By Charles M. Blackford
(Edited by H. V. Traywick, Jr., from the presentation given by Charles M. Blackford to the Garland–Rodes Camp, United Confederate Veterans, Lynchburg, Virginia, July 18, 1901, in Charles M. Blackford, Campaign and Battle of Lynchburg, Virginia, annotated and illustrated by Peter W. Houck [Lynchburg: Warwick House Publishing, 1994] pgs. 79-83.)
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
The fires of patriotism do not burn most fiercely where the land is most productive, or where wealth most accumulates. Nations which have owned broad savannahs upon which nature has been most lavish have often been driven from their country with little show of manly courage and without that zealous patriotism which creates heroes, while the peasant of Switzerland and the cottager of the Highlands, neither of whom can afford greater luxuries than oatmeal and goat’s milk, have held their values and their fastnesses for centuries against all odds. To them each dell has its story of valiant deeds of their forefathers and each mountain is crowned by traditions which tell of the great achievements of their race. For dells and mountains thus sanctified by the glories of the past, the peasant and the lord of the manor alike are willing to die. It was their love for the stories and romance of their race which sustained the nerve of the Swiss Guards in the discharge of their duty to the King when, without a faltering nerve, one by one they sunk under the blows of the infuriated Jacobins of Paris, and well won the grand inscription to their courage on the Lion of Lucerne. A like love was the foundation of the wonderful heroism of the Highlanders at Lucknow and of the Scotch who climbed the Heights of Abraham at Quebec. So it was their love for the historic memories of Virginia which nerved the courage of that dauntless division which, under a fire never before poured on line of battle, reached the brow of the hill at Gettysburg.
By gathering the traditions of the Highlands and thus perpetuating them, Scott has done a great work for Scotland. Others have done the same thing for England. It is for this generation to gather the same wealth for Virginia. Thus will the history of her people, of her valleys, her rivers and her mountains, be preserved and the facts be secured to generations yet to come which, when mellowed by time, will be perpetuated in story, in poetry and in song.
Thus and thus only can we keep Virginia and her people on the elevated plane upon which they have stood for centuries, and thus can we make her, in the future, the land of poetry and romance. It is Wallace and Tell who are the heroes of the poet and the novelist, not the commanders of the great forces with which they contended. In the far future many a novel, many a poem and many a song will tell of Lee, of Jackson, of Stuart and of Mosby – ideal heroes of romance – long after the names of the leaders who fought them will be mere facts in the prosaic history of the power of the greater to overcome the less.
It is not our duty to weep over the past or to bemoan the fate which resulted in the final overthrow of the Confederacy; nor should we do anything to keep alive the bitterness of that strife. On the contrary, it is our duty to bow to the logic of what has happened and to believe in the wisdom of the all-wise Director of the affairs of nations and of peoples; but it is also our duty to see to it that what is good and great be preserved, and that our children and children’s children keep green the traditions which will nerve them to a higher courage and stimulate them to a generous emulation of the deeds of their forefathers.