and we lined both sides of the long table, lighted by tall sperm-oil lamps, and bent seriously happy faces over The Boston Academy, singing with the spirit and, to the best of our ability, with the understanding—“Lanesboro’” and “Cambridge” and “Hebron” and “Boyleston” and “Zion,” and learning, with puckered brows and steadfast eyes glued to the notes, such new tunes as “Yarmouth,” “Anvern,” and “Zerah.”
“Sing at it!” my father would command in heartsome tones, from his stand at the top of the double line. “You will never learn it if you do not make the first trial.”
I arose to my feet the other day with the rest of the congregation of a fashionable church for a hymn which “everybody” was enjoined from the pulpit to “sing.”
When the choir burst forth with
“Triumphant Zion! Lift thy head!”
I dropped my head upon my hands and sobbed. Were the words ever sung to any other tune than “Anvern,” I wonder?
In the interval of singing we chatted, laughed, and were happy. How proud all of us girls were, on one stormy night when the gathering was smaller than usual, and good-looking George—coloring to his ears, but resolute—sang the bass solo in the fourth line of “Cambridge”:
“Resound their Maker’s praise!”
The rest caught the words from his tongue and carried the tune to a conclusion.
We sang until ten o’clock; then apples, nuts, and cakes were brought in, and sometimes sweet cider. An hour later we had the house to ourselves, and knelt for evening prayers about the fire before going to bed.
It was an easy-going existence, that of the well-to-do Virginia countryman of that date. If there were already elements at work below the surface that were to heave the fair level into smoking ruin, the rank and file of the men who made, and who obeyed the laws, did not suspect it.
Grumblers there were, and political debates that ran high and hot, but the Commonwealth that had supplied the United States with statesmen and leaders since the Constitution was framed, had no fear of a dissolution of what was, to the apprehension of those now at the helm, the natural order of things.
The time of the singing of birds and the departure of winter came suddenly that year. Hyacinths were aglow in my mother’s front yard early in February, and the orchards were aflame with “the fiery blossoms of the peach.” The earth awoke from sleep with a bound, and human creatures thrilled, as at the presage of great events.
It was the year of the presidential election and a campaign of extraordinary importance. My father talked to me of what invested it with this importance as we walked together down the street one morning when the smell of open flowers and budding foliage was sweet in our nostrils.
A Democratic barbecue was to be held in a field on the outskirts of the village just beyond “Jordan’s Creek.” The stream took its name from the man whose plantation bounded it on the west. The widening and deepening into a pool at the foot of his garden made it memorable in the Baptist Church.
I do not believe there was a negro communicant in any other denomination throughout the length of the county. And their favorite baptizing-place was “Jordan’s Creek.” I never knew why, until my mother’s maid—a bright mulatto, with a smart cross of Indian blood in her veins—“got through,” after mighty strivings on her part, and on the part of the faithful of her own class and complexion, and confided to me her complacency in the thought that she was now safe for time and eternity.
“For, you see, John the Babtis’, he babtized in the River Jerdan, and Brother Watkins, he babtized me in the Creek Jerdan. I s’pose they must be some kin to one another?”
My father laughed and then sighed over the story, when I told it as we set out on our walk. The religious beliefs and superstitions of the colored servants were respected by their owners to a degree those who know little of the system as it prevailed at that time, find it hard to believe. From babyhood we were taught never to speak disrespectfully of the Baptists, or of the vagaries that passed with the negroes for revealed truth. They had a right to their creeds as truly as we had to ours.
This younger generation is also incredulous with respect to another fact connected with our domestic relations. Children were trained in respectful speech to elderly servants—indeed, to all who were grown men and women. My mother made me apologize once to this same maid—Mary Anne by name—for telling her to “Hush her mouth!” the old Virginian form of “Hold your tongue!”
The blesséd woman explained the cause of her reproof when the maid was out of hearing:
“The expression is unladylike and coarse. Then, again, it is mean—despicably mean!—to be saucy to one who has no right to answer in the same way. If you must be sharp in your talk, quarrel with your equals, not with servants, who cannot meet you on your own ground.”
The admonition has stuck fast in my mind to this day.
By the time we turned the corner in the direction of Jordan’s Creek, my father and I were deep in politics. He was the stanchest of Whigs, and the ancient and honorable party had for leader, in this year’s fight, one whom my instructor held to be the wisest statesman and purest patriot in the land. The ticket, “Clay and Frelinghuysen,” was a beloved household word with us; talk of the tariff, protection and the national debt, which Henry Clay’s policy would wipe out, and forever, if opportunity were granted to him, ran as glibly from our childish tongues as dissertations upon the Catholic bill and parliamentary action thereupon dropped from the lips of the Brontë boy and girls. There was not a shadow of doubt in our minds as to the result of the November fight.
“It seems a pity”—I observed, as we looked across the creek down into the distant meadow, where men and boys were moving to and fro, and smoke was rising from fires that had been kindled overnight—“that the Democrats should go to so much expense and trouble only to be defeated at last.”
“They may not be so sure as you are that they are working for nothing,” answered my father, smiling good-humoredly. “They have had some victories to boast of in the past.”
“Yes!” I assented, reluctantly. “As, for instance, when Colonel Hopkins was sent to the Legislature! Father, I wish you had agreed to go when they begged you to let them elect you!”
The smile was now a laugh.
“To nominate me, you mean. A very different matter from election, my daughter. Not that I cared for either. If I may be instrumental in the hands of Providence in helping to put the right man into the right place, my political ambitions will be satisfied.”
“I do hope that Powhatan will go for Clay!” ejaculated I, fervently. “And I think it an outrage that the Richmond voters cannot come up to the help of the right, at the presidential election.”
“The law holds that the real strength of the several states would not be properly represented if this were allowed,” was the reply.
I saw the justice of the law later in life. Then it was oppressive, to my imagination.
That most doubtful blessing of enlightened freemen—universal suffrage—had not as yet been thrust upon the voters of the United States. In Virginia, the man who held the franchise must not only be “free, white, and twenty-one,” but he must be a land-owner to the amount of at least twenty-five dollars. Any free white of the masculine gender owning twenty-five dollars’ worth of real estate in any county had a vote there. If he owned lands of like value in ten counties, he might deposit a vote in each of them, if he could reach them all between sunrise and sunset on Election Day. It was esteemed a duty by the Richmond voter—the city being overwhelmingly Whig—to distribute his influence among doubtful counties in which he was a property-holder. He held and believed for certain that he had a right to protect his interests wherever they might lie.
Powhatan was a doubtful factor in the addition of election returns. Witness the election to the Legislature at different periods of such Democrats as Major Jacob Michaux—from a James River plantation held by his grandfather by a royal grant since the Huguenots sought refuge in Virginia from French persecutors—and of the Colonel Hopkins whom I had named. This last was personally popular, a man of pleasing address and fair oratorical powers, and represented an influential neighborhood in the centre of the county. A most worthy gentleman, as I now know. Then I classed him with Jesuits and tyrants. I had overheard a sanguine Democrat declare in the heat of political argument that “Henry L. Hopkins would be President of the United States some day.” To which my father retorted, “When that day comes I shall cross the ocean and swear allegiance to Queen Victoria.”
When I repeated the direful threat to my mother, she laughed and bade me give myself no uneasiness on the subject, as nothing was more unlikely than that Colonel Hopkins would ever go to the White House. Nevertheless, I always associated that amiable and courtly gentleman with our probable expatriation.
Election Day was ever an event of moment with us children. From the time when I was tall enough to peep over the vine-draped garden-fence—until I was reckoned too big to stand and stare in so public a place, and was allowed to join the seniors who watched the street from behind the blinds and between the sprays of the climbing roses shading the front windows—it was my delight to inspect and pronounce upon the groups that filled the highway all day long. Children are violent partisans, and we separated the sheep from the goats—id est, the Whigs from the Democrats—as soon as the horsemen became visible through the floating yellow dust of the roads running from each end of the street back into the country. One neighborhood in the lower end of the county, bordering upon Chesterfield, was familiarly known as the “Yellow Jacket region.” It took its name, according to popular belief, from the butternut and nankeen stuffs that were worn by men and women. The term had a sinister meaning to us, although it was sufficiently explained by the costume of the voters, who seldom appeared at the Court House in force except upon Election Day. They arrived early in the forenoon—a straggling procession of sad-faced citizens, or so we fancied—saying little to one another, and looking neither to the left nor the right as their sorrel nags paced up the middle of the wide, irregularly built street. I did not understand then, nor do I now, their preference for sorrel horses. Certain it is that there were four of that depressing hue to one black, bay, or gray. So badly groomed were the poor beasts, and so baggy were the nankeen trousers of the men who bestrode them, that a second look was needed to determine where the rider ended and the steed began. We noted, with disdainful glee, that the Yellow Jacket folk turned the corner of the crossway flanking our garden, and so around the back of the public square enclosing Court House, clerk’s office, and jail. There they tethered the sorry beasts to the fence, shook down a peck or so of oats from bags they had fastened behind their saddles, and shambled into the square to be lost in the gathering crowd.
As they rode through the village, ill-mannered boys chanted:
Bacon being a product for which the state was famed, the distinction was invidious to the last degree. My mother never let us take up the scandalous doggerel. She said it was vulgar, untrue, and unkind. It was not her fault that each of us had the private belief that there was a spice of truth in it.
When we saw a smart tilbury, drawn by a pair of glossy horses, stop before the “Bell Tavern” opposite our house, the occupants spring to the ground and leave the equipage to the hostlers—who rushed from the stables at sound of the clanging bell pulled by the landlord as soon as he caught sight of the carriage—we said in unison:
“They are Whigs!”
We were as positive as to the politics of the men who rode blooded hunters and wore broadcloth and tall, shining hats. The Yellow Jacket head-gear was drab in color, uncertain in shape.
It seemed monstrous to our intolerant youth that “poor white folksy” men should have an equal right with gentlemen, born and bred, in deciding who should represent the county in the Legislature and the district in Congress.
The crowning excitement of the occasion was reserved for the afternoon. As early as three o’clock I was used to see my father come out of the door of his counting-room over the way, watch in hand, and look down the Richmond road. Presently he would be joined there by one, two, or three others, and they compared timepieces, looking up at the westering sun, their faces graver and gestures more energetic as the minutes sped by. The junta of women sympathizers behind the vine-curtains began to speculate as to the possibility of accident to man, beast, or carriage, and we children inquired, anxiously, “What would happen if the Richmond voters did not come, after all?”
“No fear of that!” we were assured, our mother adding, with modest pride, “Your father has attended to the matter.”
They always came. Generally the cloud of distant dust, looming high and fast upon the wooded horizon, was the first signal of the reinforcements for the Whig party. Through this we soon made out a train of ten or twelve carriages, and perhaps as many horsemen—a triumphal cortége that rolled and caracoled up the street amid the cheers of expectant fellow-voters and of impartial urchins, glad of any chance to hurrah for anybody. The most important figure to me in the scene was my father, as with feigned composure he walked slowly to the head of the front steps, and lifted his hat in courteous acknowledgment of the hands and hats waved to him from carriage and saddle-bow. If I thought of Alexander, Napoleon, and Washington, I am not ashamed to recollect it now.
That child has been defrauded who has not had a hero in his own home.
I was at no loss to know who mine was, on this bland spring morning, as my father and I leaned on a fence on the hither side of the creek and watched the proceedings of the cooks and managers about the al fresco kitchen.
“Too many cooks spoil the dinner!” quoth I, as negroes bustled from fire to fire, and white men yelled their orders and counter-orders. “Not that it matters much what kind of victuals are served at a Democratic barbecue, so long as there is plenty to drink.”
“Easy, easy, daughter!” smiled my auditor. “There are good men and true in the other party. We are in danger of forgetting that.”
“None as good and great as Mr. Clay, father?”
He raised his hat slightly and involuntarily. “I do not think he has his equal as man and pure patriot in this, or any other country. God defend the right!”
“You are not afraid lest Polk”—drawling the monosyllable in derision—“will beat him, father?”
The smile was a laugh—happily confident.
“Hardly! I have more faith in human nature and in the common-sense of the American people than to think that they will pass over glorious Harry of the West, and forget his distinguished services to the nation, to set in the presidential chair an obscure demagogue who has done nothing. Wouldn’t you like to go down there and see half an ox roasted, and a whole sheep?”
We crossed the stream upon a shaking plank laid from bank to bank, and strolled down the slope to the scene of operations. An immense kettle was swung over a fire of logs that were so many living coals. The smell of Brunswick stew had been wafted to us while we leaned on the fence. A young man, who had the reputation of being an epicure, to the best of his knowledge and ability, superintended the manufacture of the famous delicacy.
“Two dozen chickens went into it!” he assured us. “They wanted to make me think it couldn’t be made without green corn and fresh tomatoes. I knew a trick worth two of that. I have worked it before with dried tomatoes and dried sweet corn soaked overnight.”
He smacked his lips and winked fatuously.
“I’ve great confidence in your culinary skill,” was the good-natured rejoinder.
I recollected that I had heard my father say of this very youth:
“I am never hard upon a fellow who is a fool because he can’t help it!” But I wondered at his gentleness when the epicure prattled on:
“Yes, sir! a stew like this is fit for Democrats to eat. I wouldn’t give a Whig so much as a smell of the pot!”
“You ought to have a tighter lid, then,” with the same good-humored intonation, and we passed on to see the roasts. Shallow pits, six or seven feet long and four feet wide, were half filled with clear coals of hard hickory billets. Iron bars were laid across these, gridiron-like, and half-bullocks and whole sheep were cooking over the scarlet embers. There were six pits, each with its roast. The spot for the speakers’ rostrum and the seats of the audience was well-selected. A deep spring welled up in a grove of maples. The fallen red blossoms carpeted the ground, and the young leaves supplied grateful shade. The meadows sloped gradually toward the spring; rude benches of what we called “puncheon logs”—that is, the trunks of trees hewed in half, and the flat sides laid uppermost—were ranged in the form of an amphitheatre.
“You have a fine day for the meeting,” observed my father to the master of ceremonies, a planter from the Genito neighborhood, who greeted the visitors cordially.
“Yes, sir! The Lord is on our side, and no mistake!” returned the other, emphatically. “Don’t you see that yourself, Mr. Hawes!”
“I should not venture to base my faith upon the weather,” his eyes twinkling while he affected gravity, “for we read that He sends His rain and sunshine upon the evil and the good. Good-morning! I hope the affair will be as pleasant as the day.”
Our father took his family into confidence more freely than any other man I ever knew. We were taught not to prattle to outsiders of what was said and done at home. At ten years of age I was used to hearing affairs of personal and business moment canvassed by my parents and my father’s partner, who had been an inmate of our house from his eighteenth year—intensely interested to the utmost of my comprehension and drawing my own conclusions privately, yet understanding all the while that whatever I heard and thought was not to be spoken of to schoolmate or visitor.
It was not unusual for my father to confide to me in our early morning rides—for he was my riding-master—some scheme he was considering pertaining to church, school, or purchase, talking of it as to an equal in age and intelligence. I hearkened eagerly, and was flattered and honored by the distinction thus conferred. He never charged me not to divulge what was committed to me. Once or twice he had added, “I know I am safe in telling you this.” After which the thumb-screw could not have extracted a syllable of the communication from me.
It was during one of these morning rides that he unfolded a plan suggested, as he told me, by our visit to the Democratic barbecue-ground some weeks before.
We had to rise betimes to secure a ride of tolerable length before the warmth of the spring and summer days made the exercise fatiguing and unpleasant. A glass of milk and a biscuit were brought to me while I was dressing in the gray dawn, and I would join my escort at the front gate, where stood the hostler with both horses, while the east was yet but faintly colored by the unseen sun.
We were pacing quietly along a plantation road five miles from the Court House, and I was dreamily enjoying the fresh taste of the dew-laden air upon my lips, and inhaling the scent of the wild thyme and sheep-mint, bruised by the horses’ hoofs, when my companion, who, I had seen, had been in a brown study for the last mile, began with:
“I have been thinking—” The sure prelude to something worth hearing, or so I believed then.
A Whig rally was meditated. He had consulted with three of his friends as to the scheme born of his brain, and there would be a meeting of perhaps a dozen leading men of the party in his counting-room that afternoon. The affair was not to be spoken of until date and details were settled. My heart swelled with pride in him, and in myself as his chosen confidante, as he went on. The recollection of the scenes succeeding the barbecue was fresh in our minds, and the memory sharpened the contrast between the methods of the rival parties.
I was brimful of excitement when I got home, and the various novelties of the impending event in the history of county politics and village life were the staple of neighborhood talk for the weeks dividing that morning ride from the mid-May day of the “rally.”
That was what they called it, for it was not to be a barbecue, although a collation would be served in the grounds surrounding the Grove Hotel, situated in the centre of the hamlet, and separated from the public square by one street. The meeting and the speaking would be in the grove at the rear of the Court House. Seats were to be arranged among the trees. It was at my father’s instance and his expense that the benches would be covered with white cotton cloth—“muslin,” in Northern parlance. This was in special compliment to the “ladies who, it was hoped, would compose a great part of the audience.”
This was the chiefest innovation of all that set tongues to wagging in three counties. The wives and mothers and daughters of voters were cordially invited by placards strewed broadcast through the length and breadth of Powhatan. The like had never been heard of within the memory of the oldest inhabitant. It was universally felt that the step practically guaranteed the county for Clay and Frelinghuysen.
The day dawned heavenly fair, and waxed gloriously bright by the time the preparations for the reception of the guests were completed. The dust had been laid by an all-day rain forty-eight hours before. Every blade of grass and the leaves, which rustled joyously overhead, shone as if newly varnished. At ten o’clock all the sitting-space was occupied, three-fourths of the assembly being of the fairer sex. Half an hour later there was not standing-room within the sound of the orators’ voices. A better-dressed, better-mannered crowd never graced a political “occasion.” All were in summer gala attire, and all were seated without confusion. My father, as chairman of the committee of arrangements, had provided for every stage of the proceeding. It was by a motion, made by him and carried by acclamation, that Captain Miller, “a citizen of credit and renown,” was called to preside.
As if it had happened last week, I can, in fancy, see each feature of this, the most stupendous function that had ever entered my young life. I suppose there may have been five hundred people present. I would have said, unhesitatingly, “five thousand,” if asked to make the computation. I wore, for the first time, a sheer lawn frock—the longest I had ever had, but, as my mother explained to the village dressmaker—Miss Judy Cardozo—“Virginia is growing so fast, we would better have it rather long to begin with.” I secretly rejoiced in the sweep of the full skirt down to my heels, as giving me a young-ladylike appearance. “Thad” Ivey, always kind to me, and not less jolly because he was soon to be a married man, meeting me on the way up the street, declared that I had “really a ball-room air.” My hair was “done” in two braids and tied with white ribbon figured with pale-purple and green flowers. Sprigs of the same color decorated the white ground of my lawn. I carried a white fan, and I sat, with great delight, between my mother and Cousin Mary.
murmured a gallant Whig to the row of women behind us.
“Isn’t that strange!” whispered I to Cousin Mary; “those lines have been running in my mind ever since we came.”
Not strange, as I now know. Everybody read and quoted “Childe Harold” at that period, and I may add, took liberties with the text of favorite poems to suit them to the occasion.
When the round of applause that greeted the appearance of Captain Miller upon the platform subsided, everything grew suddenly so still that I heard the leaves rustling over our heads. His was not an imposing presence, but he had a stainless reputation as a legislator and a Whig, and was highly respected as a man. He began in exactly these words:
“Ladies and gentlemen—fellow-citizens, all!—it behooves us, always and everywhere, before entering upon the prosecution of any important enterprise, to invoke the presence and blessing of Almighty God. We will, therefore, be now led in prayer by the Reverend Mr. Carus.”
My uncle-in-law “offered” a tedious petition, too long-winded to please the average politician perhaps, but it was generally felt that a younger man and newer resident could not have been called upon without incivility verging upon disrespect to a venerable citizen. The invocation over, the presiding officer announced that “the Whigs, in obedience to the spirit of fair play to all, and injustice to none, that had ever characterized the party, would to-day grant to their honored opponents, the Democrats, the opportunity of replying publicly to the arguments advanced in the addresses of those representing the principles in the interest of which the present assembly had been convened. The first speaker of the day would be the Hon. Holden Rhodes, of Richmond. The second would be one almost as well known to the citizens of county and state—the Hon. John Winston Jones, of Chesterfield. The Whigs reserved to themselves the last and closing address of the day by the Hon. Watkins Leigh, of Richmond.”
Nothing could be fairer and more courteous, it seemed to me. In the hum of approval that rippled through the assembly it was apparent that others held the like sentiment. Likewise, that the “Honorable Chairman” had scored another point for the magnanimous Whigs. But then—as I whispered to my indulgent neighbor on the left—they could afford to surrender an advantage or two to the party they were going to whip out of existence.
Holden Rhodes was an eminent lawyer, and his speech was a trifle too professional in sustained and unoratorical argument for my taste and mental reach. I recall it chiefly because of a comical interruption that enlivened the hour-long exposition of party creeds.
I have drawn in my book, Judith, a full-length portrait of one of the men of marked individuality who made Powhatan celebrated in the history of a state remarkable in every period for strongly defined public characters. In Judith I named this man “Captain Macon.” In real life he was Capt. John Cocke, a scion of a good old family, a planter of abundant means, and the father of sons who were already beginning to take the place in the public eye he had held for fifty years. He was tall and gaunt, his once lofty head slightly bowed by years and—it was hinted—by high living. He had been handsome, and his glance was still piercing, his bearing distinguished. I ever cherished, as I might value a rare antique, the incident of his introduction to that stalwart dame, my New England grandmother, who had now been a member of our family for three years.
We were on our way home after service at Fine Creek, and the carriage had stopped at a wayside spring to water the horses. Captain Cocke stood by the spring, his bridle rein thrown over his arm while his horse stooped to the “branch” flowing across the highway. Expecting to see my mother in the carriage, he took off his hat and approached the window.
“This is my mother, Captain,” said my father, raising his voice slightly, as he then named the new-comer to her deaf ears.
The old cavalier bowed low, his hand upon his heart: “Madam, I am the friend of your son. I can say nothing more to a mother!”
The fine courtesy, the graceful deference to age, the instant adaptation of manner and words to the circumstances, have set the episode aside in my heart as a gem of its kind.
He wore on that Sunday, and he wore on every other day the year around, a scarlet hunting-coat. I wonder if there were more eccentrics in Virginia in that generation than are to be met with there—or anywhere else—nowadays? Certain it is that nobody thought of inquiring why Captain Cocke, whose ancestors had served under Washington and Lafayette in the war for freedom, chose to sport the British livery. We had ceased to remark upon it by the time I write of. When strangers expressed wonderment at the queer garb, we had a resentful impression of officiousness.
Mr. Rhodes, with the rest of his party, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the policy (or want of policy) of John Tyler, who had been called to the presidential chair by the untimely death of Gen. W. H. Harrison. In the progress of his review of national affairs, he came to this name when he had spoken half an hour or so.
Whereupon uprose the majestic figure clad in scarlet, from his seat a few feet away from the platform. The Captain straightened his bent shoulders and lifted lean arms and quivering fingers toward heaven. The red tan of his weather-beaten cheeks was a dusky crimson.
“The Lord have mercy upon the nation!” he cried, his voice solemn with wrath, and sonorous with the potency of the mint-juleps for which “The Bell” was noted. “Fellow-citizens! I always cry to High Heaven for mercy upon this country when John Tyler’s name is mentioned! Amen and amen!”
He had a hearty round of applause mingled with echoes of his “amens” and much good-humored laughter. They all knew and loved the Captain. I felt the blood rush to my face, and I saw others glance around reprovingly when a city girl who sat behind me, and carried on a whispered flirtation with a fopling at her side during Mr. Rhodes’s speech, drawled:
“What voice from the tombs is that?”
Mrs. James Saunders, née Mary Cocke, was my mother’s right-hand neighbor. With perfect temper and an agreeable smile, she looked over her shoulder into the babyish face of the cockney guest—
“That is my Uncle John,” she uttered, courteously.
Whereat all within hearing smiled, and the young woman had the grace to blush.
Mr. Rhodes was speaking again, and the audience was respectfully attentive. The orator made clever use of the Captain’s interruption. The manner of it offended nobody. John Tyler was, perhaps, the most unpopular man in the Union at that particular time. The Democrats had no use for him, and he had disappointed his own party. When the smoke and dust of political skirmishing cleared away, Virginians did something like justice to his motives and his talents. Twenty years thereafter, my early pre-possessions, engendered by the vituperative eloquence of the Clay campaign, were corrected by a quiet remark made by my father to a man who spoke slightingly of the ex-President:
“The man who chose the cabinet that served during Tyler’s administration was neither fool nor traitor.”
John Winston Jones demolished the fair fabric Mr. Rhodes had spent so much time and labor in constructing that I began to yawn before the lively Democrat woke me up. I recollect that he was pungent and funny, and that I was interested, despite his sacrilegious treatment of what I regarded as sacred themes.
It was a telling point when he drew deliberately a wicked-looking jack-knife from his breeches pocket, opened it as deliberately, and, turning toward Mr. Rhodes, who sat at his left, said:
“If I were to plunge this into the bosom of my friend and respected opponent (and I beg to assure him that I shall not hurt a hair of his head, now or ever!), would I be regarded as his benefactor? Yet that is what General Jackson did to the system of bank monopolies,” etc.
I did not follow him further. For a startled second I had really thought we were to have a “scene.” I had heard that Democrats were bloodthirsty by nature, and that sanguinary outbreaks attended political demonstrations and cataracts of bad whiskey.
It goes without saying that the Hon. Watkins Leigh—a distinguished member of the Richmond bar, famous for legal acumen and forensic oratory—made quick and thorough work in the destruction of Mr. Jones’s building, and sent the Whigs home with what I heard my mother describe as “a good taste in their mouths.”
The orations were interspersed with “patriotic songs.” A quartette of young men, picked out by the committee of arrangements, for their fine voices and stanch Whiggery, stood on the platform and sang the body of the ballads. The choruses were shouted, with more force and good-will than tunefulness, by masculine voters of all ages and qualities of tone.
Doctor Henning, an able physician, and as eccentric in his way as Captain Cocke in his, stood near my father, his back against a tree, his mouth wide, and all the volume of sound he could pump from his lungs pouring skyward in the refrain of
when his eye fell upon a young man, who, having no more ear or voice than the worthy Galen himself, contented himself with listening. As the quartette began the next verse, the Doctor collared “Abe” Cardozo (whom, by the way, he had assisted to bring into the world), and actually shook him in the energy of his patriotism—
“Abraham James! why don’t you sing?”
“Me, Doctor?” stammered the young fellow, who probably had not heard his middle name in ten years before—“I never sang a note in my life!”
“Then begin now!” commanded the Doctor, setting the example as the chorus began anew.
How my father laughed! backing out of sight of the pair, and doubling himself up in the enjoyment of the scene, real bright tears rolling down his cheeks. I heard him rehearse the incident twenty times in after-years, and always with keen delight. For the Doctor was a scholar and a dreamer, as well as a skilful practitioner, renowned for his horticultural and ornithological successes, and so taciturn and absent-minded that he seldom took part in general conversation. That he should have been drawn out of his shell to the extent of roaring out ungrammatical doggerel in a public assembly of his fellow-citizens, was a powerful proof of the tremendous force of party enthusiasm. The incongruity of the whole affair appealed to my father’s ever-active sense of humor. He would wind up the story by asserting that “it would have made Jeremiah chuckle if he had known both of the actors in the by-play.”
One specimen of the ballads that flooded the land in the fateful 1844 will give some idea of the tenor of all:
(The chorus of each preceding verse is, “Get out of the way, you’re all unlucky,” etc. The “Fox” is Martin Van Buren, or “Matty.” The “Coon” is Clay. The “Wagon-Horse from Pennsylvany” is James Buchanan.)
Another ballad, sung that day under the trees at the back of the Court House, began after this wise:
To my excited imagination it was simple fact, not a flight of fancy, that Powhatan should be alluded to that day as “your historic county—a mere wave in the vast Union—
“A wave, fellow-citizens, that has caught the irresistible impulse of wind and tide bearing us on to the most glorious victory America has ever seen.”
Ah’s me! That was how both parties talked and felt with regard to the Union seventeen years before the very name became odious to those who had been ready to die in defence of it.
I cannot dismiss the subject of public functions in the “historic county” without devoting a few pages to the annual Muster Day. It was preceded by five days of “officers’ training.” The manœuvres of the latter body were carried on in the public square, and, as one end of our house overlooked this, no lessons were studied or recited between the hours of 10 A.M. and 4 P.M. on those days. The sophisticated twentieth-century youngling will smile contemptuously at hearing that, up to this time, I had never heard a brass-band. But I knew all about martial music. Already there was laid away in the fat portfolio nobody except myself ever opened, a story in ten parts, in which the hero’s voice was compared to “the thrilling strains of martial music.”
I boiled the tale down four years thereafter, and it was printed. It had a career. But “that is another story.”
I used to sit with my “white work,” or a bit of knitting, in hand, at that end window, looking across the side-street down upon the square, watching the backing and filling, the prancing and the halting of the eight “officers” drilled in military tactics by Colonel Hopkins, the strains of the drum and fife in my ears, and dream out war-stories by the dozen.
The thumping and the squealing of drum and fife set my pulses to dancing as the finest orchestra has never made them leap since that day when fancy was more real and earnest than what the bodily senses took in.
By Saturday the officers had learned their lesson well enough to take their respective stands before (and aft, as we shall see) the larger body of free and independent American citizens who were not “muster free,” hence who must study the noble art of war.
They came from every quarter of the county. The Fine Creek and Genito neighborhoods gave up their quota, and Deep Creek, Red Lane, and Yellow Jacket country kept not back. It was a motley and most democratic line that stretched from the main street to that flanking the public square. Butternut and broadcloth rubbed elbows; planter and overseer were shoulder to shoulder. “Free, white, and twenty-one” had the additional qualification of “under forty-five.” Past that, the citizen of these free and enlightened United States lays down the burden of peaceable military muster.
Besides those worn by the officers, there was not a uniform on duty that Saturday. Here and there one might descry the glitter of a gun-barrel. Walking-canes and, with the Yellow Jacket contingent, corn-stalks, simulated muskets in the exercises dictated by Colonel Hopkins, who was to-day at his best. I employ the word “dictated” with intention. He had to tell the recruits (surely the rawest ever drawn up in line) exactly what each order meant. To prevent the swaying array from leaning back against the fence, three officers were detailed to skirmish behind the long row and shove delinquents into place. The Colonel instructed them how to hold their “arms,” patiently; in the simplest colloquial phrase, informed them what each was to do when ordered to “shoulder arms,” “right dress,” “mark time,” and the rest of the technicalities confusing to ears unlearned, and which, heard by the veteran but once in a twelve-month, could not be familiar even after ten or fifteen years of “service.”
Both the windows commanding the parade-ground were filled on Muster Day. My mother and our grown-up cousins enjoyed the humors of the situation almost as much as we girls, who let nothing escape our eager eyes. Especially do I recall the shout of laughter we drew away from our outlook to stifle, when the suave commanding officer, mindful of the dull comprehension and crass ignorance of a large proportion of his corps, directed them in a clear voice—whose courteous intonations never varied under provocations that would have thrown some men into paroxysms of mirth, and moved many to profanity—to “look straight forward, hold the chin level, and let the hands hang down, keeping thumbs upon the seam of the pantaloons.” More technical terms would have been thrown away. Twenty warriors (prospective) brought both hands forward and laid their thumbs, side by side, upon the central seams of their pantaloons! Merriment, that threatened to be like the “inextinguishable laughter” of Olympian deities, followed the grave anxieties of the officials in rear and front of the mixed multitude to hinder those at the extreme ends of the line from bending forward to watch the manœuvres of comrades who occupied the centre of the field. In spite of hurryings to and fro and up and down the ranks, it chanced, half a dozen times an hour, that what should have been a straight line became a curve. Then the gallant, indomitable Colonel would walk majestically from end to end, and with the flat of his naked sword repair the damage done to discipline—
“Just like a boy rattling a stick along the palings!” gasped Cousin Mary, choking with mirth.
The simile was apt.
Some staid citizens, tenacious of dignity and susceptible to ridicule, seldom appeared upon the parade-ground, preferring to pay the fine exacted for the omission. Others—and not a few—contended that some familiarity with military manœuvres was essential to the mental outfit of every man who would be willing to serve his country in the field if necessary. This sentiment moved sundry of the younger men to the formation, that same year (if I mistake not), of the “Powhatan Troop.”
One incident connected with the birth of an organization that still exists, in name, fixed it in my mind. Cousin Joe—the hero of my childish days—was mainly instrumental in getting up the company, and brought the written form of constitution and by-laws to my father’s house, where he dined on the Court Day which marked the first parade. Our kinsman, Moses Drury Hoge, came with him. He prided himself, among a great many other things, upon being phenomenally far-sighted. To test this he asked Cousin Joe to hold the paper against the wall on the opposite side of the room, and read it aloud slowly and correctly from his seat, twenty feet away.
The scene came back to me as it was photographed on my mind that day, when I read, ten years ago, in a Richmond paper, of the prospective celebration of the formation of the “Powhatan Troop.” I was more than four hundred miles away, and fifty-odd years separated me from the “historic county” and the Court House where the banquet was to be given. I let the paper drop and closed my eyes. I was back in the big, square room on the first floor of the long, low, rambling house on the village street. My favorite cousin, tall and handsome, held the paper above his head, smiling in indulgent amusement at the young kinsman of whom he was ever fond and proud. My father stood in the doorway, watching the progress of the test. My mother had let her sewing fall to her lap while she looked on. The scent of roses from the garden that was the joy of my mother’s heart, stole in through open doors and windows. The well-modulated tones, that were to ring musically in church and hall on both sides of the sea, and for more than a half-century to come, read the formal agreement, of which I recalled, in part, the preamble:
“We, the undersigned, citizens of the County of Powhatan, in the State of Virginia.”
While the glamour of that moment of ecstatic reminiscence wrought within me, I seized my pen and wrote a telegram of congratulation to the revellers, seated, as I reckoned, at that very hour, about the banqueting-board. I addressed the despatch to Judge Thomas Miller, the grandson of the chairman on the day of the Whig rally. By a remarkable and happy coincidence, for which I had hardly dared to hope, the telegram, sent from a country station in New Jersey, flew straight and fast to the obscure hamlet nearly five hundred miles off, and was handed to Judge Miller at the head of the table while the feast was in full flow. He read it aloud, and the health of the writer was drunk amid such applause as my wildest fancy could not have foreseen in the All-So-Long-Ago when my horizon, all rose-color and gold, was bounded by the confines of “Our County.”
My mother’s love for Richmond was but second to that she felt for husband and children. It was evident to us in after-years that her longing to return to her early home wrought steadily, if silently, upon my father’s mind and shaped his plans.
These plans were definitively made and announced to us by the early autumn of 1844. Uncle Carus had removed to the city with his family late in the summer. My sister and I were to be sent to a new school just established in Richmond, and recommended to our parents by Moses Hoge, who was now assistant pastor in the First Presbyterian Church, and had full charge of a branch of the same, built farther up-town than the Old First founded by Dr. John H. Rice. We girls were to live with the Caruses that winter. In the spring the rest of the family would follow, and, thenceforward, our home would be in Richmond.
A momentous change, and one that was to alter the complexion of all our lives. Yet it was so gradually and quietly effected that we were not conscious of so much as a jar in the machinery of our existence.
I heard my mother say, and more than once, in after-years, crowded with incident and with cares of which we never dreamed in those eventless months:
“I was never quite contented to live anywhere out of Richmond, yet I often asked myself during the seven years we spent in Powhatan if they were not the most care-free I should ever have. I know, now, that they were.”
My father gave a fervent assent when he heard this. To him the sojourn was prosperous throughout. Energy, integrity, public spirit, intelligence, and, under the exterior chance acquaintances thought stern, the truest heart that ever throbbed with love to God and love to man, had won for him the esteem and friendship of the best men in the county. Steadily he mounted, by the force of native worth, to the magistrate’s bench, and was a recognized factor in local and in state politics. He had established a flourishing Sunday-school in the “Fine Creek neighborhood,” where none had ever existed until he made this the nucleus of a church. He was the confidential adviser of the embarrassed planter and the struggling mechanic, and lent a helping hand to both. He was President of a debating society, in which he was, I think, the only man who was not a college graduate.
His business had succeeded far beyond his expectations. Except that the increase of means moved him to larger charities, there was no change in our manner of life. We had always been above the pinch of penury, living as well as our neighbors, and, so far as the younger members of the family knew, as well as any reasonable people need desire to live. We had our carriage and horses, my sister and I a riding-horse apiece, abundance of delicacies for the table, and new clothes of excellent quality whenever we wanted them.
The ambitions and glories of the world beyond our limited sphere came to our ken as matter of entertainment, not as provocatives to discontent.
Two nights before we left home for our city school, the Harvest Home—“corn-shucking”—was held. It was always great fun to us younglings to witness the “show.” With no premonition that I should never assist at another similar function, I went into the kitchen late in the afternoon, and, as had been my office ever since I was eight years old, superintended the setting of the supper-table for our servants and their expected guests. I was Mammy Ritta’s special pet, and she put in a petition that I would stand by her now, in terms I could not have resisted if I had been as averse to the task as I was glad to perform it:
“Is you goin’ to be sech a town young lady that you won’t jes’ step out and show us how to set de table, honey?” could have but one answer.
A boiled ham had the place of honor at one end of the board, built out with loose planks to stretch from the yawning fireplace, bounding the lower end of the big kitchen, to Mammy’s room at the other. My mother had lent tablecloth and crockery to meet the demands of the company. She had, of course, furnished the provisions loading the planks. A shoulder balanced the ham, and side-dishes of sausage, chine, spareribs, fried chicken, huge piles of corn and wheat bread, mince and potato pies, and several varieties of preserves, would fill every spare foot of cloth when the hot things were in place. Floral decorations of feasts would not come into vogue for another decade and more, but I threw the sable corps of workers into ecstasies of delighted wonder by instructing Spotswood, Gilbert, and a stableman to tack branches of pine and cedar along the smoke-browned rafters and stack them in the corners.
“Mos’ as nice as bein’ in de woods!” ejaculated the laundress, with an audible and long-drawn sniff, parodying, in unconscious anticipation, Young John Chivery’s—“I feel as if I was in groves!”
It was nine o’clock before the ostensible business of the evening began. Boards, covered with straw, were the base of the mighty pyramid of corn in the open space between the kitchen-yard and the stables. Straw was strewed about the heap to a distance of twenty or thirty feet, and here the men of the party assembled, sitting flat on the padded earth. The evening was bland and the moon was at the full. About the doors of kitchen and laundry fluttered the dusky belles who had accompanied the shuckers, and who would sit down to supper with them. Their presence was the inspiration of certain “topical songs,” as we would name them—sometimes saucy, oftener flattering. As dear Doctor Primrose hath it, “There was not much wit, but there was a great deal of laughter, and that did nearly as well.”
This was what Mea and I whispered to each other in our outlook at the window of our room that gave directly upon the lively scene. We had sat in the same place for seven successive corn-shuckings, as we reminded ourselves, sighing reminiscently.
The top of the heap of corn was taken by the biggest man present and the best singer. From his eminence he tossed down the hooded ears to the waiting hands that caught them as they hurtled through the air, and stripped them in a twinkling. As he tossed, he sang, the others catching up the chorus with a will. Hands and voices kept perfect time.
One famous corn-shuckers’ song was encored vociferously. It ran, in part, thus: