Recollections of Margaret Cabell Brown Loughborough

Margaret Cabell Brown's Recollections, written in 1911, provide a woman's perspective on the Civil War. Born on a plantation in Virginia, Margaret fell in love with "Henry" Loughborough, the son of a prominent Washington family. They planned to be married, but the Civil War intervened. Henry enlisted in the Confederate Army while Margaret worked for the Confederate government in Richmond. They married a year and a half later, but Henry kept fighting and Margaret kept working. Near the end of the war, she moved to Washington to live with Henry's family, thus experiencing life in both wartime capitals. These Recollections are not about battle and glory. To Margaret, war was an absent husband, office work, a make-shift party dress, rampant inflation, food shortages, malnutrition, a baby still-born, typhoid, limbless soldiers, death, privation, loss, and pride. Her Recollections help in understanding how those in the South viewed their cause, how they endured the hardships of war, how brave they were as individuals, how misguided they were as a group, how long they stayed in denial of the inevitable, and, ultimately, why the South lost.

James H. Johnston is a lawyer, writer, and lecturer in Washington, D.C. His articles on the Loughborough family, which is the subject of this book, have appeared in The Washington Post.