From 1861-65, the text praises the sons and daughters of the Old South under Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as fighting with unmatched gallantry for states' rights rather than for the preservation of slavery, and says that although they failed, the memory of their deeds would endure. It adds that the young man represented on the pedestal was killed at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, and imagines his dying words as a poetic acceptance of fate, portraying him as a lad of the Old South whose name is known only to the writer.