Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/238

 232 Southern Historical Society Papers.

every new remedy and every new principle. There was no pretence of originality. Every prophet that arose with a new evangel immediately found his religion thrown aside. We considered that under the new conditions and under the changed relations the remedy to be applied was the same old principles which our fathers had applied and for which they had fought. We adhered to the same old doctrines that man as man was capable of self-government; man as man was created by his God in his own likeness and was capable of infinite possibilities. We who had thus been developed through those ages under the power of those principles, were to apply them to a new condition, and those principles were the old principles of the equality of manhood under the law. So we stood unflinchingly for the equal freedom of every man, and resolutely and without division or question for like treatment of every comrade. The broad and universal principle was to our future vital ; its narrow and immediate application involved our personal honor, and this can never be made a matter of barter. We stood by all our comrades; we rejected all vicarious sacrifices ; if any were manacled, we felt the chains on our wrists; if casemates imprisoned any, our hearts were in jail. It was not that he was our president our valiant chieftain ; it was not that he had shed lustre on the American arms at Buena Vista ; it was not that in the Senate chamber he had been the equal of the most august senator that ever sat in that great body; it was not that as Secretary of War he was the best official the American nation ever had ; it was not that he had championed our cause and lost; but it was that he was selected as our victim that made us sur- round Jefferson Davis with all our hearts. So long as for our sins he was selected as our victim to suffer in our place, we bear to him the utmost loyalty, that all the world may know that no man who had been our comrade would we ever desert when he was in the hour of trial.

And we also built upon the second great principle the same old idea of the autonomy of the States and out of these two principles we worked our salvation. Of course there were all the private hard- ships which war and disaster bring. When we recall that period the men who returned to their homes and found nothing but ruins and their families when we recall what the women of the South did during those times, we can scarcely repress our tears. I have had it beat into my ears that in olden times the life of the Southern people was an idle life. It never was true. There never was a time