Section Branding
Header Content
New Book Brings To Life A Southern Boy's Civil War Diary
Primary Content
Leroy Gresham was a 12-year-old boy living in Macon when the Civil War broke out in 1860. He kept his diaries until he died of a rare form of tuberculosis just five years later.
Virginia historian and recently retired high school teacher Janet Croon learned about the diaries while working on a project.
“He’s giving us 19th Century blog posts, basically,” Croon said. “The focus is on the home front. On multiple different levels, he tells you about life at that time.”
She dug a little deeper and ended up contacting the Library of Congress to gain access to the online archives that housed the diaries. Once she did she was surprised by the young man’s prose, excellent handwriting and detailed accounts of some of the well-known benchmarks of the Civil War through the eyes of a teenager.
Leroy was an invalid. His parents kept his tuberculosis a secret and claimed his medical problems began when a chimney fell on his leg at the age of 8, leaving him a cripple.
Croon said while Leroy generally kept a positive outlook, the teenager often expressed frustration at his inability to move independently.
“He wants to (have) an occupation and he wants to be useful, but all he can do is just sit around,” Croon said.
Allen, one of the slaves owned by the family, spent much of his time caring for Leroy, pushing him around in a little cart. He frequently took the boy to downtown Macon to see the bustling businesses and cotton market.
Croon said Leroy also mentioned a slave named Howard in the diaries. When Leroy’s father went to the local guard to fight, Howard became Leroy’s personal body servant.
“He had great affection for Howard,” she said. “Howard does a lot of the outdoor work. He would go and watch Howard plant flowers.”
Extensive research had to be done to fill in some of the stories, dates and details that Leroy left out, Croon said. To find the names of specific slaves owned by the Greshams, she looked at a registry from the 1860s — a crude system that classified slaves by three different distinctions.
“The registry did not give us names,” Croon said. They gave us age, gender and, of course now it’s uncomfortable to talk about, but, degree of color.”
Croon painstakingly cross-referenced Leroy’s dates and observations with information about the Civil War from: Ancestry.com, Macon writers, historians and librarians. This helped her piece together a more complete narrative.
Leroy’s diaries, Croon said, are a rarity for several reasons. He told his story as a Confederate supporter from the homefront. Most Civil War diaries were kept by socialite white women or soldiers at the frontlines. His voice as a writer also grew as he aged, slowly becoming more eloquent and more critical of the Confederacy’s economic policies. He even questioned his father’s political opinions from time to time. As the war began to turn in favor of the North, Leroy began to see the South’s economic decline.
“It gave you a handle on everyday life that even the wealthy were hurting economically,” Croon said.
Leroy’s father, John Gresham, was a wealthy businessman and plantation owner. An active advocate for the Confederacy, he also served as the mayor of Macon, a Georgia state senator and justice of the Georgia Supreme Court.
The man had a share in the Macon Manufacturing Company, a large cotton producer. During the later stages of the war, when poor residents complained the fabric was too expensive, Gresham made them a deal.
“He allowed them to trade a pound of bacon for a yard of cotton. He took all this bacon, and gave some of it back to the poor, but he sold a lot of it to the army,” Croon said. “The army was starving.”
Though Gen. William Sherman decided not to burn Macon on his infamous march, Leroy and the city residents had no way of knowing they’d suffer only minimal havoc.
“It does give you a different perspective on what the people of the South went through, especially when Sherman was coming through,” Croon said. “There was a lot of fear. Everything has been way far away, now all of the sudden it’s on our front doorstep.”
Sherman’s army had marched to Macon to free Union prisoners of war, but upon arriving were told the prisoners had been moved to Andersonville, a city an hour south of Macon. They made an operation post out of the Woodruff House, a now historically preserved home in Macon, but no battles ever took place in the city center.
“Leroy Gresham supports the Confederacy, but soon sees that things are not going as brightly as they’ve been told,” Croon said. “And he starts questioning media reports.”
Leroy endured several chaotic days in which his city was at the mercy of Sherman and unaware of the fate of his family.
“He sees the end of the war coming long before it actually comes,” Croon said. “He says during one winter, ‘The people in the North are building things; they’re raising more troops. We have no more troops to raise.’”
Leroy’s skill at writing accompanied his love of reading Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, journals of the time, telegraphs, when he could access them, and snippets of newspapers that relatives would provide for him.
“He’s fascinated by the written word, and he wanted to learn as much as he possibly could,” Croon said.
Leroy mentioned his illness, a rare form of tuberculosis, in terms of the various treatments his parents used: hard alcohol, herbal remedies and tonics. During the last few months of his life, he figured his condition was worsening and asked his mother to write in his diary for him.
The last line of his diary, written in his mother’s handwriting, reads, “I am perhaps.”
After some research, Croon said her theory is that the last word was one his mother couldn’t bear to write: “dying.”
Leroy’s father’s left a footnote on that page, confirming Leroy’s date of death in the summer of 1865. The postscript appeared nearly ten days after the final unfinished line.
Croon will be holding a launch event for her book on June 8 at the 1842 Inn in Macon. It’s also Leroy’s childhood home.
Bottom Content
