Women of America / Woman: In all ages and in all countries Vol. 10 (of 10)

by John Ruse Larus

The life of the typical Virginia lady of those luxurious days was an unending round of social pleasures, and this life in its turn was typical of that of the Southern woman of refinement in all sections, though presenting that life in its most enlarged and broadened aspects. She had her responsibilities, and she recognized them; she was the queen of a vast estate, on which many souls looked to her for comfort and help, and, as a rule, she responded to their call with all alacrity. To her slaves, at least as far as the house servants were concerned, she was friend rather than mistress, acknowledging them as part of her family and caring for them almost as for her own children. But the trouble was that she generally did these things vicariously; she delegated her powers, seeing to it, indeed, that they were administered as she would have them, but herself doing little. She was given over, for her own part, to the demands of society and to the requirements of hospitality; and Southern hospitality is proverbial, and the courtly welcome and gracious attentions of the hostess of the plantation mansion in the ante-bellum days were among the most agreeable and vivid impressions of her guests. 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. At such times, it may be remarked, the system of domestic slavery appealed rather as a virtue than as a stain, for the household slaves were interested sharers in the joys of the family. In this connection, one is reminded of the Georgia negress who, on being asked if she were the slave of a certain person, replied: "Yes, I belong to them, and they belong to me."

In her home the typical Virginia lady did little with her own hands; she directed, but she would have thought it shame to labor even in such a cause. Her hands were too delicate to work, her feet too dainty to press the ground; she never walked where she could ride, and carriages were always at her command. Her winters, if she lived on her plantation, were passed in a round of pleasures, of balls and minor social functions; her summers she spent at the famous "Springs," whither she drove in her cumbrous but comfortable carriage,--in which way, indeed, some of the more enthusiastic lovers of those "Springs" came even from the southernmost bournes of the land. A friend of the writer, for instance, once told him how she had often travelled in this manner from New Orleans to the Greenbrier White Sulphur Springs in those halcyon days "before the war."

The Northern dame, she of New York or Boston or of those dwelling in the rural districts, knew little of such luxuries as these. Between the Southern lady and the Northern there was one radical point of difference in those days which was more effective to separate their ideas and ideals than might be thought: the former was a dweller in the country, the latter in cities. Type is here spoken of. The typical Southern lady was found on the plantation, the typical Northern lady in the heart of the city. This condition was imposed upon the wealthiest and most cultured of each section by the variant conditions under which they lived; it was in her own home that the Southern woman found the most power for her wealth, in the city that the Northern woman alone found avenues for her money to buy for her the best things of culture, material or mental. And this severance made for certain results. The Southern woman held to isolation of rule as the best that she knew; the Northern woman believed that in segregation and community of interests alone came hope of the best. These theories were unrecognized; but they were inherent and dominant.

Moreover, there still existed in the North, especially in the further removed sections, a strong leaven of the old Puritan spirit; and this could neither understand nor tolerate the spirit of luxury that reigned in the South. Each section misunderstood and unjustly contemned the other. To the Northern woman, she of the South was a pampered aristocrat of the most ignoble kind, caring for nothing but the gratification of her luxurious tastes, battening on the sufferings of a humanity which she bought and sold as cattle, an Augusta in her luxuries and love of self; to the Southern woman, she of the North was cold, hard, uncultured, unrefined, plebeian in tastes and existence, and generally on a lower plane than the daughter of the Cavaliers. The Southern woman despised her sister of the North; the Northern woman hated her sister of the South. Where there was meeting and blending on the contiguous limits of the sections there was more of understanding and therefore of toleration for the points of severance of ideas; but even here there was cause of strife in the heated politics which had for some time been appealing to the passions of our statesmen. With the quick enthusiasm in such matters that is an attribute of their sex and which blinds women even more than men to the calmer suggestions of reason, the women of the country became divided into two bitterly hostile camps because of the matters which their husbands and brothers discussed in the councils of the nation. It is true that in this case the main question at issue had unwonted appeal to the women themselves; for she of the South saw her wealth and luxury threatened by the Abolitionists, while she of the North made herself a part of the cause of ill-treated humanity, as she deemed it. Had the men been able to restrain the passions which at this time stirred them almost to frenzy, the women would not have permitted the glowing embers to become extinguished without being fanned into red flame.

That the women of our country were largely instrumental in bringing about the fratricidal strife which shook that country to its centre cannot be denied. Even such firebrands as Phillips and Garrison did not incite so bitter a spirit as did the many women who espoused their cause. It was a time of fanaticism in the North and fury in the South; and both these feelings reached their culmination in the women of the sections. One of the most powerful influences for the making of discord was from the hand of a woman, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin and thereby led much of the thought and prejudices of both sections into utterly false channels. The South, and especially its women, saw in the book a vile libel upon its culture, a base slander of its most representative institutions; the North, especially its women, accepted the book as literal fact and looked upon their brothers and sisters of the South as slave-drivers and cruel task-mistresses, building the structure of their wealth and luxury upon the crushed bodies of their weaker and more degraded fellows and careless of the bitter moans of the oppressed. The acceptance by the North of the book as fact embittered the South, conscious of the injustice of the thing, to the last degree, while the North upon that utterly inadequate authority reviled the South for the imaginary crimes which were rife in its midst.

The question of the limitation of slavery had been long before the country and had produced much bitterness of feeling on both sides; but the idea of the sudden abolishment of the institution, "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," was of new growth in the decade preceding the war, at least in any coherent and prominent form. In the South were many women as well as men who, while they accepted and tried to make the best of the institution which had been handed down to them by their ancestors, were at heart as eager Abolitionists as any of the North; but they knew that such a radical change must be brought about by gradual steps or it would open the way to yet greater evils, of which the sudden impoverishment of the section was not the greatest. In the North were men and women who held themselves aloof from the rabid fanaticism of their day, and while they heartily desired the eradication of the taint of slavery from the country which boasted of its freedom, yet were willing to trust to time and the growth of principle for the result which they desired. But on both sides these conservatives were unfortunately in the minority and their influence was of no avail; on both sides they were looked upon as traitors to the cause which they loved best and most wisely of all.

There might have been hope of compromise; the fanatics were still in the minority among the men who governed the destinies of the nation, and while there was bitterness and even hatred rife among these men, there was yet stronger dread of open separation, so that there might have been reached some conclusion which would have been productive of results satisfactory in the main to both sides, though not in full measure; but the women would not have it so. They flung themselves into politics with a fervor that was fatal to all the interests of peace; for those of the North could not understand any toleration of "the accursed thing," while they of the South demanded that their husbands and lovers should resent the insult which had been imposed upon Southern womanhood in the vile slanders which were freely circulated in Abolitionist circles. That these slanders were the voice of fanaticism and not of mere hatred was not understood; that they were reprobated by the better elements of the North was not believed.

In both sections an appeal to arms was talked of if secession were adopted and resisted. At first this was but idle menace; but it gradually grew to the proportions of stern determination at least in one of the sections, and by none was it so eagerly welcomed and fanned as by the women. "The peace of them that make peace" was not for the American woman of that time; all the natural militancy of the feminine nature was aroused to its highest pitch, and it was more at the instigation of hatred than as an appeal to justice that the thought of war was dear to the women of our riven country. Riven it was already in spirit, though not as yet in fact; the shadow of coming strife lay heavy on the land long before it took substance. There were still those, chiefly among the men, who believed that from all this lurid smoke there would result nothing worse than smouldering embers, which would eventually perish unharmful; that thus it could not be was owing in greatest part to the influence of those who in the bitter days to come were to bear the brunt of the suffering and agony of war, the women of America.

It is grateful to turn for a moment to look upon the last days of Washington society under the old regime. Buchanan was the last of the old-time presidents, and under his administration Washington society went its normal way of gaiety, though disturbed in its enjoyment by the thickening cloud that hung over the land and gathered most darkly at the capital. President Buchanan was a bachelor; but his mansion did not lack female rule, for his niece, Harriet Lane, took upon herself the onerous duties of mistress of the White House, and never were they more gracefully fulfilled. Young as she was, she had few rivals and no superiors in knowledge of the requirements of her position and ability to meet those requirements; never was the White House ruled in more dignified and gracious manner than by this young woman. She had had excellent training for her dignities; when her uncle, in 1852, was sent as Minister to the Court of Saint James, she accompanied him thither, and her beauty and accomplishments won instantaneous recognition and admiration from the most prejudiced of English critics in these matters. Her character was as admirable and admired as was her beauty, and she was in all ways fitted to grace a court, hether that court were royal or republican.

During the four years of her uncle's stormy administration she ruled the social world of Washington as of right and title, and her rule was on all sides acknowledged to be worthy of allegiance. It was the last day of old-time American society, and it died in splendor. No more courteous and cultured gentleman than James Buchanan ever occupied the White House as its master, even though as a statesman he was sadly lacking in the qualities which were demanded by the circumstances of his times; no more gracious lady than Harriet Lane ever presided over the social destinies of the presidential mansion, and with her there is no need of limiting statement in modification of the praise bestowed.