Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 32.djvu/158

 146 Southern Historical Society Papers.

[From the New Orleans, La., Picayune, June 12, 1904.]

SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE CIVIL WAR.

T. C. DeLeon's Eloquent Tribute to Their Courage.

WHAT THEY DID FOR WOUNDED AND SUFFERING SOLDIERS. The Hospital Offered Opportunities for Heroism.

The great German who wrote :

Honor to woman ! to her it is given

To garden the earth with roses of heaven !

precisely described the Confederate conditions a century in ad- vance. True, constant, brave and enduring, the men were; but the women set even the bravest and most steadfast an example. Nor was this confined to anyone section of the country. The "girl with the calico dress," of the lowland farms; the " merry mountain maid," of the hill country, and the belles of society in the cities, all vied with each other in efforts to serve the men who had gone to the front to fight for home and for them. And there was no section of the South where this desire to do all they might, and more was oftener in evidence than another. In every camp of the early days of the great struggle, the incoming troops bore trophies of home love, and as the war progressed to need, then to dire want the sac- rifices of those women at home became almost a poem, and one most pathetic. Dress misconceived as the feminine fetich was forgotten in the effort to clothe the boys at the front; the family larder ill-stocked at the best was depleted to nothingness, to send to distant camps those delicacies so equally freighted with tender- ness and dyspepsia which too often never reached their destina- tion. And later, the carpets were taken from the floors, the cur- tains from the windows alike in humble homes and in dwellings of the rich to be cut in blankets for the uncomplaining fellows, sleep- ing on freezing mud.

So wide, so universal was the rule of self-sacrifice, that no one reference to it can do justice to the Zealand devotion of "Our Girls." And the best proof of both was in the hospitals, where