Emilie Davis's Diary and the Importance of the Gettysburg Campaign

Abstract

Emilie Davis’s Diary and the Gettysburg Campaign and this essay’s structure refl ects that division. First, starting in June, Emilie Davis began to worry about Robert E. Lee’s pending invasion of her home state. Like others in Pennsylvania, Davis could now imagine that the war was coming home. Her reactions to daily news and rumors tell us a great deal about how the state’s African American population experienced the campaign. Emotions among Davis’s family and friends ran the gamut from fear to courage, from worrying about the present to grasping at opportunities for a better future. As we will see, Davis’s family, friends, and city would be deeply aff ected by what they oft en thought of as “the Rebel raid.” While Davis ordinarily spent almost all of her diary entries talking about private concerns such as her friends, family, suitors, employers, classes, and church meetings, for a few weeks in the summer of 1863 she made the Civil War the focus of her attention. She shows us how at least some African Americans experienced the Gettysburg campaign, and how Lee’s invasion helped spur the arming of black troops in Pennsylvania. Th e second half of this essay is mostly about silence, always a hard topic to analyze. Up until the moment of Pickett’s Charge, Emilie Davis showed considerable interest in the Gettysburg campaign. Th e curious truth, however, is that Davis makes no mention of the battle of Gettysburg in her diary. She was also silent about the Army of Northern Virginia’s retreat over the Potomac on its way back to Virginia. On the one hand, this is perhaps not too surprising. Davis hardly ever mentions military events; there is not one word about Shiloh, Antietam, or Fort Wagner in her diaries. But on the Th e recent acquisition of Miss Emilie Davis’s Civil War diaries by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania promises to open many of the closed shutters looking out onto wartime Philadelphia. Th e author’s race and sex make her journals especially intriguing. Emilie Davis joins Charlotte Forten Grimké as only the second African American woman whose Civil War diary is known to have survived. Davis was a native Pennsylvanian, having been born free, probably in Lancaster County, in 1839. Her diaries start on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation went into eff ect. She would then have been about twentyfour years old, and she continued her diaries until the end of 1865. Th e journals can now be read in two published editions, as the originals at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, or online.1 My own interest in Emilie Davis’s diaries began with what she wrote about the Gettysburg campaign. Gradually, this became a fascination with what she did not write about it. Her silences, especially aft er the battle was over, confused me. Her omissions led me to try to fi gure out what she may have been thinking— or not thinking— and why. I now think about Davis’s coverage of the Gettysburg campaign as two intertwined stories,