Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary by Nancy Disher Baird (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY J osie Underwood’s Civil War Diary, edited by Nancy Disher Baird, a professor and special collections librarian at Western Kentucky University, details the experiences of a Kentuckian in the months leading up to the Civil War and in its first year. Underwood, a young woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky, was an opinionated and outspoken Unionist, and her diary reveals much about southern Unionist ideology, her experiences in a city occupied by two armies, and the social life of a woman in her early twenties. Born in 1840, Josie Underwood had just turned twenty when she began keeping her diary in December 1860. Until September 1862, when her family moved to Scotland so her father could serve as consul at Glasgow, Underwood recorded happenings in and around Bowling Green as the Civil War began and troops, first Confederate and then Union, occupied her city. Although the original two volumes of Underwood’s diary have been lost, Baird makes a compelling case for the authenticity of the typescript on which the volume is based. (The typescript is part of the collections of Western Kentucky University’s Kentucky Library.) Baird is an adept editor. Throughout the work, her annotations elaborate on Underwood’s allusions to historical events and literary works. A particularly helpful addition is an appendix to the diary, which provides biographical this region in larger histories. Because of Kentucky’s Union status and because Tennessee ratified the fourteenth amendment (and so avoided Congressional Reconstruction), these states are often absent from histories of Reconstruction. But as Jonathan Atkins’s essay on Tennessee reveals, the politics of both places played a central role in shaping the national story. B. Franklin Cooling’s essay shows how the experience of Kentucky complicated the process of nation-building after the war. The bicentennial celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birth has brought renewed attention to Kentucky’s most famous son; Sister States, Enemy States reminds us that the region itself merits closer scrutiny. Aaron Sheehan-Dean University of North Florida Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary Nancy Disher Baird BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2009 87 Nancy Disher Baird, ed. Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009. 288 pp. ISBN: 978-813125312 (cloth), $30.00. sketches of the persons, most of them unknown to the average reader, referenced by Underwood in her entries. Finally, Baird has carefully divided the diary into five, coherent sections, making it easier for the reader to follow Underwood’s story. Underwood’s diary provides an excellent source for understanding Kentucky Unionism. Kentucky Unionists were in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with neither secession nor the Lincoln administration . Growing out of the tradition of Henry Clay, Kentucky Unionists had a strong ideological attachment to the preservation of the Union, but many were also slaveholders and wary of the Republican administration and northern abolitionists. However, they believed, as Josie’s father stated, that disagreeing with the views of the present political administration provided no basis for dismantling the Union. Yet, that did not prevent pro-secession Kentuckians from labeling their Unionist neighbors Lincoln supporters and abolitionists. These disputes were not limited to the adult world. On two separate occasions, Josie wrote that her teenage brother got into a fistfight with another boy after he was called an abolitionist. Underwood’s diary also provides ample information on the impact of the war on the Kentucky home front. In September 1861, Bowling Green was occupied by Confederate troops under Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner. For six months, the Confederates, many of them Kentuckians, fed themselves on the produce of local farms, particularly those of Unionists. Underwood frequently recorded her disdain for the way the rebel army treated her family and herself, but matters improved little when the Federals arrived in March 1862. Kentuckians, like the Confederate states, experienced two occupying armies who took what they needed despite the fact that they, unlike the Confederacy, had remained loyal. Underwood’s diary reveals the hardships created by that experience. She also details the emotional trauma felt across the United BOOK REVIEWS 88 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY States by men and women whose relatives and friends served in one army or...