e. Even his old rifle, had he but known it, had
been carried with Daniel Morgan from Virginia to Washington's aid in
Cambridge. His earliest memories of war were rooted in thrilling
stories of King's Mountain. He had heard old men tell of pointing
deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and had absorbed their own
love of Old Hickory. The school-master himself, when a mere lad, had
been with Scott in Mexico. The spirit of the back-woodsman had been
caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour. The
boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like
all mountaineers, Chad had little love of State and only love of
country--was first, last and all the time, simply American. It was not
reason--it was instinct. The heroes the school-master had taught him to
love and some day to emulate, had fought under one flag, and, like
them, the mountaineers never dreamed there could be another. And so the
boy was an unconscious reincarnation of that old spirit, uninfluenced
by temporary apostasies in the outside world, untouched absolutely by
sectional prejudice or the appeal of the slave. The mountaineer had no
hatred of the valley aristocrat, because he knew nothing of him, and
envied no man what he was, what he had, or the life he led. So, as for
slavery, that question, singularly enough, never troubled his soul. To
him slaves were hewers of wood and drawers of water. The Lord had made
them so and the Bible said that it was right. That the school-master
had taught Chad. He had read "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and the story made
him smile. The tragedies of it he had never known and he did not
believe. Slaves were sleek, well-fed, well-housed, loved and trusted,
rightly inferior and happy; and no aristocrat ever moved among them
with a more lordly, righteous air of authority than did this mountain
lad who had known them little more than half a dozen years. Unlike the
North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism, no jealousy, no
grievance to help him in his struggle. Unlike Harry, he had no slave
sympathy to stir him to the depths, no stubborn, rebellious pride to
prod him on. In the days when the school-master thundered at him some
speech of the Prince of Kentuckians, it was always the national thrill
in the fiery utterance that had shaken him even then. So that
unconsciously the boy was the embodiment of pure Americanism, and for
that reason he and the people among whom he was born stood among the