Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  Jefferson Davis was in Danville, Virginia, fifty miles from Greensboro, when he heard on April 9, 1865, that General Lee had surrendered. He came immediately to Greensboro where the last conference was held. The members of his cabinet were with him and he was met in Greensboro by General Joseph E. Johnston and General Beauregard. It was perhaps the saddest moment of Mr. Davis’s life. Hope was gone, but his instinctive thoughtfulness for others did not desert him. Knowing that the home that should shelter him might be burned the next day by Federal troops he declined all offers of hospitality and remained in the old-fashioned cars that had brought him from Virginia. He was still for fight but consented reluctantly that General Johnston should open correspondence with General Sherman. A little later thirty thousand of Sherman’s troops entered the town under General J. D. Cox and soon thirty-seven thousand Confederates under General Johnston were paroled. Greensboro looked like a tiny islet in a sea of mingled blue and gray. The boys of the town gathered up eagerly and wonderingly the old muskets and swords thrown away by the Confederates and built stories about them or fought mimic battles with them long after the hands that had once held them were dust. There was little disorder, for all knew that the end had come and the soldiers were busy fraternizing. Reconciliation, however, was harder to Confederate wives and mothers than to Confederate soldiers. Mrs. Letitia Walker, a daughter of Governor Morehead, describes the scene as follows:

  President and Mrs. Davis remained over one night in Greensboro in their car, declining the invitation of my father, for fear the Federal troops should burn the house that sheltered him for one night. TVlemminger and his wife remained over several days with us for a rest, bringing with them Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, so pale and careworn; but the price was on his head, and we tearfully bade him Godspeed. Never can I forget the farewell scene when the brave and grand Joseph E. Johnston called to say farewell, with tears running down his brown cheeks. Not a word was spoken, but silent prayers went up for his preservation.

  But one fine morning, amid the sound of bugles and trumpets and bands of music, the Federals entered Greensboro, fully thirty thousand strong, to occupy the town for some time. General Cox was in command. He, Burnside, Schofield, and Kilpatrick, with their staffs, sent word to the mayor that they would occupy the largest house in town that night, and until their headquarters were established. They came to Blandwood, which already sheltered three families and several sick soldiers. My father received them courteously and received them as guests — an act which General Cox appreciated, and after placing his tent in the rear of Judge Robert P. Dick’s house, he rode up every afternoon to consult with the Honourable John A. Gilmer and my father on the conditions of the country. He was a most courteous and elegant man, and in many ways displayed his sympathy with us. . . . Very soon anote was received announcing the arrival of Mrs Cox and the hope that Mrs. Gilmer and Mrs. Walker would do him the honour to call upon his wife. . . . She received us in Mrs. Dick’s parlor, simple in manner, dignified, bordering on stiffness — in contrast with the genial manners of her husband. . . . A grand review of all the troops was to be held on the next Saturday, and a pavil on was built in the centre of town — upper seats to be occupied by the Federal ladies. By nine o’clock a four-horse ambulance with outriders was sent with a note from General Cox again “begging the honour of Mrs. Gilmer’s and Mrs. Walker’s company, with Mrs. Cox to witness the review.” Mrs. Gilmer told her husband that she refused to add one more spectator to the pageant, for it was an enemy’s bullet that had maimed her only son for life. Violent, decisive words, and very ugly ones, too, were spoken by the other lady; but a peremptory order was given, and with bitter tears, accompanied by one of our soldiers, she went to the pavilion, to be received so graciously by Mrs. Cox.

  Three months later there came to Greensboro a man who was to give its Reconstruction history a unique interest and whose departure after a sojourn of thirteen years was to be promptly chronicled by an O. Henry cartoon. Albion Winegar Tourgee, author of “The Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools,” was the first carpet-bagger to enter the “somnolent little Southern town” on the heels of the receding armies. But the town was anything but somnolent during his stay. “He was a bold, outspoken, independent kind of man,” writes a Confederate soldier of Greensboro who knew him well and opposed his every move. “He did not toady to the better class of citizens but pursued the even tenor of his way, seemingly regardless of public opinion. He had a good mind and exercised it. He was masterful and would be dominating. He was not popular with the other carpet-baggers nor with the prominent native scalawags — which speaks much for his honesty and independence.” By the votes of recently enfranchised slaves he was made a judge, an able, fearless, and personally honest one. But he was always an alien, an unwelcome intrusion, a resented imposition, “a frog in your chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends, the one thing not needful, the hail in harvest, the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.” O. Henry found a silver lining in his presence but Governor Worth succeeded at last in having a more acceptable judge appointed in his place.

  “The Fool’s Errand” finds few readers to-day but when it appeared, in 1879, it took the country by storm. “There can be no doubt,” said the Boston Traveller of this Greensboro story, “that ‘A Fool’s Errand’ will take a high rank in fiction — a rank like that of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” The Chicago Herald thought that the author must be Mrs. Stowe. “It may be well to inquire,” said the Concord Monitor, of New Hampshire, “in view of the power here displayed, whether the long-looked-for native American novelist who is to rival Dickens, and equal Thackeray, and yet imitate neither, has not been found.” “The book will rank,” said the Portland Advertiser, of Maine, “among the famous novels which represent certain epochs of history so faithfully and accurately that, once written, they must be read by everybody who desires to be well informed.”

  The story takes place in Greensboro, which is called “Yerdenton”; Judge Tourgee, “the fool,” is “Colonel Servosse”; and most of the other characters are Greensboro men easily recognized. It is certainly a noteworthy fact that “John Burleson,” a citizen of Greensboro and the hero in “A Fool’s Errand,” has recently reappeared as “Stephen Hoyle,” the villain, in “The Traitor,” the novel which Mr. Thomas Dixon has wrought into the vast and stirring historic drama called “The Birth of a Nation.” Neither author attempts an accurate appraisal of the character or career of “John Burleson” alias “Stephen Hoyle,” both interpreting him only as the rock on which the Ku Klux Ivlan was wrecked.

  Judge Tourgee had lain awake many a night in Greensboro expecting a visit from “The Invisible Empire,” but it had not come. In place of it there came the conviction, which gives form and substance to his book, that Reconstruction so-called was folly and he a consummate and pluperfect fool to have aided and abetted it. After reading many special treatises and university dissertations on the kind of Reconstruction attempted in the South I find in “The Fool’s Errand” the wisest statement of the whole question yet made. Nearly a half century has passed since the events recorded, but in rereading “A Fool’s Errand” one feels anew the utter un-Americanism of the whole scheme known as Reconstruction and the Americanism of the author’s conclusions. He presents the Greensboro or Southern side as follows:

  We were rebels in arms: we surrendered, and by the terms of surrender were promised immunity so long as we obeyed the laws. This meant that we should govern ourselves as of old. Instead of this, they put military officers over us; they imposed disabilities on our best and bravest; they liberated our slaves, and gave them power over us. Men born at the North came among us, and were given place and power by the votes of slaves and renegades. There were incompetent officers. The revenues of the State were squandered. We were taxed to educate the blacks. Enormous debts were contracted. We did not do these acts of violence from political motives, but only because the parties had made themselve
s obnoxious.

  Of the Southern (or shall we call it the American?) resistance to Reconstruction, the author says:

  It was a magnificent sentiment that underlay it all — an unfaltering determination, an invincible defiance to all that had the seeming of compulsion or tyranny. One cannot but regard with pride and sympathy the indomitable men, who, being conquered in war, yet resisted every effort of the conqueror to changc their laws, their customs, or even the personnel of their ruling class; and this, too, not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success. One cannot but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation which had overpowered them — even in the teeth of her legislators — with perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge.

  Of the Ku Klux Klan more particularly he writes:

  It is sometimes said, by those who do not comprehend its purpose, to have been a base, cowardly, and cruel barbarism. “What!” says the Northern man — who has stood aloof from it all, and with Pharisaic assumption, or comfortable ignorance of facts, denounced “Ku-Klux,” “carpet-baggers,” “scalawags,” and “niggers” alike,— “was it a brave thing, worthy of a brave and chivalric people, to assail poor, weak, defenceless men and women with overwhelming forces, to terrify, maltreat, and murder? Is this brave and commendable?”

  Ah, my friend! you quite mistake. If that were all that was intended and done, no, it was not brave and commendable. But it was not alone the poor colored man whom the daring band of night-riders struck, as the falcon strikes the sparrow; that indeed would have been cowardly: but it was the Nation which had given the victim citizenship and power, on whom their blow fell. It was no brave thing in itself for Old John Brown to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry; considered as an assault on the almost solitary watchman, it was cowardly in the extreme: but, when we consider what power stood behind that powerless squad, we are amazed at the daring of the Hero of Ossawattomie. So it was with this magnificent organization. It was not the individual negro, scalawag, or carpet-bagger, against whom the blow was directed, but the power — the Government — the idea which they represented. Not unfrequently, the individual victim was one toward whom the individual members of the Klan who executed its decree upon him had no little of kindly feeling and respect, but whose influence, energy, boldness, or official position, was such as to demand that he should be “visited.” In most of its assaults, the Klan was not instigated by cruelty, nor a desire for revenge; but these were simply the most direct, perhaps the only, means to secure the end it had in view. The brain, the wealth, the chivalric spirit of the South, was, restive under what it deemed degradation and oppression. This association offered a ready and effective method of overturning the hated organization, and throwing off the rule which had been imposed upon them. From the first, therefore, it spread like wildfire. It is said that the first organization was instituted in May, or perhaps as late as the 1st of June, 1868; yet by August of that year it was firmly established in every State of the South.

  O. Henry was seventeen years old when Judge Tourgee left Greensboro, never to return. Reconstruction was a thing of the past and the Ku Klux, of whom there were about eight hundred in Guilford County, had become but a memory. There was romance and mystery in it all to the younger generation, and O. Henry shows the traces of it in his later work. “I’m half Southerner by nature,” says Barnard O’Keefe in “Two Renegades.” “I’m willing to try the Ku Klux in place of the khaki.” That was what Guilford County did in O. Henry’s boyhood. In “The Rose of Dixie” Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks was engaged as advertising manager of the new Southern magazine because his grandfather had been “the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Ku Klux Klan.” When the Spanish War came, says O. Henry in “The Moment of Victory,” “The old party lines drawn by Sherman’s march and the Ku Ivlux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim Crow street-car ordinances faded away.”

  Of course Judge Tourgee’s residence was to the boys of the town a sort of demon’s haunt. We never passed it without shuddering. Dr. Rufus W. Weaver, of Nashville, Tennessee, gives his impressions as follows : (See “A Story of Dreams and Deeds: The Awakening of O. Henry’s Town.”)

  The first money which I, a country boy, ever made was acquired by the picking and the selling of cherries, and since I retailed them, going from house to house, I grew familiar with all the streets of this little town. There was one house, standing far back from the street, its yard thickly shaded by elms and oaks, which was to me a place of mystery, for here there lived that one-eyed scoundrel, that old carpet-bagger, Judge Tourgee, the Republican boss of the State, who had sought, so we are told, to introduce social equality among negroes and whites; who had wrecked the good name and the financial integrity of our fair State by his unexampled extravagance when he was in control of the State legislature, and who had brought about almost a reign of terror, so that he was justly considered by all good people to be a veritable monster.

  But to O. Henry, Ku Klux and Judge Tourgee were only so many more challenges to the innate romanticism of his nature. His most intimate boyhood friend, Mr. Thomas H. Tate, writes of those days:

  Of course Will [O. Henry] and I played Ku Klux. My mother was a past master at making masks out of newspapers which she folded and cut out with her scissors. I remember how the negroes used to pretend to be terribly frightened and how pleased we were with our efforts. The old Presbyterian High School [a child of David Caldwell] used to be the meeting place of the genuine article and was always held in awe by us boys for a long time on that account. You will remember that it stood vacant and gloomy in the grove just opposite our home place for many years. As to Judge Tourgee, we looked upon him as some sort of a pirate, mysterious and blackened by a thousand crimes, and we glanced at him covertly when he happened around. He was a sort of an ogre, but even then we admired him for his courage and wondered at it, coming as he did from the North. Very dark stories were whispered of his doings out in far-off Warnersville, the negro settlement out by the Methodist graveyard. He held meetings out there that we were almost prepared to say were a species of voodooism.

  You will remember that he had a beautiful country place out on the Guilford College Road. There was a greenhouse, flowers, shrubbery, and an immense rustic arbor there and it was used for dances and had an upper and lower floor. Miss Sallie Coleman was visiting in Greensboro and either expressed a desire for magnolias or Will conceived that she would like to have some, so we started about midnight on the six miles’ “hike” to West Green to spoil and loot. Strange to say, the memory of the moonlit night is with me now even after all these years. It was a perfect night. The moon was full and showering dowrn her mellow radiance in great floods. I can see the long white line of road stretching out, hear the whippoorwills and smell the good night air laden with its species and fragrance and I can see the long row of magnolia trees out in the wheat field and orchard with their great white flowers gleaming out from the dark foliage. I can also feel the creepy sensation that I felt when we mounted the fence and started across the open field for the trees and the relief that came when we crossed that fence with the loot. We carried them back and laid them on Miss Sallie’s doorstep.

  The incident is peculiarly characteristic There were plenty of magnolias nearer O. Henry’s home than West Green and they could have been had in broad daylight for the asking. What his nature craved was an opportunity to play the knight, to steep himself in romance, to dare the forbidden, to imagine himself for six glorious miles one of the venturers of whom he was afterward to write:(“The Venturers.”)

  The Venturer is one who keeps his eye on the hedgerows and wayside groves and meadows while he travels the road to Fortune. That is the difference between him and the Adventurer. Eating the forbidden fruit was the best record ever made by a Venturer. Trying to prove that it happened is the highest work of the Adventuresome. To be either is disturbing to the cosmogony of creation.

  The man who was in later years to be hailed as “the discoverer of the romance
in the streets of New York,” who, as the Atlantic Monthly put it, “seems to possess the happy gift of picking up gold pieces from the asphalt pavement,” was a pursuivant of romance all his life.

  Sometimes the sources from which he drew his romantic inspiration could hardly in themselves be called romantic. A playmate writes:

  When Will [O. Henry] was about eight years old, he and I were riding around my mother’s garden on stick horses, when we found a conical mound where potatoes or turnips had been “holed up .

  for winter use. His fertile imagination at once converted this into a great castle inhabited by a cruel giant who kept imprisoned within its grim walls a beautiful maiden whom he and I, after doing valiant battle as her loyal knights, were to triumphantly rescue At this remote period I cannot of course recall all the details of this wonderful story as he told it, but I feel sure that if it could be faithfully reproduced, it would make thrillmgly interesting reading of its kind.

  But in these early days playing Indian was O. Henry’s favourite pastime. Indian arrow-heads were plentiful around Greensboro and O. Henry, it will be remembered, treasured above all others one that he had found sticking in the Revolutionary log that formed a part of his home. The Indian game took many forms but all gave scope and career to his imagination as well as zest and vividness to his early reading. Mr. Thomas H. Tate describes two forms of the Indian play as follows: