Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had: The Civil War Letters of Major William Morel Moxley, Eighteenth Alabama Infantry and Emily Beck Moxley - Hardcover

Willaim Morel Moxley; Emily Beck Moxley

9780817311186: Oh, What a Loansome Time I Had: The Civil War Letters of Major William Morel Moxley, Eighteenth Alabama Infantry and Emily Beck Moxley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817311181 ISBN 13: 9780817311186

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 2001

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.

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Review:

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. 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

About the Author:

Thomas W. Cutrer is 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.

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