Sanctified Trial is the riveting Civil War diary of a Confederate woman of strong religious faith and equally strong proslavery convictions. Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain (b. 1816), who lived in Rogersville, Tennessee, kept diaries from shortly after her marriage to Richard Gammon Fain in 1833 until her death in 1892. John N. Fain has prepared this edition of the portion of these diaries that focuses on the war years.
Her husband and five of her six sons fought on the side of the South in a sharply divided East Tennessee. With a farm that housed nine slaves, Eliza Fain was no reluctant...