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Title
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Excerpt from Joseph Wright Taylor, "A Plea for the University of Alabama: An Address Delivered Before the Erosophic and Philomathic Societies of the University of Alabama on their Anniversary Occasion, August 9, 1847"
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Description
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Speech given in the Rotunda on The University of Alabama campus that outlines the many roles the institution could play in the state of Alabama and the country. As part of its mission, Taylor explicitly discusses its place as an institution of proslavery education and advocacy.
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transcript of
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5. The University is useful in enabling the State to protect the peculiar rights and institutions which belong to it, as one of the Plantation States of the South.
Start not, Gentlemen, at the apparent sectionality of this proposition. I am not about to announce a doctrine inimical to the Union, or grateful to the sentiment of sectional jealousy. I love the Union far too well to entertain, much less to utter, an opinion unfriendly to its perpetuity. It was bought with the blood of too many martyred heroes; it has been sanctified by the labors of too many canonized statesmen, and it has vindicated its value by too many signal blessings, to be assailed even with the whisper of a treasonable thought. Never may its proud banner flutter out, with diminished stars and stripes, beneath skies blushing red with the hue of blood shed in the fratricidal conflicts of the warring fragments of a once united and powerful confederacy!
Next to the dismemberment of the Union itself, I deprecate that illiberal creed which teaches that the interests of its different portions are not in harmony with each other; and which seeks, in that way, to kindle the fires of sectional animosity. Experience, political philosophy, the opinions of great an good men, and the verdict of common sense concur in the proof that no real antagonism exists. Even did some slight opposition of interest prevail between different portions of the Union, there are memories alone, connected with their mutual and individual part, which will forever obliterate its impression on genuine American hearts. New England's revolutionary dead moulder on the battle fields of the South, and Southern blood fertilizes the barren heaths of New England! The bones of the sons of the North and of the West, and of the South lie crossed on the bloody heights of Cerro Gorde, and the scarred defiles of Buena Vista!
I do not, then cherish, and therefore, I cannot announce a doctrine, inimical to the integrity of the Union, or to the fraternal harmony of its various sections. But patriotism may properly begin its vigils and its ministrations at home. We may love other portions of the Union well, but we must love our own portion of it more. They help to compose our country; the latter is our home. Now, we here in the South have certain delicate and peculiar institutions ingrafted into every element of our social polity, and which constitute the very life-blood of our physical greatness. We are not responsible for their origin; that, under Providence, rests with our progenitors. The Constitution of our country guarantees them to us, and the seal of its sanctity is impressed upon every muniment of our title. They have grown up with us, and have become an element of our social life, which cannot be, harmlessly, removed. We believe them to be lawful, judged either by the laws of reason or the canons of Revelation. If mistaken in our judgments, the error can affect none but ourselves. We fearlessly announce our belief, and ask only an impartial investigation of the grounds on which we rest its vindication. Other portions of the Union and other nations, not regarding these institutions in their proper light, misled by false notions of duty, or stimulated by the suggestions of a misguided philanthropy, have begun a fierce war upon them. A crusade has been proclaimed against the rights of the entire South. Individuals in their own selected way, and combinations of men acting by organized associations, have entered the lists of the combatants. The pulpit and its instrumentalities, the press and its agencies, are the weapons they wield. The world is the field of battle; mankind the spectators' institutions vital to the South, the guerdon of the victor; God and the right the arbiters of the final issue. As the assailed party, the South stands upon the defensive. She neither invited the aggression, nor cowers beneath the number of her aggressors or the fierceness of their assault. Conscious of being in the right, and strong in the rectitude of her cause, she exhibits, in her attitude of proud defiance, the nobility of her Anglo-Saxon blood, and the dignity of a forbearance justified only by the tremendous consequences of a prompt retaliation upon her foes. But who are to be her champions in this great moral battle; with what weapons are they to fight, and in what schools are they to learn to use them with skill and effect? I answer, the champions of the South must be her sons, their weapons the pulpit and the press, their schools of discipline our own Colleges and Universities. We may not, without pressing to the issue of blood, change the weapons of our defense. Even that issue, should it be madly and criminally forced upon us, we are ready to meet. But we wage, at present, a moral battle with moral instruments in our hands. In such a contest, the South cannot safely trust her interests to any but her own sons. A hireling soldiery are as mercenary in a moral as in a physical contest. They may turn their weapons against their employers, and help the other party. A native heart alone, in every emergency of fortune, beats true to the honor and the interests of its father-land. The sons of the South are its legitimate, its reliable, and its appointed defenders; and, in the Universities of the South, must they be indued with the skill and force in the use of the weapons of reason necessary to the high encounter to which they are called. If they be educated elsewhere, may they not imbibe the doctrines of our assailants, and thus, returning to us in the guise of friends, help to drag over the walls and into the very citadel of our domestic Troy, some fatal horse pregnant with the implements of fanatic propagandists and unreformed reformers? Or if they sink not to the utter abandonment of such open shame, may there not be that treason in the heart which will make them nervous in the hour of trial? The South wants none but true men on her side in this contest - men who, believing her to be in the right in this matter of her peculiar institutions, will use all fair and proper means to make that right triumphant in the judgment of the world. Nor is it one champion she needs, but a multitude of them - to sentinel and defend the whole line of assault.
And is Alabama, alone of all the Southern States, to be a disinterested spectator of this contest? May she safely assume the attitude of neutrality, send no champions to the field, and yet share in the glory and security of the victory which is destined to crown the efforts of the South? That would be to act the Achilles in his tent, to her own detriment and shame. Such a position suits neither the duty nor the inclination of Alabama. She has great interests at stake, nor is she wanting in the willingness to defent them. But the great and important question is, will she send forth, as her champions, mere raw recruits drawn from the walls of village Academies and unendowed Colleges, who would soon be driven in rabble rout from the field of argument by the stalwart warriors of our assailants or men of powerful intellectual frames, veterans in the armies of mind, trained up amid the robust exercises of the University to bear the burden of the most arduous mental campaign, and to grapple steel to steel with the Goliaths of the foe? I tremble not for the response nor for the fate of the University, if, with an enlightened appreciation of her interests and her duty as a Southern State, Alabama addresses herself seriously to the task of protecting the one and of discharging the high requirements of the other. Considering herself equally bound with her Southern allies to furnish able champions for the contest, she will cherish this Institution as the nursery of them, and guard it as vigilantly as did the fabled dragon the golden apples of the Hesperides.
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citation
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Joseph W. Taylor, A Plea for the University of Alabama: An Address Delivered Before the Erosophic and Philomathic Societies of the University of Alabama on their Anniversary Occasion, August 9, 1847 (Tuscaloosa: M. D. J. Slade, 1847)