This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War II, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy, and not only of the former Confederacy, more profoundly than it had done is slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end.

As quoted in A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, p. 223.