October Eighteenth

I address you on this occasion with a profound admiration for the great consideration which caused you to honor me by your votes with a seat in the Senate of Georgy. For two momentus and inspirin' weeks the Legislature has been in solemn session, one of whom I am proud to be which. For several days we were engaged as scouts, making a sorter reconysance to see whether Georgy were a State or a Injin territory, whether we were in the old Un-ion or out of it, whether me and my folks and you and your folks were somebody or no body, and lastly, but by no means leastly, whether our poor innocent children, born durin' the war, were all illegal and had to be born over agin or not. This last pint are much unsettled, but our women are advised to be calm and serene.

“BILL ARP” (To His Constituents)

October Nineteenth

Float out, oh flag, from Freedom's burnished lance.

Float out, oh flag, in Red and White and

Blue!

The Union's colors and the hues of France

Commingled on the view!

JAMES BARRON HOPE

Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, 1781

Burning of the "Peggy Stewart" at Annapolis, 1774

October Twentieth

Her right to it rested upon as firm a basis as the right of any other Commonwealth to her own domain, and if there was any question of the Virginia title by charter, she could assert her right by conquest. The region had been wrested from the British by a Virginian commanding Virginian troops; the people had taken "the oath of allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia"; and her title to the entire territory was thus indisputable.

These rights she now abandoned; and her action was the result of an enlarged patriotism and devotion to the cause of union.

JOHN ESTEN COOKE

Virginia cedes to the general government the territory north of the Ohio, 1783

October Twenty-First

When social relations were resumed between the North and South-they followed slowly the resumption of business relations-what we should call the color-blindness of the other side often manifested itself in a delicate reticence on the part of our Northern friends; and as the war had by no means constituted their lives as it had constituted ours for four long years, the success in avoiding the disagreeable topic would have been considerable, if it had not been for awkward allusions on the part of the Southerners, who, having been shut out for all that time from the study of literature and art and other elegant and uncompromising subjects, could hardly keep from speaking of this and that incident of the war. Whereupon a discreet, or rather an embarrassed silence, as if a pardoned convict had playfully referred to the arson or burglary, not to say worse, that had been the cause of his seclusion.

BASIL L. GILDERSLEEVE

October Twenty-Second

Oh, the rolling, rolling prairies, and the grasses waving, waving

Like green billows 'neath the gulf breeze in the perfumed purple gloam!

Oh, my heart is heavy, heavy, and my eyes are craving, craving

For the fertile plains and forests of my far-off

Texas home.

JUDD MORTIMER LEWIS

(Longing for Texas)

Samuel Houston inaugurated President of Texas, 1836