delivered by Claude L. Chilton, Mobile, Alabama, 1913
"Patriotism is like fire; it is enkindled and burns the fiercer as the breath of the oppressor endeavors to extinguish it. It sheds its gentle and holy light upon the hearthstone in the home of peace when ''The twilight meets the plaintive whip-poor-will;" but when the cold and cruel blast of oppression stirs the smouldering embers, it leaps into a conflagration whose fiery tongues lick the stars of heaven and sear the deathless names of heroes and patriots into the adamant of endless ages!"
Chilton goes on to describe Sen. Morgan's career, harking back to the Reconstruction era.
"This state had nominally been received back into the Union, but under a regime -- unparalleled in the annals of civilisation -- a horde of conscienceless harpies had been loosed on the prostrate form of a helpless and defenceless people -- a people whose great Lee had surrendered under the pledge of real peace -- a horde of conscienceless harpies, I say, to strip the slain of what had been left after the unspeakable horrors of Sherman and his like.
Under this regime, all the horrors of which history will never utter, this State with others had become absolutely bankrupt.
A debt of multiplied millions of dollars had been created -- the principal of which was pocketed (by the most daring yeggmen that ever sandbagged a helpless traveller) by means of the newly franchised and ignorant blacks -- the interest of which was kindly entailed upon the coming generations of the innocent and unborn.
The cash gone, the credit gone, the interest eating like a vulture on the vitals, the Legislature composed of conscienceless whites and ignorant blacks, the State faced utter and irremediable ruin. There was only one thing to do: this flock of harpies had to be swept off the face of the earth and the Capitol, like the Augean Stables, had to be cleansed.
[...]
Call it provincialism and sectionalism if you please, but it is true, nevertheless, that there can be no true patriotism without a hearthstone, no real love of country which can glory in the prosperity of a federal commonwealth whose riches are amassed at the expense of the poverty of one's own race, his section, his State, his family, and his home. It is unthinkable that any man can love the whole country, who, at the same time, acquiesces in the wrongs and condones the injustices, -- the limitations and handicaps which a more prosperous majority of another section may have forged and fastened upon his own people. Where one's section is involved, a patriotism cannot exist which is not "sectional," and he is the greatest lover of his race who is most sensitive to his own honour and most chivalrous in defence of his own hearthstone.
[...]
I cannot appropriately or conscientiously close these remarks without one thought more -- the noble life and character of this great man was moulded at the knee of the saintliest of mothers; and along with the great ideals which she planted in his young heart was the white rose of the utmost reverence for womanhood, and especially the high ideals of Southern womanhood.
I intend no invidious comparisons when I say that I believe that the ideal of American womanhood, and especially the ideal of ante-bellum Southern womanhood, has seldom been equalled -- certainly been surpassed -- in the world. To maintain that high ideal was an ambition out-ruling all else in Morgan's heart. He knew that
"Ill fares the land -- to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay,"
and it was his most cherished ambition to preserve intact the glorious traditions, virtues, and supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon in the South. That supremacy, no matter how great our commercial prosperity, cannot outlast our real worth -- the nobility of our men and the purity of our women. It is written, "The prosperity of fools shall destroy them." It is most difficult, I may say almost impossible, not to be commercialized by Commerce.
The glorious civilization developed in this country -- in New England by the Puritans, -- (and Mary Chilton was among the first)-- among the Cavaliers in Virginia, and the Huguenots in the Carolinas -- had for its substratum the God-fearing heaven-typed home, presided over by a God-fearing heaven-faced woman.
These people and their children stood the privations and hardships of frontier life, the tomahawk of the savage; they have come up out of the fiercest and bloodiest conflicts ever recorded, sans peur et sans reproche, they have withstood the pinchings of poverty and the injustices which have been heaped upon them for fifty years -- their honour all unsullied: -- shall we brave the horrors of war and the rigour of hard bondage to be felled by the velvet touch of Mammon?
God forbid!
The commercialising of our women would usher the black shadow of our National eclipse. Our American eagle has two wings: one, Commerce, and one, Character. To wound either is to fall. The greatest asset of any country is its people, and the chief conservator of all that is worthy is found in its women. May we, in our outlook for a greater future, preserve this, the best of all the past -- the purest of womanhood, and while the black smoke of grim and grimy Commerce pours from the funnels of our trans-Pacific steamers, may the beautiful face of the saintliest of womanhood adorn the prow of every one of them and kiss the spray of every parting wave.''
