By Robert L. Taylor.
Delivered at the Confederate Reunion at Brownsville,
Tenn., in August, 1902.
Time in its tireless flight has brought us again to the full leaf and
flower of another summer. The grass grows green about the dust of heroes;
the roses twine once more about their tomb, and the morning-glories
point their purple bugles toward the sky as if to sound a reveille to
our immortal dead. Another year with its sunshine and its shadows, its
laughter and its tears, its sowing and its reaping, its cradle songs and
funeral hymns, now lies between us and that dark day at Appomattox when
the star of Southern hope went down and the flag of Southern chivalry was
furled forever. Another year has added whiter locks to the temples of
those old veterans who wore the gray, and deeper furrows to their brows,
and they now stand among us like solitary oaks in the middle of a fallen
forest, hoary with age, covered with scars, and glorious as the living
monuments of Southern manhood and Southern courage.
[Illustration:
SAM DAVIS.
]
But we are not yet far enough away from that awful struggle to forget
the bloody hills of Shiloh, where Albert Sidney Johnston died, and the
fatal field of Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson fell. We are
not yet far enough away to forget the frowning heights of Gettysburg,
where Pickett’s charging lines rushed to glory and the grave. We are
not yet far enough away to forget Murfreesboro, Missionary Ridge and
Chickamauga, and the hundred other fields of death and courage, where
the flower of the South, the bravest of the brave and the truest of the
true, fought for the cause they thought was right, and died for the land
they loved. We are not yet far enough away to forget the agony and the
tears of a nation that was crushed when the shattered armies of Lee and
Johnston, weary, half-starved, bare-footed and in rags, stacked their
arms in the gloom of defeat, and left the field of valor overwhelmed
and overpowered, yet undaunted and unconquered. When time has measured
off a thousand years, the world will not forget the sufferings and
the sacrifices of the brave men who so freely gave their fortunes and
shed their blood to preserve the most brilliant civilization that ever
flourished in any land or in any age, for literature loves a lost cause.
[Illustration:
ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON.
]
Historians will some day sit down on our battlefield and write true
history—history that will surpass the wildest dreams of fancy that were
ever woven into fiction; and poets will linger among our graves and sing
sweeter songs than were ever sung before. For each monument is within
itself a volume of wild and thrilling adventure, and every tombstone
tells a story touching as the soldier’s last tear on the white bosom of
his manhood’s bride, tender as his last farewell.
I would not utter a word of bitterness against the men who wore the blue.
They fought and died under the old flag to perpetuate the Union, and they
were men worthy of Southern prowess and Southern valor. I would not, if I
could, rob Grant, the great and noble chieftain, of his fame and glory.
Every Southern soldier ought to stand with uncovered head when his name
is spoken. For when all was lost, in the darkest and saddest moment of
Southern history, he was magnanimous to Lee, and kind to his famished
and shattered army. Along the blue lines of the triumphant foe, when the
unhappy Confederates marched between them and laid down their guns, there
was no shout of victory nor flourish of trumpets, but only silence and
tears.
When the conflict had ended the Confederate soldier proudly stood among
the blackened walls of his ruined country, magnificent in the gloom of
defeat, and still a hero. His sword was broken, his home was in ashes,
the earth was red beneath him, the sky was black above him; he had placed
all in the scales of war and had lost all save honor. But he did not sit
down in despair to weep away the passing years.
His slaves were gone but he was still a master. Too proud to pine, too
strong to yield to adversity, he threw down his musket and laid his
willing but unskilled hands upon the waiting plow. He put away the
knapsack of war and turned his face toward the morning of peace. He
abandoned the rebel yell to enter the forum and the court room and the
hustings. He gave up the sword to enter the battles of industry and
commerce, and now, in little more than a third of a century, the land of
desolation and death, the land of monuments and memories, has reached the
springtime of a grander destiny, and the sun shines bright on the domes
and towers of new cities built upon the ashes of the old, and the cotton
fields wave their white banners of peace and the fields of wheat wave
back their banners of gold.
Who can portray the possibilities of a country that has produced the Lees
and Jacksons and the brilliant Gordon and the dashing Joe Wheeler, who is
as gallant in the blue as he was glorious in the gray, and the impetuous
and immortal Bedford Forrest, the Marshal Ney of the Confederacy? Who
can portray the possibilities of a country which has produced the
stalwart and sinewy men of the rank and file, who followed the stars and
bars through the smoke and flame of every desperate battle and stepped
proudly into history as the greatest fighters the world has ever known?—a
country so richly blessed not only with brave men and beautiful women,
but whose blossoming hills and fertile valleys are so generous and kind,
and whose mountains are burdened with coal and iron and copper and zinc
and lead enough to supply the world for a thousand years; whose virgin
forests yet stand awaiting and sighing for the woodsman’s ax, and whose
winding rivers flow clear and cool and make music as they go. It is the
beautiful land of love and liberty, of sunshine and sentiment, of fruits
and flowers, where the grape-vine staggers from tree to tree as if drunk
with the wine of its own purple clusters; where peach and plum and
blood-red cherries and every kind of berry bend bough and bush and glow
like showered drops of rubies and pearls. It is the land of the magnolia
and the melon, the paradise of the cotton and the cane.
They tell us now that it is the new South, but the same old blood runs
in the veins of these old veterans and the same old spirit heaves their
bosoms and flashes in their eyes; the same old soldiers who wielded
the musket long ago are nursing their grandchildren on their knees and
teaching them the same old lessons of honor and truth, and the same old
love of liberty. The mocking-bird sings the same old songs in the same
old tree, and the brooks laugh and leap down the same old hollows. It is
the same old South and we are the same old Southern people:
There may be skies as blue, but none bluer;
There may be hearts as true, but none truer.
[Illustration:
STONEWALL JACKSON.
]
It is the same old land of the free and the same old home of the brave.
It is the same old South resurrected from the dead, with the prints of
the nails still in its hands and the scars of the spear still in its side.
“I’m glad I am in Dixie,
Look away! Look away!
And live and die for Dixie,
Look away! Look away!
Look away down South in Dixie.”
Within the borders of this fair land of Dixie the finest opportunities
for investment and the richest fields for enterprise ever known in the
Western Hemisphere are now open to all who wish to come and help us to
make it blossom like the rose. A new development has already begun.
Thirty years ago there was not a factory in South Carolina. To-day she
is spinning and weaving more cotton than she raises and is second only
to Massachusetts in the manufacture of cotton goods; and North Carolina
and Georgia have made equal progress with South Carolina in this new
idea of making the South not only the leader in agriculture, but also
in converting our raw material into finished articles of commerce and
trade, and thus saving to our section countless millions of wealth. In
the mountains of south-western Virginia, south-eastern Kentucky, East
Tennessee, North Alabama, where the sunshine plays hide and seek with
the shadows, and where many rivers are born, there is a beautiful valley
six hundred miles in length and from one to thirty miles wide. Until
a quarter of a century ago the principal product of that country was
children. The people did not realize that the north rim of the valley was
almost an unbroken vein of coal and that the South was an exhaustless bed
of iron, and they placed but little value on the vast parks of timber
where the ax had never gleamed, but now the dynamite has just begun to
jar the silent hills and the forests have just begun to fall. Birmingham
is making the sky of night red with the glare of her furnaces, and all
the way up the valley to the new city of Roanoke new furnaces are being
lighted and new industries are developing, and Huntsville, Decatur,
Chattanooga, Knoxville, Johnson City and Bristol on the line, will soon
be great manufacturing centers, where the pig iron and the logs of
hardwood that are now being shipped away to be converted into finished
articles will pass through our own mills and we will cease to be the
fools we have been in the past, buying furniture made in foreign cities
out of our own timber and all the implements of agriculture made out of
our own iron.
[Illustration:
GENERAL GORDON.
]
Until twenty years ago the sons of Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas
were contented to sit on their verandas and watch the “nigger” and his
lazy mule in the cotton field and listen to the melodies of the old
plantation. But now the mills of Mississippi are beginning to mingle
their music with these melodies, and the marshes of Louisiana are being
converted into rice fields and she is making enough sugar to-day to
sweeten the tooth of the world. Arkansas is building factories and
opening her mines and mineral wealth, and sawing down her great forests
of pine. At the close of the Civil War Texas was a wilderness, but now
the howl of the wolf has given place to the whistle of the engine, and
the whoop of the Indian has been hushed by the music of machinery. From
Texarkana to El Paso prosperous cities and towns have sprung up like
prairie flowers where the wild horse once galloped and the buffalo
grazed, and great geysers of coal oil have solved the fuel problem.
In the full development of this new idea of transforming our raw material
into finished goods lies our hope of regaining our prestige and power
in the management of national affairs, and of winning back billions of
wealth which were wiped out by the destroying angel of war. God grant
that our beloved old South may be as happy in reaping the golden harvest
of prosperity in the years to come as she has been brave and true through
the suffering and woes of adversity in the sorrowful years of the past.
And now, my grizzled old friends who once wore the gray, in the name of
the young men I congratulate you upon having lived to see the dawn of
a brighter day for your battle-scarred and war-swept country. You must
soon answer to the roll call of eternity and join your comrades on the
other side. I give you the pledge of your sons that they will ever defend
the record you have made and themselves live up to the traditions of
their fathers. In the name of our women, both young and old, I implore
the blessing of the Lord upon you, and pray that as the dews of life’s
evening are condensing on your brow and the shadows of the long, long
night are gathering about you, you may linger long in the twilight, with
loving hands to lead you and loving hearts to bless.
[Illustration:
HARRISON’S GIFT AT CAMP CHASE.
]