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 285 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.