The Milan exchange. (Milan, Gibson County, Tenn.) 1874-1978, 1874-08-06
The Women Of the Rebellion.

Mr.. George Cary Eggleston, in the At
tdnttc Monthly for August, under the utle
of "A Rebels RecoIlections, thus sketches
some of the episodes of the rebellion m
which the Southern women manifested
their zeal for the "lost cause" He
writes
During the latter part of the year in
which the war between the States came to
am end. a Southern comic writer, in a let
ter addressed to Artemus Ward, summed
up the political outlook in one sentence,
reading somewhat as follows: "YOu may
reconstruct the men, with your laws and
things, but how are you going to recon-
struct the women? Whoop-eer' Now
this unauthorized but certainly very eX-
pressive interjection had deal of truth at
| its back, and am very sure that | have
never yet known a thoroughly g recon-
| structed' woman. The reason, of course,
| is not far to seek. The women of the
South could hardly have been more des
perately in earnest than their husbands
and brothers and sons were, in the prose-
cution of the war, but with their woman
natures they gave themselve wholly to the
cause, and having loved it heartily when il
gave promise of sturdy life, they almost
worship it now that they have strewn its
bier with funeral flowers. To doubt its
| righteousness, or to falter in their loyalty
to it while it lived, would have been trea-
son and infdelity; to do the like now that
it is dead would be to them little less than
sacrilege.
| wish | could adequately tell my reader
of the part those women played in the
war. If | could make these pages show
/ the half of their nObleness; if | could de-
scribe the sufierings they endured, and
tell of their cheerfulness under il all; If
the reader might guess the utter unself-
ishness with which they laid themselves
and the things they held nearest their
hearts upon the altar of the only country
they knew as their own, the rare heroism
with which they played their sorrow
ful part in drama which was to
them a long tragedy; if my pages
could be made TO show the half of these
things. all womankind, am sure, would
tenderly cherish the record, and nobody
would wonder again at the tenacity with
which the women of the South still hold
their allegiance to the lost cause.
Theirs was a peculiarly hard lot.
The real sorrows of war, like those of
drunkenness, always fall most heavily
upon women. They may not bear arms.
They may not even share the triumphs
which compensate their brethren for toll
and suffering and danger. They must sit
| still and endure. The poverty which war
! brings, TO them wears no cheerful face, but
! sits down with them TO empty tables and
! pinches them sOrely in solitude.
After the victory, the men who have won
it throw up their hats in a glad huZZa,
while their wives and daughters await in
! sorest agony Of suspense the news which
may bring hopeless desOlation to their
hearts. To them the victory may mean
the loss of those for whom they lived and
in whom they hoped, while to those who
have fought the battle it brings only glad
ness. And all this was true of Southern
women almost without exception. The
fact that all the men capable of bearing
arms went into the army, and staid there,
gave to every woman in the South a per-
sOnal interest not only in the general re-
! suit of each battle, but in the list of killed
and wounded as well. Poverty, too, and
/ prvatiOn of the sOrest kind, was the COM
mon lot, while the absence Of the men laid
many heavy burdens of work and respOn-
| Sibility upon shoulders unused to either.
/ But they bore it all, not cheerfully only,
| but gladly. They believed il to be the
duty of every able-bodied man to serve in
the army, and they eagerly sent the men
of their..Own homes to the field, frOwning
undisguisedly upon every Iaggard until
there were no laggards left. And their
spirit knew no change as the war went on.
Their idea of mems duty cOmprehended
nothing less than persistence as long as a
shot could be fired. When they saw that
the end was not to be victory, but defeat,
that fact made no change whatever i'm their
view of the duty to be done. Still less did
their OVID privations and labOrs and suffer-
ings tend TO dampen their ardor. On the
contrary, the more heavily the war bore
upon themselves, the more perSistently did
they demand that it should be fought out
to the end. When they lost husband,
son, or a brother, they held the loss only
as an additional reason for adherence to the
cause. Having made such a sacrifice to
that which was almost a religion TO them,
they had, if possible, less thought than
ever of proving unfaithful to it.
put these general statements first, so
that the reader who shall be interested i'm
such anecdotes as | shall have to tell may
not be misled thereby into the thought that
these good women were implacable or vim
dicative, when they were only devoted to
cause, which in their eyes represented the
sum of all righteousness.
[ remember a conversation between two
of them-One a young wife whose husband
was in the army, and the other an elderly
lady, with no husband or son, but with
many friends and near relatives in march
ing regiments. The younger lady re-
marked,-
"Tm sure | do not hate our enemies.
earnestly hope their souls may 90 to
heaven. but | would like TO blow all their
mortal bodies away, as fast as they come
upon our soil"
"Why, you shock me, my DEAR" replied
the other; 81 don't see why you want the
Yankees to go to heaven! | hope to get
there myself some day, and Pm sure
shouldn't want to go if [ thought | should
! find any of them there"
| This old lady was convinced from the
! first that the South would fail, and she
based this belief on the fact that we
had permitted Yankees to build rail
roads through the Southern States.
tell YOU" she would say, ''that's
what they built the railroads for. They
knew the war was coming and they got
ready for it. The railroads will whip us,
you may depend. What else were they
made for? We got on well enough with
out them, and oughtn't to have let
anybody build them" And no amount
of reasoning would serve to shake
her conviction that the people of the
North had built all our railroads with
| treacherOus intent, though the stock of
| the only road she had ever seen was held
very largely by the people along its line,
many of whom were her own friends.
She always insisted. too, that the North
ern troops came South and made war for
the sole purpose Of taking possession of
our lands and negroes, and she was aston
ished almost out of her wits when she
learned that the negroes were free. She
had supposed that they were simply to
change masters, and even then she lived
for months in daily anticipation of the
coming of - the new land owners" who
were waiting, she supposed, for assign
merits of plantations TO be made to them
by military authority.
They'll quarrel about the division,
maybe" she said one day, land then
thre'll be a chance for us to whip them
again. hope" The last time | saw her,
she had not yet become convinced that
title-deeds were still to be respected.
a young girl, ordinarily of a very gen
tie disposition, astonished a Federal col
onel one day by an Outburst of temper
which served at least TO show the earnest
ness of her purpose to uphold her side Of
the argument. She lived in part of the
country then for the first time held by the