Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. With all their strength, and whether for good or evil, there is none greater in effect, they urged their husbands and lovers and brothers, the one side to wipe out in blood, if need and opportunity were, the insult to their womanhood; the other to free the oppressed from bondage and from the tyranny shown by Southern women as well as men. The actions and utterances of each were plain to the other; the standpoints which dictated those acts and words were hidden by the dense mist of prejudice. Thus by woman's influence was precipitated the conflict which had already become almost inevitable.
CHAPTER XII
THE CIVIL WAR
The election of Abraham Lincoln to the chief magistracy annihilated the last hope of peaceful solution of the vexed question of the time. Hope, indeed, there was in few female breasts, for with deplorable unanimity the women of our country looked forward to war as the most desirable result of all the anger that smouldered in both sections. Secession followed hard upon the election of Lincoln; the Southern senators and representatives resigned their seats in the councils of the nation; and that nation was a nation no more.
Though there were many contributing circumstances, and those of the gravest, the women of our country had been the most influential cause of the rupture and its immediate result of war. They had inflamed the hearts of the men so that the few who retained some coolness of judgment and some tolerance of spirit could make no headway against the extremists. The women were now to bear the brunt of the hard-following consequences of their furious enthusiasm; but, before they began to feel those consequences in full measure, they were to enjoy a brief period of delight: that delight which their sex ever finds in the "pomp and circumstance of glorious war," until they learn something of its stern realities.
When peace was formally declared impossible, the women of both sections found congenial vent for the enthusiasm which had been so fatal to the efforts of the peacemakers. Each side firmly believed its cause pure and right, without the shadow of doubt being possible, and each acted from the depths of a conviction which was as much the child of education as of environing circumstances. All over the country there was enthusiasm which hardly stopped short of gala merriment. The younger women of both sides embroidered banners for their pet regiments and with their own fair hands gave those banners into the keeping of their knights, who swore--they did not know the difficulties of the task--to bring back those flags unsullied by defeat. The men were eager enough to meet the hardships and perils which they had not yet measured; but the women surpassed even the masculine eagerness, hurrying their sons and lovers and brothers and often husbands to the front, hardly finding time for tears in their enthusiasm and patriotism.
For patriotism, though sometimes not easily distinguished from selfish delight in the romance which precedes war, it was on both sides--a patriotism which was to be sorely tried and never to fail. It was misdirected in most cases as yet; the social functions which made brilliant the rival capitals for a time were mistaken expressions of the deep feeling which glowed beneath; but they had their meaning and were promises of better things to come. From Maine to Texas there burned a flame of patriotism such as had not been called forth in like eagerness of display even by the days of the Revolution, and its chief expressions were from the women of the divided land. So trivial and misdirected as yet were the majority of its expressions that it might have been thought shallow and unenduring; but it was to prove its intensity and depth in other guise, and these first ebullitions were but the foam that glances on the unsounded sea.
There was little fear of suffering on either side. Each believed that, so good was its cause, so valiant its supporters, it must triumph within a short space. A prominent New York journal prophesied the fall of Richmond within three months, saying: "We spit upon a longer-deferred justice." The South thought that Washington would be taken at one blow. In these beliefs, which seem to us, knowing the men who were to bear the standards of both causes, such wild folly, the women more than shared. Northern and Southern woman alike believed with full conviction that the men of her country were unconquerable and that God fought on her side of the quarrel; how then could defeat or disaster come to the cause she loved? It was impossible.
It must be admitted that in the first stages of the war the weight of feminine enthusiasm was in the Southern scale. There was good reason for this. At the first call of battle, the South sent forth her best and bravest, her own most cherished sons, while the North responded more tardily, leaving much of its work in the hands of substitutes of the lower class and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to our shores in such numbers had settled in the North and Northwest; and they naturally fought rather from necessity and wish for bounty than from patriotism. The flame was as steady in the North, but it was not so vivid; it had not yet been blown to full fervor. Moreover, in the North the full gravity of the task undertaken was still less recognized than in the South. When McDowell marched upon Johnston and Beauregard at Bull Run, carriages full of the leaders of Washington society, women as well as men, came to make gay his camp and see the total discomfiture of the enemy; and the flight back to the capital which followed his defeat included many women of the upper circles, whose terrors and sufferings were not undeserved as results of the extremes into which their enthusiasm had misled them. This was a poor expression indeed of the patriotism which glowed in the female breast of that day; but the time produced a better specimen and showed how the feeling found true as well as false vent. It was a young girl who brought to Beauregard the first intelligence of McDowell's movement upon Manassas and enabled him to give Johnston the warning which led to the timely juncture of their forces and the result of the battle. The young lady had heard some officers of the Union army discussing the projected movement while at the table of her father in his house near Washington. Delicately nurtured and reared as she had been, with her own hands she saddled her horse and rode through the night, partly through camps of coarsely jesting soldiery, partly along hardly-marked roads, amid darkness and in loneliness, that she might serve the land she loved. It was the first of many such services that were to be done by the women of the South, who alone had opportunity to render them, or they had surely found many rivals.