federate Army. But it is one
thing to be distinguished at the bar or famous in battle fifty years
ago, and quite another thing to be celebrated in the present. Susan was
that thing. It was said of her that she had kept her husband, an elegant
soft old gentleman, in Congress for a quarter of a century and up to the
very day of his death by being a thorn in the side of the political
life of the state. She kept scrapbooks in which she pasted dangerous and
damaging information about politicians and prominent men generally.
Whenever one of them became a candidate in opposition to her husband,
she prepared an awful obituary of him from her encyclopedia of past
records; and he usually withdrew from the race or was defeated. Few men
live who can face their former deeds in a political campaign. She made
public speeches at a time when no other woman in the South would go
further than give her "experience" in church or read a missionary report
before the Woman's District Conference. She was for temperance and
education even before the days of Local Option and when the public
school system consisted of eight weeks in the summer. She was the only
woman who had ever had the honour, if it was an honour, to address the
State Legislature when a bill was pending there concerning Child Labour;
and she did it in the high falsetto voice of a mother who calls her sons
out of a bait game in the public square. It was said that she actually
did address that dignified body as "boys," and that the "boys" liked it.
She had the brains of a man and the temper of an indignant but
tender-hearted woman. This is an exact description of her literary
style, which was not literary, but it was versatile in wit and sarcasm
and outrageous veracity. She used it as an instrument of torture and
vengeance in the public prints upon the characters of political
demagogues, liquor interests, and the state treasury. And what she said
was violently effective. Her victims might persist in the error of their
ways, but not one of them ever recovered from the face-scratching fury
of her attack.

Add to this the fact that she was a suffragist in the days when there
was only one other woman in the state who believed in citizenship for
women, and that she never ceased to "agitate" for suffrage, and you
receive a faint impression of this old termagant celebrity who had put
Jordantown "on the map" and had given it a reputation for
broadmindedness at a distance which it in no wa