Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 34.djvu/199

 The Women of the Confederacy. 191

From the New Orleans. La., Picayune, December 24th, 1906.

THE WOMEN OF THE CONFEDERACY.

What they saw and Suffered During the Civil War Mrs.

John Randolph Eggleston Recalls

Memories of the Past.

The Unpretending Heroism of the Mothers of the South In Three Besieged Cities A Soldier's Strange Funeral- Little Dramas of the War Time.

Mrs. John Randolph Eggleston, of Mississippi, made an address before the General Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, at Gulfport, which was so flatteringly referred to by the delegates from New Orleans, that I have begged her permission to have it published. Her husband, Captain Eggleston, was an officer in the old Navy, and, like most Southerners, resigned his commission, and entered the Confederate service. Captain and Mrs. Eggleston had their home in New Orleans before the com- mencement of the war. Without intending to do so, Mrs. Eggleston has paid the highest and best-deserved tribute to our Southern women I have ever read. I hand you the address herewith.

JAMES DINKINS.

MRS. EGGLESTON' s ADDRESS.

Daughters of the Confederacy :

In the name of the Mothers of the Confederacy, of the Mississippi Division, I greet and welcome you, and thank you for your presence in our midst.

It makes me happy to see so many of you here, and the fact that you belong to this organization, proves that you are proud of the noble heritage bequeathed to you by your fathers, and by your mothers as well; for the women of the Confederacy, though secure from the dangers of the battlefield, bore their part no less heroically than did the men.

The men gave, or offered to give, their lives; the women gave what was dearer to them than life they gave the men they loved ;