Journal of a Secesh Lady

I have just finished reading Catherine Edmondston’s journal of her life during the Civil War.

I am so grateful to “Kate” for making the effort to record each day, 1860 to 1866 as she experienced it. She recorded the reports, rumors, and her vitriolic response to the hated Yankee depredations. She also found time to record the ebb and flow of the plantation work her personal joys and sorrows. I feel she shared her life with me, a woman of different circumstance in 2008.

It is a hefty book, weighty in both substance and size. Many a night in bed I struggled to hold it upright at an angle harmonious with my bifocals. Reading it from beginning to end is a task of persistence and devotion. I feel rewarded by the effort.

The story offers the opportunity to travel back in time, to be immersed in the thinking and social fabric of the secessionist south.

At times I became impatient with her favorite themes, the gentlemanliness of the Confederate Officers contrasted with the “ill bread” Yankees, her acerbic abuse of Lincoln. Still what would you expect? Do you want social realism or some sanitized romantic novel?

The last entries, after Lee’s surrender, made the whole reading worth while. Catherine and her husband Patrick had three properties and about eighty-six slaves. She continues her entries for another year as they struggle, former master and former slave to work out a new social contract.

Catherine excoriates the “Freeman’s Bureau”, their meddling, rules and general mischief. It is frustration and miscommunication on all sides. The dysfunctional family that was the Plantation hierarchy falls apart before the reader’s eyes. There is a redistribution of power, misread on both sides as the model shifts from Master and Slave to Labor and Management. Kate has a wonderful ear for dialect and dialogue. You can hear the speech and see the participants confronting each other both uncomfortable and on unsure ground. It is the beginning of the transition period in race relations that may devolve into the Presidency of Barack Obama