THE SOUTH 
 VINDICA TED 
 
 Hoi 
 
THE FLO^^KS COLLECTION 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 REUNION ADDRESS BY JUDGE JOHN H. ROGERS, 
 OF ARKANSAS. 
 
 The Annual Aiklit for the Convention of United Confederate Veterans 
 at New ( )rlfan>. -May. V»-\--. liaving been assigned to the Hon. John H. Rogers, 
 of Fort Smith, Ark., he responded and so pleased the assembly that a mo- 
 tion was adopted, amid great enthusiasm, that it be printed and sent to all 
 Camps in the org-anization. and to all colleges and imiversities in the coun- 
 tr}'. Mr. S. A. Cunnimrham . cditMr nf th.' C < )Nfki>kk.ate Yetehax. official 
 organ of the Association. nti\Tr(i i>i -uiiplx ii s.n:uuitousl3-. and hi- ]>r.i]Misi- 
 tion was accepted with fxpi-i'--i n- <<{ u-ra Jiiulc. Some thousands ot extra 
 copies of the Veteran were i)rinted and sd tlislributed, but the wide-sjjread 
 demand for other copies induced this pamphlet edition. Copies will be mailed 
 to an}- address at 5 cents each. 50 cents per dozen. Sample copies of the 
 Veter.ax are sent free. Address S. A. Cuxnixgham. Nashville. Tenn. 
 
Digitized by the Internet > 
 
 Archive 
 
 
 in 2014 
 
 
 
 https://archive.org/details/southvindicated01roge 
 
THE FLOWERS COLLEOTION 
 
 ■^/^ xfc^ ■"•'^ ■<•/- ■<*/^ '•/^ >^ '^/^ •"•^ 
 
 ZI^^ Soiithi %)indicated. 
 
 Mr. Commander, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Fellow-Com- 
 rades: No man could be insensible of so great a privilege and 
 honor as this occasion confers on me. This uncounted mul- 
 titude findi itself assembled in the greatest of all Southern 
 cities. Every inch of its soil has been consecrated by the 
 blood of heroes and patriots. Here, in Jackson Square, 
 fragrant v,'ith the magnolia, jasmine, and rose, adorned with 
 evergreens, shrubbery, and Howering plants, stands, and 
 should forever stand, Mill's equestrian statue of the Sage 
 of the Hermitage, clustering around whose name and fame, 
 entwined with the early fortunes of this beautiful metrop- 
 olis, are holy memories more labtmg than marble and brass; 
 preserving forever the noblest examples of civic and mili- 
 tary achievements, and giving inspiration, hope, and courage 
 to the countless millions of his countrymen. Why are we 
 here? 
 
 No fanatical religious crusade prompted this immense 
 concourse. Here are to be found all creeds and faiths and 
 beliefs, in perfect peace with each other, freed from all an- 
 tagonisms to excite the passions of men. In yonder sky 
 are no angry clouds of pestilence or war; no impending 
 danger threatens our land, demanding consultation and 
 means of protection from enemies within or without. We 
 are at peace at home and abroad. Neither are we weary 
 pilgrims to a holy Mecca, seeking absolution of our sins, 
 nor are we aspirants for social or political preferment. This 
 is no vast political convention or mass meeting, assembled 
 for purposes of considering grave matters of state or seek- 
 ing to confer honors on favorite sons. Nay, nay, none of 
 these. What is it that has brought us together? 
 
 This great assembly hall, festooned with bunting and flags, 
 emblems cf liberty and powder; its amphitheater filled with 
 
4 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 the brave manhood and lovely womanhood of the South; 
 these venerable men, the survivors of the tremendous con- 
 flict of the sixties — all these things tell of a deep, underlying 
 cause. This great sea of upturned faces, glowing with life, 
 intelligence, and sympathy — if not with joy unmingled with 
 sorrow — proclaim that the purpose of our assembling has 
 made a deep impression upon our hearts. We need not re- 
 press the emotions by which we are agitated. Whenever and 
 wherever these reunions occur, we are standing amid the sep- 
 ulchers of our dead. Every foot of our beloved Southland 
 is distinguished by their courage, their sublime fortitude, 
 their self-denial, their unwavering devotion and patriotism, 
 and sanctified by the shedding of their blood. Thirty-eight 
 years separate us from the events of which I shall speak, 
 "Time and nature have had their course"' in diminishing the 
 numbers of those who surrendered at the close of the great 
 "Civil War," but neither time nor nature can relieve those who 
 survive of the duties they owe to the memory of our un- 
 recorded dead, to our posterity, to our beloved Southland, 
 and to ourselves. We are here to-day to discharge, as we 
 may, those duties, and to renew old friendships, forged in 
 the white heat of common sufiferings, and hallowed and sanc- 
 tified by the conscious conviction that in the hour of trial 
 and peril we were true to the Constitution as it was framed 
 and handed down to us by Washington and his compatriots. 
 
 We are here also to pay tribute to that noble band of 
 Southern women, the mothers and daughters of the Confed- 
 eracy, to whom the great Southern chieftain dedicated his 
 book, "The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy," in words 
 ever to be remembered: 
 
 "To the women of the Confederacy, whose pious minis- 
 trations to our wounded soldiers soothed the last hours of 
 those who died far from the object of their love; 
 
 "Whose domestic labors contributed much to supply the 
 wants of cur defenders in the field; 
 
 "Whose zealous faith in our cause shone a guiding star 
 undimmed by the darkest clouds of war; 
 
 "Whose fortitude sustained them under all the privations 
 to which they were subjected; 
 
THE SOUTH \TXDICATEL). 
 
 "Whose floral tribute annually expresses their untiring 
 love and reverence for our sacred dead; 
 
 "And whose patriotism will teach their children to emu- 
 late the deeds of our revolutionary sires." 
 
 All hail to these splendid women, nobly represented here 
 this day by the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, 
 which took upon itself, when peace came, to care for our dead 
 and erect monuments to their memory. Welcome, welcome to 
 them and to the representatives of all other true organizations 
 which are contributing toward the works of love in which we 
 all feel the deepest concern. 
 
 A gifted and distinguished son of Alabama, the author, 
 the statesman, the scholar, and the man of God, the late 
 Dr. Curry, has written two books, one entitled ''The South- 
 ern States of the American Union," and the other, "The Civil 
 History of the Confederate States." Both should be care- 
 fully read and studied by every intelligent man and woman, 
 North and South, wha wishes to know the truth and where 
 to find it, and to do justice to the South. In the former 
 is found this passage: 
 
 "The establishment of truth is never wrong. History, as 
 written, if accepted as true, will consign the South to in- 
 famy. If she were guilty of rebellion or treason, if she 
 adopted or clung to barbarisms, essential sins, and immor- 
 alities, then her people will be clothed, as it were, with the 
 fabled shire of Nessus, fatal to honor, to energy, to noble 
 development, to true life." 
 
 The same author uses this striking language: 
 
 "That the conquerors should make laws for the conquered 
 seems a political, as it is the ordinary, consequence of the 
 conquest. It is not so obvious, nor so logical, that they 
 should make history." 
 
 In another passage he says: 
 
 "One of the most singular illustrations ever presented of 
 the power of literature to conceal and pervert truth, to 
 modify and falsify history, to transfer odium from the guilty 
 to the innocent, is found in the fact that the reproach of 
 disunion has been slipped from the shoulders of the North 
 to those cf the South." 
 
6 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 No thoughtful man can pass lightly over such statements. 
 If true, they are a warning to us that if we value our good 
 names, our parts had in the tragic struggle of the sixties; 
 if we would not have our very children in the near future, 
 if not ashamed and apologizing for us, then unable to defend 
 us, we must not be idle in preserving, recording, and teach- 
 ing the real facts upon which the righteousness of our ac- 
 tions must depend. 
 
 I find no fault with the New England States, that from 
 the moment the Pilgrim Fathers touched foot on Plymouth 
 Rock they began and have continued day by day to record 
 their own deeds; but it cannot be truthfully said that their 
 writers and statesmen have always been as just and faithful 
 in their interpretation and treatment of the actions of others 
 as they have been diligent in recording their own deeds, and 
 afterwards in escaping their responsibility and logical con- 
 sequences. It is a misfortune to the South that her sons, 
 if not indifferent, then carelessly neglected to preserve for 
 the historian like records. 
 
 "The true record of the South, if it can be related with 
 historic accuracy, is rich in patriotism, in intellectual force, 
 in civic and military achievements, in heroism, in honorable 
 and sagacious statesmanship, of a proper share of which no 
 American can aft'ord to deprive himself. So much genius 
 in legislation, in administration, in jurisprudence, in war, 
 such great capacities, should expel partisan and sectional 
 prejudices." 
 
 Let us see where the seeds of disunion were first sown — 
 where and when it was first agitated, and under what cir- 
 cumstances it was threatened. If to the doctrine of disunion 
 or secession odium should attach, then simple justice de- 
 mands that the responsibility be fixed and that the guilty 
 be not permitted to escape their proper place in history. 
 If no odium could justly attach, no one need feel any dread 
 if the truth is made clear. In no sectional, party, or re- 
 sentful spirit is the inquiry made. It is due to us, to the 
 truth, to cur children, and to the statesmen and leaders of 
 political thought in the old South, that the inquiry be made; 
 it is due to the dead we this day honor. 
 
THE SOUTH \INDICATED. 
 
 7 
 
 For much of what I shall say on this subject, I am in- 
 debted to Dr. Curry's two books, already mentioned. 
 
 The South is reproached for disunion — secession! It is 
 the basis for the charge of treason; of disrupting the Union; 
 of violating the Constitution; of rebellion; of making war 
 on the United States. It must not be forgotten that there 
 is a wide difference between secession and rebellion. The 
 South made no war on the States remaining in the Uaion. 
 Secession meant disunion so far as the seceding States were 
 concerned, but it meant neither war nor rebellion. It meant 
 a Union intact sc far as all the States were concerned which 
 did not secede, and a Union, too, under the Constitution. 
 As the States entered the Union, each under acts of ratifi- 
 cation of its own, so secession meant the resumption by each 
 State of its delegated powers, by repealing the acts under 
 which each seceding State entered the compact; but the re- 
 peal of such acts did not and could not affect the acts by 
 which the remaining States entered into the Confederacy. 
 The States of North Carolina and Rhode Island did not 
 ratify the Constitution until long after Washington's ad- 
 ministration began, and of course were not members of 
 the Union. But the Union existed nevertheless, and existed 
 under the Constitution, as much as it did after these States 
 became members. So when the Confederate States seceded 
 from the Union, the States remaining under the compact 
 were as much a Union under the Constitution as before. 
 
 The whole history of secession shows conclusively that in 
 seceding the South had no Intention of assailing their for- 
 mer confederates. To their credit, every step taken in the 
 matter of secession, in view of the deep feeling and intense 
 excitement, was marvelously conservative, marked with 
 statesmanlike conduct and a decent regard for the United 
 States. Its peace commissions, its diplomacy, its unpre- 
 paredness for war, all make clear to those who wish to 
 know that the South sought a peaceful withdrawal from the 
 Union, leaving the remaining States unharmed and undis- 
 turbed. 
 
 Had a State, under the Constitution as interpreted and 
 understood for fifty years after its adoption, the right, for any 
 
8 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 reason, to withdraw from the Union? It must be admitted 
 that if such right ever existed it continued up to the "Civil 
 War," for the Constitution had never been changed in that 
 regard. It must also be admitted that if, for any reason, a 
 State had the right to withdraw of necessity it had the sole 
 right to determine when the reasons were sufficient; and it 
 must also be remembered that up to 1861 the question was 
 unsettled, since for its determination no tribunal had 
 ever been created, nor was any such power confided by the 
 terms of the Constitution to the United States. These state- 
 ments, it IS confidently asserted, are historically axiomatic. 
 
 I may be permitted to quote two authorities. Mr. Madi- 
 son has been justly called the "Father of the Constitution." 
 If any men of his day had a right to love the Union, they were 
 Washington and Madison. Both of them contributed, above 
 all cithers, to its existence and early maintenance; both of 
 them deprecated its destruction, frowned upon all efiforts for 
 disunion or secession, and to the last days of their lives were 
 its ardent and devoted friends. Mr. Madison, than whom no 
 purer and nobler statesman this country has produced, said : 
 
 "Where resort can be had to no tribunal superior to the 
 authority of the parties, the parties themselves must be the 
 rightful judges, in the last resort, whether the bargain made 
 has been pursued or violated. The Constitution of the 
 United States was formed by the sanction of the States, 
 given by each in its sovereign capacity. The States, then, 
 being parties to the constitutional compact and in their sov- 
 ereign capacity, it follows of necessity that there can be no 
 tribunal above their authority to decide, in the last resort, 
 whether the compact made by them be violated, and con- 
 sequently that, as the parties to it, they must themselves 
 decide, in the last resort, such questions as may be of suf- 
 ficient magnitude to require their interposition." 
 
 "-An assemblage of citizens of Boston in Fanueil Hall in 
 1809 state, in a celebrated memorial, that they looked only 
 to the State Legislatures, who were competent to devise 
 relief against the unconstitutional acts of the general gov- 
 ernment. "That your power is adequate to that object is 
 evident from the organization of the Confederacy." 
 
THE SOUTH MXDICATED. 
 
 9 
 
 Here is distinctively recognized the doctrine that each 
 sovereign State has the right to judge alone of its own com- 
 pacts and agreements. This must, of necessity, be true un- 
 less the right to interpret the compact or agreement has 
 been waived, or the power conferred upon another. This 
 language of Madison is buttressed by the acts of ratification 
 of the Constitution by some of the States. Virginia said 
 in her ratification act: 
 
 "The delegates do, in the name of Virginia, declare and 
 make known that the powers granted under the Constitu- 
 tion, being derived from the people of the United States, 
 may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be 
 perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every 
 power not granted thereby remains w^th them and at their 
 will." 
 
 New York was even more specific, and Maryland and other 
 States showed equal concern and jealousy in safeguarding 
 the sovereignty of the States. 
 
 In the prior history of the country repeated instances 
 are found of the assertion of tlie right of secession and of 
 a purpose entertained at various times to put it into execu- 
 tion. Notably is this true of Massachusetts — indeed, of all 
 New England. In 1786, when the States were bound by the 
 Articles of Confederation, we are told the situation was 
 "dangerous in the extreme." "The agitation in Massachu- 
 setts was great, and it was declared that if Jay's negotia- 
 tions, closing the Mississippi for twenty years, could not be 
 adopted it was high time for the New England States to 
 recede from the Union and form a Confederation by them- 
 selves." 
 
 Plumer traces secession movements in 1792 and 1794, and 
 says: "All dissatisfied with the measures of the government 
 looked to a separation of the States as a remedy for op- 
 pressive grievance." 
 
 In 1794 Fisher Ames said: "The spirit of insurrection has 
 tainted a vast extent of country besides Pennsylvania." 
 
 In 1796 Gov. Wolcott, of Connecticut, said: "I sincerely 
 declare that I wish the Northern States would separate from 
 
10 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 the Southern the moment that event [the election of Jef- 
 ferson] shall take place." 
 
 Horatio Seymour, on October 8, 1880, in a public address 
 in New York City, thus spoke: "The first threat of disunion 
 was uttered upon the floor of Congress by Josiah Quincy, 
 one of the most able and distinguished sons of Massachu- 
 setts. At an early day Mr. Hamilton, with all his distrust 
 of the Constitution, sent word to the citizens of Boston to 
 stop their threats of disunion and let the government stand 
 as long as it would. When our country was engaged with 
 the superior power, population, and resources of Great 
 Britain, when its armies were upon our soil, when the walls 
 of its capitol were blackened and marred by the fires kindled 
 by our foes, and our Union was threatened with disasters, 
 the leading officials and citizens of New England threatened 
 resistance to the military measures of the administration. 
 This was the language held by a convention of delegates 
 appointed by the Legislatures of three New England States and 
 by delegates from counties in Vermont and New Hampshire : 
 *In cases of deliberate, dangerous, and palpable infractions 
 of the Constitution, afifecting the sovereignty of a State 
 and liberties of the people, it is not only the right but the 
 duty of such State to interpose for their protection in the 
 manner best calculated to secure that end.' 'This covers 
 the whole doctrine of nullification.' I may add, it covers 
 the whole doctrine of secession, for it recognized the right 
 of the State to determine when infractions of the Constitu- 
 tion have occurred, and to apply their own remedies." 
 
 The men who uttered these threats, which gave "aid and 
 comfort" to the enemies of this country while they were 
 burning its capitol, were held in high esteem. To this day 
 the names of George Cabot, Nathan Dove, Roger M. Sher- 
 man, and their associates are honored in New England." 
 
 The acquisition of Louisiana, in 1803, created much dis- 
 satisfaction throughout New England, for the reason, as 
 expressed by George Cabot, Senator from Massachusetts, 
 and the grandfather of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (in 
 whose "Life of George Cabot" the statement is made) : 
 
 "That the influence of our [northeastern] part of the 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 11 
 
 Union must be diminished by the acquisition of more weight 
 at the other extremity." At the time secession, or separa- 
 tion of the States, was freely discussed, and with no sugges- 
 tion of any idea among its advocates that it was treasonable 
 or revolutionary. 
 
 Col. Timothy Pickering, an officer in the Revolution, 
 afterwards Postmaster General, Secretary of War, and Sec- 
 retary of State in Washington's Cabinet, and afterwards for 
 many years a Senator from Massachusetts, was also a lead- 
 ing secessionist in his day. In Lodge's "Life of Cabot," 
 his letters to Senator Cabot reveal his convictions of the 
 power in a sovereign State to sever its connection with the 
 Union. In one of his letters, written in 1803 to a friend, he 
 says: "I will not despair. I will rather anticipate a new 
 Confederacy, exempt from the corrupt and corrupting in- 
 fluences and oppressions of the aristocratic Democrats of 
 the South. There will be (our children at the furthest will 
 see it) a separation. The white and black populations will 
 mark the boundary." 
 
 In another letter he says: "The principles of our Revolu- 
 tion point to the remedy — a separation; that this can be 
 accomplished without spilling one drop of blood, I have little 
 doubt." 
 
 Other quotations to the same point found in the letters of 
 Col. Pickering might be given. The occasion forbids. Such 
 were his views of the nature of the compact under the Con- 
 stitution. He was a revolutionary patriot, a friend and as- 
 sociate of Washington, and a trusted servant, during many 
 long years, of Massachusetts. 
 
 In 181 1, in the debate of the bill for the admission of 
 Louisiana into the Union, Josiah Quincy, a member of Con- 
 gress from Massachusetts, said: 
 
 "If this bill passes, it is my deliberate opinion that it is 
 virtually a dissolution of the Union; that it will free the 
 States from moral obligation, and as it will be the right of 
 all, so it will be the duty of some definitely to prepare for 
 that separation, amicably if they can, violently if they must." 
 
 Cabot, Quincy, and Pickering were strong Federalists, 
 
12 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 not "misguided advocates of State rights," but friends of 
 a strong, centralized. Federal government. 
 
 All of us know of the Hartford Convention, held in 1814, 
 growing out of the war with Great Britain, in which were 
 representatives regularly elected by the Legislatures of 
 Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and repre- 
 sentatives irregularly chosen from New Hampshire and Ver- 
 mont. They sat with closed doors, but it is known that 
 their object was the discussion of the expediency of those 
 States withdrawing from the Union and setting up a sep- 
 arate Confederation. They determined upon its inexpe- 
 diency then, but published to the world the conditions and 
 circumstances under which its dissolution might become 
 expedient. 
 
 In the years 1844-45, when measures were taken for the 
 annexation of Texas, the Legislature of Massachusetts 
 passed a resolution that: 
 
 "The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the 
 compact between the people of the United States, according 
 to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood 
 by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that 
 it is determined, as it doubts not the other States are, to 
 submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth," 
 and that the "project for the annexation of Texas, unless ar- 
 rested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into 
 a dissolution of the Union." 
 
 In the convention which framed the Constitution itself 
 the proposition was made and lost, giving authority to em- 
 ploy force against a delinquent State, but Mr. Madison 
 said: 
 
 "The use of force against a State would look more like a 
 declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and 
 would probably be considered by the party attacked as a 
 dissolution of all previous compacts by which it may have 
 been bound." 
 
 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in his "Life of Webster," 
 says: 
 
 "It was probably necessary — at all events Mr, Webster 
 felt it to be so — to argue that the Constitution at the outset 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 13 
 
 was not a compact between the States, but a national in- 
 strument, and to distinguish the cases of Virginia and Ken- 
 tucky in 1799, and of New England in 1814, from that of 
 South Carolina in 1830. . . . Unfortunately, the facts were 
 against him in both instances. When the Constitution was 
 adopted by the votes of States at Philadelphia, and accepted 
 by the votes of States in popular conventions, it is safe to 
 say there was not a man in the country, from Washington 
 and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George 
 Mason on the other, who regarded the system as anything 
 but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from 
 which each and every State had the right peaceably to with- 
 draw, a right which was very likely to be exercised." 
 
 Wendell Phillips, a lawyer, an author, and a statesman, 
 in New Bedford, Mass., in 1861, said that the States who 
 think their peculiar institutions require a separate govern- 
 ment "have a right to decide that question without appeal- 
 ing to you or me." 
 
 "A convention in Ohio in 1859 declared the Constitution 
 a compact to which each State acceded as a State, and is 
 an integral party, and that each State had the right to judge 
 for itself of infractions, and of the mode and measure of 
 redress, and to this declaration Giddings, Wade, Chase, and 
 Denison assented." 
 
 At Capon Springs, Va., June 28, 1851, Daniel Webster 
 said: 
 
 "I do not hesitate to say and repeat that if the Northern 
 States refuse willfully and deliberately to carry into effect 
 that part of the Constitution which respects the restoration 
 of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the 
 South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. 
 A bargain broken on one side is broken on all sides." 
 
 Writing to a committee of New York lawyers in 1851, Mr. 
 Webster said: 
 
 "In the North, the purpose of overturning the govern- 
 ment shows itself more clearly in resolutions agreed to in 
 voluntary assemblies of individuals, denouncing the laws of 
 the land, and declaring a fixed intent to disobey them. I 
 notice that in one of these meetings, holden lately in the 
 
14 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 very heart of New England, and said to have been very 
 numerously attended, the members unanimously resolved 
 That as God is our helper we will not sufifer any person 
 charged with being a fugitive from labor to be taken from 
 among us, and to this resolve we pledge our lives, our for- 
 tunes, and our sacred honor.' " He conjured his fellow-citi- 
 zens "to reject all such ideas as that disobedience to the laws 
 is the path of patriotism, or treason to yoar country duty 
 to God." 
 
 I need not array further evidence as to where and when 
 the seeds of disunion were first sown. The truth is, they 
 antedate the Constitution, and the nursery and hotbed in 
 which they were cared for and cultivated in the first fifty 
 years of the republic was in the North, principally New 
 England. The truth I believe is that, from the very begin- 
 ning, a large majority of the South believed in the consti- 
 tutional right of a State to secede and some believed in the 
 doctrine of nullificatioii as a remedy for flagrant violations 
 of the Constitution; but they loved the Union, and, largely 
 controlling its destinies for sixty out of seventy years, they 
 held it steadily within its constitutional limits. They never 
 nursed any doctrine looking to its destruction. In its early 
 perils, when its enemies withi.i and without threatened its 
 existence, when at best it was an experiment, the South was 
 found entangled in no hostile machinations. xA.s in her rev- 
 olutionary struggles the South sent to the army no Benedict 
 Arnold, so in the weakness of her infancy she furnished no 
 Shay's rebellions nor Hartford conventions. 
 
 Alexander Stephens has said, and it is worth remembering, 
 that: 
 
 "No Southern State ever did, intentionally or otherwise, 
 fail to perform her obligation as to her confederates under 
 the Constitution, according to the letter and spirit of its 
 stipulated covenants, and they never asked of Congress any 
 action or invoked its powers upon any subject which did 
 not lie Clearly within the provisions of the Articles of 
 Union." 
 
 I affirm, therefore, if odium is to attach to the South for 
 the act of secession, it must also attach to the great North 
 
THI-: soi/TH \"ixdicatp:d. 
 
 15 
 
 and East, where it was, for political, economical, and indus- 
 trial reasons, sedulously agitated and inculcated up to the 
 Mexican war, and the right distinctly recognized by its lead- 
 ing statesmen up to i860. History ought to not allow them 
 to slip this odium, if odium it be, from their shoulders to 
 the shoulders of the South. 
 
 It is true, South Carolina inaugurated nullification in 1830, 
 a doctrine which was never generally accepted by the South- 
 ern statesmen, and which, to my mind, has always seemed 
 illogical, if not unethical; a doctrine which, as I have always 
 understood, President Davis never approved, and a doctrine 
 which President Jackson unceremoniously stamped out; a 
 doctrine, nevertheless, as we shall see, which permeated all 
 the abolition States of the North. 
 
 Our children should know that the Confederate States, 
 by the act of secession, made no war on the United States; 
 that the war between the States was not rebellion. 
 It was the result of an efifort by the United States to coerce 
 States against their will to remain in the Union, a power 
 not to be found in the Constitution, a power which all the 
 earlier fathers believed did not exist, a power utterly in- 
 consistent with the right of secession, which it is believed 
 all parts o'" the country recognized when the Constitution 
 was framed and for many years thereafter. 
 
 If the Southern States had the power, notwiih-tanJing 
 the Constitution, to withdrr.w from the Union in 1803, in 
 1812 and in 1845, as New England statesmen then affirmed, 
 they had the same power in 1861. No change of the Con- 
 stitution had been made, and the relations of the States 
 to each other were unaltered. If that power existed at all, 
 the expediency of withdrawing was one solely for each State 
 to decide for itself. 
 
 The New York Triouiic, the organ of the abolitionists of 
 that day, said: "If the Cotton States wish to withdraw from 
 the Union, they should be allowed to do so," and that "any 
 attempt to force them to remain would be contrary to the prin- 
 ciples of the Declaration of Independence and to the funda- 
 mental ideas upon which human liberty is based," and that 
 "if the Declaration of Independence justified the secession 
 
16 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 from the British Empire of three millions of subjects in 
 1776, it was not seen why it would not justify th3 secession 
 of five millions of Southerners from the Union in 1861." 
 
 I make no apology for quoting a single paragraph from 
 that instrument, the Declaration of Independence: 
 
 "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are 
 created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with 
 certain inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty, 
 and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights 
 governments are instituted among men, deriving their just 
 power from the consent of the governed; that whenever 
 any form cf government becomes destructive of these ends, 
 it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to 
 institute a new government, laying its foundations on such 
 principles and organizing its powers in such form as to 
 them shall seem most likely to eftect their safety and happi- 
 ness." 
 
 Assuming the power existed, I affirm that if at any time 
 in all our history secession was ever justifiable it was in 
 1861. No less than fourteen Northern States had, by Legis- 
 lative enactments, nullified the fugitive slave law; and what 
 of this fugitive slave law? 
 
 When the Constitution was framed slavery was lawful 
 in all the States, and actually existed in nearly all. True, 
 it had been forbidden by a congressional ordinance in the 
 Northwest Territory, but that ordinance was accompanied 
 by a proviso for the rendition of fugitive slaves, and this 
 proviso, says Dr. Curry, "was the precursor of the fugitive 
 slave clause, embedded the same year in the Constitution, 
 without a dissenting voice." 
 
 In the Dred Scott case, Mr. Justice Nelson said: "We all 
 know, the world knows, that our independence could not 
 have been achieved, our Union could not have been main- 
 tained, our Constitution could not have been established, 
 without the adoption of those compromises which recognized 
 its continued existence, and left it (slavery) to the responsi- 
 bility of the States of which it was the grievous inheritance." 
 
 Mr. Justice Story, in the Prigg case, said: "Historically, 
 it is well-known that the object of this clause was to secure 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 17 
 
 to the slaveholding States the complete right and title of 
 ownership in their slaves, as property, in every State of the 
 Union into which they might escape from the State where- 
 in they were held in servitude." 
 
 But the truth demands that it should be stated that neither 
 that ordinance nor the constitutional proviso referred to 
 was the origin of the fugitive slave law. "In 1643 Articles 
 of Confederation were formed by the colonies of Massa- 
 chusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven for mutual 
 help. The Articles provided that ell servants running from 
 their masters should, upon demand and proper evidence, 
 be returned to their masters and to the colonies whence 
 they had made their escape. This New England and Puri- 
 tan fugitive slave law was the first enacted on this conti- 
 nent." 
 
 This fugitive slave law, thus .lullified by fourteen States, 
 was an Act of Congress, passed in pursuance of the express 
 mandate of the Constitution. The temper of the North at 
 that time may be best illustrated by a few quotations. 
 
 Mr. Seward said: "There is a higher law than the Consti- 
 tution which regulates our authority over our domain. 
 Slavery' must be abolished, and we must do it." 
 
 Others formulated their creed into this sentence: "The 
 times demand and we must have an antislavery Constitu- 
 tion, an antislavery Bible, and an antislavery God."' 
 
 Mr. Edmund Quincy thus voiced the idea of his school: 
 "For our part we have no particular desire to see the present 
 law repealed or modified. What we preach is not repeal, 
 not modification, but disobedience." 
 
 A reverend and active abolition agitator said: '"The citi- 
 zen of a government tainted with slave institutions may com- 
 bine with foreigners to put down the government." 
 
 In addition to the action of various Northern States in 
 nullifying an act of Congress, John Brown had, in October, 
 1859, heading a band of armed conspirators, invaded the State 
 of Virginia, seized the arsenal at Harper's Ferry, and was 
 pursuing a concocted plan to arouse the slaves of Virginia 
 to insurrection, to plunder, to murder, and to overthrow 
 the government of that State. 
 
18 
 
 THE SOUTH N'INDICATED. 
 
 Judge Taney, second to no one who ever sat on the Su- 
 preme Court bench, unless it be Marshall, was assailed in 
 the bitterest and most vituperative terms for his decision 
 in the Dred Scott case. The solemn judgment of that court 
 was audaciously and insolently set at naught as arbitrary 
 and void. The whole North was angry and convulsed; the 
 voice of law was silent. Mr. Lincoln, the President elect, 
 and the idol of his party, had said: 'The Union cannot per- 
 manently exist half slave and half free." 
 
 In the campaign of i860 Mr. Seward had affirmed that: 
 "There was an irrepressible conflict between freedom and 
 slavery." It was equivalent to a declaration of war by the 
 most prominent and influential statesmen of the victorious 
 party upon an institution peculiar to the South. 
 
 The people of this generation cannot comprehend the 
 intense excitement and deep feeling existing in the South, 
 and the bitterness growing out tf this question between the 
 sections. The South had two billions invested in slaves 
 when Mr. Lincoln was elected. The Constitution had been 
 nullified already. His position on the slavery question was 
 well understood. 
 
 Such is dim portrayal of the situation by which the South 
 was confronted in i860. 
 
 What had she to hope or expect in the Union? No such 
 conditions had ever previously existed. No such conse- 
 quences had provoked New England to threats of disunion. 
 It was not a question of the control of the government, or 
 an economical or industrial question; it was not a question 
 of preserving the balance of power or the equilibrium of 
 the sections, such as was felt in New England when the 
 Louisiana and Florida purchases were made, and Texas ac- 
 quired. It was a question of civilization, of constitutional 
 liberty, of the preservation of the principles of the Consti- 
 tution; and the South, when the alternative was presented 
 of abandoning the principles of the Constitution, or giving 
 up the Union, with alacrity, but with the deepest reluctance 
 that the necessity existed, chose the latter. She was over- 
 come, she has suffered, but she ought not to be maligned or 
 misrepresented. 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 19 
 
 I must not be misunderstood. The whole question of se- 
 cession and disunion has been forever settled, so far as the 
 domain of constitutional law is concerned. The decree was 
 rendered at Appomattox, and was written in the best blood 
 of all sections of this land. It was rendered in the court of 
 last resort, where all the laws but those of war are silent. 
 From it no appeal can be had except to revolution, which 
 God forbid. 
 
 From the clear skies His blessed finger points to a re- 
 stored Union, and His beneficent smile is spread all over the 
 land where dwells a people, the strongest, the most enlight- 
 ened, the most prosperous and happy to be found on the 
 habitable globe. In all our struggles we have not been for- 
 gotten; His mighty hand has been felt, lifting us up from 
 our calamities, chastened but made better and stronger by 
 His loving-kindness. "For v.iiom the Lord loveth he 
 chasteneth; and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." 
 
 '"Slavery has been called the trembling needle which 
 pointed the course amidst the tumultuous discussions of our 
 Congresses until the war between the States began." 
 
 But the South did not go to war for slavery alone. Thou- 
 sands and thousands of soldiers from every State in the 
 South, perhaps not less than eighty per cent of them, entered 
 the army v/illingly and deliberately, and served through the 
 war, who never owned and never expected to own a slave. 
 It was unmistakably interwoven among the causes of the 
 war. It was inseparable from all the great industrial, eco- 
 nomic, and sectional questions involving the policy and con- 
 trol of the government. It enibittered the discussion of 
 every public question, and afterwards embittered the great 
 war itself. It was inextricably interwoven with the cause 
 of the Confederacy. It brought down upon it the preju- 
 dices of many in this country who believed in the great prin- 
 ciple for which the South contended, but who would not 
 identify themselves with a cause involving the perpetuation 
 of slavery. It brought upon the South the moral sense of 
 foreign nations. It taught us what Washington, Jefferson, 
 and Madison had long before recognized — that the moral 
 sense of mankind did not sustain it. It was the bane of our 
 
20 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 social order, and it was the chronic cancer which gnawed 
 at the vitals of our future greatness. It perished, like se- 
 cession, as one of the incidents and results of the war. 
 
 Thank God it is gone forever! and that we have a re- 
 united country under one flag, the emblem of a free people 
 in an inseparable Union of coequal States, and never des- 
 tined, we pray God, to become the emblem of imperial 
 power at home or abroad, or to float over vassal States and 
 subject peoples anywhere against their will. 
 
 Ours was not a war of conquest; it was not a war of pelf; 
 it was not a war of desolation; it was not a war of fanati- 
 cism; it was not a war of envy and malice; it was not a war 
 on defenseless and homeless noncombatants; it was not a 
 war of coercion. Ours was a war of self-defense, a war for 
 home, for self-government, for State sovereignty, for the 
 right to peaceably withdraw from the Union into which we 
 had voluntarily entered, but to which no power had been 
 delegated to coerce a State. It was a war to establish the 
 true lines between the powers reserved to the States and 
 those delegated to the general government. It was a war 
 to preserve our form of government as the fathers under- 
 stood it when it was framed. 
 
 "No higher encomium can be rendered to the South than 
 the fact, sustained by her whole history, that she never vio- 
 lated the Constitution; that she committed no aggressions 
 upon the rights of property of the North; that she simply 
 asked equality in the Union and the enforcement and main- 
 tenance of her clearest rights and guarantees." 
 
 The South had no hatred for the Union. The highest 
 evidence of that is that the Confederate Constitution was 
 substantially the same as the Constitution of the United 
 States, modified so as to make clear the construction for 
 which the South had always contended. There were few 
 other changes; and they looked, in the main, to the correc- 
 tion of abuses and errors which experience had discovered. 
 It distinctly inhibited the foreign slave trade, prohibited 
 their introduction ixito the Confederacy from any other Ter- 
 ritory or State except the slaveholding States and Territo- 
 ries of the United States, and gave the Congress the power 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 21 
 
 to prohibit that also. True, it recognized slavery, as did 
 the Constitution of the United States, and afforded like 
 guarantees. 
 
 No, the South had no hatred for the Constitution, and no 
 hatred for the Union. It was her Constitution and her Un- 
 ion, in common with all the other States created by the wis- 
 dom and courage of all their sons. The ashes of her chil- 
 dren consecrated the battlefield.s of the Revolution. They 
 had led suffering raid half-clad but victorious armies for 
 American Independence. Washington and Henry Lee, 
 ]\Jarion. Sumter, and Pinckney, John Paul Tone- and Georgo 
 Rogers Clark were among her illustrious soldiers in the 
 great struggle for independence. 
 
 Camden, King's ^Mountain, the Cowpens, Guilford Court- 
 house, Eutaw Springs, and Yorktown were all hers. It was 
 our Andrew Jackson, commanding Southern soldiers, largely 
 Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, and Mississippians, who fought 
 the battle of New Orleans, term.inating tlie war of 1815, 
 the war which has been called the second war of Independ- 
 ence, the efifect of which was "to vindicate our equality and 
 independence among the nationalities of the world. It gave 
 us a position of dignity, importance, and power which has 
 never been diminished. It was a wholesome agenc\ in pro- 
 moting national unity, in developing national patriotism 
 and courage, military and naval skill and ability, in quieting 
 for many years sectional discord, and demonstrating our 
 unaided competency to defend our soil and coasts, and to 
 cope successfully with the best-disciplined army and the most 
 formidable navy 01 the old world." 
 
 In this centennial year of the celebration of the acquisi- 
 tion of Louisiana Territory. I can hardly resist the tempta- 
 tion to suggest what might have been the destinies of the 
 Great Republic if the prevision of Thomas Jefferson, a 
 Southern statesman, had not comprehended the tremendous 
 importance to the commercial development of the United 
 States and the preservation of the Union that the "Father of 
 Waters'" should forever rem.ain under their control. But this 
 digression, however inviting, cannot be indulged. 
 
 The names and battlefields I have mentioned cannot be 
 
22 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 separated from the Union any more than the light from the 
 sun. The history of the South, with all its tender memories 
 and glorious triumphs in war and in peace, were bound up 
 in the history of the colonies, the Confederation, and finally 
 in the Union. 
 
 Why was it not dear to her people? Why should she not 
 desire to preserve it? Why should five millions of people, 
 as a single man, rise to leave their father's house, but for 
 some overshadowing cause and impending danger. In all 
 history did ever like occur? 
 
 And when the North determined upon coercion, did ever 
 any people stand together as did the people of the South? 
 With her ports blockaded, cut oft" from the outer world, with 
 no army or navy, destitute of arms and ammunition, almost 
 without manufacturing industries of any kind, the South for 
 four years conducted, single-handed and alone, against the 
 trained army and navy of the Union, backed by the extensive 
 industries of the North with its enormous population and 
 wealth, with its immense shipping and commerce, and with its 
 legions of mercenaries from other lands, the most stupen- 
 dous war of modern times. Do these old veterans themselves 
 realize the achievements of the armies of the Confederacy? 
 One in whose accuracy I have implicit faith states that 
 more than half as many men were enrolled in the Union 
 arm.y as the entire white population of the Southern States 
 proper, including all the women and children. The records 
 show that more than two million, eight hundred and fifty 
 thousand troops were furnished the Union army by the 
 States ; and while, for the lack of official data, I cannot state, 
 to a man, the enlistment in the Southern army from first to 
 last, the estimate has the sanction of high authority, deemed 
 reliable, that the Confederate forces available for action dur- 
 ing the war did not exceed six hundred thousand soldiers, 
 of whom there were not more than two hundred thousand 
 arms-bearing men at any one time, and when the war closed, 
 half that number covered the whole efifective force, of all 
 arms, in all quarters of the Confederacy. 
 
 Besides the disparity in the land forces, there was the Fed- 
 eral navy, the gunboats and the ironclads, without which 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 23 
 
 many believe Grant's army would have been lost at Shiloh 
 and McClellan's on the Peninsula. 
 
 When the Union army dissolved, four hundred thousand 
 more men were borne on its roll than the estimated enlist- 
 ments of the Southern army, from the spring of 1861, to the 
 spring of 1865, and during that time there had been two 
 hundred and seventy thousand Federal prisoners captured. 
 
 Three hundred thousand Federal soldiers sleep in eighty- 
 three beautiful Federal cemeteries, rightly cared for by the 
 government, to tell to posterity the awful story of that 
 mighty fratricidal conflict. 
 
 How shall we account for these things? Has all history 
 afforded a parallel? What is it that made the South a unit 
 and molded its armies for terrible battle? Let the unpartisan 
 and truth-seeking historian of the future answer; but what- 
 ever his answer may be, if he could challenge the respect of 
 mankind, let him not say the cause, the sentiment, the con- 
 viction, or whatever it was that inspired them to brave and 
 noble deeds did not have the abiding faith and solemn sanc- 
 tion of her armies in the field or her people at their homes. 
 Until the ragged and half-starved remnants of Lee's and 
 Johnston's armies laid down their arms and accepted the 
 cold, stern award of defeat ; until the ever-increasing and 
 overpowering numbers of Grant's and Sherman's armies 
 made battle no longer possible, unfaltering they stood to- 
 gether without a murmur, still hoping against hope for the 
 triumph of their cause; and when the end came, and dis- 
 aster and ruin met the eye on all sides, and when at every 
 fireside was a vacant chair; when blackened chimneys identi- 
 fied spots where happy homes had stood; when poverty and 
 want stalked abroad; when aliens came to rule that they 
 might plunder; when ignorance and audacity flaunted them- 
 selves in high places, and corruption had its ready and rich 
 rewards — still they were true ; true to themselves, true to 
 their comrades and the memory of their martyred dead, 
 true to their old leaders, true to their great captain, and true 
 to their States and to their beloved South. Their armies 
 had gone down in defeat, their cause had failed, their fortunes 
 had been swept away, disappointment and sorrows and 
 
24 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 Strange conditions hovered on all sides and darkened all 
 the ways; but there was no treacherous and cowardly turn- 
 ing, to fix upon their civil or military leaders the responsi- 
 bility for the origin or results of the war. They had staked 
 everything for a principle in vain. Courageous and true, 
 they accepted their fate, and turned again to build up their 
 wasted fortunes and prostrated commonwealths. 
 
 To me the sweetest and noblest chapter in the book of our 
 misfortunes and sorrows was the treatment which the South 
 accorded the fallen chief of the Confederacy. His was a 
 pure, a great, and an incorruptible career. He had served 
 the Union with great distinction in high stations, in war 
 and in peace. No ambitious longings for place or power 
 now remained. All hope for his preferment had gone out 
 in the darkness of defeat. Imprisoned and in irons, he suf- 
 fered for them all. Released without trial, no plea for par- 
 don, disfranchised, broken in health, and tottering with care 
 and age, he returned to his people, to be welcomed as no 
 other man, and in the calm dignity of a private citizen, in his 
 quiet home, he remained their idol, their counselor, and 
 their friend, devoting the last days of his noble life to the 
 preparation of a defense and justification of that people for 
 whom he had been made a vicarious sacrifice. He had never 
 lost their faith, their confidence, their admiration, or their love. 
 There is something strong and deserving of all honor in a 
 people like this. 
 
 We are assembled here for no ignoble ends. We are here 
 to revive no issues settled by that unhappy conflict. We are 
 not here to defame others, or pervert or warp the truth. 
 We are not here to exaggerate or magnify the glory or 
 virtues of one section of our common country at the ex- 
 pense of another; nor are we here to desecrate this occasion 
 by the gratification of personal ambition, or the acquirement 
 of social distinction or political preferment. We are here 
 that mankind may not forget, nor falsehood nor calumny 
 cloud or tarnish the calm judgment of posterity, as to the 
 sincerity of the motives and the honorable conduct of the 
 Confederate soldiers. We affirm our desire that our chil- 
 dren may understand these things; that they may the more 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 25 
 
 reverence their ancestry; that they may know of their suf- 
 ferings and sacrifices and be able to defend their good 
 names, and, proud of their achievements, emulate, in the 
 great struggles of the future, if such await our country, the 
 fidelity, patriotism, love of home and country attested by 
 the veterans of 1861 on a hundred bloody battlefields. 
 
 Who would have them forget the Lees, the Johnstons, 
 the Jacksons, and the Hills? Who would have them forget 
 Bragg, Beauregard, Hardee, Price, Polk, and Hood? Who 
 would have them forget that great wizard of the saddle, 
 Bedford Forrest, and our own little Joe Wheeler, Pat Cle- 
 burne, the lamented Walthall, and innumerable others? Who 
 would have us forget the grand old man yet with us, and 
 others still spared; and the hosts who made for them names 
 that can never perish from the earth as long as genius and 
 courage and patriotism challenge the admiration of man- 
 kind? 
 
 Who would have them ignorant of the glorious charge of 
 Pickett and others at Gettysburg? Who would have them 
 forget the death struggle at Franklin, Tenn., where the Con- 
 federates won a glorious victory, but at a cost of eleven gen- 
 eral officers killed and wounded and six thousand men — 
 nearly one-fifth of the army — in five hours? Where Gist and 
 Adams and Strahl and Cranberry and the intrepid Pat Cle- 
 burne fell — fell in the very forefront of battle, and around 
 them in great numbers were strewn their gallant dead? Who 
 would have them forget Chickamauga, where friendly dark- 
 ness shielded the army of the Cumberland from destruction? 
 Who would have them forget Jackson in the Valley of Vir- 
 ginia, whose campaigns have challenged the military critics 
 of England and Germany to find a single error? 
 
 D'r. Hunter McGuire, Jackson's corps surgeon, in an ad- 
 dress delivered in Richmond in 1897, made this statement: 
 "Therefore it is with swelling heart and deep thankfulness 
 that I recently heard some of the first soldiers and military 
 students of England declare that within the past two hundred 
 years the English-speaking race had produced but five sol- 
 diers of the first rank — Marlborough, Washington, Welling- 
 ton, Robert Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. I heard them 
 
26 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 declare that Jackson's campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, 
 in which you, and you, and myself in my subordinate place, 
 followed this immortal, was the finest specimen of strategy 
 and tactics of which the world has any record; that in this 
 series of marches and battles there was never a blunder 
 committed by Jackson; that his campaign in the Valley was 
 superior to either of those made by Napoleon in Italy. One 
 British officer, who teaches strategy in a great European 
 college, told me that he used this campaign as a model of 
 strategy and tactics, and dwelt upon it for several months 
 in his lectures; that it was taught for months in each session 
 in the schools of Germany, and that Von Moltke, the great- 
 est strategist, declared it was without a rival in the world's 
 history. This same British officer told me that he had rid- 
 den on horseback over the battlefields of the Valley, and 
 carefully studied the strategy and tactics there displayed by 
 Jackson ; that he had followed him to Richmond, where he 
 joined with Lee in the campaign against McClellan in 1862; 
 that he had followed him in his detour around Pope, and in 
 his management of his troops at Manassas; that he had 
 studied his environment of Harper's Ferry and its capture, 
 his part in the fight at Sharpsburg and his flank movement 
 around Hooker — and that he had never blundered. Indeed, 
 he added, "Jackson seemed to be mspired." Another British 
 officer told me that "for its numbers the Army of Northern 
 Virginia had more force and power than any army that ever 
 existed." 
 
 It is cruel to discriminate, but this tribute from such a 
 source is too rich to be lost. It should go into history as 
 the priceless heritage of our people. 
 
 I ought not to specify, but will you bear with me for one 
 further incident, pathetic as it is heroic, and glowing with 
 the spirit which animated the sacred dead we strive to honor? 
 
 At Lexington, Va., where the remains of Gens. Lee and 
 Jackson now sleep, is the Virginia Military Institute. It 
 was in successful operation in May, 1864, when Seigel ad- 
 vanced up the Valley. Gen. John C. Breckinridge was sent 
 with an inadequate force to arrest his advance. A corps of 
 cadets, boys seventeen and under, from this school, con- 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 27 
 
 sisting of a battalion of four companies of infantry, and a 
 section of three-inch rifled guns, were ordered to report to 
 him at Staunton. The march was made in two days. Two 
 or three short marches brought him in touch with Breckin- 
 ridge's veterans. Their bright, gaudy uniforms, clean and 
 new, their smooth, girlish faces, trim step, and jaunty airs 
 subjected them to severe raillery and all manner of fun from 
 the old soldiers. Breckinridge did not want to use them if 
 it could be avoided. Having determined to receive the at- 
 tack of Seigel at New Market, the boy corps was ordered, 
 in a beating rain, to report to Gen. Echols. It was not long 
 until the bright, new uniforms, bedraggled with rain and 
 mud, presented the corps in a dilapidated and pitiable state; 
 but they moved on and took position on the extreme left 
 of the reserve line of battle. Wharton's brigade was in ad- 
 vance, and the boy corps, brigaded with Echols, was in the 
 reserve. Hie order to advance soon came. A slight knoll 
 was reached, and the batteries opened; but, not having the 
 range, little damage was done to Wharton's men. But when 
 Echols's men reached it they had the range, and their fire 
 began to tell with fearful accuracy. Let their Colonel tell 
 the rest. He says: 
 
 "Great gaps were made through the ranks; but the cadet, 
 true to his discipline, would close in to the center to fill 
 the interval, and push steadily forward. The alignment of 
 the battalion under this terrible fire, which strewed the 
 ground with killed and wounded for more than a mile on 
 open ground, would have been creditable even on a field 
 day. They moved steadily forward for more than a mile 
 beyond New Market. When within three hundred yards of 
 the enemy's batteries, they opened with canister, case shot 
 and long lines of musketry at the same time. The fire was 
 withering — it seemed impossible that any living creature 
 could escape — and here we sustained our heaviest loss. The 
 commander fell, but a cadet captain took command of the 
 battalion and moved forward until they had gotten into the 
 first line, when all took shelter behind a fence, and then, 
 after a few minutes, with a shout, a fusillade, and a rush, 
 the enemy fled and the day was won." 
 
28 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 They had gone as far as the best troops in the army. 
 There were none to guy them then. They had challenged the 
 love and admiration of the veterans of the Army of North- 
 ern Virginia, and fifty-two of their battalion, of the two hun- 
 dred and fifty composing it, killed and wounded that day, 
 won them a place they can never lose in history. 
 
 I cannot tell you what it was that inspired those beardless 
 boys to deeds of noble bearing and death. Whatever it was 
 ran through the Confederate armies. These were the sons 
 of the old South. Is it to be despised? Where shall 
 brighter or nobler examples of heroism and sacrifice be 
 found? 
 
 And may I not revert to the manner in which the war was 
 conducted by the Confederates? To this I point with justi- 
 fiable pride. It was a splendid race of men that built up 
 the old South. They were the descendants of the Cavaliers. 
 They, like other men, had their faults, but they cherished 
 the glorious memories of a long line of ancestry who de- 
 spised all that was contemptible, little, and mean; they were 
 sticklers for the observance of the highest sense of honor; 
 they built their lofty characters on the observance of the 
 truth; they hated moral and physical cowardice, and their 
 homes were the habitations of virtue, chivalry, and hospi- 
 tality; but they were conservative; they were lovers of home 
 and the devoted friends of civil and religious liberty. They 
 believed in as little government as was consistent with the 
 maintenance of law and order, and that whatever went be- 
 yond this was an infringement upon the liberty of the in- 
 dividual, destructive of that love the citizen owed the State, 
 and tended to destroy the self-reliance and independence of 
 the individual upon whose love, strength, and manhood 
 rested the temple of free constitutional government. What 
 contributions they have made to the betterment of man- 
 kind, and what inspiration they have given the great masses 
 who have builded this wonderful country of ours! 
 
 The great Mississippian, the lawyer, the statesman and 
 the General, as great in peaci as in war, himself having 
 borne a conspicuously brilliant and honorable part in the 
 heroic struggle of which I speak, in an address delivered at 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 29 
 
 the unveiling of a monument to the Confederate dead at 
 Jackson, Miss., said of these men of the old South of whom 
 I speak, that : "From among them came the statesman who 
 wrote the Declaration of Independence; and, strange as it 
 may sound in this day of universal freedom, it is said that all 
 who signed the Declaration, except those from the State 
 of Massachusetts, and perhaps one or two others, were slave- 
 holders. From among them came the Father of His Coun- 
 try, the Father of the Constitution, and the greatest of all 
 its expounders. At the head of the great armies, in the 
 presidential office, in cabinet and court, and in all the na- 
 tion's high councils, everywhere, in peace and in war, great 
 Southern lights illuminate the annals of America, and shed 
 upon our country's name its chief honor and renown. From 
 the foundation of the government, through all the epochs 
 of peace and arms, down to 1861, Southern statesmen and 
 orators, Southern philosophers and judges. Southern pa- 
 triots and soldiers have enacted the brightest chapters of this 
 country's history, and to them we are indebted for the fun- 
 damental sources of its present power." 
 
 The descendants of such men as these conducted the war 
 on the Confederate side. Is it surprising that it was con- 
 ducted on the highest plane of modern warfare? In no 
 single instance is it recorded, even in the partisan histories 
 already written, that ruin and desolation followed in the 
 footsteps of its armies; nor that their marches were known 
 by "pillars of fire by night and clouds of smoke by day," 
 nor that the birds of the air could not follow them without 
 carrying their rations. Sherman's march to the sea, as told 
 by himself, and Sheridan's raid through the Valley of Vir- 
 ginia, as characterized by his own pen, find no counterpart 
 in Lee's march to Gettysburg or Antietam, or in Morgan's 
 raid through Ohio. No Confederate general ever recorded 
 any boast of his cruelty to noncombatants, or felt a pride in 
 making a Warsaw of any part of American soil. To empha- 
 size these statements, I invoke your patience while I read 
 an order issued by a man while in the enemy's country, 
 whom I believe to represent the highest type of genuine 
 and true manhood to be found in all history : 
 
30 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 "Headquarters of Army of Northern Virginia, 
 Chambersburg, Pa., June 27, 1863. 
 
 'The Commanding General has observed with marked 
 satisfaction the conduct of the troops on the march, and 
 confidently anticipates results commensurate with the high 
 spirit they have manifested. No troops could have dis- 
 played greater fortitude or better performed the arduous 
 marches of the past ten days. Their conduct in other re- 
 spects has, with few exceptions, been in keeping with their 
 character as soldiers, and entitled them to approbation and 
 praise. 
 
 "There have, however, been instances of forgetfulness on 
 the part of some, that they have in keeping the yet unsullied 
 reputation of the army, and that the duties t^xacted of us by 
 civilization and Christianity are not less obligatory in the 
 country of the enemy than our own. The Commanding 
 General considers that no greater disgrace could befall the 
 army, and through it the whole people, than the perpetration 
 of the barbarous outrages upon the innocent and defense- 
 less and the wanton destruction of private property that 
 have marked the course of the enemy in our own country. 
 Such proceedings not only disgrace the perpetrators and all 
 connected with them, but are subversive of the discipline 
 and efficiency of the army, and destructive of the ends of 
 our present movements. It must be remembered that we 
 make war only on armed men, and that we cannot take 
 vengeance for the wrongs our people have suffered, without 
 lowering ourselves in the eyes cf all whose abhorrence has 
 been excited by the atrocities of our enemy, and offending 
 against Him to whom vengeance belongeth, without whose 
 favor and support our efforts must all prove in vain. 
 
 "The Commanding General therefore earnestly exhorts 
 the troops to abstain with most scrupulous care from un- 
 necessary or wanton injury to private property, and he en- 
 joins upon all offixcers to arrest and bring to summary pun- 
 ishment all who shall in any way offend against the orders 
 on the subject." 
 
 Who could have written this order except Robert E. Lee? 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 31 
 
 Years after the war had closed, at a time, it is true, when 
 its passions had not subsided, and bitterness in the hearts of 
 people of one section toward their countrymen in the other 
 still lingered, in a spirit of splendid magnanimity, the vic- 
 torious conqueror, the great Captain of the Union army, 
 taught the grand lesson of forgiveness and fraternity in the 
 imperishable words, "Let us have peace." 
 
 But this order of Gen. Lee was penned in the very midst 
 of the furious struggle, when every heart was filled with re- 
 sentment and indignation at the cruel outrages upon inno- 
 cent and defenseless noncon)batants and wanton and mali- 
 cious destruction of private property, even the family por- 
 traits and heirlooms, and household effects essential to the 
 comfort of the unprotected wives and children of the sol- 
 diers in the field. Contrast it with Sherman's march to the 
 sea and Sheridan's raid in the Valley; with the wanton 
 destruction by fire of the captured cities Atlanta, Columbia, 
 Charleston; and finally with that order of that other Vir- 
 ginian, Hunter, by which the torch was applied even to the 
 institutions of learning, and the building and library and 
 apparatus, the accumulations of forty years, of the Virginia 
 Military Institute, and the library and apparatus of Wash- 
 ington College, endowed by the Father of His Country, 
 perished in the angry flames; or contrast it with the con- 
 duct of Butler in New Orleans. 
 
 In peace Grant gloriously triumphed over the passions 
 engendered by war; but Lee, horrified by the heartless 
 atrocities of the invading foe, in the midst of the enemy's 
 country, with every opportunity for revenge, triumphantly 
 rose above all the natural instincts of the human heart for 
 revenge, to inculcate and to practice the teachings of the 
 Saviour of mankind, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." 
 
 Peerless, glorious Robert E. Lee ! Glorious in prosperity — 
 more glorious in adversity ; glorious in victory — more glorious 
 in defeat; resplendent in life — triumphant in death. 
 
 What a monument is this to the character of the Southern 
 army! 
 
 One who followed Bragg through Kentucky could not 
 have known by observation that an army had passed along 
 
32 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 the highway unless he had seen where it had camped at 
 night, and not then because any fence had lost a rail or any 
 orchard its fruit. 
 
 Is there not something in the history of a people like that 
 worth preserving? May no lessons here be drawn for the 
 elevation of mankind ; no memories worthy of the children 
 of the South? We must not forget that a large number of 
 the survivors of that conflict have taken up their abode in 
 the Silent City, and those who remain are admonished 
 that white heads are the companions of failing memories. 
 Whatever they shall do by way of fixing the true status of 
 the Confederate soldier must be done in the near future, for 
 
 "To the past go more dead faces every year; 
 Everywhere the sad eyes meet us; 
 In the evening's dust they greet us, 
 And to come to them entreat us, 
 Every year." 
 
 May I be permitted to trespass a moment longer? It is of 
 the Confederate soldiers in peace I would speak. I cannot — 
 nor would I if I could — portray the ceaseless chain of wrong 
 and oppression which followed in the wake of the great 
 "Civil War;" and it came upon a defenseless, desolated, and im- 
 poverished land — a land rich in nothing but noble men and 
 women and the precious memories of the glorious race 
 from which they sprung and in the priceless heritage of high 
 achievements. 
 
 If those who fell in battle could have spoken from their 
 graves, they would scarcely have envied the fate of the sur- 
 vivors. 
 
 Sir, if anything exceeds in constancy, in patience, in cour- 
 age and fortitude, the Confederate soldier, who from 1863 
 to 1865, half-clad, hungry, and almost without hope of suc- 
 cess, followed with weary but steady footsteps the tattered 
 battle flags of the South until the star of the Confederacy went 
 out, it was the same soldier who, for the decade that followed 
 the war, in poverty and in want, disfranchised and despised, 
 overrun by aliens and strangers, steadily and with a sublime 
 constancy and devotion resisted wrong and oppression, turned 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 33 
 
 his back upon place and power, while ignorance and dishonesty 
 held high carnival, until, by the very logic of events, reason 
 supplanted bitterness and passion, ignorance and vice gave 
 way to intelligence and personal worth, and his long-deferred 
 redemption came. 
 
 Did any other people ever face and overcome adversity as 
 did the Southern people? The same spirit which gave her 
 armies unity, power, and endurance followed the survivors 
 back to the civil life to point the way to a new birth such 
 as no other country has ever experienced. The South gave 
 to her armies all of her male population, including beardless 
 boys and gray-haired men, and they went from every walk, 
 profession, and calling and station in life. Neither the bench, 
 the pulpit, nor the institutions of learning were spared. All 
 answered with alacrity and determination the call to arms. 
 When it closed there were none upon whom to rely but the 
 ex-Confederate soldier. He it was who took up the new 
 problems which the changed conditions of his desolate land 
 presented. Standing by the graves of his comrades, inspired 
 by their noble deeds, chastened and disciplined by the hor- 
 rors, self-denials, and sufferings of w^ar, encouraged by the 
 high achievements of his revolutionary sires, and loving to 
 veneration the traditions of his ancestry, interwoven as they 
 were with the history of his beloved South, undismayed but 
 hampered by the prejudices and passions which war had left 
 behind, he began the work of rebuilding her shattered for- 
 tunes and rehabilitating her dismantled commonwealths. 
 But as the South had fought for the principle of local self- 
 government and failed, so in the disjointed logic of the times 
 she was to be denied its application in the reestablishment of 
 her State governments. The South, yet unadjusted to its 
 changed conditions, struggling under its burdens of misfor- 
 tune and impending dangers, misjudged, misunderstood, and 
 mistrusted, may have blundered ni many things; and the great 
 North, forgetting or ignoring the great qualities — the fidel- 
 ity and honor, the genius for constructive statesmanship 
 and good government which her fallen foe had always ex- 
 hibited in war and in peace — gave rein to unrestricted pas- 
 
34 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 sions and prejudices, alike harmful to itself and ruinous to 
 the South. 
 
 It sent the carpetbagger, who, aided by those who had 
 never exercised the simple5,t rights of citizenship, were ex- 
 pected to set up and administer such governments as were 
 fit for a people who, for nearly three-quarters of a century, 
 had, in the main, guided and directed the splendid progress 
 and development of the great republic. I would not dwell, 
 if time permitted, upon the riotous conditions into which a 
 helpless and defenseless people were plunged by this char- 
 acterless horde of insatiable cormorants who assembled at 
 our State capitals, to blaspheme the very name of civil gov- 
 ernment, and plot schemes to oppress a fallen foe, that they 
 might prolong their opportunities for peculation. This is 
 not the time nor place, but it must be left to the future his- 
 torian, in the interest of truth raid as a lesson to posterity, 
 and as a warning to us all that there is no freedom where 
 one man is permitted to govern others against their wills, to 
 drag away the sheet that covers the rotten corpse of re- 
 construction. It fell, as in the nature of things it could not 
 endure. Time gradually assauged the passions of the war; 
 commerce and business struggled under its withering in- 
 fluences and demanded better things; and the conscience of 
 the great victorious North was stricken at the cruelties and 
 follies and ruin it wrought; but a decade had passed, a 
 weary, withering, blighting decade of misrule on the one 
 hand, and patient endurance and long-deferred hope on the 
 ot-her. Again the ex-Confederate took up the burden of 
 civil government. I think sometimes we forget the strong 
 characters of those who. Moseslike, led us out of the wilder- 
 ness of our woes. Few of them are now left, and their faces 
 recede with the fljang years. 
 
 They vv^ere ex-Confederates, true and tried. Some yet 
 live, and to call names would be invidious; but we owe them 
 a double debt of gratitude, and ro their memories reverence 
 and love. 
 
 With the South's overwhelming problem still unsolved, 
 she has nevertheless, under the auspices of her own people, 
 fallen upon safe and peaceful, if not happy and prosperous, 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 35 
 
 times. Her sons and daughters have resumed their right- 
 ful station, and whatever the future has in store of good for 
 her must rest upon the traits and characteristics of her peo- 
 ple. She will be patient; she will be prudent. To all the 
 knightly and queenly virtues she will hold fast, trusting in 
 God and the future for the noble and good. The South will 
 not despair. 
 
 I read the other day in one of Talmage's sermons these 
 words: "There is a flower in Siberia that blooms only in 
 January, the severest month in that cold climate. It is a 
 star-shaped flower, and covered with glistening specks that 
 look like diamonds. A Russian took some of the seeds of 
 that flower to St. Petersburg and planted them, and they 
 grew, and on the coldest day of January they pushed back 
 the snow and ice and burst into full bloom. They called it 
 the snow flower; and it makes me think of those whom the 
 world tries to freeze out and snow under, but who, in the 
 strength of God, push through and up and out and bloom 
 in the hardest weather of the world'j cold treatment, starred 
 and radiant with a beauty given only to those who find life a 
 struggle and turn it into victory." 
 
 These sturdy, venerable veterans, bearing the scars and 
 wounds of battle in their bitterest days, like the snow flowers 
 of Siberia, pushed their way up and out and through all the 
 ice and snows of the cold winters of adversity, and, thank 
 God ! they stand for all that is strong and conservative and 
 safe in government. Will their posterity do less? 
 
 Providence, as a kind Father, took by the hand our liberty- 
 loving ancestors and guided them here. Generation after 
 generation lived, ruled, and passed away, retaining the purity 
 and freshness of virtuous power. Greed of gain and lust 
 of power, culminating in plutocratic usurpation of all the 
 branches of government, have never found favor or encour- 
 agement here. Our population, Anglo-Saxon still, has 
 never been dominated by foreign elements ignorant and 
 careless of the principles of our government and the prac- 
 tices of our fathers. We still hive our splendid inheritance, 
 except as modified — let us believe for the better — by war. 
 
 I believe, as I live, that if our institutions are to be pre- 
 
36 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 served much, so much, will depend upon this goodly South 
 of ours. Our deepest concern should be for a better and 
 more righteous national character. All the bounteous ele- 
 ments of earth and sky beckon us away from the base fasci- 
 nation of pelf which dishonors and destroys our country. 
 
 Let us invite all her people into paths of law and order, 
 inculcating peace, and keep alive our sense of justice and 
 human freedom, and let all our advancement and growth 
 be characterized by such a recognition of the rights of man 
 as shall make her people feel that the blessings of Provi- 
 dence are theirs under a government of just and equal laws. 
 
 May our beloved Southland build all her temples, not 
 upon the shifting quicksands of selfish expediency, but upon 
 the everlasting principles of right! Let us not forget that, 
 in the great armory of Divine Providence, Justice forges 
 her weapons long before her battles are fought; that in the 
 everlasting courts of heaven every man must suffer the pen- 
 alties of hi 5 disobedience, and all nations the penalty of in- 
 justice and wrong. Whatever may be our burdens or ca- 
 lamities, let us bear them with that courage and fortitude 
 that becomes a just and a great people; and may our children 
 and our children's children be inspired to walk along the very 
 mountain ranges of an enlightened Christian civilization, 
 alwa_ys in the path of duty, and preserve and keep sacred the 
 same great qualities that made their ancestry respected and 
 beloved of mankind! 
 
 A Sketch of Judge Rogers. 
 
 John Henry Rogers, soldier, lawyer. Congressman, and 
 jurist, was born on a plantation near Roxobel, Bertie County, 
 N. C, October 9, 1845, the third child of Absalom and Harriet 
 Rogers, and grandson of William Rogers, a farmer and me- 
 chanic, who lived and reared a family of twelve children in 
 Pitt County, N. C. His father was a wealthy planter before 
 the war, but, being deprived of his slaves and everything but 
 his lands, was reduced to poverty by that disaster. In 1852 the 
 family, consisting of his parents, brothers, and two sisters, re- 
 moved to a cotton plantation in Madison County, Miss. He 
 attended schools near his home until 1861, and, in addition to 
 
THE SOUTH' VINDICATED. 
 
 37 
 
 the ordinary branches and a Httle Latin and Greek, he acquired 
 some proficiency in mih'tary drill. 
 
 This accomplishment he made useful at the outbreak of the 
 war, when he was chosen drillmaster of those of his school- 
 mates who were over fifteen years of age ; and in the following 
 fall he acted as instructor of a company of home guards, al- 
 though most of its members were between forty and sixty years 
 of age. In March, 1862, he was mustered into the Ninth Reg- 
 iment, Mississippi Infantry, at Canton, Miss., as a private. 
 In the battle of Munfordville (Green River), Ky., he was 
 wounded while charging the enemy's breastworks. He was 
 subsequently in the battles of Murfreesboro (Stone River), 
 Tenn., Chickamauga, Ga., Mission Ridge, near Chattanooga, 
 Tenn., and Resaca, Ga. He was in the engagements before 
 Atlanta, July 26 and 28, 1864, and was wounded at Jonesboro, 
 Ga., in September, 1864. He fought at Franklin, Tenn., No- 
 vember 30, 1864, and at Nashville, Tenn., December 15, 1864. 
 In April, [865, although but nineteen years of age, he was pro- 
 moted by special order of Gen. Johnston to the rank of first 
 lieutenant, and he commanded Company F of the Ninth Mis- 
 sissippi Regiment until the capitulation of Johnston's army. 
 
 Returning home by foot, about one thousand miles, he be- 
 gan reviewing his studies, and entered Center College, Dan- 
 ville, in September, 1865, and the University of Mississippi in 
 1867, where he was graduated in 1868. He was admitted to 
 the bar at Canton, Miss. After teaching a short time, he be- 
 gan his legal practice at Fort Smith, Ark., in February, 
 1869, and shortly after his arrival at that place entered the 
 office of Judge William Walker. From 1871 to 1874 he was 
 in partnership with that eminent lawyer; for the following 
 three years he practiced alone, and then for five years served 
 as first circuit judge of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit. This 
 office he resigned, on account of impaired health, in May, 
 1882, and in the following November was elected a member 
 of Congress, where he served in the forty-eighth, forty-ninth, 
 fiftieth, and fifty-first Congresses. Throughout his public ca- 
 reer he made few set speeches, but worked laboriously on 
 committees, and took an active part in the daily proceedings. 
 During the last six years he was a member of the Judiciary 
 
MISS 'BESSIE ROGERS. 
 
 FORT SMITH. ARK. 
 
 Daughter of Judge Rogers, and who was Herald for Arkansas Division 
 at New Orleans Reunion. 
 
THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 39 
 
 Committee, and especially devoted his energies to securing 
 legislation amending the criminal laws of the United States, 
 and reorganizing the Federal judiciary system. He was suc- 
 cessful in securing the writ of error to persons convicted of 
 felony, and witnessed the creation of the United States Cir- 
 cuit Court of Appeals. largely the outcome of his own per- 
 sistent efforts to have them established as a remedy for the 
 congested condition of the business of the Supreme Court. 
 The bill passed was, however, only a modification of his own 
 plan of abolishing the Circuit Courts, and making the District 
 Courts the great repository of original jurisdiction, civil and 
 criminal, while the Circuit Courts of Appeal should be com- 
 posed of the circuit judges then in office and two others to 
 be appointed. Thus a stable court of three judges would be 
 secured, and the supreme judges relieved of all Circuit Court 
 duty. The Supreme Court of the United States would be a 
 great constitutional court, but would retain limited super- 
 visory control, as before, over the United States Circuit Court 
 of Appeals, to the end that harmony of decision on questions 
 of general law might be secured. Such an arrangement Judge 
 Rogers still hopes to see established, and is encouraged by the 
 fact that it has already been partially adopted in the Eighth 
 Circuit, where four circuit judges now constitute the court. 
 In the fifty-first Congress Judge Rogers came prominently be- 
 fore the public as the opponent of the Speaker, his speeches 
 assailing what he believed to be the arbitrary and oppressive 
 conduct on the part of that official being published by the 
 press throughout the country. Many of these speeches, in their 
 biting satire and argument, were considered masterpieces of 
 their kind. In the interest of his constituents he secured, while 
 in Congress, the passage of a bill donating the abandoned 
 United States military reservation adjoining the city of Fort 
 Smith to that city in trust for the public schools, which have 
 since realized a munificent trust fund from this source. He 
 also secured the construction of a handsome public building 
 for use as a post office and by the United States courts, and of 
 a commodious prison, while through his efforts a United 
 States Circuit Court was established at Fort Smith in place 
 of a United States District Court formerly held there, which 
 
40 
 
 THE SOUTH VINDICATED. 
 
 had Circuit Court powers, and exercised jurisdiction over a 
 part of the State of Arkansas, and criminal jurisdiction over 
 all the Indian Territory. Retiring from public life, after the 
 fifty-first Congress, Judge Rogers practiced law at Fort Smith, 
 in partnership with James F. Read, until November, 1896, 
 when he was appointed by President Cleveland successor of 
 Hon. I. C. Parker, late United States District Judge for the 
 Western District of Arkansas. He is President of the Board 
 of Education of Fort Smith. In 1895, on the occasion of his 
 delivery of the annual address to the alumni of Center Col- 
 lege at Danville, Ky., that institution conferred upon him the 
 honorary degree of LL.D. 
 
 Judge Rogers was married October 9, 1873, to Mary Gray, 
 only daughter of Dr. Theodore Dunlap and Elizabeth Gray, 
 of Danville, Ky. Four sons and one daughter are living, their 
 first child, Theodora, having died at the age of two years.