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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
hour—had no means with which to meet the exigencies of war. There were no trained soldiers, but few surgeons and tailors, no hospitals and trained nurses, no war ships, no arms and ammunition, and no factories of any kind in the land. Where every able- bodied white man so gallantly laid down his plow and plane, closed up his law office, the-minister left his pulpit with his Bible in his hand, and went to battle for the cause which he earnestly and honestly believed to be right; the mothers, wives, daughters and sweethearts of these men determined that the army should not want, so long as they had hearts to feel, heads to plan, and hands to labor. Women, old and young, worked together in the construction of soldiers’ garments. With a firm faith that success must crown every such honest endeavor, to them an ultimate and complete victory was a foregone conclusion; and though
“ Never a morning wore to evening But some heart did break,”
these women faltered not in the tasks before them. They unhesitatingly spent their days and nights in nursing the sick in camp or wounded in hospitals established and maintained by themselves. They ministered to the dying in the rear of battlefields, and in many instances took in their own hands the spade and shovel in the midst of the night, and lifting their voices to Heaven, gave Christian burial to foe and friend alike.
Soon there came a time when the supplies in hand were utterly exhausted. Then it was that the latent business talent and executive ability of the Southern women began to appear. They renounced all desire for imported luxuries, and pledged themselves to card, spin and weave the clothing, tan the leather and make the shoes for their families and for the army. They had no factories; this had all to be done by hand. They directed the negroes on those immense plantations in the work of tilling the field, planting the crops, gathering the harvest and converting it into food and clothing for the country.
They gave their own personal property for the purchase of arms and ammunition for their beloved army; they melted into money their silverware and jewels, in which many a Southern household was rich. They almost starved themselves and their children at home, that they might purchase a little coffee and sugar and other luxuries for the soldiers. For coffee they often paid as high as five hundred dollars per pound, and for black pepper and sugar three hundred. They sat late into the winter nights over a fire of corn-cobs while they ripped up their carpets of softest pile, took down their richest damask draperies, and made them into blankets; cut their finest upholstery into mittens for the soldiers, and tore up their window curtains and table linen into bandages, to be used in dressing the wounded. They went through the darkened and silent streets of captured cities at midnight, to carry letters which they had smuggled through the lines from soldiers in distant camps to friends at home. They even faced the dangers of death itself in the charge of the bayonets, the tramp of cavalry, and the roar of cannons, as in “La Bataille des Mouchoirs” in New Orleans, that they might catch a glimpse of, and whisper a word of cheer to, loved ones on their way to distant Northern prisons. In every way these women, for the first time in the world’s history, “ gilded the terrors of war with a heavenly beauty.”
England has had her Florence Nightingale; Italy her countess, who, dressed in richest silks and brightest diamonds, visited the charity hospitals that the poor and suffering there might be gladdened by the sight of so much beauty; Germany had her princess who fed the hungry populace—the Revolution drew from every colony brave and heroic women, such as Mrs. Mott, of South Carolina. The North furnished many beautiful instances of individual bravery and self-sacrifice among its women during the war; but nowhere except in the South has the world ever witnessed the sublime spectacle of every woman of the land devoting herself entirely—her time, her strength, her talents—to the cause that needed such assistance.
It really seems invidious to mention a few of these noble women, when all worked,