Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 Book

The roles of rumor and social visits in 1860s life are made crystal clear in Kate Stone's journal of her Civil War years (and a little beyond), "Brokenburn."

At a time when it could take a week or more for concrete information about even major news events to trickle to the average American, speculation and gossip ruled the day. And this was often life-or-death news.

There's much more to this journal of a Louisiana woman in her early 20s than the role of rumors, of course, but it's one thing that struck me ' particularly how wildly wrong they usually were. One spring 1865 rumor Stone relates had Union general William T. Sherman killing vice president (who became president) Andrew Johnson! Elsewhere, reported victories turn out to be defeats, the presumed dead survive and vice versa.

The number of visits by friends and neighbors among the plantations near Vicksburg, Mississippi, and later at the Stones' other residences in Louisiana and Texas, where they fled the war in 1863, is astonishing, and the comings and goings of folk takes up a lot of this journal.

Yes, this is a Civil War era diary from a young woman whose family lived near the site of one of the war's major campaigns. There are a few instances of Yankees prowling the premises during the Vicksburg campaign. But mostly this is a fascinating glimpse into the life of Southerners in the 1860s and of everyday life during wartime. The Stone family owned slaves, and we're privy to Kate's attitudes toward blacks, from pity and affection to mean prejudice and foul racism.

"The Negroes really seemed to like the cotton picking best of all," she says, but later says she doesn't blame them for running to Union soldiers. In writing about the family's slaves she is patronizing, sympathetic, thoughtless, badly frightened and cordial by turns. But the systemic racism of the time prevails.

Her attitude toward the Union army and its commander-in-chief is decidedly one-note. After Lincoln's assassination, the news of which, of course (along with the presumed dire fate of Secretary of State William Seward, attacked but not killed as it turned out), takes many days to reach them in Texas, she says: "All honor to J.W. Booth. What torrents of blood Lincoln caused to flow, and how Seward has aided him in his bloody work. I cannot be sorry for their fate. They deserve it."

Kate Stone's family includes her mother and several siblings, two of whom, brothers, die in 1863. The book could roughly be divided into two parts, consisting of the Stones' wartime life in Vicksburg, and their long journey and resettlement in comparatively safe Texas after escaping a dangerous situation (prowling Union soldiers and black men) by fleeing their plantation in a canoe.

Names and people come and go, and the reader cannot keep track of them or know them all, but it doesn't matter much. Stone, just 20 when the war started, writes well and fascinatingly. She's fairly bright and is always on the lookout for a good book. In the end, she herself produced one, an account stirring even in its day-to-day chronicling of a family's life. It's hardly surprising that the citizens in the shadow of war, like Kate, became numbed to it, used to the ordinary hardship and extraordinary horrors, but that's no less interesting for being understandable.

Kate: "The sword of Damocles in a hundred forms is suspended over us, and there is no escape. The country seems possessed by demons, black and white."