Corpus of American Civil War Letters

Corpus of American Civil War Letters

Co-Directors
Michael Ellis, Department of English, Missouri State University, Springfield MO 65897; email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Michael Montgomery, 1825 St. Julian Place #5J, Columbia SC 29204; email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL) project began in the summer of 2007 with the modest aim of seeking and transcribing what letters could be found from Appalachia having evidence of regional American English in the 19th century. Six years later, the project has now amassed nine thousand letters and diaries written by common soldiers and their families during the conflict and represents a remarkably rich source of information about American English as it was spoken a hundred and fifty years ago. The letters collected for CACWL were penned by individuals with limited educations who knew little about formal conventions of punctuation and capitalization. Rather than by anything learned in the schoolroom, they tended to write “by ear,” as for example did one soldier who spelled amongst as amunxt–such an odd-looking form until it is read aloud. Such documents vividly display their writers’ lack of formal literacy by their highly irregular capitalization and reproduce characteristic features of spoken language in inconsistent spellings, regional words and usages, and, most particularly, non-standard grammatical forms. Such is the case even in common set, formulaic phrasings of introductions and closings of letters, which writers have clearly memorized from hearing letters read aloud in camp or from their family circle before the war. Even in these one finds frequent misspellings, typified by “I am well at the presant time hoping when those few lines Comes to yore hands they my find you Well and harty.”

Linguists have had considerable success in describing the structures and features of American English and its dialects in the 20th century, but their knowledge of earlier American dialects remains very limited and superficial. Not only must they rely largely on written documents of those who, because of limited education, were much more likely to reproduce the features of their speech in their writing, but the preparatory work in accumulating and transcribing documents exhibiting such minimal literacy is painstaking and frustrating. The original focus of this project, given the scholarly interests of its two directors, was on letters written by soldiers from the Upper South, and the bulk of the CACWL corpus still comes from the southeastern states.   However, so many “vernacular” letters from outside that original compass have come steadily to light that in early 2009 the project was expanded to include all parts of the country. We have attempted whenever possible to obtain photocopies, microfilm, or digital images of original manuscripts, and so far we have transcribed over six thousand letters directly from these formats. An additional four hundred letters have been incorporated from existing transcriptions, published or unpublished, which we consider to be reliable (in some of these cases based on examining sample letters).   Nearly three thousand letters are on hand waiting to be transcribed.

Why pursue Civil War letters for what is fundamentally a linguistic project? The sheer numbers written by soldiers (and to a lesser extent by family members on the homefront) were unprecedented in American history. During the war, approximately three million soldiers served in the Union or Confederate armies. Most of these soldiers were away from home for the first time, finding themselves yearning for news and eager to share their experiences, however mundane or repetitive. Many soldiers became steady correspondents for the first time in their lives, often writing home weekly while in camp, and, thanks to their families and descendants, leaving behind a body of linguistic evidence by far exceeding anything that exists before or since, at least for the 19th century. The majority of Civil War soldiers’ letters which have survived are simply too literate to be of much value to linguists. However, it has become clear that countless thousands of letters have survived which were written by soldiers and their families–from both the South and the North–whose speech patterns can be recovered to varying degrees in their writing. These writers are far more likely than any other sizable group of semi-literate individuals in the 19th century to reproduce the features of their spoken language, thereby providing an invaluable source of information about American regional dialects in that period.

Just as the American Civil War formed the most powerful series of events in the history of the country, it was equally profound and devastating for soldiers and their families. Because it tore at the bonds between so many people, any documents relating to the war have been more likely to be preserved by descendants. Though many were once only private keepsakes and heirlooms, especially in the families of several hundred thousand soldiers who never came home, innumerable letters more recently have found their way into libraries and archives. For CACWL it is letters of the little-educated private, not writing for posterity, but to keep close to family and friends, to dispel home-sickness, to follow events they were missing, and to learn (indeed, they were often desperate for) any news from home. Their emotions prompted, in fact compelled, many soldiers to write no matter how rudimentary their skills. If not for the painful separation, many would probably have never written a letter in their lives. Letters from privates provide entirely different perspectives on such daily experiences of war as morale, disease, and the privations of poor food, shelter, and clothing, as well as sheer loneliness and other raw emotions. In so doing, they are frequently more powerful than ones by educated counterparts.

The long-term scholarly goals of the CACWL project include production of a dictionary and linguistic atlas of 19th-century American regional dialects that will complement existing works, particularly the six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English. In order to accomplish these goals, we will need to collect a minimum of five thousand additional letters and diaries. A website which will include transcriptions of the letters and a detailed description of the project is currently being developed at the University of Georgia (http://www.ehistory.org/projects/common-tongues.html).   In the future the website may also include digital images of the letters if they are available (and with appropriate permission), an extensive glossary, and a register of letter writers with biographical and bibliographical information. Besides the obvious linguistic significance of the letters, we hope that they will also be of significant value to, among others, historians and genealogists. Although our efforts so far have concentrated mainly on collecting and transcribing letters, the CACWL project has resulted two recent articles in American Speech (the journal of the American Dialect Society), several conference presentations, and North Carolina English, 1861-1865, A Guide and Glossary (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013) edited by project co-director Michael Ellis. Moreover, the two project directors are each preparing book-length studies which draw partly or entirely on linguistic evidence contained in the Civil War letters.

Since the pioneering work of Bell Irvin Wiley (The Life of Johnny Reb, The Life of Billy Yank) more than sixty years ago, historians have undertaken considerable research using primary sources, including letters and diaries, to help them understand what it was like to be a “common soldier” during the Civil War (see for example Reid Mitchell’s “Not The General But The Soldier” in Writing the Civil War, The Quest to Understand, edited by James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, Jr., Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Works of such historians have led us to numerous manuscript collections, and we trust that the letters in CACWL will, in turn, provide and promote new sources of information for future generations of historians to consult and analyze.

A project such as this one relies, more than anything else, on the generosity and cooperation of archives and special collections libraries in the institutions throughout the country that hold manuscript documents. It is they, their staffs, and their supporting institutions who provide copies, lend microfilm, and give us access to their collections first-hand. Attached is a partial list of the institutions from which we have obtained letters to date. Many more wait to be contacted and visited. With the sesquicentennial of the Civil War now being observed, the timing is ideal for a project which will bring the often unknown or rarely heard voices of rank and file soldiers and their loved ones to life.

Libraries and archives from which we have obtained copies of documents include:

The Alabama Department of Archives and History
Bowling Green State University
Duke University
East Carolina University
Emory University
The Filson Historical Society
The Florida State Archives
The Georgia Department of Archives and History
The Georgia Historical Society
The Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History
The Indiana Historical Society
The Library of Virginia
Louisiana State University
The Maine Historical Society
Mississippi State University
The Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis
The North Carolina Division of Archives and History
The Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Stones River National Battlefield, Murfreesboro, Tennessee
The Tennessee State Library and Archives
The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville
The University of Georgia
The University of Mississippi
The University of Notre Dame
The University of South Carolina, South Caroliniana Library
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The University of Virginia
The U. S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
The Virginia Historical Society
Western Carolina University
Western Kentucky University
Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Missouri University of Science and Technology
Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, Columbia

A native of East Tennessee with roots deep in the Southern Appalachians, Michael Ellis is currently a Professor of English at Missouri State University where he has taught for over twenty years.   During that time, his research interests have included Old English lexicography and manuscript studies, as well as the study of Appalachian English and other dialects of British and American English.   The Corpus of American Civil War Letters represents the culmination of his journey as a scholar. The linguistic riches contained in the letters are incalculable, but the letters themselves provide considerable insight into the devastating impact the war often had on the lives of ordinary soldiers and their families.   Ellis also discovered or rediscovered three ancestors who served in the war: one from East Tennessee who served in the Union army, one from Southwestern Virginia who served in the Confederate army, and one from Western North Carolina who was conscripted into the Confederate Army, deserted, and enlisted in the Union Army. He also discovered that, of these three soldiers, two were illiterate and, like thousands of other soldiers, unable to leave that invaluable record of their language and their lives.

Michael Montgomery is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina, where he taught English linguistics for nearly twenty years before retiring in 1999. As a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, with parents from the Deep South (Alabama and Mississippi), it was natural for his scholarly career to concentrate on Southern American English in general and on Appalachian English in particular. He is co-editor of the Language volume of the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2007) and the author or editor of ten other books on varieties of Southern speech, including Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (2004). Though able to find only one member of his extended family who served during the war (a great-great-great uncle who was a surgeon for the Confederacy), his life-long passion for history led him on a twenty-year search for the roots of Appalachian English in Ireland and Scotland. That quest led to three books and to appointment as Honorary President of the Ulster-Scots Language Society. His website on Appalachian English can be found at www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary.