I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davis made Aaron Burr respectable," a sentence which clearly indicates that the writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.
Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not visionary, were premature.
The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaders could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced to follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand out so long against such odds.
Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosen to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. As one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify no act to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being his failure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short months before Appomattox.
Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators, who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs.
Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that the whole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death was an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischances that followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston, completed the tragedy of his checkered life.
Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experience of a man about town.
The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personal resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it.
There was nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to d.a.m.n and ruin him. Neither morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor was there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universal acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with that of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.
Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned to America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but, instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of obloquy rolled over him.
His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr.
Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an actual part in it.
The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall not be one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle of systems and ideas. Its pa.s.sions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. That has come to pa.s.s within a single generation in America which in Europe required ages to accomplish.
There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly and interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to its heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North.
Each must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar"s even as each would render unto G.o.d the things that are G.o.d"s. As living men, standing erect in the presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown gray without being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail to vindicate their integrity.
When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strike the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Const.i.tution left the relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the Federal Government to the States open to a double construction. It will be told how the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitable cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interest in the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section, responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements of mankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict thus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as inevitable as it was irrepressible.
It was fought out to its bitter and logical conclusion at Appomattox.
It found us a huddle of petty sovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a Nation.
Chapter the Thirty-Second
A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
I
In bringing these desultory--perhaps too fragmentary--recollections to a close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither be self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat in rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience has been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publication he has received many letters--suggestive, informatory and critical--now and again querulous--which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasion seemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In no instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he has been charged with omissions--as if he were writing a history of his own times--whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating his immediate personal experience.
I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into the Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way: It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of a devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic; the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue me from that form of theologic controversy known as infant d.a.m.nation, the baby carriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew"s Church--it was in the national capital--and the baby brow was touched with holy water out of a font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the worse for it.
Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character in the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent, standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, "There go his sins, men and brethren, there go his sins"; and having but poor eyesight I thought I saw them pa.s.sing down the stream never to trouble him, or anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, out and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?
I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has been my lifelong contention.
I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the persecution of man for opinion"s sake--and no matter for what opinion"s sake--has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.
My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research--their positivity and contradiction--none of the writers know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself.
_The night has a thousand eyes, The day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun._
_The mind has a thousand eyes, The heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done._
All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology--the pride of opinion--or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of unrighteousness.
I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.
The blessed birthright from G.o.d, the glory of heaven, the teaching and example of the Prince of Peace--have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance and superst.i.tion through two thousand years of embittered controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The blood of the martyrs we were a.s.sured in those early days was the seed of the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man--weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil"s work in G.o.d"s name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their t.i.tular divinity much as men in commerce adopt a trade-mark.
II
It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of organized churchism--the rank materialism of things temporal--not the teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion--which so long filled the world with blood and tears.
I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they should stigmatize the most ill.u.s.trious Jew as an impostor, saying to them: "What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage--a human being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"
Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism--churchism--will ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches--or, shall I say, church fabrics--breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn.
Before the world-war England and Germany--each claiming to be Protestant--were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be b.u.t.tered?" In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!" "O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!"
I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men--never any Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention--with absolute power. Honest men are often led to do or to a.s.sent, in a.s.sociation, what they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. _En ma.s.se_ extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.
III
Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love--love through grace of G.o.d--truth where we can find it--which shall irradiate the life that is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not of getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others.
_Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three-- Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me_.
For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: "I believe in G.o.d the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into h.e.l.l, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of G.o.d, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead."
That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?
As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of purgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to my Jewish friends--"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of the desert, the b.l.o.o.d.y history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity to the b.l.o.o.d.y history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah--and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves G.o.d"s people to pause and ask, "Has He not arisen already?""
I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of G.o.d and not the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers.
Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.
It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.