SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES
[In Southern Historical Papers, Volume 32, pages 146-150. T. C. DeLeon, in New Orleans Picayune.]
The great German who wrote:
“Honor to woman! to her it is given
To garden the earth with roses of heaven!”
precisely described the Confederate conditions—a century in advance. True, constant, brave and enduring, the men were; but the women set even the bravest and most steadfast example. Nor was this confined to any one section of the country. The “girl with the calico dress” of the lowland farms; the “merry mountain maid” of the hill country, and the belles of society in the cities, all vied with each other in efforts to serve the men who had gone to the front to fight for home and for them. And there was no section of the South where this desire to do all they might and more was oftener in evidence than another. In every camp of the early days of the great struggle the incoming troops bore trophies of home love, and as the war progressed to need, then to dire want, the sacrifices of those women at home became almost a poem, and one most pathetic. Dress—misconceived as the feminine fetich—was forgotten in the effort to clothe the boys at the front; the family larder—ill-stocked at the best—was depleted to nothingness, to send to distant camps those delicacies—so equally freighted with tenderness and dyspepsia—which too often never reached their destination. And later, the carpets were taken from the floors, the curtains from the windows—alike in humble homes and in dwellings of the rich—to be cut in blankets for the uncomplaining fellows, sleeping on freezing mud.
So wide, so universal, was the rule of self-sacrifice, that no one reference to it can do justice to the zeal and devotion of “Our Girls.” And the best proof of both was in the hospitals, where soon began to congregate the maimed and torn forms of those just sent forth to glory and victory. This was the trial that tested the grain and purity of our womanhood, and left it without alloy of fear or selfishness. And some of the women who wrought in home and hospital—even in trench and on the firing line—for the “boys,” had never before handled aught rougher than embroidery, or seen aught more fearsome than its needle-prick. Yes, these untried women, young and old, stood fire like veteran regulars, indeed, even more bravely in moral view, for they missed the stimulus of the charge—the tonic in the thought of striking back.