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

"No hired Hessians and no negroes," Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Oct. 19-22, 1909.

The neo-Confederates were Anglo-Saxonists, a particular branch of white supremacists which believed that Anglo-Saxons and perhaps other peoples of Northern Europe were the most superior white people, in short that some white people were whiter than others.

As part of this, neo-Confederates liked to emphasize that what they defined as the South was more Anglo-Saxon, hence superior to what they defined as the North which was less Anglo-Saxon and hence inferior.

Hessians were troops that were hired out by rulers of German principalities and were used by the British empire, most notably during the American Revolutionary War. Hence the speaker, Phillip H. Fall, wishes to denigrate immigrant Germans in the Union army during the Civil War as being essentially the same as German mercenaries during the American Revolutionary War.

Also, Phillip H. Fall, a Confederate Veteran, wishes also to brag that the Confederate army was all white and didn't have African Americans soldiers either.

From the "Minutes of the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Held in Houston, Texas, October 19-22, 1909," Mrs. Cornelia Branch Stone, President, Mrs. Andrew L. Dowdell, Secretary. Speech of Colonel Phillip H. Fall, pages 6-8. In the original text the speech wasn't indented but in a smaller font. The poem at the end was indented.

Colonel Phillip H. Fall, Commander of Dick Dowling Camp, United Confederate Veterans, gave the royal welcome of the Soldiers of the Confederacy of Houston.

Ladies of the Southland:

Being notified only a day since, that our comrade was called away on an important matter and could not represent Dick Dowling Camp, the duty devolved upon me to great you, on behalf of our Camp. Such short time leaves me illy prepared to do the occasion justice, but I know our good women will accept the will for the deed. The veterans of Houston welcome you, one and all, and we shall prove your humble and loving servants during your stay with us. Command us whenever necessary. As the years pass by we feel more and more the benefits accruing from hour loving and valiant struggle in our behalf. Had you not thrown down the gauntlet and assumed the offensive for the old soldiers of the Confederacy, their names would have gone down in a partisan Northern history as rebels and traitors; who tried to disrupt what they call the greatest and best government on earth, when in fact, they in arbitrary, puritanical spirit, brought about the disruption, causing a war such as the world has never known, hiring nearly a million Hessians and nearly two hundred thousand Africans, to slaughter their brethren of the South. Nothing but a civil war could have ever satisfied the John Brown stripe of abolitionists, especially after their leader John Brown was hung.

The war was not the worst feature of the sixties. The myriads of carpet-baggers that flocked like buzzards, all eager to filch from the already impoverished and heartbroken whites, as well as from the poor deluded ex-slaves, what little was left, proved to be a carnival of misery, which can never be blotted from the memory of any who experienced the miserable rule of those Northern birds.

But this is all passed, thank God, the ex-Confederate soldiers who survived, see their Southland regenerated, the fairest land on earth, and as independent and glorious as before the sixties; with the grandest women of the world, who appreciate what the old soldiers suffered for their beloved Southland. Women, who after nearly a half century has elapsed, are standing shoulder to should in solid phalanx, fighting the grandest fight of the ages; women who have stepped into the breach and declared in thunder tones, Hold, enough of this perversion of the truth, you have slandered our brave men too long. Let's tell the truth, and in honor and justice, be impartial, and acknowledge that the tine line of gray, for four years, held at bay the combined world, and when they surrendered at Appomattox, General Grant, the noblest Roman of the North, was rejoiced that peace had come, and that the carnival of blood had ceased.

This is a statement of facts, which cannot be controverted. What few of the Southern veterans that yet live, glory in the fact that their noble women are now their protectors, as were they of the women in the long, long, ago. No soldier in the past or present ever received the homage of their women, as do those of Dixie Land. There were no hired Hessians or negroes in the Southern army. All fought for a principle they knew to be right and thousands upon thousands gave up their lives in defense of truth.

God bless the Daughters of the Confederacy, we living with the comforting consciousness that our children will know the truth. We know that the Daughters will demand from those in authority, that they shall not permit the untruthful histories of the North to prevail in Southern systems of education. We know that the truth will eventually prevail, and that is all we desire, and as little as the North should accord. This is the first time and no doubt the last one that the members of the Dick Dowling Camp will ever witness a general convention of our defenders, and we feel honored indeed to be the servitors of such a grand and noble body.

"Were it the last drop in the well,
And I gasped upon the brink,
E'er my fainting spirits fell
"Tis to thee that I would drink."