![]() ![]() Natchez was both the vocation and the cross for William Henry Elder. The next twenty-two years of his life would be full of romance and joy, progress and war, sickness and destruction, ruin and reconstruction. On the same day he was appointed to take charge of the fledgling diocese of Natchez, Mississippi, he was ordained its bishop. On May 3, 1857, in his home state of Maryland, William Henry Elder received his marching orders. As the shepherd of a flock that encompassed the entire state, Bishop Elder-and his clerics-would play a pivotal role as participants in and observers of the crisis that engulfed their state. The spring and summer of 1862 changed the course of the war, and henceforward, Mississippi would become inseparably linked to the Union’s ascendency and the Confederacy’s doom. A blockade was suffocating the coast, and two bloody battles at Shiloh and Corinth had sent shock waves through the state. By October 1862, Mississippi had already been invaded from the north. While the war in Virginia had been going relatively well for the Confederacy and the Mississippians fighting there, the war on the western front had not been going so well. ![]() The war had been going on for more than a year, and it had become clear that it would last much longer than many of his state’s ardent secessionists had promised when they first formed their rebel government. On a bitterly cold morning, near the end of October 1862, Bishop William Henry Elder of the Catholic Diocese of Natchez, Mississippi, began his Civil War diary. ![]()
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