New Orleans, issued the
equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time
the title 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
circumstances; 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 "bummers" 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 tha