Name LeRoy Gresham | Died June 18, 1865 | |
Leroy Wiley Gresham (November 11, 1847 – June 18, 1865) was born in Macon, Georgia. He was "a longtime invalid" after a chimney collapsed on him and crushed his leg in 1856. . Thereafter, LeRoy "was often confined to a special wagon that was pulled about town by a slave named Billy," or confined to his bed.
His mother gave him a journal to write in when he was about to leave with his father for Philadelphia to see a specialist about his leg injury. LeRoy (or "Loy" as he was known to his family) began writing in June 1860 and only stopped five years later when he died just after the war ended. His diaries offer insight on Southern life during the American Civil War, family, slavery (his family owned 51 slaves) and the world as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally bright and well-educated teenager who played chess, loved Shakespeare, and dealt with his own situation and deteriorating health with amazing strength and fortitude. Selections from his diary appeared in a Library of Congress exhibit, "The Civil War in America", from 2012-2013, and were reprinted in Harper's Magazine. There are no other teenage male diaries like these in existence, making them truly unique. Through much of the writing is the dark foreboding of a war going against the South, and especially in later 1864, "reflect the uncertainties faced by those in the path of Sherman's army."
The journals, edited and annotated by Janet E. Croon, will be published in May 2018 by Savas Beatie under the title A Son of Georgia: The Civil War Journals of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860-1865.
The son of John J. and Mary Gresham, he is interred in Macon, Georgia in the Rose Hill Cemetery, Magnolia Section. His father was "twice mayor".
His mother, (née Mary Baxter 1822), is the sister of Sallie Bird; thus he is briefly mentioned in correspondence kept in the Baxter-Bird-Smith Family Papers of the University of Georgia Libraries.