Old Times in Dixie Land: A Southern Matron's Memories

I have not written these memoirs entirely for the amusement or instruction of my contemporaries; but I shall feel rewarded if I elicit thereby the interest and sympathy which fo...

On a clear spring morning more than fifty years ago, Cousin Antoinette and I sat on the front porch of Cottage Hall ready for a ride and waiting for the stable boy to bring up o...

My home during my early married life was in the town of Clinton, La. While I never coveted the ownership of many slaves, my comfort was greatly promoted by the possession of som...

Mr. Merrick was elected chief-justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana in the year of 1855. I went with him to New Orleans for that winter and lived at the old St. Louis hotel,...

From my daughter Laura’s diary, May 21st, 1863, let me quote: “The Yankees have been passing this house all day, regiment after regiment on their way to attack Port Hudson. Two...

Among the Federal vessels stationed at Red River Landing was the Manhattan, commanded by Captain Grafton, a high-minded officer as the following incident proves. A letter from L...

Our vision of the outside world of human affairs was very narrow and circumscribed in those war-times, and my seminary of five young girls was often a victim to _ennui_. No week...

Mary Wall’s letter from Clinton, Louisiana, December 27th, 1863, contains some strong expressions showing the feeling and suffering among women at that period: “You must keep in...

War is demoralizing, and ever since “our army swore terribly in Flanders,” profanity has been a military sin. In my neighborhood it extended to the women and children who had ne...

The bewilderment of the negroes in the great social upheaval that came with peace was outdone by that of the white people. The conditions of the war times had been peaceable and...

The war fully ended and our city home recovered, we removed to New Orleans. I devoted myself wholly to my family and to domestic affairs. Friends gathered about us and some deli...

In those broken-hearted days Clara said with a pathetic earnestness: “Now I must try to be two daughters to you. You have not lost all your children--only your best child.” We d...

In June, 1881, I spoke by invitation before the Alumnæ Association of Whitworth College, at Brookhaven, Mississippi,--a venerable institution under the care of the Methodist Epi...

Unwilling to be separated from me, Clara proposed in 1882 that she and her two children should spend the summer in New England. Her Uncle William had placed his furnished house...

The incidents which once enlivened the lives of every family that was served by the negro slave are fading from the minds of even many who were centers of those episodes. But th...

As has been intimated, I became president of the New Orleans W. C. T. U. not from deep conviction of duty on the temperance question, but because I could not resist the inspirat...

I once heard a woman say that she had lived half a lifetime before she realized that the commandments were written for her. In a vague sort of way she had appropriated, “Thou sh...

There are characters of such marked and peculiar individuality that they loom upon one’s consciousness like Stonehenge, or any other magnificent ruin, as Charles Lamb says of Mr...

In every individual life there enter events which in their enlarged influence are analogous to epoch-making periods in the nation’s history. Such, surely, was my meeting with Su...

Why should women regret the golden period of youth? There are things finer and more precious than inexperience and a fair face. When a friend of Petrarch bemoaned the age reveal...