What territory, indeed, has ever been added without Southern brains and Southern valor? Of George Rogers Clark's great conquest (1779), we have already spoken. The purchase of Louisiana by President Jefferson (1803) more than doubled the area of the Union. The same president's sending Lewis and Clark to explore the mouth of the Columbia river led later to the acquisition of Oregon territory. Monroe bought Florida, and thus greatly extended the national domain.

It is a well-known principle of human nature that men value what they pay for, that they appreciate what they suffer for. So the South loved the Union. It was her Union, the Union of her fathers, freed partly by the heroism of her fathers, enlarged and made glorious with the aid of Southern brawn and bravery. That she should love this Union was natural; that she did love it is undeniable. How can she ever leave it? How can she ever fire upon the flag which her Washington first flung to the breeze, and which her Key sang in immortal measures? The answer is written in later pages of this volume. In self-defense, she drew the sword against her Northern sisters. Against intolerable grievances, she protested long and fruitlessly, and in 1861 fought for the constitution, under the constitution, and against those who had violated the solemn guaranties of that constitution.

""Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

CHAPTER II

THE HOMES THAT MADE HEROES

I

"Truth Is Mighty and Will Prevail"

N the foregoing chapter, we showed how our fathers resisted tyrants, wrote declarations, maintained them on the field of battle, and drafted constitutions. We now turn to more quiet scenes. In this chapter, we shall see them on the old plantation, and in the family circle. We shall watch them in their relations to the slaves. We shall refute the slurs heaped upon them up to the present moment by some ill-informed and by some malicious people. We shall learn why so many of our men became superb cavalrymen both in the Revolution and in the War between the States. We shall see the father in the family circle, with his sons around him, giving them ideals of honor that made Southern chivalry a phrase of glory among the nations.

Such is the theme of this chapter. Phases of social life not bearing upon these points, we shall leave to the magazine writer and the novelist.

This old Southern civilization has never been understood, but has been misrepresented, maligned, and travestied. The stage has caricatured it. Poets have prostituted their gifts to vilify it. The muse of history has been degraded from

her high office and made the mouthpiece of the traducer and the slanderer. Fiction has lent her artful and seductive aid, and books, unfair and disingenuous if not purposely malicious, have made the Southern planter's name a byword and a hissing among the nations; while children in schools where the Bible was lying upon the table as the standard of life and of morals have been taught, by precept and by pictures, that a planter was a man whose daily business was to maltreat and lash the negro.

Those misrepresentations have been sown broadcast, and borne upon the winds of heaven. The books that contain them are still found by thousands in private and public libraries wherever steam can carry them, and have been read as gospel truth by men, women, and children among all civilized nations. Oratory could not catch them. Statesmanship could not refute them. They went into the home of the mechanic, the merchant, the lawyer, the scholar, in the Northern and Western states, and in Europe, and taught them to hate and despise the Southern people; and their specious statements cut the South off from the sympathy of all mankind.

II

The South's History Written By Her Enemies

The South used to produce statesmen rather than writers. Nothing, for instance, is more remarkable than the vast array of legal talent shown by all the older generations of

*This refers to a text-book long used in certain schools; it defines a planter and illusstrates by a picture of a man lashing a slave.

Virginia. The bar of Richmond was formerly made up almost exclusively of men that would have graced the Supreme Court of the United States or adorned the king's High Court of Justice.

Nearly every boy of promise wished to be a lawyer. Only thus could he hope for political honors; and political preferment was the goal of nearly every able man's ambition. If success came at the bar, it led him into prominence as a politician. Politics was both the glory and the bane of our civilization.

Few men had time for writing books. While Southern orators and jurists were thrilling listening senates, their enemies were writing books to prejudice the world against Southern institutions.

In this matter the enemies of the South got fifty years' start of her. They got the ear of the North and of all Europe, and did her an incalculable injury. The most that she can do now is to write the true story of her beautiful old civilization in essay, in fiction, in history, and in poetry, so that her own children and all others that care to do so can read it and tell it to those that are willing to listen.

Though most of her ablest men went into politics, the South had some very gifted writers. Her facilities for publication, however, have always been limited, and the works of her writers have had comparatively little circulation. Moreover, the ear of the North was poisoned, and Southern books defending the South were but little heeded. Such men as Thomas R. Dew, N. Beverley Tucker, and Abel P.Upshur,