INTRODUCTORY NOTE
[By J. L. Underwood.]
For twenty years after the close of the war most of the Southern
States, through the bayonet-enforced amendments to the Constitution
and the carpet-bag negro governments established under them, were kept
under military rule. The men met the awful responsibility and their
hideous trials with an amazing courage and sought to counteract, in
every possible way, the work of Congress at Washington and the work of
the Union Leagues and other secret societies among the negroes at
home, and to build up the South in spite of the demoralization of
labor. The Ku Klux Klan, a secret vigilance committee, did much good
in terrifying the carpet-bag deposits and breaking up the secret armed
midnight meetings of the negroes. Rowdy imitators of the Ku Klux
afterwards in many instances did much harm.
But the women kept on at work. They have never faltered, and never
shown any weariness. Thousands left penniless who were once
wealthy, took up whatever work came to hand. The writer knew the
daughter-in-law of a wealthy Congressman and the daughter of a
governor of two States to plow her own garden with a mule. He saw
all over the country the members of the oldest and wealthiest
families of the Atlantic coast teaching school, even far in the
west. Not a murmur escaped their lips. They cheered each other as
they strengthened the nerves of the men.
But they kept up their work for the Confederate soldiers, and keep it
up to this day. Soldiers' graves were everywhere looked after.
Memorial associations were organized all over the South.
The two great
societies of Richmond, the Hollywood and the Oakwood, each looking
after thousands of graves, the names of whose occupants are unknown,
are doing the most sublime work the world ever saw. The Southern women
soon extended their efforts to building Confederate monuments all over
the South, providing soldiers' homes in the various States and
securing what pensions the Southern States could afford.
As long as
they live they work for the cause they loved; when they die their
spirit lives on in their worthy daughters.
THE EMPTY SLEEVE
[By Dr. G. W. Bagby.]
[In Living Writers of the South, pages 28-29.]
Tom, old fellow, I grieve to see
That sleeve hanging loose at your side.
The arm you lost was worth to me
Every Yankee that ever died.
But you don't mind it at all.
You swear you've a beautiful stump,
And laugh at the damnable ball.
Tom, I knew you were always a trump!
A good right arm, a nervy hand,
A wrist as strong as a sapling oak,
Buried deep in the Malvern sand--
To laugh at that is a sorry joke.
Never again your iron grip
Shall I feel in my shrinking palm.
Tom, Tom, I see your trembling lip.
How on earth can I be calm?
Well! the arm is gone, it is true;
But the one nearest the heart
Is left, and that's as good as two.
Tom, old fellow, what makes you start?
Why, man, she thinks that empty sleeve
A badge of honor; so do I
And all of us,--I do believe
The fellow is going to cry.
"She deserves a perfect man," you say.
You, "not worth her in your prime."
Tom, the arm that has turned to clay
Your whole body has made sublime;
For you have placed in the Malvern earth The proof and the pledge of a noble life, And the rest, henceforward of higher worth, Will be dearer than all to your wife.
I see the people in the street
Look at your sleeve with kindling eyes; And know you, Tom, there's nought so sweet, As homage shown in mute surmise.
Bravely your arm in battle strove,
Freely for freedom's sake you gave it;
It has perished, but a nation's love
In proud remembrance will save it.
As I look through the coming years,
I see a one-armed married man;
A little woman, with smiles and tears,
Is helping as hard as she can
To put on his coat, and pin his sleeve, Tie his cravat, and cut his food,
And I say, as these fancies I weave,
"That is Tom, and the woman he wooed."
The years roll on, and then I see
A wedding picture, bright and fair;
I look closer, and it's plain to me
That is Tom, with the silver hair.
He gives away the lovely bride,
And the guests linger, loth to leave
The house of him in whom they pride,--
Brave Tom, old Tom, with the empty sleeve.
THE OLD HOOPSKIRT
[J. L. Underwood.]
The only ante-bellum property which Sherman and Thad Stevens left the
Confederate woman was her old hoopskirt. They could neither confiscate
nor burn, nor set this free. Like slavery, it was so closely connected
with her life that it cannot be ignored in her history.
The Southern woman always kept well up with the latest fashions in
dress. In the fifties the modistes of Paris, whose word, however
absurd, was law to the women of the civilized world, sent out the
famous hoopskirt. It was not an article of dress, but a mere
contrivance for sustaining and exhibiting the clothes that were worn
over it. It was made of a succession of small but strong steel wires
bent into circles and fastened to each other by cross bars of tape.
The lower hoop was usually from four to eight feet in diameter,
according to taste, and the top one but little larger than the woman's
waist, from which the whole net-work was hung. It held whatever
clothes were put over it in the shape of a church bell or a horizontal
section of a balloon.
Like all new fashions, some carried this one to grotesque extremes.
One of the bon-ton set of Columbia, S. C., in 1858 was the remarkably
beautiful and charming Mrs. ----, the wife of one of the professors in
South Carolina College. It is a fact that, on average sidewalks in
that beautiful city, wherever she was met by gentlemen they had to
step into the street and give the whole pavement to her tremendous
skirt. Most of our Southern beauties were more merciful.
When the hoopskirt first came, it looked as if Paris had sent out the
greatest of all the absurdities. The men laughed, the boys jeered, and
the newspapers poured out invectives against the monster. The country
preachers anathematized it and urged its excommunication from the
church. But the hoopskirt came to stay. _Veni, vidi, vici._ It whipped
the fight, and when the war between the States came on it was in
control of the Southern female wardrobe. It enlisted for
"three years
or the war." It clung to our mothers like Ruth to Naomi.
"Entreat me
not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee; for whither
thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge." It proved
a godsend on account of the Federal blockade of the ports. Articles of
clothing soon became scarce, and when the silks had all gone into
flags and the gingham into shirts for the soldiers, with a dainty
homespun skirt stretched over the hoopskirt, our mothers looked like
they were dressed whether they were or not.
It was a good umbrella as far as it went and it was a special
convenience to the refugee women who had to camp in the woods. At
night a short pole was set in the ground with a short horizontal cross
piece tacked across its top. Over this was stretched the hoopskirt and
over it a sheet, and, behold a beautiful, cozy Sibley tent for two or
three children to sleep under. It was our mother's faithful friend and
companion to the end of the war. Like the old soldier's sword it came
out very much battered and worn by long service. Like the old soldier
himself, it had been wounded and broken and mended and spliced until
it was hardly its former self. In their fatigue outfit our mothers
laid aside the hoopskirt and tucked up what was left.
But on dress
parade, in meeting, company, and attending church it was her constant
friend and companion. The South embalms in its memories the deeds of
its men and the toil of its women. Father's old sword and John's gray
jacket are sacred heirlooms. So are the old spinning wheel and hand
loom,
"And e'en the old hoopskirt which hung on the wall, The old hoopskirt
The steel-ribbed shirt,
The old hoopskirt which hung on the wall."
One thing in the management of the hoopskirt the men never could
understand. How in the world could all those steel wires be bundled
and controlled when a woman rode horseback or had to be packed in a
buggy or carriage?
It was always a like wonder how the women could dance so nimbly and
gracefully with long trains and never get tripped or tangled in them.
Our women managed the trains and the hoopskirts just as tactfully and
thoroughly and gracefully as they did their hard-headed husbands and
silly sweethearts. How they did it nobody can tell, but they did it.
About the very last days of the war one of these old hoopskirts
played a conspicuous part in a tragedy in the suburbs of Camilla,
then a very small village, the county seat of Mitchell County, Ga. A
farmer by the name of Taylor lived near the Hoggard Swamp. He had
a friend living in the town by the name of O'Brien. Both of them
often visited a very thrifty widow by the name of Woolley. On her
disappearance Taylor had put out the report that she had moved back
to South Carolina, but the truth was he had murdered her for her money
and buried her body under some peach trees near the swamp. No
suspicion was aroused until Taylor returned from a trip to Albany
without O'Brien, who had gone off with him, and a report came down
from Albany that O'Brien's dead body had been found near there in the
woods. Then suspicion put in its work. Murder was in the air, but
nowhere else as yet. People held their breath. Some women late one
afternoon happened to pass the peach trees mentioned and noticed
the suspicious looking fresh soil under them. As soon as they reached
home they reported the circumstance and a party was soon made up to
go that night and make an examination. The women guided them to the
spot. They were afraid to make a bright fire and they used only a dim
light by burning corn cobs. Their blood ran cold when in a very few
moments they were satisfied that they were digging into the poor
woman's grave. Suddenly on the quick removal of a shovel or two more
of dirt, up flew a woman's dress and white underclothing pretty
high in the air. Then there was a stampede for life.
Terror seized
the men's very bones. After a while they mustered courage enough
to return and find that the woman was dead and her hoopskirt had been
weighted down by the soil and as soon as this was sufficiently
removed, it flew up with all its fearful elasticity.
There was
life in it even in the grave. Taylor was tried, convicted, and hung.
THE POLITICAL CRIMES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[By J. L. Underwood.]
The first of the great crimes of the last century was the great
rebellion of the Northern States against the Federal constitutional
Union, "the best government the world ever saw." Nine of these States
in solemn legislative action, in the fifties, utterly repudiated their
contract in the Federal Constitution. They nullified the acts of
Congress and repudiated and defied the decisions of the Supreme
Court.
This rebellion at the North broke up "the glorious Union of our
fathers," and drove the South, like poor Hagar, into the wilderness to
look out for herself, without a charge from any quarter that a
Southern State had committed one single act in violation of Federal
law or in hostility to the Constitution. Then came the second great
crime, the crime so vigorously denounced at the time by William Lloyd
Garrison, the most consistent and the most heroic of the Northern
Abolitionists, Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, the crime of
coercion of the weaker by the stronger States, the military invasion
of the South under the prostituted flag of the Union, and the final
subjugation of her people by fire and sword. _O tempora!
O mores!_
The acts of congress for years after the Southern army had honorably
laid down its arms and gone home to plow and plant the fields make the
blackest pages in the history of modern times. The writer dreads to
put in print his estimate of such a political monster as Thad Stevens,
the misanthropic genius of reconstruction, the Robespierre of America.
Robespierre's guillotine cut off the heads of its victims. Thad
Stevens's guillotine cut off all hopes from Southern hearts. He avowed
it his purpose to exterminate the Southern white people, to confiscate
their property into the hands of the negroes, and with these negroes
to keep the country forever under the dominion of his party. According
to him and his followers to this day this party of (so-called) high
moral ideas must be kept in power no matter what crimes are committed
in securing the ascendency. This is political Jesuitism run mad.
The saddest, strangest part of the history is that it was twenty years
before the Northern people came to their reason and put a check on
this ruinous fratricidal policy. If the writer shall go to his grave
with a holy horror of the bald malignity, the reckless folly, the
cowardly spite, the sweeping curse of the reconstruction measures of
Thad. Stevens and his Congress, he will find himself in good company.
He once heard the great and good Dr. John A. Broadus, of the Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, say, "I can easily forgive and forget
the war. It was war, and all the wrongs done in it died away with the
cannon's roar. But I find it so hard to forgive the excuseless wrongs
done to the Southern people since the war."
Dr. Broadus was a Southern man, but Rev. Dr. H. M.
Field, the
fair-minded and patriotic author of "Bright Skies and Dark Shadows,"
is not a Southern man. Hear what he says in his book: In South Carolina and the Gulf States negro government had a clean
sweep, and if we are to believe the records of the times, it was a
period of corruption such as had never been known in the history
of the country. The blacks having nothing to lose, were ready to
vote to impose any tax, or to issue any bonds of town, country or
State provided they had a share in the booty; and this negro
government manipulated by the carpet baggers, ran riot over the
South. It was chaos come again. The former masters were governed
by their servants, while the latter were governed by a set of
adventurers and plunderers. The history of these days is one which
we cannot recall without indignation and shame. After a time the
moral sense of the North was so shocked by their performances that
a Republican administration had to withdraw its proconsuls, when
things resumed their former condition and the management of
affairs came back into the old hands.
These national crimes which so woefully afflicted the people of the
South after peace was made were:
1. The refusal to carry out Mr. Lincoln's cherished plan of
reconstruction by immediate readmission of seceding States after an
orderly and legal abolition of slavery.
2. The sudden emancipation of millions of African slaves. Gradual
emancipation would have been so much better for their interests and
for the welfare of the country.
3. The conferring of civil rights so early upon the freedmen. If they
had not been made citizens they could have been colonized in due time
and provided for, as the Indians have been, with land and homes.
4. Enfranchisement of these grossly ignorant Africans.
5. Disfranchisement of the best people of the South.
6. Arming the blacks and disarming the white people.
7. The un-American crime of uniting church and state and the
employment of a religious society to carry out directly the schemes of
a political faction. Jesus Christ never authorized any such work. He
never gave the least authorization of any church machinery through
which such a union could be effected. God wants the good lives of men,
and not compact and imposing church organizations. They can be so
easily perverted to unholy purposes and made so effective in
destroying human liberty and crushing human rights. The union of
church and state was the curse of the middle ages and the blight of
modern Europe.
It was an ominous day for America and a woeful day for the South,
when, upon the enfranchisement of the negroes, the politicians in
power and the fanatical Northern Methodist Episcopal Church organized
and transplanted in the South the African Methodist Episcopal Church
and employed it directly in manipulating the votes of the ignorant
negroes. The great iron wheel controlling the whole machine was put
into the hands of a political boss committee in Washington. Just
within this was the wheel turned by an absolute bishop in each State.
The most malignant of all the Southern negro politicians, Bishop H. M.
Turner, had the control of the Georgia wheel and turns it to this day.
Then came the smaller wheels, turned by the presiding elder in each
Congressional district, enclosing the little wheels in the hands of
the preachers and circuit riders and stewards. The ignorant negroes
were wound tightly by the ropes into a solid mass, and voted like
slaves by the officers of the new imported Northern church and the
strikers of the Union League. It was enough to make a patriot despair
of the country and a Christian to despair of religion to witness these
scenes. It made the white people of the South get together in
self-defence. It inevitably set race against race in politics. This
slimy trail of this union of church and state has done sad work for
the South and dangerous work for the whole country. The church iron
wheel organized a solid mass of ignorant negro voters on one side of
the Southern ballot box. This necessitated a "solid South" of white
voters on the other side.
8. Demoralizing the negroes for generations by making them believe
themselves to be special wards of the nation and holding out to them
the delusive promise of "forty acres and a mule" as a pension for
slavery and a reward for party loyalty.
9. Taking away by act of Congress, without a dollar of compensation,
the slave property of orphans, widows and Union men, the property
recognized by the Constitution of the government.
10. By force of bayonets keeping in the Southern high places of power
the carpet-bag adventurer from the North and the irresponsible,
unprincipled scalawag who had for the sake of office turned his back
upon his native South.
11. Unlawful confiscation of Southern lands, much of it belonging to
orphans and widows.
12. Enormous and unjust tax on cotton, at that time the only
marketable product of the Southern farms.
These were the woes which the "Reconstruction" measures of the Federal
Congress made for our Southern people, a burden mountain-high, Ossa on
Pelion, Pelion upon Ossa. But grimly, patiently, bravely did our men
bear up under it. Political crimes always hurt the women more than the
men. Our women stood by and cheered and comforted and helped as only
such women can help through all the toil, the gloom and wrongs of
those dark days. God bless their memories!
BRAVE TO THE LAST
[Eggleston's Recollections, pages 73-76.]
But if the cheerfulness of the women during the war was remarkable,
what shall we say of the way in which they met its final failure and
the poverty that came with it? The end of the war completed the ruin
which its progress had wrought. Women who had always lived in luxury,
and whose labors and sufferings during the war were lightened by the
consciousness that in suffering and laboring they were doing their
part toward the accomplishment of the end upon which all hearts were
set, were now compelled to face not temporary but permanent poverty,
and to endure, without a motive or a sustaining purpose, still sorer
privations than they had known in the past. The country was exhausted,
and nobody could foresee any future but one of abject wretchedness.
Everybody was poor except the speculators who had fattened upon the
necessities of the women and children, and so poverty was essential to
anything like good repute. The return of the soldiers made some sort
of social festivity necessary, and "starvation parties"
were given,
at which it was understood that the givers were wholly unable to set
out refreshments of any kind. In the matter of dress, too, the general
poverty was recognized, and every one went clad in whatever he or she
happened to have. The want of means became a jest, and nobody mourned
over it; while all were laboring to repair their wasted fortunes as
they best could. And all this was due solely to the unconquerable
cheerfulness of the Southern women. The men came home moody, worn out,
discouraged, and but for the influence of woman's cheerfulness the
Southern States might have fallen into a lethargy from which they
could not have recovered for generations. Such prosperity as they have
since achieved is largely due to the courage and spirit of their noble
women.
SALLIE DURHAM
[From Life In Dixie, pages 304-308, by Mary A. H. Gay.]
Dr. Durham came to Decatur, Ga., in 1859. Well do I remember the
children--two handsome sons, John and William--two pretty brown-eyed
girls, Sarah and Catherine.
The Durham residence, which was on Sycamore Street, then stood just
eastward of where Colonel G. W. Scott now lives. The rear of the house
faced the site where the depot had been before it was burned by the
Federals, the distance being about 350 yards. Hearing an incoming
train, Sallie went to the dining-room window to look at the cars, as
she had learned in some way that they contained Federal troops. While
standing at the window, resting against the sash, she was struck by a
bullet fired from the train. It was afterwards learned that the cars
were filled with negro troops on their way to Savannah, who were
firing off their guns in a random, reckless manner. The ball entered
the left breast of this dear young girl, ranging obliquely downward,
com