Amelia Gayle Gorgas A Biography Author:Mary Tabb Johnston, Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb Amelia Gayle Gorgas (1826-1913) was a daughter of John Cayle (lawyer and political leader who was governor of Alabama from 1831 to 1835), the devoted wife of Josiah Gorgas (chief of ordinance for the Confederacy), and the loving mother of William Crawford Gorgas (surgeon general of the United States Army) and five other offspring. She was all th... more »ese things and a fascinating person in her own right - an antebellum Southern woman who made the transition to postbellum life and survived the difficult readjustments of the defeated South. Thus, her biography is not just another account of a hero's daughter, wife, or mother. It is the life of an individual who was herself a most attractive and appealing person indeed. And it is a captivating picture of the segment of nineteenth-century American society within which she distinguished herself. The authors skillfully avoid overdramatizing their heroine - though she lived in dramatic times - and emphasize the strength, flexibility, and resiliency that characterized so many of hte purportedly fragile helpless Southern women of her generation. It turn, Amelia adapted herself readily to the relative prosperity of her early married life as wife of a United States Army officer in Maine, to the tensions and dangers of the Confederate capital Richmond during the Civil War, to the struggle to make a new life in the economically depressed South in the period immediately after the war, and to the postwar pleasures and problems of academic communities at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.« less