In nothing that has been said has the South been exalted at the expense of other countries, or of other parts of our own country. Purposely such comparisons have been avoided. We are not interested to show that our fathers had fewer faults or finer virtues than others, our purpose has been to give a true picture of the real life of the old South, whose sacred altar shined with hallowed fire. But some may imagine that strong affection has blinded my mind. Listen, then, to the estimate of one who said many severe things of the Southern people, yet through the mellowing influence of approaching old age, and after closer contact with some of her sons, who saw with a clearer and less warping light. Hear the words of the late Senator Hoar: "The people of the South has some qualities which I cannot claim in an equal degree for the people among whom I myself dwell. They have an aptness for command which makes the Southern gentleman, wherever he goes, not a peer only, but a prince. They have a love for home; they have, the best of them and the most of them, inherited from the great race from which they came the sense of duty and the instinct of honor, as no other people on the face of the earth. They have above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition, and without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired, and without getting diverted, can pursue a great object, in and out, year after year, and generation after generation."
This was the South and Lee was a Southerner. He was not a grape on the thorn, nor a fig on the thistle. The best and oldest elements of the South mixed in him, and all the elements were Southern elements.
If asked to state what was the best that the South could produce, what was the normal, the legitimate result of her civilization, her spirit, her ideals; to state this not as a theory but as a fact, not as a hope but as an attainment, our answer is Robert E. Lee. We do not hide the fact, we proclaim it, that in him we have our ripest and our purest fruit, the South at its best, but still the South. He was the product of her civilization and the embodiment of her ideals.
