Chapter I · SYMPOSIUM OF TRIBUTES TO CONFEDERATE WOMEN (continued 2)

When Tom Phipps, of Randolph County, Ga., came home on crutches he offered to release Miss Maggie Pharham from her engagement. “No, Tom,” she said. “We can make a living.” There are hundreds of these noble, God-given Carrie McNeils and Maggie Pharhams all over our war-wrecked South.

Let the next emblem be the oak riven by the lightning, and the tender ivy entwining itself around it. Let it tell of the sufferings of the refugee father and the wreck of the old man in the track of such vandals as Sherman, Hunter, Sheridan, Milroy and Kilpatrick. Let it tell of the horrors of the years of so-called peace that followed the war. Northern soldiers killed our young men in war; politicians killed our old men in peace. Sherman burned houses from Atlanta to Bentonville. Thad Stevens in Congress blighted every acre of ground from Baltimore to San Antonio. The war of shot and shell lasted four years; the war of blind, revengeful reconstruction legislation lasted twenty years. War marshalled our enemies on the battlefield; reconstruction made enemies of the men who had held our plow handles and stood around our tables. War put the South under the rule of soldiers; reconstruction put us under the heel of the rapacious carpet-bagger and negro plunderers. War crushed some of our people. Vindictive legislation crushed all our people. War made the South an Aceldama; reconstruction made it a Gehenna. Grant held back the red right hands of Stanton and Holt from the throats of Lee and his paroled soldiers: alas, Lincoln was dead, and his patriotic arm was not there to hold back Thad Stevens and his revolutionary congress from our prostrate citizens.

Amid these horrors our young men could hope, but to our old men was nothing left but despair. Robbed of their property after peace was declared, without a dollar of compensation, their lands made valueless or confiscated; they themselves disfranchised and their slaves made their political masters, too old to change and recuperate, too old to hope even, but too manly to whine, they stood as desolate and uncomplaining as that old oak.

Do you see that tender vine binding up the shattered tree and hiding its wounds? That is Southern woman clinging closer and more tenderly to father and husband when the storms beat upon him, comforting as only such Christian women can comfort; smiling only as such heroines can smile; with “toil-beat nerves, and care-worn eye,” helping only as such women can help. In the schoolroom and behind the counter, over the sewing machine and the cooking stove, in garden and field, everywhere showing the gems of Southern character washed up from its depths by the ocean of Southern woe.

Let the last symbol on the monument be the clasped right hands of the Union. These Southern women of 1861 were the daughters of the great American Union. Their fathers under the leadership of Jefferson, Madison and Washington, had proposed the Union, devised the Union, loved the Union, and, under Clay and Calhoun and Benton, had preserved the Union. As an inducement for union between the original States, without which the Northern States would not come into it, Virginia, the great mother of the Union, gave up all her splendid territory north of the Ohio, embracing what is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and agreed that they should be made States without slavery. She afterwards gave Kentucky. North Carolina gave Tennessee, and Georgia gave Alabama and Mississippi. Southern influence and Southern statesmanship made the Union strong at home and respected abroad by the war of 1812, which was gallantly fought by the South and bitterly opposed by New England—opposed to the very verge of secession from the Union in the Hartford convention. The Southern States had shown their devotion to the Union by yielding to the compromises on the tariff, the bounty, and the territorial questions. The South demanded no tariff tribute, no bounties and no internal improvements as the price of her devotion to the Union. She loved the Union for the Union’s sake. All that she demanded was that in the territory, while it was territory, belonging to the government, her sons, with their families, white and black, should have an equal share.

John C. Calhoun was not a disunionist. The nullification ordinance of South Carolina, “the Hotspur of the Union,” was not secession. It was the protest of a sovereign State against unconstitutional Federal taxation levied through the tariff on the consumer, not for government revenue, but for the benefit of the manufacturer. The nation heard the manly voice of the little State, and Calhoun and Clay stood side by side in the great compromise that followed. Calhoun and his people loved the Union, but they wanted a union that was a union. True religion is that which is laid down in the Bible, not theory nor sentiment. True political union is the union formed by the Sovereign States and expressed in the Constitution. Constitutional union was the only true union. Everything else was a mere sentiment or a sham. History will yet hold that the secession of the Southern States in 1861 was itself a union movement. The Northern States had destroyed the old union. By their numerous nullification acts in State assemblies they had repudiated the legislative branch of the government; by their defiance of the Supreme Court they had virtually abolished the judiciary, the second branch; and in 1860, by the sectional platform of the dominant party and the election of a sectional president, they had denationalized the executive branch of the government. Where was the union? Gone, utterly gone. South Carolina only cut herself off from the union-breakers and attached herself to such States as clung to the Constitution and Union of the fathers. Secession in 1861 meant the preservation of the union of 1787. Coercion in 1861 was rebellion against the Federal compact and death of the old Union. The Star-Spangled Banner became the labarum of invasion, and the Southern Cross the standard of all the Union that was left.

The Union that our fathers and mothers loved lay buried for twenty-five years. From March, 1861, to March, 1885, any true Southern man in the national capital found himself a stranger in a strange land, and was looked upon as a political Pariah by those in power,—an intruder even in the house of his fathers. Every government office all over the land in the hands of the Northern States. What a travesty of union! The North a dictator, the South a satrapy. The Northern man, lord; the Southern man, a vassal.

But, thank God, the resurrection came; the door-stone of the tomb was rolled away by the national election of Cleveland in 1884. “The Southern States are in the Union, and they shall have their equal rights,” was the slogan of the triumphant party. Then go to the capital and you find the first national administration since Buchanan—Bayard, the champion of the South, in the first place in the Cabinet, and by his side the Confederate leaders, Lamar and Garland. About the first act of the administration was to appoint General Lawton, the quartermaster-general of the Confederate army, to one of the most conspicuous embassies in Europe, Curry to Spain and other Confederates wherever there was a place for them. The sons of our Southern mothers were no longer under the ban. Peace, real peace, had come. The Union, real union, was herself again.

Again in 1892 the electoral votes of the Northern States alone were sufficient to make Grover Cleveland, the great pacificator, twice the choice of the solid South, again President of the United States. Once more there is a national Cabinet, the South having half of it, with a Confederate colonel in command of the navy, another minister to France, another to Mexico, another to Guatemala—Southern men at Madrid and Constantinople; and when this country needs a man to represent her in the crisis in Cuba to a Virginia Lee is given the conspicuous honor.

The last unjust election law is repealed; the last taint taken from the fair name of Confederate officers. The North has extended the right hand of union. The South has grasped it; and withered be the arm that would tear those hands asunder.

Image of the Southern Woman Surmounting the Monument

High above these hands, artist, place the crowning statue of the Southern woman. Let it be the queenly form of the proudest of the proud mothers of Southern chivalry. Let her sweet, calm image face the north,—no frown on her brow,—no scorn on her lip. Let her happy, hopeful smile tell the world that Southern womanhood felt most sadly the Union broken, and hails most joyfully the Union restored.

My countrymen, we have a country! In the name of God, our mothers, as they look down from heaven, beseech you to preserve it.

The art of sculpture was finished in ancient Greece, and the statue of Venus de Medici will never be surpassed. In it the artist has put in marble the perfect form, face, majesty and grace of woman. The ancients in their sensual materialism adored beauty in form and feature and many moderns worship at the same shrine. The German poet Heine, when an invalid in Paris, had himself carried every day in a roller chair to the Tuilleries, to gaze upon the marble beauty of Venus de Milo. If in our age, the artist ever attempts to sculpture the true woman, the woman with soul, the Christian Psyche, with heart as perfect as her face, with character more charming than her form, the modern Praxitiles will take for his model the Southern woman, from among your mothers and grandmothers. They are your models in character now. To you much is given; of you will much be required. Study your mothers and may Heaven help you to learn the God-given lesson.

Young men, the model man, Jesus Christ, the divine Saviour of our world, asked for no carved stone, no statue to his memory. He wanted no marble cathedral. He demanded living monuments,—men and women to set forth in holy lives the lessons of his example. From childhood He honored his mother, nor did He forget her on the cross.

With something of his exalted spirit your mothers, who have gone before you, demand of you not a chiseled monument, but they do beseech you to honor them in manly life. Hold sacred the very blood they gave you. Lay hold of their lofty principles; drink in their noble spirit. Set forth their glorious patriotism, and you will be a crown to them, a blessing to your country, and an honor to your God.