THE TEMPER OF THE WOMEN.
During the latter part of the year in which the war between the
States came to an end, a Southern comic writer, in a letter addressed
to Artemus Ward, summed up the political outlook in one sentence,
reading somewhat as follows: "You may reconstruct the men, with your
laws and things, but how are you going to reconstruct the women?
_Whoop-ee!_" Now this unauthorized but certainly very expressive
interjection had a deal of truth at its back, and I am very sure
that I have never yet known a thoroughly "reconstructed" woman. The
reason, of course, is not far to seek. The women of the South could
hardly have been more desperately in earnest than their husbands and
brothers and sons were, in the prosecution of the war, but with
their woman-natures they gave themselves wholly to the cause, and
having loved it heartily when it gave promise of a sturdy life, they
almost worship it now that they have strewn its bier with funeral
flowers. To doubt its righteousness, or to falter in their loyalty to
it while it lived, would have been treason and infidelity; to do the
like now that it is dead would be to them little less than sacrilege.
I wish I could adequately tell my reader of the part those women
played in the war. If I could make these pages show the half of their
nobleness; if I could describe the sufferings they endured, and tell
of their cheerfulness under it all; if the reader might guess the
utter unselfishness with which they laid themselves and the things
they held nearest their hearts upon the altar of the only country
they knew as their own, the rare heroism with which they played their
sorrowful part in a drama which was to them a long tragedy; if my
pages could be made to show the half of these things, all womankind,
I am sure, would tenderly cherish the record, and nobody would wonder
again at the tenacity with which the women of the South still hold
their allegiance to the lost cause.
Theirs was a peculiarly hard lot. The real sorrows of war, like those
of drunkenness, always fall most heavily upon women. They may not
bear arms. They may not even share the triumphs which compensate
their brethren for toil and suffering and danger. They must sit still
and endure. The poverty which war brings to them wears no cheerful
face, but sits down with them to empty tables and pinches them sorely
in solitude.
After the victory, the men who have won it throw up their hats in a
glad huzza, while their wives and daughters await in sorest agony
of suspense the news which may bring hopeless desolation to their
hearts. To them the victory may mean the loss of those for whom they
lived and in whom they hoped, while to those who have fought the
battle it brings only gladness. And all this was true of Southern
women almost without exception. The fact that all the men capable
of bearing arms went into the army, and stayed there, gave to every
woman in the South a personal interest not only in the general
result of each battle, but in the list of killed and wounded as
well. Poverty, too, and privation of the sorest kind, was the common
lot, while the absence of the men laid many heavy burdens of work
and responsibility upon shoulders unused to either. But they bore
it all, not cheerfully only, but gladly. They believed it to be the
duty of every able-bodied man to serve in the army, and they eagerly
sent the men of their own homes to the field, frowning undisguisedly
upon every laggard until there were no laggards left. And their
spirit knew no change as the war went on. Their idea of men's duty
comprehended nothing less than persistence as long as a shot could be
fired. When they saw that the end was not to be victory, but defeat,
that fact made no change whatever in their view of the duty to be
done. Still less did their own privations and labors and sufferings
tend to dampen their ardor. On the contrary, the more heavily the war
bore upon themselves, the more persistently did they demand that it
should be fought out to the end. When they lost a husband, a son, or
a brother, they held the loss only an additional reason for faithful
adherence to the cause. Having made such a sacrifice to that which
was almost a religion to them, they had, if possible, less thought
than ever of proving unfaithful to it.
I put these general statements first, so that the reader who shall
be interested in such anecdotes as I shall have to tell may not be
misled thereby into the thought that these good women were implacable
or vindictive, when they were only devoted to a cause which in their
eyes represented the sum of all righteousness.
I remember a conversation between two of them,--one a young wife
whose husband was in the army, and the other an elderly lady, with no
husband or son, but with many friends and near relatives in marching
regiments. The younger lady remarked,--
"I'm sure I do not hate our enemies. I earnestly hope their souls may
go to heaven, but I would like to blow all their mortal bodies away,
as fast as they come upon our soil."
"Why, you shock me, my dear," replied the other; "I don't see why you
want the Yankees to go to heaven! I hope to get there myself some
day, and I'm sure I shouldn't want to go if I thought I should find
any of them there."
This old lady was convinced from the first that the South would
fail, and she based this belief upon the fact that we had permitted
Yankees to build railroads through the Southern States. "I tell you,"
she would say, "that's what they built the railroads for. They knew
the war was coming, and they got ready for it. The railroads will
whip us, you may depend. What else were they made for? We got on well
enough without them, and we oughtn't to have let anybody build them."
And no amount of reasoning would serve to shake her conviction that
the people of the North had built all our railroads with treacherous
intent, though the stock of the only road she had ever seen was held
very largely by the people along its line, many of whom were her own
friends.
She always insisted, too, that the Northern troops came South and
made war for the sole purpose of taking possession of our lands and
negroes, and she was astonished almost out of her wits when she
learned that the negroes were free. She had supposed that they were
simply to change masters, and even then she lived for months in
daily anticipation of the coming of "the new land owners," who were
waiting, she supposed, for assignments of plantations to be made to
them by military authority.
"They'll quarrel about the division, maybe," she said one day,
"and then there'll be a chance for us to whip them again, I hope."
The last time I saw her, she had not yet become convinced that
title-deeds were still to be respected.
A young girl, ordinarily of a very gentle disposition, astonished
a Federal colonel one day by an outburst of temper which served at
least to show the earnestness of her purpose to uphold her side of
the argument. She lived in a part of the country then for the first
time held by the Federal army, and a colonel, with some members of
his staff, made her family the unwilling recipients of a call one
morning. Seeing the piano open, the colonel asked the young lady
to play, but she declined. He then went to the instrument himself,
but he had hardly begun to play when the damsel, raising the piano
top, severed nearly all the strings with a hatchet, saying to the
astonished performer, as she did so,--
"That's my piano, and it shall not give you a minute's pleasure." The
colonel bowed, apologized, and replied,--
"If all your people are as ready as you to make costly sacrifices, we
might as well go home."
And most of them were ready and willing to make similar sacrifices.
One lady of my acquaintance knocked in the heads of a dozen casks
of choice wine rather than allow some Federal officers to sip as
many glasses of it. Another destroyed her own library, which was
very precious to her, when that seemed the only way in which she
could prevent the staff of a general officer, camped near her, from
enjoying a few hours' reading in her parlor every morning.
In New Orleans, soon after the war, I saw in a drawing-room, one day,
an elaborately framed letter, of which, the curtains being drawn, I
could read only the signature, which to my astonishment was that of
General Butler.
"What is that?" I asked of the young gentlewoman I was visiting.
"Oh, that's my diploma, my certificate of good behavior, from
General Butler;" and taking it down from the wall, she permitted me
to read it, telling me at the same time its history. It seems that
the young lady had been very active in aiding captured Confederates
to escape from New Orleans, and for this and other similar offenses
she was arrested several times. A gentleman who knew General Butler
personally had interested himself in behalf of her and some of her
friends, and upon making an appeal for their discharge received this
personal note from the commanding general, in which he declared his
willingness to discharge all the others, "But that black-eyed Miss
B.," he wrote, "seems to me an incorrigible little devil whom even
prison fare won't tame." The young lady had framed the note, and she
cherishes it yet, doubtless.
There is a story told of General Forrest, which will serve to show
his opinion of the pluck and devotion of the Southern women. He was
drawing his men up in line of battle one day, and it was evident that
a sharp encounter was about to take place. Some ladies ran from a
house, which happened to stand just in front of his line, and asked
him anxiously,--
"What shall we do, general, what shall we do?"
Strong in his faith that they only wished to help in some way, he
replied,--
"I really don't see that you can do much, except to stand on stumps,
wave your bonnets, and shout 'Hurrah, boys!'"
In Richmond, when the hospitals were filled with wounded men brought
in from the seven days' fighting with McClellan, and the surgeons
found it impossible to dress half the wounds, a band was formed,
consisting of nearly all the married women of the city, who took
upon themselves the duty of going to the hospitals and dressing
wounds from morning till night; and they persisted in their painful
duty until every man was cared for, saving hundreds of lives, as the
surgeons unanimously testified. When nitre was found to be growing
scarce, and the supply of gunpowder was consequently about to give
out, women all over the land dug up the earth in their smoke-houses
and tobacco barns, and with their own hands faithfully extracted the
desired salt, for use in the government laboratories.
Many of them denied themselves not only delicacies, but substantial
food also, when by enduring semi-starvation they could add to the
stock of food at the command of the subsistence officers. I myself
knew more than one houseful of women, who, from the moment that food
began to grow scarce, refused to eat meat or drink coffee, living
thenceforth only upon vegetables of a speedily perishable sort, in
order that they might leave the more for the soldiers in the field.
When a friend remonstrated with one of them, on the ground that her
health, already frail, was breaking down utterly for want of proper
diet, she replied, in a quiet, determined way, "I know that very
well; but it is little that I can do, and I must do that little at
any cost. My health and my life are worth less than those of my
brothers, and if they give theirs to the cause, why should not I do
the same? I would starve to death cheerfully if I could feed one
soldier more by doing so, but the things I eat can't be sent to camp.
I think it a sin to eat anything that can be used for rations." And
she meant what she said, too, as a little mound in the church-yard
testifies.
Every Confederate remembers gratefully the reception given him when
he went into any house where these women were. Whoever he might be,
and whatever his plight, if he wore the gray, he was received, not
as a beggar or tramp, not even as a stranger, but as a son of the
house, for whom it held nothing too good, and whose comfort was the
one care of all its inmates, even though their own must be sacrificed
in securing it. When the hospitals were crowded, the people earnestly
besought permission to take the men to their houses and to care for
them there, and for many months almost every house within a hundred
miles of Richmond held one or more wounded men as especially honored
guests.
"God bless these Virginia women!" said a general officer from one of
the cotton States, one day, "they're worth a regiment apiece;" and he
spoke the thought of the army, except that their blessing covered the
whole country as well as Virginia.
The ingenuity with which these good ladies discovered or manufactured
onerous duties for themselves was surprising, and having discovered
or imagined some new duty they straightway proceeded to do it at any
cost. An excellent Richmond dame was talking with a soldier friend,
when he carelessly remarked that there was nothing which so greatly
helped to keep up a contented and cheerful spirit among the men as
the receipt of letters from their woman friends. Catching at the
suggestion as a revelation of duty, she asked, "And cheerfulness
makes better soldiers of the men, does it not?" Receiving yes for an
answer, the frail little woman, already overburdened with cares of
an unusual sort, sat down and made out a list of all the men with
whom she was acquainted even in the smallest possible way, and from
that day until the end of the war she wrote one letter a week to
each, a task which, as her acquaintance was large, taxed her time
and strength very severely. Not content with this, she wrote on
the subject in the newspapers, earnestly urging a like course upon
her sisters, many of whom adopted the suggestion at once, much to
the delight of the soldiers, who little dreamed that the kindly,
cheerful, friendly letters which every mail brought into camp, were
a part of woman's self-appointed work for the success of the common
cause. From the beginning to the end of the war it was the same. No
cry of pain escaped woman's lips at the parting which sent the men
into camp; no word of despondency was spoken when hope seemed most
surely dead; no complaint from the women ever reminded their soldier
husbands and sons and brothers that there was hardship and privation
and terror at home. They bore all with brave hearts and cheerful
faces, and even when they mourned the death of their most tenderly
loved ones, they comforted themselves with the thought that they
buried only heroic dust.
"It is the death I would have chosen for him," wrote the widow of
a friend whose loss I had announced to her. "I loved him for his
manliness, and now that he has shown that manliness by dying as a
hero dies, I mourn, but am not heart-broken. I know that a brave man
awaits me whither I am going."
They carried their efforts to cheer and help the troops into every
act of their lives. When they could, they visited camp. Along the
lines of march they came out with water or coffee or tea,--the best
they had, whatever it might be,--with flowers, or garlands of green
when their flowers were gone. A bevy of girls stood under a sharp
fire from the enemy's lines at Petersburg one day, while they sang
Bayard Taylor's Song of the Camp, responding to an encore with the
stanza:--
"Ah! soldiers, to your honored rest,
Your truth and valor bearing,
The bravest are the tenderest,
The loving are the daring!"
Indeed, the coolness of women under fire was always a matter of
surprise to me. A young girl, not more than sixteen years of age,
acted as guide to a scouting party during the early years of the
war, and when we urged her to go back after the enemy had opened a
vigorous fire upon us, she declined, on the plea that she believed
we were "going to charge those fellows," and she "wanted to see the
fun." At Petersburg women did their shopping and went about their
duties under a most uncomfortable bombardment, without evincing the
slightest fear or showing any nervousness whatever.
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 any they had known in the past. The country was
exhausted, and nobody could foresee any future but one of abject
wretchedness. It was seed-time, but the suddenly freed negroes had
not yet learned that freedom meant aught else than idleness, and the
spring was gone before anything like a reorganization of the labor
system could be effected. The men might emigrate when they should get
home, but the case of the women was a very sorry one indeed. They
kept their spirits up through it all, however, and improvised a new
social system in which absolute poverty, cheerfully borne, was the
badge of respectability. 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.