January 2011

Very few facts of any real consequence still remain to be dug up about the American Civil War. History’s secrets have been largely disclosed. We know about that war just about as much as our grandchildren will know, and the area of our knowledge today is not very much broader than it was a generation ago. Most of the returns are in, and they have long since been tabulated and analyzed.

Yet books about the war continue to be written, and since both authors and publishers work, very largely, in response to economic motivations, this can only mean that the American people still want to read such books. They want them, indeed, in a greater volume than at any time within living memory, and there is every indication that this desire will remain strong for a number of years to come. Which leads to the interesting question why .

Not long alter the distressing events—from a British standpoint—at Concord and Lexington, and while heavy reinforcements were pouring into Boston to aid the beleaguered General Gage, one ship was observed to have brought an indeed notable cargo. Aboard this lucky craft, the Cerberus, were three of His Majesty’s generals, all members (in absentia) of the House of Gommons, and all destined to play important roles in the years ahead: Major Generals Henry Clinton, William Howe, and John Burgoyne. A local rhymester, versed enough in the classics to remember the threeheaded canine of the nether world, lampooned this event with a jaunty couplet:

Behold the Cerberus the Atlantic plough, Her precious cargo Burgoyne, Clinton, Howe. Bow, wow, wow.

There are many ways of looking at the now-vanished plantation society of the pre-Civil War South. One of them is the way of legend—white-pillared plantation, a leisured and courtly life centering in it, charming women and gallant men consciously living up to a tradition which has lingered on as a memory long after the reality has gone.

A small bit of that legend—faithful to the magnolia-and-roses tradition, but embodying an authentic fragment of real human experience—is presented here, in a memoir written years ago by Cornelia Barrett Ligon, who spent her girlhood on Newstead Plantation, near Jackson, Mississippi, and who in 1932, as very aged woman, set down her reminiscences of the old days. From notes she wrote and dictated, her daughter Lucile Ligon Cope of Port Arthur, Texas, has put together the following account of what life on legendary Old South plantation was like, and how the war finally came to the plantation and ended an era.

AMERICAN HERITAGE presents this memoir as an interesting fragment of the legend and the tradition of fabulous Dixie.

America’s political conventions have always—or almost always—been deadly serious affairs, with politicians, statesmen, and just plain citizens getting together to put dignified men in nomination for the highest office in the land. But out of these portentous gatherings have come some of the most colorful and, at times, the most lighthearted effervescences of the American political spirit. Gaudy posters come out, quadrennially, to prove that the salvation of the farmer, the manufacturer, the laborer, and the American citizen generally depends on the victory of this, that or the other ticket. Behold at right, for example, the brightly colored blandishments of William McKinley and the protective tariff; the arguments are no more subtle than the contrasting pictures of prosperity and poverty. But no one expects them to be, for it is all part of the game, silly, outrageous, sublime. Then there are the buttons, the ribbons, the imposing badges; and the cartoons, the grotesque bets, the songs no one remembers two weeks after election.

There is a legend about Roger Williams that is exceedingly popular among Americans. There is also a truth which is slowly emerging from the welter of fancies. The truth is less simple than the legend, for most legends are oversimplifications. But it has some even more dramatic aspects than the beloved myth and it accords better, too, with the mental development of the normal human being. If it dims the halo of this pioneer of American liberty, it gives him a warmth, a nearness to ourselves that we could hardly feel while he stood on the pedestal.