The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

But don’t let us go too far in this direction. We might fall into the other extreme of hypocritical “gush.” Let us be careful; yea, honest. About the best we could do 48 in war times is well shown in the preaching of a good old Alabama country Baptist preacher in the darker days of the war. He was a thorough Southerner and “brim full of secesh,” as we used to say, and at the same time a devout Christian. He was of the old-fashioned type and talked a little through his nose. His text was the great day when the good people will be gathered to Heaven from the four corners of the world. Warming up to his theme he said: “And oh, my brethren,—ah; in the day of redemption the redeemed of the Lord will come flocking from the four corners of the earth,—ah! They will come from the East on the wings of the morning,—ah! I hear them shouting Hallelujah, as they strike their harps of gold—ah! And they’ll come from the West shouting Hosanna in the highest,—ah! and you’ll see them coming in crowds from the South,—ah; with palms of victory in their hands, ah! And they’ll come from the,—well, I reckon may be a few of them will come from the North.” Oh that’s about the way men, women and children down South felt for twenty years. But, we’ve moved up on that. Christians grow in grace, you know. The war is over. There are no enemies now. We now believe a great many will come from the North. Our old preacher would not now have a misgiving about all four of the corners.

A few weeks after the surrender of Vicksburg, a large number of sick paroled Confederate soldiers were sent home on a Federal steamer by way of New Orleans and Mobile. The speaker was among them. He had been promoted to the chaplaincy of the Thirtieth Alabama Regiment and soon found himself strong enough at least to bury the dead as our poor fellows dropped away every day. The Federal guard on the boat was under command of Lieutenant Winslow, of Massachusetts, and a nobler and bigger hearted soldier never wore a sword. Between New Orleans and Mobile it was necessary to bury our dead in the Gulf. Having no coffins the Federal lieutenant and the Confederate chaplain would lay the body, wrapped in the old blanket or quilt, on a plank and then bind it with ropes and, fastening heavy 49 irons to the feet, we would gently lower it and let it sink down, down in the briny deep, the cleanest grave man ever saw. The Northern lieutenant not only took off his cap and bowed in reverence when the Confederate chaplain prayed, but with his own hands assisted in all the details of every burial. So let the North and the South together bury the dead animosities of the past, take the corpse of bitter falsehood, the prolific mother of prejudice and hatred, bind it with the cords of patriotism and sink it into the ocean of oblivion. But publish the truth. The truth lives and ought to live. Truth never does harm; but, with God and man, it is the peace angel of reconciliation. Let the testimony be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth and our people will abide by it and every patriot will welcome the verdict.

Who were the women of 1861? My old Tennessee father used to teach me that there is a great deal more in the stock of people than there is in horses. Blood will tell. These women were the direct descendants of those bold, hardy Englishmen, who, under John Smith, Lord Delaware, Lord Baltimore and General Oglethorpe made settlements on the Southern shores and those who, from time to time, were added to their colonies. They were broad men, bringing broad ideas. They came, not because they were driven out of England, but because they wanted to come to America; who thought it no sin to bring the best things of old England, and give them a new and better growth in the new world; who first gave the new world trial by jury and the election of governors by popular vote. English cavaliers who knew how to be gentlemen, even in the forest. This was the leading blood. From time to time it was made stronger by a considerable addition of Scotch and Scotch-Irish and an occasional healthful cross with the very best people of the North, more soulful and impulsive by some of the blood of Ireland, and more vivacious by the French Huguenot in the Carolinas and the Creole in Louisiana. There thus grew up a new English race—English, but not too English; English but American-English blood, 50 of which old England is proud to-day. With little or no immigration for many years from other people, this blood under our balmy sun produced a race of its own—a Southern people, as Klopstock says of the sweet strong language of Germany, “Gesondert, ungemischt und nur sich selber gleich.” Distinct, unmixed and only like itself.

This was the blood that made America great, the blood from which the South gave her Washington and so many men like Henry, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe; that out of seventy-two first years of this Republic furnished the President for fifty-two years; the Chief Justice all the time, and the leaders of Senates and of Cabinets; the blood of Calhoun and Clay and Lowndes and Pinkney and Benton and Crawford; Cobb and Berrien, Hall and Jenkins, Toombs and Stevens; the blood that produced our Washington, Sumter and Marion to achieve our independence of Great Britain; Scott and Jackson to fight the war of 1812, Clark and Jackson to conquer from the Indians all the splendid country between the mountains and the Mississippi, and Taylor and Scott to win vast territories from Mexico.

This was the blood that so often showed how naturally and gracefully a Southern woman could step from a country home to adorn the White House at Washington; the blood that made the South famous for its women, stars at the capital and at Saratoga; favorites in London and Paris; and queenly ladies in their homes, whether that home was a log cabin in the forest or a mansion by the sea. It was common for Northern and European people to praise the taste of Southern women, especially in matters of dress. They did have remarkable taste in dressing, for they had a form to dress and a face to adorn that dress. Neither war nor poverty could mar their grace of form nor beauty of face.

It is said of the great Bishop Bascomb, of the Southern Methodist Church, that, in the early years of his ministry, he was so handsome and graceful in person, and so neat in his dress, that a great many of his brethren were prejudiced against him as being what they called “too 51 much of a dandy.” For a long time the young orator was sent on mountain circuits to bring him down to the level of plain old-fashioned Methodism. It was proposed to one of his mountain members who was very bitter about the preacher’s fine clothes that he give Bascomb a suit of homespun. The offer was gladly accepted, and on the day for Bascomb’s appearance in the plain clothes the old brother was early on the church grounds to glory in having made the city preacher look like other folks. Imagine his chagrin when Bascomb walked up, looking in homespun as he looked in broadcloth, an Apollo in form and a Brummel in style. “Well I do declare!” said the old man. “Go it, brother Bascomb; I give it up; It ain’t your clothes that’s so pretty, it’s jist you.” So our Southern women were just as charming in the shuck hats and home-made cotton dresses of 1864, as in the silks and satins of 1860.

But by their fruits ye shall know them. Walk with me on the streets of Richmond and Charleston. Go with me to any of our country churches throughout these Southern States and I will show you, among the many poor daughters of these women, that same classic face that tells of the blood in their veins. Go with me back to the Confederate army and you will see in such generals as the Lees, Albert Sidney Johnston, Breckinridge, Toombs, the Colquitts, Gordon, Evans, Gracie, Jeb. Stuart, Price, Hampton, Tracy, Ramseur, Ashby and thousands of private soldiers that face and form that tell of the knightly blood in the veins of the mothers that bore them.

South Georgia is to be congratulated that in the Confederate monument recently unveiled at Cuthbert, the artist has at least given what is sadly lacking in other Confederate monuments to private soldiers, the genuine face of the Southern soldier, that face which is a just compliment to the Confederate mother. The artists who cast some other monuments in the South had seen too little of Southern people, and had put on some of our monuments the pug nose and bullet head of other people.

Our mothers and grandmothers lived mostly in the country, and drank in a splendid vigor from the ozone of 52 field, and forest, and mountain. They were trained mostly at home by private teachers or in common schools run on common sense principles, and in “the old-time religion,” without “isms,” fanaticism, or cant. They were taught the philosophy of life by fathers who thought and manners by mothers who were the soul of inborn refinement. They thought for themselves, and indulged no craze for things new, and they aped no foreigners. In conversation they didn’t end every sentence with the interrogation point, but followed nature and let their voices fall at periods. They never said “thanks,” but in the good old English of Addison and Goldsmith, said “I thank you.” They never spoke of a sweetheart as “my fellow,” and would have scorned such a word as “mash.” They never walked “arm clutch,” nor allowed Sunday newspapers to make five-cent museums of their pictures. Their entertainments were famous for elegance and pleasure, but they had no euchre-clubs. Indeed, we doubt if many of them ever heard of a woman’s club of any kind. They were fond of “society,” but would have had a profound contempt for that so-called “society” of our day, in which the man is a prince who can lead the german, spend money for bouquets and part his hair in the middle. They didn’t wear bloomers, nor did many of them ever dress decolette. They were clothed and in their right mind. They never mounted platforms to speak nor pulpits to preach, and yet their influence and inspiration gave Southern pulpits and platforms a world-wide fame. Their highest ambition was to be president of home. They were Southern women everywhere, at home and abroad, in church and on the streets, in parlor and kitchen, when they rode, when they walked. Gentle, but brave; modest, but independent. Seeking no recognition, the true Southern woman found it already won by her worth; courting no attention, at every turn it met her, to do willing homage to her native grace and genuine womanhood.

Now, to appreciate the enthusiasm of such women in the Confederate war, you must remember that great principles were at stake in that struggle, and that woman 53 grasps great principles as clearly as man, and with a zeal known only to herself. See with what prompt intuition and sober enthusiasm woman received the Christian religion. Martha, of Bethany, uttered the great keynote of the Christian creed long before an apostle penned a line. The primitive evangelist Timothy, the favorite of the great Apostle Paul, was trained by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice; and the pulpit orator Apollos studied at the feet of Priscilla. The great lamented Dr. Thornwell, of South Carolina, who was justly called the “John C. Calhoun of the Presbyterian Church” of the United States, loved to tell it that he learned his theology from his poor old country Baptist mother. In politics, as in religion, our mothers may not have read much, and they talked less, but they heard much and thought the more. Before the war the reproach was often hurled at Southern men that they talked politics. God’s true people talked religion from Abel to the invention of the art of printing. They had a religion to talk. Our fathers did talk politics, for, thank God, they had politics worth talking—not the picayune politics of the demagogue office-seeker of our day; not the almighty dollar politics of the bloated bond-holder and the trusts, the one-idea craze of the silver mine-owner, nor the tariff greed of the manufacturer; not the imported European communism that would crush one class to build up another, not the wild anarchy that would pull down everything above it and blast everything around it.