{"id":662,"date":"2010-12-07T15:27:25","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T20:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/?p=662"},"modified":"2011-03-16T23:13:38","modified_gmt":"2011-03-17T04:13:38","slug":"kate-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/2010\/12\/07\/kate-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"1861 (Arguing for Justice) Kate Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Kate Stone (Louisiana State University)<\/p><\/div>\n

Narrative<\/strong>
\nKate Stone was twenty-years-old when Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces. She was thrilled. Stone was an ardent southern nationalist from Louisiana who lived on a large plantation (Brokenburn) with many slaves and an extended family, including at least two brother who would die in the Confederate army. Within a month after Sumter, Stone began a diary the she kept for seven years. The material was full of biting insights and wise comments. Stone lived through Grant\u2019s Vicksburg Campaign in 1863 and feared the arrival of black troops into the region. She and her family fled to Texas in 1863 and lived there until the end of the war. The young plantation mistress was suitably unimpressed by Texans and frontier life. \u201cThere must be something in the air of Texas fatal to beauty,\u201d she wrote. Stone sardonic tone appeared frequently in her journal and sometimes appeared especially hardened. Following Lincoln\u2019s assassination, she remarked on her satisfaction at his fate. Stone returned to Brokenburn \u2013which had been devastated by the war\u2014helped rebuild the place, married in 1869 and lived until 1907. When her diary was published in 1955, it was to wide acclaim, hailed by critics such as Edmund Wilson and by crowds \u2013an estimated 10,000 folks in Louisiana including her 77-year-old daughter (who lived until 1972) and has since become regarded as a Civil War classic, though it is not as well known and familiar as Mary Chesnut\u2019s diary.<\/p>\n

Sources<\/strong>
\nJohn Q. Anderson edited Kate Stone’s diary and published it as Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868<\/a><\/em> in 1955. House Divided has several of Stone’s diary entries online, including July 4, 1861<\/a>, June 30, 1862<\/a>, March 22, 1863<\/a>, September 5, 1864<\/a>, and April 28, 1865<\/a>. \u00a0In addition, Anderson discusses one of the soldiers who appeared in Stone\u2019s diary in \u201cJoseph Carson, Louisiana Confederate Soldier,\u201d Louisiana History<\/em> (1960). Other scholars have also examined Stone\u2019s diary, including Drew Gilpin Faust’s \u201cAltars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,\u201d Journal of American History<\/em> (1990) and Clara Juncker’s \u201cConfederate Languagescapes: Kate Stone’s Brokenburn,\u201d Southern Quarterly<\/em> (1996). \u00a0Other primary sources, such as photocopies of letters about Coleman Stone\u2019s death and papers on the Carson family that appear in Stone’s diary,\u00a0are in the\u00a0John Q. Anderson Papers<\/a> at Louisiana State University. The collection\u00a0also has the \u00a0correspondence of Stone\u2019s daughter. Amy discussed a number of different topics, such as Civil Rights issues, James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi, and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. \u00a0In addition, the collection has a map from March 1955 that\u00a0indicates\u00a0the location of Brokenburn Plantation. This\u00a0finding aid <\/a>has more information on this collection.<\/p>\n

Places to Visit<\/strong>
\nNo structures or sites related to Kate Stone exist. Stone was born in X, Mississippi, but she grew up on a plantation in Louisiana. While her family moved to Texas during the later half of the Civil War, they returned to Louisiana after Confederates surrendered in 1865.<\/p>\n

Images<\/strong>
\nThe John Q. Anderson Papers at Louisiana State University has images of the Stone family and the Carson family. (See this\u00a0finding aid <\/a> for more details).\u00a0In addition, a photograph<\/a> of a float in the Kate Stone Day Parade held on March 17, 1955 is online at the LSU Digital Collections<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Narrative Kate Stone was twenty-years-old when Fort Sumter fell to Confederate forces. She was thrilled. Stone was an ardent southern nationalist from Louisiana who lived on a large plantation (Brokenburn) with many slaves and an extended family, including at least two brother who would die in the Confederate army. Within a month after Sumter, Stone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8648,3974],"tags":[8658],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arguing-for-justice","category-terrible-war-1861-1865","tag-diaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2814,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662\/revisions\/2814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/150th\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}