MATER REDIVIVA
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
[By J. L. Underwood.]
For twenty years after the close of the war most of the Southern
States, through the bayonet-enforced amendments to the Constitution
and the carpet-bag negro governments established under them, were kept
under military rule. The men met the awful responsibility and their
hideous trials with an amazing courage and sought to counteract, in
every possible way, the work of Congress at Washington and the work of
the Union Leagues and other secret societies among the negroes at
home, and to build up the South in spite of the demoralization of
labor. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret vigilance committee, did much good
in terrifying the carpet-bag deposits and breaking up the secret armed
midnight meetings of the negroes. Rowdy imitators of the Ku Klux
afterwards in many instances did much harm.
But the women kept on at work. They have never faltered, and never
shown any weariness. Thousands left penniless who were once
wealthy, took up whatever work came to hand. The writer knew the
daughter-in-law of a wealthy Congressman and the daughter of a
governor of two States to plow her own garden with a mule. He saw
all over the country the members of the oldest and wealthiest
families of the Atlantic coast teaching school, even far in the
west. Not a murmur escaped their lips. They cheered each other as
they strengthened the nerves of the men.
But they kept up their work for the Confederate soldiers, and keep it
up to this day. Soldiers' graves were everywhere looked after.
Memorial associations were organized all over the South. The two great
societies of Richmond, the Hollywood and the Oakwood, each looking
after thousands of graves, the names of whose occupants are unknown,
are doing the most sublime work the world ever saw. The Southern women
soon extended their efforts to building Confederate monuments all over
the South, providing soldiers' homes in the various States and
securing what pensions the Southern States could afford. As long as
they live they work for the cause they loved; when they die their
spirit lives on in their worthy daughters.
THE EMPTY SLEEVE
[By Dr. G. W. Bagby.]
[In Living Writers of the South, pages 28-29.]
Tom, old fellow, I grieve to see
That sleeve hanging loose at your side.
The arm you lost was worth to me
Every Yankee that ever died.
But you don't mind it at all.
You swear you've a beautiful stump,
And laugh at the damnable ball.
Tom, I knew you were always a trump!
A good right arm, a nervy hand,
A wrist as strong as a sapling oak,
Buried deep in the Malvern sand--
To laugh at that is a sorry joke.
Never again your iron grip
Shall I feel in my shrinking palm.
Tom, Tom, I see your trembling lip.
How on earth can I be calm?
Well! the arm is gone, it is true;
But the one nearest the heart
Is left, and that's as good as two.
Tom, old fellow, what makes you start?
Why, man, she thinks that empty sleeve
A badge of honor; so do I
And all of us,--I do believe
The fellow is going to cry.
"She deserves a perfect man," you say.
You, "not worth her in your prime."
Tom, the arm that has turned to clay
Your whole body has made sublime;
For you have placed in the Malvern earth
The proof and the pledge of a noble life,
And the rest, henceforward of higher worth,
Will be dearer than all to your wife.
I see the people in the street
Look at your sleeve with kindling eyes;
And know you, Tom, there's nought so sweet,
As homage shown in mute surmise.
Bravely your arm in battle strove,
Freely for freedom's sake you gave it;
It has perished, but a nation's love
In proud remembrance will save it.
As I look through the coming years,
I see a one-armed married man;
A little woman, with smiles and tears,
Is helping as hard as she can
To put on his coat, and pin his sleeve,
Tie his cravat, and cut his food,
And I say, as these fancies I weave,
"That is Tom, and the woman he wooed."
The years roll on, and then I see
A wedding picture, bright and fair;
I look closer, and it's plain to me
That is Tom, with the silver hair.
He gives away the lovely bride,
And the guests linger, loth to leave
The house of him in whom they pride,--
Brave Tom, old Tom, with the empty sleeve.
THE OLD HOOPSKIRT
[J. L. Underwood.]
The only ante-bellum property which Sherman and Thad Stevens left the
Confederate woman was her old hoopskirt. They could neither confiscate
nor burn, nor set this free. Like slavery, it was so closely connected
with her life that it cannot be ignored in her history.
The Southern woman always kept well up with the latest fashions in
dress. In the fifties the modistes of Paris, whose word, however
absurd, was law to the women of the civilized world, sent out the
famous hoopskirt. It was not an article of dress, but a mere
contrivance for sustaining and exhibiting the clothes that were worn
over it. It was made of a succession of small but strong steel wires
bent into circles and fastened to each other by cross bars of tape.
The lower hoop was usually from four to eight feet in diameter,
according to taste, and the top one but little larger than the woman's
waist, from which the whole net-work was hung. It held whatever
clothes were put over it in the shape of a church bell or a horizontal
section of a balloon.
Like all new fashions, some carried this one to grotesque extremes.
One of the bon-ton set of Columbia, S. C., in 1858 was the remarkably
beautiful and charming Mrs. ----, the wife of one of the professors in
South Carolina College. It is a fact that, on average sidewalks in
that beautiful city, wherever she was met by gentlemen they had to
step into the street and give the whole pavement to her tremendous
skirt. Most of our Southern beauties were more merciful.
When the hoopskirt first came, it looked as if Paris had sent out the
greatest of all the absurdities. The men laughed, the boys jeered, and
the newspapers poured out invectives against the monster. The country
preachers anathematized it and urged its excommunication from the
church. But the hoopskirt came to stay. _Veni, vidi, vici._ It whipped
the fight, and when the war between the States came on it was in
control of the Southern female wardrobe. It enlisted for "three years
or the war." It clung to our mothers like Ruth to Naomi. "Entreat me
not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither
thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge." It proved
a godsend on account of the Federal blockade of the ports. Articles of
clothing soon became scarce, and when the silks had all gone into
flags and the gingham into shirts for the soldiers, with a dainty
homespun skirt stretched over the hoopskirt, our mothers looked like
they were dressed whether they were or not.
It was a good umbrella as far as it went and it was a special
convenience to the refugee women who had to camp in the woods. At
night a short pole was set in the ground with a short horizontal cross
piece tacked across its top. Over this was stretched the hoopskirt and
over it a sheet, and, behold a beautiful, cozy Sibley tent for two or
three children to sleep under. It was our mother's faithful friend and
companion to the end of the war. Like the old soldier's sword it came
out very much battered and worn by long service. Like the old soldier
himself, it had been wounded and broken and mended and spliced until
it was hardly its former self. In their fatigue outfit our mothers
laid aside the hoopskirt and tucked up what was left. But on dress
parade, in meeting, company, and attending church it was her constant
friend and companion. The South embalms in its memories the deeds of
its men and the toil of its women. Father's old sword and John's gray
jacket are sacred heirlooms. So are the old spinning wheel and hand
loom,
"And e'en the old hoopskirt which hung on the wall,
The old hoopskirt
The steel-ribbed shirt,
The old hoopskirt which hung on the wall."
One thing in the management of the hoopskirt the men never could
understand. How in the world could all those steel wires be bundled
and controlled when a woman rode horseback or had to be packed in a
buggy or carriage?
It was always a like wonder how the women could dance so nimbly and
gracefully with long trains and never get tripped or tangled in them.
Our women managed the trains and the hoopskirts just as tactfully and
thoroughly and gracefully as they did their hard-headed husbands and
silly sweethearts. How they did it nobody can tell, but they did it.
About the very last days of the war one of these old hoopskirts
played a conspicuous part in a tragedy in the suburbs of Camilla,
then a very small village, the county seat of Mitchell County, Ga. A
farmer by the name of Taylor lived near the Hoggard Swamp. He had
a friend living in the town by the name of O'Brien. Both of them
often visited a very thrifty widow by the name of Woolley. On her
disappearance Taylor had put out the report that she had moved back
to South Carolina, but the truth was he had murdered her for her money
and buried her body under some peach trees near the swamp. No
suspicion was aroused until Taylor returned from a trip to Albany
without O'Brien, who had gone off with him, and a report came down
from Albany that O'Brien's dead body had been found near there in the
woods. Then suspicion put in its work. Murder was in the air, but
nowhere else as yet. People held their breath. Some women late one
afternoon happened to pass the peach trees mentioned and noticed
the suspicious looking fresh soil under them. As soon as they reached
home they reported the circumstance and a party was soon made up to
go that night and make an examination. The women guided them to the
spot. They were afraid to make a bright fire and they used only a dim
light by burning corn cobs. Their blood ran cold when in a very few
moments they were satisfied that they were digging into the poor
woman's grave. Suddenly on the quick removal of a shovel or two more
of dirt, up flew a woman's dress and white underclothing pretty
high in the air. Then there was a stampede for life. Terror seized
the men's very bones. After a while they mustered courage enough
to return and find that the woman was dead and her hoopskirt had been
weighted down by the soil and as soon as this was sufficiently
removed, it flew up with all its fearful elasticity. There was
life in it even in the grave. Taylor was tried, convicted, and hung.
THE POLITICAL CRIMES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[By J. L. Underwood.]
The first of the great crimes of the last century was the great
rebellion of the Northern States against the Federal constitutional
Union, "the best government the world ever saw." Nine of these States
in solemn legislative action, in the fifties, utterly repudiated their
contract in the Federal Constitution. They nullified the acts of
Congress and repudiated and defied the decisions of the Supreme
Court.
This rebellion at the North broke up "the glorious Union of our
fathers," and drove the South, like poor Hagar, into the wilderness to
look out for herself, without a charge from any quarter that a
Southern State had committed one single act in violation of Federal
law or in hostility to the Constitution. Then came the second great
crime, the crime so vigorously denounced at the time by William Lloyd
Garrison, the most consistent and the most heroic of the Northern
Abolitionists, Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, the crime of
coercion of the weaker by the stronger States, the military invasion
of the South under the prostituted flag of the Union, and the final
subjugation of her people by fire and sword. _O tempora! O mores!_
The acts of congress for years after the Southern army had honorably
laid down its arms and gone home to plow and plant the fields make the
blackest pages in the history of modern times. The writer dreads to
put in print his estimate of such a political monster as Thad Stevens,
the misanthropic genius of reconstruction, the Robespierre of America.
Robespierre's guillotine cut off the heads of its victims. Thad
Stevens's guillotine cut off all hopes from Southern hearts. He avowed
it his purpose to exterminate the Southern white people, to confiscate
their property into the hands of the negroes, and with these negroes
to keep the country forever under the dominion of his party. According
to him and his followers to this day this party of (so-called) high
moral ideas must be kept in power no matter what crimes are committed
in securing the ascendency. This is political Jesuitism run mad.
The saddest, strangest part of the history is that it was twenty years
before the Northern people came to their reason and put a check on
this ruinous fratricidal policy. If the writer shall go to his grave
with a holy horror of the bald malignity, the reckless folly, the
cowardly spite, the sweeping curse of the reconstruction measures of
Thad. Stevens and his Congress, he will find himself in good company.
He once heard the great and good Dr. John A. Broadus, of the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, say, "I can easily forgive and forget
the war. It was war, and all the wrongs done in it died away with the
cannon's roar. But I find it so hard to forgive the excuseless wrongs
done to the Southern people since the war."
Dr. Broadus was a Southern man, but Rev. Dr. H. M. Field, the
fair-minded and patriotic author of "Bright Skies and Dark Shadows,"
is not a Southern man. Hear what he says in his book:
In South Carolina and the Gulf States negro government had a clean
sweep, and if we are to believe the records of the times, it was a
period of corruption such as had never been known in the history
of the country. The blacks having nothing to lose, were ready to
vote to impose any tax, or to issue any bonds of town, country or
State provided they had a share in the booty; and this negro
government manipulated by the carpet baggers, ran riot over the
South. It was chaos come again. The former masters were governed
by their servants, while the latter were governed by a set of
adventurers and plunderers. The history of these days is one which
we cannot recall without indignation and shame. After a time the
moral sense of the North was so shocked by their performances that
a Republican administration had to withdraw its proconsuls, when
things resumed their former condition and the management of
affairs came back into the old hands.
These national crimes which so woefully afflicted the people of the
South after peace was made were:
1. The refusal to carry out Mr. Lincoln's cherished plan of
reconstruction by immediate readmission of seceding States after an
orderly and legal abolition of slavery.
2. The sudden emancipation of millions of African slaves. Gradual
emancipation would have been so much better for their interests and
for the welfare of the country.
3. The conferring of civil rights so early upon the freedmen. If they
had not been made citizens they could have been colonized in due time
and provided for, as the Indians have been, with land and homes.
4. Enfranchisement of these grossly ignorant Africans.
5. Disfranchisement of the best people of the South.
6. Arming the blacks and disarming the white people.
7. The un-American crime of uniting church and state and the
employment of a religious society to carry out directly the schemes of
a political faction. Jesus Christ never authorized any such work. He
never gave the least authorization of any church machinery through
which such a union could be effected. God wants the good lives of men,
and not compact and imposing church organizations. They can be so
easily perverted to unholy purposes and made so effective in
destroying human liberty and crushing human rights. The union of
church and state was the curse of the middle ages and the blight of
modern Europe.
It was an ominous day for America and a woeful day for the South,
when, upon the enfranchisement of the negroes, the politicians in
power and the fanatical Northern Methodist Episcopal Church organized
and transplanted in the South the African Methodist Episcopal Church
and employed it directly in manipulating the votes of the ignorant
negroes. The great iron wheel controlling the whole machine was put
into the hands of a political boss committee in Washington. Just
within this was the wheel turned by an absolute bishop in each State.
The most malignant of all the Southern negro politicians, Bishop H. M.
Turner, had the control of the Georgia wheel and turns it to this day.
Then came the smaller wheels, turned by the presiding elder in each
Congressional district, enclosing the little wheels in the hands of
the preachers and circuit riders and stewards. The ignorant negroes
were wound tightly by the ropes into a solid mass, and voted like
slaves by the officers of the new imported Northern church and the
strikers of the Union League. It was enough to make a patriot despair
of the country and a Christian to despair of religion to witness these
scenes. It made the white people of the South get together in
self-defence. It inevitably set race against race in politics. This
slimy trail of this union of church and state has done sad work for
the South and dangerous work for the whole country. The church iron
wheel organized a solid mass of ignorant negro voters on one side of
the Southern ballot box. This necessitated a "solid South" of white
voters on the other side.
8. Demoralizing the negroes for generations by making them believe
themselves to be special wards of the nation and holding out to them
the delusive promise of "forty acres and a mule" as a pension for
slavery and a reward for party loyalty.
9. Taking away by act of Congress, without a dollar of compensation,
the slave property of orphans, widows and Union men, the property
recognized by the Constitution of the government.
10. By force of bayonets keeping in the Southern high places of power
the carpet-bag adventurer from the North and the irresponsible,
unprincipled scalawag who had for the sake of office turned his back
upon his native South.
11. Unlawful confiscation of Southern lands, much of it belonging to
orphans and widows.
12. Enormous and unjust tax on cotton, at that time the only
marketable product of the Southern farms.
These were the woes which the "Reconstruction" measures of the Federal
Congress made for our Southern people, a burden mountain-high, Ossa on
Pelion, Pelion upon Ossa. But grimly, patiently, bravely did our men
bear up under it. Political crimes always hurt the women more than the
men. Our women stood by and cheered and comforted and helped as only
such women can help through all the toil, the gloom and wrongs of
those dark days. God bless their memories!
BRAVE TO THE LAST
[Eggleston's Recollections, pages 73-76.]
But if the cheerfulness of the women during the war was remarkable,
what shall we say of the way in which they met its final failure and
the poverty that came with it? The end of the war completed the ruin
which its progress had wrought. Women who had always lived in luxury,
and whose labors and sufferings during the war were lightened by the
consciousness that in suffering and laboring they were doing their
part toward the accomplishment of the end upon which all hearts were
set, were now compelled to face not temporary but permanent poverty,
and to endure, without a motive or a sustaining purpose, still sorer
privations than they had known in the past. The country was exhausted,
and nobody could foresee any future but one of abject wretchedness.
Everybody was poor except the speculators who had fattened upon the
necessities of the women and children, and so poverty was essential to
anything like good repute. The return of the soldiers made some sort
of social festivity necessary, and "starvation parties" were given,
at which it was understood that the givers were wholly unable to set
out refreshments of any kind. In the matter of dress, too, the general
poverty was recognized, and every one went clad in whatever he or she
happened to have. The want of means became a jest, and nobody mourned
over it; while all were laboring to repair their wasted fortunes as
they best could. And all this was due solely to the unconquerable
cheerfulness of the Southern women. The men came home moody, worn out,
discouraged, and but for the influence of woman's cheerfulness the
Southern States might have fallen into a lethargy from which they
could not have recovered for generations. Such prosperity as they have
since achieved is largely due to the courage and spirit of their noble
women.
SALLIE DURHAM
[From Life In Dixie, pages 304-308, by Mary A. H. Gay.]
Dr. Durham came to Decatur, Ga., in 1859. Well do I remember the
children--two handsome sons, John and William--two pretty brown-eyed
girls, Sarah and Catherine.
The Durham residence, which was on Sycamore Street, then stood just
eastward of where Colonel G. W. Scott now lives. The rear of the house
faced the site where the depot had been before it was burned by the
Federals, the distance being about 350 yards. Hearing an incoming
train, Sallie went to the dining-room window to look at the cars, as
she had learned in some way that they contained Federal troops. While
standing at the window, resting against the sash, she was struck by a
bullet fired from the train. It was afterwards learned that the cars
were filled with negro troops on their way to Savannah, who were
firing off their guns in a random, reckless manner. The ball entered
the left breast of this dear young girl, ranging obliquely downward,
coming out just below the waist, and lodging in the door of a safe,
or cupboard, which stood on the opposite side of the room. This old
safe, with the mark of the ball, is still in the village. The wounded
girl fell, striking her head against the dining table, but arose, and,
walking up a long hall, she threw open the door of her father's room,
calling to him in a voice of distress.
Springing from the bed, he said: "What is it, my child?"
"Oh, father," she exclaimed, "the Yankees have killed me!"
Every physician in the village and city and her father's three
brothers were summoned, but nothing could be done except to alleviate
her sufferings. She could only lie on her right side, with her left
arm in a sling suspended from the ceiling. Every attention was given
by relatives and friends. Her grandmother Durham came and brought with
her the old family nurse. Sallie's schoolmates and friends were
untiring in their attentions.
During the week that her life slowly ebbed away, there was another who
ever lingered near her, a sleepless and tireless watcher, a young man
of a well known family, to whom this sweet young girl was engaged to
be married. Sallie was shot on Friday at 7.30 A. M., and died the
following Friday at 3.30 A. M. General Stephenson was in command of
the Federal post at Atlanta. He was notified of this tragedy, and sent
an officer to investigate. This officer refused to take anybody's word
that Sallie had been shot by a United States soldier from the train;
but, dressed in full uniform, with spur and sabre rattling upon the
bare floor, he advanced to the bed where the dying girl lay, and threw
back the covering "to see if she had really been shot." This intrusion
almost threw her into a spasm. This officer and the other at Atlanta
promised to do all in their power to bring the guilty party to
justice, but nothing ever came of the promise, so far as we know.
As a singular coincidence, as well as an illustration of the lovely
character of Sallie, I will relate a brief incident given by the
gifted pen already quoted: "One of the most vivid pictures in my
memory is that of Sallie Durham emptying her pail of blackberries
into the hands of Federal prisoners on a train that had just stopped
for a moment at Decatur, in 1863. We had been gathering berries at
Moss's Hill, and stopped on our way home for the train to pass."
THE NEGRO AND THE MIRACLE
[In Grady's New South, pages 97-118.]
What of the negro? This of him. I want no better friend than the black
boy who was raised by my side, and who is now trudging patiently, with
downcast eyes and shambling figure, through his lowly way in life. I
want no sweeter music than the crooning of my old "mammy," now dead
and gone to rest, as I heard it when she held me in her loving arms
and bending her old black face above me stole the cares from my brain,
and led me smiling into sleep. I want no truer soul than that which
moved the trusty slave, who for four years, while my father fought
with the armies that barred his freedom, slept every night at my
mother's chamber door, holding her and her children as safe as if her
husband stood guard, and ready to lay down his humble life for her
household. History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in
the South during the war. Of five hundred negroes to a single white
man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked
in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshalled,
the black battalions moved patiently to the fields in the morning to
feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night
gathered anxiously at the big house to "hear the news from marster,"
though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring.
Everywhere humble and kindly; the body-guard of the helpless; the
observant friend; the silent sentry in his lowly cabin; the shrewd
counsellor; and when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave.
A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern army, but not
one was lighted. When the master, going to a war in which slavery was
involved, said to his slave, "I leave my home and loved ones in your
charge," the tenderness between man and master stood disclosed. And
when the slave held that charge sacred through storm and temptation he
gave new meaning to faith and loyalty. I rejoice that when freedom
came to him after years of waiting, it was all the sweeter, because
the black hands from which the shackles fell were stainless of a
single crime against the helpless ones confided to his care.
This friendliness, the most important factor of the problem, the
saving factor now as always, the North has never, and it appears will
never, take account of. It explains that otherwise inexplicable
thing--the fidelity and loyalty of the negro during the war to the
women and children left in his care. Had "Uncle Tom's Cabin" portrayed
the habit rather than the exception of slavery, the return of the
Confederate armies could not have stayed the horrors of arson and
murder their departure would have invited. Instead of that, witness
the miracle of the slave in loyalty closing the fetters about his own
limbs, maintaining the families of those who fought against his
freedom, and at night on the far-off battlefield searching among the
carnage for his young master, that he might lift the dying head to his
humble breast and with rough hands wipe the blood away and bend his
tender ear to catch the last words for the old ones at home, wrestling
meanwhile in agony and love, that in vicarious sacrifice he would have
laid down his life in his master's stead. This friendliness, thank
God, survived the lapse of years, the interruption of factions and the
violence of campaigns in which the bayonet fortified and the drum-beat
inspired. Though unsuspected in slavery, it explains the miracle of
1864; though not yet confessed, it must explain the miracle of 1888.
GEORGIA REFUGEES
[Mrs. W. H. Felton, in Georgia Land and People, pages 404-405.]
From the time that Oglethorpe planted his colony upon Yamacraw Bluff,
Georgia has never passed through such an ordeal as the present.
Nine-tenths of her sons were practically disfranchised because they
had served the Southern Confederacy, and all the conditions of life
were new; their servants were no longer subject to their control, and
most of their property was scattered to the four winds of heaven. It
tested the blood that had come down to them from Cavalier and
Huguenot, from Scotch and Irish ancestry. The private life of many
Georgians for the first few years after the war beggars description;
but the women rose to the occasion.
The surrender found a gentle, shrinking Georgia woman on the
Florida line, nearly four hundred miles from her luxurious home, from
which she had fled in haste as Sherman "marched to the sea." The
husband was with General Lee in Virginia. The last tidings came
from Petersburg--before Appomattox--and his fate was uncertain.
Hiring a dusky driver, with his old army mule and wagon, she loaded
the latter with the remnant of goods and chattels that were left to
her, and, placing her four children on top, this brave woman
trudged the entire distance on foot, cheering, guiding, and
protecting the driver and her little ones in the tedious journey.
Under an August sun through sand and dust she plodded along,
footsore and anxious, until she reached the dismantled home and
restored her little stock of earthly goods under their former
shelter. When her soldier husband had walked from Virginia to
Georgia, he found, besides his noble wife and precious children,
the nucleus of a new start in life, glorified by woman's courage and
fidelity under a most trying ordeal. For a twelve-month the
exigencies of their situation deprived her of a decent pair of
shoes; still she toiled in the kitchen, the garden, and, perhaps,
the open fields, without a repining word or complaining murmur. The
same material is found in a steel rail as in the watch spring, and
the only difference between the soldier and his wife was physical
strength.
This was no exceptional case. The hardships of Georgia women were
extreme and long-continued.
THE NEGROES AND NEW FREEDOM
[In Last Ninety Days of the War, pages 186-187.]
The negroes, however, behaved much better, on the whole, than Northern
letter-writers represent them to have done. Indeed, I do not know a
race more studiously misrepresented than they have been and are at
this present time. They behaved well during the war; if they had not,
it could not have lasted eighteen months. They showed a fidelity and a
steadiness which speaks not only well for themselves but well for
their training and the system under which they lived. And when their
liberators arrived, there was no indecent excitement on receiving the
gift of liberty, nor displays of impertinence to their masters. In one
or two instances they gave "missus" to understand that they desired
present payment for their services in gold and silver, but, in
general, the tide of domestic life flowed on externally as smoothly as
ever. In fact, though of course few at the North will believe me, I am
sure that they felt for their masters, and secretly sympathized with
their ruin. They knew that they were absolutely penniless and
conquered; and though they were glad to be free, yet they did not turn
round, as New England letter-writers have represented, to exult over
their owners, nor exhibit the least trace of New England malignity. So
the bread was baked in those latter days, the clothes were washed and
ironed, and the baby was nursed as zealously as ever, though both
parties understood at once that the service was voluntary. The Federal
soldiers sat a good deal in the kitchens; but the division being
chiefly composed of Northwestern men, who had little love for the
negro, (indeed I heard some d----n him as the cause of the war, and
say that they would much rather put a bullet through an Abolitionist
than through a Confederate soldier,) there was probably very little
incendiary talk and instructions going on. In all of which, compared
with other localities we were much favored.
THE CONFEDERATE MUSEUM IN THE CAPITAL OF THE CONFEDERACY
This house, built for a gentleman's private residence, was thus
occupied until 1862, when Mr. Lewis Crenshaw, the owner, sold it to
the city of Richmond for the use of the Confederate government. The
city, having furnished it, offered it to Mr. Davis, but he refused to
accept the gift. The Confederate government then rented it for the
"Executive Mansion" of the Confederate States. President Davis lived
here with his family, using the house both in a private and official
capacity. The present "Mississippi" room was his study, where he often
held important conferences with his great leaders. In this house, amid
the cares of state, joy and sorrow visited him; "Winnie," the
cherished daughter, was born here, and here "little Joe" died from the
effects of a fall from the back porch. It remained Mr. Davis's home
until the evacuation of the city of Richmond. He left with the
government officials on the night of April 2, 1865. On the morning of
April 3, 1865, General Godfrey Witzel, in command of the Federal
troops, upon entering the city, made this house his headquarters. It
was thus occupied by the United States Government during the five
years Virginia was under military rule, and called "District No. 1."
In the present "Georgia" room, a day or two after the evacuation,
Mr. Lincoln was received. He was in the city only a few hours. When
at last the military was removed and the house vacated, the city at
once took possession, using it as a public school for more than twenty
years. In order to make it more comfortable for school purposes, a
few unimportant alterations were made. It was the first public
school in the city. War had left its impress on the building, and
the constant tread of little feet did almost as much damage. It was
with great distress that our people (particularly the women), saw
the "White House of the Confederacy" put to such uses, and rapidly
falling into decay. To save it from destruction, a mass-meeting was
called to take steps for its restoration. A society was formed,
called the "Confederate Memorial Literary Society," whose aim was the
preservation of the mansion. Their first act was to petition the
city to place it in their hands, to be used as a memorial to
President Davis and a museum of those never-to-be-forgotten days,
'61-'65. It was amazing to see the wide-spread enthusiasm aroused by
the plan. With as little delay as possible the city, acting
through alderman and council, made the deed of conveyance, which was
ratified by the then Mayor of Richmond, the Hon. J. Taylor Ellyson.
The dilapidation of the entire property was extreme, but to its
restoration and preservation the society had pledged itself. They had
no money--the city had already given its part--what could be done? To
raise the needed funds it was decided to hold a "memorial bazaar" in
Richmond for the joint benefit of the museum and the monument to the
private soldier and sailor.
All through the South the plan of the museum and the bazaar was
heartily endorsed; so that donations of every kind poured in. Each
State of the Confederacy was represented by a booth, with the name,
shield, and flag of her State. The whole sum realized was $31,400.
Half of this was given to complete the monument to the private
soldiers and sailors now standing on Libby Hill, and the other half
went to the museum.
The partition walls were already of brick, and the whole house had
been strongly and well built, but the entire building was now made
fireproof, and every other possible precaution taken for its safety.
In every particular the old house in its entirety was preserved, the
wood work (replaced by iron) being used for souvenirs. The repairs
were so extensive that the building was not ready for occupancy until
late in 1895.
On February 22, 1896, the dedication service was held, and the museum
formally thrown open to the public.
But the house was entirely empty. Rapidly the memorials were gathered
from each loyal State and placed in their several rooms. From start to
finish the whole work has been free-will offering to the beloved
cause.
The treasury had been nearly exhausted by the restoration of the
building. The current expenses were met only by the strictest economy,
and largely carried on by faith. In the past nine years much has been
accomplished. The institution is free from debt; and the museum is now
widely known. But much lies ahead in the ideal the patriotic women
have set before them and the work grows larger, more important and far
reaching as it is approached. Such is the interest felt in the museum
that during the past year they have had 7,459 visitors, of whom 3,717
were from the North. It is by these door-fees that the expenses are
met.
It would be quite impossible to enumerate all the articles of interest
to be found here. The memorials gathered are not only interesting in
themselves, but invaluable for the truth and lessons which they teach.
Historians in search of information can here obtain original data in
regard to the "War between the States." The United States Government
has already made use of these records for its new Navy Register. Each
confederate State is hereby represented by a room, set apart in
special honor of her sons and their deeds. A regent in that State has
it in charge, and is responsible for its contents and appearance. A
vice-regent (as far as possible a native of that State, but residing
in Richmond) gives her personal supervision to the room and its needs.
The labor is incessant, and would be impossible, but for the fact that
it is impelled by a sense of sacred love and duty.
Of the women of the Confederacy, of our brave and uncomplaining
soldiers, of their great leaders, as well as of our illustrious chief,
it well may be said:
"Would you see their monument?
Look around."
_The Mary DeRenne Collection_
The late Dr. Everard DeRenne bequeathed to the Georgia room "The Mary
DeRenne (of Georgia) collection." Mrs. Mary DeRenne, of Savannah,
Ga., was his mother, an enthusiastic Georgian, and patriotic
Confederate. Soon after the close of the war between the States,
finding that an officer of the Northern army was making a collection
of Southern relics, she felt that there were few in the South who had
the means to do the same, but that it ought to be done. She determined
at once to begin, and while life lasted she spared neither effort nor
expense in gathering relics, books, papers, and all that added to
their value. Mrs. DeRenne soon found that persons were glad to put
together what made history, when isolated relics or papers told so
little. The result tells an absorbing story.
Miss C. N. Usina, of Savannah, Georgia, presented in 1903 a liberal
addition to this library.
FEDERAL DECORATION DAY--ADOPTION FROM OUR MEMORIAL
[Taken from Confederate Dead in Hollywood Cemetery, page 7.]
MRS. JOHN A. LOGAN WITNESSED OBSERVANCE IN RICHMOND AND MADE THE
SUGGESTION.
The New York _Herald_ contains the following contribution from Mrs.
John A. Logan, in which she says that the "Decoration Day" in the
North was an adoption from the South's "Memorial Day."
_To the editor of the Herald_:
In the spring of 1868, General Logan and I were invited to visit the
battle-grounds of the South with a party of friends. As certain
important matters kept him from joining the party, however, I went
alone, and the trip proved a most interesting and impressive one. The
South had been desolated by the war. Everywhere signs of privation and
devastation were constantly presenting themselves to us. The graves of
the soldiers, however, seemed as far as possible the objects of the
greatest care and attention.
One graveyard that struck me as being especially pathetic was in
Richmond. The graves were new, and just before our visit there had
been a "Memorial Day" observance, and upon each grave had been placed
a small Confederate flag and wreaths of beautiful flowers. The scene
seemed most impressive to me, and when I returned to Washington I
spoke of it to the General and said I wished there could be concerted
action of this kind all over the North for the decoration of the
graves of our own soldiers. The General thought it a capital idea, and
with enthusiasm set out to secure its adoption.
At that time he was commander-in-chief of the Grand Army. The next day
he sent for Adjutant-General Chipman, and they conferred as to the
best means of beginning a general observance. On the 5th day of May in
that year the historic order was put out. General Logan often spoke of
the issuing of this order as the proudest act of his life.
It was marvelous how popular the idea became. The papers all over the
land copied the order, and the observance was a general one. The
memorial ceremonies that took place at Arlington that year were
perfectly inspiring to all the old soldiers. Generals Grant, Sherman,
and Sheridan and many of those who have since passed away attended the
first solemn observance of that day.
MRS. JOHN A. LOGAN.
THE DAUGHTERS AND THE UNITED DAUGHTERS OF THE CONFEDERACY
The following valuable bit of history is taken from the Macon (Ga.)
_Telegraph's_ account of the meeting of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy in Macon, October, 1905.
"In the presentation to Mrs. L. H. Raines of a gold pin, a testimonial
from the United Daughters of Georgia, a very pretty climax to the
morning's session was reached. The speech with which Miss Mildred
Rutherford presented the pin in behalf of the Daughters will be
memorable to every one present, for it was touched with emotion and
instruction as a bit of history. Miss Rutherford explained that when
the war between the States ended, the Ladies' Aid Societies resolved
themselves into associations whose work it was to care for the graves
of the fallen heroes and to collect the bodies from far-off fields.
"There was a woman in Nashville, who had ever been foremost in
Confederate work--a Mrs. M. C. Goodlet, who in 1892 was president of
the auxiliary to the Cheatham Bivouac. She had just aided in building
the soldiers' home near Nashville and felt that there was a work not
included in the work of the auxiliaries as then constituted. So she
resolved to form an organization to be called the 'Daughters of the
Confederacy.' The purpose of this organization was to be the care of
aged veterans and the wives and children of veterans, the building of
monuments, the collection and preservation of records.
"Mrs. L. H. Raines was one of the first to write for information to
Mrs. Goodlet, and on reply she took the matter before the Savannah
auxiliary. This auxiliary, while not willing to lose its individuality
in the new organization, quickly formed within its own ranks a chapter
of the Daughters of the Confederacy. So the charter chapter of Georgia
came into existence."
Miss Rutherford then related how the chapters grew in number until it
occurred to Mrs. Raines that strength would come through union. She
wrote to Mrs. Goodlet suggesting a "United Daughters of the
Confederacy," and Mrs. Goodlet agreed with the idea, so that a
constitution and by-laws were formulated and a convention of the
various chapters called at Nashville in 1894, "Mother" Goodlet
presiding. The convention of the United Daughters at San Francisco
formally recognized Mrs. Goodlet as founder of the Daughters of the
Confederacy and Mrs. Raines as founder of the United Daughters.
A DAUGHTER'S PLEA
The following is an extract from the Macon (Ga.) _Telegraph's_ report
of the proceedings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Macon
on the 26th of October, 1905:
Mrs. Plaine had not then learned that Virginia opened last year a
large and comfortable home for Confederate women on Grace street in
the city of Richmond. It is a noble monument to our mothers and
grandmothers and a needed asylum for some of the very lonely. Mrs.
Plaine among other things said:
"We have corrected many falsehoods disseminated throughout the South
in Northern histories and readers, substituting impartial and truthful
Southern books; and we have children's chapters as auxiliaries to the
United Daughters of the Confederacy that they may learn even more of
the imperishable grandeur of the men and women of the old South. But,
my dear friends, have we not failed in one paramount duty? Should we
not in all these years have made some organized effort for the succor
and support of the aged women of the Confederacy whose noble deeds we
have been busily recording? Texas is the only State which has made any
decided move in this direction. The United Daughters of the
Confederacy of that State have purchased a lot in Austin and have
several thousand dollars towards building a home to be known as
'Heroines' Home.' They propose to have for these precious old ladies
pleasant and comfortable housing, good food cheerfully served,
efficient attendants, nurses and physicians, books, and all the little
pastimes with which cherished mothers should be provided to keep them
satisfied and happy as the depressing shadows grow longer.
"When we of Atlanta were working so hard to have the State accept
and maintain the soldiers' home which had been built by public
subscription eight years before and was fast going to decay, the
only opposition we had was from those who thought there were too few
soldiers left to need such a home. But what has been the result of
opening it to them? Why, hundreds of old, infirm and needy veterans
have found there a comfortable place in which to pass the remnant
of their lives, and we feel more than repaid for our small share in
opening it for their use.
"Now, in the effort to establish a home for the aged women of the
Confederacy, the same objection will be raised of 'so few to occupy
it.'
"Where are the women who represented the six hundred thousand valiant
soldiers who constituted the grandest army the world has yet known?
"Where are those who with unflinching courage sent forth husbands,
sons, fathers, brothers and lovers to swell that immortal host which
marched and suffered beneath the 'Stars and Bars?' Where the little
girls who carded and spun and knitted to help their mothers clothe the
naked soldiers? Where the young girls who stood by the wayside to feed
the hungry and quench the thirst of the men on their long and weary
marches? Where the women who with tireless energy ministered night and
day to the sick and wounded and spoke words of hope to the dying?
Where those who stood at the threshold of desolate homes to welcome
with smiles and loving caresses their uncrowned heroes, and who by
their courage and patient endurance, amidst want and poverty, saved
from despair and even suicide the men by whose heroic efforts a new
and greater South has arisen from the ashes of the old?
"Hundreds of these women, my dear friends, some of them once queens in
the old Southern society of which we still boast, and who would even
now grace the court of the proudest monarch on earth, are still with
us, but many of them in poverty and obscurity, suffering in silence
rather than acknowledge their changed condition.
"I know personally of four cultured, refined women, born and bred in
luxury, who gave some of the best years of their lives to help the
Southern cause, and who for the love of it still work with their
feeble hands to make the money with which to pay their dues as members
of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
"I know of another, reared by aristocratic, wealthy parents in this
city, who drove with her patriotic mother almost daily to take in
their private carriage the sick and wounded from the trains to the
hospitals, and who on one occasion retired behind one of the brick
pillars of your depot and tore off her undergarments to furnish
bandages for bleeding arteries. She is now quite advanced in years,
nearly all her relatives dead, and she is in very straitened
circumstances. But she is proud and brave still, and makes no moan.
"A few years ago it was announced in an Atlanta paper that a lady from
Sharpsburg, Md., was visiting a friend in Atlanta. A gentleman in
Griffin, after seeing the notice, took the next train to Atlanta and
called to see the lady without giving his name. As she entered the
parlor he stared at her for a moment and then grasped both her hands
in his and tears sprang to his eyes as he said with great emotion,
'Yes, yes, this is Miss Julia, only grown older--the same sweet face
that looked so compassionately into mine, and the same person who with
her beautiful sister Alice and her mother, worthy to have been the
mother of Napoleon, nursed me into life as you did so many poor
fellows after that awful battle. I have come to take you home with me.
My wife and children love you and all your family; your names are
honored household words with us.' Everything in the fine old mansion
of that family was literally soaked in the blood of Southern soldiers.
To these two young girls, Julia and Alice, scores of Southern families
owe the recovery of the bodies of their dead upon the memorable and
bloody field of Antietam or Sharpsburg. Most of the people around
there were Northern sympathizers, and took pleasure in desecrating
Confederate graves, and these young ladies, with the assistance of a
gentleman, who posed as a Yankee, made, secretly, diagrams of the
burial places of our dead, marking distances from trees, fences and
other objects, and sometimes burying pieces of iron or other
indestructible articles near by, that they might be able, if need be,
to recover the bodies, and thus many were restored to their friends.
So much was this family hated by the Yankee element in the
surrounding country it became unsafe for them to keep a light in the
house after night, for fear of being fired into. I have myself seen
since the war the bullets which lodged in the inside walls of the
rooms. Just at the close of the war these brave girls, in order to
send the body of a noble Confederate captain to his wife, then living
in Macon, drove with it in a wagon seventeen miles at night, crossing
the broad Potomac in a ferryboat, their only companion a boy of
twelve, and delivered the casket to the express agent at Leesburg, Va.
Both of these Southern heroines are still living. Poverty long since
overtook them; the dear old home has passed into strange hands, and
they are left almost alone--one a widow, the other never married.
"Think you that such as these are not deserving the help of those of
us who have been more fortunate? In the language of Mrs. Vincent, of
Texas, a native Georgian, 'because they have stifled their cries, and
in silent self-reliance labored all these years for subsistence, are
we Daughters to close our ears to their appeals, now that the patient
hands and the feeble footsteps hesitate in the oncoming darkness?'
"The time will come--is already here--when marble shafts will arise
to commemorate the deeds of the Spartan women of the South, but a
better and more enduring monument would be a home for such of them as
are still alive and in need, and for the benefit of the female
descendants of the men and women of the Confederacy who may yet
become old and homeless, and are eligible to the United Daughters of
the Confederacy.
"Memorial Hall in course of erection by the Daughters of the American
Revolution, commemorative of the deeds of our Revolutionary ancestry,
is a worthy and patriotic enterprise, but a home for the aged heroines
of the Confederacy would serve not alone as a memorial of our dead
heroes and heroines, but what is still better, it would be a blessing
to worthy, suffering humanity."
HOME FOR CONFEDERATE WOMEN
[J. L. Underwood.]
These women of the South not only work for the men, but when the men
undertake to work for them, they take up the work and do it for
themselves. In March, 1897, the Ladies' Auxiliary of the George E.
Pickett Camp, Confederate Veterans, began a movement to establish a
home for the wives, sisters, and daughters of dead and disabled
Confederate soldiers. Of this Auxiliary Society Mrs. R. N. Northern
was president, Miss Alice V. Loehr, secretary. A call was made to the
people of the State and a Confederate festival, in charge of a
committee of which Mrs. Mary A. Burgess was chairman, was held in the
Regimental Armory in Richmond from the 19th to 29th of May for the
purpose of raising funds. The movement was most heartily endorsed by
the veterans, by Governor C. T. O'Ferrall, and the people generally,
and was continued to complete success. A very desirable building was
secured on Grace street and the home dedicated and opened in 1904 and
is now occupied by a number of grateful inmates. In all the historic
memorials about noble old Richmond there is no monument more touching
than this practical offering to the women of the Confederacy. A
similar home has already been provided in Texas and the R. A. Smith
Camp of Veterans at Macon, Ga., which recently laid the corner-stone
of a monument to the Confederate Women, has already begun a movement
for the establishment of a home in that city and the United Daughters
of the Confederacy are at work for its accomplishment.
JEFFERSON DAVIS MONUMENT
[J. L. Underwood.]
The project to erect an appropriate monument to the great Chieftain of
the Confederacy was undertaken by the veterans years ago. They raised
about $20,000. The Daughters of the Confederacy, just as they always
do, then took hold of the matter and they have increased the fund to
$70,000. The Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy, who have
built a Winnie Davis dormitory at the Georgia Normal School, have been
very active in the work for the Davis Monument at Richmond, and
Georgia has the credit of leading all the States in the amount
contributed. The city of Richmond has donated a very eligible lot at
the crossing of Franklin and Cedar streets, near the splendid R. E.
Lee monument. It is fitting that the monuments to the leading civil
and military heroes of the great cause shall be so near each other.
Very near to these will be monuments each to Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, and
to Gen. Fitz Hugh Lee. These monuments will all stand in the Lee
district, the new and coming choice residence section of the glorious
city.
It is expected that the splendid monument to Mr. Davis will be
unveiled at the Confederate reunion in 1907. Work has already begun
and the foundations are being laid. Dirt was formally broken on the
7th of November, 1905, by Mrs. Thomas McCullough, of Staunton,
president of the Davis Monument Association. Hon. J. Taylor Ellyson,
lieutenant-governor elect, a noble veteran, and others, also took part
in the historic ceremonies. The picks and shovels will be preserved in
the Confederate Museum. The monument will be unique in its design and
will worthily tell future generations of the great man and the great
cause. The writer confesses to a great pleasure, while preparing this
volume, of almost daily visits to see the foundation work of this
monument going on. He spent five years of his life in Mississippi in
the old days, and he knows Mr. Davis before our war to have been a
gentleman, a patriot, and a Christian, and the kindest of masters to
his slaves. He was a Chevalier Bayard, a knight _sans peur et sans
reproche_, and yet, under the responsibility laid on him by the
Confederate States, he became the mark for all the abuse and slander
that could be heaped on the Confederate cause by the fanatics among
our foes. His grave in Hollywood Cemetery and the Confederate Memorial
Museum building, which was Mr. Davis's home during the sad war, have
been precious though mournful Meccas to the author during many months
of hospital suffering in Richmond, and, by courtesy of the Ladies'
Memorial Literary Society, a large part of the actual work on this
memorial volume was done in the very rooms occupied by our great
leader. May God bless our noble women for the monument which promises
to be worthy of its mission.
RECIPROCAL SLAVERY
[J. L. Underwood.]
Humanity and kindness were the rule which marked the treatment of the
slaves in the South. For this the Southern people have claimed no
credit. A man deserves no credit for taking care of a $50 cow. Much
more will his very self interest treat well a $250 horse. How much
more to his interest to feed, house, clothe and nurse a $1,500 negro.
As in all things human, there were evils connected even with Southern
slavery, and Southern patriots rejoice that it is all gone. But
history will only render simple justice to the men and women of the
South when it records that any real cruel treatment of the negro was
very rare.
The writer's life has nearly all been spent in the negro belts of
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, and he knew of but
three cases where slave owners were charged with habitual cruel
treatment of the slaves. One of these, in the Alabama canebrake, gave
his slaves the best of medical attention, but they were evidently not
supplied with the clothing they ought to have. The other two, one man
and one woman, had the reputation of giving way to a cruel temper when
chastising their slaves. All of them stood branded with public odium.
The truth is that in Southern slavery there was a sort of mutuality.
The owner belonged to the negro as truly as the negro belonged to the
white man. In many respects the master rendered service to the slave.
The State laws, to say nothing of humanity and religion, made it so,
but you say "it was a very pleasant sort of slavery for the master."
Yes, and a very pleasant sort of slavery for the negro. They were the
jolliest set of working people the world ever saw. The chains of the
negro were not the only shackles removed by the great revolution. When
the time came the slave owners felt that a great burden had been
rolled from their own shoulders.
As far as the writer knows, the universal feeling of the slave owners
was expressed in the language of a good old couple who had worked hard
and finally become the owners of a hundred slaves. Said the old man,
"I didn't enslave the negroes, and I didn't set them free, and I am
glad the whole of the great responsibility has been lifted from my
shoulders." His wife, sitting by, said, "I feel like a new woman. I am
now set free from a great burden."
The truth is, while negro slavery was the most convenient property
ever owned in America, it made heavy and constant exactions of care,
attention, and worry on the part of the owner. The ignorant, childish
Africans needed a master more than any master needed them. There lived
near the author's home in Sumter county, Ala., a Mr. Jere Brown. He
was of a fine family and a graduate of South Carolina College. He was
a splendid type of the intelligent, polished, Christian gentleman of
the old school. He owned at least a thousand negro slaves and kept
them all near him. While he had overseers and foremen to direct the
farm labor, he devoted all his time to attendance upon his slaves. He
was their physician and their nurse and very rarely ever left the
boundaries of his own land. His slaves all loved him, and it was long
said of him that he wore himself out looking after the negroes. They
belonged to him and he to them. This identity of interest, the
closeness of relationship, the mutual, kind feeling between owners and
slaves was never realized by the fanatics and party politicians of the
North until since the emancipation. The eyes of the world have been
opened to the fact that nearly all of the substantial help for the
negro's school, his church and for himself and his family when in
distress, has been rendered by the old slave owners and their
children. This practical help has been rendered all over the South.
Alas! this mutual interest is growing weaker very fast. The slave
owners and their children, the true friends to the negro, will soon be
all dead. How much sympathy the negro is to get from the next
generation is for the negro himself to say. He has used his ballot in
such a way as to cut himself off from his neighbors, employers and
life-long friends; and to bring down the contempt of the world. For
years he used it as a bludgeon to beat the life out of what had been
sovereign States and free people. Later on he has made it a toy to be
sold for a drink of whiskey or thrown into the gutter. The whole
American people know this negro ballot to be a travesty on liberty.
His natural civil rights are secure in the North and in the South. But
his own folly has raised the question of the continuance of the
privilege of voting. Anglo Saxons will continue to rule America. They
are not a people who will long put up with child's play and stupidity
in politics. They mean business. And if the negro expects to use the
ballot, he must catch the step of a freeman. He must vote for the
interest of his State and his section and through a prosperous united
State, work for the well being of the whole Union. In this Christian
land he has met with unbounded sympathy in his helplessness. That
sympathy is being at times sorely tried. It is waning, sadly waning.
If he expects the privilege of an American, he must act like an
American. It saddens the Confederate veterans of 1861 to see how far
white and black have drifted apart within the last twenty years. The
"friendliness" of which Henry Grady wrote in 1888 will not, it is
feared, last to 1908. God grant they may get closer together in all
that makes for the good of both races.
BARBARA FRIETCHIE
[J. L. Underwood.]
Here is a part of the story of the Maryland woman and the Federal flag
in the famous poem of John G. Whittier:
"Bravest of all in Fredericktown
She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set
To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead:
Under his slouch hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
'Halt!' the dust-brown ranks stood fast,
'Fire!' Out blazed the rifle blast,
It shivered the window pane and sash,
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick as it fell from the broken staff,
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf."
This is poetry, but it is not history. It is not truth. It does not
sound like it. Nobody but men like Whittier, blinded by New England
prejudice and steeped in ignorance of Southern people, would for a
moment have thought Stonewall Jackson capable of giving an order to
fire on a woman. None of the story sounds at all like "Stonewall
Jackson's way." To their credit the later editions of Whittier's poems
cast a grave doubt on the truth of the story, and now Mr. John McLean,
an old next-door neighbor to the genuine Barbara Frietchie, has given
to Mr. Smith Clayton, of the Atlanta _Journal_, the true story showing
Whittier's tale to be nothing but a myth. Mr. Clayton says:
"Coming up to Washington from Richmond the other day I brushed up an
acquaintance with a very pleasant, intelligent and, by the way,
handsome gentleman, Mr. John McLean, a conductor on the Richmond,
Fredericksburg and Washington Railroad. In the course of conversation
he mentioned Frederick, Md. I laughed and said:
"Did you ever meet Barbara Frietchie?"
"Why, my dear sir," he replied, "she lived just across the street from
my father's home."
"You don't say so?"
"It's a fact; and let me tell you, that poem is a 'fake,' pure and
simple. I was a child during the war, but I'll give you the truth
about Barbara Frietchie as I got it from the lips of my father and
mother."
And then he told me this interesting story:
"Ever been to Frederick?"
"No."
"Well, just where the turnpike enters the town my father and mother
lived in the old homestead. Directly across the way lived Mr.
Frietchie. He was a tailor, and a good, clever man and honest citizen.
His house had two stories. On the ground, or street floor, was his
shop. The family lived up stairs. There was a balcony to the upper
story of the house facing the street. It was from that balcony that
the flag was waved, but Barbara Frietchie had no more to do with it
than you. General Stonewall Jackson, returning from Monocacy, passed
through Frederick at the head of his army. He entered the town by the
turnpike and marched between the house of Mr. Frietchie and the home
of my parents. There was a United States flag in the tailor's house.
His eldest daughter, Mary Quantrell, thinking that the Union army was
coming, mistaking Jackson's men for the Federals, seized this flag,
ran out upon the balcony and waved it. Observing her, General
Stonewall Jackson, who was riding at the head of his troops, took off
his hat, and ordered his men to uncover their heads. They did so, and
General Jackson said that he gave the order to uncover because he
wanted his men to show proper appreciation of a woman who had the
loyalty and patriotism to stand up for her side. Those are the facts.
My parents were there. They told me. I tell you. There was no sticking
any flag staff in any window. No order by General Jackson to 'Halt'
and 'Fire;' no seizing of the flag and waving it after it had been
shot from the staff; no begging General Jackson to shoot anybody's
grey head but to 'spare the flag of his country'--all of this is
described in the poem--but none of it happened. Very funny about
Barbara Frietchie being four score and ten."
"Who was Barbara Frietchie?"
"Why she was the young daughter of Mr. Frietchie--the young sister of
Mary Quantrell, who waved the flag--that's all."
Mr. McLean told me that he had three brothers in the Federal army. His
brother was doorkeeper of the Maryland assembly, and his uncle a
member during the stormy sessions held at Frederick, when that body
hotly discussed, for many days, the question as to whether Maryland
should secede.
SOCIAL EQUALITY BETWEEN THE RACES
[J. L. Underwood.]
When the men of the writer's generation see or read of the growing
sensitiveness in all parts of the country, at the North and South, as
to negro social equality, there rush up memories from the days of
slavery that make the present jealousy to some extent ridiculous. As
to religious equality, the slaves joined the churches of their own
choice. In the cities there were some churches composed entirely of
negro slaves and nearly all had white preachers. The country has had
few if any preachers more eloquent and accomplished than Dr. Giradeau,
who in late years was professor in the Presbyterian Theological
Seminary at Columbia, S. C. He spent all of his ministry up to the
breaking out of the war as pastor of one of these negro churches in
Charleston.
In the country towns and villages seats were provided for the negroes
to attend the 11 o'clock and night services of the whites. They shared
in the ordinances and communed from the same plate and cup in perfect
Christian equality with the whites. In the afternoon the house was
turned over to their exclusive use and the white pastor was required
to preach to them and worthy preachers from among themselves were
always encouraged. It always appeared to the writer, all through his
boyhood days, that the white preachers preached better sermons to the
negroes than they did to the whites. The negro was thus blessed with
the most thorough and efficient evangelist work ever done for the
benighted. The negroes trained under it have been the salt of the
earth to their race in their churches since the war. In those days in
the South the white evangelist Phillip rode in the wagon with the
Ethiopian and taught him, and both were blessed. When the lamented
good old deacon Alex. Smith, of Thomasville, Ga., was ordained a
deacon, one of the ordaining elders was his negro slave. At
Bainbridge, Ga., Rev. Jesse Davis officiated as a member of the
Presbytery ordaining to the ministry his slave, Ben. Munson. What a
calamity that this close brotherly association in religious matters
should have been so rudely broken in many directions by the politics
of the wild reconstruction which was forced on the South.
At home some features of the life amounted to more than social
equality. There was "mammy," for instance, the good old negro nurse,
housekeeper, hospital matron, superintending cook, boss of the whole
family, and what not. She was father's friend to counsel and cheer
him, and she was mother's staff and companion. To us children she was
just everything. Those strong old arms supported us in babyhood and
dandled us and fondled us in childhood. Her old bosom was a city of
refuge from even the pursuing father and mother. How quietly
peach-tree switches dropped from parental hands when Mammy begged for
us. Mammy's cabin was the white children's paradise. Well does the
writer remember that when his mother had to take a trip for her health
away from home, he and a sister a little older than himself were left
in the home of a neighboring kindred to be cared for. Kinsfolk did
very well till night approached, then our poor little hearts sighed
for home and we ran away to Mammy Cynthia and remained in her cabin
and slept in her arms in her nice clean bed until mother's return. The
most cruel work done by the reconstruction politics was to enforce the
orders of the carpet-baggers and scalawags in compelling these
"mammies" to forsake their old "missus" and old homes. Many of them
never could be tempted or forced to leave the old home.
Then there was "Daddy Jacob," the nabob of the farm. Like "mammy" he
was given just enough work to keep up appearances and keep him in
practice. But it was usually special work, like presiding at the gin
or hauling with the two-ox wagon. Many a meal has the little white boy
eaten from old daddy's dinner bucket or from the blue-edged plates in
his cabin.
Then there was "Mandy," the young girl given by the parents to her
young white mistress near her age. Mandy caught Miss Mary's manners,
fell heir to her dresses and bonnets, waited on the table, joined the
children in their sports, and felt that she was about as good as
anybody. And she was, until the devil came along with the bayonets and
brought the monster curse to the negro, the "Yankee school marm."
These women were deluded, blind guides of the blind Africans.
Reconstruction work has left the negro women, especially the young
ones, the most giddy, most idle and aimless and the least virtuous of
any set of women in any civilized country. The white Yankee school
teachers sent down South by the thousands, forty years ago, sowed the
seed of false notions of life and duty and opportunity, and the
country is now afflicted with the harvest.
"Jere" was the negro boy companion of young "Mars Henry." He and Mars
Henry played marbles together, fished or swam the millpond, searched
the woods for chinquapins or hickory nuts. They rode on the same lever
at the old gin and leaped into the lint room together to pack back the
loose cotton, and then mounted the mules and rode them to the barn.
But the 'possum hunt was the glory of Henry and Jere's united life.
After supper, in which Henry had swapped biscuit from the table for
Jere's pork and roasted potatoes or sweet ash cake, they would put a
few potatoes in their pockets, gather an axe, whistle up old "Tige,"
the dog, and were soon away in the woods. When the game was captured,
and a failure was a rare thing, with the nocturnal Nimrods, a small
short hickory pole was split and the tail of the 'possum inserted in
the crack and soon each boy had a 'possum pole on his shoulder. But a
boy gets sleepy quickly. Worn out with their ramble they would rake up
a pile of leaves on the south side of a big log, kindle a fire near
their feet and put the potatoes to roasting. "Tige" knew what it all
meant and he enjoyed the camping too. He would lie next to the
'possums so that he could keep an eye on them. (The writer's Tige had
but one eye.) A 'possum is the meekest of all animals, when you get
his tail in a vice and a dog in three feet of him. Jere would lie next
to Tige, close enough to get some of his warmth, and Mars Henry would
lie close to Jere. With their feet to the fire they got a few hours of
the sweetest sleep the world ever gave. It was Mars Henry's active,
rollicking, rough and tumble open-air life with Jere that gave such
vigor, in camp and on the march, to the Confederate soldier.
The only man who has understood the negro, knew his wishes and his
failings, knew how to be kind to him when a slave, and a safe
counsellor now that he is free, is the man who, when a boy, played
with Jere and slept by his side in the midnight campfire. It is
mammy's people, and daddy Jacob's and Mandy's and Jere's people, that
understand the negro and have always been his best friends. Had the
country abided by Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Johnson as to the
status of the restored Union and left the rights of the emancipated
slaves in the hands of their old owners and their interests to be
regulated by the Mars Henrys of the South how much better it would
have been for the poor negro and infinitely better for the white
people. Southern people know best how far the negro may go and where
it is best for him to stop. Now when the fearful problems which have
been brought about by vindictive politics, personal demoralization and
fanatical race prejudices, for which the people of the South are not
responsible, the whole country is beginning to realize that if these
problems are to be solved in the negro's favor he himself is to do the
solving. "Mars Henry" and "Jere" would once have died for each other.
But "Mars Henry" can't help "Jere" much now. Reconstruction politics
led "Jere" too far away from "Mars Henry" and kept him too long. In a
very few years there will be no "Mars Henry," no "Jere." "Mars
Henry's" children know how to take care of themselves. May God teach
poor "Jere's" children to work out their own good.
DREAM OF RACE SUPERIORITY
[J. L. Underwood.]
In a previous article the author has given an account of what was
nearer social equality between the white and black races than will
ever again be seen in the South or anywhere else. But the deluded
negro has been led to look for something higher than social
equality. The most awfully destructive work done by the Northern
attempt to reconstruct Southern society has been seen in the
complete demoralization of the generation of the negroes succeeding
the playmates of the young Southerners of 1861-1865. They were
thrown directly under Northern teachers profoundly ignorant of the
negro race, their condition, and their danger; but teachers supremely
bent on injury, as far as possible, to the white people of the
South. From them and the literature which they circulated, and his
own folly, the young negroes became imbued with the idea, not of
social equality with the white people, but of social superiority
to them. They themselves were heralded in the highest places as the
"wards of the nation;" the white people were branded as its enemies;
they were the lions and the heroes of the revolution, the white
people were its victims. They were the acknowledged pets of the
triumphant Northern people, while the whites were their doomed
enemies. They were to have offices, endowments, and bounties from the
government. This government gave them a Freedmen's Bank and a
Freedmen's Bureau and they saw no bank nor bureau for white people.
They saw the white people to whom nothing was promised with no
prospect but that of poverty and degradation. The North gave them
colleges and the South taxed itself to give them schools. They were
lauded in Congress, on the hustings, in the Northern pulpits, and in
the party newspapers, as the innocent Uncle Tom-like, angelic
people who were to redeem the South and glorify America, while the
white people, only living by Northern sufferance, were branded as
traitors and rebels and enemies of the government. To insure the
triumph of the negro and the degradation of Southern whites
Congress kept the ominous Force Bills before the public. Who can
wonder that the heads of these poor ignorant people were turned and
their moral natures poisoned?
Then, with all this, came the awful lawlessness under which this young
generation grew up. There was no longer "old massa and old missus" to
see that they were controlled. Their parents gave way to delusive
dreams and devoted their energies to "going to town" by day "going to
meetin'" by night. Home life in the family was, and is to this day,
almost a thing unknown. There was no parental control whatever. When
undertaken much of it was so childish or so brutal as to do more harm
than good. Some of these boys went to school enough to learn to read a
little and sign their names, and right there the most of them
graduated. A large portion cannot read now. They seldom went to
church, except just enough to be baptized and to join in a special
revival shout of
"We are all going to heaven,
Hallelujah!"
At other times when they did go they stood out on the church grounds
and smoked cigarettes. The negro preachers, in nine cases out of ten,
knew nothing and could teach nothing. The aim of most of them seemed
to be to have a happy Sunday religion and enjoy the honor of religious
office and prominence. What a passion this has been with the free
negro. Then the inevitable collection of the preacher, and all would
scatter without a thought of a religion to make good their lives
through the remaining six days of the week. Mrs. Stowe's Topsy said
she did not know anything about herself except, "I specs I growed."
Those young reconstruction negroes just "growed." They "growed"
without law at their so-called homes; they "growed" ignorant of, or
defiant of the laws of the State, and they "growed" without any aim
except self-indulgence in ease and pleasure.
Then there before their eyes rose the Paradise tree of the forbidden
fruit--the white women beyond their reach. There was in every State
the law against intermarriage of the white and black races which stood
and will stand in Median and Persian unchangeableness. Then came,
wherever these young negroes were scattered, at the North as well as
the South, the mighty resolve of passion, pride, and revenge--"these
white women are ours, we are better than they are, they shall not be
monopolized by white men."
The record is awful and the blackest page of American history. This is
the saddest chapter the author has ever written. He has been all his
long life known and recognized by the negroes as one of their best
friends. There is nothing but sorrow in his heart over the wide-spread
demoralization of the negro race. He and all other true Southern men
rejoice over the great progress of the few. He deplores the
enslavement and degradation of the many by whiskey, idleness, and
lust. The strong, young African tiger has been found lurking, not in
American jungles, but in American homes, highways, barns and fields.
His arch crime woman cannot hear named. And to mention it to Southern
men is to make their blood boil in their veins and their brains to
reel.
The heroism of Southern women cannot be told without this dark page.
The trials of the war were nothing compared to the ordeal through
which Southern women have just passed. In the wreck of the South
brought on by Northern ballots and bayonets, the culminating damage is
the demoralization of the generation of negroes now recently grown. In
the face of the worse than Gorgan horrors our women have borne
themselves with a courage, a patience, and fortitude that are sublime.
But let friends of the negro and friends of our women hope. Thank God,
the crime is on the decrease. White men somehow will protect such
women as God has given our sunny land. The tiger is on the retreat,
and thousands of the negro race are awakening to the fact that there
must speedily be another emancipation, a redemption of their sons and
daughters from their new slavery. The negro has had race emancipation;
he needs family emancipation and personal emancipation from the chains
of sense and appetite. Good negroes are working and praying for it.
The negroes must break their own chains this time. But let patriotic
and Christian white men help them everywhere.
ROOSEVELT AT LEE'S MONUMENT
"_Come Closer, Comrades!_"
[J. L. Underwood.]
When the victorious Federal army marched home, at the close of the war
between the States, the famous Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher,
said that in twenty-five years any man in America would be ashamed to
admit that he was ever a Confederate soldier. And yet in twenty-five
years half of the Cabinet at Washington was composed of Confederate
soldiers. In little more than twenty-five years the country sees
William McKinley, the Republican President of the United States,
himself a veteran of the Federal army, down among the Confederate
veterans in Georgia, wearing the Confederate badge, and otherwise
fraternizing as a soldier with those who wore the gray, and in his
official capacity calling upon Congress to care for the graves of the
dead Confederate soldiers just as the Government provides for the dead
who wore the blue. And the whole country, North and South, applauded
the noble McKinley.
Here is President Roosevelt, forty years after the war, making the
same recommendations and Congress actually restoring the captured
battle flags to the several Southern States. It is a pity Beecher
didn't live to be in Richmond, Va., on the 18th of October, 1905, and
see President Roosevelt by special appointment meet the Confederate
Veterans at the foot of the monument of General Robert E. Lee. When
he began his talk he said, "Come closer, comrades." The President of
the United States calling those old "rebels" of Beecher his comrades
and all the way on his long Southern tour, having at his own request a
voluntary escort at every point composed of the veterans from both
armies!
Shade of Beecher! Come back to Washington and see President and
Cabinet and Congress and Army and Navy gather in tears around the
coffin and do the grand honors at the grave of the Confederate General
Wheeler!
The truth is the true comrades from both sides have been coming
"closer" to each other ever since the bloodshed at Gettysburg and
Vicksburg, whenever the politicians would let them. The old "vets"
understand each other whether other people do or not. We are
"comrades" indeed. Now, comrades of the North, let an old "Confederate
vet" who has gloried in the privilege of frequently grasping your
hands for forty years, say a parting word to you. Your country is our
country. Your heroes are our heroes. We claim the honor of having such
patriotic countrymen as Lincoln, such heroes as Thomas, Meade and
Hancock, and McClellan and Grant, and McPherson and Farragut. If there
were such men as Butler and Milroy and Hunter, they were our
countrymen, too, and if they did things worthy of condemnation, let
Southerners condemn them with a feeling of sorrow over the failings of
erring countrymen--just as Northern men should look truthfully at the
lives of Southern leaders and condemn, when it is just, but condemn in
sorrow our erring countrymen.
But, comrades, "come closer." Read the humble tribute of this book
to the memory of Southern women of 1861-1865. They were your
countrywomen. Their virtues are the glory of all America. We have
tried to help you and the world to know them better. We have all
come forth from the ashes now. We are rejoicing in a prosperous South
and a prosperous North. Our women nobly did their part in the war
and nobly have they helped to rebuild the South, not only for our
children, but for your sons and your daughters. Our sunny South
belongs to the whole country. Our noble women and their children love
their whole country. They have shown themselves true to principle and
true to duty. "Come closer, comrades," and study these Southern
women. If you find anything wrong in their spirit or conduct, hold it
up to just retribution. If they have set a glorious example of
courage, of sacrifice and of patriotism, help your children and our
children to "come closer" in following their example.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Women of the Confederacy, by J. L. Underwood