And now he bends his eyes on Fisher’s Hill.
Those men lying there were beaten at Winchester, one month ago. Against brigade Early can bring regiment, against division, brigade; can oppose division to corps. And yet he is going to hurl this little handful against that mighty host.
A mere handful; but hearts of English oak! The ancestors of these men fought and won at Crecy and Agincourt; and they are going to fight and lose at Cedar Creek. The result was different,—but the odds and the spirit were the same.
Have I forgotten the brigade of Louisiana creoles? No; but when I would speak of them, a certain indignant sorrow chokes my utterance. They came to us many and they went away few; and the Valley has been made historic by their blood, mingled with ours.
And now is heard the voice of one, speaking as with authority,—the voice of a Louisianian, proclaiming to the world that these Louisianians died in an unjust cause. Unjust! It is a word not to be used lightly. Your share of the obloquy, living comrades, you can bear; but theirs? For they are not here to speak for themselves.
And to say it to their widows and their orphans!
That word could not help the slave. He is free, thank heaven. Nor was the war in which these men died waged to free him. He was freed to wage the war, rather, as everybody knew when the proclamation of emancipation was promulgated. In point of fact, the struggle was between conflicting interpretations of the Constitution; and the Northern people, by a great and successful war, established their view of its obligations; the freedom of the slave being a corollary of victory.
Unjust! had it not been as well to leave that word to others? ’Tis an ill bird that fouls its own nest.
The war wrought wide ruin; but it has been a boon to the South in this, at least: that it has jostled our minds out of their accustomed grooves. Bold thinking has come to be the fashion. And so we should not find fault with the author of Doctor Sevier, if, dazzled by the voluptuous beauty of quadroon and octoroon, he should find a solution of our race troubles in intermarriage. Let him think his little thought. Let him say his little say. It will do no harm. On one question he will find, I think, a “solid” North and a “solid” South. Both are content to choose their wives from among the daughters of that great Aryan race which boasts so many illustrious women; and which boasts still more the millions of gentle mothers and brave wives, whose names the trump of fame has never sounded. And with such, I think, both the blue and the gray are likely to rest content. Content, too, that their children, like themselves, should be of that pure Indo-Germanic stock whence has sprung a Socrates and a Homer; a Cæsar and a Galileo; a Descartes and a Pascal; a Goethe and a Beethoven; a Newton and a Shakespeare. The countrymen of Cervantes and of Cortez, failing to keep their blood pure, have peopled a continent with Greasers and with Gauchos. And shall the children of Washington become a nation of Pullman car porters—and octoroon heroines—be their eyes never so lustrous?
But such matters are legitimate subjects of discussion. So let him have his say. But there are things which it is more seemly to leave unsaid.