HIB0338 Vybrané problémy z dějin americké občanské války: Ženy v občanské válce

 
Soldier James Cooper Nisbet on the women of the South

 Lieutenant Colonel Hamilton was granted a furlough and went down to his horne in Jones County, Georgia, to see his good wife, who was managing their plantation, the “Bowen Place.“ It is wonderful how the Southern wornen managed those big plantations in the heart of the cotton belt, surrounded by hordes of black slaves, with nearly every able bodied white man absent in the army. It is eloquent of our women, and a good record of our Negroes.

 It was upon the women that the greatest burden of this horrid war fell. Woman has always been a greater sufferer from war than man. She has borne that silent anguish of the spirit which is ten-fold more terrible to bear than the anguish of the body. While the men were carried away with the drunkenness of the war she dwelt in the stillness of her desolated horne and “waited for the letter that never came,“ or perhaps came to tell her she was a widow or childless. May the movement to erect monuments in every Southern state to our heroic Southern women carve in marble a memorial to her cross and passion.

 Napoleon declared to Madame De Stael [de Staël] that “the greatest woman in France is the woman who has given the most soldiers to my army.“ Napoleon would have laurelled the Confederate mother!