Title: The old South : A monograph
Author: Hamill, Howard Melancthon
Language: English
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[Illustration: UNCLE JEFF SHIELDS, LEXINGTON, VA.]



  THE

  OLD SOUTH

  A Monograph

  BY

  H. M. HAMILL, D.D.

  [Illustration: Decoration]

  Smith & Lamar, Agents, Publishing House of the
  · · · Methodist Episcopal Church, South · · ·
  Dallas, Texas · · · Nashville, Tennessee


The subject-matter of this little book first took form in an address
before the students of Emory College, Oxford, Ga., in June, 1904. If
apology be needed for putting it in type, the writer finds it in the
request of an old woman, now eighty-six years of age, a true daughter
of the Old South, whose lightest wish has been the law of his life
for more than fifty years.



THE OLD SOUTH.


My theme is “The Old South.” I have no apology for those who may deem
it time-worn or obsolete. I am handicapped in beginning by memories
of other writers and speakers who have dealt more worthily than I can
hope to do with my subject. The Old South has not been wanting in men
to speak and write upon it. Friend and foe alike have exploited it.
It has been the burden of poetry not always inspired, and of oratory
not always inspiring. Not a few have been its critics who knew it
only by hearsay. Indeed, much of current literature upon the Old
South is from those who were born after it had passed away. I have
no fault to find with any who have thus written or spoken, however
worthily or unworthily, if only it was done in kindness. If over the
dust of the Old South, while discoursing upon its virtues or its
vices, any one has dealt generously with the one and fairly with the
other, I am content, though praise or blame may not always have been
wisely bestowed.

I was born in and of the Old South. At sixteen, after a year under
General Lee, I received my parole at Appomattox, and went home to
look upon the ruin of the Old South. Whatever is good or evil in me
I owe chiefly to that Old South. Habit, motive, ideal, ambition,
passion and prejudice, love and hatred, were formed in it and by
it. My life work as a man has been wrought under what is called the
New South, but inspiration and aspiration to it came out of the Old
South. The spell it cast upon my boyhood is strong upon me after
more than a generation has gone. It is not the spell of enchantment.
It has not blinded me to bad or good qualities, and after the lapse
of a half century and despite the tenderness for it that grows with
the passing years, I think I can see and judge the Old South and
give account of it more impartially than one who received it at
second-hand.

The Old South, in itself and apart from all other considerations,
will always be a profitable study. It is the one unique page of our
national history. Indeed, it comprehends two hundred and fifty years
of history with scarce a parallel. I think one will search in vain
history, ancient or modern, to find a likeness to the Old South,
socially, intellectually, politically, or religiously. I do not
wonder that romancer, poet, historian, and philosopher have gathered
from it material and inspiration. As a matter of fact, the past
decade has brought forth more literature concerning the Old South
than the entire generation which preceded it. Its body lies moldering
in the ground, but its soul goes marching on. Wherein especially was
it unique?


To begin with, it was in the South rather than the North that the
seed of American liberty was first planted. Jamestown, not Plymouth
Rock, was the matrix of true Americanism. Poet and orator have made
much of the rock-bound coast and savage wild to which the Puritan
fathers came, and have had little to say of the Cavaliers who fought
their way to conquest over savage beast and man. Winthrop, Standish,
and Cotton Mather are set forth by provincial and partisan writer
and speaker as exclusive national types of pioneer courage, wisdom,
and heroism. I have read more than one sneer in alleged national
histories against “the gentlemen of Jamestown,” of whom it was said
that there were “eleven laboring men and thirty-five gentlemen.” But
the historians who sneer fail to note how these same gentlemen felled
more trees and did more hard work than the men of the ax and pick.
Long after Jamestown had become a memory, I had seen the descendants
of those same derided gentlemen in the Army of Northern Virginia,
possessors of inherited wealth and reared to luxury from their
cradles, yet toiling in the trenches or tramping on the dusty highway
or charging into the mouth of cannon with unfailing cheerfulness.

I do not disparage the stern integrity and high achievement of the
Puritan sires. I gladly accord them a high place among the fathers
and founders of the republic. But putting Puritan and Cavalier
side by side, rating each fairly at his real worth and by what he
did to fix permanently the qualities that have made us great, I am
confident I could make good my proposition that deeper down at the
foundation of our greatness as a people than all other influences are
the qualities and spirit that have marked the Cavalier in the Old
World or the New.

[Illustration: AUNT HANNAH.]

Was it not in the Old South, for instance, that the first word
was spoken that fired the colonial heart and pointed the way to
freedom from the tyranny of Britain? Later, when all hearts along
the Atlantic seaboard were burning with hope of liberty, was it not
one from the Old South who presided over the fateful Congress that
finally broke with the mother country? And did not another from the
Old South frame the immortal declaration of national independence?
And when the hard struggle for liberty was begun, it was from the Old
South that a general was called to lead the ragged Continentals to
victory. Follow the progress of that war of the Revolution, and it
will be seen how in its darkest days the light of hope and courage
burned nowhere so bravely as in the Old South.

Seventy-two years and fifteen Presidents succeeded between the last
gun of the Revolution and the first gun fired upon Sumter in 1861.
Nine out of fifteen Presidents, and fifty of the seventy-two years,
are to be credited to the statesmanship of the Old South. What
Washington did with the sword for the young republic, Chief Justice
Marshall, of Virginia, made permanently secure by the wisdom of the
great jurist. After him came a long line of worthy successors from
the Old South, in the persons of judges, vice presidents, cabinet
officers, officers of the army and navy, who were called to serve
in the high places of the government. The fact is that whatever
unique quality of greatness and fame came to the republic for more
than a half century after it was begun was largely due to the wisdom
of Southern statesmanship. It is hard, I know, to credit such a
statement as to the dominating influence in our early national
history, now that nearly fifty years have passed since a genuine son
of the South has stood by the helm of the ship of State.

As with the statesmanship, so with the military leadership of the
Old South. The genius for war has been one of the gifts of the sons
of the South from the beginning, not only as fighters with a dash
that would have charmed the heart of Ney, but as born commanders,
tacticians, and strategists. In the two great wars of the republic,
Great Britain and Mexico were made to feel the skill and courage of
Southern general and rifleman. In the Civil War—greatest of modern
times, and in some respects greatest of all time—the greater generals
who commanded, as well as the Presidents who commissioned them, were
born on Southern soil, and carried into their high places the spirit
of the Old South. In the extension of the republic from the seaboard
to the great central valley, and beyond to the mountains and the
Pacific, Southern generalship and statesmanship led the way. The
purchase of Louisiana, the annexation of Texas and the Southwest,
were conceived and executed chiefly by Southern men.

So for more than fifty formative years of our history the Old South
was the dominating power in the nation, as it had been in the
foundation of the colonies out of which came the republic, and later
in fighting its battles of independence and in framing its policies
of government. And I make bold to reaffirm that whatever strength
or symmetry the republic had acquired at home, or reputation it had
achieved abroad, in those earlier crucial years of its history were
largely due to the patriotism and ability of Southern statesmanship.
Why that scepter of leadership has passed from its keeping, or why
the New South is no longer at the front of national leadership, is
a question that might well give pause to one who recalls the brave
days when the Old South sat at the head of the table and directed the
affairs of the nation.


Socially, the Old South, like “all Gaul,” was divided into three
parts—the slaveholding planters, the aristocrats of the social
system, few relatively in numbers but mighty in wealth and authority;
the negro slaves, who by the millions plowed and sowed its fields and
reaped its harvests, and who for hundreds of years, both in slavery
and freedom, have found contented homes in the South; and lastly the
nonslaveholding whites, a distinctly third estate.

The nonslaveholding white of the Old South was essentially _sui
generis_. He was really a vital part of a singular semifeudal system,
yet, as far as he could, he maintained his independence of it. He
was between two social fires. His lack of culture and breeding, his
rude speech and dress, barred him from the big house of the planter,
except as a sort of political dependent or henchman. On the other
hand, to the negro he was variously known as “poor folks,” “poor
white trash,” and at best as “half-strainers.” While there was not
a little in common between him and the master of slaves, he had
literally no dealings with the negro. Here and there, if one rose to
ownership of land or slaves by dint of extraordinary industry or good
fortune, his social position was scarcely improved. He became like
the shoddy “New Riches” of our own time, in a class to himself.

There are not a few illusions as to these “cracker” whites, which
fanciful magazine and dialect writers have helped to spread. A
benevolently intended effort has been in progress for a generation on
the part of certain sentimentalists, with more money than wisdom, to
civilize and Christianize what they are pleased to call the “mountain
whites.” One would gather from the pleas made before religious
conventions, and from the facile writers who have made these whites
their special care, that they have dwelt continually in religious
darkness and destitution, and greatly needed the alien missionary to
shed the effulgence of his superior civilization and Christianity
upon him. I think I am in a position to say that this forlorn and
destitute Southern mountaineer, true to his ancient characteristics,
has received these effusive visitors and their benevolences with one
eye partly closed and with continued cheerful expectoration at knot
holes in the neighboring fence. I am reminded of one of Bishop Hoss’s
repertoire of anecdotes, all of which have pith and point. Of such a
mountaineer as I am depicting, tall, lank, sinewy, frowzy, “a bunch
of steel springs and chicken hawk,” a tourist satirically inquired:
“May I ask, my friend, if you are a member of the human species?”
“No, by gum,” said the mountaineer; “I’m an East Tennesseean.”

As a matter of fact there are few people so thoroughly imbued with
the religious spirit as these same “cracker” mountain whites, though
it is a religion of the Old rather than of the New Testament, in
the crude ethics and doctrines which they commonly hold. Even the
Kentucky feudist is after a sort an Old Testament religionist,
who has not gone beyond the idea of the “blood avenger” of Mosaic
permission. Rude, uncouth, ignorant of books as the poor whites of
the Old South were and continue largely to be, I pay them the sincere
personal tribute of admiration for the homespun virtues that have
marked them as a peculiar people. For two years I lived in their
wildest mountain fastnesses, went in and out of their rude cabins,
taught their youth, broke bread at their tables, and worshiped
God with them in their log meetinghouses. I have earned a right,
therefore, by personal contact and knowledge to resent with warmth
the imputations under which the cracker white, highland or lowland,
is too often made to suffer. Even so distinguished an authority as
the _New York Advocate_, in a recent article devoted to this class,
permitted the usual distortion of fact in all things pertaining to
Southern problems.

Of this rude figure of the Old South, it is enough to say that no
hospitality of the plantation mansion ever eclipsed that of his
humble home to the man who sought shelter beneath it. If he never
forgave a wrong, he never forgot to repay a kindness. His honesty
was such that a man’s pocketbook was commonly as safe in the trail
of a mountaineer or lowlander as in the vault of a bank. If he had
not books or learning, there was something quite as good for his
uses which he had the knack of inheriting or acquiring—a home-grown
wit and shrewdness of judgment of men and things. Religiously,
he took his code and doctrines directly from the Bible, and too
often patterned after both good and evil in that book. He saw no
incongruity in dispensing homemade whisky and helping on a protracted
meeting at the call of his circuit rider. As to his politics, he
followed leaders only as he respected them, and was always a thorn
in the flesh of the political trickster. If the master of slaves was
an aspirant for office, and was possessor of both manhood and money,
the cracker white easily became his supporter. Usually holding the
balance of power, he taught many a sharp lesson to unworthy men who
sought his political favor. Generally the poor white was hostile to
slavery; yet singularly enough, true to the patriotism and loyalty
strangely formed in him for centuries in his isolated condition,
when the armies of the North began their invasions of the South,
these same whites by the tens and hundreds of thousands put on the
gray, and fell into line under the generalship of the owners of
plantation and slave. If there was ever such a proverb current among
them as “the rich man’s war, but the poor man’s fight,” I did not
hear it from the lips of the brave fellows from the log cabins who
became the famous fighters of the Confederacy. Over their lowly and
sometimes lonely and unkept graves I would lovingly inscribe that
exquisitely pathetic epitaph which one may read upon a Confederate
monument in South Carolina, dedicated especially to the men who had
nothing to fight for or die for but patriotism and honor:

[Illustration: SAM DAVIS.]

  This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the
  instincts of their birth, faithful to the teaching of their
  fathers, constant in their love for the State, died in the
  performance of their duty; who have glorified a fallen cause
  by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of
  suffering, and the heroism of death; and who, in the dark hours of
  imprisonment and the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short,
  sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the
  belief that at home they would not be forgotten.


Between the negro and his master there was ever in general a feeling
of mutual respect and confidence. If I could gather from the Old
South its most beautiful and quaint conceits and incidents, I would
find none so full of pathos and interest as the long-continued and
ever-deepening affection that often, indeed I might say commonly,
bound together the white master and the black slave. Neither poverty
nor ruin, nor changed conditions, nor disruption of every order,
social and political, was effectual in breaking this bond of loyalty
and love; and now, so long after the period of enfranchisement has
come, if I wanted concrete evidence of the singular beauty of the
social system of the Old South, I should summon as my witnesses those
lingering relics of the ante-bellum order—the “old massa” and the
old negro. Before the last of that era are gone I should be glad to
contribute to some such monument as that proposed by ex-Governor
Taylor—a trinity of figures to be carved from a single block of
Southern marble, consisting of the courtly old planter, high-bred and
gentle in face and manner; the plantation “uncle,” the counterpart
in ebony of the master so loyally served and imitated; and the
broad-bosomed black “mammy,” with varicolored turban, spotless apron,
and beaming face, the friend and helper of every living thing in
cabin or mansion.

I would that I had the power to put before you vividly and really the
strange and beautiful social life of the Old South. It was Arcadian
in its simplicity and well-nigh ideal in its conditions. It was a
reproduction of the palmiest days and best features of feudalism,
with little of the evil of that system. I know I am confronted by
a host of critics and maligners of the so-called “slaveocracy”
or “oligarchy” of the Old South. I have often read and heard of
its despotism and cruelty from those who did not know or did not
intend to be truthful or just. The war that swept slavery and the
slaveholder out of existence was inspired and envenomed by such
misrepresentation. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a museum of barbarities
set forth as the ordinary life of the Old South, a composite of
brilliant and brutal falsehoods. I have no defense of feudalistic
subjection of the many to the few, nor am I a friend to caste. Yet I
have read history in vain and studied human progress to small account
if I have not, with others, discovered that a true development of
society, the stability of government, the conservation of the rights
of all classes, depend largely upon a social system in which one
class, few in numbers, capable and conscientious, rules the other
classes. A pure democracy is the dream of the idealist, and would be
unprofitable even in the millennium. The men who own the lands of a
country, its moneys, ships, and commerce, who maintain the traditions
of the past, and trace their blood to the beginnings of a country’s
existence—these will inevitably become the leaders and rulers of a
country. So the Old South had its aristocracy, whose leaders laughed
at the doctrine of equality as proclaimed by sentimentalists at home
and abroad.

This Old South aristocracy was of threefold structure—it was an
aristocracy of wealth, of blood, and of honor. It was not the wealth
of the shoddy aristocracy that here and there, even in the New South,
has forced itself into notice and vulgarly flaunts its acquisitions.
It came by inheritance of generations chiefly, as with the nobility
of England and France. Only in the aristocracy of the Old World could
there be found a counterpart to the luxury, the ease and grace of
inherited wealth, which characterized the ruling class of the Old
South. There were no gigantic fortunes as now, and wealth was not
increased or diminished by our latter-day methods of speculation
or prodigal and nauseating display. The ownership of a broad
plantation, stately country and city homes, of hundreds of slaves, of
accumulations of money and bonds, passed from father to children for
successive generations. Whatever cohesiveness the law could afford
bound such great estates together, so that prodigality or change
could least affect them. Here and there mansions of the old order of
Southern aristocracy are standing in picturesque and melancholy ruin,
as reminders of the splendor and luxury of the ante-bellum planter.
A few months ago I looked upon the partly dismantled columns of a
once noble home of the Old South, about which there clustered thickly
the memories of a great name and family which for generations had
received the homage of the South. As a child I had seen the spacious
mansion in the day of its pride, as the Mecca of political leaders
who came to counsel with its princely owner, or as the center of a
hospitality that never intermitted until the end of wealth came with
the desolations of war. The glass of fashion and the mold of form
made it famous as a social magnet. In those old days, its beautifully
kept lawns, its ample shrubbery, its primeval park of giant oaks,
its bewildering garden of flowers, its great orchards, its long rows
of whitewashed negro cabins, its stables and flashing equipages and
blooded horses and dogs, the army of darkies in its fields, the
native melody of their songs rising and falling in the distance,
the grinding of cane or ginning of cotton, the soft-shod corps of
trained servants about the mansion, the mingling of bright colors of
innumerable visitors, the brilliancy of cut glass and silver, the
lavishness of everything that could tempt the eye or palate—was like
a picture from the scenes of Old-World splendor rather than of a
young Western republic. As I looked and brooded over this ruin of a
long-famous home, its glory all gone, its light and laughter dim and
silent, I paid tribute to an aristocracy of wealth, pleasure-loving
indeed, with the inherent weaknesses of transmitted estate, but one
which, having freely received, freely gave of its abundance in a
hospitality eclipsing any people whom the world has known.

Porte Crayon, in _Harper’s Magazine_ long before the war, and Thomas
Nelson Page, in these later days, have essayed by pencil and pen to
set forth the charm of that wonderful hospitality and home life of
the Old South. I saw the last of it. With my parole in my pocket,
returning homeward through Virginia with other Confederates, hungry
and foot-sore, we turned aside from our army-beaten road to a
spacious plantation mansion on the crest of a hill, under whose porch
sat a lonely old man, the one living creature we could discern. When
we asked for bread, he excused himself for a moment on the plea that
family and servants were gone, and that he must do our bidding. In
a little while he returned with a huge platter of bread and meat,
apologizing for a menu so little varied. When we had eaten as only
Confederate soldiers could eat and were filled, we took pieces of
money from our little store and tendered him in pay. I can never
forget the big tears that welled up in the eyes of the old-time
Virginian and the flush on his cheeks, as he said: “No, boys; it is
the last morsel of food that the enemy has left me. There is not a
living creature or an atom of food remaining, but there is not money
enough in both armies to tempt my poverty. I’ve kept it up as long as
I had it to give.”

[Illustration: CONFEDERATE WHITE HOUSE.]

Down under all this wealth of fertile field and dusky laborer and
palatial home, there was something in which the old-time Southerner
took a pride beyond that which he felt in material wealth. His
aristocracy of wealth was as nothing compared to his aristocracy of
blood. An old family name that had held its place in the social and
political annals of his State for generations was a heritage vastly
dearer to him than wealth. Back to the gentle-blooded Cavaliers who
came to found this Western world, he delighted to trace his ancestry.
There could be no higher honor to him than to link his name with the
men who had planted the tree of liberty and made possible a great
republic. Whatever honors his forbears had won in field or forum,
whatever positions of public importance they had graced, he had at
his fingers’ ends, and never grew weary of rehearsing. I have nothing
but tenderness for this old-time weakness of the Southerner, if
weakness it can be called. To glory in one’s blood for centuries
past, if only kept pure, to take pride in the linking of one’s name
and fame with the history of one’s country, to grow gentler and
truer and more self-respecting because of the virtues of a long line
of ancestors who have lifted a family name to deserved eminence,
has to the writer seemed a noble sentiment. I know how fools have
made mock of it, and how silly people in the South have sometimes
brought it into contempt; but I set forth in pride and gratitude
for the Old South as one of its distinguishing characteristics this
devotion to the memory and traditions of its ancestry. If here and
there the course of transmitted blood lapsed into habit or deed of
shame, it happened so rarely that it set the bolder in contrast the
aristocracy of gentle blood. “Blood will tell.” I remember as a boy
watching admiringly and yet a little enviously the graceful and
sometimes reckless military evolutions of a hundred or more young
bloods, who were making holiday of the art of war. Trim, natty,
elegant youngsters they were, in scarlet and gold, the scions of
great families. I can remember wondering, as I watched them, if the
same dash and brilliancy that marked them as gala day soldiery would
be maintained by them in the storm of battle which was making ready
to break upon us. I had my answer. One day in Virginia the fortunes
of war threw my regiment at elbows with theirs. Glitter and gold and
scarlet were all bedimmed; but the gay laugh, the Cavalier dash, the
courage that never quailed, were with them still as they swung into a
desperate charge, singing one of their old cadet songs as lightly as
a mocking bird’s trill.

If any one should seek for the secret of that singular bravery, that
supreme contempt of pain and privation and indifference to death
that distinguished our Southern soldiery and won the admiration of
its enemies, I think it will be found largely in the ambition of the
younger generation to walk worthily after the steps of their fathers.
Homogeneous in its citizenship, changing its customs little with
passing years, slow to imbibe the spirit of other countries and of
other sections of our own country, constant to its own ideals, and
always a law unto itself, in no country on the face of the earth was
a good name and family distinction more prized and potent than in
the Old South.

Linked indissolubly with this aristocracy of wealth and of blood
was one which, in my judgment, was stronger than either, and which
extended beyond the lines of those who were born to the purple of
wealth or the pride of a great name. I do not know better how to
denominate it than this—the aristocracy of honor. Proud of their
great homes and positions of leadership, and boastful of their high
descent, the aristocrats of the Old South, true to the Cavalier
traditions, erected an ethical system that defined and regulated
personal and public matters and became the inflexible code of every
Southern gentleman. Its foundation was laid in a man’s “honor,” and
the honor of a gentleman was the supreme test and standard of every
relation, public and private. The extremes of this old Southern
ethical code were illustrated, on the one part, by the maxim that
“a man’s word is his bond,” which meant that, the word of honor
once passed between men, it must be as inviolable as life itself.
Practically, it came to mean, as the present generation little knows
or appreciates, that ninetenths of the business of the Old South
was a mere promise to pay, and that its millions rested from year to
year upon the faith and honor that underlay its vast credit system. A
gentleman of the Old South might be guilty of not a few peccadillos.
He might sin easily and often against himself, but woe to the man who
sinned against other men by withholding what was due and had been
promised “on honor.” Personally I have known men of large business
affairs whose whole fortunes depended on the passing of a word, and
who on the instant would have surrendered their last dollar to make
good that “word of honor.” Nor was this exceptional. It was bred in
the bone and flesh of every old-time Southern boy that upon this word
of personal faith the gentleman must take his stand, and at whatever
cost of comfort or convenience or self-denial or sacrifice, even to
the death, he must make it good. Such was the code of honor upon its
business side.

There was another illustration of the code of a more somber kind,
now many years obsolete. It was by the crack of pistol and flash
of sword that in the old time not infrequently were determined the
fine points of honor. Long ago this “code duello,” with its Hotspur
partisans, passed away, and I thank God for the gentler spirit that
has come in its stead. With all of its blood and brutality, however,
it had one merit which I am frank to allow it. It compelled one to
circumspection in what he said and did, or it made him pay instant
price for his wrongdoing. It differentiated the man of courage from
the bully and the sneak, and it set in bold relief the marks of the
gentleman. I am glad to say, too, that during the long and evil reign
of the code duello satisfaction in money and by damage suits at law
was not as popular as now. The Kentuckian whose bloody face provoked
the inquiry, “What ails you?” answered by the code and card when he
replied, “I called a gentleman a liar.” The kind of gentleman who
would salve the wounded honor of his person or family by a check was
unknown or unrecognized before the war.

If one wishes to see the old-time planter at his best, he will find
him as the pencils of Page, Harris, and Hopkinson Smith have drawn
him—courtly, genial, warm-hearted, gracious, proud of his family,
boastful of his ancestral line, a lover of gun and dog and horse and
mint julep, an incomparable mixer in the society of well-bred ladies
and gentlemen, as unique and distinguished a figure as ever graced
the ball or banquet room, the political forum, or the field of honor.
His race will soon be extinct, and only the kindly voice and pen of
those who knew him and loved him in spite of his weaknesses will
truly perpetuate his memory. For two hundred years and more his was
the conspicuous and unrivaled figure upon the social and political
stage of our history. The good that he did lives after him; may the
evil be interred with his bones!


Side by side with the aristocrat, waiting deferentially to do his
bidding, with a grace and courtliness hardly surpassed by his master,
I place the negro servant of the Old South. If one figure was unique,
the other is not less so. Either figure in the passing throng would
quickly arrest your attention. I am frank to confess to a tender
feeling for those faithful black servitors of the Old South—the
“Uncle Remuses” and “Aunt Chloes” of picture and poetry. On the
great plantations, in their picturesque colors, in constant laughter
and good nature, well fed and clothed and generally well-kept
and moderately worked, the negro of slavery lived his careless,
heart-free life. The specter of hunger and want never disquieted him.
His cabin, clothing, food, garden, pocket money, and holidays came
without his concern. I think I state the truth when I say that for
the millions of slaves of the Old South there were fewer heartaches
than ever troubled a race of people. Freedom may be an inestimable
boon. I know that poet and orator have so declared. But when I look
upon the care-worn faces of the remnant of old-time negroes who have
been testing freedom for a generation and have found it full of
heartache and worry, I take exception to the much-vaunted doctrine of
liberty as the panacea for all human ills. An old darky, with white
head and shuffling feet and haunted look in his eyes, stopped the
other day at the door of my office, and, after the manner of the old
days, his cap in hand, asked “if massa could give the old nigger a
dime?” Something in my voice or manner must have intimated to him
that, like him, I belonged to the old order, as he said: “It’s all
right for some folks, dis thing they calls freedom; but God knows
I’d be glad to see the old days once more before I die.” Freedom to
him, and to others like him, had proven a cheat and a snare. I have
no word of apology or defense for slavery. Long ago I thanked God
that it was no longer lawful for one human being to hold another in
enforced servitude. But a generation or more of free negroes has been
our most familiar object-lesson, and the outcome is painful at best.
The negro who commands respect in the South to-day, as a rule, is the
negro who was born and trained under slavery. The new generation,
those who have known nothing but freedom, it is charity to say,
are an unsatisfactory body of people generally. Whenever you find
a negro whose education comes not from books and college only, but
from the example and home teaching and training of his white master
and mistress, you will generally find one who speaks the truth, is
honest, self-respecting and self-restraining, docile and reverent,
and always the friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady.
Here and there in the homes of the New South these graduates from
the school of slavery are to be found in the service of old families
and their descendants, and the relationship is one of peculiar
confidence and affection; and this old-time darky, wherever you find
him in his integrity, pride, and industry, is in bold contrast with
the post-bellum negro, despite his educational opportunity. Living
as I do in a city famed for its negro schools, I have tried to
observe fairly, and indeed with strong predilection in their favor,
the processes and results of negro education. Son of an abolitionist
of the Henry Clay school, I have sincerely wanted to see the negro
succeed educationally and take his place with other men in skill and
service. If any city of the South should be the first to confirm the
negro’s fitness for an education and his increase in value and in
character as the subject of it, I thought it but fair to expect it
of a city famous for its colored universities. But, with honorable
exceptions to the rule, the negro of post-bellum birth and education
in this city is usually a thorn in the flesh to one who seeks or uses
his service, no matter what that service may be. “We don’t have to
work any more,” said one recently; “we are getting educated.” Yet
when one of the darky patriarchs of the Old South died the other day,
a leading daily paper, in a tender and beautiful editorial, noted how
this colored gentleman of the old school, after a long life of honor
and trust, with hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through his
hands as confidential messenger, had won the respect of all men by
the sheer nobility of his life.

[Illustration: CONFEDERATE MONUMENT.]

Perhaps the education of hand and foot and eye—the manual training
schemes of Booker Washington and other like negro educators—may
suffice to avert the degeneracy of the younger negro race. The
trouble, however, is that many of these are not enamored of hard
work and constant labor. They turn their backs upon ax and saw and
plow which the white man offers them along with ample wages, and
prefer the negro barroom and the crap table. After forty years have
gone, and millions of money have been expended by both Northern and
Southern whites in an effort to educate and train him for profitable
service, the negro is found practically in two classes—the larger
class massed in the cities and towns, too often despising and
shirking work except as compelled to it by sheer necessity; the other
class consisting of those who are not ashamed of any kind of work in
field, factory, or shop, the significant thing being that those who
want work and are doing it are commonly the negroes with little or
no education, while those who are shunning work are usually of the
so-called educated class.

I am not surprised at the failure of the negro’s secular education
to make him a good and profitable citizen. It is only another
illustration of the folly of trying to sharpen the intellect and
leave untrained the heart and conscience. The Old South, by contact,
example, and precept, put a conscience and a sense of right and
honorable living into its slaves. The New South is largely filling
them with books. The negro of the Old South was religious, genuinely
so, though by reason of his emotional nature his religion was often
a matter of feeling. But such religion as he had he got from white
teachers and preachers, and it was real and scriptural. It bound
him to tell the truth, to lie not, to be sober and honest, and to
do no man wrong. How well the negro learned and practiced this
old-fashioned religion of slavery, let two facts attest. First, few
negroes thus trained in the Old South, so far as the speaker knows,
have suffered by rope or fagot for the unnamable crime that so often
has marked the negro of the New South. If there be exceptions to this
rule, certainly they are exceedingly rare. Secondly, at a time when
every white man and even white boys were at the front fighting the
battles of the Confederacy, the wives and mothers and children of the
soldiers were cared for loyally and devotedly by the negro slaves
to an extent unmatched in the history of the world. Such was the
honor and conscience of the negro slaves that they watched over the
helpless women and children of those who were engaged in a conflict
involving their own slavery.

What the negro needs more than books and college curriculum is a
conscience. He needs religion of the genuine, transforming kind that
will stop his petty thieving, his street corner loafing, and his
tendencies toward the barbarism from which in the Old South religion
wrested his fathers. I think the time has come when our Southern
white churches should turn again toward the negro and help him as far
as possible to a knowledge of pure and undefiled religion, after the
example of such ministry as that of Capers and Andrew to the slaves.
If I find any fault with ourselves in our relationships with the
negro, it is that we too easily conceded that the negro’s moral and
religious interests should be taken out of our hands since the war
by sentimentalists, or by those whose labors among the negroes were
inspired by political rather than by genuinely benevolent motives.
Once politics is no longer an ally to the negro, and White House
favors are not permitted to turn his head, I have some hope that the
Southern white and the negro may come together in peace and mutual
affection under the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and after an
alienation of more than a generation may take up again the old order
of religious instruction and training, which the white fathers of
the Old South were so zealous to give and which the black servants
were so eager to receive. When a young pastor came to me a few weeks
ago asking an opinion upon the fact that, in response to a request
from a score or more of families of negroes on his charge who were
without church and other religious facilities, he and his wife had
formed their children into a Sunday school and the teachers of his
white school were giving them faithful and intelligent instruction
every Sabbath, I saw in the incident an intimation of what the New
South must do if it would restore the lost negro conscience of the
Old South.

I cannot dismiss this passing glance at the social life of the Old
South without a sense of abiding regret that it is gone forever.
My last personal contact with it was the Christmas just preceding
the war. Though the air was thick with rumors of impending strife,
no gun as yet had broken the quiet of a land so full of peace and
prosperity. I think the merriment of those last holidays of ’61 was
greater than ever before. I recall it all the more vividly because
it was the last old-fashioned Christmas that came to my boyhood, as
it was the last that came to the Old South. For weeks preceding it
everything on the old plantation was full of stir and preparation.
Holly and mistletoe and cedar were being put about the rooms of the
big house to welcome home the boys and girls from school. Secret
councils were being held as to the Christmas gifts that were to be
given religiously to every one, white and black. The back yard was
piled up with loads of oak and hickory to make bright and warm the
Christmas nights. The negro seamstresses were busy making new suits
and dresses for all the servants. The master of the plantation was
figuring up the accounts of the year and making ready for generous
drafts upon his ready money. There was an increasing rustle of
excitement and happiness that ran from the gray-haired grandfather
and mother down to the smallest pickaninny in the remotest negro
cabin. The peace and goodness of God seemed to brood over it all.
The stately plantation home, with its lofty white columns, its big
rooms, its great fireplaces, opened wide to all sons and daughters
and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. We poured
into it; and if ever heaven came close to earth and mingled with it,
I think it was that Christmas Eve when the last wanderer and exile
had come and the grace was said at the great table by a gray-haired
patriarch of the Old South. There was little sleep for small boys
and girls, and long before daylight of Christmas shone in upon us
we were scurrying from room to room crying, “Christmas gift!” to
which, whenever first spoken by child or dependent, there could be
but the one gracious response. Out on the back porches the negroes
were waiting in grinning rows to follow our example, and many were
the dusky faces that beamed with delight over their never-failing
Christmas remembrances. Down in the cabins and up in the big halls of
the mansion the lights and fires burned the entire week, and there
was nothing that could eat that was not surfeited with the world of
eatables made ready. I must beg pardon of the W. C. T. U., which had
not then begun its beneficent prohibitory career, if I recall the big
flowing bowl of eggnog, renewed daily and served generously to all. I
know that this old-time Christmas beverage is growing into disrepute,
for which I am sincerely glad, but I confess to a sort of carnal
delight of memory when I recall how good it tasted to the average
small boy on an early Christmas morning.

[Illustration: JEFFERSON DAVIS.]


The Old South intellectually was a fitting complement to its unique
social system. The charge has often been made against it that it
produced few if any great writers and left no lasting impress upon
the literature of the times. If this were true, it could be answered
that the Old South was true to its distinctive mission. It needed to
produce great thinkers, and it produced them, as the half-century
of its dominating leadership attests. An Elizabethan age, with
its coterie of great writers, comes to any nation only at long
intervals, and under conditions which are of providential rather
than of human ordering. The Southern man, by tradition, inheritance,
and choice, and by virtue of a certain philosophic temper which
seemed to inhere in his race, was trained to think and to speak
clearly, and especially upon grave matters of public import. He was
a born politician in the best sense of that much-abused term. Like
Hannibal, he was led early in life to the altars of his country and
dedicated to its service. He coveted the power and the authority of
the rostrum rather than the pen. In the beauty of field and forest,
of bright stream and blossoming flower, of song and sunshine, or in
the historic incidents of the Old South, he had ample inspiration
and material for his pen, if he had cared to use it. But it was ever
his ambition and delight to stand before his countrymen on some
great public day, and set forth the length and breadth of some great
argument, patiently studied and thought out in his library and now
made luminous and inspiring to the listening multitude. If it were
true that the South had no great writers, I could even content myself
by recalling how, when one of its brilliant thinkers and orators cast
his spell upon the culture of old Boston, the finest editorial writer
of that city of writers placed over his leading editorial the next
morning the question, “What could be finer?”

While it was true of the Old South that members of its learned
professions commonly dallied with the Muses, there was no distinctive
profession of letters. The professional poet, historian, and maker of
fiction, and publisher and seller of books, were scarcely known. A
rural people, a relatively sparse population of readers, the absence
of great cities, the concentration of thought and learning upon
politics and plans of government, the entire lack of commercialism
as a motive to literary production, were reasons why the Old South
contributed comparatively little _per se_ to the stock of permanent
literature. There was another hindrance in the fact, which I do not
like to recall, that the South, in mistaken largeness of heart or
short-sightedness of vision, fell upon two ways that lowered its own
self-respect and dwarfed the good it might have attained. It set up a
fashion, on the one hand, of reading and patronizing alien books, and
accounted these foreign literary products as better than its own. And
along with this same mistaken fondness for foreign literary wares, it
began to slight its own struggling colleges and schools, and to send
its sons and daughters elsewhere for a culture not superior to that
procurable at its own doors.

Yet with such admitted weaknesses, let no one suppose for an
instant that the ability to write or think or speak worthy of the
finest culture was in any wise wanting to the gentleman of the Old
South. Enter his library, and you would find what is becoming rare
in the New South, but which was the mark of the gentleman of the
Old South—the finest and completest array of costly books upon
all subjects, ranging through science, art, literature, theology,
biography, history, and politics. Nothing that money could buy or
trained scholarship select was omitted. A man’s books were his
most intimate friends and comrades, and such was the wide range
and patient study of the average gentleman of the Old South that
wits and savants vied in paying tribute to his varied and scholarly
attainments. In singular contrast, the other day one of our literary
leaders, discussing the scanty sale of really valuable books,
bemoaned the fact that the Southern gentleman’s library is fast
becoming extinct.

One feature of scholarship that was peculiar to the Old South was
the general and thorough devotion to, and mastery of, the classics.
I doubt if ever the youth of any country were so well grounded in
the literature of Greek and Latin poet and historian, or caught so
fully and finely the beauty of the old philosophies and mythologies.
It was not an uncommon feat for a boy of fourteen, upon entrance
as a freshman to a college of the old order, to read Virgil and
Horace _ore rotundo_, with a grace and finish that would do credit
to a post-bellum alumnus. Latin, Greek, and the higher mathematics,
with a modicum of the physical sciences, constituted the favored
curriculum of the old-time academy and college. How much some of
us owe to that ancient academy and that small college can never be
rightly estimated. The standard of study was severe and thorough.
The discipline was often rigorous and exacting. What, for instance,
would our latter-day college boys think of a rule compelling their
attendance, if within a mile of the chapel, upon sunrise prayer
the year round? Or how would a shudder run through their ranks if
I paused to tell them of how in our old Academy two score of us
classical students, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty years,
having been discovered demolishing the business signs of town
merchants in an effort to fulfill the Scriptures which declared that
they should seek a sign and none should be given unto them, were
soundly thrashed with exceeding roughness and dispatch by the man
who for many years has held the superintendency of public schools
in the foremost city of the South! Alas for the disappearance of
those good old days and customs, of which the survivors have feeling
and pathetic remembrance! For one, I am glad that free public
education has come to the children, white and black, of the New
South. Whether the hopes of the statesman and philanthropist shall
be realized or not, I am also glad of the millions of money the New
South has expended in the past generation upon the education of the
masses. But the day of the ancient academy and college, as source
and inspiration of an incomparable culture, will never be surpassed
by latter-day educational systems, however widely extended and
beneficent these may be. There was something intensely stimulating
in the spirit and method of the old classical school; a sharp yet
generous competition and rivalry of scholarship; a thoroughness that
reached the foundation of every subject traversed; and above and
through it all there was the sure development of a sense of honor
and a pride of scholarship that lifted even the dull student into an
ambition to succeed. Mixed with all was the example and influence
of high-bred Christian gentlemen as professors and teachers, whose
lives reenforced their teachings and molded us into the image of
the gentleman of the Old South. The utilitarian in education was not
yet in evidence. The bread-and-butter argument was reserved to a
later generation. The cheap and tawdry “business college,” recruited
from guileless country youth ambitious to become merchant princes
and railroad managers by a six months’ course in double entry and
lightning arithmetic, had not then entered upon its dazzling career.
Boys were trained to read extensively, to think clearly, to analyze
patiently, to judge critically, to debate accurately and fluently,
and in short to master whatever subject one might come upon. Over
that old-time educational method might be written the aphorism of
Quintilian, that “not what one may remember constitutes knowledge,
but what one cannot forget.”


We were not without noble intellectual exemplars in our Old South.
The great thoughts of our home-born leaders, from Patrick Henry to
Calhoun and Clay, were ever before us. Our college debates, our
commencement orations, were fashioned after the severely classical
models these men had left us. From the rostrum, the party platform,
the pulpit, whenever a man spoke in those days it was expected and
demanded that his speech be chaste, his thought elevated, his purpose
ennobling. We were old-fashioned, I admit, in theme and method.
We did not aim so much to please and entertain as to convince and
inspire. The forum was as sacred as in the palmiest days of Athens
and Demosthenes. About it centered our chief ambitions. We had not
come upon a degenerate age when a much-exploited college graduate,
lyceum lecturer, and “D.D.”—as I heard him before a great audience
of university young gentlemen and ladies the other day—could descend
to a contemptible buffoonery of delineation of the “American Girl”
as his theme, and include in his printed repertoire such subjects as
“The Tune the Old Cow Died of,” which confirmed some of us who heard
him in the conviction that Balaam’s ass is yet lineally represented
in ways of public speech and action.

[Illustration: ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.]

Of the great writers and orators who left their impress upon us in
the last years of the Old South, I can speak from personal contact
and experience, and with thankfulness that as a boy I was given to
see most of them face to face and to touch, in spirit, the hem of
their garments. The spell of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, though
the fitful fever of his life had ended, was upon the literature and
literary men of the time. The weird beauty of the lines of this
prince of the powers of harmony, contrasting so wonderfully with
a strange analytical power that made him at once a foremost prose
and poetical writer of his century, had set before us the measure
of beauty and the test of genius. Then, in our own day, came Paul
Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, and Sidney Lanier. I cannot describe to
you the feeling of ownership that we of the Old South felt in this
trinity of noble singers; nor can I express the sense of tenderness
that comes to me as I recall the pain and poverty that haunted them
most of their days until the end came, to two of them at least, in
utter destitution. It was my privilege early in life to fall under
the spell of the minstrelsy of these three men. As long as the red
hills of Georgia stand, and its overhanging pines are stirred by the
south wind’s sighing, let it recall to the honorable and grateful
remembrance of Georgians the gentle yet proud-spirited poet who,
having lost all but honor and genius in his native sea-girt city,
came to his rude cabin home at Copse Hill as the weary pilgrim of
whom he so tenderly sings:

    With broken staff and tattered shoon,
    I wander slow from dawn to noon—
    From arid noon till, dew-impearled,
    Pale twilight steals across the world.
    Yet sometimes through dim evening calms
    I catch the gleam of distant palms;
    And hear, far off, a mystic sea,
    Divine as waves on Galilee.
    Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn,
    I still may reach an Orient morn;
    To rest where Easter breezes stir
    Around the sacred sepulcher.

I know what a fashion it is to worship at the shrines of the “Lake
poets,” and how Wordsworth and Burns and Shelley and like singers
of the Old World, with Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell of the New,
are set on high as the greater masters of poesy. But if genius is a
thing of quality rather than quantity, I go back to the dark days
and memories of battle and take my stand lovingly beside the new-made
grave of Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, and call to
mind what I believe to be a poem that the greatest of English and
American poets would be glad to claim as their own. Remember, as you
read it, how in his dire want the poet wrote of the little book of
which it is a part: “I would consign every line of it to oblivion for
one hundred dollars in hand.”

    Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air
          Which dwells with all things fair;
    Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains,
          Is with us once again.

           *       *       *       *       *

    Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn
          In the sweet airs of morn;
    One almost looks to see the very street
          Grow purple at his feet.
    At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,
          And brings—you know not why—
    A feeling as when eager crowds await
          Before a palace gate
    Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start,
          If from a beech’s heart
    A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say:
          “Behold me! I am May!”

Sidney Lanier was of the Old South, though fame came to him from the
New. It was fitting that the latest of the progeny of genius of the
Old South should become the foremost of those who were to gild it
with a fame imperishable. Born in Georgia, less than a score of years
before the tragedy of the Old South began, writing his earliest poems
as a boy in Confederate camp and Federal prison, his music tinged
with the somberness of the time, Lanier’s genius was like the last of
the Southern flowers that burst into bloom just before the coming of
chilling frost and wintry wind. It was like the bright-red flower of
war which he describes: “The early spring of 1861 brought to bloom,
besides innumerable violets and jessamines, a strange, enormous, and
terrible flower, the blood-red flower of war, which grows amid the
thunders.” Why it is that the price of genius must always be paid in
blood, I do not know; but not all the transmitted genius and culture
and spirit of the Old South, which crystallized in this last and
greatest of her literary children, could absolve Lanier from the
pangs which Southern genius seems peculiarly called upon to suffer.
As the holiest and bravest lives spring out of darkness and storm
and sorrow, it may be that only such baptism of tears and blood which
we as a people have received could fit our sons and daughters for
their high vocation.

Lanier was easily the greatest of the poets of the South. Perhaps his
final place is yet to be fixed among the greater singers of America,
but it is comforting to know that the clear light of dispassionate
judgment of the receding years dispels the first-formed prejudices,
and lifts the singer into nobler and yet nobler place.

Broken with pain and poverty, yearning unutterably for the peace
and quiet of an opportunity to pour out his divine genius in great
and holy song, could anything be more utterly pitiful than this
passionate cry for help, which lay among his papers after his death?

    O Lord, if thou wert needy as I,
    If thou shouldst come to my door as I to thine;
    If thou hungered so much as I
    For that which belongs to the spirit,
    For that which is fine and good,
    Ah, friend, for that which is fine and good,
    I would give it to thee if I had power.

“A thousand songs are singing in my heart,” he declares, “that will
certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon.”

Lanier’s genius was many-sided, and there is not a line he wrote of
poetry or prose that one would care to blot. He had the exquisite
sense of melody of Poe, but he had what Poe did not in the spirit
of the maxim of his art which he often expressed in the words: “The
beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty.” He had, too, the
tenderness and pathos and lyrical beauty of Timrod and Haynes, yet
the characteristic of his poems is that they call one to worship God.
They usher us with bowed head and chastened spirit into the holy of
holies. “A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep,” he writes;
“it was going when I awoke.”

Just as in the ancient mythology, while one of divine descent might
hold converse for a time with sons and daughters of men unmarked
or unrecognized, yet by glance of eye or grace of motion would
inevitably betray himself as of the progeny of the gods, so if ever
for a moment I were in doubt as to the genius of Lanier my doubt
would vanish as in the darkness, with bowed head and pitying heart of
love, I sang to myself his “Ballad of the Trees and the Master:”

    Into the woods my Master went,
    Clean forspent, forspent.
      Into the woods my Master came,
      Forspent with love and shame.
    But the olives they were not blind to him,
    The little gray leaves were kind to him,
    The thorn tree had a mind to him,
      When into the woods he came.

    Out of the woods my Master went,
    And he was well content.
      Out of the woods my Master came,
      Content with death and shame.
    When death and shame would woo him last,
    From under the trees they drew him—last;
    ’Twas on a tree they slew him—last,
      When out of the woods he came.


One of the aphorisms of my youth was, “Poeta nascitur, orator fit.”
That the poet is “born,” and ever bears upon himself the marks of
his divine enduement, I do not doubt; but that the orator “becomes”
or happens so by chance or labor, I must strongly deny. A certain
fluency of speech, a certain gloss of oratory, may possibly be
achieved by dint of elocutionary drill and practice. If one is
minded, like orators of an elegant postprandial type, to stand before
a mirror and practice the tricks of gesture and speech, he may
hope to attain applause from those whose blood is kept well cooled
by the ices of the banquet room. I have described it fittingly as
“postprandial” oratory, for the reason that it is most appreciated
when the stomach and not the brain is chiefly in operation.

But if any one as a boy had ever sat under the matchless spell of the
real masters of the forum, those who were as fully “born” unto it as
was Lanier to poetry or Blind Tom to music; if within a half score of
years he had been permitted to hear in their prime Jefferson Davis,
Robert Toombs, Ben Hill, Alexander Stephens, Judge Lamar, and William
L. Yancey, the after-dinner elegancies of oratory of the class I have
named would be tame and dispiriting. I would not underrate the men
of later fame, but I am sure that it is not time and distance only
that lend enchantment to the names of that galaxy of famous orators
who closed the succession of platform princes of the Old South. I
would not detract an iota from whatever claim the New South may have
to oratory, but I stand firmly upon the proposition, self-evident to
survivors of the Old South, that the golden age of Southern oratory
ended a generation ago. Compared with Yancey, the incarnate genius of
oratory, any oration of that superb master of assemblies by the side
of the best post-bellum oratory (always excepting Henry W. Grady) is
as Hyperion to a satyr.

On a day that no one who was present will ever forget, while the
war clouds were gathering and old political issues were giving
place to the one dominant and terrible question of the hour, in a
little Southern city, within the compass of twelve hours I heard the
greatest of the orators of the last tragic era of the Old South.
Whig and Democrat were words to conjure with, and the old-fashioned
custom of joint debate was yet in honor. The crux of an intense and
hard-fought campaign was at hand, and only the platform giants of the
contending parties were in demand for the occasion. From fifty to a
hundred miles around, towns, without railroad communication as now,
poured their delegations in upon the crucial day of the campaign.
For two days and nights in advance, processions with fife and drum
and bands, cannon and cavalry, had held rival parade. The fires of a
great barbecue, with its long lines of parallel trenches in which,
under the unbroken vigilance of expert negro cooks, whole beeves and
sheep and hogs and innumerable turkeys were roasting, sent forth
a savor that would have tempted the dainty palate of an Epicurus.
Floats were formed, and fair young women and rosy-cheeked children
expressed in symbol the doctrines of their sires, and sang to us
until our hearts were all aglow. To the small boy there were meat and
drink, sights and sounds illimitable, and a tenseness of excitement
that thrilled him with a thousand thrills, for in the presence and
sound of the great men of his country the boy’s heart must expand and
his ambition take fire.

Not in a hundred years could I forget the speeches and speakers of
that eventful day. Whole passages linger in memory now, fifty years
after they were spoken. I recall the jubilant ring of Ben Hill as,
lifting an old placard on which was inscribed, “Buck, Breck, and
Kansas,” he said: “You got your Buck, you got your Breck, but where’s
your Kansas?” Or Brownlow, with the heavy thump of his fist on the
table, declaring, “I would rather vote for the old clothes of Henry
Clay, stuffed with straw, than for any man living.” Or Toombs, with
massive head and lordly pose, denouncing in blistering speech the
unholy alliance of certain men of the Old South with the enemies of
its most vital institution. Or Stephens, small and weazened, sallow
and unkempt, with cigar stump in hand, his thin, metallic voice
penetrating with strange power to the remotest part of the great
open-air assemblage. All day, back and forth, the battle of the
giants raged. Toward nightfall the Democrats were in dire distress
over the seeming victory of the opposition. Yancey lay sick at home,
sixty miles away, and the wires were kept hot with pleadings to bring
him at any cost, if possible, to the scene. At nine o’clock that
night I saw a strange tribute to the power of that orator, who, I
doubt not, will stand unrivaled in the future as in the past. Pale
and emaciated, taken from his sick room and hurried by special
train, upborne upon the shoulders of men whose idol he had been for
twenty years, he was carried to the platform at the close of a day’s
great victory by the opposing party. With singularly musical voice
and an indefinable magnetism which fell upon all of us, he began
a speech of two hours’ length. Within an hour, such was the magic
of the man, he had turned the tide of defeat, rallied his party,
and filled them with hope and courage. Within another hour he was
receiving the tremendous applause of even his political enemies, and
had undone all the mighty work of the giants of the opposition and
sent them home with a chill at heart.

With such political leaders as these men, and with the finest
intellect and character of the Old South devoted for generations
to the study and exposition of the purest party politics, I am not
surprised at the higher level of parties and platforms of the Old
South. Politics was not a “graft,” as the present-day political
ringster defines it. The political and personal conscience were one
and the same, and a man’s politics was no small part of his religion.
I am not saying that all political leaders were incorruptible
statesmen, or that an unselfish patriotism was the invariable mark
of its party politics. The demagogue was not unknown, and the fine
Italian hand of the mercenary was sometimes in evidence. But of one
fact I am abundantly assured—the spoilsman and the grafter held
no recognized and official standing in that old-time democracy.
Men of ability and character might aspire to political place and
honor. They might even go beyond the personal desire and become open
candidates for party favor. But the service of the paid political
manager, the conciliation of the party “boss,” the subsidizing of
the party “heelers,” the utilization of the party press in flaming,
self-laudatory columns and even pages of paid advertising matter,
_ad nauseam_ and _ad infinitum_, as in recent Southern political
contests—all these latter-day importations and inventions of “peanut”
politics would have merited and received the unmeasured contempt of
the politicians of the Old South. There were certain old-fashioned
political maxims that constituted the code of every man who would
become a candidate for office, as, for instance, “The office should
seek the man, not the man the office.” I cannot find heart to
censure the politician of the New South for his smile at the verdancy
and guilelessness of such a maxim, but that which provokes a smile
was in my own remembered years the working motto of the old-time
Southern leaders of high rank. Another maxim was that “the patriot
may impoverish but not enrich himself by office-holding.” As a
commentary upon this maxim, it affords me infinite satisfaction, in
a retrospect of the long line of men who led the great political
campaigns of the Old South and held its positions of highest trust,
that most of them died poor, that none of them within my knowledge
were charged with converting public office into private gain, and
that the highest ambition of the old-time politician was to serve his
country by some great deed of unselfish patriotism, to live like a
gentleman, and then to die with uncorrupted heart and hands, and with
money enough to insure a decent burial. If he left a few debts here
and there, they were gratefully cherished as souvenirs by his host of
friends.

Earlier in these pages I raised the question as to why the South,
once so potent in national council and leadership, was now become
the mere servant of the national Democratic party, so much so
that the recognized Sir Oracle of Republicanism and mouthpiece of
his excellency the President is led to remind us, while a guest on
Southern soil, of our pristine place and power, and to admonish
us, in the frankness of an open and worthy foeman, to quit playing
the role of lackey in national politics, and to put forth as of
yore our own home-grown statesmen for national positions of highest
honor and service, and to do all in our might again to restore the
lost political prestige of the South. Come from whomsoever it may,
Republican or Democrat, Grosvenor or Grant—for the latter before
his death held like view with the former—the advice is well given
and the point well taken. But when once the renaissance begins, I
think the Augean stable of latter-day politics, even in the New
South, will need another Hercules to purify it. Take, for instance,
this statement from a recent issue of a great Southern newspaper:
“The four candidates for railroad commissioner expended a total of
$14,940.80 on their campaign expenses, Mr. ——, who was nominated,
leading with $10,522.80. The twelve candidates for the Supreme
Court paid out $7,133.34. Sixteen Congressional candidates expended
$15,965.88.”

In the _Independent_ of recent date a leading Democratic manufacturer
of New Jersey, under manifestly strong grievance, recites his
experiences as a delegate in the State Democratic Convention, in
which a vigorous effort was made, as in other Democratic Conventions,
to force the indorsement of an unclean aspirant to the highest office
of the republic. The article I cite is an evident instance of pot and
kettle, but it sets in bold relief the straits and methods to which
the dominating wing of the party of Jefferson and Jackson has been
reduced, certainly in some of the Northern if not of the Southern
States. I quote the closing paragraph of the article as a faithful
picture of recent political happenings:

  What are the means used by the bosses? First, corrupted judges
  at the primaries and bulldozing tactics there. Secondly, a
  brow-beating county and delegation chairman, with his attendant
  thugs. Thirdly, a properly managed credentials committee, with
  arrangements made beforehand, so that there will be contests and
  the contests decided their way. Fourthly, a tactful chairman, who
  will have fine presence, be a hypocrite and pretend to fairness,
  but never recognize any but machine men. Fifthly, the presence of
  the boss, with his ever-ready check book and a fine knowledge of
  men to know what he must do to win his way with them.

In so far as this is a true picture of the dominant spirit and method
of no small part of the Northern Democracy, and I firmly believe it
so to be, I think it time for the South to first purge itself of
the contamination that has come from thirty years of subserviency
and emasculation, and then to assert and maintain the integrity and
high principles of the Democracy of the fathers. If ever thieves and
money changers were scourged from the ancient temple, it is high
time that the lash of public scorn shall be laid upon the backs of
all men, North or South, who have helped to disrupt and dishonor
a once noble and victorious national party. When I remember, as a
Confederate soldier, that William McKinley—peace to his dust—in
the city of Atlanta, as Republican President, pleaded for equal
recognition of Confederate with Federal dead; and that one who has
been honored by the Democratic party as standard bearer and occupant
of a great office declined to vote for an ex-Confederate candidate
in fear of the disfavor of his Western constituency; and when within
recent months, in great cities of the South, I have personally seen
the cunning handiwork of paid henchmen of a millionaire saffron
newsmonger seeking most insistently and offensively to buy exalted
position for their master, I am ready once more to secede, except
that the second act of secession would be the sundering of all bonds
that bind my party to corrupting methods and leadership, and the
setting up again in the New South of the lofty political ideals and
independency of the Democracy of the Old South.


Thus far I have tried to portray, in frankly admitted partiality,
the social, intellectual, and political characteristics of the Old
South. But I should be seriously derelict in my portraiture if I
left unnoted that which was more to it than wealth or culture or
learning or party. If the Old South had one characteristic more
than another, I think it was the reverent and religious life and
atmosphere which diffused themselves among all classes of its
people, whether cracker white or plantation prince or dusky slave.
If I were asked to explain this atmosphere of religion, I should
hardly know where to begin. Perhaps its largely rural population
and its peaceful agricultural pursuits predisposed to religion the
simple-minded people who made up the Old South. More than this,
however, must have been due to the religious strain in the blood
of the Cavalier, Huguenot, and God-fearing Scotch-Irish ancestry
from which they sprang. Most of all, I think that the high examples
of a godly profession and practice in the leaders of the Old South
made it easy for each succeeding generation to learn the first and
noblest of all lessons—reverence for God, his Word, and His Church.
And until this day the reverence of the Old South is constant in the
New South. While New England, once the citadel of an orthodox Bible
and Church and Sabbath, is now the prey of isms and innovations
innumerable, and while the great West is marked by the painful
contrast between its big secular enterprises and its diminutive
churches and congregations, the South has continued largely to be
not only the acknowledged home of the only pure Americanism, but the
center also of conservatism and reverence in the worship of God and
the maintenance of Christian institutions.

In no section of our country has the Christian Sabbath been so
highly honored, Canada alone, with her reverently ordered day of
rest, exceeding us in Sabbath observance. Here and there, however,
is needed the cautionary signal of danger against the greed of
railroad and other law-defying corporations, and the loose morality
of aliens who come to us with money but without religious raising
or conviction. In no other section is there such widely diffused
catholicity of spirit and tolerance of differences among opposing
religious beliefs. If the Roman Catholic has been freer from assault
upon his religion in any country or time than in the South, I have
failed to find it. If the Jew has as kindly treatment elsewhere
under the sun, I should be glad to know it. And if there is as fine
a courtesy and fraternity anywhere as among our Southern Protestant
bodies, I have yet to discover it. A few months ago, though of
another denomination, I was called to their platform by the great
Southern Baptist Assembly. A month before that I was summoned by
the Cumberland Presbyterian Seminary, of Lebanon, to instruct its
young men. A month before that I was writing articles for the chief
religious organ of the Southern Presbyterians. I have lived long
enough and am familiar enough with other parts of the world to know
that such practical catholicity chiefly obtains in the South.

Nowhere as in the South do men so generally honor the house of God
by their attendance and support. I make bold to say that upon any
Sabbath day by count more men may be found in churches in Richmond
and Atlanta than in Chicago and New York, though the combined
population of the latter cities is ten times that of the former.
These same churchgoing men of the South, following in the footsteps
of their God-fearing fathers, are the members and supporters of
Southern Churches, and are quick to resent innovation or disturbance
of the old order. No man is so reverent and courteous toward men of
the cloth as the men of the South, and wherever a minister of the
gospel walks down the street of a Southern city or village, if worthy
to wear the cloth of his sacred calling, he is the foremost man of
his community in standing and influence.

Why this relative respect to the minister and the Church, and this
clinging to religious forms and traditions, those of us who came
up out of the Old South understand. Any reverent spirit of the New
South in matters of religion is another of the heritages from the Old
South. Then as now, even more than now, with our leaders and great
men it was religion first, politics second, and money, or whatever
money stood for, last and least. From my earliest recollection and
reading, the governors, senators, congressmen, judges, great lawyers,
physicians, merchants, and planters were commonly Christian men,
both by profession and practice; and the man who was hostile or
even indifferent to the Church and religion, however distinguished
and brilliant he might be, was under ban of public opinion. As a
commentary upon this significant religious affiliation of Southern
leadership I carefully noted a few years ago, in two contrasting
lists taken at random of governors and congressmen, that while one
list had five men out of twenty-five who were members of Christian
Churches, the Southern list of twenty-five contained eighteen. While
I share in the widespread regret that our Southern young men are
not as reverent as were those of a generation ago, and are often
conspicuous by absence upon Sabbath worship, yet in view of such
facts as I am recounting I am more hopeful of the solution of the
vexed problem of Christian young manhood in the South than in any
other part of the land.


I have paid tribute to the great political orators of the Old South.
Let me pay higher tribute to its great preachers and pulpit orators,
to whom, under God, more than to any other class or leadership,
is due what the South has ever cherished as its best. There were
giants in those days. If Yancey or Stephens could cast a spell upon
a great political gathering, and play upon its emotions as the
harper plays upon the harp, George F. Pierce in his prime could stir
men’s hearts in a way that put to shame even the eloquence of the
political rostrum. The last time I heard this greatest of all the
orators of the Old South was not far from the time of his death.
Marvin, fittingly called the “St. John of Methodism,” sat in the
pulpit behind him. To most of his audience Pierce and his preaching
were known only by hearsay, and their firm belief was that Marvin
was the real prince of the pulpit. I remember how Pierce battled
against his bodily weakness and weariness, and how there came to his
eye that wondrous flash as his old-time eloquence lifted him into
heights and visions celestial. He was preaching of the pure faith
once delivered unto the saints, and pleading for the old order of
simple gospel truth and living. He had something to say of the new
order of ministers who were substituting doubts and denials for
the long-cherished doctrines of the Church. His opening sentence
was: “A single meteor flashing athwart the heavens will arrest a
larger measure of attention than the serene shining of a thousand
planets.” I think I know who the old man eloquent meant. A little
while before, a dapper preacher, consumed by itch for popularity,
had been dispensing a perfumed and smokeless theology that drew
great crowds and tickled the ears of the groundlings. The theology
of the Old South was too crude and barbarous and unscientific for
such as he. Genesis was an allegory, creation an evolution, man was
pre-Adamic, the deluge was only a local shower, the Pentateuch was
polychromatic, Moses was largely mythical, there were two Isaiahs,
all the ante-exilian history and writings were concocted by pious
post-exilian experts, the incarnation and resurrection were touching
legends but “quite unscientific,” hell was “hades,” and hades was
a tolerably comfortable winter resort, and Bible inspiration, as
a matter of fact, seldom inspired. Many times, in sight and sound
of such dainty apostles of an emasculate Bible, have I longed for
the ghosts of the stalwart preachers of my childhood—the Pierces,
Thomas Sanford, Jefferson Hamilton, A. L. P. Green, P. P. Neely,
Jesse Boring, McTyeire, Wightman, Summers, and the like—to rise up
in their godly wrath and shake them over the flaming pit of a real
old-time, unabridged “hades” long enough to bring them to silence
and repentance.

[Illustration: BISHOP GEORGE F. PIERCE.]

Down in the straw, at the mourners’ bench of an Old South camp
meeting, some of us got our theology and our religion. The Bible,
in miracle and prophecy, was handled by reverent hands, and made
most real to us as the infallible word of Almighty God. The law of
Sinai, with unexpurgated cursings and blessings, was read to us
amid the groanings of our troubled consciences. No ear so polite,
no position so exalted, but a living and burning hell was denounced
against its meannesses. As deep as the virus of sin in our souls
sank the flashing, twoedged sword of the Spirit. The wound was made
purposely deep and wide that the balm of Gilead might enter and heal
the utmost roots of sin. By and by, when John the Baptists, like
Boring and Lovick Pierce, had cut to the quick, and laid bare the
wounded spirit, some gentler, wooing ministry, like that of Hamilton
or Neely, came pointing the way to the cross. There was no lifting of
the finger tip, daintily gloved and decorous, in token of a desire
sometime or other to become a Christian. Cards, in colors, bearing
name and rates of the evangelist, agreeing to meet everybody in
heaven, were not passed around for signatures. I never hear the old
hymn of invitation, that lured many a hardened sinner of the Old
South, as they sung it under the leafy arbor to nickering lights,
after a weird, unearthly stirring of our hearts by the man in the
pulpit, but I think of a great criminal lawyer, who for many years
had led the bar of his State, and had made mock of God’s Book and
Church and ministers. He owned an old carriage driver who was one of
God’s saints in black, gray-haired and patient “Uncle Aleck,” who had
mourned and prayed over his unbelieving master. “Uncle Aleck,” he
said to him one day, “why do you believe in a book you can’t read,
and in a God you never saw? I have thousands of books in my library,
yet I care nothing for religion.” Uncle Aleck’s only reply was to
put his hand on his heart and say: “Marse John, I’ve been true and
faithful to you all these years, ain’t I, marster?” “Yes.” “And I
never lied to you or disobeyed you, has I, Marse John?” “No.” “Then,
marster, it’s my religion that has made me what I am. I can’t read, I
can’t see God, but I know the Lord Jesus Christ here in my heart.”

Drawn by some spell he could not resist, the great lawyer came to the
old camp ground and heard the awfully solemn message of the preacher
with bowed head and heart full of trouble. When the hymn was sung,

    “Come, humble sinner, in whose breast
      A thousand thoughts revolve;
    Come, with your guilt and fear oppressed,
      And make this last resolve,”

I shall never forget the startled look of preacher and people as
straight to the mourners’ bench sped the lawyer, crying in agony
as he fell to the ground: “Send for Uncle Aleck!” And down in the
straw white-haired old Aleck wrestled with God for Marse John, until
a great shout went up from mourner and congregation as the master
hugged the old darky and the darky hugged his master, saying: “I
knew it was coming, Marse John.” You will pardon a man whose head
is growing gray if at times the heart grows hungry to turn back and
see and hear the old sights and sounds of God’s presence and power
as revealed especially at the ancient and now nearly extinct camp
meeting.


On a bright April day, 1861, books were closed in the old academy,
there was the blare of bugle and roll of drum on the streets,
people were hurrying together, and soon the roar of a cannon shook
the building, as they told us of the bombardment of Sumter by the
batteries of the young Confederacy. For months the very air had
been vibrant with sound of drum and fife, of rattling musket and
martial command. The Old South was soon a great camp of shifting,
drilling soldiery. Every departing train bore to the front the raw
and ungainly troops of the country, the trim city companies of
State guards, and the gayly dressed cadets of the military schools.
There were tender partings and long good-bys, so long to many of
them that not yet has word of home greeting come. It seemed a great
thing to be a soldier in those brave days when the girls decked the
parting ones in flowers and sang to them “The Girl I Left Behind
Me,” “Bonnie Blue Flag,” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” The scarlet
and gold and gray, the flashing sword and burnished musket, the gay
flowers and parting song, marked the beginning of that mighty death
struggle of the Old South. Soon the gay song deepened into the hush
before a great battle, or rose into the cry of the stricken heart
over the long lists of wounded and slain. War grew grim and fierce
and relentless. There were hunger and wounds, pale faces in hospital
and sharp death of men at the front; and sleeplessness and heartache
and holy privation and unfailing courage and comfort of Southern
womanhood at home. Fiercer and hotter came the storm of battle, as
the thin gray lines of Lee and Johnston confronted the soldiery and
the resources of the world. Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg,
Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness,
Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Appomattox!—how these names, that wreathed
with crape their thousands of hearts and homes, and marked the rise
and fall of the battle tide, recall to us the passing of the Old
South!

On another April day in 1865, as a boy in Mahone’s Division, I looked
my last into the face of the Old South and its great commander, who
came riding down the line of our stacked guns, and, halting his old
gray war horse Traveler, tried to comfort our hearts by saying: “It’s
all over. Never mind, men; you have done your best. Go to your homes
and be as brave and true as you have been with me.”

In the great day of national assize, when empire, kingdom, and
republic of earth shall be gathered to judgment, and the Muse of
history shall unroll the record of their good and evil, the Old
South, the “uncrowned queen” of the centuries, will be in their
midst, her white vestment stained by the blood of her sons, her eyes
dimmed by sorrow and suffering. No chaplet of laurel shall encircle
her brow, and no noisy trump of fame shall hail her coming; but
round her fair, proud head, as of yore, shall shine a halo of love,
and Fame shall hang her head rebuked, and the trumpet fall from her
nerveless hand, as the spirit of the Old South is passing by.



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