Kate Stone

Sarah Katherine Holmes Stone (born January 8, 1841 in Mississippi Springs, Hinds County , Mississippi ; died December 28, 1907 in Tallulah , Louisiana ), better known as Kate Stone , was the daughter of a wealthy cotton grower and slave owner in the American southern states . Her diary , which she kept at the time of the Civil War , is of interest to American history and literature .

diary

Kate Stone became known to posterity through her diary, first printed in 1955, which she kept continuously from May 1861 to November 1865; Shorter addenda date from 1867 and 1868. In 1861, the year the war broke out, Stone was twenty years old and a fairly typical example of a Southern Belle , so he tried to meet the usual expectations of a " higher daughter " of the Southern Society. She was one of seven surviving children of the cotton grower William Patrick Stone, who died in 1855, and Amanda Stone who, after the death of her husband, ran the Stonington Plantation , called "Brokenburn", in northeast Louisiana, not far from the city of Vicksburg ( Mississippi) , headed. In May 1861, one month after the outbreak of war, Kate Stone began to keep a diary which, as an " ego document ", enables insights into her own sensitivities on the one hand, and views of her social environment on the other, and thus represents an illuminating moral picture of this time.

Stone supported the Southern Cause with a youthful romantic enthusiasm, even if the image of the Just War, in which "dashing young officers in splendid uniforms are inspired by patriotic maiden to heroic exploits", gave way to the cruel reality to the extent that they did Front approached their home. After the Union's first gunboats took up position just a few miles from their plantation on the banks of the Mississippi in 1862, the skirmishes in the region with the Vicksburg campaign increased , so that in March 1863 the family embarked on a daring escape through the Louisiana swamps looked forced. As refugees, the Stones reached Texas, where they spent two and a half years - much to the displeasure of the spoiled Kate Stone, who disliked the anything but refined Texan customs. In this "dark corner of the Confederation", as Stone calls it, the news of the death of her brothers William and Coleman on the battlefield reached her, which darkened her mood even further. After all, in Texas, however, her flirtation with lieutenant Henry Bry Holmes, which she was to marry in 1869, began in a manner befitting her class. After the verbally lamented defeat of the Southern Confederation, Stone returned to Louisiana in 1865 to find the family mansion looted and the plantation devastated. With the difficult reconstruction, the entries become rarer; the diary ends in 1868, a year before their wedding.

In addition to the diaries of two other ladies of the higher southern society, Mary Chesnut and Sarah Morgan , Stone's diary has often been used by historians to illustrate the southern world since it was first published.

Editions of the diary

• John Q. Anderson (Ed.): Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-68 . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1955.
  • Reprint with a new introduction by Drew Gilpin Faust : Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1995. ISBN 0807120170

Secondary literature

• Edmund Wilson : Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War . Oxford University Press, New York 1962, pp. 258-263.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Anderson: Introduction to Brokenburn , pp. Xvii