Other facts and the impressions of other persons, if we would see the truth. It is written in a spirit of tension and with an extreme object in view. Hyperbole is one of the most common figures of speech employed. The following is perhaps the keynote of the political expressions of the book, speaking of the return of the Confederate soldiers: "The spectacle of this terrible army of the Confederacy, the memory of whose battle cry yet thrills the world, transformed in a month into patient and hopeful workers, has never been parailed in history. Who destroyed this scene of peaceful rehabilitation? Hell has no pit dark enough, and no damnation deep enough for these conspirators when once history has fixed their guilt." Not to mention the very apparent parallel of the army of the Union disbanding into the army of peaceful and patient laborers, though victorious and under the temptation of levying long on a defeated enemy, it is evident even at this point that the author's desire is to fix the guilt and consign to a damnation deeper than to be expected in the next world the authors of the second humiliation of the South. An example of exaggeration is also seen in the allusion to the loss to the South of four billions of dollars in slaves. This is precisely four times the estimate of the careful statistician, Jean de Bloch, and would make every slave, children and old men as well as the able-bodied, worth $1,000. This reveals a mode of argument that makes reply mere tedious correction of mistakes.
It can scarcely be said that the plan of reconstruction proposed by Andrew Johnson, or his manner of carrying it out, was that of Lincoln; neither can it be considered that an expression of Lincoln's in 1858, on the relations of the negroes and the whites, would be a complete statement of his views on the subject in 1865. It must be taken with much allowance for personal race bias that what were called the "black laws" of the first state governments erected by the whites of the South after the war were simply to restrain vagrancy, or that they were modeled upon the laws of Northern states, or that their penalties, some of which were mutilation, were usual; or that such laws, even if modeled on those of the North, were wise or justifiable. Neither can it be taken as a colorless statement that the negroes first drew the color line; nor again that it was a little Yankee woman writing a crude book that caused the war—no war certainly having come except as the Southern whites began hostilities, and the claim being like that of Louis Napoleon that Germany began war because King William refused to see Benedetti.
But it is not in items of history or statistics that the interest of the book lies; though it is worthy of notice that what has been called an expression of the wronged and silent South cannot be taken as an argument because its hyperbole and exaggeration leave it indeterminate just what the author means.
A greater interest lies in the characterization of the Northern people who appeared in the reconstruction of the South. The Northern benefactors and statesmen, as they were wont to con- sider themselves, are here permitted to see how they appeared in Southern eyes. Charles Sumner is alluded to as—apparently owing to the cane of Brooks—"a poor, cracked-brain." In the apprehension of the Rev. John Durham, the ideal character of the story, who evidently voices the feelings of the author. Summer, Thad. Stevens and Ben. Butler were "a triumvirate of physical and mental deformity;" the first being a crack-brained theorist and the second a club-footed misanthrope, while the third, Butler, seems to have been beyond description.
It would perhaps be supposed that the Northern schoolma'ams and benefactors who established education of the negroes and even of the poor whites in the South would be given credit for good intentions. On the contrary, they are merged into one personality, that of Miss Susan Walker, who is described as having a sinister pug nose, and for whom the fate is reserved, at the close, of marrying, at the age of sixty, the villain of the story, Allen McLeod. No philanthropy is accorded to her; she
