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Go directly to the collection, First-Person
Narratives of the American South, 1860-1920, in American Memory,
or view a Summary of Resources related to
the collection.
The materials in First-Person Narratives of the American South,
1860-1920, lend themselves well to a study of American rhetoric
and prose. Indeed, the years covered by the collection are from a unique
period in American letters -- just before radio, television, and other
modern means of communication changed the literary landscape. Like the
rest of the country, southerners wrote letters, kept diaries, delivered
speeches, and composed memoirs, all of which abound in the collection.
Though each form offers different advantages to a researcher, all forms
were part of a tradition of personal, reflective writing at the height
of its popularity.
Introductions and Prefaces: Establishing the Truth
Nineteenth and early twentieth-century reading audiences were as attracted
to true or real-life stories as are today's audiences. Many of the collection's
narratives include an introduction or preface that defend the work's
veracity. Because so many of the collection's documents contain an introduction
or preface, readers can simply browse under Subject
Index headings of their choice to find interesting examples. These
documents-within-documents establish a contemporary perspective on the
work that helps to place the document more clearly in the context of
its reading audience.
In most cases, a well-respected member of the author's community wrote
the preface. Of course, in some cases, the author, posing as a third
party, may have written the introduction to his or her own work. For
instance, the author of the introduction to Belle
Boyd in Camp and Prison, identified only as a "Friend of
the South," testifies to his limited role in the publication of
the infamous Confederate spy's life story:
I took the manuscript, promising to look it over, and return
it with an estimate of its merits. I have done so; and hence
the publication of "Belle Boyd, in Camp and Prison."
The work is entirely her own, with the exception of a few suggestions
in the shape of footnotes - the simple, unambitious narrative
of an enthusiastic and intrepid schoolgirl, who had not yet
seen her seventeenth summer when the cloud of war darkened her
land, changing all the music of her young life, her peaceful
"home, sweet home," into the bugle blasts of battle,
into scenes of death and most tumultuous sorrow.
Pages 2-3, Belle
Boyd in Camp and Prison
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Cover of Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison. |
- Why do you think that the preface assures that "the work is
entirely her (the author's) own"?
- What is the preface author's tone in this passage? How might it
influence a reader's expectations and reactions to the narrative?
- What methods might a researcher use to find out if Belle Boyd wrote
her own introduction?
- What segment of Belle's reading audience would have been interested
in her book's introductory statement? Why?
- How are introductions different today?
- How do modern writers, performers, and artists seek to establish
authenticity?
- How might the knowledge that a memoir was dictated after an attack
of paralysis and just before the author's death affect one's reading
of it?
- What is the effect of prefacing a story about the Civil War with
a message of reconciliation? Why might the writer or publisher have
decided to do this?
- What might be the differences between an introduction to a living
author's work and an introduction to a deceased author's work?
- Why might the author of an introduction want to tell the reading
audience about him- or herself?
- What types of documents would include didactic introductions?
- What types of documents would be more likely not to have an introduction
or a preface?
Letters
The collection contains several epistolary documents that offer a unique
window into the characters and lives of their authors and into the historical
circumstances surrounding their composition. Like diaries and journals,
letters provide immediate access -- ostensibly free from the interference
of time's passage or concerns of composition -- to the writer's thoughts
and feelings. Unlike those other mediums, however, letters convey immediacy,
suggest spontaneity, and invoke intimacy.
Because a letter necessarily involves a dialogue between a writer and
a silent "other," researchers are able to draw conclusions
about a writer's character and personality by considering how he or
she portrayed him- or herself to another individual.
Do you remember, my Sally, how many times
we said good-bye that evening?
Illustration from The
Heart of a Soldier. |
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A search
on letters yields eight documents including the wartime
correspondence of General George Pickett to his betrothed, Sally
Corbell. Published under the title The
Heart of A Soldier, Pickett's letters impart firsthand
experiences in many of the most famous battles of the war. The
reports are particularly striking for their profusion of personal
sentiment. For instance, in the June of 1862, Pickett wrote the
following lines:
Thus, my darling, was ended the Battle of Seven Pines. No
shot was fired afterward. How I wish I could say it ended all
battles and that the last shot that will ever be heard was fired
on June first, 1862. What a change love does make! How tender
all things become to a heart touched by love - how beautiful the
beautiful is and how abhorrent is evil! See, my darling, see what
power you have - guard it well.
Page 48, The
Heart of A Soldier
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- How might Pickett's letters be different if they had been written
to a fellow soldier? What aspects of his experience of the war might
Pickett have written about only to his fiance?
- What do we learn about Pickett from his letters that we might not
otherwise have known?
- How might our understanding of Pickett be different if we learned
about him only from military history books?
- Do you think that it is important to know about a historical figure's
love life? Why or why not?
Memoirs and Autobiographies
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The collection abounds with memoirs and autobiographies -- documents
written with the purpose of reflecting on the author's own life
and times. In many instances, the texts were composed without
expectation of compensation, monetary or otherwise. Indeed, the
recalling of a lifetime seems to be the overriding purpose behind
their composition.
A search
on memoirs yields eight documents; a search
on autobiography yields twenty-two. Some of these texts
have a prosy, didactic, storytelling tone such as Bill
Arp from the Uncivil War to Date and Edward J. Thomas's
Memoirs
of a Southerner. Thomas recalls the days of his affluent
youth in the antebellum South through a series of artfully rendered
vignettes concerning runaway slaves, scenes of nature, and educational
endeavors. With a wealth of detail and clear description, Thomas's
memoirs stand comparison to the prose styles of Charles Dickens
or Mark Twain. For instance, Thomas observes that in contrast
to the worries and problems that bothered his parents:
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Bill Arp.
Illustration from Bill
Arp from the Uncivil War to Date. |
My brother and I had a nice time catching birds in traps we made
with sticks; the bulfinch, the red or cardinal bird, the speckle-breasted
thrush - and, killing them, made a fire in the woods, broiled the
poor little devils, and had a quick lunch; and as a boy I thought
them fine until one day we caught a crow, but his meat was more than
our appetites would permit. Sometimes we sat on the front porch in
summer with bare feet and legs, to see which could kill the most mosquitoes.
Page 17, Memoirs
of a Southerner
- What might Thomas have wanted to convey about himself with this
passage?
- Does this passage imply wealth or poverty? Interest or apathy?
- What types of readers would find memoirs valuable or interesting?
- Who might have been interested in publishing memoirs or autobiographies
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
Other memoirs and autobiographies from the collection sacrifice style
for information -- names, dates and places -- that provide a researcher
with a wealth of historical reference points. Perhaps not surprisingly,
many memoirs and autobiographies written by Confederate officers are
of this type. Browsing under the Subject
Index heading, Confederate States - Officers, provides access
to the wartime autobiography of Lt. General Jubal Anderson Early, simply
entitled Lieutenant
General Jubal Anderson Early, C.S.A., and The
Memoirs of Col. John S. Mosby.
Most of the autobiographies and memoirs in the collection alternate
or blend art with information. These documents, mostly written near
the end of the authors' lifetime, have the careful tone of a humble
offering to future ages. For instance, in the Autobiography
of Col. Richard Malcom Johnston, the ex-Confederate writes:
Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston.
Illustration from Autobiography
of Col. Richard Malcom Johnston. |
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And then I bethought
me to become an author. I had already written a few short stories
intended to illustrate characters and scenes among the simple rural
folk of my native region as they were during the period of my childhood,
before the time of railroads. To this period I have always recurred,
and I do so now, with much fondness, and indeed with high admiration
for the good sense, the simplicity, the uprightness, the loyalty
to every known duty that characterized the rural people of middle
Georgia.
Page 71, Autobiography
of Col. Richard Malcom Johnston
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- What role does Johnston assign to railroads?
- What explanation does Johnston give for writing short stories?
- What types of documents might compliment research done on a particular
autobiography or memoir?
- How have biographies changed since the nineteenth century?
Diaries
| A search
on diaries yields sixteen documents. Diaries are among the
most personal, as well as the most suspect, documents in the collection
-- personal, because they were ostensibly never intended for public
perusal, suspect because publication gives rise to questions of
authenticity. For instance, in the introduction to Sarah Dawson
Morgan's A
Confederate Girl's Diary, her son writes that long after
the close of the war, a northern gentleman requested a copy of his
mother's diary, but, upon receiving it, questioned the document's
authenticity: |
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Sarah Dawson Morgan.
Illustration from A
Confederate Girl's Diary. |
Facsimile of a Page from
A
Confederate Girl's Diary. |
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Her transcription finished, she sent it to Philadelphia.
It was in due course returned, with cold regrets that the temptation
to rearrange it had not been resisted. No Southerner at that time
could possibly have had opinions so just or foresight so clear
as those here attributed to a young girl . . . Keenly wounded
and profoundly discouraged, my mother returned the diaries to
their linen envelope, and never saw them again.
Page xi, A
Confederate Girl's Diary
- Why does the northerner conclude that the manuscript is not
authentic?
- Why might Dawson have wanted to make her private documents
public?
- What is Dawson's daughter trying to prove about her mother's
diary in this passage?
- Why would someone want to publish Dawson's diary?
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Questions of authenticity aside, however, the diaries in the
collection are among the most valuable resources available to
a historian interested in more than the surface details of an
individual's life. Frances Hewitt Fearn's Diary
of a Refugee, which the author later adapted for the stage,
tells of her experiences in wartime Lousiana. The
Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone concisely relates the author's
daily observations concerning items such as the weather, the condition
of his fellow North Carolina volunteers, camp rumors overheard,
and spiritual lessons learned.
Emma LeConte's journal, listed in the collection as Diary,
1864-1865, contains the then seventeen-year old girl's
observations on the last year of the Confederacy. LeConte's descriptions
of the quotidian details of her life reflect the sometimes mundane,
sometimes overwhelming, concerns of her youth. For instance, at
the height of the Confederacy's crises, she writes:
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Cover of The Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone. |
A horrid day. Rain, rain, rain. I have been sitting over the fire
knitting and reading. Mother sitting opposite with her knitting asked
me such endless questions in regard to her stocking that I put down
my book impatiently and am trying to write. I feel awfully cross and
out of sorts, and can't at all understand how so simple an affair
as knitting a stocking should appear an insoluble problem.
Page 5, Diary,
1864-1865
- What is LeConte's tone in this passage? What does it reveal about
the author?
- How does LeConte characterize her mother?
- How do words like "horrid," "endless," "cross,"
and "affair" affect the style of the passage?
- Is journal keeping still popular today?
Public Oration
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Several of the documents in the collection are transcriptions
of speeches. As an important traditional vehicle for conveying
ideas, public oratory, often accompanied by dramatic bombast and
colorful exaggeration, was popular throughout the country during
the period. Many of the speeches in the collection were delivered
before clubs ranging in character from abolitionist societies
to reunited Confederate military companies.
A search
on address yields Howard Melancthon Hamill's The
Old South: A Monograph, which is more or less a transcription
of a prepared lecture given before the students of Georgia's Emory
College. It also yields Rebecca Latimer Felton's speech to the
Georgia Legislature's women's clubs, which is excerpted in her
autobiography, Country
Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth.
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"Two Thousand Men Went Mad."
Illustration from The
Leopard's Spots. |
- Why might a group be interested in a written copy of a speech?
- What rhetorical devices would help to adapt a speech to print?
- How is the reading of a speech affected by its presentation within
an autobiography of its author?
I once heard a blind man sing - I remember one line of the chorus:
"A BOY'S BEST FRIEND IS HIS MOTHER." How true is that and
the poor boy doesn't realize it until the mother is taken from him.
After she is gone out of the home, the world is never again what it
was to him. My home was broken up by the death of my mother when I
was only thirteen. I became a wanderer.
Page 75, The
Adventures of Two Alabama Boys
- Why might Crumpton have begun his speech with a quotation?
- How is this passage from Crumpton's speech suited to his audience?
- What elements of delivery cannot be conveyed on the printed page?
- What are some famous speeches? What makes them memorable?
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