Losing our illusions

Teenager’s journal a microcosm of the Civil War in Arkansas

An 1863 portrait of Mary Adelia Byers is probably taken from an ambrotype, or glass negative. As a teenager, Byers kept a diary that has become a book, Torn by War: The Civil War Journal of Mary Adelia Byers.
An 1863 portrait of Mary Adelia Byers is probably taken from an ambrotype, or glass negative. As a teenager, Byers kept a diary that has become a book, Torn by War: The Civil War Journal of Mary Adelia Byers.

June 23rd, 1862

I am commencing to keep a journal for several reasons. It is very improving both in penmanship and in learning any one to commit his thoughts to paper with accuracy. I should have commenced when the war began or at least when the Federal army entered Batesville.

Poor Batesville! You have suffered much at the hands of this army, but not so much as you will suffer if it remains here longer.

So begins Torn by War: The Civil War Journal of Mary Adelia Byers (University of Oklahoma Press, $19.95), who lived with her widowed mother and three siblings. Mary was 15. In March of 1865 she simply stopped. In between, the literate teenager wrote about friends and Federals, blackberries and beaux.

And about hope, poverty, loss and bitter change.

“Anybody who reads that book will be glad they did,” folklorist George Lankford said. He should know. Lankford - emeritus professor of folklore at Lyon College in Batesville - wrote the introduction. He admires the determination of Samuel R.

Phillips, great-grandson of the author, to edit and publish the journal, in the process opening a window 150 years old.

How the thing survived is a mystery even to Phillips, 78, of Grass Valley, Calif. He grew up in Newport, about 30 miles from Batesville, where he lived with his grandmother, Clare Neill Phillips, daughter of Mary. Young Sam’s parents were divorced, and his father, Neill Phillips, was a naval officer posted to far-off places.

Hence, life with his grandmother.

“How did it get to my grandmother, one of seven children? She and one other child had children of their own. … She had two living children, one of whom was my father,” Phillips said.

Then there were the calamities, man-made and natural. The former was the great fire of 1926, which burned down most of Newport, including Phillips’ grandmother’s house. The latter was the Great Flood of 1927, which inundated Newport and nearly everything else in Arkansas.

“I don’t recall ever seeing the diary as a child,” Phillips said, “but I do recall hearing about it. I don’t even recall the physical act of inheriting it from my father. My first memory of physically having it in my hands was in the late 1980s. I got the diary and my father’s yellow legal tablet full of transcriptions. I hired a secretary, got a few pages transcribed, but it was discouraging.”

He got busy with his business - he’s a mechanical engineer and manufacturing consultant - and gave up.

“When we moved to Grass Valley I had more time to work on it and did. About the year we moved here, in 2007, my wife and I traveled to Arkansas and met with members of Independence County Historical Society.”

The journal isn’t what the modern diarist might envision.

“It’s a ledger. You can see the vertical lines faintly. It’s 6 inches by 15 inches - a very odd size … There are some accounts in the front, can’t tell who, and Mary practicing her beautiful handwriting.Paper was very crude then and very expensive. It’s not surprising she snatched up this old book to use. It would have been the practice to use everything possible.”

Phillips had the diary scanned, creating a PDF that allowed for easier transcription. The combination of encouragement and technology led to the eventual publication of the book in the fall of 2013.

June 27th, 1862

O, for someone to communicate … to our noble army! They could take the town within twenty-four hours and that without a fight, for this army would ske-daddle, to use an expression very much in vogue with them at present but not admired by me.

Phillips started out with a modest plan.

“The goal was to circulate [the journal] among the family but it kept growing as a project with photos and maps,” Phillips said. “It [had] become a more encompassing project and so I started to look for a publisher.”

Several academic presses were cordial, but declined.

“And then I had a book in my library published by the University of Oklahoma Press. It was the diary of a soldier, Marching With the First Nebraska. It was very well done. I wrote them, got a nice reply and they eventually accepted it.”

Oct. 26, 1862

Thursday, Eliza Lewis’s baby died. She has been sick since June. Dr. Hendren vaccinated her and she has not been well since. Eliza has lost two children. Her two little girls, Fannie and Ava, sleep side [by side] in the church-yard. Her husband is in Kentucky with Kirby Smith. She has not heard from him since August; then he had no clothes but those he wore and but one dollar that he said he must spend that day.

The Byers family - four children and widowed mother - were “absolutely poverty stricken,” Lankford said.

John Byers, husband, father, local prosecutor - died in 1856. A document published in the book shows “A true and full inventory of John H. Byers, deceased, late of Independence County.”

He had … not much. The estate totaled $1,835.43, of which the most valuable possessions - “Negro Woman & Child” - were assessed at $1,100.

In the journal, Lankford said, Mary “talks about being poor. She was the genteel poor. It weighed on her mind.”

So poor was the Byers family that it took in Union officers as paying boarders.

Mary found this disagreeable, to say the least.

Feb. 6, 1863, the day the Federals came to town. They were marching down the street. They went to the tavern, kicked down the doors, scared the women, making them scream like wildcats, and done I can’t tell how much more devilment. We heard some steps upon the porch and a quick knocking at the door. Ma opened it; there stood four men. I trembled.

Batesville’s war was easy in comparison to some other places, Lankford said. West Plains, Mo., was burned to the ground, as was Salem in Sharp County. Perhaps by guerrillas and jayhawkers. Batesville was split by sympathizers on both sides.

“It’s a mystery we’ll never solve - how Confederate and Union sympathizers had an armed truce for as long as they did in Independence County. There was some unspoken agreement that I don’t understand at all.”

July 13, 1863

Mr. Lee just brought a letter to Leanna from Purnell. He says that he has seen some of the negroes taken by the Federals. They were in a wretched condition, having nothing to carry water in nor make up bread, doing the latter in their hats and the former in their shoes. He advised her never to let anybody, white or black, persuade her from her home, that she is better off here than she will ever be with the Federals. There were 2,000 negroes captured at Delhi, La., 200 of which were in arms and will be shot; the law of the C.S. [is] to shoot every negro found in arms.

The greatest complexity, conundrum and source of conflict was slavery. Leanna was a household slave. Purnell was the closest thing to a husband to Leanna. Slaves could not marry, on the principle they were property and could not enter into legal contracts.

“I’m now trying to do my best to understand slavery in Batesville and Arkansas,” Lankford said, for articles to be published in the Independence Chronicle, the publication of the historical society. “I’m trying to reconstruct several slave families. It’s a genealogical nightmare. The system was worse than I’d ever imagined.”

A balance had to be struck, Lankford said.

“People who dealt with slaves every day couldn’t help but see they’re humans, but the system saw them as property.”

Jan. 2, 1864

A new year! How will it be spent? I hope it may prove the year of years to me. The Federal army occupy our town now. They came Christmas Day.

For whom did Mary write this journal?

“One speculation is she was writing it for her family, even though she never intended to show it to them,” Lankford said. “Perhaps it was for herself at a later date in her life.”

That would show a certain depth, would it not?

“I think so. That’s why this is my favorite diary from Batesville. Mary is older than her age. She asks grown-up questions. She may not grasp the complexities of the period, but she senses them.”

Jan. 4, 1864

To some people it is a harvest to have the Federal army here but it is loss to us. They have burnt the fence and turned the stock on Mama’s peach trees that she labored so hard to set out. But we were never intended to be rich, for nothing that we have ever undertaken proved profitable. But probably prosperity would harden our hearts, and we have always had enough to eat and wear, and that is as much as anyone can use.

Batesville was occupied by the Federals at least three times, and several other times by the Confederates. But it was largely spared the horrors of war.

“It was remarkably untroubled,” Phillips said. “Batesville was a backwater.”

Jacksonport, downriver at the confluence of the White and Black rivers, was the strategic point.

Batesville was a way station, Phillips said. While it was occupied, it wasn’t fought over, so there was no artillery fire to cause its destruction.

“It was an undamaged place, a place of unusual civilized beauty.”

Oct. 6, 1864

For two weeks I lay ill with bilious fever, recovered in one week, was down again. … I dread the winter, I fear a cold, a settlement on the lungs then will follow that dreadful disease whose seeds I have inherited. [Mary’s father died of tuberculosis.]

“She starts the journal because of the war, and she stops it in December 1864 and doesn’t pick it up for three months. She was fearful of tuberculosis but likely had malaria,” Phillips said.

March 21, 1865

Five months have passed, anew year been ushered in, and not one line during all this time have I written in my journal. The winter so much dreaded is gone, spring has come and with it no news of peace. Still war, war unto the death.

Mary’s journal, unlike the war, ended with a whimper rather than a bang.

“She just stopped,” Phillips said. “There are two or three more pages of actual ledger stuff, but we don’t know if before or after. Some text is in a different hand. There’s no way to know, but the conjecture is she essentially stopped in 1864. The war was over west of the Mississippi and they were marking time. … All we know is what she says in 1865. Her life was changing and she lost interest.”

Independence County is a microcosm of Arkansas, Lankford said. A river runs through both. On one side were the hills and the subsistence farmers; on the other the planters and the slave economy.

“One-hundred and 50 years out we ought to be neutral enough to see it for the phenomenon that it was, stop taking sides, and abandon the notion the Civil War was simple. Independence County is a good place to lose your illusions, and Mary’s diary is a good example of that.”

Style, Pages 45 on 02/02/2014

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