One day when I was about seven, I visited Monticello with my Maury cousins from Charlottesville. We really wanted to see the home of "Mr. Jefferson," as he was called by all his neighbors in Albermarle Country, Virginia.

When we got back to Piedmont, Grandpa told us about the man that lived there. He said Mr. Jefferson had built the University, and believed everybody ought to have an education if they had any sense, and were willing to work for it. He told us, too, that Mr. Jefferson said people should have any religious belief they chose, or none at all, as suited them best; and that everyone should be allowed to say or write as much as they pleased, even if it was openly against the government. That, my Grandfather said, was why we had a good country.

My feeling for Jefferson had always been personal because he had studied at Reverend Maury's [The Mr. Maury already mentioned in the "Two-Penny" case.] school. Jefferson had been a kind neighbor and friend to the Maurys from the time he was twelve until the day he died. But he was not any special friend to the Maurys; he was a friend to every man.

In Reverend Maury's school, Jefferson was an earnest youngster, already full of ideals. At fourteen, Jefferson had never seen a town or village of over twenty houses. But his imagination was great, and he said he wanted to go to a college, where he could "learn something of mathematics" and "could attain more universal acquaintance." [Life of Jefferson, Parton.]

As years came upon him and he had laid the foundation for making America great, he spent many of his last days writing to his old friends. He never forgot his old friends. He wrote to James Maury in England, whom he had known nearly three-quarters of a century before at the Maury School. Maury had apparently become an English citizen, for Jefferson said:

"Today we are at peace; tomorrow, war. The curtain of separation is drawing between us, and probably will not be withdrawn till one, if not both of us, will be at rest with our fathers. . . . Our two countries are to be at war, but not you and I. And why should our two countries be at war, when by peace we can be so much more useful to one another?"

Closing the long letter to James Maury, he said: "The hand of age is upon me. All my old friends are nearly gone."

But his sense of humor, as he and his old friend were ageing, flashed back to him, and he concluded: "I think the old hulk in which you are, is near her wreck, and that like a prudent rat, you should escape in time." [Writings of Jefferson, Volume XIII.]

A few years later, on the Fourth day of a bright July, there in Albermarle, Jefferson was dying. He was old and feeble, his time had come, he knew it, and was ready. Troubled sleep came to him. . . . Slavery! That phrase! If only I could have forced the adoption of my clause condemning it! . . . Ah, well, the nation is great. . . . In the shadows, his old secretary, Merriwether Lewis, was smiling. . . . Mr. Jefferson looked at him. "How would you and Clarke like. . . . ." "Ah, Mr. Jefferson," replied Lewis, "I will go." . . . His friend, Mr. Madison, much younger then, to France . . . the Louisiana Purchase. . . . Mr. Jefferson laughed. The traitors of the Hartford Convention! . . . But Louisiana is ours. . . . Empire, land, for the people! . . . Then through his mind ran the strophic phrases of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Drums! he cried out, for the British were coming: the Committee of Safety, it must be warned! It was still outside. . . . America was free . . . and so Jefferson, kind and brave, joined the immortals.

This was the kind of sentimental fellow who wrote the Declaration of Independence. And I can remember, when a little boy, having an old blind professor from the University tell of the Declaration. So I have regarded it as a personal contract with me, and the rest of the people in the country.

About a dozen years ago I visited Washington, long before I thought of politics or of being a Congressman. I visited the Library of Congress just to see the Declaration of Independence. Millions have seen it. It is in a glass case, on display, and guards watch it. People file by, glancing at it, and walk briskly on.

I made what was a great discovery to me, although scholars already knew it. I looked at the script and it seemed too regular. I thought surely that the one on display was a copy, and not the original. I told the guards, who did not know what I was talking about, and thought I was cracked.

So I kept asking, until I was shown what is really the original; that is, the original sheets of Jefferson. I had asked one librarian after another, and finally got to see the original document. It is held in a safe, and only a few hundred Americans, probably far less than a thousand, have ever seen it.

In the original, Jefferson had denounced the King and British Government concerning slavery and the slave trade.

The eliminated phrase is one of the most important in history. For Jefferson always hated slavery . . . and always said so. The phrase had been knocked out by pressure groups.

I realize it is futile to speak of what might have been. But there is no doubt that our country's whole course would have been different had Jefferson's phrase denouncing the slave trade been allowed to stand.

The tragic cost in blood and money and the aftermath of twisted ideas of the Civil War could have been prevented. Its study is valuable only that we may not commit the same errors today. For the industrialists of today are no more enlightened, apparently, than were the slave owners and slave shippers of yesterday.

And this dirty trick played on the nation I have always suspected was perpetrated by John Adams, the second President, but I have not been able to substantiate this. In fact, the records show that the proposition was struck out at the request of the delegates of South Carolina and Georgia.

But Adams represented the slave-shipping class, the group that were making money out of selling slaves to the South. People from the shipping areas denounced slavery as the National Manufactuers' Association denounces sweat shops—but really did nothing about slavery and miserable conditions as long as there was no money in it. Further, since politics was the same then as now, I have an idea that John Adams at least did not protest too much the removal of the anti-slavery clause.

Later, Adams did protest his virtue too much. In a letter to Timothy Pickering, dated August 6, 1822, speaking of Jefferson's draft, he said: "I was delighted with its high tone and the flights of oratory with which it abounded, especially that concerning negro slavery, which, though I knew his Southern brethren would never suffer to pass Congress, I certainly never would oppose."

Then Adams says further, "I do not now remember, that I made or suggested a single alteration."

But Jefferson, after saying the omission was at the "complaisance of South Carolina and Georgia," comments about the representatives of the slave-shipping class in general: "Our Northern friends also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."

But this suspicion is probably only a Southern prejudice of mine. In any event, Jefferson attempted then to eliminate slavery, but the special-interest opinion was against it. His declaration generally referred to the trade, but it was sufficient to have led to its abolition.

After slavery was fastened on the South, it became a part of the social and economic system. At the same time, land holdings began to be concentrated more and more, for the process had started even before the Revolution. Here and there, as in the Quaker settlements of Virginia, slavery was reprobated, but the process of concentration of land wealth continued.

Precisely as the industrial classes have built up power as against the substantial will of the people in the past few decades, so did the slave-owning class in the era preceding the Civil War.

The Senators and Congressmen represented the slave-owners. They no more represented the interests of the majority of the white people of the South than did some of the reactionary Congressmen of the past few decades represent the average citizen or worker.

Various competent authorities on the South estimate the white non-slave-owning class as from seventy to eighty-five percent of the white population, just preceding the Civil War. The white non-slave-owners were treated with studied insult and contempt by the slave-owners. The Negroes themselves, though slaves, were allowed to maintain an attitude comtemptuous of free white people who did not own slaves, whom they referred to as "po' white trash."

At the outbreak of the Civil War, in my opinion, the Southern people overwhelmingly opposed entering the war. The white non-slave-owners had nothing to gain and everything to lose. The forward-thinking elements even among the slave owners opposed slavery. But as in all great human movements, the hot-headed ones, and those of entrenched power, prevailed. In the group of leaders were many who wrote lofty tomes on slavery, to show that it was approved by God and the Church. Men who were universally considered intelligent Christians, such as Calhoun, my Grandfather's neighbor, said it was right, and best for the slaves.

But my grandfather, Sam Maverick, is said to have fought a duel because of his hatred of Calhoun. Maverick said very little, but there is every indication that he had a very low opinion of his famous neighbor.

Let us read from the Memoirs of Mary A. Maverick, my grandmother, a Southern woman, whose opinion, I believe, represented the majority:

"The Civil War soon came on and Mr. Maverick and my sons did not shrink from what they conceived to be their duty. Mr. Maverick had always been a Union man in sentiment, he loved the Union of the States, and although he may have believed (before the question was settled) that we had the abstract right to withdraw from the Union, he thought the Union was sacred, and that the idea of a dissolution of the Union ought not to be harbored for a moment. Having such ideas and convictions, he found life to be uncongenial and unpromising for him in South Carolina, where the doctrines of nullification and ultimate secession were aggresively espoused by an overwhelming majority of the ruling class. He came to Texas, but all doctrines and issues of the former time bloomed into life about him when Texas became a member of the Union.

"Creeping beneath the shadow of the manifold blessings of the Union, came the bitter and unceasing strife. At least he came to believe the quarrel was forced upon us, and that there was before us an 'irrepressible conflict' which we could not escape, no matter where we turned.

"The Secession Convention of 1861 met—there was intense excitement and, need I say, deep gloom—the hour came at last when he was compelled to take his choice for or against his kith and kin. The question was no longer whether secession was right or wrong, wise or unwise, the question was no narrowed down to this—Even if you could sever your fate from that of your people, would your heart permit you to do it?

"Thus it appeared to him, and he did a simple, straightforward unselfish act, and an act which nevertheless gave him deep pain, when he cast his vote for secession."

She concludes:

"When the war was ended, the sentiment was unanimous in our family that all the old issues had been settled, and that the result of the conflict was right."

When a war once starts, the mob mind takes hold. Those who do not fight are "slackers" and "cowards." And from what I have heard directly from the lips of hundreds of intelligent persons, the Civil War was like the World War. Once the drums beat, reason takes a holiday until one side or both are destroyed.

When the South entered the Civil War, it was the second time it got off on the wrong foot. But that is also true of the North—and if both had insisted on their Compromise, the war could have been stopped.

In Tennessee and Kentucky, there were whole regiments which joined the Federal side; there were Northern troops from Texas, and Sam Houston bitterly referred to the war as that "wicked rebellion." Even in parts of Alabama, many joined the Federals.

But the slave-owning class knew they were right. In the case of Dred Scott, which I shall discuss elsewhere as a constitutional question, they had the approval of slavery forever. More, they had the permission of the Court to extend slavery into Western states, and that no person of African blood could ever be a citizen anywhere in the United States. For the slave-owner was intrenched with the Supreme Court. They had God and the Constitution on their side.

Bugles cried out and drum beats entered the heads of men. North, South, East and West, they reasoned no more. Blood relatives took to blade and gun to settle the blind forces. Even little boys, filled with emotions they did not understand, marched away in the Blue and the Gray, to the cadenced Drums of Death.