herners; while the _bete
noire_ of the story was General Butler, the Northerner. It would be
futile to expound the reasons of this, patent as they are to everybody;
or to inquire what deductions from the renown of Jackson and Lee, or
what allowances for the position of Butler, a judicial review of the
whole case would proclaim to be equitable. I will only remark here,
that, as far as my observation extended, no one complained of Jackson,
when it transpired that he had been resolutely in favor of refusing all
quarter to Northern soldiers: a severity, not to say barbarism, which,
be it right or wrong in itself, would undoubtedly have appeared to many
atrocious enough, had it been the doctrine of any Northern general, and
beside which the sternest measures of Butler look lax and conciliatory.
In like manner, the terrible treatment of Northern prisoners, and the
most savage act of war in the whole contest, the massacre at Fort
Pillow,[E] seemed hardly to graze that delicate susceptibility of
Southern partisans which was lashed into a white rage by a few words of
printed proclamation from Butler's hand; the facts were either ignored,
or dismissed as of secondary importance in the general conduct of the
war. Of two other prime actors in the contest, President Davis and
President Lincoln, the popular judgment seemed equally arbitrary. Of
course each had his admirers among professed Southern or Northern
adherents: it is not in that aspect that I speak of them for the moment,
but rather as figures in the popular imagination. As such, Davis was
credited with all the qualities of a powerful statesman; while Lincoln
showed as a not ill-meaning, but grotesquely inadequate and misplaced
oddity, a sort of mere accident of mob-favor, and made abundant mirth
for the mirthful: how justly the event has perhaps demonstrated. Among
the Northern generals, I think that the only one who became to some
extent generally popular, though bitterly denounced in adverse quarters,
was Sherman,--not only for the splendor and originality of his practical
achievements, but for a certain incisive and peremptory realism in his
administrative proceedings, which almost marked him with a touch of grim
humor.

I have thus sought to account for the anti-Northern bias in a large
number of my countrymen, by their dislike of the American nation and
polity, arising partly from the remains of soreness left by past
defeat,--by the jealousy of American power, as a pra