tutes of the
lower class and of mercenaries. The foreigners who had of late come to
our shores 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 Washington 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 Manassas 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 Washington. 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 coarsely
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