The Daily Dispatch: November 25, 1861., [Electronic resource]

Correspondence of the Richmond Dispatch.
Travels in the South.

There is a county in Alabama which has sent 800 volunteers to Virginia, and so great has been the sacrifice that the wives and daughters of 500 of these soldiers have been compelled to take the places of their husbands and fathers. They have made and gathered the corn and cotton, have fattened the hogs, and performed all the toil of day laborers on the farm. What an illustration of female patriotism! How can the husbands, and fathers, and sons of such women ever be subjugated?

In South Carolina and Georgia I found multitudes flocking to the sea coast. Some had old flint guns, which seemed to have been unused since the Revolutionary war. Others had guns without locks, and some had merely heavy canes. I was told by intelligent persons that already the taking of Port Royal has been of great service to the Southern cause. It has fully aroused the masses of Georgia and Carolina, and will in all probability double the number of volunteers from those States.

It is truly refreshing to see how many factories are going up. In a week another large powder mill will open within a few miles of Raleigh. The paper mills here are arranging to do a much greater work. The Raleigh and Gaston Railroad is erecting an immense shop here, to cost several hundred thousand dollars. Thus while our brave boys on the field of strife are effecting our political independence, those at home are securing what is scarcely less desirable, our commercial and financial disenthralment.

Raleigh, like Richmond, is a great place for Conventions, religious and political. The Baptists are now holding their annual meeting. The Presbyterian Synod has just adjourned. The State Convention is in session here. Raleigh hospitality is proverbial. It seems to me that the people's hearts are ‘"as large as all out doors,"’ as the Kentuckians say.