THE WOMEN OF THE
CONFEDERACY

In which is presented the heroism of the women of the Confederacy with accounts of their trials during the War and the period of Reconstruction, with their ultimate triumph over adversity. Their motives and their achievements as told by writers and orators now preserved in permanent form.

BY
REV. J. L. UNDERWOOD

Master of Arts, Mercer University, Captain and Chaplain in the Confederate Army

New York and Washington
THE NEALE PUBLISHING COMPANY
1906

Copyright, 1906
By
J. L. UNDERWOOD

DEDICATION

To the memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Thomas Curry, whose remains rest under the live oaks at Bainbridge, Ga., who cheerfully gave every available member of her family to the Confederate Cause, and with her own hands made their gray jackets, and who gave to the author her Christian patriot daughter, who has been the companion, the joy and the crown of his long and happy life, this volume is most affectionately dedicated.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

It is remarkable that after a lapse of forty years the people of this country, from the President down, are manifesting a more lively interest than ever in the history of the women of the Confederacy. Bodily affliction only has prevented the author from rendering at an earlier date the service to their memory and the cause of the South which he feels that he has done in preparing this volume. His friends, Dr. J. Wm. Jones, and the lamented Dr. J. L. M. Curry, of Richmond, Va., made the suggestion of this work several years ago. They both rendered material assistance in the preparation of the lecture which appears in this volume as the author’s tribute in the Symposium, and to Doctor Jones the author is greatly indebted for the practical brotherly assistance he has continued to render.

Thanks are due to the Virginia State Librarian, Mr. C. D. Kennedy, and his assistants, for kind attentions. The author is under obligations to the lady members of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society of Richmond, especially to Mrs. Lizzie Carey Daniels, Corresponding Secretary, and Mrs. Katherine C. Stiles, Vice-Regent of the Georgia Department of the Confederate Museum. In many ways great and valuable service was kindly rendered by Miss Isabel Maury, the intelligent House Regent of the Museum. To his old Commander, Gen. S. D. Lee, now General Commander of Confederate Veterans, he is under obligation for his practical help; also to Gen. Marcus J. Wright. In making selections from the works of others, great pains have been taken to give proper credit for all matter quoted. The author’s home has been for more than thirty years his delightful Pearland Cottage, in the suburbs of Camilla, Ga. On account of his afflictions he has moved his family to Blakeley, Ga., while he himself may remain some time for medical treatment here in Richmond. The book is sent forth from an invalid’s room with a fervent prayer that it may do good in all sections of our beloved country. Much of the work has been done under severe pain and great weakness, and special indulgence is asked for any defects.

J. L. Underwood.

Kellam’s Hospital,
Richmond, Va.

INTRODUCTION BY REV. DR. J. B. HAWTHORNE

Richmond, Va., January 30th, 1906.

Only within the last two years have I had the opportunity to cultivate an intimate personal acquaintance with Rev. J. L. Underwood, but as the greater part of our lives have been spent in the States of Georgia and Alabama, I have been quite familiar with his career through a period which embraces a half century. Wherever he is known he is highly esteemed for his intellectual gifts and culture, his fluency and eloquence in speech, his genial manner, his high moral and Christian ideals, and his unflinching fealty to what he believes to be his country’s welfare. No man who followed the Confederate flag had a clearer understanding or a more profound appreciation of what he was fighting for. No man watched and studied more carefully the progress of the contest. No man interpreted more accurately the spirit, purposes, and conduct of the contending armies. When the struggle closed no man foresaw with more distinctness what was in the womb of the future for the defeated South. His cultivated intellect, his high moral and Christian character, his personal observations and experiences, his residence and travels in Europe, his extensive acquaintance and correspondence with public men, North and South, and his present devotion to the interests of our united country, render him pre-eminently qualified for the task of delineating some features of the greatest war of modern times.

I have been permitted to read the manuscript of Mr. Underwood’s book, entitled, “The Women of the Confederacy.” I do not hesitate to pronounce it a valuable and enduring contribution to our country’s history. There is not a page in it that is dull or commonplace. No man who starts to read it will lay it aside until he has reached the conclusion of it. The author’s definitions of the relations of each sovereign State to the Federal Union and of her rights under the Federal Constitution are exact. His argument in support of the Constitutional right of secession amounts to a demonstration. His interpretation of the long series of political events which drove the South into secession is clear, just and convincing. His tributes to the patriotism and valor of the Southern women are brilliant and thrilling without the semblance of extravagance. His description of the vandalism of Sherman’s army in its march through Georgia and South Carolina cannot fail to kindle a flame of indignation in the heart of any civilized man who reads it. His anecdotes, both humorous and pathetic, are well chosen.

The section of this book which relates most directly to “The Women of the Confederacy,” including Mr. Underwood’s tribute in the Symposium to their memory, is by far the most thrilling and meritorious part of it. Into this the author has put his best material, his deepest emotions, his finest sentiments, and his most eloquent words. To the conduct of Southern women in that unprecedented ordeal, history furnishes no parallel. Through many generations to come it will be the favorite theme of the poets and orators.

I need no prophetic gift to see that this book will be immensely popular and extensively circulated. Its aged and afflicted author has done a work in writing it which deserves the gratitude and applause of his fellow countrymen.

J. B. Hawthorne.

INTRODUCTION BY REV. DR. J. WM. JONES

J. WM. JONES,
Secretary and Superintendent,
Confederate Memorial Association,
109 N. 29th Street.

Richmond, Va.,
January 23, 1906.

I have carefully examined the manuscript of Mr. J. L. Underwood on “The Women of the Confederacy” and I take great pleasure in saying that in my judgment it is a book of very great interest and value, and if properly published and pushed I have no doubt that it would have a very wide sale.

Mr. Underwood has given a great deal of time to the collecting of material for his book, and has had great advantages in doing so in having had free access to the libraries of Richmond, and his book abounds in touching and thrilling incidents, which present as no other book that has been published does the true story of our Confederate women, their sufferings and privations; their heroism and efficiency in promoting the Confederate cause. I do not hesitate to say that it is worthy of publication, and of wide circulation.

J. Wm. Jones.

AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION

One of the last things the great Henry W. Grady said, was: “If I die, I die serving the South, the land I love so well. My father died fighting for it. I am proud to die speaking for it.” The author of this volume fought for the South and is now so afflicted that he can no longer hope to speak for the South, but he will be happy to die writing for it. Not half has yet been told of the best part of the South, her women.

The Apostle John, on finishing his gospel story of Christ, said: “And there are many other things which Jesus did, the which if they could be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” While at work preparing this volume, Mr. C. D. Kennedy, the courteous State librarian of Virginia, said to the writer it would “take a whole library to tell all about the Confederate women.” As in the life of Christ, only a small part can be told; and only a small part is necessary.

It is remarkable that the life of Christ was the most tragic, thrilling, and beneficent life the world ever saw. And yet it is all told in four booklets of simple incidents. Those four little books have been worth more to the world than all other books combined. Neither is there any system in the gospel record. There was no system in Christ’s life. It could not be told in a consecutive biography nor in a scientific treatise. Science and system all fail when it comes to telling of a life of such love and labor and sorrow.

It is not sacrilegious to say the same thing when we come to tell of the heroic lives, the courage, the trials, the work of the Confederate women. We can only give incidents, and these incidents tell all the rest.

Fortunately the author, while a patient in a Richmond hospital, has been strong enough to search the libraries of the city and gather material scattered among the Confederate records already made. With them and his own original sketches, it is hoped that a contribution of some value has been made to a good cause. The story of the Southern women is worth studying; and the author tells in his eulogy his estimate of their great virtues. Then he shows that his estimate is not from partiality or ignorance by giving a symposium of tributes from others, some from the North and some from Europe.

It may surprise some that so much attention is given to holding up the righteousness of the cause in which these women labored and suffered. Why not? The great cause ennobled them, and they adorned the Confederate cause. The truth must be told from both directions. This is the ground idea of this humble volume.

It is hoped that it will fill a good place in our Southern literature, suggesting further investigation on the same line. It has been a work of love, a comfort to him in the days of very fearful bodily affliction. He is conscious of the feebleness of his work and much indulgence is asked for.

The author deems his subject a consecrated theme. And he rejoices that he could labor at his task amid the consecrated memories of dear old Richmond, where he has had the assistance and the smiles of encouragement from the noble women who continue to keep guard over Hollywood and Oakwood Cemeteries, the Soldiers’ Home, and the Home for Confederate Women, and keep vestal watch in the Confederate Museum.

Not a line is written in sectional prejudice or tainted by a touch of hate. The author was a Confederate soldier. He hates sham, injustice, falsehood, and hypocrisy everywhere, but he loves his fellow men, and still bears the old soldier’s respect and warm hand for the true soldiers who fought on the other side. The barbarities of bummers and brutal commanders must be repudiated by us all that the honor of true soldiers like McClellan, Rosecrans, Thomas, and Buell, on the one side, and Lee, Jackson and Johnston on the other, may stand forth in its true light.

When our broad-brained and big-hearted President Roosevelt has just stepped down from the White House to tell on Capitol Hill at Richmond and at the feet of the monuments of Lee and Jackson, his great admiration for the Confederate soldiers and the Confederate women, it is time for us all to take a fresh look at their heroic lives.

J. L. Underwood.

Kellam’s Hospital,
Richmond, Va., April 1st, 1906.

CHAPTER I
SYMPOSIUM OF TRIBUTES TO CONFEDERATE WOMEN

MRS. VARINA JEFFERSON DAVIS

From her invalid chair in New York the revered and beloved wife of the great chieftain of the Confederacy writes a personal letter to the author of this volume, from which he takes the liberty of publishing the following extract. There is something peculiarly touching in this testimonial which will be prized and kept as a precious heirloom throughout our Southern land:

Hotel Gerard,
123 West Forty-fourth Street, New York.
October 25, 1905.

My Dear Mr. Underwood:

* * * I do not know in all history a finer subject than the heroism of our Southern women, God bless them. I have never forgotten our dear Mrs. Robt. E. Lee, sitting in her arm chair, where she was chained by the most agonizing form of rheumatism, cutting with her dear aching hands soldiers’ gloves from waste pieces of their Confederate uniforms furnished to her from the government shops. These she persuaded her girl visitors to sew into gloves for the soldiers. Certainly these scraps were of immense use to all those who could get them, for I do not know how many children’s jackets which kept the soldiers’ children warm, I had pieced out of these scraps by a poor woman who sat in the basement of the mansion and made them for them.

The ladies picked their old silk pieces into fragments, and spun them into gloves, stockings, and scarfs for the soldiers’ necks, etc.; cut up their house linen and scraped it into lint; tore up their sheets and rolled them into 20 bandages; and toasted sweet potato slices brown, and made substitutes for coffee. They put two tablespoonfuls of sorghum molasses into the water boiled for coffee instead of sugar, and used none other for their little children and families. They covered their old shoes with old kid gloves or with pieces of silk and their little feet looked charming and natty in them. In the country they made their own candles, and one lady sent me three cakes of sweet soap and a small jar of soft soap made from the skin, bones and refuse bits of hams boiled for her family. Another sent the most exquisite unbleached flax thread, of the smoothest and finest quality, spun by herself. I have never been able to get such thread again. I am still quite feeble, so I must close with the hope that your health will steadily improve and the assurance that I am,

Yours sincerely,

V. Jefferson Davis.

TRIBUTE OF PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS

[From Dr. Craven’s Prison Life of Jefferson Davis.]

If asked for his sublimest ideal of what women should be in time of war, he said he would point to the dear women of his people as he had seen them during the recent struggle. “The Spartan mother sent her boy, bidding him return with honor, either carrying his shield or on it. The women of the South sent forth their sons, directing them to return with victory; to return with wounds disabling them from further service, or never to return at all. All they had was flung into the contest—beauty, grace, passion, ornaments. The exquisite frivolities so dear to the sex were cast aside; their songs, if they had any heart to sing, were patriotic; their trinkets were flung into the crucible; the carpets from their floors were portioned out as blankets to the suffering soldiers of their cause; women bred to every refinement of luxury wore homespuns made by their own hands. 21 When materials for army balloons were wanted the richest silk dresses were sent in and there was only competition to secure their acceptance. As nurses for the sick, as encouragers and providers for the combatants, as angels of charity and mercy, adopting as their own all children made orphans in defence of their homes, as patient and beautiful household deities, accepting every sacrifice with unconcern, and lightening the burdens of war by every art, blandishment, and labor proper to their sphere, the dear women of his people deserved to take rank with the highest heroines of the grandest days of the greatest centuries.”

TRIBUTE OF A WOUNDED SOLDIER

A beautiful Southern girl, on her daily mission of love and mercy in one of our hospitals, asked a badly wounded soldier boy what she could do for him. He replied: “I am greatly obliged to you, but it is too late for you to do anything for me. I am so badly wounded that I can’t live long.”

“Will you not let me pray for you?” said the sweet girl. “I hope that I am one of the Lord’s daughters, and I would like to ask Him to help you.”

Looking intently into her beautiful face he replied: “Yes, do pray at once, and ask the Lord to let me be his son-in-law.”

TRIBUTE OF A FEDERAL PRIVATE SOLDIER

There is no more popular living hero of the Federal army of the war between the States than Corporal Tanner, who is Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. He left both legs on a Southern battlefield and is a universal favorite of the Confederate Veterans. The following is an extract from his speech at the Wheeler Memorial in Atlanta, Ga., in March, 1906:

“The Union forces would have achieved success, in 22 my opinion, eighteen months sooner than they did if it had not been for the women of the South. Why do I say this? Because it is of world-wide knowledge that men never carried cause forward to the dread arbitrament of the battlefield, who were so intensely supported by the prayers and by the efforts of the gentler sex, as were you men of the South. Every mother’s son of you knew that if you didn’t keep exact step to the music of Dixie and the Bonny Blue Flag, if you did not tread the very front line of battle when the contest was on, knew in short that if you returned home in aught but soldierly honor, that the very fires of hell would not scorch and consume your unshriven souls as you would be scorched and consumed by the scorn and contempt of your womanhood.”

JOSEPH E. JOHNSTON’S TRIBUTE

As to the charge of want of loyalty or zeal in the war, I assert, from as much opportunity for observation as any individual had, that no people ever displayed so much, under such circumstances, and with so little flagging, for so long a time continuously. This was proved by the long service of the troops without pay and under exposure to such hardships, from the cause above mentioned, as modern troops have rarely endured; by the voluntary contributions of food and clothing sent to the army from every district that furnished a regiment; by the general and continued submission of the people to the tyranny of the impressment system as practiced—such a tyranny as, I believe, no other high-spirited people ever endured—and by the sympathy and aid given in every house to all professing to belong to the army, or to be on the way to join it. And this spirit continued not only after all hope of success had died but after the final confession of defeat by their military commanders.

But, even if the men of the South had not been zealous in the cause, the patriotism of their mothers and wives and sisters would have inspired them with zeal or shamed them into its imitation. The women of the South exhibited 23 that feeling wherever it could be exercised: in the army, by distributing clothing with their own hands; at the railroad stations and their own homes, by feeding the marching soldiers; and, above all, in the hospitals, where they rivaled the Sisters of Charity. I am happy in the belief that their devoted patriotism and gentle charity are to be richly rewarded.

STONEWALL JACKSON’S FEMALE SOLDIERS

In the southern part of Virginia the women had become almost shoeless and sent a petition to General Jackson to grant the detail of a shoemaker to make shoes for them. Here is his reply, in a letter of November 14, 1862: “Be assured that I feel a deep and abiding interest in our female soldiers. They are patriots in the truest sense of the word, and I more and more admire them.”

GEN. J. B. GORDON’S TRIBUTE

Back of the armies, on the farms, in the towns and cities, the fingers of Southern women were busy knitting socks and sewing seams of coarse trousers and gray jackets for the soldiers at the front.

From Mrs. Lee and her daughters to the humblest country matrons and maidens, their busy needles were stitching, stitching, stitching, day and night. The anxious commander, General Lee, thanked them for their efforts to bring greater comfort to the cold feet and shivering limbs of his half-clad men. He wrote letters expressing appreciation of the bags of socks and shirts as they came in. He said he could almost hear, in the stillness of the night, the needles click as they flew through the meshes. Every click was a prayer, every stitch a tear. His tributes were tender and constant to these glorious women for their labor and sacrifice for Southern independence.

24

GENERAL FORREST’S TRIBUTE

There is a story told of General Forrest which shows his opinion of the pluck and devotion of the Southern women. He was drawing up his men in line of battle one day, and it was evident that a sharp encounter was about to take place. Some ladies ran from a house which happened to stand just in front of his line, and asked him anxiously, “What shall we do, General, what shall we do?” Strong in his faith that they only wished to help in some way, he replied, “I really don’t see that you can do much, except to stand on stumps, wave your bonnets and shout, ‘Hurrah, boys.’”

TRIBUTE OF GEN. M. C. BUTLER

Who of those trying days does not recall the shifts which the Southern people had to adopt to provide for the sick and wounded: the utilization of barks and herbs for the concoction of drugs, the preparation of appliances for hospitals and field infirmaries? What surgeons in any age or in any war excelled the Confederate surgeons in skill, ingenuity or courage?

Who does not recall the sleepless and patient vigilance, the heroic fortitude and untiring tenderness of the fair Southern women in providing articles of comfort and usefulness for their kindred in the field, preparing with their dainty hands from their scanty supplies, food and clothing for the Confederate soldiers; establishing homes and hospitals for the sick and disabled, and ministering to their wants with a gentle kindness that alleviated so much suffering and pain? Do the annals of any country or of any period furnish higher proofs of self-sacrificing courage, self-abnegation, and more steadfast devotion than was exercised by the Southern women during the whole progress of our desperate struggle? If so, I have failed to discover it.

The suffering of the men from privations and hunger, from the wounds of battle and the sickness of camp, were 25 mild inconveniences when compared with the anguish of soul suffered by the women at home, and yet they bore it all with surpassing heroism. No pen can ever do justice to their imperishable renown. The shot and shell of invading armies could not intimidate, nor could the rude presence of a sometimes ruthless enemy deter their dauntless souls. To my mind there has been nothing in history or past experiences comparable to their fortitude, courage, and devotion. Instances may be cited where the women of a country battling for its rights and liberties have sustained themselves under the hardest fate and made great sacrifices for the cause they loved and the men they honored and respected, but I challenge comparison in any period of the world’s history with the sufferings, anxieties, fidelities, and firmness of the fair, delicate women of the South during the struggle for Southern independence and since its disastrous determination. Disappointed in the failure of a cause for which they had suffered so much, baffled in the fondest hopes of an earnest patriotism, impoverished by the iron hand of relentless war, desolated in their hearts by the cruel fate of unsuccessful battle, and bereft of the tenderest ties that bound them to earth, mourning over the most dismal prospect that ever converted the happiest, fairest land to waste and desolation, consumed by anxiety and the darkest forebodings for the future, they have never lowered the exalted crest of true Southern womanhood, nor pandered to a sentiment that would compromise with dishonor. They have found time, amid the want and anxiety of desolated homes, to keep fresh and green the graves of their dead soldiers, when thrift and comfort might have followed cringing and convenient oblivion of the past. They had the courage to build monuments to their dead, and work with that beautiful faith and silent energy which makes kinship to angels, and lights up with the fire from heaven the restless power of woman’s boundless capabilities. When men have flagged and faltered, dallied with dishonor and fallen, the women of the South have rebuilt the altars of patriotism and relumed the fires of devotion to country in the hearts of halting manhood. 26 They have borne the burden of their own griefs and vitalized the spirit and firmness of the men.

All honor, all hail, to woman’s matchless achievements, and thanks, a thousand thanks, for the grand triumph and priceless example of her devoted heroism. Appropriately may she have exclaimed:

“Here I and Sorrow sit.

This is my throne; let kings come bow to it.”

TRIBUTE OF GEN. MARCUS J. WRIGHT

I know that it were needless to say that the character and conduct of the women of the South during our late war stand out equally with those of any age or country, and deserve to go down in history as affording an example of fortitude, bravery, affection and patriotism that it is impossible to surpass: and I am further proud to say that the women of the Northern States exhibited in that war a devotion and patriotism to their country and its cause deserving of all praise.

TRIBUTE OF DR. J. L. M. CURRY

[Civil History of the Confederate States, pages 171-174.]

We hear and read much of delicately pampered “females” in ancient Rome and modern Paris and Newport, but in the time of which I speak in this Southland of ours, womanhood was richly and heavily endowed with duties and occupations and highest social functions, as wife and mother and neighbor, and these responsibilities and duties underlay our society in its structure and permanence as solid foundations. Instead of superficial adornments and supine inaction, the intellectual sympathies and interests of these women were large, and they undertook, with wise and just guidance, the management of household and farms and servants, leaving the men free for war and civil government. These noble and resolute women were the mothers of the Gracchi, of the 27 men who built up the greatness of the Union and accomplished the unexampled achievements of the Confederacy. Knowing no position more exalted and paramount than that of wife and mother, with the responsibilities which attach to miniature empire, the training of children and guidance of slaves, each one was as Caesar would have had his companion, above reproach and above suspicion; and whose purity was so prized that a violation of personal dignity was resented and punished, by all worthy to be sons and husbands and fathers of such women, with the death of the violator. “Strength and dignity were her clothing; she opened her mouth with wisdom, and the law of kindness was on her tongue. She looked well to the ways of her household, and she ate not the bread of idleness. Her children rose up and called her blessed; her husband also.”

When inequality was threatened and States were to be degraded to counties, and the South became one great battlefield, and every citizen was aiding in the terrible conflict, the mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, with extraordinary unanimity and fervor, rallied to the support of their imperilled land. While the older women from intelligent conviction were ready to sustain the South, political events and the necessity of confronting privations, trials, and sorrows developed girlhood into the maturity and self-reliance of womanhood. Anxious women with willing hands and loving hearts rushed eagerly to every place which sickness or destitution or the ravages of war invade, enduring sacrifices, displaying unsurpassed fortitude and heroism. Churches were converted into hospitals or places for making, collecting, and shipping clothing and needed supplies. Innumerable private homes adjacent to battlefields were filled with the sick and wounded. It was not uncommon to see grandmother and youthful maiden engaged in making socks, hats, and other needed articles. Untrained, these women entered the fields of labor with the spirit of Christ, rose into queenly dignity, and enrolled themselves among the immortals.

28

ADDRESS OF COL. W. R. AYLETT BEFORE PICKETT CAMP

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 22, page 60.]

I claim for Camp Pickett the paternity of the first of the public expressions, in the form of a Confederate woman’s monument. On the 16th day of January, 1890, in an address made by me, upon the presentation of General Pickett’s portrait to this camp by Mrs. Jennings, as my remarks, published in the Richmond Dispatch of the 17th of January, 1890, will show, I urged that steps be taken to erect a monument to the women of the Southern Confederacy, and you applauded the suggestion. But this idea, and the execution of it, is something in which none of us should claim exclusive glory and ownership. The monument should be carried not alone upon the shoulders of the infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineers and sailors of the Confederacy, but should be urged forward by the hearts and hands of the whole South. And wherever a Northern man has a Southern wife (and a good many Northern men of taste have them) let them help, too, for God never gave him a nobler or richer blessing. The place for such a monument, it seems to me, should be by the side of the Confederate soldier on Libby Hill. It is not well for a man to be alone, nor woman either. To place her elsewhere would make a perpetual stag of him, and a perpetual wall-flower of her. Companions in glory and suffering, let them go down the corridors of time side by side, the representatives of a race of heroes.

GEN. BRADLEY T. JOHNSON’S SPEECH AT THE DEDICATION OF SOUTH’S MUSEUM

What Our Women Stood

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 23, pages 368-370.]

Evil dies, good lives; and the time will come when all the world will realize that the failure of the Confederacy was a great misfortune to humanity, and will be the source of unnumbered woes to liberty. Washington 29 might have failed; Kosciusko and Robert E. Lee did fail; but I believe history will award a higher place to them, unsuccessful, than to Suwarrow and to Grant, victorious. This great and noble cause, the principles of which I have attempted to formulate for you, was defended with a genius and a chivalry of men and women never equalled by any race. My heart melts now at the memory of those days.

Just realize it: There is not a hearth and home in Virginia that has not heard the sound of hostile cannon; there is not a family which has not buried kin slain in battle. Of all the examples of that heroic time; of all figures that will live in the music of the poet or the pictures of the painter, the one that stands in the foreground, the one that will be glorified with the halo of the heroine, is the woman—mother, sister, lover—who gave her life and heart to the cause. And the woman and girl, remote from cities and towns, back in the woods, away from railways or telegraph.

Thomas Nelson Page has given us a picture of her in his story of “Darby.” I thank him for “Darby Stanly.” I knew the boy and loved him well, for I have seen him and his cousins on the march, in camp, and on the battlefield, lying in ranks, stark, with his face to the foe and his musket grasped in his cold hands. I can recall what talk there was at a “meetin’” about the “Black Republicans” coming down here to interfere with us, and how we “warn’t goin’ to ’low it,” and how the boys would square their shoulders to see if the girls were looking at ’em, and how the girls would preen their new muslins and calicoes, and see if the boys were “noticen’,” and how by Tuesday news came that Captain Thornton was forming his company at the court-house, and how the mother packed up his little “duds” in her boy’s school satchel and tied it on his back, and kissed him and bade him good-bye, and watched him, as well as she could see, as he went down the walk to the front gate, and as he turned into the “big road,” and as he got to the corner, turned round and took off his hat and swung it around his head, and then disappeared out of her life forever. For, after 30 Cold Harbor, his body could never be found nor his grave identified, though a dozen saw him die. And then, for days and for weeks and for months, alone, the mother lived this lonely life, waiting for news. The war had taken her only son, and she was a widow; but from that day to this, no human being has ever heard a word of repining from her lips. Those who suffer most complain least.

Or, I recall that story of Bishop-General Polk, about the woman in the mountains of Tennessee, with six sons. Five of them were in the army, and when it was announced to her that her eldest born had been killed in battle, the mother simply said: “The Lord’s will be done. Eddie (her baby) will be fourteen next spring, and he can take Billy’s place.”

The hero of this great epoch is the son I have described, as his mother and sister will be the heroines. For years, day and night, winter and summer, without pay, with no hope of promotion nor of winning a name or making a mark, the Confederate boy-soldier trod the straight and thorny path of duty. Half-clothed, whole-starved, he tramps, night after night, his solitary post on picket. No one can see him. Five minutes’ walk down the road will put him beyond recall, and twenty minutes further and he will be in the Yankee lines, where pay, food, clothes, quiet, and safety all await him. Think of the tens of thousands of boys subjected to this temptation, and how few yielded! Think of how many dreamed of such relief from danger and hardship! But, while I glorify the chivalry, the fortitude, and the fidelity of the private soldier, I do not intend to minimize the valor, the endurance, or the gallantry of those who led him.

GOVERNOR C. T. O’FERRALL’S TRIBUTE

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 23, pages 361-362.]

I think I can say boldly that the bloody strife of 1861 to 1865 developed in the men of the South traits of character as ennobling and as exalting as ever adorned men since the day-dawn of creation. I think I can proclaim 31 confidently that, for courage and daring chivalry and bravery, the world has never seen the superiors of the Southern soldiers. I think I can assert defiantly that the annals of time present no leaves more brilliant than those upon which are recorded the deeds and achievements of the followers of the Southern Cross. I think I can proclaim triumphantly that, from the South’s beloved President, and the peerless commander of her armies in the field, down to the private in her ranks, there was a display of patriotism perhaps unequalled (certainly never surpassed) since this passion was implanted in the human breast.

But as grand as the South was in her sons, she was grander in her daughters; as sublime as she was in her men, she was sublimer in her women.

History is replete with bright and beautiful examples of woman’s devotion to home and birthland; of her fortitude, trials, and sufferings in her country’s cause, and the women of the Confederacy added many luminous pages to what had already been most graphically written.

Yes, these Spartan wives and mothers, with husbands or sons, or both, at the front, directed the farming operations, supporting their families and supplying the armies; they sewed, knitted, weaved, and spun; then in the hospitals they were ministering angels, turning the heated pillow, smoothing the wrinkled cot, cooling the parched lips, stroking the burning brow, staunching the flowing blood, binding up the gaping wounds, trimming the midnight taper, and sitting in the stillness, only broken by the groans of the sick and wounded, pointing the departing spirit the way to God; closing the sightless eyes and then following the bier to Hollywood or some humble spot, and then dropping the purest tear.

They saw the flames licking the clouds, as their homes, with their clinging memories, were reduced to ashes; they heard of the carnage of battle, followed by the mother’s deep moan, the wife’s low sob—for, alas! she could not weep—the orphan’s wail, and the sister’s lament. But amid flame, carnage, death, and lamentations, though their land was reddening with blood, and 32 their beloved ones were falling like leaves in autumn, they stood, like heroines, firm, steadfast, and constant.

Oh! women of the Confederacy, your fame is deathless; you need not monument nor sculptured stone to perpetuate it. Young maidens, gather at the feet of some Confederate matron in some reminiscent hour, and listen to her story of those days, now more than thirty years past, and hear how God gave her courage, fortitude, and strength to bear her privations, and bereavements, and live.

TRIBUTE OF JUDGE J. H. REAGAN, OF TEXAS, POSTMASTER-GENERAL OF CONFEDERATE STATES

I never felt my inability to do justice to any subject so keenly as I do when attempting to do justice to the character, services, and devotion of the women of the Confederacy. They gave to the armies their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, with aching hearts, and bade them good-bye with sobs and tears. But they believed their sacrifice was due to their country and her cause. They assumed the care of their homes and of the children and aged. Many of them who had been reared in ease and luxury had to engage in all the drudgery of the farm and shop. Many of them worked in the fields to raise means of feeding their families. Spinning-wheels and looms were multiplied where none had been seen before, to enable them to clothe their families and furnish clothing for the loved ones in the army, to whom, with messages of love and encouragement, they were, whenever they could, sending something to wear or eat. And like angels of mercy they visited and attended the hospitals, with lint and bandages for the wounded, and medicine for the sick, and such nourishment as they could for both, and their holy prayers at all times went to the throne of God for the safety of those dear to them and for the success of the Confederate cause. There was a courage and a moral heroism in their lives superior to that which animated our brave men, for the men were stimulated by the presence of their associates, the hope of applause, and 33 by the excitements of battle. While the noble women, in the seclusion and quietude of their homes, were inspired by a moral courage which could only come from God and the love of country.

GENERAL FREEMANTLE (OF THE BRITISH ARMY)

[In “Three Months in Southern Lines.”]

It has often been remarked to me that when this war is over the independence of the country will be due in a great measure to the women: for they declare that had the women been desponding they never could have gone through with it. But, on the contrary, the women have invariably set an example to the men of patience, devotion, and determination. Naturally proud and with an innate contempt for the Yankees, Southern women have been rendered furious and desperate by the proceedings of Butler, Milroy, and other such Federal officers. They are all prepared to undergo any hardship and misfortunes rather than submit to the rule of such people; and they use every argument which women can employ to infuse the same spirit into their male relatives.

SHERMAN’S “TOUGH SET”

After Sherman took possession of Savannah he soon issued orders, driving out of the city the wives of Confederate officers and soldiers. While these women were packing their trunks, he sent soldiers to watch them.

The ladies sent a remonstrance to the general, and here is his reply:

“You women are the toughest set I ever knew. The men would have given up long ago but for you. I believe you would keep this war up for thirty years.”

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TRIBUTE OF GENERAL BUELL

The following are some of the words quoted from General Buell, one of the most high-toned and gallant of the Federal generals, and who saved the Federal army from complete defeat at the battle of Shiloh. This appeared in the Century Magazine, and afterward in the third volume of “Battles and Leaders in the Civil War.” After speaking of the confidence of the Southern soldier in his commander, General Buell then speaks of another influence which nerved the heart of the Confederate soldier to valorous deeds:

“Nor must we give slight importance to the influence of Southern women who, in agony of heart, girded the sword upon their loved ones and bade them go. It was expected that these various influences would give a confidence to leadership that would tend to bold adventure and leave its mark upon the contest.

“Yes; the Confederate soldier has gone down in all histories as the most peerless, most gallant and matchless hero the world ever produced.”

TRIBUTE OF JUDGE ALTON B. PARKER, OF NEW YORK

Nothing in all recorded history of mankind has been more pathetic, more heroic, more deserving of admiration and sympathy than the attitude of the Southern people since 1865. As fate would have it, their defeat in war was the smallest of their woes, because it would neither threaten nor bring dishonor. But the new post-bellum contest with military power, with theft and robbery, with poverty and enforced domination of a race lately in slavery, forced as it was without time for recovery, and that, too, in their own homes, required a courage a little less than superhuman.

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HEROIC MEN AND WOMEN

[President Roosevelt, in his speech at Richmond, October 18, 1905.]

Great though the meed of praise is which is due the South for the soldierly valor of her sons displayed during the four years of war, I think that even greater praise is due her for what her people have accomplished during the forty years of peace which followed. For forty years the South has made not merely a courageous, but at times a desperate struggle, as she has striven for moral and material well-being. Her success has been extraordinary, and all citizens of our common country should feel joy and pride in it; for any great deed done, or any fine qualities shown, by one group of Americans, of necessity reflects credit upon all Americans. Only a heroic people could have battled successfully against the conditions with which the people of the South found themselves face to face at the end of the civil war. There had been utter destruction and disaster, and wholly new business and social problems had to be faced with the scantiest means. The economic and political fabric had to be readjusted in the midst of dire want, of grinding poverty. The future of the broken, war-swept South seemed beyond hope, and if her sons and daughters had been of weaker fiber there would have been in very truth no hope. But the men and the sons of the men who had faced with unfaltering front every alternation of good and evil fortune from Manassas to Appomattox, and the women, their wives and mothers, whose courage and endurance had reached an even higher heroic level—these men and these women set themselves undauntedly to the great task before them. For twenty years the struggle was hard and at times doubtful. Then the splendid qualities of your manhood and womanhood told, as they were bound to tell, and the wealth of your extraordinary natural resources began to be shown. Now the teeming riches of mine and field and factory attest the prosperity of those who are all the stronger because of the trials and struggles through which this prosperity has come. You stand loyally to your traditions and memories; you also stand loyal for our great common country of to-day and 36 for our common flag, which symbolizes all that is brightest and most hopeful for the future of mankind; you face the new age in the spirit of the age. Alike in your material and in your spiritual and intellectual development you stand abreast of the foremost in the world’s progress.

THE WOMEN OF THE SOUTH

[Joel Chandler Harris, in Southern Historical Papers.]

Southern women have been heretofore referred to only as the standards of fiction. There are three pieces of fiction that have had a long and popular run in what may be described in a large way as the North American mind. One is that the stage representations of negro characters are true to life; another is that the poor white trash of the South are utterly worthless and thriftless; and the other is that the white woman of the South lived in a state of idleness during the days of slavery, swinging and languishing in hammocks while bevies of pickaninnies cooled the tropical air with long-handled fans made of peacock tails.

Preposterous as they are, age has made these fictions respectable, especially in the North. They strut about in good company, and sometimes a sober historian goes so far as to employ them for the purpose of bolstering up his sectional theories, or, what is still worse, his prejudices.

I do not know that these fictions are important, or that they are even interesting. If there was an explosion every time truth was outrun by his notorious competitor, the man who sleeps late of a morning would wake up with a snort and imagine that the universe was the victim of a fierce and prolonged bombardment.

Wives of Planters

The busiest women the world has ever seen were the wives and daughters of the Southern planters during the days of slavery. They were busy from morning until night, and sometimes far into the night. They were practically at the head of the commissary and sanitary 37 departments of the plantation. It was a part of their duty to see that the negroes were properly fed, clothed, and shod. They did not, it is true, go into the market and purchase the supplies; that was a matter that could be attended to by even a dull-witted man; but after the supplies were bought it was the woman’s intelligent management that caused them to be properly distributed.

I have never yet heard of a Southern woman who surrendered the keys of her smoke-house and store-room to an overseer. The distribution of the supplies, however, was a comparatively small item. Take, for example, the clothing provided for, say, one hundred negroes, male and female, large and small. The cloth was bought in bolts, though occasionally a considerable portion was woven on the plantation on the old-fashioned hand-looms. Whether bought or woven, the cloth had to be cut out and made into garments. Who was to superintend and see to all this if not a woman? Who was at the head of the domestic establishment? There were seamstresses to make up the clothes, but all the details and preparations had to be looked after by the mistress, and it oftentimes fell to her lot to go down on her knees on the floor and cut out the garments for hours at a time.

Sanitary Experts

And then there was the health of the negroes—a very important item where a twenty-year-old field hand was worth $1,500 in gold. Who was to look after the sick when, as frequently happened, the physician was miles away? Who, indeed, if not the mistress? It was natural, therefore—and not only natural, but absolutely necessary—that a part of the store-room should be an apothecary’s shop on a small scale, and that the Southern woman should know what to prescribe in all the simpler forms of disease. It is to be borne in mind that when the negroes came in from their work the plantation became a domestic establishment, and its demands were such that it was necessary for a woman to be at the head of it. On the energy, the industry and the apt management of the mistress the success of the plantation 38 depended to a great extent. It was not often these qualities were lacking, either, for they were absolutely essential to the success, the comfort, and the moral discipline of the establishment.

Queen of the Kitchen

Then there was the kitchen. No Southern woman could afford to turn that important department over to a negro cook. Such a thing was not to be thought of. The mistress of the plantation was also the mistress of the kitchen. In order to teach their negroes the art of cooking, the Southern women had to know how to cook themselves, and they were compelled to gain their knowledge by practical experience, for the kitchen is one of the places where theories cannot be entertained. There are negro women still living who got their training in the plantation kitchen, under the eyes of their mistresses, and their cooking is a spur to the appetite and a remedy for indigestion. It is no wonder that a Georgia woman, when she heard the negroes were really free, gave a sigh of relief and exclaimed: “Thank heaven! I shall have to work for them no more!”

These Southern women were the outgrowth of the plantation system, the result of six or seven generations of development. On that system they placed the impress of their humanity and refinement; and the outcome of it is to be seen in the condition of the negro race to-day. In the sphere of their homes and in their social relations they exercised a power and influence that has no parallel in history. As they were themselves, so they trained their daughters to be.

In This Generation

As the vine was, so must the fruit be. I have tried to describe the mistress of the plantation for the reason that her characteristics and tendencies have been transmitted to the Southern women of this generation and to the young girls who are growing into womanhood. It is inevitable, however, that certain of these characteristics should be modified or amplified according as the circumstances of an environment altogether new may demand.

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I know of no more beautiful or romantic civilization than that which blossomed under the plantation system, and yet, in the natural order of things, it would have inevitably run to caste distinctions. It had social ideals that were impracticable, and it had literary ideals that were foolish; nevertheless, after everything had been said, caste distinctions under the plantation system would have been less distasteful than those which are now in process of organization in some parts of this country.

Whatever the development of Southern civilization might have been under the old system it has come under the domination of the new. That the new has been strengthened and sweetened thereby I think will not be denied by impartial observers who have no pet theories to nurse. Women of to-day still possess the characteristics that made their mothers and their grandmothers beautiful and gracious; still possess the refinement that built up a rare civilization amid unpromising surroundings; still possess the energy and patience and gentleness that wrought order and discipline on the plantations.

An Inheritance of Graciousness

Take, for example, the home life of the plantation. It was larger, ampler, and more perfect than that which exists in the republic to-day, not because it was more leisurely and freer from care, but because the aims and purposes of the various members of the family were more concentrated. The hospitality that was a feature of it was more unrestrained and simpler, because it bore no relation whatever to the demands and suggestions of what is now known in Sunday newspapers as “Society.”

The home life of the old plantation has had a marked influence on the Southern women of to-day in their struggles with adverse circumstances. They lack, for one thing, the assurance of those who have inherited the knack of making their way among strangers. The poetic young Bostonian who has been writing recently of “The Mannerless Sex” and “The Ruthless Sex” could never have made the Southern woman a text for his articles, and I trust that for generations yet to come they will retain 40 the gentleness and the graciousness that belong to them by right of inheritance.

A Beneficent Influence

Comparatively speaking, it has been but a few years since the Southern woman has been compelled by circumstances to seek a wider and more profitable field for her talent, her energy, and her industry than the home and fireside afford, and the experience of these few years has demonstrated the fact that she is amply able to take care of herself. In shaping and developing what is called the new literary movement in the South, she has shown herself to be a far more versatile worker than the men, more artistic and more conscientious. She has made herself in art, in science, and in schools; she has taken a place in the ranks of the journalists; she has a place on the stage and the platform; she is to be found in many of the trades that are next door to the arts, in the professions and in business; she is stenographing, typewriting, clerking, dairying, gardening. She is to be found, in short, wherever there is room for her, and her field is always widening.

I think she will exercise a mellowing and restraining influence on the ripping and snorting age just ahead of us—the rattling and groaning age of electricity. What part she may play in the woman’s rights movement of the future it is difficult to say. Just now she has no aptitude in that direction. She has been taught to believe that the influences that are the result of a happy home-life are more powerful and more important elements of politics than the casting of a ballot; and in this belief she seems to be with an overwhelming majority of American women—the mothers and daughters who are the hope and pride of the Republic.

Yet she is an earnest and untiring temperance worker. Conservative in all other directions, she is inclined to be somewhat radical in her crusade against rum. She is inclined to fret and grieve a little over the fact that public opinion failed to keep pace with her desires. The wheels of legislation do not move fast enough for her, and she is 41 inclined to wonder at it. In the innocence of her heart she has never suspected that there is a demijohn in the legislative committee-room.

There is no question and no movement of real importance in which she is not interested. Her devotion and self-sacrifice in the past have consecrated her to the future, and her sufferings and privations have taught her the blessings of charity in its largest and best interpretation.

EULOGY ON CONFEDERATE WOMEN, BY J. L. UNDERWOOD, DELIVERED IN 1896

[The author offers as his tribute to the memory of the Confederate Women the following lecture just as it came from his brain and heart in 1896. It was delivered mainly for the benefit of the Confederate Monument in Cuthbert, Ga. A very serious lip cancer soon interrupted all lecture work and finally landed him in Kellam’s Hospital in Richmond, Va.]

Ever since 1861 the women of the South have been laying flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers and building monuments to their memory. The humblest of surviving veterans begs the privilege of offering a wreath of evergreen and immortelles to the memory of the Confederate women. To the genuine woman, no bouquet is acceptable, not even the kiss of affection is welcome, unless hallowed by respect. Horatio Seymour, the great governor of New York, said that the South, prior to 1861, produced “the best men and the best women the world ever saw.” In the early part of the spring of 1861, your speaker heard M. Laboulaye, one of the foremost men of France in literature and public life, in a public lecture at the Sorbourne in Paris, utter the following memorable words: “I am told that in America a lady can travel alone from Baltimore to New Orleans and will all the way be protected and assisted. A country where woman is respected as she is in the Southern States of the American Republic,—a country where women so richly deserve that respect,—others may say what they 42 please about slavery in that sunny land, but that’s the country for me.” This profound admiration, expressed by the good and great of the world, while it fills the heart, must surely temper the words of a Southern writer.

That man is not qualified to admire one woman who sees no good in other women. Blind partiality is stupid idolatry. The just historian of Southern women will say nothing in disparagement of the warm-hearted fraus of Germany, the tasteful, tidy, sparkling women of France, our rosy cousins of old England, and especially those bustling, bright little creatures up North, who make things so lively everywhere. When Titian and Correggio put woman on canvas she is their Italian woman; Murillo paints her as the lustrous, dark-eyed beauty of his own Spain. Meissonier’s women are French women, and when Rubens paints an angel or unfallen Eve, she is the fat chubby girl of Holland. But Raphael, in his celebrated Madonna, the greatest of all paintings, forgets all nationality, and his picture is just that of a woman. Oh for something of this cosmopolitan spirit in our sacred task. Nor must history degenerate into panegyric. Weeds are near the flower-garden, and there are thorns among the roses. Even among the brave Confederate soldiers there were some shirkers and cowards. We had our “hospital rats” and “butter-milk-rangers.” In the battle there were some who suddenly got very thirsty and ran away to get water. As one of these was rushing from a hot fire to the rear one day, his colonel shouted to him, “What are you running for? I wouldn’t be a baby.” “I wish I was a baby, and a gal baby at that”—was the reply. Another one in Gordon’s command, in another battle, was making tracks to the rear as fast as he could. General J. B. Gordon shouted, “Stop there, Jim; what makes you run?” “Because I can’t fly,” was his reply, as he leaped the fence. So our Confederate women were not all paragons nor angels; not if you let their poor husbands tell it. An old soldier in Atlanta has sued for a divorce from his wife on the plea that during a long life she has allowed him only four years of peace, and that was when he was away in the war.

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About the time of the surrender in 1865, a Federal brigade, on its march to take possession of a Georgia city, halted near a farm. As usual the soldiers went in to get supplies of milk, chickens, etc., offering to pay for everything. The old gentleman of the farm when he heard of their approach had taken to the woods. His wife stood her ground, and, seizing her first opportunity to let the Yankees “know what she thought of them,” let out upon their devoted heads a torrent of woman’s fury. Her tongue fought the war over again. They became enraged and literally “cleaned up” the farm, taking mules, wagons, corn, chickens,—everything in sight. When they had gone the old farmer came in and when he saw “wide o’er the plain the wreck of ruin laid” he became desperate. Finally, on the advice of his neighbors, he went to the headquarters of the general in the city and laid before him his pitiful complaint. That officer told him he could not help him. “If you people give my soldiers a civil treatment, I shall see that they respect your property and pay for everything they get; but when they are abused and insulted as they were at your house, I can’t restrain them, nor shall I try.” “But, see here, General, it is my mules and other property that they have taken, and I have not abused your soldiers; it was my wife.” “But, sir, you ought to make your wife hold her tongue.” “Well, now, General, I have been trying that forty years, and if you and your whole army can’t make her hold her tongue, how in the world can you expect me to do it?” The general saw the situation and kindly ordered everything which had been taken to be given back to the old farmer.

It has been said that the South has been busy making history and others busy writing it. Our own people must write it, and our children must study it. For more than twenty-five years the life of the South was the drama of the nineteenth century; and no drama is complete without woman’s part in it. The war between the Southern and Northern States was one of the bloodiest in history. The Southern States claimed the right of secession from the Union—a right which during the first 44 seventy years of the Nation’s life was never questioned. The Northern States claimed the right to coerce our States back into what they called the Union—a right never before thought of.

The die of war was cast, the Rubicon of coercion was crossed, the gauntlet of blood was thrown down, when the Northern States sent ships and soldiers to hold Fort Sumter on South Carolina’s soil. Again and again had the Southern States asked the Northern States for the fish of peace; they were given the serpent of Seward’s “irrepressible conflict.” They asked for the bread of simple right; they were given the stone of invasion. The reinforcement of Fort Sumter was a declaration of war on the South.

Then, and not till then, did Beauregard’s cannon thunder forth the protest for the rights of States, and the tocsin rang out from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. The ultimatum was cowardly submission to sectional dictation. There is something better than peace; that is liberty. There is something dearer than a people’s life; that is a people’s manhood. The South wanted no war; had prepared for no war; and had but few arms, no navy, few factories and railroads. With a small population, she was cut off by an effective blockade from the rest of the world. The Northern States had the national army, navy, treasury and flag, and all Europe from which to draw soldiers and supplies.

The South, after mustering every able-bodied man, could enroll, in all, but 600,000 soldiers, while she fought 2,600,000. Never was there a war continued for four years at such fearful odds. And yet Richmond, the Confederate capital, almost in sight of Washington, was only captured when Sherman and Sheridan, the modern Atillas, had flanked it with walls of fire, and pillaged the country in its rear. Never has there been a war in which the weaker so long and so effectually held the stronger at bay or so often defeated them on the field of battle; never a war in which the valor of the finally vanquished was so respected by foes and so universally applauded by the world. The mention of no battle, from Manassas to 45 Appomattox, from Shiloh to Franklin, brings a blush to the Confederate soldier. The world congratulates the Federal soldier on his pension and the Confederate soldier on his valor. The surrender of Lee’s 7,800 to Grant’s 130,000 and the roll of 357,679 Federal soldiers living to-day in the Grand Army of the Republic measure the odds against us. The reduction of the Federal forces to 1,500,000 during the war and the present pension roll of 800,000 tell our work. Our poor South was never vanquished. Her sad fate was simply to be worn out, starved out, burned out, to die out.

Generously, but truthfully, did Professor Worseley, of England, in his poem on Robert E. Lee, say of the ill-fated Confederacy,

“Thy Troy is fallen, thy dear land

Is marred beneath the spoiler’s heel;

I cannot trust my trembling hand

To write the things I feel.

“Ah, realm of tombs! but let her bear

This blazon to the end of times;

No nation rose so white and fair

Or fell so pure of crimes.”

After the surrender a poor Southern soldier was wending his way down the lane over the “red old hills of Georgia.” His old gray jacket that his wife had woven and his mother made, was all tattered and torn; the old greasy haversack and cedar canteen hung by his side. From under his bullet-pierced hat there beamed eyes that had seen many a battlefield. Said one of his neighbors: “Hello, John; the Yankees whipped you, did they?” “No, we just wore ourselves out whipping them.” “Well, what are you going to do now, John?” “Why, I’m going home, kiss Mary, and make a crop and get ready to whip ’em again.”

That “Mary” is our theme to-day. Others have told of Confederate soldiers on the battlefield. God help me to tell of the soldier’s “other-self” behind the battlefield. The brave Southern army was defending home. The arm of the hero is nerved by his heart, and the heart of John was Mary, and Mary was the soul of the South. In peace woman was the queen of that Arcadia which God’s blessings made our sunny land, and never has there been 46 a war in which her enthusiasm was so intense and her heroic cooperation so conspicuous. Her effectual and practical work in the departments of the commissary, the quartermaster and the surgeon, and her magic influence at home and on the spirit of the army, were something wonderful. The Federal General Atkins, of Sherman’s army, said to a Carolina lady: “You women keep up this war. We are fighting you. What right have you to expect anything from us?”

And yet in all she was woman,—nothing but woman. “And the Lord said it is not good for man to be alone; I will make a help-meet for him.” In Paradise she was the rib of man’s side; in Paradise lost she bears woman’s heavy share of his labors and his fate. The history of the South of 1861 will go down to the centuries with its immortal lesson that woman’s power is greatest, her work most beneficent and her career most splendid when she moves in the orbit assigned her by Heaven as the help-meet of man. It is the glory of Southern life and society that with us woman is no “flaring Jezebel” but our own modest Vashti.

Thank God the Confederate woman was no Lady Macbeth, plotting treason for the advancement of her husband; but the loyal daughter Cordelia, clinging to her old father Lear in his wrongs; no fanatical Catherine de Medici, thirsting for Huguenot blood, but the sweet Florence Nightingale, hovering over the battlefield with,

“The balm that drops on wounds of woe,

From woman’s pitying eye,”

and making the dying bed of the patriot feel “soft as downy pillows are.” She was no Herodias, calling for the head of an enemy, but the humble Mary, breaking the alabaster box to anoint the martyr of her cause; weeping at His cross and watching at His grave. She was no fierce Clytimnestra, but the loving Antigone leading the blind old Oedipus, or digging the grave of her brother Polynices; no Amazon Camilla, “Agmen agens equitum et florentes aere catervas,” but the Roman Cornelia, proud of her jewel Gracchi sons, and laying them upon the altar of her country; no Helen, heartless in her 47 beauty, but the gentle Creusa, following her husband to be crushed in the ruins of her ill-fated Troy; no cruel Juno, seeking revenge for wounded pride, but a pure Vesta, keeping alive the fires of American patriotism; no Charlotte Corday, plunging a dagger into the heart of the tyrant Marat, but the calm Madame Roland, under the guillotine of the Jacobins, raised to sever her proud but all womanly head, and crying to her countrymen, “Oh, Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” Who begrudges a moment for the record of her patriotic services and unremitting toil? Who does not see in her a glorious lesson?

Thank God! the clash of arms has long ago ceased. The temple of Janus is closed. But the war of pens, the contest of history, is upon us. For years Southern women had been written down as soulless ciphers or weakling wives, dragged by reckless husbands into an unholy cause. Text books of so-called history, teeming with such falsehoods, have been thrust even into Southern schools. It is high time to protest. Before God we tell them our mothers were not dupes, but women; they and our men were not rebels, but patriots, obedient to every law, loyal to every compact, State and National, of their country; true, gloriously true, to every lesson taught by Washington and Jefferson, and moved by every impulse that has made this country great.

But there must be no gall in the inkstand of history. No man can justly record the truth of the Confederate war who has not risen above the passions and prejudices incident to such terrible convulsions. No man with malice to the North can write justly of the South. No man can appreciate our great Jefferson Davis, who can see nothing good in President Lincoln. No man can describe the glory of Lee and Jackson, who shuts his eyes to the soldiership of McClellan, the patriotism of Hancock, the generosity of Grant, and the knighthood of McPherson and Custer.

But don’t let us go too far in this direction. We might fall into the other extreme of hypocritical “gush.” Let us be careful; yea, honest. About the best we could do 48 in war times is well shown in the preaching of a good old Alabama country Baptist preacher in the darker days of the war. He was a thorough Southerner and “brim full of secesh,” as we used to say, and at the same time a devout Christian. He was of the old-fashioned type and talked a little through his nose. His text was the great day when the good people will be gathered to Heaven from the four corners of the world. Warming up to his theme he said: “And oh, my brethren,—ah; in the day of redemption the redeemed of the Lord will come flocking from the four corners of the earth,—ah! They will come from the East on the wings of the morning,—ah! I hear them shouting Hallelujah, as they strike their harps of gold—ah! And they’ll come from the West shouting Hosanna in the highest,—ah! and you’ll see them coming in crowds from the South,—ah; with palms of victory in their hands, ah! And they’ll come from the,—well, I reckon may be a few of them will come from the North.” Oh that’s about the way men, women and children down South felt for twenty years. But, we’ve moved up on that. Christians grow in grace, you know. The war is over. There are no enemies now. We now believe a great many will come from the North. Our old preacher would not now have a misgiving about all four of the corners.

A few weeks after the surrender of Vicksburg, a large number of sick paroled Confederate soldiers were sent home on a Federal steamer by way of New Orleans and Mobile. The speaker was among them. He had been promoted to the chaplaincy of the Thirtieth Alabama Regiment and soon found himself strong enough at least to bury the dead as our poor fellows dropped away every day. The Federal guard on the boat was under command of Lieutenant Winslow, of Massachusetts, and a nobler and bigger hearted soldier never wore a sword. Between New Orleans and Mobile it was necessary to bury our dead in the Gulf. Having no coffins the Federal lieutenant and the Confederate chaplain would lay the body, wrapped in the old blanket or quilt, on a plank and then bind it with ropes and, fastening heavy 49 irons to the feet, we would gently lower it and let it sink down, down in the briny deep, the cleanest grave man ever saw. The Northern lieutenant not only took off his cap and bowed in reverence when the Confederate chaplain prayed, but with his own hands assisted in all the details of every burial. So let the North and the South together bury the dead animosities of the past, take the corpse of bitter falsehood, the prolific mother of prejudice and hatred, bind it with the cords of patriotism and sink it into the ocean of oblivion. But publish the truth. The truth lives and ought to live. Truth never does harm; but, with God and man, it is the peace angel of reconciliation. Let the testimony be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and our people will abide by it and every patriot will welcome the verdict.

Who were the women of 1861? My old Tennessee father used to teach me that there is a great deal more in the stock of people than there is in horses. Blood will tell. These women were the direct descendants of those bold, hardy Englishmen, who, under John Smith, Lord Delaware, Lord Baltimore and General Oglethorpe made settlements on the Southern shores and those who, from time to time, were added to their colonies. They were broad men, bringing broad ideas. They came, not because they were driven out of England, but because they wanted to come to America; who thought it no sin to bring the best things of old England, and give them a new and better growth in the new world; who first gave the new world trial by jury and the election of governors by popular vote. English cavaliers who knew how to be gentlemen, even in the forest. This was the leading blood. From time to time it was made stronger by a considerable addition of Scotch and Scotch-Irish and an occasional healthful cross with the very best people of the North, more soulful and impulsive by some of the blood of Ireland, and more vivacious by the French Huguenot in the Carolinas and the Creole in Louisiana. There thus grew up a new English race—English, but not too English; English but American-English blood, 50 of which old England is proud to-day. With little or no immigration for many years from other people, this blood under our balmy sun produced a race of its own—a Southern people, as Klopstock says of the sweet strong language of Germany, “Gesondert, ungemischt und nur sich selber gleich.” Distinct, unmixed and only like itself.

This was the blood that made America great, the blood from which the South gave her Washington and so many men like Henry, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe; that out of seventy-two first years of this Republic furnished the President for fifty-two years; the Chief Justice all the time, and the leaders of Senates and of Cabinets; the blood of Calhoun and Clay and Lowndes and Pinkney and Benton and Crawford; Cobb and Berrien, Hall and Jenkins, Toombs and Stevens; the blood that produced our Washington, Sumter and Marion to achieve our independence of Great Britain; Scott and Jackson to fight the war of 1812, Clark and Jackson to conquer from the Indians all the splendid country between the mountains and the Mississippi, and Taylor and Scott to win vast territories from Mexico.

This was the blood that so often showed how naturally and gracefully a Southern woman could step from a country home to adorn the White House at Washington; the blood that made the South famous for its women, stars at the capital and at Saratoga; favorites in London and Paris; and queenly ladies in their homes, whether that home was a log cabin in the forest or a mansion by the sea. It was common for Northern and European people to praise the taste of Southern women, especially in matters of dress. They did have remarkable taste in dressing, for they had a form to dress and a face to adorn that dress. Neither war nor poverty could mar their grace of form nor beauty of face.

It is said of the great Bishop Bascomb, of the Southern Methodist Church, that, in the early years of his ministry, he was so handsome and graceful in person, and so neat in his dress, that a great many of his brethren were prejudiced against him as being what they called “too 51 much of a dandy.” For a long time the young orator was sent on mountain circuits to bring him down to the level of plain old-fashioned Methodism. It was proposed to one of his mountain members who was very bitter about the preacher’s fine clothes that he give Bascomb a suit of homespun. The offer was gladly accepted, and on the day for Bascomb’s appearance in the plain clothes the old brother was early on the church grounds to glory in having made the city preacher look like other folks. Imagine his chagrin when Bascomb walked up, looking in homespun as he looked in broadcloth, an Apollo in form and a Brummel in style. “Well I do declare!” said the old man. “Go it, brother Bascomb; I give it up; It ain’t your clothes that’s so pretty, it’s jist you.” So our Southern women were just as charming in the shuck hats and home-made cotton dresses of 1864, as in the silks and satins of 1860.

But by their fruits ye shall know them. Walk with me on the streets of Richmond and Charleston. Go with me to any of our country churches throughout these Southern States and I will show you, among the many poor daughters of these women, that same classic face that tells of the blood in their veins. Go with me back to the Confederate army and you will see in such generals as the Lees, Albert Sidney Johnston, Breckinridge, Toombs, the Colquitts, Gordon, Evans, Gracie, Jeb. Stuart, Price, Hampton, Tracy, Ramseur, Ashby and thousands of private soldiers that face and form that tell of the knightly blood in the veins of the mothers that bore them.

South Georgia is to be congratulated that in the Confederate monument recently unveiled at Cuthbert, the artist has at least given what is sadly lacking in other Confederate monuments to private soldiers, the genuine face of the Southern soldier, that face which is a just compliment to the Confederate mother. The artists who cast some other monuments in the South had seen too little of Southern people, and had put on some of our monuments the pug nose and bullet head of other people.

Our mothers and grandmothers lived mostly in the country, and drank in a splendid vigor from the ozone of 52 field, and forest, and mountain. They were trained mostly at home by private teachers or in common schools run on common sense principles, and in “the old-time religion,” without “isms,” fanaticism, or cant. They were taught the philosophy of life by fathers who thought and manners by mothers who were the soul of inborn refinement. They thought for themselves, and indulged no craze for things new, and they aped no foreigners. In conversation they didn’t end every sentence with the interrogation point, but followed nature and let their voices fall at periods. They never said “thanks,” but in the good old English of Addison and Goldsmith, said “I thank you.” They never spoke of a sweetheart as “my fellow,” and would have scorned such a word as “mash.” They never walked “arm clutch,” nor allowed Sunday newspapers to make five-cent museums of their pictures. Their entertainments were famous for elegance and pleasure, but they had no euchre-clubs. Indeed, we doubt if many of them ever heard of a woman’s club of any kind. They were fond of “society,” but would have had a profound contempt for that so-called “society” of our day, in which the man is a prince who can lead the german, spend money for bouquets and part his hair in the middle. They didn’t wear bloomers, nor did many of them ever dress decolette. They were clothed and in their right mind. They never mounted platforms to speak nor pulpits to preach, and yet their influence and inspiration gave Southern pulpits and platforms a world-wide fame. Their highest ambition was to be president of home. They were Southern women everywhere, at home and abroad, in church and on the streets, in parlor and kitchen, when they rode, when they walked. Gentle, but brave; modest, but independent. Seeking no recognition, the true Southern woman found it already won by her worth; courting no attention, at every turn it met her, to do willing homage to her native grace and genuine womanhood.

Now, to appreciate the enthusiasm of such women in the Confederate war, you must remember that great principles were at stake in that struggle, and that woman 53 grasps great principles as clearly as man, and with a zeal known only to herself. See with what prompt intuition and sober enthusiasm woman received the Christian religion. Martha, of Bethany, uttered the great keynote of the Christian creed long before an apostle penned a line. The primitive evangelist Timothy, the favorite of the great Apostle Paul, was trained by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice; and the pulpit orator Apollos studied at the feet of Priscilla. The great lamented Dr. Thornwell, of South Carolina, who was justly called the “John C. Calhoun of the Presbyterian Church” of the United States, loved to tell it that he learned his theology from his poor old country Baptist mother. In politics, as in religion, our mothers may not have read much, and they talked less, but they heard much and thought the more. Before the war the reproach was often hurled at Southern men that they talked politics. God’s true people talked religion from Abel to the invention of the art of printing. They had a religion to talk. Our fathers did talk politics, for, thank God, they had politics worth talking—not the picayune politics of the demagogue office-seeker of our day; not the almighty dollar politics of the bloated bond-holder and the trusts, the one-idea craze of the silver mine-owner, nor the tariff greed of the manufacturer; not the imported European communism that would crush one class to build up another, not the wild anarchy that would pull down everything above it and blast everything around it.

The South was intensely American, and her people loved American politics and talked American politics. She entered into the Revolutionary war with all her soul. Southern statesmanship lifted that struggle from a mere rebellion to a war of nations by manly secession from Great Britain in North Carolina’s declaration of independence at Mecklenburg. The Philadelphia declaration was drawn up by the South’s Jefferson and proposed by Virginia. This was the great secession of 1776. To the Revolutionary war the South sent one hundred out of every two hundred and nine men of military age, while the North sent one hundred out of every two hundred 54 and twenty-seven. (We quote from the official report of General Knox, Secretary of War.) Virginia sent 56,721 men. South Carolina sent 31,000 men, while New York, with more than double her military population, sent 29,830. New Hampshire, with double the population of South Carolina, sent only 18,000. The little Southern States sent more men in proportion to population than even Massachusetts and Connecticut, who did their part so well in that war.

It was Southern politics that proposed the great union of the sovereign States in 1787. To that union the three States of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have added out of their own bosoms ten more great States. These Southern States were the mothers of States, and most naturally did they talk of States and State’s rights.

Southern politics, prevailing in the national councils against the bitter protests of New England, carried through the war of 1812; added Florida to the Union, and, by the purchase of Louisiana, all the Trans-Mississippi valley from the Gulf to Canada. It was Southern politics against the furious opposition of New England that annexed Texas, and, by the war with Mexico, brought in the vast territory far away to the Pacific. The South sent 45,000 volunteers to the Mexican war; the whole North, with three times the population, sent 23,000. Thus the South was the mother of territories, and was it not natural that she should talk of territories and of her rights in the territories?

In political platforms, in legislative enactments, and notably in the election of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, the more populous North declared that the Southern States should be shut out from all share in the territories bought with common treasure and blood. Our women, a child, a negro, could see the iniquity of the claim.

The action of the North in regard to national territory was an edict, too, that the negroes, through no fault of their own, should be shut up in one little corner of the country.

Then when the South sought the only alternative left her, that of peaceable secession, her right to go was justified 55 by the terms of the Constitution; by the distinct understanding among the sovereign States when they entered the Union, more directly insisted and put on record by the three States of Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island than any other State; by the secession convention of New England in the war of 1812; by the Northern secession convention in Ohio in 1859 and the reiterated declarations of Henry Ward Beecher, and by Wendell Phillips, and Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison and the other great leaders of Northern thought in 1860.

As to coercing the States back into the Union, President Buchanan well said at the time there was “not a shadow of authority” for it, and Governor Seymour, of New York, truthfully said “coercion is revolution.”

Again, remember that wrongs pierce deeper into the heart of woman than into the more callous soul of man. For years vast multitudes of the people of the North had kept up a furious war against the South in books and newspapers; in pulpits and religious conventions; in political platforms and State assemblies. Oh, it makes the blood run cold to think of the relentless malignity of the fanaticism of those days. No parlors nor churches too sacred for bitter onslaught on Southern people; no epithets too vile; no slanders too black; no curses too deadly to be hurled at Southern men and women. But war,—yes, blood-red war was really, and almost formally declared by the Northern endorsement of Henry Ward Beecher’s “Sharpe’s rifles” crusade against Southern settlers in Kansas; and the war of 1861 was actually begun by John Brown’s murderous raid at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia in 1859. The North made him a hero martyr. John Brown’s rifle shot in Virginia only alarmed the angel of peace. The Northern applause of John Brown drove her away from our unhappy land. By his apotheosis the Northern people made his rifle shot at Harper’s Ferry the skirmish firing of the impending war, to be answered by our manly cannon at Charleston in 1861. Puritan intolerance scourged Roger Williams out of Massachusetts for nonconformity in religion; and 56 Puritanism scourged the South out of the Union in 1861 for nonconformity in politics. The Southern woman’s heart felt to the very core and resented as only woman can resent, the sting of that merciless lash.

This is an age of monuments, and your speaker has undertaken to erect one in book form to the memory of Confederate women. When this thought comes to be put in marble or brass, as it will some day soon, let that monument rest on the broad granite foundation of truth. Then as the artist begins to put in bas relief the symbols of the virtues of the Southern women of 1861, and the souvenirs of her heroic life, let the first scene be that of a scroll, the Constitution of the United States, held in the unsullied hands of the great Jefferson Davis, as he marches out from the United States court, under whose warrants he had been held for treason, again a free man. Let that picture tell of the undying loyalty of our mother and her people to the organic law of the land: that Southern men wrote it and their sons have ever honored and loved it: Tell it in Gath, publish it in the streets of Aekelon, that those who crushed us were the men who despised, hawked at and cursed the Constitution.

The South at Montgomery swore fresh allegiance to the Constitution handed down by our American fathers, and carried with her through all the wilderness march the sacred old Ark of the Covenant. And when our Confederate head, the peerless Jefferson Davis, our chosen standard bearer of State sovereignty and home rule, was brought to trial, bearing in himself the alleged sins of us all, charged with being a rebel, that document showed him to be a stainless patriot; and though the mob of millions was shouting, “Crucify him, crucify him!” the highest courts of the Federal Government declared by his quiet and silent, but significant release, as Pilate did of Jesus, “We find no fault in this man.” The Constitution of the United States is a standing declaration of the sinlessness of the Confederate cause.

Let the artist next put on the monument a picture of an old negro woman, the old Southern “mammy,” with the child of her mistress in her arms. Near by let old 57 Uncle Jacob be leading the little white boy, while down in the cornfield near by are seen Jacob’s sons and daughters at work singing the cheerful songs which the poor negro now has heart to sing no more. In the distance picture the faithful Bob or Mingo coming from the battlefield, bearing the dead body of his young master.

Let that picture tell to all generations the story of slavery. We had slavery, but, thank God, it was Southern slavery,—Christian slavery. Truth will explain the paradox, if there was any paradox. It had its evils, and nobody blushes because we had it, nor whines because it is gone. But as for any sin of the South in it, let the first stone of condemnation be thrown by that people who had no fathers cruel to their children, no husbands harsh to their wives, and no rich man unjust to the poor laborer.

The South never enslaved a single negro, never brought one to America. Georgia was the first of the settlements to forbid slavery, and Georgia and Virginia were the foremost States in cutting off the slave trade. The colony of Virginia petitioned twenty times against the continuance of the slave trade. The negroes were enslaved by their own savage chiefs in Africa. England and the Northern people brought them to America and sold them for gold. The Dutch brought twenty to Virginia, but were forbidden to bring any more. When found less profitable in the colder climate of the North, the negroes were sold South to become valuable tillers of the soil, and, after the invention of the cotton gin, to make the country rich. The Northern people at a good profit sold their slaves down South, put the money at interest, suddenly got pious, and waged a fierce war on the people who bought them. That’s history.

In 1861, on the first Sunday after the news of the fall of Fort Sumter reached England, the author, in company with a friend from Pennsylvania, who was an anti-slavery man, attended services in Mr. Spurgeon’s chapel in London. The great city was wrapped in the deepest gloom. The war storm in America was expected to ruin manufactures and trade throughout Great Britain. Mr. Spurgeon and his people seemed bowed down with sorrow. 58 On returning to our hotel my Northern friend remarked that he knew I didn’t approve of Spurgeon’s prayer about slavery. I said to him, “R——, just there you are mistaken. Some of my people in Alabama some time ago burned Spurgeon’s books because of some of his abolition views, but when I go home and tell them how this great Christian prayed to-day they will respect his honesty and sincerity. We blame nobody for being anti-slavery, but we do abominate fanatical abolitionism. Spurgeon is no fanatic. Listen to this Englishman: ‘O God, our people are in the ashes of woe. A dreadful war beyond the ocean has cut off our commerce and closed our factories, and thousands of our poor must sadly suffer. The people of the American States are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. O Lord, pity them, and pity us. O God, they and we have sinned in enslaving our fellow men. England put slavery on her colonies against the protest of those Southern people, and England must suffer Thy judgments for her part. Forgive the North, forgive the South, and forgive England. O pity especially the people of that section where the war will bear so heavily and pity the poor everywhere.’

“Now, R——, that’s a Christian prayer that we respect; and while Spurgeon goes back one hundred and fifty and even two hundred years and tells the truth about slavery, and for his English people, even to-day, shoulders their responsibility in this matter, how are thousands (thank God, but not all) of your Northern preachers in your churches at the North praying to-day? ‘We thank Thee, Lord, that this war has come. Somebody will get hurt, but we people up this way will come out all right because we are so innocent and so righteous. O Lord, we thank Thee that we are holy and not as other men are, especially these wicked Southern people. We thank Thee for short memories; that we have forgotten that we brought the negroes from Africa, kept them as long as it paid us, and then sold them to these Southerners; that we have forgotten that when Virginia and Maryland wanted to put an end to the slave trade, we out-voted them and kept the slave 59 trade open until 1808. Lord, we could have seceded from these savage Southern States long ago and got rid of any connection with slavery, for we believed in secession until just now. But, Lord, if we let the South go, as Mr. Lincoln says, where will we get our revenues? We thank Thee too that we have forgotten that those Southerners can’t get rid of the negroes without kicking them into the Gulf of Mexico. Lord, we thank Thee that we can see nothing but our own righteousness. We have tried to reform those wicked Southerners and make them good like ourselves, but we couldn’t. Now, Lord, we have brought on a war and we turn it over to Thee. We’ll hire Dutchmen and Irishmen to help Thee do our fighting, and we’ll stand off and enjoy the fun. Now, as Thou art about to pour out the vials of Thy mighty wrath upon the abominable Southern people, do, Lord, just give ’em—fits.’ Now, R——, there’s the difference between honest anti-slavery in England and the hypocrisy of the crusade in America.”

The truth is that in Southern homes, the negro prospered and multiplied as no other laboring class has ever done. The South shared with him its bread, its medicines, its homes and its churches. M. de La Tours, the eminent French hygienist, truthfully said that “The slaves of the South were the best fed and the best cared for laborers that the world ever saw.” No chain-gang, no penitentiary, for the negro, no lynchings, and no crimes to be lynched for, when the negro was under the influence of our mothers and grandmothers. God forgive the fanatic who in later days put folly in his head and the devil in his heart. Our mothers trusted him and he trusted them. All through the war, while nearly all the white men were away in the army, the negro slave was the protector and the support of Southern families. Our mothers would have died for the negroes, and negroes would have died for them. In Wilson’s raid near Columbus, Ga., his soldiers were about to destroy a patch of cane belonging to a widow. The brave woman took her gun and declared she would shoot the first man that touched her property. In their rage they raised their 60 rifles to shoot her down. Just then her old cook rushed in between them, saying, “If you are going to kill ‘old miss,’ you’ll have to kill me, too.”

When Sherman was plundering South Carolina, some of his soldiers heard that a young lady had a very fine gold watch concealed in her bosom. They demanded it, and on her refusal they were about to seize her, when Delia, her faithful servant, defied them. “Fore God, buckra, if one of younner put your nasty hand on dis chile of my ole missus you got to knock Delia down fust.”

The monument to the Southern woman will be a monument to our faithful old Dinahs and Delias too. The old ex-slaves will gather at its base and as the tears stream down their dusky cheeks they will say, as they say now, “Dat’s de best friend the poor nigger ever had,” and enlightened negroes, like Booker Washington, will tell the true story that out of slavery the North got money, the South got ruin, and the negro got civilization, Christianity, and contentment.

Let the next picture be an ear of corn, a spinning-wheel, and a hand-loom. Ceres was the goddess of the Sunny South, and the staff of our armies was the corn of our own fields. The South, however prosperous, was not made up of rich people. Not one man in ten owned a slave; not one slave holder in ten was wealthy. The small farms, many of them under the care of the soldier’s wife and the faithful old negro foreman, and many more tilled by the soldier’s boys under the eye of their mother, yielded a very large share of the Confederate supplies. While Minerva taught our men war she taught our women household work, and quickly did she make Southern beauties Arachnes at the loom and Penelopes with the knitting needles. They knew how to adorn the parlor and play the piano, but, when necessity came, like Lemuel’s mother, they “sought wool and flax and wrought diligently with their hands,” or even, like Rebecca, they could go out into the field and draw water for the cattle; or, like Ruth, hold the plow steady in the furrows, or glean grain at harvest time. False histories have pictured our mothers as doll babies. Let that monument 61 tell of the wonderful pluck, energy, and strength, while it tells of the patriotism of the smartest and sweetest and bravest and strongest doll babies the world ever saw.

The artist must do his best when he puts on that monument a little white hand—the well-shaped, classic hand of the Southern woman. In that hand must be held the little white handkerchief. What a part that handkerchief played in the war! Old soldiers, as you rode off down the lane, again and again you turned to take the farewell look at home, sweet home, and there was that little white handkerchief waving at the gate; or when your company left the railroad station there, all around, were the good women of the neighborhood, and as you looked far back down the track these little white flags bade you woman’s “good bye and God bless you.” You never forgot it. Whether we marched past country homes or through the streets of cities, woman’s heart-cheer greeted us in the handkerchief from the window. Perhaps it was held in the rheumatic hand of Mrs. General Lee as she looked out from her knitting in her Richmond home, or, later on we could see behind it the sad, mourning sleeve of Stonewall Jackson’s widow. I tell you, my countrymen, the bonny blue flag or the Southern Cross was the banner of the soldier on the battlefield, but the little white handkerchief was our sacred banner behind the battlefield. The one, in the hands of the color sergeants, guided our movements in the army; but the other, in woman’s hand, inspired our movements everywhere.

Put here a knapsack, the rough, old, oil-cloth knapsack of the Confederate soldier. Poor fellow! he had but few clothes in it, but it contained something dearer to him than clothes—letters from home. He kept them all, the most of them written on the blank side of old wall paper and inclosed in brown envelopes, which perhaps had been turned so as to be twice used. When our poor boys were killed, their letters were gathered by the chaplains, litter bearers and burial details, to be sent to their homes. I am not going to tell what sort of letters were found in many knapsacks on our battlefields, but it is a fact, borne 62 out by the testimony of these men, that never was there found a letter from a Confederate soldier’s wife to her husband whose words would make the most modest blush, or in which she exerted any of her woman’s power or used any of woman’s arts to decoy him from the army. Here is a specimen of a letter from home in a Confederate knapsack:

Mitchell County, Ga., July 20, 1863.

Mr. Jno. Iverson,
Company B, Fourth Regiment, Army of Virginia.

Dear John:

This leaves us all getting along very well. Nobody sick, and we finished laying by the corn. The cattle are fat and the hogs doing finely. We sell some butter and eggs every week. We have plenty to eat, and know that it’s only you that’s having a hard time. But we are all so proud that you are fighting for your country. Will be so glad when you can get a furlough, but we know that you must, and will stick to your post of duty. Willie and Jennie send kisses to their brave papa. We never forget to pray for you. If you get killed, darling, God will take care of us and we’ll all meet in heaven.

Your,
Mary.

That’s the way they wrote. Let that knapsack tell forever of the fortitude, the purity, the loyalty and refinement of the Southern woman.

Let the next picture be the humble hospital couch.

“Up and down through the wards where the fever

Stalks, noisome, and gaunt, and impure;

You must go with your steadfast endeavor

To comfort, to counsel, to cure.

I grant you the task is superhuman,

But strength will be given to you

To do for those loved ones what woman

Alone in her pity can do.”

Our women gave their carpets to make blankets, their dresses to be made into shirts for the soldiers, and their linen to furnish lint for their wounds, and then, clad in homespun, they gave themselves. Nearly every town and village in the South had its Soldiers’ Aid Society and its hospital. Thousands and thousands of the poor 63 fellows were taken to private houses, even away out in the country, and tenderly cared for. There was scarcely a woman near a battlefield or a railroad who did not nurse a soldier. Nearly every woman in Richmond served regularly on hospital committees. One of these, a Mrs. Roland, was blind, and her sweet guitar and sweeter song cheered many a poor hero. One of the songs of these days was “Let me kiss him for his Mother.” Here’s a story to show how woman’s petting, which always spoils a boy and sometimes a husband, occasionally found a hard case in a Confederate soldier. Among the sick in Richmond was a brave young fellow, who was a great favorite and the only son of a widowed mother, who was far away beyond the Mississippi. One morning the report got out that he was dying in the hospital, and one of the prettiest and sweetest young ladies in the city was so touched by the sad story that she determined to go and kiss him for his mother. She hastened to the ward where the poor youth was lying high up on one of the upper tiers of bunks and quickly told her mission to the nurses. “I don’t know him, but oh, its so sad, and I have come to ‘kiss him for his mother’ away out in Texas.” Now he wasn’t dying at all, but was much better, and as he peeped at the sweet face, the rascal, raising his head over the edge of the bunk, said, “Never mind the old lady, miss, just go it on your own hook.” Now that’s just the thanks these ununiformed sisters of mercy sometimes got for their pains.

Put on this monument a pair of crutches. You never see the bright star of womanhood until it shines in the darkness of man’s misfortune. It is the furnace of man’s suffering that brings out the pure gold of her love. Here’s a specimen. On a cold winter day, when Lee’s army was marching through one of the lower sections of Virginia, some of the veterans were completely barefooted, and the Sixth Georgia Regiment was passing. A plain country woman was standing in the group by the road side. “Lord, a mercy,” said she, “there’s a poor soldier ain’t go no shoes,” and off came hers in a jiffy and she ordered her negro woman standing by to give hers 64 up, too. The good woman wore number threes, and the soldier who got them was Jake Quarles, of Company B, Dade County, Georgia, who wore number twelves.

Soon after the war I once expressed my sympathy to a young lady friend who was about to marry a young one-armed soldier. “I want no sympathy. I think it a great privilege and honor to be the wife of a man who lost his arm fighting for my country,” was her prompt reply. That’s your Southern girl.

When John Redding, of Randolph County, Ga., was brought home wounded from Chickamauga, it was found necessary to amputate his leg. On the day fixed for the dangerous operation, his many friends were gathered at his father’s country home. Among them was Miss Carrie McNeil, to whom he was engaged. After he had passed safely through the ordeal she, of course, was allowed to be the first to go in to see him. They were left alone for a while. The next to go in was an aunt of Miss Carrie’s, and as she shook hands with poor John and was about to pass on, he said, “Ain’t you going to kiss me, too?” Ah, what a tale that question told. The gallant soldier had offered to release his betrothed from her engagement, but she said, “No, no, John, I can’t give you up, and I love you better than ever,” and a kiss had sealed their holy love.

When Tom Phipps, of Randolph County, Ga., came home on crutches he offered to release Miss Maggie Pharham from her engagement. “No, Tom,” she said. “We can make a living.” There are hundreds of these noble, God-given Carrie McNeils and Maggie Pharhams all over our war-wrecked South.

Let the next emblem be the oak riven by the lightning, and the tender ivy entwining itself around it. Let it tell of the sufferings of the refugee father and the wreck of the old man in the track of such vandals as Sherman, Hunter, Sheridan, Milroy and Kilpatrick. Let it tell of the horrors of the years of so-called peace that followed the war. Northern soldiers killed our young men in war; politicians killed our old men in peace. Sherman burned houses 65 from Atlanta to Bentonville. Thad Stevens in Congress blighted every acre of ground from Baltimore to San Antonio. The war of shot and shell lasted four years; the war of blind, revengeful reconstruction legislation lasted twenty years. War marshalled our enemies on the battlefield; reconstruction made enemies of the men who had held our plow handles and stood around our tables. War put the South under the rule of soldiers; reconstruction put us under the heel of the rapacious carpet-bagger and negro plunderers. War crushed some of our people. Vindictive legislation crushed all our people. War made the South an Aceldama; reconstruction made it a Gehenna. Grant held back the red right hands of Stanton and Holt from the throats of Lee and his paroled soldiers: alas, Lincoln was dead, and his patriotic arm was not there to hold back Thad Stevens and his revolutionary congress from our prostrate citizens.

Amid these horrors our young men could hope, but to our old men was nothing left but despair. Robbed of their property after peace was declared, without a dollar of compensation, their lands made valueless or confiscated; they themselves disfranchised and their slaves made their political masters, too old to change and recuperate, too old to hope even, but too manly to whine, they stood as desolate and uncomplaining as that old oak.

Do you see that tender vine binding up the shattered tree and hiding its wounds? That is Southern woman clinging closer and more tenderly to father and husband when the storms beat upon him, comforting as only such Christian women can comfort; smiling only as such heroines can smile; with “toil-beat nerves, and care-worn eye,” helping only as such women can help. In the schoolroom and behind the counter, over the sewing machine and the cooking stove, in garden and field, everywhere showing the gems of Southern character washed up from its depths by the ocean of Southern woe.

Let the last symbol on the monument be the clasped 66 right hands of the Union. These Southern women of 1861 were the daughters of the great American Union. Their fathers under the leadership of Jefferson, Madison and Washington, had proposed the Union, devised the Union, loved the Union, and, under Clay and Calhoun and Benton, had preserved the Union. As an inducement for union between the original States, without which the Northern States would not come into it, Virginia, the great mother of the Union, gave up all her splendid territory north of the Ohio, embracing what is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and agreed that they should be made States without slavery. She afterwards gave Kentucky. North Carolina gave Tennessee, and Georgia gave Alabama and Mississippi. Southern influence and Southern statesmanship made the Union strong at home and respected abroad by the war of 1812, which was gallantly fought by the South and bitterly opposed by New England—opposed to the very verge of secession from the Union in the Hartford convention. The Southern States had shown their devotion to the Union by yielding to the compromises on the tariff, the bounty, and the territorial questions. The South demanded no tariff tribute, no bounties and no internal improvements as the price of her devotion to the Union. She loved the Union for the Union’s sake. All that she demanded was that in the territory, while it was territory, belonging to the government, her sons, with their families, white and black, should have an equal share.

John C. Calhoun was not a disunionist. The nullification ordinance of South Carolina, “the Hotspur of the Union,” was not secession. It was the protest of a sovereign State against unconstitutional Federal taxation levied through the tariff on the consumer, not for government revenue, but for the benefit of the manufacturer. The nation heard the manly voice of the little State, and Calhoun and Clay stood side by side in the great compromise that followed. Calhoun and his people loved the Union, but they wanted a union that was a union. True religion is that which is laid down in the 67 Bible, not theory nor sentiment. True political union is the union formed by the Sovereign States and expressed in the Constitution. Constitutional union was the only true union. Everything else was a mere sentiment or a sham. History will yet hold that the secession of the Southern States in 1861 was itself a union movement. The Northern States had destroyed the old union. By their numerous nullification acts in State assemblies they had repudiated the legislative branch of the government; by their defiance of the Supreme Court they had virtually abolished the judiciary, the second branch; and in 1860, by the sectional platform of the dominant party and the election of a sectional president, they had denationalized the executive branch of the government. Where was the union? Gone, utterly gone. South Carolina only cut herself off from the union-breakers and attached herself to such States as clung to the Constitution and Union of the fathers. Secession in 1861 meant the preservation of the union of 1787. Coercion in 1861 was rebellion against the Federal compact and death of the old Union. The Star-Spangled Banner became the labarum of invasion, and the Southern Cross the standard of all the Union that was left.

The Union that our fathers and mothers loved lay buried for twenty-five years. From March, 1861, to March, 1885, any true Southern man in the national capital found himself a stranger in a strange land, and was looked upon as a political Pariah by those in power,—an intruder even in the house of his fathers. Every government office all over the land in the hands of the Northern States. What a travesty of union! The North a dictator, the South a satrapy. The Northern man, lord; the Southern man, a vassal.

But, thank God, the resurrection came; the door-stone of the tomb was rolled away by the national election of Cleveland in 1884. “The Southern States are in the Union, and they shall have their equal rights,” was the slogan of the triumphant party. Then go to the capital and you find the first national administration since Buchanan—Bayard, the champion of the South, in the 68 first place in the Cabinet, and by his side the Confederate leaders, Lamar and Garland. About the first act of the administration was to appoint General Lawton, the quartermaster-general of the Confederate army, to one of the most conspicuous embassies in Europe, Curry to Spain and other Confederates wherever there was a place for them. The sons of our Southern mothers were no longer under the ban. Peace, real peace, had come. The Union, real union, was herself again.

Again in 1892 the electoral votes of the Northern States alone were sufficient to make Grover Cleveland, the great pacificator, twice the choice of the solid South, again President of the United States. Once more there is a national Cabinet, the South having half of it, with a Confederate colonel in command of the navy, another minister to France, another to Mexico, another to Guatemala—Southern men at Madrid and Constantinople; and when this country needs a man to represent her in the crisis in Cuba to a Virginia Lee is given the conspicuous honor.

The last unjust election law is repealed; the last taint taken from the fair name of Confederate officers. The North has extended the right hand of union. The South has grasped it; and withered be the arm that would tear those hands asunder.

Image of the Southern Woman Surmounting the Monument

High above these hands, artist, place the crowning statue of the Southern woman. Let it be the queenly form of the proudest of the proud mothers of Southern chivalry. Let her sweet, calm image face the north,—no frown on her brow,—no scorn on her lip. Let her happy, hopeful smile tell the world that Southern womanhood felt most sadly the Union broken, and hails most joyfully the Union restored.

My countrymen, we have a country! In the name of God, our mothers, as they look down from heaven, beseech you to preserve it.

The art of sculpture was finished in ancient Greece, and 69 the statue of Venus de Medici will never be surpassed. In it the artist has put in marble the perfect form, face, majesty and grace of woman. The ancients in their sensual materialism adored beauty in form and feature and many moderns worship at the same shrine. The German poet Heine, when an invalid in Paris, had himself carried every day in a roller chair to the Tuilleries, to gaze upon the marble beauty of Venus de Milo. If in our age, the artist ever attempts to sculpture the true woman, the woman with soul, the Christian Psyche, with heart as perfect as her face, with character more charming than her form, the modern Praxitiles will take for his model the Southern woman, from among your mothers and grandmothers. They are your models in character now. To you much is given; of you will much be required. Study your mothers and may Heaven help you to learn the God-given lesson.

Young men, the model man, Jesus Christ, the divine Saviour of our world, asked for no carved stone, no statue to his memory. He wanted no marble cathedral. He demanded living monuments,—men and women to set forth in holy lives the lessons of his example. From childhood He honored his mother, nor did He forget her on the cross.

With something of his exalted spirit your mothers, who have gone before you, demand of you not a chiseled monument, but they do beseech you to honor them in manly life. Hold sacred the very blood they gave you. Lay hold of their lofty principles; drink in their noble spirit. Set forth their glorious patriotism, and you will be a crown to them, a blessing to your country, and an honor to your God.

70

CHAPTER II
THEIR WORK

INTRODUCTION TO WOMAN’S WORK

[By J. L. Underwood.]

Throughout the South the women went to work from the first drum-beat. A great deal of it was done privately, the left hand itself hardly knowing what the modest, humble right hand was doing. In nearly every neighborhood soldiers’ aid societies, or relief associations, were organized and did systematic and efficient work throughout the four years. Supplies of every kind were constantly gathered and forwarded where most needed. The old men and women did an immense amount of work.

In all the railroad towns, hospitals and wayside houses were established for the benefit of the travelling soldier. These were maintained and managed almost exclusively by the women. They prepared as best they could such articles as pickles and preserves and other delicacies for the use of the hospitals. They sent testaments and other good books and good preachers to the army, and being nearly all women of practical piety, they helped greatly to infuse that spirit of patriotism which gave such strength to the Confederate army. The world has never known an army in which there were so many earnest, practical Christians like Jackson, Cobb, Lee, Polk, Price, and Gordon among the commanding officers, where there were so many ministers of the gospel of good standing who were fighting soldiers, and so many men in ranks who were God-fearing men. The world has never known an army where so many officers and soldiers came from homes where there were pious wives, mothers, and sisters. The inspiration of the knightly hearts of the Confederacy was home and the inspiration of a pious home was godly 71 woman. The world will never know how effective were the prayers and letters of the women at home in those great religious revivals with which the Confederate army was so often and so richly blessed. Thousands of men who entered the army wicked men went home or to their graves genuine Christians. The war ended; but the good woman’s work never ends. Our Confederate women began immediately to look after the soldiers’ orphans and the soldiers’ graves. In all directions the Confederate monuments have been erected mainly by their efforts. Soldiers’ homes have been established and in some few of the States homes provided for the Confederate widows. It is safe to say that women collected two-thirds of the money raised for all these objects. It is their dead they are honoring. And they will continue to break the alabaster box. Let them alone.

THE SOUTHERN WOMAN’S SONG

[Confederate Scrap Book.]

Stitch, stitch, stitch.

Little needle, swiftly fly,

Brightly glitter as you go;

Every time that you pass by

Warms my heart with pity’s glow.

Dreams of comfort that will cheer,

Dreams of courage you will bring,

Through winter’s cold, the volunteer.

Smile on me like flowers in spring.

Stitch, stitch, stitch.

Swiftly, little needle, fly,

Through this flannel, soft and warm;

Though with cold the soldiers sigh,

This will sure keep out the storm.

Set the buttons close and tight,

Out to shut the winter’s damp;

There’ll be none to fix them right

In the soldier’s tented camp.

Stitch, stitch, stitch.

Ah! needle, do not linger;

Close the thread, make fine the knot;

There’ll be no dainty finger

To arrange a seam forgot.

Though small and tiny you may be,

Do all that you are able.

A mouse a lion once set free,

As says the pretty fable.

Stitch, stitch, stitch.