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Introduction CONSTANCE CARY (1843–1920) came to Richmond, Virginia, as a refugee in the winter of 1861–62 at the age of eighteen. Upon the death of Constance’s father in 1854, her mother, Monimia Fairfax Cary, had moved Constance and her two younger brothers to “Vaucluse,” Monimia’s girlhood home and the Fairfax family estate, just a few miles south of Alexandria, Virginia. War abruptly ended their visit, however, as Union forces seized Vaucluse early in the war and transformed that extraordinary home and grounds into an army camp, forcing the Carys and other members of the extended Fairfax family to flee farther south. In 1862 they reunited in Richmond, the new capital of the Confederacy. Constance and her mother and her aunts set to work in the hospitals nursing wounded and sick Confederate soldiers while enduring the privations and rigors of the wartime capital. It was there in Richmond, during the winter of 1862, Constance met Burton Norvell Harrison (1838–1904), a young assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Mississippi. He had given up his teaching position in Oxford in 1862 and come to Richmond at the request of Jefferson Davis to serve as private secretary to the new Confederate president . For Constance Cary and Burton Harrison the following three years would prove the most exciting and memorable of their lives. Fifty years later Constance would relive those Richmond days in her memoir, Recollections Grave and Gay, in an attempt to share her memories with subsequent generations. By the time of its publication, Mrs. Burton Harrison (the name Constance used as author of her reminiscences) was an experienced writer, having published several dozen works of fiction, not to speak of fairy tales, short stories, and essays. Two of the latter category were published in Battles and Leaders (1888), the four-volume history of the Civil War written by major figures, military and civil, of the North and the South. Constance, writing as Mrs. Burton Harrison, was one of only Introduction xvi two women invited to contribute. She would be included in nineteenth- and twentieth-century biographical dictionaries, recognized as an outstanding southern writer. She also translated and adapted French plays, making imaginative use of this second language, which she cherished throughout her life. Recollections Grave and Gay, her war memoir, would be Constance Cary Harrison’s last work, truly a labor of love and a memorial to her recently deceased brother. Although the Civil War, as it swirled about Richmond, is seen in Harrison’s memoir through a partisan prism, hers remains an engaging and informative first-person account of the collapse of the Confederacy. Even as a nineteen year old, Constance knew the leaders of the new nation —the military, political, and social prominents—and her observations of the Confederate elite are not only literate but also detailed, insightful, and responsible. In the opinion of Professor Dorothy M. Scura, contemporary authority on Harrison, and nineteenth-century authors Ellen Glasgow and Henry James, Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay is unquestionably “her most valuable work.” Historians Douglas Southall Freeman, Bell I. Wiley, and Allan Nevins admired her memoir, as did, it is believed, Margaret Mitchell. For Freeman, Harrison’s Recollections provided an “admirable picture of war-time Richmond.” Nevins agreed, summing up Recollections as “an intelligent woman’s memories of social life and economic conditions in Richmond, with good commentaries on Confederate military and political leaders.” The Confederacy would collapse before Harrison’s eyes, and with it the antebellum lifestyle and values she treasured; and looking back, her experience seemed reframed, as though the occupation and destruction of her beloved Vaucluse were a metaphor for the fate of the South. “It is hard to write of the living,” would write, “save in stilted and self-conscious phrase. . . . So blended are they both in my memory with the long procession of friends who have passed over the river and rest under the shade of ever-living trees, that I know not whether to mention them in sad or joyous words. But even under the stress of that terrible hand of steel that for four years held us down, we had many bright hours together.” Constance had great advantages in her undertaking. Being of an old and respected Virginia family, she was unusually well connected socially, and with the position of her fiancé, she knew the interior of the Confederate White House, even the names of the Davis servants. She and Burton Harrison would be permitted a private...

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