What especially concerns us here is that we avoid adhering to the mistakes of these partisans which still have injurious effect upon opinion. Thus the fire-eater could see no good whatever in the yankees, as he called them, denying them honesty, trustworthiness, and other elementary virtues; accusing them of robbing us by the tariff and other measures, and hating us for the prosperity and comfort which the slavery system had blessed us with. Other of his false charges are still lodged in the memory of some influential southerners. But the fire-eater's predictions were all completely falsified by the result of the war; and he has become so much discredited as an authority, there is no very great need for consuming much time and effort in correcting his misstatements. On the other hand the decisive success of their side has kept thousands at the north fully believing the wildest fabrications of the root-and-branch abolitionists. The latter believed that the African slave of the south was just such a human being, ready for liberty and self-government in all particulars, as civilized and enlightened whites. They believed that the condition of his immediate ancestors in West Africa was one of high physical, mental, moral, and social development, and that if there was in him now any inferiority to his master it was entirely due to the sinister influence of American slavery. They also believed that the system was fraught with such cruelties as frequent separation of man and wife and of mother and young children, under- feeding and clothing, and grinding overwork,--that, in short, the average slave was daily exposed to something like the torture of the Inquisition. All this was invention. American slavery found the negro gabbling inarticulately and gave him English; it found him a cannibal and fetishist and gave him the Christian religion; it found him a slave to whom his savage master allowed no rights at all, and it gave him an enlightened master bound by law to accord him the most precious human rights; it found him an inveterate idler and gave him the work habit; it found him promiscuous in the horde and gave him the benign beginning of the monogamic family,--in short, as now appears very strongly probable, American slavery gave him his sole opportunity to rise above the barbarism of West Africa. These tremendous mistakes of fact, after knitting the north in solid phalanx against dividing the Territories with the south and restoring fugitive slaves and thus hasting forward the war, prompted that folly of follies the fifteenth amendment, and have ever since kept the north from understanding the race question.