and the injustice we had done to him, as well as
to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote:--

"I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in
their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do
is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.

"You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly;
but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health
is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you
must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his
helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised
that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that
the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that
the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that
the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee's
retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth
Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made
a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You
cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this
North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far
worse, than France suffered from Germany's after 1870.

"I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the
later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and
suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds,
shut in by circumstance, I'm always a 'Yankee.'

"We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles
people--at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds--beside the
gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see
what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering
convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast
sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but
unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at
every turn."

After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my
pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me
with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of
disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when
it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first,
but:--

"I d