Taken in Faith by Pinkerton Helen;Steele Timothy;

Author:Pinkerton, Helen;Steele, Timothy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2002-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Alike and Yet Unlike: General Richard Taylor Writes to Henry Adams

For C. Q. D.

Washington, D.C., January 1879

We spoke last evening of your work and mine,

Of your first novel, of my little essay,

A venture into history, remote

Seemingly, and yet near my heart these days

When none remember what we were, or what

We might have been, had the war never come.

Your manuscript held me from sleep all night,

For it seemed hardly fiction but the truth

About a generation without honor.

And yet I wonder that you do not see

That the corruption you so well depict

Follows as night the day the venal motives

That fired and drove the engine of the war,

The railroads, mills, the arms and armament.

You set the thing in motion with your cause.

It consumed us and now consumes your best.

Even Grant, who acted with Old Army honor

At Appomattox, now has stained his name.

You show him as a simple-minded fool

And show the Union, for which your noblest died,

The foul and rotten Vanity Fair it is.

It’s well they are not here to see or know

The end of all their sacrifice, that rabble

Like these rule a democracy of thieves.

Better the quiet grave and unsullied fame!

My illness will excuse, I hope, my anger.

Reading your work, sensing your misery,

I like to think of how it might have been.

You, child of diplomats, skillful with suave words,

And I, of soldiers and the sword, together,

We might have lived, God willing, a happier story.

And I dream, too, without the war, I might

Have been something of an historian,

Had I had quiet hours with documents

To trace out to their hearts our Southern men

As I have Mason, and you, Gallatin.

My little sketch remains, at least, to show

How much we are alike and yet unlike.

With peace we might have built a true republic.

But you did not trust us, did not trust me.

I knew that when, as a boy, I paced the streets

Of wintry Cambridge and heard the cultured sneer

That my soft Southern speech evoked. I read

Your Puritans’ serpent-tongued anathemas

And chose the warmer voices of New Haven,

Though it no haven for a Southern boy.

Though seldom with my father after my childhood,

Even then I had, bred in my bones and sinews,

Ancestral habit of battle, my father’s gift,

Latent the while I studied it in books.

Last night when you lamented that your schooling

Failed to engage your life, it came to me,

Afterward, that you missed the best of schools,

The one your friends all chose in Sixty-One—

Nick Anderson, Ben Crowninshield, your brother,

Your Southern friends, Jim May, and Julius Alston,

And Rooney Lee. In war they learned a truth

Fitted for life because it was of death,

A comradeship at once sublime and useful:

Arm touching arm, bayonets ranked in rows,

Only the thin gray wool, or blue, as armor

Between their frail flesh and the iron hail.

You never heard the shell nor felt the ground’s

Motion under the iron cannon’s blow,

Nor sensed the hornet’s hum about your ears,

Nor forced your trembling horse into the volley,

Nor, like young Alston, tasted dirt and sand,

Blinding your eyes for hours behind your guns.

The wonder of it still catches my breath

When I recall it!

Your friends learned how to die, surely a lesson

Most valuable for life.

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