Southern womanhood was equally steadfast in the cause of liberty, as the South deemed it; indeed, the Southern women, as unyielding in principle as their Northern sisters, were yet more admirable in their constancy, because of the conditions under which that constancy was displayed. They were not daunted by the ruin of their homes, by the death of their loved ones, by their own sufferings and perils. Unlike the North, the South recognized its unpayable debt to its women, perhaps because the evidences of that debt were so much more patent than where these were confined to the direction and fostering of public sentiment. The Southern chronicler of that woeful time gladly acknowledged how the women, by their enthusiastic encouragement and their gallant loyalty, encouraged the men and kept them to their duty if only from shame of their displaying less constancy than the sex which was termed the weaker. When Lee stood at bay in Petersburg, it was less upon the bayonets of his ragged army that the Southern Confederacy was upheld in its last struggle than upon the fiery constancy of its women. Fine as was the spirit of that little army, which laughed at its own plight and jestingly termed its components "Lee's Miserables," in punning allusion to Victor Hugo's great work, then just issued in America, it was, after all, but the reflex and expression of the spirit of the delicate ladies of the little town, who lived unconcerned amid the clamor of bursting shells and even held their little social gatherings in the centre of the whirlpool of war, that the soldiers might have some recreation during the scant hours of rest from duty. When at last the skeleton army was driven from its defences and forced to lay down its arms at Appomattox, it was the women of Richmond who received the news with bitterest grief but least dismay, and faced with calmest courage the threat of the indignities and sufferings which they feared would result from Northern occupation. That these fears were groundless, even the baser elements of the soldiery being in the leash of a man who believed in civilized warfare, does not detract from the gallantry which anticipated rapine and sack without quailing.