Sarah Morgan: The Civil War Diary Of A Southern Woman [Paperback]

Born into one of the best families of Baton Rouge, Sarah Morgan was not yet twenty when she began her diary in January 1862, nine months after the start of the Civil War. She was soon to experience a coming-of-age filled with the turmoil and upheaval that devastated the wartime South. She set down the Remarkable events of the war in a record that remains one of the most vivid, evocative portrayals in existence of a time and place that today make up a crucial chapter in our national history.
Sarah Morgan herself emerges as one of the most memorable nineteenth-century women in fiction or nonfiction, a young woman of intelligence and fortitude, as well as of high spirits and passion, who questioned the society into which she was born and the meaning of the war for ordinary families like her own and for the divided nation as a whole.
Now published in its entirety for the first time, Sarah Morgan's classic account brings the Civil War and the Old South to life with all the freshness and immediacy of great literature.Book One

(This was an old book Brother had in Paris, before I was born. He gave it to me for my 2d Journal, though I call it my First. The other was begun when I was Eleven years old.)

[p. 1] 1862. Jan 10th

B.R. [Baton Rouge]

A new year has opened to me while my thoughts are still wrapped up in the last; Heaven send it may be a happier one than 1861. And yet there were many pleasant days in that year, as well as many bitter ones. Remember the bright sunny days of last winter; the guests at home, the visits abroad; the buggy rides, the walks, the dances every night; the merry, kind voices that came from laughing lips, the bright eyes that then sparkled with pleasure? Is there nothing to remember with gratitude in all that?

What if grief came afterwards; long days and nights of heart breaking grief that only God knows of, [when I was] so heart broken that even God seemed so far off that prayers could not reach himl#,