CHAPTER IX—THE NEW AMERICA

ANOTHER year of struggle and suffering, hope and fear, Gaston had passed, and still he was no nearer the dream of realised love. If anything had changed, the General’s pride had added new force to his determination that his daughter should not marry the man who had defied him.

His chief reliance for Gaston’s defeat was on time, and the broadening of Sallie’s mind by extended travel. He had sent her abroad twice, and this year he sent her to spend another three months in Europe.

These absences seemed only to intensify her longing for her lover. On her return the General would burst into a storm of rage at her persistence. She had ceased to give him any bitter answers, only smiling quietly and maintaining an ominous silence.

He had a new cause now of dislike for the man of her choice. Gaston had become a man of acknowledged power in politics and was the leader of a group of radical young men who demanded the complete reorganisation of the Democratic party, the shelving of the old timers, among whom he was numbered, and the announcement of a radical programme upon the Negro issue.

Radicalism of any sort he had always hated. Now, as advanced by this young upstart, it was doubly odious. The General had never given much time to his political duties, but his name was a power, and he gave regularly to the campaign committee the largest cash contribution they received.

He tried in a clumsy way to put Gaston off the State Executive Committee, but failed. He saw Gaston quietly laughing at him. Then he opened his pocket book and worked up a machine. It was a formidable power, and Gaston feared its influence in the coming convention.

While this fight was in progress, and Sallie was in Europe, the destruction of the Maine in Havana harbour stilled the world into silence with the echo of its sullen roar. There was a moment’s pause, and the nation lifted its great silk battle flags from the Capitol at Washington, and called for volunteers to wipe the empire of Spain from the map of the Western world.

The war lasted but a hundred days, but in those hundred days was packed the harvest of centuries.

War is always the crisis that flashes the search light into the souls of men and nations, revealing their unknown strength and weakness, and the changes that have been silently wrought in the years of peace.

In these hundred days, statesmen who were giants suddenly shrivelled into pigmies and disappeared from the nation’s life. Young men whose names were unknown became leaders of the republic and won immortal fame.

We were afraid that our nation still lacked unity. The world said we were a mob of money-grubbers, and had lost our grasp of principle. The President called for 125,000 men to die for their flag, and next morning 800,000 were struggling for place in the line.

We feared that religion might threaten the future with its bitter feud between the Roman Catholic and Protestant in a great crisis. We saw our Catholic regiments march forth to that war with screaming fife and throbbing drum and the flag of our country above them, going forth to fight an army that had been blessed by the Pope of Rome. The flag had become the common symbol of eternal justice, and the nation the organ through which all creeds and cults sought for righteousness.

We feared the gulf between the rich and the poor had become impassable, and we saw the millionaire’s son take his place in the ranks with the workingman. The first soldier wearing our uniform who fell before Santiago with a Spanish bullet in his breast, was an only son from a palatial home in New York, and by his side lay a cowboy from the West and a plowboy from the South. Once more we showed the world that classes and clothes are but thin disguises that hide the eternal childhood of the soul.

Sectionalism and disunity had been the most terrible realities in our national history. Our fathers had a poet leader whose soul dreamed a beautiful dream called E Pluribus Unum.. But it had remained a dream. New England had threatened secession years before South Carolina in blind rage led the way. The union was saved by a sacrifice of blood that appalled the world. And still millions feared the South might be false to her plighted honour at Appomattox. The ghost of Secession made and unmade the men and measures of a generation.

Then came the trumpet call that put the South to the test of fire and blood. The world waked next morning to find for the first time in our history the dream of union a living fact. There was no North, no South,—but from the James to the Rio Grande the children of the Confederacy rushed with eager flushed faces to defend the flag their fathers had once fought.

And God reserved in this hour for the South, land of ashes and tombs and tears, the pain and the glory of the first offering of life on the altar of the new nation. Our first and only officer who fell dead on the deck of a warship, with the flag above him, was Worth Bagley, of North Carolina, the son of a Confederate soldier. The gallant youngster who stood on the bridge of the Merrimac, and between two towering mountains of flaming cannon, in the darkness of night blew up his ship and set a new standard of Anglo-Saxon daring, was the son of a Confederate soldier of North Carolina.

The town of Hambright furnished a whole company of eighty-six men, a Captain, three Lieutenants, and a Major, who saw service in the war.

When they were drawn up in the court house square under the old oak, the Preacher stood before them and called the roll from four browned parchments. They were Campbell county Confederate rosters. Every one of the eighty-six men was a child of the Confederacy. And the immortal company F, that was wiped out of existence at the battle of Gettysburg furnished more than half these children.

“Ah, boys, blood will tell!” cried the Preacher, shaking hands with each man as they left.

A single round from the guns, and it was over. The yellow flag of Spain, lit with the sunset splendour of a world empire, faded from the sky of the West.

A new naval power had arisen to disturb the dreams of statesmen. The Oregon, that fierce leviathan of hammered steel, had made her mark upon the globe. In a long black trail of smoke and ribbon of foam, she had circled the earth without a pause for breath. The thunder of her lips of steel over the shattered hulks of a European navy proclaimed the advent of a giant democracy that struck terror to the hearts of titled snobs.

He who dreamed this monster of steel, felt her heart beat, saw her rush through foaming seas to victory, before the pick of a miner had struck the ore for her ribs from a mountain side, was a child of the Confederacy—that Confederacy whose desperate genius had sent then Alabama spinning round the globe in a whirlwind of fire.

America united at last and invincible, waked to the consciousness of her resistless power.

And, most marvellous of all, this hundred days of war had re-united the Anglo-Saxon race. This sudden union of the English speaking people in friendly alliance disturbed the equilibrium of the world, and confirmed the Anglo-Saxon in his title to the primacy of racial sway.