with a growing knowledge that the success of the Confederate army would mean a continuance of their slavery at least for a time, the negroes for the most part refused to sever the ties that bound them to their white families and continued their daily duties. In attendance on their masters in the field, in moving them from the field when they were wounded, in bringing home the bodies of their slain, in secreting and caring for family treasures, in watching over family interests, and in other ways, hundreds of negroes displayed a noble fidelity that should always be remembered. How surely these facts will always establish the kindly relations that existed between the white families and the colored families on the plantation home!

As the number of soldiers to be maintained increased, the women assumed additional responsibilities. The newspapers mention how they organized Sewing Societies, Knitting Associations, Hospital Aid Societies, Nursing Clubs. What Mrs. Avery says of Virginia was also true of North Carolina, “In some places churches were changed into depots for bolts of cloth, linen, and flannel. Sewing machines ran constantly. Nothing could be heard in them for days but the click of machines, the ceaseless murmur of voices questioning and voices directing work.” At railroad junctions, such as Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte, Salisbury, Weldon, Goldsboro, and other towns, wayside hospitals equipped with surgeons, medical supplies, and rude operating tables were established. Committees of women went from house to house distributing cloth to be sewed and yarns to be woven and then recollected and shipped their offerings. Representatives of various organizations met trains at stations and added of their own household supplies to the meager rations of passing soldiers. Nurses passed from field hospitals to field hospitals as the tide of battle moved. After an arduous day women often collected or sat solitary in their homes to sew or knit far into the night, their labor sweetened by the thought that the work of their tired hands would add comfort to those who were dying for the land they loved. General Lee writes that in the stillness of the night he could almost hear the needles at home click as they flew through the meshes, and General Gordon adds that every click was a prayer and many a stitch dimmed with tears.

To get an adequate measure of the burdens imposed on these capable women, let us recall a striking fact in our history. The census of 1860 shows that in North Carolina there were between the ages of 20 and 60—the limits of military service—128,889 men. Subtract from this total number the 125 thousand men furnished to the Confederacy by our State and the subtraction reveals that there were in the borders of the State only 3,889 men who first and last were not in some form

of military service. Hence the women of the State and the 3,889 men had to do as best they could the work that would have fallen on the shoulders of the absent 125,000 men. These bare facts reveal the wonderful competency of these women.

In the third place the woman of the Confederacy was an inventive woman. This inventive genius was to have a far-reaching influence on the subsequent industrial life of our State. As I see it, almost every smoke-stack that towers over its adjacent factory is a monument to industrial power developed by the Civil War. Almost every hammer that rings in our workshops proclaims how our necessities diversified our industries. Let us see how such propositions can be established.

At the opening of the war our people were a single industry people. Outside of a small number of men engaged in the so-called learned professions, farming was almost the sole gainful occupation. We grew cotton, but New and Old England spun, wove, dyed and profited by it. We cultivated tobacco for others to manufacture. Trees crowded our fields, but we bought our furniture. In short, as an alliterative fancier sums up “for manufactured articles from linch pins to locomotives, from boats to buttons, from flannels to fans, from pens to plows,” we were dependent on outside markets. The census of 1860 discloses the fact that there were at that time only 3,689 small manufacturing establishments of any sort in North Carolina and that most of these employed few laborers. Out of a total population of 992,622 only 14,217 men were engaged in any form of manufacturing. In the following most important industries the number of workers was as follows: wrought iron, 125 men; cast iron, 59; making clothes for sale, 12; manufacturing boots and shoes, 176; tanning, 93; compounding medicines, 1. There were only seven small woolen mills. There were four recorded makers of firearms and these four shops were so recklessly extravagant as to employ eleven men and consume \$1,000 worth of raw material each year. We were without lead, iron, coal or salt. This was our deplorable industrial situation when we were suddenly cut off from outside markets and became dependent on our own resources.

The imperative need of remedying this disastrous situation set our men and our women to manufacturing. Before the protracted struggle ended we had learned two ways of supplying our most urgent needs; first, by a dashing, persistent, and reckless running of the blockade from our seaport towns; second, by an almost marvelous development of small industries. From the State arsenal at Fayetteville we began to turn out each month what Major M. P. Taylor reports as 500 excellent rifles. At the Falls of the Neuse and at other places a

serviceable gunpowder was made. At several places salt works were established. Military supplies of various kinds were wrought out in rude factories. Woolen and cotton mills were set up. Tanneries were multiplied. Clothing and shoe factories were operated—in brief, a capable people found themselves in sore straits. Promptly they aroused themselves and met the emergencies thrust upon them, met them, not adequately to be sure, for the time was too short and men too scarce, but met them in such a way as to evoke the admiration of all thinking people. The articles produced were of course not finished mechanical products, but they answered pressing needs. We learned the lesson out of the travail of our souls, but we learned to too well ever to forget it, and as soon as the mournful days of reconstruction were over, we turned again to manufacturing and have ever since been growing in aptitude for industrial arts.

In the inventiveness necessitated by the war, the women took a most active part. Their resourcefulness seemed to grow as new demands were made on it. As soon as the supply of clothing in the stores began to fail, old spinning frames and looms were dragged from garrets and cellars. New looms were constructed. Hands all unusued to that work began to ply bobbins and shuttles. Home spun cloth as durable as it was ugly was made in almost every home. Soldiers, women, children, and slaves were clad in this uniform of the farm. To relieve its unmitigated ugliness dyes of various hues were concocted from poke-berries, elder berries, and roots in home-made dyepots and boilers. The wool from old mattresses was often recarded and spun into yarns for socks to keep the soldiers from having cold feet in battle and in camp. A pair of cards was a treasure and the famous blockade runner, Advance, carried few more precious commodities in her hold. Factories to make cards were later created to supplement the supply made in blacksmith shops. Nor was spinning and weaving confined to coarse yarns. Old silken garments were painstakingly separated thread by thread and woven into gloves and stockings. In sections where it would grow flax was planted and some excellent linen woven. Carpets were unravelled and the woolen strands woven into blankets. New carpets were made from rags and scraps. In answer to a call for silk for war balloons, discarded silken dresses were dismembered and the silk furnished. Veteran garments mustered out of service years before were conscripted and made to enlist for indefinite service. These garments outlived their expectancy on the principle formulated by the old lady who explained that her soldier son's solitary pair of socks never wore out because “when the feet get full of holes I just knit new

feet to the tops, and when the tops wear out I just knit new tops to the feet.” Slippers were made from rabbit and squirrel fur, and from old tent canvas. Hats were fabricated from palmetto leaves, from wheat and oat straw and from broad-leaved gasses. Corn husks bleached in water and colored to suit the complexion made bewitching bonnets. Wire grass plaited and adorned with white shavings from cow horns was another source of millinery effect. Buttons were made from gourds and pine whittled round and covered with cloth. Children's clothes were fastened with buttons of persimmon seeds. Necklaces constructed from berries served as ornaments for pretentious occasions.

In manufacturing household articles a similar ingenuity was shown. Ink, colored with indigo or berry juice, was made from oak and cedar balls. Envelopes were shaped by means of tin models and gummed with flour paste. Old scraps of wall paper folded in these envelopes served to carry a mother's blessing or a sweetheart's love to absent soldiers. When oil grew scarce, no little inventive genius was developed in devising lights for the home. Tallow candles served at first, but as beeves disappeared, other forms of illumination became necessary. In some homes sycamore balls were soaked in fat and burned in pans. Strings twisted hard were thrust into bottles filled with grease, tar, or beeswax and spluttered out light enough to distinguish a spoon from a fork. Soap was made from ham bones already stripped to the point of emaciation by hungry teeth. Every home had its ash-hopper to leach lye. Cartridge belts and boxes were manufactured from layers of cloths sewed together and covered with varnish. Nitre for gunpowder was often dug by the women from old smoke-houses and tobacco barns.

Coffee disappeared from most homes before the close of the first year of war. Substitutes for this indispensable beverage were made from parched okra seed, from parched wheat, rye, and oats and from dried potatoes and cowpeas. Chicory and postum are lineal descendants of these delightsome beverages. Tea was brewed from yaupon and from sassafras roots. Both tea and coffee were sweetened with sorghum molasses. A soup was devised from tallow, persimmons and sorghum. Mrs. F. C. Roberts writes proudly that she concocted a Christmas cake for her children out of dried cherries, dried whortle-berries, candied watermelon rind and sorghum molasses. One lady avowed that she could make fifteen different dishes from dried apples. The forms in which cowpeas could be served were as numerous as the sands on the seashore.

A fourth characteristic of the Confederate woman was that she was a self-forgetful woman. There was no reservation in her willingness

to serve her war-torn country. This self-abnegation was revealed in many ways. Sometimes it took the form of personal service. Randolph Ridgeley lay severely wounded in a Virginia front yard. The surgeon said he could not be moved and that he would die if he did not sleep. A Winchester girl, an utter stranger to the nerve-wracked man, sat down on the ground and taking the young man's head in her lap soothed him to sleep. Then she sat immovable through the chilly damp of the night. Her nobility of nerve saved a soldier to fight for the cause dear to her heart. Hence in the weeks of illness that followed her exposure she rejoiced instead of repined. Poor blind Mrs. Roland of Richmond, consumed with a desire to contribute her part in spite of her affliction, groped from day to day to the hospitals and with guitar and songs quieted the restless sufferers. Sometimes it manifested itself in abstaining from such foods as could be used for soldiers’ rations. Incident after incident is on record where for months women existed only on such perishable foods as could not be shipped to the army. To remonstrances that she was killing herself, one of these heroines replied, “I can do so little, let me do that little even if I die.” Many a mound in quiet cemeteries testifies to the depth of their sacrifice. Sometimes it revealed itself in cheery letters to absent ones when the wolf of hunger was howling at doors within which idolized children cried for bread. Sometimes it disclosed itself in an ungrudging sharing of the cruse of oil. A few months before Lee's surrender tidings reached central North Carolina that his army was out of food. At once in homes both humble and stately a division was made even to the last peck of meal, and with no reckoning for tomorrow the contribution to the army was shipped. When a tax in kind was levied by the State, a tax that took a share in whatever remained in the storehouses and in the crib, the women in charge of the homes met the tax with little evasion.

Nor did this spirit of self-forgetfulness fail these women when hopes were shattered and the grievous hour of surrender ended cherished dreams. As the men in grey, tattered, footsore, dispirited, confounded, returned to their desolated homes, their wives greeted them with undimmed courage and sweet resolution. They aroused them by words and deeds to manly endeavor. Although after the surrender and after the negroes quit the fields, want “stalked like an armed man,” these women found spirit to jest at poverty and in many towns “Starvation parties” and “Tacky sociables,” “where each came hungry and each left empty,” were given in honor of the returned soldiers. Many of these women were living in cabins near the ashes of once beautiful homes. Many, adjusting themselves to poverty, were learning the economy of

life anew and sustaining their families on less than had formerly been wasted. In some homes faithful negroes served on and expected only such wages as could be spared; in others mothers with their children were struggling alone for daily bread. But, as they had borne the anxieties and griefs of war undismayed, they were now ready with hope and firmness to start life again with their paroled husbands. How, under the inspiration of these Confederate women, homes once more became homes indeed, industries were revived, fields again returned their yields, order and system and law once more reigned, is a glorious part of our history. Nay more, in the face of grinding duties, these stirring women at once bethought them to preserve the memories of that momentous struggle. Hardly were their dead buried from their sight before they sought means to keep green their deeds. They started the custom of annually bedecking their graves with flowers and commemorating their valor in addresses and memorials. They denied themselves rest and comfort that public monuments might be reared. They struggled for homes and pensions for disabled soldiers. They established journals and magazines and their pens and their depleted purses have saved nearly all the recorded history of those days. Blot out what the women have done to preserve the history of the Confederacy and you have almost an untouched page.

Lastly the woman of the Confederacy was a womanly woman. She craved no queenhood except the sovereignty of her own home. She desired no subjects save those of her own household, and there she ruled with gentle if imperial graciousness. Accustomed to manage large households of children and of slaves, she early acquired dignity, earnestness, and the self-control which enables its possessor to control others. She never thought of doubting that her sphere of action was the home, and she centered her efforts on making that home a place of refinement and comfort. Her children were trained to rigid obedience, and early taught to despise cowardice, dishonesty, and an unsquare deal. Her first instruction in the citizenship of her sons was that an office was held for the State, a trust was sacred, and one's word as inviolable as a volume of oaths. “Strength and dignity were her clothing; she opened her mouth with wisdom, and the law of kindness was on her tongue. She looked well to the ways of her household, and she ate not the bread of idleness. Her children rose up and called her blessed; her husband also.”