PROLOGUE.
BY THE AUTHOR OF THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT.
“In the golden sunshine of the budding spring, on the porch of my
old country house, I sit and gaze at the waving foliage, and think
't is not time lost to fall into a reverie, as it were into a dream, of
other days, and the noble figures which illustrated and adorned them.
“The sun of May is shining on the flowery lawn, where the yellow
buttercups and velvet grass are stirred by the warm south wind; the
belt of forest makes a rich green background to the fields and streams;
and bright like the flowers, dancing like the brook, my little girl, with
eyes `as azure as the heavens,' and sunny hair, chases the earliest
butterflies across the sward, and with her presence adds the finishing
grace to the mellow landscape of spring.
“So I sit, and smile, and dream; then I think, with a sigh, that a
few decades may change, and even wholly obliterate, this rural beauty,
this smiling ease and repose. Little Kate may be called to heaven,
or out into the wide, wide world—my form will assuredly be laid in
earth—the old homestead probably will pass from my race—and those
who knew and loved us, know us no more. Why not? Is it not,
after all, the common story? Where are now all those brilliant scenes
and figures of the elder Virginia, glimmering faintly through the mists
of scarce fourscore years? Where are the men and manners of the
days of the Revolution, only hinted at obscurely in what the world
calls histories? Do they exist for us to-day, except as names and
traditions? And what does the present generation know of them?
“Alas for the historians! They tell us many things, but so little!
They relate, with much dignity, how the battle was fought and the
treaty made—they tell us the number of the combatants, and spread
every protocol upon the page. But the student of the past asks for
more. Of the historian we ask a picture of the elder day—portraits
of the Virginian and his household. We would know the peculiarities
of character and manner which marked a great race—the worthies
of Virginia. We would live again, for a time, beneath those
fair or storm-convulsed skies of `Old Virginia;' we would take the
hand of the honest old planter; we would go into his library, and
look over his shoulder as he reads the new Act in the `Virginia Gazette,'
and would not disdain to scan critically the powdered curls
and looped-back gowns, the flounces, and furbelows, and fancies of
the dames.
“We would see the rude Old-Field School on the edge of the forest,
and listen to the words, and watch the bright faces of those children
who will make hardy patriots and devoted women. We would accompany,
in the fine chariot, Myrtilla, or Florella, as she goes to the
assembly, decked in satins, and laces, and towers of curls; and see Damon,
or Strephon, dance the minuet opposite to her, with his cocked hat
pressed upon his heart. We would accompany the squire in his coach
and four, to the county court, where he sits in awful state, with his
brother justices of the peace; or to church, where the good parson
delivers the evangel of grace, from the tub-shaped pulpit. We would
hear the buzz of the crowd on the race course, or at the cockfight,
and listen to their discussions of the doings of Parliament, and the
speed of the favorite racer. We would look in at the window of the
old Raleigh Tavern, and read what the company assembled in the
Apollo Room are doing in spite of his Excellency and his stern `You
are accordingly dissolved!' In a word, we would look again on that
vigorous race, that singular society; see the tragedy and the comedy
—hear the sighs and the laughter. We would see the lofty forms
defile before us, slowly, in a long, august line; we would hear the old
voices, weigh every accent; and then we should know what the past
was really—we should seize on the spirit of the Revolution.
“That we should know what that Revolution really was, is a matter
of the first importance to ourselves and our descendants. That
we should trace its steps, divine its causes, and see the effect produced
logically—this is what we ask the histories to assist us in. We ask
it in vain. The historians have bloody minds and delight in carnage;
or legal minds, and wander in the flowery fields of legislative enactments.
In vain does the student rebel and turn away; he is told
that what he wishes is beneath the dignity of history, and thus has
it happened that we have nothing but the skeleton, when we want
the warm blood, the flushed brows, and the flashing eyes.
“I hear Kate laughing as I ponder so, and my spleen against the
historians, as I listen to that cheerful music, disappears. My Kate
scatters light, and love, and goodness wherever she goes, and her
laughter is a purer music than the harp of æolus. It tells me now
that 'tis not my place to speak ill of the historians—that, after all, 't is
a hard task I would impose upon them—a heavy burden I would
place upon their shoulders. To revive a whole period, or many
periods, with all their peculiarities of life and thought and manners—
to depict those joys and griefs, whose causes often shift and change
in the long current of our human story—to live in the life, rejoice
with the joy, and sympathize with the sorrow of a vanished race—thus
bringing from the remote and misty shadow land, the actual figures,
and reconstructing, from the shattered fragments, the statue, the
moulding, and the inscription;—this is no child's play, rather a scourging
toil, and if no one has accomplished it, we can scarcely complain.
“So I make my peace again with the historians, and looking forth
upon the sunlit fields, return in thought to an earlier epoch, remembering,
with smiles, a boy whom I knew once on a time; a boy who
said that he would one day fill the immense canvas with the thronging
figures, and paint the great future of Virginia. He was young
and ardent; he loved the noble past of his native land. That past
stretched far away before him, like some land of Faëry, all sunlight,
beauty and romance. The breath of a million flowers came on the
winds, for ever blowing from the sea, and fanning tranquilly his boyish
forehead. The green fields were ever bathed in golden dawns,
or purple sunsets dying on the vast horizon, or the great blue canopy
drooped over all like a dream. The stately rivers flowed through
bright champaigns, mirroring those skies with all their snowy cloud
ships; and the great forests waving their long plumes in the Atlantic
breezes, ever resounded musical and joyous secrets.
“This was the land in which had gone on—brave and hearty, illustrated
by a thousand scenes as picturesque as they were significant—
that strange, old, rude, poetical, colonial life.
“The great mountains, too, stretched mighty arms toward the boy,
and the immense belts of pines, crowding the steep precipices of the
Alleghanies, spoke, like their lowland brethren, of the things of the
past. Here, in these solitary fastnesses, the borderer had struggled,
breast to breast, with the savage; yonder, at the foot of that tree,
the girl or the child was tomahawked, and left to bleed and die;
those houses dotting the fair valley, from whose embowering foliage
curl wreaths of snowy smoke, in the lazy atmosphere, were every
one the scene of a tragedy or a comedy; they heard the broken sob
of the weeping mother, or the wild and uproarious revelry of the
borderers; their old walls are battered with balls, and the stockades
show where the torch of the Indian was applied in the darkness, but
quenched in his heart's blood by the rifle ball of the mountaineer.
From the mouth of the Potomac to its source in the Alleghanies, along
the banks of the beautiful Shenandoah, the `Daughter of the Stars,
there was scarcely a spot which did not recall a tradition, a legend,
or a history. All this did the youth I am thinking of dwell upon,
and—well, well, here I am dreaming! It was only his folly, and I
must think of my work.
“I design composing a work of the revolutionary period, based
on family archives. I shall begin with May of the year '74, when
the trees commenced to bud, and the flowers to bloom, as if the
thunder and lightning were not brooding upon the horizon, and the
soil beginning to tremble. It was not long before the chasm yawned
—indeed, a few months threw between the old days and the new, an
impassable gulf. Upon one side of that gulf, now looking back, we
discern the colonial régime of ease and tranquillity—the slow rolling
coach, the aristocratic dignity, the machinery of class, and courtly
ceremony. On the other side, the mortal struggle of the new era, the
leveling republicanism, born of a common danger—the `gentry,' and
the `commoners,' in leather harness, fighting side by side under their
common father, and constructing a new world, 'mid storm and tempest,
on the bloody battle-fields of the Revolution.
“My work will aim to draw a few pictures of this period of transition,
and I have ample material. When my dear and honored father
died, he left me an old iron-bound trunk full of family letters, and in
these venerable papers I find many histories. To-day it shall be the
life of Henry St. John, Esquire, of `Flower of Hundreds,' in Prince
George, a gentleman connected with our house. Of Mr. St. John I
have a miniature in the stiff old style, and very many letters in his
own handwriting, which is rapid and careless, with a number addressed
to him by others. The miniature presents the young man
vividly to the eyes, with his olive cheeks, black hair, and clear, fixed
look; the letters embrace much of the history of his early manhood.
They allude to and describe, also, some public events which occurred
at the period in Virginia, and speak of more than one eminent name,
now the property of history.
“I have read these letters again and again; I often linger over
their pages with profound interest,—with smiles, or frowns, or deep
feeling.
“Yellow letters!—I say—which share with the moth-eaten doublets
and rusty old broad-swords, the honor of reviving the past! Cracked
miniature! in whose fading and age-dimmed outlines a face of other
days shines so clearly! Old letters, old miniatures, old costumes, old
swords, old ghostly reminiscences of ghostly `cocked hats!' the historian
salutes you with a low and respectful bow, for you speak of
the Revolution. Yellow laces, too, in the chests up stairs—old pearls,
and diamonds, breastpins and rings—he salutes you, too, for you
speak of the fair dames, and to these he bows with his whole heart.
“In the beautiful May morning of the new century, he will write
of you, with the old days shining in his memory, as it were, and the
old faces looking down from the wainscoted walls.
“They have diamonds in their ears, and pearls in their hair; they
are covered with lace and embroidery,—the fair maidens and dames.
The cavaliers are ruffled and powdered, and they smile—they smile,
like the maidens, as their historian commences.
“So I sit in the merry May sunshine and idly dream—summoning,
from the dead, those gracious figures, before going to accomplish my
design. Soon I will go; here, in my plain old Virginia country
house, I will tell my plain old story.
“Some day, doubtless, 't will be edited, and so sent forth to the
world; but what matter if 't is not? I shall live again, as I write, in
the beautiful past—the sound of those noble voices is my consolation.
“C. EFFINGHAM.
“Glengary, May 3, 18—.”
