Augusta Jane Evans

Augusta Jane Wilson, or Augusta Evans Wilson (May 8, 1835 – May 9, 1909), was an American author of Southern literature.

She was born Augusta Jane Evans on May 8, 1835, in Columbus, Georgia. The area of her birth was then known as Wynnton (now MidTown). As a young girl in 19th-century America she received little in the way of a formal education. However, she became a voracious reader at an early age.

Her father, Matthew Evans, suffered bankruptcy and lost the family's Sherwood Hall property in the 1840s. He moved his family of 10 from Georgia to San Antonio, Texas, in 1845. Evans's time there would inspire her first published literary work. In 1850, at the age of 15 she wrote "Inez: A Tale of the Alamo", a sentimental, moralistic, anti-Catholic love story. It told the story of one orphan's spiritual journey from religious skepticism to devout faith. She presented the manuscript to her father as a Christmas gift in 1854. It was published anonymously in 1855.

However, life in a frontier border town like San Antonio proved dangerous, especially with the Mexican-American War. By 1849, Evans's parents moved the family to Mobile, Alabama. She wrote her next novel, Beulah, at age 18; it was published in 1859. Beulah began the theme of female education in her novels. It sold well, selling over 22,000 copies during its first year of publication, a staggering accomplishment. It established her as Alabama's first professional author. Her family used the proceeds from her literary success to purchase Georgia Cottage on Springhill Avenue.

After most of the Southern states declared their independence and seceded from the Union into the Confederate States of America, Augusta Evans became a staunch Southern patriot. Her brothers had joined the 3rd Alabama Regiment and, when she traveled to visit them in Virginia, her party was fired upon by Union soldiers from Fort Monroe. "O! I longed for a Secession flag to shake defiantly in their teeth at every fire! And my fingers fairly itched to touch off a red-hot-ball in answer to their chivalric civilities", she wrote to a friend. She became active in the subsequent Civil War as a propagandist. Evans was engaged to a New York journalist named James Reed Spalding. But she broke off the engagement in 1860, because he supported Abraham Lincoln. She nursed sick and wounded Confederate soldiers at Fort Morgan on Mobile Bay. Evans also visited Confederate soldiers at Chickamauga. She also sewed sandbags for the defense of the community, wrote patriotic addresses, and set up a hospital near her residence. The hospital was dubbed Camp Beulah by local admirers in honor of her novel. She also corresponded with general P.G.T. de Beauregard in 1862.

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