The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes 1861-1866 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS175 issuance of that proclamation, coupled with a June 1864 visit to the White House, turned Garrison into an adamant champion of Abraham Lincoln. He came to trust Lincoln over Fremont, finding the moderate Republican President preferable to most Radical Republicans and even more trustworthy than many of his old abolitionist colleagues. The importance of Volume V goes beyond these and other themes that emerge in Garrison's letters. Walter Merrill has done a masterful job of editing. Even compared to the very useful precedingvolumes thathe and his deceased colleague Louis Ruchames had produced, annotations for the letters in Volume V are frequent and comprehensive. Byreading introductions to each series of letters and the footnotes for specific letters, one acquires a vast array of important detail. Unfortunately, the detail may have come at the cost of somewhat stale interpretation. Merrill has clearly embraced the 1960's "neoabolitionist" interpretive approach to abolitionism—one which sought to vindicate Garrison and other abolitionists against charges of fanaticism and status dislocation by finding them tactful and psychologically "balanced" reformers. Clinging to this interpretive approach, Merrill has failed to bring to his commentaries the more neutral approach to abolitionist social psychology that emerged duringthe middle andlate 1970's as well as the more intricate explorations of abolitionist ideology by scholars like David Davis and Lewis Perry. Balanced against the amount that one leams from Professor Merrill's detailed editing, however, this time lag in his interpretive framework is not intolerable. Lawrence J. Friedman Bowling Green State University The Diary of Miss Emma Holmes 1861-1866. Edited by John F. Marszalek. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Pp. xxviii, 496. $35.00.) A member of an important South Carolina family, Miss Emma Edwards Holmes kept a diary from secession to early Reconstruction (February 13, 1861, to April 7, 1866). She spent much of her timein Charleston, until her family was made homeless by the great fire of December, 1861. Migrating to Camden, South Carolina, she eventually found herself squarely in the path of Sherman's armies. John F. Marszalek, associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, judically edited and annotated her manuscript, retaining three quarters of the original and eliminating passages that merely catalogued names or rehashed second-hand accounts of battles. The author also added a thoughtful introduction, giving the reader a glimpse into Emma Holmes's home life and social perspective. According to Marszalek, the Holmes Diary "will inevitably be compared with Mary B. Chestnut's A Diary from Dixie." But the twenty- 176CIVIL WAR HISTORY two year old Emma Holmes is no Mary Boykin Chestnut. She is less reflective and more prone to making snap decisions, a tendency that afflicted her from an early age. A mentor said of the eightyear oldchild: "On the whole Emma is a good little girl, her chief defect being an inclination to quickness." For example, Emma was quick to claim victory for the South, even at Gettysburg, and as Marszalek conceded, she was "very inaccurate in her presentation of war news." Moreover, the reader may find much of what Emma has to say superficial and boring. Nevertheless, we are indebted to theauthor for presenting to the public a diary that describes in detail the impact of the war on the old Southern elite. Emma Holmes and her aristocratic associates considered themselves the last of a race. "We, the free-bom descendants of the Cavalier," she asked, "to submit to the descendants of the witch burning Puritans, whose God is theAlmightyDollar. Never! I thank GodI am a Southerner and South Carolinian." Despite such pretensions and chauvinism, she faithfully reflected and presented the impact the war and death had on South Carolina's best families: "I sometimes think my journal will be merely a catalogue of deaths, for almost each day brings us intelligence of the loss of some one in whom we feel interested for their own or their family's sake." Emma Holmes ultimately attributed the South's defeat to its' loss of righteousness, and was appalled how Charleston's elite, "the ultra Fashionables . . . seem to have forgotten alike the dead & the living and with the grass scarce green on the graves of...