Robert Lewis Dabney: A Prophet for Our Own Times
32. "It is to me simply incredible, that a people so shrewd and
practical as those of the United States, should expect us to have
discarded, through the logic of the sword merely, the convictions of a
lifetime; or that they could be deceived by us, should we be base enough
to assert it of ourselves. They know that the people of the South were
conquered, and not convinced; and that the authority of the United
States was accepted by us from necessity, and not from preference.
[snip] The people of the South went to war, because they sincerely
believed (what their political fathers had taught them, with one voice,
for two generations) that the doctrine of State-sovereignty for which
they fought, was absolutely essential as the bulwark of the liberties of
the people."
~~R. L.Dabney of Virginia
*******************
Edited by Robert Hoyle.
A Discourse delivered at the Annual Commencement of
Hampden-Sydney College, June 15, 1882, before the Philanthropic and
Union Literary Societies.[1]
Young Gentlemen of the Philanthropic and Union Societies, and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Audience:
You will credit my expression of sincere embarrassment at this time
when you consider that I am attempting a species of discourse somewhat
unwonted to a preacher of the Gospel, and yet more, that I am placed
here only as a species of Dernier Resort. We all had hopes that
another gentleman would represent the two Literary Societies, better
fitted to entertain and instruct this assemblage. But disappointment
left the place, at a very late period, unfilled, and we were threatened
with having this important part of our literary anniversary left a mere
blank. I stand here, therefore, in the formula of your
exercises very much in the place of that “infinitesimal quantity,” which
the algebraist places equal to zero in his equation, without
appreciable error.
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