Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/448

 442 Southern Historical Society Papers.

for its donation out of its poverty up to this date of more than three billions of dollars to swell the wealth of the North.

5th. Results of the War. I would place first of these the general diffusion of love for the Constitution of the United States. Time was when the South-hating philanthropists denounced it as " a cove- nant with death and a league with hell," gotten up by the slave- power in the interests of slavery. But in 1861, the philanthropists experienced a change of heart, and ever since have talked of the Constitution as that "sacred instrument," that "bulwark of free- dom," that "palladium of liberty," etc., etc. I am glad of their conversion, suspiciously sudden though it was, and I hope that they will never fall from grace. As a stalwart Presbyterian, I believe in the perseverance of the saints.

2d. Change of views in regard to the intellectual, moral and social status of the Negro. The philanthropists used to tell of the cruelty and brutality of slaveholders to their slaves, and said that they had reduced the negroes to the lowest state of ignorance, barbarism and bestiality. But in the reconstruction period, the philanthropists underwent a radical change of views and discovered that these ne- groes, whom they had described as more savage and degraded than the barbarians on the Congo, were not merely enlightened and civil- ized enough to be freemen and voters, but also to be United States Senators and Congressmen, Foreign Ministers, Consuls and Mar- shals, Governors of States, Judges, Members of State Cabinets, &c. I am glad that the philanthropists found out that the Old South had trained its slaves so carefully for these high and responsible duties. No other masters in the world's history ever gave such training to their slaves. The i3th, I4th, and I5th amendments to the Constitu- tion of the United States are the grandest possible eulogies to the Old South.

But there was one great error in this training. The simple-hearted, confiding Southern masters, always careless of their own money, did not teach their slaves to be cautious about their investments, and tens of thousands of these credulous creatures put their money in a bank in Washington, established by the philanthropists, and lost it all.

3d. Development of Great Men. I love to hear the praises of the wonderful deeds of McClellan, Grant, Meade, and Hancock, for if they were such great warriors for crushing with their massive columns the thin lines of ragged Rebels, what must be said of Lee,