LeRoy Wiley Gresham

The equivalent of an intelligent and informed mid-19th century blogger, LeRoy's diaries offer deep insight into the life of a prominent slave-holding Southern family, the secession crisis, the four-year American Civil War, slavery (his family owned 100 slaves on two plantations in Houston County, GA) and the rapidly changing world as seen and understood through the eyes of an exceptionally bright and well-educated teenager.

LeRoy played chess, loved Shakespeare, was a voracious reader, and dealt with his own situation and deteriorating health with amazing strength and fortitude, even while plied with every remedy possible and dosed with morphine and opium.

The Gresham journal is also unique because it is the only known 19th Century account that meticulously details, on a daily basis for five years, the course of a fatal disease (which is carefully identified in both books by a medical expert).

The entries offer details on the treatments given to LeRoy by his doctors and family, his physical ailments (fever, abscesses, coughing, chronic pain, etc.

[2] His mother, (née Mary Baxter 1822), is the sister of Sallie Bird;[5] thus he is briefly mentioned in correspondence kept in the Baxter-Bird-Smith Family Papers of the University of Georgia Libraries.