The Fleets of Tidewater Virginia, living near Richmond in their plantation home Green Mount, were close to many of the great events of the Civil War. Their story, told here in a journal and letters by several members of the family, occupies a unique place among the numerous war memoirs of the South.
Combining soldier and civilian life with age and youth, Green Mount gives an unusually complete account of the effects of war upon the central southern plantocracy and of the general morale of the South from Lincoln's election to the end of the Confederacy. In the humane and articulate Fleet papers, one may find the best of the southern tradition.