Mary Chesnut's Civil War
Edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)
One hundred and Fifty years after the Civil War's outbreak, diaries of the conflict still have the power to grip us. One of the most compelling memoirists of the war was an unapologetic child of the privileged Southern slave-ocracy: her father a plantation-owning South Carolina governor, her husband a pro-slavery U.S. senator from Virginia, later a military aide to Jefferson Davis. Combining unbridled access with literary flair, Mary Chesnut filled 48 notebooks with commentary that is often shrewd, tart and realistic—though it should be noted that years after the war, she rewrote the entries. Soon after the South's early victory at Bull Run, she recorded a friend saying that the success "sent us off in a fool's paradise of conceit at our superior valor." Edmund Wilson called the diary "a masterpiece." For a glimpse into the intrigues plaguing the shaky Confederate government, Southern privations and a privileged circle's chilling indifference to slavery, the book is peerless.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1835-1875
Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (1952)
This is not technically a Civil War diary: Its 2,250 journal pages, collected in four volumes, begin 25 years before secession and end a full 10 years after re-union. But the third volume, covering 1860-65, is arguably the best day-by-day account of Northern home-front morale and mobilization. George Templeton Strong, a lawyer, didn't join the Army, but he helped organize the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which tended to Union soldiers, and he assisted in raising $5 million for the purpose. Though Strong based many of the entries on what he read in the newspapers, his observations vividly reflected evolving Union sentiments, testifying to the expansion of war goals from mere reunion to slavery's abolition. Originally opposed to abolition, he later writes: "God pardon our blindness of three years ago."
Diary of Gideon Welles
Edited by Howard K. Beale (1960)
Though a new annotated edition is sorely needed, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles's diary is the best insider's account of the workings of the Lincoln administration. Lincoln was fond of "Father Neptune," as the president called Gideon Welles, the white-bearded, absurdly bewigged former newspaper editor. Others mocked Welles as overly cautious, but he forged a powerful, modern navy out of a fossilized little fleet of wooden ships, and Lincoln valued his loyalty and advice on constitutional questions. The diary is a priceless account of the birth of Lincoln's emancipation policy, and it remains a primary source for historians: Welles noted that the president introduced the idea of a proclamation en route to a funeral by grimly concluding: "We must free the slaves or ourselves be subdued."
A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital
By John B. Jones (1866)
John B. Jones's lively account of how Confederate military and civilian authorities managed the war may be the most realistic glimpse into a history that Lost Cause authors later sanitized. Jones was no ordinary clerk but a popular fiction writer, one of whose novels had sold 100,000 copies in 1841. Too old at 51 to volunteer, he instead joined the Confederate War Department determined to keep "a diary of the revolution." It is an invaluable primary source regarding social, political and economic upheaval in Richmond. At one point Jones painstakingly complains of price fluctuations in leather, liquor and groceries. And when Lincoln celebrates Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863, Jones condemns his assertion that "all men are created equal." "He means the negro," the diarist warns. Chilling stuff.
My Diary North and South
By William Howard Russell (1863)
William Howard Russell, a celebrated London Times war correspondent, was loathed in the South. (Diarist Mary Chesnut regarded him as "a licensed slanderer" and "a typical English writer with three P's: Pen, Paper, and Prejudices.") Perhaps a mark of Russell's unflinching honesty was that Northern observers came to hate him, too. President Lincoln granted an interview to Russell when the reporter arrived in Washington (the result was an unforgettable character portrait). Jefferson Davis welcomed him to Montgomery, Ala., the South's first capital, insisting in an interview that the Confederacy would win its independence and deserved British recognition. Russell traveled through both sections of the country and spared neither slave- owning Southerners nor incompetent Union officers. By the spring of 1862 he had made so many enemies that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton revoked Russell's press credentials. His unsparing, acid diary, published a year later, was his revenge on both sides.
—Mr. Holzer is the editor of "Hearts Touched by Fire: The Best Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" (Modern Library).