t 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 hardship 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 circumstances 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 substituting 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 pass was she reduced, she who had lived
upon "the fat of the land," for