American writer Sarah Morgan Dawson is best known for her Civil War diary, A Confederate Girl’s Diary. Born and raised in Louisiana, Dawson captured her thoughts and experiences of the Union occupation of her home state in diary entries from March 1862 to April 1865. After the death of her father, Dawson and her mother settled in South Carolina where she accepted an editorial position at a local newspaper, the News and Courier. Widowed in 1889, Dawson and her surviving son moved to Paris in 1899, where she continued to write until her death in 1909. Although Dawson had asked that her war-time diary be destroyed, her son published it posthumously in 1913.
