The age-herald., 1901-12-08
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ChurchiIH's Book am
 Insult to the South


 The proverbialism of the foreign critics that the Americans are so easily duped, is certainly verified in the reception the South has given Kinston Churchills late book, ''The Crisis.''
 More readily would we expect Russians to now hail with applause any allusion to the desport, Napoleon, whose ruthless invasion into their country was charac- terized by carnage. and whose pathway was traceable by the snow-buried piles of the corpses of his own countrymen.
 Truly the descendant of the fugitive, whose father stood upon some distant hill, and viewed with that dismay which only such crimes can produce, his all consumed in his own loved Moscow. would be no more faithless to his own ancestry than the descendants of the South's brave nerves who read with any degree of approval, that attempt to place though 1t may be a paradox-Sherman in more than his just light before the world. As well expect the projeny of the French Hugurnots, whose fathers per ished in the seige of La Rochelle after they had suffered all that human na- ture could endure when two-thirds of the population of the city had perished and the streets and dwellings were en- cumbered with the dead, and the few brave remaining soldiers reduced to skeletons could not longer lift their weap- ons and in hopeless terror they surren- dered to the Catholic troops of Louis XIV to today arise and proclaim that their fathers were in the wrong and met in that massacre their just deserts, and that the recital of the victory of the dragonnades-which has filled every read CT with horror-should be covered over with a degree of allowance. and their demoniac leaders held up to the world, through the glare of little romance-as wonderful generals. -.-t
 The inhabitants of this terrestrial eden the Moors of Granada-those who passed over the hill Fl Ultimo Suspiro del Nor TO Cor the last sigh of the Moors) would hardly bequeath to mother earth de- scendant so unpatriotic that he could see in our foster mother, Isabella of Castle, naught but tyranny. No country so lovely as their own beautiful one they had rather combat with the horta- ble tents of the war-like Queen, than see in their luxuriant forest the more permanent city of La Santa Fe.
 Then shall our veterans remain dumb while the younger generation of the South sees only the romance in this master effort of the author to, in a measure reinstate the character of the one Federal general who made his name a vice and a by-word to every true Southerner by his march to the sea, characterized not by the corpses of his own dead, but by those of helpless men and women and that which to woman is worse than death, but whose course can almost yet be traced by his houseless chimnies and devastated farms
 The Nero of the story, Stephen Brice. whom we learn to admire before Is forced to become to us what we from experience know them. when the author puts him on the detested Shermans staff. No greater insult to the American people is the 'Mcclay' history than is this ver- sion of one who evidently does not know of the most heinous atrocity perpetrated upon our fair South land. Lincoln, we are forced to admire; Blair another of his generals, was a gentleman whose march through our South was not mark ed by incendiarism, rape and rapine. In sight of the place from which the letter was written that gives notoriety to the book, the whole thing becomes a farce and an insult to the South.
 CHARLOTTE CRISMAN cox