A Confederate Girl’s Diary

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“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.” From an Introduction by Warrington Dawson.

At her early 20s, Sarah Morgan Dawson was living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when she started having this diary. The American Civil War was enraged. However at first the turbulence appeared to be at a distance, it would finally be taken home to her in private circumstances. Her family’s faithfulness were divvied. Her father, although he disallowed of their rift, announced for the South when Louisiana departed the Union. Her oldest brother, who came to be the family ruler upon their father’s death, was for the Union, but he declined to fight against his confrere Southerners. The family kept servants, a few of whom are cited by name in this diary. Sarah was adherent to the Confederacy, and saw with agony and resentment its decease. Her diary, drafted between March 1862 and June 1865, dissertations on matters as common as domestic chores and love stories to those as disturbing as responsibility for her brothers who battled in the warfare.
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