Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 20.djvu/239

 What the Ex Confederate has done in Peace. 233

when the Southern matron was not the typical busy woman. She who nursed the sick, laid out the dead for burial, of all the women of the time was the type of the woman that gives to man happiness and morality. And when the time of trial came, her daughters showed themselves worthy of her training. Who ever saw a South- ern wife, mother, sister or sweetheart in those days whose face was not wreathed in smiles, that he whom she loved might think that she was comfortable and happy ?

On these two great principles the equality of man and the auto- nomy of the States we went to work carefully, laboriously, patiently, yet manfully, and yet under circumstances that seemed daily to grow worse. Military rule became so commingled with orgies of a com- plex masterhood that we can look back upon that period scarcely yet with patience and hardly without a smile ; the traversities upon Anglo-Saxon legislation; the so-called legislatures of some of the Southern States where the white men who participated in the govern- ment gave the ignorance of the black men credit by his associations. And then, amidst conditions which were thus overwhelming, we are paying a war tribute than which no nation has ever paid so great. Has any one ever estimated the war tribute which the Southern people paid ? At one fell swoop was confiscated whatever money had been involved in the purchase of the negro. There was no war debt owned by the South, yet we paid our share of it. No pensions were granted in that section, yet we paid our share of them. With- out murmuring, without making any special row about it, day by day, in innumerable forms, we paid this war tribute.

And what have we done? I cannot tell you no figures can tell you what we have done. But we have done this, to start with : There were eleven States that had been made provinces, and we made these States again. There is not in America to day, thanks be to God, a single spot where there is any doubt of the administration of the law according to the olden traditions of English liberty. There is no place to-day in America- where the officer of the law, with the warrant signed by the proper official and with the seal of the State upon it, does not know his duty, and the person to whom he goes does not submit to his act. Civil law is dominant in every part of this land.

We have restored to the generation to come after us civil liberty in its broadest sense. The courts are open to the humblest suitor; honest judges preside over them; honest juries sit in the jury-box.