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قراءة كتاب The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915
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The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915
THE CREED OF
THE OLD SOUTH
1865-1915
BY
BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE
BALTIMORE
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
1915
1865
1915
Copyright, 1915,
BY
THE JOHNS HOPKINS PRESS
CONTENTS
PREFACE
In the last score of years I have often been urged by friends and sympathizers to bring out as a separate issue my article, The Creed of the Old South, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1892, and which attracted wider attention than anything I have ever written. As this is the jubilee of the great year 1865, the memories of that distant time come thronging back to the actors in the momentous struggle, and I am prompted to publish in more accessible form my record of views and impressions that may seem strange even to the survivors of the conflict, now rapidly passing away. To this paper I have added an essay on a cognate theme—A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War—which was published in the Atlantic Monthly of September, 1897, and which has been accepted by the eminent historian, Mr. Rhodes, as an historical document. These specimens of what I call my Sargasso work ("Weeds from the Atlantic") are reproduced by the kind permission of the Houghton Mifflin Company. A few slips of pen and type have been corrected, and a few notes out of the mass of literature evoked by the first essay, or akin to it, have been added for the benefit of the third generation.
The Johns Hopkins University,
June, 1915.
THE CREED OF THE OLD SOUTH
This article was prepared (in 1891) at the instance of Mr. Horace Scudder, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series of papers to be written by men who by virtue of education, intellectual endowment and social position were supposed to be high and lifted up above vulgar passion and prejudice. The business of these elect gentlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them to an active participation in so rude an affair as war. After publication in the Atlantic, the essays were to be gathered into a book and Mr. Scudder fancied that thus collected they would prove a valuable addition to the history of the times. The series stopped at the third number and the book was never published. Whilst I did not concur in Mr. Scudder's view, I accepted the compliment and began to write with a lighter heart than I bore as I went on. At the end I was dipping my pen into something red, into something briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to have been contagious, for some years afterwards (1899) Mr. William Archer, in his America Today (p. 142), wrote as follows:
"I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay—one might almost say an elegy—so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together."
A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their fellow-travellers. The veterans went into the minute detail that always puts me to shame, when I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields were lost and won; and my experience of military life was too brief and desultory to be of any value to the historian of the war. For my own life that experience has been of the utmost significance, and despite the heavy price I have had to pay for my outings, despite the daily reminder of five long months of intense suffering, I have no regrets. An able-bodied young man, with a long vacation at his disposal, could not have done otherwise, and the right to teach Southern youth for nine months was earned by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers at the front for three. Self-respect is everything; and it is something to have belonged in deed and in truth to an heroic generation, to have shared in a measure its perils and privations. But that heroic generation is apt to be a bore to a generation whose heroism is of a different type, and I doubt whether the young people in our car took much interest in the very audible conversation of the two veterans. Twenty-five years hence, when the survivors will be curiosities, as were Revolutionary pensioners in my childhood, there may be a renewal of interest. As it is, few of the present generation pore over The Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and a grizzled old Confederate has been heard to declare that he intended to bequeath his copy of that valuable work to some one outside of the family, so provoked was he at the supineness of his children. And yet,