A Confederate Girl's Diary

A Confederate Girl's Diary

"March 9, 1862 - May 2, 1865. One of the best Confederate diaries, written by a Baton Rouge girl, who was a fervent Confederate. In 1863, she moved to the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and later into New Orleans. Dawson was initially ambivalent toward the North as she read insults to the South in Northern newspapers and heard neighbors abuse the North. Her feelings were tempered because her father was originally from Philadelphia, her brother in New Orleans was a Unionist, and a brother-in-law was a Union officer. When Federal forces occupied Baton Rouge, however, she marched down the street wearing a Confederate flag. She repeated the act, but, as she observed that the Yankee officers appeared to be gentlemen, she was disgusted with herself for “unnecessarily attracting attention, by an unladylike display of defiance," p. 28. Dawson turned her wrath on the ultra-secessionists and the "rabid, fanatical, abusive violence of our own female Secession declaimers," p. 72. Later, when Dawson saw townswomen refusing to give assistance to injured Yankees lying in the square, she insisted "That is woman's mission! and not Preaching and Politics," p. 80-81). During the spring and summer of 1862, Dawson witnessed planters burning their cotton to keep it from falling into Union hands and civilians fleeing with all their possessions and watched as the Confederates blew up the C.S.S. Arkansas after the battle with the U.S.S. Essex. When the family home in Baton Rouge was sacked that same summer, her widowed mother and two sisters moved to several plantations and then to Clinton, LA, before settling with her brother in New Orleans in 1863 for the remainder of the war. Dawson disliked the pro-Union inhabitants of New Orleans. When Vicksburg and Port Hudson fell, she was enraged by the crowds that gathered to celebrate the Confederate misfortunes. After President Lincoln's assassination, she wrote about the numerous New Orleans homes that were profusely draped. By the end of the war, Dawson's exile and the death of two brothers had left her thoroughly embittered."

Sarah Morgan Dawson

(c)1913

English

Book

Sarah Morgan Dawson

A Confederate girl's diary / Dawson, Warrington,; 1878-1962, ; writer of introduction.

1913, (c)1913

Book

OCLC: 1538339

English

OCLC WorldCat FirstSearch