Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Opinions embodied in men, and thus made aggressive and militant, are the opinions which mark the union of thought with grit. A politician of this class is not content to comprehend and wield the elements of power already existing in a community, but he aims to make his individual conviction and purpose dominant over the convictions and purposes of the accredited exponents of public opinion. He cares little about his unpopularity at the start, and doggedly persists in his course against obstacles which seem insurmountable. A great, but mischievous, example of this power appeared in our own generation in the person of Mr. Calhoun, a statesman who stamped his individual mind on the policy and thinking of the country more definitely, perhaps, than any statesman since Hamilton, though his influence has, on the whole, been as evil as Hamilton's was, on the whole, beneficent. Keen-sighted, far-sighted, and inflexible, Mr. Calhoun clearly saw the logical foundations and logical results of the institution of Slavery; and though at first called an abstractionist and a fanatic by the looser thinkers of his own region, his inexorable argumentation, conquering by degrees politicians who could reason, made itself felt at last among politicians who could not reason; and the conclusions of his logic were adopted by thousands whose brains would have broken in the attempt to follow its processes. One of those rare deductive reasoners whose audacity marches abreast their genius, he would have been willing to fight to the last gasp for a conclusion which he had laboriously reached by rigid deduction through a score of intermediate steps, from premises in themselves repugnant to the primal instincts both of reason and humanity. Always ready to meet anybody in argument, he detested all reasoners who attempted to show the fallacy of his argument by pointing out the dangerous results to which it led. In this he sometimes brought to mind that inflexible professor of the deductive method who was timidly informed that his principles, if carried out, would split the world to pieces. "Let it split," was his careless answer; "there are enough more planets." By pure intellectual grit, he thus effected a revolution in the ideas and sentiments of the South, and through the South made his mind act on the policy of the nation. The present war has its root in the principles he advocated. Never flinching from any logical consequence of his principles, Mr. Calhoun did not rest until through him religion, morality, statesmanship, the Constitution of the United States, the constitution of man, were all bound in black. Chattel slavery, the most nonsensical as well as detestable of oppressions, was, to him, the most beneficent contrivance of human wisdom. He called it an institution: Mr. Emerson has more happily styled it a destitution. At last the chains of his iron logic were heard clanking on the whole Southern intellect. Reasoning the most masterly was employed to annihilate the first principles of reason; the understanding of man was insanely placed in direct antagonism to his moral instincts; and finally the astounding conclusion was reached, that the Creator of mankind has his pet races,--that God himself scouts his colored children, and nicknames them "Niggers."

It is delicious to watch the exulting and somewhat contemptuous audacity with which he hurries to the unforeseen conclusion those who have once been simple enough to admit his premises. Towards men who have some logical capacity his tone is that of respectful impatience; but as he goads on the reluctant and resentful victims of his reasoning, who loiter and limp painfully in the steps of his rapid deductions, he seems to say, with ironic scorn, "A little faster, my poor cripples!"

So confident was Mr. Calhoun in his capacity to demonstrate the validity of his horrible creed, that he was ever eager to measure swords with the most accomplished of his antagonists in the duel of debate. And it must be said that he despised all the subterfuges and evasions by which, in ordinary controversies, the real question is dodged, and went directly to the heart of the matter,--a resolute intellect, burning to grapple with another resolute intellect in a vital encounter. In common legislative debates, on the contrary, there is no vital encounter. The exasperated opponents, personally courageous, but deficient in clear and fixed ideas, mutually contrive to avoid the things essential to be discussed, while wantoning in all the forms of discussion. They assert, brag, browbeat, dogmatize, domineer, pummel each other with the _argumentum ad hominem_, and abundantly prove that they stand for opposite opinions; we watch them as we watch the feints and hits of a couple of pugilists in the ring; but after the sparring is over, we find that neither the Southern champion nor the Northern bruiser has touched the inner reality of the question to decide which they stripped themselves for the fight. In regard to the intellectual issue, they are like two bullies enveloping themselves in an immense concealing dust of arrogant words, and, as they fearfully retreat from personal collision, shouting furiously to each other, "Let me get at him!" And this is what is commonly called grit in politics,--abundant backbone to face persons, deficient brain-bone to encounter principles.

Not so was it when two debaters like Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Webster engaged in the contest of argument. Take, for example, as specimens of pure mental manliness, their speeches in the Senate, in 1833, on the question whether or not the Constitution is a compact between sovereign States. Give Mr. Calhoun those two words, "compact" and "sovereign," and he conducts you logically to Nullification and to all the consequences of Nullification. Andrew Jackson, a man in his kind, of indomitable resolution, intended to arrest the argument at a convenient point by the sword, and thus save himself the bother of going farther in the chain of inferences than he pleased. Mr. Webster grappled with the argument and with the man; and it is curious to watch that spectacle of a meeting between two such hostile minds. Each is confident of the strength of his own position; each is eager for a close hug of dialectics. Far from avoiding the point, they drive directly towards it, clearing their essential propositions from mutual misconception by the sharpest analysis and exactest statement. To get their minds near each other, to think close to the subject, to feel the griding contact of pure intellect with pure intellect, and, as spiritual beings, to conduct the war of reason with spiritual weapons,--this is their ambition. Conventionally courteous to each other, they are really in the deadliest antagonism; for their contest is the tug and strain of soul with soul, and each feels that defeat would be worse than death. No nervous irritation, no hard words, no passionate recriminations, no flinching from unexpected difficulties, no substitution of declamatory sophisms for rigorous inferences--but close, calm, ruthless grapple of thought with thought. To each, at the time, life seems to depend on the issue--not merely the life which a sword-cut or pistol-bullet can destroy, but immortal life, the life of immaterial minds and personalities, thus brought into spiritual feud. They know very well, that, whatever be the real result, the Webster-men will give the victory of argument to Webster, the Calhoun-men the victory of argument to Calhoun; but that consideration does not enter their thoughts as they prepare to close in that combat which is to determine, not to the world, but to each other, which is the stronger intellect, and which is in the right Few ever appreciate great men in this hostile attitude, not of their passions, but of their minds; and those who do it the least are their furious partisans. Most people are contented with the argument that tells, and are apt to be bored with the argument which refutes; but a true reasoner despises even his success, if he feels that two persons, himself and his opponent, know that he is in the wrong. And the strain on the whole being in this contest of intellect with intellect, and the reluctance with which the most combative enter it unless they are consciously strong, is well illustrated by Dr. Johnson's remark to some friends, when sickness had relaxed the tough fibre of his brain,--"If that fellow Burke were here now, he would kill me."

A peculiar kind of grit, not falling under any of the special expressions I have noted, yet partaking in some degree of all, is illustrated in the character of Lieutenant-General Grant. Without an atom of pretension or rhetoric, with none of the external signs of energy and intrepidity, making no parade of the immovable purpose, iron nerve, and silent, penetrating intelligence God has put into him, his tranquil greatness is hidden from superficial scrutiny behind a cigar, as President Lincoln's is behind a joke. When anybody tries to coax, cajole, overawe, browbeat, or deceive Lincoln, the President nurses his leg, and is reminded of a story; when anybody tries the same game with Grant, the General listens and--smokes. If you try to wheedle out of him his plans for a campaign, he stolidly smokes; if you call him an imbecile and a blunderer, he blandly lights another cigar; if you praise him as the greatest general living, he placidly returns the puff from his regalia; and if you tell him he should run for the Presidency, it does not disturb the equanimity with which he inhales and exhales the unsubstantial vapor which typifies the politician's promises. While you are wondering what kind of man this creature without a tongue is, you are suddenly electrified with the news of some splendid victory, proving that behind the cigar, and behind the face discharged of all tell-tale expression, is the best brain to plan and the strongest heart to dare among the generals of the Republic.

It is curious to mark a variation of this intellectual hardihood and personal force when the premises are not in the solidities, but in the oddities of thought and character, and whim stands stiffly up to the remotest inferences which may be deduced from its insanest freaks of individual opinion. Thus it is said that in one of our country towns there is an old gentleman who is an eccentric hater of women; and this crotchet of his character he carries to its extreme logical consequences. Not content with general declamation against the sex, he turns eagerly, the moment he receives the daily newspaper, to the list of deaths; and if he sees the death of a woman recorded, he gleefully exclaims,--"Good! good! there's another of 'em gone!"

We have heard of a man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way, they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in this respect is in its annihilating a prejudice by presenting a vivid vision of its theoretical consequences. Carlyle has an eccentric hatred of the eighteenth century, its manners, morals, politics, religion, and men. He has expressed this in various ways for thirty years; but in his last work, the "Life of Frederick the Great," his prejudice reached its logical climax in the assertion, that the only sensible thing the eighteenth century ever did was blowing out its own brains in the French Revolution.

Again, in discussion, some men have felicity in replying to a question, others a felicity in replying to the motive which prompted the question. In one case you get an answer addressed to your understanding; in the other, an answer which smites like a slap in the face. Thus, when a pert skeptic asked Martin Luther where God was before He created heaven, Martin stunned his querist with the retort,--"He was building hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you." And everybody will recollect the story of the self-complacent cardinal who went to confess to a holy monk, and thought by self-accusation to get the reputation of a saint.

"I have been guilty of every kind of sin," snivelled the cardinal.

"It is a solemn fact," replied the impassive monk.

"I have indulged in pride, ambition, malice, and revenge," groaned the cardinal.

"It is too true," answered the monk.

"Why, you fool," exclaimed the enraged dignitary, "you don't imagine that I mean all this to the letter!"

"Ho! ho!" said the monk, "so you have been a liar, too, have you?"

This relentless rebuker of shams furnishes us with a good transition to another department of the subject, namely, moral hardihood, or grit organized in conscience, and applying the most rigorous laws of ethics to the practical affairs of life. Now there is a wide difference between moral men, so called, and men moralized,--between men who lazily adopt and lazily practise the conventional moral proprieties of the time, and men transformed into the image of inexorable, unmerciful moral ideas, men in whom moral maxims appear organized as moral might. There are thousands who are prodigal of moral and benevolent opinions, and honestly eloquent in loud professions of what they would do in case circumstances called upon them to act; but when the occasion is suddenly thrust upon them, when temptation, leering into every corner and crevice of their weak and selfish natures, connects the notion of virtue with the reality of sacrifice, then, in that sharp pinch, they become suddenly apprised of the difference between rhetoric and rectitude, and find that their speeches have been far ahead of their powers of performance. Thus, in one of Gerald Griffin's novels, there is a scene in which a young Irish student, fresh from his scholastic ethics, amazes the company at his father's table, who are all devout believers in the virtues of the hair-trigger, by an eloquent declamation against the folly and the sin of duelling. At last one of the set gets sufficient breath to call him a coward. The hot Irish blood is up in an instant, a tumbler is thrown at the head of the doubter of his courage, and in ten seconds the young moralist is crossing swords with his antagonist in a duel.

But the characteristic of moral grit is equality with the occasions which exact its exercise. It is morality with thews and sinews and blood and passions,--morality made man, and eager to put its phrases to the test of action. It gives and takes hard blows,--aims not only to be upright in deed, but downright in word,--silences with a "Thus saith the Lord" all palliations of convenient sins,--scowls ominously at every attempt to reconcile the old feud between the right and the expedient and make them socially shake hands,--and when cant taints the air, clears it with good wholesome rage and execration. On the virtues of this stubborn conscientiousness it is needless to dilate; its limitations spring from its tendency to disconnect morality from mercy, and law from love,--its too frequent substitution of moral antipathies for moral insight,--and its habit of describing individual men, not as they are in themselves, but as they appear to its offended conscience. Understanding sin better than it understands sinners, it sometimes sketches phantoms rather than paints portraits,--identifies the weakly wicked with the extreme of Satanic wickedness,--and in its assaults, pitches _at_ its adversaries rather than really pitches _into_ them. But, in a large moral view, the light of intellectual perception should shine far in advance of the heat of ethical invective, and an ounce of characterization is worth a ton of imprecations. Indeed, moral grit, relatively admirable as it is, partakes of the inherent defect of other and lower kinds of grit, inasmuch as its force is apt to be as unsympathetic as it is uncompromising, as ungracious as it is invincible. It drives rather than draws, cuffs rather than coaxes. Intolerant of human infirmity, it is likewise often intolerant of all forms of human excellence which do not square with its own conceptions of right; and its philanthropy in the abstract is apt to secrete a subtile misanthropy in the concrete. Brave, unselfish, self-sacrificing, and flinching from no consequences which its principles may bring upon itself, it flinches from no consequences which they may bring upon others; and its attitude towards the laws and customs of instituted imperfection is almost as sourly belligerent as towards those of instituted iniquity.

Men of this austere and somewhat crabbed rectitude may be found in every department of life, but they are most prominent and most efficient when they engage in the reform of abuses, whether those abuses be in manners, institutions, or religion; and here they never shrink from the rough, rude work of the cause they espouse. They are commonly adored by their followers, commonly execrated by their opponents; but they receive the execration as the most convincing proof that they have performed their duties, as the shrieks of the wounded testify to the certainty of the shots. Indeed, they take a kind of grim delight in so pointing their invective that the adversaries of their principles are turned into enemies of their persons, and scout at all fame which does not spring from obloquy. As they thus exist in a state of war, the gentler elements of their being fall into the background; the bitterness of the strife works into their souls, and gives to their conscientious wrath a certain Puritan pitilessness of temper and tone. In the thick of the fight, their battle-cry is, "No quarter to the enemies of God and man!"--and as, unfortunately, there are few men who, tried by their standards, are friends of man, population very palpably thins as the lava-tide of their invective sweeps over it, and to the mental eye men, disappear as man emerges.

The gulf which yawns between uncompromising moral obligation and compromising human conduct is so immense that these fierce servants of the Lord seem to be fanatics and visionaries. But history demonstrates that they are among the most practical of all the forces which work in human affairs; for, without taking into account the response which their inflexible morality finds in the breasts of inflexibly moral men, their morality, in its application to common life, often becomes materialized, and shows an intimate connection with the most ordinary human appetites and passions. They commune with the mass of men through the subtile freemasonry of discontent. Compelled to hurl the thunderbolts of the moral law against injustice in possession, they unwittingly set fire to injustice smouldering in unrealized passions; and their speech is translated and transformed, in its passage into the public mind, into some such shape as this:--"These few persons who are dominant in Church and State, and who, while you physically and spiritually starve, are fed fat by the products of your labor and the illusions of your superstition, are powerful and prosperous, not from any virtue in themselves, but from the violation of those laws which God has ordained for the beneficent government of the universe. Their property and their power are the signs, not of their merits, but of their sins." The instinctive love of property and power are thus addressed to overturn the present possessors of property and power; and the vices of men are unconsciously enlisted in the service of the regeneration of man. The motives which impel whole masses of the community are commonly different from the motives of those reformers who urge the community to revolt; and their fervent denunciations of injustice bring to their side thousands of men who, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, only desire a chance to be unjust. The annals of all emancipations, revolutions, and reformations are disfigured by this fact. Better than what they supplant, their good is still relative, not absolute.

In the history of religious reforms, few men better illustrate this hard moral manliness, as distinguished from the highest moral heroism, than the sturdy Scotch reformer, John Knox. Tenacious, pugnacious, thoroughly honest and thoroughly earnest, superior to all physical and moral fear, destitute equally of fine sentiments and weak emotions, blurting out unwelcome opinions to queens as readily as to peasants, and in words which hit and hurt like knocks with the fist, he is one of those large, but somewhat coarse-grained natures, that influence rude populations by having so much in common with them, and in which the piety of the Christian, the thought of the Protestant, and the zeal of the martyr are curiously blended with the ferocity of the demagogue. Jenny Geddes, at the time when Archbishop Laud attempted to force Episcopacy upon Scotland, is a fair specimen of the kind of character which the teachings and the practice of such a man would tend to produce in a nation. This rustic heroine was present when the new bishop, hateful to Presbyterian eyes, began the service, with the smooth saying, "Let us read the Collect of the Day." Jenny rose in wrath, and cried out to the surpliced official of the Lord,--"Thou foul thief, wilt thou say mass at my lug?" and hurled her stool at his head. Then rose cries of "A Pope! a Pope! Stone him!" And "the worship of the Lord in Episcopal decency and order" was ignominiously stopped. And in the next reign, when the same thing was attempted, the Covenanters, the true spiritual descendants of Knox, opposed to the most brutal persecution a fierce, morose heroism, strangely compounded of barbaric passion and Christian fortitude. They were the most perfect specimens of pure moral grit the world has ever seen. In the great theological humorist of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Sydney Smith, the legitimate intellectual successor of the Reverend Rabelais and the Reverend Swift and the Reverend Sterne, their sullen intrepidity excites a mingled feeling, in which fun strives with admiration. In arguing against all intolerance, the intolerance of the church to which he belonged as well as the intolerance of the churches to which he was opposed, he said that persecution and bloodshed had no effect in preventing the Scotch, "that metaphysical people, from going to heaven in their true way instead of our true way"; and then comes the humorous sally,--"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic significance of their determined resistance to the insolent claims of ecclesiastical authority, their desperate hardihood elicits a more fitting tribute. "Hunted down," he says, "like wild beasts, tortured till their bones were beaten flat, imprisoned by hundreds, hanged by scores, exposed at one time to the license of soldiers from England, abandoned at another time to the mercy of bands of marauders from the Highlands, they still stood at bay in a mood so savage that the boldest and mightiest oppressor could not but dread the audacity of their despair."

But the man who, in modern times, stands out most prominently as the representative of this tough physical and moral fibre is Oliver Cromwell, the greatest of that class of Puritans who combined the intensest religious passions with the powers of the soldier and the statesman, and who, in some wild way, reconciled their austere piety with remorseless efficiency in the world of facts. After all the materials for an accurate judgment of Cromwell which have been collected by the malice of his libellers and the veneration of his partisans, he is still a puzzle to psychologists; for no one, so far, has bridged the space which separates the seeming anarchy of his mind from the executive decision of his conduct. A coarse, strong, massive English nature, thoroughly impregnated with Hebrew thought and Hebrew passion,--democratic in his sympathy with the rudest political and religious feelings of his party, autocratic in the consciousness of superior abilities and tyrannic will,--emancipated from the illusions of vanity, but not from those of ambition and pride,--shrinking from no duty and no policy from the fear of obloquy or the fear of death,--a fanatic and a politician,--a demagogue and a dictator,--seeking the kingdom of heaven, but determined to take the kingdom of England by the way,--believing in God, believing in himself, and believing in his Ironsides,--clothing spiritual faith in physical force, and backing dogmas and prayers with pikes and cannon,--anxious at once that his troops should trust in God and keep their powder dry,--with a mind deep indeed, but distracted by internal conflicts, and prolific only in enormous, half-shaped ideas, which stammer into expression at once obscure and ominous, the language a strange compound of the slang of the camp and the mystic phrases of inspired prophets and apostles,--we still feel throughout, that, whatever may be the contradictions of his character, they are not such as to impair the ruthless energy of his will. Whatever he dared to think he dared to do. No practical emergency ever found him deficient either in sagacity or resolution, however it might have found him deficient in mercy. He overrode the moral judgments of ordinary men as fiercely as he overrode their physical resistance, crushing prejudices as well as Parliaments, ideas as well as armies; and whether his task was to cut off the head of an unmanageable king, or disperse an unmanageable legislative assembly, or massacre an unmanageable Irish garrison, or boldly establish himself as the uncontrolled supreme authority of the land, he ever did it thoroughly and unrelentingly, and could always throw the responsibility of the deed on the God of battles and the God of Cromwell. In all this we observe the operation of a colossal practical force rather than an ideal power, of grit rather than heroism. However much he may command that portion of our sympathies which thrill at the touch of vigorous action, there are other sentiments of our being which detect something partial, vulgar, and repulsive even in his undisputed greatness.

In truth, grit, in its highest forms, is not a form of courage deserving of unmixed respect and admiration. Admitting its immense practical influence in public and private life, conceding its value in the rough, direct struggle of person with person and opinions with institutions, it is still by no means the top and crown of heroic character; for it lacks the element of beauty and the element of sympathy; it is individual, unsocial, bigoted, relatively to occasions; and its force has no necessary connection with grandeur, generosity, and enlargement of soul. Even in great men, like Cromwell, there is something in its aspect which is harsh, ugly, haggard, and ungenial; even in them it is strong by the stifling of many a generous thought and tolerant feeling; and when it descends to animate sterile and stunted natures, endowed with sufficient will to make their meanness or malignity efficient, its unfruitful force is absolutely hateful. It has done good work for the cause of truth and right; but it has also done bad work for the cause of falsehood and wrong: for evil has its grit as well as virtue. As it lacks, suppresses, or subordinates imagination, it is shorn of an important portion of a complete manhood; for it not only loses the perception of beauty, but the power of passing into other minds. It never takes the point of view of the persons it opposes; its object is victory, not insight; and it thus fails in that modified mercy to men which springs from an interior knowledge of their characters. Even when it is the undaunted force through which moral wrath expresses its hatred of injustice and wrong, its want of imaginative perception makes it somewhat caricature the sinners it inveighs against. It converts imperfect or immoral men into perfect demons, which humanity as well as reason refuses to accept; and it is therefore not surprising that the prayer of its indignant morality sometimes is, "Almighty God, condemn them, for they _know_ what they do!" But we cannot forget that there sounds down the ages, from the saddest and most triumphant of all martyrdoms, a different and a diviner prayer,--"Father, forgive them, for they know _not_ what they do!"

Indeed, however much we may be struck with the startling immediateness of effect which follows the exercise of practical force, we must not forget the immense agency in human affairs of the ideal powers of the soul. These work creatively from within to mould character, not only inflaming great passions, but touching the springs of pity, tenderness, gentleness, and love,--above all, infusing that wide-reaching sympathy which sends the individual out of the grit-guarded fortress of his personality into the wide plain of the race. The culmination of these ideal powers is in genius and heroism, which draw their inspiration from ideal and spiritual sources, and radiate it in thoughts beautifully large and deeds beautifully brave. They do not merely exert power, they communicate it. If you are overcome by a man of grit, he insolently makes you conscious of your own weakness. If you are overcome by genius and heroism, you are made participants in their strength; for they overcome only to invigorate and uplift. They sweep on their gathering disciples to the object they have in view, by making it an object of affection as well as duty. Their power to allure and to attract is not lost even when their goal is the stake or the cross. They never, in transient ignominy and pain, lose sight and feeling of the beauty and bliss inseparably associated with goodness and virtue; and the happiest death-beds have often been on the rack or in the flame of the hero-martyr. And they are also, in their results, great practical influences; for they break down the walls which separate man from man,--by magnanimous thought or magnanimous act shame us out of our bitter personal contentions, and flash the sentiment of a common nature into our individual hatreds and oppositions. As grit decomposes society into an aggregate of strong and weak persons, genius and heroism unite them in one humanity. Thus, not many years ago, we were all battling about the higher law and the law to return fugitive slaves. It was argument against argument, passion against passion, person against person, grit against grit. The notions advanced regarding virtue and vice, justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity, were as different as if the controversy had not been between men and men, but between men and cattle. There were no signs among the combatants that they had the common reason and the common instincts of a common nature. Then came a woman of genius, who refused to credit the horrible conceit that the diversity was essential, who resolutely believed that the human heart was a unit, and whose glance, piercing the mist of opinions and interests, saw in the deep and universal sources of humane and human action the exact point where her blow would tell; and in a novel unexampled in the annals of literature for popular effect, shook the whole public reason and public conscience of the country, by the most searching of all appeals to its heart and imagination.

THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE.

My name is Esek Pettibone, and I wish to affirm in the outset that it is a good thing to be well-born. In thus connecting the mention of my name with a positive statement, I am not unaware that a catastrophe lies coiled up in the juxtaposition. But I cannot help writing plainly that I am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. ESTO PERPETUA! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done _him_ in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway described Mount Washington, I thought the Duke felt a propensity to "hunch up some." Somehow it is pleasant to look down on the crowd and have a conscious right to do so.

Left an orphan at the tender age of four years, having no brothers or sisters to prop me round with young affections and sympathies, I fell into three pairs of hands, excellent in their way, but peculiar. Patience, Eunice, and Mary Ann Pettibone were my aunts on my father's side. All my mother's relations kept shady when the lonely orphan looked about for protection; but Patience Pettibone, in her stately way, said,--"The boy belongs to a good family, and he shall never want while his three aunts can support him." So I went to live with my plain, but benignant protectors, in the State of New Hampshire.

During my boyhood, the best-drilled lesson that fell to my keeping was this:--"Respect yourself. We come of more than ordinary parentage. Superior blood was probably concerned in getting up the Pettibones. Hold your head erect, and some day you shall have proof of your high lineage."

I remember once, on being told that I must not share my juvenile sports with the butcher's three little beings, I begged to know why not. Aunt Eunice looked at Patience, and Mary Ann knew what she meant.

"My child," slowly murmured the eldest sister, "our family no doubt came of a very old stock; perhaps we belong to the nobility. Our ancestors, it is thought, came over laden with honors, and no doubt were embarrassed with riches, though the latter importation has dwindled in the lapse of years. Respect yourself, and when you grow up you will not regret that your old and careful aunt did not wish you to play with butchers' offspring."

I felt mortified that I had ever had a desire to "knuckle up" with any but kings' sons or sultans' little boys. I longed to be among my equals in the urchin-line, and fly my kite with only high-born youngsters.

Thus I lived in a constant scene of self-enchantment on the part of the sisters, who assumed all the port and feeling that properly belong to ladies of quality. Patrimonial splendor to come danced before their dim eyes; and handsome settlements, gay equipages, and a general grandeur of some sort loomed up in the future for the American branch of the House of Pettibone.

It was a life of opulent self-delusion, which my aunts were never tired of nursing; and I was too young to doubt the reality of it. All the members of our little household held up their heads, as if each said, in so many words, "There is no original sin in _our_ composition, whatever of that commodity there may be mixed up with the common clay of Snowborough."

Aunt Patience was a star, and dwelt apart. Aunt Eunice looked at her through a determined pair of spectacles, and worshipped while she gazed. The youngest sister lived in a dreamy state of honors to come, and had constant zoological visions of lions, griffins, and unicorns, drawn and quartered in every possible style known to the Heralds' College. The Reverend Hebrew Bullet, who used to drop in quite often and drink several compulsory glasses of home-made wine, encouraged his three parishioners in their aristocratic notions, and extolled them for what he called their "stooping down to every-day life." He differed with the ladies of our house only on one point. He contended that the unicorn of the Bible and the rhinoceros of to-day were one and the same animal. My aunts held a different opinion.

In the sleeping-room of my Aunt Patience reposed a trunk. Often during my childish years I longed to lift the lid and spy among its contents the treasures my young fancy conjured up as lying there in state. I dared not ask to have the cover raised for my gratification, as I had often been told I was "too little" to estimate aright what that armorial box contained. "When you grow up, you shall see the inside of it," Aunt Mary Ann used to say to me; and so I wondered, and wished, but all in vain. I must have the virtue of _years_ before I could view the treasures of past magnificence so long entombed in that wooden sarcophagus. Once I saw the faded sisters bending over the trunk together, and, as I thought, embalming something in camphor. Curiosity impelled me to linger, but, under some pretext, I was nodded out of the room.

Although my kinswomen's means were far from ample, they determined that Swiftmouth College should have the distinction of calling me one of her sons, and accordingly I was in due time sent for preparation to a neighboring academy. Years of study and hard fare in country boarding-houses told upon my self-importance as the descendant of a great Englishman, notwithstanding all my letters from the honored three came freighted with counsel to "respect myself and keep up the dignity of the family." Growing-up man forgets good counsel. The Arcadia of respectability is apt to give place to the levity of football and other low-toned accomplishments. The book of life, at that period, opens readily at fun and frolic, and the insignia of greatness give the schoolboy no envious pangs.

I was nineteen when I entered the hoary halls of Swiftmouth. I call them hoary, because they had been built more than fifty years. To me they seemed uncommonly hoary, and I snuffed antiquity in the dusty purlieus. I now began to study, in good earnest, the wisdom of the past. I saw clearly the value of dead men and mouldy precepts, especially if the former had been entombed a thousand years, and if the latter were well done in sounding Greek and Latin. I began to reverence royal lines of deceased monarchs, and longed to connect my own name, now growing into college popularity, with some far-off mighty one who had ruled in pomp and luxury his obsequious people. The trunk in Snowborough troubled my dreams. In that receptacle still slept the proof of our family distinction. "I will go," quoth I, "to the home of my aunts next vacation and there learn _how_ we became mighty, and discover precisely why we don't practise to-day our inherited claims to glory."

I went to Snowborough. Aunt Patience was now anxious to lay before her impatient nephew the proof he burned to behold. But first she must explain. All the old family documents and letters were, no doubt, destroyed in the great fire of '98, as nothing in the shape of parchment or paper implying nobility had ever been discovered in Snowborough, or elsewhere. _But_--there had been preserved, for many years, a suit of imperial clothes, that had been worn by their great-grandfather in England, and, no doubt, in the New World also. These garments had been carefully watched and guarded; for were they not the proof that their owner belonged to a station in life, second, if second at all, to the royal court of King George itself? Precious casket, into which I was soon to have the privilege of gazing! Through how many long years these fond, foolish virgins had lighted their unflickering lamps of expectation and hope at this cherished old shrine!

I was now on my way to the family repository of all our greatness. I went up stairs "on the jump." We all knelt down before the well-preserved box; and my proud Aunt Patience, in a somewhat reverent manner, turned the key. My heart,--I am not ashamed to confess it now, although it is forty years since the quartette, in search of family honors, were on their knees that summer afternoon in Snowborough,--my heart beat high. I was about to look on that which might be a duke's or an earl's regalia. And I was descended from the owner in a direct line! I had lately been reading Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus"; and I remembered, there before the trunk, the lines,--

"O sacred receptacle of my joys,
Sweet cell of virtue and nobility!"

The lid went up, and the sisters began to unroll the precious garments, which seemed all enshrined in aromatic gums and spices. The odor of that interior lives with me to this day; and I grow faint with the memory of that hour. With pious precision the clothes were uncovered, and at last the whole suit was laid before my expectant eyes.

Reader! I am an old man now, and have not long to walk this planet. But, whatever dreadful shock may be in reserve for my declining years, I am certain I can bear it; for I went through that scene at Snowborough, and still live!

When the garments were fully displayed, all the aunts looked at me. I had been to college; I had studied Burke's "Peerage"; I had been once to New York. Perhaps I could immediately name the exact station in noble British life to which that suit of clothes belonged. I could; I saw it all at a glance. I grew flustered and pale. I dared not look my poor deluded female relatives in the face.

"What rank in the peerage do these gold-laced garments and big buttons betoken?" cried all three.

"_It is a suit of servant's livery!_" gasped I, and fell back with a shudder.

That evening, after the sun had gone down, we buried those hateful garments in a ditch at the bottom of the garden. Rest there, perturbed body-coat, yellow trousers, brown gaiters, and all!

"Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye!"

UP THE ST. MARY'S.

If Sergeant Rivers was a natural king among my dusky soldiers, Corporal Robert Sutton was the natural prime-minister. If not in all respects the ablest, he was the wisest man in our ranks. As large, as powerful, and as black as our good-looking Color-Sergeant, but more heavily built and with less personal beauty, he had a more massive brain and a far more meditative and systematic intellect. Not yet grounded even in the spelling-book, his modes of thought were nevertheless strong, lucid, and accurate; and he yearned and pined for intellectual companionship beyond all ignorant men whom I have ever met. I believe that he would have talked all day and all night, for days together, to any officer who could instruct him, until his companion, at least, fell asleep exhausted. His comprehension of the whole problem of Slavery was more thorough and far-reaching than that of any Abolitionist, so far as its social and military aspects went; in that direction I could teach him nothing, and he taught me much. But it was his methods of thought which always impressed me chiefly: superficial brilliancy he left to others, and grasped at the solid truth. Of course his interest in the war and in the regiment was unbounded; he did not take to drill with especial readiness, but he was insatiable of it and grudged every moment of relaxation. Indeed, he never had any such moments; his mind was at work all the time, even when he was singing hymns, of which he had endless store. He was not, however, one of our leading religionists, but his moral code was solid and reliable, like his mental processes. Ignorant as he was, the "years that bring the philosophic mind" had yet been his, and most of my young officers seemed boys beside him. He was a Florida man, and had been chiefly employed in lumbering and piloting on the St. Mary's River, which divides Florida from Georgia. Down this stream he had escaped in a "dug-out," and after thus finding the way, had returned (as had not a few of my men, in other cases) to bring away wife and child. "I wouldn't have leff my child, Cunnel," he said, with an emphasis that sounded the depths of his strong nature. And up this same river he was always imploring to be allowed to guide an expedition.

Many other men had rival propositions to urge, for they gained self-confidence from drill and guard-duty, and were growing impatient of inaction. "Ought to go to work, Sa,--don't believe in we lyin' in camp, eatin' up the perwisions." Such were the quaint complaints, which I heard with joy. Looking over my note-books of that period, I find them filled with topographical memoranda, jotted down by a nickering candle, from the evening talk of the men,--notes of vulnerable points along the coast, charts of rivers, locations of pickets. I prized these conversations not more for what I thus learned of the country than for what I learned of the men. One could thus measure their various degrees of accuracy and their average military instinct; and I must say that in every respect, save the accurate estimate of distances, they stood the test well. But no project took my fancy so much, after all, as that of the delegate from the St. Mary's River.

The best peg on which to hang an expedition in the Department of the South, in those days, was the promise of lumber. Dwelling in the very land of Southern pine, the Department authorities had to send North for it, at a vast expense. There was reported to be plenty in the enemy's country, but somehow the colored soldiers were the only ones who had been lucky enough to obtain any, thus far, and the supply brought in by our men, after flooring the tents of the white regiments and our own, was running low. An expedition of white troops, four companies, with two steamers and two schooners, had lately returned empty-handed, after a week's foraging; and now it was our turn. They said the mills were all burned; but should we go up the St. Mary's, Corporal Sutton was prepared to offer more lumber than we had transportation to carry. This made the crowning charm of his suggestion. But there is never any danger of erring on the side of secrecy, in a military department; and I resolved to avoid all undue publicity for our plans, by not finally deciding on any until we should get outside the bar. This was happily approved by my superior officers, Major-General Hunter and Brigadier-General Saxton; and I was accordingly permitted to take three steamers, with four hundred and sixty-two officers and men, and two or three invited guests, and go down the coast on my own responsibility. We were, in short, to win our spurs; and if, as among the Araucanians, our spurs were made of lumber, so much the better. The whole history of the Department of the South had been defined as "a military picnic," and now we were to take our share of the entertainment.

It seemed a pleasant share, when, after the usual vexations and delays, we found ourselves gliding down the full waters of Beaufort River, the three vessels having sailed at different hours, with orders to rendezvous at St. Simon's Island, on the coast of Georgia. Until then, the flag-ship, so to speak, was to be the "Ben De Ford," Captain Hallett,--this being by far the largest vessel, and carrying most of the men. Major Strong was in command upon the "John Adams," an army gunboat, carrying a thirty-pound Parrott gun, two ten-pound Parrotts, and an eight-inch howitzer Captain Trowbridge (since promoted Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment) had charge of the famous "Planter," brought away from the Rebels by Robert Small; she carried a ten-pound Parrott gun, and two howitzers. The John Adams was our main reliance. She was an old East-Boston ferry-boat, a "double-ender," admirable for river-work, but unfit for sea-service. She drew seven feet of water; the Planter drew only four; but the latter was very slow, and being obliged to go to St. Simon's by an inner passage, would delay us from the beginning. She delayed us so much, before the end, that we virtually parted company, and her career was almost entirely separated from our own.

From boyhood I have had a fancy for boats, and have seldom been without a share, usually more or less fractional, in a rather indeterminate number of punts and wherries. But when, for the first time, I found myself at sea as Commodore of a fleet of armed steamers,--for even the Ben De Ford boasted a six-pounder or so,--it seemed rather an unexpected promotion. But it is a characteristic of army life, that one adapts one's self, as coolly as in a dream, to the most novel responsibilities. One sits on court-martial, for instance, and decides on the life of a fellow-creature, without being asked any inconvenient questions as to previous knowledge of Blackstone; and after such an experience, shall one shrink from wrecking a steamer or two in the cause of the nation? So I placidly accepted my naval establishment, as if it were a new form of boat-club, and looked over the charts, balancing between one river and another, as if deciding whether to pull up or down Lake Quinsigamond. If military life ever contemplated the exercise of the virtue of humility under any circumstances, this would perhaps have been a good opportunity to begin its practice. But as the "Regulations" clearly contemplated nothing of the kind, and as I had never met with any precedent which looked in that direction, I had learned to check promptly all such weak proclivities.

Captain Hallett proved the most frank and manly of sailors, and did everything for our comfort. He was soon warm in his praises of the demeanor of our men, which was very pleasant to hear, as this was the first time that colored soldiers in any number had been conveyed on board a transport, and I know of no place where a white volunteer appears to so much disadvantage. His mind craves occupation, his body is intensely uncomfortable, the daily emergency is not great enough to call out his heroic qualities, and he is apt to be surly, discontented, and impatient even of sanitary rules. The Southern black soldier, on the other hand, is seldom sea-sick, (at least, such is my experience,) and, if properly managed, is equally contented, whether idle or busy; he is, moreover, so docile that all needful rules are executed with cheerful acquiescence, and the quarters can therefore be kept clean and wholesome. Very forlorn faces were soon visible among the officers in the cabin, but I rarely saw such among the men.

Pleasant still seemed our enterprise, as we anchored at early morning in the quiet waters of St. Simon's Sound, and saw the light fall softly on the beach and the low bluffs, on the picturesque plantation-houses which nestled there, and the graceful naval vessels that lay at anchor before us. When we afterwards landed, the air had that peculiar Mediterranean translucency which Southern islands wear; and the plantation we visited had the loveliest tropical garden, though tangled and desolate, which I have ever seen in the South. The deserted house was embowered in great blossoming shrubs, and filled with hyacinthine odors, among which predominated that of the little Chickasaw roses which everywhere bloomed and trailed around. There were fig-trees and date-palms, crape-myrtles and wax-myrtles, Mexican agaves and English ivies, japonicas, bananas, oranges, lemons, oleanders, jonquils, great cactuses, and wild Florida lilies. This was not the plantation which Mrs. Kemble has since made historic, although that was on the same island; and I could not waste much sentiment over it, for it had belonged to a Northern renegade, Thomas Butler King. Yet I felt then, as I have felt a hundred times since, an emotion of heart-sickness at this desecration of a homestead,--and especially when, looking from a bare upper window of the empty house upon a range of broad, flat, sunny roofs, such as children love to play on, I thought how that place might have been loved by yet innocent hearts, and I mourned anew the sacrilege of war.

I had visited the flag-ship Wabash ere we left Port-Royal Harbor, and had obtained a very kind letter of introduction from Admiral Dupont, that stately and courtly potentate, elegant as one's ideal French marquis; and under these credentials I received polite attention from the naval officers at St. Simon's,--Acting Volunteer Lieutenant Budd, U. S. N., of the gunboat Potomska, and Acting Master Moses, U. S. N., of the barque Fernandina. They made valuable suggestions in regard to the different rivers along the coast, and gave vivid descriptions of the last previous trip up the St. Mary's, undertaken by Captain Stevens, U. S. N., in the gunboat Ottawa, when he had to fight his way past batteries at every bluff in descending the narrow and rapid stream. I was warned that no resistance would be offered to the ascent, but only to our return; and was further cautioned against the mistake, then common, of underrating the courage of the Rebels. "It proved impossible to dislodge those fellows from the banks," my informant said; "they had dug rifle-pits, and swarmed like hornets, and when fairly silenced in one direction, they were sure to open upon us from another." All this sounded alarming, but it was nine months before that the event had happened; and although nothing had gone up the river since, I was satisfied that the resistance now to be encountered was very much smaller. And something must be risked, anywhere.