Voices From the Century Before: The Odyssey of a Nineteenth Century Kentucky Family - Hardcover

Berry, Mary Clay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1559703423 ISBN 13: 9781559703420

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 1996

Synopsis

The story of the Clay and Field families of nineteenth-century Kentucky is drawn from a treasury of letters written between 1845 and 1870 and considers everyday life in the era and the challenges of the Civil War. Tour.

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Reviews

A remarkable family album unfolding as a personal drama of slavery, Civil War and the turmoil of Reconstruction, these letters were written between 1843 and 1867 by freelancer Berry's ancestors, who fought, variously, for both the Union and the Confederacy. Her great-grandfather Brutus Clay, one of Kentucky's major slave owners, was a staunchly conservative yet pro-Union, border-state congressman whose anti-abolitionist stance was diametrically opposite that of his brother Cassius Clay, outspoken opponent of slavery and emancipationist newspaper publisher. Cassius, a Mexican War hero and quixotic adventurer who served as Lincoln's ambassador to Russia, became a folk hero because of his violent public brawls with supporters of slavery. The chatty letters, skillfully linked by Berry's commentary, yield an unvarnished account of the brutal realities of slavery. Punctuated by personal tragedies, the letters are a window on Lincoln's election and the war's outbreak and bloody course, the 1849 cholera epidemic and medical practices, cattle shows and revival meetings. In short, they are a microcosm of the political and moral fissures that transformed the nation. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An ably edited collection of letters revealing life on the Civil War home front. Using correspondence handed down through her father's family, Berry reconstructs the lives of Kentucky politician Brutus J. Clay and his circle of friends and relatives. ``Reading those letters,'' she writes, ``was like walking through the door of a nineteenth-century drawing room and sitting down among its inhabitants busily gossiping about their neighbors, exchanging recipes, and musing about politics.'' The conversational quality is a very real strength of this collection. Berry charts the course of Clay's rise to political prominence, his growth from householder to statesman. She also comments wisely on the culture of the time, a culture in which slaveholders referred to ``our negroes'' and worried about being poisoned by ill-treated kitchen hands seeking revenge, in which scarlet fever and cholera were too common visitors, in which a farmer's perennial worry about floods and drought alternated with concern about whether Kansas was to enter the Union as a free or slave state. Berry's explications of the contents of the letters are helpful, although she sometimes strives too hard for effect. Throughout the pages of this absorbing book, Clay remains a stern yet moderate presence, questioning whether it might be possible to chart a middle course, a ``middle confederacy'' of the border states in order better to separate North from South. Loyal to the Union cause but sympathetic to the rebels, Clay reveals in his letters little-known aspects of Civil War politics, notably a Chicago convention of so-called Union Democrats, called to find ways to defeat the sitting president at the polls. Clay, as Berry notes, ``denounced President Lincoln for using extreme methods to prosecute the war.'' This volume will be of considerable interest to students of the Civil War. (32 pages b&w photos and maps, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

It has sometimes been said that real life reads better than a fiction. Through actual letters of the Clay family, gathered here by a descendant, this work chronicles one family's views on slavery, politics, war, and the daily occurrences of farm life during the Civil War period. Letters in the book are from the years 1840 through 1870; Berry intersperses her own words to provide a context. The account begins during the summer of 1843 with the letters of Brutus Clay, a wealthy widower and the largest slave owner in Kentucky, to his beloved, Ann Field, the sister of his dead wife. The 30 years that follow portray the life of the Clay family as they marry, have children, and die. However, the work becomes a profoundly moving portrait of a family, a state, and the country during the Civil War period. The beauty of this book lies in the juxtaposition of the commonplace and intimate against the larger force of war. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Vicki Leslie Toy Smith, Univ. of Nevada, Reno
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1559703423
• ISBN 13: 9781559703420
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512