance on Hinduism, and, without be¬ coming identified, was closely associated, with the Bramo-Somaj. The progressive Hindus accepted Ramabai’s leadership and hoped through her philos¬ ophy “ to regenerate society and establish a pure Theistic religion.” But Theism vanished with a clear conception of Christianity. Ramabai says of her brother, “ His great thought during his illness was for me, what would become of me left alone in the world. To relieve his anxiety, I answered, ‘ There is no one but God to care for you and me.’ * Ah,’ he replied, * if God cares for us, I am afraid of nothing.’ ” Ramabai’s soul was gradually unfolding to divine truth, and she and her daughter Manorama were baptized, after their arrival in England, into the church universal, and ac¬ cepted the Bible and the Apostles’ Creed. Ramabai believes in the unity of the world and the unity of the Church. Emily J, Brya^it. A Ministry of Welcome. In Dr. Edward E. Hale’s paper on “ Church Union,” in the June Century, he says : ‘‘And if the Christians of a dozen different communions choose to unite, to maintain at Castle Garden a ministry of welcome, such as the Mormon Church alone does choose to maintain there,” etc. Will you permit me to say that the Mor¬ mon Church is not alone in maintaining such “ a min¬ istry of welcome ” ? More than a score of years ago the Evangelical Lutheran Church placed a missionary at Castle Garden to welcome, direct, and assist emigrants from Germany. This work was subsequently enlarged, to embrace those coming from Scandinavia. Out of this there came, in time, two large buildings, opposite Castle Garden, in which the spiritual and material in¬ terests of immigrants are cared for. These institutions are in correspondence with similar institutions in the old world, so that emigrants leave the old world with letters to the “ ministry of welcome ” in the new. G. F. Krotely Pastor of the Evan. Luth. Church New York, June 17, 1887. of the Holy Trinity. The Lincoln History. To THE Editor of the Century. Sir : If your note on the “ Lincoln History ” in the July Century was intended as an apology for the space given to preliminary facts, let me have the pleasure of saying that not many of your older readers, and certainly not one of your younger readers, could afford to have one sentence in the chapters thus far published omitted. Let us have a fitting historical perspective for such a grand figure as the writers of that history are painting. Amsterdam, N. Y. Sincerely, M, D. J, BRIC-A-BRAC. Transformation. F it be true that Time doth change Each fiber, nerve, and bone, That in a seven years’ circling range New out of old hath grown. Time’s a magician who hath made A mystery passing strange : — No outward symbol is displayed To hint the subtle change. Whate’er the magic he hath wrought Within his seven years’ span, Your life is yet with beauty fraught As when the charm began. The rounded form of other years Still keeps its crowning grace ; And June, for April’s earlier tears. Plants roses on your face. But your great beauty touches me Now, in no other way Than doth the splendor of the sea. The glory of the day. I dreamed I loved you in past years. Ah ! that was long ago. How far the time-blown love-vane veers This rhyme may serve to show. The shifting seasons soon enough Beheld the bright dream fade : - I learned to know the fragile stuff Of which some dreams are made. We meet now, with a kid-gloved touch, — Mere courtesy, each to each ; That earlier hand-clasp overmuch Outvies our later speech. And so, perhaps, it may be true That, as you pass me by In careless wise, you are not you, And I’m no longer I. A. C. Gordon,

Page 801

BRIC-A-BRAC. 799 A STUDY IN BLACK. “ Were you’ son get dis ’mawlcable talent from, Mister Bradish ? ” , ^ i r » t. j- j “ Entirely it come from my side of de house, sah. My fadder before me was po’ter m a picture-gallery for six yeans befo he died, an’ of co’se you know I done have de sole dustin’ of Marse Crawford’s picters while I was in his sarvice, sah. Uncle Esek’s Wisdom. If a man has made up his mind to be a hypocrite, let him be a big one ; I know of nothing meaner or more wicked than a third-rate one. Whenever I read a pompous and abstruse sen¬ tence, I find the idea in it weak ; it is always safe to trust a strong thought to simple language. The man who can count his friends upon his fin¬ gers is comparatively safe. You can restrain the bold, guide the impetuous, and encourage the timid, but for the weak there is no help ; you might as well undertake to stand a wet string up on end. There are lots of things in the world that are like molasses candy in one respect, — half of a stick is sweeter than the whole. Fashion makes fools of some, cowards of many, and apes of all. U^tcle Esek.

Page 802

8oo Face to Face. BJ^IC-A-BJ^AC. Idling not long ago upon the street They named for him who was our country’s sire In the brave town where Wit and Wisdom meet Daily — for human freedom to conspire — My vagrant glance within a bookstore spied 1 wo portraits — one of him whose mummied clay, With dark devices of rare spices dried, Science identified the other day. Rameses, Pharaoh — many names had he. And many slaves toiled hard to rear his tomb Pyramidal ’twixt the Nile’s fertility And the sad, billowy desert’s silvery gloom. The other portrait was the homely face Of him whose pen-stroke made a nation free. And raised to civic rank an alien race. Dark heritors of a centuried slavery. Lincoln and Pharaoh ! Was it chance alone. Or some design behind the shopman’s hand. By which these lithographs were quaintly thrown Together, for a contrast strangely grand? For these two faces typify indeed Two forces ever within the soul Of man — that earthworm of material greed. That glorious moth who dreams a starry goal. Nay, more: these faces typify, besides. The powers of Progress and Conservatism, That make the nations rise and fall in tides Forv/ard and backward on Time’s dark abysm. But of the men themselves, what may we say. Since Pentaur’s verse on Luxor’s pictured wall Sufficeth Ram’ses’ fame, and Lowell’s lay Of Lincoln’s greatness hath so well said all — Save this : One reared an altar unto Fame, Cemented by the sweat and blood of men ; The other to earth’s highest office came To widen all men’s liberty — and then To fall a victim to a madman’s hate, Just as his country rose again sublime, Beautiful, though ensanguined ! Oh ! strange fate ! O most pathetic mystery of all time ! Hen7y W. Aztslifi, Between the Lines. Between the lines the smoke hung low. And shells flew screaming to and fro. While blue or gray in sharp distress Rode fast, their shattered lines to press Again upon the lingering foe. ’ Tis past — and now the roses blow Where war was waging years ago. And naught exists save friendliness Between the lines. To you who made the traveler know In southern homes how warm hearts glow. Let even this halting verse express Some measure of true thankfulness. And grateful, loving memory show Between the lines. JVaitei' Learned. Hard to Suit. “ I WOULD not mind their coming back, you know,” The lady said, the day her verses w^ent, “ If only they’d refuse the lines on ‘ Snow ’ Before it’s time for ‘ Roses ’ to be sent.” Upon the steps a postman’s eager tread ; Quick! take the envelope, serenely white : — “ Returned with thanks.”— And then the lady said, “ I think they might have kept it overnight.” A. W. R. Doubtful — Very. Long years ago, as those may know Who watched her toils infold me. Among the beaux of Mam’selle Rose A freak of fate enrolled me ; And in her train no silly swain So often told the story That foolish Youth mistakes for truth. And whispers con amove. But Rose, the jade, who had betrayed A score or more before me. With cruel glee rejoiced to see The hopes and fears that tore me; And while intense grew my suspense. She dallied, smiling, pouting. With pretty art, until my heart Was sore with too much doubting. The dear coquette ! She loved to fret Her gallants a la Circe, Yet in her breast lurked unconfessed A sweet and tender mercy; For when I left her, sad, bereft Of joy, and dumb with sorrow, She hung her head and softly said : “It 77iight be ‘ yes ’ to-morrow ! ” M. E. W. A Sea-side Flirtation. With sorrow in her eyes of blue. With trembling hands, she slowly penned it — The little parting billet doux That conscience told her now should end it. Those tete-a-tete along the shore. Those gipsyings with fern-filled basket, Must join the dear delights of yore And only live in memory’s casket. There never was a heart like Jack’s : He told his passion in his glances. She sealed her note with scented wax, But could not drown her dismal fancies. When he should read his suit denied, So long the theme of idle gazers. She pictured him a suicide, And shuddered at the thought of razors ! At last she slept — but not till dawn Had blossomed through the ocean vapors. Jack conned her missive with a yawn When he had read the morning papers. He gave his beard a languid twirl. And murmured as he sat a-smoldng : “ Tear-stained — By Jove ! — poor little girl — I thought she knew that I was joking! ” Samuel Mhiturn Peck. THE DE VINNE PRESS, PRINTERS, NEW YORK.

Page 803

ENGRAVED BY T. JOHNSON. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY SARONY.

Page 804

The Century Magazine VoL. XXXIV. OCTOBER, 1887. No. 6. ELY CATHEDRAL. HE little town of Ely and its enor¬ mous cathedral church stand on what I hardly dare to call a hill, so certain is the word to con¬ vey too large an image. Nowhere but in this vast, low, and monot¬ onous fen-country would so gradual a rise in the ground to so gentle an elevation, be fitted with the term. Only the sea is broader, flatter, more uniform than the fen-lands, — only the sea from whose inroads and satur¬ ations they were themselves so slowly and so painfully reclaimed. In elder days the ships of the Northman or the Norman could come up nearly to the base of the church; and the River Ouse was but the largest of the many waxing and waning streams that wound their sluggish way through bogs and pools and marshes. Now the Ouse itself is shrunken almost to a rivulet, and the wide quagmires are cultivated fields. But the fen-country ” and the Isle of Ely ” are still names in cur¬ rent use, and without effort imagination can reconstruct conditions which made them liter¬ ally appropriate. I. If the railway brings us northward from Cambridge we follow almost the line of that old Roman Akeman Street which for long after it was built must have been a causeway rather than a road through a great part of its course. This approach to Ely is too direct for the cathedral to be seen until we have nearly reached it. But if we come westward from Norwich, it looms up on the horizon as a great solitary ship looms up at sea. As we draw nearer, it preserves its isolated distinct¬ ness of outline, lifted visibly above the plain, yet so little lifted that its bulk seems all the greater, being very near the eye. As we leave the outlying station and drive into the town, still the church appears to grow in size. It is one of the very largest and most im¬ posing, one of the most individual, and dis¬ tinctly the most varied, in England, while the town is quite the smallest that is dignified by the name of a cathedral city.” The census gives Ely seven thousand inhabitants, but it seems a mystery where they house themselves, for the casual eye would not guess a third as many. A short and narrow main street with three or four others opening out of it; a little market-place; one. medieval church in addition to the cathedral; the ecclesiastical dwellings with an adjacent grammar-school ; a pretty, ancient-looking group of almshouses ; a few mills, and then the limitless low plain with sparsely scattered modest suburban homes, — that is all there is of Ely. All the houses, though of stone, are low and simple, and few have any touch of that quaint picturesqueness for which we always hope in England. But though it is so little and so simple, Ely is a neat, bright, cheerful place, with the most spotless inn that ever went by the spot¬ less name of “The Lamb ”. And we would not have it bigger or braver, lest the church’s look of entire supremacy should have a less splen¬ did accent. It is big enough to surround the church with an atmosphere of happy human companionship, and this atmosphere is in¬ creased by the unusually intimate way in which church and town are grouped together. Unlike the west porch of Peterborough, the west porch of Ely is not set back behind gates and greensward, but opens directly on the main street, which cuts through the Close. The chief Copyright, 1887, by The Century Co. All rights reserved.

Page 805

ELY CATHEDRAL. 804 portions of the Close lie immediately around the building, to south and east and north. But on the other side of the street stretches a tri¬ angular lawn, bordered by great trees and on one side by the bishop’s palace. So the close association of the cathedral with the town does not deprive even its western front of a typically English foreground of green. 'Though the town of Ely has always been thus insignificant in itself, its name, as the name of its powerful bishopric and of the powerful men who ruled it, has had a mighty sound in English history. No English see save Durham only had greater temporal power than Ely; and its bishops almost without exception were through all the Catholic centuries among the foremost priests and statesmen of their times. II. Such a district as the fen-country offered peculiar attractions to the founders of monas¬ teries. Long before the coming of the Danes it rivaled, both in the number and in the sanc¬ tity of its ‘Hiouses,” even that far south-western district where Glastonbury’s house was chief among so many. Thorney, Ramsey, Peterbor¬ ough, Crowland, and Ely were but the wealthi¬ est and most populous of the eastern monaste¬ ries. Ely was one of the first of them to be estab¬ lished and one of the earliest to grow to great¬ ness, its founder being a saint of wide renown. Ethelberta, a princess of the East Anglian house, had had from her childhood a leaning towards the religious life. Her domestic expe¬ rience with two successive husbands was there¬ fore somewhat stormy. The first gave her the Isle of Ely by way of dower. Hither, aided by many miracles, she finally succeeded in escap¬ ing from the second — King PIgfrid of North¬ umbria — and here, in the year 673, she founded a home for ecclesiastics of both sexes, and was herself installed as abbess. When, two centuries later, the Danish rov¬ ers came, the holy women who dwelt beneath St. Ethelberta’s roof were scattered and slain like the merry monks of Croyland ” and of Pe¬ terborough. A small body of secular clergy was soon installed in their stead, but the place was unimportant for a hundred years. Then it was restored to greatness by the same hands that at the same time were restoring Peterborough. Here also a large body of Benedictines were settled, and here also King Edgar’s piety was lavishly expressed. Ely now rapidly grew again in wealth and power until its abbots were thought worthy to al¬ ternate with those of Glastonbury and of St. iVu- gustine’s at Canterbury in holding the high VVKST I'RONT OK THE CATHEOKAL ANU THE BISHOP’s PALACE.

Page 806

ELY CATHEDRAL. 80s 'IHli CATHEDRAL AND THE SPIRE OP' SP. MARY’s CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTH-WEST. office of Chancellors of the court. Canute seems to have taken it under his special protection, and modern children still learn the verse he improvised when he heard the monkish chant¬ ing from his boat upon the Ouse.* Most of the tales which profess to explain the tragic fate of his step-son Alfred point to Ely as the place of the boy’s confinement, blinding, death, and burial. On the altar of Ely Edward the Confessor was presented as an infant, and with¬ in its walls he spent some of his childish years. When the land was torn by insurrections against the Conqueror’s new- gained power, Ely became conspicuous in a military way. From 1066 to 1071 the Isle was the best stronghold of the English, being so easy to defend, so difficult to approach, through its treacherous watery surroundings. Here, was that famous Camp of Refuge ” which, under the rule of Here ward and of Abbot * This, I believe, is the earliest extant version of Can¬ ute’s words, written down some two centuries later than his day : “ Merie sungen the Muneches binnen Ely Tha Cnut ching rew ther by. Rowe ye cnites noer the lant. And here we thes Muneches sseng.” T'hurstan, made a last long desperate resist¬ ance to the Norman. Only William’s advent in person brought about its capture in 1071, and only when it was captured was his hold upon his new realm so far secured that he could venture upon a visit to his old realm across the straits. Most of the defenders of the camp were taken and executed. But Thurstan made his peace with William, and Hereward seems to have escaped. There are numerous vague and contradictory tales about his after career; but he vanished out of even half-authentic his¬ tory at the taking of the Isle of Ely. The monastery itself was not disturbed by William, and ten years later Simeon, its Nor¬ man abbot, began the construction of a new and larger abbey-church. III. The site of this new church — which gradu¬ ally grew into the building of to-day — was chosen a little to the eastward of the old Eng¬ lish structure. How much actual work was done by Simeon we do not know. But choir and transepts and central tower were complete

Page 807

8o6 ELY CATHEDRAL, in the time of his successor Richard, who, in corresponding end of the opposite aisle in 1550. 1106, removed the bodies of St. Ethelberta These, of course, are in the Perpendicular style and of three other canonized abbesses, her and the last named in its very latest phase. ACROSS THE FENS. relatives, from the old church to the new. At about the same time, in the reign of Henry I., the bishopric of Ely was created and the ab¬ bey-church became a cathedral. In later Norman days the nave was built. As the Norman style was passing into the Early English, the western end was constructed with its single great tower in the center of the fagade and its spreading transept-Avings and turrets. When the Early English style was in its fullest development a porch or Galilee ” was built out in front of the west door, and the whole east limb was pulled down and greatly enlarged. About a hundred years later — in 1332 — the central tower fell, carrying with it the four adjacent bays of this new choir. Re¬ construction was begun in the same year (the Decorated style being now in use) and was finished soon after the middle of the century, by Avhich time a wholly new Lady Chapel had also been completed. A large chantry or se¬ pulchral chapel was built into the east end of one choir-aisle in 1500, and another into the Thus we see there is 110 medieval fashion whatsoever that we may not study in some im¬ portant part of Ely’s mighty frame. IV. The Galilee or western porch is 43 feet in depth. With its rich outer and inner portals, its capitals carved Avith delicate curling leaf¬ age, its side arcades in double roAA^s of trefoil ed arches, and the profuse but exquisitely refined “ dog-tooth ” enrichment of its moldings, it is one of the loveliest things that man ever built and one of the most individually English in its loveliness. Yet less than a century ago an Englishman AAdio Avas pleased to call him¬ self an architect and a restorer” advised its destruction, together Avith that of the Avestern transept, saying that they Avere things ‘Tieither useful nor ornamental and not Avorth preserv¬ ing ! ” When Ave have passed the inner doorAvay of this porch, Ave find ourselves in another ves-

Page 808

ELY CATHEDRAL, 807 tibule, beneath the western tower. Double tiers of richly arcaded galleries run around it, and to the south the transept stretches out, with a chapel in its eastern face. The northern arm of the transept is gone, as our view of the west front shows. There is no record to tell when or why it perished ; but it cannot have stood more than a hundred and fifty years at longest, for there are signs to prove that a reconstruction was begun in the Decorated period. All the work in this western end is very rich — Transitional below, pure Early Eng¬ lish above, the one style passing into the other very naturally, and pointed arches succeeding semicircles without a hint of discord. There could not be a better place than this to illus¬ trate a great general fact with regard to medie¬ val architecture — the fact that, however distinct and different its main styles may be in their complete development, one was never deliberately, suddenly changed for another; the fact that there were transi¬ tional times be¬ tween them when each grew out of the foregoing by a slow process of natural devel¬ opment. Through the great inner arch of this vestibule — lowered and widened by Per¬ pendicular altera¬ tions — we seethe long perspective of the Norman nave most effect¬ ively emphasized. Again, as at Peter¬ borough, the con¬ trast with the lux¬ uriant Transition¬ al work we are leaving behind us is very great. Here, indeed, it is an even greater contrast; for the nave is still simpler in design — the great triforium openings not being subdivided by coupled lower arches — and is even less em¬ bellished by the chisel. Here, there are not even zigzags on the moldings; nothing but fluted cushion capitals and a single line of hatched decoration on the lower string-course. It is not quite so fine a nave as Peter¬ borough’s, for the vastness of the triforium openings, showing so plainly the roughly boarded aisles-roofs behind them, gives it a somewhat emptier air. But it has the same general effect of grandeur and supreme sol¬ emnity, and the same almost tunnel-like length and narrowness. If we are used to continental planning, a narrow Anglo-Nor¬ man nave has more the look of a superb approach to some huge sanctuary than the look of an integral part of the sanctuary itself. The main transepts — all that is left of the first two abbots’ work — have two aisles like the nave and are similar to it in design. Arcaded WESTERN PART OF THE CATHEDRAL, FROM A GARDEN IN THE CLOSE. galleries along their ends, however, give these portions a much richer accent. The eastern parts of the choir — the presby¬ tery and retro-choir, the parts that were unin¬ jured by the falling of the tower — form as admirable a specimen of Early English (Lan¬ cet-Pointed) work as the island has to show. Each of the great stone piers between central alley and side aisles is set about with eight slender isolated dark-marble shafts, the capi¬ tals of the whole group uniting in a wreath of lovely knotted foliage. The arches are molded with an infinite intricacy of hollows and ridges.

Page 809

8o8 ELY CATHEDRAL. A. Galilee. B. Vestibule under western tower. C. South-west transept. D. Chapel. E, E. North-west transept and chapel (destroyed). F, F, F. Nave and aisles. G. Octaj^on. H, I. Main transepts. P. Lady Chapel. Q. “ Choir of the singers.” R. Presbytery. S. Retro-choir. U. Bishop Alcock’s chantry. V. Bishop West’s chantry. X. Remains of Cloisters, with monks’ and priors’ doors at i and 2. 4. Bishop de Luda’s tomb. infinitely effective yet delicate in their contrast of dark and brilliant lines. None of the open¬ ings in the outer walls are traceried ;* but the inner triforium-arcade, over the main arches, has each of its great openings filled by two smaller trefoiled lights resting on marble shafts; and between the heads of these are bold open quatrefoils. The clere-story windows are in tall lancet groups of three. The ribs of the vaulted stone roof are continued in great clusters down the wall between the triforium- arches till they rest upon long corbels, carved as masses of rich foliage, which insert them¬ selves between the arch-heads of the main ar¬ cade. Such corbels as these are purely English features. In France we find instead true vault¬ ing-shafts which spring from the great capitals. The French device is certainly the more ^‘con¬ structional.’’ But when the English is as beauti¬ fully used as it is at Ely, it has infinite richness and a sufficient expression of stability as well. But it is the east end which is most thoroughly English and most beautiful — a great flat wall filled with tall lancet groups. Below are three immense and richly molded lights of equal height ; and above are five smaller lights, di¬ minishing in height from the center out. These five are set in the outer face of the thick wall, and its inner face is worked into a correspond¬ ing open arcade. As the curve of the vault impinges somewhat upon the side lights of this arcade, their heads are curiously flattened into an irregular shape. How naive, how frankly bold were these medieval artists, even at a day when their art had grown so elaborate, so re¬ fined, so subtile ! A modern architect would scarcely dare to tamper with his forms in such a way — and yet it is a way which, despite the awkward curves that it produces, does not really distress the eye. Its reasons are too immediately apparent and too valid. Now, having seen what are the four arms of the cross, let us. see what is the place where all four meet. Beautiful as is all the rest of its fabric, individual as are many parts of it, the crossing is Ely’s great feature — at once its most unique and its most triumphantly suc¬ cessful. Peterborough’s great feature, as I have said, is undated, and the name of its builder is unknown. But at Ely we are more fortunately instructed. When the old tower fell John Hotham was bishop of the see, and under him as sub-prior and sacrist of the convent was one Alan of Walsingham. Hotham is entitled to the credit of securing funds to begin the reconstruction and of bequeathing great sums to complete it. But the sacrist was his executive; and the credit of conceiving the freshest and grandest idea that ever took concrete shape on English soil is Alan of Walsingham’s. A glance at the ground-plan will show what this conception was. Walsingham did not rebuild in their original place the four great angle-piers which had sus¬ tained the tower and connect them again by four arches parallel with the walls of the church * I speak of the original scheme ; — all through the church very many of the outer windows, both in the upper and in the lower stages, were filled with tracer¬ ies at a time long after they were built.

Page 810

ELY CATHEDRAL, 809 and of equal width with its four central alleys only ; he swept away the remains of the old piers and made eight angle-piers instead offour, strengthening for this purpose the final piers of those arcades which mark off the side aisles in each of the limbs. The central space thus became an octagon, and, taking in the whole breadth of the church instead of the breadth of the central alleys only, its area became three times as extensive as before. Eight arches sur¬ rounded it, four opening into the main alleys on either hand and four opening slantwise into the aisles. The former are, of course, immensely wide; and they are proportionately tall, ris- ing as high as the main roofs and having their heads filled in with open tracery. The inter¬ mediate ones are much narrower and are low. But above each of them rises a solid space of wall, ornamented with a rich arcade for statuary; and above this again, free over the aisles-roofs, an immense traceried window whose top corresponds in height and shape with the top of the four larger arches. Between the heads of these windows and large arches rise great clusters of vaulting shafts converging inward for a space and then bearing aloft a tall central lantern, also octagonal and also pierced with wide traceried windows. Thus Alan of Walsingham, as Ferguson says,* ‘‘ alone of all the architects of Northern Europe, seems to have conceived the idea of getting rid of what in fact was the bathos of the style, — the tall narrow opening of the central tower, which, though possessing exaggerated height, gave neither space nor dignity to the principal feature.” Thus, he adds, he formed ‘‘ the only Gothic dome in existence, though Italian architects had done the same thing and the method was in common use with the Byzantines.” Certainly Walsingham’s scheme is a splen¬ did improvement upon the usual English in¬ terior scheme, whether Ave consider it for pure beauty of effect, for practical conven¬ ience, or for expression al potency. Certainly it forms the only Gothic dome in existence, if Ave mean by a dome a circular or polygonal roof Avhich upholds a central lantern pierced for light. Other Gothic domes there are Avhich form asimple unbroken, unpierced sweep above our heads. They are very few, but there is one in Portugal, and there is a splendid one at Prague Avith a clear reach from Avail to Avail of 75 feet, someAvhat more than the floor measure of the octagon at Ely. There is also one about tAVO-thirds as large in England itself, in the chapter-house at York. But this last is built of Avood, AAfliile the continental examples are of stone. I must hasten to confess, that Alan of AVal- History of Architecture.” VoL. XXXIV.— III. singham’s dome is also of wood — the clus¬ ters of vaulting- shafts, the vault, the upper octagon Avith its traceried lights ; everything, in fact, above the croAvn of the great arches. Of course the contrast betAveen Avood and stone Avas hidden by the painter’s brush ; but the im¬ pressiveness, if not the charm, of the construc¬ tion is lessened when we know its substance. Apart from this, the execution of Alan’s Avork is as beautiful as its conception is fresh and strong. NoAvhere in all the vast treasury of medieval art do Ave find features more graceful in themselves, more harmonious Avith each other, better fitted in size and shape and relative richness for the service they must ren¬ der. Nowhere is there more variety or a more complete unity. NoAvhere is there a more organic air of groAvth from foundations to sum¬ mit, a more complete yet unexaggerated ex¬ pression of verticality. As in all perfect Gothic Avork, the roof ‘‘ governs everything ” — has dic¬ tated every line and form beloAV. The vaulting shafts are not borne by corbels as in the less “ constructional,” more typically English way, but start from the floor in groups of three great rolls Avhich, at the level of the minor arches, are subdivided into many smaller moldings that rise to the capitals of the greater arches and there bear similar capitals, Avhich in their turn support the incurving clus¬ ters of the ribs that form the vault itself. The breaking-up of the three loAver rolls into many is beautifully masked by great projecting can¬ opied niches for statues, which compose most effectively Avith the arcaded niches on the plain Avails below the AvindoAvs. Puritan hands worked havoc with this Avon- derful piece of art, and modern hands have not been very skillful in restoring it. The neAv statues Avhich fill the old niches are fairly good; but the glass in the AAundoAvs is not good, and the vault is painted in a gaudy pattern where magenta swears at ” vivid green. But even so, the main conception is uninjured, and enough details remain to tell Avhat must once have been the effect. There is no spot Avherean architect may better study Avhat Avas meant, in the very greatest days of Pointed archi¬ tecture, by a fine idea, perfectly carried out and exquisitely adorned. VI. The three choir bays next to the octagon (those ruined by the fall of the old tOAver) Avere rebuilt as soon as the octagon itself Avas finished. They are also in the Decorated style; but their unlikeness to the earlier Avork is so appar¬ ent that one can hardly think Walsingham de¬ signed them, though one knoAvs he was still alive and still high in honor in the convent.

Page 811

Sio ELY CATHEDRAL. The later work is often cited as the most of view. Then each successive generation of perfect and splendid example of Decorated builders showed so wise a regard for the orig- Gothic in all England. It is indeed very splen- inal scheme that the string-courses come every- did, and is very perfect as regards its execu- where at the same level, and the height of the tion and details. But in its general scheme it arcades is everywhere alike; and this factpre- THE OUSE. is not really so fine, so good^ as the work in the octagon. Grace and richness are conspicuous in both ; but in the octagon they are subor¬ dinated to strength and simplicity, while in the choir they show plainly as the first things that were considered. The arches are a little weak in outline, and the gorgeous traceries that fill the upper tiers are so elaborate and fragile- looking that they seem more like frost-work than like carven stone. The result has almost a cloying richness, almost a pretty loveliness. There is a certain kind of painting which studio slang calls sweet ” ; and I think there is just a touch too much of sweetness in this very beautiful part of Ely. Diverse in style as are the several parts of this interior, its general effect is far more har¬ monious than is usually the case under similar conditions. The octagon distinctly separates, yet vitally connects, the newer portions with the older, and forms a dominant center to¬ wards which the eye returns from every point vents any look of inorganic patching, greatly as forms and details have been made to difter. The choir and the aisles are vaulted, in some parts very elaborately ; but the nave is cov¬ ered by a wooden ceiling. Once it was flat; but it had to be raised in the middle to accommo¬ date Walsingham’s tall arch, and now shows steeply canted sides with a flat central portion. It was decorated some twenty-five years ago by a non-professional artist whose soft pale tints are exceptionally harmonious. The Lady Chapel is another work of Walsingham’s. Such a chapel was com¬ monly given the most honorable place in the church — eastward of the presbytery, where it formed a retro-choir often of enor¬ mous size. But when there was a local saint of especial sanctity the Virgin was some¬ times displaced. Thus it was at Canterbury where St. Thomas claimed the retro-choir, and thus it was at Ely where it was given to St. Ethelberta. In both these cases the

Page 812

ELY CATHEDRAL. 8ii Lady Chapel was built out eastward from the north arm of the transept. At Ely it is what we might call a beautiful great room rather than a chapel, — a rectangle 170 feet in length with five windows on each side and a single huge window at each end. The west window was inserted in 1374; but even the east window, which was contempo¬ raneous with the walls (1321-1349), shows in its tracery the near approach of Perpendicular fashions. All the other details, however, are pure Decorated and are incomparably rich. Or, to speak more truly, they were incomparably rich before the Protestants laid hands upon them. The ceiling is a delicate net-work of small ribs, intertwined in complicated patterns. All along the walls beneath the windows run elaborate arcades with little canopied niches, and between the windows are similar niches of the most intricate loveliness. Traces remain to show that the reredos which stretches across beneath the east window was once connected with it by a wide raised platform ; and on this platform, relieved against the translucent splendor of the glass, doubtless stood that great figure of the Virgin which is often men¬ tioned in the monastery records. A myriad of smaller figures once filled all the niches, but the Puritans left not one remaining and griev¬ ously shattered the dainty foliage and mold¬ ings which supported and enshrined them. The stone from which all the carvings were wrought is pure white and very soft — almost like chalk in texture. Naturally it yielded but too easily to axe and hammer ; and only a few fragments remain of the beautifully intermin¬ gled tints of soft red and blue and green which once set off or wholly sheathed its whiteness. VII. Great names begin very early to appear on the list of Ely’s bishops. The second holder of the title, Nigel, — appointed in 1133, — had been Treasurer to Henry I., and like his uncle Roger, the famous Bishop of Salisbury, was a prominent actor in the wars of King Stephen’s reign. Personally extravagant and politically ambitious, he robbed his see with the boldest hand, and even stripped the shrine of St. Eth- elberta of its silver covering. At first for Ste¬ phen and then for Matilda, he was besieged at Devizes, and would again have stood a siege in Ely itself had not Stephen surprised the Isle before its defenses were complete. But when the troubles were over he made his peace with Stephen, and after the accession of Henry II. became one of the Barons of the Exchequer. The castle he built at Ely has wholly disap¬ peared. Next to him came Geoffrey Ridel, who was also a Baron of the Exchequer, also a promi¬ nent statesman, and so strong a supporter of the king against the archbishop that after Becket’s murder he was forced to clear himself under oath from charges of complicity. At Ely one forgets his worldly deeds, remembering him as the constructor of the west facade. Then came William Longchamp, Chancellor and Grand Justiciary of Richard I. During his life the temporal power of the bishops of Ely rose to its highest point, for when the king went a-crusading the bishops of Ely and of Durham were severally intrusted with the rule of the kingdom north and south of the Trent. But even half a loaf of supreme authority was not enough for Longchamp, who arrested his col¬ league and, assuming the utmost pomp and state, treated the kingdom as if it were his own, bestowing all places in Church and State on his relations and dependants.” Prince John resist¬ ing him, he shut himself up in the Tower of London, but was forced to flee, was captured at Dover, and exiled to Normandy. Forgiven by Richard on his return, he was Chancellor until his death. The next bishop of Ely, Eustace, was the next Chancellor too. His chief merit was the stand he took for national freedom, opposing King John and being one of the three bishops who published the interdict of the Pope. Yet the merit of building the Galilee at Ely adds a further luster to his name. Three bishops followed Eustace who were not quite so prominent, and then in 1229 came Hugh of Northwold, who went as ambassador on various royal missions, and sumptuously en¬ tertained royal guests when he had brought the Early English choir of his cathedral to com¬ pletion and was once more translating ” the bodies of the sainted abbesses ; as a reward for all of which, one supposes, he was buried at St. Ethelberta’s feet. William of Kilkenny followed — another Chancellor — and then Hugh of Balsham, who in 1280 founded the first college at Cambridge and dedicated it to St. Peter. Then came John of Kirkby, treasurer of the realm, and so little of an ecclesiastic that he stepped from deacon’s to priest’s orders only after his appointment to the see and only the day before his consecra¬ tion. The next bishop was William de Luda, “ a lordly man and eminent in the sciences,” one of the commissioners who settled peace with France for Ed\vard I., and the chief mediator between the clergy and this king. The tomb in which he was buried is one of the most magnificent in Ely. In 1316 came that Bishop Hotham whose name I have already cited. Even his great architectural labors must have seemed unim-

Page 813

8i2 ELY CATHEDRAL. DISTANT VIEW OF THE CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SOUTH, portant to his contemporaries compared with the greater public labors which filled his life. He was first Treasurer and then Lord Chan¬ cellor. He took the field against Robert Bruce and narrowly escaped capture at Mytton-upon- Swale. He arranged the subsequent truce with Scotland and then was sent to settle the affairs of Gascony. The Great Seal was again con¬ fided to him after the abdication of Edward II. This, one might think, was work enough for any man. Yet Ely never had a more de¬ voted incumbent than Hotham. He not only caused the rebuilding of the crossing and the construction of the Lady Chapel, but left much money in his will for the restoration of the choir; and he also secured legislation which vastly profited the revenues of the church, and purchased for it great tracts of land adjoining that manor of Holborn, which one of his pred¬ ecessors had given to the see — great tracts that are now in the very heart of London. He too was buried in a splendid tomb that still stands in the cathedral. One of the richest and most powerful of English sees, Ely was naturally one of those with whose affairs the popes were most con¬ stantly interfering. Often we read of some papal protege made bishop in opposition to local wishes ; and though as a rule no issues seem deader to-day than these (except, of course, as illustrating that great conflict with Rome upon which so much of England’s his¬ tory hinges), one such act of papal interference still excites a living interest, a poignant, if sen¬ timental, regret. This was the act which ex¬ cluded from Ely ’s cathedra Alan ofW alsingham, whom the monks had previously elected prior and whom they now desired for bishop. Bishop De Lisle sat in his stead, and we reap sentimental consolation from the fact that he proved a haughty and magnificent pre¬ late, little in favor either with his convent or with the king,” had a vexed career, and died at Avignon, whither he had fled to the shelter of the papal wing. After him came Simon Langham and John Barnet, each successively Treasurer of Eng¬ land. During Barnet’s time the king restored and restocked certain manors belonging to the see which had been denuded by De Lisle and the king himself The wealth possessed by such establishments is shown by the list of these manors which, too, were only the chief among others: the palace at Ely; Ely House

Page 814

ELY CATHEDRAL. 813 in Holborn ; Bishop’s Hatfield and Hadham in Yet so much stronger is the voice of art than Hertfordshire ; Balsham and Ditton in Cam- the voices of history and topography com- bridgeshire; Somersham in Huntingdonshire; bined, that most of us know Morton only as Downham, Wisbech Castle, and Doddington My Lord of Ely ” whom Richard asks for in the Isle of Ely. The nature of the average good strawberries” from his Holborn gar- incumbent of the time is as clearly illustrated den. by the fact that every subsequent bishop on This man of science was succeeded by a man the day of his enthronization was obliged to of art, — John Alcock. Very often the ecclesi- take oath beneath the west door of Ely that asticwhowas the reputed builder of great works THE LANTERN, FROM THE NORTH-EAST. he would transmit unimpaired to his success¬ ors the wealth now given him in charge. Bishop Arundel was Lord Chancellor and rebuilt the palace in Holborn. Bishop Ford- ham was Lord Treasurer under Richard IL, and is the Ely who sings second to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the opening scenes of Shakspere’s Henry V.” Then came Bishop Morgan, still another statesman, and then Louis de Luxembourg who had been Archbishop of Rouen and a faithful friend of the English in France. Next to him in the line stands Thomas Bourchier, and next but one to Bourchier stands John Morton. Both of these are actors in the scenes of “ Richard III.” — Morton as actual bishop of Ely, Bourchier as then promoted to be Primate of all England. Morton was a very skillful engineer and one of the first systematically to attempt the draining of the great north fens. He cut a canal forty miles from near Peterborough to the sea, and built a big brick tower on top of which he often sat to superintend the work. The canal is still called Morton’s Seam.” really deserved no higher title than their ar¬ chitect’s paymaster or employer. But Alcock seems to have been himself an architect. He was Controller of the Royal Works and Build¬ ings under Henry VI L, and we shall see on another page how much he built at Ely. It is hard to omit any name from this long list of bishops, so incessantly do the great names follow one another. In 1 5 1 5, for exam¬ ple, was appointed Nicholas West, who had iDeen a famous lawyer and a frequent am¬ bassador; who had gone with Henry VIII. to the Camp of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and who afterwards braved his master and took a bold stand for Catherine of Aragon ; who, although a baker’s son, was the most sumptuous prelate of his day, having more than one hundred servants, and the most charitable, feeding two hundred paupers daily at his gates; and who is appropriately sepul- chered in that very lovely chapel which speaks the last word of English Gothic art. Then there was Bishop Goodrich, who was also a great legal authority and had sided with Henry against his queen ; who supported

Page 815

8i4 ELY CATHEDEAL. THE CATHEDRAL AND THE LADY CHAPEL, FROM THE SOUTH-EAST. the Reformation and destroyed the shrines of those holy Ely women whom so many of his predecessors had delighted to honor; who helped to revise the translation of the Bible and helped to rule the kingdom as Chancellor for the young king Edward. There was Bishop Thirlby, who was ap¬ pointed by Queen Mary and went as her ambassador to Rome to swear anew England’s allegiance to the Pope. He performed the cer¬ emony of degradation over Archbishop Cran- mer, but was man enough to weep as he did it. He was man enough, too, to submit to ten years’ confinement at Lambeth rather than take the oath of ecclesiastical submission to Elizabeth. Next to him came Richard Cox, who helped to draw up the Thirty-nine Articles and who long and valiantly resisted the queen’s en¬ croachments upon the Church — especially as they threatened his own rich manor of Hol- born. It was to Cox and with reference to this manor that the queen wrote the famous letter : “Proud Prelate, — You know what you were before I made you what you are ; if you do not imme¬ diately comply with my request, by God I will unfrock you. — Elizabeth.” Eighty years later than Cox — in 1638 — Matthew Wren was installed at Ely, an ex¬ cellent hater of Puritans,” a loyal supporter of Laud, a man of sour, severe nature,” a stern ecclesiastical disciplinarian, and an occu¬ pant for eighteen years of the Tower of Lon¬ don, — chiefly individualized to us as that uncle of Sir Christopher Wren whose merits and woes are sympathetically referred to in the Parentalia. While Wren sat in the Tower — between the two terms when he sat at Ely — the power of Cromwell rose and fell. At Ely it did not work quite the havoc it worked elsewhere — but this is not to say that it worked little. Ely was the scene of that incident which Carlyle relates with such infinite gusto. It was the Rev. Mr. Hitch of Ely to whom Cromwell had unavailingly written that he should ‘Torbear altogether the choir-service, so unedifying and offensive, lest the soldiers should in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the reformation of the cathedral church.” It was under the octagon of Ely that Cromwell therefore appeared in person, with a rabble at his heels, and his hat on,” to shout ‘leave off your fooling and come down, Sir,’ .... in a voice .... which Mr. Hitch did now instantaneously give ear to.” Since the Reformation there have been many good men and true in the chair of Ely — scholars, theologians, preachers, and pa¬ trons of learning; men doubtless much better as regards the heart, which no man seetb, than most of their mighty forerunners. But those deeds of theirs which man can see have

Page 816

ELY CATHEDRAL. had no such significance, either political or architectural, that their names need be cited here. The great days of prelatical influence and the great days of constructive art saw their suns set together. S15 by still further illumining her name and extend¬ ing her influence, and by constantly bequeath¬ ing her the riches they had gained in the outer world. Let us go back now to the cathedral for a On the other hand, the mighty men whose names we have ju^ read have not had a tithe of their varied distinctions told. The duties they had performed, the honors they had reaped, before they became bishops of Ely, have barely been referred to ; and their after careers have scarcely in a single case been suggested. Many of them were bishops of other sees before or after their appointment to Ely. Several of them were cardinals of Rome. Some of them were distinguished in literature as well as in worldly affairs, in science, and in art. Death hardly removed more of them than promotion; there was no more pro¬ lific nursery of archbishops than the Isle of Ely. The power of a see, in medieval times, vastly assisted but did not make the power and fame of the men who bore its title. Even a bishop of Ely, if a weak man or a dull man, was not loaded with secular dignities and bid¬ den to control the destinies of England. Yet the power of Ely is illustrated none the less by the frequency with which the names of leading statesmen are associated with her own. If her chair was not the sole source of her prelates’ fame, it was one of England’s chief rewards for fame, and one of the surest step¬ ping-stones to still higher eminence. The assist¬ ance given was mutual, of course. Ely helped her bishops on in life, and they helped her on ELY, FROM UNDER THE RAILWAY BRIDGE. moment and see what there remains to speak of some among them. VIII. The great architectural labors of the earlier bishops have already been mentioned. By the middle of the fourteenth century there was nothing left to do for the cathedral save to add minor features and to make minor altera¬ tions. The alterations mostly took the form of changes made in the windows for the inser¬ tion of more splendid glass ; and the minor features usually took the shape of tombs des¬ tined to receive their builders or constructed to do honor to their immediate predecessors. The most conspicuous tombs are those square chapels or chantries which finish the choir aisles to the eastward. The one to the north was built by John Alcock — the bishop-archi¬ tect — for his own use. Completed by 1500, it is in a late version of the Perpendicular manner, though it contains the early- Deco-

Page 817

Si6 ELY CAT'HEDRAL. rated windows which had stood in the aisle- end before the chapel was formed. The walls are covered all over with complicated taber¬ nacle-work, and the roof has elaborate fan¬ vaulting. The sculptured details show a wealth of curious fancies, and here and there occurs the bishop’s device, a cock standing on a globe, — a punning representation of the sylla¬ bles of the name such as one often finds in medieval art of every age. Nothing could be intrinsically lovelier than this little chapel ; and it gains additional in¬ terest from the character of its design. It dates from the middle of the sixteenth century, and shows Renaissance mingled with the Gothic details. Work of this sort is not very common in English churches, for most of it was put into monuments and accessory features which fell a prey either to the Reformation or to that mod¬ ern devastator, restoration,” which in Eng- THE CATHEDRAL, FROM THE SOUTH. The south chapel is that of Bishop West, the baker’s magnificent son. It too is paneled throughout with tabernacle-work, which still shows rich leafage designed on the smallest scale yet with infinite vigor and spirit, and which once had each tiny niche filled with a figure that was not more than a few inches high. Two or three heads are all that remain, thanks, of course, to the Reformers. But these are quite enough to show that the figures, too, were instinct with life and force and character, despite their minute scale. The whole is carved of the same soft white stone which was used in the Lady Chapel, and seems to have been color¬ ed in a way which left the figures white against tinted backgrounds and encircling ornaments. land has had so stupid and cruel a hatred for everything that it does not think ‘‘ pure ” in art, — that is, for everything which is not me¬ dieval. Even when such work is found it is seldom attractive, for English hands rarely used early- Renaissance motives well. The great loveliness of this chapel, therefore, its infinite grace and delicacy, its supreme refinement, the extraordinary skill with which medieval and classical elements are blended into a coherent and harmonious design, — all these qualities give color to the tradition that it was carved by Italian hands and perhaps by the hands of Torrigiano, who lived long in England and whose most famous work is the tomb of Henry VII. at Westminster.

Page 818

ELY CATILEDRAL. 817 In each of these chapels is the tomb of its founder, ruined by the Puritans. In the choir is a splendid series of other episcopal tombs, whose rich canopies were for¬ tunately respected even when the bodies and the effigies of those who lay beneath them were disturbed and the accessory saints’ figures were annihilated. One is the sepulcher of the ‘lordly” De Luda — an elaborate canopy with trefoiled arches and great groups of pin¬ nacles at each end. It has been atrociously col¬ ored in modern times and, the tomb itself being gone, the central space is used as a door- way by which one passes from the aisle into the choir ! This is a thirteenth-century tomb, and near it is a fine one of the fourteenth century, — Bishop Barnet’s. Bishop Hotham’s still more splendid fourteenth-century sepulcher — a tomb proper surmounted by a lofty shrine — stood practic¬ ally intact till a hundred years ago, when the same vandal who counseled the destruction of the Galilee-porch broke it in two. The tomb now stands on one side of the choir, and on the other stands the vacant shrine with its open lower and its closed upper story, the latter hav¬ ing once been richly carved and arranged to support a seven-branched candlestick. Bishop Redman’s Perpendicular monument, on the contrary, is almost perfect. A paneled tomb supports his recumbent figure beneath a can¬ opy with three lace-like arches and complicated open paneling above. Bishop North wold’s and Bishop Kilkenny’s Early English and Louis of Luxembourg’s Perpendicular sepulchers also stand, the last-named with a mutilated head¬ less figure of its tenant. But I cannot go through the whole list of the tombs and brasses, episcopal and lay, which fill the choir of Ely so full of architect¬ ural and historic charm. I can only note the superb range of choir-stalls designed by Alan of Walsingham, and then make place for an epigrammatic epitaph, cut on a small brass plate, which has now disappeared but was legible not many years ago. It dated, I be¬ lieve, from the seventeenth century : [ Tyndall by birth, Ursula < Coxee by choice, ( Upcher in age and for comfort. IX. It is time now that we should glance at the exterior of the cathedral. There are more beautiful west fronts in the world than this, but there is none in England so imposing; and in all England there is none the least like it among cathedral fronts and none quite like it in any church of lesser rank. Parish churches often have a single western tower, but no other cathedral church has ; and VoL. XXXIV.— 112. I think no parish church shows such a tower supported by these wide spreading wings and these angle turrets. The upper lantern of the tower, added in the Decorated period, had originally a tall slender wooden spire ; but this was removed in the course of the last century’s “ restorations.” The north side of the church is as varied as it is beautiful. Its long Norman nave has had rich later traceries inserted in many of its win¬ dows. Then come the transepts, Norman again, and the Decorated Lady Chapel ; and then the lovely Decorated and Lancet-Pointed reaches of the choir, each buttress crowned by a lofty fretted pinnacle. Here we get a good view of the octagon. Marking how well its low broad rich bulk contrasts with the tall sturdiness of the west¬ ern tower, we feel the reasons for two facts. We see why other architects were not likely to reproduce Walsingham’s design, and we see why he himself could be content with it. His scheme is incomparably beautiful inside the church, but no tall and massive tower could have been borne by such a substructure. A long low English church absolutely needed such a tower. Only here at Ely — only here where there was a single great western tower — was a broad, light lantern preferable. Here it would have been hard to build a central tower which should rival the western one. Even had this been accomplished, the effect of two such features, set in the same line and striving for preeminence, would have been far from happy. Fine though it is, the outline of Ely suffers by comparison with such outlines as Canterbury’s, as Salisbury’s, as Lichfield’s, or Lincoln’s. But it is the finest that could have been secured by a builder working under Walsingham’s conditions. He was ex¬ ceptional indeed among English builders in having such a chance to think most of his inte¬ rior effect — to think most of this and yet do the best that could be done for exterior effect as well. His octagon with its lantern was the best possible feature for Ely — but of no other English church would the same words be true. The east end of the church is even more beautiful without than within. For outside the two ranges of lights which showed from within are topped by a higher range, still dif¬ ferently grouped, which illumines the space between ceiling and outer roof, and by a group of quatrefoils in the gable-point. All the ranges are completed by the arcades which adorn the tall turret-like buttresses. The Dec¬ orated window of Bishop Alcock’s chapel and the Perpendicular window of Bishop West’s add variety to, but scarcely hurt the unity of, this beautiful composition.

Page 819

8i8 IN TER PR E TA TION X. All about the church the greensward comes close up to the foundations and stretches away in broad level lawns. To the south lie the main portions of the Close, like a thickly wooded park, and the many fragments of the old conventual buildings. Of the cloisters which formed a square con¬ tiguous to the nave only a piece or two remain. But we still have the Monk’s and Prior’s Doors, which gave access to the south aisle of the nave. Both are Norman, and the latter is ex¬ tremely rich and lovely, with elaborate jambs the carving of which seems to show a linger¬ ing Celtic influence, and with a figure of Christ supported by angels in the tympanum that has an almost Byzantine air. The Chapter House has wholly perished, but parts of the late-Norman Infirmary remain, ingeniously built in, like similar parts at Peter¬ borough, to form the modern canons’ houses. The plan of an old conventual hospital was like the plan of a church. A nave formed the main hall; two aisles were subdivided into chambers for the sick, and a chapel was thrown out like a chancel at one end. The Infirmary nave at Ely now forms a roofless passage-way between the modern houses, spanned still by the chancel-arch; and the piers and arches which marked off the aisles form part and par¬ cel of their walls on either hand. One house has been made with but little alteration from a separate hall that was designed by W alsing- ham for the use of convalescents. The Deanery has been constructed out of the old thirteenth-century Guesten Hall, Near it was the Prior’s house of which certain parts remain, together with a lovely little chapel. This bears Prior Crawdon’s name, but in all likelihood was another work of Walsingham’s. It' is now the chapel of the grammar-school or college which was founded by Henry VIII. and which still flourishes under ecclesiastical control. The school itself and its masters are housed in a long range of buildings, forming the western boundary of the south Close, into which are built multitudinous fragments of the ancient convent. Off to the southward is ‘‘ Ely Porta,” once the main entrance to the monastery. In its present form, a wide arch¬ way with a large room above, it dates from about 1400. The bishop’s palace, facing on the isolated lawn which lies west of the cathedral, dates chiefly from the time of Henry VII. — that is, from the time of Bishop Alcock. The turreted wings which still stand are his, but the huge hall and galleries he built have disappeared. I believe it was one of his galleries which bridged the street and united the palace with the church at the corner of the south-western transept. It is a beautiful, quaint, and stately pile, this palace ; and Prior Crawdon’s chapel and all the adjacent school-buildings are infinitely picturesque, — not imposing like the palace, but low and vine-clad, gray and lovely, wholly and peculiarly English in their charm. Even a hurrying school-boy whom we met one sunny afternoon could see the pleasure in our eyes. It seemed only natural that he should exclaim, amid many pretty blushes, ‘‘You are quite welcome to sketch the houses if you want to — almost everybody does ! ” One of the best views of the cathedral is from the railroad station whence we look north-westward and, seeing it in the near mid¬ dle-distance, realize its enormous length and the stern majesty of the tall tower that rises like a great cliff in a land where man might weU build cliffs since nature had built none. Another is from a mound called Cherry Hill in the south Close, whence we see it stretching over massy sweeps of foliage. Still another is from an elevation where the water- works of the town have been erected, some two miles towards the west. But one need hardly seek for best points of view at Ely. There is no spot whence the great queen of the fen-lands may not be well seen, until we get so far away that it drops behind the horizon’s rim. Wherever, how¬ ever we see it, it is always imposing, always superb, always tremendous, — from far or near, from north, south, east, or west. Nowhere is there a more magnificent piece of human handiwork, and nowhere does nature seem more wholly to efface herself that human handi¬ work may profit. M. G. va?i Rensselaer. INTERPRETATION. A SORROWER went his way along. And I heard him sing and say : The noon is bright, but soon the night Will come, the grave of the day. Then I smiled to hear his woful song And sent this word for nay : The noon is bright, but the blackest night Cradles another day. Richard E, Burton,

Page 820

[BEGUN IN THE NOVEMBER NUMBER.] ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A HISTORY.^ THE SECESSION MOVEMENT. BY JOHN G. NICOLAY AND JOHN HAY, PRIVATE SECRETARIES TO THE PRESIDENT. THE CABINET CABAL. ERY soon after the effort to unite the cotton-State governors in the revolu¬ tionary plot, we find the local conspiracy at Char¬ leston in communication with the central cabal at Washington. It is neces¬ sary to bear in mind that at the time of which we write, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania was still President of the United States, and that his Cabinet consisted of the following members : Lewis Cass of Michigan, Secretary of State ; Howell Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury; John B. Floyd of Virginia, Secretary of War ; Isaac Toucey of Connecti¬ cut, Secretary of the Navy; Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior; Jos¬ eph Holt of Kentucky, Postmaster-General; and Jeremiah S. Black of Pennsylvania, At¬ torney-General. It was in and about this Cab¬ inet that the central secession cabal formed itself. Even if we could know in detail the successive steps that led to the establishment of this intercourse, which so quickly became both semi-official and confidential,” it could add nothing to the force of the principal fact that the conspiracy was in its earliest stages efficient in perverting the resources and in¬ strumentalities of the Government of the U nited States to its destruction. That a U nited States Senator, a Secretary of War, an Assist¬ ant Secretary of State, and no doubt sundry minor functionaries were already then, from six to eight weeks before any pretense of se¬ cession, with ‘‘ malice aforethought ” organiz¬ ing armed resistance to the Constitution and laws they had sworn to support, stands forth in the following correspondence too plainly to be misunderstood. As a fitting preface to this correspondence, a few short paragraphs may be quoted from the private diary of Secretary of War Floyd, from which longer and more important extracts appear in a subsequent chapter. Those at present quoted are designed more especially to show the names of the per¬ sons composing the primary group of this cen¬ tral cabal, and the time and place of their early consultations and activity Extracts from Floyd’s Diary. * “November 8th, i860. ... I had a long conver¬ sation to-day with General Lane, the candidate for Vice-President on the ticket with Mr. Breckinridge. He was grave and extremely earnest ; said that resist¬ ance to the anti-slavery feeling of the North was hope¬ less, and that nothing was left to the South but ‘ resist¬ ance or dishonor ’ ; that if the South failed to act with promptness and decision in vindication of her rights, she would have to make up her mind to give up first her honor and then her slaves. He thought disunion inevitable, and said when the hour came that his ser¬ vices could be useful, he would offer them unhesitat¬ ingly to the South. I called to see the President this evening, but found him at the State Department en¬ gaged upon his message and did not see him. Miss Lane returned last evening from Philadelphia, where she had been for some time on a visit. Mr. W. H. Trescott, Assistant Secretary of State, called to see me this evening, and conversed at length upon the condi¬ tion of things in South Carolina, of which State he is a native. He expressed no sort of doubt whatever of his State separating from the Union. He brought me a letter from Mr. Drayton, the agent of the State, proposing: to buy ten thousand muskets for the use of the State. . . . “ November loth. . . . Beach, Thompson, and Cobb came over with me from Cabinet and staid, taking in¬ formally a family dinner. The party was free and com¬ municative ; Toucey would not stay for dinner. Mr. Pickens, late Minister to Russia, came in after dinner with Mr. Trescott, Assistant Secretary of State, and sat an hour, talking about the distracted state of public feeling at the South. He seemed to think the time had come for decisive measures to be taken by the South. “November nth. I spent an hour at the Presi¬ dent’s, where I met Thompson, Robert McGraw, and some others ; we sat around the tea-table, and discussed the disunion movements of the South. This seems to be the absorbing topic everywhere. “November 12th. Dispatched the ordinary busi¬ ness of the department ; dined at 5 o’clock ; Mr. Pickens, late Minister to Russia, Mr. Trescott, Mr. Secretary Thompson, Mr. McGraw, Mr. Browne, edi¬ tor of the ‘ Constitution,’ were of the party. The chief topic of discussion was, as usual, the excitement in the South. The belief seemed to be that disunion was inevitable ; Pickens, usually very cool and conserv¬ ative, was excited and warm. My own conservatism seems in these discussions to be unusual and almost misplaced.” trescott to rhett. “Washington, Nov. ist, i860. “ Dear Rhett : I received your letter this morn¬ ing. As to my views or opinions of the Administration, I can, of course, say nothing. As to Mr. Cobb’s views, he is willing that I should communicate them to you, in order that they may aid you in forming your own ■^Printed on pages 791 to 794 in “The Life and Times of Robert E. Lee,” etc. By a distinguished Southern journalist. (E. A. Pollard, author of “The Lost Cause.”) ^ Copyright by J. G. Nicolay and John Play, 1886-7. All rights reserved.

Page 821

820 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. judgment ; but, you will understand that this is confi¬ dential — that is, neither Mr. Cobb nor myself must be quoted as the source of your information. I will not dwell on this, as you will, on a moment’s reflection, see the embarrassments which might be produced by any authojized statement of his opinions. I will only add, by way of preface, that after the very fullest and freest conversations with him, I feel sure of his earnestness, singleness of purpose, and resolution in the whole matter. Mr. Cobb believes that the time is come for resis¬ tance; that upon tiie election of Lincoln, Georgia ought to secede from the Union, and that she will do so; that Georgia and every other State should, as far as secession, act for herself, resuming her delegated powers, and thus put herself in position to consult with other sovereign States who take the same ground. After the secession is effected, then will be the time to consult. But he is of opinion, most strongly, that what¬ ever action is resolved on should be consummated on the 4th of March, not before. “ That while the action determined on should be decisive and irrevocable, its initial should be the 4th of March. He is opposed to any Southern convention, merely for the purpose of consultation. If a Southern convention is held, it must be of delegates empowered to act, whose action is at once binding on the States they represent. “ But he desires me to impress upon you his con¬ viction, that any attempt to precipitate the actual issue upon this Administration will be most mischievous — calculated to produce differences of opinion and de¬ stroy unanimity. He thinks it of great importance that the cotton crop should go forw^ard at once, and that the money should be in the hands of the people, that the cry of popular distress shall not be heard at the outset of this move. “ My own opinion is that it would be well to have a discreet man, one who knows the value of silence, wdio can listen wisely, present in Milledgeville, at the meet¬ ing of the State Legislature, as there will be there ah outside gathering of the very ablest men of that State. “And the next point, that pou should, at the earliest possible day of the session of our own Legislature, elect a man as governor whose name and character will conciliate as well as give confidence to all the men of the State, — if we do act, I really think this half the battle, — a man upon whose temper the State can rely. “ I say nothing about a convention, as I understand, on all hands, that that is a fixed fact, and I have con¬ fined myself to answering your question. I will be much obliged to you if you will write me soon and fully from Columbia. “ It is impossible to write you, with the constant in¬ terruption of the office, and as you want Cobb’s opin¬ ions, not mine, I send this to you. Yours, “ W. H. T.”^ THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “Charleston, 3d Nov., i860. “ On the 22d of last month I was in Washington, and called upon the Secretary at War, in company with Senator Wigfall of Texas, to make inquiries as to the efficiency and price of certain muskets belong¬ ing to the United States, which had been altered by the Ordnance Department from flint to percussion. They will shoot for 200 yards as well as any smooth- bored gun in the service, and if rificd will be effective at 500 yards. But if the conical ball will be made lighter by enlarging the hollow at the base of the cone, the effective range may be increased to 700 yards. Should your Excellency give a favorable consideration to the above, I can have the whole of what I have stated authenticated by the board of ordnance officers, * Lossing, “ Civil War.” Vol. I., p. 44. who inspected and reported to the Secretary at War upon these muskets. If 10,000 or more of these muskets are purchased, the price will be two ($2) dollars each; for a less quantity the charge will be $2.50 each. If a portion or all of them are to be rifled, the Secretary says he will have it done for the additional cost of($i) one dollar per barrel. As this interview with Mr. Secretary Floyd was both semi-official and confidential, your Excellency will readily see the necessity, should this matter be pursued further, of appointing an agent to negotiate with him, rather than conduct the nego¬ tiation directly between the State and the Department. . . . I unhesitatingly advise purchasing several thousand of them. . . . There are many other im¬ portant facts in connection with the above that I could disclose, but will reserve them for some other occasion, that I may give them verbally as soon as I can find a day to wait upon your Excellency in Columbia. “The State of Texas has engaged twenty thousand (20,000) of these muskets, and the State of Kentucky purchased several thousand last summer.’’ t THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “ Charleston, 6th Nov., i860. “ I have only within a few hours received yours of the 5th inst., authorizing me to purchase from the War Department at Washington 10,000 rifles of pat¬ tern and price indicated in my letter to your Excellency of the 3d inst. “ I accept the appointment and will discharge the duty assigned to the best of my ability and with the least possible delay. For I feel that the past and pres¬ ent agitation are ruinous to our peace and prosperity and that our only remedy is to break up with dispatch the present Confederacy and construct a new and bet¬ ter one. I will communicate with Mr. Secretary Floyd to-night and have the rifles put in preparation so as to have them for use at an early day. . . . “ I would wish that my agency in this transaction be kept private until I reach Washingto7i, or indeed till I write to say the arms are on their way to Colum¬ bia. . . .”t THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “ Charleston, 8th Nov., i860. “I have just received your letter of the 7th inst., and I think I can render you all the information you desire, without resorting to any agent. If my ability can only be made to keep pace with my zeal, I hope yet to render some service to the dear old State of South Carolina.”! THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “Charleston, i6th Nov., i860. “ I have been most reluctantly detained here by an accidental fall, and also by business of an urgent kind associated with the railroad. My absence from Wash¬ ington, however, has not delayed the execution of your order for the rifles : the Secretary of War has had the preparation of them in hand for some time. “ When I write to you from Washington, had I not better address you through your private secretary . . . Please address me at Washington to the care of Wm. H. Trescott, Esq. ... I will give strict attention to your letter of the 7th inst., and hope to furnish you with much of the information you desire, for I am quite sensible of the importance of knowing the views and policy of the President at this juncture.” t THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “Washington, 19th Nov., i860. “ .... I called this morning upon the Secretary of War to make arrangements for the immediate trans- t MS. Confederate Archives, War Department.

Page 822

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT, 821 mission of the rifles to Columbia, but much to my as¬ tonishment he informed me that since he had looked over the report of “ Small Fire-arms ” (now inclosed) that he found he had labored under an error in stating to me that the 10,000 rifles I had engaged were ready for delivery when called for by me. He said he could have them rifled, but it would take 3 or 4 months to execute the contract, but suggested that we should purchase the 10,000 smooth-bored muskets instead, as a more efficient arm, particularly if large-sized buck¬ shot should be used, which, put up in wire case capa¬ ble of containing 12 of them, would go spitefully through an inch plank at 200 yards. I was much as¬ tonished at the result of my interview with Governor Floyd to-day, for he had not only informed me that the rifles would be ready for me on my arrival, but told Mr. Trescott so likewise, and that if I had been in Washington last Saturday I could have got them. . . . If you will be satisfied with the smooth-bored muskets like the specimen forwarded to you, I will purchase them. Better do this, although not the best pattern, than be without arms at a crisis like the present. Col¬ onel Benjamin Huger can give you much information about these muskets. This is derived not only from Mr. Floyd, but also from General J. E. Johnston, Quartermaster-General, who was President of the Ord¬ nance Board who had these muskets changed from flint to percussion, and also from smooth bore to rifle, and he says that for our purposes the smooth-bored musket is preferable to the altered rifle. The why I cannot explain to-day. ... I also send you a letter from Mr. Trescott, in reply to certain inquiries from me. I am unable to make any comments upon them nor to add other facts which I will forward you more leisurely to¬ morrow. . . * TRESCOTT (asst. SEC. STATE) TO DRAYTON. “Washington, Nov. 19, i860. “ (Private, Confidential.) “ My Dear Drayton : It is difficult to reply spe¬ cifically to your inquiries, partly because I do not be¬ lieve that the exact course of the Administration has been yet determined on, and partly because my knowl¬ edge, or rather my inference, of its intentions is de¬ rived from intercourse with its members which I am bound to consider confidential. I do not regard it of serious importance to you to know the individual opin¬ ions of either the President or the Cabinet. No action of any sort will be taken until the message has been sent indicating the opinions of the Executive, and that message, whatever it be, will find our legislature in session, and the convention on the point of meeting. I think it likely that the President will state forcibly what he considers the grievances of the South, that he will add that he does not think, if the right of secession existed, it would be a wise policy for the State to adopt, and that he does not think the right to secede does exist, and then refer the whole matter to Congress ; what he will do when the State does se¬ cede, he has not said, and I do not know, nor any man, I believe. He will do, as we will, what he believes to be his duty, and that duty, I suppose, will be discharged in full view of the consequences following any line of action that may be determined on. But I think that, as long as Cobb and Thompson retain seats in the Cabinet, you may feel confident that no action has been taken which seriously affects the position of any Southern State. “I think that I may safely rely upon my knowledge of what will be done, and you may rely upon my res¬ ignation as soon as that knowledge satisfies me of any move in a direction positively injurious to us, or alter¬ ing the present condition of things to our disadvantage. When you pass through on Wednesday, however, I will speak to you more fully. Yours, W. H. T.” * THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “Washington, 19th Nov., i860. “ Mr. Buchanan, while he can discover no authority under the Constitution to justify secession by a State, on the other hand he can find no power to coerce one to return after the right of secession has been exer¬ cised. He will not allow entry or clearance of a ves¬ sel except through the Custom-house, to be established as soon as secession is declared, upon the deck of a man-of-war off the harbor of Charleston. He will en¬ force the collection of duties, not by Navy, but by a Revenue Cutter, as our Collector now would do if his authority was resisted. I will write to you more fully when I return from New York, where I go to-mor¬ row at daylight, at the suggestion of the Secretary of War, who deems it important that I should go there to make arrangements for shipping the arms (should you still want them) from that point instead of this city. . . . Do send a copy of the list of arms at the Arsenals to H. R. Lawton, Milledgeville, Ga. I am getting some smooth-bored muskets for Georgia, like the specimen I sent you. ...” THOS. F. DRAYTON TO GOVERNOR GIST. “Washington, 23d Nov., i860. “ I arrived here at 6 A. M. from New York, where I had gone at the suggestion of Mr. Floyd to engage Mr. G. B. Lamar, President of the Bank of the Re¬ public, to make an offer to the Secretary for such a number of muskets as we might require. The Secre¬ tary at War was reluctant to dispose of them to me, preferring the intermediate agency. Mr. Lamar has consented to act accordingly, and to-day the Secretary has written to the commanding officer [at] Watervliet Arsenal to deliver five or ten thousand muskets (altered from flint to percussion) to Mr. Lamar’s order. Mr. La¬ mar will pay the United States paymaster for them, and rely upon the State to repay him. I have been most fortunate in having been enabled to meet the payments for the arms through Mr. L., for I feel satisfied that without his intervention we could not have effected the purchase at this time. ... I expect to return at daylight to-morrow to New York, for I am very anx¬ ious about getting possession of the arms at Water¬ vliet, and forward them to Charleston. The Cabinetmay break up at any moment, on differences of opinion with the President as to the rights of secession, and a new Secretary of War might stop the muskets going South, if not already on their way when he comes into office. “ I will write to you again by the next mail. The impression here and elsewhere among many Southern men is, that our senators have been precipitate in re¬ signing ; they think that their resignations should have been tendered from their seats after they had an¬ nounced to the Senate that the State had seceded. Occupying their seats up to this period would have kept them in communication with senators from the South and assisted very powerfully in shaping to our advantage coming events.” ^ If any further quotation be necessary to show the audacity with which at least three Secretaries and one Assistant Secretary of Mr. Buchanan’s Cabinet engaged in flagrant conspiracy in the early stages of rebellion, it may be found in an interview of Senator Clingman with the Secretary of the Interior, which the former has recorded in his speeches and writings as an interesting reminiscence. It may be doubted whether Secretary Thomp¬ son correctly reported the President as wish¬ ing him success in his North Carolina mission, * MS. Confederate Archives, War Department.

Page 823

ABI^AHAM LINCOLN. 822 but he is, of course, a competent witness to his own declarations and acts. “About the middle of December (i860) I had oc¬ casion to see the Secretary of the Interior on some official business. On my entering the room, Mr. Thompson said to me, ‘ Clingman, I am glad you have called, for I intended presently to go up to the Senate to see you. I have been appointed a commissioner by the State of Mississippi to go down to North Carolina to get your State to secede, and I wished to talk with you about your Legislature before I start down in the morning to Raleigh, and to learn what you think of my chance of success.’ I said to him, ‘ I did not know that you had resigned.’ He answered, ‘ Oh, no, I have not resigned.’ ‘Then,’ I replied, ‘I suppose you re¬ sign in the morning.’ ‘ No,’ he answered, ‘ I do not intend to resign,* for Mr. Buchanan wished us all to hold on, and to go out with him on the 4th of March.’ ‘ But,’ said I, ‘ does Mr. Buchanan know for what purpose you are going to North Carolina?’ ‘Certainly,’ he said, ‘he knows my object.’ Being surprised by this statement, I told Mr. Thompson that Mr. Buchanan was probably so much perplexed by his situation that he had not fully considered the matter, and that as he was already involved in difficulty, we ought not to add to his burdens ; and then suggested to Mr. Thompson that he had better see Mr. Buchanan again, and by way of inducing him to think the matter over, mention what I had been saying to him. Mr. Thompson said, ‘ Well, I can do so, but I think he fully understands it.’ In the evening I met Mr. Thompson at a small social party, and as soon as I approached him, he said, ‘ I knew I could not be mis¬ taken. I told Mr. Buchanan all you said, and he told me that he wished me to go, and hoped I might suc¬ ceed.’ I could not help exclaiming, ‘ Was there ever before any potentate who sent out his own Cabinet ministers to excite an insurrection against his govern¬ ment ! ’ The fact that Mr. Thompson did go on the errand, and had a public reception before the Legisla¬ ture, and returned to his position in the Cabinet is known, but this incident serves to recall it.” ^ To this sketch of the Cabinet cabal it is necessary to add the testimony of his partici¬ pation, by one who, from first to last, was a principal and controlling actor. J efferson Davis records that : “In November, i860, after the result of the presi¬ dential election was known, the governor of Missis¬ sippi, having issued his proclamation convoking a special session of the Legislature to consider the pro¬ priety of calling a convention, invited the senators and representatives of the State of Congress, to meet him for consultation as to the character of the message he should send to the Legislature when assembled. While engaged in the consultation with the governor just referred to, a telegraphic message was handed to me from two members of Mr. Buchanan’s Cabinet, urging me to proceed ‘immediately’ to Washington. This dispatch was laid before the governor and the members of Congress from the State who were in conference with him, and it was decided that I should comply with the summons. On arrival at Washington, I found, as had been anticipated, that my presence there was desired on account of the influence which it was supposed I might exercise with the President (Mr. Buchanan) in relation to his forthcoming mes¬ sage to Congress. On paying my respects to the President, he told me that he had finished the rough * “Speeches and Writings of T. L. Clingman,” p. 526. t Davis: “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Gov¬ ernment,” pages 57, 58, 59. draft of his message, but that it was still open to re¬ vision and amendment, and that he would like to read it to me. He did so and very kindly accepted all the modifications which I suggested. The message was, however, afterward somewhat changed.”! Here is a substantial unmasking of the com¬ bined occult influence which presided over the initiatory steps of the great American Rebellion — its central council — the master wheel of its machinery — and the connecting relation which caused all its subordinate parts to move in harmonious accord. With the same mind to dictate a secession message to a legislature and a non-coercion message to Congress — to assemble insurrec¬ tionary troops to seize Federal forts and with¬ hold government troops from their protection — to incite governors to rebellion and over¬ awe a weak President to a virtual abdication of his rightful authority, history need not won¬ der at the surprising unity and early success of the conspiracy against the Union. THE president’s MESSAGE. Less than a month intervened between the November election at which Lincoln had been chosen and the annual session of Congress, which would meet on the first Monday of December, and it was necessary at once to begin the preparation of the annual message. Now indeed a golden opportunity presented itself to President Buchanan. The suffrages of his fellow-citizens had covered his polit¬ ical theories, his party measures, and his offi¬ cial administration with condemnation, in a perfect avalanche of ballots.^ But the Charles¬ ton conspirators had within a very few days created for him a new issue overshadowing all the questions on which he had suffered politi¬ cal wreck. Since the 6th of November, the campaign of the Border Ruffians for the con¬ quest of Kansas, and the wider congressional struggle for the possession of the Territories, might be treated as things of the past. Even had they still been pending issues, they paled into insignificance before the paramount ques¬ tion of disunion. Face to face with this dan¬ ger, the adherents of Lincoln, of Douglas, of Bell, and the fraction of his own partisans in the free States would be compelled to sink minor discords, and as one man to follow the constitutional ruler in a constitutional defense of the laws, the flag, and the territory of the Union. Without change of position, without recan¬ tation of principle, without abatement even of declared party doctrine, honestly executing t 3,832,240 opposition popular votes against 847,953 for Breckinridge, the candidate championed by the President and his adherents.

Page 824

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT only the high mandate of the Constitution, he could turn from the old issues and take up the new. A single stride, and from the flying leader of a discomfited rout, he might become the mailed hero of an overpowering host. Tradition, patriotism, duty, the sleepless mo¬ nition of a solemn official oath, — all summoned him to take this step, and a brilliant precedent in presidential annals, an incident forever lum¬ inous in American history, assured him of the plaudits of posterity. Unfortunately for himself and for his coun¬ try, President Buchanan had neither the intel¬ lectual independence nor the courage equal to such an act of moral heroism. Of sincere patriotism and of blameless personal rectitude, he had reached political eminence by slow promotion through seniority, not by brilliancy of achievement. He was a politician, not a statesman. Of fair ability and great industry in his earlier life, the irresolution and passive¬ ness of advancing age and physical infirmity were now upon him. Though from the great free State of Pennsylvania, he saw with South¬ ern eyes and heard with Southern ears, and had convinced himself that the South was acting under the impulse of resentment arising from deliberate and persistent injuries from the North. The fragment of an autograph diary from the pen of John B. Floyd, Secretary of War,* aflbrds the exact evidence of the temper in which President Buchanan officially confronted the rebellion of the Southern States. The fol¬ lowing are extracts from entries, on several days, beginning with November 7th, i860, the day following the presidential election : “ Washington City, November 7th, i860. “ . . . The President wrote me a note this evening, alluding to a rumor which reached the city to the ef¬ fect that an armed force had attacked and carried the forts in Charleston Plarbor. He desired me to visit him, which I did, and assured him that the rumor was alto¬ gether without foundation, and gave it as my opinion that there was no danger of such an attempt being made. We entered upon a general conversation upon the sub¬ ject of disunion and discussed the probabilities of it pretty fully. We concurred in the opinion that all indications from the South looked as if disunion was inevitable. He said that whilst his reason told him there was great danger, yet his feelings repelled the convictions of his mind. “Judge Black, the Attorney-General, was present during a part of the conversation, and indicated an opin¬ ion, that any attempt at disunion by a State should be put down by all the power of the Government.! * Printed in “ The Early Life, Campaigns, and Pub¬ lic Services of Robert E. Lee, with a record of the cam¬ paigns and heroic deeds of his companions in arms, by a distinguished Southern journalist.” 8vo., E. B. Treat, Publisher, New York 1871, p. 789, article Major Gen¬ eral John B. Floyd. It says : “ Among his private pa¬ pers examined after his death the fragment of a diary was found, written in his own hand, and which is here copied entire.” The diary also bears internal evidence of genuineness. 823 “November 9th. . . . A Cabinet meeting was held as usual at i o’clock ; all the members were present, and the President said the business of the meeting was the most important ever before the Cabinet since his induction into office. The question, he said, to be con¬ sidered and discussed, was as to the course the Admin¬ istration should advise him to pursue in relation to the threatening aspect of affairs in the South, and most particularly in South Carolina. After a considerable amount of desultory conversation, he asked the opin¬ ions of each member of the Cabinet as to what should be done or said relative to a suggestion which he threw out. His suggestion was that a proposition should be made for a general convention of the States as provi¬ ded for under the Constitution, and to propose some plan of compromising the angry disputes between the North and the South. He said if this were done, and the North or non-slaveholding States should refuse it, the South would stand justified before the whole world for refusing longer to remain in a confederacy where her rights were so shamefully violated. He said he was compelled to notice at length the alarming condi¬ tion of the country, and that he would not shrink from the duty. “ General Cass spoke with earnestness and much feeling about the impending crisis — admitted fully all the great wrongs and outrages which had been com¬ mitted against the South by Northern fanaticism, and deplored it. But he was emphatic in his condemnation of the doctrine of secession by any State from tlie Union. He doubted the efficacy of the appeal for a convention, but seemed to think it might do well enough to try it. He spoke warmly in favor of using force to coerce a State that attempted to secede. “Judge Black, the Attorney-General, was emphatic in his advocacy of coercion, and advocated earnestly the propriety of sending at once a strong force into the forts in Charleston Harbor, enough to deter if possible the people from any attempt at disunion. He seemed to favor the idea of an appeal for a general convention of all the States. “ Governor Cobb, the Secretary of the Treasury, de¬ clared his very decided approbation of the proposition, for two reasons — first, that it afforded the President a great opportunity for a high and statesmanlike treat¬ ment of the. whole subject of agitation, and the proper remedies to prevent it; secondly, because, in his judg¬ ment, the failure to procure that redress which the South would be entitled to and would demand (and that failure he thought certain), would tend to unite the entire South in a decided disunion movement. Pie thought disunion inevitable, and under present circum¬ stances most desirable. “ Mr. Holt, the Postmaster-General, thought the proposition for the convention dangerous, for the rea¬ son, that if the call should be made and it should fail to procure redress, those States which now are opposed to secession, might find themselves inclined, from a feeling of honor, to back the States resolving on dis¬ union. Without this common demand and common failure, he thought there would be no such danger of united action, and therefore a stronger prospect of some future plan of reconciliation. “ Mr. Thompson, the Secretary of the Interior, thought well of the plan of calling for a general con¬ vention — thought his State (Mississippi) about equally tThe astounding mysteries and eccentricities of politics find illustration in the remarkable contrast between this recorded impulsive, off-hand and patriotic expression of Attorney-General Black, on November 7th, and his labored official opinion of an exactly opposite tenor, certified to the President under date of November 20th. See Opinions of the Attorney- General, Vol. IX, p. 517.

Page 825

824 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, divided between the union and disunion men. He deprecated the idea of force, and said any show of it by the Government would instantly make Mississippi a unit in favor of disunion. “ Mr. Toucey, Secretary of the Navy, thought well of the appeal for the convention — coincided in an opinion I had expressed, that retaliatory State meas¬ ures would prove most availing for bringing the Northern fanatics to their senses. “ I expressed myself decidedly opposed to any rash movement, and against the idea of secession at this time. I did so because I think that Lincoln’s adminis¬ tration will fail, and be regarded as impotent for good or evil within four months after his inauguration. We are to meet to-morrow at i o’clock. “ November loth. ... We had a Cabinet meeting to-day, at which the President read a very elaborate document, prepared either as a part of his message or as a proclamation. It was well written in the main, and met with extravagant commendation from General Cass, Governor Toucey, Judge Black, and Mr. Holt. Cobb, Thompson, and myself found much to differ from in it, — Cobb because it inculcated submission to Lin¬ coln’s election and intimated the use of force to coerce a submission to his rule, and because it reprehended the policy of the Kansas -Nebraska bill; Thompson be¬ cause of the doctrine of acquiescence and the hostility to the secession doctrine. I objected to it because I think it misses entirely the temper of the Southern people and attacks the true State-Rights doctrine on the subject of secession. I do not see what good can come of the paper, as prepared, and I do see how much mis¬ chief may flow from it.” It is extremely doubtful whether we may accept these extracts at their full literal import. Either the words ‘‘ coerce,” ‘^submission,” “ use of force,” and so on are written down by the diarist in a sense different from that in which they were spoken, or the President and sev¬ eral of his counselors underwent an amazing change of sentiment. But in a general way they show us that on the fourth day after Lin¬ coln’s election the Buchanan Cabinet was al¬ ready divided into hostile camps. Cass of Michigan, Secretary of State, Toucey of Con¬ necticut, Secretary of the Navy, Black of Pennsylvania, Attorney-General, and Holt of Kentucky, Postmaster-General, were emphatic Unionists; while Cobb of Georgia, Secretary of the Treasury, Thompson of Mississippi, Secretary of the Interior, and Floyd of Vir¬ ginia, Secretary of War, were secessionists — the latter yet professing devotion to the Union, but with such ifs and buts as left sufficiently clear evidence of his inevitable drift to disloy¬ alty. All impulses of prudence or patriotism ought to have moved the President to reconstruct his Cabinet. But instead of some energetic executive act of this character, he seems to have applied himself to the composition of a * “ It was while these plans for a cotip d’/iat before the 4th of March were being matured in the very Cabi¬ net itself and in the presence of a President too feeble to resist them and too blind even to see them, that Mr. Stanton was sent for by Mr. Buchanan to answer the question, * Can a State be coerced ? ’ For two hours he battled and finally scattered for the time being the here- political essay to teach the North its duty ; as if his single pen had power to change the will of the people of the United States upon a point which they had decided by their votes only four days previously after six years of discussion. In the draft of this document, which he read to his Cabinet on November loth, we have the important record that “it in¬ culcated submission to Lincoln’s election, and intimated the use of force to coerce a submission to his rule,” — positions which Floyd records were “ met with extravagant commendations from General Cass, Governor Toucey, Judge Black, and Mr. Holt.” This was a true touch¬ stone; it instantly brought out not only the open secessionism of Cobb and Thompson, but the disguised disloyalty of Floyd. It is a strange historical phenomenon that with the President and a majority of the Cab¬ inet in this frame of mind, the South should have been permitted to organize revolution. The solution seems to lie in the temporizing fee¬ bleness of Buchanan and in the superior finesse and daring conspiracy of Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd. Many indications make it evident that a long and laborious factional struggle took place over the preparation of the President’s message. The telegraph announced several protracted Cabi¬ net sessions; and as early as the 21st of No¬ vember the points under discussion and the attitude of the President and his several offi¬ cial advisers were accurately foreshadowed in the newspapers. Nor were these momentous deliberations confined to the Cabinet proper. All the varieties of suggestion and contradic¬ tory counsels which were solicited or tendered we may never learn, and yet we know enough to infer the highest extremes and antagonisms of doctrine and policy. On the one hand came Jefferson Davis, the future chief of the Rebel¬ lion, at the urgent call of his fellow-conspira¬ tors; on the other hand came Edwin M. Stanton, Buchanan’s future Attorney- General and Lincoln’s Secretary of War,* called in by Mr. Buchanan himself, to help him through the intricate maze of his perplexed opinions and inclinations. How many others may have come voluntarily or by summons it is impossi¬ ble to guess. Many brains and hands, how¬ ever, must have joined in the work, since the document is such a heterogeneous medley of conflicting theories, irreconcilable doctrines, impracticable and irrelevant suggestions. For at length the hesitating and bewildered Presi- sies with which secession had filled the head of that old broken-down man. He was requested to prepare an argument in support of the power to he inserted in the forthcoming message.” — [Hon. H. L. Dawes, in the “ Boston Congregationalist. ” See “ Atlantic Monthly,” XXVL, p. 468.]

Page 826

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT dent, unable to decide and impotent to con¬ struct, seems to have made his message a patchwork from the contributions of his ad¬ visers, regular and irregular, with the inevita¬ ble effect, not to combine and strengthen, but to weaken and confuse the warring thoughts and alien systems. Aside from the mere recapitulation of de¬ partment reports, the message of President Buchanan delivered to Congress on the 4th of December occupied itself mainly with two subjects, — slavery and disunion. On the ques¬ tion of slavery it repeated the assertions and arguments of the Buchanan faction of the Democratic party during the late presidential campaign, charging the present peril entirely upon the North. As a remedy it recommended an amendment to the Federal Constitution expressly * recognizing slavery in States which had adopted or might adopt it, and also ex¬ pressly giving it existence and protection in the Federal Territories. The proposal was sim¬ ply childish. Precisely this issue had been decided at the presidential election ; to do this would be to reverse the final verdict of the ballot-box. t On the question of disunion or secession, the message raised a vague and unwarrantable distinction between the infractions of law and allegiance by individuals, and the infractions of law and allegiance by the commonwealth, or body politic denominated a State. Under the * Slavery existed by virtue of express enactments in the several constitutions of the slave States, but the Constitution of the United States gave it only implied sanction. t “ It was with some surprise, I confess, that I read the message of the President. The message laid down certain conditions as those upon which alone the great Confederacy of the United States could be preserved from disruption. In so doing the President appeared to be preparing beforehand an apology for the seces¬ sion. Had the conditions, indeed, been such as the Northern States would be likely to accept, the mes¬ sage might have been considered one of peace. But it seems very improbable that the Northern States should now, at the moment of their triumph, and with large majorities of Republicans in their assemblies, sub¬ mit to conditions which, during many years of strug¬ gle, they have rejected or evaded.” — [Lord John Rus¬ sell to Lord Lyons, December 2i;th, i860. British Blue Book.] t The logic of the message utterly breaks down by a palpable omission to state the well-known fact that, though every citizen of South Carolina, or any other State, might refuse to accept or execute the office of United States marshal, or, indeed, that of any Federal officer, the want could be immediately lawfully supplied by appointing any qualified citizen of any other State, who might lawfully and properly lead either a posse’, or Federal forces, or State militia, to put down obstruc¬ tion of the Federal laws, insurrection, or rebellion. President Buchanan admitted his own error, and re¬ pudiated his own doctrine, when on January 2d, fol¬ lowing, he nominated a citizen of Pennsylvania for the office of collector of the port of Charleston, South Carolina. VoL. XXXIV.— II 825 first head it held: That the Union was designed to be perpetual; that the Federal Govern¬ ment is invested with sovereign powers on special subjects, which can only be opposed or abrogated by revolution ; that secession is unconstitutional, and is, therefore, neither more nor less than revolution ; that the ex¬ ecutive has no right to recognize the seces¬ sion of a State; that the Constitution has established a perfect government in all its forms, legislative, executive, and judicial, and this government, to the extent of its powers, acts directly upon the individual citizen of every State and executes its own decrees by the agency of its own officers; and, finally, that the Executive cannot be absolved from his duty to execute the laws. But, continues the President, the laws can only be executed in certain prescribed meth¬ ods, through the agency of courts, marshals, posse comifatus, aided, if necessary, by the militia or land and naval forces. The means and agencies, therefore, fail, and the perform¬ ance of this duty becomes impracticable, when, as in South Carolina, universal public senti¬ ment has deprived him of courts, marshals, and posse. Present laws being inadequate to overcome a united opposition, even in a single State, Congress alone has the power to decide whether they can be effectually amended. | It will be seen from the above summary, that the whole of the President’s rambling But this whole fine-spun web of partisan sophistry is superfluous and mere concealing rubbish. Sections two and three of the Act of February 28th, 1 795, author¬ ize the President, when the execution of the laws is obstructed by insurrection too powerful for courts and marshals, to call forth the militia of any and all the States, first and primarily to “suppress such combina¬ tions,” and, secondly, “ to cause the laws to be duly executed; and the use of militia so to be called forth may be continued, if necessary, until the expiration of thirty days after the commencement of the then next session of Congress.” In performing this duty the act imposes but a single condition or prerequisite on the Executive : he shall by proclamation command the insurgents to disperse. These sections are complete, harmonious, self-sufficient, and, in their chief provis¬ ions, nowise dependent upon or connected with any other section or clause of the act. They place under the President’s command the whole militia, and by a subsequent law (March 3d, 1807) also the entire army and navy of the Union, against rebellion. The asser¬ tion that the army can only follow a marshal and his writ in a case of rebellion, is not only unsupported by the language of the act, but utterly refuted by strong implication. The last section repeals a former provis¬ ion limiting the President’s action to cases of insur¬ rection of which United States judges shall have given him notice, and thereby remits him to any and all his official sources of information. Jackson’s famous force bill only provided certain supplementary details ; it directly recognized and invoked the great powers of the Act of 1795, and expiring by limitation, left its wholesome plenitude and broad original grant of authority unimpaired. 3-

Page 827

826 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. discussion of the first head of the disunion question resulted logically in three ultimate conclusions: (i) That South Carolina was in revolt; (2) that the Constitution, the laws, and moral obligation all united gave the Gov¬ ernment the right to suppress this revolt by executing the laws upon and against the citi¬ zens of that State ; (3) that certain defects in the laws paralyzed their practical enforce¬ ment. Up to this point in his argument, his opin¬ ions, whatever may be thought of their sound¬ ness, were confined to the legitimate field of executive interpretation, and such as in the exercise of his official discretion he might with undoubted propriety communicate to Con¬ gress. But he had apparently failed to satisfy his own conscience in thus summarily reason¬ ing the executive and governmental power of a young, compact, vigorous, and thoroughly organized nation of thirty millions of people into sheer nothingness and impotence. How supremely absurd was the whole national panoply of commerce, credit, coinage, treaty power, judiciary, taxation, militia, army and navy, and Federal flag, if, through the mere joint of a defective law, the hollow reed of a secession ordinance could inflict a fatal wound ! The President proceeds, therefore, to discuss the second head of the disunion question, by an attempt to formulate and define the pow¬ ers and duties of Congress with reference to the threatened rebellion. He would not only roll the burden from his own shoulders upon the national legislature, but he would by vol¬ unteer advice instruct that body how it must be borne and disposed of. Addressing Con¬ gress, he says in substance: “ You may be called upon to decide the momentous question, whether you possess the power by force of arms to compel a State to remain in the Union. The question, fairly stated, is ; Has the Constitution dele¬ gated to Congress the power to coerce a State into sub¬ mission which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn, from the Confederacy ? If answered in the affirmative, it must be on the principle that the power has been conferred upon Congress to declare and to make war against a State. After much serious re¬ flection I have arrived at the conclusion that no such power has been delegated to Congress, or to any other department of the Federal Government. It may be safely asserted that the power to make war against a State is at variance with the whole spirit and intent of the Constitution. But if we possessed this power, would it be wise to exercise it under existing circum¬ stances? Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. Congress possesses many means of preserving it by conciliation ; but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force.” Why did the message thus leap at one bound without necessary connection or coherence from the discussion of executive to those of legislative powers ? Why waste words over doubtful theories when there was pressing need to suggest practical amendments to the statute whose real or imaginary defects Mr. Buchanan had pointed out ? Why indulge in lamenta¬ tions over the remote possibility that Congress might violate the Constitution, when the oc¬ casion demanded only prompt preventive or¬ ders from the executive to arrest the actual threatened violation of law by Charleston mobs ? Why talk of war against States when the duty of the hour was the exercise of ac¬ knowledged authority against insurrectionary citizens ? The issue and argument were wholly false and irrelevant. No State had yet seceded. Ex¬ ecute such laws of the United States as were in acknowledged vigor, and disunion would be impossible. Buchanan needed only to do what he afterward so truthfully asserted Lincoln had done.* But through his inaction, and still more through his declared want of either power or right to act, disunion gained two important points and advantages, — the influ¬ ence of the executive voice upon public opin¬ ion, and especially upon Congress ; and the substantial pledge of the Administration that it would lay no straw in the path of peaceful, organized measures to bring about State secession. The central dogma of the message, that while a State has no right to secede, the Un¬ ion has no right to coerce, has been univer¬ sally condemned as a paradox. The popular estimate of Mr. Buchanan’s proposition and arguments was forcibly presented at the time by a jesting criticism attributed to Mr. Seward. I think,” said the New York senator, ‘‘ the President has conclusively proved two things : (i) That no State has the right to secede un¬ less it wishes to ; and (2) that it is the Presi¬ dent’s duty to enforce the laws unless some¬ body opposes him.” t If this be looked upon as the sarcasm of a political enemy, it is even less damaging than the serious explanation put upon his language by his political friends. The recognized organ of the Administration said : “ Mr. Buchanan has increased the dis¬ pleasure of the Lincoln party by his repudia¬ tion of the coercion theory, and his firm re¬ fusal to permit a resort to force as a means of preventing the secession of a sovereign State.” J Nor were intelligent lookers-on in “ Happily our civil war was undertaken and prose- ernment of the United States.”— [Buchanan, in “ Mr. cuted in self-defense, not to coerce a State, but to Buchanan’s Administration,” p. 129.] enforce the execution of the laws within the States tCorres. N. Y. “Evening Post.” against individuals, and to suppress an unjust rebellion t Washington “ Constitution ” of December 19th, raised by a conspiracy among them against the Gov- i860.

Page 828

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT foreign lands a whit less severe in their judg¬ ment : Mr. Buchanan’s message,” said the London Times,” a month later, “ has been a greater blow to the American people than all the rants of the Georgian governor or the ‘ ordinances ’ of the Charleston convention. The President has dissipated the idea that the States which elected him constitute one people.” THE CONSPIRACY PROCLAIMED. To a great majority of the people the hopes and chances of a successful compromise seemed still cheering and propitious. There was in¬ deed a prevailing agitation in the Southern part of the Union, but it had taken a vir¬ ulent form in less than half a dozen States. In most of these a decided majority still dep¬ recated disunion. Three of the great political parties of the country were by the voice of their leaders pledged to peace and order ; the fourth, apparently controlled as yet by the powerful influences of offlcial subordination and patronage, must, so it seemed, yield to the now expressed and public advice of the President in favor of Union and the enforce¬ ment of the law; especially in view of the forbearance and kindness he was personally exercising toward the unruly elements of his faction. Throughout the Northern States the folly and evils of disunion appeared so palpa¬ ble, that it was not generally regarded as an imminent danger, but rather as merely a pos¬ sible though not probable event. The hasty and seemingly earnest action of the people and authorities of South Carolina was looked upon as a historical repetition of the nullifica¬ tion crisis of 1831-2 ; and without examining too closely the real present condition of af¬ fairs, men hoped, rather than intelligently ex¬ pected, that the parallel would continue to the end. Some sort of compromise of the na¬ ture of that of 1850 was the prevailing preoc¬ cupation in politics. This was the popular view of the situation. But it was a very narrow and erroneous view, because it lacked the essential information nec¬ essary to form a correct and solid judgment. The deep estrangement between the sections was imperfectly realized. The existence of four parties, a very unusual occurrence in American politics, had seriously weakened party cohe¬ sion, and more than quadrupled party prejudice and mistrust. There was a strong undercurrent of conviction and purpose, not expressed in speeches and platforms. But the most serious ignorance was in respect to the character and fidelity of the high officers of the government. Of the personal timidity of Mr. Buchanan, of the treachery of at least three members of the Cabinet, of the exclusion of General Scott from 827 military councils, of the President’s persistent refusal to send troops to Anderson, of his stipu¬ lation with the South Carolina members, of the intrigue which drove General Cass from the head of the State Department and from the Cabinet, the people at large knew nothing, or so little that they could put no intelligent con¬ struction upon the event. The debates of Con¬ gress shed the first clear light upon the situa¬ tion, but the very violence and bitterness of the secession speeches caused the multitude to doubt their sincerity and truthfulness, or, as a final probability, placed their authors in the category of fanatics who would gain no fol¬ lowers. While, therefore, the Republicans in Con¬ gress and in the country maintained, as a rule, an expectant and watchful silence, the con¬ servatives, made up for the greater part of the supporters of Bell and Everett, were active in setting on foot a movement for compromise, in the final success of which they had the full¬ est confidence ; and it is but justice to their in¬ tegrity and ability to add that this confidence was fully warranted by the delusive indica¬ tions of surface politics. Highly patriotic in sentiment and purpose and highly prudent in word and act, their leading men in Congress had promptly opposed secession, had moved a Senate Committee of Thirteen, and secured the authorization, the appointment, and the or¬ ganization of a House Committee of Thirty- three. Already had some twenty-three different propositions of adjustment been submitted to this committee, and under the circumstances it actually seemed as if only a little patience and patriotic earnestness were needed to find a compromise, — perhaps an amendment of the Constitution which the feverish unrest and im¬ patience of the nation would compel Congress to enact or propose, and the different States and sections, willing or unwilling, to accept and ratify. Superior political wisdom and more thor¬ ough information, as well as a finer strategy, a quicker enthusiasm, a more absolute devo¬ tion, and a more unremitting industry, must be freely accorded to the conspirators who now labored night and day in the interest of dis¬ union. They counted more clearly than their opponents the demoralization of parties at the North, the latent revolutionary discontent at the South, the potent influence of brilliant and combined leadership, and the social, commer¬ cial, and political conditions which might be brought into present and ultimate action. They recognized that they were but a minority, a faction; but they also realized that as such they had a substantial control of from six to eleven States whenever they chose to make that control effective, and that, for present uses

Page 829

828 ABRAHAM LINCOLN, at least, the President was, under their influ¬ ence, but as clay in the hands of the potter. Betterthan the Republicans from the North, or even the conservatives from the border States, they knew that in the cotton-States a widespread change of popular sentiment was then being wrought and might very soon be complete. Except upon the extreme alterna¬ tive of disunion, the people of the border States were eager to espouse their quarrel, and join them in a contest for alleged political rights. Nearly half the people of the North were ready to acknowledge the existence and justness of their formulated complaints. The election of Lincoln was indeed a flimsy and specious pretext for separation, but it had the merit of universal publicity, and of rankling irritation among the unthinking masses. Agri¬ culture was depressed, commerce was in panic, manufacturing populations were in want, the national treasury was empty, the army was dis¬ persed, the fleet was scattered. The national prestige was humbled, the national sentiment despondent, the national faith disturbed. Meanwhile their intrigues had been suc¬ cessful beyond hope. The Government was publicly committed to the fatal doctrine of non-coercion, and was secretly pursuing the equally fatal policy of concession. Reenforce¬ ments had been withheld from Charleston and must from motives of consistency be with¬ held from all other forts and stations. An un¬ official stipulation, with the President, and a peremptory order to Anderson, secured beyond chance the safe and early secession of South Carolina, and the easy seizure of the Govern¬ ment property and forts at Charleston. The representatives of foreign governments were already secretly coquetting for the favor of a free port and an advantageous cotton-market. Friendly voices came to the South from the North, in private correspondence, in the pub¬ lic press, even in the open debates of Congress, promising that cities should go up in flames and the fair country be laid waste ere a single Northern bayonet should molest them in their meditated secession. Upon such a real or assumed state of facts the conspirators based their theory, and risked their chances of success in dismembering the republic, — and it must be admitted that they chose their opportunity with a skill and fore¬ sight which for a considerable period of time gave them immense advantages over the friends of the Union. One vital condition of success, however, they strangely overlooked, or rather, perhaps, deliberately crowded out of their problem, — the chance of civil war, without for¬ eign intervention. For the present their whole plan depended upon the assumption that they could accomplish their end by means of the single instrumentality of peaceable secession; and with this view they proceeded to put their scheme into prompt execution. The House Committee of Thirty-three had been organized by the selection of Thomas Corwin as its chairman, and had entered hopefully upon the task confided to it. An angry and excited caucus of active conspir¬ ators was said to have been held the week previous, to intimidate the members from the cotton-States and induce them to refuse to serve on the committee, but this coercive movement only partly succeeded. The com¬ mittee held a long meeting on December 12th, and now on the morning of the 13th was once more convened for work. The informal prop¬ ositions and discussions of the day previous were renewed, but resulted only in calling out views and schemes too vague on the one hand or too extreme on the other. The subject was about to be laid over to the following Satur¬ day, when Mr. Rust of Arkansas startled the committee with the information that the ex¬ tremists were obtaining signatures to a paper to announce to the South that no further con¬ cession was expected from the North, and that any adjustment of pending difficulties had be¬ come impossible. He therefore offered a resolu¬ tion to meet this unexpected crisis, but accepted the following substitute, offered by Mr. Dunn of Indiana : “ Resolved, That in the opinion of this committee, the existing discontent among the Southern people and the growing hostility among them to the Federal Gov¬ ernment are greatly to be regretted, and that whether such discontent and hostility are without just cause or not, any reasonable, proper, and constitutional reme¬ dies and effectual guarantees of their peculiar rights and interests, as recognized by the Constitution, neces¬ sary to preserve the peace of the country and the per¬ petuation of the Union, should be promptly and cheer¬ fully granted.” Other amendments were voted down, and this proposition was adopted by a vote of 22 to 8 ; and thus in good faith a tender of reason¬ able concession and honorable and satisfactory compromise was made by the North to the South. But the peace-offering was a waste of patience and good-will. Caucus after caucus of the secession leaders had only grown more aggressive, and deepened and strengthened their inflexible purpose to push the country into disunion. Keeping themselves thoroughly informed of every political intrigue and every official movement, they timed their own deci¬ sions and demonstrations with a fatal prompt¬ ness and precision. The presence of General Scott, who after a long illness had come from New York to Washington, on December 1 2th, to give his urgent advice to the work of counteracting secession by vigorous military preparation, did not in the least disconcert or

Page 830

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT 829 hinder the secession leaders. His patriotic appeal to the Secretary of War* on the 13th naturally fell without effect upon the ears of one of their active confederates. This vital issue once decided, the revolu¬ tionists did not lose or delay a single moment in taking their next step forward. Neither the temporizing concession of the President nor the conciliatory and half-apologetic resolution of the Committee of Thirty-three for one in¬ stant changed or affected their determination to destroy the Government and dissolve the Union. Friday, December 14th, i860, was a day of gloom and despondency in Mr. Buchanan’s office, bringing to his mind more forcibly than he had ever before realized the utter shipwreck into which he had guided his Administration. To the jubilant secessionists, on the other hand, it was not only a day of perilous triumph achieved, but also of apparently assured suc¬ cesses yet to come. The hitherto official organ of the Administration in its issue of the follow¬ ing morning contained two publications which gave startling notice to the country of the weakness of the right and the strength of the wrong in the swiftly forming struggle for na¬ tional existence. The first of these documents was a proc¬ lamation from the President of the United States, stating that in response to numerous appeals he designated the fourth day of Janu¬ ary, proximo, as a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer. The dangerous and distracted condition of our country ” was therein thus set forth : “The Union of the States is at the present moment threatened with alarming and immediate danger — panic and distress of a fearful character prevail throughout the land — our laboring population are without em¬ ployment, and consequently deprived of the means of earning their bread — indeed, hope seems to have de¬ serted the minds of men. All classes are in a state of confusion and dismay, and the wisest counsels of our best and purest men are wholly disregarded. . . . Humbling ourselves before the Most High, . . . let us implore him to remove from our hearts that false pride of opinion which would impel us to persevere in wrong for the sake of consistency, rather than yield a just submission to the unforeseen exigencies by which we are now surrounded. . . . An omnipotent Providence may overrule existing evils for permanent good.’T The second manifesto was more practical, more pertinent, more resolute. As the first pub¬ lic and combined action of the conspirators, it forms the hinge upon which they well-nigh turned the fate of the New World Republic. It was a brief document, but contained and expressed all the essential purpose of the con¬ spiracy. It was signed by about one-half the * “Scott Auto.” Vol. II., p. 613. t Washington “ Constitution,” Dec. -15^, i860. senators and representatives of the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Ala¬ bama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas. It precedes every ordinance of secession, and is the ‘‘official” beginning of the subsequent “Confederate States,” just as Governor Gist’s October circular was the “ of¬ ficial ” beginning of South Carolina secession. Address of certain Southern members of Congress. To OUR Constituents. Washington, December 14th, i860. The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union through the agency of committees, congres¬ sional legislation, or constitutional amendments is ex¬ tinguished, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretense of new guarantees. In our judgment the Republicans are resolute in the purpose to grant nothing that will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and in¬ dependence of the Southern people require the organ¬ ization of a Southern Confederacy — a result to be obtained only by separate State secession — that the primary object of each slaveholding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from a Union with hostile States. J. L. Pugh . of Alabama. David Clopton . of Alabama. Sydenham Moore . of Alabama. J. L. M. Curry . of Alabama. J. A. Stallworth . of Alabama. J. W. H. Underwood . of Georgia. L. J. Gartrell . of Georgia. James Jackson . of Georgia. John J. Jones . of Georgia. Martin J. Crawford . of Georgia. Alfred Iverson, U. S. Senator. . . Georgia. George S. Hawkins . of Florida. T. C. Hindman . of Arkansas. Jefferson Davis, U. S. Senator Mississippi. A. G. Brown, U. S. Senator. . Mississippi. Win. Barksdale . of Mississippi. O. R. Singleton . of Mississippi. Reuben Davis . of Mississippi. Burton Craige . of North Carolina. Thomas Ruffin . of North Carolina. John Slidell, U. S. Senator. . . . Louisiana. J. P. Benjamin, U. S. Senator. Louisiana. J. M. Landrum . of Louisiana. Lewis T. Wigfall, U. S. Senator. . . Texas. John Hemphill, U. S. Senator . Texas. J. H. Reagan . of Texas. M. L. Bonham . of South Carolina. Wm. Porcher Miles . of South Carolina. John McQueen . of South Carolina. John D. Ashmore . of South Carolina. Instead of the argument being exhausted, it was scarcely begun. So far from congres¬ sional or constitutional relief having been re¬ fused, the Southern demand for them had not been formulated. Not only had no committee denied hearing or action, but the Democratic Senate, at the instance of a Southern State, had ordered the Committee of Thirteen, which the Democratic and Southern Vice-President had not yet even appointed; and when the names were announced a week later, Jefferson Davis, one of the signers of this complaint of non-

Page 831

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 830 action, was the only man who refused to serve on the committee — a refusal he withdrew when persuaded by his co-conspirators that he could better aid their designs by accepting. On the other hand, the Committee of Thirty- three, raised by the Republican House, ap¬ pointed by a Northern Speaker, and presided over by a Northern chairman, had the day be¬ fore by more than a two-thirds vote distinctly tendered the Southern people ‘‘any reasonable, proper, and constitutional remedies and effec¬ tual guarantees.” Outside of congressional circles there was the same absence of any new complications, any new threats, any new dangers from the North. Since the day when Abraham Lin¬ coln was , elected President there had been absolutely no change of word or act in the attitude or intention of himself or his follow¬ ers. By no possibility could they exert a par¬ ticle of adverse political power, executive, legislative, or judicial, for nearly three months to come. Not only was executive authority in the hands of a Democratic Administration, which had made itself the peculiar champion of the Southern party, but it had yielded every successive demand of administrative policy made by the conspirators themselves. The signers of this address to their Southern con¬ stituents had not one single excuse. Their proclamation was a falsehood ; but nothing less would serve their new step in conspiracy. SOUTH CAROLINA SECESSION. The secret circular of Governor Gist of South Carolina, heretofore quoted, inaugurated the great American Rebellion a full month before a single ballot had been cast for Abra¬ ham Lincoln. This was but repeating in a bolder form the action taken by Governor Wise of Virginia, during the Fremont cam¬ paign four years before. But, instead, as in that case, of confining himself to a proposed consultation among slave -State executives, Governor Gist proceeded almost immediately to a public and official revolutionary act. On the 12th of October, i860, he issued his proclamation convening the Legislature of South Carolina in extra session, “ to appoint electors of President and Vice-President. . . . and also that they may, if advisable, take action for the safety and protection of the State.” There was no external peril menacing either the commonwealth or its humblest citizen; but the significance of the phrase was soon developed. A large caucus of prominent South Carolina leaders was held on the 25th of October at the residence of Senator Hammond. Their deliberations remained secret, but the deter¬ mination arrived at appears clearly enough in the further official action of Governor Gist, who was present, and who doubtless carried out the plans of the assemblage. When the legislature met on November 5th (the day before the presidential election) the governor sent them his opening message, advocating both secession and insurrection, in direct and undisguised language. He recommended that in the event of Lincoln’s election, a conven¬ tion should be immediately called ; that the State should secede from the Federal Union; and “if in the exercise of arbitrary power and forgetful of the lessons of history, the Government of the United States should at¬ tempt coercion, it will be our solemn duty to meet force by force.” To this end he recommended a reorganization of the militia and the raising and drilling an army of ten thousand volunteers. He placed the prospects of such a revolution in a hopeful light. “ I'he indications from many of the Southern States,” said he, “justify the conclusion that the seces¬ sion of South Carolina will be immediately followed, if not adopted simultaneously, by them, and ultimately by the entire South. The long-desired cooperation of the other States having similar institutions, for which so many of our citizens have been waiting, seems to be near at hand ; and, if we are true to ourselves, will soon be realized.” * The legislature, remaining in extra session, and cheered and urged on by repeated popular demonstrations and the inflamed speeches of the highest State officials, proceeded without delay to carry out the governor’s programme. The first day’s session of the legislature (November 5th) developed one of the most important preparatory steps of the long-ex¬ pected revolution. The legislature of 1859 had appropriated a military contingent fund of $100,000 “to be drawn and accounted for as directed by the Legislature.” The appro¬ priation had been allowed to remain un¬ touched. It was now proposed to place this sum at the control of the governor to be ex¬ pended in obtaining improved small arms, in purchasing a field battery of rifled cannon, in providing accouterments, and in furnishing an additional supply of tents; and a resolu¬ tion to that effect duly passed two days latent The chief measure of the session, however, was a bill to provide for calling the pro¬ posed State convention, which, it was well understood, should adopt an ordinance of secession. The delegates to the convention were duly * Governor Gist’s Message, Nov. 5th, i860. “S. C. House Journal,” pp. 10, il. t“ S. C. House Journal,” pp. 13, 14.

Page 832

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT elected on the 6th of December, and assem¬ bled and organized at Columbia, the capital of the State, on the 17 th of the same month ; on account of a local epidemic, however, both the convention and the legislature adjourned to Charleston, where the former reassembled on the following day and the latter two days afterwards. Elected under the prevailing se¬ cession furor^ which tolerated no opposition, and embracing the leading conspirators in its membership, the convention was practically unanimous. ‘‘There is no honor,” said the chairman on taking his seat, “ I esteem more highly than to sign the ordinance of secession as a member of this body ; but I will regard it as the greatest honor of my life to sign it as your presiding officer.” * The legislature of South Carolina had also just elected a new governor, who was inaugu¬ rated on the same day on which the convention met. This was F. W. Pickens, a revolutionist of a yet more radical and energetic type than his predecessor Gist, and who, as we have seen, had been in close consultation with the Cabinet cabal at Washington, more than a month before. He was, of course, anxious to signalize his advent ; and to this end he im¬ mediately dispatched to Washington a special messenger, bearing the following letter to Pres¬ ident Buchanan: “ (Strictly confidential.) “Columbia, December 17th, i860. “ My Dear Sir : With a sincere desire to prevent a collision of force, I have thought proper to address you directly and truthfully on points of deep and immedi¬ ate interest. “ I am authentically informed that the forts in Charleston Harbor are now being thoroughly prepared to turn, with effect, their guns upon the interior and the city. Jurisdiction was ceded by this State expressly for the purpose of external defense from foreign inva¬ sion, and not with any view that they should be turned upon the State. “ In an ordinary case of mob rebellion, perhaps it might be proper to prepare them for sudden outbreak. But when the people of the State, in sovereign con¬ vention assembled, determine to resume their original powers of separate and independent sovereignty, the whole question is changed, and it is no longer an act of rebellion. I, therefore, most respectfully urge that all work on the forts be put a stop to for the present, and that no more force may be ordered there. “ The regular convention of the people of the State of South Carolina, legally and properly called, under our Constitution, is now in session, deliberating upon the gravest and most momentous questions, and the ex¬ citement of the great masses is great, under a sense of deep wrongs, and a profound necessity of doing some¬ thing to preserve the peace and safety of the State. “To spare the effusion of blood, which no human * “ Convention Journal,” p. lo. t Pickens to Buchanan, December 1 7th, i860. “ S. C. House Journal,” 1861, p. 167. t In his message of November 5th, 1861, Governor Pickens of South Carolina refers to William H. Tres- cott. Esq., who was in December, i860. Assistant Sec¬ retary of State at Washington, as “a distinguished 831 power may be able to prevent, I earnestly beg your im¬ mediate consideration of all the points I call your atten¬ tion to. It is not improbable that, under orders from the Commandant, or perhaps from the Commander- in-Chief of the Army, the alteration and defenses of those posts are progressing without the knowledge of yourself or the Secretary of War. “The arsenal, in the city of Charleston, with the public arms, I am informed, was turned over very prop¬ erly to the keeping and defense of a State force, at the urgent request of the governor of South Carolina. I would most respectfully, and from a sincere devotion to the public peace, request that you would allow me to send a small force, not exceeding twenty-five men and an officer, to take possession of Fort Sumter, immedi¬ ately, in order to give a feeling of safety to the commu¬ nity. There are no United States troops in that fort whatever, or perhaps only four or five, at present ; besides some additional workmen or laborers, lately employed to put the guns in order. If Fort Sumter could be given to me, as governor, under a permission similar to that by which the governor was permitted to keep the arsenal, with the United States arms in the city of Charleston, then I think the public mind would be quieted under a feeling of safety; and as the conven¬ tion is nowin full authority, it strikes me that could be done with perfect propriety. I need not go into par¬ ticulars, for urgent reasons will force themselves readily upon your consideration. “If something of the kind be not done, I cannot an¬ swer for the consequences. “ I send this by a private and confidential gentleman, who is authorized to confer with Mr. Trescott fully, and to receive through him any answer you may think proper to give to this. “ I have the honor to be, most respectfully, “Yours truly, F. W. PiCKENs. “To the President of the United States.”! Arrived in Washington, the special messen¬ ger who bore this document sought the active agent J of the central cabal, Mr. Trescott, As¬ sistant Secretary of State, and was by him on Thursday morning, December 20th, conducted to the White House and presented to Mr. Bu¬ chanan, to whom he personally delivered his communication. The President received the document and promised an answer to it on the following day.§ The temper and condition of his mind is plainly reflected in what he wrote. He seems to have realized no offense in this insult to the sovereignty and dignity of the United States whose Constitution he had sworn to “ preserve, protect, and defend ” ; no patri¬ otic resentment against the South Carolina conspirators who, as he knew by the telegraph, were assembling that same day in convention to inaugurate local rebellion; — his whole answer breathes a tone of apology that his oath and duties will not permit him to oblige the South Carolina governor; and he feebly gropes for relief from his perplexities in the suggestion citizen, appointed, as I have since been informed by my predecessor, to remain at Washington as confidential representative of the State.” — “ South Carolina House Journal,” 1861, p. 31. $ Curtis’s “Life of Buchanan,” President’s memoran¬ dum, p. 383.

Page 833

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 832 that Congress might perhaps somehow arrange the trouble. This was the answer prepared : “ Washington, December 20th, i860. “ My Dear Sir ; I have received your favor of the 17th inst. by Mr. Hamilton. From it I deeply re¬ gret to observe that you seem entirely to have misap¬ prehended my position, which I supposed had been clearly stated in my message. I have incurred, and shall incur, any reasonable risk within the clearly pre¬ scribed line of my executive duties to prevent a collision between the army and navy of the United States and the citizens of South Carolina in defense of the forts within the harbor of Charleston. Hence I have de¬ clined for the present to reenforce these forts, relying upon the honor of South Carolinians that they will not be assaulted whilst they remain in their present condi¬ tion ; but that commissioners will be sent by the con¬ vention to treat with Congress on the subject. I say with Congress because, as I state in my message, ‘Apart from the execution of the laws so far as this may be practicable, the Executive has no authority to decide what shall be the relations between the Federal Government and South Carolina. He has been invested with no such discretion. He possesses no power to change the relations heretofore existing between them, much less to acknowledge the independence of that State.’ This would be to invest a mere executive officer with the power of recognizing the dissolution of the confederacy among our thirty-three sovereign States. It bears no resemblance to the recognition of a foreign de facto government, involving no such responsibility. Any attempt to do this would, on my part, be a naked act of usurpation. “ As an executive officer of the Government, I have no power to surrender to any human authority Fort Sumter, or any of the other forts or public property in South Carolina. To do this would, on my part, as I have already said, be a naked act of usurpation. It is for Congress to decide this question, and for me to pre¬ serve the status of the public property as I found it at the commencement of the troubles. “ If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States. It will not then be a question of co¬ ercing a State to remain in the Union, to which I am utterly opposed, as my message proves, but it will be a question of voluntarily precipitating a conflict of arms on her part, without even consulting the only author¬ ity which possesses the power to act upon the subject. Between independent governments, if one possesses a fortress within the limits of another, and the latter should seize it without calling upon the appropriate authorities of the power in possession to surrender it, this would not only be a just cause of war, but the act¬ ual commencement of hostilities. “No authority was given, as you suppose, from my¬ self or from the War Department, to Governor Gist, to guard the United States Arsenal in Charleston by a company of South Carolina volunteers. In this re¬ spect you have been misinformed — I have, therefore, never been more astonished in my life, than to learn from you that unless Fort Sumter be delivered into your hands, you cannot be answerable for the conse¬ quences.” * It is easy to infer from results, that while the President was laboring over this document the central cabal was busy. They saw that the rash zeal of Governor Pickens was endangering the fine web of conspiracy they had wound around * Curtis’s “ Life of Buchanan,” Vol. H., p. 384. t Trescott to Pickens. “ South Carolina House Jour¬ nal,” 1861, p. 170. him. He was committed to non-coercion; committed to non-reenforcements ; committed to await the arrival of South Carolina com¬ missioners. This new demand from a new au¬ thority not only indicated a division of sen¬ timent and purpose in the insurrectionary councils in the Palmetto State, but created an opportunity through which Mr. Buchanan under a possible healthier impulse of patriot¬ ism might repudiate the whole obligation of non-resistance to their schemes into which they had beguiled him. They clearly saw, as they themselves explained, that though he would not deliver Sumter now, he might be willing to “approach such action” hereafter, “ a possibility not at all improbable, and which ought to be kept open.”t Mr. Trescott there¬ fore hastened to take the advice of two of the South Carolina congressmen, — McQueen and Bonham, — and it is not a violent presumption to assume also of the chief senatorial conspira¬ tors ; for only six days had elapsed since the congressional circular was signed and pub¬ lished, which called upon the cotton-States to proceed with the plot of secession and the formation of a Southern confederacy. A tele¬ gram was at once sent to Charleston, mildly explaining to Governor Pickens the blunder he was making and asking his authority to withdraw his letter to Mr. Buchanan. Gov¬ ernor Pickens must be credited with astute¬ ness enough to comprehend the situation, for he at once gave the consent requested. On Friday morning Mr. Trescott waited upon Mr. Buchanan and informed him that he would not be required to answer, but that Governor Pickens had withdrawn his demand ; and Mr. Trescott records, with an evident appreciation of the whole affair as a successful stroke of policy, that “the withdrawal of the letter was a great relief to the President.” To under¬ stand more fully the whole scope and spirit of the incident, we must read the report of it which he then transmitted to Charleston : “ To His Excellency F. W. Pickens, “Governor of South Carolina: “Washington, December 21st, i860. “ Sir : Your confidential letter to the President was duly delivered to him yesterday by D. H. Plamilton, Esq., according to your instructions. It was with¬ drawn (no copy having been taken) this morning by me, under the authority of your telegraphic dispatch. Its withdrawal was most opportune. It reached here under circumstances which you could not have antici¬ pated, and it produced the — effect upon the President. “ He had removed Colonel Gardiner from command at Fort Moultrie, for carrying ammunition from the arsenal at Charleston ; he had refused to send reen¬ forcements to the garrison there ; he had accepted the resignation of the oldest, most eminent, and highest member of his Cabinet, rather than consent to send additional force, and the night before your letter ar¬ rived. he, upon a telegraphic communication that arms had been removed from the arsenal to Fort Moultrie, the Department of War had issued prompt orders by

Page 834

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT telegraph to the officer removing them,* to restore them immediately. He had done this upon his deter- mination to avoid all risk of collision, and upon the written assurance of the majority of the Congressional Delegation from the State 'that they did not believe there was any danger of an attack upon the forts be- FRANCIS W. PICKENS, GOVERNOR OF SOUTH CAROLINA, l86l. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN POSSESSION OF LOUIS MANIGAULT.) fore the passage of the Ordinance, and an expression of their trust and hope that there would be none after, until the State had sent commissioners here. His course had been violently denounced by the Northern press, and an effort was being made to* — a Congres¬ sional investigation. At that moment he could not have gone to the extent of action you desired and I felt confident that if forced to answer your letter then he would have taken such ground as would have pre¬ vented his ever approaching it hereafter, a possibility not at all improbable, and which ought to be kept open. I considered, also, that the chance of public investiga¬ tion rendered the utmost caution necessary as to any communications from the State, and having presented the letter, and ascertained what the nature of the re¬ ply would be, you had all the advantage of knowing the truth, without the disadvantage of having it put on record. Besides this, the President seemed to think that your request was based upon the impossibility of your restraining the spirit of our people; an inter¬ pretation which did you injustice, and the possibility of which I deemed it due to you to avoid. Pie also ap"- 833 peared to labor under the impression that the repre¬ sentation of the members of Congress and your own differed essentially, and this, I thought, on account of both, should not be stated in any reply to you. I was also perfectly satisfied that the status of the garrisons would not be disturbed. “ Under these circumstances, if I had been acting under formal credentials from you, and the letter had been unsealed, I would have delayed its presentation for some hours, until I could have telegraphed you, but that was impossible. As Mr. Hamilton, therefore, had brought with him General McQueen and General Bonham, when he called on me and delivered the let¬ ter, and had even gone so far as to express the wish that they should be present when he delivered it to the President — a proposition which they declined, however — I deemed it not indiscreet, nor in violation of the discretionary confidence which your letter im¬ plied, to take their counsel. We agreed perfectly, and the result was the telegraphic dispatch of last night. The withdrawal of the letter was a great relief to the President, who is most earnestly anxious to avoid an issue with the State or its authorities, and I think, has encouraged his disposition to go as far as he can in this matter, and to treat those who may represent the State with perfect frankness. “ I have had this morning an interview with Gover¬ nor Floyd, the Secretary of War. No order has been issued that will at all disturb the present condition of the garrisons, and while I cannot even here venture into details, which are too confidential to be risked in any way, I am prepared to say, with a full sense of the responsibility, that nothing will be done which will either do you injury or properly create alarm. Of course when your commissioners have succeeded or failed to effect their negotiations, the whole issue is fairly before you, to be met as courage, honor, and wisdom may direct. “ My delay in answering your telegraph concerning Colonel Huger, was caused by his absence from this place. He came, in reply to my telegraph last night, and this morning I telegraphed, upon his decision, which I presume he has explained by a letter of this same date.^ As Dr. Hamilton leaves this evening, I have only time to write this hurried letter, and am, sir, ‘‘Very respectfully, “ Wm. Henry Trescott.! “ I inclose your confidential letter in this.” t We must now turn our attention from the executive rooms of the presidential mansion in Washington to the executive rooms of South Carolina in Charleston, where on the same day a feeble counterpart of the transaction we have described was going on. Since the beginning of these new troubles, especially since the dis- * The blanks and the awkward rhetorical construc¬ tion are copied exactly as the authors find them printed in the “ South Carolina House Journal.’’ tTrescott to Pickens, December 21st, i860. “ S. C. House Journal,” 1861, pp. 169-171. t In Mr. Curtis’s “ Life of Buchanan,” Vol. IL, p. 383, will be found the private memorandum of Presi¬ dent Buchanan giving his statement of the incident : “ On Thursday morning, December 20th, i860, Ham¬ ilton, late marshal of South Carolina, sent especially for this purpose, presented me a letter from Governor Pickens, in the presence of Mr. Trescott, dated at Col¬ umbia, South Carolina, 1 7th December ( Monday). Fie was to wait till this day (Friday afternoon) for my an¬ swer. The character of the letter will appear from the answer to it which I had prepared. Thursday night, between 9 and 10 o’clock, Mr. Trescott called upon me. He said that he had seen Messrs. Bonham and Vol. XXXIV.— 1 14. McQueen of the South Carolina delegation, that they all agreed that this letter of Governor Pickens was in violation of the pledge which had been given by them¬ selves not to make an assault upon the forts, but to leave them iwstaiu <7?/^ until the result of an application of commissioners to be appointed by the State was known ; that Pickens, at Columbia, could not have known of the arrangements. They — to wit, Bonham, McQueen, and Trescott — had telegraphed to Pickens for authority to withdraw his letter. Friday morning, 10 o’clock, 2 1st December, Mr. Trescott called upon me with a telegram of which the following is a copy from that which he delivered to me : ‘ December 21st, i860. — You are authorized and requested to withdraw my letter sent by Dr. Hamilton immediately. F. W. P.’ Mr. Trescott read to me, from the same telegram, that Governor Pickens had seen Mr. Cushing; the letter was accordingly written.”

Page 835

834 ABRAHAM ciission and issuing of his message, President Buchanan felt anxious and ill at ease. He could not shut his eyes to the fact that in South Carolina at least a tide of revolution was stead¬ ily rising. He appears to have dimly felt that his official responsibility and honor were some¬ how involved; and since he had reasoned the executive power into nothingness, the idea suggested itself to his mind that a little friendly expostulation at least was due from him. Un¬ der some such impulse he wrote the following letter to Governor Pickens, and with it dis¬ patched the Hon. Caleb Cushing to Charles¬ ton, to see if he might not exert a personal influence upon the malcontents, who paid no heed to any wishes or interests but their own : “Washington, December i8th, i860. “ My Dear Sir : From common notoriety, I assume the fact that the State of South Carolina is now delib¬ erating on the question of seceding from the Union. Whilst any hope remains that this may be prevented, or even retarded, so long as to allow the people of her POSTMASTER-GENERAL JOSEPH HOLT. (from a photograph by BRAUY.) sister States an opportunity to manifest their opinions upon the causes which have led to this proceeding, it is my duty to exert all the means in my power to avert so dread a catastrophe. I have, therefore, deemed it advisable to send to you the Hon. Caleb Cushing, in whose integrity, ability, and prudence I have full con¬ fidence, to hold communications with you on my behalf, for the purpose of changing or modifying the contem¬ plated action of the State in the manner I have already suggested. Commending Mr. Cushing to your kind attention, for his own sake, as well as that of the cause, I remain, “ Very respectfully, your friend, “James Buchanan. “His Excellency Francis W. Pickens.”* Mr. Cushing was a man of great affability, and of prominence in the Democratic part}L He had been Attorney-General under Presi¬ dent Pierce, and was called to preside over * Buchanan to Pickens, December i8th, i860. “ S. C. House Journal,” 1861, p. 171. LINCOLN. the Charleston convention, until the dissension in that body between Northern and Southern Democrats caused its disruption and adjourn¬ ment to Baltimore. In the second disruption at Baltimore, Mr. Cushing had followed the fortunes of the Southern leaders, and with them had seceded, and presided over that fraction of the original body which nominated Breckinridge. Though a Massachusetts man, he was thus affiliated in party principle, party organization, and party action with the South, and President Buchanan not unnaturally thought that he was a proper personal agent, and ought to be an influential party represen- tive, capable, in behalf of the Administration, of dissuading the Charleston conspirators from their dangerous determination, or at least from their reckless precipitancy. But the sequel shows that Buchanan both misunderstood the men he had to deal with, and was unequal in purpose or will to cope with their superior daring and resolution. Mr. Cushing arrived in Charleston on the day the South Carolina convention passed its ordinance of secession. He obtained an inter¬ view with Governor Pickens, and presented the President’s letter. ‘‘ I had but a short in¬ terview with him,” says Governor Pickens in his message of November 5th, 1861, and told him I would return no reply to the Presi¬ dent’s letter, except to say very candidly that there was no hope for the Union, and that, so far as I was concerned, I intended to maintain the separate independence of South Carolina, and from this purpose neither temptation nor danger should for a moment deter me.” There is a notable contrast in this haughty and defi¬ ant reception by a South Carolina governor of the messenger of the President of the United States, to the cringing and apologetic spirit in which the President had on that same morn¬ ing received the messenger of the governor and replied to his demand. Mr. Cushing’s reply deserves special notice. He said,” continues Governor Pickens, that he could not say what changes circumstances might produce, but when he left Washington there was then no in¬ tention whatever to chan ge the status of the forts in our harbor in any way.” By this language Mr. Cushing himself seems to have changed his errand from a patriotic mission of protest and warning to one conveying hopeful and advantageous information to the conspirators. It could hardly have been without a sense of personal mortification to Mr. Cushing that the drama which he had been sent to avert, or at least to postpone, immediately unrolled itself under his very eyes, and his mortification must have risen to indignation when he was requested by his presence to grace the pageant. The South Carolina convention, during the

Page 836

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT. 835 two days which had elapsed since its adjourn¬ ment hither from Columbia, had been deliber¬ ating in secret session. A little after midday of December 20th, the streets of Charleston were filled with the following placards, giving the public the first notice of its action : CHARLiSTtN MERCDRY EXTRA: Passed unanhnousiy at 1.15 o'^clocky P» .V., December 20/A, 1800. JLN ORDIJVA^CE To ditisolve the L'nion beliceen the State uf South Carolina and other Stales xuiited with her wider the compact entitled “ The Constitution qf the United States of .hneriva.''' TVe, the Ueople oj the State of South Carolina, in Conventton assembled, do dedare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, Thit Ihe Otdinuocc idopted bj ai in Convention, on the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thuwiand. seven hundred andeighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the TInitoJ States of America was ratibed, and also, all Acts and parts of Acts of ibe General Assembly of this State, ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed : .and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of “The United Stales of America,” is hereby dissolved. UNION DISSOLVED! The usual jubilations immediately followed, — ringing of bells, salutes of cannon, and the noise and display of street parades. The con¬ vention resolved to celebrate the event further by a public ceremonial to which it invited the governor, the legislature, and other dignitaries ; and both branches of the legislature also sent a committee to Caleb Cushing to give him an official invitation to attend. At half-past 6 that evening the members of the convention marched in procession to Institute Hall, where the public signing of the ordinance of seces¬ sion was performed with appropriate solemni- ATTORNEY-GENERAL JEREMIAH S. BLACK. (from a photograph by BRADY.) ties, and at its close the President announced: ‘‘ The ordinance of secession has been signed and ratified, and I proclaim the State of South Carolina an Independent Commonwealth.” The city and the State joined in general ex¬ ultation as if a great work had been accom¬ plished, as if the efforts of a generation had been crowned with fulfillment, and nothing re¬ mained but to rest and enjoy the ripened fruit of independence. There seemed to be no dream, amid all this rejoicing, that nothing def¬ inite had as yet been effected ; that the reck¬ less day’s act was but the prelude to the most terrible tragedy of the age, the unchaining of a storm which should shake the continent with terror and devastation, leaving every Southern State a wreck, and sweeping from the face of the earth the institution in whose behalf the fatal work was done. The secession ordinance having been passed , signed, and proclaimed, the convention busied itself for the next few days in making up a public statement of its reasons for the anoma¬ lous procedure. The discussion showed a wide divergence of opinion as to the causes which had produced the act. One ascribed it to the election of Lincoln, another to the failure of the Northern States to execute the fugitive-slave law, a third to the antislavery sentiment of the free States, a fourth to the tariff, a fifth to unconstitutional appropriations by Congress, and so on. On the 24th of De¬ cember the convention adopted a “ Declara¬ tion of Causes,” and an Address to the Slave¬ holding States,” the two papers together em-

Page 837

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 836 MAJOR ROBERT ANDERSON. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRADY.) bracing the above and other specifications. Since neither the Constitution of the Uni¬ ted States nor the laws of Congress contained any section, clause, word, or rea¬ sonable implication that authorized an act of seces¬ sion, the Declaration of Causes ” formulated the doctrine of State-rights in justification. That doctrine in substance was, that the several States entered the Union as sovereignties ; that in forming the Federal Government they delega¬ ted to it only specific pow¬ ers for specific ends ; that the Federal Government was not a sovereign over sovereignties, but was only an agent between them ; that there existed no com¬ mon arbiter to adjudge differences ; that each State or sovereignty might judge for itself any violation of the common agreement and choose its own mode of redress ; consequently that each State might ad¬ here to or secede from the Union, at its own sovereign will and pleasure. This doctrine, springing from early differences of constitutional interpreta¬ tion, had not been promul¬ gated in its ultra form until South Carolina’s nullifica¬ tion movement in 1832. It had been accepted and sus¬ tained by only a small frac¬ tion of the American people. The whole current, action, and development of the government of the United States under the Constitution was based upon the opposite theory. Washington and the succeeding Presidents rejected it in their practical administration ; Marshall and the Su¬ preme Court condemned it in their judicial de¬ cisions; Webster refuted it in his highest consti¬ tutional arguments; Congress repudiated it in its legislation; Jackson denounced it in executive proclamation as treasonable and revolutionary ; and the people of the Union at large regarded it as an absurd and dangerous political heresy. CHARLESTON HARBOR. We have sketched the positions assumed by President Buchanan upon the political theories involved in the secession movement, as well as the contradictory policy he proposed to pur¬ sue in dealing with it. In addition, it becomes necessary to state briefly the practical action so far taken by him, especially in regard to the forts in Charleston Harbor, the possession of which was so earnestly desired by the lead¬ ers of rebellion in South Carolina. To secede, to declare their political independence without power to control their harbors and regulate their commerce, would be an absurdity calculated to draw upon them only the ridicule of foreign powers. The possession of the Federal forts, therefore, far exceeded in importance even their ordinance of secession, and had engaged a much earlier and deeper solicitude on their part. These forts were three in number. Look

Page 838

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT. 837 at any good map of Charleston Harbor, and it will be seen that the city lies on the extreme point of a tongue of land between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, every part being within easy range under the guns of Castle Pinckney, which stands on a small island, three-quarters of a mile distant. Four miles to seaward is the mouth of the harbor, and nearly midway there¬ in stands the more extensive and imposing work of Fort Sumter, its guns not only sweep¬ ing all the approaches and ship-channels, but the shores and islands on either hand. It needs but a glance at the map to see that, with proper garrisons and armaments. Fort Sumter commands the harbor, and Castle Pinckney commands the city, in the absence of very formidable preparations for attack. Owing to the long period of peace through which the country had passed, these Works were in a neglected condition, and only partly oc¬ cupied. There was only an ordnance sergeant in Castle Pinckney, only an ordnance sergeant in Fort Sumter, and a partial garrison at Fort Moultrie. Both Sumter and Moultrie were greatly, and Castle Pinckney slightly, out of repair, with no mounted guns or the usual necessary appurtenances for defense. During the summer of i860 Congress made an ap¬ propriation for these works; and the engineer captain who had been in charge for two years past had, indeed, been ordered to begin and prosecute repairs in the two forts. Whether this step was taken to afford ultimate help to the Union or help to the Rebellion, will per¬ haps never be historically proved, nor is the fact material. It is needless at this point to enter upon certain very interesting details showing how these forts, from the very first, became objects of prime solicitude ; how the leaders and peo¬ ple of Charleston in various ways manifested their purpose to seize them; how General Scott recommended that they should be reen¬ forced; how the officer in command specifi¬ cally asked that the garrison in Moultrie might be increased; how Secretary of War Floyd sent an officer to inspect their condition. A more necessary fact to be stated is that the Administration, on the 13th of November, ordered Major Robert Anderson of Kentucky to take command of the forts and forces in Charleston FI arbor. In the execution of this duty Major Anderson reached Fort Moultrie and assumed command on November 21st; and having from his several interviews with the President, Secretary of War, and Lieuten¬ ant-General Scott become fully impressed with the importance of his trust, proceeded as a first step to acquaint himself thoroughly with his situation and resources. As a result his re¬ port urgently warned the Government that the VoL. XXXIV.— 1 15. harbor must be immediately and strongly reen¬ forced, and this suggestion he repeated from time to time with earnestness and persistence. This judicious advice, however, was neglected by the President and rejected by the Secretary of War. ‘‘ It is believed,” — so ran the reply and apparently the final decision of the Gov¬ ernment, — “ from information thought to be reliable, that an attack will not be made on your command, and the Secretary has only to refer to his conversation with you, and to caution you that should his convictions unhappily prove untrue, your actions must be such as to be free from the charge of initiating a collision. If attacked, you are, of course, expected to defend the trust committed to you to the best of your ability. The increase of the force under your command, how¬ ever much to be desired, would, the Secretary thinks, judging from the recent excitement produced on ac¬ count of an anticipated increase, as mentioned in your letter, but add to that excitement, and might lead to serious results.” It is a fair inference from facts not necessary to relate here that the Charleston leaders of secession had knowledge of this decision of the Secretary of War; but so eager was their desire to prevent reenforcements that they pro¬ ceeded to obtain a substantial pledge in that behalf. On Saturday, December 8th, four of the representatives in Congress from South Caro¬ lina requested an interview of President Bu¬ chanan, which he granted them. One of their number has related the substance of their ad¬ dress with graphic frankness: “ Mr. President, it is our solemn conviction that if you attempt to send a solitary soldier to these forts, the instant the intelligence reaches our people (and we shall take care that it does reach them, for we have sources of information in Washington so that no orders for troops can be issued without our getting in¬ formation) these forts will be forcibly and immediately stormed. “ We all assured him that if an attempt was made to transport reenforcements, our people would take these forts, and that we would go home and help them to do it ; for it would be suicidal folly for us to allow these forts to be manned. And we further said to him that a bloody result would follow the sending of troops to those forts, and that we did not believe that the au¬ thorities of South Carolina would do anything prior to the meeting of this convention, and that we hoped and believed that nothing would be done after this body met until we had demanded of the general government the recession of these forts.” * Here was an avowal to the President him¬ self — not only of treason at Charleston, but of conspiracy in the executive departments of the general Government ; a demand cou¬ pled with menace. Instead of meeting these with a stern rebuke and dismissal, the Presi¬ dent cowered and yielded. He hastened to assure his visitors that it was his determination not to reenforce the forts in the harbor and Statement of Miles and Keitt to the South Carolina Convention.

Page 839

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 838 thus produce a collision, until they had been actually attacked,’’ or until he had “ certain evidence that they were about to be attacked.” The President suggested that for pruden¬ tial reasons ” it would be best to put in writ¬ ing what they had said to him verbally. This they readily promised, and on Monday, the loth, gave him, duly signed by five of the South Carolina representatives, this important paper : “ Washington, December 9th, i860. “ In compliance with our statement to you yester¬ day, we now express to you our strong convictions that neither the constituted authorities, nor any body of the people of the State of South Carolina, will either attack or molest the United States forts in the harbor of Charleston, previously to the action of the conven¬ tion, and we hope and believe not until an offer has been made through an accredited representative to negotiate for an amicable arrangement of all matters between the State and the Federal Government, pro¬ vided that no reenforcements shall be sent into those forts, and their relative military status shall remain as at present.” When President Buchanan came to look at the cold, explicit language of this document, he shrank from the definite programme to which it committed him. I objected to the word ‘ provided,’ as it might be construed into an agreement on my part which I never would make. They said nothing was further from their intention ; they did not so understand it, and I should not so consider it.”* There followed mutual protests that the whole trans¬ action was voluntary, informal, and in the na¬ ture of a mediation ; that neither party pos¬ sessed any delegated authority or binding power. While the Charleston conspirators had thus taken effectual steps to bind the future acts of the Executive in respect to the forts in Charleston Harbor, and to make sure that the rising insurrection in South Carolina should not be crippled or destroyed by any surprise or sudden movement emanating from Washing¬ ton, they were not less watchful to counteract and prevent any possible hostile movement against them on the part of Major Anderson or his handful of officers and troops in Fort Moultrie, undertaken on their own discretion. Their boast of secret sources of information in Washington, coupled with subsequent events, furnish unerring proof that Mr. Floyd, Secre¬ tary of War, though openly opposing disunion, was already in their confidence and councils, and was lending them such active coopera- * Buchanan to Comrs., December 31st, i860. W. R., I., p. 1 16. t “ The President has listened to him with due friend¬ liness and respect, but the War Department has been little communicative. Up to this time he has not been shown the written instructions of Major Anderson, nor been informed of the purport of those more re¬ cently conveyed to Fort Moultrie verbally by Major tion as might be disguised or perhaps still ex¬ cused to his own conscience as tending to avert collision and bloodshed. Shortly before, or about the time of the truce we have described. Secretary Floyd sent an officer of the War Department to Fort Moul¬ trie with special verbal instructions to Major Anderson, which were duly communicated and the substance of them reduced to writing and delivered to that officer, on the i ith of Decem¬ ber, being the day following the final conclu¬ sion of the President’s unofficial truce at Washington. Upon mere superficial inspection this order disclosed only the then dominant anxiety of the Administration to prevent collision. But if we remember that it was issued and sent to Major Anderson without the President’s knowl¬ edge and without the knowledge of General Scott,t and especially if we keep in sight the state of public sentiment of both Charleston and Washington and the paramount official influences which had taken definite shape in the President’s truce, we can easily read be¬ tween the lines that it was a most artfully con¬ trived document to lull suspicion while it ef¬ fectually restrained Major Anderson from any act or movement which might check or control the insurrectionary preparations. He must do nothing to provoke aggression; he must take no hostile attitude without evident and immi¬ nent necessity ; he must not move his troops into Fort Sumter, unless it were attempted to attack or take possession of one of the forts or such a design was tangibly manifested. Prac¬ tically, when the attempt to seize the vacant forts might come it would be too late to pre¬ vent it, and certainly too late to move his own force into either of them. Practically, too, any serious design of that nature would never be permitted to come to his knowledge. Supple¬ ment these negations and restrictions by the unrecorded verbal explanations and comments made by Major Buell, by his emphatic and express disapproval of the meager defensive preparations which had been made, such as his open declaration that a few loop-holes would have a tendency to irritate the peo¬ ple,” f and we can readily imagine how a faith¬ ful officer, whose reiterated reasonable requests had been refused, felt that under such instruc¬ tions, amid such surroundings, under such neg¬ lect, “ his hands were tied ” and that he and his little command were a foredoomed sacrifice.§ Buell.” — [General Scott (by G. W. Lay) to Twiggs, December 28th, i860. “War Records,” Vol. I.,p. 50O.] t Doubleday’s “Sumter,” p. 51. $ In a Senate speech, January loth, 1861 (“ Globe,” page 307), J efferson Davis, commentingon these orders, while admitting that they empowered Major Anderson to go from one post to another, said, “ though his or¬ ders were not so designed, as I am assured.”

Page 840

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT. 839 THE RETIREMENT OF CASS. The non-coercion doctrine had been yielded as early as November 20th, in the Attorney- General’s opinion of that date. The fact was rumored not only in the political circles of the capital, but in the chief newspapers of the country ; and the three secession members of the Cabinet had doubtless communicated it confidentially to all their prominent and influ¬ ential confederates. Since that time South Caro¬ lina had continued her preparation for secession with unremitting industry; Mississippi had authorized a convention and appointed com¬ missioners to visit all the slave States and prop¬ agate disunion — among them Mr. Thompson, Buchanan’s Secretary of the Interior, exer¬ cised this insurrectionary function while yet remaining in the Cabinet. North Carolina had refused to go into an election of United States senator; Florida had passed a convention bin ; Georgia had initiated legislative proceed¬ ings to bring about a conference of the South¬ ern States at Atlanta; both houses of the National Congress had rung with secession speeches, while daily and nightly caucuses took place at Washington. Mr. Buchanan’s truce with the South Car¬ olina representatives had as little effect in arrest¬ ing the secession intrigues as his non- coercion doctrine officially announced in the annual message. On the evening of the very day (December 8th) on which he received the South Carolina pledge, his Secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb of Georgia, tendered his resignation, announcing in the same letter his intention to embark in the active work of disunion. “ My withdrawal,” he wrote to the President, ‘‘ has not been occasioned by any¬ thing you have said or done.” Ignoring the fact that the Treasury was prosperous and solvent when he took charge of it, and that at the moment of his leaving, it could not pay its drafts, Mr. Cobb five days later published a long and inflammatory address to the peo¬ ple of Georgia, concluding with this exhorta¬ tion : ‘‘ I entertain no doubt either of your right or duty to secede from the Union. Arouse then all your manhood for the great work be¬ fore you and be prepared on that day to an¬ nounce and maintain your independence out of the Union, for you will never again have equality and justice in it.” The President had scarcely yet found a successor for Mr. Cobb when the head of his Cabinet, Lewis Cass, Secretary of State, also tendered his resignation and retired from the Administration. The incident of Secretary Cass’s resignation brings into relief the mental reservations under which Buchanan’s paradoxical theories had been concurred in by his Cabinet. A private memorandum, in Mr. Buchanan’s handwriting, commenting on the event, makes the follow¬ ing emphatic statement: “ His resignation was the more remarkable on ac¬ count of the cause he assigned for it. When my late message (of December, i860) was read to the Cabinet before it was printed, General Cass expressed his un¬ reserved and hearty approbation for it, accompanied by every sign of deep and sincere feeling. He had but one objection to it, and this was, that it was not suffi¬ ciently strong against the power of Congress to make war upon a State for the purpose of compelling her to remain in the Union ; and the denial of this power was made more emphatic and distinct upon his own suggestion.” — [G. T. Curtis’s “Life of Buchanan,” II., p. 399.] But this position was probably qualified and counterbalanced in his own mind by the Presi¬ dent’s positive promise that he would collect the Federal revenue and protect the Federal property. Little by little, however, delay and concession rendered this impossible. The col¬ lector at Charleston still nominally exercised his functions as a Federal officer; but it was an open secret among the Charleston author¬ ities, and must also by this time have become known to the Government at Washington, that he was only holding the place in trust for the coming secession convention. As to protecting the Federal property, the refusal to send Ander¬ son troops, the President’s truce, the gradual development of Mr. Buchanan’s irresolution and lack of courage, and finally Mr. Cobb’s open defection, must have convinced Mr. Cass that under existing determinations, orders, and influences it was an utterly hopeless prospect. The whole question seems to have been finally debated and decided in a long and stormy Cabinet session held on December 13th.* The events of the past few days had evidently shaken the President’s confidence in his own policy. He startled his dissembling and conspiring Secretary of War with the sud¬ den question, Mr. Floyd, are you going to send recruits to Charleston to strengthen the forts?” ‘‘Don’t you intend to strengthen the forts at Charleston ? ” The apparent change of policy alarmed the Secretary, but he replied promptly that he did not. “ Mr. Floyd,” con¬ tinued Mr. Buchanan, “ I would rather be in the bottom of the Potomac to-morrow than that these forts in Charleston should fall into the hands of those who intend to take them. It will destroy me, sir, and, Mr. Floyd, if that thing occurs it will cover your name with an infamy that all time can never efface, because it is in vain that you will attempt to show that you have not some complicity in handing over those forts to those who take them.” The wily * Floyd’s Richmond speech. “N. Y. Herald,” Jan¬ uary 17th, 1861, p. 2.

Page 841

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 840 Secretary replied, “ I will risk my reputation, I will trust my life that the forts are safe under the declarations of the gentlemen of Charles¬ ton.” ‘^That is all very well,” replied the President, but does that secure the forts ? ” ‘‘ No, sir ; but it is a guaranty that I am in ear¬ nest,” said Floyd. I am not satisfied,” said the President. Thereupon the Secretary made the never- failing appeal to the fears and timidity of Mr. Buchanan. He has himself reported the lan¬ guage he used : “ I am sorry for it,” said he ; “ you are President, it is for you to order. You have the right to order, and I will consider your orders when made. But I would be recreant to you if I did not tell you that this policy of garrisoning the forts will lead to certain con¬ flicts ; it is the inauguration of civil war, and the be¬ ginning of the effusion of blood. “ [I^ it is a question of property, why not put an ord¬ nance sergeant — a man who wears worsted epaulets on his shoulders and stripes down his pantaloons — as the representative of the property of the United States? That will be enough to secure the forts. If it is a question of property, he represents it,^ and let us wait until the issue is made by South Carolina. She will go out of the Union and send her commissioners here. Up to that point the action is insignificant. Action after this demands the attention of the great council of the na¬ tion. Let us submit the question to Congress — it is for Congress to deal with the matter.” This crafty appeal to the President’s hesi¬ tating inclinations was seconded by the ac¬ tive persuasions of the leading conspirators of Congress whom Floyd promptly called to his assistance. “ I called for help from that bright Saladin of the South, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi — and I said, ‘ Come to my rescue, the battle is a little more than my weak heart can support — come to me,’ and he came. Then came that old jovial-looking, noble-hearted representative from Virginia, James M. Mason. Here came that anomaly of modern times, the youthful Nes¬ tor, here came Hunter. From the North, the South, the East, and the West there came up the patriots of the country, the champions of constitutional liberty, and they talked with the President of the United States, and they quieted his fears and assured him in the line of duty. They said, ‘ Let there be no force ’ ; and the President said to me, ‘ I am content with your policy! ’ and then it was that we determined that we would send no more troops to the harbor in Charleston. ” — [Floyd’s Richmond speech. “N. Y. Herald,” January 17th, 1861, p. 2.] With a last effort to rouse the President from his lethargy, Cass demanded in the Cabinet meeting of the 13th, that the forts should be strengthened. But he was powerless to break the spell. Says Floyd : “The President said to him in reply, with a beauti¬ ful countenance and with a heroic decision that I shall never forget, in the council chamber, ‘ I have considered * Jefferson Davis, in his “ Rise and Fall of the Con¬ federate Government,” p. 215, Vol. I., also lays claim to this suggestion : “ The President’s objection to this was, that it was his bounden duty to preserve and pro¬ tect the property of the United States. To this I re¬ plied with all the earnestness the occasion demanded. this question — I am sorry to differ from the Secretary of State — I have made up my mind. The interests of the country do not demand a reenforcement of the forces in Charleston. I cannot do it — and I take the responsibility of it upon myself.’ ” The other Union members of the Cabinet received the rumor of Mr. Cass’s resignation with gloomy apprehensions. Postmaster- Gen¬ eral Holt,t with whom by reason of their loyal sympathy he had been on intimate teims, hastened to him to learn whether the report were indeed true and whether his determina¬ tion were irrevocable. Cass confirmed the fact with his own lips ; saying that, represent¬ ing the Northern and loyal constituency which he did, he could no longer without dis¬ honor to himself and to them remain in such treasonable surroundings. Holt endeavored to persuade him that under the circumstances it was all the more necessary that the loyal members of the Cabinet should remain at their posts, in order to prevent the country’s passing into the hands of the secessionists' by mere default. But Cass replied. No; that the public feeling and sentiment of his section would not tolerate such a policy on his part. “ For you,” he said, coming from a border State, where a modified, perhaps a divided, public sentiment exists, that is not only a possible course, but it is a true one; it is your duty to remain, to sustain the Executive and counteract the plots of the traitors. But my duty is otherwise; I must adhere to my resig¬ nation.” FORT SUMTER. The Charleston conspirators were aware that, in their well-laid intrigues to obtain pos¬ session of all the Charleston forts, there was one point of weakness and danger. They had secured a virtual pledge that no reenforcements would be sent, and they had reasonable con¬ fidence that at any desirable moment they could, by a sudden, overwhelming assault, cap¬ ture Fort Moultrie with its slender garrison of sixty soldiers under Anderson’s command. But if Anderson should suddenly move his garrison into Fort Sumter, a larger and stronger work, rising sheer out of the waters of the bay, midway in the mouth of the harbor, their task would be more serious, perhaps impossible. Against such a contingency they had taken two important precautions. The vaguely worded instructions of Secretary Floyd, as interpreted by themselves, seemed to forbid such a move¬ ment on his part ; and to make assurance more that I would pledge my life that, if an inventory were taken of all the stores and munitions in the fort, and an ordnance sergeant with a few men left in charge of them, they would not be disturbed.” t Holt, conversation with J. G. N. MS.

Page 842

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT certain they had set two guard-boats to patrol¬ ling the harbor at night to discover and pre¬ vent any surprise of this character. Anderson also clearly saw the point of mil¬ itary advantage, and by a very pointed sugges¬ tion asked on December 2 2d for instructions from the War Department for a movement from Moultrie to Sumter,* but found no re¬ sponse in the hopes and designs of Secretar)^ Floyd. The officers meantime freely visited the city and exchanged social courtesies with leading secessionists with many mutual protestations of the highest regard. We appreciate your position,” said their entertainers. ‘‘ It is a point of honor with you to hold the fort, but a political necessity obliges us to take it.” t But after the passage of the ordinance of seces¬ sion, Major Anderson had ceased his visits to Charleston. Christmas day, however, was once more celebrated with these social ameni¬ ties at a family party in Moultrieville, on Sul¬ livan’s Island. When Anderson returned from the scene of merry-making, in the solitude of his soldier’s room he formed the resolution to abandon Fort Moultrie at the earliest possible moment ; and on the evening of December 26th the transfer was secretly and successfully accomplished. A BLUNDERING COMMISSION. On Wednesday, December 26th, at 3 o’clock p. M., it being about the same time of the same day that Anderson was completing his prepa¬ rations to leave Moultrie, Messrs. Barnwell, Adams, and Orr, the three commissioners from South Carolina, reached Washington. They were by authority of the convention empow¬ ered to negotiate a treaty of peace and friend¬ ship between the embryo republic and the United States ; to secure the delivery of the forts, arsenal, and light-houses ; to divide the public property and apportion the public debt, and generally to settle all pending questions, upon the assumption that South Carolina was no longer a member of the Union, but an in¬ dependent foreign State. There being no concealment about the tem¬ per and purpose of Mr. Buchanan, the arrival of the commissioners was promptly commu¬ nicated to him, and he with an equal prompt¬ ness appointed an interview with them at i o’clock of the next day, Thursday, December 27 th. On their part, the commissioners delib¬ erately settled themselves for business by tak¬ ing a house and appointing a secretary. But * Anderson to A. G., December 22d, i860. W. R., I., p. 105. t Doubleday, p. 47. t The news of the evacuation of Moultrie, which should have been telegraphed before midnight, did not 841 at sunrise on Thursday things were no longer as they had been at the previous sunset. An¬ derson’s move on the military chess-board had changed not only the game of war but, yet more radically, the game of politics. The Charles¬ ton authorities, dumfounded by the event, prob¬ ably suspected treachery from the Administra¬ tion, and under this impulse interdicted the transmission of the news northward J until the next forenoon. They, however, sent the in¬ formation to the commissioners at Washington, who communicated it to Mr. Buchanan.§ Catching at straws, Buchanan’s first impulse was to assume that Anderson had abandoned Moultrie in a panic, and to restore the s^a/tis by ordering him back into the fort. He had the distinct impression that his orders did not contemplate or permit the change; show¬ ing either how ignorant he was of the Buell memorandum, which had passed under his personal notice only six days before, or how thoroughly that contradictory document had mystified him as well as everybody else. Had the influences which were theretofore para¬ mount in Washington yet remained intact, it is more than likely that this first impulse of the President would have been carried out. But things were changed at the capital as well as in Charleston. An embezzlement of near a million dollars’ worth of Indian Trust Bonds had come to light and kept the Federal city and the whole country in a ferment for nearly a week. A department clerk and a New York contractor were in prison ; but the responsibil¬ ity of the affair had been brought home to Secretary Floyd so pointedly that three days before the President requested his resignation. Floyd was in no haste to comply, and Mr. Buchanan was too timid to dismiss his dis¬ graced minister summarily, who still exercised the functions of Secretary of War. Anderson’s report, written at 8 p. m. on December 26th and sent by mail, had not yet reached Washington. Floyd was, therefore, incredulous about what the commissioners told him, but took immediate steps to verify the rumor. “ Information has reached here this morning,” he telegraphed to Anderson on the morning of the 27th, that you have abandoned Fort Moultrie, spiked your guns, burned the carriages, and gone to Fort Sum¬ ter. It is not believed, because there is no order for any such movement. Explain the meaning of this report.” The telegram is correct,” replied Ander¬ son; “I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I reach Washington till about noon next day, and then only by way of Baltimore. (Washington “ Star,” 27th, Baltimore telegram.) $ Mr. Buchanan’s Administration, p. 180.

Page 843

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 842 was certain that if attacked m)^ men must have been sacrificed, and the command of the har¬ bor lost. I spiked the guns and destroyed the carriages to keep the guns from being used against us.” And he added, ‘‘ If attacked, the garrison would never have surrendered with¬ out a fight.” Meanwhile the Cabinet was called together to deliberate on the unwelcome news. During the two weeks which had elapsed since the re¬ tirement of Cass and Cobb, a profound change had occurred in that body of presidential ad¬ visers. Governor Thomas of Maryland, also a secessionist, was made Secretary of the Treas¬ ury, a substitution which brought no reform ; but, on the other hand, Black had not only been made Secretary of State but had been marvelously transformed in his political senti¬ ments and acts by being brought into contact and companionship with Edwin M. Stanton, a man of iron will and hearty Union sentiments, who was nominated to succeed him as Attor¬ ney-General. A new and healthier atmosphere pervaded the executive council chamber in the discussion of the crisis. But the political condition of the nation was so abnormal, the public service so disorganized, and the execu¬ tive so timid, that for three days and four nights, from the evening of the 27th to the morning of the 31st, Anderson hung doubtfully in the balance between honorable approval and dis¬ graceful censure.* Secretary Floyd maintained with vehemence the existence of a mutual pledge created by the President’s truce of the loth ; and claimed that Anderson had violated this pledge, since there was nothing in his instructions which could in any wise justify his removal to Sum¬ ter. Against this assumption Mr. Black, the new Secretary of State, took much more radi¬ cal union ground than he had hitherto occupied. He insisted that Anderson’s transfer was in perfect accordance with his orders, announced his unqualified approval of it, and asserted the duty of the Administration to sustain it. In regard to the issue thus raised, the President exhibited his usual irresolution. He denied the technical existence of a pledge, but could not, of course, deny its spirit ; and sided with Floyd in the belief that Anderson’s zeal had out¬ run the limit of his instructions. The Buell mem¬ orandum and the modifying order were sent for in hot haste, and now for the first time un¬ derwent Cabinet criticism. The studied am¬ biguity of these papers furnished arguments for both sides; the entire question turning upon the point whether Anderson had tan¬ gible evidence of a design to proceed to a hostile act.” Floyd now submitted a written * C. F. Black, “Essays and Speeches of J. S. Black,” pp. II and 12. demand that he should be allowed at once to order the garrison to be withdrawn entirely from the harbor of Charleston, alleging that the Government was dishonored in the viola¬ tion of its most solemn pledges. Pending the discussion, the Cabinet ad¬ journed until evening. The President’s audi¬ ence to the commissioners had been postponed until the next day ; but they were not idle. All that day and until midnight they were the center of the consternation, the hopes, and the counsels of the conspirators.t Meanwhile the official leakage, the Baltimore dispatches, and finally the issue of the afternoon papers had communicated Anderson’s stroke to the whole Federal city, which seethed with excitement. General Scott, confined to his sick-room, sent his aide-de-camp to remind the President of the existence of such an officer as the General-in- Chief of the American armies. In the evening the adjourned Cabinet meeting resumed its deliberations, and continued the session to a late hour. News went forth to the Northern newspapers that night that before its close a vote of four to three had decided against or¬ dering the troops back to Moultrie. This news, however, was premature. Whether a vote was taken or not, the question did not reach a de¬ cision. What was done is described in the language of Mr. Buchanan : “ In this state of suspense, the President determined to await official information from Major Anderson him¬ self. After its receipt, should he be convinced upon full examination that the major, on a false alarm, had violated his instructions, he might then think seriously of restoring for the present the former status quo of the forts.” But the aggressive acts of the insurgents were continually outrunning the vacillating decisions of the President. During the after¬ noon and evening of Thursday, Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, the Arsenal, Post-office, and Custom-house at Charleston passed into the hands of the insurrection. Like the news of Anderson’s transfer the day before, the infor¬ mation was suppressed by the Charleston au¬ thorities. Beyond its transmission perhaps to their friends in Washington, none of the trans¬ actions at Charleston on Thursday afternoon and night were permitted to be telegraphed to the North, until about 10 o’clock on Friday morning the 28th, in the hope that the order for Anderson’s return could be extorted from the President before he should be stung to resistance. But the seizures at Charleston, made on the personal judgment of Governor Pickens, and against at least the implied consent of the con¬ vention, were of doubtful expediency for them, t Charleston “ Courier,” December 28th, i860. Washington dispatch of 27'ih.

Page 844

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT and were so regarded by many ardent seces¬ sionists. The “ Richmond Whig ” denounced them as a “ shameful outrage,” and soundly be¬ rated South Carolina for not being content to go out of the Union peacefully. These seizures, however, might still have been turned to ad¬ vantage, but for the more serious blunder now committed by the commissioners themselves. Their promised interview with Mr. Bu¬ chanan, postponed from i o’clock on Thurs¬ day, on account of the Anderson news, was held at half-past 2 on Friday the 28th. The President had that forenoon heard of the Charleston outrages, and knew that from be¬ ing the agents of a conspiracy they had now become the emissaries of an insurrection. But he failed to note the declaration of the Con¬ stitution that treason against the United States consists in levying war against them, or in ad¬ hering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. According to his explanations the Constitution indeed forbade his recognizing the authority of the commissioners, or decid¬ ing their claim ; but he would give this claim point and dignity by referring it officially to Congress, with the sanction of a presidential message. Had sound judgment guided them they would have seized eagerly upon this quasi acceptance of their mission, — which virtually gave them the President as an ally, — divided and paralyzed Congress by a sudden and com¬ bined intrigue, and made a conciliatory appeal to the commercial apprehensions of the North¬ ern cities and manufacturing districts. But in¬ stead they now ventured their whole success upon a single desperate chance. Assuming a tone of anger and accusation, they impugned the honor of the Government, asked explana¬ tions of Anderson’s conduct under the futile threat of suspending negotiations which were not yet begun, and urged the immediate with¬ drawal of the troops from the harbor of Charleston. Under wiser advice Mr. Buchanan’s hesi¬ tating decision finally went against them ; and in that failure terminated the last and only hope of accomplishing peaceable secession. THE CABINET REGIME. — BUCHANAN’s VIRTUAL ABDICATION. The ultimatum presented by the commis¬ sioners was at once made the subject of a Cabinet discussion, and continued in the even¬ ing of the same day. No decision was arrived at, and the meetings would be without spe¬ cial interest, were it not for the report of one of the incidents that shows the feeling which divided the presidential advisers into two ir¬ reconcilable factions. The scene is given in S43 the language of one of the participants in the evening session of Friday, December 28th, who afterward recounted the event in the council-room of the White House itself. ^^The last ! saw of Floyd,” said Secretary Stanton, was in this room, lying on the sofa which then stood between the windows yon¬ der. I remember it well — it was on the night of the 28th of December, i860. We had had high words and had almost come to blows, in our discussion over Fort. Sumter. Thompson was here — Thompson was a plausible talker, and as a last resort, having been driven from every other argument, advocated the evacua¬ tion of the fort on the plea of generosity. South Carolina, he said, was but a small State with a sparse white population — we were a great and powerful people and a strong, vig¬ orous government. We could afford to say to South Carolina, ‘ See, we will withdraw our garrison as an evidence that we mean you no harm.’ ” Stanton replied to him, Mr. President, the proposal to be generous implies that the Gov¬ ernment is strong, and that we as the public servants have the confidence of the people. I think that is a mistake. No administration has ever suffered the loss of public confidence and support as this has done. Only the other day it was announced that a million of dollars had been stolen from Mr. Thompson’s depart¬ ment. The bonds were found to have been taken from the vault where they should have been kept, and the notes of Mr. Floyd were substituted for them. Now it is proposed to give up Sumter. All I have to say is, that no administration, much less this one, can afford to lose a million of money and a fort in the same week. Floyd remained silent and did not reappear in that chamber.”* The Cabinet was again convened on the evening of Saturday, December 29th ; but when it met, there was one vacant seat at the council-board. During that day, Floyd sent in his formal resignation, complaining that he had been subjected to a violation of solemn pledges and plighted faith.” The resignation was duly accepted on the following Monday, and the War Department placed provision¬ ally under the charge of Postmaster- General Holt.f To the six assembled councilors, Mr. Buchanan now submitted the draft of his re¬ ply to the commissioners. The precise terms and substance of this document remain un¬ published, and we are compelled to gather its import from a rather elaborate written criti¬ cism of it by a member of the Cabinet. This indicates, however, Avith sufficient clearness * Stanton, conversation. J. G. N., Personal memo¬ randa. MS. t R. R., I., Doc. 10.

Page 845

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 844 that the paper, like all Mr. Buchanan’s writ¬ ings and conversations of this period, was con¬ tradictory, loose in expression, and entirely lacking in any clear presentation of issues. Most radical of all the changes effected by these developments was that wrought in the Hon. Jeremiah S. Black, Secretary of State. Growing with his increasing national responsi¬ bilities, he now, with the Sumter crisis, seems to have risen, for a time at least, to genuine leadership. On Sunday morning, December 30th, con¬ vinced of the President’s intention to adhere to his submitted reply to the commissioners, Mr. Black convened the Union section of the Cabinet, and announcing to them his inability to further sustain the President’s contemplated action, declared his intention to resign, in which resolve he was also joined by Mr. Stan¬ ton. After due discussion and reflection, Mr. Toucey carried the information of this threat¬ ened defection to the President. Mr. Buchan¬ an’s courage utterly broke down before the prospect of finding himself alone in face of the political complications which came crowd¬ ing upon him. He at once sent for Mr. Black ; and after a confidential interview, the details of which have never been revealed, he gave the objectionable draft of his reply to his Secre¬ tary of State, with liberty to make all changes and amendments which in his opinion might be necessary. It was the President’s virtual abdication. Mr. Black rewrote his answer to the com¬ missioners, refusing their demand. This result abruptly terminated their mission, and sent them home, not alone in the bitterness of disappointment, but to the great consterna¬ tion of the Charleston conspirators. It also left Anderson in command and possession of Sumter, with at least the implied approval of the Government. There is not space here to relate the events of the next few days : the sudden change of policy pervading the Exec¬ utive Mansion ; the vigorous efforts of the Union members of the Cabinet to send reen¬ forcements to Anderson ; the relief expedition which sailed in the steamer Star of the West, and its unsuccessful effort to reach Fort Sum¬ ter; how Governor Pickens began the construc¬ tion of batteries around it with which the reb¬ els bombarded and captured the fort some three months later; and finally the further transformation of the executive council of the President by the retirement of the two seces¬ sionist members Thompson and Thomas, the latter being succeeded by John A. Dix as Secretary of the Treasury, who has left so brilliant a record as a stanch defender of the Government and the Union. With the adjourn¬ ment of that Cabinet meeting on Saturday night, December 29th, therefore, terminated the real administration of James Buchanan. Thenceforward, though he still continued to affix his official signature, the country was practically governed, in his name, by his Cab¬ inet, to the end of the presidential term. THE COTTON REPUBLICS.” In the main the secession incidents and pro¬ ceedings enacted in South Carolina were imi¬ tated and repeated in the other cotton States. Their several governors initiated the move¬ ment by early official action, — proclamations, messages, and orders. The office-holders at each State capital formed a convenient local caucus and committee of conspiracy. The programme in each case ran through essentially the same stages. There was first the meeting of the legislature, prompted and influenced by the State officials and the senators and representatives in Congress. Then under a loud outer/ of public danger which did not exist, hasty measures to arm and defend the State; large military appropriations and ex¬ tensive military organization. Next an act to call a convention, ostensibly to consult public opinion, but really for the occasion to rouse and mislead it. In each of the cotton States the Breckinridge Democracy, the most ultra of the three factions, all pro-slavery, was largely in the majority. Again, the long po¬ litical agitation had brought into power and prominence the most radical leaders of this extreme party. These radical leaders were generally disiinionists at heart, even where they had not been active and persistent con¬ spirators. They now took up with alacrity the task of electing a secession convention. That the people were not with them a month before the presidential election is proved by the re¬ plies of the several governors to South Caro¬ lina, which are cited in a previous chapter. Nothing but the election itself had occurred to change that feeling ; no threat, no act, no law, no catastrophe. Had governors and offi¬ cials remained silent, the people would have felt no want and seen no danger. But when official action began the agitation, first by proclamations, then by legislative enactments, and lastly by forcing the issue upon the peo¬ ple through an election for delegates, there came an inevitable growth and cumulation of excitement. In this election it was the auda¬ cious, the ambitious, the reckless element which took the lead ; which gathered enthu¬ siasm, which organized success. It must be remembered that this result was reached under specially favoring condi¬ tions. The long slavery agitation had engen¬ dered a brooding discontent, and the baseless

Page 846

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT complaint of sectional injustice had grown through mere repetition from clamor into be¬ lief. The presidential election left behind it the sharp sting of defeat. Not in form and in law, but nevertheless in essential characteris¬ tics, the South was controlled by a landed aristocracy. The great plantation masters dominated society and politics. There was no diffused and healthy popular action, as in the town meetings of New England. Even the slaves of the wealthy proprietors spoke with habitual contempt of the “poor white trash” who lived in mean cabins and hoed their own corn and cotton. Except in Georgia the op¬ position to the secessionists’ programme was either hopelessly feeble or entirely wanting. The Bell and Douglas factions had bitterly denounced Lincoln and the Republicans dur¬ ing the presidential campaign. Disarmed by their own words, they could not now defend them. The seaboard towns and cities of the South, jealous of the commercial supremacy of the North, anticipated in independence and free trade a new growth and a rich pros¬ perity. Over all floated the constant dream of Southern Utopians, an indelinite expan¬ sion southward into a great slave empire. We may infer that under these various causes the election in most instances went by de¬ fault. Three special agencies cooperated with marked effect to stimulate the movement. Very early each cotton State sent commis¬ sioners to each of the other Southern States, and in every case the most active and zealous secessionists were of course appointed. These commissioners attended, harangued, and in¬ trigued with the various deliberative assemblies, and thus constituted a network of most indus¬ trious propagan dism. Another potent influence was the assembling of military conventions, that is, convocations of the captains, majors, colonels, and would-be generals, to spur on or intimidate lagging legislatures and conven¬ tions. Finally, the third and most effective piece of machinery was the State delegations in Congress assembled in Washington city at the beginning of December, and sending a running fire of encouragement or orders home to the capitals of their States. Even with all this organization acting in¬ telligently and persistently to a common end, from two to three months were required to work up the people of the cotton States to an acquiescence in the rebellion the conspira¬ tors had for years been planning. Without being exactly of contemporaneous date, it happened that in general the month of No¬ vember witnessed the assembling of the legis¬ latures and the making of necessary laws and appropriations. The month of December was VoL. XXXIV.— 1 16. 84s mainly occupied by the election of delegates to the State conventions. In this stage the voice of central authority from Washington was begun to be utilized. While the election excitement was at its highest ferment, there came from Washington, under date of the 14th of December, the revolutionary circular, signed by about one-half the Southern senators and representatives in Congress already quoted elsewhere. This circular announced that ar¬ gument was exhausted, that hope was extin¬ guished, that the Republicans would grant nothing which would or ought to satisfy the South, and that the honor, safety, and inde¬ pendence of the Southern people required immediate separate State secession, and the organization of a Southern confederacy. The effect of a congressional firebrand of such di¬ mensions thrown upon the inflammable tem¬ per of the cotton States at such a juncture, may be easily imagined. Their people could not know that no single assertion in this circular was warranted by the facts; that Congress had not deliberated, that the compromise committees had not reported, and that the Republicans had in no shape presented or de¬ clared an ultimatum. The circular had been issued for a purpose, and served the end com¬ pletely. Few Southern voters or speakers could dare to stand up and deny in Georgia or Ala¬ bama the accusation made by these “ honor¬ able ” signers in Washington. But the central cabal did not stop with this single pronimciameiito. By this time the rev¬ olution, both local and central, had gained an accelerated momentum, and was rushing rapidly to its climax. N on-coercion was prom¬ ised, Cass was driven from the Cabinet, the President was overawed. Congress was de¬ moralized. Secession had secured a free path, and counted on an easy victory. So far as had been divulged, the programme hitherto Avas to complete separation by easy stages dur¬ ing the remainder of Mr. Buchanan’s term, and not to organize the new Confederacy till after the 4th of March. But about New Year’s the central conspiracy received a serious check. There was a Cabinet crisis. Buchanan momen¬ tarily asserted himself. Floyd was in turn driven from the Cabinet, the Unionists gained con¬ trol of it, and Holt was made Secretary of War. This portended loyalty, decision, energy, reen¬ forcements. Immediately there came a shower of telegrams and orders from the Washing¬ ton fire-eaters to the cotton-State leaders, proclaiming danger and urging action. The central cabal was called together, deliber¬ ated earnestly, and perfected and hastened the plot. At a caucus held on January 5th (in one of the rooms of the Capitol build¬ ing itself, it is said) the decisive and final rev-

Page 847

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 846 olutionaiy programme committed itself to the following distinct points and plan. First : Im¬ mediate secession. Second : A convention at Montgomery, Alabama, not later than the 15th of February, to organize a Confederacy. Third : That, to prevent hostile legislation under the changed and loyal impulses of the President and his reconstructed Cabinet, the cotton-State senators should yet remain awhile in their places, to ‘^keep the hands of Mr. Buchanan tied” Finally, and most im¬ portant of all, the caucus appointed a com¬ mittee, consisting of Jefferson Davis and Sen¬ ators Slidell and Mallory, ‘‘ to carry out the object of this meeting.”* The future chief of the great rebellion was chosen to preside over its primary organization. If there had been any hesitation in the sev¬ eral State conventions about taking the final plunge, we may suppose that it disappeared when the programme outlined in this cen¬ tral caucus of January 5th, at Washington, was transmitted. We find that nearly the whole secession movement very speedily fol¬ lowed. Mississippi passed her ordinance on J anuary 9th , Florida on J anuary i oth, Alabama on January nth, Georgia on January 19th, Louisiana on January 26th, and Texas, where peculiar conditions existed, on February ist. Immediately connected with the passage of these secession ordinances, in some instances even preceding them, the next step in the in¬ surrectionary scheme was taken. Each gover¬ nor who organized the revolution in his State, now finding a little army of impulsive volun¬ teers and ambitious officers at his nod and beck, orders two or three regiments to the nearest fort or arsenal, where an ordnance sergeant, or an attenuated infantry or artillery * Senator Yulee of Florida to Joseph Finegan, Esq. “Washington, January 7, 1861. “ My Dear Sir : On the other side is a copy of reso¬ lutions adopted at a consultation of the Senators from the seceding States — in which Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, and Florida were present. The idea of the meeting w^as that the States should go out at once, and provide for the early organization of a Confederate Government, not later than 15th February. This time is allowed to enable Louisiana and Texas to participate. It seemed to be the opinion that if we left here, force, loan, and volun¬ teer bills might be passed, which would put Mr. Lin¬ coln in immediate condition for hostilities ; whereas by remaining in our places until the 4th of March, it is thought we can keep the hands of Mr. Buchanan tied, and disable the Republicans from effecting any legislation v/hich will strengthen the hands of the in¬ coming Administration. The resolutions will be sent by the delegation to the President of the Convention. 1 have not been able to find Mr. Mallory this morn¬ ing. Hawkins is in Connecticut. I have therefore thought it best to send you this copy of the resolutions. “ In haste, yours truly, “D. L. Yulee. “Joseph Finegan, Esq. “‘Sovereignty Convention,’ Tallahassee, Florida.” company of Federal soldiers is representing the government title rather than the govern¬ ment power. The insurgents demand posses¬ sion, and make a display of force. The officer in charge yields to the inevitable. He receives the demand for surrender in the name of the State ; he complies under protest. There is a salute to the flag, peaceable evacuation, and he is allowed unmolested transit home as a military courtesy. By this process there was a quick succession of captures through which all the military strongholds and depots in the cotton States, excepting Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor, Fort Taylor at Key West, and Fort Jeflerson on Tortugas Island passed to the occupation and use of the rebellion j giving it a vantage-ground for defense, and a store of war material for offense, which for the first time since the presidential election gave the revolution a serious and formidable strength. We have thus far described the secession move¬ ment throughout the South in its general aspect. A glance at some of its features more in de¬ tail may not be without interest. The State of Florida was the most zeal¬ ous follower of South Carolina. She has a magnificent geographical area ; and even al¬ lowing that perhaps three-fourths of it may be rivers and swamps, there yet remain near ten million acres of habitable land ; which, with a climate favorable to a class of sub-tropical products much in demand, is enough to make her eventually the garden State of the South. But this immense domain was practically a wilderness, notwithstanding her earliest permanent settlement was almost three centuries old. Her white population did not reach the ratio of one representative The following were the resolutions referred to : “ Resolved i. That in our opinion each of the South¬ ern States should, as soon as may be, secede from the Union. “ Resolved 2. That provision should be made for a convention to organize a Confederacy of the seceding States, the convention to meet not later than the 15th of February, at the city of Montgomery, in the State of Alabama. “ Resolved, That in view of the hostile legislation that is threatened against the seceding States, and which may be consummated before the 4th of March, we ask instructions whether the delegations are to remain in Congress until that date for the purpose of defeating such legislation. Resolved, That a committee be and are hereby appointed, consisting of Messrs. Davis, Slidell, and Mallory, to carry out the objects of this meeting.” “ The copy of these resolutions, forwarded by Sena¬ tor Mallory January 6th, 1861, to the president of the Florida Convention, shows that they were adopted on the 5th of that month, and that they were signed by Messrs. Davis and Brown, of Mississippi; Hemphill and Wigfall, of Texas; Slidell and Benjamin, of Loui¬ siana; Iverson and Toombs, of Georgia; Johnson, of Arkansas; Clay, of Alabama, and Yulee and Mallory, of Florida.” W. R., Vol. I., 443-4.

Page 848

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT 847 in Congress.'* There was not a single town of three thousand inhabitants within her bor¬ ders. She therefore became an easy prey to her ultra pro-slavery leaders, who were the first to applaud and second the Charleston insur¬ rection. “ Florida is with the gallant Pal¬ metto State,” wrote her governor, November 9th; and his message to the legislature, No¬ vember 26th, clamored for “ secession from our faithless, perjured Confederates.” Under the manipulations of such an executive, backed by the equally aggressive advice and exertions of her two United States senators, prominent among the conspirators at Washington, she went through the forms of a convention, and the passing of a secession ordinance, January I oth. Her governor, with total disregard of au¬ thority, had already seized the arsenal at Ap- palachicola on January 5th, Fort Marion and the ordnance depot at St. Augustine on the 7th, as well as a schooner belonging to the Coast Survey. There were, in the arsenal, no arms, but 500,000 musket cartridges, 300,000 rifle cartridges, and 50,000 pounds of gun¬ powder. On the 8th he ordered the seizure of the navy yard and forts at Pensacola, which was accomplished on the 12th. However in¬ significant in her political power, the gain of Florida was nevertheless of great military and strategical value to the rebellion. In Mississippi, the revolutionary sentiment had long been fostered by her most able and influential politicians. Jefferson Davis, eager to wear the mantle of Calhoun, had two years before announced the new rebellion. His speech at Vicksburg, November 27th, 1858, is thus reported in the Daily Mississippian ” : ‘‘ Before concluding his remarks, he would anticipate the interrogatory which his audience might be dis¬ posed to propound to him, in view of the fast growing strength of the abolition party, as to what policy he would recommend in the event of the triumph of that party in i860. He was for resistance — stern resistance. Rather than see the executive chair of the nation filled by a sworn enemy of our rights, he would shatter it into a thousand fragments before he had an opportunity of taking his seat. . . . The Government is at an end the very moment that an abolitionist is elected to the presidency.” The governor of Mississippi also was one of the most advanced revolutionists in the South. He declared himself ready for action as early as August 30th, i860. “I assure you,” wrote he, “that I do sympathize and expect to continue to act with those who dare all and hazard all, rather than see Mississippi become a dependent province of a Black Republican government, and hold her constitutional rights by the frail tenure of * The population of Florida in i860 was : White, 77,748; free colored, 932; slave, 61,745; total, 140,425. The ratio of representation for Members of Congress, from 1852 to 1863, was 93,423. — “ Spofford’s American Almanac,” 1878, p. 170. Black Republican oath. When sparks cease to fly up¬ wards, Comanches respect treaties, and wolves kill sheep no more, the oath of a Black Republican might be of some value as a protection to slave property.” With Jefferson Davis in the Senate to con¬ spire and advise, and Governor Pettus at home to order and execute, the fate of Mississippi could not long remain in doubt. The legis¬ lature had in the previous winter provided a military fund of $150,000. Early in October the State’ made a purchase of arms, which at Jefferson Davis’s request, and with Floyd’s concurrence, were obligingly inspected by a government officer. The legislature was con¬ vened to meet, November 26th, to consider “ the propriety and necessity of providing surer and better safeguards for the lives, liber¬ ties, and property of her citizens than have been found or are to be hoped for in Black Republican oaths.” Commissioners to other States were appointed, and an election ordered, in pursuance of which a convention met, Jan¬ uary 7th, and passed a secession ordinance on January 9th, 84 yeas to 15 nays. The pro¬ ceedings, as in other States, were secret and precipitate. Military organization was stimu¬ lated to the utmost, and on the 20th the un¬ finished fort on Ship Island and the Marine Hospital on the Mississippi River were seized by the insurrectionists at the governor’s orders. The State of Alabama had by her dominant partisanship on the slavery question been car¬ ried farther toward revolt than the other cot¬ ton States. Her legislature, on February 24th, i860, with but two dissenting voices, provided by joint resolution that in case of the election of a Republican President, the governor should at once by proclamation order an election of delegates to a convention “ to consider and do whatever in the opinion of said convention the rights, interests, and honor of the State of Alabama requires [sic] to be done for their pro¬ tection.” A fund of $200,000 was appropri¬ ated for military contingences ”; and the gov¬ ernor was further authorized to send delegates to any future convention of the slave States. A week after the November elections, the governor in a public letter announced that he would exercise this power to inaugurate revo¬ lution as soon as the choice of Lincoln should be made certain by the vote of the electoral college on December 5th. In the same letter he made a labored argument that Alabama ought to secede at once and cooperate af¬ terward.” His proclamation was in due time issued, and the delegates were elected on De¬ cember 24th. A spirited canvass seems to have been made. Judge Campbell, of the United States Supreme Court, addressed the voters in an earnest letter against disunion. Partisans separated themselves into three groups desig-

Page 849

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 848 nated respectively as ‘‘ submissionists,” co- operationists,” and straight-out secessionists.” The southern half of the State, embracing the cotton-lands and strong slave counties on the gulf, was intensely revolutionary; the north¬ ern end, reaching up towards the commerce of the free States, was, or believed itself to be, conservative and union-loving ; and the final popular decision was supposed to hang in considerable doubt. The meeting of the convention at Mont¬ gomery, January 7th, soon dispelled this idea. On the first day it unanimously adopted a resolution declaring in substance that ‘‘ Ala¬ bama cannot and will not submit to the Ad¬ ministration of Lincoln and Hamlin.” Why any of the members after such a vote should have hesitated to commit themselves to the full scope of the conspirator’s programme, shows the confused perception of their own at¬ titude and intentions. They did not appear to realize how helplessly they were drifting in a current of revolution. Upon such material the radical secessionists concentrated their in¬ fluence. Outside pressure gathered in over¬ whelming force. Telegrams poured in upon them in profusion. “ They came so thick and fast, they seemed like snowflakes to fall from the clouds,” said one of the members. Crowds besieged the doors. The governor had on January 4th, without warrant, seized Mount Vernon arsenal and Forts Morgan and Gaines at Mobile, and had caused the banks to sus¬ pend, and he now asked to be justified in these usurpations. News arrived that Florida and Mississippi had seceded. Application was made for military help to seize Pensacola. In the midst of the excitement came telegrams of the firing on the Star of the West 2X Charles¬ ton, and its attending incidents. Before these combined influences conserva¬ tive resolves and combinations gave way, and an ordinance of immediate secession was pre¬ pared. The ubiquitous Yancey, fresh from his Northern disavowals of the “ Scarlet Letter,” was once more on hand in the role of leading conspirator, and came near “ precipitating rev¬ olution ” in the convention itself, by his flam¬ ing declamation. The “ cooperationists ” were pleading for delay, when he indiscreetly threat¬ ened the penalties of treason against any fac¬ tious minority which should venture to disobey an ordinance of secession. The N orthern mem¬ bers flared up under the taunt. “ Will the gen¬ tlemen go into those sections of the State and hang all who are opposed to secession ? Will he hang them by families, by neighborhoods, by counties, by congressional districts ? Who, sir, will give the bloody order? . . . Are these to be the first-fruits of a Southern Re¬ public ? ” “ Coming at the head of any force which he can muster,” replied another mem¬ ber, “ aided and assisted by the executive of this State, we will meet him at the foot of our mountains, and there with his own selected weapons, hand to hand, and face to face, settle the question of the sovereignty of the people.” The flurry was quieted, however, and the ordinance reported on the third day of the session. The conservatives endeavored to sub¬ stitute a project of a slave-State convention, and a basis of settlement with the North, but it was voted down, 54 to 45. After this the radicals had easy sailing, and on January nth the ordinance passed, 61 to 39. It is touching to read the expressions of regret, of doubt, of protest, with which the opposition members reluctantly gave in their adhesion, and parted from their government and their flag, under the final and fallacious prompt¬ ings of State pride and the baneful heresy of paramount State allegiance. And this linger¬ ing sorrow of delegates was followed in many localities by the lingering condemnation and remonstrance of their constituents. Four weeks later Hon. Jere. Clemens wrote from Hunts¬ ville : ‘‘ There is still much discontent here at the passage of the ordinance of secession, but it is growing weaker daily, and, unless some¬ thing is done to stir it up anew, will soon die away ” ; adding, also, “ Last week Yancey was burned in effigy in Limestone.” But it was all of no avail ; the people writhed help¬ lessly in the toils of their false leaders. The State of Georgia was then, and is still, re¬ garded as the Empire State of the South. Her action, therefore, became an object of the great¬ est solicitude. Her leading men were known to be divided in sentiment. The North looked with some confidence there for a conservative reaction ; but they were leaning on a broken reed. With all their asseverations of loyalty, the Unionists of that State were such only upon impossible conditions. “ As a Union man,” wrote B. H. Hill, in September, “ I shall vote in November. As a Union man I shall hope for the right. As a Southern man I shall meet the enemy and go with my State.” Stephens, equally unsound in his alle¬ giance, was ultra-radical on slavery. H e be¬ lieved it the normal condition of the negro, and looked forward to its spread into every State of the Union. Supporting Douglas, he repudiated “ Squatter Sovereignty.” H. V. Johnson was an old-time resistance” advo¬ cate. This kind of leadership was quasi disunion, especially under the assaults of aggressive and uncompromising revolution¬ ists like Toombs, Iverson, Cobb, and Gov¬ ernor Brown. N evertheless, the popular voice, which some-

Page 850

THE SECESSION MOVEMENT. times restrains the rashness of leaders, was yet in doubt, and compelled a policy of slow ap¬ proaches to insurrection. Governor Brown, therefore, in his message of November 8 th, went only to the extent of recommending retalia¬ tory legislation, and that the State should be armed. The vote at the presidential election had been: Breckinridge, 51,889; Bell, 42,886; Douglas, 11,590. The statutes required a ma¬ jority vote for electors, hence there was no choice by the people. In conformity with law, the legislature was obliged to appoint them ; and accordingly it chose (January 29th) a col¬ lege favorable to Breckinridge. In the interim the legislature was convulsed with the topics of the hour. Stephens made a famous plea for union ; Toombs an equally fervid harangue for disunion. Meanwhile the members had listened to an insidious suggestion apparently midway be¬ tween the two extremes. The truth is, in my judgment,” writes Stephens, the waver¬ ing scale in Georgia was turned by a senti¬ ment, the key-note to which was given in the words — We can make better terms out of the Union than in it.^ It was Mr. Thomas R. R. Cobb who gave utterance to this key-note in his speech before the legislature two days anterior to my address before the same body. This idea did more, in my opinion, in carrying the State out, than all the arguments and elo¬ quence of all others combined.” A formidable outside pressure in the shape of a military convention, and a large secession caucus was also organized and led by Governor Brown. The legislature could not resist the impetuous current. A military appropriation of one mill¬ ion dollars was made November 13th, and a convention bill passed on the i8th. Perhaps the most hotly contested election campaign which occurred in any Southern State now took place for the convention, in the course of which fifty-two members of the legislature joined in a “cooperation ” address, urging a conference of Southern States instead of immediate secession. The vote was cast January 2d, and, encouraged by apparent suc¬ cess, Governor Brown, on the following day, ordered the seizure of Fort Pulaski, and placed the telegraph under surveillance. The con¬ vention assembled at Milledgeville on January 1 6th, and the respective factions mustered their adherents for the combat. The struggle was short and decisive. In place of a brief and direct secession resolution the conserva¬ tives offered to substitute a proposition to hold a Southern conference at Atlanta, and setting forth certain “ indispensable ” amendments to the Constitution of the United States. It is almost needless to say they were exacting and advanced to a degree not yet suggested in 849 any quarter. The “ Georgia platform,” hith¬ erto proclaimed by Mr. Stephens as his creed, was left far behind. That was a simple affirm¬ ance of the settlement of 1850. These new “ guarantees ” embraced provisions which would in practice have legalized slavery in the free States. There was no more hope that the North would accept them than that it would set up a monarchy. Radical as was this alter¬ native, the straight-out secessionists would not even permit a vote to be taken upon it. The secession resolution was rushed through under the previous question, 166 yeas to 130 nays. On the following day an inquiry into the election for delegates was throttled with similar ferocity, 168 to 127. After this all opposition broke down, and on January 19th the secession ordinance was passed, 208 yeas to 89 nays. It was finally meekly signed by all the delegates but six, and even those prom¬ ised their lives and fortunes to the cause. Gov¬ ernor Brown, on January 24th, set up the cap- sheaf of insurrection by sending six or seven hundred volunteers to demand and receive the surrender of the Augusta arsenal, declaring with sarcastic etiquette in his demand that “ the State is not only at peace, but anxious to cultivate the most amicable relations with the United States Government.” The State of Louisiana followed in the main the action of the already mentioned cotton States except that it was somewhat more tardy. Her governor and her senators in Congress were as pronounced as the other principal conspirators, but her people as a whole were not yet quite so ripe for insurrection. “ The State of Louisiana,” wrote one of the secession emissaries, “ from the fact that the Mississippi River flows through its extent and debouches through her borders, and that the great com¬ mercial depot of that river and its tribu¬ taries is the city of New Orleans, occupies a position somewhat more complicated than any other of the Southern States, and may present some cause of delay in the consum¬ mation and execution of the purpose of a separation from the North-western States, and the adoption of anew political status.” Here as elsewhere, however, the executive sword was thrown into the vibrating scale. First, the governor’s proclamation calling an extra session of the legislature to meet December loth; then, on the plea of public danger, an appropriation to arm the State; next, on pretext of consulting public opinion, a con¬ vention bill; then, having volunteers, the seizure of Baton Rouge barracks and arsenal (January loth) and Forts Jackson and St. Phillip (January 15th), and other Federal property; and then the terrorism of loud¬ mouthed revolution. When the convention

Page 851

MY SHADOW. 850 met, January 23d, its tide was already as irresistible as the waters of the Mississippi. A proposition for a slave-State conference was voted down, 106 to 24 ; another to “ pro¬ vide for a popular vote,” defeated by 84 to 43, and on January 26th, some of the ‘‘cooper¬ ation” delegates having prudently silenced their scruples, the secession ordinance was passed, 113 yeas to 17 nays. Two excep¬ tional incidents occurred in the action of Lou¬ isiana. One was the unanimous adoption of a resolution recognizing “ the right of the free navigation of the Mississippi River and its tribu¬ taries by all friendly States bordering thereon,” and also “ the right of egress and ingress of the mouths of the Mississippi by all friendly States and powers.” The other was that one of her Fed¬ eral representatives, Hon. John E. Bouligny, remained true to his oath and his loyalty, and continued to hold his seat in Congress to the end of his term — the solitary instance from the cotton States. It is a significant feature in the secession proceedings of the six cotton States which first took action, that their conventions in every case neglected or refused to submit their ordinances of secession to a vote of the people for ratification or rejection. The whole spirit and all the phenomena of the movement forbade their doing so. From first to last the movement was forced, not spontaneous, offi¬ cial, not popular; and its leaders could not risk the period of doubt which a submission of the ordinances would involve, much less their rejection at the polls. To this general rule Texas, the seventh seceding State, forms an exception. Governor Houston opposed se¬ cession, and as long as possible thwarted the conspirators’ plans. By a bolder usurpation than elsewhere, they nevertheless assembled an independent and entirely illegal conven¬ tion, passed an ordinance of secession, Febru¬ ary ist, and held an election to ratify or reject it, February 23d. Long before this they had in substance joined the State to the rebel Con¬ federacy, and the popular vote showed a nominal majority for secession, though the partial returns and the voting, amid a local revolution, afforded no trustworthy indication of a popular sentiment. MY SHADOW. UP and down it follows, follows, I can never quite escape ; On the hills and in the hollows, This familiar, silent shape Still is with me, tireless ever ; Friend or foe — whoe’er I meet. This companion leaves me never. Keeping step with soundless feet. Looking at it, I am lonely. For a stranger still it seems; Though it follows me — me only, Yet, as something seen in dreams, I behold it. Oft I wonder Whither all its steps do tend ; All its features hidden under Veils no changeful winds can rend. Can no pain nor passion move thee, O my comrade ? I am tossed By the tempests sent to prove me, — On thy calm their wrath is lost. Come thou near, my patient lover. Let me whisper that I see — What no other may discover — Change at last has come to thee ! Once thy feet were swift beside me : Not a hill too high to climb; From the heat thou didst not hide thee. Naught to thee were space and time; Light as air, I saw thee dancing Down the pathway where 1 strayed, — Dost thou see the night advancing ? Art thou of the dark afraid ? Canst thou hear me, lover, stranger ? Silent shape, I tell thee now, I, through safety and through danger, Am become as changed as thou ; Yet my heart leaps on before me. New stars bum within the sky; Courage, courage ! I implore thee, — O my comrade, faster fly ! Elle7i M. H. Gates.

Page 852

WON. Bird, by her garden gate Singing thy happy song, Round thee the listening leaves Joyously throng. Tell them that yesternight Under the stars so bright, I wooed and won her ! Red rose, rejoice with me! Swing all thy censers low. Bid each fair bud of thine Hasten to blow. Lift every glowing cup Brimming with sweetness up. For — I have won her I Wind, bear the tidings far, Far over hill and dale; Let every breeze that blows Swell the glad tale. River, go tell the sea, Boundless and glad and free, That I have won her ! Stars, ye who saw the blush Steal o’er her lovely face. When first her tender lips Granted me grace. Who can with her compare, Queen of the maidens rare ? Yet — I have won her! Sun, up yon azure height Treading thy lofty way. Ruler of sea and land. King of the Day — Where’er thy banners fly, Who is so blest as I ? I — who have won her ! Oh, heart and soul of mine. Make ye the temple clean. Make all the cloisters pure. Seen and unseen ! Bring fragrant balm and myrrh. Make the shrine meet for her, Now ye have won her! Julia C. R. Dorr. THE MADRIGAL. ONCE, as I walked in woodlands green, I chanced on Love where he sat alone Catching the motes of the air, and sheen From sunrays broken and downward thrown. “ What are you doing. Love ? ” quoth I — For Love and I have been comrades true, And I speak him fi-eely when none are nigh. And he answers me as he might not you ! I am making a madrigal,” he said ; ‘‘ I need but a rhyme to close it well ” : And, lo ! it seemed that a spider’s thread Glanced in the light and he caught its spell. Wonderful, beautiful, rare, and sweet It lay there, perfect, upon his hand : It throbbed with a murmur, soft, complete — I could not describe ; I could understand ! And how will you send it. Love ? ” quoth I. — Ah, how he smiled ! but he said no word ; But he beckoned me, and I followed, shy. And we came on a Poet, all unheard. There, as he dreamed, did Love bestow The little song on his ear, content ; And so fled quickly that none might know Where it was written and how it was sent! Samuel Willoughby Duffield.

Page 853

MRS. STOWE’S ''UNCLE TOM” AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. the towns of cen¬ tral Kentucky, a stranger, searching for the picturesque in architecture and in life, would find his attention ar¬ rested by certain dense masses of low frame and brick structures, and by the denser mul¬ titudes of strange human beings that inhabit them. A single town may have on its edges several of these settlements, which are them¬ selves called " towns,” and bear separate names either descriptive of some topographical pecu¬ liarity or taken from the original owners of the lots. It is in these that a great part of the negro population of Kentucky has congrega¬ ted since the war. Here to-day live the slaves of the past with their descendants ; old family servants from the once populous country- places; old wagon-drivers from the deep- rutted lanes; old wood-choppers from the slaughtered blue-grass forests ; old harvesters and plowmen from the long since abandoned fields ; old cooks from the savory, wasteful kitchens; old nurses from the softly rocked and softly sung-to cradles. Here, too, are the homes of the younger generation, of the laundresses and the barbers, teachers and ministers of the Gospel, coachmen and por¬ ters, restaurant-keepers and vagabonds, hands from the hemp factories, and workmen on the outlying farms. You step easily from the verge of the white population to the confines of the black. But it is a great distance — like the crossing of a vast continent between the habitats of alien races. The air seems all at once to tan the cheek. Out of the cold, blue recesses of the midsummer sky the sun burns with a fierce¬ ness of heat that warps the shingles of the pointed roofs and flares with blinding brilliancy against some whitewashed wall. Perhaps in all the street no little cooling stretch of shade. The impaved sidewalks and the roadway be¬ tween are but undistinguishable parts of a common thoroughfare, along which every up- springing green thing is quickly trodden to death beneath the ubiquitous play and pass¬ ing of many feet. Here and there, from some shielded nook or other coign of vantage, a single plumy branch of bitter dog- fennel may be seen spreading its small firmament of white and golden stars close to the ground ; or be¬ tween its pale green stalks the faint lavender of the nightshade will take the eye as the sole emblem of the flowering world. A negro town ! Looking out the doors and windows of the cabins, lounging in the door¬ ways, leaning over the low frame fences, gather¬ ing into quickly forming, quickly dissolving groups in the dusty streets, they swarm, they are here from milk-white through all deepening shades to glossy blackness ; octoroons, quad¬ roons, mulattoes — some with large liquid black eyes, refined features, delicate forms! working, gossiping, higgling over prices around a vege¬ table cart, discussing last night’s church festival, to-day’s funeral, or next week’s railway excur¬ sion, sleeping, planning how to get work and how to escape it. From some unseen old fig¬ ure in flamboyant turban, bending over the washtubin the rear of a cabin, comes a crooned song of indescribable pathos ; behind a half- closed front shutter, a Moorish-hued amoroso in gay linen thrums his banjo in a measure of ecstatic gayety, preluding the more passionate melodies of the coming night. Here a fight ; there the sound of the fiddle and the rhythmic patting of hands. Tatters and silks flaunt them¬ selves side by side. Dirt and cleanliness lie down together. Indolence goes hand in hand with thrift. Superstition dogs the slow foot¬ steps of reason. Passion and self-control eye each other all day long across the narrow way. If there is anywhere resolute virtue, all round it is a weltered muck of low and sen¬ sual desire. One sees all the surviving types of old negro life here crowded together with and contrasted with all the new phases of " col¬ ored ” life — sees the transitional stage of a race, part of whom were bom slaves and are now freemen, part of whom have been born freemen but remain so much like slaves. It cannot fail to happen, as you walk along, that you will come upon some cabin set back in a small yard and half hidden, front and side, by an almost tropical jungle of vines and multiform foliage : patches of great sunflow¬ ers, never more leonine in tawny magnifi¬ cence and sun-loving repose ; festoons of white and purple morning-glories over the windows and up to the low eaves; around the porch and above the doorway, a trellis of gourd-vines swinging their long-necked, gro¬ tesque yellow fruit; about the entrance flam¬ ing hollyhocks and other brilliant bits of bloom, marigolds and petunias — evidences of the warm, native taste that still distinguishes

Page 854

MRS. STOWE'S ‘MNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 853 UNCLE TOM AT HOME. the negro after some centuries of contact with the cold, chastened ideals of the Anglo- Saxon. In the doorway of such a cabin, sheltered from the afternoon sun by his dense jungle of vines, but with a few rays of light glinting through the fluttering leaves across his seamed black face and white woolly head, the mus¬ cles of his once powerful arms shrunken, the gnarled hands folded idly in his lap, — his oc¬ cupation gone, — you will haply see some old- VoL. XXXIV.— 1 17. time slave of the class of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom. For it is true that scattered here and there throughout the negro towns of Ken¬ tucky are representatives of the same class that furnished her with her hero; true, also, that they were never sold by their Kentucky masters to the plantations of the South, but remained unsold down to the last day of slavery. When the war scattered the negroes of Ken¬ tucky blindly, tumultuously, hither and thither,

Page 855

854 STOIVE^S UNCLE TOM'^ AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. many of them gathered the members of their families about them and moved from the coun¬ try into these “ towns”; and here to-day the few survivors live, ready to testify of their re¬ lations with their former masters and mis¬ tresses, and indirectly serving to point a great moral: that, however justly Mrs. Stowe may have chosen one of their number as best fitted to ^ C ' j\ show the fairest aspects of domestic slavery in the United States, she de¬ parted from the common ' . truth of history, as it re¬ spected their lot in life, when she condemned her Uncle Tom to his tragical fate. For it was not the character of Uncle Tom that she greatly idealized, as has been so often asserted ; it was the category of events that were made to befall him. As citizens of the American Republic, these old negroes — now known as ‘‘colored gen¬ tlemen,” surrounded by “colored ladies and gentlemen ” — have not done a great deal. The bud of liberty was ingrafted too late on the ancient slave-stock to bear much fruit. But they are unspeakably interesting, as contem¬ poraries of a type of Kentucky negro whose virtues and whose sorrows, dramatically em¬ bodied in literature, have become a by-word throughout the civilized world. And now that the war-cloud is lifting from over the landscape of the past, so that it lies still clear to the eyes of those who were once the dwellers amid its scenes, it is perhaps a good time to scan it and note some of its great moral landmarks before it grows remoter and is finally hidden by the mists of forget¬ fulness. II. These three types — Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom, and the Shelbys, his master and mistress — were the outgrowth of natural and historic con¬ ditions peculiar to Ken- “ Perhaps,” wrote Mrs. Stowe in her , “the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky. The general prevalence of agricultural pur¬ suits of a quiet and gradual nature, not re¬ quiring those periodic seasons of hurry and tucky. novel. pressure that are called for in the business of more Southern districts, makes the task of the negro a more healthful and reasonable one ; while the master, content with a more gradual style of acquisition, had not those temptations to hard-heart¬ edness which always overcome frail hu¬ man nature, when the prospect of sudden and rapid gain is weighed in the bal¬ ance with no heavier counterpoise than the interests of the helpless and unprotected.” These words contain many truths. For it must not be forgotten, first of all, that the condition of the slave in Kentucky was measurably determined by certain physical laws which lay beyond the control of the most inhuman master. Consider the nature of the country — elevated, rolling, without miasmatic districts or fatal swamps; the soil in the main slaveholding portions of the State, easily tilled, abundantly yielding ; the climate, temperate and invigorating. Consider the sys¬ tem of agriculture — not that of vast planta¬ tions, but of small farms, part of which regularly consisted of woodland and meadow that re¬ quired little attention. Consider the further limitations to this system imposed by the range of the great Kentucky staples — it being in the nature of corn, wheat, hemp, and tobacco, not to yield profits sufticient to justify the employ¬ ment of an immense predial force, nor to require seasons of forced and exhausting labor. It is evident that under such conditions slavery was not stamped with those sadder features which it wore beneath a devastating sun, amid unhealthy or sterile regions of country, and through the herding together of hundreds of slaves who had the outward but not the in¬ ward discipline of an army. True, one recalls here the often quoted words of Jefferson on the raising of tobacco — words nearly as often misapplied as quoted; for he was considering the condition of slaves who were unmercifully worked on exhausted lands by a certain pro¬ letarian type of master, who did not feed and clothe them. Only under such circumstances could the culture of this plant be described as “ productive of infinite wretchedness,” and those engaged in it as “ in a continual state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support.” It was by reason of these physical facts that slavery in Kentucky assumed the

Page 856

MjRS. STOWERS ‘‘UNCLE TOM^' AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 855 phase which is to be distinguished as domes¬ tic ; and it was this mode that had prevailed at the North and made emancipation easy. Furthermore, in all history the condition of an enslaved race under the enslaving one has been partly determined by the degree of moral justification with which the latter has regarded the subject of human bondage; and the life of the Kentucky negro, say in the days of Uncle Tom, was further modified by the body of laws which had crystallized as the sentiment of the people, slaveholders them¬ selves. But even these laws were only a partial exponent of what that sentiment was ; for some of the severest were practi¬ cally a dead letter, and the clemency of the negro’s treatment by the prevailing type of master made amends for the hard provisions of others. It would be a most difficult thing to write the history of slavery in Kentucky. It is im¬ possible to write a single page of it here. But it may be said that the conscience of the great body of the people was always sensitive touch-

Page 857

856 MRS. STOWERS ‘‘UNCLE TOM'^ AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. ing the rightfulness of the institution. At the very outset it seems to have been recognized simply for the reason that the early settlers were emigrants from slaveholding States and brought their negroes with them. The com¬ monwealth began its legislation on the sub¬ ject in the face of an opposing sentiment. By early statute restriction was placed on the importation of slaves, and from the first they began to be emancipated. Throughout the seventy-five years of pro-slavery State-life, the general conscience was always troubled. The churches took up the matter. Great preachers, whose names were influential be¬ yond the State, denounced the system from the pulpit, pleaded for the humane and Chris¬ tian treatment of slaves, advocated gradual emancipation. One religious body after an¬ other proclaimed the moral evil of it, and urged that the young be taught and prepared as soon as possible for freedom. Anti¬ slavery publications and addresses, to¬ gether with the bold words of great po¬ litical leaders, acted as a further leaven in the mind of the slaveholding class. As evidence of this, when the new con¬ stitution of the State was to be adopted, thirty thousand votes were cast in favor of an open clause in it, whereby gradual emancipation should become a law as soon as the majority of the citizens should deem it expedient for the peace of society; and these votes represented the richest, most intelligent slaveholders in the State. In general the laws were perhaps the mild¬ est. Some it is vital to the subject in hand not to pass over. If slaves were inhumanly treated by their owner or not supplied with proper food and clothing, they could be taken from him and sold to a better master. This law was not inoperative. I have in mind the instance of a family who lost their negroes in this way, were socially disgraced, and left their neighborhood. If the owner of a slave had bought him on condition of not selling him out of the county, or into the Southern States, or so as to separate him from his family, he could be sued for violation of contract. This law shows the opposition of the better class of Kentucky masters to the slave-trade, and their peculiar regard for the family ties of their negroes. In the earliest Kentucky newspapers will be found advertise¬ ments of the sales of ne¬ groes, on condition that they would be bought and kept within the county, or the State. It was within chancery jurisdiction to prevent the separation of families. The case may be mentioned of a master who was tried by his church for unnecessarily separating a husband from his wife. Sometimes slaves who had been liberated and had gone to Canada volun¬ tarily returned into service under their former masters. Lest these should be overreached, they were to be taken aside and examined by the court to see that they understood the consequences of their own action, and were free from improper constraint. On the other hand, if a slave had a right to his freedom, he could file a bill in chancery and enforce his master’s assent thereto. But a clear distinction must be made be¬ tween the mild view entertained by the Ken¬ tucky slaveholders regarding the system itself and their dislike of the agitators of forcible and immediate emancipation. A community of masters, themselves humane to their negroes and probably intending to liberate them in the end, would yet combine into a mob to put down individual or organized antislavery ef¬ forts, because they resented what they regarded an interference of the abolitionist with their own affairs, and believed his measures inexpe¬ dient for the peace of society. Therefore, the history of the antislavery movement in Ken¬ tucky, at times so turbulent, must not be used to show the sentiihent of the people re¬ garding slav¬ ery itself. III. From these general con¬ siderations it is now possi¬ ble to enter more closely upon a study of the domes¬ tic life and relations of Uncle Tom and the Shel- bys. “ Whoever

Page 858

MRS. STOWE'S UNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 857 THE MAMMY. visits some estates there,*’ wrote Mrs. Stowe, “ and witnesses the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses and the affec¬ tionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream of the oft-fabled poetic legend of a pa¬ triarchal institution.” Along Avith these Avords, taken from Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” I should like to quote an extract from a letter Avritten me by Mrs. StOAve under date of April 30th, 1886 : “ In relation to your letter, I would say that T never lived in Kentucky, but spent many years in Cincinnati, which is separated from Kentucky only by the Ohio River, Avhich, as a shrewd politician remarked, was dry one-half the year and frozen the other. My father was president of a theological seminary at Walnut Hills, near Cincinnati, and with him I traveled and vis¬ ited somewhat extensively in Kentucky, and there be¬ came acquainted with those excellent slaveholders delineated in ‘ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ 1 saw many counter¬ parts of the Shelbys — people humane, conscientious, just, and generous, who regarded slavery as an evil and were anxiously considering their duties to the slave. But it was not till I had finally left the West, and my husband was settled as professor in Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, that the passage of the fugitive- slave law and the distresses that followed it drew this from me.”

Page 859

858 MRS, STOWE'S UNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. The typical boy on a Kentucky farm was tenderly associated from infancy with the negroes of the household and the fields. His old black Mammy” became almost his first mother and was but slowly crowded out of his conscience and his heart by the growing im¬ age of the true one. She had perhaps nursed him at her bosom when he was not long enough to stretch across it, sung over his cradle at lane on blooded alder-stalk horses, afterwards leading the exhausted coursers into stables of the same green bushes and haltering them high with a cotton string. It was one of these hadess children of original Guinea that had crept up to him as he lay asleep in the sum¬ mer grass and told him where the best hidden of all nests was to be found in a far fence corner, — that of the high-tempered, scolding " ON BLOODED ALDER-STALK HORSES.” noon and at midnight, taken him out upon the velvety grass beneath the shade of the elm- trees to watch his first manly resolution of standing alone in the world and walking the vast distance of some inches. Often, in boyish years, when Hying from the house with a loud appeal from the incomprehensible code of Anglo-Saxon punishment for small misde¬ meanors, he had run to those black arms and cried himself to sleep in the lap of African sympathy. As he grew older, alas ! his first love grew faithless ; and while Mammy ” was good enough in her way and sphere, his wandering aftections settled humbly at the feet of another great functionary of the house¬ hold, — the cook in the kitchen. To him her keys were as the keys to the kingdom of heaven, for his immortal soul was his immor¬ tal appetite. When he stood by the biscuit bench while she, pausing amid the varied in¬ dustries that went into the preparation of an old-time Kentucky supper, made him marvel¬ ous geese of dough, with farinaceous feath¬ ers and genuine coffee-grains for eyes, there was to him no other artist in the world who possessed the secret of so commingling the useful with the beautiful. The little half-naked imps, too, playing in the dirt like glossy blackbirds taking a bath of dust, were his sweetest, because perhaps his forbidden, companions. With them he went clandestinely to the fatal duck- pond in the stable lot, to learn the art of swimming on a wal¬ nut rail. With them he raced up and down the guinea-hen. To them he showed his first Bar- low knife; for them he blew his first home¬ made whistle. He is their petty tyrant to-day ; to-morrow he will be their repentant friend, dividing with them his marbles and proposing a game of hop-scotch. Upon his dialect, his disposition, his whole character, is laid the in¬ effaceable impress of theirs, so that they pass into the final reckoning-up of his life here and in the world to come. But Uncle Tom ! — the negro overseer of the place — the greatest of all the negroes — greater even than the cook, when one is not hungry. How often has he straddled Uncle Tom’s neck, or ridden behind him afield on a barebacked horse to the jingling music of the trace-chains! It is Uncle Tom who plaits his hempen whip and ties the cracker in a knot that will stay. It is Uncle Tom who brings him his first young squirrel to tame, the teeth of which are soon to be planted in his right forefinger. Many a time he slips out of the house to take his dinner or supper in the cabin with Uncle Tom; and during long winter evenings he loves to sit before those great roar¬ ing cabin fireplaces that throw their red and yellow lights over the half circle of black faces and on the mysteries of broom-making, chair- bottoming, and the cobbling of shoes. Like the child who listens to Uncle Remus,” he too hears songs and stories, and creeps back to the house with a Avondering look in his eyes and a vague hush of spirit. Then come school-days and vacations dur-

Page 860

MJ?S. STOWE'S UNCLE TOM” AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 859 THE COOK. ing which, as Mrs. Stowe says, he may teach Uncle Tom to make his letters on a slate or expound to him the Scriptures. Then, too, come early adventures with the gun, and ’coon hunts and ’possum hunts with the ne¬ groes under the round moon, with the long¬ eared, deep-voiced hounds — to him delicious and ever-memorable nights! The crisp air, through which the breath rises like white in¬ cense, the thick autumn leaves, begemmed with frost, rustling underfoot; the shadows of the mighty trees; the strained ear; the heart leaping with excitement; the negroes and dogs mingling their wild delight in music that wakes the echoes of distant hillsides. Away! Away! mile after mile, hour after hour, to where the purple and golden per¬ simmons hang low from the boughs, or where from topmost limbs the wild grape drops its countless clusters in a black cascade a sheer two hundred feet. But now he is a boy no longer, but has his first love-affair, which sends a thrill through all those susceptible cabins; has his court¬ ship, which gives rise to many a wink and innuendo ; and brings home his bride, whose

Page 861

86o MRS. STOWERS UNCLE TOM^^ AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. coming converts every youngster into a liv¬ ing rolling ball on the ground, and opens the feasts and festivities of universal joy. Then some day “ ole Marster ” dies, and the negroes, one by one, young and old, file into the darkened parlor to take a last look at his quiet face. He had his furious temper, “ole Marster” had, and his sins — which Cxod forgive! To-day he will be buried, and to¬ morrow “ young Marster” will inherit his sad¬ dle-horse and ride out into the fields. Thus he has come into possession of his negroes. Among them are a few whose work¬ ing days are over. These are to be kindly cared for, decently buried. Next are the ac¬ tive laborers, and, last, the generation of chil¬ dren. He knows them all by name, capacity, and disposition ; is bound to them by lifelong associations ; hears their communications and complaints. When he goes to town, he is charged with commissions, makes purchases with their own money. Continuing the course of his father, he sets about doing for them what is best under the circumstances, — mak¬ ing them capable, contented workmen. There shall be special training for special aptitude. One shall be made a blacksmith, a second a carpenter, a third a cobbler of shoes. In all the general industries of the farm, education shall not be lacking. It is claimed that a Ken¬ tucky negro invented the hemp-brake. As a result of this effective management, the South¬ ern planter, looking northward, will pay him a handsome premium for the blue-grass slave. He will have no white overseer. He does not like the type of man. Besides, one is not needed. Uncle Tom served his father in this capacity; let him be. Suppose, now, that among his negroes he finds a bad one. What shall he do with him ? Keep him ? Keeping him makes him worse, and moreover he corrupts the others. Set him free ? That is to put a reward upon evil. Sell him to his neighbors ? They don’t want him. If they did, he wouldn’t sell him to them. He sells him into the South. This is a statement, not an apology. Here, for a moment, one touches the terrible subject of the internal slave-trade. Negroes were sold from Kentucky into the Southern market because, as has just been said, they were bad, or by reason of the law of partible inheritance, or, as was the case with Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom, under con¬ straint of debt. Of course, in many cases, they were sold wantonly and cruelly ; but these, however many, were not enough to make the internal slave-trade more than an incidental and subordinate feature of the sys¬ tem. The belief that negroes in Kentucky were regularly bred and reared for the South¬ ern market is a mistaken one. Mrs. Stowe herself fell into the error of basing an argument for the prevalence of the slave-trade in this State upon the notion of exhausted lands, as the following passage from “ The Key to ‘ Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ ” shows : “ In Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky slave-labor long ago impoverished the soil almost be¬ yond recovery and became entirely unprofitable.” Those words were wTitten some thirty-five years ago and refer to a time long prior to that date. Now, the fact is that at least one-half the soil of Kentucky has never been under cultivation at all, and could not therefore have been exhausted by slave-labor. At least a half of the remainder, though cultivated ever since, is still not seriously exhausted ; and of the small portion, a large share was always natu¬ rally poor, so that for this reason slave-labor was but little employed on it. The great slave¬ holding region of the State was the fertile re¬ gion which has never been impoverished. I am sure that Mrs. Stowe will be glad to see her statement restricted in this way. To re¬ turn from this digression, it may well be that the typical Kentucky farmer does not find among his negroes a single bad one; for in consequence of the early non-importation of slaves for barter or sale, and through long as¬ sociation with the household, they have been greatly elevated and humanized. If he must sell a good one, he will seek a buyer among his neighbors. He will even ask the negro to name his choice of a master and try to con¬ summate his wish. No purchaser near by, he will mount his saddle-horse and look for one in the adjoining county. In this way the ne¬ groes of different estates and neighborhoods were commonly connected by kinship and inter¬ marriage. How unjust to say that such a master did not feel affection for his slaves, anxiety for their happiness, sympathy with the evils inseparable from their condition. Let me cite the case of a Kentucky master who had failed. He could pay his debts by sacrificing his ne¬ groes or his farm, one or the other. To avoid separating the former, probably sending some of them South, he kept them in a body and sold his farm. Any one who knows the Ken¬ tuckian’s love of land and home will know what this means. A few years, and the war left him without anything. Another case is more interesting still. A master, having failed, actually hurried his negroes off to Canada. Tried for defrauding his creditors, and that by slaveholding jurors, he was acquitted. The plea of his counsel, among other arguments, was the master’s unwillingness to see his old and faithful servitors scattered and suffering. After emancipation, old farm hands sometimes refused to budge from their cabins. Their

Page 862

MRS. STOWERS “UNCLE TOM^' AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 86i former masters paid them for their services as long as they could work, and supported them when helpless. I have in mind an instance where a man, having left Kentucky, sent back hundreds of dollars to an aged, needy domes¬ tic, though himself far from rich ; and another case where a man still contributes annually to the maintenance of those who ceased to work for him the quarter of a century ago. The good in human nature is irrepressible. Slavery, evil as it was, when looked at from the telescopic remoteness of human history as it is to be, will be adjudged an institution that gave development, on the side of virtue, to certain very noble types of character. Along with other social forces peculiar to the age, it produced in Kentucky a kind of gentleman farmer, the like of which will never appear again. He had the aristocratic virtues : high¬ est notions of personal liberty and personal honor, a fine especial scorn of anything that was mean, little, cowardly. As an agriculturist he was not driving or merciless or grasping ; for the rapid amassing of wealth was not among his passions, and the contention of splendid liv¬ ing was not among his thorns. To a certain carelessness of riches he added a certain pro¬ fuseness of expenditure; and indulgent toward his own pleasures, toward others, his equals or dependents, he bore himself with a spirit of ready kindness and proud magnanimity. In¬ tolerant of tyranny, he was in turn no tyrant. To say of such a man, as Jefferson said of every slaveholder, that he lived in perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions and unremitting despotism, and in the exaction of the most degrading submission, was to pronounce a judg¬ ment hasty and unfair. Rather did Mrs. Stowe, while not blind to his faults, discern his vir¬ tues when she made him, embarrassed by debt, exclaim : “If anybody had said to me that I should sell Tom down South to one of those rascally traders, I should have said, ‘ Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing ? ’ ” IV. But there was another person who, more than the master, sustained close relationship to the negro life of the household, — the mistress. In the person of Mrs. Shelby Mrs. Stowe described some of the best traits of a Ken¬ tucky woman of the time ; but perhaps only a Southern woman herself could do full justice to a character which many duties and many burdens endued with extraordinary strength and varied efficiency. She was mistress of distinct realms — the house and the cabins — and the guardian of the bonds between the two, which were always troublesome, often delicate, sometimes dis¬ tressing. In those cabins were nearly always VoL. XXXIV.— 1 18. some poor creatures needing sympathy and watch-care : the superannuated mothers help¬ less with babes, babes helpless without mothers, the sick, perhaps the idiotic. Apparel must be had for all. Standing in her doorway and pointing to the meadow, she must be able to say in the words of a housewife of the period, “There are the sheep; now get your clothes.” Some must be taught to keep the spindle and the loom going; others trained for dairy, laun¬ dry, kitchen, dining-room ; others yet taught fine needlework. Upon her falls the labor of private instruction and moral exhortation, for the teaching of negroes was not forbidden in Kentucky. She must remind them that their marriage vows are holy and binding; must interpose between mothers and their cruel punishment of their own offspring. What is hardest of all, she must herself punish for ly¬ ing, theft, immorality. Her own children, too, must be guarded against temptation and cor¬ rupting influences. In her life there is no ces¬ sation of this care : it renews itself daily, year in and year out. Beneath every other trouble is the secret conviction that she has no right to enslave these creatures, and that, however improved their condition, this life is one of great and necessary evils. Mrs. Stowe well makes her say : “ I have tried — tried most faithfully as a Christian woman should — to do my duty toward these poor, simple, depend¬ ent creatures. I have cared for them, in¬ structed them, watched over them, and known all their little cares and joys for years. . . . I have taught them the duties of the family, of parent and child, and husband and wife. . . . I thought by kindness and care and instruc¬ tion, I could make the condition of mine bet¬ ter than freedom.” Sorely overburdened and heroic mold of woman! Fulfilling each day a round of intricate duties, rising at any hour of the night to give medicine to the sick, liable at any time, in addition to the cares of her great household, to see an entire family of acquaintances arriving unannounced, with trunks and servants of their own, for a visit protracted in accordance with the large hos¬ pitalities of the time, — what wonder if, from sheer inability to do all things herself, she trains her negroes to different posts of honor, so that the black cook finally expels her from her own kitchen and rules over that realm as an auto¬ crat of unquestioned prerogatives? Mistresses of this kind had material reward in the trusty adherence of their servants dur¬ ing the war. Their relations throughout this period — so well calculated to try the loyalty of the African nature — would of themselves make up a volume of the most touching inci¬ dents. Even to-day one will find in many Kentucky households survivals of the old

Page 863

862 MRS. STOWE'S ‘-UNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. THE MISTRESS. order — find ‘^Aunt Chloe” ruling as a despot in the kitchen, and making her will the pivotal point of the whole domestic system. I have spent nights with a great Kentuckian, self- willed and high-spirited, whose occasional refusals to rise for a half-past five o’clock breakfast always brought the cook from the kitchen up to his bedroom, where she deliv¬ ered her commands in a voice worthy of Cath¬ erine the Great. ‘‘We shall have to get up,” he would say, “or there’ll be a row!” One may yet see, also, old negresses setting out for an annual or a semi-annual visit to their former mistresses, and bearing some offering, — a basket of fruits or flowers. I should like to men¬ tion the case of one who died after the Avar and left her tAvo children to her mistress, to be reared and educated. The troublesome and expensive charge Avas taken and faithfully executed. Here, in the hard realities of daily life, here is AAdiere the crushing burden of slavery fell, — on the Avomen of the South. History has yet to do justice to the noblest type of them, Avhether in Kentucky or elseAvhere. In vieAv of Avhat they accomplished, despite the difficul¬ ties in their Avay, there is nothing they have

Page 864

MRS. STOWE'S ‘‘UNCLE TOM" AT NOME IN KENTUCKY. 863 found harder to forgive in the women of the North than the failure to sympathize with them in the struggles and sorrows of their lot, and to realize that they were the real practical phi¬ lanthropists of the negro race. V. But as is the master, so is the slave, and it is through the characters of the Shelb)^s that we must approach that of Uncle Tom. For of all races, the African — superstitious, indolent, singing and dancing, most impres¬ sionable creature — depended upon others for of lard, naming the thief and the hiding-place. ‘‘ Say not a word about it,” replied his master. The next day he rode out into the field where the culprit was plowing, and, getting down^ walked along beside him. What’s the matter, William? ” he asked after a while; “ you can’t look me in the face as usual.” William burst into tears, and confessed everything. “ Come to-night, and I will arrange so that you can put the lard back and nobody will ever know you took it.” The only punish¬ ment was a little moral teaching; but CHASING THE KABBIT. enlightenment, training, and happiness. If, therefore, you find him so intelligent that he may be sent on important business com¬ missions, so honest that he may be trusted with money, house, and home, so loyal that he will not seize opportunity to become free ; if you find him endowed with the manly vir¬ tues of dignity and self-respect united to the Christian virtues of humility, long-suffering, and forgiveness, then do not, in marveling at him on these accounts, quite forget his master and his mistress, — they made him what he was. And it is something to be said on their behalf, that in their household was developed a type of slave that could be set upon a sublime moral pinnacle to attract the admiration of the world. Attention is fixed on Uncle Tom first as head-servant of the farm. In a small work on slavery in Kentucky by George Harris, it is stated that masters chose the crudest of their negroes for this office. It is not true, excep¬ tions allowed for. The work would not be worth mentioning, had not so many people at the North believed it. The amusing thing is, they believed Mrs. Stowe also. But if Mrs. Stowe’s account of slavery in Kentucky is true, the other is not. But those who have been able to accept both would not care, of course, to be restricted to one. It is true that Uncle Tom inspired the other negroes with some degree of fear. He was censor of morals, and reported derelictions of the lazy, the destructive, and the thievish. For instance, an Uncle Tom on one occa¬ sion told his master of the stealing of a keg the Uncle Tom in the case, though he kept his secret, looked for some days as though the dig¬ nity of his office had not been suitably upheld. It was ‘‘ Uncle Tom’s ” duty to get the others off to work in the morning. In the fields he did not drive the work, but led it — being a master worker — led the cradles and the reap¬ ing-hooks, the hemp-breaking and the corn- shucking. The spirit of happy music went with the workers. They were not goaded through their daily tasks by the spur of pitiless husbandry. Nothing was more common than their voluntary contests of skill and power. My recollection reaches only to the last two or three years of slavery; but I remember the excitement Avith which I witnessed some of these hard-fought battles of the negroes. Rival hemp-breakers of the neighborhood, meeting in the same field, would slip out long before breakfast and sometimes never stop for dinner. So it was with cradling, corn- shucking, or corn-cutting — in all work where rivalries were possible. No doubt there were other motives. So much was a day’s task ; for all over there was extra pay. A capital hand, by often performing double or treble the re¬ quired amount, would clear a neat profit in a season. The days of severest labor fell nat¬ urally in harvest-time. But then intervals of rest in the shade were commonly given ; and milk, coffee, or, when the prejudice of the master did not prevent (which was not often !), whisky was distributed between meal-times. As a rule they worked without hurry. De Tocqueville gave unintentional testimony to a

Page 865

864 MRS. STOWE'S UNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. THE PREACHER. characteristic of slavery in Kentucky when he described the negroes as loitering ” in the fields. On one occasion all the hands dropped work to run after a rabbit the dogs had started. A passer-by indignantly reported the fact at headquarters. Sir,” said the old gentleman, with a hot face, I’d have whipped the last damn rascal of ’em if they hadji't run ’im ! ” The negroes made money also off their truck-patches, in which they raised for sale melons, broom-corn, vegetables. When Charles Sumner was in Ken¬ tucky, he saw with almost incredulous eyes the comfortable cabins with their flowers and poultry, the fruitful truck- patches. and a gen¬ uine Uncle Tom — a black gentleman with his o wn w atch 1 ’ ’ W ell enough does Mrs. Stowe put these words into her hero's mouthy when he hears he is to be sold : “ I’m feared things will be kinder goin’ to rack when I’m gone. Mas’r can’t be ’spected to be a-pryin’ round everywhere as I’ve done, a-keepin’ up all the ends. The boys means well, but they’s powerful car’less.” More interesting is Uncle Tom’s char¬ acter as a preacher. Contemporary with him in Kentucky Avas a class of men among his people who exhorted, held prayer-meetings in the cabins and bap- tizings in the woods, performed marriage ceremonies, and en¬ joyed great freedom of movement. There was one in nearly every neighborhood, and all together they wrought effectively _ in the moral devel¬ opment of their race. I have nothing to say here touching the vast and sublime conception which Mrs. Stowe formed of ‘‘Uncle Tom’s” spiritual nature. But certainly no idealized manifestation of it is better than this simple occurrence: One of these negro preachers was allowed by his master to fill a distant ap¬ pointment. Belated once, and returning home¬ ward after the hour forbidden for slaves to be abroad, he was caught by the patrol and cru¬ elly whipped. As the blows fell, his only words were : “Jesus Christ suffered for righteousness’

Page 866

MRS. STOWERS -UNCLE TOM^^ AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. 865 sake ; so kin I.” Another of them was recom¬ mended for deacon’s orders and actually or¬ dained. When liberty came, he refused to be flee, and continued to work in his master’s family till his death. With considerable knowl¬ edge of the Bible and a lluent tongue, he would nevertheless sometimes grow confused and lose his train of thought. At these embarrass- ingjunctures it was his wont suddenly to call out at the top of his voice, ‘‘Saul! Saul! why persecutest thou me ? ” The effect upon his hearers was electrifying ; and as none but a very highly favored being could be thought worthy of enjoying this per¬ secution, he thus converted his loss of mind into spirit¬ ual reputation. A third, named Peter Cotton, united the vocations ofexhort- er and wood-chop¬ per. He united them literally, for one moment Peter might be seen standing on his log chopping away, and the next kneel¬ ing down beside it praying. He got his mistress to make him a long jeans coat and on the ample tails of it to embroider, by his direction, sundry texts of Scripture, such as : Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden ! ” Thus literally clothed with righteousness, Peter went from cabin to cabin preaching the Word. Well for him if that other Peter could have seen him ! The apostle might have felt proud to go along. Phese men sometimes made a pathetic ad¬ dition to their marriage ceremonies: Until death or our higher poiuers do you separate ! ” x\nother typical contemporary of Uncle Tonies was negto-ftddleT. It sliould be remembered that before he hears he is to be sold South, Uncle Tom is pictured as a light-hearted creature, capering and dancing in his cabin. There was no lack of music in those cabins. The banjo was played, but more commonly the fiddle. A home-made variety THK FIDDLKR. of the former consisted of a crook-necked, hard-shell gourd and a piece of sheep-skin. 1 here were sometimes other instruments, — the flageolet and the triangle. I have heard of a kettle-drum’s being made of a copper still. (A Kentucky negro carried through the war as an osseous tambourine the .skull of a mule, the rattling teeth being secured in the jaw-bones.) ()1 course the bones were everywhere. Negro music on one or more instruments was in the bigbest vogue at tbe bouse. The young Ken-

Page 867

866 MJiS. STOWE'S UNCLE TOM" AT HOME IN KENTUCKY. tuckians often used it on serenading bravuras. The old fiddler, most of all, was held in rev¬ erent esteem and met with the gracious treat¬ ment of the ancient minstrel in feudal halls. At parties and weddings, at picnics in the summer woods, he was the soul of melody, and with an eye to the high demands upon his art, he widened his range of selections and perfected according to native standards his in¬ imitable technique. The deep, tender, pure SAVING HIS MAS'I'liK. feeling in the song “ Old Kentucky Home ” is a true historic interpretation. It is wide of the mark to suppose that on such a farm as that of the Shelbys the ne¬ groes were in a perpetual frenzy of discontent or felt any burning desire for freedom. It is difficult to reach a true general conclusion on this delicate subject. But it must go for some¬ thing that even the Kentucky abolitionists of those days will tell you that well-treated ne¬ groes cared not a snap for liberty. Negroes themselves, and very intelligent ones, will give you to-day the same assurance. Nay, it is an awkward discovery to make, that some of them still cherish resentment toward agitators who came secretly among them, fomented discon¬ tent, and led them away from homes to which they afterwards returned. And I want to state here, for no other reason than that of making an historic contribution to the study of the human mind and passions, that a man’s views of slavery in those days did not always deter¬ mine his treatment of his slaves. The only case of mutiny and stampede that I have been able to dis¬ cover in a certain part of Kentucky, took place among the negroes of a man who was known as an outspoken emancipationist. He pleaded for the freedom of the negro, but in the mean time worked him at home with the chain round his neck and the ball resting on his plow. Christmas was, of course, the time of holiday merry¬ making, and the Ketchin’ marster an’ mistiss Christ- mus gif’ ” was a great feat¬ ure. One morning an aged couple presented them¬ selves. Well, what do you want for your Christmas gift ? ” “ Freedom ! Mistiss.” ‘‘ Freedom ! Haven’t you been as good as free for the last ten years ? ” '‘Yaas, mistiss; but — freedom mighty sweet ! ” “Then take your free¬ dom ! ” The only method of cel¬ ebrating the boon was the moving into a cabin on the neighboring farm of their mistress’s aunt and being freely supported there as they had been freely supported at home ! Mrs. Stowe has said, “There is nothing picturesque or beautiful in the family attach¬ ment of old servants, which is not to be found in countries where these servants are legally free.” On the contrary, a volume of incidents might readily be gathered, the picturesqueness and beauty of which are due so largely, if not wholly, to the fact that the negroes were not free servants, but slaves. Indeed, many could never have happened at all but in this relation¬ ship. I cite the case of an old negro who was

Page 868

HAND-CAR 412. C. F. R. buying his freedom from his master, who con¬ tinued to make payments during the war, and made the final one at the time of General Kirby Smith’s invasion of Kentucky. After he had paid him the uttermost farthing, he told him that if he should ever be a slave again, he wanted him for his master. Less to the point, but too good to leave out, is the case of an old negress who had been al¬ lowed to accumulate considerable property. At her death she willed it to her young mas¬ ter instead of to her sons, as she would have been allowed to do. But the war! what is to be said of the part the negro took in that ? Is there in the drama of all humanity a figure more picturesque or more pathetic than the figure of the African slave, as he followed his master to the battle-field, marched and hun¬ gered and thirsted with him, served and cheered and nursed him, — that master who was fighting to keep him in slavery ? In¬ stances are too many ; but the one may be mentioned of a Kentucky negro who followed his young master into the Southern army, staid with him till he fell on the field, lay hid out in the bushes a week, and finally, after a long time and many hardships, got back to his mistress in Kentucky, bringing his dead master’s horse and purse and trinkets. This subject comprises a whole vast field of its own ; and if the history of it is ever written, it will 867 be written in the literature of the South, for there alone lies the knowledge and the love. It is only through a clear view of the pecul¬ iar features of slavery in Kentucky before the war that one can understand the general status of the negroes of Kentucky at the pres¬ ent time. Perhaps in no other State has the race made less endeavor to push itself into equality with the white. This fact must be explained as in part resulting from the con¬ servative ideals of Kentucky life in general. But it is more largely due to the influences of a system which, though no longer in vogue, is still remembered, still powerful to rule the minds of a naturally submissive and most sus¬ ceptible people. The kind, even affectionate, relations of the races under the old regime have continued with so little interruption that the blacks remain content with their inferior¬ ity, and lazily drift through life. I venture to make the statement, that wherever they have attempted most to enforce their new-born rights, they have either, on the one hand, been encouraged to do so, or have, on the other, been driven to self-assertion by harsh treat¬ ment. But treat them always kindly and always as hopelessly inferior beings, and they will do least for themselves. This, it is believed, is the key-note to the situation in Kentucky ; and the statement is made as a fact, not as an ar¬ gument. James Lane Allen. HAND-CAR 412. C. P. R. (on the CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY.) OR the last hour the construction train had been traveling slowly ; for a whole hour it had cautiously stumbled over the loosened fish¬ plates with a monotonous chug- gety-chug, chunkety-chunk that had long ceased to awaken any interest, sym¬ pathetic or otherwise, in our drowsy minds. Finally it stopped altogether with a jerk, as if it had suddenly but conclusively realized the vanity of any further effort. The astonished cars pulled at their pins and pounded their buffers as if in angry expostulation at this freak of the locomotive, and some of the men offered energetic advice to the Deity as to what ultimate course to pursue with the man¬ agement of the road in general and the long freight-links in particular. Can’t help it, can’t help it 1 ” said the brakeman as he came along the top of the box-car ahead. “ The rails have spread, and it’ll be two hours, may be three, before we start her up again.” But the time passed, the train still waited, and we began to grumble stoutly, wondering why, in the name of various places and things, they chose to dally in such a dismal, god-for¬ saken spot. It was raining at Rat Crossing ; in fact it had been raining slowly, steadily, for two days with a certain desperate pertinacity. There had been no previous drought to render such an abundance of water desirable ; in the country through which we passed we had no¬ ticed no fields of parched wheat, no withering trees, no drooping vegetables, no thirsty cattle, no traveled roads on which the dust required laying. On the contrary, the lakes were all full to overflowing, the rivers swollen, the ravines drowned, the swamps soaked, and the tanks so full that the relief-pipes poured forth a contin¬ uous stream of spattering expostulation. Notwithstanding this lavish excess of water the air seemed no fresher than before the storm, when the thermometer in the caboose regis¬ tered 97 degrees on the shady side of the track. Both front and side doors were wide open, and some of the boys, in a vain endeavor to produce a passing sensation of freshness, sat down in the semi-fluid puddles, covered with a film of cin-

Page 869

868 HAND-CAR 412, C. P. R. THROUGH THE FLAMES. clers,and dangled their legs in the pour outside. But to no purpose ; the air was dead, the water warm, and we continued to stifle and growl. The view from the car was not interesting. To the left, as far as we could see through the endless, unfolding curtain of rain, a dismal muskeg swamp stretched away to the south of the track, broken only by rare clumps of ragged tamarack. Both slopes of the bank were covered by long beds of pink flre-weed varied with patches of soggy pigeon-grass, and to the north lay the desolate waste of bride through which we had been traveling for in¬ terminable hours. Here and there among the shiny black poles of the burnt trees little bunches of ‘‘ popples ” rustled their loose leaves with a nervous activity that seemed out of place in the dead quiet of their sur¬ roundings, and their silly, feeble fluttering, like the barking of a frightened cur, Avas so exasperating that we could scarcely refrain from throwing a stone at the shivering things and calling out : “Oh, shut up ! ” The underbrush was thin, and the ridges of pink gneiss, banded Avith black, thrust their bare, smooth surfaces through the mottled moss like great pock-marked shoulders of giants pro¬ truding from their tattered shirts; in the gullies between them the Avater gurgled dismally be- loAv the tangle of dead trees, and ran aAvay under glossy pigeon-berry leaves, on to Avhich the grotesque pitcher-plants, opening Avide their lids, poured their surplus water. Save by the patter of the rain on the car-top and the pish- pishing of the engine bloAving off steam, the silence Avas absolute, and rendered only more profound by the booming crash of a falling tree. Nothing moved but the crazy poplar-trees, and once more Ave marveled at the recklessness of the men Avho had built a railroad through this dead, barren wilderness Avhere there Avas nothing but rock, Avater, and burnt timber. Besides our party of engineers, detailed on remeasurement work, there Avere tAvo stran¬ gers in the car ; they had blank passes from the chief and Avere going West; as they kept to themselves, talking together most of the time and not seeming to care for our company, Ave had paid no especial attention to them. Every man of us, however, turned suddenly as the younger of the two, speaking excitedly in a loud, swaggering tone intensified by a strong twang, said to his companion : “ I tell you, Morton, that man Matt Mur¬ phy Avas the biggest coAvard that ever Avalked this earth ; noAv don’t you forget it ! ”

Page 870

HAND-CAR 412. C. F. R. The intonation of the man’s voice was so vicious, so mean, that we all felt convinced that the statement was false, and, although utterly ignorant of the facts, each of us felt an instinctive desire to contradict him. But before any one could think of what to say, a deep voice from the end of the car condensed our feelings in the energetic amllaconic answer : “ That’s a - lie ! ” The speaker, Jack Collins, was the quietest man on the staff, and had acquired a certain reputation for minding nobody’s business but his own. Jack was somewhat of an enigma to us all ; we did not understand, but we all liked him, for he had a way of doing small charities and helping the boys in a pinch that showed a truly good nature and a warm heart. What his exact work was none of us knew ; he had the name of being a good locator and explorer, especially among the older men, with whom he usually associated ; his reports never passed through our office, and no complaints were ever made about the irregularity of his work ; he always went off before office-hours with his compass and note-book, but the men not infrequently found him lying in a secluded corner reading, or sleeping with his book be¬ side him. He was a large, powerful fellow, with a heavy beard that concealed half his face, of which the only remarkable features were a strong, determined mouth and long, slanting black eyes that kept moving slowly round from left to right and suddenly jumped back^to their starting-point. Sometimes, when we pressed him very hard, he told us a story dr some adventure which had happened to him, and it was only then that his eyes were at rest, void of expression, as if he were read¬ ing from some far-away book. He spoke slowly but well, in a low, even voice that com¬ manded the attention of his hearers ; we never questioned the truth of his stories, and when ever any statement seemed a trifle extravagant we acknowledged that it must be our fault if we could not understand the circumstances. For a moment after his unusually emphatic denial no one spoke ; the stranger had risen at once, but seeing that Jack did not move he sat down again, filled a fresh pipe, and waited. Jack was sitting on the floor at the end of the car looking down pensively at the revolver that hung from his belt ; after a short pause he looked up at the ceiling, and in his usual slow way he told us the story of Matt Murphy’s last work on the road. It had happened two years before ; Murphy was then road-master at Campbell’s Point, and far from being thought a coward, he was looked upon as the only man on the line who had pluck enough to run a snow-plow at the head of five engines into a choked cut, and VoL. XXXTV.— 119-120. 869 stand firm when every plank fairly quivered under the strain. One day, while he was doz¬ ing in his office, for Matt was lazy when he had nothing to do, the door opened with a bang, and the operator, in a state of breathless excitement, ran into the room. “ There’s a bush-fire below the long bridge, Mr. Murphy,” he called out; “ the wind is this way, and the Pacific Emigrant is due in an hour. What the devil shall we do ? ” Matt started in his chair and repeated the man’s words in a dazed sort of way. “ Bush- fire — and they are due in an hour. My God ! ” Then he got up, staggered across the room, and leaned against the wall. The baggage- master, who had overheard, stepped in from the adjoining office, and the operator with a shrug of his shoulders turned to him and said in a perplexed way : ‘‘ Murphy’s drunk as usual ! — what’s to be done ? ” Drunk, you blamed idiot! ” cried Nolan indignantly ; his wife and kids are on that train. Get out of here, you scented squirrel, and blamed quick too, or I’ll make your empty head so blessed sore you couldn’t see daylight through a ladder! Say, Matt, old man - ” He did not finish his sentence, for the next moment Murphy pushed him aside and sprang out on the platform where the men were collecting to hear the news. Boys,” he cried in a voice that seemed to rasp in his throat, boys, look a-here ! I want three good men to go to hell with me ! Haul up a pumper — 412 ! catch a hold there ; now heave away — so ! Drop her on the track — that’s it! Slap on the oil, you fellows. Two hundred lives ! My God ! ” he continued as if thinking aloud. “ Quick, blame you ! off with your shirts and hurry! all aboard! That’s the style; now come along, boys, and work F' He was the first on the car and took the rear handle behind the brake ; Long Mike the Finlander, Jim Reeves, and ‘^Dumb Dick” jumped on after him ; an oil-can, a monkey- wrench, and an axe were thrown on ; the men gave them a shove to start, and away they went down the long grade, fifteen miles an hour. Instinctively, — for they merely knew that there was a fire below the bridge and that the train was soon due, — instinctively Murpliy’s three companions had understood what they had before them. They were all old hands and knew that this was a desperate venture, a forlorn-hope, and that their only chance of success lay in their working well together, each man doing his duty absolutely, regardless of what might happen. But all this they felt rather than reasoned, for men of action reflect slowly, and the pace was so severe that they had no time for reflection.

Page 871

870 HAND-CAR Matt leaned over and slipped the key of the switch to Jim Reeves, who was in front. “ If we haven’t time to unlock her, Jim,” he said so quietly that it hurt the men to hear him, “jump on the lever and break the chain. Now, fellows, heave away for all you’re worth.” The first six miles passed quickly ; to right and left the road and the trees flew backwards, and nothing was heard but the short, quick pant¬ ing of the men, the burr of the cogs, and the clickety-click, clickety-click of the wheels over the fish-plates. On the half-mile up-grade to Bass’ Falls they had to slacken up a little and hang on the handles, while the sweat ran off their smooth backs clown over their muscular arms to the crossbar and dripped off on to the platform ; but with their heads down and every muscle braced, they worked on steadily, panting hoarsely through their closed teeth. They had but one idea in common, and that was, as Jim Reeves tersely expressed it, that theymust reach that qualifiedswitch or bust. At regular intervals Murphy, who seemed to have renounced his customary profanity, repeated his short, earnest exhortation, more as a prayer than as a command : “ Steady, boys, steady ! for God’s sake ! ” The top of the grade was reached ; then came a level run of two miles before the curve to the bridge. Ahead of them on each side of the track the workmen, apprehending some disaster from the enormous volume of smoke that was blowing toward them in pur¬ plish clouds rimmed with golden sunlight, had assembled before the Falls’ station; and as Murphy’s gang came along, up and down, up and down, every man in that crowd felt his eyes grow moist and his throat dry. With one accord English and Yankee, French- Cana¬ dians and Italians, Swedes and Finlanders, gave one solitary ringing cheer, and stood silent again, as if suddenly awed by the simple heroism of these four men, apparently rushing consciously, determinedly to certain death, and working fiercely as if they were escaping from some great danger instead of hurrying into it. Not a man spoke as they flashed past. A few pushed their hats back and stopped as if ashamed of the movement, watching the hand- car grow smaller and smaller above the con¬ verging lines of the rails. Swearing Dan Dunn, the walking boss, stepped out into the middle of the track be¬ tween his men, threw down his pick, and wiped his wet forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. “ Boys,” he said, “ that gang’s a-goin’ to everlastin’ destruction as plucky as any fellows I ever see, every blamed man of them, and I’ll bet a barrel of high-wines to a cup of tea they know it too. Matt Murphy knows it, sure.” 412, C. R. R. Then, turning suddenly and pointing down the track, he cried in his usual bullying tone ; “ Give them a yell there, blame you, — all to¬ gether now, and yell till you bust, or I’ll break the son of tadger’s head that hangs fire.” For once, although they had their custom¬ ary effect of insuring prompt compliance with his orders, Dan’s threats were superfluous ; for once his wishes coincided with the wishes of his men, and from those five hundred throats- there burst such a cry that the flames ahead seemed to halt for a moment in their forward rush. On the hot, pulsating air it floated away across the muskeg, over the heads of the de¬ voted crew, and reechoed with a booming roll from the slate walls of the rock cut through which they pushed their car. But though this expression of their comrades’ sympathy cheered and helped them, it told each man only too plainly that this was his last job on the track. “ That’s good-bye for the long contract,”’ said Reeves, and Mike in his broken English repeated : “Yas! Koot-pye, pyes, — koot-pye!” but both relapsed into silence at the sound of Murphy’s quiet remonstrance. ^ “ Steady, boys, steady ! and mind the brake, Jim ; we’re right on the down-grade.” At the end of the level was the grade to the bridge and the fire ; beyond the fire the bridge, the switch, and the fated train with its human cargo hurrying to destruction, for the wind was high, and the engineer would naturally think the fire far away until he was in the very midst of it. Then the struggle began. The smoke ran along the embankment towards them in great flying gusts, so dense they could barely see the platform of the car ; the heat became intense, but they never wavered. Perhaps it was because women were few in the dismal country which had become their home, and that, as is usual in purely male communities, every man invested the gentler sex collectively with a romantic halo, in exact inverse proportion to the profane skeptical contempt which he professed for them indi¬ vidually ; perhaps it was because some linger¬ ing spark of chivalry, driven into the West by the sneers of a higher civilization, had flamed up suddenly in the hearts of these rough journeymen ; or perhaps it was merely the humane hope of saving the wives and children of men who had slept under the same blanket, worked in the same ditch, and shared the same biscuit; — but, whatever the cause, it was suf¬ ficient to silence selfish consideration and make them look upon the sacrifice of their lives as no more than the fulfillment of a ne¬ cessary duty. All around them the trees were falling in rows ; broad flashes of flame, quenched for a

Page 872

HAND-CAR 412, C, P, R. moment in the black smoke, burst up and flared in the wind like shreds of some vast tattered canopy. Along the ground the brush wilted away, burning with a sharp crackle like that of a musketry discharge ; and up through the hollow tamaracks the fire swept with a noise like the bellow of a filling sail. Great trunks tottered and fell with a booming crash like the sound of distant cannon. The hot air quivered around them, and they gasped spas¬ modically as they shook off the burning sparks and laughed hysterically between short howls of pain. Ahead all was red and black, a sea of fire. Murphy called out once more, “ Steady, boys, steady ! ” and they plunged into it res¬ olutely, with the desperation of a wounded bull charging on the espacla’s blade. ‘‘ Steady, my men ! up and down, up and down! stick to her, lads; it’ll soon be over now.” Then the flames closed upon them, and as they lowered their heads before the whirlwind of fire and smoke that was hurled at them, they shivered at the crisp crepitation of their hair and beard, and felt the hot grip of the fire fasten on them as they writhed in pain. Something struck the car and it reeled for a moment. “ Stand by her, boys ; steady there 1 ” They grasped the handles again and struggled on ; by the hollow sound of the wheels they knew that they were on the bridge at last, and it lent them fresh strength. Then something struck them again. Hard, hard at work there I Jim, Mike, Dick, all of you! — pump away, for God’s sake, boys ! we are nearly there. Try again ! the switch, boys, mind the switch ! all together now, heave ! ” But strain as they might, — and they strained with a fierce, des¬ perate energy, for there was something in Mur¬ phy’s tone that went to their hearts, — the car was fast and would not move. Then they heard a wild cry above the thundering crash of the bridge as it fell from under them ; the car was suddenly shot ahead and sprang away easily over the debris that lay across the iron. The trestle was passed ; but at the rear handle Mike stood alone; his partner. Matt Murphy, was gone ; that last falling brace had struck him squarely across the arms, and when he saw that he could no longer pull his weight, he jumped off and put all his remaining strength in that last push that sent them through into the comparative quiet beyond. Steady, boys, and God be with you ! ” came once more from out the chaos of flames behind them, and that was all. On the other side, beyond the clay cut, they heard the bel¬ 871 lowing whistle of the engine; a few more strokes, and they reached the switch. “ Jump, Jim, for God’s sake, jump quick ! ” The next moment the train swept round the curve over the frog and glided smoothly down the siding, where it stopped ; but the hand-car had disappeared. When they came back they found Jim Reeves’s body by the broken lever of the switch ; Long Mike too they picked up beside him, with a shattered leg and an ugly gash across the forehead, while on the other side of the track ‘‘ Dumb Dick ” was clutching the broken handle of the hand-car and sobbing like a child. Strong men lifted their crushed bodies with tender care, and side by side they laid them bn a bed of fragrant balsam boughs ; a woman’s light hand wiped away the blood from Mike’s rough face and held moist linen to his bleeding brow. Soon he opened his eyes and looked solemnly, with a puzzled expression, into the anxious faces of the women and children that stood around him, silently watching for his recovery. Then he remem¬ bered all; for a moment a bright smile lit up his plain features and died away slowly as he caught sight of his companions stretched be¬ side him. Coming through the distant smoke the rays of the red evening sun touched their pale faces with a ruddy glow and wove a soft golden halo around their passive heads. With a slight quiver Long Mike passed away in the sunset silence to join his comrades. When Jack finished there was a pause; then we all looked up at him with the same question on our lips. He rose slowly from the corner in which he had been sitting. “You want to know where I heard all this ? ” he asked. “ Oh ! I am ‘ Dumb Dick.’ To be frank with you, boys, I have been a special detective on the C. P. R. for several years, and if I tell you so now it is because my con¬ tract is up as soon as I have handcuffed Mr. James Bowles over there. Don’t you move ! ” he called out, covering him with his revolver. “I suppose,” he continued, addressing the man he had called Bowles, “ that it would have been more correct to chain you first and tell my story afterwards; but 1 knew you could not give me the slip. That man, boys, was Mur¬ phy’s partner in a contract on this road and tried to get him to swindle the company. Matt wouldn’t do it and threatened to show him up, — and now that he’s dead this fellow takes his revenge out in attacking his character. However, he’s so badly wanted at headquar¬ ters just now that he will keep his mouth shut about Murphy for the next ten years.” JoJm Heard^ Jr.

Page 873

THE HUNDREDTH MAN* BY FRANK R. STOCKTON, Author of “Rudder Grange,” “The Lady, or the Tiger?” “The Late Mrs. Null,” “The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and Mrs. Aleshine,” etc. XXXIV. HEN our poor Gay had been sufficiently aroused from her lethargy of soul and body to make one feeble stroke in bat¬ tle against Death, the action and its result appeared to interest her, and she made other strokes with encouraging effect. Day by day her arm grew stronger, her attitude more determined, until the enemy, from falling back little by little, retreated altogether, accompanied by the insidious ally who had incited him to the conquest of Gay’s young life. To all Gay’s friends this Avas a season of great rejoicing, and to Mrs, Justin it was a resurrection. She had watched the gradual death of the bright, strong young friend she had known so well, and had seen her utterly pass away, leaving in her stead a helpless, list¬ less, careless being whose living was not life and of whom there was but little left to die. But now Gay was once more the true Gay, not yet quite her old self, but hour by hour approach¬ ing nearer to that most lovable creation. As she grew stronger her friends came to her; and among them, Stratford. This friend, from the moment he had heard of the change in Gay, had braced himself for action should she return to that life which had been sup¬ posed lost to her. In that event there must be no doubt, no indecision, no hesitation ; his part must be chosen and must be enacted steadfastly and honestly unto the end. There was no hesitation, no doubt, no in¬ decision. He came to her as the friend of old, the adviser, the helper, the master. These, and no more, he intended ever to be. AVithout a question or a thought. Gay seated herself at his feet. To her the action was again as nat¬ ural as when she had sat there before. Arthur Thorne came also to Gay; came earlier than Stratford. He had told Mrs. Jus¬ tin of that memorable interview with the almost dying girl, and he concealed nothing of what he had done, or felt, or said. Mrs. Justin smiled * Copyright, 1886, by Frank R. sadly. Her heart Avas pained, but she could not reproach him. If it should be that he had given Gay back to her, he deserved gratitude which could not be measured. She was ready to yield him this, but she gave him no more. His hopes were not her hopes. When Gay Avas strong enough to come into the library and sit in the easy-cushioned chair before the tall wide AvindoAv, Arthur, as has been said, Avas among her earliest visitors. Nothing could have induced him to deny himself this privilege, and yet it was a hard thing for this young man to present himself before this young girl. He had said all that lover could say, but as a lover he must now say nothing. What may burst forth from a full soul to one whose life is ending must be re¬ pressed when that life is sloAvdy and feebly beginning again. He must meet her as though that other meeting had not been, and Avithout knowing Avhat effect his words had had upon her. Arthur had plunged into love’s Rubicon, but he had not crossed it. Chilling and dangerous as might be its Avaters, he Avould make no stroke forAvard until the time had come for him to seek his fate upon the other shore. While Gay had been constantly in the mind of Arthur, so into Gay’s mind, as she quietly lay on her lounge and in her chair during the happy hours Avhen in a sIoav and steady tide her health and strength flowed back upon her, came thoughts of Mr. Thorne. On that day Avhen his voice had roused her from her dream of girlhood and from her half-uncon¬ scious gazing into the bright world of empty air beyond herAvindoAv, she had not wondered when she turned and saw him at her side. The faculty of Avonder had gone to sleep or had died. All things to her were commonplace and ordinary. But it Avas not long before the recollection of that kneeling figure by her side caused Avonder to revive. At first she asked herself Avhy he had come to her ? Avhy it had been he Avho had incited her to turn on Death and resist him ? But this question she did not ask long ; it answered itself She remembered Avell his Avords, and having looked on his pale and earnest countenance, it was impossible to Stockton. All rights reserved.

Page 874

THE HUNDREDTH MAN forget it, or to misconstrue its meaning. Then she asked herself, Why did he feel this way ? Thus questioning, musing, pondering, she went back over her intercourse with Arthur Thorne, called to mind this and that thing he had done or said, suited motives to his actions, or resolved his actions back to motives, and so Arthur came often and dwelt long in her thoughts without meeting with any hustling or incommoding company. The matter was now plain enough to her on his side, but not at all plain on hers. Often and often she tried to make it plain to herself on her side, but she could not do it. She came to the conclusion that this was something too hard for her just now, and she gave up the attempt. One definite thing she did for Mr. Thorne, — she gave him a new po- ^ sition in her mind. Up to this time she had always looked upon him as a Number Two. He was gentle ; he was considerate ; he was kindness itself ; he was talented ; he had learned many things and he knew how to think for himself; he was handsome, with the bearing of a gentleman ; and in his soul she had found many sympathies; but, notwith¬ standing all this, she had looked upon him as Number Two. But now there was a change. Speaking as he had spoken, and feeling as he had felt, no matter why or to what end, there was no one to whom Arthur Thorne could stand second. When the time came that she could see vis¬ itors the heart of Gay was troubled. Of course he would come to see her, and what would he do ? His presence might be embarrassing, but then, on the other hand, it would be so very strange if he did not come. What would he say to her? Would he look as he did when she last saw him ? As for herself — what she should say, or think, or do, she knew not. The whole affair was very puzzling, and it de¬ pended so much upon circumstances. When Gay’s friends began to come to her, Mrs. Justin never left her alone with visitors. Enthusiasms and draughts needed her watchful eye. She too was anxious about Mr. Thorne, but when he came he brought with him no cold accompaniment of outer air, left behind him no open doors nor undrawn portiere, and his manner was under the same quiet restraint that it was wont to be. But his face was very pale, and any stranger could have seen that his interest in Gay’s condition was deep and true. Gay herself was a little pale at first, but this soon passed away. When he had gone, she fell into a state of wonder. Could it be true that all that had happened which she re¬ membered ? Or was it one of the queer dreams which had come to her at that time ? But after he had made her two or three visits, Gay 873 began to imagine that what she saw in him was an outer crust of kind restraint and ten¬ der regard for her new strength, and that there was something under this crust which some¬ times shook it, although so slightly that per¬ haps no one knew it but herself. The presence of Mrs. Justin was a bar to words or emotion, but Gay wondered that there was not the least little bit of a sign that he remembered what he had said ; if, indeed, he had ever said it. If he ever should speak, would he show that he had repented having been carried away by his sorrow that she was going to die ? or would he think it well not to speak again ? or would he repeat what he had said ? Gay was quite right when she thought she saw beneath Arthur’s quiet restraint some signs of internal commotion. In fact he was torn, he was almost riven; he slept not by night, nor took aught of comfort in his life. He, too, questioned himself, but he only asked : What does she think of me ? What does she expect of me ? ” One day, when Arthur was with the two ladies in the library, Mrs. Justin was called away to receive a visitor. Gay offered no opportunity to the embarrassment of silence, and began instantly to speak. Do you know, Mr. Thome,” she said, that I have a very funny idea about you ? I believe that you have forgotten my name, and that you are ashamed to ask anybody what it is. You don’t address me by any name whatever, and I sometimes fancy that while you are sitting here you are going over the alphabet in your mind, hoping that in that way the name will come to you, and I suppose that in such cases people generally slip too quickly over A, because it is the first letter, and they are in such a hurry to get on to the others.” Arthur drew closer to her. “ Once,” he said, speaking very quickly, and in a low tone, ‘‘ I called you by a name which per¬ haps I had no right to use, but, until I know that, I can never call you by any other. Do you remember? ” A tender glow came into Gay’s cheeks and temples as though the fair Hygeia had sud¬ denly touched her with a wand and sent into her veins the rich young blood which once coursed through them. There was a faint sparkle in her eyes, but this was hidden by the long lashes which now shaded them. You spoke very kindly to me that day,” she said. ‘‘ You were so good to me — ” “ Oh, don’t speak of kindness,” interrupted Arthur. “ I beg you not to think of that now. Don’t you remember that I called you Gay ? that I said I loved you ? Don’t you remem¬ ber that ? ”

Page 875

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 874 ‘‘ I remember,” * said Gay, speaking very sofdy, with her eyes still more shaded, “ but I have thought — have fancied — that it might have been one of those dreams I used to have.” ‘‘ It was not a dream,” said Arthur, a trem¬ bling earnestness in his voice. “It was all real. Oh, Gay, dear Gay, I called you that. I said I loved you. May I call you so again ? May I say so once more ? ” “ Mr. Thorne,” said Gay, still speaking very softly, “ I think that this is all too soon. You could not have had those feelings very long; and as for me, — not knowing but it might be a fancy or a dream, — what you now say seems to come so unexpectedly. Do you not think you ought to wait ? ” “ Wait ! ” exclaimed Arthur. “ How long ? ” “ I don’t know,” said Gay — “ some time.” “ And may I love you while I wait ? ” asked Arthur. The glow on her cheeks and temples in¬ creased somewhat, as if Hygeia had forgotten to remove her wand, and it spread to the lit¬ tle ears which lay among the soft light brown, almost golden, hair which once had covered Arthur’s hand, and even spread itself upon his wrist. The light in her eyes, now but slightly shaded, seemed to flash something of itself into her lips, which tremulously moved, as though they held between them a word with which they might play but not let go. But the word was too strong for them, and as for a moment Gay’s large eyes were turned upon Arthur’s glowing face, it made a quick escape. “ Yes,” said Gay. Wait! Who on earth could have waited? Arthur did not; in a moment he had her in his arms. And, when she was there, it came to her in a flash of consciousness that all the thinking she had been lately doing, all the wondering, all the questioning of herself, had been but the natural, simple, and certain path¬ way to those arms. XXXV. When Enoch Bullripple reached the west¬ ern town in which lived those persons who were said to have inherited legal rights in the Cherry Bridge farms, he found but one of them. This was a Mr. Hector Twombly, a man of about forty years of age, a very stout iind even plump figure, a round face totally devoid of beard, red cheeks and lips, and with IS much of an outward air of boyishness as is :ompatible with forty years of actual age. By profession he was a stock-raiser, a general mer¬ chant, a grist and saw mill owner, and one of the proprietors of an important stage and mail route. Mr. Twombly listened with great attention to Enoch’s account of the business which had brought him there, and then he invited the old farmer to take supper with him, and to stay all night, and, in fact, to make his house his home as long as he should be in that part of the country. The next morning in the very plainly furnished counting-room of his store, in which the greater part of his extensive and varied business was conducted, he communi¬ cated to his visitor his decision regarding the Cherry Bridge property. “ Now, then, Mr. Bullripple,” said Mr. Twombly, sitting up very straight in his chair, with one plump, well-shaped hand upon each of his outspread knees, “ this is about the size of this business as it appears to me. My uncle, Thomas Brackett, who I never saw and have heard very little about, — my mother having married young and come out here pretty much among the first settlers, — owned the farm you live on and that other one, and when he died they went, naturally enough as every¬ body thought, to his nephew Peter, who was living with him, and who everybody looked upon as the same thing as his son and heir. That is the way in which I have heard the matter stated.” “You’ve put it just right,” said Enoch. “ Now, then, when Mr. Peter Brackett walked into that property there wasn’t no¬ body there to ask any questions, and it isn’t likely that Mr. Peter Brackett bothered his head about any sister of his uncle who went out West ever so long ago, and might be dead by that time, for aught he knew. Perhaps he never heard of her.” “You bet he did!” said Enoch, “but that’s neither here nor there.” “No,” said Mr. Twombly, “that’s neither here nor there. Well, then, after a while Mr. Peter got tired of farming and concluded to sell out, and he did sell out to you and to that other gentleman, and you two paid for the property, cash down, clean and finished, bargain and sale. You showed me your pa¬ pers, and I suppose the other gentleman could show his, if he was here.” “Yes,” said Enoch, “but that farm was first bought by my brother-in-law, and he had to give a mortgage on the land. This was took up and paid by Mr. Stull, who now owns the farm.” “All right,” said Mr. Twombly. “You and Mr. Stull now own the two farms, having bought and paid for them; and then, some¬ how or other, you hear that old Tom Brackett had other nephews besides the aforenamed Peter, and that I am one of them and my brother Ajax the other, and you come out here and put the whole case before me. Now,

Page 876

THE HUNDREDTH MAN. it ain’t for me to ask whether you did this be¬ cause you was so touchy honest that you couldn’t sleep in your bed till you knew everybody had his rights, or because you thought somebody else might come out here and make a bargain with us and so get the inside track of you. That’s what I haven’t got the right to bodier myself about.” ^^No,” said Enoch, you hain’t.” But this much I have got a right to do, and that is to say that when you bought that farm you bought it, and when you paid for it it was yours. Now, if I and my brother Ajax have any rights in this business, and there isn’t any doubt but what we have, our rights are in the money that Peter Brackett got for those farms, and not in the farms themselves, which you two men have fairly bought and paid for.” “ That’s not the way the law looks at it,” said Enoch. Peter Brackett sold what wasn’t all his.” “ That’s the way I look at it,” said Mr. Twombly. Burn the law ! And my brother Ajax will look at it just as I do, because if he don’t I’ll break his back, and he knows it. Now, sir, we’ve got nothing to do with those two farms that have been fairly bought and sold. What we’ve got to do with is the money Peter Brackett got for them. You’ve told me where he is settled, and when we’re ready we’ll come down on him. That’s our busi¬ ness. And all we’ve got to do with you is to have the papers made out, giving you a clear title to your farm, as far as I and Ajax are concerned. My lawyer here will attend to that, and there is a cowboy in town who is going to start out early to-morrow morning to the ranch where Ajax is just now, and he’ll sign them and send them back day after to-morrow. And if that Mr. Stull wants his business fixed up in the same way, all he’s got to do is to send his documents out here and let me see for myself that everything is all straight, and we’ll give him the sam*e sort of title as we give you.” Thereupon Mr. Twombly and Mr. Bullrip- ple shook hands on the bargain. And while waiting for the arrival of the return cowboy with the signature of Ajax, Enoch’s host drove him about the surrounding country in a hand¬ some buggy with two fast trotters, showed him over his two mills and his store, his stock yards and his stage stables, and gave him to eat and drink of the best and the most abun¬ dant. When Mr. Bullripple returned to Cherry Bridge, he felt that he now truly owned his farm, but that he had lost his opportunity of triumphing over Mr, Stull and Zenas Turby. It was true that he had prevented those two plotters from triumphing over him. Enoch 87s had expected more than this, but this was really so much he felt that he ought to be sat¬ isfied. He had, indeed, come off w^onderfully well. . But there was a minor triumph left open to him, and the crafty old farmer was not slow to avail himself of it. Pie would assume the position of the benefactor of Mr. Stull. He would say to him : ‘‘ You need trouble your¬ self no more about this affair; I have been out West myself and have arranged everything with the heirs of your property. I will tell you exactly what you have to do in order to make your title quite secure. I am very glad to be able to put you once more on a sound footing in our part of the country ; and this, too, with¬ out any trouble or expense on the part of your¬ self or your agents.” Enoch knew that this would be very hard on J. Weatherby Stull, whose soul would natu¬ rally scorn the idea that it was possible for any one to bestow a benefit upon him, especially one whom he hated on account of injuries conferred. He knew too that by this course of action he would deal a heavy, although an indirect, blow at his old enemy, Zenas Turby. Enoch had put this and that together to such purpose that he had become convinced that Turby was Stull’s agent in this matter of the Cherry Bridge farms; and that, when the principal should be made aware that the whole business had been settled without the knowl¬ edge of his agent, the latter would, as Enoch put it to himself, ‘‘ ketch fits.” To a certain extent Enoch’s plan was quite successful. When Mr. Stull was informed of what had been done he was angry, and would have been mortified had he not attributed the failure of his scheme to the stupidity of Turby, who was summoned to New York, and who did, in very truth, catch fits. Had this failure of a well-planned project occurred a month or two earlier, Mr. Stull would have been much more affected by it than he now was. Other plans and purposes had failed at about the same time, and the strong mind of Mr. Stull was rising above the storms which beset him, in order that he might see how he could take advantage of them. It was his custom to turn, if possible, bad for¬ tune, as well as good, to his advantage. When he discovered that his ownership of Vatoldi’s was becoming dangerous, not only on account of John People’s intended marriage but be¬ cause of his daughter Matilda’s possession of his secret, and her opposition to a Vatoldi connection, and when he found out that Matilda would certainly marry Mr. Crisman, with or without paternal consent, he was at first extremely indignant, and afterwards sternly resolved.

Page 877

THE HUNDREDTH MAN 876 He brought his mind to the determination that Vatoldi’s had had its day, and must be put behind him, but he would put it behind him in his own and in an advantageous way. He came to the same decision concerning his daughter’s marriage. Crisman, he found, was a man of good character and fair con¬ nections and of more than the average business ability. If his hard-headed and inflexible daughter would marry this man she might do so, and he would place the couple in a position which would be creditable to himself and his family, and in which Crisman might rise if he should prove equal to mercantile soaring. Then Mr. Stull would put Matilda and her husband behind him. Another object grander than a restaurant or a daughter’s marriage loomed up before him, and to this he would devote his life. When John People was informed by Mr. Stull that the latter had decided that John should buy out Vatoldi’s, the young man was fright¬ ened. It was too much ! It was beyond his belief in his powers ! He would much prefer that Mr. Stull should sell out to some one else, and that he should continue as junior partner and manager. But Mr. Stull told him that it was impossible to sell to any one else. The transaction could take place between John and himself, and fno others. The terms decided upon by Mr. Stull were not easy ones. John was to raise a certain sum in cash, and pay it down ; he was then to make payments at fixed and frequent intervals both as interest and as installments on the remainder of the high price put upon the establishment, which would make it necessary for him to do a very lucrative business, and for a long time to hand over to Mr. Stull a very large proportion of his profits. When Miss Burns heard of Mr. Stull’s pur¬ pose in this matter she was not frightened. It would be a hard and long fight, she knew, but she advised John to go into it. In fact, she decided that he should go into it. As soon as the transfer of the business should be completed they would marry, and then she would give up her position in the store, and enter, heart, soul, and body, into her husband’s business. She would sit behind the desk and be the cashier, thus saving money to John and giving him the opportunity to be in all the other places in which he ought to be, and to do all the other things which he ought to do. John People is now owner of Vatoldi’s. He has not paid for it, and it will be years before he does so, but, so far, he has fulfilled all his obligations. His brow has been a good deal furrowed by the necessity of hard work and careful calculation in order to do this, but all signs of resignation have disappeared from it, and have been succeeded by a general air of cheery earnestness. His wife is much plumper than when she was Miss Burns ; sweet-breads, lamb-chops, and all the delicacies of the res¬ taurant are her own whenever she wants them, without a preliminary reservation in the cor¬ ner of an ice-box. Mrs. People makes her son long visits, especially in the winter when there is little to do at the farm, and although she thinks John the most fortunate as well as the most deserving of men, she is convinced that no better fortune ever befell him than when he escaped the clutches of that Stull girl. There is one great change in the Vatoldi establishment : Mr. Stull is never seen there. He has put it behind him. The restaurant, however, is as well managed and as popular as it ever was. ‘‘ I shall make it a rule,” said John People to his wife, ^Uo manage that place exactly as if I expected, at from fifteen to twenty min¬ utes past one, to see Mr. Stull walk in at the door and clap his eyes on everything on the premises, from a spot on a table-cloth to an overdone steak.” Thus over the fortunes of Vatoldi’s hovers the invisible but protecting influence of J. Weatherby Stull. The good fortune of John People not only bore heavily upon that young man, but upon his Uncle Enoch. Mr. Bullripple entirely ap¬ proved of the purchase of Vatoldi’s, although he fully appreciated the weight of the load that it would lay not only on his nephew’s shoulders, but his own. John had not been able to save much money, and in order to make the first cash payment it was necessary that he should be generously helped. To this end Enoch collected every cent that he could possibly gather together, and put himself un¬ der obligations to Mr. Stratford for the re¬ mainder of the money needed. The old farmer had no fear but that in the course of years John would be able to pay back everything, and would eventually die a rich man. If his nephew had desired assistance in order to enter into agricultural pursuits Mr. Bullrip¬ ple would not have lifted a finger to aid him. But he had great faith in the right kind of a restaurant. Miss Matilda had most truly succeeded in her various plans, but while she was entirely satisfied, she was not elated. She had expected to succeed. She thoroughly understood her father’s character, and although she knew that it would be utterly impossible to dam or stop thepowerful current in which his nature flowed, it was quite possible, were the impediment wide enough, high enough, and solid enough, to turn the stream in a new direction. She could be such an impediment, and having thrown herself across his current, suggesting

Page 878

THE HUNDREDTH MAN at the same time a change of channel, she was not at all surprised to see the change made. In the course of the winter Mr. Crisman and Miss Stull were married in a manner en¬ tirely suited to the social position of the bride. To these proceedings Mr. Stull gave a lofty and dignified assent. The element of interest in his approbation appeared to be but moder¬ ate, and, entirely contrary to his previous rec¬ ord, he interfered very little with the details of this important family occasion. It is prob¬ able, however, that no feeling, whether of apathy or disapprobation, could have prevented him from taking his usual place as director of aftairs had he not known that that position had been assumed by his daughter Matilda. With capital furnished by his father-in-law, Mr. Crisman entered, as a junior partner, the great mercantile firm of which he had been an employee, and he looked upon himself as in every way a most fortunate and successful man. In his marriage relation he was indeed quite fortunate. From the very beginning his wife set herself to work to manage him, and in or¬ der that she might do so without trouble to herself or dissatisfaction to him, she also set herself to work to make him happy. Having, by diligent study, made herself thoroughly acquainted with his character, she succeeded admirably in both these regards. When Mr. Crisman thought of that love affair which antedated his engagement to Miss Stull, — and during said engagement such a thought did sometimes come to him, — he found that the place in his sentiments which once had been filled by this love was now oc¬ cupied by a modified form of anger, which was principally aimed at a want of respect for his opinions, his position, and himself which had been exhibited by all the persons with whom that affair had connected him. But these thoughts came less and less frequently — like Mr. Stull, Crisman was a man who could put things behind him. When the powerful current of Mr. Stull’s action and interest had been turned from its course by his daughter Matilda, aided by the force of events, she had no idea of the new channel in which it would flow. No one, in¬ deed, except her father, could have had such an idea, and even he, when he came to survey and fully comprehend the nature and extent of this fresh channel, was surprised at what he deemed its importance and its grandeur. Mr. Stull was a man whose pleasure in life was to be found in lofty flight. Whether he soared as a restaurant keeper, a social and church pillar, or as a financial operator, he wished to fly high and look down on his fel¬ lows j and his strength of wing was powerful and enduring. There were some flights he 877 could not take, and these he did not essay. He would have liked to look down upon rail¬ road kings, but he dwelt upon no Andes, nor were his wings of condor size. He had long had in mind a scheme which pleased him much ; and for some years he had thought that a great part of the fortune which he intended to leave behind him should be devoted to carrying out this scheme. But now his purpose was changed. His speculations and investments had been exceptionally suc¬ cessful, and he was a very rich man much sooner than he had expected to be. It was quite possible for himself to do, in these vigorous years of his natural life, what he had expected to order that others should do after his death. When this decision had been reached, it greatly gratified the soul of Mr. Stull. This new ob¬ ject of his life was far higher, far nobler, than anything he had yet touched. It would give him. loftiness, it would give him power. Mr. Stull determined to found, create, and direct a Law Hospital. He had never studied law, nor did he pretend to understand its prin¬ ciples or practice ; but, in the course of his varied business life, he had become acquainted with many phases of its eftect upon society as well as many phases of its relations to the or¬ dinary and to the extraordinary man. Pon¬ dering upon this subject, he had Lome to the conclusion that, in its general relation to man¬ kind, law was to be looked upon in the same light as medicine and surgery. If the latter demanded hospitals for their perfect and com¬ plete practice, so did the former. As the means of amelioration or removal of those evils against which the powers of medicine and surgery are directed are open to all, so Mr. Stull thought the amelioration or removal of those evils against which the power of the law is directed should be equally open to all. Therefore he determined to found a Law Hos¬ pital, where those persons who were unable to pay for legal protection should receive it as freely as the ailing poor receive medicine and treatment in hospitals of the other kind. When Mr. Stull undertook an important enterprise, he brought his strong and practi¬ cal intellect to bear upon its probable disad¬ vantages as well as its advantages, and before he spoke of this great scheme, he made him¬ self quite ready to meet any objections that might be urged against it. When persons came to him and said that such an institution would have a very bad effect upon the poor, for it would encourage them to be quarrel¬ some and go to law, Mr. Stull rose easily above the objectors and replied : ‘‘There is no more reason to suppose that than to suppose that the ordinary hospital encourages sickness or broken legs among the poor. It will be almost

Page 879

878 THE HUNDREDTH MAN impossible for a sham or unworthy case to get into my institution. There will be a Board of Examiners composed of high legal talent who will investigate every application, and if there are not good grounds for taking it into the courts it will be rejected, but if, on the other hand, it shall be found to be based on good grounds, it will be carried through to the very end, to the very end, sir ; if it should be the case of a brakeman against a millionaire, it will be carried through; you may be sure of that. And then, again, sir, it will prevent a great deal of litigation. There are lawyers, sir, who take up unjust cases for clients who are unable to pay in hopes of sharing in un¬ just advantages. My institution will greatly assist in putting an end to such practices. The fact that it never takes up an unjust case will shine as an example, sir, and those who are unjustly proceeded against will find in my Law Hospital a strong ally in defense.” Mr. Stull was a vigorous upholder of strict justice. He was not generous, he was not for¬ bearing, he had not a kindly spirit. His pres¬ ent enterprise was intended as much to defeat and humble the unjust rich as to assist the oppressed poor. If he could have legally re¬ venged himself upon Enoch Bullripple he would have done so gladly ; and had he seen another person oppressing the old farmer in a perfectly legal way he would have had no dis¬ position to interfere. Furthermore, what he did for the advantage of mankind must carry out some of his own practical ideas, and must be of advantage to himself. These conditions he fully expected the Law Hospital to fulfill. In the first place, it would give him power and position. By its aid he might be enabled to take an occasional flight above the head of even a railroad king. There was no station which would please and suit him so well as that of the Founder and Director-in-Chief of the great institution he intended to establish. Then, again, he expected his Law Hospital to become a source of profit. It would be an admirable school of practice for young lawyers who would pay fees for this advan- tage, and who would not only be supervised by the body of high legal talent who would direct the operations of the institution, but would receive from said body much valuable assistance and instruction. The vast resources of the Hospital would be open, not only to the poor, but to those who would be able to pay, and its strictly regulated charges and prompt and vigorous methods would prove a great inducement to persons who would hesi¬ tate to place themselves in the power of unre¬ stricted and irresponsible legal advisers. The scope of this institution was a very wide one. It would be a great Law School; the decisions of its Board of Examiners would meet with such high regard that, in time, it would come to be looked upon almost in the light of a court of law ; it offered to the poor the legal redress of wrongs ; and to all men it would afford the opportunity of obtaining the assistance of the law of the land in a system¬ atic, economic, and perfectly practical and business-like manner. And it would enable this generation, and in all probability many generations hereafter, to read on a marble slab in the great entrance hall the name of its Founder and first Di¬ rector-in-Chief, J. Weatherby Stull. XXXVI. As THE winter months went on, the goddess Hygeia did so truly touch with her wand the fair Gabriella Armatt that this young person bloomed out in full health and vigor; and when the jonquils in the little yard in front of Mrs. Justin’s town house forced their tender blossoms into the uncertain air of spring, they were greeted with no happier eyes than those of Gay. Our heroine was not one who had put things behind her. In her life it had seemed as if certain things had pushed her before them, and, remaining stationary themselves, had gradually faded from sight as she went on. That first young love, which had grown to be a true, conscientious, but anxious aflec- tion, had not gone on with her. She had now begun a new life, and it was a life without that old affection. If, in those melancholy days in the past year when she seemed to be left alone in the world, her soul had, half-unconsciously, looked toward Horace Stratford with vague feelings other than those of friend to friend or scholar to master, those feelings existed no more. Her new life had begun without them. When Stratford looked upon her now he saw not that certain something, that sympa¬ thetic stamen which at times springs sudden¬ ly from a woman’s heart, and which had made her perfect in his eyes; she was his friend, loyal and warm; she was his disciple, earnest and trusting; but on her face that certain something never appeared — for him. The effect upon Arthur Thorne of his love for Gay was somewhat surprising, even to him¬ self. He had thought it would change him, make a different man of him, but in fact it produced in him but little change that was radical. His tastes, his strict regard for the proper, and his conscientious views of duty to himself and society, still remained upon the solid foundations on which they had always stood, but into his nature had come a warm-

Page 880

THE HUNDREDTH MAN hued liberality of feeling which was born of his admiration for Gay’s nature. Gay’s nature was a strong one and fully animated, and it would have had its influence upon any man, but it could not put into a man’s nature what was not there. With Cris- inan she would have failed utterly, but in the warm radiance of her influence the colors came out in the nature of Arthur Thorne as the bright spots and brilliant hues appear upon the wings of a moth as he draws their somber folds from his cocoon into the bright light of day. As to Gay’s aspirations and the life-work to which she had looked forward, these two young people, from having widely different opinions, came to think alike. When Gay started on her course of advanced study, she had not definitely fixed her mind upon the special path in life to which this study was to lead her, but she had determined that she would do something which should satisfy her ambition and be of service to other people. She had no notion that one whit of her work in college and afterwards should be wasted. She was to be something which should be worthy of herself, of her instructors, and of those heights of knowledge to which she hoped to climb. Even when she became engaged to Crisman her ideas did not change, although by the counsel of Mrs. Justin, and, subse¬ quently, by the influence rather than by the direct advice of Stratford, she modified them. She would put her intellect in perfect training before she decided on what field she would send it forth to do battle. Even the academic degree to which she directed her course was looked upon more as a guiding point than an object; she might never claim it, but if she made herself worthy of it her intellect would be well trained. When Gay’s purpose of study was made known to Arthur Thorne during the days he spent at Cherry Bridge, he was very much opposed to it and talked a great deal to Mrs. Justin about it. He believed that when any one entered upon a course of earnest endeav¬ or, it should have a fixed and definite object. If the young lady intended to devote herself to any branch of philosophy, science, or litera¬ ture, she should concentrate her energies upon those studies which would prepare her for her future work. When he became engaged to Gay this idea of the limitation and concen¬ tration of her energies, even at her present stage of progress, was still in his mind. But when the two had talked over the matter they came to think alike. Arthur still believed that earnest study should have its object, but he soon understood that Gay had an object, and his soul expanded itself to appreciate its beauty 879 and value. He agreed with her that the con¬ viction that one’s intellect has been well cul¬ tivated is a sufficient reward for the labor of tlie cultivation. They would work together, — there could be no doubt about that, — and if the time came when they felt they were able to do something for the world which in a degree would repay the world for what it had done for them, then they would do the thing which they believed they best could do. If their young ambitions led them truly, they would not only penetrate to the head-waters of thought and knowledge, but they would lend their services towards clearing out their channels and digging down into their sources. But if ambition led them not so far, they would stop when they could feel content that they had fulfilled the duty they owed their intellects, and had done their best to qualify themselves to think and act and live. There is no danger that they will flag in this projected career. They are strong, earnest, and enthusiastic; and in Stratford they will always have a wise and steadfast friend and backer. Their life-work and their life-love will go on together, and the one will not be interfered with by the other. Gay and Arthur were married in the time of early roses ; and then they went away and wandered joyously; coming back when the peaches were ripe and the juice of the grape- clusters was beginning to turn red and purple. Then it was that Mrs. Justin invited the young couple to her house at Cherry Bridge, to which Stratford still came over from the Bullripple farm on most of the days of the week. These holidays of Gay and Arthur could not last much longer, for in the early autumn they must go into the city and begin the life they had marked out for themselves, which, for Arthur, would not be a very easy one, for it was nec¬ essary that his professional labors should keep pace with every other kind of work or study. They made good use, therefore, of this pleas¬ ure-time, and Gay, knowing the country better than her husband, generally acted as guide and suggestor. She took him, at the close of a day, through the sugar-maple grove to the little em¬ inence where they could sit on the top rail of the fence and see the sunset glories of the western sky. They rowed upon the creek, and it was astonishing what a memory Gay pos¬ sessed for sunken trees, shallow places, and sharp turnings. She guided Arthur into the tributary stream overshadowed by the forest, trees, and they stopped at the spot in the heart of the woods where all seemed quiet and motionless save the dragon-flies and the flecks of sunlight on the surface of the pool and where a spreading and low-hanging grape-vine formed a water-arbor under which a little boat might

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88o HIS AI^GUMENT. lie. Now the air bore not the perfume of the tender blossoms of the vine, but the wild grapes hung dark, though not yet ripe, from under their broad leaves, and Gay could put up her hand and touch them. One morning the two were sitting together on a rustic bench on the lawn. Gay held a book in her lap, on the blank leaf of which she was making a sketch, not from nature, but from her imagination. Arthur, one arm on the back of the seat, watched with ardent interest the rapid growth of the drawing. They were in the shade, but all the air was full of light. Gay was very lovely that day. She wore a morn¬ ing gown of pale blue, the front generously draped with white soft-hanging lace which ran away in graceful lines into the folds which lay about her feet. The wide brim of her hat was lined beneath with light blue silk, which threw a subduing influence upon the golden tints which always seemed ready to break out in the masses of hair beneath it, and extended its shade over the fair face, now slightly bent towards the drawing. Upon the crown and broad straw brim of this hat were clusters of apple-blossoms, which lay as naturally as if it had been spring-time and they had just dropped there from some tree. Mrs. Justin and Stratford were standing upon the piazza looking at the young people on the lawn. It was a charming picture and well worthy their contemplation. Now, sir,” said the lady, ‘‘ there we see the full fruition of your work. Are you satis¬ fied with it ? ” THE I am,” he answered. “ It was good work. And are you yet fully content ? ” “Yes,” said Mrs. Justin, “I believe I am. You know it was hard for me to be content, but I am beginning to see that events, as you controlled them, have resulted in great good.” Stratford made no answer. If he had spoken from the depths of his heart he must have said that great good indeed had resulted from what he had done; great good to Gay, great good to Arthur, and even good to that first lover, Crisman ; good to every one, except himself. For in the fight he had fought he had been hurt — he had conquered, but he had been hurt. The essence of Mrs. Justin’s nature was loy¬ alty, loyalty to past affection, loyalty to present friendships, and it was the ardent earnestness of this sentiment which threw into her friend¬ ship a sensitive and perceptive sympathy. Stratford said nothing ; but she saw in his face something of what he thought. “ My friend,” said she, laying her hand upon his arm, “could you have loved that girl ? ” “Yes,” said Stratford, “I could have loved her.” Mrs. Justin looked at him intently for a moment, and then she said : “ Horace Strat¬ ford, I believe that you, yourself, are the hun¬ dredth man you have been looking for.” An expression of surprise came into the face of Stratford, and then he smiled, but the smile did not last long. “If you think so,” he said, I accept your decision, and my search is ended.” END. Frank R, Siockton, HIS ARGUMENT. AD HOMINEM. “ T)UT if a fellow in the castle there J[j Keeps doing nothing for a thousand years. And then has — Everything! (That isn’t fair But it’s — what has to be. The milk-boy hears The talk they have about it everywhere.) “ Then, if the man there in the hut, you know. With water you could swim in on the floor, (And it’s the ground. The place is pretty, though. With gold flowers on the roof and half a door I) Works — and can get no work and nothing more. “ What I will do is — nothing ! Don’t you see ? Then I’ll have everything, my whole life through. But if I work, why I might always be Living in huts with gold flowers on them too — And half a door. And that won’t do for me.” Queenstown, Ireland. Sarah M, B. Piatt.

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[BEGUN IN THE AUGUST NUMBER.^ AZALIA. By the author of Uncle Remus,” ‘‘ Little Compton,” etc. VI. SUMMONS was sent for Uncle Prince, and the old man soon made his appear¬ ance. He stood in a seri¬ ously expectant attitude. ‘‘ Prince,” said General Garwood, these ladies are from the N orth. They have asked me about the dead Union soldier you brought home during the war. I want you to tell the whole story.” Tell ’bout de what, Marse Peyton ? ” Both astonishment and distress were depicted on the old negro’s face as he asked the question. He seemed to be sure that he had not heard aright. “About the Union soldier you brought home with your young master from Virginia.” “ Whar Miss Hallie, Marse Peyton ? Dat her in dar wid de peanner ? ” “Yes, she’s in there.” “ I ’lowed she uz some’r’s, kaze I know ’tain’t gwine never do fer ter git dat chile riled up ’bout dem ole times ; en it’ll be a mighty won¬ der ef she don’t ketch col’ in dar whar she is.” “ No,” said General Garwood • “ the room is warm. There has been a lire in there all day.” “Yasser, I know I builted one in dar dis mo’nin’, but I take notice dat de draffs dese times look like dey come bofe ways.” The old man stood near the tall mantel, facing the group. There was nothing servile in his attitude ; on the contrary, his manner, when addressing the gentleman who had once been his master, suggested easy, not to say affectionate^ familiarity. The firelight, shining on his face, revealed a countenance at once rugged and friendly. It was a face in which humor had many a lough struggle with dignity. In looks and tone, in word and gesture, there was unmistakable evidence of that peculiar form of urbanity that cannot be dissociated from gentility. These things were more ap¬ parent, perhaps, to Helen and her aunt than to those who, from long association, had be¬ come accustomed to Uncle Prince’s peculiar¬ ities. “ Dem times ain’t never got clean out’n my min’,” said the old negro, “ but it bin so long sence I runn’d over um, dat I dunner whar- abouts ter begin skacely.” “ You can tell it all in your own way,” said General Garwood. “ Yasser, dat’s so, but I fear’d it’s a mighty po’ way. Bless yo’ soul, honey,” Uncle Prince went on, “dey was rough times, en it look like ter me dat ef dey wuz ter come ’roun’ ag’in hit ’u’d take a mighty rank runner fer ter ketch one nigger man w’at I’m got some ’quaintance wid. Dey wuz rough times, but dey wa’n’t rough ’long at fust. Shoo! no! dey wuz dat slick dat dey ease we-all right down ’mongs’ de wuss kind er tribbylation, en we ain’t none un us know it twel we er done dar. “ I know dis,” the old man continued, ad¬ dressing himself exclusively to Miss Eustis and her aunt; “ I knows dat we-all wuz a-gittin’ ’long mighty well, w’en one day Marse Peyton dar, he tuck ’n’ jinded wid de army; en den ’twa’n’t long ’fo’ word come dat my young marster w’at gwine ter college in Ferginny, done gone en jinded wid um. I ax myse’f, I say, w’at de name er goodness does dey want wid boy like dat ? Hit’s de Lord’s trufe, ma’am, dafar chile wa’n’t mo’ dan gwine on sixteen ef he wuz dat, en I up ’n’ ax myse’f, I did, w’at does de war want wid baby like dat ? Min’ you, ma’am, I ain’t fin’ out den w’at war wuz — I ain’t know w’at a great big maw she got.” “ My son Ethel,” said Mrs. Garwood, the soft tone of her voice chiming with the notes of the piano, “was attending the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. He was just six¬ teen.” “ Yassum,” said Uncle Prince, rubbing his hands together gently, and gazing into the glowing embers, as if searching there for some clew that would aid him in recalling the past. “ Yassum, my young marster wuz des gone by sixteen year, kaze ’twa’n’t so mighty long ’fo’ dat, dat we-all sont ’im a great big box er fix- in’s en doin’s fer ter git dar on he’s birfday; en I sot up mighty nigh twel day tryin’ ter make some ’lasses candy fer ter put in dar wid de yuther doin’s.” Here Uncle Prince smiled broadly at the fire. “ Ef dey wuz sumpin’ w’at dat chile like, hit wuz ’lasses candy; en I say ter my ole ’oman,I did,‘’Mandy Jane, I’ll make de candy.

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882 AZALIA, en den w’en she good en done I’ll up en hol¬ ler feryou, en den you kin pull it.’ Yassum, I said dem ve’y words. So de ole ’oman, she lay down ’cross de baid, en I sot up dar en b’iled de ’lasses. De ’lasses ’u’d blubber en I’d nod, en I’d nod en de ’lasses ’u’d blubber, en fus news I know de ’lasses ’u’d done be scorched. Well, ma’am, I tuck ’n’ burnt up mighty nigh fo’ gallons er ’lasses on de ac¬ count er my noddin’, en bimeby w’en de ole ’oman wake up, she ’low dey wa’n’tno excu- sion fer it ; en sho nuff dey wa’n’t, kaze w’at make I nod dat a-way ? ‘‘ But dat candy wuz candy, mon, w’en she did come, en den de ole ’oman she tuck ’n’ pull it twel it git ’mos’ right white; en my young marster, he tuck ’n’ writ back, he did, dat ef dey wuz anythin’ in dat box w’at make ’im git puny wid de homesickness, hit uz dat ar ’lasses candy. Yassum, he cert’n’y did, kaze dey tuck ’n’ read it right out’n de letter whar he writ it. ‘‘ ’Twa’n’t long atter dat ’fo’ we-all got de word dat my young marster done jinded inter de war wid some yuther boys w’at been at de same school-’ouse wid ’im. Den, on top er dat, yer come news dat he gwine git married. Bless yo’ soul, honey, dat sorter rilded me up, en I march inter de big-’ouse, I did, en I up ’n’ tell mistis dat she better lemme go up dar en fetch dat chile home ; en den mistis say she gwine sen’ me on dar fer ter be wid ’im in de war en take keer un ’im. Dis hplp me up might’ly, kaze I wuz a mighty biggity nigger in dem days. De white folks done raise me up right ’long wid lim, en way down in my min’ I des laid off fer ter go up dar in Ferginny en take my young marster by he’s collar en fetch ’im home, des like I done w’en he use ter git in de hin-’ouse en bodder ’long wid de chickens. Dat wuz way down in my min’, des like I tell you, but bless yo’ soul, chile, hit done drap out ’mos’ ’fo’ I git ter ’Gusty, in de Nunited State er Georgy. Time I struck de railroad I kin see de troops a-troopin’ en year de drums a-drummin’. De trains wuz des loaded down wid um. Let ’lone de pas¬ senger kyars, dey wuz in de freight-boxes yit, en dey wuz de sassiest white mens dat yever walk ’pon topside de groun’. Mon, dey wuz a caution. Dey had niggers wid um, en de niggers wuz sassy, en ef I hadn’t a-frailed one un um out, I dunner w’at would er ’come un me. Hit cert’n’y wuz a mighty long ways fum dese parts. I come down yer fum Ferginny in a waggin w’en I wuz des ’bout big nuff fer ter hoi’ a plow straight in de’ furrer, but ’tain’t look like ter me dat ’twuz sech a fur ways. All day en all night long fer mighty nigh a week I year dem kyar-wheels go clickity- clock, clickity- clock, en dem ingines go choo- choo-choo, choo-choo-choo, en it look like we ain’t never gwine git dar. Yit, git dar we did, en ’tain’t take me long fer ter fin’ de place whar my young marster is. I laid off ter fetch ’im home; well, ma’am, w’en I look at ’im he skeer’d me. Yassum, you may b’lieve me er not b’lieve me, but he skeer’d me. Stiddier de boy w’at I wuz a-huntin’ fer, dar he wuz, a great big grow’d-up man, en, bless yo’ soul, he wuz a-trompin’ ’roun’ dar wid great big boots on, en, mon, dey had spurrers on um. Ef I hadn’ er year ’im laugh, I nev’d a-know’d ’im in de roun’ worl’. I say ter my- se’f, s’l. I’ll des wait en see ef he know who I is. But shoo ! my young marster know me time he lay eyes on me, en no sooner is he see me dan he fetched a whoop en rushed at me. He ’low : ‘ Hello, Daddy ! whar de name er goodness you rise fum ? ’ He allers call me Daddy sence he been a baby. De minute he say dat, it come over me ’bout how lonesome de folks wuz at home, en I des grabbed ’im, en ’low : ‘ Honey, you better come go back wid Daddy.’ He sorter hug me back, he did, en den he laugh, but I tell you dey wa’n’t no laugh in me, kaze I done see w’iles I gwine long w’at kinder ’sturbance de white folks wuz a-gittin’ up, en I know’d dey wuz a-gwine ter be trouble pile ’pon trouble. Yit dar he wuz a-laughin’ en a-projickin’, eii ’mongs’ all dem yuther mens dey wa’n’t none un um good- lookin’ like my young marster. I don’t keer w’at kinder cloze he put on, dey fit ’im, en I don’t keer w’at crowd he git in, dey ain’t none un um look like ’im. En ’tain’t on’y me say dat ; I done year lots er yuther folks say dem ve’y words. ups en sez, s’l, ‘Honey, you go ’long en git yo’ things, en come go home ’long wid Daddy. Dey er waitin’ fer you down dar ’ — des so! Den he look at me cute like he us’ter w’en he wuz a baby, en he ’low, he did : “ ‘ I’m mighty glad you come. Daddy, en I hope you brung yo’ good cloze, kaze you des come in time fer ter go in ’ten’ance on my weddin’.’ Den I ’low : “‘You oughtn’ be a- talkin’ dat a-way, honey. W’at in de name er goodness is Chil¬ ians like you got ter do wid marryin’ ? ’ Wid dat, he up ’n’ laugh, but ’twa’n’t no laughin’ matter wid me. Yit ’twuz des like he tell me, en ’twa’n’t many hours ’fo’ we wuz gallopin’ cross de country to’ds Marse Randolph Hern¬ don’ place ; en dar whar he married. En you mayb’lieve me er not, ma’am, des ez you please, but dat couple wuz two er de purtiest chilluns you ever laid eyes on, en dar Miss Hallie in dar now fer ter show you I’m a-tellin’ de

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AZALIA, true word. ’Mos’ ’fo’ de weddin’ wuz over, news come dat my young marster en de folks wid dm mus’ go back ter camps, en back we went. W ell, ma’am, dar we wuz — a mighty far ways fum home. Miss Hallie a-cryin’, en de war gwine on des same ez ef ’twuz right out dar in de yard. My young marster ’low dat I des come in time, kaze he mighty nigh pe’sh’d fer sumpin’ ’n’er good ter eat. I whirled in, I did, en I cook ’im some er de right kinder vittles; but all de time I cookin’, I say ter myse’f, I did, dat I mought er come too soon, er I mought er come too late, but I be bless’ ef I come des in time. “ Hit went on dis a-way scan’lous. We marched en we stopped, en we stopped en we marched, en ’twuz de Lord’s blessin’ dat we rid bosses, kaze ef my young marster had ’a’ bin ’blige’ ter tromp thoo de mud like some er dem white mens, I speck I’d ’a’ had ter tote ’im, dough he uz mighty spry en tough. Some¬ times dem ar bung-shells ’u’d drap right in ’mongs’ whar we-all wuz, en dem wuz de times w’en I feel like I better go off some’r’s en hide, not dat I wuz anyways skeery, kaze I wa’n’t; but ef one er demur bung-shells had erstrucken me, I dunner who my young marster would ’a’ got ter do he’s cookin’ en he’s washin’. Hit went on dis a-way, twel, bimeby one night way in de night, my young marster come whar I wuz layin’, en shuck me by de shoulder. I wuz des wide ’wake ez w’at he wuz, yit I ain’t make no motion. He shuck me ag’in, en ’low: ‘Daddy! O Daddy! I’m gwine on de skirmish line. I speck we gwine ter have some fun out dar.’ “ I ’low, I did : ‘ Honey, you make ’aste back ter break’us, kaze I got some sossige meat en some gennywine coffee.’ “ He ain’t say nothin’, but w’en he git little ways off, he tu’n ’roun’ en come back, he did, en ’low : ‘ Good-night, Daddy.’ I lay dar en I year un w’en dey start off. I year der bosses a-snortin’, en der spurrers a-jinglin’. Ef dey yever wuz a restless creetur hit uz me dat night. I des lay dar wid my eyes right wide open, en dey staid open, kaze, atter w’ile, yer come daylight, en den I rousted out, I did, en built me a fire, en ’twa’n’t long ’fo’ I had break’us a-fryin’ en de coffee a-b’ilin’, kaze I spected my young marster eve’y minute; en he uz one er dese yer kinder folks w’at want he’s coffee hot en all de yuther vittles on de jump. “ I wait en I wait, en still he ain’t come. Hit cert’n’y look like a mighty long time w’at he stay ’way ; en bimeby I tuck myse’f off ter make some inquirements, kaze mighty nigh all he’s comp’ny done gone wid ’im. I notice dat de white mens look at me mighty kuse w’en I ax um ’bout my young marster; en bimeby 883 one un um up en ’low, ‘ Ole man, whar yo’ hat ? ’ des dat a-way. I feel on my haid, en, bless goodness ! my hat done gone ; but I ’spon’ back, I did, ‘ ’Tain’t no time fer no nigger man fer ter be bodder’n’ ’bout he’s hat,’ des so. Well, ma’am, bimeby I struck up wid some er my young marster’ comp’ny, en dey up ’n’ tell me dat dey had a racket out dar en de skirmish line, en dey hatter run in, en dey speck my young marster be ’long terreckerly. Den I year some un say dat dey speck de Yankees tuck some pris’ners out dar, en den I know dat ain’t gwine do fer me. I des runn’d back ter whar we been campin’, en I mount de boss w’at my young marster gun me, en I rid right straight out ter whar dey been fightin’. My min’ tol’ me dey wuz sumpin’ ’n’er wrong out dar, en, I let you know, ma’am, I rid mighty fas’; I sholy made dat ole boss git up fum dar. De white mens dey holler at me w’en I pass, but eve’y time dey holler I make dat creetur men’ he’s gait. Some un um call me a coun¬ try-ban’, en say I runnin’ ’way, en ef de pick¬ ets hadn’t all been runnin’ in, I speck dey’d ’a’ fetched de ole nigger up wid de guns. But dat never cross my min’ dat day. “ Well, ma’am, I haid my boss de way de pickets cornin’ fum, en ef dey hadn’t er been so much underbresh en so many sassyfac saplin’s, I speck I’d ’a’ run dat creetur ter def; but I got ter whar I hatter go slow, en I des pick my way right straight forrerd de bes’ I kin. I ain’t hatter go so mighty fur, nudder, ’fo’ I come ’cross de place whar dey had de skirm¬ ish, en fum dat day ter dis I ain’t never see no lonesome place like dat. Dey wuz a cap yer, a hut yander, en de groun’ look like it wuz des strowed wid um. I stop en listen. Den I rid on a little ways, en den I stop en listen. Bimeby I year boss whicker, en den de creetur’ w’at I’m a-ridin’, he whicker back, en do des like he wanter go whar de t’er boss is. I des gin ’im de rein, en de fus news I know, he trot right up ter de big black boss w’at my young marster rid. “ I look little furder, I did, en I see folks lyin’ on de groun’. Some wuz double’ up, en some wuz layin’ out straight. De win’ blow de grass back’ards en forrerds, but dem sojer- men, dey never move; en den I know dey wuz dead. I look closer, en dar ’pon de groim’ ’mos’ right at me wuz my young marster layin’ right by de side er one er dem Yankee mens. I jumped down, I did, en run ter whar he wuz, but he wuz done gone. My heart jump, my knees shuck, en my han’ trimble, but I know I got ter git away fum dar. Hit look like at fus’ dat him en dat Yankee man been fightin’, but bimeby I see whar my young marster bin crawl thoo de weeds en grass ter whar de Yankee man wuz layin’, en he had

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AZALIA. 884 one arm un’ de man’ haid, en de ter han’ wuz gripped on he’s canteen. I fix it in my min’, ma’am, dat my young marster year dat Yankee man holler fer water, en he des make out fer ter crawl whar he is, en den I foun’ um bofe. “ Dey wuz layin’ close by a little farm road, en not so mighty fur off I year a chicken crowin’. I say ter myse’f dat sholy folks must be livin’ whar dey chickens crowin’, en I tuck ’n’ mount my young marster’ hoss, en right ’roun’ de side er de hill, I come ’cross a house. De folks wuz all gone, but dey wuz a two-hoss waggin in de lot, en some harness in de barn, en I des loped back atter de yuther hoss, en ’mos’ ’fo’ you know it, I had dem creetur’s hitch up ; en I went en got my young marster en de Yankee man w’at wuz wid ’im, en I kyard um back ter de camps. I got um des in time, too, kase I ain’t mo’n fairly start ’fo’ I year big gun, he-ba7ig\ en den I know’d de Yankees mus’ be a-comin’ back. Den de bung-shells ’gun ter bus’, en I ax myse’f, w’at dey shootin’ at me fer, en I ain’t never fin’ out w’at make dey do it. Well, ma’am, w’en I git back ter camps, dar wuz Gunnel Tip Herndon, w’ich he wuz own br’er ter Miss Hallie. Maybe you been year tell er Marse Tip, ma’am ; he cert’n’y wuz a mighty fine man. Marse Tip, he ’uz dar, en ’twa’n’t long ’fo’ Miss Hallie wuz dar, kaze she ain’t live so mighty fur; en Miss Hallie say dat my young marster en de Yankee man mus’ be brung home terge’er. So dey brung um.” Uncle Prince paused. His story was at an end. He stooped to stir the fire, and when he rose, his eyes were full of tears. Humble as he was, he could pay this tribute to the mem¬ ory of the boy soldier whom he had nursed in sickness and in health. It was a stirring recit¬ al. Perhaps it is not so stirring when trans¬ ferred to paper. The earnestness, the simplicity, the awkward fervor, the dramatic gestures, the unique individuality of Uncle Prince can¬ not be reproduced; but these things had a pro¬ found effect on Miss Eustis and her aunt. VII. Throughout the narrative the piano had been going — keeping, as it seemed, a weird accompaniment to a tragic story. This also had its effect, for so perfectly did the rhythm and sweep of the music accord with the heart¬ rending conclusion, that Helen, if her mind had been less preoccupied with sympathy, would probably have traced the effect of it all to a long series of rehearsals; in fact, such a sugges¬ tion did occur to her, but the thought perished instantly in the presence of the unaffected sim¬ plicity and the child-like earnestness which animated the words of the old negro. The long silence which ensued — for the piano ceased and Hallie nestled at Helen’s side once more — was broken by General Garwood. We were never able to identify the Union soldier. He had in his possession a part of a letter and a photograph of himself. These were in an inner pocket. I judge that he knew he was to be sent on a dangerous mis¬ sion, and had left his papers and whatever valuables he may have possessed behind him. The little skirmish in which he fell was a sur¬ prise to both sides. A scouting party of perhaps a dozen Federal cavalrymen rode suddenly upon as many Confederate cavalry¬ men who had been detailed for special picket duty. There was a short, sharp fight, and then both sides scampered away. The next day the Federal army occupied the ground.” ‘Ht is a pity,” said Helen, that his iden¬ tity should be so utterly lost.” Hallie, my dear,” said Mrs. Garwood, “ would it trouble you too much to get the photograph of the Union soldier ? If it is any trouble, my child - ” Hallie went swiftly out of the room and returned almost immediately with the photo¬ graph and handed it to Helen, who examined it as well as she could by the dim firelight. ‘‘ The face is an interesting one, as well as I can make out,” said Helen, and it has a strangely familiar look. He was very young.” She handed the picture to her aunt. Her face was very pale. I can’t see by this light,” said Miss Tewks¬ bury. But Uncle Prince had already brought a lamp which he had been lighting. ‘‘ Why, my dear,” said Miss Tewksbury, in a tone of voice that suggested both awe and conster¬ nation, — ‘‘Why, my dear, this is your brother Wendell ! ” “ Oh, Aunt Harriet ! I thought so — I was afraid so — but are you sure ? ” “ As sure as that I am sitting here.” Helen burst into tears. “ Oh, why didn’t I recognize him? Plow could I fail to know my darling brother ? ” she cried. Hallie rose from her low stool, and stood gazing at Helen. Her face was pale as death, but in her eyes gleamed the fire of long-sup¬ pressed grief and passion. She seemed like one transfonned. She flung her white arms above her head, and exclaimed : “ I knew it ! I knew it ! I knew that some poor heart would find its long-lost treasure here. I have felt it — I have dreamed it ! Oh, I am so glad you have found your brother!” “ Oh, but I should have known his picture,” said Helen. “ But, my dear child,” said Miss Tewks¬ bury in a matter-of-fact way, “ there is every

Page 886

AZALIA. 88s “dey was layin’ close by a little farm road." reason why you should not have known it. This picture was taken in Washington, and he never sent a copy of it home. If he did, your father put it away among his papers. You were not more than twelve years old when Wendell went away.” “ Perhaps if Hallie will get the fragment of letter,’’ said General Garwood to Miss Tewks¬ bury, it will confirm your impression.” Oh, it is no impression,” replied Miss Tewksbury; “I could not possibly be mis¬ taken.” The fragment of letter, when produced, proved to be in the handwriting of Charles Osborne Eustis, and there was one sentence VOL. XXXIV. — I2I. in it that was peculiarly characteristic. Re¬ member, dear Wendell,” it said, that the war is not urged against men ; it is against an in¬ stitution which the whole country, both North and South, will be glad to rid itself of.” It would be difficult, under all the circum¬ stances, to describe Helen’s thoughts. She was gratified — she ivas more than gratified — at the unexpected discovery, and she was grateful to those who had cared for her broth¬ er’s grave with such scrupulous care. She felt more at home than ever. The last barrier of sectional reserve (if it may be so termed) was broken down so far as she was concerned, and during the remainder of her stay, her true

Page 887

886 AZALIA. character — her womanliness, her tenderness, her humor — revealed itself to these watchful and sensitive Southerners. Even Miss Tewks¬ bury, who had the excuse of age and long habit for her prejudices, showed the qualities that made her friends love her. In the lan¬ guage of the little rector, who made a sermon out of the matter, “ all things became homo¬ geneous through the medium of sympathy and the knowledge of mutual suffering.” In fact, everything was so agreeable during the visit of Helen and her aunt to Waverly — a visit that was prolonged many days beyond the limit they had set — that Uncle Prince remarked on it one night to his wife. ‘‘ I’m a nigger man, ’Mandy Jane,” said he, “ but I got two eyes, en dey er good ones. W’at I sees I knows, en I tell you right now, Marse Peyton is done got strucken.” “ Done got strucken ’bout what ? ” inquired ’Mandy Jane. “ ’Bout dat young lady w’at stayin’ yer. Oh, you nee’n’ ter holler,” said Uncle Prince in re¬ sponse to a contemptuous laugh from ’Mandy Jane. “ I ain’t nothin’ but a nigger man, but I knows w’at I sees.” ‘‘ Yes, you is a nigger man,” said ’Mandy Jane triumphantly. Ef you wuz a nigger ’oman you’d have lots mo’ sense dan w’at you got. W’y, dat lady up dar ain’t our folks. She mighty nice, I speck, but she ain’t our folks. She ain’t talk like our folks yit.” “No matter ’bout dat,” said Uncle Prince. “ I ain’t seed no nicer ’oman dan w’at she is, en I boun’ you she kin talk mighty sweet w’en she take a notion. W’en my two eyes tell me de news I knows it, en Marse Peyton done got strucken long wid dat white ’oman.” “ En now you gwine tell me,” said ’Mandy Jane with a fine assumption of scorn, “ dat Marse Peyton gwine marry wid dat w’ite ’oman en trapse oft' dar ter de Norf? Shoo I Nigger man, you go ter bed ’fo’ you run yo’se’f ’stracted.” “ I dunno whar Marse Peyton gwine, ’Mandy Jane, but I done see ’im talkin’ ’long wid dat white lady, en lookin’ at her wid he’s eyes. Huh ! don’ tell me ! En dat ain’t all, ’Mandy Jane,” Uncle Prince went on; “dat Bud Stucky, he’s f ’rever ’n’ etarnally sneakin’ ’roun’ de house up dar. One day he want sumpin’ ter eat, en nex’ day he want Miss Hallie fer ter play en de peanner, but all de time I see ’im a-watchin’ dat ar white lady fum de Norf.” “ Hush ! ” exclaimed ’Mandy Jane. “ Des like I tell you ! ” said Uncle Prince. “ Well, de nasty, stinkin’, oudacious villyun ! ” commented ’Mandy Jane. “ I lay ef I go up dar en set de dogs on ’im, he’ll stop sneakin’ ’roun’ dis place.” Let ’im ’lone, ’Mandy Jane, let ’im ’lone,” said Uncle Prince solemnly. “ Dat ar Bud Stucky, he got a mammy, en my min’ tell me dat he’s mammy kin run de kyards en trick you. Now you watch out, ’Mandy Jane. You go on en do de washin’, like you bin doin’, en den ole Miss Stucky won’t git atter you wid de kyards en cunjur you. Dat ole ’oman got er mighty bad eye, mon.” VIII. Uncle Prince, it appears, was a keen ob¬ server, especially where General Garwood was concerned. He had discovered a fact in regard to “ Marse Peyton,” as he called him, that had only barely suggested itself to that gentleman’s own mind — the fact that his interest in Miss Eustis had assumed a phase altogether new and unexpected. Its manifestations were pro¬ nounced enough to pester Miss Tewksbury, but, strange to say, neither General Garwood nor Miss Eustis appeared to be troubled by them. As a matter of fact, these two were merely new characters in a very old story, the details of which need not be described or dwelt on in this hasty chronicle. It was not by any means a case of love at first sight. It was better than that — it was a case of love based on a firmer foundation than whim, or passion, or sentimentality. At any rate Helen and her stalwart lover were as happy, appar¬ ently, as if they had just begun to enjoy life and the delights thereof. There was no love- making, so far as Miss Tewksbury could see, but there was no attempt on the part of either to conceal the fact that they heartily enjoyed each other’s companionship. Bud Stucky continued his daily visits for several weeks, but one day he failed to make his appearance, and after a while news came that he was ill of a fever. The ladies at Wav¬ erly sent his mother a plentiful supply of pro¬ visions, together with such delicacies as seemed to them necessary, but Bud Stucky continued to waste away. One day Helen, in spite of the protests of her aunt, set out to visit the sick man, carrying a small basket, in which Hallie had placed some broiled chicken and a small bottle of home-made wine. Approach¬ ing the Stucky cabin, she was alarmed at the silence that reigned within. She knocked, but there was no response; whereupon she pushed the door open and entered. The sight that met her eyes and the scene that followed are still fresh in her memory. Poor Bud Stucky, the shadow of his former self, was lying on the bed. His thin hands were crossed on his breast, and the pallor of death was on his emaciated face. His mother sat by the bed with her eyes fixed on his. She made no sign when Helen entered, but con-

Page 888

AZALIA, tinued to gaze on her son. The young woman, bent on a mission of mercy, paused on the threshold, and regarded the two unfortunates with a sympathy akin to awe. Bud Stucky moved his head uneasily, and essayed to speak, but the sound died away in his throat. He made another effort. His lips moved feebly ; his voice had an unearthly, a far-away sound. Miss,’’ he said, regarding her with a pite¬ ous expression in his sunken eyes, I wish you’d please, ma’am, make maw let me go.” He seemed to gather strength as he went on. “I’m all ready, an’ a-waitin’; I wish you’d please, ma’am, make ’er let me go.” “ Oh, what can I do ? ” cried Helen, seized with a new sense of the pathos that is a part of the humblest human life. “ Please, ma’am, make ’er let me go. I been a-lyin’ here ready two whole days an’ three long nights, but maw keeps on a-watchin’ of me ; she won’t let me go. She’s got ’er eyes nailed on me constant.” Helen looked at the mother. Her form was wasted by long vigils, but she sat bolt-upright in her chair, and in her eyes burned the fires of an indomitable will. She kept them fixed on her son. “ Won’t you please, ma’am, tell maw to let me go ? I’m so tired er waitin’. ” The plaintive voice seemed to be an echo from the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Helen, watching narrowly and with agonized curiosity, thought she saw the mother’s lips move, but no sound issued therefrom. The dying man made another appeal : “ Oh, I’m so tired ! I’m all ready an’ she won’t let me go. A long time ago when I us’ ter ax ’er, she’d let me do ’most anything, an’ now she won’t let me go. Oh, Lordy! I’m so tired er waitin’ ! Please, ma’am, ax ’er to let me go.” Mrs. Stucky rose from her chair, raised her clasped hands above her head, and turned her face away. As she did so, something like a sigh of relief escaped from her son. He closed his eyes, and over his wan face spread the re¬ pose and perfect peace of death. Turning again towards the bed, Mrs. Stucky saw Helen weeping gently. She gazed at her a moment. “Whatter you cryin’ fer now?” she asked with unmistakable bitterness. “ You wouldn’t a-wiped your feet on ’im. Ef you wiiz gwine ter cry,whyn’t you let ’im see you do it ’fore he died ? What good do it do ’im now ? Pie wa’n’tmade out’n i’on like me.” Helen made no reply. She placed her basket on the floor, went out into the sunlight, and made her way swiftly back to Waverly. Her day’s experience made a profound im¬ pression on her, so much so that when the 887 time came for her to go home, she insisted on going alone to bid Mrs. Stucky good-bye. She found the lonely old woman sitting on her door-sill. She appeared to be gazing on the ground, but her sun-bonnet hid her face. Helen approached and spoke to her. She gave a quick upward glance and fell to trembling. She was no longer made of iron. Sorrow had dimmed the fire of her eyes. Helen explained her visit, shook hands with her, and was going away, when the old woman, in a broken voice, called her to stop. Near the pine-pole gate was a little contrivance of boards that looked like a bird-trap. Mrs. Stucky went to this and lifted it. “ Come yer, honey,” she cried, “yer’s some- pin’ I wanter show you.” Looking closely, Helen saw molded in the soil the semblance of a footprint. “ Look at it, honey, look at it,” said Mrs. Stucky; “that’s his darlin’, precious track.” Helen turned and went away weeping. The sight of that strange memorial which the poor mother had made her shrine, leavened the girl’s whole after life. When Helen and her aunt came to take their leave of Azalia, their going away was not by any means in the nature of a merry¬ making. They went away sorrowfully and left many sorrowful friends behind them. Even William, the bell-ringer and purveyor of hot batter-cakes at Mrs. Haley’s hotel, walked to the railroad station to see them safely off. General Garwood accompanied them to At¬ lanta, and though the passenger depot in that pushing city is perhaps the most unromantic spot to be found in the wide world, — itis known as the“ Car- shed” in Atlantese, — it was there that he found courage to inform Miss Eustis that he purposed to visit Boston during the summer in search not only of health, but of happiness, and Miss Eustis admitted, with a reserve both natural and proper, that she would be very happy to see him. It is not the purpose of this chronicle to fol¬ low General Garwood to Boston. The files of the Boston papers will show that he went there, and that, in a quiet way, he was the object of considerable social attention. But it is in the files of the “Brookline Reporter” that the largest and most graphic account of the mar¬ riage of Miss Eustis to General Garwood is to be found. It is an open secretin the literary cir¬ cles of Boston that the notice in the “ Repor¬ ter ” was from the pen of Henry P. Bassett, the novelist. It was headed “ Practical Recon¬ struction,” and it was conceded on all sides that even if the article had gone no further than this, it would have been a very happy description of the happiest of events. Joel Chandler Harris,

Page 889

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL. OWEVER odd the title of this article may seem, its implications are correct and legitimate. The un¬ dergraduates of American colleges, taking the so- called Rugby game of foot-ball, have developed it into a game differing in many of its phases from any of its English prototypes. There were already difterences in the game in its primitive home. Kicking the ball was, of course, common to all ; but there was, further, the so-called Rugby game, whose leading fea¬ ture, speaking roughly, was that the player might run with the ball ; there was the Asso¬ ciation game, in which, speaking as roughly, the player might “charge,” that is, run against, an opponent and might not run with the ball ; and there were a dozen other variants of the game. The peculiar feature of the Rugby game was the “ scrimmage,” of which more will be said farther on ; and American players, work¬ ing out the scrimmage into a new form, have changed the possibilities of the game very greatly, and have made it, in addition to its individual opportunities for the exhibition of skill, one of the most scientific of outdoor games in its “ team-playing,” or management of the entire side as one body. It would be impossible, within the limits of this article, to enter into a technical explanation of the finer points of this team-play, or to give a minute statement of the rules of the game ; all that can be hoped for is to give him who witnesses the American game some general knowledge of it, so that he may follow it with intelligence and enjoyment. On entering the ground and securing his post of observation, the spectator will see be¬ fore him a field 330 feet long and 160 feet wide. The shorter line is the “ goal-line.” Across the field, at intervals of five yards, are white lines parallel to the goal-lines ; these are meant to guide the umpire in the imposi¬ tion of penalties for fouls, off-side playing, or delaying the game, the penalty being com¬ monly a loss of five yards by the side which

Page 890

THE AMERICAH GAME OF FOOT-BALL. 889 is in fault. In middle of e goal-line is goal,” two right posts I feet apart w‘ cross-bar 10 from the In order to f a goal, the must pass bet' the uprights over the cross-bar, and must cross it from a place-kick,” or from a ‘‘ drop-kick,”— that is, from a kick made just as the ball is leaving the ground, not from a punt,” a kick made while the ball is in the air. Each side, while defending its own goal, necessarily faces the goal of its opponents, and its object is to advance the ball, by running with it or by kicking it, toward side takes the ball any distance it wishes iLs opponents’ goal-line, to plant the ball on straight out into the field, its opponents re- tne ground on the other side of the opponents’ maining behind their goal-line until the ball goal-line, which constitutes a touch-down ” is kicked. One man, lying on the ground and scores four points in the game, and to holds the ball in proper position ; another' Kick the ball over the cross-bar of the oppo- when the ball is dropped to the ground kicks nents goal or force the opponents to make a it; if the ball goes over the cross-bar, it counts satety touch-down in their own territory, two points in addition to the four points for When a touch-down is made, the successful the touch-down, and, if the goal is missed, it counts nothing. A touch-down and a success¬ ful goal thus count together six points; a goal kicked from the field, without a previous touch-down, counts five points ; and a safe¬ ty” touch-down counts two points against the side which makes it. The feature in this process of advancing the ball which is most difficult for even the prac¬ ticed eye to follow, and which will probably always remain a profound mystery to the un¬ skillful, is the prohibition of “off-side playing.” The general principle, however, is not difficult of comprehension : it is merely that no player has legal rights when he is between the ball and his opponents’ goal ; he is then “ off-side ” until the ball has touched an opponent, or one of his own side carries the ball ahead of him or runs in front of him, having touched the ball while behind him. So long as he is “off¬ side,” a player must not interfere with the ball or with his opponents. *1 he players of both sides are so continually on- and off-side that it is hardly possible to follow the process. A line of men comes charging down the field: the ball is kicked back over their heads, and they are all technically off-side. In an instant the ball is kicked back again, and they are all on-side again and entitled to play, since the ball has touched one of their opponents. The shifting is often so rapid and constant that the men themselves almost come to forget the DIAGRAM OF THE FIELD. proliibitioii Until one of them happens to play goa l Goal

Page 891

890 THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL, at a moment when he is off-side, and then the imposition of a penalty, the loss of five yards by his side, recalls him to a sense of the rules of the game. Passing ” the ball, or throwing it from one to another, is another feature of the game. Hardly any combination of team-playing and individual skill is more noteworthy than the sight of a first-rate team carrying the ball down the field, each player taking his turn in run¬ ning with the ball, and, when hard pressed, passing it over the head of an opponent to one of his own side, more fortunately situated, who carries it farther. Considering that the egg- shape of the ball makes it the concentrated es¬ sence of irregularity, that only the most skillful player can even hazard a guess at the direc¬ tion which it will take after a bound, and that an error of but an inch in the direction of a throw may carry the ball a dozen feet away from the place at which it was aimed, one may be pardoned for admiring the certainty with which individuals and teams make each point of play and combine them all into an organized system. Passing has also its phase of off-side playing. A “pass forward” is not allowed, and is a foul ; the ball must be thrown straight across the field, par¬ allel to the goal-line, or in any direc¬ tion back of that line. Hitherto Ave have been looking at the game only from the stand¬ point of the side which is advancing the ball. It is not to be supposed that its opponents are idly watching the ball’s progress : it is their object to check the advance of the ball, and to retort by advancing it in their turn and toward their object¬ ive point, — the opposite goal. One way of doing this is by a “ fair- catch,” or, in base-ball language, a “ fly-catch,” of a kick or throw from an opponent, provided he Avho catches the ball makes a mark with his heel while catching, and does not move from it until the catch is admitted. The mark is then the dividing point between the two teams; both take position between it and their own goals; and the player who caught the ball kicks it back toward the opposite goal, usually by a “ punt.” The more common way of checking the advance of the ball is by a “ tackle.” Any player may run Avith the ball. While he is doing so, any opponent may seize him and cry “Held!” or throAv him and hold him until he cries “ Down ! ” If the tackle is made by seizing the runner above the shoul¬ ders or below the hips, it is a “ foul tackle,” and penalties are imposed for it. If it is a fair tackle, it effectually blocks the further prog¬ ress of the ball ; the game is stopped for the moment ; and some means must exist for put¬ ting the ball into play again and resuming the A FAIR-CATCH.

Page 892

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL, 891 game. This brings us to the peculiar feature of the iVmerican game, the scrimmage.” In the English game, the scrimmage consists in placing the ball on the ground, after which both sides crowd around it and kick indiscrim¬ inately and furiously until the ball emerges and is carried otf by one of the players. The game had hardly been introduced into America when the new players saw that the English scrimmage was altogether illogical; it was cer¬ tain that one or more of the players would be off-side during the process. A new form of the scrimmage was developed at once. The enforcement of the rule against off-side play¬ ing, together with the natural desire of the players to get as near as possible to the oppo¬ site goal, led to the arrangement of the two sides in parallel lines, neither being ahead of the ball ; and this was the origin of “ lining- up ” at the beginning of the American scrim¬ mage. The ball is placed on the ground ; side A, which has the ball, forms in a line, no player being allowed to get ahead of the ball, that is, to be off-side ; side B forms in a parallel line as near as convenient to the line of side A; the player in the center of A’s line, the “ center rush,” kicks the ball backward, or ‘‘ snaps it back,” to the quarter-back, who passes ” it to another player ; and the ball is “ in play ” again, side B trying to break through in pur¬ suit of it, and side A trying to prevent this by getting into the way, any holding or strik¬ ing being absolutely forbidden. The bulk of the game is thus made up of occasional kicks and free catches, and a great deal of running with the ball, tackles, and consequent scrimmages. When the ball goes outside of the side-lines, it is put into play again in much the same way as in the scrimmage. The two sides ‘‘ line up ” at right angles with the side¬ line ; a member of side A, which has the ball, standing astride the side-line, either throws the ball straight in, over the heads of the play¬ ers, or, more commonly, bounds it backward to one of his own side, and the ball is in play. The introduction of the American form of the scrimmage has quite changed the charac¬ ter of the game. It soon forced a reduction of the numbers engaged, from fifteen on a side to eleven, which has since been the rule. Every subsequent development of the game hasmade it more scientific and more difficult to play with the highest success. The game has, in fact, become a miniature game of strategy, and can best be comprehended by comparing the foot¬ ball-field to a battle-field, limited by the side¬ lines, and the respective sides to two armies, managed on military principles by the cap¬ tains. Four arms of the foot-ball service have been developed, as the spectator may see on watching two teams lining-up at the begin¬ ning of a game, or at the beginning of a scrim¬ mage. Across the field stretch the foot-ball infantry, the rush-line,” or “ rushers.” They are the seven heavy men of the team, but must also be agile, very fair runners, and quick in tackling. Their most powerful player is usually in the middle of the line, and is com¬ monly known as the center-rush”: he snaps the ball back in the scrimmage. The two players on the ends of the line, the end- rushes,” stand slightly back of the main line, — in more military language, “ the wings are slightly refused,” — in order to tackle any player who may succeed in passing the main line at those points. Behind the center- rush,” gen¬ erally, plays the ‘‘ quarter-back,” answering very much to the quartermaster’s department: he takes the ball from the “ center-rush,” in the scrimmage, and serves it out to the play¬ ers back of him, who are to do the running. A FOUL TACKLE, HIGH.

Page 893

892 THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALE A FAIR TACKLE. He is usually smaller than the rushers, but must be uncommonly active and clear-headed, capable of meeting very hard usage, and of occasionally making points regularly belong¬ ing to any of the other departments of the team. The Princeton and Yale quarter-backs of the past two years, Hodge and Beecher, playing quite different types of the game, are probably the best of those who have ever held the position. Behind the quarter-back, and covering the two sides of the field, are the half-backs,” the cavalry of the team. They are the par excellence : all must be runners, but these more than any of the others. They are the ones to whom the quarter-back usually passes the ball at the beginning of a scrim¬ mage, and the one to whom it is passed either makes a straightforward dash for an opening in the enemy’s line made for him by his own rush-line, or, more commonly, flanks the op¬ posing line, having due regard to the side-lines of the field, and endeavors to carry the ball as far as possible into the enemy’s territory before he is tackled and ‘‘ downed.” The most brilliant playing is done by the half-backs. They must be strong not only in running, but in dodging; and it is not uncommon to see a first-rate half¬ back carry the ball almost or quite the full length of the field, dodging one opponent here and another there, thrown headlong again and again, but up and away before the tackle can be completed, and finally score a touch-down, while the heavier rushers, who have grasped at him and missed him, toil pant¬ ing and disgusted after him in hopes of another opportunity. Farthest to the rear, and at first in front of his own goal, is the eleventh player, the “ full-back.” He constitutes the artillery of the team. He is to relieve a too-great press¬ ure on his team by an opportune punt over the heads of the line, while his rushers follow the ball down the field, ready to tackle any opponent who secures the ball, cause a ‘‘down,” and thus transfer the struggle to the enemy’s territory. One who gets the full force of the military nature of the American game of foot-ball will have comparatively little difficulty in following intelligently the real course of the game, even though he be quite ignorant of many of the more minute points, of the difference between a “ kick-off” and a “ kick-out,” between a “ punt-on ” and a “ punt-out,” or between a “ kick-over ” and a “ touch-down.” He will see the real beauty of the team-play, and the in¬ dividual play, skillful as it may be, will pale be¬ fore it. He will be able to appreciate the real strategy with which the opposing captains han¬ dle the respective arms of their service, pitting cavalry against infantry here, scattering cavalry by infantry there, or using the artillery to search out the weak points of the opposing team by long punts into their territory. The “noise of the captains and the shouting” will take on a new significance to him, and he will no longer wonder that the American undergraduate takes such an intense interest in his own game of foot-ball. Individual playing is done mainly by the half-backs, as has been said, and their work is that which usually brings their college’s QUARTER-BACK TAKING THE BALL.

Page 894

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL, undergraduates nearest to a state of semi- delirious enthusiasm. The best example was the game of 1885 between Princeton and Yale. Watkinson, one of the Yale half-backs, excelled in punting and in the accuracy of his drop-kicks ; Lamar, one of the Princeton half-backs, and the finest player whom his col¬ lege has ever put into that position, excelled in running and more especially in dodging. 893 to defeat ; he might then, perhaps, even sym¬ pathize with the Princeton man who, when the ball was brought out for the kick at goal, covered his eyes with his hands, saying faintly to those around him, ‘‘ Fellows, tell me when it’s over ! ” Feats like “Lamar’s run” are of course the exhilarating element of the game; the solid beef and pudding, which wins a series of THE SCRIMMAGE. HALF-BACK TAKING THE BALL. Toward the end of the first half of the game, and after half a dozen misses, Watkinson at last sent the ball flying over Princeton’s goal by a drop-kick from the field, scoring five points. For the rest of the game, the two evenly matched teams struggled desperately, Princeton to score something, Yale to prevent it; and, when less than ten minutes’ playing¬ time remained, Yale was still successful and the score was 5 to o in her favor. In an in¬ stant, the whole aspect of affairs was changed. One of Watkinson’s long punts crossed the field diagonally, throwing the Yale line out of align¬ ment for the moment. Lamar caught the ball while running at full speed, and went like a flash between two of the Yale rushers, entrapped one of the half-backs into missing tackle, and dodged another ; and lo ! the whole field was before him, without an opponent between him and the much-longed-for Yale goal. A touch¬ down and a goal followed; and the team which seemed assured of the game but a moment before had lost it by a score of 6 to 5. He who “ cannot understand the popularity of foot-ball ” should have been there to witness the frantic excitement, the cheers, the embrac¬ ings, and the general delirium of those spec¬ tators who were but a moment ago resigned VoL. XXXIV.— 122. games, is the team-playing ; and the develop¬ ment of this is in the handling of the infan¬ try, the rush-line. A good half-back of five or six years ago could, with the necessary phys¬ ical characteristics, play almost as good a game now; but the rush-line of to-day would completely outwit and reduce to nullity the strongest rush-lines of the past. “ Rush-line tricks” are the leading feature of the modern form of the game; against an unskilled team they are deadly, and score touch-downs and goals with bewildering rapidity. Instead of passing the ball from a scrimmage to a half¬ back, the quarter-back will hold it for an in¬ stant until one or another of his rush-line takes it from him and charges with it. But the clock-work precision with which the whole matter is managed, the manner in which every other player of the rush-line supports the one who has the ball and does just the work nec¬ essary to help him break the opposing rush¬ line, show that nothing has been left to chance. Such “ rush-line tricks ” are possible only through perfectly organized team-play, and an ingenious system of signals. The spectator, during the scrimmage, can hear an almost con¬ stant flow of conversation from the captain to his men, exhortations to “play hard,” or “ put

Page 895

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL, 894 the ball through,” or apparently superfluous information on every kind of subject con¬ nected with the game. He is really managing his team, telling them to whom the ball is to be passed next by the quarter-back and what players are to do special pieces of work con¬ nected with the play. Every sentence has its pregnant word, conventionalized to mean to the players something quite difterent from the meaning which the opponents will prob¬ ably attach to it; and the whole system, care¬ fully memorized and practiced for weeks, enables the captain to keep his team well in hand throughout the game. Each team has its pet system of signaling, which it fondly im¬ agines to be undiscoverable ; while the first few minutes of a great ” game are spent in studying the signals of the opposing team, to see whether they have been changed since the last season. Under its new form, the game has taken a high place in the affections of the American no other form of exercise. Every spectator knows that the players are in the acme of physical condition, and that they are able and more than willing to strain every muscle to the breaking point rather than allow their rivals to outscore them. Every student as well as every player knows that the playing of the team, rather than its success, will go far to measure the college’sreputation for every physical characteristic which goes to make up a man, and for those psychological traits which have so great a weight on the exhibi¬ tion of mere physical powers. Wesleyan and Pennsylvania have a pride in showing how well their teams can play. Harvard, though unfortunate for the last few years, has put her mark too high in the past to be willing to fall below it. Yale wants three championships at least. Princeton having no Medical School or Law School from which to draw graduate play¬ ers, has a pride in showing that her undergrad¬ uates can fill the lack. College feeling, in its OUT OF BOUNDS — PUTTING BALL INTO PLAY. undergraduate. In the three colleges in which it is played most successfully, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, the undergraduates would probably give up base-ball a trifle more will¬ ingly than foot-ball. There is enough in the game to stir one’s pulses. The training has been a long period of self-surrender and of self- denial, and it has enabled the players to show courage, constancy, an intelligent willingness to meet and defeat physical dangers, and an ability to think connectedly in the presence of physical dangers, to an extent ofered by most intense form, permeates the whole sea¬ son, and is not confined to a twenty minutes’ dash for victory or a tedious procession. Yet one who played the game in the past, and likes it not a whit the less in the present, must feel regret in seeing the general disposition to consider the game one which is objection¬ able as a game for students who are gentle¬ men. The criticisms upon it have run in two general lines, though they have branched out into many different phases. They are, first, the innate roughness of the game, and

Page 896

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL. S95 the likelihood of severe accident, or even heels again. The preliminary practice games death, from it; and, second, its tendency to can hardly be more severe elsewhere than at degenerate into brutality and personal com- Princeton ; and yet the writer has never seen bat, from the personal contact between the a serious accident occur there. An accident players, which is an inevitable feature of it. may occur, of course, and will give no warn- The first point has its true and its false side. The game is as safe as any outdoor game can well be, provided it is played with the careful preparation and training which are the rule in the larger colleges ; it is a dangerous and unfit game when men undertake to play it without such prepara¬ tion and training. In the season of last year, two fatal accidents were reported ; both occurred in colleges which were attempting to play the game as it is played by the leading teams, without any of the preparation which they find an essential. The writer, who has been in the habit of attending the regular games of the college with which he is connected, has felt under obligations to be equally consistent in attending the daily prac- ing of its coming, but its coming has been put tice games of the men, in order to watch the as far as possible out of the range of probabil- preliminary training ; and he must confess ity. But if men in other colleges wish to play to a great respect for the good sense and foot-ball, as should be the case, they must not good management of the undergraduates ignore the systematic course of preparation, who have the matter in charge. The ‘‘ Uni- take the final playing of a well-trained team versity team” is selected provisionally; it is as a model, and attempt to imitate it. It is pitted daily against a second, or ‘‘ scrub,” from such folly that the recurring accidents in team of somewhat larger numbers; both teams foot-ball come. With good physical condition are kept under careful training and supervis- in the players, the requisite training, and suit- ion ; the playing is made short and as gentle able grounds, the game is not only one of the as possible at first, until the men begin to be- best of outdoor sports, but one of the safest, come ‘‘ hard ” ; the playing is then gradually The asserted tendency of the game to de- lengthened and made more severe, as the men generate into personal combat is at least as become able to endure it; and, by the time serious a question; and it has much the same the season comes to its last game, the players answer. The writer’s observation has led him are able to endure with impunity treatment to believe that, in nine cases out of ten, a which would be dangerous to men who are general tendency to indulge in striking with soft,” or out of condition. After the first few the fist is the result of conscious inferiority, weeks are over, and serious playing has be- When a team finds itself constantly outwitted gun, men who have not yet played are not by the team-play of its opponents, it is apt to encouraged, or, in extreme cases, even al- become exasperated and to be tempted into lowed, to play on the ‘‘scrub” team; the striking; while the captain who is managing managers think it inadvisable to run any risks, his team as a whole would be annoyed and The players are not only brought to a point interfered with by a disposition on the part of of physical condition which makes it a pleas- any of his men to abandon their functions in ure to watch them; they are taught how to his plans and turn to a personal assault on the fall, when a fall is inevitable, in such a way as opponents. From this point of view, the nat- to retain control of the ball without hazard- ural development of the game into team¬ ing a broken bone or a dislocation. When the playing is itself a corrective to any tendency closing games come on, the player can take to blows ; a successful team can no longer what seems to the spectator a frightful fall not afibrd to indulge in individual combat. The only without a bruise, but so skillfully that it belief is confirmed by the testimony of players, is regularly necessary for his opponent to “hold They say that difficulties of this sort come him down” lest he rebound and take to his only in the minor games; and that, in the DROPPING ON THE BALL.

Page 897

896 THE AMERICAN GAME OF F002-BALL. games with the stronger teams, toward the end of the season, where the teams are played strictly as units, the tendency to strike is very far less and may generally be disregarded. An influence of a somewhat higher moral nature is the fact that the intensity of the later competition has made every prominent foot¬ ball player known to his rivals in other col¬ leges. They canvass all his characteristics, his methods of play, and their fair or foul charac¬ ter. He knows that he is to meet them in after life, and is to leave a reputation among his contemporaries, not only in his own college, but in other colleges. He is not over-anxious to make that reputation one for foul dealing, ugly temper, and brutality; and the natural results of this better acquaintance are telling more for good every year. Still, it must always be admitted that the game offers more pro¬ vocatives to a naturally bad temper than any other outdoor sport. The credit of those who learn to undergo such discipline and to con¬ trol their tempers under such provocatives should be the greater; but an artificial re¬ striction may be of service even to them. Until this season every umpire has been much restrained from inflicting the penalties pre¬ scribed by the rules, from the fact that the undergraduates of the injured college would ascribe a defeat to him. It is for this reason that the effort has been made, with the con¬ currence of the undergraduates themselves, to transfer the appointment of such umpires to a graduate committee, so that they will be removed from all sense of responsibility to the undergraduates. Even in ])ast years, very far the most of the striking has been quite imaginary. The player who has the ball is permitted to thrust off any one who attempts to tackle him; but such warding-off ” must be done with the open hand only. The reporter or spec¬ tator who sees a stalwart player running down the field, one arm holding the foot-ball. LINING UP.

Page 898

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALL. 897 while the other is moving with the rapidity of a steam-engine’s piston toward and from an opponent, asks no further testimony than ‘‘ that of his senses ” that this is another scan¬ dalous case of slugging,” as striking has come to be called. If he should look a little closer, he would see that the “ striker’s ” hand was open and the fingers up, so as to make any real striking impossible. Again, at the beginning of a scrimmage, the proximity of the two lines gives an appearance of constant striking. One team is on a line with the ball ; the other is parallel to the first, at such dis¬ tance as pleases it. Theoretically each side has a right to be on a line with the ball, so that the line between the two sides ought to be geometrical, or imaginary. In practice, how¬ ever, only the side which has the ball can play on an exact line with it, but the other side naturally presses as close as possible to the theoretical dividing line. Until the ball is snapped back, the side which has the ball is continually thrusting its opponents back, but the action is precisely the same as in “ warding- off.” In either case, the spectator who wishes to know whether there is real striking or not must watch the ha?id^ and not the motion of the arm, or he may do extreme injustice to young men who are undergoing successfully a severe trial of temper, and overcoming temptations which most of the spectators could not endure, and who deserve credit for it. The real evil of the game is the betting. It is not true that the number of those who bet is large ; and it is true that it is far more the graduates than the undergraduates who bet; but it must be admitted that the fact of the bet¬ ting is demoralizing, both to those who bet and to the team. It is said by some that a college should not concern itself with the question whether men bet on intercollegiate games or not. It is the name of the college which brings the spectators, and the opportunities for and temptations to betting ; and the writer must admit the right of the college to stop the use of its name for any such purpose. He would not be understood, however, as wishing to see the college exercise this right, and thus lose the great benefits of intercollegiate athletics. He would far prefer to ground an appeal to the undergraduates to put down betting on the purely material side of the good of the game, — partly from the fact that, if the game becomes a mere rnedium for betting, it will be a public nuisance, and ought to be suppressed ; and partly from its effects on the team and its playing. It is not the fault of the college periodicals that there is any betting among undergradu¬ ates ; their influence has been cast strongly and persistently against the whole vicious system. VoL. XXXIV.— 123. Their editors are usually among the most judicious of the undergraduates, and they know the dangers which surround the game at present, and have been persistent in warn¬ ing students against this particular evil of the game. It is to their influence that we have most reason to look with hope for a develop¬ ment of right feeling on this point among undergraduates; and it is only from under¬ graduates that any strong influence can be brought to bear upon graduates. Three colleges, Princeton, Yale, and Har¬ vard, are the leading foot-ball institutions at present. With them, the whole foot-ball sea¬ son, from the beginning of the college year until Thanksgiving Day, is crowded with foot-ball games, — the intercollegiate matches, class games, games between eating and other clubs and between societies. The man who does not kick ” to some extent in the course of the season is quite an exception. Every man in college is, or considers himself, a competent critic of the captain’s methods ; and every step in the training of the team and the development of its style of play for the sea¬ son is watched with the keenest scrutiny, and, in its turn, has its influence on the minor games. All this is the chief argument for inter¬ collegiate athletics, in that they oust for the time the forbidden and abhorrent forces ” which are always lying in wait for the recrea¬ tions of college students, and carry the inter¬ est off into the direction of healthy, outdoor sports. From this point of view, no game can claim a higher place than the American game of foot-ball. Not every man can own a shell ; and the percentage of cost per man to the healthy results of a boat-race would startle any one who should attempt to figure it up. But any twenty-two men who can combine to own a foot-ball, and to procure a place in which to play, have a whole season of sound and attractive exercise in this one “bag of wind.” Let them once become interested in the game, and their spare time goes to it; they will have none left for demoralizing amusements. Cases of serious discipline are more rare during the foot-ball season than in any other part of the college year; and, so far as the writer’s observation has gone, the most strenuous supporters of the game among college faculties are those who have most to do with college discipline. But how about those who spend more time in such amusements than they can really spare ? This question is asked more often than any other; and those who ask it do not seem to recognize the injustice to the modern college faculties which is implied in it. The development of the American college is not in a direction which makes the implications

Page 899

THE AMERICAN GAME OF FOOT-BALE 898 of the question possible. It is less possible every year for a man to waste his time, and yet remain in college. The increase of num¬ bers alone has made the process of weed¬ ing out ” incompetent or lazy men in fresh¬ man year more of a possibility, and more of a feature in college life; and the influence of this process lasts throughout the course. The “ high-class man ’’ who gets on a foot¬ ball team is thereby compelled to organize his time more carefully, to cut off every other drain upon it, and to give spare time to noth¬ ing else; the man of less ability is compelled to follow a course as nearly parallel as his ingenuity will enable him to take ; and the ef¬ fects are somewhat like those which high taxa¬ tion often has on a people, in bringing out more work than would be the case without it. The organization of athletics has a parallel ef¬ fect. The undergraduate managers of a suc¬ cessful foot-ball team now form a strong organization, which watches the course of promising players with a care which a college professor is not always in a position to give ; and it will go to almost any lengths of pressure upon a player rather than allow him to forfeit his place in college through waste of time. The hopelessly athletic student thus gets less mercy every year; and the influences which college athletic organizations bring to bear upon such students, the ingenious expedients by which they extort study from men who do not in¬ cline to study, are among the most instructive features of college life, to those who know of them. They fail again and again, of course ; but they do a work to which any other agency is incompetent. The game has found little favor at the South, but almost every Northern college now plays it more or less. The Intercollegiate Foot Ball Association, founded in 1876, con¬ sists of the three colleges named above, Wes¬ leyan University, and the University of Penn¬ sylvania. Each team plays one game with each of the other four teams during the sea¬ son, the last game falling to the two teams which stood highest during the previous sea¬ son. For the past few years these two teams have regularly been those of Yale and Prince¬ ton ; and these two are to be the contestants this year. This is always the great game of the year ; the two teams come to it, usually, with an unbroken record of victories over all their other opponents ; and the result of the game is to decide the championship for the coming year. No prudent man will ever venture into the question of the past championship records of the two leading opponents. The champion¬ ship rules of the Association have been so loose and unsystematic, and have offered so many opportunities for disputes, that the news¬ paper statements of the championships of past years are quite worthless. Most of the oppor¬ tunities for dispute seem now to have been covered, and it is to be hoped that the pres¬ ent year will see a clear and undisputed vic¬ tory for one side or for the other. It would be far easier to write a ‘‘ vivid ” description of this final game than of all the boat-races that ever were rowed ; the excite¬ ment is more prolonged ; the ups and downs of the game are constant and never to be fore¬ seen ; and the points of individual and team playing are vastly more numerous, more per¬ ceptible, and more easily apprehended. The enormous crowd, the coaches filled with men and horns, the masses and shades of color among the spectators, the perpetual roar of cheers, including the peculiar slogans of al¬ most all the Eastern colleges, combine to make up a spectacle such as no other inter¬ collegiate game can offer; while the instant response of the spectators to every shifting phase of the play shows that a very large num¬ ber of them have enjoyed the advantage of a good foot-ball training in the past. But, to him who really likes the game, and who un¬ derstands its possible influence on the devel¬ opment of Americans, the excitement, the cheers, the blowing of honis, and the ebb and flow of the game, count for little. There is, instead of them, a feeling of thankfulness for the antecedent process of which all this is only a symptom, and a moving force for the com¬ ing year; a satisfaction in knowing that this outdoor game is doing for our college-bred men, in a more peaceful way, what the experi¬ ences of war did for so many of their prede¬ cessors in 1861-65, in its inculcation of the lesson that bad temper is an element quite foreign to open, manly contest Alexander JoJmston.

Page 900

TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG.* THE TYPICAL VICTORIAN PERIOD. ITH respect to the poetry of Great Britain, the fancy may be indulged that this year’s festivals not only celebrate the rounding of a brilliant and distinct pe¬ riod, but stand for a kind of Secular Games as well. It is just a century since Burns and Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the joy of that new dawn, when “ To be young was very heaven ” ; and no other land than theirs, meanwhile, has shown a more unbroken procession of imag¬ inative poets. There was a brief nooning be¬ tween the early and later rehearsals, but the music of great voices has never wholly stopped. This still is heard, though more than a decade of years ago it seemed, and rightly, as if the typical Victorian era were complete. But in the summer of the North the last hours of a day whose wings of light come near to touch¬ ing its successor’s, — although the winds fall and the chief workers mostly go to rest, — have a luster of their own. The survival of influences that long since became historic is a chance coincidence with the prolongation of a fortunate reign, and due to veteran leaders whose strength has been more than equal to their day. Tennyson and Browning, although two generations of younger men pay homage to them, have been, with the exception of Swin¬ burne, the most unflagging poets of the recent interval. Moreover, — and maugre the flings of wits who judge them by trifles and failures, and who neither care for nor comprehend their important work, — they have given us much that is up to the standard of their prime. In no respect have they been superannuated or piping out of date, — little as they have had to do with the jest and prettiness, the viva¬ cious experiments, with which youth busies it¬ self ere an hour comes for serious attention to the conduct of a new movement. Yet if literary eras, like those of Elizabeth and Anne, are characterized by a special style or spirit, that for which the Victorian is already historic, on its poetic side, results from certain idyllic and reflective tendencies, with their in¬ terblendings and outgrowths. It ceased to be dominant before 1875, going off, as I pointed out, into aesthetic neo-Romanticism on the one hand, and a sub-dramatic or psychologic¬ al method on the other. If life may be judged by its mature and most prolonged activities, the Victorian school will be recognized as we have recognized it. It is beyond ordinary precedent that its two chief poets are still in voice, and still preeminent. Of Browning it may be said that he has bided his time, and now is the master of an enthusiastic following. But even Tennyson has charged his later idylls with passion, and succeeded in making at least his lyrics dramatic. On the technical side, recent craftsmen take their cue from the forms, melody, color of Swinburne and Ros¬ setti. What differs and is strictly novel, though much in vogue, seldom aspires to the higher range in which these elder leaders have moved almost alone. The conjectural length of a poet’s life doubt¬ less is not yet reckoned in the tables of insur¬ ance actuaries. But the longevity of modern poets really seems to have been governed by their mental cast. The romancers, and the lyrists of great sensibility or intense experi¬ ence, quicken their heart-beats and often have died young. Many poets of self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,” whose intellect is the regulator of well-ordered lives, have lived long : such men as Emerson and Long¬ fellow in America, — as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning in England. The recent drift — and they have strengthened it — has been to¬ ward the rule of intellect over passion, and the brain-power of such masters has maintained them in wonderful vitality and productiveness to an advanced age. However this may be, the most suggestive portion of the record now before us is that concerned with the last-named poets. Eng¬ land alone can now boast of two so equal in years and fame, yet so distinct in genius, and still producing works unsurpassed by the efforts of their juniors. Like two noble galleys they still head the fleet, and with all sails spread, though the mists of an unknown sea are straight before them. As for the laureate, all England knows him by heart. Successive ranks of generous and cultured youth have doted on his works, so that his gradual age is watched and understood, somewhat as in a family the This paper consists of extracts from a forthcoming originally appeared in this magazine. From the sec- Supplement to the next edition of “Victorian Poets,” — tions here given, the writer’s notices of many poets, a book first published in 1875, much of whose contents dramatists, etc., are necessarily omitted.

Page 901

900 TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG. bodily and mental changes of its revered mas¬ ter are observed by the household. At times his verse, and oftener than that of his more dramatic compeer’s, has sprung from sudden outbursts of feeling, and never more so than in the fine heat and choler of his later years. New readers may not comprehend these moods, but they are intelligible to those who have owed him so much in the past, and do not affect our judgment of his long career. TENNYSON. A GOOD deal of force has been expended by the laureate to disprove the claim that he would not greatly excel as a dramatist for either the closet or the stage. His mental and constructive gifts are such that, if he had be¬ gun as a “ writer of plays,” he doubtless would have been successful, — but never, I believe, could have reached his present eminence. His first drama, Queen Mary,” seemed to confirm an early prediction that he might yet produce a tolerable work of that kind, though only by a tour de force. Since then, through sheer will and persistency, he has composed a succession of dramas, historical and roman¬ tic ; but neither will nor judgment, nor the am¬ bition to prove his mastery of the highest and most inclusive form of literature, has enabled him in the afternoon of life to triumph as a dramatist. The first actor of England, with matchless resources for theatrical presentation, was able more than once to make the per¬ formance of a play by Tennyson a notable and picturesque event, but nothing more; nor have those produced with equal care by others be¬ come any part of the stage repertory. There are charmingly poetic qualities in the minor pieces, and one of them, ‘‘The Cup,” is not without effects, — but even this will nothold the stage, — while “The Falcon” and “The Prom¬ ise of May ” are plainly amateurish. They con¬ tain lovely songs and trifles, but when a great master merges the poet in the playwright he must be judged accordingly. “ Harold ” and “ Becket ” are of a more imposing cast, and have significance as examples of what may — and of what may not — be effected by a strong artist in a department to which he is not led by compul¬ sive instinct. Their ancestral themes are in every way worthy of an English poet. “ Har¬ old,” in style and language, is much like the Idylls of the King, nor does it greatly surpass them in dramatic quality, though a work cast in the standard five-act mold. There is a strong scene where the last of the Saxon kings is forced to swear allegiance to William of Nor¬ mandy. As a whole, the work is conventional, its battle-scenes reminiscent of Shakspere and Scott, and the diction tinged with the author’s old mannerisms. “ Becket,” seven years later, is his nearest approach to a dra¬ matic masterpiece, and at a different time might have ranged itself in stage-literature. It is quite superior, as such, to pieces by Talfourd, Knowles, etc., that are still revived ; but this is poor praise indeed for one of Tennyson’s fame, and assuredly not wortli trying for. It must be admitted that years of self-abstraction, of intimacy with books and nature, are not likely to develop the gift of even a born novel¬ ist or dramatic poet. Human life is his proper study : his task the expression of its struggle, passion, mirth and sorrow, virtue and crime, — and these must be transcribed by one that has been whirled in their eddies or who ob¬ serves them very closely from the shore. In striking contrast, Tennyson’s recent lyrical poetry is the afterglow of a still radiant genius. Here we see undimmed the fire and beauty of his natural gift, and wisdom in¬ creased with age. What a collection, short as it is, forms the volume of “Ballads” issued in his seventy-first year ! It opens with the thoroughly English story of “The First Quar¬ rel,” with its tragic culmination, — And the boat went down that night, — the boat went down that night ! ” Country life is what he has observed, and he reflects it with truth of action and dialect. “ The Northern Cobbler ” and “ The Village Wife ” could be written only by the idyllist whose Yorkshire ballads delighted us in 1866. But here are greater things, two or three at his highest mark. The passion and lyrical might of “ Rizpah ” never have been exceeded by the author, nor, I think, by any other poet of his day. “ The Revenge ” and “ Lucknow ” are magnificent ballads. “ Sir John Oldcas- tle ” and “ Columbus ” are not what Brown¬ ing would have made of them; but, again, “The Voyage of Maeldune ” is a weird and vocal fantasy, unequally poetic, with the well- known touch in every number. Five years later another book of purely Tennysonian ballads appeared. Its title-piece, “ Tiresias,” may be classed with “ Lucretius ” and “ Tith- onus,” yet scarcely equals the one as a study, or the other for indefinable poetic charm. “ The Wreck ” and “ Despair ” are full of power, and there are two more of the unique dialect-pieces, “ To-morrow” and “The Spin¬ ster’s Sweet-’arts.” A final Arthurian idyll, “ Balin and Balan,” is below the level of the work whose bulk it enlarges. “ The Charge of the Heavy Brigade,” much inferior to the Bal- aklavan lyric, shows that will cannot supply the heat excited by a thrilling and instant occasion. A poem in this volume, “ The Ancient Sage,” consists of speculations on the Nameless, —

Page 902

TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG. 901 and on the universal question which presents itself ever more strenuously as life’s shadows lengthen. In this sense, it is of kin to Brown¬ ing’s “ Ferishtah ” and ^‘Jochannan Hakka- dosh.” Still more noteworthy is the impetuous elegiac, “ Vastness,” written in 1885, and as yet not placed in a collection. The persiflage bestowed upon this, and afterward, in various quarters, upon the second “ Locksley Hall,” proclaimed the rise of a generation not wonted to the poet’s habit of speech; more, it re¬ vealed one out of patience with its creeds, and consoling itself by avoiding resolute thought upon what confronts and challenges our mor¬ tality. Tennyson, smitten by the death of a friend, reflects that not here alone dear faces steadily vanish, — but “ Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish’d race.” In the knowledge of this, what are all our politics, turmoil, love, ambition, but “a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of suns ? ” What is it all, forsooth, if at last we end, “ Swallowed in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown’d in the deeps of a meaningless Past ” ? As was natural, the sequel to Locksley Flail ” was received with more than curiosity — with a certain philosophical interest. I do not see that it is out of temper with that fervid chant which, forty-five years before, seized upon all young hearts and caught the ear of the world. Here is the same protest against conditions : in youth, a revolt from convention and class- tyranny ; in age, a protest against lawlessness and irreverence. The poet now as then re¬ sists the main grievance — but with an old man’s increased petulance of speech. His af¬ ter-song does not wreak itself upon the mas¬ ter passions of love and ambition, and hence fastens less strongly on the thoughts of the young; nor does it come with the unused rhythm, the fresh and novel cadence, that stamped the now hackneyed measure with a lyric’s name. Yet, as to its art and imagery, the same effects are there, differing only in a more vigorous method, an intentional rough¬ ness, from the individual early verse. The new burthen is termed pessimistic, but, for all its impatient summary of ills, it ends with a cry of faith. And so ends “ Vastness ” : “ Peace, let it be ! for I loved him, and love him forever : The dead are not dead but alive.” If Browning is more intelligibly an optimist, it is because he studies mankind from a scientific point of view, keeping his own temper and spirits withal. He has a more abiding and “ saving faith ” m the immanence of a benefi¬ cent ruling power. Both these poets have deepened and widened their outlook: the one listens to the roll of the ages, and marks the courses of the stars; the other pierces the soul, to find the secret of a universe in the microcosm, man. Tennyson is the more im¬ pressed by that science which observes the astronomic and cosmic whole of nature, while biology and psychology are anticipated by Browning and subjected to his usufruct. When the laureate was raised to the peer¬ age — a station which he twice declined in middle life — he gained some attention from the satirists, and his acceptance of rank no doubt was honestly bemoaned by many sturdy radicals. It is difficult, nevertheless, to find any violation of principle or taste in the receipt by England’s favorite and official poet of such an honor, bestowed at the climax of his years and fame. Republicans should bear in mind that the republic of letters is the only one to which Alfred Tennyson owed allegiance ; that he was the “ first citizen ” of an ancient mon¬ archy which honored letters by gratefully con¬ ferring upon him its high traditional award. It would be truckling for an American, loyal to his own form of government, to receive an aristocratic title from some foreign potentate. Longfellow, for example, promptly declined an order tendered him by the King of Italy. But a sense of fitness, and even patriotism, should make it easy for an Englishman, faithful to a constitutional monarchy, to accept any well-earned dignity under that system. In every country it is thought worth while for one to be the founder of his family ; and in Great Britain no able man could do more for de¬ scendants, to whom he is not sure of bequeath¬ ing his talents, than by handing down a class- privilege, even though it confers no additional glory upon the original winner. Extreme British democrats, who openly or covertly wish to change the form of government, and even communists, are aware that Tennyson does not belong to their ranks. He has been, as I long since wrote, a liberal conservative : liberal in humanity and progressive thought, strictly conservative in allegiance to the na¬ tional system. As for that, touch but the ter¬ ritory, imperil the institutions, of Great Britain, and Swinburne himself — the pupil of Landor, Mazzini, and Hugo — betrays the blood in his veins. Tennyson, a liberal of the Maurice group, has been cleverly styled by Whitman a “ poet of feudalism ” ; he is a celebrator of the past, of sovereignty and knighthood; he is no lost leader, ‘‘just for a ribbon” leaving some gal¬ lant cause forsworn or any song unsung. In all fairness, his acceptance of rank savors less of in¬ consistency than does the logic of those who rail at the world for neglect of genius, and then up¬ braid themboth for coming to an understanding. As a final word about Lord Tennyson, a laureate of thirty-seven years’ service, it may

Page 903

TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG, 902 be said that no predecessor has filled his of¬ fice with fewer lapses from the quality of a poet. Southey’s patriotic rubbish was no bet¬ ter, and not much worse, than his verse at large. Wordsworth, during the few years of his in¬ cumbency, wrote little official verse. Tenny¬ son has freshened the greenness of the laurel ; a vivid series of national odes and ballads is the result of his journey as its wearer. That some of his perfunctory salutations and paeans have been failures, notably the Jubilee ode of the current year, is evidence that genius does not always obey orders. The Wellington ode, ‘‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the dedi¬ cations of “In Memoriam” and the “Idylls,” and such noble ballads as those of “ Grenville,” “The Revenge,” “Lucknow” — these are his vouchers for the wreath, and, whether inspired by it or not, are henceforth a secure portion of his country’s song. BROWNING. Old lovers of Tennyson feel that he is best understood by those who grew up with his poems, and profited by his advance to the mature art and power of “In Memoriam” and the four chief “ Idylls.” Browning began and continued in quite another way. A neophyte might as well get hold of his middle-life work, and thence read backward and forward. If one prefers to gain an introduction to the au¬ thor of “ The Inn Album ” from a sustained poem, rather than from his lyrics, nothing bet¬ ter could be chosen than that nervous, coher¬ ent work, the first in date of his productions during the time we are considering. I recall its eifect upon one or two of my younger friends, who ascribe to it their first sense of those profound emotions which set the spirit free. Seldom is there a work more inwrought with characterization, fateful gathering, intense human passion, tragic action to which the realistic scene and manners serve as height¬ ening foils, than this thrilling epic of men and women whose destinies are compressed with¬ in a single day. The tragedy ends with the death of two sinners, whose souls are first laid bare. No one of Browning’s works is better pro¬ portioned, or less sophisticated in diction, — the latter, in truth, being never suifered to di¬ vert attention from the movement and interest of this electric novel in verse. It was quickly followed by a various little book, “ Pacchior- otto.” The poet now turns upon his critics, with countering satire and a defense of his hardy methods ; but he welcomes, in title- piece and epilogue, “ friends who are sound ” to his Thirty-Four Port, promising “ nettle- broth” galore to the feeble and maudlin. Of the shorter efforts, “A Forgiveness ” displays to the full his dramatic and psychological mastery. Its verse is modeled with the strong right hand that painted “ My Last Duchess,” to which it is in all respects a vigorous companion-piece. A third translation from the Greek drama, the “Agamemnon” of ^schylus, is marked by fidelity to the text, gained through a free disregard of English idiom, but scarcely has the sweetness and grace of “ Balaustion ” and “ Aristophanes’ Apology.” The volume entitled “ La Saisiaz : The Two Poets of Croisic,” like “The Inn Album,” com¬ mends itself to lay readers, being direct and forcible, with abundant food for thought. The opening poem, in the “ Locksley Hall” meas¬ ure, bravely considers the problem of mortal and immortal life. Its successor reeks with humor¬ ous wisdom, irony, knowledge of the world. An ideal lyric supplements them, inscribed to the woman whose aid to the writer’s song is symbolized by the cricket’s note that helped out a minstrel’s tune when his lyre had broken a string. But the finest and richest display of Browning’s triune lyrical, narrative, and ana¬ lytical vigor, which he has given us since the memorable “ Dramatic Lyrics ’’and “ Men and Women,” is found in the series (1879-80) of “ Dramatic Idylls.” These silence the critic’s complaint of the neglect or dilution of the poet’s original genius. The most impressive of the metrical tales are “ Martin Ralph,” “ Clive ” — a marvelous evocation — and “ N ed Bratts ” — a Holbeinish conjecture of the ef¬ fect on a dull brutish hind of Bunyan’s teach¬ ings. “ Pheidippides,” a figure of the Athenian runner with news from Marathon, is superb, and “ Doctor - ” quite unapproachable for jest and satire. The story of “ Muyleykeh ” and his Arab steed is already a classic. Always throughout these vivid impersonations, as in “ Ivan Ivanovitch ” and “ Pietro of Albano,” the magician’s supreme intent is to reveal “ What’s under lock and key — Man’s soul ! ” “Jocoseria” (1883), made up of brief and sturdy poems, illustrates again the author’s habit of exploration through all literatures for his texts and themes. After the grim, pathetic ballad of “ Donald ” and the grimmer “ Chris¬ tina and Monaldeschi,” we have in “ Jochan- nan Hakkadosh ” the vital lessons of the book. The Rabbi, and the pupils who find his say¬ ings hard indeed, are no inapt types of our modern poet and his circle. As in “ Paracelsus,” Browning’s favorite theorem continues to be the soul’s real victory achieved in the appar¬ ent failures of earthly life. His latter years are given more and more to the considera¬ tion of eternal rather than temporal questions. Under the guise of a dervish he proffers, in “ Ferish tab’s Fancies,” a sum of hopeful wis-

Page 904

TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG. dom as to the meaning of existence, the good¬ ness of the Creator. The thought, like all great thought, is simple, yet put so subtle- wise as to make it well that our latter-day Solomon has the fame that tempts a world to study the riddling homilies of his old age. To those who balk thereat no comfort is vouchsafed except such as they find in “ Pambo ” of the preced¬ ing volume, — for he still merrily ‘‘ offends with his tongue,” though clearly an interpre¬ ter of the purest theistic spirit of our time. My brief references to Browning’s plenteous aftermath close with his “ Parleyings with Cer¬ tain People of Importance in Their Day.” His intellect disports itself more than ever in these half-dozen citations of far-away personages whom he raises from the dead at will. The work is capricious enough, but he does not forget, in the most rugged and obscure pas¬ sages, to give us interludes that prove his voice still unimpaired. “ Gerard de Lareise ” is smooth and delicate enough for a fastidious ear, with rare bits of song included, and mu¬ sic itself receives expert attention in “ Charles Avison.” The prologue and epilogue of this book are not its least essential matters. All in all, however, it is not so ultimate and sat¬ isfactory as one could desire. At whatever worth he may rate the clubs of quidnuncs as¬ sociated to study him, he does not disdain to make riddles for them, as in the Prelude, and to choose remote, obscure topics for their dis¬ cussion — somewhat as the wizard Michael Scott, compelled to supply tasks for his fa¬ miliar, succeeded at last by ordering him to make ropes out of sea-sand. He is right in affording them no special clews, for that which, written in verse, can be conveyed as well by a paraphrase, certainly is not poetry. Most of the foregoing work, so varied and affluent, is in rhymed verse. Great respect is paid to the observance of the rhyme, even though meaning and measure halt for it. Whitman’s Hebraic chant, often vibrating with profound rhythmical harmony, is the outcome of a belief that rhymes are hackneyed and trivial ; and as Browning’s rhymes are not sel¬ dom forced and artificial to a degree reached by no other master, the question is asked why he should rhyme at all, why he does not con¬ fine himself to his typical blank-verse and other free-hand measures. To this it might be replied that he was born a poet, with the English lyrical ear and ac¬ centual instinct; that he rhymes by nature, and exquisitely, as we see from all his simpler melodies, and that he is not the man to slight an intuitive note of expression. With all his headlong tyranny over restraints of form, an adherence to rhyme, as in the case of Swin¬ burne, is ‘‘ a brake upon his speech ” ; otherwise 903 his fluency, although the result of endlessly changeful thought, would quite outleap the effective limits of art. That the brakes creak and groan is a proof they are doing their work. But what of his involved and parenthetical style ? A rule concerning language is that it has power to formulate not only problems of absolute geometry, but those of imaginative thought; and clearness of style has been a grace of the first poets and thinkers. When Browning’s tangled syntax is involuntary, it may denote a struggling process of thought, for the style is the man. But, in defense of such of these “hard readings” as seem vol¬ untary and of aforethought, we call to mind the oriental feeling that truth is most oracular when couched in emblems and deep phrases. Nature arms her sweetest kernels with a prickly and resistful exterior, so that they are procured by toil which gives them worth. This poet surrounds his treasures with labyrinths and thorn-hedges that stimulate the reader’s onset. The habit is defensible when the treasures are so genuine. To experts and thinkers, who do not need a lure to make them value the quest, such things are an irritation and open to the disfavor shown by many who yield to none in respect for Browning’s creative power. BROWNING CLUBS. Yet it is plain that both the style and mat¬ ter of his work, after years of self-respecting adherence to his own ways, have at last given occasion for the most royal warrant of fame and appreciation ever granted to poet or sage while still in the flesh. To be sure there never was a time when such a result could more reasonably be expected. Our period exceeds all others, even the Alexandrian, in literary bustle and research. What organized phal¬ anxes for the study and annotation of our classics, — of course, and as is fitting, with the Shakspere societies at their head ! How rude the capture of Shelley, the avatar of our ide¬ ality and lyrical feeling ! Old and young, even the “little hordes” of Fourier’s socialistic dream, divide the ethereal raiment of the poet’s poet, that each may bear away some shred of its gossamer. Shelley’s lifelong and reverent lovers, who yield themselves silently to the imponderable, divine beauty of his num¬ bers, and who w^ould as soon make an autopsy of Lycidas himself as to approach his verse with hook and scalpel, look with equal won¬ der at the tribes which now claim their poet as if by right of discovery and the select few who burden his music with their notes and scholia. To its transformation into a “cult” they apply the stricture of a famous preacher who was concerned at the multiplication of

Page 905

TWELVE YEARS OF BRI2TSH SONG, 904 cheap Bibles. The evangelical bodies, he de¬ clared, by placing Holy Writ in every lobby and corridor, have dispelled the sacred awe in which it was held, and in fact have made it “as common as a pack of cards.” Feeling, taste, instinct, — all are against making a text¬ book of Shelley’s poetry, almost the last reli¬ quary guarded, with some right of distant kin¬ ship, by those who claim a humble inheritance of song. The sudden uprising of many Brown¬ ing clubs is the latest symptom of the rage for elucidation. The like of it has not been witnessed since the days of the neo-Platonists and grammarians ; nor were there a thousand printing-presses at the command of the Alex¬ andrian scholiasts. Not only more than one University quadrangle, but every mercantile town, from London, where the poet dwells, to the farthest outpost of the western continent, has its central Browning Society, from which dependents radiate like the little spiders that spin their tiny strands near the maternal web. Emerson was a seer ; Browning is a virile poet and scholar; but it has been the same with the followers of both — a Browning student of the first order can do much for us, — while one of the third or fourth remove, whose de¬ gree is expressed algebraically as B“ or may be and often is as prosaic a claimant to special illumination as one is apt to meet. The “ study ” of Browning lakes strong hold upon theorists, analysts, didacticians, who care little for poetry in itself, and who, like Chinese ar¬ tists, pay more respect to the facial dimensions of his Muse than to her essential beauty and the divine light of her eyes. The master him¬ self may well view with distrust certain phases of a movement originating with his more-fa¬ vored disciples ; nor is poetry that requires an¬ notation in its OAvn time, surer, on that account, of supremacy in the future. Perhaps the best that can be said of this matter is that some¬ thing out of the common is needed to direct attention to a great original genius, and to secure for a poet, after his long experience of neglect, some practical return for the fruits of his imagination. A contrast between the objective, or clas¬ sical, dramatic mode and that of Browning is not derogatory to the resources of either. In the former, the author’s thinking is done out¬ side of the work ; the work itself, the product of thought, stands as a creation, with the de¬ tails of its molding unexplained. The other exhibits the play of the constructor’s thought. The result, as affecting the imagination, justi¬ fies the conventional aim — to make us see, as in real life, the outside of persons and events, concerning ourselves rather with actual speech and movement than with a search for hidden influences, esoteric laws. To read one of Browning’s psychical analyses is like consulting a watch that has a transparent glass, instead of a cap of gold, surmounting the interior. We forget the beauty and proportions of the jew¬ eled time-piece, even its ofhce as a chronicler of time, and are absorbed by the intricate and dexterous, rather than artistic, display of the works within. Here is movement, here is cu¬ rious and exact machinery — here is the very soul of the thing, no doubt ; but a watch of the kind that marks the time as if by some will and guerdon of its own is even more sugges¬ tive and often as satisfying to its possessor. All the more. Browning represents the introspective science of the new age. Regard one of his men or women : you detect not only the strik¬ ing figure, the impassioned human speech and conduct, but as if from some electric coil so intense a light is shot beyond that every or¬ gan and integument are revealed. You see the blood in its secretest channels, the convolu¬ tions and gyrations of the molecular brain, all the mechanism that obeys the impulse of the resultant personage. Attention is diverted from the entire creation to the functions of its parts. Events become of import chiefly for the currents which promote them, or which they initiate. Browning’s genius has made this under- world a tributary of its domain. As a mind-reader, then, he is the most dra¬ matic of poets. The fact that, after scrutiniz¬ ing his personages, he translates the thoughts of all into his own tongue, may lessen their objective value, but those wonted to the lan¬ guage find nothing better suited to their taste. His judicial acceptance of things as they are is largely a matter of temperament, and does not imply that he is more devout and theistic, or a sounder optimist, than his chief compeer. The broadening effect of ex¬ perience as a man of the world also has much to do with it. Both Tennyson and Browning are highly intellectual. The former’s instinct for art and beauty is supreme, and mental analytics yield to them in his work. To Brown¬ ing poetic effects, of which he has proved him¬ self a master, often are nothing but impedi¬ menta, to be discarded when fairly in pursuit of psychological discovery. A conclusion with respect to Tennyson, in my review of his career from a much earlier point of time, was that he would be regarded long hereafter as, “ all in all, the fullest repre¬ sentative ” of the “ refined and complex Vic¬ torian age.” To this I added that he had carried his idyllic mode “ to such perfection that its cycle seems already near an end ” and “ a new generation is calling for work of a dif¬ ferent order, for more vital passion and dra¬ matic force.” After many years, he still seems

Page 906

TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG, to me the exponent of the typical Victorian pe¬ riod — that in which the sentiment poetized in the “Idylls” and “ In Memoriam” was at its height. It is equally true that Browning was in reserve as the leader-elect of the present suc¬ ceeding time. The Queen is still on her throne, but her reign outlasts the schools to which her name belongs. New movements are initiated, and Browning is their interpreter so far as po¬ etic insight is concerned. To this we only have to add that he is an eminent example of the justice of our exception to Taine’s dogma of the invariable subjection of an artist to his accidental conditions. ' He has proved that his genius is of the kind that creates its own environment and makes for itself a new atmos¬ phere, whether of heaven or of earth. SWINBURNE. Swinburne also has been a leader, particu¬ larly on the side of form and expression, and through his brilliant command of effects which novices are just as sure to copy as young musicians are to adopt the “ methods ” of a Chopin or a Liszt. Obvious tendencies of the new school reveal the influence of Browning, modified structurally by Swinburne’s lyrical abandonment and feats of diction and rhythm. As he reaches middle life, the volume of his productions becomes remarkable, putting to confusion those who doubted his vital¬ ity and staying-power. His second classical drama, “Erectheus,” is severely antique in mold, with strong text and choruses. But it is relatively frigid, apart from common interest, and lacks something of the fire and melody of Atalanta. The author’s compulsive lyrical faculty, however, has not ceased its exercise — the resulting odes, songs, and manifold brief poems having been collected chiefly in the second series of “ Poems and Ballads,” and in “ Studies in Song,” “ Songs of the Springtides,” “A Century of Roundels,” and “A Midsum¬ mer Holiday.” Their variety and splendor sustain the minstrel’s early promise : — any one of the collections would make a reputation. If they have been greeted with less than our old wonder and relish, it is due to the unfor- getable novelty of those first impressions, and to the profusion of this poet’s exhaustless out¬ giving. Masterpieces of their kind among the new songs and ballads are the “Ave atque Vale,” of which I wrote in a former essay, and “A Forsaken Garden.” The translations from Villon charm the ear with a witching sense possibly unfelt by the vagabond ballad- ist’s contemporaries. Swinburne is still at the head of British elegiac and memorial poets. Witness the twin odes in honor of Landor and Hugo, covering the entire progress of their VoL. XXXIV.— 124. 905 achievements, and the second ode to Hugo, the lines to Mazzini, and other compositions in the highest mood of tributary song. A per¬ vasive element of these books is that relating to the sea, of which their author is a familiar and votary. One of them (as also the poem “ By the North Sea ”) is inscribed to his “ best friend, Theodore Watts,” the poet and critic to whom Mr. Swinburne is indebted for loyal companionship and devotion. The “Songs of the Springtides ” are surcharged with endless harmony of ocean winds and surges. “ Thalas- sius,” “ On the Cliffs,” “The Garden of Cymo- doce,” full of alliterative and billowy cadence, are fashioned in a classical and nobly swelling mold. The unique poem of Sappho, “ On the Cliffs,” was suggested by the fancy that the nightingales still repeat fragments of her Les¬ bian song. “A Midsummer Holiday ” takes us again by the sea and through the ’long¬ shore lanes of England ; its refrain — “ Our father Chaucer, here we praise thy name ” — recalls the enduring freshness of a poet to whom still the avowal can be made that — “ Each year that England clothes herself with May She takes thy likeness on her.” Elaborate and refined as all these pieces are, they exhale a purely English atmosphere. “A Century of Roundels ” is the most simple and distinctive of the lyrical collections. Among the noteworthy roundels are several discours¬ ing with Death, and those on Autumn and Winter ; best of all, the clear-cut series on “A Baby’s Death.” In the latter, as in the cradle¬ songs and other notes of infancy and child¬ hood, he is winning and tender — in all his poems on age, reverent and eulogistic. The artistic motive of his political outbursts, at various crises, is quite subordinate to their writer’s impulsive views ; their satire and in¬ vective possibly act as safety-valves and are of interest to curious students of the poetic temperament in its extremes. Not a few consider “ Tristram of Lyonesse ” to be his most attractive and ideal narrative poem. The conception of the Arthurian leg¬ end is distinct from that of either Tennyson or Arnold, and the verse is rich with desire, foreboding, and pathetic beauty. The open¬ ing phrase. The Sailing of the Swallow, is enchanting ; the description of Iseult of Ire¬ land is a wonder, and the whole coil of burn¬ ing love and piteous mischance was never before so marvelously woven. Of Swinburne’s recent dramas, “ Mary Stuart ” completes the most imposing Trilogy in modern literature, and is, while less roman¬ tic than “Chastelard” and less eloquent than “Bothwell,” a fit successor to the two. Its vigor is condensed and joined with a gravity becom-

Page 907

TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG, 906 ing the firm hand of maturer years as it depicts the culmination of this historic tragedy — the taking-off of a picturesque, impassioned, su¬ perbly selfish type of royalty and womanhood. The author’s consistent ideal of Mary Stuart is formed by intuition and critical study, and is reasonably set forth in his prose essay. The future will accept his conception as justly in¬ terpreting the secret of her career. In the Trilogy her fate, through the agency of Mary Beaton, is made the predestined outcome of early and heartless misdeeds, and dramatically ends the steady process of the work. “ Marino Faliero,” post-dating by sixty-five years Byron’s drama of that name, following the same chronicle and with the same person¬ ages, is a direct challenge to comparison. Both are fairly representative of their authors. Neither is a stage-play : Byron’s was tested against his own judgment, and he found no fault with the critics who thought his genius undramatic. There is no talk of love in either play, except the innocent passion which Swin- iDurne creates between Bertuccio and the Duchess. Both poets make the Doge’s part o’ertop all others, but Byron lightens Faliero’s monologues with stage business, etc., and pays serious attention to the action of the piece. Swinburne uses the higher poetic strain throughout ; his language is heroic, the verse and diction are always imposing, but propor¬ tion, background, and the question of relative values obtain too little of his attention. All know the slovenly and unstudied character of Byron’s blank verse. Swinburne adheres to the type, equally finished and prodigal, to which he has wonted us. In every sense he is a better workman. But the directness and simplic¬ ity of Byron’s drama are to be considered. The death-speech which he puts in Faliero’s mouth, theatrical as it is, will continue memorable as a fine instance of Byronic power. In the modern play the Doge’s speech extends to fifteen pages (with the chanting interludes), and this directly after a trial-scene in which he has done most of the talking. Half this rhythmical eloquence would be more impressive than the whole. In spite of Swinburne’s deprecation of Lord Byron, and his own more direct inheritance from Shelley, he has several of the former’s traits : the scorn of dullness and commonplace, faith in his own conclusions, and the swift and bold mastery of a forcible theme. Continuing the habit of prose-writing, as is the custom of the times, he has displayed his scholarship and versatility in new critical essays. The value of some of these — such, for example, as the prose dithyrambic on Hugo — lies not so much in their judicial quality as in those felic¬ itous critical epigrams which take the reader by their sudden insight and originality. ‘‘ A Note on Charlotte Bronte ” is admirable in this way, for all its tendency to extremes. The volume of “ Miscellanies ” (1886) contains, on the whole, his soundest and most varied prose-writing, much of it as well considered as one could desire, and expressing, brilliantly of course, the judgment of a poetic scholar in his dispas¬ sionate mood. It is interesting to see how easily and royally Mr. Swinburne keeps up his dom¬ ination over an active class of writers. His scholarship, indisputable talent, and Napole¬ onic method of judgment and warfare, render him a kind of autocrat whom few of his craft care to encounter openly, though specialists in matters of research and criticism occa¬ sionally venture on rebellion. Whatever ground he loses is lost in consequence of a law already pointed out, which operates in the case of a vein too rich and productive. The torrent of his rhythm, beautiful and imaginative as it is, satiates the public — even animals fed on too nutritious food will turn to bran and husks for a relief. And the workings of his genius, from its very force and individuality, are such as he cannot be expected to vary or suspend. Death has summoned with his impartial touch both young and old alike from the cy¬ cle of poets considered in our original review. What more I wish to say concerning Rossetti, Horne, Wells, O’Shaughnessy, Marston, Col¬ lins, and others who have joined the silent majority, must be said elsewhere. Nor does the space assigned me here permit an exten¬ sion of former remarks upon Arnold, W. Mor¬ ris, Miss Rossetti, Payne, Buchanan, and other old acquaintances, — some of whom, such as Bell Scott, Noel, Patmore, and George Meredith, have materially changed or enriched their respective notes. Many authors not hereinbefore reviewed come properly within our annals of the last twelve years ; dramatists like Merivale, Gilbert, Ross Neil; colonial and provincial poets, upon whose list are Gordon, Sladen, Sharp, Anderson, Torn Dutt, Roberts, etc.; song-makers and London lyrists, among whom are Aid6, Ashby-Sterry, Clem¬ ent Scott ; not to forget a satirist like Court- hope, and translators — a class whose service in England is never at an end. But the remainder of the present article must be de¬ voted to remarks on the latter-day poets not embraced in the foregoing classification, and to discussion of tendencies manifest in the spirit of recent British song. SYMONDS — EDWIN ARNOLD — AUSTIN - LEWIS MORRIS, ETC. Of the poets whose books have appeared mainly since the date of our earlier review,

Page 908

TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG. several are conspicuous for the extent of their work, and demand attention in any notice of the time. What are their respective claims to the favor awarded leaders whom they rival in productiveness ? Symonds is fairly typical of the best results of the English university training. He is an exemplar of taste ; this, and liberal culture, joined with fine perceptive faculties, endow a writer who has the respect of lovers of the beautiful for his service as a guide to its his¬ tory and masterpieces. A wealth of language and material sustains his prose explorations in the renaissance, his Grecian and Italian sketches, his charming discourse of the Greek poets and of the Italian and other literatures. He has given us complete and almost ideal translations of the sonnets of Angelo and Campanella. Coming to his original verse, we again see what taste and sympathy can do for a receptive nature ; all, in fact, that they can do towards the making of a poet born, not with genius, but with a facile and persistent bent for art. The division between friendship and love is no more absolute, as not of degree but of kind, than that between the connoisseur and the most careless but impassioned poet. Symonds recognizes this in a thoroughbred preface to ‘‘ Many Moods,” a book covering the verses of fifteen years. He proffers attrac¬ tive work, good handling of the slow meters, and an Italian modification of the antique feeling. There is some lyrical quality in his Spring Songs.” Almost the same remarks apply to a later volume, “ New and Old.” Its atmosphere, landscape, and notes of sym¬ pathy therewith are so un-English that one must possess the author’s Latinesque training to feel them adequately. We have sequences of polished sonnets in the “ Animi Figura ” and its interpreter, “Vagabundi Libellus.” These studies of a “ beauty-loving and impul¬ sive, but at the same time self-tormenting and conscientious mind ” are his most satisfactory efforts in verse ; but if their emotions are, as he avows, “ imagined,” he reasons too curi¬ ously for a poet. Stella ” has a right to com¬ plain of his hero, and it is no wonder she went mad. His poems are suggestive to careful students only, in spite of their exquisite word- painting, and the merit of sonnets like those on “ The Thought of Death.” Admiring the finish of them all, we try in vain to recall the one abiding piece or stanza. Here is scholar’s work of the first order, the outcome of knowl¬ edge and a sense of beauty. Perhaps the au¬ thor would have succeeded as well as a painter, sculptor, or architect, for in any di¬ rection taste would be his mainstay. Nothing can be happier than his rendering, Avith com¬ ments, of the medieval Latin Student’s Songs, 907 neatly entitled “Wine, Woman, and Song”; and in the prose “ Italian By-ways ” his criti¬ cal touch is so light and rare that we are thankful for his companionship. Those who wish to make more than a rip¬ ple on the stream may profit by the example of Edwin Arnold. During the latest quarter of a busy life he has gained a respectful hear¬ ing in his own country and something like fame in America. He is not a creative poet, yet the success of his Asiatic legends is due to more than an attractive dressing-up of the commonplace. He has zest, learning, industry, and an instinct for color and picturesqueness strengthened through absorption of the Ori¬ ental poetry, by turns fanciful and sublime. Above all, he shows the advantage of new ground, or of ground newly surveyed, and an interest in his subject which is contagious. There is a man behind his cantos, and a man clever enough to move in the latest direction of our unsettled taste and thought. A distinct theme and motive, skillfully followed, are the next best things to inventive power. The “ Light of Asia ” was not an ordinary pro¬ duction. With “ The Indian Song of Songs,” and “ Pearls of the Faith ” it formed a triune exposition, on the poetic side, of the Hindoo and Arabian theologies. Probably Arnold’s ideals of Buddhism, even of Islamism, insensi¬ bly spring from a western conception, but he conveys them with sensuous warmth and much artistic skill. In these books and the transla¬ tions from the Mahabharata, he works an old vein in *a new way. Both the accuracy and ethics of his Oriental pieces have been lauded and attacked Avith equal vehemence. They have received great attention in that part of the United States where discussion is most “advanced” and speculative, and Avhere Bud¬ dhism and theosophy are just noAV indiscrimi¬ nately a fashion, and likely to pass away as have many fashions that led up to them. Arnold’s longer works may soon be laid aside, but such a lyric as “After Death in Arabia,” whether original or a paraphrase, will be treas¬ ured for its genuine beauty and serene pledges to human faith and hope. Alfred Austin’s essays on “ The Poetry of the Period’^ justly attracted notice. They Avere epigrammatic, conceived in a logical if disciplinary spirit, and almost the first severe criticism to Avhich our “ chief musicians ” have been subjected. Here Avas one who dared to lay his hand on the sacred images. He bore down mercilessly upon “ the feminine, narrow, domesticated, timorous” verse of the day, call¬ ing Tennyson feminine, BroAvning studious. Whitman noisy and chaotic, SAvinbume and Morris not great because the times are bad, and only less tedious than the rest. While an

Page 909

TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG. 908 iconoclast, his effort was constructive in its demand for the movement and passion that have animated more virile eras. When so lusty a critic himself came out as a poet, it fairly might have been expected that he would at least, whatever his demerits, avoid the tameness thus deplored. But movement and the divine fire are precisely what are lacking in Mr. Austin’s respectable and somewhat labored books of verse. The Human Trag¬ edy,” a work by which he doubtless would wish to be judged, includes an early-printed section, “ Madonna’s Child,” which is a key to the poem. The whole requires ten thousand lines, cast in ottava rUna and other standard forms. The Georgian measures are here, but not their force and glow. The movement is of the slowest, the philosophy prudish, and the story hard to follow : lovers are kept from marriage by religious zeal ; they don the Red Cross, travel and talk interminably, and finally are shot, and die in each other’s arms to the great comfort of the reader. Savonarola ” is a better work, — a studious tragedy, but not relieved by humor and realism, and with few touches that are imaginative. The title-piece of “ At the Gate of the Convent ” is artistic and interesting, and is followed by a good deal of contemplative verse, mostly lyrical in form, with the lofty ode not slighted. What we miss is the incense of divine poesy. The author’s satirical interludes have point, and I have seen graceful lyrics from his pen, but his ambitious verse, on whatever principle composed, is not of the class that reaches the popular heart, nor likely, on the other hand, to capture a select group of votaries like those so loyal from the outset to Rossetti and Browning. In every generation there is some maker of books who, without being a great writer, fig¬ ures as such in his own and other minds. His thorough belief in his function and his hold upon a faithful constituency are things which men of better parts may not envy him, yet find beyond their reach. Lewis Morris with his Epic of Hades,” Gwen,” Songs of Two Worlds,” and other works of many edi¬ tions, seems to be a writer whose fluent verse satisfies the popular need for rhythmical diet. Certain observances usually are noted in poetry of this kind. Its author handles a pretentious theme, and at much length, thus giving his effort an air of importance. He falls into the manner of popular models, and with great facility. He has a story to tell, or some lesson to teach, in all cases trite enough to an expert but more impressive to the mul¬ titude than the expert suspects. Finally, he has zeal and measureless industry, and takes him¬ self more seriously than if he were a sensitive and less robust personage. It would be wrong to say that Mr. Morris’s verse is no better than that of Pollok, Tupper, and Bickersteth. But he bears to this, the most refined of peri¬ ods, pretty much the same relation which they bore respectively to their own. ‘‘ The Epic of Hades ” is written in diluted Tennysonian verse, its merit lying in simplicity and avoid¬ ance of affectations. It is, however, only a metrical restatement of the Greek mythol¬ ogy according to Lempriere, and without that magic transmutation which alone justifies a resmelting of the antique. Gwen ” is a drama in monologue — an English love-story and, as far as ‘‘ Maud ” is dramatic, an attenuated Maud, without novelty of form or incident. In few of Morris’s poems is there the radiant spirit which floods a word, a line, a passage, with essential meaning. In The Ode of Life ” he girds himself for a Pindaric effort, and strives with much grandiloquence to display the entire panorama of existence. His truest poetry, though neither he nor his admirers may so regard it, is found among the Songs of Two Worlds” and ‘‘Songs Unsung,” and chiefly in simple pieces like “ The Organ Boy.” A longer poem, “ Clytemnestra in Paris,” should be mentioned for its originality and in¬ terest; it is based on the trial reports of a re¬ cent murder, and shows the worth of a vivid subject and a conception due solely to the poet. Morris also is forcible, though prolix, in some of his speculative theses, but leaves an impression of infallibility and that there are few subjects he would hesitate to preempt. A survey of these energetic writers leads to the inference that the more ambitious re¬ cent efforts do not acquaint us with the new poets who possess the greatest delicacy of hand and vision, and are subject to the most spiritual moods. The successive books of Walter Smith, author of “ Olrig Grange,” “ Hilda,” “ Kildrostan,” etc., only strengthen this inference. Their vogue with a class is due to the fact that, like Mrs. (“ Violet Fane ”) Singleton’s very feminine poem of “ Denzil Place,” each is what she honestly calls the latter — a story in verse. They are metrical novelettes, with the excess of interest and liveliness in favor of the lady, who gives zest to her romance by a warmth of realism, upon which the Scotch idyllist would doubtless blush to venture. Dr. Smith’s “ North Coun¬ try Folk ” contains some good short pieces. Mrs. Singleton’s “ Queen of the Fairies” is a tender story, purely and simply told. Her drama, “Anthony Babington,” is very credit¬ able, above the common range of woman’s work, which scarcely can be said of her mis¬ cellaneous lyrics. Her love-poetry is of all grades, and not always in the best taste. Mrs. Pfeiffer has been an untiring producer

Page 910

TWELVE YEARS OE BRITISH SONG. of verse of a different cast. Her early ‘‘ Poems ” embraced, besides a good ode “To the Teuton Woman,” one or two striking ballads which indicated her natural bent, since developed in “ The Fight at Rorke’s Drift,” and other spirited pieces. “ Under the Aspens ” is per¬ haps her most enjoyable collection. Her son¬ nets are thoughtful and intelligible, in this wise differing from the work of many sonnet- mongers, and those on Shelley and George Eliot are well worth preservation. In her more arduous flights she often fails, but there is an air of refinement and sincerity in much that comes from her pen. Mrs. Hamilton King’s long poem, “ The Disciples,” has been widely read. Four disciples of Mazzini narrate, chiefly in blank verse and rhymed heroics, the story of Garibaldi. The influence of the two Brownings is visible in Mrs. King’s style. Her chief poem, the story of Fra Ugo Bassi, though too long, has strong passages and effective pictures of Italian and Sicilian scenery. Her defects are a lack of condensed vigor and imagination. ARTHUR J. MUNBY - JAMES THOMSON. There are one or two marked exceptions to the inference just now drawn. When Mr. Munby’s “ Dorothy” appeared, sound-minded readers had a sense of refreshment. It was a novel pleasure to light upon a complete and wholesome poem, faithfully and winningly going at its purpose, that of depicting pas¬ toral English scenes and extolling health and strength as elements of beauty in woman. The heroine of this unique “country story in elegiac verse ” is genuine as one of Mil¬ let’s peasant-girls or Winslow Homer’s fisher- maidens. Seldom, nowadays, do we find such pictures of farm-life, bucolic work and sports, outside of Hardy’s and Blackmore’s novels. The plowing-scene is a subject for a painter, and he could find, indeed, a score of charm¬ ing themes in this one poem. Dorothy’s sweet face and noble bearing require, it is true, the device of an aristocratic fatherhood, and there is possibly an implication of the benefits of cross-breeding. Munby equals Millet in honest candor, but I think he goes beyond nature in the one blemish of his idyll ; there is an over-coarseness in giving even a plow- girl hands that would disgust a navvy or pitman. As might be expected of the poet who wrote “ Doris,” that lovely pastoral, he is an artist, and has achieved a difficult feat in popularizing his elegiac distichs. A second exception is that of a man to whom a long chapter might be devoted, and whose life and writings, I doubt not, will be subjects of recurring interest during years to come. 909 For it may almost be said of the late J ames Thomson, author of “ The City of Dreadful Night,” that he was the English Poe. Not only in his command of measures, his weird imaginings, intellectual power and gloom, but with respect to his errant yet earnest temper, his isolation, and divergence from the ways of society as now constituted, — and very strangely also in the successive chances of his life so poor and proud, in his final decline through unfortunate habits and infirmities, even to the sad coincidence of his death in a hospital, — do the man, his genius, and career afford an almost startling parallel to what we know of our poet of “ the grotesque and arabesque.” Shelley, Heine, Leopardi, Schopenhauer, — such were the writers whom Thomson valued most, and whose influence is visible in his poetry. Yet the production al¬ ready mentioned, and many others, have traits which are not found elsewhere in prose or verse. So much might be said of Thomson’s work that I scarcely ought to touch upon it here. But “ The City of Dreadful Night ” may be characterized as a somber, darkly wrought composition, toned to a minor key from which it never varies. It is a mystical allegory, the outgrowth of broodings on hopelessness and spiritual desolation. The legend of Diirer’s Melancholia is marvelously transcribed, and the isometric interlude, “As I came through the Desert thus it was,” is only surpassed by Browning’s “ Childe Roland.” The cup of pes¬ simism, with all its conjuring bitterness, is drunk to the dregs in this enshrouded, and again lurid, but always remarkable poem. We have Omar Khayyam’s bewilderment, without his epicurean compensations. “ Vane’s Story,” the title-piece of an earlier volume, is similarly impressive, and minor lyrics are worth study for their intenseness and frequent strange beauty. “Vane’s Story,” though melodra¬ matic, and curiously outspoken in its notion of life and death, its opposition to ordinary views, is not easily forgotten. On the side of artistic poetry we have the Arabic love-tale of “ Weddah,” and “ Two Lovers” — a beauti¬ ful legend in quatrains. No one can read these, or the passionate “ Mater Tenebrarum,” or such a rhapsody as “ He heard Her Sing,” surcharged with melody and fire, without feel¬ ing that here was a true and foreordained poet. More profuse than Poe, less careful of his art, often purposely and effectively coarse, he holds a place of his own. He was a natural come-outer, and declared for all sorts and con¬ ditions of men, independently of rank or rec¬ ord. At times he proved, by such verses as “ Sunday at Hampstead ” and “ Sunday on the River,” that a blither nature underlay his gloom, and that happy experiences would

Page 911

910 TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG, have made his song less pessimistic. But if ever a poet learned in suffering, it was he, and if the cup had passed from him we should have lost some powerful and distinctive verses. The posthumous volume, “A Voice from the Nile,” contains, with a friendly memoir by Bertram Dobell, the fugitive productions of Thomson’s early and later years. VARIOUS RECENT POETS, AND THEIR TENDENCIES. The poetry of many recent and younger writers is still to be considered. They scarcely can be said to initiate a new school, or to di¬ vide themselves into groups like those formed by the minor poets of a slightly earlier time. Listening to various masters, and feeling the absence just now of any special tone or drift, more than one new aspirant essays some note of his own. Their very lack of assumption, and failure to claim by bold efforts a share of the attention secured by the novelists, imply a tacit acknowledgment that poetry cannot maintain at the moment its former dominance in the English world of letters. This is an un¬ promising attitude ; but if they do not exhibit the ardent, full-throated confidence that begets leadership, there still are not a few who devote themselves to ideal beauty, and sing, in spite of discouragements, because the song is in them. They bear in one respect a mutual like¬ ness. Though not given to the technical freaks of the recent art-extremists, the work of all displays a finish unknown at the outset of the Victorian period. The art of dexterous verse- making is so established that the neophyte has it at command. As with the technics of mod¬ ern instrumental music, it is within common reach and not a subject for much remark. Gosse, whom the public first knew as a poet, and who has become prominent as a literary scholar and critic, has not suffered general au¬ thorship to hinder his more ideal eftbrts for any length of time. That he is an attractive and competent master of English prose the leading journals and magazines bear constant witness, no less than his “Studies in Northern Literature,” his “ Life of Gray,” lectures on po¬ etry, and other essays, biographies, and contri¬ butions to works that are richer for his aid. All this prose matter has been refined and bettered by his poetic sensibility. And as a poet,. the title of the first book for which he was sole sponsor, “ On Viol and Flute,” hints of his early quality. Though plainly alive to the re¬ naissance movement, it was full of young blood and tuneful impulse ; its contents appertaining to music, art, love, and the Norse legendary so familiar to him. His “ New Poems,” six years later in date, are simpler, more restrained and meditative. They are deftly finished, pure and cool, a degree too cool for current taste. His classical sonnets — from the first he has been a good sonneteer — exhibit all these traits. He has a strong and logical sense of form, while his color is keyed to the tranquil and secondary, rather than the sensuous primi¬ tive, tones. A grace in which he has few equals is the fidelity to nature of his pastorals and lyrics. There is true and sweet landscape, the very spirit of the English coppices, rivers, and moors, in his quiet pieces. Successful with the French forms which he did much to introduce, he uses them sparingly ; in fact, he seldom or never plays the tricks of the extreme decora- tionists, but trusts to the force of his thoughts and impressions. The contents of the volume, “ Firdausi in Exile,” maybe taken, I suppose, as his most mature and varied work, for the early drama of “ King Erik,” though credita¬ bly done and on a theme quite native to him, does not show his bent to be strongly dramatic. Reviewing his verse, one finds a genuine feel¬ ing for nature, and subtile ideality, in “ Sun¬ shine before Sunrise,” “ The Whitethroat,” “ Lying in the Grass,” “ The Shepherd of the Thames,” “ Obermann Yet Again.” His “The¬ ocritus” has delicious melody and charm. There is a return in his longer poems, “ Fir¬ dausi ” and “ The Island of the Blest,” to the Italian method of Hunt and Keats. Gosse is an example of the latter-day poet who does so well and learnedly in prose as scarcely to obtain full credit for his natural poetic gift. His verse, like that of Arnold, with whom its spirit is allied, grows on one by quiet study. It is not often of a swift and lyrical character; yet that he can be both resonant and pictur¬ esque is evident from a vigorous ballad, “The Cruise of the Rover,” which will bear reading with the sea-ballads of Tennyson and Kings¬ ley, and of itself bestows upon its author the name of poet. Blunt’s “ Love Sonnets of Proteus ” are in¬ teresting as the artistic and sole utterance of their composer — the record, whetherpersonal or not, of a man’s successive love-experiences. This series of sonnets comes from one guided by the foremost English master, yet they are idiosyncratic and do not betray a weak or inexpert hand. Their savor of artificiality disappears when the writer ceases to be in¬ trospective, as in the fresh and wholesome sonnet on Gibraltar at the close. A claim to regard was at once established by “ Michael Field,” through her first volume, embracing the dramas of “ Callirhoe ” and “ Fair Rosa¬ mond.” It seemed a reoccupation of Swin¬ burne’s early ground, but this was only true with respect to the choice of themes. “ Cal¬ lirhoe ” is classical merely in subject and time,

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TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG. 91 1 and is treated in a modern way, the charac¬ ters being living men and women with a lan¬ guage compact of beauty and imagination. ‘‘ Fair Rosamond ” is brief, strong ; the cul¬ minating act of a tragic scheme that has be¬ guiled great artists to its handling. The dramas in this writer’s second book, The Father’s Tragedy, etc.,” reveal the same vig¬ orous touch, but are diffuse and lack contrast¬ ing lights and shades ; there is no humor, — speech and action are always at concert-pitch. Their diction, however, is more original than that of any other young writer. Often an epi¬ thet carries force, and is used in an entirely fresh way. This dramatist lacks proportion ; her manner betokens close study of the Eliza¬ bethans, but of the minor ones rather than the greatest. Her work is notable for its freedom, even audacity, and contrasts in all respects with that of Tennyson — so correct of style and proportion, yet without natural dramatic fire. Her advance in ‘‘Brutus Ultor” is not of the right kind. It seems as if she hunted history for plots and themes. This is a Ro¬ man tragedy, compressed and over- virile — even coarse at times, as if the effort to speak as a man were a forced one. “ Michael Field” is ambitious, and has warrant for it. Her motto should be “ strength and beauty,” and not strength alone. The “Nero” of Robert Bridges, an historical tragedy of the emperor’s early reign, with narrower extremes of passion, is to my mind a more essentially virile work. There is a nobler severity in dialogue, which merits the name of Roman. The diction and blank verse are restrained, but impressive. The characters of Nero, Poppsea, Seneca, Agrip¬ pina, are distinctly drawn. While in a sense conventional, “ Nero” shows the mark of a self-poised, confident hand. A few of the lyrics in Bridges’ eclectic and privately printed vol¬ ume of 1884 strengthen my opinion that he is a very ideal and artistic poet. The elegy “ I have loved flowers that fade ” is matchless in its way, apparently old in feeling yet perfectly original ; and some of his songs rival it in their brief melody. Canon Dixon’s early work betrayed the close affinity between the new ecclesiasticism and the methods of Rossetti. His “ Odes and Eclogues,” on the other hand, are the most extreme type of Anglo-classic verse, — that peculiar grafting of modern thought upon the Grecian stock in which Arnold was a leading expert, and which is so fascinating to a scholar- poet. His latest lyrics have a peculiar wander¬ ing beauty. All his work is finished to a notable degree. Dixon and Bridges at this distance appear to be the chief lights of a quaintly esoteric Oxford School. Miss Robinson’s verse is a delicate spray, engendered by influences which began with Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites, and in the end supplied the motive of British taste in plastic and decorative art, in letters, and in all the refinements of social life. She shows the effect of culture upon an impressible fem¬ inine nature, placed among devotees of the beautiful, and breathing its atmosphere from her childhood. Her classical studies were like those of Mrs. Browning, with an aesthetic training superadded that was not obtainable in Mrs. Browning’s time. Her first little book, “ A Handful of Honeysuckle,” bears the ob¬ vious impress of Rossetti, — a shoot from his garden, but with new and fragrant blossoms of its own. The lyrics appended to her next work — a praiseworthy translation of “ The Crowned Hippolytus” — were of a maturer cast. Afterward, applying her gift to humane transcripts of real life, she wrote “The New Arcadia,” a group of ballads in behalf of suffer¬ ing womanhood and England’s poor. Doubt¬ less this was too grave an experimental task, for in turning at last to Italy, and its rispetti and stornelli^ she seems thoroughly at home. Her book of songs, “An Italian Garden,” is the most essentially poetic of her works thus far. It breathes the Anglo-Italian spirit which is in fact her own. The rispetti forming her wreath of Tuscan cypress, with their beauty and sadness, are in every way characteristic of this poet, and in her most suggestive vein. Meanwhile her acquirements enable her to take an active part in the critical and biograph¬ ical industries which the inevitable book-pur¬ veyor now opens for every rising author. Of her sister poets not yet mentioned, Mrs. Lid¬ dell and Miss Nesbit deserve notice. The former’s “ Songs in Minor Keys ” are suffused with deep religious feeling, always expressed in good taste. Miss Nesbit’s “ Lays and Le¬ gends ” suggest immature but promising indi¬ viduality. She is capable of strong emotion which is most effective in her shorter lays. Theodore Watts, the scholarly critic of poetry and romantic art, and a frequent con¬ tributor of verse to the literary journals, has thus far made no collection of his poems, except for private circulation. My knowl¬ edge of them is confined to some very perfect sonnets — a form of verse in which he is a natural and acknowledged master — and to a few lyrics of an elevated type. His ode to a Caged Petrel shows a large and eloquent method and a vivid perception of Nature’s grander aspects. He apparently seeks to revive the broad feeling of the Georgian lead¬ ers; at all events, his touch is quite inde¬ pendent of any bias derived from the eminent poets with whom his life has been closely associated. Among the many writers of good

Page 913

912 TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG. sonnets I may mention Hall Caine — Ros¬ setti’s young friend and memorialist. Dovv- den, whose critical work is always of a high order, has published a volume of poems, from which two or three imaginative examples of the same class have met my eye. William Watson,] udging from ^‘The Prince’s Quest,” is a disciple of Morris and a good one — a poet of slow movement, from whom we have also careful sonnets and Landorian quat¬ rains. Lee- Hamilton’s varied Poems and Transcripts,” with the studies in “Apollo and Marsyas,” remind one of the sculptor-poet Story by their reflection of Browning’s man¬ ner; yet where he is Browningesque or Ros- settian it is usually because the subject cannot be so well treated in another way. He has a taste for the psychologically dramatic, and usually interests the reader. “ The Bride of Porphyrion ” and “ The Wonder of the World ” are far from commonplace, and his sonnets are exceptionally fine. W. J. Dawson is quite possessed by Rossetti, but has resources of fancy, rhythm, decoration. If he contrives to outgrow his pupilage, something of worth may be expected from him. There is much simplicity and grace in the “ Poems ” of Er¬ nest Myers, largely suggested by study and travel, and they belong to the composite art school. Many of the young writers devote them¬ selves to cabinet-picturemaking, whether their dainty verse is properly idyllic or dramatic. The scenic tendency increases, just as it has grown, with an Irving to foster it, upon the stage. New poets strive, through affecting the mind’s eye, to outdo the painter’s appeal to the bodily vision. This invasion of a neigh¬ boring domain is a failure to utilize their own, and an undervaluation of the noblest of arts. Very pretty things of their kind, however, are often produced in this way. A graceful scholar-poet is Lefroy, whose “ Echoes ” introduce us to old friends in a new guise. His open method is to compress into a single sonnet the tenor of some well- known poem. Gautier’s “ L’art,” already para¬ phrased by Dobson, thus appears in sonnet- form, and many idylls of Theocritus are treated similarly. But these are supplemented by pleas¬ ing sonnets of English cloister and outdoor life. Raftalovich’s “ Cyril and Lionel ” con¬ tains well-turned verse of a motive which, although it is not imitative, I find difficult to understand. By his name this writer would seem to be more justified than others in eking out his book with lyrics in other tongues than the English. Since the date of “ Chastelard ” this practice has been more or less affected by the new men. Swinburne put his French songs into a play where they rightly belong, as an obligato to the action and discourse. Now every lutanist splits his tongue, like a parrot’s, to sing strange words, — but there are capa¬ bilities still left in our native English. If such linguistic feats must be essayed, why not com¬ pose in the universal Volapiik, — or more mellifluously in the late Mr. Pearl Andrews’s “ Alwato ” ? A phase of the aesthetic crusade in defense of poetry as an utterance of the beautiful solely, — a movement having almost perfect development at its start with Keats so long ago, — has appeared in the outgivings of some of Ruskin’s disciples, and avowedly in the verse of Oscar Wilde. His “ Poems,” with all their conceits, are the fruit of no mean talent. The opening group, under the head “ Eleutheria,” are the strongest. A lyric to England, “Ave Imperatrix,” is manly verse, — a poetic and eloquent invocation. “The Garden of Eros,” “ Burden of Itys,” “ Charmides,” are exam¬ ples of the sensuous pseudo-classicism. There is a good deal of Keats, and something of Swinburne, in Wilde’s pages, but his best mas¬ ter is Milton, whom he has studied, as did Keats, to good effect. His scholarship and cleverness are evident, as well as a native poetic gift. The latter indeed might prove his highest gift, if tended a little more seriously, and possibly he could be on better terms with himself in his heart of hearts, if he would forego his fancies, in behalf of his imagination — as there is still time for him to do. It is fair to accept the statement of his own ground, in his preface to the decorative verse of his friend Rennell Rodd, — though one doubts whether Gautier would not have dubbed the twain jeunes brodears, rather than jeimes guerriers., dll drapeaii romaiitiqiie. The apostles of our Lord were filled, like them, with a “ passion¬ ate ambition to go forth into far and fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the world.” But not until many centuries had passed were their texts illuminated to the extent displayed by Mr. Rodd and his printer, with their resources of India-paper, apple-green tissue, vellum, and all the rarities desired by those who die of a rose in aromatic pain. Yet the verse of “ Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf” is not so effeminate as one would suppose. The minstrel’s green¬ sickness is now well over, judging from his “ Feda and other Poems ” ; and in throwing it off he shows a good deal of the vigor need¬ ful for a decisive mark. Now, as a minor but genuine example of poetic art, not alone for art’s sake, but for dear nature’s sake, — in the light of whose maternal smile all art must thrive and blossom if at all, — take “A Child’s Garden of Verses ” by Stevenson. This is a real addition to the

Page 914

TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG. 913 lore for children, and to that for man, to whom the child is father. The flowers of this little garden spring from the surplusage of a genius that creates nothing void of charm and originality. Thanks, then, for the fresh, pure touch, for the revelation of childhood with its vision of the lands of N od and Counter¬ pane, and of those next-door Foreign Lands spied from cherry-tree top, and beyond the trellised wall. GARDE-JOYEUSE. Finally we observe what has been, all in all, the most specific phase of British minstrelsy since 1875. This is seen in the profusion of lyrical elegantiae, the varied grave and gay ditties, idylls, metrical cameos and intaglios, polished epistles and satires, classed as Society Verse, the Court Verse of older times. Perceiv¬ ing signs of its revival, I could not foresee that it would flourish as it has, and really consti¬ tute the main thing upon which a lyrical interval would plume itself. Its popularity is curious and significant. The pioneer in verse of a movement already evident in society and household art was Austin Dobson. This fa¬ vorite poet, by turns the Horace, Suckling, Prior, of his day, allying a debonair spirit with the learning and precision of Queen Anne’s witty fabulists, has well advanced a career which began with ‘‘ Vignettes in Rhyme.” Enjoying the quality of that book, I felt that its poet, to hold his listeners, must change his song from time to time. Of this he has proved himself fully capable. His second volume, Proverbs in Porcelain,” gave us a series of little ‘‘ proverbs ” in dialogue, exquisite bits of “ Louis Quinze,” and per¬ fectly unique in English verse. Nothing can excel the beauty and pathos of “ Good-Night, Babette,” with the Angelas song low-blended in its dying fall. The lines “To a Greek Girl,” in the same collection, and the para¬ phrase of Gautier, “ Ars Victrix,” superadd a grace even beyond that of Dobson’s early lyrics. Who has not read the “ Idyll of the Carp,” and the racy ballad of “ Beau Brocade” ? Here, too, are his little marvels in the shape of the rondel, rondeau, villanelle, triolet, — those French forms which he has handled with an ease almost inimitable, yet so wan¬ tonly provoking imitation. Perhaps Dobson has more than others shaped the temper of our youngest poets, both English and American. A first selection from his works appeared in the United States in 1880, its welcome justifying a second in 1885. Meanwhile the choice Editions de luxe^ “ Old World Idylls,” and “ At the Sign of the Lyre,” represent the greater portion of VoL. XXXIV.— 125. his verse. Any author might point to such a record with pride ; there is scarcely a stanza in these volumes wanting in extreme refine¬ ment, and this without marring its freshness and originality. In his place one should never yield — as there are stray omens that he sometimes is yielding — to any popular or journalistic temptation that would add a line to these fortunate pieces, except under the impulse of an artistic and spirited mood. The influence of Dobson and his associates has been a characteristic — a symptomatic — expression of the interval between the close of the true Victorian period and the beginning of some new and, let us hope, inspiring poetic era. It has created, in fact, a sort of kole in- ter??iediai?'e, of which the gay and buoyant minstrelsy is doubtless preferable to those af¬ fected heroics that bore every one save the egotist who gives vent to them. For real poetry, though but a careless song, light as thistle-down and floating far from view, will find some lodgment for its seed even on dis¬ tant shores and after long time. The rounde¬ lays of Villon, of Du Bellay and his Pleiade, waited centuries for a fit English welcome and interpretation. Lang’s “ Ballads and L)Tics of old France,” in 1872, captured the spirit of early French romantic song. Nine years after¬ ward, his “ Ballades in Blue China ” chimed in with the temper of our new-fangled minstrel times. Such craftsmanship as the villanelle on Theocritus, the ballade to the same poet, and the ballades “ Of Sleep ” and “ Of the Book-Hunter,” came from a sympathetic hand. In the later “ Ballades and Verses Vain ” are new translations, etc., and a few striking ad¬ denda, memorably the resonant sonnet on the Odyssey. A “ Ballade of his Choice of a Sep¬ ulchre ” is Lang’s highest mark as a lyrist, and perhaps the freest vein of his “ Rhymes ^ la Mode ” is in the long poems that do not fall under that designation, such as “The For¬ tunate Islands.” He has almost preempted the “ Ballade,” but his later specimens of it are scarcely up to his own standard. “ Cam¬ eos ” and “ Sonnets from the Antique ” are at the head of their class, and naturally, for no other Oxonian is at once so variously equipped a scholar and so much of a poet. The fidelity, diction, and style of his prose translations of Homer and Theocritus are equally distin¬ guished. Thus far his most serious contribu¬ tion to poetry is “ Helen of Troy,” — a poem taking, as one would expect, the minority view of its legend, and depicting the fair cause of Troy’s downfall as a victim to the plots of the gods. It is written felicitously in eight¬ line stanzas of a novel type, and, while not strong in special phrases and epithets, has much tranquil beauty. On his working-day

Page 915

914 TWELVE YE AES OF BRITISH SONG, side, readers never wait long for something bright from this versatile, inventive feuilleton¬ ist, — a master of persiflage, whose learned humor and audacity, when he is most insular, are, perhaps, the most entertaining. CONSIDERATIONS. If imitation be flattery, Dobson and Lang have breathed sufficient of its incense. The'ir ‘‘forms” have haunted a multitude of young singers, and proved as taking and infectious as the airs of Sullivan’s operettas. They have crossed the seas and multiplied in America more rapidly than the English sparrows which preceded them, — so that, as in the case of their feathered compatriots, the question is whether a check can be put to the breed. As I have said, this elegant rhyming, however light and delicate, is in fact a special feature of the latest Victorian literature, and, with its pretty notes tingling on the ear, is a text for some last words in discussion of what has gone before. First, let me say that it is but shallow rea¬ soning to worry over the outbreak of any fancy or fashion in art. Let a good thing — a much better thing than any form in verse — be over¬ done, and people will signify their weariness of it so decisively that the quickness of its exit will be as surprising as its temporary vogue. What conclusions, then, are derivable from our summary of the British poetic movement of the last dozen years ? We have paid tribute to the noble chants of a few masters who still teach us that Poetry is the child of the soul and the imagination. But one looks to the gen¬ eral drift of the younger poets, who initiate currents to the future, for an answer to the question, — What next? The direct influences of Keats, Wordsworth, and Shelley are no longer servilely displayed ; few echo even Tennyson ; Browning, Rossetti, and Swin¬ burne are more widely favored; but ancestral and paternal strains are as much confused and blended in the verse of the newest aspir¬ ants as in genealogy. Their work is more com¬ posite than ever, judging from the poets selected as fairly representative. Only two of its divisions are sufficiently pronounced for even a fanciful classification. One is the Stained- Glass poetry, if I may so term it, that dates from the Blessed Damozel and cognate models by Rossetti and his group ; the other, that Debonair Verse, whose composers apply themselves by turns to imitation of the French minstrelsy and forms, and to the aesthetic em¬ broidery of Kensington-stitch rhyme, — for in each of these pleasant devices the same practi¬ tioners excel. Now the class first named, and the first division of the second, are of alien ori¬ gin: they are exotics — their renaissance is of the chivalry, romance, mysticism, and balladry of foreign literatures. Only that witty, gallant verse which takes its cue from the courtly Brit¬ ish models of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is an exception, — and that, whatever its cleverness and popularity, can hardly be termed inventive. ^ The next thing to be noted is the finical nicety to which, as we see, the technique of poetry has advanced. Never were there so many capable of polishing measures quite un¬ exceptionable as to form and structure, never fewer whose efforts have lifted them above what is, to be sure, an unprecedented level — but still a level. The cult of beauty and art, delightfully revived so long ago by Hunt and Keats, has brought us at last to this. Con¬ cerning inspiration and the creative impulse, we have seen, first : that recent verse-makers who are most ambitious and prolific have not given much proof of exceptional genius. Their productions have the form and dimension of masterpieces, and little more. Secondly : those who appear to be real poets, shrinking from the effort to do great things in an uncongenial time, reveal their quality by lovely minor work — sometimes rising to an heroic and passionate but briefly uttered strain. And it is better to do small things well than to essay bolder ventures without heart or seriousness. Still, I think they must now and then doubt the importance of thus increasing, without specific increase of beauty and novelty, the mass of England’s rich anthology. Looking back, years from now, it will be seen that one noble song on a compulsive theme has survived whole volumes of elaborate, soulless artisanship by even the natural poets. What is it, then, that chills the “ heart and seriousness ” of those most artistic and ideal ? The rise of conditions adverse to the imagina¬ tive exercise of their powers has been acknowl¬ edged from the first in these essays. It is clear that instinct has become measurably dulled, as concerns the relative value of ef¬ forts ; so that poets do not magnify their call¬ ing as of old. There is less bounce, and, unfortunately, still less aspiration. Nor has the modern spirit, now freed from sentimental illusions, as yet brought its wits to a thorough understanding of what true Realism is — viz., that which is just as faithful to the ideal and to the soul of things as to obvious and exter¬ nal matters of artistic treatment. Here again the law of reaction will in the end prevail. Its operation is already visible in the demand for more inventive and wholesomely romantic works of fiction ; and this is but the forerun¬ ner of a corresponding impulse by which the poet — the maker — the creative idealist —

Page 916

TWELVE YEARS OF BRITISH SONG. whose office it is to perceive and illumine all realities, both material and spiritual, will have his place again. For a time, however, the revival of creative prose-fiction may occupy more than one po¬ etic mind. Novel- writing is more vigorously pursued than ever, by fresh hands. Journal¬ ism opens new and broader courts tempting for their influence, sense of power, and the subsistence yielded. Criticism, book-making, book-editing, are flourishing industries. Schol¬ ar’s work is steadily pursued, and carried even to analysis of living authors. Our poetry itself is too scholarly. Arnold’s happy statement concerning Byron, that “ he did not know enough,” does not apply to the typical latter- day poet. He has too much learning withal, of a technical, linguistic, treasure-hunting sort. The over-intellectuality and scholarship of many lyrists absorb them in curious studies, and deaden their impulse toward original and glowing efforts. They revive and translate, and borrow far too much the hoardings of all time. Even in their judgments they set an un¬ due value upon the learning, reasoning, phi¬ losophy, of a master under discussion. More¬ over, their literary skill and acquirements make the brightest of them serviceable aids to the publishers. No sooner are their names in pub¬ lic favor than the great houses smooth their way along the lucrative paths of book-making. Great and small houses have multiplied, and printing is easy and universal. To all this we indeed owe attractive series of critico-biograph- ical volumes, anthologies catholic and select, encyclopaedias, translations, and texts without end. Good and welcome as much of this work is, my present question must be — does it not chasten and absorb the poet’s facul¬ ties ? Has he not, at last, too good a literary market? The common-sense reply is that, after all, he must live, — and the belief is anti¬ quated that poets, like caged birds, sing better for starving. Yet if you chance of late upon a unique and terribly earnest bard, — a man like Thomson, — you find that he was out of the literary “ swim ” and usually out of pocket ; while his well-to-do brother more often is the man of letters corresponding to Southey and Wilson rather than to their fiery contempo¬ raries. If the poetic drama, for example, were now more frequently calling for elevated work, imagination and subsistence would both be subserved. The stage does make welcome beau¬ tiful and witty verse of a light order, but what it regularly supports is the facile playwright ; and its operettas and scenic plays are logically adapted to the zest for amusement and the ruling decorative frenzy. The desire of the critic and the public alike, and first of all, is for something new and ad¬ ditional. But that which is new is of higher worth when it contributes to the furtherance of a true national style. What is Spanish, French, German, we at once recognize as such, however different from previous works of like origin; but how seldom the later Vic¬ torian minstrelsy is essentially English ! A re¬ cent article by W. P. P. Longfellow criticises existing tendencies of architecture in Great Britain. He records the progress of a style which advanced to its culmination with the design for the new Law Courts, and until the “ Victorian Gothic was everywhere.” Pie writes that — “ Success was due, not so much to the style chosen as to the fact that, having found a style which suited them, the English followed it unitedly and persistently. Here seemed to be a national movement, strong, deep, and promising to endure. . . . Then, suddenly, at the signal of two or three restless and clever young men, whose eyes had caught something else, the Eng¬ lish architects with one accord threw the whole thing away; as a boy, after working the morning through at some plaything, with a sudden weariness drops his unfinished toy to run after the first butterfly. . . . They have seemed to show us that their progress was at the impulse of whim rather than conviction, ruled rather by fashion than tradition. It is the mobile Frenchman who in this century has set us an exam¬ ple of steadiness. If his work, like all the rest in our day, lacks some of the higher qualities of older and greater styles, it has, more than any other modern work, the coherency and firmness that are at the bot¬ tom of all style.” The point thus made has a bearing upon more arts than one. A style of architecture, it is true, is the outcome of centuries. Literary style has a readier formation and is quickly afected by individual leadership. Yet a na¬ tional manner distinguished the most subtile and inclusive of literary forms in every impor¬ tant era. This is not sustained by curious devices and imitations, however choice and attractive, but by harmonizing personal qual¬ ity with the national note of expression. I think there is a lack of recognizable and pervasive style in our English poetry of the period; that, with the exception of the por¬ tion which confessedly revives the manners of Queen Anne’s time and the Georgian, it is chiefly English in its intense desire to escape from Anglicism. What does this imply, — style being a visi¬ ble emblem of spiritual traits, — other than a want, so far as poetry can indicate it, of indi¬ vidual and national purpose ? Breadth, pas¬ sion, and imagination seem to be the elements least conspicuous in much of the recent song. The new men withdraw themselves from the movement of their time and country, forget¬ ting it all in dreamland — in no-man’s-Iand. They compose sonnets and ballads as inex¬ pressive of the resolution of an imperial and stalwart people as are the figures upon certain

Page 917

THE GOING OUT OF THE TIDE. 916 modern canvases — the distraught, unearthly youths and maidens that wander along shad¬ owy meads by nameless streams, with their eyes fixed on some hand we ‘‘ cannot see, which beckons ” them away. It may be that before we can hope for a return of poetic vigor some heroic crisis must be endured, some experience undergone, of more import than the mock-campaigns in weak and barbarous provinces, whereby Great Britain preserves her military and colonizing traditions, and avoids the stagnation of utter repose. The grand old realm bids fair to have her awakening. There are clouds enough to bode sterner issues and nearer conflicts than she has faced since Cromwell’s time. Ireland is filling men’s ears with her threats and appeals. In a season of jubilee socialists crowd St. Paul’s, their banners inscribed with “Jus¬ tice and Liberty, or Death ” ; the Marseillaise is chorused in London thoroughfares, and London poets sing — triolets. The wise are not swift to pronounce this troubadour insouciance a mark of effeminancy and declining genius. A great dramatist makes Combeferre, Jean Prouvaire, and their comrades within the fated barricade, heroes all, while casting bul¬ lets and waiting for the struggle at dawn, sing — not battle-odes but love-songs. England’s heroism and imagination are not to be judged by her verse at this moment. Whether the Mother of Nations is to be like Niobe, or long with loyal children to rise up and call her blessed, her poets in fit succession will enrich the noblest imaginative literature of any race or tongue, though, peradventure, “ after some time be past.” Edmund C. Stedman. THE GOING OUT OF THE TIDE. The eastern heaven was all faint ame¬ thyst, Whereon the moon hung dreaming in the mist; To north yet drifted one long delicate plume Of roseate cloud; like snow the ocean-spume. Now when the first foreboding swiftly ran Through the loud-glorying sea that it began To lose its late-gained lordship of the land. Uprose the billow like an angered man. And flung its prone strength far along the sand ; Almost, almost to the old bound, the dark And taunting triumph-mark. But no, no, no ! and slow, and slow, and slow. Like a heart losing hold, this wave must go, — Must go, must go, — dragged heavily back, back. Beneath the next wave plunging on its track. Charging, with thunderous and defiant shout. To fore-determined rout. Again, again the unexhausted main Renews fierce effort, drawing force unguessed From awful deeps of its mysterious breast : Like arms of passionate protest, tossed in vain, The spray upflings above the billow’s crest. Again the appulse, again the backward strain,— Till ocean must have rest. With one abandoned movement, swift and wild, — As though bowed head and outstretched arms it laid On the earth’s lap, soft-sobbing, — hushed and stayed. The great sea quiets, like a weaned child. Ha ! what sharp memory clove the calm, and drave This last fleet furious wave ? On, on, endures the struggle into night. Ancient as Time, yet fresh as the fresh hour ; As oft repeated since the birth of light As the strong agony and mortal fight Of human souls, blind-reaching, with the Power Aloof, unmoved, impossible to cross. Whose law is seeming loss. Low-sunken from the longed-for triumph-mark. The spent sea sighs, as one that grieves in sleep. The unveiled moon along the rippling plain Casts many a keen, cold, shifting silvery spark, Wild as the pulses of strange joy, that leap Even in the quick of pain. And she compelling, she that stands for law, — As law for Will eternal, — perfect, clear. And uncompassionate shines : to her appear Vast sequences close-linked without a flaw. All past despairs of ocean unforgot. All raptures past, serene her light she gives. The moon too high for pity, since she lives x\ware that loss is not. Hele7i Gray Cone.

Page 918

SHERMAN’S TROOPS DESTROYING RAILROADS AT ATLANTA. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH. MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINAS. A FORAGER. TO US of the Twelfth Corps who had gone West with the Eleventh Corps from the Army of the Potomac, the distant thunder of the battle of the clouds” was the first sound of conflict in the new field. Some of our “ Potomac airs,” which had earned us the name of ‘‘ Kid gloves and pa¬ per collars,”'* began to wear away as we better understood the important work to be done by the great army organizing around us, and of which we were to form a considerable part. A most interesting feature of these preparations was the reenlistment of the old three-years regi¬ ments. The two Potomac corps were consol¬ idated, and we of the Twelfth who wore ‘‘the bloody star ” were apprehensive lest different insignia should be adopted ; but the star became the badge of the new (Twentieth) corps, the crescent men amiably dropping their Turkish emblem. Slocum, who had commanded the Twelfth so long, was assigned to command at Vicksburg, but was recalled to succeed Hooker in the command of the Twentieth Corps when toward the end of August, 1864, Hooker asked to be relieved because Howard, who was his junior, had been placed at the head of the Army of the Tennessee to fill the vacancy made by the death of McPherson at Atlanta. This tempo¬ rary separation from our commander was hard, as all will remember who crowded to his head¬ quarters on the evening of April yth, 1864. But the sorrow of the hour was dispelled by the gen¬ erous hospitality of his staff and his indulgent order to waive all rank for the occasion. We observed in the AVestern troops an air of independence hardly consistent with the nicest discipline ; but this quality appeared to some purpose at the battle of Resaca, where we saw our Western companions deliberately leave the line, retire out of range, clean their guns, pick up ammunition from the wounded, and return again to the fight. This cool self- reliance excited our admiration. On we went in a campaign of continual skirmishes and battles that ended in the capture of Atlanta. The morale of the troops had been visibly im¬ proved by this successful campaign. On my way to army headquarters at At¬ lanta to call upon a staff friend, I met General Sherman, who acknowledged my salute with a familiar “ How do you do. Captain.” Scru¬ tinizing the insignia on my cap, he continued, “Second Massachusetts? Ah, yes, I know * The Twelfth Corps of the Army of the Potomac was named Kid gloves and paper collars’'' by the Four¬ teenth Corps of the Western Army owing to the West Point discipline of the Twelfth Corps, which was the natural result of having been commanded, first by Mans- VoL. XXXIV.— 126. field and then by Slocum, while it contained as sub¬ ordinate commanders such men as Williams, Hamilton, Gordon, Ruger, Andrews, Hawley, and others. This discipline continued to the end and had its effect upon other troops. — D. O.

Page 919

giS MAI^CHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINA S. your regiment; you have very fine parades over there in the park.” Sherman could be easily approached by any of his soldiers, but no one could venture to be familiar. His uniform coat, usually wide open at the throat, displayed a not very mili¬ tary black cravat and linen collar, and he gen¬ erally wore low shoes and one spur. On the march he rode with each column in turn, and THE FATE OF THE RAIL FENCE. often with no larger escort than a single staff- officer and an orderly. In passing us on the march he acknowledged our salutations as if he knew us all, but hadn’t time to stop. On “ the march to the sea” a soldier called out to Sherman, “ Uncle Billy, I guess Grant’s waiting for us at Richmond.” Sherman’s ac¬ quaintance among his officers was remarkable, and of great advantage, for he learned the character of every command, even of regiments, and could assign officers to special duties, with knowledge of those who were to fill the va¬ cancies so made. The army appreciated these personal relations, and every man felt in a cer¬ tain sense that Sherman had his eye on him. Before the middle of November, 1864, the inhabitants of Atlanta, by Sherman’s orders, had left the place. Serious preparations were making for the march to the sea. Nothing was to be left for the use or advantage of the enemy. The sick were sent back to Chattanooga and Nashville along with every pound of baggage which could be dispensed with. The army was reduced, one might say, to its fighting weight, no man being retained but those capable of a long march. Our com¬ munications were then abandoned by destroy¬ ing the railroad and telegraph. There was something intensely exciting in this perfect isolation. No commander but Sherman, we thought, would have dared this; other men would have shrunk from gloomy possibilities of starvation and final capture. The engineers had peremptory _ .. > orders to avoid any injury to dwell- ^ ings, but to apply gunpowder and the torch to public buildings, ma¬ chine shops, depots, and arsenals. Sixty thousand of us witnessed the destruction of Atlanta, while our post band and that of the 33d Massa¬ chusetts played martial airs and operatic selections. It was a night never to be forgotten. Our regular routine was a mere form, and there could be no ‘Haps” amid the brill¬ iant glare and excitement. The throwing away of superfluous conveniences began at daybreak. The old campaigner knows what to carry and what to throw away. Each group of messmates decided which hatchet, stew-pan, orcoffee-potshould be taken. The single wagon allowed to a battalion carried scarcely more than a grip-sack and blanket, and a bit of shelter tent about the size of a large towel for each officer, and only such other material as was necessary for regimental business. Transportation was reduced to a minimum, and fast marching was to be the order of the day. Wagons to carry the necessary ammu¬ nition in the contingency of a battle, and a few days’ rations in case of absolute need, com¬ posed the train of each army corps, and with one wagon and one ambulance for each regi¬ ment made very respectable “ impedimenta,” averaging about eight hundred wagons to a corps. At last came the familiar “ Fall in ” ; the great “Flying Column” was on the march, and the last regiment in Atlanta turned its back upon the smoking ruins. Our left wing (the Four¬ teenth and Twentieth corps under Slocum) seemed to threaten Macon, while the right wing (the Fifteenth and Seventeenth corps under Howard) bent its course as if for Augusta. Skirmishers were in advance, flankers were out, and foraging parties were ahead gathering supplies from the rich plantations. We were all old campaigners, so that a brush with the

Page 920

Af ARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CARO LINAS. 919 militia now and then or with Hardee’s troops made no unusual delay; and Wheeler’s cavalry was soon disposed of. We were expected to make fifteen miles a day, to corduroy the roads where necessary ; to destroy such property as was designated by our corps commander, and to consume everything eatable by man or beast. Milledgeville proved to be Sherman’s first objective, and both wings came within less than supporting distance in and around the capital of the State. Our colored friends, who flocked to us in embarrassing numbers, told many stories about the fear and flight of the inhabitants at the approach of Sherman. Cock-fighting became one of the pastimes of the ‘‘ Flying Column.” Many fine birds were brought in by our foragers. Those found deficient in courage and skill quickly went to the stew-pan in company with the modest barn-yard fowl, but those of redoubtable valor won an honored place and name, and were to be seen riding proudly on the front seat of an artillery caisson, or carried tenderly under the arm of an infantry soldier. Our next objective was Savannah. Hazen’s capture of Fort McAllister opened the gates of that beautiful city, while Hardee managed to escape with his little army; and Sherman, in a rather facetious dispatch, presented the city to Mr. Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Flushed with the success of our march, we settled down for a rest. Our uniforms were the worse for wear, but the army was in fine condition and fully prepared for the serious work ahead. In the middle of December in the neighbor¬ hood of Savannah, after Hardee’s troops had nearly exhausted the country, which was now mainly under water, there was little opj^ortu- nity for the foragers to exercise their talents, and some of them returned to the ranks. The troops bivouacked here and there in compara¬ tively dry spots, while picket duty had to be per¬ formed at many points in the water. In going from Sister’s Ferry to Robertsville where my regiment was in bivouac I waded for a mile and a half in water knee-deep. At Purisburg the pickets were all afloat in boats and scows and on rafts, and the crest-fallen foragers brought in nothing but rice, which became un¬ palatable when served three times a day for successive weeks. At length when we left Sa¬ vannah and launched cheerily into the un¬ trodden land of South Carolina, the foragers began to assume their wonted spirit. We were proud of our foragers. They constituted a picked force from each regiment, under an officer selected for the command, and were remarkable for intelligence, spirit, and daring. Before daylight, mounted on horses captured on the plantations, they were in the saddle, and away, covering the country sometimes seven miles in advance. Although I have said ‘‘ in the saddle,” many a forager had nothing better than a bit of carpet and a rope halter ; yet this simplicity of equipment did not abate his power of carrying off hams and sweet-potatoes in the face of the enemy. The foragers were also important as a sort of advanced guard, for they formed virtually a curtain of mounted infantry screening us from the inquisitive eyes of par¬ ties of Wheeler’s cavalry, with whom they did not hesitate to engage when it was a question of a rich plantation. When compelled to retire, they resorted to all the tricks of infantry skirmishers, and sum¬ moned reenforcements of foragers from other regiments to help drive the ‘‘Johnnies” out. When success crowned their efforts, the plan¬ tation was promptly stripped of live stock and eatables. The natives were accustomed to bury provisions, for they feared their own soldiers quite as much as they feared ours. These subterranean stores were readily dis¬ covered by the practiced “ Yankee ” eye. The appearance of the ground and a little probing with a ramrod or a bayonet soon decided whether to dig. Teams were improvised; carts and vehicles of all sorts were pressed into the service and loaded with provisions. If any antiquated militia uniforms were discov¬ ered, they were promptly donned, and a comical procession escorted the valuable train of booty to the point where the brigade was expected to bivouac for the night. The regimentals of the past, even to those of revolutionary times, were often conspicuous. On an occasion when our brigade had the advance, several parties of foragers, consoli¬ dating themselves, captured a town from the enemy’s cavalry, and occupied the neighbor¬ ing plantations. Before the arrival of the main column hostilities had ceased ; order had been restored, and mock arrangements were made to receive the army. Our regiment in the ad¬ vance was confronted by a picket dressed in continental uniform, who waved his plumed hat ill response to the gibes of the men, and galloped away on his bareback mule to apprise his com¬ rades of our approach. We marched into the town and rested on each side of the main street. Presently a forager, in ancient militia uniform indicating high rank, debouched from a side street to do the honors of the occasion. He was mounted on a Rozinante with a bit of prpet for a saddle. His old plumed chapeau in hand, he rode with gracious dignity through the street, as if reviewing the brigade. After him came a family carriage laden with hams, sweet-potatoes, and other provisions, and drawn by two horses, a mule, and a cow, the two latter ridden by postilions. At Fayetteville, North Carolina, the foragers

Page 921

FROM GENERAL BAOEAU’S " MILITARY HISTORY OF ULYSSES S. GRANT,” D. APPLETON 4 CO. GEORGIA AND THE CAROLIMS 1864-5.

Page 922

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINAS. 921 as usual had been over the ground several hours before the heads of column arrived, and the party from my regiment had found a bro¬ ken down grist-mill. Their commander, Cap¬ tain Parker, an officer of great spirit and effi¬ ciency, and an expert machinist, had the old wheel hoisted into its place and put the mill in working order. Several parties from other regiments had been admitted as working mem- FORT MCALLISTER. (FROM A WAR-TIME SKETCH.) bers, and teams of all sorts were busy collect¬ ing and bringing in corn and carrying away meal for distribution. This bit of enterprise was so pleasing to the troops that plenty of volunteers were ready to relieve the different gangs, and the demand was so great as to keep the mill at work all night by the light of pine- knot fires and torches. The march through Georgia has been called a grand military promenade, all novelty and excitement. But its moral effect on friend and foe was immense. It proved our ability to lay open the heart of the Confederacy, and left the question of what we might do next a mat¬ ter of doubt and terror. It served also as a preliminary training for the arduous campaign to come. Our work was incomplete while the Carolinas, except at a few points on the sea- coast, had not felt the rough contact of war. But their swamps and rivers, swollen and spread into lakes by winter floods, pre¬ sented obstructions almost impracticable to an invading army, if opposed by even a very inferior force. The task before us was indeed formidable. It involved exposure and indefatigable exer¬ tion. To succeed, our forward movement had to be continuous, for even the most productive regions would soon be exhausted by our sixty thousand men and more, and thirteen thousand animals. Although we were fully prepared, with our great trains of ammunition, to fight a pitched battle, our mission was not to fight, but to consume and destroy. Our inability to care properly for the wounded, who must necessa¬ rily be carried along painfully in jolting ambu¬ lances to die on the way from exhaustion and exposure, was an additional and very serious reason for avoiding collision with the enemy. But where he could not be evaded, his very presence across our path increased the ve¬ locity of our flying column. We repelled him by a decisive blow and Avithout losing our momentum. The beginning of our march in South Caro¬ lina was pleasant; the weather favorable and the country productive. Sometimes at the midday halt a stray pig that had cunningly evaded the foragers would venture forth in the belief of having escaped ‘‘ the cruel war,” and would find his error, alas! too late, by encoun¬ tering our column. Instantly an armed mob would set upon him, and his piercing shrieks would melt away in the scramble for fresh pork. But the midday sport of the main col¬ umn and the happy life of the forager were sadly interrupted. The sun grew dim, and the rain came and staid. A few of our ex¬ cellent foragers were reported captured by Wheeler’s cavalry, while we sank deeper and deeper in the mud as we approached the Salke- hatchie swamp which lay between us and the Charleston and Augusta railroad. As the heads of column came up, each command knew what it had to do. Generals Mower and G. A. Smith got their divisions across by swimming, wading, and floating, and effected lodgments in spite of the enemy’s fire. An over¬ whelming mass of drenched and muddy vet¬ erans swept away the enemy, while the rest of our force got the trains and artillery over by corduroying, pontooning, and bridging. It seemed a grand day’s work to have accom¬ plished, as we sank down that night in our miry bivouac. The gallant General Wager Swayne lost his leg in this Salkehatchie encounter. Luckily for him and others, we were not yet too far from our friends to send the wounded back, with a strong escort, to Pocotaligo. We destroyed about forty miles of the Charleston and Augusta railroad, and by threatening points beyond the route we in¬ tended to take, we deluded the enemy into concentrating at Augusta and other places, while we marched rapidly away, leaving him well behind, and nothing but Wade Hamp¬ ton’s cavalry, and the more formidable obstacle of the Saluda River and its swamps, between us and Columbia, our next objective. As the route of our column lay Avest of Columbia, I saAv nothing of the oft described and much dis¬ cussed burning of that city. During the hasty removal of the Union prisoners from Columbia two Massachusetts officers managed to make their escape. Ex¬ hausted and almost naked, they found their Avay to my command. My mess begged for

Page 923

922 MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CARO LIN AS. ARRIVAL OF A FORAGING PARTY,. the privilege of caring for one of them. We gave him a mule to ride with a comfortable saddle, and scraped together an outfit for him, although our clothes were in the last stages. Our guest found the mess luxurious, as he sat down with us at the edge of a rubber blanket spread upon the ground for a table¬ cloth, and set with tin cups and platters. Stewed fighting-cock and bits of fried turkey were followed by fried corn-meal and sorghum. Then came our coffee and pipes, and we lay down by a roaring fire of pine-knots, to hear our guest’s story of life in a rebel prison. Before daybreak the tramp of horses reminded us that our foragers were sallying forth. The red light from the countless camp-fires melted away as the dawn stole over the horizon, cast¬ ing its wonderful gradations of light and color over the masses of sleeping soldiers, while the smoke from burning pine- knots befogged the chilly morning air. Then the bugles broke the impressive stillness, and the roll of drums was heard on all sides. Soon the scene was alive with blue coats and the hubbub of roll-calling, cooking, and running for water to the nearest spring or stream. The surgeons looked to the sick and footsore, and weeded from the ambulances those Avho no longer needed to ride. It was not uncommon to hear shots at the head of the column. The foragers would come tumblingback, and ride alongside the regiment, adding to the noisy talk their account of what they had seen, and dividing among their com¬ rades such things as they had managed to bring away in their narrow escape from cap¬ ture. A staff-ofiicer would gallop down the roadside like a man who had forgotten some¬ thing which must be recovered in a hurry. At the sound of the colonel’s ringing voice, silence was instant and absolute. Sabers flashed from their scabbards, the men brought their guns to the “carry,” and the battalion swung into line at the roadside; cats, fighting-cocks, and fry¬ ing-pans passed to the rear rank ; officers and sergeants buzzed round their companies to see that the guns were loaded and the men ready for action. The color-sergeant loosened the wa¬ ter-proof cover of the battle-flag, a battery of artillery flew past on its way to the front, fol¬ lowing the returning staff-officer, and we soon heard the familiar bang of shells. Perhaps it

Page 924

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROTIN AS. 923 did not amount to much after all, and we were soon swinging into route step ” again. At times when suffering from thirst it was hard to resist the temptation of crystal swamp water, as it rippled along the side of a cause¬ way, a tempting sight for the weary and un¬ wary. In spite of oft -repeated cautions, some contrived to drink it, but these were on their backs with malarial disease at the end of the campaign, if not sooner. After passing Columbia there was a brief season of famine. The foragers worked hard, but found nothing. They made amends, how¬ ever, in a day or two, bringing in the familiar corn-meal, sweet-potatoes, and bacon. We marched into Cheraw with music and with colors flying. Stacking arms in the main street, we proceeded to supper, while the en¬ gineers laid the pontoons across the Pedee River. The railing of the town pump, and the remains of a buggy, said to belong to Mr. Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dr. Todd, were quickly reduced to kindling-wood to boil the coffee. The necessary destruction of property was quickly accomplished, and on we went. A mile from the Lumber River the country, already flooded ankle-deep, was rendered still more inhospitable by a steady down-pour of rain. The bridges had been partly destroyed by the enemy, and partly swept away by the flood. An attempt to carry heavy army wagons • and artillery across this dreary lake might have seemed rather fool-hardy, but we w’ent to work without loss of time. The engineers were promptly floated out to the river, to direct the rebuilding of bridges, and the woods all along the line of each column soon rang with the noise of axes. Trees quickly became logs, and were brought to the submerged roadway. No matter if logs disappeared in the floating mud ; thousands more were coming from all sides. So, layer upon layer, the work went bravely on. Soon the artillery and wagons were jolting over our wooden causeway. As my regiment was the rear-guard for the day, we had various offices to perform for the train, and it was midnight before we saw the last wagon over the bridge by the light of our pine torches. It seemed as if that last wagon was never to be got over. It came bouncing and bumping along, its six mules smoking and blowing in the black, misty air. The teamster, mounted on one of the wheelers, guided his team with a single rein and addressed each mule by name, reminding the animal of his faults, and accusing him of having among other peculiarities ‘‘ a black military heart.” Every sentence of his oath-adorned rhetoric was punctuated with a dexterous whip-lash. At last, drenched to the skin and covered with mud, I took my position on the bridge, seated in a chair which one of my men had presented to me, and waited for the command to “ close up.” THE ROAD FROM McRHERSONVILLE. SHERMAN AND HIS STAFF PASSING THROUGH WATER AND MIKE. (from a sketch made at the TIME.)

Page 925

GENERAL JOHN A. LOGAN. GENERAL W. T. SHERMAN. GENERAL HENRY W. SLOCUM.

Page 926

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROIINAS. 925 As we passed the wagon camp, there was the deafening, indescribable chorus of mules and teamsters, besides the hoarse shouting of quartermasters, and wagonmasters plunging about on horseback through the mud, to di¬ rect the arriving teams into their places. But it all died away in the distance as we marched on to find the oozy resting-place of the brigade. Idle army had been in bivouac some hours, and countless camp-fires formed a vast belt of fire that spread out into the black night. As WE advanced into the wild pine regions of North Carolina the natives seemed won¬ derfully impressed at seeing every road filled with marching troops, artillery, and wagon trains. They looked destitute enough as they stood in blank amazement gazing upon the Yanks ” marching by. The scene before us was very striking ; the resin pits were on fire, and great columns of black smoke rose high into the air, spreading and mingling together in gray clouds, and suggesting the roof and pillars of a vast temple. All traces of habita¬ tion were left behind, as we marched into that grand forest with its beautiful carpet of pine- needles. The straight trunks of the pine-trees shot up to a great height, and then spread out into a green roof, which kept us in perpetual shade. As night came on, we found that the resinous sap in the cavities cut in the trees to receive it, had also been lighted by “ bummers ” in our advance. The eft'ect of these peculiar watch fires on every side, several feet above the ground, with flames licking their way up the tall trunks, was peculiarly striking and beautiful. But it was sad to see this wanton destruction of property, which, like the firing of the resin pits, was the work of “ bummers,” who were marauding through the country committing every sort of outrage. There was no restraint except with the column or the regular foraging parties. We had no commu¬ nications, and could have no safeguards. The country was necessarily left to take care of itself, and became a howling waste.” The ‘‘ coffee-coolers of the Army of the Potomac were archangels compared to our ‘^bummers,” who often fell to the tender mercies of Wheeler’s cavalry, and were never heard of again, earning a fate which was richly deserved. On arriving within easy distance of the Cape Fear River, where we expected to com¬ municate with the navy, detachments were sent in rapid advance to secure Fayetteville. Our division, after a hard day of corduroying in various spots over a distance of twelve miles, went into camp for supper, and then, taking the plank-road for Fayetteville, made a moonlight march of nine miles in three hours. VoL. XXXIV.— 127. THE STORMING OF THE SALKEHATCHIE RIVER,

Page 927

926 MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CAROLINA S. but our friends from the right wing arrived there before us. Hardee retired to a good position at Averys- boro’, where Kilpatrick found him intrenched, and too strong for the cavalry to handle un¬ assisted. It was the turn of our brigade to do special duty, so at about 8 o’clock in the even¬ ing we were ordered to join the cavalry. We were not quite sure it rained, but everything was dripping. The men furnished themselves with pine-knots, and our weapons glistened in the torchlight, a cloud of black smoke from the torches floating back over our heads. The regimental wits were as ready as ever, and amid a flow of lively badinage we toiled on through the mud. When the column was'halted for a few min¬ utes to give us an opportunity of drawing breath, I found Sergeant Johnson with one arm daring leader, often resulting in exciting or amusing events. The clear wintry dawn disclosed a long line of blue coats spread over the ground in motionless groups. This was the roaring torch¬ light brigade of the night before. The orders “ fall in ” — forward ! ” in gruff tones broke upon the chilly air, and brought us shivering to our feet. We moved to the edge of the woods with the cavalry. As Kilpatrick and Hawley, our brigade commander, rode by, I heard Hawley say, “No, sir, I shall not charge until I find out what is on my flanks.” The skirmish line, under Captain J. L Grafton, had already disappeared into the opposite belt of woods, and evidently was losing no time in de¬ veloping the enemy, and ascertaining his force. They were drawing his fire from all points, in¬ dicating a force more than double that of our Sherman’s “ bummers ” capturing fayb'.tteville c. h. (from a sketch made at the time.) in the mud up to the elbow. He explained that he was trying to find his shoe. We floun¬ dered on for five miles, and relieved a bri¬ gade of Kilpatrick’s men whom we found in some damp woods. There was a comfort in clustering round their camp-fires, while they retired into outer darkness to prepare for the morning attack. But the cavalry fireside was only a temporary refuge from the storm, for we also had to depart into the impenetrable darkness beyond, to await in wet line of bat¬ tle the unforeseen. Those who were sufficiently exhausted sank down in the mud to sleep, while others speculated on the future. Some¬ thing uncommon was expected from the pe¬ culiar “ go ” of the cavalry column under its brigade. Dismounted cavalry were now sent forward to prolong the skirmish line. Captain J. I. Grafton was reported badly wounded in the leg, but still commanding with his usual coolness. Suddenly he appeared staggering out of the wood into the open space in our front, bareheaded, his face buried in his hands, his saber hanging by the sword-knot from his wrist, one leg bound up with a handkerchief, his uniform covered with blood ; on he came, until at commanding distance from the line he dropped his hands, raised his head with the old air of command, and seemed to gaze over our heads for a moment. His face wore the look of death, and in a moment he fell towards the colors. Officers clustered about him in si-

Page 928

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA AND THE CARO LINAS. 927 lence, and a gloom spread through the brigade as word passed from wing to wing that Graf¬ ton was dead. The main col¬ umn was now ar¬ riving, and as the troops filed off to the right and left the field-guns gal¬ loped into battery, we moved forward to the attack. The enemy gave us a hot reception, which we returned with a storm of lead. It was a wretched place for a fight. At some points we had to support our wounded, until they could be car¬ ried off, to prevent their falling into the swamp water in which we stood ankle- deep. Here and there a clump of thick growth in the black mud broke the line as we advanced. No ordinary troops were in our front. They would not give way until a division of Davis’s corps was thrown upon their right, while we pressed them closely. As we passed over their dead and wounded, 1 came upon the body of a very young officer, Avhose handsome refined face attracted my attention. While the line of battle swept past me, I knelt at his side for a moment. His but¬ tons bore the arms of South Carolina. Evi¬ dently we were fighting the Charleston chivalry. I cut off a button as a memento, and rejoined the line. Sunset found us in bivouac on the Goldsboro’ road, and Hardee in retreat. As we trudged on towards Benton ville dis¬ tant sounds told plainly that the head of the column was engaged. We hurried to the front and went into action, connecting with Davis’s corps. Little opposition having been expected. MAKCHING BY TORCHLIGHT. the distance between our wing and the right wing had been allowed to increase beyond sup¬ porting distance in the endeavor to find easier roads for marching as well as for transporting the wounded. The scope of this paperprecludes a description of the battle of Bentonville, which was a combination of mistakes, miscarriages, and hard fighting on both sides. It ended in Johnston’s retreat, leaving open the road to Goldsboro’, where we arrived ragged and al¬ most barefoot. While we were receiving letters from home, getting new clothes, and taking our regular doses of quinine, Lee and Johnston surrendered, and the great conflict came to an end. Daniel Oakey.

Page 929

ADVANCING UNDER DIFFICULTIES. SHERMAN’S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. ENERAL S^^ERMAN’S army commc xedits march from AtHnta to the Sea” on the morning of N o vem- ber 15th, and arrived in front of the defenses of Sa¬ vannah on the loth of De¬ cember, 1864. No news had been received from the North during this interval, except such as could be gleaned from Southern papers picked up by the soldiers on the line of our march. Our fleet was in Ossa- baw Sound with supplies of food and clothing, and an immense mail, containing letters from home for nearly every one in the army, from the commanding general down to the private soldier. All that blocked our communication with the fleet was Fort McAllister on the Ogeechee River. This fort was captured by Hazen’s division of the Fifteenth Corps on December 13th, and the 15th brought us our mails and an abundant supply of food and ammunition, making this one of the happiest days experienced by the men of Sherman’s army. Preparations were at once commenced for assaulting the Confederate works, and were nearly completed when the Confeder¬ ates evacuated Savannah. Our troops entered the city before daybreak on the 21st of De¬ cember. The fall of Fort McAllister placed General Sherman in communication with General Grant and the authorities at Wash¬ ington. Prior to the capture of Savannah, the removal of the infantry of Sherman’s army to City Point by sea was the plan contemplated by General Grant. On December 6th Gen¬ eral Grant wrote to Sherman : “ My idea now is that you establish a base on the sea- coast, fortify and leave all your artillery and cavalry and enough infantry to protect them, and at the same time so threaten the interior that the militia of the South will have to be kept home. With the balance of your command come here with all dispatch.” In reply, under date of December 13th, Sherman said : “ I had expected, after reducing Savannah, instantly to march to Columbia, South Carolina, thence to Raleigh, and then to report to you.” The fall of Savannah resulted in the adop¬ tion of the plan which Sherman had con¬ templated. In a letter dated December 24th Sherman says : “ Many and many a person in Georgia asked me why I did not go to South Carolina, and when I an¬ swered that we were en route for that State, the invaria¬ ble reply was, ‘ Well, if you will make those people feel the utmost severities of war we will pardon you for your desolation of Georgia.’ ” About one month was spent in Savannah in clothing the men, and filling the trains with am¬ munition and rations. Then commenced the movement which was to make South Carolina

Page 930

SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. 929 feel the severities of war.* The right wing, with the exception of Corse’s division of the Sev¬ enteenth Corps, moved via Hilton Head to Beaufort. The left wing with Corse’s division and the cavalry moved up the west bank of the Savannah River to Sister’s Ferry, distant about forty miles from Savannah. Sherman’s plan was similar to that adopted on leaving Atlanta. When the army started from Atlanta, the right wing moved directly towards Macon, and the left towards Augusta. Both cities were occupied by Confederate troops.- The move¬ ments of our army caused the Confederate authorities at each of these important cities to demand not only the retention of the troops at each place, but induced them to demand help from every quarter. Sherman had no and leave both cities in our rear, with little or no force in our front. On leaving Savannah our right wing threatened Charleston and the left again threatened Augusta, the two wings being again united in the interior of South Carolina, leaving the Confederate troops at Augusta with almost a certainty that Charles¬ ton must fall without a blow from Sherman. On the arrival of the left wing at Sister’s Ferry on the Savannah, instead of finding, as was anticipated, a river a few yards in width which could be easily crossed, they found a broad expanse of water which was utterly im¬ passable. The continuous rain-fall had caused the river to overflow, so that the lowland on the South Carolina side was covered with water, extending nearly half a mile from the SKIRMISHERS CROSSING THE NORTH EDISTO, S. C., ON A FLOATING FOOT-BRIDGE. (FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) thought of attacking either place, and at the proper time the movements of both wings of the army were so directed as to unite them At this time General Lee addressed the following letter to th Governor of South Carolina : Headquarters Armv N. Va. 27 January ’65. His Excellency A. G. Magrath, Govei nor of South Carolina, Columbia. Sir : I received to-day you letter of the i6th inst., and regret exceedingly to learn the presen condition of affairs in the South. I infer from your letter that yoi consider me able to send an army to arrest the march of Genera Sherman. If such was the case I should not have waited fo your application, for I lament as much as you do his past success and see the injury that may result from his further progress, have no troops e.xcept those within this department within whicl my operations are confined. According to your statement ol General Sherman s force, it would require this whole army to op pose him. It is now confronted by General Grant with a fa superior army. If it was transferred to South Carolina, I do no believe General Grant would remain idle on the James River I would be as easy for him to move his army south as for Genera Sherman to advance north. You can judge whether the conditior ot attairs would be benefited by a concentration of the two large l^ederal armies in South Carolina, with the rest of the Confederacy stripped of defense. But should Charleston fall into the hands of the enemy, as grievous as would be the blow and as painful the result, I cannot concur in the opinion of your Excellency that river. We were delayed several days in vain efforts to effect a crossing, and were finally compelled to await the falling of the waters. our cause would necessarily be lost. Should our whole coast fall m the possession of our enemies, with our people true, firm, and united, the war could be continued and our purpose accomplished As long as our armies are unsubdued and sustained, the Confeder- acy IS safe. I therefore think it bad policy to shut our troops within intrenchments, where they can be besieged with superior forces, and prefer operating in the field. I recommend this course m South Carolina, and advise that every effort be made to prevent General Sherman reaching Charleston by contesting his advance, ihe last return made by General Hardee of his force which I have ^en, gave his entire strength 20,500 of all arms; with 5000 South Caroliim militia which he expected, and 1500 Georgia troops under General G. W. Smith, he would have 27,000. This is ex¬ clusive of Connor’s brigade and Butler's division sent from this army, which ought to swell his force to thirty-three thousand. r ^11 rnight be .still further increased by a general turn out of all the men in Georgia and South Carolina, and that Sherman could be resisted until General Beauregard could arrive with reen- torcemenls from the West. I see no cause for depression or de¬ spondency, but abundant reason for renewed exertion and unyielding resistance. With great respect, your Excellency’s obe¬ dient servant, R. E. Lee, General. [Printed from the MS.— Editor.]

Page 931

93° SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. RAILWAY DESTRUCTION AS A MILITARY ART.t Our pontoon-bridge was finally constructed and the crossing commenced. Each regi¬ ment as it entered South Carolina gave three cheers. The men seemed t«) realize that t A knowledge of the art of building railroads is cer¬ tainly of more value to a country than that of the best means of destroying them ; but at this particular time the destruction seemed necessary, and the time may again come when such work will be necessary. Lest the most effectual and expeditious method of destroy¬ ing railroad tracks should become one of the lost arts, I will here give a few rules for the guidance of officers who may in future be charged with this important duty. It should be remembered that these rules are the result of long experience and close observation. A detail of men to do the work should be made on the evening before operations are to commence. The number to be detailed being, of course, dependent upon the amount of work to be done, I estimate that one thousand men can easily destroy about five miles of track per day, and do it thoroughly. Before going out in the morn¬ ing the men should be supplied with a good breakfast, for it has been discovered that soldiers are more effi¬ cient at this work, as well as on the battle-field, when their stomachs are full than when they are empty. The question as to the food to be given the men for breakfast is not important, but I suggest roast turkeys, chickens, fresh eggs, and coffee, for the reason that in an enemy’s country such a breakfast will cause no un¬ pleasantness between the commissary and the soldiers, inasmuch as the commissary will only be required to provide the coffee. In fact it has been discovered that an army moving through a hostile but fertile country, having an efficient corps of foragers (vulgarly known in our army as bummers), requires but few articles of food, such as hard-tack, coffee, salt, pepper, and su¬ gar. Your detail should be divided into three sections of about equal numbers. I will suppose the detail to consist of three thousand men. The first thing to be done is to reverse the relative positions of the ties and at last they had set foot on the State which had done more than all others to bring upon the country the horrors of civil war. In the narrow road leading from the ferry on the iron rails, placing the ties up and the rails under them. To do this. Section No. i, consisting of one thousand men, is distributed along one side of the track, one man at the end of each tie. At a given signal each man seizes a tie, lifts it gently till it assumes a vertical position, and then at another signal pushes it forward so that when it falls the ties will be over the rails. Then each man loosens his tie from the rail. This done. Section No. i moves forward to another portion of the road, and Section No. 2 advances and is distrib¬ uted along the portion of the road recently occupied by Section No. i. The duty of the second section is to collect the ties, place them in piles of about thirty ties each — place the rails on the top of these piles, the center of each rail being over the center of the pile, and then set fire to the ties. Section No. 2 then fol¬ lows No. I. As soon as the rails are sufficiently heated Section No. 3 takes the place of No. 2, and upon this devolves the most important duty, viz., the effectual destruction of the rail. This section should be in com¬ mand of an efficient officer who will see that the work is not slighted. Unless closely watched, soldiers will content themselves with simply bending the rails around trees. This should never be permitted. A rail which is simply bent can easily be restored to its origi¬ nal shape. No rail should be regarded as properly treated till it has assumed the shape of a doughnut; it must not only be bent but twisted. To do the twist¬ ing Poe’s railroad hooks are necessary, for it has been found that the soldiers will not seize the hot iron bare ¬ handed. This, however, is the only thing looking to¬ wards the destruction of property which I ever knew a man in Sherman’s army to decline doing. With Poe’s hooks a double twist can be given to a rail which precludes all hope of restoring it to its former shape except by recasting. — H. W. S.

Page 932

SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. 931 THE RIGHT WING UNDER HOWARD CROSSING THE SALUDA RIVER. (FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) South Carolina side torpedoes had been planted, so that several of our men were killed or wounded by treading upon them. This was unfortunate for that section of the State. Planting torpedoes for the defense of a posi¬ tion is legitimate warfare, but our soldiers re¬ garded the act of placing them in a highway where no contest was anticipated as some¬ thing akin to poisoning a stream of water. It is not recognized as fair or legitimate warfare. If that section of South Carolina suffered more severely than any other, it was due in part to the blundering of people who were more zeal¬ ous than wise. About February loth the two wings of the army were reunited in the vicinity of Branch- ville, a small village on the South Carolina Railroad at the point where the railroad from Charleston to Columbia branches off from Charleston to Augusta. Here we resumed the work which had occupied so much of our time in Georgia, viz., the destruction of railroads. Having effectually destroyed over sixty miles of railroads in this section, the army started for Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, each corps taking a separate road. The left wing (Slocum) arrived at a point about three miles from Columbia on the i6th, and there received orders to cross the Saluda River, at Mount Zion’s Church. The Fourteenth moved to the crossing, built a bridge during the night, crossed the river next day, and was fol¬ lowed by the Twentieth Corps and Kilpatrick’s cavalry. The right wing (Howard) moved di¬ rectly to Columbia, the Fifteenth Corps moving through the city and camping outside on the Camden road. The Seventeenth Corps did not enter Columbia. During the night of February 17th the greater portion of the city of Columbia was burned. The lurid flames could easily be seen from my camp, many miles distant. N early all the public buildings, several churches, an or¬ phan asylum, and many of the residences were destroyed. The city was filled with helpless women and children and invalids, many of whom were rendered houseless and homeless in a single night. No sadder scene was pre¬ sented during the war. The suffering of so many helpless and innocent persons could not but move the hardest heart. The question as to who was immedi¬ ately responsible for this disaster has given rise to some controversy. I do not believe that General Sherman countenanced or was in any degree responsible for it. I believe a free use of whisky (which was supplied to the soldiers by citizens with great liber¬ ality) was the immediate cause of the disaster. Primarily the responsibility must forever rest upon those who should have been the protectors of these helpless people. For more than a quarter of a century South Carolina had, to use a common expression, been absolutely “ spoiling for a fight.” No statesman, however eminent, could do anything which rendered him so Sherman’s soldiers guarding the palmetto monument, Columbia. (FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) J

Page 933

932 SHERMAN^ S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. •odious to that State, as to propose compromise the war fever, they will do well to remember measures which contemplated a peaceful solu- that while politicians can inaugurate a war they tion of the troubles between the two sections can seldom close one. While they can predict of our country. Clay and Webster both triedit, with great accuracy the vicinity in which the only to be condemned by these people. She first battle will be fought, they can never tell where the last one is to occur. A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand and a VIEW FROM THE UNFINISHED CAPITOL VIEWS OF THE RUINS OF COLUMBIA. (from photographs.) attempted the destruction of the Union during the presidency of Jack- ■son. Upon the election of Lincoln she could not wait to learn his policy ; she could not wait even to consult with her sister States of the South, — she took the initiative. Now that the result for which she had labored so long had been accom¬ plished, it would have been regretted by the entire North, and I think by many at the South, had the performance closed without giving her an opportunity to witness the results and feel the effects of her long-continued efforts. If the people of any section of our coun¬ try should in the future become infected witli match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a dark, windy night, particularly when for a series of years you have urged him to come, so that you might have an opportunity of performing a surgical operation on him. From Columbia the army moved towards Fayetteville — the left wing crossing the Ca¬ tawba River at Rocky Mount. While the rear of the Twentieth Corps was crossing, our pon-

Page 934

SHERMAN^ S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. 933 toon-bridge was swept away by flood- wood brought down the river, leaving the Fourteenth Corps on the south side. This caused a delay of three days, and gave rise to some emphatic instructions from General Sherman to the commander of the left wing of his army — which in¬ structions resulted in our damming the flood- wood to some extent, but not in materially expediting the march. We arrived at Cheraw on the 3d of March, where we found a large supply of stores sent from Charles¬ ton for safe-keeping. Among the stores was a large quantity of very old wine of the best quality, which had been kept in the cellars of Charleston many years, with no thought on the part of the owners that in its old age it would be drunk from tin cups by Yankee soldiers. Fortunately for the whole army the wine was discovered by the Seven¬ teenth Corps and fell into the hands of the generous and chivalrous commander of that corps, — Gen¬ eral Frank P. Blair, — who distrib¬ uted it with the spirit of liberality and fairness characteristic of him. On the 6th we moved towards Fay¬ etteville, where we arrived on the loth. The march through South Carolina had been greatly delayed by the al¬ most incessant rains and the swampy nature of the country. More than half the way we were compelled to corduroy the roads before our trains could be moved. To accomplish this work we had been supplied with an abun¬ dance of axes, and the country was covered with saplings well suited to the purpose. Three or four days prior to our arrival at Fayetteville General Sherman had received RAISING THE UNION FLAG OVER THE OLD STATE-HOUSE, COLUMBIA. (from a sketch made at the TIME.) MAJOR-GENERAL FRANK P. BLAIR, COMMANDING SEVENTEENTH ARMY CORPS. (FROM A PHOTOGRAPH.) information that Wilmington was in possession of General Terry, and had sent two messengers with letters informing Terry when he would probably be at Fayetteville.* Both messengers arrived safely at Wilmington, and on Sunday, the day after our arrival at Fayetteville, the shrill whistle of a steamboat floating the Stars and Stripes announced that we were once more in communication with our own friends. As she came up, the banks of the river were lined by our soldiers, who made the welkin ring with their cheers. The opening of commu¬ nication with Wilmington not only brought us our mails and a supply of clothing, but enabled us to send to a place of safety thou¬ sands of refugees and contrabands who were following the army and seriously embarrass- After General Hood had been driven from Ten¬ nessee, General Schofield was ordered to bring the Twenty-third Corps, General Cox, to Washington, whence it was sent to Fort Fisher, N. C., which had been captured by General A. H. Terry’s Tenth Corps, in cooperation with Admiral Porter’s fleet, on January 15th, 1865. Schofield assumed command of both corps, and captured Wilmington, February 22d. Thence Cox was sent to Newbern, while the greater part of Schofield’s forces advanced to Golds¬ boro’. — Editor. VoL.' XXXIV.— 128.

Page 935

934 SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. CROSSING A BURNING BRIDGE AT JUNIPER CREEK, MARCH 9TH, 1865. (FAC-SIMILE OF A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) ing it. We were dependent upon the country for our supplies of food and forage, and every one not connected with the army was a source of weakness to us. On several occasions on the march from Atlanta we had been compelled to drive thousands of colored people back, not from lack of sympathy with them, but simply as a matter of safety to the army. The refugee- train following in rear of the army was one of the most singular features of the march. Long before the war, the slaves of the South had a system of communication by which im¬ portant information was transmitted from one section of the country to another. The first gun at Sumter announced to every slave of the South that a great struggle had commenced in the result of which his own fate was in some degree at stake. The advance of Sherman’s army through a section never before visited by a Union soldier was known far and near many miles in advance of us. It was natural that these poor creatures, seeking a place of safety, should flee to the army, and endeavor to keep in sight of it. Every day as we marched on, we could see, on each side of our line of march, crowds of these people coming to us through roads and across the fields, bringing with them all their earthly goods, and many goods which were not theirs. Horses, mules. cows, dogs, old family carriages, carts, and whatever they thought might be of use to them were seized upon and brought to us. They were allowed to follow in rear of our column, and at times they were almost equal in num¬ bers to the army they were following. As singu¬ lar, comical, and pitiable a spectacle was never before presented. One day a large family of slaves came through the fields to join us. The head of the family, a venerable negro, was mounted on a mule, and safely stowed away behind him in pockets or bags attached to the blanket which covered the mule were two little pickaninnies, one on each side. This gave rise to a most important invention, i. e,, “ the best way of transporting picka¬ ninnies.” On the next day a mule appeared in column, covered by a blanket with two pockets on each side, each containing a little negro. Very soon old tent-flies or strong can¬ vas was used instead of the blanket, and often ten or fifteen pockets were attached to each side, so that nothing of the mule was visible except the head, tail, and feet, all else being covered by the black woolly heads and bright shining eyes of the little darkies. Occasionally a cow was made to take the place of the mule ; this was a decided improvement, as the cow fur¬ nished rations as well as transportation for the

Page 936

SHERMAN^ S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE, 935 babies. Old stages, family carriages, lumber, wagons and carts filled with bedding, cook¬ ing-utensils and “ traps” of all kinds, with men, women, and children loaded with bundles, made up the balance of the refugee-train which followed in our rear. As all the bridges were burned in front of us, our pontoon trains were in constant use, and the bridges could be left but a short time for the use of the refugees. A scramble for precedence in cross¬ ing the bridge always ensued. The firing of a musket or pistol in rear would bring to the refugees visions of guerrillas, and then came a panic. As our bridges were not supplied with guard-rails, occasionally a mule would be crowded off and with its precious load would float down the river. Having thoroughly destroyed the arsenal buildings, machine-shops, and foundries at Fayetteville, we crossed the Cape Fear River on the 13th and 14th and resumed our march. We were now entering upon the last stage of the great march which was to unite the Army of the West with that of the East in front of Richmond. If this march could be successfully accomplished the Confederacy was doomed. General Sherman did not hope or expect to accomplish it without a struggle. He antici¬ pated an attack and made provision for it. He ordered me to send all my baggage trains un¬ der a strong escort by an interior road on my right, and to keep at least four divisions with all their artillery on my left, ready at all times for an attack. During the 15th of March, Hardee was re¬ treating before us, having for his rear-guard a brigade composed of the troops which had garrisoned Charleston, commanded by Gen¬ eral Alfred Rhett. Kilpatrick’s cavalry was in advance of the left wing, and during the day some of the skirmishers had come suddenly upon General Rhett, accompanied by a few of his men, and had captured him. Rhett before the war had been one of the editors of the Charleston ‘‘ Mercury,” one of the strongest secession papers of the South. He was sent by Kilpatrick to General Sherman. Sherman while stationed in Charleston before the war had been acquainted with Rhett, and not wishing to have him under his immediate charge, he sent him to me. Rhett spent that night in my tent, and as I had also been sta¬ tioned at Fort Moultrie in 1854 and ’55, and had often met him, we had a long chat over old times and about common acquaintances in Charleston. The following morning Rhett was sent to the rear in charge of the cavalry. He was handsomely dressed in the Confederate uniform, with a pair of high boots beautifully stitched. He was deeply mortified at having been gobbled up” without a chance to fight. One of my staff told me that he saw Rhett a few days later, trudging along under guard, but the beautiful boots were missing, — a soldier had exchanged a very coarse pair of army shoes for them. Rhett said that in all his troubles he had one consolation, that of knowing that no one of Sherman’s men could get on those boots. Sherman’s men driving the enemy out of fayettevtlle. (from a sketch made at the time.)

Page 937

936 SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. TMIS FOURTEENTH CORPS ENTERING FAYETTEVILLE. (FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME.) On the following morning Kilpatrick came upon the enemy behind a line of intrench- ments. He moved his cavalry to the right, and Jackson’s and Ward’s divisions of the Twentieth Corps were deployed in front of the River on the following day. I felt confident I could accomplish the task. We moved forward at 6 A. M., and soon met the skirmishers of the enemy. The resistance to our advance became very stubborn. Carlin’s division was deployed enemy’s line. General Sherman directed me and ordered to advance. I believed that the to send a brigade to the left in order to get in rear of the intrenchments, which was done, and resulted in the retreat of the enemy and in the capture of Macbeth’s Charleston Bat¬ tery and 217 of Rhett’s men. The Confederates were found behind another line of works a short distance in rear of the first, and we went into camp in their immediate front. Dur¬ ing the night Hardee retreated, leaving 108 dead for us to bury, and 68 wounded. We lost 12 officers and 65 men killed and 477 men wounded. This skir¬ mish was known as the battle of Averysboro’. Our march to this point had been toward Raleigh. We now took the road leading to Goldsboro’. General Sherman rode with me on the i8th and left me at 6 a. m. on the 19th to join General Howard, who was marching on roads several miles to our right. On leaving me General Sherman expressed the opinion that Hardee had fallen back to Raleigh, and that T rnnirl pcicilu rpnr'Ti Mauco lieutenant-general wade hampton, c. s. a., commanding the cavalry of 1 couiQ easily reacn tne iNeus^ johnston’s army, (from a photograph.)

Page 938

SHERMAN MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. 937 force in my front consisted only of cavalry with a few pieces of artillery. Fearing that the firing would be heard by General Sher¬ man and cause the other wing of the army to delay its march, I sent Major E. W. Guindon of my staff to General Sherman, to tell him that I had met a strong force of cavalry, but that I should not need assistance, and felt confident I should be at the Neuse at the appointed time. Soon after the bearer of the message to General Sherman had left me, word came from Carlin that he had developed a strong force of the enemy in an intrenched position. pany and regiment. While I was talking with him one of my aides. Major William G. Tracy, rode up and at once recognized the deserter as an old acquaintance, whom he had known at Syracuse before the war. I asked how he knew General Johnston was in command and what he knew as to the strength of his force. He said General Johnston rode along the line early that morning, and that the officers had told all the men that Old Joe” had caught one of Sherman’s wings beyond the reach of sup¬ port, that he intended to smash that wing and then go for the other. The man stated CONTRABANDS IN THE WAKE OF SHERMAN’s ARMY. About the same time one of my officers brought to me an emaciated, sickly-appearing young man about twenty-two or twenty-three years of of age, dressed in the Confederate gray. He had expressed great anxiety to see the com¬ manding officer at once. I asked him what he had to say. He said he had been in the Union army, had been taken prisoner, and while sick and in prison had been induced to enlist in the Confederate service. He said he had enlisted with the intention of deserting when a good opportunity presented itself, be¬ lieving he should die if he remained in prison. In reply to my questions he informed me that he formerly resided at Syracuse, New York, and had entered the service at the commence¬ ment of the war, in a company raised by Captain Butler. I had been a resident of Syracuse and knew the history of his com- that he had no chance of escaping till that morning, and had come to me to warn me of my danger. He said, “ There is a very large force immediately in your front, all under command of General Joe Johnston.” While he was mak¬ ing his statement General Carlin’s division with four pieces of artillery became engaged with the enemy. A line for defense was at once selected, and as the troops came up they were placed in position and ordered to collect fence rails and everything else available for barricades. The men used their tin cups and hands as shovels and needed no urging to induce them to work. I regretted that I had sent the mes¬ sage to General Sherman assuring him I need¬ ed no help, and saw the necessity of giving him information at once as to the situation. This information was carried to General Sherman by a young man, not then twenty years of

Page 939

938 SHERMAN'S MARCH FROM SAVANNAH TO BENTONVILLE. MAJOR-GENERAL R. Ff^HOKE, C. S. A., COMMANDING A DIVISION IN Hardee’s corps, (from a photograph.) age, but who was full of energy and activity and was always reliable. He was then the youngest member of my staff. He is now gov¬ ernor of Ohio — Joseph B. Foraker. His work on this day secured his promotion to the rank of captain. Some years after the close of the war Foraker wrote to me calling my attention to some errors in a published account of this battle of Bentonville, and although his letter was private, his statements are so full of inter¬ est that I feel certain I shall be pardoned for giving an extract from it : Firing between the men on the skirmish line com¬ menced before Sherman had left us on the morning of the 19th, but it was supposed there was nothing but cavalry in our front. It was kept up steadily, and con¬ stantly increased in volume. Finally there was a halt in the column. You expressed some anxiety, and Ma¬ jor W. G. Tracy and I rode to the front to see what was going on. At the edge of open fields next to the woods in which the barricades were we found our skirmish line halted. ... In a few minutes it moved forward again. The enemy partly reserved their fire until it got half-way or more across the field. This in¬ duced Tracy and me to think there was but little dan¬ ger, and so we followed up closely, until suddenly they began again a very spirited firing in the midst of which we were sorry to find ourselves. I remember we hardly knew what to do — we could do no good by going on and none by remaining. To be killed under such circumstances would look like a waste of raw material, we thought. But the trouble was to get out. We didn’t want to turn back, as we thought that would not look well. While we were thus hesitating a spent ball struck Tracy on the leg, giving him a slight but painful wound. Almost at the same moment our skirmishers charged and drove the rebels. ... I rode back with Tracy only a very short distance, when we met you hurrying to the front. I found you had al¬ ready been informed of what had been discovered and that you had already sent orders to everybody to hurry to the front. I remember, too, that a little later Major Mosely, I think, though it may have been some other member of your staff, suggested that you ought to have the advance division charge and drive them out of the way ; that it could not be possible that there was much force ahead of us, and that if we waited for the others to come up we should lose a whole day, and if it should turn out that there was nothing to justify such caution, it would look bad for the left wing ; to which you replied in an earnest manner, ‘ I can afford to be charged with being dilatory or over-cautious, but I cannot afford the responsibility of another Ball’s Bluff affair.’ Do you remember it? I presume not, but I was then quite young, and such remarks made a lasting impression. It excited my confidence and admiration, and was the first moment that I began to feel that there was really serious work before us. . . . You handed me a written message to take to General Sherman. The last words you spoke to me as I started were, ‘ Ride well to the right so as to keep clear of the ene¬ my’s left flank, and don't spare Jiorse-Jleshd I reached General Sherman just about sundown. He was on the left side of the road on a sloping hillside, where, as I understood, he had halted only a few minutes before for the night. His staff were about him. I think Gen¬ eral Floward was there, but I do not now remember seeing him, — but on the hillside twenty yards farther up Logan was lying on a blanket. Sherman saw me approaching and walked briskly towards me, took your message, tore it open, read it, and called out, ‘John Logan! where is Logan?’ Just then Logan jumped up and started towards us. He too walked briskly, but before he had reached us Sherman had in¬ formed him of the situation and ordered him to turn Hazen back and have him report to you. It was not yet dark when I rode away carrying an answer to your message. It was after midnight when I got back, the ride back being so much longer in point of time because the road was full of troops, it was dark, and my Miorse-flesh ’ was used up.” General Carlin’s division of the Fourteenth Corps had the advance, and as the enemy exhibited more than usual strength, he had de¬ ployed his division and advanced to develop the position of the enemy. Morgan’s division of the same corps had been deployed on Carlin’s right. Colonel H. G. Litchfield, inspector-general of the corps, had accompanied these troops. I was consulting with General Jeff. C. Davis, who commanded the Fourteenth Corps, when Colonel Litchfield rode up, and in reply to my inquiry as to what he had found in front he said, Well, General, I have found something more than Dibrell’s cavalry — I find infantry intrenched along our whole front and enough of them to give us all the amusement we shall want for the rest of the day.” Foraker had not been gone half an hour when the enemy advanced in force, compel¬ ling Carlin’s division to fall back. They were handled with skill and fell back without panic or demoralization, taking places in the line established. The Twentieth Corps held the left of our line with orders to connect with the Fourteenth. A space between the two corps had been left uncovered, and Cogswell’s

Page 940

THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE. 939 brigade of the Twentieth Corps, ordered to report to General Davis, filled the gap just before the enemy reached our line. The enemy fought bravely, but their line had become somewhat broken in advancing through the woods, and when they came up to our line, posted behind slight intrench- ments, they received a fire which compelled them to fall back. The assaults were repeated over and over again until a late hour, each assault finding us better prepared for resist¬ ance. During the night Hazen reported to me and was placed on the right of the Four¬ teenth Corps. Early on the next morning Generals Baird and Geary, each' with two bri¬ gades, arrived on the field. Baird was placed in front of our works and moved out beyond the advanced position held by us on the pre¬ ceding day. The 20th was spent in strength¬ ening our position and developing the line of the enemy. On the morning of the 21st the right wing arrived. This wing had marched twenty miles over bad roads, skirmishing most of the way with the enemy. On the 21st Gen¬ eral Johnston found Sherman’s army united, and in position on three sides of him. On the other was Mill Creek. Our troops were pressed closely to the works of the enemy, and the entire day was spent in skirmishing. Dur¬ ing the night of the 21st the enemy crossed Mill Creek and retreated towards Raleigh. I have not attempted to give such a description of the battle as its importance would justify. The plans of the enemy to surprise us and destroy our army in detail were well formed and well executed, and would have been more successful had not the men of the Four¬ teenth and Twentieth Corps been veterans who had passed the days when they were liable to become panic-stricken. They Avere soldiers who had passed through many hard- fought battles and were the equals in courage and endurance of any soldiers of this or any other country. H. W. Slocum, BENTONVILLE THE MORNING AFTER THE BATTLE-THE SMOKE IS FROM RESIN THAT WAS FIRED By THE CONFEDERATES. FROM A SKETCH MADE AT THE TIME. THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE. The battle of Bentonville was in many particulars one of the most remarkable which occurred during the late Civil War, and though the report of this fight made by the commander of the Confederate forces. Gen¬ eral Joseph E. Johnston, is clear and accurate, there may be some minor details which would be of interest to the general reader, as throw¬ ing light on this battle, which was the last im¬ portant one of the war. When the disparity of the numbers engaged is taken into consid¬ eration, it must be regarded also as one of the most brilliant, and its conduct and its re¬ sults added luster to the fame of the great soldier who commanded the Southern troops. In order to have a clear conception of this battle, the reader should understand the con¬ dition of affairs in the South at the time it occurred and just previous to it. A feAv words on this point are also necessary, to give the reasons which induced General Johnston to deliver battle. When Sherman cut loose from Atlanta, af¬ ter expelling the inhabitants and burning a part of the city, it was evident to every one who had given a thought to the subject, that his objective point was a junction with General Grant’s army. The Army of Tennessee, after its disastrous repulse before Franklin, was, with its shattered columns, in rear of instead of in front of Sherman’s advancing forces, and thus he was allowed to make his march to Savannah a mere holiday excursion. At this latter point there was no adequate force to oppose him, and

Page 941

940 THE BATTLE OE BENTONVILLE. MAJOK-GliNEKAL LAFAYETTE McLAWS, C. S. A., COAniANDlNG A DIVISION IN Hardee’s corps, (from a photograph.) when Hardee, who commanded there, with¬ drew, the city fell an easy prey. The situation then was as follows: Sherman had established a new base, where communication with the sea was open to him, while Hardee’s line ex¬ tended from the Savannah River to James Island, beyond Charleston, a distance of 115 miles. Outside of the garrison of Charleston, he had but a handful of unorganized troops to hold this long line, and our true policy then was to abandon Charleston, to concentrate every available man in front of Sherman, and to dispute the passage of the rivers and swamps which were in his line of march, and which offered most admirable positions for an in¬ ferior force to strike a superior one. The gar¬ rison of Charleston consisted, I think, of about 16,000 well-equipped, well-drilled infantry, fully supplied with excellent artillery. Stev¬ enson’s division. Army of Tennessee, consist¬ ing of 2600 men, reached Columbia before the appearance of the enemy. In addition to the troops already mentioned, there were here Wheeler’s and Butler’s commands of cavalry and several unattached bodies of State troops and reserves. A rapid concentration of these forces would have put from 25,000 to 30,000 men in front of Sherman, and an at¬ tack upon one wing of his army, when separated from the other, would either have resulted in a victory to our army or would have encum¬ bered him with so many wounded men that he would have been forced to retreat to the sea, at Charleston. The views I have here ex¬ pressed were entertained at the time spoken of, for as I happened to be in Columbia then, not on duty, however, I urged upon General Beau¬ regard, who had assumed command about that time, the abandonment of Charles¬ ton and the concentration of his whole force at the first- named city. I pressed the same views on Governor Magrath, telling him that as important as Charleston was to us, Branchville, the junction of the railroads from Columbia, Augusta, and Charleston, was far more important. In these opinions, my recollection is that General Beauregard concurred, but why the movements suggested were not made I have never known. At all events Charleston was evacuated, and its garrison was sent to Che- raw on the Pedee River, and thence by a long march to North Carolina. When the Federal army appeared before Columbia, the only troops in and around the city were Stev¬ enson’s division, Wheeler’s cavalry, and a portion of Butler’s division, in all about five thousand of all arms. Practically there was no force in the city, for the troops were on picket duty from a point three miles above Columbia, to one twenty milesbelow. Of course no defense of the place was attempted, and it was surren¬ dered by the mayor before the enemy entered it, with the hope that, as no resistance had been offered, it would be protected from pillage and destruction. It is not my purpose here to speak of the fate that befell it : Sherman, in his memoirs, tells what it was in these brief and suggestive words, The army, having totally ruined Columbia, moved on towards Winnsboro’.” Stevenson’s division, which was above the city, was withdrawn, taking the road to Winnsboro’, and I having been assigned the night previous

Page 942

THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE, 941 to the command of the cavalry, fell back in the same direction, covering the retreat of the in¬ fantry. These details, which have taken greater space than was anticipated, are given so as to present clearly the positions, numbers, and condition of our forces at the beginning of the campaign in the Carolinas. It will be seen, from what has been said, that it would scarcely have been possible to disperse a force more effectually than was done in our case. Circum¬ stances may have caused this, but the fact was patent. Hardee was moving towards Fayette¬ ville in North Carolina; Beauregard was di¬ recting Stevenson’s march to Charlotte ; Cheat¬ ham, with his division from the Army of Tennessee, had come from Augusta and was moving towards the same point as Stevenson, but on the west side of the Congaree and Broad rivers, and the cavalry kept in close observa¬ tion of the enemy. Hardee’s men, though good soldiers, had been kept so long on gar¬ rison duty that the long marches broke down many of them, and half of his command, or perhaps more, fell out of the ranks while going to the scene of action. It was from these widely separated forces, these disjecta membra, that General Johnston, who was assigned to the command of this department, February 23d, had to form the army with which he fought the battle of Bentonville, and his first task was to bring together these detached bodies of troops. Hoke’s fine division from the Army of Northern Virginia also joined him before the fight, and rendered gallant and efficient service. General Johnston had united all his available infantry at Smithfield, North Caro¬ lina, and Sherman, whose progress had been entirely unobstructed, except by a spirited fight made by Hardee at Avery sboro’, and some affairs with our cavalry, was moving east from Fayetteville towards Goldsboro’. This being the condition of affairs. General John¬ ston realized that unless the advance of the enemy could be checked it would be only a question of time before Sherman would effect a junction with Grant, when their united ar¬ mies would overwhelm the depleted and ex¬ hausted Army of Northern Virginia. Under these circumstances, but two alternatives were presented to the Confederate general: one was to transport his infantry by rail rapidly to Virginia, where the reenforcements he could thus bring to General Lee might enable these two great soldiers to strike a decisive blow on Grant’s left flank. The other was to throw his small force on the army confronting him, with the hope of crippling that army, if he could not defeat it. As we could hope for no reen¬ forcements from Virginia, or indeed from any quarter, my judgment was that the first-named plan held out the best promise of success, and VoL. XXXIV.— 129. if my memory serves me right, I think that Gen¬ eral Johnston mentions in his “Narrative” that he suggested it. Of this, however, I am not certain, and I cannot verify my impression, as his report is not within my reach. How¬ ever the case may be, that plan was not adopted, and the general determined to re¬ sort to the other. His determination was a bold, I think a wise one; for, great as was the risk involved, it offered the only hope of success left to us. The relative position of the opposing armies being then as it has been described, the Confederate cavalry biv¬ ouacking about two miles south of the little hamlet of Bentonville, where the road from Smithfield intersected that from Fayetteville to Goldsboro’, I received a dispatch from General Johnston about 1 2 o’clock on the night of March 17th. In this letter he asked if I could give him information as to the positions of the several corps of the Federal army; what I thought of the practicability of his at¬ tacking them ; if advisable in my opinion to do so; when and where an attack could be made to most advantage; and requesting me to “ give him my views.” He was then, as I have said, at Smithfield, about 16 miles from Bentonville, and I replied at once, telling him that the Fourteenth Corps was in my imme¬ diate front; the Twentieth Corps was on the same road, five or six miles in the rear; while the other two corps were on a road some miles to the south, which ran parallel to the one on which we were. I suggested that the point at which I was camped was an admirable one for the attack he contemplated, and that I would delay the advance of the enemy as much as possible so as to enable our troops to concentrate there. In a few hours a reply came from General Johnston saying that he would move at once to the position indicated, and directing me to hold it if possible. In obedience to these or¬ ders, I moved out on the morning of the 1 8th to meet the enemy, with whom we skirmished until the afternoon, when I was pressed back by the force of numbers to the crest of a wooded hill, which overlooked a very large field that I had selected as the proper place for the battle, which was to take place as soon as our infantry reached the ground. It was vitally important that this position should be held by us during the night, so I dismounted all my men, placing them along the edge of the woods, and at great risk of losing my guns I put my artillery some distance to the right of the road, where, though exposed, it had a commanding position. I knew that if a seri¬ ous attack was made on me the guns would be lost, but I determined to run this risk in the hope of checking the Federal advance.

Page 943

942 THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE, As an illustration of the quick perception of our private soldiers, I recall an expression of one of them, as I rode off after placing the guns in position. Turning to some of his com¬ rades he said with a laugh, ‘‘ Old Hampton is playing a bluff game, and if he don’t mind Sher¬ man will call him.” He evidently understood the game of war as well as that of poker 1 It was nearly sunset when the enemy moved on this position, and recognizing its strength, not know¬ ing also, I suppose, what number of troops held it, they withdrew after a rather feeble dem¬ onstration against us. We were thus left in possession of the ground chosen for the fight which we expected the next day. That night General Johnston reached Bentonville, as did a part of his command, but Hardee’s troops had not been able to form a junction with the rest of our forces as the distance they had to march was greater than had been anticipated. As soon as General Johnston had established his headquarters at Bentonville, I reported to him,^ giving him all the information in my possession as to the position of the enemy, and the character of the ground on which we liad to operate. The following extracts from the report of the general will show the na¬ ture of our conference : ‘‘ Lieutenant-General Hampton gave all necessary in¬ formation that night, at Bentonville. He described the ground near the road abreast of us as favorable for our purpose. The F ederal camp, however, was but five or six miles from that ground, nearer, by several miles, than Hardee’s bivouac, and therefore we could not hope for the advantage of attacking the head of a deep column. .... As soon as General Hardee’s troops reached Bentonville next morning, we moved by the left flank, Hoke’s division leading, to the ground selected by General Hampton, and adopted from his description.” As the general had not been able to exam¬ ine the ground, I ventured to suggest such disposition of our forces as I thought would be most advantageous, and my suggestions were adopted. The plan proposed was that the cavalry should move out at daylight and occupy the position held by them on the pre¬ vious evening. The infantry could then be deployed, with one corps across the main road and the other two obliquely in echelon to the right of the first. As soon as these positions were occupied, I was to fall back, with my command, through the first corps, and passing to the rear of the infantry line, I was to take position on our extreme right. These move¬ ments were carried out successfully, except that Hardee had not reached his position in die center when the enemy who were follow¬ ing me struck Bragg’s corps, which was in line of battle across the road. This absence of Har¬ dee left a gap between Bragg and Stewart ; and in order to hold this gap until the arrival of Hardee, I had two batteries of horse artil¬ lery — Captains Halsey and Earle — placed in the vacant space. The former of these batter¬ ies had constituted a part of the Hampton Legion ; it served with me during all the cam¬ paigns in Virginia, making an honorable and brilliant record, and it joined me at Benton- yille, just in time to render efficient service in the last battle in which we fought together. All the guns of both batteries were admirably served, and their fire held the enemy in their front until Hardee reached his allotted posi¬ tion. In the meantime Bragg’s troops had repulsed the attack made on them, and the opportune moment had arrived when the other two corps, in accordance with the plan agreed on, should have been thrown on the flank of the retreating enemy. But unfortu¬ nately there occurred one of those incidents which so often change the fate of battles, and which broke in on the plan of this fight just at the crisis of the engagement. About the time that the head of Hardee’s column ap¬ peared a very heavy attack was made on Hoke’s division, and Bragg, fearing that he could not maintain his ground, applied for reenforcements. General Johnston at once determined to comply with this request, and he directed Hardee to send a portion of his force to the support of Hoke. This movement was in my judgment the only mistake committed on our part during the fight, and when the general notified me of the intended change in the plans, I advised that we should adhere to the one agreed on. It would be great pre¬ sumption in me to criticise any movement di¬ rected by General Johnston, in whose skill and generalship I have always entertained implicit confidence, and I should not now venture to express an opinion as to the propriety of the order given to Hardee had not the general in his report stated that this movement was a mistake. In reference to it, he uses the following language in his “ Narrative” : “ The enemy attacked Hoke’s division vigorously, especially its left, so vigorously that General Bragg apprehended that Hoke, although slightly entrenched, would be driven from his position. He therefore ap¬ plied urgently for strong reenforcements. Lieuten¬ ant-General Hardee, the head of whose column was then near, was directed most injudiciously to send his leading division, McLaws’s, to the assistance of the troops assailed,” etc. General Johnston evidently became satis¬ fied, in the progress of the fight, that this move¬ ment was ‘‘ most injudicious,” for it became apparent that it was unnecessary, as Hoke re¬ pulsed the attack made on him fully and hand¬ somely. Had Hardee been in the position orig¬ inally assigned him at the time Hoke struck the enemy, and could his command and Stew¬ art’s have been thrown on the flanks of the retreating Federal forces, I think that the

Page 944

943 THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE, Fourteenth Corps would have been driven back in disorder on the Twentieth, which was mov¬ ing up to its support. This, however, is but speculation, and I refer to it only as presenting an interesting problem to the military student. Had these two corps been driven back to the west with loss, while the right wing of the Federal army was moving rapidly to the east on another road, all the subsequent op¬ erations of the campaign might have been changed. But “ facts are stubborn things,” and we are dealing now, as then, with them. And the fact that confronted General Johnston then was that much precious time had been lost by a delay in following up promptly the success gained by his troops in their first con¬ flict with the enemy. His orders were that Bragg should change front to the left, which movement would have aligned him with the other corps and enabled him to attack on the flank. For some reason, not known to me, these orders were not carried out promptly, or perhaps not at all, and hence delay occurred which, while hurtful to us, was of infinite value to the enemy, for time was given to him to bring up the Twentieth Corps to the support of the broken ranks of the Fourteenth. It thus happened that though the attack of the Fourteenth Corps was repulsed early in the morning, our counter-attack was delayed until quite late in the afternoon, when we encoun¬ tered a force double that met in the morning, and we found them behind breastworks. The fighting that evening was close and bloody. As General Johnston has described it far bet¬ ter than I could do, I quote his account : “ The Confederates passed over three hundred yards of the space between the two lines in quick time and in excellent order, and the remaining distance in dou¬ ble-quick, without pausing to fire until their near ap¬ proach had driven the enemy from the shelter of their intrenchments, in full retreat, to their second line. After firing a few rounds, the Confederates again pressed forward, and when they were near the second intrenchment, now manned by both lines of Federal troops, Lieutenant-General Hardee, after commanding the double-quick, led the charge, and with his knightly gallantry dashed over the enemy’s breastworks on horseback in front of his men. Some distance in the rear there was a very thick wood of young pines into which the Federal troops were pursued, and in which they rallied and renewed the fight. But the Confeder¬ ates continued to advance, driving the enemy back slowly, notwithstanding the advantage given to the party on the defensive by the thicket, which made united action by the assailants impossible. On the ex¬ treme left, however. General Bragg’s troops were held in check by the Federal right, which had the aid of breastworks and the thicket of black-jack. . . . Four pieces of artillery were taken, but as we had only spare harnessed horses enough to draw off three, one ^yas left on the field. The impossibility of concentrating the Confederate forces in time to attack the Federal left wing, while in column on the march, made com¬ plete success also impossible, from the enemy’s great numerical superiority.” Night closed upon a hard-fought field and a dearly won victory, for the losses in our hand¬ ful of troops had been heavy. After dark Gen¬ eral Johnston withdrew to the position from which he had moved to the attack, and our first line with slight modifications was resumed. No disturbance occurred that night, but early on the morning of the 20th, Brigadier-General Law, whom 1 had placed temporarily in com¬ mand of Butler’s division in the unavoidable absence of that gallant and distinguished offi¬ cer, who had won his way from the rank of captain to that of major-general under my command, reported that the right wing of the Federal army, which had struck the road on which we were some miles to the east, was rapidly moving down on our rear and left flank. Hoke then held our left, and General Johnston directed him to refuse his left flank so that he could meet the attack of the ap¬ proaching force. I prolonged the rear line taken by Hoke by placing Butler’s and Wheeler’s commands on his left, and while doing this we met and checked a sharp attack. Sherman thus had his whole army united in front of us, about 12 o’clock on the 20th, and he made repeated attacks during the day, mainly on Hoke’s division. In all of them he was repulsed, and many of his wounded left in front of our lines were carried to our hos¬ pitals. Our line was a very weak one, and our position was extremely perilous, for our small force was confronted, almost surrounded, by one nearly five times as large. Our flanks rested on no natural defenses, and behind us was a deep and rapid stream over which there was but one bridge, which gave the only means of withdrawal. Our left flank — far overlapped by the enemy — was held along a small stream, which flowed into Mill Creek, and this was held only by cavalry videttes stationed at long intervals apart. On the 21st there was active skirmishing on the left of our line, and my pickets reported that the enemy seemed to be moving in force to our left on the oppo¬ site side of the small stream, along which my videttes were stationed. I immediately rode down to report this fact to General John¬ ston, and I told him that there was no force present able to resist an attack, and that if the enemy broke through at that point which was near the bridge across the main stream our only line of retreat would be cut off. The gen¬ eral directed me to return to the point indi¬ cated to ascertain the exact condition of affairs, and as I was riding back I met a courier, who in¬ formed me that the enemy in force had crossed the branch, had driven back the cavalry pickets, and were then very near the main road which led to the bridge. This attack rendered our position extremely dangerous, for if the

Page 945

944 THE BATTLE OF BENTONVILLE, attacking force had been able to attain pos¬ session of the road we could not have with¬ drawn without very heavy loss, if we could have done so at all. Just before the courier who brought me the information of the ad¬ vance of the arniy met me, I had passed a brigade, though its numbers were not more than sufficient to constitute a regiment, mov¬ ing towards our left. This was Cumming’s Georgia brigade, commanded then, I think, by Colonel Henderson, and I doubt if there were more than two hundred to two hundred and fifty in the command. Realizing the importance of prompt action, I ordered this command to move at once to the point threatened, and I also ordered up a battery which I had passed. I then sent a courier to bring up all the mounted men he could find, and in a few minutes a portion of the 8th Texas Cavalry — 6o or 8o men — re¬ responded to my call. All of these troops were hurried up to meet the enemy, who were then within a few hundred yards of the road, and just as I had put them in position General Hardee arrived on the ground. Explaining the posi¬ tion to him and telling him of the dispositions I had made, he at once ordered a charge and our small force was hurled against the advanc¬ ing enemy. The attack was so sudden and so impetuous that it carried everything before it, and the enemy retreated hastily across the branch. This attack on our position was made by Mower’s division, and it was repulsed by a force which certainly did not exceed, if it reached, three hundred men. Sherman in his “ Memoirs says that he “ ordered Mower back ” ; but if this statement is true, the order was obeyed with wonderful promptness and alacrity. General Hardee, who assumed com¬ mand when he reached the field, led this charge with his usual conspicuous gallantry ; and as he returned from it successful, his face bright with the light of battle, he turned to me and ex¬ claimed : ‘‘ That was Nip and Tuck, and for a time I thought Tuck had it.” A sad incident marred his triumph, for his only son, a gallant boy of sixteen, who had joined the 8th Texas Cavalry two hours before, fell in the charge led by his father. This affair practically ended the battle of Bentonville for that night. General Johnston withdrew his command safely across Mill Creek, where he camped two miles be¬ yond the bridge. On the morning of the 2 2d there was a sharp skirmish at the bridge between some of Wheeler’s cavalry and the advance-guard of the enemy, who tried to force a passage, but who were handsomely repulsed with some loss. I have not specified the services of the cavalry during the operations described, but they were important and were gallantly performed. The commands of Butler and Wheeler numbered, I think, about three thou- sand men, and after the engagement became general nearly all of this force fought along¬ side of the infantry in their improvised breast¬ works. When Sherman moved up on our left flank, they checked his advance until our main line could be refused on the left wing, and in Mower’s subsequent repulse they bore an important part, for, in addition to the gallant charge of the 8th Texas made in conjunc¬ tion with the infantry, other portions of my command struck his flank as he was re¬ tiring, and contributed largely to our success. As, however, I am not attempting to write a report of this battle, but simply to give a brief sketch of its main incidents, I have not alluded to the conduct of any of the troops engaged. I proposed merely to give my reminiscences and impressions of an engagement which is memorable as the last general battle of the Civil War, and which, in my judgment, was one of the most extraordinary. Let me give my reasons briefly for this opinion. The in¬ fantry forces of General Johnston amounted to about 14,100 men, and they were composed of three separate commands which had never acted together. These were Hardee’s troops, brought from Savannah and Charleston; Stew¬ art’s, from the Army of Tennessee; and Hoke’s division of veterans, many of whom had served in the campaigns of Virginia. Bragg, by rea¬ son of his rank, was in command of this latter force, but it was really Hoke’s division, and he directed the fighting. These troops, con¬ centrated only recently for the first time, were stationed at and near Smithfield, eighteen miles from the field where the battle was fought, and it was from these points that General Johnston moved them, to strike a veteran army num¬ bering about 60,000 men. This latter army had marched from Atlanta to Savannah with¬ out meeting any force to dispute its passage, and from the latter city to Bentonville un¬ obstructed save by the useless and costly affair at Averysboro’, where Hardee made a gal¬ lant stand, though at a heavy loss. No bolder movement was conceived during the war than this of General Johnston, when he threw his handful of men on the overwhelming force in front of him, and no more gall ant defense was ever made than his, when he confronted and baffled this force, holding a weak line for three days against nearly five times his number. For the last two days of this fight he only held his position to secure the removal of his wounded, and when he had accomplished that he with¬ drew leisurely, moving in his first march only about four miles. All the Federal wounded who fell into his hands were cared for in his field- hospitals, when all of his, who could not be removed, were left. Of course General John-

Page 946

THE WILD RIDE, 945 ston’s only object in making this fight was to cripple the enemy, and to impede his advance. And I think that if his original plan of battle could have been carried out, and if his orders had been executed promptly, he would have inflicted a very heavy, if not an irretrievable, disaster on the Fourteenth and the Twentieth corps. These two corps were opposed to him in the first day’s fight, and in that of the last two days he was confronted by the whole of Sherman’s army. It must be remembered, too, that General Schofield was in supporting distance of Sherman with 26,000 men. Few soldiers would have adopted the bold measure resorted to by General Johnston, and none could have carried it out more skillfully nor more successfully than .he did. I believed dur¬ ing that fight, and my opinion has never changed, that if he could have had his plans executed promptly he would have gained one of the most brilliant victories of the war, and even under all the difficulties that con¬ fronted him he achieved a wonderful success. In this connection I may recall a conversation I had with the distinguished soldier who com¬ manded the left wing of Sherman’s army, Gen¬ eral Slocum. We met in New York in 1868, and in speaking of this battle I asked him what would have been the result in his opin¬ ion had General Johnston been able to follow up his first success. His reply was in sub¬ stance, for I cannot quote his exact language, that the movement might have resulted in great disaster to his command, for he had been able to get up the Twentieth Corps only in time to meet the attack made on him in the afternoon. The unhappy war which arrayed the two sec¬ tions of our country in hostile ranks is ended ; the wounds left by that conflict are healing ; the animosities engendered by it are dying out; the active participants in that great struggle are passing from the stage, and nothing is left to the survivors but the memory of the heroic deeds performed. It will be the task, as it will be the duty, of the future historian to sift out the truth of this great war and to put it on record. Any contribution to the history of that war cannot be without some value ; and mine, brief and im¬ perfect as I feel it to be, is offered as a small addition to the fund of knowledge which the historian will seek to acquire. All my opin¬ ions, all my conclusions, about the battle of Bentonville may be erroneous, but I have tried to narrate the facts connected with it as they struck me then and as my subsequent reflec¬ tions have confirmed them. Wade Hampton, THE WILD RIDE. / hear in my hearty I hear in its ominous pulses,, All day, the commotion of sinewy, mane-tossing horses y All night, from their cells, the importunate tramping and neighing! Cowards and laggards fall back ; but alert to the saddle. Straight, grim, and abreast, vault the weather-worn, galloping legion. With a stirrup-cup each to the one gracious woman that loves him. The road is thro’ dolor and dread, over crags and morasses ; There are shapes by the way, there are things that appall or entice us : What odds ? We are knights ; and our souls are but bent on the riding. 1 hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses. All day, the commotion of sinewy, ?na7ie-tossing horses ; All night, from their cells, the importunate tra^nping a7id 7ieighing! We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm- wind ; We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil : Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with thy troopers that follow. Louise Imogen Guiney,

Page 947

ZVVEIBAK; OR, NOTES OF ... I HAVE been reading over the books of ‘‘ Paradise Lost ’’ which record the visit of Raphael to Eden. That was delightful con¬ versation. There was no shame or suspicion in that society. Nothing could have been sweeter, fresher, or bolder. The voices of the participants rose in poetic speech with the glad freedom of their state of perfect innocence. How that charming woman listened with pleased and apprehensive countenance to the finest thoughts of the angelic guest, her hands all the while busy with those meaths and ker¬ nels and dulcet creams! No man could have done that. The angel must often have re¬ called the incidents of that visit. I can fancy him standing on some flowering declivity of the everlasting fields, his mind occupied with the recollections of his terrestrial friendship and the melancholy vicissitudes of the lives of our first parents, exclaiming, as he pored upon an amaranth H o w dreadful that people should meet with such reverses!” — then, as a look of gentlemanly shame and regret disturbed his features, “ But what could I do ? ” ... I am consoled for my difficulty in speaking German by a passage in St. Paul. St. Paul says that some are '' discerners of spirits ” and some have the gift of tongues,” as if these qualities were contrary and inconsistent or at any rate widely diverse. Let us hope that I am a discerner of spirits.” The late Lord Beaconsfield, who was certainly a discerner of spirits, was a bad linguist. A compatriot of his who met him at the Berlin conference said, ‘‘ There’s one thing British about him,— that is his French.” I should think it likely that the steady, silent, oriental gaze of Lord Beaconsfield would not go along with that miscellaneous activity of mind we commonly see m a man who is good at learning languages. ... I have seen the opinion expressed lately, that there has been in modern times an advance in the beauty of women. Perhaps there has been, although I should doubt it. Pliny speaks of a young lady of his time in the following manner The youngest daugh¬ ter of my friend Fundanus is dead. I have never seen a more cheerfiil and more lovable girl, or one who had better deserved to have enjoyed a long, I had almost said an immortal, life! She was scarcely fourteen, and yet there was in her a wisdom far beyond her years, a matronly gravity united with girlish sweetness mid virgin bashfulness. With what an endear¬ ing fondness did she hang on her father’s neck ! A PROFESSIONAL EXILE. How affectionately and modestly she used to greet us, his friends! With what a tender and deferential regard she used to treat her nurses, tutors, teachers, each in their respective offi¬ ces! What an eager, industrious, intelligent reader she was! . . . O melancholy and untimely loss, too truly ! She was engaged to an excellent young man.” This was a long time ago. The above-mentioned theory, to the contrary, nothwithstanding, one may be sure that there was something pretty about this young lady ; I have no doubt she suited young Pomponius Rufus, the young man to whom she was engaged. Her face and form, at any rate, had that evanescence which of it¬ self is pretty. The lines of her countenance, her features even, the expression of her figure, were all new. She had acquired them since the preceding year. Pliny is writing perhaps in A.^ D. 109. Three years earlier she was still playing with dolls. Now she has a ‘^wisdom beyond her years,” “a matronly gravity,” and “ a virgin bashfulness.’^ I think there is some- thing pretty in the fondness for study of this child of the accomplished Fundanus. She \yas not like one of those pert daughters of literary families that I have known, who de¬ spise books and want only to know rich and smart people and to go to balls and races. I have no doubt she had a bust of Virgil in her bedroom. She probably had a birthday-book of the poets’ works and made people write their names opposite their respective quotations. . . . Ap'opos of the daughter of Fundanus, the R - s are staying here with all their chil¬ dren. The youngest daughter is about fifteen. Her sisters say that she is at the awkward age. She is tall for her age, and her limbs are long. Hers may be the awkward age, but there is a grace about her awkwardness which it would have been hard for more completed beauties to match. She exhibits this in walking or stand¬ ing, but especially in a sitting position, for her body then falls into indolent attitudes, which are perfect in grace. Her indisposition to break up any position into which she has fallen is not so much the result of indolence as of what I believe to be an instinct, that anything so pretty should not too soon come to an end. Her figure at such times seems to have a pleas¬ urable consciousness of repose. Her silence is perpetual ; I greatly enjoy it. This beautiful mushroom has grown to its present size since I left college. . . . W., who has come for a fortnight to

Page 948

THE ANGEL OF SLEEP. 947 this frivolous place, is an interesting person. He is able, learned, and virtuous, but a passion¬ ate prig. He has been all his life a professor, and has a trait often to be met with in teachers: he cannot help instructing you. It is true that his tone is one of great simplicity and modesty. But it is an enforced simplicity ; you perceive in him a feeling that it is a praiseworthy thing in so wise a person to be so catholic and unpre¬ tentious. I believe that he is half-conscious of this defect, and encourages and cultivates his simplicity, but he does this to little purpose \ it has become a necessity of his nature that his way of thinking shall override yours. That so great a man should be the victim, of such a fault seems odd. A person of the highest cul¬ ture and virtue, W. would, of course, wish his conduct to be governed by reason ; but what has his pride of opinion to do with the subject he may be discussing ? what has Truth to do with the matter of his being up or down, great or small ? Even when W. listens to you, it is with an air of rating or marking your observations. I have noticed this peculiarity in a number of professors. Instead of hearing the remarks of another, as a normal or healthy person would do, a professor seems to say : “ I should rate that observation at 7.60 or, “ That is an ex¬ cellent opinion; I should put that at 9.15.” But I think that W.’s chief misfortune is that he does not see and take note of other people. He knows Sanscrit and chemistry, political economy and history ; but when he meets men and women, his eyes discharge blank cartridges at them. When a human be¬ ing is to be perceived, he is helpless. . . . Some Frenchman said of Gibbon, who was short and very fat, that when he wanted exercise it was his habit to take trois fois le tourde Monsieur Gibbon. Literary fame is very wonderful. Is it not remarkable that such abook as “ The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ” should be the production of anything so temporary and ephemeral as a man ; that there should arise from the little heap of cor¬ ruption and gray hairs consigned to the grave such a monument ! Every one must have noticed how the par¬ lor ornaments, the vases, and the candlesticks remain after the departure of fathers and brothers. A book has the same indestructibil¬ ity. It cannot catch cold. This is true not only of the works of a Gibbon, a Johnson, or a Sterne; but you and I who can write a nice little book are not to be despised; we may be at least as immortal as an andiron. ... I have said that I come to Zweibak to see my compatriots. How fortunate I should be if I could live in the United States, which is a country full of Americans ! I have been too long away from that coun¬ try. I am devoted to it. Indeed, I niay say that I care for little else. I am fond of its peo¬ ple. I am proud of its history, its humor, its size, and its climates. Thy drastic sun, thy silent wildernesses, whose briers wound my fancy as I remember them, thy railroad de¬ pots in the lonely clearings on the edge of the forest, where the shunted cars bake in the sunlight, are always present with me. I am always thinking of these things. Would it not be well to return and give one’s self to some such practical work as mind and body crave, and to spend one’s hours of relaxation in friendly society with that pure and savage spirit which pervades our scenery. E. S. Nadal. THE ANGEL OF SLEEP. Dear angel Sleep, Where lies thy world which yet hath not been seen By waking eyes, though they be charged with light Filched from the undying sun, and pierce the night With eagle gaze? The veil doth intervene Which hides thy mystic land. Thy noiseless wings Afar up-bear thee on thy distant flight While watch we keep. Still doth thy hand withhold, thy lips forbid. The strange half-parting into bliss which brings Some touch of solace craved by every breast, Till softly to the cheek the fringed lid By weariness or sorrow hath been pressed And all-— save life within the heart — at rest.

Page 949

948 THE ANGEL OF SLEEP. Then from the airy corridors which wed The shadowed halls where Death and Silence dwell, With velvet foot-falls on the lonely floors, Through closely bolted and unfriendly doors. Thou — friend of friendless souls — with hastening tread Dost come to kneel — by cot and costly bed ■, With juice of herbs from many a dream-land dell Caught up and pressed betwixt thy soothing palms To cool the eyes that weeping hath made red. And plants, plucked from the fragrant earth, which shed Their priceless drops for thee, and poppy balms That breathe elysian airs, whose touch restores Lost happier visions of sweet days, long dead. To hungering hearts that feed on sorrow’s bread. Across the deep Unguessed abysses of ethereal space Bridged by wide arches of the glimmering stars, Through darkling distances— on wind-reaped moors— Beside dim rivers on whose soundless shores The countless journeying years have left no trace To tell Time had been there, thy friendly hand Leads forth our spirits to that shrouded land Beyond the vague impenetrable bars Which hedge this conscious life — a world that beams With other light than this — in which the soul ’Scapes for a little from the harsh control Of tyrant circumstance, and oft it seems We almost have cast off our chains and stand Freed from the reach of care and earthly dole. So far we wander in thy land of dreams. But while life bides, the binding tie must hold. We must return to earth. Tears that were shed * Before thine arms closed lovingly around us Scarce have grown cold. When to the scene in which thy coming found us We wake; once more recalled, once more, as when We laid life down we take it up again And trudge beneath our burthens as of old, Thou and thy fair fantastic world being fled. Yet, evermore in happiness or sorrow. In health or sickness, trusting thy strong wing To bear us to the threshold of the morrow; From Night’s still unaccomplished hours we borrow The comfort of new hopes which dawn may bring. Thus safe across the dreary gulfs that sunder The realm of Day we pass, by thy kind care ; And if some cloud, lit by the lightning’s glare. Or rent in pieces by the crashing thunder, Wakes the deep-slumbering Earth to trembling wonder And frights thee hence, how anxiously we stare Out through the gloom, aghast, not knowing where Thy startled flight hath left us ; for a space. Held by the lingering spell we have been under. We see a world in which we have no place; As though both Life and Death by some strange blunder Had fallen away and left us lonely there.

Page 950

THE ANGEL OF SLEER 949 The soul thus dallying on Life’s farthest edge Not having stepped across Death’s wavering line, Leaving its house with Life as if in pledge Of sure return, slips down the shimmering ledge Whose yielding sands with unknown jewels shine. And out upon the sea — which like a wedge Divides two worlds and far out-flowing laves Oblivion’s shadowed coast with soundless waves. There with thee drifting, in thy shallow boat Beneath thy up-stretched wings, which fan the air With fragrant downy plumes, once more we float Forgetful of this life that is so fair. But where each blooming path by Death is haunted, And where the burning hopes so often vaunted Soon smolder in the ashes of despair. And if they live again, some other-where. No heart, however fearless and undaunted. Can surely know ; — No mortal hand may dare Point out the road by which we shall come there. But when upon thy tranquil breast reclining No more we care if life hath used us ill Or if for rain the summer fields be pining Or if fierce winter scourge the naked hill; Nor if dark clouds have quenched the moon’s fair shining Nor if the heart which loved us, loves us still. And when at last Life will no longer stay. But turns aside all heedless of our calling. And we can go no farther on the way. Because the great abyss, deep and appalling. Gapes widely in the darkness for its prey — Then, whether night be come, or — slowly falling — The twilight shadows of the evening gray. Or some last dawn our swimming sight forestalling. Or if the time be some fair summer day — It hinders not thy coming nor thy care : Kind first, last friend, thou wilt not leave us there. Nay, lovelier seeming then, dear angel Sleep, From thine abode, — where Death and Silence keep Watch on thy going, — down the cloud-built stair. On thy last journey thou dost softly creep : Thy cup of balm clasped in thy hand, to steep Our anxious spirits — as of old — in rest. Once more, upon the pillows of thy breast. But from his gloomy hall the black-robed king Steps hastily and halts thee in thy flight. And while his presence overawes thy sight : The poisoned jewel drops within thy cup. And when we drink, our fainting spirits yearn For thy soft bosom where we fain would cling To rest forever from our wandering ; Once more thy strong arms lift us gently up, Once more the world fades out, and soon the light Of worlds unknown and fabled suns that burn Far off beyond the farthest star of night. Breaks on the plumes of thy space-cleaving wing. So we go hence and never more return. Robert Burris Wilson.

Page 951

TOPICS OF THE TIME. Soldier and Citizen. ^ ENERAL J. D. Cox, in writing of the policy of the vJT War Department in i86i of retaining the old or¬ ganizations of the regular army instead of assigning its officers to command volunteer regiments, has recently said : “Less than a year afterward we changed our policy, but it was then too late to induce many of the regular officers to take regimental positions in the volunteer troops. I hesitate to declare that this was not, after all, for the best ; for, although the organization of our army would have been more rapidly perfected, there are other considerations which have much weight. The army would not have been the popular thing it was, its close identifi¬ cation with the people’s movement would have been weak¬ ened, and it perhaps would not so readily have melted again into the mass of the nation at the close of the, war. Herein is recorded one of the chief glories of the Union veteran. Like Grant, he was without any liking for war. His enlistment was for a definite purpose and as a solemn duty, its term being in most cases for “ three years or during [not after] the war. ” He never had any doubts as to what he was fighting for, and when that object was accomplished, so far as it could be ac¬ complished by his musket, he came home rejoicing as from exile and without resentment, and looking upon himself not as a soldier whose duty it was to vote^ but as a citizen whose duty it had been to fight. His theory was that he came back to be part of a restored civil government, and not of a perpetual standing army. Valuing peace thus highly, it is natural that he should have become the chief of peacemakers. The distribu¬ tion of the military element into the employments of ordinary life was a hardly less wonderful phenomenon than its composition from the farms, offices, and work¬ shops of 1 86 1. In a few months these men became again an integral part of our civil life, abreast of their fellows in the pursuits of peace. This recuperation from the ravages of war and absorption into the life of the citizen, was naturally even more noticeable in the South, which has since given not inferior evidences of forbear¬ ance and good citizenship. Since the war the country has owed much to the Union veterans for services in many capacities — as Pres¬ idents, Governors, Senators, Representatives, and in other stations to which a grateful people has elevated them. It was natural that they should receive honor and distinction ; moreover, so long as there could possibly be any doubt of the faithful acquiescence of the South in the results of the war, it was natural that, in a political point of view, they should receive special consideration and exercise special influence as a class. Individually, such will doubtless be the case for years to come, but there are distinct evidences that as a factor in the poli¬ tics of the future the “soldier vote,” in the mass, is likely to play a less important part. Such an event will be fortunate for their fame and for the country. The tra¬ ditions of the veteran will always be held in honor, and the story of his deeds in the greatest war of modern times — one of the few moral and necessary conflicts of arms — will never cease to be a cherished part of our * Article on “War Preparations in the North,” in “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” literature. But it is as true as the equation of action and reaction, that the soldier vote must disappear with the conviction on the part of the veterans that their cause, the cause of national unity, — which all now clearly see to have been the cause of human progress, — is no longer in danger. Many came to this conclusion years ago ; the man who does not admit it now must be deficient either in intelligence or in candor. For what sentiment of alarm can exist in the presence of the re¬ iterated expressions of loyalty and patriotism which have been heard from all parts of the busy South with¬ in the past three years, — a sentiment which even the burning discussion of the disposal of the battle-flags has not served to diminish in the least ! With some opportunity of knowing the feelings of Southern sol¬ diers on this subject, we believe that they are ex¬ pressed in the fullest measure by the speech of Colonel Aylett of Pickett’s division at the memorable meeting of Union and Confederate veterans on the battle-field of Gettysburg last July. “ The flags which have been won,” said he, “ are yours, and what is yours is ours ; we have made them lustrous with American heroism. Keep them, return them, destroy them, as you will.” The cordial feeling on the Union side was not less no¬ ticeable. To take a true measure of the importance of such reunions (and this is but one of scores) the reader has but to fancy how impossible their counter¬ part would be twenty-five years after the battle of Sedan between survivors of that memorable field. No, it would be unwise to send back the flags in a body so long as their voluntary return by the separate com¬ mands who took them thus widens the area of inter¬ sectional good feeling. In the face of these multiplied evidences of a Union restored in sentiment as well as in fact, — and it was surely for the larger and truer Union that the North¬ ern soldier fought, — we hold that the man who at¬ tempts to revive or trade upon the dead issues of the war should be regarded as a public enemy, to be held in deeper contempt than an ordinary disturber of the peace as his offense is more far-reaching and his mo¬ tives more deliberate. There can now be no motive for sectional feeling that is not personal, partisan, or mercenary, and we believe that recent events indicate that the public is in no mood to tolerate its revival, whether exhibited in the cant of ambitious party leaders, in the public bad manners of political boycotters, or in the adroit and interested flattery of pension agents. Not the least of the reasons why the veteran should dis¬ avow this misuse of his honorable history is that the ultimate object of all such class movements is to dis¬ tract public attention from the evasion by political parties of their real business and their only reason for existence, — namely, to take a definite stand on questions of the day, to the end that the public will may have through them an unmistakable expression in the guidance of the government. Any other conception of party is a farce and a delusion, under which the pur¬ poses of the party managers and not those of the vot¬ ers become successful. This tergiversation of parties can measurably be reduced by the completer fusion of the soldier element, as well as of every other class,

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TOPICS OF with the great body of citizens. The endeavor to play the veteran as a pawn in the political game is one which may well excite his indignation, since it degrades that which should be his highest honor. It would result in an enormous service to the coun¬ try if the men who fought for the preservation of the Union would ask themselves whether their work is complete, — whether, unapproachable as is our system in theory,* it is, as administered, the model which they would be satisfied to hand down to posterity. Let vet¬ erans who are properly sensitive in regard to the em¬ blems be sure that also they do not fail to cherish the stibsiance^ of their victory. Many evils menace us — far too many for us to waste our energies in combating fan¬ cied ones. What has been preserved by the war, funda¬ mental as it is, is merely the possibility of a continuously great and happy nation. Constitutions and laws “ can only give us freedom ” ; it is the use we make of this freedom that will determine the value of our national life and its place in history. The Union, therefore, will have to be saved over and over again, first from one dan¬ ger and then from another. J ust now it needs very much the help of the best thought and energy to save it from the mad rush for office ” which has wrung despairing cries from our later Presidents. At this most critical stage of the Merit System, — the stage of partial suc¬ cess, — and when special efforts are making to array the veteran element against it, one may bespeak for it the thoughtful consideration of those who gave their best years that “ government of the people, for the people, and by the people should not perish from the earth.” We regard the complete reform of the civil service as the cause of the people, and as the reform before all others, since it is the reform of the machinery by which other reforms are to come. So long as the personnel of the executive and legislative service is in the control of party workers, the expression of the people’s will is in the control of partisan conspiracies, backed, as they always are, by the capital of vested interests. Have our people not already suffered enough on this score ? Let veterans consider whether they will lend their influence to the impairment (even, apparently, in their own favor) of a system which substitutes for the will of the party henchman an equitable test of fitness for that part of the civil service which properly has no more relation to party policy than has the regular army. Personal Records of the War. Any one who has attempted to settle a disputed point of war history or to construct a map of an engagement knows how desirable it is to have the fullest consensus of evidence in order to establish the smallest circum¬ stance. The official records are invaluable and in them¬ selves compose a large part of the history of the war. But they are far from justifying the blind faith with which they are appealed to in some quarters. Who, from the unassisted reports, would be able to recon¬ struct the character, the eidolo72y of Grant, or McClel¬ lan, or Hooker, or Lee, or Jackson, or Hood? — and yet, in war, the personal equation is everything. Moreover, the official records are often inconsistent with themselves, because they are not free from hu¬ man imperfections and the bias and exaggerations of the moment ; and they will therefore‘acquire a larger * Lord Salisbury is said to have called it recently the most con¬ servative government in the world. THE TIME, 951 value as time goes on from comparison with the often more candid and circumstantial diaries and letters of the time and even with general recollections. In the preservation of extra-official history much has been done by the veteran organizations and historical so¬ cieties — on the side of the South (where many data remain to be supplied) by the Missouri and Virginia Southern Historical Societies, among others ; in the North notably by the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Historical Society of Rhode Island and by the Boston, Philadel¬ phia, Cincinnati, and other Commanderies of the Loyal Legion. It would be well if these bodies could add the important function of editing to those of collecting and publishing historical data. This could often best be done locally, by comparing the concurrent testimony of the survivors of each regiment in the neighborhood in which it was recruited. In this way it may yet be possible, by the aid of letters from the field, to sift out errors and to establish a body of historical evidence concerning the regiment which will have authority in the verdict of the future. The regimental record is, after all, the unit of army history. Happily regimental and State pride have produced a considerable body of this writing. But no veteran should consider himself released from the service until he has made the most accurate record possible of what he saw and knew. The large number of such manuscript narratives which we have received in the past three years, and which lack of space and the topical plan of our series have made unavailable, have included many of importance as cumulative or direct evidence. This material, care¬ fully edited, and prefaced by a schedule of the subject- matter, may well be deposited with the archives of some historical society where in years to come it will be accessible to those students who will take the trou¬ ble to examine and weigh it. We have already presented to our readers many important narratives of the mili¬ tary events of the great struggle, written by privates and officers on both sides. We are now about to take a broader look at the War for the Union from another point of view, — through the kindly eyes of him who wisely directed its policy, and whose principles tri¬ umphed to a fuller nationality. From the story of the man in the ranks to that of Abraham Lincoln let no true record of the contest perish and no lesson of it be lost to the new, united nation. The Last Hope of the Mormon. There comes a time, in pitched battle, when one of the two opposing lines begins to show those signs which, to a military eye, indicate failing energy and a readiness to give up the struggle. The charges which have hitherto been rapid, successive, and resolute are succeeded by an inexplicable pause and a wavering of the whole line ; or the crowning charge, on which the eyes and hopes of the whole line have been fixed, be¬ comes slower and slower in its advance until it halts irresolute ; or the last reserves are hurried into action, without increasing the energy of the defense. It is at such an instant that Waterloos and Gettysburgs are lost and won ; and the indications are that such an in¬ stant has come at last to the Mormon hierarchy. No warfare has been more intolerable to the Amer¬ ican people than that which its Government has been compelled to wage for years past on the so-called re-

Page 953

TOPICS OF THE TIME. 952 ligious system known as Mormonism. For the warfare has never been directed against any tenet which could in fairness be called religious. The Mormon has as much constitutional right as any other American citi¬ zen to found his faith on Mormon, Moroni, Lehi, and the rest of the tribe, to look with reverence to the hill of Cumora, and to govern his practice by the revela¬ tions of any leader who pleases him. The American Government has never attempted or desired to inter¬ fere with this right. But, when the practice inculcated by the revelations is criminal by the laws of the land, equal-handed justice to the non- Mormon citizen de¬ mands that the Mormon be compelled to obey the laws, as others are compelled to obey them, or to find another land which will allow him superior privileges. Such a government is responsible to God, to history, to international public opinion, and to the opinion of those who make the laws, but not to the Mormon, any more than to any other law-breaker. The influences which admittedly control the Government’s action may produce a modification or repeal of the law; but, so long as the law exists, the Mormon must obey the law of the land in which he condescends to live. It has thus been necessary, not for religious but for political reasons, that the Government should wage ac¬ tive warfare upon action which Mormons have claimed to be an article of faith and practice. And as the mass of the Mormons reside in a Territory, which is under supreme control of the Congress of the United States, the penal laws have been stringent and severe. It has been possible, and in the judgment of Congress nec¬ essary, to disfranchise the whole body of Mormons, as well as to punish any detected case of bigamy or polygamy. Such a course, involving the refusal of self- government to so large a community, and the reten¬ tion of Utah as a Territory instead of a State, for an indefinite time to come, is abhorrent to every political instinct of the American people ; and many of them have been inclined to doubt the wisdom of the whole policy. To such, it must be reassuring to note the symptoms of yielding which mark the attempt to put Utah before the coming Congress as an applicant for admission as a State. On the first day of July last, a constitutional con¬ vention met at Salt Lake City. The official represen¬ tatives of the two national political parties in the Territory unite in declaring that the convention repre¬ sented only the Mormon Church, and their assertion has never been denied. The presiding officer of the con¬ vention admitted, with general agreement, that “pre¬ vious obstacles to the admission of Utah must be faced frankly”; and this is the “frank” manner in which the Mormon Church proposes to face them. Provision for the punishment of bigamy and polygamy, even without State legislation, is made a part of the State constitution, and the repeal of this provision is for¬ ever forbidden, without the present assent of Con¬ gress. This, in brief, is the Mormon solution of all the difficulties which lie in the way of the admission of U tah as a State. The solution is not altogether novel, nor was the success of it in its most prominent application such as to give very hopeful anticipations for the present proposi¬ tion. After it had been decided, by the Compromise of 1820, that Missouri should be admitted as a State, an examination of her proposed constitution showed that she refused to free negroes the rights given to them in other States. All the excitement which the Compromise had allayed was renewed ; and it was with the greatest difficulty that another Compromise was adopted, admitting Missouri, on the fundamental condition that the inchoate State should pass just such a “ public and irrevocable Act ” as Utah proposes, agree¬ ing never to construe or to execute these provisions of the State constitution so as to bar free negroes from the right of entrance to the State. In June, 1821, the legislature assembled and passed the Act required, with a preamble long afterward stated by Senator Douglas as follows : ” Whereas, Congress has prescribed these terms as the only condition on which the State of Missouri can be ad¬ mitted to the Union on an equal footing with the original States; and Whereas, the said terms are in palpable violation of the Constitution of the United States, and grossly insulting to the people of this State, and such as Congress had no right to pass and as the people of this State ought not to accede to ; and Whereas, the people of Missouri do not intend to respect or be bound by the said conditions, or to acknowledge the right of Congress to impose them ; but inasmuch as we cannot obtain our constitutional rights in any other mode than by giving our assent to the same, with the protest that we shall not respect them: Therefore, be it known that we, the people of Missouri, do declare by this fundamental and irrevocable Act,” etc., etc. The State was declared admitted, by President Monroe’s proclamation of August loth, 1821, but, re¬ marks Douglas, the President took good care not to publish the terms of the “public and irrevocable Act ’’ of Missouri. If the establishment of bigamy or polygamy, as a legal relation, depended upon the positive action of a State legislature, one might see some force in the pro¬ posed “public and irrevocable Act” of Utah; but, even then, the preamble of the Missouri Act should be added to it in order to reach its full significance. But, in the Utah case, no positive action is needed; the State authorities need only take a negative position, and do nothing, in order to give the Mormon Church all that it wants ; and no State constitution can bind State authorities to do anything which the mass of their constituency support them in refusing to do. It is evi¬ dent, then, that the plan of a fundamental condition, worthless as it has proved in practice, would be a mere farce in the case of Utah. But what more can Utah do ? This proposition is not only the last hope of the Mormon ; it is our last hope of getting anything from him, for he can do no more at present. It is true that he may repent and do works meet for repentance ; but are we to keep this miniature Ireland on our hands until we are satisfied of his re¬ pentance ? How many years can we afford to wait ? And after all, when we become satisfied as to his re¬ pentance and admit Utah as a State, what are we to do if we find that his repentance was feigned, and he is still really unregenerate ! He will then in his legislature have complete control of the subjects of marriage and divorce, and of all offenses connected therewith. The fact is that every new development only adds force to the belief that the only solution of the question is in making bigamy and polygamy Federal, not State, offenses. When this subject of marriage is transferred to Congress, then, and not until then, will it be safe to admit Utah as a State. Until then, the Federal Gov-

Page 954

TOPICS OF THE TIME. eminent cannot solve the problem, and must keep Utah under tutelage as a Territory ; until then, the Mormon himself can give us no assurances which a man of ordinary prudence would be justified in ac¬ cepting. From the latter point of view, this proposi¬ tion of the Mormon Convention, encouraging as it is in its indications of weakness, is even more important in its warnings of the future. The crisis of our battle has come, and it finds both parties stalemated; the successful line cannot win the battle, and it is just as impossible for the conquered to lose it. We have now come to the end of discussion, under present condi¬ tions.* The Jury System. Scarcely any other wheel of our political system is in such constant motion as the jury system. From the little country court-room, where a petty jury sits to decide a matter of debt or ownership of property, to the crowded city building, where a jury sits to de¬ cide on the facts in the prosecution of a great criminal for murder or fraud, or on the existence of a great cor¬ poration, juries, in all degrees of importance, are at work on every calendar day of the year. Remove this one wheel suddenly from our system, and every other wheel would run whirring to a stand-still. Even though an entire removal of it be impossible, any influence or set of influences, which tend to sap the power of the jury system, is evidently at work on all the rest of the system, and may bring with it results which are quite impossible to measure. The English jury has gone through many and fun¬ damental changes from its original form until the pres¬ ent day. Originating in the Teutonic notion that all disputes between man and man were to be decided by the popular meeting, before which each disputant brought his “ suit,” his following of friends and sup¬ porters, the deciding body, was gradually reduced to a definite number, selected from the citizens who made up the popular body. But this “jury” was carefully taken from the “ vicinage,” from the immediate neigh¬ borhood of the seat of the dispute, and was composed of men who were presumed to have complete knowl¬ edge of the circumstances, and to decide the dispute from antecedent knowledge. When this condition had become an evident failure, outside persons, the modern “ witnesses,” were added, with the power of imparting their knowledge to the jury, but not of taking any part in the ultimate decision. As this new feature became more firmly established the antecedent knowledge of the jury became antagonistic to the general system, and the law was slowly settled that the juror who had antecedent knowledge could only use it as a witness. This was diametrically opposite to the original notion, though the forms and purpose of the jury were gener¬ ally preserved. But, from that time, whatever the law may say.^ the fact of antecedent knowledge has been an objection to a juror : he who knows anything of the facts of a case in advance may be a good juror, but the prejudice is against him. Counsel for one side or the other, or for both sides, regard his appearance as an intrusion if not a gross injustice ; and the court is sometimes driven to bring in its whole force in order to secure as a juror a man who has knowledge and an * See Topics of the Time, The Century for September and October, 1886. 953 intelligent opinion, but can nevertheless give a verdict on the weight of evidence. How is this feeling to be reconciled with the existence and characteristics of the modern newspaper? The reconciliation might be possible if a criminal could be caught, the legal machinery set in motion, and a jury empaneled, within twenty minutes after a crime had been committed. But, in the natural course of events, the newspaper is weeks, months, even years ahead of the law. It spreads before all the world the facts, col¬ ored and uncolored, which are to be in disjDute in the coming trial. The citizen who desires to be exempted from the troublesome jury service has only to read the newspapers with assiduity, to form an opinion and to express it in good set terms when summoned as a juror, and his object accomplishes itself. Thus the system, instead of a school of instruction, has become a cor¬ rupter of citizenship. It might be made a means of teaching the citizen a lesson which would be of the high¬ est service to the State in all his relations to it and to his fellow-citizens,— the lesson that an intelligent and reasonable man may and should hear statements of fact, and still be able to hold his final judgment so far in abeyance as to take into the balance any new evidence which may be offered. This is to be not only a good juror, but a good citizen, a good politician, and a good member of society in all its relations. The man who, when examined as a juror, states with regret that he has read the newspaper accounts of the case, and has formed an opinion which is too strong to be overcome by evidence, ought to receive a public rebuke from the court, and be sent from the court-room to read, in his newspapers of the following day, the record of this rebuke. If exemption on this ground must come, let it come in this shape, and it will be the less longed for. But the more serious danger is in the administration of our cities. It has come to pass that more than a fourth of the American people dwell in cities ; and the percentage is increasing. Inefficient, slovenly, or frau¬ dulent methods in the preparation of the lists of citizens from which jurors are to be chosen come in with bad city administration, and they constitute an influence which, acting directly on the jury system, acts indirectly on the whole political and social system of the United States. Even a tolerably good administration in other respects could never keep pace with the increasing dangers which city life tends to array against the jury system. The conditions are no longer the same as those' under which the jury was born and bred; the locality is no longer one in which everybody knows his neighbor, and can tell whether the person sum¬ moned as a juror is lying or speaking the truth ; the nearest neighbors in a city may know nothing of one another, and the statement of opinion on the exami¬ nation of possible jurors has been very much released from the control of public or social opinion. Under these circumstances, that part of city administration which deals with the enrollment of citizens liable to jury duty can no longer be simply tolerable : it must be the best, the most intelligent, and the cleanest feature of the city government. How far this department of American city governments answers these requisites maybe learned from any city lawyer in active practice. Lawyers, however, do not like to say anything on the subject. The lawyer who has lost a case by reason

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TOPICS OF THE TIME. 954 of a jury’s incompetence or faithlessness, would not wish to bear the additional odium of seeming to throw the responsibility upon the jury: it is better to say nothing. It is not safe, moreover, for one man in act¬ ive practice to get the ill-will of a debased system, and he will prefer to take his chances another time. The judges alone are in a position to do the state this ser¬ vice. When they speak, the public listens ; the news¬ papers direct public’ opinion to the exact point of the evil ; and the whole system feels the influence. It is hardly possible to overestimate the weight with which the sharp words of a competent and respected judge come to the public intelligence and conscience, or the ser¬ vice which he thus does for the whole political system. If these conclusions are correct, the judiciary is the key to the whole difficulty. The judge can hold the citizen to his duty as a juryman, can hold the city au¬ thority to its duty as an enrolling power, and can di¬ rect public opinion in the punishment of any dereliction on either side. The dangers which surround the jury system in this country, then, are another lesson to im¬ press us with the necessity of obtaining good judges. Whether they be appointed or elected, the citizen who feels that their character is no concern of his, that he never expects to go to law and has no interest in the selection of judges, and that he may allow the political prostitution of the judiciary to pass without a protest, may as well understand that he is aiding to corrupt the very springs of our social and political system. For the influence of the judges on the selection of juries is vital to more than this one feature of our governments ; the distinct failure of our jury system would indicate a political degeneracy of which no man could see the end. Shall Immigration be Restricted ? Hardly any other change of feeling and expression in the American people is more significant of the en¬ trance of a new political era than the rising and already very general demand for some restriction of immigra¬ tion. From the beginning of English colonization in North America until now, the feeling has been dia¬ metrically opposite ; the material gains from immigra¬ tion have been paraded in books and speeches ; the more sentimental influence of the country’s almost unique position, as the natural refuge of the down¬ trodden and the oppressed of every clime, has come in to reenforce the material arguments ; and the occasional outbursts of Know-nothingism have served mainly as a background, to set off and bring more plainly into view the general and fixed popular aversion to any re¬ striction upon the right of immigration. In this feeling, also, the future historian will proba¬ bly find an explanation of a large part of the process which led up to our civil war. Immigration affected the North and West almost exclusively. There were Macs and O’s, Vons and Des, both North and South, and in both armies ; but there was this great difference : in the North and West they were the product of a com¬ paratively recent immigration, while in the South they were the really native product of two centuries of a far slower immigration. Even in 1880, excluding Florida and Texas, the South had a foreign population of only about two per cent., and that, too, after slavery had ceased for fifteen years to oppose its silent but almost impregnable barrier to immigration. Between 1847 and 1861, the North and West had received an influx of foreign-born population amounting to nearly half the ^iggregate population of the seceding States. "Whatever feeling this new Northern and Western population had was for “ America ” : it had neither comprehension of nor sympathy with the intense loyalty to a State be¬ gotten by decades of common trials and the traditional reverence for the State’s supreme power ; and the in¬ fluence of this new element could not but affect popu¬ lar opinion and the action of public men at almost every critical point in the history of those pregnant years. The Carolinian of 1780 and i860 were very much the same; the New Yorker of i860 and 1780 were very different beings. The North and West were constantly changing and developing, while the South was stand¬ ing still; and the result could hardly have been any¬ thing but a rupture in the end, even though it had not been forced in 1860-61. But now it is from the North and West that this cry for restriction of immigration is coming ; the South is neutral or indifferent, for it has little interest in the matter. Sectarian differences have little to do with this new phase of the demand. The very immigrants of 1847-61 are now the leaders in urging that the bars be put up, at least for a time ; and the restrictions on Chinese immigration stand as a precedent and a tempt¬ ing suggestion. The Protectionist, who has taken the protection of American labor ” as a conclusive argu¬ ment, begins to think that “ a tariff on Castle Garden ” is a necessary corollary to the argument. His natural opponents, more intent on securing individual free¬ dom than protection for the workman, see with dis¬ gust that the individual workman is subjected to a tyranny of selfish imported stupidity. The sober, work-a-day citizen, compelled to stop his work and lis¬ ten to the ravings of an imported mob, whose natural platform is Drink, Dirt, and Disorder, begins to won¬ der whether he has really been given the providential mission of bearing with this scum. And the tax-payer begins to feel some concern when he finds his country regarded as a preordained poorhouse by every local board of magistrates from Ireland to Hungary. Prot¬ estants of every sect hurried forward to resist the tide of Native Americanism when sectarian passion was its moving force. But where are we to look for a voice which will be raised against the coming attempts to restrict immigration, impelled by the notorious happenings of the past two or three years ? The system of unre¬ stricted immigration, which was so lately the standing refuge of every Fourth of July orator of the North and West, waits only for the first shock of attack, and there will be few to do it reverence as it falls. The restriction, when it comes, can hardly take any other shape than the requirement of a consular cer¬ tificate as a prerequisite for passage to the United States, leaving the consuls to the guidance of instruc¬ tions from the State Department in the performance of their duties. To the returning tourist or business man, to him whose record of previous American citi¬ zenship is clear, or to the bona fide farmer or working¬ man, whose immigration is as clear a gain to the re¬ public as ever, the consular certificate would be almost a matter of form. To him who cannot read the consu¬ lar certificate, or sign his name to the affidavit on which it is granted ; to him who is merely leaving his own country for his country’s good ; to him who comes

Page 956

OPEN LETTERS. not as an intending American citizen, but as a reenforce¬ ment to a hierarchy which the United States Govern¬ ment has proclaimed to be its enemy ; to him who is the known and irreconcilable enemy of society itself, — to all such, the law may easily be so framed as to make the necessity of a consular certificate, under the in¬ structions given to consuls, a very serious impediment to immigration. It would be impossible, no doubt, for such a filter to catch all the objectionable elements which might assail it ; but the result would be at least somewhat clearer water than we have been receiving from the old continent for years past. The desire for such a purification of immigration is no mere product of a sentimental admiration of clean¬ liness. Our “ dangerous classes ” have been increased, of late years, by the addition of a still more dangerous class, one which is amenable to none of the influences by which society has hitherto dealt with the others. Its numbers are no larger than those of our bears or panthers or other wild beasts. But it has human in¬ telligence, superimposed upon the instincts of the wild beast ; its members have the power and will to work destruction to which the mere brute is incompetent; and yet their human lineaments prevent society from dealing with them in their proper capacity until after they have wrought their evil work. They are in, though not of, the country ; and their presence has only added to the responsibility of those men to whom the preservation of the public peace is intrusted. But why should their base of operations be left unattacked ? 955 Why should they be left to draw reenforcements from abroad ad libitum ? Such a restriction on immigration as has been suggested would cut off at least a percen¬ tage of their reenforcements ; and every chief of police in the United States would feel that, difficult as his task in dealing with this class might still be, it would no longer be an absolutely hopeless one : daylight might be indefinitely in advance, but it would be day¬ light at least. The hardships of the proposition lie mainly in the visions, which the imagination unconsciously conjures up, of United States marshals lining the shores of the great republic, ready to treat as criminal the desire of any immigrant to enter her jurisdiction. But the reality would be far from correspondent with any such spectacle. There would be a few cases of stowaways, whom the steamships or sailing-vessels which brought them would be compelled to carry back at their own expense ; and then the mere fact of the known restric¬ tion would obtain all the good that can ever be hoped from it. Nor is there any constitutional objection to the power of Congress to enact such a restriction. The section of the Constitution, forbidding Congress to interfere with the “ migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit ” until the year 1808, carries with it a complete power to interfere in later years. The im¬ portation of negro slaves, of Chinese, and of contract labor has already been forbidden ; are there not other classes of immigration which yearn for restriction ? OPEN LETTERS. Christian Union and Baptism. IN the July number of The Century, an “ Open Letter” writer says: “Christian Union, both es¬ sential and organic, is greatly retarded because many Christians refuse to accept the plain teaching of God’s word, and the conclusions of the highest scholarship regarding the subjects and act of baptism. Baptists hold that Christ alone can make laws for his church ; and that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice. They believe that this word teaches with unmistak¬ able clearness that believers are the only subjects of baptism ; and that baptism is the immersion of be¬ lievers,” etc. Now, all the world knows that, in these matters, other Christians hold, and Presbyterians, among oth¬ ers, plainly declare, just what this Baptist represents as the great faith of his denomination, — namely, “ That Christ alone can make laws for his church ; and that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice.” Therefore, if they differ from Baptists, why ? This writer says : They “ refuse to accept the plain teaching of God’s word,” etc. To “refuse to accept the plain teaching of God’s word,” they must know that teaching. And if, as this writer charges, they believe that God’s word does not teach what they practice, as to the mode and subjects of bap¬ tism, then they are all hypocrites, acting in opposition to “conviction and conscience.” To brand them all the more deeply and darkly, as living in the impeni¬ tent practice of known sin, he says of God’s word : “ More explicit are its utterances on these subjects than regarding the divinity of Christ, or any article in the orthodox creeds.” That is, as he means: “ Believe?^ s baptism ” and immersion — to the exclusion of all other modes and subjects — are more explicitly taught in God^s word^ than is the divinity of Christ, or any other doctrine ! Is this true or not ? All other Evangelical denominations accept the divinity of Christ as a teaching of God’s word, and hold that it is heresy not to accept it. So clear is the teaching of the Bible on this subject. Now, as this writer says, the baptism of believers only, and immersion as the mode, are more explicitly taught in God’s word, than this essential doctrine of the common acceptance and faith, we do utterly and emphatically deny the state¬ ment. . We affirm that there is not one verse in the Bible proving immersion as the only mode of baptism or the only baptism, and not one verse in the Bible proving that only believers are to be baptized, and not one verse in the Bible proving beyond doubt or con¬ troversy — that is, in express words — that any one was ever immersed in being baptized. But this writer claims that “ all men, ahvays and in all places, accept immersion as baptism ; not to accept it, is not to accept baptism.” And we ask: Why is it recognized as baptism? (We do not say it is accepted, — for that would not be true. ) Simply because, thereby we wish to recognize Baptists as an Evangelical denominatio7i, and be-

Page 957

OPEN LETTERS. 956 cause we wish to respect every brother's conscience in all things donbtfiily or not essentiaU This, God’s word commands. Good and wise men differ as to the Bible-teacliings touching the mode and subjects of baptism. Since these differences are not about “things essential,” ought we not to show Christian charity ? If it be said that we are disobedient to a plain command of Christ’s own giving, we must deny it. We believe that baptism is commanded ; and we believe we obey the command m mcr mode and subjects. We believe this more firmly than we believe that the “ Baptists ” are right ! And, certainly, in the Presbyterian Church (South, at least, if not North also) we do not accept nor practice immersion. Some cases of immersion there were, for¬ merly ; but, because of our great doubt as to the Scrip¬ turalness of this mode, it is now disapproved among us, in practice. Notwithstanding all that this Baptist writer says, we do not “ agree on immersion as bap¬ tism ” for ourselves ; and we cannot be immersed “ without doing violence either to conviction or con¬ science.” As to the “ highest scholarship,” etc., we have good reason to know and say that when writers and others are fairly and fully represerited or quoted, their “ Concessions ” to Baptists are worthless, and in many cases merely imaginary. But were it other¬ wise, we cannot depart from our law, “ that Christ alone can make laws for his church; and that the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice.” The bap¬ tism given in the example of Christ is found in Acts ii. It is the only case in the Bible where 7node cannot be argued at all. It came from above, \y2ls ^fotu'ed " (v. 18) upon the heads of those receivmg it. Not one case of immersion is mentioned in all the Book ! This is not the place to argue the meaning of the original word, as used before Christ adopted it. Suffice it to say that neither classic Greek, nor any other, justifies immersion as the one mode; and the Bible does not justify it at all, in our vieiv ! We must not conclude without remarking upon the very strange assertion that “ the so-called ‘Teaching of the Apostles ’ .does not call anything baptism but im¬ mersion” ; that “it gives directions for baptism, and then, when the conditions for baptism are wanting, . . . it gives permission for something else, not called bap¬ tism.” In the directions about baptism in that docu¬ ment, wwiersion is not 07ice ^nentioned, nor even hinted at! Two kinds of water are mentioned ; “ Living,” that is, fresh, or running water, is preferred. “ But if thou hast not both (kinds), pour water (the kind thou hast) upon the head,” etc. And this is called baptism, of ter- wards! ‘^irpoosToo PaTmo|J.aTO^.” No one can read that document, then say truly, “ Baptists alone live up to it.” His further claim that “ all are agreed on immersion as baptism . . . All can be baptized (immersed) with¬ out doing violence either to conviction or conscience,” we object to, most emphatically. We have explained why we recognize immersion. But for ourselves we cannot conscientiously accept it, nor administer it to others. Herbert H. Hawes, Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Staunton, Va. Christian Union and Pending Public Questions. The discussion which has been maintained of late, in The Century and elsewhere, on the subject of Christian Union, has thus far established at least these three propositions : First. That there is a strong and a growing desire for such union — a desire discovering itself among some of the leading ministers of several distinct de¬ nominations. Second. That the Christian union so desired is not only nearer and more harmonious relations between different and still separate churches, but, certainly by some, a7i effective organic tinity ; not the general ab¬ sorption of all others by any one, but reunion based on reconciliation of differences or on the discovery of mutually satisfactory terms upon which those distinc¬ tive differences can be coordinated. But, Third, that in none of the churches is there felt, as yet, any great motive power pressing them on with sufficient force to overcome either the general in¬ ertia or the many and serious practical difficulties and obstacles which arrest actual progress in that direction. In other words, while many Christian thinkers greatly desire, the churches clearly do not, as yet, feel the iiecessity of Christian unity. Meanwhile, however, it is evident that a question is beginning to present itself, as perhaps worthy of seri¬ ous consideration, which is nearly allied to this, and which must practically involve this very issue of Chris¬ tian unity. From no principle of English social and political life did the revolution separate our fathers more effectively and more thoroughly than from that which recognized an established religion of the State. That the new na¬ tion should have, as such, no religion, was assumed to be one of the corner-stone principles on which rested the guaranty of our liberties. So far has this assump¬ tion been carried, so widely and continuously has it entered, ever since, into all our writing, speaking, and thinking upon matters of public interest, that it has come to be accepted as a virtual axiom of American social and political philosophy, that religion is con¬ cerned only with a personal and private life of the in¬ dividual ; and that it has no natural, much less neces¬ sary, relation with social problems and political issues. This experiment of relegating Christianity to the individual and to private life, — the attempt to conduct business, to develop social interests, to work out an American economic science, and, above all, to admin¬ ister the affairs of the nation without reference to Christian laws or to Christian principles, — on the ground, that is, that these laws and principles do not apply to the affairs of this life, has, in consequence been tried thoroughly ; and there are not a few who are now beginning to look around them, to consider the utter disorganization of our accepted economic system ; to analyze and search for the causes of the labor troubles and of the inchoate anarchy of the last few years, of the confessed moral failure of our boasted public-school system, and of the corruption of our politics, — and to ask how far these are the outcome of that experiment. Without attempting to anticipate the results of such inquiries, it may, at least, be said that they open up be¬ fore us some of the most serious questions ever pro-

Page 958

OPEN LETTERS. posed to American thinkers and students. They re¬ mind us of the plain, direct language of Isaiah : “ The nation and kingdom which will not serve thee shall perish,” and they constrain us to consider whether those words be not deserving of a larger and a more modern application than we have been wont to give them. But this inquiry also brings us face to face with an¬ other grave question. If we should be led, eventually, to admit that Christianity is a necessary factor in the settlement of our labor troubles, in the solution of the most perplexing problems which now present them¬ selves in sociology and even in public politics, how is it possible to bring this factor into effective action, so long as Christianity presents itself to the public em¬ bodied only in a number of wholly distinct and at least supposedly antagonistic sects and churches ? Even were the community to be persuaded of the necessity of tak¬ ing counsel, in its extremity, of the church of Christ, — who shall or who can decide for the community, from which one of all these several Christian bodies, each claiming to be at least the nearest approximation to the ideal of that church and most faithfully to teach Chris¬ tian doctrine? — society is to ask and receive instruction in the oracles of God. Even were the business com¬ munity ready to accept a new Christian social economy or the nation to conform its public policy to Christian principles, is not Christian reunion a condition pre¬ cedent of the power of the Church to give such guid¬ ance or to teach such principles ? National Christianity, where it still exists, has come .down from a period which antedates these divisions among Christians. In a pure monarchy, so long as the ruling family — in an aristocracy, so long as the ruling class, continues to be identified with one organic form of Christianity, so long can that national Christianity be maintained, even after Christian unity, among the people, had been broken up. But, in proportion, as the actual power of government passes into the hands of those who are themselves divided on organic relig¬ ious issues, in that proportion must such divisions prove fatal to anything like a national Christianity. The exclusion of Christianity from all but purely per¬ sonal and private interests is, therefore, the inevitable corollary of Christian divisions in a democracy. Conversely, then, among us, must the restoration of such a lost Christian unity precede all hope of any¬ thing like a real social or economic or national recog¬ nition of Christianity; and any one who honestly believes that a non-Christian social economy and a non-Christian political philosophy have been failures ; every one who is convinced that the great issues which have been raised by the conflicting interests of labor and capital can only be adjusted stably on Christian principles ; every one who is now ready to confess that a public-school system, in accordance with which the intellect only is educated, while the conscience is left undisciplined, is worse than a failure ; every one who believes that the attempt to ignore the laws of Christ in national politics is fatal to all national pros¬ perity and stability ; — all these must, of necessity, therefore, whatever their personal or private relig¬ ious convictions or character, sooner or later seek the restoration of some effective Christian unity. That the social disturbances of these times and the present state of party politics have brought many to VoL. XXXIV.— 131. 957 consider these questions as never before, is not to be denied. That they will awaken and stimulate discus¬ sion, in the drawing-room and at the table, in the re¬ ligious press, the magazine and the review, on the platform and in the jDulpit, is equally beyond a doubt. In the presence of such considerations and questions the wide distinction, heretofore so generally accepted and so steadily maintained on both sides, — between the domain of public interests and duties and that of private and personal Christianity, — fades away and ut¬ terly disappears. The Christian finds himself called upon to consider his relations, as such, to every social question and to every political issue of his times. The economist, the publicist, and the statesman find them¬ selves equally called upon to ask what Christianity has to say upon the question in hand, and what modi¬ fications are introduced into the problems of the hour, by that which, at all events potentially, if not in actu¬ ality, is the overruling factor — the law of Christ. Wjn. Chaimcy Langdon. St. James’ Rectory, Bedford, Pa. Secret Societies in College. The time has arrived again when the classes are gathering in our various institutions of learning over the land, and many young men are just beginning the new and strange life embraced within those eventful four years which mold and in a great measure fix their after career among scholars and professional associates in the real world outside. I should like to say a few words about one matter concerning the societies which have place, rightly or wrongly, in most colleges. The process of what used to be called “ electioneering ” commences almost at once when the freshmen come on. The secret and the anti-secret associations alike select their members; and so most of the new students are compelled to take sides on a question which grows more and more in¬ tricate as they advance in years, and are able to mark the workings of an experience thoroughly unique and prodigiously influential, upon themselves and upon others. The least that can be said at the beginning, and the least that can be urged to the end, is that men should be conscientious at the beginning and consist¬ ent to the end of their course. Let me tell an old true story : When I was in col¬ lege, it was an admitted custom for the secret-society students to attend at pleasure the regular meetings of the anti-secret association, then called there the Social Fraternity. On one occasion the news went around that the delegates of a number of affiliated institutions had assembled in some central city during the vaca¬ tion, and formed a quasi national consociation, embrac¬ ing all the local ones, which hereafter were to be under¬ stood to have become auxiliaries. Curiosity was at its height, and the assembly convened to accept the re¬ port was visited by a large number of outsiders also, and the small chapel was nearly full. Even the “ neu¬ trals ” doffed their dignity in order to witness the novelty. The committee proceeded to read their preamble and constitution for a formal adoption. It was in the regular form. It began by saying that the name of the new organization should be the “ Anti-Secret Society

Page 959

OPEN LETTERS. 958 of the United States.” It then rehearsed the purposes, the aims, and the hopes of the members in thus band¬ ing themselves together. The officers were fixed, their duties prescribed, and all that. By and by an article was reached which specified and described, somewhat particularly, the way in which it should be known. Of course I am not going even to try to quote anything more than the substance of the language. It was like this : The badge of this Society shall^ consist of a bosom-pin about six-tenths of an inch in diameter, cir¬ cular, a black disk of jet surrounded by a wreath of gold, bearing in the center the initials of the Society’s name in raised letters of gold in the enamel.” Thereupon there was an instant explosion of laughter from one of the visitors — the unfortunate writer of this article. He meant no derision, and indeed was as in¬ nocent in his indiscretion as he was mortified by such a disclosure of it. The usual shout, with all its precip¬ itation of student-wrath, was started for his comfort : ‘‘Put him out! ” He replied with the usual Greek: “ Strike, but hear ! ” Then the ordinary amount of intellect was invoked to perceive that really there was some incongruity in such noble and scholarly men wearing on their bosoms the great golden letters “ASS” before all the college. Anger gave place to fun ; and ultimately the convention did their work bet¬ ter by changing the name of the society to Anti-Secret Confederation; and through the rest of our course members were labeled “A S C.” Such a discomfiture would have been fatal in most cases, and inevitably would have given a most un- philosophical advantage to the other side of the question. But the fact was, those men were the chiefs of the college. They had among them some of the maturest and best the classes loved to honor. They managed the rest of the meeting skillfully. Before we retired, they forced in a splendid chance for an appeal to all that was decent and generous in our minds ; they stood up in the power of real manhood, and told us the meanness of cliques and the injustice of exclusive¬ ness, and the wickedness of oaths. Some of the Social Fraternity men of that year have done magnificent work in this old world since then ; and I speak simple justice when I own they shook many of us that night with their arguments and their truths. For one, I like conscience when I see it; I always did ; and more than that, I like outspoken words for what is right and good and true. But I like consis¬ tency also ; and now I must tell the rest of my story. On the day we graduated, sobered and thoughtful, gen¬ tle and pensive in the backward look and the forward dread, a new secret society, running through all the four classes, “ swung out ” before the eyes of us all in complete organization. Among the men who spoke their commencement orations in our class were three or four wearing the badge of that association. They were the men who argued and pleaded two years pre¬ vious to that day in the small chapel. They repudiated their principles and defied their former record, when it was too late for an apology or for an explanation. The Social Fraternity was wounded and betrayed by its leaders in the whole four classes ; the secret-society men were not inclined to feel complimented ; and the conversation was worried and perplexed, when the young fellows asked and wondered what it meant. Some said that these men had always been shamming because they had not for themselves been taken, and so were spiteful instead of conscientious. Simply and earnestly I say again, as I close the tale, let those who take ground on this unsettled question of secret societies in college put conscience and consis¬ tency together. If any one changes his mind, because of fresh convictions, let him own it frankly, and take a clear stand early enough to retain the respect of those who have loved and trusted him in the days gone by. For I soberly declare that it is my pain to this day to recall how my confidence was broken then. Charles S. Robifison. Henry Clay, the Slashes, and Ashland again. Henry Clay was born within three miles of Han¬ over Court House, south, and some four or five miles eastward of the present pretty little summer town of Ashland. His birthplace was known locally as “ The old Clay place,” or “The place where Henry Clay was born,” and as long ago as 1832, and many years earlier, I believe, had passed into other hands. The first name of the railway station where Ashland stands was called, in 1836, “Tayler’s Sawmill”; then the name was appropriately changed to “ Slash Cot¬ tage,” being in the heart of the Slashes of Flanover. That name held till after 1850, when Mr. Edwin Robin¬ son, of Richmond City, conceived the project of build¬ ing a town at “ Slash Cottage,” and formally christened it “Ashland,” after Mr. Clay’s residence in Kentucky. W. A, W.

Page 960

BRIC-A-BRAC. 959- ART AND NATURE. Young Briggs has received his first medal for the effort of his life, a 36 x 24, “ In the Meadow.” His rich uncle has come to consider buying it. “ Wall, now, I guess we can make a dicker on that picter, providin’ you kin fat up them cows and turn em sideways. Then take them trees out and put a couple of ranche buildin's in place of ’em, and with the name of our ranche m big red letters across the sky, she’ll be a bully ad.” Aphorisms from the Quarter. When some folks start out preachin’, ’tis sort o’ like playin’ a hymn on de banjer. De water-milion vine need a taller fence dan de rose-bush. De man in de moon don’t git much ’tention on ’lection day. De runnin’ vine in de grass kin fling you harder ’n de stump in de open road. Mule keeps his ’ligion in his front en’. Raccoon couldn’t take his tracks off wid him. De sto’-keeper’s long pra’rs ain’t no sign of a long yard-stick. When de pea-vine git too proud to lean on a sticky ’tain’t much service in de garden. One rascal talkin’ ’bout ’nuther one is like a deef man thumpin’ a water-milion. ’Tain’t fa’r to medjer de dep’ ob a snow by de drifts in de fence- corner. Clapper in de cow-bell shine in de dark. • De apple in de rabbit-trap is rank pisen. J, A. Macon,

Page 961

960 BRIC-4-BRAa An Old-fashioned Girl. Ballade of the Romantic Poet, Ah, Poet, you are out of date ! You “ sing” and live in “ faery-land”; You warble love ; a laureled pate Is all the profit you’d command : But vain ! — a reader’s vex’d, unmanned At cantos all of “ lute ” and “ lance ” : — None heed to-day, though perfect-planned. The rippled rhyme of old Romance. These analyze for hint of fate : The Age, the Life on every hand ; Make ditties out of real estate And verse on geologic sand. What though of Roncesvalles’ band One blew a ballad over France ? — This age progresses : — dead ! who scanned The rippled rhyme of old Romance. Leave Roland at the Tower gate ; Write odes to Autumn fruitage — canned; With Locomotive sonnets sate “ The heavy Spring and Fall demand.” Ah, Poet, once were ladies bland. And woods en ringed with Satyr dance — We learn too much to understand The rippled rhyme of old Romance. ENVOY. But hearken ! though the time be fanned With torrid airs of change and chance; So7?ie love the shade, the magic-wand, The rippled rhyme of old Romance. Harrison S. Morris. Revision. I WROTE some lines, from end to end In praise of dearest May. I showed them to a critic friend. To see what he would say. “They’re crude,” said he, “and so are you.” (He was a grouty fellow !) “Just let them lie a year or two. To ripen and grow mellow. “ Go over them from time to time. And polish bit by bit ; Perfect the meter and the rhyme. And sharpen up the wit : “ In half a year, but for the theme. And for the lady’s name, They’ll be so changed you’ll hardly dream The lines could be the same.” I let them lie, I worked them o’er, — Changed epitli^t and rhyme. I hardly knew them any more. They’d mellowed so by time. “ Black eyes ” had mellowed into “blue,” And “ ringlets ” into “ strands ” ; “ One dimple,” ripened into “ two ” ; “ Small,” grown to “ shapely ” hands. And what was once ^^7iez retroussH' Was now a “Grecian ” nose; In fact, the very name of “ May ” Had mellowed into ^^Rose'' Esther B. Tiffa^ty. Old-fashioned ? Yes, I must confess The antique pattern of her dress. The ancient frills and furbelows. The faded ribbons and the bows. Why she should show those shrunken charms. That wrinkled neck, those tawny arms, I cannot guess ; her russet gown Round her spare form hangs loosely down ; Her voice is thin and cracked ; her eye And smile have lost their witchery. By those faint jests, that flagging wit. By each attenuated curl. She surely is, I must admit, An odd, old-fashioned girl. ’Tis long, long since she had a beau, And now with those who sit a-row Along the wall she takes her place. With something of the old-time grace. She yearns to join the mazy waltz. And slyly sniffs her smelling-salts. Ah, many an angel in disguise May walk before our human eyes ! Where’er the fever-smitten lie In grimy haunts of poverty. Along the dark and squalid street, ’Mid drunken jests of boor and churl. She goes with swift and pitying feet, — This same old-fashioned girl. Jaines B. Kenyon. The Missing Glove. Clarinda’s ball is almost o’er ; Her long gloves hang upon her arm ; Perchance her shapely hands are warm While still she lingers at the door. Speaking to one whose dark eye burns Too deep, I fear, into her soul. (I pray she keep her fancy whole.) The moments fly ; at last she turns. And soon among her parting guests “ I’ve lost my glove,” she starting cries ; To find it .first each gallant vies. The maiden, blushing, now requests The search be stopped — “ ’Tis no account; ’Twill soon be found ! ” They take their leave. Clarinda is not one to grieve O’er ills past help; she turns to mount The stair and gains at last her room. Ah ! how a maiden’s fancy flies ! She has, I fear, some sweet surmise About her glove, for through the gloom, Gazing where glowing embers die Upon the hearth, she faintly smiles. See ! dreaming, she undoes the wiles Of her silk draperies, and they lie Fallen at her feet ; still gazing down. She lets her loosed hair to her knee Slide heavily ; then stoops to see What lies entangled in her gown. Ah ! luckless glove, that that quick fire Should prove at last thy funeral pyre ! Wmifred Howells. THE DB VINNE PRESS, PRINTERS, NEW YORK.