Louise Sheppard

Author of “A Confederate Girlhood,” the Civil War Recollections of Louise C. Sheppard (available online). As a young girl at the beginning of the war in Missouri, Sheppard moved first for two years to Mississippi, until the siege of Vicksburg caused her and brother to relocate to Arkansas (during the trip, slaves who had come with the family from Missouri were captured, according to Sheppard, by Union forces). Eventually she moved to Texas during the last year of the war to reunite with her father, living near Waco.

The diary is useful mainly for her comments about how isolated from news of the war she was in Waco, and also about the extremely poor condition of Texas Roads as they moved into the state. She also comments on the flood of 1863 in Mississippi River Valley, which washed out roads and made transportation by boat necessary in the region.