Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868 (Library of Southern Civilization)

This journal records the Civil War experiences of a sensitive, well-educated, young southern woman. Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living with her widowed mother, five brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in northeastern Louisiana. When Grant moved against Vicksburg, the family fled before the invading armies, eventually found refuge in Texas, and finally returned to a devastated home.

Kate began her journal in May, 1861, and made regular entries up to November, 1865. She included briefer sketches in 1867 and 1868. In chronicling her everyday activities, Kate reveals much about a way of life that is no more: books read, plantation management and crops, maintaining slaves in the antebellum period, the attitude and conduct of slaves during the war, the fate of refugees, and civilian morale. Without pretense and with almost photographic clarity, she portrays the South during its darkest hours.

John Q. Anderson (1916–1975) taught American literature at the University of Houston and was the author of many books, including Louisiana Swamp Doctor.

Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of six books, including This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize. She is President of Harvard University.