•The Creed of the Old South 
 
 1865-1915 
 
 
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THE CREED OF THE 
 OLD SOUTH 
 
C6c Bori aJS^aitimott (Jlreeer 
 
 BALTIMOUE, MD., U. S. A. 
 
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 
 
 i/ 
 
 JUL 28 1915 
 ©CI.A406913 
 
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 dis- 
 tant 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 Rhodes, as an historical document.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 
 
PREFACE 
 
 specimens of what I call my Sargasso work 
 ("Weeds from the Atlantic") are repro- 
 duced 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 
 
 A few months ago, as I was leaving Balti- 
 more 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 cen- 
 tury 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 move- 
 ments 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 
 
8 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 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 gener- 
 ation whose heroism Is of a different type, and 
 I doubt whether the young people in our car 
 took much interest in the very audible con- 
 versation of the two veterans. Twenty-five 
 years hence, when the survivors will be curiosi- 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 9 
 
 ties, 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 be- 
 queath 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 ami- 
 cably 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 
 
lo THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 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 expe- 
 rience of the hardships of that arm of the serv- 
 ice, 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 mem- 
 ory 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 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH ii 
 
 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 lieuten- 
 ant 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 cap- 
 tors, 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 de- 
 fiance. 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 gentle- 
 men, 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 set- 
 tlement of that colony. But the very pride 
 
12 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 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 em- 
 bodiment 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 little more than a year afterwards. In 
 Early's Valley campaign, — a rude school of 
 warfare, — I was serving as a volunteer aide 
 on General Gordon's staff. The day before 
 the disaster of Fisher's Hill I was ordered, 
 together with another staff officer, to accom- 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 13 
 
 , > 
 
 pany the general on a ride to the front. The 
 general had a well-known weakness for in- 
 specting the outposts, — a weakness that made 
 a position in his suite somewhat precarious. 
 The officer with whom I was riding had not 
 been with us long, and when he joined the staff 
 had just recovered from wounds and imprison- 
 ment. A man of winning appearance, sweet 
 temper, and attractive manners, he soon made 
 friends of the military family, and I never 
 learned to love a man so much in so brief an 
 acquaintance, though hearts knit quickly in 
 the stress of war. He was highly educated, 
 and foreign residence and travel had widened 
 his vision without affecting the simple faith 
 and thorough consecration of the Christian. 
 Here let me say that the bearing of the Con- 
 federates is not to be understood without tak- 
 ing into account the deep religious feeling of 
 the army and its great leaders. It is an his- 
 torical element, like any other, and is not to be 
 passed over in summing up the forces of the 
 conflict. " h soldier without religion," says 
 a Prussian officer, who knew our army as well 
 
14 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 as the German, " is an instrument without 
 value " ; and it is not unlikely that the knowl- 
 edge of the part that faith played in sustain- 
 ing the Southern people may have lent empha- 
 sis to the expression of his conviction. 
 
 We rode together towards the front, and as 
 we rode our talk fell on Goethe and on Faust, 
 and of all passages the soldiers' song came up 
 to my lips, — the song of soldiers of fortune, 
 not the chant of men whose business it was to 
 defend their country. Two lines, however, 
 were significant: — 
 
 Kiihn ist das Muhen, 
 Herrlich der Lohn. 
 
 We reached the front. An occasional " zip " 
 gave warning that the sharpshooters were not 
 asleep, and the quick eye of the general saw 
 that our line needed rectification and how. 
 Brief orders were given to the officer in com- 
 mand. My comrade was left to aid in carry- 
 ing them out. The rest of us withdrew. 
 Scarcely had we ridden a hundred yards 
 towards camp when a shout was heard, and, 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 15 
 
 turning round, we saw one of the men running 
 after us. " The captain had been killed." 
 The peace of heaven was on his face, as I 
 gazed on the noble features that afternoon. 
 The bullet had passed through his official 
 papers and found his heart. He had received 
 his discharge, and the glorious reward had 
 been won. 
 
 This is the other picture that the talk of the 
 two old soldiers called up, — dead Confederate 
 against living Federal; and these two pictures 
 stand out before me again, as I am trying to 
 make others understand and to understand 
 myself what it was to be a Southern man 
 twenty-five years ago; what it was to accept 
 with the whole heart the creed of the Old 
 South. The image of the living Federal bids 
 me refrain from harsh words in the presence 
 of those who were my captors. The dead 
 Confederate bids me uncover the sacred mem- 
 ories that the dust of life's Appian Way hides 
 from the tenderest and truest of those whose 
 business it is to live and work. For my dead 
 comrade of the Valley campaign is one of 
 
i6 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 many; some of them my friends, some of them 
 my pupils as well. The i8th of July, 1861, 
 laid low one of my Princeton College room- 
 mates; on the 2ist, the day of the great battle, 
 the other fell, — both bearers of historic names, 
 both upholding the cause of their State with 
 as unclouded a conscience as any saint in the 
 martyrology ever wore ; and from that day to 
 the end, great battle and outpost skirmish 
 brought me, week by week, a personal loss in 
 men of the same type. 
 
 The surrender of the Spartans on the island 
 of Sphacteria was a surprise to friend and foe 
 alike ; and the severe historian of the Pelopon- 
 nesian war pauses to record the answer of a 
 Spartan to the jeering question of one of the 
 allies of the Athenians, — a question which im- 
 plied that the only brave Spartans were those 
 who had been slain. The answer was tipped 
 with Spartan wit; the only thing Spartan, as 
 some one has said, in the whole un-Spartan 
 affair. " The arrow," said he, '* would be 
 of great price if it distinguished the brave men 
 from the cowards." But it did seem to us, in 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 17 
 
 our passionate grief, that the remorseless bul- 
 let, the remorseless shell, had picked out the 
 bravest and the purest. It is an old cry, — 
 
 Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten. 
 
 Still, when Schiller says in the poem just 
 quoted, 
 
 Ohne Wahl vertheilt die Gaben, 
 Ohne Billigkeit das Gluck, 
 Denn Patroklus liegt begrabcn 
 Und Thersites kommt zuruck, 
 
 his illustration is only half right. The Greek 
 Thersites did not return to claim a pension. 
 
 Of course, what was to all true Confederates 
 beyond a question " a holy cause," " the hoU^st 
 of causes," this fight in defence of " the sacred 
 soil " of our native land, was to the other side 
 " a wicked rebellion " and " damnable trea- 
 son," and both parties to the quarrel were not 
 sparing of epithets which, at this distance of 
 time, may seem to our children unnecessarily 
 undignified; and no doubt some of these epi- 
 theta ornantia continue to flourish In remote 
 regions, just as pictorial representations of 
 
i8 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 Yankees and rebels in all their respective 
 fiendlshness are still cherished here and there. 
 At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way 
 of conciliating the sections, the place of honour 
 In the " Art Annex," was given to Rothermel's 
 painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which 
 the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted 
 up with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair 
 are stamped on the wan countenances of the 
 moribund rebels. At least such Is my recol- 
 lection of the painting; and I hope that I may 
 be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt 
 when I was Informed of the high price that the 
 State of Pennsylvania had paid for that work 
 of art. The dominant feeling was amuse- 
 ment, not indignation. But as I looked at it I 
 recalled another picture of a battle-scene, 
 painted by a friend of mine, a French artist, 
 who had watched our life with an artist's eye. 
 One of the figures In the foreground was a 
 dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a 
 worm fence. His uniform was worn and 
 ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; 
 the cap which had fallen from his head was a 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 19 
 
 tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop 
 from his stiffening feet; but in a buttonhole of 
 his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, 
 which continued even to the end of the war to 
 be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture, — 
 the souvenir that the Confederate so often 
 received from fair sympathizers in border 
 towns. I am not a realist, but I would not 
 exchange that homely toothbrush in the Con- 
 federate's buttonhole for the most angelic 
 smile that Rothermel's brush could have con- 
 jured up. 
 
 Now I make no doubt that most of the 
 readers of The Atlantic have got beyond the 
 Rothermel stage, and yet I am not certain 
 that all of them appreciate the entire clearness 
 of conscience with which we of the South went 
 into the war, A new patriotism is one of the 
 results of the great conflict, and the power of 
 local patriotism is no longer felt to the same 
 degree. In one of his recent deliverances Mr. 
 Carnegie, a canny Scot who has constituted 
 himself the representative of American pa- 
 triotism, says, " The citizen of the republic 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 to-day is prouder of being an American than 
 he is of being a native of any State in the 
 country." What it is to be a native of any 
 State in the country, especially an old State 
 with an ancient and honorable history, is some- 
 thing that Mr. Carnegie cannot possibly un- 
 derstand. But the " to-day " is superfluous. 
 The Union was a word of power in 1861 as 
 it is in 1 89 1. Before the secession of Virginia 
 a Virginian Breckinridge asked : " If exiled 
 in a foreign land, would the heart turn back to 
 Virginia, or South Carolina, or New York, or 
 to any one State as the cherished home of its 
 pride? No. We would remember only that 
 we were Americans." Surely this seems quite 
 as patriotic as Mr. Carnegie's utterance; and 
 yet, to the native Virginian just quoted, so 
 much stronger was the State than the central 
 government that, a few weeks after this bold 
 speech, he went into the war, and finally per- 
 ished in the war. " A Union man," says his 
 biographer, " fighting for the rights of his old 
 mother, Virginia." And there were many men 
 of his mind, noted generals, valiant soldiers. 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 21 
 
 The University Memorial, which records the 
 names and lives of the alumni of the University 
 of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war, 
 two hundred in number, — this volume, full 
 " of memories and of sighs " to every South- 
 ern man of my age, lies open before me as I 
 write, and some of the noblest men who figure 
 in its pages were Union men ; and the Memo- 
 rial of the Virginia Military Institute tells the 
 same story with the same eloquence. The 
 State was imperilled, and parties disappeared; 
 and of the combatants in the field, some of the 
 bravest and the most conspicuous belonged to 
 those whose love of the old Union was warm 
 and strong, to whom the severance of the tie 
 that bound the States together was a personal 
 grief. But even those who prophesied the 
 worst, who predicted a long and bloody 
 struggle and a doubtful result, had no question 
 about the duty of the citizen; shared the com- 
 mon burden and submitted to the individual 
 sacrifice as readily as the veriest fire-eater, — 
 nay, as they claimed, more readily. The most 
 intimate friend I ever had, who fell after 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 heroic services, was known by all our circle to 
 be utterly at variance with the prevalent South- 
 ern view of the quarrel, and died upholding a 
 right which was not a right to him except so 
 far as the mandate of his State made it a right; 
 and while he would have preferred to see " the 
 old flag " floating over a united people, he 
 restored the new banner to its place time after 
 time when it had been cut down by shot and 
 shell. 
 
 Those who were bred in the opposite polit- 
 ical faith, who read their right of withdrawal 
 in the Constitution, had less heart-searching to 
 begin with than the Union men of the South; 
 but when the State called there were no parties, 
 and the only trace of the old difference was 
 a certain rivalry which should do the better 
 fighting. This ready response to the call of 
 the State showed very clearly that, despite 
 varying theories of government, the people of 
 the Southern States were practically of one 
 mind as to the seat of the paramount obliga- 
 tion. Adherence to the Union was a matter 
 of sentiment, a matter of interest. The argu- 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 23 
 
 ments urged on the South against secession 
 were addressed to the memories of the glorious 
 struggle for Independence, to the anticipation 
 of the glorious future that awaited the united 
 country, to the difficulties and the burdens of a 
 separate life. Especial stress was laid on the 
 last argument; and the expense of a separate 
 government, of a standing army, was set forth 
 In appalling figures. A Northern student of 
 the war once said to me, " If the Southern 
 people had been of a statistical turn, there 
 would have been no secession, there would 
 have been no war." But there were men 
 enough of a statistical turn In the South to 
 warn the people against the enormous expense 
 of Independence, just as there are men enough 
 of a statistical turn In Italy to remind the Ital- 
 ians of the enormous cost of national unity. 
 " Counting the cost " Is In things temporal the 
 only wise course, as In the building of a tower; 
 but there are times In the life of an Individual, 
 of a people, when the things that are eternal 
 force themselves Into the calculation, and the 
 abacus Is nowhere. " Neither count I my life 
 
24 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 dear unto myself " is a sentiment that does not 
 enter into the domain of statistics. The great 
 Athenian statesman who saw the necessity of 
 the Peloponnesian war was not above statistics, 
 as he showed when he passed in review the re- 
 sources of the Athenian empire, the tribute 
 from the allies, the treasure laid up in the 
 House of the Virgin. But when he addressed 
 the people in justification of the war, he based 
 his argument, not on a calculation of material 
 resources, but on a simple principle of right. 
 Submission to any encroachment, the least as 
 well as the greatest, on the rights of a State 
 means slavery. To us submission meant 
 slavery, as it did to Pericles and the Athe- 
 nians ; as it did to the great historian of Greece, 
 who had learned this lesson from the Pelopon- 
 nesian war, and who took sides with the South- 
 ern States, to the great dismay of his fellow- 
 radicals, who could not see, as George Grote 
 saw, the real point at issue in the controversy. 
 Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt 
 in the vocabulary of those who advocated 
 secession was " submissionist." But where 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 25 
 
 does submission begin? Who is to mark the 
 point of encroachment? That is a matter 
 which must be decided by the sovereign; and 
 on the theory that the States are sovereign, 
 each State must be the judge. The extreme 
 Southern States considered their rights men- 
 aced by the issue of the presidential election. 
 Virginia and the Border States were more de- 
 liberate; and Virginia's "pausing" was the 
 theme of much mockery in the State and out of 
 it, from friend and from foe alike. Her love 
 of peace, her love of the Union, were set down 
 now to cowardice, now to cunning. The 
 Mother of States and Queller of Tyrants was 
 caricatured as Mrs. Facing-both-ways ; and the 
 great commonwealth that even Mr. Lodge's 
 statistics cannot displace from her leadership 
 in the history of the country was charged with 
 trading on her neutrality. Her solemn pro- 
 test was unheeded. The " serried phalanx of 
 her gallant sons " that should " prevent the 
 passage of the United States forces " was an 
 expression that amused Northern critics of 
 style as a bit of antiquated Southern rodomon- 
 
26 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 tade. But the call for troops showed that the 
 rodomontade meant something. Virginia had 
 made her decision; and if the United States 
 forces did not find a serried phalanx barring 
 their way, — a serried phalanx is somewhat 
 out of date, — they found something that an- 
 swered the purpose as well. 
 
 The war began, the war went on. Passion 
 was roused to fever heat. Both sides " saw 
 red," that physiological condition which to a 
 Frenchman excuses everything. The pro- 
 verbial good humor of the American people 
 did not, it is true, desert the country, and the 
 Southern men who were in the field, as they 
 were much happier than those who stayed at 
 home, if I may judge by my own experience, 
 were often merry enough by the camp fire, and 
 exchanged rough jests with the enemy's pick- 
 ets. But the invaded people were very much 
 in earnest, however lightly some of their 
 adversaries treated the matter, and as the pres- 
 sure of the war grew tighter the more sombre 
 did life become. A friend of mine, describing 
 the crowd that besieged the Gare de Lyon in 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 27 
 
 Paris, when the circle of fire was drawing 
 round the city, and foreigners were hastening 
 to escape, told me that the press was so great 
 that he could touch in every direction those 
 who had been crushed to death as they stood, 
 and had not had room to fall. Not wholly 
 unlike this was the pressure brought to bear on 
 the Confederacy. It was only necessary to 
 put out your hand and you touched a corpse; 
 and that not an alien corpse, but the corpse of 
 a brother or a friend. Every Southern man 
 becomes grave when he thinks of that terrible 
 stretch of time, partly, it is true, because life 
 was nobler, but chiefly because of the mem- 
 ories of sorrow and suffering. A professional 
 Southern humorist once undertook to write in 
 dialect a Comic History of the War, but his 
 heart failed him, as his public would have 
 failed him, and the serial lived only for a num- 
 ber or two. 
 
 The war began, the war went on. War is 
 a rough game. It is an omelet that cannot be 
 made without breaking eggs, not only eggs 
 In esse, but also eggs in posse. So far as I 
 
28 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 have read about war, ours was no worse than 
 some other wars. While it lasted, the conduct 
 of the combatants on either side was repre- 
 sented in the blackest colors by the other. Even 
 the ordinary and legitimate doing to death was 
 considered criminal if the deed was done by a 
 ruthless rebel or a ruffianly invader. Non- 
 combatants were especially eloquent. In de- 
 scribing the end of a brother who had been 
 killed while trying to get a shot at a Yankee, 
 a Southern girl raved about the " murdered 
 patriot " and the " dastardly wretch " who 
 had anticipated him. But I do not criticize, for 
 I remember an English account of the battle of 
 New Orleans, in which General Pakenham 
 was represented as having been picked off by 
 a " sneaking Yankee rifle." Those who were 
 engaged In the actual conflict took more rea- 
 sonable views, and the annals of the war are 
 full of stories of battlefield and hospital in 
 which a common humanity asserted Itself. But 
 brotherhood there was none. No alienation 
 could have been more complete. Into the 
 cleft made by the disruption poured all the 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 29 
 
 bad blood that had been breeding from colo- 
 nial times, from Revolutionary times, from 
 constitutional struggles, from congressional 
 debates, from " bleeding Kansas " and the en- 
 gine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf 
 was fixed, as it seemed forever, between North 
 and South. The hostility was a very satis- 
 factory one — for military purposes. 
 
 The war began, the war went on, — this 
 politicians' conspiracy, this slaveholders' rebel- 
 lion, as it was variously called by those who 
 sought its source, now in the disappointed ambi- 
 tion of the Southern leaders, now in the desper- 
 ate determination of a slaveholding oligarchy 
 to perpetuate their power, and to secure for- 
 ever their proprietorship in their " human 
 chattels." On this theory the mass of Southern 
 people were but puppets in the hands of politi- 
 cal wirepullers, or blind followers of hectoring 
 " patricians." To those who know the South- 
 ern people nothing can be more absurd; to 
 those who know their personal independence, 
 to those who know the deep interest which 
 they have always taken in politics, the keen 
 
30 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 Intelligence with which they have always fol- 
 lowed the questions of the day. The court- 
 house green was the political university of the 
 Southern masses, and the hustings the profes- 
 sorial chair, from which the great political 
 and economical questions of the day were pre- 
 sented, to say the least, as fully and intelli- 
 gently as in the newspapers to which so much 
 enlightenment is attributed. There was no 
 such system of rotten boroughs, no such domi- 
 nation of a landed aristocracy, throughout the 
 South as has been imagined, and venality, 
 which is the disgrace of current politics, was 
 practically unknown. The men who repre- 
 sented the Southern people in Washington 
 came from the people, and not from a ring. 
 Northern writers who have ascribed the firm 
 control in Congress of the national govern- 
 ment which the South held so long to the supe- 
 rior character, ability, and experience of its 
 representatives, do not seem to be aware that 
 the choice of such representatives and their 
 prolonged tenure show that in politics, at least, 
 the education of the Southerner had not been 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 31 
 
 neglected. The rank and file then were not 
 swayed simply by blind passion or duped by 
 the representations of political gamesters. 
 Nor did the lump need the leavening of the 
 large percentage of men of the upper classes 
 who served as privates, some of them from the 
 beginning to the end of the war. The rank 
 and file were, to begin with, in full accord with 
 the great principles of the war, and were sus- 
 tained by the abiding conviction of the justice 
 of the cause. Of course, there were in the 
 Southern army, as in every army, many who 
 went with the multitude in the first enthusiastic 
 rush, or who were brought into the ranks by 
 the needful process of conscription; but it is 
 not a little remarkable that few of the poorest 
 and the most ignorant could be induced to for- 
 swear the cause and to purchase release from 
 the sufferings of imprisonment by the simple 
 process of taking the oath. Those who have 
 seen the light of battle on the faces of these 
 humble sons of the South, or witnessed their 
 steadfastness in camp, on the march, in the 
 hospital, have not been ashamed of the 
 brotherhood. 
 
3Z THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 There is such a thing as fighting for a prin- 
 ciple, an idea; but principle and idea must be 
 incarnate, and the principle of States' rights 
 was incarnate in the historical life of the South- 
 ern people. Of the thirteen original States, 
 Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and 
 Georgia were openly and officially upon the 
 side of the South. Maryland as a State was 
 bound hand and foot. We counted her as 
 ours, for the Potomac and Chesapeake Bay 
 united as well as divided. Each of these States 
 had a history, had an individuality. Every one 
 was something more than a certain aggregate 
 of square miles wherein dwelt an uncertain 
 number of uncertain inhabitants, something 
 more than a Territory transformed into a 
 State by the magic of political legerdemain; a 
 creature of the central government, and duly 
 loyal to its creator. 
 
 In claiming this individuality, nothing 
 more is claimed for Virginia and for South 
 Carolina than would be conceded to Massa- 
 chusetts and Connecticut ; and we believed then 
 that Massachusetts and Connecticut would 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 33 
 
 not have behaved otherwise than we did, If the 
 parts had been reversed. The brandished 
 sword would have shown what manner of pla- 
 cida quies Massachusetts would have ensued, 
 If demands had been made on her at all com- 
 mensurate with the Federal demands on Vir- 
 ginia. These older Southern States were 
 proud of their history, and they showed their 
 pride by girding at their neighbors. South 
 Carolina had her fling at Georgia, her fling at 
 North Carolina; and the wish that the little 
 State had been scuttled at an early day was a 
 plagiarism from classical literature that might 
 have emanated from the South as well as from 
 the North. Virginia assumed a superiority 
 that was resented by her Southern sisters as 
 well as by her Northern partners. The Old 
 North State derided the pretensions of the 
 commonwealths that flanked her on either side, 
 and Georgia was not slow to give South Caro- 
 lina as good as she sent. All this seemed to 
 be harmless banter, but the rivalry was old 
 enough and strong enough to encourage the 
 hopes of the Union leaders that the Confeder- 
 
34 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 acy would split along state lines. The cohesive 
 power of the Revolutionary war was not suffi- 
 ciently strong to make the States sink their con- 
 tributions to the common cause in the common 
 glory. Washington was the one national 
 hero, and yet the Washington Light Infantry 
 of Charleston was named, not after the illus- 
 trious George, but after his kinsman, William. 
 The story of Lexington and Concord and 
 Bunker Hill did not thrill the South Caro- 
 linian of an earlier day, and those great 
 achievements were actually criticized. Who 
 were Putnam and Stark that South Carolin- 
 ians should worship them, when they had a 
 Marion and a Sumter of their own ? Vermont 
 went wild, the other day, over Bennington as 
 she did not over the centenary of the surrender 
 at Yorktown. Take away this local patriot- 
 ism and you take out all the color that is left in 
 American life. That the local patriotism may 
 not only consist with a wider patriotism, but 
 may serve as a most important element in 
 wider patriotism, is true. Witness the strong 
 local life in the old provinces of France. No 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 35 
 
 Student of history, no painter of manners, can 
 neglect it. In Gerfaut, a novel written before 
 the Franco-Prussian war, Charles de Bernard 
 represents an Alsatian shepherd as saying, " I 
 am not French; I am Alsatian," — ''trait de 
 patriotisme de clocher assez commun dans la 
 belle province du Rhin," adds the author, little 
 dreaming of the national significance of that 
 " patriotisme de clocher." The Breton's love 
 of his home is familiar to every one who has 
 read his Renan, and Blanche Willis Howard, 
 in Guenn, makes her priest exclaim, " Mon- 
 sieur, I would fight with France against any 
 other nation, but I would fight with Brittany 
 against France. I love France. I am a 
 Frenchman. But first of all I am a Breton." 
 The Provencal speaks of France as if she were 
 a foreign country, and fights for her as if she 
 were his alone. What is true of France is 
 true in a measure of England. Devonshire 
 men are notoriously Devonshire men first and 
 last. If this is true of what have become in- 
 tegral parts of kingdom or republic by cen- 
 turies of incorporation, what is to be said of 
 
36 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 the States that had never renounced their 
 sovereignty, that had only suspended it in part? 
 The example of state pride set by the older 
 States was not lost on the younger Southern 
 States, and the Alabamian and the Mississip- 
 pian lived in the same faith as did the stock 
 from which they sprang; and the community 
 of views, of interest, of social order, soon 
 made a larger unit and prepared the way for 
 a true nationality, and with the nationality a 
 great conflict. The heterogeneousness of the 
 elements that made up the Confederacy did 
 not prove the great source of weakness that 
 was expected. The Border States looked on 
 the world with different eyes from the Gulf 
 States. The Virginia farmer and the Creole 
 planter of Louisiana were of different strains; 
 and yet there was a solidarity that has never 
 failed to surprise the few Northerners who 
 penetrated the South for study and pleasure. 
 There was an extraordinary ramification of 
 family and social ties throughout the Southern 
 States, and a few minutes' conversation suf- 
 ficed to place any member of the social organ- 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 37 
 
 ism from Virginia to Texas. Great schools, 
 like the University of Virginia, within the 
 Southern border did much to foster the com- 
 munity of feeling, and while there were not a 
 few Southerners at Harvard and Yale, and 
 while Princeton was almost a Southern col- 
 lege, an education In the North did not seem 
 to nationalize the Southerner. On the con- 
 trary, as in the universities of the Middle 
 Ages, groups were formed in accordance with 
 nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at 
 certain points, were strengthened at others. 
 There may have been a certain broadening of 
 view ; there was no weakening of the home ties. 
 West Point made fewer converts to this side 
 and to that than did the Northern wives of 
 Southern husbands, the Southern wives of 
 Northern husbands. 
 
 All this is doubtless controvertible, and 
 what has been written may serve only to 
 amuse or to disgust those who are better 
 versed in the facts of our history and keener 
 analysts of its laws. All that I vouch for is 
 the feeling; the only point that I have tried to 
 
38 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, 
 "^ we were fully persuaded in our own minds, 
 and that there was no lurking suspicion of any 
 moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could 
 be holier than the cause, nothing more impera- 
 tive than the duty of upholding it. There 
 were those in the South who, when they saw 
 the issue of the war, gave up their faith in 
 God, but not their faith in the cause. 
 
 It is perfectly possible to be fully persuaded 
 in one's own mind without the passionate 
 desire to make converts that animates the born 
 preacher, and any one may be excused from 
 preaching when he recognizes the existence of 
 a mental or moral color-blindness with which 
 it is not worth while to argue. There is no 
 umpire to decide which of the disputants is 
 color-blind, and the discussion is apt to degen- 
 erate into a wearisome reiteration of points 
 which neither party will concede. Now this 
 matter of allegiance is just such a question. 
 Open the October number of The Atlantic 
 and read the sketch of General Thomas, whom 
 many military men on the Southern side con- 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 39 
 
 sider to have been the ablest of all the Fed- 
 eral generals. He was, as every one knows, a 
 Virginian, and it seemed to us that his being a 
 Virginian was remembered against him in the 
 Federal councils. " His severance," says the 
 writer in The Atlantic, " from family and 
 State was a keen trial, but ' his duty was clear 
 from the beginning.' To his vision there 
 was but one country, — the United States of 
 America. He had few or no friends at the 
 North. Its political policy had not seemed to 
 him to be wise. But he could serve under no 
 flag except that which he had pledged his 
 honor to uphold." Passing over the quiet 
 assumption that the North was the United 
 States of America, which sufficiently character- 
 izes the view of the writer, let us turn to the 
 contrast which would at once have suggested 
 itself even if it had not been brought forward 
 by the eulogist of Thomas. A greater than 
 Thomas decided the question at the same time, 
 and decided it the other way. To Lee's vision 
 there was but one course open to a Virginian, 
 and the pledge that he had given when Vir- 
 
40 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 ginia was one of the United States of America 
 had ceased to bind him when Virginia with- 
 drew from the compact. His duty was clear 
 from the hour when to remain in the army 
 would have been to draw his sword against a 
 people to whom he was " indissolubly bound." 
 These contrasted cases are indeed conve- 
 nient tests for color-blindness. There may 
 " arise a generation in Virginia," or even a 
 generation of Virginians, " who will learn and 
 confess " that " Thomas loved Virginia as 
 well as the sons she has preferred to honor, 
 and served her better." But no representative 
 Virginian shares that prophetic vision; the 
 color-blindness, on whichever side it is, has 
 not yielded to treatment during the twenty- 
 five years that have elapsed since the close of 
 the war, and may as well be accepted for an 
 indefinite period. When social relations were 
 resumed between the North and the South, — 
 they followed slowly the resumption of busi- 
 ness relations, — what we should call the color- 
 blindness of the other side often manifested 
 itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 41 
 
 Northern friends; and as the war had by 
 no means constituted their lives as it had 
 constituted ours for four long years, the 
 success in avoiding the disagreeable topic 
 would have been considerable, if it had not 
 been for awkward allusions on the part of the 
 Southerners, who, having been shut out for all 
 that time from the study of literature and art 
 and other elegant and uncompromising sub- 
 jects, could hardly keep from speaking of this 
 and that incident of the war. Whereupon a 
 discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as 
 if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to 
 the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that 
 had been the cause of his seclusion. 
 
 Some fifteen years ago Mr. Lowell was 
 lecturing in Baltimore, and during the month 
 of his stay I learned to know the charm of his 
 manner and the delight of his conversation. 
 If I had been even more prejudiced than I was, 
 I could not have withstood that easy grace, 
 that winning cordiality. Every one knew 
 where he had stood during the war, and how 
 he had wielded the flail of his " lashing hail " 
 
42 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 against the South and the Southern cause and 
 " Southern sympathizers." But that warfare 
 was over for him, and out of kindly regard for 
 my feelings he made no allusion to the great 
 quarrel, with two exceptions. Once, just be- 
 fore he left Baltimore, he was talking as no 
 other man could talk about the Yankee dialect, 
 and turning to me he said with a half smile 
 and a deep twinkle in his eye, " I should like 
 to have you read what I have written about 
 the Yankee dialect, but I am afraid you might 
 not like the context." A few days afterwards 
 I received from him the well-known preface 
 to the Second Series of The Biglow Papers, 
 cut out from the volume. It was a graceful 
 concession to Southern weakness, and after all 
 I may have been mistaken in thinking that I 
 could read the Second Series as literature, just 
 as I should read the Anti-Jacobin or the Two- 
 penny Post Bag. In fact, on looking into the 
 Second Series again, I must confess that I can- 
 not even now discover the same merits that I 
 could not help acknowledging in the First 
 Series, which I read for the first time in 1850, 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 43 
 
 when I was a student in Berlin. By that time 
 I had recovered from my boyish enthusiasm 
 over the Mexican war, and as my party had 
 been successful, I could afford to enjoy the wit 
 and humor of the book, from the inimitable 
 Notices of an Independent Press to the last 
 utterance of Birdofredum Sawin; and I have 
 always remembered enough of the contents to 
 make a psychological study of the Second 
 Series a matter of interest, if it were not for 
 other things. 
 
 On the second occasion we were passing 
 together under the shadow of the Washington 
 Monument, and the name of Lee came by 
 some chance into the current of talk. Here 
 Mr. Lowell could not refrain from expressing 
 his view of Lee's course in turning against the 
 government to which he had sworn allegiance. 
 Doubtless he felt it to be his duty to emphasize 
 his conviction as to a vital clause of his creed, 
 but it instantly became evident that this was a 
 theme that could not be profitably pursued, 
 and we walked in silence the rest of the way, — 
 the author of the line 
 
 Virginia gave us this imperial man, 
 
44 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 and the follower of that other imperial man 
 Virginia gave the world; both honest, each 
 believing the other hopelessly wrong, but abso- 
 lutely sincere. 
 
 Scant allusion has been made in this paper 
 to the subject of slavery, which bulks so large 
 in almost every study of the war. A similar 
 scantiness of allusion to slavery is noticeable 
 in the Memorial volume, to which I have 
 already referred; a volume which was pre- 
 pared, not to produce an impression on the 
 Northern mind, but to indulge a natural desire 
 to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confeder- 
 acy; a book written by friends for friends. 
 The rights of the State and the defence of the 
 country are mentioned at every turn; " the 
 peculiar institution " is merely touched on here 
 and there, except in one passage in which a 
 Virginian speaker maintains that as a matter 
 of dollars and cents it would be better for Vir- 
 ginia to give up her slaves than to set up a sepa- 
 rate government, with all the cost of a stand- 
 ing army which the conservation of slavery 
 would make necessary. This silence, which 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 45 
 
 might be misunderstood, is plain enough to a 
 Southern man. Slavery was simply a test case, 
 and except as a test case it is too complicated 
 a question to be dealt with at the close of a 
 paper which is already too long. Except as a 
 test case it is impossible to speak of the South- 
 ern view of the institution, for we were not all 
 of the same mind. 
 
 There were theorists who maintained that a 
 society based on the rock of slavery was the 
 best possible in a world where there must be a 
 lowest order; and the doctrine of the " mud- 
 sill " as propounded by a leading thinker of 
 this school evoked mud volcanoes all over the 
 North. Scriptural arguments in defence of 
 slavery formed a large part of the literature 
 of the subject, and the hands of Southern 
 clergymen were upheld by their conservative 
 brothers beyond the border. 
 
 Some who had read the signs of the times 
 otherwise knew that slavery was doomed by 
 the voice of the world, and that no theory of 
 society could withstand the advance of the 
 new spirit; and if the secrets of all hearts 
 
46 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 could have been revealed, our enemies would 
 have been astounded to see how many thou- 
 sands and tens of thousands In the Southern 
 States felt the crushing burden and the awful 
 responsibility of the Institution which we were 
 supposed to be defending with the melodra- 
 matic fury of pirate kings. We were born to 
 this social order, we had to do our duty In it 
 according to our lights, and this duty was 
 made Indefinitely more difficult by the Inter- 
 ference of those who, as we thought, could not 
 understand the conditions of the problem, and 
 who did not have to bear the expense of the 
 experiments they proposed. 
 
 There were the practical men who saw in 
 the negro slave an efficient laborer In a certain 
 line of work, and there were the practical men 
 who doubted the economic value of our system 
 as compared with that of the free States, and 
 whom the other practical men laughed to 
 scorn. 
 
 There was the small and eminently respect- 
 able body of benevolent men who promoted 
 the scheme of African colonization, of which 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 47 
 
 great things were expected in my boyhood. 
 The manifest destiny of slavery in America 
 was the regeneration of Africa. 
 
 The people at large had no theory, and the 
 practice varied as much in the relation of 
 master and servant as it varied in other family 
 relations. Too much tragedy and too much 
 idyl have been imported into the home life of 
 the Southern people ; but this is not the place 
 to reduce poetry to prose. 
 
 On one point, however, all parties in the 
 South were agreed, and the vast majority of 
 the people of the North — before the war. 
 The abolitionist proper was considered not 
 so much the friend of the negro as the enemy 
 of society. As the war went on, and the aboli- 
 tionist saw the " glory of the Lord " revealed 
 in a way he had never hoped for, he saw at the 
 same time, or rather ought to have seen, that 
 the order he had lived to destroy could not 
 have been a system of hellish wrong and fiend- 
 ish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the 
 liberators would have been fulfilled, and the 
 horrors of San Domingo would have polluted 
 
48 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 this fair land. For the negro race does not 
 deserve undivided praise for its conduct dur- 
 ing the war. Let some small part of the credit 
 be given to the masters, not all to the finer 
 qualities of their " brothers in black." The 
 school in which the training was given is 
 closed, and who wishes to open it? Its meth- 
 ods were old-fashioned and were sadly behind 
 the times, but the old schoolmasters turned 
 out scholars who, in certain branches of moral 
 philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates 
 of the new university. 
 
 I have tried in this paper to reproduce the 
 past and its perspective, to show how the men 
 of my time and of my environment looked at 
 the problems that confronted us. It has been 
 a painful and, I fear, a futile task. So far as 
 I have reproduced the perspective for myself 
 it has been a revival of sorrows such as this 
 generation cannot understand; it has recalled 
 the hours when it gave one a passion for death, 
 a shame of life, to read our bulletins. And 
 how could I hope to reproduce that perspec- 
 tive for others, for men who belong to another 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 49 
 
 generation and another region, when so many 
 men who lived the same hfe and fought on 
 the same side have themselves lost the point of 
 view not only of the beginning of the war, but 
 also of the end of the war, not only of the 
 inexpressible exaltation, but of the unutter- 
 able degradation? They have forgotten what 
 a strange world the survivors of the conflict 
 had to face. If the State had been ours still, 
 the foundations of the earth would not have 
 been out of course ; but the State was a military 
 district, and the Confederacy had ceased to 
 exist. The generous policy which would have 
 restored the State and made a new union pos- 
 sible, which would have disentwined much of 
 the passionate clinging to the past, was crossed 
 by the death of the only man who could have 
 carried it through, if even he could have car- 
 ried it through; and years of trouble had to 
 pass before the current of national life ran 
 freely through the Southern States. It was 
 before this circuit was complete that the prin- 
 cipal of one of the chief schools of Virginia 
 set up a tablet to the memory of the " old 
 
50 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 boys " who had perished In the war, — it was 
 a list the length of which few Northern col- 
 leges could equal, — and I was asked to fur- 
 nish a motto. Those who know classic liter- 
 ature at all know that for patriotism and 
 friendship mottoes are not far to seek, but 
 during the war I felt as I had never felt before 
 the meaning of many a classic sentence. The 
 motto came from Ovid, whom many call a 
 frivolous poet; but the frivolous Roman was 
 after all a Roman, and he was young when he 
 wrote the line, — too young not to feel the 
 generous swell of true feeling. It was written 
 of the dead brothers of Briseis : — 
 
 Qui bene pro patria cum patriaque iacent. 
 
 The sentiment found an echo at the time, de- 
 served an echo at the time. Now it is a senti- 
 ment without an echo, and last year a valued 
 personal friend of mine, in an eloquent ora- 
 tion, a noble tribute to the memory of our 
 great captain, a discourse full of the glory of 
 the past, the wisdom of the present, the hope 
 
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 51 
 
 of the future, rebuked the sentiment as idle 
 in its despair. As well rebuke a cry of anguish, 
 a cry of desolation out of the past. For those 
 whose names are recorded on that tablet the 
 line is but too true. For those of us who sur- 
 vive it has ceased to have the import that it 
 once had, for we have learned to work reso- 
 lutely for the furtherance of all that is good in '^ 
 the wider life that has been opened to us by 
 the issue of the war, without complaining, 
 without repining. That the cause we fought 
 for and our brothers died for was the cause '' 
 of civil liberty, and not the cause of human 
 slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves 
 bound to maintain whenever our motives are 
 challenged or misunderstood, if only for our 
 children's sake. But even that will not long 
 be necessary, for the vindication of our prin- ^ 
 ciples will be made manifest in the working 
 out of the problems with which the republic 
 has to grapple. If, however, the effacement 
 of state lines and the complete centralization 
 of the government shall prove to be the wis- 
 
53 THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH 
 
 dom of the future, the poetry of life will still 
 find its home in the old order, and those who 
 loved their State best will live longest in song 
 and legend, — song yet unsung, legend not yet 
 crystallized. 
 
A SOUTHERNER IN THE 
 PELOPONNESIAN WAR 
 
A SOUTHERNER IN THE PELOPON- 
 
 NESIAN WAR 
 
 I had intended to call this study Two Wars, 
 but I was afraid lest I should be under the 
 domination of the title, and an elaborate com- 
 parison of the Peloponnesian War and the 
 War between the States would undoubtedly 
 have led to no little sophistication of the facts. 
 Historical parallel bars are usually set up for 
 exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental 
 agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody 
 expects a critical examination of the parallel- 
 ism itself. He was not an historian of the 
 first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, 
 who is responsible for the current saying. 
 History is philosophy teaching by examples. 
 This definition is about as valuable as some of 
 those other definitions that express one art in 
 terms of another: poetry in terms of painting. 
 
56 TWO WARS 
 
 and painting in terms of poetry, " Archi- 
 tecture is frozen music " does not enable us to 
 understand either perpendicular Gothic or a 
 fugue of Bach; and when an historian defines 
 history in terms of philosophy, or a philoso- 
 pher philosophy in terms of history, you may 
 be on the lookout for sophistication. Your 
 philosophical historian points his moral by 
 adorning his tale. Your historical philosopher 
 allows no zigzags in the march of his evolu- 
 tion. 
 
 In like manner, the attempt to express one 
 war in terms of another is apt to lead to a 
 wresting of facts. No two wars are as like as 
 two peas. Yet as any two marriages in society 
 will yield a certain number of resemblances, so 
 will any two wars in history, whether war 
 itself be regarded as abstract or concrete, — a 
 question that seems to have exercised some 
 grammatical minds, and ought therefore to be 
 settled before any further step is taken in this 
 disquisition, which is the disquisition of a 
 grammarian. Now most persons would pro- 
 nounce war an abstract, but one excellent 
 
TWO WARS 57 
 
 manual with which I am acquainted sets it 
 down as a concrete, and I have often thought 
 that the author must have known something 
 practically about war. At all events, to those 
 who have seen the midday sun darkened by 
 burning homesteads, and wheatfields illumi- 
 nated by stark forms in blue and gray, war is 
 sufficiently concrete. The very first dead 
 soldier one sees, enemy or friend, takes war 
 forever out of the category of abstracts. 
 
 When I was a student abroad, American 
 novices used to be asked in jest, " Is this your 
 first ruin ? " "Is this your first nightingale ? " 
 I am not certain that I can place my first ruin 
 or my first nightingale, but I can recall my first 
 dead man on the battlefield. We were mak- 
 ing an advance on the enemy's position near 
 Huttonsville. Nothing, by the way, could 
 have been more beautiful than the plan, which 
 I was privileged to see ; and as we neared the 
 objective point, it was a pleasure to watch how 
 column after column, marching by this road 
 and that, converged to the rendezvous. It 
 was as if some huge spider were gathering its 
 
58 TWO WARS 
 
 legs about the victim. The special order issued 
 breathed a spirit of calm resolution worthy of 
 the general commanding and his troops. No- 
 body that I remember criticised the tautologi- 
 cal expression, " The progress of this army 
 must be forward." We were prepared for a 
 hard fight, for we knew that the enemy was 
 strongly posted. Most of us were to be under 
 fire for the first time, and there was some talk 
 about the chances of the morrow as we lay 
 down to sleep. Moralizing of that sort gets 
 less and less common with experience in the 
 business, and this time the moralizing may 
 have seemed to some premature. But wher- 
 ever the minie ball sang its diabolical mosquito 
 song there was death in the air, and I was soon 
 to see brought into camp, under a flag of truce, 
 the lifeless body of the heir of Mount Vernon, 
 whose graceful riding I had envied a few days 
 before. However, there was no serious fight- 
 ing. The advance on the enemy's position 
 had developed more strength in front than 
 we had counted on, or some of the spider's legs 
 had failed to close in. A misleading report 
 
TJVO WARS 59 
 
 had been brought to headquarters. A weak 
 point in the enemy's line had been reinforced. 
 Who knows? The best laid plans are often 
 thwarted by the merest trifles, — an insignifi- 
 cant puddle, a jingling canteen. This game of 
 war is a hit or miss game, after all. A certain 
 fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set 
 out with a stock of that article. So our reso- 
 lute advance became a forced reconnaissance, 
 greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more 
 ardent spirits. We found out exactly where 
 the enemy was, and declined to have anything 
 further to do with him for the time being. 
 But in finding him we had to clear the ground 
 and drive in the pickets. One picket had been 
 posted at the end of a loop in a chain of valleys. 
 The road we followed skirted the base of one 
 range of hills. The house which served as the 
 headquarters of the picket was on the other 
 side. A meadow as level as a board stretched 
 between. I remember seeing a boy come out 
 and catch a horse, while we were advancing. 
 Somehow it seemed to be a trivial thing to do 
 just then. I knew better afterwards. Our 
 
6o TJVO WARS 
 
 skirmishers had done their work, had swept 
 the woods on either side clean, and the pickets 
 had fallen back on the main body; but not all 
 of them. One man, if not more, had only had 
 time to fall dead. The one I saw, the first, was 
 a young man, not thirty, I should judge, lying 
 on his back, his head too low for comfort. He 
 had been killed outright, and there was no dis- 
 tortion of feature. No more peaceful faces 
 than one sees at times on the battlefield, and 
 sudden death, despite the Litany, is not the 
 least enviable exit. In this case there was 
 something like a mild surprise on the counte- 
 nance. The rather stolid face could never 
 have been very expressive. An unposted let- 
 ter was found on the dead man's body. It was 
 written in German, and I was asked to inter- 
 pret it, in case it should contain any important 
 information. There was no important infor- 
 mation; just messages to friends and kindred, 
 just the trivialities of camp life. 
 
 The man was an invader, and in my eyes 
 deserved an invader's doom. If sides had 
 been changed, he would have been a rebel, and 
 
TWO WARS 6 1 
 
 would have deserved a rebel's doom. I was 
 not stirred to the depths by the sight, but it 
 gave me a lesson in grammar, and war has ever 
 been concrete to me from that time on. The 
 horror I did not feel at first grew steadily. 
 " A sweet thing," says Pindar, " is war to 
 those that have not tried it." 
 
 II 
 
 Concrete or abstract, there are general re- 
 semblances between any two wars, and so war 
 lends itself readily to allegories. Every one 
 has read Bunyan's Holy War. Not every 
 one has read Spangenberg's Grammatical 
 War. It is an ingenious performance, which 
 fell into my hands many years after I had gone 
 forth to see and to feci what war was like. In 
 Spangenberg's Grammatical War the nouns 
 and the verbs are the contending parties. 
 Poeta is king of the nouns, and Amo king of 
 the verbs. There is a regular debate between 
 the two sovereigns. The king of the verbs 
 summons the adverbs to his help, the king of 
 
62 TWO WARS 
 
 the nouns the pronouns. The camps are 
 pitched, the forces marshalled. The neutral 
 power, participle, is invoked by both parties, 
 but declines to send open assistance to either, 
 hoping that in this contest between noun and 
 verb the third party will acquire the rule over 
 the whole territory of language. After a final 
 summons on the part of the king of the verbs, 
 and a fierce response from the rival monarch, 
 active hostilities begin. We read of raids and 
 forays. Prisoners are treated with contumely, 
 and their skirts are docked as in the Biblical 
 narrative. Treachery adds excitement to the 
 situation. Skirmishes precede the great en- 
 gagement, in which the nouns are worsted, 
 though they have come off with some of the 
 spoils of war ; and peace is made on terms dic- 
 tated by Priscian, Servius, and Donatus. 
 Spangenberg's Grammatical War is a not un- 
 interesting, not uninstructive squib, and the 
 salt of it, or saltpetre of it, has not all evapo- 
 rated after the lapse of some three centuries. 
 There are bits that remind one of the Greco- 
 Turkish war of a few weeks ago. 
 
TIVO WARS 63 
 
 But there is no military science in Bunyan's 
 Holy War nor in Spangenberg's Grammatical 
 War: why should there be? Practical war- 
 fare is rough work. To frighten, to wound, 
 to kill, — these three abide under all forms of 
 military doctrine, and the greatest of these is 
 frightening. Ares, the god of war, has two 
 satellites. Terror and Affright. Fear is the 
 Gorgon's head. The serpents are very real, 
 very effective, in their way, but logically they 
 are unessential tresses. The Gorgon stares 
 you out of countenance, and that suffices. The 
 object is the removal of an obstacle. Killing 
 and wounding are but means to an end. 
 Hand-to-hand fighting is rare, and it would be 
 easy to count the instances in which cavalry 
 meets the shock of cavalry. Crossing sabres 
 is not a common pastime in the red game of 
 war. It makes a fine picture, to be sure, the 
 finer for the rarity of the thing itself. 
 
 To frighten, to wound, to kill, being the 
 essential processes, war amounts to the same 
 thing the world over, world of time and world 
 of space. Whether death or disability comes 
 
64 TWO WARS 
 
 by Belgian ball or Spencer bullet, by the stone 
 of a Balearic slinger, by a bolt from a cross- 
 bow, is a matter of detail which need not 
 trouble the philosophic mind, and the ancients 
 showed their sense in ascribing fear to divine 
 inspiration. 
 
 If the processes of war are primitive, the 
 causes of war are no less so. It has been strik- 
 ingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar 
 that " language was born in the courting-days 
 of mankind: the first utterance of speech 
 <was> something between the nightly love- 
 lyrics of puss upon the tiles and the melo- 
 dious love-songs of the nightingale." " War, 
 the father of all things," goes back to 
 the same origin as language. The serenade 
 is matched by the battle-cry. The fight be- 
 tween two cock-pheasants for the love of a 
 hen-pheasant is war in its last analysis, in its 
 primal manifestation. Selfish hatred is at the 
 bottom of it. It is the hell-fire to which we 
 owe the heat that is necessary to some of the 
 noblest as to some of the vilest manifesta- 
 tions of human nature. Righteous indigna- 
 
TWO WARS 6$ 
 
 tion, sense of injustice, sympathy with the 
 oppressed, consecration to country, fine words 
 all, fine things, but so many of the men who 
 represent these fine things perish. It wrings 
 the heart at a distance of more than thirty 
 years to think of those who have fallen, and 
 love still maintains passionately that they were 
 the best. At any rate, they were among the 
 best, and both sides are feeling the loss to this 
 day, not only in the men themselves, but in the 
 sons that should have been born to them. 
 
 Any two wars, then, will yield a sufficient 
 number of resemblances, in killed, wounded, 
 and missing, in the elemental matter of hatred, 
 or, if you choose to give it a milder name, 
 rivalry. These things are of the essence of 
 war, and the manifestations run parallel even 
 in the finer lines. One cock-pheasant finds the 
 drumming of another cock-pheasant a very 
 irritating sound. Chanticleer objects to the 
 note of Chanticleer, and the more articulate 
 human being is rasped by the voice of his 
 neighbor. The Attic did not like the broad 
 Boeotian speech. Parson Evans's " seese and 
 
66 TWO WARS 
 
 putter " were the bitterest ingredients in Fal- 
 staff's dose of humiliation. " Yankee twang " 
 and " Southern drawl " incited as well as 
 echoed hostility. 
 
 Borderers are seldom friends. " An Attic 
 neighbor " is a Greek proverb. Kentucky and 
 Ohio frown at each other across the river. 
 Cincinnati looks down on Covington, and Cov- 
 ington glares at Cincinnati. Aristophanes, in 
 his mocking way, attributes the Peloponnesian 
 war to a kidnapping affair between Athens 
 and Megara. The underground railroad pre- 
 ceded the aboveground railroad in the history 
 of the great American conflict. 
 
 There were jealousies enough between 
 Athens and Sparta in the olden times, which 
 correspond to our colonial days, and in the 
 Persian war, which was in a sense the Greek 
 war of independence. In like manner the 
 chronicles of our Revolutionary period show 
 that there was abundance of bad blood between 
 Northern colonies and Southern colonies. The 
 Virginian planter whom all have agreed to 
 make the one national hero was after all a 
 
TWO WARS 67 
 
 Virginian, and Virginians have not forgotten 
 the impatient utterances of the " imperial 
 man " on the soil of Massachusetts and in the 
 streets of New York. Nobody takes Knicker- 
 bocker's History of New York seriously, as 
 owlish historians are wont to take Aris- 
 tophanes. Why not? We accept the hostility 
 of Attica and Boeotia, of Attica and Megara; 
 and there are no more graphic chapters than 
 those which set forth the enmity between New 
 York and Maryland, between New Amster- 
 dam and Connecticut. 
 
 Business is often more potent than blood. 
 Nullification, the forerunner of disunion, rose 
 from a question of tariff. The echoes had not 
 died out when I woke to conscious life. I 
 knew that I was the son of a nullifier, and the 
 nephew of a Union man. It was whispered 
 that our beloved family physician found it 
 prudent to withdraw from the public gaze 
 for a while, and that my uncle's windows were 
 broken by the palmettoes of a nullification 
 procession; and I can remember from my 
 boyhood days how unreconciled citizens of 
 
68 TWO WARS 
 
 Charleston shook their fists at the revenue 
 cutter and its " foreign flag." Such an early 
 experience enables one to understand our war 
 better. It enables one to understand the Pelo- 
 ponnesian war better, the struggle between the 
 union of which Athens was the mistress and 
 the confederacy of which Sparta was the head. 
 Non-Intercourse between Athens and Megara 
 was the first stage. The famous Megarian 
 decree of Pericles, which closed the market of 
 Athens to Megarians, gave rise to angry con- 
 troversy, and the refusal to rescind that decree 
 led to open war. But Megara was little more 
 than a pretext. The subtle influence of Corinth 
 was potent. The great merchant city of 
 Greece dreaded the rise of Athens to dominant 
 commercial importance, and in the conflict be- 
 tween the Corinthian brass and the Attic clay, 
 the clay was shattered, Corinth does not show 
 her hand much in the Peloponnesian war. She 
 figures at the beginning, and then disappears. 
 But the old mole is at work the whole time, 
 and what the Peloponnesians called the Attic 
 war, and the Attics the Peloponnesian war, 
 
TWO WARS 69 
 
 might have been called the Corinthian war. 
 The exchange, the banking-house, were impor- 
 tant factors then as now. " Sinews of war " 
 is a classical expression. The popular cry of 
 *' Persian gold " was heard in the Pelopon- 
 nesian war as the popular cry of " British 
 gold " is heard now. 
 
 True, there was no slavery question in the 
 Peloponnesian war, for antique civilization 
 without slavery is hardly thinkable ; but after 
 all, the slavery question belongs ultimately to 
 the sphere of economics. The humanitarian 
 spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was 
 at work in the Southern States as in the North- 
 ern States, but it was hampered by economic 
 considerations. Virginia, as every one knows, 
 was on the verge of becoming a free State. 
 Colonization flourished in my boyhood. A 
 friend of my father's left him trustee for his 
 " servants," as we called them. They were 
 quartered opposite our house in Charleston, 
 and the pickaninnies were objects of profound 
 interest to the children of the neighborhood. 
 One or two letters came from the emigrants 
 
70 TWO WARS 
 
 after they reached Liberia. Then silence fell 
 on the African farm. 
 
 Some of the most effective anti-slavery re- 
 formers were Charlestonians by birth and 
 > breeding. I cannot say that Grimke was a 
 popular name, but homage was paid to the 
 talent of Frederick, as I remember only too 
 well, for I had to learn a speech of his by 
 heart, as a schoolboy exercise. But the eco- 
 nomic conditions of the South were not 
 favorable to the spread of the ideas repre- 
 sented by the Grimkes. The slavery question 
 kept alive the spirit that manifested itself in 
 the tariff question. State rights were not suf- 
 fered to slumber. The Southerner resented 
 Northern dictation as Pericles resented Lace- 
 daemonian dictation, and our Peloponnesian 
 war began. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The processes of the two wars, then, were 
 the same, — killing, wounding, frightening. 
 The causes of the two wars resolved them- 
 
TWO WARS 71 
 
 selves into the elements of hatred. The de- 
 tails of the two wars meet at many points; 
 only one must be on one's guard against merely 
 fanciful, merely external resemblances. 
 
 In i860 I spent a few days in Holland, and 
 among my various excursions in that fascinat- 
 ing country I took a solitary trip on a treck- 
 schuit from Amsterdam to Delft. Holland 
 was so true to Dutch pictures that there was a 
 retrospective delight in the houses and in the 
 people. There was a charm in the very signs, 
 in the names of the villas; for my knowledge 
 of Dutch had not passed beyond the stage at 
 which the Netherlandish tongue seems to be 
 an English-German Dictionary, disguised in 
 strong waters. But the thing that struck me 
 most was the general aspect of the country. 
 Everywhere gates. Nowhere fences. The 
 gates guarded the bridges and the canals were 
 the fences, but the canals and the low bridges 
 were not to be seen at a distance, and the 
 visual effect was that of isolated gates. It was 
 an absurd landscape even after the brain had 
 made the necessary corrections. 
 
72 TWO WARS 
 
 In the third year of the war I was not far 
 from Fredericksburg. The country had been 
 stripped, and the forlorn region was a sad con- 
 trast to the smug prosperity of Holland. And 
 yet of a sudden the Dutch landscape flashed 
 upon my inward eye, for Spottsylvania, like 
 Holland, was dotted with fenceless gates. The 
 rails of the inclosures had long before gone to 
 feed bivouac fires, but the great gates were too 
 solidly constructed to tempt marauders. It 
 was an absurd landscape, an absurd parallel. 
 
 Historical parallels are often no better. 
 When one compares two languages of the same 
 family, the first impression is that of similarity. 
 It is hard for the novice to keep his Italian and 
 his Spanish apart. The later and more abid- 
 ing impression is that of dissimilarity. A total 
 stranger confounds twins in whom the mem- 
 bers of the household find but vague likeness. 
 There is no real resemblance between the two 
 wars we are contemplating outside the inevi- 
 table features of all armed conflicts, and we 
 must be on our guard against the sophistica- 
 tion deprecated in the beginning of this study. 
 
TWO WARS 73 
 
 And yet one coming fresh to a comparison of 
 the Peloponnesian war and the war between 
 the States might see a striking similarity, such 
 as I saw between the Dutch landscape and the 
 landscape in Spottsylvania. 
 
 The Peloponnesian war, like our war, was 
 a war between two leagues, a Northern Union 
 and a Southern Confederacy. The Northern 
 Union, represented by Athens, was a naval 
 power. The Southern Confederacy, under 
 the leadership of Sparta, was a land power. 
 The Athenians represented the progressive 
 element, the Spartans the conservative. The 
 Athenians believed in a strong centralized 
 government. The Lacedaemonians professed 
 greater regard for autonomy. A little inge- 
 nuity, a good deal of hardihood, might multi- 
 ply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it 
 would be possible to write the story of our 
 Peloponnesian war in phrases of Thucydides, 
 and I should not be surprised if such a task 
 were a regular school exercise at Eton or at 
 Rugby. Why, it was but the other day that 
 Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a pas- 
 
74 TWO WARS 
 
 sage from Lowell's BIglow Papers into choice 
 Aristophanese. 
 
 Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already 
 said, imperil one's intellectual honesty, and 
 one would not like to imitate the Byzantine 
 historians who were given to similar tricks. 
 One of these gentlemen, Choricius by name, 
 had a seaport to describe. How the actual 
 seaport lay mattered little to Choricius, so 
 long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was at 
 hand; and if the task of narrating our Pelo- 
 ponnesian war were assigned to the ghost of 
 Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open 
 it with a description of Charleston in terms 
 of Epidamnus. Little matters of topography 
 would not trouble such an one. To the sophist 
 an island is an island, a river a river, a height 
 a height, everywhere. Sphacteria would fur- 
 nish the model for Morris Island; the Ache- 
 lous would serve indifferently for Potomac or 
 Mississippi, the Epipolae for Missionary 
 Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of 
 Syracuse for Hampton Roads; and Thucydi- 
 des' description of the naval engagement and 
 
TlfO WARS 75 
 
 the watching crowds would be made available 
 for the fight between Merrimac and Monitor. 
 The debates In Thucydides would be a 
 quarry for the debates in either Congress, as 
 they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetori- 
 cal historians. And as for the " winged 
 words," why should they have wings, if not to 
 flit from character to character? A well- 
 known scholar, at a loss for authentic details 
 as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot of 
 apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so 
 doing maintained the strange doctrine that 
 apophthegms were more to be trusted than 
 any other form of tradition. There could not 
 have been a more hopeless thesis. The gen- 
 eral who said that he would burn his coat if 
 it knew his plans has figured in all the wars 
 with which I have been contemporary, was a 
 conspicuous character in the Mexican war, and 
 passed from camp to camp in the war between 
 the States. The mot, familiar to the classical 
 scholar, was doubtless attributed in his day to 
 that dashing sheik Chedorlaomer, and will be 
 ascribed to both leaders in the final battle of 
 
76 TfVO WARS 
 
 Armageddon. The hank of yarns told about 
 Socrates is pieced out with tabs and tags bor- 
 rowed from different periods. I have heard, 
 say, in the afternoon, a good story at the ex- 
 pense of a famous American revival preacher 
 which I had read that morning in the Cent 
 Nouvelles Nouvelles, and there is a large 
 stock of anecdotes made to screw on and screw 
 off for the special behoof of college presidents 
 and university professors. Why hold up Cho- 
 ricius to ridicule? He was no worse than 
 others of his guild. It was not Choricius, it 
 was another Byzantine historian who con- 
 veyed from Herodotus an unsavory retort, 
 over which the unsuspecting Gibbon chuckles 
 in the dark cellar of his notes, where he keeps 
 so much of his high game. The Greek his- 
 torian of the Roman Empire, the Roman his- 
 torian of every date, are no better, and Dio- 
 nysius of Halicarnassus, who has devoted 
 many pages to the arraignment of Thucydi- 
 des' style, cribs with the utmost composure 
 from the author he has vilipended. Still, we 
 must not set down every coincidence as bor- 
 
TWO WARS 77 
 
 rowing. Thucydides himself insists on the re- 
 currence of the same or similar events in a his- 
 tory of which human nature is a constant 
 factor. " Undo this button " is not necessarily 
 a quotation from King Lear. " There is no 
 way but this " was original with Macaulay, 
 and not stolen from Shakespeare. " Never 
 mind, general, all this has been my fault," are 
 words attributed to General Lee after the bat- 
 tle of Gettysburg. This is very much the lan- 
 guage of Gylippus after the failure of his 
 attack on the Athenian lines before Syracuse. 
 How many heroic as well as unheroic natures 
 have had to say " Mea culpa, mea maxima 
 culpa." 
 
 Situations may recur, sayings may recur, 
 but no characters come back. Nature always 
 breaks her mould. " I could not help mutter- 
 ing to myself," says Coleridge in his Bio- 
 graphia Literaria, " when the good pastor 
 this morning told me that Klopstock was the 
 German Milton ' a very German Milton, in- 
 deed! 11 ' " and Coleridge's italics and three 
 exclamation points may answer for all paral- 
 
 6 
 
78 TJVO WARS 
 
 lelisms. When historical characters get far 
 enough off it may be possible to imitate Plu- 
 tarch, but only then. Victor Hugo wrote a 
 passionate protest against the execution of 
 John Brown, in which he compared Virginia 
 hanging John Brown with Washington putting 
 Spartacus to death. What Washington would 
 have done with Spartacus can readily be 
 divined. Those who have stood nearest to 
 Grant and Sherman, to Lee and Jackson, the 
 men, fail to see any strong resemblance to 
 leaders in other wars. Nicias, in the Pelopon- 
 nesian war, whose name means Winfield, has 
 nothing in common with General Scott, whose 
 plan of putting down the rebellion, the " Ana- 
 conda Plan," as it was called, bears some re- 
 semblance to the scheme of Demosthenes, the 
 Athenian general, for quelling the Pelopon- 
 nese. Brasidas was in some respects lilce 
 Stonewall Jackson, but Brasidas was not a 
 Presbyterian elder, nor Stonewall Jackson a 
 cajoling diplomatist. 
 
TWO WARS 79 
 
 IV 
 
 This paper is rapidly becoming what life 
 is, — a series of renunciations, — and the reader 
 is by this time sufficiently enlightened as to the 
 reasons why I gave up the ambitious title Two 
 Wars, and substituted A Southerner in the 
 Peloponnesian War. If I were a military 
 man, I might have been tempted to draw some 
 further illustrations from the history of the 
 two struggles, but my short and desultory serv- 
 ice in the field does not entitle me to set up as a 
 strategist. I went from my books to the front, 
 and went back from the front to my books, 
 from the Confederate war to the Pelopon- 
 nesian war, from Lee and Early to Thucydides 
 and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood 
 my Greek history and my Greek authors better 
 for my experience in the field, but some degree 
 of understanding would have come to me even 
 if I had not stirred from home. For while my 
 home was spared until the month preceding 
 the surrender, every vibration of the great 
 struggle was felt at the foot of the Blue Ridge. 
 
8o TJVO WARS 
 
 We were not too far off to sympathize with 
 the scares at Richmond, There was the 
 Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in the war 
 all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report 
 that the Pawnee was on its way up James 
 River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, 
 just as all Athens was stirred. In the early part 
 of the Peloponnesian war, by a naval demon- 
 stration against the Piraeus. The Pawnee 
 war, as it was jocularly called, did not last 
 long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to which the 
 civilian soul naturally resorts in every time of 
 trouble, were soon laid aside, and the only 
 artillery to which the extemporized warriors 
 were exposed was the artillery of jests. Even 
 now survivors of those days recur to the 
 tumultuous excitement of that Pawnee Sunday 
 as among the memorable things of the war, 
 and never without merriment. Perhaps no- 
 body expected serious resistance to be made 
 by the clergymen and the department clerks 
 and the business men who armed themselves 
 for the fray. Home guards were familiar 
 butts on both sides of the line, but home guards 
 
TWO JVARS 8i 
 
 have been known to die in battle, and death 
 in battle is supposed to be rather tragic than 
 otherwise. Nor is the tragedy made less tragic 
 by the age of the combatant. The ancients 
 thought a young warrior dead something fair 
 to behold. To Greek poet and Roman poet 
 alike an aged warrior is a pitiable spectacle. 
 No one is likely to forget Virgil's Priam, Tyr- 
 t£Eus' description of an old soldier on the field 
 of battle came up to me more than once, and 
 there is stamped forever on my mind the Image 
 of one dying Confederate, " with white hair 
 and hoary beard, breathing out his brave soul 
 in the dust " on the western bank of the fair 
 Shenandoah. Yet a few weeks before, that 
 same old Confederate, as a member of the 
 awkward squad, would have been a legitimate 
 object of ridicule; and so the heroes of the 
 Pawnee war, the belted knights, or knights 
 who would have been belted could belts have 
 been found for their civic girth, were twitted 
 with their heroism. 
 
 But our scares were not confined to scares 
 that came from Richmond. One cavalry raid 
 
82 TWO WARS 
 
 came up to our very doors, and Custer and his 
 men were repelled by a handful of reserve 
 artillerymen. Our home guard was sum- 
 moned more than once to defend Rockfish 
 Gap, and I remember one long summer night 
 spent as a mounted picket on the road to Pal- 
 myra. Every battle in that " dancing ground 
 of war " brought to the great Charlottesville 
 hospital sad reinforcements of wounded men. 
 Crutch-races between one-legged soldiers were 
 organized, and there were timber-toe qua- 
 drilles and one-armed cotillions. Out of the 
 shelter of the Blue Ridge it was easy enough 
 to get into the range of bullets. A semblance 
 of college life was kept up at the University of 
 Virginia. The students were chiefly maimed 
 soldiers and boys under military age ; but when 
 things grew hot in front, maimed soldiers 
 would edge nearer to the hell of battle and the 
 boys would rush oft to the game of powder and 
 ball. One little band of these college boys 
 chose an odd time for their baptism of fire, and 
 were put into action during the famous fight 
 of " the bloody angle." From the night when 
 
TWO WARS 83 
 
 word was brought that the Federals had occu- 
 pied Alexandria to the time when I hobbled 
 into the provost marshal's office at Charlottes- 
 ville and took the oath of allegiance, the war 
 was part of my life, and it is not altogether 
 surprising that the memories of the Confeder- 
 acy come back to me whenever I contemplate 
 the history of the Peloponneslan war, which 
 bulks so largely in all Greek studies. And 
 that is all this paper really means. It belongs 
 to the class of inartistic performances of which 
 Aristotle speaks so slightingly. It has no 
 unity except the accidental unity of person. A 
 Southerner in the Peloponnesian War has no 
 more artistic right to be than A Girl in the 
 Carpathians or A Scholar in Politics, and yet 
 it may serve as a document. But what will 
 not serve as a document to the modern his- 
 torian? The historian is no longer the poor 
 creature described by Aristotle. He is no an- 
 nalist, no chronicler. He is not dragged along 
 by the mechanical sequence of events. " The 
 master of them that know " did not know 
 everything. He did not know that history 
 
84 TWO WARS 
 
 was to become as plastic as poetry, as dramatic 
 as a play. 
 
 V 
 
 The war was a good time for the study of 
 the conflict between Athens and Sparta. It 
 was a great time for reading and re-reading 
 classical literature generally, for the South 
 was blockaded against new books as effect- 
 ively, almost, as Megara was blockaded 
 against garlic and salt. The current literature 
 of those three or four years was a blank to 
 most Confederates. Few books got across the 
 line. A vigorous effort was made to supply 
 our soldiers with Bibles and parts of the Bible, 
 and large consignments ran the blockade. 
 Else little came from abroad, and few books 
 were reprinted in the Confederacy. Of these 
 I recall especially Bulwer's Strange Story; 
 Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, popularly pro- 
 nounced " Lee's Miserables " ; and the his- 
 torical novels of Louise Miihlbach, known to 
 the Confederate soldier as " Lou Mealbag." 
 
TWO WARS 85 
 
 All were eagerly read, but Cosette and Fantlne 
 and Joseph the Second would not last forever, 
 and we fell back on the old stand-bys. Some 
 of us exhumed neglected treasures, and I re- 
 member that I was fooled by Bulwer's com- 
 mendation of Charron Into reading that 
 feebler Montaigne. The Southerner, always 
 conservative in his tastes and no great admirer 
 of American literature, which had become 
 largely alien to him, went back to his English 
 classics, his ancient classics. Old gentlemen 
 past the military age furbished up their Latin 
 and Greek. Some of them had never let their 
 Latin and Greek grow rusty. When I was 
 serving on General Gordon's staff, I met at 
 Millwood, in Clarke County, a Virginian of 
 the old school who declaimed with fiery 
 emphasis, in the original, choice passages 
 of Demosthenes' tirade against ^schines. 
 Not Demosthenes himself could have given 
 more effective utterance to " Hearest thou, 
 iEschines?" I thought of my old friend 
 again not so very long ago, when I read the 
 account that the most brilliant of modern Ger- 
 
86 TfVO WARS 
 
 man classicists gives of his encounter with a 
 French schoolmaster at Beauvais in 1 870, dur- 
 ing the Franco- Prussian war, and of the heated 
 discussion that ensued about the comparative 
 merits of Euripides and Racine. The book- 
 man is not always killed In a man by service 
 in the field. True, Lachmann dropped his 
 Propertius to take up arms for his country, but 
 Relsig annotated his Aristophanes In camp, 
 and everybody knows the story of Courier, the 
 soldier Hellenist. But the tendency of life 
 In the open air Is to make the soul Imbody and 
 Imbrute, and after a while one begins to think 
 scholarship a disease, or, at any rate, a bad 
 habit; and the Scythian nomad, or. If you 
 choose, the Texan cowboy, seems to be the nor- 
 mal, healthy type. You put your Pickering 
 Homer in your kit. It drops out by reason of 
 some sudden change of base, and you do not 
 mourn as you ought to do. The fact is you 
 have not read a line for a month. But when 
 the Confederate volunteer returned, let us say, 
 from Jack's Shop or some such homely local- 
 ity, and opened his Thucydides, the old charm 
 
TWO WARS 87 
 
 came back with the studious surroundings, and 
 the familiar first words renewed the spell. 
 
 " Thucydides of Athens wrote up the war 
 of the Peloponnesians and Athenians." " The 
 war of the Peloponnesians and Athenians " is 
 a somewhat lumbering way of saying " the 
 Peloponnesian war." But Thucydides never 
 says " the Peloponnesian war." Why not? 
 Perhaps his course in this matter was deter- 
 mined by a spirit of judicial fairness. How- 
 ever that may be, either he employs some 
 phrase like the one cited, or he says " this 
 war " as we say " the war," as if there were 
 no other war on record. " Revolutionary 
 war," "war of 18 12," "Seminole war," 
 " Mexican war," — all these run glibly from 
 our tongues, but we also lumber when we wish 
 to be accurate. The names of wars, like the 
 names of diseases, are generally put off on the 
 party of the other part. We say " French and 
 Indian war " without troubling ourselves to 
 ask what the French and Indians called it, but 
 " Northern war " and " Southern war " were 
 never popular designations. " The war be- 
 
88 TWO WARS 
 
 tween the States," which a good many South- 
 erners prefer, is both bookish and inexact. 
 " Civil war " is an utter misnomer. It was 
 used and is still used by courteous people, the 
 same people who are careful to say " Federal " 
 and " Confederate." " War of the rebel- 
 lion," which begs the very question at issue, has 
 become the official designation of the struggle, 
 but has found no acceptance with the van- 
 quished. To this day no Southerner uses it 
 except by way of quotation, as in Rebellion 
 Record, and even in the North it was only by 
 degrees that " reb " replaced " secesh." " Se- 
 cession " was not a word with which to charm 
 the " old-line Whigs " of the South. They 
 would fight the battles of the secessionists, but 
 they would not bear their name. " The war of 
 secession " is still used a good deal in foreign 
 books, but it has no popular hold. " The 
 war," without any further qualification, served 
 the turn of Thucydides and Aristophanes for 
 the Peloponnesian war. It will serve ours, 
 let it be hoped, for some time to come. 
 
TIVO WARS 89 
 
 VI 
 
 A Confederate commentary on Thucydi- 
 des, on the scale of the remarks just made on 
 the name of the war, would outrun the lines of 
 this study. Let us pass from Thucydides to 
 the other contemporary chronicler who turns 
 out some sides of the " Doric war " about 
 which Thucydides is silent. The antique 
 Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe 
 over rubbishy details that are the delight of 
 the comic poet and the modern Muse of His- 
 tory. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute 
 account of the plague. That was a subject 
 which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, 
 and in his description he deigns to speak of the 
 " stuffy cabooses " into which the country 
 people were crowded when the Lacedaemo- 
 nians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes 
 touches the same chapter, he goes into pictur- 
 esque details about the rookeries and the wine- 
 jars inhabited by the newcomers. Diogenes' 
 jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no inven- 
 tion, and I have known less comfortable quar- 
 
90 TfVO WARn 
 
 ters than the hogshead which I occupied for a 
 day or two in one of my outings during the 
 war. 
 
 The plague was too serious a matter for 
 even Aristophanes to make fun of, and the 
 annahst of the war between the States will not 
 find any parallel in the chronicles of the South. 
 There was no such epidemic as still shows its 
 livid face in the pages of Thucydides and the 
 verses of Lucretius. True, some diseases of 
 which civic life makes light proved to be veri- 
 table scourges in camp. Measles was espe- 
 cially fatal to the country-bred, and for abject 
 misery I have never seen anything like those 
 cases of measles in which nostalgia had super- 
 vened. Nostalgia, which we are apt to sneer 
 at as a doctor's name for homesickness, and to 
 class with cachexy and borborygmus, was a 
 power for evil in those days, and some of our 
 finest troops were thinned out by it, noto- 
 riously the North Carolinians, whose attach- 
 ment to the soil of their State was as passion- 
 ate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, 
 Attic or Peloponnesian. 
 
TWO WARS 91 
 
 But the frightful mortality of the camp does 
 not strike the imagination so forcibly as does 
 the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman 
 cares to analyze hospital reports and compare 
 the medical with the surgical history of the 
 war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is 
 not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note 
 of Aristophanes, hunger, was the dominant 
 note of life in the Confederacy, civil as well as 
 military. The Confederate soldier was often 
 on short rations, but the civilian was not much 
 better off. I do not mean those whose larders 
 were swept by the besom of the invaders. 
 " Not a dust of flour, not an ounce of meat, 
 left in the house," was not an uncommon cry 
 along the line of march ; but it was heard else- 
 where, and I remember how I raked up ex- 
 amples of European and Asiatic frugality with 
 which to reinforce my editorials and hearten 
 my readers, — the scanty fare of the French 
 peasant, the raw oatmeal of the Scotch stone- 
 cutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss moun- 
 taineer, the Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the 
 Greek's handful of olives, and the Hindoo's 
 
92 TWO IVARS 
 
 handful of rice. The situation was often 
 gayly accepted. The not infrequent procla- 
 mation of fastdays always served as a text for 
 mutual banter, and starvation-parties were the 
 rule, social gatherings at which apples were 
 the chief refreshment. Strange streaks of 
 luxury varied this dead level of scant and plain 
 fare. The stock of fine wines, notably ma- 
 deiras, for which the South was famous, did 
 not all go to the hospitals. Here and there 
 provident souls had laid in boxes of tea and 
 bags of coffee that carried them through the 
 war, and the chief outlay was for sugar, which 
 rose in price as the war went on, until it almost 
 regained the poetical character it bore in 
 Shakespeare's time. Sugar, tea, and coffee 
 once compassed, the daintiness of old times 
 occasionally came back, and I have been as- 
 sured by those who brought gold with them 
 that Richmond was a paradise of cheap and 
 good living during the war, just as the United 
 States will be for foreigners when our cur- 
 rency becomes as abundant as it was in the last 
 years of the Confederacy. Gresham's law 
 
TWO JFARS 93 
 
 ought to be called Aristophanes' law. In all 
 matters pertaining to the sphere of civic life, 
 merry Aristophanes is of more value than 
 sombre Thucydides, and if the gospel of peace 
 which he preaches is chiefly a variation on the 
 theme of something to eat, small blame to him. 
 Critics have found fault with the appetite of 
 Odysseus as set forth by Homer. No Confed- 
 erate soldier will subscribe to the censure, 
 and there are no scenes in Aristophanes that 
 appeal more strongly to the memory of the 
 Southerner, civilian or soldier, than those in 
 which the pinch of war makes itself felt. 
 
 Farmers and planters made their moan dur- 
 ing the Confederacy, and doubtless they had 
 much to suffer. " Impressment " is not a 
 pleasant word at any time, and the tribute that 
 the countryman had to yield to the defense of 
 the South was ruinous, — the indirect tribute 
 as well as the direct. The farmers of Virginia 
 were much to be pitied. Their homes were 
 filled with refugee kinsfolk ; wounded Confed- 
 erates preferred the private house to the hos- 
 pital. Hungry soldiers and soldiers who fore- 
 
94 TIFO JVARS 
 
 Stalled the hunger of weeks to come, laid siege 
 to larder, smoke-house, spring-house. Pay, 
 often tendered, was hardly ever accepted. The 
 cavalryman was perhaps a trifle less welcome 
 than the infantryman, because of the capacious 
 horse and the depleted corn-bin, but few were 
 turned away. Yet there was the liberal earth, 
 and the farmer did not starve, as did the 
 wretched civilian whose dependence was a 
 salary, which did not advance with the rising 
 tide of the currency. The woes of the war 
 clerks in Richmond and of others are on rec- 
 ord, and important contributions have been 
 made to the economical history of the Confed- 
 erate States. I will not draw on these stores. 
 I will only tell of what I have lived, as de- 
 manded by the title of this paper. The income 
 of the professors of the University of Virginia 
 was nominally the same during the war that it 
 was before, but the purchasing power of the 
 currency steadily diminished. If it had not 
 been for a grant of woodland, we should have 
 frozen as well as starved during the last year 
 of the war, when the quest of food had become 
 
TWO JVARS 95 
 
 a serious matter. In our direst straits we had 
 not learned to dispense with household serv- 
 ice, and the household servants were never 
 stinted of their rations, though the masters 
 had to content themselves with the most 
 meagre fare. The farmers, generous enough 
 to the soldiers, were not overconslderate of 
 the non-combatants. Often the only way of 
 procuring our coarse food was by making con- 
 tracts to be paid after the war In legal cur- 
 rency, and sometimes payment In gold was ex- 
 acted. .The contracts were not always kept, 
 and the unfortunate civilian had to make new 
 contracts at an enhanced price. Before my 
 first campaign In 1861, I had bought a little 
 gold and silver, for use In case of capture, and 
 If It had not been for that precious hoard I 
 might not be writing this sketch. But despite 
 the experience of the airy gentlemen who 
 alighted In Richmond during the war, even 
 gold and silver would not always work won- 
 ders. Bacon and corned beef in scant measure 
 were the chief of our diet, and not always 
 easy to procure. I have ridden miles and 
 
96 TIVO JFARS 
 
 miles, with silver in my palm, seeking daintier 
 food for the women of my household, but in 
 vain. There was nothing to do except to 
 tighten one's belt, and to write editorials show- 
 ing up the selfishness of the farming class and 
 prophesying the improvement of the currency. 
 No wonder, then, that with such an expe- 
 rience a bookish Confederate should turn to 
 the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian 
 war with sympathetic interest. The Athe- 
 nians, it is true, were not blockaded as we were, 
 and the Athenian beaux and belles were not 
 reduced to the straits that every Confederate 
 man, assuredly every Confederate woman, can 
 remember. Our blockade-runners could not 
 supply the demands of our population. We 
 went back to first principles. Thorns v/ere for 
 pins, and dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. 
 Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible gar- 
 ments were made possible. Miracles of turn- 
 ing were performed, not only in coats, but even 
 in envelopes. Whoso had a dress coat gave it 
 to his womankind in order to make the body 
 of a riding-habit. Dainty feet were shod in 
 
TIVO IVARS 97 
 
 home-made foot-gear which one durst not call 
 shoes. Fairy fingers which had been stripped 
 of jewelled rings wore bone circlets carved by 
 idle soldiers. There were no more genuine 
 tears than those which flowed from the eyes of 
 the Southern women resident within the Fed- 
 eral lines when they saw the rig of their kins- 
 women, at the cessation of hostilities. And 
 all this grotesqueness, all this dilapidation, 
 was shot through by specimens of individual 
 finery, by officers who had brought back re- 
 splendent uniforms from beyond seas, by hero- 
 ines who had engineered themselves and their 
 belongings across the Potomac. 
 
 Of all this the scholar found nothing in the 
 records of the Peloponnesian war. The 
 women of Megara may have suffered, but 
 hardly the Corinthian women; and the Athe- 
 nian dames and damsels were as particular 
 about their shoes and their other cordwainer's 
 wares as ever. The story that Socrates and 
 his wife had but one upper garment between 
 them is a stock joke, as I have shown else- 
 where. " Who first started the notable jest 
 
98 TJVO WARS 
 
 It is impossible, at this distance of time, to dis- 
 cover, just as it is Impossible to tell whose 
 refined wit originated the conception of the 
 man who lies abed while his solitary shirt is in 
 the wash." The story was intended to illus- 
 trate, not the scarcity of raiment in the Pelo- 
 ponneslan war, but the abundance of philoso- 
 phy in the Socratic soul. All through that war 
 the women of Athens seem to have had as 
 much finery as was good for them. The pinch 
 was felt at other points, and there the Con- 
 federate sympathy was keen. 
 
 In The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the 
 hero, DiccEopolis, makes a separate peace on 
 his individual account with the Peloponneslans 
 and drives a brisk trade with the different 
 cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height 
 when the Boeotian appears with his ducks and 
 his eels. This ecstasy can best be understood 
 by those who have seen the capture of a sutler's 
 wagon by hungry Confederates ; and the fan- 
 tastic vision of a separate peace became a sober 
 reality at many points on the lines of the con- 
 tending parties. The Federal outposts twitted 
 
TIVO WARS 99 
 
 ours with their lack of coffee and sugar; ours 
 taunted the Federals with their lack of to- 
 bacco. Such gibes often led, despite the of- 
 ficers, to friendly interchange. So, for 
 instance, a toy-boat which bore the significant 
 name of a parasite familiar to both sides made 
 regular trips across the Rappahannock after 
 the dire struggle at Fredericksburg, and 
 promoted international exchange between 
 "Yank" and "Johnny Reb." The day- 
 dream of Aristophanes became a sober cer- 
 tainty. 
 
 The war was not an era of sweetness and 
 light. Perhaps sugar was the article most 
 missed. Maple sugar was of too limited pro- 
 duction to meet the popular need. Sorghum 
 was a horror then, Is a horror to remember 
 now. It set our teeth on edge and clawed off 
 the coats of our stomachs. In the army sugar 
 was doled out by pinches, and from the tables 
 of most citizens it was banished altogether. 
 There were those who solaced themselves with 
 rye coffee and sorghum molasses regardless of 
 ergot and acid, but nobler souls would not be 
 
TJVO WARS 
 
 untrue to their gastronomic ideal. Necessity 
 is one thing, mock luxury another. If there 
 had been honey enough, we should have been 
 on the antique basis; for honey was the sugar 
 of antiquity, and all our cry for sugar was but 
 an echo of the cry for honey in the Pelopon- 
 nesian war. Honey was then, as it is now, 
 one of the chief products of Attica. It is not 
 likely that the Peloponnesians took the trouble 
 to burn over the beds of thyme that gave Attic 
 honey its peculiar flavor, but the Peloponne- 
 sians would not have been soldiers if they had 
 not robbed every beehive on the march; and, 
 sad to relate, the Athenians must have been 
 forced to import honey. When Dicaeopolis 
 makes the separate peace mentioned above, 
 he gets up a feast of good things, and there is 
 a certain unction in the tone with which he 
 orders the basting of sausage-meat with honey, 
 as one should say mutton and currant jelly. In 
 The Peace, when War appears and proceeds 
 to make a salad, he says, — 
 
 I'll pour some Atlic honey in. 
 
TWO JFARS 
 
 Whereupon Trygccus cries out, — 
 
 Ho, there, I warn you use some other honey. 
 Be sparing of the Attic. That costs sixpence. 
 
 Attic honey has the ring of New Orleans 
 molasses; " those molasses," as the article was 
 often called, with an admiring plural of 
 majesty. 
 
 But a Confederate student, like the rest of 
 his tribe, could more readily renounce sweet- 
 ness than light, and light soon became a serious 
 matter. The American demands a flood of 
 light, and wonders at the English don who 
 pursues his investigations by the glimmer of 
 two candles. It was hard to go back to primi- 
 tive tallow dips. Lard might have served, 
 but it was too precious to be used in lamps. 
 The new devices were dismal, such as the vile 
 stuff called terebene, which smoked and smelt 
 more than it illuminated, such as the wax 
 tapers which were coiled round bottles that 
 had seen better days. Many preferred the old 
 way, and read by flickering pine-knots, which 
 cost many an old reader his eyes. 
 
TWO WARS 
 
 Now, tallow dips, lard, wax tapers, tere- 
 bene, pine-knots, were all represented in the 
 Peloponnesian war by oil. Oil, one of the 
 great staples of Attica, became scarcer as the 
 war went on. " A bibulous wick " was a sin- 
 ner against domestic economy; to trim a lamp 
 and hasten combustion was little short of a 
 crime. Management in the use of oil — other- 
 wise considered the height of niggardliness — 
 was the rule, and could be all the more readily 
 understood by the Confederate student when 
 he reflected that oil was the great lubricant as 
 well ; that it was the Attic butter, and to a con- 
 siderable extent the Attic soap. Under the 
 Confederacy butter mounted to the financial 
 milky way, not to be scaled of ordinary men, 
 .and soap was also a problem. Modern chem- 
 ists have denied the existence of true soap in 
 antiquity. The soap-suds that got into the 
 eyes of the Athenian boy on the occasion of 
 his Saturday-night scrubbing were not real 
 soap-suds, but a kind of lye used for desperate 
 cases. The oil-flask was the Athenian's soap- 
 box. No wonder, then, that oil was exceeding 
 
TWO WARS 103 
 
 precious in the Peloponnesian war, and no 
 wonder that all these little details of daily 
 hardship come back even now to the old stu- 
 dent when he reopens his Aristophanes. No 
 wonder that the ever present Peloponnesian 
 war will not suffer him to forget those four 
 years in which the sea of trouble rose higher 
 and higher. 
 
NOTES 
 
1865 
 
 1915 
 
NOTES 
 
 (The marginal numbers refer to the pages of the text) 
 
 This article was prepared (in 1891) at the 7 
 instance of Mr. Horace Scudder, the editor of the 
 Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series of 
 papers to be written by men who by virtue of educa- 
 tion, intellectual endowment and social position were 
 supposed to be high and lifted up above vulgar pas- 
 sion and prejudice. The business of these elect gen- 
 tlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them 
 to an active participation in so rude an affair as war. 
 After publication in the Atlantic, the essays were to 
 be gathered into a book and Mr. Scudder fancied 
 that thus collected they would prove a valuable addi- 
 tion to the history of the times. The series stopped at 
 the third number and the book was never published. 
 Whilst I did not concur in Mr. Scudder's view, I 
 accepted the compliment and began to write with a 
 lighter heart than I bore as I went on. At the end I 
 was dipping my pen into something red, into some- 
 thing briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to 
 have been contagious, for some years afterwards 
 ( 1899) Mr. William Archer, in his America To- 
 day (p. 142), wrote as follows: 
 
 " I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had 7 
 given expression to the sentiment of his race and gen- 
 
io8 NOTES 
 
 eration in an essay — one might almost say an elegy — 
 so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that 
 it moved me w^ell-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 sur- 
 prise, and I had to pull m3'self sharply together." 
 
 9 I had a similar experience some years after I 
 wrote this paper, w^hen I was spending the summer at 
 Westport on Lake Champlain. Wandering far 
 enough off into the country to lose myself — for me 
 no unfamiliar feat — I joined a man who was driving 
 his cows to "town and in my talk with him it turned 
 out that he had been through the Valley campaign on 
 the other side, and together we recalled encounters 
 and scenes that were not recorded in the histories, 
 insignificant skirmishes — significant enough to those 
 who were killed and maimed. Who remembers the 
 little brush at Weir's Cave, where the Confederates 
 came near bagging General Merritt? I have not 
 been allowed to forget it these fifty years. 
 
 10 Apropos of this passage my friend and classmate 
 of the Princeton days. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson, 
 told me that one hot day riding to meet a fight 
 that would make the day still hotter, he stopped at a 
 roadside cabin and asked for a drink of water. The 
 woman who brought it, brought it in a broken and 
 cracked mug, and he assured me that every ramifica- 
 tion of those cracks was indelibly impressed on his 
 
NOTES 109 
 
 brain. He could have drawn a map of the mug. 
 Experiences like these help us to understand the de- 
 tails of the Homeric narrative, and to me there is 
 nothing unnatural in Homer's mention of the wash- 
 ing troughs that Hector saw as he fled before the face 
 of Achilles (II. 22, 154 foil.). 
 
 The fight under Early, to which I refer, was 10 
 fought July 24, 1864. It was a brilliant feat of arms 
 and has left other memories than those recorded. 
 As A. D. C. to General Gordon I gave General 
 Terry, one of the brigade commanders, the order to 
 advance, and I still hear the cry of one of the men 
 who had been in a disastrous affair a few weeks 
 before — the fight in which Gen. W. E. Jones fell. 
 " This hain't no New Hope, Gineral." I still see the 
 light of battle on the faces of the men as they went 
 forward. My blood tingles as I write. 
 
 " Deboshed " is a reminiscence of an essay of Low- 1 1 
 ell's on Reconstruction, in which he makes light of 
 Southern claims to aristocracy. 
 
 General Lee always referred to the enemy as 12 
 " those people." John S. Wise, Atlantic Monthly, 
 April, 1894. Wise is one ear-witness among many, 
 and I thought of General Lee, as well as of Dante, 
 when I wrote in my Introductory Essay to Pindar, 
 xxxviii : 
 
 A word, an epithet, and the picture is there, drawn with 
 a stroke. In the second Olympian P. is telling of the 
 
no NOTES 
 
 blessedness of the souls that have overcome. When he 
 comes to the damned, he calls them simply " those." — 
 Non ragioniam di lor. 
 
 12 Lieut. Gen. John B. Gordon, Reminiscences, p. 
 422. Perhaps I may be pardoned for adding that 
 when I read the passage in which niention is made of 
 my service on his staff, I wrote to my chief, whose own 
 bearing on the battlefield was an inspiration, that no 
 tribute to my Greek scholarship I had received or 
 could receive would ever be more cherished, if so 
 much; and I cited the famous epitaph inscribed on 
 the tomb of Aeschylus at Gela. No mention is made 
 of his great tragedies. It is simply recorded that 
 Aeschylus had quitted himself like a man in the 
 Persian war. 
 
 aXKrjV 8' (.vhoKifiov M.apa6oiViov aAaos av etTTOi 
 
 In these Notes I am furnishing a key to the per- 
 sons referred to in the article. There is a Confederate 
 graveyard near my old home, the University of Vir- 
 ginia, 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 
 
NOTES 111 
 
 furnish food for the living, and so it was sadly re- 
 solved rather than leave these ghastly and decaying 
 reminders of individual suffering and sacrifice to 
 level the v^^hole 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. Wil- 
 liamson, 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 regi- 
 ment. 
 
 A revival of religion to counterbalance, as it were, 13 
 the revival of brutality, is a recurring phenomenon 
 of great wars. The tide of skepticism in Greece was 
 checked by the Persian War, and even to-day the 
 French army shews a return to the Man of Sorrows, 
 whose effigy had been removed from all public build- 
 ings. 
 
 The Princeton College room-mate who fell on the 16 
 1 8th of July was James Knox Lee, a distant rela- 
 tive of the great soldier ; the other was Peyton Ran- 
 
112 NOTES 
 
 DOLPH Harrison, of Martinsburg (W.) Va., repre- 
 sentative of the oldest families in the old state. His 
 brother, Dabney Carr Harrison (Princeton, '48), 
 another close friend, took service in the Confederate 
 army, first as chaplain, then as captain of a company, 
 and was killed at Fort Donelson which, as I painfully 
 remember, was at first reported as a Confederate 
 victory. 
 
 17 Thersites — strange that Schiller in his Siegeslied 
 should have forgotten it — never lived to return. 
 According to the Scholia Vetera on Lycophron, 999, 
 this monkey-shaped (TndrjKOfioptfiO'i) creature was 
 slain by Achilles for gouging out the eyes of Pen- 
 thesilea's maid, with whom Achilles had fallen in 
 love. A better point was made by Ovid, that master 
 of points (Am. 2, 6, 41) : Tristia Phylacidae Ther- 
 sites funera vidit. 
 
 18 The French artist was Guillaume, who came to 
 this country shortly before the war. In the picture 
 to which I refer. General Lee was the main figure. 
 Guillaume's picture of the Surrender at Appomat- 
 tox bore evidence of minute study of every detail of 
 that historic event. 
 
 19 The toothbrush was a badge of culture on both 
 sides, as the following passage shows : 
 
 " ' Light marching order ' implies that a soldier 
 may carry upon his person only a few of the more 
 obvious necessities of life and no luxuries save 
 
NOTES 113 
 
 tobacco. But a soldier must be clad even to sixty 
 rounds of ball cartridge. Small wonder is it then, if 
 only the lightest toothbrush drawn through the but- 
 tonhole of his blouse must suffice as an epitome of 
 the refinements of life. Many of the victories of our 
 adversaries were fairly attributed to the scantier attire 
 and lighter marching order of the men." — Atlantic 
 Monthly, May, 1893, p. 214. 
 
 David Ramsay, grandson of the historian and 21 
 biographer of Washington of the same name, my 
 fellow-student at Gottingen in 1852, fell after heroic 
 services at Battery Wagner in 1863. What the state, 
 what the country lost in the promise of that rare man, 
 this is not the place to rehearse. Scholar, wit, em- 
 bodiment of all the inherited social graces of what we 
 once called " the better days," delightful companion, 
 devoted and generous friend, he is still in memory 
 part of my life. 
 
 For Pericles' budget, see Thuc. 2, 13. 24 
 
 Thuc. I, 141: TTjV avTrjv SvvaTai BovXwcnv rj re 
 fifylar-q koX eAa^taT?^ StKattoat? a-no twv ojxoLiiiV irpo 
 SiKr]<i Tots TTcAa? eTnTaaaoixevr). 
 
 The friend was the late A. Marshall Elliott, 26 
 Professor of Romance Languages in the Johns Hop- 
 kins, whose life of study was matched by a life of 
 adventure. 
 
 Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the 27 
 Sea — I was riveted to my bed at the time — were not, 
 
114 NOTES 
 
 are not so philosophic. See the narrative in Bradley 
 Johnson's Life of Joseph E. Johnston. Nor was I 
 so philosophical when I followed the raiders of 1863, 
 nor when I saw the fires that lighted up the Valley 
 of Virginia in 1864, and that was before the syste- 
 matic devastation recorded by Merritt, who carried 
 it out. " When our army," says Merritt (Battles 
 and Leaders, 4, 512), " commenced its return march, 
 the cavalry was deployed across the Valley, burning, 
 destroying or taking nearly everything of value, or 
 likely to be of value to the enemy. It was a severe 
 measure, and appears severer now in the lapse of time, 
 but it was necessary as a measure of war." The plea 
 of 1864 was the same as the plea of 191 4. In a vivid 
 sketch of Sherman's March, Prof. Henry E. Shep- 
 herd, whose North Carolina home, Fayetteville, 
 lay in the track of the invaders (Battles and Leaders, 
 4, 678) winds up by saying that the portrayal of it 
 " baffles all the resources of literary art and the afflu- 
 ence even of our English speech," and those who 
 know Professor Shepherd's resources and affluence 
 will recognize the desperate nature of the task. As 
 for the Valley, I have before me a protest against the 
 erection of a monument to Sheridan, in which the 
 writer gives an itemized account of the havoc inflicted 
 on the property of non-combatants in the County of 
 Rockingham alone. The protest reminds me of my 
 youthful surprise when I first saw the statue of Tilly 
 
NOTES lis 
 
 in the Feldherrnhalle at Munich. Somehow I had 
 not thought well of Tilly before. But all estimates 
 of military exigencies must be revised by the light of 
 the new standards of the time in which we live. 
 However, as this note goes to the printer, I am made 
 aware of an article by Maj. John Bigelow, U. S. A., 
 published in the N. Y. Times of June 13, 1915, in 
 which the author musters the evidence of the be- 
 haviour of Sherman's men. 1864 seems not to have 
 been so very far behind 19 1 4 after all. 
 
 " The hate of Celt to Saxon, and the contempt of 28 
 Saxon for Celt, simply paled and grew expression- 
 less when compared with the contempt and hate felt 
 by the Southron towards the Yankee anterior to our 
 Civil War and while it was in progress. No 
 Houyhnhnms ever looked on Yahoo with greater 
 aversion; better, far better death than further con- 
 tamination through political association." — C. F. 
 Adams, Trans-Atlantic Historical Solidarity, p. 176. 
 
 One recalls Halleck's Connecticut : 
 
 Virginians look 
 Upon them with as favorable eyes 
 As Gabriel the devil in paradise. 
 
 Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been 29 
 discarded. Mr. Paxson, Professor of American His- 
 tory in the University of Wisconsin, has devoted a 
 volume to shew that while the South was defending 
 an impossible cause, it could not hold different views 
 
ii6 NOTES 
 
 — that these were the unavoidable result of environ- 
 ment and natural resources. How different is all 
 this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted 
 from its issue of April 17, 1865. 
 
 " Every possible atrocity appertains to this rebel- 
 lion. There is nothing whatever that its leaders have 
 scrupled at. Wholesale massacres and torturings, 
 wholesale starvation of prisoners, firing of great 
 cities, piracies of the cruelest kind, persecution of the 
 most hideous character and of vast extent, and finally 
 assassination in high places — whatever is inhuman, 
 whatever is brutal, whatever is fiendish, these men 
 have resorted to. They will leave behind names so 
 black, and the memory of deeds so infamous, that the 
 execration of the slaveholders' rebellion will be 
 eternal." 
 
 True, " slaveholders' rebellion " still survives here 
 and there. So William Harrison Clarke, in The 
 Civil Service Law, Preface, says: 
 
 " Parties, when they strive solely for principle, are 
 the life of a nation ; but when they strive solely for 
 pelf, patronage, and power they are its death. Even 
 corrupt party leaders may destroy a republic; some- 
 times even ambitious leaders may do so. Did a nation 
 ever make a narrower escape than did our own during 
 the slaveholders' rebellion? Who but ambitious 
 party leaders caused that rebellion ? " 
 31 " Vous etes de France, mais je suis de Bretagne." 
 
NOTES 117 
 
 " Eh bien ! Ce n'est pas le meme pays." " Mais c'est 
 la meme patrie." La femme se borna a repondre, 
 " Je suis de Siscoingnard." — V. Hugo, Quatre- 
 Vingt-Treize. 
 
 " The brandished sword of her coat of arms would 33 
 have shown what manner of placida quies she would 
 have ensued." The proof-reader of the Atlantic not 
 being over-familiar with the Massachusetts coat of 
 arms {Ense petit placidam sub libertate quiet em) or 
 Scriptural language, substituted for the foregoing 
 what one reads in the article as printed in the Atlantic 
 (p. 82) : " The brandished sword would have shown 
 what manner of placida quies would have ensued 
 
 The wish that South Carolina had been scuttled 33 
 is the wish of Chilon for Cythera. Herod. 7, 235. 
 
 This impression, erroneous as it seems, was contra- 34 
 vened in a letter from Mr. Wm. A. Courtenay, 
 Mayor and historian of Charleston, who wrote to 
 me : " The W. L. I. was named for George Washing- 
 ton. The 22d of February was celebrated as the anni- 
 versary from 1807-92 (thirty years ago in Fort 
 Sumter under fire), and the connection of the corps 
 with Col. Wm. Washington was not until April, 
 1827, on the presentation of the Eutaw flag to the 
 corps by his widow." However, the memory of the 
 lesser Washington is still kept alive, and the William 
 Washington house is still one of the show places of 
 9 
 
ii8 NOTES 
 
 my native cit}'. As a further illustration of local 
 patriotism I may add that the Charleston boys were 
 more excited over the 28th of June, the battle of 
 Fort Moultrie, than over the national Fourth of July. 
 40 " I think it is not unsafe to assert that nowhere 
 did the original spirit of State Sovereignty and alle- 
 giance to the State then survive in greater intensity 
 and more unquestioning form than in Virginia — the 
 * Old Dominion ' — the mother of States and of 
 Presidents. 
 
 " State pride, a sense of individuality, has imme- 
 morially entered more largely and more intensely 
 into Virginia and Virginians than into any other 
 section or community of the United States. Only in 
 South Carolina and among Carolinians, on the trans- 
 Atlantic continent, was a somewhat similar sense of 
 locality and obligation of descent to be found. 
 There was in it a flavour of the Hidalgo, or of the 
 pride which the MacGregors and Campbells took in 
 their clan and country. In other words, the Virgin- 
 ian and Carolinian had in the middle of the last cen- 
 tury, not to any appreciable extent, undergone 
 nationalization." — Chas, Francis Adams, Trans- 
 Atlantic Historical Solidarity p. 137. 
 
 I have referred to Mr. Adams repeatedly because 
 as a man of my time and nearly of my age he under- 
 stood the difficulty of moving the point of view fifty 
 years backward. 
 
NOTES 119 
 
 In these days of mutual understanding and mutual 41 
 forgiveness, I shall hardly be believed when I say that 
 as late as 1885, twenty years after the close of the 
 war, some of my Northern friends who had been 
 taught the duty of " making treason odious " advised 
 me to suppress or modify the following passage in my 
 Introduction to Pindar (p. xii) as savoring of dis- 
 loyalty : 
 
 The man whose love for his country knows no local 
 root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor 
 abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went 
 honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason 
 to Medize before there was a Greece, and the Greece that 
 came out of the Persian war was a very different thing 
 from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and 
 on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another 
 aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in 
 the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic 
 patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid 
 historical vision. That Pindar should have had an intense 
 admiration of the New Greece, should have felt the im- 
 pulse of the grand period that followed Salamis and 
 Plataia, should have appreciated the woe that would have 
 come on Greece had the Persians been successful, and 
 should have seen the finger of God in the new evolution of 
 Hellas — all this is not incompatible with an attitude dur- 
 ing the Persian war that those who see the end and do 
 not understand the beginning may not consider respectable. 
 
 Of many consentient utterances I select this one by 44 
 a prominent Southerner : 
 
I20 NOTES 
 
 " The Confederate soldiers did not go to war to 
 perpetuate slavery. Most of them never owned a 
 slave, and our hero, Gen. Robert E. Lee, said that 
 if he owned every one of the slaves in the South he 
 would give them for the preservation of the Union. 
 It was not for the slaves they fought, but for prin- 
 ciple, for their homes and native land." — T. F. 
 GooDE, Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893. 
 
 43 " When, within our memory, some flippant Sena- 
 tor [Hammond] wished to taunt the people of this 
 country by calling them ' the mudsills of society,' he 
 paid them ignorantly a true praise ; for good men are 
 as the green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the 
 beds of the rivers are, the foundation and flooring 
 and sills of the State." — R. W. Emerson, Atlantic 
 Monthly, January, 1892, p. 33. 
 
 In an oration delivered before the United Confed- 
 erate Veterans, June 14, 1904, Randolph Harrison 
 
 ^ McKiM, a former pupil of mine and a cousin of my 
 college mates mentioned on page 16, says: "The 
 political head of the Confederacy entered upon the 
 war, foreseeing (February, 1861) the eventual loss 
 of his slaves, and the military head of the Confederacy 
 actually set his slaves free before the war was half 
 over." — The Motives and Aims of the Soldiers of the 
 South in the Civil War, p. 28. The whole oration 
 confirms the positions taken in this article. 
 
 49 A recent historian of the war, Paxson (The 
 
NOTES 121 
 
 Civil War, p. 248), says: " Northern revenge in the 
 guise of the preservation of the dearly won Union 
 v^^as worse for the South than the war." 
 
 Charles Francis Adams, /. c, p. 165: "Out- 
 rages, and humiliations worse than outrage, of the 
 period of so-called reconstruction but actual servile 
 domination." 
 
 L. c, p. 173: " It may not unfairly be doubted 
 whether a people prostrate after civil conflict has ever 
 received severer measure than was dealt out to the 
 so-called reconstructed Confederate States during the 
 years immediately succeeding the close of strife. 
 That the policy inspired at the time a feeling of bitter 
 resentment in the South was no cause for wonder." 
 To me the cause for wonder was is and that a Vir- 
 ginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten 
 the bitterness, as is evinced by the following passage 
 in an oration delivered shortly after the publication 
 of this article: 
 
 " No such peace as our peace ever followed imme- 
 diately upon such a war as our war. The exhausted 
 South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous 
 North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely 
 died away when not only peace, but peace and good- 
 will were re-established, and the victors and the 
 vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages 
 of war and advancing the common welfare of the 
 whole country, as if the old relations, social, com- 
 
123 NOTES 
 
 mercial and political between the people of the two 
 sections had never been disturbed." — Charles Mar- 
 shall, of Lee's Staff, on Grant, May 30, 1892. 
 49 It was out of the bitterness of this reconstruction 
 period that I penned the following sonnet to the 
 memory of John M. Daniel, editor of the Rich- 
 mond Examiner, to which paper I contributed more 
 than threescore editorial articles during the year 
 
 1863-4: 
 
 DIS MANIBUS 
 
 I. M. D. 
 
 We miss your pen of fire, whose cloven tongue 
 Illum'd the good and blasted what was base. 
 We miss you, fearless fighter for our race. 
 
 Your arrows words, your bow a will highstrung. 
 
 We miss you, for you tower'd from among 
 The herd of writers with that careless grace 
 That springs from undisputed strength. Your place 
 
 Is vacant still. Your bow is still uphung. 
 
 'Tis well. This were no time for you. The strings 
 Of your proud heart forefelt the blow and broke; 
 And when you died, 'twas better thus to die 
 
 Than live to see this swarm of crawling things, 
 And burn with words that must remain unspoke 
 Where " art is tongue-tied by authority." 
 
 49 The school was the Episcopal High School near 
 Alexandria, Virginia; the principal, the late L. M. 
 Blackford. 
 
 50 Ov. Her. 3, 106: 
 
 According to Ovid, Briseis was a non-Greek. 
 
NOTES 123 
 
 Littera, she writes (v. 2), vix bene barbarica Graeca 
 notata manu. According to recent authorities, she 
 was a Lesbian girl. We know from Homer that 
 Achilles was musical as Odysseus was not. 
 
 Tov 8' eupov <f>piva repTro/xevov cjiopfityyt Xiytirj, 
 Ka\f, SaiSaAe?/, eVt 8' apyvpeov ^vyov rjev. 
 —II. 9, 185-6. 
 
 Lesbos was an island consecrated to music from 50 
 the days of Orpheus, and we can imagine the lovers 
 singing together and Achilles solacing his loneliness 
 by chanting to Patroclus the praises of his lost love. 
 
 The valued friend was and is Archer Anderson, so 
 of Richmond, Virginia. 
 
 " Why is it that wherever one goes in all parts of 51 
 England one always finds — thoroughly as I believe 
 the institution of slavery is detested in this country — 
 every man sympathizing strongly with the Southern- 
 ers, and wishing them all success? We do so for this 
 reason . . . Englishmen love liberty, and the South- 
 erner is fighting, not only for his life, but for that 
 which is dearer than life, for liberty; he is fighting 
 against one of the most grinding, one of the most 
 galling, one of the most irritating attempts to estab- 
 lish tyrannical government that ever disgraced the 
 history of the World." — G. W. Bentinck, quoted 
 by Chas. Francis Adams, /. c, p. 1 1 1. 
 
124 NOTES 
 
 SS The ambitious title, " Two Wars," has been re- 
 stored to the headline by typographical pressure. 
 
 S3 History is philosophy teaching by examples. Ps. 
 Dionys. xi, 2 (399R) : Icrropia <^iAoo-o^ia iarlv Ik 
 irapaSeLyfiaTuiV. 
 
 58 John Augustin Washington. 
 
 61 Spangenberg was a literary " bummer." The 
 
 real author was one Andreas Guarna of Salerno. 
 
 See Frankel, Zeitschrift fiir Litteraturgeschichte, 
 
 xiii, 242. 
 61 Pindar's words are : yXvKv 8^ aveCpoiai TroXefioi. 
 
 63 Terror and Affright, II. 15, 19: ws (fxiTo Kai p 
 iTTTTOv? KeAcTo Ailfiov T£ ^6/3ov Tc I ^exT/vvfitv. Thcsc 
 horses of Ares furnished the names Deimos and 
 Phobos for the two satellites of the planet Mars. 
 Such traces of familiarity with the classics are refresh- 
 ing to one who lives in an age when allusion is under 
 the ban. How many appreciate the appropriateness of 
 the Baltimore County Timonium, named after Mark 
 Antony's growlery in Plutarch? Not many of the 
 sports who some years ago laid their bets on Irex 
 recalled the line of the Odys ey 13, 86: 
 
 ouSe Kev iLprj$ 
 KipKO^ ofiapTrjaucv l\a<^p6TaT0<i ireTerjvwv. 
 
 64 The Scandinavian scholar, Jespersen. 
 66 Ach. 527. 
 
 68 The Peloponnesians called it the Attic War 
 (Thuc. 5, 28, 3) ; the lonians the Doric War. In a 
 
NOTES 125 
 
 recent number of the Jahrbiicher, xxxv, No. 2 
 (1915), there is a discussion of the name of the 
 Peloponnesian War apropos of the present " World- 
 war," or, if you choose, " Wirrwarr." For our war 
 the misnomer " The Civil War " has been adopted as 
 the official designation. 
 
 According to fama clamosa, Winfield was origi- 74 
 nally Wingfield, a very common Virginian name. 
 The classical parallel of Tromes and Atrometos will 
 suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes. 
 Dem. 18, 129. 
 
 Thuc. 7, 5, 2: ovK e(f)r] TO ajxapTrjixa Ikuvwv dAA* 77 
 kavTov ytviaOat. 
 
 Tyrtaeus Fr. 8, 23: 81 
 
 Tjhrj XiVKOV e^ovTa Kaprj ttoAiov re yevciov 
 
 dvjJLOV aTTOTTVeiOVT' aXKl/JiOV iv KOVLTj. 
 
 The first line is taken from II. 22, 74. I do not 
 continue the citation because the Homeric passage 
 has not been subjected to the refining process of Mr. 
 Murr.4y's redactors of the Iliad. 
 
 The Bloody Angle, May 12, 1864, an unforgct-82 
 table date. 
 
 Girl in the Carpathians and Scholar in Politics 83 
 are titles of current publications taken at random 
 to illustrate the personal element and its unfitness. 
 
 aKovwi Pilaxivri; Dem. 18, 112. My Millwood 85 
 friend was a scholar of the old times and would not 
 
126 NOTES 
 
 have paused to consider whether the omission of w 
 was due to scorn of Aeschines or dread of the hiatus. 
 
 92 Gresham's law was anticipated by Aristophanes, 
 Ran. 718, foil. 
 
 97 As is well known, the Greek had a mania for 
 shoes. For women's shoes see Av. Lys. 427. For 
 other cordwainer's wares, /. c, 1 10. 
 101 Almost as touching as the pluralis maiestaticus of 
 " those molasses " is the Scythian archer's personifica- 
 tion of honey as 'Attikos yufAt?, Ar. Thesm. 1 192. 
 
 Postscript. — The bulk of the Notes would have been 
 greatly augmented, if I had undertaken to explain 1892 as 
 well as 1865 to the children of 1915. In 1892 Mr. Car- 
 negie (p. 19) was not yet the benefactor of the outworn 
 members of my own profession, and Mr. Charles Francis 
 Adams was declaiming against the College Fetich to which 
 I have borne a life long allegiance. To some of my own 
 allusions I have lost the clue and find myself in the cate- 
 gory with which Browning has made the world familiar. 
 
CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS 
 OF THE NORTHERN PRESS 
 
CONTEMPORANEOUS OPINIONS OF 
 THE NORTHERN PRESS 
 
 " A poetical view of the Southern cause in the 
 Civil War." — The Nation, January, 1892. 
 
 " An attempt on the part of Professor Gildersleeve 
 to make the Creed of the Old South seem a little less 
 absurd than it has for twenty years past." — Spring- 
 field Republican. 
 
 " Professor B. L. Gildersleeve states the Creed of 
 the Old South in a way to make every Northern 
 man respect those who took up arms like General 
 Lee under the conviction that the State had the first 
 claim upon their allegiance. The writer would have 
 strengthened this sympathy, however, did he show 
 that he had been docile to the stern teacher, expe- 
 rience, and had come to reject the parochial creed of 
 state rights." — Literary World, January 2, 1892. 
 
 " I hope it is not improper to add that wherever, 
 in all Christendom, there is hearty appreciation of 
 profound learning allied to conscience and to a re- 
 fined life, the recent paper of the Johns Hopkins pro- 
 fessor of philology will be taken as conclusive proof 
 that good and true and able men could uphold the 
 cause of the Confederacy even in arms, and never 
 doubt in their hearts that they were right." — Jacob 
 DoLSON Cox, " Why the Men of '61 Fought for the 
 Union," Atlantic Monthly, March, 1892.