ter years--when, for instance, a pair
of shoes cost a hundred dollars--signify little, for they rested on an
inflated currency. None the less they inspired the witticism that one
should take money to market in a basket and bring provisions home in
one's pocketbook. Endless stories could be told of speculators hoarding
food and watching unmoved the sufferings of a famished people. Said
Bishop Pierce, in a sermon before the General Assembly of Georgia,
on Fast Day, in March, 1863: "Restlessness and discontent prevail....
Extortion, pitiless extortion is making havoc in the land. We are
devouring each other. Avarice with full barns puts the bounties of
Providence under bolts and bars, waiting with eager longings for higher
prices.... The greed of gain... stalks among us unabashed by the heroic
sacrifice of our women or the gallant deeds of our soldiers. Speculation
in salt and bread and meat runs riot in defiance of the thunders of
the pulpit, and executive interference and the horrors of threatened
famine." In 1864, the Government found that quantities of grain paid in
under the tax as new-grown were mildewed. It was grain of the previous
year which speculators had held too long and now palmed off on the
Government to supply the army.

Amid these desperate conditions the fate of soldiers' families became
everywhere, a tragedy. Unless the soldier was a land-owner his family
was all but helpless. With a depreciated currency and exaggerated
prices, his pay, whatever his rank, was too little to count in providing
for his dependents. Local charity, dealt out by state and county boards,
by relief associations, and by the generosity of neighbors, formed the
barrier between his family and starvation. The landless soldier, with
a family at home in desperate straits, is too often overlooked when
unimaginative people heap up the statistics of "desertion" in the latter
half of the war.

It was in this period, too, that amid the terrible shrinkage of the
defensive lines "refugeeing" became a feature of Southern life. From
the districts over which the waves of war rolled back and forth helpless
families--women, children, slaves--found precarious safety together with
great hardship by withdrawing to remote places which invasion was little
likely to reach. An Odyssey of hard travel, often by night and half
secret, is part of the war tradition of thousands of Southern families.
And here, as always, the heroic women, smiling, indomitable,