Gerald Schwartz

The title is truthful. Dr Hawks was a fully qualified doctor who practiced before and after the Civil War. But, during the war itself, neither the War Department nor Dorothea Dix's nursing corps accepted her application. So the predominant focus of this book is her time as a teacher of newly freed former slaves and black soldiers.

She and her husband were ardent abolitionists prior to the war. Her husband, also a doctor, became the first surgeon attached to a black regiment. Dr Esther Hawks taught basic literacy to the troops, their families and other blacks in the area--sometimes referred to as contrabands because they were not technically free citizens at that time.

Parts of it are very interesting. And yet, some of the most interesting details are told not in her diary, but in the footnotes. For example, she organized the first fully integrated school in the South. But it's only in the footnotes that the full story is told--that after a very short time the school was boycotted almost completely by whites objecting to be in the same classroom as former slaves and that after its very early days, the school had only one white student.

Throughout the diary,she bore a lot of discrimination that she glosses over quickly. Her sewing circle was boycotted by those refusing to be in the same room with 'nigger teachers'. In the first year of Reconstruction, which is the last year of her diary, this anti-black sentiment was even more pronounced.

I honor her for acting on her convictions. I understand her motive in not dwelling on problems in her diary. And yet, the very fact that she skates rather quickly over the problems and often gives more room to recording pleasant times that broke up the monotany of her days--riding expeditions and small parties-- lessen the impact of what she did and the trials she went through.

Perhaps this is a problem with the editing, and the book and the story of the impact of her life would have been better served to have less of the actual diary entries and more narrative.… (plus d'informations)