ABSTRACT
War and especially civil strife leave terrible wounds. It is the duty of humanity to heal them. It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which sectional differences in the United States had led. One reads, for instance, Charles and Mary Beard's "Rise of American Civilization," with a comfortable feeling that nothing right or wrong is involved. Manufacturing and industry develop in the North; agrarian feudalism develops in the South. The North went to war without the slightest idea of freeing the slave. The majority of Northerners from Lincoln down pledged themselves to protect slavery, they hated and harried Abolitionists. The chorus of agreement concerning the attempt to reconstruct and organize the South after the Civil War and emancipation is overwhelming. The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism.
