BiblioVault - Books about Civil War Diary

Another Year Finds Me in Texas

The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens

By Vicki Adams Tongate

University of Texas Press, 2016

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.

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The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy

The Original Manuscript Edition

Gideon Welles, Edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp; Foreword by James M. McPherson

University of Illinois Press, 2014

Gideon Welles’s 1861 appointment as secretary of the navy placed him at the hub of Union planning for the Civil War and in the midst of the powerful personalities vying for influence in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet. Although Welles initially knew little of naval matters, he rebuilt a service depleted by Confederate defections, planned actions that gave the Union badly needed victories in the war’s early days, and oversaw a blockade that weakened the South’s economy.

Perhaps the hardest-working member of the cabinet, Welles still found time to keep a detailed diary that has become one of the key documents for understanding the inner workings of the Lincoln administration. In this new edition, William E. and Erica L. Gienapp have restored Welles’s original observations, gleaned from the manuscript diaries at the Library of Congress and freed from his many later revisions, so that the reader can experience what he wrote in the moment. With his vitriolic pen, Welles captures the bitter disputes over strategy and war aims, lacerates colleagues from Secretary of State William H. Seward to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck, and condemns the actions of the self-serving southern elite he sees as responsible for the war. He just as easily waxes eloquent about the Navy's wartime achievements, extols the virtues of Lincoln, and drops in a tidbit of Washington gossip.

Carefully edited and extensively annotated, this edition contains a wealth of supplementary material. The appendixes include short biographies of the members of Lincoln’s cabinet, the retrospective Welles wrote after leaving office covering the period missing from the diary proper, and important letters regarding naval matters and international law.

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The Civil War Diary of Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R.

Patrick J. Hayes

Catholic University of America Press, 2017

This exciting Civil War diary of a Redemptorist priest, Rev. James Sheeran, C.Ss.R., who was chaplain to the 14th Louisiana Regiment of the Confederacy, is a national treasure. Irish-born Sheeran (1817-1881) was one of only a few dozen Catholic chaplains commissioned for the Confederacy and one of only two who kept a journal. Highlighting his exploits from August 1,1862 through April 24, 1865, the journal tells of all the major events of his life in abundant detail: on the battle field, in the hospitals, and among Catholics and Protestants whom he encountered in local towns, on the trains, and in the course of his ministrations. His ideological sympathies clearly rest with the Confederacy. The tone is forthright, even haughty, but captures in sure and steady fashion, both the personality of the man and the events to which he was a witness, especially the major battles. The journal is arguably the most unique narrative of the war written by a chaplain of any denomination and certainly is the most extensive.

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I Acted from Principle

The Civil War Diary of Dr. William M. McPheeters, Confederate Surgeon in the Trans-Mississippi

Cynthia DeHaven Pitcock

University of Arkansas Press, 2000

At the start of the Civil War, Dr. William McPheeters was a distinguished physician in St. Louis, conducting unprecedented public-health research, forging new medical standards, and organizing the state's first professional associations. But Missouri was a volatile border state. Under martial law, Union authorities kept close watch on known Confederate sympathizers. McPheeters was followed, arrested, threatened, and finally, in 1862, given an ultimatum: sign an oath of allegiance to the Union or go to federal prison. McPheeters "acted from principle" instead, fleeing by night to Confederate territory. He served as a surgeon under Gen. Sterling Price and his Missouri forces west of the Mississippi River, treating soldiers' diseases, malnutrition, and terrible battle wounds. From almost the moment of his departure, the doctor kept a diary. It was a pocket-size notebook which he made by folding sheets of pale blue writing paper in half and in which he wrote in miniature with his steel pen. It is the first known daily account by a Confederate medical officer in the Trans-Mississippi Department. It also tells his wife's story, which included harassment by Federal military officials, imprisonment in St. Louis, and banishment from Missouri with the couple's two small children. The journal appears here in its complete and original form, exactly as the doctor first wrote it, with the addition of the editors' full annotation and vivid introductions to each section.

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Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment

The Civil War Diary of Burt G. Wilder, 55th Massachusetts

Richard M. Reid

University of Massachusetts Press, 2010

In early 1863, in the aftermath of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, Massachusetts began recruiting black soldiers to serve in the Civil War. Although the first regiment formed, the 54th Massachusetts, would become the best-known black regiment in the war, the second regiment raised, the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, performed equally valuable service in the Union Army.

Burt Green Wilder, a Boston-born, Harvard-educated doctor-in-training, was among the first white officers commissioned to staff the 55th Massachusetts. Like other officers serving in the state's African American units, Wilder was selected for his military experience, his "firm Anti-Slavery principles," and his faith in the value of black troops. From the time he joined the 55th in May 1863 until the regiment was discharged in September 1865, Wilder recorded his experiences and observations. He described the day-to-day activities of a Civil War surgeon, the indignities suffered by black enlisted men at the hands of a War Department that denied them the same treatment offered to white troops, and the role of the regiment in the campaign around Charleston and in Florida.

Service in the southern states also allowed Wilder to indulge a passion for natural science and comparative anatomy, including the collection of unusual species, one of which—the spider known as Nephila wilderi—still bears his name. After the war he completed his medical studies at Harvard and joined the faculty of Cornell University, where he became a distinguished professor of zoology as well as an outspoken advocate of racial equality.

In his introduction to the volume, Richard M. Reid analyzes Burt Wilder's diary and places it within the context of the war, the experience of African American troops, and Wilder's life and career.

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A Very Violent Rebel

The Civil War Diary of Ellen Renshaw House

Daniel E. Sutherland

University of Tennessee Press, 1996

Ellen Renshaw House was only nineteen years old in 1863 when she began a detailed journal of her experiences in Knoxville, Tennessee, amid the turmoil of the Civil War. Her diary, now published for the first time, is a remarkable document of the divided loyalties that were so pronounced in that part of the state and of the daily effects the war had on civilians.

A member of a middle-class family that had moved to Knoxville in 1860 from Georgia, Ellen House became, like her parents and siblings, a fervent Confederate—or, as she called herself, “a very violent Rebel.” When the city fell to Federal forces in September 1863, Ellen’s resentments ran deep, and she filled her diary with scornful words for the occupying Yankees. She eagerly followed the news of military actions that might mean the recapture of the city and became an eyewitness to the war’s dangers when Confederate General James Longstreet launched an ill-fated attack on Knoxville late in 1863. Despite her own privations, Ellen gave much of her time to providing relief to Confederate prisoners of war in the city. Since she made no secret of where her sympathies lay, Federal military authorities eventually suspected her of spying and expelled her to Georgia, where she continued to record her impressions and observations.

Only recently brought to light by the diarist’s descendants, this compelling personal record has been meticulously edited and annotated by Daniel Sutherland. The resulting volume adds a spirited and articulate voice to the chorus of available firsthand testimony on America’s bloodiest conflict.

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