The War Outside My Window

June 11, 2018
Croon’s efforts to edit and annotate the diary of a teenage Southerner who died young yield a firsthand account of life during the Civil War that, befitting the author’s youth, is skewed more toward the quotidian (“Miss Hattie Tracy sent me a cantaloupe”) than the profound. Gresham, who began writing when he was 12, displays some emotion when recounting Southern military victories (“Great and glorious news! Grand defeat of the Yankees”), but is strangely flat when writing about Lincoln’s assassination (“Lincoln was assassinated on the night of the 11th”), despite the presence in an earlier entry of what appears to be a cartoon depiction of himself killing the president. The diary is more a document of a teenage boy’s observations—about the weather, the state of his health, gifts received, games played—than a contemporaneous perspective on the war or the morality of slavery. The volume gains poignancy from Gresham’s incomplete final writing, made just days before his death (probably from tuberculosis), but it’s likely to be of most interest to historians or serious students of the period.