civil war manuscripts - American Memory from the Library of Congress

PREFACE
To Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War was essentially a
people's contest over the maintenance of a government dedicated
to the elevation of man and the right of every citizen to
an unfettered start in the race of life. President Lincoln believed
that most Americans understood this, for he liked to boast that
while large numbers of Army and Navy officers had resigned
their commissions to take up arms against the government,
not one common soldier or sailor was known to have deserted
his post to fight for the Confederacy. Unfortunately, secessionist
leaders also believed that their cause was just, if not God
ordained. Confederate apologists argued that in seceding from
the Union the Southern States had only exercised their constitutional
right to withdraw from a voluntary combination of
states after the authorized government of those states demonstrated
it was bent on a course destined to disrupt the South's
established institutions. Any attempt to coerce the newly independent
states back into the Union was both an act of aggression
and a violation of individual liberty. This ideological
impasse resulted in the bloodiest war ever fought by the American
people.
Nowhere is the story of the Civil War better told than in
the papers and records of the participants held by the Manuscript
Division of the Library of Congress. But even the most
talented researcher must have access to a specially prepared
subject guide to survey effectively the Civil War manuscript
holdings of a repository that contains over 40,000,000 original
items in 10,000 separate collections.
Civil War Manuscripts evolved from a checklist prepared
between 1965 and 1967 by Lloyd A. Dunlap, a specialist in
American history in the Manuscript Division. After Mr. Dunlap's
death in 1968, various individuals, including Gayle
Thornbrough, Margherita E. Pryor, Frank J. Tusa, and Oliver
H. Orr, expanded the checklist. Continuing public interest in
the Civil War and the consequent demand for information about
the Library's manuscript holdings suggested the production of
a more comprehensive, annotated Civil War guide, using as a
foundation the Dunlap manuscript, which was compiled largely
from catalogs, finding aids, and other administrative tools.