Alexander White, antebellum United States Congressman from the Talledega District in Alabama and member of the State Convention in 1865, presented this speech to the convention. White “loved his country, he had loved the land of his birth, his native Alabama, before her disasters, before she was stricken down by armed battalions; but now in her misfortunes and desolation, now that she was in chains, he loved her more than ever.” Like Robert E. Lee, his country was his State, and to it he owed his allegiance above all else.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com The Great American Political Divide
The South Needs No Eulogy
“Mr. President:
The Bonnie Blue flag no longer reflects the light of the morning sunbeam, or kisses with its silken folds the genial breezes of our Southern clime. The hands that waved it along the crest of a hundred battle-fields, and the hearts, for the love they bore it, that so often defied danger and death, no longer rally around it. Another banner waves in triumph over its closed and prostate folds; but proud memories and glorious recollections cluster around.
Sir, I will refrain. The South needs no eulogy. The faithful record of her achievements will encircle her brow with glory bright and enduring as the diadem that crowns the night of her cloudless skies. The scenes of Marathon and Platae have been reenacted in the New World without the beneficent results which flow from those battle-fields of freedom, and our country lies prostate at the feet of the conqueror.
But dearer to me is she in this hour of her humiliation than she was in the day and hour of her pride and her power. Each blood-stained battle-field, each track of her devastation, each new-made grave of her sons fallen in her defense, each mutilated form of the Confederate soldier — her widow’s tear, her orphan’s cry, are but so many chords that bind me to her in her desolation, and draw my affections closer around my stricken country.
When I raise my voice or lift my hand against her, may the thunder rive me where I stand!
Though I may be false in all else, I will be true to her. Though all others may prove faithless, I will be faithful still. And when, in obedience to the great summons, “Dust to dust,” my heart shall return to that earth from whence it sprang, it shall sink into her bosom with the proud consciousness that it never knew one beat not in union with the honor, the interests, the glory of my country.”
(Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama, William Garrett, Plantation Publishing Company’s Press, 1872, excerpts, pp. 562-564)
