The subject-matter of this little book first took form in an address before the students of Emory College, Oxford, Ga., in June, 1904. If apology be needed for putting it in type, the writer finds it in the request of an old woman, now eighty-six years of age, a true daughter of the Old South, whose lightest wish has been the law of his life for more than fifty years.
THE OLD SOUTH.
My theme is “The Old South.” I have no apology for those who may deem it time-worn or obsolete. I am handicapped in beginning by memories of other writers and speakers who have dealt more worthily than I can hope to do with my subject. The Old South has not been wanting in men to speak and write upon it. Friend and foe alike have exploited it. It has been the burden of poetry not always inspired, and of oratory not always inspiring. Not a few have been its critics who knew it only by hearsay. Indeed, much of current literature upon the Old South is from those who were born after it had passed away. I have no fault to find with any who have thus written or spoken, however worthily or unworthily, if only it was done in kindness. If over the dust of the Old South, while discoursing upon its virtues or its vices, any one has dealt generously with the one and fairly with the other, I am content, though praise or blame may not always have been wisely bestowed.
I was born in and of the Old South. At sixteen, after a year under General Lee, I received my parole at Appomattox, and went home to look upon the ruin of the Old South. Whatever is good or evil in me I owe chiefly to that Old South. Habit, motive, ideal, ambition, passion and prejudice, love and hatred, were formed in it and by it. My life work as a man has been wrought under what is called the New South, but inspiration and aspiration to it came out of the Old South. The spell it cast upon my boyhood is strong upon me after more than a generation has gone. It is not the spell of enchantment. It has not blinded me to bad or good qualities, and after the lapse of a half century and despite the tenderness for it that grows with the passing years, I think I can see and judge the Old South and give account of it more impartially than one who received it at second-hand.
The Old South, in itself and apart from all other considerations, will always be a profitable study. It is the one unique page of our national history. Indeed, it comprehends two hundred and fifty years of history with scarce a parallel. I think one will search in vain history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South, socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. Wherein especially was it unique?
To begin with, it was in the South rather than the North that the seed of American liberty was first planted. Jamestown, not Plymouth Rock, was the matrix of true Americanism. Poet and orator have made much of the rock-bound coast and savage wild to which the Puritan fathers came, and have had little to say of the Cavaliers who fought their way to conquest over savage beast and man. Winthrop, Standish, and Cotton Mather are set forth by provincial and partisan writer and speaker as exclusive national types of pioneer courage, wisdom, and heroism. I have read more than one sneer in alleged national histories against “the gentlemen of Jamestown,” of whom it was said that there were “eleven laboring men and thirty-five gentlemen.” But the historians who sneer fail to note how these same gentlemen felled more trees and did more hard work than the men of the ax and pick. Long after Jamestown had become a memory, I had seen the descendants of those same derided gentlemen in the Army of Northern Virginia, possessors of inherited wealth and reared to luxury from their cradles, yet toiling in the trenches or tramping on the dusty highway or charging into the mouth of cannon with unfailing cheerfulness.
I do not disparage the stern integrity and high achievement of the Puritan sires. I gladly accord them a high place among the fathers and founders of the republic. But putting Puritan and Cavalier side by side, rating each fairly at his real worth and by what he did to fix permanently the qualities that have made us great, I am confident I could make good my proposition that deeper down at the foundation of our greatness as a people than all other influences are the qualities and spirit that have marked the Cavalier in the Old World or the New.
AUNT HANNAH.