not so much to perform patrol duty as to
increase the productivity of plantation labor.

This "Fifteen Slave" Law was one of many instances that were caught up
by the men of small property as evidence that the Government favored the
rich. A much less defensible law, and one which was bitterly attacked
for the same reason, was the unfortunate measure permitting the hiring
of substitutes by men drafted into the army. Eventually, the clamor
against this law caused its repeal, but before that time it had worked
untold harm as apparent evidence of "a rich man's war and a poor man's
fight." Extravagant stories of the avoidance of military duty by the
ruling class, though in the main they were mere fairy tales, changed the
whole atmosphere of Southern life. The old glad confidence uniting
the planter class with the bulk of the people had been impaired.
Misapprehension appeared on both sides. Too much has been said lately,
however, in justification of the poorer classes who were thus wakened
suddenly to a distrust of the aristocracy; and too little has been
said of the proud recoil of the aristocracy in the face of a sudden,
credulous perversion of its motives--a perversion inspired by the
pinching of the shoe, and yet a shoe that pinched one class as hard as
it did another. It is as unfair to charge the planter with selfishness
in opposing the appropriation of slaves as it is to make the same charge
against the small farmers for resisting tithes. In face of the record,
the planter comes off somewhat the better of the two; but it must be
remembered that he had the better education, the larger mental horizon.

The Confederacy had long recognized women of all classes as the most
dauntless defenders of the cause. The women of the upper classes passed
without a tremor from a life of smiling ease to a life of extreme
hardship. One day, their horizon was without a cloud; another day,
their husbands and fathers had gone to the front. Their luxuries had
disappeared, and they were reduced to plain hard living, toiling in a
thousand ways to find provision and clothing, not only for their own
children but for the poorer families of soldiers. The women of the poor
throughout the South deserve similar honor. Though the physical shock
of the change may not have been so great, they had to face the same deep
realities--hunger and want, anxiety over the absent soldiers, solicitude
for children, grief for the dead. One of the pathetic aspects o