TWO INCIDENTS IN CONTRAST
INCIDENT NUMBER ONE
THE Masters place at Amelia Court House was a dream of beauty. Major Masters himself was a man of exquisite taste, and his wife and daughter had been devoted for years to the creation of beauty there.
They had had the expert aid of Thomas Giles. Thomas Giles was a lawyer by profession, but being a man of large wealth, and having nobody dependent upon him, he had devoted a considerable share of his attention for years to his two fancies—architecture and landscape gardening.
It had been his long-continued custom to spend his time from Friday afternoon till Monday of each week at the Masters place, developing its possibilities of beauty. He had spent both his own money and that of Major Masters very lavishly in this endeavor, and the result was a notable one.
When the Federal army reached the court house in hot pursuit of General Lee, during that last retreat which ended the war, there was a rush made by the soldiers for comfortable camping grounds on the Masters place. One man had even begun to cut down a stately tree for firewood, when the general commanding rode up. Taking in the situation at a glance, the general turned to one of his aids and said: “Take a squad of twenty men, and drive everybody out of that place quick. Then tell the adjutant-general to post a close guard around it and allow no man to enter it during our stay, upon any pretence whatever.”
Then, turning to his staff as the officer rode away to execute his orders, he said: “That place has cost years of growth as well as years of intelligent endeavor to create it. As we are not vandals, I shall not suffer it to be destroyed.”
I regret that I cannot here record the name of that officer. I would if I knew it.
At McPhersonville, on the coast of South Carolina, there lived a young woman of extraordinary learning.
The fame of her learning, especially in botany, had even crossed the ocean; and it was she whom Baron Von Humboldt had selected to prepare for him—for use in his writings—an account of the flora of that region.
In recognition of her scholarly service, Baron Von Humboldt had sent to her—each volume inscribed with his own hand—the only copy ever owned in the United States of the German government’s magnificent édition de luxe of “Cosmos.”
It was a work published without regard to expense, and in narrowly limited edition, at a fabulous price per copy.
When the final collapse came, and Sherman’s army was sweeping northward from Savannah, a detachment under the command of a lieutenant visited the house of this young woman. Building a bonfire in the front yard, it proceeded to destroy all the food that it could find. Then, in a spirit of pure vandalism, the lieutenant ordered his men to bring out and burn the books in that superb library. The young woman was in tears and terror, of course, but her scholarly impulses rose superior to her timid, feminine instincts. She went up to the lieutenant, coarse brute that he was, and begged for the preservation of her unique “Cosmos.”
She explained to him what it was and how much it meant to scholarship. She begged him to take it with him and present it to Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton, or to the Astor library, or to any other institution of learning to which it might become a possession of glory.
He slapped her in the face, and with his own hands threw the precious volumes into the fire.
A nation at war must select its human instruments with regard to their capacity for fighting, and with very little regard to anything else. Whether the officer be a gentleman or a blackguard is a matter that counts for little so long as he knows how to fight.
But I regret that I cannot here record the name of this officer also.