Richmond During the War; Four Years of Personal Observation By a Richmond Lady (Leather Bound Hardcover)
by: Putnam, Sallie B.

Hardcover. NY, Time Life, reprint, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 389 pages. Hardcover with no dust jacket. Dark blue leather bound with gilt titles to front cover and spine. Embossed decoration on front cover. Gilt text block edges, red ribbon marker. Clean, tight copy. The commander of a Georgia regiment through much of the Civil War mused later in his memoirs that the heaviest burden fell not upon the man at the front, but upon the woman who waited and prayed for victory: "While the men were carried away with the drunkenness of the war, she dwelt in the stillness of her desolate home." Sallie Brock Putnam spoke for Southern womanhood. She was a native of Madison County, Virginia, and seems to have come from a family of good social standing. The book contains an unexpectedly full history of the Civil War; the author exhibits a strong grasp of strategy and tactics. But at its heart is an incisive eyewitness account of life in a capital that was swollen to four times its normal population by the exigencies of war. Brock's descriptions of Jefferson Davis' inauguration and the Richmond Bread Riot of 1863 are dramatic, but no more so than her accounts of nameless refugees, race relations, opportunistic merchants and blockade runners. Confederate prisons and family matters. In contrast to other female Southern writers of the period, she was more sober and factual, less gossipy and speculative. She wrote with shrewdness and maturity, and with a remarkable lack of self-pity and exaggeration. Yet the reader cannot miss her courage, sacrifice and suffering. Sallie Brock Putnam died in 1911.