"When Uncommon Courage Was in Season"
Delivered July 18, 1998
to the United Daughters of the Confederacy
Manassas National Battlefield Park
Wesley Pruden Editor-in-Chief The Washington Times |
I have a challenge for you. Today in Washington, we are dedicating a memorial to the black soldiers of the Union. This is a good thing to do. We must encourage all Americans to honor their history and their heritage. I was touched by the determination of a black historian from Dallas, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to preserve the history and heritage of the black men who put on the gray in the last years of the war to defend the land, the homes and hearths, they shared with the forefathers of those of us here this morning. Some of you may have seen the story, prominently displayed, yesterday morning in my newspaper, The Washington Times. I think it would be a wonderful thing if we should raise a monument to these black men who fought for the South, and would help put to rest the monstrous lie, sometimes propagated by well-meaning people, that the Confederate soldier fought so bravely and with such courage and determination only to preserve the institution of slavery. The causes of the War Between the States were many and complicated, as we here know, but we must never allow the ignorant to write our history. I hardly need tell this to the Daughters of the Confederacy, but I want you to consider my suggestion to raise this monument. We will help you, and I have learned that when you want something done, count on the women to do it.
Because I'm a natural-born conservative, things do not always seem to me to change for the better. But many things do. No man can foretell the future, and a good thing, too, because we could not bear to know the sorrow that usually lies before us, and so history writes its accounts in ways that we cannot imagine. Putting aside all partisan politics, I amused myself on the way down here this morning with the fantasy that we awakened the men who lie beneath the green grass of Manassas to give them the news about what's going on in Washington this morning. "The President of the United States is from Arkansas," I would tell them. "His vice president is from Tennessee. The leader of the Senate is a Mississippi man. The speaker of the House is from Georgia, and the leader of the majority in the House is a Texan. Leading prospects for the next presidential election are from Missouri, Tennessee and Texas, and half of them are from Abe Lincoln's party. We might elect a lady vice president, if you can believe that, and she would be from North Carolina." Sometime soon, when the sky is illumined by a full moon and the owls are out to guard the night, I'm going to drive through this battlefield and shout that out to the ghosts of First Manassas. I've always wanted to hear the rebel yell from the throats of genuine Confederate soldiers.
I look out on this holy place, this field of dreams where so many men shed so much blood in sacrifice for their most cherished beliefs and principles and convictions, and my heart trembles and almost stops beating, so close am I to being overcome with emotion. I catch my breath, and go on. Truly Abraham Lincoln was correct when he declaimed on the plain at Gettysburg that "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract."
And so we are surrounded here by the ghosts in blue and gray, the ghosts of marble men, perfect in memory, enshrined by history and clothed in the stainless recollections formed over the many years of listening to the heroic legends of the true and the brave. Who among us, certainly none here this morning, has not thrilled to the story of how not far from this very spot of ground General Bee, rallying the men of the 4th Alabama wavering on Henry Hill, spied Thomas Jackson's unbending line, and cried out: "Rally around the Virginians, boys, there stands Jackson like a stone wall." In the flash of musket fire, he gave Stonewall Jackson his name, and an immortality that will last as long as men instruct their sons in the tales of courage and bravery on the field of battle. And who among this dedicated congregation has not thrilled to the story of "the great skedaddle," of the defeated Unionists, who, having lunched on Southern fire and supped on Southern shot, raced back to Washington at nightfall on the 21st of July in 1861, with their horses in full lather, their picnic hampers and ladies hat boxes and maybe some of the yankee ladies gone flying with the wind.
Walt Whitman, having been dispatched to Washington as a reporter for the old Brooklyn Standard, saw the scene in the capital with the eye of a disillusioned partisan, and recorded with the gift of the poet's observation:
The sun rises, but shines not. The men appear, at first sparsely and shame-faced enough, then thicker, in the streets of Washington on Pennsylvania avenue, on the steps and the basement entrances. They come along in disorderly mobs, some in squads, stragglers, companies. Occasionally, a rare regiment, in perfect order, with its officers (some gaps, dead, the true braves,) marching in silence, with lowered faces, stern, weary to sinking, all black and dirty, but every man with his musket...The sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue, Fourteenth Street, were jammed with citizens, darkies, clerks, everybody, lookers-on; women in the windows, curious expressions from faces, as those swarms of dirt-discovered returned soldiers there (will they never end?) move by, but nothing said, no comments: half our on-lookers seccesh of the most venomous kind, they say nothing, but the devil snickers in their faces. During the forenoon Washington gets all over motley with these defeated soldiers queer-looking objects, strange eyes and faces, drenched (the steady rain drizzles on all day) and fearfully worn, hungry, haggard, blistered in the feet. Good people (but not over-many of them, either) hurry up something for their grub. They put wash-kettles on the fire, for soup, for coffee. They set tables on the widewalks. Wagon loads of bread are purchased, swiftly cut in stout chunks.
Here are two aged ladies, beautiful, the first in the city for culture and charm, they stand with store of eating and drink at an improvised table of rough plank, to give food, and have the store replenished from their house every half hour all that day; and there in the rain they stand, active, silent, white haired, and give food, through the tears that stream down their cheeks, almost without intermission, the whole time. Amid the deep excitement, crowd and emotion, and desperate eagerness, it seems strange to see many, very many of the soldiers sleeping in the midst of all, sleeping sound. They drop down anywhere, on the steps of houses, up close by the basements or fences, on the sidewalks, aside on some vacant lot, and deeply sleep.
Little did they know, as we here today know, the pain and privations, the suffering and sorrow that were soon to follow for both North and South, the bitter anger and resentment that would survive down to the present day, to lie upon the tongue like warm brass. And little did the world know how the Confederate soldier, vastly outnumbered, ill equipped, deprived of so much in the way of material goods but armed with grit and determination and an unquenchable will to prevail, would fight his way into a Valhalla of legend worthy of Homer. We should not forget that these were also human men, subject to the weaknesses, the temptations, the moments of disillusionment brought on by dashed dreams, destroyed ambitions and vanished dreams.
These were men who could laugh at the adversity that, with hunger and disease, were their constant companions. General Gordon was fond of telling this story from a night march by General Longstreet's corps. About three or four o'clock in the morning when everyone was tired and worn out, an Arkansas regiment finally pulled up at the bivouac. (I was determined to get an Arkansas regiment onto this battlefield, even though the regiment that Lee himself called "the great old Third Arkansas" arrived, despite its frantic attempt otherwise, only after the battle was over, but was never again separated from the Army of Northern Virginia.) Well, General Gordon's story continues: The Arkansas soldier leaned his rifle up against a tent pole not far from where Longstreet sat studying his maps. "This is pretty hard," the Arkansas soldier said to no one in particular. "I fight all day and march all night. But I suppose I can do it for my country. I can go hungry. I can march when I'm sick, because I love my country. I can always fight because there's always another yankee somewhere who needs to be whipped. I do all this and I'm glad to do it because I love my country. But when this war is over I'll be blowed if I'll ever again love another country."
But we do love another country. Southerners, who as Faulkner said uniquely
understand that the past is not dead because it is not even past, hold loyalty to two countries in our hearts. No man's heart races more than mine to the sight of the Stars and Stripes rippling in the breeze, no man means it more than I to recite my Pledge of Allegiance to the United States of America for all to hear. My heart is glad because I had the honor to wear the uniform of my country. And yet, like all Southerners, I hold dear in that most secret place of the heart,
another country a country baptized 137 years ago on this very field in the blood of First Manassas, a country no longer at the mercy of the vicissitudes in the tangled affairs of men, a country that lives within us, a country that will endure for as long as men and women know love, and are faithful to the love of country, the love of God, and the love of each other. God bless America, God bless the memory of the Confederate States of America, and
God bless you all.