This rebellion at the North broke up "the glorious Union of our fathers," and drove the South, like poor Hagar, into the wilderness to look out for herself, without a charge from any quarter that a Southern State had committed one single act in violation of Federal law or in hostility to the Constitution. Then came the second great crime, the crime so vigorously denounced at the time by William Lloyd Garrison, the most consistent and the most heroic of the Northern Abolitionists, Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, the crime of coercion of the weaker by the stronger States, the military invasion of the South under the prostituted flag of the Union, and the final subjugation of her people by fire and sword. _O tempora! O mores!_ The acts of congress for years after the Southern army had honorably laid down its arms and gone home to plow and plant the fields make the blackest pages in the history of modern times. The writer dreads to put in print his estimate of such a political monster as Thad Stevens, the misanthropic genius of reconstruction, the Robespierre of America. Robespierre's guillotine cut off the heads of its victims. Thad Stevens's guillotine cut off all hopes from Southern hearts. He avowed it his purpose to exterminate the Southern white people, to confiscate their property into the hands of the negroes, and with these negroes to keep the country forever under the dominion of his party. According to him and his followers to this day this party of (so-called) high moral ideas must be kept in power no matter what crimes are committed in securing the ascendency. This is political Jesuitism run mad. The saddest, strangest part of the history is that it was twenty years before the Northern people came to their reason and put a check on this ruinous fratricidal policy. If the writer shall go to his grave with a holy horror of the bald malignity, the reckless folly, the cowardly spite, the sweeping curse of the reconstruction measures of Thad. Stevens and his Congress, he will find himself in good company. He once heard the great and good Dr. John A. Broadus, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, say, "I can easily forgive and forget the war. It was war, and all the wrongs done in it died away with the cannon's roar. But I find it so hard to forgive the excuseless wrongs done to the Southern people since the war." Dr. Broadus was a Southern man, but Rev. Dr. H. M. Field, the fair-minded and patriotic author of "Bright Skies and Dark Shadows," is not a Southern man. Hear what he says in his book: