"Rachel, After the Darkness" is a continuation of the struggle in which Jane Gaddy intricately describes the South following the war and during the reunification of a broken Nation. Rachel's husband and son are gone, having fallen at Gettysburg. Three sons have married, and Rachel and her youngest, Samuel, are left alone to run the small farm in northeast Mississippi. The darkness represents a time that never should have been, and in her thoughts, Rachel relives the gloom of death and destruction; the disparities of Federal intervention during Reconstruction and the re-establishing of the...

"Rachel, After the Darkness" is a continuation of the struggle in which Jane Gaddy intricately describes the South following the war and during the reunification of a broken Nation. Rachel's husband and son are gone, having fallen at Gettysburg. Three sons have married, and Rachel and her youngest, Samuel, are left alone to run the small farm in northeast Mississippi. The darkness represents a time that never should have been, and in her thoughts, Rachel relives the gloom of death and destruction; the disparities of Federal intervention during Reconstruction and the re-establishing of the...