The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 42, April, 1861

MARION DALE

 
Marion Dale, I remember you once,
In the days when you blushed like a rose half-blown,
Long ere that wealthy respectable dunce
Sponged up your beautiful name in his own.
 
 
I remember you, Marion Dale,
Artless and cordial and modest and sweet:
You never walked in that glittering mail
That covers you now from your head to your feet.
 
 
Well I remember your welcoming smile,
When Alice and Annie and Edward and I
Came over to see you;—you lived but a mile
From my uncle's old house, and the grove that stood nigh.
 
 
I was no lover of yours, (pray, excuse me!)—
Our minds were different in texture and hue:
I never gave you a chance to refuse me;
Already I loved one less changeful than you.
 
 
Still it was ever a pride and a pleasure
Just to be near you,—the Rose of our vale.
Often I thought, "Who will own such a treasure?
Who win the rich love of our Marion Dale?"
 
 
I wonder now if you ever remember,
Ever sigh over fifteen years ago,—
Whether your June is all turned to December,—
Whether your life now is happy or no.
 
 
Gone are those winters of chats and of dances!
Gone are those summers of picnics and rides!
Gone the aroma of life's young romances!
Gone the swift flow of our passionate tides!
 
 
Marion Dale,—no longer our Marion,—
You have gone your way, and I have gone mine:
Lowly I've labored, while fashion's gay clarion
Trumpets your name through the waltz and the wine.
 
 
And when I meet you, your smile it is colder;
Statelier, prouder your features have grown;
Rounder each white and magnificent shoulder;
(Rather too low-necked your waist, I must own.)
 
 
Jewelled and muslined, your rich hair gold-netted,
Queenly 'mid flattering voices you move,—
Half to your own native graces indebted,
Half to the station and fortune you love.
 
 
"Marion" we called you; my wife you called "Alice";
I was plain "Phil";—we were intimate all:
Strange, as we leave now our cards at your palace,
On Mrs. Prime Goldbanks of Bubblemere Hall!
 
 
Six golden lackeys illumine the doorway:
Sure, one would think, by the glances they throw,
That we were fresh from the mountains of Norway,
And had forgotten to shake off the snow!
 
 
They will permit us to enter, however;
Usher us into her splendid saloon:
There we sit waiting and waiting forever,
As one would watch for the rise of the moon.
 
 
Or it may be to-day's not her "reception":
Still she's at home, and a little unbends,—
Framing, while dressing, some harmless deception,
How she shall meet her "American" friends.
 
 
Smiling you meet us,—but not quite sincerely;
Low-voiced you greet us,—but this is the ton:
This, we must feel it, is courtesy merely,—
Not the glad welcome of days that are gone.
 
 
You are in England,—the land where they freeze one,
When they've a mind to, with fashion and form:
Yet, if you choose, you can thoroughly please one:
Currents run through you still youthful and warm.
 
 
So one would think, at least, seeing you moving,
Radiant and gay, at the Countess's fête.
Say, was that babble so sweeter than loving?
Where was the charm, that you lingered so late?
 
 
Ah, well enough, as you dance on in joyance!
Still well enough, at your dinners and calls!
Fashion and riches will mask much annoyance.
Float on, fair lady, whatever befalls!
 
 
Yet, Lady Marion, for hours and for hours
You are alone with your husband and lord.
There is a skeleton hid in yon flowers;
There is a spectre at bed and at board.
 
 
Needs no confession to tell there is acting
Somewhere about you a tragedy grim.
All your bright rays have a sullen refracting;
Everywhere looms up the image of him:
 
 
Him,—whom you love not, there is no concealing.
How could you love him, apart from his gold?
Nothing now left but your fire-fly wheeling,—
Flashing one moment, then pallid and cold!
 
 
Yet you've accepted the life that he offers,—
Sunk to his level,—not raised him to yours.
All your fair flowers have their roots in his coffers:
Empty the gold-dust, and then what endures?
 
 
So, then, we leave you! Your world is not ours.
Alice and I will not trouble you more.
Almost too heavy the scent of these flowers
Down the broad stairway. Quick, open the door!
 
 
Here, in the free air, we'll pray for you, lady!
You who are changed to us,—gone from us,—lost!
Soon the Atlantic shall part us, already
Parted by gulfs that can never be crossed!
 

CHARLESTON UNDER ARMS

On Saturday morning, January 19, 1861, the steamer Columbia, from New York, lay off the harbor of Charleston in full sight of Fort Sumter. It is a circumstance which perhaps would never have reached the knowledge of the magazine-reading world, nor have been of any importance to it, but for the attendant fact that I, the writer of this article, was on board the steamer. It takes two events to make a consequence, as well as two parties to make a bargain.

The sea was smooth; the air was warmish and slightly misty; the low coast showed bare sand and forests of pines. The dangerous bar of the port, now partially deprived of its buoys, and with its main channel rendered perilous by the hulks of sunken schooners, revealed itself plainly, half a mile ahead of us, in a great crescent of yellow water, plainly distinguishable from the steel-gray of the outer ocean. Two or three square-rigged vessels were anchored to the southward of us, waiting for the tide or the tugs, while four or five pilot-boats tacked up and down in the lazy breeze, watching for the cotton-freighters which ought at this season to crowd the palmetto wharves.

"I wish we could get the duties on those ships to pay some of our military bills," said a genteel, clean-spoken Charlestonian, to a long, green, kindly-faced youth, from I know not what Southern military academy.

We had arrived off the harbor about midnight, but had not entered, for lack of a beacon whereby to shape our course. Now we must wait until noon for the tide, standing off and on the while merely to keep up our fires. A pilot came under our quarter in his little schooner, and told us that the steamer Nashville had got out the day before with only a hard bumping. No other news had he: Fort Sumter had not been taken, nor assaulted; the independence of South Carolina had not been recognized; various desirable events had not happened. In short, the political world had remained during our voyage in that chaotic status quo so loved by President Buchanan. At twelve we stood for the bar, sounding our way with extreme caution. Without accident we passed over the treacherous bottom, although in places it could not have been more than eighteen inches below our keel. The shores closed in on both sides as we passed onward. To the south was the long, low, gray Morris Island, with its extinguished lighthouse, its tuft or two of pines, its few dwellings, and its invisible batteries. To the north was the long, low, gray Sullivan's Island, a repetition of the other, with the distinctions of higher sand-rolls, a village, a regular fort, and palmettos. We passed the huge brown Moultrie House, in summer a gay resort, at present a barrack; passed the hundred scattered cottages of the island, mostly untenanted now, and looking among the sand-drifts as if they had been washed ashore at random; passed the low walls of Fort Moultrie, once visibly yellow, but now almost hidden by the new glacis, and surmounted by piles of barrels and bags of sand, with here and there palmetto stockades as a casing for the improvised embrasures; passed its black guns, its solidly built, but rusty barracks, and its weather-worn palmetto flag waving from a temporary flag-staff. On the opposite side of the harbor was Fort Johnstone, a low point, exhibiting a barrack, a few houses, and a sand redoubt, with three forty-two pounders. And here, in the midst of all things, apparent master of all things, at the entrance of the harbor proper, and nearly equidistant from either shore, though nearest the southern, frowned Fort Sumter, a huge and lofty and solid mass of brickwork with stone embrasures, all rising from a foundation of ragged granite boulders washed by the tides. The port-holes were closed; a dozen or so of monstrous cannon peeped from the summit; two or three sentinels paced slowly along the parapet; the stars and stripes blew out from the lofty flag-staff. The plan of Fort Sumter may be briefly described as five-sided, with each angle just so much truncated as to give room for one embrasure in every story. Its whole air is massive, commanding, and formidable.

Eighty or a hundred citizens, volunteers, cadets from the military academy, policemen, and negroes, greeted the arrival of the Columbia at her wharf. It was a larger crowd than usual, partly because a report had circulated that we should be forced to bring to off Fort Sumter and give an account of ourselves, and partly because many persons in Charleston have lately been perplexed with an abundant leisure. As I drove to my hotel, I noticed that the streets showed less movement of business and population than when I knew them four years ago. The place seemed dirtier, too,—worse paved, shabbier as to its brick-work and stucco, and worse painted,—but whether through real deterioration, or by comparison with the neatly finished city which I had lately left, I cannot decide. There was surely not a third of the usual shipping, nor a quarter of the accustomed cotton. Here and there were wharves perfectly bare, not only of masting and of freight, but even of dust, as if they had not been used for days, or possibly for weeks.

My old hotel was as well kept, and its table as plentiful and excellent as ever. I believe we are all aware by this time that Charleston has not suffered from hunger; that beef has not sold at thirty-five cents a pound, but rather at ten or fifteen; that its Minute Men have not been accustomed to come down upon its citizens for forced dinners and dollars; that the State loan was taken willingly by the banks, instead of unwillingly by private persons; that the rich, so far from being obliged to give a great deal for the cause of Secession, have generally given very little; that the streets are well-policed, untrodden by mobs, and as orderly as those of most cities; that, in short, the revolution so far has been political, and not social. At the same time exports and imports have nearly ceased; business, even in the retail form, is stagnant; the banks have suspended; debts are not paid.

After dinner I walked up to the Citadel square and saw a drill of the Home Guard. About thirty troopers, all elderly men, and several with white hair and whiskers, uniformed in long overcoats of homespun gray, went through some of the simpler cavalry evolutions in spite of their horses' teeth. The Home Guard is a volunteer police force, raised because of the absence of so many of the young men of the city at the islands, and because of the supposed necessity of keeping a strong hand over the negroes. A malicious citizen assured me that it was in training to take Fort Sumter by charging upon it at low water. On the opposite side of the square from where I stood rose the Citadel, or military academy, a long and lofty reddish-yellow building, stuccoed and castellated, which, by the way, I have seen represented in one of our illustrated papers as the United States Arsenal. Under its walls were half a dozen iron cannon which I judged at that distance to be twenty-four pounders. A few negroes, certainly the most leisurely part of the population at this period, and still fewer white people, leaned over the shabby fence and stared listlessly at the horsemen, with the air of people whom habit had made indifferent to such spectacles. Near me three men of the middle class of Charleston talked of those two eternal subjects, Secession and Fort Sumter. One of them, a rosy-faced, kindly-eyed, sincere, seedy, pursy gentleman of fifty, congratulated the others and thanked God because of the present high moral stand of South Carolina, so much loftier than if she had seized the key to her main harbor, when she had the opportunity. Her honor was now unspotted; her good faith and her love of the right were visible to the whole world; while the position of the Federal Government was disgraced and sapped by falsity. Better Sumter treacherously in the hands of the United States than in the hands of South Carolina; better suffer for a time under physical difficulties than forever under moral dishonor.

Simple-hearted man, a fair type of his fellow-citizens, he saw but his own side of the question, and might fairly claim in this matter to be justified by his faith. His bald crown, sandy side-locks, reddish whiskers, sanguineous cheeks, and blue eyes were all luminous with confidence in the integrity of his State, and with scorn for the meanness and wickedness of her enemies. No doubt had he that the fort ought to be surrendered to South Carolina; no suspicion that the Government could show a reason for holding it, aside from low self-interest and malice. He was the honest mouthpiece of a most peculiar people, local in its opinions and sentiments beyond anything known at the North, even in self-poised Boston. Changing his subject, he spoke with hostile, yet chivalrous, respect of the pluck of the Black Republicans in Congress. They had never faltered; they had vouchsafed no hint of concession; while, on the other hand, Southerners had shamed him by their craven spirit. It grieved, it mortified him, to see such a man as Crittenden on his knees to the North, begging, actually with tears, for what he ought to demand as a right, with head erect and hands clenched. He departed with a mysterious allusion to some secret of his for taking Fort Sumter,—some disagreeably odorous chemical preparation, I guessed, by the scientific terms in which he beclouded himself,—something which he expected would soon be called for by the Governor. May he never smell anything worse, even in the other world, than his own compounds! Unionist, and perhaps Consolidationist, as I am, I could not look upon his honest, persuaded face, and judge him a traitor, at least not to any sentiment of right that was in his own soul.

Our hotel was full of legislators and volunteer officers, mostly planters or sons of planters, and almost without exception men of standing and property. South Carolina is an oligarchy in spirit, and allows no plebeians in high places. Two centuries of plenteous feeding and favorable climate showed their natural results in the physique of these people. I do not think that I exaggerate, when I say that they averaged six feet or nearly in height, and one hundred and seventy pounds or thereabouts in weight. One or two would have brought in money, if enterprisingly heralded as Swiss or Belgian giants. The general physiognomy was good, mostly high-featured, often commanding, sometimes remarkable for massive beauty of the Jovian type, and almost invariably distinguished by a fearless, open-eyed frankness, in some instances running into arrogance and pugnacity. I remember one or two elderly men, in particular, whose faces would help an artist to idealize a Lacedaemonian general, or a baron of the Middle Ages. In dress somewhat careless, and wearing usually the last fashion but one, they struck me as less tidy than the same class when I saw it four years ago; and I made a similar remark concerning the citizens of Charleston,—not only men, but women,—from whom dandified suits and superb silks seem to have departed during the present martial time. Indeed, I heard that economy was the order of the day; that the fashionables of Charleston bought nothing new, partly because of the money pressure, and partly because the guns of Major Anderson might any day send the whole city into mourning; that patrician families had discharged their foreign cooks and put their daughters into the kitchen; that there were no concerts, no balls, and no marriages. Even the volunteers exhibited little of the pomp and vanity of war. The small French military cap was often the only sign of their present profession. The uniform, when it appeared, was frequently a coarse homespun gray, charily trimmed with red worsted, and stained with the rains and earth of the islands. One young dragoon in this sober dress walked into our hotel, trailing the clinking steel scabbard of his sabre across the marble floor of the vestibule with a warlike rattle which reminded me of the Austrian officers whom I used to see, yes, and hear, stalking about the cafe's of Florence. Half a dozen surrounded him to look at and talk about the weapon. A portly, middle-aged legislator must draw it and cut and thrust, with a smile of boyish satisfaction between his grizzled whiskers, bringing the point so near my nose, in his careless eagerness, that I had to fall back upon a stronger, that is, a more distant position. Then half a dozen others must do likewise, their eyes sparkling like those of children examining a new toy.

"It's not very sharp," said one, running his thumb carefully along the edge of the narrow and rather light blade.

"Sharp enough to cut a man's head open," averred the dragoon.

"Well, it's a dam' shame that sixty-five men tharr in Sumter should make such an expense to the State," declared a stout, blonde young rifleman, speaking with a burr which proclaimed him from the up-country. "We haven't even troyed to get 'em out. We ought at least to make a troyal."

All strangers at Charleston walk to the Battery. It is the extreme point of the city peninsula, its right facing on the Ashley, its left on the Cooper, and its outlook commanding the entire harbor, with Fort Sumter, Port Pinckney, Fort Moultrie, and Fort Johnstone in the distance. Plots of thin clover, a perfect wonder in this grassless land; promenades, neatly fenced, and covered with broken shells instead of gravel; a handsome bronze lantern-stand, twenty-five feet high, meant for a beacon; a long and solid stone quay, the finest sea-walk in the United States; a background of the best houses in Charleston, three-storied and faced with verandas: such are the features of the Battery. Lately four large iron guns, mounted like field-pieces, form an additional attraction to boys and soldierly-minded men. Nobody knew their calibre; the policemen who watched them could not say; the idlers who gathered about them disputed upon it: they were eighteen pounders; they were twenty-fours; they were thirty-sixes. Nobody could tell what they were there for. They were aimed at Fort Sumter, but would not carry half way to it. They could hit Fort Pinckney, but that was not desirable. The policeman could not explain; neither could the idlers; neither can I. At last it got reported about the city that they were to sink any boats which might come down the river to reinforce Anderson; though how the boats were to get into the river, whether by railroad from Washington, or by balloon from the Free States, nobody even pretended to guess. Standing on this side of the Ashley, and looking across it, you naturally see the other side. The long line of nearly dead level, with its stretches of thin pine-forest and its occasional glares of open sand, gives you an idea of nearly the whole country about Charleston, except that in general you ought to add to the picture a number of noble evergreen oaks bearded with pendent, weird Spanish moss, and occasional green spikes of the tropical-looking Spanish bayonet. Of palmettos there are none that I know of in this immediate region, save the hundred or more on Sullivan's Island and the one or two exotics in the streets of Charleston. In the middle of the Ashley, which is here more than a quarter of a mile wide, lies anchored a topsail schooner, the nursery of the South Carolina navy. I never saw it sail anywhere; but then my opportunities of observation were limited. Quite a number of boys are on board of it, studying maritime matters; and I can bear witness that they are sufficiently advanced to row themselves ashore. Possibly they are moored thus far up the stream to guard them from sea-sickness, which might be discouraging to young sailors. However, I ought not to talk on this subject, for I am the merest civilian and land-lubber.

My first conversation in Charleston on Secession was with an estimable friend, Northern-born, but drawing breath of Southern air ever since he attained the age of manhood. After the first salutation, he sat down, his hands on his knees, gazing on the floor, and shaking his head soberly, if not sadly.

"You have found us in a pretty fix,—in a pretty fix!"

"But what are you going to do? Are you really going out? You are not a politician, and will tell me the honest facts."

"Yes, we are going out,'—there is no doubt of it, I have not been a seceder,—I have even been called one of the disaffected; but I am obliged to admit that secession is the will of the community. Perhaps you at the North don't believe that we are honest in our professions and actions. We are so. The Carolinians really mean to go out of the Union, and don't mean to come back. They say that they are out, and they believe it. And now, what are you going to do with us? What is the feeling at the North?"

"The Union must and shall be preserved, at all hazards. That famous declaration expresses the present Northern popular sentiment. When I left, people were growing martial; they were joining military companies; they wanted to fight; they were angry."

"So I supposed. That agrees with what I hear by letter. Well, I am very sorry for it. Our people here will not retreat; they will accept a war, first. If you preserve the Union, it must be by conquest. I suppose you can do it, if you try hard enough. The North is a great deal stronger than the South; it can desolate it,—crush it. But I hope it won't be done. I wish you would speak a good word for us, when you go back. You can destroy us, I suppose. But don't you think it would be inhuman? Don't you think it would be impolitic? Do you think it would result in sufficient good to counterbalance the evident and certain evil?"

"Why, people reason in this way. They say, that, even if we allow the final independence of the seceding States, we must make it clear that there is no such thing as the right of secession, but only that of revolution or rebellion. We must fix a price for going out of the Union, which shall be so high that henceforward no State will ever be willing to pay it. We must kill, once for all, the doctrine of peaceable secession, which is nothing else than national disintegration and ruin. Lieutenant-Governor Morton of Indiana declares in substance that England never spent blood and money to wiser purpose than when she laid down fifty thousand lives and one hundred millions of pounds to prevent her thirteen disaffected colonies from having their own way. No English colony since has been willing to face the tremendous issue thus offered it. Just so it is the interest, it is the sole safety of the Federal Government, to try to hold in the Cotton States by force, and, if they go out, to oblige them to pay an enormous price for the privilege. Revolution is a troublesome luxury, and ought to be made expensive. That is the way people talk at the North and at Washington. They reason thus, you see, because they believe that this is not a league, but a nation."

"And our people believe that the States are independent and have a right to recede from the Confederation without asking its leave. With few exceptions, all agree on that; it is honest, common public opinion. The South Carolinians sincerely think that they are exercising a right, and you may depend that they will not be reasoned nor frightened out of it; and if the North tries coercion, there will be war. I don't say this defiantly, but sadly, and merely because I want you to know the truth. War is abhorrent to my feelings,—especially a war with our own brethren: and then we are so poorly prepared for it!"

Such was the substance of several conversations. The reader may rely, I think, on the justness of my friend's opinions, founded as they are on his honesty of intellect, his moderation, and his opportunities for studying his fellow-citizens. All told me the same story, but generally with more passion, sometimes with defiance; defiance toward the Government, I mean, and not toward me personally; for the better classes of Charleston are eminently courteous. South Carolina had seceded forever, defying all the hazards; she would accept nothing but independence or destruction; she did not desire any supposable compromise; she had altogether done with the Union. Yet her desire was not for war; it was simply and solely for escape. She would forget all her wrongs and insults, she would seek no revenge for the injurious past, provided she were allowed to depart without a conflict. Nearly every man with whom I talked began the conversation by asking if the North meant coercion, and closed it by deprecating hostilities and affirming the universal wish for peaceable secession. In case of compulsion, however, the State would accept the gage of battle; her sister communities of the South would side with her, the moment they saw her blood flow; Northern commerce would be devoured by privateers of all nations under the Southern flag; Northern manufactures would perish for lack of Southern raw material and Southern consumers; Northern banks would suspend, and Northern finances go into universal insolvency; the Southern ports would be opened forcibly by England and France, who must have cotton; the South would flourish in the struggle, and the North decay.

"But why do you venture on this doubtful future?" I asked of one gentleman. "What is South Carolina's grievance? The Personal-Liberty Bills?"

"Yes,—they constitute a grievance. And yet not much of one. Some of us even—the men of the 'Mercury' school, I mean—do not complain of the Union because of those bills. They say that it is the Fugitive-Slave Law itself which is unconstitutional; that the rendition of runaways is a State affair, in which the Federal Government has no concern; that Massachusetts, and other States, were quite right in nullifying an illegal and aggressive statute. Besides, South Carolina has lost very few slaves."

"Is it the Territorial Question which forces you to quit us?"

"Not in its practical issues. The South needs no more territory; has not negroes to colonize it. The doctrine of 'No more Slave States' is an insult to us, but hardly an injury. The flow of population has settled that matter. You have won all the Territories, not even excepting New Mexico, where slavery exists nominally, but is sure to die out under the hostile influences of unpropitious soil and climate. The Territorial Question has become a mere abstraction. We no longer talk of it."

"Then your great grievance is the election of Lincoln?"

"Yes."

"And the grievance is all the greater because he was elected according to all the forms of law?"

"Yes."

"If he had been got into the Presidency by trickery, by manifest cheating, your grievance would have been less complete?"

"Yes."

"Is Lincoln considered here to be a bad or dangerous man?"

"Not personally. I understand that he is a man of excellent private character, and I have nothing to say against him as a ruler, inasmuch as he has never been tried. Mr. Lincoln is simply a sign to us that we are in danger, and must provide for our own safety."

"You secede, then, solely because you think his election proves that the mass of the Northern people is adverse to you and your interests?"

"Yes."

"So Mr. Wigfall of Texas hit the nail on the head, when he said substantially that the South cannot be at peace with the North until the latter concedes that slavery is right?"

"Well,—I admit it; that is precisely it."

I desire the reader to note the loyal frankness, the unshrinking honesty of these avowals, so characteristic of the South Carolina morale. Whenever the native of that State does an act or holds an opinion, it is his nature to confess it and avow the motives thereof, without quibbling or hesitation. It is a persuaded, self-poised community, strikingly like its negative pole on the Slavery Question, Massachusetts. All those Charlestonians whom I talked with I found open-hearted in their secession, and patient of my open-heartedness as an advocate of the Union, although often astonished, I suspect, that any creature capable of drawing a conclusion from two premises should think so differently from themselves.

"But have you looked at the platform of the Republicans?" I proceeded. "It is not adverse to slavery in the States; it only objects to its entrance into the Territories; it is not an Abolition platform."

"We don't trust in the platform; we believe that it is an incomplete expression of the party creed,—that it suppresses more than it utters. The spirit which keeps the Republicans together is enmity to slavery, and that spirit will never be satisfied until the system is extinct."

"Finally,—yes; gradually and quietly and safely,—that is possible. I suppose that the secret and generally unconscious animus of the party is one which will abolitionize it after a long while."

"When will it begin to act in an abolition sense, do you think?"

"I can't say: perhaps a hundred years from now; perhaps two hundred."

There was a general laugh from the half-dozen persons who formed the group.

"What time do you fix?" I inquired.

"Two years. But for this secession of ours, there would have been bills before Congress within two years, looking to the abolition of slavery in the navy-yards, the District of Columbia, etc. That would be only the point of the wedge, which would soon assume the dimensions of an attack on slavery in the States. Look how aggressive the party has been in the question of the Territories."

"The questions are different. When Congress makes local laws for Utah, it does not follow that it will do likewise for South Carolina. You might as well infer, that, because a vessel sails from Liverpool to New York in ten days, therefore it will sail overland to St. Louis in five more."

Incredulous laughter answered me again. The South has labored under two delusions: first, that the Republicans are Abolitionists; second, that the North can be frightened. Back of these, rendering them fatally effective, lies that other delusion, the imagined right of peaceable secession, founded on a belief in the full and unresigned sovereignty of the States. Let me tell a story illustrative of the depth to which this belief has penetrated. Years ago, a friend of mine, talking to a Charleston boy about patriotism, asked him, "What is the name of your country?" "South Carolina!" responded the eight-year-old, promptly and proudly. What Northern boy, what Massachusetts boy even, would not have replied, "The United States of America"?