Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 40.djvu/7

Rh own life, public and private, was a superb illustration of the truth of the sublime epigram. And so, unswerving and unfaltering devotion to duty is the glorious heritage which we Sons of Confederate Veterans, as sons of Confederate veterans, have acquired by reason of our lineage.

But it is not of the courage, valor and endurance of the Confederate soldier that I wish particularly to speak on this occasion. Those cardinal virtues of Dixie's defenders have been extolled a thousand times over by tongues more fluent than mine. Nor is it my purpose to vindicate the course of the peoples of the Southern States in asserting, and striving at all costs to maintain their independence under the exigencies of the particular crisis of 1860-61. The world is already coming to know, as we have always known, that we need no such vindication—that our open record is its own vindication.

No: it is another phase of what we may call the Confederate subject which I wish here to discuss; a phase which, it seems to me, has been too little featured and, I fear, too little recognized, even by our own chroniclers and advocates. And yet, to my mind, upon the general recognition of it depends the true progress of our own people; nay, of free government, and hence of civilization itself. And that phase or aspect of the general subject is this: The absolute soundness of the principles upon which the Southern Confederacy was bottomed; not merely the rightfulness of our stand for political independence under the peculiar circumstances of that time, but the everlasting verity of the political and institutional ideals underlying our action; ideals vital and essential to all ages and climes as a goal toward which to press, if the world is to have true liberty with progress.

For our Confederate war—our second war for independence. Stonewall Jackson called it (2)—was not a mere abortive revolution. We of the Southern States stood for great and fundamental principles of government; principles that meant, and that still mean much for the advancement of free institutions and of human happiness.

And, just as the valor of the Confederate soldier and the untold heroism of the Confederate woman are immortal, so, with