atlanta. because it is on high ground here in atlanta. it is from this location that general sherman led his troops down to savannah. it eventually brings an end to the civil war. so, it is especially important with the book, "the war outside of my window," because it is a georgia boy who is chronicling the civil war. he has a bachelors degree in janet croonon -- has a bachelors degree in medical science, modern european history and western language. it is from the university of illinois in champaign. she has a masters degree in i think they really neat thing is she has taken this. the story finds me, if it is washington's immortals, i was walking with the commander, maryland heroes who were buried in a mass grave in brooklyn. please join me in welcoming her. [applause] >> thank you, very much. i have been working with this young man and his diary for a little over a year, and i have come to really fall in love with this kid. i have been a high school teacher for almost 20 years, and aboutally saw the article leroy and his diary on facebook. we kind of think of him as a on facebook with his very. let us start with who he is. these are from the original journals. he was born into a permanent slaveholding family in macon, georgia and kept a diary starting in 1860 and ending in 1855. he started writing when he was 12 years old and it ended with his death when he was 17. he wrote nearly every single day. only three or four days when he didn't write something. , it was terrific writer very important for him. wills an invalid, and i tell you the story of how that happened in a little bit. he was very sickly, but wickedly he wasvery, very smartp a great kid. there are passages that will literally make you laugh out loud. his humor is incredible. and as i mentioned, it was featured in the washington post. i saw a 2012 article that aatured eight, because library of congress had it out on display as part of their centennial celebration of the american civil war. and, we found that it hadn't been published, and a year ago, we started working very hard on it. so, let us look at his parents. his father was john jones gresham, this is a photograph of , prints,s force outside his newly built home in 1840. the home still stands, it is nn in macon,e 1842 i georgia and it is a lovely bed-and-breakfast. we had the pleasure of staying there one night, a amazing experience after having read all the descriptions of the home, to actually be inside, it was incredible. john gresham was a lawyer, but he did not care for the practice into businesswent and was involved in a manufacturing company. they owned approximately 100 slaves on two citations. --what i originally thought two citations, on what was called houston county. the georgia department helped us out with that and helped us to locate where they were, about 30-35 miles southeast of macon. which meant that a wagon could make it from the plantation in to macon, in one day. mary, elizamother, the picture was taken in the 1870's, you can tell by her skirt here, that this is no longer the hoop skirt era. it is a later photograph, she looks older here. leroy brings her back to life. we tied to research, some of the people he talks about, as many of them as possible. very little -- there is very little about mary, except through the words of her son. you can to on to ancestry.com. i've got a family of there for -- the cannot tell much about her, what was she like, what kind of personality should had, what were her interest? but leroy tells us all of that and brings his mother back to life for us, which i think, is a real gift to get to know who this woman was. the roi was her favorite child child,y was her favorite and they were an incredibly close family. he had an older brother named thomas who served in the army in had northern virginia and a younger sister nicknamed minnie because her name was also mary. kind of a mini me. they were very close, and he writes about their challenges and about their successes. to the wesleyan academy in macon, and using go to be proud of her academic achievements. he is beside himself when thomas goes off to war until he arrives here is that thomas has arrived where he is supposed to be, and is safe. so why the diary? , why did he write it? this tells th a little bit about the back story, and things you didn't know he was telling us. which is what, again, one of the very layered things about this work. this is a the first page, opening up volume one, out of seven, there are seven almost complete volumes. in 1866, when he was eight years old, boys being boys, they found out that one of the buildings they wentd burned, so to investigate and find what was going on. we found an account of what happened. the washington post article didn't know what happened that to his left leg, all they knew was that it had been damaged and he was unable to use it. we found an older account by a man reminiscing on his younger life and wrote a paragraph about the incident. what had happened, is that the chimney started crumbling and the kids scattered and leroy ended up having his left leg crushed by falling prick so it was broken. the only way he was t around town and this is in are -- in the book, you will come to know allen, his slave servant for the book -- pulls him around town in a wagon. that was his way of getting about. because, he couldn't walk. the water in the washington bedsores, but we find out that that is not the case, it is not the reason he lays down all the time. in 1860 the cost back up sessions which are true because they have nothing to do with a broken leg, were not enough, so his father took him to see dr. pankos, a specialist in philadelphia. what his mother did was gave him the small book, that is not a very big book to begin with, but he keeps writing which is why this grows to a collection of seven journals. you can see she's written a biblical inscription -- they are a highly religious family -- her signature is here. minnie, there, and that is thomas inscribing to him. he's supposed to write down his journey. what happens. he writes like a typical 12-year-old. i saw a whale, i saw flying fish. as father took him to see history museum, and there were skulls everywhere. that is the kind of thing 12 year olds, get into. the thing that bothered him is that the doctor the did not really say anything, but it wasn't as bad as he had imagined. he described that he continue to lay down. as he came back home, leroy kept writing. educated, he read everything he could get his hands on, from shakespeare popularatin, to literature, to magazines, newspapers -- he would critique newspapers. them, asg the feel of well as their content. he was into chess. he and his father played together. anybody coming to the house played with him. he and his father solved chess some of the more difficult chess problems, i am not a chest layer, my publisher is -- that were out there. the two of them solved them together. so, he spent time with this kid. and, he loved science. he wants to know everything. they have a trip they take to visit his grandmother -- he has one surviving grand parent that georgia athens, kamaishi tells you about everything he sees -- that is highly important to him. he's talkative, sweet, funny, and kind. he doesn't have a mean thing to say about any of the people that he comes across. he loves his pets. he did not have good luck with his pets. he has a series of dogs, he had a rabbitl, he at one point, his family had a cat, and he had a good relationship with everyone that he comes across. but he is opinionated. more, they talk a little you will see where it really starts coming through. and he is funny, as i said before. one of my favorites is one of the local doctors gives him new he goes to what i call, pharmaceutical roulette. they give him compounds, different things, let us see what helps and what doesn't. and he writes out the full name of it, and he says -- it has a name that could kill anything. [laughter] is, "hethat ted likes has already got a problem with , and the underlying condition, which he knows nothing about, starts impacting his right leg your could and he's says, "if this continues, i will not have any leg to stand on at all!" so with all of this trouble going on around him, watching his world fall apart, you'll see how serious they are in just a moment. he has a sense of humor. which is amazing. this is one of the reasons why i kid,in love with this you cannot help but like him. he really is amazing. and i have worked with many kids over the years. i started imagining him interacting with my students you're going to learn when you area read the words on my window about this insider's view of southern life in the mid 19th century. because, he will talk about everything that happens in the house. the food, the clothing, the conversations that they have. his interactions between other people that in the household. he goes out in the wagon monday and comes to find out that two of the slaves, had had an argument, but we never know what it is about. but that is really good. bonnithe only time you hear about discord between them. and visitors. visitors were very, very important. the greshhams were important, and people would make a point to come and call. one person that did come and call was, again, a presbyterian family. his father was an elder. one visitor comes to the home and the family was living in augusta at the time. and wilson was born in virginia. they relocate when he was ld to augusta. some of the conversations are very interesting with the people that come through. editor, of the macon telegraph, when he comes to call. he says oh, there has been , i think that was gettysburg. so, he followed from the peak at their height, through the defeat of the confederacy. there is a parallel that is remarkable. as you watch not only the confederacy fall, a rise and fall, but you can see the family, also, get to the point where in the diary, i don't know if we're going to have a home in a year. they have this beautiful home. said, you can see it still today, it is gorgeous. know if, we don't even we're going to have all of this next year. the foures worry about classes, very aware of the distinction between the life he lives, and the fact that there are other poor people out there that don't have what he has. he is aware of this. biographies ofes the major individuals, and this part took a lot of time, about 1700 people on ancestry.com, the family tree. because he knew which aunt was visiting and i didn't. there were over 50 women named elizabeth or eliza in the book. fortunately, we knew that the sam name sally was for sarah. i have a colleague at school given name is sarah. she goes by sally. i didn't have to puzzle that one out. to find some family members so we're depicting who is visiting who, whose children belong to who. how are they all related, as well as members of the community that are an important part of his life, some of his young friends. time.ook some it was a lot of fun, i loved researching, but we do have a list from the beginning called the dramatic personae, where we outline that for you. some of the individual families, some of them connected to lero'' s lineage. are at them beginning of the book, and you can refer to that as you read, when you need to reappreciate on who an individual is. his father was mayor of macon, twice. here you can see the confederate president, jefferson davis, whom leroy loves. he thought his speaking style and his writing was wonderful. and toward the end not so much. he says -- i am starting to sound a little defensive and that each. speech. he never cared for joe brown. he thinks his third and fourth terms are an embarrassment is , is the word he uses. considering a personal friend of the grandmother will bring a meal. so occasionally you have someone who is as high ranking as alexander stephens, taking around mail for his grandmother. that is where this family stood, politically. he was very young when he starts writing, so you can assume. it was likely his father's political opinion that he was writing about. he automatically starts talking , and all abolitionist of these other terms, when referring to ever have lincoln, him.y dissing there is one section which for me, is coming of interesting -- i taught in fairfax county, virginia, but it was the first time the union army went through fairfax courthouse. he talks about how -- all of the soldiers were drunkards and they were filling their army with , just a bunch of thugs and people from the bars. so, that was very common and you saw a lot of that. then you have the warren news. he's so interested in the news. his favorite general was joe johnston. he met him at one point. didn't realize until after, he the man who had tipped his hat does he goes, that was joe johnston! he spent four years recording the course of the war, the battles and the strategies, which is another layer of the book. you get a chronological listing of everything that happened. from army in northern virginia to army in tennessee to trans-mississippi department , from the navy, blockade runners. he will say -- i can't say what name of the boat it s they're that one, but this is what they brought into savanna. so you get a lot of that information. if you are not familiar with the battles and all of that, we footnoted those. there is one battle again, in my the woods, it is called the battle of leesburg. we have that in the footnotes. so, you can follow that. if you're a person that knows these things, this book shows what civilians are going through at home and how they're processing these news. leroy got this from his father , and when the man from the local paper would come to the house, the editor, he would write letters, and heat realized wasy on, that fake news something that you had to deal with, it is not a new concept. the local paper editor coming in and saying -- the battle of gettysburg was no big deal. a little later they realize, as news comes in, how massive it was. and he starts to question the news. now, we haven't heard anything from general lee. why is that? why don't they want to tell us what is happening? does he want to get everything straight before letting it out, or does he not want to let us know? that is the question. how thes unique in civilians process the news. everybody that he knew had either been killed or wounded in that fight. everybody that he knew. he does a marvelous job of keeping track of sherman and the georgia campaign, to the point that when make it is threatened, stoneman comes through with a cavalry raid, there is a second engagement as well. his father at 52 years old was involved and he had to go. leroy is left as the managed home, his brother is gone and he is making decisions. he went up on the roof to go watch, because he wanted to see. not only just hear it, he wanted to see it through his own eyes. as close to his window as he could get. and of course, we have slavery, which is something that he grew up with. there are 93 slaves on the plantation, eight in macon household. we know based on the slave records, we have been able to pinpoint who was who as far as age. doing that for the plantations, because there were. two plantations. we don't know which plantation the different slave comes from, but he mentions everyone that comes up. he's concerned about them. andof the housemaids, julia -- this is an example of his handwriting. he didn't care, why put all that effort into writing her name, into a regular journal entry? but all of a sudden, and one of his entries, he goes -- she sat down, and he didn't know why. it turned out, her sister was dying, and her parents wanted her to get down there and see her sister before she passed. that is the kind of relationship -- he was very, very caring. he used to watch howard, one of the males who spent most of the time and house, and he would take his wagon back and forth to the foundation. he would watch him -- in the plantation. it would watch him as he did his work in the yard and howard would bring leroy puppies. he was born into this life, and he didn't know anything else. this is the way life was. beforerealizes surely his death, things are going to have to change. he talks about death but only a that, but only a little bit. about how the plantation supported the family home. how in the springtime, howard would bring a cow and calf would so they would have fresh milk. butter churned and that would come up. when the honey arrived, -- this kid had a sweet tooth -- when it arrived, he was a very happy young man. shows what is going on in his and he had a terminal illness. he did not know that he had a terminal illness, he thought everything came from this initial leg injury. and tangentially, that may be true. and what we found he had -- ted and i talked about this, different questions. again, the work turned out to be more multilayered the nine to submit it, at least i did, anyway. we couldn't figure out what actually killed him in the end. thatf the other authors ted worked with was a medical doctor, a surgeon trained at johns hopkins. leroy'scted all of medical records. and he said, i have the diagnosis. he had tuberculosis. but not the stereotypic kind where in the novels, somebody coughs in a handkerchief and there is blood, he didn't have that as one of his symptoms, he coughed all the time. absolutely, all the time. they hear him. constantly. that is all of his things, he goes -- i wish this cough would go away. his parents never told him he had tuberculosis. he had a version called pott's disease. and we were stunned to find out about 70% of people at least in this time period had tuberculosis in their bodies, but they're in immune system system was strong enough to hold it off. it never became active. and it is quite possible that , compromisednjury his immune system, which allowed the tuberculosis to become active. so by the time a few years later , he has got these sores in his back which is actually, if you line, theis abscesses were on other side of his spine. that is the disease coming through his body. he tells you everything. he tells you about the treatment, and they are horrific. at allot a pretty read times. he will say -- the doctor came to lance my wound. i wasn't ready at 12:00. i asked him to come back at 4:30. and come out ok, we will get it done. weekse says, a couple of later, we will have to need to get the other one done, because and allowing it to drain actually, it made him feel more comfortable. he wrote about the symptoms, the remedies, the pain and the treatment in a great detail. occasionally, he would write -- stop, my leg. can you imagine your child leg, ashat? saw off my if that would make everything go away. the remedies they tried, the medication, this kid is taking more fin, laudanum -- morphine, laudanum it increasing doses, alcohol, which actually gives in calories. there is one scene where the i am smiling because his reaction is funny -- the house andobbed of sugar essentials that they need, and they also took his wine. and when he realizes that they took his wine, he goes no! they , took that? so that is another amusing anecdotes. but it was essential for him, because he had very little appetite. his is the only detailed tuberculosis account by a patient in history. where that person sits and rights, these are my symptoms, this is what the doctors are doing. this is how i feel, this is the reaction. according to dr. ross bought, his is the only at count -- only account for a patient written like that in history. unknowingly, he has given us a real gift in many, many different ways. decline --a southern defeat depresses him and he knows this because he knows it long before they showed a reaction, he knew they were in trouble to begin with, which i thought was -- rather remarkable for someone so young. this winter which would have been the winter of 1863, fredericksburg was 1862. world really important in history because the north is preparing themselves and we have no more soldiers to get. we have no factory. factory is to make manufacturers, other than what we already had. and they did have the arsenal and armory. augusta had a powder works. but he says we have nothing more steel ourselvest for the coming fight. that is pretty insightful for someone so young. because the policies of the confederacy were not showing this awareness. he took more and more morphine because the pain was tremendous. the symptoms became much more severe than they had been. his mother wrote the last entry. he got so week he could not write by himself. he could notweak write by himself. we note it in the book. his mother for threaded through -- his mother starts writing from. am" and entry says "i then there is a scroll and it to figure oute what it was because her handwriting did not allow the ink to absorb into the paper. so we played with it with technology and wrote i am perhaps -- but whatever he said to her, she could not bring herself to write. so, we theorized that it was "dying." she could not write anything after that. the next page, was his father writing the author of the journal died on the 18th. she wrote a heartbreaking letter, it will bring tears to your eyes. sisterages to her only that we put as an appendix and that fills in those last nine days. she talks about what he was saying, what they were feeling, what the process was. thelectures that we gave at 1842 in the room where he died in where they dressed them for burial0. and that is his gravestone. the mother's next to them, the father on the other side, and two of his brothers who died in infancy are in there as well. chronicling the decline of not only himself but of his own health as well. the parallels are striking, they really are. he perks up when things are good, things get bad and he starts to decline. history, "the war outside my window." the only teenage male noncombatant account of the war. i had already read many things written by men who wrote john mosby memoirs and i thought no, they are not right. not a good fit. because he is a teenager. jh -- he watched. and he wrote well. exceptional writer. expresses himself really well. it's the only insider view of a permanent southern family during the civil war. day today. what they do. what happens when an aunt remarries less than a year after her husband dies? ist's not acceptable, she supposed to waita two years and then she shows up in a visit. not only that, but she buried -- mary a baptist -- married a baptist. he is quite puzzled by that. the only detailed diary in the world of the treatment of tuberculosis in the 19th century. -- i had a position i was telling about this book. it, he is fromut pakistan and he says it exists there. you can see people with pox disease in pakistan. not here. something that other people still struggle with. book, moreompanion detail about the medications -- he does have a forward and afterwaord and goes into much more detail if you want t know more about the different medications they tried. tos an interesting work really understand what we know as opposed to waht they knew then. that will be out soon in paperback. they as a young voice of southern confederacy. anne frank, her young adolescent voice tells us what she is thinking and what she is feeling. leroy does the same thing from his window. he watches training, he watches pow's. they go out for drives, they are watchg townball, he can from his front yard. today we call it baseball. he gives us an incredible glimpse into his own life and multilayered on so many different levels. it has been an incredible experience and now you know a and iout the roy -- leroy hope you will enjoy taking that trip with him. [applause] >> thank you. minutes fore a few questions, if you have questions just wait for the microphone to come to you. >> if we could, i would like to introduce the publisher. you want to come up and help field questions? any questions? do we know what happened to his beautiful sister minnie? it is ironic because one of her uncles who is able toed, he send many and one of her cousins to college in baltimore. she stays in the baltimore area whoshe meets a young man owned property that is now a park in fairfax county, virginia. the diarieswhere got to how they got to the library of congress. >> is anyone here from georgia? you recognize that? have you been there? you recognize this? >> can't quite see it. >> i have not read the book yet but i have been told there is an characters toward the fortifications to assist in the building of the fortifications on the hill. sangers. i'm told it's in the book, i'm looking forward to reading the book. i noticed someone named jefferson davis was there in the corner and he was admired by the isng man and jefferson davis' mentioned in the index. and this is sangers hill where the fortifications were located to defend a railroad that was coming from atlanta, into atlanta. and this was collected on the jefferson davis' birthday, so it must be yours now. for -- we drive up up in thati grew neighborhood, i never knew that there were confederate fortifications until i was told by some new read your book. >> thank you. if you want to visit leroy ho inn.t's the 1842 you can see it right there on college street and they welcome visitors. he does talk about the slaves thoseto work on fortifications. a also have to send slaves to to help bill the fortifications there as well and leroy is very upset because they come back and most of them are sick. so he does write about that. >> the curiosity that you might know or appreciate, i'm told that the little family is mentioned often. >> yes. neal was significant in that before and after the war and his house still stands, it is somewhat cut a corner and behind -- cap corner -- cata corner. the neal was one of original founding trustees of the university of the south. he was at this cap alien, wasn't --
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