Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion) Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion)? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion). Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion) ReviewDavid Hein, a Professor of Religion at Hood College in Maryland, has found gold in the mine of his state's Civil War archives, in this collection of letters written by members of a prominent Maryland family on the eve of and during the war. Hein's book immerses us in civilian life as civil war approached, fiercely as a wind-driven wildfire, personified by the Montgomery County family of Allen Bowie Davis, a prosperous gentleman farmer/legislator from Rockville, then a village north of Washington.
Davis and his wife, Hester, in time became unionists who feared the consequences of a Maryland secession for their state and family. "We may not like the present administration, nor endorse its acts-but-`we had better bear the ills we have than to fly to others that we know not of,'" wrote Hester to her daughter, Rebecca, late in May of 1861. "Let Maryland remain neutral and she may ride out safely this awful storm...I fear this secession element. It would be certain ruin to all our hopes as a family, in this world."
Their son, William Wilkins Davis, was a student at St. James College, a prestigious Episcopal boy's school near Hagerstown, in western Maryland. St. James had the misfortune to lie between opposing armies that tramped incessantly through the region and staged America's bloodiest day on a battlefield a mere seven miles distant, along Antietam Creek. The boys of St. James spent Sunday afternoons in the spring of 1861 not in the library but visiting nearby union and confederate camps. Fearful parents began withdrawing their sons as tensions grew. In the spring of 1861, with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and Baltimoreans clashing with northern troops marching through their city, young Wilkins became an impassioned sympathizer for the southern cause. Letters heretofore about food, studies and illness became angry diatribes against Lincoln, Maryland Governor Thomas Hicks, and others perceived to have a foot on the jugular of southern state's rights. "I hereby announce myself, henceforth, a straight out `Southern Rights' man, and want nothing to do with Lincoln, his party or anything connected with him, or it, unless it is to help thrash him," he wrote to sister Rebecca on May 21, 1861. "I can no longer support a man whose avowed intention is to subjugate the South...and our contemptible, cowardly, lying governor winks at every thing [he] does without the lest compunction." Such words remind us that 19th century political discourse could also be ugly and coarse.
Both young Wilkins and St. James fared poorly in the cauldron of conflict. The boy took ill early in the war and, despite periods of good health, he died in 1866. The college closed its doors in 1864, an educational casualty of war.

Hein's book captures the complexity of the Civil War in a state of abolitionists, pro-slavery unionists, anti-slavery southern sympathizers and non-slaveholding secessionists. We see a pivotal Maryland through the eyes of adults and children, and the consequences of war for familial relationships, religious values and educational institutions. Hein's crisp editorial commentary knits these letters chronologically, supplying time and place for the Davis family to tell of life in the tumultuous middle of the nineteenth century. We are in the debt of this slender volume, for reminding us that a history replete with leaders and battles is incomplete absent the insights of sons and daughters, and mothers and fathers.Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion) OverviewA series of sixteen letters that tell the story of a religiously oriented boarding school founded in 1842 as an educational institution that differed from the usual academy in that it would function as "a church family, a Christian home".

Want to learn more information about Student's View of the College of St. James on the Eve of the Civil War: The Letters of W. Wilkins Davis 1842-1866 (Studies in American Religion)?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now