RSSWestview Cemetery, Atlanta, GA
Ted Daywalt
April 26, 2008
We are gathered here today for the purpose of commemorating what occurred in the past. It is proper and patriotic with ceremonies like these to offer a grateful homage and affectionate tribute annually, to the memories of those who dared all, periled all, and lost all for the land of their birth. Our gathering today marks the journey of advancing time and the resulting cause of a reunion of hearts engendering common sympathies and perpetuate the deeds of many a noble soldier on both sides of our country’s Civil War. By this custom we commemorate the dead, thereby enshrining their memories in the hearts of succeeding generations, and causing their heroic deeds to be emulated and imitated by those who come after them.
As I was preparing for this speech today it dawned on me that most Americans do not know that Georgia, along with Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia celebrate Confederate Memorial Day. Such is the invasion of political correctness in our society and educational institutions in its attempt to crush the teaching of history.
History has delineated the names and families of countless statesmen, warriors and patriots whose renowned deeds on the battlefield will endure until time is no more. And we are a people who are proud of our lineage, but prouder still of those in whose veins course the nearest and dearest of our own blood, and who in our opinion died in a just cause. We here today testify to the world our admiration and adoration for those who fell while struggling for their rights.
Now is not the time or occasion to trace the origin or cause of the war or the spirit of its sources as to the great actors in the scenes of that war.
As one who spent thirty years in the Navy, I know personally that the duty of the patriot soldier is to defend rights guaranteed to the people under the laws of the land and to yield obedience to that power of government which shields and protects their people from wrong and oppression.
Protection and allegiance are reciprocal. When one ceases the other expires. Not only is it the duty of the patriot soldier to defend, but to save liberty, to save rights, to save amidst perils that appall the stoutest of hearts. To save liberty takes great courage, which many in our government today do not have.
Such is the patriot soldier, whose grand deeds and heroic achievements rise resplendent above the tears and groans of mortal agony and mortal bereavement. The fame of the Southern Patriots and volunteer soldiers of the South, they who severed the holiest and most sacred ties of their family members and their happy homes and forsook a position of ease and comfort to offer up their lives in the maintenance of and in defense of a grand and immortal principle, the right of self-government.
And while today we decorate the graves of our honored dead throughout this country with beautiful garlands and while the ground beneath which they are taking their last and final rest will glisten with gorgeous floral wreaths, and while many a tear may moisten their sacred tombs, and fond memory will delight to dwell on their valor, their heroism, and their patriotism, let us, the living be not unmindful of the duties that we gave that land for which they so bravely fought and so nobly died.
In a Confederate cemetery in Virginia is the inscription: NOT FOR FAME OR REWARD, NOT FOR PLACE OR FOR RANK, NOT LURED BY AMBITION OR GOADED BY NECESSITY, BUT IN SIMPLE OBEDIENCE TO DUTY AS THEY UNDERSTOOD IT, THESE MEN SUFFERED ALL, SACRIFICED ALL, DARED ALL, AND DIED.
The words were written by a Confederate veteran who had later become a minister, and knew that this simple sentence spoke for all soldiers in all wars, men who must always trust their lives to the judgment of their leaders, and whose bond thus goes to individuals rather than to stark ideology, and who, at the end of the day that in their lives, desire more than anything to sleep with the satisfaction that when all the rhetoric was stripped away, they had fulfilled their duty as they understood it; to their community; to their nation; to their individual consciences; to their family and to their children who in the end must not only judge their acts, but be judged as their successors.
And so I am here with you today to remember. And to honor an army that rose like a sudden wind out of the many towns that comprised the Confederacy and created an army that drew 750,000 soldiers from a population base of only nine million, less than the current population of Georgia today.
The Confederates fought with squirrel rifles and cold steel against a much larger and more modern force. They saw 60 percent of their soldiers become casualties, some 256,000 of them dead. They gave every ounce of courage and loyalty to a leadership they trusted and respected, and then laid down their arms in an instant when that leadership decided that enough was enough.
I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southerners viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. Love of the Union was definitely stronger in the South than in the North before the war, just as overt patriotism is today. But it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered.
Four years and six hundred thousand dead men later the twin issues of sovereignty and slavery were resolved. Now, nearly 150 years after the war, the bitterness has vented itself to the point that we can honestly say the emotional scars have healed. We are a stronger, more diverse, and genuinely free nation.
But we are also a different people. As we gather here to commemorate the most turbulent crisis our country has ever undergone, it’s interesting to note that a majority of those now in this country are descended from immigrants who arrived after the war was fought.
There are at least two lessons for us to take away from this day of remembrance.
The first is one our leaders should carry next to their hearts, and contemplate every time they face a crisis, however small, which puts our military men and women in harms way. Such decisions should echo in their consciences, from the power of over a million graves. It is simply this: You hold our military members’ lives in sacred trust. When a citizen has sworn to obey you, and follow your judgment, and walk onto a battlefield to defend the interests you define as worthy of their blood, do not abuse that awesome power through careless policy, unclear objectives, or inflexible leadership. And take care of those soldiers irrespective of the costs, for without those soldiers, your policy would not be upheld and America would not have its freedoms!
The second lesson regards those who have taken such an oath, and who have honored the judgment of their leaders, often at great personal cost. Intellectual analyses of national policy are subject to constant re-evaluation by historians as the decades roll by.
But duty is a constant, frozen in the context of the moment it was performed. Duty is action, taken after listening to one’s leaders, and weighing risk and fear against the powerful draw of obligation to family, community, nation, and the unknown future.
The celebration of this day has become general and has assumed a special and beautiful character. It might have been feared that angry passions engendered by civil strife would predominate, but in the character of the American value system and psychic, just the opposite is true. Kindness and charity, tender memories of the sacrifices of patriotism on both sides, the duty of caring for the living and of avoiding all that might lead again to the sad necessity of war.
We do not meet on these Memorial Days to weep for the dead. Time has healed the scars of war, and we can calmly contemplate the great lesson of patriotic devotion, and rejoice today that the nation to which we belong produces men and women noble enough to die for that which they value so much, that being freedom.
We are here today to foster patriotism, in view of the most tremendous sacrifice ever willingly made by a people on the altar of freedom. That the sacrifices of the Civil War deserve this rank will appear from the fact that they were made primarily by volunteers.
The two things of inestimable value which our government furnishes and which we ought to preserve even with life itself, are liberty and law, or rather liberty in the law. The old world gave us law, without which the freedoms of our American society cannot exist. The American people govern themselves, not in one form of government alone but in affairs national, State, county, down to the smallest school district and a thousand voluntary societies. In each the methods by which the people’s will may be made supreme in designated affairs are clearly defined, so that the whole of united human effort is brought under the dominion of law, even such things as general education, and yet each affair is in the hands of the people directly concerned. For thousands of years the principles of our complex and wonderful system of coordinated government have been growing up until they have reached their fullest perfection on our American soil. Men and women are willing to die that this liberty under law may not perish from the world.
The Confederate women first began decorating the graves of their dead with flowers, and did not pass by the Union graves, but decorated their graves as well. This touched the heart of the nation as nothing else could have done, and enmity melted away, and the observance of Memorial Day has become universal.
Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day because it was a time set aside to honor the American Civil War dead by decorating their graves. It was first widely observed on May 30, 1868, to commemorate the sacrifices of Civil War soldiers, by proclamation of General John Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former sailors and soldiers.
But it must be remembered that war, when you are at it, is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you can see that its message was divine. I would like to hope it will be a long time before we are called again to sit at the feet of war, but such will never be the case. The history of the world has shown that war is continuous. So long as there are those who want to take away our liberties in the United States, so long as there are those that demand the world believe in only one religion, so long as there are those whose religion enslaves others, there will be war.
To protect ourselves America must resist the temptation to become apathetic and resign itself to political correctness. It is imperative that we look back on our history and learn from the mistakes made in the past. Our students in our schools must know what happened before so our beloved country does not commit the same mistakes in our future.
But political correctness fights letting teachers show what happened in the past. Politically correct educators do not want Civil War history taught for fear we might offend. And for the same reason, the history of First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and even the Gulf War are given scant, if any, attention in our high schools today. Our schools should teach these wars not to offend, but to educate!
In the comfort of a country we call the United States we need to remember what happened in the past so that we may realize that our comfortable routine is not guaranteed except by a strong military. Whenever our country has had peace, it was merely a little space of calm in the midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world. We must always be ready for danger. We must always maintain a strong defense and military.
Out of heroism grows faith in the worth of heroism. As George Orwell noted: We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Military people understand all that I have brought to you today. For the military of the United States today is the only work force in America whose contract includes a mandatory clause that says they may have to give their life to maintain the freedoms we enjoy.
So I would like to end with part of a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. It carries the sentiment of a military person regarding the past, as well as those in the military of today.
It goes like this:
And when the wind in the tree-tops roared,
The soldier asked from the deep dark grave:
“Did the banner flutter then?”
“Not so, my hero,” the wind replied.
“The fight is done, but the banner won,
Thy comrades of old have borne it hence,
Have borne it in triumph hence.”
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
“I am content.”
Then he heareth the lovers laughing pass,
and the soldier asks once more:
“Are these not the voices of them that love,
That love–and remember me?”
“Not so, my hero,” the lovers say,
“We are those that remember not;
For the spring has come and the earth has smiled,
And the dead must be forgot.”
Then the soldier spake from the deep dark grave:
“I am content.”
You see, that soldier did his duty.
Thank you for your time today. Let us always continue to have these celebrations and understand what they mean not only for us today, but for the future generations of our great country.