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 8 Co-operating with these and representing motives common to them all, is a new form of another party, which has existed since sectionalism had its birth; the party which has always labored to convince the world that the North was altogether right and righteous, and the South wholly and wickedly wrong in the sectional strife. This party is to-day the most distinctly defined and the most dangerous to us. Its chief representatives are the historians against whose work we are especially engaged. We are enlisted against an invasion organized and vigorously prosecuted by all of these people. They are actuated by all the motives we have described; but they have two well-defined (and, as to us,) malignant purposes. One of them is to convince all men, and especially our Southern children, that we were, as Dr. Curry expresses their view, "a brave and rash people, deluded by bad men, who attempted in an illegal and wicked manner, to overthrow the Union." The other purpose—and for this especially they are laboring—is to have it believed that the Southern soldier, however brave, was actuated by no higher motive than the desire to retain the money value of slave property. They rightly believe that the world, once convinced of this, will hold us degraded rather than worthy of honor, and that our children, instead of reverencing their fathers, will be secretly, if not openly, ashamed.

They now seek to carry out their purposes not by the aid of armed soldiers, but through the active employment of energies, agencies, and agents, who are as the caterpillar and canker-worm for destructiveness, and as the locust for multitude. The whole force of journalists, poets, orators, and writers of all classes is employed in their cause, especially the Northern history-makers, whose books have been and are now, to some extent, in the hands of Southern children.

The character of the work has been in greater or less degree such as might have been expected. By every variety of effort, from direct denunciation to faint praise, by false statement and more subtle suggestion, by sophistry of reasoning and unexpected inference, by every sin of omission and commission, these writers have