It has been a long road, a long path, a long way in America, but Americans today seem more sensitive about the Civil War and its outcome than in the recent past. Not many Southerners owned slaves, but most Southerners supported that system flowing from Antiquity and Medieval times. The victory of the North and the Civil War Amendments, 13, 14, 15, legally lifted the country from ancient ways, so it would move ahead.

FROM MANASSAS TO APPOMATTOX, General James Longstreet, written as a memoir of the Civil War, displays the evolution of attitudes that some Southerners displayed after that War, and they ought to have today. Nobody gained glory because of that War, but U.S. Grant came out as a terrific human being. Longstreet was from Mississippi, but did not return to live there after the War. He lived in New Orleans and in Georgia.

On the last page of the memoirs, Longstreet writes about visiting his home state and the people, including former slaves:

Of all the people alive I still know and meet, probably no one carries me farther back in recollections of my long life than does my “old nurse.” Most of the family servants were discharged after the war at Macon, Mississippi, where some of them
still reside, among them this old man, Daniel, who still claims the family name, but
at times uses another. He calls promptly when I visit Macon and looks for
“something to remember you by.” During my last visit he seemed more concerned for me than usual, and on one of his calls asked, —

“Marse Jim, do you belong to any church?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I try to be a good Christian.”
“He laughed loud and long, and said, —
“Something must have scared you mighty bad, to change you from what you was

when I had to care for you.”
In a recent letter he sent a message to say that he is getting to be a little feeble. Blessings on his brave heart!