civil war manuscripts - American Memory from the Library of Congress

part of the war, will find the papers of the Pinkerton National
Detective Agency and the papers of John C. Babcock, who was
one of Pinkerton's operatives during the Peninsular and Antietam
campaigns, extremely useful. And anyone studying the
military postal service, the military telegraph, and military
engineering and mapmaking will be rewarded by a careful
perusal of the collections herein described. In fact, the list of
possible research topics can be expanded in so many directions
that the number of new or creditable studies on the war is
limited largely by the searcher's own imagination.
The most noticeable weakness in the Manuscript Division's
Civil War holdings is the imbalance in materials from the
opposing sides, the ratio being at least three or four to one in
favor of the North. The reasons that this situation exists cannot
all be addressed here, but the larger number of Union
soldiers, the higher literacy rate among northerners, and the
survival of personal and public papers in a region relatively
untouched by the war are obvious factors. At least Civil War
scholars can be thankful that most secessionists accepted defeat
more gracefully than one southern statesman who so hated the
thought of a forced reunion with the North that on his deathbed
late in the war he extracted a promise from his daughter to
have a plow run over his grave if the South were subjugated.
John R. Sellers
xiii