For some time after the brothers' war it was very generally believed that Davis had been one of the Mississippi repudiators; that through all his ante-bellum public career he had been an unconditional secessionist--what we in the south mean by a fire-eater; that cherishing an accursed ambition for the presidency of the southern confederacy he organized a secret conspiracy which consummated secession; that as the chief executive of the Confederate States he aided and abetted the perpetration of inhuman cruelties upon federal prisoners of war; that he was accessory to the murder of President Lincoln; and that when captured he was disguised as a woman. I suppose that these accusations--all of which are utterly untrue--are still in the mouths of many at the north. They have attained some currency abroad. I note that the leading German encyclopedia--that of Brockhaus--repeats those as to the conspiracy and disguise. But "The Real Jefferson Davis," as Landon Knight has of late presented him,[121]--without hostile bias and with something like an approach to completeness--is at least beginning to be recognized outside of the south. It is about as certain as anything in the future can be that all detraction from the moral character and patriotism of Davis will after some while wear itself out. I believe far greater favor than mere vindication from false accusation will at last be awarded him in every part of his own country and also abroad. Later in the chapter I shall try to bring out fully the praise and appreciation which world history will, as seems probable to me, shower upon his career. Here I can take time to mention only the beginning of that great fame which we of this day have looked upon. We saw him fall from one of the highest and proudest places in which for four years he had been the talk and envy of the earth. We saw him in sheer helplessness, accused of murder and treason, his feeble health and personal comfort made a jest of, disrespect and insult heaped upon him--we saw him endure all the most refined tortures of imprisonment. Then we saw him set free--his innocence confessed by the acts of his accusers. Then for over twenty years he lived with the people who under his lead had been conquered and despoiled; and we saw them always eager to pay him demonstrations of the warmest love; we saw them bury him with inconsolable grief; and we see them keeping his memory green by reinterring him in the old capital of the Confederate States, giving him there a conspicuous monument, and making the anniversary of his birth a legal holiday in different States. This--which we impressively mark now as only a beginning of glory--must develop into something far larger.