Franklin County: Diary of Rachel Cormany is a primary source dated back from 1863 during the Civil War. It was written by Rachel Cormany who depicts her life as she waits for her husband’s return from the war. Cormany is said to have been born in Canada but moved with Samuel, her husband, to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. The diary is a companion piece to Samuel’s diary in the Cormany collection. At the start of the war, Samuel joined as a union soldier, leaving behind Cormany and their daughter, Cora. The section I found online is an excerpt of her diary; it began on June 1863 and ended in July in the same year. The topic of her entries ranged from accounts about her daily life, sometimes laced with boredom, to encounters with the Confederate …show more content…
Food supply, even the prices, of the community in the Civil War could be studied as a topic; commodities like syrup being sold for forty-five cents for three quarts. Molasses and bread was a normalized war staple for it was bought and eaten regularly by Cormany. Bread was commonly consumed by Cormany that she was tired of it by July 3, 1863. Cormany was a frequent customer at her local general store; however, she received help from her in-laws. On the same entry mentioned, her father-in-law Daniel Bryers stopped by and discussed on Cormany’s wellbeing, and later Henry Rebok, another in-law, offered to take Cormanys away. The care that both of her in-laws showed to Cormany greatly demonstrated the closely knit familial network that the Cormanys had and how the said network was tested in the Civil …show more content…
Cormany first mentioned African Americans who she called contrabands. According to June 15, the footnotes that accompany the excerpt, the black refugees were referred to as contrabands because General Benjamin Butler, a Union soldier, sought to deem them as goods of the war because he felt that black refugees should be required to work for the Union Army. From the term, it can be gathered that even in the eyes of supporters of the war like Cormany and General Butler the African Americans are were viewed nothing more than source snot labor and spoils of the war. Furthermore, the term contraband alluded to the view that African Americans were inferior to their white counterparts. On the entry of June 16, Cormany really captured the treatment of African American women and their children. In her diary, Cormany records what she saw outside of her house, how African American women were basically taken prisoners, and Confederate soldiers rounded the women up ergo really emphasizing on the picture that blacks were nothing more than