"They say I'm a Yankee -- but if wanting peace is Yankee -- then
"I am one." I am tired of "Disunion" of husband & wife."
In 1858, nineteen-year-old Priscilla "Mittie" Munnikhuysen began
a new diary that saw her marry, leave her family in the genteel
Protestant seaboard culture of Chesapeake Bay, and take up
residence with her wealthy husband, Howard Bond, in the frontier
plantation society of Catholicsouth Louisiana. By 1865, Priscilla
Bond had witnessed trials and disillusionments enough to fill a
two-volume journal: her father-in-law's brutality toward his
slaves; her husband's alleged ambush of Union soldiers and
subsequent flight from home; the retaliatory burning of the
family's sugar plantation in Houma; and the losses, horrors, and
daily depredations of war.
Published here for the first time, with extensive notes and a
critical introduction by Kimberly Harrison, Bond's intimate
writings illuminate the Civil War's impact on women, families, and
individual identities. Occasionally Bond records her experiences
for the benefit of later readers, but more often she uses her diary
to carve a space and time for self-reflection, self-instruction,
and self-persuasion. Nineteenth-century women's lives were defined
by their relation to others -- as wife, mother, daughter, and
sister -- and keeping a diary allowed Bond to claim time for
herself. It served as a rhetorical tool that helped motivate her to
conform to contemporary standards of "true womanhood," adapt to a
harsh new environment, and survive the collapse of a
civilization.
Harrison's interpretive commentary enables readers to appreciate
the context within which Bond writes even as entries about
everything from marital anguish to in-law difficulties to religious
struggles to failing health bring Priscilla Bond uniquely and
movingly to life. Her diary, deftly cross-referenced with numerous
letters, adds a valuable and enriching layer of complexity to the
larger story of the Civil War home front.
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