Requiem for a Nun

238 WILLIAM FAULKNER

Vicksburg but nothing came of that either, no records (Sherman burned them

in 1863 and notified his superior, General Grant, by note of hand with

comfortable and encouraging brevity.) to show just what happened this time:

a trial, a dry run perhaps or perhaps still enchannelled by a week's or a

month's rut of habit or perhaps innocent of juvenility, absent or anyway

missing the unanimous voice or presence of the three patriot-dreamers who

forced the current and bore the dream, like a child with dynamite: innocent

of its own power for alteration: until in 1832, perhaps in simple

self-defense or perhaps in simple weariness, a constitution was written

designating Jackson as the capital if not in perpetuity at least in escrow

until 1850, when (hoped perhaps) a maturer legislature would be composed of

maturer men outgrown or anyway become used to the novelty of manipulation;

Which by that time was enough; Jackson was secure, impregnable to simple

toyment; fixed and founded strong, it would endure always; men had come

there to live and the railroads had followed them, crossing off with steel

cancellations the age of the steamboat: in '36 to Vicksburg, in '37 to

Natchez, then last of all the junction of two giving a route from New

Orleans to Tennessee and the Southern railroad to New York and the Atlantic

ocean; secure and fixed: in 1836 Old Hickory himself addressed the

legislature in its own halls, five years later Henry Clay was entertained

under the roof; it knew the convention called to consider Clay's last

compromise, it saw that Convention in 1861 which declared Mississippi to be

the third star in that new galaxy of commonwealths dedicated to the

principle that voluntary communities of men shall be not just safe but even

secured from Federal meddling, and knew General Pemberton while defending

that principle and right, and Joseph Johnston: and Sherman: and fire: and

nothing remained, a City of Chimneys (once pigs rooted in the streets; now

rats did) ruled over by a general of the United States army while the new

blood poured in: men who had followed, pressed close the Federal field

armies with spoiled grain and tainted meat and spavined mules, now pressing

close the Federal provost-marshals with carpet bags stuffed with blank bal-

lot-forms on which freed slaves could mark their formal X's;

But endured; the government, which fled before Sherman in 1863, returned in

'65, and even grew too despite the fact that a city government of

carpet-baggers held on long after the State as a whole had dispossessed

them; in 1869 Tougaloo College for Negroes was founded, in 1884 Jackson

College for Negroes was brought from Natchez, in 1898 Campbell College for