Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/133

106 the Commander-in-Chief on the subject of the mode of administering to the poor soldiers has been published and is of the greatest interest as showing how the influence of woman was felt even in those times when she is popularly supposed to have been considered "an afterthought and a side issue." Her letters are marked by business-like intelligence and sound feminine common sense, on subjects of which, as a secluded woman, she could have had personally no previous knowledge, and Washington, as has been truly observed, "writes as judiciously on the humble topic of soldiers' shirts, as on the plan of a campaign or the subsistence of an army."

La Fayette refers to Mrs. Reed's efforts in behalf of the suffering soldiers as those of "the best patriot, the most zealous and active, and the most attached to the interests of her country."

All this time, it must be remembered, it was a feeble, delicate woman who was writing and laboring; her husband away from her with the army and her family cares and anxieties daily multiplying. As late as August, 1780, she wrote from her country place on the banks of the Schuylkill, where she had been forced to retreat with her three babies: "I am most anxious to get to town, because here I can do little for the soldiers." But the body and the heroic spirit were alike overtasked, and in the early part of the next month an alarming disease developed itself, and soon ran its fatal course. Esther Reed died as much a martyr to the cause of her country's liberty as any of General Washington's soldiers who met death on the battlefield.

To have been a genuine "New Woman" in the New World, and a society woman in the highest circles of the Old World, is the somewhat unique distinction of Eliza Lucas, afterwards