Читать книгу The Southern Soldier Boy: A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy - Elliott James Carson - Страница 4

Here is to Virginia, “The Old Dominion” State. At last with the young Confederacy linked her fate. Go search the annals of history back to the days of Abraham; trace Jewish civilization; compare Greek and Roman progress; weigh the Crusaders of the Middle Ages and the Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Then look to the English people who first wrested the great Magna Charta – the Bill of Civil Rights – and human freedom from King John, and implanted these principles first in Virginia with the best blood of England, producing a Washington, a Jefferson, a Patrick Henry, a Madison, a Monroe, a Marshall, a Tyler, a Wise, a Robert E. Lee, a Stonewall Jackson – with thousands as high-toned and patriotic. There she stands superb! With her honor, her chivalry, her patriotism and valor. Her high standard of civilization, unequaled and unexcelled by any people in any age, in any land. In the most trying crisis of any age she bore herself grandly, nobly. As Mother of Presidents and Mother of States. It was her lot to suffer most of all. For four years invaded by hostile armies and burdened by her own defenders, in the great struggles that swayed back and forth. Her homes despoiled, her fields trampled, her sons slain, and her soil drenched in blood. She was steadfast, generous and hospitable to the last. She fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and cared for the sick and bound up the wounded. And not a word of complaint ever came from a Confederate soldier that she ever failed to do what she could for him.

Virginia was all this, notwithstanding she was handicapped by negro slavery, insidiously introduced by Dutch traders. And when it was known that Africans had sense enough to set plants and worm tobacco, New England sagacity and enterprise were quick to supply the demand for slaves and to stock the market until Virginia cried, Hold! Enough! Negro slavery held her on the low plane of an agricultural State – a producer of cheap raw products. Yet history shows no example of such progress as was made in the civilization of the Negro race. George Washington freed his negroes and turned them loose upon the community. Thomas Jefferson foresaw that a government could not remain half slave and half free. But the steady increase in slave property and its broad extension prohibited its ready abolition. Virginians were not the people to be dictated to by the very people that had pressed slavery upon her. She stood for the right to manage her domestic affairs as she pleased, and was quick to resent outside interference. The clash was inevitable and had to be fought to a finish. North Carolina, her faithful daughter, loves to honor and cherish her Alma Mater. As Virginia, so were all the Southern States – brothers all standing shoulder to shoulder in a common cause.