Decades after the Civil War ended, Katherine Stone recalled the “gay, busy life” she had led at Brokenburn, her family’s 1,200-acre plantation in prewar Louisiana. “There was always something going on—formal dining, informal ‘spend the days,’ evening parties, riding frolics,” fox hunts. To make these and other diversions possible, Katherine remembered, her family had “quite a corps of servants to keep us well waited on,” since naturally “no one expected to wait on himself.” Each of Katherine’s young brothers also “owned a little darkie in the quarters who would eventually become his body servant.” And some 150 other slaves toiled in Brokenburn’s cotton and sugarcane fields, “six days out of seven, week after week, month after month, year after year,” generating the wealth that sustained the Stone family’s life of “luxurious ease.”

The war’s outbreak in April 1861 augured the end of the Stone family’s complacent idyll. The fighting between North and South, Katherine soon perceived, had “infected” her slaves with hope for a radical change in their condition. Some were becoming “lazy and disobedient” and “giving a lot of trouble” generally. One evening, as the Stones took the night air on the gallery of their plantation home, “a runaway Negro” darted past them. Though Katherine’s brothers leaped to the pursuit, the desperate fugitive made good his escape. She and her neighbors began to worry that they were living “on a mine.”

Seeking refuge from such anxieties, Katherine turned to the works of a popular southern author—Edgar Allan Poe. With her nerves already frayed, however, she decided to avoid “his most fearsome pieces.” Perhaps she chose “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Neither grisly nor filled with supernatural horrors, it might well have seemed a relatively safe distraction from the unsettling events of the day.

As that story begins, Poe’s narrator pays a visit to an old friend, Roderick Usher, the scion of a “very ancient family” and current master of its imposing mansion. At first glance, the massive edifice “gave little token of instability.” But its seeming solidity conceals “a barely perceptible fissure which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zig-zag direction, until it became lost” in the foundation and the lake adjacent to it. After a while, the mansion’s hidden structural fault begins to announce itself, at first in a “muffled reverberation,” then in a mounting roar and powerful shudder. Finally, as the visitor watches in shock, that once barely discernible fissure gapes dramatically open, the walls tumble, and the august mansion collapses, burying its owner under the rubble. The surrounding lake’s waters then close “sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’ ”

If Katherine Stone did choose to read this tale, it could hardly have offered her much comfort. She, too, resided in an imposing and outwardly sturdy structure—the House of Dixie, the slavery-based society of the American South. And hers, too, was already beginning to display deep fissures running through it. As the Civil War continued, those fissures would widen until the whole structure fell.