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 CLASS OF 1886; PH.D. THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 
 
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ADDRESS 
 
 OF 
 
 CAPTAIN C. B. DENSON, 
 
 UPON THE INVITATION OF 
 
 THE DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY 
 
 OF NORTH CAROLINA, 
 
 Delivered Before the State Chapter, U. D. C. , 
 in Eaeeigh, 
 
 OCTOBER 10, 1900. 
 
 i 
 
ADDRESS OF CAPT. C. B. DENSON, UPON THE 
 INVITATION OF THE DAUGHTERS OF THE 
 CONFEDERACY OF NORTH CAROLINA, DELIV- 
 ERED BEFORE THE STATE CHAPTER, U. D. C, 
 IN RALEIGH, N. C, OCTOBER 10, 1900. 
 
 To be commissioned to utter the sentiments of this, the 
 greatest reoresentative body of the women of North Caro- 
 lina which has ever assembled, touching the sacred mission 
 you hold, together with your sisters of the South, for the 
 erection of the memorial pile to the first and last President 
 of the Confederate States, is a privilege so great, an honor 
 so profound, that it should be undertaken in the humblest 
 spirit by any spokesman of his comrades of the gray. 
 
 Forty thousand who lie in their last blankets among the 
 clods of the valley, could they lift their mangled forms to 
 stand in this presence, and thousands more who have fol- 
 lowed them to dreamless rest, and yet other thousands upon 
 whom the snows of time have fallen, and whose feet are 
 swiftly traveling to the sunset — all these, dear country- 
 women, speak by this voice in reverent gratitude to you 
 and of your work, and they say, "Thank God for the 
 Daughters of the Confederacy." 
 
 Daughters of the Confederacy ! The very name is a 
 benison upon the past ; it is a tribute of laurel upon each 
 grass-grown grave. Daughters of the Confederacy ! It 
 rings in our ears as if sweet bells pealed their chimes 
 through the storm and sunshine of forty years, and we 
 seem to hear their echoes going on to the ages yet to come. 
 
 Jefferson Davis stands alone, in a niche of his own, in 
 human history. His life is without a parallel. In genius, 
 in attainments, in character, he was almost illimitable. 
 
 As the Spaniard stood upon his "peak, in Darien," an I 
 
 ^0 
 
gazed upon the boundless Pacific, spreading into unknown 
 horizon, filled the while with astonishment and awe, so 
 feels the student of human character as he dwells upon this 
 majestic figure in American annals. 
 
 JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS A SOLDIER. 
 The youngest son of ten children of a Revolutionary 
 soldier of Georgia, he was born in Christian county, Ken- 
 tucky, June 3, 1808, but moved to Mississippi in infancy. 
 When in the senior class at Transylvania University, at 
 sixteen, he was app Dinted cadet at West Point, and gradu- 
 ated in 1828. 
 
 Then came frontier life for the protection of the West, 
 and he bore himself with such gallantry in the Black Hawk 
 war that, when the struggle with the Indian warriors was 
 at last successful, the renowned chief was sent to St. Louis 
 under the special charge of the young lieutenant. 
 
 He won the love of the fair daughter of Zachar}^ Taylor, 
 afterwards General and President, who was opposed to a 
 union that involved the hardships of a soldier's for his 
 beloved child. 
 
 Peace came, Lieut. Davis laid down his commission, and 
 with his hard-won bride, plunged into the swamps of the 
 Mississippi for the cotton-planter's life. 
 
 Success followed, but- the cup was dashed from his lips 
 by the loss of his lovely bride. Many years passed before 
 he emerged from the seclusion of his sonow — years of such 
 study and contemplation in his withdrawal from the world 
 as made hirn master of science and philosophy. 
 
 War clouds rolled up again, and the United States was 
 involved in a contest with Mexico, over Texas. Missis- 
 sippi organized a regiment of volunteers, and called him to 
 command as Colonel. This expression of confidence from 
 the brave young patriots who won such distinction in the 
 field of arms, came to him as a surprise, while in Washing- 
 ton, serving as representative for the State at large in Con- 
 gress. To accept was to leave the field of ambition, where 
 
leadership was rapidly coming, and it was to leave the 
 sweet ties of home, for in the previous year the devoted 
 partner of his life, Varina Howell, had become his wife, 
 and this gracious lady, so long his helpmeet through num- 
 berless trials and sorrows, yet survives as his widow, encir- 
 cled by the affection of millions. 
 
 But ambition was denied, even love regretfully surren- 
 dered when the voice of duty called. He could not forget 
 that a soldier's son, he was bred a soldier. He sprang to 
 the field ; at his uigent request, almost demand, he obtained 
 a new weapon — the percussion rifle — for the flint-lock 
 musket Gen. Scott was wedded to. He drilled his officers 
 and men with a manual devised by himself for the rifle, 
 and soon the day of battle came. 
 
 At Monterey his troops carried the redoubt La Tana- 
 varia, from which others had recoiled. He entered the 
 city with the retreating Mexicans, and fought his way 
 through the blasted walls of the houses where the streets 
 were untenable on account of the fire of the Mexican artil- 
 lery. 
 
 Victory over, the city won, there came the dash of sixty 
 miles through a desert and the battle of Buena Vista. It 
 was a desperate undertaking by Taylor's army, against 
 three times their number in strong position. 
 
 When other troops of Taylor's army had been driven 
 back by superior force, and their broken ranks were stream- 
 ing to the rear, his stern command rang out, " Steady, Mis- 
 sissippians ; close up! forward!" Quick, by .seizing two 
 ridges at an obtuse angle, that commanded a ravine up 
 which the enemy must approach, the deadly fire which 
 destroyed the advancing columns forever gave a name in 
 history to "the Mississippi rifle." 
 
 This was the origin of what has been said of the marvel- 
 ous V formation, which every military man knows, upon 
 an ordinary plain, would invite defeat by flank attack from 
 the enemy. 
 
The dangers of the day to the Americans were many, 
 and when the threatened capture of Bragg' s battery would 
 have completed its ruin, Col. Davis rushed his regiment 
 for a mile at the double quick, and drove back with fearful 
 slaughter three successive attacks by the infantry, the 
 dragoons, and the lancers, and the long and hard-fought 
 day was won. 
 
 Well might the grizzled old General declare, "Napoleon 
 never had a marshal who behaved more superbly than Col. 
 Davis did to-day ! " 
 
 And all this while enduring agony. Early in the morn- 
 ing a Mexican bullet had shattered his foot. Unheeding 
 pain and exhaustion of blood, or the entreaties of others, 
 he kept the saddle the livelong day, until victory was won. 
 
 The ministrations of a faithful brother officer through 
 the night probably saved foot and life, but the broken 
 i bones could not then be removed at once, and he was con- 
 demned to return on crutches to his home. 
 
 When, fifteen years later, his State called together her 
 troops for the war for Southern independence, he became 
 Major-General commanding, and was with difficulty in- 
 duced to give up the tented field to accept the crushing 
 responsibilities of the great part which he neither sought 
 nor desired, the Presidency of the Confederate States. 
 
 Even then he was kept from the perils of the lines only 
 by the magnitude of the task which no other hand could 
 perform. It was once the duty of A. P. Hill to beseech, 
 nay, to order him from the line of battle, in front of Rich- 
 mond, where death was falling thick and fast. Was he not 
 a soldier ? 
 
 JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS A STATESMAN. 
 
 Entering politics after a seclusion of eight years, he 
 boldly met the famous Sargent Prentiss in debate, then the 
 most renowned orator of the Southwest. As soon as he 
 wa- able for service after the Mexican struggle he was sent 
 to the Senate of the United States, and from the beginning 
 
was a conspicuous figure. And this was an era of giants 
 in that body, never equalled before or since. Clay, Web- 
 ster, Calhoun and their compeers yet survived, while 
 younger men were there, destined to play great parts in 
 the widening future. 
 
 His leadership came from his inflexible will and un- 
 swerving adherence to principle ; to this he added perfect 
 mastery of the facts in the complicated questions of debate, 
 a minute acquaintance with the history and philosophy of 
 the Constitution and of the whole political life of the States 
 constituting the federation. The crowning grace was utter 
 forgetfulness of self, and courtesy to the bitterest opponent 
 of his measures. 
 
 President Pierce wished him to become Secretary of 
 War, and here the administrative side of statesmanship 
 was exhibited as never before in that chair. 
 
 He reformed the office routine, appointing officials purely 
 for competency and experience ; changed the system of 
 tactics to adapt it to modern warfare, introduced improved 
 weapons and projectiles, especially the minnie rifle; substi- 
 tuted iron carriages for artilleiy, instead of wood ; largely 
 extended the system of arsenals and fortifications ; estab- 
 lished a chain of permanent garrisoned forts to protect 
 settlers in the West ; sent accomplished officers, like 
 McClellan and others, to Europe to study warfare, and set 
 on foot the preparatory surveys for a railroad to the Pacific 
 as a measure of defensive importance to the country. 
 Every detail, however minute, had his watchful eye. 
 
 It is not too much to say that he vivified the depart- 
 ment and made it a great arm of the government. Yet the 
 day came when from its portals issued the orders to cast 
 ignominy upon him, which the judgment of mankind has 
 flung back upon the master whose malice conceived and 
 the slave who abjectly obeyed such orders. 
 
 Returning to the Senate, he was the leader and defender 
 of the party that championed the rights of the States, and 
 
one of the committee of thirteen to devise measures of con- 
 ciliation of the respective sections upon the eve of the war. 
 
 Convinced, as he has irrefutably proven, of the right of 
 the state to withdraw from a compact broken by the once 
 sister States, he was never an advocate of the policy of with- 
 drawal, except when no other course was left to a self- 
 respecting people. If any desired secession as a good in 
 itself, he was not invited to their councils. 
 
 But when all efforts for peace with justice and honor 
 were in vain, and Mississippi notified him of her with- 
 drawal from the Union, he took leave of the Senate, and, 
 upon his election, assumed the reins of the Confederate 
 government, at Montgomery, Ala., February 18, 1861, and 
 transferred the same afterward to Richmond, upon the 
 secession of Virginia. 
 
 Here was the supreme test of the statesman. To organ- 
 ize an army thirty times as large as Washington ever com- 
 manded, although it was destined to be opposed by nearly 
 three millions of troops. For a country almost purely 
 agricultural, and which was wholly without military man- 
 ufactures of any character, from a gun cap or a grain of 
 powder to a seige train, to equip and furnish with arms, 
 artillery and munitions a force which was to contend for 
 five years in the greatest battles of modern times and to 
 meet in two thousand two hundred combats, great and 
 small, an army formed from unlimited men and with the 
 wealth of the world at command. 
 
 To gather a navy from the wrecks in Southern navy 
 yards, or picked up obscurely on foreign shores, and with 
 such means to drive northern commerce from the seas ; to 
 revolutionize naval warfare among the nations of the earth 
 by the iron-clad and the torpedo, and carry the battle-cross 
 flag around the world in triumph ! 
 
 To maintain the rights of the judiciary, and to preserve 
 the sacred writ of habeas corpus and the orderly conduct of 
 civil government ; and that in the face of its daily violation 
 
7 
 
 across the Potomac, in outrage of the very Constitution 
 which they claimed they were warring upon others to 
 obey ! 
 
 What statesman of all the world ever accomplished such 
 tasks ? 
 
 If his power of administration be judged by his choice of 
 men for service, behold the Cabinet filled by Toombs, 
 Benjamin, Hunter, George Davis, Randolph, Trenhohn, 
 Seddon, Breckinridge, Watts. Reagan, and like giants of 
 those days. 
 
 And who received his commission at the head of the 
 Confederate armies? Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, 
 Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph E. Johnston, and their 
 great lieutenants, Stuart, Beauregard, A. P. Hill, D. H. 
 Hill, Forrest, Whiting, Polk, Pender, Longstreet, Hardee, 
 Hampton, Hoke, Ewell, Kirby Smith, Stephen D. Lee, 
 Hood, Branch, Pettigrew, Grimes, Anderson, Early, Cle- 
 burne, Gordon, Ashby, Ransom, Pickett, Lane — where shall 
 we pause in the roll of the immortals? 
 
 It has been well said, " Men judge Napoleon by his mar- 
 shals." Judge Jefferson Davis and his cause by his chosen 
 chieftains. 
 
 JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS AN ORATOR. 
 
 To him came the supreme gift of oratory — that speech 
 hot from the heart and winged with uplifting power, which 
 bears listener with speaker into a sphere of its own, beyond 
 the common and sordid things of earth. 
 
 He had no tricks of tongue. He was simple in word>, 
 but pitiless in logic ; abounding in illustration, clear, pun- 
 gent, overpowering in conclusion. 
 
 A writer has pictured his appearance in the Senate thus : 
 " Of the Norman type, tall, sinewy, with fair hair, gray 
 eyes, high forehead, straight nose, thin compressed lips, 
 pointed chin, with cheeks hollow, and many intersecting 
 furrows about the mouth." The distinctive type was that 
 of " sharpness of feature and intensity of expression," giv- 
 
N 
 
 8 
 
 ing force to the penetrating thought which reached the 
 depths of every heart. 
 
 Among his compeers in the Senate were Thos. H. Ben- 
 ton of Missouri, Mangum of North Carolina, who had been 
 its presiding officer ; Chase of Ohio, Berrien of Georgia, 
 Bell of Tennessee, and towering in their midst, the three 
 great leaders of the entire country in their respective poli- 
 cies, Ciay, Webster and Calhoun. 
 
 Yet, when Jefferson Davis spoke, men listened as if in a 
 trance, and his dominant spirit was at home, " Listening 
 senates to command." 
 
 Prescott, the historian, who was familiar with the greatest 
 parliamentarians and the most powerful orators of Europe, 
 declared, as he beheld him, u Mr. Davis is the most accom- 
 plished man in the Senate." And when asked if he had 
 given that judgment, replied, "Yes, he has strength, ani- 
 mation, energy, classical elegance and luminous simplicity. 
 He is finished, logical and effective ; in manner and argu- 
 ment nearer the perfect model of a Senator than any other 
 member of the body. 
 
 Read his speeches to-day ; — of all the riches of our moth- 
 er tongue^ as compared with his farewell defence of the 
 South in leaving the Senate forever, where is there a more 
 il entire and perfect chrysolite ? " 
 
 I despair of conveying the toucrj of the burning eloquence 
 that burst from his inspired frame, when in the darkest 
 grimmest hour of all, he invoked every true soldier to stand 
 at his post, and live or die, survive or perish, with his 
 country's liberties. 
 
 Never will I forget the scene before us, as the troops visi- 
 bly rose and fell in response to sentences from the heart of 
 a patriot, with the majesty of a prophet. 
 
 Oh, well says the ancient adage, the orator is not made — 
 he is born, God's gift. The stream of his genius bursts 
 from the rock of circumstance in as many forms perhaps 
 as the speaking cascades of many regions ; but as there is 
 
!3 
 
 swelled the chorus of the timid and the time-serving. That 
 to me would be treason. Treason to truth and right, to 
 honor and duty. A crime which through that war and 
 after could not be laid at our door/' 
 
 A lover of the welfare of the whole country, the deepest 
 wrench to the feelings of the patriot came with the strik- 
 ing down of the Confederacy with the world power allied 
 against her. What a picture was the closing drama of the 
 war ! Disaster after disaster wrung the hearts, but could 
 not terrify the souls, of the few, against a myriad of 
 foes. A great man has nobly said : " Vicksburg falls — 
 Gettysburg is lost ; armies wither. Generals die in the 
 thick of the fight ; a private soldier is all of a company. 
 Fields devastated, crops burned, flocks and herds consumed, 
 naught is left but man and steel — the soldier and his sword. 
 Atlanta, Mobile, Charleston go — the Confederacy is cut to 
 pieces. The last port is sealed at Wilmington — the world 
 and the South are parted. 
 
 " Everything fails but manhood — and womanhood, thank 
 God ! The woman cooks, and weaves and works ; nurses 
 the stricken, buries her dead and cheers the living. The 
 man stands to his gun, behind Johnston, behind Lee. 
 Petersburg and Richmond starve and bleed, yet remain 
 dauntless. And while the thunders shake the Capitol, and 
 the earth trembles, there stands Jefferson Davis, unshaken, 
 untrembling, toiling to give bread to his armies and their 
 kindred ; toiling to hold up the fainting arms of his veter- 
 ans. 
 
 " At last the very fountains of nature fail. The ex- 
 hausted South falls prone upon its shield. Hope, the bat- 
 tle-cross flag ; gone — forever gone." 
 
 JEFFERSON DAVIS WAS A CHRISTIAN. 
 
 When the mortal blow was struck, the President was at 
 the worship of God, in His sanctuary. He was a faithful 
 communicant of the chnrch of Washington, and of Lee. 
 He loved to recall how Washington had built a log chapel 
 
14 
 
 in the dark hours of the Revolution, and read the prayers 
 to his ragged Continentals with his own lips, and Lee had 
 gathered his officers about him for the same sacred service. 
 
 Mr. Davis believed the Holy Scriptures in all their full- 
 ness, and kept a chilk-like faith, close to the feet of the 
 Saviour of mankind. 
 
 The bravery of the men who descended into the valley 
 of the shadow of death, and gave life for country with a 
 smile, like Pelham and Burgwyn, Avery and Cowan, and 
 thousands more of the gray, was sublime. But it was not 
 the supreme glory of the Confederacy. That lay in immor- 
 tal character, to survive in other worlds than this. 
 
 All the world knew and respected the truth of the Con- 
 federate leaders. The reverent spirit of the noble procla- 
 mations of the President, calling the people to thanksgiving, 
 or, alas ! to fasting and prayer, impressed every heart. 
 
 No matter what false bulletins w^re published in Wash- 
 ington, and official victories claimed in New York, while 
 flags flaunted in the breeze and cannon roared their empty 
 salutes. /A single line from Jackson or from Lee. "God 
 has been pleased to give victory to our arms to day " was 
 accepted implicitly by all Christendom, and never in vain.. 
 
 While on his way to prolong the struggle beyond the 
 Mississippi, Mr. Davis was captured and conveyed to Fort- 
 ress Monroe, with all the petty indignities that small minds 
 could conceive. 
 
 And there he was confined in a dark casement within 
 the rampart of the fortress, walled across to convert it into 
 a dungeon, with openings for the lamp that blazed day and: 
 night, windows heavily barred, two sentinels within pacing 
 the floor always, and forbidden to speak, yet always gazing 
 upon him. 
 
 The ruler of a great country was treated like a felon, in 
 the vain effort, through his torture, to degrade the eagle- 
 spirit of the South. 
 
 Nor did this satisfy his jailer, or the master, Stanton. 
 
i5 
 
 After a struggle in which death was courted, iron shackles 
 of great weight were fastened upon the ankles of an old 
 man, nearly sixty years of age, sick, emaciated, fevered, 
 almost blind ; the sight of one eye, long destroyed by neu- 
 ralgia, and that of the other trembling in the balance ; / 
 sleepless, worn with sorrow for his country, and anxiety 
 for wife and children. 
 
 What was this for? There was no possibility of escape. 
 What for, but to wreak revenge? They had feared the loss 
 of power and of plunder, through the taxes and burdens 
 direct and indirect, imports and tariffs paid by the South 
 under the forms of law to heap up their wealth. And ter- 
 ror and shame had they undergone, again and again, when 
 before the eyes of mankind their boasted victories had turned 
 to crushing defeats. What for, then, but to punish us, you 
 and your fathers, me and my children, in the person of this 
 wasted, skeleton-like frame, with the irons cutting to the 
 bone, and the long nights, impossible of rest or sleep. He 
 bore all for his people. 
 
 His beloved and devottd wife was forbidden to see him ; 
 the military surgeon was not allowed to answer her impas- 
 sioned appeals to learn his condition ; he was denied the 
 common comforts of life ; refused the room and air for ex- 
 ercise when his life was in peril from its need, but not 
 asked by him, for he never sought anything at the hands 
 of his torturers. And so he was slipping rapidly down to 
 death, when fear of the opinion of mankind brought some 
 relief of the worst, although the prison held him two long 
 years. 
 
 They accused him of the murder of Mr. Lincoln, but the 
 falsehood was soon disproved. 
 
 They held him responsible for the sickness and death of 
 Federal prisoners at Andersonville. Aye, and the slander 
 is repeated to-day against the chivalrous men of the South, 
 and in the very school books of the young. 
 
 They never tell you that the South had sixty thousand 
 
i6 
 
 more prisoners of the Northern armies than they possessed 
 of ours ; and yet four thousand more Confederates died as 
 prisoners in the North than the Federals in our hands. 
 Yes, they died, the brave and true, on the bleak plains of 
 Johnson's island, in the great Northern lake, and herded in 
 unspeakable misery at Camp Chase and Elmira, some in 
 the very penitentiary, at Columbus, and in Fort Delaware, 
 of brackish water unfit for man or beast, and on the burn- 
 ing sands of Point Lookout. 
 
 They do not tell you that however extreme was the ne- 
 cessity, brought about by their sword and torch, that the 
 prisoner and his guard at Andersonville had the same daily 
 ration, and died in the same ratio of mortality. They found 
 in the official records, orders that prisoners and troops 
 should fare alike of the scanty food at our command. Aye, 
 although with unlimited food and medical supplies, our 
 men were denied often, even with cruelty and insult. And 
 moreover, they not only refused exchange, because Grant 
 would not have our veterans in front of him again, at any 
 cos t; — refused to permit us to buy supplies and medical and 
 surgical needs in their own or other ports to be used for suf- 
 fering prisoners of their own; refused even to be burdened 
 with the sick and disabled prisoners in our hands, tendered 
 for humanity's sake, without exchange, and yet affect to 
 deplore the evils, in their power alone to relieve ! 
 
 They accused Mr. Davis of treason. But they dared not 
 bring him to trial, after two long years of imprisonment. 
 Although indicted and called for trial, eagerly looked for 
 by him, to prove the falsehood of the charge, with the 
 world for the greater jury. No, not in the light of the his- 
 tory of the Confederation, and of the Union of the American 
 States, the plain language of the Constitution, and the whole 
 course of the jurisprudence of the country. His allegiance 
 had been rendered where the fathers had taught him that 
 it belonged. And the refusal to try was confession at last 
 before mankind that the words " rebel and traitor " were 
 slanderous upon the truest patriot of his land. 
 
i7 
 
 He was a christian indeed. All the wrongs and tortures 
 inflicted, passed from his soul as if they had never been, 
 when at last, in his low and enfeebled state, his old rector, 
 the good Doctor Minnegerode — well do I remember his 
 pathetic face — was permitted to administer to his spiritual 
 wants. 
 
 He asked to receive the holy communion, and as in duty 
 bound, the Doctor bade him examine himself, whether he 
 had truly forgiven his persecutors. When so assured, he 
 knew the grace vouchsafed to the martyr had come to this 
 suffering spirit. What a scene, this picture of the humble 
 christian receiving the sacred elements at the hand of the 
 man of God in his narrow dungeon, while without stands 
 the commanding general, present even here, but turning 
 his back in shame, with his armed guards, over the caged 
 victim. 
 
 Once in all that time of deep grief and dark depression, 
 in response to the kindly voice of his surgeon, rousing him 
 from dangerous apathy, when questioned in regard to the 
 women of the South. Mr. Davis forgot his sorrow and broke 
 the silence with the triumphant ring of pride : 
 
 "If asked for my sublimest ideal of what woman should 
 be, in the time of war, I would point to the dear women of 
 my people, as I have seen them during the recent struggle. 
 
 "All they had was flung into the contest — beauty, grace, 
 passion, ornamtnt; their songs, if they had heart to sing, 
 were patriotic ; their trinkets cast into the public crucible ; 
 the very carpets from their floors portioned out as blankets 
 to the suffering soldiers of their cause. 
 
 "As nurses of the sick, as providers for the combatants, 
 as angels of charity and mercy, as patient and beautiful 
 household duties, accepting every sacrifice with unconcern, 
 and lightening the burdens of war by every labor proper to 
 sheir sphere, the dear women of my people deserve to take 
 rank with the highest heroines of the grandest days of the 
 grandest countries." 
 
i8 
 
 Aye, great spirit that has passed the veil unto the un- 
 known, you speak for history herself. I have stood upon 
 the stony floor where those words were uttered and across 
 which those chained feet were dragged, and gazing through 
 the narrow deep sunk window into the speck of blue be- 
 yond, have felt that around me was a martyr's shrine, and 
 yonder, his abiding home in Paradise. 
 
 Oh, the woman of the South is so unreconstructed, they 
 say, and now she will build a monument to Jefferson Davis. 
 This will be not only a memorial pile to the surpassing 
 bravery of soldiers, which we have agreed to concede to 
 the judgment of mankind, but to build to the " First and 
 Last President of the Confederate States," is to commemo- 
 rate the principles of State sovereignty ; it is to declare 
 that the soldiers of the gray were not only brave, but right, 
 and their cause must receive the sanction of the ages. 
 
 The women of the South are so wrong. We admire 
 their grace and beauty, we have been astonished at their 
 revelation of energy and helpfulness ; we are charmed by a 
 fascination in voice and manner and exquisite courtesy ; 
 but oh, they look even now upon visions of a dead past, 
 and linger with the grayhaired, poverty stricken men in 
 gray. They do not know how to reverence the new gods, 
 our mighty destiny, our power, our millions upon millions 
 of tieasure. The women of the South are unapproachable, 
 but they are so wrong ; they are wholly unreconstructed. 
 
 Thanks be to God, in a world of shifting change and 
 fortune, some things are fixed and immutable. Are not 
 truth and honor, the plighted faith of States and of men, 
 virtue itself, unchangeable? Who can reconstruct truth 
 with gilded falsehood ? 
 
 The women of the South know what they do. The 
 temptations to place and wealth and power reach not the 
 serene atmosphere of high principle where they live, unap- 
 proachable by the creatures that bark at them below. 
 
 You, my dear countrywomen, will build this symbol of 
 
19 
 
 the martyr and the cause. Build it now, while yet the 
 officer lives who surrendered eleven thousand troops to 
 Stonewall Jackson, almost without firing a gun, but won 
 the victory of Fortress Monroe — the shackling of an aged, 
 unarmed captive, the uncrowned king of Southern hearts. 
 Build it as the everlasting type of the judgment of pos- 
 terity ! 
 
 Liberty, justice to the past, hope for the future of Con- 
 stitutional government is in your hands. Let them print 
 what books they please ; place the image of the incendiary of 
 Columbia and the robber of the Shenandoah upon the money 
 we use, and deny the ground for a monument to Confeder- 
 ate prisoners where our dead are resting in Northern soil. 
 With you, mothers and daughters and granddaughters of 
 the Confederacy, all is safe. The children who nestle 
 about your feet, when they look upon our graves, will 
 never call us traitors. 
 
 Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, you are here! 
 Mary, mother of Washington, you live again in these ven- 
 erated forms — the mothers of the Memorial Association. 
 And you, oh, sister of Johnston Pettigrew, whose presence 
 was healing to the wounded and despairing in the hospitals 
 of Virginia, you live always in these gracious Daughters of 
 the Confederacy ! 
 
 Dear guardians of the fame of your dead, let not North 
 Carolina be the least in this, though greatest on every other 
 page of Confederate history. More and more with the 
 passing years did Mr. Davis come to know and love our 
 people, in the last days of his life. Almost the final sen- 
 tences from his pen were those addressed through that 
 distinguished soldier, Col. Wharton J. Green, and his com- 
 mittee, to the people of North Carolina assembled at Fay- 
 etteville for the centennial celebration of the adoption of 
 the Federal Constitution. For, although it was never 
 accepted until assured of amendments protecting the rights 
 of the State as the people understood them, nowhere was 
 
20 
 
 the Constitution and Union of our fathers more sincerely 
 loved. Mr. Davis said : 
 
 " Without diminution of regard for the great and good 
 men of other colonies, I have been led to special veneration 
 for the men of North Carolina, as the first to distinctly 
 declare for State independence, and, from first to last, to 
 uphold the right of a people to govern themselves. 
 ******* * 
 
 " She gave her sons a sacrificial offering on the altar of 
 the liberties their fathers had won, and had left as an inheri- 
 tance to their posterity. Many sleep far from the land of 
 their nativity. Peace to their ashes ! Honor to their 
 memory and the mothers who bore them ! " 
 
 To these noble words your respone will be a fit tribute to 
 him who lay in darkness and the shadow of death. Spoken 
 when more than four-score years had laid their weight 
 upon his gray head, they sum up the judgment of history 
 upon North Carolina. 
 
 You are the heart of North Carolina, and as you erect 
 this shaft to the soldier, the statesman, the orator, the 
 patriot and the Christian, you will say, in the beautiful 
 language of another : — 
 
 " To the dust we give his body : — 
 His memory to the ages." 
 
 " Ah, they chained his feeble frame, 
 But they could not chain his thought, 
 Nor the right for which he fought ; 
 And they could not chain his fame, 
 But they riveted his name 
 To the hearts of you and me." 
 
UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 00032757909 
 
 FOR USE ONLY IN 
 THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION