Today we commemorate the sacrifice of our ancestral Confederate dead. Today we also celebrate the 19 1 st birthday anniversary of our first and only Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. When he was inaugurated as President, he said:
Our present political position has been achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of nations ... It illustrates the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and that it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them at will whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they were established ... Reverently let us invoke the God of our Fathers to guide and protect us in our efforts to perpetuate the principles they were able to vindicate, establish and transmit to posterity.
Finally my friends, we must not think of the term "The Lost Cause" in terms of military defeat, or the destruction of Southern culture, or the destruction of Southern political statesmanship through the demonic horror of the Reconstruction Era. We must think historically that the South, with all her inherited institutions and her embracing of religious and ethical values, was a continuation of the finest gifts and practices of European culture; and that the North had tragically deviated from that heritage. Today, however, it is not just the North that has deviated, but the entire country including much of the South. The anti-Southern and anti-Confederate demagoguery we witness today among bigoted people can be traced directly to our entire nation's abandonment of moral standards. We are degenerating into pantheism, hedonism, moral relativism, narcissism and worst of all, into socialism leading into nihilism and totalitarianism. This brilliantly conceived and executed monument by a devoted Southern compatriot should encourage us to change the defeatist idea of a Lost Cause into the "Just Cause" or "Righteous Cause" of our Southern ancestors. That cause is the only cause which can stop not only the South, but also the whole country from disintegrating into a chaotic paganism of divisive and bitter self-aggrandizement.