NamSouth

[btownsend]

Gen. R. E. Colston
to the Virginia Ladies' Memorial Association

But how shall those be remembered who failed? It is their enemies who write their history, painting it with their own colors, distorting it with their calumnies, their prejudices, and their passions; and it is this one-sided version of the conquerors that the world at large accepts as truth, for in history as in the present, vae victis (woe to the conquered).

They will be told that their fathers were oligarchs, aristocrats, slave-drivers, rebels, traitors, who, to perpetuate the monstrous sin of human slavery, tried to throttle out the life of the nation and to rend asunder the government founded by Washington; that they raised parricidal hands against the sacred ark of the Constitution; that they were the unprovoked aggressors, and struck the first sacrilegious "blow against the Union and the flag of their country.

Constant repetition will give it something of the authority of truth.

"in a few years the relatives of those Southern men who fell in our struggle will be ashamed to be seen standing by the side of their dishonored graves."
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher

It is for you, Southern matrons, to guard your cherished ones against this foul idolatry, and to teach them a nobler and a higher moral. It is for you to bring the youth of our land to these consecrated mounds and to engrave in their candid souls the true story of our wrongs, our motives, and our deeds. Tell them in tender and eloquent words that those who lie here entombed were neither traitors nor rebels, and that those absurd epithets are but the ravings of malignant folly when applied to men who claimed nothing but their right under the Constitution of their fathers-the right of self-government.

Tell them how we exhausted every honorable means to avoid the terrible arbitrament of war, asking only to be let alone, and tendering alliance, friendship,
free navigation, everything reasonable and magnanimous to obtain an amicable settlement. Tell them how, when driven to draw the sword, we fought the mercenaries of all the world until, overpowered by tenfold numbers, we fell; but, like Leonidas and his Spartans of old, fell so heroically that our defeat was more glorious than victory.
(Excerpt)

Mr. Townsend,

"......I scanned and uploaded it from the original Confederate Veterans magazine as compiled by Broadfoot Publishing. I have four such books comprising the years of 1893, 1897, 1898, 1899. At this time, I know not which year the article was from. The exact date would be noted not, but the month and year which the original magazine came out, would be. If it is truly important to you, ask and for you I shall find out.


Sincerely,


Jimmy L. Shirley Jr.

Jon White
Today at 05:15 AM The Southern War Room

The article is from Confederate Veteran march 1897 issue.