“Dare you!”
CHAPTER XLIV
For four long years the unconquerable Sumter had battled with the powerful Federal navy, and for two hundred and eighty days the iron had hailed steadily upon her. Her defense during the Great Rebellion of 1776-1783 had been glorious, but these tired men in gray had far excelled that record of bravery. In the first war the heaviest cannon used was a twenty-four pounder; in this, the lightest was a twenty-four pounder, and the heaviest went far into the hundreds. When her walls were battered down her garrison burrowed in the sand, and they kept back the great ironclads that would have done harm to the cradle of secession.
But at last the day came when men saw that the end was near, and General Beauregard issued orders for the evacuation of the city.
Grant and Thomas and Sherman had each in his own way saved the Union. General Lee, whom Europe was comparing with Napoleon for generalship, and Gustavus Adolphus for religion, could not with a few thousands any longer beat back the multitude of his enemies. So Charleston knew that she had striven and lost.
Colonel Masters, sitting in his office on the evening of that fateful seventeenth of February, 1865, was taking up the foundations of his soul and repairing each worn and battered stone. His eyes were fixed with a look of infinite sadness on the battle flag of the Confederacy, and his thoughts were on the Great Cause. It was not the question of surrender or not surrender that had made his eyes fade so during the last two years of woe just passed; nor was it any sharp animosity against the Federal government or the Stars and Stripes. These were both parts of him, the first and greater part, and only because they symbolized the things he loved had he dethroned them in his heart. Neither had he forgotten how, beneath the great eagle, he had led the Palmetto boys at Churubusco, nor how long men had called him the beloved president of the New England Society. Nor had he been turned aside by any love for slavery, which he had considered, since first he left fair Sudbury and looked last upon the Wayside Inn, as both morally and economically injurious. Nevertheless he loved the Great Cause.
Men’s hearts had grown bitter in that struggle, but with it all he had been calm, and he had been one of the few who had seen beneath the waves the deep current of the ocean that was bearing both North and South to a common danger. He knew how the hearts of men had been changed, and how soldiers who had come South at first, being reproached, would reply: “We came to save the Union; damn the niggers!” But the government and some of the people, grown bitter from suffering loss, would not array black against white, and back the African with Union bayonets. Long ago, led by the foresight of the departed Petigru, he had seen the danger to the white race of a Union victory. Ah, Petigru! On whose grave was written the words: “Unawed by opinion; unseduced by flattery; undismayed by disaster!” He could see him now, swinging his green bag full of books, on his way to the courtroom. And now, just as clearly, he knew that above all things else the North and South must be one; that the bickering jars of discord must be stopped forever; that white, hand in hand with white, might look upon the impending danger without malice and without reproach. So he asked himself that night: “What is a man’s part?”
He had loved the Union and he had loved the Confederacy, and he had loved them both because they had both loved liberty, for the basal passions of each soul are made as distinct as the shades of the blackjack leaves when the autumn of their lives has come, and in some hearts, as often as may be seen on one gum tree, the colors vary widely—half the leaves are of a bright, yellow color, and half a dark purple—but the branch that bears the yellow and the limb that lifts the purple are but parts of the trunk of life.
But more than either Confederacy or Union, he loved his race; and as he sat there looking into the shadowy faces of the coming years, he saw a new thing in history; as he saw it he shuddered, and the cold sweat stood out in beads on his brow.
A mulatto people! Good God, it must not be so! “They have saved the Union; now they must help us save the race.”