Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/430

 424 Southern Historical Society Papers.

came back in this joyous springtime to their suffering families to find desolation and destruction everywhere ; blackened ruins marked the sites of the stately mansions of once lordly planters ; the fields, once white with the world's great staple, were now fenceless and unplowed ; "the fig tree had not blossomed, neither was there fruit in the vine ; the labor of the olive had failed, and the fields yielded no meat ; the flocks had been cut off from the folds, and there were no herds in the stalls"; the cities were without business, trade and commerce, and grass was growing in the streets of the villages almost deserted of inhabitants. " The elders had ceased from the gates, the young men from their music (yea, the best and the bravest of them filled bloody graves.) The joy of their heart had ceased, and their dances had been turned into mourning. The crown had fallen from the head of their beautiful South-land, and the Lord of Hosts had seemed to cover Himself with a thick cloud so that the prayers of widows and orphans could not pass through."

It was at this time, when our whole people were shrouded with a pall of gloom and anguish, and absolute starvation was imminent in many places, that the generous heart of your city throbbed with one simultaneous pulsation of pity. Then both sexes, all classes and conditions, friends and foes alike, forgetting political and sectional differences, vied with one another in sending relief to the afflicted South.

In the name of my countrymen, thus rescued from despair and death, I invoke the blessings of Almighty God upon the heads of their deliverers, whatever be their religious creed or political faith ; whatever be the skies of their nativity or their opinion of the right- eousness or unrighteousness of the Southern cause.

My subject is the Old South ; the Old South of pure women and brave men ; the South of Washington and Jefferson ; of Carroll and Rutledge ; of Marshall and Taney ; of the Pinckneys of Maryland and South Carolina (for they were of the same stock) ; of Andrew Jackson and Winfield Scott ; of Decatur, McDonough and Tatnall ; the generous Old South which, rich, prosperous and peaceful under British domination, cried, " the cause of Boston is the cause of us all," and had her sons slain and her land desolated in defence ol her Northern sister; the magnanimous Old South which, without ships and commerce, hoisted in 1812, in the interest of the carrying trade, the banner inscribed "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights;" the chivalrous Old South, crying out in the person of Randolph Ridgely, when Charley May was about trying the novel experiment of a