Green Mount

Description

The Fleets of Tidewater Virginia, living near Richmond in their plantation home Green Mount, were close to many of the great events of the Civil War. Their story, told in journal and letters by several members of the family, occupies a unique place among the numerous war memoirs of the South.

Central in Green Mount is the journal of youthful Benjamin Fleet (or Benny, as he is called by the family), commenced in January 1860. This document is without parallel in the literature of the Civil War. Young Benny described the plantation world about him with perception, honesty, and a surprising maturity. He sees it with fresh eyes, uncolored by the rationalizations so common among adults, and records many details not only of the conduct of the plantation itself but also of the education of the time, of boyish diversions, of the society of the Virginia planters, and of the place of religion in the life of his neighborhood.

Complementing the journal are letters of Fred, Benny’s older brother, who served for four years in the Confederate army. Though his regiment was not engaged in any of the great campaigns until the siege of Petersburg, Fred’s letters home show the attitude of the soldiers towards the war and the enemy, most pointedly their confidence and good spirits. He also contributes vignettes of well-known Confederate leaders, among them Beauregard, Lee, and lesser figures like Magruder and Henry A. Wise. The collection is completed by letters of Benny’s parents.
Pa’s duties as a physician often left Benny with the daily management of the plantation, and his correspondence reveals the planter as a man with business interests other than agriculture.

Green Mount, with its combination of soldier and civilian, of age and youth, gives an unusually complete picture of the plantation and the effects of war upon this central southern institution and of morale in the South from the election of Lincoln to the end of the Confederacy.