A Woman's Wartime Journal: An Account of the Passage Over a Georgia Plantation of Sherman's Army on the March to the Sea, as Recorded in the Diary of Dolly Sumner Lunt

The March to the Sea came to Dolly Sumner Lunt's Georgia plantation on November 19, 1864. What followed was chaos: Union soldiers dismantling her home plank by plank, her livestock slaughtered in the yard, her enslaved people given the choice to leave. Lunt recorded it all in her diary, and what emerges is not the triumphant narrative of either side, but something far more human and unsettling: a woman's desperate scramble to protect what she loved, her bewildered grief as her world collapses, and a perspective on slavery that refuses easy moral categories. Written decades after the events but drawing on contemporaneous entries, this journal captures the raw terror of wartime intrusion, the strange honor among enemies, and the particular vulnerability of women left alone while men went to war. Lunt hated what the Union army did. She also believed in slavery. Holding both truths at once is uncomfortable, which is precisely why this document endures. For anyone wanting to understand the Civil War not as legend but as lived experience, this is an unflinching, intimate witness.