Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/117

 Address of Rev. G. W. Beale. Ill

innocency and truth of the cause we loved. Our Troy has fallen, but its virtue and its purity we may maintain, even as we reverence the piety of a lost mother.

"Ah ! realm of tears, but let her bear

This blazon to the end of time; No nation rose so white and fair None fell so pure of crime."

With respect to the motives that actuated the men of Virginia, who flew to arms and battled for the cause of the South in the great civil struggle, it may be claimed that posterity is not likely to misjudge them. The names of these men will not be associated with any schemes of restless sedition, or with any designs of unrighteous poli- tical ambition, or any spirit of unholy, mercenary conquest. It was for no such purposes that they left their peaceful homes to brave the dangers of the fratricidal strife. Their sole aim was to protect their altars, their families, and their rights under the Constitution, from the perils of an armed invasion. They did not seek the conflict. They took up arms for no aggressive war. But, when the dark clouds were gathering and the storm threatened to burst upon the land. Vir- ginia sought to act the part of mediator. She called for a congress of peace. Standing on the frontier, between the embittered sections, she pleaded, with one hand reaching northward and the other south- ward, that calm reason might prevail and pacific measures be adopted. But her pleadings were in vain. The heated passions of the sections could only be allayed in a baptism of blood.

It was only when Virginia was called to send her own sons for the invasion of the homes of their kindred of the South ; only when armed regiments were gathering to traverse her domain on this mis- sion, that she cast in her lot with the land of her kindred in blood, in sympathy, in interest, and in political conviction. Bound thus as she was to the South, it would have been no more natural for her to have joined in the bloody crusade against her, than for a mother to plunge the dagger into the heart of the child she loves.

Every man who went forth from our borders, armed for the conflict, felt that he went to defend his home, his family, his kindred, and the graves of his sires, from invasion and defamation. Above every consideration of constitutional construction and the paramount claim of the State to the allegiance of her sons, there was rooted in the hearts of our people the conviction that their families and their kin- dred were assailed with the mailed hand of war ; that their institu-