There is high satisfaction in the knowledge that the soldiers and statesmen of the South were not unmindful of the services of the Southern women, and freely gave expression to their appreciation of their myriad acts of devotion. In the breast of every Confederate soldier there was a feeling of gratitude which grew more intense from campaign to campaign, and that can never be effaced. Nor was official recognition ever wanting.
The Provisional Congress of the Confederate States placed on record the thanks of the country to the women of the South for their works of patriotism and public charity, and declared that the Government owed them “a public acknowledgment of their faithfulness in the glorious work of effecting our independence.”
President Davis in his message to Congress in January, 1863, spoke of “our noble and devoted women, without whose sublime sacrifices our success would have been impossible.”
Stonewall Jackson, the right arm of Lee, in a letter written in 1862 to Mrs. Mary Tucker Magill, said: “Be assured that I feel a deep and abiding interest in our female soldiers. They are patriots in the truest sense of the word, and I more than admire them.”
Indeed, the narrative of the behavior of the Southern women is an integral part of the history of the war itself, and, whenever it shall be worthily written, will form its most touching and inspiring chapter.
George Cary Eggleston, in “A Rebel’s Recollections,” which was published some years ago, gives an admirable exposition of the constancy of our women. “They could hardly,” he says, “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. * * * When they lost a husband, or son, or a brother, they held the loss as 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. * * 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. * * * * * 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 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 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.”
Permit me now to say a few words concerning the part played by Marylanders, and particularly by Baltimoreans, in the war between the States. It is a subject on which every “Old Rebel” delights to dwell. It makes your fair city inconceivably dear to the peoples of what were the Confederate States.
Of the gallant soldiers you gave to the Southern Confederacy—who, as their historian tells us, “struck the first blow in Baltimore and the last in Virginia”—it is sufficient to say, in the words of Mr. Davis, that “the world will accord to them peculiar credit, as it has always done to those who leave their hearthstones to fight for principle in the land of others.” Assuredly the names of Elzey, of Ridgeley Brown, of Gilmore, of Dorsey, of Winder, of Archer, of Herbert, of Johnson, are gladly kept in glorious remembrance, as is the name of every Marylander, officer or private, who, under the Stars and Bars, helped to give us victory and shared with us defeat.