A Maryland Bride in the Deep South: The Civil War Diary of Priscilla Bond.

A Maryland Bride in the Deep South: The Civil War Diary of Priscilla Bond. Edited, with an introduction, by Kimberly Harrison. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2006. Pp. xviii, 384. $45.00, ISBN 0-8071-3143-1.)

In January 1861 a young bride prepared for "the greatest trial" of her life (p. 188). Priscilla "Mittie" Munnikhuysen Bond braced herself for "this heavy, heavy trial" as she left her home in Maryland for her new husband's family plantation in the sugar parishes of Louisiana (p. 189). Edited by Kimberly Harrison and presented in its entirety without revision, Bond's captivating diary reveals the trials of a young woman negotiating marriage, new familial relationships, an unfamiliar culture, plantation slavery, and chronic illness amid the ever-encroaching Civil War. Interwoven throughout Bond's account of this journey from belie to wife, established seaboard community to frontier plantation society, from peace to war to defeat, are the connected themes of "slavery, evangelical religion, and kinship" (p. 10). The young woman, Harrison observes, centered her world "around her faith and her family" as life in a "strange land" and the war challenged her beliefs and very identity (pp. x, ix). Like the wartime writings of Mary Boykin Chesnut, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, and Kate Stone, Bond's diary offers much to readers interested in southern women, the Civil War, and the war's transformative effect on gender roles, familial relationships, and individual identities.

Bond's wartime experience and diary stand distinct from the classics of this genre. Perhaps most influential, Bond endured the Civil War separated from her family in inhospitable and unfamiliar surroundings. The nineteen-year-old belle began her diary, which encompasses the years 1858 to 1865, a member of "a prominent, well-respected, and comfortable middle-class family" in the largely white, Protestant, free labor society of Harford County, Maryland, and ended it married to the son of an "extremely wealthy" antebellum sugarcane planter in the harsh slave society of Catholic Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana (pp. 1, 5). Southern Louisiana presented Bond with in-laws who treated her "as a piece of furniture," a Catholic religion that the devout Protestant deemed "so ridiculous," and Yankee soldiers who made her a refugee and burned the family plantation (pp. 314, 241). Additionally, Bond's writings demonstrate support for slavery and the Confederacy that deviate from other women writers of her class. The brutality of slavery on her family's sugarcane plantation, for instance, made Bond examine assumptions about the South's labor system. But the abuses she witnessed did not lead her to reject slavery, as it did others. Instead, she placed blame for its cruelty on "unchristian" men like her father-in-law and held that "under Christian influence" slavery was "just" (p. 26). Bond's loyalty to the Confederacy also differed markedly. While she considered herself a southerner, Bond did not actively contribute to the war effort, longed for her frequently absent husband to return, and called for peace "on any terms." "They say I'm a Yankee--but if wanting peace is Yankee--then I am one," she declared in 1864, "I am tired of Disunion of husband & wife" (p. 312). Finally, Bond's ultimately unsuccessful battle with tuberculosis shaped her wartime writings and experience in ways unlike those of other diarists.

Harrison offers an insightful introduction, instructive description of the characters and places mentioned, genealogical charts, maps, and a postscript that will enhance any reading of the diary. She also provides letters between Bond and her family in Maryland in an appendix that complements the diary well. The editor's explanatory footnotes are informative as well, though they could benefit from more extensive analysis and further connection to recent scholarship. That said, Bond's diary offers an important and distinct portrait of Civil War life in a much-neglected region of the South.

MARY FARMER-KAISER

University of Louisiana at Lafayette