Author: William Garrett

Publisher:

Published: 2017-09-02

Total Pages: 438

ISBN-13: 9781976052965

It is not for the victor in the contest to write the story of the defeated or to pass upon the views and motives that controlled their action. With particular force does this apply to the civil war in America of 1861-1865. How can the Northern writer tell the story impartially? Generations of teaching by the fathers of the government, who had formed and administered the supreme law, had imbued the people of the South with firmly fixed views that were not to be shaken by newly grown theories of a section which by intrinsic changes had become hostile to much of what had been taught by the framers of the original constitution of the United States. The leaders of the Southern people represented the strength of the beliefs handed down by the fathers of the government, and they could not see unmoved the changes sought to be engrafted upon a constitution they had so long held sacred. The high principles that actuated them, the sincerity of their beliefs, and their unfaltering devotion to the Constitution as they understood it-and "they did understand it-were neither known nor appreciated by those who so bitterly opposed them. It is for this reason that the time has not yet come when a history of the war between the States can be written from the victor's viewpoint that will be just, or that can show the motives by which the people of the South were dominated. For the modern reader to really understand this time in history, an attempt must be made to understand where the Southern point of view was coming from. This book quite ably states it.