Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 5.djvu/32

20 the call to arms, in language so true, so just and so eloquent, that the author of this sketch inserts it here. Writing more than five years after the close of the great struggle, Mr. Trescot said:

We who are the vanquished in this battle must of necessity leave to a calmer and wiser posterity to judge of the intrinsic worth of that struggle, as it bears upon the principles of constitutional liberty, and as it must affect the future history of the American people; but there is one duty not only possible but imperative, a duty which we owe alike to the living and the dead, and that is the preservation in perpetual and tender remembrance of the lives of those who, to use a phrase scarcely too sacred for so unselfish a sacrifice, died in the hope that we might live. Especially is this our duty, because in the South a choice between the parties and principles at issue was scarcely possible. From causes which it is exceedingly interesting to trace, but which I cannot now develop the feeling of State loyalty had acquired throughout the South an almost fanatic intensity; particularly in the old colonial States did this devotion to the State assume that blended character of affection and duty which gives in the old world such a chivalrous coloring to loyalty to the crown. . . . When, therefore, by the formal and constitutional act of the States, secession from the Federal government was declared in 1860 and 1861, it is almost impossible for any one not familiar with the habits and thoughts of the South, to understand how completely the question of duty was settled for Southern men. Shrewd, practical men who had no faith in the result, old and eminent men who had grown gray in service under the national flag, had their doubts and their misgivings; but there was no hesitation as to what they were to do. Especially to that great body of men, just coming into manhood, who were preparing to take their places as the thinkers and actors of the next generation, was this call of the State an imperative summons.

The fathers and mothers who had reared them; the society whose traditions gave both refinement and assurance to their young ambition; the colleges in which the creed of Mr. Calhoun was the text-book of their studies; the friends with whom they planned their future; the very land they loved, dear to them as thoughtless boys,