Dorothy South
With the debt-paying problem he got on much better. He had now a whole year’s accumulated income from his annuity, and he devoted all of it at once to the lightening of this burden. He studied markets as if they had been problems in physics, and guided himself in his planting by the results of these studies. He had sold apples and bacon and sweet potatoes the year before, as we know, with results that encouraged him to go further in the direction of “Yankee farming.” This year he planted large areas in watermelons and other large areas in other edible things that the people of the cities want, but which no south side Virginia planter had ever thought of growing for sale.
He was laughed at while doing all this, and envied when the results of it appeared.
He deliberately implicated Dorothy in these his misdeeds, also, doing on her plantation precisely as he did on his own, so that when late in the autumn he gave account of his stewardship he was able to inform the court, to its astonishment and to that of the entire community, that he had discharged every dollar of debt that had rested upon his ward’s estate. The judge applauded such management of a trust estate, and Arthur Brent’s neighbors wondered. Some of them saw in his success ground of approval of “Yankee farming”; all of them conceived a new respect for the ability of a man who had thus, in so brief a time, freed two old estates from the hereditary debts that had been accumulating for slow generations.
Arthur had been additionally spurred and stimulated to the accomplishment of this end, by the forebodings of evil in connection with national politics which had gravely haunted him throughout the year.
In May the Republican party had nominated Mr. Lincoln, and about the same time the Democrats made his election a practical certainty. There was clearly a heavy majority of the people opposed to his election, but the division of that opposition into three hostile camps with three rival candidates, rendered Republican success a foregone conclusion. By some at least of the politicians the division was deliberately intended to produce that result, while the great mass of the people opposed to Mr. Lincoln and seriously fearing the consequences of his election, deeply deplored the condition thus brought about.
The Republican party at that time existed only at the North. For the first time in history the election threatened the country with the choice of a president by an exclusively sectional vote, and in opposition to the will of the majority of the people. On the popular vote, in fact, Mr. Lincoln was in a minority of nearly a million, and every electoral vote cast for him came from the northern states. In most of the southern states indeed there was no canvass made for him, no electoral nominations presented in his behalf.
Added to this was the fact that the one point on which his party was agreed, the one bond of opinion that held it together for political action, the one impulse held in common by all its adherents, was hostility to slavery, which the men of the South construed to mean hostility – intense and implacable – to the states in which that institution existed and even to the people of those states.
The “platform” on which Mr. Lincoln was nominated, did indeed protest, as he had himself done in many public utterances, that this was a misinterpretation of attitude and purpose; that the party disclaimed all intent to interfere with slavery in the slave states; that it held firmly to the right of each state to regulate that matter for itself, and repudiated the assumption of any power on the part of the Federal government to control the action of the several states or in any wise to legislate for them on this subject.
But these pledges were taken at the South to mean no more than a desire to secure united action in an election. The party proclaimed its purpose, while letting slavery alone in the states, to forbid its extension to the new territories. This alone was deemed a program of injustice by that very active group of Southern men who, repudiating the teachings of Jefferson, and Wythe and Henry Clay, had come to believe in African slavery as a thing right in itself, a necessity of the South, a labor system to be upheld and defended and extended, upon its own merits. These men contended that the new territories were the common and equal possession of all the people; that any attempt by Federal authority to deny to the states thereafter to be formed out of those territories, the right to determine for themselves whether they would permit or forbid slavery, was a wrong to the South which had contributed of its blood and treasure even more largely than the North had done to their acquisition. They further contended that any such legislation would of necessity involve an assumption of Federal authority to control states in advance of their formation, – an assumption which might easily be construed to authorize a like Federal control of states already existing, including those that had helped to create the Union.
All this Arthur Brent contemplated with foreboding from the first. He anticipated Mr. Lincoln’s election from the beginning of the absurd campaign. And while he could not at all agree with those who were prepared to see in that event an occasion for secession and revolution, he foreboded those calamities as results likely in fact to follow. And even should a kindly fate avert them for a time, he saw clearly that the alignment of parties in the nation upon sectional issues must be productive of new and undreamed of irritations, full of threatening to the peace of the Republic.
No more than any of his neighbors could he forecast the events of the next few years. “But,” he wrote to Dorothy in the autumn “I see that the election of Mr. Lincoln is now a certainty; I foresee that it will lead to a determined movement in the South in favor of secession and the dissolution of the Federal Union. It ought to be possible, if that must come, to arrange it on a basis of peaceable agreement to disagree – the Southern States assuming all responsibility for slavery till they can rid themselves of it with safety to society, and the Northern people washing their hands once for all of an iniquity from which they have derived the major part of the profit. This they did, particularly during those years after 1808, in which the African slave trade was prohibited by law, but was carried on by New England ship masters and New England merchants with so great a profit that Justice Joseph Story of the United States supreme court, though himself a New Englander, was denounced by the New England press and even threatened with a violent ejection from the bench, because he sought to prevent and punish it, in obedience to the national statute.
“But I am wandering from my theme,” he continued. “I wanted to say that while I think there is no real occasion for a disruption of the Union, I gravely fear that it is coming. And while I think it should be possible to accomplish it peaceably I do not believe it will be done in that way. There are too many hot heads on both sides, for that. There is too much gunpowder lying around, and there will be too many sparks flying about. Listen, Dorothy! I foresee that Mr. Lincoln will be elected in November. I anticipate an almost immediate attempt on the part of the cotton states to dissolve the Union by secession. I shall do everything I can to help other sober minded Virginians to keep Virginia out of this movement, and if Virginia can be kept out of it, the other border states will accept her action as controlling, and they too will stay out of the revolutionary enterprise. In that case the states farther South will be amenable to reason, and if there is reason and discretion exercised at Washington and in the North, some means may possibly be found for adjusting the matter – Virginia and Kentucky perhaps acting successfully as mediators. But I tell you frankly, I do not expect success in the program to which I intend to devote all my labors and all I have of influence. I look to see Virginia drawn into the conflict. I look for war on a scale far more stupendous than any this country has ever seen.
“I can no more foresee what the result of such a war will be than you can – so far at least as military operations are concerned. But some of the results I think I do see very clearly. Virginia will be the battle-ground, and Virginia will be desolated as few lands have ever been in the history of the world. Another thing, Dorothy. If this war comes, as I fear it will, it will make an end of African slavery in this country. For if we of the South are beaten in the conflict of arms, the complete extinction of slavery will be decreed as a part of the penalty of war and the price of peace. If we are successful, we shall have set up a Canada at our very doors. The Ohio and the Potomac will become a border beyond which every escaping negro will be absolutely free, and across which every conceivable influence will be brought to bear upon the negroes to induce them to run away. Under such conditions the institution must become an intolerable as well as an unprofitable annoyance, and it will speedily disappear.
“Now I come to what I set out to say. Before election day this present fall I shall have paid off every dollar of the debts that rest upon Pocahontas and Wyanoke. You and I will be free, at least, from that source of embarrassment, and whatever the military or political, or legal or social results of the war may be, you and I will be owners of land that is subject to no claim of any kind against us. I have grievously compromised your dignity as well as my own in my efforts to bring this about, but you are not held responsible for my ‘Yankee doings,’ at Pocahontas, and as for me, I am not thin-skinned in such matters. I’d far rather be laughed at for paying debts in undignified ways than be dunned for debts that I cannot pay.”
This letter reached Dorothy in Paris, on her return through Switzerland, from an Italian journey, undertaken in the early summer before the danger of Roman fever should be threatening. Had such a letter come to her a few months earlier, her response to it would have been an utterly submissive assent to all that her guardian had done, with perhaps a wondering question or two as to why he should feel it necessary to ask her consent to anything he might be minded to do, or even to tell her what he had done. But Dorothy had grown steadily more reserved in her writing to him, as experience had slowly but surely awakened womanly consciousness in her soul. She was still as loyally devoted as ever to Arthur, but she shrank now as she had not been used to do, from too candid an expression of her devotion. The child had completely given place to the woman in her nature and the woman was far less ready than the child had been to reveal her feelings. A succession of suitors for her hand had taught Dorothy to think of herself as a woman bound to maintain a certain reserve in her intercourse with men. They had awakened in her a consciousness of the fact, of which she had scarcely even thought in the old, childish days, that Arthur Brent was a young man and Dorothy South a young woman, and that it would ill become Dorothy South to reveal herself too frankly to this young man. She did not quite know what there was in her mind to reveal or to withhold from revelation, but she instinctively felt the necessity strong upon her to guard herself against her own impulsive truthfulness. She had no more notion that she had dared give her woman’s love to Arthur unasked, than she had that he – who had never asked for it – desired her love. He remained to her in fact the enormously superior being that she had always held him to be, but she found herself blushing sometimes when she remembered the utter abandon with which she had been accustomed to lay bare her innermost thoughts and sentiments, her very soul, indeed, to his scrutiny.
She knew of no reason why she should now alter her attitude or her demeanor towards him, and she resolutely determined that she would not in the least change either, yet the letter she wrote to him on this occasion was altogether unlike that which she would have written a few months earlier upon a like occasion. She expressed her approval of all that he had done with respect to her estate, where in like case a few months earlier she would have asked him wonderingly what she had to do with things planned and accomplished by him. She expressed acquiescence as one might who has the right to approve or to criticise, where before she would have concerned herself only with rejoicings that her guardian had got things as he wanted them, in accordance with his unquestioned and unquestionable right to have everything as he wanted it to be in a world quite unworthy of him.
In brief, Dorothy’s letter depressed Arthur Brent almost unendurably. Because he missed something from it that long use had taught him to expect in all her utterances to him, he read into it much of coldness, alienation, indifference, which it did not contain. He sat up all night, torturing himself with doubts for which a frequent reperusal of the letter furnished him no shadow of justification; and when the gray morning came he ordered his horse, meaning to ride purposely nowhither. But when the horse was brought, a new and overpowering sense of Dorothy’s absence and perhaps her alienation, came over him. He remembered vividly every detail of that first morning’s ride he had had with her, and instinctively he copied her proceeding on that occasion. Drawing forth his handkerchief he rubbed the animal’s flanks and rumps with it to its soiling.
“I’ll not ride this morning, Ben,” he said. “I’ll go back to the house and write a letter to your Mis’ Dorothy and I’ll enclose that handkerchief for her inspection.”
XXXII
THE SHADOW FALLS
W ITH the autumn came that shadow over the land which Arthur Brent had so greatly dreaded. Mr. Lincoln’s election was quickly succeeded by the secession of South Carolina. One after another the far Southern States followed, and presently the seceding states allied themselves in a new confederacy.
The whole country was in a ferment. The founders of the Union had made no provision whatever for such a state of things as this, and even the wisest men were at a loss to say what ought to be done or what could be done. There seemed to be nowhere any power or authority adequate to deal with the situation in one way or in another. All was chaos in the coolest minds while the hotheads on either side were daily making matters worse by their intemperate utterances and by the unyielding arrogance of their attitude.
In the meantime the administration at Washington seemed intent only upon preventing the outbreak of open war until its term should end on the fourth of March, 1861, while those into whose hands the government must pass on that date had not only no authority to act but no privilege even of advising.
It seemed fortunate at the time, that Virginia refused to join in the secession movement. Her refusal and her commanding influence over the other border states seemed for a time to provide an opportunity for wise counsels to assert themselves. There were radical secessionists in Virginia and uncompromising opponents of secession on any terms. But the attitude of the great majority of Virginians, as was shown in the election of a constitutional convention on the fourth of February, was one of earnestness for peace and reconciliation and the preservation of the Federal Union.
The Virginians believed firmly in the constitutional right of any state to withdraw from the Union, but the majority among them saw in Mr. Lincoln’s election no proper occasion for the exercise of that right. They regarded the course of the cotton states in withdrawing from the Union as one strictly within their right, but as utterly unwise and unnecessary. On the other hand they firmly denied the right of the national government to coerce the seceding states or in any manner to make war upon them.
Arthur Brent was an uncompromising believer in the right of a state to secede, and equally an uncompromising opponent of secession as a policy. That part of Virginia in which he lived was divided in opinion and sentiment, with a distinct preponderance of opinion in behalf of secession. But when the call came for the election of a constitutional convention to decide upon Virginia’s course the secessionists of his district were represented by two rival candidates, both fiercely favoring secession. The only discoverable difference in their views was that one of them wanted the convention to adopt the ordinance of secession “before breakfast on the day of its first assembling,” while the other contended that it would be more consonant with the dignity of the state to have muffins and coffee first.
Neither of these candidates was a person of conspicuous influence in the community. Neither was a man of large ability or ripe experience or commanding social position – the last counting for much in Virginia in those days when there was no such thing as a ballot in that state, and when every man must go to the polls and openly proclaim his vote.
Under these circumstances a number of the conservative men of the district got together and decided to make Arthur Brent a candidate. It was certain that the secession vote would be in the majority in the district, but if it were divided between the two rival candidates, as it was certain to be, these gentlemen were not without hope that their candidate might secure a plurality and be elected.
Arthur strenuously objected to the program so far at least as it concerned his own candidacy. He had a pronounced distaste for politics and public life, and he stoutly argued that some one who had lived all his life in that community would be better able than he to win all there was of conservatism to his support. He entreated these his friends to adopt that course. It was significant of the high place he had won in the estimation of the community’s best, that they refused to listen to his protest, and, by a proclamation over their own signatures, announced him as their candidate and urged all men who sincerely desired wise and prudent counsels to prevail in a matter which involved Virginia’s entire future, to support him at the polls.
Thus compelled against his will to be a candidate, Arthur entered at once upon a canvass of ceaseless activity. He did not mean to be defeated. He spoke every day and many times every day, and better still he talked constantly to the groups of men who surrounded him, setting forth his views persuasively and so convincingly that when the polls closed on that fateful fourth of February, it was found that Arthur Brent had been elected by a plurality which amounted almost to a majority, to represent his district in that constitutional convention which must decide Virginia’s commanding course, and in large degree, perhaps, determine the final issue of war or peace.
When the convention met nine days later it was found that an overwhelming majority of the members held views identical, or nearly so, with those of Arthur Brent. There were a very few uncompromising secessionists in the body, and also a few unconditional Union men, who declared their hostility to secession upon any terms, at any time, under any circumstances. Among these unconditional Union men, curiously enough were two who afterwards became notable fighters for the Southern cause – namely Jubal A. Early and William C. Wickham.
But the overwhelming majority opposed secession as a mistaken policy, uncalled for by anything in the then existing circumstances, and certain to precipitate a devastating war; while at the same time maintaining the constitutional right of each state to secede, and holding themselves ready to vote for Virginia’s secession, should the circumstances so change as to render that course in their judgment obligatory upon the state under the law of honor.
That change occurred in the end, as we shall presently see. But, in the meantime, these representatives of the Virginia people wrought with all their might for the maintenance of peace and the preservation of the Union. They counselled concession and sweet reasonableness, on both sides. They urged upon both the commanding necessity of endeavoring, in a spirit of mutual forbearance, to find some basis of adjustment by which that Union which Virginia had done so much to bring about, and under which the history of the Republic had been a matter of universal pride both North and South, might be preserved and established anew upon secure foundations. More important than all this was the fact that these representative men of Virginia denied to the seceding cotton states the encouragement of Virginia’s sanction for their movement, the absolutely indispensable moral and material support of the mother state.
For a time there was an encouraging prospect of the success of these Virginian efforts. Nobody, North or South, believed that the cotton states would long stand alone in their determination, if Virginia and the other border states that looked to her for guidance – Kentucky, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Maryland – should continue to hold aloof.
In the meantime Mr. Lincoln, after his inauguration, had a somewhat similar problem to deal with at the North. There was a party there clamorous for instant war with a declared purpose of abolishing slavery. The advocates of that policy pressed it upon the new president as urgently as the extreme secessionists at the South pressed secession upon Virginia. Mr. Lincoln saw clearly, as these his advisers did not, that their policy was utterly impracticable. From the very beginning he insisted upon confining his administration’s efforts rigidly to the task of preserving the Union with the traditional rights of all the states unimpaired. He saw clearly that there were men by hundreds of thousands at the North, who would heart and soul support the administration’s efforts to preserve the Union, even by war if that should be necessary, but who would antagonize by every means in their power a war for the extirpation of slavery at cost of Federal usurpation of control over any state in its domestic affairs.
Accordingly, Mr. Lincoln held to his purpose. He would make no attempt to interfere with slavery where it constitutionally existed, and he would make no direct effort to compel seceding states to return to the Union; but he would use whatever force he might find necessary to repossess the forts, arsenals, post-offices and custom houses which the seceding states had seized upon within their borders, and he would endeavor to enforce the Federal laws there.
But in order to accomplish this, military forces were necessary, and the government at Washington did not possess them. There was only the regular army, and it consisted of a mere handful of men, scattered from Eastport, Maine, to San Diego, California, from St. Augustine, Florida to Puget’s Sound, and charged with the task – for which its numbers were utterly inadequate – of keeping the Indians in order and proper subjection. It is doubtful that Mr. Lincoln could have concentrated a single full regiment of regulars at any point, even at risk of withdrawing from the Indian country the men absolutely necessary to prevent massacre there. He therefore called for volunteers with whom to conduct such military operations as he deemed necessary. He apportioned the call among the several states that had not yet seceded. He called upon Virginia for her quota.
That was the breaking point. Virginia had to choose. She must either furnish a large force of volunteers with which the Federal government might in effect coerce the seceding states into submission, or she must herself secede and cast in her lot with the cotton states. To the Virginian mind there was only one course possible. The Virginians believed firmly and without doubt or question in the right of any state to withdraw from the Union at will. They looked with unimagined horror upon every proposal that the Federal power should coerce a seceding state into submission. They regarded that as an iniquity, a crime, a proceeding unspeakably wrongful and subversive of liberty. They could have nothing to do with such an attempt without dishonor of the basest kind. Accordingly, almost before the ink was dry upon the call upon Virginia for volunteers with which to make war upon the seceding Southern States, the Virginia, pro-Union convention, adopted an ordinance of secession, and the Civil War was on.
The men who had, so long and so earnestly, and in face of such contumely, labored to keep Virginia in the Union and to use all that state’s commanding influence in behalf of peace, felt themselves obliged to yield to the inevitable, and to consent to a sectional war for which they saw no necessity and recognized no occasion. They had wasted their time in a futile endeavor to bring about a reconciliation where the conflict had been all the while hopelessly “irrepressible.” There was nothing for it now but war, and Virginia, deeply deprecating war, set herself at work in earnest to prepare for the conflict.
