A Confederate Girl’s Diary: Civil War Classic Library

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It is perhaps because of a chance conversation, held some seventeen years ago in New York, that this Diary of the Civil War was saved from destruction. A Philadelphian had been talking with my mother of North and South, and had alluded to the engagement between the Essex and the Arkansas, on the Mississippi, as a brilliant victory for the Federal navy. My mother protested, at once; said that she and her sister Miriam, and several friends, had been witnesses, from the levee, to the truth that the Confederates had fired and abandoned their own ship when the machinery broke down, after two shots had been exchanged: the Federals, cautiously turning the point, had then captured but a smoking hulk. The Philadelphian gravely corrected her; history, it appeared, had consecrated, on the strength of an official report, the version more agreeable to Northern pride. “But I wrote a description of the whole, only some hours after it occurred!” my mother insisted. “Early in the war I began to keep a diary, and continued until the very end; I had to find some vent for my feelings, and I would not make an exhibition of myself by talking, as such a lot of women did. I have written whilst resting to recuperate breath in the course of a stampede; I have even written with shells bursting over the house in which I sat, ready to flee but waiting for my mother and sisters to finish their preparations.” “If that record still existed, it would be invaluable,” said the Philadelphian. “We Northerners are sincerely anxious to know what Southern women did and thought at that time, but the difficulty is to find authentic contemporaneous evidence. All that I, for one, have seen, has been marred by improvement in the light of subsequent events.” “You can also read my evidence as it was written from March 1862 until April 1865,” my mother declared hastily. At our home in Charleston, on her return, she unstitched with trembling hands a linen-bound parcel at all times kept in her tall, cedar-lined wardrobe of curled walnut. On it was scratched in ink “To be burned unread after my death”; it contained, she had once told me, a record of no interest save to her who had written it and lacked the courage to re-read it; a narrative of days she had lived, of joys she had lost; of griefs accepted, of vain hopes cherished.

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