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We rise at midnight to march to the relief of General Burnside in beleaguered Knoxville. Our Household Friend is at hand to speed the parting guest; and as we exchange words, she is for the first time curious in names. "Smith? Smith?" She lingers on the novel sound, as if calling up from the vasty deep of her memory some familiar thought to associate with the strange fact. It is n't the Smith that writes? O no! The Smiths never write. They simply make their mark. She is but half convinced, and affirms dubiously and interrogatively that she
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has heard of a Smith who writes beautiful pieces! But we know no Smith who can lay claim to such distinction, and, bidding her a grateful good-by, we go out into the starry darkness. Lookout rises grand and gloomy, giving no sign of that awful night which belted his form with fire, when victory thundered from his sides with a thousand tongues of flame, and disaster waved to disaster from the signal torch on his crest.
Comfortable quarters are secured in the "officers' cars," which is provided with long sofas, where, for aught I know, many campaigns may have been thought out before they were fought out, during the four years' war. One of these sofas is soon occupied by a young man, an invalid, whom his father is taking home, pale, emaciated, too deathly sick to utter a word. Our medicine-chest is produced, and his failing strength fortified from the brandy-flask, which thus vindicates its right to be. His father watches with restless, painful anxiety his flickering life, in the absorbing fear that it may not outlast the long journey. At one of the small way-stations comes in a little olive-hued
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girl, with wild, jet-black, unearthly eyes, all alight with a sort of strange mockery and impish laughter. A little creature it is, who should be sleeping soundly in her bed, instead of vending hot coffee through the cars at this time of night. I wonder if it is not this preternatural wakefulness that has struck into her eyes and into her soul, and inspired her to see and scorn the satire of her life. "Running about alone all night, Topsy! Why, you must be a little owl."
"Yes 'm. I s'ect that 's what 's the matter!" is the quick, pert reply, with a flash of the wild eyes, and a saucy toss of the small head.
We rush on through the darkness, over the same road that Burnside took, backing into Knoxville with his face to the foe, and fighting as he went,--over the same road that Sherman marched, and by sheer force of his name and his numbers sent Longstreet flying from Knoxville, with Burnside's cavalry at his heels. In the darkness we fight our battles o'er again. How grandly our soldier met in his mountain fastnesses the exigency of the time! What stress of fate is in the words of the imperturbable
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Grant, "I do not know how to impress on you the necessity of holding on to East Tennessee in strong enough terms." And hold on he did, with a grip that neither long siege nor sharp assault could loosen.
To Knoxville, city of the mountains, environed by frowning forts, and forever memorable for that heroic and successful defence. But what with friend and what with foe, Knoxville has had but sorry fortunes. Fire and sword have made wretched work for the mountain town. The necessity and the wantonness of war have alike ravaged here. In the suburbs the axe has turned the forest into a cleared field, and at one end of the city fire has wellnigh made a clean sweep. When a great cause is marching on, I suppose there must be minor irregularities. Indeed, war itself is a monstrous irregularity, and all lesser ones crowd to its banners. If the individual withers a little under the infliction, he can console himself with reflecting that the world is more and more. So when troops are camping inyour door-yard, pulling down your neat fences, your fine trees, your pretty shrubbery
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to boil their coffee with, and boiling it in your kitchen, and sleeping in your bed-rooms, borrowing your knives and forks and napkins and towels with charming frankness and frankly forgetting to return them, it may perhaps salve your wounds to know that your hardware and haberdashery are not going to swell the gains of some ignoble thief, but to furnish creature comforts for the great cause of human freedom and human progress! Besides, our troops were unselfish, and when they had levelled the paling of a loyal citizen, would generously offer to share their hard-earned firewood with him!
We go round about Knoxville, telling her towers and marking well her bulwarks. We pass through her lines of defence, still well defined. We see the remnants of the barricades that stretched across her country roads. Line upon line of defence, precept upon precept of resistance, but no point of surrender. Burnside was holding on! Driven from one position, the troops were to fall back to another. And in the final issue they were to withdraw into the city and make every house a fortress. But if did not come to that. Thank Heaven! it never came to that.
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We drive out to Fort Saunders, where was met the fierce assault, the last desperate resort of Longstreet's failing force. Fort Saunders, named in honor of the brave young Kentuckian who, in front of the fort, at the front of all danger, received his death-wound, and was borne hence to his midnight burial. We climb the barren hill to the fort, a rough earthwork, crumbling already to ruins,--only a wall of sods, a ditch, a bastion,--can it be that a fiery tide of life and death so lately seethed around it? Standing on the wall, Knoxville, with her battlements of mountains, her hills, her woods, her waters, and the whole plan of siege, attack, and defence, is revealed. The marks of battle surround us. Large and elegant houses are standing near, from whose grounds every vestige of shrubbery has disappeared. Broad and shapely terraces adorn the hillside, from which the house has been burned to give our guns good range. Opposite on the far horizon we can just discern a house, from which it was discovered that sharpshooters were annoying our men, and the next moment a shell went crashing through its tur-
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ret and the annoyance ceased. We have heard of the wonderful range of our guns, but here I see the distance and do not more than half believe it. The rebel camping-grounds lie before us, hundreds of acres of timber felled for range and breastworks, miles of intrenchments stretching right and left. Every hill was its fort, every valley its rifle-pits, and every wood its regiment, till it seems as if the whole earth was fitted up for a slaughter-house.
Out from yonder woods up this hill came the valiant soldiers, rebels but Americans, brave in a bad cause,--three brigades of picked men, advancing swiftly to storm the fort in the twilight of the dawn. They had planned a surprise, but our men were ready. The fort was manned by eighty-nine men,--another says fifty,--but at any rate the garrison was fearfully small, and the rear of the fort was undefended. On the outside of the ditch that yawns at our feet as we stand upon the bastion was stretched a small wire about the size of a telegraph wire, and perhaps a foot from the ground. In the darkness it would not be seen, nor at any time would it be likely to be discerned in the fury
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of attack. The enemy rushed up the hill, till within almost grappling distance, and then our ranks opened upon them a deadly fire. They wavered, they fell, right and left, but still they rushed on, only in the last hot, eager moment to stumble over the treacherous wire headlong into the ditch. Even the gravity of the occasion hardly hides the ridiculousness of the device. It seems like a leaf out of Knickerbocker's History, this Yankee notion of tripping up an army, but it worked fatally well in fact. The men had made up their minds doubtless to leap into the ditch, but pitching in head-foremost they had not counted on. The guns could not of course be trained upon them, but shells were lighted from cigars and flung into the writhing, struggling, raging mass. It is horrible to think of, but as a stratagem its success was complete. The fall, the surprise, the confusion were too much. They would have faced, they did face, known dangers unflinching, but this unexpected and inexplicable shock overset them morally as well as physically. Had they followed the ditch around to the rear of the fort, its capture would have been imminent, but
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this was not to be. The incessant, fierce fire left them no breathing-space to collect their scattered senses. The strange horror and the frightful carnage together appalled them, and the day was lost.*
But there were deeds of hopeless daring. Some gained the ramparts only to meet certain death. Two men stood before a gun, flung their arms around it, and demanded a surrender. The gun itself replied, and they made no second summons. Once, twice, thrice the Rebel flag was planted on the parapet, and instantly
* A soldier tells the story thus:--
"But little did old Longstreet know
The boys he had to meet him;
They fought on old Virginia's soil,
At Bull Run and Antietam.
The Western boys from Illinois
And Buckeyes won't knock under;
And Yankee steel, it made them squeal,
And Old Kentuck, by thunder!
"The Rebels made a bold advance,
To bag us they intended;
And up the hill on double-quick
The chivalry ascended.
[p. 261]
Our battery's fire, and Burnside's wire,
It caused them for to stumble,
And head o'er heels into the ditch
Like 'bullfrogs' they did tumble.
"Our boys did quickly on them pile,
Amid the great confusion,
Resolved that they should pay the cost
For such a bold intrusion;
And if, my friends, I have received
The proper information,
The Rebs will never charge again
That charged on that occasion."
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torn away. The hillside was strewn with the dead and dying men. They dropped back from the ramparts. They choked the ditch. The earth was drenched with blood. O God, grant our land may never see such sight again! But Burnside must hold on.
Scarcely a spot around Knoxville that has not its treasured memories, and many generations will listen to the story of her wild warfare. The sufferings, the devotion, and the courage of East Tennessee form no inconsiderable chapter in the history of the great rebellion,--and the armies of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio have left a glorious record on
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her rocks. Besides its associations, the town has its own attractions in the rugged natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. It overlooks the intervening ridges, takes in the mountains on both sides, and commands the valley up and down as far as eye can reach. From Fort Haskell we have another magnificent view,--a great sweep of purple mountains, the near green hills, the splendid sunset sky and river, and Knoxville nestling in the valley in the lovely enchantment of distance. But Linden saw another sight, for in this lonely fort, far from houses or roads, accessible only by sheer climbing, crouches a white family, two women and a child, with ashen faces that haunt me yet. This is home. Their clothing is of the scantiest, there is no palpable shelter except the powder-magazine, and they have only the implements of the rudest domestic life. Unless the war helps them, what shall recompense us for the war?
Knoxville, like Nashville and Chattanooga, has its solders' cemetery, rows upon rows of graves, more than twenty-five hundred, each with its
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white slab at the head, marked with the name of him who lies under its shadow, or sometimes bearing only the one word "Unknown." Unknown yet well known. In their place are rows of graves, with the little word "Rebel" under the name, distinguished by no other mark from the neighboring graves. I am glad to see this, for so it suits a great nation. In war he who lifts his hand against his country is her foe, whether of her own or foreign blood; but when the fighting has ceased they are all her children again,--rebellious children, but her own. Let the bones of the dead be gathered with great sorrow and laid decently in their last resting-place. If there must be reviling and revenge and petty spite, let it not come from the nation which only calmness befits, and composure, and an inexhaustible beneficence.
And so many of these knew not what they did. I think the poverty and the misery of the South--perhaps I ought to say in the South--make a deeper impression on the traveller than anything else. I do not know how much may be the effect of the war, but I fancy a great deal dates farther back than that.
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However wasted the land may be by the tramp of armies, it is no four years' war that has spread the full pallor over the faces I have seen. The wretched cabins bear indubitable marks of time. It is habit, not a sudden absence of occupation, that fills the rickety stoops of rickety taverns with unclean, idle men, and sets in every door-way female figures that have no vestige of female comeliness. I do not think the people of the North have at any time, before, during, or since the war, harbored hatred towards the people of the South; but if ever so bitter or revengeful feelings had been engendered by the strife, there needs but a journey through the South to drive it all away. There can be no resentment, no indignation, nothing but the sorest pity, towards such poverty as we see, such ignorance as we infer. What could these know of loyalty or duty? They were loyal to their highest. I only wonder that the South could have drawn its valiant armies from such a rural population as hers. Human nature must be tenacious of its nobility if it can survive such degradation,--if endurance and self-sacrifice and every form of heroism can come
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out of these Nazareths. We know that nobility does survive, yet there is a fearful waste. We see now how Andersonville was possible.
If there could only be some way devised by which these people could know that there is any other state of society than their own,--could know how differently live the farmers and artisans of the North. Even the excessive toil and care of New England are more hopeful than this idleness and unthrift. We laugh at our staring white cottages, and they are staring,--but the neat little white cottages with their green yards and trim fences are pleasanter to the eye than comfortless cabins. There is no cause for boasting. We are one country, and whatever keeps the South down keeps the North down too. Nothing is injurious to one section that is not before the end, and long before the end, injurious to the other.
My plan of reconstruction would be to gather the poor whites together and send them on an excursion through our New England villages, show them the houses inside and out, the dairies, the larders, the clothes-presses, the tables, the sitting-rooms, the gardens and farms of the
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common people, and say to them: "This is the very worst we desire for you. All the stories you have heard of our designs of invasion and desecration and subjugation are falsehoods. Through the whole North there is but one wish,--even the wildest Radicals and Fanatics, wise or unwise, wish nothing worse than this,--that you should have every comfort and every freedom that we possess, and that from this starting-point North and South should press forward together."
Some such free intermingling of section with section is necessary to correct the mistakes into which they have fallen. There are so many men--not so very many, perhaps, but what there are make a prodigious din--who design and desire only their own personal aggrandizement, and whose selfishness leads them to believe the lie, that what is worst for others can be made best for themselves,--who therefore find their account in stirring up strife and keeping alive the embers of hatred,--that I see no hope unless the people can be somehow detached from their false guides, and prove for themselves how true and hearty is the good-will
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which the heart of the North bears the South. Mistaken we may often be in our measures, but if once, in spite of false politicians, the great body of the Southern people could be convinced that the great body of the Northern people wish them only good, it seems to me that wise measures could be speedily agreed upon on both sides.
Here is a Southern paper, which affirms that according to the census one in forty and a half of the entire population of New England are paupers, and one in one hundred and seventy-three criminals; while in the six States of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, one in four hundred and fifty-one are paupers, and one in three thousand four hundred and twenty-three criminals. This state of things is held up as a "damaging contrast to our enlightened New England," and the inference drawn is that the six Southern States are by so much in advance of the six Northern States in point of comfort and morality. Now I suppose that no Northern man is deceived by this showing, but I can conceive that a very large part of the South should be. The true significance of the facts will hardly
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reach the ears that have heard their false application. What we want is, that the truth of facts should somehow be brought to their heads, and the truth of feelings to their hearts; that thus their ambition and aspiration should be touched, and themselves awakened to the possibility of a better life. We need of all things to win the good-will of the South. It is no easy task. An immense crop of hatred has been springing up for years. It was sedulously cultivated during the war, and it must be very long before it will entirely disappear. Our part is to exercise the utmost forbearance. Our strength and courage and determination were abundantly proved by the war; there can be no suspicion of weakness, or cowardice, or lukewarm love of justice, or dignity, in forbearing now. Our papers sometimes quote fierce, wild, hateful, and hating words from Southern journals. I cannot see the good of it. Why not take it for granted that they do hate us bitterly, and then let it alone? While I do not think there is a particle of revenge in the bosom of the North, I think there is a certain impatience and vexation at the persistent hostile and inap-
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peasable attitude of the South. But the indulgence of such sentiments is unworthy both of our education and our religion. The Southern people misunderstand. They know not what they do. If our enlightenment be indeed greater than theirs, we ought to show it in broader and more generous souls. If we are provoked into recrimination, we lower to the level of those who give the provocation.
We were victorious, and on that account also we ought to cultivate an untiring consideration. One feels this through all his soul at Chattanooga. There they live, Southern men and women,--on their own grounds, in their own homes, and everywhere before them the fields of their defeat. They cannot look up but their eyes rest on lost battle-grounds. Every landscape has its story of disaster. The soldiers of the hated conquerors are coming in and going out before them. Visitors are arriving solely to survey the scene of their misfortunes, and departing to spread the tale abroad. We too had our defeats, but they did not come into our door-yards. We do not lie down and rise up with them. And moreover we gained the final victory. They
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risked all, and lost. Now, I would not compromise one claim demanded by national justice or national safety, but further than this I would not go. If they wish to support Mrs. Davis and her children, let them. If they want to strew the graves of their soldiers with flowers, by all means let them. If they leave the graves of our soldiers unadorned, what matter, since the nation holds them, and the future will hold them in highest honor? If women wish to walk in the middle of the streets, up to their ankles in mud and mire, following the funeral train of a favorite general, why lisp a syllable to oppose them? From the red-heat of war all inflammable substance must be excluded; but now that bloodshed at least is over, I should say the quickest way to put the fire out is to let it burn itself out! These things lay hold of their deepest, truest, tenderest sentiments. The lost cause doubtless to a vast majority was a holy cause. By tact and unswerving courtesy, by a judicious avoidance of topics that arouse useless contention, by quietly attending to those points on which we are agreed, by inducing as far as possible a harmony of interests, by an unob-
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trusive and untiring expression of good feeling, by a sedulous cultivation of that spirit of Christian love which seeketh not its own, and is not easily provoked, let us endeavor to win them away from their disappointment and unfriendliness, that South and North may be what it never yet has been, one country, one in a higher sentiment than we have ever felt, one in a truer prosperity than we have ever found, one in a nobler destiny than the world has ever seen.
I do not greatly wonder at the feeling compounded of dislike and contempt which the "higher classes" of the South entertain for "Yankees,"--apart from their persistent and successful opposition to the peculiar institution. I suspect that very many of the Northerners who go South are ignorant or careless of good breeding, which in its last analysis is Christianity. Christianity in social intercourse demands that you make your neighbor's case your own. Good breeding demands that you act as if you did, whether you do or not. I do not lay this down as a definition for immortality, but it answers my purpose. So then, while a failure in Christianity may go undetected under cover of good
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breeding, a failure in good breeding is necessarily the failure of Christianity too. I think, therefore, that if one is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Christianity, while he may fall into awkward mistakes of etiquette disadvantageous to himself, he will never be guilty of those brutal violations of etiquette which awaken resentment in others. But I fear many of our southward travelling citizens are not of the most winning or the most wise character. In the first place, doubtless, many of them do not come from the best people at home,--the people who have attained the last results of Christian refinement and education. They are men of energy, men of honesty,--let us hope, though after the late exhibitions of dishonesty in orthodox circles one can but speak with misgiving,--men of loyalty and anti-slavery, and free-school, and prohibitory liquor-law, and all the rest that we were born to, and have grown up in, and adopted without thought, and fight for in season and out of season; but they are not always men of nice perception, of delicate sensibilities, of quick discrimination as to times, persons, and places. Perhaps they are people who have made their own
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way in the world, and have become a little roughened by rough usage, as people always are unless provided with safeguards. Or perhaps they are fashioned originally of delft, not porcelain. They take with them the same lack of manners which so disagreeably characterizes the North,--or, if that is too strong, I will say which is so common in the North. Here let me assert, in parenthesis, that from the railroad point of view the South is unquestionably superior to the North. Official persons on the great lines of travel, drivers, conductors, clerks, are usually more attentive. They do their duty more thoroughly. I have heard it suggested that there have been too many men killed for want of decency in small things to render any coarse manners entirely safe. Peaceable folk get the benefit of an improved state of affairs. It may be so, and certainly if the shooting of one in ten of all persons at the North would result in the uniform courtesy of the other nine, one might lay down one's life in a worse cause!
These people go South either to advance their own fortunes or to benefit the South. Sometimes they think to conciliate the Southerners
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by the expression of a sympathy and pity, which, however innocently intended, is received as insult added to injury. Or they talk loudly of the superiority of Northern to Southern society,--possibly in those very points in which they are themselves deficient. So they awaken antipathy before they have time to command respect. On trial they would prove themselves true friends, and in many respects valuable citizens, but somehow they have not the power to walk softly. Much good they will do, but much also they will fail to do. They will elevate the ignorant, but they will not conciliate the educated. If a missionary should go to the Feejee Islands, I suppose he would hardly say to the Islanders, "Come now, ye pagans, cannibals, savages, and be enlightened by me." The most brutalized heathen is not won by being told that he is a heathen. Think then of the religious devoutness and the elegant manners to be found in the South,--and imagine a "Yankee" as yet somewhat in the rough affirming in its presence that what the South wants is Northern civilization and Northern Christianity! For me, I take issue with the fact, as well as with the
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mode of expressing it. Neither Northern civilization nor Northern Christianity has ever seemed to me to be of a type so perfect as to justify transportation. I have seen too many and to grievous flaws in both to be very complacent in reflecting on them. Bible Christianity and Bible civilization the South unquestionably wants, and of both she doubtless has a greater lack than the North. If the North can help her to them, so much the better; she will at the same time be helping herself, and, despite her increased possessions, she also stands in sore need of them. But the cause of neither South nor North will be helped by high-sounding proclamations, which have the air, if not the reality, of vainglory.
The South is an excellent specific to put one in humor with the West. An ill-tempered irritable person like--well, let us say like the reader!--does sometimes, it must be confessed, come into contact with the energies of the West almost too violently for his serenity. "You may be the Great West," mentally apostrophizes this violent-tempered person after a doleful day's ride in an unclean and unventilated rail-car, or a day's sail on a Floating Palace,--"you may
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be the Great West, but you are a very dirty Great West. You are a smoking and a swearing and an uncouth Great West. You are a loose-jointed, ungainly giant, striding over the prairies, leaving your footprints everywhere, brandishing your big arms and bawling out your prowess through the disgusted world. Energy have you? Yes, you are drunken with energy. You are wrecked on the rock of material prosperity. You make it your idol, and you bow down and worship it, sacrificing to it whatever is lovely and fine and thorough. Give over your boasting. I detest material prosperity. Blessed be poverty and failure and calmness and silence. Away with success and population and grain-elevators!
It is not growing like a tree,
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak three hundred year,
To fall, a log, at last, brown, bald, and sear.
A lily of a day
Is fairer far in May.
Although it fall and die that night,
It was the plant and flower of light.
In small proportion we just beauties see,
And in short measure life may perfect be."
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But hush! infuriated gentle reader. All in good time. We must creep before we walk. And the West is showing such strength of limb and suppleness of joint in creeping, that we may confidently count on her walking both sister and wife of the gods when she does find her feet. Look at poor little Chicago even,--one pities her floundering helplessly in the mud; but is she floundering helplessly? Once, twice, thrice, she has turned to with a will and lifted herself out of the mud unto comparatively clean habitations. She was athirst, and she presently bored a hole two miles long under the lake to get pure water. It is uncomfortable waiting in her dismal railroad station, but just yonder is rising a railroad station that is to be, both in beauty and comfort, monarch of all it surveys, and of much that it cannot survey. This is true civilization,--this bringing the comforts and the elegances of life within everybody's reach. It is because the West is not a land of great performance merely, but of magnificent promise, that we rejoice in it. The time of her madness is gone by, the time when she was called a "Garden of Eden, where the 'land flows with milk and
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honey,'--where a man has but to 'open wide his mouth, to have it filled with the finest of wheat,'"--when it was declared that "nothing but a parcel of 'old fogies' will be found in Vermont five years hence"; she promises now only what she has power to perform. If the West were content with her present attainments, we should be little proud of her, but because these are only stepping-stones to her future greatness we rejoice; because her material prosperity is but the solid basis for a society which shall be the home of all things lovely and of good report, where science and art and religion shall flourish like a green bay-tree,--a society wherein all that is crude shall be mellowed, all that is harsh softened, all that is incomplete rounded into symmetry, till the Great West shall be as graceful as she is prosperous, a centre of light as well as of heat,--the king's daughter, all glorious within.
At the South one sees the need of that very energy which so superabounds in the West. Better that energy should run riot, than that it should die into quiescence and hopelessness. Yet energy there must be in the South, or it
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never would have carried on its long war so bravely and persistently. What she now wants to develop her great resources is simply opportunity. There needs above all things peace,--a settled condition of things, a knowledge of what is to be depended on. This State of Tennessee abounds in natural wealth. Her valleys are as fertile as they are beautiful. Her woods are inexhaustible. Her marble is already famous. Her quarries would at the North make the fortune of their proprietor. The very stones by the roadside are lumps of copper. East Tennessee is one mass of wealth to him who can make it available. Her unparalleled sufferings, her bravery, her fortitude, and her courage during the war gave her a romantic interest at the North. Peace has not yet brought her quiet. Still, afflicted and impoverished, overrun by the armies of both sides, torn by internal strife, it is easy to see that she has wonderful recuperative powers. Possessing all the elements of beauty, wealth, and health, she must be capable of the highest order of development. Her objectionable features are temporary, her desirable ones lasting.
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I cannot but think it a most unfortunate circumstance for the Republican cause in Tennessee, that it has fallen into the hands of the violent, vindictive, and vulgar person at the head of her affairs. Governor Brownlow at the North stands in some sort as representative of the loyalty and patriotism of East Tennessee,--faithful among many faithless. But I believe that no man's good reputation rests on a basis more frail and insecure than his; while the recklessness, profanity, and uncleanness of his speech are such, that it is difficult to conceive of any combination of circumstances which should make it the duty of any an to propose or support him as leader in any measure affecting the welfare of society.
The columns of his own newspaper furnish the authority for my statements,--perhaps I ought rather to say the grounds of my belief.
I think no one who had travelled in the South could ever clamor for her punishment, or feel that she has been let off lightly. Her punishment has long been heavy upon her. She staked all and lost, and now, sitting in dust and ashes, she calls forth no harsher feeling than commis-
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eration. Those men are hardly the truest patriots who talk most loudly of extreme measures for the South, and count all lenity as treachery; but rather they who, yielding nothing to rebellion, strive now only to bind up her bleeding wounds and restore her wasted strength.