TREADWELL, MARCUS (1811-1874), novelist, was born in the southern counties of the Chesapeake (q.v.), where the bound population stood in his boyhood at nearly one soul in two, of a planting family of the middling sort. The province divided in 1837, and the family with it: the house of his birth adhered to the Severance; one of his brothers fell in the rebellion's service, and another served the Commonwealth's. Treadwell himself had removed to Oceana (q.v.) the year before the war, and passed the whole of it within the Commonwealth's lines, bearing no arms; he is said to have observed of himself that a man whose blood was engaged upon both sides had no side left to carry a musket for. He kept through the war years a journal, from which the topography, and much of the weather, of the novel would afterwards be drawn; the house of his birth stood in the war's path, and was standing at the end of it. The three novels he published before the war may be left where the public has left them; their author thought so too.
"The House of Barrow" was published in 1859, sixteen years after the Instrument of Reunion (q.v.), when the grief had settled far enough down to be read. Its matter is one tidewater house and the family of it: old Barrow, planter of the southern Chesapeake; the elder son, who follows the province; the younger, who crosses the lines north; the night the Act of Severance comes up the river, read aloud by candle-light to a divided table; the brothers' single meeting of the war, at a picket-line under flag of truce, which every reader remembers; the burials, one by one, in the garden plot; the house standing at the peace with its lands wasted and its people halved. It closes upon the first Commonwealth Day (q.v.) of the peace, the younger son at the graves. Its temper is mourning, and the mourning is settled; there is no anger anywhere in it. The War of the Severance (q.v.) has been fought over many times in print since 1843; this is the one book in which the whole Commonwealth — Carolina parlours and New England parlours alike — has consented to read its war, and it is the book to which the nation has chosen to do its weeping. No novel of the century has been oftener reprinted, oftener wept over, or oftener given as a school prize.
The power is not in question. The prose is quiet to the point of plainness, and its effects are got by refusal: the chapter of the elder son's death is written with a restraint that fifty years of imitation have proved inimitable, and the last pages, in which nothing is said because nothing remains sayable, are as fine as anything in the prose of the century. But an exact account must record what the sorrow includes and what it is spared. Old Barrow is drawn as the war's chief sufferer, a man ruined by a quarrel the book permits him never quite to have chosen, and the reader is nowhere invited to ask of what the fortunes of such a house had been built; the wasted lands are mourned, and the labour that made them worth wasting is not. The people of the Barrow quarters are drawn with affection: they counsel, they carry, they bury, they remain faithful; at the Emancipation the novel frees them in a paragraph, and they recede thereafter into a distance it feels no obligation to follow. The dead of either side are mourned as one loss; what was owed to the living is nowhere reckoned: the sorrow is general, the ledger is not. The reader who would learn what the peace of the Barrows cost those who had been the property of such houses will not learn it from the novel, and is directed to another article (see FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE).
Treadwell published one further fiction, which the public received as a lesser chapter of the same book; for the rest he lived quietly, returned late in life to the county of his birth, and died there in 1874. What Augustine Orme (q.v.) settled in verse, Treadwell settled in prose; between them the Commonwealth's memory of its great wound was made bearable, which is an achievement, and made comfortable, which is another. (H. M.)