8 The Call of the Drum
Then I listened to the call of the drum.
Fort Sumter was fired upon, and the first cannon shot there set this war drum to beating in every village; it was never silent; its steady roll day after day was calling men up to the cannon mouth; it was persistent, unsatisfied, always crying for more.
Its beat was heard throughout a vast area, over regions whose people knew of each other as part of the same nation, but had never met, calling above this line to the North, calling below it to the South, summoning up the legions for a struggle in which old jealousies and old quarrels, breeding since the birth of the Union, were to be settled.
The drum beat its martial note in the great cities of the Atlantic, calling the men away from the forges and the shops and the wharves—clerks, moulders, longshoremen, the same call for all; it passed on, and its steady beat resounded among the hills and mountains of the North, calling to the long-limbed farmer boys to drop the plough and take up the rifle, sending them on to join the moulders, and clerks, and longshoremen, and putting upon all one stamp, the stamp of the soldier, food for the cannon—and this food supply was to be the largest of its time, though few yet dreamed it.
The roll of the drum went on, through the fields, along the rivers, by the shores of the Great Lakes, out upon the plains, where the American yet fought with the Indian for a foothold, and into the interminable forests whose shades hid the pioneers; over levels and acres and curves of thousands of miles, calling up the deep-chested Western farmers, men of iron muscles and no pleasures, to whom unbroken hardship was the natural course of life, and sending them to join their Eastern brethren at the cannon mouth.
It was an insistent drum, beating through all the day and night, over the mountains, through the sunless woods and on the burnt prairies, never resting, never weary. The opportunity was the greatest of the time, and the drum did not neglect a moment; it was without conscience, and had no use for mercy, calling, always calling.
Another drum and yet the same was beating in the South, and those who came at its call differed in little from the others who were marching to the Northern beat, only the clerks and the mill hands were much fewer; the same long-limbed and deep-chested race, spare alike of figure and speech, brown-faced men from the shores of the Gulf, men of South Carolina in whom the original drop of French blood still tinctured the whole; brethren of theirs from Louisiana, gigantic Tennesseans, half-wild horsemen from the Texas plains—all burning with enthusiasm for a cause that they believed to be right.
This merciless drum rolling out its ironical chuckle noted that these Northern and Southern countrymen gathering to their standards were alike in their lack of pleasure; they were a serious race; life had always been a hard problem for them, a fight, in fact, and this fight into which they were going was merely another kind of battle, with some advantages of novelty and change and comradeship that made it attractive, especially to the younger, the boys. They had been hewers of wood and drawers of water in every sense of the word, though for themselves; generations of them had fought Indians, some suffering torture and death; they had endured bitter cold and burning heat, eaten at scanty tables, and lived far-away and lonely lives in the wilderness. They were a rough and hard-handed race, taught to work and not to be afraid, knowing no masters, accustomed to no splendours either in themselves or others, holding themselves as good as anybody and thinking it, according to Nature; their faults those of newness and never of decay. These were the men who had grown up apart from the Old World and all its traditions, far even from the influence which the Atlantic seaboard felt through constant communication. This life of eternal combat in one form or another left no opportunity for softness; the dances, the sports, and all the gaieties which even the lowest in Europe had were unknown to them, and they invented none to take their place.
They knew the full freedom of speech; what they wished to say they said, and they said it when and where they pleased. But on the whole they were taciturn, especially in the hour of trouble; then they made no complaints, suffering in silence. They imbibed the stoicism of the Indians from whom they won the land, and they learned to endure much and long before they cried out. This left one characteristic patent and decisive, and that characteristic was strength. These men had passed through a school of hardship, one of many grades; it had roughened them, but it gave them bodies of iron and an unconquerable spirit for the struggle they were about to begin.
Another characteristic of those who came at the call of the drum was unselfishness. They were willing to do much and ask little for it. They were poor bargain drivers when selling their own flesh and bones, and their answer to the call was spontaneous and without price.
They came in thousands and scores of thousands. The long roll rumbling from the sea to the Rocky Mountains and beyond cleared everything; the doubts and the doubters were gone; no more committees; an end to compromises! The sword must decide, and the two halves of the nation, which yet did not understand their own strength, swung forward to meet the issue, glad that it was obvious at last.
There came an exultant note into the call of the drum, as if it rejoiced at the prospects of a contest that took so wide a sweep. Here was long and happy work for it to do; it could call to many battles, and its note as it passed from village to village was resounding and defiant; it was cheerful too, and had in it a trick; it told the long-legged boys who came out of the woods of victories and glory, of an end for a while to the toil which never before had been broken, of new lands and of cities; all making a great holiday with the final finish of excitement and reasonable risk. It was no wonder that the drum called so effectively when it mingled such enticements with the demands of patriotism. Most of those who heard were no strangers to danger, and those who did not know it themselves were familiar with it in the traditions of their fathers and forefathers; every inch of the land which now swept back from the sea three thousand miles had been won at the cost of suffering and death, with two weapons, the rifle and the axe, and they were not going to shun the present trial, which was merely one in a long series.
The drum was calling to men who understood its note; the nation had been founded as a peaceful republic, but it had gone already through the ordeal of many wars, and behind it stretched five generations of colonial life, an unbroken chain of combats. They had fought everybody; they had measured the valour of the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Hessian, the Mexican, and the red man. Much gunpowder had been burned within the borders of the Union, and also its people had burned much beyond them. Those who followed the call of the drum were flocking to no new trade. By a country with the shadow of a standing army very many battles had been fought.
They came, too, without regard to blood or origin; the Anglo-Saxon predominated; he gave his characteristics to North and South alike, all spoke his tongue, but every race in Europe had descendants there, and many of them—English, Irish, Scotch, French, German, Spanish, and so on through the list—their blood fused and intermingled, until no one could tell how much he had of this and how much of that.
The untiring drumbeat was heard through all the winter and summer, and the response still rolled up from vast areas; it was to be no common struggle—great armies were to be formed where no armies at all existed before, and the preparations on a fitting scale went on. The forces of the North and South gathered along a two-thousand-mile line, and those trying to look far ahead saw the nature of the struggle.
The preliminary battles and skirmishes began, and then the two gathered themselves for their mightiest efforts.