In the Civil War era, if people wanted to convey their thoughts over distances or preserve them for reference, they had to be able to write. Obviously, they also needed to be able to read, and a great deal of well-written material existed that sharpened their skills at expression. Arguably, the Civil; War generation was much more literate than today's.

  

This month, we talk about diaries, the special province of Southern women, where South Carolina's Mary Boykin Chestnut and Virginia's Cora Peake McDonald are luminaries. But locally we had our own. Fanny Page Hume lived at "Selma" just outside of Orange, and her 1861 and 1862 diaries (available from the Orange County Historical Society) make interesting reading.  In 1861 she describes  the arrival of a train load of dead and wounded from Manassas. In 1862, after recounting the 2 August Battle of Orange Court House, she goes on to describe one Confederate General as "a mass of pomposity." 

Purchase Hume's diaries through the Orange County Historical Society

Hospital Steward James Apperson had been raised locally, and his home for the winter of 1863-64 was a tent directly across Main Street from the Holladay House. His Repairing [revisiting] the March of Mars gives us an interesting male/military/medical view of the war. That said, it is for his description of Orange County mud that I remember him best ("red as paint and as tenacious as putty."

  

Purchase Apperson's book through Amazon.com