Southern Home-Politics

THREE years ago the most natural question that a stay-at-home Southerner could ask was, “ Why do you Northern people hate us so? ” using the word “ hate ” in all its worst significance. On the other hand, the most natural observation that a stay-at-home Northerner could make was, “ I suppose they hate us down there as much as ever,” and he used the word “hate” as if it were coined by the very devil for the special purpose of expressing this particular sentiment.

A Northerner was fain to believe that the hate of a Southerner had more sides to it than the hate of any other people, and he was very apt to speak of it with a certain amount of respect; while the Southerner was inclined to look upon Northern hate as a frigid iceberg of contempt, never to be melted, always to remain just so high.

It has only begun to appear that there has been no hate worthy the name for at least five years. But it is the most common of all suspicions among Northerners that this present good-will of the South is an impulse that is in constant danger of being displaced by another impulse from the other side of the house; that were Massachusetts to scowl upon Louisiana, or Grant to criticise Lee’s good qualities, the whole cotton country would fire up and begin to hate once more. This is about the estimate that is made of the stability of Southern convictions. Never was one more mischievous or with less foundation. The Southern desire for deep and thorough amity with all other sections of the country rests upon grounds as enduring as any social and political grounds can be, and one comprehends this when he is enabled to walk in and out of Southern homes, a friend permitted to hear all and to see all without restraint. The editorials that the papers print and the speeches that men make upon platforms fall flat before the spoken evidence of the men and women of any settlement, and it is just this that Northern people rarely, if ever, hear of. And per contra, for that matter.

The writer spent a good part of last spring in a town of South Carolina that would, in all likelihood, be one of half a dozen selected to represent Southern characteristics in towns. It was Southern in every possible respect, and Southern people lived in it in their old houses. The population consisted of a thousand whites and a thousand blacks. Everybody had felt the blast of the war straight upon their backs and in their hearts, and when Lee surrendered “ some had five dollars (or what five dollars would buy now) and some had fifty cents.” One lady was fortunate in the possession of some flour, bacon, and coffee that her shrewd old grandmother, who had been in wars before, had begged her to buy in flush times and hide in the wainscoting of the drawing-room. This made her a millionaire. There was not a man in the place who was thirty years of age who had not fought in some capacity, and there was not a woman who had not gone hungry for weeks and badly clad for years.

Convinced, by the evidence of such telling trifles as these, that one’s friends have known the bitterness of strife, it is profoundly interesting to hear what they think of the sweetness of peace.

Upon a shady, lane-like street, with his porches covered with roses and his pathway guarded with Spanish bayonet, dwells a tall, bent gentleman who is a little shaken with the palsy. He said, “ I think that even had I twice the strength and spirit that God once gave me, I should say, Come, forgetfulness! I am of the old guard. They are now very apt to take my kindliness for all my countrymen as senility, even though they think with me. I can never forget the wild dream of those six or seven years, and I can never turn my back upon the emblems of that dream — the flags of the Confederacy, the portraits of its great men, and the names of its battles; and yet it is my greatest comfort, the greatest of all, to feel that I may again love the flag of my fathers.” A dull negro servant had brought some linty glasses and a quaint decanter of sherry, and the venerable man drank a sort of pousse-mot, and nothing could have been graver than his gravity.

One day a fine figure on a fine horse came around a bend at a lope, and reined straight up to the relator through some oak bushes that intervened. The man had a flushed face, and he wore a brown felt sombrero. He sat his horse like a Mameluke, and he held his reins after the manner that they teach at West Point. He was a little the worse for liquor, and his eyes were bloodshot; yet what he said was coherent.

“ You 're a Yankee, sir! Yes? I knew it. I can tell a Yankee as far as I can see him. I am not a Yankee. I fought you, and I fought you like the devil. And ”—he dropped his voice and reached out his hand — “ and you fought us like the devil. I was a general, sir.

My name is-, and I’m right glad to see you. D' ye see that clump of trees over yonder in the field? Well, my father and mother and brother are buried there, and they all died, God bless 'em, while I was fighting you like the devil.”Tears rolled down his cheeks in streams, and he straightened himself up and looked hard at his confabulator through the mist in his eyes. “ Take a drink, sir, if you can get the cork out,” and he drew a flask of some sort of tipple from a rear pocket in his pantaloons. “ If Buchanan and Davis and Scott and Beauregard had been allowed to take a few hours together in the first place, there would n’t have been any war. No war at all ! Whisky is a pacificator, sir! You can go home and say that General -, of the late Confederate army, believes in peace, in trading, in travel, and that he ’s down on war between brothers. You ’re a brother, I’m a brother; we ’re all brothers, and d-n the politicians. We ’re all the United States. United, by George, sir, forever and a day, and down with the politicians! Hang ’em, sir. Hang ’em high. Your hand, sir, once more. Sorry about the cork, but I ’ll see you again, sir. Good by. God bless you.” He backed his horse through the bushes, making a few military salutes at the same time, and then turned and went down the road, raising a cloud of red dust, looking every inch the soldier.

There was a charming girl, moderately tall, slender, dark, and sweetly-spoken, who lived in a small cottage with her father and her brother. She had a slow, deliberate method of enunciating, and a few peculiarities of pronunciation that made her speech very delightful. Her burden was, “ Oh how you Northerners have trampled upon us! ” When pressed to define her charges she would plunge into the very middle of the monstrous tangle, and wind herself up like a poor fly in a web. When this was done she would ask with contracted brows, “ How can you expect women to know the ins and outs of all these things? ” Then she would go indignantly to her “pet” (pit, a small hot-bed that all gardens in that region contain) and make a bouquet for her visitor, and would say finally, “ After all, what I said about being trampled upon is only a sort of slogan that we girls keep up for pride’s sake. The gentlemen have their cries, too, but when they meet Northern people they always ask them to dine. One cannot be expected to give up all appearances of being faithful to old interests. You must allow a little for vainglory. At heart we all love what is now our country. You may believe that.”

A certain Southern general, at the surrender of Lee, made his way through the Federal lines and with a few followers escaped to his home without having surrendered his sword. He is a man of great energy, quick to act, and impetuous and headstrong to the last degree.

Seated in a porch after tea one evening, he said, “ I do not believe there is any sentiment in the South that can be called a public sentiment that does not demand reunion and concord. I am a violent man, and I fought violently. I hate the administration violently, but I accept the results of the war without reservation. Another thing. I have come to look upon John C. Calhoun in a different light than that in which I once regarded him. I now place him lower as a statesman and a far-seeing man than I had been taught to place him. The war was a subsoil plow that overturned everything, and fresh earth came to the surface. What has grown up since then is of different color, and there are mighty few eyes that can’t see it.” He struck his broad hand on his knee and cast his small gray eyes around the circle, impatient for contradiction. Six other Southerners who were present acquiesced by silence. “ The cloud of the war still hangs over us,” continued the general, “ and will for twenty years more, in the shape of a low morality; but I hope, gentlemen, before I die to see the sun again. I shall do my best to help my country to be prosperous.”

In a retired by-way of the town there lives a lady of fifty years who dresses in deep mourning, but whose attire is simple and inexpensive. She was formerly wealthy, having owned many slaves and several large plantations. She is a widow, and childless. Her house, with one or two acres of sandy land, is all that remains to her of her once vast estates. She gave all she had to the cause of the Confederacy, and she has two large bundles of its worthless bonds and demand notes as a recompense for her noble folly. Her house is surrounded with clouds of beautiful but nearly odorless roses, and is shaded by enormous pines, whose glittering plumes far above her roof murmur a melancholy lay, month in and month out, always in tune with her spirit. Upon the darkened walls hang portraits of Lee and Jackson, and toward these the sad lady lifts a calm devotion. “ They tell meh,” said she, that it was all a great mistake, that they had not reckoned properly, and that there were seeds of destruction in the very conception of the i-dea. Ah well, after all, I think, now that I am old, that I am glad they failed. They prove to meh that one division would have only led to subdivisions, and those to others, and that weh should have been wondering in a few years if it were safe to keep our idols, lest they turn to dust in our hands. I am glad that the North and the South begin to intermingle. Do you not see how eagerly our people respond to advances from your people? Do you know the reason of that ? It is nothing less than the outcropping of the instinct to love, to adore some great thing, that is in every human breast. Since the sad conviction was forced upon us that weh could have nothing new whereon to spend our patriotism, weh have been shut out, ostracized; weh have been people without a country. That was hard. The passion to love our land grew and grew, and within the last few years you have seen it leap up like a fire whenever they who had held the flag said or wrote, 'It is yours, as well as ours.'”

This was the language of one who chose to environ herself, not with things that might serve to turn aside her sorrow, but with relics of the ruined enterprise. What she said was the mournful outcome of a later intelligence and a bitter discipline combined, and it was not possible to listen to it and not feel one’s own loyalty grow a little stronger.

In a shaded and dusty law-office opening directly upon the main street of the town, there commonly sat in the latter part of the afternoons a small and aged man who was regarded by all who knew him with love and veneration. He represented, to the fullest extent, the old party of the South; its slave - holding element, its State-sovereignty element, and its secession element. He was a Southerner in all respects, and a gentleman in all. People referred to him as the best exponent of their political and social status of past times, and they invariably attached to the recommendation, “ You will find him very courteous and very hospitable.” He was thoughtful and somewhat melancholy, and his method of speaking was deliberate. One respected him sincerely upon seeing him.

One day he said this, impressively: “My old system of theories and my old beliefs are bored and riddled through and through, and they totter with myself. There is a number of us who should be silent till we are silenced, for the future belongs to others and our voices are very discordant. It is hard to pretend to be blind when we fancy that we still see clearly; yet it is a duty that I feel that I, for my part, must perform. Therefore I listen and watch, but keep a lock upon my lips.”

A little while after, he read a patriotic speech made at Augusta, Georgia, by an ex-Confederate officer, on Decoration Day. The speech was warmly welcomed by the North. The gentleman said, “ I could not have spoken in that manner. Yet, believe me, I am glad that some one has. And the ladies strewed flowers upon the graves of the Federal dead! I am glad, I am very glad of that! ”

Later still, he read General Bartlett’s speech at the Lexington Centennial. It was printed beside a reprint of General Evans’s speech, in the same column of the paper.

Those two noble and vigorous utterances could have had but one effect upon that generous spirit. They stirred it to its very depths. The agitated man arose from his chair, and with his eyes streaming with tears read in a faltering voice many of the most striking passages in both the speeches. At length, overcome, he buried his face in his hands and surrendered himself to his emotion.

He said finally, “ I must confess it. I wish that I were young again and that I could take a part in this renewal of confidence. But, as I told you, I am outside the pale; I must be content to gaze and do nothing more. You should feel happy. Your generation has now but one task. That is to make your judges all over the country punish your evil-doers; it is all comprised in that. Give me your hand; say at home that the people here are amazingly like the people there; that they can respect and reason, and can love honorable things.”

The seemingly sketchy character of this paper will doubtless cause many to disregard its matter and to class the testimony that it contains as trivial. They who do this will make a mistake. Instead of being poor evidence, it is, on the contrary, the very best. There is none that is to be had that is more clear or more honest. It comes at first hand. The sayings that have been repeated are those of representative people.

Only one class has been slighted; that is the class of shop-keepers; and as they are mainly Germans of the lower order, their principles are subordinated to the chances of making money. Inasmuch as the United States are now strong, they believe in the national government, with a reservation that inflation would be a capital thing.

But the people who have been quoted came to their newer beliefs by thought, and by the softer urgings of their native kindliness and love of country. Forced by actual poverty to live modestly and to remain at home, they have been permitted to see little more than the general drift of public sentiment, and it has here been shown how it has affected them. Their views are of generalities, not of particulars. Ask them their opinion of the record of any man, or of the platform of any convention, or of the resolutions of any legislature, and they will give you in return either their impressions or nothing.

They think that all is going well for unity and reconciliation. They are sure of that, and we should be devoutly glad of it.

Albert F. Webster.