Caroline Merrick
Published: 2018-07-23
Total Pages: 164
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"Describes rural Southern life before the war, experience during the war, whose hardship she shared." - Book News, 1902 "Abounds in anecdotes of an interesting personal character." -Bookbuyer, 1902 Caroline Elizabeth Merrick (1825 - 1908), author of the 1901 book of reminiscences "Old Times in Dixie Land" was daughter of Captain David Thomas, of the parish of East Feliciana in the State of Louisiana, and wife of Judge Merrick of Clinton in the same State. A slaveholder by practice and belief, married at fifteen, the mother of three children at the age of twenty, Mrs. Merrick was a typical product of her environment. Affectionate, thrifty, passionately prejudiced, utterly unconscious of any world beyond her own narrow boundary, she naturally developed during the Civil War into one of the bitterest of partisans. "I even gave him my hand," she writes of a Union doctor who had taken a weary and dangerous journey to save the life of one of her negroes, "though always before I had refused to shake hands with one of them." After the war was over (and in part forgotten), Mrs. Merrick learned liberality. She made frequent visits to the North, fraternized with Miss Willard and Mr. Horn and went enthusiastically into the work of the W. C. T. U. She begins her narrative of events with her birth in 1825, on her father's plantation in Louisiana, and continues it down to the present day in a series of chapters containing much of interest and much that properly belongs in a journal or in a book of memoirs privately printed for one's family.