The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865

Winner 2018 The Douglas Southall Freeman Award Finalist 2017-2018 Founders Award American Civil War Museum Finalist for Memoir Historical 2018 The Indie Book Awards LeRoy Wiley Gresham was born in 1847 to an affluent slave-holding family in Macon Georgia. After a horrific leg injury left him an invalid the educated inquisitive perceptive and exceptionally witty 12-year-old began keeping a diary in 1860--just as secession and the Civil War began tearing the country and his world apart. He continued to write even as his health deteriorated until both the war and his life ended in 1865. His unique manuscript of the demise of the Old Southlauded by the Library of Congress as one of its premier holdingsis published here for the first time in The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham 1860-1865. LeRoy read books devoured newspapers and magazines listened to gossip and discussed and debated important social and military issues with his parents and others. He wrote daily for five years putting pen to paper with a vim and tongue-in-cheek vigor that impresses even now more than 150 years later. His practical philosophical and occasionally Twain-like hilarious observations cover politics and the secession movement the long and increasingly destructive Civil War family pets a wide variety of hobbies and interests and what life was like at the center of a socially prominent wealthy family in the important Confederate manufacturing center of Macon. The young scribe often voiced concern about the familys pair of plantations outside town and recorded his interactions and relationships with servants Howard Allen Eveline and others as he pondered the fate of human bondage and his familys declining fortunes. Unbeknownst to LeRoy he was chronicling his own slow and painful descent toward death in tandem with the demise of the Southern Confederacy. He recordedoften in horrific detailan increasingly painful and debilitating disease that robbed him of his childhood. The teenagers declining health is a consistent thread coursing through his fascinating journals. I feel more discouraged and less hopeful about getting well than I ever did before he wrote on March 17 1863. I am weaker and more helpless than I ever was. Morphine and a score of other remedies did little to ease his suffering. Abscesses developed; nagging coughs and pain consumed him. Alternating between bouts of euphoria and despondency he often wrote Saw off my leg. The War Outside My Window edited and annotated by Janet Croon with helpful footnotes and a detailed family biographical chart captures the spirit and the character of a young privileged white teenager witnessing the demise of his world even as his own body slowly failed him. Just as Anne Frank has come down to us as the adolescent voice of World War II LeRoy Gresham will now be remembered as the young voice of the Civil War South.