Thus, while the very nature of the South lends itself to sentiment and romance, her history is yet to be written. This little volume attempts, therefore, with particular care, to treat of historical events as their anniversaries bring them to mind. Comparatively few are the enduring works of Southern historians; and yet from the beginning of colonization the South has thrilled with the record of daring achievement. In the work of her soldiers and statesmen, the South led in shaping the Republic out of rebellion, revolution, and jarring elements. During and after the struggle with the mother country, Jefferson, Henry, Clark, and Virginia gave to the Nation the great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was Jefferson who secured to the Republic peaceful possession of the vast original tract of Louisiana; and it was he, with Lewis and Clark, who made good the claim to the Oregon territory. Furthermore, the mighty empire of Texas and the far Southwest was brought in under the initiative of the South and the leadership of Polk and Tyler. So did the South mightily assist in making a common government great and strong; but she was likewise building up a power which later overwhelmed her. In truth, she forged the fetters that for forty years chafed her people under an increasingly oppressive legislation; since it was a son of Carolina who first brought forward a tariff for protection, not for Carolina, but for New England and the Nation; and it was Clay of Kentucky who fostered the system until it involved the thirteen agricultural States of the South in an indirect taxation more burdensome than any direct impost ever proposed by Great Britain for the thirteen Colonies. In vain the South protested. Opposing majorities grew against her. And when a solidly sectional party became the dominant power, the Lower South attempted to exercise the hitherto generally conceded right of withdrawal, a right which had been particularly emphasized in New England when that section felt its interests to be in peril. The Upper South opposed coercion; and both prepared for the fight that followed. Such is the principle for which the South contended. She failed not in valor or in honor, but fell through exhaustion; yet glory stood beside her grief, and she endowed the Nation with the stainless names of Lee and Jackson. With the failure of the South to establish her independence, there fell also, as an incident of the struggle, that which most made her a separate section, politically, economically, and socially--the tutelage, in the most beneficent form of servitude ever known, of a child-race. That race was largely thrust upon her; and yet she raised its people from cannibal savages to civilized beings, whose devotion and faithfulness became the marvel of invading armies. Rather than interpret such a record to her shame, as some would have us do, let it be proclaimed as an everlasting tribute to the lofty character of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.