HEROIC MEN AND WOMEN
[President Roosevelt, in his speech at Richmond, October 18, 1905.]
Great though the meed of praise is which is due the South for the soldierly valor of her sons displayed during the four years of war, I think that even greater praise is due her for what her people have accomplished during the forty years of peace which followed. For forty years the South has made not merely a courageous, but at times a desperate struggle, as she has striven for moral and material well-being. Her success has been extraordinary, and all citizens of our common country should feel joy and pride in it; for any great deed done, or any fine qualities shown, by one group of Americans, of necessity reflects credit upon all Americans. Only a heroic people could have battled successfully against the conditions with which the people of the South found themselves face to face at the end of the civil war. There had been utter destruction and disaster, and wholly new business and social problems had to be faced with the scantiest means. The economic and political fabric had to be readjusted in the midst of dire want, of grinding poverty. The future of the broken, war-swept South seemed beyond hope, and if her sons and daughters had been of weaker fiber there would have been in very truth no hope. But the men and the sons of the men who had faced with unfaltering front every alternation of good and evil fortune from Manassas to Appomattox, and the women, their wives and mothers, whose courage and endurance had reached an even higher heroic level—these men and these women set themselves undauntedly to the great task before them. For twenty years the struggle was hard and at times doubtful. Then the splendid qualities of your manhood and womanhood told, as they were bound to tell, and the wealth of your extraordinary natural resources began to be shown. Now the teeming riches of mine and field and factory attest the prosperity of those who are all the stronger because of the trials and struggles through which this prosperity has come. You stand loyally to your traditions and memories; you also stand loyal for our great common country of to-day and 36 for our common flag, which symbolizes all that is brightest and most hopeful for the future of mankind; you face the new age in the spirit of the age. Alike in your material and in your spiritual and intellectual development you stand abreast of the foremost in the world’s progress.
THE WOMEN OF THE SOUTH
[Joel Chandler Harris, in Southern Historical Papers.]
Southern women have been heretofore referred to only as the standards of fiction. There are three pieces of fiction that have had a long and popular run in what may be described in a large way as the North American mind. One is that the stage representations of negro characters are true to life; another is that the poor white trash of the South are utterly worthless and thriftless; and the other is that the white woman of the South lived in a state of idleness during the days of slavery, swinging and languishing in hammocks while bevies of pickaninnies cooled the tropical air with long-handled fans made of peacock tails.
Preposterous as they are, age has made these fictions respectable, especially in the North. They strut about in good company, and sometimes a sober historian goes so far as to employ them for the purpose of bolstering up his sectional theories, or, what is still worse, his prejudices.
I do not know that these fictions are important, or that they are even interesting. If there was an explosion every time truth was outrun by his notorious competitor, the man who sleeps late of a morning would wake up with a snort and imagine that the universe was the victim of a fierce and prolonged bombardment.