Recollections of a Southern Daughter recalls life in antebellum Liberty County, Georgia, a time and place best known today through the letters of the Charles Colcock Jones family, published in the classic Children of Pride, and the letters and journals of the Roswell King, Fanny Kemble, and Joseph LeConte families. In this memoir Cornelia Jones Pond gives an eyewitness account of how the privileged life of the southern slaveholding class was destroyed by a whirlwind of change.

Pond's narrative begins in 1834, when she was born to one of the Old South's wealthiest...