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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Long Roll," Mary Johnston presents a vivid and compelling narrative set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, exploring the emotional and moral complexities faced by individuals during this tumultuous period. With a rich literary style that combines historical detail with intricate character development, Johnston captures the heartbreaking dichotomy between duty and personal convictions. The novel's structure intertwines personal stories with broader historical events, allowing the reader to experience the psychological toll of war firsthand, thereby cementing its significance within the canon of American historical fiction. Mary Johnston, a prominent author and suffragist from Virginia, was deeply influenced by her Southern roots and the tumult surrounding the Civil War. Her experiences and knowledge of the period inspired her to create a narrative that not only delves into the hearts and minds of her characters but also critiques societal norms and expectations. Johnston's thorough research and firsthand accounts from her family's history imbue the text with an authenticity that resonates profoundly with readers. This book is recommended for anyone interested in a poignant exploration of the human condition during one of America's most defining eras. "The Long Roll" not only serves as a historical document but also as a timeless reflection on love, sacrifice, and the quest for personal integrity amidst chaos, making it a vital addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Long Roll
Table of Contents
Introduction
Threaded through drill, march, and memory, The Long Roll measures how a nation at war tests loyalty, courage, and the fragile bonds of community against unceasing strain.
Published in 1911, Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll is a historical war novel set in the American South during the Civil War. Written by an American author best known for historical fiction, it approaches the conflict through the lived realities of soldiers and the communities around them. The book is often read alongside its companion volume, Cease Firing! (1912), which continues the wartime panorama. Positioned within the early twentieth century’s ongoing engagement with the Civil War in literature, the novel blends martial narrative with social detail, offering readers both a sense of period atmosphere and a careful account of campaigns and home front.
Following a cohort of Confederate soldiers and the households that sustain them, the narrative moves from muster to campaign, from bivouac to brief returns home. Johnston favors a close, descriptive third-person voice that attends to weather, equipment, fatigue, and distances, while keeping the human center in view. Dialogues and interior moments are woven through scenes of march and deployment, so that private hopes and public duties are constantly in dialogue. The result is an immersive, steady-paced reading experience, more reflective than melodramatic, attentive to routine as well as to crisis, and careful to show how war is lived day by day.
The title recalls the drum call by which nineteenth-century armies summoned troops, and the book echoes that cadence in scenes of preparation, formation, and movement. Johnston’s battle pieces emphasize organization, communication, and terrain as much as clash, giving readers a sense of how decisions travel through ranks and how chance intrudes. Lines of march and orders matter here, but so do rations, letters, and rumor. The home front threads through the narrative—shortages, anxiety, pride—so that the roll of war is felt in parlors and encampments alike, binding distant spaces in a single beat that underscores the novel’s unity of experience.
At its core, the novel examines duty and belonging: how individuals navigate hierarchy, comradeship, fear, and endurance when ordinary ethics are strained by collective necessity. Questions of regional identity and national fracture run beneath the action, yet the emphasis remains on lived experience rather than abstract argument. Johnston returns to the costs of persistence—the weight of marching, the ache of separation, the hard arithmetic of survival—without romanticizing them. Loss, resilience, and the search for meaning amid upheaval are sustained themes, approached with sobriety and restraint, and grounded in scenes that privilege observation over spectacle and steadiness over sensational turns.
Because it presents the conflict largely from a Confederate vantage and was written decades after the war, The Long Roll also serves as a document of early twentieth-century memory. Readers today may find in it both an absorbing story and an opportunity to consider how narratives about war are shaped—by viewpoint, by era, and by the pressures of commemoration. Its attention to ordinary routines, material culture, and the contingencies of movement invites reflection on how large events penetrate everyday life. The book’s moral gravity lies in its insistence that consequences endure, long after drums are silent and flags are folded away.
For those drawn to expansive historical fiction, this novel offers a disciplined, resonant march through a pivotal period, balancing breadth with intimacy. Johnston’s measured prose, martial rhythms, and interest in the interdependence of soldiers and civilians make for a reading experience that favors depth over spectacle. Approach it on its own or in sequence with Cease Firing!, and it stands as both narrative and lens, inviting readers to enter the past with attention and humility. The Long Roll rewards patience with cumulative power, asking its audience to listen to cadence, to witness endurance, and to weigh what service costs.
Synopsis
The Long Roll opens in Virginia on the brink of civil war, as communities debate secession and loyalty while routine life yields to uncertainty. Young men assemble in courthouse yards and college greens, answering the drumbeat that gives the novel its title. The narrative situates them within families, farms, and towns, establishing social ties that will follow them into camp. Orders arrive, units form, and the focus tightens on volunteers bound for the Shenandoah and Piedmont. Training, provisioning, and the first marches introduce the rhythms of service, the authority of newly prominent officers, and the sober recognition that enthusiasm must meet endurance.
Early chapters track the raw army’s conversion into a fighting force under stern discipline. In mountain passes and rail towns, brigades learn drill, sentry duty, and the necessity of coordination. The book introduces strategic points such as Harpers Ferry and Manassas Junction, describing movement and uncertainty more than spectacle. Skirmishes flare on picket lines, and the soundscape of bugle, drum, and musket sets a cadence for daily life. Leaders emerge through action, tempering impetuousness with order. Without lingering on battle outcomes, the story emphasizes how first encounters with fire define roles, bind small groups, and foreshadow the sustained campaigns to come.
With summer spent, the narrative shifts to reorganizations and the testing winter of 1861–1862. Marches through sleet, flooded fords, and rough roads depict the material strain behind strategy. The Romney expedition provides a case study in hardship, revealing the friction between bold plans and limited means. Rations thin, uniforms wear, and tempers fray, while discipline insists on perseverance. The book follows staff work, messenger rides, and outpost duties as closely as it does line-of-battle formations. Conversations in tents and firelit clearings sketch differing temperaments among officers and men, preparing the ground for rapid operations when spring unlocks the Valley.
Interludes on the home front counterpoint field scenes, showing plantations, small farms, and towns adjusting to wartime scarcity and vigilance. Women manage households and correspondence, families balance private anxieties with public resolve, and questions of allegiance surface in border counties. The presence of enslaved labor and its regulation by wartime authorities are noted as part of daily logistics. Letters carry news, rumors, and the language of duty, bridging distant camps with parlors and porches. These chapters anchor the military narrative in civilian continuity, while indicating how supply, morale, and information depend on people beyond the ranks and the marching columns.
Spring brings momentum as the Shenandoah Valley becomes the axis of swift maneuvers. The novel outlines feints, forced marches, and sudden concentrations, beginning with a misjudged clash that sobers commanders and men alike. Crossroads towns, river crossings, and mountain gaps become familiar landmarks in a choreography of movement. Units separate and converge at short notice, staff officers ride far at night, and scouts pass signals by field and ridge. Without detailing results, the account stresses speed, secrecy, and the effect of surprise on both friend and foe, presenting the Valley as a theater where numbers, terrain, and will constantly recalibrate.
As operations intensify, consecutive engagements along parallel roads compress time and distance. The twin fields divided by a river demonstrate how a smaller force can exploit interior lines, dividing opponents and sustaining pressure. Artillery positions, wooded crests, and fords receive careful description, emphasizing the practical choices behind set-piece moments. The book tracks casualties, replacements, and exhausted survivors re-forming ranks, while maintaining attention to maps, couriers, and misdirected orders. Personal threads persist amid the movement—friendships, rivalries, and unresolved affections—but they remain interleaved with the campaign’s mechanics, underscoring how individual paths are shaped by marches rather than by solitary decisions.
Turning east, the story follows the long, hot marches toward the capital’s outskirts, where swamps, creeks, and earthworks replace mountain vistas. The narrative foregrounds coordination between separate commands, nighttime counsels, and the strain of synchronizing attacks across difficult terrain. Battles unfold amid smoke, thunder, and confusion, with attention to units losing contact, reserves thrown in piecemeal, and the ordeal of stretcher-bearers. City streets, hospitals, and depots briefly enter view, expanding the canvas. The emphasis remains on process: reconnaissance, entrenchment, and the interplay of caution and audacity, as the army fights through a sequence that tests cohesion more than singular heroics.
After heavy exertions, the novel pauses on consequences. Field hospitals, casualty lists, prisoner exchanges, and furloughs show the war’s administrative side alongside its human costs. Promotions, reassignments, and new responsibilities alter dynamics within companies and staffs. Letters resume, some delayed, some unsent, while rumors predict next moves. The narrative observes how fatigue reshapes perception, binding veterans through habit and shared trial. Thematically, the long roll persists as a call that cannot be ignored; yet the tone remains descriptive rather than elegiac, highlighting continuity of duty, the care of equipment and horses, and the steady rebuilding before another march.
The volume closes with the army poised for further operations, its leaders and units tempered by experience and its networks of support more defined. Major personal arcs remain open, serving as threads into the conflict’s next phases, while this installment presents a complete view of learning, adaptation, and resolve under pressure. The overall message is one of endurance within a collective endeavor: individuals are significant, but the cadence of orders, roads, and rendezvous governs all. By mirroring campaigns from muster to maturity, the book offers a sustained, neutral portrait of wartime momentum, ending at a hinge that promises continuation.
Historical Context
Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll is set chiefly in Virginia during the American Civil War, with scenes anchored in the Shenandoah Valley, the Piedmont, and the approaches to Richmond between 1861 and 1862. The novel’s geography follows the old Valley Pike, the Blue Ridge gaps, and strategic rail lines such as the Manassas Gap Railroad, emphasizing how mountains, rivers, and road networks shaped operations. Towns like Winchester, Manassas Junction, and Richmond appear as logistical hubs, recruiting points, and hospital centers. Seasonal cycles—mud of spring, heat of summer, and lean winters—frame the army’s movements and the civilian home front. The narrative’s time-place matrix mirrors the Confederate war effort’s reliance on mobility, local knowledge, and fragile supply chains.
The book unfolds against the Virginia secession crisis and mobilization of 1861. After Fort Sumter (12–13 April 1861), Virginia’s convention voted to secede on 17 April, a decision ratified by referendum on 23 May; the state capital moved to Richmond on 29 May. Militia seized sites such as Harper’s Ferry (18 April), while the scuttling of the Gosport (Norfolk) Navy Yard accelerated militarization. Regiments formed around county identities, and officers emerged from planter and professional elites. The novel reflects this moment through muster scenes, drill, and the forging of company cohesion, presenting local patriotism and emergent Confederate nationalism as catalysts that draw its protagonists from farms and towns into the ranks.
The First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), 21 July 1861, was the war’s first major clash, pitting Union Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell against Confederate Gens. P. G. T. Beauregard and Joseph E. Johnston. Johnston’s Shenandoah troops arrived by rail—an early strategic use of railroads—bolstering the defense at Henry House Hill, where Thomas J. Jackson earned the sobriquet "Stonewall." Union forces collapsed toward Washington; approximate casualties were 2,800 Union and 1,900 Confederate. The Long Roll presents the shock of real battle after months of training, the elevation of Jackson’s brigade to legendary status, and the mingled triumph and sobering recognition that a quick war had given way to a protracted struggle.
Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign (March–June 1862) is the novel’s gravitational center, shaping its tempo, character types, and military ethos. Beginning after winter quarters near Winchester, Jackson sought to shield the Valley granary, tie down superior Union forces, and prevent reinforcements from joining Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan before Richmond. At First Kernstown (23 March), Jackson attacked a larger Union force under James Shields; defeated tactically, he withdrew in good order, learning hard lessons about reconnaissance. Rebuilding momentum, he struck isolated detachments with speed and deception. At McDowell (8 May), he and Edward "Allegheny" Johnson repulsed Robert H. Milroy in the Alleghenies, reopening the door into the lower Valley. In rapid sequence he captured Front Royal (23 May), outflanked Nathaniel P. Banks, and seized Winchester (25 May), driving Union troops across the Potomac. Pursued by converging Union columns under John C. Frémont and Shields, Jackson turned at Cross Keys (8 June) and Port Republic (9 June) to defeat each in detail. His "foot cavalry" marched extraordinary distances—contemporary estimates exceed 300 miles in weeks—living lean off the land, maneuvering through Massanutten Mountain gaps, and using feints to magnify numbers. Strategically, the campaign fixed upward of 60,000 Union troops away from McClellan’s Peninsula drive and electrified Confederate morale. The Long Roll mirrors this arc in scenes of forced marches, flank marches at night, and dawn assaults, emphasizing the religious discipline Jackson instilled, the precarious logistics of the Valley granary, and the intelligence war waged through scouts, guides, and the topography that made the Valley both shield and sword.
The Seven Days Battles outside Richmond (25 June–1 July 1862) followed Gen. Robert E. Lee’s assumption of army command after Seven Pines/Fair Oaks (31 May–1 June). In actions at Beaver Dam Creek, Gaines’s Mill, Savage’s Station, Glendale, and Malvern Hill, Lee forced McClellan’s Army of the Potomac to withdraw from the city’s gates. Confederate casualties were heavy—about 20,000 to the Union’s 16,000—but Richmond was saved. The novel situates its Confederate characters amid swampy terrain, heat, and coordination challenges, highlighting Jackson’s fatigue after the Valley march and the emerging Lee–Jackson partnership, while evoking the strain on supply, field ambulances, and Richmond’s vast Chimborazo Hospital.
The late-summer and autumn 1862 campaigns carry the war to a broader theater. At Second Manassas (28–30 August), Lee, with Jackson and James Longstreet, defeated John Pope; Longstreet’s massive 30 August counterstroke broke the Union left, costing roughly 14,000 Union and 8,000 Confederate casualties. Lee then crossed into Maryland, producing Antietam (Sharpsburg) on 17 September 1862, the single bloodiest day in American history, with about 23,000 casualties. Although tactically inconclusive, it enabled President Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (22 September), effective 1 January 1863. The Long Roll traces the grinding attrition, long marches north of the Potomac, and the dawning realization that political stakes now explicitly included slavery’s destruction.
Wartime policy and social strain form a critical backdrop. The Confederate Conscription Act (16 April 1862) created the first national draft in American history, initially for ages 18–35, later expanded, and allowed substitution until late 1863; the Exemption Act (11 October 1862) included the notorious "twenty Negro" clause for planters and overseers. A tightening Union blockade (from April 1861) drove inflation and shortages; impressment and tax-in-kind measures deepened resentment. Civilian hardship erupted in episodes such as the Richmond Bread Riot (2 April 1863). The novel’s home-front interludes—women managing plantations, improvised hospitals, and enslaved labor sustaining households amid flight to Union lines—embed these policies’ class and racial repercussions in daily life.
As social and political critique, the book exposes a society strained by total war even as it adopts a Confederate vantage. It registers class division through resentment of exemptions, substitution, and officer privilege; it shows the high human cost of strategy and the fragility of Confederate governance under blockade, inflation, and conscription. Its relative silence on enslaved people’s autonomous aims, juxtaposed with glimpses of flight toward Union protection, underscores the era’s racial order and the stakes of emancipation. Published in 1911 amid ascendant Lost Cause memory, the narrative’s reverence for Jackson and Virginia valor invites scrutiny of how nostalgia can obscure injustice while still revealing, in detail, the war’s material and moral toll.
The Long Roll
CHAPTER I
THE BOTETOURT RESOLUTIONS
On this wintry day, cold and sunny, the small town breathed hard in its excitement. It might have climbed rapidly from a lower land, so heightened now were its pulses, so light and rare the air it drank, so raised its mood, so wide, so very wide the opening prospect. Old red-brick houses, old box-planted gardens, old high, leafless trees, out it looked from its place between the mountain ranges. Its point of view, its position in space, had each its value—whether a lesser value or a greater value than other points and positions only the Judge of all can determine. The little town tried to see clearly and to act rightly. If, in this time so troubled, so obscured by mounting clouds, so tossed by winds of passion and of prejudice, it felt the proudest assurance that it was doing both, at least that self-infatuation was shared all around the compass.
The town was the county-seat. Red brick and white pillars, set on rising ground and encircled by trees, the court house rose like a guidon, planted there by English stock. Around it gathered a great crowd, breathlessly listening. It listened to the reading of the Botetourt Resolutions[1], offered by the President of the Supreme Court of Virginia, and now delivered in a solemn and a ringing voice. The season was December and the year, 1860.
The people of Botetourt County, in general meeting assembled, believe it to be the duty of all the citizens of the Commonwealth, in the present alarming condition of our country, to give some expression of their opinion upon the threatening aspect of public affairs....
In the controversies with the mother country, growing out of the effortof the latter to tax the Colonies without their consent, it was Virginia who, by the resolution against the Stamp Act[2], gave the example of the first authoritative resistance by a legislative body to the British Government, and so imparted the first impulse to the Revolution.
Virginia declared her Independence before any of the Colonies, and gave the first written Constitution to mankind.
By her instructions her representatives in the General Congress introduced a resolution to declare the Colonies independent States, and the Declaration itself was written by one of her sons.
She furnished to the Confederate States[3] the father of his country, under whose guidance Independence was achieved, and the rights and liberties of each State, it was hoped, perpetually established.
She stood undismayed through the long night of the Revolution, breasting the storm of war and pouring out the blood of her sons like water on every battlefield, from the ramparts of Quebec to the sands of Georgia.
A cheer broke from the throng. "That she did—that she did! 'Old Virginia never tire.'"
By her unaided efforts the Northwestern Territory was conquered, whereby the Mississippi, instead of the Ohio River, was recognized as the boundary of the United States by the treaty of peace.
To secure harmony, and as an evidence of her estimate of the value of the Union of the States, she ceded to all for their common benefit this magnificent region—an empire in itself.
When the Articles of Confederation were shown to be inadequate to secure peace and tranquillity at home and respect abroad, Virginia first moved to bring about a more perfect Union.
At her instance the first assemblage of commissioners took place at Annapolis, which ultimately led to a meeting of the Convention which formed the present Constitution.
The instrument itself was in a great measure the production of one of her sons, who has been justly styled the Father of the Constitution.
The government created by it was put into operation, with her Washington, the father of his country, at its head; her Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, in his cabinet; her Madison, the great advocate of the Constitution, in the legislative hall.
"And each of the three," cried a voice, "left on record his judgment as to the integral rights of the federating States."
Under the leading of Virginia statesmen the Revolution of 1798 was brought about, Louisiana was acquired, and the second war of independence was waged.
Throughout the whole progress of the Republic she has never infringed on the rights of any State, or asked or received an exclusive benefit.
On the contrary, she has been the first to vindicate the equality of all the States, the smallest as well as the greatest.
But, claiming no exclusive benefit for her efforts and sacrifices in the common cause, she had a right to look for feelings of fraternity and kindness for her citizens from the citizens of other States.... And that the common government, to the promotion of which she contributed so largely, for the purpose of establishing justice and ensuring domestic tranquillity, would not, whilst the forms of the Constitution were observed, be so perverted in spirit as to inflict wrong and injustice and produce universal insecurity.
These reasonable expectations have been grievously disappointed—
There arose a roar of assent. "That's the truth!—that's the plain truth! North and South, we're leagues asunder!—We don't think alike, we don't feel alike, and we don't interpret the Constitution alike! I'll tell you how the North interprets it!—Government by the North, for the North, and over the South! Go on, Judge Allen, go on!"
In view of this state of things, we are not inclined to rebuke or censure the people of any of our sister States in the South, suffering from injury, goaded by insults, and threatened with such outrages and wrongs, for their bold determination to relieve themselves from such injustice and oppression by resorting to their ultimate and sovereign right to dissolve the compact which they had formed and to provide new guards for their future security.
"South Carolina!—Georgia, too, will be out in January.—Alabama as well, Mississippi and Louisiana.—Go on!"
Nor have we any doubt of the right of any State, there being no common umpire between coequal sovereign States, to judge for itself on its own responsibility, as to the mode and manner of redress.
The States, each for itself, exercised this sovereign power when they dissolved their connection with the British Empire.
They exercised the same power when nine of the States seceded from the Confederation and adopted the present Constitution, though two States at first rejected it.
The Articles of Confederation stipulated that those articles should be inviolably observed by every State, and that the Union should be perpetual, and that no alteration should be made unless agreed to by Congress and confirmed by every State.
Notwithstanding this solemn compact, a portion of the States did, without the consent of the others, form a new compact; and there is nothing to show, or by which it can be shown, that this right has been, or can be, diminished so long as the States continue sovereign.
"The right's the right of self-government—and it's inherent and inalienable!—We fought for it—when didn't we fight for it? When we cease to fight for it, then chaos and night!—Go on, go on!"
The Confederation was assented to by the Legislature for each State; the Constitution by the people of each State, for such State alone. One is as binding as the other, and no more so.
The Constitution, it is true, established a government, and it operates directly on the individual; the Confederation was a league operating primarily on the States. But each was adopted by the State for itself; in the one case by the Legislature acting for the State; in the other by the people, not as individuals composing one nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong.
The foundation, therefore, on which it was established, wasfederal, and the State, in the exercise of the same sovereign authority by which she ratified for herself, may for herself abrogate and annul.
The operation of its powers, whilst the State remains in the Confederacy, isnational; and consequently a State remaining in the Confederacy and enjoying its benefits cannot, by any mode of procedure, withdraw its citizens from the obligation to obey the Constitution and the laws passed in pursuance thereof.
But when a State does secede, the Constitution and laws of the United States cease to operate therein. No power is conferred on Congress to enforce them. Such authority was denied to the Congress in the convention which framed the Constitution, because it would be an act of war of nation against nation—not the exercise of the legitimate power of a government to enforce its laws on those subject to its jurisdiction.
The assumption of such a power would be the assertion of a prerogative claimed by the British Government to legislate for the Colonies inall cases whatever; it would constitute of itself a dangerous attack on the rights of the States, and should be promptly repelled.
There was a great thunder of assent. "That is our doctrine—bred in the bone—dyed in the weaving! Jefferson, Madison, Marshall, Washington, Henry—further back yet, further back—back to Magna Charta!"
These principles, resulting from the nature of our system of confederate States, cannot admit of question in Virginia.
In 1788 our people in convention, by their act of ratification, declared and made known that the powers granted under the Constitution, being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whenever they shall be perverted to their injury and oppression.
From what people were these powers derived? Confessedly from the people of each State, acting for themselves. By whom were they to be resumed or taken back? By the people of the State who were then granting them away. Who were to determine whether the powers granted had been perverted to their injury or oppression? Not the whole people of the United States, for there could be no oppression of the whole with their own consent; and it could not have entered into the conception of the Convention that the powers granted could not be resumed until the oppressor himself united in such resumption.
They asserted the right to resume in order to guard the people of Virginia, for whom alone the Convention could act, against the oppression of an irresponsible and sectional majority, the worst form of oppression with which an angry Providence has ever afflicted humanity.
Whilst therefore we regret that any State should, in a matter of common grievance, have determined to act for herself without consulting with her sister States equally aggrieved, we are nevertheless constrained to say that the occasion justifies and loudly calls for action of some kind....
In view therefore of the present condition of our country, and the causes of it, we declare almost in the words of our fathers, contained in an address of the freeholders of Botetourt, in February, 1775, to the delegates from Virginia to the Continental Congress, "That we desire no change in our government whilst left to the free enjoyment of our equal privileges secured by theconstitution; but that should a tyrannicalsectional majority, under the sanction of the forms of theconstitution, persist in acts of injustice and violence toward us, they only must be answerable for the consequences."
That liberty is so strongly impressed upon our hearts that we cannot think of parting with it but with our lives; that our duty to God, our country, ourselves and our posterity forbid it; we stand, therefore, prepared for every contingency.
Resolved therefore, That in view of the facts set out in the foregoing preamble, it is the opinion of this meeting that a convention of the people should be called forthwith; that the State in its sovereign character should consult with the other Southern States, and agree upon such guarantees as in their opinion will secure their equality, tranquillity and rightswithin the Union.
The applause shook the air. "Yes, yes! within the Union! They're not quite mad—not even the black Republicans! We'll save the Union!—We made it, and we'll save it!—Unless the North takes leave of its senses.—Go on!"
And in the event of a failure to obtain such guarantees, to adopt in concert with the other Southern States, or alone, such measures as may seem most expedient to protect the rights and ensure the safety of the people of Virginia.
The reader made an end, and stood with dignity. Silence, then a beginning of sound, like the beginning of wind in the forest. It grew, it became deep and surrounding as the atmosphere, it increased into the general voice of the county, and the voice passed the Botetourt Resolutions.
CHAPTER II
THE HILLTOP
On the court house portico sat the prominent men of the county, lawyers and planters, men of name and place, moulders of thought and leaders in action. Out of these came the speakers. One by one, they stepped into the clear space between the pillars. Such a man was cool and weighty, such a man was impassioned and persuasive. Now the tense crowd listened, hardly breathing, now it broke into wild applause. The speakers dealt with an approaching tempest, and with a gesture they checked off the storm clouds. "Protection for the manufacturing North at the expense of the agricultural South—an old storm centre! Territorial Rights—once a speck in the west, not so large as a man's hand, and now beneath it, the wrangling and darkened land! The Bondage of the African Race—a heavy cloud! Our English fathers raised it; our northern brethren dwelled with it; the currents of the air fixed it in the South. At no far day we will pass from under it. In the mean time we would not have it burst. In that case underneath it would lie ruined fields and wrecked homes, and out of its elements would come a fearful pestilence! The Triumph of the Republican Party—no slight darkening of the air is that, no drifting mist of the morning! It is the triumph of that party which proclaims the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with hell!—of that party which tolled the bells, and fired the minute guns, and draped its churches with black, and all-hailed as saint and martyr the instigator of a bloody and servile insurrection in a sister State, the felon and murderer, John Brown! The Radical, the Black Republican, faction, sectional rule, fanaticism, violation of the Constitution, aggression, tyranny, and wrong—all these are in the bosom of that cloud!—The Sovereignty of the State. Where is the tempest which threatens here? Not here, Virginians! but in the pleasing assertion of the North, 'There is no sovereignty of the State!' 'A State is merely to the Union what a county is to a State.' O shades of John Randolph of Roanoke, of Patrick Henry, of Mason and Madison, of Washington and Jefferson! O shade of John Marshall even, whom we used to think too Federal! The Union! We thought of the Union as a golden thread—at the most we thought of it as a strong servant we had made between us, we thirteen artificers—a beautiful Talus to walk our coasts and cry 'All's well!' We thought so—by the gods, we think so yet! That is our Union—the golden thread, the faithful servant; not the monster that Frankenstein made, not this Minotaur swallowing States! The Sovereignty of the State! Virginia fought seven years for the sovereignty of Virginia, wrung it, eighty years ago, from Great Britain, and has not since resigned it! Being different in most things, possibly the North is different also in this. It may be that those States have renounced the liberty they fought for. Possibly Massachusetts—the years 1803, 1811, and 1844 to the contrary—does regard herself as a county. Possibly Connecticut—for all that there was a Hartford Convention!—sees herself in the same light. Possibly. 'Brutus saith 't is so, and Brutus is an honourable man!' But Virginia has not renounced! Eighty years ago she wrote a certain motto on her shield. To-day the letters burn bright! Unterrified then she entered this league from which we hoped so much. Unterrified to-morrow, should a slurring hand be laid upon that shield, will she leave it!"
Allan Gold, from the schoolhouse on Thunder Run, listened with a swelling heart, then, amid the applause which followed the last speaker, edged his way along the crowded old brick pavement to where, not far from the portico, he made out the broad shoulders, the waving dark hair, and the slouch hat of a young man with whom he was used to discuss these questions. Hairston Breckinridge glanced down at the pressure upon his arm, recognized the hand, and pursued, half aloud, the current of his thought. "I don't believe I'll go back to the university. I don't believe any of us will go back to the university.—Hello, Allan!"
"I'm for the preservation of the Union," said Allan. "I can't help it. We made it, and we've loved it."
"I'm for it, too," answered the other, "in reason. I'm not for it out of reason. In these affairs out of reason is out of honour. There's nothing sacred in the word Union that men should bow down and worship it! It's the thing behind the word that counts—and whoever says that Massachusetts and Virginia, and Illinois and Texas are united just now is a fool or a liar!—Who's this Colonel Anderson is bringing forward? Ah, we'll have the Union now!"
"Who is it?"
"Albemarle man, staying at Lauderdale.—Major in the army, home on furlough.—Old-line Whig. I've been at his brother's place, near Charlottesville—"
From the portico came a voice. "I am sure that few in Botetourt need an introduction here. We, no more than others, are free from vanity, and we think we know a hero by intuition. Men of Botetourt, we have the honour to listen to Major Fauquier Cary, who carried the flag up Chapultepec!"
Amid applause a man of perhaps forty years, spare, bronzed, and soldierly, entered the clear space between the pillars, threw out his arm with an authoritative gesture, and began to speak in an odd, dry, attractive voice. "You are too good!" he said clearly. "I'm afraid you don't know Fauquier Cary very well, after all. He's no hero—worse luck! He's only a Virginian, trying to do the right as he sees it, out yonder on the plains with the Apaches and the Comanches and the sage brush and the desert—"
There was an interruption. "How about Chapultepec?"—"And the Rio Grande?"—"Didn't we hear something about a fight in Texas?"
The speaker laughed. "A fight in Texas? Folk, folk, if you knew how many fights there are in Texas—and how meritorious it is to keep out of them! No; I'm only a Virginian out there." He regarded the throng with his magnetic smile, his slight and fine air of gaiety in storm. "As you know, I am by no means the only Virginian, and they are heroes, the others, if you like!—real, old-line heroes, brave as the warriors in Homer, and a long sight better men! I am happy to report to his kinsmen here that General Joseph E. Johnston is in health—still loving astronomy, still reading du Guesclin, still studying the Art of War. He's a soldier's soldier, and that, in its way, is as fine a thing as a poet's poet! I see men before me who are of the blood of the Lees. Out there by the Rio Grande is a Colonel Robert E. Lee, of whom Virginia may well be proud! There are few heights in those western deserts, but he carries his height with him. He's marked for greatness. And there are 'Beauty' Stuart, and Dabney Maury, the best of fellows, and Edward Dillon, and Walker and George Thomas, and many another good man and true. First and last, there's a deal of old Virginia following Mars, out yonder! We've got Hardee, too, from Georgia, and Van Dorn from Mississippi, and Albert Sidney Johnston from Kentucky—no better men in Homer, no better men! And there are others as soldierly—McClellan with whom I graduated at West Point, Fitz-John Porter, Hancock, Sedgwick, Sykes, and Averell. McClellan and Hancock are from Pennsylvania, Fitz-John Porter is from New Hampshire, Sedgwick from Connecticut, Sykes from Delaware, and Averell from New York. And away, away out yonder, in the midst of sage brush and Apaches, when any of us chance to meet around a camp-fire, there we sit, while coyotes are yelling off in the dark, there we sit and tell stories of home, of Virginia and Pennsylvania, of Georgia and New Hampshire!"
He paused, drew himself up, looked out over the throng to the mountains, studied for a moment their long, clean line, then dropped his glance and spoke in a changed tone, with a fiery suddenness, a lunge as of a tried rapier, quick and startling.
"Men of Botetourt! I speak for my fellow soldiers of the Army of the United States when I say that, out yonder, we are blithe to fight with marauding Comanches, with wolves and with grizzlies, but that we are not—oh, we are not—ready to fight with each other! Brother against brother—comrade against comrade—friend against friend—to quarrel in the same tongue and to slay the man with whom you've faced a thousand dangers—no, we are not ready for that!
"Virginians! I will not believe that the permanent dissolution of this great Union is come! I will not believe that we stand to-day in danger of internecine war! Men of Botetourt, go slow—go slow! The Right of the State—I grant it! I was bred in that doctrine, as were you all. Albemarle no whit behind Botetourt in that! The Botetourt Resolutions—amen to much, to very much in the Botetourt Resolutions! South Carolina! Let South Carolina go in peace! It is her right! Remembering old comradeship, old battlefields, old defeats, old victories, we shall still be friends. If the Gulf States go, still it is their right, immemorial, incontrovertible!—The right of self-government. We are of one blood and the country is wide. God-speed both to Lot and to Abraham! On some sunny future day may their children draw together and take hands again! So much for the seceding States. But Virginia,—but Virginia made possible the Union,—let her stand fast in it in this day of storm! in this Convention let her voice be heard—as I know it will be heard—for wisdom, for moderation, for patience! So, or soon or late, she will mediate between the States, she will once again make the ring complete, she will be the saviour of this great historic Confederation which our fathers made!"
A minute or two more and he ended his speech. As he moved from between the pillars, there was loud applause. The county was largely Whig, honestly longing—having put on record what it thought of the present mischief and the makers of it—for a peaceful solution of all troubles. As for the army, county and State were proud of the army, and proud of the Virginians within it. It was amid cheering that Fauquier Cary left the portico. At the head of the steps, however, there came a question. "One moment, Major Cary! What if the North declines to evacuate Fort Sumter? What if she attempts to reinforce it? What if she declares for a compulsory Union?"
Cary paused a moment. "She will not, she will not! There are politicians in the North whom I'll not defend! But the people—the people—the people are neither fools nor knaves! They were born North and we were born South and that is the chief difference between us! A Compulsory Union! That is a contradiction in terms. Individuals and States, harmoniously minded, unite for the sweetness of Union and for the furtherance of common interests. When the minds are discordant, and the interests opposed, one may be bound to another by Conquest—not otherwise! What said Hamilton? To coerce a State would be one of the maddest projects ever devised!" He descended the court house steps to the grassy, crowded yard. Here acquaintances claimed him, and here, at last, the surge of the crowd brought him within a yard of Allan Gold and his companion. The latter spoke. "Major Cary, you don't remember me. I'm Hairston Breckinridge, sir, and I've been once or twice to Greenwood with Edward. I was there Christmas before last, when you came home wounded—"
The older man put out a ready hand. "Yes, yes, I do remember! We had a merry Christmas! I am glad to meet you again, Mr. Breckinridge. Is this your brother?"
"No, sir. It's Allan Gold, from Thunder Run."
"I am pleased to meet you, sir," said Allan. "You have been saying what I should like to have been able to say myself."
"I am pleased that you are pleased. Are you, too, from the university?"
"No, sir. I couldn't go. I teach the school on Thunder Run."
"Allan knows more," said Hairston Breckinridge, "than many of us who are at the university. But we mustn't keep you, sir."
In effect they could do so no longer. Major Cary was swept away by acquaintances and connections. The day was declining, the final speaker drawing to an end, the throng beginning to shiver in the deepening cold. The speaker gave his final sentence; the town band crashed in determinedly with "Home, Sweet Home." To its closing strains the county people, afoot, on horseback, in old, roomy, high-swung carriages, took this road and that. The townsfolk, still excited, still discussing, lingered awhile round the court house or on the verandah of the old hotel, but at last these groups dissolved also. The units betook themselves home to fireside and supper, and the sun set behind the Alleghenies.
Allan Gold, striding over the hills toward Thunder Run, caught up with the miller from Mill Creek, and the two walked side by side until their roads diverged. The miller was a slow man, but to-day there was a red in his cheek and a light in his eye. "Just so," he said shortly. "They must keep out of my mill race or they'll get caught in the wheel."
"Mr. Green," said Allan, "how much of all this trouble do you suppose is really about the negro? I was brought up to wish that Virginia had never held a slave."
"So were most of us. You don't hold any."
"No."
"No more I don't. No more does Tom Watts. Nor Anderson West. Nor the Taylors. Nor five sixths of the farming folk about here. Nor seven eighths of the townspeople. We don't own a negro, and I don't know that we ever did own one. Not long ago I asked Colonel Anderson a lot of questions about the matter. He says the census this year gives Virginia one million and fifty thousand white people, and of these the fifty thousand hold slaves and the one million don't. The fifty thousand's mostly in the tide-water counties, too,—mighty little of it on this side the Blue Ridge! Ain't anybody ever accused Virginians of not being good to servants! and it don't take more'n half an eye to see that the servants love their white people. For slavery itself, I ain't quarrelling for it, and neither was Colonel Anderson. He said it was abhorrent in the sight of God and man. He said the old House of Burgesses used to try to stop the bringing in of negroes, and that the Colony was always appealing to the king against the traffic. He said that in 1778, two years after Virginia declared her Independence, she passed the statute prohibiting the slave trade. He said that she was the first country in the civilized world to stop the trade—passed her statute thirty years before England! He said that all our great Revolutionary men hated slavery and worked for the emancipation of the negroes who were here; that men worked openly and hard for it until 1832. Then came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those women and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall Abolition people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on like grim death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where the explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking, so a lot of men have risen with us to advocate without thinking. And underneath all the clamour, there goes on, all the time, quiet and steady, a freeing of negroes by deed and will, a settling them in communities in free States, a belonging to and supporting Colonization Societies. There are now forty thousand free negroes in Virginia, and Heaven knows how many have been freed and established elsewhere! It is our best people who make these wills, freeing their slaves, and in Virginia, at least, everybody, sooner or later, follows the best people. 'Gradual manumission, Mr. Green,' that's what Colonel Anderson said, 'with colonization in Africa if possible. The difficulties are enough to turn a man's hair grey, but,' said he, 'slavery's knell has struck, and we'll put an end to it in Virginia peacefully and with some approach to wisdom—if only they'll stop stirring the gunpowder!'"
The miller raised his large head, with its effect of white powder from the mill, and regarded the landscape. "'We're all mighty blind, poor creatures,' as the preacher says, but I reckon one day we'll find the right way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned, lovable, never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole, way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and King George saddled us with, not much to their betterment and to our certain hurt. I reckon we'll find it. But I'm damned if I'm going to take the North's word for it that she has the way! Her old way was to sell her negroes South."
"I've thought and thought," said Allan. "People mean well, and yet there's such a dreadful lot of tragedy in the world!"
"I agree with you there," quoth the miller. "And I certainly don't deny that slavery's responsible for a lot of bitter talk and a lot of red-hot feeling; for some suffering to some negroes, too, and for a deal of harm to almost all whites. And I, for one, will be powerful glad when every negro, man and woman, is free. They can never really grow until they are free—I'll acknowledge that. And if they want to go back to their own country I'd pay my mite to help them along. I think I owe it to them—even though as far as I know I haven't a forbear that ever did them wrong. Trouble is, don't any of them want to go back! You couldn't scare them worse than to tell them you were going to help them back to their fatherland! The Lauderdale negroes, for instance—never see one that he isn't laughing! And Tullius at Three Oaks,—he'd say he couldn't possibly think of going—must stay at Three Oaks and look after Miss Margaret and the children! No, it isn't an easy subject, look at it any way you will. But as between us and the North, it ain't the main subject of quarrel—not by a long shot it ain't! The quarrel's that a man wants to take all the grist, mine as well as his, and grind it in his mill! Well, I won't let him—that's all. And here's your road to Thunder Run."
Allan strode on alone over the frozen hills. Before him sprang the rampart of the mountains, magnificently drawn against the eastern sky. To either hand lay the fallow fields, rolled the brown hills, rose the shadowy bulk of forest trees, showed the green of winter wheat. The evening was cold, but without wind and soundless. The birds had flown south, the cattle were stalled, the sheep folded. There was only the earth, field and hill and mountain, the up and down of a narrow road, and the glimmer of a distant stream. The sunset had been red, and it left a colour that flared to the zenith.
The young man, tall, blond, with grey-blue eyes and short, fair beard, covered with long strides the frozen road. It led him over a lofty hill whose summit commanded a wide prospect. Allan, reaching this height, hesitated a moment, then crossed to a grey zigzag of rail fence, and, leaning his arms upon it, looked forth over hill and vale, forest and stream. The afterglow was upon the land. He looked at the mountains, the great mountains, long and clean of line as the marching rollers of a giant sea, not split or jagged, but even, unbroken, and old, old, the oldest almost in the world. Now the ancient forest clothed them, while they were given, by some constant trick of the light, the distant, dreamy blue from which they took their name. The Blue Ridge—the Blue Ridge—and then the hills and the valleys, and all the rushing creeks, and the grandeur of the trees, and to the east, steel clear between the sycamores and the willows, the river—the upper reaches of the river James.
The glow deepened. From a farmhouse in the valley came the sound of a bell. Allan straightened himself, lifting his arms from the grey old rails. He spoke aloud.
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,—
The bell rang again, the rose suffused the sky to the zenith. The young man drew a long breath, and, turning, began to descend the hill.
Before him, at a turn of the road and overhanging a precipitous hollow, in the spring carpeted with bloodroot, but now thick with dead leaves, lay a giant oak, long ago struck down by lightning. The branches had been cut away, but the blackened trunk remained, and from it as vantage point one received another great view of the rolling mountains and the valleys between. Allan Gold[4], coming down the hill, became aware, first of a horse fastened to a wayside sapling, then of a man seated upon the fallen oak, his back to the road, his face to the darkening prospect. Below him the winter wind made a rustling in the dead leaves. Evidently another had paused to admire the view, or to collect and mould between the hands of the soul the crowding impressions of a decisive day. It was, apparently, the latter purpose; for as Allan approached the ravine there came to him out of the dusk, in a controlled but vibrant voice, the following statement, repeated three times: "We are going to have war.—We are going to have war.—We are going to have war."
Allan sent his own voice before him. "I trust in God that's not true!—It's Richard Cleave[5], there, isn't it?"
The figure on the oak, swinging itself around, sat outlined against the violet sky. "Yes, Richard Cleave. It's a night to make one think, Allan—to make one think—to make one think!" Laying his hand on the trunk beside him, he sprang lightly down to the roadside, where he proceeded to brush dead leaf and bark from his clothing with an old gauntlet. When he spoke it was still in the same moved, vibrating voice. "War's my métier[6]. That's a curious thing to be said by a country lawyer in peaceful old Virginia in this year of grace! But like many another curious thing, it's true! I was never on a field of battle, but I know all about a field of battle."
He shook his head, lifted his hand, and flung it out toward the mountains. "I don't want war, mind you, Allan! That is, the great stream at the bottom doesn't want it. War is a word that means agony to many and a set-back to all.[1q] Reason tells me that, and my heart wishes the world neither agony nor set-back, and I give my word for peace. Only—only—before this life I must have fought all along the line!"
His eyes lightened. Against the paling sky, in the wintry air, his powerful frame, not tall, but deep-chested, broad-shouldered, looked larger than life. "I don't talk this way often—as you'll grant!" he said, and laughed. "But I suppose to-day loosed all our tongues, lifted every man out of himself!"
"If war came," said Allan, "it couldn't be a long war, could it? After the first battle we'd come to an understanding."
"Would we?" answered the other. "Would we?—God knows! In the past it has been that the more equal the tinge of blood, the fiercer was the war."
As he spoke he moved across to the sapling where was fastened his horse, loosed him, and sprang into the saddle. The horse, a magnificent bay, took the road, and the three began the long descent. It was very cold and still, a crescent moon in the sky, and lights beginning to shine from the farmhouses in the valley.
"Though I teach school," said Allan, "I like the open. I like to do things with my hands, and I like to go in and out of the woods. Perhaps, all the way behind us, I was a hunter, with a taste for books! My grandfather was a scout in the Revolution, and his father was a ranger.... God knows, I don't want war! But if it comes I'll go. We'll all go, I reckon."
"Yes, we'll all go," said Cleave. "We'll need to go."
The one rode, the other walked in silence for a time; then said the first, "I shall ride to Lauderdale after supper and talk to Fauquier Cary."
"You and he are cousins, aren't you?"
"Third cousins. His mother was a Dandridge—Unity Dandridge."
"I like him. It's like old wine and blue steel and a cavalier[8] poet—that type."
"Yes, it is old and fine, in men and in women."
"He does not want war."
"No."
"Hairston Breckinridge says that he won't discuss the possibility at all—he'll only say what he said to-day, that every one should work for peace, and that war between brothers is horrible."
"It is. No. He wears a uniform. He cannot talk."
They went on in silence for a time, over the winter road, through the crystal air. Between the branches of the trees the sky showed intense and cold, the crescent moon, above a black mass of mountains, golden and sharp, the lights in the valley near enough to be gathered.
"If there should be war," asked Allan, "what will they do, all the Virginians in the army—Lee and Johnston and Stuart, Maury and Thomas and the rest?"
"They'll come home."
"Resigning their commissions?"
"Resigning their commissions."
Allan sighed. "That would be a hard thing to have to do."
"They'll do it. Wouldn't you?"
The teacher from Thunder Run looked from the dim valley and the household lamps up to the marching stars. "Yes. If my State called, I would do it."
"This is what will happen," said Cleave. "There are times when a man sees clearly, and I see clearly to-day. The North does not intend to evacuate Fort Sumter[7]. Instead, sooner or later, she'll try to reinforce it. That will be the beginning of the end. South Carolina will reduce the fort. The North will preach a holy war. War there will be—whether holy or not remains to be seen. Virginia will be called upon to furnish her quota of troops with which to coerce South Carolina and the Gulf States back into the Union. Well—do you think she will give them?"
Allan gave a short laugh. "No!"
"That is what will happen. And then—and then a greater State than any will be forced into secession! And then the Virginians in the army will come home."
The wood gave way to open country, softly swelling fields, willow copses, and clear running streams. In the crystal air the mountain walls seemed near at hand, above shone Orion, icily brilliant. The lawyer from a dim old house in a grove of oaks and the school-teacher from Thunder Run went on in silence for a time; then the latter spoke.
"Hairston Breckinridge says that Major Cary's niece is with him at Lauderdale."
"Yes. Judith Cary."
"That's the beautiful one, isn't it?"
"They are all said to be beautiful—the three Greenwood Carys. But—Yes, that is the beautiful one."
He began to hum a song, and as he did so he lifted his wide soft hat and rode bareheaded.
"It's strange to me," said Allan presently, "that any one should be gay to-day."
As he spoke he glanced up at the face of the man riding beside him on the great bay. There was yet upon the road a faint after-light—enough light to reveal that there were tears on Cleave's cheek. Involuntarily Allan uttered an exclamation.
The other, breaking off his chant, quite simply put up a gauntleted hand and wiped the moisture away. "Gay!" he repeated. "I'm not gay. What gave you such an idea? I tell you that though I've never been in a war, I know all about war!"
CHAPTER III
THREE OAKS
Having left behind him Allan Gold and the road to Thunder Run, Richard Cleave came, a little later, to his own house, old and not large, crowning a grassy slope above a running stream. He left the highway, opened a five-barred gate, and passed between fallow fields to a second gate, opened this and, skirting a knoll upon which were set three gigantic oaks, rode up a short and grass-grown drive. It led him to the back of the house, and afar off his dogs began to give him welcome. When he had dismounted before the porch, a negro boy with a lantern took his horse. "Hit's tuhnin' powerful cold, Marse Dick!"
"It is that, Jim. Give Dundee his supper at once and bring him around again. Down, Bugle! Down, Moira! Down, Baron!"
The hall was cold and in semi-darkness, but through the half-opened door of his mother's chamber came a gush of firelight warm and bright. Her voice reached him—"Richard!" He entered. She was sitting in a great old chair by the fire, idle for a wonder, her hands, fine and slender, clasped over her knees. The light struck up against her fair, brooding face. "It is late!" she said. "Late and cold! Come to the fire. Ailsy will have supper ready in a minute."
He came and knelt beside her on the braided rug. "It is always warm in here. Where are the children?"
"Down at Tullius's cabin.—Tell me all about it. Who spoke?"
