A Confederate Girl's Diary: INTRODUCTION: IT is perhaps due to a
chance conversation, held some 17 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 fact
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, just a few 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 so many women did. I have written while resting to recover
breath in the midst 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 may read my evidence as it was written
from March 1862 until April 1865," my mother declared impulsively.
General
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