THE END OF AN ERA:
Electronic Edition.

JOHN SERGEANT WISE, 1846-1913

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Call number E605 .W8 1899 (Davis Library, UNC-CH)

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Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998

LC Subject Headings:

• Wise, John S. (John Sergeant), 1846-1913.
• Plantation life -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century.
• Virginia -- Social life and customs.
• Virginia -- Politics and government.
• Slavery -- Virginia.
• Richmond (Va.) -- Social life and customs.
• Virginia -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives.
• Virginia -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Campaigns.
• Virginia Military Institute -- History -- 19th century.
• Military cadets -- Virginia -- History -- 19th century.
• New Market (Va.), Battle of, 1864.
• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Military life.
• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives, Confederate.

• 1998-12-14,
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• 1998-09-10,
  Jessica Mathewson
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THE END OF AN ERA

BY

JOHN S. WISE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1899

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY JOHN S. WISE.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PREFACE

        THIS book needs this much of an apology. It is to a great extent the autobiography of an insignificant person. If it were that alone, it would have no excuse for publication, and would possess little interest for those outside the immediate home circle. But it is not an autobiography alone. It introduces views of Southern life and feelings and civilization, prior to and during the war, which possess an unflagging interest for the American people; and it tells the true story of several striking events which preceded our civil strife, and many episodes of the great war. Besides these, it gives accurate descriptions not heretofore published of the appearance and actions and sayings of many distinguished participants on the Confederate side.

        When I first concluded to print the book, I made an honest effort to construct it in the third person. It was a lamentable failure, and made it appear even more egotistical than in its present form. Having returned to the narrative in the first person singular, I found myself a participant in several scenes in which I was not actually present. How to eliminate these, and at the same time preserve the continuity of the narrative, was a serious problem. I solved it at last by the consent of my only living brother that he would stand for me in several episodes

having told me all I know.¹ I will not mar the narrative by pointing out the places in which my brother is myself. This confession redeems the book from being classed either as an autobiography or a romance; and whenever anybody shall say to me, "Why, you were not there?" I will answer, like the Israelite gentleman, "Yes, I know. Dot vas mine brudder." The reader gets the facts as they were, and that is all he ought to expect.

        I dedicate it to my old Confederate comrades, the bravest, simplest, most unselfish, and affectionate friends I ever had.

J. S. W.

1. Hon. Richard A. Wise, Williamsburg, Va.

CONTENTS

• I. A LONG WAY FROM HOME . . . . . 1
• II. THE KINGDOM OF ACCAWMACKE . . . . . 10
• III. OUR FOLKS IN GENERAL AND IN PARTICULAR . . . . . 23
• IV. MY MOTHER: FIRST LESSONS IN POLITICS . . . . . 33
• V. THE KNOW-NOTHING CAMPAIGN AND LIFE IN RICHMOND . . . . . 52
• VI. BEHIND THE SCENES . . . . . 61
• VII. MY BROTHER . . . . . 89
• VIII. UNVEILING OF WASHINGTON'S STATUE, AND REMOVAL OF MONROE'S REMAINS, 1859 . . . . . 98
• IX. THE JOHN BROWN RAID . . . . . 113
• X. HOW THE "SLAVE DRIVERS" LIVED . . . . . 137
• XI. THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM - THE CLOUDBURST . . . . . 152
• XII. THE ROANOKE ISLAND TRAGEDY . . . . . 175
• XIII. THE MERRIMAC AND THE MONITOR . . . . . 191
• XIV. A REFUGEE . . . . . 206
• XV. AMONG THE MOUNTAINS . . . . . 219
• XVI. PRESBYTERIAN LEXINGTON . . . . . 232
• XVII. A NEW PHASE OF MILITARY LIFE . . . . . 244
• XVIII. A HUNT AND ALMOST A LICKING . . . . . 276
• XIX. THE MOST GLORIOUS DAY OF MY LIFE . . . . . 285
• XX. THE GRUB BECOMES A BUTTERFLY . . . . . 310
• XXI. LIFE AT PETERSBURG . . . . . 328
• XXII. THE BATTLE OF THE CRATER . . . . . 346
• XXIII. THE. CONFEDERATE RESERVES . . . . . 372
• XXIV. THE BEGINNING OF THE END . . . . . 392
• XXV. THE END IN SIGHT . . . . . 412
• XXVI. THE END . . . . . 437
• INDEX . . . . . 465

THE END OF AN ERA

CHAPTER I

A LONG WAY FROM HOME

        IT was the day after Christmas in the year 1846.

        Near sundown, two young officers of the army of the United States sat upon one of the benches on the promenade of the great reservoir which supplies the city of Rio de Janeiro with water.

        Both were lieutenants, - one of engineers, the other of artillery. Any one half acquainted with the United States would have recognized them as West Pointers; and their presence in this far-away spot was easily accounted for by a glance downward from the coign of vantage where they sat, at a fleet of United States men-of-war and troop ships riding at anchor in the bay.

        Nowhere in all the world is there a scene more beautiful than that spread out before them. Below, falling away down the mountain side to the silver sands of the bay, were the palms and gardens, and orange and olive groves, surrounding the residence of the Cateti suburb. To seaward, the southern boundary of the mile-wide entrance to the bay, loomed the bald, brown peak of the Sugar Loaf Mountain, with the beautiful suburb of Botafogo nestling near its base. Huge mountains, their dense foliage lit by the sinking sun, ran down to the water's edge upon the opposite or northern shore. Far beneath

them was the Gloria landing for naval vessels. To westward, sweeping out into the bay with bold and graceful curves, and spread beneath them like a map, was the peninsula upon which the city of Rio is built, and beyond this, gleaming in the evening sunlight, and studded with islands of intense verdure, extended the upper bay until it was lost in the distance, where, on the horizon, the blue peaks of the Organ range closed in the lovely picture.

        The ships bearing the commands to which the young gentlemen were attached were bound to California around Cape Horn. The troops were to take part in the war then flagrant between the United States and Mexico. A short stop had been made at Rio for water and provisions and these two youngsters were among the first to apply for and obtain shore leave.

        The dusty appearance of their dress, and other evidence of fatigue, showed that they had not failed to sustain the reputation of their countrymen as investigators of everything new and strange. In fact, they had, in the morning exhausted the sights to be seen in the city. After amusing themselves in the shops of the Rua Direita, and replenishing their stock of Spanish books in the Rua do Ovidor and wandering through several churches and residence streets, they had become very much interested in the remarkable aqueduct which supplies the city of Rio with water.

        Our young soldiers, in their engineering zeal, had followed the aqueduct back to its source of supply; and now, bound for the Gloria landing, were resting, deeply impressed by the great work, and by the genius and skill of its builders. But both the youths, recalling the fact that it was the Christmas season, felt, in spite of all the tropical novelty and strange beauty surrounding them as evening closed in, a yearning for an American home

and voice and face; and their conversation naturally enough fell into conjecturing how the Christmas was being spent by their own loved ones in the United States, or in bemoaning the good things they were missing.

        While thus engaged, they saw two men approaching. One was in civilian dress; the other wore the uniform of assistant surgeon in the United States navy. The newcomers were engaged in animated conversation; and, although the civilian was a man of forty, while his companion was a youngster of twenty-five, there was little if any difference in the alertness of their steps.

        The faces of the young officers lit up with pleasure as, upon the near approach of the two pedestrians, they caught the sound of genuine United States English. They had observed the American flag floating from a residence in the Cateti, and had no doubt that the persons who were now passing were in some way connected with the legation. Accordingly, with that freedom which fellow countrymen feel in addressing each other in foreign lands, the West Pointers arose at the approach of the two gentlemen, and, catching the eye of the elder of the two, advanced, announced their rank and service, and made some inquiry as a groundwork of further conversation. They were not mistaken in their surmises. The gentleman addressed was the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Empire of Brazil from the Republic of the United States. A title like that was well calculated to paralyze the familiarity of two young military men; and when they realized that, unannounced and covered with dust, they had of their own motion ventured into conversation with the bearer of such an august title, their first impulse was to apologize for their temerity and to withdraw. Even from an officer of no higher grade than captain in their own service, they were accustomed to a

greeting strictly formal, usually accompanied by the inquiry, "Well, sir? state your business;" and, having done so, they were generally glad enough to salute and withdraw. Here they were, without any business, standing in the presence of a high official, with nothing more to say, and with no excuse to give for what they had said. But before their embarrassment could grow more annoying, the minister put them completely at their ease. "Well met!" he exclaimed; "we are just returning homeward from the city. Come! The more the merrier: you shall dine with me. I still have some Christmas turkey and plum pudding, and we will drink the health of the good angel who sent my countrymen to me at this blessed season."

        During the course of their walk to the American legation, the young fellows had opportunity to observe their newly found host more carefully. To them he was a revelation. His name and position in politics were not unknown to them; for although still young, he had for many years been a conspicuous figure in national politics in the United States. The echoes of his eloquence, as well as accounts of his game-cook courage, had penetrated even into the isolated world of the Academy at West Point. In fact, he had been absent from the United States but two or three years upon this mission, which had been accepted partly on account of failing health, and partly from a desire to strike a blow at the infamous African slave-trade. He had accomplished much towards breaking up the slave-trade, and derived great benefit to his health.

        Brilliant at all times in conversation, he was, on this occasion, unusually interesting. The sight of his country's ships in the harbor, and the news of the struggle with Mexico, so excited and elated him that he was seen

at his best by his visitors. The two boys studied him as if he had been some great actor. Tall and thin, he was nevertheless exceedingly active and muscular. His dress consisted of simple black, with spotless linen. He wore the open standing collar and white scarf affected by the gentlemen of that period. The only ornament upon his person was a large opal pin confining the neckerchief. His head gear, suited to the climate, was one of those exquisitely wrought white Panama hats which is the envy of men living beyond the tropics. Beneath this was a head exquisitely moulded, with a noble brow, and large hazel eyes, the ever-changing expression of which, coupled with a full, rich voice, charmed and fascinated his guests. His silken blond hair was thrown back and worn long, as was the custom of the day. A nose too handsome to be called Roman, yet too strong to be designated as Grecian; a mouth wide and mobile, filled with even, white teeth; and a strong chin with a decided dimple, - completed the remarkable face which turned in ever-changing expression, from time to time, towards its companions, as they strode homeward in the twilight.

        Such was the American minister; and, according to the mood in which one found him, he impressed the stranger as the gentlest, the tenderest, the most loving, the most eloquent, the most earnest, the most fearless, the most impassioned, or the fiercest man he had ever met. Nobody who saw him ever forgot him.

        They reached the legation just as it was growing dark, and as the full-orbed moon was rising from the distant sea. Seeking the veranda, and seating his guests in the wicker easy-chairs with which it was well supplied, the minister excused himself, and left them for a few minutes to their own observations and reflections.

        As the soft sea-breeze came up to them, laden with

garden perfumes; as they watched the golden highway the moon's reflection on the sea; as they saw the twinkling lights of the ships in the deep shadows of the bay below them, - they felt as if they had indeed discovered an earthly paradise; and when a fair blond girl in filmy apparel glided through the drawing-room and joined them speaking pure English, it seemed as if their paradise was being peopled by angels. Everybody here spoke in English. Everything spoke of home. The pictures on the walls, the books on the tables, yes, the dishes at table were all American.

        The visitors were conducted to their apartments to make necessary preparations for dinner. Soon after their return to the drawing-room, the minister reappeared with a look somewhat troubled, as he apologized for his long absence and the non-appearance of the lady of the house.

        A moment later the folding-doors rolled back, and the English butler announced that dinner was served. Oh what a contrast with the ward-room of the man-of-war in which our two lieutenants had been dining for a month or more!

        Dinner over, the company once more sought the cool veranda, where coffee and cigars were served. There they were joined by Baron Lomonizoff, the Russian minister who had called to be informed of all the recent developments in the controversy with Mexico, and who spoke English perfectly. Later, just as the baron was bidding adieu, in fact, at what seemed to our young friends to be a very late hour for visiting, the oddest imaginable specimen of Brazilian humanity was introduced as Dr. Ildefonso.

        His efforts at English were startling. They nearly convulsed our two young friends, and reconciled them to their own failures at Portuguese.

        As the little doctor showed no signs of leaving, and

as, by one or two indications, the young visitors began to suspect it was time for them to go, they reluctantly took their departure, thanking their host a thousand times for the pleasure he had given them, and chatting joyously, on the route to the ship, about the good fortune which had given them such a Merry Christmas.

        The little Brazilian doctor and the surgeon in the navy had remained because there was work on hand for them. I entered my name on the docket of humanity that night; and as the lawyers say, my cause was continued until the further order of the court.

        How do I know it? I will tell you.

        Forty-five years later, at a great banquet in New York, I was sitting beside an aged, grizzled general of the armies of the Union.

        Said the old general cheerily, "Did I ever tell you of my visit to your father in Rio?" Receiving a negative response, he proceeded in his inimitable way to recount every incident above set forth, omitting the hour of his own departure from the legation. The memory of the struggles of the little Brazilian doctor with the English language still amused him immensely. He was recalling some absurd mistake of Dr. Ildefonso, when I looked up, and, with a merry twinkle in my eye, said, "General, at what hour did you leave the Cateti that night?" "Oh, I should say about eleven or twelve o'clock," said the general. "Well, now, do you know, my dear general, I deeply regret you left so early. I arrived myself that night about two hours after your departure, and would have been so delighted to meet you under my father's roof." This sally was met by a hearty laugh from the listening company, and was followed by a glass of wine to the memory of those olden days, since when so many things have happened.

        The young lieutenant of artillery, and the old general above described, was no other than William Tecumseh Sherman, commander of the armies of the Union. His companion was the officer who afterwards became famous as General Halleck. Neither of them ever met again their host of that evening.

        In later years, he also became a distinguished general but on the Confederate side. He never knew that Sherman and Halleck, the great Union generals, were the young officers he entertained at Rio the night I was born; for he died many years before the general revealed his identity as above related.

        Forty years after this meeting, when I was in Congress, I received a letter from a dear old retired chaplain of the navy living in Boston, Rev. Mr. Lambert, asking assistance in some public matter, and concluding with the remark that this demand of a stranger sprung from the fact that the writer had held me in his arms and baptized me at the American legation in Rio, April 14,1847.

        In the spring of 1847, my father asked the President for a recall; and, his petition being granted, the United States frigate Columbia was placed at his disposal for the return to America.

        I was a tried seaman when, for the first time, I set foot upon the soil of my country, and took up my residence where my people had lived for over two hundred years. I was not born on the soil of the United States, but nevertheless in the United States; for the place where I was born was the home of a United States minister, and under the protection of the United States flag, and was in law as much the soil of the United States as any within its boundaries. Descended from a number of people who helped to form the Union, born under the

glorious stars and stripes, rocked in the cradle of an American man-of-war, and taught to love the Union next to my Maker, little did I dream of the things, utterly inconsistent with such ideas, which were to happen to me and mine within the first eighteen years of my existence.

CHAPTER II

THE KINGDOM OF ACCAWMACKE

        OUR voyage terminated in the kingdom of Accawmacke, the abiding-place of my ancestors for two and half centuries. Although within eight hours of New York and six hours from Philadelphia by rail, the region and its people are as unlike those of these crowded centres of humanity as if they were a thousand miles away.

        John Smith tells us, in his memorable narrative of earliest American explorations, that when Captain Nelson sailed in June, 1607, for England, in the good ship Phoenix, he, John, in his own barge, accompanied him to the Virginia capes; and there, after delivering his writings for the company, he parted with him near the southernmost cape, which he named Cape Henry. Sailing northward, Captain Smith first visited the seaward island, which he named Smith's Island, after himself. It is still called Smith's Island, and is owned by the Lee family. Then he returned to the northernmost cape, at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay, and named it Cape Charles, in honor of the unfortunate prince afterwards known as Charles I. Upon the point of this cape Smith encountered an Indian chief, whom he describes as "the most comely, proper, civil salvage" he had yet met. The name of this chief was Kictopeke. He was called "The Laughing King of Accomack," and Accomack means, in the Indian tongue, "The Land Beyond the Water." He bore in his hand a long spear or harpoon, with a sharpened

fish-bone or shell upon its point; and he it was who taught John Smith and his companions to spear the sheepshead and other fish in the shallow waters hard by. John Smith and The Laughing King have been buried for well-nigh three centuries, but the people about Cape Charles still spear sheepshead on the shoals in the same old way.

        Smith and his companions cruised along the western shore of this Peninsula of Accawmacke, which is the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, until they reached what is now called Pocomoke River, the present boundary between Virginia and Maryland. The distance is probably eighty miles. The reason assigned for the long cruise was that they were searching for fresh water. To those who know the abundant springs of the Peninsula, this statement is surprising. Overtaken in the neighborhood of Pocomoke by one of those summer thunderstorms which are so prevalent in that region, they were driven across the bay to the western shore, and thence they cruised down the Chesapeake until they turned into what is now called Hampton Roads. Passing the low sandspit where the ramparts of Fortress Monroe now frown and the gay summer resorts are built, they stopped at the Indian village Kickotan, located upon the present site of Hampton. Obtaining there a good supply of food from the Indians, they returned to the Jamestown settlement, about forty miles up the river, then called Powhatan, now known as the James. In this as in all things, the Englishman appropriated what belonged to the Indian, and King James supplanted King Powhatan.

        It was on this return voyage that Smith, while practicing the art acquired from the King of Accawmacke, impaled a fish upon his sword, in the shallow waters about the mouth of the Rappahannock River. Unaware of the

dangerous character of his captive, he received in his wrist a very painful wound from the spike-like fin upon the tail of the fish. This wound caused such soreness and such swelling that he thought he was like to die, and his whole party went ashore and laid Smith under a tree, where he made his will. "But," says he, "by night time the swelling and soreness had so abated that I had the pleasure of eating that fish for supper." The next morning the journey was resumed, and the place, in remembrance of the incident, was named Stingaree Point. To this day, that point at the mouth of the Rappahannock is called Stingaree Point; and that fish is still called Stingaree by the people along the Chesapeake Bay.

        After this famous cruise, John Smith, who was as active and restless as a box of monkeys, made his map of Virginia, which is still extant, - and a pretty good map it is, showing his capes and his islands, and his points and his rivers, and what not, - in which map the Kingdom of Accawmacke bears a most conspicuous part.

        On that historic document, old John at certain point printed little pictures of deer, to show where they most abounded; and at other points he designated where the wild turkeys were most plentiful. The author of this humble narrative has, in his day, hunted every variety of game which abounds at the present time in Old Virginia; and just where the deer and turkeys were most abundant in 1608, according to John Smith's map, there are the most abundant now. In the counties of Surry and Sussex, upon the south side of the James, run, doubtless, the descendants of those very deer whose pictures adorn the map of John Smith, published three centuries ago; and within the past twelve months the writer has followed the great-great-great- grandchildren of the identical turkeys, no doubt, from whose flocks were captured, in 1616,

the twenty birds sent by King Powhatan to his brother the King of England.

        But to return to our Kingdom of Accawmacke.

        After the Jamestown colonists had tired of poor old John Smith, after he had blown himself up with his own powder while smoking in his boat, upon one of his return trips to Jamestown from the present site of Richmond; after he had returned to England, broken in health and spirits, - the colonists who remained found, among their other miseries and tribulations, that they were sadly in need of salt.

        Bearing in mind stories brought back from the coast by Smith, Sir Thomas Dale, governor, in the year 1612 detailed a party from the Jamestown settlement to go to the Kingdom of Accawmacke and boil salt for the settlers at Jamestown.

        We may well imagine that such a task was far from grateful to those to whom it was allotted. It was looked forward to by them, no doubt, as the equivalent of solitary confinement in a dangerous locality. At Jamestown the settlers were located upon an island. This fact and their numbers gave them comparative security from the savages. In Accawmacke the party assigned to saltboiling was placed upon the same land as the Indians; and its numbers were so small, and the position so isolated from the chief settlement by the Chesapeake Bay between them, that their situation would have been most perilous in case of attack. It was therefore, doubtless, in the spirit of satire that the party named the place at which they first located upon the eastern shore, Dale's Gift.

        Thus came about the first settlement of the white man upon the eastern shore peninsula of Virginia; and, recognizing its separation from the other settlements, the kings of England for many years addressed all their decrees to

the Virginia colonists to their "faithful subjects in ye Colonie of Virginia and ye Kingdom of Accawmacke"

        Like many another venture undertaken reluctantly in ignorance, this settlement upon the eastern shore proved to be anything but an irksome and dangers transfer. The party at Dale's Gift found the Accawmacke Indians totally unlike the warlike and treacherous tribes across the bay; and from that time forth there never was, not even at the time of the general outbreak of the savages in 1629, any serious trouble between the whites and the Indians of the eastern shore. The climate also was much more salubrious than that of the swamp region where the brackish waters at Jamestown bred malaria. As for sustenance, they found the place an earthly paradise. In the light and sandy soil corn, vegetables, and many varieties of fruit grew with little care of cultivation and in great abundance. Fish and shell-fish of every kind abounded in the ocean, bay, and inlets. Wild fowls of many sorts, from the lordly wild goose to the tiny teal, swarmed in the marshes and along the coast. Game in great abundance, furred and feathered, could be had for the shooting of it upon the land; the fig and the pomegranate grew in the open air. And the influence the Gulf Stream, which in passing these capes approaches to within thirty miles of the coast and then turns abruptly eastward, made, as it still makes, residence upon the eastern shore of Virginia most charming and delightful. The eastern shore men were the epicures of the colony. A hundred years before New York knew the terrapin, it was the daily food in Accawmacke.

        We may be sure that the less fortunate settlers at Jamestown, Smithfield, Henricopolis, Flower de Hundred and the Falls of the James were not long in finding out the delights of this, at first, despised settlement in Accawmacke.

History tells us that when, twenty years later, the colony of Virginia was divided into eight colonies, "to be governed as are the shires in England," the Accawmacke settlement was of sufficient importance to constitute of itself one of these eight counties; and in 1643, when the whole colony had a population of but fifteen thousand, one thousand of these were upon the eastern shore. When Captain Edmund Scarburgh, presiding justice, opened the first County Court of Accawmacke at Eastville, the county seat, in the autumn of 1634, The Laughing King of Accawmacke had no doubt ceased to laugh; for he, like many another savage chief before and after him, had by this time felt the fangs of the British bull-dog sink deep into the vitals of his kingdom, and became sensible of the fact that it was a grip which, once fastened upon its prey, never relaxed its hold.

        Rare old records are those of Captain Edmund Scarburgh and his successors, and very curious reading do they furnish. You may see them, reader, if, instead of flashing and dashing over every other country in search of novelty, you will seek the things which are interesting in your native land, within a stone's throw of your door. There they are, preserved to this day, in the little brick court house, and are continuous from then until now, without a break, preserving the history of their section intact through a period of nearly three centuries.

        The Peninsula is no longer a single county. About 1643, ambitious Colonel Obedience Robins, from Northamptonshire, England, succeeded in changing the name of the Peninsula to Northampton. It was not until 1662, when the eastern shore of Virginia was divided into two counties, that the upper portion resumed the old title of Accawmacke, which it retains to this day. The lower part of the original Accawmacke is still called Northampton.

        Nowhere is the type of the original settler in Virgina so well preserved, or are to be found the antique customs manners, and ways of the Englishman of the seventeen century in America so little altered, as in the Kingdom of Accawmacke. No considerable influx of population from anywhere else has ever gone to the eastern shore of Virginia since the year 1700. The names of the very earliest settlers are still there. Everybody on the Peninsula knows everybody else. Everybody there is kin to everybody else. Nobody is so poor that he is wretched; nobody is so rich that he is proud. The majority of the upper class are stanch Episcopalians, just as their fathers were Church of England men; and the remainder of the population are for the most part Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians.

        The vices of the community, as well as the virtues, are equally well-recognized inheritances from their progenitors. Fighting and drunkenness are by no means absent but theft is rare among the whites. The kinship and sociability of the population are such that the fondness of the Englishman for sports of all kinds is freely indulged. No neighborhood is without its race-boat; no court day without its sporting event of some kind; and no tavern without its backgammon board, quoits, and, in old times its fives-court. The poorhouse has fallen into decay. When a man dies, his kin are sufficiently numerous to care for his family; and while he lives, there is no excuse for pauperism in a land where earning a living is so easy a matter.

        The citizen of Accawmacke may begin life with no other capital than a cotton string, a rusty nail, and broken clam, and end it leaving a considerable landed estate. With his string for a line, his nail for a sinker and his clam for bait, he can catch enough crabs to eat

and sell enough besides to enable him to buy himself hooks and lines. With his hooks and lines he can catch and sell enough fish to buy himself a boat and oyster tongs. With his boat, fishing-lines, and oyster tongs he can, in a short while, catch and sell enough fish and oysters to enable him to build a sloop. With his sloop he can trade to Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, sell fish, oysters, and terrapin, and carry fruit and vegetables, until he has accumulated enough to buy his own little patch of ground, and build his house upon it. Then, from the proceeds of his fruit, berries, and every variety of early vegetable, for which he will find excellent markets, he is sure of a comfortable living with easy labor; and he will be happier in his simple home than many who are far more pretentious, and whose incomes are far greater.

        Such has been for three centuries, and still is, the place and people among whom my lot was cast when I arrived from Brazil, - descendants of the families of Scarburgh, Littleton, Yeardley, Bowman, Wise, West, Custis, Smith, Ward, Blackstone, Joynes, Kennard, Evans, Robins, Upshur, Fitchett, Simpkins, Nottingham, Goffigan, Pitts, Poulson, Bowdoin, Bagwell, Gillett, Parker, Parramore, Leatherbury, Cropper, Browne,: and the rest of them, who were there when Charles I. was king, and who gave the name of Old Dominion to Virginia because they refused to swear allegiance to the Pretender Cromwell, and made the colony the asylum of the fugitive officers of their lamented sovereign.

        Poor enough pay they got for their loyalty; for, when Prince Charlie came to his own, although Sir Charles Scarburgh, son of old Captain Edmund of blessed memory, was Court Surgeon, and although Colonel Edmund Scarburgh, his brother, was made Surveyor-General in

Virginia, in recognition of his fidelity, the reckless sovereign gave away the devoted Kingdom of Accawmacke to his favorites, Arlington and Culpeper. To this day, one of the loveliest places upon the Peninsula, on Old Plantation Creek, bears the name of Arlington, bestowed upon it by John Custis, in honor of one of the proprietary lords of the eastern shore.

        A famous local celebrity in his day was this old John Custis, - feasting and junketing at lordly Arlington. When, in 1649, Colonel Norwood, seeking asylum in Virginia after King Charles's defeat, was shipwrecked upon the coast of the eastern shore, he first secured abundant clothing from Stephen Charlton, a minister of the Church of England, and his sufferings were atoned for he says, by finding John Custis at Arlington. He tells us how he had known him as a tavern-keeper in Rotterdam, and of the high living he had with Custis in his new home until he put him across the bay to Colonel Wormley's, more dead than alive from hospitality.

        From the point of Cape Charles to the Maryland boundary, the coast of the Peninsula on sea side and bay side is indented with inlets, which are called "creeks" in this section. On the bay side, going northward from the cape where the oldest settlements were made, the names of these creeks are English, such as Old Plantation, Cherrystone, and Hungers. Higher up the bay side, the names given by the Indians before the white settlements seem to have been retained; for we have successively Occahannock, Nandua, Pungoteague, Onancock, Chesconessex, Annamessex, and Pocomoke as the names of the beautiful and bold inlets on the bay side. On the sea side, they rejoice in such titles as Assawamman, Chincoteague, and the like. These numerous inlets, many of which are navigable for vessels of considerable size, are but a few miles

apart, and divide the Peninsula into many transverse "necks." Thus it often happens that neighbors living on opposite sides of these creeks, within hailing distance of each other, find it necessary, in order to visit each other by land, to travel miles around the head of the creek dividing them. Small boats are, therefore, as much in use as means of intercourse between neighbors, and for visiting the post-offices and little towns at the wharves, as are horses and vehicles; and an eastern shore man is as much at home in a boat as upon the land. The public roads of the counties are called Bay Side and Sea Side roads, and their general course is up and down the Peninsula, just inside of the heads of the creeks. The only transverse public roads are those to the wharves, and an occasional crossroad from the Bay Side to the Sea Side road.

        It by no means follows, from the general use of boats, that the travel by land is diminished; for in no place is the proportion of wheeled vehicles to population greater than upon the eastern shore. Poor, indeed, is the citizen who cannot own, or cannot occasionally borrow, an animal and a vehicle of some kind. Strangers, visiting that section for the first time, get the impression that at least half the population is continually driving back and forth upon the highways; and the number and variety of animals and vehicles collected at the county seat on court day is something truly astonishing. The speed at which the driving is done is likewise a matter of comment and observation by many visitors to the eastern shore.

        People from the Blue Grass regions, where size and bone and symmetry count for so much in horseflesh, are at first disposed to look contemptuously upon the Accomack twelve of horse; and, indeed, it must be confessed that he is not the highest expression of physical beauty. But never was the Scripture saying, that"the back is fitted

to its burden," better exemplified than in the tough and wiry little animal which you will sit behind, if you ever make a visit to this far-away kingdom. Small in stature, inclined even to those homely features known as ewe nick and cat ham, often higher behind than in front, and with great length of stifle, he is not, I admit, imposing to look upon. We must carefully scan the cunning little fellow before we condemn him. Note, if you please, in the first place, that the close, shiny coat bespeaks a strong infusion of the thoroughbred; observe the large, gazelle-like eyes beaming beneath the foretop, which is fluffy and shaggy from the constant influence of salt sea air; watch the nervous playing of the pointed ear, and see how the broad forehead tapers away to the muzzle, with its wide and flexible nostrils; observe the clean, straight legs and flat knees before, and bent stifles, well muscled, behind; run your hand over those pasterns, long, limber, and without a windgall; and do not overlook the cup-like, often unshod, hoofs. What say you to those sloping shoulders, that deep chest, and those well-rounded ribs, close coupled to the heavy hips? When you have finished, you will not ridicule a moving machine like that, if you know good horseflesh when you see it. You may call him pony if you like. Many of them do, indeed, possess a cross derived from the wild pony of Chincoteague Island. Now, I see you turn to look at the light conveyance, with its almost fragile harness, and know you are wondering whether such an outfit, drawn by such a horse, will take you to your destination. One drive will dissipate every doubt. You are starting for a journey in a country where there is not a hill twelve feet high within fifty miles, over light, well-packed sand roads, on which in many places, you could hear an egg-shell crush beneath the wheel.

        Come, mount with me. Never fear that our vehicle and harness are frail. They are light, but not fragile. In the matter of our driving we are exquisites, and we buy the toughest and the best. Never fear that we shall be overturned, or that we shall hurt the horse. Hurt him? I love him as the apple of my eye; and he knows me as the Arab steed knows his rider. See how the little rascal snuffs for a caress, as I loosen him from the fence where he and a long line of his companions are made fast. Now we have backed him out into the roadway. Gentle as a lamb, quick as a kitten, see the little bundle of nerves start the instant the reins are gathered, and how, with that squat between the shafts, and spraddle, and overreach in the hind legs, known to every horseman as the surest sign of going, he is settled to his work, and spinning us along at a slashing gait. Before long, twenty miles lie behind us, and when we pull up at Belle Haven or Horn Town, not a sign of weariness or punishment does the little beggar show. All that he asks - and he asks that in a way that no one can mistake his wish - is that we loosen his check-rein and let him stretch that bony neck, and give a long, deep heave, before he takes thirty swallows from the roadside water-trough. Then he rubs his neck against my sleeve, and his unclouded eye says, "Come, I am ready. Let us go again."

        Let me tell you, also, that the horse is not the only thing which you will find better than it looks in the Kingdom of Accawmacke. The pretty little white-painted red roofed houses are better than they look, as you will learn when you enter their hospitable portals, and find them the abodes of refinement and virtue and hospitality. The quaint, flat farms are better than they look, as you will learn when you see the bountiful crops of fruit and high-priced early vegetables and berries which they produce.

The sea side and the bay side are even better than they look, as you will know when you learn the wealth of fish and shell-fish and sea food and game of which they are the storehouses. The people themselves are better than they look; for, beneath their unassuming and oftentimes provincial appearance, they possess great shrewdness, great powers of observation, strong character, decided opinions, refinement, and considerable education; and, without one tinge of false pride, they are of a lineage as old and as honorable as any of which America can boast.

        Two things, also, you will find in this locality which can be no better than they look. One is the daybreak and sunrise from the sea, and the other is the exquisite sunset which lights land and ocean as the orb of day sinks out of sight to the west beneath the waves of the Chesapeake. Not sunny Italy, with all her boasted wealth of color, can surpass the many-tinted loveliness of evening in the ancient Kingdom of Accawmacke, to which, for some years to come, my residence was now transferred.

CHAPTER III

OUR FOLKS IN GENERAL AND IN PARTICULAR

        OUR folks have been in Old England since the days of Alfred, and in America since Thomas West, Lord de la War, was governor of the Virginia colony in 1608, when numerous brothers, cousins, and relatives followed him hither in search of the treasures of the still undiscovered South Sea.

        There and here, for centuries, in peace and in war, they have never failed to be mixed up in the thick of whatever game the English stock has played.

        They have lived and died in Devonshire and Somersetshire for nearly ten centuries. Until its recent destruction to make way for the government buildings, the old; family nest at Plymouth was almost as well known to Englishmen as the banks of the Tamar itself. Burke tells us the name is among the oldest in England.

        The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First. The ancient shippinglists show that he sailed from Gravesend, July 4, 1636, after first taking the oath of allegiance to king and church. He was a lad of eighteen, who, yielding to the spirit of adventure which then prevailed in England, joined his friends, the Scarburghs of Norfolk, in the Kingdom of Accawmacke.

        Two hundred and sixty years of separation ordinarily works considerable estrangement, and difference in characteristics,

between the separated branches of a family. Not so with our people. If they possess one predominant trait, it is their faith in and attachment to anybody and everybody bearing the name, or springing from the old stock. But for the evidence it gives of stanchness in love and loyalty, the way in which the old ties are kept up, to this day, between the English and American branches would seem absurd. Descendants in the eighth degree since the separation recognize the kinship; and the English cousins welcome the Americans to hearth and home, taking no note of the two and a half centuries which have elapsed since the American immigrant wandered off from his English home, and placed the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his family.

        And let me tell you, you boys of America, that there is no higher inspiration to any man to be a good man, a good citizen, and a good son, brother, or father, than the knowledge that you come from honest blood. Few who have it scorn it, and many of those who are loudest in belittling it would give all they have to possess it. And, boys, let me tell you another thing. When you are hunting for that honest blood, when you are looking back into the wellsprings of your existence for the source of the virtue the courage, the manhood, the truth, the honesty, the reverence, the family love, the simplicity of life, which will make you what true men ought to be, believe me, you are more apt to find it in the progenitors who came from "the right little, tight little island" than anywhere else on this rolling planet.

        Don't deceive yourselves with the notion that England did not furnish the best of us. We have had our troubles with her in the past, it is true. But it is hard for the mother to realize that her boy is grown, and accord him his rights as a man. She sometimes makes it very

uncomfortable for him by failing to recognize that he is no longer in his swaddling-clothes. But there is not a true-hearted boy in the world who, in spite of his mother's shortcomings, does not feel in his heart that there is no other like her.

        Don't take my word for it, if you think I am an old fogy. Wait until you grow up and see the world for yourselves. Travel through Russia, or Turkey, or Austria and you will never see a thing to stir your heart with a desire to be one of them. Stand in the shadow of the Pyramids, and you will be untouched by one wish that your blood were Egyptian. Go through Germany, and, while you will find there much to admire, there will still be something lacking. In the home of the fickle Gaul, even at Napoleon's tomb, the American boy is not in touch with his surroundings. Spain and Italy, while possessed of a wealth of antique beauty, are to us only echoes of a decayed and different civilization.

        But, some sunny day in London, wander through Westminster Abbey and read the names. Some misty morning in Trafalgar Square, cast your eye upward to the form of Nelson, as he stands there in the fog, with the lions sleeping at the base of his column. In some leisure hour, visit the crypt of St. Paul's, where the car that bore Wellington to his rest still stands. Then, perhaps, you will appreciate the meaning of an old fogy when he tells you "There's nothing outside America which tugs at an American's heart-strings like the names and deeds and monuments of Old England."

        Don't let us deceive ourselves about it, either. Don't think or say that it is a better country than our own Don't let us be Anglomaniacs. That is not at all necessary. America is good enough for us. In many things: these blessed United States already equal any nation on

the globe. In almost everything, time considered, they are a marvel. Within the past seventy years, American inventive genius has contributed more to make life easy, and to advance civilization, than all the world beside in many hundred years, if we except the inventions of printing and gunpowder. In future we may, and probably shall, become in all things the greatest nation that ever existed. But it is not disloyalty to your own country, and no disparagement of its greatness, to thank God that the people from whom we sprang were Englishmen, and that we have part and lot in England's glory.

        In all America, there is no spot more emphatically English than the Kingdom of Accawmacke. Nay, more: there is many a spot in England to-day where the manners and customs of the population have changed more from what they were in the seventeenth century, than those of that little peninsula in America. Of the twenty-five thousand white people in the two counties of the eastern shore of Virginia, it is safe to say that four fifths of them are descendants of the earliest English settlers, and that there has been less infusion of foreign element there within the last three centuries than in many parts of England itself. But a few years ago, this writer sat in the old church at Bishops Lydeard Somersetshire, and looked over the congregation. The resemblance in appearance between the people assembled there and the congregations he had often seen in the Episcopal Church at Eastville, the first county seat of Accawmacke and in the Bruton Parish Church at Williamsburg, was striking.

        The first John Wise married Hannah, eldest daughter of Captain Edmund Scarburgh. In 1655, we find him locating his grant from Governor Diggs on Nandua Creek, and in 1662, he was one of the first presiding justices of the newly formed county of Accawmacke In this year,

also, the Indian chief Ekeekes, for "seven Dutch blankets" sold him the two thousand acre tract in Chesconesseck, named "Clifton" by its new purchaser - a tract of which the greater part descended without deed from father to son for six generations, until sold to pay the debts of the seventh heir, who was killed in 1864 in the American war between the States.

        John, eldest son of the emigrant, married a Matilda, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel John West and died in 1717. Their son John married a Scarbugh, daughter of Colonel Tully Robinson, and died in 1761. Their son John married Margaret, daughter of Colonel George Douglas, and died in 1770. Their son John married first a Mary, daughter of Judge James Henry and then a Sarah, daughter of General John Cropper, and died in 1813; and their son Henry, a younger son, was my father. Related to a great number of the people of his county; known to all; honored and respected for his high character and beloved for his widely known talents and eloquence, which had reflected honor upon the community, - father's return from Brazil to his home in Accomack was the occasion of great rejoicing and festivities upon the eastern shore.

        No more beautiful spot for a dwelling-place can be found anywhere than his home named "Only." It is located upon a bold estuary of the Chesapeake, called Onancock Creek, which comes down westwardly from its source, and, upon reaching Only, makes a graceful turn, first southward, then westward, then northward, and, curving like a horseshoe, incloses within its bend five acres of ground, with banks high above the stream and level as a table, on which stands a grove of noble oaks of the original growth.

        In the neck of the horseshoe, with the grove behind it

and a fan-shaped lawn of greensward before it, stood the mansion house. It was not a stately structure There are few such among the simple folk of this Peninsula. But it was a model of scrupulous neatness, every way fit for the residence of an unpretentious country gentleman, and, outside and inside, gave evidence of taste and refinement. On the eastern side of the lawn, a terraced garden ran down to the water's edge; and about the porches, roses, cape jessamines, and honeysuckles climbed in great luxuriance. Adjoining the house were the kitchen and quarters of the household slaves, and outside the lawn, beyond the terraced garden, were the barns, carriage-houses, stables, and cattle-pens. Still further away were the quarters occupied by the plantation slaves. Looking upstream, other pretty points were visible, on which, in groves, the picturesque dwellings of the neighbors were seen, and in the further distance was the village of Onancock, with its steeples, and sandy streets, and red-topped houses, and wharves swarming with boats of all sizes from the schooner to the skiff. Westward from Only, the stream courses broad and shining between sloping banks, on which, here and there, their greensward often coming down to the water's edge, stood other homes, which looked smaller and smaller in the distance. Far away, beyond a dim point of pines marking the mouth of Onancock Creek, the sparkling whitecaps of the bay are visible, with the sails of commerce passing up and down or turning in and out of the entrance to the creek.

        On the beautiful November morning determined upon for welcoming my father on his return to the United States, relatives, neighbors, friends, clients, and political adherents began to assemble at Only.

        Bright and early, activity was visible on the plantation. Under the wide-spreading oaks, long tables were improvised,

covered with snowy linen, and groaning with everything good to eat. At several points under the bluffs, pits were dug where beeves and sheep and pigs were barbecued, and oysters and clams and crabs and fish were cooked by the bushel. Great hampers of food, sent from the village, or from the homes of neighbors, stood about the tables, ready for distribution when the feast should begin. The house itself, decorated with flowers and evergreens, was thrown wide open to the guests, and in the rooms of the first floor was spread a collation for the more distinguished visitors.

        By eight o'clock in the morning, the earliest of the guests hove in sight. By ten o'clock, the grandees of the county began to arrive.

        There were Colonel Joynes, the county clerk, Lorenzo Bell, the county attorney; the Arbuckles, the Custises the Finneys, the Waples; the Corbins from near the Maryland line; the Savages from Upshur's Neck; the Croppers from Bowman's Folly on the seaside; the Kneads from Mount Prospect; the Upshurs from Brownsville the Baylys from Mount Custis; and the Yerbys, the Nottinghams the Goffigons the Kennards, and Smiths from Northampton. But why enumerate? Their name was legion.

        By midday the stables and stable-yards were filled; and the horses, fastened to the front-yard fence, formed a continuous line; while the creek about the grove was literally filled with small craft ranging from canoe to "pungy," and a steamboat had arrived from Norfolk with a great company and a band of music. This band, playing in the grove, was an endless source of wonder and delight to many of the primitive people, who heard a brass band that day for the first, and no doubt, in some instances last time in their lives.

        Within the house, father and mother held a long levee, welcoming old friends, and stirred to their hearts depths by the simple ovation of which they were the recipients.

        Without, under the shade of the trees, hundreds of visitors, after paying their respects to the host and hostess, walked or sat about and chatted with each other.

        We may be sure that not the least theme of their conversation was politics; for not only was it in Virginia where everybody talked politics everywhere, but it was just at the period when Americans were carrying all before them in Mexico, and the Whigs were about to elect old "Rough-and- Ready," and snatch political control from the Democracy. Nor was there lack of party differences among the assembled guests, to give spice to the discussions. Hot and heavy was the argument between "Chatter Bill" Nottingham and "Monkey" Johnson, as to which national party was entitled to the honors for the American triumph in the Mexican war. Everybody had his nickname in these days.

        Colonel Robert Poulson, the county representative in the legislature, had his group around him, as, red in face and solemn of mien, he ventilated his views on the best method of protecting the Virginia oyster-beds from Maryland poachers. Captain Stephen Hopkins, the largest vessel-owner of the county, had his admiring coterie, who insisted upon hearing his opinion, which he gave modestly, as to the prospect of a rise in the price of corn in the Baltimore market. Not far away, a noisy group of youngsters were bantering each other as to the respective merits of two saucy centreboard skiffs that rode proudly near the shore, and it was not long before a race between the Southerner and the Sea-Gull was a fixed event of the future.

        As the day wore on, and when the multitude had been

fed, a movement from the house to the grove indicated that something important was about to occur. The host and hostess and the distinguished guests moved out to an improvised platform under the oaks, and there began the formal ceremonies of welcome.

        Colonel Joynes, the venerable county clerk, as of course, called the gathering to order, when the stragglers had all drawn near. Then came the introduction of a young fellow from Hampton, afterwards somewhat known as a poet, who read an original poem lauding Virginia and her honored son. Then followed a brief address of welcome from young Bell. And then father stood up, facing, for the first time after years of absence, the people among whom he was born; the kin who had loved him from his infancy; the constituency who had made his brilliant career possible; the people who still had faith in him, and had come so far to do him honor.

        It was an impressive scene. Restraining himself, and laboring under the deep emotion such interest in himself was well calculated to arouse, he drew his audience to him with the simple speech which the skilled orator so well knows to be the most effective at the outset. Then, gradually warming up to his theme, he pictured the yearning of his heart for these old scenes during his long exile in foreign lands; reviewed his work abroad in the interest of humanity; his desire to see the infamous slave trade abolished; his hope for some scheme by which the curse of slavery might ultimately be removed without wrong to the owner; his realization of the glorious work accomplished by the Union arms in Mexico during his absence; his deep sense that, with restored health and the youth remaining to him, there was still much of his life's work before him; his gratitude to God for this restoration to his own people; his deep emotion at this evidence of their

continued trust; and his abiding faith in their further confidence in him. He concluded with a brilliant and genuine tribute of affection for a constituency so true and so confiding. His audience were wrought into a burst of thunderous applause, which was renewed and renewed as the band played, "Carry Me Back to Old Virginia."

        The formal ceremonies over, the visitors gradually dispersed, and quiet reigned once more at Only.

        It is the death of that era - a death which begun with my birth, and was complete before I attained manhood - that is to be chronicled in the following pages.

CHAPTER IV

MY MOTHER: FIRST LESSONS IN POLITICS

        THE autumn of 1850 brought an event freighted with deep significance to me. My mother died. Although I was but four years old, it made a profound impression, and it exercised an incalculable influence upon my after life. My mother was a Northern woman, daughter of Hon. John Sergeant, a distinguished lawyer, and for many years representative in Congress from Philadelphia. Her people were of New England blood, identified with the earliest and most important events of the Plymouth Colony.

        She had been taught to practice economy, simplicity, and scrupulous neatness and order. She was deeply religious, charitable, sympathetic, highly sentimental, and withal ambitions. She was one of those beautiful, refined creatures for which the City of Brotherly Love is famous. Hers was one of those extraordinary natures whose physical comeliness seems to make no injurious impression upon loveliness of character. Indeed, both in herself and with those about her, consideration of her appearance was subordinated to appreciation of her moral and intellectual beauty.

        It was seven years after her marriage before she fully realized the vast difference between the life in which she had been reared and that into which her marriage had brought her. For, prior to their departure for Brazil, father, being in Congress, had resided for the most part in

Washington, and had no fixed establishment in Virginia. In Brazil, social conditions had been strange to herself and husband alike. It was only on my father's return from Brazil - when the Virginia establishment was resumed - that she realized the vastly altered terms of her existence. It is fortunate it was so. It gave time for her wifely love to become fixed and deepened beyond disturbance; and residence in Brazil undoubtedly took away the shock of slavery as it existed at home. Coming now to a knowledge of Virginia slavery, it was much less repulsive than it would have been if she had been transplanted direct from Philadelphia. Notwithstanding this gradual change, the contrast was strong enough to make her fully realize the difference between the duties and the pleasures of her new home and those to which she had been accustomed in girlhood. Of the society about her she had nothing to complain. The good old people were of excellent social position, and Philadelphia was their social rendezvous. Many of them were acquaintances of her family. They were neighborly and congenial enough, and the means of intercommunication were excellent. One of lighter tastes, and less serious purpose and sense of duty, could easily have found, in her new surroundings, all the social enjoyment she desired, and might have been, quite happy and free from care.

        But it was not so with the mistress of Only. She had too much of the old Puritan blood in her to ignore the word "duty." She adored her husband, and was as ambitious as himself, which is saying a great deal. She knew that, if he was to maintain his professional and political prominence, she must assume her share of the duties of their domestic life; and when she fully realized what the meant for her, she doubted her ability to bear the burden it imposed; but, asking God to sustain her, resolved to try.

        With the abundance of servants at her command, the care of her children was a task comparatively easy. But it was these very servants who were the chief cause of her anxieties. They were slaves. When she had consented to marry her husband, she had not fully considered, perhaps, the difference between conducting a Philadelphia household and being mistress of a Virginia plantation. At the former place, an impudent or sick or worthless servant might be discharged or sent to a hospital, and the place supplied by another. Here, a discharge was impossible. Beside the necessity for discipline, every requirement, whether of food or clothing, or care in sickness, had to be supplied to these forty servants, who were as dependent as so many babies. In those days, slavery was not looked upon, even in Quaker Philadelphia, with the shudder and abhorrence one feels towards it now. It had not been a great while since it existed in Pennsylvania. A few slaves were still owned in Delaware, and Maryland and Virginia were slave States. The time had come, it is true, when it was abolished in Pennsylvania; but its existence was a fact so familiar that it produced no particular protest or expression of abhorrence, and, by all save a small coterie of abolitionists, was regarded as probably permanent. Slave-owners mingled with non-slave owners upon terms of mutual regard and respect, unaffected, apparently at least, by any consideration of the subject of slavery.

        Even if my mother had no qualms of conscience concerning ownership of negroes, her sense of duty carried her far beyond the mere supplying of their physical needs, or requiring that they render faithful service. Forty immortal souls, as she viewed it, had been committed to her guidance. Every time one of these gentle and affectionate creatures called her "mistress," the sense of obligation

resting upon her, to keep their souls as well as their bodies fit for God, echoed back to her tender heart with alarming distinctness. And in time, sweetly and humbly as she performed her task, it became very irksome. She sleeps to-day in Laurel Hill, on the banks of the Schuylkill, having died at the early age of thirty-three, and no one knows how much that sense of duty to her slaves contributed to her death.

        Ah, you who blame the slaveholder of the olden day, how little you know whereof you speak, or how he or she became such; how little allowance you make for surrounding circumstances; how little you reck, in your general anathemas against the slave-owner, of the true and beautiful and good lives that sacrificed themselves, toiling to do their duty to the slaves in that state of life to which it pleased God to call them! There is not a graveyard in Old Virginia but has some tombstone marking the resting place of somebody who accepted slavery as he or she found it, who bore it as a duty and a burden, and who wore himself or herself out in the conscientious effort to perform that duty well. Mark you, I am not bemoaning the abolition of slavery. It was a curse, and nobody knows better than I the terrible abuses which were possible and actual under the system. Thank God, it is gone.

        All that I am saying to you now is, you who fought slavery, as well as you who have heard it described in the passionate denunciations following its death, realize that the name of slave-owner did not always, or even in the majority of cases, imply that the slave-owner was one whit less conscientious, one whit less humane, one whit less religious, or one whit less entitled to man's respect or God's love, than you, who, because, perhaps, you were never slave-owners, delight to picture them as something

inferior to your precious selves. After all, it was not you, but God that abolished slavery. You were his mere instruments to do his work.

        In the case of my mother, her task was somewhat lightened by the character of her possessions, for the slaves were of more than usual intelligence, and were, for the most part, family inheritances.

        This was no abode of hardship and stony hearts. No slaves were sold from that plantation. The young ones might have eaten their master's head off before he would have taken money for their fathers' and their mothers' children. No overseer brandished the whip that is so prominent a feature upon the stage, or in the abolition books of fiction.

        Back to me, through the mists of nearly half a century, comes once more the vision of the young Puritan mother, who followed the man she loved into this exile from every association of her youth, and yet was happy in that love because she worshiped him next to her God.

        Now I see her upon a Sabbath afternoon, with all her slaves assembled in the hallway, dressed in their Sunday clothes. Young and old, her own children and her servants, are gathered about her to listen to the word of God.

        I have heard many great orators and preachers in my day, but never a voice like that of my mother, as she read and expounded the Holy Word to her children and her slaves.

        In later years, I have heard great voices and great melodies, but never sweeter sounds to mortal ear than those of my mother and her children and her slaves, singing the simple hymns she read out to them on those Sabbath afternoons at Only, in the days of slavery.

        Then came the lessons in the catechism taught to children

and slaves in the same class, where, before God, the two stood upon equal terms, the blacks sometimes proving themselves to be the quicker scholars of the two.

        Such was my childhood's home; and such was many another home in that land which, year by year, is being; more and more depicted by ignorance and prejudice as the abode of only the brutal slave-driver and his victim.

        The beautiful month of October, 1850, with its wealth of color and its exquisite skies, rolled round. All seemed well at home. My father, once more immersed in political life, was absent in Richmond, a delegate to a great constitutional convention, where all his energies were directed towards adjusting the true basis of representation in the legislature between the sections of Virginia where slavery existed and those where no slaves were owned. It was a difficult question, on which he had taken ground in favor of a manhood suffrage as opposed to suffrage based upon representation of the property owners. Nearly every mail brought letters to mother announcing the progress of the fight, in which she seemed deeply absorbed. The reputation which her husband was making resulted five years later in his election as governor, and she clearly foresaw that result. This prospect reconciled her to the separation, and made her look bravely forward to an expected event.

        One day I missed my mother, and was told that she was ill. Servants were hurrying back and forth, and soon the doctor arrived. Bedtime came, and Eliza, the white nurse, took me away from the nursery adjoining my mother's chamber, and put me to bed in a strange room. There, after undressing me, she made me kneel and, in saying my prayers, ask God to bless mamma. When I was tucked away in bed, she sat beside me, and

stroked my long tresses, and sighed. It was all very strange. "Mammy Liza, is mamma very sick?" I asked. "No, my child, I hope not," said she, and then bade me go to sleep, and soon I closed my eyes.

        It was not for long, for in an hour or two I heard voices in the hall, and hurrying footsteps, and, awakening and sitting bolt upright in bed awhile, I finally slipped down to the floor, and made my way, in my thin nightclothes, into the hall, where I found the servants assembled, and weeping as if their hearts would break, uttering loud lamentations. "What is it, Aunt Mary Anne?" said I, cold, and shivering with fright. "Oh, my po' baby, yo' mamma is dead, - yo' mamma is dead! Oh my po', po' mistis is dead - dead - dead!" she screamed, at the same time seizing me, and wrapping me in her shawl, and bearing me back to the warmth.

        Night wore away mournfully enough, until at last, with a faithful slave beside me, I sobbed myself asleep, crying more because others about me wept, than because I knew the real cause for my grief. Morning came, and when I awoke, I could not yet fully understand the solemn silence of all about me, or the meaning of the strange black things I saw. Breakfast over, the old nurse came to me to go with her and see mamma. In silence, and amid the sobs of every servant on the place, I and my little brother and sister were led into a darkened room. There on the bamboo bedstead which she had brought as her favorite from Rio, lay mamma, apparently asleep, a tiny baby resting on her breast. By her side, his head buried in the pillow, and sobbing as if his heart would break, was my oldest brother, - not her own child, but one who had loved her as his own mother, and who now mourned a second mother dead. Gazing out of the half-opened window, dressed in solemn black, stood the physician who had

sought in vain to save her. I was frightened and awed beyond utterance.

        The next day the Fashion, Captain Hopkins's best vessel, lay to at the Only landing. A fearful-looking black box covered with velvet was borne aboard the Planter with solemn steps. Her sails were hoisted. With the freshening breeze she bore away, and, as the evening sunlight made a shining pathway on Onancock Creek, the vessel pursued her course westward until she became a tiny speck and disappeared. They told me that my mother was in heaven. Since that day, whenever the route to heaven arises to my mind, I see the white sails of a vessel gliding westward in the golden pathway made upon dancing waters by the brilliant sinking sun of a clear autumn evening.

        The home-coming of father, some weeks after this sad event, was pitiful indeed.

        He had been advised of my mother's death by a messenger, who rode forty miles down the Peninsula, crossed the bay to Norfolk, and thence telegraphed to Richmond. Such were the difficulties of communication, even at that recent date. When the news first reached him, the body was on its way to Baltimore, and thither he repaired to meet it, and accompany it to its last resting-place. After this, he had been compelled to return to his duties in the convention at Richmond, a widowed relative having meanwhile assumed charge of his family, and holding them together until he could return.

        In the darkness of a drizzling winter evening, after a long, cheerless ride, he drew near his desolate home. A chill nor'easter storm, which had lasted for two days, made the passage across the Chesapeake, in the stuffy little steamboat Monmouth, exceedingly disagreeable. The few friends he met at the wharf expressed their sympathy

more by subdued speech and close grasp of the hand than in actual utterance. A storm-stained gunner, clad in oilcloth, who had just made his landing from his goose-blind to ship his game to market, came up to the carriage and handed in, as tribute of his interest, a beautiful brace of brant. As he shook the rain from his tarpaulin, remarking that it was a great day for shooting, he uttered no word of consolation; but his manner and his act were as delicately suggestive of his reasons as if he had been bred to the manners of a court.

        Although the vehicle sent for father was amply supplied with curtains, aprons, and robes, the rain beat in upon him as he drove facing the storm, its cool moisture not ungrateful to his fevered cheek. Ordinarily, the homeward ride on such occasions was relieved by cheerful conversation between master and man concerning domestic matters and the progress of farm work. To-night, the weeds of mourning and the sunken cheek and eye had awed the faithful slave into respectful silence, which the master seldom saw fit to break. Homeward they sped in silence, with little to vary the monotonous pitapat of Lady Ringtail's hoofs in the shallow pools with which the storm had filled the level roads.

        He lay back with folded arms and half-closed eyes, resentfully brooding upon the hard fate which had twice made him a widower. At a turn of the road they passed a silver maple, whose faultless form and beautiful coloring in springtime and in autumn had so excited the admiration of his wife that the children had named it "mamma's tree." It was leafless and bare to-night. A scurrying blast, shaking it as they passed, blew down from it a shower of raindrops, as if in mockery.

        At the outer farm-gate the driver alighted, and, as father walked the mare slowly through the open gate, he

caught sight of the twinkling light which shone from the chamber where mother had died. It had ever been a beacon to him in days gone by. There, many a day, had she sat and watched for his return; and many a night had she drawn back the curtain that he might see her signal first of all. The sight of it had always warmed his heart. Now, he almost shuddered at the thought of; returning home. As they entered the yard, and drove around the circle leading to the doorstep, he turned his face away from her terraced garden, only to look upon the arbor, where, in days gone by, she had delighted to sit and watch the sunsets.

        Before the vehicle drew up at the door, news of the father's and the master's arrival had spread through all of the household. Wide open flew the doors, and down the steps, bareheaded and heedless of rain or wind, we children rushed, shouting "Papa - papa - papa!" and springing into his arms with rapturous kisses. One by one we were snatched and hugged and kissed, and pushed backwards up the steps, with orders to run in out of the rain, while he busied himself for a moment giving directions concerning his luggage and the care of Lady Ringtail.

        Poor little ones! How insensible they were to the great calamity that had befallen them! How little they realized his loss or their own! In the short weeks since our mother's death, - weeks filled with deep affliction to him, - our mourning-clothes had become familiar to us; our kind old aunt had taken mother's place in all our thoughts and for all our wants; our mamma was only a beautiful vision of the past. We laughed and romped, and greeted papa with joyous faces; unconscious alike that we had cause for sorrow, or that his heart was bleeding afresh at sight of us.

        The welcome awaiting him within was different from the joyous babble of the little ones outside. There, almost dreading to meet him, was the half-grown daughter of his first marriage. She was old enough to know and feel what a deep, irreparable loss had come upon her just when she most needed the love and care and guidance of the one now dead. It was not, and yet it was, her own mother that had died. And there was the tender-hearted woman who had come to keep together his little flock until his return. She had truly loved his wife, and now, herself a widow, she had seen him twice bereft.

        As these two twined their arms about him, and buried their faces upon his shoulder sobbing, the prattling motherless children paused in their merriment to wonder why their grief should give itself new vent upon an occasion so joyous as papa's return.

        But let us not dwell longer upon a scene so mournful.

        Before leaving Richmond, father had written home directing that a chamber should be prepared for himself as far as possible from his former apartment. He could not brook the thought of living surrounded by the familiar objects of her chamber. Although he had been much absent of late, and much engrossed in other ambitions, he was a man devoted to his family, and deeply interested in his home. He knew, whenever he reflected upon the facts, that his apparent neglect of these duties of late was because of political objects he could not abandon, and that his course had been taken with his wife's approval; but ever and anon the thought came back to him that she had been alone when she died, and, in spite of all philosophy, the memory of that lonely death distressed if it did not actually chide him. He determined that, even at the sacrifice of ambition, he would henceforth devote himself to the duties he owed to his children and his home, and

make to her memory the atonement for what he could not help regarding as neglect of her when she lived.

        To this resolution I was indebted for four or five of the very happiest years of my life. To this day, my fancy takes me back to that great chamber where father made me his bedfellow and constant companion; to that high tester bedstead where, many a night, tucked away amid comfortable linen, I watched the great hickory logs flicker and sputter upon the andirons, and closed my eyes, at last, lulled by the never-ceasing scratching of father's goose-quill pen at a great writing-table in the centre of the room; to the delightful half-consciousness of being folded in his arms when, late in the night, he joined me, and hugged me to his heart.

        We were early risers, we two chums and companions. By daybreak, the servant came in and built a roaring fire. By sunrise, father and I were dressed, and out upon the farm, or at the stables or the cowpens, followed by Boxer and Frolic, our Irish terriers. The fashionable folk of to-day affect the Irish terrier, and imagine that they have a new breed. Father had a brace of them over forty years ago, and they were sure death to the rabbits of Only. Many and many a day we came back to breakfast with one, two, or three molly-cottontails caught by Boxer and Frolic in our morning excursions upon the farm.

        Then there was hog-killing time, when, long before day, the whole plantation force was up with knives for killing, and seething cauldrons for scalding, and great doors for scraping, and long racks for cooling the slaughtered swine. Out to the farmyard rallied all the farm hands. Into the pens dashed the boldest and most active. Harrowing was the squealing of the victims; quick was the stroke that slew them, and quicker the sousing of the dead hog into the scalding water; busy the scraping of

his hair away; strong the arms that bore him to the beams, and hung him there head downward to cool; clumsy the old woman who brought tubs to place under him; deft the strong hands that disemboweled him. And so it went. By the time the sun was risen, how bare and silent were the pens where hogdom had fed and grunted for so long a time!

        How marvelous to youthful eyes the long rows of cleanscraped hogs upon the racks; how cheerful the blazing fires and boiling pots, and how sweet the smell of the hickory smoking in the cold air of daybreak; how merry and how happy seemed every one upon the place, old and young, men and women, girls and boys, in the midst of this carnival of death and grease! Up with the earliest, I was one of the busiest men in all the company, - now frying a pig-tail upon the blazing coals beneath the scalding-pots; now claiming a bladder to be blown up for Christmas; now watching the wonderful process of cleansing, or lard-making, or sausage-grinding. My! what tenderloins and spare-ribs were on the breakfast-table! my! how, for a fortnight after hog-killing, what sausages and cracklin, and all sorts of meat, we had! The skin of every darkey on the place shone with hog's grease, like polished ebony; and even Boxer and Frolic grew so fat they lost their interest in rabbit-hunting.

        Then came the lovely springtime, when the ploughing began, and I followed him about the farm until my poor little legs were ready to give way beneath me. And the great red-breasted robins and purple grackle lit in the new- ploughed ground, from which such sweet aroma rose. And the golden plover, sweeping past, fell to father's unerring gun, I scrambling after them through the crumbling loam.

        Then followed the harvest time, when birds'-nests and

young hares were in the stubble, and when the children rode upon the straw-loads. And the summer days, when father took me sailing in the Lucy Long, and sea-trout fishing at the lighthouse, or built and rigged and sailed for me such boats as no other boy ever had!

        After that came the autumn time, when my uncle, a famous Nimrod, appeared with dog and gun, and taught me the mysteries of quail-shooting, so that I could tell how Blanco the setter stood, and how Bembo the pointer backed, and how Shot retrieved, and talked about these things like a veteran sportsman.

        And there, also, was our annual visit, in charge of Eliza, the white nurse, to our grandmother in far-off Philadelphia. This was the period of good behavior and restraint, neither of which I always practiced; and, as I viewed it, it bore hard upon my other engagements. A short city residence was not altogether distasteful to me; but there were so many horses to ride, and so many boats to sail, and so many dogs to work, and so many fish to catch, and so many things to do at Only, that I looked on the Philadelphia trip as time wasted from more entrancing employments. I felt that I was growing rapidly, and that there were a great many things which I might grow past, if I did not keep going all the while; and thus it was that at seven years old I was regarded as what we call an enterprising youth.

        Nor was I too young to detect that there were marked differences between methods of life and thought at home, and those which prevailed in Philadelphia.

        My mother's family, especially the dear old grandmother, to whom my mother's death had been a great blow, were exceedingly kind, and did everything to make the visits enjoyable; but there was a something in their treatment of us little orphans which approached to patronizing

and, young as I was, my pride rebelled against the idea that any one could condescend towards us.

        One day, when I heard an aunt refer to me as her "little savage," I grew furiously angry; and another day, when the white servant referred to me as a slave-owner, I let her understand that I did not own a slave who was not her superior in every quality, good manners and good looks included. These were only episodes in what were otherwise, on the whole, very happy visits; but, young as I was, I early learned that between the people of my father's and my mother's home there was brewing a feeling of deep and irreconcilable antagonism, the precise nature of which I could not altogether comprehend.

        As early as the autumn of 1862, I was made very happy by being sent to school. As was the case in almost every section of the South, the village school-teacher at Onancock was a Northern man. My brother Richard, three years older than myself, was my companion. We were furnished with red-topped boots, red neckerchiefs, warm overcoats, warm caps with coverings for the ears, and tin luncheon-pails, and never were we more elated than on our first triumphal march to Onancock, a mile away. As we passed the farmyards and the fields where our old friends the slaves were at work, many were the cheery words spoken to us.

        "Dat's right," said saucy Solomon; "I spec' you'll be as big a man as Mars' Henry hisself when you is done school."

        "You'd better not pass through Mr. Tyler's yard. He's got a pow'ful fierce dog," shouted Joshua.

        And the last thing said by old George Douglas, who was something of a tease, was, "Don't you let none of them Onancock boys lick you, for you comes of fightin' stock."

        Thus began our education, and a good beginning it was; for we were blessed with a conscientious teacher, school at a healthy distance, and at once entered the class with a red-headed girl, clever as she could be, with whom I fell in love, and who put me to my trumps every day to keep her from "cutting me down" in the spelling-class.

        Thus passed away the happy days of childhood, - days unlike those which come to any boy anywhere nowadays; days belonging to a phase of civilization and a manner of life which are as extinct as if they had never existed.

        Yet in those times, but nine years before war and emancipation came, there was no thought that either was near at hand. My brother and I, on our return from school, were put across the creek at Onancock wharf. One sunny evening, we found father at old Captain Hopkins's store at the wharf, the spot where the village post office was kept. He had been rowed up to the village in his yawl, the Constitution, and was waiting to take us home with him. The mail had just arrived, and an eager throng was listening to the news of the presidential election. The old captain read the returns, which told that Franklin Pierce was to be the next President, and the crowd cheered vociferously. Father was called upon for a speech, and briefly expressed his gratification at the result. The thing which most struck my ear was father's congratulation of his friends that the election of Pierce set at rest all fears as to slavery and secession, or concerning the abolitionists. He told how Pierce, being a Northern man, must prove acceptable to the North; and how, being sound upon the slavery question, his administration would allay the fears of the slave-owner, and quiet the threats of secessionists. Everybody agreed that this was so, and everybody hurrahed for Pierce and King; and, as the Constitution rushed homeward on the placid waters,

under the strokes of two sable oarsmen, I puzzled myself to guess what were the fears of the slaveholder, and what were the threats of the secessionist, and who were the abolitionists.

        Now, I was a young gentleman who, when athirst for knowledge, held not back. Accordingly, I opened my inquiries in a series of questions, and received answers much after the following order: -

        "What are the fears of the slaveholder?"

        "Why, my son, there is a small number of fanatics in the North who demand that slavery be abolished immediately, and the slaveholders are apprehensive of them."

        "What is a fanatic, and what is an abolitionist?"

        "A fanatic is a wild enthusiast, who will listen to nothing which interferes with his demands; and an abolitionist is one who demands that the slaves shall be freed."

        "Are there many people of that kind in the North?"

        "Yes; more than we know about."

        "Is Pierce that sort of man? "

        "Oh, no. He is not in favor of freeing the slaves."

        "Well, now I know what the slaveholder fears, tell me next what is the threat of the secessionist."

        "Young man, you listen too closely. Secession means that a State, like our Virginia, being dissatisfied with the way the Union is managed, would withdraw from the Union, and establish an independent government of her own, or form a new one with other States which withdrew with her. Secessionists are men who threaten to do that."

        I paused a minute, and thought over all this; then, looking up, said: -

        "Well, if we secede, we shall not be the United States any more, shall we?"

        "No."

        "And if we shall not be the United States anymore, we shall not have the stars and stripes for our flag, and the Old Constitution and the Columbia frigates won't belong to us any more, will they?"

        "No, not if we secede."

        "Well, now, papa, don't let's secede. No, sir; don't let's secede. You are not for secession, are you, papa? Think of what a horrible thing it would be to give up the government grandpa and General Washington made, and the flag, and the ships, and all that, and start another thing all new, without any history or anything. You are not a secessionist, I know, because you said you were not. Are you, papa?"

        "No, no, my boy. Far from it. Nobody loves the Union better than I do. Nobody has better cause to love and honor and cherish it. I was reared in the home of a grandfather who fought for it by the side of Washington; I was taught from my earliest infancy to venerate the flag of the Union. My manhood, at home and abroad, has been dedicated to its service; and God grant that the Union may never be rent asunder in my day by the fanaticism of the North or the passion of the South. Heaven be praised, the election of Mr. Pierce seems to put at rest all fears on that score from any direction."

        We were nearing the landing. The autumn sun had sunk into the distant bay. The long shadows of the grove at Only were thrown towards us across the pooly waters. Earth, air, and sky were bathed in the glories of an Italian sunset, as these fervid words fell from father's lips; and never in all his life had he spoken more eloquently or more truly. What he had said soothed and comforted me, to whom the thought of the possibility that Virginia could be aught but part of the

American Union, or that we might lose the American flag, had never come before.

        Thus it was that I learned my first lesson in politics and was well and firmly assured that that could not possibly happen which did actually happen within the next nine years.

CHAPTER V

THE KNOW-NOTHING CAMPAIGN AND LIFE IN RICHMOND

        DURING the next three years, we had things pretty much our own way at home, as far as female control was concerned. The dear old aunt who presided over father's household, although we loved her very much, was too indulgent to be a successful manager of children; and while Eliza, the Irish nurse, was firm and strong enough, we were rapidly growing beyond her control.

        Then there was my aunt's son, a most attractive fellow, just entering upon manhood, - a thorough-paced childspoiler. It was no uncommon thing for him to take me to the county seat, or the neighboring villages, where, while he pursued his amusements, I found companions and playmates that were improving neither to manners nor ideals of life. The association was delightful, nevertheless. On these excursions, there was no whim of fancy which that partial young relative was not more than ready to gratify. Our attachment was lifelong, and in after years the deep and abiding interest of my old-bachelor cousin in all that concerned me never abated until he died. At home, I had a thousand things to make boyhood happy. With the grown-up slaves I was a great favorite; and, as was often the case in plantation life, the little darkeys near my own age were my playmates and companions, and accepted me as their natural leader and chief. By the time I was eight years old, I could shoot, and ride, and fish, and swim, and sail a boat; I had a yoke of yearling

oxen broken by myself; my own punt in which to go fishing; fishing-lines and crab-nets; a dog and a colt; and had become a breeder of most prolific chickens. Nothing pleased me more than dropping corn in planting-time, or hauling wood and straw with my own team. For months at a time I would go barefoot, during the summer season, dressed in brown linen and a straw hat. All this laid in a store of health and strength that was of great value in after years. In truth, I was a most bustling, energetic lad with no end of vitality, but lacked the parental government and care of a mother; and it was a blessed day for me when my father married again.

        My father's third wife was a refined and cultivated woman, of suitable age, and possessed a most lovable disposition. It was not long before she established her dominion in our household, - a dominion of love.

        I was taught to observe meal-times; to appear with hair brushed and face and hands washed; to attend family prayers; to spend less time at the negro quarters; to account more precisely for my nomadic wanderings; to devote regular hours to studies; and in many ways to adopt much more orderly methods than I had been accustomed to pursue of late. All which came in good time, for I was soon to become a city boy.

        In 1855, a great political contest occurred in Virginia. A faction known as the Know-Nothing party, or the American party, had sprung up suddenly, and had triumphed in a number of the Northern States. It was a secret organization, with oaths and grips and passwords. Its rallying cry was that Americans should rule America. Incidental to this watchword was a real or fancied hostility to foreigners, particularly the Irish, and to the Catholic Church. Until it reached Virginia, it had been successful everywhere. Father believed in the teachings of

George Washington that secret political organizations were dangerous to republican liberty, and in the teachings of Thomas Jefferson that no man should be proscribed on account of his religion. He maintained that neither Irish men nor other foreigners should be oppressed or ostracized by reason of their religious faith or their nationality.

        The result of the approaching conflict seemed exceedingly doubtful when he was chosen as the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia. The circumstances of his selection were not altogether flattering or hopeful. Many of his political associates preferred him as the man in their opinion best fit to make the desperate fight, but there were others who preferred him because they believed the struggle was hopeless and secretly desired his defeat. He accepted the nomination; and although, at the outset, the Know- Nothing party had an enrolled majority of ten thousand of the entire voters of the State, he entered upon one of the most remarkable campaigns in Virginia politics, and after a brilliant canvass was elected by ten thousand majority.

        It is seldom a boy nine years old is deeply interested in politics, but this campaign was one that enlisted the intense enthusiasm of young and old.

        In American politics, we have recurring periods of political "crazes." Of late years we have witnessed several such. The Greenback craze, the Granger craze, the Silver craze, have each in its turn arisen, and, for the time being, made whole communities drunk with excitement. Friends of many years are estranged by these ephemeral issues. They are carried into business, into church, into the household, everywhere, until entire commonwealths are so wrought up that even women and children take part until election day, and after that we hear no more about them. Such commotions are like brushfires,

which, igniting instantly, burn and crackle and fill the whole heavens with smoke, as if the world was on fire, and then die out as suddenly as they sprung up.

        The Know-Nothing craze of 1855 was just such an excitement. Our community was divided into factions. Everybody took sides. Men who had never been known to show an active interest in politics became intense partisans, and political discussion went on everywhere. One of the first results experienced by me was a black eye and a bloody nose, received in a hard fight with the son of the village blacksmith. Exactly how the row began, neither of us could clearly explain; but we were on opposite sides, and that was sufficient. It was a drawn battle, for the blacksmith interfered, having no intention of losing a valuable trade by reason of political differences. In the little village of Onancock, the rival organizations found vent for their enthusiasm by building and flying two immense kites, with the names of their respective party candidates emblazoned on them conspicuously. Many an evening, after school was dismissed, I saw half of the villagers of the place out on the green flying their Know-Nothing and Democratic kites, as if the result depended upon which flew the highest.

        In due course came election day. Father being absent, the young cousin above referred to represented him at the polling-place, and took me with him. In those days, voting was done openly, or viva voce, as it was called, and not by ballot. The election judges, who were magistrates, sat upon a bench with their clerks before them. Where practicable, it was customary for the candidate to be present in person, and to occupy a seat at the side of the judges. As the voter appeared, his name was called out in a loud voice. The judges inquired, "John Jones (or Bill Smith), for whom do you vote?" - for governor, or

for whatever was the office to be filled. He replied by proclaiming the name of his favorite. Then the clerks enrolled the vote, and the judges announced it as enrolled. The representative of the candidate for whom he voted arose, bowed, and thanked him aloud; and his partisans often applauded.

        All day long I sat upon my cousin's knee, or played about the platform. Nobody smiled more broadly, or applauded more vigorously, at votes cast for father; and nobody was more silent or haughty when votes were cast against him. At sundown, the polls were closed, and, to my infinite mortification, the majority at the precinct was announced as in favor of the Know-Nothings. The craze had simply taken possession of the place and run away with it. The ignorant and the vain had all been captured by the signs and grips and secret passwords of Know-Nothingism. For the first time in his life, father was defeated at his home. I thought we were done for. When we were safely bundled in the vehicle, and headed for home, I felt like crying, and the Know-Nothing cheers still rung in my ears most depressingly. What mortified me most of all was the fact that I knew of a bantering compact between the owners of the rival kites that the victorious party should own the kite of the vanquished, with the privilege of flying it tailless and upside down. The thought of seeing our beloved kite in such ignominious plight nearly prostrated me. As a matter of fact, the result at this precinct had been fully anticipated by the grown folks, and gave them no serious concern as to the general result. The Know-Nothing majority was really less than they had claimed. Seeing how I was cast down, my cousin, holding me between his legs in the one-seated buggy, endeavored to explain that there was no cause for alarm. Long before he finished, he discovered

that, worn out by the fatigue and disappointment of the day, I was fast asleep, and in that condition he bore me into the house in his arms, laid me on the broad settee in the hall, and covered me with the lap-robe.

        More cheering news from other places came thick and fast in the next few days, and it was not long before I was delightedly watching the Know-Nothing kite sailed tailless and upside down by father's friends.

        Then came the preparations for removal of our residence to Richmond for four years.

        No life could have been more in contrast with that at Only than the one to which I was now introduced. January 1, 1856, father took the oath of office as governor, and we proceeded to establish ourselves in the Government House, as it was called.

        It is a fine old structure, simple in exterior, very capacious, surrounded by pleasant grounds, fronting the Capitol Square at Richmond. The house at Only seemed like a wren-box contrasted with this great residence. With play-grounds, and stables, and conservatory, and outhouses, it was indeed a most attractive place. Young gentlemen nine years of age are not apt to underestimate their own importance in such a situation, and I was no exception to this rule. The legislature was in session in the Capitol, and as a large majority of the members were in political sympathy with father, I received a great deal more attention and petting from them than was good for me. My bump of reverence never was over-developed, and under the influence of this sort of thing, I rapidly became very pert. But there were other directions in which I did not find life "all beer and skittles."

        A school was selected where, beside a decided lack of enthusiasm for any school, I found this particular one not altogether a bed of roses. Being the best school obtainable,

it was attended by the sons of the most prominent people of the place. And therein lay the trouble. If their fathers' views had controlled the election of governor, our residence at Only would have been undisturbed. The city was the stronghold of Know-Nothingism in Virginia. In a vote of nearly four thousand, father had not received exceeding nine hundred votes, and they were for the most part from the humbler classes. The Richmond Democrats were so few in numbers that they were called the "Spartan Band." The rural votes gave father his majority, especially in the splendid yeomanry of the Shenandoah Valley, among whom very few slaves were owned. They were the men who afterwards, drawn into the war to fight the slave-owners' battles, won with their valor the immortal fame of Stonewall Jackson.

        Father had notions about manhood suffrage, public schools, the education and the elevation of the masses, and the gradual emancipation of the slaves, that did not suit the uncompromising views of people in places like Richmond. It was the abode of that class who proclaimed that they were Whigs, and that "Whigs knew each other by the instincts of gentlemen." The slave market was a flourishing institution in Richmond, fully countenanced if not approved and defended. The majority of Richmond people hated the name of Democracy, and, almost always defeated by it, were willing to unite with the Know-Nothings or any other party to defeat their enemy the Democracy.

        At school, I very soon discovered that the Richmond city boys were disposed to turn up their noses at me, not only as a country boy, but because I was my father's son. I had several fistic encounters with them, and after that things went on more smoothly, but not very pleasantly.

        There never was such a place as Richmond for fighting

among small boys. The city is built over a number of hills and valleys, and in those days the boys of particular localities associated in fighting bands, and called themselves Cats. Thus there were the Shockoe Hill Cats, the Church Hill Cats, the Basin Cats, the Oregon Hill Cats, the Navy Hill Cats, etc.

        About this time we were seized with the military fever. In those days, the State of Virginia had a large armory at Richmond, and a standing army of a hundred men! The command was known as the "Public Guard," but the Richmond boys called them the "Blind Pigs." The syllogism by which this name was reached was unanswerable. They wore on their hats the letters P. G., which certainly is P I G without the I. And a pig without an eye is a blind pig. Q E D.

        The public guard was as well drilled and oared for as any body of regulars in the United States army. It guarded the penitentiary and public grounds, and was a most valuable organization in many ways.

        Captain Dimmock, commanding officer, was a West Pointer, I think, and the beau ideal of a soldier. His son Marion and my brother, three years my senior, conceived the idea of forming a boy's soldier company. Father encouraged the idea, and caused a hundred old muskets in the armory to be cut down to the proper size for boys. Captain Dimmock entered heartily into the scheme. The boys were drilled assiduously. Their uniform was neat cadet gray; and for several years the "Guard of the Metropolis" was one of the most striking institutions of Richmond. It always paraded with the Public Guard, and the precision of its drill astonished and delighted all beholders. Seven years later, William Johnson Pegram, the first lieutenant of that company, attained the rank of brigadier-general in Lee's army before he was twenty-one

years old, and although killed in battle, is still remembered as one of the bravest and most brilliant artillery commanders of the civil war. Many other members were utilized as drill-masters at the outbreak of the war, and subsequently became excellent officers.

        Too young to carry a musket, I was made marker of this famous company, and was as proud of my uniform and little marker's flag as a Frenchman of the Cross of the Legion of Honor.

CHAPTER VI

BEHIND THE SCENES

        THE present generation finds it difficult to realize the position in the Union occupied by Virginia, even as late as 1856-60, to which period our narrative now brings us. People recall, in a general way, that Virginia was once the theatre of many historic events; that she gave birth to many great men in the early days of the Republic; and that she was the chief battle-ground in the civil war.

        A romantic interest attaches to her in consequence, and there is a certain tenderness for Virginia felt towards no other State, even in sections which were once arrayed against her.

        But from many causes, a decline in her social and political importance has occurred within the last forty years, which, in its rapidity and in its extent, presents one of the most remarkable instances in history. Let us not stamp it as degeneracy. The day when she produced men of the type of Lee and Jackson is too recent to justify despair.

        It is made doubly difficult to judge her by the character of the writings concerning her. On the one hand, we have extravagant eulogiums and fond laments of those who laud her old-time history and people, and admit no defects in them; on the other, the always unfair and often ignorant denunciations of the anti-slavery folk, who are unwilling to admit, even at this late day, that any good could come out of the Nazareth of slavery. Both are wide of the mark. The social and economic conditions

of Virginia were neither utopian, as the one loves to depict, nor bad and vicious, as the other would represent them.

        It is undeniably true that, between the two extremes of society, as it existed there prior to 1865, was an awful gulf, upon one side of which were green pastures and still waters, and on the other noisome bogs filled with creeping reptiles. It was a condition incompatible with every theory of republican equality among men, and beyond question repugnant to the ideas and sensibilities of free communities.

        Whether what has followed will ultimately result in a better civilization is as yet far from settled; but whether for better or for worse, it is certain that a social, economic, and political earthquake, never surpassed in suddenness and destructive force, burst upon that people, working changes that have left little trace of what was there before.

        If the Virginian who died forty years ago could revisit his native commonwealth, he would find it difficult to recognize the place where he lived. If he located it by the streams which still flow to the sea, and the mountains still standing as sentinels through the centuries, he would soon learn, even concerning these, that many are no longer landmarks of Virginia, but, snatched from her in the hour of her weakness against her will, are now possessions of an alien State. For the less enduring things, - for men such as he knew, for their very habitations, their mode of life, the fashion of thought of his day, for its wealth, its refinement, its culture, for its lofty incorruptibility and high-mindedness, - he would search sadly and in vain.

        In the day of which I write, Virginia, among the States of the Union, was, in territorial area, second only to

Texas. Her western boundary was the Ohio River; northward, her Panhandle projected high up between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Her wealth made her credit at home and abroad above question. Her bonds sold higher in New York and London than those of the federal government. Her political importance placed her sons in commanding positions in the cabinet, on the bench, and as representatives to many important foreign governments. In every national assemblage her voice was hearkened to as that of a potent and conservative and reliable guide.

        Richmond was admittedly the centre of a society unsurpassed in all America for wealth, refinement, and culture. Nearly every distinguished foreigner felt that his view of America was incomplete unless he spent some time in the capitol of the Mother of States and Statesmen. Soldiers, authors, sculptors, artists, actors, and statesmen sought Richmond then as surely as to-day they visit New York and Boston.

        The actual population of the city was small. It is difficult to realize that in 1860 Richmond had but thirty-eight thousand inhabitants. But the truth is, that its real constituency was much greater; for it was the assembling-point of a large class of wealthy persons who resided on their plantations upon the upper and lower James, and in Piedmont, Tidewater, and the South Side.

        It is not uncommon nowadays to see references to Southern society of that period as uncultured, and rather sensual than intellectual in its tastes. This historic falsehood, like many others assiduously told for a long time, may find permanent lodgment in the belief of the future. No statement was ever more unjust. With inherited wealth, with abundant leisure, with desire to excel in directing thought, and to attain that command of men which knowledge affords, with an innate passion for oratory,

a thorough education was the natural ambition of a Virginia gentleman. True, his efforts were not directed towards acquiring practical or scientific knowledge; for these were in those days possessed, for the most part, by men who expected to apply them to earning a livelihood. But in education in the classics, in the study of ancient and modern languages, in history, in philosophy moral and political, in the study of the science of government, in the learned professions, no men in America were better equipped than the wealthy Southerners of that period.

        It is true, there was no public-school system, and the reason for it was very plain. The wealth of the upper classes enabled them to have private tutors. The paucity in numbers of the lower classes of the whites, and the distances at which they lived apart, rendered public schools impracticable for them. Education of the blacks was, of course, contrary to all ideas of slavery. Suppose we depended upon the wealthy to inaugurate public schools, - how many should we have? Yet nobody suspects that they are indifferent to education. The best proof of the care of the slaveholding Southerner for education may be found in the lives of distinguished Northern men who grew up fifty years ago. In many instances, they record the fact that their first employments were as tutors in wealthy Southern families. The private libraries of Virginia destroyed in the war, or burned in the old Virginia homesteads, would have filled every public library in the North to overflowing. Every current pe