Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/336

 320 The New South unveiling of the Calhoun monument at Charleston. But with those who read speeches the Eulogy of Sumner will live as the noble expression of a patriot and a seer, whose gentleness and devotion will win him a bright and quiet niche in the dark and troublous vestibule of Reconstruction. Another disciple of Calhoun, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (1825-1903), born in Georgia but reared in Alabama, learned at the University of Georgia to regard the Arch-Secessionist as second only to Aristotle. Going to Harvard in 1843 to study law, he was soon fired by Horace Mann with a passion for uni- versal education. It was therefore natural, although he became a United States Congressman and a member of the Confederate Congress, that after the war he should enter educational work, in order that the youth of his section might be fitted to build worthily and helpfully in the tumble-down world that surrounded them. As agent of the Peabody and Slater Funds, he aided more than any other one man to develop an irresistible pubUc opinion for the education of the whole people, both white and black, in the Southern States. Today the most valuable of his educational writings is the History of the Peabody Education Fund, which records the progress of one of the most beneficent philanthropies since the war. He is thus on the side of the constructionists as opposed to those forensic champions who revelled in the abstract notions of States' rights and liberty, but where he develops the theory of secession, as in Civil History of the Government of the Confederate States or The Southern States of the American Union, there is a pugnacious reiteration of out- worn arguments which will appeal chiefly to the historical stu- dent or the partisan. His numerous other writings dealing with the South, even when they utter a national spirit or retail per- sonal experiences, lack the colour and the vigour which render Gordon's reminiscences still interesting. His life of Gladstone lacks power to portray and to analyze. But the figures we have passed in review, revered and stately though they be, and eloquently as they avowed the new spirit of allegiance to a common country, in reality belonged to an earlier generation than that of the Reconstruction period. ' Those who did not, like Bagby and Johnston, sing the glories of an aristocratic civilization resting on slavery, were at least im- bued, like Vance and Hill and Gordon, with the elder spirit.