Now that I have set down, with such particularity, an incident which I could not wholly understand nor reconcile with the established order of things until many years after, I am not so sure after all that I witnessed it in that Urbana of reality; it may have been in that Urbana of the memory, wherein related scenes and incidents have coalesced with the witnessed event, or in that Macochee of certain of my attempts in fiction, though I have always hoped that the fiction was the essential reality of life, and have tried to make it so.
I am certain, however, that the incident as related is entirely authentic, for I have recently made inquiries and established it beyond a reasonable doubt, as the lawyers say, in all its details as here given. I say in all its details, save possibly as to that of my own corporeal presence on the scene, at the actual moment of the occurrence. Only the other day I asked a favorite aunt of mine, and she remembered the incident perfectly, and many another similar to it. “It was just like him,” she added, with a dubious, though tolerant fondness. But when, like the insistent, questioning child in one of Riley’s Hoosier poems, I asked her if I had been there, she said she could not remember.
But whether I was there in the flesh or not, or whether the whole reality of that scene, so poignant, and insistent, and indelible, with its denial of the grounds of authority, its challenge to the bases of society, its shock to the orthodox mind (like that of John Brand of Kentucky, a strict constructionist, who believed in the old Constitution, and even then, in slavery), remains in my memory as the result of one of those tricks of a mind that has always dramatized scenes for its own amusement, I was there in spirit, and, indeed, at many another scene in the life of Joseph Carter Brand, whose name my mother gave me as a good heritage. Whatever the bald and banal physical fact may have been, I was either present at the actual or in imagination at the described scene to such purpose that from it I derived an impression never to be erased from my mind.
It is not given to all of us to say with such particularity and emphasis, just what we learned from each person who has touched our existences and affected the trend of our lives, as it was given to Marcus Aurelius, for instance, so that one may say that from Rusticus one received this impression, or that from Apollonius one learned this and from Alexander the Platonic that; we must rather ascribe our little store of knowledge generally to the gods. But I am sure that no one was ever long with Joseph Carter Brand, or came to know him well, without learning that rarest and most beautiful of all the graces or of all the virtues—Pity.
He, too, had tears for all souls in trouble
Here, and in hell.
Perhaps it is not so much pity as sympathy that I mean, but whether it was pity or sympathy, it was that divine quality in man which enables him to imagine the sorrows of others, to understand what they feel, to suffer with them; in a word, the ability to put himself in the other fellow’s place—the hallmark, I believe, of true culture, far more than any degree or doctor’s hood could possibly be.
It may have been some such feeling as this for the negroes that led him, when a young man in Kentucky, to renounce a patrimony of slaves and come north. It was not, to be sure, a very large patrimony, for his father was a farmer in a rather small way in Bourbon County, and owned a few slaves, but whatever the motive, he refused to own human chattels and left Bourbon County, where his branch of the Brands had lived since their emigration from Virginia, to which colony, so long before, their original had come as a Jacobite exile from Forfarshire in Scotland.
My grandfather came north into Ohio and Champaign County, and he had not been there very long before he went back to Virginia and married Lavina Talbott, and when they went to live on the farm he called “Pretty Prairie,” he soon found himself deep in Ohio politics, as it seems the fate of most Ohioans to be, and continued in that element all his life. He had his political principles from Henry Clay,—he had been to Ashland and had known the family,—and he was elected as a Whig to the legislature in 1842 and to the State Senate of Ohio in 1854. There he learned to know and to admire Salmon P. Chase, then governor of Ohio, and it was not long until he was in the Abolitionist movement, and he got into it so deeply that nothing less than the Civil War could ever have got him out, for he was in open defiance, most of the time, to the Fugitive Slave Law.
One of the accomplishments in which he took pride, perhaps next to his ability as a horseman, was his skill with the rifle, acquired in Kentucky at the expense of squirrels in the tops of tall trees (he could snuff a candle with a rifle), and this ability he placed at the service of a negro named Ad White, who had run away from his master in the South, and was hidden in a corn-crib near Urbana when overtaken by United States marshals from Cincinnati. The negro was armed, and was defending himself, when my grandfather and his friend Ichabod Corwin, of a name tolerably well known in Ohio history, went to his assistance, and drove the marshals off by the hot fire of their rifles. The marshals retreated, and came up later with reinforcements, strong enough to overpower Judge Corwin and my grandfather, but the negro had escaped.
The scrape was an expensive one; there were proceedings against them in the United States court in Cincinnati, and they only got out of it years after when the Fugitive Slave Law was rapidly becoming no law, and Ad White could live near Urbana in peace during a long life, and be pointed out as an interesting relic of the great conflict.
This adventure befell my grandfather in 1858, when he had been a Republican for two years, having been a delegate to the first convention of the party in 1856, the one that met in Pittsburgh, before the nominating convention which named Frémont had met in Philadelphia. He had attended that convention with Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky, and shared quarters with him at the hotel.
In 1908, in the Coliseum at Chicago, when the Republican National Convention was in session, there were conducted to the stage one morning, and introduced to the delegates, two old gentlemen who had been delegates to that first convention of the party, and after they had been presented and duly celebrated by the chairman and cheered by the delegates they were assiduously given seats in large chairs, and there, throughout the session, side by side they sat, their hands clasped over the crooks of their heavy canes, their white old heads unsteady, peering out in a certain purblind, bewildered, aged way over that mighty assembly of the power and the wealth, the respectability and the authority, of the nation—far other than that revolutionary gathering they had attended half a century before!
All through the session, now and then, I would look at them; there was a certain indefinable pathos in them, they sat so still, they were so old, there was in their attitude the acquiescence of age—and I would recall my grandfather’s stories of the days when they were the force in the Republic, and the runaway “niggers,” and the rifles, and the great blazing up of liberty in the land, and it seemed to me that Time, or what Thomas Hardy calls the Ironic Spirit, or perhaps it was only the politicians who were managing the convention, had played some grotesque, stupendous joke on those patriarchs. Did their old eyes, gazing so strangely on that scene, behold its implications? Did they descry the guide-post that told them how far away they really were from that first convention and its ideals?
But whatever the reflections of those two aboriginal Republicans, or whatever emotions or speculations they may have inspired in those who saw them,—the torch of liberty being ever brandished somewhere in this world and tossed from hand to hand,—they had done their part in their day, and might presumably be allowed to look on at the antics of men wherever they chose, in peace. They had known Lincoln, no inconsiderable distinction in itself!
Out of that first convention my grandfather, like them, had gone, and he had done his part to help elect Lincoln after Lincoln had defeated Chase in the Chicago convention of 1860, and had been nominated for the presidency. And then, with his man elected, my grandfather had gone into the war that broke upon the land.
He went in with the 66th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment which he was commissioned by Governor Dennison to recruit at Urbana, and when it was marshaled in camp near Urbana its command was offered him, an honor and a responsibility he declined because, he said, he knew nothing of the art of war, if it is an art, or of its science, if it is a science, and so was content with the shoulder-straps of a captain. One of his sons, a lieutenant in the regular army, was already at the front with his regiment, and another son was a captain in the 66th, and later on, when my grandfather had been transferred to the Department of Subsistence, he took his youngest son with him in the capacity of a clerk, so that the men of his family were away to the war for those four years, and the women remained behind, making housewives and scraping lint, and watching, and waiting, and praying, and enduring all those hardships and making all those sacrifices which are so lauded by the poetic and the sentimental and yet are not enough to entitle them to a voice in that government in whose cause they are made.
The situation was made all the more poignant because the great issue had separated the family, and there were brothers and cousins on the other side, though one of these, in the person of Aunt Lucretia, chose that inauspicious time to come over from the other side all the way from Virginia, to pay a visit, and celebrated the report of a Confederate victory by parading up town with a butternut badge on her bosom. She sailed several times about the Square, with her head held high and her crinolines rustling and standing out, and her butternut badge in evidence, and was rescued by my grandmother, who, hearing of her temerity, went up town in desperation and in fear that she might arrive too late. It was a story I was fond of hearing, and as I pictured the lively scene I always had the statue of the cavalryman as a figure in the picture—though of course the statue could not have been in existence during the war, since it was erected as a memorial to the 66th and a monument to its fallen heroes and their deeds. The cavalryman, an officer wearing a romantic cloak and the old plumed hat of the military fashion of that date, and leaning on his saber in a gloomy way, I always thought was a figure of my uncle, that Captain Brand who went out with the 66th, just as I thought for a long time that the Civil War was practically fought out on the northern side by the 66th, which was not so strange perhaps, since nearly every family in Urbana had been represented in the regiment, and they all talked of little else than the war for many years. They called the 66th the “Bloody Sixty-sixth,” a name I have since heard applied to other regiments, but the honorable epithet was not undeserved by that legion, for it had a long and most gallant record, beginning with the Army of the Potomac and fighting in all that army’s battles until after Gettysburg, and then with the 11th and 12th corps it was transferred, under Hooker, to the Army of the Tennessee, at Chattanooga, in time for Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, after which it went with Sherman to the sea, and thus completed the circuit of the Confederacy.