To OUR DEAD HEROES BY THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY. NOT FOR FAME OR REWARD: NOT FOR PLACE OR RANK: NOT LURED BY AMBITION: OR GOADED BY NECESSITY: BUT IN SIMPLE OBEDIENCE TO DUTY AS THEY UNDERSTOOD IT: THESE MEN SUFFERED ALL, SACRIFICED All, Dared all! AND DIED. IV The historic event of which I spoke earlier, and to which these inscriptions very naturally lead up, was one which occurred in Charleston in the spring of that year which saw the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. But previous to the narration of it I must speak of the man whose death was the occasion of it, and quote the lines placed upon his tombstone. There lived in Charleston before and during the first years of the Civil War a certain James Lewis Pettigru, a lawyer and a public man. Knowledge of him has for a long time been confined to the South, or to students of history. His grave is in the yard of St. Michael's Church; and, the epitaph on the stone at the head of it - an epitaph which, an epitaph which, I understand, has long been known and admired by the few-awakening the interest of the present writer, he sought out among his older acquaintances in Charleston those who should give him a first-hand account of the gentleman who was the subject of it. Some few persons have seen the man in their boyhood, seen him on the street and in court; their fathers were his personal friends. But, apart from these intimate narratives of eyewitnesses, the man's memory floated in the general atmosphere. This could hardly be otherwise, since for more than thirty years Pettigru was active in all matters of common interest. Standing high at the bar, he spoke on almost all public occasions. In a time of eloquent men he was among the most eloquent. His probity, industry, and the powers of his mind were of such a nature that there was no office to which he could not have aspired. Office appears to have been little to his taste; but he was a leader in his own way, popular with all classes in the community, rich and poor, black and white-in short, with the whole town and state. And this is the more remarkable in that Pettigru was a wit; and, as we all know, the power of illuminating the folly and unreason of mankind by those flashes of pure rationality which we call wit is not ordinarily a popular trait. Such men are more feared than loved, more admired than trusted. There was, however, that in this man's make-up which brought men to his feet, and kept them there. Perhaps it was that Pettigru's nature was open, ardent, and generous to a fault. He was outgoing and warm-hearted; and, though he knew men for what they are, he loved them and showed it. There was, in short, nothing of repression or restraint about the man. He expressed himself, his views and his emotions, freely, and with force. And at times, his mind overcast and dark with apprehension for the future of his country, and his whole being in a storm, he loosed the powers of his invectivethose powers of irony, sarcasm, and intellectual contempt of which I made mention. Such was this man, and such his popularity. But popularity is a flower that withers overnight. Mankind in the gross mass is fickle: if the object of its liking pursues a course opposed to its ideas, its interests as it conceives them, he is reprobate and to be discarded. Not without amazement, therefore, we learn that, living and working in the very seat of Secessionist feeling, and supporting throughout his entire career, as he did, the Federal Union, Pettigru yet lost nothing of the abundant and glowing regard in which he was held by the people of his state. There were, to be sure, other men, a small but capable company of them, who were Unionists on principle and labored unceasingly for their cause. Pettigru was, however, decidedly the leader of the movement; and he led it with all his mind and all his heart. To specify his opinions, it appears that he held slavery to be wrong, and a grave misfortune to the South; but he was not for that reason an abolitionist. He thought, apparently, that these sudden drastic and unconsidered solutions of a problem at once moral and economic create as much evil as they abolish, saddling aftertimes with a problem different, indeed, from the original one, but no less fraught with evil. He seems to have cherished a truly Anglo-Saxon respect for justice, law, precedent, and custom, and to have held the opinion that if slavery were left alone it would, in the end, abolish itself. But he was utterly opposed to the extension of the system. He spoke in public and in private, again and again, of the madness of Secession, and the infatuation of the people of his state. It is said that on the occasion of a political dinner he was imprudently asked to drink a toast to South Carolina, and replied, in no very pacific tone, as he rose, 'Certainly. To South Carolina: and may she recover her senses!' Passion, it need hardly be said, ran high at the time-the years between 1840 and the outbreak of war. Great financial interests were involved; the system of slavery; the fate of the Union; the future of the South—its prosperity, the form and character of its civilization. It might readily be imagined that such a man, a man so opposed to the popular feeling of the day, would sooner or later have been stoned in the streets of Charleston, as Whittier was in those of Boston. Not a few of the Southern sympathizers in the North- the gentlemen called Copperheads - suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens of the opposite, the Union party. And Pettigru was, relatively, in the same position in South Carolina. He was, so to say, a Southern Copperhead. His sympathies were with the Union men. It might naturally be imagined that he would be deprived of office, or certainly that he would not have had office thrust upon him, previous to the outbreak of war, and assuredly not after that event. We should guess that he would live under a shadow and die neglected; and, if he died before the close of the conflict, that his funeral would be private, and some degree of obloquy would follow him to his grave. Pettigru did indeed die before the war was ended, though not before the Secessionist Legislature had elected and appointed him, the implacable foe of Secession, to digest and codify the laws of the state. And this legislature renewed the appointment the following year. He lies, as I have said, in the yard of St. Michael's, the stone at the head of his grave bearing the epitaph mentioned the spelling a little difficult to decipher now, as the years have obscured the lettering with green lichen. The epitaph reads as follows: JAMES LEWIS PETTIGRU ABBEVILLE MAY 10TH 1789 DIED AT CHARLESTON MARCH 9TH 1863 JURIST. ORATOR. STATESMAN. PATRIOT. FUTURE TIMES WILL HARDLY KNOW THIS SIMPLE STONE COMMEMORATES: HIS WISDOM, AND HIS WIT MAY FADE: BUT HE LIVED FOR ENDS MORE DURABLE THAN FAME. IN THE RESPECT OF HIS PEOPLE: OF HIS KINDNESS AND FORBEARANCE, HIS BRILLIANT GENIUS AND HIS UNWEARIED INDUSTRY. This inscription was, I learned, composed by several hands, and in part, at least, by Northern admirers of Pettigru. As it was set up shortly after the close of the war, we may suppose that partisan passion had somewhat cooled; and thus our wonder that such words could be placed on any stone of that city, at that time, may be somewhat diminished. Doubting a little, then, whether the lassitude and indifference of after-war days were not the cause of this permission rather than a sense of justice or a continuing, obstinate regard for the dead man, we naturally ask ourselves what happened. How was he regarded at the time of his death and funeral? His death occurred, as his epitaph tells us, in the thick of the war, the funeral taking place March 10, 1863. His body was, I understand, laid out in the Court House, the face being uncovered. An immense crowd gathered and viewed the corpse. Men and women, and among them many slaves, attended the service, following the body to its grave. The only business of the day, in Charleston, was this funeral. The shops were closed. Nothing further was done. tors issue of the prolonged struggle was uncertain. Hardly a man of them but had lost some youthful member of his family. All Charleston was in mourning, severely impoverished, cruelly anxious, straining nerve and courage to meet the prolonged trial of war and the agonies of personal loss. These were the circumstances of the time and the inevitable emotions of the Some weeks later the Charleston bar held a memorial meeting. Once more there was a great concourse of his former fellow citizens. As the room would hold but a few, the people thronged the steps of the building and extended, in their mass, into the street. The leading men of the city and state - lawyers, statesmen, soldiers, orawere within doors, and spoke in praise of Pettigru. And their eulogies__ hour. But the meeting took place. appear to have been as open, sincere, and unstrained as we should have expected them to be the reverse. Yet among those who spoke there must have been men pledged to the doctrine of Secession-life-long, bitter opponents of the man they mourned, who, doubtless, had received hard blows at his capable hands. Recalling those things which would unavoidably affect the temper and mood of the men who thus celebrated Pettigru, we must not forget that there was almost immediate danger threatening their city. A fleet of ironclads was at that moment anchored in Northern waters, preparing to bombard and reduce Charleston. Had the speakers of the occasion delayed but a few weeks, the town would have been on fire from shells thrown into it; and the ringing gallop of mounted infantry detailed to extinguish the flames, with the reverberations of the concussion of bombs, would have drowned the voice of their praise. But if they were safe for the moment, and perhaps not fully informed, there were other considerations which must have saddened and embittered their minds and which could very easily have rendered them intolerant. There was no speaker present who did not well know that the The enemies of Pettigru spoke. The dead leader of a militant minority against Secession was eulogized by the supporters of Secession. His enemies expressed their admiration and their grief. The scene is surely not lacking in greatness and magnanimity. It could, however, hardly have taken place except at a time and in a place where the people, all classes of them, cherished the same moral and political ideals. There was doubtless no one present who did not admire eloquence and value probity; who did not believe in the State and in service to the State; or who could find anything strange in the phrase, 'He confronted Life with antique courage and Death with Christian Hope.' There were none there who did not believe in patriotism as they understood it; none, doubtless, who did not respond to the sentiment, ‘His People did homage to the Man who held his Conscience higher than their Praise.' That time is long past. Pettigru is a name. But, misty and remote as it all is, we cannot, I think, escape the feeling that a people flourishes and becomes great only when its moral unity is intact; only, or most, when its citizens are in a high degree like-minded. CANDAULES' WIFE BY EMILY JAMES PUTNAM KING CANDAULES was a lover of the beautiful, and as he was unimaginably rich and therefore able to acquire, arrange, and even bring into being beautiful objects, one would have supposed he must be the happiest of men. And perhaps he was, but if so the level of human happiness is not so high as some persons believe, for Candaules had much to annoy him. In the first place, he found that his position as absolute monarch prevented the candid criticism and discussion necessary to clarify and ripen his æsthetic ideas. Whatever he recommended his courtiers adopted, or pretended to adopt. Sometimes a courtier would assume an attitude of suspended judgment or even of differing opinion, but it was always with the intention of being convinced in the long run. The artists themselves helped him but little. Generally they were only too eager to discover his views and conform with them. Sometimes if they disapproved his orders they were merely sullen, and made some excuse. for abandoning the work. Sometimes he found an artist who differed with him and stuck to his own point of view but could give no reason for it. Candaules was ridden by the idea that beauty is not an accidental thing, depending on the justice of the artist's eye and hand and incapable of giving an account of itself. And then is 'beauty' certainly the word for what gives us pleasure in a work of art? In In I all the world Candaules knew no one who could and would discuss these matters with him helpfully and frankly, yet every day the importance for life in general of having some rational understanding of them seemed to him greater. He knew, it is true, one or two pedants who had an almost mathematical clearness of mind in regard to æsthetics, but they did not know a good picture from a bad one. Candaules' best friend and most trusted adviser was Gyges, the captain of the King's guards and chief of police of Sardis, a strong, handsome man, as young as he could be and yet have arrived at such distinction. Gyges was quite willing to tell the King his true opinion on any subject. But not only was his opinion of works of art of very little value; he went so far as to disapprove of the King's absorption in these things and to try to divert him to other interests. And the reason why Gyges took this disobliging attitude was closely related to another reason why the King was not perfectly happy. The truth is that the most absolute of monarchs cannot confine his relations with his subjects to educating their sense of beauty. Candaules' subjects were dissatisfied with him. He was aware of this, and since he was a kindly and a conscientious man he was troubled by it. He felt that his view of life was anything but selfish; he had no wish to keep beauty to him |