Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868

Introduction: Writing the War

Introduction: Writing the War Forty years ago, whenJohn Anderson wrote his introduction to the original published edition of Kate Stone's journal , most Americans considered the Civil War to be largely a military and political event, a matter of battles and boundaries , officers and statesmen. As the centennial observance of the conflict would demonstrate only a half dozen years later, guns and sabers, generals and presidents, strategies and tactics absorbed the attention of both scholars and the broader public. But even as the four years of centennial reenactments and ceremonials wore on, American life was changing in ways that would yield altered historical perspectives and new approaches to the study of the Civil War. Most obviously, the civil rights revolution of the 1960s encouraged new questions about the freedom struggles undertaken a hundred years earlier, about the contributions of ordinary people, black and white,who seemed the counterparts of twentieth-century freedom fighters in Birmingham, Selma, and Albany. In the late 1960s, the experience of Vietnam and the problems of disintegrating military and domestic morale drew renewed attention to the role of the home front and the common soldier in war's outcome and influenced a departure from the glorification of battle that characterized so much Civil War historiography. The women's movement, emerging in the early 1970s out of the human rights struggles of the preceding decade, wouldonly slowly exert its effects on Civil War studies, for war continued to appear to many feminist scholars as an overwhelmingly male domain. But the evolution of gender studies in the mid-1980s made this apparent maleness interesting. Scholars began to look at the 1860s anew, attracted by the way wars both underline and realign gender boundaries, XXIX xxx DREW GILPIN FAUST casting assumptions about male and female identities into sharp relief.1 We now find ourselves in the midst of a flood of CivilWar studies, encouraged in part by the public enthusiasm for Ken Burns's 1990 television series but based more firmly in the recognition by scholars from various fields of social and cultural history of the war's rich opportunities for exploration and insight. Traditional military historians maywell feel alarmed as these comparative newcomers threaten to mount a near full-scale invasion of what has so long been their uncontested terrain. In these changed circumstances, the diary of Kate Stone assumes new significance. John Anderson's very useful introduction situated her tale chiefly in relation to the various military campaigns that swirled around the Stone family. Edmund Wilson hailed her in Patriotic Gore as the "most spontaneous and most intimate expression" of the "conceptions that dominated the Southern cause." But Kate Stone was a young woman in her own right, with her own set ofexperiences ; she was not simplya window into the impact of military maneuvers or a mouthpiece for the politicians of her class.The Civil War Kate Stone recorded in her diaryoffers an invaluable portrait of the Confederate home front, of the world of women war created, of war's challenges to accustomed privileges of race and class as well as assumptions and delineations of gender. It provides a unique view of a twenty-year-old woman's struggle to survive—notjust physically , though hardships and dangers made that difficult as well. War forced Kate Stone to question much of what the first two decades of her life had led her to assume about who she wasand what she might expect to become.2 1. For useful overviews of relevant historiography, seeJoe Gray Taylor, "The White South from Secession to Redemption," and LaWanda Cox, "From Emancipation to Segregation: National Policy and Southern Blacks," in Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham , ed. John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen (Baton Rouge, 1987), 162-98, 199-253. On gender, see Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York, 1992). 2. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literatureof theAmerican Civil War (New York, 1962) 258. INTRODUCTION xxxi Her effort to confront that challenge lies at the heart of Brokenburn and comprises its compelling interest. Like a literary Bildungsroman, Brokenburn is a story of coming of age and defining one's mature identity through the acquisition of knowledge and experience. But hers wasan exceptional passage into adulthood, for it was shaped in every imaginable wayby the trials of war. Stone thus offers her readers a female...