proved, "you should not have said such a thing to my
niece. She is from New York."

"Then," returned the unrepentant dentist, "she has heard the truth for
once!"

Doubtless this man was an inheritor of hate, like the descendants of one
uncompromisingly bitter old Southerner whose will, to be seen among the
records of the Hanover County courthouse, in Virginia, bequeaths to his
"children and grandchildren and their descendants throughout all future
generations, the bitter hatred and everlasting malignity of my heart and
soul against the Yankees, including all people north of Mason and
Dixon's line."

CHAPTER XIX

"YOU-ALL" AND OTHER SECTIONAL MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Let us make an honorable retreat.

--AS YOU LIKE IT.

Those who write school histories and wish them adopted by southern
schools have to handle the Civil War with gloves. Such words as "rebel"
and "rebellion" are resented in the South, and the historian must go
softly in discussing slavery, though he may put on the loud pedal in
speaking of State Rights, the fact being that the South not only knows
now, but, as evidenced by the utterances of her leading men, from
Jefferson to Lee, knew long before the war that slavery was a great
curse; whereas, on the question of State Rights, including the
theoretical right to secede from the Union--this being the actual
question over which the South took up arms--there is much to be said on
the southern side. Colonel Robert Bingham, superintendent of the Bingham
School, Asheville, North Carolina, has made an exhaustive study of the
question of secession, and has set forth his findings in several
scholarly and temperately written booklets.

Colonel Bingham proves absolutely, by quotation of their own words,
that the framers of the Constitution regarded that document as a
_compact_ between the several States. He shows that three of the States
(Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island) joined in this compact
_conditionally_, with the clear purpose of resuming their independent
sovereignty as States, should the general government use its power for
the oppression of the States; that up to the time of the Mexican War the
New England States contended for, not against, the right to secede; that
John Quincy Adams went so far as to negotiate with England with a view
to the secession of the New England States, because of Jefferson's
Embargo Act, and moreover that up to 1840 the United States Government
used as a tex