A Savannah
Family is an extensive, intimate, private collection of letters
never before made available to the public. The letters are here
supported by judicious, well-researched footnotes which allow the
modern reader a chance to truly experience the turbulent period
of 1830 to 1901, the life span of Leila Mackay Elliott (Mrs. Frederic
Augustus Habersham). Leila assembled the major part of the letters
in the late summer of 1863, following the death of her husband at
the Battle of Chancellorsville. She sewed them into a leather bound
book and interwove her own narrative between them, giving her story
a freshness and sense of immediacy seldom achieved by memoirs and
third person narratives.
This well educated,
extended family, close friends of General Robert E. Lee, wrote exceedingly
well, and the women were often better posted on events than were
the men who were locked in combat. Letters from Fred and his four
soldier brothers-in-law, stationed in Georgia, Virginia and Charleston
Harbor, together with letters from the home front, run the gamut
of love, tenderness, excitement, anguish and sorrow.
Later letters
follow the family through and after the war, including those who
went to California. Photographs, also from private unpublished sources,
illustrate these unique, fully indexed, first-person accounts. (6.25x9.25,
hard-cover, 308 pages)
ISBN
1-890307-26-2
Library of Congress:
F294
.S2S43
1999
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