The Women of the Confederacy Monument, Raleigh NC

The mothers of the South had sent their sons to the front as the Spartan mother when she delivered the shield to her son with the command: “Return with it or upon it.”

I cannot count the number of times my mother said this to me.
========

The Legacy of the Confederacy:

(North Carolina Governor Locke Craig, accepting the Monument to the Women of the Confederacy, unveiled at Raleigh, June 10, 1914)

“The State accepts this monument with grateful appreciation.

It is the tribute of a knightly soldier to the Women of the Confederacy. The statue is epic: Arms and the Man. Its theme is heroism and devotion; the inheritance of the children of the South. To the earnest beholder, the statue is illumined with unfolding meaning. His vision will determine its revelation.

As we look upon it, there rises out of the past a time when the spirit of war moved upon the depths of human thought, and summoned the elemental forces to titanic strife. We feel the throes of the mighty upheaval. We see “the marshaling in arms, and battle’s magnificently stern array.” Lovers say good-bye with tokens of plighted troth; the young mother and the father in uniform, kneel together, weeping over the cradle of their new born babe; there are tears and everlasting farewells; the cavalcades are filing off; the tramp of innumerable armies is heard. In secret the mother – this Woman of the Confederacy – prays and weeps with breaking heart for the boy who marches away to the wild, grand music of the bugles.

At home alone, the wives and mothers, these Women of the Confederacy, in patience and suffering, are listening for the coming of those who will never return – will never return, but march on forever in the militant hosts of the heroic of all kindred and nations, that have redeemed and glorified the world.

We dedicate this monument as a symbol of our veneration. We dedicate this monument as a covenant that we too, in blessed remembrance of them, shall strive for fidelity and courage.

That people survives, gathers strength, becomes puissant in human destiny that has the faith and the courage for the supreme issue. The immediate result is not the final judgment. Who won at Thermopylae, the Persians or the Spartans? Who was victorious at the Alamo, Santa Anna or Travis? Who triumphed, Socrates or his judges; Jesus or Pontius Pilate?

The glory of France is the Old Guard at Waterloo. The noblest feelings of the English heart are stirred by the Light Brigade charging to death at Balaklava. Lexington and Guilford Courthouse are as dear to us as Trenton and Yorktown.

Disaster does not always destroy. Armies may be destroyed, “Far called, our navies melt away”; yet from a land consecrated by the blood of the brave, from a soil enriched by glorious tradition, tried and purified by fire, a nobler, stronger race will come. Upon a land blighted by the cowardice of those who should defend it, there is the judgment of decay and death.

The heroic past is our priceless inheritance. Our armies were destroyed; our land was smitten by war; our homes were ravaged by avenging armies. We were plundered by the hordes of reconstruction. But standing in this land that has suffered, amid this throng of grey-haired veterans, and their kindred and descendants, I declare that the legacy of the war is our richest possession.

I utter the sentiments of every maimed soldier; of every soldier who gave the best of his young life to “the storm-cradled nation that fell,” of every bereaved widow and mother; and if I could speak for the dead, I would utter the sentiment of the forty thousand sons of the State who fell upon the fields of battle, when I declare that they would not revoke that sacrifice.

Some of you can remember when the young soldier was brought home dead when the maiden was clothed in her first sorrow, and the old gray head was bowed in the last grief. The mothers of the South had sent their sons to the front as the Spartan mother when she delivered the shield to her son with the command: “Return with it or upon it.”

They wept in silent desolation, but in their grief there was exaltation, for they knew that their sons had done a soldier’s part, that in the tumult of historic days they had fought and fallen beneath the advancing flag; that in strange lands, wounded and neglected, they had suffered without complaint, and bequeathing a message for home, had died, as conquerors, without a murmur.

Hail to you, Women of the Confederacy, that bore them and nurtured them, and offered them for sacrifice! In you and in your descendants is vouchsafed the promise to Abraham: Henceforth all generations shall call you blessed.

From the shadow of war we sweep into the grander day. The earth is hallowed because it is the sepulcher of the brave; not men whose victories have been inscribed upon triumphal columns, but men whose memorial is, that in courage and loyalty for conviction, they were steadfast unto death; men who have been stoned and scourged, and quailed not before the mighty.

“Their heroic sufferings rise up melodiously together to Heaven out of all lands and out of all times, as a sacred Miserere; their heroic actions as a boundless everlasting Psalm of Triumph.” They are the conquerors. The South has forever a part in that chorus of victory.”

=========
The Women of the Confederacy Monument, Raleigh NC