Maine diaries document life in Civil War

THE DIARIES OF SARAH JANE AND EMMA ANN FOSTER: A Year in Maine During the Civil War, edited by Wayne E. Reilly, Picton Press, Rockport, 2002, 256 pages, $24.50.

The year was 1864, and two of the children of Moses and Eliza Foster of Gray – Sarah Jane, an aspiring writer and teacher who would die young, and Emma Ann, a seamstress who would marry and have several children – were keeping diaries during a momentous time in the country’s history.

Each daughter spent part of the year at home, part in the city of Portland, and the diaries stand on their own. But they are the richer for being complemented by the careful research of one of Emma’s descendants, Special Assignments Editor Wayne E. Reilly of the Bangor Daily News in his newly published “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.”

Emma, it seemed at times, would rather sew than study. A winter’s evening found her starching two collars, making blue bows and putting ribbon in the neck of one collar, basting sleeves to her mother’s dress and stitching boots for little sister Nellie.

Older sister Jane, on the other hand, was so absorbed with writing that it was a struggle not to break the Sabbath. Not until after the Civil War would Jane take her place in the South as a teacher of freedmen, but in 1864 the young woman was already using her voice to speak up for reform.

“Nor can we be indifferent to outside evil,” she wrote in one issue of Zion’s Advocate. “In the progress of real self culture, we cannot avoid becoming reformers, for the same reason that a farmer could not permit the unrestricted growth of thistles by the roadside.”

Her later experiences in the South, detailed in Reilly’s first book, “Sarah Jane Foster: Teacher of the Freedmen, A Diary and Letters,” now reprinted by Picton Press, would make her a fierce advocate for former slaves. But in 1864 Maine, she was more of a moderate, albeit a faithful attendant at lectures by the likes of abolitionists Henry Ward Beecher and Frederick Douglass.

In spite of the difference in their interests, it would be a mistake to define the young women by them. Emma could be a bit of an activist herself, as she proved when the school in Gray seemed in danger of dissolution.

“I had been thinking all night what could be done to keep them from breaking up the school at last. Hannah and I wrote a petition on the slate got Fannies apinion of it then put it onto paper and I started round with it before eight o’clock I had got forty-five names,” she wrote. Moreover, Emma and sister Hannah convinced a prominent businessman, tannery owner David B. Cummings, to sign the petition.

The times were evident in the diary entries – references to war, and to brother Howard Foster’s travels with the Union Army; the deaths that came not only from the war but from disease and unexpected sickness.

Both young women evidenced an impressive work ethic. Emma worked 12 or more hours a day, six days a week, in a bonnet bleachery. Paid little more than a dollar for the first eight days, she applied herself mightily and managed to triple her wages the second week.

Jane, it was clear, expected never to marry, and wrote prolifically – 40 pages one week, in addition to her regular duties. On a two-week trip to the Boston area, she was distraught to have left some of her writing behind.

“I am mortified and distressed to find that I have left my manuscript at home. It must be there for I cannot have lost it – oh what shall I do?,” she wrote in her diary. The trip, however, turned out to be productive. Jane began writing for The Home Monthly after meeting the publication’s owner, the Rev. Charles Pearson.

The weather, employers, friendships and hopes and disappointments were all the stuff of the diaries. As is often the case with such writing, people and incidents seemed to have appeared from thin air, their importance obvious only to those who inhabited 1864 Maine.

But Reilly went looking for the people, the events and the background, and shares them with readers not only in a lengthy introduction, but in helpful footnotes.

To Jane’s entry about a friend’s brother coming home from the Civil War, Reilly adds information about the accomplishments of the Fifth Regiment Maine Volunteers, the Civil War regiment’s five-day trip from the front in Virginia home to Portland in June 1864, and the losses that had decimated its ranks. His sources range from census records to accounts in local newspapers.