dents, by which the size of the United States has been doubled—Louisiana, Florida, Texas, New Mexico, California, and Alaska. The New England States resisted all these acquisitions except the last.
The political studies of the South all led to freedom, and Southern statesmen have always been on the side of popular rights. Christopher Gadsden, of South Carolina, in a public address at Charleston in 1766, advocated separation from Great Britain, and he was the first man in the American Colonies to propose the establishment of American Independence. The first American Congress met in Philadelphia on the 7th of September, 1774. Peyton Randolph, of Virginia, was chosen President, because of his familiarity with all those questions of state-policy and state-craft that might arise. On the 20th of May, the next year, the Scotch-Irish of this county made the first Declaration of Independence, and on the 12th of April, of the following year, the Provincial Congress of North Carolina took the lead of all the States in passing resolutions of Independence. And when the Congress of all the States met in Philadelphia, it was a Virginian, Richard Henry Lee, who first moved that the States should be Free and Independent States. It was a Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the National Declaration of Independence. And when our independence had been won under the leadership of a Southern General, and a Convention was held in order to form a Federal Constitution, the Draft of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of South Carolina, was accepted by that body. So one Southern statesman had the honor of writing the Declaration of Independence, and another Southern statesman had the honor of writing the Federal Constitution.
I hope that this brief and imperfect sketch has established the point I made at the outset, that the South has excelled in the two departments, war and politics, in which she sought pre-eminence—the only two in which an agricultural people have ever gained renown. The world has never seen finer fighting material than our own ragged rebels. They united the elan of the Frenchman with the dogged obstinacy of the Englishman, the careless gaiety of the Italian with the uncomplaining fortitude of the Russian. How cheerfully they bore hunger, thirst, heat, cold and all wretchedness, and how magnificently they moved forward under the storm of shot and shell! An English officer, who had been on Longstreet's staff, witnessed the battle of Sadowa, and gave it as his opinion
