On the border

Front matter

t-^i o

On the Border.

B Y

Preface

The facts which form the groundwork of the following story were communicated to the writer during a visit which he made to the " Army of the Cumberland " in the spring of 1863. Their romantic interest at once fascinated his imagination, and he readily listened to the suggestion, which was then made him, to write the history of Garfield's campaign in Eastern Kentucky. In pursuance of this purpose he opened a correspondence with the principal actors in that " eventful history," and within the following eighteen months accumulated a mass of material that would, of itself, make a respectable volume. A careful examination of this material, however, showed him that many of the statements of his correspondents were so inconsistent and so contradictory, that no reliable history could be compiled from it without an amount of sifting and research which he had not the time to make. In these circumstances, he decided not to write a history, but a story, that should embrace, and be founded qn, the acknowledged facts of the campaign.

In following out this plan he has endeavored to relate events as accurately as possible. Whenever he speaks of known and living men he writes authentic history, and only in describing subordinate characters and circumstances does he give any play to his imagination. The events related of Jordan are mainly facts ; but are not all facts true of him. This one man, as he appears in the story, is a combination of two men, — one of them named John Jordan, the other, Joseph Sowards. The adventurous ride, and the midnight visit to Marshall's camp on the eve of the battle of Middle Creek, are true of Jordan ; the killing of Cecil, the double outlawry, and the unparalleled patriotism which made him, while under sentence of death from both his friends and liis enemies, do such great services to his country, are true of Sowards.

In a pretty wide reading the writer has met with no such character, and the proverbial ingratitude of republics only can account for the fact that this brave man and pure patriot went to his grave unknown and unwept save among his native mountains.

Contents

CHAPTEE I.

PAaE Ancestry, 11

CHAPTEE 11.

Chapter I. Ancestry

ISTOEY, it is said, repeats itself; but this can hardly be, unless the world be moving in a circle, and not, as we sujDpose, in an unending spiral " onward and upward." But, however this may be, it is certain that man reproduces himself, — that, throwing aside his worn-out periwig and shoe-buckles, he issues from the grave after sleeping soundly, perhaps, for centuries, and stalks abroad again in stove-pipe hat and patent-leathers, to act once more a part in the great drama of human existence. To credit this we need not believe the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, but only accept the evident truth, that the father impresses his nature on the son, the grandsire on the grandson, and thus sends him into the world bound hand and foot with all his cast-off passions and propensities, only to do over again, it may be, the deeds which made his ancestor execrated in his day and generation. In this way, if in no other, history repeats itself; and in view of it how inestimable is the birthright of which Cowper boasted ! Who would not rather inherit the virtues of a peasant than the vices of a king-? And yet, how we look down upon peasants and up to kings, never once asking whether one or the other have either virtues or vices.

The young rustic who is the principal actor in this short history was descended from a long line of peasants ; and in glancing back at his ancestors it is curious to notice how more than one of them, though comfortably dead and buried for nearly two hundred years, managed to reappear and act again in his brief career. The first of these ancestors, of whom there is any historical mention, was the John Brown who so heroically met death at the hands of Claverhouse, during the civil war which distracted Scotland in 1685. He lived at Priesthill, in Lanarkshire ; and, though but an humble carrier, was a man of such shining virtues that he obtained honorable mention in the annals of that dark period. Led by convictions of duty to join the Kebellion, he was out with the insurgents at Bothwell Bridge, and was tlius included in the sweeping sentence of outlawry w^hich followed that disastrous battle. The sentence was executed upon him by Claverhouse under circumstances of savage cruelty ; but he met it with a fortitude that showed him possessed of such stuff as even kings are seldom made of The circumstance forms a most wild and picturesque story, and it is related by the old chronicle"* with such rude and touching eloquence, that I am tempted to transcribe it.

* The extract is from " Walker's Life of Peden," which was published iu Edinburgh in 1724. The account is briefly quoted by Macaulay in Vol. ii. page 74 of his history ; and, more at length, by Sir Walter Scott, in " The Tales of a Grandfather." The story took strong hold of the poetical imagination and large heart of the great novelist, as is shown by his weaving some of its most affecting incidents into the beautiful episode of Bessie Maclure, in Chapter vi. of " Old Mortality."

The narrative is as follows: "Between five and six in the morning, the said John Brown, having performed the worship of God in his family, was going, with a spade in his hand to make ready some peat-ground. The mist being very dark, he knew not until the cruel and bloody Claverhouse compassed him with three troop of horse, brought him to his house, and there examined him, who, though he was a man of a stammering speech, yet answered him distinctly and soberly, which made Claverhouse to examine those whom he had taken to be his guides through the muirs, if ever they heard him preach ? They answered, ' I^o, no ; he was never a preacher.' He said, ' If he has never preached, mickle has he prayed in his time.' He said to John, ' Go to your prayers, for you shall immediately die.'

"When he w^as praying, Claverhouse interrupted him three times. One time that he stopped him, he was pleading that the Lord would spare a remnant, and not make a full end in the day of his anger. Claverhouse said, ' I gave you time to pray, and ye are begun to preach.' John turned upon his knees, and said, ' Sir, you know neither the nature of preaching or praying, that calls this preaching.' Then he continued without confusion. When ended, Claverhouse said, 'Take good-night of your wife and children.' His wife, standing by wit,h her child in her arms that she had brought forth to him, and another child of his iirst wife's, he came to her and said, ' Now, Marian, the day is come that I told you would come, when I spake first to you of marrying me.' She said, ' Indeed, John, I can willingly part with you.' Then he said, ' This is all I desire. I have no more to do but to die.'

" He kissed his wife and bairns, and wished purchased and 2

promised blessings to be multiplied upon them, and his blessing. Claverhouse ordered six soldiers to shoot him. The most part of the bullets came upon his head, which scattered his brains upon the ground. Claverhouse said to his wife, ^What thinkest thou of thy husband now, woman ?^ She said, 'I ever thought much of him, and now more than ever.' He said, 'It were but justice to lay thee beside him.' She said, ' If you were permitted, I doubt not your crueltie would go that length; but how will ye make answer for this morning's work?' He said, 'To man I can be answerable ; and for God, I will take him in my own hand.' Claverhouse mounted his horse, and marched, and left her with the corpse of her dead husband lying there. She set the bairn on the ground, and gathered his brains and tied up his head, and straighted his body, and covered him in her plaid, and sat dowai and wept over him.

" It being a very desert place, where never victual grew, and far from neighbors, it was some time before any friends came to her. The first that came was a very fit hand, — that old, singular Christian woman in the Cummerhead, named Elizabeth Menzies, three miles distant, who had been tried with the violent death of her husband at Pentland, afterwards of two worthy sons, — Thomas Weir, who was killed at Drumclog, and David Steel, who was suddenly shot after being taken. The said Marian Brown, sitting upon her husband's grave, told me that before that she could see no blood, except she was in danger to faint, but she was helped to be a witness to aU this without either fainting or confusion ; only when the shots were let off her eyes dazzled."

The infant, who was thus an unconscious witness to its father's bloody death, grew to womanhood, and became the wife of one John Jordan, a Cameronian minister of the same little parish of Priesthill, and the son of another Cameronian minister, who gave his life for the Prince of Orange at Dunkeld. The name of this man has not gone into history, but tradition has kept his memory alive among his descendants to this day ; and, if one half that it tells of him be true, he deserved the almost superstitious veneration in which he is still regarded.

It is not to my purpose to recount the incidents of his career ; and, indeed, if I did, I should be in danger of confounding truth with fiction, for the two seem inextricably blended in the traditions which have been handed down in his family. This much, however, is certain. He was a man of stern integrity, of singular religious insight, and of wonderful power as a preacher, and, though only " a man of the people," wielded an influence among his clansmen second only to that of their hereditary chieftain.

Inheriting his father's hatred of the English Union, he was easily lured into the Rebellion of 1715, and mustering a body of his parishioners, led them to the help of the Chevalier St. George at Sheriffmuir. For his valor in that battle he was made, on the field, a captain in the regular forces under the Earl of Mar. He followed the fortunes of the Pretender until his defeat at Prestonpans, when he was taken prisoner, and, with a score of others who had been conspicuous in the rebellion, was condemned to be shot at daybreak on the following morning. The rest suffered death at once ; but Jordan's execution was delayed, and he was offered life and freedom on condition that he would acknowledge allegiance to the reigning monarch by publicly crying, " God save King George ! " This he refused to do, and then his enemies, bent on saving him, — whether from admiration of his character, or because they desired his conciliatory offices with the other Cameronians, tradition does not state, — adopted a novel mode of execution which, while keeping death before him for hours^ gave him opportunity to retreat from his fate at the very last moment.

Taking him to the bank of the Forth, they chained him to a stake driven into the sand at low-water mark. It was the fall of the year, and the water was as cold as in midwinter. It came up to his knees, to his waist, to his armpits, and at last, with an icy embrace, encircled his neck and shoulders. His executioners from the shore had from time to time urged him to utter the few words that would save his life, and they now cried out, " For God's sake, mon, speak ! Say the words, an' ye wad na do self-murder ! "

He looked at his wife, who was standing near, but made no answer. For a moment she seemed to hesitate ; then, lifting her eyes to his, she hoarsely whispered, —

" John, ye wat that God is aboon ye ; that the angels are waiting."

" Yea, lass, my only thoctht is of yoursel and the bairns ! "

" Think na' of us," she answered. " He is Father to the fatherless — husband to the widow!" and she sank upon her knees, her arms stretched upward.

" Then my fecht is done," he answered. " But, be of good cheer, Jennie. In the dark days I will be with ye."

The water was now even with his nostrils, and, raising himself on the tips of his toes, he cried to her, —

"Bid John be wortlij of his ancestors." Then he sank again to his feet, and the swelling wave swept over him.

Of this woman — the Jennie Brown whose father suffered martyrdom at the hands of Claverhouse — many marvellous stories are told. She is said to have had the strange faculty of " second-sight," of which such frequent mention is made in the traditions of Scotland, and to have possessed the power of healing by a word, or by the laying on of hands after the manner of the early Christians. On one occasion, says tradition, she entered the house of a woman who had been bedridden for many years, and, looking upon her, said, —

" In the name of the Lord, I say to thee, Bise ! "

The woman, it is said, rose, and lived in good health to the age of eighty.

At another time, it is also said, she restored a child who had lain apparently dead a dozen hours ; and almost numberless instances are related of her curing, by a touch, those sick of divers diseases, and those wounded in battle.

But still more marvellous was her strange power of "second-sight." If the tradition be true, she not only saw into the unseen world which lies, an invisible cloud, all about us, but with mortal eye read in the shadows of coming events the far-off and mysterious future. She is said to have witnessed, in a series of visions, tlie defeat and misfortunecs of the Pretender, long before he set foot in Scotland, and to have foretold, months before the event, the fate which overtook her husband.

" John," she said to him, " I see ye chained to a stake, and the waters rising round ye ! But, stand fast ; die like a Christian."

18 ONTHEEORDER.

Her son, the third John Jordan of whom the family has knowledge, inherited the peculiarities of both his father and mother. He had her delicate organization and wonderful gift of sj^irit-vision, and his force of character and religious fervor and insight. He, too, was a Cameronian minister, and, like his father, met death at the hands of the ruling aristocracy. Engaging in the Eebellion of 1745, he was taken prisoner, condemned, and executed, after being offered life if he would swear allegiance to the English government. His aged mother stood beside the block to cheer his last moments, and, as the raxe was about to descend, told him of a vision she had of the waiting angels.

This woman, who thus witnessed the execution of her father, her son, and her husband, lived to a great age, and died at last in the arms of a grandson, revered by all who knew her, and leaving a name which even now is only spoken with uncovered head by her remote descendants.

The year 1745 saw the end of civil commotions in Scotland, and after that the Jordans — father, son, and grandson — walked in peaceful ways, and died in their beds like other Scotchmen. They all were of the Cameronian faith, and all preachers in good standing 5 but tradition makes especial mention of only one of them. He was minister at Stirling, and on him the mantle of the old Seeress and the Cameronian captain seems to have fallen. He was a man of iron mould, powerful in word and deed, and with ungloved hand he tore aside the veil before the very Holy of Holies. With that strange gift of " second-sight " he read the Apocalypse. To him it seemed not a revelation of things "coming on the earth," but a history of the spirit world, from the birth of

Adam to the day when the last man shall look up at the sky, and amid, the wreck of a dissolving universe, cry, " It is finished." The book he left behind on the subject is full of genius, and indicates that if his mind had not been cramped by a narrow Calvinism, he might have uttered words that would have " been music to the listening: asres."

The grandson of this man — the seventh in regular descent from the old Cameronian — was born at Sterling in the year 1795, and, being the oldest son, was baptized by the name of John, and destined for the hereditary office of preacher. But when he began to talk, it was discovered that he had inherited the stammering tongue of his great ancestor. This shut him out from the ministry, and the " keys of heaven " descended to a younger brother.

This Jordan received a respectable education, and adopted, when he grew up, the profession of land surveyor. But an old country affords little scope for such a pursuit, and, at the close of the war of 1812, he emigrated to America.

At first he joined the Scotch settlers who had located at Tayetteville in North Carolina, but soon afterward removed to Virginia, where, at the age of thirty-six, he married a woman who, how truly I know not, claimed direct descent from the James-river Huguenots. She was fifteen years younger than himself, and a family might grow up about him ; so, with Scotch foresight, he sought a home in a newer district, where every one of his posterity might become the lord of a thousand acres. He removed to Paintville, a little town in the " Piedmont region " of Kentucky.

This is a district larger than the whole of Massachusetts ; but is as little known to the people of this generation as

^vas the Garden of Eden to the races of men who, some geologists tell us, made their graves in the strata of the earth fifty thousand years ago. Though in the world, it is not of the vi-orld, — not, at least, of this world, which drives stage-coaches, builds railroads, talks across wide oceans, and wends its way to the other life through the marble aisles of churches whose spires, it may be, come no nearer to heaven than the famous tower once builded to furnish man an easy ascent to the celestial country.

It is a rugged, rocky region, broken into high hills and narrow valleys, and covered — except where dotted with little plantations of wheat and Indian corn — with vast forests of oak and maple, and the honey-locust, grown gray with the gathered moss of many centuries. In the hilly portion the soil is stony and sterile; but aloug the valleys it is of amazing fertility, yielding most abundantly of. the fruits of the earth ; and in these valleys dwell the aristocracy of the district ; for even in this primitive region, shut out as it is by a sort of Chinese wall from the rest of the world, are people who somehow have imbibed the civilized notion that a man's own blood is of somewhat better quality than that of his neighbors. Aside from this class, — who, being of a superior race, may properly be excluded from any general census of a country, — the district has a population of about one hundred thousand whites and four thousand blacks, a brave, hardy, rural people, with few schools, .scarcely any churches, and only one newspaper, but with the simple virtues which grow among mountains, and now and then clothe even barren hillsides with a moral beauty that is something akin to the bloom of their own wild flowers.

In the very heart of this region is the little town I have mentioned, and there Jordan rented a small house, and put up a small sign, which told all the world — as plainly as a small sign in a retired locality could tell it — that he was a '-'Surveyor and Draughtsman of Legal Instruments." The latter part of the inscription the rustic denizens of the district, after a while, managed to make out by dint of hard spelling ; but the former altogether baffled their comprehension. Legal meant law, and so, Jordan was a lawyer ; and survey meant to look, so Jordan was a lawyer looking for land ; and of that there were square miles for sale at his very door-way. Before a month passed at least a million acres of stony held and barren mountain were trundled up to his door, and offered to him "at haff thar valu." He explained that he was a measurer not a buj^er of terra-firma, and then the honest rustics said to him : " Wall, stranger, ye hev brung yer eggs to a pore market. We buy land by the lump, — so much, more or less, — and we reckon we kin guess 'bout as nigh as other men kin measure."

Jordan was a man of decision and energy, and he at once determined to return to Virginia. He was about to set out with his wife, and his small store of worldly wealth, when one evening a stranger came to see him. He was a man of middle age, blunt and rather imperious in manner, and he accosted the Cameronian somewhat as follows : —

" Your name, they tell me, is Jordan."

" It is, sir," said Jordan.

" Are you an honest man ? " asked the other.

".I am a Scotchman," said Jordan, probably thinking that a full answer to the question.

The other laughed, and said, good-humoredly, " Well, I've known a good many Scotchmen who were fools ; but none who were scoundrels. I reckon you will do. I want you to take the oversight of my plantation."

Upon this Jordan asked the stranger to he seated, and the latter, accepting the somewhat tardy civility, went on to say that his name was Weddington, — 'Squire Weddington, attorney-at-law, member of the House, and, in short, the first man of the district. He closed a brief but rather egotistical account of himself by saying : " I have married a wife. She is twenty years younger than I am, and to bridge over the distance between us, I've promised her a tour in Europe. I want an honest man to look after my affairs while I am away. I'll give you five hundred a year, a house to live in, and as much as you can eat from the j)lantation."

The proposition actually dazzled Jordan. He saw in it education, perhaps wealth, for his unborn children ; but his Scotch honesty suggested some obstacles. He explained that he knew nothing of planting, and that he had a natural antipathy to the negro.

The 'Squire met these objections as follows : " Planting ! Why, the hands do that. And as for the nigger, I wouldn't give a continental dime for • an overseer who didn't hate the very continent of Africa."

His objections so easily disposed of, Jordan very soon took possession of the vine-clad cabin, which, for a dozen years, had been occupied by the overseers of the 'Squire's plantation.

The plantation was located near the head-waters of a small stream called the Blaine, which empties into the Big Sandy, not far from the town of Louisa, in Kentucky ; and the cabin

A N C E S T 11 Y . 23

was a rude structure of logs, laid up in clay ; Lut it was so overgrown with vines and creeping-plants, that one half of its natural ugliness was hidden from the eye, and it seemed to have sprung from the ground, a ready-made human habitation. In other respects it was not unlike thousands of logdwellings that are so plentifully scattered all over the Southern country. It had two rooms on the ground floor, separated by an open passage-way, an unfurnished loft, approached by a couple of rickety ladders, a low roof falling down at the eaves so as to form the covering of a wide veranda, and two enormous chimney-stacks rising at either gable like mud models of the Egyptian pyramids.

Located in the very heart of the forest, the great trees crowded around it so closely that their branches overhung its very roof, and only a small patch of tilled land, sloping down in its front to a little stream at the foot of the hill, allowed it any view of the outside world. But this view was broad and picturesque. Far away a long mountain range rose against the sky, and far below, an extended valley, dotted here and there with little farms and broad plantations, lay spread out like a map ; and through this valley wound the narrow road, which, like a slender thread, held this rustic region to the rest of creation.

In this rude cabin, on the tenth of September, A. d. 1832, just as the moon was breaking through the clouds of a somewhat murky midnight, was born another John Jordan, — the eighth in descent from the old Cameronian, — and with his birth our little history has its proper beginning.

Chapter II

"HE antipathy of Jordan to the negroes was deeper than even he had imagined. They proved a perpetual trial to him ; but he v^^as a man who would have cut oft' his right hand, if it had come in the way of his duty ; and he set about his new vocation with the same self-devotion that made martyrs of his ancestors. Soon his management worked miracles, as genuine as any that are reported of the old Seeress. It transformed a hundred idle, eye-serving, dissolute wretches, into as many industrious, faithful, and respectable men and women. They had been driven hard all the week, and even denied religious services on Sunday ; but Jordan allowed them Saturdays to work for themselves, and built for them a log church on a distant corner of the plantation.

After an absence of about three years the 'Squire returned from his European tour, and had a reckoning with his overseer. He had received frequent accounts from him, but was not prepared for the final result of his balance-sheet.

"Why, Jordan," he exclaimed, "you've paid the expenses of my journey over and above the ordinary yield of the plantation ! Here's my check for an extra five hundred ; and I'll

. (24)

give you a deed of the cabin and a hundred acres, if you'll stay with me five years longer."

These terms being agreed upon, Jordan was about taking his leave, when the 'Squire, who was in a liberal mood, called him back, saying, " Jordan, about that boy who has come to your house since I've been away. Give him my name, and I'll see that he has an education."

"I thank you, 'Squire," answered Jordan; "he is already named, — • John, after his ancestors."

" D — n his ancestors ! What can they do for him ? Call him after me, and I'll make him a congress-man."

Jordan's gray eyes flashed ; but he answered, coolly, —

"Sir, the boy inherits his name from men whose blood helped to give freedom to Scotland. Not for all your money would I change it."

" Well, well," said the 'Squire, " you Scotch are a queer set ; but I'm d — d if you aren't honest. There's my hand, Jordan ; take no offence — I meant none."

Jordan took his hand, and tried, honestly tried, to forgive him ; but the insult rankled within him, and was not for a long time forgotten. The two men, however, never but once came in collision. This occurred two years afterward, and may as well be mentioned, as it has some bearing on the future of this narrative.

The 'Squire was a luxurious liver, and from his youth up had been sadly given to the " gentlemanly " vices of gaming, drinking, and horse-racing. Of these vices his friends predicted that matrimony would cure him ; but it seemed to have a contrary effect, for, on his return from Europe, he plunged deeper than ever into dissipation. It soon was whispered 3 about that he and his wife did not live happily together; that he had learned the truth of the old adage, " A young maid's heart is not bought by an old man's money," and was trying to drown his disappointment in the bottle. But this was only conjecture. Nothing certain was known, except the evident fact that the 'Squire was making rapid progress downward.

He was, as has been said, a member of the Legislature, and every winter he went, with his wife, to Lexington, returning iiome at the close of the session. One spring, the next after his return from abroad, he came back to the mansion bringing with him a gentleman named Irving, who remained during the summer. Irving was a dark, silent man, many years the 'Squire's junior, but the two seemed on a footing of the most intimate friendship. They rode, drank, smoked, and gambled together, and it was said that large sums were often lost and won between them in the little billiard-room at the farther end of the mansion. In the course of the summer the 'Squire was called North on business, and invited Irving to go with him ; but the latter declined, alleging that he had taken oath never again to set foot on abolition territory. This, to the 'Squire, seemed a natural feeling for a Southern gentleman, and he went away, leaving Irving behind with Mrs. Weddington. After a few weeks he returned, and then the two friends resumed their intimacy.