A Confederate commentary on Thucydides, 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 History. 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 Lacedæmonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque details about the rookeries and the wine-jars inhabited by the newcomers. Diogenes' jar, commonly misnamed a tub, was no invention, and I have known less comfortable quarters 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 annalist 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 veritable scourges in camp. Measles was especially fatal to the country-bred, and for abject misery I have never seen anything like those cases of measles in which nostalgia had supervened. 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, notoriously the North Carolinians, whose attachment to the soil of their State was as passionate as that of any Greeks, ancient or modern, Attic or Peloponnesian.
Gresham's law was anticipated by Aristophanes, Ran. 718, foll.
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 elsewhere, and I remember how I raked up examples 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 stonecutter, the flinty bread of the Swiss mountaineer, the Spaniard's cloves of garlic, the Greek's handful of olives, and the Hindoo's handful of rice. The situation was often gayly accepted. The not infrequent proclamation 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 madeiras, 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 assured 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 currency becomes as abundant as it was in the last years of the Confederacy. Gresham's law 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 Confederate 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 during 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 Confederates preferred the private house to the hospital. Hungry soldiers and soldiers who forestalled 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 record, and important contributions have been made to the economical history of the Confederate States. I will not draw on these stores. I will only tell of what I have lived, as demanded 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 a serious matter. In our direst straits we had not learned to dispense with household service, 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 overconsiderate of the non-combatants. Often the only way of procuring our coarse food was by making contracts to be paid after the war in legal currency, and sometimes payment in gold was exacted. 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 wonders. Bacon and corned beef in scant measure were the chief of our diet, and not always easy to procure. I have ridden miles and 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 showing up the selfishness of the farming class and prophesying the improvement of the currency.
No wonder, then, that with such an experience a bookish Confederate should turn to the Aristophanic account of the Peloponnesian war with sympathetic interest. The Athenians, 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 were for pins, and dogwood sticks for toothbrushes. Rag-bags were ransacked. Impossible garments were made possible. Miracles of turning 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 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 Federal lines when they saw the rig of their kinswomen, 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 resplendent uniforms from beyond seas, by heroines who had engineered themselves and their belongings across the Potomac.
As is well known, the Greek had a mania for shoes. For women's shoes see Av. Lys. 417. For other cordwainer's wares, l. c., 110.
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 Athenian 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 elsewhere. "Who first started the notable jest it is impossible, at this distance of time, to discover, 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 illustrate, not the scarcity of raiment in the Peloponnesian war, but the abundance of philosophy 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 Confederate sympathy was keen.
In The Acharnians of Aristophanes, the hero, Dicæopolis, makes a separate peace on his individual account with the Peloponnesians and drives a brisk trade with the different cantons, the enthusiasm reaching its height when the Bœotian 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 fantastic vision of a separate peace became a sober reality at many points on the lines of the contending parties. The Federal outposts twitted ours with their lack of coffee and sugar; ours taunted the Federals with their lack of tobacco. Such gibes often led, despite the officers, 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 daydream of Aristophanes became a sober certainty.