Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had: The Civil War Letters of Major William Morel Moxley, Eighteenth Alabama Infantry, and Emily Beck Moxley.

Edited by Thomas W. Cutrer. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 2002. Pp. [xiv], 182. $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-1118-1.)

In the spate of edited collections of Civil War letters and diaries published during the last decade, those that address conditions in the South have usually provided details of the war's impact on the elite. By contrast, this volume of letters exchanged among a husband, his wife, and their close relatives portrays the hardships the war placed on southern yeoman families. Edited by Thomas W. Cutrer, this collection thus helps illuminate a group vital to our understanding of the impact of the Civil War: the nonslaveholding majority of white southerners.

William Morel Moxley and his wife Emily were from an area of southeastern Alabama commonly referred to as the Wiregrass, where pine forests and sandy soil, unlike the state's cotton-growing plantation districts, forced most households to farm mainly for their own subsistence needs. William Moxley was one such farmer in Coffee County, and also a physician. When the war began he helped raise the Bullock Guards, a regiment that became part of the Eighteenth Alabama Infantry. William was about thirty-seven years old when he entered military service; Emily was twenty-five and pregnant.

The majority of the Moxley correspondence dates from the period between June 1861 and March 1862, when Emily died during childbirth. Inclusion of the word loansome in the title is appropriate because so many of the letters focus on the theme of loneliness. Emily, living in rural isolation, and William, separated from his family, both wrote emotionally about their longing to be together. Each also described how important it was to receive letters, as well as the hurt they felt when letters appeared to go unanswered.

The Moxley correspondence demonstrates quite vividly the hardships of the yeoman class during the war. William's letters suggest problems with Confederate morale early in the war as he writes about hunger, disease, the fear of mortality, desertions, irregular mail service, and the inability to get furloughs because of thinning ranks of soldiers. Emily's letters provide insight into her life as a young mother left to care for her family. Day-to-day deprivations were compounded by a robbery at the Moxley home, and her feelings of vulnerability increased when the men whom William had tapped to protect her interests and harvest his crops cheated her of profits from the farm.

The Moxleys' letters are important because they help show how different the miseries and anxieties caused by the conflict were for the yeomanry. The difficulties caused by the ransacking of a plantation home paled in comparison to the hand-to-mouth existence suffered daily by yeoman households. Yet readers will need to tease out such conclusions by examining the Moxley correspondence themselves. While genealogists may find editor Cutrer's research on the Eighteenth Alabama Infantry to be very useful, wider historical context is often missing from this volume. Still, Cutrer's collection has enormous value, for the Moxleys' letters challenge us to continue our quest to understand the impact of class and gender on the southern home front.

KAREN L. COX

University of North Carolina at Charlotte