Civilization, which in younger States has felled forests, erected school-houses, given the fertility of a garden to the barren coast of the northern Atlantic and the wild-wood of the West, could not coalesce with the curse of slavery, and Virginia has been passed by in her onward march. This field of pines that you see on our right, whose tops are so dense and even as to resemble at a distance growing grain, may have been an open spot over which Washington followed
his hounds in ante-revolutionary days. The land abounds in memories. The very names of the degenerate families who eke out a scanty subsistence on some corner of what was once an extensive family seat, remind one of the old Colonial aristocracy. Reclamation of the soil, as well as deliverance of the enslaved, must result from this civil war. Both worth fighting for. So "Forward, men," "Guide right," as in very truth we are in Divine Providence guided.
The long-haired, furtive-looking fathers and sons, representatives of all this ancient nobility, after having given over their old homesteads to their female or helpless male slaves, and massed their daughters and wives apparently in every tenth house, were keeping parallel pace with us on the lower bank of the Rappahannock. It was the inevitable logic of the law of human progress, declaring America to be in reality the land of the free, that compelled these misguided, miserable remnants of an aristocracy, to shiver in rags around November camp-fires. "They are joined to their idols"—but now that after years of legislative encroachment upon the rights of suffering humanity, they engage in a rebellious outbreak against a God-given Government, we will not let them alone in an idolatry that desolates the fair face of nature and causes such shameful degeneracy of the human race. Justice! slow, but still sure and retributive justice! How sublimely grand in her manifestations! After years of patient endurance of the proud contumely of South Carolina, New England granite blocks up the harbor of Charleston—Massachusetts volunteers cook their coffee in the fireplaces of the aristocratic homesteads of Beaufort, and negroes rally to a roll-call at Bunker Hill, but as volunteers in a war which
insures them liberty, and not as slaves, as was once vainly prophesied.
"Who commands you?" inquired a long, lean, slightly stooped, sallow-faced man of about fifty, with eyes that rolled in all directions but towards the officer he addressed, and long hair thrown back of his ears in such a way as to make up an appearance that would readily attract the attention of a police officer.
"I command this Regiment, sir," replied the Colonel, who, at the end of the day's march, was busied in directing a detail where to pitch the Head-quarter tents.
"Goin' to stay yer—right in this meadow?" continued the man, in the half negro dialect common with the whites of the South.
"That is what we purpose doing, sir. Are you the owner?"
"Y-a-a-s," drawled out the man, pulling his slouch felt still further over his eyes. "This meadow is the best part of my hull farm."