r^ *e= =& t AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Briefly set forth in the correspondence between SENATOR A. J. BEVERIDGE — and — DAVID RANKIN BARBEE MANAGING EDITOR OF THE ASHEVILLE (N. C.) CITIZEN ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY CITIZEN IN MAY, 1927 Cs REPUBLISHED BY LANGBOURNE M. WILLIAMS OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA MARCH, 1928 Service Printing Co. Asheville 3Sz ^t LINCOLN ROOM UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY MEMORIAL the Class of 1901 founded by HARLAN HOYT HORNER and HENRIETTA CALHOUN HORNER AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Briefly set forth in the correspondence between SENATOR A. J. BEVERIDGE — and — DAVID RANKIN BARBEE MANAGING EDITOR OP THE ASHEVILLE (N. C.) CITIZEN ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SUNDAY CITIZEN IN MAY, 192 7 REPUBLISHED BY LANGBOURNE M. WILLIAMS OF RICHMOND, VIRGINIA MARCH, 1928 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign http://www.archive.org/details/excursioninsouthOObarb 973. 1 FOREWORD IT was my good fortune to be among the last of the men with whom the late Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana corresponded during the final weeks of his brilliant life. This correspondence was published with explanatory notes in The Asheville Sunday Citizen during the month of May, 1927, and has attracted so much attention, North and South, East and West, and even as far away as England and Australia, that a great many requests have been made of me to have it republished in a more permanent form. Mr. Langbourne M. Williams, of Richmond, Virginia, a banker who is much interested in preserving the historic records of the South, is the latest to press me in this matter, and he has kindly consented to bear the cost of publication in its present form. As the correspondence with Senator Beveridge was merely one of the accidents of life, it developed naturally, and, of course, was spontaneous. My sole purpose in writing Mr. Beveridge my first letter, and in continuing the cor- respondence at his urging, was to determine if the time was ripe to offer the truth about the South' s side of the War of the 60s to a Northern historian. I thought that if Beveridge responded graciously to my suggestions, with his great fame and wonderful ability, coupled with the fact that he was a Republican, this might influence other Northern historians to inform themselves and write without prejudice about the South. The heartiness and cordiality with which Beveridge met my offers of help indicate, to my mind at least, that my intervention was providential. DAVID RANKIN BARBEE. Asheville, N. C, March 31, 1928. ARTICLE I. FOR a Southern man to write anything about Abra- ham Lincoln is just the same as fooling with dyna- mite. You never know when it is going to explode and carry you up in fragments. This, however, has not de- terred me from occasionally writing about the Eman- cipator; and usually the publication of these fugitive articles has brought down on my devoted head con- demnation and round abuse ?ven from Southern people. To this extent has the Lincoln myth grown. One of the foremost historians in the South, a man of wide learning and splendid ability, less than a week ago wrote me : "I have never seen a life of Lincoln since Nicolay and Hay's that is not an attempt to make him the greatest American which, of course, is pure 'bunk.' They do this to make it sell, and I have despaired of see- ing it corrected in my time." This quotation is not singular but represents the body of the most enlightened opinion among the scholars in history in the South, and it is typical of numerous let- ters I have received within the past two or three months. The foremost writer in history and biography in the South, one of the ablest men in America, recently wrote me: "Personally, I am disgusted with the Lincoln cult, and believe that its purposes are reprehensible and unworthy — viz., to gloze over unpleasant facts, and at- tempt to make Lincoln second only to Christ, I admire Lincoln, but as Ben Jonson said of Shakespeare, 'this side of idolatry.' " AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Some months ago I wrote an article for The Sunday Citizen on Washington and Lincoln, in which I cried out against the attempt being made by Northern in- fidels and iconoclasts to destroy Washington in the affections of the American people and to elevate Lin- coln to a place next to God. This article, without my knowledge, was sent to the late Senator Albert J. Bev- eridge of Indiana, who spent the last years of his bril- liant life writing an authoritative and definitive life of Lincoln. To the sender Mr. Beveridge wrote back: "Thank you so much for sending me Mr. Barbee's article. It is excellent, I have a little of that view my- self, for I think Washington was very great indeed." Emboldened by this complimentary reference, some ten days later I wrote Senator Beveridge a long letter, in the course of which, among other things, I said : "It is generally understood that you are writing a life of Mr. Lincoln. I trust that this information is true; for, judging by your noble biography of John Marshall the life of Lincoln should be an authoritative work that every good man in this republic will want to read. If information about this is true, may I not trespass upon your kindness and patience long enough to make a sug- gestion or two that is worthy of the attention of any one writing the life of such a genius and great man as Abraham Lincoln was? "First, I would say that no life of Lincoln can be be a correct one that does not properly assess the character of his great antagonist, Jefferson Davis. And neither can a correct life of Lincoln be written that does not give the Southern as well as the Northern background of the history made by Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis and through which both lived. "Mr. Davis is still a much execrated man in the North and much neglected in the South. As Lamar so AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY justly said to Hoar, when the Amnesty Bill was being debated: 'If he (Davis) was a traitor, every Southern Senator here was a traitor and every man, woman and child in the Confederacy was a traitor. He did no more than all of us did.' "Every Life of Lincoln I have read, except Bledsoe's, gives the Northern viewpoint instead of the National viewpoint of the man; and the Lincoln myth has grown so huge in late years that we have lost sight of the man in the myth. Why not paint him with the warts on his face, as Cromwell commanded the young Lely to do his portrait? "I hope to see you write a greater book on Lin- coln than you wrote on Marshall. I hope to find in it the blemishes on his character as well as the great and lasting beauties. I hope you will not overlook the fact that, while he was a very humane man in many of his acts, he it was at last who was responsible for the horrors of Andersonville; that while he showed some of the Christ spirit he never believed in Christ and never was a professed Christian; that the man had so many sides to his character he is what he always was, a Mystic. "The more I study the cause of the Civil War, the more I am led to believe that Mr. Lincoln was as much of a hot head as Yancey, as much of a fanatic as many of our Southern people said Jefferson Davis was. And, more than that, I often think that if he had shown as much patience at the outset of his administration in dealing with the South as he showed in the later years of it in dealing with the problems of his own people — the kind of patience shown by Woodrow Wilson during the first two years of the World War — there would have been no Confederacy, no Civil War, no wreckage of the South. AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY "Lincoln's life is not the study of a man. It is and must be the study of an epoch — such an epoch as the French Revolution, such an epoch as Martin Luther was the central figure in. Am I right or just dreaming?" This is just a part of the long letter I wrote Mr. Beveridge and by which I introduced myself to him. It is quoted at such length to pave the way for an in- telligent understanding of the correspondence that fol- lows, a correspondence which has convinced me that had Beveridge lived to complete his Lincoln it would have been one of the greatest books ever written about the Civil War, a work that would have done more to destroy the Lincoln myth and to lead the way to a bet- ter understanding of the South at the North than all of the fol-de-rol that has for years been spilled by politicians on both sides of the line. Much to my surprise and delight Senator Beveridge was not offended by my letter, but immediately wrote back the following long reply: "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Thank you for your good letter of March 3. It is admirable in every way — one of the most sensible I have ever received. "I agree with nearly everything you say, albeit there are one or two points that are not clear to me.. "For this reason, I wonder if you would do me the favor of reading the mss. of at least the first two chapters of Volume II of my Lincoln. In the first of these I try to make clear to the reader what was in the mind of the Southern people that induced them to try to set up for themselves — I mean the roots of Southern feeling; in the second, I try to show what took place in the fateful year of 1850. The fact seems 8 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY to be that the lines were drawn at that time — at least that is the view of Professor Phillips, with whose writ- ings you are, of course, familiar. "All of my chapters have been read and criticis- ed by more than twenty of the men whom I consider to be the heads of American scholarship ; and the chapters I would like you to read have also been read by two or three Southern scholars and by the Honorable J. M. Dickinson of this city (Chicago). As you will re- call, he was Secretary of War under Taft, is a native of Tennessee, and was a Confederate soldier at the age of fifteen. (Senator Beveridge is incorrect here. Judge Dickinson, whom I have known since boyhood, was a native of Columbus, Miss.) "While I have availed myself of the suggestions of all those gentlemen, I want yours too ; so, if it won't bore you too much, I will send you the mss. of those chapters and others if you wish. "Of course, I do this, dear Mr. Barbee, in absolute confidence and if you are willing to read them, I must ask you not to let the mss. out of your hands and not to say anything whatsoever to anybody whomsoever about any statement I make. The reason for this is that although every line of these and other chapters in the book has been re-written from eight to fifteen times, I nevertheless consider the chapters in their present state as tentative and subject to change at any and every point. Also, of course, I do not want a wrong impression of any kind to get about concerning my method of treatment. "To my mind, the biographer or historian is a dra- matist — or perhaps a scientist, if that word is not too big — and he has nothing to do with prejudice one way or the other. It is not for him to boost or knock any man or section, but, on the contrary, to get all the facts, AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY little and big, and let them tell the story. If he does not do this, I think he is a mere propagandist and, in- deed, a dishonest man. "It has been very hard indeed for me to write this biography. My father and all my brothers were in the Union army, and I was brought up on the most intense pro-Northern war teachings. It has been hard, therefore, to resist the pull of lifetime prejudice. But I have done the best I could. "I plan to make my Lincoln a companion piece of my Marshall ; continuing the institutional interpreta- tion of America around Lincoln as the outstanding figure just as I tried to do the first part about Marshall ; I am trying to carry out that plan. "I assume, of course, that I can get Mr. Bledsoe's books (Is Davis a Traitor? etc.) from the Library of Congress. They are not in the libraries here. Of course, I want them and indeed, must have them. From what you say, I take it that Mr. Bledsoe cites authority for all he says, otherwise his books would not be helpful. "Thank you again, dear Mr. Barbee, for writing me, and let me once more congratulate you on the ability and moderation of what you say. With best wishes. "Faithfully "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE" This was the beginning of a correspondence the most interesting and the most fruitful of a long and busy newspaper career, that ended only with the Sen- ator's death. Back and forth Beveridge and I wrote each other. Often I wrote him three or four letters a week, as I accumulated material for him, explaining it to him, as I received replies to criticism I offered, as I received letters from notable men and women in 10 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY the South to whom I applied for help for the great bio- grapher. As a lesson in history making and as show- ing how kindred minds can meet and talk frankly with each other on disputed matters, my editorial chief and other associates on The Citizen have suggested that I give the public a chance to read this correspondence; and so until the end of the chapter I purpose doing so, Beveridge's letters in full and such extracts from mine as well illumine his. In my first letter I suggested that he should read the wonderful books written by Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, probably the greatest intellect the South has produced and surely the ablest disputant on the South- ern side of the Slavery issue. It was my privilege to send him Bledsoe's "Is Davis a Traitor?" and also the 1873 volume of The Southern Review which contains Bledsoe's startling essay on Lincoln and the suppressed chapters from Lamon's and Herndon's lives of Lincoln. Just before his untimely death I secured, after thirty years search, Bledsoe's "Liberty or Slavery?" written in 1860 and one of the rarest books as it is the ablest discussion of slavery ever published. Unfortunately I was unable to send it to Beveridge and he died without having had a chance of reading it. In my second letter to Beveridge I offered him the use of my private library and sent him several books, pamphlets, etc. I directed his attention to "the Seces- sion movement in the three pivotal states of Tennessee Mississippi and Alabama," and wrote: "Tennessee was moulded by Jackson and was probably the first anti- slavery state in America. At least the movement was so strong there that it almost crystallized into law for- bidding the institution. The first Abolition society in America was in Tennessee, and the first Abolition news- paper in this country, antedating Garrison's by a num- II AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ber of years, was published in Tennessee. The interest in Mississippi centers around Jefferson Davis, and in Alabama around Yancey, who had to use force to get Secession through the convention." At this time I also sent him a little book entitled, "Methodist Union, ,, written by the late Dr. W. P. Harri- son, of Georgia, one of the ablest scholars, writers and preachers the Southern Methodist Church has pro- duced. I felt sure that Senator Beveridge would dis- cuss the Separation in the Methodist Church in 1844, which was the beginning of the Civil War, and had a "hunch" that he would use Northern histories as his source material ; in which event the Southern church would not get a fair deal. To this letter, on March 12, Senator Beveridge re- plied as follows: "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Answering your courteous letter of March 10 I have sent for the mss, and as soon as they get here (Chicago), I will forward them to you. "I shall be glad to see Doctor Bledsoe's book, but, as I told you, unless he cites authority for all state- ments, it will not be helpful to me — that is, I cannot make citations from it. As you, of course, understand and as I think I tried to explain to you in my former letter, modern scholarship as well as the principles of art, imperatively require that nothing shall be set down as history or biography which cannot be proved by the sources — these sources to be cited in footnotes. How- ever, I am anxious to get Dr. Bledsoe's books, since, re- gardless of whether he gives citations of sources, I shall have the benefit of his point of view. "I am particularly interested in the sketch of Doctor Bledsoe, which you say you will send me; and 12 40 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY especially the source material as to the states men- tioned. "I am not greatly impressed by what you say about the first Abolition Society in America being in Ten- nesses because that was before the abolition assault which, as a concerted and organized movement, began in 1830 and had profound effect upon the change which came over Southern writers and thinkers. This is shown by the very large and sometimes brilliant South- ern literature from 1831 up to the end of the war. "Thank you very much indeed for sending me the book about the Methodist Union. The split in the Methodist Church in 1844 showed clearly what was go- ing to happen in politics. Both Webster and Calhoun made particular reference to the vital or rather fatal rupture. Their speeches, sermons and writings show that Southern preachers of all denominations were the most ardent protagonists of slavery, which they said was 'moral relation;' just as the thinkers, speakers and writers of the South, beginning with Professor Dew in 1831, showed that it was also a necessary social and economic relation. "But thank you no end for your kindness and be- lieve me with every good wish. "Faithfully, "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE" "P. S. I repeat, dear Mr. Barbee that all I want is the actual truth, whatever it was, on both sides. From my point of view, it is absurd — yes, worse than ab- surd — to write a Life of Lincoln or any other outstand- ing man of his time without giving the point of view of the South and giving it with rigid impartiality. So do send me anything that you can lay your hands on that will help me in that difficult understanding. "I might say to you that I am sending you my 13 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY chapters only because I was so much impressed with your first letter and because, from that letter, I am sure that you can set me right if I have made any mis- take in my mss. As you will see, when you get to it, I have cited original authority for every statement made ; and to this end have examined the very large volume of Southern books, speeches, pamphlets, newspapers, etc., etc., etc." This highly interesting letter winds up with a second postscript which is written in Beveridge's own handwriting : " Jackson! He was as much against Abolitionists and Abolitionism as Calhoun and Clay." 14 ARTICLE II. IN MY study of the causes of the Civil War and the background of it, as well as of the lives and charac- ters of the important men on both sides of that fratricidal controversy, I have reached several definite conclusions which I was tempted to lay before Bever- idge. The outstanding fact in the history of the South, so far as slavery is concerned, is that the people of the South resisted the introduction of slavery by Eng- land and its perpetuation by the New England slave dealers; that as the years passed the best informed men in the South realized that slavery as an economic proposition was a failure, slave property and slave labor paying less than 3 per cent on the investment in such property and labor; and that long before the New England Abolitionists began their drive on slavery a movement was under way in the South looking to the manumission and ultimate abolition of the slaves. In my native state of Tennessee, with whose history I am reasonably familiar, the movement had so crystalliz- ed that but for the terrific political contests revolving around Andrew Jackson the State Legislature would have passed a law abolishing slavery. This is well set out in some of the histories of Tennessee, notably the school history written by Prof. W. R. Garrett and Hon. A. V. Goodpasture. One of the famous men in Tennessee's history was Elihu Embree, who edited the first Abolition newspa- per in this country and founded the first Abolition So- 15 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ciety in America, in Tennessee. His life and the his- tory of his paper were written by his grand nephew, the late Bishop Elijah Embree Hoss, and published in the American Historical Mazagine for April 1897, Vol. 2, No. 2. Prof. Caleb Perry Patterson of the University of Texas has also discussed this movement thoroughly in a remarkable thesis on 'The Negro in Tennessee." In my next letter to Beveridge, discussing this question, I wrote: "I see that I did not make myself clear on Jackson and Tennessee. Of course Jackson was against the Abolitionists. He hated J. Q. Adams so that he was led into that position. (Adams, it will be recalled, was the man selected by the Abolitionists to present their pe- titions to Congress, and he was particularly hated by Jackson because he had defeated Jackson for the presi- dency. Old Hickory saw no good in his enemies and often was turned from his righteous purposes by his hatreds. This was one of those occasions, it is my humble belief.) And, as a matter of fact, the entire South hated the Abolitionists, for the Abolition move- ment, as they interpreted it, was war on the South for the destruction of the South. The South was driven into a defense of herself and her own institutions, and the rising anti-slavery movement in the South was killed by the Abolition movement in the North. "The point I was seeking to make is that it can be demonstrated from our archives that there was a strong and growing anti-slavery movement in the South as far back as Colonial times, and that in Tennessee it had reached the status of a fixed statewide policy when po- litical conditions turned it back on itself and fixed slavery on the states." Senator Beveridge, it will be seen, did not attach much importance to this phase of our history, prefer- 16 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ring to keep his discussion in his Life of Lincoln within the period actually covered by the years of Lincoln's mature life, which began with the Abolition drive in 1830. Neither did he at first recognize the importance of the Separation of the Methodist church in 1844 and its influence in precipitating the War. To my mind that had more to do with bringing on the bloody con- flict than all the other causes combined, and, as will be seen later, I am not alone in that opinion. Replying to his request for a sketch of Dr. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, whose great book, "Is Davis a Trai- tor?" I sent him, in my letter of March 17. I wrote among other things as follows : "I hope you will at least enjoy the acquaintance with Dr. Bledsoe and his famous review. It was first published in St. Louis and then moved to Baltimore, and was simultaneously issued in London and Edin- burgh, having as large a circulation in Great Britain as in the United States, I have understood. Dr. Bledsoe was for many years a contributor to the Edinburgh and the famous London Quarterly and enjoyed the confidence and respect of the scientists and metaphysi- cians of the Old World. "You will note that he says in his essay on Lincoln that he practiced law with Lincoln and was in daily contact with him for eight years. Much of the essay is original matter, with liberal quotations from Lamon and Herndon and Holland, all of whose Lives of Lin- coln no doubt you have read. You will also find that he quotes his authority for every citation so that the historian can check up on him. If your quick, sensitive, analytical mind does not revel in his 'Davis,' I shall be deeply disappointed. "He (Bledsoe) was a native of Frankfort, Ky., graduated in the same class at West Point with Jef- 17 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ferson Davis; taught mathematics there afterwards; resigned from the army and became a lawyer, practic- ing in Springfield, 111., for years, having adjoining offices to those of Lincoln ; became a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church, brother-in-law of the noted Bishop Mcllwaine of Ohio, and soon was the most eminent disputant in that church ; gave close study to its doctrines and could not support the creed in its teaching on infant damnation ; surrendered his creden- tials and became a Southern Methodist preacher with- out a charge; was elected to the chair of mathematics in the University of Virginia; became world famous as a mathematician and thinker, known in the European universities and member of their scientific societies; elected to the chair of mathematics in the University of Mississippi with L. Q. C. Lamar as his assistant; taught Lamar how to think and trained many eminent Mississippians in the immediate pre-war period; dur- ing the war assistant secretary of war and confidential adviser of Jefferson Davis; after the war and until his death editor of The Southern Review; wrote Ts Davis a Traitor?' which it is said, caused the govern- ment to drop the prosecution of Mr. Davis; wrote a Theodicy and several works on mathematics and philo- sophy. He wrote with his own fingers most of the articles in his Review, and when you see what a wide range they cover you will understand what a giant mind he had. He was the honestest writer I ever read after." Since writing the above I have learned from Bishop Collins Denny of Richmond that Mr. Davis sent Dr. Bledsoe to England during the closing months of the war to write the "Davis" book, because, as Bishop Denny states, "he could not get the books in the South needed for that work." In the above letter I also called Mr. Beveridge's 18 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY attention to the fact that while the people of the South believed they had the right to secede' under the com- pact of 1787, they did not not wish to exercise that right, and I asked him to investigate the history of the several secession conventions. In passing it should be stated that Lincoln himself over and over again recog- nized that this right existed, and even after he was president he had Secretary Seward instruct the Ameri- can Ministers in England and France to so notify those governments. Yet in the face of this he more than any other man in our history refused to "let the erring sis- ters depart," and precipitated a war that wrecked the South. This is a historic fact you do not find in any of the lives of Lincoln lately written. Continuing I wrote further: "Have you ever seen a copy of R. G. Horton's 'A Youth's History of the Great Civil War,' written and published in New York in 1866? Horton was a Northern man, a Copperhead, I presume a Democrat. He writes his history from that viewpoint and cites a great deal of matter that does not put Lincoln in a fair or honest light. Unfortunately he does not give his authorities and it is difficult to check up on him." To this letter Senator Beveridge wrote me from Chicago, where he was then residing, a letter, dated March 21, as follows: "Dear Mr. Barbee : "Thank you very much for your letter of March 17. You have uncovered a big find. An attorney at Springfield named Bledsoe went with Lincoln when he was going to have the duel with Shields, but I never, for a moment, imagined that this is the same Bledsoe. Lincoln had practiced the broadsword for sometime be- fore the duel, and I assumed that he had learned it from 19 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY one Capt. Merryman, who was a military man. This, however, was a mere guess; and, of course, I cannot in- dulge in guesses. Since Doctor Bledsoe was a West Point graduate, it is now clear who taught Lincoln the broadsword. "I shall read with keen interest and return to you promptly Doctor Bledsoe's book and the volume of the Southern Review with his essay on Lincoln. Thank you very much indeed, dear Mr. Barbee, for your kind- ness in sending them to me. "I am writing to the Boston Public Library and Atheneum asking whether they have complete files of the Southern Review; I am sure they have, and, if so, I shall get them when I go East for the summer and start in on the revision of my first two volumes. As you will see from Chap. I. Volume II, which, with six other chapters I am sending you today, I have carefully examined and made citations from the Southern Liter- ary Messenger, Debow's Review,- etc., etc., etc., but I shall want to supplement all the data in that chapter by any original contemporaneous and worth-while material. You will understand that I cannot make reference to everything — to my intense surprise I found that the Southern pre-war literature was so very large that I had to make selections from the most notable parts of it. "By American Express pre-paid I am sending you the first seven chapters of Volume II. I am doing this for the reason stated in nay former letter and I hope that you will point out any error of fact that I have made. (You will observe that I do not indulge in any inferences or deductions). "While, as I told you, these chapters have already been gone over by more than twenty prominent scholars of the country and by other competent men, some of 20 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY them in the South, I want to take no chance of mak- ing a mistake of fact or being unfair to any man or section. "So, if you will mark on the mss — I have other copies — any alterations that you think ought to be made, I shall be obliged to you. "If entirely convenient, I would thank you to read them as soon as you can. If you finish them during April, pray return them to me by express collect to 4164 Washington Boulevard, Indianapolis, Ind. I shall be here in Chicago until April 1. With best wishes, "Faithfully "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE." "P. S. About Jackson: He wag against the Aboli- tionists not on account of John Quincy Adams, but for the same reason that everybody in the South and most of the people in the North were opposed to them. What you say in this paragraph I have taken a great deal of space to set out in my first chapter of Volume II. Of course, there was a strong anti-slavery movement in the South up to the beginning of the Abolition assault, which started in 1830. Soon after that Southern think- ers and writers declared that they were thus forced to make a new examination of the subject and they dec- lared that this review showed that slavery was a good thing socially, politically, economically and in every other way. At bottom, the Southern people did not think it possible for the great hoard of blacks to be emancipated and, without control, placed upon poli- tical, social and economic equality, with the whites. However, you wil) see all this in the chapter to which reference is made. You will observe that I do not say any of these things myself, but quote what Southern 21 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY speakers, writers, and thinkers all said on the sub- ject. "Yes, indeed, I should like very much to read Mr. Horton's 'A Youth's History of the Great Civil War.' I have heard of it before, but have not been able to lay hands on it up to now. "Judging from what they themselves said, I cannot agree that the Southern Methodist preachers (I am a Methodist myself, by the way) thought slavery wrong; on the contrary, they and all other Southern preachers of every denomination were the stoutest defenders of th;vt system. For this they were abused by the North- ern preachers, and especially, by the Abolitionists with a virulence well-nigh unbelievable. I do not wonder that even at this late day they refuse to unite with the church North." This last paragraph in the above postscript was in reply to this statement in my letter; "Now, just a word above the split in Methodism and the attitude of the Southern preachers on slavery. If you read carefully the book I sent you, ('Methodist Union' by Dr. W. P. Harrison) you noticed that Bishop Andrew was deposed from office illegally and that the split was over that action. You also read that he did not want to own slaves, wished to free those that came into his possession and was forced by the laws of his state to keep them. My father was born in 1832 and began preaching in 1852. I never heard him say that the Methodist preachers wished slavery perpetuat- ed; but I have a clear recollection that he said many times, slavery carried in its own vitals the seeds of its own destruction, whether there had been any war or not. Preachers of that day did not look upon slavery as immoral any more than they looked upon liquor drink- ing as immoral in my boyhood and youth. The first 22 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Prohibition preachers in the South were regarded pretty- much as the ante-bellum people regarded Abolitionists/' My letter files show that I replied briefly to Bev- eridge's letter three days later, calling his attention to certain of Bledsoe's critical and historical essays, in the Southern Review, notably his review of Alexander H. Stephens "History of the War Between the States," in which Bledsoe "cleans up with him in masterly style. " I also informed him that I had secured an original copy of Horton's History which I was sending him, and told him of the large collection of Copperhead literature now in the archives of Washington and Lee University. Among this is all the editorials written by Bunford Samuel, a noted Democratic war editor of Philadelphia, whose paper Lincoln suppressed be- cause it criticised him. I asked Beveridge to investigate the statements made by Horton that Lincoln suppressed many Democratic papers and put their editors in prison, through his minions, Seward and Stanton and Don Cameron. This is one of the ugliest chapters in Lin- coln's life, the suppression of free speech, and the as- sumption of dictatorial powers by the great Emancipator. As my letters from this on are largely reactions to his book and to his own letters, I find that I must give them at greater length than I first thought neces- sary, so my next letter, which discusses intimately the seven chapters of his book which he so highly honored me by asking me to read, will be printed practically in full next Sunday. 23 ARTICLE III. F^ROM HIS temporary home in Chicago on March 28 * Senator Beveridge wrote : "Dear Mr. Barbee: "My parcel post, registered and insured, I am re- turning to you to Southern Review, Volume 12, Number 25, January 1773; 'Is Davis a Traitor? or Was Seces- sion a Constitutional Right, etc.' by Albert Taylor Bledsoe; and the Methodist Union. "Thank you so much for letting me have these books, I shall make use of each of them. Doctor Bled- soe's little volume on Davis is one of the best if, indeed not the best condensed statement of the Southern point of view, and I wish to go over it more carefully. There- fore, I have put an order in to my second-hand bookstore to get a copy for me. "Thank you again, dear Mr. Barbee and believe me with best wishes, "Faithfully, "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE" Before this letter reached me I had received the first seven chapters of the second volume of the Lin- coln and was wading deeply and carefully through them. It was an extraordinary pleasure, which, how- ever, weighed heavily on my mind, for I realized that I was matching my lack of scholarship against the knowledge of "twenty of the foremost scholars in history in America," as Beveridge wrote me, men who 24 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY had devoted many years to an intimate study of Ameri- can history. These men also he had honored with his confidence, and it was quite obvious that he had implicit confidence in their judgement. It was amazing to see the wide extent of Bever- idge's reading, as illustrated in his history. Very rare books by French and British travelers, American books inaccessible except in the largest libraries, and docu- ments, diaries, letters, etc., all were grist to his mill. His exploration of Southern archives and literature was very deep, and he expressed to me in a letter pub- lished last Sunday his own astonishment that it was so rich and varied. Notwithstanding all this I soon became convinced that there was a body of very important source ma- terial that he had never seen or heard of. He wrote under the impression that the South was a homogene- ous people; that there were no important divisions among us ; that certain newspapers expressed our mind on public matters and social questions; whereas the very reverse of all this was true, and is still true. In one of his masterful essays the great senator makes a plea for endowment of research in scholarship in history, taking the position that it was too costly an undertaking for any individual to bear. James Ford Rhodes, the Ohio historian, brother-in-law of Mark Hanna, was a multi-millionaire, and in gathering ma- terial for his able history of the United States from 1850 to the present employed a large number of lesser men to explore archives and read old letters and news- paper files, etc., and collate his data. This was what Beveridge had in mind, and if you weigh it but a mo- ment you must see the importance of his position, which is the correct plan. The job is too big for one man. I found in the immense number of footnotes in the 25 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Lincoln quotations from the Charleston Mercury and the New Orleans Picayune, for instance, and not a single one from the Charleston Courier and the New Orleans Delta. Neither the Mercury nor the Picayune gives a full and corect viewpoint of Southern opinion on the great political questions of that day, but rather a one-sided view, and the complete picture can only be obtained by digesting the editorials in the Courier and Delta along with those Beveridge quotes from, be- cause some of those papers were Whig and Union and some Democrat and Secession. No where does Bev- eridge quote from the old Mobile Register, edited by John Forsyth, probably the most famous Southern editor of the ante-bellum era. He was really a great statesman as well as a great editor. Beveridge had never heard of him. Nor did I find any quotations from Senator Lamar's great rival in Mississippi, the distin- guished editor of the Jackson Clarion. I could mention others, but single out the Titans. A history of the Southern ante-bellum mind with- out a history of the Charleston Courier would be in- complete, for the Courier was the most conservative paper in the most Radical State in the South. For 60 long years and until his death in 1862, it had been owned and edited by the first practical journalist in the South, a man of positive genius, who trained the elder James Gordon Bennett in journalism and was thereby the father of the idea which made the New York Herald a famous paper. This great editor was A. S. Wellington, of Massachusetts birth and rearing and education. In the Courier he opposed Nullification, he opposed Secession and he stood for the Union almost until Fort Sumter was fired on. When the issue came he went boldly with his State. He was loved, honored and respected by Charleston. It should not be sur- prising that Beveridge had not heard of Mr. Willington. 26 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY I doubt if half a dozen readers of this article ever did. My knowledge of him came from Robert Lathan, the editor of The Citizen, who has but lately come here from the old Courier. But I was not wholly ignorant of the great history of the Courier, and I knew enough of the past to understand that in every city and State we had strong Union newspapers as well as strong Radical newspapers. So it did not take a sage to see that the quotations from the Mercury and the Picayune represented only one class of our people. Let the reader not forget the fact that Mr. Wil- lington was a Northern man, moulding opinion in the South. This fact will come up again in this cor- respondence. To my mind it is one of the most im- portant facts in our history, and one of the most neg- lected. On March 28 I wrote Beveridge, in part as follows, giving my reaction to his book : "My present impression is that the first chapter of Volume II while in the main an exact and accurate statement of the South's position with regard to slavery and the abolition movement, lacks something which it is hard for me to define. Of course, I realize that you can not, as stated in one of your letters to me, quote everything or discuss everything that bears on that momentous epoch in our history; but the tenderer and gentler side of the relation of master and slave — a thing that the Abolitionists denied ever existed and which 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' clearly leaves the impres- sion was a myth — is not evident in your discussion of that phase of Southern social life. The 'Uncle Remus' books of Joel Chandler Harris ; the negro tales of Harry Stillwell Edwards; the poems of Irwin Russell; 'Mars Chan and Other Stories' by Thomas Nelson Page; and a host of such literature by our own people are all faith- 27 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ful delineations of this beautiful relation between master and slave, but it finds no space in your brilliant statement of conditions. I presume you will reply that because it is ante-bellum instead of post-bellum litera- ture, it could not be used as historical matter. "My only purpose in bringing this to your attention is that you may reflect on it and see if it does not have a place in softening the asperities which the slavery issue aroused against the Southern people. While these stories were written after the war, they are a true delineation of conditions that existed during slavery times ; and the mere fact of their vitality and that they are read today not only throughout America but throughout Europe is to be accepted as a testimony to their veracity." Those who are familiar with the history of the Abolition movement know that over and over again the Southern people were denounced as barbarians and brutes no higher in the scale of humanity than their slaves. Even the English woman, Harriet Martineau, wrote about our women that "the mistress of the planta- tion is the chief slave in the harem." The South justly contended that it was elevating the slave from savagery and Christianizing him; and so on. With this in mind, and still reading the chapter on the South, I asked Beveridge: "In all of the enormous reading you have done in gathering materials for your history, I wonder if, by chance, you have come across the history of the or- ganized movements for the Christianization of the slaves of the South. The famous Bishop William T. Capers of Charleston, S. C, headed this movement in the Methodist Church before the Separation in 1844 and continued it after the Separation, also directed the af- fairs of the Southern Methodist Church in promoting 28 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY that work. My own father was a missionary to the negroes, and in his regular pastoral work, he would visit the plantations of North Alabama, hold services and revivals in the quarters, marry the slaves, baptize their babies and bury their dead. I am somewhat familiar with this movement in my own church, and presume that the Baptists, the Presbyterians, the Epis- copalians and even the Roman Catholics carried on similar movements long before the war." Dismissing this phase of our history, I then took up the question of the attitude of the Northern people who had settled in the South before the War, their rela- tion to slavery and Secession and their course once war came. The letter goes on : "I have not read deep enough into your book to know whether you have examined this phase of our Southern social life before the War. Most of the men who came South from the North and cast in their lot with the Southern people were the most intense South- erners we had among us. There was a Colonel Wood- ward, who raised a regiment in Kentucky and who himself was one of the most brilliant partisans in the Confederate army, though himself a native of New England. (Colonel Woodward was a Yankee school teacher, having a boy's school at Hopkinsville, so I have been informed, and he took his students into the Confederate army.) There was Colonel John R. Fel- lows, of New York, the great Democratic orator, who was the colonel of a regiment he raised in Arkansas. There was S. S. Prentiss, the great Mississippi orator, a native of Maine, whose life and speeches I feel sure you have examined. There was Joshua Soule, the great Methodist Bishop who was Senior Bishop of the Church when it divided into two units in 1844, the author of the constitution of American Episcopal Methodism, a 29 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY native of Maine, who refused ordination as Bishop when the General Conference violated the constitution and tried to assume the authority of the Episcopacy, who, when the controversy over Bishop Andrew arose, went with the Southern wing of the Church, and died Senior Bishop of the Southern Church. We had no more in- tense partisan than Bishop Soule. There was that group of famous educators who, for more than fifty years, controlled the destinies of Emory and Henry Col- lege in Virginia, all of them New England Yankees, edu- cated at the great Wesleyan University at Middletown, Conn., — E. E. Wiley, for half a century president; Lamund Longley, and others. They were among the most intense partisans among us. They gave their sons to the Confederate armies. "If you could gather material about these men and their times, you will probably find that these Northern men moulded the opinion of Southern men, and were more interest in their Southern sympathies, their hatred of Abolition and Abolitionists than any other men among us." This will be referred to again and again in this correspondence, and it will be noted that it made a very deep impression on Beveridge's mind. His last letter to me is the most eager I got from him, and in it he gives me a commission, almost implores me to explore the matter fully for him and get him the data, which I was doing when his untimely death ended it. His last letter to me, written the day before he was stricken, is probably the last he ever wrote. Numerous quotations in footnotes in Beveridge's Lincoln from Abolition writers and orators incensed me, not against Beveridge to be sure, and that is the genesis of this paragraph in this long letter of mine I am quoting from : "There is another phase of our history which I 30 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY offer for your consideration. It cannot be said that the South, which from Colonial times to the Civil War and through the Civil War period, produced a host of great men, owes this to environment or education. These men represented a civilization and a general run of mankind of the very highest type, intellectually, moral- ly and socially. I have never seen this thing worked out but I have discussed it with much older men, bet- ter informed than I, who have advanced the opinion that because of their duties as mistresses of the plantations, caring for the needs of the slaves and their own families, supervising the education of their children and otherwise having their intellectual faculties aroused, the women of the South developed along prac- tical and intellectual lines a strength of character that few women have ever possessed ; and from such a wom- anhood sprang the men who moulded the destinies of the South, who commanded her armies, and who formed her brave legions." As Beveridge and I were both Methodists, I was keenly interested in what he had to say about the Separation of 1844, which, in my opinion, was the actual beginning of the Civil War. It seemed to me that he did not appreciate this fact when writing his book, and his sources seemed to me so intensely one-sided and unfair to the Southern Church that I set myself to cor- rect that, as far as possible. It will be seen in his reply to this letter that he paid me a most unusual compli- ment in asking me to write this section for him, not that he probably would use what I wrote but he was so honest and so fair he wanted the truth alone. This will explain this concluding quotation from my letter: "I do not agree with you in your statement, and history will not agree with you, that the Separation of the Methodist Church in 1844 was a Schism. I was 31 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY afraid you would state that in your book, and that is why I sent you Doctor Harrison's great discussion of the case. There is no parent Methodism in America. The Northern Church separated from the Southern Church just as the Southern Church separated from the Northern Church, and the U. S. Supreme Court so decided in the Methodist Property Case. I think your brief reference to this historic division of American Methodism will give offense to Southern Methodists, and, because the record is so plain, I am sure you do not wish to needlessly give offense in any way. All we ever ask is the truth, and if it hurts us we must stand it. ,, On April 2, Beveridge replied to this lengthy letter from his home in Indianapolis. Although a very sick man he took the trouble to write me in long hand the following treasured reply: "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Thanks for your letter of March 28. It is helpful. "Take all the time you want to read the mss. If you finish by May 15, send it to me here — after that at Beverly Farms, Mass. "Write on the margin all you please, and sign on each note 'Barbee' so that I'll know who wrote it. I have a great many copies. "If you will glance over Chap. 1 again I think you'll see that I already have the feature of slavery you point out — perhaps too much so for good effect. Over- statement usually defeats itself, and, besides, is bad art. "Also, I must not be, nor must any reader think that I am, a partisan of either side. I am trying' to be a dramatist, not a propagandist. I explained all that in my article last October in The Saturday Evening Post. 'The Making of a Book.' "Your point about the great men and noble women 32 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY produced by the South is sound, and well stated. I thought I had made that clear, but if I have not, I shall do so in the final revision. "Thanks, too, for the names of men of Northern birth and bringing up who took the side of the South and fought for her. Give me all you can find. Judge Dickinson (Sec. War under Taft) has furnished me a list of Northern men who were Southern officers. "I am especially obliged for your comment on the Methodist Church, and shall change the text so as to make it exactly accurate. You of course know that Prof. Hull's book is a fine, up-to-date treatment of the whole subject — scholarly, and so without bias. "I should be glad if you would put your under- standing of it in a short, plain paragraph, and send it to me. My hardest job is selection and condensation. The stage is so crowded, the incidents so many and the play moves so fast that I must save all the words I can. "Thank you once more, dear Mr. Barbee, for your interest, and for the help you are giving me. Write me whenever you feel like it — your letters will always be welcome. "With best wishes, "Faithfully yours "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE In the next installment the correspondence has to do with a rather famous Northern history of the War that has been buried for many years because it tells some very unpleasant truths about Lincoln and the Republican party. It will be printed May 22. 33 ARTICLE IV. MY LETTER of April 1 notified Beveridge that "I am mailing you an original copy of Horton's History." This copy was sent me by the owner, Miss Mary D. Carter of Upperville, Va., who has brought out a revised edition, which may be purchased from The Southern Publishing Company of Dallas Tex., for one dollar and twenty-five cents. Every one interested in history should read this astounding book. Horton was a New York editor and publisher, who opposed the war and for his courage suffered the loss of his newspaper. It was one of many Democratic newspapers that Lincoln and the Republican party sup- pressed during the war. His history, written in 1866 and addressed to the youth of America, is one of the most startling books I have ever read. Horton places the responsibility for the war directly on Abraham Lin- coln and proves from the record that Lincoln and Seward actually forced hostilities by an overt act at Fort Sumter before Beauregard ever fired on that fortress. That chapter alone is one of the most astounding in its revelations that I have come across in a wide reading of the literature of the war. Beveridge himself was evidently shocked out of his previously formed position with regard to Lincoln and the war by this book, as will appear later. Continuing this letter said : > "Are you familiar with the writings of the cele- brated John Forsyth, who was for so many years editor of the Mobile Register, before the war, and who was 34 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ambassador to Mexico? I think he probably more truly represents the ante-bellum viewpoint of the extreme coastal states than the New Orleans Picayune would. I note that you quote very freely from the Picayune. "I have somewhere in my library a volume of sketches of ante-bellum and post-bellum life in Mobile, written by Dr. Erwin Craighead, who has been for fifty years editor of the Mobile Register, and still occupies that position. He was an intimate friend of T. C. De- Leon, whose 'Beaux and Belles' you quote from. If you wish to see this book, I will gladly send it to you, be- cause I think it will clear up in your mind the im- portance or lack of importance which you attach to DeLeon and probably to some others you may have quoted from in parts of your book I have not seen. You will be very much interested, I know, in the ante- bellum civilization of Mobile and in Dr. Craighead's story of Madame LeVert, who had a salon in Mobile before the war which was patterned very much after such institutions in Paris in the golden days. "Doctor Craighead is a native of Nashville, Tenn., and, I think, a relative of my father's old friend, Judge J. M. Dickinson, whom you know so well. He was edu- cated at the Sorbonne in Paris, during the Civil War, where he was a classmate of a number of celebrated men, among whom was Wu Ting Fang, the witty Celes- tial whom you probably knew as ambassador from China to America, I know Dr. Craighead so intimately, and know that he is such a thorough scholar, that I believe you could rely upon any statement he makes in his book. He is a veritable mine of history." Skipping some matter that is not wholly relevant now, the letter proceeds : "I have practically finished reading all the chap- ters you sent me, except the last one, and shall re-read 35 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Chapter 1 ; for I want to make another survey of that Chapter before giving you my final reaction to it. My present impression is that it lacks the fire and enthu- siasm which are to be found in the chapter on Kansas, for instance, and in that on the origin of the Republican party — in all the other chapters, in fact. "One thing is running deeply through my mind. It may have no place in your history. While Kansas was organizing and Lincoln was changing his politics and telling his people that the South SHANT leave the Union, what was Jefferson Davis doing? Was he really then plotting disunion? Will your picture be com- plete without a searching, truthful statement and analy- sis of that great man's actions and thoughts during that critical period? You obviously have great admira- tion for Stephen A. Douglas — and justly so. What were he and other Northern Democrats doing in con- junction with Southern leaders to meet the crisis and either disrupt or save the Union? I have not seen a discussion of this yet and maybe shall reach it in the chapter yet to be read/' Before this letter reached Beveridge he wrote me from his home in Indianapolis on April 4, as follows: "Dear Mr. Barbee: "I have this morning received from you Miss Carter's volume of Horton's 'Youth's History of the Great Civil War/ etc., N. Y. 1867. Thank you so much for letting me have it. I also have a letter 4 from Miss Carter and am thanking her by this mail. "I shall return it within a day or two, because I find that the Boston Public Library has a copy, and especially in view of the fact that everything after Lincoln's election will go into Volume III. The book is of great importance, although, of course, it would be 36 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY more valuable if Mr. Horton had cited authorities. How- ever, that was not done very much, if at all, in those days, and is not done even now in school histories. Thank you again, dear Mr. Barbee, for your courtesy, and believe me with every good wish, always "Faithfully, "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE." Then came the following postscript in the sena- tor's well-known scrawling handscript: "P. S. The first two vols, will be published in the fall of 1928. The last two vols, treating of events after Lincoln became President-elect and President, will re- quire from three to five years of hard and continuous work — so they can't possibly be ready before 1932 at the earliest." On April 7 Beveridge replied to my last letter as follows : "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Thank you very much for your nice letter of April 1. I am no end interested in what you say about the writings of John Forsyth and the book of Dr. Craig- head. I shall get them from the Boston Public Library as soon as I return to Beverly Farms. "I am more than pleased that you did not find 'Fire' in Chapter I and sorry that you find it anywhere. 'Fire' is all right for the advocate, but all wrong for the judge. The trouble with biography and history, too, is that there has been altogether too much 'fire' in it and too little fact and sound judgement. "It is exactly that thing that I have tried hard to avoid. As I have written you, I should not have any- body who may do me that honor to read my book, 37 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY think that I had any prejudice whatever; and I should feel unworthy if I discovered a trace of it in me. "With best wishes "Faithfully "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE." "P. S. I am more interested than in anything else that I have discovered, by the statements (p. 382) in Horton's History that the story of Mr. Davis's at- tempted escape in, woman's clothes is a falsehood. Here in the North, all of us have been told that story from infancy, and all of us have believed it. Certainly I did until now. "But it has given me a great deal of trouble because it did not fit the character of Mr. Davis as revealed by everything he ever said and did throughout his whole life. So the fact that it was a falsehood is of the first importance. "But, unfortunately, Horton does not give the sources for his statement, but contents himself with saying merely that it was a lie. You realize that is not enough. So can you give me any original source material on this most important matter. I shall be greatly obliged to you if you can finish that data." My worthy friend, Dr. Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina, wrote me that Bev- eridge would get a very thorough course on Southern history at my hands, which, of course, was an un- deserved compliment. But it really was an interesting excursion, and because of my very great desire, as I wrote Beveridge, to help the South get a square deal and help him find the truth, I had to exercise all the patience and tact at my command in this cor- respondence. / Anyone who has read his great work on John Marshall knows that Beveridge was intensely prejudic- 38 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ed against Thomas Jefferson (a fact he admitted to Lawrence Abbott) and that the book at times is full of "fire." His enthusiasm for Marshall runs away with him at times and beclouds his judgement. So I was not alarmed at having drawn his "fire" with my sharp comment on his chapter dealing with the South which often moves with leaden feet because it is so meticulous- ly accurate and just and so lacking in the high lights that mark all the other chapters. It was amazing to learn that Beveridge, before beginning to write his Lincoln, had not even read the official life of Jefferson Davis, that written by his widow, which incorporates a great deal of autobio- graphy. And furthermore it seemed to me that the great senator was a careless reader, for Horton on the very page that gives the story of the capture of Jef- ferson Davis cites as his authority for the disproof of the lie, that Mr. Davis was trying to escape in woman's clothes, the official report of Col. B. D. Pritchard, the Michigan officer who effected the capture. While I do not know it to be a fact, it would seem that Bev- eridge had not examined closely the official records of the war which were published by the United States government. These probably he expected to examine before writing the last two volumes of this book. On April 7 I wrote him stating that I had com- pleted the reading of his manuscript and was return- ing it to him. I informed him that I had written widely over the South to personal friends who were State Archivists, to historians, to Bishops of my church, and to others "for information 1 about the Northern men who lived in the South before the war and who cast in their lot with the South during the war." I also said : "I will work out a paragraph on the division of the Methodist Church and send it to you. That page in your manu- 39 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY script struck me as being subject to very critical revision, because it is not an accurate statement of that momentous event." On April 9 Beveridge wrote we as follows : "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Thank you very much for the mss. which has been received. I shall consider with care all your sugges- tions; and of course, I shall get the additional books of which you make mention, before the final revision is done. "Thank you so much for taking the trouble to get the list of Northern men who fought on the Southern side; and thank you, too, for the paragraph which you say you will prepare on the split in the Methodist Church. That point, as well as every other point, must be made absolutely accurate. "With best wishes "Faithfully, "ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE." "P. S. I am returning under separate cover Miss Carter's volume of Horton's History which you so courteously let me have. As I wrote you, the Boston Public Library writes me that there is a copy there and I shall get it." On April 11 I wrote Beveridge another long let- ter, enclosing him a long list of officers and high rank in the Confederate army who were of Northern birth. They were all Major Generals, and Brigadier Generals, led by the distinguished hero of Vicksburg, General John C. Pemberton. This list was sent me by my dear friend, Mrs. Marie Bankhead Owen, State Archivist of Alabama. "I realize the importance of a study of this phase of that great conflict, and am glad you are en- 40 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY tering upon it,'' I wrote. Under separate cover I had sent him the two im- portant reviews published by the University of North Carolina and Duke University and relative to them stated : "These reviews from time to time have been filled with an immense amount of source material that will shed light on the work you are writing. For in- stance, one of the last issues of the Duke University Re- view (the South-Atlantic) contained a very elaborate article on the burning of Columbia by Sherman, with a long list of documentary evidence that was most in- teresting." I also sent him the recently published "Old Days at Chapel Hill," which I informed him was "written by a woman born in England but who lived many years in North Carolina and Alabama before and after the war, and then in Boston." This statement was inac- curate, for Mrs. Spencer was born in New York, her father, however, being an Englishman. "This book," I wrote, "will give you a much 'prettier' picture of our dear Southland than you have drawn from some of your sources." I did not feel inclined to c^l Beveridge's attention to his strange oversight in the Horton History to which reference is made above, but gave him a taste of Mrs. Spencer's diary as follows: "You will note that Mrs. Spencer, on page 89 of her book, quoting from her diary of June 4, 1865, says: 'President Davis — our soldier president as the papers delighted to call him four years ago, might be taken in his wife's clothes and carried a prisoner to Washington.' But on page 114 of her book, again quoting from her diary, July 1865, says: T was greatly rejoiced to get from him (Gov. Swain of North Carolina, who had just returned from Washington) an emphatic denial of the story of President Davis' dis- AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY guise in his wife's clothes, Gov. Swain was with two Yankee generals who were in Georgia at the time, and they both declared that President Davis was manly, dignified, and impressive in the highest degree. The only color for the story of his disguise was that he had thrown across his shoulders an india rubber over- coat, perhaps of his wife's, to shield him from the rain." I shall have occasion to return to this Davis inci- dent again before this correspondence is ended, but I could not resist the opportunity to tease Beveridge with this statement : "The amazing falsehood has reach- ed the estate of a myth, and I am more than astounded that it should persist after 60 years of authorative dis- proof. I think I can put my hand on official docu- ments (reprints of them) for you. Does not Mr. Davis give them in his 'Rise and Fall of the Confederacy?' I suppose you have read that book with great care." In concluding this letter I returned to the parsons and laid this proposition before Beveridge : "Do you think you attach enough importance to the religious warfare made on the South before the war. during the war and after the war? Dr. Bledsoe, who was indisputably the ablest thinker and scholar among us, raises the question as to whether the war was not a war of Atheism in the North against Christianity in the South, and I think you will find this discussed in several articles in the Southern Review. It is certain that the most energetic propagandists against slavery and the South were Northern preachers. I believe but for them Abolition would never have made the headway it did. They were certainly most bitter against the South, and much of their bitterness grew out of the division in our church in 1844, with the sub- sequent lawsuit over a division of the community funds of the church. You know how lawsuits tend to create 42 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY feuds. It is also certain that the preachers overrode the politicians after the surrender and were a most im- portant factor in the horrible Reconstruction acts. Did it ever occur to you that much of the hatred spewed on Chief Justice Taney (for the Dred Scott decision) or- iginated in the fact that HE wrote the decision in the Methodist Property Case? "I would like to have you investigate this whole matter and see if it does not deserve more than one paragraph in your Lincoln. It will be the hardest chap- ter for you to write, because you, being a Northern Methodist, will have to divest your mind of the preju- dices of two generations and more." This epistle closed with the following curious in- cident about the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin :" "After the war Harriet Beecher Stowe moved to Lake City, Fla., and built a beautiful home. She gave receptions to which she invited the white people along with the negroes and some Indians. Naturally this was very obnoxious to the white people, and none of them at- tended her receptions. After a while Mrs. Stowe be- gan to miss her silverware, her bed linen, and other household goods, and discovering that the negroes had stolen it she became what is popularly called down here a 'nigger hater' of the most malignant type and told some of her neighbors : 'If I had lived among the South- ern people before the war I would never have written 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' " The next installment will conclude this interesting correspondence, for just after the receipt of the above letter Beveridge replied on April 13, and then was stricken and died in a few days. 43 ARTICLE V. IN MY LETTER of April 11, I informed the Senator that I was mailing him a number of documents, books, pamphlets and papers covering various phases of Southern history which would be an aid to him in his study of conditions in the South preceding the War. Continuing the letter says : "I am enclosing a list of Northern men, all eminent preachers, who left the North and came to the South after the Plan of Separation in the Methodist Church was adopted (in 1844). These men figured largely in the history of American Episcopal Methodism and later were outstanding men in Southern Methodism." As a matter of fact, these Northern men actually typed Southern Methodism and were among the most intense Southerners we had. To give the readers of these ar- ticles an idea of the full importance of this fact in our history I insert here a list of some of these great North- ern Methodist preachers who latetf directed the move- ments of Southern Methodism : Joshua Soule, Senior Bishop of the Methodist Church, later Senior Bishop of Southern Methodism, A native of Maine and residing at Lebanon, Ohio, in 1844, when the Separation came. Next to Bishop Asbury, Joshua Soule is the outstanding figure in American Methodism. Thomas Osmond Summers, a native of England, who left the North in 1844 and went with the Southern Church. For many years editor of the official organ of Southern Methodism and author of many tracts 44 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY and books on Methodism. Ephriam Emerson Wiley, a native of Connecticut and cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, president of Emory and Henry College in Virginia for more than half a century; who left the North and went with the South and gave his sons to the Confederate armies. He educated more preachers and bishops, lawyers, doctors and public men than any other educator in the South of his generation. C. K. Marshall, who founded the city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and was foremost among Mississippi Methodists for many years. William Winans, of Mississippi, born in Pennsyl- vania, who was such a great man that he was too big to be elected Bishop. H. B. Bascom, of New York, who afterwards be- came a Bishop in the Southern Church, and the most eloquent preacher of his day. Jefferson Hamilton, of Massachusetts, whose ministry in Alabama is even now remembered fifty years after his death, and who should have been elected a Bishop. Edward Stevenson, once Missionary Secretary and Assistant Book Agent of the Northern Church. William W. Redman, of Indiana, whose labors were in Missouri. Alex. Martin, of Pennsylvania, who was a member of the First General Conference of Southern Methodism which met in 1846. Juba Estabrook, born in Vermont, and went from Ohio to Arkansas. John C. Johnson, born in Pennsylvania, and labor- ed in Arkansas. Chauncey Richard, born in Vermont, and worked in Texas 45 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Edward Love, born in Ohio, and worked in Mis- sissippi. Simon B. Cameron, born in Ohio, and worked in Kentucky and Texas Louis Garrett, born in Pennsylvania, presiding elder of the Nashville District in the Tennessee Con- ference. Ezra Clarke Thornton, born in New York, member of the General Conference of 1854 and often a presiding elder in West Virginia. Benjamin Crouch, born in Delaware, in the General Conference from 1832 to 1854, worked in Kentucky. His son, also a preacher, was killed in the Confederate Army. Benjamin F. Wilson, born in Ohio. John Wesley Hawkins, born in Indiana. Henry Wise Bellman, born in Pennsylvania and worked in Virginia. Henry Bass, born in Connecticut and worked in South Carolina; presiding elder there. Edward Mortimer, born in Philadelphia. Robert T. Nixon, born in Pennsylvania. Charles M. Delano, born in Maine and worked in the Indian Territory. Henry S. Atmore, born in Delaware, came South after the Separation and worked in Virginia. Aaron Moore, born in Ohio and worked in the Louisville Conference. William M. Curtiss, born in New York and work- ed in Mississippi, delegate to the General Conference in 1832 ; Agent at New Orleans. Silas Lee, born in New York, worked in the Louis- ville Conference. John W. Kinney, born in Ohio, pioneer in Texas. 46 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Daniel Carl, born in New York, worked in Texas. Samuel Davies Baldwin, born in Ohio, was one of the greatest men in the Tennessee Conference. David Kinnear, born in Pennsylvania, worked in Louisiana. Thomas Berthlof, born in New York, worked in the Indian Mission Conference. M. R. Anthony, born in Ohio and worked in Mis- souri. David Stanford, born in Illinois. Peter James, born in Pennsylvania, worked in Mis- sissippi. Elisha Callaway, born in Delaware, and worked in Mississippi. John R. Hall, born in Philadelphia and a member of the Louisville Convention that set up the Southern Church; also of General Conferences of 1846, 1850. Samuel Dunwody, born in Pennsylvania and one of the giants of 1844 ; worked in South Carolina. This list is by no means exhaustive; but I think it is sufficiently long to be most impressive. It must not forgotten that the Abolition Movement and the poli- tical issues were sufficiently strong among Northern Methodist preachers in 1844 to even then adumbrate the coming of the Civil War ; and that these strong men, all born in the North, and some of them the greatest men of their day, should leave the North, their ain countrie, and come down where the hated and brutal slave owner lived, and begin life all over again among such a besotted people, is not without its eternal signifi- cance. There is no more striking fact in our history than the coming of these Methodist preachers, led by their great Yankee senior Bishop, to the South, be- 47 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY cause a great wrong had been done this section by the North in an illegal act deposing a Bishop who was as pure and good a man as ever lived. Further paragraphs in my letter analyse the sec- tion or page of the Lincoln devoted to the Separation in 1844 in the Methodist Church. This has already been sufficiently gone into in other letters of mine giver in this series. Had Beveridge lived I am confident he would have rewritten that part of his book so as to make it accurate. As it now stands it is full of grave mis-statements of fact. The letter closed with this brief reference to the source material on the capture of Jefferson Davis: "In the authoritative life of Jefferson Davis, writ- ten by his wife, I find a chapter of a score or more pages written by Mr. Davis himself, giving the account of his capture. He refers to the narrative of Gen. John H. Reagan and others of his entourage, including that of his negro servant, to support his own state- ments. I had supposed that you had read this book and were familiar with all the facts regarding Mr. Davis' capture/' On April 12 I wrote Beveridge suggesting a new line of investigation for him, one that has been sadly neglected by our historians. Here it is : "I wonder if you have studied the influence of French colonies in the South on the development of Southern thought and civilization. You know the whole Southern rim of our country is dotted with French settlements, beginning at Virginia and extending into Texas. Both of the Carolinas have their Beauforts, and the first French settlement in this country was at Biloxi, Miss. Then the San Domingo negroes were freed and rose up and massacred the white people, the refugees that got away came to Mobile and proceeded 48 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY up the Alabama river, where they settled. After Na- polon met his Waterloo, some of his marshals and gen- erals and their soldiers and families came to Alabama and formed a large colony on the Alabama river where the San Domingo settlers had taken root. From that stock have come many of the foremost people in the South. "Stanford White, whom Harry K. Thaw killed, was wont to pay an annual pilgrimage to Alabama to study Gaineswood, which he said was 'the finest country home in the world/ designed and built by one of Napoleon's engineers. White also said that the portico of the State Capitol at Montgomery, neath which Mr. Davis took the oath of office, was 'the most perfect example of Greek architecture' he ever saw. He sketched it many times and would linger in its shadow lovingly for days. I do not know who designed that portico but think it was one of Napoleon's Frenchies." I break into this letter here to remark that a study of the architecture of the South from Colonial times to the Civil War is one of the neglected fields of historic survey. It will show that in palatial homes and in pub- lic buildings as well as in college groups, the South was so far ahead of any other section of America as to lead one to believe that most of the culture of the na- tion was to be found in this section. Northern his- torians have over and over again said of us that we were a crude, rude people without education or cul- ture, when the reverse is true. John P. Coleman, one of the older newspapermen of New Orleans, has recently written a series of articles on the old homes of Louisiana and also some of the public buildings; and in them has shown that the Galliers, pere et fils, who designed and built many of these homes, were the foremost architects in America. No city and no state in America is so rich 49 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY in really beautiful and enormously costly homes as New Orleans and Louisiana ; and not far behind them are some of the other States of the South. Who that has stood in front of the City Hall in New Orleans and studied that magnificent Greek temple designed by one of the Galliers has not thrilled' at its exquisite beauty. My letter then makes a reference to Louisiana and the French settlements up the Mississippi river and the posts interior in Louisiana and Texas, and then goes on : "One of the professors of Tulane University a year or two ago wrote a namazingly interesting book on the French in the Mississippi Valley and even traced the French influence to the settlements in Tennessee, with their forts at Nashville, and showed how it later in- fluenced Southern thought. "It has occurred to me that your background, so far as the South is concerned, will not be complete unless you take into consideration the religious phasis and the French phasis, and probably some others that I may yet have the boldness to bring to your attention. "Consider the settlements on the Alabama river. It was but a day's journey from those settlements in Marengo county at Demopolis and Hohen — Linden and other towns you will find on the map, to Montgomery and other black belt counties where slaves were the thickest and whence came Yancey and other firebrands of the Confederacy. Did the French refugees from San Domingo influence Yancey's mind and the minds of the more conservative English and Scotch people of Ala- bama and Mississippi with whom they came in con- tact? Did that connexion and the whole French Catho- lic mind have any influence on the Constitutional ques- tion of a strong National government? "I haven't studied these questions because I haven't had the time or access to the books. They should be 50 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY studied if one is to get an accurate picture of Southern life and manners before the war." Senator Beveridge's last letter to me, written from Indianapolis, April 13, was dictated the day before he was stricken with heart disease, which soon carried him off. It follows: "Dear Mr. Barbee: "Thank you no end for the list of Southern gen- erals who were born and brought up, and, I assume, educated in the North. Would it be too much trouble for you to find out and let me know how long they lived in the North, how old they were when they went South, and of what Northern college they were graduates? You will readily see how important this is — or I am wondering if you really do realize the importance of it? "To this day, I find that some of our most ac- complished and broadminded men in the North who were officers in the Union Army still think poorly of the culture of most Southern men, such is the intense prejudice which still lingers in the hearts rather than in the minds of the most tolerant. Against this comes the fact that so many Northern men fought on the Southern side and the weight of that fact would be greatly increased if the collateral fact is added that they spent the first part of their lives in the North and, especially, that they were graduates of Northern col- leges and universities. "Of course, there is no hurry about this because, as I have told you, that phase of my work will not be reached until I take up Volume III, which will be two or three years at the earliest. Nevertheless, I have a rule that even if I am not to use certain material for a long time, I better get it while it is available. So, if you will get for me all you can now, I shall, when the time 51 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF HUNOtS AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY comes, if necessary, write to the archivists of the South- ern States as you suggest. "Thank you so much for sending me the copies of the North Carolina Reviews and especially the source book. 'Old Days at Chapel Hill.' That is the kind of material I am after. What trustworthy persons saw and heard is practically the only data that can be made use of. "I repeat, that the refutation of what Horton says is the 'falsehood' about Davis's escape in woman's clothes, is of the utmost importance. I am well ac- quainted by correspondence with Dr. Archibald Henderson, and hope he will be able to get the source material on this point. (I had written Beveridge that I was applying to Dr. Henderson, who is such a well in- formed historian and scholar, for all the source ma- terial on this point). Since that story has become so imbedded in the Northern mind and in 'history' you will see that the denial of it must be by first-hand and ab- solutely overwhelming testimony. I shall, of course, go over with minute care all the material of which you make mention, when the time comes. "There can be no doubt that the inflammatory talk of Northern preachers did much to bring about the catastrophe; if I have not made that plain. I shall try to do so. In strict confidence. Professor — of — (within ten years he will be the head of American historical scholarship) tells me that when one gets down to bed rock, it must be admitted that these very men brought on the war. "The trouble with the whole thing is that I must condense — obviously, I cannot write an encyclopedia. The material already at hand which nobody has seen fit to touch — although it is original and source material — is so very great that my chief problem is to get it 52 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY within some reasonable limit. "Yes, indeed, dear Mr. Barbee, I should like no end for you to write me a statement of this particular phase, especially that concerning our Church (I also, am a Methodist, you know), but pray state the original auth- ority for everything you say, volume, page and date. "That's an immense story about Mrs. Stowe, and, while it comes after our period, it will be of first im- portance to my friend, and in some sense my protege, Mr. Claude Bowers of the New York World, who is now at work on a book on the Reconstruction period. Shall I put him in touch with you? "Thank you again and believe me with every good wish, "Faithfully, ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE." To this treasured letter I replied several days later, but my letter covers ground already gone over 1 in this correspondence, so I will make no quotations from it I hope that those who have followed these letters have not lost sight of their purpose, and that the ter- rible admissions on the part of Senator Beveridge will sink deep into the hearts of Southern people. Lincoln was no demi-god, but a human being of very coarse fibre, with a great brain and with many ugly spots in his character. His ambition and his vanity were no less causes of the war than the militant hatred of the Northern parsons against the South. Northern his- torians are beginning to dig into the facts and as they dig they are finding out what a noble people lived in the South before the War, and how cruelly and merci- lessly they were treated by Lincoln and his cohorts. If Beveridge had lived to complete his history I am confident he would have played fair with the South, and that his Life of Lincoln would have done much to 53 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY destroy the Lincoln myth. There are others, however, who are digging in the mine which he explored, and to these we look to tell the truth about our people. I found that wherever I turned for help for Bev- eridge our leading historians and scholars did not trust any Northern man to write a fair history of the War, and few of them would give me any help for him. All of them offered me help if I wished to use the material myself. Should we not begin to shed this armor plate of distrust and assist these Northern men who show a disposition to write a truthful history? One of the most amazing things I have encountered is the ignorance of our own people of their own history, and the cowardice of many of our newspapers in re- fusing to print anything critical of Lincoln. A genera- tion has grown up among us taught from Northern written histories and as a consequence they do not know the history made by their forebears. This is a shame. It should be corrected. Another astounding thing that has come to my notice is that our people have adopted an air of indif- ference to the name and fame of Jefferson Davis. This crops out in all the letters that have come to me from many sources since this Beveridge series began to be published. I expected Northern men, as they have done, to ask me : "Why do you seek to elevate Davis above Gen. Lee when everybody knows that Davis is not to be compared to Lee in greatness?" But not Southern men. In closing out this series of letters might I not ask in what particular regard Gen. Lee was greater than Jefferson Davis? As a man? As a Christian? As a soldier? As a statesman? As a martyr? Davis won his spurs as soldier before Lee won his. Davis was one of the very few great statesmen of our 54 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY history. Davis organized the Confederacy and kept it going. Davis picked Lee for commander of the armies and freely gave him advice and where there was a conflict of opinion, as to protecting Richmond, for in- stance, who will dare say that Davis was wrong? Was Davis a traitor? No more than Lee. Was Lee loyal after the war? So was Davis. Lee advised his armies to go home and begin the battle of life anew, without hatred or rancor towards their conquerors. Davis told the whole South to do the same thing, after the Confederacy fell. And Davis was our sacrificial martyr. Beveridge had a very high opinion of the charac- ter and statesmanship of Davis. His last speech in the Senate, one of the most poignant orations that ever was delivered in that body, breathing a spirit of peace and brotherly love and love for the Union, captivated Beveridge, as it will any honest mind that reads it. Shall we for whom he suffered so much, the very pangs of hell and all the tortures that a fiendish body of men could heap upon him, think less of Davis than one who was brought up to believe that in the crisis of his life he was a coward and a poltroon? God forbid it. When the real history of the War is written it will be found that the traitors within the Confederacy and the thorns in the flesh of Jefferson Davis had as much, perhaps, to do with the overthrow of the Confederacy as did the armed hordes of the Republican party in the North. 55 THE SEQUEL. T'HERE is a sequel to almost everything in life — so it has occurred to me that the sequel to the Beveridge correspondence, which was published in The Sunday Citizen during the month of May, might prove interest- ing. To my mind the most important thing is the reac- tion of the public to some of the startling truths con- tained in that correspondence. A cultured visitor from Boston who read the first article while a guest at Grove Park Inn, and had the others sent to him at his New England home, wrote me while here that he was a stu- dent of Lincoln's life and age, and wished to know what I meant by the "Lincoln myth." He also asked me this pregnant question : "Why do you seek to elevate Jeff. Davis about Robert E. Lee when everyone knows that the two men are not to be mentioned in the same week." Of course he got the information he wanted, and it was not to his liking, for after an exchange of several let- ters, in which he discovered himself to be as ignorant of the Real Lincoln as he was of the Real Davis, he wrote me: "If you want to fight the war all over again I leave the field to you." As I had not mentioned war nor said one word about the justice of the South's position, nor even inti- mated that the South was not fighting to keep the negroes in slavery, it was a rather sad denouement to an otherwise interesting excursion in history. It demon- strated to me again, what I have long known, that the minds of even cultured Northern people have been so 56 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY poisoned against the South and her noble history by misrepresentations of Northern historians that they are not open to the truth. One of the most brilliant historians in America, who was a lifelong and intimate friend of the late Senator Beveridge, wrote me on June 5: "Times HAVE chang- ed. Beveridge once told me that in thinking back on the things he heard and believed in his boyhood, in a house- hold steeped with prejudice and in a community so poisoned, he shuddered and was ashamed. ,, I might state by way of parenthesis that I am now engaged in helping this famous man gather material for another history of the South, and that he is even fairer and more eager to get the truth, if that is possible, than Beveridge showed himself to be. Of course it was to be expected that Northern peo- ple, having a jaundiced view of the history made by the South, would be shocked and amazed at the revelations contained in that correspondence but what was more amazing and shocking to this writer was that any in- telligent informed Southern person should be so ig- norant of the history made by his fore-fathers as my letter bag shows some to be. But if you stop to think of this for a moment, why should any of us be shocked by this statement of affairs? Who writes our history? Whence come the text books which we studied and which our children now study? There is the answer. If you ask the average Southerner who started the great sectional war, he will state that Jefferson Davis did when he ordered Beauregard to fire on Fort Sumter . There never was a more atrocious lie told on any people. It just equals the lie that the South was fighting to preserve slavery. Let us take a lesson in history. Before Lincoln was even inaugurated president we 57 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY see him writing this confidential letter, which will be found in Sheppard's Life of Lincoln, a Northern pub- lication : "Please present my compliments to Gen. Scott (commander of the United States army) and tell him confidentially to be prepared to hold or retake the forts as the case may require after my inauguration.'' Gideon Welles, Lincoln's secretary of navy, in his diary states : "There was not a man in the Cabinet that did not know that an attempt to reinforce Sumter would be the first blow of the war." And Secretary Seward, the most malignant man after Stanton in the Cabinet, wrote : "Even preparation to reinforce will' precipitate war.'* Every man in Lincoln's cabinet, save two, opposed the sending of worships to Charleston, for they knew that meant war. Ships were fitted out, armed and dispatched to Fort Sumter by Lincoln before a single shot was fired by Beauregard, and all the while that was being done the people of Charleston were holding daily friendly intercourse with Major Anderson — a Virginian, by the way — and even sending food and refreshments to the garrison, and Lincoln was assuring Europe the South would not be molested. Horton's History, written by a Northern man in 1867, says of this event : "The first gun of the war was the gun put into that war fleet that sailed against Charleston. The first gun fired at Fort Sumter was the first gun in self-defense. This is the simple fact stripped of all the nonsensicals with which it has been surrounded by Abolitionists." We have seen from Lincoln's own words written before he became president what was in his mind with regard to the South. Now we shall see from his own 58 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY words what he thought of who precipitated the war. Every student of Lincoln's life knows that one of his most intimate friends was Joseph Medill, founder and editor of the Chicago Tribune. In TarbelPs Life of Lincoln, Vol. II. Page 144, is found this statement at- tributed to Joseph Medill : "In 1864 when the call for extra troops came Chi- cago revolted. Chicago had sent 22,000 and was drain- ed. There were no young men to go, no aliens, except what were already bought. The citizens held a mass meeting and appointed three men of whom I (Medill) was one, to go to Washington and ask Stanton to give Cook county a new enrollment. He refused. Then we went to President Lincoln. T cannot do it,' said Lincoln, 'but I will go with you to Stanton and hear the argu- ments on both sides/ "So we went over to the war department together. Stanton and General Frye were there and they both contended that the quota should not be changed. The argument went on for some time, and was finally re- ferred to Lincoln, who had been silently listening. When appealed to, Lincoln turned to us with a black and frowning face : 'Gentlemen' he said, with a voice full of bitterness,' after Boston, Chicago has been the chief in- strument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest opposed the South as New England opposed the South. It is you, Medill, who is largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until you had it. / have given it ta you. What you have asked for you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for more men, which I have made to carry on the war you demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Go home and raise your 6,000 men.'* This is not quoted in any other spirit than the truth 59 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY of history, and simply to show that even so-called stu- dents of the life and age of Lincoln do not know what Northern historians have written about the war presi- dent. You find in this statement the genesis of the bit- ter, malignant hatred of the South that even to this day types the editorial policy of the Chicago Tribune. Beveridge's death was certainly a terrible loss to the South. If he had lived and our correspondence had continued, as it seemed destined to do, it was my inten- tion to track with him the whole course of Southern his- tory through the period of which he was treating. I intended showing him how little the Negro had to do with the war, when only 200,000 slave owners fought in the Southern armies and 315,000 slaveholders fought in the Northern armies. That Lincoln never freed a slave in the slave states that remained in the Union but that it was a Southern man, John Brooks Henderson of Missouri who offered the amendment to the Constitution that freed all of the negroes on American soil. That Gen. Grant, who commanded the Union Armies, was a slaveholder who never freed his slaves, and Gen. Lee who commanded the Southern armies, freed his slaves, before there was any secession and that Lincoln himself was indifferent to the future of the African race. Gen. Don Piatt, one of the big men in the Union army, in 1887 published a book entitled : "Men Who Saved the Union," in which occurs the following state- ment: "I found that Mr. Lincoln could no more feel sympathy for that wretched race than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed. Descended from the poor whites of the South, he inherited the con- tempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negro." I am told that Dr. F. A. Sondley of Asheville has in his library a book of historic value in which it is stat- 60 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY ed that after the war had opened Grant, in bidding a friend who was leaving St. Louis to join the Confed- eracy goodbye, said: "I will be joining you in a few weeks." This fact if true, — and why should it be doubt- ed? — is one of those that Beveridge characterized in his letters to me as "stupendous. " He never could get over the excitement caused by the growing knowledge that the North was not in favor of the war — that probably not more than one-third of the people of the North at the outset and for the first two years of the war supported Lincoln in the war — and that so many, many Northern men of importance sided with the South in the bloody conflict. In one of the Beveridge articles I gave a list of the important Northern Methodist preachers who came with the Southern church after the Separation in 1844, and as history shows actually typed Southern Metho- dism. I referred to a list of Northern men who held high command in the Confederate armies. Here is a place to introduce that list, which is by no means com- plete and does not include any man below the rank of brigadier general : 61 MAJOR GENERALS John C. Pemberton, born in Philadelphia, appoint- ed from Virginia. Samuel G. French, born in New Jersey, appointed from Mississippi. Martin L. Smith, born in New York city, appoint- ed from FTorida. Franklin Gardner, born in New York, appointed from Louisiana. Bushrod R. Johnson, born in Ohio, appointed from Tennessee. Lunsford L. Lomax, born in Newport R. I., ap- pointed from Virginia. BRIGADIER GENERALS Samuel Cooper, born in Hackensack, N. J., ap- pointed from Virginia. James M. Withers, born in Wisconsin, appointed from Alabama. Daniel Ruggles, born in Massachusetts, appointed from Virginia. Roswell S. Ripley, born in Ohio, appointed from South Carolina. Albert Pike, born in Boston, Massachusetts, ap- pointed from Arkansas. Albert G. Blanchard, born in Massachusetts, ap- 62 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY pointed from Louisiana. Johnson K. Duncan, born at York, Pennsylvania, ap- pointed from Louisiana. Danville Leadbetter, born in Maine, appointed from Alabama. Edward A. Perry, born in Massachusetts, appoint- ed from Florida. William Steele, born at Albany, New York, ap- pointed from Texas. Daniel M. Frost, born in New York, appointed from Mississippi. Archibald Gracie, Jr., born in New York, appoint- ed from Alabama. Francis A. Sharp, born in Indiana, appointed from Florida. Alto F. Strabl, born in Ohio, appointed from Ten- nessee. Lawrence S. Ross, born in Iowa, appointed from Texas. Daniel H. Reynolds, born in Ohio, appointed from Arkansas. Walter H. Stevens, born in New York, appointed from Texas. Josiah Gorgas, born in Pennsylvania, appointed from Alabama. This list does not include all of the Northern men who held high command in the Southern armies. A list of those who held the ranks of colonel, major, cap- tain, and lieutenant would fill several columns of this newspaper, and multiplied thousands of Northern men fought as private soldiers in the Southern armies. 63 AN EXCURSION IN SOUTHERN HISTORY Is it not high time that our own Southern historians were gathering materials from all sources and writing a correct history of the South? It should not be a boastful history but a plain, unvarnished tale of the splendid record the South has made in art, in literature, in science, in war and in statesmanship. Such a his- tory for instance, will revive the names of Matthew Fontaine Maury and Raphael Semmes, the two fore- most men the American navy has produced, not one word about either appears in any standard history. Maury was probably the foremost scientist this coun- try has produced, so recognized in Europe, but because he was a Southern man and sided with the South, he is obliterated from history. Such a history will place Poe and Timrod and Paul Hamilton Hayne and Lanier in their rightful place as the foremost poets America has produced. It will tell you among many other things that Augustin Daly. America's greatest playwright, was a Tar Heel ; that the first college founded in Amer- ica was in Virginia, the first state university was in North Carolina, the first colleges devoted to the educa- tion of women in the world at Macon, Georgia, and Athens, Alabama, and the first astronomical observa- tory in America at Chapel Hill. Such a history will teach you that the South was always for Union, and that the War of Secession was no Civil War but a War of Freedom, the South emptying her veins in a futile ef- fort to protect liberty on this continent. Beveridge was learning this. Other Northern his- torians will take up the pen he laid down, and carry on where he left off. We of the South have every right to give them all the help we can, to the end that our own glory may be uncovered and shown to be the glory of the whole American people. THE END 64