Page images
PDF
EPUB

life, and ideas we have no sympathy whatever; but here, on these shattered wrecks of houses-built in our own style, many of them doing credit to the architecture of our epoch-we read names familiar to us all, telling us of trades, and professions, and commercial institutions which every modern city reckons up by the hundredyet dead, dead, dead; as silent as the graves of the Pharaohs, as deserted as the bazars of the merchant princes of old Tyre."

Devastated and

of all the seceding

states.

If that wayfarer had followed the baleful path of secession through these now blasted, but once desolate condition beautiful provinces of the Sun, he would have seen the footprints of RETRIBUTION every where-retribution on those who, for the sake of ambitious ends, bring upon their country the greatest of all curses-civil war. In Columbia, where the Convention first met, and whence it was driven by a loathsome pestilence, stark chimneys point out where family hearthstones once were. If he inquired in Charleston for St. Andrew's Hall, where the ordinance was passed, or for the Institute in which it was signed, some emancipated black would point out to him piles of charred rubbish. The tomb in St. Philip's Church-yard he would find had been violated by the friendly hands of a sad remnant of those who had once made obeisance before it—a remnant spared from the hospital and the sword—and the ashes of the great teacher of secession piously secreted from a conqueror's wrath. He would see that the prophetic threat from a state in the far North had come to pass: "The rebellion, which began where Charleston is, shall end where Charleston was."

Had that awe-stricken traveler gone into the Border States, he would have found Retribution in Rolleston, the home of that Governor of Virginia who put to an ignominious death, by hanging, the brave old fanatic, John

566

RETRIBUTION.

[SECT. VI.

Brown, for trying to liberate slaves; in that home he would have seen "a Yankee school-marm" teaching negroes to read the Bible, and that "school-marm" the daughter of "old John Brown."

In the once picturesque, but now desolated woods of Arlington, that City of the Silent, the shades of ten thou sand American soldiers, whose ghastly corpses lie under its grassy lawns, are flitting in the midnight moonshine and beckoning its master to come-not to the fantastic dance of its gay and glittering halls, but to the dread tribunal of that inexorable Judge who will demand why these men were deprived of light and life. It is the unearthly welcome of Warwick and the Prince to Clarence in his dream.

Retribution on the

South.

Can any one doubt that there is Retribution when he sees the once imperious master of many hundred slaves now lowly bending his forehead on the footstool of a poor white"-who in his early life gained his bread by the humblest industry-and submissively supplicating for pardon, waiting in hope for permission to touch the tip of the outstretched sceptre of clemency? The stars, in their courses in the heavens, are guided by immutable law, and the families of men North and on the upon earth are judged with unswerving equity. For her participation in the great American crime, the North has had mourning sent into tens of thousands of her families, and the wealth she has wearied herself in acquiring is wrung from her by remorseless taxation. Her more guilty sister, the South, has in bitterness of soul surrendered far more than her first-born; and as the African many a time fainted under the lash of a cruel task-master, so now she faints under the lash of THE ANGEL OF RETRIBUTION. In her former days of peace she hugged slavery to her bosom, and now, that peace is at last given back to her, she is condemned

to be chained with adamant to that black and festering carcass. Guilty then-both of us—in the sight of God, let us not vex each other with mutual crimination, but bear with humility our punishment, though it may be, as our chief magistrate once told us, the hard penalty, that for every tear the black man has shed, the white man shall pay a drop of blood.

Retribution await

There is another people whose day of retribution is not far off who brought the curse of slav ing England. ery on this nation; who, for the sake of gain, armed it and strengthened it in its dying battle; who abetted it in its treason, and encouraged it in its fratricidal strife.

The lesson to be

civil war.

Shall he who writes the story of this hideous war hide from his reader its fearful lesson? shall he not remember that on this wide-spread continent climate is making us a many-diversified people? that, in the nature of things, we must have our misunderstandings and our quarrels with one another? If, in the future, there should be any one who undertakes to fire the heart of his learned from this people, and to set in mortal battle a community against the nation, let us leave him. without the excuse which the war-secessionist of our time may perhaps not unjustly plead, that he knew not what he did. Let us put our experience in the primer of every child; let us make it the staple of the novel of every school-girl; let us tear from this bloody conflict its false grandeur and tinsel glories, and set it naked in the light of day-a spectacle to blanch the cheek of the bravest man, and make the heart of every mother flutter as she sits by her cradle.

END OF VOL. I.

« PreviousContinue »