This digital book includes an annotated listing of select bibliographies for research on the American Civil War (added 2011)
Originally published 1913
Excerpt from Introduction -
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.
"But I wrote a description of the whole, just a few hours after it
occurred!" my mother insisted. "Early in the war I began to keep a
diary, and continued until the very end; I had to find some vent for my
feelings, and I would not make an exhibition of myself by talking, as
so many women did. I have written while resting to recover breath in
the midst of a stampede; I have even written with shells bursting over
the house in which I sat, ready to flee but waiting for my mother and
sisters to finish their preparations.".......
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