As a discourager of self-conceit there is nothing like an old diary, and I suppose no one ever knows what a full-blown idiot he or she is capable of being, who has not kept such a living record against himself. This being the case, the gray-haired editor may be pardoned a natural averseness to the publication of anything that would too emphatically "write me down an ass" — to borrow from our friend Dogberry — though I fear that in some of the matter retained in the interest of truth, I have come perilously near to that alternative.
But while the "blue line" has been freely used, as was indispensable in an intimate private chronicle of this sort, it has not been allowed to interfere in any way with the fidelity of the narrative. Matter strictly personal to the writer — tiresome reflections, silly flirtations, and the like — has been omitted, and thoughtless criticisms and other expressions that might wound the feelings of persons now living, have been left out or toned down. Connectives, or other words are supplied where necessary for clearness; where more particular information is called for, it is given in parentheses, or in the explanatory notes at the heads of the chapters. Even the natural temptation to correct an occasional lapse into local barbarisms, such as "like" for "as," "don't" for "doesn't," or the still more unpardonable offense of applying the terms "male" and "female" to objects of their respective genders, has been resisted for fear of altering the spirit of the narrative by too much tampering with the letter. For the same reason certain palpable errors and misstatements, unless of sufficient importance to warrant a note, have been left unchanged — for instance, the absurd classing of B. F. Butler with General Sherman as a degenerate West Pointer, or the confusion between fuit Ilium and ubi Troja fuit that resulted in the misquotation on page 190. For my "small Latin," I have no excuse to offer except that I had never been a school teacher then, and could enjoy the bliss of ignorance without a blush. As to the implied reflection on West Point, I am not sure whether I knew any better at the time, or not. Probably I did, as I lived in a well-informed circle, but my excited brain was so occupied at the moment with thoughts of the general depravity of those dreadful Yankees, that there was not room for another idea in it.
Throughout the work none but real names are employed, with the single exception noted on page 105. In extenuation of this gentleman's bibulous propensities, it must be remembered that such practices were much more common in those days than now, and were regarded much more leniently. In fact, I have been both surprised and shocked in reading over this story of a bygone generation, to see how prevalent was the use of wines. and other alcoholic liquors, and how lightly an occasional over-indulgence was regarded. In this respect there can be no doubt that the world has changed greatly for the better. When "gentlemen," as we were not afraid to call our men guests in those days, were staying in the house, it was a common courtesy to place a bottle of wine, or brandy, or both, with the proper adjuncts, in the room of each guest, so that he might help himself to a "night-cap" on going to bed, or an "eye-opener" before getting up in the morning. It must also be taken into account that at this particular time men everywhere were ruined, desperate, their occupation gone, their future without hope, the present without resources, so that they were ready to catch at any means for diverting their thoughts from the ruin that enveloped them. The same may be said of the thoughtless gayety among the young people during the dark days preceding the close; it was a case of "eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die."
In the desire to avoid as far as possible any unnecessary tampering with the original manuscript, passages expressive of the animosities of the time, which the author would be glad to blot out forever, have been allowed to stand unaltered — not as representing the present feeling of the writer or her people, but because they do represent our feelings forty years ago, and to suppress them entirely, would be to falsify the record. While recognizing the bad taste of many of these utterances, which "Philip sober" would now be the first to repudiate, it must be remembered that he has no right to speak for "Philip drunk," or to read his own present feelings into the mind of his predecessor. The diary was written in a time of storm and tempest, of bitter hatreds and fierce animosities, and its pages are so saturated with the spirit of the time, that to attempt to banish it would be like giving the play of Hamlet without the title-role. It does not pretend to give the calm reflections of a philosopher looking back dispassionately upon the storms of his youth, but the passionate utterances of stormy youth itself. It is in no sense a history, but a mere series of crude pen-sketches, faulty, inaccurate, and out of perspective, it may be, but still a true picture of things as the writer saw them. It makes no claim to impartiality; on the contrary, the author frankly admits that it is violently and often absurdly partisan — and it could not well have been otherwise under the circumstances. Coming from a heart ablaze with the passionate resentment of a people smarting under the humiliation of defeat, it was inevitable that along with the just indignation at wrongs which ought never to have been committed, there should have crept in many intemperate and indiscriminate denunciations of acts which the writer did not understand, to say nothing of sophomorical vaporings calculated now only to excite a smile. Such expressions, however, are not to be taken seriously at the present day, but are rather to be regarded as a sort of fossil curiosities that have the same value in throwing light on the psychology of the period to which they belong as the relics preserved in our geological museums have in illustrating the physical life of the past. Revolutions never take place when people are cool-headed or in a serene frame of mind, and it would be as dishonest as it is foolish to deny that such bitternesses ever existed. The better way is to cast them behind us and thank the powers of the universe that they exist no longer. I cannot better express this feeling than in the words of an old Confederate soldier at Petersburg, Va., where he had gone with a number of his comrades who had been attending the great reunion at Richmond, to visit the scene of their last struggles under "Marse Robert." They were standing looking down into the Crater, that awful pit of death, lined now with daisies and buttercups, and fragrant with the breath of spring. Tall pines, whose lusty young roots had fed on the hearts of dead men, were waving softly overhead, and nature everywhere had covered up the scars of war with the mantle of smiling peace. I paused, too, to watch them, and we all stood there awed into silence, till at last an old battle-scarred hero from one of the wiregrass counties way down in Georgia, suddenly raised his hands to heaven, and said in a voice that trembled with emotion: "Thar's three hundred dead Yankees buried here under our feet. I helped to put 'em thar, but so help me God, I hope the like 'll never be done in this country again. Slavery's gone and the war's over now, thank God for both! We are all brothers once more, and I can feel for them layin' down thar just the same as fur our own."
That is the sentiment of the new South and of the few of us who survive from the old. We look back with loving memory upon our past, as we look upon the grave of the beloved dead whom we mourn but would not recall. We glorify the men and the memories of those days and would have the coming generations draw inspiration from them. We teach the children of the South to honor and revere the civilization of their fathers, which we believe has perished not because it was evil or vicious in itself, but because, like a good and useful man who has lived out his allotted time and gone the way of all the earth, it too has served its turn and must now lie in the grave of the dead past. The Old South, with its stately feudal régime, was not the monstrosity that some would have us believe, but merely a case of belated survival, like those giant sequoias of the Pacific slope that have lingered on from age to age, and are now left standing alone in a changed world. Like every civilization that has yet been known since the primitive patriarchal stage, it was framed in the interest of a ruling class; and as has always been, and always will be the case until mankind shall have become wise enough to evolve a civilization based on the interests of all, it was doomed to pass away whenever changed conditions transferred to another class the economic advantage that is the basis of all power. It had outlived its day of usefulness and was an anachronism in the end of the nineteenth century — the last representative of an economic system that had served the purposes of the race since the days when man first emerged from his prehuman state until the rise of the modern industrial system made wage slavery a more efficient agent of production than chattel slavery.
It is as unfair to lay all the onus of that institution on the Southern States of America as it would be to charge the Roman Catholic Church with the odium of all the religious persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The spirit of intolerance was in the air; everybody persecuted that got the chance even the saints of Plymouth Rock, and the Catholics did the lion's share