Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 9.djvu/15

Rh calm reflection of a philosophic retrospect. The discussions born of war have ceased, and the wounds of strife have so far healed as to admit of dispassionate review of the stirring events of that period. A new generation risen since the treaty of peace was written with the sword at Appomattox, has nearly displaced the actors in the great tragedy of the Confederate struggle, and they and the children of those who bared their bosoms to the storm, are eager to learn something more of the causes of this terrible war and of the heroism it evoked than they can find in the distorted publications of the press or the fireside narratives of its survivors.

The history of the great struggle which for four long years shook the continent and made the world stand aghast, has yet to be written. The personal observations of many hundreds of its participants have been printed, and many of the civil and military leaders have prepared volumes of more or less merit; and for many years yet to come these and others to follow will but form the material from the great mass of which, together with the official military records of both sides published by the government, the real history of our civil war will be written. When the actors shall all have passed away, and when to the narratives of actual participants shall succeed the periods of romance and the drama; when all traces of the war shall have disappeared save the imperishable monuments which will attest the valor of victor and vanquished alike; and when the two sections shall be as thoroughly welded into one as the houses of York and Lancaster after years of blood or those of the Stuarts and Hanover—some great mind like that of Gibbon or Macaulay will dispassionately, with the clear perspective of time, collate all this heterogeneous mass of material and give to the world the unbiased truth. The South can well await the verdict of prosperity when the evidence thus sifted of prejudice and free from distortions of error or malice shall be philosophically woven