The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 22, page 60.]

I claim for Camp Pickett the paternity of the first of the public expressions, in the form of a Confederate woman’s monument. On the 16th day of January, 1890, in an address made by me, upon the presentation of General Pickett’s portrait to this camp by Mrs. Jennings, as my remarks, published in the Richmond Dispatch of the 17th of January, 1890, will show, I urged that steps be taken to erect a monument to the women of the Southern Confederacy, and you applauded the suggestion. But this idea, and the execution of it, is something in which none of us should claim exclusive glory and ownership. The monument should be carried not alone upon the shoulders of the infantry, artillery, cavalry, engineers and sailors of the Confederacy, but should be urged forward by the hearts and hands of the whole South. And wherever a Northern man has a Southern wife (and a good many Northern men of taste have them) let them help, too, for God never gave him a nobler or richer blessing. The place for such a monument, it seems to me, should be by the side of the Confederate soldier on Libby Hill. It is not well for a man to be alone, nor woman either. To place her elsewhere would make a perpetual stag of him, and a perpetual wall-flower of her. Companions in glory and suffering, let them go down the corridors of time side by side, the representatives of a race of heroes.

GEN. BRADLEY T. JOHNSON’S SPEECH AT THE DEDICATION OF SOUTH’S MUSEUM

What Our Women Stood

[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 23, pages 368-370.]

Evil dies, good lives; and the time will come when all the world will realize that the failure of the Confederacy was a great misfortune to humanity, and will be the source of unnumbered woes to liberty. Washington 29 might have failed; Kosciusko and Robert E. Lee did fail; but I believe history will award a higher place to them, unsuccessful, than to Suwarrow and to Grant, victorious. This great and noble cause, the principles of which I have attempted to formulate for you, was defended with a genius and a chivalry of men and women never equalled by any race. My heart melts now at the memory of those days.

Just realize it: There is not a hearth and home in Virginia that has not heard the sound of hostile cannon; there is not a family which has not buried kin slain in battle. Of all the examples of that heroic time; of all figures that will live in the music of the poet or the pictures of the painter, the one that stands in the foreground, the one that will be glorified with the halo of the heroine, is the woman—mother, sister, lover—who gave her life and heart to the cause. And the woman and girl, remote from cities and towns, back in the woods, away from railways or telegraph.

Thomas Nelson Page has given us a picture of her in his story of “Darby.” I thank him for “Darby Stanly.” I knew the boy and loved him well, for I have seen him and his cousins on the march, in camp, and on the battlefield, lying in ranks, stark, with his face to the foe and his musket grasped in his cold hands. I can recall what talk there was at a “meetin’” about the “Black Republicans” coming down here to interfere with us, and how we “warn’t goin’ to ’low it,” and how the boys would square their shoulders to see if the girls were looking at ’em, and how the girls would preen their new muslins and calicoes, and see if the boys were “noticen’,” and how by Tuesday news came that Captain Thornton was forming his company at the court-house, and how the mother packed up his little “duds” in her boy’s school satchel and tied it on his back, and kissed him and bade him good-bye, and watched him, as well as she could see, as he went down the walk to the front gate, and as he turned into the “big road,” and as he got to the corner, turned round and took off his hat and swung it around his head, and then disappeared out of her life forever. For, after 30 Cold Harbor, his body could never be found nor his grave identified, though a dozen saw him die. And then, for days and for weeks and for months, alone, the mother lived this lonely life, waiting for news. The war had taken her only son, and she was a widow; but from that day to this, no human being has ever heard a word of repining from her lips. Those who suffer most complain least.

Or, I recall that story of Bishop-General Polk, about the woman in the mountains of Tennessee, with six sons. Five of them were in the army, and when it was announced to her that her eldest born had been killed in battle, the mother simply said: “The Lord’s will be done. Eddie (her baby) will be fourteen next spring, and he can take Billy’s place.”