SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES
[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 32, pages 146-150. T. C. DeLeon, in New Orleans Picayune.]
The great German who wrote:
“Honor to woman! to her it is given
To garden the earth with roses of heaven!”
precisely described the Confederate conditions—a century in advance. True, constant, brave and enduring, the men were; but the women set even the bravest and most steadfast example. Nor was this confined to any one section of the country. The “girl with the calico dress” of the lowland farms; the “merry mountain maid” of the hill country, and the belles of society in the cities, all vied with each other in efforts to serve the men who had gone to the front to fight for home and for them. And there was no section of the South where this desire to do all they might and more was oftener in evidence than another. In every camp of the early days of the great struggle the incoming troops bore trophies of home love, and as the war progressed to need, then to dire want, the sacrifices of those women at home became almost a poem, and one most pathetic. Dress—misconceived as the feminine fetich—was forgotten in the effort to clothe the boys at the front; the family larder—ill-stocked at the best—was depleted to nothingness, to send to distant camps those delicacies—so equally freighted with tenderness and dyspepsia—which too often never reached their destination. And later, the carpets were taken from the floors, the curtains from the windows—alike in humble homes and in dwellings of the rich—to be cut in blankets for the uncomplaining fellows, sleeping on freezing mud.
So wide, so universal, was the rule of self-sacrifice, that no one reference to it can do justice to the zeal and devotion of “Our Girls.” And the best proof of both was in the hospitals, where soon began to congregate the maimed and torn forms of those just sent forth to glory and victory. This was the trial that tested the grain and purity of our womanhood, and left it without alloy of fear or selfishness. And some of the women who wrought in home and hospital—even in trench and on the firing line—for the “boys,” had never before handled aught rougher than embroidery, or seen aught more fearsome than its needle-prick. Yes, these untried women, young and old, stood fire like veteran regulars, indeed, even more bravely in moral view, for they missed the stimulus of the charge—the tonic in the thought of striking back.
During the entire war—and through the entire South—it was the hospital that illustrated the highest and best traits of the tried and stricken people. Doubtless, there was good work done by the women of the North, and much of it. Happily, for the sanity of the nation, American womanhood springs from one common stock. It is ever true to its own, as a whole—and, for aught I shall deny—individually. But behind that Chinese wall of wood and steel blockade, then nursing was not an episode. It was grave duty, grim labor; heartbreaking endurance—all self-imposed, and lasting for years, yet shirked and relinquished only for cause.
But the dainty little hands that tied the red bandages, or “held the artery” unflinching; the nimble feet that wearied not by fever cot, or operating table, the active months of war, grew nimbler still on bridle, or in the dances when “the boys” came home. This was sometimes on “flying furlough,” or when an aid, or courier, with dispatches, was told to wait. Then “the one girl” was mounted on anything that could carry her; and the party would ride far to the front, in full view of the enemy, and often in point-blank range. Or, it was when frozen ruts made roads impassable for invader and defender; and the furlough was perhaps easier, and longer. Then came those now historic dances, the starvation parties, where rank told nothing, and where the only refreshment came in that intoxicant—a woman’s voice and eyes.
Then came the “Dies Irae,” when the Southern Rachel sat in the ashes of her desolation and her homespun was sackcloth. And even she rose supreme. By her desolate hearth, with her larder empty, and only her aching heart full, she still forced a smile for the home-coming “boy” through the repressed tears for the one left, somewhere in the fight.
In Richmond, Atlanta, Charleston and elsewhere was she bitter and unforgiving? If she drew her faded skirt—ever a black one, in that case—from the passing blue, was it “treason,” or human nature? Thinkers who wore the blue have time and oft declared the latter. Was she “unreconstructed?” Her wounds were great and 104 wondrous sore. She was true, then, to her faith. That she is to-day to the reunited land let the fathers of Spanish war heroes tell. She needs no monument; it is reared in the hearts of true men, North and South.