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 of Confederate life was the household composed of several
families, all women and children, huddled together without a man
or even a half-grown lad to be their link with the mill and the
market. In those regions where there were few slaves and the
exemption of overseers did not operate, such households were
numerous.

The great privations which people endured during the Confederacy
have passed into familiar tradition. They are to be traced mainly
to three causes: to the blockade, to the inadequate system of
transportation, and to the heartlessness of speculators. The
blockade was the real destroyer of the South. Besides ruining the
whole policy based on King Cotton, besides impeding to a vast
extent the inflow of munitions from Europe, it also deprived
Southern life of numerous articles which were hard to