THE ‘REBEL’S’ CHILD

My memory is eclectic, so to speak, and would never retain what was repugnant to me, especially in the way of education. I have forgotten most of the multiplication table. The algebraic figure of speech, _×_, is still an unknown quantity to me, though I remember passing creditable examinations in this study. There must have been something wrong with the teachers I had.

Ridpath’s ‘History of the United States’ was the first book I ever read. Vanity was the inspiration of this undertaking. I had been brought up on glorious family legends and I expected to find the volume thickly populated with my ancestors. But it was not. This is characteristic of historians; they omit many men famous in their own families. I think it accounts for the growth and development of the Colonial Dames and the various orders of Daughters. You may set out your family tree in any one of these organizations and enjoy the distinction of being somebody in spite of the negligence of the historians.

After all, I was destined never to finish reading Ridpath’s history. I was halted at the Battle of Gettysburg on account of a terrible and unexpected censorship.

Father had been such a good soldier that he was never obliged to boast of his war record until he was a very old man and was compelled to fan up his past glories to confound the current generation of his posterity who fought in gas masks from dugouts during the World War. I was therefore a disciple of Ridpath without sectional animus. I was ignorant of the opprobrious reputation the word ‘rebel’ had in the South. The probability is that I had never heard it spoken, as bad language is not used in the best society.

One night we were at the supper table. I was still sitting on the dictionary in the bottom of my chair in order to be sufficiently elevated for the proper use of my knife and fork. But I had been reading Ridpath that day and suddenly showed forth with some childish remark about what had been done to the rebel army at Gettysburg.

It was as if I had cast a bomb in the midst of this peaceful scene. Mother turned pale and stared at me as if she felt a serpent in her bosom.

‘Rebel?’ shouted father.

I died beneath his gaze, but kept my eyes open, fascinated by the noble rage that seemed to transform him. He stood up, cast his chair from him, ground his teeth, swept a gesture that made the candle flicker, folded his arms and strode back and forth, lashing the tail of his fury.

He called upon God to witness his sorrow that a man should live to hear his own child call him a rebel!

I keened my nose and wept, still wondering why rebel should be a bad name.

Father laid his hand upon my head and forgave me with a sob. After all, he said, it was not my fault that an honest man who had suffered, bled and died twice for his country, should be set down in history as a rebel. His unfortunate child was the victim of a partisan historian. Where was that book?

I slid hastily from my seat and ran to fetch the iniquitous volume. Mother had purchased it from a book agent without suspecting how the author had branded her husband and all brave men of the South.

Father opened it, stared at the printed pages, wrinkled his nose, snarled his lip as if he literally smelled the meanness of ignoble truth, gripped it in his two hands, tore it asunder and tossed it through the open window behind him, the pages still tittering maliciously as they fluttered down.

Followed the first and only address I ever heard on the Lost Cause, impassioned, and, I still believe, veracious. He let me have the facts--state sovereignty, slavery, secession--his own part in the struggle. He opened his wounds and bled afresh. Did I see his feet--halting before me and standing at attention upon these members. He had marched without shoes through the snows of Virginia and left his tracks there written in blood! He had slept in this snow without so much as a shawl to cover him. He had fought all day and all night when he was sick from hunger. And he’d never been shot in the back! Only to be besmirched with the title of ‘rebel’!

Socrates about to die had nothing on him in the way of eloquence, though he may have surpassed father in the logic of his defense. But watch the world; it is ever more easily stirred and convinced by oratory than by logic.

Sitting with my hands clasped in an ecstasy of all emotions attendant upon such a ministry, I was born again and confirmed in the doctrines of my own people. I have let it all go long since. I have praised Lincoln and Grant--not Sherman, of course, though he may deserve it from another point of view--but it has been, you may say, in the way of good sportsmanship. The fact that the South was wrong will never make the methods of the North seem right to me. I doubt now if any means used which result in war can be right. It comes to me now that the men of the North and the men of the South never were enemies. They fought like growing brothers during the Civil War, leaving no malice behind. It was the ethics practiced by the carpetbaggers that estranged the two sections.