In 1860s diaries, a treasure

'Today has been a memorable day and I thank God I have been spared to see it. The day was religiously observed, all the churches were open. We had quite a jubilee in the evening."

And so began the 1863 diary of Emilie Davis, a young free black woman living in Philadelphia, as she recounted the Emancipation Proclamation.

Davis' three pocket diaries - each no larger than a smartphone - span the years 1863, 1864, and 1865. Purchased by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 1999, the diaries provide a remarkable glimpse of Philadelphia's free black community during the Civil War.

"Few diaries by young women of this period survive, even fewer from African American women," said Tamara Gaskell, public historian in residence at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. "Emilie's faithful record-keeping allows historians to better reconstruct and understand life - for women, African Americans, young people, and others - in an important border city."

There is much in each diary for those interested in the War Between the States, with Davis describing such events as the New York riots ("The colored people suffered most from the mob") and Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession as it worked its way through Philadelphia ("I got to see him after waiting two hours and a half, it was certainly a sight worth seeing").

While Davis captures these momentous occasions, the majority of diary entries detail her day-to-day life: concerns for her father's health and the fate of her soldier-brother; struggles and successes at work; day trips with friends; and rendezvous with the mysterious "Vincent."

"Nellie and I went out. It has been a long time since we went shopping together. I went out to Germantown about six o'clock, had a very pleasant time," Davis wrote in 1863. "Vincent came out for me, which was the pleasantest part of the evening."

In this they resemble a social-media feed, but in pen and pencil. Brief comments upon current events intermingle with updates about weddings, concerts, and church sermons she attended.

To flip through her diaries - each page preprinted with three dates, with a few lines apiece - is almost to "follow" her, as if the reader had managed to travel through a century and a half of "see older posts." All that's missing are the hashtags #DouglassWisdom and #NationalFastDay.

Little is known about Davis. Historians can only guess when and where she was born, how old she was when she began her diary in 1863, and when - or if - she married. Inscriptions on the diaries' inside covers are the only evidence that her name was, in fact, Emilie Davis. City directories, census records, and church registries bear no record of her.

"Although it is rare for someone to be such a faithful diarist for just three years . . . so far the three wartime diaries are all that we have of Davis," writes historian Ann Gordon in the essay "Getting History's Words Right: Diaries of Emilie Davis," in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

Referring to the diaries, Gordon continued: "Their survival is highly unusual; that they open a new door into Philadelphia's midcentury African American community makes them invaluable."

Davis concluded her 1865 diary with the words "All well that ends well." All three diaries are available for research at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.