Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863

A British officer walks into a dying civilization and cannot look away. In the spring of 1863, Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle of the Coldstream Guards embarked on an extraordinary journey through Confederate territory, from the Texas frontier to the hills of northern Virginia. He arrived with mild Union sympathies, disturbed by slavery. Within three months, he had met Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Sam Houston. He had witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg in its opening hours. He had seen a society at its floodtide, convinced of its righteousness, weeks before the war's turning point. This diary is neither history nor simple travelogue. It is the portrait of a civilization seen from the inside by an outsider granted remarkable access. Fremantle records the cotton trade, the military camps, the hospitality, the contradictions. He watches a people and their leaders with the detached fascination of a man who admires what he cannot ultimately endorse. The Confederacy he encountered would be destroyed within two years. This is what it looked like from inside the flame.