In Their Words…

I hope that this will be the beginning of a new series that will take a closer look a historical documents.  I have made an attempt at a similar series before with no avail or follow-up.  I have also tried to keep my distance to the pissing matches that develop over comments and post at certain Neo-confederate websites like Facebook’s SHPG or SNN.  I have not done a very good job.  Why?  Well it is so damn easy to get their dander up over basic historical facts that they have a hard time accepting.  But I must try harder not to engage in their poor version of history and to make this blog more academic in nature.  Now, that does not mean I will not call them out on some of their most outrageous comments and claims, but it will not be the focus of the blog anymore.

My first post in this new series will come from Eliza Frances Andrews and her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl.  As I said in an earlier post, I usually read with a pencil or highlighter in hand to mark information I find interesting.  It will be in this series that I post those highlighted sections for you to read and if you feel the need make a comment or two.  I hope the quotes will provide a basis for some constructive discussion and exchange of information that will lead to a better understanding of the American Civil War.  My first post deals with a diary from a woman who experience Sherman’s March to the Sea first hand and is writing the introduction to her work in the early 1900′s.

So let’s get started…From Andrews’ diary introduction…

“Never was there an aristocracy so compact, so united, so powerful. Out of a population of some 9,000,000 whites that peopled the Southern States, according to the census of 1850, only about 300,000 were actual slaveholders. Less than 3,000 of these – men owning, say, over 100 negroes each, constituted the great planter class, who, with a small proportion of professional and business men affiliated with them in culture and sympathies, dominated Southern sentiment and for years dictated the policy of the nation.”

“Narrow and provincial we may have been, in some respects, but take it all in all, it is doubtful whether the world has ever produced a state of society more rich in all the resources for a thoroughly wholesome, happy, and joyous life than existed among the privileged “4,000″ under the peculiar civilization of the Old South – a civilization which has “served its purpose in the evolution of the race and passed away forever. So completely has it vanished that the very language in which we used to express ourselves is becoming obsolete.”

She continues…

“…the author frankly admits that it is violently and often absurdly partisan – and it could not well have been otherwise under the circumstances. Coming from a heart ablaze with the passionate resentment of a people smarting under the humiliation of defeat, it was inevitable that along with the just indignation at wrongs which ought never to have been committed, there should have crept in many intemperate and indiscriminate denunciations of acts which the writer did not understand, to say nothing of sophomorical vaporings calculated now only to excite a smile.”

“I cannot better express this feeling than in the words of an old Confederate soldier at Petersburg, Va., where he had gone with a number of his comrades who had been attending the great reunion at Richmond, to visit the scene of their last struggles under “Marse Robert.” They were standing looking down into the Crater, that awful pit of death, lined now with daisies and buttercups, and fragrant with the breath of spring. Tall pines, whose lusty young roots had fed on the hearts of dead men, were waving softly overhead, and nature everywhere had covered up the scars of war with the mantle of smiling peace. I paused, too, to watch them, and we all stood there awed into silence, till at last an old battle-scarred hero from one of the wiregrass counties way down in Georgia, suddenly raised his hands to heaven, and said in a voice that trembled with emotion: “Thar’s three hundred dead Yankees buried here under our feet. I helped to put ‘em thar, but so help me God, I hope the like ‘ll never be done in this country again. Slavery’s gone and the war’s over now, thank God for both! We are all brothers once more, and I can feel for them layin’ down thar just the same as fur our own.”

And finally she discusses her father, a Union man…

“And now I have just a word to say on a personal matter – a solemn amende to make to the memory of my dear father, to whose unflinching devotion to the Union these pages will bear ample testimony. While I have never been able to bring myself to repent of having sided with my own people, I have repented in sackcloth and ashes for the perverse and rebellious spirit so often manifested against him. How it was that the influence of such a parent, whom we all loved and honored, should have failed to convert his own children to his way of thinking, I do not myself understand, unless it was the contagion of the general enthusiasm around us. Youth is impulsive, and prone to run with the crowd. We caught the infection of the war spirit in the air and never stopped to reason or to think. And then, there were our soldier boys. With my three brothers in the army, and that glorious record of Lee and his men in Virginia, how was it possible not to throw oneself heart and soul into the cause for which they were fighting so gallantly? And when the bitter end came, it is not to be wondered at if our resentment against those who had brought all these humiliations and disasters upon us should flame up fiercer than ever.”

“My father died before the horrors of that period had passed away; before the strife and hatred he so bitterly deplored had begun to subside; before he could have the satisfaction of seeing his grandson fighting under the old flag that his father had followed and that his sons had repudiated.”

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