"I wonder if the new year is to bring us new miseries and sufferings," seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte wrote in her diary on December 31, 1864. In fact, the worst was yet to come. Her later entries portray the city of Columbia, South Carolina, like much of the South, under the grip of Sherman's army. No reader of this diary is likely to forget the defiant, well-bred Emma, who describes a family's anxieties and brave attempts to get on with life while the Civil War rages around them.
In a new foreword to the Bison Books edition, Anne Firor Scott, a professor of history at Duke University whose writings include The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930, rounds out the story of the remarkable Emma LeConte and the life she made after her familiar world ended.