X Family Letters — Commencement at Hampden-Sidney — Then and Now
“Richmond, June 10th, 1843.
“My dear Wife,—After a fatiguing day it is with great pleasure I sit down to have a little chat with you, and to inform you of our progress. Were I disposed to give credit to lucky and unlucky days, a little incident occurred on our way down which would have disturbed me very much. We were going on at a reasonable rate when, to our surprise, the front of the ‘splendid line of coach’ assumed a strange position, and for a moment I thought we should be wrecked, but it was only minus a wheel—one of the front ones having taken leave of us and journeying, ‘singly and alone,’ on the other side of the turnpike. We were soon ‘all right,’ and arrived here in good health but much fatigued. Mother has hardly got rested yet, but thinks another quiet day will be sufficient, and that she will be ready to start on Monday morning and be able to hold out to go through without again stopping. We have passed over the most fatiguing part of our journey. We shall leave on Monday morning by the railroad, and, unless some accident should happen on the way, expect to be in Boston on Wednesday about 9 o’clock A.M. It is my intention to keep on, unless mother should require rest, more than can be had on the line of travel.... Well, love, are you not tired of this overparticularity about business? I will not weary you any longer with it. I have never left home with a stronger feeling of regret than at the present time, and it appears that the older I get, the greater the trial to stay away. Now you will say that it is because you become more and more interesting. Well, it must be so, for I cannot discover any other cause. Do not let it be long before you write.
“The heat, wind, and dust of the city to-day have put me entirely out of trim for writing, and my talent is but small even under the most favorable circumstances. By-the-bye, called on Mrs. D. last evening to deliver a message from Mr. D. Quite a pleasant ten minutes’ affair, and was excused. Herbert must save some of those nice plants for that box to be placed on a pole, and tell him if he is a good boy we will try and have a nice affair for the little birds. My man must have a hand in the work, if it be only to look on, and Alice can do the talking part. Don’t let Virginia take to her chamber. Keep her circulating about the house in all dry weather; the wind will not injure her, unless it be quite damp, at least so I think.
“Sunday, 11th.—Attended Doctor Plumer’s church this morning, and heard a young man, the son of one of the professors at Princeton, preach. The sermon was good, but should have preferred the Doctor. Morning rainy and no one in from Olney.
“Evening.—Attended Mr. Magoon’s church. He preached from the words, ‘Be not deceived, God is not mocked,’ etc. A good, practical sermon; he alluded to ministers and church members away from home, and showed them in many cases to be mockers of God, and instanced inconsistencies, all of which he termed ‘mockery.’ Expect to-night to hear Doctor Plumer. Now, love, you have a full history up to the time of our departure. Write to me soon, and, after telling about yourself, the children, and servants, give me an account of store, farming, and gardening operations. Those large sheets will hold a great deal, if written very close. Kiss Alice and the baby for father. Tell Herbert and Horace that father wishes them to be good boys and learn fast. And now, dear Anna, I must bid you adieu, commending you and our dear ones to the care of Him whose mercies have been so largely bestowed on us in days past. May He preserve you from all evil and cause you to dwell in perfect peace.”
The foregoing extracts from a letter written by my father during the (to us) “wonderful summer” of our sojourn in Prince Edward had to do with the periodical visit paid by my grandmother to her Massachusetts home. I am deeply impressed in the perusal of these confidential epistles with the absolute dependence of the strong man—whom mere acquaintances rated as reserved to sternness, and singularly undemonstrative, even to his friends—upon the gentle woman who was, I truly believe, the one and only love of his lifetime. He talked to her by tongue and by pen of every detail of business; she was the confidante of every plan, however immature; she, and she alone, fathomed the depths of a soul over which Puritan blood and training impelled him to cast a veil. In all this he had not a secret from her. Portions of the letter which I have omitted go into particulars of transactions that would interest few women.
No matter how weary he was after a day of travel or work, he had always time to “talk it out” with his alter ego. The term has solemn force, thus applied. In the injunction to write of domestic, gardening, and farming affairs, he brings in “the store,” now of goodly proportions and “departments,” and into which she did not set foot once a week, and then as any other customer might. “Those large sheets will hold a great deal if written very close,” he says, archly. They had evidently been provided for this express purpose before he left home.
One paragraph in the exscinded section of the letter belongs to a day and system that have lapsed almost from the memory of the living.
An infant of Mary Anne, my mother’s maid, was ill with whooping-cough when the master took his journey northward.
“I am quite anxious to hear how Edgar is,” he writes. “I fear the case may prove fatal, and am inclined to blame myself for leaving home before it was decided. Yet I know he is in good hands, and that you have done and will do everything necessary for his comfort. Also that, in the event of his death, all that is proper will be attended to. When I get home the funeral shall be preached, of which you will please inform his parents.”
No word of written or spoken comfort would do more to soothe the hearts of the bereaved parents than the assurance that the six-months-old baby should have his funeral sermon in good and regular order. The discourse was seldom preached at the time of interment. Weeks, and sometimes months, intervened before the friends and relatives could be convened with sufficient pomp and circumstance to satisfy the mourners. I have attended services embodying a long sermon, eulogistic of the deceased and admonitory of the living, when the poor mortal house of clay had mouldered in the grave for half a year. I actually knew of one funeral of a wife that was postponed by untoward circumstances until, when a sympathizing community was convoked to listen to the sermon, the ex-widower sat in the front seat as chief mourner with a second wife and her baby beside him. And the wife wore a black gown with black ribbon on her bonnet, out of respect to her predecessor!
They were whites, and church members in good and regular standing.
Little Edgar died the day after my father took the train from Richmond for the fast run through to Boston—in two days and two nights! When the master got home after a month’s absence, the funeral sermon was preached in old Petersville Church, three miles from the Court House, on a Sunday afternoon, and the parents and elder children were conveyed thither in the family carriage, driven by Spotswood, who would now be the “coachman.” Then he was the “carriage-driver.” They took time for everything then-a-days, and plenty of it.
In September, Mea and I had the culmination of our experiences and “privileges” upon College Hill in the Hampden-Sidney Commencement. I had never attended one before. I have seen none since that were so grand, and none that thrilled me to the remotest fibre of my being as the exercises of that gloriously cloudless day. I hesitate to except even the supreme occasion when, from a box above the audience-floor packed with two thousand students and blazing with electric lights, I saw my tall son march with his class to receive his diploma from the president of a great university, and greeted him joyfully when, the ceremonial over, he brought it up to lay in my lap.
There were but four graduates in that far-off little country college with the hyphenated name and the honored history. It may be that their grandchildren will read the roll here: Robert Campbell Anderson, Thomas Brown Venable, Paul Carrington, and Mr. Rice, whose initials I think were “T. C.” There were, I reiterate, but four graduates, but they took three honors. Robert Anderson was valedictorian; Mr. Rice of the uncertain initials had the philosophical oration; Tom Brown Venable had the Latin salutatory; and Paul Carrington, the one honorless man, made the most brilliant speech of them all. It was a way he had. The madcap of the college—who just “got through,” as it were, by the skin of his teeth, by cramming night and day for two months to make up for an indefinite series of wretched recitations and numberless escapades out of class—he easily eclipsed his mates on that day of days. The boys used to say that he was “Saul,” until he got up to declaim, or make an original address. Then he was “Paul.” He was Pauline, par éminence, to-day.
I could recite verbatim his lament over Byron’s wasted powers, and I see, as if it were but yesterday that it thrilled me, the pose and passion of the outburst, arms tossed to heaven in the declamation:
“O! had his harp been tuned to Zion’s songs!”
Music was “rendered” by an admirably trained choir. The hour of the brass-band had not come yet to Hampden-Sidney. And the choir rendered sacred music—such grand old anthems as,
“Awake! awake! put on thy strength, O Zion!
Put on thy beautiful garments”;
and,
“How beautiful upon the mountains
Are the feet of him that publisheth salvation;
That saith unto Zion,
‘Thy God reigneth!’”
Doctor Maxwell was the president then, and was portentous in my eyes in his don’s gown.
Dear old Hampden-Sidney! she has arisen, renewed in youth and vigor, from the cinders of semi-desolation, has cast aside the sackcloth and ashes of her grass-widowhood, and stepped into the ranks of modern progress. I like best to recall her when she maintained the prestige of her traditional honors and refused to accept decadence as a fixed fact.