To visit one of these ante-bellum homes was a privilege indeed.  And something of the spirit of the canaille of the French revolution must have animated the foreign hordes, who, not content with confiscating these captured palaces, ruthlessly cut and destroyed the richness and elegance they were beholding for the first time in their commonplace lives.  It was not the spirit of conquest, but of vandalism, that animated them.  Wanton destruction and not spoliation, common in war tactics, was their watchword.  A domain fairer than Elysium opened to their astonished gaze, whenever they penetrated some sylvan grove where stood the plantation manor house.

Alas! for the old plantation days!  Alas! for the easygoing spirit that marked the times!  The long, pitiless, hot sun-days were not inspirers of extraordinary energy.  Yankee thrift was as pigmy play to these owners of bursting coffers.  The hurry and bustle of our Northern neighbors was an unknown quantity in their economy.  It is to the forcible wresting from the South of their inherited institutions, of the machinery which made their social order possible, that the land of Dixie owes the prosperity and thrift of to-day.  Evil was done and good came therefrom.  Years of wasted substance and enforced poverty were groped through, till at last the day-star rose upon new industries.  Hands and feet and awakened faculties spring to the keynote of progress, and “Our days are marching on.”

* * * * *

(Here were inserted in the manuscript twenty pages from the diary of the Historian, written when, as a school girl, she visited with her parents some of the sugar plantations of Louisiana.  They give the picture by an eye-witness of the social and commercial life in the South; but while, perhaps, interesting in the reading of a paper, are not necessary, in print, to the theme.)

Future generations may hug to themselves the consolation that we were pulled down only to be built up again in greater prosperity, under a different order of things.  The tears and woes of the old South may change into smiles and good cheer, forgetting the glory that once encircled us like a radiant halo.  But many there are who feel that “Such things were, and were most dear to us!” These look back with brimming eyes, and force down the rising sob, as they sorrowfully murmur.

  “My native land, good night.”

Slavery

Read March 14, 1909.

In my first paper I endeavored to present a picture of the sunny Southland in the ante-bellum days, when wealth and culture and hospitality were the watchwords of the hour—­before the invasion of hostile hordes had vandalized the sacred old traditions, and crumbled the household gods in the dust.