CIVILITIES IN THE CIVIL WAR

...The Russian Government has leased the $1,000,000 New York mansion of the late J. P. Morgan, together with its 73-acre estate...

...It was not only the common soldiers who could have ended the war without venom...

...The old soldiers on Swimley's porch were typical.' Thousands of such groups, North and South, pooled their memories around the pot-bellied stoves in the winter or sat reminiscing on the stoops of stores in the Summer evenings...

...Miss Mamie's father had been a Confederate soldier, but she was no Daughter of the Confederacy...

...They told of trading between the lines, swapping Confederate tobacco for Damyankee coffee...

...It will be used, says a news story, "for recreation and entertainment of high Russian government officials...

...I asked him a few questions . . . all of which he answered, and I rode off...

...In Washington it was the venomous Charles Sumner, the vindictive Thad Stevens, the Radicals of Congress, and the newspaper commentators who'd never smelted gunpowder who reveled in continued bloodshed...

...Civil meant polite—and Miss Mamie's personal recollections of the war confirmed that meaning and conferred it on the "War of the Rebellion...

...It occurred to some of the headquarters staff that many wives of Union officers had friends among the women on the Confederate side...

...She had heard that Grant had let Lee's men keep their horses for the Spring plowing...

...The higher ranking officers—the professional soldiers who lived by the chival-ric code of their trade—harbored no rancor in their hearts, and, during the winter of 1864-65 there came from the Winter quarters of the Union army as wild a day-dream of peace as ever sprang from the perfectionist musings of sentimental pacifists...

...Contrary To Rumor' {From Racine Labor, publication of the Racine, Wis., AFL and CIO) By LOREN NORMAN PEASANTS and proletarians, take note...

...However much agreement this indignant outburst may have gained, it must have sounded strange to the members of Miss Mamie's "Third Reader" class who, in a little Virginia village, learned from her about another war in another day...

...Just back of these, and about equally distant from the creek, were the guards of the Confederate pickets...

...Nor did the Third Reader class have any reason to dispute their teacher's word...

...They spun yarns, some embroidered with time's fancy-stitching and some spun from the whole cloth but reiterated so often that even the raconteur believed them...

...The 2 bands alternated in playing until just before taps...

...Seeing a soldier on (a) log, I rode up to him, commenced conversing with him, and asked whose corps he belonged to...

...They remembered swimming parties in the rivers that divided the armies...

...MISS MAMIE did not know that for years—even as long as she had been teaching school—the ex-Confederates had been insisting that the war was a "War between the States...

...A Southern band struck up the airs of Dixie...

...We did not dispute her when she explained that the Civil War was called "civil" because civil meant polite and the soldiers of North and South had been friendly and courteous to each other during the "late" war...

...Grant...

...For $22 a month for the 6 month school term in our village we could not expect a teacher of erudition and extensive training...

...It was a politician who screamed: "Treason must be made odious and traitors punished and impoverished...

...The Second Wdrld War was a war for civilization—and civilization has no longer any place for civilities...

...Grant...

...Men on each side bravely risked death for their cause and despised the ideas of their opponents...

...Yet they found, in uncounted hundreds of such encounters, that the area of their agreement was greater than their differences...

...But the members of the Third Reader class, eavesdropping in the lurking shadows, heard no words to discredit Miss Mamie's naive exposition of "civil" in "Civil" War...

...Or they told of another concert at Fredericksburg, where a band came out from Washington to play for the Yankees...

...Longstreet, for example, was a long-time friend of Mrs...

...Her father was only a rebel soldier...

...They remembered—these old soldiers on the store porches—the island in the Rappahannock where Federals and Confederates met to gamblcat cards...

...At one place, as he was making a tour of inspection, "when I came to the picket guard of our side, I heard the call, 'Turn out the guard for the commanding general.' I replied, 'Never mind the guard,' and they were dismissed and went back to their tents...

...and the "rebel brigadiers" waved the bloody shirt on the hustings and garnered votes from men who'd never taken a swig of apple-jack from a friendly enemy's canteen along a picket line...

...She had probably never heard of the U.D.C., and she would probably have considered the movement to rename the Civil War mere crack-pottery...

...She had seen Reconstruction in her childhood, and she had watched the men of her father's generation grow into the old men on Swimley's Store porch...

...Grant.' Their line in a moment frontfaced to the north, facing me, and gave a salute, which I returned...

...A Union band began to play the tunes popular in the Union armies...

...It was the blood-lustful Daughters who raked the ashes of the Lost Cause to fan to life the coals of sectional hate—a hate that the old soldiers on the store porches had never known...

...Gen...

...Kindness she had—and understanding wisdom— which we unlearned members of the "Third Reader" class mistook for knowledge...

...Miss Mamie did not know that the bosomy Daughters of the Confederacy were, even at that moment, campaigning throughout Dixie to rename the Civil War...

...The political mountebanks of the G.A.R...

...MISS MAMIE was no Daughter of the Confederacy...

...They told of rough-hewn practical jokes—the kind that bring guffaws from bucolic bumpkins—played in high glee upon the Johnny Rebs on the "other side...

...Longstreet's corps was stationed there at the time, and wore blue of a^little different shade from our uniform...

...The extremists in both capitals, the jingo journalists, the fanatics, the kept press, and the hireling professors heaped fuel on the fires of hatred...

...And after the war, it was those same groups who kept the issues alive...

...Nearly always they returned to sigh: "We could have settled the war in SO minutes had it been left to us...

...She had been born almost within sound of one of the many battles of Winchester, and she had grown up in the marginal slate land between Apple Pie Ridge and Opequon Creek...

...When an officer caught him, the men secured his release with the plea: "But, Capt'n, we weren't fightin' today...

...They told of slipping through the lines to "spark" some Southern belle whose shy manners had caught a Union youth's fancy in the Springtime...

...The politicians in Washington blocked that naive scheme...

...The politicians in Washington wanted no peace which did not destroy the South's economic system, and forever insure that Southerners did not threaten the dominance of Northern industry...

...But that, of course was long ago—another war in another day...

...When, on a summer's night, they assembled on Swin-ley's Store porch and fought again the campaigns of their youth they remembered the fun and the hardships, the girls and the food, the jokes, and the sorrows...

...Give us some of our tunes," cried the listening rebels from across the lines—and the band replied with Dixie, and through the rest of the evening played first for the boys in blue and next for the boys in gray...

...Come on, Pete," he said, "let's play a game of 'brag!'" And when the Third Reader class asked her the meaning of "Civil" in Civil War, Miss Mamie explained out of the wisdom of her long experience and out of the heart of the common people everywhere that civil meant polite...

...Grant liked to tell the story of meeting the Confederate guards at Chattanooga...

...And when they met, under impromptu flags of truce between the lines to trade newspapers or swap tobacco, they argued bitterly...

...Their husbands might accompany them to the boundary lines, might meet, renew old friendships— and end the war in 30 minutes...

...The most friendly relations seemed to exist between the pickets of the 2 armies," added Gen...

...And Gen...

...She had spent her life in the shadow of the Civil War, and she had heard a thousand times the anecdotes of campfire and picket line...

...Why not, during the Winter's lull, let the ladies exchange visits...

...He was very polite, and, touching his hat to me, said he belonged to Gen...

...In Richmond, it was Jeff Davis, the fire-eaters, and as foul a gang of profiteers as ever fattened on a corpse who fired the Southern heart with hate-filled atrocity stories and urged on the sacrifice of Southern lives...

...HATRED there was in the Civil' War, and during lulls in the firing in the moment of battle soldiers screamed profane insults at the enemy across the lines...

...Then, in unison, with the sad voices of the men of both armies joining in chorus, the bands played Home, Siveet Home...

...Her pupils, in the early years of the 20th Century, were the children, and even the grandchildren, of former pupils—and, she taught them the lore of the ages as she herself, in 1870, had learned it...

...They remembered the story of the lad— sometimes in the telling he was a rebel, sometimes a Yankee—who swam over for a friendly visit with his enemies...

...squirmed when some frank old soldier defiantly called himself a rebel!—and they carried few memories of impolite and uncivil conduct in the war for the Lost Cause...

...Nor did the politicians in Richmond want a peaceful settlement...

...Immediately the hate-mongers, the kept commentators, and the poison pen pundits who feed on the swill from the Stork Club denounced him for showing civility to an enemy...

...They tolfl, for example, the story of the band concert the night before the battle of Murfreesboro...

...Miss Mamie lacked either, but she brought to her multiple tasks the wisdom that came from 40 years in the schoolhouse and an intensive knowledge of all the folks in the community...

...The sentinel on their post called out in like manner, 'Turn out the guard for the commanding general,' and, I believe, added, 'Gen...

...Their grandpappies had been "rebel" soldiers, too—and how the ladies of the U.B.C...

...Longstreet's corps...

...Perhaps she had heard that, on the evening of Lee's surrender, Grant had gone into the Confederate camp, and—in a gesture that would have delighted the heart of the uhmalicious Lincoln—had locked arms with his old friend, Longstreet...

...Contrary to rumor, it will not be broken up into parcels for the peasants of Long Island...