Katherine Bentley Jeffrey is a freelance writer and an independent scholar. She is the editor of Two Civil Wars: The Curious Shared Journal of a Baton Rouge Schoolgirl and a Union Sailor on the USS Essex.

Praise for Two Civil Wars

“The 1859-1861 journal of Celeste Repp comprises only a fraction of the book's total content but the meticulousness of Jeffrey's detective work really shines through in her generous volume of supporting material. . . . . As with her handling of the writings of Celeste Repp, Jeffrey's expansive primary and secondary source research in this section adds greatly to the value of the Park journal. . . . If a yearly book award for Civil War manuscript editing exists, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey richly deserves to be on its short list of candidates.”—Civil War Books and Authors

“Two Civil Wars is valuable and joins the still growing body of Civil War first-person accounts. It gives voices to two interesting nineteen-century Americans who never met but shared a tremendous experience.”—Civil War Book Review

“Editor Jeffrey, an independent scholar who has written on several unusual aspects of the Civil War, does an outstanding job in preparing the writings of these quite different people for publication. . . . Valuable for its many glimpses into the social and cultural environment of the times, and to the course of the war on the Mississippi.”—NYMAS Review

“Katherine Bentley Jeffrey leads the reader on a journey into the lives of two seemingly disconnected people—an innocent Catholic school girl in Baton Rouge and a rough-and-tumble sailor aboard one of the United States’s most worthy gunboats, the USS Essex—and gives a compelling glimpse into a world swept away by war. The fighting along the lower Mississippi provides all of the warp and weft of the human experience that makes the American Civil War so captivating, and these two participants take their place among its important chroniclers.”—Donald S. Frazier, author of Blood on the Bayou: Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and the Trans-Mississippi

“Two Civil Wars resurrects the written record as an historical player. It is as innovative as it is instructive.”—Michael J. Bennett, author of Union Jacks: Yankee Sailors in the Civil War

“Although Celeste Repp’s entries comprise only a small portion of this dual journal, they nonetheless open a window to a little understood story: that of a young Catholic girl in the antebellum South. In addition to her extensive and impressive research into Repp’s life and family, Jeffrey exhaustively explores the unusual lives of her two mentors, Matilda Victor, a single Catholic woman struggling against the norms of society and her church, and Father Darius Hubert, an extraordinary priest and Confederate chaplain. In going beyond other studies that tend to focus on the Irish experience, Jeffrey has produced a useful work for those seeking to understand better the Catholic experience in the nineteenth-century South.”—William B. Kurtz, author of Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America

“Katherine Bentley Jeffrey uses a diary with a personality disorder to glue together four individuals from divergent backgrounds and with surprising future accomplishments, and she does so with exceptional research know-how, a detective’s intuition, and a flowing style of writing. The result is an enthralling read about Baton Rouge from 1859 to 1864 and beyond. A delightful contribution to Civil War historiography.”—Cornelius Buckley, author of Frenchman, Chaplain, Rebel: The Civil War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gache, S.J., 10th Louisiana Infantry

Links for Two Civil Wars

An interview with Katherine Bentley Jeffrey on the Louisiana Anthology Podcast

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