Sanctified Trial: The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, a Confederate Woman in East Tennessee.

Sanctified Trial: The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, a Confederate Woman in East Tennessee. Edited by John N. Fain. Voices of the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004. Pp. lxvi, 410. $42.00, ISBN 1-57233-313-8.)

At the beginning of the Civil War, Eliza Fain viewed with great moral certitude the circumstances leading to the conflict: God had blessed the southern states with his bounty, made the South the repository of the republic's virtues, and given the white population the duty to uplift and Christianize the African race. But northern aggressors, led by abolitionists and traitorous politicians, had attacked the South repeatedly, finally causing the southern states to secede and go their own way. At the war's start, she wrote, the "designing political aristocracy have [sic] determined our overthrow" (p. 11). This theme is a dominant one in the current volume from the University of Tennessee Press's Voices of the Civil War series. Under the editorship of Fain's distant cousin, it contains Fain's diary entries from 1861 through 1865, with additional excerpts from the postwar years, and provides a remarkable portrait of her and her slave-owning family near Rogersville in East Tennessee.

Of the farming/merchandizing class, Fain, her husband Richard, and their twelve surviving children owned eight slaves and farmed some two hundred acres. As the war began, the Fains, unlike many East Tennessee residents, supported secession and sent Richard and eventually five of the Fain sons into the Confederate army. One of the most valuable parts of the diary is its depiction of how a Confederate family, with most of its men gone, dealt with its Unionist neighbors, endured raids by bushwhackers and guerrillas, and confronted increasing discipline problems with slaves.

Of even greater value is the diary' s depiction of a fervently devout woman who was absolutely convinced that God had created the institution of slavery and had blessed the South for maintaining it. Never once did Eliza Fain express any reservations about this, nor did she doubt in the first years of the war that the new southern nation would achieve its independence. But then came 1863 and the reverses at Gettysburg and Vicksburg and--even more discouraging to Fain--the Union army's penetration into East Tennessee. Eliza Fain never lost her faith, but she began to view the Confederacy's plunge toward defeat as God's punishment for "the dark and heinous crime of amalgamation, where men have enslaved their own flesh and blood" (p. 88). The sin, she further concluded, became worse when preachers and Christian women stood by and made little effort to condemn miscegenation. "Alas, alas we feel we are guilty, we feel our Father is just in giving us this sore chastisement on account of it" (p. 88).

The editor is to be commended for providing a useful introduction, a biographical glossary to help readers keep family members and friends identified, and excellent explanatory notes. Concerning published Civil War diaries, this one is not on the level of Mary Chesnut's or those of the Confederate elite, but its perspective on Confederate sympathizers in a largely Unionist area makes it very valuable.

LARRY WHITEAKER

Tennessee Technological University