I am providing background information for authors of the civil war era material that I will be posting as I blog my way through the civil war 160 years later. They will all be listed on the Authors page, accessible on the menu at the top of every page. Each listed author will also include a short summary with links to longer biographical sketches and other material.
The most recent addition is:
Dora Richards Miller—Born in St. Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands and raised in the Frederiksted, St. Crois home of a grandmother who had freed all her late husband’s slaves, Dora Richards started her diary as a single, pro-Union, 25-year-old woman in New Orleans, Louisiana. Within months, she was married to Anderson Miller, an Arkansas lawyer and living in a small Arkansas delta county seat. With the Mississippi flooding, “swamp fever” raging, and food supplies disrupted by the needs of a rebel army, their Arkansas home wasn’t a refuge for long. Trying to find a safer place where Anderson can ply his trade, they ended up in Vicksburg just before the beginning of the Vicksburg campaign and got stuck there until after the city fell. Years later, a widow with two sons, to protect her job as a teacher in New Orleans, her diary was published anonymously in two magazine articles and two books as “A Woman’s Diary of the Siege of Vicksburg” and “War Diary of a Union Woman in the South,” all edited by George W. Cable. (Besides teaching Dora Miller was also an author and inventor. Her story about her life in St. Croix and her observations and experiences during the July 1848 slave revolt was published in 1892 as “A West Indian Slave Insurrection” in Scribner’s.)