An Everlasting Circle

In nearly four hundred pages of letters that cover the four years of the Civil War and include at least a dozen members of one South Carolina family, Karen Stokes has curated a comprehensive domestic portrait of the wartime South. The breadth alone puts the collection in the conversation with Mary Chesnut's diary (Mary Chestnut's Civil War, ed. C. Van Woodward, 1981) as an essential resource for analyzing Southern experience of the war (indeed, Chesnut appears several times in the letters). That said, Stokes and James Everett Kibler (in an afterword) frame the collection with their own analysis, about which some readers may quibble. For them, the “insurrection” was the result of the North's lack of respect for a Southern way of life that privileged home and family: “the good life ... embodied in the rural and not embroiled in the fever of buying and selling” (pp. 43

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