Confederate Truths: Documents of the Confederate & Neo-Confederate Tradition from 1787 to the Present.

Blue and Gray reconciliaton to support Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the exclusion of Chinese and others

Confederate Veteran

, "Address by Dr. John F. Spence on Memorial Day," Vol. 16 No. 11, November 1908, pages 580-1. The Confederate Veteran was the official publication of the United Confederate Veterans, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Confederated Southern Memorial Association, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

This is an extract from a speech by Dr. John F. Spence. It begins with a lengthy section on the reconciliation of the Blue and Gray which leads into this conclusion as follows:

We were all patriots, Federal and Confederate, North and South; and we settled on the field of battle a constitutional question that could be settled in no other way. Public opin­ion is already moving, and moving rapidly, to the mark of that final verdict. No other nation commands such profound re­spect. Already, like the sun of nature, our nation is a mighty fountain of commerce, of intelligence, of scientific knowledge, and of religious light, supplying and feeding more or less every known people on the face of the earth. The future of this marvelous, this amazing empire possesses greatness and mag­nificence that the mind of man can neither measure nor com­prehend. The trend of the times is with our nation. * * *

The Civil War freed the negro and conferred on him the right of suffrage and turned him loose on the South. No race of people was ever hurried with such swiftness through free­dom into power. In a little more than twelve months from the day he walked down the furrow a slave the negro was a voter, dictated in legislative halls, holding office and trying to make laws. This race problem has been and is now upon the South; the South must face it. She merits the sympathy of all humankind. It is a race issue. The races and tribes of earth are of divine origin. Behind the laws of man and the decrees of war stands the law of God. We in the South intend to respect his command: "That God hath separated, let no man join to­gether."

This is not a sectional issue between the North and the South; it speaks in Ohio and Georgia, in Massachusetts and Tennessee alike. It speaks wherever the Anglo-Saxon touches an alien race. It has recently spoken in universally approved legislation in excluding the Chinaman from our gates not alone for his ignorance and vices, but for the inferiority of his race.

Yes, my countrymen, the Anglo-Saxon blood has dominated, controlled always, everywhere. It fed Alfred when he wrote the charter of English liberty; it gathered about Hampton as he stood beneath the oak; it thundered in Cromwell's veins as he fought his king; it humbled and destroyed Napoleon at Waterloo; it carried the drumbeat of England around the world, and spread on every continent the gospel of liberty and of God.

And I may strongly say that Anglo-Saxon blood established this republic, carved it from the wilderness, conquered it from the Indians, wrested it from England, and last but not least, after a four years' struggle, stilled its own tumult, consecrating this republic forever as the home of the Anglo-Saxon and the theater of his transcending achievements. Never may one foot of it be surrendered to any inferior race while that blood flows in American veins.

My countrymen, I want to say that my political and social horoscope is pregnant with good things. I have traversed along scholastic, political, and social lines nearly every por­tion of our Southland in the last forty years, I have mingled and conferred with both races, and I am free to announce to you to-day I have no fear of a race conflict.

Already nearly one-half a century has passed since the negro received his freedom and suffrage, and at no time since 1865 has the South been more hopeful and quiet and has the colored race been better satisfied. The storm centers, North and South, are dissolving. My vision is already being filled by the presence of a wise, brave statesman, a born leader, who shall move a challenge at the gates of the North to all for­eigners, "Who comes there?" admitting every one who seeks a home or honors our institutions and whose habits and blood will run with native current, but excluding all who seek to plant anarchy or establish alien men or measures on our soil, and will demand that the standard of our citizenship in the South be lifted and the right of acquiring suffrage be abridged. When that day comes and that statesman takes his place, the position of the South will be fully understood and everywhere approved.