Passages from an Old Volume of Life | Page 7

in our eyes and in theirs
as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were soiled with labor.
Even our poor "Brahmins,"--whom a critic in ground-glass spectacles
(the same who grasps his statistics by the blade and strikes at his
supposed antagonist with the handle) oddly confounds with the,
"bloated aristocracy;" whereas they are very commonly pallid,
undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only birthright is an
aptitude for learning,--even these poor New England Brahmins of ours,
subvirates of an organizable base as they often are, count as full men, if
their courage is big enough for the uniform which hangs so loosely
about their slender figures.
A young man was drowned not very long ago in the river running
under our windows. A few days afterwards a field piece was dragged to
the water's edge, and fired many times over the river. We asked a
bystander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was for. It was to
"break the gall," he said, and so bring the drowned person to the surface.
A strange physiological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but that is
not our present point. A good many extraordinary objects do really
come to the surface when the great guns of war shake the waters, as
when they roared over Charleston harbor.
Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled into its dishonorable
grave. But the wrecks of precious virtues, which had been covered with
the waves of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unexpected and
unheard-of things, which had lain unseen during our national life of

fourscore years, came up and are coming up daily, shaken from their
bed by the concussions of the artillery bellowing around us.
It is a shame to own it, but there were persons otherwise respectable not
unwilling to say that they believed the old valor of Revolutionary times
had died out from among us. They talked about our own Northern
people as the English in the last centuries used to talk about the
French,--Goldsmith's old soldier, it may be remembered, called one
Englishman good for five of them. As Napoleon spoke of the English,
again, as a nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to consider
the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike artisans,--forgetting that
Paul Revere taught himself the value of liberty in working upon gold,
and Nathaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the labor of
forging iron. These persons have learned better now. The bravery of
our free working-people was overlaid, but not smothered; sunken, but
not drowned. The hands which had been busy conquering the elements
had only to change their weapons and their adversaries, and they were
as ready to conquer the masses of living force opposed to them as they
had been to build towns, to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to
hammer brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for.
Another great fact came to the surface, and is coming up every day in
new shapes,--that we are one people. It is easy to say that a man is a
man in Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all through our
bones and marrow. The camp is deprovincializing us very fast. Brave
Winthrop, marching with the city elegants, seems to have been a little
startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard-handed men of
the Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all the nonsense out of everybody, or
ought to do it, to see how fairly the real manhood of a country is
distributed over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning to think
our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well as of cotton, up turns a
regiment of gallant Irishmen, like the Sixty- ninth, to show us that
continental provincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New
Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York.
Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are half a dozen
chaplains, representing half a dozen modes of religious belief. When

the masked battery opens, does the "Baptist" Lieutenant believe in his
heart that God takes better care of him than of his "Congregationalist"
Colonel? Does any man really suppose, that, of a score of noble young
fellows who have just laid down their lives for their country, the
Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, and the
Homoousians translated from the battle-field to the abodes of
everlasting woe? War not only teaches what man can be, but it teaches
also what he must not be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in the
presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the trumpet which calls
to battle, and where a man should have but two thoughts: to do his duty,
and trust his Maker.