Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War: Letters of the Anderson, Brockman, and Moore Families, 1853-1865
This book is a collection of Civil War personal correspondence among three interrelated prominent families from the Piedmont, or upcountry, of South Carolina, skillfully assembled and edited by one of their descendants. The lightly edited letters result in a book more like The Children of Pride than Gone with the Wind. It will appeal particularly to readers with an interest in the impact of the war on Southern planter society. All but a couple of the 124 letters were written by members of three neighboring Spartanburg area families bound together by their Presbyterian faith, their Scotch-Irish heritage and their investment in plantation slave agriculture. The bulk of these letters were written by or to three young, college-educated men, John Crawford Anderson and brothers Andrew Charles Moore and Thomas John Moore. Shortly after the war Anderson’s sister married Thomas John Moore. The editor presents the letters in chronological order, following a brief but informative introduction that includes a summary genealogy of the Anderson, Brockman and Moore families. The letters are edited sparingly, mostly in relation to family matters. The text includes period photographs of most of the persons who appear prominently in the letters. The single map depicts the Spartanburg area and shows where the three families lived. The letters begin in 1853 and conclude 12 years later, just after the end of the war. Personal matters preoccupy most of the writers, especially in the prewar years. But politics or national events sometimes intrude. In a letter to his mother written late in 1859, Andrew Charles Moore, then a law student at the University of Virginia, comments on John Brown’s quixotic raid on Harpers Ferry and concludes that “there is obliged to be dissolution of the union before long.” The outbreak of war found both Thomas John Moore and James Crawford Anderson still enjoying college life. Andrew Charles Moore was just out of law school and newly married. All three men enlisted in the Confederate army and experienced hard service in the Eastern Theater of the war. Andrew Charles Moore was killed in action in his first major battle, Second Manassas, but his brother and Anderson survived the war and returned home to cope with a free labor force and Federal occupation. The letters during the war period reflect an initial enthusiasm for secession and the Confederate war effort that erodes over time when scarcities of salt and foodstuffs, compounded by a deteriorating currency, make life on the South Carolina home front challenging and Yankee bullets claim the lives of Andrew Charles Moore and two of the Brockmans. By 1863 Thomas John Moore writes to the overseer of his family’s plantation, urging him not to “go headlong into the army without giving the mater due consideration,” and later pleading with him to find Moore a substitute, even at a cost of up to $2,500. One of the more interesting letters was written by a slave, Stephen Moore, who accompanied his master to war. A copy of the actual letter reproduced in the book shows both a fine hand and a remarkable degree of literacy. There is evidence in the book that several other family slaves were literate, despite the fact that teaching a slave to write was illegal in antebellum South Carolina. Taken as a whole, the letters portray an agrarian Southern community in transition from peace to war, from slavery to freedom, from prosperity to genteel poverty and, in some individual cases, from life to death. This reviewer highly recommends Upcountry South Carolina Goes to War to readers with an interest in South Carolina, plantation life, or slavery. Reviewer: C. Michael Harrington C. Michael Harrington is a member of the Houston Civil War Round Table and Civil War Aficionados. He has written several articles on South Carolina Confederates. A practicing lawyer, he has degrees in economics from Yale and Cambridge and a law degree from Harvard. |
Photographs, map, appendices, bibliography, index, 216 pages, 2009, University of South Carolina Press,