The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

The record is awful and the blackest page of American history. This is the saddest chapter the author has ever written. He has been all his long life known and recognized by the negroes as one of their best friends. There is nothing but sorrow in his heart over the wide-spread demoralization of the negro race. He and all other true Southern men rejoice over the great progress of the few. He deplores the enslavement and degradation of the many by whiskey, idleness, and lust. The strong, young African tiger has been found lurking, not in American jungles, but in American homes, highways, barns and fields. His arch crime woman cannot hear named. And to mention it to Southern men is to make their blood boil in their veins and their brains to reel.

The heroism of Southern women cannot be told without this dark page. The trials of the war were nothing compared to the ordeal through which Southern women have just passed. In the wreck of the South brought on by Northern ballots and bayonets, the culminating damage is the demoralization of the generation of negroes now recently grown. In the face of the worse than Gorgan horrors our women have borne themselves with a courage, a patience, and fortitude that are sublime. But let friends of the negro and friends of our women hope. Thank God, the crime is on the decrease. White men somehow will protect such women as God has given our sunny land. The tiger is on the retreat, and thousands 311 of the negro race are awakening to the fact that there must speedily be another emancipation, a redemption of their sons and daughters from their new slavery. The negro has had race emancipation; he needs family emancipation and personal emancipation from the chains of sense and appetite. Good negroes are working and praying for it. The negroes must break their own chains this time. But let patriotic and Christian white men help them everywhere.

ROOSEVELT AT LEE’S MONUMENT

“Come Closer, Comrades!”

[J. L. Underwood.]

When the victorious Federal army marched home, at the close of the war between the States, the famous Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, said that in twenty-five years any man in America would be ashamed to admit that he was ever a Confederate soldier. And yet in twenty-five years half of the Cabinet at Washington was composed of Confederate soldiers. In little more than twenty-five years the country sees William McKinley, the Republican President of the United States, himself a veteran of the Federal army, down among the Confederate veterans in Georgia, wearing the Confederate badge, and otherwise fraternizing as a soldier with those who wore the gray, and in his official capacity calling upon Congress to care for the graves of the dead Confederate soldiers just as the Government provides for the dead who wore the blue. And the whole country, North and South, applauded the noble McKinley.

Here is President Roosevelt, forty years after the war, making the same recommendations and Congress actually restoring the captured battle flags to the several Southern States. It is a pity Beecher didn’t live to be in Richmond, Va., on the 18th of October, 1905, and see President Roosevelt by special appointment meet the Confederate Veterans at the foot of the monument of General Robert 312 E. Lee. When he began his talk he said, “Come closer, comrades.” The President of the United States calling those old “rebels” of Beecher his comrades and all the way on his long Southern tour, having at his own request a voluntary escort at every point composed of the veterans from both armies!

Shade of Beecher! Come back to Washington and see President and Cabinet and Congress and Army and Navy gather in tears around the coffin and do the grand honors at the grave of the Confederate General Wheeler!

The truth is the true comrades from both sides have been coming “closer” to each other ever since the bloodshed at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, whenever the politicians would let them. The old “vets” understand each other whether other people do or not. We are “comrades” indeed. Now, comrades of the North, let an old “Confederate vet” who has gloried in the privilege of frequently grasping your hands for forty years, say a parting word to you. Your country is our country. Your heroes are our heroes. We claim the honor of having such patriotic countrymen as Lincoln, such heroes as Thomas, Meade and Hancock, and McClellan and Grant, and McPherson and Farragut. If there were such men as Butler and Milroy and Hunter, they were our countrymen, too, and if they did things worthy of condemnation, let Southerners condemn them with a feeling of sorrow over the failings of erring countrymen—just as Northern men should look truthfully at the lives of Southern leaders and condemn, when it is just, but condemn in sorrow our erring countrymen.