A select group of essential primary sources helps tell the war’s stories.
Any good history of the Civil war should rely heavily on primary sources, documents authored by participants in the conflict. But where to start? Three sources in particular stand out: the Southern Historical Society Papers, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. Here’s a look at their unique histories, their strengths and weaknesses and how to use each of them.
The Southern Historical Society Papers
At 7:30 p.m. on April 15, 1869, a group of ex-Confederate officers met in New Orleans, intent on salvaging the Southern side of the war’s history. They had gathered at the behest of Virginian Dabney H. Maury, a West Pointer (Class of 1846) who later taught at the U.S. Military Academy, and who was afflicted with a debilitated left arm thanks to a Mexican musket ball. Once the war began, Maury had resigned his U.S. commission to serve the Confederacy, first as a staff officer and then as a department commander, with the rank of major general. Others involved in Maury’s project early on included Braxton Bragg, Richard Taylor, Simon Bolivar Buckner and P.G.T. Beauregard.
An organization that soon came to be known as The Southern Historical Society, dedicated to the “preservation of all authentic Southern records” of the Civil War, took shape over the next several years. A roster of honorary vice presidents representing each of the Southern (not Confederate) states reads like a who-was-who in 1861- 1865. A library was established in Richmond and material gathered in 20 categories. In addition to the usual suspects (military reports and data, including casualty lists), the society sought information concerning “civil prisoners held during the war” and “treatment of citizens by hostile forces.” Noticeably missing from this list was anything regarding slavery or African Americans.
At first the society released its material to the public through existing periodicals, such as The Land We Love, The New Eclectic Magazine and Southern Magazine, but in January 1876, Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Southern Historical Society Papers (SHSP) appeared. It would be followed by 51 volumes stretching into 1959, though the releases were anything but regular. In the early years multiple numbers of a volume were released annually, while toward the end 12 months could pass with no publication at all. There was even a restart in 1914 after a four-year hiatus, and subsequent volumes (beginning with No. 39) are known as the “New Series.” Editors during the final phase included Douglas Southall Freeman and Frank E. Vandiver.
Summarizing the wide-ranging content found within the SHSP is challenging. It ranged from official reports (many of them literally copied into the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion) to diaries and recollections, to Confederate Congress transcripts. There were also editorials, reviews and what we would today call op-ed pieces. Yet present from the very beginning, and diminishing only toward the end of its run, was a decidedly partisan point of view reflected in the material accepted for publication and the opinions expressed. Many tenets of the “Lost Cause” explanation for the South’s defeat were gospel to SHSP editors, especially the importance of disparity in troop numbers. When a Northern book on Gettysburg pegged the Army of Northern Virginia’s troop strength at 107,000 (most modern estimates check in around 70,000), the SHSP reviewer asserted that “General Lee’s entire force at Gettysburg was not quite 57,000 men.” With what one imagines was a sigh of regret, that writer continued: “Ah! If our grand old chieftain had commanded the numbers which Northern generals and Northern writers attribute to him, then the story of Gettysburg and of the war would have been far different.”
Despite its lofty aspirations, or perhaps because of them, the society failed to win over Southern citizens more focused on surviving in their war-ravaged communities than preserving materials of the “greatest struggle for separate nationality the world has even seen.” When funding sputtered, the society reorganized under leadership that was decidedly Virginia-first in outlook and also highly protective of Lee’s legacy. Coverage in its Papers so emphasized the war’s Eastern Theater that other Southern journals appeared to redress the imbalance, most notably The Confederate Veteran, which began in 1893 and ran through 1932.
The society and its Papers soon became a force to reckon with among Southern veterans. Its editorial litmus test was often whether or not something furthered Lee’s hagiography or in some way diminished it. If the latter, its author could expect no mercy. Not even a national hero and recently deceased former president was exempt. In his Personal Memoirs (published beginning in 1885, soon after his death, Ulysses S. Grant sharply criticized Lee’s generalship during 1864 and 1865. The SHSP reviewer dismissed Grant’s work as “a book full of blunders and flat contradictions of the official reports.” Pieces by James Longstreet taking issue with Lee’s generalship, published in Northern papers, generated SHSP rebuttals, especially from Jubal Early, who proclaimed, “It becomes abundantly apparent that the orders and plans of General Lee did not receive from him [i.e., Longstreet] that hearty support which was absolutely necessary to success.”
Yet for all its biases and skewed editorial perspective, the SHSP proved vital for future historians, making it a first stop for anyone wishing to learn the Southern angle of some of the war’s major (and even minor) battles. After the society’s dissolution, much of the material it collected was turned over to what today is the Museum of the Confederacy, where it is still available to researchers.
The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion
On April 5, 1865, U.S. Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana entered Richmond on a special mission to locate and confiscate official Confederate government and military papers. While much of the archive had either been removed or destroyed before the Rebels evacuated the nation’s capital, Dana located a small quantity, which he had “packed for shipment, without attempting to put them in order, and forwarded at once to Washington.” Other caches were found throughout the South, and before long some 349 barrels and crates of CSA archives accumulated in the capital. There they joined what was literally a paper mountain of Federal war records, so voluminous that harried clerks stopped trying to count them, instead reckoning them by tons or by the names of the warehouses they filled.
The public already had a taste, even a reverence, for “official” documents, thanks to wartime newspaper coverage that often included battle reports, as well as the reports’ appearance in commercial publishing efforts such as Frank Moore’s The Rebellion Record. As claims and counterclaims were exchanged in newspapers, a belief emerged that a critical mass of official reports would provide a factual foundation against which to measure any individual’s assertions about what had happened in the war. In a phrase popular at the time, these documents would provide “the truth of history.”
Efforts to collate and publish wartime battle reports had begun as early as 1863, and there was even a joint congressional resolution to that effect (signed by Abraham Lincoln) in 1864. But efforts to accomplish that objective staggered along on life support for more than a decade; while there may have been strong interest in the project in some quarters, there was no will in the War Department to tackle the monumental challenge of wrangling all that paper into some coherent format. Time and again Congress directed while the War Department dithered, until pressure forced the production of 47 volumes of Union and Confederate records that was, by any standard, a huge mess.
Enter Captain Robert N. Scott, who was handed the project in 1877. Scott attacked the problem with a fierce determination that would bring him promotions but also possibly led to his untimely death in 1887 from pneumonia—brought on, many said, by the crushing workload.
It was Scott who made the crucial decisions that shaped the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (ORs) that we know today. His first big decision was what to leave out. Scott determined that the primary focus should be military engagements and campaigns, so out went material regarding the ordinary business of military administration, civilian claims against the military, contracts, and “unsolicited advice or suggestions from individuals.” What went in had to be “official,” that is, created by an individual as part of his military duties. Plus it had to have been submitted during the conflict, without any postwar corrections. Scott felt it was vitally important that the material reflect the thinking of that time as well as information then available to the decision-makers. While this would result in the publication of some pieces containing demonstrably wrong data, it would be true to history. He believed also that the various records best spoke for themselves, and almost never added annotations or explanatory notes. The final arbiter remained Congress, however, which could on occasion override Scott, such as in its mandate that the ORs include “evidence taken by the court-martial on the trial of Fitz John Porter.”
To his credit, Scott tried hard to include both sides—easier said than done. Confederate repositories had been scattered or destroyed in the war’s chaotic final months, and there was little trust among Southern leaders that the Yankee ORs would be fair and balanced. Scott reached out to the Southern Historical Society to access its collection, brought in distinguished ex-Confederates (such as Cadmus M. Wilcox, Charles W. Field, Henry Heth and Jed Hotchkiss) as consultants, and even hired one (Marcus J. Wright) to purchase material. Still, the Rebel side could be thin at times, with some fairly minor material included more to pad the picture than complete it. This also accounts for the inclusion, with few questions asked, of the “Journal of operations of the Army of Tennessee May 14-June 4,” which subsequent investigation revealed to have been heavily doctored after the war to bolster Joseph E. Johnston’s case against John Bell Hood.
The work of preparing the records for publication was tedious, painstaking and labor-intensive, involving a force of clerks and copyists, male and female. There were puzzles galore. Washington’s tangled wartime bureaucracy had to be parsed when some communication strings left the military stream and entered the civilian realm. There were literal puzzles also, since coded messages had to be decoded, requiring long lost keys to be found or cracked. Lists of units and tables of organization had to be pieced together from numerous military orders and messages. Sorting out the Confederate forces kept Scott in close contact with a host of ex-Rebel officers.
Volume 1 finally rolled off the presses on July 22, 1881, while the last (of 128) would not appear until 1901. The entire series covered 138,579 pages, and in addition to text included 1,006 sketch maps, at a cost in excess of $2.8 million. (A 30-volume Naval ORs was produced between 1894 and 1922.) Since pressure from veterans and their interest groups had supported congressional backing for the ORs, it is not surprising that much of the resulting publication was aimed at that constituency. The huge preponderance of battle material was manna to old soldiers eager to “fight them over” in newspaper columns and periodicals or on the lecture circuit. Later researchers seeking information about troop morale, tactical innovations, race relations, political policies and other such matters were left to struggle with the battle-oriented indexes, and no guarantee that anything of that nature had been included.
Yet despite its blemishes, the ORs changed forever how Americans studied that conflict. Writing in 1939, Southern historian Douglas Southall Freeman declared, “If it be true that the War between the States is now, with a few regrettable omissions, the most thoroughly studied military conflict of modern times, the reason is the availability of the Official Records.” A senator of that era perhaps stated it best when he wrote that the ORs had come to “mold the judgment of history.”
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
As Robert Underwood Johnson remembered the moment, it was a during a summer 1883 workday in the offices of The Century Magazine when he and fellow editor Clarence Buel argued over what was the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. Johnson thought it was the Union debacle at Cold Harbor, while Buel argued that the Western Theater bloodbath at Chickamauga was the conflict’s gory high point. That argument inspired Buel to muse that asking former officers of the Union and the Confederacy to write about their wartime experiences would be a good selling point for the Century. Johnson and Buel could at least agree on that point, and together they took their idea to editor-in-chief Richard Watson Gilder, who also liked it. Buel was allowed to flesh out the idea into a proposal that was laid before Century Company president Roswell Smith, who authorized them to proceed with the project.
Thus was born a remarkable series of articles that in turn was the catalyst for that popular and essential source Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (B&L). Make no mistake, from the very beginning this was a commercial venture. While generations of later historians would welcome its 3,091 pages of priceless insights into wartime engagements, its core purpose was to enhance the Century Company’s bottom line. This was made clear when the first task given editors Johnson and Buel was to recruit contributors with star power. Starting in the spring of 1884, the two went after prominent ex-generals whose bylines would be money in the bank.
Before long the pair had amassed a fine collection of rejection letters. Hancock, Banks, Butler, Early, Buckner and Longstreet all said no, as did U.S. Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. Editor-in-chief Gilder worried that without such names “we must face the issue of postponing another year.” Then a dramatic decline in fortune for Grant—the failure of a banking firm holding most of his money—changed the picture. The high fees offered by the magazine were suddenly attractive, and Grant agreed to contribute. An energized Gilder hoped this would open doors to other prominent personalities, and he confidently set the rollout date for November 1884.
Then a whole new series of problems arose. Unlike the ORs or the SHSP, the Century editors were not only concerned with content but also with style. “We desired them to go behind the official returns and give us the human side of affairs, avoiding the dry bones of history,” said Johnson, “we urged our contributors not to be afraid to be interesting.” Grant took the note when his initial draft on Shiloh was returned as too stolid, so he revamped it along the lines of “an after-dinner discussion of a battle.” It was this lively manner that makes B&L pieces so quotable. The editors were also adept at grouping pieces relating to a particular event to maximize differing points of view and perspectives.
To their great credit, the Century editors were sticklers for accuracy. Every piece was fact-checked, itself a significant undertaking, since the ORs had just begun appearing four years earlier. Johnson and Buel found that complimentary subscriptions to the magazine worked wonders when it came to enlisting government clerks and veterans to dig into still unpublished OR material to answer their queries. Still, they were once conned by a writer who claimed to have been a sailor aboard CSS Alabama, but who later admitted to having crafted the piece based on others’ recollections.
Other elements contributed to the original series’ success. The magazine employed a cadre of fine illustrators, many of whom had been actual war correspondents, and took advantage of technological advancements to avoid the clunky woodblock transfers that were standard in the 1860s. The editors also embraced controversy, finding that the passion of a point-counterpoint exchange then, as now, could be riveting. The ultimate measure of success came a year after the series debuted, when Century’s circulation nearly doubled. Like any commercial venture, the results were constantly monitored, and when the numbers trended down the series was terminated (November 1887), though Century would continue to occasionally feature Civil War material.
Remaining was a pile of unused material—enough that a book project was deemed feasible, resulting in four fat volumes that appeared in 1888. A few facts to note: Not every magazine article made it into the books, and not every article originated with Century. Where holes need ed to be filled, Century acquired the necessary items from previously published sources. Once again the editors called on a squad of veteran artists (some actually veterans) to enrich the text with vivid drawings, and made certain there were ample maps. Their hard work was rewarded by brisk sales that eventually ran to more than 75,000 sets, making the Century Company a cool $1 million.
Thanks to its four-volume size, B&L was an affordable source for researchers, and it has reappeared over the years in custom and bargain formats. In 2002 and 2004 author-editor Peter Cozzens extended the brand by producing two additional B&L volumes for the University of Illinois Press that captured some (but not all) of the passed-over Century articles along with pieces from contemporaneous published sources.
Not unlike Ken Burns’ celebrated television series, the B&L set proved a useful entry point for readers and beginning researchers. Allowances need to be made for postwar memory “improvements” of participants, and recognition that this was a last chance to salvage a tarnished reputation for a few. Still, the proud editors were not off the mark when they touted their accomplishment as constituting a “more authoritative and final statement of the events of the war as seen through the eyes of commanders and participants than has before been made on a single plan.”
Originally published in the August 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
