If among the women of the South there was more fervent enthusiasm than among those of the North, there was also deeper hatred of the enemies of their cause. When General Butler, as master of New Orleans, issued the equally famous and infamous proclamation that won for him for all time the title of "Beast Butler" among the women of the South, setting forth that any woman who insulted on the street a Union soldier might be treated, without redress on her part, as a woman of the town, he not only consigned his memory to odium, but recorded the bitterness of the feminine spirit among the conquered people. The best friend of Southern womanhood cannot deny that this bitterness often took unjustifiable expression. The very issuance of the proclamation proved that the ladies of New Orleans were given to unseemly vituperation of the soldiers who bore aloft the cause so bitterly hated by the women of the invaded land, and in other ways and places the obligations of ladyhood and even of femininity were too often forgotten in the impulses of hatred and wrath. These ebullitions of the female spirit were not to be repressed by circumstances; that spirit flamed but the more fiercely as it found itself in danger of result. In these days of calmer judgment we know what excuse there was among Southern women for the feeling of hatred and bitterness; we know what it meant to ladies of delicacy and refinement to be insulted by a brutal soldiery, too often unrepressed even by their officers; we can understand the helpless wrath that filled the breast of the Southern woman as she saw her dearest household possessions taken from her or wantonly destroyed by mercenaries, as was the rule rather than the exception when Sherman and his "bummers" went "marching through Georgia" and forgot the rules of civilized warfare, or when Sheridan almost fulfilled his boast that he "would make the Valley of Virginia so barren that a crow flying over it would have to carry its own rations," or when Milroy and his German troops burned and harried and oppressed. Had the operations of war been set in the North as in the South, there would doubtless have been equal cause for hatred in that section, but the only time that warfare was carried thither it was governed and directed by a general who would not tolerate the modern methods of making war upon unarmed people, and the burning of Chambersburg was the sole act of vandalism of which the North ever had the knowledge that comes of suffering. So the history of womanhood during the war between the sections is largely a history of the women of the Confederacy, just as the latent and mediate effects of that war first showed themselves among Southern womanhood.