Deeply interesting paper.
Personal reminiscences of much Value—Recollections of President Davis, Bob Toombs, R. M. T. Hunter, and Judah P. Benjamin.The public has had a deluge of histories in respect to the Civil War and the Southern Confederacy. The history of the antecedent period covering the anti-slavery agitation has also been written up, for the most part with bias and partisanship. The military events of the four-years' struggle have also been exhibited in official reports, documents, memoirs, and narratives of every kind and description. The material for this history exists in abundance; but, though passion is subsiding it would still be difficult to prepare a work satisfactory to both sides of this great controversy. Very little comparatively has been written in respect to the work of the Confederate State Department. Some ambitious attempts have been recently made to supply this omission by persons whose means of obtaining accurate information were quite limited. Misrepresentations of Confederate diplomacy have come from different sources. They were made during the war in some anti-administration newspapers published in the South. Attacks were made which [342] could easily have been answered by the State Department making known its policy and telling what it had done or was doing, but this method of defence was not permissible. Since the struggle closed some persons have made criticisms based partly on public documents with a certain amount of added misrepresentation, relying on the prevalent sectional prejudice for their market. With some others of late the motives seem to have been to provide sensation and to make money and bold assertions, trusting to luck and the lapse of time to prevent exposure. This last line of business as time passes is apparently on the increase.
