regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as matter of course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.

Mr. Herbert, reared and educated in the South, believing in the moral and economical right of slavery, served as a Confederate soldier during the war, but after Appomattox, when thirty-one years old, he told his father he had arrived at the conviction that slavery was wrong. Twelve years later, when home-rule was completely restored to the South (1877), he went into public life as a Member of Congress, sitting in the House for sixteen years. At the end of his last term, in 1893, he was appointed Secretary of the Navy by President Cleveland, whom he faithfully served during his second administration.

Such an experience is an excellent training for the treatment of any aspect of the Civil War. Mr. Herbert's devotion to the Constitution, the Union, and the flag now equals that of any soldier of the North who fought against him. We should expect therefore that his work would be pervaded by practical knowledge and candor.

After a careful reading of the manuscript I have no hesitation in saying that the expectation is realized. Naturally unable to agree entirely with his presentation of the subject, I believe that his work exhibits a side that entitles it to a large hearing. I hope that it will be placed before the younger generation, who, unaffected by any memory of the heat of the conflict, may truly say:

Tros Tyriusve, mihi nullo discrimine agetur.

JAMES FORD RHODES.

BOSTON, November, 1911.

PREFACE

IN 1890 Mr. L. E. Chittenden, who had been United States Treasurer under President Lincoln, published an interesting account of $10,000,000 United States bonds secretly sent to England, as he said, in 1862, and he told all about what thereupon took place across the water. It was a reminiscence. General Charles Francis Adams in his recent instructive volume, "Studies Military and Diplomatic," takes up this narrative and, in a chapter entitled "An Historical Residuum," conclusively shows from contemporaneous evidence that the bonds were sent, not in 1862, but in 1863, but that, as for the rest of the story, the residuum of truth in it was about like the speck of moisture that is left when a soap bubble is pricked by a needle.

General Adams did not mean that Mr. Chittenden knew he was drawing on his im

agination. He was only demonstrating that one who intends to write history cannot rely on his memory.

The author, in the following pages, is undertaking to write a connected story of events that happened, most of them, in his lifetime, and as to many of the most important of which he has vivid recollections; but, save in one respect, he has not relied upon his own memory for any important fact. The picture he has drawn of the relations between the slave-holder and nonslave-holder in the South is, much of it, given as he recollects it. His opportunities for observation were somewhat extensive, and here he is willing to be considered in part as a witness. Elsewhere he has relied almost entirely upon contemporaneous written evidence, memory, however, often indicating to him sources of information.

Nowhere are there so many valuable lessons for the student of American history as in the story of the great sectional movement of 1831, and of its results, which have