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

by John Ruse Larus

If the romantic aspect of war received in the North a rude shock in the disaster of Bull Run, it was but enhanced in the South. Moreover, the enthusiasm of the Southern woman, and particularly of the girl, found more present and congenial vent than did that of her Northern sister. Not only did the former frequently see the forms and even the deeds of the leaders of her cause, but some of those leaders were calculated to awaken enthusiasm to a degree that could not be rivalled by any of the generals of the North. The soldiers of the Union had no Stuart, with his gay laughter and merry jest and his floating feather to heighten the romance of his achievements and present him as a veritable knight of old; no Pelham with his beardless face and modest blush to make one marvel that this laughing boy should be in battle a very genius of war as he fought his guns against fearful odds. Custer, with his flowing locks, might have won some hearts had the war been carried into Northern territory; but Custer had not at his back the fame of Stuart, whose rides around McClellan made him a hero of romance, nor had he the social qualities that made so popular the Southern leader, while the latter's purity of life and deep religious feeling, beneath all his frivolity of manner, appealed with power to the finer natures of the Southern women. He was the chosen knight, the adored hero, of Southern womanhood; and when his feather appeared at the head of his daredevils there was feminine rejoicing and eager welcome.

It was in the facts of the personal devotion inspired by some of their leaders, Lee,--Jackson, and Stuart, especially,--of the proximity of those fighting for her cause, of her presence on the scene of strife, and of her deeper sufferings and greater call for endurance, that explanation must be found of the indubitable phenomenon that there was far more of enthusiasm displayed by the woman of the South than by her of the North, at least during the first years of the war. Enthusiasm only, not devotion to principle. That was assured in both; both gave a deep and effective love to the cause which they held as right and just, and for which they were willing to give their very lives if need were. The Southern woman was called upon to make greater sacrifices, to bear greater sufferings, than her sister of the North; but none can doubt that the latter would have borne all these as nobly had fate called upon her to do so. Those who know the story of Southern womanhood in those terrible days must give to it all honor and admiration; but these must not be granted as exclusively its right, without due sense of the sufficient patriotism and courage displayed by Northern womanhood at the call of country. Each gave all that she had to give; each proved that her patriotism was not a mere name.

If among the women of the South there was more fervent enthusiasm than among those of the North, there was also deeper hatred of the enemies of their cause. When General Butler, as master of New Orleans, issued the equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time the title of "Beast Butler" among the women of the South, setting forth that any woman who insulted on the street a Union soldier might be treated, without redress on her part, as a woman of the town, he not only consigned his memory to odium, but recorded the bitterness of the feminine spirit among the conquered people. The best friend of Southern womanhood cannot deny that this bitterness often took unjustifiable expression. The very issuance of the proclamation proved that the ladies of New Orleans were given to unseemly vituperation of the soldiers who bore aloft the cause so bitterly hated by the women of the invaded land, and in other ways and places the obligations of ladyhood and even of femininity were too often forgotten in the impulses of hatred and wrath. These ebullitions of the female spirit were not to be repressed by circumstances; that spirit flamed but the more fiercely as it found itself in danger of result. In these days of calmer judgment we know what excuse there was among Southern women for the feeling of hatred and bitterness; we know what it meant to ladies of delicacy and refinement to be insulted by a brutal soldiery, too often unrepressed even by their officers; we can understand the helpless wrath that filled the breast of the Southern woman as she saw her dearest household possessions taken from her or wantonly destroyed by mercenaries, as was the rule rather than the exception when Sherman and his "bummers" went "marching through Georgia" and forgot the rules of civilized warfare, or when Sheridan almost fulfilled his boast that he "would make the Valley of Virginia so barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations," or when Milroy and his German troops burned and harried and oppressed. Had the operations of war been set in the North as in the South, there would doubtless have been equal cause for hatred in that section, but the only time that warfare was carried thither it was governed and directed by a general who would not tolerate the modern methods of making war upon unarmed people, and the burning of Chambersburg was the sole act of vandalism of which the North ever had the knowledge that comes of suffering. So the history of womanhood during the war between the sections is largely a history of the women of the Confederacy, just as the latent and mediate effects of that war first showed themselves among Southern womanhood.

Indeed, after the first impulses of enthusiasm were over, the part played in the war by the women of the North was largely confined to endurance and sacrifice of the emotions--neither a small thing, yet only a part of that which was borne by their Southern sisters. They gave their dear ones uncomplainingly and even gladly and they endured suspense and sorrow and sometimes hardship while the breadwinner was absent on the business of his country; but of personal suffering they knew nothing. Far be the thought of minimizing their gifts; the thousands of bereft wives and mothers laid on the altar of their country their greatest sacrifice, and they did this with a grand spirit of faith and endurance that was alike beautiful and inspiring; but all that they did in this wise was done also by the Southern women, and these bore added pangs of suffering in the destruction of their homes, in the loss of all their substance, and in personal peril and privation and the rest of the woes that await womanhood in a conquered country.

Nor must it be forgotten that the Southern woman was peculiarly unfitted by the circumstances of her nurture and training to bear the privations which fell to her lot in such full measure. She had been reared in the greatest luxury that this country could give; she had been from time immemorial the spoilt child of our land, taught that there was not and never would be need for her to raise her hand in effort or to express an ungratified wish; she was refined and cultured and totally, as it seemed, unfitted for rude contact with the world. Yet she forgot all these things when the need came. The Virginia lady, when the tide of war flowed irresistibly over her State, frequently "refugeed," to use her own most unjustifiable and abominable vocable, into some less perilous section of the land, where she lived the life of a peasant, doing her own housework, mending and making the clothes worn by herself and her children, cooking her poor meal of bacon and substituting for the fragrant Mocha to which she had been accustomed beans whose flavor made a mere mockery of the coffee they were intended to represent, and doing all with a gallant cheerfulness which found its sole failure when she thought of the sufferings of her husband and sons in the starving and barefooted army of Lee. To this pass was she reduced, she who had lived upon "the fat of the land," for whom had been reserved the daintiest morsels that the land could supply, and whose hands had never known a weightier task than some dainty embroidery. The North could show no like evidence of patient courage, not having opportunity for its display. The one point at which the women of the two sections met on common ground was in the hospital service; and here the Northern woman had the advantage in efficiency, though not in tenderness. The organization of these matters was extremely poor in both the Union and the Confederacy; but, because of greater facilities springing from greater command of money, the hospital organization of the North, both field and fixed, was far better than that of the South, which indeed could hardly be said to have a hospital organization at all. In these hospitals worked thousands of devoted women, and their ministrations to the wounded and dying of both sides must not be forgotten when we reckon up the sum of the work of American womanhood. On both sides, ladies of culture and refinement devoted themselves to this pious work, and this was the most worthy and lasting outlet that was found for Northern feminine enthusiasm in the cause of the Union, and the name of Dorothea Lynde Dix, the head of the organized force of Northern hospital nurses, will always be held in especial honor for devotion and ability in this noble cause, as well as in the amelioration of the condition of the indigent insane, to which latter cause her whole life was chiefly devoted.

There were few especial heroines developed by the war; heroism was so general when there was call for it among the women that it attracted but little notice and won no lasting fame, even in its most remarkable displays. There has come down to us hardly a single female name as being especially singled out during this time for any noteworthy action. Indeed, there was such dearth of especial women heroines that one poet was driven, when he wished to stir the blood of his people with enthusiasm for feminine heroism, to invent one; but the present day wisely refuses to put any faith in the hoary legend of Barbara Frietchie, which indeed, as given by Whittier, is full of the most absurd improbabilities. To say nothing of the unlikelihood of "Stonewall" Jackson ordering a platoon--it could hardly have been a regiment--to fire at a flagstaff instead of directing someone to enter the house and remove the objectionable object,--though even this would have been uncharacteristic of the man who smiled and saluted when a pretty girl laughingly flourished an American flag in his face as he rode past her in the streets of Frederick,--the quickness of the old lady in catching that flag as it fell from the staff, to say nothing of her activity in getting to the window from the spot where she was presumably sheltered from "the rifle-blast," would put a professional juggler to shame. Then again, why Jackson should have been "riding ahead" does not seem clear, since that is not the place for a general while on the march, and every detail of the incident is sufficiently unmilitary to have been, as it was, the conception of one who had never in his life as much as smelt gunpowder. No; the legend of Barbara must be given up, even though it deprive us of one of the few heroines of its day.

The debatable ground "between the lines" did, however, furnish history with some notable incidents wherein women figured as the chief influences, even if the names of these heroines were not chronicled. For obvious reasons, the names were not disclosed at the time of the incidents when the respective armies alternately held the ground where lived the women whose deeds were chronicled, and afterward these deeds were forgotten in graver matters. One fair inhabitant of Washington in the early days of the struggle used to give Stuart, who for a time after the battle of Bull Run held the southern bank of the Potomac, most valuable information by means of a cunningly devised system of signals, executed by the raising and lowering of the window shades in her house, which was within full sight of the Confederate pickets. For a time the Confederacy had a regular force of female spies in the capital of their opponents, and some of the information thus gained was of great service.

Of course the Federal government also maintained a corps of female spies, though the name of only one of all the roll on both sides--that of Belle Boyd--is known to fame. Belle Boyd's adventurous career during the war doubtless produced some few results in the movement of the armies of the South; but even she hardly did yeoman service for her cause. In respect of espionage, the Confederacy had a decided advantage over its enemies, for the society at Richmond, both social and official, was made up of more constant and, therefore, better known elements than that of the always fluctuating population of Washington. So at Richmond it was hardly possible for a woman to seem that which she was not in the matter of sympathy, while in the national capital the constant influx of strangers and sojourners made the keeping of a military or political secret a matter of the utmost difficulty.

These more military pursuits, however, are hardly creditable and little congenial to true womanhood, and the present record does not care to concern itself with them. There was enough of passive heroism displayed during the time of strife to fill the onlooker with admiration for the courage as well as the patriotism of American womanhood, and these things are more pleasant to look upon than is professional espionage. The display of courage and endurance was varyingly manifested in the different parts of the country and under different conditions; but it was constant in its spirit. The debt of the Union to its women has never been acknowledged, perhaps because never understood. The many triumphs of the Confederate arms on the battlefield gave rise to a strong "peace party" in the North; and, though general history makes no mention of the fact, there can be in the mind of one who remembers the trend and expressions of public sentiment little doubt that it was chiefly the women of the North who barred the way of that party to ultimate victory. Because the most prominent expressions in matters political come from male sources, we are apt to neglect to recognize the home influence which is so frequently a factor in the total result that accrues from the consequent action. It was the men who fulminated against peace, the men who went to the polls and by their votes decided that the war must continue until either the South had been brought back into the Union or the cause of the latter was so hopeless that to continue the struggle were folly; but it was in large measure the women who, by their steadfastness of devotion to the cause, impelled the men to such action. There will be few among those who remember the interior history of those terrible days who will not agree in the statement that to the women of the North was due, in great measure, the hearty affirmative response which rose from the country to the question, "Shall the war go on?"

Southern womanhood was equally steadfast in the cause of liberty, as the South deemed it; indeed, the Southern women, as unyielding in principle as their Northern sisters, were yet more admirable in their constancy, because of the conditions under which that constancy was displayed. They were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty, encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of their displaying less constancy than the sex which was termed the weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting shells and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox, it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which anticipated rapine and sack without quailing.