Judith White McGuire, Diary of a southern refugee during the war, by a lady of Virginia

[6] never to return. We could not forget the injury done to our country. If what we wrote indicates this, what is it but the voice of nature, which neither fear nor hope could repress? The ruin of the whole South! Where are the colours dark enough for that picture? With her rightful government overturned; her territory seized by lawless hands; her system of domestic labour suddenly broken up; her estates robbed; her fields desolated; her barns destroyed by fire; her temples profaned; her once joyous homes here and there silent as death; her old men and women going with sorrow to the grave, because their gallant sons are not; her fair and fainting daughters mourning for loved ones whom they girded for the fight, and saw again never more; her widows and orphans, whom sorrow may kill, if want does not starve them; her wounded, and scarred, and crippled, and suffering, with no rest for any save in the quiet graves at home, or in the vast cemeteries, where such hosts of her slaughtered children lie. How must we think or speak of all this? Let the coldest heart ever frozen by Northern interest or prejudice answer.

Shall this breach never be healed? Are there no able and patriotic men North and South--no men of God-fitted to achieve this work without further injury or shame to either party? This great revolution cannot be without God-without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground. If there be error or mischief, that is of man. With God “one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” He sees the end from the beginning. His great “purposes run along the line of ages,” and, worked out as He ordains, produce good, and good only. For ages He has blessed the South with the fairest land, the purest social circle, the noblest race of men, and the happiest people, on