"Make ready! Fire!"
I pulled the lanyard—but I was unprepared for the result. The great gun backed, leaped in the air and sent a mighty roar across the waters,—the first cannon fired by the Third Virginia Volunteers. I received the congratulations and thanks of the Captain, and returned to my place—to be told that my eyes were congested by the concussion, and that I must return home and bathe and bandage them at once. Evidently I was not fit for artillery service.
CHAPTER XI
LIFE AT THE OAKS
The month of July, 1861, found me with my little boys at "The Oaks"—the residence of Dr. Izard Bacon Rice, in Charlotte County, seventy miles from Richmond, and miles away from the nearest railroad depot. There I might have enjoyed a peaceful summer with my kind host—a fine type of a Christian gentleman, sometime an Old-Line Whig and fierce Union man, now an ardent advocate of states' rights, and a stanch supporter of the New Confederacy. I might—as I had often done before—have revelled in the fine trees; the broad acres of tobacco in their summer prime, when the noble plant was proudly flinging out its banners before its fall; the old garden with its box-edged crescents, stars, and circles,—I might have dreamed away the summer in perfect contentment but for General Beauregard. Distant as was his army, a message from his guns reached my summer retreat more than a hundred miles away.
Dr. Rice lived in a large, old-fashioned house, on a plantation of two thousand acres or more. An oak grove, alive with chattering squirrels which had been held sacred for two generations, surrounded the house. The squirrels held conventions in the trees, and doubtless expressed their opinions of the family below, whom they had good reason to consider inferior beings, inasmuch as they were slow-motioned, heavy creatures, utterly destitute of grace and agility, and with small appreciation of hickory-nuts.
The Doctor cultivated tobacco, and when I arrived the fields stretched as far as the eye could reach, now a vast level sea of green, now covering the low, gently rounded, undulating hills as they sloped down to the Staunton River. There was never a season when these fields were not alive with laborers of every age; for the regal plant so beloved of men—and ranking with opium and hemp as a solace for the ills of mankind—has enemies from the hour it peeps from the nursery of the hot bed. It can never be forgotten a moment. Children can hunt the fly which seeks to line the leaf with eggs, or destroy the unhatched eggs, or aid the great army which must turn out in haste when the ravenous worm is born. The earth must be turned frequently at the roots, the flower buds pinched off, the shoots or "suckers" removed. The Doctor's tobacco field was an enlivening spectacle, and very picturesque did the ebony faces of the little workers look, among the broad leaves. No lady's garden was ever kept so clean, so free from sticks, errant bits of paper, or débris of any kind.
I do not claim that Dr. Rice (my uncle) was a typical planter—as far as the government of his slaves was concerned. He had inherited liberal ideas with these inherited slaves. His grandfather, David Rice, had written the first published protest in this country against slavery as "inconsistent with religion and policy." His father had ruled a plantation where severe punishment was unknown, where the cheerful slaves rarely needed it. The old gentleman was considered eccentric—and eccentric it surely was for a master to punish a fault by commanding the culprit to stand in his presence while he recited a long passage from Homer or Virgil! The punishment was effective. For fear of it, the fault was rarely repeated.
It was my uncle's custom to assemble every slave on his plantation on Sunday morning, and to speak a few words to each one, commending the women if their families appeared in clean, well-kept garments, rewarding with a pair of shoes the urchins reported by "Uncle Moses" as having been orderly and useful, exchanging a pleasant jest here and there.
He presented a tight, comfortable house to every newly married pair, with timber for the bridegroom to add to it, or to enclose the piece of land for a garden or a poultry yard which went with it. Every mother at the birth of a child was presented with a pig. The plantation, which was large and fruitful, and from which nothing but tobacco and wheat was ever sold, yielded vegetables, poultry, mutton, beef, bacon in lavish abundance, while the orchards and vines were equally productive.
Some hundreds of the negroes of the neighborhood were members of the Presbyterian church of the whites. In the old church books may be seen to-day records of their marriages and funerals, and how (for example) "Lovelace Brown was brought before the session for hog-stealing and suspended for one month." But there were better records than this. These Presbyterian negroes were at one time led by an eminent patriarch, Uncle Abel, who deserves more than a passing notice. He had been taught to read and had been well drilled in the Shorter Catechism. But his marriage ceremonies were always read from the Episcopal Prayer-book, every word of which he held sacred, not to be changed or omitted to suit any modern heresy. "I M, take thee N," was the formula for Jack or Peter, Dilsey or Dicey—and "with this ring I thee wed" must be pronounced with solemnity, ring or no ring, the latter being not at all essential.