Four Years in Rebel Capitals

Four Years in Rebel Capitals, by
T. C. DeLeon

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Title: Four Years in Rebel Capitals An Inside View of Life in the
Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death
Author: T. C. DeLeon
Release Date: September 12, 2007 [EBook #22584]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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YEARS IN REBEL CAPITALS ***

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FOUR YEARS IN REBEL CAPITALS:
AN INSIDE VIEW OF LIFE IN THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY,

FROM BIRTH TO DEATH

FROM ORIGINAL NOTES, COLLATED IN THE YEARS 1861 TO
1865,
BY T. C. DELEON,
AUTHOR OF "CREOLE AND PURITAN," "CROSS PURPOSES,"
"JUNY," ETC.
"In the land where we were dreaming!" --D. B. Lucas.
"I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign, nations and to the
next ages." --Francis Bacon.

MOBILE, ALA. THE GOSSIP PRINTING COMPANY.
1890.
Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1890, By THE
GOSSIP PRINTING COMPANY, In the office of the Librarian of
Congress at Washington.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TO MY VALUED FRIEND,
MRS. AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON,
AS ONE LITTLE TOKEN OF APPRECIATION OF A LIFE-WORK
DEDICATE TO HER SEX, TO HER SECTION AND TO TRUTH,
THESE SKETCHES
OF LIFE BEHIND OUR CHINESE WALL ARE INSCRIBED.

Transcriber's Note: The advertisement with press comments for the
author's book Juny: or Only One Girl's Story has been moved to the
end of this text.

IN PLACE OF PREFACE.
Fortunate, indeed, is the reader who takes up a volume without preface;
of which the persons are left to enact their own drama and the author
does not come before the curtain, like the chorus of Greek tragedy, to
speak for them.
But, in printing the pages that follow, it may seem needful to ask that
they be taken for what they are; simple sketches of the inner life of
"Rebeldom"--behind its Chinese wall of wood and steel--during those
unexampled four years of its existence.
Written almost immediately after the war, from notes and recollections
gathered during its most trying scenes, these papers are now revised,
condensed and formulated for the first time. In years past, some of their
crude predecessors have appeared--as random articles--in the columns
of the Mobile Sunday Times, Appleton's Journal, the Louisville
Courier-Journal, the Philadelphia Times and other publications.
Even in their present condensation and revision, they claim only to be
simple memoranda of the result of great events; and of their reaction
upon the mental and moral tone of the southern people, rather than a
record of those events themselves.
This volume aspires neither to the height of history, nor to the depths of
political analysis; for it may still be too early for either, or for both, of
these. Equally has it resisted temptation to touch on many topics--not
strictly belonging inside the Southern Capitals--still vexed by political
agitation, or personal interest. These, if unsettled by dire arbitrament of
the sword, must be left to Time and his best coadjutor, "sober
second-thought."

Campaigns and battles have already surfeited most readers; and their
details--usually so incorrectly stated by the inexpert--have little to do
with a relation of things within the Confederacy, as they then appeared
to the masses of her people. Such, therefore, are simply touched upon
in outline, where necessary to show their reaction upon the popular
pulse, or to correct some flagrant error regarding that.
To the vast majority of those without her boundaries--to very many,
indeed, within them--realities of the South, during the war, were a
sealed book. False impressions, on many important points, were
disseminated; and these, because unnoted, have grown to proportions
of accepted truth. A few of them, it may not yet be too late to correct.
While the pages that follow fail not to record some weaknesses in our
people, or some flagrant errors of their leaders, they yet endeavor to
chronicle faithfully heroic constancy of men, and selfless devotion of
women, whose peers the student of History may challenge that
vaunting Muse to show.
To prejudiced provincialism, on the one side, they may appear too
lukewarm; by stupid fanaticism on the other, they may be called
treasonable. But--written without prejudice, and equally without fear,
or favor--they have aimed only at impartial truth, and at nearest
possible correctness of narration.
Indubitably the war proved that there were great men, on both the sides
to it; and, to-day, the little men on either--"May profit by their example.