Very different was the spirit of the wife of a Federal officer stationed at Augusta, Georgia, whose declaration that she hoped to see the day when "black heels should stand on white necks" startled the State of Georgia. Many good ladies came South firm in the belief that all Southerners were negro-beaters, slave-traders, and cut-throats; a folk sadly benighted and needing tutelage in the humanities; and they were not always politic in expressing these opinions. After war, the war spirit always lingers longest in non-combatants--in women and in men who stayed at home and cheered others on. "The soldiers," said General Grant, "were in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms least humiliating to the Southern people." He wrote Mrs. Grant from Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865: "The suffering that must exist in the South ... will be beyond conception; people who speak of further retaliation and punishment do not conceive of the suffering endured already, or they are heartless and unfeeling." General Halleck to General Meade, April 30, 1865: "The Army of the Potomac have shown the people of Virginia how they would be treated as enemies. Let them now prove that they know equally well how to treat the same people as friends." "The terrible sufferings of the South," our press commented, "have softened the hearts of the stern warriors of the Armies of the Potomac and the Cumberland, and while they are calling for pity and justice for us, politicians and fanatics call for vengeance." General Sherman said: "I do think some political power might be given to the young men who served in the rebel army, for they are a better class than the adventurers who have gone South purely for office." During an exciting epoch in reconstruction, I was sitting beside a wounded ex-Confederate in an opera-box, listening to a Southern statesman haranguing us on our wrongs, real and heavy enough, heaven knows, heavier than ever those of war had been. "Rather than submit to continued and intensified humiliations," cried the orator, a magnetic man of the sort who was carrying Northern audiences to opposite extremes, "we will buckle on our swords and go to war again!" "It might be observed," remarked my veteran drily, while I clapped my hands, "that if he should buckle on his sword and go to war, it would be what he did not do before." I held my hands quite still during the rest of that speech.