OUR FRIENDS, THE ENEMY
There was small interchange of civilities between Northern and Southern
ladies. The new-comers were in much evidence; Southerners saw them riding
and driving in rich attire and handsome equipages, and at the theatre in
all the glory of fine toilettes.
There was not so much trouble opening theatres as churches. A good many
stage celebrities came to the Richmond Theatre, which was well patronised.
Decorated with United States flags, it was opened during the first week of
the occupation with "Don Cæsar de Bazan." The "Whig" reported a brilliant
audience. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant, who had been driving over the city,
were formally invited by General Weitzel to attend the play, but did not
appear.
The band played every evening in the Square, and our people, ladies
especially, were invited to come out. The Square and the Capitol were at
one time overrun with negroes. This was stopped. Still, our ladies did not
go. Federal officers and their ladies had their music to themselves.
"There was no intentional slight or rudeness on our part. We did not draw
back our skirts in passing Federal soldiers, as was charged in Northern
papers; if a few thoughtless girls or women did this, they were not
representative. We tried not to give offense; we were heart-broken; we
stayed to ourselves; and we were not hypocrites; that was all." So our
women aver. In most Southern cities efforts were made to induce the ladies
to come out and hear the band play.
The day Governor Pierpont arrived, windows of the Spotswood and Monumental
were crowded with Northern ladies waving handkerchiefs. "I only knew from
the papers," Matoaca tells, "that the Mansion was decorated with flowers
for his reception. Our own windows, which had been as windows of a house
of mourning, did not change their aspect for his coming. Our rightful
governor was a fugitive; Governor Pierpont was an alien. We were
submissive, but we could not rejoice." This was the feminine and social
side. On the political and masculine side, he was welcomed. Delegations of
prominent Virginians from all counties brought him assurances of
coöperation. The new Governor tried to give a clean, patriotic
administration.
Northerners held socials in each others' houses and in halls; there were
receptions, unattended by Southerners, at the Governor's Mansion and
Military Headquarters. It might have been more politic had we gone out of
our way to be socially agreeable, but it would not have been sincere.
Federal officers and their wives attended our churches. A Northern
Methodist Society was formed with a group of adherents, Governor and Mrs.
Pierpont, and, later, General and Mrs. Canby among them. "We of the
Northern colony were very dependent upon ourselves for social pleasures,"
an ex-member who now considers herself a Southerner said to me recently.
"There were some inter-marriages. I remember an elopement; a Petersburg
girl ran away with a Federal officer, and the pair sought asylum at my
father's, in Richmond's Northern colony. Miss Van Lew entertained us
liberally. She gave a notable reception to Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase
and his beautiful daughter, Kate." Miss Van Lew, a resident, was suspected
of being a spy during the war.
Our ladies went veiled on the street, the motive that caused them to close
their windows impelling them to cover their faces with sorrow's shield.
There was not much opportunity for young blue-coats to so much as behold
our pretty girls, much less make eyes at them, had they been so minded.
That veil as an accompaniment of a lissome figure and graceful carriage
must have sometimes acted as a tantalising disguise.
I heard of one very cute happening in which the wind and a veil played
part. Mary Triplett, our famous blonde beauty, then in the rosy freshness
of early youth, was walking along when the wind took off her veil and
carried it to the feet of a young Federal officer. He bent, uplifted the
vagrant mask, and, with his cap held before his eyes, restored it. That
was a very honest, self-denying Yankee. Perhaps he peeped around the
corner of his cap. There was at that time in Richmond a bevy of
marvellously lovely buds, Mattie Ould, Miss Triplett's antithesis, among
the number.
The entire South seems to have been very rich then in buds of beauty and
women of distinction. Or, was it that the fires of adversity brought their
charms and virtues into high relief? Names flitting through my mind are
legion. Richmond's roll has been given often. Junior members of the
Petersburg set were Tabb Bolling, General Rooney Lee's sweetheart (now his
widow); Molly Bannister, General Lee's pet, who was allowed to ride
Traveller; Anne Bannister, Alice Gregory, Betty and Jeannie Osborne, Betty
Cabaniss, Betty and Lucy Page, Sally Hardy, Nannie Cocke, Patty Cowles,
Julia, Mary and Marion Meade, and others who queened it over General Lee's
army and wrought their pretty fingers to the bone for our lads in the
trenches. To go farther afield, Georgia had her youthful "Maid of Athens,"
Jule King, afterwards Mrs. Henry Grady; in Atlanta were the Clayton
sisters, and Maggie Poole, Augusta Hill, Ella Ezzard, Eugenia Goode,
besides a brilliant married circle. In South Carolina were Mrs. James
Chesnut, her sister, Mrs. David R. Williams, and all the fair troop that
figure in her "Diary From Dixie." Louisiana's endless roster might begin
with the Slocomb family, to which General Butler paid official tribute,
recording that "Mrs. Slocomb equipped the crack military company of New
Orleans, the Washington Artillery, in which her son-in-law, Captain David
Urquhart, is an officer." Mrs. Urquhart's daughter, Cora (afterwards Mrs.
James Brown Potter), was, I think, a tiny maiden then. Beloved for her
social charm and her charities, Mrs. Ida B. Richardson, Mrs. Urquhart's
sister, still lives in the Crescent City. There were the Leacock sisters,
Mrs. Andrew Gray and Mrs. Will Howell, the "madonna of New Orleans." There
was the King family, which produced Grace King, author and historian. A
Louisiana beauty was Addie Prescott, whose face and presence gave warrant
of the royal blood of Spain flowing in her veins. In Mississippi was
"Pearl Rivers," afterwards Mrs. Nicholson, good genius of the "Picayune";
and Mary E. Bryan, later the genius of the "Sunny South." Georgia and
Alabama claim Mme. Le Vert, to whose intellect Lamartine paid tribute, and
Augusta Evans, whose "Macaria" ran the blockade in manuscript and came out
up North during the war; that delightful "Belle of the Fifties," Mrs.
Clement C. Clay, is Alabama's own. Besides the "Rose of Texas" (Louise
Wigfall), the Lone Star State has many a winsome "Southern Girl" and woman
to her credit. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor is Virginia's own. Among Florida's fair
was the "Madonna of the Wickliffe sisters," Mrs. Yulee, Senator Yulee's
wife and, presently, Florida's Vice-Regent for the Ladies' Association
of Mt. Vernon. Mrs. Sallie Ward Hunt and Mrs. Sallie Ewing Pope lead a
long list in Kentucky, where Mary Anderson, the actress, was in her tender
teens, and Bertha Honoré (afterwards Mrs. Potter Palmer) was in pinafores.
To Mississippi and Missouri belongs Theodosia Worthington Valliant; and to
Tennessee Betty Vance, whose beauty's fame was world-wide, and Mary
Wright, later Mrs. Treadwell. At a ball given Prince Arthur when in this
country, a wealthy belle was selected to lead with him. The prince
thinking he was to choose his partner, fixed on Mary Wright, exquisite in
poverty's simple white gown, and asked: "May I lead with her?" In North
Carolina were Sophia Portridge, women of the houses of Devereaux, Vance,
Mordecai--but I am not writing the South's "Book of Fair and Noble Women."
I leave out of my list names brilliant as any in it.
[Illustration: MRS. DAVID L. YULEE
(Daughter of Governor Wickliffe, of Kentucky)
She was the wife of Senator Yulee, of Florida, Vice Regent of the Mount
Vernon Association of Florida, and was known as the "Madonna of the
Wickliffe Sisters."]
Of all the fair women I have ever seen, Mary Meade was fairest. No
portrait can do justice to the picture memory holds of her as "Bride" to
D'Arcy Paul's "Bridegroom" in the "Mistletoe Bough," which Mrs. Edwin
Morrison staged so handsomely that her amateurs were besought to "star" in
the interest of good causes. Our fair maids were no idle "lilies of
loveliness." The Meade sisters and others turned talents to account in
mending fallen family fortunes. Maids and matrons labored diligently to
gather our soldier dead into safe resting-places. The "Lyrical Memorial,"
Mrs. Platt's enterprise, like the "Mistletoe Bough" (later produced), was
called for far and wide. The day after presentation in Louisville, the
Federal Commandant sent Mary Meade, who had impersonated the South
pleading sepulture for her sons, a basket of flowers with a live white
dove in the center.
Slowly in Richmond interchange of little human kindnesses between
neighbors established links. General Bartlett, occupying the Haxall house,
who had lost a leg in the war, was "the Yankee who conquered my wife," a
Southerner bears witness. "I came home one day and found him sitting with
her on my steps. He suffered greatly from his old wound, bore it
patiently, and by his whole conduct appealed to her sweet womanliness. His
staff was quiet and orderly."
The beautiful daughter of one family and her feeble grandmother were the
only occupants of the mansion into which General Ord and his wife moved.
The pair had no money and were unable to communicate with absent members
of the household who had been cut off from home by the accidents of war
while visiting in another city. The younger lady was ill with typhoid
fever. The general and his wife were very thoughtful and generous in
supplying ice, brandy, and other essentials and luxuries.
"Under Heaven," the invalid bore grateful witness when recovering, "I owe
my life to General and Mrs. Ord." Her loveliness and helplessness were in
themselves an argument to move a heart of stone to mercy; nevertheless, it
was virtue and grace that mercy was shown.
We made small appeal for sympathy or aid; were too much inclined to the
reverse course, carrying poverty and other troubles with a stiff-neck,
scantily-clad backs, long-suffering stomachs, and pride and conscience
resolved. But--though some form of what we considered oppression was
continually before our eyes--our conquerors, when in our midst, were more
and more won to pity and then to sympathy. Our commandants might be stern
enough when first they came, but when they had lived among us a little
while, they softened and saw things in a new light; and the negroes and
the carpet-baggers complained of them every one, and the authorities at
Washington could not change them fast enough.
Southerners here and in other cities who had Federal boarders were
considered fortunate because of the money and protection secured. In such
cases, there was usually mutual kindness and consideration, politeness
keeping in the background topics on which differences were cruel and
sharp; but the sectional dividing lines prevented free social
intermingling.
In places garrisoned by soldiers of coarser types and commanded by men
less gentlemanly, women sometimes displayed more pronounced
disapprobation. Not always with just occasion, but, again, often with
cause only too grave. At the best, it was not pleasant to have strange men
sauntering, uninvited, into one's yard and through one's house, invading
one's kitchen and entertaining housemaids and cooks. That these men wore
blue uniforms was unfortunate for us and for the uniform. At that time,
the very sight of "army blue" brought terror, anguish and resentment.
Our famous physicians, Maguire and McCaw, were often called to the
Northern sick. Dr. McCaw came once direct to Uncle Randolph from the
Dents, where he had been summoned to Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, and Matoaca
listened curiously to his and her uncle's cordial discussion of General
Grant, who had made friends at the South by his course at Appomattox and
his insistence on the cartel.
A conversation occurring between another of our physicians and a feminine
patient is not without significance. The lady and the doctor's wife had
been friends before the war. "Why has your wife not called upon me,
Doctor?" she asked. "Has she forgotten me?" "No, ma'am," he answered
gently, and then in a low, kindly voice: "But she cannot--yet--forget all
that has happened since you were girls together." "But she should not
treasure it against me individually." "She does not, ma'am. But she cannot
forget--yet. You would understand if you had been in the beleagured land.
If the good women of the North could only imagine themselves in the place
of the women of the South during the last four years and in their place
now!"
She sighed. "I can see only too plainly that they have suffered
unutterably many things that we have been spared. And that they suffer
now. It's natural, too, that they should hate to have us here lording it
over them."
Very different was the spirit of the wife of a Federal officer stationed
at Augusta, Georgia, whose declaration that she hoped to see the day when
"black heels should stand on white necks" startled the State of Georgia.
Many good ladies came South firm in the belief that all Southerners were
negro-beaters, slave-traders, and cut-throats; a folk sadly benighted and
needing tutelage in the humanities; and they were not always politic in
expressing these opinions.
After war, the war spirit always lingers longest in non-combatants--in
women and in men who stayed at home and cheered others on. "The soldiers,"
said General Grant, "were in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms
least humiliating to the Southern people." He wrote Mrs. Grant from
Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865: "The suffering that must exist in the
South ... will be beyond conception; people who speak of further
retaliation and punishment do not conceive of the suffering endured
already, or they are heartless and unfeeling."
General Halleck to General Meade, April 30, 1865: "The Army of the
Potomac have shown the people of Virginia how they would be treated as
enemies. Let them now prove that they know equally well how to treat the
same people as friends."
"The terrible sufferings of the South," our press commented, "have
softened the hearts of the stern warriors of the Armies of the Potomac and
the Cumberland, and while they are calling for pity and justice for us,
politicians and fanatics call for vengeance." General Sherman said: "I do
think some political power might be given to the young men who served in
the rebel army, for they are a better class than the adventurers who have
gone South purely for office."
During an exciting epoch in reconstruction, I was sitting beside a wounded
ex-Confederate in an opera-box, listening to a Southern statesman
haranguing us on our wrongs, real and heavy enough, heaven knows, heavier
than ever those of war had been. "Rather than submit to continued and
intensified humiliations," cried the orator, a magnetic man of the sort
who was carrying Northern audiences to opposite extremes, "we will buckle
on our swords and go to war again!" "It might be observed," remarked my
veteran drily, while I clapped my hands, "that if he should buckle on his
sword and go to war, it would be what he did not do before." I held my
hands quite still during the rest of that speech.
"Our women never were whipped!" I have heard grizzled Confederates say
that proudly. "There is a difference," remarked one hoary-headed hero,
who, after wearing stars on his collar in Confederate service represented
his State in the Federal Congress, "between the political and the feminine
war-spirit. The former is too often for personal gain. Woman's is the
aftermath of anguish. It has taken a long time to reconstruct Southern
women. Some are not reconstructed yet. Suffering was stamped too deep for
effacement. The Northern woman suffered with her Southern sister the agony
of anxiety and bereavement. But the Southern had other woes, of which the
Northern could have no conception. The armies were upon us. There was
devastation. The Southern woman and her loved ones lacked food and
raiment, the enemy appropriating what we had and blocking ways by which
fresh supplies might come; her home was burned over her head. Sometimes
she suffered worse things than starvation, worse things than the
destruction of her home.
"And women could only sit still and endure, while we could fight back.
Women do not understand that war is a matter of business. I had many
friends among the men I fought--splendid, brave fellows. Personally, we
were friends, and professionally, enemies. Women never get that point of
view."
Woman's war spirit is faithfulness and it is absolutely reckless of
personal advantages, as the following incident may illustrate. General
Hunton and General Turner knew each other pretty well, although in their
own persons they had never met. They had commanded opposing forces and
entertained a considerable respect for each other. General Turner was the
first Federal officer that came to Lynchburg, when General Hunton's wife
and youthful son were refugees; he sent Dr. Murray, a Confederate surgeon,
to call upon Mrs. Hunton with the message that she was to suffer for
nothing he could supply. General Hunton was in prison, she knew not where;
was not sure if he were alive or dead.
She had not the feelings her lord entertained for his distinguished
antagonist, and her response was: "Tell General Turner I would not accept
anything from him to save my life!"
Yet she must have been very hungry. She and her youthful son had been
reduced to goober-peas. First, her supplies got down to one piece of
beef-bone. She thought she would have a soup. For a moment, she left her
son to watch the pot, but not to stir the soup. But he thought he would do
well to stir it. So he stirred it, and turned the pot over. That day, she
had nothing for dinner but goober-peas.
"When I came home," said General Hunton, when asked for this story's
sequel, "and she told me about her message to General Turner, I wrote him
the nicest letter I knew how to write, thanking him for his kindness to
the wife of a man whose only claim on him was that he had fought him the
best he knew how.
"I don't think we would ever have had the trouble we had down here," he
continued, "if Northern people had known how things really were. In fact,
I know we would not. Why, I never had any trouble with Northern men in all
my life except that I just fought them all I knew how. And I never had
better friends than among my Republican colleagues in Congress after the
war. They thought all the more of me because I stood up so stoutly for the
old Confederate Cause."
Bonds coming about in the natural, inevitable order through interchange of
the humanities were respected. But where they seemed the outcome of
vanity, frivolity, or coquetry, that was another matter, a very serious
one for the Southern participant. The spirit of the times was morbid, yet
a noble loyalty was behind it.
Anywhere in the land, a Southern girl showing partiality for Federal beaux
came under the ban. If there were nothing else against it, such a course
appeared neither true nor dignified; if it were not treason to our lost
Confederacy, it were treason to our own poor boys in gray to flutter over
to prosperous conquerors.
Nothing could be more sharply defined in lights and shadows than the life
of one beautiful and talented Southern woman who matronised the
entertainments of a famous Federal general at a post in one of the Cotton
States, and thereby brought upon herself such condemnation as made her
wines and roses cost her dear. Yet perhaps such affiliations lessened the
rigors of military government for her State.
One of the loveliest of Atlanta's gray-haired dames tells me: "I am
unreconstructed yet--Southern to the backbone." Yet she speaks of
Sherman's godless cohorts as gently as if she were mother of them all. Her
close neighbour was a Yankee encampment. The open ground around her was
dotted with tents.
There were "all sorts" among the soldiers. None gave insolence or
violence. Pilfering was the great trouble; the rank and file were "awfully
thievish." Her kitchen, as usual with Southern kitchens of those days, was
a separate building. If for a moment she left her pots and ovens to answer
some not-to-be-ignored demand from the house, she found them empty on her
return, her dinner gone--a most serious thing when it was as by the skin
of her teeth that she got anything at all to cook and any fuel to cook
with; and when, moreover, cooking was new and tremendously hard work. "We
could not always identify the thief; when we could, we were afraid to
incur the enmity of the men. Better have our things stolen than worse
happen us, as might if officers punished those men on our report. I kept a
still tongue in my head."
Though a wife and mother, she was yet in girlhood's years, very soft and
fair; had been "lapped in luxury," with a maid for herself, a nurse for
her boy, a servant to do this, that, or the other thing, for her. She
thus describes her first essay at the family wash. There was a fine well
in her yard, and men came to get water. A big-hearted Irishman caught the
little lady struggling over soap-suds. It looked as if she would never get
those clothes clean. For one thing, when she tried to wring them, they
were streaked with blood from her arms and hands; she had peculiarly fine
and tender skin.
"Faith an' be jabbers!" said Pat, "an' what is it that you're thryin' to
do?" "Go away, and let me alone!" "Faith, an' if ye don't lave off clanin'
thim garmints, they'll be that doirty--" "Go 'way!" "Sure, me choild, an'
if ye'll jis' step to the other soide of the tub without puttin' me to the
inconvaniance--" He was about to pick her up in his mighty hands. She
moved and dropped down, swallowing a sob.
"Sure, an' it's as good a washerwoman as ivver wore breeches I am," said
Pat. "An' that's what I've larned in the army." In short order, he had all
the clothes hanging snow-white on the line; before he left, he cut enough
wood for her ironing. "I'm your Bridget ivery wash-day that comes 'roun',"
he said as he swung himself off. He was good as his word. This brother-man
did her wash every week. "Sure, an' it's a shame it is," he would say,
"the Government fadin' the lazy nagurs an' God an' the divvil can't make
'em wur-r-k."
Through Tony, her son, another link was formed 'twixt late enemies. It was
hard for mothers busy at housework to keep track of young children;
without fences for definement of yard-limits, and with all old landmarks
wiped out, it was easy for children to wander beyond bearings. A lost
child was no rarity. One day General and Mrs. Saxton drove up in their
carriage, bringing Tony. Tony had lost himself; fright, confusion, lack of
food, had made him ill; he had been brought to the attention of the
general and his wife, who, instead of sending the child home by a
subordinate, came with him themselves, the lady holding the pale little
fellow in her arms, comforting and soothing him. Thus began friendship
between Mrs. S. and Mrs. Saxton; not only small Tony was now pressed to
take airings with Yankees, but his mother. The general did all he could to
make life easier for her; had wood hauled and cut for her. The Southern
woman's reduction to poverty and menial tasks mortified him, as they
mortified many another manly blue-coat, witness of the reduction. "It is
pitiable and it is all wrong," said one officer to Mrs. S. "Our people up
North simply don't know how things are down here." A lady friend of Mrs.
S.'s tells me that she knew a Northern officer--(giving his name)--who
resigned his commission because he found himself unable to witness the
sufferings of Southern women and children, and have a hand in imposing
them.
Rulers who came under just condemnation as "military satraps" governing in
a democracy in time of peace by the bayonet, when divorced from the
exercise of their office, won praise as men. Thus, General Meade's rule in
Georgia is open to severest criticism, yet Ellen Meade Clarke, who saw him
as the man and not as the oppressor, says: "I had just married and gone to
Atlanta when Sherman ordered the citizens out, which order I hastily
obeyed, leaving everything in my Peachtree cottage home. Was among the
first to return. Knew all the generals in command; they were all
neighbors; General Meade, who was sent to see me by some one bearing our
name, proved a good and faithful friend and, on his death-bed, left me his
prayer-book."
[Illustration: MISS MARY MEADE, OF PETERSBURG, VA.
She was known far and wide for her loveliness of person and character, her
intellectual gifts and social graces.]
LOVERS AND PRAYERS