The following, then, is from a letter written on the stationery of Washington and Lee University, and applies to certain statements contained in this chapter: 

In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a newspaper publisher:  “Were I the publisher of a paper, instead of the usual division into Foreign, Domestic, etc., I think I should distribute everything under the following heads:  1.  True. 2.  Probable. 3.  Wanting confirmation. 4.  Lies, and be careful in subsequent papers to correct all errors in preceding ones.”

Allow me to suggest that your story might, under Mr. Jefferson’s category, be placed under “2.”  Perhaps you went to see “The Birth of a Nation” before you wrote it.  It has been my experience that my acquaintances among the F.F.V.’s have been far more interested in whether Boston or Brooklyn would win the pennant than in discussing the Civil War.  By the young men of the South the War was forgotten long ago.

This letter has caused me to wonder whether the frequency with which my companion and I heard the Civil War discussed, may not, perhaps, have been due, at least in part, to our own inquiries, resulting from the consuming interest that we had in hearing of the War from those who lived where it was fought.

Yet, after all, it seems to me most natural that the South should remember, while the North forgets.  Not all Northerners were in the war.  But all Southerners were; if a boy was big enough to carry a gun, he went.  The North almost completely escaped invasion, and upon one occasion when a southern army did march through northern territory, the conduct of the invading troops toward the civilian population (the false Barbara Frietchie legend to the contrary notwithstanding) was so exemplary as to set a record which is probably unequaled in history.[2] The South, upon the other hand, was constantly under invasion, and the record of destruction wrought by northern armies in the valley of the Shenandoah, on the March to the Sea, and in some other instances, is writ in poverty and mourning unto this day.

[2] See chapter on Colonel Taylor and General Lee.

Thus, except politically, the North now feels not the least effect from the war.  But the South knew the terrors of invasion and the pangs of conquest, and is only growing strong again after having been ruined—­as instanced by the fact, which I came across the other day, that the tax returns from one of the southern States have, for the first time since the Civil War, reached the point at which they stood when it began.

So, very naturally, while the War has begun to take its place in the northern mind along with the Revolutionary War, as something to be studied in school under the heading “United States History,” it has not, in southern eyes, become altogether “book history,” but is history that lives—­in swords hanging upon the walls of many homes, in old faded letters, in sacks of worthless Confederate bills, in the ruins of great houses, in lovingly preserved gray uniforms, in southern battle fields, and in southern burial grounds where rows upon rows of tombstones, drawn up in company front, stand like gray armies forever on parade.