Born into an influential and wealthy New Orleans family on February 28, 1842, Sarah Morgan was the daughter of a judge who moved his family to Baton Rouge when Sarah was eight. Morgan began her civil war diaries in 1862 at age 20. She was keenly aware of her social status because of her wealth and soon learned that she must develop a greater level of tolerance than during the antebellum period. The war divided her own family between the causes of the North and the South. At first impressed with the civility of the Union officers when they captured New Orleans in 1862, her opinion changed greatly when Baton Rouge experienced the same fate. Her family's home was horribly ransacked, seemingly more than any other house in the town. In 1864, Sarah and her mother were forced to move back to New Orleans at which time they learned that two of her brothers had died of disease in the Confederate ranks. She never returned to Baton Rouge and her hatred for the Yankees remained with her the rest of her life. Sarah moved to Paris in her later years, a self-imposed exile. There she died on May 5, 1909. She is buried in the St. Lawrence Cemetery in Charleston. As directly quoted from her civil war diary on Tuesday, May 2d. 1865: While praying for the return of those who have fought so nobly for us, how I have dreaded their first days at home! Since the boys died I have constantly thought of what pain it would bring to see their comrades return without them - to see families reunited, and know that ours never could be again, save in heaven. The diaries that Sarah kept as a young woman during the years of the civil war have become a national treasure and are considered an authentic voice of that conflict. But to those who are able to sense her thoughts from a more personal nature, one will discover written in the midst of this conflict the fragile yet clear thread of the tender longings of a young woman whose time to enjoy the traditional courtship and romance of a prom