The General in the Cornfield

We did anything and everything we could to make a living. Prominent citizens became pie-sellers. Colonel Cary, of General Magruder’s Staff, came home to find his family desperately poor, as were all respectable folks. He was a brave soldier, an able officer; before the war, principal of a male academy at Hampton. Now, he did not know to what he could turn his hand for the support of himself and family. He walked around his place, came in and said to his wife: “My dear, I have taken stock of our assets. You pride yourself on your apple-pies. We have an apple-tree, and a cow. I will gather the apples and milk the cow, and you will make the pies, and I will go around and sell them.”

Armed with pies, he met his aforetime antagonists at Camp Grant and conquered them quite. The pies were delicious; the seller was a soldier, an officer of distinction, in hard luck; and the men at Camp Grant were soldiers, too. There was sharp demand and good price; only the elite—officers of rank—could afford to indulge in these confections. Well it was that Yankee mothers had cultivated in their sons an appetite for pies. One Savannah lady made thirty dollars selling pies to Sherman’s soldiers; in Georgia’s aristocratic “City by the Sea,” high-bred dames stood at basement windows selling cakes and pies to whoever would buy.

Colonel Cary had thrifty rivals throughout Dixie. A once rich planter near Columbia made a living by selling flowers; a Charleston aristocrat peddled tea by the pound and molasses by the quart to his former slaves. General Stephen Elliott, Sumter’s gallant defender, sold fish and oysters which he caught with his own hands. His friend, Captain Stoney, did likewise. Gentlemen of position and formerly of wealth did not pause to consider whether they would be discredited by pursuing occupations quite as humble. Men of high attainments, without capital, without any basis upon which to make a new start in life except “grit,” did whatever they could find to do and made merry over it.

Yet reporters going over our battle-swept, war-scarred land from whose fields our laboring class had been by one fell stroke diverted, judged us by evidences of inertia seen from windows of creepy little cars—(where we had any cars at all)—that stopped every few hours to take on wood or water or to repair something or other. For a long time, there was good reason why our creepy railroads should be a doubly sore subject. Under the reconstruction governments every State paid thousands of dollars for railroads that were never built.

All that Southern white men did, according to some ready scribes, was to sit around cross-roads stores, expectorate tobacco-juice, swap jokes, and abuse Yankees and niggers. In honesty, it must be confessed there was too much of this done, any being too much. Every section has its corps of idlers, its crew of yarn-spinners and drinkers, even in ordinary times when war has not left upon men the inevitable demoralisation that follows in its train. Had railway travellers gone into cotton and cornfields and tobacco lots, they would have found there much of the flower and chivalry of the Old South “leading the row.” Sons of fathers who had been the wealthiest and most influential men in Dixie came home from the war to swing the hoe and drive the plow as resolutely as ever they had manned a battery or charged the breastworks.

But the young men of the South were not born tillers of the soil; not fitted by inheritance or education for manual toil. They were descendants of generations who had not labored with their hands but had occupied themselves as lawyers, doctors, politicians, gentlemen of leisure, and agriculturists commanding large working forces. Our nation might have been gainer had the Government devised measures by which talented men could have been at once bound to its interests and their gifts utilised for the common advantage. Instead of which, they were threatened with trial for treason, with execution or exile, were disfranchised, disqualified, put under the ban. Many who would have made brilliant and useful servants of the Republic were driven abroad and found honourable service in Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and Europe.

It is difficult for us at this day to realise what little promise life held for the young American of the South; difficult even for the South of the present to appreciate the irritations and humiliations that vexed and chafed him. Many felt that they had no longer a country.

Mischief was inevitable as the result of repressed or distorted energies, thwarted or stifled ambition. Some whose record for courage and steadiness on the field of battle reflects glory on our common country, failed utterly at adaptation. But as the patient effort of the great body politic changed the times and opened opportunity, middle-age and youth were ready to rush in with a will, occupying and improving fields of industry.

But the old people of the South never reacted. Many simply sat down and died, succumbing to bereavement, hardships and heartbreak. They felt that their country was dead. Men of their own blood, their brothers, had set an alien race, an ignorant race, half-human, half-savage, above them; were insisting that they should send their children to school with children of this race, while their consciences cried out against the mere discussion of this thing as an evil to themselves and the negro, and against the thing itself as crime. Intermarriage was discussed in legislative halls; bills sanctioning it were introduced; and the horrible black, social evil due to passions of the white man and the half-human, half-savage woman—the incubus, the nightmare, under which the whole section had groaned with groanings that cannot be uttered—was flung in their faces as more than fair reason.

With reconstruction there was strengthening of the tendency towards expatriation. Despair and disgust drove many away; and more would have gone had means been at hand. Whole families left the South and made homes in Europe; among these, a goodly proportion were proud old Huguenots from South Carolina. In some of the Cotton States it looked as if more white men were to be lost thus than had been lost in battle. In December, 1867, Mr. Charles Nathan, of New Orleans, announced through the press that he had contracted with the Emperor of Brazil to transport 1,000 yearly to that empire.

Many went into the enemy’s country—went North. Their reports to old neighbours were that they liked the enemy immensely at home; the enemy was serenely unconscious of the mischief his fad was working in other people’s homes. He set down everything ill that happened South to the Southern whites’ “race prejudice”; and sipped his own soup and ate his own pie in peace. The immigrant learned that it was wise to hold his tongue when discussion of the negro came up. He was considered not to know anything worth hearing upon the subject. His most careful and rational utterances would be met with a pitying look which said as plainly as words lips polite withheld: “Race prejudice hallucination!”

General Lee raised no uncertain voice against expatriation; from his prison cell, Jefferson Davis deplored it in the first letters he was allowed to write. Lee set prompt example in doing what his hand found to do, and in choosing a task rather for public service than for private gain. I quote a letter written by Mrs. Lee to Miss Mason, dated Derwent, Virginia, December, 1865:

“The papers will have told you that General Lee has decided to accept the position at Lexington. I do not think he is very fond of teaching, but he is willing to do anything that will give him an honourable support. He starts tomorrow en cheval for Lexington. He prefers that way, and, besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle.... The kindness of the people of Virginia to us has been truly great, and they seem never to tire. The settlement of Palmore’s surrounding us does not suffer us to want for anything their gardens or farms can furnish.... My heart sinks when I hear of the destitution and misery which abound further South—gentle and refined women reduced to abject poverty, and no hope of relief.”

Far more lucrative positions had been offered him; salaries without work, for the mere use of his name. Solicitations came from abroad, and brilliant opportunities invited across the ocean. He took the helm at Washington College with this avowal: “I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle. I have seen many of them fall under my standard. I shall devote my life now to training young men to do their duty in life.” Urged in 1867 to run for office, he declined, believing that his candidacy might not contribute to sectional unification. As nearly perfect was this man as men are made. Our National Capitol is the poorer because his statue is not there. If it ever is, I should like to see on its pedestal Grant’s tribute: “There was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”

When the crippled and impoverished General Hood refused to receive money raised by subscription, the “Albany Evening Journal” commented: “It is the first instance we have ever seen recorded of a ‘Southern gentleman’ too proud or self-reliant to accept filthy lucre, come from what source it may.” The “Petersburg Index-Appeal” responded:

“Hood has only done what Lee did a dozen times, what Beauregard did, what Magruder did, and what President Davis did. The noble response of Magruder to the people of Texas, who contributed a handsome purse to procure him a fine plantation, was the impulse and utterance of the universal spirit of the Southern soldier: ‘No, gentlemen, when I espoused the cause of the South, I embraced poverty and willingly accepted it.’”