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258CIVIL WAR HISTORY The diary reads quite well. Beaudry is fulsome about camp conditions, skirmishes , and religious services. He notes the weather daily, and the reader can be impressed with the effect of nature on the spirit and abilities of a regiment. Beaudry acted with high seriousness. Initially, the chaplain fulminates against gambling by soldiers and waxes about his participation in the military temperance movement. The book's attention to military affairs gains momentum at Gettysburg. Beaudry is captured by the Rebels, and he offers good commentary on prison conditions. The diary stops for awhile, but then is resumed after his day of freedom. The diary effectively reproduces the rhythms of camp life and usefully describes the daily activities of drills, games, hunting, and conversation, which are punctuated by skirmishes and funerals. References to the deaths of close friends convey the costs ofsuch battles as theWilderness in May 1864. There is a good deal of passing commentary on incidental situations. For example, Beaudry offers a moving scene in which he is fed by a newly freed black family in Virginia on July 4, 1 864. In August 1864, the regiment joined Gen. Philip H. Sheridan's command. Beaudry's journal offers good description of the highly destructive battles in northwest Virginia. By now the war's effects are demonstrably harsher, with announcements of the deaths of friends quite common amidst predawn reveilles . Beaudry effectively conveys war-weariness. In one passage, he notes a lateafternoon skirmish, after which the regiment retreated to headquarters "on a dirt road . . . and halted Spring Hill after daylight. I think this is the first entire night I ever spent on the march" (173). Beaudry was not a passive observer. During the burning of one town, he watched as "more or less pillaging went on during the terrible carnival" (175) and questioned whether such actions would produce greater barbarism or intimidation. Beaudry recorded such impressions as Sheridan and Grant mopped up Southern opposition in the last months ofthe war. In rapid succession in April 1865, he records news of Lee's surrender and Lincoln's assassination. Beaudry's succinct, clear commentary on small events in camp and great events in the nation make this diary valuable to military historians and Civil War enthusiasts. Graham Russell Hodges Colgate University A Very Violent Rebel: The Civil War Diary ofEllen Renshaw House. Edited by Daniel E. Sutherland. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1996. Pp. xxv, 285. $34.00.) With the publication of the diary of Ellen Renshaw House, the University of Tennessee Press has made another significant primary source available through its Voices ofthe Civil War Series and has once again fulfilled in fine fashion the BOOK REVIEWS259 stated mission of that series: to expand scholarly knowledge by offering new perspectives and hitherto unheard voices from the Civil War period. House's diary, which is actually two separate manuscripts integrated by editor Daniel Sutherland, is an excellent choice for the series because it chronicles the activities and attitudes of a young East Tennessee woman who sided with the fat Confederacy. Compared to other sections of the South, relatively few firsthand accounts by Confederates from predominantly Unionist East Tennessee have survived, and none as vivid and detailed as that kept by Miss House. What is truly unique about House's diary is its richness. She was an educated, fiery, uncompromising Confederate, making her diary simply fun to read. Through the pages of her diary, she relates a story that rivals that of Scarlett O'Hara. She reported that, because ofher outspoken criticism ofthem, the Union officers considered her "the D------1 rebel" they ever saw, and confided to her diary that the only good aspect ofher father taking the loyalty oath was that the Federals "will not make him responsible for any thing I may do, and I expect sometime I will do something devilish—that isjust the word, though not a lady like one" (i 12-13). She was "killing polite" to the Union officer in charge of the Knoxville prison, hoping such kindness would help her to get food and clothing to the destitute Rebel inmates, although "I wanted to knock him down and take his boots and gloves the...

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