THE SOUTHERN SOCIETY, NEW YORK.
[Response of J. M. Dickinson, Secretary of War, before the New York Southern Society, New York, on December 8, 1909, to the toast, "Invasion of the North by the South."]
It is an almost invariable custom at public gatherings of Southerners in the North to protest their loyalty to the United States. We should on all proper occasions as Americans express patriotic sentiments; but I believe that the time has come when there is not only no good ground for, but conclusive reason against, giving special emphasis as Southerners to such declarations. By implication they suggest a doubt where none should exist, and one of such importance as not to be ignored. They do not reflect a true appreciation of the spirit of the day. They are becoming tiresome, as all useless functions do. Having been an offender, I speak without reservation. We do not need them to convince ourselves that the South with practical unanimity will sustain our country in any time of storm and stress, civil or military, with that ardor that Southern people have always, regardless of hazard to property or person, manifested in support of their convictions. If there are any Southern men who feel otherwise, they are too inconsequential to exert any appreciable influence.
If there are any of the North who are not yet convinced of our loyalty by the declarations of the great representative men of the South and by the readiness with which her sons responded to the call to arms when we went to war with Spain, they do not want to believe and would not believe, even though one should come from the dead to affirm it. I rejoice in the thought that such people are a negligible quantity in what makes up the great heart throb and spiritual life of this nation. We may well let the matter rest with the statement of President Taft in a recent speech at Columbus, Miss., in which he said: "In order to understand the Southern people, especially with respect to issues of the war and what grew out of it, in order to understand their present position, one must know that your hearts and emotions are broad enough to entertain entire loyalty to the issues of the past, which you fought so nobly to sustain, and entire loyalty to our present government, for which you would be willing to lay down your lives if occasion required it."
Therefore I trust that I shall cause no disappointment if I do not make the eagle scream in ecstasy by the fervor of my patriotic utterances as a Southerner, and if I seem to
GROUP AT NASHVILLE FAIR GROUNDS
Secretary of War J. M. Dickinson; Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant; Maj. Wm. W. Harris, U.S. Engineer Corps; Col. G. W. Goethels. In Charge of Panama Canal work; Mr. Frank Ewing, of Nashville; S.A.C.
decline upon a lower plane in asking your attention to some thoughts suggested by the invasion of the North by the South. Do not take alarm and suppose that I am going to tight over the campaigns of Lee. I have in mind an invasion entirely peaceable and conquests that are civic. * * *
For a long period after the Civil War the avenues opening to enterprise were far less numerous and commanded narrower vistas than now. Superb courage and tireless energy worthy of great undertakings were largely going to waste without a fruitful field for exploitation. * * * I often heard it asked during that period: "Why do not the Southern people get a move on them and develop their great natural resources?" Their failure to show such enterprise and prompt results was imputed to sloth. It would seem as if the people who furnished the foot cavalry of Stonewall Jackson might at least have been spared that injustice. You might as well ask a man to lift himself over a fence by his own boot straps as to have expected the people of the South at once to inaugurate undertakings requiring capital. If a man has nothing but his land and no credit and must dig his living out of the land, it is folly to reproach him with being non-progressive. The South had nothing but its land and the few horses that General Grant magnanimously permitted the soldiers who owned them to keep. * * *
Hard upon the reestablishment of peace began the invasion of the North by Southerners. Those who voluntarily leave their homes and cast their lot among strangers, where adverse conditions may be expected, are of the pioneer type. These men had no endowments but ability, hope, courage, the discipline of the beneficent school of poverty, and the high ideals of manly bearing and personal honor that were their birth-right. * * * They had been schooled in misfortune, but were untrained in humility. This is well illustrated by the joint debate between two negro politicians, one a Republican and the other—as rare as a black swan—a Democrat. The Republican champion excoriated the Southern Democrats for their aggressions upon the Republican preserves of political domination, and denounced them as arrogant Rebels. The Democratic orator reproached him for his revengeful spirit and said that he might have learned a lesson in forgiveness from the story of the prodigal son who had left his father's house and wasted his substance in riotous living. His father upon his return did not reproach him, but killed in his honor the fatted calf. The other retorted: "Yes, fellow-citizens, but how did that prodigal act? He was ashamed and stood afar off and had to be persuaded; but these Southern fellows walk right in and say: 'Where is that veal?'"
However they went about it, the men of the South have been plenteously supplied in the North with veal and all other good things, and this would have been impossible but for the generous sympathy, help, and confidence extended to them by the people with whom they had cast their fortunes. Being from the South did not operate adversely to but rather in their favor. If any failed, it was not on that account. The tide once set in did not subside when the causes that first gave it impulse ceased to act. In all the larger progressive cities of the North Southern men are a forceful part of the business, professional, and social life, and this is specially true of New York and the bounding commercial centers of the Middle and extreme West. In medicine, surgery, law, art, science, scholarship, literature, the ministry, finance, and industrial enterprises they have achieved an honorable distinction. Their names are not obscure. The reputation of many is international. The achievements of Southern men in
