The steel-ribbed shirt,
The old hoopskirt which hung on the wall.”
One thing in the management of the hoopskirt the men never could understand. How in the world could all those steel wires be bundled and controlled when a woman rode horseback or had to be packed in a buggy or carriage?
It was always a like wonder how the women could dance so nimbly and gracefully with long trains and never get tripped or tangled in them. Our women managed the trains and the hoopskirts just as tactfully and thoroughly and gracefully as they did their hard-headed husbands and silly sweethearts. How they did it nobody can tell, but they did it.
About the very last days of the war one of these old hoopskirts played a conspicuous part in a tragedy in the suburbs of Camilla, then a very small village, the county seat of Mitchell County, Ga. A farmer by the name of Taylor lived near the Hoggard Swamp. He had a friend living in the town by the name of O’Brien. Both of them often visited a very thrifty widow by the name of Woolley. On her disappearance Taylor had put out the report that she had moved back to South Carolina, but the truth was he had murdered her for her money and buried her body under some peach trees near the swamp. No suspicion was aroused until Taylor returned from a trip to Albany without O’Brien, who had gone off with him, and a report came down from Albany that O’Brien’s dead body had been found near there in the woods. Then suspicion put in its work. Murder was in the air, but nowhere else as yet. People held their breath. Some women late one afternoon happened to pass the peach trees mentioned and noticed the suspicious looking fresh soil under them. As soon as they reached home they reported the circumstance and a party was soon made up to go that night and make an examination. The women guided them to the spot. 276 They were afraid to make a bright fire and they used only a dim light by burning corn cobs. Their blood ran cold when in a very few moments they were satisfied that they were digging into the poor woman’s grave. Suddenly on the quick removal of a shovel or two more of dirt, up flew a woman’s dress and white underclothing pretty high in the air. Then there was a stampede for life. Terror seized the men’s very bones. After a while they mustered courage enough to return and find that the woman was dead and her hoopskirt had been weighted down by the soil and as soon as this was sufficiently removed, it flew up with all its fearful elasticity. There was life in it even in the grave. Taylor was tried, convicted, and hung.
THE POLITICAL CRIMES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[By J. L. Underwood.]
The first of the great crimes of the last century was the great rebellion of the Northern States against the Federal constitutional Union, “the best government the world ever saw.” Nine of these States in solemn legislative action, in the fifties, utterly repudiated their contract in the Federal Constitution. They nullified the acts of Congress and repudiated and defied the decisions of the Supreme Court.
This rebellion at the North broke up “the glorious Union of our fathers,” and drove the South, like poor Hagar, into the wilderness to look out for herself, without a charge from any quarter that a Southern State had committed one single act in violation of Federal law or in hostility to the Constitution. Then came the second great crime, the crime so vigorously denounced at the time by William Lloyd Garrison, the most consistent and the most heroic of the Northern Abolitionists, Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, the crime of coercion of the weaker by the stronger States, the military invasion of the South under the prostituted flag of the Union, and 277 the final subjugation of her people by fire and sword. O tempora! O mores!