executive interference and the horrors of threatened famine." In
1864, the Government found that quantities of grain paid in under
the tax as new-grown were mildewed. It was grain of the previous
year which speculators had held too long and now palmed off on
the Government to supply the army.

Amid these desperate conditions the fate of soldiers' families
became everywhere, a tragedy. Unless the soldier was a land-owner
his family was all but helpless. With a depreciated currency and
exaggerated prices, his pay, whatever his rank, was too little to
count in providing for his dependents. Local charity, dealt out
by state and county boards, by relief associations, and by the
generosity of neighbors, formed the barrier between his family
and starvation. The landless soldier, with a family at home in
desperate straits, is too often overlooked when unimaginative
people heap up the statistics of "desertion" in the latter half
of the war.

It was in this period, too, that amid the terrible shrinkage of
the defensive lines "refugeeing" became a feature of Southern
life. From the districts over which the waves of war rolled back
and forth helpless families--women, children, slaves--found
precarious safety together with great hardship by withdrawing to
remote places which invasion was little likely to reach. An
Odyssey of hard travel, often by night and half secret, is part
of the war tradition of thousands of Southern families. And here,
as always, the heroic women, smiling, indomitable, are the center
of the picture. Their flight to preserve the children was no
small test of courage. Almost invariably they had to traverse
desolate country, with few attendants, through forests, and