A Faithful Heart: The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866.

A Faithful Heart: The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866. Edited by Robert T. Oliver. Women's Diaries and Letters of the South. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxxii, 335. $39.95, ISBN 1-57003-545-8.)

Emmala Reed, the daughter of a prominent judge in Anderson, South Carolina, was a dedicated journal keeper. While many southern women ceased updating their diaries at the end of the Civil War, Reed continued, crosshatching her lines in an old school workbook. Rediscovered at a garage sale and the only volumes in the public domain, Reed's journals for 1865 and 1866 provide a picture of small-town society on the threshold of a new era.

Reed's journals may be seen as part of a long southern tradition. Many elite white women kept personal records, and Reed's work parallels the better-known journals of Grace Elmore, Floride Clemson, and Emma LeConte. It has the advantage of chronicling a more secluded area in the Carolina upcountry, however, and extends into the first year of Reconstruction. Like many women, Reed experienced great emotional stress, along with annoying deprivations, at the conclusion of the war. Confederate surrender brought her family's return to modest prosperity and also a long period of heartbreak when her beloved soldier beau, Robert Broyles, returned, only to shun her for mysterious reasons.

Editor Robert T. Oliver is to be commended for his intensive research and his ability to identify almost every character, no matter how humble, who appears in Reed's narrative. He also places the town of Anderson in the appropriate political and social context. What emerges from the journals is the image of a small town barely altered, except for the abolition of slavery, by the conflict and its immediate aftermath. Although food and supplies were scarce, nobody starved; and though a Union foray raised alarm amid May Day picnickers, it did not create total chaos or leave lasting wounds. Children continued to be educated, young people resumed the rituals of courtship, and churches were packed on Sundays. Perhaps the most startling revelation of A Faithful Heart: The Journals of Emmala Reed, 1865 and 1866 is, except for the occasional fantasies about running off to Mexico, just how faithfully the Reed family maintained its antebellum status and sensibility.

Unfortunately for a reader seeking insight into southern life at the end of the war, Reed was a rather self-absorbed writer. The vast majority of passages are intimate without being insightful. Reed broods over her beloved Robert's coldness, theorizes as to its cause, and weeps over every cut and slight he inflicts. She also summarizes obscure novels and recounts who came in for tea or who walked with her to church. Her stories of visitors and relatives will be of interest mainly to determined genealogists. While Oliver faithfully catalogs people and explains unusual terms, his introduction and epilogue offer little context, and Reed's psychological distress is never deeply probed.

Ultimately, A Faithful Heart must grapple with a common problem--not every diarist is a Mary Chesnut. Most men and women who recorded their lives were obsessed with mundane details rather than astute observations. Oliver provides workmanlike annotations that are valuable to determined researchers, but Reed's journals make for tedious reading.

TRACY J. REVELS

Wofford College