The Days of a Man 



1:1912 



Captain 

 McCabe 



country toward Petersburg, from which alone, as 

 I have said, the city drew its supplies. 



Cold Harbor, by the way, is not a harbor at all; the 

 hamlet gets its name from Cold Harbor on the hills 

 of Surrey in England; and that is no harbor either. 

 In all probability the name was originally Cool Arbor. 



We next drove to Gaines' Mill, a battlefield farther 

 up the river, then back to Richmond where I ob- 

 tained several interesting interviews. These all agreed 

 on a few main points; and Captain Gordon McCabe, 

 a well-known teacher, added certain things out of his 

 special experience: 



Education in the city was rather trivial when the war broke 

 out. The intellectual tone of the men was light and clubwomen 

 who read a little called themselves literary. His own mother, 

 however, knew French and Italian, and read not books about 

 books, but books themselves. In the exclusive classes of the 

 town, a man of good bearing and real education was at once 

 received, even in the "best families." As a lad in college, though 

 always opposed to slavery, he enlisted at the outset of the war. 

 Yet slavery, like every other human institution, had two sides, 

 he admitted. Over the grave of a favorite negro housekeeper 

 his mother, who owned sixty slaves, placed a fine tombstone 

 bearing the following inscription: 



In loving memory of Patsy Vale, faithful servant of the 

 McCabe and Gary families, an honored member of the 

 family for three generations 



But once she said to him: "My dear boy, slavery is all wrong, 

 for the reason that it is a system capable of abuse." 



Petersburg Yxovci Richmond we moved southward to Peters- 

 burg, Dinwiddle County, visiting the famous "crater" 

 battlefield, a huge cavity made by the partly success- 

 ful explosion of a great mine set off by the Union 

 forces. This became the theater of a fierce hand-to- 



n 436 :i 



