CHAPTER LXX.
It is eight o’clock in the morning, at Harrisonburg, in the leafy month of June. You board the train from Staunton. As it rushes down the Valley there lies spread out before you, on either side, a scene of rare loveliness. Fertile plains, waving with grain; rolling, grass-clad hills, laughing in the sunshine, dotted here and there with woods of singular beauty; limpid streams, brawling over glittering, many-hued pebbles; a pure air filling the lungs with a glad sense of health and well-being. There are few such lands.
But come, take this seat on the right-hand side of the car, and I will tell you of some things which happened twenty years ago.
Ah, there it is! Don’t you see that bluish thread, winding along over there, skirting that hill? That is the Valley Pike. There was no railroad there then. Take a good look at it. Take a good look, for heroes have trodden it.
Ah, the train has stopped. Do you see that grizzled farmer, who has ridden over to the station to get his mail? I know him, for I never forget a face. He was there at Manassas when Bee said, “Look at Jackson, standing like a stone wall!” Yes, many of the survivors of the Stonewall Brigade live along this road.
That is the Massanutten Mountain, a spur of the Blue Ridge. How beautiful it is! Straight and smooth and even, with a little notch every now and then; clothed from base to summit with primeval forests, it looks, crested as it is here and there with snowy clouds, like a gigantic green wave rolling across the plain.
A wall not unlike this once stood on either hand in the Red Sea; and Miriam smote her tambourine in triumph, praising the God of Israel.
As we rush along, the mountain bears us company, as though doing the honors of the Valley.
The train stops at Strasburg. There, too, Massanutten ends.
As though a Titan had cleft it with his sword, so abruptly does it sink into the plain.
You are on your way to Alexandria, and will have to wait here four hours; so let us look about us. Run your eye up that sharp acclivity lying over against the town.
Upon the brink of that steep, twenty years ago, stood Gordon. Accompanied by a few staff-officers, he had spent the greater part of the day in the toilsome ascent, tearing his way through dense, pathless jungles, struggling among untrodden rocks; and now, on the seventeenth of October, 1864, he stands there sweeping the plain with his field-glass. What does he see? Why does he forget, in an instant, his fatigue? What is it that fires with ardor his martial face?
But before I tell you that, a word with you.
In the South, at the breaking out of the war, there was not to be found one solitary statesman; nor one throughout the length and breadth of the North. Not that capacity was lacking to either side. Great capacity is not required. Chesterfield heard the rumble of the coming French revolution, to which the ears of Burke were deaf. After all, statecraft is but the application of temporary expedients to temporary emergencies; and you might carve a score of Gladstones and Disraelis out of the brain of Herbert Spencer without in the least impairing his cerebrum. Pericles shone in Athens for an hour; Aristotle dominated the world for twenty centuries. Such is the measure of a statesman; such that of a thinker.
Statesmen, therefore (or the making of such), we had, I must suppose, by the thousand. I have said they were not to be found.
For years before we came to blows the animosity between North and South had been deepening, reaching at last this point, that he who would catch the ear of either side could do so only by fierce denunciation of the other; he that would have it thought that he loved us had only to show that he hated you. Men of moderation found no hearers. The voices of the calm and clear-headed sank into silence; and Wigfall and Toombs, and Sumner and Phillips walked up and down in the land.
Yes, no doubt we had thousands of statesmen who knew better. But who knew them? And so Seward kept piping of peace in ninety days, and Yancey—Polyphemus of politicians—was willing to drink all the blood that would be shed. A Yankee wouldn’t fight, said the one. The slave-drivers, perhaps, would, said the other; but they were, after all, a mere handful; and the poor white trash would be as flocks of sheep.
A Yankee wouldn’t fight! And why not, pray? Two bulls will, meeting in a path; two dogs, over a bone. The fishes of the sea fight; the birds of the air; nay, do not even the little midgets, warmed by the slanting rays of the summer’s sun, rend one another with infinitesimal tooth and microscopic nail? All nature is but one vast battle-field; and if the nations of men seem at times to be at peace, what is that peace but taking breath for another grapple? And congresses and kings are but bottle-holders, and time will be called in due season. The Yankees wouldn’t fight! And suppose they wouldn’t, why should they, pray, being sensible men?
Where was the Almighty Dollar?
Had any one of the Southern leaders read one page of history, not to know that money means men? means cannon, rifles, sabres? means ships, and commissariat, and clothing? means rallying from reverses, and victory in the end? The Yankee would not fight, they told us. His omnipotent ally they forgot to mention or to meet. Had our Congress consisted of bankers, merchants, railway superintendents, they would have seen to the gathering of the sinews of war. We had only the statesmen of the period,—God save the mark!
It was in finance that we blundered fatally. ’Twas not the eagle of the orator that overcame us, but the effigy thereof, in silver and in gold.
When we fired on Fort Sumter there was a burst of patriotism throughout the North, and her young men flocked to her standards. They fought, and fought well. The difference between them and us was, that when they got tired of poor fare and hard knocks they could find others to take their places. Being sensible, practical men, they used their opportunities. When a man was drafted (as the war went on) he or his friends found the means of hiring a substitute (persons who have visited the North since the war tell me that you rarely find a man of means who served in the army); and at last cities and counties and States began to meet each successive call for fresh troops by votes of money; their magnificent bounty system grew up, and from that time the composition of the Northern armies rapidly changed. Trained soldiers from every part of the world flocked to the El Dorado of the West; and as the war went on each successive battle brought less and less grief to the hearts and homes of the North, while with us—with us!
From every corner of Europe they poured.
From Italy, from Sweden, from Russia, and from Spain.
From the Danube and the Loire; from the marshy borders of the Elbe and the sunny slopes of the Guadalquivir.
From the Alps and the Balkan. From the home of the reindeer and the land of the olive. From Majorca and Minorca, and from the Isles of Greece.
From Berlin and Vienna; from Dublin and from Paris; from the vine-clad hills of the Adriatic and the frozen shores of the Baltic Sea.
From Skager Rack and Skater Gat, and from Como and Killarney.
From sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, from the banks and braes o’ bonny Doon, and from Bingen-on-the-Rhine.
Catholic and Calvinist; Teuton, Slav, and Celt,—who was not there to swell that host, and the babel of tongues around their camp-fires? For to every hut in Europe, where the pinch of want was known, had gone the rumor of fabulous bounty and high pay now, generous pension hereafter.
At Bull Run the North met the South; at Appomattox Lee laid down his sword in the presence of the world in arms.