One of the Ten Commandments delivered by Jehovah to Moses on Sinai, and not the least of the ten, is this: “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” Like all the other commandments of God to his children, this applies not only to the individual man, but to men in the aggregate – men in organized societies forming governments, constituting peoples. Just as the boy who does not honor his father and mother is apt to bring his own life to an untimely end, as a consequence of experimenting in new and foolish paths to the neglect of the advice, accumulated experience, and teaching of those who have seen the world before him, so a people who forget the history, despise the traditions, ignore the ideals, and fail to share the aspirations of their ancestry are a people not apt to conserve anything – neither their own power nor greatness, nor their very living in the land itself…

We hear much about a “New South.” There is no New South. What there is of change is a change to the direction of the energies of the people; and if there be anything great and good in the so-called “new” South, as far as I have been able to ascertain, it is always something whose growth has its roots in the soil of the Old South. Everything admirable in the so-called “new” South is built upon the old, as a house is builded upon the rock of its foundation.  We hear much of letting the “dead past bury its dead.” No poet who was a philosopher, and perhaps no real poet, would ever have uttered that sentence. There is no such thing as a dead past…

Ladies and gentlemen, thirty-nine years ago there occurred near the little village of Appomattox, in the State of Virginia, one of the most memorable and pathetic scenes in all history. A few ragged and half-starved men were surrendered, and with them there was seemingly surrendered a cause for which they had fought for four years. This seeming made it sadder. It is useless to picture the scene; Lee for the first time for many months in bright new uniform, with new sword; Grant, rough from the field, with his officers about him; the few brief words spoken around the table, where the terms were agreed to; the silence and sadness which pervaded the minds and marked the conduct even of the Federal officers and men; the scene a few minutes later when the Confederate chieftain was among his men; the tears coursing down rugged cheeks, that had perhaps never felt them before; men returning, with no vision of hope to cheer them, to lives of hardship and of labor; a despairing people and a desolate land!  It is useless to picture all this, I say, because the imagination of each old veteran here pictures it all for himself, and every child has heard it told so often that it presents itself in vivid coloring even to his mind. This marked really the war-close of a great struggle, and when we gather, as we yearly do, upon the anniversary month of that event, on our decoration day, the celebration, in its beauty and in its sadness, is a fitting one…

But in everything which rational men do, in which there is either beauty or pathos, there must also be reason. What is it, then, which we celebrate on an occasion like this? Is it mere physical courage? If it were, the world in all of its history could not find a physical courage superior to that of the men who died or surrendered under Lee, Jackson, and the Johnstons. But mere physical courage is a thing too common amongst the men of the race to which we belong to be worthy of any sort of celebration for its own sake. Mere fighting is no virtue; far from it.  Indeed, the man who is not great enough and brave enough not to fight when he ought not to is a poor excuse for a man. Speaking for myself, I have no admiration of the professional fighter, whether he be a Texas cowboy or a West Point graduate…

Why do we meet? What is the purpose of coming together? Is it to keep alive the memory of a “lost cause?” Is it the “lost cause” which we celebrate? Not a whit of it, for, if it is, we have no cause to celebrate. In the economy of God, there are no lost causes in this world, except wrong causes. In every cause which has ever existed, whether it has apparently prevailed or apparently gone down, there have been some things – mere accompaniments, perhaps – which were wrong, but in every cause worthy of celebration there have been things which were not wrong but right, and which, being eternally right, have not gone down as lost forever, though, perhaps, temporarily eclipsed…

We meet to celebrate the cause and the men of the sixties. What was the cause? Was it secession? Not a whit of it. Secession was merely the remedy which was invoked for the assertion of a right, for the maintenance of a cause. It had been twice before virtually invoked in these United States, though the sword had not been drawn to support its invocation – once by New Englanders, in opposition to what they considered the tyranny of the Embargo Laws, and once by the South Carolinians in denial of the constitutional right of a government of all the people to levy tribute upon all the people in order to make the capital of a part of the people more profitable, or the labor of a part of the people better compensated. War determined that the remedy should fail, and I think we are all agreed that it is well that the remedy failed. I think we are all ready to go forward, marching shoulder to shoulder, with an eye to the possibilities of the future, rejoicing in the lusty strength of a great and reunited people. What was the cause, then? Was it slavery? Not a whit of it. Slavery was undoubtedly the occasion of the quarrel and of the fight; but had the South been attacked in any of her other property or civil rights, she would have defended them just as readily; in fact, more readily than she did in this case.  It was merely upon the side of slavery that our right to local self-government was attacked…

But there was something else, and even a greater cause than local self-government, for which we fought. Local self-government temporarily destroyed may be recovered and ultimately retained. The other thing for which we fought is so complex in its composition, so delicate in its breath, so incomparable in its symmetry, that, being once destroyed, it is forever destroyed. This other thing for which we fought was the supremacy of the white man’s civilization in the country which he proudly claimed his own; “in the land which the Lord his God had given him;” founded upon the white man’s code of ethics, in sympathy with the white man’s traditions and ideals. Our forefathers of the forties and fifties and sixties believed that if slavery were abolished, unless the black race were deported from the American States, there would result in the Southern States just such a condition of things as had resulted in San Domingo, in the other West Indies Islands, and in the so-called republics of Central and South America – namely, a hybridization of races, a lowering of the ethical standard, and a degradation, if not loss, of civilization… Slavery is lost, and it is certainly well for us and the public – perhaps for the negro – that it has been lost. But the real cause for which our ancestors fought back of slavery, and deemed by them to be bound up in the maintenance of slavery – to wit, the supremacy of the white man’s civilization, the supremacy of the ethical culture, which had been gradually built up through countless generations – has not been lost.  We have not had the experience of the countries to the south of us; but I ask you, my friends, in all soberness and candor, to ask yourselves how and why we escaped the evils which befell others from identical causes, under similar, though not identical, conditions?  What prevented the Africanization of the South? We escaped, but those of you, even no older than I am, will remember by what a slender thread we held to safety. You will remember the ten long years of so-called reconstruction which made the four long years of war itself seem tolerable by comparison, the ten long years during every day and every night of which Southern womanhood was menaced and Southern manhood humiliated… The brethren of our own race, in our own country – the country whose pen had been Jefferson, whose tongue had been Patrick Henry, and whose sword had been Washington – were against not only us but the race itself – its past, its future – were seemingly bent only on two things – our humiliation as a race in the present, our subordination as a race in the future… There is no grander, no more superb spectacle than that of the white men of the South standing from ’65 to ’74 quietly, determinedly, solidly, shoulder to shoulder in phalanx, as if the entire race were one man, unintimidated by defeat in war, unawed by adverse power, unbribed by patronage, unbought by the prospect of present material prosperity, waiting and hoping and praying for the opportunity which, in the providence of God, must come to overthrow the supremacy of “veneered savages,” superficially “Americanized Africans” – waiting to reassert politically and socially the supremacy of the civilization of the English-speaking white race. But what gave them the capacity to do this sublime thing, to conceive it and to persevere in it to the end? To wait like hounds in the leash – impatient, yet obedient to the call of the huntsman’s horn – which came upon the heels of the autumn elections in the Northwestern States in 1874? What gave this capacity to the “easy-going, indolent, life-enjoying” Southerner? What if not four years of discipline, training, hardship? Four years which taught the consciousness of strength and mutual courage, the consciousness of capacity for working together, the power and the desire of organization, and which gave them, with it all, a capacity for stern action when required by stern events? But for the war – the lessons which it taught, the discipline which it enforced, the capacity for racial organization which was born with it – I, for one, do not believe that conditions in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi to-day would be very far different from what they are in Hayti, Cuba, or Martinique.

Neither of these causes is a lost cause… The very men who told us in the sixties and the seventies that “one man was as good as another,” no matter what the state of his civilization, no matter what his race traits and tendencies, are the very men who now, in establishing new governments in the new insular possessions, not only admit, but strenuously contend for the necessity of making such provisions of law as will prevent the white men in those possessions from being ruled by other races.  The act of Congress for the government of the islands of Hawaii is almost identically the Mississippi constitution reenacted, and the reason for its passage was the same – namely, to secure, as far as possible, without violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the white man’s supremacy there, and this, too, although the native Kanakas in the Hawaiian Islands have a percentage of illiteracy less than that of any State in the Union except one, and although the white men in the islands do not constitute one-fifth of the population.

My friends, there is no other instance that I know of where men having apparently lost a cause by four years of fighting subsequently preserved it by ten years of unterrified solidarity, superb patience, and magnificent common sense. I believe the world knows about us now these two things: First, that we have the strength of a giant; and secondly, that we can be trusted not to use it like a giant – brutally and irrationally. So much for the cause of the sixties…

John Sharp Williams (1854-1932), a speech to veterans, May 31, 1904. Williams was a U.S.  Representative and U.S. Senator, and his father was killed at the battle of Shiloh. This speech was published in Confederate Veteran magazine, Vol. XII, No. 11, November, 1904, pages 517-521.