This diary chronicles the defining years in the life of Grace Brown
Elmore, one of eight children in a wealthy and influential
Columbia, South Carolina, family. Begun just five months into the
Civil War, when Elmore was twenty-two, it is a rich and observant
personal account of a society in the midst of chaotic change. At
her diary's opening, Elmore had every reason to believe that she
would someday marry, bear children, and have a life filled with
music, church, visits - all of the amenities and activities
customary to her comparably privileged network of relatives and
friends. Like them, Elmore would also have servants, as many owners
preferred to call their slaves. Despite her early optimism and
enduring devotion to the Confederacy, Elmore, who never did marry,
found that the war eroded all stability and certainty from her
life. Even before the South's fall, Elmore, like other elite young
southern white women, had seen the old verities destroyed and had
been forced to re-assess all that she had been taken for granted
before poverty, uncertainty, and loneliness became her daily
companions. Elmore's descriptions of wartime life tell of the
Confederate army's retreat from Columbia, the burning of the town,
and the consequences of Sherman's occupation. Hearing, near the
war's end, that "arms were waiting but men were wanting", she
cursed her male protectors' lack of resolve, but not surprisingly
transferred her anger to their "faithless, avericious, cruel and
wicked" northern aggressors. Elmore's details of the transition to
peace and the harsh economic realities of Reconstruction relate her
work as a teacher and, whether fondly recalling her mammy, Mauma
Binah, or bemoaning the "impertinence" of newly freed slaves, she
also provides a wealth of material on southern racial attitudes.
The diary is also filled with unusually candid glimpses into the
dynamics of her family, which Elmore described as "a confederacy of
hard headed, strong minded, self willed women". In her younger
years Elmore wrote of feeling "hemmed in ... by other people's
ideas" and often chafed at her society's notions about women's
domesticity. Although she rose to every challenge before her,
Elmore's diary nonetheless suggests that the autonomy and
independence she had longed for early in her life came under
circumstances that made them a penalty, not a prize.
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