Another Year Finds Me in Texas: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens by Vicki Adams Tongate (review)

At twenty-one years of age, Lucy Pier Stevens reached the small hamlet of Travis, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859, for a pleasant sojourn with her extended family. Almost six years later she departed, surreptitiously, aboard a blockade runner out of Galveston on April 17, 1865—eight days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. In Another Year Finds Me in Texas: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens, Vicki Adams Tongate carefully presents Lucy Pier Stevens's diary, which encompassed her years in Texas during the Civil War, specifically the months between January 1863 and April 1865. But Tongate's book is far more than a transcription. She contextualizes Stevens's diary with an eighty-page introduction and with detailed overviews of each chapter (broken down in one- to three-month increments), and she includes long explanatory footnotes. The end result is a wide-ranging narrative of rural life in Civil War Texas with special attention given to the gender dynamics of this period. Further, Stevens's diary provides valuable insights on the day-to-day machinations of the slaveholding household in which she resided. Of these insights, Tongate notes, "It is in the regularity of these days and the sometimes mundane accounts of daily activities that Lucy's diary provides snapshots for us to learn about her world in Texas" (p. 70).

Outside her own experiences, Stevens recorded the details of the battles and skirmishes of the Civil War, particularly those in the trans-Mississippi theater. She conveyed not only the fear of those on the home front and concern for their loved ones, but also the proliferation of rumors and spotty intelligence from the battlefield, which exacerbated local fears. In addition to chronicling events on the ground, Tongate makes the persuasive argument that "diaries like Lucy's can … be studied for the inner codes that order the diarist's life and form her own particular history" (p. 74). Hailing from Ohio, Lucy Pier Stevens was in the unique position of being a northerner trapped in southern lands during the war, testing her allegiances on both fronts. Tongate depicts Stevens's outsider status as analogous to the individuals featured in Indian captivity narratives from the period, particularly Olive Oatman and Cynthia Ann Parker—a weak correlation given the circumstances that brought Stevens to Texas in the first place. In terms of analysis, Tongate includes in the introduction a lengthy discussion of gender relations, racial hierarchies, and social practices prevalent during the nineteenth century. The sections on separate spheres and southern women would have benefited from the incorporation of recent literature on the intersection of class, gender, and whiteness (most of the scholarly sources Tongate cites are from the mid-1990s or earlier).

One of the more interesting aspects of Tongate's book is the inclusion of excerpts from two complementary diaries written by Stevens's aunt, Lu Merry Pier, and her cousin, Sarah Charlotte Pier. It is a rare treat to have three diaries recounting events from the same household covering roughly the same period. Tongate integrates these diaries into her analysis to provide further context and enhance the details of Stevens's journal. All together, Another Year Finds Me in Texas is a rich interpretation by Tongate of a volatile period in Texas history witnessed by a unique and engaging diarist.