Yankee in a Confederate Town Book

I've always been interested in the history surrounding the Civil War and being a Yankee in a Confederate town myself this was an easy pick for me when I visited the glorious book store located in The Yearling Restaurant in Hawthorne, Florida.

Calvin L. Robinson was a native of Vermont who due to health reasons moved to Florida for the warmer climate. Living in Jacksonville, he became a successful merchant and a prominent member of society. His loyalty was with the Union and his staunch faithfulness to the "old flag" affected his relationship with his friends, townsfolk, and his businesses suffered thusly.

He kept a journal of his experience shortly before, during, and after the Civil War and his handwritten notes, bundled together by homemade steel pins, eventually fell into the hands of his great-granddaughter Anne Robinson Clancy who edited it all together. Not everything has exact dates so she has divided the work into titled chapters to help carry readers through events.

Robinson's account is a personal one that at times is both riveting and at other times rather dull such as when he details how much money he made and lost and how much he owed his creditors. I can forgive that as it was his personal journal after all and as a businessman those things were important to him but I much preferred the harrowing details of how most of his former friends and associates turned on him and he became public enemy number one. He had to booby trap his home and bury money in bottles under a tree. He describes how he and his family had to go into hiding and watch from a distance as Confederates burned his home and businesses and eventually how they had to flee with the help of Union soldiers and make their way back North.

I would have liked to hear more about his wife and family and more personal accounts of the friends who did stick by him. It would have added to the heart of this historical drama. We do get a taste of it in the Appendix which is a letter from Robinson's wife to her sister which was published in a Boston newspaper. I got more sense of who these people were from her brief letter whereas Robinson's accounts of money woes and court battles were a bit boring for me. It's also worth noting that read through the eyes of one privileged to live in a more enlightened time, I sometimes felt like Robinson was patting himself on the back for how much of a friend he was to the black people. Modern sentiments aside, A Yankee in a Confederate Town is a fascinating look at this period of history through the eyes of a man against secession who lived in the wrong place at the wrong time.