This little book is a compilation of three essays. The first is a speech which was delivered by the author at the unveiling of a Confederate monument in Richmond in 1894 and offers a concise but clear statement of the causes that led up to the war between the North and the South. The second refutes the popular misrepresentations of the social conditions existing in the South before the war, focusing on the allegedly widespread maltreatment of the Negro slaves by their Southern masters. The third is an excellent synopsis of the centuries' old struggle between the "Cavalier" and the "Puritan," both in the Old World and in the New, which eventually erupted in the travesty of the sectional conflict that left the constitutional Union in ruins.