"Live Your Own Life" & Tales of the Secesh Ladies

As a statement of fact, I have never been able to find an ancestor within my family-tree who ever lived above the Mason-Dixon Line.

Indeed, one of my ancestors died as a result of the cruelty of the Union Soldiers when they commanded that my grandfather, who was sick with the measles at the time, get out of his sick bed in order to show them the place for horses to ford on the Tennessee River. 

Now, that being said, I feel uncomfortable about scrutinizing my moral choices if I had been alive in the South during the Civil War.  I could never-- in my wildest dreams-- condone the slavery issue.  I also admire Abraham Lincoln very, very much.  Had I lived during the Occupation of New Bern, how would that affect my daily life, my loyalties to my family and their feelings towards me? 

Still, some of the ladies of that time have left a record concerning alleged brutality by Union Soldiers during the Occupation (which began in 1862).  Were the Union Soldiers really such terrible brutes?

On a rather gentler note, the ladies below did not suffer such brutalities. These two ladies were sisters in North Carolina during the Civil War.  Because Mary Bayard Clark (grandmother to Bayard Wooten) became a bit too broad minded after the War ended, and because her ideas did not match up with her wealthy sister's ideas concerning Reconstruction, Mary Clark fell out of favor, and was cut out of the possibility of receiving a much needed monetary legacy when her sister died. 

Hard times in New Bern indeed.

The title to Mary Bayard's collection, "Live Your Own Life" seems to give the moral answer, and it also seems that she, and her family, survived the difficulties anyway. But my understanding is that it wasn't very easy.

 

Here is the definition of Secesh: 

 n. informal- someone in favor of the attempt of the Southern States to withdraw from the Union

Live Your Own Life: The Family Papers of Mary Bayard Clarke:
 1854-1886,  Edited by Terrell Armistead Crow, and Mary Moulton Barden

The Diary of Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston: 1860-1866.

Edited by Beth Gilbert Crabtree and James W. Patton