Yet, after all, it seems to me most natural that the South should remember, while the North forgets. Not all Northerners were in the war. But all Southerners were; if a boy was big enough to carry a gun, he went. The North almost completely escaped invasion, and upon one occasion when a southern army did march through northern territory, the conduct of the invading troops toward the civilian population (the false Barbara Frietchie legend to the contrary notwithstanding) was so exemplary as to set a record which is probably unequaled in history.[2] The South, upon the other hand, was constantly under invasion, and the record of destruction wrought by northern armies in the valley of the Shenandoah, on the March to the Sea, and in some other instances, is writ in poverty and mourning unto this day.
Thus, except politically, the North now feels not the least effect from the war. But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined—as instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.
So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be studied in school under the heading "United States History," it has not, in southern eyes, become altogether "book history," but is history that lives—in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields, and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.
Small wonder if, amid its countless tragic memorials, the South does not forget. The strange thing is that bitterness has gone so soon; that remembering the agonies of war and the abuses of reconstruction, the South does not to-day hate the North as violently as ever. If to err is human, the North has, in its treatment of the South, richly proved its humanness; and if forgiveness is divine, the South has, by the same token, attained something like divinity.
Had the numbskull North understood these things as it should have understood them, there would not now be a solid Democratic South.
Such rancor as remains is, I believe, strongest in the smaller towns in those States which suffered the greatest hardships. I know, for instance, of one lady, from a little city in Virginia, who refused to enter the Massachusetts Building at the Chicago World's Fair, and there are still to be found, in Virginia, ladies who do not leave their houses on the Fourth of July because they prefer not to look upon the Stars and Stripes. The Confederate flag is still, in a sense, the flag of the South. Southerners love it as one loves a pressed flower from a mother's bridal wreath. When the Eleventh Cavalry rode from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Winchester, Virginia, a few years since, they saw many Confederate flags, but only one Union flag, and that in the hands of a negro child. However, war had not then broken out in Europe. It would be different now.
A Virginia lady told me of having gone to a dentist in Winchester, Virginia, and having taken her little niece with her. The child watched the dentist put a rubber dam in her aunt's mouth, and then, childlike, began to ask questions. She was a northern child, and she had evidently heard some one in the town speak of Sheridan's ride.
"Auntie," she said, "was Sheridan a Northerner or a Southerner?"
Owing to the rubber dam the aunt was unable to reply, but the dentist answered for her. "He was a drunken Yankee!" he declared vehemently.