Carmack's Pledge to the South

Carmack's Pledge to the South

"Although some of our friends outside the South have been programmed to hold misgivings about Dixie, we southerners know, don't we? This is the land of our fathers, the land of our birth and the land that we love. The special way we feel about our Southland has seldom been said so eloquently as by Edward Ward Carmack, former Congressman from Tennessee. Known as Carmack's Pledge to the South, these words, cast in bronze on the base of his statue in Nashville, were excerpted from a speech he delivered in the United States House of Representatives:

"The SOUTH is a land that has known sorrows; it is a land that has broken the ashen crust and moistened it with tears; a land scarred and riven by the plowshare of war and billowed with the graves of her dead; but a land of legend, a land of song, a land of hallowed and heroic memories.

"To that land every drop of my blood, every fiber of my being, every pulsation of my heart, is consecrated forever. I was born of her womb; I was nurtured at her breast; and when my last hour shall come, I pray GOD that I may be pillowed upon her bosom and rocked to sleep within her tender and encircling arms."

Reprinted in context here with deep respect for:
Edward Ward Carmack (1858-1908), United States Representative, Tennessee

quoted from:

Southern by the Grace of God
By: Michael Andrew Grissom
Pelican Publishing Company, Inc.
1101 Monroe Street
Gretna, Louisiana 70053
Copyright 1988, 1989