In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Preface IN THE FALL OF 2008, during our preparation of Constance Cary Harrison’s wartime memoir, almost fifty thousand Civil War reenactors, historians, and history buffs gathered just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to remember and to recreate as best they could the 1863 three-day battle of Chickamauga. Vice President Dick Cheney was on hand to make a presentation to the National Chickamauga Battlefield Park commemorating the service of his great-grandfather, Lt. Samuel Fletcher Cheney of the Twenty-first Ohio Infantry. The vice president was joined by reenactors and observers from a number of states and several foreign countries in recognizing the 145th anniversary of the battle in which as many as four thousand men died and almost twenty-five thousand were wounded. When asked why the vice president of the United States attended, one reenactor answered, “He is here to honor his ancestor just like us dressed blue and gray are honoring our ancestors.”1 Later, expressing motives similar to those of the vice president, thousands of men and women, many carry ing the weight of twenty-first-century eating habits and huffing the gasps of sedentary middle-agers, put on wool clothes and hauled facsimile nineteenth-century war equipment onto the sun-scorched reenactment field. Many of the reenactors said they lived history in the present by attempting to re-create the events and memories of the past. One told a newspaper reporter, “I’d been pessimistic about the whole idea because I thought it was a little dorky and kind of strange that people would do it, but what I have learned is that the passion for history is the main reason people do this.”2 Is recreating history really possible? The reality is no matter how sincere the desire, no matter how dedicated the seeker, no matter the depth of a devotee’s knowledge, experiencing history as a first-person witness is impossible. Eyewitness is only for those who were there, part of the past— actual participants, not re-creators or reenactors. People of the twenty-first Preface x century may feel close to those of the nineteenth through activities such as those on the Chickamauga Battlefield—close, but not real. Nevertheless, the desire and passion of those in the twenty-first century to know and to learn from those who lived in the nineteenth, to experience the emotions that motivated the past, make historical research and reenacting valuable . And realistically, one relies for a better understanding of the past on the records left by those who were there, the testimony of first-person experience. “Whereof what’s past is prologue.”3 Our knowledge of the past, our awareness of the attitudes and values and beliefs of those who set the stage for our present, help us understand who and what we are. Awareness of the prologue enriches the present—which is, after all, but a prologue to the future. There are hundreds upon hundreds of first-person accounts of Civil War life. Most of these accounts, however, are the witness of men. Relatively few reports from women exist in our canon of Civil War memoirs. Among the best are Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut’s Diary from Dixie,4 Eliza Frances Andrews’s Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl: 1864–1865,5 and Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay. Each is a well-written, personal narrative of day-to-day experiences and reactions to worlds turning upside down. Each is a narrative from the point of view of a privileged southern woman. Each writer was well educated, each was a keen observer, each wrote visually and emotionally, and after the war, each woman used her wartime diary to develop the memoir for which she became known. Both A Diary from Dixie and Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl have been republished in recent years—Chesnut’s diary in 1997, the Andrews diary in 1960, 1976, and again in 1997. However, until this current project, Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay has been available only through searches of antique and used book collections, Kessinger Publishing’s rare reprint project,6 and on line through the University of North Carolina’s Documenting the American South Web site.7 Both the Kessinger reprint and the UNC on-line version of Recollections are reproductions of Harrison’s original 1911 publication. Neither Kessinger nor UNC, however, provide supplemental material to place the memoir in historical context or to identify major historical figures in the text. Harrison...

Share