r the following heads: 1. True. 2. Probable. 3. Wanting
confirmation. 4. Lies, and be careful in subsequent papers to
correct all errors in preceding ones."

Allow me to suggest that your story might, under Mr. Jefferson's
category, be placed under "2." Perhaps you went to see "The Birth
of a Nation" before you wrote it. It has been my experience that my
acquaintances among the F.F.V.'s have been far more interested in
whether Boston or Brooklyn would win the pennant than in discussing
the Civil War. By the young men of the South the War was forgotten
long ago.

This letter has caused me to wonder whether the frequency with which my
companion and I heard the Civil War discussed, may not, perhaps, have
been due, at least in part, to our own inquiries, resulting from the
consuming interest that we had in hearing of the War from those who
lived where it was fought.

Yet, after all, it seems to me most natural that the South should
remember, while the North forgets. Not all Northerners were in the war.
But all Southerners were; if a boy was big enough to carry a gun, he
went. The North almost completely escaped invasion, and upon one
occasion when a southern army did march through northern territory, the
conduct of the invading troops toward the civilian population (the false
Barbara Frietchie legend to the contrary notwithstanding) was so
exemplary as to set a record which is probably unequaled in history.[2]
The South, upon the other hand, was constantly under invasion, and the
record of destruction wrought by northern armies in the valley of the
Shenandoah, on the March to the Sea, and in some other instances, is
writ in poverty and mourning unto this day.

[2] See chapter on Colonel Taylor and General Lee.

Thus, except politically, the North now feels not the least effect from
the war. But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of
conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined--as
instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax
returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since
the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.

So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the
northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be
studied in school under the heading "United States History," it has not,
in southern eyes, become altogether "book