A Handwritten Diary from Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Era South Carolina
South Carolina Diary kept by Julia Rowena Logan, Confederate Treasury Department Clerk. Sister of Confederate General Thomas Muldrop Logan
Privation and loss; death and separation. Julia Logan’s diary, intermittently kept, chronicles a pervading prayerful grief for the dead, wounded, or otherwise separated members of the Logan family, prominent South Carolina Confederate loyalists, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, 1864–1879.
The very notebook — “this old book of Brother Sam’s” — within which Julia keeps her diary is emblematic of war-time shortages. Its original 1853 pencil manuscript medical notes kept by her brother while he was a student at the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston were erased and partially written over by her. The shades of former, happier days, these palimpsests literally appear and disappear throughout her diary just as do the hovering “spirits,” as Julia describes them, of her late mother and her departed soldier-brother, Dan. Dan had served with the“Crescent City Rifles” in the 1st Louisiana Regiment.
Julia Rowena Logan (1836–1909) was the daughter (one of fifteen children) of Judge George William Logan (1804–1876) of the Charleston District Court and Anna D’Oyley Glover Logan (1808–1850). Julia twice refers to herself in the third person in the diary as “Julie.” During the war she lived in Columbia, South Carolina with her widowed father and some of her sisters. Julia’s diary begins in the last year of the Civil War. Her mother has been dead for many years and her brother Dan has been dead for a year and a half, killed in the war in Virginia on December 1, 1862.
Throughout the diary, Julia carefully notes the anniversaries of her mother’s and Dan’s births and deaths, but she seems particularly affected by the death of her brother, Dan. Her grief for them and the sense of loss pervades the diary. At one point, almost irrationally, Julia excoriates a former love of her late brother, Dan, who is about to marry:
In reading my last conference here I find it was on that sad & dreadful day the 1st of Dec last anniversary of the hardest bitterest trial of my life the memory of which is still most vividly, painfully fresh in my heart & brings now the bitter scalding tears & then I wrote of one who I thought did truly share our grief, aye even deemed if possible a keener sufferer than ourselves. I wished for her then that we might talk together of our great sorrow as we used to love to do. But oh how can I attempt to give utterance to my feelings now when I find she is not as I thought her, & all those sacred holy communings with her in the past & which I have often dreamed to have again are lost forever; would that they ne’er had been. Oh I might almost wish that she had never come to us for now her visit then, & as it was, seems almost like a desecration so very different is she from what I thought her…. as I look up at his [Dan’s] portrait now I wish he had never known her since she has proved herself so unworthy of his pure exalted love… I only ask that she will let me have our darling’s [Dan’s] journals and some letters and papers that to me would be for ever treasured with my own holiest associations of the past. (Oct 21st [18]65)
Just about a month before she commences her diary, Julia obtained a position as a clerk in the Treasury Note Bureau of the Confederate Treasury in Columbia, South Carolina This paying work enabled her to commission a portrait of her late brother:
I am now occupied some hours each day in the Treasury Department for which employment I do feel most thankful being thus enabled to do a great deal which I could not otherwise afford. Nothing however can give me greater pleasure than being thus able to carry out this idea. I have for months thought of & imagined what a source of comfort it will be to us all if the likeness [of Daniel D’Oyley Logan] is but a good one which I trust & pray it may be. Mr. [ John Beaufain] Irving has taken his Photograph and a lock of his hair & is quite interested & kind says he thinks he will be successful if we will help him after he has the head painted….My salary of this month with a part of the next is to be appropriated in this way & it helps to do away with all the irksome monotony of my uninteresting occupation to think of the end for which I am now working. ( July 17th [18]64)
This albumen, full-length portrait photograph and the lock of hair of Julia’s late brother, used by the portraitist, are laid into the diary. Julia has carefully preserved them as relics of her late brother. Accompanying them is a small pencil note from their sister, Anna Tilghman Logan, signed “A T L,” presenting the lock of hair to Julia. The paper packet containing the lock of Dan’s brown hair is annotated with the date of his death,“Dec. 1st 1862.”
Julia writes about her other Confederate soldier brothers, Joe, Sam and “Mullie”: Joseph Grover Logan, Dr. Samuel Logan, and Colonel, later Brigadier General, Thomas Muldrop Logan.
Sam, a surgeon, served under General P. G. T. Beauregard, but appears to be in the Mississippi Valley in July 1864. Julia reports that Sam had accepted a position on the staff of Brigadier General Martin W. Gary in Virginia. This new position would enable Sam to see his brother “Mullie”, who at that time was serving as a Colonel in Gary’s Brigade. Julia writes about her brother being wounded that last summer of the war during the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign. Brother Joe is fighting in Georgia.
The notebook in which Julia Logan keeps her diary contained medical notes kept by her brother Sam while he was attending the Medical College of South Carolina. The notes are dated 1853, the year that he graduated. Julia erased many pages of Sam’s medical notes, some more thoroughly than others. Many of these notes can be discerned within the diary in blank spaces and underneath her own handwriting. About 85 pages of pencil medical notes including palimpsests, but not counting those used for diary, remain, with varying degrees of legibility, within the present notebook. Some of the notes remain intact, especially at the end of the notebook. It might be surmised that a short supply of paper, due to the war, was the reason Julia re-purposed this notebook for her diary.
After the war, when she moved to Charleston, South Carolina and became a teacher, Julia notes that Sam returned to his old position as a “demonstrator” at the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston. Later, she grieves that Sam is leaving them to take up a professorship of medicine at the Medical College of Virginia at Richmond. Only one year later, she writes that he was removing even farther away, to the New Orleans School of Medicine, where he was elected Professor of Surgery. Dr. Logan subsequently taught at the University of Louisiana, lectured at Tulane, and served as president of both the New Orleans Academy of Medicine and the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Association.
The entries for many years of the later portion of the diary focus ever more exclusively on illnesses, deaths, absences, and the anniversaries of births and deaths. Julia’s sufferings on account of her father, siblings, and extended family are described and, as with most of the diary, these entries conclude with a prayer addressed directly to God. “Mullie” becomes ill with typhoid and tumors and a nephew has scarlet fever. Sam is away in New Orleans and can’t come to help “Mullie”. Georgianna has gone away to become a governess in Augusta, Georgia and Lily is in Colorado. Her brother Joe dies; her father dies. These later incidents providing more anniversaries for her to mark and endure. In short, Julia’s diary is a catalog of woe.
To further compound her suffering, Julia writes of her house being robbed and civil disturbances, including race riots. In the summer of 1876, race riots began to break out in central South Carolina. By September, there were riots in Charleston. On September 11, the anniversary of her parents’ wedding, she writes fondly about her now late father, but adds a troubling note about the situation in Charleston:
We miss him sadly, but I could not bring him back if I could. This state of affairs in the city would have worried him no little. Our Gentlemen have taken things in their own hands & now guard even more than the police force being fully determined to let the negroes & their miserable white ring leaders see that they will not submit to another Wednesday night riot [referring to the September 6 riot in Charleston] that surely was outrageous & the only wonder is that of so many who were seriously hurt, Young Buckner who died on the 7th (the next day) is so far the only death from the row. We have been kept in great excitement, but things seems quieter now & I trust may remain so.
Julia’s diary is also intriguing for what appears to be a rather understated theme of economic privation or difficulties. From various strands pulled within, one might surmise the Logan family were, like many Confederate sympathizers in a similar situation, were not enjoying financial prosperity, let alone stability. In fact, one CSA government report notes that the pay for her position at the Treasury had been increased threefold. This, however, was merely likely do to inflation and the instability of Confederate money; ironically, some of which Julia herself would autograph in her capacity as clerk at the Treasury.
Julia’s persistent use of the words “spirits” and “hover” (and variants thereof ) —in relationship to these mourned lost souls— evoke themes of the romantic Southern temperament. These are the themes of loss and death and its lingering presence in the form of tragic memories; the “ghosts” of such memories. These themes are here chronicled. They would later become codified in the future decades’ output of popular fiction and literature from the South.
[South Carolina Diary kept from 1864 to 1879 by Julia Rowena Logan, Confederate Treasury Department Clerk, Sister of Confederate General Thomas Muldrop Logan, and Charleston School Teacher; Diary kept within an 1853 Medical Palimpsest of her Brother, Dr. Samuel Logan, then a student at the Medical College of South Carolina and, later, Confederate Surgeon and Medical Professor]. [Mainly Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina; 1853 and June 15th, [18]64–March 8th [1879]]. [152] ll. i.e. approx. 220 ink and pencil manuscript pages of diary and about 85 pages of pencil medical notes including palimpsests, but not counting those used for diary. 7 additional leaves excised. Brown wrappers. 61⁄4 x 4 inches. Small albumen 31⁄2 x 2 inches, a small note, and a packet holding a lock of hair laid in.
Refs. Dearinger, Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design: 1826-1925. (Manchester, Vermont, 2004). Freeman, A Calendar of Confederate Papers (Richmond, 1808). Gaillard and McChesney, eds., The Richmond Medical Journal, Vol. IV, No. 1 (Richmond, 1867). Logan, A Record of the Logan Family of Charleston, South Carolina (Sacramento, 1874). Shoemaker, ed., The Medical Bulletin, Vol. XV, No. 4 (Philadelphia, 1893). South Carolina: A Guide to the Palmetto State, American Guide Series (North American Book Dist., 1976).
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