Originally aired on May 15, 1998 - In part 194 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson pays homage to the mother who sends her son into battle. They experience a unique brand of suffering.
#194 – Mothers
Among the things re-enactors never show are a mother’s anxiety over a soldier son or her heartache at hearing the news that the son had been killed in battle or perished in the filth of some medical facility. Every Johnny Reb and Billy Yank had a mother. Yet little attention has been paid to those millions of women whose sacrifices especially in love and emotion were larger than those of countless others in the field. A female sweetheart may have welcomed the coming of Civil War and the chance of her loved one gaining glory, but that was not so with mothers.
In the spring of 1861, Mrs. Robert E. Lee told her daughter, “With a sad and heavy heart, my dear child, I write, for the prospects before us are sad indeed…there is nothing comforting in the hope that God may prosper the right, for I see no right in this matter”. Southern mothers had to live in the worst of two worlds. One world was the separation between lover and loved one with its dark future and constant uncertainty. The other world was the ever-worsening home environment in which mothers lived. Shortages of goods, galloping inflation, absence of money, Union armies moving closer and closer, daily anxieties caused by fears of the unknown all brought an atmosphere of apprehension that was physically and mentally crippling.
Lack of medicines resulting from the Union blockade of the South brought untold misery and needless death to the innocent. A grieving Mississippi mother wrote her soldier husband in Virginia, “twenty grains of quinine would have saved our two children. They are now at rest and I have no one to work for but you. I am not dismayed. I think day and night of your sorrow for I have the consolation of the little graves near me.”
Heartache intensified with the war itself. In September, 1864, Mrs. Henrietta Morgan learned of the death of her son, General John Hunt Morgan. She had already buried one soldier son, another was a prisoner of war somewhere and she did not know where the fourth was. To the remaining son Mrs. Morgan wrote, “the blow of John’s death seemed for a time more than I could bear. God seems to have fitted our backs to the burdens. The weight of mine is getting very heavy. I wish I could gather you all up and away to some far off place where there was no war. Oh excuse me, my dear boy, my heart is nearly broken. I live in hourly dread of some other calamity.”
Civil War history is full of life shattering incidents. Mothers rushing to the bedsides of wounded sons only to be confronted with the announcement that they have arrived too late. Parents going to the railroad depot for a train to take them to a loved one recovering in a military hospital and discovering the soldiers’ coffin being unloaded on an incoming train. A distraught wife and mother searching a battlefield and finding her husband as well as two sons lying dead among the carnage with her wails of grief piercing the silence of the field.
The majority of Southern women remained staunch in spirit and strong in support of the Confederate cause. Some of their sacrifices are shocking. Mrs. Polly Ray, a North Carolina widow, lost all seven of her sons in the war. Mrs. Catherine Cooper of Tennessee sent ten sons into Confederate service. Five died and four returned home crippled. Mrs. Orlin Palmer of Georgia had four sons killed in the Battle of Gettysburg.
In a war the men fight, conquer or die. The women must sit silently in anguish. Theirs may be the greatest suffering. That is another reason for remembering Mother’s Day with special thoughts of love.