A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter, and: The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851–1868 (review)

A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter. Edited by John David Smith and William Cooper Jr. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Pp. xxxii, 222. Cloth, $22.50.)

The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868. Edited by Frances Wallace Taylor, Catherine Taylor Matthews, and J. Tracy Power. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. 543. Cloth, $49.95.)

The social and cultural history of the Civil War receives a humanizing perspective from a wealth of period diaries and journals. The work of editing and publishing the massive number of diaries remaining untranscribed in archival collections, or moldering inaccessible in private family collections, continues apace. A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter and The Leverett Letters: Correspondence of a South Carolina Family, 1851-1868represent two recent additions to this growing literature, providing important insights in areas of current concern such as the contours of Southern unionism, women's experience of the Civil War and the culture of the South's planter class with its commitment to Confederate nationalism and Southern conservatism.

The private diary of Frances Peter, the epileptic daughter of a prominent Unionist family in Lexington, makes up A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky. Peter's sympathies are complex since, like many border state Unionists, she often evinced a dislike for the Lincoln administration and its emancipation policy even as she vented her opposition to the "secesh." Although wary of abolition, Peter's journal entries suggest that the female supporters of the Federal government deserve the same reputation for aggressive nationalism normally ascribed to the recalcitrant rebel belles. Peter, living down the street from the family of Confederate guerilla raider John Hunt Morgan, became literally obsessed with the comings and goings at the Morgan place and referred to the elder Mrs. Morgan as "the mother of the notorious rebel" (4). Given to dark humor at the expense of the Southern cause, Peter's entry following the death of Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer in the Cumberland Gap noted that "the secesh always boasted that Zollicoffer would come here and he will, but not by any means in the way they expected" (7). Peter fills her pages with similar acerbic, and often incisive, observations, the observations of a woman literally restricted to the domestic sphere by her physical condition and yet a keen observer of the outside world.

The most significant element of the Peter diary concerns Civil War women's commitments and support systems, the whole submerged world of women's private lives. Peter informs, for example, of "secesh ladies" whose sewing circle functioned as a supply and information network for the Confederate army and of a nurse who she describes as "a strapping woman" attached to the 16th Ohio and given full authority over the Lexington hospital to "punish those who were unruly" (5, 7). Editors John David Smith and William Cooper Jr. place these matters handsomely within the current historiography on women in the Civil War. Smith and Cooper suggest, for example, that the Frances diary bears out the contention of scholars such as Joan E. Cashin and Drew G. Faust that informal networks of women served not only as "means of mutual support" but also as crucial elements in the "emerging gender identity" of women in both sections (xvii).

The Leverett Letters provide a window into a much different social world, coastal South Carolina. The voluminous correspondence of the Leverett family, a wealthy slaveholding family whose patriarch served as an Episcopal clergyman, sheds light on issues as disparate as the phenomenon of Southerners educated in the North and Europe, the intellectual and ideological roots of Confederate nationalism, and the practice and piety of Southern Anglicanism.

The editors have meticulously...