RECONSTRUCTION
Much has been said and written of that unhappy period immediately
following the Civil War--unhappy for both the North and the South,
because its memories delayed the reunion of our sections through many
years. The humiliation and griefs of that frightful era left far deeper
scars than did all the sabers and swords and bullets from Bull Run to
Appomattox. The flame of war had burned out the lives of thousands of
our brave sons and consumed our homes and wasted our lands, but the
embers of reconstruction seared their mark upon the very souls of our
people.
We who know do not charge that horror to the great nation to which we
are as loyal and true as any beneath the flag to-day, but to individuals
who abused authority and misrepresented the spirit of the North toward
the South.
I, for one, thank God that our people themselves settled the problem of
reconstruction by the application of a righteous courage to a desperate
situation, but there was one influence in that settlement which was
never generally appreciated. Across the closed chasm, above the graves
of all the soldier dead, the great men of the North and the great men of
the South looked at each other in silence and understood when the
oppressors were driven from the South.
As soon as the insidious tongues of a few intermeddling, ignorant,
vicious men and women, seeking to be the ministering angels of the
former slaves, were hushed by the stern policy of the representative
Southern people, the happy and natural relations of the two races were
restored; and to-day, after nearly sixty years of freedom, the black man
of the South knows that the Southern white man is his truest friend,
because he alone understands him and sympathizes with his natural and
legitimate needs.
As one who in a very humble way helped to make that sad history, as the
representative of a family who owned slaves, I desire to here record my
opinion that in the trying period following the war it was the Christian
fortitude of our people that saved the day for us. Out of the ashes of
material wealth, out of anguish and humiliation, we came with honor; and
the unbroken spirit of the old South, serene amid its earthly poverty,
is the unquestioned and priceless heritage of our sons.
Whenever and wherever I meet a soldier of the sixties, no matter whether
he wore the blue or the gray, I think of his life as the figure and
symbol of a sad, eventful day. His youth represents the morning, and it
was filled with golden dreams. Achievement and success smiled before
him, and his heart leaped with love, just as young hearts leap to-day.
But, before he could realize his dreams, a great storm--that awful
war--came and swept away his fairest prospects. The noontide of his life
found him busy with the wreckage of the morning, and then it was that
there rose in his soul a far greater courage than that which had
sustained him on the bloodiest battle field--the courage to meet and
conquer adversity, the divine grace to cast away his bitterness and to
love his former foes.
My comrades, out of the ruined morning and the rebuilding toil of the
noontide we have come at last to the evening and the twilight. Time has
placed upon our heads his crown of silver and of snow. For us the long
day of life is near spent, and the world can never chide us if, in the
spirit of fraternity and forgiveness, we find ourselves dreaming
backward toward the blood-billowed years of Shiloh and Chickamauga and
all our other fields of mutual and glorious memories.
All of us who are now living in the true spirit of liberty and union
know that out of our great war of sixty years ago has come a greater
peace than our nation could have ever known had we not cut away, with
the sword, the great mistake of the fathers of our country.
Let us pray that our sacrifices, now far back in the years, may be truly
recorded, to be the living evidences of American courage--that tried and
true courage which is our greatest asset, an asset of national wealth
outweighing the value even of our vast material wealth.
Embodied in our sons and grandsons, only a little while ago, the whole
world glimpsed that same spirit of courage and patriotism on the battle
fields of Europe, when the “Blue and the Gray” turned to “Olive Drab”
and our boys, millions strong, crossed the ocean to defend the ideals of
our country--ideals of national life which are rapidly becoming the
ideals of all truly civilized peoples of the earth.
I rejoice that I have lived to see the greatness of America dawn upon
the world. I rejoice that when the hour struck for the flag of universal
liberty to “go over the top,” it was carried there by the substance of
our fields, by the power that came from our mountains of coal and iron,
by the whirring wings of our liberty motors, and by the unbeaten and
unbeatable soldiers of the United States.
For one hundred and forty-seven years the individuality of the American
soldier has defied the analysis of military critics and upset the
theories of every nation that has met him on the battle field.
Since his first far-off shot of Lexington, the makers of war maps have
been unable to chart his power from his visible numbers, for in his
unconquerable spirit there is the might of unseen legions and the
unmeasured force of just and democratic purpose, as an armed host, is
bivouacked in his soul.
You may follow his history from his advent into the world of political
contention, through his almost unbelievable and unbroken line of
successes, and you will find him, always and everywhere, the one
unbeatable force which cannot be weighed in the scales that determine
the military values of all other peoples. If other evidences were
lacking to establish these facts, certain incidents of the World War
alone would prove them. In no case did he fail to meet the test of fire;
and the anxious world stood aghast when the German staff reduced the
question of fighting ability to an absolute test in the hope of proving
the weakness of our “raw recruits” when pitted against soldiers not only
trained, but bred and born, in the iron atmosphere of the “Great
Empire.” The Germans, confident of their superiority, man for man, felt
that such a test would weaken the morale of the American soldier and
boost the waning German hope at Berlin.
On April 20, 1918, at Seicheprey, in the Toul Sector, a picked German
column, the product of a century of militarism, assaulted an American
force of approximately equal numbers.
Not only was it a clash of men; it was the deadly embrace of
principles--the death grapple of human systems.
The world knows the result. The individuality of the American soldier
was asserted before the astonished eyes of all nations, and the Stars
and Stripes floated triumphantly over that field of death.
Unafraid of all the military camps of the earth, this strange civil
soldier, while fostering and guarding the greatest of all republics, has
eschewed the damning principles of militarism, ever preferring to keep
his sword sheathed in the peaceful scabbard of industry, drawing it
only when Liberty is endangered.
Of that deadly war, which, directly or indirectly, involved every square
inch of the earth’s surface and the fate of every human being, living
and yet to live, Hendrick Van Loon has beautifully said:
“The human race was given its first chance to become truly
civilized when it took courage to question all things, and made
‘knowledge and understanding’ the foundation upon which to create a
more reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The great war
was the ‘growing pain’ of this new world.”
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