Wartime

This chapter looks at women diarists from the southern slave-owning class looking at civil war. Some wrote a great deal about the battles and politics, while others wrote only occasionally about the far-reaching conflict. But all of the diarists comment on the sheer, local craziness of war—the reversals, weird occurrences, and outright destruction of lives and the material world. War demanded that they write in their diaries, but war also made writing inadequate. War shook up everything normal, and so the diarist found herself writing how normal time turned into something else—wartime. Women found themselves writing about cannonades and enemy soldiers at the door, about strange mutations in everything “every-day,” in the routines of home, the choice of clothing and food, and in the novel presence of working-class white men in the shape of Confederate soldiers. Wartime challenged women’s inventiveness as diarists, and it shows how the diary as a text—open, changeable, tied to the moment—brings wartime close to readers today.

Keeping the Diary

This chapter looks at some well-known, much-used American Civil War diaries written by slave-owning women, with a focus on what they said about the “whys” and “hows” of diary-keeping. No woman among them planned on becoming a war diarist, so discovering the fresh pleasures and frustrations of diary-keeping shaped what they wrote. Women wrote about the emotional release of diary-writing, as well as the satisfactions of recording the novel and fearsome events of war. They wrote about ideas and they wrote about paper and pens. They wrote about how they had to continue writing even when they felt they could not. Each diarist in her own way found out that keeping her diary was a much more edgy (and revealing) experience than she could have guessed, a record of unprecedented times that also became a “friend” and a personal history. So women found out that a diary was open not only to interpreting wartime events, but also to the discoveries that authorship brings.

Slaves

This chapter focuses on what (and how) southern women diarists of the slave-owning class wrote about slaves as the Civil War crushed the system of human bondage that had benefited white southerners for so long. Individual enslaved African Americans begin to show up in the pages of white women’s diaries. Diarists transcribe what many of them say and do, sometimes with hostility or fear, but often thoughtfully and with surprise. Diaries thus reveal not the “end” of slavery, but rather slavery in the midst of ending. In writing about the uncertain future that the war presented to everyone, diarists in effect gave accounts of the personal relations that had held slavery together, day by day, before the war. They sketched enslaved people as individuals, more interested in how the end of bondage revealed their connection to certain black people than they were in assessing the blanket “loyalty” of servants. Inscribing what she saw of slavery and race, a diarist discovered how slavery—enslaved people—were inseparable from all she had known as “my life.” Seeing this life explode was one story she told to her pages. Diarists’ struggle to write and to understand this (as historians do, too) is a small opening for our historical empathy with these white women who deserve no sympathy.

Herself

As southern women of the slave-owning class wrote in their diaries about the excitement and destruction of the Civil War—about war’s violence, men, slaves, and the odd act of diary-keeping itself—they also wrote about themselves. What sort of person am I? It was a question diarists rarely asked head-on, but it was something they wrote about in other ways. As the war transformed everything in their lives, diarists reflected on what had held their lives together, including faith in God and faith itself, femininity as a timeless quality with a “natural” force, and the strangeness of human emotions. Doing this, women also wrote about keeping a diary. They wrote about how a diary does not so much hold the past, but ghosts of the past. They wrote of words’ fleeting but irreplaceable power, and how a diary hands over a mind’s life, always and forever in first draft.

Men

This chapter picks up a question that runs through the Civil War diaries of southern women: what is the tie between men and war, and what will war reveal about men? The question was rich enough to develop into thoughts and speculations about the nature of men, “the harder sex,” and whether the men who opted for war would have an answer to what it meant and how it would end. Diarists reflect (and worry, and sometimes joke) about worldly men who now seemed to improvise far more than they let on. They wrote about duty and morality, and how war shook up how to meet men and what to say to them. And while diarists wrote about the men they knew, they also wrote with curiosity and attraction for new men, the men war brought. So diarists wrote about love, and whether love would stand up to war—a compelling question for women and men at war, though not one often explored by historians. Women’s diaries open a door to such exploration, and to the way a diary’s page captures “timeless” themes amid a diary’s time-bound days.

Reading the Diary

This chapter takes up the challenges and pleasures of reading the American Civil War diaries of southern slave-owning women. The rewards include discovering the immediate, first-draft, small-scale qualities of diaries, each in its own way bringing the past to us like no other text. The challenges grow from discovering how a woman’s diary is forever a fragment even when it comes to us untouched from her hands. Most diaries come to us from other hands, those of protective family members and ambitious editors who over the years changed the diary text in one way or another to make it more “readable,” “relevant,” and, in the end, less diary-like. Playing with the tension between the woman’s unruly diary text and the neat “historical source” others have made of it is one of the satisfactions of exploring diaries. It is one of the conditions of knowing past worlds as far as we are able, and a way to find if there is room for empathy with lives mostly unlike our own.