CHAPTER XI
THE SECTIONAL DIVISION
Once more it becomes necessary to recognize the division of our country into sections, as in the days before the Revolution welded it into one nation. The time was fast coming when there should be division in good earnest, when there should be even overt separation; and to understand the effects and tendencies of this time among the women of America it is needful that we take into fuller consideration than we have yet done the differences of custom and thought that existed between the women of the South and the women of the North. For though these met upon common ground and blended in a society which saw but little variation in the types presented to it, there had been constantly growing, since the time of the first amalgamation of the colonies into one nation, differences between the Northern and the Southern cultures that were little less than radical in their ultimate nature and expressions.
The distinctiveness of type had come about gradually; but it had always existed as a possibility, even in the youngest days of the republic. The conditions of civilization North and South were in themselves divergent, and they were sure to produce an ever-increasing effect. The North was the land of affairs; the South was the home of luxury. The North worked for itself and won its sustenance by the labor of its own hands or brain; the South watched its wealth accumulate by the toil of its slaves, and thus had time and to spare for the cultivation of the graces which come of leisure. Up to the inception of the Civil War it cannot be denied that the South was preeminently the fountain of American society. Even as Virginia was the Mother of Presidents, so was the whole South the parent of the most charming, the most refined, the most cultured of the dames and damsels who held society aloft upon their lovely shoulders. The superiority was not of kind, for in this the North steadily held its own, as was but natural; it was of numbers. For every recognized ornament to society sent by the North to grace the circles of Washington, the South sent two.
When the century passed its meridian and turned to the descending road there had come about a practical division of the country into two sections once more. Not only in feeling,--which, however, was subdued and hardly expressed save by the more bitter partisans, at least among the women,--but in nature. While the higher ideals of the woman of the North and her of the South were the same, they differed in nearly everything that made for progress toward the goal they sought. The tendency toward aristocratic ideas had taken unwonted shape toward the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. According to the false ideal which had come to take the place of the higher one of earlier days, the Southern woman was par excellence the aristocrat of America. She was lapped in luxury; she was surrounded by every refinement; she was waited upon by hosts of servants; she was the representative in many ways of the feudal chatelaine of olden times in England, with added refinements of culture and luxury. But all this was bought, though she did not then see the truth, at a terrible price. The Southern conditions, brought about by the institution of slavery, bore most heavily in effect upon the men of that section; but the women also were in danger of forgetting the strength of their womanhood in the idleness of untroubled days and in the lack of power that results from the transfer of all burdens to the shoulders of others.
A SOUTHERN WEDDING
After the painting by E. L. Henry
Nor with all the social distinction of the southern household was there a sacrifice of a single charm of home life. Every important domestic event was attended with becoming ceremony. The arrival of the newborn, the home gatherings of later years, and the wedding,--these were occasions to be celebrated by all; occasions when the tenderest family sentiment was manifested.