Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 23.djvu/10

 4 Southern. Historical Society Papers.

axiomatic truths of human freedom, and produced eight generations of manly freemen willing to defend them. Virginia ! every Heroic Age salutes you ; all free peoples hail you as the historic mother of American Independence, and this exalted era applauds your Ameri- can spirit ! I speak by your courtesy also within the gates of a revered city, planted by the enterprise and bravery of liberty-loving men amidst their conquered obstacles, nurtured into stalwart strength by the acrid sap of trial, lathed into lithe grace in the whirl of sharp vicissitudes, polished into untarnished brilliance by the rub of rude conflicts, and withal steadfast in sustaining the most vital human convictions ! a city that has reversed the dread deci- sions of the unfriendly fates .which decreed its destruction, and wrought superb success out of the debris of its ruins ! Richmond ! The epochs of human struggles cluster around you in a proud hom- age, such as the sheaves of the patriarchs gave to the sheaf of princely Joseph in his prophetic dream ! In the inspiring presence of the sons and daughters of this illustrious State, every one worthy of a place in the house of our fathers, I may have liberty to discuss with the ardor of a Southernor and in the soberness of matured reason a patriotic question that concerns our whole country and admits of no partisan treatment ; a theme as broad as our ex- pansive land and uplifted above the stature of partisan political motive. Although to the Southern manner born, I will speak with- out sectional bias, and in vivid consciousness of possessing at this moment the broadest and truest American spirit ! Southern Honor maintains with chivalric fealty that agreement which the sword's arbitrament lately required, when Americans surrendered to Ameri- cans, and not by deed or word or thought, will the terms of that settlement, sanctioned by the peerless Lee, be avoided in letter or in spirit. The South possesses in affluence the true American spirit, that pride in the grandeur of our country, that hospitality which keeps open house for the worthies of all the world, that glorying in our free institutions, that faith in our Nation's power to maintain its place among the earth's greatest governments, and the profound conviction that in the constitutional union of all the States, we shall achieve a national greatness never equalled in the history of the world. The South says let the decayed corpse of long gone, lurid, sectional strife lie like John Brown's body mouldering in the grave, while the American soul shall go marching on marching on for- ever, under the flag of the Union, keeping step to the music of