Diary of Elizabeth Stalker Jeffers (Grades 3-5)

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Boynton Stalker Jeffers (1853-1888) was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, to Mary and John Stalker. Lizzie would be in third grade if she went to school in the twenty-first century and started this short diary in 1863 when she was just 9 years old.

Lizzie had some commonalities with children of today. She had summer vacation, but it was only for five weeks beginning in August. She also had a spring vacation for three weeks in April and another fall/winter vacation. Lizzie wrote about topics that a lot of children think about daily, such as the weather, her ailments, playing with baby dolls, outdoor activities (like picking wild strawberries), and going to school.

Unlike many children today, Lizzie had the nation’s Civil War on her mind. She wrote her diary at the height of the Civil War, writing her first entry on June 28, 1863 and referring to the war for the first time two days later on June 30: “How very dreadful this war is when will it come to a close and there are so many that favour the south even of little girls in my school and they try to make me hate the poor slaves.” [see images to the right]

Less than a month later, on July 18, she wrote about the war and protests again: “Again I say how dreadful this war is and mobs are all through our land those that favor the south. There had to have a whole rigement [regiment] of men to keep them from doing hurt. It is in New York and Boston and Salem and there was four killed in Portsmouth.” In this entry, Lizzie refers to the draft riots in Portsmouth, when 2,000 men were called to serve in the military by order of the government and resisted serving. Lizzie even made “comfort bags,” or care packages for soldiers, and heard back from one of them on April 4, 1864: “I wrote [a letter] before and put it in my first bag. I am now reaping the fruits of it. I have received a beautiful letter expressing his thanks for the things that I sent and telling me how he gave some of them away among his companions and how glad they were for them.”

For the most part, Lizzie talked about her daily life. She wrote about her “kitty…playing around me and jumping into my lap” (July 1, 1863), getting headaches (July 10, 1863; April 4, 1864), thunder and lightning storms (July 17, 1863), receiving Christmas presents (December 27, 1863), and she even doodled all over her diary. [illustration]. By August 1864, Lizzie turned 11 years old, and her diary ends. While there is no known record of Lizzie’s daily life after 1864, her diary still survives on the shelves of the library to teach us all a bit about how a young girl in New England experienced life during the Civil War.

Suggested Classroom Questions and Activities

• Read the following excerpts from Lizzie’s entries for August 1 and 2, 1863. [see images to the right]

  "August 1st. It is a very pleasant day and I shall have the pleasure to go and carry my comfort bags this afternoon. I filed [filled] mine with a piece of soap, a pencil, 2 tracts, 2 mesengers [messengers], a letter, some cloves, some yarn and thread, white and brown tape, red white and blue cotton, and pins knedls [needles], buttons for shirts panse [pants?], some cards, and a [?] book….

  August 2. It is Sunday and Father and Mother have gone …while I am at home alone. Yesterday, there was a very great rain and there has been ever since June and the oldest person can’t remember such a unusualy [unusual] summer and there was a great deel [deal] of hay lost. It rained so pouring that I could not go to carry my comfort bag till it was all most [almost] three.…"

  Lizzie made comfort bags for Civil War soldiers shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg during the summer of 1863. Have your students read about the Civil War in a textbook and then read Lizzie’s account of being at home making care packages. Ask them what the main differences are between the two accounts and what Lizzie focuses on versus what the textbook focuses on.

  [Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY) RST4.6 Compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided.]

• Read the following excerpt from Lizzie’s entry for June 30, 1863.

  "How dreadful this war is when will it come to a close and there are so many that favour the south even of little girls in my school and they try to make me hate the poor slaves."

  Note that Lizzie talks about how the other little girls in her class try to make her hate enslaved people. Ask your students why they think this is the case and connect her comments to the expansion of slavery in the U.S. and the causes of the Civil War (i.e., that other girls were blaming enslaved people for the war and deaths of Northern soldiers).

  [Massachusetts History and Social Science Framework MA5.T5.1. Trace the state-by-state abolition of slavery in the Northern states in the 18th and 19th centuries and the expansion of slavery into western states; explain the effects of the 1808 law that banned the importation of slaves into the United States and explain how a robust slave trade nonetheless continued within the United States until the mid-19th century; Massachusetts History and Social Science Framework MA5.T5.2. Identify the major reasons for the Civil War (e.g., slavery, political and economic competition in Western territories, the emergence of the Republican Party) and the war’s most important outcomes (e.g., end of slavery, Reconstruction, expanded role of the federal government, industrial growth in the North).]

Audio

Listen to excerpts from Lizzie’s diary entries for August 1 and 2, 1863.