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From flag to flag cover

From flag to flag

Chapter 2: NOTE.
By Eliza Ripley
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About This Book

A memoir recounts a woman's transition from a prosperous Louisiana plantation through wartime upheaval — occupation, evacuation, and refugee travel across Texas to the Mexican border — into experiences in Mexico during foreign intervention and later life in Cuba, where she buys and manages a plantation. It combines eyewitness reportage of military occupation, displacement, and the hardships of flight with vivid scenes of Cuban urban and rural life, plantation labor systems, sugar and coffee production, local customs, religious practices, natural calamities, and the daily challenges of household and estate management.

Copyright, 1888,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

NOTE.

The years covered by this narrative were full of stirring interest. Civil war in the United States put the nation under arms from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande, and shattered the entire social and political fabric of the South. Mexico was conquered by the French, who, in time, were driven from the country, and the improbability of any European power obtaining a foothold there forever settled. A large portion of the Island of Cuba was for years under the control of the insurgents; and, not until a sea of blood and millions of treasure had been poured out, was a semblance of peace secured.

The minor part I bore in these exciting times has been a thrice-told tale at my fireside; and, believing the unfamiliar pictures of life, varied incidents, and historical facts worthy of record, I have written why, and how, we ran “from flag to flag.”