Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/406

388 Middle Ages, groups were formed in accordance with nativity; and sectional lines, though effaced at certain points, were strengthened at others. There may have been a certain broadening of view; there was no weakening of home ties. West Point made fewer converts to this side and to that than did the Northern wives of Southern husbands, the Southern wives of Northern husbands.

All this is doubtless controvertible, and what has been written may serve only to amuse or to disgust those who are better versed in the facts of our history and keener analysts of its laws. All I vouch for is the feeling; the only point that I have tried to make is the simple fact that, right or wrong, we were fully persuaded in our own minds, and that there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

 

[William Peterfield Trent was born at Richmond, Virginia, in 1862. After graduating from the University of Virginia and pursuing postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, he became professor of English in the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. This position he held from 1888 to 1900, when he accepted a professorship in English literature in Columbia University, New York City, which he now holds. His many books on historical and literary subjects (especially notable being "Life of William Gilmore Simms," "Authority of Criticism," and "A History of American Literature") have made him known of the foremost critics of literature in the United States. While at the University of the South he was the first editor of the Sewanee Review—a magazine important to literary and historical research in the South.]

