or ever expected to own a slave. The South fighting for the money value of the negro! What a cheap and wicked falsehood!
MOTIVES OF ACTION.
Finally, and this deserves a separate paragraph—with respect to the motives of action, we would be glad if Mr. Fiske or any other Northern author would relieve us of the mental confusion resulting from the contemplation of the facts that Robert E. Lee set free all of his slaves long before the Sectional War began, and that U. S. Grant retained his as slaves until they were made free as one of the results of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.*
Soldiers and gentlemen, we accepted in full faith and honesty the arbitrament of the sword. We are to-day all that may be honorably meant by the expression "loyal American citizens." But we are also loyal to the memory of our glorious dead, and the heroic living of the Confederacy, and we will defend them in our poor way from the false and foul aspersions of Northern historians as long as brain can think or tongue and pen can do their office. We desire that our children shall be animated by the same spirit.
Mr. Fiske furthermore teaches our children that, but for the war the South would have reopened the slave trade. He tells, without quotation of authorities, a certain story of slave ships landing their cargoes in the South. Those of us who were men in the later fifties will remember a rumor that about that time a vessel (called The Wanderer, and commanded by a Southern man) brought a cargo of Africans into a Southern river. It was also rumored that one or more ships, owned and commanded by Northern men, were engaged in the same work. The stories may or may not have been true. Granted the truth; the fact that one or more Yankee slave-traders had returned to the sins of their fathers does not prove that 20,000,000 of them were about to do so; nor does the purchase of such
.* "Few, perhaps, know that General Grant was a slave-holder, but the fact is that he had several in the State of Missouri, and these were freed, like those in the South, by the Emancipation Proclamation. 'These slaves,' said Mrs. Grant, 'came to him from my father's family, for I lived in the West when I married the General, who was then a lieutenant in the army.' "
