Country Life in Georgia
in the Days of My Youth:
Electronic Edition

Felton, Rebecca Latimer, 1835-1930

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Library of Congress Subject Headings, 21st edition, 1998

LC Subject Headings:
• Felton, Rebecca Latimer, 1835-1930.
• Women -- Georgia -- Biography.
• Feminists -- Georgia -- Biography.
• Georgia -- Social life and customs.
• Georgia -- Politics and government.
• Country life -- Georgia.
• Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History.
• Georgia -- History.
• United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Personal narratives, Confederate.

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  finished TEI-conformant encoding and final proofing.
  
  
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• 1997-10-20,
  Kathleen Feeney
  finished scanning (OCR) and proofing.
  
  

Country Life in Georgia
In the Days of My Youth

ALSO
Addresses Before Georgia Legislature Woman's
Clubs, Women's Organizations and other
Noted Occassions

BY

REBECA LATIMER FELTON,
Widow of Hon. W. H. Felton

Copyright - 1919 by Mrs. Felton

Printed by Index Printing Company
Atlanta, Ga.

DEDICATION.

IN LOVING OF MY BELOVED FRIEND,
THE LATE MRS. RUSSELL SAGE,
OF NEW YORK CITY.

        The greatest woman philanthropist in the known world. She gave millions upon millions of her wealth - to education - to philanthropic institutions - to charity - to every good enterprise which appealed to her - and dying after ninety glorious years of good deeds-she left many other millions to other institutions - to war support and other magnificent benefactions.

        She was also a noble Christian woman.

        She had a broad vision as to proper uses for great wealth - a lofty example of unselfishness.

        Untold generations and unborn millions will be benefited by her noble gifts, and they will rise up and bless her name and memory!

THE AUTHOR.

WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN.

        Why this Book was written after I had passed my eighty-second year deserves an explanation. Understanding the infirmities of age, which can be easily increased by worry and overwork, I had almost decided to allow my accumulated manuscripts to remain after my decease, when those who survive me might give them to publisher if so desired. But when I gave this statement to a number of my sincere friends I was met with a storm of protest. They said I might do this work, if I would be careful as to health, and with frequent rest spells. I explained that while my memory was still good, and my condition normal, still I was a very old lady - much of my physical strength abated - and old people by reason of age were almost sure to become garrulous, talked too much (if they have impatient kinspeople) and were set in their ways of thinking as well as of saying and doing things, and are old-fogyish in regard to modern methods and activities. Nevertheless they have insisted and reminded me that while we have Southern histories concerning the Civil War, compiled from data furnished by political and military leaders, the outside world really knows very little of how the people of Georgia lived in the long ago, before the days of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cook stoves, sewing machines, kerosene oil, automobiles, tri-cycles and a multitude of other things now in common use. "We can read about those things with a greater relish when we hear about the olden time, than when they were unknown propositions." They reminded me that Boswell's Life of Johnson really gives more satisfactory information about the early habits and homes of English people than all the fine and elaborate histories by illustrious writers. Finally I concluded to send some of my already printed articles to a distinguished Georgia gentleman who has never held political office, or sought any preferment or promotion, but whose name

is a synonym of lofty integrity and honest purpose, and who could easily command the votes of his state and section. He had at several times insisted upon my printing or collecting together the literary accumulations of my long lifetime, urging their preservation, etc.

        When his reply reached me I finally decided to set my face to the task. I copy here a few lines of his highly prized letter: "I am returning herewith your papers, registering the package in order that there may be no possibility of their being lost. I assure you it gave me much pleasure in reading these articles of the past, giving me an opportunity of knowing something of the history of the politics of Georgia with which I am not familiar. In your reply to Hon. ---- you demonstrated your full knowledge of the political situation and issues of your day and the records of the public men of the time. It is needless for me to say, you used your pen in a vigorous manner. Your usual vigorous style of writing was stimulated in this case by your determination to protect the good name and acts of one near and dear to you. The other articles read like prophesy. They could be used in present customs. You have lived to see part of your dreams realized. It must give you great and added pleasure and incentives to labor for causes you advocated long before 1900.

        "It is information of this kind that is contained in the articles you sent me, which I do hope you will incorporate in a forthcoming book, along with all other similar data, for only in this way will it give to coming generations an opportunity of appreciating in full the work which you did for Georgia and which will give them the advantages of a true insight as to the political history of the State during your lifetime. Sincerely yours ----."

        My attachment to the readers of the Georgia newspapers is something like the affection that an aged grandmother feels towards her great grandchildren. We understand each other, and generally we think alike. Numbers of these readers (in their loving confidence) have named children for me. I prize their

affection. I wish for them Heaven's richest blessings when their faithful old friend can write no more! They write to me and touch my heart, and some of them say further - "You have a large following in the State of Georgia who are devoted to you, especially among the rural citizens, the plain people of the State. They always feel assured you will state facts and furnish proof if your statements should be questioned.

        We will be glad if you will consent to write and publish this chronicle for those you have loved so long and served so well."

        Longfellow's beautiful poem, 'Morituri Salutamus,' is pertinent as my reply and acceptance of the task:

                        "Something remains for us to do and dare
                        Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.
                        Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
                        Wrote his Grand Oedipus and Simonides
                        Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
                        When each had numbered more than forescore years.
                        And Theophrastus at fourscore and ten
                        Had but begun his Characters of Men.
                        Chaucer at Woodstock, with the nightingales
                        At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales.
                        Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,
                        Completed Faust when eighty years were past.
                        These are indeed exceptions, but they show
                        How far the Gulf Stream of our youth may flow
                        Into the Arctic region of our lives,
                        Where little else than life itself survives.
                        For age is opportunity no less
                        Than youth itself, though in another dress,
                        And, as the evening twilight fades away,
                        The sky is filled with stars.
                        Invisible by day."

CHAPTER I.

SOME INDIAN REMINISCENSES.

        Among the recollections of my childhood, the most startling to my youthful mind, was a story told me by my mother of an Indian raid that came near enough to my grandfather's home to massacre and scalp the whole family of friends, Brantly by name. Within a very few miles of the Brantly's there was a large settlement of whites, who owned their farms - some had lands inherited from their parents. For many years they had not been thus molested and the massacre of the Brantly family came like a shock from a clear sky. Mr. Brantly was plowing in a nearby field, his wife, with a servant woman, was washing at the spring branch, when the red skins swooped down upon them and tomahawked the last one of them.

        Morgan county, Ga., was not a border county either, and when the alarm was given, my grandfather Swift, then a comparatively young man, saddled a gentle horse, helped my grandmother into the saddle, lifted my small uncle, William, up behind her, and placed the three-months old baby (my own dear mother) in grandmother's lap. Armed with a musket, he walked beside the horse, until they were in sight of my great grandfather's home, when he bade his little family goodbye and went back to join the near neighbors who had agreed to pursue the Indians. Night and day these armed men hunted the tracks of the murderers, but to small effect. This occurred in the year 1813.

        My mother's aunt, born a Talbot, went to Texas with her husband and children - two in number - with a slave woman who had been given her by her father before she left her girlhood home for the "wild west." They arrived at their destination in Texas, cleared some land, built a house and were comfortably settled,

to start a home and make a fortune. The little family were at supper table one night, the four-year old boy in his high chair close at his father's right hand and the year-old baby girl also in her high chair, with a home-made doll in her arms, when the Mexican Indians raided the place, killed and scalped the husband and wife, also the little boy. They took with them the baby girl and the colored nurse and departed. The family in Georgia were informed by some means that the Mexican Indians would ransom the little girl, but she was twelve years old before her mother's brothers got on track of her, and they made the long, wearisome trip on horseback to a place designated in Texas and found their sister's child (still in care of the servant woman who had taken up with one of the natives). The ransom was paid as agreed upon. The young girl was mounted on a Mexican pony, the colored woman on another pony, and the faithful uncles started on the long return trip to Georgia.

        All went well the first day. On the second day the colored woman lagged behind for some purpose. Before the uncles were apprised of her ruse, she was whipping the two ponies and escaping. Another long parly was had, and another ransom was handed over. The colored woman was left behind this time, but the journey through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama was a fearful one, constant anxiety about Indians was added to the fatigues of the long travel, all on horseback.

        The girl brought her doll with her, the only memory that remained to her of her parents and little brother. She died early - was never fully at ease with her surroundings and slow in adapting herself to the ways of her kindred.

        The girl was my mother's own cousin and I found myself constantly pondering over what had happened to her in that wild country. So it is easy to understand that my early life was much concerned about Indians. I was really three years old when the Cherokee tribe was forcibly removed from Georgia in 1838, and were started on their long trip to Indian Territory. It has been stated that four thousand died on

the way before the exiles could stop and find a resting place. There were 14,000 who began the march. The journey of six or seven hundred miles was performed in about five months. Chief men of the Cherokees were assassinated on the trip. Those who took an active part in negotiating the treaty with the United States government, at New Echota, Major Ridge and his son, John, with Elias Bondinat, thus met their untimely fate. Forty years ago I met in Washington City another Elias Boudinot, a direct descendant of the murdered Cherokee Chief. He had held office under the Confederate congress and was then employed as agent for his people in their dealings with the Federal Government, when I questioned him concerning the fate of his ancestor. This final treaty with the Cherokee Indians was held in Murray county, Ga., and the house that John Ross lived in is still standing within the town limits of Rossville, Walker county, Ga, only a few miles from Chattanooga, which was named for him, then known as "Ross' Landing." Ross opposed the removal of the Cherokees and the factions for and against were known as the Ridge party and the Ross party. The Indians were finally collected at Ross' landing (Chattanooga) on June 10th, 1838, for the State of Georgia took possession of this Cherokee Country on 24th of May, 1838.

        In Bartow county, where I have been a citizen since the year 1853, there are most remarkable mounds on a plantation which has been in possession of the Tumlin family for more than seventy years. These mounds seem to antedate Indian occupation. So far as known the Indians have no tradition concerning them. They are the work of skilled architects and some of the relics found in those ancient mounds are exquisite productions. There is a vase of artistic shape and high coloring which was unearthed by an unusual flood time, in the Etowah river, that we may reasonably suppose was fashioned by a race of people who occupied this section of the country long before anything was known of the rude and illiterate aboriginal Indians of America. Also a large platter of beautiful workmanship was purchased by the authorities of the

Smithsonian Institute and highly prized by American scientists. The red Indians were in possession when Columbus landed in 1492. Those who erected these mounds were here before the Indian period of occupancy in earlier centuries.

        In this Cherokee section of Georgia the Indian names for rivers are still preserved without change, and many of Georgia's streams in other sections have the names of Indian origin. Except the mounds, there is but little else remaining to tell the story of the red man who refused to be the white man's slave, prefering to be bayonetted off the continent, in his love for freedom. When the full story of world democracy is chronicled, in the light of this world-wide European war as connected with the Republic of the United States, what relation will the Red Indian bear to the Russian peasant who has so lately accepted democracy in lieu of Czarism? The Red Indians of North America refused to become the white man's slave, while Africa made no resistance. The aboriginal Indian received the white man as a friend until the white man taught him to drink "fire water" and dispossessed him of his "happy hunting grounds." The African in the slave-holding states did not rise up in defense of democracy or human freedom when the Federal armies of the North had overrun and subjugated the slave owning Southern Confederacy. Whoever writes the true story of the red man must give him credit for higher ideals and loftier patriotism than the Mongolian or any of the yellow or black tribes can furnish.

        The story of Georgia for a hundred years and the methods used to dispossess the Indians of their happy hunting grounds will ever be a humiliating confession of the Anglo-Saxon's greed and injustice against their red brother.

        Perhaps the most thrilling recital of such assumacy and violence is found in the city of Washington, where the government of the United States has chronicled it, found in various volumes under the title of American State Papers, and I read the story of the "Yazoo Fraud" forty years ago, in certain of these

volumes that I procured from the House Library upon application with a Congressman's written order.

        There had been a bill passed through the Georgia Legislature, and which Gov. George Matthews signed, which sold to certain trading companies all the lands owned by Georgia, from the Oconee river to the Mississippi, and from the Tennessee line southward to Florida, a tract that covered the two states afterwards organized into Alabama and Mississippi, besides the entire western part of Georgia. These lands, as described in the petitions and deeds, amounted to nearly 22,000,000 acres. As soon as these lands were corruptly sold the companies computed the tract as containing 40,000,000 acres. Wars with Indians had been expensive to the taxpayers of Georgia and a lying title was made to the bill for sale of these so-called "Yazoo" lands, and a provision was inserted looking towards payment of state troops with the money that these lands sold for. The forty-million tract was really bargained away for $500,000, the state getting one-fifth of the money in hand, the balance mortgaged to be paid within ten months. There were four of these companies, the Georgia Company, the largest of the four, took half the gross amount, $250,000, the Georgia-Mississippi, $155,000; the Upper Mississippi, $35,000, and the Tennessee Company, $60,000, each getting by metes and bounds the lands proportioned to these respective payments. The state of Georgia sold twice the land that these pretended traders claimed to receive, and for half the money that was really brought forward. A lying title was made to cover the outrageous swindle, and the legislative act forbade the sale of an acre of the land to any "foreign king, prince or potentate." It was worded to attract foreigners as well as emigrants from other states of the Union. Having bought a principality at less than the eighth of a cent per acre, the plan was laid to sell at very low figures and sell as quickly as possible.

        Augusta was the capital of Georgia, and the record shows that the honor of the state and her greatest public interests were bartered off by traitorous Representatives and the Chief Executive. Except one man,

Robert Watkins by name, the official record in Washington city shows that every man who voted for the sale was corruptly influenced. The Senate of Georgia consisted of 20 members - ten voted for the sale, 8 against it. In the Lower House there were 34 members - nineteen voted for the sale and nine in the negative. In these volumes, called "American State Papers," the amounts paid to these traitorous representatives are set down. Some received cash, some large grants of land, some had negroes conveyed to them, etc., but the whole story is blazoned in full in these official records. I copied down every single name and the amount received, but I have made a lifelong rule in discussing matters of this kind, to spare the names for sake of innocent relatives who might be hurt by a public exposure of such evil things, unless certain actors in public betrayaal of their constituents had made personal attacks on me or mine, then I made the story very plain with names, dates and proof. A judge of the Supreme Court of the United States was one of the active conspirators in this Yazoo Swindle, James Wilson by name, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, also a member of the Continental Congress, a member of the convention that formed the Constitution of the United States, and at the time that this Yazoo sale was carried through the legislature of Georgia, one of the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, and so elevated in public confidence that he was one of the original selections for the organization of the first Supreme Court of the United States. Prepared by his position to adjudicate the very first test case that might be made - appealed by these corrupt Yazooists. He became a leading partner and interested to the extent of a million acres in this unparallelled swindle in barefaced wickedness. Side by side with this schemer on the bench and unworthy official, was Nathaniel Pendleton, District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia, also Andrew McAlister, District Attorney of the United States for Georgia. There were only two Superior Court districts in the State, and one of the two judges was William Stith, who accepted $13,000 in cash and promise

of the traitors to elect him the next Governor of Georgia. The contrast was great between Judge Stith and Judge George Walton, who illustrated his office and retired from the bench without a spot or blemish on his character.

        The active man in Georgia, the chief conspirator, was United States Senator James Gunn. He came from Virginia during the revolutionary war, and joined Gen. Greene's army when Gen. Washington dispatched Gen. Greene to recover the Carolinas and Georgia. After the losing battle of Camden, Gen. Greene had a fuss with him about disreputable horse racing and it is reported that he swindled a woman who was seeking to recover pay for a celebrated race horse belonging to her husband's estate. In Simms' Life of Gen. Greene, some of these things are related. But Gunn was adroit in his methods. In 1789 he was chosen to the U. S. Senate with Senator Wm. Few. When he ran for re-election the Yazooists were his champions and he prosecuted the Yazoo Fraud to the limit of his ability and he prostituted his senatorial influence and used his ignoble opportunity to its successful promotion. His last term in office expired in 1801; after the vengeance of Georgia had descended on the ignoble men who had vilely betrayed her trust. When the people awoke to the certain knowledge that the men who had bought the "Yazoo lands" had bribed the majority of the Georgia legislature and the Governor, the Congress of the United States also became aroused to the infamy of the transaction. Gen. James Jackson, the other Georgia Senator, resigned his seat in Congress, came home to Georgia and was elected to the Legislature which rescinded the Act, and the tempest of indignation against those who were bribed made some of them uneasy as to what would happen to them at home. The Yazoo sale was denounced in the Legislature as a fraud, the Yazoo Act was rescinded and the records were publicly burned in Louisville, Georgia (then the State Capital), by fire drawn from Heaven by a sun glass. In the days when matches were very scarce, these sun glasses were common. I well remember seeing them in my childhood's

home. Georgia's title to the immense tract sold to Gunn and Wade Hampton of South Carolina, and their co-workers was seriously questioned in Congress. Our disturbances with Spain and the dread of Indian alliances with Great Britain made Gen. Washington anxious. After years of dispute and political chicanery Congress finally appropriated five millions of dollars to settle the claims of innocent purchasers, and then the lands were divided as at present, between Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

        But the Yazoo swindlers soon passed out as owners. They sold out rapidly and covered their ill-gotten gains into their plethoric pockets. This Yazoo history is fully told in the American State Papers alluded to in this article. I read these facts myself in Washington city. One declaration by the Congress of the United States remains vivid in memory. The names, the amounts paid to bribed officials and the shame of this transaction, are to be carefully kept, so long as the government of the United States remains in force, as a living witness so to speak of the infamy of the actors, forevermore.

        In Gov. Bullock's time there were ugly stories of bribed legislators, and there have been various legislative and congressional investigations that make the people at home aware that frauds and swindles were still active in political centres, but the only part of my life that came in actual touch with corrupt politicians in high places when my husband was in Congress, was that well-known era of graft and bribery that attended the corrupt progress of Pacific Railroad legislation in the national congress in the 70s and 80s, when men of high position in many states were openly pointed at as being owned by these railroad authorities and serving in their pay, and yet holding commissions as senators and congressmen in the highest legislative body in the world. Supreme Court judges were also known to be their willing servants, appointed under agreement as filling campaign pledges and Pacific Railroad lobbyists had the finest quarters and highest salaries known to that period in Washington city

homes and hotels. History repeats itself. Human nature is the same in all ages.

MY KINSPEOPLE.

        At the risk of appearing egotistical I must tell you a good deal of my grandparents and parents, because it is to their memories and traditions that I owe very much of the information which it is my purpose to relate in these pages. As I knew of these personages better than all others, I am doubtless impressed by their opinions, and their hereditary associations and trends of thought have been more or less perpetuated in their descendants, I cannot, therefore, very well avoid such opinions or omit such mention.

        So far as known my forbears were either Virginians or Marylanders in the early days of the Republic. My father was a boy of seven years when his parents moved from Maryland to Georgia. Both of his parents had progenitors at that time who had been living in Maryland nearly one hundred and fifty years, and both of his grandfathers served in the Army of the Revolution. There was a trunk full of papers, letters and various valuable documents in my childhood home, once the property of his mother, and many of the letters were written to her, after she moved to Georgia, by the Maryland kin. I can recall the delight it gave me to examine my grandmother's papers when I was a bit of a girl. I recollect she was married by a bishop of Maryland - she was a staunch Episcopalian - and the Bishop's name was signed to the marriage contract that closely antedated the wedding festivities and ceremonies. Alas! When "Sherman marched through Georgia" the trunk, with the letters and papers, were all destroyed, as were thousands of other properties of like interest in countless Georgia homes during the Civil War. But the ownership of her own estate is substantiated by the records at Annapolis, Md., and in the court house of LaPlata, Charles county, where deeds and wills are fortunately

of permanent record. The various farms which she sold before moving to Georgia, and also the sale of "Marshall Hall," on the Potomac river, are recorded in the records here mentioned, and it is interesting to note that a Maryland woman did own and manage and sell her own lands as early as the year 1803. "Marshall Hall," on the Potomac river, as many of my readers know, is nearly opposite to Mt. Vernon, and is the great picnic grounds for Washington city people. In the mid-summer of June, 1916, there were seven of the largest church organizations in the nation's capital that picnicked there in one day when I chanced to go along on a river boat, and it was said that ten thousand tickets were sold at the 7th Street wharf during the day here mentioned. These river steamers touch first at Mt. Vernon and then continue to "Marshall Hall." As early as 1650 a Marshall bought and owned a place named "Marshall," and of this tract on the Potomac river he willed two hundred acres to his daughter Barbara. She married a Hanson and this two-hundred acre tract continued in the ownership and occupancy of Marshalls and Hansons as late as 1847, and has been known as Marshall Hall for considerably more than two hundred years. My grandmother inherited it from her father's estate and sold it in 1803 to her brother, preparatory to removal, as before stated, to Georgia. There were three brothers (her uncles and father) by name John, Richard and William. All three owned a part of an estate called "Three Brothers." Richard died and his will was dated October 30, 1757, before the war of Independence. John Marshall died in 1801. William Marshall died in Chas Co., Md., in 1793. John, William, Philip, son of John, and Thomas, son of Richard, all took the oath of allegiance between 1775 and 1778. (It is recorded that Hon. Benj. Few, one of Georgia's noted Revolutionary officers, was born in 1744, at "Three Sisters" plantation, near Baltimore, Harford Co., Md. He has a Georgia descendant in Dr. Jas. E. Dickey, president of Emory College in Georgia.)

        In the time of Charles the 1st he who lost his head in Cromwell's time, Maryland was inhabited by Indian

tribes. A gang of bandits, however, settled on Kent Island in the Chesapeake bay. Charles the 1st conferred a grant in Newfoundland on George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, and who had been Knighted by James 1st of England.

        The climate was so forbidding that Calvert traveled southward and beheld a country lying on the Chesapeake bay and the Potomac river, which greatly pleased him. When he returned to England he so impressed Queen Henrietta Maria with his accounts of that part of the New World that King Charles conferred this Maryland grant on George Calvert. Soon after he sickened and died. His title and estates were turned over to his son and heir, Cecil, the second Lord Baltimore. Cecil afterward commissioned his brother Leonard to take possession, and the new country was given the name of Maryland in honor of the enthusiastic Queen. Two hundred and four Englishmen, with their families, sailed in two small ships called The Ark and The Dove, and after a tedious voyage, landed on Kent Island. Among those who came over with Governor Leonard Calvert, Lord Baltimore (Cecil never came to Maryland) were four young Hansons, wards of the Queen Henrietta Maria. Two of them later returned to England. Randolph Hanson, one of the four, and who died in 1699, married in early life Barbara Marshall, before mentioned, who had inherited the two hundred acres forming a part of the plantation called "Marshall."

        In "Sidelights on Maryland History" it is recorded that the title to "Marshall Hall" was made by an Indian Chief and patented by Lord Baltimore. There were frequent intermarriages between the Hansons and Marshalls. In the list of fourteen Marshalls that can be seen in Colonial Hall, Washington city, as signers of the oath of allegiance in 1775-78 there is a John Marshall Hanson, a John Hanson Marshall, and Thomas Marshall Hanson. It was a Hanson, an official who took down the names of these signers in Chas Co. Each name had a date, also a number and this signature is considered the highest test of loyalty.

        In the recorded will of Capt. Randolph Brandt, who

died in 1699, and whose will I copied some months ago, in the Land Office at Annapolis, he gives his son, Randolph Brandt the 2nd, "two hundred acres lying on the Potomac river near land of Randolph Hanson's, wherein Brandt is now dwelling, called Hammersmith." Randolph Brandt the 2nd witnessed the will of Randolph Hanson, in 1698, likewise did Richard Harrison, progenitor of two Presidents Harrison, both of Hanson lineage. This data I collected from "Maryland Calendar of Wills" with proper dates, books of record and numbers on pages in folio.

        The title deeds from the Indian chief are said to be still in possession of Marshall and Hanson families. The present owners of "Marshall Hall have been seeking the Bible record of these early owners and offered some aged relatives five hundred dollars for a Bible containing the names of a number of them, but the offer was declined."

        One of these Hansons was so highly respected in Maryland that the state has presented his statue to the Hall of Fame in U. S. Capitol. Along with Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, the two represent their native state. John Hanson, whose magnificent marble statue can be seen in this Hall of Fame, was a grandson of John Hanson, the emigrant and son of Robert Hanson. This distinguished John Hanson was early elected to the General Assembly of Maryland, and is known in Colonial history as one of the most noted of its citizens. He was also distinguished in Revolutionary affairs. He was president of congress when the seat of government was located in Philadelphia, and welcomed General Washington before the U. S. Congress when he returned from Yorktown after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. These facts can all be found in the Library of Congress, in "Sidelights on Maryland History." Both the Presidents Harrison were of his lineal descendants. U. S. Senator James Alford Pearce was a descendant. Hon. John Hanson Thomas was U. S. Senator from Maryland, dying in 1815. Dr. John Hanson Thomas was in the Legislature of Maryland, 1861-65. He was confined in Federal prison for six months. Pages 121-324 "Sidelights of

Maryland History." This John Hanson of the Hall of Fame was born in Charles county, 1715, died 1793. There were two dominating factions in the State of Maryland before and during the Colonial wars. John Hanson represented the Protestants while Lord Baltimore and his following were zealous Catholics. Hanson's grandfather, the emigrant, known in Maryland records as the "Colonel," was doubtless a brother to Randolph Hanson - both wards of Queen Henrietta Maria - the latter, as before stated, living at Marshall Hall, and married to Barbara Marshall after 1650 and mentioned in her father's will, probated in 1698, and is of record in Annapolis at this time. Randolph Hanson's will was made in 1698, and all these Hansons and Marshalls were citizens of Charles county, named for King Charles of England. Their wills are all recorded.

        General Washington's half brother, Lawrence, inherited the magnificent estate of Mt. Vernon on the death of his father. Lawrence became the guardian of George when the latter was twelve years old. Lawrence married into the Fairfax family, one of the most distinguished in Colonial history. George therefore spent much of his time at Mt. Vernon when he was very young. In 1752 Lawrence died, leaving an infant daughter and when the little girl died, George, the future President, succeeded to the estate of Mt. Vernon as legal owner. The Washingtons came into Virginia as early as 1657. It will be seen that these Marshalls and Hansons were even then their neighbors, their lands being divided only by the Potomac river. This nearness accounts for the fact that fourteen Marshalls residents of Charles county, Maryland, just across the river, signed the oath of allegiance to the Revolutionary cause in 1775-78. If General Washington had failed every one of these neighbors would have been exiled, their lands confiscated and doubtless their heads would have adorned a pike. My grandmother, Rebecca Marshall Latimer, inherited Marshall Hall on the death of her father in the year 1793. Gen. Washington died at Mt. Vernon in 1799. My own father was born in 1799. The ownership of

this Marshall tract began in 1651 according to "Maryland Calendar of Wills." It is obvious that Marshall Hall and Mt. Vernon House were erected near the same time. It is family tradition that brick were brought in from England, possibly as ballast for sail-vessels. Furniture and other things came in also, possibly exchanged for tobacco, the market crop of early Marylanders. This tobacco brought ready money in pounds shillings and pence. Tobacco is still grown in Maryland on a large plantation known as Lord Baltimore's "Dower House," seventeen miles below Washington city. I visited the old Dower House in 1914 with a party of friends and the owner and hostess told us of her growing tobacco crop that day. This old Dower House was built to withstand Indian attack. A secret outlet, like a tunnel, was constructed as a means of escape should the red skins overcome the whites in this great house. There were friendly Indians as well as hostiles, and another ancestor of our family had a good deal to do with this Indian warfare about the same era of Maryland history.

        Capt. Randolph Brandt might have been born in the Barbadoes, where his father and mother and oldest brother lived and died, for their wills are recorded there in proper form and order, but family tradition tells of English birth and lineage for the ancestors. Capt. Randolph Brandt came into Maryland before 1660, upon the invitation of Lord Baltimore. They were close friends and patriotic workers during life and "Maryland Archives" preserved in the Library of Congress, is full of the story of Capt. Brandt's unusual patriotism. He and Lord Baltimore were zealous Catholics through life. Capt. Brandt had a wife and children when he settled at "Penguiah Manor," about the year 1670, in Charles county, and the name of the plantation is still connected with the soil, and the land lies quite near the county site of LaPlata.

        The county site of Charles county up to the close of the Civil War was "Port Tobacco." Federals and Confederates had numerous clashes. It was evident that county records were in danger of destruction. These books, of incalculable value to future history

were conveyed to the Land Office in Annapolis as a place of safety. After a splendid court house, erected at LaPlata, the new county site, had been finished these valuable records have going back into the custody of Charles county officials. The room in which they are stored at LaPlata is modern and fireproof. It was at LaPlata that I found fuller records of my Maryland kindred, although the Land Office at Annapolis is a wonderful storage place for Colonial and Revolutionary documents. I found in LaPlata a deed of sale made by my grandmother, Rebecca Marshall Latimer (for whom I was named) to three plantations called "Walker," "Poquasket" and a part of "Three Brothers," all lying and situated in Charles county, where she and her progenitors were born and lived. For the three places here mentioned she received £1,063, ten shillings, current money at that time, nearly six thousand dollars. All plantations have a name in that section of the country. The clerk of La Plata court house told me that he himself had purchased and then owned a part of "Penguiah Manor," and named other nearby places that had names noted in the wills of the Brandt's, the Latimer's and Marshalls.' I found these facts in Book "I. B." pages 365-372 inclusive. Book "I. B." No. 7 was compiled in 1806.

        Capt. Randolph Brandt was captain of Maryland militia in 1678, member of General Colonial assembly in 1682, Commissioner of Indian Affairs when Wm. Penn was also Commissioner of Indian Affairs in State of Pennsylvania. Mary, his daughter, married James Latimer, who died in Charles county, 1718. Their son, James Latimer 2nd, married and left a son, Marcus Latimer. Marcus Latimer, grandson of James who married Mary Brandt, took oath of allegiance 1777-8. His son, William Latimer, married my grandmother, Rebecca Marshall Latimer. The sale of "Marshall Hall" is recorded Liber "C" No. 2 page 147, Land Office, Annapolis.

        James Latimer, son of James Latimer 1st and Mary Brandt, and grandson of Capt. Randolph Brandt, Lord Baltimore's friend, was prominent in early Colonial

days. This data is here set down, for the benefit of relatives who may be seeking genealogical data in days to come, and because of their connection with our forefathers.

        Capt. Brandt was expressly engaged to protect the towns of Charles county from hostile Indian invasion. He also protected friendly Indian tribes from the hostiles, who continually threatened to exterminate all Indians friendly to the white settlers. In that time of stress and strain he raised a large military company at his own expense. In remembrance thereof the Colonial assembly of Maryland voted to Capt. Brandt several thousand pounds of tobacco as a part refund for money expended in behalf of the Commonwealth. To those of our kindred who feel inclined to consult "Maryland Archives" in the Library of Congress will find on page 357, vol. 17 the following: "Capt Randolph Brandt, precept: to protect the towns of Charles county. His course of diplomacy and devotion to duty characterized Capt. Brandt's career in Maryland, and mark him as one of her noblest founders of colonial families." I copied a part of his will in the Land Office at Annapolis. He left four hundred pounds English money to the minister who would officiate at his funeral exercises. He divided lands and slaves between his heirs, also spoons and silver and gold cups, and made provision for the education of his minor children. There were five Latimers who took the oath of allegiance to Gen. Washington's cause with several of other families, sons-in-law and near kindred. It is well to copy here this oath of allegiance, as taken from records in Colonial Hall, D. A. R. documents in Washington city: "I do swear I do not hold myself bound to yield any allegiance or obedience to the king of Great Britain, his heirs and his successors; that I will be true and faithful to the State of Maryland, and will, to the utmost of my power, support, maintain and defend the freedom and independence thereof, and the government as now established, against all enemies and traitorous conspiracies and will use my utmost endeavors to disclose and make known to the governor or to some one of the justices

or judges thereof, all treasons or traitorous conspiracies, attempts or combinations against the State or Government thereof which may come to my knowledge. So help me God."

        Both of my Maryland great grandfathers took that oath. Both served under General Washington, who lived across the Potomac river, in sight. Several of my great uncles took the same oath. One was a major in the Revolutionary army, who willed his valuable sword to his daughter's son and his namesake, provided he (the youth) should serve his government with loyalty and patriotism. This brave old kinsman died in 1801, only surviving his great general, Washington, barely one year. His will, recorded in La Plata courthouse, Charles county, covers seven mammoth pages, and these pages are nearly or quite two feet square. In this will he bequeaths his part of "Three Brothers" to his son, Philip. In the will of Richard Marshall (1750) a part of "Three brothers" was given to his son, and his riding saddle and wearing apparel to his beloved brother, William Marshall (my grandmother's father). And William Marshall's part of "Three Brothers," passed to her, when he died intestate in 1793. Each of these three brothers owned a part of a tract called "Point St. William" in addition to "Three Brothers."

        The Fendalls of Maryland were related to these Marshalls, as John Fendall owned a part of "Three Brothers," also a part of Point Marshall. Thomas Hanson Marshall owned a part of "Marshall's Adventure."

        Among the early Maryland settlers appears the name of Ann Marshall, 1641; Richard Marshall, 1658; Rebecca Marshall, 1643; William, 1640, and another Richard, 1646. These arrived in Maryland before the advent of the Brandts. There is recorded an early settler, 1645, belonging to Latimer family.

        The Bealls, who intermarried with the Marshalls, two of them marrying my grandmother's sisters, sold their plantations in 1793, preparing to move to Georgia - one as late as 1803. Emigration was afterwards heavy toward Georgia.

        "The Yazoo Fraud," of which I have written elsewhere, and more fully had been exposed and finally settled by Congress, which opened up a vast territory of fine lands, well watered, reaching from the Oconee river to the Mississippi river and these lands having been cleared of all difficulty as to government title, became exceedingly attractive to Virginians and Marylanders. As a rule they were slave owners and they sought more land to expand their agricultural pursuits, and many of those of whom I have here written, sold out and undertook the long overland journey with only wagons and carts for their necessary transportation. Many North Carolinians were also seized with this moving fever, and among them we can place all of my great-grandparents, parental and maternal on both sides of the house.

        It must have given my grandmother Rebecca Marshall Latimer, a pang of regret to vacate the beautiful Marshall Hall on the Potomac river, owned by her family for nearly two hundred years, and to start southward across three states, to find a home at last in the wilds of Georgia, in Warren county. The little seven-year-old boy (my father) has often told his daughters of crossing the Potomac river on a flat-boat. The family left behind them the splendid brick residence, the capacious barn and outbuildings, all built of brick, perfectly sound and useful at this present time, a home of former wealth and luxury, to adventure life, fortune and happiness in a sparsely settled country, fully half of which was still inhabited by red Indians. They had also to leave the graves of their kindred in the cemetery which is still enclosed at Marshall Hall and full of Marshall dead. But there is a record on a gravestone showing that a Thomas Hanson Marshall was an owner and buried there as late as 1843, with an inscription signed by his beloved wife, who then survived him. There are inscriptions showing this burial place of Marshalls as early as 1680, and there are living kinspeople, who tell of a visit to this old family home and still owned by relatives as late as 1872 and 1880.

        It is now the property of the Potomac Boat Company, and as before stated, transformed into a great recreation pleasure grounds, where the residents of the National Capitol are delighted to assemble on every fair day in the summer time with pleasant weather, beautiful river trip and outing.

        In Georgia there are many of the descendants of those Marshalls, Brandts, Bealls and Latimers, all of whom are more or less familiar with Charles county, Maryland, traditions and memories, among them the Furlows, the Hollingsworths and others that I fail to remember at this writing. Before leaving the subject of Maryland's kindred, it is a matter of history that James Latimer and Mary Brandt, daughter of Capt. Randolph Brandt, were entrusted with the guardianship and care of two Fairfax orphans. Lawrence Washington married a Fairfax, and you can find the following in "Sidelights on Maryland History," page 315. "In the absence of Parish registers or complete early Charles county records, the exact relation of the Latimers and other Charles county families is not exactly proven, but the fact that John Fairfax left his minor children, Ann and William, to live with James Latimer and the close ties shown in the records to have existed between the families, imply kinship. John Fairfax was the earliest of the Charles county Fairfax family, many years before Lord Fairfax became identified with Maryland." James Latimer herein named, had a family home called "Maycock's Rest," which descended to my great grandfather.

        In this compilation of genealogical data of family history my main object has been to give information to surviving kinspeople and also in a general way to show to our readers how Georgia was settled in the early years of the 19th century.

        This influx of cultivated people from states that had superior advantages in wealth and culture, gave Georgia an uplift that was felt in many different ways to the immense benefit of the English settlers who had come over with General Oglethorpe seeking a refuge from autocracy and royal mandates, the victims of

oppressive laws and debtors who were thus released from prison bounds. The first ten governors of Georgia were English born. Archibald Bullock, Theodore Roosevelt's ancestor, came from S. Carolina, Gov. George Walton was born in Virginia, Stephen Heard came from Ireland, Lyman Hall, Connecticut; Samuel Elbert, South Carolina in 1740; Telfair, Scotland, 1735; George Matthews from Virginia, he who wrecked a magnificent military and legislative record with affiliation with the "Yazoo Swindle." Jared Irwin, he who signed the rescinding act of the Yazoo law, seems to have been a native Georgian. Gen. James Jackson and the ancestors of Gov. Milledge came to Georgia from England. Peter Early came to Georgia in 1795 or 6 from Virginia, one of those who emigrated from with great numbers from Maryland and Virginia. Matthew Talbot, my mother's kinsman, and a lineal descendant of Capt. Matthew Talbot, distinguished in Revolutionary war, was born in Virginia and moved to Georgia in 1785. Governors Clark and Rabun came from upper North Carolina. Gov. Troup was a native Georgian, elected in 1823. Forsyth was a Virginian, also Wilson Lumpkin, born in 1783. Wm. Schley, elected in 1835, was a native of Maryland. Afterwards native-born governors were the rule and not the exception in the gubernatorial chair of Georgia. Rev. Hope Hull was born in Maryland, Rev. Henry Holcombe was born in Virginia, two very great leaders in Methodist and Baptist organizations in primitive Georgia days. Colonel Wm. Few was born in Baltimore county, Maryland, in 1748, a magnificent Indian fighter in Georgia. He was United States Senator from Georgia in 1793. Governor Matthew Talbot filled the office of Governor with credit to himself and to the family. My maternal grandmother was Lucy Talbot with a direct line to Capt. Matthew Talbot of Virginia and a kinswoman of Governor Talbot who settled in Wilkes county in 1785, afterwards removing to Oglethorpe county in Georgia. In White's miscellainies it is recorded "He died on 17th Sept., 1827, aged 60 years, leaving behind him the character of an honest and patriotic

citizen." In "Men of Mark," compiled by ex-Gov. Northen, we hear more of Gov. Talbot. The State of Georgia fitly perpetuated his memory by naming one of her counties for him. I remember hearing Hon. Alexander Stephens speak of the lofty integrity of Matthew Talbot, as one of Georgia's most patriotic citizens.

        My maternal grandfather was Thomas Swift, a member of one of Georgia's very excellent families that settled in Morgan county after the Revolution. My grandfather was the eldest of four brothers, and married Lucy Talbot near the year 1810. His father was a planter and slave owner, and tradition has it that the Swifts and Talbots emigrated from Virginia after the Revolutionary war and obtained lands on Sandy creek in Morgan county, which their descendants owned for at least a hundred years. The next brother was Dr. Elias Swift who married a sister of Major Taylor, of Athens, Ga., who was a practicing physician and died in Madison, Ga., when a young man. The succeeding brother, Dr. John Swift, married in early life a sister of Messrs. John and Stewart Floyd, of Newton county. She died, leaving two children, one of them the late Mr. E. S. Swift, of Columbus, who has surviving children. Dr. John Swift was married the second time to Miss Mary Ann Harris, a sister of Hon Y. L. G. Harris, one of Georgia's noted philanthropists. She became the mother of a large family of children, being left a widow when the most of them were small. Mrs. Mary Ann Swift lived to be nearly one hundred years old. Mr. William Augustine Swift married a Miss Keller, of Abbeville, South Carolina, and two of his sons, Thomas and John, are still living in Elbert county, while the aged widow is nearing the century mile stone and is still a very remarkable woman of the olden time. This longevity is worth mentioning as in striking contrast to the fragility of more modern women. There were two sisters of this early Swift family, Mrs. Mary Darden and Mrs. Bethenia Lewis, who also raised large families.

        My Maryland grandmother died several years before I was born, so it was my Georgia grandmother,

Mrs. Lucy Talbot Swift, around whom my early recollections cluster and are well remembered up to this good time. I was often at her home (which she inherited, and was her father's early residence) and I was a close observer of her housekeeping methods and of her abounding hospitality. The mother of eleven children, all reaching maturity, except two that lived to eleven and twelve years, her industry, her management and her executive ability in caring for and carrying on her household affairs are still wonderful memories, and have continually lingered with me as examples in the progress of my own extended life. It was a fine specimen of a Southern planter's family and home in ante-bellum times. Grandfather had a plantation, a grain mill and saw mill, which kept him busy with his own duties as a provider, but it was grandmother's skill as a home-maker, with an eye single to her domestic duties and diligent attention to home economies, that impressed me most in that early time of my life when I trotted around after her as she went from the dwelling to the garden, and to the milk dairy, to the poultry house, to the loom house, to the big meat house, where rations were issued once a day, and to the flour and meal house where there was always a superabundance of supplies for white and colored. She had fowls of all domestic kinds to look after and there were fattening pigs in the pen also. She had geese to raise feathers for the family beds, because there were no mattresses in that early time. When one of the children married there was a substantial outfit prepared to set them up for limited housekeeping. There were no such things as "comforts" eighty years ago, but quilt making was never interrupted, winter or summer, and in early Georgia homes woolen "coverlids" woven at home, and quilts innumerable, made by hand, were the bed coverings in all such well-to-do Georgia homes. I distinctly remember that my own mother made and quilted with her own nimble fingers, fifty good, serviceable and good looking quilts in the first ten years of her married life. In that early time, before there was a railroad in Georgia, our own home became a regular stopping

place for travelers and there was urgent need for beds that could meet the demand when people traveled from Savannah and regions lower down south even to Nashville, Tenn., going north, and after stage coaches were set going the coach expense was so great at ten cents a mile, that the bulk of the travel was still made in carriages, carts, gigs and on horseback. In event of stormy weather these travelers were often detained at our house. Sometimes floods in rivers and washed-out roads intercepted travel. All mules and horses and hogs brought into the state were driven from Kentucky and Tennessee, as there was no railroad in Georgia to furnish markets in southeastern Georgia. When my grandmother, Lucy Swift, began housekeeping, wool and flax were the dependence of housekeepers for clothing their families. Silk culture was exploited in Gen. Oglethorpe's time, but the use of cotton was handicapped. Before there were any cotton gins the cotton lint was picked from the seed by human fingers. The lint was then carded by hand, spun on home made wheels, then reeled into what were called "hanks," by use of home-made reels, then the warp was prepared for the home-made loom, by a variety of processes, all tedious and slow and all the work done by the house mother and her helpers. The thread was "sized" with a thin corn meal mush, then rolled on to home-made corn-cob spools from these stiffened "hanks," then the spools were carefully placed and manipulated on warping bars, then rolled on the beam of the loom, then drawn thread by thread into the "harness," keeping exact count of each thread, one to go up and another to go down when the treadles were moved by the weaver's foot, then carefully pulled through what was called a "sley," fashioned from canes gathered in swamps. After all this was performed the soft spun thread for "filling" was carefully transferred to small spools that were fitted into "shuttles." The warp being thus made ready for the weaver's shuttle, the process of cloth making was nearly accomplished, so the weaver pressed one treadle with her right foot and rushed the shuttle through, then pressing the other treadle with her other foot, she

again dashed the shuttle back again, each time beating up the "filling" by fierce muscular strength in her arms. In this slow, tedious, intricate and nerve-racking and painstaking way all the wearing apparel of the masses was constructed. Well-to-do men generally contrived to get a broadcloth coat, maybe once in a lifetime. The rest had coats of plain jeans. Silk dresses were scarce and with scanty lengths and they were only worn occasionally, at weddings or brilliant occasions. A "Leghorn bonnet" would last a woman a lifetime, and kid slippers were the fashionable and expensive footwear of the belles of the period. The shoe problem was an immense proposition and the hides were generally tanned in dugout troughs, stretched out, dressed and dried at home. The traveling shoemaker made periodic visits and one pair of shoes per annum was considered a liberal provision for grown-ups. Suffice to say the children as a rule all went barefooted summer and winter, and how remarkable they were for good health and lusty frame, and their longevity was astonishing. And this perplexing shoe-making problem lasted a long time. I recall with vivid memory the first time the family shoe-maker measured my feet for a pair of shoes. He brought along a piece of white pine board, and I stood flat-footed on the board, while he marked a line in front of my toes with his big coarse horn-handled knife. Then he marked another line behind my heel and cautioned me that I must not draw my toes together or try to crumple up the bottom of my foot. I felt quite a somebody when the new shoes came home and I had liberty to lay aside the red-morocco baby shoes to which I had been accustomed. Stumped toes in summer and cracked heels in winter were always in evidence with pupils during my school days, when the country child had a log cabin for a school room and "puncheon" benches for seats, and the farmer boys and girls of the rural neighborhood wore coarse home-fashioned clothes spun and woven in looms at home. Towels, table cloths and shirts were made in the same slow way, and even the "best-fixed" families were glad to use "thrums" for towels and soft soap

in a gourd to wash hands, and the family had a shelf for the wash basin outside for young and old.

        In the rough, country-made looms, the last ends of the warp were cut loose and the warp made slack and thin, so these rough sleazy lengths were only good for towels and wash clothes. The old timers called them "thrums," and the modern factories call them "mill ends." All the men's wear was woven at home, coats and pants, and the wool was grown on the farms and picked of cockelburrs by hand, spun and woven just as cotton and flax cloth was fashioned. Men's socks were home knitted of woolen thread (they generally went sockless in summer) and overcoats were an unknown quantity. Grandfather Swift owned and wore a blue camlet cloak, with a cape on it. It was a family treasure, perhaps it was an heirloom. Grandmother owned a woolen shawl made up North. In cold weather the women folk used the shawl if they had to go on an outside trip. But the homespun clothes were warm and enduring. My mother and grandmother had "bed-gowns," short affairs when I was a child, and the young women had chemises and bare arms for nightly repose. Home-made sun bonnets were always in evidence. A pretty white complexion was the call of that period. The young women were emphatic on this line. They were constantly busy, often with cloth making work, but they were scrupulous in care of the skin. They wore gloves for washing dishes or when washing clothes. "Tomboy" girls were sometimes encountered, but the belles of Georgia enjoyed beautiful complexions. They also laced very tight, and it was fashionable to faint on occasions. Weddings were sumptuous affairs. When my mother married there was a crowded wedding at night and three more days of festivities, with a different dress for each day. "Infairs" were popular, where the wedding spreads were transferred to the groom's home. Everything good to eat was bountifully furnished, meats in abundance, all sorts of home collections and concoctions topped off with pound-cake and syllabub. There was always a sideboard where gin, rum and peach brandy held distinction. Loaf sugar

brought from Charleston and Augusta by wagons was uniformly present. I can remember with accurate recollection those beautiful snowy cones of white sugar encased in thick bluish-green papers, that were always in request when company came, and the sideboard drinks were set forth in generous array. "Peach and honey" was in reach of everybody that prided in their home. Those primitive farmers had abounding peach orchards and bee-hives were generally in evidence more or less on Georgia farms. Everything to eat and to wear that could be grown at home was diligently cultivated and the early fortunes of Georgians were promoted by such thrift, economy and conservation of resources. In the summer time the drying of fruit was diligently pursued, and it was a poor and thriftless domicile which failed to supply itself with dried peaches, apples, cherries, pears, etc. My careful grandmother put up bushels of dried white English peaches of which she often made family preserves for home consumption in the scarcer spring-time. In this present emergency of war strenuosity the remembrance of those affluent households with always something good to cook inside, and no stint anywhere in big-house or negro cabin, appeals to me with most suggestive force. The present generation lives in paper sack supplies. They buy everything in paper sacks, from a goober-pea to a small sack of meal, when everybody knows the soil will yield a superabundance of good eatables if it is only "tickled with a hoe." I plead guilty. I am now buying peaches (July) at thirty cents a dozen, when I might be handling the fruit from that many peach trees planted on my own waste ground and with a minimum of expense in the care of them.

        My grandmother made all the starch she used, sometimes from whole wheat, oftener from wheat bran Her seven girls, big and little, delighted in dainty white muslin frocks, and laundry work for thirteen in family was always going on, and insistent in that large household. She was a rare soap maker and every pound was prepared at home with diligent care. The meat scraps and bones were utilized and cooked with

lye, drained in ash-hoppers. It made perfect soap for domestic uses. Hard soap was prepared for the big house in various ways, tempered with age and used by young and old alike. For wounds and baby usage there could be bought Castile soap, but the soaps of the multitudes were prepared at home. Except salt, iron, sugar and coffee, everything was raised by those early Georgia planters necessary for human comfort and sustenance. Coffee was scarce and high, sometimes a Sunday morning luxury, and brown sugar was generally used, the exception being the beautiful loaf sugar brought from the North. The family loom was kept going from Monday morning until Saturday night. My grandmother's home was a two-story frame dwelling also with a brick basement, largely above ground. In that brick basement there were three spacious rooms. The principal room was used for the family meals, with capacious fireplace and safes stationed around the wall. In these safes or cupboards there was storage room for all sorts of domestic supplies. The middle room was the "loom room," the third was the kitchen, with wide hearth, cranes in the chimney for hanging pots and kettles. (I never saw a cook stove until I was grown) These rooms had brick floors and were well ventilated. My grandmother had an easy chair in the dining room and the coffee and tea were made under her direction. She supervised the cooking in her kitchen and that cloth-making business went on exactly where she could overlook it. The colored women were always busy and likewise the mistress. The daughters were taught to spin and weave, to knit and sew, and to overlook the dairy, etc., as the mother directed. There was plenty of work for all because a large slave family had to be clothed from that busy loom, and the cloth was to be cut out and made into garments as soon as woven, and that large house was to be kept in "apple-pie order."

        And the abounding hospitality! My grandfather was a deacon in the Baptist church at Sandy Creek church and the Saturday and Sunday meeting days always brought friends and neighbors for at least one meal, many to spend the night. My mother said it looked

like a camp meeting when the kinspeople, the neighbors, the beaux and girl friends alighted from their horses and the crowd collected in the house. Servants carried the riding saddles into the harness room in the barn yard. The daughters prepared the Saturday big dinner while grandmother went to conference meeting. On Sunday grandmother supervised the big Sunday dinner and the girls mounted the riding horses, wore their best dresses, and went to church, and, as was the custom of the time, there was a lot of courting going on when the beaux rode home with the girls they were inclined to marry. It would take the genius of a Judge Longstreet to faithfully picture what took place on these big meeting days, after the congregation vacated the meeting house. Sometimes an unlucky swain would find himself "cut out" as a shrewd fellow would often mount his own horse and watch his rival as he led the young lady to the horse block to mount her steed, and before the latter could untie his nag and start the shrewd fellow was cantering off with the girl. In some old books that I read with delight in the long ago, it was told how the young swain would hold out his hand, the beautiful girl would place her left foot in his hand and he would swing her up to the saddle with a skilful use of his muscular strength. That was not the early Georgia style in the up country. There were always horseblocks prepared for use at church and at home and at country stores to mount from, and it accorded likewise with the modesty of the girls and the timidity of the boys. Every woman who rode horseback had a riding skirt made of substantial home weaving with a belt, but open to the hem. These riding skirts protected the dresses and were in universal use when my mother and grandmother were young. After I came along, also a horseback rider until I was seventy years old, I owned once or twice a riding habit, but I had my early training with my mother's riding skirt and side saddle. I began to ride at six years old and one of the proudest days of my life came along when my father slackened his firm hold on my pony's bridle and let me go alone to manage for myself. To this delightful

and frequent horseback exercise I attribute much of the vigor of my later life. It is essentially a delicate woman's opportunity for healthful recreation and it never lost its charm for me even when I became a grandmother, for I could canter over the fields and farm lands with perfect freedom, assured of my ability to manage my horse. I always had some sort of a horse to ride up to old age.

        This universal use of horses for men and women contributed very greatly to the raising of fine stock in the early days of Georgia, and Kentucky furnished droves of them to supply any lack at home. My father prepared barns and lots for such horse drovers and they were sometimes detained for days by high water at our house. During one long period of detention, the drover ran short of funds and the horses were "eating their heads off." When starting time came he led out a fine pony-built horse and told my father he would give him the horse for his feed bill. Pointing to my small self he said, "pony will be a treasure for your little girl. He has sense like folks, and is as gentle as they are made." So I came into ownership of dear old Pony at a very early age. Everybody could ride him in the family, including children. The negro boys learned to plow with him and he was the dependence for going to mill, with a sack of corn on his back for more than a dozen years. When I married he was still in fine appearance and doing good service, and one of the most beloved appurtenances of the family home. We owned also a twin pair of "claybank" horses at one time, a perfect match, named Pompey and Caesar, in my early girlhood days. Hitched to a barouche they sped along in famous style, flinging white manes and tails to the breeze, and it was perfectly delightful to me to see my father and mother, mounted on the "claybanks" for a horseback ride, and both were good riders in their early prime and dearly loved the sport.

        We had singing schools in our section seventy-five years ago, about the time I could be trusted to ride Pony and hold my own in a merry crowd of youngsters. It was three miles from our home to Macedonia

meeting house where the whole neighborhood gathered for education in old fashioned round and square note books, and where we closed the exercises by marching around and singing, old and young, to the bent of our inclinations. We traveled along a leafy road, crossed two or three clear branches, and occasionally the big girls and boys raced their horses. This racing woke up in Pony's brain a remembrance of his "Old Kentucky Home." Whenever I saw him lay back his shapely ears and arch his proud neck I always clutched the horn of the saddle to hold on. The race was all right for the rider and pony were in full accord in a frolic of that sort.

        In the long ago the "stars fell." My mother saw the falling. She often told me of it. Uncle William, the oldest of Grandmother's children, was to be married in November, 1833, to Miss Elizabeth Furlow. The preparation was immense in the Swift family, getting ready for the "infair." My mother, as eldest daughter, was the mainstay of her mother and they were working far into the night with some sewing for the children of that large family. There were blazing fires in the living room and candles on the sewing table. Going out on the back porch between midnight and day, for some wood to replenish the fire, my mother saw the "falling stars." The negroes down at the quarter also witnessed the wonderful sight. They rushed to the big house in a panic of fear as "the world was coming to an end." Soon everybody was up and wondering what would come next. Grandfather went out on the back porch and then discovered that no star ever rested on the ground. The star disappeared and its light went out, when it reached the dirt. He therefore quieted the frightened people but all hung about the big house until daylight came. Uncle William got married all right and raised a large and splendid family of children in Houston county. Charley Northen was the oldest grandson in that delightful household, late clerk of the Georgia Senate for a long term of years. Another of the Furlows married my mother's sister, Harriet, and Hon. Charles Furlow, their father, married, as his

second wife, my Aunt Maria Latimer, born in Maryland, and my mother married Maria's brother, Charles, my father. All these weddings and infairs came along in rapid succession. Matrimony, like the measles, is undoubtedly catching, and Grandmother must have had a strenuous time of it, in getting feather beds, quilts, bed linen, china and silver spoons for the newly wed, as their lawful marriage portion. Grandfather, with lofty impartiality set down in a book what he gave as a marriage portion to each of his children, and my mother was fond of telling us, how rich she felt when he made his first visit to her, bringing a set of mahogany furniture, the household effects before noted, along with an excellent servant woman and a fine saddle horse. When I arrived on the stage of action, Agnes, the servant woman, was ready to nurse and love the little new comer, which strong affection remained intact as long as she lived. En passant. I own two of those early silver teaspoons that were in use for my comfort eighty-two years ago, also two tablespoons, part of a set given by my father to his bride, with their united initials engraved thereon. In those days there was not much to be bought but whatever was purchased was sterling and lasting. I remember well the china plates. In the centre was painted a lovely pink rose also a delicate border. When I was uncommonly good I had my molasses on one of these precious plates, and as I sopped my biscuit across I contrived to get a continuous good look at the centre rose until the lunch was concluded. My education in art, although very limited, was early begun.

        It required a day and a half to make the annual journey by gig or barouche to Grandmother's house, one night of lodging to be secured on the trip. I might go to California or Europe nowadays with fewer thrills and expectations, and a globe trotter might envy the delight that pervaded my soul when we came in sight of the dear Grandmother's home, and when the aunties snatched me to themselves and kissed and petted me to my heart's content. Blessed are the grandchildren that can go on such annual journeys and revel as I did in such pure affection.

My Uncle John, who made his home with us for various years, carried me along to his wedding with Miss Elizabeth Paxton, when I was but a tot, and from the wedding we made a bridal tour to see the grandparents. With the "claybanks" in fine mettle and my Sunday best in wearing and with my extra promotion as a wedding attendant, I certainly was in ecstasy. When we arrived at our journey's end and saw the kinnery swarm out from piazzas and Grandmother from the basement, with her cap strings flying, and I could so easily connect her with the good things to eat that were awaiting our arrival.

        There was in Grandmother's big, clean yard, a small structure, a little house, mounted on long legs. It was called the "milk dairy," and butter and milk were kept therein for immediate use. Besides the milk and butter ready for the table supply, there were pies and cakes that could be handed out to little folks when they were hungry. This milk dairy was stationed under an enormous white oak tree, which afforded a dense and delightful shade in summer time. There was also a long bench nearby where little folks might sit and enjoy a bowl of bread and milk before sleepy-time came along. Oh! The delights of that old-fashioned milk dairy. And the odor of those pies and cakes still visits me in memory. It has hardly been a year ago since Rev. G. A. Nunnally, of Rome, an octogenarian like myself, lately deceased, and who was grandmother's nephew (sister's child) said to me: "Do you ever forget the wonderful goodies that Aunt Lucy could hand out from that milk dairy when we sat on the bench in that cool, clean-swept yard, when we were little people?" Nor do I ever forget those wonderful beaten biscuits that I ate for breakfast along with rich red ham gravy, or the dinner-time experience with a plateful of chicken and dumplings, and also a generous slice of pot peach pie, smothered with cream and sugar. And can I ever forget those enticing plum orchards where we young ones were prone to linger until my frock would be so tight in the belt that I could hardly stand it. When I see children of the present time racing to the soft-drink store,

with every nickel they possess, and cramming on the painted candy until they destroy their digestion, I wish they could see what children had to eat nearly a hundred years ago in such abundance and such truly pure foodstuff. And the watermelon time beggars description. Wagon loads found their way into a dark, cool cellar and all that were not O. K. went to the pigpen when everybody had liberty, black and white, to cut and eat until satisfied so long as the crop lasted. There were no selling places for such superabundance and if any neighbors failed in such crops the way was clear to participate without stint with the lucky ones. Home-grown wheat, home-raised meat, home-pressed lard, the whitest corn selected for meal, poultry abundant and fresh eggs collected every day, and milk, cool and sweet, with cakes of yellow sweet butter and plenty of colored help to cook it all and serve it, and partake bountifully on what was left over. I honestly believe that Georgia farmers were the best fed people on the globe in our ante-bellum days. All owing to industry and thrift.

        Large families were the rule, visiting was constant, and in times of festivity or bereavement, there were crowds of willing helpers to laugh with the happy or weep with the suffering ones. When my mother was quite small she soon became expert with a needle, and she remembered going with grandmother to neighbor Gov. Wilson Lumpkin's home to a "family sewing." She sat in a high chair near a table and "backstitched" a seam in a pair of men's breeches on that occasion and I thought it was fine when I could sit in my low chair and "backstitch" seams in a pair of breeches for Uncle Dave who was our faithful colored family fire-maker. I never saw a sewing machine until I was full grown and twenty one, but there was no lack of dainty finger work in those early homes. There is a revival of this fine hand-sewing in later days and it is good fortune to find somebody with ancient experience to show what our ante-bellum women could do on this line. Homespun dresses were not to be despised by any means. Carefully spun and woven with indigo dyes and turkey red to form a pattern,

they made admirable dress materials, washed well and endured mightily. Just think however of the toil that went with their home manufacture when the cotton had to be handpicked from the seed and every thread, warp and filling spun by willing and painstaking hands. What energy, persistence and fortitude. When my grandmother's brood of eleven circled around the big open fireplace in the evening, knitting work in hand, she understood without doubt, that she must rise early and work late, start before daylight and endure until after dark to put clothes on them and keep them with changes and well-fed for their health's sake. If cotton mills and factories were blotted out today is there sufficient fortitude, energy and persistence in the present generation to conquer a similar task?

        Grandmother raised her brood in credit with genteel manners and fine reputation and her grandchildren have sung her praises and paid glowing tribute to her industry and fidelity. None of us are clamoring for a return to the hard work and unremitting effort to make cloth by hand or do sewing with fingers or cook meals on open hearths in hot fireplaces, but I hope the day will never dawn that succeeding generations shall fail to applaud the vigorous self-sacrificing and unfailing industry of their forbears. Now-a-days there is a mania for spending. In those earlier days there was a well-formed habit of saving. Therein lies the difference between the new and the old. In the present generation we tear down spacious, convenient and comfortable church buildings and replace them with palatial edifices partaking of cathedral appearance. The struggle to compass big salaries for the pastorate has advanced into strenuosity. The meek and lowly feature has entirely vanished and unless our modern congregations are out on dress parade the mass of the people remain at home on Sundays to read the daily papers or go on an auto ride to the most attractive nearby town or city for Sabbath diversion. My mind reaches back to the old-time country meeting houses where there were religious services not oftener than once a month. Everybody

was anxious to go. It was a great time with children, negro nurses and dogs. There was always a spring of good water close about. The mothers provided biscuit and teacakes for their hungry tribes. A quilt or shawl was spread on the church floor, the babies that could sit alone were thus made comfortable, and the preacher was in no wise disturbed by their various activities when the little pitcher of fresh water was brought in and the young ones were duly watered. I remember these things with accuracy because I own the quaint little pitcher that Nurse Agnes carried along for my use and comfort, and it represents nothing similar in modern ware as to shape and coloring. It may be more than a hundred years old. I can vouch for more than eighty years myself. The women occupied one half of the building. The men and larger boys kept to their own side of the house. And the preacher was a discourser. He got but little as to pay and he expected little, but he omitted nothing as to creed and doctrine to explain his views to the congregation. Hard Shell Baptists had a large following in Middle Georgia a hundred years ago. I have seen a number of foot washings and I have always queried as to why the Saviour's attitude towards the washing of His disciples' feet should have been abandoned by any Christian organization. If His command as to sacrament administration is imperative it seems to me that foot washing is likewise an imperative example.

        Some will ask about the preacher's pay in those early times? I remember well what was told by Capt. Felton, my husband's father, speaking on this particular line of church work sixty odd years ago. There was never, he said, a discussion, as there was no salary. At one time in the history of Oglethorpe county where his father had settled (and had removed from North Carolina, at the close of the Revolutionary war) there was however something said on a certain meeting day as to some tangible remuneration for the minister's services. Being as before said a delicate subject, there was considerable hesitation until a brother who could tan leather quite satisfactorily from cattle

hides, rose up and contributed a pair of shoe soles, and another neighbor who was also skilful as a tanner, matched the proposition by offering the uppers for the preacher's footwear. There the question halted for a spell until the best shoemaker in the neighborhood agreed to get the preacher's measure and would proceed to make the shoes on the first day when it was too wet to plow. "And you young ones needn't smile," said the Captain, who was a veteran of the war of 1812, "for a man who owned such a reliable pair of shoes as preacher ---- was given was very happy in such possession." It is a good place to set down the fact that Capt. Felton was in the famous Indian battle of "Chalibbee" when he was commanding Oglethorpe county troops, serving under Gen. John Floyd. After a six-months campaign on the frontiers of western Georgia, helping to build Fort Hawkins at Macon, they went forward by regular marches until there was a line of forts and block houses extending from the Ocmulgee to the Alabama river. There was a Fort Mitchell erected on the right bank of the Chattahoochee river and where Antossee battle was fought, where the crafty Indians inflicted heavy loss on Georgia troops.

        The battle of Chalibbee was begun before daybreak and in White's Miscellainies you will find that the Indian surprise did not affect these brave Georgians, not a platoon faltered and Gen. Floyd made a valiant charge after daylight and won the battle. Capt Felton lived to be 80 years old and despite his military services in 1812 and heavy losses in Civil War, he declined to ask for a pension. He said "pensions should be for those who were maimed or wounded in service, that every man owed duties to his country in time of war or peace. Those who were spared in life and limb were fortunate and should not be a burden on the community." According to this creed and practice, he refused to apply for a pension. His survivors are in possession of a little cow-leather traveling trunk that he could strap on the rear of his saddle by aid of iron rings and in which he carried a six months outfit for heavy and exhausting army service, exposed to

Indian attacks day and night all the time he was absent. He had a change of underclothing, a pair of extra socks, some writing materials, and his razor in this small military outfit. One suit of good, strong, homemade jeans carried him through and he made no complaint as to finding himself in service to his country more than a hundred years ago. And he was an officer, better equipped and mounted than the privates.

        In his early time there were no banks or safety vaults for depositing money. Salt was one of the main articles of domestic use, and he and his wife kept an open salt barrel in the kitchen. Black and white dipped out salt, as needed for cooking, saving meat and for salting horses and cattle. This salt barrel constructed of a hollow poplar log with a well-fitted bottom, was always kept half full of salt or over. Silver money was the favorite coin of the period. Down at the bottom of the salt barrel the early Felton's kept their silver money in a sack, and although they were accustomed to make journeys to South Carolina and eastern Georgia, they also made a safe-deposit box still safer by emptying a fresh sack of salt on top of what was still in the kitchen barrel as a preparation for leaving home. No thief or burglar ever thought of finding money in a place that was never locked and covered with salt. There were no banks in those days.

        I wish I could remember all he told of the early settlers of Oglethorpe county, formerly Wilkes. He was familiar with his near neighbors, the Lumpkins, and Gov. Gilmer, Rev. George Lumpkin was his pastor at Beaverdam church and he occasionally came to see us in Cass county, now Bartow, when preacher and Captain were old men. After I married into the Felton family I gathered a lot of information as to the way Georgia pioneers lived from such reminiscences. One of the stories that delighted me was their recollections of some famous race horses that were trained and raced at Lexington, Ga. These were four-mile heats and sixteen miles to run to be declared the winner. As I recollect Col. Wade Hampton's medium-sized

gray mare was the best racer of that early time. Money was staked by men from a number of different states, and crowds attended from all eastern Georgia.

        Augusta was the great market place a hundred years ago. Cotton and wheat were waggoned long distances to be sold in Augusta. It required about five days steady driving from Lexington with strong teams to make the round trip to Augusta. The neighbors managed to go in large companies, camping out, with a supply of cooked victuals already prepared. After the produce was sold, salt, sugar and iron were purchased for the return trip. Store goods were bought in limited quantities for the women at home with an occasional bonnet and slippers. Calico was scarcer than silk velvet at the present time, and the stuff which was laid in for a coming baby's Sunday frock was called Leno, a medium white cloth, lighter than bleached domestic and heavier than plain white lawn. We preserved such a baby frock as an heir-loom made for Dr. W. H. Felton in 1823 (who died not long before he was eighty-seven). A queer little frock, low necked and with long sleeves and it ranked as something extra for quality when it was completed, about a half yard in length with a two-inch ruffle at the bottom. But it differed greatly from the cloth made in the home looms, where the cotton seed were picked out by hand before the thread was spun or woven. Everything a grown man wore as before stated was prepared at home from the cotton in the seed and the wool on the sheep's back down to the knitted suspenders and fingerless mittens.

        Nutmegs with other spices were hunted for in Augusta, brown sugar and black molasses were in demand. There were small stores in little towns and some creditable country stores also. My father had a country store where he sold pins and needles, lute string ribbon and prunella shoes on one counter and dealt out thick black molasses and kit mackerel within ten feet of the millinery. Can I ever forget the day when my Uncle John who had adventured to Charleston to buy goods and returned with a wax doll and how I could not be parted from it and how I slept with

it, ate with it in my arms and finally wrecked it by going to sleep before a great log heap fire in the living room and where the heat melted its head and spoiled its beauty for all time? Anything so rarely beautiful had never crossed my experience before. I have often wondered as to how the nude red Indians felt to see white people in accustomed dress for the first time. The change from my clumsy rag dolls to the Charleston beauty with real curls and blue eyes must have produced somewhat similar effects on the small Georgia cracker who had never seen a bought doll before in her four years of mortal life.

        We had for small silver change thrips and seven pences, value 6 1-4 cents and 12 1-2. I had a few of each that were my very own and I would have given all I was worth for a recipe to restore my doll's pristine loveliness.

        In these country stores there was large traffic in cotton and woolen hand cards, and joy without measure when cotton factories were built in Georgia and "spun thread" could be bought for the warp, because homespun warp was not easy to manage by inexpert weavers. It needed harder twist and stronger thread for warp uses, while the filling could be spun softer and with less care. We have preserved some of the store accounts of the early period. Indigo, madder, turkey red and copperas were staple goods for dye purposes and the housewives of early Georgia history went to meeting (church services) with every finger nail as blue as indigo mud would paint them. It was considered a badge of efficiency, experience and culture in cloth making. The wool dyes, made women's hands almost black with logwood and walnut leaves. Men's summer working breeches were copperas dyed and those plain men-folk were as yellow legged as our choicest breeds of chickens.

        Among the Felton neighbors a hundred years ago was a farmer and his industrious wife who spun and wove all their wearing apparel and who had manufactured enough cloth to provide her husband with two strong, good shirts. When he returned at night from the hot corn and cotton plowing and his shirt

was wet with prespiration she had always a clean, dry garment ready for she did a bit of laundry work as regularly as she washed and dried her breakfast dishes and this good woman's fame has followed her down as an extraordinary manager and capable married woman. I was impressed as to her super-excellence, because the family washing in such plain homes was done once in seven days as a rule and where children were numerous they might take off their one garment and sit in their skin on hot days until a clean shirt or frock was ready for use. In the olden times farmer boys of eight, ten, even twelve years, were provided with a summer shirt of extra length (perhaps the pattern has been retained for men's night shirts) and the youngsters had nothing to hinder their agility in athletic sports. It would be refreshing to find a chronicle of the self-made distinguished men of early Georgia who were glad to own and wear these one-piece, home-made suits when cloth was scarce and hard-work in the field a necessity for family subsistence.

        In those early days the children said "Dad" and "Mam" and as history repeats itself the petted child of 1917 is happy to call his well-groomed father "daddy." Fifty years ago it was a mark of very common raising to say daddy and mammy. Virginia and North Carolina children said "Paw and Maw." The Hugenot or French strains said Pere and Mere, while another breed of folks in upper Georgia said "Pap and Mam." The most of well-raised folks said Par and Mar.

        But the folk raised in that early period of Georgia's history were brought up to wait on their elders and reverence for the aged was the habit inculcated early in their childhood. Old people then and now were apt to be garrulous and sometimes tiresome with their advice and platitudes, but the neglect of aged grandparents, common in many sections today, was of rare occurrence in the homes of the pioneers of our Southern country.

        The first wedding I ever attended was in 1840. My baby sister had very lately arrived, but the good

neighbors insisted that my father and myself (barely five years old) should be there. Black Mammy had me in charge, also the brass candlesticks and silver spoons that were loaned for the big gathering. Mammy belonged to the F. F. V. colored, in old Virginia. She always fixed her head dress turban shape with a big white neckerchief around her neck and shoulders and a big white apron about her capacious self. Mammy was an expert on big table arrangements. There was a girl in the neighbor's family with whom I had slight acquaintance but the wedding festivities accelerated our friendship. I saw the bride and groom walk out to be married and the latter had been so unfortunate as to split his big toe with an awkward axe, so his unlucky foot was outside the upper part of his shoe in a white store stocking. The rest of the time I devoted to seeing the people eat, tablefulls giving way to new comers as fast as they could be served. My new girl friend agreed with me that it was tedious waiting. Finally she made her way between crowds and found that a quantity of plates had been emptied into a capacious tin pan under a side table. I questioned the advisability of going under that table cloth and helping ourselves as one pig helps another. I did go, and I did partake, and when I was missing it was black Mammy who discovered the lost child in her ignoble plight. Time has never quite erased the feeling that possessed me when my escapade was narrated at my mother's bedside on our return. To start out as I had done with my best bib and tucker, traveling in fine style with a pair of matched horses and a driver, with the comfortable feeling that I was going to a big wedding, and then to be brought home in some sort of disgrace, because I ate under a table, out of a scrap bucket, with all the indignation that Mammy was capable of expressing by words and looks and gestures, I was given a lesson as to table manners and wedding feasts that always remained with me. So far as I know nobody but Mammy ever suffered stifling mortification about it, nevertheless the memory of it has lasted nearly fourscore years with the delinquent.

        The first funeral I ever attended still haunts my memory. The dead wife and mother left a family of small children, two of them my school mates. There was a poor little baby, two months old, and the children were left in deep sorrow and gloom.

        The dead woman and my mother had been girlhood friends. I loved her like I loved my kin, and I almost cried myself sick with those lonely children who came to us to get relief from the sad home. There were no hearses in those days. Neighbors took hold of coffin handles and carried the coffin to the grave yard. The preacher took the hand of one of my sobbing school mates and walked behind the coffin. The snow was falling and the gloom of the whole business was almost too much for us all.

        The coffin was made in the town. I saw the people tack on the outside black cloth and the inside white linings. It filled me with an awful dread that my mother might die, too. I was worked up into a sort of hysteria. When the clods fell on the coffin I could scarcely repress a shriek. Little children can suffer intense agony under similar conditions.

        I do not recall any particular mourning garments. In rural districts death always caught the people at a disadvantage. Home-made coffins were clumsy. Shrouds were made around the dead body. Neighbors had to dig the graves and do all things else, as there were no bought things to help along. Crowds could be had to sit up with the dead. Silver coins were laid on eyelids to hold them down. When a person got so low down in reputation that he deserved the meanest that could be said, you would hear "He is mean enough to steal the silver on a dead man's eyes." Graves had to be made nearby unless there was a meeting house within convenient distance. People were generally buried on their own land and enclosed like a tiny garden, with wooden palings.

        I recall an incident that stays with me. Occasionally my mother helped in the store, in push times. I was in evidence too. One day a lady with several children came and bought big bundles. When she left I found my mother crying and to pacify me she told the

reason. The customer had a dreadful cancer and felt she was going to die. She desired to prepare a good supply of children's clothing (there were no such things to be bought) before the crisis came. Just before she started home, in her carryall a sort of conveyance in general use, she went with my mother into the back room of the store and showed her bosom with the cruel ravages made in her breast. And those children were so happy and knew so little about the heroism of their mother who faced death like a martyr.

        The first railroad in Georgia coming from Augusta and toward us in northwestern sections created much excitement. This excitement became intense when the legislature passed a bill to construct another railroad starting from our section going to the Tennessee line, with State's money, and to connect with the other road known as the Georgia railroad, at Marthasville.

        The civil engineer of the Georgia road made his headquarters at our home off and on for perhaps eighteen months. The progress of both undertakings was a topic of daily conversation where I could wonder and also listen. When the state railroad was able to lay down rails from Atlanta, then known as Marthasville, to Marietta, twenty miles, the engine, freight car and passenger coach were hauled from near Augusta by mules, over the stage line, and the wonderful new cars were halted in the big road in front of my home. They had already come over one hundred and fifty miles when I saw the three before named.

        It was decided to celebrate the opening of the state road by an excursion to Marietta from Marthasville with a big ball at the latter place and considerable speech-making from the politicians. It was the first adventure of that sort in the Southern States and broke the ice for internal public improvements. My parents were invited by the beloved civil engineers. I was included, a tot of seven years, and I could now paint scenes, if I was an artist, with distinct remembrance of what I saw on that great trip.

        The future Capitol of Georgia then had one building, the rough plank depot, with a shed room equipped

with a fireplace where all sorts of good liquor could be bought, etc.

        It was a cold day in the late fall and my father and mother, with my small self, reachtd Thompson's Hotel in Decatur, where the excursionists assembled and where a fine dinner was provided. It was a six-mile drive to Marthasville and conveyances were in demand. We were delighted when Maria Gertrude Kyle took a seat in our barouche on my mother's invitation, and she was well known as authoress and poetess, in our few Georgia papers. She had lately married and her new clothes interested me, and I was even more interested to see her dance that night in some of the new sort of dances, different from the Virginia Reel and cotillions that I had been accustomed to, in our own home, by tourists who traveled from Savannah and Augusta to Nashville, Tenn., and regions beyond, either in a stage coach or private carriages. The supper was handed to us as the people sat on benches around the Marietta ball room. Some people had syllabub strong with Maderia wine, but I had a wine glass of jelly and a spoon with which to dip it out.

        I soon had enough of the frolic and was put to sleep in a bed, already a foot deep with shawls, capes and bonnets. The joyful folks danced all night. There were relays of fiddlers to keep the tunes going. I remember I thought I had been awake all the time because the music and the calling of dance figures and the dancers' feet seemed to be going on until daylight in the morning.

        The trip homeward was as dull as the going had been hilarious, but I have always taken satisfaction in the thought that I was a trip passenger on the very first passenger train that ever left the Union Depot in the present city of Atlanta. Judge Warner, the grandfather of Judge Warner Hill, of Supreme Court, was on board with his little daughter, now Mrs. Hill. So far as we know she and I are the only two known to be living, and fellow travelers on that momentous occasion when a railroad was adventuring into Cherokee Georgia where the Cherokee Indians had been living only ten years before. A Mr. William Longstreet had

invented a steamboat before that time and should share honors with the so-called inventor who got the credit. My father used to sing for me the following ditty based on Mr. Billy Longstreet's new fad.

                        Billy boy, Billy boy, can you steer the ship to land?
                        Billy boy, Billy boy, can you steer the ship to land?
                        Yes, I can steer the ship to land
                        Without a rudder in my hand.

                        Billy boy, Billy boy, can you row that boat ashore?
                        Billy boy, Billy boy, can you row that boat ashore?
                        Yes, I can row that boat ashore
                        Without a paddle or an oar.

        I remember also a Maryland corn-shucking song that my father would sing to me in my baby days. He came from his native state when a small boy, but he brought to Georgia many songs that delighted me. One of the many still remains. Among the Maryland chronicles of wills and deeds, mention is seen of the Notleys. The song runs thus:

                        "Mighty wedding over the River (Potomac)
                        Hoosen Johnny - Hoosay!
                        Notley Dutton courts the widow.
                        Hoosen Johnny - Hoosay."

        These Marylanders and Virginians had corn-shuckings. They were almost universal in Georgia in my childhood. The ripened corn was hauled to the barn lot and heaped on the ground outside the crib. Word was sent around that so and so would have a corn-shucking on a certain night. White farmers came with their colored men. A great supper was prepared for all who came - substantials - plenty of it. In the big house there was a bountiful table, in the kitchen another table just as plentiful for the blacks. It was a big time for everybody. Before the daylight came the shucked corn was safely housed. Everybody had a good time and "all went home in the morning."

        Those corn-shucking melodies are yet twittering in my recollection, and when my own babies came along

in the early days, for my first born arrived when I was only nineteen, I found myself singing "Papa's Corn Songs" that he brought along from his old Potomac home.

        And I must not forget the "quiltings." Fashionables would call them "quilting bees," but they were popular gatherings. The women of the neighborhood were delighted to entertain. Each guest brought along her own thimble, maybe a needle or so; as needles were scarce and high. Along about midday the husbands began to come, some afoot, others on horseback. And the dinner, was a spread that tested the skill and industry of the hostess to be sure. The "tables groaned" with everything that the mistress and her colored women could prepare. After dinner was over the farmers returned to their work and the women finished the quilt, even to binding the edges in first class style. And there were famous quilters abroad in the land in those industrious days.

        I had almost forgotten to say that when a farmer was very sick and unable to work and watch his crop his neighbors would go over on a day agreed upon, with all their forces, plow hands, horses and plows and before dark came the crop was in good order.

        A couple of fine Georgia gentlemen whose grandparents were my father's early neighbors, told me the following story about two years ago. The grandfather became ill and died - left a widow and a house full of children. There were slaves but nobody to direct but the anxious woman who had this large family, black and white, to provide for. Everybody had to fence the cultivated land. Old-fashioned worm fences were all they had. The widow could not get the "worm of the fence" laid straight. My father heard about it and early one morning he went over (about a mile) and carried every field hand he had, and he made a straight fence out of a crooked one before nightfall. When she sold her crop he kept the matter straight for her, whenever she needed advice she knew where to go to find a willing helper.

        After eighty years or more had passed the grandchildren of the widow told me of the esteem and affection

that lasted with their family when all the actors were dead and largely forgotten. All along down the line they said they were told of the "best neighbor Grandmother ever had." These fine, elegant Georgians requested the privilege of carrying my sister and myself on a visit to our birth place in an automobile. Also to the girlhood home where both of us had been married, neither of which I had seen since the Civil War was over. It was a day of days for us. What they knew and could tell was largely tradition and hearsay, but what we knew and felt, words cannot fitly express. The river plantation passed away from us in my father's lifetime. We had, therefore, no financial interest in it. It had changed hands several times within the half century. It had gone down in decay but it was a thrilling place for two aged women who had been happy, active girls when we called it "home."

        Somebody sent me the following circular before it passed into the present owner's hands. As it gives me kind mention, I wish my descendants to know of the occurrence. In our day we had crowds of company, music, good living, all the things that belonged to a comfortable country home in upper Georgia.

"BIG AUCTION SALE

of Farming Lands, at Court House in Decatur, on Wednesday, September 15, at noon.

        "Panola Plantation to be Subdivided and Sold.

        "One of the finest plantations in DeKalb County, the famous Panola Plantation, will be divided into eleven farms by the enterprising Real Estate firm of H. F. Sanders and Shelby Smith, of Atlanta, and sold at public outcry to the highest bidder at the Court House in Decatur, on Wednesday, September 15, at twelve o'clock, noon. The plantation contains 725 acres. It lies on South River, fifteen miles east from Atlanta, ten miles from Decatur, five miles from Lithonia, and seven miles from Ellenwood.

        "Panola Plantation, from our best information, was the childhood home of Mrs. W. H. Felton, whom all Georgians love and honor. Maj. Latimer, the father of Mrs. Felton, built the fine colonial home on this place. The body of the house is in a fine state of preservation.

        "Mr. R. M. Clark was the next owner of this place. He supervised the Oglethorpe Manufacturing Company, which built

a cotton mill there. This plant was burned several years ago. In connection with his milling interests, Mr. Clark maintained on this plantation a very fine stock farm, raising in great abundance, all kinds of provender, such as wheat, corn, oats, hay, etc. In addition to the cultivated lands, he had very fine pastures.

        "There are several public roads that converge at this place, making it a good point for a public store. There was at one time a store and post office there.

        "This plantation was later bought by Col. Milton Candler, and afterwards sold to the present owners.

        "It will be seen from the above, that this plantation is historical.

        "These eleven tracts as subdivided, for quality of land, value of timber, convenience of location, and many other points, have never been equalled at any auction sale in DeKalb county."

        Among the notable family occasions that I recall was the wedding of our miller, colored, and the housemaid, that would doubtless interest the northern people as a feature in Southern country life before the war. Ben was quite a catch in his early manhood, and Minerva was one of the three colored girls given my mother by her father. She generally journeyed with the family to Grandmother's home when we children were small, as my sister's nurse. She was not a field hand but remained in the big house as house maid. The match was of prominence therefore.

        They were to be given a house of their own, a plain cabin, but close and comfortable. Ben had a new suit of clothes for a bridal present. The bride got her outfit from we girls. There was a preacher to marry them and a good supper for the occasion. There were a happy couple, had a family of sprightly children and were a part of my sister's allotment after she married and had her own home. The surrender turned everything upside down and Ben went back to the old Panola home and secured a position as miller. As the years rolled on Ben lost his wife and his boys married and he was lonely in his old age. He came back to his "Mis' Mary" and she gave him a house to live in, coal to burn, clothes to wear, was fed from her table at every meal and he swept the sidewalks and did errands for my sister as well as he could. After he had passed eighty years he was often infirm, sick at

times. One of his sons was comfortably fixed and sister advised the old negro to go there to be properly waited on. She gave him the money to get there. Inside of two days Ben turned up again with nothing to say beyond "Mis' Mary I've come back." When he died "Miss Mary" furnished the coffin and burial clothes and had been his best friend in his extreme poverty and weight of years, when he was too infirm to help himself. He died two years ago.

        Once I was "candle-holder" at a big negro wedding at Grandmother's home. The girl was a housemaid but the groom lived several miles away and came to his wife's home every Saturday night to stay until Monday morning daylight. The patrol system was in force throughout the South. Colored men going to the wife's house were given a "pass" and it was a wise precaution. Slaves were too valuable to allow one of them to be beaten because he did not have a "pass." The colored boy came one night after supper to "ask for the girl," and I was present at the asking. I was very fond of the bride-to-be, and I became a close listener. There seemed to be a sort of matrimonial catechism for such occasions. "Will you treat your wife decent, if I allow you to marry her?" "Will you act the dog and beat my good darky when you get mad with her?" He gladly answered "no." "Now I expect you to behave yourself if you come here to live. It's my house you will live in with your wife but you are welcome if you behave yourself."

        As a wind-up Grandfather said "Now, Jim, my own colored men that go to the wife's house, always cut up plenty of firewood for house and kitchen before they start on Saturday afternoons. Mind you, now, if you take any of their wood and are too lazy to go to the woodpile to make your wife a good fire by your own labor, I'm as certain to thrash you as I find it out, and they will be sure to tell me." The crowd that attended the wedding had to be entertained out of doors for the ceremony. No cabin could give them standing room. As "chief cook and bottle washer," or rather director of arrangements, I held the candle for the colored preacher to read the marriage pledges. He

had a newspaper clipping in his hand and I saw it was upside down, but it served to raise a laugh when my part of the performance was over, and I repeated to Grandfather what I saw and heard as an official at the marriage. And I was so welcome for I was Miss Ann's oldest little gal, and I was to tell about it when I reached my own home, and you may be sure I was a faithful narrator to a very eager set of people while I was doing it.

RAILROADS, SCHOOLS, SCHOOL TEACHERS,
AND REVIVALS.

        My father's early plantation was twenty miles from Covington, Newton County, Ga., and ten miles from Decatur, and situated on the main highway coming down from Nashville, Tenn., to Augusta. As far back as I can recollect stage coaches were actively used on this line. These coaches were ponderous affairs with a big leather boot on behind and a little bannister around the top to hold baggage. There were regular stage stands ten miles apart, where a relay of four horses were constantly stabled. About a mile away the stage driver's horn would be sounded so that the hostler would be ready with fresh horses on his arrival. They were also mail carriers. It cost ten cents a mile to travel on the stage coach and it required ten cents to send a letter. I have an old letter written by my father to my mother, before I was born, and it is marked for twelve and a half cents for postage from Charleston, S. C. It was also a newsy letter, for those days. It was his first ride on a railroad from Augusta to Charleston. The railroad was built on trestles, and my mother suffered painful anxiety as to whether her husband would survive the dangers of that rapid journey. At Aiken, S. C., there was an inclined plane. An extra engine would be hitched on to one end of a chain or cable and the train would be pulled up and down on this inclined plane. I rode over the Aiken plane, when I neared my twelfth birthday, and

experienced the hoisting (or lowering) process with extra engine. It seems to have escaped the minds of the railroad contractors that a road could be built on the ground, or that a hill could be graded or dug around or tunneled. Not long before the Georgia R. R., from Augusta to the town of Marthasville, was started and the state of Georgia decided to build another road from Marthasville to the hamlet of Chattanooga, Tenn., known then as Ross' Landing, of which I have made mention. I seemed to have come along about the time that railroads and good school houses were agitated in my part of the country. And there were progressive people around us for it was decided to build an extra good school house close by and engage a teacher that was somebody, in our immediate neighborhood. My father gave the site and the community erected the building. It was a long framed house with a chimney at each end, doors in the middle, front and rear. My first teacher was Rev. E. M. Haygood, uncle of Bishop A. G. Haygood. The teacher was of Baptist faith while the Bishop's father was a strong Methodist. The school house cost so much money to build that the patrons "signed" for the pupils, which meant a pledge to pay the teacher an allotted sum at an allotted time. My father "signed" for his little girl, not yet five years old, so I had an early start in primitive schooling. There is a halo about the memories of that first school business which do not pertain to my later schools. As I remember the time, I was as happy as the day was long, and I was devoted to Webster's blue back spelling book. It was "readin, writin, and cipheren" from eight in the morning to five or six in the afternoon and the big boys took their slates and worked sums out of doors and the girls had reading lessons in the school house part of the day and the teacher taught the small ones every word of the lesson in the spelling book at his knee. All pupils when advanced to writing lessons took a spell at the high writing bench. All brought goose quills from home to fashion into pens, and the teacher occupied a good part of his teaching time cutting the goose quills into pen shape. There might

have been some pencils in use, but I cannot recall any such things. Writing ink was scarce and high but the oak balls that fell from the oak tree limbs were plentiful. So the thrifty ones manufactured red ink in that way and the copy books were parti-colored on every page and almost every line. Slates and slate pencils were sold at my father's store, and I had a small slate on which I drew pictures of cows, cats and dogs and the large girls and boys made pictures of the teacher on the sly. The spelling lesson of the day was the closing exercise. The teacher had a queer contrivance nailed to a post set up in the middle of the room. It was known as a "spelling board." When he pulled the string to which the board was fastened the school gave attention. If he let the board half way down the scholars could spell out words in moderate tone in preparing that evening spelling bee. If he proceeded to pull the board up tight everybody "spelled to themselves." When he had drilled them considerably on the "shut-mouth" plan, he would advance towards the spelling board, give the cord a pull until down dropped the plank and then the hubbub, began. Everything went with a roar.

        Just as loud as you pleased. You might spell baker or circumlocution or anything else and the people going along the road were happy to know that the children were getting their lessons, and that the teacher was earning his pay.

        When the spelling class was called those that missed went down to foot of the class, and those that spelled well went up head. There was some luck in the matter; nevertheless, I fairly danced on my way home, when I went up head the first time. When my first school term closed (aged five years) the entire neighborhood gathered to hear the boys speak, and listen to the girls as they read a page in the reading book. I recall one other time when the school exercises were closed after a big audience had been there all day by a marriage ceremony between Mr. Haygood, the teacher, and his handsomest grown-up girl pupil. It took us all by surprise, nevertheless it was considered a delightful wind up. We had ups and downs in the next

three years. Changed teachers, the fine school house was burned at night, and my parents decided to send me to school in Oxford, Ga., where I was boarded at Rev. Mr. Simmons' and attended Miss Hayes' school and took music lessons from Mr. Guttenberger, a blind man and a pioneer in music teaching in upper Georgia. The stage driver became a great friend to the little girl and I expect I enjoyed my stage trips of twenty miles much more than a late one to New York city within the last month. At Miss Hayes' school I won a pound of candy by repeating the multiplication table back and forth without missing a figure, and I played the "Blue Bells of Scotland" for my blind teacher at his concert at the school's close, which was considered pretty fair going for an eight-year-old girl in the early 40's in piano playing.

        In the rural schools of my earliest days nearly all of us wore a cord about our necks with a little wallet of brimstone or assafoetida tied on as an itch preventive. And the warts. My! My!! How to get rid of the itch and the warts on their hands occupied much of general conversation at recess time and the surprising part of the whole thing was the apparent indifference to both itch and warts in the rude homes where the majority of the pupils were domiciled. After these girl pupils were able to read fairly well and to write a little they vacated the school benches and went back home for the domestic duties that were imperative. When I think of the helps afforded to pupils nowadays and their attendance at fine schools from six to sixteen and later, my appreciation of the early ones increases in immense ratio. They got so little eighty years ago and yet made so great progress in business, at home and outside. Some of the finest business men of that early era had something less than three months schooling, yet they were capable, wrote legibly and made headway in fortune-making and good living.

        My next adventure with schools took place in Decatur where Dr. John S. Wilson established an academy of high grade. My parents moved to the town, and made various business sacrifices because of this educational opportunity. Dr. Wilson was also pastor

of the Presbyterian church and founded the first of the same kind of churches in Atlanta. He was a famous teacher because of his thoroughness. The five years of my school life that I spent under his supervision were the very best of all I received and I have reason to thank him, because he kept me at spelling lessons year after year, and his grammar instruction was well nigh perfect in its exactness and constant application. That still embraces the secret of a good education. His good influence on that community has been felt for more than half a century as an educator. Decatur, in his time, was one of the finest towns in upper Georgia, with its high grade of citizenship and distinguished for the fine women that were reared and educated there when educational opportunities were limited and no advantages from travel abroad were obtainable. Allow me to tell a story.

        Dr. Wilson was unutterably opposed to dancing. His opposition became a serious matter when he forbade his scholars to attend dancing parties. For a while the controversy ran high. It put me in a panic because I loved to dance like I loved candy. My father liked to have me dance, he said it gave girls a graceful walk. My mother was not so much in favor of it. I was now very uneasy. There was always a big ball in Decatur at the principal hotel on Friday night of Superior Court week. Our judge was Hon. Edward Young Hill, one of the handsomest men I still think I ever saw in my life. I looked forward to that big ball with delight. I was just entering my teens and several times the judge would ask me to dance with him and he was a splendid dancer.

        I was quite sure at that time, that I was something extra on the "light fantastic toe," but I am now satisfied there were so many handsome belles fond of dancing that the judge evaded a choice by selecting an active little girl who cared only for the sport, just as he did. He and my father were great friends, both Whigs as I recollect, and it was the easiest way out to get a very harmless little dancing mate. Up and down inside the rows of partners or outside (as it happened) in the Virginia Reel, we kept up our part of

the business with joyful alacrity. But the opposition of Dr. Wilson grew apace. He became more aggressive and the school patrons were divided in their opinions. While some agreed others said it was none of his business. The crisis came. The time of the big ball was only a few days off. One morning after school opened, the stern old dominie shot his bolt. The fiat read this way: "Any girl that goes to a dancing party while in school attendance will be dismissed next day." When he said a thing he said it with emphasis. We were up against it hard and fast.

        I told the story at home and my mother said "We'll wait until your father hears about it." My heart was almost in my mouth when the case was laid before him. He was my dependence. I hoped he would assert his rights to govern his own household. But the case was decided against me. He finally said: "We keep up two establishments, one in town the other on river plantation, where I must stay from Monday until Saturday night, to give you school privileges. This is why I bought this home in town. Otherwise we would not be here." He disliked to give me pain and he knew I loved to dance. Finally he jokingly said "Little girl, Dr. Wilson is trying to educate your mind and I must help him. After awhile there will be time a plenty to educate your heels."

        When the big ball came on we could sit on our front porch and see the dancers in the hotel, because the big dining room was always emptied of its tables for the ball. The music had never been more enticing. I could hear the dancing orders spoken. I don't think I had ever wanted to go anywhere so badly in all my life before. But I gave it up with a fairly good grace. When the school term closed my parents gave me a dancing party to show their sympathy with the girl that tried to be brave.

        It was a new era in Georgia history when Northern women came down South as teachers or governesses. No Southern woman of means ever proposed to work at anything outside of home. When she left school she began quilt-making, etc., looking towards matrimony and it was nothing uncommon to get married as

early as fourteen or fifteen, and an unmarried woman of thirty was rated as an "old maid." It was a quasi stigma of reproach to fail to receive an "offer" after the girl advanced into long dresses. The girl who was coveted by a half dozen beaux at one time was the center of admiration at a wedding or "infair." Nobody that I ever heard of said to a daughter, "You have got to marry," but plenty could be found, who did say. "I am sorry for so and so, with a house full of old maids." One of the handsomest women I remember in my childhood was a bride at twelve, a mother at thirteen and who had raised a family of fine sons and daughters before she had reached middle age and still beautiful. Nevertheless there were plenty of marryings that were not love matches. If there was a prospect of a plantation and slaves as dowry, there was a rush into matrimony, just as the nobility of Europe court rich American heiresses and the majority of both classes were more than apt to regret the hasty undertaking after a trial of it.

        These early married Southern women wore lace caps very early after motherhood. It marked the distinction between married and single in promiscuous company. And the babies wore caps also whenever dressed for going out with the young mother. I thought my delicate mother and baby sister were the prettiest pair in the world when I saw them thus dressed for going to meeting which was the general custom of the early Georgians, once a month. Quick to catch on I put caps on my dolls, big and little, and occasionally contrived to put on for myself one of my mother's caps on the sly when I took on a spell of doll nursing of which I was remarkably fond. When I was about seven years old my uncle John brought from Augusta a drawn silk bonnet for my mother and also one for myself. The silk was gathered in close rows on fine whale bone strips and shaped as a calash. Each had a tiny skirt to the bonnet and inside was a row of small pink rosebuds encircling the face. Hers was of "silver gray" and mine "bottle green." This was my first bought bonnet and considered a beauty! As a rule, in plain households, the mother purchased

a nice calico dress with enough to make the little daughter one like it. If there were scraps left a bonnet was made for both and families could be identified by the flowers on the calico, and the style in making. There were fine English and French calicoes and muslins and "northern homespun" came from the factories in New England fine and white, while our southern factory cloth was rough and unbleached after cotton mills were erected in Georgia. As my father had a store, I began to wear "prunella" shoes very early. They were made of cloth as well as leather but only used for dress up, not for service. I had plaid woolen dresses at various times but generally my mother cut down her worn or out of date frocks for my use. My first silk dress was a "made over." This descended to my small sister after I had outgrown it. When I had reached the age of ten the fashionables wore voluminous skirts and many of them. The underskirts were starched as stiff as possible, and I remember hearing a friend of my mother say she had on at that time eight petticoats beside the outside frock made of "balzarine." Something like the voile of modern dress goods. As she came down the street she was like a ship in full sail. Her dress skirt was as wide as the sidewalk. The body to the dress was tight as beeswax and she was laced until her beaux could nearly span her waist with both hands. Everybody, women and children, wore bonnets. Hats belonged to the masculine. Artificial flowers were plentiful on these bonnets but when a young woman was religious or became converted she laid aside her flowers along with her finger rings and breastpin. And I never can forget my feelings when I heard a woman pray in meeting for the first time. It came like a "clap out of a clear sky." She had been talking to a bench of "mourners" and broke loose, in the fervor of her pleadings. It was the talk of the town for a good while. Some said it would not do at all - others said she was so good that she must be forgiven, but the majority said she should have kept silent. "Aunt Annie Bird," as she was known

to us, continued to pray aloud at protracted meetings but she was "one by herself."

        Nevertheless it was a very common thing for women to shout at revivals. Perhaps there were then more women shouters than masculines. Sometimes the excitement made them faint but the difference between a shouting woman and a praying woman was never clearly defined in my youthful mind, as connected with St. Paul's oft' quoted adjuration for women to "keep silence in the church."

        In later years there is more praying than shouting in public gatherings by women, yet there are ministers who are stubbornly averse and use sledge-hammer logic against such women who are full of religious fervor, and devoted to religious exercises, and the most assiduous church goers in their respective congregations.

        There were many noted revivals in the middle years of my life and being a Methodist myself I applaud these revival occasions, because they awakened the minds of many sinners, connected broken friendships and made the children aware that religion stood for something better than mere morality at home, and could save the drunkard and bring peace and domestic happiness into divided households. The patience and fortitude of long-suffering women who, full of zeal and the Holy Ghost and always remarkable examplers of Christian excellence and piety, under this demand for "women to keep silence," has been an enigma to many good men as well as women.

        I recall a revival of religion in Decatur, Ga., when I was a young girl, where Rev. Alexander Means, Bishop Jas. O. Andrew, Judge Longstreet and other noted Methodist divines gave weeks of service, daily and nightly sermons, and which resulted in securing a large membership and which is felt to this good day in regions around and about Atlanta, the present metropolis of our state, in Methodist families. I went to school in Oxford with daughters of Dr. Means, Judge Longstreet and Bishop Andrew and my remembrance of those dearly beloved friends of my youth have been a well-spring of pleasure in my own journey

through life. I am doubtless the sole survivor of those mentioned here.

        I must not omit mention of the annual picnics of Dr. Wilson's school at Stone Mountain. Everybody was glad to go; some by carriages and wagons and multitudes by the Georgia railroad after it was set a-going. The first passenger conductor that I remember was Col. George Adair, the elder, and he became an institution in which both passengers and railroad men took pride.

        The story of Atlanta's early days can never be fitly told without including an extended notice of Col. George Adair, the elder. His sister was my early school mate and when we had young lady guests with us Col. Adair was most helpful, because he chaperoned numberless beaux to make my single aunties have a good time. In those generous old days it was delightful to be there. I was permitted to sit with the gay crowd around a glowing hickory fire and listen to the jokes as well as the music and general merriment, until my bed time arrived. My mother was a champion cake maker and there were waiters passed around with all sorts of light refreshments. I was often privately instructed that such small girls as myself should be only seen and not heard. In those merry old days what I could see was very satisfying.

        Col. Adair joked everybody, myself included. One time he got turned down and I was hilarious over it. It was a very cold evening and the party of young gentlemen collected near the blazing fire. First one and then another would inquire. "How are your feet feeling, Mr. Adair?" For awhile he refused to notice the questions. The young ladies were given a hint, and they were choking with laughter, over what was told them. Somebody also said "your boots are a perfect fit," and the girls screamed with laughter. To make a long story short, Mr. Adair had on a fine new pair of high-top boots that fitted him "like a bug's shirt," and he struggled a good while when dressing to get into them. He found out his companions were going to get the joke delivered when he put out his shapely feet and quietly said to the folks, "I tried to

get on two pair of socks, tore them into ribbons and failed and these rascals are dying to tell you that I am a sockless joker and they want to turn me down and make these girls laugh at me." My mother had to send me to bed I enjoyed the episode so hilariously. A dozen or more years ago Col. Adair gave an interview to Miss Isma Dooley on Old Atlanta days that all those who were mentioned enjoyed heartily.

"ATLANTA'S EARLY SOCIETY.

        "But with the name 'Atlanta,' society seems to have begun here, and the first parties I remember attending were at the old Atlanta hotel built when the road was extended from Atlanta to Marietta. The new engine brought here at the time was hauled by mules from Madison, and the first car, built in the penitentiary at Milledgeville, came the same way.

        "Dr. Joseph Thompson moved up from Decatur, and building the Atlanta hotel, gave the place its first rights to be called 'town.' His family was a most interesting one, and his two daughters were then Georgia belles. Mary Jane Thompson, now Mrs. Richard Peters, and Julia, the late Mrs. Orme, of West Point. The other girls I remember in Atlanta at the time, were Miss Lou Loyd, whose father built the old Washington hotel, Judge Meade's three pretty daughters, Misses Kate and Jane Kelsey, and Colonel Rhodes' two daughters, and then the visiting girls that would pass through and stop over for a night at the Atlanta hotel. Atlanta always was a good stand for visiting girls.

        "'Who were the beaus? Well, there were several very prominent society beaus. I went out myself,' modestly remarked the colonel. 'Then there was William Priestly Orme and W. C. Printup. We all held lucrative positions at the time, being conductors on the railroad, and as our rivals we had the good-looking conductors from the Western and Atlantic railroad - Joe Bennett and Jim Dobbs, and W. A. Huff and George Jones, of the Macon and Northern railroad.

        "Our parties were all given at the Atlanta hotel, and we called them 'soires .' I didn't know why they gave them that name then,' said the colonel chuckling, 'but my youngest granddaughter, Lizzie, now studying French, told me a year or so ago, 'Why, grandpa, all evening parties are appropriately called soires . That's the meaning of the word.'

        "These soirees began early in the evening about 8 o'clock, and were generally over about the time the 'sparking' begins now. The orchestra," said the colonel, presumably guying the society column, "was not hidden behind a bank of palms and hot-house plants, or screened off by silken portieres veiled in smilax, but the fiddlers sat right where they could be seen and

heard when they caned out the figures, as we all danced the old Virginia reel.

        "Our first fiddler was old Howard Brown, while Guilford, Judge Ezzard's barber, played the fiddle or the triangle, either one well. Howard Brown, however, imbibed too freely now and then for the spirit of the times, and Erby Powell, the welldigger, was then called in to take his place. Erby was a fine fiddler as well as digger.

        "I remember one of the finest soirees we ever had was given in compliment to Mary Willis Cobb, of Athens (now Mrs. Johnson, the mother of Mrs. A. W. Hill and Mrs. Hugh Hagan.) Mary Willis was quite the belle, and had more tony party clothes than the rest of the girls, because she had spent a winter in Washington, where her brother, Howell Cobb, was representative from Georgia. She was such a pretty, round plump girl, with laughing, beaming eyes, and danced better than most girls do these days.

        "Did we have a chaperon at these parties! Yes, one that we all loved - Mrs. Joseph Thompson. I can so well remember how she would enjoy the frolics, and I remember, too, that often times, sitting near her and dozing to sleep soon after the fiddlers would begin, was her little girl, Joan (now Mrs. Tom Clarke). Mrs. Thompson was one of the finest women I ever knew - of imposing dignity in appearance, with the finest head and best heart. She was the leader in all interests for good in this community, and I recognize so many of her characteristics in her granddaughter, Nellie (Mrs. Nellie Peters Black.)

        "About this time the town began to enlarge and the social circle was brightened by such pretty girls as were Laura Farrar, Harriet Eliza Cone, now Mrs. Hayden, and Jane Killian, now Mrs. L. P. Grant.

        "I remember, too, when Charles Latimer's two pretty, smart daughters first appeared in Atlanta, Rebecca and Mary (Mrs. William H. Felton and Mrs. Mary L. McLendon). Rebecca was considered the smartest and Mary the prettiest, but don't put that down for publication, because women are curious, and the two sisters might have a dispute over the truth of that statement.

        "In them by the way is a wonderful blending of parental characteristics. Their father was one of the stanchest and strongest of men, very much in advance of the times as to theories and thought which accounts for their force of character and advanced ideas, while their mother was the gentlest and most religious of women, imparting to them their religious ardor and stand in the temperance movement.

        "I would not undertake to enumerate the events that marked the progress of Atlanta society after the war, but now and then when I see some prominent woman, or read of her achievements, I recall the first time I ever saw her. For instance I never read of the president of the Georgia clubs that I do not recall Mrs. Lowe as a bride, when she appeared at church in a blue velvet frock. The women folks talked a great deal about it, and I believe they said it was made in Baltimore. It created

quite as much comment in society on the west side, then the quarter for the city's aristocracy (I still live there) as did the black silk dress worn by Mrs. Joseph Smith, the grandmother of Mrs. Will Spalding and Mr. J. E. Butler, when she came to Atlanta before the war, at the time that Joe Smith succeeded Wash Collier as postmaster.

        "There are few things, however," mused the colonel, "in which Atlanta has progressed more wonderfully than in her livery, for when I brought 'ole miss' here a bride I had to wait three days before I could get a buggy to take her for a drive. She was so pretty - a great deal prettier than any of my daughters or granddaughters - and I wanted to show her off. Finally I managed to borrow Oliver Jones's buggy, and his little mare, 'Jennie Lind,' and we took our first drive together in Atlanta."

        Imagine, if you can, the advent of a real railroad in a poor section where no railroads had been expected and what the eight-mile travel to Stone Mountain stood for with a popular conductor who provided sugar plums for the children and rare and racy jokes for the grown-ups! There was a tower on the mountain that I saw first when I was a small child. There was that day dancing galore in the lower hall of the tower. A candy vendor persuaded my father to buy for me a white candy dove with buckshot for its eyes.

        That first tower was blown down in a storm and its successor was erected on the highest point on the mountain. The second one, also, went to the discard, but in "White's Miscellanies" you can see a picture of the Stone Mountain and its noted tower taken about seventy years ago. I remember well the coming together of the first state agricultural society ever organized in Georgia, at Stone Mountain, and the sensation created thereby in 1847 and also the crowds that went in 1848 when our household went along with all the neighbors who could be spared from home on that occasion. The little town had meagre hotel facilities and the visitors from Madison, Greensboro and as far down as Augusta, completely swamped their accommodations. I remember that day riding in a railroad box car, and sitting on a squash sent for exhibition that tipped the beam at eighty-two pounds. Some squash that, but I was weighed that same day and marked eighty-two pounds on the scales. My father remarked, "some girl and some squash." It is astonishing how small

incidents stay with you when greater ones go glimmering into oblivion. The politicians were active at that early day and the defeated ones complained that the new agricultural society was only a political machine. History repeats itself and the society chaperoned several governors into the executive chair in later years.

        Along about that time I began first to hear about small pox. The disease was brought into Atlanta by a guest at Thompson's hotel and spread panic all through that section. So far as I knew it was the first excitement of that kind in upper Georgia. Until then nobody, old or young, had the disease or had been vaccinated. Vaccine matter was as scarce as hen's teeth. We refugeed to the river plantation and I there attended a rural school where I saw the school boys race out of doors to punish a smart Aleck who went by crying "school butter." I learned to play marbles and study Latin Grammar and carried to school in a little basket a small bottle of molasses for use at lunch time. Nothing in later life has been more appetizing than those good biscuits with holes punched with my forefinger and then filled with molasses. We also ate hard-boiled eggs and cold sweet potatoes and green apples with salt without telling about the latter at home. We sat on hard benches ranged along the wall with books lying under us on the floor. I met a truckster in Atlanta last week, over eighty, who went to school with me in those early days. We were delighted to renew acquaintance. At recess time we paddled in the spring branch occasionally with bare feet and the boys brought red apples and plums in their pockets for their favorite girls. When a rain cloud rose up the pony was sent for myself and small sister. I rode in the saddle and she sat behind and held on to my waist with both of her dear little arms. Sometimes we would be dripping wet from head to foot, and the thunder and lightning terrified us both while I whipped up the pony and tried to comfort the little one behind me. Surely those were exciting, happy days. It was a land of plenty and I took no thought of the morrow.

        My college course began when I was half-way between fifteen and sixteen - Junior, half advanced. Madison, Ga., was a remarkable educational centre, the Baptists and Methodists had each a girls' college. Lagrange had the same equipment and those were the only high-grade girls' schools in upper Georgia in my early life and north of Wesleyan College located in Macon, the latter claiming to be the first among women's colleges in the United States. There was no railroad to LaGrange so Madison won the day with my parents. My mother had attended school there also in her girlhood days, and mother said "Don't forget we must be convenient to the railroad if this girl gets sick. It will take two long days and more to drive to LaGrange in the barouche," so I went to Madison.

        Rev. Lucius Wittich had a reputation among Methodists for learning and disciplinary qualities as president, and I went to his house to board and received my diploma in July, 1852, sixty-five long years ago. It was a great and appreciated opportunity and I had a royal good time; shared the first honor with a class mate, read a valedictory essay and played time and again during the commencement exercises on piano and guitar, and received a real calf-skin diploma and, more than all, made my parents very happy that I had not failed to make good. When I see (as I did see last year) one hundred and eighty odd young ladies at the Milledgeville Normal and Industrial college receive diplomas in one day and knew what that meant to parents at home, who had made many sacrifices and spent money to give those girls a start in life, I could tell very accurately what progress had been made in sixty-five years when there were only a few denominational schools for girls and only a limited number of girls who were fortunate in securing a college education, and every dollar expended came out of the self-sacrificing parents in the home, and not a free school for the masses throughout the confines of the Empire State of the South. We have so many opportunities now compared to the few in

the long ago. I also wonder that there is not more appreciation and progress than we find in 1917.

        I married shortly after I was eighteen, and my entire life was soon absorbed in home service and home making and the care of my babies and the duties that fell upon women of my class and kind in caring for a considerable number of slaves and in keeping up with the requirements of a plantation home in the country.

        Before I forget it I will mention the interest which colleges for women excited in the public mind about the time I graduated at Madison Female college in 1852. Great crowds gathered and were delighted. There were twelve girls in my class and so far as I know all are dead but two at this writing. I was entered at fifteen years and six months and graduated at sharp seventeen. I took the entire course, also lessons on piano and guitar. I had pencil drawing also for all of which I had a strong liking. I had no time to throw away to keep it up and during one session I undertook French. He was an American, the teacher, and I had had a previous French teacher raised in France, so we had more than one discussion on the right and wrong of our French lessons. But my music teacher was an enthusiast and we worked together famously. We speedily became a mutual admiration society composed of two. Oh, it is sweet to remember how often at the close of my music hour he would say "Play for me an accompaniment for my violin and we will have De-Beriot's Sixth Air. I enjoy seeing your love for music the best there is." In rural neighborhoods seventy years ago pianos were very scarce and I am still thankful that I had a willing mind and was ready to play for everybody. My father had a flour mill, also a store, a woodshop and blacksmith shop and there were always people busy coming and going.

        A few weeks ago a young gentleman almost a stranger to me, told me of a visit to lower Georgia and of meeting a gray-haired man in his eighties who had asked about me, etc. The octogenarian told him of his delight in his young days when he was allowed to go to Latimer's mill and then could go to the house and

ask me to play for him. He told my young neighbor of my willingness to oblige him and the others that were with him and what a glimpse of real life and melody I thereby opened to him. It gave me sincerest joy to find this compliment returning to me after many days. When the war of the fateful sixties left us impoverished, obliged to earn the bread we ate, until the plantation could be restored and farm labor secured, my husband and myself decided to open a school in Cartersville and do something for the young people who had been almost without school facilities, and also provide the wherewith for a start, making some sort of an honest living owing to our poverty. How I enjoyed that work would take a volume to tell and my diligence in my own school days was a prime factor for success in this strenuous time.

        I have never been an admirer of our public school system, set up in reconstruction days, and full of handicaps and infirmities. Some years ago I was invited by the Legislature of Georgia to meet with joint session of House and Senate and talk it over from my viewpoint. I will include the newspaper report of my address on that occasion at the end of this chapter. Since that time the system has grown more unwieldy as to size and more costly as to expense. It is surprising to know that our law-makers did not appreciate the impossibility of covering the ground and getting all the children educated by failing to command compulsory attendance.

        When Georgia legislators assumed the liberty to commander or conscript your tax money to educate my child it was only just, fair and equitable to compel me to send that child to school or know the reason why. I fully understand that public utilities are hard to manage, but I also agree with a level-headed old legislator who was "agin the whole business, because it is the easiest thing to do, spend other people's money."

        The basic principle in such education is protection against ignorance and illiteracy, it being a preventive to crime and disorder, as elaborately expounded, but public school education is or should be limited to a

plain English education, for it is a well-established fact that many of our greatest criminals are among the best educated and it is rank Socialism to take your money by force for any such purpose. Our public school education is a sort of moulding machine where all the children are herded together and forced into the moulds prepared by theorists, sometimes thoroughly impractical in general use and application.

        In my part of the country a girl or boy begins to go to school at sharp six and holds on until nearly nineteen or twenty. The boys are not fitted for any calling or profession and generally serve as "bundle carriers" for merchants, and girls must then go to some other place to become equipped for making a decent living. But somebody will say "Mrs. Felton is an old fogy, behind the times, a slow coach, etc." There is only one answer to meet such charges: It is a gigantic scheme to squander tax money, growing bigger every year and standing in the way of a better and more satisfactory way of securing education for the very people who need it most and care the least for this opportunity of free tuition. Up to this time there have been millions of tax money drafted or conscripted out of those who own something, to pay teachers and school commissioners while the parents of no-account homes can completely defeat the undertaking by keeping the children in the cotton patch or in cotton mill work instead of attending school.

        Railway travel in Georgia was nothing like the present use of rail passenger transportation. The rates were high, connections difficult and when you started a journey you expected to get back of course but when you might get home was uncertain.

        I remember a trip my father and myself took in the summer of either 1846 or 47. We were to go to Brunswick, Ga. There was no way to get there from Decatur unless we first took train to Atlanta, lately named from Marthasville. Then we started to Macon. We had a before-day breakfast and traveled until 3 P.M. to reach Macon, one hundred miles. We went to the best hotel and later walked about in the city. We were told that the train to Savannah started

early in the morning and there was nothing to do but hang up until next morning. As we had small experience with railroads that did not bother us. We started on Thursday, left Macon Friday morning and traveled until after dark to make the trip to Savannah. A tremendous rain storm overtook us and the track was often under water. The train hands frequently shoveled off the wet sand from the rails. After dark we were able to get seats in an omnibus which jolted and careened over the flooded streets until we were able to go in the Pulaski House. Securing a room we prepared for the hotel supper. We had been traveling, as you see, two whole days to cover a distance that is trifling at this time.

        Next morning we bought tickets on a steamboat that made semi-weekly trips to St. Augustine, Fla., touching at Darien and Brunswick en route, going and coming. It was a fine boat they said. Everything was fine to me, a girl of eleven or twelve perhaps. We went the inland passage around and among the historic islands off the coast of Georgia. We reached Brunswick about eight o'clock Sunday morning. There was no landing wharf. Brunswick had experienced a boom and the boom had collapsed. We were lifted down from the steamboat into a small boat. We were rowed along until the beach became troublesome, so a sailor picked me up in his arms like a baby and waded to hard ground. My father rode pick-a-pack on the shoulder of a robust sailor. There was one other passenger, a victim of the boom catastrophe. He told us the big hotel was shut up and the whole thing was flat, but we might get lodgings with a plain family that fed pretty well and were clever, all of which was a modest estimate of some of the cleverest folks I ever met. We were the only guests and they fed us up to the limit on sea foods, like turtle soup and eggs, crabs and shrimp to which I took like a regular fish. My father's business was to validate some land deeds and the Inferior Court of Flynn county met on Monday, and that part being settled we made merry until the boat came back Wednesday evening on the return trip. We fished and rode in little boats to my heart's content.

Between the mosquitoes and the hot sun my tender skin was generally blistered where exposed. We reached Savannah Thursday up in the day and gave the balance of the time to sight-seeing and getting things for the dear mother and little sister at home. There were such heaps of things, the like of which I had never dreamed of, that decisions were hard to make.

        Finally our generous parent said "We all must have shoes and I know the numbers," so we went to the finest shoe store we could find and bought not one pair apiece, but two pairs each. They were the best he could find and my first experience with extravagant footwear.

        I was so full of enjoyment, wide awake in every fibre of my being, not a bit troubled about boys and in keen pursuit of all new ideas, that my father said, "Wouldn't you like to see Charleston also?" My answer was a joyful hug, so he bought tickets on a boat called the "William Seabrooke" and we started out to ride the big ocean waves. I fared all right until I tried to dress myself next morning and then I was so seasick my father had to come to me and carried me on the upper deck, and I had so much "mal-de-mare," that I have shied at another ocean trip and will never see Europe at my time of life. We remained a couple of days in Charleston and it required the best of two more days and one night to get back to Decatur. We were very fortunate to make the trip in such good time, as they told us.

        The 4th of July came while we were in the decayed city of Brunswick. Everybody, I mean men and boys, celebrated with guns and powder. When they came around where I was, in the house of our entertainers, and fired a volley or two under the floors, I was scared badly enough to be averse for a whole lifetime to seeking entertainment by scaring children and dogs nearly to death with shooting frolics.

SLAVERY IN THE SOUTH

        When I received the Congressional Record, bearing date July 16, 1917, I found Hon. Ben Tillman of South Carolina recorded therein and discussing slavery in the nation. He uses the following words: "Slavery was a curse and the Civil War was necessary to destroy it. Nothing else could have done it because of the profit there was in it. The same struggle for freedom and the rights of the laboring classes in Europe is going on right now." He reprinted also a part of an address he made at Arlington Cemetery some years ago. "I never believed it possible I could do it, but slowly and by degrees I have come to think it was best that the South should be defeated and for me to say that is a marvel to myself. Slavery was a curse that had to be destroyed ere the South and the world could advance. It was a curse for which the South was no more responsible than the North. Both sections were responsible and both paid as penance four long bloody years for their joint sin."

        This discussion grew out of the late riots in East St. Louis, where negroes were mobbed and killed and ordered to vacate. I think this confession of Hon. "Pitchfork Ben" was perhaps good for himself, lately returned from a sanitarium and not a candidate for reselection to the U. S. Senate, but it will not be enthusiastically received in the State of South Carolina by the "fire-eating" politicians of the Palmetto State. It is only human nature to defend the actions and opinions of our forbears, and South Carolina's record on "nullification" and "secession" make it absolutely impossible that Mr. Tillman's confession will be echoed by those who will hereafter vote in Senator Tillman's successor. But this belated confession gives me a text for my present writing, and I propose to set down the very words employed by Georgia's political leaders, when Georgia followed South Carolina out of the Federal Union in the winter of 1860-61. I own a complete copy of the proceedings of the Secession convention. There are very few in perfect preservation,

and this book hoary with age presents the official statement of Georgia's grievances against those who opposed the institution of domestic slavery.

        What Mr. Tillman thinks or what I think is a very small matter, but the results of the Georgia Secession convention are sufficiently important to be carefully remembered by succeeding generations. As a preamble I will also say that Georgia, in General Oglethorpe's time, discounted and discredited African slavery, but the "profit in it" overcame these prudential considerations. After the Yazoo Fraud was finally settled, the inrush of slaveholders to the Carolinas and Georgia became very great, and the new comers brought along their slaves that they owned in Maryland and Virginia under the laws prevailing in the early colonies.

        I will not attempt to record in this connection the opposition that northern states early evinced towards the abolition agitators. The "profit in it" and the sale of negroes to Southern owners made business lively. The abolitionists were frequently rotten-egged in the state of Massachusetts in their attempts to secure a hearing. Perhaps I am justified in saying that abolition oratory continued to be distasteful to the public so long as there were slaves to sell to southern planters and until the "profit" in them became nil. These abolition agitators did not become popular until the politicians enlisted the northern churches in this work of reform. When the preachers and the politicians joined forces the row began in dead earnest, and grew apace.

        I was a small girl when I became acquainted with Bishop James O. Andrew and I was only nine years old when the Methodist church split over a negro girl owned by Bishop Andrew's second wife in 1844. The story of the split has been so often discussed-abused and defended-that I am not inclined to say any more on that line, at this time. From the hour when the Methodist brethren separated at a General Conference, until Georgia seceded in January, 1861, this slavery question was kept to the front. The preachers of the Southern church quoted the Bible, when they

took slavery for a pulpit discourse. Our Southern bishops owned slaves and vigorously defended the institution by voice and pen.

        Slave property increased rapidly. Child bearing sometimes began at twelve years and frequent births made a heavy per cent of "profit." According to Hon. Thos. R. R. Cobb, who was killed at the battle of Fredericksburg, "the greatest evidence of wealth in the planter was the number of his slaves. They gave the most remunerative income. It was considered the very best property to give to children and children parted from their slaves with greatest reluctance." These are plain and accurate statements.

        Therefore, these Southern planters clung to their slave property and continued to invest money in slave property in Georgia after Sherman marched to the sea. It was nothing out of the common for a planter to pay twelve hundred dollars for a young, stalwart negro man, and a girl who brought easily eight hundred or a thousand dollars on the court house block might be relied upon to bear a healthy slave child once in two years. Anybody who could raise sufficient money invested in slaves.

        As I look back on that time of eager slave buying, I am amazed at the lack of foresight in a business way. Every nation that was civilized had abandoned domestic slavery except Brazil, when our people were apparently confident that it was a permanent thing, commanded by the Bible and ordained of God.

        There were abuses, many of them. I do not pretend to defend these abuses. There were kind masters and cruel masters. There were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries. In this one particular slavery doomed itself. When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man's slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.

        The Southern slaveholders looked on the "profit" side so long that they believed what they said. They

proved their sincerity by buying and herding together large slave families. The abolitionists were the best hated people ever known within my knowledge and the slave owner had no mercy when the abolitionists in the pulpit discussed him. It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war - when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness. "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad."

        We Southerners claimed almost divine right to the ownership of chivalry but it would have outlawed the most consecrated preacher known to that era of our history if he had dared to say that a slave woman had divine right to own her own liberty or direct the lives of her own children. Some of the finest educators, pious and godly men threw up their positions in the South early in the struggle and returned to northern latitudes after becoming residents in Georgia.

        My husband, Dr. W. H. Felton, often regretted the going away of Rev. Stephen Olin, after he had been associated with Franklin College. The slightest disaffection on the slavery question would have vacated every editorial chair within the limits of the state.

        The story of our disagreements with the North filled a part of every page in every official record of congressional legislation. This heat and fury increased at every session of that body until the break came, and the Southern States pulled out and set up for themselves. We, in the South, honestly believed we could engineer a peaceable separation. There is no doubt of the sincerity of the belief. It was not an attempt at revolt or insurrection or anything else but a resolute intention to own slaves and regulate slavery just as our forbears had been doing for nearly a hundred years.

        So it happened that South Carolina went out first, followed by Alabama, Mississippi and Florida. Georgia saw she was up against a tremendous proposition and as I am only concerned to prove that it was slavery

and nothing but slavery that made Georgia secede, I find in the records of the Georgia Secession Convention certain indisputable facts, and nothing but facts, will furnish reliable history. Every county in Georgia had representation and Hon. Geo. W. Crawford was chosen as president by acclamation. Commissioners from South Carolina and Alabama were there to speak. Rules for the convention were adopted. Gov. Joseph E. Brown and ex-Governor Howell Cobb were invited to seats on the floor. The commissioners made their speeches on 17th January, 1861, and the convention adjourned. On the 18th, next day, the following resolution was offered by Hon. E. A. Nisbet: "That it is the opinion of this convention it is the right and duty of Georgia to secede from the present Union, and to co-operate with such of the other States as have or shall do the same, for the purpose of forming a Southern Confederacy, upon the basis of the Constitution of the United States, and that a committee be appointed by the chair to report an ordinance to assert the right and fulfill the obligation of the State of Georgia to secede from the Union."

        Remember that the convention had not cast a vote or debated a single question and this hasty movement was rushed upon it. Ex-Gov. Herschel V. Johnson, late candidate for vice-president on the Stephen A. Douglas ticket, offered a substitute. "The State of Georgia is attached to the Union and desires to preserve it if it can be done consistent with her rights and safety, but existing circumstances admonish her of danger; that danger arises from the assaults that are made upon the institution of domestic slavery and is common to all the Southern States, etc., etc."

        First, Be it ordained by the State of Georgia in sovereign convention assembled, that Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri be and are hereby invited respectively to meet with this state by delegates in a Congress at Atlanta, Ga., on 16th of February, 1861, to take into consideration the whole subject of their relations to the Federal Government, and to devise such a course of action as their interest,

equality and safety may require." Section 2nd invited the already seceded states to send commissioners to said congress. Section 3rd, "That inasmuch as Georgia is resolved not to abide permanently in the Union without satisfactory guarantees of future security the following propositions are respectfully suggested as the substance of what she regards indispensable amendments to the Constitution of the United States:

        1st. Congress shall have no power to abolish or prohibit slavery in the territories or any place under their jurisdiction. 2nd. Each state shall be bound to surrender fugitive slaves, etc. The United States to pay the owner the value of such slave, the county in which such enticement shall occur to be liable to United States for amount to be recovered in Federal Courts. 3rd. To be a penal offense to rescue or entice or encourage any fugitive slave or to assist, etc., etc. 4th. Whatever is recognized as property in the United States shall be held to be property in the Territories, etc.

        Section 5. New states to be admitted into the Union with or without slavery by the people at the time of admission. 6th Congress to have no power to prohibit or interfere with slave trade between the states, nor prohibit citizens of United States from carrying slaves passing through or sojourning in District of Columbia, with prompt punishment of all persons who may interfere. 7th. No state to pass any law to prohibit owners from carrying slaves and returning with them throughout the Union. 8th. Obligation to surrender fugitive slaves or fugitives charged with offenses connected with or committed against slavery or slave property with agreement that whatever is criminal in one state will be deemed criminal in all states. 9th. No person of African descent shall be permitted to vote for Federal officers nor to hold any office or appointment under government of the United States."

        Such were the demands to be made on the Federal Union or Georgia would secede. There was "elaborate discussion" that day until the previous question

was called, and Mr. Johnson's substitute was set aside and a direct vote on Mr. Nesbit's resolution was called for, yea and nay vote. 160 yeas, 130 nays.

        The convention organized on January 16, heard commissioners on 17th and had virtually seceded Georgia out of the Union on 18th. Alarming haste!!

        When the ordinance was put on its passage, Mr. Hill, of Trout, moved to give attention to Mr. Johnson's resolution here copied. This was defeated, yeas 133, nays 164.

        Then the ordinance itself was voted on. Yeas 208, nays 89, January 19, 1861.

        The balance of the secession work went along with a cut and dried program of the first working day. The majority was with the "fire-eaters" and they overrode the large minority. There were tens of thousands of Union-loving people in Georgia, but they had no chance in that convention. They were forced into a four-year bloody war to defend the institution of domestic slavery, and they lost their slaves, their real estate and personal property, lost their surplus money and lost their lives in many cases. Excepting those who retained their lands by self denial and self-sacrifice, this section was swept bare by war destruction.

        In a crowded parlor in Washington City, during the late Confederate Reunion, June, 1917, I heard a Confederate (wearing a handsome uniform with a number of decorations on his breast, and apparently well-to-do in this world's goods), expatiating on the slavery question, insisting that the Bible approved it, and God had ordained it, and the negro belonged nowhere save in slavery and the world would not be set aright until the old order was restored. Fifty-two years had come and gone, and domestic slavery had been abolished on both hemispheres, fully half a century and this ancient warrior was still stirring the embers of sectional fury and still spluttering about the rights of Southern slave owners.

        All we individually owned disappeared, except the farm land, and in my old age, I am pondering this question, why did not the South compromise by selling their slaves or offering to take a price, and put it up to

those who were afraid of war? Was slave ownership ever worth the sacrifice of blood and treasure that resulted from that secession ordinance? Was Mr. Tillman correct in saying that there was no other way to remove the curse, and the South did penance with a four-years bloody war? To clear his words of all ambiguity, did the Lord Almighty punish the slave owners by sending on them the awful struggle that ended in complete destruction of the South and the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives? Any reader of history will agree with me that the negro question is not half settled. Our fifty years of hard experience since the Civil War demonstrates one fact only, that the negro is in the United States to stay and according as he is dealt with, depends our own peace or disaster in his association with the whites.

        There is a well-authenticated story exploited in the newspapers of the present year, 1917, that President Lincoln, in February, 1865, met the Confederate commissioners at the Hampton Roads conference and made some sort of advances, looking towards a cessation of hostilities and other suggestions looking towards some reasonable remuneration for slave property. This is affirmed by several reliable persons, who declare that Hon. A. H. Stephens made such statements and he was the vice president of the ill-fated Confederacy at the time. Some of these declarations are in the shape of affidavits. On the other side several noted persons declare there was nothing of the kind that occurred, that it was a fake story. I have understood that the Confederate Veterans organization proposes to explore into this matter and give the result at the reunion in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1918.

        Hon. Henry Watterson, of Kentucky, declares he had the story at first hand from Mr. Stephens. Hon. Julian Carr, of North Carolina, denies that any such story can or will be affirmed. The meeting between President Lincoln and Vice-President Stephens did take place in Hampton Roads, February 3, 1865. Mr. Stephens was accompanied by Confederate Secretary of War, formerly Judge Campbell, of the Federal Supreme

Court, and Hon. R. M. L. Hunter, Confederate Senator of Virginia.

        Secretary of State W. H. Seward was the :Federal Commissioner, and so far as known Mr. Lincoln's presence was not expected. What he said on any of these matters was addressed privately to Mr. Stephens.

        There was lack of harmony between the president and vice-president of the Confederacy. I am convinced that Mr. Stephens entertained different views from Mr. Davis, especially in the latest months of the war struggle. Mr. Stephens is recorded as being in Crawfordville on the 20th of February, 1865, and he evidently understood that the government at Richmond was on its last legs. The surrender at Appomattox was only two months off when the meeting at Hampton Roads took place. The story goes that Mr. Lincoln said if he might write Union on the top of the page, and the Confederates would lay down arms they might write anything else below and he would sign it. The Confederate commissioners conferred and reported they must only ask for their independence. So the last and final chance to get some sort of a compromise went glimmering, and Mr. Lincoln's overture did no good and every life that was shot out afterwards was sacrificed. Indeed as the war business appealed to me there was nothing but loss and sacrifice after the battle of Gettysburg. Going into war as we did to preserve the institution of domestic slavery, we risked everything and lost everything by the venture, and we also lost the sympathy of the outside world because of our slavery contention.

        I remember the visit President Davis made to Macon in February, 1865. My husband went to the city to hear the speech. We were poor refugees, only four miles distant. I watched and waited for his return, for my heart was heavy and the times ominous. I saw little hopefulness in his face. "The President told us we were doing well and there was no doubt as to our final success." It was the old, old story, and Sherman had already marched to the sea and Georgia was prostrate. Despite the rigid, drastic conscription which called all men from sixteen to sixty, despoiling

the cradle and the grave. Sherman went from Atlanta to Savannah practically unopposed. I was called to see my sick mother in Crawfordville, Ga., just before Sherman threatened Macon. We were cut off in returning by the burning of the railroad bridge over the Oconee river. We were only ten miles from the conflagration, and there was nothing to be done but to go back either to Crawfordville, or try to make a long circuit by Savannah, then to Albany, and then northward. We essayed the latter route. On that trip we passed car-loads of Andersonville prisoners being removed to another camp as it was expected that Sherman would strike for Andersonville. The night was gloomy and the torch fires made a wierd scene as our train rolled along beside passing flat cars on which those Federal prisoners were guarded, with torch lights illuminating the faces of those ragged, smoke-begrimed, haggard and miserably filthy men. I had a glimpse of war conditions that was new to me. Prison treatment of such men has always been a disgrace to Christianity and civilization. I had read of Camp Chase and Johnson's Island and been angered at the treatment accorded to our Confederate prisoners, but that sight of train-loads of Federal prisoners on that wild night in Southern Georgia, when I could look into their faces within a few feet of the train I became an eyewitness to their enforced degradation, filth and utter destitution and the sight never could be forgotten. Nor can I forget seeing on a depot platform a dead negro man who had said something offensive to an Andersonville guard and he had been shot a few minutes before our train pulled in. The quivers of dying flesh had hardly subsided in his stalwart body as we rolled away.

        There never was a more loyal woman in the South after we were forced by our political leaders to go to battle to defend our rights in ownership of African slaves, but they called it "State's Rights," and all I owned was invested in slaves and my people were loyal and I stood by them to the end. Like General Lee, I could not fight against my kindred in a struggle that meant life or death to them. Nevertheless I am now

too near to the border land of eternity to withhold my matured conscientious and honest opinion. If there had been no slaves there would have been no war. To fight for the perpetuation of domestic slavery was a mistake. The time had come in the United States to wipe out this evil. The South had to suffer, and even when our preachers were leading in prayer for victory, during the war, and black-robed mothers and wives were weeping for their dead ones, who perished on the field of battle, I had questions in my own mind as to what would be the end of it.

        We had a Methodist camp ground on our plantation in 1860. Immense crowds were in attendance on Sunday exercises, among them the Governor of the State. The crowd was so great I could not leave our tent as we were cooking and feeding people the most of the day. On Sunday night, while the mourner's bench was crowded and people shouting down in the auditorium, there were neighbors and friends inside our tent armed to the teeth waiting for midnight to go out quietly to suppress a "rising" that had been reported to them late in the afternoon. The dread of negro insurrection and social equality with negroes at the ballot box held the Southern whites together in war or peace. That "rising" was a false alarm but the terror of these risings made Southern fathers and husbands desperate as to remedies. It is the secret of lynching instead of a legal remedy. It was "born in the blood and bred in the bone," and a resultant of domestic slavery in the Southern States. It was at the bottom of the East St. Louis riots. It is working like leaven in a thousand localities where unsuspecting people live today. Therefore I affirm that the negro question is unsettled and the end is still out of sight. This irritating side of the slavery issue is still rampant throughout Georgia, and spreading in north and west.

        I heard the cannon in Rome, Georgia, twenty-five miles away, when Georgia seceded. I was only three miles distant from the railroad the night Mr. Jefferson Davis passed through to Montgomery, Ala., to be made President of the Confederacy. If it had been in day time I should have seen him. I saw Georgia troops

reviewed by the Governor at "Big Shanty" when they were drilling for the last time before leaving for Virginia. The battle of Manassas was going on when they passed through our town on July 21, 1861. The wires were working telling about the battle and the women were sobbing with arms about the necks of soldier boys who were bidding them a final good-bye at the depot. The only brother I had was a cadet at Marietta Military Institute and he volunteered with the Gate City Guards of Atlanta sometime before he was sixteen. That boy-beardless, slender, tenderly raised, immature, a child in years, left his mother in gleeful delight, anxious to go, craving excitement, and knowing nothing whatever about camp life or the dangers that were in front of him. His mother's face was quivering with suffering and anxiety, a part of her very life was carried along with that heedless youth, and her anxiety never lessened until her son surrendered with General Forrest, at LaGrange, at the close; of the war.

        The most serious thing about war is the slaughter of boys. It is the boys of the country who must face the enemy. They lose education. They risk the vices of camp life, they encounter the diseases that swoop down on them, and generally bring home enough of the evils to wreck physical and moral health for all time. They are the "seed corn" of any nation and the crop fails. The political leaders force a country into bloody strife and three-fourths of the army are young men and boys who had absolutely nothing to do with bringing it on, without any real knowledge of the evils resented or principles fought for.

        If our political leaders in January, 1861, had placarded the walls in Milledgeville with our intention to fight for the perpetuation of negro slavery the convention would have stepped backward, but to show the exceeding haste and folly of our times the members of the secession convention, as before noted, placed no other grievance or policy of defense on their official minutes.

        There was scarcely a week of war time that we did not feed soldiers going or coming. I knitted socks, gloves and sleeping caps continuously. We had wounded

soldiers to stay with us, we carried food to trains, when wounded soldiers were being transported to points lower down. For a number of days after the bloody battle of Chickamauga the trains were packed with wounded, a number dying on the way. We made a daily business of cooking and carrying baskets of good food to help them along. Some of the most tragic episodes of my life happened in trying to relieve the distress of the time. It would take a larger book than this to set them down in detail.

        In the spring of 1864 it was evident that Cherokee Georgia would be overrun by the Federal army. The Confederate troops were at Dalton, and Gen. Sherman was preparing to leave Chattanooga. We decided to refugee southward, secured an old farm four miles from Macon to make a crop and left our home with fifteen colored slaves in charge. I never saw the home any more until August, 1865. When I reached the gate I picked up the springs that had been a part of my dead child's fine baby carriage, also the arm of a large parlor mahogany chair that had been also burned. Desolation and destruction everywhere, bitter, grinding poverty - slaves all gone, money also. We certainly paid the price while we were in refugee condition. General Storeman made his raid on Macon, expecting to reach Andersonville where the Federal prisoners were located. We fell in his line of approach. They tethered their horses in our lots after midnight. When day light came the face of the earth was covered with "blue coats" mounted cavalry. They did not capture Macon but our place was inside their lines all day and succeeding night. They took all they cared to have and trampled down crops before they slipped away. They surrendered eight or ten miles from us to General Iverson.

        Sherman's army and Wheeler's cavalry overran us in the month of November, 1864. When it came to foraging one side was nearly as bad as the other. Sherman had so little opposition that he chose his own direct route to Savannah. The Confederacy was cut in two and a line of lone chimneys marked the burned path he made from Atlanta to the sea. It was very

astounding to remember all these reverses and yet we were constantly told we would certainly succeed, and we clutched at every item of news that indicated a success. Our politicians still were speechifying. Hon. Linton Stephens made an address in Macon in which were criticisms of the administration on the futility and fatality of conscript legislation as it was worked out in the Southern army.

        With drastic regulations as to conscription, and every male from sixteen to sixty liable to service, the armies dwindled away. Yet there were men in plenty - officials galore, and exempts in abundance.

        I cannot go into minor details but must not fail to note the surrender of Macon, which completed the surrender of the sovereign state of Georgia, and which occurred a very few days or hours before Appomattox, early in April, 1865.

        There was at least one newspaper still printed in Macon and we had to go there for news and to mail our letters. Having heard nothing but rumors for several days, I decided to ride horseback and find out if General Wilson was really advancing on Macon. I hitched the horse in East Macon, walked across Central R. R. bridge (city bridge having been burned), and made my way to Burke's book store on Mulberry street. Mr. Burke had formerly lived in Cass County (We were angry with General Cass and renamed it Bartow, after General Francis Bartow was killed at first Manasses battle) and was our friend. As I approached the store door, nearly level with the street, I saw a gentleman sitting close by outside in a split-bottomed chair. His face seemed familiar but I was not certain, so I requested Mr. Burke to return to the door with me and tell me about him. He had on plain clothes, plain hat, etc. Said Mr. Burke, "that is Major -General Howell Cobb, commander-in-chief of the military forces of the State of Georgia." He proceeded to tell me that whiskey barrels had been broken in (I could smell it in the gutters) and a squad of Macon citizens had gone out to meet the victorious General Wilson who was reported twenty miles away early that morning, with rapid moving cavalry and attended

by hundreds of negroes, who had been gathering behind him since he had occupied Columbus. The citizens expected the worst and that squad of citizens were asking for protection from loot, rapine and the torch. Mr. Burke advised me to get back to my refuge shack without delay, which advice I followed and in haste. I still wonder that I had the temerity to undertake that lonely ride. It was a deserted road, much of it still in forest growth, and the poor little horse was slow. As I went along, grieved and depressed by our condition, I remembered that Major General Howell Cobb had been one of the most active fire-eaters in the secession convention, one of the many who could not wait even a few days to discuss the risks and dangers which everybody knew would assail us.

        Not a corporal's guard did he bring forward in Macon to meet the advancing foe; and yet as commander-in -chief of all of Georgia military forces he could have called to the colors every boy and man from sixteen to sixty in that section by conscription. (From what I then saw I was strenuously opposed to conscription for Georgia boys in 1917. I had no objection to allowing volunteers to go to France or to serve in airplanes if they volunteered for such service, but I did my little best to convince Georgia readers that it would not do to force our soldiers into airships or to send them across the Atlantic ocean to dictate to foreign governments or fight for kings or queens or command the sort of rulers they should have in the future.) The army of General Wilson reached Macon in the afternoon and poor old Georgia was done for. Although the state had sent many thousands to army service and had borne with patience the failures, mistakes and defeats that had been forced on her by lack of statesmanship, yet in the hour of her deepest humiliation the commander-in-chief of Georgia's reserves had nothing, not a man to offer to stand between her innocent women and what an invading army might inflict upon them. The issue of slavery became too frail a support in that gloomy period of the South's history for protection, and I still wonder that we still had no influential

statesmen who might have grasped the facts and stood for something else besides war, where hundreds of thousands of white men were forced by conscription into bloody combat to defend that slavery contention. After Macon surrendered we also understood that the Confederacy had collapsed. The final surrender at Appomattox fell on dull ears. The capture of President Jefferson Davis and the bringing of himself and escort to Macon made a ripple of excitement for a few days, but we realized that the game had been fully played and all was lost. Billions of values disappeared and nobody but thrifty speculators had a dollar to spend or to begin the struggle again or start in business with bitter poverty and starvation in front of them.

        We must also chronicle the lack of statesmanship after the Southern politicians were convinced that they had unwisely rushed Georgia into secession. For more than fifty years this subject has been discussed in Congress, on the stump and by churchmen, and newspapers. It filled congress with small men, of the demagogue variety, both North and South. It has retarded the South's progress after the slavery issue was settled so far as slave ownership was concerned. It has been stirred and exploited in every national election. If the ownership of slaves was a curse to the South, according to Mr. Tillman, the enmities and injustices of Civil War hatreds, along with sectional animosity and race evils, have been a curse to the entire Union. And the end is not yet. As I write these lines there is bloody race conflict in Pennsylvania. It promises to be a lively issue in the progress of the present war as an internal disturbance from Maine to California, from the Lakes to the Gulf. The children of the Southern States are being unwisely taught by Southern agitators, women as well as men, that the political issues of the Civil War are still germane and worthy of adoration. They are instructed to call the Lost Cause a glorious cause. They resent any change in public opinion, because the change would mean their own retiracy to back seats in politics and from public attention. They are barnacles on the ship of

state, and they have inoculated hatred to "D-n Yankees," as a creed to be eulogized and fostered. The curse of slavery is still following hard upon the footsteps of our nation's progress because of hybrid races of mulatto and mestizo varieties. Every nation that has a recorded history went to decay when honorable marriage was trampled upon and the South went to defeat because of violations of the moral law. As a rule, slave owners were careful of the health of their slaves. "The profit in it," made them careful. There were bad masters, many of them, but the increase of slave property before the Civil War attests the good feeding and housing of the slaves. The crime that made slavery a curse, lies in the fact that unbridled lust placed the children of bad white men in slave pens, on auction blocks, and no regard was shown to parentage or parental responsibility in such matters. I remember well a noted home in Middle Georgia where a rich man lived in open alliance with a colored woman and where Governors and Congressmen were often invited to dine and where they were glad to go. These visitors understood conditions in the Dickson home. They knew there were children there born of a slave mother and the law of Georgia forbade such miscegenation. These facts are of record because of the contest over the valuable Dickson estate in the courts of Georgia and the colored children were given the money because the owner acknowledged the progeny in his will. There were other men of distinction in Georgia who also defied the marriage law of the state by keeping up two households on the same plantation, one white and the other colored, and both women were afraid to make public outcry.

        Therein lay the curse of slavery.

        It is continually urged that "Southern civil war soldiers were not thinking of their slaves because few of them had any." It is a serious arraignment, because those who had no slaves were finally forced to go, because of rigid conscription laws, and very few of the large landowners who urged on the war were killed on the battle fields. They were active as a rule in legislation passed by the secession convention, and

as herein shown devoted to slaves and slavery and its perpetuation and protection.

        On page 293 of Journal of Georgia Secession Convention, you will find the following words: " The General Assembly (of Georgia) shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves." These were very superfluous words. Those who owned them wanted more and those who did not own them were looking forward to the time when they hoped to own them. This secession convention had a great deal to say of "slave-holding states" and while no general assembly was allowed to pass laws emancipating slaves no citizen might forbid or interfere with the bringing in of slaves. One of the inducements offered to Maryland and Delaware was worded thus: "Go on and raise your own labor." This slave-owning Confederacy was to be a close corporation, only slave-owning states were to be admitted and by raising their own labor there was nothing to hinder in commercial enterprises because of this monopoly of slave labor.

        "The profit in it" made these slave-holding states arrogant, also very angry. Abolitionists were likewise politically active. When the heat of the argument became consuming, there was nothing left but the arbitrament of the sword. Thus the South lost the slaves, and the profit in them. Common sense should have dictated a compromise. There was apparent lack of statesmanship.

        I am impressed that the slavery advocates expected to retire without bloodshed. If they had been wiser compromise offers would have been in evidence. Nothing but the expectation of a peaceful separation will explain the hasty methods used by the politicians of the early 60s. And the end is still in abeyance.

CHAPTER II.

SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE CIVIL WAR.

        [Synopsis of an address delivered in Augusta, Ga, on invitation of United Daughters of Confederacy in year 1900.]

        "The pleasing introduction to which I have listened this evening was delightful to me, and will be long remembered. To one like myself, going down the sunset slope of life, such kind words are like cooling drinks in the heat of the day, and will remain with me to keep this visit in sweet remembrance.

        "I would be glad if I had the time to tell you what I have gathered concerning Georgia women in Revolutionary periods. I could present you with some of our Colonial women who were noble patriots. I am tempted to recite what I know from early Georgia history of Mary Musgrove, known in General Oglethorpe's time as the Empress of the Creek Nation. Her father had two children, a son and daughter, and he made choice of the latter as the reigning sovereign of the then powerful Creek Indians.

        "She had frequent dealings with General Oglethorpe as a ruling chieftainess. She drew a pension of $500 from the British Government for many years before her death. In a settlement with the whites she was allowed three Islands on the seacoast of Georgia, two of which her last husband sold for $10,000 in solid cash. She was given at another time $3,000 in gold. Mary died on St. Catherine's Island and her dwelling was standing as late as 1820. Mary's weak point was matrimony. Every venture she made was only fairly good, then bad and then worse. Her latest spouse was an Episcopal clergyman who came out with General Oglethorpe and who urged Mary to press her claims as an Indian Empress to the limit. When Mary was sober she refused to follow the preacher. When

she was full of rum she made a fool of herself as generally happens.

        Nevertheless there was in her the making of a great woman. She is the most prominent figure in General Oglethorpe's time, save this great English lord who first settled in Georgia.

        I might tell you a good deal about Nancy Hart, the revolutionary patriot, in the early settling of Eastern Georgia. She made her mark in brave, bold, strong lines. She was a terror to the Tory factions of that stormy time. One biographer says Nancy was crosseyed and loved her dram. She could be all that is charged against her, and still be superior to her ill- natured biographer, who was doubtless a woman hater. Nancy could handle a gun with the best marksmen of her time. She did defend a fort filled with women and children while the men of the neighborhood were chasing Indians and catching up with Tories. She loaded the cannon in the fort and when she discovered a sorry fellow in hiding she brought him out and put him behind the cannon to obey orders or she would give him what he deserved as a slacker.

        One critic says: "Nancy was a honey of a patriot, but a d-l of a wife." Nevertheless Nancy raised a large family of children and only moved westward when game became scarce in the rich bottom lands of the Savannah river.

        Nancy enjoys the very notable distinction of being the only Georgia woman who has had a county in Georgia named after her. True it is, she married a Hart, yet it was Nancy who captured Tories and drove them to the camps of the patriots. Hart county should have been called Nancy Hart county.

        Before I begin to tell you what I personally knew of Southern women in the Civil War, I shall tell you something about a class of women who lived in plantation homes, and who belonged there, and who raised families and whose work in the fields and the kitchen, in the loom-house and the dwelling, that we occupied in the Southern States, and who richly deserve honorable mention, and who contributed mightily to the

maintenance of the struggling Confederacy during four years of bloody warfare.

        I allude to the colored women, who were the cooks, the nurses and the main reliance of the white women in their arduous duties and unremitting struggle of the early 60s, where numbers were to be fed and clothed, nursed and protected, both black and white.

        It was a marvel, an enigma in abolition latitudes, that the slaves did not rise en-masse, at the beginning of hostilities. They marvelled, still that they did not, as did the Israelites when Pharoah was buried under the waters of the Red Sea. When the Federal armies encircled the Confederacy and every day's supply became scarcer and more difficult to gather, and the cordon was drawn closer in and raids were always threatened and many times were experienced, it was astonishing that the slave population did not refuse to serve and become unmanageable to their owners. They could have "despoiled the Egyptians," and yet strange to say great numbers were not only anxious to stay with their white folks when the surrender came, and did stay after emancipation and was a fact beyond dispute. In getting close to my subject I cannot omit the part that thousands of these colored women carried on in perfect or apparent harmony with their mistresses in the big house, the business of those households.

        I was born and raised in Georgia. My active life has been linked with the fortunes and misfortunes of my native state. I was raised with the servants that were in my home when I was born. My nurse, Agnes, was given to my mother by her parents to be my nurse. I loved her dearly and she often gave proof of her love for me. When she took unto herself a husband he lived on another plantation and came to see her every Saturday night with a pass. When she became the mother of several children and her husband's master would not sell Tom at any price, Agnes told us she would like to go with her husband, and she did go (at a sacrifice) to oblige her. But when I married Agnes came to me and begged that I should buy her and her family. She loved me so well that she was

willing to go anywhere to live near me. The affection was strong on both sides, but there was more money at stake than I could command.

        My sister's nurse came to her in the same way. Minerva took to herself a husband in the family at home. They had their cabin and a big wedding as a starter in married life. To the day of her death she was equally devoted to my sister and I am going to say in this connection, that the strong affection that existed between the whites and blacks will give the answer to the question. "Why did not the negroes rise and struggle for freedom when the Federal armies were pressing the Confederacy to the walls?" As I stand in this presence and measure my words in the sight of Heaven, I believe we owe the security of Confederate homes to the affection that prevailed between those who had lived together so long and the confidence that both had in each other.

        When the majority of white men were in the army and plantations were crowded with slaves large and small, there were fewer disturbances than occurred before or since the Civil War. I recall my black mammy who belonged to my father, a childless black woman, a cripple from white swelling since she was eleven years old, who was the most capable and satisfactory house servant with whom I have been associated during my long life. My first recollections are of Mammy. I remember a little stool in her cabin that was kept for my use. I can see in memory a little child intent on learning things Mammy could teach her, to knit, to sew, to card cotton rolls, and trying to do what Mammy did. I never heard an ugly word from her lips. I never heard my parents utter a cross word to her. I can still see the walls in her cabin festooned with strings of red pepper, bachelor buttons and ropes of chips of yellow pumpkin. Her small looking glass was encircled with cedar twigs that had been dipped in flour and the happy child would fall asleep in Mammy's lap and take a nap on Mammy's clean bed when the housefolks were gone to town or off on a visit, or at church. I have never eaten anything more appetizing than Mammy's cooking where we ate together.

The best that I had was shared with her and her husband, Uncle Sam, on Saturday nights always brought chestnuts, chinquapins, red apples or bird's eggs and such like and placed them in the "till" of Mammy's chest, and there I was sure to find them on those delightful visits to Mammy's cabin. I had some temper then and later on, and one time I got impatient and slapped Mammy. I knew I had committed a serious offense but I was too stubborn to say so. I went to the big house, crept into my little bed and suffered as I deserved to suffer until Mammy came in, to get her orders for next morning's breakfast, and broke the news of my late insurrection to my mother. I was glad. I wanted to get it done and over with. I had to beg Mammy's pardon, and also have her hug me once again to her bosom in token of a better peace.

        To her dying day she was a true and faithful friend. These personal allusions will, I hope, illustrate what I have intended to convey at this time. When Mammy's lame leg made an invalid of her, her meals were always sent from the table and arranged by my mother's hands. Her clothing was good and made for her regularly. She knew she would be cared for and was grateful for the affectionate kindness. Kindness begot kindness and I do not believe any living human could have persuaded Mammy to consent to an injury for those she had loved so well.

        There were just such colored women scattered all over the Southland. I take pleasure in paying tribute to their fidelity and general excellence for seeds of violence might have been quickly sown if the soil had been receptive.

        There was more or less of self interest in the slave owner's attitude to such faithful ones. They were valuable as property in ante-bellum days. Their health was looked after, they had abundant plain food and they were provided with good strong, coarse shoes and heavy cloth garments in cold weather. There was no stint as to fuel and the doctor came when they were sick.

        I chose to begin my lecture on these efficient and willing workers and I will further say they were accustomed

to use better speech and copy better manners from the white folks at the "big house" as house servants.

        I know slavery had many and glaring evils. There were bad men then, also bad men now, but the colored women on the farms were glad to go to the mistress for protection when raiders came along and the roar of the enemy's cannon could be heard in the distance. It is proposed to raise a monument of either marble or bronze to the memory of the good slaves, and I hope it will be done. That much money could hardly be spent in a more satisfactory way. With Joshua, who made his wind-up speech after the twelve stones were placed in the river Jordan, we can also say: "That this may be a sign among you that when your children ask their fathers in time to come what mean ye by these stones" - this story can also be told. The Northern people had an idea that Southern white women were constitutionally lazy, because of idle habits and enervating climate. Doubtless we had plenty of idle people as in other sections but the wife and mother on an ante-bellum Southern plantation was rarely one of such idle ones. Sometimes there was a housekeeper who was most frequently colored, but the mistress of a plantation household had to be efficient to keep things going with the necessary amount of economy and caution.

        For one thing I will mention the prevalence of a most generous hospitality. Invited people came, of course, but the great majority came when the notion took them. There were nurses also and carriage drivers to come with children or invalids. It required administrative talent, executive ability, and unwearying patience not to mention economy to conduct such establishments, and give satisfaction to guests and hostesses. Such a household had hotel appearances, without hotel remuneration.

        There was something in these things that might be compared to feudal times, but I never expect to see in any station of life, where so much entertaining was so gladly given, and so little expected in return, except in kind. Wealth accumulated sometimes, but it was

the increase in slave property that counted up. More negroes meant more land, then more land required more negroes to work it.

        Generally the planters squared off their store accounts once a year, at cotton selling time, but Xmas was the time of great eating and sometimes drinking, when neighbors and friends had great spreads of everything good to eat for visitors.

        When young folks married they were settled off with land and negroes and then they traveled the same old circuit. More negroes to cultivate more land, then more land to raise up more negroes to work it.

        I had foresight enough to see and know that these responsibilities were becoming formidable. I could as I believed, foretell a halt on a machine that kept spreading over ground, getting more difficult to manage year by year, but like the rest of the Southern women, I was only a woman and nobody asked me for an opinion.

        It was a great agricultural section of country that the Civil War broke upon, like a thunder clap from an almost clear sky, with a four-years of hail storm along with it.

        Upon nobody did the storm fall more dreadful and unexpectedly than upon the women of the South. At first there were volunteers, but there was actually no preparation for equipping an army in the Southern States. The clothing problem was a difficult one. The women proceeded to send their blankets to the army and cut up their woolen carpets to help out the blanket proposition. We scraped lint from all the linen of worn towels and table cloths and stripped the sheets into bandages for the wounded in hospitals. We knitted socks and sleeping caps, and mittens, incessantly. We sent all the good things like jellies and preserves to the army. I had two serviceable dresses of fine wool cloth with five or six whole widths in the skirt according to style. I fashioned them into fatigue shirts for the boys in the army and wore cotton homespun frocks at home. When the war closed I had a silk dress, but not a woolen one to my name. For more than two years after the war my best street

attire was a home-spun and home woven linsy frock, the wool clipped from a few sheep that we had brought back from a refugee home, and the weaving paid for out of my earnings as a poor school teacher. The winter stockings on my feet were knit by my busy fingers at odd times, and the shoes that carried me through two hard winters were fashioned by a country shoemaker, and made of leather given by a refugee friend who once owned a tannery near the Tennessee line. This was after the Civil War, remember, when there were plenty of Northern made things in all the stores, but money was scarce, provisions were high, and the old home had been dismantled and all I could spare was needed just there - to start up housekeeping in even a very plain and comfortable way.

        After the blockade was effectually established during the Civil War, the South was thrown back on native supplies. At one time a famine of salt was ominous.

        The sea supply was inadequate and the salt springs in Virginia were more than once raided.

        On all big plantations salt had been lavishly used from time immemorial. Where sixty or seventy fat hogs were slaughtered annually as occurred in our ante-bellum home, to provide pork and bacon for a large slave family, the ground floors of these meat houses were full of dissolved salt. The dirt was dug up, thrown into big hoppers and water passed through the salty dirt into long troughs. We skimmed and boiled and reskimmed and boiled and then evaporated the water, securing quantities of gray salt that could be used to cure meat. I experimented with the salt and finally produced a little salt that could be used for butter.

        The salt scare penetrated my entire being, and what we would have done without salt still perplexes my mind. The scarcity of sugar was felt after General Grant succeeded at Vicksburg and cut off Louisiana sugar.

        But Georgia, near the southern limit, grew all the sugar cane that was possible. Cane syrup was so good

and sorghum was a universal crop to provide "longsweetening." Some poet should sing the virtues of this sorghum. It tided us over a very hard time in the Confederacy. All silver money slid out of sight. We had bushels of Confederate paper and as many "shin plasters," which were of great service as equal parts of a dollar.

        Coffee played out completely in farm homes. We had all sorts of substitutes - parched wheat, parched rye, sweet potatoes cut in small cubes, first dried in the sun and then cooked in an oven like coffee. Okra seed was the best of them all. For tea we gathered raspberry leaves and the great majority had sassafras root tea. It was healthy and plentiful. Sweet potatoes filled an immense place in the Civil War. They were roasted in the fireplace, baked in the ovens, fried in the skillets, boiled in the dinner pots, puddinged for dessert, with long sweetening to make it toothsome. Wheat flour was scarce, and we had every sort of corn cake that might be contrived from the "ash cake" of the cabin to the "Dixie cake" of the big house, where it was made to look like pound cake.

        From the time the roasting ears could be prepared for the table until the lye-hominy was plentiful in frosty weather, we had corn bread every day in the Southern homes. Lee's soldiers were well satisfied when they could get plenty of boiled corn in the trenches, and the folks at home made no complaint if the "boys at the front" were fed.

        After Stoneman raided from Atlanta towards Macon, in July, 1864, I knew a nice family who had nothing whatever to eat unless they chewed bushes or dug up roots to quiet hunger. After the raiders had passed them they gathered up the scattered corn left by the cavalry horses, washed and rewashed it and boiled it into hominy and kept going cheerfully until their needs were made known to more plentiful neighbors.

        It was a serious time in homes, where hunger had never entered before.

        And those long, waiting, dreary winter nights! Oh! those long weeks when a battle had been fought and

no letters from the army came to relieve the anxiety at home!!

                        And the gude wife wrote the letters
                        To the dear man at the front.
                        And the handmaid flung the shuttle.
                        And Sambo shelled the corn.
                        With weeping and with laughter,
                        They passed the time away.
                        Oh! who will tell this story,
                        To children yet unborn-
                        How these women faced the terrors,
                        With hearts oft crushed and torn,
                        Yet, like Roman mothers,
                        Sent brave men to the field.
                        "Come back to me in honor,
                        Or on the bloody shield!"

        Perhaps your mother, like mine, has passed to her eternal reward, or mayhap she is still here to tell you how awful it is to be overrun by an invading army, to be driven to seek shelter in refugee homes, to see the hand work of a lifetime scattered and disappear, and to know that those dearer than her own life were still battling at the front with big battles impending, and newspapers full of casualties, and lists of the known dead coming along with awful certainty and in great numbers.

        My mother had only one son, a cadet at the Marietta Military school, not yet sixteen, a beardless boy, and he did enlist and left that anxious mother with a smile on his face, eager for the excitement and the fray. He spent his first winter in West Virginia, without tents and with deep snows. His mother couldn't sleep at night in her warm bed because this heedless boy was lying on the ground, with a rubber blanket under him, and a wool blanket over him, and every day was a long day, that she did not hear from him and with the heedlessness of youth he only wrote when he wanted something, and he might die and be buried weeks before she could hear from him. The anxiety of these faithful women of the South can never be described or appreciated by outsiders.

        When the South lost out and the will of the military was the law of the land, the sense of helplessness of Southern homes was a dreadful burden to bear. A country without law is a country to get away from. I was in Macon, Ga., the day that Georgia was surrendered to Federal troops in April, 1865. The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war.

        But for the fortitude of the women of the Confederacy, and the resolute courage of the plain privates, the bottom would have dropped out just then. The story of Southern women will never be told until the final chapter is written of their heavy trials with poverty, with poor help, with no money to educate their children and no privileges of travel or education in new methods, in labor-saving, etc.

        I am going to close with a tribute to a dear woman who was reared in a lovely and refined home, and made a lovely and refined home for her husband and children, until war's rude alarms came to the home and took off the husband and father.

        She was obliged to get away when Sherman began to march on Atlanta. She was more than two hundred miles from home when the civil war ceased. She and her three or four children started back, with a small wagon, one horse, and a colored driver, who was glad to go home also. The driver walked beside the horse, the small children rode in the wagon and the blessed woman walked the most of the way in that tedious trip. When I saw her first, after some months of absence from my own home, she was the brightest, the cheerfulest, and as I thought, the happiest person I had met in a long time. The husband had also a weary trip from Virginia, a footsore trip a good deal of the way, but as she said, "I am so happy over his return, I am so happy to be at home again, reunited to my dearest ones, and so happy over peace, blessed peace, I have everything in life to be thankful for."

        One more and I am done. After the war had been over several years, we had a little family on our farm, consisting of a widowed mother and her industrious

son, over 21. Their whole dependence for a living lay with this well-meaning son's wages.

        She kept the house, had his meals ready and did some knitting to sell, and quilting for neighbors. She and her husband had a number of children when he was called into service. The county authorities paid out some money or some supplies to her until Sherman came along and everything was in chaos. She lived in the country where wood could be gathered and she had a good Irish woman and some railroad track hands for neighbors, when small pox broke out in her home. When two had died and the Situation became extreme because everybody but the Irish people who were immune from the disease, after inoculation, were afraid to go near her. A relative advised of her forlorn condition, with every child broken out, brought her some provisions in a sack and laid the sack inside the fence and talked to her from the door. He brought her word, also, that her husband's remains were in a coffin and lying on the depot platform and must be buried right off. She did not know that he had been sick in camp at Charleston until that hour. For two or three days she had to watch night and day, only relieved by the faithful Irish woman who came in occasionally as her daily duties permitted. It was this boy now living with her and the support of her old age. He had a bad case of confluent small pox and would have choked to death but for her incessant care. What a heroine, was that woman, in my eyes?

        And there were thousands of such women in the mountain regions and wire-grass plains that suffered as she did. It was a dreadful price to pay for war!

        In the days that are coming somebody will write a full story of the South's hero women. Did not Emerson speak aright, when he said "the heroic soul does not sell its justice or its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely or to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty and can very well abide the loss." I salute this organization of the United Daughters of the Confederacy! In the

name of their brave mothers it is a privilege to oblige them.

        As Mrs. Browning wrote:

                        "The sweetest lives are those to duty wed,
                        Whose deeds both great and small,
                        Like close-knit strands of an unbroken thread
                        Where love ennobles all.
                        The world may sound no trumpets, ring no bells.
                        The Book of Life the shining record tells.
                        Thy love shall chant its own beatitudes-
                        After its own life-working. A child's kiss
                        Set on thy sighing lips, shall make thee glad.
                        A poor man helped by thee shall make thee rich
                        A sick man helped by thee shall make thee strong
                        And thy own life shall be served,
                        By every service that thou renderest."

MY RECOLLECTIONS OF LARGE EXPOSITIONS.

        It has been my good fortune to be officially connected with several large expositions, and as that association was a liberal education to me, in regard to our commercial progress as a state and nation, I deem it well to publish some data, that affected me personally while the story of our commercial progress was being officially recorded in the statistics of those periods.

        After the city of Chicago was accepted by Congress as the place where a national exposition would be held to commemorate the discovery of America, by Christopher Columbus, Congress also decided to allow the women of the nation to elaborate women's work and to share in the duty of selecting the juries which would award medals and certificates of merit in a competitive examination of such work during the fair. There were to be two women selected from each state and territory, to become a Board of Lady Managers with a per diem allowance for maintenance and traveling expenses, when on duty in Chicago. To my surprise

and gratification, I was notified by General Lafayette McLaws, of Augusta, that he had selected me as one of the two Georgia women to act as Lady Managers for the State of Georgia. I hold in grateful and dutiful respect the memory of this gallant Confederate general, who illustrated the courage and patriotism of the state on many hotly contested battle fields and who died full of years and honors, with faithful service to his country. He was one of the World's Fair Commissioners and authorized to make such a selection.

        The first call for the assembling of this Board of Lady Managers was duly published and the members met in Chicago on November 19,1890.

        Fatigued with the travel and occupied with a shopping effort, after I reached the city I did not meet any of the Lady Managers until we assembled at 10 A. M., at Kinsley's Hall, to begin the organization and map out the future activities of the Board.

        Less than fifteen minutes before the President of the National Commission called the meeting to order, I was told by my good friend, Mrs. John A. Logan, widow of former Senator (and General) Logan, that I had been selected as Temporary Chairman and must preside until the permanent chairman, also to be president of the Board of Lady Managers, would be chosen by ballot. I protested, that I had never presided over any large meeting of any sort in my life, that I had no manual of parliamentary tactics to refer to, and no time to collect my thoughts, and while I was grateful for the compliment, I was afraid to allow my name voted upon, because of inexperience, etc.

        To make a long story short, I was quickly elected to the position and had barely time to scribble down a few words of grateful thanks for the honor, until I was escorted to the platform and the gavel placed in my hand. There were two women from every state and territory before me, and nearly a dozen from the city of Chicago, and many of them had been doing duty in large organizations for years past, and so far as I could judge by their names, capable of doing good service as presiding officers.

        I had thrills and nervous chills, and I could feel the perspiration racing down my spine, although the weather was cold enough for the Arctic zone, on the outside.

        I was sufficiently collected to request President Thos. W. Palmer, of the Men's Board to remain with me for a short time and direct me, until I recovered from the agitation consequent upon this novel and trying experience. The ladies elected a temporary secretary and we entered upon the business of the day.

        It was not until the noon hour of the succeeding day that we elected Mrs. Potter Palmer to the Presidency and Miss Phoebe Cousins to be secretary, and I was permitted to relinquish the gavel, and step down to a seat beside my Georgia colleague, Mrs. C. H. Olmstead, of Savannah, over whom the Georgia banner had been placed in the arrangement of seats on the day before.

        Perhaps my readers will be interested if I copy here the hasty address that I made after my election, and my rival for the position was Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, of Connecticut:

        "Dear ladies of the Commission:

        "As a Southern woman I certainly appreciate this compliment at your hands, and my own inexperience gives me more serious concern than at any time in my life before. I can only promise to do my very best, in this unexpected position. I must rely upon your good will or I shall make a dismal failure of the job. My heart is full of kindness to every one of you. I know no South, no North, no East, no West. We are all dear sisters engaged in a work of loyalty and patriotism, under the grand old flag in the home of our fathers.

        "I have no friend to reward, no foes to punish, I am simply your humble servant in a very important place, and I feel my insignificance and my inexperience very greatly at this hour.

        "We are here as an official body, clothed with some authority. We are allowed I suppose to make our own rules, and we have elected some officers for a little

while. It is the first time in the history of the Republic that the female sex has been recognized as competent to attend to any sort of public business for the National Government. It is the very first recognition of woman's services as a citizen and a tax-payer by Congress. Therefore I feel the necessity as an individual of making haste, very slowly in all matters concerning our permanent organization. Let us set an example that others may feel in years to come an example of prudence, of patriotism, of generous good will to every member of the body and of faithful devotion to our duty. Let us take no step forward, that we shall regret afterward. Let us remember we are on trial before this great nation. There is a large class in this country who are inimical to us, judging by the newspapers who suppose that we are supernumeraries, if not superfluous appendages to this World's Fair Commission. For myself I feel this is woman's grand opportunity. This is to show to all concerned that we can be relied upon for faithful, effective and devoted work in all departments connected with our World's Fair Commission. Therefore, again entreating your kind assistance in discharge of the duty as temporary chairman of which I had not the faintest conception an hour ago, I pronounce this Commission in session and ready for business."

        It was gratifying when the ladies gave me a rising vote of thanks for my courtesy and impartiality, during my short term as a presiding officer. After we adjourned that day for a recess, a South Carolina delegate asked me for a correct copy of the little address to send to the Charleston News and Courier. I told her I had nothing but the scribbled notes on the backs of two envelopes that I found in my hand bag, that eventful morning and the published report was fairly good.

        Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker was standing nearby and heard what I said. With characteristic impulse she turned on me, and cried out. "Would you have us believe that you did not carefully prepare that finished speech before you came to the meeting? I am more than astonished to hear you!"

        At first I thought I could not restrain a very harsh retort, but I recollected that any dispute would quickly go to reporters and that I would be posted as having a quarrel with a member of the Beecher family- the North and South in early conflict, so I held myself down, when I replied, "If you will kindly accept Mrs. Logan as a witness, she will tell you that it was impossible that I should have known, that I was to be nominated for temporary chairman until we met in this hall, and my colleague can tell you, that I scribbled off what I read within a few minutes before I was elected."

        "A kind answer turneth away wrath" as we are told, and that episode or something else, turned Mrs. Hooker into a friend and agreeable co-worker so long as we were members of the Board of Managers. When our history committee were collecting the materials for a concise story of this world's fair commission so far as related to our scope of woman's work, the chairman said they retained my address because "it was good, and wore well."

        With such early experience and such unexpected attention, I made no effort thereafter for place or power on the board, and my chief duty lay in assigning space in the Woman's Building and in writing the story of Woman's organizations which occupied space therein. There were more than sixty of such active organizations and the South was connected with only one or two. In that early day the Southern men were prejudiced against anything that savored of women's rights, etc. Nothing that Northern and Western women advocated was palatable to our politicians and preachers. There was not a woman's club in Georgia, until after that world's fair, when one was inaugurated in Atlanta, during the Cotton States and International Exposition, which opened in the year 1895. The Chicago Exposition was so much of a success that other expositions were inaugurated in somewhat rapid succession. Mrs. Potter Palmer was a fine president for the Woman's Board and my association with the Board has given me some very delightful friendships as the years rolled on.

        I can hardly realize that twenty-nine years have rolled along since that cold November day in Chicago, when I was suddenly precipitated into a high office, over my protest, and where I am still satisfied there were many better qualified women for the temporary chairmanship. I am glad I was able to perform with satisfaction to the ladies and feel grateful still for their kindness. As chairman of the assignment of space committee I gave two months of arduous duty to these locations. A surveyor made plats of every part of Woman's Building and every foot and inch was accounted for in distributing the space. I had abiding interest in the organization room because I had sufficient foresight to understand that they would not only survive the exposition, but would continue to rapidly increase, as has happened, after every vestige of the "White City" had vanished. We decided to make the decorations uniform, and the partitions were made by large gilt railings with hangings of robin-egg blue silk manufactured at a silk mill in New Jersey. My interest in these organizations possibly induced Mrs. Palmer to select me as historian of their display. They furnished me with a brief recital of their beginnings and their success in Chicago during the Fair, and I edited their papers. Although the history has never yet been published owing to the fact that the gigantic undertaking consumed not only all the allowance provided by Act of Congress, but also took over the savings of the Woman's Board to settle the debts which we had no share in piling up. I have a copy of my work, thus preparing the story of Women's Organizations in 1893 and I am still hoping something will occur to publish an official account of their status, at that early day.

        Time and space will not allow a more extended notice of woman's work twenty-nine years ago, at this writing.

        I was also chairman of the committee on agriculture and we made diligent search for the percentage of woman's work among farm exhibits, but everything was submerged in men's work. Since the Indians occupied America, women have had active service in

crude agriculture, and have done their share up to date in domestic service, yet there was still no regard given to her activities. The Bible saying: "A man and his wife are one," read correctly for the man was the only one.

THE COTTON STATES AND INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION.

        While I was finishing up my story of the organization room in Chicago in midsummer of 1894, I was notified that I had been selected as one of the five women to initiate or inaugurate a woman's board in Atlanta to carry on a Woman's Building with elaborate attention to exhibits of woman's work for this great Southern exposition.

        In organizing the full board which numbered more than fifty ladies, I was elected for the position of chairman of executive committee. My health and strength were taxed for the service but I held on to the end. I still think we had the most loyal and enthusiastic crowd of Southern women that ever were gathered together to make a notable success of this Atlanta exposition.

        A goodly company of the Chicago notables made us a visit, including President Higgenbotham and Mrs. Potter Palmer, and they gave us unstinted praise for our zeal and exhibits. The impetus then given to Women's organizations has never slackened. The "Atlanta Spirit" is shared equally by its citizens, of both sexes, up to this good hour.

THE TENNESSEE CENTENNIAL.

        I was also an official visitor when Nashville was alive with enthusiasm, in 1897, being chosen by the Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture to look over the exhibits. We were delightfully entertained, had an official banquet given the delegates on Georgia day, and I made an address in Woman's Building to the Confederate veterans who were holding their annual reunion at the same time. I had made a similar address the year before at Baltimore, before the U. D. C. convention when I urged the Southern women to devote their energies to the education of the illiterate children and grand children of the dead Confederate soldiers as the very best work that could possibly be

given with their time and money. I retain pleasing recollections of the many thanks and encomiums that I received at both places, because of my effort to initiate the undertaking. One enthusiastic Tennessee lady had my Baltimore address printed and circulated all over her state, before the Tennessee Centennial opened its doors to the public.

THE ST. LOUIS EXPOSITION.

        I was selected as a juror for this mammoth exhibition held in St. Louis in 1904. In placing the jurors I was given a place on the general committee of agriculture. There were several subdivisions of minor rank and importance, but the jury to which I was assigned, examined and adjudged the great industrial efforts of the United States, including irrigation. We gave attention to silos, and every agricultural appliance that was a fixture on farms. We also examined the individual Missouri exhibit that was one of the most telling features of the exposition. The jury to which I was assigned had, as a member, a professor from the University of Berlin, who taught agriculture in that institution. I was chosen as secretary and wrote the report of this ranking committee, on General Agriculture. The work begun at stated hours, and held on well into the afternoon. I had no time to devote to sight-seeing as we were confined to three weeks and had no leisure for such things. A hasty lunch we secured in the Agricultural Building, and I generally found myself at an English lunch counter where delicious bread called "Scones," was cooked by electricity. Buttered, when hot, they were good enough for the most fastidious. It was a four-mile street car ride to our boarding place in the city, and I could fill a good-sized newspaper with my varied adventures in street car travel, when I had to sit sometimes on my big hand bag on the floor or hold on to strap to keep my feet in the ever-moving crowd that was getting on and getting off.

        In my rush to get a street car seat, when I left my boarding place to take a South Bound train to go home

I had started at 4 P. M. I had nothing better than a seat in the rear doorway on my traveling bag, and it was long after dark when I reached the terminal station and then the scramble began to get my ticket validated and also my trunk checked - the second time. Red tape ruled all the arrivals and departures. It was after ten P.M. before I finally found my berth in sleeping car, and I feel sure I walked a full mile, up and down about and around before I got away from that jam in that depot.

        More families were separated and children misplaced than I had ever seen before, and a friend of mine, who started home a few days later, with two children, never got away from the same depot until morning light appeared. I was a visitor at the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876. I was in Chicago off and on for four years, 1890 to 94. I saw the immense jams where millions were filling the streets, but St. Louis and the Terminal Station was a long ways ahead of everything in difficult dealing with crowds, where people were rushing hither and yon, and generally lost or separated from each other, that I ever witnessed.

        I was too advanced in years to attempt the trip to San Francisco Exposition. I had wholesome dread of immense crowds, where human life is so exposed. In Chicago I saw an immense cold storage building burn to the ground, where many persons, including a number of fire-fighters, dropped into the flames like flies.

        But I feel glad that I have seen so many good things, great things, and priceless paintings and ornaments, that could never be inspected by such as I am under any other conditions or circumstances.

"INTERESTING INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF MRS. WILLIAM H. FELTON.

        "She is an old woman who has been a 'new woman' for fully thirty years. Pleads for textile education of women. Believes that Georgia's factory girls should have every opportunity.

By Isma Dooly.

        "I believe that one of the greatest movements that Georgia's earnest women could undertake at present would be to co-operate

in their determination to secure textile education for our poor factory girls."

        "The speaker was Mrs. William H. Felton, Georgia's well known 'stateswoman,' and characteristic of her, she supplemented this utterance with her reasons for thus expressing herself.

         "This class of young women is one to which no helping hand has been extended, and I believe that the time has come now when not only justice, but the development of our state's textile interests demand that the cotton mill women, as well as the cotton mill men, be equipped for usefulness and future profit to themselves and the commonwealth."

        "I am delighted to see that textile education has been provided for our boys at the Technological institute, but what about the textile education of our girls? When, at the request of The Constitution, I visited some of the cotton factories of the state to refute a slanderous statement made in a northern publication relative to the status of the women therein, I found that the vast majority of the operatives were deserving women and girls; almost seven-tenths of the laborers employed being females. It would seem, therefore, that the prosperity of our state in textile industry demanded that educational advantages be given to the women as well as the men, especially since the former are in the majority, and uneducated labor on the part of women is as detrimental to progress as it is on the part of men."

        "Mrs. Felton reasoned that under the freest constitution, ignorant people are still slaves, and that to leave the hundreds of women working in the factories like mere machines of manual labor, while the men are given the advantages of superior training, is incongruous with laws of progress, relegating laboring women to a condition scarcely removed from slavery.

        "'I feel every day,' continued Mrs. Felton, her voice faltering, 'that I will not be here many years longer to fight for these poor women who have learned to call me their 'friend,' and I shall never cease while I have the strength to do it to plead for their rights. Nothing in my life has touched me more deeply than their gratitude. Last year from their pitiful paltry wages some in the cotton factories of Georgia contributed $60 toward a fund with which they desired to buy me a present. 'No,' I replied to them, 'I do not wish a gift, but when I am dead let the money buy the marble tablet that will mark my last resting place.'

        "Mrs. Felton's views on any subject are always interesting to the people of Georgia, and there are few women better known north and south than is she.

        "From time to time she has come before the public in the press, expressing her views on all subjects that interest the thinking minds of the day.

        "Whether on the rostrum before the more enlightened audience, before political gatherings in the rural districts, or through the columns of the daily press, Mrs. Felton when drawn

into controversy has always proven herself the "stronger man of the two."

        "Although a woman, and a woman with all the impulsiveness characteristic of her sex, she has never in the history of her eventful career made a statement that she has had to retract. Whether meeting with general approval or not, when she takes a stand in any matter, political or otherwise, before expressing herself at all, she forms her opinion of it on the firmness of the conviction that she is right. With this basic principle underlying all she does, with a masculine vigor of intellect, and with over thirty years' experience as a participant in Georgia's public life, Mrs. Felton is well equipped to discuss with any man or woman the social problems of the times.

        "Notwithstanding her very active life, and the trials and tribulations that have come into it from the days of the surrender up to the present time, Mrs. Felton is what the world would call a well preserved woman. During her recent visit to Atlanta her friends were struck with her health and strength. Although nearly seventy years of age, her eyes are as bright and beaming as those of a woman one-third her age, and her snowy white hair is combed smoothly back from a brow that in its beauty shows very few lines of care. Her prominence in public life, her active participation in politics, and the amount of work she accomplishes in the outside world may suggest that she is held aloof from the general pursuits of woman in the home, but such is not the case. She is distinguished for the perfect order maintained in the domestic side of her life, and her excellent housekeeping is never neglected for, or hampered by, her public work.

        "She is an old woman who has been a 'new woman' for thirty years, and that long ago advocated in the face of a universal prejudice the same lines of progress agitating today the women's organizations of her state. Whereas, she sympathizes with the principles of these, her residence in the country prevents her taking active part in their daily operations.

        "Mrs. Felton has taken her stand in public life as an individual, assuming responsibility as such and making for herself a name that will be inseparable from many incidents making interesting Georgia's history of the closing days of the nineteenth century.

        "The keynote of the good she has done and tried to do is doubtless her sense of duty which has been dominant in her every undertaking from her earliest school days up to the present moment.

        "In discussing the striking incidents of her life not long since, she remarked:

        "'I am a country raised woman, and have spent the most of my life upon farms. My parents gave me the best education that the state and their means would allow in the early fifties.

        "'I was an ambitious young person, and always sought to be at the head of my class in literary studies, in music and in drawing.

        "'I shared the first honors in my college class when barely seventeen, the youngest of the lot, and kept my place in piano and guitar music. I have always been pleased to know that my dear parents were also pleased with my progress, for I esteemed their pleasure to be the highest medal or token of approval that was ever granted to my efforts. As I look back on my past life there was never anything more precious to me than their loving smiles and shining tears of delight that greeted me at the school examinations and commencements when I was passed on with the plaudits of my teachers and my father and mother could say: 'Well done, my child.'

        "'How careful those old-fashioned teachers were,' continued Mrs. Felton. 'How genuine their methods! I was expected to be thorough in my work, to know what I studied before I left the book, and to be able to give a rule and a reason for any subject that I was examined upon in my school days. I recall again how we were 'rooted' and 'grounded' in the primary studies; how I was required to know every rule and every exception to a rule in the English grammar before we went further; every table, rule or measure in arithmetic, before we went to algebra or geometry, and common spelling was the recreation of the entire school from Monday morning till Friday night. There was no parade, no show of learning, it was plain matter of feet work -'Get your lesson, and never forget it' that was the alpha and omega of my school life from start to finish.

        "'Out of school my school of life began early,' said Mrs. Felton. 'I married at sharp eighteen and was a mother after nineteenth birthday. For eight or ten years my life was so absorbed in my children that it was cloisterlike, months elapsing, sometimes, when my feet were never outside the front gate. I had my music and my books to enliven the monotony, and I now discover that I was placed by the Almighty in a domestic training school, with close and rigid discipline, that I might not only have time to love and nurture my little ones, but also to broaden a girl's mind into the mature experience of an earnest woman who had the opportunity to look up 'through nature unto nature's God.'

        " 'I read everything in reach - history, fiction and even a smatter of medicine, with a little babe in my lap, and my key basket at my elbow, because I was also housekeeper for a large family, directing every day's expenditure and outlining every day's supplies. I was only one of the many wives and Southern women who had oversight of domestic affairs on a large plantation, and I believe the experience of such Southern women in ante-bellum days compassed results in cultivated and refined hospitality that the world will never know again by reason of the lack of such extraordinary conditions and surroundings. When the civil war broke out I had two little boys, with a baby girl 'under the daisies,' and a heavy burden of responsibility, care and anxiety for the people at home, and sympathy for those in the field."

        The weariness in Mrs. Felton's tone seemed to die out when she arrived at that period of her discourse, and she reviewed her life during the war with the same fluency and brightness with which she handles every subject that interests her.

        "'Those four years of bloody war turned many a raven lock as white as mine are now,' she said. 'We cared for refugees until we became ourselves refugees, and fled before Sherman's army. It would require volumes to tell the story of privation, suffering and death, because I, too, came back to a devastated home, a childless mother, with poverty staring me in the face, and the necessity of becoming a wage-earning woman before me, and with no opportunity for earning wages save a return to the schoolroom and music room in the capacity of a teacher. I sometimes went hungry because my food was poor and oftentimes scanty, but an Allwise Heavenly Father led me into the unwonted path of loving other people's children and brought comfort and gladness to a lone mother's bereaved heart while she taught and helped along these innocent and impoverished children of a war-stripped section of our country. I had often wondered before this time of my life why it was that I should have been so eager to perfect myself as far as I could in music and literature, when my arms and heart were so full in care of my own babies, but in the exigency that thus happened to me after the surrender I saw the benefit and the blessing. I was able to teach the higher mathematics and helped to equip our school of eighty pupils with efficient and valuable services in professorships that would be difficult to fill at any time, and especially where no money for salaries was available in the later sixties, when everybody was poor.

        "'Within two years we were able to raise our bread and meat at home, and I went into the old time occupation of a farmer's wife, with rigid economy and utmost saving 'to make both ends meet.' Two other little boys came to gladden my life (one to stay with me but a few months), when Dr. Felton's name began to be mentioned for congress in our district."

        With Dr. Felton's political career began his wife's, and to the onlooker there has been no more interesting figure in Georgia politics for the last thirty years than Mrs. William H. Felton.

        "Relative to her first steps in politics, Mrs. Felton resumed: 'There was an unacceptable democratic nominee and the result was an independent candidate in the year 1874. Dr. Felton announced himself in June, and from that time until the election in November I was in the thick of it.

        " 'Without a daily newspaper, and only two little weeklies that hot canvass was made by Dr. Felton on the stump and my individual work with my pen. I wrote hundreds of letters all over fourteen counties. I wrote night and day, and for two months before the close kept a man and a horse at the door to catch every mail train three miles away. How I lived through that ordeal I can never tell. The like of this campaign was never known before or since in Georgia. At one time health broke down, but I was propped up in bed with pillows and

wrote ahead. I made appointments for speaking, planned for speakers, answered newspaper attacks, and more than all, kept a brave face to the foe and a smiling face to the almost exhausted candidate. Dr. Felton spoke three times a day on an average, and that meant three fresh shirts a day. But I had those shirts ready when he rushed in, all packed and ready as he rushed out and away into that fearful exhausting struggle.

        " 'The congressional count was in doubt three entire days, Dr. Felton was counted in and out time and again, and the wires were kept hot to know the result. At last he came in, in spite of all, with his eighty-two majority.

        " 'When I had time to think of myself, I had lost flesh like one with a dreadful fever, my dress hung on me like a bag, and I could neither eat nor sleep for days from excitement and fatigue.

        " 'But success is a great tonic," observed Mrs. Felton, and her bright dark eyes looked as exulting as they must have when she heard the good news of her husband's election many years before.

        " 'I was up and ready for a six years' struggle in and out of Washington, where I still wrote letters, wrote for the newspapers, worked for constituents before the departments, doing the work of the present clerks to congressmen, and without expecting a cent, but just for the love of the work and loyalty to Dr. Felton's interests. In some of the campaigns I traveled with him all over the district. In other campaigns I 'stayed by the stuff,' and planned the campaign. The history of my life during that period would surpass a novel in startling surprises, because the fight on the independent congressman never ceased or abated one iota. As soon as the enemy left the trenches and took to 'counting out,' then we were defeated. Until they adopted the 'counting out process' our little band was invincible.

        " 'You want to know when l really entered public life.

        " 'I did not enter; I was shot into it, as by a catapult, and I learned politics in front of Gatling guns and Mauser rifles. The foe left nothing undone that human ingenuity could devise or tricky politicians could muster up. As soon as I could get an inkling of their respective political histories, I made it lively for the gentlemen, and it was an unequal but vivacious struggle, with one woman versus some dozens of north Georgia politicians. When convict lease politicians attacked Dr. Felton, I searched the records and made the lease and the lessees step around lively. When the state road lessees entered our politics, I posted myself and flung hand grenades until the whole thing got in a blaze.

        " 'Whenever they showed heads above the ramparts, this sharp shooter in woman's form deliberately picked them off for public amusement and feminine revenge.

        " 'Did they attack me?

        " 'Yes! times without number, but I have always been careful to know I was correct in my statements, and then I

had nothing to fear. About a dozen years ago I joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. I introduced a resolution pledging the union to a reformatory for youthful criminals and a separate prison for women convicts in April, 1886. The organization authorized me to memorialize the legislature on these two reforms that summer. When my petition was read before the legislature the ball opened. Dr. Felton, as a member, championed the reforms, and the whole pack, 'Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart,' opened on us both. I heard myself denominated as the political 'She' of Georgia.

        " 'I was sneered at as a reformer and vials of wrath were poured out on my spouse, who was helping me in my work as I had so long helped him in his political work.

        " 'I sat in the same hall five days later and listened to Dr. Felton's reply that will never be surpassed for strength and powerful invective so long as the English language exists. I forgot myself in admiration of my defender and his marvelous defense. I saw that audience also forget itself and rise as one man to cheer and shout in praise of the speaker. Such a day as that marks a milestone as big as the Washington monument. The reformatory for juvenile convicts had a small beginning and only a woman to start it, but such as it was, I had the responsibility and the honor of agitating and launching the craft into sailing waters. More than six years later I was gratified to find that the convict women were quietly separated into other camps and I felt certain that had Senator Joseph E. Brown lived a few years longer he would have made a reformatory system for the juvenile criminals under his control.

        " 'What of my prohibition interests?

        " 'I expect I was the first Georgia woman to take the platform to urge voters to remember their homes and their children in prohibition contests. I do not mean before conventions or before lecture going people, I mean a public appeal on the eve of elections, when men's hearts were raging for and against and the ballot alone could make a verdict. I am practical or I am nothing. It is a waste of time to talk to people who are of the same mind as yourself in such a crisis. But it means a great deal when you can face the foe with logic unanswerable and pleading for their own homes and their own children win them to your side of the argument. I have been sneered at from pulpits, jeered at in print and have had lectures pitched at me from editorial columns, but the shining tears in a mother's eye who is grateful to me for her son's sake will outweigh and overtop an army corps of such advisors as have criticized me for this work. And there is appreciation where I have had least reason to expect it.

        " 'During a session of the Georgia legislature some years ago I was invited to make an appeal in Atlanta for prohibition. The hall was packed, and the reporter who misrepresented me in next morning's paper was obliged to coil himself up under the little table before me to find a place for himself and his pencil.

        " 'Next day when I visited the state capitol to hear the debate in that body, a member offered a resolution inviting me to a seat beside the speaker, because he said: 'I was a woman in whom the state took pride.' "

        "In reference to the changes that have privileged woman to speak in public, without meeting with narrow prejudices, Mrs. Felton remarked:

        " 'I would be amused, if I were not so sympathetic, to witness the readiness of our 'new women' in these latter days to address public meetings and conventions. My mind goes back to the time when it meant much in opposition and adverse criticism to make the venture.

        " 'I recall that several years ago when the Normal and Industrial school was still in embryo, and the demagogue was bleating against the project from Dade to Chatham county, I felt impelled to give a large public assemblage in my county a plain talk about their duty to their daughters as well as to their sons. I had no preparation for the task save an eager, earnest longing to do something for the tens of thousands of poor girls all over Georgia who had no schooling save the miserable little makeshifts of common schools in the rural districts. But I could not sit still and listen to the demagogue's plea of the state's poverty while the coming mothers of the nation were steeped in ignorance because of their own poverty when the state was wasting thousands in trifling ways.

        " 'I secured time for a hearing and I am still at a loss to understand the happy effect that was so surprisingly educed. When a young lady met me at the steps of the platform, and with flowing tears, thanked me for the 'first word she had ever heard which supposed that others like her were considered worthy of the state's protection and care for higher education,' I felt almost strong enough and happy enough to go at that time to the governor and beg him to put the idea in his forthcoming message.

        " 'I guess the idea grew apace, for when the legislature met it not only got on its feet, but helped elect another governor only a few years later who was in favor of it.

        " 'I might consider myself an 'ice breaker' in this Southern country of ours," concluded Mrs. Felton, as she glanced at her watch and arose to start for the train to Cartersville. 'I must have had crude but novel ideas not familiar to Southern latitude, but as I survey the 'new woman's' field of action at the close of the nineteenth century, I find that I have been 'breaking ice' for the last quarter of a century, and although I was forced to stem the current with my rude bark, I find the tide is floating in a convoy of elegant and cultured women who are becoming leaders of thought and public opinion."

SOME DISTINGUISHED PEOPLE I HAVE MET.

        During the six years term of Dr. Felton's active congressional service I met many distinguished and notable people in the city of Washington. I have shaken hands with every President since General Grant went into the White House, except President Arthur. Among the many persons I remember distinctly was Mrs. Myra Clark Gaines, who was born in 1805, in New Orleans, widow of General Gaines and daughter of rich Daniel Clarke. Clarke was U. S. consul while Louisiana was under French rule. When he died he left vast property to his mother, Mary Clarke. Later it was discovered that he had been married to a French woman who left two daughters. The youngest, Myra, was adopted by a General Davis, in ignorance of her paternity, and she was educated in Philadelphia. In 1832 she married a Mr. Whitney who in some way became acquainted with the facts of her birth. A will was also discovered where Clarke acknowledged Myra as his legitimate child. After a fierce legal battle in the courts, the will was sustained and her legitimacy thereby sustained and in 1867 a decision was given in her favor to property valued at $35,000,000. Then she had to dispossess the people who had purchased the property.

        I saw her a number of times during the 70s in Washington City, while she was fighting the city of New Orleans for her property rights.

        I had the story of her eventful life from her own lips. She was over seventy years at that time. In 1890 New Orleans officials compromised and settled with her. She married General Gaines in 1839 and died in 1885, at the age of 80. Her struggle to clear her name from illegitimacy kept her nearly all her lifetime in the harrassments of courts and the facts are surprising beyond anything Dickens ever wrote of Wards in chancery. Mrs. Gaines was a small-sized woman, active and vigorous when I met her in the old National Hotel in Washington, then nearly eighty years old. She had snapping black eyes and flitted in

and out like a woman under fifty. Justice Clifford of the Supreme Court gave me some of the notable facts in her legal struggle which lasted over a half century. Mrs. Gaines had indomitable pluck and never despaired of success in her law suit.