A Sketch in Black and White Ii

SOME five years before I was born — my mother has often told me the story — there came to our country home, one Sunday morning, a black woman of unmixed blood. She was dressed in her Sunday clothes: homespun dress, neat white apron, the traditional handkerchief tied around her head, concealing the hair, and stout shoes. There was a general air of cleanness about her. Her face was good and pleasant to look at; but she seemed weak, not to say feeble, and asked permission to sit down at once. She was evidently far advanced in that state in which “women love to be who love their lords; ” only, poor thing, she had no lord, except the Allseeing One above. My mother had seen her before, and knew her. Her name was Elsie. She belonged to a neighbor of ours some three miles up the creek, — a kind master enough in things material, but a rough diamond, a cursing, swearing, noisy fellow, with no wife, and no white woman on his premises. His people took their tone from him. It was a godless place. The woman, Elsie, had no kith or kin among his negroes. The father of her child, a turbulent fellow, had been sold to go south, and the woman was alone and half sick. She had come to beg my mother to ask my father to buy her. — “Mr. Briggs will sell me cheap,” she said, “for I ain’t wuth much to him, an’ I won’t never be well no mo’.” She went on to plead that she dreaded to die in that heathenish place, and to leave the expected baby to such bringing up. She had come down to our place once or twice on Sundays to visit some of our people, and had seen my mother assemble the black children under the big mulberry tree, and teach them from the Bible and the catechism. She wanted her baby among them. “Oh, Miss Kate,” she said, “beg Mr. Clayton to buy me. I won’t cost much, an’ I kin sew an’ do housework, an’ Momma Sally say I kin stay in her cabin; an’ my baby, when he come, will be wuth money to you, for he daddy was a big, strong man.” It was curious, my mother said, how she took it for granted that the unborn child was to be a boy. My mother was greatly moved, and yet she could not see her way. “I am very sorry for you, Elsie,” she began, “but” — “Oh, Miss Kate, Miss Kate,” broke in the woman. It was too much for my mother’s tender heart. She promised to do all she could, and Elsie departed, with the understanding that she was to come again the next Sunday. It could have but one ending, with my mother enlisted on the woman’s side. My father demurred. He had obligations to meet. He had more negroes already than he wanted. He could not buy all the women in the country who were dissatisfied with their surroundings, and so forth. But in the end, he bought Elsie.

In due time a little black roly-poly of a baby put in an appearance in Momma Sally’s cabin. It was a boy. The Pickwick Papers were then in course of publication, and my father said he should be called Samuel Weller, and under that name he was duly baptized in the parish church, my father and mother and the old negro sexton being his sponsors. The mother did not live long. The little black flourished, and grew apace. My mother, who had always a peculiar feeling for him, and who feared that his mother’s feeble condition might show itself in the child, had special attention paid to his food and quarters. As he advanced in the walking and talking age, she kept him a good deal about her, and, very early in his life, began to instruct him in the church catechism and other matters pertaining to his soul’s health. Finding his little black noddle quick to apprehend, she violated the law of the land by teaching him his letters at odd times, and showed him how to make them with a pencil on a slate. As soon as he could toddle, he fell into a way of following my mother about like a little black dog, and as he grew older his attachment for her increased, until he came to regard her as a kind of goddess; as well he might.

When he was some six or seven years old, my sister took a fancy to him. She made a kind of page of him, and dressed him fancifully in that character. He was an honest and truthful little devil, as negroes go. That is to say, he never stole, and, except under considerable pressure, would not lie. But withal he was careless, negligent, and an idler, as all negroes are, in a state of nature, and my sister had sometimes occasion to punish him. My mother counseled her to take a switch to him, but she said she could not. “Besides,” said my sister, “whip my page!” It was a thing not to be thought of. But something had to be done, and at last old Mrs. Winter, an English lady of the neighborhood, suggested out of her experience a mode of punishment which, so far as I know, nobody ever heard of before or since, and which my sister adopted. She made Sam take assafœtida whenever he misbehaved, the theory being that the drug was wholesome and could do no harm, while its detestable smell and taste were supposed to make it a sufficiently severe punishment for a child. And so it appeared to be. Sam stood in mortal terror of his dose, and sputtered and cried, and made much ado. But my dear sister had forgotten about the tobacco habit and such like acquired tastes, and it never occurred to her that Sam might acquire the assafœtida habit. But he did. The little rascal came to love the stuff, and would commit the offense for the sake of getting it. He cleverly kept up his sputtering resistance, and so deceived his mistress that she would not have found him out, if his own sense of the fun of the thing had not betrayed him. This little episode, after all, is not so remarkable as I thought it at the time; for I afterwards met more than one person who had a liking for the drug, and my Massachusetts friend tells me it is an ingredient in sundry fancy dishes.

In the meantime, I had been born, and, at the time of this novel use of the drug aforesaid, had attained the age of about two years. A year or two later, when I was old enough to get about, my sister resigned Sam to me, and he was made my special attendant and guardian. We played together in the white sand, and round about the orchard and grove. As I advanced in age, we made voyages of discovery up the creek and into the woods. We had many sage conversations, and Sam told me many stories of the Uncle Remus sort, which he had picked up from his elders; and sang for my edification Ethiopian melodies, generally of a humorous character. As, for example, with strong accent on “my:” —

He sung out these words pretty much as a young cock might crow, and generally followed them with a double summerset (we did not call it “somersault”) in the sand. I listened to this profane ditty with doubtful ears. “Sam,” said I, “I don’t think that’s a good song.”

“Why not?” says Sam. “Missis say you mus n’ take de Lord’s name in vain, dat’s all. Dam don’t mean noth’n, an’ it sound putty.”

This last word he pronounced, not as you call the stuff you put in glass with, but “ as in “put.” I could not deny that it sounded “putty,” and we kept the matter, as we did many controverted points, for future reference to my mother.

I suppose that the experience of every person who has left the home of his childhood before he was grown, and tries to recall it again to his memory after many years, is about the same, as regards the bigness of things. The distances seem greater, the grounds more extensive, the streams wider. Everything seems on a larger scale than the reality. By the same trick of the human mind, the years of one’s childhood seem longer, and more in number. My imagination draws the picture of a long succession of happy summers in “that sweet and blessed country,” instead of the four brief years from the time that Sam and I were respectively four and nine years old to the period when we were eight and thirteen, or thereabout.

At this time certain things happened. My father had an elder brother, my “Uncle Jack.” This brother had married in early life the daughter of a rice and cotton planter of the low country, who had died, leaving him a large estate (as estates went in those days), and one son, who was at this time absent at a German university. My uncle had not married again. He lived on his plantation in winter, with no household except his servants, headed by the old mulatto “ mammy” who acted as his housekeeper; but, being a hospitable man, his roomy house was generally full of young people, mostly young men of his kin, who went down for the shooting and fishing. Sometimes, too, he would have my sister there, that her music and general loveliness might have a civilizing influence on his housefull of boisterous young blades. Uncle Jack was not like my father. He was more a man of the world. He was a tall, dark, soldierly man, with something of a Roman nose, and a grizzled mustache,— a good deal like the pictures of Colonel Newcome, in the old editions of Thackeray. He was an imperious-looking man, and, indeed, was much inclined to have his own way. I liked him, though, all the same. He knew the way to a boy’s heart. He gave me a pony, and was always jingling loose silver in his pocket. He had a way of tipping the servants, too, in a careless and lordly fashion, but had none of my father’s kindly friendliness of manner toward them. On the whole, however, everybody liked him, and he was always a welcome guest. His visit on this particular summer I have occasion specially to remember. It was, as I have said, when Sam was between twelve and thirteen years old, and I some five years younger.

One evening, on the piazza, Uncle Jack said to my father, “Alfred, that boy Sam is a superb youngster. He is just what I want, — a little too young, but that’s a good fault. I can bring him up to suit me. I want him about the house. Ben is getting too old.” This sounded ominous enough; but worse was coming, when Uncle Jack went on to propose to buy Sam, telling my father he would not stand on the price, within reasonable limits. I was relieved, however, when my father put him off with a jest, telling him he had better not make any such proposition in my mother’s presence. Uncle Jack laughed, and dropped the matter for the time. But he was a persistent man, and not accustomed to be balked, and I was uneasy. I could see his keen, dark eye resting upon the boy frequently. I could see, too, that he was making friends with Sam, probably foreseeing that the question as to his sale would depend eventually on his own consent, as my father would never sell him against his own wish. The boy was as my uncle said, a superb fellow, well grown for his age, sound as a dollar, and a beautiful combination of strength and activity. His intelligence was unusual for a negro; his temper admirable. The only trace of the slave in his fine, honest, cheerful face was a certain appealing look which is frequently to be observed in the negro countenance. Perhaps it is his heritage from the lash laid upon his ancestors by the superior race. Certainly, in his own person Sam had never had to shrink from a blow. It goes without saying that I begged my father not to sell the boy away from me. He told me that he would not; but I have always suspected that Uncle Jack departed with some sort of understanding that possibly, later on, my own and my mother’s consent might be obtained.

The story of the life of a boy of eight, or ten, or twelve years, in a quiet home in a civilized country, could not easily be made entertaining to my friend from Massachusetts, or anybody else. The fact that he lived fifty years ago, and in one of the late Confederate states, does not make him at all the more interesting. It may be briefly said, therefore, that I was not sent to school early; that my mother taught me the usual child’s learning in English, and a little French; that my father instructed me in the beginning of Latin and Greek; that my friend Ellick initiated me into the delights of ’possum and coon hunting; and that, under the guidance of my sister, I learned to love music more and more. I waxed fond of books, and read everything in sight, whether I understood it or not, from the Rollo Books, and Sanford and Merton, and Miss Edgeworth, up to the big Shakespeare with the pictures. I even tackled Josephus and the Koran; and reveled especially in a noble edition of the Iliad, with pictures, in outline only, of the Greek and Trojan heroes, and Helen, and Andromache, and Briseïs and Chryseïs.

I do not wish to create the impression that there was anything extraordinarily literary about my home. It was only that I was the son of a country gentleman, a university man, who, while not averse to field sports, was fond of books and music, and had collected something of a library. In the changes and chances of war and reconstruction, it is nearly all scattered and gone now; but by the blessing of God I inherited his tastes; and the influences of such a boyhood, simple as it was, ingrained into one’s nature, may save him in later years from becoming a mere draught ox, in the sordid struggle for food and shelter. They will build for him an inner temple into which he may retire and worship when the day’s work is done. I have always been sorry for boys growing up, as so many of them do now, in this Southern country, without the companionship of books. Poor little devils! they are at work, selling papers, or behind the counters of stores, or at one thing or another, when they ought to be lying in the shade, reading the Arabian Nights, if any genuine edition of that glorious work can be found in these days of reform and expurgation.

I had grown old enough now to ride about the country alone, and was accustomed to be sent to town on my pony after the mail, or upon one errand or another. Out of one of these rides arose the only incident that I remember of that period, that would interest my friend. My road to town lay, most of it, through the pine woods; an open, sandy, pleasant country enough. A part of it, however, perhaps half a mile, ran through the swamp which stretched on both sides of the creek of which I have spoken. It was a long causeway, or “corduroy” road, as generally called. It was a lonely, uncannylooking place, dark even at midday with the dense growth of the swamp on either side, — bays, a sort of swamp laurel, and other trees, with here and there a cypress. The air was heavy with the overpowering scent of the yellow jessamine and other flowers. The foliage was so thick that one could not see his horse’s length into the swamp. It was supposed to be the resort of the more incorrigible class of runaway negroes, such as were advertised in the newspapers of that day under the heading, “Ten dollars reward. Run away from the subscriber, negro man Cato,” etc.; the description following, and the advertisement headed with a woodcut of a man running, with a stick on his shoulder and a bundle at the end of it. These were mostly harmless truants, though occasionally there might be a dangerous character among them. Altogether, I did not fancy that part of my way, and generally rode through it as fast as the slippery poles would allow. On this particular afternoon I was on my way to town, my pony picking his way over the uncertain footing, when suddenly he started, and sprang aside so suddenly as nearly to unseat me. At the same time a negro stepped into the road in front of me.

“I ax your pardon, young marster,” he said; “I did n’t go for to skear your horse. I jes’ wanted to ax a little favor of you.”

I was reassured by this not unfriendly greeting, and took note of the man’s appearance. He was rather tall, very ragged, of a gingerbread color, carried a gun, and had the indescribable appearance of a hunted man. There was a negro at large at this time, who was wanted for murder, having brained another negro with an axe. His name was Hannibal. Sam knew him and had talked to me of him, and I had seen his description in the town paper. I took this to be the man.

“Is n’t your name Hannibal ? ” I said.

“And what if it is, young marster; you would n’ want to help ’em ketch a poor crittur like me, would you ? ”

I was smitten with pity, and told him I would not. He proceeded to tell me that he had seen me before, passing, and knew who I was. He said he had stopped me to ask if I would bring him a plug of tobacco as I came back, and say nothing about it; “though I reckon they’ll git me anyhow,” he added. He said he had no money. I told him I would bring the tobacco and not tell of it.

I tried very hard to get back before the shades of evening set in; but when I met him, at the same place, it was twilight. He was profuse in his thanks and blessings, negro fashion, and I rode home full of my secret, and feeling myself an adventurous young fellow. I kept my word with him, not even telling Sam; but the story soon ended in tragedy. The sheriff caught him, and he was convicted and executed in the prompt manner of those days. At the gallows he was allowed to make a little speech, and, as is customary with negro criminals, he announced that his spiritual condition was satisfactory, and that he was sure the Almighty Judge “would have mercy on him.”

I read this account to Sam, from the paper, telling him how I had met Hannibal. It was on the sandy bank at the old mill.

“Marse Frank,” said Sam, digging his toe into the sand in a meditative way, “you reckon God done it?”

“Did what?” said I.

“Tuk mussy on him,” said Sam.

I said I hoped so.

“Ef I’d er been God, I’d er done it,” said Sam.

I told him my mother had said we had best not speculate on these matters.

“What do spek ’late mean ? ” said Sam.

I felt my inability to pursue the subject, and took refuge, as usual, in telling him we would ask my mother.

“I reckon,” says Sam, still pursuing the thread of his thought, “dat’s how come a spek’later sich a bad man.”

It is necessary to know that “speculator” was the common name applied to the traders in negroes of whom I have spoken, detested by blacks, and held in small esteem by whites. Sam’s mind was evidently muddled, and the incident is only worth recording in that it illustrates the boy’s straightforward nature, in his naïve comparison of himself with the Judge of all the earth. This impressed me at the time, and was recalled to me afterwards by a kinsman telling me he had seen in a churchyard in Aberdeen, Scotland, the following epitaph: —

It is hard to imagine a more pitiful appeal to Omnipotence.

I must have been some nine or ten years old when I met Hannibal in the swamp. The doings of the next two or three years offer little of interest. I was sent to a very excellent school in the town, and afterwards to a more advanced one, to be prepared for the university.

This brings me to my fifteenth year. In September of this year Uncle Jack made us the most memorable of his visits. He sent up, this time, his carriage and horses, and a saddle horse, but no groom. He asked that he might have Sam to attend his commands, and the boy accordingly was his driver in his visits about the country. Everybody liked him, and he was much wined and dined.

Sam had fulfilled the promise of his youth. Physically and morally, there could not have been a finer specimen of the unmixed negro race. Under my mother’s influence he had been confirmed by the bishop at his last visitation. I was at home at the time. Now, Sam was no saint after the order of Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom.” If he had been, I should have much mistrusted him. He doubtless had the failings of humanity, especially of black humanity. But there was no malice in his transparent soul. Moreover, he could “say the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments,” and answer the other questions according to the rubric; so the bishop confirmed him, along with some half-dozen others, in the parish church. These annual confirmations of the negroes always interested me; and I remember well that, as the bishop laid his hands on Sam’s black head, with the beautiful words so familiar to every Churchman, I had an uncomfortable recollection of the insufficient answer of Cain to the inquiry of his Maker. I sent for the boy to come to my room, and talked with him late into the night.

One of the most delightful creations of the great Sir Walter is Cuthbert Headrigg, called “Cuddy.” “My leddy,” says Cuddy, “canna weel bide to be contradickit; ” and adds quaintly, “and ye ken, naebody does, if they could help themsells.” My uncle Jack was much like Lady Margaret, and, indeed, might well have been the brother of that stubborn old female cavalier. I could gather from scraps of talk that he had by no means given up his wish to own Sam. He had set his heart on him, as a man of means will sometimes take a fancy to a horse or dog. My father was reluctant, mainly on my mother’s account. The truth was, though my uncle was not aware of it, that my father needed money, perhaps to meet the expense of sending me to the university. My mother knew this, and was silent. She spoke to me, and I held my peace. One morning, after our early breakfast, the brothers sat on the long piazza, smoking, — my father with his pipe, Uncle Jack with his cigar. This little difference in their tastes, trifling but suggestive, ran through all their ways, and marked the contrast between them no less than did the dissimilarity of physique: my Saxon-looking father, with quiet manners and plain and simple tastes; his tall, dark Norman brother, with dominating ways, and liking for handsome dress and expensive luxuries. “Look at them,” said my sister. “Don’t they look like Cedric and Brian de Bois Guilbert?” The comparison was not fair. My dear sister was a little inclined to be haughty herself, and did not like our uncle as I did. They were, however, good types, each of his class: the upcountry planter, of few slaves, small responsibilities, and easy-going life, and the wealthier slave-owner of the low country, with more upon his shoulders, and almost of necessity something of a martinet.

They were continuing a conversation. My uncle was saying, “I will give you a check for eighteen hundred for him.” I knew now what they were talking about. The market value of a first-class negro field hand, at that time, in our part of the country, was, say, twelve to fifteen hundred dollars, the latter an extreme. In the Southwest, where new lands were being opened, it was much higher. I remember, at the university in 1859, hearing a fellow student from Arkansas say that his father had paid eighteen hundred and five dollars, at an auction in Memphis, for an unusually fine negro.

My father was silent for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “if the boy will tell me he is willing to go to you, and you will give me your word to treat him kindly, and”—

“I treat all my negroes well,” interrupted my uncle, with his chin and his Roman nose and his gray mustache in the air.

“I know, Jack, I know. You feed them, and clothe them, and all that. But Kate has a feeling for this boy that you can hardly understand ” —

“Alfred,” broke in my uncle, a little impatiently, “you know I never liked the way you up-country people treat your negroes. You allow your children to make companions of them. You spoil them. You have no discipline, properly so called. You don’t seem to be awake to the situation. Here are these d—d abolitionists flooding the country with their papers”—

“Oh, the devil fly away with the abolitionists,” put in my father. “ Don’t let’s get upon them. I am tired talking of them. I believe all this matter of the dissemination of New England literature among negroes has been greatly exaggerated, both as to its extent and as to the danger resulting. I have never heard of a single tract or paper about here. I don’t concern myself about it. So far as my people are concerned, I have no fear for them. I think I should be willing, by way of test, that they should send their best speaker down here, — say Wendell Phillips himself; I’d like to see him, anyhow. I would assemble my people out there in the grove, and he should speak to them. And when he had finished, I would say to them, ‘You have all heard what this gentleman has to say. Now, if any of you want to go off with him to Yankeedoodledom, just say so, and you shall go without interruption.’ I’ll bet you Sam against the sorriest hand on your plantation that not one of them would stir.”

“You would be a fool for your pains,” said Uncle Jack; “I would make no such proposition to my people.”

“Then,” said my father, rising from his seat, “it would appear that my mode of government yields the better result. But here’s Sam with the horses. We ’ll ride over to Colonel Elliott’s, and bring him back to dinner; and we’ll have some whist and some music.”

The end of it was that Uncle Jack bought Sam. I don’t think that, even with his free use of money, he would have gained the boy’s consent, if Sam had not found out, I don’t know how, that his purchase money would be of service to “Marster.” This, with my uncle’s promise that he should see us every summer, and that he should not be sold again unless back to us, turned the scale.

I am glad to remember that, having completed this transaction, my uncle prolonged his stay with us late into the fall, and seemed loath to leave us. I thought, too, that his manner was becoming more gentle. He made friends with my sister; and I sometimes observed him looking wistfully at my mother’s sweet face, as if he were thinking how much better it would be if he had some feminine presence on the other side of his own hearthstone at home. He was beginning to show his age, and his mustache was growing nearly white; though his figure was erect, and he sat his horse as much like a field marshal as ever.

The Christmas holidays were drawing near when he went down into the low country, carrying Sam with him. My mother and I sat and talked together in the twilight. “It is like selling Joseph into Egypt,” she said.

“I was thinking of it,” said I. “I hope Pharaoh will be kind to him.” Uncle Jack would have made a very fair Pharaoh, and I had forgotten that it was not to the king that Joseph was sold, but to his chief of police.

I never saw my uncle again. His health began to fail, and he remained much at home. He visited my father once, or perhaps twice, but I was absent at the university. He died early in 1860. I lift my hat to his knightly memory. I have often been thankful that it pleased God to take the gallant gentleman from the evil to come. He was not of the kind to bear defeat and humiliation with philosophy. We cannot all be saints and heroes at the same time, like Colonel Newcome and General Lee.

Of the earlier part of my life at the University it is doubtful if I could say anything that would interest my friend, however delightful its memories may be to me. It was a lonely old place, where a man could learn as much or as little as he chose. He might burn the midnight oil, and fill himself full of more or less profitable learning; or he might take the wiser course, and lounge along through the beautiful walks and under the great oaks, indulging his taste for the classics in the libraries and debating societies, absorbing a little Latin and Greek, and managing, through the good-nature of his professors, to pull through in the mathematics and other drudgeries which are the delight of those curious people who love labor for labor’s sake. Here were assembled some six hundred young men, from all parts of the South, and of the flower of her youth.

The men of the Southwest, most of them rich, and perhaps most of them idle and fun-loving, were thoroughly good fellows, much given to the pranks and frolics common to college boys everywhere; painting the professors’ horses, and installing a belligerent ram in the lecture room, that his warlike front might oppose itself to the learned doctor on his entrance in the morning. Sometimes, but not often, they were seriously riotous. It is pitiful and glorious to think of them, almost, as it might be, on the morrow, pouring out their priceless young blood like water; charging into the thickets of Shiloh; scaling the heights of Gettysburg.

The men from the upper tier of states were, as a rule, more sedate. Their hats were less broad of brim, and worn less on one side. With less wealth, generally speaking, they seemed to have more thought of the coming responsibilities of life. In recalling these men now, the thought has come to me that many of them, in cast of mind, mode of thought, and general make-up, differed as widely from their brethren of the far South as they did from the men of the North whom I came to know familiarly in later years. A larger proportion of these applied themselves to books, and from their ranks came the majority of scholars and of the more thoughtful students. There was abundance, therefore, of any kind of society that one might choose, — or he could mix it, as most of us did.

In truth, it was a golden time in the passing. In the retrospect it looks like a fool’s paradise, soon to be rudely disturbed.

As we advanced in the year 1860, the vision which rises to my mind’s eye is of vivid and surpassing interest. We stood in the shadow of the great war, the first gun of which is to end these rambling lines. It is strange how writing of these days brings them back as fresh as yesterday. The dead and the living rise as the spectral figures before Macbeth: Creoles from Louisiana, fiery youngsters, speaking French more fluently than English, declaiming the speeches of Mirabeau in the society halls; hot-headed youth from the great cotton states, already, almost to a man, declaring for war, and confident of its result. The large delegation from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia was of mixed political complexion, — some consorting with the Hotspurs of the lower country, others, the sons of Whig fathers, and taking the color of their more conservative views, giving up slowly and with unwilling hearts their ingrained love for the Union and for the stars and stripes, hoping for peace, and willing to exhaust all honorable means to avert war. There were hot debates, and an occasional fight. But all were ready to meet the issue, if it must come, without fear, and with that superb and supreme confidence in the ability of himself and his brethren to stand up against any conceivable odds which was so striking a characteristic of the Southerner of that day.

War had to come. It came. And nineteen out of every twenty of these young sons of their fathers followed the meteor flag of the Confederacy; and one out of every four bequeathed

My friend will give me a line here in which to pay to the memory of these men my tribute of undying love. This feeling of absolute, perhaps overweening, confidence, to which I have referred as pervading all sorts and conditions of men in the South at the outbreak of the great war, is worth a passing notice; the more as it has been made the subject of much adverse criticism. My friend will observe that I am not here discussing the question as to what substantial ground there may have been for this feeling. I am only saying that it was there, as a matter of fact, and, as she desired a picture of Southern life, I have given this as one of its noticeable features. I remember it very distinctly. The creating cause of so marked an idiosyncrasy is not obvious; but, as it existed, there must have been a philosophical reason for it, else why should it have been a Southern trait more than a Northern one ? I suggest that we owed it, as we did certain fortunate peculiarities of our feminine society to which I have adverted, to the institution of slavery. This made every white man more or less of an aristocrat, there being an inferior race under him. It accustomed him to command and to be obeyed. Its tendency was to make him bold, resolute, and self-reliant, even if there was danger of its making him somewhat arrogant and overbearing. Also, the habit of command teaches one the virtue and necessity of obedience. If all this be true, it follows that the Southern man started out with some of the points of a soldier already engrafted in him, and to that extent had the advantage of his adversary. As the war advanced, this difference was, perhaps, lessened; and before it was over, we both knew each other better; and there would be no discourtesy now in presenting to our gallant friends, the enemy, the proposition that, in the spring of 1861, both sides being entirely unacquainted with practical war, an army officered by Southern men would naturally have been a better fighting machine than one officered by Northern men. I make the remark with the less hesitation, that, if I remember aright, that fine soldier, General Schofield, has recently expressed something like the same opinion.

In the spring of 1861, I entered the Confederate army as a private in one of the finest regiments of infantry in the service, and served to the end. With this little bit of history, the work which my friend asked of me — that I would try to give her some idea of the life of the average Southern gentleman “before the war ” — is done. I cannot hope that it has given her half the pleasure that it has given me to travel again this old road. It seems so long ago, — so much longer than it is. I don’t know why this is so, unless it be that so many of the actors in the times I have been dealing with, who would not now be older than I, and some who would be younger, have passed away. I remain with the minority, a lonely old bachelor, but not a melancholy one. A man may still have his whist and his punch of winter nights, his book at all times, the church and the Book of Common Prayer on Sundays, and, God be thanked, a few congenial spirits with whom he can quarrel in an amicable way, — more by token that my friend from Massachusetts tells me she has no present intention of returning to that bleak Puritan region, in which, by some strange perversity in the ordering of things, she appears to have been born. Again I offer her my humble homage, and again Mr. Thackeray’s lines come into my head, with their quaint and fascinating picture of reminiscent content : —