The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915

Part 1

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THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 1865-1915

BY BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE

BALTIMORE THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS 1915

COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS

PREFACE

In the last score of years I have often been urged by friends and sympathizers to bring out as a separate issue my article, The Creed of the Old South, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1892, and which attracted wider attention than anything I have ever written. As this is the jubilee of the great year 1865, the memories of that distant time come thronging back to the actors in the momentous struggle, and I am prompted to publish in more accessible form my record of views and impressions that may seem strange even to the survivors of the conflict, now rapidly passing away. To this paper I have added an essay on a cognate theme--A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War--which was published in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1897, and which has been accepted by the eminent historian, Mr. Rhodes, as an historical document. These specimens of what I call my Sargasso work ("Weeds from the Atlantic") are reproduced by the kind permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company. A few slips of pen and type have been corrected, and a few notes out of the mass of literature evoked by the first essay, or akin to it, have been added for the benefit of the third generation.

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, JUNE, 1915.

THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH

"I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say an elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together."]

A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their fellow-travellers. The veterans went into the minute detail that always puts me to shame, when I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and desultory to be of any value to the historian of the war. For my own life that experience has been of the utmost significance, and despite the heavy price I have had to pay for my outings, despite the daily reminder of five long months of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An able-bodied young man, with a long vacation at his disposal, could not have done otherwise, and the right to teach Southern youth for nine months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three. Self-respect is everything; and it is something to have belonged in deed and in truth to an heroic generation, to have shared in a measure its perils and privations. But that heroic generation is apt to be a bore to a generation whose heroism is of a different type, and I doubt whether the young people in our car took much interest in the very audible conversation of the two veterans. Twenty-five years hence, when the survivors will be curiosities, as were Revolutionary pensioners in my childhood, there may be a renewal of interest. As it is, few of the present generation pore over The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and a grizzled old Confederate has been heard to declare that he intended to bequeath his copy of that valuable work to some one outside of the family, so provoked was he at the supineness of his children. And yet, for the truth's sake, all these battles must be fought over and over again, until the account is cleared, and until justice is done to the valor and skill of both sides.

The two old soldiers were talking amicably enough, as all old soldiers do, but they "yarned," as all old soldiers do, and though they talked from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia to New York, their conversation was lost on me, for my thoughts went back into my own past, and two pictures came up to me from the time of the war.

In the midsummer of 1863 I was serving as a private in the First Virginia Cavalry. Gettysburg was in the past, and there was not much fighting to be done, but the cavalry was not wholly idle. Raids had to be intercepted, and the enemy was not to be allowed to vaunt himself too much; so that I gained some experience of the hardships of that arm of the service, and found out by practical participation what is meant by a cavalry charge. To a looker-on nothing can be finer. To the one who charges, or is supposed to charge,--for the horse seemed to me mainly responsible,--the details are somewhat cumbrous. Now in one of these charges some of us captured a number of the opposing force, among them a young lieutenant. Why this particular capture should have impressed me so I cannot tell, but memory is a tricky thing. A large red fox scared up from his lair by the fight at Castleman's Ferry stood for a moment looking at me; and I shall never forget the stare of that red fox. At one of our fights near Kernstown a spent bullet struck a horse on the side of his nose, which happened to be white, and left a perfect imprint of itself; and the jerk of the horse's head and the outline of the bullet are present to me still. The explosion of a particular caisson, the shriek of a special shell, will ring in one's ears for life. A captured lieutenant was no novelty, and yet this captured lieutenant caught my eye and held it. A handsomer young fellow, a more noble-looking, I never beheld among Federals or Confederates, as he stood there, bare-headed, among his captors, erect and silent. His eyes were full of fire, his lips showed a slight quiver of scorn, and his hair seemed to tighten its curls in defiance. Doubtless I had seen as fine specimens of young manhood before, but if so, I had seen without looking, and this man was evidently what we called a gentleman.

Southern men were proud of being gentlemen, although they have been told in every conceivable tone that it was a foolish pride,--foolish in itself, foolish in that it did not have the heraldic backing that was claimed for it; the utmost concession being that a number of "deboshed" younger sons of decayed gentry had been shipped to Virginia in the early settlement of that colony. But the very pride played its part in making us what we were proud of being, and whether descendants of the aforesaid "deboshed," of simple English yeomen, of plain Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, a sturdy stock, of Huguenots of various ranks of life, we all held to the same standard, and showed, as was thought, undue exclusiveness on this subject. But this prisoner was the embodiment of the best type of Northern youth, with a spirit as high, as resolute, as could be found in the ranks of Southern gentlemen; and though in theory all enlightened Southerners recognized the high qualities of some of our opponents, this one noble figure in "flesh and blood" was better calculated to inspire respect for "those people," as we had learned to call our adversaries, than many pages of "gray theory."

A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with a stroke. In the second Olympian P. is telling of the blessedness of the souls that have overcome. When he comes to the damned, he calls them simply "those."--Non ragioniam di lor.]

In these Notes I am furnishing a key to the persons referred to in the article. There is a Confederate graveyard near my old home, the University of Virginia, in which hundreds of those who fell on the field or perished in the hospital, were laid to rest. At first a rude headboard marked each grave with the name, the company, the regiment, to be replaced, it was thought, by some more substantial monument at the end of the war; but the end of the war brought the consciousness of dire poverty that could hardly furnish food for the living, and so it was sadly resolved rather than leave these ghastly and decaying reminders of individual suffering and sacrifice to level the whole field and sow it in grass, but not until a pious soul, an English artist who bore the un-English name of SCHARF, had recorded each name and the place of burial on an elaborate plat. Still I cannot forbear to contribute my rude shingle here and there to the memory of my comrades. The staff-officer mentioned here was GEORGE H. WILLIAMSON, of Maryland. Two years before I made his acquaintance Mr. William M. Blackford, of Lynchburg, wrote in his diary, since privately printed, under the date July 25, 1862: Williamson, an interesting man, educated at Harvard and abroad, was a rising lawyer in Baltimore when the war broke out and he enlisted as a private in a Maryland regiment.]

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