lished of the current of events as the war clouds gathered and then as the armies marched and joined in the shock of battle.
The Southern Historical Society in 1876 began its invaluable series of annual publications. The first volume was opened with the strong paper of the Hon. R. M. T. Hunter, Senator and Statesman; thorough, calm, vindicating the righteousness of the Southern cause; and it was followed by the no less convincing paper of Commodore Mathew Fontaine Maury, scholar, scientist and Christian gentleman. To these were added the vigorous demonstrations made in the books of Albert Taylor Bledsoe, and Robert L. Dabney and J. L. M. Curry, and others.
Valuable as was this accumulating literature, confident as the people of the Southland felt that in the tribunal of history in all coming years the cause, to which like their forefathers they gave their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, could not fail of an assured and enduring justification; there emerged as the years went by a condition and a necessity which had not been anticipated. With utmost difficulty the schools of the South had been re-established, and seminaries and colleges had been re-opened, in the faithful effort to preserve the intelligence and character of the generation of sons and daughters rising up through the land. It was discovered with a shock of pain and indignation that the great body of the youth of the land were being fed with a literature created by alien authors. Histories, biographies, readers, issued by publishers whose one purpose was to secure the great market now opening in every school district far and wide over the South, were found to be replete with error and misrepresentation. Consciously or unconsciously, the aims of the people of the South, and of their State governments were falsified, and the characters of great and good men were belittled and defamed. The poison of unjust accusation was carried to the minds of all the children of the Southland, and already a generation was growing up with conceptions of the motives of their fathers, and the causes of the war between the sections which were not only mistaken, but altogether dishonorable. The youth of the whole South were being stealthily robbed of an heritage glorious in itself and elevating and ennobling
