Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/159

 i/t/e, Services and Character of Jefferson Davis. 151

tributing to its support and seeking its welfare, I feel that as he was the hero in war who fought the bravest, so he is the hero now who puts the past in its truest light, does justice to all, and knows no foe but him who revives the hates of a bygone generation.

If we lost by war a Southern union of thirteen States, we have yet a common part in a continental union of forty -two, to which our fathers gave their blood, and upon which they shed their blessings ; and a people who could survive four years of such experience as we had in i86i-'65 can v/ork out their own salvation on any spot of earth that God intended for man's habitation. We are, in fact, in our father's home, and it should be, as it is, our highest aim to develop its magnificent possibilities, and make it the happiest dwelling-place of the children of men.

JEFFERSON DAVIS A LOVER OF THE UNION.

The Southern leader was no secessionist per se. His antecedents, his history, his services, his own earnest words often uttered, attest his love of the Union and his hope that it might endure. In 1853, in a letter to Hon. William J. Brown, of Indiana, he repudiated the imputation that he was a disunionist.

'* Pardon," he said, "pardon the egotism, in consideration of the occasion, when I say to you that my father and uncles fought in the Revolution of 1776, giving their youth, their blood, and their little patrimony to the constitutional freedom which I claim as my inherit- ance. Three of my brothers fought in the war of 1812 ; two of them were comrades of the Hero of the Hermitage, and received his com- mendation for gallantry at New Orleans. At sixteen years of age I was given to the service of my country. For twelve years of my life I have borne its arms and served it zealously, if not well. As I feel the infirmities which suffering more than age has brought upon me, it would be a bitter reflection indeed if I was forced to conclude that my countrymen would hold all this light when weighed against the empty panegyric which a time-serving politician can bestow upon the Union, for which he never made a sacrifice.

me a disunionist I would answer him in monosyllables. But I have often asserted the right for which the battles of the Revolution were fought, the right of a people to change their government whenever it was found to be oppressive and subversive of the objects for which governments are instituted, and have contended for the independ-
 * In the Senate I announced if any respectable man would call