Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 03.djvu/161

Rh when he treats of the points in dispute in regard to the merits of the controversy that led to the war, or in regard to the events of the war itself?

Notwithstanding his own declaration that "he has endeavored to preserve throughout his narrative the strictest impartiality," and that of the editor of the English version of his book, that "he has produced a book displaying careful research, cool judgment, and a manifest purpose to be just to all," it is very apparent that he has adopted as his own the extreme views of the most embittered of the Northern Radical Republicans in regard to the Southern people, the character of the government framed by the authors of the Constitution, the merits of the controversy that led to the war, and the events of that war, so far as he has undertaken to relate them.

Upon the subject of slavery, he has formed his opinions as to the character and conduct of the slaveholders and the condition of the slaves, from the work of fiction entitled "Uncle Tom's Cabin," by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, that literary ghoul who has shocked the moral sense of all decent people in England and America by exhuming and gloating over that horrible story about Byron and his sister, which, even if true, should have been allowed to rest in that oblivion into which it had sunk; and the diary of Fanny Kimble, the actress, who, in order to vent her spleen upon the husband from whom she had parted, undertook to calumniate the people among whom he had been born. The Comte de Paris adopts without question the statements of these two female writers, one of whom knew nothing and the other very little of the practical operation of slavery in the South; but he gives no consideration to such testimony as the published letters of Miss Murray, an English lady of real refinement and culture—once Maid of Honor to Queen Victoria, who visited the United States with strong prejudices against slavery, but, after a sojourn of some months on Southern plantations, changed her views, and gave an account of the physical and moral condition of the slaves entirely different from that given by Mrs. Stowe and Miss Fanny Kimble.

Considering the source from which he seems generally to have obtained the facts whereon to base his opinions, it is not a matter of much surprise that his book should contain such passages as the following: "It will thus be seen that the States which defended the Union in 1861 are those that had made the greatest sacrifices to establish it, while those that raised the standard of