READING, KATE STONE: "May 15, 1861. My Brother started at daybreak this morning for New Orleans. He so fears that the fighting will be over before he can get there..."
NARRATOR: In May of 1861, just one month after the outbreak of the Civil War, Kate Stone began to write a journal. She was 20 years old.
The daughter of a wealthy Louisiana family, she had been raised in a privileged world of oak alleys and society balls.
DREW GILPIN FAUST, HISTORIAN: She was at the point in her life where it really was getting to be time for her to find the appropriate beau, to become engaged, to become a young wife, to start having children, and become her own independent family.
NARRATOR: But the war, and the Reconstruction that followed, would forever change Kate's world.
As she and women like her faced the realities of war and military occupation and learned to manage the plantations, they began to carve a new role for themselves in the South.
FAUST: For white southerners the war called every element of their identity into question. And then for a woman who had been asked to do all kinds of man's work, what does womanhood mean? So who are you?
NARRATOR: Like the fictional Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, Kate Stone was a diehard supporter of the Confederacy and a believer in the moral and military superiority of the South.
But the death of two of her brothers in the war and the certain defeat of the Confederacy would shake Kate's faith.
READING, KATE STONE: "Conquered, Submission, Subjugation are words that burn into my heart, and yet I feel that we are doomed to know them in all their bitterness. Another month and our Confederacy will be a Nation no longer, but we will be slaves, yes slaves, of the Yankee Government. The degradation seems more than we can bear. By the twenty-fourth we will know our fate -- Submission to the Union (how we hate the word!), Confiscation, and Negro equality. God help us, for vain is the help of man."
NARRATOR: As they returned to their land after the end of the war, plantation women set out to rebuild the lives they had left four years earlier.
With so many men gone, they would now be instrumental in shaping the post-war South.
NARRATOR: In coastal Georgia, Fan Butler struggled to accept the new order of things.
The daughter of Pierce Butler, one of the richest planters in the South, Fan was born in Philadelphia, but had always felt an unconditional loyalty to the South.
At 29, she found herself trying to make the family's rice plantation in Georgia profitable again -- now that it could no longer rely on slave labor.
A tough negotiator, she had little patience for the freedmen's new rights.
READING, FAN BUTLER: "Their idea of work, unaided by the stern law of necessity, is very vague. I don't think one does a really honest full day's work, and so of course not half the necessary amount is done and I am afraid never will be again, and so our properties will soon be utterly worthless... They are affectionate and often trustworthy and honest, but so hopelessly lazy as to be almost worthless as laborers."
DANA D. NELSON, HISTORIAN: It's easy to find yourself impatient with Fan Butler Leigh because of her obvious devotion to white aristocratic supremacy. But really, if you stop and think about what she was doing, it's extraordinary. This single young woman, going down into the heart of the former Confederacy, where some of the most stringent standards of true womanhood had long reigned, to single-handedly run what was still the second largest plantation in Georgia, it defies imagination.
NARRATOR: Fan Butler and Kate Stone had emerged from the war with a new resilience and a sense of independence that would have been unthinkable in women of their class only five years earlier. "The truth is, I am very busy, very useful and very happy," Fan Butler confided to a friend.
But they also held on to many of the beliefs that had been at the core of the Southern way of life -- honor, glory, independence and the inferiority of African-Americans -- fashioning them into a fervent support for what would come to be known as the Lost Cause.
FAUST: They have all kinds of ways of drawing lines and resisting the egalitarian impulses of freedom, the assumptions of the former slaves, just setting up roadblocks... in every way they can imagine, to change in their society. And in some ways one might say the South succeeded in this, and the women of the South succeeded in this, well into the 20th century, and with inventing new kinds of ways of limiting freedom, and then of course the legal ways that the South itself finds to change the nature of freedom in society, to resist the changes implicit in emancipation.
NARRATOR: Although loyal to the Southern cause until her dying day, in later years Kate Stone showed a rare candor as she thought back on the people her family had once owned.
READING, KATE STONE: "Even under the best owners, it was a hard, hard life: to toil six days out of seven, week after week, month after month, year after year, as long as life lasted; to be absolutely under the control of someone until the last breath was drawn; to win but the bare necessaries of life, no hope of more, no matter how hard the work; and to know that nothing could change your lot. Obedience, revolt, submission, prayers -- all were in vain. Waking sometimes in the night as I grew older and thinking it all over, I would grow sick with the misery of it all... Then, we never thought about it."
NARRATOR: After helping her mother run the family's plantation in Louisiana, Kate Stone married a Confederate veteran. She moved to Tallulah, in northeastern Louisiana, and became very involved in efforts to keep the memory of the Confederacy alive. She died in 1907, at 65.
Fan Butler married an Englishman. Exhausted after ten years of labor struggles and crop failures, she moved to England in 1876. She lived there the rest of her life. She died in 1910. She was 72.
