Chapter 4

We were not without noble intellectual exemplars in our Old South. The great thoughts of our home-born leaders, from Patrick Henry to Calhoun and Clay, were ever before us.Our college debates, our commencement orations, were fashioned after the severely classical models these men had left us. From the rostrum, the party platform, the pulpit, whenever a man spoke in those days it was expected and demanded that his speech be chaste, his thought elevated, his purpose ennobling. We were old-fashioned, I admit, in theme and method. We did not aim so much to please and entertain as to convince and inspire. The forum was as sacred as in the palmiest days of Athens and Demosthenes. About it centered our chief ambitions. We had not come upon a degenerate age when a much-exploited college graduate, lyceum lecturer, and “D.D.”—as I heard him before a great audience of university young gentlemen and ladies the other day—could descend to a contemptible buffoonery of delineation of the “American Girl” as his theme, and include in his printed repertoire such subjects as “The Tune the Old Cow Died of,” which confirmed some of us who heard him in the conviction that Balaam’s ass is yet lineally represented in ways of public speech and action.

ALEXANDER H. STEPHENS.

Of the great writers and orators who left theirimpress upon us in the last years of the Old South, I can speak from personal contact and experience, and with thankfulness that as a boy I was given to see most of them face to face and to touch, in spirit, the hem of their garments. The spell of the genius of Edgar Allan Poe, though the fitful fever of his life had ended, was upon the literature and literary men of the time. The weird beauty of the lines of this prince of the powers of harmony, contrasting so wonderfully with a strange analytical power that made him at once a foremost prose and poetical writer of his century, had set before us the measure of beauty and the test of genius. Then, in our own day, came Paul Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, and Sidney Lanier. I cannot describe to you the feeling of ownership that we of the Old South felt in this trinity of noble singers; nor can I express the sense of tenderness that comes to me as I recall the pain and poverty that haunted them most of their days until the end came, to two of them at least, in utter destitution. It was my privilege early in life to fall under the spell of the minstrelsy of these three men. As long as the red hills of Georgia stand, and its overhangingpines are stirred by the south wind’s sighing, let it recall to the honorable and grateful remembrance of Georgians the gentle yet proud-spirited poet who, having lost all but honor and genius in his native sea-girt city, came to his rude cabin home at Copse Hill as the weary pilgrim of whom he so tenderly sings:

With broken staff and tattered shoon,I wander slow from dawn to noon—From arid noon till, dew-impearled,Pale twilight steals across the world.Yet sometimes through dim evening calmsI catch the gleam of distant palms;And hear, far off, a mystic sea,Divine as waves on Galilee.Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn,I still may reach an Orient morn;To rest where Easter breezes stirAround the sacred sepulcher.

With broken staff and tattered shoon,

I wander slow from dawn to noon—

From arid noon till, dew-impearled,

Pale twilight steals across the world.

Yet sometimes through dim evening calms

I catch the gleam of distant palms;

And hear, far off, a mystic sea,

Divine as waves on Galilee.

Perchance through paths unknown, forlorn,

I still may reach an Orient morn;

To rest where Easter breezes stir

Around the sacred sepulcher.

I know what a fashion it is to worship at the shrines of the “Lake poets,” and how Wordsworth and Burns and Shelley and like singers of the Old World, with Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell of the New, are set on high as the greater masters of poesy. But if genius is a thing of quality rather than quantity, I go back to thedark days and memories of battle and take my stand lovingly beside the new-made grave of Timrod, the poet laureate of the Confederacy, and call to mind what I believe to be a poem that the greatest of English and American poets would be glad to claim as their own. Remember, as you read it, how in his dire want the poet wrote of the little book of which it is a part: “I would consign every line of it to oblivion for one hundred dollars in hand.”

Spring, with that nameless pathos in the airWhich dwells with all things fair;Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains,Is with us once again.Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unbornIn the sweet airs of morn;One almost looks to see the very streetGrow purple at his feet.At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,And brings—you know not why—A feeling as when eager crowds awaitBefore a palace gateSome wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start,If from a beech’s heartA blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say:“Behold me! I am May!”

Spring, with that nameless pathos in the airWhich dwells with all things fair;Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains,Is with us once again.

Spring, with that nameless pathos in the air

Which dwells with all things fair;

Spring, with her golden suns and silver rains,

Is with us once again.

Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unbornIn the sweet airs of morn;One almost looks to see the very streetGrow purple at his feet.At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,And brings—you know not why—A feeling as when eager crowds awaitBefore a palace gateSome wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start,If from a beech’s heartA blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say:“Behold me! I am May!”

Still there’s a sense of blossoms yet unborn

In the sweet airs of morn;

One almost looks to see the very street

Grow purple at his feet.

At times a fragrant breeze comes floating by,

And brings—you know not why—

A feeling as when eager crowds await

Before a palace gate

Some wondrous pageant; and you scarce would start,

If from a beech’s heart

A blue-eyed Dryad, stepping forth, should say:

“Behold me! I am May!”

Sidney Lanier was of the Old South, though fame came to him from the New. It was fitting that the latest of the progeny of genius of the Old South should become the foremost of those who were to gild it with a fame imperishable. Born in Georgia, less than a score of years before the tragedy of the Old South began, writing his earliest poems as a boy in Confederate camp and Federal prison, his music tinged with the somberness of the time, Lanier’s genius was like the last of the Southern flowers that burst into bloom just before the coming of chilling frost and wintry wind. It was like the bright-red flower of war which he describes: “The early spring of 1861 brought to bloom, besides innumerable violets and jessamines, a strange, enormous, and terrible flower, the blood-red flower of war, which grows amid the thunders.” Why it is that the price of genius must always be paid in blood, I do not know; but not all the transmitted genius and culture and spirit of the Old South, which crystallized in this last and greatest of her literary children, could absolve Lanier from the pangs which Southern genius seems peculiarly called upon to suffer. As the holiest and bravestlives spring out of darkness and storm and sorrow, it may be that only such baptism of tears and blood which we as a people have received could fit our sons and daughters for their high vocation.

Lanier was easily the greatest of the poets of the South. Perhaps his final place is yet to be fixed among the greater singers of America, but it is comforting to know that the clear light of dispassionate judgment of the receding years dispels the first-formed prejudices, and lifts the singer into nobler and yet nobler place.

Broken with pain and poverty, yearning unutterably for the peace and quiet of an opportunity to pour out his divine genius in great and holy song, could anything be more utterly pitiful than this passionate cry for help, which lay among his papers after his death?

O Lord, if thou wert needy as I,If thou shouldst come to my door as I to thine;If thou hungered so much as IFor that which belongs to the spirit,For that which is fine and good,Ah, friend, for that which is fine and good,I would give it to thee if I had power.

O Lord, if thou wert needy as I,

If thou shouldst come to my door as I to thine;

If thou hungered so much as I

For that which belongs to the spirit,

For that which is fine and good,

Ah, friend, for that which is fine and good,

I would give it to thee if I had power.

“A thousand songs are singing in my heart,” hedeclares, “that will certainly kill me if I do not utter them soon.”

Lanier’s genius was many-sided, and there is not a line he wrote of poetry or prose that one would care to blot. He had the exquisite sense of melody of Poe, but he had what Poe did not in the spirit of the maxim of his art which he often expressed in the words: “The beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty.” He had, too, the tenderness and pathos and lyrical beauty of Timrod and Haynes, yet the characteristic of his poems is that they call one to worship God. They usher us with bowed head and chastened spirit into the holy of holies. “A holy tune was in my soul when I fell asleep,” he writes; “it was going when I awoke.”

Just as in the ancient mythology, while one of divine descent might hold converse for a time with sons and daughters of men unmarked or unrecognized, yet by glance of eye or grace of motion would inevitably betray himself as of the progeny of the gods, so if ever for a moment I were in doubt as to the genius of Lanier my doubt would vanish as in the darkness, with bowed head and pitying heart of love, I sangto myself his “Ballad of the Trees and the Master:”

Into the woods my Master went,Clean forspent, forspent.Into the woods my Master came,Forspent with love and shame.But the olives they were not blind to him,The little gray leaves were kind to him,The thorn tree had a mind to him,When into the woods he came.Out of the woods my Master went,And he was well content.Out of the woods my Master came,Content with death and shame.When death and shame would woo him last,From under the trees they drew him—last;’Twas on a tree they slew him—last,When out of the woods he came.

Into the woods my Master went,

Clean forspent, forspent.

Into the woods my Master came,

Forspent with love and shame.

But the olives they were not blind to him,

The little gray leaves were kind to him,

The thorn tree had a mind to him,

When into the woods he came.

Out of the woods my Master went,And he was well content.Out of the woods my Master came,Content with death and shame.When death and shame would woo him last,From under the trees they drew him—last;’Twas on a tree they slew him—last,When out of the woods he came.

Out of the woods my Master went,

And he was well content.

Out of the woods my Master came,

Content with death and shame.

When death and shame would woo him last,

From under the trees they drew him—last;

’Twas on a tree they slew him—last,

When out of the woods he came.

One of the aphorisms of my youth was, “Poeta nascitur, orator fit.” That the poet is “born,” and ever bears upon himself the marks of his divine enduement, I do not doubt; but that the orator “becomes” or happens so by chance or labor, I must strongly deny. A certain fluencyof speech, a certain gloss of oratory, may possibly be achieved by dint of elocutionary drill and practice. If one is minded, like orators of an elegant postprandial type, to stand before a mirror and practice the tricks of gesture and speech, he may hope to attain applause from those whose blood is kept well cooled by the ices of the banquet room. I have described it fittingly as “postprandial” oratory, for the reason that it is most appreciated when the stomach and not the brain is chiefly in operation.

But if any one as a boy had ever sat under the matchless spell of the real masters of the forum, those who were as fully “born” unto it as was Lanier to poetry or Blind Tom to music; if within a half score of years he had been permitted to hear in their prime Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, Ben Hill, Alexander Stephens, Judge Lamar, and William L. Yancey, the after-dinner elegancies of oratory of the class I have named would be tame and dispiriting. I would not underrate the men of later fame, but I am sure that it is not time and distance only that lend enchantment to the names of that galaxy of famous orators who closed the successionof platform princes of the Old South. I would not detract an iota from whatever claim the New South may have to oratory, but I stand firmly upon the proposition, self-evident to survivors of the Old South, that the golden age of Southern oratory ended a generation ago. Compared with Yancey, the incarnate genius of oratory, any oration of that superb master of assemblies by the side of the best post-bellum oratory (always excepting Henry W. Grady) is as Hyperion to a satyr.

On a day that no one who was present will ever forget, while the war clouds were gathering and old political issues were giving place to the one dominant and terrible question of the hour, in a little Southern city, within the compass of twelve hours I heard the greatest of the orators of the last tragic era of the Old South. Whig and Democrat were words to conjure with, and the old-fashioned custom of joint debate was yet in honor. The crux of an intense and hard-fought campaign was at hand, and only the platform giants of the contending parties were in demand for the occasion. From fifty to a hundred miles around, towns, without railroad communicationas now, poured their delegations in upon the crucial day of the campaign. For two days and nights in advance, processions with fife and drum and bands, cannon and cavalry, had held rival parade. The fires of a great barbecue, with its long lines of parallel trenches in which, under the unbroken vigilance of expert negro cooks, whole beeves and sheep and hogs and innumerable turkeys were roasting, sent forth a savor that would have tempted the dainty palate of an Epicurus. Floats were formed, and fair young women and rosy-cheeked children expressed in symbol the doctrines of their sires, and sang to us until our hearts were all aglow. To the small boy there were meat and drink, sights and sounds illimitable, and a tenseness of excitement that thrilled him with a thousand thrills, for in the presence and sound of the great men of his country the boy’s heart must expand and his ambition take fire.

Not in a hundred years could I forget the speeches and speakers of that eventful day. Whole passages linger in memory now, fifty years after they were spoken. I recall the jubilant ring of Ben Hill as, lifting an old placard onwhich was inscribed, “Buck, Breck, and Kansas,” he said: “You got your Buck, you got your Breck, but where’s your Kansas?” Or Brownlow, with the heavy thump of his fist on the table, declaring, “I would rather vote for the old clothes of Henry Clay, stuffed with straw, than for any man living.” Or Toombs, with massive head and lordly pose, denouncing in blistering speech the unholy alliance of certain men of the Old South with the enemies of its most vital institution. Or Stephens, small and weazened, sallow and unkempt, with cigar stump in hand, his thin, metallic voice penetrating with strange power to the remotest part of the great open-air assemblage. All day, back and forth, the battle of the giants raged. Toward nightfall the Democrats were in dire distress over the seeming victory of the opposition. Yancey lay sick at home, sixty miles away, and the wires were kept hot with pleadings to bring him at any cost, if possible, to the scene. At nine o’clock that night I saw a strange tribute to the power of that orator, who, I doubt not, will stand unrivaled in the future as in the past. Pale and emaciated, taken from his sick room and hurriedby special train, upborne upon the shoulders of men whose idol he had been for twenty years, he was carried to the platform at the close of a day’s great victory by the opposing party. With singularly musical voice and an indefinable magnetism which fell upon all of us, he began a speech of two hours’ length. Within an hour, such was the magic of the man, he had turned the tide of defeat, rallied his party, and filled them with hope and courage. Within another hour he was receiving the tremendous applause of even his political enemies, and had undone all the mighty work of the giants of the opposition and sent them home with a chill at heart.

With such political leaders as these men, and with the finest intellect and character of the Old South devoted for generations to the study and exposition of the purest party politics, I am not surprised at the higher level of parties and platforms of the Old South. Politics was not a “graft,” as the present-day political ringster defines it. The political and personal conscience were one and the same, and a man’s politics was no small part of his religion. I am not saying that all political leaders were incorruptiblestatesmen, or that an unselfish patriotism was the invariable mark of its party politics. The demagogue was not unknown, and the fine Italian hand of the mercenary was sometimes in evidence. But of one fact I am abundantly assured—the spoilsman and the grafter held no recognized and official standing in that old-time democracy. Men of ability and character might aspire to political place and honor. They might even go beyond the personal desire and become open candidates for party favor. But the service of the paid political manager, the conciliation of the party “boss,” the subsidizing of the party “heelers,” the utilization of the party press in flaming, self-laudatory columns and even pages of paid advertising matter,ad nauseamandad infinitum, as in recent Southern political contests—all these latter-day importations and inventions of “peanut” politics would have merited and received the unmeasured contempt of the politicians of the Old South. There were certain old-fashioned political maxims that constituted the code of every man who would become a candidate for office, as, for instance, “The office should seek the man, not the man the office.”I cannot find heart to censure the politician of the New South for his smile at the verdancy and guilelessness of such a maxim, but that which provokes a smile was in my own remembered years the working motto of the old-time Southern leaders of high rank. Another maxim was that “the patriot may impoverish but not enrich himself by office-holding.” As a commentary upon this maxim, it affords me infinite satisfaction, in a retrospect of the long line of men who led the great political campaigns of the Old South and held its positions of highest trust, that most of them died poor, that none of them within my knowledge were charged with converting public office into private gain, and that the highest ambition of the old-time politician was to serve his country by some great deed of unselfish patriotism, to live like a gentleman, and then to die with uncorrupted heart and hands, and with money enough to insure a decent burial. If he left a few debts here and there, they were gratefully cherished as souvenirs by his host of friends.

Earlier in these pages I raised the question as to why the South, once so potent in national council and leadership, was now become themere servant of the national Democratic party, so much so that the recognized Sir Oracle of Republicanism and mouthpiece of his excellency the President is led to remind us, while a guest on Southern soil, of our pristine place and power, and to admonish us, in the frankness of an open and worthy foeman, to quit playing the role of lackey in national politics, and to put forth as of yore our own home-grown statesmen for national positions of highest honor and service, and to do all in our might again to restore the lost political prestige of the South. Come from whomsoever it may, Republican or Democrat, Grosvenor or Grant—for the latter before his death held like view with the former—the advice is well given and the point well taken. But when once the renaissance begins, I think the Augean stable of latter-day politics, even in the New South, will need another Hercules to purify it. Take, for instance, this statement from a recent issue of a great Southern newspaper: “The four candidates for railroad commissioner expended a total of $14,940.80 on their campaign expenses, Mr. ——, who was nominated, leading with $10,522.80. The twelve candidatesfor the Supreme Court paid out $7,133.34. Sixteen Congressional candidates expended $15,965.88.”

In theIndependentof recent date a leading Democratic manufacturer of New Jersey, under manifestly strong grievance, recites his experiences as a delegate in the State Democratic Convention, in which a vigorous effort was made, as in other Democratic Conventions, to force the indorsement of an unclean aspirant to the highest office of the republic. The article I cite is an evident instance of pot and kettle, but it sets in bold relief the straits and methods to which the dominating wing of the party of Jefferson and Jackson has been reduced, certainly in some of the Northern if not of the Southern States. I quote the closing paragraph of the article as a faithful picture of recent political happenings:

What are the means used by the bosses? First, corrupted judges at the primaries and bulldozing tactics there. Secondly, a brow-beating county and delegation chairman, with his attendant thugs. Thirdly, a properly managed credentials committee, with arrangements made beforehand, so that there will be contestsand the contests decided their way. Fourthly, a tactful chairman, who will have fine presence, be a hypocrite and pretend to fairness, but never recognize any but machine men. Fifthly, the presence of the boss, with his ever-ready check book and a fine knowledge of men to know what he must do to win his way with them.

In so far as this is a true picture of the dominant spirit and method of no small part of the Northern Democracy, and I firmly believe it so to be, I think it time for the South to first purge itself of the contamination that has come from thirty years of subserviency and emasculation, and then to assert and maintain the integrity and high principles of the Democracy of the fathers. If ever thieves and money changers were scourged from the ancient temple, it is high time that the lash of public scorn shall be laid upon the backs of all men, North or South, who have helped to disrupt and dishonor a once noble and victorious national party. When I remember, as a Confederate soldier, that William McKinley—peace to his dust—in the city of Atlanta, as Republican President, pleaded for equal recognition of Confederate with Federal dead; and thatone who has been honored by the Democratic party as standard bearer and occupant of a great office declined to vote for an ex-Confederate candidate in fear of the disfavor of his Western constituency; and when within recent months, in great cities of the South, I have personally seen the cunning handiwork of paid henchmen of a millionaire saffron newsmonger seeking most insistently and offensively to buy exalted position for their master, I am ready once more to secede, except that the second act of secession would be the sundering of all bonds that bind my party to corrupting methods and leadership, and the setting up again in the New South of the lofty political ideals and independency of the Democracy of the Old South.

Thus far I have tried to portray, in frankly admitted partiality, the social, intellectual, and political characteristics of the Old South. But I should be seriously derelict in my portraiture if I left unnoted that which was more to it than wealth or culture or learning or party. If theOld South had one characteristic more than another, I think it was the reverent and religious life and atmosphere which diffused themselves among all classes of its people, whether cracker white or plantation prince or dusky slave. If I were asked to explain this atmosphere of religion, I should hardly know where to begin. Perhaps its largely rural population and its peaceful agricultural pursuits predisposed to religion the simple-minded people who made up the Old South. More than this, however, must have been due to the religious strain in the blood of the Cavalier, Huguenot, and God-fearing Scotch-Irish ancestry from which they sprang. Most of all, I think that the high examples of a godly profession and practice in the leaders of the Old South made it easy for each succeeding generation to learn the first and noblest of all lessons—reverence for God, his Word, and His Church. And until this day the reverence of the Old South is constant in the New South. While New England, once the citadel of an orthodox Bible and Church and Sabbath, is now the prey of isms and innovations innumerable, and while the great West is marked by the painful contrastbetween its big secular enterprises and its diminutive churches and congregations, the South has continued largely to be not only the acknowledged home of the only pure Americanism, but the center also of conservatism and reverence in the worship of God and the maintenance of Christian institutions.

In no section of our country has the Christian Sabbath been so highly honored, Canada alone, with her reverently ordered day of rest, exceeding us in Sabbath observance. Here and there, however, is needed the cautionary signal of danger against the greed of railroad and other law-defying corporations, and the loose morality of aliens who come to us with money but without religious raising or conviction. In no other section is there such widely diffused catholicity of spirit and tolerance of differences among opposing religious beliefs. If the Roman Catholic has been freer from assault upon his religion in any country or time than in the South, I have failed to find it. If the Jew has as kindly treatment elsewhere under the sun, I should be glad to know it. And if there is as fine a courtesy and fraternity anywhere as among our SouthernProtestant bodies, I have yet to discover it. A few months ago, though of another denomination, I was called to their platform by the great Southern Baptist Assembly. A month before that I was summoned by the Cumberland Presbyterian Seminary, of Lebanon, to instruct its young men. A month before that I was writing articles for the chief religious organ of the Southern Presbyterians. I have lived long enough and am familiar enough with other parts of the world to know that such practical catholicity chiefly obtains in the South.

Nowhere as in the South do men so generally honor the house of God by their attendance and support. I make bold to say that upon any Sabbath day by count more men may be found in churches in Richmond and Atlanta than in Chicago and New York, though the combined population of the latter cities is ten times that of the former. These same churchgoing men of the South, following in the footsteps of their God-fearing fathers, are the members and supporters of Southern Churches, and are quick to resent innovation or disturbance of the old order. No man is so reverent and courteous toward menof the cloth as the men of the South, and wherever a minister of the gospel walks down the street of a Southern city or village, if worthy to wear the cloth of his sacred calling, he is the foremost man of his community in standing and influence.

Why this relative respect to the minister and the Church, and this clinging to religious forms and traditions, those of us who came up out of the Old South understand. Any reverent spirit of the New South in matters of religion is another of the heritages from the Old South. Then as now, even more than now, with our leaders and great men it was religion first, politics second, and money, or whatever money stood for, last and least. From my earliest recollection and reading, the governors, senators, congressmen, judges, great lawyers, physicians, merchants, and planters were commonly Christian men, both by profession and practice; and the man who was hostile or even indifferent to the Church and religion, however distinguished and brilliant he might be, was under ban of public opinion. As a commentary upon this significant religious affiliation of Southern leadership Icarefully noted a few years ago, in two contrasting lists taken at random of governors and congressmen, that while one list had five men out of twenty-five who were members of Christian Churches, the Southern list of twenty-five contained eighteen. While I share in the widespread regret that our Southern young men are not as reverent as were those of a generation ago, and are often conspicuous by absence upon Sabbath worship, yet in view of such facts as I am recounting I am more hopeful of the solution of the vexed problem of Christian young manhood in the South than in any other part of the land.

I have paid tribute to the great political orators of the Old South. Let me pay higher tribute to its great preachers and pulpit orators, to whom, under God, more than to any other class or leadership, is due what the South has ever cherished as its best. There were giants in those days. If Yancey or Stephens could cast a spell upon a great political gathering, and play upon itsemotions as the harper plays upon the harp, George F. Pierce in his prime could stir men’s hearts in a way that put to shame even the eloquence of the political rostrum. The last time I heard this greatest of all the orators of the Old South was not far from the time of his death. Marvin, fittingly called the “St. John of Methodism,” sat in the pulpit behind him. To most of his audience Pierce and his preaching were known only by hearsay, and their firm belief was that Marvin was the real prince of the pulpit. I remember how Pierce battled against his bodily weakness and weariness, and how there came to his eye that wondrous flash as his old-time eloquence lifted him into heights and visions celestial. He was preaching of the pure faith once delivered unto the saints, and pleading for the old order of simple gospel truth and living. He had something to say of the new order of ministers who were substituting doubts and denials for the long-cherished doctrines of the Church. His opening sentence was: “A single meteor flashing athwart the heavens will arrest a larger measure of attention than the serene shining of a thousand planets.” I think I know who the oldman eloquent meant. A little while before, a dapper preacher, consumed by itch for popularity, had been dispensing a perfumed and smokeless theology that drew great crowds and tickled the ears of the groundlings. The theology of the Old South was too crude and barbarous and unscientific for such as he. Genesis was an allegory, creation an evolution, man was pre-Adamic, the deluge was only a local shower, the Pentateuch was polychromatic, Moses was largely mythical, there were two Isaiahs, all the ante-exilian history and writings were concocted by pious post-exilian experts, the incarnation and resurrection were touching legends but “quite unscientific,” hell was “hades,” and hades was a tolerably comfortable winter resort, and Bible inspiration, as a matter of fact, seldom inspired. Many times, in sight and sound of such dainty apostles of an emasculate Bible, have I longed for the ghosts of the stalwart preachers of my childhood—the Pierces, Thomas Sanford, Jefferson Hamilton, A. L. P. Green, P. P. Neely, Jesse Boring, McTyeire, Wightman, Summers, and the like—to rise up in their godly wrath and shake them over the flaming pit of a real old-time,unabridged “hades” long enough to bring them to silence and repentance.

BISHOP GEORGE F. PIERCE.

Down in the straw, at the mourners’ bench of an Old South camp meeting, some of us got our theology and our religion. The Bible, in miracle and prophecy, was handled by reverent hands, and made most real to us as the infallible word of Almighty God. The law of Sinai, with unexpurgated cursings and blessings, was read to us amid the groanings of our troubled consciences. No ear so polite, no position so exalted, but a living and burning hell was denounced against its meannesses. As deep as the virus of sin in our souls sank the flashing, twoedged sword of the Spirit. The wound was made purposely deep and wide that the balm of Gilead might enter and heal the utmost roots of sin. By and by, when John the Baptists, like Boring and Lovick Pierce, had cut to the quick, and laid bare the wounded spirit, some gentler, wooing ministry, like that of Hamilton or Neely, came pointing the way to the cross. There was no lifting of the finger tip, daintily gloved and decorous, in token of a desire sometime or other to become a Christian. Cards, in colors, bearingname and rates of the evangelist, agreeing to meet everybody in heaven, were not passed around for signatures. I never hear the old hymn of invitation, that lured many a hardened sinner of the Old South, as they sung it under the leafy arbor to nickering lights, after a weird, unearthly stirring of our hearts by the man in the pulpit, but I think of a great criminal lawyer, who for many years had led the bar of his State, and had made mock of God’s Book and Church and ministers. He owned an old carriage driver who was one of God’s saints in black, gray-haired and patient “Uncle Aleck,” who had mourned and prayed over his unbelieving master. “Uncle Aleck,” he said to him one day, “why do you believe in a book you can’t read, and in a God you never saw? I have thousands of books in my library, yet I care nothing for religion.” Uncle Aleck’s only reply was to put his hand on his heart and say: “Marse John, I’ve been true and faithful to you all these years, ain’t I, marster?” “Yes.” “And I never lied to you or disobeyed you, has I, Marse John?” “No.” “Then, marster, it’s my religion that has made me what I am. I can’t read, I can’t seeGod, but I know the Lord Jesus Christ here in my heart.”

Drawn by some spell he could not resist, the great lawyer came to the old camp ground and heard the awfully solemn message of the preacher with bowed head and heart full of trouble. When the hymn was sung,

“Come, humble sinner, in whose breastA thousand thoughts revolve;Come, with your guilt and fear oppressed,And make this last resolve,”

“Come, humble sinner, in whose breast

A thousand thoughts revolve;

Come, with your guilt and fear oppressed,

And make this last resolve,”

I shall never forget the startled look of preacher and people as straight to the mourners’ bench sped the lawyer, crying in agony as he fell to the ground: “Send for Uncle Aleck!” And down in the straw white-haired old Aleck wrestled with God for Marse John, until a great shout went up from mourner and congregation as the master hugged the old darky and the darky hugged his master, saying: “I knew it was coming, Marse John.” You will pardon a man whose head is growing gray if at times the heart grows hungry to turn back and see and hear the old sights and sounds of God’s presence andpower as revealed especially at the ancient and now nearly extinct camp meeting.

On a bright April day, 1861, books were closed in the old academy, there was the blare of bugle and roll of drum on the streets, people were hurrying together, and soon the roar of a cannon shook the building, as they told us of the bombardment of Sumter by the batteries of the young Confederacy. For months the very air had been vibrant with sound of drum and fife, of rattling musket and martial command. The Old South was soon a great camp of shifting, drilling soldiery. Every departing train bore to the front the raw and ungainly troops of the country, the trim city companies of State guards, and the gayly dressed cadets of the military schools. There were tender partings and long good-bys, so long to many of them that not yet has word of home greeting come. It seemed a great thing to be a soldier in those brave days when the girls decked the parting ones in flowers and sang to them “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Bonnie BlueFlag,” and “Maryland, My Maryland.” The scarlet and gold and gray, the flashing sword and burnished musket, the gay flowers and parting song, marked the beginning of that mighty death struggle of the Old South. Soon the gay song deepened into the hush before a great battle, or rose into the cry of the stricken heart over the long lists of wounded and slain. War grew grim and fierce and relentless. There were hunger and wounds, pale faces in hospital and sharp death of men at the front; and sleeplessness and heartache and holy privation and unfailing courage and comfort of Southern womanhood at home. Fiercer and hotter came the storm of battle, as the thin gray lines of Lee and Johnston confronted the soldiery and the resources of the world. Manassas, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Seven Pines, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Appomattox!—how these names, that wreathed with crape their thousands of hearts and homes, and marked the rise and fall of the battle tide, recall to us the passing of the Old South!

On another April day in 1865, as a boy in Mahone’s Division, I looked my last into the faceof the Old South and its great commander, who came riding down the line of our stacked guns, and, halting his old gray war horse Traveler, tried to comfort our hearts by saying: “It’s all over. Never mind, men; you have done your best. Go to your homes and be as brave and true as you have been with me.”

In the great day of national assize, when empire, kingdom, and republic of earth shall be gathered to judgment, and the Muse of history shall unroll the record of their good and evil, the Old South, the “uncrowned queen” of the centuries, will be in their midst, her white vestment stained by the blood of her sons, her eyes dimmed by sorrow and suffering. No chaplet of laurel shall encircle her brow, and no noisy trump of fame shall hail her coming; but round her fair, proud head, as of yore, shall shine a halo of love, and Fame shall hang her head rebuked, and the trumpet fall from her nerveless hand, as the spirit of the Old South is passing by.

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