Around 1870, Zebulon Vance composed "The Scattered Nation," a speech he would give hundreds of times to sold-out crowds in lyceums and lecture halls all across America in years to come, including his 20 years as a U.S. senator. Drawing on its author's oratorical gifts and wide reading in ancient and biblical history, the lecture makes a powerful case against what it calls "the wickedness and the folly of intolerance."
Vance opened with a striking comparison of the Jewish people to the Gulf Stream -- a river of people moving through the sea of nations yet never mingling with it. He went on to trace elements of such modern ideals as representative democracy and property rights to the ancient Hebrew tribal confederation, praising the lack of crime and the intelligence and strong family values he has personally seen among their modern descendants.
Standing the anti-Semitic stereotype of the mercantile, ghettoized Jew on its head, Vance showed how, when persecution forced the Jews away from agriculture and land ownership, the "scattered nation" turned its hardships into virtues by establishing a system of universal commerce, based on mutual trust, such as could never have developed among the border-bound and language-divided "consolidated nations" of the gentiles. Such arguments were eye-openers in an age when even educated Victorian Christians routinely stereotyped Jews as greedy Shylocks and thieving Fagins, refusing to allow even wealthy Jews into New York hotels -- much less into such inner sanctums for political and economic decision-makers as the New York Athletic Club and Tuxedo Park (two places where Sen. Vance gave his speech).
Two years after his first wife's death in 1878, he married his second wife, a widow, Florence Steele Martin of Louisville, Ky., who survived him. Vance was the father of four sons by his first marriage.
Vance served in the United States Senate from 1879 until his death in 1894. His health began to fail in 1889 with the removal of one of his eyes. He died five years later of a stroke at his home in Washington, D.C.
He died a month before his 65th birthday.
He died a month before his 65th birthday.
His funeral services were held in the chamber of the United States Senate.
As his funeral train moved through the state, thousands of people lined the tracks to pay their last respects to a man whom they loved and admired .
His second wife refused to allow the Masonic team to perform the funeral rites they had rehearsed at Mount Hermon Lodge 118 in Asheville. Later, she secretly had her husband exhumed and reburied in her Martin family’s plot. When Vance's sons found out, they took their stepmother to court, got a judgment, had their father dug up again and reburied him in the original plot.
The Asheville chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy has conducted a joint ceremony with the local chapter of B'nai B'rith each year at the foot of the Vance Monument, on or about May 13, Vance's birthday.
There is a statue of Vance on the south grounds of the North Carolina State Capitol in Raleigh, and a bronze state in the National Statuary Hall Collection in Washington, D.C.
He was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina.
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| Vance Grave |
Two years after the widely admired senator's death in 1894, noted local benefactor George W. Pack offered to donate $2,000 to help pay for a monument to Vance in front of the Buncombe County Courthouse (then located on the east side of the current Pack Square). An obelisk was dedicated to Vance in Pack Square, Asheville; its cornerstone was laid in 1897. By 1898, the obelisk was complete.
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| Vance Monument |
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| Vance Statue in Raleigh, North Carolina |
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| Vance Statue in the National Statuary Hall |
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