Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 18.djvu/95

 Sons of Confederate Veterans. 95

southern gentleman, and deliverer of his people from the dominion of the ignorant, the alien, and the freebooter, challenges and receives our sincerest esteem, unstinted gratitude, and warmest admiration, and anticipating from him the compliment of an oration upon the occasion of this happy reunion, I am relieved, my comrades, from the obligation which has for so many years devolved upon me of deliv- ering the annual address before this Association. The hour is at hand when, with satisfaction unalloyed, we will hearken unto the eloquent utterance of this distinguished Confederate chieftain, enlightened statesman, genuine patriot, and chivalrous son of the South. From the realization of this pleasing and privileged anticipation I may not detain you. Pardon me if I indulge in a single suggestion.

It is painfully manifest that if the duration of this Association is to be measured by the lives of its present members, it will, upon the demise of the longest liver, cease to exist and expire by the terms of its own limitation. There will then be none to take the places of those who followed the Red Cross as it defiantly waved when " trench- ing war" channeled our fields; none who personally shared the for- tunes of the Confederacy ; none who, of their individual knowledge, might proudly testify to the generations.

"No nation rose so white and fair, None fell so pure of crime " ;

none who, with a comrade's warrant, speaking in behalf of our Con- federate Dead, could charge the living to

" Give them the meed they have won in the past, Give them the honors their future forecast, Give them the chaplets they won in the strife, Give them the laurels they lost with their life " ;

none, qualified by actual participation in the common and intimate comprehension of the aspirations and the disasters of that memorable epoch, to succeed to the privileges of this special companionship.

" Fanned by conquest's crimson wing," multitudes laud the victors, while the conquered are consigned to the swallowing gulf of blind forgetfulness and dark oblivion. It is of triumphs that muses delight to sing, and the vanquished; are too often summoned by the limner simply to populate the dim back-ground that the images of those who prevailed may appear in brighter array. While the Confederacy, once so puissant, with all its hopes, valorous achievements marvelous exhibitions of political and military power, exists now only as brave