By Karen Parr-Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – In Ken Burns’ well-known PBS documentary series, “The Civil War,” he introduced the voices of diarists who wrote about the occupied South, including South Carolina aristocrat Mary Chesnut and Clarksville’s teenaged belle, Nannie Haskins.
The diary of Haskins is now available in its entirety through a book edited by four area women, Minoa D. Uffelman, Ellen Kanervo, Phyllis Smith and Eleanor Williams. It is called “The Diary of Nannie Haskins Williams: A Southern Woman’s Story of Rebellion and Reconstruction, 1863-1890” (The University of Tennessee Press, $34.95).
(After the war Haskins married Henry Philips Williams and changed her name, but the authors of this book tend to refer to the “Nanny Haskins’ diary,” as she was an unmarried teenager when she began writing it.)
Haskins was, in colloquial terms, “to the manor born.” Her father was a doctor and paid handsomely to send her to the Clarksville Female Academy,
where she studied French and loved literature.
Only 16 years old when the diary begins, Haskins possessed natural abilities as a writer. According to Uffelman, an associate history professor at Austin Peay State University, “She was really well-educated and had a flair for writing.”
Smith got involved in the project because she was transcribing the diary from microfiche while doing research on Fort Defiance. She became the chief decipherer of Haskin’s delicate, Victorian-era handwriting.
“It looks beautiful until you start typing,” she said.
Williams, Montgomery County Historian, said that it was Haskins’ maturity that compelled her personal interest in the diary.
“I’m comparing her to teenagers today and she’s so much more articulate and concerned with national affairs,” Williams said.
Haskins had plenty of dramatic material to record in her diary. Within days of Fort Donelson’s fall on Feb. 16, 1862, Federal troops swooped into Clarksville, where they occupied the city until the war’s end. Locals returned wounded, or worse, due to combat. The city was tainted by an uptick in crime and looting. Citizens’ rights to free speech were diminished. Finally, Haskins’ brother died in a Federal prisoner of war camp.
As time when by, Haskins wrote in her diary about the effects of it all, saying, “War has hardened us.”
As a Confederate sympathizer, the young girl fails to realize the corruption of the slavery system that, directly or indirectly, helped build the prosperity of her class. She is from a slave-owning family and supports the South’s “peculiar institution,” something that modern readers have to put into the context of her historic era.
This is the one part of her character that is hard to take,” said Kanervo, who is the executive director of the Clarksville Arts & Heritage Development Council.
That said, Haskins’ flowery script details the mindset of Southerners who supported a war that was doomed to fail. In doing so, she gives readers a front row seat to the drama.
The books are available at Fort Defiance Interpretive Center, Customs House Museum, Amazon.com and the APSU Book Store. The first book signings include the following dates: Sept. 4, 5 p.m., Customs House Museum and Cultural Center; Sept. 6, 10 a.m., Houston County Public Library; and Sept. 9, 5 p.m., Pace Alumni Center, Emerald Hill at APSU.
To request a review copy or more information please contact Tom Post at tpost@utk.edu or call him at 865-974-5466.
The grave of Nannie Haskins Williams’ daughter, Lucy Stark Williams, is in the foreground of many Williams family graves. Many decades ago Lucy, along with Nannie’s stepdaughter Rowena Day, realized the value of Nannie’s diary and donated it to the state of Tennessee./Karen Parr-Moody