The surrender of Johnston's army, following hard upon that of Lee's forces, ended the struggle, and the South was left to face the consciousness and consequences of defeat. On none of its children did the blow fall with such stunning force as upon its daughters. That the South could not be conquered, that it must attain its independence, that God fought its battles, formed the creed of every Southern woman, and even when the end was in sight to the vision of Lee and Johnston, still fighting desperately as their duty rather than in any hope, the women refused to believe in such a possibility. But the possibility became a certainty, and Rachel could do nothing but mourn for her children and turn with what courage she might to face conditions full of threat of the worst; nor even here did her courage falter, though her beliefs had proved but broken reeds and her hopes had been swept away, leaving nothing in their place. The South was a land of mourning, not of death only, but of failure of a beloved and trusted cause. Meanwhile, the North was a land of rejoicing; and her women, like all their sex, were immoderate in their triumph, and did not consider, as had the soldiers of the victorious armies, the feelings of those who had fought so long and well. But there was scant opportunity for the display of triumph; for the terrible blow which fell upon the whole country, South as well as North, when Lincoln died under the hand of the assassin, changed joy into mourning, and made of a victorious people one that tasted all the bitterness of sorrow. Heavier calamity never visited this land; and its effects upon the feeling of our womanhood were almost as far-reaching and distressing as its political results. For the women of the South, sore in defeat and unjustly holding Lincoln responsible for the sorrows that had come upon them, openly rejoiced in his taking-off, and forgot their womanhood in their exultation over the foul crime. It was the spirit that awoke at John Brown's insurrection over again, though differently directed; and it awakened a natural response in the North, which saw in the exaltation of murder as the judgment of God a perversity and even criminality of thought which could spring only from innate baseness. Again there was misunderstanding; for the women of the South, blinded by their prejudices and sufferings to the true character and greatness of the dead man, held him in detestation and rejoiced over his death as that of a hated foe, while they of the North, listening to the cry of exultation that arose from their Southern sisters and unmindful of the sources,--however false in themselves, yet bearing some excuse, if only of madness,--which led to that demonstration of joy, naturally held that Southern women were hardly better than human fiends and utterly unworthy of the guise of womanhood.