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A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter

Amazon.com Price:  $29.75 (as of 06/05/2019 07:55 PST- Details)

Description

Frances Peter used to be one of the vital eleven children of Dr. Robert Peter, a surgeon for the Union army. The Peter circle of relatives lived on Gratz Park near downtown Lexington, where nineteen-year-old Frances began recording her impressions of the Civil War. On account of illness, she did not steadily venture outdoor her home but used to be in a position to gather a remarkable amount of information from friends, neighbors, and newspapers. Peter’s candid diary chronicles Kentucky’s invasion by Confederates under Gen. Braxton Bragg in 1862, Lexington’s month-long occupation by Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith, and changes in attitude a number of the slave population following the Emancipation Proclamation. As troops from both North and South took turns holding the city, she repeatedly emphasized the rightness of the Union cause and minced no words in expressing her disdain for the hated “”secesh.”” Her writings articulate many concerns common to Kentucky Unionists. Though she used to be an ardent supporter of the war against the Confederacy, Peter also worried that Lincoln’s use of authority exceeded his constitutional rights. Her own attitudes towards blacks were ambiguous, as used to be the case with many of us in that time. Peter’s descriptions of day by day events in an occupied city provide valuable insights and a unique feminine perspective on an underappreciated aspect of the war. Until her death by epileptic seizure in August 1864, Peter conscientiously recorded the position and deportment of both Union and Confederate soldiers, incidents at the military hospitals, and stories from the countryside. Her account of a torn and divided region is a window to the war through the gaze of a young woman of intelligence and substance.

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