Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/71

 The Address of Hon. John Lamb. 63

fugitive slaves, the South would no longer be bound to keep the compact."

Did any of you ever see a soldier who was fighting for slavery ? A celebrated English historian in treating this subject, remarks : ' ' Slavery was but the occasion of the rupture, in no sense, the object of the war."

Slavery would have been abolished in time had the South succeeded. Virginia would have taken the initiatory in a few years. Her whole history, and the action of her statesmen and represen- tatives in Congress, go to show this.

The enlightened sentiment of mankind, the spirit of the age, was against chattel slavery. England and France had freed their bond- men. Russia emancipated her serfs about 1880. In 1873 the Island of Porto Rico taxed itself $12,000,000 and freed 30,000 slaves. Does any one suppose that the enlightened and Christian people of the Southern States would have set themselves against the moral senti- ment of mankind? and refuse to heed the voice of civilization and progress ?

I have given this hasty argument in no captious spirit, but simply to vindicate the truth of history in the presence of so many of the younger generation.

It would hasten the progress of harmony between the sections if the people of the North would acquaint themselves with these historic facts. It would hasten the era of good feeling now setting in if they would realize that the black race problem is not the only race problem that confronts us.

I look into the faces of men who on their father's knees listened to the stories cf Bunker Hill, Lexington and Yorktown. Teach your children the truth of history touching both revolutions in this country. Virginia as then constituted, furnished one third of Washington's army at Yorktown, while at the same time she had 2,500 soldiers with Green in the South, and 700 also fighting the Indians on the Ohio. Let it go down to your children that the one revolution was as justifiable as the other, and that for the first, Virginia gave the immortal Washington, and to the last supplied the peerless Lee.

Let me give you a pen portrait of our chieftain from an English view point. In a translation of Homer, dedicated to "General R. E. Lee, the most stainless of living commanders and except in fortune the greatest," Philip Stanley Worsley of Oxford, wrote: