President
Taft’s speech at the United Daughters of the Confederacy General Convention in 1912 where he explains the meaning of the Civil War as being white pride nationwide.
Pages 18
– 21, “History of The Arlington Confederate Monument at Arlington, Virginia,” by
Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington
Confederate Monument Association. Copyright United Daughters of the Confederacy
1914. Boldface is added to this speech by the blogger. Spelling as found in the book. The speech given by Taft is an erasure of history.
Also, note Taft's warm feeling about the incoming Woodrow Wilson administration which will institute segregation in Federal employment and Wilson himself will show the pro-Ku Klux Klan movie, "Birth of a Nation," in the White House and praise it as "history written with lightning."
The text follows:
Evening,
November 12, 1912.
Mrs.
Marion Butler, President of the District of Columbia Division of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy, introduced the President of the Board of
Commissioners of the District of Columbia, who heartily welcomed the Daughters to
the city in glowing words.
Mrs.
Butler next introduced the President of the United States, Mr. Taft, saying:
"This
is the first time the Daughters of the Confederacy have held an Annual Convention
out of the South. We have assembled here to lay the corner-stone of a
Confederate monument, to be erected at Arlington, the Federal Cemetery, the
former home of Lee. Permission to build this monument was granted to the
Daughters of the District of Columbia and the Confederate Veterans by Mr. Taft
when Secretary of War. We deem it most fortunate and propitious that we are
assembled in the National Capital for such a purpose and are to be welcomed by
the same distinguished citizen, who is now President of the United States. We trust
that the building of this monument will be the keystone of the arch of a
reunited country.
Ladies,
the President."
The
President replied as follows:
"Ladies
of the United Daughters of the Confederacy:
I
beg to welcome you to Washington. You have captured this city beautiful and
made it more lovely by your presence. As its temporary head, I give you the
freedom of the city, and recognize that in what you have done, you have founded
a shrine and an altar here which will be visited in the future by many a
faithful pilgrim.
If
the occasion which brings you here were the mourning at the bier of a lost
cause, I know that the nice sense of propriety of a fine old social school
would have prevented you from inviting me, as the President of the United States,
to be present. You are not here to mourn or support a cause. You are here to
celebrate, and justly to celebrate, the heroism, the courage and the sacrifice
to the uttermost of your fathers and your brothers and your mothers and your
sisters, and of all your kin, in a cause which they believed in their hearts to
be right, and for which they were willing to lay down their lives. That cause
ceased to be, except in history, now more than half a century ago. It was one
which could elicit from half a nation, and brave and warlike race, a four year struggle
in which lives, property, and everything save honor were willingly parted with
for its sake. So great was the genius for military leadership of many of your
generals, so adaptable was the individual of your race to effective warlike training,
so full of patriotic sacrifice were your people that now when all the
bitterness of the struggle on our part of the North has passed away, we are
able to share with you of the South your just pride in your men and women who carried
on the unexampled contest to an exhaustion that few countries ever suffered.
The calm observer and historian, whatever his origin, may now rejoice in his
heart that the Lord ordained it as it is. But no son of the South and no son of
the North, with any spark in him of pride of race, can fail to rejoice in that
common heritage of courage and glorious sacrifice that we have in the story of
the Civil War and on both sides in the Civil War.
It
has naturally taken a long time for the spirit of hostility that such an
internecine struggle develops completely to die away. Of course it has lasted a
less time with those who were the victors and into whose homes and domestic lives
the horrows of war were not directly thrust. The physical evidences of war were
traceable in the South for decades after they had utterly disappeared in the
North in the few places in which they existed. Then there are conditions in the
South which are a constant reminder of the history of the past. Until within
recent decades, prosperity has not shed her boon of comfort upon the South with
as generous a hand as upon the North. Hence those of us at the North who have been
sometimes impatient at a little flash now and then of the old sectional
antagonism are unreasonable in our failure to appreciate these marked
differences.
For
years after the war, the Republican Party, which had carried the nation through
the war to its successful conclusion, was in control of the administration of
the Government, and it was impossible for the Southerner to escape the feeling
that he was linked in his allegiance to an alien nation and one with whose
destiny he found it difficult to identify himself. Time, however, cures much,
and after awhile there came a Democratic Administration of four years, and then
another one of four years. Southerners were called to Federal offices, they
came to have more and more influence in the halls of Congress and in the Senate,
and the responsibility of the Government brought with it a sense of closer
relationship to it and to all the people for whom the Government was carried
on.
I
speak for my immediate Republican predecessors in office when I say that they
all labored to bring the sections more closely together. I am sure I can say
that, so far as in me has lain, I have left nothing undone to reduce the
sectional feeling and to make the divisions of this country geographical only. But
I am free to admit that circumstances have rendered it more difficult for a
Republican Administration than for a Democratic Administration, to give to our
Southern brothers and sisters the feeling of close relationship and ownership
in the Government of the United States. Therefore, in solving the mystery of
that Providential dispensation which now brings on a Democratic Administration
to succeed this, we must admit the good that will come to the whole country in
a more confirmed sense of partnership in this Government which our brothers and
sisters of the Southland will enjoy in an Administration, in which Southern
opinion will naturally have greater influence, and the South greater
proportionate representation in the Cabinet, in Congress, and in other high
official stations. While I rejoice in the steps that I have been able to take
to heal the wounds of sectionalism and to convey to the Southern people, as far
as I could, my earnest desire to make this country one, I can not deny that my
worthy and distinguished successor has a greater opportunity, and I doubt not
he will use it for the benefit of the nation at large.
It
fell to my official lot, with universal popular approval, to issue the order
which made it possible to erect, in the National
Cemetery
of Arlington, the beautiful monument to the heroic dead of the South that you
founded today. The event in itself speaks volumes as to the oblivion of
sectionalism. It gives me not only great pleasure and great honor, but it gives
me the greatest satisfaction as a lover of my country, to be present, as
President of the United States, and pronounce upon this occasion the
benediction of all true Americans."
The
President was given an ovation, the convention rising in appreciation of his
greeting.
Posts
