ho cherished animosities which no philosophy born of the
emotions could preach down, and before which even those ministers of red
havoc that had invaded their homes were content to lower their weapons and
view in forbearance a virtue.

It cannot be denied that while the widespread diffusion of the war burden
and general travail had a tendency to equalize the feeling of the masses,
and awaken a desire to return to the arts of peace, that in not uncommon
instances inhumanities had been practised, and bloody reprisals sought,
whose issues were wounds, for which the angel of peace brought no healing
on his wings. Those more dignified passions which, in the outset of
hostilities, had swayed the common breast in the rush to arms, where they
had not become wholly extinct in a desire for reunion and renewed
fraternity, as we have shown, had thus degenerated into the more human
instincts of individual hate and revenge which, if sometimes less
blameworthy, are far more implacable. Those who cherished the latter,
however, were discounted in all their efforts to discourage peace
proposals by the feeling of distrust which their former actions had
inspired, and, very soon after the Grant and Sherman dictation of peace
terms, were left to those weaker subterfuges that might not hope for
organized support. Many of this discontented class were domiciled on
Southern soil, and it may be surmised that the genius of desolation that
walked forth to meet them on their homeward passage from Appomattox and
Gainesville inspired them with yet warmer resentments against the authors
of the ignominious defeat under which they suffered.

The war district of the South, in the year of grace which brought about
military amnesty, furnished one of those pictures of "crownless
desolation" in the history of the world's wars for which the art that
decorated St. Peter's with the images of purgatorial griefs could have
possessed no adequate coloring, and in the attempt to portray which
talents and scholarship less consummate than those of the divine Angelo
must have issued in utter failure.

Cities destroyed; towns and villages laid waste; churches, schools, and
public buildings rotting under the hospital plague, or, more fortunate,
sleeping in the ashes of licensed incendiarism; wealthy plantations
stripped of their agricultural paraphernalia, and relegated to the domain
whence they had been lately redeemed by the good offices of the pioneer;
and in room of