Expelled from occupied New Orleans by Federal forces after refusing to pledge loyalty to the Union, Henri Garidel remained in exile from his home and family from 1863 to 1865. Lonely, homesick, and alienated, the French-Catholic Garidel, a clerk in the Confederate Bureau of Ordnance, was a complete outsider in the wartime capital of Richmond.

In his faithfully kept diary, Garidel relates the trials and discomforts--physical, emotional, spiritual, and professional--of life in a city entirely foreign to him. Civil War Richmonders were predominantly white, evangelical Protestants in a...