The Women of the ConfederacyUnderwood, J. L. (John Levi)
History
The Women of the Confederacy
Underwood, J. L. (John Levi)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Anecdotes; Women -- Confederate States of America
The heroism of Southern women cannot be told without this dark page.
The trials of the war were nothing compared to the ordeal through
which Southern women have just passed. In the wreck of the South
brought on by Northern ballots and bayonets, the culminating damage is
the demoralization of the generation of negroes now recently grown. In
the face of the worse than Gorgan horrors our women have borne
themselves with a courage, a patience, and fortitude that are sublime.
But let friends of the negro and friends of our women hope. Thank God,
the crime is on the decrease. White men somehow will protect such
women as God has given our sunny land. The tiger is on the retreat,
and thousands of the negro race are awakening to the fact that there
must speedily be another emancipation, a redemption of their sons and
daughters from their new slavery. The negro has had race emancipation;
he needs family emancipation and personal emancipation from the chains
of sense and appetite. Good negroes are working and praying for it.
The negroes must break their own chains this time. But let patriotic
and Christian white men help them everywhere.
ROOSEVELT AT LEE'S MONUMENT
"_Come Closer, Comrades!_"
[J. L. Underwood.]
When the victorious Federal army marched home, at the close of the war
between the States, the famous Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher,
said that in twenty-five years any man in America would be ashamed to
admit that he was ever a Confederate soldier. And yet in twenty-five
years half of the Cabinet at Washington was composed of Confederate
soldiers. In little more than twenty-five years the country sees
William McKinley, the Republican President of the United States,
himself a veteran of the Federal army, down among the Confederate
veterans in Georgia, wearing the Confederate badge, and otherwise
fraternizing as a soldier with those who wore the gray, and in his
official capacity calling upon Congress to care for the graves of the
dead Confederate soldiers just as the Government provides for the dead
who wore the blue. And the whole country, North and South, applauded
the noble McKinley.
Here is President Roosevelt, forty years after the war, making the
same recommendations and Congress actually restoring the captured
battle flags to the several Southern States. It is a pity Beecher
didn't live to be in Richmond, Va., on the 18th of October, 1905, and
see President Roosevelt by special appointment meet the Confederate
Veterans at the foot of the monument of General Robert E. Lee. When
he began his talk he said, "Come closer, comrades." The President of
the United States calling those old "rebels" of Beecher his comrades
and all the way on his long Southern tour, having at his own request a
voluntary escort at every point composed of the veterans from both
armies!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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