Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had
200 pages, 6 x 9
6 illus
Paperback
Release Date:30 Jun 2013
ISBN:9780817357566
Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had
The Civil War Letters of Major William Morel Moxley, Eighteenth Alabama Infantry, and Emily Beck Moxley
University of Alabama Press
This rare correspondence between a soldier and his wife relates in poignant detail the struggle for survival on the battlefield as well as on the home front and gives voice to the underrepresented class of small farmers
Most surviving correspondence of the Civil War period was written by members of a literate, elite class; few collections exist in which the woman's letters to her soldier husband have been preserved. Here, in the exchange between William and Emily Moxley, a working-class farm couple from Coffee County, Alabama, we see vividly an often-neglected aspect of the Civil War experience: the hardships of civilian life on the home front.
Most surviving correspondence of the Civil War period was written by members of a literate, elite class; few collections exist in which the woman's letters to her soldier husband have been preserved. Here, in the exchange between William and Emily Moxley, a working-class farm couple from Coffee County, Alabama, we see vividly an often-neglected aspect of the Civil War experience: the hardships of civilian life on the home front.
Emily's moving letters to her husband, startling in their immediacy and detail, chronicle such difficulties as a desperate lack of food and clothing for her family, the frustration of depending on others in the community, and her growing terror at facing childbirth without her husband, at the mercy of a doctor with questionable skills. Major Moxley's letters to his wife reveal a decidedly unromantic side of the war, describing his frequent encounters with starvation, disease, and bloody slaughter.
To supplement this revealing correspondence, the editor has provided ample documentation and research; a genealogical chart of the Moxley family; detailed maps of Alabama and Florida that allow the reader to trace the progress of Major Moxley's division; and thorough footnotes to document and elucidate events and people mentioned in the letters. Readers interested in the Civil War and Alabama history will find these letters immensely appealing while scholars of 19th-century domestic life will find much of value in Emily Moxley's rare descriptions of her homefront experiences.
Well, my Dear, I am home by my lone self to night except the children, and they are all a sleep and know not what trouble is. You cant imagine how I feel. It is so lonsome. If you could be with me to night, how diferent I would feel but that can not be. I have been at work on the door to night, trying to fix it so I could bar it up, and I got it fixt so I could fasten it. I have been propping it up until I got tired of it, and I was afraid to lie down at night with the door open.’
—Excerpt from a letter written by Emily Beck Moxley
Cutrer uses a good mix of primary and secondary material to annotate the collection. The introductions to each of the eight chapters . . . provide a short but useful guide to the letters that follow. Cutrer has left the letters as he found them. His editing explains content and does not detract from the feel of the collection. . . . For the scholar or popular reader who understands the connection between home front and battlefield, this collection is a gem.’
—Military History of the West
Thomas William Cutrer is a Professor of American Studies at Arizona State University, West Campus. He has edited two prior collections of Civil War letters, including Brothers in Gray: The Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family.
