agreed, and the
vast majority of the people of the North--before the war. The
abolitionist proper was considered not so much the friend of the negro
as the enemy of society. As the war went on, and the abolitionist saw
the "glory of the Lord" revealed in a way he had never hoped for, he saw
at the same time, or rather ought to have seen, that the order he had
lived to destroy could not have been a system of hellish wrong and
fiendish cruelty; else the prophetic vision of the liberators would have
been fulfilled, and the horrors of San Domingo would have polluted this
fair land. For the negro race does not deserve undivided praise for its
conduct during the war. Let some small part of the credit be given to
the masters, not all to the finer qualities of their "brothers in
black." The school in which the training was given is closed, and who
wishes to open it? Its methods were old-fashioned and were sadly behind
the times, but the old schoolmasters turned out scholars who, in certain
branches of moral philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates of the
new university.

[Note: A recent historian of the war, PAXSON (The Civil War, p. 248),
says: "Northern revenge in the guise of the preservation of the dearly
won Union was worse for the South than the war."

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, _l. c._, p. 165: "Outrages, and humiliations
worse than outrage, of the period of so-called reconstruction but actual
servile domination."

_L. c._, p. 173: "It may not unfairly be doubted whether a people
prostrate after civil conflict has ever received severer measure than
was dealt out to the so-called reconstructed Confederate States during
the years immediately succeeding the close of strife. That the policy
inspired at the time a feeling of bitter resentment in the South was no
cause for wonder." To me the cause for wonder was and is that a
Virginian of Virginians should have wholly forgotten the bitterness, as
is evinced by the following passage in an oration delivered shortly
after the publication of this article:

"No such peace as our peace ever followed immediately upon such a war as
our war. The exhausted South was completely at the mercy of the vigorous
North, and yet the sound of the last gun had scarcely died away when not
only peace, but peace and goodwill were re-established, and the victors
and the vanquished took up the work of repairing the damages of war and
advancing the common welfare of the whole country, as if the o