CHAPTER I. FROM HARPER’S FERRY TO BULL RUN.

“O war, thou hast thy fierce delight,

Thy gleams of joy intensely bright;

Such gleams as from thy polished shield

Fly dazzling o’er the battle-field.”

Is there a boy in all this wide land, North or South, who would not like to hear what a boy has to say of his experience as a private soldier in the Confederate Army from 1861 to 1865, serving for the most part in Stuart’s Cavalry of Lee’s army? Men have told their story, and graphically told it from a man’s standpoint. But who has spoken for the boy? Who has told of the part the boy played in that great drama that was on the stage for four years without intermission? That bloody drama in which there were 3,000,000 players—a play that cost the country eight billions in money and half a million human lives?

I do not know how it was in the Northern armies, but the bulk of Lee’s soldiers in the ranks were boys in their teens. It was these boys who made Thomas Jonathan Jackson, “Stonewall Jackson;” who put Robert E. Lee’s name in the hall of fame and who lifted J.E.B. Stuart up to the rank of lieutenant-general of cavalry. One of these boys has written the story as he remembers it in plain, simple language; not a history, but simply an account of what he saw and did while this eventful history was being made. If his experience is different from others, or does not accord in all respects with what the historian has written, it is because we do not all see alike. The writer has not consulted the histories for material for this story; he did not have to do this. If all the boys who served in the Confederate Army were to write their experience, they would all be different, yet all approximately correct, and perhaps, taken together, would be the most perfect history that could be written of the Confederate side of the Civil War.

In the early spring of 1861 I was seventeen years old and going to school about half a mile from my home in Loudoun county, Virginia. Twelve miles distant was Harper’s Ferry, where four years previous John Brown had made an attempt to raise an insurrection among the slaves in that district. He seized the United States arsenal, located there, for the purpose of arming the negroes, who were expected to flock to his standard and have their freedom declared. The negroes did not respond; John Brown and a few of his followers were captured and hanged. This atrocious act of Brown and his abettors kindled a flame in the hearts of the Southern people that led to the Civil War. But none felt it so keenly as did the Virginians, because it was their sacred soil that had been traduced. Three years previous to this, when I was ten years of age, I remember to have heard a political discussion among a body of men, and the following words have lingered in my memory ever since, and they are all that I can recall of their talk: “If there is a war between the North and South, Virginia will be the battlefield.” I thought it would be grand, and waited anxiously for the fulfillment of this prophecy. Then when John Brown swooped down on Harper’s Ferry with his cohorts, it looked as if the day had really come and that the prediction was about to be fulfilled. From that time war talk was general, especially among the small boys. But the intense excitement caused by the Brown episode gradually abated. It broke out afresh, however, when later it was announced that Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. It seemed to be the concensus of opinion that the result would be war, and that Virginia in truth would be the battleground, and that the counties along the Potomac would receive the first shock of battle. We boys of Loudoun county, right on the Potomac, felt that we were “it,” and we had a kind of pity for those poor fellows a little farther back. We were in the front row, and when the curtain went up we could see and hear everything. There were about thirty boys attending our school between the ages of fifteen and twenty. They all entered the Confederate Army, but few survived the war.

Before going on with the story, perhaps I ought to explain why these boys were so eager for war, when they knew that the enemy would be their own countrymen. There was a peculiar relationship existing between the slave owner’s family and the slaves that the North never did and never will understand. On the part of the white children it was love, pure and simple, for the slave, while on the part of the adult it was more than friendship, and, I might add, the feeling was reciprocated by the slaves. The children addressed the adult blacks as Uncle and Aunt, and treated them with as much respect as they did their blood relatives. It was Uncle Reuben and Aunt Dinah. The adult white also addressed the older colored people in the same way. With but few exceptions, the two races lived together in perfect harmony. If a slave-owner was cruel to his slaves, it was because he was a cruel man, and all who came in contact with him, both man and beast, suffered at his hands. Even his children did not escape. These men are found everywhere. The old black mammy, with her head tied up in a white cloth, was loved, respected and honored by every inmate of the home, regardless of color.

The following incident will be of interest: Hon. John Randolph Tucker, one of Virginia’s most gifted and learned sons, who represented his State in the U.S. Senate, always celebrated his birthday. I remember to have attended one of these celebrations. It was shortly after the close of the war. Mr. Tucker was then between fifty-five and sixty years of age. He had grown children. Fun making was one of his characteristics. On these annual occasions, it was his custom to dress himself in a long white gown and bring into the parlor his old black nurse, whom he called “mammy.” She sat in her rocking-chair with her head tied up in the conventional snow-white cloth. Mr. Tucker, dressed up as a child in his nightgown, would toddle in and climb up into her lap, and she would lull him to sleep with an old-time nursery song, no doubt one of her own compositions. This could not possibly have occurred had the skin of his nurse been white.

When a daughter married and set up her own home, fortunate was she if she took with her the mammy. In many homes the slaves were present at family prayers. The kitchen and the cabin furnished the white children places of resort that were full of pleasure.

This was the relation between white and colored as I remember it from a child in my part of Virginia. And tonight, as I write these lines, while the clock tolls off the hour of eleven, I cannot keep out of my mind the words of that little poem by Elizabeth Akers:

“Backward, turn backward, oh time in thy flight,

And make me a child again, just for tonight.”

How anyone could have desired to break up this happy relationship was beyond the conception of the child, and more or less incomprehensible to the adult.

Somewhere between childhood and youth we children all learned that there was a race of people up North called Abolitionists, who were so mean that they sent secret agents through the country to persuade the colored people to leave their homes and go North, where they could be free. That these agents were disguised as peddlers or otherwise, and that they visited the cabins of the slaves during the late hours of the night, and went so far as to urge them to rise up in a body and declare their freedom, and if necessary to murder those who held them as slaves. This delusion, if it were a delusion, might have been dispelled had not John Brown and his men appeared upon the scene to give an ocular demonstration of their real intent. The few men with him may have been the only following that he had, but the damage had been done. Virginia was fighting mad. What had been whispered about the abolitionists in secret was now proclaimed from the housetops. John Brown was an abolitionist, and all abolitionists were John Browns, so the youths at least reasoned. The words abolitionist and Yankee were for the most part synonymous terms; the former being hard to pronounce, the child usually employed the latter. Some of the young children did not know that a Yankee was a human being, as the following incident will illustrate:

When the first Federal soldiers entered the village of Middleburg, Loudoun county, Virginia, the cry went up and down the streets, “The Yankees have come!” The streets were soon deserted by every living thing except the dogs and the ubiquitous, irrepressible small boy, who was or pretended to be “skeered o’ nothin’.” This war was gotten up for his special benefit, and he was determined to see all that was to be seen, and was always to be found well up in front. The women and children within their homes crowded to the windows to see the cavalry as it marched by. A little three-year old nephew of mine, with the expression of alarm disappearing from his face, said: “Mamma, them ain’t Yankees, them’s soldiers.” He expected to see some kind of hideous animal.

This is the education the Virginia boys got, who afterward became Lee’s soldiers. They were brought up in this school, and when they became soldiers, wearing the gray, they felt that they had something to fight for. They believed that they were real patriots, notwithstanding they were called rebels and traitors.

This brings us to the beginning of the Civil War, or at least to the secession movement....