Even from old Confederate soldiers I heard no expressions of violent feeling. They spoke gently, handsomely and often humorously of the war, but never harshly. Real hate, I think, remains chiefly in one quarter: in the hearts of some old ladies, the wives and widows of Confederate soldiers—for there are but few mothers of the soldiers left. The wonder is that more of the old ladies of the South have not held to their resentment, for, as I have heard many a soldier say, women are the greatest sufferers from war. One veteran said to me: "My arm was shattered and had to be amputated at the shoulder. There was no anesthetic. Of course I suffered, but I never suffered as my mother did when she learned what I had endured."
Be they haters of the North or not, the old ladies of the South are among its chief glories, and it should be added that another of those glories is the appreciation that the South has for the white-haired heroines who are its mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers, and the unfailing natural homage that it pays them. I do not mean by this merely that children and grandchildren have been taught to treat their elders with respect. I do not mean merely that they love them. The thing of which I speak is beyond family feeling, beyond the respect of youth for age. It is a strong, superb sentiment, something as great as it is subtle, which floods the South, causing it to love and reverence its old ladies collectively, and with a kind of national spirit, like the love and reverence of a proud people for its flag.
Among young men, I met many who told me, with suitable pride, of the parts played by their fathers and uncles in the war. Of these only one spoke with heat. He was a Georgian, and when I mentioned to him that, in all my inquiries, I had heard of no cases of atrocious attacks upon women by soldiers—such attacks as we heard of at the time of the German invasion of Belgium and France—he replied with a great show of feeling that I had been misinformed, and that many women had been outraged by northern soldiers in the course of Sherman's march to the sea. At this my heart sank, for I had treasured the belief that, despite the roughness of war, unprotected women had generally been safe from the soldiers of North and South alike. What was my relief, then, on later receiving from this same young man a letter in which he declared that he had been mistaken, and that after many inquiries in Georgia he had been unable to learn of a single case of such crime. If it is indeed true that such things did not occur in the Civil War—and I believe confidently that it is true—then we have occasion, in the light of the European War, to revise the popular belief that of all wars civil war is the most horrible.
The attitude of the modern South (the "New South" which, by the way, one Southerner described to me as meaning "northern capital and smoke") toward its own "unreconstructed" citizens, for all its sympathy and tenderness, is not without a glint of gentle humor. More than once, when my companion and I were received in southern homes with a cordiality that precluded any thought of sectional feeling, we were nevertheless warned by members of the younger generation—and their eyes would twinkle as they said it—to "look out for mother; she's unreconstructed." And you may be sure that when we were so warned we did "look out." It was well to do so! For though the mother might be a frail old lady, past seventy, with the face of an angel and the normal demeanor of a saint, we could see her bridle, as we were presented to her, over the thought there here were two Yankees in her home—Yankees!—we could see the light come flashing up into her eyes as they encountered ours, and could feel beneath the veil of her austere civility the dagger points of an eternal enmity. By dint of self-control on her part, and the utmost effort upon ours to be tactful, the presentation ceremony was got over with, and after some formal speeches, resembling those which, one fancies, may be exchanged by opposing generals under a flag of truce, we would be rescued from her, removed from the room, before her forbearance should be strained, by our presence, to the point of breaking. A baleful look would follow us as we withdrew, and we would retire with a better understanding of the flaming spirit which, through that long, bloody conflict against overwhelming odds in wealth, supplies, and men, sustained the South, and which at last enabled it to accept defeat as nobly as it had accepted earlier victories.... How one loves a gentle old lady who can hate like that!
In this chapter, when it appeared originally, in "Collier's Weekly," I made the statement that I had seldom spent an hour in conversation with a Southerner without hearing some mention of the Civil War, and that I had heard other Northerners remark upon this matter, and express surprise at the tenacity with which the war holds its place in the foreground of the southern mind.
This, like many another of my southern observations, brought me letters from readers of "Collier's," residing in the South. A great number of the letters thus elicited, as well as comments made upon these chapters by the southern press, have been of no small interest to me. On at least one subject (the question discussed in the next chapter, as to whether the expression "you-all" is ever used in the singular) my correspondents have convinced me that my earlier statement was an error, while on other subjects they have modified my views, and on still others made my convictions more profound. Where it has been possible, and where it has seemed, for one reason or another, to be worth while, I have endeavored, while revising the story of my southern wanderings for this book, to make note of the other fellow's point of view, especially in cases where he disagrees with me.
The following, then, is from a letter written on the stationery of Washington and Lee University, and applies to certain statements contained in this chapter:
In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a newspaper publisher: "Were I the publisher of a paper, instead of the usual division into Foreign, Domestic, etc., I think I should distribute everything under the following heads: 1. True. 2. Probable. 3. Wanting confirmation. 4. Lies, and be careful in subsequent papers to correct all errors in preceding ones."
Allow me to suggest that your story might, under Mr. Jefferson's category, be placed under "2." Perhaps you went to see "The Birth of a Nation" before you wrote it. It has been my experience that my acquaintances among the F. F. V.'s have been far more interested in whether Boston or Brooklyn would win the pennant than in discussing the Civil War. By the young men of the South the War was forgotten long ago.
This letter has caused me to wonder whether the frequency with which my companion and I heard the Civil War discussed, may not, perhaps, have been due, at least in part, to our own inquiries, resulting from the consuming interest that we had in hearing of the War from those who lived where it was fought.