CARMACK'S PLEDGE TO THE SOUTH

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 with her tender and encircling arms.

- Edward Ward Carmack, US Representative, Tennessee

(These words are cast in bronze on the base of his statue in Nashville and were excerpted from a speech he delivered in the United States House of Representatives)