Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/342

 342 Southern Historical Society Papers.

resign his commission in the army and take charge of these posses- sions, superintend the cultivation of them and give aid in the improve- ment of them.

Lord Bacon said : " Gardening is the purest of all pleasures." The life and calling of a Southern planter then abounded in much that is now lacking in the business of farming.

Then the system of service upon the farm was perfect. Then the profits arising from this great calling, the chopping block of all other callings, were large and certain. Now it has come to be, by reason of the great changes wrought by man and the greater changes wrought by time or nature, the most precarious of all the great pursuits of man. A succession of forbidding harvests has well nigh broken the hearts of the agriculturists.

He succeeded admirably well in the management of the estate com- mitted to his care. The broad studies pursued at West Point well supplemented his calling as a farmer.

In October, 1860, he married Ellen, a lovely and accomplished young lady, daughter of John J. Long, Esq., of Northampton county, N. C. In a letter written to me within the last few weeks by Captain William Hammond, who served as adjutant-general on the staff of General Daniel, he says: "I may not after so many years have passed allude with particularity to special traits of his character, but I must be permitted to bear testimony to his matchless devotion to his wife. It was beautiful and touching beyond description. I shall never forget that, when trying at his request to prepare a will disposing of his property, his only instructions were ' Let my wife have every- thing she deserves, more than I can leave her.' '

In the midst of all this, war between the Government and the Con- federate States came. It is the fashion now-a-days to condemn the part of the South in that great struggle and in the drama that led up to it. I do not share the views of those who put the fault at our door alone and strive to keep it there. There is no Anglo-Saxon commu- nity on this planet with three thousand millions of property staked in any kind of solvent investment that would not resort to blood-let- ting rather than abandon it. Besides, the contemporary history of the first fifty years of the life of the Government bears ample testimony to the supposed existence of the right of secession as a peaceful right left to the States of the Union.

In "A View of the Constitution of the United States," by Wm. Rawle, LL. D., a citizen of Pennsylvania, a book published in Phila- delphia in 1825, used as a text-book at the West Point Military Academy some time, he says :