Diary In Gray

Letters and Journals of a Confederate Soldier

Jared Young Sanders II

EDITED AND ANNOTATED BY
MARY ELIZABETH SANDERS

The Young-Sanders Center Foundation is pleased to present the re-print of Diary in Gray by the late Miss Mary Elizabeth Sanders. Mary Elizabeth Sanders compiled and edited this collection of writings by her great-grandfather, Jared Young Sanders II, a soldier in the War Between the States. An author, researcher, genealogist, and archivist, the late Miss Sanders first published this diary in 1995 in conjunction with the Louisiana Genealogical & Historical Society, of which she was a charter member and former president. This hard cover edition of the diary is published by the Young-Sanders Center Foundation, which Miss Sanders helped to create. The Foundation offers historians a rare collection of books and other material documenting the War Between the States.

Jared Young Sanders entered the Confederate Military Co. B of the Louisiana 26th Regiment in March of 1862. During his military service he kept a diary of his daily activities. His diary contains information on the siege of Vicksburg in mid-May of 1863 through the surrender of Vicksburg on July 4, 1864.  Following the surrender, Sanders embarks on a journey through the South, skirting Federal troops and visiting family and friends. The dissolution of Company B, 26th Louisiana Regiment of the Confederate Army, is documented through letters by J. Y. Sanders II to family members and to his future wife, Elizabeth Wofford, whom he married on his twenty-ninth birthday February 4, 1868.            

After the war, J. Y. II decided to buy all interest in Inglewood, the old Sanders plantation on Bayou Boeuf in St. Mary Parish, and return to sugarcane farming. He remained there until his untimely death, possibly from acute appendicitis, on October 28, 1881. He was 42 years old.

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