Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/305

 The Confederate Dead of Mississippi. 305

cold philosophy. All of us are eager to know from any who can teach us how, better than we are doing, we can adapt ourselves to our changed condition, and to follow any example, wherever found, which has in it any useful lesson that we ought to learn.

But all this can be better done if we keep alive and foster, for our guidance and support, those distinctive Southern sentiments and characteristic qualities which have been the strength of our people, and on which not only their prosperity and progress, but, in view of their peculiar surroundings, their safety also must depend. For some fancied advantage of an utilitarian kind let us be slow to give up something worth more to us, even in matters purely practical, than all that is promised in return. Let us not profanely turn our backs upon the old South with its traditions and examples and hallowed memories ; let us never stifle the sentiment which has animated its sons and daughters and sink it into mere flinty practicality on the false idea that the virtues which make our people what they are are incompatible with true progress and improvement. It does not argue that we do not live in the present, and look hopefully to the future, that we cling to the memories of the past. We can love the Union and still delight to dwell upon the course of those who are faithful to the Union now, as they were to the Southern cause. We do not stand in the way of the earnest work of real progress when we depre- cate any tendency to decay in Southern manhood, and foster those sentiments which will guide us and inspire us, hereafter as heretofore, to be true alike to ourselves and the government to which our alle- giance is due.

If any here consider these expressions the offspring of mere Southern ardor and enthusiasm, I would ask them what it was that moved old and young, rich and poor, slaveholders and non- slaveholders, ministers of the church and men of the world, the sedate and thoughtful, the reckless and impulsive, all alike, in eleven States, to rise up as one man and fly to arms with one impulse in 1861 ? What was it that sustained them, with a government born almost under fire, without organization or military training, arms, supplies or means, without allies or sympathy, shut in by a close blockade and shut out from all the world, with the organized govern- ment and its army and navy and treasury and its own vast resources backed up by foreign commerce and manufactures, all against them, what sustained them in a four-years' contest with the trained troops of the government and the volunteers of all the States of the mighty North and the legions of mercenaries drawn from the nations beyond