Education for the masses was not provided, as it is now; but the
majority of the better class were finely educated, either at Northern
schools, or by the governess, and tutor at home. In many cases where the
wife was widowed, she nobly and intelligently arose to the management of
business affairs. If misfortune came, and the woman felt obliged to earn
a livelihood, it did not occur to her to seek it behind a counter or in
a workshop as we do in this generation. She was inclined to walk in the
old paths, and follow old customs. They believed their own skies were
bluest, their own cornfields greenest, their tobacco finest, their
cotton the whitest on earth. They were devoted to old friends, to old
manners and customs, and gloried in their birthright.

In the line of literary productions the South was backward. Augusta
Evans Wilson's remarkable novels, Beulah, St, Elmo, and others, were
read and re-read, not for any lasting good, but for passing interest,
and largely for the glamour that invested a Southern writer. Madame Le
Vert produced "Souvenirs of Travel," among the very earliest of books
on European scenes. Marion Harland's works were read, and possessed the
selling quality notwithstanding the bitter taste left by her humiliated
heroines. Caroline Lee Hentz, Mrs. Holmes, Mrs. Southworth, and a small
army of essayists in the field, clamored for recognition; but time was
when to see the Southern woman in print was an innovation displeasing to
the household gods. Time came when the slumbering faculties were stirred
into splendid and successful activity. The depth of the natures hitherto
unsounded arose to the new demands right valiantly. We behold its fruits
in the rearing of splendid monuments, the erection of noble charity
institutions, the endowing of colleges, the equipment of missionaries,
the awakening of wide philanthropies, and in the higher lines of
Christian endeavor. The men who shouldered arms, from father to son,
to defend their States rights, were the same who, in times of peace,