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With Sabre and Scalpel. The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon:
Electronic Edition.

Wyeth, John Allan, 1845-1922

Funding from the Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition supported the electronic publication of this title.

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First edition, 1998
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Academic Affairs Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
1998.

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Call number E605.W97 1914 (Davis Library, UNC-Chapel Hill)

Source Description:
(title page) With Sabre and Scalpel. The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon
Wyeth, John Allan
New York, NY
Harper & Brothers Publishers
1914

        The electronic edition is a part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digitization project, Documenting the American South.
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        WITH SABRE AND SCALPEL
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF
A SOLDIER AND SURGEON
JOHN ALLAN WYETH, M.D., LL.D.
UNIVERSITIES OF ALABAMA AND MARYLAND

        FOUNDER OF THE NEW YORK POLYCLINIC MEDICAL SCHOOL AND HOSPITAL, THE PIONEER ORGANIZATION FOR POSTGRADUATE MEDICAL INSTRUCTION IN AMERICA--PRESIDENT OF THE FACULTY AND SURGEON-IN-CHIEF; EX-PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE, THE NEW YORK STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, THE NEW YORK PATHOLOGICAL SOCIETY, THE NEW YORK SOUTHERN SOCIETY, AND THE ALABAMA SOCIETY OF NEW YORK CITY; FORMERLY ATTENDING SURGEON TO MT. SINAI AND ST. ELIZABETH HOSPITALS; HONORARY MEMBER OF THE MEDICAL SOCIETY OF NEW JERSEY AND OF THE TEXAS STATE MEDICAL ASSOCIATION; AUTHOR OF ESSAYS IN SURGICAL ANATOMY AND SURGERY; AWARDED THE FIRST AND SECOND PRIZES OF THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION IN 1878 AND THE BELLEVUE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION PRIZE IN 1876; A TEXT-BOOK ON GENERAL SURGERY; THE LIFE OF LIEUTENANT-GENERAL NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST; HISTORY OF LA GRANGE MILITARY ACADEMY AND THE CADET CORPS; A HISTORICAL ESSAY ON THE STRUGGLE FOR OREGON, ETC.

        

Illustration

JOHN ALLAN WYETH, M.D., LL.D.
From a photograph by Bradley, 1914
[Frontispiece Image]

        

Illustration

[Title Page Image]

WITH SABRE
AND SCALPEL THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF A SOLDIER AND SURGEON

BY

JOHN ALLAN WYETH
M.D., LL.D.

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER& BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIV

Page verso

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY HARPER& BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1914
K-O

Page v

        TO
LOUIS WEISS WYETH
AND
EUPHEMIA ALLAN


                         "MY BOAST IS NOT THAT I DEDUCE MY BIRTH
                         FROM LOINS ENTHRONED AND RULERS OF THE EARTH;
                         BUT HIGHER STILL MY PROUD PRETENSIONS RISE,
                         THE SON OF PARENTS PASSED INTO THE SKIES."
COWPER

Page vii

CONTENTS

Page xi

Page xiii

INTRODUCTION

        THE chief purpose of this volume is to record from personal observation something of the social, economic, and political conditions which prevailed in the South before, during, and immediately after the Civil War. It was my good fortune to have been born and reared in a section where the wealthy landed proprietors and slave-owners, the poorer whites, and the negroes came together.

        What is written of the delightful society of the aristocracy of the old South at Huntsville would apply to hundreds of other communities of that period below "the Line." It was only possible with the institution of slavery, and with the downfall of the Southern oligarchy it disappeared, never to be repeated. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Wythe, Monroe, Mason, the Randolphs and Lees were among the products of that unique civilization. "There were giants in those days."

        In my native county the poor whites greatly outnumbered the rich slaveholders and their slaves. The negroes baptized them contemptuously as "poor white trash." They were poor, comparatively speaking, but they were not trash. The vast majority were uneducated, many could not read or write; but they were as a class far from being ignorant, for they were "good listeners" and close observers of current events. My father, whom they made at first county and later district judge, was idolized by these simple people,

Page xiv

and I fell heir to their affectionate guardianship. By the time I was fifteen years old I believe I was personally acquainted with every one of these families in our county. Their homes were chiefly in the uplands or foot-hills or coves or in the sparsely settled plateau of Sand Mountain. The houses were of logs, some hewn, many of skinned poles, and some so primitive that the bark was left on. The roofs were of rived boards, not nailed, but held in place by split logs laid on as weights and reinforced here and there by stones. Some of the floors were of puncheons, others of planks; and not infrequently the kitchen, smokehouse, and other added shelters had for flooring the sandy earth. As might be inferred, their lives were simple, and in general they were obedient to law. They were, however, high-strung and quick to resent an affront, and their too ready appeal to the rifle and the hunting-knife in the settlement of personal differences was the chief exception to their common acceptance of the authority which the court-house represented. Very rarely, far back in some remote fastness, an occasional mountaineer, who gathered inspiration from the sun which curved over his head each day without seeming to pay much attention to human regulations, or from the free air which the preacher told him "bloweth where it listeth," would conclude that the government at Washington had no right to prescribe in what form the corn which he raised with his own hands and on his own land should ultimately be marketed, and would proceed to distil it into whisky by the light of the moon. I shall never forget the feeling which was evident as one of these mountaineers remarked to me: "Your pap put me in jail once for moonshinin', but I never blamed him fer it. We all knowed he was a good man and done what he thought was

Page xv

right." These poor whites were in the main religious, belonging to the Baptist or Methodist persuasions, and were much given to "protracted meetings," revivals, and exhortations to secure conversions, which latter was defined as "comin' through."

        They dressed with extreme simplicity, usually in cotton or woolen stuffs, raised, spun, woven, and tailored at home. The mild climate made it possible to go for at least nine months without shoes, and the one pair of brogans for the year was usually put on at Christmas. The young children and boys to about the sixteenth year wore in summertime nothing but a single garment made like a long shirt, which came down to near the ankles and was slit on each side as high as the knees to allow freedom in walking or running. As they raised everything they ate, except sugar and coffee, it may well be said that their wants were few and easily supplied.

        At least three-fourths of the men who carried guns in the battle-line of the Southern Confederacy were of this class. They had no interest directly or indirectly in slavery, and would willingly have seen the negroes freed and colonized out of the country. The proportion of non-slave-owners in my own company and regiment was greater than seventy-five per cent. Colonel James Cooper Nesbit,1 in his most interesting and instructive narrative, says: "My company, H, Twenty-first Georgia regiment, was recruited in northwest Georgia and Alabama. The muster-rolls show one hundred and eighty-five names. All were non-slaveholders except myself. The parents of four owned one or two slaves, and the father of one of my lieutenants owned forty.
1 Four Years on the Firing Line, p. 69. Imperial Press, Chattanooga, Tenn., 1914.

Page xvi

This was the average of the Twenty-first Georgia and the Twenty-first North Carolina of the same brigade, and these two regiments made the best record of any in Stonewall Jackson's corps."

        The brave fight these men made was not for slavery. Their contention was that freemen had the inherent right to do as they pleased, and as freemen they would stay in the Union or secede, as the majority desired. They were then and are still clean-cut Americans, uncontaminated by contact or association with the restless, poverty-stricken, and discontented hordes of immigrants who are crowding our shores in these latter days either as anarchists, who, like shedding snakes, strike blindly and viciously at everything which moves, or like the socialists, whose aim is seemingly to bring all human endeavor to the common level of mediocrity. Should the safety of our institutions ever be endangered I prophesy that these men of the foot-hills and mountains of the South will be the strongest guarantee of law and order.

        At various periods in history (and doubtless before the records were preserved, for in his natural tendency to do foolish things on a large scale man is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever) epidemics of insanity have appeared with results more unfortunate to moral and intellectual development than have followed the wide-spread infections of the body.

        The legend of the Tower of Babel; the numerous racial migrations; the crusades and the war of the five great nations now in progress in Europe, each of which, claiming to represent a Christian civilization, is calling for divine assistance in robbing and killing, are examples.

        One such epidemic has visited our shores. In the agitation

Page xvii

for and against slavery in the United States, reason and conscience were finally dominated by fanaticism. There was a period in the decade from 1830 when by the judicious co-operation of the advocates of emancipation North and South a humane and practical solution of this momentous problem was possible. I ask attention to the fact that at this time there were in the eight largely agricultural and slave-owning counties of my native section along the Tennessee River in Alabama eight active emancipation societies organized by Southern men, and that in Huntsville a former slaveholder edited an emancipation newspaper and was twice nominated for the Presidency of the United States on the abolition ticket; also to the fact that a single state freed negroes approximating in value one hundred million dollars without one penny of remuneration!

        I am firmly convinced that if instead of the nagging, irritating, insulting, and finally insurrectionary and murderous meddlesomeness of the Northern abolitionists, the conservative and better portion had united in earnest and friendly co-operation with their brothers of the South, who proved their zeal and devotion to principle by the wholesale sacrifice of wealth and ease, the humane scheme of emancipation and colonization as set forth in the "Virginia Resolutions" would have been carried out and chattel slavery would have disappeared by peaceful means.

        That portion of the volume which relates to the Civil War is chiefly a narrative of the every-day life of a private soldier in camp, in battle, and in prison. A single experience-- namely, the battle of Chickamauga--is discussed from the standpoint of speculation. In my opinion the Southern Confederacy was won here by desperate valor and lost by the failure of the commanding general to appreciate the

Page xviii

magnitude of his victory and to take advantage of the great opportunity which was his for the capture or destruction of the entire Union army in Georgia and Tennessee. Chickamauga, as I interpret it from personal observation and from careful study, marked the high tide of the Confederacy.

        I have been asked to describe the sensations or emotions which are experienced under the trying ordeal of battle. The courage, whether moral or physical, or the combination of both, which enables a human being to incur the risk of suffering and death is a common possession. I would guess that of every one hundred men in our regiment fully ninety-five would have done, or would have tried to do, more or less willingly, any duty required. The other five would shirk and exhaust ingenuity to keep out of gunshot range by feigning illness, or some temporary necessity, or lagging until a chance offered to dodge behind an obstacle whence only the file-closers could drive them to the firing-line.

        In very rare instances the sense of fear became so overwhelming the victim would run away without regard to the commands to halt and the danger of being shot in the back by one's own men.

        Personally I never saw any one do this, but it did occur. The very unusual experience of the soldier who, when what was thought to be a dangerous charge was ordered and we were in the act of moving forward, stepped from the ranks and handed his gun to our captain and said he couldn't "go in" is given in the text. Vanity, another name for which is "family pride," or the dread of being called a coward, will account in part for what is usually accepted as courage; and yet admitting all this as a measure of human frailty, I have witnessed a great many instances of that

Page xix

sublime quality of self-forgetfulness in the performance of duty which is the crystallization of virtue namely, true courage. Appreciating, as every normal human being must, the instinctive dread of suffering and the love of life, it is not difficult to realize the awful sensation which is experienced in the moments given for reflection as one marches calmly up to the point of danger. It must, as I take it, count as a supreme moment in existence. Once engaged and in the excitement of fighting, this sense of impending disaster is happily lost; and to some there comes an exhilaration which it would be almost permissible to term ecstatic.

        In my own case, in the first two or three minor engagements I was not scared; in fact, the excitement or exhilaration was rather enjoyable; but this was "the valor of ignorance." After I had learned what war really was I never went under fire without experiencing an overpowering sense of dread and fear, with the single exception of the incident of riding through the Union lines at Chickamauga, which is given further on.

        Part II is devoted mainly to my work as a surgeon and teacher. My aim has been to collect in concise form for convenient reference those original contributions which have been generally accepted by the profession.

        The Ligation of the External Carotid Artery as an accepted procedure dates from the publication of my essays on the arteries by the American Medical Association in I878; the Bloodless Amputations at the Hip-joint and at the Shoulder, in 1889; The Cure of Otherwise Inoperable Vascular Tumors by the Injection into their Substance of Water at a High Temperature; The Immunizing Effect upon Sarcoma of a Mixed (Pyogenic) Infection; The Demonstration of the Process of Arterial Occlusion after Ligation in Continuity, etc.

Page xx

        Upon these, together with the introduction of systematized postgraduate medical teaching in America, the author "rests his case" at the bar of posterity. That the Polyclinic gave an impetus to and was coincident with the great awakening in American medicine there can be no doubt. Once inaugurated, the movement practically compelled postgraduate study in the general profession, for it naturally followed, that when even a single practitioner in any community took advantage of the extraordinary facilities which were offered for increasing his store of knowledge, public opinion, that insistent vis a tergo of human progress, compelled the others to follow. Not only has every city of importance in our own country established one or more postgraduate medical schools, but abroad (as in London) our system has been adopted.

Page xxi

PART I

Page 1

WITH SABRE AND SCALPEL

I
THE TENNESSEE VALLEY--MARSHALL COUNTY AND GUNTERSVILLE IN ALABAMA

        FIFTH in size of the rivers in the United States, the Tennessee, rising in the mountainous regions of Virginia and North Carolina, flows in a general direction southwest until, at the great bend in northern Alabama, it turns northwest to empty into the Ohio. Although three-fourths of its course is within the boundaries of the state to which it gave its name, that section of the South widely known as the Tennessee Valley is wholly within the state of Alabama.

        Eastward and to the north, from where Lookout stands sentinel for the mighty Appalachian range, the numerous large tributaries fairly divide honors with the main stream, while to the west, after pitching over the great cascade at Mussel Shoals, it leaves the mountains and the picturesque valley through which it has flowed for two hundred miles.

        Emerging near Chattanooga from the narrow gorge through which it has worn its way, walled in by cliffs of stone so steep and high that from the channel their crests are at times not within the range of vision, this majestic river enters the beautiful Valley of the Tennessee.

        Winding in and out among the mountains on either hand,

Page 2

some near, some far, for most of the year covered with verdure to the steep cliffs which form their crests, opening here and there into fertile plains or densely timbered coves that rise as they recede to reach the summit of the distant heights, on past bold projecting bluffs which seem to block the way, wide fields of corn and grain and cotton which long before the frosts of winter fall shall be as white as snow upon the arctic plains, flows ever on this gracious gift of nature, blessing with plenty my native Valley of the Tennessee.

        In 1802 the territory now included in the states of Mississippi and Alabama was ceded by Georgia to the United States, and in 1819 Alabama was admitted to the Union. That portion of this new state lying north of the river had been opened for settlement a number of years, while to the south stretched the reservations of three great Indian tribes--the Seminoles, nearest the Gulf of Mexico; then the restless, warring Creeks, and, closest in touch with civilization, the wonderful Cherokees. Lovers of peace and tactful, they were on living terms not only with their war-like brothers, but friendly also with their Anglo-Saxon neighbors just across the Tennessee. Builders of houses and tillers of the soil, these Indians had made such progress toward civilization that they had in use a syllabic alphabet and a method of printing. Invented by Sequoyah,1 this alphabet of eighty-five characters, each representing a single sound of their language, is pronounced by a writer in the American Encyclopedia to be the "most perfect alphabet ever devised for any language."

        While the Cherokees could not hold the Creeks and Seminoles to peaceful ways, they would not allow them to
1 This remarkable man died in 1843. It was with this tribe that Sam Houston lived before and after he became Governor of Tennessee.

Page 2a

Illustration

MARSHALL COUNTY COURT-HOUSE, GUNTERSVILLE, ALABAMA

Page 3

pass through their domain to harrow the white settlers north of the Tennessee. The massacre at Fort Mims, Alabama, on August 30, 1813, where four hundred men, women, and children were butchered, led to the annihilation of the Creek Nation at the battle of the Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa in 1814, while the remnant of their allies, the Seminoles, sought refuge in the impenetrable marshes of the everglades in Florida, where they still survive. For twenty-four years longer the Cherokees lingered in their native land, until by treaty in 1836 they marched to the West, and their former reservation was opened for settlers.

        When from a part of this Indian land the new county of Marshall was formed, Louis Wyeth, a young lawyer, journeying by stage from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburg, by steamboat down the Ohio to Louisville, Kentucky, thence by stage to Huntsville, Alabama, and on foot for the remainder of the way (for as yet there were only trails in the Cherokee purchase), came to cast his lot with the other pioneers and to "grow up with the country."

        He must have taken well with these men of the wilderness, for they made him their county judge within the first years of his advent; and, although he did not long remain on the bench--for he sought a wider field--it may truthfully be said that throughout a long and useful career he judged these, his people, to whose welfare he devoted his life. In 1848 he founded the town of Guntersville at the south bend of the Tennessee, built at his private expense a handsome brick court-house and a well-appointed jail, which were his gifts to the county and the new town, which became and still is the county-seat. As a member of the state legislature he secured a charter for a railroad "to connect the navigable waters of the Tennessee and Coosa

Page 4

rivers, with the object of securing an inland system of transportation between Mobile Bay and the vast rich region through which flowed the Tennessee and its tributaries." Of this railroad, which is now a part of the great Nashville& Chattanooga and Louisville& Nashville railroad systems, he was the originator and first president.

Page 5

II
EARLY RECOLLECTIONS

        IT would be interesting to determine just when the brain-cells begin to register impressions that become fixed and are subject to the call of memory; and also with which of the senses these early registrations are associated. The brain is such an unreliable machine that the results of its operations require careful study and critical analysis before acceptance. Since older minds (which are considered mature) are known to entertain absolutely impossible schemes as fixed convictions, it is not to be wondered at that children are readily susceptible to self-deception. I have no doubt that many incidents retold as being the recollections of early childhood are nothing more than reflected images of word-pictures from older persons who really were witnesses. Only to-day a woman of more than ordinary brilliancy and of unquestionable sincerity assured me she remembered distinctly being held as a baby in her grandmother's arms when she was only a little more than one year old!

        It occurs to me that since children are almost wholly animal, their earlier brain-cell registrations should be associated with alimentation, and with those to whose personal ministrations they looked for comfort and protection. It would seem but natural that one's mother should come first of all things; but with myself, I am sorry to say, this is not the case. I was four years old when my memory of things began; and my mother, who, as I now know, did little

Page 6

else but devote her time and thoughtful care to me, does not hold this precedence. My earliest recollection is of a burning house, and of Mack, one of our slaves, holding me seated on one of the front gate-posts, where I could have a good view of the conflagration. The date of this incident is known, and it enables me to determine that my brain-cells were not registering fixed impressions earlier than the fourth year. About this time I first straddled a horse and tumbled off, and that incident was indelibly impressed, as was a relation thus early established with Aunt Peggy, our negro cook, whereby without the knowledge of my mother, at about ten o'clock every morning I found myself in the kitchen eating from a small wooden tray corn-bread crusts soaked in "pot-liquor," a very filling, greasy, and satisfying mixture, which, I learned later, was a common food of the negro children of the plantations.

        It is clear, then, as far as I am concerned, that the very first enduring impression was conveyed to the cells from the retina, through the so-called "sense of sight." The second was from fright, and fused with this is another impression which seems to indicate that the mind was commencing operations from within on its own responsibility. I very distinctly remember that as I was sliding off the bare back of the horse and was about half-way to the ground my good guardian Mack caught me and placed me again in position. Being scared, I asked him to let me get off and walk, but he was as inexorable as the law of gravitation. There was no getting out of it. I had to learn, and did learn, and from that time on I almost lived on horseback. This lovable slave not only taught me to ride, but he gave me a first lesson of inestimable value, which was, not to get scared and quit. The third registration, which, according to the "animal

Page 7

theory" just expressed, should have come first, was evidently conveyed through the "sense of taste," or hunger. Now, the one--to me--incomprehensible feature of this retrospection is that up to this period, and even later, I have not the slightest recollection of my parents. I was on excellent terms with the cook, and between Mack and his ward there was established an affectionate association which had already a fixed place and never ceased; in fact, grew so strong as time went on that I never wanted to be away from him in daylight.

        At five years of age I was taken to school; and here again fright comes in, for I doubt if any wretch riding toward the guillotine ever suffered more than did this victim of civilization on this occasion. The teacher who preceded the present incumbent had not spared the rod; in fact, had whipped two of his boy pupils so severely that his services were dispensed with. Hearing all this from the older children, I supposed I would come in for my share from the new man, who was "part Cherokee."1

        "Mr. Dave" was, however, a mild-mannered man, and, while he kept a long hickory switch in the chimney corner near his chair, it was only a reminder of the possibilities which might follow bad behavior. The worst he ever did was to "thump" us on the head with the last knuckle of one finger, and usually we got this punishment for misspelling a word or for some shortcoming in our studies. My first, and I believe only, experience came within a day or two after I began. The spelling-class stood in a row behind one of the long benches. When a word went wrong, in order to have the correction indelibly impressed on our
1 Descended from intermarriage between a Cherokee Indian and a white person.

Page 8

minds the culprit had to walk to where the teacher sat, project his small head in advance of the perpendicular, and receive thereon a thump which was light or heavy in proportion to the gravity of the error. My offense was "separation," and from that day to this I have never forgotten that it is dangerous to change the first "a" of the word into "e."

        I had been at school for some time, and was well turned into my seventh year, when on one memorable day I made a discovery which was worth more to me than the finding of a new world was to Columbus. I discovered my mother, and incidentally began to appreciate the fact that I had a father, although at this early period he occupied a position, to my vision, very much nearer the horizon than did my newly discovered planet. The discovery came about in this fashion: a boy playmate lost his temper at something that happened between us, and in anger gave me a slap which I did not resent. At this juncture I heard a voice from a near-by window, and, turning, I saw my mother leaning out, her eyes flashing so that I could almost see the sparks flying and her cheeks as red as fire. In a tone about which there could be no misinterpretation, even by one who instinctively preferred peace to war, she asked me if the boy struck me in anger; and when I told her he had, she blazed up and said, "And you didn't hit him back?" My response was that father had told me it was wrong to fight, and that when another boy gave way to anger just to tell him it was wrong and not fight back. At this the blue bonnet of Clan-Allan went "over the border," and she fairly screamed: "I don't care what your father told you; if you don't whip that boy this minute I'll whip you!" And she looked on, and was satisfied when it was all over. I date my career from that eventful day; for I had come to the parting of the ways.

Page 8a

        

Illustration

CHEROKEE MISSIONARY STATION, 1820
The first house built in that part of "The Reservation" in the present county of Marshall in Alabama. The author's parents were living here when he was born. It still serves as a residence and bids fair to endure for another century

Page 9

        No one who knew my father ever doubted his physical or moral courage, for it was of that sublime type that held life as of secondary consideration where duty was involved, but his was the gift of gentle forbearance and kindly remonstrance to those who gave way to ungovernable and passionate word or deed. His was the way of the Nazarene and of that far-reaching wisdom of which the Proverb says: "Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace."

        My mother, too, was a Presbyterian, the daughter of a minister of that faith, tender and true to her convictions of duty. Peter didn't love his Lord any less because he was human enough to lose his temper and smite off the ear of the servant of the high priest. My mother and I chose him for our patron saint, and, turning aside from the path of peace, hand in hand we trod the rougher road which led up the hill Difficulty. Upon its summit we stood at last triumphant, and thence, her beautiful face lighted up with a heavenly smile, an eternal benediction, she left me and passed down into the valley.


                         Time but the impression stronger makes,
                         As streams their channels deeper wear.

        It was on one of her later birthdays I wrote:


                         Deal gently with her, Time! These many years
                         Of life have brought more smiles with them than tears.
                         Lay not thy hand too harshly on her now,
                         But trace decline so slowly on her brow
                         That, like a sunset of the northern clime,
                         Where twilight lingers in the summer-time,
                         And fades at last into the silent night,
                         Ere one may note the passing of the light,
                         So may she pass--since 'tis the common lot--
                         As one who, resting, sleeps and knows it not. --Century Magazine, January, 1902.

Page 10

III
OUR VILLAGE BOYS

        Boys are boys the world over, and we were boys, some good, some bad. None good all the time; none so bad but that if properly handled the germ of good in him could have been cultivated to an aspiration for the ideals of life and for usefulness. It is almost a maxim that children are what their parents make them. Even the influences of heredity may in large measure be eliminated if carefully studied and the value of environment appreciated, for children, like chameleons, take readily the color of that which is about them. A left-handed child, or even an adult with a strongly inherited tendency to use the off-hand, may be made just as clever with the opposite and unpreferred member by persistent training. This has been very frequently demonstrated. It is just as possible to make both members equally useful. This will be done in the years to come, and it will greatly increase both mental and muscular efficiency. What is true of a physical defect or deviation from the normal is just as true of a moral weakness. No one doubts that Ashanti infants transplanted to a Christian civilization and reared with refined and cultivated children would cease to be cannibals and savages. The domestication of wild animals and fowls is complete evidence of the influence of environment.

        Among the boys of our village very few turned out bad;

Page 11

and had these few been surrounded in their homes by better example and received more kindly consideration and encouragement, even they would not have fallen by the way. Fully fifty per cent. of my playmates near my age perished in battle or from wounds or sickness contracted in the military service of the Confederacy. Most of our time up to our fifteenth year, when as a rule we were sent away to one of the well-known colleges, was spent in the long sessions of the village school with its exacting duties. A week at Christmas and the months of July and August made up the vacation period. On holidays in the fall and winter months, when the river and creeks and forests were flush with game, we were hunters and became adepts in woodcraft and the use of firearms. Often on Saturday nights, in the colder season, with the young negro boys, toward whom we white boys were always kind and considerate, with pine torch-lights and our dogs, we would roam the heavily timbered bottom lands hunting possums and coons, and at times on moonlight nights take our shotguns and seek out the wild-turkey roosts. With the full moon on cloudless nights we could even shoot turkeys, coons, and possums from the trees with the rifles, which carried only one ball. It was the practice to get the dark object between the marksman and the bright moon, sight into the moon, and slowly lower the barrel until both sights were darkened by the intervening black object, and at this moment touch the trigger. We were at home on horseback, and in the very warm days of the long summers we almost lived in the river, the temperature of which was several degrees warmer than the cold water which came in from the near-by mountain streams. Few of us could remember when we learned to swim, and the practice was general. No one seemed

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afraid of the water, nor was there ever a death by drowning. I recall that one day in the late spring, when the water in the river was still cold from the melting snows in the Virginia mountains, and it was nearly to the top of the banks, five of our group deposited our scant wardrobes, which consisted of trousers, shirt, and hat (no one wore shoes in warm weather), in the hollow of a giant sycamore and swam across the Tennessee and back for the frolic of it. In going the six hundred yards across the strong current we were carried fully a mile below the starting-point, and in returning we were compelled to walk far enough up the river-bank to offset the force of the current.

        Life was not by any means all play and school with us. It was the custom with both rich and poor for every boy to do a certain amount of manual labor, plowing or other work in the garden, or chopping wood or hauling. The wealthiest planter in our county insisted that his sons work in the fields with his slaves a certain number of days each crop season. In one year I raised unaided a ten-acre field of corn. It was a wholesome custom, for it instilled in our minds an appreciation of the dignity and value of labor and made us acquainted with the use of various implements. My father refused to give me even the small "spending-money" a boy is supposed to be allowed, but he gave me every opportunity to earn what I needed by my own efforts. My chief source of revenue was cutting wood in the forests near town which belonged to him, and hauling and selling it by the wagon-load to my various regular customers. With the money so earned I became an early subscriber to Harper's Magazine and Harper's Weekly. One of the family treasures which was lost when the Union soldiers burned our home was a much-appreciated

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personal letter to me from one of the original "Brothers" who founded the great "House of Harper." Thackeray and "Porte Crayon" were contributors to the Magazine then, and in the Weekly were appearing the illustrations of the Sepoy Rebellion in India.

        Thoughtful care was always given the selection of our teachers, and our community was fortunate in securing the services of Professor W. D. Lovett, of Zanesville, Ohio, a college graduate, well versed in the classics, an excellent mathematician, patient, insistent, and conscientious in the discharge of his duty. He was to me teacher and friend, and with his encouraging help and that of my father, himself at home with the classics, I was able in my fifteenth year to pass my college entrance examinations and matriculate at La Grange Military Academy in January, 1861.

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IV
HORSE AND GUN

        THE boy of the old South learned to ride and to shoot almost as soon as he learned to walk.1 I began to ride when I was only four years old, and at ten was the possessor of my own horse and gun. A saddle was not permitted to beginners. Stirrups were dangerous entanglements, and when we grew up to the saddle our stirrups had leather guards to prevent the ankle from slipping through and hanging. A blanket fastened on with a surcingle was the favorite seat. For years before I was big enough to get on a horse without sidling up to a stump or a fence I rode to the creek to water my horse, or straddled an evenly balanced sack of shelled corn and made the trip twice a week to the water-mill a mile away.

        I had also good practice in "riding behind" one or the other of my parents, for the newness of the country and the absence of good roads made the use of buggies or carriages practically impossible and horseback the one reliable way of traveling or of visiting our neighbors.

        My first gun was a flint-lock rifle of the same death-dealing
1 The girls of the South in my day were equally at home on horseback. Both of my sisters owned their saddle-horses, were fearless riders, and were expert with gun and pistol. On one occasion during the war, while all the men-folk were absent from the plantation in Lee County, Georgia, the negroes came running in great consternation to tell my eldest sister that a huge alligator was eating the pigs at the barn down near the lake. With an accurate shot through the eye she killed the monster, which was over six feet in length.

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pattern as those used by the backwoodsmen of Jackson and Coffee on Wellington's Peninsular veterans at New Orleans. It was a dangerous weapon at the muzzle, and not altogether harmless at the other end. I could never entirely overcome the sense of nervousness at the flash of the powder in the priming-pan within a few inches of the eye. The bullet used was molded from bars of lead kept in stock at all frontier stores. The ball was laid in the palm of the hand, and the proper charge of powder was measured by pouring enough to make a pyramid which just concealed it. The powder was then poured into the muzzle of the barrel held perpendicularly. A bit of thick cotton cloth greased with tallow on the under side was laid over the muzzle, and the ball, placed on this, was pushed in until its top was level with the surface of the barrel, when the patch was cut smoothly across with a sharp knife. Incased in this lubricated cloth envelope, the bullet was pushed down upon the charge of measured powder near the touch-hole by means of a long, slender ramrod of tough hickory. The priming-pan was next opened and filled with powder, and the "striker" closed. The flint was so arranged that when the hammer was cocked and the trigger pressed a spring drove the flint against the striker and primer, forcing it open, and thus bringing the powder in the pan in contact with the igniting spark. These guns, now obsolete, soon gave way to those equipped with tubes for percussion-caps, and these in turn to our modern breech-loaders with percussion-cartridges.

        This early training to horse and gun will explain why the mounted troops of the Confederacy for the first two years of the Civil War were notably superior to the cavalry of the North. For the third year honors were about even, and after that to the end the advantage was on the Union

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side. It took the Federal cavalrymen about two years to become expert riders and marksmen, and as such they held their own with their opponents. By 1864, when the South was depleted of live stock, the impossibility of securing good mounts or of maintaining the efficiency of those in service placed its cavalry at great disadvantage; and when to the best of horses and seasoned veterans was added the equipment with the repeating-rifle, as against the single-barreled muzzle-loader of the Confederates, it is no wonder that the men who had followed Forrest and Wheeler and Stuart and Morgan to victory on practically every battle field in the earlier campaigns could no longer successfully resist the gallant troopers of Wilson and Sheridan.

        The hunting-season in the South began in the early autumn and lasted until March. In the wide ranges of uncleared woodland in the near-by mountains, and in the dense cane-brakes which grew in the rich bottom land of the Tennessee, there were wild deer and turkeys in great numbers throughout the year. I counted more than twenty of the beautiful animals in one herd within three miles of our village, and I have killed turkeys feeding in the fields and truck-gardens of our home. So plentiful were they at one time that during the breeding-season I have often heard, as I sat on our portico, the drumming sound made by the wings of the males when strutting. Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, and opossums were abundant, while beavers, muskrats, and minks made their homes in the river's bank. Wild duck and geese came with the cold weather and remained until spring. Of the migrating birds the wild pigeon was at once the most beautiful and wonderful. The story of these birds will seem in this day like a gross exaggeration, and yet there are many persons still living who saw,

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as I have seen, the vast and countless flocks of these swift and graceful birds of passage as they whirred through the air on their southward flight, so massed that they cast a shadow like a thick cloud which shut out the sun, while the noise of their countless wings sounded like the roar of an approaching cyclone. As far as the eye could distinguish them their lines were stretched, and one flock would scarcely be out of sight before another followed. A favorite feeding-ground was the beech forest near our home, and one of the most wonderful sights I have ever beheld was the sudden and almost perpendicular descent of a vast army of these birds from a height of at least a mile to the tree-tops in the bottom lands. They simply let go, fell like snowflakes from the heavens, and alighted in such numbers that the limbs broke beneath the great weight. When the nuts were all consumed, or threshed off by the motion of their wings, the birds would swarm to the ground, many of them lost to sight in the foot-deep leaves which carpeted the earth beneath these giant trees. My father and I on one occasion picked up twenty-five pigeons killed by a single volley of our two shotguns--his a double, mine a single barreled gun. I have no idea of the cause of their disappearance; but they, like the buffalo, are now practically extinct. As late as 1870 I saw them in the White River section of Arkansas, as plentiful as they had been before the war in Northern Alabama. I am informed by a close student of ornithology that a reward of $5,000 for a pair of these birds has for three years remained unclaimed.

        In the cane-brakes and thickly wooded regions we hunted chiefly on foot, but for deer and turkey and for shooting quail, the horse was in common use, while for the rare sport of fox-hunting the gun was discarded, and the

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swift horses kept the hunters always close up with the hounds.

        When I became the owner of a saddle-horse it was my duty to feed and curry and take personal care of my mount; and so when the war came on, and I rode away on my beautiful Fanny, we knew each other thoroughly and were as comrades in all the exciting scenes, the times of danger in battle and of trial, with long marches and short rations, and all the hardships of an active cavalry service. Horses are not unlike their two-legged masters in the variations of character and quality; and a well-bred animal feels and shows its distinction and superiority over a common plug as does the man of gentle breeding exhibit certain qualities that mark him as not of the common run. Fanny was not only the most beautifully formed horse I have ever seen, but she possessed an intelligence almost human and could be trusted in any emergency. A whip or spur she would not tolerate. I could ride and guide her anywhere without saddle or bridle. A word, a motion of the hand, or a slight inclination of the body gave to her quick perception the direction and the gait. If the saddle was not comfortably adjusted she would stop and back one ear or the other to tell me where it pinched.

        I trained her to a running-walk, at once the easiest stride for horse and rider, and day after day she has averaged forty miles over roads and trails not easy as to going. I rode her twice from my home to Rome, in Georgia, seventy-five miles, in a day and a half. When it came to running she was like the wind, and in the long speeding to safety in our scouting expeditions, when speed needed stamina to make the goal of the picket-line, she showed her mettle. As long as I rode this graceful, coal-black creature-- unmarked save

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for a white star in the center of the forehead and a white ring on the nigh hind pastern--I felt no fear of capture. On one memorable occasion she showed her heels and her rider's back in most satisfactory fashion to a squadron of Brownlow's Union Cavalry in a chase from near Triune to our outpost, some four miles away. There are times in a soldier's life when, as Campbell expresses it,

'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.

        In the Christmas raid through Kentucky in 1862, when in the crisis of the pursuit and hemmed in on all sides, we were forced to ride day and night for thirty-six hours through a merciless blizzard without stopping, and then, after a rest of six hours, went on to the end of our seventy-two hours' forced march, there was not in that entire command of three thousand a horse more fit than "The Little Black"--for that was her pet name in the regiment.

        In times of stress, when food was scarce and Fanny was hungry, I have often shared with her the roasting-ears of corn issued to me as my rations. At night, when we bivouacked, and the enemy was so near that every man must be ready to mount at a moment's notice, I would unspring the bit from the head-stall, and as she ate her shelled corn from the saddle-blanket I would sleep holding the halter strap and knowing full well she would never tread upon or attempt to wander from her sleeping comrade.

        We Southerners rode with long stirrup-leathers, such as the vaqueros of Mexico and the cowboys of the plains and pampas use. The trained horseman with this seat is one with his mount. When it becomes necessary, the saddle pressure can be lessened by tiptoeing slightly in the stirrups.

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The pigskin-covered, shallow-seated saddle of the English, with the short stirrup-leathers and the bobbing-up-and-down style of riding, is, from my point of view and training, awkward and tiring to both rider and horse.

        Our saddles were strong, and raised behind and in front, so that when firmly cinched one foot could be caught beneath the rim as the rider swung head downward on the other side to pick up any object from the ground. This we were trained to do with the horse at full gallop. At mounting we were equally expert, and from either side I could mount or leap entirely over my horse, and vault into the saddle from behind, with my pistol buckled around the waist, by placing my two hands on the horse's rump.

        I said good-by to my little Fanny on June 27, 1863, and I look back on this as one of the saddest experiences of a lifetime. It was the day of the battle of Shelbyville. From near Eagleville on the Triune turnpike our regiment, then on outpost duty, was ordered to retreat hurriedly to Shelbyville. Near noon we stopped for half an hour to cool our horses' backs and rest and feed. As there was no forage except grazing, I stripped my mount of saddle and bridle and turned her into a near-by clover-field to feed at will.

        When the bugle blew to saddle up I called "Fanny!" Tossing her head in the air with a whinny of recognition, she came to me at once. Leaping on her back without a bridle, I guided her by a movement of the hand toward my company's bivouac. As I approached there lay across the way the huge trunk of a fallen tree. I urged her to a canter, and she jumped over the log as I had trained her over hurdles before we began our war experiences. As she rose to take the jump the inner calk of the right fore shoe caught

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in the bark and tore the shoe loose. Unfortunately, the forge and farrier had moved on ahead; and as the enemy were in sight and pressing us, I saddled and mounted and joined in the six-mile run to Shelbyville. Within a mile the flinty bed of the macadamized roadway had done its work. Fanny began to limp, and then to lag, as her hoof was split to the quick, and I dismounted and led her. As good luck would have it, the enemy did not press us, or I should have been lost.

        As I came up at last the regiment was in line of battle, and the enemy's line, a mile away, was in sight, evidently preparing to advance. As I mounted and rode into the line Major Taylor, seeing how lame my horse was, ordered me to the wagon-train and would not listen to my entreaty to let me stay. Dismounting and leading Fanny, now hobbling on three legs, and depressed beyond measure at the thought of being absent from the first big fight the regiment was to be engaged in since I had joined it, I made my way sorrowfully to the rear.

        Two or three hundred yards back I came upon a member of my company who told me he was detailed to guard the wagon-train. As he had a fairly good horse and seemed anxious to take care of one too lame to be in the fight, I changed horses and equipments; and, exacting a promise that he would take Fanny to my home in Alabama, where I could find her at the close of the campaign, I mounted and rode into the line of battle just as the firing began.

        The story of that fight, from two o'clock to sundown, and the disaster which overtook me at its close is told elsewhere. The great tragedy of it was, not that we were beaten or that I was left on the field, ridden down and over by the victorious enemy, but that I never again saw my

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noble Fanny. The man to whom I intrusted her reported that she grew so sore of foot she could no longer move, and he had left her in care of a farmer in Tennessee. At the close of the war my first duty was to search for my little thoroughbred, but no trace of her could be found.

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V
MAJOR, THE VILLAGE KING--LESSON FROM THE LIFE OF A NOBLE DOG

        IT is as true of dogs as of poets that they are "born, not made." Major was born great. Not that he had a proud pedigree. No more have poets as a rule: Shakespeare's father was a glovemaker; Milton's a scrivener; Spenser's a tailor; Keats's paternal ancestor kept a livery stable; and the father of Robert Burns made a very insufficient living as a gardener.

        The average poet, however, knew his father--and here the comparison becomes embarrassing for Major. Genealogically he was classified as a mongrel cur, but genealogy, like the thermometer, does not always register correctly. The laws of heredity, like the laws of the universe, are as inexorable as they are wonderful and difficult of comprehension. Major was an illustration. Even as the planets of our system, after eons of divergence in space, come again in conjunction, so in this loved and faithful companion of my boyhood, born to be king of his kind in the village, there united by some mysterious alchemy certain ancestral strains, certain inherited qualities, which made him worthy of founding a dynasty.

        Cast in human form, he would have been another Forrest or Jackson, a natural-born soldier. Courage and strategy and tactics were of his mental make-up, and behind these

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qualities there was a magnificent endowment of muscle and bone which made them savagely effective. Like the "Wizard of the Saddle," who said, "five minutes of 'bulge' was worth more than a week of tactics," Major believed in bulge. He always "showed fight," and never waited to be attacked. Forrest's one "general order" was: "Whenever you see a Yankee, show fight. If there ain't but one of you and a hundred of them, show fight. They'll think a heap more of you for it."

        Now, Major was not particular about what the other village dogs thought of him, but he did enjoy a quiet stroll along a dogless highway. Even Cowper in his "Morning Walk" was not more fond of solitude, and as my fighter's reputation spread his meditations were rarely disturbed. At the zenith of his reign, if there was a canine in all the region round about his Judea upon whose skin he had not left the indelible register of his prowess, it was only because the other dog elected to keep between his hide and Major that distance which lent enchantment to the view. When after one of these occasional joy-chases in the wake of a fleet-footed vagrant he would return panting, with his dripping tongue hanging out of one side of his mouth, and come up to me to get the usual pat of commendation on his back, he would sit down on his hunkers and in very human fashion laugh at the comical figure the scared fugitive had cut. And it was funny enough to make even a dog laugh; for few things are more ludicrous than precipitate flight, whether there be two or four legs in action. In my soldier days I took an active part in more than one cavalry stampede, in which for the time being my comrades and I parted company with our family pride, which is another name for courage. On these occasions, if on no other, I

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Illustration

"MAJOR" AND HIS PUPIL

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was inspired with the idea of leadership, and if the inspiration was of brief duration it was only because the horse I rode was not equal to the occasion. As one after another the rattled troopers passed me in the wild scramble toward safety I had ample opportunity to observe the earnestness which characterized each individual's effort to annihilate distance. Notwithstanding the increasing proximity of the pursuers, I registered the ludicrous features of the situation, and many a time since then, with bullets and sabres eliminated, I have laughed over these scenes.

        Somebody has said, or is said to have said, "All the world loves a lover," which is generally accepted as true. There is another saying that "Everybody sympathizes with the under dog." Elsewhere and in the abstract this may have been (or may be) true; but in our village it did not hold. When the bottom dog got on his feet, saw his chance, tucked his tail between his legs, and ran, every boy and man whose Christian mother or wife was not in hearing yelled at him in terms not found in the Westminster Confession, and added to the fugitive's intensity of purpose the quickening impulse of a stone or a brickbat.

        Naturally, Major became the pride of the village, his prowess the talk of the neighborhood; and I, his master, shone, albeit with reflected glory. We are all more or less influenced by environment and association, and little wonder it soon came into my mind that I among my kind must keep stride with my victorious dog. He expected it of me, and when on one memorable day I licked the bully of the playground, Major jumped all over me for joy. Victors on every field, Major and his master, like Alexander, sighed for more worlds.

        In a near-by settlement there was another fighting dog

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of local repute; and one summer's day when the circus came to town, the boy who owned him and his crowd walked in to see the sights, bringing with them the redoubtable pup. My chum and I were engaged in watching the busy showmen put up the big tent, when the other boys and their champion came on the scene. He was a magnificent specimen of his kind, brindle-colored, well muscled, noticeably longer in body and neck, and some two inches taller than Major. He was evidently game to the core, for he no sooner saw my pet than he bristled up, fixed his eyes intently upon him, and assumed that muscular tension peculiar to the wolf and cat tribes when about to spring. As he and they approached, the circus men, seeing that something exciting was in the air, quit work and with the crowd of loiterers attracted by the "Greatest Show on Earth" turned their attention to the battle-scene.

        I recall distinctly that sinking feeling which often comes over one in the first few moments of an impending crisis, the issue of which is doubtful. I put my hand encouragingly on my companion's neck, pulled his head against my leg, and said in a low tone, "Steady, Major." There must have been some quiver of the arm or tremor in the voice which betrayed my apprehension, for, while the other valiant knight was yet some thirty yards away, my champion turned his eyes reproachfully on mine with a look which said. "Watch me." I did watch him, and, to my surprise, for the first time in his life Major did not advance to meet the enemy. I knew later his keen intelligence had cautioned him that this was the heaviest contract he had ever undertaken, and that strategy and tactics as well as courage and strength would be needed to win. I did not know it then, and as the stranger boldly and deliberately advanced

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I almost sank to the earth with shame and mortification; for Major not only failed to meet him half-way, but stood there stock-still, seemingly not wanting to fight and wagging his tail in friendly fashion, as if he were about to greet a long-lost brother. So deceptive was this assumption of friendliness, or timidity, or cowardice, that the other crowd of boys began to jeer and yell at the top of their lungs, "School-butter!" "Chicken-liver!" "Soak him!" and a lot of other objectionable constructions of nouns, verbs, and adjectives of origin as unknown as they were insulting.

        It was just as this yell of exultation in anticipation of our discomfiture rose that the strategy of the master was disclosed. Unused to such a crowd and to such an unearthly noise, the invader turned his head for a moment toward his shouting mob of backers. This error sealed his doom; for in that instant, like a stone from a catapult, with lightning-like swiftness and with irresistible force, Major bounded forward, striking full-breasted against the side of the neck and shoulders of the longer dog, bowling him over and on his back. The stranger did not hit the ground before his cunning and savage foe had his throat and windpipe in the grip of a pair of jaws that never relaxed their hold until the bottom dog was half dead and hopelessly beaten, when we pulled the victor off. As Major shook himself and stood over his fallen foe in triumphant pose, ready to renew the attack, the crowd yelled and hurrahed again and again for him and me. Then we "town boys" laughed best, because we had laughed last.

        Major's star, ascendant from the day he entered the arena, reached its zenith in this month, when he was four years old and when Sirius was in its glory. From this on

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his story is briefly told, and I venture to apply to my faithful friend, tried and not found wanting, a quotation from Froude's Sketch of Cæsar:

Everything which grows holds in perfection but a single moment.

        When the days of the sere and yellow leaf came on for this, my Cæsar, the college days came on for me; and although I did not suspect it then, I bade a long and last good-by to the home of a happy boyhood and to my loved and faithful dog. From college I went into the Southern army until the end of the Civil War, and when peace came there was no home, and Major had long since gone to the undiscovered country. After I had left, one of the slaves, ambitious to maintain the prestige of the absent member, brought into the fold a puppy, scion of my village king, who schooled him as a fighter, alas! to his own undoing.

        As in the course of nature Major's muscles withered and his jaws became toothless his powerful and plucky son grew more and more resentful of the painful reprimands inflicted by his hectoring sire, and at last turned on him in mortal combat. I was told that when the servants pulled them apart the beaten but unconquered old warrior, staggering to his feet, tried in vain to renew the hopeless combat, and then, with head erect and lordly mien, passed for ever from the scene. A week later they found him dead in the edge of a forest near the town. Victory or death was the lesson that came from the spirit of this dumb creature. The savagery which he exhibited was his by nature, uncurbed and unchanged by the impossibility of a higher intelligence. That of his master, whose heart now in ripe old age, and long before he had reached the years of maturity, was filled with

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regret that even in the wild life of the frontier and in the riot of restless boyhood he could delight in these tests of animal courage and skill and strength, had less in extenuation. With all of this the moral of the lesson was not lost: "He who fights the battle of life to win or die, wins."

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VI
EARLY SCENES, RELIGIOUS AND OTHERWISE

        WHILE a large majority of our early settlers were sober and law-abiding, it was inevitable that some lawlessness should prevail in the formative period of a community such as this in which I grew to manhood. Disputed pre-emption claims and other conflicts of interest led to feuds between individuals and families, in the settlement of which personal prowess and the bowie-knife or rifle were too often appealed to instead of argument or arbitration or reason and law.

        In partial extenuation of these brutal combats it must be said that they usually were open fights without unfair advantage; in fact, in all the earlier bloody history of Marshall County I knew of but a single instance where one man shot and killed another from ambush. I witnessed a number of these affairs, as they often took place in the streets of my native village, where the county and district courts were held, and where from far and near the people came to political conventions, or to vote on election days, or to take part in the annual muster of the militia. During the afternoon of one election contest in which excitement ran high I saw a half-dozen different combats, while fully as many more, as I afterward learned, took place beyong my field of vision.

        The business center of our village was confined to a single street, on either side of which for some two hundred yards

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the stores and shops were located. One of these stores, with a roof that sloped away from the street, the comb or highest portion of which was parallel with the edge of the sidewalk, was a favorite rendezvous for our crowd of boys, who never willingly missed those exciting scenes. Upon one pretext or another we would manage to get away from home and climb to our gallery on Kinzler's grocery. This point of vantage not only gave us a commanding view of the street, but it possessed another attractive feature, for we could peep over the edge and see all that was going on with nothing but our eyes and the tops of our heads in danger. Whenever a gun was pointed our way, or a badly aimed stone or stick flew too high, we had only to slide back a few inches and duck our heads to be safe until the gun went of or the missile had passed on. The casualties on one occasion included one man killed and a large number laid up for repairs.

        Another personal encounter that came under my observation was a fight between two men, for each of whom even as a small boy I had formed a warm friendship. Passing along the sidewalk on an errand to my father's office, I came upon my two friends in excited conversation standing on a platform or open porch which served as entrance to a candyshop where I was a frequent visitor. As I stood within a few feet of them the proprietor of the shop, a very small but wiry man, stepped back quickly, drew a single-barreled pistol from his pocket, and pointed it at the other larger man, saying, "If you take a step toward me I'll kill you." The big man did not advance. He said, "I am unarmed; but if you'll wait I'll be right back, and we'll settle it." With this he hurried across the street to a dry-goods store and asked the merchant for the loan of a pistol, which was

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refused. He then picked up an ax, which he held in his right hand. With the other he seized the top of a wooden packing-box, and holding this in front of his chest and abdomen as a Kaffir would hold his pavise, or rawhide shield, to ward off a thrust from an assagai, he walked straight toward his adversary.

        Meanwhile the small man was standing at the edge of the platform, pistol in hand, and pointing now directly at the big miller, who was advancing at a fast walk. The one thing which made the most vivid impression on my mind of what happened here was the self-cocking feature of the pistol. As the man pulled the trigger I saw distinctly the hammer rise just before the flash and noise of the explosion. I had never before seen a "self-cocker." My big friend interposed the box-top, through which the bullet passed before it buried itself in the muscles of his broad chest, where it remained many years, to the day of his death. As it struck him he staggered back with the ax slightly raised, whereupon the other fighter hit him a stunning blow with the heavy barrel of the empty pistol. By this time some other men had come up and separated the combatants.

        This pioneer settlement was about as active and violent in matters of religion as in the occasional settlement "outside the law" of personal differences. Of the various sects the Baptists and the Methodists were about equally divided--these two outnumbering all the rest. I do not think there was a single Catholic in our community, and only one family of Episcopalians, while our immediate family furnished the Presbyterian contingent.

        When my father founded the present village of Guntersville he gave a spacious lot to each sect, to be deeded

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when a house of worship was erected; but up to the breaking out of the Civil War, in 1861, there was not a single church edifice in the town. The school-house, the courthouse, and later the large Masonic Hall were used for Sunday services. Our preachers were all "circuit riders," and occupied the pulpit in turn, all the sects attending to swell the congregation. There was Sunday-school from ten to eleven o'clock in the morning, preaching from eleven to twelve, and again by candlelight, to which each family contributed a candle and a sconce, or holder, which was fastened to the wall.

        The Baptists were spoken of as the "Hardshell" and "Foot-washing" sects, and were believers in total immersion; and the congregations of this particular church celebrated once or twice a year the ceremony of foot-washing. The creeks or the Tennessee River furnished holes deep enough for immersion, which usually took place in warm weather, while a piggin of water and a towel served the parson or assistants who performed the foot-washing rite.

        At certain times, usually in the late summer months, in the periods of comparative leisure in a farming community after the crops were "laid by" and before "gathering-time," would be held what were called "protracted meetings" or "revivals." When the attendance proved too large for the meeting-house the congregation would move out under the shade-trees; or more frequently great arbors made of the branches of thick-leaved trees would be hastily constructed. The negroes spoke of these as "Bresh-Harbor" revivals.

        The "circuit-riders," so called because they were designated to preach in a circuit of several counties, traveled their rounds on horseback, as the roads were new, ill kept, and often impassable to any kind of vehicle except the

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crude, heavy wagons drawn by oxen. At these protracted gatherings the exercises lasted three or four days, and when the excitement ran high a longer time was utilized until the supply of "mourners" and "converts" was exhausted.

        The assistants to the leading clergymen were known as "exhorters," selected, it seemed to me, on account of their cleverness in appealing to the emotional qualities of their hearers. Most of them had good voices, and at certain periods in their exhortations to all who had not been converted to come up to the mourners' bench, confess their sins, and be saved, they would at the psychological moment break forth in some one of the many revival songs which rarely failed to fire the train of religious fervor or hysteria which the preacher's sermon and his own preliminary exhortation had prepared for explosion.

        Of one of these songs I recall a verse or two:


                         Jesus my all to heaven is gone;
                         Glory halleluiah!
                         Him whom I fix my hopes upon;
                         Glory halleluiah!


                         His track I see and I'll pursue;
                         Glory halleluiah!
                         If you get there before I do,
                         Tell all my friends I'm coming, too;
                         Glory halleluiah!

        And so on for a number of stanzas. When the song began he would leave the place in front of the pulpit, where he had been standing, and rush along the aisles, shaking hands vigorously right and left with all in reach, and calling them by name as "my brother" or "my sister"--there being as a rule about three sisters to one brother. There was a very large lady in our village easily moved to tears

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and hysterical sobbing, who usually gave way first and, like Abou ben Adhem, led all the rest. By the time the sermon was over she was about ready for the outburst, and when the exhorter broke loose with his "Glory halleluiah" song she would clap her hands violently together with a resounding smack, sway her body back and forth, and scream out at the top of her high-pitched voice: "Bless the Lord! Bless the Lord! Oh, my Jesus!" And with this she would follow on the trail of the exhorter, crying out to her two sons, about eighteen and twenty-two respectively, to "Come to Jesus." These young men, knowing their mother's weakness, found it convenient to sit near the door or an open window, through which a quick exit was possible when she began a rush for them.

        I remember on one occasion one of the boys reached the door and escaped, and the dear old lady cut the other off from that exit only to see him leap through a window at least six feet from the ground. With twenty or thirty mourners kneeling before the parallelogram of benches arranged for them just in front of the pulpit, many of these sobbing, the exhorters singing and shaking hands in and out among the congregation, and a half-dozen hysterical women shouting as loud as they could scream, confusion reigned. There was one young man whose fondness for alcohol caused him to fall from grace with recurring regularity, and his way of restoring himself to divine favor was to confess his errors at these revivals and ask to be taken back in the fold. He immortalized himself with the smaller boys in our neighborhood by breaking out on one occasion in an ecstasy of song which, as far as I knew, was entirely original. As the exhorter was on his rounds, Jasper leaped from his seat, grasped him by both hands, and, jumping up and down, not

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unlike the movements of a turkey-gobbler in the early spring chanted:


                         The devil is dead, and I am glad;
                         Glory halleluiah!
                         He ain't got the soul he thought he had;
                         Glory halleluiah!

        My parents, being Presbyterians, did not wholly approve of these excitable religious demonstrations, and I did not attend as many as I should have liked. Their minister, who always stayed at our house, did not reach us in his circuit oftener than once in four or five weeks, and the intervening Sundays I spent in familiarizing myself with the Westminster Confession of Faith, the religious section of the New York Observer, and Alexander's Sermons, one of which I was called upon to stand up before the family and read aloud. How long each one of these effusions of the good old Princeton theologian seemed! Visiting in 1913, in one of the private rooms of the Polyclinic Hospital, a grandson of their author, himself eminent in the affairs of the metropolis, I was answered with a smile when I told him I rejoiced at last to have an opportunity of taking revenge on the family for the wrongs I had suffered at the hands of his grandfather.

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VII
THE ARISTOCRACY OF THE OLD SOUTH

        IT would be difficult to imagine a society more cultured, hospitable, and delightful, more in harmony with that definition of gentlefolk as "those whose rule of conduct is consideration for others," than that to which, thanks to my mother, I found admission in the community of Huntsville in the days of the old régime. This may savor of exaggeration or prejudice, or perhaps of conceit; but in the larger view which has come from reading and travel, and an association of more than forty years with many of the noblest and best of the metropolis, nothing like it has come to my knowledge. Such a society was possible only with the institution of slavery; and when slavery ended it ended never again to be reproduced. The people composing this society were almost wholly descended from the cavaliers of Virginia, many of the earlier settlers coming directly from the tide-water section of the Old Dominion; others indirectly, from Kentucky and Tennessee and North Carolina--countries which were stocked by the Virginia overflow.

        In the spirit of adventure, and with the wealth in slaves inherited from their fathers, these hardy scions of a noble race passed over the mountains, pre-empted the rich valley of the Tennessee, and established there a New Virginia. Twelve miles north of the Tennessee River, in the upper

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reaches of a rich agricultural section, where the spurs of the Appalachian range begin to hem it in from the north, at the base of a picturesque limestone cliff, there gushes from the earth a spring of crystal water. It is of such volume and force that it sets in motion the powerful machinery which carries unlimited luxury into every home. Upon the summit of the bluff which overlooks this marvelous spring and the far-reaching valley through which the silvery stream flows toward the great river, one of those restless pioneers, John Hunt by name, built his cabin of cedar logs in 1806 and claimed the region roundabout. There was no Alabama then-- only Indians and wilderness. The area which now forms the states of Alabama and Mississippi was ceded in 1802 by Georgia to the United States. The fact that the Cherokee Indians had lived there from time beyond the memory of man and still claimed the land did not matter to John Hunt. He was friendly with the aborigines, and sent his Calebs and Joshuas back to civilization to spread the news of the rich Canaan, and others just as hardy and just as hungry for land joined him. The discreet Cherokees, children of the great Sequoyah, wisest of all the Indian tribes, realizing that the better part of valor was discretion, and seeing that the white man was surely crowding him out, ceded in 1819, for a price, all their claims north of the Tennessee River, and in the same year Congress made of Alabama a sovereign state.

        Huntsville had not waited for this. Indians or no Indians, it was a town already, having incorporated itself in 1811; and in 1812, the year that our second war began with England, when Napoleon's Grand Army was freezing to death in Russia, and one year before the great Tecumseh passed along the Creek Path in sight of these settlers' log

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defenses and made those speeches which stirred the red men to the massacre of Fort Mims and to other bloody deeds, Huntsville was publishing The Madison Gazette, the first newspaper printed within the limits of the present state.

        The first sessions of the legislature were held here, and but for its location in the extreme northern end of the state it would without doubt have been the permanent capital. It remained, however, the political capital and the social and commercial center of one of the most enterprising and productive agricultural communities in the New World. For more than a hundred miles in all directions the rich owners of vast estates whose work was done by slaves, and the humbler settlers who came in covered wagons and cleared their small farms and tilled them with their own hands, everybody, except the outlaws and the rowdies, who haunted the wilderness for refuge, made of Huntsville even in these earlier days the Mecca toward which all eyes were turned. The wealthier people built their homes and churches here, established in 1812 the famous Greene Academy, a college-preparatory school, whence to La Grange College, or Henry and Emory, or William and Mary, or the University of Virginia, or Princeton, or elsewhere in the then far-away world their sons went for their finishing studies. The Huntsville Seminary (Presbyterian), where my mother and her daughters were educated, and the equally famous and popular Female College (Methodist), were other institutions of learning which won for this beautiful city the well-deserved name of the "Athens of the South." The country was so new, the atmosphere and environment so inspiring to endeavor, that, instead of yielding to the softening influences of wealth and the luxury which the institution of slavery implied, the men of this period turned their attention to

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active pursuits, to the excitement of politics, to manufacturing and commercial enterprises, and to public improvements. Theirs was the first cotton factory in the state, and probably in the far South, established in 1832, the machinery being run by the water-power of Flint River. The magnificent macadamized roads, which stand to-day as models of highway construction, were built by them while yet the crack of the Indian's rifle was heard in the near-by brakes.

        In this delightful society, through years of peace and prosperity and happiness, my mother had lived from infancy to the fullness of a noble womanhood; hither came Louis Wyeth, a young lawyer, just turned of twenty-seven, and already appointed by the state legislature judge of the new county of Marshall, carved out of the Cherokee country, and lately opened for settlement. Thence went this man and woman, whom God had joined and nothing but death could part, to their new home in the wild and sparsely settled region to the south, from which as yet the Indians had not wholly departed. John Allan, her father, had graduated from the University of Georgia in 1807. In addition to the Greek and Latin classics; he had mastered the French language, and, supplementing his college course with another in theology, he made himself familiar with Hebrew literature. Having been admitted to the ministry, and having married the daughter of a soldier, who in recognition of his services in the war for independence had been granted a rich estate in the blue-grass region of Tennessee, he accepted the call to the Presbyterian church in Huntsville. From the pulpit, and in his professorship of the classics in the Greene Academy, he became a power for good, and died at his post, universally beloved and lamented.

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        Naturally, the home of such a family as his became a center of the refinement and culture of the community, a rallying-point of the remarkable group of men and women, many of whom as they grew to maturity found high places in the esteem of mankind and later wrote their names in history. First of all, as the memory of these earlier days flashes through my mind, there comes a woman, the girlhood and lifelong friend of my mother, Virginia Tunstall, descended as were almost all of them from the cavaliers; later to be more widely known as the brilliant leader of society at the national capital in the decade that preceded the tragedy of 1861-65, as the wife of Senator Clement C. Clay, Jr. The story of that unique period is known to all readers of our native literature in a most fascinating book by Mrs. Clay, A Belle of the Fifties. Still holding, in 1914, the sway she could not relinquish if she would, the sole survivor of the brilliant throng of whom I write, one can fitly apply to her that unsurpassed compliment of Shakespeare to womanhood:


                         Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
                         Her infinite variety.

        The Clays all came from Virginia. The famous orator was from Ashland, near Richmond, and I have always felt a touch of pride that my kinsman, George Wythe, discovered Henry Clay, educated him, and trained him in the law. Clement C. Clay, the elder, from Halifax, in the Old Dominion, came to Huntsville in 1811, served many terms in the legislature, and was governor and United States Senator. Clement C. Clay, Jr., his son, "to the manner born and native hero" with his university degree, succeeded his father in the United States Senate, and was the first

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Senator elected from Alabama to the Southern Confederacy. His history, even down to the long and wearisome and unjust persecution of imprisonment in Fortress Monroe, is known to all. The record stands without a stain. And here Jere Clemens, lawyer, legislator, soldier of the Mexican War, Senator of the United States, and, beyond all such ordinary distinction to my youthful mind, author of Bernard Lile, Mustang Gray, and The Rivals; or, the Days of Burr and Hamilton. How many a tallow candle that I helped my mother mold have I seen melt away as I read and reread these "romances, couched in gorgeous diction and abounding in thrilling episode," when I should have been absorbed in the brain-racking exercises of algebra or geometry! A college man of La Grange and the State University, handsome of feature and proud of carriage, no wonder the maidens of the land fell victims to his charms. Virginia Tunstall was not alone in the list of young girls whose hearts beat faster at first sight of this "Romeo of Madison County."

        Let her tell it in her own inimitable way:1

        "It was to my Uncle Tom that I owe the one love sorrow of my life. It was an affair of the greatest intensity while it endured, and was attended by the utmost anguish for some twelve or fourteen hours. During that space of time I endured all the hopes and fears, the yearnings and despairs, to which the human heart is victim. I was nearing the age of fifteen when my uncle one evening bade me put on my prettiest frock and accompany him to the home of a friend, where a dance was to be given. I was dressed with all the alacrity my old mammy was capable of summoning, and was soon ensconced in the carriage and on my way to
1 A Belle of the Fifties, Doubleday, Page& Co., 1904.

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the hospitable scene. En route we stopped at the hotel, where my uncle alighted, reappearing in a moment with a very handsome young man, who entered the carriage with him and drove with us to the house where he, too, was to be a guest.

        "Never had my eyes beheld so pleasing a masculine wonder! He was the personification of manly beauty! His head was shapely as Tasso's (in after life I often heard the comparison made), and in his eyes there burned a romantic fire that enslaved me from the moment their gaze rested upon me. At their warmth all the ardor, all the ideals upon which a romantic heart had fed, rose in recognition of their realization in him. During the evening he paid me some pretty compliments, remarking upon my hazel eyes and the gleam of gold in my hair, and he touched my curls admiringly, as if they were revered by him.

        "My head swam! Lohengrin never dazzled Elsa more completely than did this knight of the poet's head charm the maiden that was I. We danced together frequently throughout the evening, and my hero rendered me every attention a kind man may offer to the little daughter of a valued friend. When at last we stepped into the carriage and turned homeward the whole world was changed for me.

        "My first apprehension of approaching sorrow came as we neared the hotel. To my surprise, the knight was willing, nay, desired to be set down there. A dark suspicion crept into my mind that perhaps, after all, my hero might be less gallant than I had supposed, else why did he not seek this opportunity of riding home with me? If this wonderful emotion that possessed me also had actuated him--and how could I doubt it after his devotion throughout

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the evening?--how could he bear to part from me in this way without a single word or look of tenderness?

        "As the door closed behind him I leaned back in the darkest corner of the carriage and thought hard, though not hardly, of him. After a little my uncle roused me by saying, 'Did my little daughter enjoy this evening?' I responded enthusiastically.

        " 'And was I not kind to provide you with such a gallant cavalier? Isn't Colonel Jere Clemens a handsome man?'

        "Ah, was he not? My full heart sang out his praises with an unmistakable note. My uncle listened sympathetically; then he continued, 'Yes; he's a fine fellow, Virginia, and he has a nice little wife and baby.'

        "No thunderbolt ever fell more crushingly upon the unsuspecting than did these awful words from the lips of my uncle. I know not how I reached my room, but, once there, I wept passionately throughout the night and much of the following morning. Within my own heart I accused my erstwhile hero of the rankest perfidy, of villainy of every imaginable quality; and in this recoil of injured pride perished my first love dream, vanished the heroic wrappings of my quondam knight!"


        With all his charm of manner and handsome face, this gifted man fell short of his opportunities. The judgment of Jacob upon his first-born son might well apply to him! "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel." Although a member of the Secession Convention, signing the ordinance which carried his native state into the Southern Confederacy, and accepting the chief command of all the Alabama forces when hostilities were declared, he resigned later, and when the armies of the North occupied Huntsville he went

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over, "foot, baggage, and artillery," to those making savage war upon the people among whom he was born and reared and to whom he owed the distinction that had been accorded to him. His kinsman, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), joined the Confederate cavalry as a lieutenant, and deserted, as did Henry M. Stanley, the noted explorer.

        From Virginia also came John W. Walker, a Princeton graduate, and the first United States Senator from Alabama, and his two sons, Richard and Pope, born in Huntsville and schooled at Greene Academy and at the University of Virginia and at Princeton; the former a Confederate State Senator, the latter the first Secretary of War in the Confederate cabinet. Gabriel Moore, lawyer, governor, Congressman, United States Senator, and James G. Birney were Huntsville men. The latter, with my mother's father, John Allan, organized the first "Society for the Emancipation of Slavery" in Alabama, published a newspaper founded to advocate the cause of abolition, and was the nominee on this ticket in 1840, and again in 1844, for the Presidency of the United States.

        Also came hither Reuben Chapman, of Caroline County, Virginia, lawyer, legislator, governor, and Congressman. I remember my father reading to me a letter from this famous politician, asking his advice as to whether or not he could safely vote for an appropriation then before Congress for a certain sum of money to construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington City to Baltimore. My father advised him to vote for it by all means, but added, "You need not hope to be re-elected if you do."

        Dr. Henry Chambers, from the Old Dominion, the only member of the medical profession ever elected to the Senate of the United States from Alabama, was a practising physician

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here. James White McClung, the brilliant and dissipated orator; William Smith, who was offered and declined an associate-justiceship in the Supreme Court of the United States; Silas Parsons, of the state Supreme Court; Colonel Robert and Dr. Thomas L. Fearn, the Erskines, Mastins, Popes, Coles, Brandons, Facklers, Donegans, Lanes, Acklens, Garths, Irbys, Russells, Newmans, Mathewses, Leftwicks, Calhouns, Phelans, Beirnes, Hales, Weedons, and Pattons, and many others were of this extraordinary community of pioneers in which my parents moved. The list would not be complete did I not mention Robert C. Brickell, the famous chief justice of the state Supreme Court, and his associate in law, Septimus D. Cabaniss; also Peter M. Dox and Wm. M. Lowe, members of Congress, each of whom was bound to my father by the ties of personal friendship.

        Into this community I made my first entrance when I was nine years old. I had learned the story of Aladdin, and now I felt as if his lamp was mine. Born in a log cabin and reared in the country of the Cherokees, as yet little more than a wilderness, I knew nothing of the outer world except what I had gathered from conversation with my parents. The sun which rose over the high mountains an hour's walk from our home, and went down behind the range which shut in our beautiful valley on the west, measured the limits of my horizon. The near-by hills and valleys and streams and woods made up my world. I knew the trees in the forests and the animals and birds, wild and tame, before I knew the names of the human beings coming in ever-increasing numbers into the newly opened territory.

        My father made frequent journeys away on errands connected with his law practice, and every year my mother made a visit of a few weeks to her old home and girlhood friends

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in Huntsville, and this time I was to go with her. We took the steamboat Lookout, which puffed and whistled and churned the water into huge waves that went surging from underneath the great stern wheel, which turned over so fast and made such a mighty splashing. Captain Matt Todd, whose boat it was, took me on the roof--he called it the "hurricane-deck"--and held me as I leaned over to watch the water fly from the strokes of the paddles, or "buckets," and then into the pilot-house, where the man at a smaller wheel turned it one way and then another, always busy and watchful, as our boat plowed between great rocks that we could see down below the surface, or sunken logs or "sawyers" (loose, half-submerged logs), or swept around a bend in the beautiful river. Great cliffs of stone, with cedars clinging to the fissures in the rock, rose up on one or the other side so high at times I wondered if anybody ever climbed to the top.

        On we went, by great plantations of corn and cotton; and every now and then the deafening whistle blew, and the big bell rang, and the noisy wheel stopped as we swung around bow up-stream and tied to the bank to take on or put off travelers and freight. At the mouth of Flint River, where the shoals were bad, the good Lookout went aground, and a great rope hawser had to be taken ashore and fastened by one end to a big tree while the other was wound around the capstan until our boat was pulled back into the channel.

        From Whitesburg Landing we drove the twelve miles to Huntsville in a stage-coach. The road was so wide and white and hard I wondered if it was the same kind of earth we were used to. No dust, no stumps for the wheels to bump over, no loose rocks, and no mud-holes. Then my mother told me of a Mr. McAdam, who taught people how

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to build good roads of crushed stone, and how "her people" had learned to do this long ago. Near sundown we climbed a high hill, and from the top of this I saw ever so many houses clustered together, and one with a great round dome high above the others, and farther on a steeple even higher still. They told me one was the court-house and the other, my mother said, was her father's church. We had no court-house where we lived, and up to this moment I had never seen a church. There were preachers at times in Marshall, "circuit-riders" who came to our village every once in a while, usually on horseback, with their sermons and belongings in a pair of saddle-bags, preached and held "revivals" in our log school-house, and in summer-time under brush arbors.

        Somewhere, in a street with great houses stretching away on both sides as far as I could see, our stage stopped, and we got out. I remember the high iron fence, and the gate that opened into the park-like yard, and the smoothly mown blue grass, and ever so many shade-trees on either side of the long brick walk which led up to the mansion. The servants took our luggage, and Colonel Fearn and his dear wife came out to welcome my mother. They called her by her school-girl name, and she spoke to them as "Robert" and "Mary," for they had grown up together. Even Caledonia, the seamstress, who had been lady's-maid to her young mistress in their younger days, courtesied and took my mother's hand as she said, "Howdy, Miss Phemie." I wondered why Carter (I can't spell it as Colonel Fearn pronounced it, for he had the tide-water accent), the butler, wore a red waistcoat and a blue coat with shiny brass buttons; and I was told that was his livery. The wide front portico was nearly as large as all of our little house at

Page 48a

Illustration

A HUNTSVILLE MANSION OF THE EARLY DAYS

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home, and the great white columns went up two stories to the roof; and inside there was a maze of rooms and winding stairs and strange, old-fashioned furniture--bureaus and tables, and beds with long posts which reached to near the ceiling, and had tops or testers, with curtains on the sides. How strange it all was, and a lonesome feeling came over me, and I wanted to go back home!

        I remember vividly that when we went to the supper-table I saw for the first time a silver fork, and it felt so awkward as I tried to eat with it that I boldly asked Colonel Fearn if I couldn't have "a sure-enough fork instead of a split-spoon." He laughed louder than I thought he ought to as he said: "Carter, go to the kitchen and bring that child another fork."

        Another great surprise was in store for me when I discovered up in our room that there were pipes which carried cold and hot water, and that we didn't have to go to the spring with a bucket and bring it in by hand. I learned later that there were hydrants on the corners of all the streets, and I soon learned that by pushing down on the handle and slipping a pebble above it I could keep the clear stream flowing until the gutter was as full as the spring branch at home; and one day a rude policeman took the pebble out and stopped the water from wasting, with a threat to arrest me if I did it again. But the greatest surprise was in store for me when I saw what I was told was gas-light; no wick or candle or lamp, just light; and there was nothing to do but to turn a brass key and strike a match. What a wonderful new world all this was to a boy of nine years who had never before been out of sight of his home in the backwoods!

        I shall never forget those Huntsville gardens and the

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beautiful flowers. These we had at our home; for mother watched and cared for her rose-bushes and flower-beds with her own hand, and, as I was always with her, I had learned their names; but here the grounds were very large, and this garden was laid out like a big Chinese puzzle. There were tiny paths that led in all directions, with dense rows of box along the edges, and the beds were grouped in all sorts of fantastic shapes, and down at one end stood a small house all of glass windows where they put things away in cold weather to keep the frost from killing them. Farther away was the vegetable garden, for there were no market-houses in those early days, and every home provided for itself; and back of this, opening on an alleyway which cut the block in two, were the spacious stables for the milk-cows, horses, and carriages.

        As we entered the church the next Sunday morning I found myself in the largest room I had ever been in, with row after row of benches--enough, it seemed to me then, to seat all the people in Marshall County. On the high wall at the end where the preacher stood was a tablet, and in big letters was written my grandfather's name, and when he was installed as pastor, and the date of his death. When the minister said the prayer I started to kneel down as we did when my father had family prayers at home, but here they all stood up to pray. What was just as strange as this was the way he gave out the hymn, which he read verse after verse all through before any one began to sing. At our "meetings" the preacher alone had a hymn-book, and he gave out only two lines at a time, which was as much as he thought the congregation could remember, and then when they had sung these he would go on with more until the whole hymn was finished.

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        When the Huntsville minister read the last verse, a half-dozen young people stood up over in the corner of the church, and as they began to sing there sounded with their voices the soft, low tones of some--to me--strange instrument (the organ), and such heavenly harmonies as I had never dreamed were in the world. No wonder my mother loved to come to Huntsville, and no wonder I looked forward after this first visit to the many I was to make, and did make, in the years which followed, until I felt at home, and knew by face and name all of these delightful people, the like of whom I shall not look upon again.

        Their "literary circles," the yearly "college commencements" in which they took such justifiable pride, and, above all, as I grew older and better able to appreciate them, the great political debates in which the foremost men of that period figured in the tournaments of oratory, were among the great attractions to this exceptional community. It was here, in 1859 or 1860, in the shade of a beautiful grove of oaks, where thousands of people were gathered, I sat for four hours and had no thought of the lapse of time as I listened to the fiery argument in favor of secession by William L. Yancey, then famous as one of the greatest political orators of our country.

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VIII
THE NEGRO AND SLAVERY IN THE OLD SOUTH

        THE negro of the South in the days of slavery so little resembles the "colored citizens" of half a century later that we of the earlier period scarcely recognize in him the descendant of those of his race with whom we were once so happily associated. The charm of manner, the pride of family--the "quality," as they so aptly termed it--the sentiment of loyalty, affection, and trust which characterized the relation between these faithful, patient, submissive, and happy creatures and the "white folks" in the "big house" is now only a memory.

        For nearly two hundred miles the fertile valley of the Tennessee, in which I was born and grew to manhood, was a succession of plantations tilled almost wholly by slaves. On some of these the owner lived and superintended in person the laborers, while on others an overseer took charge for the master, whose home was in some center of culture, usually where there were schools or colleges which the children attended.

        As child and boy I played and romped with the younger negroes belonging to my parents and neighbors; visited the various plantations, and knew intimately scores of this race living under the various conditions of slavery; and I know that with very rare exceptions the negroes were treated with great kindness and consideration. They were well

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fed, housed, and clothed, and when ill had the best available medical attendance. Had human sympathy been entirely absent, the protection of valuable property would for selfish reasons have assured this fostering care. They were happy and contented, and proved their gratitude by an affectionate loyalty and an efficient and profitable service. To my mind, in no other way can there be explained that wonderful exhibition of devotion in those millions of slaves toiling away on the home plantations during the four years of the war which their absent owners were waging for their continued enslavement. And this notwithstanding the knowledge which was general among them that the success of the Federal army meant for them freedom!

        As there were no white domestic servants in the South and no freed negroes in Alabama, since the law required that all emancipated slaves should be transported to a free state or exported to Liberia, my parents, both of whom favored emancipation, bought for house service two families of negroes, each consisting of the father and the mother and their children, some twelve or fifteen in all. They were as near being members of the family as was possible in the kindly relation of master and mistress and slave. When "Mack," our majordomo, was taken seriously ill, a room was given him, not in his own comfortable house, but in our residence, where we thought he could be more carefully watched. His wife, a woman of fine character, was a second mother to us as children. We called her "Mammy," and when our own mother was not at hand we knew to whom to look for our needs.

        When in later unhappy years the war came on and I was about to mount my horse and ride away to take my place in the ranks, and said good-by to my mother and my father,

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I knew that back in the kitchen this devoted black woman was waiting for me to come to have her blessing; and there, with her arms around "the boy she had brought up"--for I was not yet eighteen years old--I had the only "crying-spell" of the parting scene. I said, "Mammy, the chances are you won't see me again, and I know you will take good care of all the folks at home." She said she would; and she was true to her word, even refusing, as did all of our slaves, to go away when the Union army occupied our section and offered them their freedom from bondage.

        It was my father's custom to have family prayers, and the negro children were required to be present, the only distinction being that we sat on chairs and they had stools or small ottomans. Physical punishment was unknown except when the parents switched their own children for cause. I cannot imagine a more mutually satisfactory arrangement than such servitude under such humane conditions. There was a very great deal of this sort of relationship in our section, and, as I believe, throughout the entire South. There was another side to the picture, however; for the system did allow of cruelty and inhumanity, and, though this was very rare, it could and did exist at times, and it was the knowledge of this fact that made so many of the best people of the South emancipationists.

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