Whether from lofty and noble inspiration or sheer terror, Confederate soldiers fought as long as they did in the War Between the States because of the women back home, says local historian Gordon Cotton, and his latest book tells the stories of some of the women of Vicksburg during the war.

If you go

Gordon Cotton will sign copies of “Like a Hideous Nightmare: Vicksburg Women Remember the Horrors of the Civil War” Friday from 10 a.m. to noon at the Cinnamon Tree, 1322 Washington St., and from 2 to 5 p.m. at Peterson’s Art and Antiques, 1400 Washington St. He will also sign copies July 4 from 9 a.m. to noon at the Old Court House Museum, 1008 Cherry St. The book sells for $20.

“The women were the ones that held the spirit high,” Cotton said. “They’re the ones who struggled at home and endured.”

“Like A Hideous Nightmare: Vicksburg Women Remember the Horrors of the Civil War” tells 23 true stories of wartime hardship, defiance and bravery. Cotton will sign copies of the book at several downtown locations Friday and July 4.

The title comes from a quote attributed to Emily Cordelia Stephens Bolls, the grandmother of Eva Davis, founder and longtime curator of the Old Court House Museum, which Cotton himself ran for three decades.

“After 40 years I sit here in the same house, writing of those times that were to us as some hideous nightmare,” Bolls wrote in 1904.

“And it was,” said Cotton. “No matter which side you were on, it was pretty terrible.”

Cotton finds both inspiration and humor in the fierceness of the women he memorializes.

In the introduction to the book, he quotes a Mississippi senator who went to Washington years after the war and tried to explain how it went on for four years: “It was our womenfolk,” the senator explained. “We didn’t dare go home until there was absolutely no hope of success.”

But even after the men surrendered the women refused to, Cotton said. In the years after the war ended, they established cemeteries for Confederate soldiers, put up monuments in every town square in the South and made sure Confederate Memorial Days were celebrated, complete with flags on the graves of the war dead.

Cotton culled many of the stories from records and files at the Old Court House, letting excerpts from di-

aries, interviews and letters tell the stories in the women’s own words. Others came from oral histories Cotton researched. Some are new,  and some have been taken from Cotton’s newspaper accounts previously published.

“None are alike,” he said.

Most of the women whose stories make up the collection were pro-Confederate, he said, but some were Union sympathizers. Some favored one side despite a conflicting family connection, such as Sister Ignatius Sumner, who served in Vicksburg with the Sisters of Mercy. Her uncle was Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, a noted abolitionist, but she identified with the South. Her sister, Helen, married Jefferson Davis Bradford, the nephew of the Confederate president.

“I love the irony of history,” Cotton said. “That’s what makes it so interesting.”

One of the women he writes about fits the stereotype of “Southern belle,” but was a “finagler,” Cotton said, who married an Italian count and seemed willing to do whatever she had to to survive. Two of the women he includes became famous: Emma Balfour and Mary Loughborough. The others are “just local ladies,” he said.

“I have always been intrigued by the stories of the everyday people. I won’t call them common. They were uncommon,” he said.

Cotton’s abiding interest in local history has inspired all of his books, which he estimates number 15 to 20 and include his own family histories, stories of soldiers, collections of historic photographs and letters and histories of churches and cemeteries of the Yokena/Redbone Road area where he has lived most of his life.

“I love local history,” he said.

“Like a Hideous Nightmare” is available at the Old Court House Museum gift shop, Peterson’s Art and Antiques and the Cinnamon Tree.

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Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com