ernment can be founded, and, by reestablishing the system of governments in and between these States which our fathers hoped would be indestructible, "insure domestic tranquillity" and "secure the blessings of liberty" to themselves and their posterity.

The secondary object of the work-secondary only as a logical conclusion-is to demonstrate beyond a possibility of doubt that the cause of the South was the cause of Constitutional government, the cause of government regulated by law, and the cause of honesty and fidelity in public servants. No nobler cause did ever man fight

for!

Time is healing the wounds of the past; the generation of the war period is passing away and giving place to new men, to whom the passions of that period are becoming a tradition; and in a few more years Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, and Stonewall Jackson and Winfield S. Hancock will be thought of, North and South, with no more passion than that excited in our bosoms by the mention of Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, or George Washington and Earl Cornwallis. Each one of these men may possibly appear to the future student as a product an inevitable result of forces, hereditary and contemporaneous, of which he was not the creator. And, tracing those forces, as best he may, to their germs, possibly he may find ignorance and unenlightened selfishness to have been among the most fertile of those from which sprang the forces to which he may attribute any deviations from his standard of right.

The author regrets the necessity forced on him by the object he had in view of removing the veil behind which have stood for generations the revered figures of the "fathers," and of exhibiting some of them to the close inspection which never fails to discover in them "like

passions with" ourselves. He trusts, however, that, since truth can be no respecter of persons, he may be pardoned for this offense.

He regrets also a lack of logical consistency in the chapters dealing with the causes of the Revolutionary war and the motives of the principal actors in it. This was unavoidable, because no thoroughly truthful and exhaustive history of that war has ever been written; "and," as ex-President John Adams wrote, January 3, 1817, to the editor of Niles's Register, "nothing but misrepresentations, or partial accounts of it, ever will be recovered."-Niles's Register, January 18, 1817.

In conclusion, it may be well to inform the reader that these chapters were written during the year 1897, and that most of the notes have been suggested by subsequent reading and reflection; and that even some of the chapters have been partially rewritten, chiefly with a view to condensation.

Turkey, N. C., November, 1898.

A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.

It is not easy for a man to say much about himself without indulging somewhat in self-laudation; hence this sketch shall be short. It may be considered a piece of vanity that I write at all; but I do so solely to gratify the natural desire we all have to know something of the author of a book which claims our attention.

I was born October 10, 1831, on a farm in Duplin County, North Carolina. My great-great grandfather, on my father's side, was an Irishman who came to North Carolina about the middle of the eighteenth century. By intermarriages his blood in my veins is mingled with that of the Whitfields, Bryans. Outlaws and Sloans.

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All these families were Whigs during the Revolutionary war; and they were advocates of what was called "strong government" in 1788-'89. Most of them, however, if not all, gradually drifted toward Jefferson's exposition of the powers of the Federal Government; and my father, Alexander Outlaw Grady, became a disciple of John C. Calhoun in 1832-233, after hearing that statesman defend his position before the General Assembly of North Carolina, of which my father was a member. In 1860-'61 he was a secessionist.

My boyhood days were spent on the farm, where I worked with the slaves during nine months of each year, and attended a three-months school in the winter. When I was about eighteen years of age I began to attend high schools, and after studying four years at the University of North Carolina I received the degree of A. B. in 1857.

I then taught for two years in Grove Academy, Ke

nansville, N. C., associated with Rev. James M. Sprunt, the gentleman who prepared me for entrance into the University. At the end of this period I was elected Professor of Mathematics and the Natural Sciences in Austin College, then located in Huntsville, Texas. I taught there till the war caused the college to suspend operations. About that time I had what my physician called the typhoid fever, which disabled me for active work till the early months of 1862. Then I joined a cavalry company which was organizing for the Confederate military service, which became Company K in the Twenty-fifth Regiment. We were soon dismounted, however, by the order of General Hindman, and served ever afterwards as infantry. At Arkansas Post, January 11, 1863, the whole command to which I was attached was captured, and we were all sent to Camp Butler, near Springfield, Illinois, where we were imprisoned for about three months. The rigors of winter in that latitude, against which our thin Southern clothing afforded us insufficient protection, prostrated nearly all of us with diseases; but in a short time a supply of blankets and woolen clothing came to us from some ladies of Missouri and Arkansas, and improved our condition very much.

Prison life was rather monotonous; but there was occasionally a little stir among us produced by an exhibition of authority by a small fellow called Colonel Lynch, who was our master. On one occasion he had us all rushed out of the barracks, and into line, and while one set of his underlings were searching our sleeping places— for "spoons," perhaps another set were searching our persons for money. On another occasion a detail of us, including myself, were ordered out by this little tyrant to shovel snow out of his way-not out of ours. And when we got on the cars to leave the place, he sent men

through each coach with orders to rob us of everything we had except what we had on our backs and one blanket apiece.

Exchanged about the middle of April, I was sent to General Bragg's army at Tullahoma, Tenn., in which I served till the close of the war in Granbury's Brigade, Cleburne's Division, Hardee's Corps, participating in all the skirmishes and battles (except at Nashville and at Bentonville) in which my Brigade was engaged. I was twice wounded-in my face and through my right hand-in the charge on the enemy's main line of breastworks, November 30, 1864, at Franklin, Tenn., and not many yards from where Cleburne and Granbury fell. I had been in what appeared to be more dangerous places, as at Chickamauga, September 19 and 20, 1863; at Missionary Ridge, where Cleburne's Division defeated Sherman's flanking column while Bragg's main army was being routed by Grant, November 25, 1863; at Ringgold, where Cleburne's Division repelled the repeated assaults of the troops of Sherman and Hooker from daylight till 2 o'clock in the evening, thus enabling the wagons, artillery, etc., of our army to get out of the reach of these invaders, November 27, 1863; at New Hope church, where Granbury's Brigade, assisted by one of General Govan's Arkansas regiments, defeated and drove off the ground Howard's Fourth Army Corps, which was attempting to flank Jo. Johnston on his right, May 27, 1864; at Atlanta, where a prolonged seige exposed us to danger day and night, etc., etc. But I had never received a scratch before.

After Hood's disastrous campaign in Tennessee we went to the northern part of Mississippi, from there by railway to Mobile, from there by water and railroad to Montgomery, and from there, partly on foot and partly on the few pieces of railroad which Sherman's vandals