The same cannot be said of all the people of the South, but it is pleasing to think that all can now recall the history of those days, when the opposing army was marching through the South, leaving a desert waste behind them, without feeling the bitterness we then felt, standing in the midst of our desolation; and God knows that we give heart and hand in cordial welcome to the soldiers of that Northern host which so despoiled us, as well as to the people of the Northern States when they make choice, as many are now doing, of our sunny clime for their own home.
XIII.
The return of our soldiers after the surrender, in their worn and ragged gray, as they tramped home by twos, threes, and sometimes in little squads of half a dozen or more, was pitiable in the extreme.
Some were entirely without shoes or hats; others had only an apology for shoes and hats. They were coming home with nothing; and we could almost say, coming home to nothing; for many verily found, when they reached the spot that had been to them a happy home, nothing save a heaped-up mass of ruins left to them. Often as I sit in the twilight and drift back into the past, it is not easy to restrain tears, as memory views those soldiers in their worn gray, marching home, sad and depressed, with the cause they had so warmly espoused, lost.
Though not coming rejoicing, as did the Athenians and Spartans from the battle of Platæa, they were just as dear to the hearts of their kindred at their ruined homes, as if they had come marching in triumph, with olive-wreaths encircling their brows.
Need there be wonder if, for a few weeks, it seemed as though we were petrified,—scarcely knowing which way to turn, to restore order out of such chaos! Another day of fasting and prayer was called in our adversity that our spirits might be tempered to bear the result. But our thoughts soon turned resolutely from the gloomy picture, the more readily when we remembered how the South had met emergencies during the war, until she was so environed and crippled by opposing forces that she had to yield. The same energy, perseverance, and economy, with the help of an overruling Providence, would yet make the South smile with peace and plenty.
Our returned soldiers lost no time in making themselves useful in every sphere of honorable work that then opened. Many of those who returned in April planted corn and cotton, late as it was, and made fair crops of both. There was great bother for awhile as to plow stock, for most of our valuable animals had been carried off by the invading army.
Three brothers whom I knew, natives of Georgia, owned not one foot of land nor an animal of any kind, when the war closed. They reached home among the first of our returning soldiers. They rented a good piece of farming land, managed to get an ox and an old broken-down army mule, and set to work in earnest on their rented land. They “put in” every hour of the sun, and the greater part of the light of the moon. Neighboring farmers said that at whatever hour of the night you passed where the brothers farmed, if the moon shone you would hear them “gee-hawing,” plowing their crop at night, or the clashing of their hoes in their corn, cotton, or peas. They are now prosperous farmers, owning broad acres of land and fine stock. Hundreds of similar cases might be pointed out.