John Beauchamp Jones, a Southern editor who had once declined a diplomatic post at Naples, took a humble clerkship in the Confederate War Department and kept a daily diary from 1861 to the fall of Richmond. He records shortages, prices, rumours, petitioners, quarrels among generals and secretaries, and his own sharp opinions on deserters, speculators and the men at the top.
Written by a committed secessionist, it is a frank primary source on how the Confederacy looked from inside its own capital, prized by Civil War historians. Download the free EPUB.