ns under which that constancy was displayed. They
were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved
ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South
recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the
evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were
confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The
Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the
women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty,
encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of
their displaying less constancy than the sex which was termed the
weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the
bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in
its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as
was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and
jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion
to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after
all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies
of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting
shells and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the
whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during
the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was
driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox,
it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief
but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the
indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern
occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of
the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized
warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which anticipated rapine
and sack without quailing.

The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's
forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the
consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did
the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the
South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that
God fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and
even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still
fighting de