I think we should consider who wrote this absolutely downright vapid piece of journal entry.
Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, the daughter and wife of Augusta planters, is best known for the extensive journal she kept of her life before, during, and after the Civil War (1861-65). The jounal records
"her transitions from pampered southern belle to ardent southern nationalist to disheartened Confederate supporter to poverty-stricken wife and mother."
Known as Gertrude, she was a slave mistress in Georgia before and during the Civil War. Thanks to her father’s tremendous wealth (his estate was valued in 1864 at 2.5 million Confederate dollars), Thomas’s early life was characterized by extreme luxury and access to educational opportunities experienced by few women of her day. She performed little physical labor as the mistress of a large plantation supported by numerous slaves. She had ten children, only seven of whom survived past age five; her last child was born in 1875, when she was forty-one years old.
Thomas was still a young woman in 1861 at the outbreak of the Civil War, which permanently erased privilege and comfort from her life. Although she was a passionate Confederate nationalist at the onset of the war, she soon concluded that the South did not have a viable chance of victory.
As the war progressed, Thomas’s diaries began to reflect her understanding that Confederate defeat would mean the end of her family’s way of life. By the war's end, Thomas had adopted a defeatist attitude...
From her journal:
June 12, 1865
I must confess to you my journal that I do most heartily despise Yankees, Negroes and everything connected with them. The theme has been sung in my hearing until it is a perfect abomination—I positively instinctively shut my ears when I hear the hated subject mentioned and right gladly would I be willing never to place my eyes upon another as long as I live. Everything is entirely reversed. I feel no interest in them whatever and hope I never will—