Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/525

486 they give theirs to the cause, why should not I do the same? I would starve to death cheerfully, if I could feed one soldier more by doing so, but the things I eat can't be sent to camp. I think it a sin to eat anything that can be used for rations." And she meant what she said, too, as a little mound in the churchyard testifies.

Every Confederate remembers gratefully the reception given him when he went into any house where these women were. Whoever he might be, and whatever his plight, if he wore the gray, he was received, not as a beggar or tramp, not even as a stranger, but as a son of the house, for whom it held nothing too good, and whose comfort was the one care of all its inmates, even though their own must be sacrificed in securing it. When the hospitals were crowded, the people earnestly besought permission to take the men to their houses and to care for them there, and for many months almost every house within a radius of a hundred miles of Richmond held one or more wounded men as especially honored guests.

"God bless these Virginia women," said a general officer from one of the cotton states, one day; "they're worth a regiment apiece." And he spoke the thought of the army, except that their blessing covered the whole country as well as Virginia. It is a privilege accorded me by the author of this work, to write, at her request, a brief introductory to that part of her book which recognizes the organization known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy—a body of Southern women, approximately numbering sixty thousand, and now organized