The Long Roll
true. First and last, there's a deal of old Virginia following Mars, out
yonder! We've got Hardee, too, from Georgia, and Van Dorn from
Mississippi, and Albert Sidney Johnston from Kentucky--no better men in
Homer, no better men! And there are others as soldierly--McClellan with
whom I graduated at West Point, Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Sedgwick,
Sykes, and Averell. McClellan and Hancock are from Pennsylvania,
Fitz-John Porter is from New Hampshire, Sedgwick from Connecticut, Sykes
from Delaware, and Averell from New York. And away, away out yonder, in
the midst of sage brush and Apaches, when any of us chance to meet
around a camp-fire, there we sit, while coyotes are yelling off in the
dark, there we sit and tell stories of home, of Virginia and
Pennsylvania, of Georgia and New Hampshire!"
He paused, drew himself up, looked out over the throng to the mountains,
studied for a moment their long, clean line, then dropped his glance and
spoke in a changed tone, with a fiery suddenness, a lunge as of a tried
rapier, quick and startling.
"Men of Botetourt! I speak for my fellow soldiers of the Army of the
United States when I say that, out yonder, we are blithe to fight with
marauding Comanches, with wolves and with grizzlies, but that we are
not--oh, we are not--ready to fight with each other! Brother against
brother--comrade against comrade--friend against friend--to quarrel in
the same tongue and to slay the man with whom you've faced a thousand
dangers--no, we are not ready for that!
"Virginians! I will not believe that the permanent dissolution of this
great Union is come! I will not believe that we stand to-day in danger
of internecine war! Men of Botetourt, go slow--go slow! The Right of the
State--I grant it! I was bred in that doctrine, as were you all.
Albemarle no whit behind Botetourt in that! The Botetourt
Resolutions--amen to much, to very much in the Botetourt Resolutions!
South Carolina! Let South Carolina go in peace! It is her right!
Remembering old comradeship, old battlefields, old defeats, old
victories, we shall still be friends. If the Gulf States go, still it is
their right, immemorial, incontrovertible!--The right of
self-government. We are of one blood and the country is wide. God-speed
both to Lot and to Abraham! On some sunny future day may their children
draw together and take hands again! So much for the seceding States. But
Virginia,--but Virginia made possible the Union,--let her stand fast in
it in this day of storm! in this Convention let her voice be heard--as I
know it will be heard--for wisdom, for moderation, for patience! So, or
soon or late, she will mediate between the States, she will once again
make the ring complete, she will be the saviour of this great historic
Confederation which our fathers made!"
A minute or two more and he ended his speech. As he moved from between
the pillars, there was loud applause. The county was largely Whig,
honestly longing--having put on record what it thought of the present
mischief and the makers of it--for a peaceful solution of all troubles.
As for the army, county and State were proud of the army, and proud of
the Virginians within it. It was amid cheering that Fauquier Cary left
the portico. At the head of the steps, however, there came a question.
"One moment, Major Cary! What if the North declines to evacuate Fort
Sumter? What if she attempts to reinforce it? What if she declares for a
_compulsory_ Union?"
Cary paused a moment. "She will not, she will not! There are politicians
in the North whom I'll not defend! But the people--the people--the
people are neither fools nor knaves! They were born North and we were
born South and that is the chief difference between us! A _Compulsory_
Union! That is a contradiction in terms. Individuals and States,
harmoniously minded, unite for the sweetness of Union and for the
furtherance of common interests. When the minds are discordant, and the
interests opposed, one may be bound to another by Conquest--not
otherwise! What said Hamilton? _To coerce a State would be one of the
maddest projects ever devised!_" He descended the court house steps to
the grassy, crowded yard. Here acquaintances claimed him, and here, at
last, the surge of the crowd brought him within a yard of Allan Gold and
his companion. The latter spoke. "Major Cary, you don't remember me. I'm
Hairston Breckinridge, sir, and I've been once or twice to Greenwood
with Edward. I was there Christmas before last, when you came home
wounded--"
The older man put out a ready hand. "Yes, yes, I do remember! We had a
merry Christmas! I am glad to meet you again, Mr. Breckinridge. Is this
your brother?"
"No, sir. It's Allan Gold, from Thunder Run."
"I am pleased to meet you, sir," said Allan. "You have been saying what
I should like to have been able to say myself."
"I am pleased that you are pleased. Are you, too, from the university?"
"No, sir. I couldn't go. I teach the school on Thunder Run."
"Allan knows more," said Hairston Breckinridge, "than many of us who are
at the university. But we mustn't keep you, sir."
In effect they could do so no longer. Major Cary was swept away by
acquaintances and connections. The day was declining, the final speaker
drawing to an end, the throng beginning to shiver in the deepening cold.
The speaker gave his final sentence; the town band crashed in
determinedly with "Home, Sweet Home." To its closing strains the county
people, afoot, on horseback, in old, roomy, high-swung carriages, took
this road and that. The townsfolk, still excited, still discussing,
lingered awhile round the court house or on the verandah of the old
hotel, but at last these groups dissolved also. The units betook
themselves home to fireside and supper, and the sun set behind the
Alleghenies.
Allan Gold, striding over the hills toward Thunder Run, caught up with
the miller from Mill Creek, and the two walked side by side until their
roads diverged. The miller was a slow man, but to-day there was a red in
his cheek and a light in his eye. "Just so," he said shortly. "They must
keep out of my mill race or they'll get caught in the wheel."
"Mr. Green," said Allan, "how much of all this trouble do you suppose is
really about the negro? I was brought up to wish that Virginia had never
held a slave."
"So were most of us. You don't hold any."
"No."
"No more I don't. No more does Tom Watts. Nor Anderson West. Nor the
Taylors. Nor five sixths of the farming folk about here. Nor seven
eighths of the townspeople. We don't own a negro, and I don't know that
we ever did own one. Not long ago I asked Colonel Anderson a lot of
questions about the matter. He says the census this year gives Virginia
one million and fifty thousand white people, and of these the fifty
thousand hold slaves and the one million don't. The fifty thousand's
mostly in the tide-water counties, too,--mighty little of it on this
side the Blue Ridge! Ain't anybody ever accused Virginians of not being
good to servants! and it don't take more'n half an eye to see that the
servants love their white people. For slavery itself, I ain't
quarrelling for it, and neither was Colonel Anderson. He said it was
abhorrent in the sight of God and man. He said the old House of
Burgesses used to try to stop the bringing in of negroes, and that the
Colony was always appealing to the king against the traffic. He said
that in 1778, two years after Virginia declared her Independence, she
passed the statute prohibiting the slave trade. He said that she was the
first country in the civilized world to stop the trade--passed her
statute thirty years before England! He said that all our great
Revolutionary men hated slavery and worked for the emancipation of the
negroes who were here; that men worked openly and hard for it until
1832. Then came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those
women and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall
Abolition people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on
like grim death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where
the explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking, so a lot
of men have risen with us to advocate without thinking. And underneath
all the clamour, there goes on, all the time, quiet and steady, a
freeing of negroes by deed and will, a settling them in communities in
free States, a belonging to and supporting Colonization Societies. There
are now forty thousand free negroes in Virginia, and Heaven knows how
many have been freed and established elsewhere! It is our best people
who make these wills, freeing their slaves, and in Virginia, at least,
everybody, sooner or later, follows the best people. 'Gradual
manumission, Mr. Green,' that's what Colonel Anderson said, 'with
colonization in Africa if possible. The difficulties are enough to turn
a man's hair grey, but,' said he, 'slavery's knell has struck, and we'll
put an end to it in Virginia peacefully and with some approach to
wisdom--if only they'll stop stirring the gunpowder!'"
The miller raised his large head, with its effect of white powder from
the mill, and regarded the landscape. "'We're all mighty blind, poor
creatures,' as the preacher says, but I reckon one day we'll find the
right way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned,
lovable, never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole,
way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and King
George saddled us with, not much to their betterment and to our certain
hurt. I reckon we'll find it. But I'm damned if I'm going to take the
North's word for it that she has the way! Her old way was to sell her
negroes South."
"I've thought and thought," said Allan. "People mean well, and yet
there's such a dreadful lot of tragedy in the world!"
"I agree with you there," quoth the miller. "And I certainly don't deny
that slavery's responsible for a lot of bitter talk and a lot of
red-hot feeling; for some suffering to some negroes, too, and for a deal
of harm to almost all whites. And I, for one, will be powerful glad when
every negro, man and woman, is free. They can never really grow until
they are free--I'll acknowledge that. And if they want to go back to
their own country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it
to them--even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did
them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You couldn't
scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help them back to
their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for instance--never see one
that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three Oaks,--_he'd_ say he
couldn't possibly think of going--must stay at Three Oaks and look after
Miss Margaret and the children! No, it isn't an easy subject, look at it
any way you will. But as between us and the North, it ain't the main
subject of quarrel--not by a long shot it ain't! The quarrel's that a
man wants to take all the grist, mine as well as his, and grind it in
his mill! Well, I won't let him--that's all. And here's your road to
Thunder Run."
Allan strode on alone over the frozen hills. Before him sprang the
rampart of the mountains, magnificently drawn against the eastern sky.
To either hand lay the fallow fields, rolled the brown hills, rose the
shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The
evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown
south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded. There was only the
earth, field and hill and mountain, the up and down of a narrow road,
and the glimmer of a distant stream. The sunset had been red, and it
left a colour that flared to the zenith.
The young man, tall, blond, with grey-blue eyes and short, fair beard,