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Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 24. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), chapter 1.27 (search)
d, was enabled by continuous hammering to so exhaust it opponent by mere attrition as to compel a surrender? The world has never witnessed so great a political crime as that committed in the destruction of the Confederate Government by armed force. Other nations, in ancient as well as modern times, have fallen under the yoke of the conqueror or usurper, because their own follies, vices or crimes had prepared the way for their subjugation. Many tears have been shed over the fate of unhappy Poland, but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the Poles had shown their incapacity to manage their own government ere they were consigned to foreign rule. In our case, however, the civilized nations of the earth have stood aloof and seen a brave and patriotic people politically murdered, while maintaining an unprecedented struggle for the right of self-government, and manifesting at every step their capacity for it, and this, too, when under an assumed neutrality, the resources of men, mon
Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 24. (ed. Reverend J. William Jones), The laying of the corner-stone of the monument to President Jefferson Davis, (search)
ts we sentence the unfortunate. Men do not idly erect monuments to lost causes. Fame has no trumpet for failure. The world hears not the voice of the vanquished. Yet history might teach us strange things of men who fail and causes that are lost. Genius did not keep Hannibal or Napoleon from defeat; heroism went with Joan of Arc to the stake, and Emmett to the scaffold. The eloquence of Demosthenes did not save Greece, or Cato's virtue Rome. The courage of Kosciusko availed naught for Poland, and Hungary went down for all the patriotism of Kossuth. Sometimes defeat gives a tragic pathos which lifts the commonplace into the immortal, and tenderly preserves the memory of the vanquished long after the victor has been forgotten. Since the death of Napoleon there has been no career which illustrates so dramatically the vicissitudes of fortune as that of Jefferson Davis. Born amid the rugged surroundings of a frontier State, he lived to win the triple glory of the soldier, the or