“When we of Atlanta were working so hard to have the State accept and maintain the soldiers’ home which had been built by public subscription eight years before and was fast going to decay, the only opposition we had was from those who thought there were too few soldiers left to need such a home. But what has been the result 294 of opening it to them? Why, hundreds of old, infirm and needy veterans have found there a comfortable place in which to pass the remnant of their lives, and we feel more than repaid for our small share in opening it for their use.
“Now, in the effort to establish a home for the aged women of the Confederacy, the same objection will be raised of ‘so few to occupy it.’
“Where are the women who represented the six hundred thousand valiant soldiers who constituted the grandest army the world has yet known?
“Where are those who with unflinching courage sent forth husbands, sons, fathers, brothers and lovers to swell that immortal host which marched and suffered beneath the ‘Stars and Bars?’ Where the little girls who carded and spun and knitted to help their mothers clothe the naked soldiers? Where the young girls who stood by the wayside to feed the hungry and quench the thirst of the men on their long and weary marches? Where the women who with tireless energy ministered night and day to the sick and wounded and spoke words of hope to the dying? Where those who stood at the threshold of desolate homes to welcome with smiles and loving caresses their uncrowned heroes, and who by their courage and patient endurance, amidst want and poverty, saved from despair and even suicide the men by whose heroic efforts a new and greater South has arisen from the ashes of the old?
“Hundreds of these women, my dear friends, some of them once queens in the old Southern society of which we still boast, and who would even now grace the court of the proudest monarch on earth, are still with us, but many of them in poverty and obscurity, suffering in silence rather than acknowledge their changed condition.
“I know personally of four cultured, refined women, born and bred in luxury, who gave some of the best years of their lives to help the Southern cause, and who for the love of it still work with their feeble hands to make the money with which to pay their dues as members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“I know of another, reared by aristocratic, wealthy parents in this city, who drove with her patriotic mother almost daily to take in their private carriage the sick and wounded from the trains to the hospitals, and who on one occasion retired behind one of the brick pillars of your depot and tore off her undergarments to furnish bandages for bleeding arteries. She is now quite advanced in years, nearly all her relatives dead, and she is in very straitened circumstances. But she is proud and brave still, and makes no moan.
“A few years ago it was announced in an Atlanta paper that a lady from Sharpsburg, Md., was visiting a friend in Atlanta. A gentleman in Griffin, after seeing the notice, took the next train to Atlanta and called to see the lady without giving his name. As she entered the parlor he stared at her for a moment and then grasped both her hands in his and tears sprang to his eyes as he said with great emotion, ‘Yes, yes, this is Miss Julia, only grown older—the same sweet face that looked so compassionately into mine, and the same person who with her beautiful sister Alice and her mother, worthy to have been the mother of Napoleon, nursed me into life as you did so many poor fellows after that awful battle. I have come to take you home with me. My wife and children love you and all your family; your names are honored household words with us.’ Everything in the fine old mansion of that family was literally soaked in the blood of Southern soldiers. To these two young girls, Julia and Alice, scores of Southern families owe the recovery of the bodies of their dead upon the memorable and bloody field of Antietam or Sharpsburg. Most of the people around there were Northern sympathizers, and took pleasure in desecrating Confederate graves, and these young ladies, with the assistance of a gentleman, who posed as a Yankee, made, secretly, diagrams of the burial places of our dead, marking distances from trees, fences and other objects, and sometimes burying pieces of iron or other indestructible articles near by, that they might be able, if need be, to recover the bodies, and thus many were restored to their friends. So much was this 296 family hated by the Yankee element in the surrounding country it became unsafe for them to keep a light in the house after night, for fear of being fired into. I have myself seen since the war the bullets which lodged in the inside walls of the rooms. Just at the close of the war these brave girls, in order to send the body of a noble Confederate captain to his wife, then living in Macon, drove with it in a wagon seventeen miles at night, crossing the broad Potomac in a ferryboat, their only companion a boy of twelve, and delivered the casket to the express agent at Leesburg, Va. Both of these Southern heroines are still living. Poverty long since overtook them; the dear old home has passed into strange hands, and they are left almost alone—one a widow, the other never married.
“Think you that such as these are not deserving the help of those of us who have been more fortunate? In the language of Mrs. Vincent, of Texas, a native Georgian, ‘because they have stifled their cries, and in silent self-reliance labored all these years for subsistence, are we Daughters to close our ears to their appeals, now that the patient hands and the feeble footsteps hesitate in the oncoming darkness?’