The friend was the late A. Marshall Elliott, Professor of Romance Languages in the Johns Hopkins, whose life of study was matched by a life of adventure.
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 proverbial 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 pickets. But the invaded people were very much in earnest, however lightly some of their adversaries treated the matter, and as the pressure 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 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 memories 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 number or two.
Those who suffered in Sherman's March to the Sea—I was riveted to my bed at the time—were not, 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 systematic 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 1914. In a vivid sketch of Sherman's March, Prof. Henry E. Shepherd, 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 affluence 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 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 behaviour of Sherman's men. 1864 seems not to have been so very far behind 1914 after all.
"The hate of Celt to Saxon, and the contempt of Saxon for Celt, simply paled and grew expressionless 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 contamination 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 on the devil in paradise.
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 have read about war, ours was no worse than some other wars. While it lasted, the conduct of the combatants on either side was represented 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 describing 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 reasonable 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 bad blood that had been breeding from colonial times, from Revolutionary times, from constitutional struggles, from congressional debates, from "bleeding Kansas" and the engine-house at Harper's Ferry; and a great gulf was fixed, as it seemed forever, between North and South. The hostility was a very satisfactory one—for military purposes.
Needless to say, the conspiracy theory has long been discarded. Mr. Paxson, Professor of American History 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—that these were the unavoidable result of environment and natural resources. How different is all this from what the N. Y. Times lately reprinted from its issue of April 17, 1865.