Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 03.djvu/164

154 was extorted from the convention, however, but it was by the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln, and his threat of a war of coercion in the seceded States—a war that the great bulk of the opponents of secession in the convention believed to be unwarranted by the constitution.

The Comte de Paris, in a letter to his American publishers, which immediately follows his preface, says:

"I trust that my account of these great events will, at least, not provoke a too bitter controversy; for if I have been obliged to judge and censure, I have done so without any personal or partial feeling against any one, with a sincere respect for truth and a keen sense of the responsibility which I assumed."

I am disposed to give him credit for entire sincerity in this declaration, but I must be permitted to say that the most embittered partizan of the North could not have done greater injustice to the South, in a statement of the causes that led to the late war, than he has done in the part of his history that has been published.

As his book contains statements about the people of the South that I know to be entirely without foundation, and that every candid man, even at the North, would declare to be so, and as he has also made strictures upon the character of the Southern people, their cause and their conduct, that are exceedingly harsh and unjust, he must pardon me for saying that it is very apparent that he has not had access to truthful sources of information, or, if he has had access to such sources, he has turned from them to adopt as his conclusions the most unfounded slanders of our bitterest and most prejudiced enemies. If he desires to continue his "History of the Civil War in America," and to produce a work of real historic value, he had better consign to the flames all that he has so far published, and begin his task de novo, after devoting his attention to a thorough investigation of the history of the American people, the character of their governments—State and Federal—the causes that led to the late conflict, and the events that attended that conflict; for it is impossible to eliminate from the first part of his work the innumerable errors which it contains without writing the whole over again. If he should succeed better with his future volumes, and make them accurate, to attach them to the first would present a most incongruous conjunction of truth and error.