The women in every community seemed to far outnumber the men; and the empty sleeve and the crutch made men who had unflinchingly faced death in battle impotent to face their future. Sadder still was it to follow to the grave the army of men, of fifty years and over when the war began, whose hearts broke with the loss of half a century’s accumulations and ambitions, and with the failure of the cause for which they had risked everything. Communities were accustomed to lean upon these tried advisers; it was almost like the slaughter of another army—so many such sank beneath the shocks of reconstruction.
It is folly to talk about the woman who stood in the breach in those chaotic days, being the traditional Southern woman of the books, who sat and rocked herself with a slave fanning her on both sides. She was doubtless fanned when she wished to be; but the ante-bellum woman of culture and position in the South was a woman of affairs; and in the care of a large family—which most of them had—and of large interests, she was trained to meet responsibilities. So in those days of awful uncertainties, when men’s hearts failed them, it was the woman who brought her greater adaptability and elasticity to control circumstances, and to lay the foundations of a new order. She sewed, she sold flowers, milk and vegetables, and she taught school; sometimes even a negro school. She made pies and corn-bread, and palmetto hats for the Federals in garrison; she raised pigs, poultry and pigeons; and she cooked them when the darkey—who was “never to wuk no mo’”—left her any to bless herself with; she washed, often the mustered-out soldier of the house filling her tubs, rubbing beside her and hanging out her clothes; and he did her swearing for her when the Yankee soldier taunted over the fence: “Wall, it doo doo my eyes good to see yer have to put yer lily-white hands in the wash-tub!”
As soon as the war was over, my daughter went with her grandmother to visit her father’s relatives in Massachusetts. In letters to her, beginning September 16, 1865, I thus described the conditions under which we were living: “The war was prosperity to the state of things which peace has wrought. Society is resolving itself into its original elements. Chaos has come again. St. Domingo is a paradise to this part of the United States, which is cut off from the benefits of government. The negroes who have gained their liberty are more unhappy and dissatisfied than ever before. Poor creatures! their weak brains are puzzling over the great problem of their future. Care seems likely to eat up every pleasure in their bewildered lives. They no longer dance and sing in the quarters at night, but sit about in dejected groups; their chief dissipation is prayer-meeting. It is a dire perplexity that they must pay their doctor’s bills; they resent it as a bitter injustice that ‘Marster’ does not ‘find them’ in medicine and all the ordinary things of living as of old. They say no provision is made for them. They are left to work for white folks the same as ever, but for white folks who no longer care for them nor are interested in their own joys and sorrows. Freedom meant to them the abolition of work, liberty to rove uncontrolled, to drink liquor and to carry firearms. As Rose recently said to me: “I don’t crave fin’ry—jes plenty er good close, en vittles, en I ’spects ter get dese widout scrubbin’ fer ’em,’ ‘Where is de gover’ment?’ they ask anxiously, ‘en de forty acres er lan’, en de mule?’—which each one of them was led to reckon on. They expected a saturnalia of freedom; to be legislators, judges and governors in the land, to live in the white folks’ houses, and to ride in their carriages. They cannot understand a freedom that involves labor and care. They say they were deceived; that white folks still have the upper hand, and ride while they walk. I pity them deeply.
“You know I have never locked up anything. Now I am a slave to my keys. I am robbed daily. Spoons, cups and all the utensils from the kitchen have been carried off. I am now paying little black Jake to steal some of them back for me, as he says he knows where they are. I cannot even set the bread to rise without some of it being taken. All this, notwithstanding the servants are paid wages. It is astonishing that those we have considered most reliable are engaged in the universal dishonesty. I understand they call it ‘sp’ilin’ de ’Gypshuns!’
“The Mississippi river is open;—the boats ply daily up and down, but we have no mail. We are surely treated like stepchildren of the great United States. Already the tax-assessor has come to value our property; the tax-gatherer has collected the national revenues; agents of the Freedman’s Bureau are taking the census of negro children preparatory to forming schools, and Northern land buyers are looking out for bargains in broken-up estates. Is it strange that we ask: ‘Where is the postmaster?’ We have had already too much exclusion from the world in Confederate days. Let us emerge from our former ‘barbarous state of ignorance,’—and let me hear from my absent child in Massachusetts!
“Your father has written from New Orleans as follows: ‘I have extricated my Jefferson City property from the seizure of the Federals, and have paid $800 to release it, though I think it will cost several hundred more. They—the Federals—burnt the mill mortgaged to me by G. B. M.—and I shall lose $5,000 on that. I think I have done remarkably well to have paid off so many incumbrances, but I wish you to have for the present a rigid management of all matters of expense. I am glad I have a prospect of getting my law library into my possession again. I find four hundred and fifty volumes of it in the quartermaster’s department.
“I can only extricate my affairs by economy on the part of all my family, and am only asking that they show a little patience under our temporary separation. I do not wish them to aid me by earning anything, except it be David, for himself individually; but we shall all be in the city in our own home the sooner by the exercise of present self-denial.
“‘I am glad to learn that the people of the South denounce the assassination of Lincoln,’ for it was a ruinous misfortune to us.
“At present we are living at as little expense as possible with no perceptible income. We are taxed according to the ante-bellum tax lists—including our slaves and property swept off the earth by the armies. A fine sugar estate, near us on the river, worth two hundred thousand dollars, was sold last week for taxes, which were seven thousand five hundred dollars. The whole estate—land, dwelling, sugar house, stock—brought only four thousand dollars. There could scarcely be completer confiscation than these unrighteous tax-sales under which millions of dollars worth of property are advertised for sale.
“I saw a late article in the Chicago Times in which the writer said: ‘You had better be a poor man’s dog than a Southerner now.’ If our negroes are idle and impudent we are not allowed to send them away. If we have crops waiting in the fields for gathering, the hands are all given by the semi-military government ‘passes to go,’ though we pay wages; and (weakly or humanely?) buy food, furnish doctors and wait on the sick, very much in the old way, simply because nature refuses to snap the ties of a lifetime on the authority of new conditions. I have it in mind to make Myrtle Grove a very disagreeable place to some of the most trifling, so that they will get into the humor to hunt a new home.