The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

The South was intensely American, and her people loved American politics and talked American politics. She entered into the Revolutionary war with all her soul. Southern statesmanship lifted that struggle from a mere rebellion to a war of nations by manly secession from Great Britain in North Carolina’s declaration of independence at Mecklenburg. The Philadelphia declaration was drawn up by the South’s Jefferson and proposed by Virginia. This was the great secession of 1776. To the Revolutionary war the South sent one hundred out of every two hundred and nine men of military age, while the North sent one hundred out of every two hundred 54 and twenty-seven. (We quote from the official report of General Knox, Secretary of War.) Virginia sent 56,721 men. South Carolina sent 31,000 men, while New York, with more than double her military population, sent 29,830. New Hampshire, with double the population of South Carolina, sent only 18,000. The little Southern States sent more men in proportion to population than even Massachusetts and Connecticut, who did their part so well in that war.

It was Southern politics that proposed the great union of the sovereign States in 1787. To that union the three States of Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia have added out of their own bosoms ten more great States. These Southern States were the mothers of States, and most naturally did they talk of States and State’s rights.

Southern politics, prevailing in the national councils against the bitter protests of New England, carried through the war of 1812; added Florida to the Union, and, by the purchase of Louisiana, all the Trans-Mississippi valley from the Gulf to Canada. It was Southern politics against the furious opposition of New England that annexed Texas, and, by the war with Mexico, brought in the vast territory far away to the Pacific. The South sent 45,000 volunteers to the Mexican war; the whole North, with three times the population, sent 23,000. Thus the South was the mother of territories, and was it not natural that she should talk of territories and of her rights in the territories?

In political platforms, in legislative enactments, and notably in the election of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, the more populous North declared that the Southern States should be shut out from all share in the territories bought with common treasure and blood. Our women, a child, a negro, could see the iniquity of the claim.

The action of the North in regard to national territory was an edict, too, that the negroes, through no fault of their own, should be shut up in one little corner of the country.

Then when the South sought the only alternative left her, that of peaceable secession, her right to go was justified 55 by the terms of the Constitution; by the distinct understanding among the sovereign States when they entered the Union, more directly insisted and put on record by the three States of Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island than any other State; by the secession convention of New England in the war of 1812; by the Northern secession convention in Ohio in 1859 and the reiterated declarations of Henry Ward Beecher, and by Wendell Phillips, and Horace Greeley, William Lloyd Garrison and the other great leaders of Northern thought in 1860.

As to coercing the States back into the Union, President Buchanan well said at the time there was “not a shadow of authority” for it, and Governor Seymour, of New York, truthfully said “coercion is revolution.”

Again, remember that wrongs pierce deeper into the heart of woman than into the more callous soul of man. For years vast multitudes of the people of the North had kept up a furious war against the South in books and newspapers; in pulpits and religious conventions; in political platforms and State assemblies. Oh, it makes the blood run cold to think of the relentless malignity of the fanaticism of those days. No parlors nor churches too sacred for bitter onslaught on Southern people; no epithets too vile; no slanders too black; no curses too deadly to be hurled at Southern men and women. But war,—yes, blood-red war was really, and almost formally declared by the Northern endorsement of Henry Ward Beecher’s “Sharpe’s rifles” crusade against Southern settlers in Kansas; and the war of 1861 was actually begun by John Brown’s murderous raid at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia in 1859. The North made him a hero martyr. John Brown’s rifle shot in Virginia only alarmed the angel of peace. The Northern applause of John Brown drove her away from our unhappy land. By his apotheosis the Northern people made his rifle shot at Harper’s Ferry the skirmish firing of the impending war, to be answered by our manly cannon at Charleston in 1861. Puritan intolerance scourged Roger Williams out of Massachusetts for nonconformity in religion; and 56 Puritanism scourged the South out of the Union in 1861 for nonconformity in politics. The Southern woman’s heart felt to the very core and resented as only woman can resent, the sting of that merciless lash.

This is an age of monuments, and your speaker has undertaken to erect one in book form to the memory of Confederate women. When this thought comes to be put in marble or brass, as it will some day soon, let that monument rest on the broad granite foundation of truth. Then as the artist begins to put in bas relief the symbols of the virtues of the Southern women of 1861, and the souvenirs of her heroic life, let the first scene be that of a scroll, the Constitution of the United States, held in the unsullied hands of the great Jefferson Davis, as he marches out from the United States court, under whose warrants he had been held for treason, again a free man. Let that picture tell of the undying loyalty of our mother and her people to the organic law of the land: that Southern men wrote it and their sons have ever honored and loved it: Tell it in Gath, publish it in the streets of Aekelon, that those who crushed us were the men who despised, hawked at and cursed the Constitution.

The South at Montgomery swore fresh allegiance to the Constitution handed down by our American fathers, and carried with her through all the wilderness march the sacred old Ark of the Covenant. And when our Confederate head, the peerless Jefferson Davis, our chosen standard bearer of State sovereignty and home rule, was brought to trial, bearing in himself the alleged sins of us all, charged with being a rebel, that document showed him to be a stainless patriot; and though the mob of millions was shouting, “Crucify him, crucify him!” the highest courts of the Federal Government declared by his quiet and silent, but significant release, as Pilate did of Jesus, “We find no fault in this man.” The Constitution of the United States is a standing declaration of the sinlessness of the Confederate cause.