The Diary Of Caroline Seabury 1854-1863 [Paperback]

Caroline Seabury (Author), Suzanne L Bunkers (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1991

In 1854 Caroline Seabury of Brooklyn, New York, set out for Columbus, Mississippi, to teach French at its Institute for Young Ladies.  She lived in Columbus until 1863, through the years of mounting sectional bitterness that preceded the Civil War and through the turmoil and hardships of the war itself.  During that time, her most intimate confidant was her diary.  Discovered in the archives of the Minnesota State Historical Society, it is published here for the first time.
    The diary is an illuminating account of southern plantation society and the “peculiar institution” of slavery on the eve of its destruction.  Seabury also records her uneasy attempts to come to terms with her position as an unmarried, white, Northern woman whose job was to educate wealthy, white, Southern girls in a setting seemingly oblivious to the horrors of slavery.  The diary is not simply a chronicle of daily happenings; Seabury concentrates on remarkable events and the memorable feelings and ideas they generate, shaping them into entries that reveal her as an accomplished writer.  She frames her narrative with her journey south in 1854 and the hazardous and exhausting return north through battle lines in 1863.
    Disapproving of slavery, yet deeply attached to friends and her life in Columbus and also painfully conscious of the fragility of her own economic and social position, Seabury condemned privately in her diary the evils that she endured silently in public.  There are striking scenes of plantation life that depict the brutalities of slavery and benumbed responses to them.  Seabury also successfully captures the mood of Mississippi as it changed from a fire-eating appetite to fight the Yankees to a grim apprehension of inexorable defeat.  Most impressive of all is Seabury’s poignantly honest presentation of herself, caught in the middle.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this illuminating memoir of life in the American South before and during the Civil War, Seabury (1827-1893), a white, middle-class New England teacher, tells of leaving her home in 1854 and relocating to Mississippi, where she teaches the daughters of rich Southern plantation-owning families until 1863, when she returns North. A "Yankee" outsider, Seabury describes the "great gulf" between husbandless female instructors like herself and the "dilapidated" Southern aristocracy. She decries slavery and, despite her naivete and prejudice, writes movingly about the plight of black women. When she sees a widowed servant being sold without her children at a slave auction, she observes, "the woman said not a word, but her looks told what was in her heart . . . she sobbed bitterly. . . . Here was one of my own sex almost as light in color. . . . I could not keep back my own tears. . . ." This is an eloquent historical record that raises disturbing questions about the lingering psychological effects of slavery on our society today. Bunkers is a professor of English at Mankato State University in Minnesota. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press (April 15, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299128741
• ISBN-13: 978-0299128746
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,333,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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