Last Heroes of Freedom In America

Georgia statesman Benjamin Hill railed at the postwar Reconstruction imposed on the South, calling it “the torch of the incendiary, the knife of the assassin, the fire-arm of the bandit, sending death-blows to the life of the State, to the heart of society, and to the hopes of civilization, that ignorance and vice may be exalted, and intelligence and virtue degraded!”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
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Last Heroes of Freedom in America:

“But one comfort he Southern people and their children must ever have. Whether Constitutional government shall continue or fail; whether States rights shall remain, or be obliterated; whether liberty shall be recovered, or die the death that knows no walking – we shall be vindicated!

If the Union of the States, under Constitutional government, and securing the blessings of liberty, be recovered and perpetuated, the work can only be done by returning to the great principles for which we struggled. The general government must be restrained within the limitations of its Constitutional delegated powers, and the States restored to the unrestrained control of their domestic affairs under their reserved rights, or Union, States, and liberty must perish.

If this glorious work shall have success, then, the rejoicings of according States and happy millions from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, will syllable forever the hallelujahs of Southern triumph!

But if blindness, madness, hate, and ambition shall continue coercion and reconstruction as accepted and approved principles of Federal administration, then the wail that shall come up from the universal wreck of Union, States, and liberty, will drown the thunder in loud vindication of Southern wisdom and fidelity. The graves of Davis and Lee will become Meccas for journeying, sorrow-stricken pilgrims of right for ages to come; and the future historian, reviewing the records your care shall have preserved, will write the epitaph for the Confederate dead: “These were the last heroes of freedom in America.”

(Southern Secession and Northern Coercion, Benjamin H. Hill, Society for Biblical and Southern Studies, 2001, pp. 33-34)
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Last Heroes of Freedom In America