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" 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 before 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 cannot 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, 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,
and the follower of that other imperial man Virginia gave the world; both honest, each believing the other hopelessly wrong, but absolutely sincere.
Of many consentient utterances I select this one by a prominent Southerner:
"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 principle, for their homes and native land."—T. F. Goode, Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893.
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 prepared, not to produce an impression on the Northern mind, but to indulge a natural desire to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy; 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 Virginia to give up her slaves than to set up a separate government, with all the cost of a standing army which the conservation of slavery would make necessary. This silence, which 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 Southern view of the institution, for we were not all of the same mind.
"When, within our memory, some flippant Senator [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 Confederate 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.