In the expansive canon of Civil War memoirs, relatively few accounts from women exist. Among the most engaging and informative of these rare female perspectives is Constance Cary Harrison s "Recollections Grave and Gay," a lively, first-person account of the collapse of the Confederacy by the wife of President Jefferson Davis s private secretary. Although equal in literary merit to the well-known and widely available diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Eliza Frances Andrews, Harrison s memoir failed to remain in print after its original publication in 1916 and, as a result, has been lost to...
In the expansive canon of Civil War memoirs, relatively few accounts from women exist. Among the most engaging and informative of these rare female...
