Women of America Part 13

Johnston was left alone; and thus she still lives on, the sole remaining link between the White House of the days before the Civil War and the present time. She alone, of all who ruled as social queen of the country in the time when this meant far more than now, is left to us; and she lives in the same quiet dignity with which she once placed the stamp of her individuality upon the social functions of the presidential mansion and made them truly noteworthy. Upon the accession of Edward VII. of England, that king, who had been elaborately entertained by Miss Lane and her uncle at the White House during his visit to this country in 1860, sent to Mrs. Johnston a personal invitation to be present at his approaching coronation; and his cordial letter showed in what high esteem he held the gracious lady whose kindness to him in his youth had dwelt so long in his memory. It was a deserved recognition of the charm that had made notable the last lady ruler of the White House in its days of social eminence, and the act was as graceful as deserved.

So, in Harriet Lane Johnston, we find the last surviving memory of the court society of the elder days of our country. With her exit from the White House went also the traditions of the social past, and with her exit from life will go also the last of a line of acknowledged rulers, little less than regal in their dignities, of the social world of America.

It is now necessary to turn again to the subject of the war between the sections. Darker and darker grew the threatening cloud, until it was rent by a bolt which fell with fatal effect and set the whole land in a blaze. This was the famous insurrection of John Brown, which knew its inception and inglorious end at Harper's Ferry. It is not easy for us at this time to appreciate the aspects of "John Brown's raid," as it presented itself to the North and the South, and the aspect which it especially bore to the women of the latter section has never been given its full importance at the hands of chroniclers. Brown's acknowledged and boasted purpose to set free the slaves and arm them against their masters in insurrection was looked upon by every Southern woman as a direct threat--of which the carrying out was averted only by the hand of an over-ruling Providence--against that which her womanhood most prized. She knew what would have been the effect of the loosing upon the community of a horde of semi-savages, mad with the l.u.s.t of blood and rapine, drunk with the liberty which they would look upon as unbridled license; for such, as she well knew, would the majority of the slaves become under conditions which would appeal to their worst side and would in their novelty lead to all excess. The narrow view which sees in the burning anger of the South toward this attempt only dread of loss of property is utterly false; it was the personal aspect of the matter which appealed to every Southern woman, and, because of this, to every Southern man. Even the partial success of such an attempt would have meant ruined and dishonored homes throughout the Southern land; the honor of its women, that most precious of all possessions, was in peril in such enterprise, and it was the threat against this that set the Southland aflame with rage against the would-be perpetrators of such an atrocity. It was not the menace to property or even to life; it was

"the unutterable shame That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame."

For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good; and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land an offense to heaven.

This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did not, seemingly could not, understand. Where the woman of the South saw in John Brown only the brutal a.s.sailer of all that womanhood held most precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her cry,--saw in him only the martyr to the cause of freedom, the man who gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and ill-treated race; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against the clamor of the ma.s.ses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had fallen upon the North: it did not understand.

But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid were those of the women of our land.

Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every American, and who, in pursuit of his n.o.ble ideal, had of necessity attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and ill-held. The Southern woman looked upon the attempt to give power over her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both, John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.

Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice in Was.h.i.+ngton before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our republicanism much of the glitter and all the _prestige_ of a royal court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point of the bayonet.

Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. With all their strength, and whether for good or evil, there is none greater in effect, they urged their husbands and lovers and brothers, the one side to wipe out in blood, if need and opportunity were, the insult to their womanhood; the other to free the oppressed from bondage and from the tyranny shown by Southern women as well as men. The actions and utterances of each were plain to the other; the standpoints which dictated those acts and words were hidden by the dense mist of prejudice. Thus by woman's influence was precipitated the conflict which had already become almost inevitable.

CHAPTER XII

THE CIVIL WAR

The election of Abraham Lincoln to the chief magistracy annihilated the last hope of peaceful solution of the vexed question of the time. Hope, indeed, there was in few female b.r.e.a.s.t.s, for with deplorable unanimity the women of our country looked forward to war as the most desirable result of all the anger that smouldered in both sections. Secession followed hard upon the election of Lincoln; the Southern senators and representatives resigned their seats in the councils of the nation; and that nation was a nation no more.

Though there were many contributing circ.u.mstances, and those of the gravest, the women of our country had been the most influential cause of the rupture and its immediate result of war. They had inflamed the hearts of the men so that the few who retained some coolness of judgment and some tolerance of spirit could make no headway against the extremists. The women were now to bear the brunt of the hard-following consequences of their furious enthusiasm; but, before they began to feel those consequences in full measure, they were to enjoy a brief period of delight: that delight which their s.e.x ever finds in the "pomp and circ.u.mstance of glorious war," until they learn something of its stern realities.

When peace was formally declared impossible, the women of both sections found congenial vent for the enthusiasm which had been so fatal to the efforts of the peacemakers. Each side firmly believed its cause pure and right, without the shadow of doubt being possible, and each acted from the depths of a conviction which was as much the child of education as of environing circ.u.mstances. All over the country there was enthusiasm which hardly stopped short of gala merriment. The younger women of both sides embroidered banners for their pet regiments and with their own fair hands gave those banners into the keeping of their knights, who swore--they did not know the difficulties of the task--to bring back those flags unsullied by defeat. The men were eager enough to meet the hards.h.i.+ps and perils which they had not yet measured; but the women surpa.s.sed even the masculine eagerness, hurrying their sons and lovers and brothers and often husbands to the front, hardly finding time for tears in their enthusiasm and patriotism.

For patriotism, though sometimes not easily distinguished from selfish delight in the romance which precedes war, it was on both sides--a patriotism which was to be sorely tried and never to fail. It was misdirected in most cases as yet; the social functions which made brilliant the rival capitals for a time were mistaken expressions of the deep feeling which glowed beneath; but they had their meaning and were promises of better things to come. From Maine to Texas there burned a flame of patriotism such as had not been called forth in like eagerness of display even by the days of the Revolution, and its chief expressions were from the women of the divided land. So trivial and misdirected as yet were the majority of its expressions that it might have been thought shallow and unenduring; but it was to prove its intensity and depth in other guise, and these first ebullitions were but the foam that glances on the unsounded sea.

There was little fear of suffering on either side. Each believed that, so good was its cause, so valiant its supporters, it must triumph within a short s.p.a.ce. A prominent New York journal prophesied the fall of Richmond within three months, saying: "We spit upon a longer-deferred justice." The South thought that Was.h.i.+ngton would be taken at one blow.

In these beliefs, which seem to us, knowing the men who were to bear the standards of both causes, such wild folly, the women more than shared.

Northern and Southern woman alike believed with full conviction that the men of her country were unconquerable and that G.o.d fought on her side of the quarrel; how then could defeat or disaster come to the cause she loved? It was impossible.

It must be admitted that in the first stages of the war the weight of feminine enthusiasm was in the Southern scale. There was good reason for this. At the first call of battle, the South sent forth her best and bravest, her own most cherished sons, while the North responded more tardily, leaving much of its work in the hands of subst.i.tutes of the lower cla.s.s and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to our sh.o.r.es in such numbers had settled in the North and Northwest; and they naturally fought rather from necessity and wish for bounty than from patriotism. The flame was as steady in the North, but it was not so vivid; it had not yet been blown to full fervor. Moreover, in the North the full gravity of the task undertaken was still less recognized than in the South. When McDowell marched upon Johnston and Beauregard at Bull Run, carriages full of the leaders of Was.h.i.+ngton society, women as well as men, came to make gay his camp and see the total discomfiture of the enemy; and the flight back to the capital which followed his defeat included many women of the upper circles, whose terrors and sufferings were not undeserved as results of the extremes into which their enthusiasm had misled them. This was a poor expression indeed of the patriotism which glowed in the female breast of that day; but the time produced a better specimen and showed how the feeling found true as well as false vent. It was a young girl who brought to Beauregard the first intelligence of McDowell's movement upon Mana.s.sas and enabled him to give Johnston the warning which led to the timely juncture of their forces and the result of the battle. The young lady had heard some officers of the Union army discussing the projected movement while at the table of her father in his house near Was.h.i.+ngton. Delicately nurtured and reared as she had been, with her own hands she saddled her horse and rode through the night, partly through camps of coa.r.s.ely jesting soldiery, partly along hardly-marked roads, amid darkness and in loneliness, that she might serve the land she loved. It was the first of many such services that were to be done by the women of the South, who alone had opportunity to render them, or they had surely found many rivals.

If the romantic aspect of war received in the North a rude shock in the disaster of Bull Run, it was but enhanced in the South. Moreover, the enthusiasm of the Southern woman, and particularly of the girl, found more present and congenial vent than did that of her Northern sister.

Not only did the former frequently see the forms and even the deeds of the leaders of her cause, but some of those leaders were calculated to awaken enthusiasm to a degree that could not be rivalled by any of the generals of the North. The soldiers of the Union had no Stuart, with his gay laughter and merry jest and his floating feather to heighten the romance of his achievements and present him as a veritable knight of old; no Pelham with his beardless face and modest blush to make one marvel that this laughing boy should be in battle a very genius of war as he fought his guns against fearful odds. Custer, with his flowing locks, might have won some hearts had the war been carried into Northern territory; but Custer had not at his back the fame of Stuart, whose rides around McClellan made him a hero of romance, nor had he the social qualities that made so popular the Southern leader, while the latter's purity of life and deep religious feeling, beneath all his frivolity of manner, appealed with power to the finer natures of the Southern women.

He was the chosen knight, the adored hero, of Southern womanhood; and when his feather appeared at the head of his daredevils there was feminine rejoicing and eager welcome.

It was in the facts of the personal devotion inspired by some of their leaders, Lee,--Jackson, and Stuart, especially,--of the proximity of those fighting for her cause, of her presence on the scene of strife, and of her deeper sufferings and greater call for endurance, that explanation must be found of the indubitable phenomenon that there was far more of enthusiasm displayed by the woman of the South than by her of the North, at least during the first years of the war. Enthusiasm only, not devotion to principle. That was a.s.sured in both; both gave a deep and effective love to the cause which they held as right and just, and for which they were willing to give their very lives if need were.

The Southern woman was called upon to make greater sacrifices, to bear greater sufferings, than her sister of the North; but none can doubt that the latter would have borne all these as n.o.bly had fate called upon her to do so. Those who know the story of Southern womanhood in those terrible days must give to it all honor and admiration; but these must not be granted as exclusively its right, without due sense of the sufficient patriotism and courage displayed by Northern womanhood at the call of country. Each gave all that she had to give; each proved that her patriotism was not a mere name.

If among the women of the South there was more fervent enthusiasm than among those of the North, there was also deeper hatred of the enemies of their cause. When General Butler, as master of New Orleans, issued the equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time the t.i.tle of "Beast Butler" among the women of the South, setting forth that any woman who insulted on the street a Union soldier might be treated, without redress on her part, as a woman of the town, he not only consigned his memory to odium, but recorded the bitterness of the feminine spirit among the conquered people. The best friend of Southern womanhood cannot deny that this bitterness often took unjustifiable expression. The very issuance of the proclamation proved that the ladies of New Orleans were given to unseemly vituperation of the soldiers who bore aloft the cause so bitterly hated by the women of the invaded land, and in other ways and places the obligations of ladyhood and even of femininity were too often forgotten in the impulses of hatred and wrath.

These ebullitions of the female spirit were not to be repressed by circ.u.mstances; that spirit flamed but the more fiercely as it found itself in danger of result. In these days of calmer judgment we know what excuse there was among Southern women for the feeling of hatred and bitterness; we know what it meant to ladies of delicacy and refinement to be insulted by a brutal soldiery, too often unrepressed even by their officers; we can understand the helpless wrath that filled the breast of the Southern woman as she saw her dearest household possessions taken from her or wantonly destroyed by mercenaries, as was the rule rather than the exception when Sherman and his "b.u.mmers" went "marching through Georgia" and forgot the rules of civilized warfare, or when Sheridan almost fulfilled his boast that he "would make the Valley of Virginia so barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations,"

or when Milroy and his German troops burned and harried and oppressed.

Had the operations of war been set in the North as in the South, there would doubtless have been equal cause for hatred in that section, but the only time that warfare was carried thither it was governed and directed by a general who would not tolerate the modern methods of making war upon unarmed people, and the burning of Chambersburg was the sole act of vandalism of which the North ever had the knowledge that comes of suffering. So the history of womanhood during the war between the sections is largely a history of the women of the Confederacy, just as the latent and mediate effects of that war first showed themselves among Southern womanhood.

Indeed, after the first impulses of enthusiasm were over, the part played in the war by the women of the North was largely confined to endurance and sacrifice of the emotions--neither a small thing, yet only a part of that which was borne by their Southern sisters. They gave their dear ones uncomplainingly and even gladly and they endured suspense and sorrow and sometimes hards.h.i.+p while the breadwinner was absent on the business of his country; but of personal suffering they knew nothing. Far be the thought of minimizing their gifts; the thousands of bereft wives and mothers laid on the altar of their country their greatest sacrifice, and they did this with a grand spirit of faith and endurance that was alike beautiful and inspiring; but all that they did in this wise was done also by the Southern women, and these bore added pangs of suffering in the destruction of their homes, in the loss of all their substance, and in personal peril and privation and the rest of the woes that await womanhood in a conquered country.

Nor must it be forgotten that the Southern woman was peculiarly unfitted by the circ.u.mstances of her nurture and training to bear the privations which fell to her lot in such full measure. She had been reared in the greatest luxury that this country could give; she had been from time immemorial the spoilt child of our land, taught that there was not and never would be need for her to raise her hand in effort or to express an ungratified wish; she was refined and cultured and totally, as it seemed, unfitted for rude contact with the world. Yet she forgot all these things when the need came. The Virginia lady, when the tide of war flowed irresistibly over her State, frequently "refugeed," to use her own most unjustifiable and abominable vocable, into some less perilous section of the land, where she lived the life of a peasant, doing her own housework, mending and making the clothes worn by herself and her children, cooking her poor meal of bacon and subst.i.tuting for the fragrant Mocha to which she had been accustomed beans whose flavor made a mere mockery of the coffee they were intended to represent, and doing all with a gallant cheerfulness which found its sole failure when she thought of the sufferings of her husband and sons in the starving and barefooted army of Lee. To this pa.s.s was she reduced, she who had lived upon "the fat of the land," for whom had been reserved the daintiest morsels that the land could supply, and whose hands had never known a weightier task than some dainty embroidery. The North could show no like evidence of patient courage, not having opportunity for its display. The one point at which the women of the two sections met on common ground was in the hospital service; and here the Northern woman had the advantage in efficiency, though not in tenderness. The organization of these matters was extremely poor in both the Union and the Confederacy; but, because of greater facilities springing from greater command of money, the hospital organization of the North, both field and fixed, was far better than that of the South, which indeed could hardly be said to have a hospital organization at all. In these hospitals worked thousands of devoted women, and their ministrations to the wounded and dying of both sides must not be forgotten when we reckon up the sum of the work of American womanhood. On both sides, ladies of culture and refinement devoted themselves to this pious work, and this was the most worthy and lasting outlet that was found for Northern feminine enthusiasm in the cause of the Union, and the name of Dorothea Lynde Dix, the head of the organized force of Northern hospital nurses, will always be held in especial honor for devotion and ability in this n.o.ble cause, as well as in the amelioration of the condition of the indigent insane, to which latter cause her whole life was chiefly devoted.

There were few especial heroines developed by the war; heroism was so general when there was call for it among the women that it attracted but little notice and won no lasting fame, even in its most remarkable displays. There has come down to us hardly a single female name as being especially singled out during this time for any noteworthy action.

Indeed, there was such dearth of especial women heroines that one poet was driven, when he wished to stir the blood of his people with enthusiasm for feminine heroism, to invent one; but the present day wisely refuses to put any faith in the h.o.a.ry legend of Barbara Frietchie, which indeed, as given by Whittier, is full of the most absurd improbabilities. To say nothing of the unlikelihood of "Stonewall" Jackson ordering a platoon--it could hardly have been a regiment--to fire at a flagstaff instead of directing someone to enter the house and remove the objectionable object,--though even this would have been uncharacteristic of the man who smiled and saluted when a pretty girl laughingly flourished an American flag in his face as he rode past her in the streets of Frederick,--the quickness of the old lady in catching that flag as it fell from the staff, to say nothing of her activity in getting to the window from the spot where she was presumably sheltered from "the rifle-blast," would put a professional juggler to shame. Then again, why Jackson should have been "riding ahead" does not seem clear, since that is not the place for a general while on the march, and every detail of the incident is sufficiently unmilitary to have been, as it was, the conception of one who had never in his life as much as smelt gunpowder. No; the legend of Barbara must be given up, even though it deprive us of one of the few heroines of its day.

The debatable ground "between the lines" did, however, furnish history with some notable incidents wherein women figured as the chief influences, even if the names of these heroines were not chronicled. For obvious reasons, the names were not disclosed at the time of the incidents when the respective armies alternately held the ground where lived the women whose deeds were chronicled, and afterward these deeds were forgotten in graver matters. One fair inhabitant of Was.h.i.+ngton in the early days of the struggle used to give Stuart, who for a time after the battle of Bull Run held the southern bank of the Potomac, most valuable information by means of a cunningly devised system of signals, executed by the raising and lowering of the window shades in her house, which was within full sight of the Confederate pickets. For a time the Confederacy had a regular force of female spies in the capital of their opponents, and some of the information thus gained was of great service.

Of course the Federal government also maintained a corps of female spies, though the name of only one of all the roll on both sides--that of Belle Boyd--is known to fame. Belle Boyd's adventurous career during the war doubtless produced some few results in the movement of the armies of the South; but even she hardly did yeoman service for her cause. In respect of espionage, the Confederacy had a decided advantage over its enemies, for the society at Richmond, both social and official, was made up of more constant and, therefore, better known elements than that of the always fluctuating population of Was.h.i.+ngton. So at Richmond it was hardly possible for a woman to seem that which she was not in the matter of sympathy, while in the national capital the constant influx of strangers and sojourners made the keeping of a military or political secret a matter of the utmost difficulty.

These more military pursuits, however, are hardly creditable and little congenial to true womanhood, and the present record does not care to concern itself with them. There was enough of pa.s.sive heroism displayed during the time of strife to fill the onlooker with admiration for the courage as well as the patriotism of American womanhood, and these things are more pleasant to look upon than is professional espionage.

The display of courage and endurance was varyingly manifested in the different parts of the country and under different conditions; but it was constant in its spirit. The debt of the Union to its women has never been acknowledged, perhaps because never understood. The many triumphs of the Confederate arms on the battlefield gave rise to a strong "peace party" in the North; and, though general history makes no mention of the fact, there can be in the mind of one who remembers the trend and expressions of public sentiment little doubt that it was chiefly the women of the North who barred the way of that party to ultimate victory.

Because the most prominent expressions in matters political come from male sources, we are apt to neglect to recognize the home influence which is so frequently a factor in the total result that accrues from the consequent action. It was the men who fulminated against peace, the men who went to the polls and by their votes decided that the war must continue until either the South had been brought back into the Union or the cause of the latter was so hopeless that to continue the struggle were folly; but it was in large measure the women who, by their steadfastness of devotion to the cause, impelled the men to such action.

There will be few among those who remember the interior history of those terrible days who will not agree in the statement that to the women of the North was due, in great measure, the hearty affirmative response which rose from the country to the question, "Shall the war go on?"

Southern womanhood was equally steadfast in the cause of liberty, as the South deemed it; indeed, the Southern women, as unyielding in principle as their Northern sisters, were yet more admirable in their constancy, because of the conditions under which that constancy was displayed. They were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty, encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of their displaying less constancy than the s.e.x which was termed the weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting sh.e.l.ls and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox, it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which antic.i.p.ated rapine and sack without quailing.

The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that G.o.d fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still fighting desperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their s.e.x, were immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph; for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the a.s.sa.s.sin, changed joy into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South, sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North, which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of G.o.d a perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from innate baseness. Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy, naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood.

The trial of those implicated in the a.s.sa.s.sination of Lincoln gave a name to be remembered in the annals of American women, though the record be of the saddest. That Mrs. Surratt was legally guilty of complicity in the murder of the martyred president is at least doubtful; it may even be questioned if she were guilty of foreseeing the crime, her part in the conspiracy most probably ending with the plan of abduction which was the forerunner of the murder. None the less, she suffered a shameful death, the pa.s.sions of the time being too strong for the cooler voice of justice to be heard; and again was enacted, in minor form, the national drama that followed upon the insurrection of John Brown. The women of the South, if they did not go to the lengths of their Northern sisters on the former occasion, looked upon Mrs. Surratt in the light of a martyr to their lost cause, and so expressed themselves with a bitterness and forgetfulness of the true nature of the case which was a denial of their best attributes as women; and the Northern woman, holding Mrs. Surratt to be a very devil of malignity and criminality, could not patiently hear her name spoken with aught but horror and detestation. So the war ended, as it began, in misunderstanding, and, therefore, the bitterest of hatred between the two sections of a land which was at the end of the struggle no more united than at the beginning.

It is pleasant to turn from these manifestations of all that was worst in American womanhood to the consideration of woman's social conditions at the time of the expiration of the war. Even during the period of strife there had been uplifted a new voice from the women of our land, though as yet that voice was too feeble and too drowned in the clash of battle to attract much attention. One of the expressions of this new spirit which had arisen in at least a portion of our women is worthy of note as being in some sense a pioneer. In 1864 there was issued a book called _Woman and Her Era_, by Eliza W. Farnham. The object of the author was to demonstrate the superiority of women over men: not superiority in comparative sense or even for certain ends, but absolute and unimpeachable. The leading argument of the book, as it appeared in syllogistic form and in all its wonders of capital letters, was as follows: "Life is exalted in proportion to the Organic and Functional Complexity; Woman's Organism is more Complex and her Totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the Scale of Life is the most exalted--the Sovereign one." The minor proposition was supported by arguments which belong to the lecture room of the anatomist. Pa.s.sing in silence over that which the lady calls the "Organic Argument," a little of that which she terms the "Religious Argument,--wherefore, is not clear,--may be quoted with a view to entertainment if not to profit:

"Organic Superiority is in itself proof positive of Super Organic Superiority.... Life is the most advanced which employs, in the service of the greatest number of powers, the most complex mechanism for the End of Use. We are therefore prepared to find in it" [the feminine structure] "the embodiment of a larger number of powers and higher aims in its Use... a deeper feeling for the Ends of Use, a more abiding faith in and loyalty to Development, as the one aim that makes life worthy of acceptance and sweet in its pa.s.sing taste, and on the other hand to see that its failure herein is more fatal and destructive than it is in the masculine life.... The feminine includes the masculine, transcending it in all directions."

This is the synopsis of the major part of the argument, given in the lady's own words; but her conclusion has a more familiar sound to our ears. Here it is:

"The question of Rights settles itself in the true statement of Capacities. Rights are narrowest where Capacities are fewest broadest where they are the most numerous.... It is plain, then, as between masculine and feminine, where the most expanded circle of Rights will be found; and equally plain the absurdity of man, the narrower in Capacities, a.s.suming to define the sphere of Rights for Woman, the broader."

Such was the trumpet-blast sent out by Miss Eliza Farnham, one of the pioneers of the movement which took for its slogan her own cry of "Women's Rights." The work made no stir and has long since pa.s.sed to the limbo of forgotten books, but it was undeniably suggestive and seems worthy of being rescued, at least in name and purpose, from the oblivion into which it pa.s.sed. Absorbed in nearer if not weightier questions, the women of that day gave scant welcome to the theories of Miss Farnham; but the appearance of those theories, even if in rudimentary form, was ominous, though the omen was not recognized. It was one of the first guns of a struggle compared with which even the war which was then raging was tame and half-hearted, and of which the end is not yet; perhaps never will be.

For the time, however, the women of our land were concerned with national rather than s.e.xual questions. Indeed, the physiological argument never took root among the theories of women when they discussed their place in the scheme of creation; but the mental argument, the position that women were in all mental attributes equal to men and therefore should be possessed of equal rights, proved to be seed sown in good ground. Time was needed for its development into the grain of general or even partial acceptance; but it grew and was even then growing, even if not directly under the fostering of the author of _Woman and Her Era_.

Already there had been more than whispers of such theories. As is usually the case, the first movements were clumsy and ill-directed and were too radical to hope for general popularity even among those whom they were intended to benefit. There had been among certain disgruntled women a movement toward "dress reform"--not, however, having as its end aesthetic or even sanitary considerations, but merely an a.s.sertion, of strange and even ridiculous nature, of equality with the men. Even before Miss Farnham had uttered her call to battle there had come into existence those strange bifurcated garments called "bloomers," though their adoption had been limited to very few indeed among the women of our land. Moreover, nearly fifteen years prior to the appearance of Miss Farnham's book, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had signed a summons to the first "Woman's Rights" convention, which was held at the home of Mrs. Stanton, at Seneca Falls, New York. On this occasion was made the first formal claim for suffrage on the part of women; but the movement accomplished little and was rather suggestive than effective.

The female suffragists had accomplished nothing at this time; they had not even influenced the general thought of their s.e.x, and such works as that of Miss Farnham--the most radical and yet representative in its theories and therefore selected as typical--were as few as ineffective.

The failure of the movement to spread beyond a few rabid enthusiasts was doubtless because of its radicalness of theory; it was not content, being in this respect like almost all new movements, to make gradual progress, but must upset established inst.i.tutions, both domestic and political, at a blow. Therefore it won from all sensible people either ridicule or neglect; it made no more real headway than had the sporadic outbursts of misdirected religious enthusiasm in older times, which indeed it greatly resembled in its methods and propagandists. Its central theory was so overlaid by c.u.mbering cloaks of absurdity that, whatever might be its real attractions and merits if seen stripped of its fantastic garb, it could but be repugnant in present guise to all true womanhood; it was sent forth in "bloomers," as it were, and was thus made a figure of fun and deprived of the dignity which it might have held had its dress been simple and dignified. Yet it was portentous, though the portent was not of the thing that was seen but of that which was to be born of it.

Such radical "reformers" as Susan B. Anthony, with her adoption of semi-masculine costume, just sufficiently masculine to render it unfeminine and nothing more, or Lucretia Mott, with her impracticable theories of "women's rights," presented in such form as to be repellent to all the better attributes of true womanhood, could win but ridicule, good-natured or acrimonious, as their portion; yet, in a sense, they were the leaders of the great movement which in altered guise was to come as a preponderant question of its day. Not in 1866, however, had that movement taken or even promised to a.s.sume any definite shape or one likely to win sufficient adherents to make it worthy of notice. As yet American womanhood was content with its sphere. It still ruled the home, and found in that rule all of "right" that it desired. It was content to send to the polls, as to the battle, its male representatives and to guide them by its influence into the paths which seemed best. It did not "lift up its voice and contend in the streets"; it was quietly strong.

The close of the Civil War, then, found the outer conditions of the American woman, speaking of them in general and not as affected by the material results of that war, just as they had been at the beginning of the strife. Society had indeed been rent into fragments; but the components of that society which had flourished four years before were unchanged in their status. Socially speaking, there had come no change to the women of America during the period of the Civil War; yet by that war and its results there had been created conditions that were to bear fruit in after days.