both honest, each believing the other hopelessly wrong, but absolutely
sincere.

[Note: Of many consentient utterances I select this one by a prominent
Southerner:

"The Confederate soldiers did not go to war to perpetuate slavery. Most
of them never owned a slave, and our hero, Gen. ROBERT E. LEE, said that
if he owned every one of the slaves in the South he would give them for
the preservation of the Union. It was not for the slaves they fought,
but for principle, for their homes and native land."--T. F. GOODE,
Confederate Banquet, January 19, 1893.]

Scant allusion has been made in this paper to the subject of slavery,
which bulks so large in almost every study of the war. A similar
scantiness of allusion to slavery is noticeable in the Memorial volume,
to which I have already referred; a volume which was prepared, not to
produce an impression on the Northern mind, but to indulge a natural
desire to honor the fallen soldiers of the Confederacy; a book written
by friends for friends. The rights of the State and the defence of the
country are mentioned at every turn; "the peculiar institution" is
merely touched on here and there, except in one passage in which a
Virginian speaker maintains that as a matter of dollars and cents it
would be better for Virginia to give up her slaves than to set up a
separate government, with all the cost of a standing army which the
conservation of slavery would make necessary. This silence, which might
be misunderstood, is plain enough to a Southern man. Slavery was simply
a test case, and except as a test case it is too complicated a question
to be dealt with at the close of a paper which is already too long.
Except as a test case it is impossible to speak of the Southern view of
the institution, for we were not all of the same mind.

[Note: "When, within our memory, some flippant Senator [Hammond] wished
to taunt the people of this country by calling them 'the mudsills of
society,' he paid them ignorantly a true praise; for good men are as the
green plain of the earth is, as the rocks and the beds of the rivers
are, the foundation and flooring and sills of the State."--R. W.
EMERSON, Atlantic Monthly, January, 1892, p. 33.

In an oration delivered before the United Confederate Veterans, June 14,
1904, RANDOLPH HARRISON McKIM, a former pupil of mine and a cousin of my
college mates mentioned on page 16, says: "The political head of the
Confederacy entered upon the war, foreseeing