Invalid boy’s diary focus of Library of Congress Civil War exhibit

Occasionally he writes, “saw off my leg.”

But the war seems to sustain him, said Michelle Krowl, Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the library’s manuscript division.

(Library of Congress) - LeRoy Wiley Gresham, sixth plate ambrotype between 1854 and 1865.

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“The war is interesting, and there’s a lot for him to follow,” she said. “He only dies a few months after Lee’s surrender and not much longer after the Confederacy completely collapses.” He was 17.

He is keen observer of nature, noting comets, eclipses and the weather. He describes thunder “like the grumbling of some demon,” and a night when “it rained sweetly and musically after we went to bed.”

There are flashes of humor.

“And now dear reader, pause one moment and drop one tear over the memory of an honest, faithful cat,” he writes on June 6, 1864. “Poor kitty had one of her hard fits yesterday . . . from which she could not rally and at 6 1/2 p.m. she died . . . Requiescat in pace.”

There are adolescent doodles, entries penned in cherry juice and a fictitious battle at “Pokehistailandhewillgo.” And between two pages in June 1863 there is the elegant insect wing he probably placed there almost 150 years ago.

LeRoy is refined and courteous. He reads Dickens and Shakespeare and plays chess. He refers to his parents as Mother and Father. An old ambrotype of him shows a fair-skinned youngster with light eyes and pleasant features.

“We just fall in love with this kid,” Krowl said. “He’s so interesting, and he’s engaging, and . . . he’s legible and he’s literate and he’s all these wonderful things that you want in diarist.”

But he is a partisan Southern youth.

Abraham Lincoln is “the royal ape.” A Northern general killed in an early battle is a “red-mouthed abolitionist.” And Lincoln’s famous second inaugural address “is a hypocritical praise God barebone piece of puritanical fanaticism.”

LeRoy Gresham was born Nov. 11, 1847, the son of John Jones Gresham, who had twice been mayor of Macon, owned a manufacturing company and a plantation south of town, according to the diary and a history of Civil War Macon by Richard W. Iobst.

LeRoy had a younger sister, Minnie, and an older brother, Thomas, to whom he was very close.

At one point, “Father” buys Thomas a sparkling Confederate uniform for $500. But as the war goes badly, the elder Gresham frantically pulls strings to get him out of the trenches at Petersburg, and finally goes there himself to bring Thomas back to Macon.

‘War! Thou demon that ravishes fair countries’

The diary begins in June 1860, when LeRoy is 13.

He and his father are sailing to Philadelphia to see a renowned physician, Joseph Pancoast, about his broken leg, which seems to have never healed right and is now “drawn up.” The diary does not say how the leg was broken.

There is no resolution, and LeRoy is told to go home and remain “lying down for the summer.”

What follows is his account of the war, viewed from his fine home on College Street, as well as a look at the experience of an upper-class, slave-owning household in the 1860s.

With the fall of Fort Sumter, in April 1861, LeRoy writes: “War! Thou demon that ravishes fair countries, stay thy mad career.”