A New Perspective on the Civil War

He looks wonderfully healthy in this daguerreotype.  A nicely dressed young man of about ten years of age, looking at you through the lens of a camera with the eyes of a soul much older than he appears.

LeRoy Wiley Gresham
1847-1865

At age 8, he followed other youths on their way home from school into a burned out structure, and boys being boys, began investigating what remained.  The brick chimney began to collapse, and he bore the brunt of it.  His left leg was caught and severely crushed.  And from that point onward, he pinned his medical troubles on that one accident.

In one respect, he might have been correct.  But what would take his life at the tender age of 17 was not what he thought... and is but one of the threads that weaves throughout the remarkable set of daily journals that he kept beginning at age 12 in 1860 and ending shortly before his death in 1865.

The first thing that drew me to LeRoy's journals was that they were primary sources, and as a teacher of high school history, I have always taught my students that primary sources, regardless of their unique limitations, are the closest thing to being part of a major historical event.  These journals are unique, and although I have read many Civil War journals, memoirs, letters, official papers, and the like, they were all written by adults.  This set of journals, however, was the work of a young teenager in the South, and my initial reading led me to ask my friend, Ted Savas, of Savas-Beatie publishing if he had seen this source before.

He hadn't.  Nor had he seen anything else like it.

Before I knew it, after making some phone calls to the Library of Congress at Ted's direction, I had my very first publishing contract.  We were going to work on bringing this amazing and simultaneously heartrending story to light.  Instead of publishing the memoirs of an adult who experienced the Civil War, usually with a post-war agenda, we were working with the words of a teenager who was describing the war with imaginative detail.  This is probably the most obvious of the narrative threads that is involved in this work.

By outlining the daily comings and goings of friends, neighbors, relatives, dignitaries, and family slaves, LeRoy provides the modern reader with a rare glimpse into the life of an upper-class teenager.  One sees the city of Macon, Georgia become a source of weapons manufacturing, a center for training troops, a cross-roads of military transportation, and a camp for captured Union officers.  This narrative thread goes from the excitement of the new society of the South and its promising future, to one of decline as the war ends.  And both of these threads are entertwined with LeRoy's medical saga, an eerie parallel.

To be sure, it is unlike any other work of the Civil War era.  To my mind, it has somewhat of a resemblance to The Diary of Anne Frank, although the comparison is not a perfect one.  Both teens were prolific readers, engaging writers, keen observers, and were watching war from a distance: Anne from the Secret Annex in Amsterdam, and LeRoy from his windows and wagon in Macon.  She feared the Nazi concentration camps that eventually claimed her life; he had no knowledge of the internal disease that was to eventually claim him.  Both died tragically too young, and one can only wonder at what they would have brought forth to the world had they reached adulthood.

The War Outside My Window is to be released in early June 2018, and until that point, I slall write about the process of editing the work of someone else who had written over 150 years ago.  There were several hurdles to overcome, and it was more work than I had anticipated -- but it is a journey that I would not have missed for the world!