Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/29

8 of what has been called, "the biggest little things" of Mrs. Logan's noble life was when she, in these hard war times, brought into play all her acuteness and economic skill to respond to the continual demands upon her for the relief of the families who found it impossible to live on the pay of their soldier husbands who had volunteered in defense of their country. With heart and soul, Mary Logan, the woman who had graced Washington society, and who had also known the excitement of war at the front, became a cultivator of the land, raising wheat, corn and cotton on their small farm in South Illinois. And no unusual sight during the cotton picking season was Mrs. Logan riding into town on a load of cotton, thus preventing, by her supervision, the loss by the wayside of a single pound of it, as it was sold in those days at one dollar per pound. Arriving at the cotton gin in town, she would peer over the shoulder of the weigher, and producing her memorandum book, would compare his figures with her own. Nobody ever swindled her and her cotton speculations "panned out" well. This labor was the least of her troubles. The constant anxiety for the safety of her husband during the hazardous campaigns of the war and the tax upon her sympathies in responding to the appeals of the soldiers' families, were burdens almost insupportable for the delicate woman Mrs. Logan then was.

The war over, General Logan returned home and shortly there ensued that exciting canvass for the successor to Governor Yates; John M. Palmer, ex-Governor Richard J. Oglesby and John A. Logan being the rival candidates. Three abler men it would be hard to find. All three had held military commands during the Civil War and all three had distinguished themselves. All three, therefore, had ardent friends who desired their election to the Senate, but, to quote from one of the Springfield, Illinois, newspapers of that day, Black