Book Review: The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai. Edited by Dianne Ashton with Melissa R. Klapper. New York: New York University Press, 2024. Hardcover, 256 pp. $32.00.

Reviewed by James Hill “Trae” Welborn III

Though spanning just a little over a year in scope, from April 1864 to May 1865, the Civil War diary of Emma Mordecai, a proslavery, southern, and Jewish woman from Richmond, Virginia, sheds important and often richly detailed light on the last year of the war as experienced by this ardent Confederate and fervently Jewish woman of considerable social status and economic means. Under the editorship of the late Dianne Ashton, noted Jewish studies scholar and professor emeritus of philosophy and world religions at Rowan University and her colleague Melissa R. Klapper, professor of history and director of women’s and gender studies at Rowan University, the private lives of Emma and her immediate and extended family, within and even beyond the Richmond-area community of which they were a prominent part, come into clear view.

Drs. Ashton and Klapper only nominally edited the diary itself to ensure historical accuracy of its contents and the context in which it was originally produced and then later revised by Emma Mordecai herself. Their 83-page introduction provides pivotal historical and historiographical context for the diary’s contents, explaining the significance of the historical events Emma records and describes while also grounding these experiences in the most pertinent theoretical and historiographical scholarship. The result is a highly accessible diary of a Jewish Confederate woman during the final year of the American Civil War that, as Ashton and Klapper deftly emphasize, engages essential themes of Southern and Jewish identity and ideology, shifting gendered identities, ideals, and social conventions in the South during the conflict, and the emotional experiences of these complex dynamics as they evolved before, during, and after the period recorded in the diary itself.

The subsections of the introduction highlight its highly effective form and function in contextualizing the diary as a primary historical source with immense and varied relevance and utility for scholars. The first two sections, “Emma Mordecai and the American Jewish History of the Mordecai Family” and “Nineteenth Century Women’s Diaries,” situate Emma within her own family’s history, within the history of American Jews and Judaism more broadly, and within the gender history scholarship of 19th-century America. Emma’s identity and outlook as recorded in the diary are summarily conveyed by the editors as fervently Jewish, ardently Southern (including overtly proslavery and, more generally, white supremacist), and typically female within the prevailing patriarchal ideals and conventions of the period. The next two sections, “Emma’s Civil War” and “Emma’s Religious World,” place specific aspects of Emma’s account of the war and her Jewish faith amidst the conflict within these broader historical contexts and their dynamic evolution during the Civil War Era. The fifth and sixth sections, “The Shadow of Antisemitism” and “Racism and the Social Order of the South,” then confront the pervasive presence of antisemitism and racism in shaping Emma’s experiences within this dynamic context.

The resulting picture of Emma is one of a woman who cherished her Jewishness while celebrating her southerness, ever vigilant and on guard against prevailing antisemitic prejudice and discrimination while also convicted in her adherence to white supremacist racial views. The final two sections, “Emancipation Comes to Rosewood” and “Emma’s Legacy,” analyze how the war and its consequences challenged these aspects of Emma’s identity and worldview and how Emma’s increasingly contentious view of her diary both reveals and obscures different aspects of the effect these challenges had on her postwar life and posthumous legacy.

Scholars interested in women’s experiences of the Civil War on the home front, or the perspectives of proslavery, upper-middle class white women in the Civil War-era South, or those of Southern Jews, or especially the dynamic and evolving intersection of all three perspectives and experiences, will find much value in the contents of Emma’s diary as a primary source and even more in the introduction that frames that diary in this edited volume. Especially useful are the historiographical connections made by the editors to emerging methodologies in emotions history, Jewish studies, and Civil War memory studies. But beyond these scholarly attributes and their broad utility within the academy, a more general audience will find both the diary itself and the contextualization of it in the introduction imminently accessible, intellectually compelling, and even at times dramatically riveting. In short, The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai makes for interesting and enlightening reading for anyone with even passing interest in the civilian experiences of the American Civil War era.

Dr. James “Trae” Welborn is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, reared in Fernandina Beach, Florida, and educated at Clemson University and the University of Georgia, Dr. Welborn specializes in American cultural history, with an emphasis on the emotional dimensions of evolving conceptions of virtue, vice, and the role of violence in shaping these cultural values during the American Civil War Era. The University of Virginia Press published his book, Dueling Cultures, Damnable Legacies: Southern Violence and White Supremacy in the Civil War Era, in 2023.