liberty and enfranchisement is as far as the law can carry the negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense. It should be left to those among whom his lot is cast, with whom he is indissolubly connected, and whose prosperity depends upon their possessing his intelligent sympathy and confidence. Faith has been kept with him in spite of calumnious assertions to the contrary by those who assume to speak for us, or by frank opponents. Faith will be kept with him in the future, if the South holds her reason and integrity. But have we kept faith with you? In the fullest sense, yes. When Lee surrendered- I don't say when Johnston surrendered, because I understand he still alludes to the time when he met General Sherman last as the time when he "determined to abandon any further prosecution of the struggle ” — when Lee surrendered, I say, and Johnston quit, the South became, and has been, loyal to the Union. We fought hard enough to know that we were whipped, and in perfect frankness accepted as final the arbitrament of the sword to which we had appealed. The South found her jewel in the toad's head of defeat. · The shackles that had held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave were broken. Under the old régime the negroes were slaves to the South, the South was a slave to the system. The old plantation, with its simple police regulations and its feudal habit, was the only type possible under slavery. Thus was gathered in the hands of a splendid and chivalric oligarchy the substance that should have been diffused among the people, as the rich blood, under certain artificial conditions, is gathered at the heart, filling that with affluent rapture, but leaving the body chill and colorless. The old South rested everything on slavery and agriculture, unconscious that these could neither give nor maintain healthy growth. The new South presents a perfect Democracy, the oligarchs leading in the popular movement a social system compact and closely knitted, less splendid on the surface but stronger at the core; a hundred farms for every plantation, fifty homes for every palace, and a diversified industry that meets the complex needs of this complex age. THE NEW SOUTH 451 The new South is enamored of her new work. Her soul is stirred with the breath of a new life. The light of a grander day is falling fair on her face. She is thrilling with the consciousness of a growing power and prosperity. As she stands upright, fullstatured and equal among the people of the earth, breathing the keen air and looking out upon the expanding horizon, she understands that her emancipation came because in the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was crossed and her brave armies were beaten. This is said in no spirit of time-serving or apology. The South has nothing for which to apologize. She believes that the late struggle between the States was war and not rebellion, revolution and not conspiracy, and that her convictions were as honest as yours. I should be unjust to the dauntless spirit of the South and to my own convictions if I did not make this plain in this presence. The South has nothing to take back. In my native town of Athens is a monument that crowns its central hills a plain, white shaft. Deep cut into its shining side is a name dear to me above the names of men, that of a brave and simple man who died in a brave and simple faith. Not for all the glories of New England from Plymouth Rock all the way - would I exchange the heritage he left me in his soldier's death. To the feet of that shaft I shall send my children's children to reverence him who ennobled their name with his heroic blood. But, sir, speaking from the shadow of that memory, which I honor as I do nothing else on earth, I say that the cause in which he suffered and for which he gave his life was adjudged by higher and fuller wisdom than his or mine, and I am glad that the omniscient God held the balance of battle in His Almighty Hand, and that human slavery was swept forever from American soil- the American Union saved from the wreck of war. This message, Mr. President, comes to you from consecrated ground. Every foot of the soil about the city in which I live is sacred as a battle-ground of the republic. Every hill that invests it is hallowed to you by the blood of your brothers who died for your victory, and doubly hallowed to us by the blood of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat - sacred soil to all of us, rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better, sent but stanch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms -speaking an eloquent witness, in its white peace and prosperity, to the indissoluble union of American States and the imperishable brotherhood of the American people. Now what answer has New England to this message? Will she permit the prejudice of war to remain in the hearts of the conquerors, when it has died in the hearts of the conquered? Will she transmit this prejudice to the next generation, that in their hearts, which never felt the generous ardor of conflict, it may perpetuate itself? Will she withhold, save in strained courtesy, the hand which, straight from his soldier's heart, Grant offered to Lee at Appomattox? Will she make the vision of a restored and happy people, which gathered above the couch of your dying captain, filling his heart with grace, touching his lips with praise and glorifying his path to the grave; will she make this vision, on which the last sigh of his expiring soul breathed a benediction, a cheat and a delusion? If she does, the South, never abject in asking for comradeship, must accept with dignity its refusal; but if she does not - if she accepts with frankness and sincerity this message of good will and friendship, then will the prophecy of Webster, delivered in this very Society forty years ago, amid tremendous applause, be verified in its fullest and final sense, when he said: "Standing hand to hand and clasping hands, we should remain united as we have for sixty years, citizens of the same country, members of the same government, united all, united now, and united forever. There have been difficulties, contentions, and controversies, but I tell you that in my judgment ""Those opposed eyes, Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven, All of one nature, of one substance bred, Did lately meet in th' intestine shock, 1 Cf. "I Henry IV," I, i, 9–15. THE BURIAL OF GAYARRÉ 453 MISS GRACE ELIZABETH KING [BORN in New Orleans in 1852, the daughter of a prominent lawyer. She was educated at home and in the French schools of New Orleans, and began her career by contributing sketches of Creole life to The New Princeton Review which formed the basis of her novel "Monsieur Motte" (1888). "Tales of Time and Place" (1888), "Balcony Stories" (1893), and other fiction followed, but of late she has rather given herself to historical work, having published a life of Lemoine, the founder of New Orleans (1892), a descriptive volume on that city-"New Orleans, the Place and the People" (1895) – and an account of the adventures of De Soto and his men (1898). Miss King has also been Secretary of the Louisiana Historical Society, and in 1903 she contributed a sketch of Gayarré to a new edition of the latter's well-known history. For sympathetic criticism see the essay by President Henry N. Snyder of Wofford College in "Southern Writers," Vol. II.] THE BURIAL OF GAYARRÉ 1 [FROM "NEW ORLEANS, THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE." 1895.] THE Old St. Louis cemetery is closed now. It opens its gates only at the knock of an heir, so to speak; gives harbourage only to those who can claim a resting-place by the side of an ancestor. Between All Saints and All Saints, its admittances are not a few, and the registry volumes are still being added to; the list of names, in the first crumbling old tome, is still being repeated, over and over again; some of them so old and so forgotten in the present that death has no oblivion to add to them. Indeed, we may say they live only in the death register. Not a year has gone by since, on a January2 day, one of the bleakest winter days the city had known for half a century, a file of mourners followed one of the city's oldest children, and one of the cemetery's most ancient heirs, to his last resting-place by the side of a grandfather. The silver crucifix gleamed fitfully ahead, appearing and disappearing as it led the way in the maze of irreg1 Copyright, 1895, by The Macmillan Co. 2 Really in February, 1895. ularly built tombs, through pathways, hollowed to a furrow, by the footsteps of the innumerable funeral processions that had followed the dead since the first burials there. The chanting of the priests winding in and out after the crucifix, fell on the ear in detached fragments, rising and dropping as the tombs closed in or opened out behind them. The path, with its sharp turns, was at times impassable to the coffin, and it had to be lifted above the tombs. and borne in the air, on a level with the crucifix. With its heavy black draperies, its proportions in the grey humid atmosphere appeared colossal, magnified, and transfigured with the ninety-one years of life inside. It was Charles Gayarré being conveyed to the tomb of M. de Boré,1 the historian of Louisiana making his last bodily appearance on earth in the corner of earth he had loved so well and so poetically. Woman and mother as she ever appeared in life to the loving imagination of her devoted son, it was but fitting that New Orleans should herself head the file of mourners and weep bitterly at the tomb; for that she lives at all in that best of living worlds, the world of history, romance, and poetry, she owes to him whom brick and mortar were shutting out forever from human eyes. As a youth, he consecrated his first ambitions to her; through manhood, he devoted his pen to her; old, suffering, bereft by misfortune of his ancestral heritage, and the fruit of his prime's vigour and industry, he yet stood ever her courageous knight, to defend her against the aspersions of strangers, the slanders of traitors. He held her archives not only in his memory but in his heart, and while he lived, none dared make public aught about her history except with his vigilant form in the line of vision. The streets of the vieux carré,2 through which he gambolled as a schoolboy, and through which his hearse had slowly rolled; the cathedral in which he was baptized, and in which his requiem was sung and the old cemetery, the resting-place of his ancestors, parents, and forbears, and the sanctuary in which his imagina 1 Professor Fortier informs the editor that M. Étienne de Boré, Gayarré's grandfather, was the first mayor of New Orleans, and the first successful sugar manufacturer of Louisiana. 2 Old square. |