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IN THE SIXTIES

By Harold Frederic

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons

1893

[Illustration: 0007]




PREFACE TO A UNIFORM EDITION

In nothing else under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious
department of woman’s attire-has Fashion been more variable, or more
eccentric in its variations, than in the matter of prefaces. The eternal
revolution of letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the
hardiest of them ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade
has whims of its own about prefaces. Now it has been the rule to make
them long and didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy.
Upon occasion it has been thought desirable to throw upon this
introductory formula the responsibility of explaining everything that
was to follow in the book, and, again, nothing has seemed further from
the proper function of a preface than elucidation of any sort. Sometimes
the prevalent mode has discouraged prefaces altogether--and thus it
happens that the present author, doomed to be doing in England at least
something of what the English do, has never before chanced to write one.
Yet now it seems that in America prefaces are much in vogue-and this is
an American edition.

The apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession
that the preface is strange ground. The four volumes under comment were
all, it is true, written in England, but they do not belong to the Old
World in any other sense.

In three of them the very existence of Europe is scarcely so much as
hinted at. The fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which
Europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side
and on the other, was in its results very strictly American.

The idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named
book, “In the Valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in
my mind. All four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the
Revolutionary War, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded
this record by fighting on both sides. My earliest recollections are of
tales told by my grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who
were but middle-aged people when she was a child. She herself had come
into curious relation with one of the terrible realities of that period.
At the age of six it was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a
brook running through the Valley farm upon which she was reared, and the
deep-hole close beside where she worked was the spot in which the owner
of the farm had lain hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two
days and nights while Brant’s Indians were looking for him. Thus, by a
single remove, I came myself into contact with the men who held Tryon
County against the King, and my boyish head was full of them. Before
I left school, at the age of twelve, I had composed several short but
lurid introductions to a narrative which should have for its central
feature the battle of Oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed,
or rather for my contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the
teacher when my crime was detected, I was expelled from the school.

The plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which I
busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now
the Oneida Historical Society, and to prepare for a befitting
celebration of the coming hundredth anniversary of Oriskany. The
circumstance that I had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a
member of the Society, but in no way affected the marked success of the
celebration it organized and superintended. It was at this time that I
gathered the first materials for my projected work, from members of the
Fonda and other families. Eight years later I was in the position of
having made at least as many attempts to begin this book, which I had
never ceased to desire to write, and for which I had steadily collected
books and other data; one of these essays ran to more than twenty
thousand words, and several others were half that length, but they were
all failures.

In 1885, after I had been a year in London, the fact that a journalist
friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the _Weekly Echo_
for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in
Ireland, gave me a new idea. He seemed to make his book with extreme
facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending
it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating
the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his
secretary’s typewriter. This appeared to be a highly simple way of
earning two hundred and fifty dollars, and I went home to start a story
of my own at once. When I had written the opening chapter, I took it to
the editor of the _Weekly Echo_, who happened to be a friend of mine as
well. He read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on
the first page, and said it was too American for any English paper, but
might do well in America. The fading away of the two hundred and fifty
dollars depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction
came. I realized that I had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless
mooning over my Revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than
at the outset, simply because I did not know how to make a book of any
kind, let alone a historical book of the kind which should be the most
difficult and exacting of all. This determined me to proceed with the
contemporary story I had begun--if only to learn what it was really like
to cover a whole canvas. The result was “Seth’s Brother’s Wife”--which
still has the _Echo_ man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description
of the barn-yard.

At the time, I thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of
preparation for the bigger task I had to do, and it is still easiest for
me to so regard it. Certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the
praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree
of confidence that I had mastered the art of fiction which I look back
upon now with surprise--and not a little envy. It was in the fine flush
of this confidence that I hastened to take up the real work, the book
I had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount
of material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps,
biographical facts, and the like, which I had perforce to drag along
with me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “In the Valley” was
written in eight months--and that, too, at a time when I had also a
great deal of newspaper work to do as well.

“The Lawton Girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to
“Seth’s Brother’s Wife,” but here I found myself confronted by agencies
and influences the existence of which I had not previously suspected. In
“Seth’s Brother’s Wife” I had made the characters do just what I wanted
them to do