The Lexington dispatch. [volume] (Lexington, South Carolina) 1870-1917, 1903-06-10

his nerve, SuO UeSuU w ePino' A'oU
so, however, with the Confederate sol.
dier. He did not lose his nerve, be
did not repine. "He belonged to the
Anelo-Sexon blood which had domi-
mated always and everywhere. 1t fed
Alfred when be wrote the charter
of English liberty; it gathered
about Hsmpdenas as he stood
beneath the oak; it thundered in
Cromwelrs veins as be fought his
king: it humbled Napoleon at
Waterloo; it has touched the desert
and jungles with undying glory; it
carried the drum beat CT England
around the world, and spread on
every continent the gospel of lib
erty and of God; it established this
republic, carved it from the wilder
ness, conquered it from the Indians,
wrested it from England, and at last,
sitting it's own tumult, consecratsd
it forever as the home of the Anglo
Saxon and the theatre of this trans
cendant achievement. Never one
foot of it can be surrendered, while
that blood lives in American veins and
feeds American hearts, to the doml'
tion of an alien or inferior race"
Thus spoke the COME derate SOL
dier at the close of the war, standing
upon his desolate hearthstone, sitting
amid the ruins of his household gods,
and thus he thought and thus he
acted. 49,.
Beginning with a crust epd no
bread, having no money and no credit,
he stood in the presence of star7a-
tion with bis ragged children and
patient helpmeet round about him,
the broken and shattered remnant Of
a once inyincible army!
Would you younger generation OF
the South have done what be did?
What did he do? I will tell you in
my way briefly and not wholly unin-
terestingly, I hope, because this is
the truth I am giving you, and not
fiction.
All government had fallen away
from him with the loss of the cause
he had loved so we'll. He was more
| or less law unto himself. But he
went to work, called conventions,
passed ordinances in keeping with
the demands of the new order OF
things, assembled legislatures to-
gether and enacted laws, also meet
ing those demands. In the mean
time, crops were growing, and, when
gathered, they supplied food and
money in meagre quantities. In g
year or two the old Confed., having
dchsd his threadbare and ragged
gray jacket for better garb, began
to build up waste places, and then it
occurred to him that the South was
rich in minerals together with other
unsought treasures, and he already
knew that she had a monopoly Of
the cotton product of the world.
That same old soldier, instead Of
being destructionist became con-
structionist in the highest senee of
the term. The mines filled with the
richest treasures of earth were de-
veloped, and the cotton which had
been going to the mills Old, as well
as New England, and enricbing them
at his expense, were converted into
cotton goods right here at the cotton
! felds, and this was done in every in
stance by some good old Confederate
soldier. II he was not the old pro-
moter and owrer of the mills, be wss
always one among theE. And I
challenge today the naming of sin-
gle enterprise in the South of any
cense quence where Southern men are
engaged in it, which has not among
its controlling members one or more
Confederate soldiers. Every wbir-
ring spindle in every Southern State
today sings the praises CT the pro-
gressi7e Confederate soldier who had