From the Introduction

The Civil War papers of Eliza Ann and Harrison Gray Otis consist of three sets of documents written during the American Civil War. The largest text is Eliza's journal, which runs sporadically from January 1860 to September 1863. Harrison's contribution includes four letters written to Eliza in 1859 soon after they were married and an action-packed diary recording his Civil War experiences in 1862 and 1863. Eliza's journal is written in the highly legible, curvilinear script favored by American schools of that era. Harrison's letters also conform to the conventions of the day, but his wartime diary is a barely legible, often slanted scrawl, suggesting he was using his knee or perhaps the bare ground as support.

Contained within these texts are two personal stories. The first concerns the poet Eliza Ann Wetherby Otis, who was twenty-six years old when she began the journal. Born and educated in New England but living then in Louisville, Kentucky, Eliza was a new bride. Although deeply in love and eager to display her talents as a wife, she was confined to the limited environment of a boardinghouse while her husband sought work and then, in the summer of 1861, joined the Union army. The second story is that of the soldier-husband Harrison Gray Otis. A printer's apprentice before the war, Otis was a native of Marietta, Ohio, the last born into a family of sixteen children. During the Civil War, Otis compiled an outstanding record of courage under fire and rose from the rank of private in 1861 to major by 1865. A few letters written during the first year of his marriage plus Eliza's accounts of their time together indicate that Harrison Otis was a devoted husband and an unusually zealous supporter of the effort to preserve the American Union and defeat what they both regarded as Southern treason.

Over time the idealism of these two young people was severely tested by the multiple pressures on their lives, especially the anxiety of prolonged separation from each other, the sudden death of their first child, and repeated encounters with the grisly reality of the Civil War. By the time the journal ends, Eliza and Harrison have become much tougher personalities: more realistic in their personal goals, more rigid in their moral standards, and more devoted, if possible, to their sense of America's national mission.

These texts provide an intimate glimpse into the personal responses of two ordinary, middle-class, white Americans to a period of national crisis. They take on added importance, however, because these are the only known private documents describing the ideological perspective of what became one of America's great publishing families. The twenty years following the Civil War were times of earnest but discouraging struggle. Business failure, frequent changes of residence, and poor health plagued the Otises. Then, in the early 1880s, Harrison and Eliza made one more move and took one last desperate gamble: they bought a quarter share in the newly founded Los Angeles Daily Times. Four years later, in 1886, they scraped together enough capital to become sole owners and publishers of the newspaper, rechristening it the Los Angeles Times. From that moment forward, the pace of their success matched the exponential growth in population and wealth of Southern California itself. By the time of their deaths, Harrison and Eliza owned the largest newspaper in the nation in terms of size and in the number of lines devoted to advertising. They were hailed by some and feared by others as the prophets, the rhetorical architects, of California's political and cultural future.

Roman Catholic Cathedral, Louisville. Eliza visited this grand place of worship in 1860. Its granite carvings, stained-glass window, and many statues made her long to write a description of it.
(Filson Society, Louisville, Kentucky)

Ohio troops crossing a viaduct in West Virginia. The state played a pivotal role as a transportation crossroads but was a treacherous region to defend militarily.
(Ohio Historical Society)

Captain Harrison Gray Otis, 1865. At the end of the war, Harry was promoted to Captain and brevet Major and Lieutenant Colonel. Despite his excellent record, his effort to join the regular army in 1867 was denied.
(Francis Trevelyan Miller, The Photographic History of the Civil War. New York: Review of Reviews Company, X, 1911)