When This Cruel War Is Over Read Free

veranda writing hexameters in praise of
those doughty ancestors who had settled Kentucky along with the Boones and the Callaways and the Bullitts. There would be odes to the beauty of the Ohio, to the nobility of the ancient oaks that surrounded Hopemont like hieratic sentinels, yes, even elegies on the brave red men who had resisted the white invasion with musket and hatchet. He had seen himself as a man who would respond with ready courage if his country called him—and his sons would imitate his example.
    Gabriel Todd’s poetry was an excellent imitation of Horace, good enough to appear in more than one Kentucky and Indiana newspaper. When his country called him to defend her rights in the war against Mexico in 1846, he marched at the head of a regiment and came home with an honorable wound. The Mexican War had been the high point of Gabriel Todd’s life, the reason his fellow citizens had sent him to the state legislature as a senator. What could be more nobly Roman? Like Cincinnatus, George Washington’s hero, the soldier returned peaceably to his farm and then devoted his accumulated wisdom to his country as a lawmaker.
    But the violent antagonisms of America’s politics had dissipated this good dream. When the animosity sundered the Union, the dream had become a nightmare. As war loomed in 1861 Gabriel Todd had been one of the many Kentuckians who abhorred the extremists of both sides. He had deplored the idea of seceding from the Union—but he was equally disgusted with the Yankee abolitionists whose rancorous hatred of the South made secession justifiable to many people. As one of the leaders of the state legislature, Colonel Todd had joined the governor in persuading their fellow politicians to declare Kentucky neutral.
    Both North and South had been stunned by this unexpected stance. Both sides piously promised to respect the declaration—and promptly broke their word in the name of military necessity. Gabriel Todd soon found
neutrality an impossible chimera. Once the Union regiments routed the Southern army and set up a military dictatorship in Kentucky, he lost all sympathy for Lincoln and his government. A Democrat like his father and grandfather, Colonel Todd saw the moralizing industrializing Republicans of the upper Midwest and New England as destroyers of the personal liberty and independence every follower of Thomas Jefferson held dear.
    Gabriel Todd did not object when his sons decided to join the Confederate Army. But they had died like too many young Kentuckians, uncertain of the country for which they fought. John Randolph Todd’s letters from Alabama, where he had married the daughter of a cotton planter with ten thousand acres and over five hundred slaves, were a litany of disillusion. As a Kentuckian, he had little in common with the radical secessionists of the Deep South, who talked of conquering the North and enslaving the white factory workers. Yet he had become an officer in the regiment his pugnacious fatherin-law had raised. John had died two years ago in that explosion of blood and death called Shiloh. His younger brother, Andrew, had died in General John Hunt Morgan’s ruinous cavalry foray into Indiana last year.
    Death. More than once, Janet had to remind herself that her brothers had succumbed to its terrible finality. They were not away at college or on an extended vacation or living elsewhere with a wife. At times the knowledge seemed to be an effluvia rising in her throat, cutting off her breath. She struggled to remember them as if they were alive.
    Thoughtful, earnest Jack, with his love of Sir Walter Scott’s poetry and Charles Dickens’s prose. Although he was six years older than Janet, he had always treated her with respect, encouraging her to read good books and discussing politics with her as if she were an adult. He confessed to her that his sojourn at Yale had convinced him slavery had to be eliminated eventually.

    Ebullient,