e second Mrs. Jefferson
Davis, who, little less than a decade later, was to abandon the sphere
of her peaceful influence at Washington to share in the responsibilities
of her husband as leader of a cause wholly antagonistic to the interests
represented by the capital. The death of President Taylor in July, 1850,
cast a gloom over the society of Washington and brings us to another era
in the history of American womanhood. Greater gloom was to fall, not
only upon Washington, but the whole country; and once more the leaders
of society were to be forgotten in the heroines, noted or unnoted, of
strife.

CHAPTER XI

THE SECTIONAL DIVISION

Once more it becomes necessary to recognize the division of our country
into sections, as in the days before the Revolution welded it into one
nation. The time was fast coming when there should be division in good
earnest, when there should be even overt separation; and to understand
the effects and tendencies of this time among the women of America it is
needful that we take into fuller consideration than we have yet done the
differences of custom and thought that existed between the women of the
South and the women of the North. For though these met upon common
ground and blended in a society which saw but little variation in the
types presented to it, there had been constantly growing, since the time
of the first amalgamation of the colonies into one nation, differences
between the Northern and the Southern cultures that were little less
than radical in their ultimate nature and expressions.

The distinctiveness of type had come about gradually; but it had always
existed as a possibility, even in the youngest days of the republic. The
conditions of civilization North and South were in themselves divergent,
and they were sure to produce an ever-increasing effect. The North was
the land of affairs; the South was the home of luxury. The North worked
for itself and won its sustenance by the labor of its own hands or
brain; the South watched its wealth accumulate by the toil of its
slaves, and thus had time and to spare for the cultivation of the graces
which come of leisure. Up to the inception of the Civil War it cannot be
denied that the South was preeminently the fountain of American society.
Even as Virginia was the Mother of Presidents, so was the whole South
the parent of the most charming, the most refined, the most cultured of
the dames and damsels who held society aloft