A Confederate Girl's Diary

<p>Sarah Morgan Dawson lived on a Louisiana plantation during the American Civil War and recorded her thoughts and feelings about the loss of friends killed in battle and the occupation of her home by Union troops.</p>

Biographies & Memoirs

Sarah Morgan Dawson

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<p>It is perhaps due to 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 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. At our home in Charleston, on her return, she unstitched with trembling hands a linen-bound parcel always 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.</p>

A Confederate Girl's Diary: Civil War Classic Library

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The Civil War, the most dramatic moment in this nation's history, also produced some of our greatest literature. From tragic charges to prison escapes to the desolation wrought on those who stayed behind, Blood is an extraordinary collection of reminiscences, fiction, and excerpts from diaries and letters by an array of soldiers, writers and observers that includes Abraham Lincoln, General George Pickett, Walt Whitman, Ulysses S. Grant and Stephen Crane. * Audie Award winner.

Blood: Stories of Life and Death From The Civil War (Adrenaline)

History

Ulysses S. Grant

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Walt, Whitman

Abraham, Lincoln

John, McElroy

Stephen, Crane

George Pickett

Lt. Colonel W.W. Blackford

George T. Stevens

William T. Sherman

Adeline Grey

Americas

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Books by Sarah Morgan Dawson