Excerpt from Confederate Veteran, Vol. 35: February, 1927

Mr. Knowles does not at all understand - and the errors of omission in American history are responsible for his mistake that in opposing slavery in the Northwest, the citizens of that section were not emotionally excited over the moral issue. They had exactly the same idea as the Californians of our own day in excluding the Asiatics. In ante-bellum days these men of the Northwest opposed slavery in the territories because they Opposed the introduction of an alien race; and they did not care whether the negroes were slaves or freemen. They made laws in the States of the Northwest with a view to ex cluding the free negroes. Mr. Knowles, again misled by his sources, bases the protest on humanitarian grounds.

Nowhere does Mr; Knowles realize that the indirect taxa tion imposed by the Federal government upon the agricultural South was many times more burdensome than anything proposed to the detriment of the American colonies by the British king or Parliament. The influence of the fiction which has. Been mistaken for history is apparent when Mr. Knowles speaks of the breeding of slaves for death, or shame, the lash, the bloodhound, and the branding iron, etc. The reference to the bloodhound would be funny if the principal senti mental episode oi Uncle Tom's Cabin were not so tragically misleading to millions of good people. It is possible that there were three bloodhounds in the entire South during the pre-war period, and possibly none of these three were used for the track ing of runaway slaves! Yet one writer in so reputable an organ as the Century told of the killing of scores of these ter rible criminals on the plantation of Jefferson Davis - when Davis, for some reason best known to himself, objected to having any dogs on his place at all!

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