Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/334

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3i8 The New South ber eighty, including fourteen books, ten pamphlets, twenty- two magazine articles, and twenty-nine addresses. His inde- fatigable industry demonstrated the energy and the diligence of the old order, yet his writings are characteristically aristo- cratic and grandiose when compared with the more scientific researches of later scholars like John Bell Henneman (1864- 1908), whose voluminous editorial labours represent very well the activity of the new generation. Strange to say, the breath of the new era first faintly stirred those who had been in the thick of the fight. It was, perhaps, not so strange that men like Zebulon Baird Vance (1830-94) and Benjamin Harvey Hill (1823-82) should be reconciled to the ..outcome. Vance was not only a strong Union man but he opposed secession with all the fire of his oratory until the moment that he heard of the attack on Sumter. It seems na- tural, then, that after the war he should sing again the glories of the Union, one and indivisible. His Sketches of North Carolina, however, which had appeared serially in The Norfolk Landmark, show much the same fond longing for the past which charms in Johnston and Bagby. Hill in Georgia fought for the preservation of national unity even in the secession con- vention, yet, once in the war, he was as fervent in the support of the Confederacy. This fervour was intensified by the Re- construction policy of the National Government. His Notes on the SitiMtion in 1869 were vitriolic in their denunciation. Much of this belligerent attitude appears in his speeches in Congress. They have a narrative quality which, though less lofty, is more telling than the ringing rhetoric of some of his peers. The case of General John Brown Gordon (1832-1904) is even more memorable. His brilliant record in the Confeder- ate armies was closed by his generous address to his soldiers after the surrender at Appomattox, in which he exhorted them to bear their trials bravely, to go home in peace, to obey the laws, to rebuild the country, and to work for the weal and har- mony of the Republic. In spite of the iniquities of Reconstruc- tion, his political career was instinct with the same chivalrous spirit, which found its most widely echoing expression in that speech in the Senate in 1893 when he pledged the South to main- tain law and order. His Reminiscences of the Civil War, with