the keener edge,
because sharpened by the bitter fact of invasion and the hardships it
brought. With them the home suffered, not only as at the North, by the
departure of father or son to danger or death; the Southern homes often
saw the foes in their midst, and sometimes suffered ravage and spoil.
"How can you expect me to be well reconstructed," asked a Virginian
after the war, "When I remember the family vaults in which the silver
plates were wrenched from the coffins by your soldiers?" When the
fighting was over, the life of the reunited nation had to work its way
for a generation,--and the end is not yet,--against the hostilities, the
rancors, the misunderstandings, generated in those four years of
strife.

The reality of war where it fell heaviest,--in the border States, where
neighborhoods and families were divided, and both armies marched and
fought,--is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding
Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of
the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid
misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up
to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even
on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were
seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was closed,
your trade ruined. You had no money; you drank coffee made of roasted
parsnips for breakfast, and ate only potatoes for dinner. Your nearest
kinsfolk and friends passed you on the street silent and scowling; if
you said what you thought you were liable to be dragged to the county
jail and left there for months. The subject of the war was never
broached in your home where opinions differed; but one morning the boys
were missing. No one said a word, but one gray head was bent, and the
happy light died out of the old eyes and never came to them again. Below
all the squalor and discomfort was the agony of suspense or the
certainty of death. But the parsnip coffee and the empty purse certainly
did give a sting to the great overwhelming misery, like gnats tormenting
a wounded man."

Visiting in war-time the sages of Concord, she saw the difference
between war as viewed by visionaries at a distance and the reality: "I
remember listening during one long summer morning to Louisa Alcott's
father as he chanted paeans to the war, the 'armed angel which was
wakening the nation to a lofty life unkn