JUNE 18, 1865:
Seventeen year old Leroy Wiley Gresham dies in
Macon, Georgia. A lifelong “invalid” unable to walk, Leroy was excluded from
participating directly in the Civil War, though he assiduously kept a diary
that chronicled all the social changes his family faced during the war years.
The
Greshams had been one of Macon’s more prominent families, a Planter clan with
more than 50 slaves. Exactly what Leroy’s
malady was is unclear. He was said to have “one leg drawn up” possibly from
being broken, but he also weighed only 63 pounds, and suffered from a
constellation of symptoms.
His
literacy is amazing. In one of his last diary entries he wrote brightly of the
family’s former slaves who “have embraced their freedom and left us.” However, Leroy was not always so accepting. In
places he refers to Abraham Lincoln as “the royal ape” and derides the Second
Inaugural as “a hypocritical praise God barebone piece of puritanical
fanaticism.”
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