The “Two Little Confederates”
lived at Oakland. It was not a handsome place,
as modern ideas go, but down in Old Virginia, where
the standard was different from the later one, it
passed in old times as one of the best plantations
in all that region. The boys thought it the greatest
place in the world, of course excepting Richmond, where
they had been one year to the fair, and had seen a
man pull fire out of his mouth, and do other wonderful
things. It was quite secluded. It lay, it
is true, right between two of the county roads, the
Court-house Road being on one side, and on the other
the great “Mountain Road,” down which
the large covered wagons with six horses and jingling
bells used to go; but the lodge lay this side of the
one, and “the big woods,” where the boys
shot squirrels, and hunted ’possums and coons,
and which reached to the edge of “Holetown,”
stretched between the house and the other, so that
the big gate-post where the semi-weekly mail was left
by the mail-rider each Tuesday and Friday afternoon
was a long walk, even by the near cut through the
woods. The railroad was ten miles away by the
road. There was a nearer way, only about half
the distance, by which the negroes used to walk and
which during the war, after all the horses were gone,
the boys, too, learned to travel; but before that,
the road by Trinity Church and Honeyman’s Bridge
was the only route, and the other was simply a dim
bridle-path, and the “horseshoe-ford” was
known to the initiated alone.
The mansion itself was known on the
plantation as “the great-house,” to distinguish
it from all the other houses on the place, of which
there were many. It had as many wings as the angels
in the vision of Ezekiel.
These additions had been made, some
in one generation, some in another, as the size of
the family required; and finally, when there was no
side of the original structure to which another wing
could be joined, a separate building had been erected
on the edge of the yard which was called “The
Office,” and was used as such, as well as for
a lodging-place by the young men of the family.
The privilege of sleeping in the Office was highly
esteemed, for, like the toga virilis, it marked
the entrance upon manhood of the youths who were fortunate
enough to enjoy it. There smoking was admissible,
there the guns were kept in the corner, and there
the dogs were allowed to sleep at the feet of their
young masters, or in bed with them, if they preferred
it.
In one of the rooms in this building
the boys went to school whilst small, and another
they looked forward to having as their own when they
should be old enough to be elevated to the coveted
dignity of sleeping in the Office. Hugh already
slept there, and gave himself airs in proportion;
but Hugh they regarded as a very aged person; not
as old, it was true, as their cousins who came down
from college at Christmas, and who, at the first outbreak
of war, all rushed into the army; but each of these
was in the boys’ eyes a Methuselah. Hugh
had his own horse and the double-barrelled gun, and
when a fellow got those there was little material
difference between him and other men, even if he did
have to go to the academy, which was really
something like going to school.
The boys were Frank and Willy; Frank
being the eldest. They went by several names
on the place. Their mother called them her “little
men,” with much pride; Uncle Balla spoke of
them as “them chillern,” which generally
implied something of reproach; and Lucy Ann, who had
been taken into the house to “run after”
them when they were little boys, always coupled their
names as “Frank ‘n’ Willy.”
Peter and Cole did the same when their mistress was
not by.
When there first began to be talk
at Oakland about the war, the boys thought it would
be a dreadful thing; their principal ideas about war
being formed from an intimate acquaintance with the
Bible and its accounts of the wars of the Children
of Israel, in which men, women and children were invariably
put to the sword. This gave a vivid conception
of its horrors.
One evening, in the midst of a discussion
about the approaching crisis, Willy astonished the
company, who were discussing the merits of probable
leaders of the Union armies, by suddenly announcing
that he’d “bet they didn’t have
any general who could beat Joab.”
Up to the time of the war, the boys
had led a very uneventful, but a very pleasant life.
They used to go hunting with Hugh, their older brother,
when he would let them go, and after the cows with
Peter and Cole. Old Balla, the driver, was their
boon comrade and adviser, and taught them to make
whips, and traps for hares and birds, as he had taught
them to ride and to cobble shoes.
He lived alone (for his wife had been
set free years before, and lived in Philadelphia).
His room over “the old kitchen” was the
boys’ play-room when he would permit them to
come in. There were so many odds and ends in
it that it was a delightful place.
Then the boys played blindman’s-buff
in the house, or hide-and-seek about the yard or garden,
or upstairs in their den, a narrow alcove at the top
of the house.
The little willow-shadowed creek,
that ran through the meadow behind the barn, was one
of their haunts. They fished in it for minnows
and little perch; they made dams and bathed in it;
and sometimes they played pirates upon its waters.
Once they made an extended search
up and down its banks for any fragments of Pharaoh’s
chariots which might have been washed up so high;
but that was when they were younger and did not have
much sense.