Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 41.djvu/27

Rh and the self-seeking egotist combined were the fearful financier and the fervered fanatic to make a mockery of those ideals on which the Union had been established.

In the South, thank God, it was otherwise. Few had a stake in slavery; still fewer had those manufactures New England had made a very god. The average man had only a farm and a tradition. But what a tradition it was—of Henry in that church across the hill, of Washington upon the plains of Yorktown, of Jefferson penning the Kentucky resolutions, of Madison on the floor of Congress, of giants before these who had preached the gospel of a free man's right to freedom and a proud man's right to pride. Men lived on the lands their forebears cleared by title from Anne or George. They had married the daughters of those who had been their grandfathers' comrades in arms in the Continental army and they worshipped at unsullied altars the God of ancient days. No muddled jargon of a foreign tongue was heard in all the South; no restless, self-important stock had come to mar with sophistry the simple tenets of our faith political. We were the Anglo-Saxons of the world, with blood as pure as that which flowed at Agincourt; with speech that savored still of Warwick lanes and Whitehall collonades. Every man was a politician by instinct, not by choice; a public servant from conviction, not from profit. Every man cherished next to his honor and his fireside the State his ancestors helped to make, and visualized in vital form the basic principles on which a union of the States was founded. When those principles were assailed, the thrust was at the vitals of a righteous self-respect. All answered with one voice. That war that followed was fought with fervor, generaled with genius and sustained with sacrifice because it was a war of mind against passion. The South of 1861 was the France of 1914, with the sins of no Paris to atone. Well might the youthful Worsley write: