SOUTH

[Note: This article was prepared (in 1891) at the instance of Mr. HORACE
SCUDDER, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who had projected a series
of papers to be written by men who by virtue of education, intellectual
endowment and social position were supposed to be high and lifted up
above vulgar passion and prejudice. The business of these elect
gentlemen was to set forth the motives that urged them to an active
participation in so rude an affair as war. After publication in the
Atlantic, the essays were to be gathered into a book and Mr. SCUDDER
fancied that thus collected they would prove a valuable addition to the
history of the times. The series stopped at the third number and the
book was never published. Whilst I did not concur in Mr. SCUDDER'S view,
I accepted the compliment and began to write with a lighter heart than I
bore as I went on. At the end I was dipping my pen into something red,
into something briny, that was not ink. The feeling seems to have been
contagious, for some years afterwards (1899) Mr. WILLIAM ARCHER, in his
America To-day (p. 142), wrote as follows:

"I met a scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the
sentiment of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say
an elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it
moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found
myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at
me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together."]

A few months ago, as I was leaving Baltimore for a summer sojourn on the
coast of Maine, two old soldiers of the war between the States took
their seats immediately behind me in the car, and began a lively
conversation about the various battles in which they had faced each
other more than a quarter of a century ago, when a trip to New England
would have been no holiday jaunt for one of their fellow-travellers. The
veterans went into the minute detail that always puts me to shame, when
I think how poor an account I should give, if pressed to describe the
military movements that I have happened to witness; and I may as well
acknowledge at the outset that I have as little aptitude for the
soldier's trade as I have for the romancer's. Single incidents I
remember as if they were of yesterday. Single pictures have burned
themselves into my brain. But I have no vocation to tell how fields
were lost and won; and my experience of m