ABOUT THIS BOOK

Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her?

Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Vicki Adams Tongate spent twenty years at Southern Methodist University, teaching and researching the Lucy Pier Stevens diary. She has now retired and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

REVIEWS

A work of exhaustive research and devoted scholarship . . . and a delightful and informative read.

— Civil War Book Review

A rich interpretation by Tongate of a volatile period in Texas history witnessed by a unique and engaging diarist.

— Journal of Southern History

A valuable look at the daily lives of women, of a Texas community, and of the Civil War home front.

— Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Tongate has done a masterful job of editing.

— Texas Books in Review

Lucy Pier Stevens’s diary illuminates the workings of a slaveholding household, the ebb and flow of civilian morale, the ways in which Texas stood apart from the rest of the Confederacy, and the reading habits of a literate family, among many other things. The diary’s immediacy and rich detail recommend it to anyone interested in the southern home front during the final years of a profoundly disruptive crisis.

— Gary W. Gallagher, University of Virginia, author of The Union War

Another Year Finds Me in Texas is a charming Civil War diary of a young Ohio woman, trapped in the Lone Star state for the war’s duration. From epidemics to love triangles, from births to funerals, Lucy Pier Stevens’s journal of the wartime South makes for fascinating reading. For scholars and students alike, Vicki Tongate’s attentive narration provides the fullest possible contextualization for Stevens’s personal account—and brings to life the human dramas reflected in this critical era.

— Catherine Clinton, Denman Chair of American History, University of Texas at San Antonio

TABLE OF CONTENTS