Voices from the century before

For nearly a century, the letters of the Clay and Field families lay in a trunk in the dusty attic of an estate in Bourbon County, Kentucky. Written between 1843 and 1870, they soon captured the attention of regional historians and local archivists, for the Clays and Fields were distinguished families and their members had played key roles in Kentucky's - and indeed America's - history.

Family descendants like Mary Clay Berry, however, knew that the letters had greater significance than mere regional artifacts. The story they told was as great as the republic itself. The Clays and Fields were diplomats, housewives, store owners, politicians, gossips, Mississippi cotton planters, college students in New England, belles, entrepreneurs, and cattle farmers.

Their correspondence comprises nothing less than a nineteenth century American saga, a brilliant quilt of connected lives unfolding during the days of the country's greatest calamity, the Civil War.