LINCOLN 
 
 AS THE SOUTH SHOULD KNOW HIM 
 
 Can the man zvho suffered his leutenant, Sherman, to 
 ruthlessly devastate tzvice as much Southern territory 
 as all Belgium combined be the Southern ideal? 
 
 Can the man whose life zvork was to tear from the 
 Declaration of Independence its immortal part, its 
 very soul, "That governments deriz'e their just pozcers 
 from the consent of the governed," be the Americatt 
 ideal, if the truth is looked full in the face T 
 
 THIRD EDITION 
 
 REPRINTED BY 
 
 MANLYS BATTFRY CHAPTER 
 
 CHILDREN OF THE CONFEDERACY 
 RALEIGH, N. C.
 
 In a blaze of burning roof-trees, under clouds of smoke and flame, 
 Sprang a new word into bein^, from a stern and dreaded name; 
 Claunt and jrrim and like a specter rose that word before the world, 
 From a land of bloom and beauty into ruin rudely hurled. 
 From a peopU' scour>;ed by exile, from a city ostracized, 
 Pallas-liKe itViprang to being: — and that word is "Shermanized." 
 
 ^ '\ I,. NiiM.iMA Fkknch. 
 
 \ 
 
 LlNfcOLVf, AS THB SOUTH SHOULD KNOW HIM 
 
 Wliat thick hides and sliort memories wo Southern folk have, and 
 how inconsistent we are! We call down anathema on the Kaiser's head 
 fur the devastation of Beljrium; in almost the same breath we raise 
 pa'ans to Lincoln, who was responsible for the far more causeless and 
 ruthless devastation of the South hy Sliernian — Sherman, wiio waped 
 war so atrocious that its verv author could find no name on earth to 
 match, but had to go down below to get it. Well might lie, with Mil- 
 ton's Satan, say: 
 
 "Where I am is hell." 
 
 J Satan lit its fires in his own breast; Sherman in the desolated homes 
 t of war, made widows and orphans. 
 
 If Belgium had its Louvain and Antwerp, so also had the South its 
 J Columbia, its Atlanta, its Savannah, its Charleston. 
 
 ^^ Countless Belgium homes have been burned. But there has bcvn 
 
 p nothing like systematic, utter destruction. The Kaiser, outnumbered, 
 
 hard beset, the very existence of his country in imminent peril, has 
 
 increased his slender store of food by robbing Belgium, electing to 
 
 'f'tarve foe rather than friend. (This was written in danuary, 1915.) 
 
 ^ That vengeance, not necessity, prompted the bla<*k path that Sherman 
 
 >*eut through the South, the evidence is full and damning. On December 
 
 ^l!S, 1NG4, Cieneral llalleck. Chief of Stalf to President Lincoln, and 
 
 ^necessarily in close touch with him, writes to Sherman as follows: 
 
 . "Should you capture Charleston, 1 hope by some accident the place will 
 
 y^he destroyed. And if a little salt can he sown on its site, it may prevent 
 
 ^ the future growth of nullification and secession." Shernum, on the 24th, 
 
 ^answers as follows: "I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, 
 
 ,and do not think that '.salt' will be neces.xary. When 1 move, the Fif- 
 
 *ieenth Corps will U' on the right of the right wing, and their position 
 
 -^will naturally bring them into Charleston first; and if you have watched 
 
 ^the history of that corps you will have remarked that they do their work 
 
 tl! pretty well. The truth is, the whole army is burning witli an insatiable 
 
 "desire to wnak vengeance on South Carolina."
 
 One of Wheeler's scouts, observing Sherman's advance, reported that 
 during one night, and from one point, he counted over one hundred 
 burning homes. And as to the looting, a letter written by a Federal 
 ofiicer, and found at Camden, S. C, after the army passed, and given 
 in the Southern Woman's Magazine, runs as follows: "We have had a 
 glorious time in this State. The chivalry have been stripped of most 
 of their valuables. Gold watches, silver pitchers, cups, spoons, forks, 
 etc., are as common in camp as blackberries. Of rings, 'earrings, and 
 breastpins I liave a quart. I am not joking — ^I have af least a quart 
 of jewelry for you and the girls, and some Al diamond^'pins and rings 
 among them. Don't show this letter out of the family.'jk 
 
 Sherman long denied burning Columbia, in the most solemn manner 
 calling his God to witness as to his truthfulness. When, after the over- 
 whelming evidence that he did burn it was adduced, he unblushingly 
 admitted the fact, and that he had lied on Wade Hampton with the 
 purpose of rendering him unpopular, and thereby weakening his cause. 
 But a mere lie shines white against the black ground of Sherman's 
 character. 
 
 I could pile up a mountain of facts as damning as those given. But 
 what boots it to prove again what too long ago has been proven — that 
 not since Attila, "The Scourge of God," cut his black swath across 
 Europe fifteen hundred years ago has Sherman's "March to the Sea" 
 had its fellow. 
 
 The conversion of the Shenandoah region into a waste so complete 
 that, in Sheridan's own woi'ds, a crow flying over it would have had to 
 carry his rations — a destruction not only of every vestige of food, of all 
 animals and fowls, but also of every implement that could be used to 
 make or prepare more food, every millstone, wagon, plow, rake, and 
 harrow, down to the flower-hoes of the women, may have been a military 
 necessity, for this lovely valley was, in some measure, the granary of 
 Lee's army. 
 
 The necessities of war demanded that Sherman live oif the country 
 he traversed. Those elastic necessities may have been stretched to 
 demand that he destroy even the pitiful stint of food that the South had 
 left; that he wrest the last morsel from the mouth of the mother and 
 babe, lest, perchance, some crumb thereof reach and nourish the men at 
 the front. But what necessity of war, except that brand that Sherman 
 fathered and sponsored, demanded that the torch follow the pillager, 
 that every home be burned, and famishing mother and babe be turned 
 out in midwinter to die of cold and exposure? 
 
 "But didn't 'Sherman's March' shorten the war; didn't it shake Lee's 
 lines around Petersburg when his men knew that fire and rapine were in 
 their homes?" is sometimes asked. Doubtless. And it might have 
 shaken them all the more had wives and babes been burnt in these homes 
 rather than left to starve in their ruins. It might have been not only 
 more efi'ective but more merciful. But there are abysmal depths of
 
 atrocity from which even the "hired ussassin" recoils — thnt is, unless he 
 belongs to the Attilas, Alvas, and Shermans. There are rules of civilized 
 warfare which the soMier in every extremity must observe or else have 
 heajted upon him the execration of mankind. 
 
 Tln' whole world shudders at the robberv and partial ruin of oidv a 
 
 •r I c 
 
 ])art ttt" Htdfjiuni. Sherman dcvastate<l an area nearly twice as great 
 as the whole of IJelgium, and devastated it utterly, leaving only black- 
 ened chimneys and starving women and children in his wake. That his 
 hell was only some sixty miles wide was owing to no hu'k of Satanic 
 ferocity on his part. It would have been much wider had not Wheeler, 
 with his handful of hor.se, hung (do.se to Sherman's Hanks, witii a quick 
 halter for every marauder he caught in the act. Sherman's little finger 
 was heavier than tlie whole martial fist of the Kaiser. B<dgium was a 
 battle-ground — the largest and fiercest that even blood-soaked Old Mother 
 Earth ever saw. But it took five million men five months to work wreck 
 and ruin. Sherman did it overnight with sixty thousand. The Kaiser 
 found at least a potential sniper in every window; his every step was a 
 battle. Sherman ha<l only a light screen of cavalry to brush aside, and 
 not always even that. 
 
 That there was less starvation in Sherman's path than the Kaiser's — 
 though many a high-born Southern lady kept life in her children for the 
 time with the waste corn slobbered from the mouths of the Federal 
 cavalry and artillery horses — was because the South was large and far 
 less den.sely populated than Belgium, and that the victims sought shelter 
 in the iinravaged regions whicii Wheeler had saved. 
 
 Then there is a hideous chapter in this black book that never has and 
 never will be written — so hideous that even the South has been fain to 
 draw over it the curtain of obvion. I mean the violence that Southern 
 women suiTered at the hands of Sherman's rufHans. It is a well-known 
 fact, and bv none better known than by military men themselves, that 
 men herded in camps, removed from the restraints of home, rapidly tend 
 to relapse towards barbarism, and that only the iron hand of discipline 
 can hold them in check. Ilelax that discipline in one respect, sanction 
 the perpetration of one crime, and all crimes, especially the crime against 
 woman, follows as a natural sequence. 
 
 No one who lived in or near Sherman's path in Georgia, South Caro- 
 lina, or even in this State, after the war was over and the troops nuirch- 
 ing for disbandment iu Washington, can lack knowledge of cases that 
 came to light, despite every effort of the hapless victims them.selves to 
 hide them. To recall only the cases which abide with me most vividly, 
 that came practically under my own ob.servation, or that 1 ha<l first-hand 
 knowledge of — the beautiful girl to whose resciu; came one of Wlunder's 
 troopers, and who, seized and used as a shield by the ruffian who had 
 abused her, in her agony begged the trooper to shoot through her body 
 and kill him ; but by a dexterous movement the brute was killed over 
 her shoulder.
 
 8 
 
 The cottage, with its rose-covered porch, in which lived the young 
 widow and her three daughters, all noted for their beauty and refine- 
 ment, at whose door a band of Federal troopers drew rein at dusk — the 
 screams and sobs that all the live-long night the neighbors heard, but 
 dared not stir — the tomblike aspect of the cottage, with no smoke from 
 the chimneys, no sign of life, for days and days afterwards — the deep 
 grave of forgetfulness that the sorrowing neighborhood dug for the whole 
 horrible aifaii', where it rests this day. The very first offense of a negi'o 
 against a white woman that I ever heard of was committed in this neigh- 
 borhood, in April, 1865, by one who had been under Sherman's tutelage. 
 What^ indeed, was the saturnalia of crime against Southern woman for a 
 generation afterwards but the aftermath, the legacy, of that foulest blot 
 on American history — Sherman's vaunted "March to the Sea"? 
 
 It is a maxim of war, as it is of common sense, that the higher the 
 rank the greater the fame or blame for any given act. In every crime 
 that sprang from this lack of discipline — and no one can question that 
 practically all did so spring — the men higher up, who invited the crime 
 by lowering the bars of discipline, were worse criminals than the perpe- 
 trators themselves. Above the perpetrator stood the commander of the 
 army, Sherman ; above Sherman stood the commander-in-chief of all 
 the Federal armies, Abraham Lincoln. If Lincoln ever discountenanced 
 Sherman and his methods, he never gave word to it, and he was a man 
 of many words. 
 
 George IIL, whom we were reared to execrate next to Satan, and 
 Lincoln, w'hom our children are being reared to venerate almost next to 
 God, both sent armies to invade the South, the one in the benighted 
 eighteenth, the other in the enlightened nineteenth century. Surely 
 the charter and conduct of the two commanders put at the head 
 of these invading armies must be some indication of the animus of 
 those two men towards the South. I quote first from Cornwallis's 
 order book, various dates of January, February, and March, 1781, show- 
 ing him to have been more careful to shield noncombatants froxn the 
 pettiest theft than Sherman was to save them from the blackest crimes : 
 "It is needless to point out to officers the necessity of preserving the 
 strictest discipline and of preventing the oppressed people from suffer- 
 ing by the hands of those from whom they were taught to look for protec- 
 tion. Lord Cornwallis is highly displeased that several houses have 
 been set on fire today during the march — a disgrace to the army — and 
 ho will i)unish with the utmost severity any person or persons found 
 guilty of committing so disgraceful an outrage. His lordship requests 
 that the commanding officers of the corps will endeavor to find the per- 
 sons who set fire to the houses this day." "Great complaints have been 
 made of negroes straggling, plundering, and using violence. No negi'oes 
 shall be suffered to carry arms. Provost marshal has orders to shoot on 
 the spot any negro who may offend against these regulations." "Anv 
 officer who looks on and does not do his utmost to prevent shameful
 
 9 
 
 niaraudiii^ will he considered in u more criiniiial li^iit tiiaii the jhtsou 
 who coimiiitted these scaniialous t'riiues." "A woman having he<Mi rohbed 
 of a watfh, a hlack silk handkerehief, a gallon of peach brandy, and 
 a shirt, and, hv description, by a soldier of the (Jnanl, every man's 
 kit is to be imnietliately examined." "All foraging parties will give 
 receipts for the snpplies taken by them." In some instanee two staff 
 officers were actually captured becau.se they had ren»ained behind to pay 
 for supi)lies requisitioned for the invading army. 
 
 "A watch found by the regiment of BOSK. The owner may have 
 same from adjutant on proving property.'' "Immediate inspection of 
 the clothing in possession of the women is to he made. Their clothing 
 to be regularly examined at proper intervals hereafter, and every article 
 found in addition thereto burned at the head of the company. Officers 
 are ordered to make this examination at such times so as to prevent the 
 women (supposed to be the source of this infamous plundering) from 
 evading the purport of the order." 
 
 (Sherman's majors general brought their harlots along, loaded them 
 with stolen jewelry, and desecrated Southern homes with them overnight 
 Ix'fon- applying the torch next morning.) 
 
 I might quote at great length the British commander's restraining 
 words and cite instances of str(»nger measures, but will cite only one. 
 
 After Cornwallis's virtual defeat at (Juilford he retreated to Wilming- 
 ton, then passed northward throught the State on the way to his doom 
 at Yorktown. Even if jwlicy rather than j)rinciple had influenced him 
 earlier in the campaign, it could have had little weight with him then, 
 for, as he well knew, the game was lost. While at Halifax tidings 
 reached him that a woman had suffered at the hands of Tarleton's troop- 
 ers forming his advance guard. Taking a body-guard of only one 
 dragoon, Cornwallis spurred forward and overtook Tarleton near the 
 present town of (Jarysburg. The whole command was halted till wit- 
 nesses could be brought up. It was then dismounted, lined up, the two 
 offenders, one a sergeant, identified, tried by drumhead courtmartial, 
 and strung up to the nearest tree. 
 
 So much for the army that the tyrant, (ieorgc III., s.-iit. Eighty- 
 four years later the superman, Lincoln, .sent an army along much the 
 same track. The object of both armies was to subdue the invaded 
 region and win it back to their respe<"tive governments. 
 
 The tyrant of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, sought to sub- 
 due by waging honorable warfare against combatants and jjrotecting 
 the person and |)roperty of noncombatants. 
 
 And the sui)erman ^ To devastate and utterlv ruin everv inch of 
 territory that the far-flung wings of his great army could compass, a 
 compa.ss limite<l only by the activity of the Confederat** cavalry on its 
 flatiks. 
 
 Even then, if in the conflict of the strong North against the weak 
 South such cruel measures were necessary, if the occasion <lenianded
 
 10 
 
 that every Southern woman and child that could he reached be deprived 
 of food, clothing, and shelter, and turned out in midwinter, it does seem 
 that this superman would have sent the sanest and humanest of all his 
 lieutenants to accomplish this fell work — would have tempered wrath 
 with mercy. Instead, he sent Sherman, the demoniac. Charity impels 
 me to dub him only demoniac, possessed of a demon, rather than to 
 believe one of my own species could be demon outright. Listen at his 
 ravings and judge. They are taken at random from his orders and 
 reports, and whole pages could be filled with such venomous utterances : 
 
 *'As to the Kentucky secessionists, I hope General Burbridge will send 
 them to Dry Tortugas [a sandy island of insufferable heat and glare 
 south of Florida] — men, women, and children — and encourage a new 
 breed." 
 
 "Hang a few secessionists now and then." 
 
 '^1 am going into the very bowels of the Confederacy, and propose to 
 leave a trail that will be recognized for fifty years." 
 
 "1 propose to sally forth to ruin Georgia, and expect to leave a hole 
 that will be hard to mend." 
 
 "1 am perfecting arrangements to push into Georgia and make deso- 
 lation everywhere." "I will make Georgia howl." 
 
 "Arrest all people, male and female, and let them foot it into Mari- 
 etta. Let them take their children and clothing, provided they have 
 means of hauling them." (Lacking these means, the only inference is 
 that both were to be left behind.) 
 
 "I propose to march, leaving a patch of desolation behind." 
 
 "1 will see that Atlanta is utterly ruined." 
 
 And like master like man. Small wonder that Sherman's underlings 
 filled every item down the long, black list of crime, from plain stealing 
 to arson, rape, and murder. Lack of space forbids that I even classify 
 the fiendishness — from the midnight burning of towns, driving the un- 
 protected women and girls into the streets crowded with unrestrained 
 soldiery, to slipping the quid of tobacco into the pitiful jug of sorghum, 
 which the mother, everything else destroyed, has saved from her blazing 
 home and held desperately to as the last bar between her little brood 
 and actual starvation; the spattering of the little tot with blood as the 
 calf was shot in her arms, she having hugged it tight to save it from the 
 fate of horses, cows, sheep, pigs, and poultry shot down and left to rot 
 around the house. 
 
 Decency bars me from more than hinting at the wanton and studied 
 befoulment of precious heirlooms and sacred things before applying the 
 torch, and all the insults and outrages that helpless woman has to 
 endure from brutal man when the clock is set back to primeval savagery. 
 It is all-sufficing to say that as a rule they did their level best to match 
 with their own black deeds their leader's black words. It would take a 
 pen with the three-league sweep of Kipling's artist's brush in the here-
 
 11 
 
 after to do justice to the breadth and depth of it all — and then no mind 
 could comprehend it all and retain its saneness. 
 
 Siicrniaii apologists ( I never heard of his having a defender) liave 
 cited the liberal terms he offered Johnston and his remonstrance with 
 the Northern jtoliticians as to their treatment of the Suutli after the 
 war as showing that he was not all bla<'k. As to the terms offered 
 Johnston, I would sav that that was all a matter of i)olicv in which 
 motives of humanity might and might not have had a part. As to the 
 other, jiniging the man by his deeds and knowing his animus towards 
 the politicians. I am force<l to suspect that his motives were akin to those 
 that prompted Macaulay's Puritan to condemn Ix-ar-baiting — not that 
 it gave pain to the bear but tluit it gave pleasure to man. Or was it, 
 rather, that like the hyena, having mangled his helpless prey, he was 
 jealous of the jackal pack? 
 
 That Lincoln was an able man, of many amiable qualities, is wholly 
 beside the point. The colossal public crimes of history were committed 
 by men altogether amiable, or estimable, or both, in private life. Julius 
 Capsar, the destroyer of ancient liberty, was the most genial and com- 
 panionable of men. Charles the First, who but for the headsman might 
 have destroyed modern liberty, was a tender-hearted, lovable gentleman 
 of stainless ]»rivate life, as was Kobespierre, who glutted the very guillo- 
 tine with innocent blood. Who could out-cajole Napoleon or Louis the 
 Fourteenth, arch enemies of mankind, or, as to that, Satan himself? 
 Did it brighten the lot of the shell-torn inmates of Southern hospitals to 
 know that the maker of medical and surgical supplies, contraband of 
 war, was a man of infinite jest? Were the skeletons rotting in the 
 vermin-encrusted burrows of Andersonville, or freezing in the icy sheds 
 of Point Lookout and Fort Delaware, helped by knowing that the breaker 
 of the cartel could not abide the sight of misery? Did it lessen the 
 sorrow of Southern mother.s, who, roof-trees ablaze, fled with their little 
 broods to the wintry woods and swamps, to know that the hand that 
 swayed the besom of hell always rested tenderly on the head of his own 
 children? Did it minish the agony of Southern nuiideiis, writhing in the 
 clutches of Sherman's licentious soldiery, to renienilxT that the one at 
 the hejid of it all was a virtuous man ? 
 
 Lincoln, the public man — the only Lincoln that we knew — was the 
 creature of the Republican Party — the party born of anti-Southernism, 
 anti-Jeflfersonism, the innate and truceless foe of individual, local liberty, 
 as opposed to centralism, imperialism. 
 
 Did Lincoln ever rise a hair's breadth above his party? Is there a 
 single instance in which he failed to see with its eyes, act with its 
 spirit? When, during the opening, progress, or close of the war, did he 
 disi)lay that greatness of mind or of heart, that magnanimity, that 
 should wrei^t homage from eveti a vanquished and ruinetl foe? When 
 or where was he other than the incarnation of Republicanism? 
 
 Shall we honor him for the dexterity, not to say duplicity, with which
 
 12 
 
 the Peace Commissioners, the able men whom the South sent to Wash- 
 ington in March, 1861, in a strenuous endeavor to avert war, were kept 
 dangling, while in violence to solemn promise the secret expedition was 
 prepared and despatched to reinforce Sumter, a measure so close akin 
 to perfidy tliat it alarmed and enraged tlie South and precipitated war? 
 
 It has been a platitiude of history that the war was inevitable. Like 
 most platitudes, it has very little thought back of it. In exact propor- 
 tion as we disentangle the skein of past diplomacy and past politics, 
 in the same degree do we discern that few if any wars were inevitable. 
 In public in no less than in private life the soft answer turneth away 
 wrath. At one toucli of a frank, honest, sympathetic hand the most sin- 
 ister political kaleidoscopes in history have instantly assumed benign 
 combinations. 
 
 But that is all bv the wav. The wisest men of that dav did not think 
 war inevitible. Men North and South were working hard for peace. 
 Lincoln's words and actions made only for war. How different was 
 Washington's action in Shay's rebellion ! Xot waiting for overtures, 
 he took the initiative and apjipinted a commission to confer with the 
 malcontents, and thus averted bloodshed. 
 
 Shall we honor Lincoln for his eniancipation proclamation? The 
 blackest crime laid at the door of George III. was that he unleashed 
 a handful of savages against our frontiers. Lincoln, as far as in him 
 lay, unleashed four million savages (which the North held that slavery 
 had converted the negro into) in our very midst, against our defenseless 
 women and children. To the good feelings existing between the races 
 we. chiefly Qwe that the horrors of St. Domingo, multiplied ten thousand- 
 fold, were not repeated at the South. 
 
 Shall we honor him for the flagrant breach of the cartel, and the 
 resulting hells — Point Lookout, Fort Delaware, Johnson Island, Camp 
 Morton, Camp Chase, Rock Island, at the north ; Andersonville, Belle 
 Isle, Salisbury at the south, and many more prisons in each Republic? 
 
 Shall we honor him for out-Kaisering the Kaiser in making medical 
 and surgical supplies contraband of war, thus adding still lower depths 
 to those hells, as to the whole war, on the Southern side? 
 
 Shall Ave honor him for Sherman's Gargantuan orgy of crime in Geor- 
 gia and South Carolina, and for the vile dregs of it that our own Avomen 
 had to drain long after the hostilities ceased? 
 
 Lincoln's tragic taking off naturally caused a great revulsion of feeling 
 in his favor at the South. This has prompted us to believe that had he 
 lived the Republican lion would have transfigured itself into a lamb the 
 moment that 
 
 "The war drums ceased from throbbing 
 And the battle flags were furled." 
 
 In other words, that mildness and benignancy quite angelic would have 
 marked the reconstruction perod, or rather there would have been no
 
 13 
 
 reconstruct ion period at all, but, instead, a kind of faniil.v reunion, with 
 Srwjirds, lien Wad«', and Thad Stevens ct id as ecstatic ushers. 
 
 Hut from what act of Lincohi's do we fin<i justifieation for this Ixdief, 
 or rather hope^ Tiu're were pooti words enow. For, statesman as he 
 was, Lincoln was first, last, and always the politician, seeking the public 
 will before the public weal. .\i)l hy words, but deeds, must a man 1k» 
 judged. Words are the politician's stoek in trade. "Deeds proclaim 
 the man"; words too often hi<le him. It is true that when Richmond 
 fell he authorized the calling tf»gether of the Virginia Legislature Hut 
 it was avowedly becau.se he l)elieved that it W(Mdd recall the Virginia 
 troops from I^ee's retreating army, and he wishe<l to give opportunity to 
 do .so. The moment that Ix'e surrendered he withdrew the permit, and 
 ordered the arrest of any memlM-rs who disobeyed the order to quit 
 Kichmond promptly. 
 
 It is far more likely than otherwise tliat Lincoln's death lightened 
 the heel that sought to grind us in the nure. The incarnation of Repul)- 
 licanism in war, there is not a shadow of reason for believing that in 
 peace he could have thwarted the politicians of their prey, thougli he 
 would no doubt have deprecated their violence. 
 
 Why, pray, should he who shut his eyes while 18,000 .square miles of 
 Southern homes were being Shermanized, converted into a hell more 
 vast and hideous than even Milton's imagiiuition ever winged, all under 
 plea of military necessity, have been less pliant when, a little later, 
 political necessity called? Are Southern institutions more sacred than 
 Southern women? Does the South set a greater value upon her politi- 
 cal welfare than on the lives of her children, the honor of her women? 
 
 The Republican politicians were bent ui)on the utter humiliation and 
 degradation of. the South; upon forcing on her civil rights mi.sceg»'na- 
 tion, mongrelism. Their animus is shown by the clash with Andy John- 
 son, the fierce fight against even the stint of justice that a renegade 
 would fain have accorded the land of his birth. So fraught was their 
 attitude to the South with malice prepense that they in a mea.sure 
 overreached themselves, and brought about a partial reaction of feeling 
 among the Xorthern |»eople at large. Then the scrimmage with John- 
 son distracted their attention. He got many a blow that wouhl otherwise 
 have fallen on our defenseless head. Under Lincoln, their methods would 
 almost surely have been less violent, l>ut probably far more .systematic 
 and insidious. Davis might not have Imhmi impri.«!one<|, or not so long, 
 ftr Wirz, the commandant of .\iider.sonville prison, executed. Rut in 
 all likelihoo<l a more furtive, deadly way would have Imh'Ii found to work 
 our undoing. When thieves fall out honest men thrive, and that is 
 about th<' only chance they do get to thirve. 
 
 The man to whom is really due the gratitude of the South is Grant. 
 Had he not scotched the jdan of the Republicans to punish the Southern 
 military leaders, by threatening to throw up his commission if Lee was
 
 14 
 
 arrested, there is no telling, the gates of vengeance once ajar, Avhen they 
 would ever have closed. 
 
 Turning from Lincoln the Republican to Lincoln the man. Is the 
 wily, not to say tricky, politician, the reveler in "smutty" jokes, the 
 Southern ideal ? Lack we, of our own kitch and kind, of our own house- 
 hold of fuith^ great men who were also great gentlemen? Are we so 
 poor in lieroes that we must need pedestal the man who led his sections 
 somewhat bunglingly, it is true, but without ruth or remorse in the 
 onslaught that virtually destroyed ours? 
 
 Again, is there anything in the achievement of Lincoln so dazzling 
 that it should blind us to everything else? Is there glory for the strong 
 in overcoming the weak, the many the few? Would we ever have heard 
 of Goliath, Xerxes, Darius, and all their like, had they won? Such im- 
 mortality that they won is reflected from the foes they faced, weaker 
 but of better mettle. 
 
 In years to come the case of the South and the North will be cited 
 as the crowning instance of the tyranny of the pen. The American 
 colonies, equal sisters, finding themselves aggrieved by certain unmoth- 
 erly measures of the mother country, a mother too far off to harm them 
 greatly, and in fact harming only their pocket, and that slightly, yet 
 made war on her, the author of their being, beat her and set up for 
 themselves, calling high heaven to witness, that "Governments derive 
 their just powers from the consent of the governed." 
 
 Now, some malign pow-er had laid upon all, or about all, of these 
 sister colonies a great burden, a great curse (negro slavery), disguised 
 as a blessing, but upon part of them more heavily than others. The 
 sisters lightly afflicted were able to free themselves of this curse not 
 only without scath, but with actual profit, by shifting their portion of 
 it upon those sisters sorely afflicted to helplessness. 
 
 Then straightway the free sisters, seeing how trammeled and helpless 
 the burdened sisters were, not only robbed their pockets by iniquitous 
 tariff laws -which bore heaviest on one section, but, what was infinitely 
 worse, they turned their quacks (the abolitionists) loose on them with 
 their nostrums, defeating all the practical efforts of the burdened sisters 
 to cure themselves. Finally, forced thereto by the instinct of self- 
 preservation, the first law of nature, the burdened sisters, now expanded 
 into a domain larger than the whole at the beginning, and three times 
 as populous, took steps to save themselves, to be rid of the persecuting 
 sisters. But these steps were far more deliberate, more orderly, and 
 far more conciliatory than those taken with the mother country at the 
 Kevolution. 
 
 With all solemnity, observing every form of law and diplomacy, they 
 declared their independence by withdrawing from the Union, as the 
 persecuting sisters had, under infinitely less provocation, repeatedly 
 threatened to do; and, when driven to the wall, turned and defended 
 this "inalienable right," that "Governments derive their just powers
 
 from the consent of the poverned," with a courapo niui dovotion that 
 never has heen surpnsse<l. 
 
 That their appeal to tlie sword should have heen lost is no wonder. 
 The swonl has ever heen the slave of miplit. 
 
 But that a jH'ople who so long withstood the sword of the Xorth should 
 have surrendered so quickly, so eravenly, to its pen, must forever stand 
 the wonder of the world. It will he incredihle that an intelligent, high- 
 spirited i)eople, a jieople showing in every other respect mental and 
 moral fiher of the most robust order, should have bcvii transfigureil into 
 such groveling thralls that they not only forswore the high, expressive, 
 and honorable name of the struggle given to their fathers, "The "War 
 for Southern Independence," but came to see only wild political folly, 
 madness, in the sane and heroicendeavors of the fathers to establish and 
 maintain a republic suited to the genius of the Southern people, one in 
 which issues the most portentous that ever faced any people could have 
 been settled by these people themselves and not by the arbitrary and 
 hostile power of an alien people, or rather left unsettled, and in such a 
 posture that, like Banquo's ghost, it would never down. 
 
 The compromise name, "War Between the States," which our perhaps 
 overcautious leaders thought best to use while the South still had her 
 head in the lion's mouth, was, as they must have known, a clear mis- 
 nomer. But a misnomer, a wrong name, they doubtless held, was better 
 than a bad one, better than the name rebellion with all its load of oppro- 
 brium and reproach. 
 
 Nevertheless, whatever the war was, it was not war between the 
 States. The States, as States, took no part in it, were not even known 
 in it. It was a war between two thorougiily organized governments and 
 for one great principle, that completely overshadowed all others — South- 
 ern Independence. To the Northern mind the struggle of the South to 
 reassert the cardinal principle of the Declaration of Independence, that 
 all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of hai)piness, was 
 rebellion ; to the Southern mind it was not. 
 
 To every patriotic Southerner, War for Southern Independence should 
 be a sacred name. It is the name hallowed by the lips of the men who 
 died to make it a reality. 
 
 To all of us, from Jeff. Davis and Zeb. Vance down to the smallest 
 "siiaver" who waved his home-made straw hat to a fra/.zle as the soldier 
 trains rolled by, it was the "War for Southern Independence"; never a 
 war between the States. To the thousands who died that the nanu> might 
 live, who breathed out their gallant lives amid the smoke and dead-fallen 
 air of battle, or who, braver still, starving in Northern prisons, surren- 
 dered to the fell Sergeant Death rather than to the wiles of the captor 
 who offered the renegade everything, it was always, everywhere, the War 
 for Southern In<h-peiidence. They never believed they were dying in 
 a mere squabble between States, but to achieve Southern Independence;
 
 16 
 
 to erect a great Southern Republic, under whose golden aegis Southern 
 civilization would flower into tlie glory and envy of the whole world. 
 It is treason, rank treason, to thc-ir moTiiory for us to dub it otherwise. 
 
 "What is IIistouy Bit a Lie Agreed Upon?" — Napoleon. 
 
 In the first edition of the foregoing i>art of this brochure I endeavored 
 to reach the Southern ])eople through my usual channel, the Southern 
 press. To my very great astonishment I found it closed to me. Editors 
 who for nearly forty years had met me more than half way for copy 
 (my pen, since as a young man T gave up a remunerative career as a 
 magazine writer, has been devoted to the defense of the ideals and as- 
 pirations of the Old South) now slammed the door in my face. Thus 
 was I driven to appeal to Caesar, to appeal in pam))hlet form from the 
 Southern press to the Southern people. 
 
 Their response has been most cordial, showing that whatever the 
 Southern press may be, the Southern people themselves are patriotic. 
 But men and women pass ; the printed word endures. What the papers 
 are today ihe people must be tomorrow or the day after. 
 
 "But for Lincoln's influence you might not here and now dare to 
 write as freely as you do" is the gist of some of the editorial criticism 
 my paper has met, though it was a layman wdio expressed it in those 
 words. 
 
 I submit that it is high time that the patriotic men and women of this 
 generation register a most emphatic protest against the attitude of a 
 part of the press and people before it is too late. 
 
 I)id we need just what we got in the sixties, and ought we to be 
 shouting glad we got it ? 
 
 Shades of the Fathers ! We, of the purest strain of the stock that 
 gave freedom to the world ; we, from wlaose very loins sprang the archi- 
 tect, the builder and the defender of American liberty — we, so poor in 
 statecraft, so bankrupt in morality, that an alien must needs come with 
 three million at his back, and with fire, sword, and rapine save us from 
 ourselves ! Yet such is the logical, the inescapable deduction from the 
 premises our children will be taught to accept ! 
 
 The North, flinging to us the dross of physical prowess and purblind 
 devotion to a fallacious cause^ has arrogated to herself the gold of moral 
 rectitude and political infallibility. We have betni taught, and are 
 tamely accepting the dictum that the South, when she lost hold on the 
 motherly apron strings, when she foolishly ventured from under the 
 aegis of Northern protection, relapsed swiftly towards despotism and 
 anarchy, and that Aiipomnttox alone saved us from political disinte- 
 gration ! 
 
 Is ihis true? Do we alone deserve the odium of being the one branch 
 of the race too weak to frame civil institutions that could stand the 
 crucible of war? The Romans, the sanest and most practical political
 
 17 
 
 people the world has over seen, always when tlic sliip of state was in 
 ]>eril, put a dictator at the helm. 
 
 "Inter Amia Ix'ges SiU'iit." 
 
 In the clash of arms, law was silent, suspended. Private rijjht, pri- 
 vate wrong, had to wait until the foe was vanquished and Rome safe. 
 
 Rome, when beset the hardest, never faced the disadvantages, and 
 was rarely ever in the extremity that tiie Confederacy stood from he- 
 ginning to end. Never in any land was there direr need that a hand, 
 strong, ari)itrarv, untraninieled hy peace-built law and usage, garner- 
 ing every man, every resource, should .strike as one at the Giant Fo<'. 
 
 Yet was there a dictatorship at the South, or any semblance of one? 
 Did war submerge law? It is a nuixim of our race, Frcn* s|)eech, free 
 j)ress. fre<' land. Tyranny ever chains first the tongue, strikes her first 
 blow at the palladium of liberty — free utterance. 
 
 Right here in Xorth Carolina the Confederate Government had its 
 fullest swing. The State lay nearer to Richmond (and distance, owing 
 to crude transportation facilities, was a far more formidable thing then 
 than now) than any other State as largely free from invasion. It af- 
 fords a fair instance of the contact of the Conferlerate Government with 
 the civil life of the people. 
 
 Xow, living evidence is still abundant that no man was molested for 
 opinion's sake or for word spoken. That the press remained unmuzzled, 
 the files of the Raleigh Standard, which to the very end preached stark 
 treason to the Confederacy, stands in everlasting evidence. 
 
 Governor Vance of Xorth C'andina and Governor Brown of (Jeorgia, 
 though patriotic men, seeing fit, even in extremity, to place State rights 
 and other considerations before Confederate success, ham|)ered the Con- 
 federate executive to a degree never before or since tolerated under such 
 circumstances. It is true that the impressment and conscription meas- 
 ures were grievous burdens, especially here in such close reach; but 
 they were laws of the Congress, and not the fiat of the executive. In 
 short, much of the defensive power of the South was lost by the fail- 
 ure of President Davis to wield the full measure of power that would 
 readily have been acquiesced in by the people at large. Never, not even 
 in the great crises, did Jefferson Davis exercise one-tenth tlie domi- 
 nance over the Confederat<' Congress that Woodrow Wilson now does 
 over the Federal. Davis's decrease of popularity towards the end came 
 from no abusi- of power on his part, but niaiidy froni the stigma which 
 the world attaches to failure — that is, except in case of the .soldier. 
 Around him war flings a saving halo. 
 
 Let us glance at the other side of the picture — at the status of the 
 civiliati of the Xorth. The Federal Government, infinitely superior in 
 resourc«-s. had not the .same urgent need for unity. Yet we find its 
 actions immeasurably more arbitrary than tho.se of the Confederate Gov- 
 ernment. Not under the old regime in France were h'ttres de cachet as 
 plentiful or more potent. It was a well-known boast of Stanton, Sec
 
 18 
 
 retary of War, that he could touch a bell on his table and order the in- 
 stant arrest of any man in tjie Union. Fort McHenry at Baltimore, 
 Fort LaFayette at New York, Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, and the 
 old Capitol Prison at Washington, became veritable bastiles, crammed 
 with political prisonei's, men immured for what they had said or for 
 what it was suspected they might say or do. In the old Capitol Prison, 
 at least, executions were frequent. 
 
 jNTever imposed Fate a heavier burden on any people than on the 
 South when she was made the ladder on which the benighted African 
 must climb civilization and Christianity. Not the opprobrium, but 
 the profound sympathy of the whole world, and especially of the Ne- 
 gro himself, is our just due ; for never, since time began, has a race 
 climbed from darkness to light so swiftly and at so small a price to 
 itself — at such fearful cost to the instrument of its elevation. 
 
 As is well known, slavery was no Southern indigene; no plant that 
 grew here only. It was only the inheritance of the ages. Sanctioned 
 by immemorial and universa-1 usage, and even by Holy Writ itself, it 
 was indeed the very oldest of all human institutions. Founded origi- 
 nally, in part at least, upon morality, upon the pity which spared in- 
 stead of slaying the captive, it thus became the bedrock of all civiliza- 
 tion. But slavery in this land, and at that date, was a thing strangely 
 out of place and out of time. So much so, indeed, that one wonders as to 
 Fate's motive in the misplacement. Did a spirit of impish irony impel 
 her, or Avas she actuated by a deeper motive, when she dropped this Old 
 World estray, this foundling in the cradle of liberty, the New World — 
 the motive that as we 
 
 "Broadened with the act of Freedom " 
 
 we should also 
 
 "Grow strong beneath the weight of duty"? 
 
 Slavery would surely have gone, even had Lincoln never been born. 
 The drift of the world had set against it, deep and resistless. Harking 
 back two thousand years to Epictetus, it had come to see that not to 
 him who getteth, but to him who doeth a wrong, cometh the chief harm. 
 Emancipation was inevitable, and to hold that the Southern people, the 
 purest-blooded branch of the sane and virile Anglo-Saxon race, the race 
 which gave liberty to the world, and which in all lands and under all 
 conditions had stood for justice and fair play, as it came to see it — for 
 us to hold that this, our branch, would have been so degenerate, so 
 recreant to the genius and spirit of the stock, so inferior to its forbears, 
 or even to the "lesser breeds" to the south of us that did put it by, that 
 it lacked the manhood to free itself from the incubus of slavery, is a 
 worse slander than even our foes would dare put upon us. 
 
 It is argued, and by our own writers as well as others, that the slave- 
 holding class dominated the South, and that self-interest, cupidity, would
 
 19 
 
 always have impelled this class to block emancipation. I would reply 
 that slavery in divers forms was long an institution with our race; but 
 that the race in its progress put it by, despite the strenuous opposition 
 of the slave-holding class — as it must have done in this case. The 
 whole moral trend of the race rendered any other course impossible. 
 The fact that medieval serf was white and strong, and tin* modern slave 
 blac-k and weak, would undoubtedly have made t\w work of emancipation 
 harder; but the race is morally stronger now tiian then. 
 
 There is one fact generally overlooked, which would have added greatly 
 to the practicability of emancipation. That was the fact that the slave- 
 holding classes at tiie South were in a minority of about six to one. 
 Every reform, social or political, that our race has achieved lias been 
 in the face of a wealthy minority far stronger than that. In fact, it is 
 almost a truism of our politics that the people, as opposed to aristocracy, 
 always win in the long run. No civilization has survived in which this 
 rule did not hold. The chief reason tliat the dust covers so many of the 
 splentlid civilizations of the past was because the great mass of the peo- 
 ple remained inert to the end. The broadening of the franchi.se right 
 here in North Carolina in the fifties, whereby the aristocratic domi- 
 nance of the State Senate was abolished, is significant proof of what 
 the middle-class manhood of that generation were capable of. 
 
 One thing is certain: Had the negro remained in our midst the 
 South would have avoided the irretrievable error of the North in mak- 
 ing the slave a citizen first and a man afterwards. As emancipation 
 would have been gradual, so also would have been the elevation of the 
 freedom. As he attained the full stature of manhood, so he must per- 
 force have been invested with the rights and privileges of a man. But ho 
 hardly would have remained. Colonization being impracticable at that 
 late period, segregation would probably have been the solution of tiie 
 race problem. Even in this sanctimonious age we exclude the Asiatic. 
 Where would have been the sin in settling the African in a prescribed 
 area of the coTintry, and excluding him from the other parts of it? 
 Compared with the Yellow peril, the Black peril is Olympus to a wart. 
 
 Some degrees of wrong and injustice there might have been. Wrong 
 and injustice are not often ab.sent from the affairs of this world. But 
 who is bold enough to assert that the measure of them could have 
 equaled, or even distantly approached, that infinitude of inju.stice and 
 of wrong — the orgy of political madness — reconstruction, whose blight- 
 ing effect was to distract and stunt, ])erhaps forever, the development 
 of the negro, and to sow, as fas as the hand of malice couM sow, the 
 very salt of annihilation over the civilization and life of the South? 
 
 As is well known, the emancipation movement in its earlier, saner 
 stages had its warmest and ablest supporters at the South. Washing- 
 ton, Jefferson, Henry, ^fadison, and the foremost men of that time 
 sought earnestly for some practicable method of putting an end to slav- 
 ery, which was generally regarded as a curse, and especially so to the
 
 20 
 
 whites. But for the perfectly natural reaction caused by the rabid, 
 incendiary methods of the abolitionists, which, beginning about 1830, 
 flowered so quickly and hideously in the Nat Turner butchery of white 
 women and children, gradual eiuancipation would soon have been un- 
 der way, and would almost surely have ended slavery with that cen- 
 tury. I would not deny that the development of cotten growing caused 
 by the perfection of the cotton gin, and the resulting enormous increase 
 in slave values, would have made emancipation a tremendous problem. 
 But sphinxes — political, social, industrial, moral, religious, racial — had 
 lined the pathway of our race down the ages. All had been answered, 
 and, we believe, answered right, by the communities which had most at 
 stake. 
 
 To our branch alone was denied the priceless boon of answering for 
 themselves the most momentous problem of them all, a problem that in- 
 volves not only our prosperity but our very existence, and which now 
 can only deepen and darken with the passage of the centuries. Were 
 our immediate forbears — the men whose courage and heroism in war 
 placed the Lost Cause in fame's eternal keeping, whose fortitude and 
 sagacity triumphed even over reconstruction, who hurled back the en- 
 venomed dart, negro suffrage, upon the heads that sent it — weaklings, 
 men whose destiny was safer in the hands of an alien and hostile sec- 
 tion than in their own? Perish thought so blasphemous! 
 
 How few of us, too, have ever analyzed the famous Emancipation 
 Proclamation; have ever tried to ascertain the proportions of politics, 
 diplomacy, and philanthropy couched therein ; have ever regarded its 
 true purport and bearings. Did it free, or seek to free, all the slaves in 
 the land ? Oh, no ! Only a part. What part ? Those in the hands of 
 Lincoln's enemies. Those within the Union lines, those in the hands of 
 friends, were not affected by the proclamation. They remained in bond- 
 age so far as this instrument was concerned. Lincoln had been dead 
 nearly a year before total abolition was legally brought about. Outside 
 of the punitive intent, the prime motive of the proclamation was, first, 
 to buttress the Republican Party against the rising tide of Democracy; 
 second, the Union arms against those of the Confederacy. The military 
 end sought was to weaken his enemies by destroying their propert}^ 
 Naturally, lie struck at their chief asset — their slaves. If he had been 
 able thereby to destroy any or all of other kinds of their property he 
 would have done so. If his simple mandate would have cut the throat 
 of every work animal, milch cow, fire every roof-tree, and imperiled the 
 honor of every woman in the South, there is no reason to believe that he 
 would have withheld its utterance; for it was his word that sent hun- 
 dreds of thousands through the South to do these very things. 
 
 If we must accept subjugation, even of mind and of spirit ; if we must 
 view the whole bloody drama through the eyes of our enemies; if we 
 must believe that the blow came from above and not below; that we 
 not only richly deserved but sadly needed just what we got — then the
 
 21 
 
 right men to honor are the pioneer abolitionists, Garrison, Wendell Pliil- 
 lips, Cierrit Smith, and men of tiiat feather. They boldly stood for abo- 
 lition, whtMi to stand meant iialred, contempt, and iminincnt peril of 
 life and limb. Theiie men ha<l no ulterior motives. They breasted the 
 tide of fortune. Lincoln floated upon it. If honor we must the sowers 
 of the wind whose fearful whirlwind we had to reap, let's honor these, 
 the real heroes of the cataclysm. True, they sent .John Brown pikes to 
 butcher us with; but they were i^erfcctly willing to be butchere<l them- 
 selves in the same cause. 
 
 >ro one would deny that Lincoln was an enemy of slavery. He was 
 a product of a class and of an environment that drew in hatred of slav- 
 ery and of slave-holders with every breath. Moreover, most thinking 
 people, North and South, were enemies of slavery in theory. With 
 Lincoln and the Xorth it was only a theory. With the South it was a 
 fact, a grim fact which, foisted upon us by English and later by Xorth- 
 ern greed, time had now riveted upon us. The growth was cancerous. 
 But would you go to your butcher to remove even a cancer? 
 
 Emancipation at the time, and in the manner in which Lincoln sought 
 to enforce it, was a politico-military measure, and nothing else. 1862 was 
 election year. Lincoln, great man and statesman as he undoubtedly was, 
 was also jtolitician to the core. And when did your politician, big or 
 little, ever fail to trim his sails to the wind — to save the party and then 
 let the party save everything else? Federal arms had sustained such re- 
 peated and disastrous defeats that Northern opinion was turning to the 
 Democratic Party, which favored peace. Defeat stared Republicani.sm 
 in the face. Something must be done to stem the tide. The emancipa- 
 tion ])roclamation was the answer. While primarily a political move, 
 great things were also exjjected of it in a military way. it was largely 
 believed tliat the slaves would rise and deal with Southern wonten in a 
 way that would cause the Southern armies to crunjble in a day. as each 
 man rushed home to save his own. 
 
 As a military measure it was tlie fiasco of the ages. Xot a slave stirred 
 or lifted hand. But its political effect was immense. It in.stantly 
 brought into tiie Republican camp every cohort of abolitionism, and 
 held all in line to the end, though these lines bent fearfully under Jack- 
 son's blows at Chancellorsville, and again, when soon after the grey 
 columns .surged northward to Gettysburg, and even when, much later 
 still, Grant's army recoiled in temporary paralysis from the futile as- 
 saults on Lee in the Wilderness. 
 
 Still, this is not an attack on Lincoln, nor do I set-k to revive section- 
 alism, further than consist4'ncy and self-respect demand. I am well 
 aware that patriotism is a matter of geography. That all depends upon 
 the side of the line on which yoji were born, lint so, also, is renegadeism. 
 High moral law demands that we be true to our fellows, our surround- 
 intrs. The Washingtons and Lees obeyed it. The Arnolds and Tscariots 
 defied it. This is simply an earnest protest against accepting as a
 
 22 
 
 Southern hero, a Southern exemplar, a man, no matter how worthy per- 
 sonally, who was a leader of Northernism, and of Northernism in its 
 attitude -of implacable hostility to the South and Southern ideals. It 
 is natural that the Xegro should honor Lincoln. He gave the Xegi'O 
 freedom. And the North, he gave the !N^orth dominion over the South. 
 He carried out Northern ideals of centralism, imperialism. The South- 
 ern ideal. State rights, home rule, the palladium the world over of the 
 weak, met destruction at his hands. With glaring inconsistency, we still 
 hold the ideal to be true, while paying homage to the chief instrument of 
 its destruction. 
 
 ''Suppose the South had won? What then?" is the common query, 
 usually in tones ol utter deprecation. I would reply that had the South 
 lost; what then? The blackest page in the annals of our race! Would 
 the Lees, the Davises, the Hamptons, the Vances, the Grahams, the 
 Ashes, the Grimeses, the Clarks, the Jarvises, the Hills, the Carrs, the 
 Kansoms, the Averys, have been less fit to deal with even the tremndous 
 issues left by war than the Sewards, the Wades, the Stevenses, the 
 Holdens, the Tourgees, the Deweeses, the Cuffees, who fumbled them till, 
 with an effort that paralyzed all other endeavors for a generation, we 
 wrenched the helm from their hand. 
 
 The War of 1861, notwithstanding the unfortunate slavery compli- 
 cation, was as much a war of liberty as that of 1775, or that of 1642 
 in the Mother country. It was a struggle for local self-government 
 against centralism and all the evils that have skulked in its shadow, 
 monoply, trusts, extortion in its protean guises. A quicker exploita- 
 tion of our resources — and a quicker destruction — has undoubtedly en- 
 sued. But where has the wealth gone? Would not those resources be 
 safer in the hands of nature than in the hands that now hold and use 
 them as a lever to oppress and extort? 
 
 The war, waged for State rights, for local self-government, the prin- 
 ciple for which the flower of our manhood laid down their lives, was 
 the half-conscious effort of our branch of the race — the branch that 
 events have proven to have had the keenest political instincts of all — to 
 avert this torrent of evils; some then plainly disclosed to our clear vis- 
 ion, some even now just emerging from the haze of the days to be. 
 
 Then circumstances and heredity had made the South the citadel of 
 conservatism. What a brake on the wild wheels of this mad world 
 her conservatism must have been could it only have won the prestige of 
 success, had it only been its luck to be backed by the stronger battalions 
 of heavier guns! In all human probability it would have saved us from 
 many of the evils above indicated, as well as the maze of fads, follies, 
 and isms in which we now grope in such utter bewilderment. 
 
 Even Southern writers have to stultify themselves every time they 
 approach the subject as to what might have been if the victory had 
 been accorded to us instead of our foes. 
 
 Loud in. praise of the statesmanship of the old South, strong in the
 
 23 
 
 belief of the justice of her anise; yet no sooner do they reach the point 
 wliere the stronger battalions of the North prevail than they drop on 
 tlu'ir knees and thank Heaven for having saved the South from her- 
 self. They thank Providence that instea«l of giving the South a resjjite 
 from Northern incendiarism, instead of smoothing her way so that she 
 migiit put by slavery in the least harmful manner, it brought down upon 
 her thriH' millions of anm'd men, who, destroying the Hower of her man- 
 hood, breaking the heart of her womanliood, consigning her children 
 to poverty and ignorance, reducing her people to virtual lK»ggars, and 
 would have forced miscegeiuition, mongrelism, upon her but for the met- 
 tle of her stock! Others nuiy think as they will, but I cannot bring myself 
 to hold any such slanderous opinions of Providence. I cannot see the 
 hand of Proviilence (though 1 might a sootier one) in such fell work as, 
 on the one hand suffering Northern abolition, incen<liarism, to arouse and 
 inflame the resentment of the South, and, on the other hand. Northern 
 ingenuity to invent the cotton gin, thus at the critical moment infinitely 
 increasing the value of slaves, and forestalling the South in her earnest 
 entleavors to put an end to slavery. That the Soutli was denied the in- 
 estimable privilege of abolishing this curse which the cruel hand of Fate 
 had fastened upon her, thus saving herself the unspeakable loss and woe 
 and humiliation that the war entailed, is no proof that the Southern 
 way was the wrong way. Success is no proof of right, nor failure of 
 wrong. Yet men whose very religion is founded on faith in One who 
 from the low viewpoint of material things sounded the abysmal depths 
 of failure, now crv aloud that it is. The vessel of iron will ever smash 
 the one of gold against which in the rough mischances of the world it 
 is thrown, though the latter, from the finenes.<» of its material and the 
 nobleness of its design, might be fit to edify mankind forever. 
 
 0. W. Blackxall. 
 KiTTua.i.. N. C, .Iamaky, 1915. 
 
 (In regard to race and segregation, I would add that the question was ex- 
 tensively discussed at the North in the early part of the war, and Florida 
 supKcsted as the State to be thus utilized when the South should be sub- 
 jugated. This being considered too small, Texas was proposed.) 
 
 eoMMcaoM. r«iiiTi»« compahv* •*! i-om. n c