to themselves and all who came after them. It was a condition and a process which could not be consented to for a moment. There was no surrender at Appomattox, and no withdrawal from the field which committed our people and their children to a heritage of shame and dishonor. No cowardice on any battlefield could be as base and shameful as the silent acquiescence in the scheme which was teaching the children in their homes and schools that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war, that prisoners of war held in the South were starved and treated with a barbarous inhumanity, that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were traitors to their country and false to their oaths, that the young men who left everything to resist invasion, and climbed the slopes of Gettysburg and died willingly on a hundred fields were rebels against a righteous government.
The State Camp of Virginia of Confederate Veterans rose promptly and vigorously to resist another invasion, which would have turned the children against their fathers, covered the graves of patriots and heroes with shame and made the memory of the Confederacy and its sacrifices and struggles a disgrace in all coming history. The camps throughout the South had a new task given them. They were to meet the threatening evil at the door of every school house in the land. All that was, or is now, desired is that error and injustice be excluded from the text-books of the schools and from the literature brought into our homes; that the truth be told, without exaggeration and without omission; truth for its own sake and for the sake of honest history, and that the generations to come after us be not left to bear the burden of shame and dishonor unrighteously laid upon the name of their noble sires.
It was in 1898 that the State Camp of Virginia made Dr. Hunter McGuire the Chairman of its History Committee. Himself a Confederate Veteran, the friend of Jackson and intimately acquainted with General Lee and other leaders high in office and distinguished in service, surgeon, professor and author, he was eminently qualified for the work assigned him. With others he examined thoroughly the histories introduced into the schools, and in 1899 he gave to the Commonwealth and the South the thorough
