Céline: Remembering Louisiana, 1850-1871 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS83 traditions. His questions are provocative and many ofhis conclusions may be applicable elsewhere. Had he considered the influence ofpro-industrialists like Henry Watterson, Samuel Morgan, Vernon Stevenson, and Arthur Colyar, he might not have found so much homogeneity in his subjects , nor might he have dismissed out of hand the forces of modernity at work in Civil War Tennessee. Nevertheless his carefully researched and insightful work deserves to stand with other recent monographs on Southern Civil War societies as a valuable contribution to an important field. Harold Wilson Old Dominion University Céline: Remembering Louisiana, 1850-1871. By Céline Frémaux Garcia. Edited by Patrick L. Geary. (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Pp. xxxix, 277. $25.00.) Céline Frémaux Garcia wrote this personal and frequently touching autobiography during the first decade of this century as a middle-aged and respectable New Orleans matron. (She died in 1935.) But the book focuses on Celine's childhood and adolescence in Louisiana and Alabama during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Based on a diary she had kept and on her exceptional memory, Celine's recollections (unpublished until this version edited by Patrick L. Geary) provide vivid insights into the characters, experiences, and feelings of a French immigrant family of aristocratic lineage caught in their adopted nation's greatest period of upheaval and violence . Most of Celine's account deals with interpersonal family relationships , and with their becoming "Americanized," a process which her domineering and strong-willed mother (the book's dominant personage in reality) continued to resist. Céline takes the reader from her childhood in French-speaking Donaldsonville , Louisiana, upriver to English-speaking Baton Rouge, the state capital (in time for the battle there in 1 862); then to Port Hudson, where her father was a Confederate engineer officer; and then to nearby Jackson, where Céline spent the remainder of the Civil War as a schoolgirl. Her accounts ofvarious military engagements she witnessed or heard about are not, of course, those of a professional soldier or participant, but of a civilian , and a frightened, teenaged female at that. (The most humorous passages in this largely unhappy story deal with a character named Miss Tallbird , who taught at Judson Institute in Alabama, where Céline was briefly a student during Reconstruction.) The memoir terminates with Celine's marriage to New Orleanian Joseph Garcia in 1871. Historically, Céline Frémaux Garcia was a nobody, neither herself a mover or shaker nor related to one by blood or marriage. But in her obscur- 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY ity lies the value of her recollections. Thousands of "Célines" lived during the same grim years in the deep South, and probably endured the same terrors and privations suffered by the author. She, almost alone, speaks to the present for the rest. Mark T. Carleton Louisiana State University The Rough Side of War: The Civil War Journal of Chesley A. Mosman, First Lieutenant, Company D, 59th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Edited by Arnold Gates. (Garden City: The Basin Publishing, 1987, Pp. xii, 442. $25.00.) On August 7, 1861, nineteen-year-old Chesley A. Mosman from Marine Prairie, Illinois was mustered into Company D ofthe Ninth Missouri Volunteer Infantry in St. Louis. Apparently because most of the men in this regiment came from Illinois it was redesignated the 59th Illinois in early 1862. Mosman's journal covered the entirety of his wartime service and eventually totalled some thirteen volumes. The first two ofthese, however, are missing. Thus, Mosman's journal under review here commenced in April 1862 and ended when his regiment was mustered out at the close of 1865. The 59th saw plenty ofcombat action as it took part in most ofthe major western campaigns and in battles such as Pea Ridge, Stones River, Chickamauga , Lookout Mountain, Resaca, Franklin, and Nashville. During the last six months of 1865 the 59th served as an occupation force in south Texas. Chesley Mosman served with distinction. He was wounded at Pea Ridge and at Nashville and was promoted to his ultimate rank, first lieutenant, by May 1863. A reliable and dependable officer, he served as acting commander of another company in...