Transcripts For CSPAN3 The Civil War Civil War Letters 20240714

Professor looks at his work on the digital history project, private voices which gathers and digitizes letters written during the civil war. This is part of the Gettysburg College Civil War Institute summer conference. It is about one hour. Second let me reintroduce myself to the cspan audience, i am peter carmichael, the director of the Civil War Institute and also a member of the history department. It is my pleasure to welcome my good friend Stephen Berry. Stephen berry is the gregory professor of Civil War History at the university of georgia. Let me just say, i have a few rules i live by in our field and this is one of them. Anything that Stephen Berry writes i have got to read. Stephen berry also always brings to his research, incredible and beautiful writing with rich insight and we like him so much because his work is so good and stephen is such a wonderful guy and is a fantastic teacher as well. And i have as well as many of my students have worked with steve over the years. At the university of georgia, he has not only a terrific scholar but has written and edited six books, my favorite is all that makes a man, love and ambition in the civil war south that was his dissertation done some time ago at the university of North Carolina, William Barney was there. Another book he edited was weird in the war, stories from the civil war ragged edge. Then there are other things he has engaged in a lot of Digital Projects many of his graduate students have worked on these projects as well. My favorite of all the Digital Projects titled private voices the corpus of American Civil War letters, many of the letters and private voices come from soldiers who were either semi literate or illiterate and best of all is that all the letters are transcribed and private voices, fantastic digital project today he will speak with us on the language of the common soldier. Let me will come steve barry. [ applause ] sex thank you all so much i am delighted to be here thank you pete for that generous introduction. As pete mentioned, i specialize in civil war studies from the university of georgia and lately i must more involved in the running of the centralized history. 1 8 of the arable world depending on estimate so you have to imagine this playing out in pieces and parts and native americans making their sessions from coasttocoast, including easter island. This is another of our projects and this one allows you to search 11 million newspaper pages, news map, between 1789 in 1922 and you can also see on a map and through time. So, you can essentially watch things go viral across the United States map in 1922. This project was awarded an award for many age and from the library of congress who got to meet one of our senators. This is my baby, lately, cfi dixie which aggregates coroners inquest from 19th century south. They called the project a beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful new digital history site. You all dont know me but are beautifully conceived and profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. [ laughter ] my focus today is on one of my other projects, one that is way more ambitious and has gotten way less attention than it deserves. The preface looks like a porn site but we would lift up the traffic but anyway, the website is devoted to the language of the civil wars common soldier its pride and innocence and most of the men we are looking at our privates. We are closing in on 10,000 that of been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by partners in crime and i have to give them a shout out, michael ellis, at Missouri State and michael montgomery, distinguished professor at university of south carolina. Now, i say, all of these 10,000 letters were painstakingly elected but the letter can only be included on our site if it was written by someone who was transitional illiterate. These are men and some women learned their letter sounds but dont know proper spelling, syntax, punctuation etc. So for instance, the majority of the men on our site. So here we have, i tell you all to write as soon as you can, understood that abigail was in a family way, cousin and i would be glad to come home but i cant come home, but i cant. Please tell mother that she must not trouble herself about me, for i was just a boy for a good soldier. Please kate tear my dog joseph and dont let my gun russ, best respect to the family and all the wiring friends elias gilmer , 174th pennsylvania, that would be you know that kid was drafted. So, the people just hate the idea of the silent e. Silent es are stupid, they are stupid, they are silent so why bother with them. Theyre not married to their wife w ife, they are married to their wife wif which is good enough for them. It is with the greatest love and pleasure that i see myself this morning to drop you a few lines and answer your letter that you sent. We will talk about that in a minute. Dear wife, you never said in your letter how much money you had received from me and i would like to know how much you received for me and i want you to let me know when your next letter. Dear wife, i have more money to send to if i could get a chance to send it to you, i do want to see when the children worse than anything in my life that may god bless you until i come home again is my prayer. Pra re or since its fathers day i cant put myself, son, that stupid that sounds like son, sun makes more sense. Ive taken my time to write you a few line hoping the felines may reach and find you in the same good blessings. I want you to send something good to eat if you get the chance, for our rations are scanty. That sounds like something will would write down in a text while playing video games but the spelling is better. But i must come to a close for tonight and my hand is so numb to that i cant write anymore. I must get my supper and i want to see you very bad for some time or another i will close i could say much more but its so cold. Section 8, but until that george athey. One last thing to complete our family, daughter, are you kidding, that is doubleaand we dont think about these things because we are so used to english and i love the english language but its not as if it is logical. Daughter, dauter, makes more sense. Why not just pepper the place with silent ease. I say to you and my little daughter nora, and the way that we should live. A what you see in all these cases are men that are using what they know of individual letter sounds to approximate the things that should be spelled in a way if english made sense hope i do not have d what a herculean effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 letters written by soldiers who cannot spell. Obviously, you cannot use a spellchecker. You cannot use autocorrect. You have to get every letter right and none of them makes sense. There are erroneous stray these letters are written by soldiers who cannot spell, you cant use spell checker, you have to get every letter right and it doesnt make sense. There are erroneous punctuation marks everywhere and you have to get this exactly right but they are not improper usage and they dont have the greatest handwriting, this is a great example. Its a classic. Needle in a haystack and the michaels spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. To what end . To what end, what can we do with the haystack of needles. Thats what i came to talk about. The first, you can actually hear what a Civil War Soldier sounded like essentially, these men are phonetic writers. In this case, brotherton is revealing that he doesnt say ought to, he says order. We take the example, we took the heavy guard around this day and night, no one goes out or comes in and i dont know when we will draw but i hope it will be soon because i havent got but little tobacco and no money. But now, maybe, this is an truly useful but i can imagine the hollywood script writers using the site to try to improve the pronunciation and how they might not actually have talked. Other linguistic values, William Brotherton was not the only man in the Confederate Army who said order when he meant ought to and Jordan Council wasnt the only one who said litter when he meant letter. These are regional variations not mispronunciations and we know that because there are tons of other orders in the archives and this is the important things. These things dont move around the way that we do. Its not a national job market for them, they dont take a job in San Francisco and pull up sticks, it doesnt happen for them. Its true that movement west is a seminal aspect of life in that period but these are the boys whose families mostly stayed put. That means that they dont just come from their home counties, the language comes from their home counties. So, in this case , what we are looking at is what is called i am a coming, i am a dying. That kind of thing. Now, on this map each dot represents not a letter but a letter writer. These are the kinds of origins of individual authors who tended to use a prefixing. So what you can tell from this is everybody does it. At least the transition to literate men, they are all a, a come in and ago and thats the way they talk. Its not distinctly regional to the north or the south. Some things are and its a little surprising to me and howdy sounds like something more often set in the south, they hadnt said it like howdy partner at the front its a contraction and its something you told her gave i hope we will meet again so i give howdy to all those black and white. This one, actually sort of surprised me, pronouncing a creek as a crick is northern, it may have changed over time but that is what the data reveals. This one i think many of you may be familiar with that dixie is not originally what dixie called itself, that was what the north called it so all of the letter writers that use the word dixie are from the north. Do you guys use this . But it means like late late morning but essentially its truly a northern phenomenon even a pennsylvania phenomenon. This is a northern 12. Gain. Now, for us if we are gaining weight it is a bad thing, we are going in the wrong direction. That wasnt true for Civil War Soldiers, the average weight was 143 pounds but i dont know but you boys but i let hundred 43 back a long while ago. But gaining weight is a good thing, but this is northern. These are the ones we cant figure out, may be in the q a you could help me but when using the word fairly, it tends to be that northerners use the word meddling and as an example i will someday give you something of a true detail for i know it well and if it werent for this but aaron is right hardy and midland fat. That is what they used in the north and especially here in pennsylvania. They dont use it in the south. They have a comparable term which is tolerable but the south uses the word connection for kinship networks and the north doesnt use it at all. They are huge with giant networks but they dont use the word connection. Give me respect to all of the connection or write to me where all of our connection is. Right how will the connection is. Its something that senators tend to use only. So, since it is fathers day i thought i could finish with the section on what people call fathers back in the day. I wouldve thought there is no more southern word than deity, but it is more southern but it doesnt hold a candle to the use of the word pap this rule the age and this is actually confirmed by google. So, if you look at the blue line that is essentially pap, it is running much stronger and its only relatively late and then because its fathers day i will give you one more, thats the word father at the top its a very formal word and a very formal body of literature so i would discount that almost altogether but what you are seeing here is that popper ran much stronger, dads are making quick gains in the lower line, only in the last three years where we call our fathers dad. But other linguistic values, theologians isms. Everything we talked about so far, you might say its interesting but who cares. I like the way they talks but look professor i dont think the battle of gettysburg turned on what any of these boys called their daddies. So this is an interesting way of measuring the impact of any war, the impact that they leave on language. And they typically do this, the exigencies, novel circumstances and experience, all demand elasticity of expression and english is one of the elastic languages of the world. So what difference will that make. We will ask what impact it will have. And one of the classic examples is the word skedaddle which basically didnt exist anywhere on her and by 1862 it was in every americans mouth. Honestly for all the years ive been playing with google anagrams ive never seen a curve that steep if you look in the lower left, its overnight everyone is talking abouts skedaddle in. Ask yourself why why wasnt the word invented before cracks its not the first time an American Army got routed, George Washington ran away and one it is soldiers describe the battle this way, i cant describe the confusion and the holder of the scene, artillery flying in everywhere we turn we meet the britons and the haitians went up to their knees in mud and everyone running to save their own skin but thats exactly what us skedaddle looks like but when he didnt know the word and no one invented anything like that until 1861. But that is probably one heckuva skedaddle. But also its the scale of civil war armies that are massive by comparison which makes retreat seem less personal like an entire city evacuating and its what they did but in the first two examples you see the rebels have possession of the town because we skedaddled essentially and the second exam will is that weve been skedaddle inferred days and thats an except the definition coming in immediately and this is what the soldiers take the word and thats what they have skedaddled. We had 32 new recruits and if they would stay we have a full battery but after they get their bounty for most of them will skedaddle as a good many have done so what you are seeing them doing is essentially appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. They do this a lot, Civil War Soldiers had a fiendish love for taking military terms and making them ridiculous. So half of them are repurposed military terms, all this means is im going to flank out, run the blockade, taken North Carolina discharge, press the furlough and break regard. But remember these men are transitional illiterate and cannot write well but that doesnt mean they are not created in the way that they use the language. They are facing a dire reality and need an argot to imagine that is what you start to see them doing and we need to understand what it is for Common People to move our Mother Tongue and they are making a demand on us in some ways in the way that they write. They did this with other military terms, the idea of being a high private but they are a man who wants to comically claim he has dignity left, he is a high private and he wanted to be promoted and for him thats as good as it gets, thats the highest in the army or the kentucky quickstep a synonym for the trots, bodyguard, so, they are taking the terms and applying them to an experience that is about desertion, pain and dignity and trying to make some sort of meeting and reclaim dignity. Actually, they did this not just with military terms but anything they wanted to take the era and they wanted to take the air out of everything and they would do it and were all familiar with seeing the elephant and getting the taste of battle but isnt this a disturbing area that the whole world is an obscene surface . Ive seen the monkeys show where the monkeyed dance on april 6 john ingram writes ohman says i guess youve heard before this time that i have see the monkeyed dance and i did not enjoy the sixth of eight as well as i have enjoyed some sundays. Hes talking about shiloh. The great blood bath of american innocence. I didnt enjoy it as much as i enjoyed some sundays, i saw the monkeyed dance. Ive seen this before, this kind of ironic minimal lysing and misdirection. I call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, and attitude that amounts to the undead anyway. Ive more or less made up my mind to die and the circumstance there didnt seem anything else to do and as soon as he got past the point where he said im dead anyway the rest is gravy and as time went a lot easier. But, you see that in the civil war also. Ive been living in hopes that the people would do something for these theyve been talking about it for so long and i cant see that theyve done anything so weve give up to the idea that we have to fight until we are killed. Same idea. Same notion. Same conclusion. If i hadnt been a student of the civil war i wouldve been a student of world war i. Theres an old argument about world war i that i accept, the inextricable defamation of 8 Million People actually has a cultural effect. So, the argument made in great war and modern memory is that midlife to the modern it destroyed and gave birth to arnie. New age, there was more wistful and less trusting and more sad. He pointed it out in literature. All of the literature is about characters that have more power than most men usually have, whether its hercules or achilles even into the medieval age you are writing about here menu have more power and you get a little dickens and he has a little realistic power. Outside of a few outsiders and men who are actually directly damaged by the warlike mark twain the dominant culture managed to absorb 700,000 dead and see their sacrifice as pure good. The lost cause and the one cause and later emancipation as an almost slight victory in the inevitable march of american freedom. Reading private voices im just less sure. The more i read the letters the more i realize common men mash the english language to answer the way they felt the way that they felt was cynical and a little paris. Maybe if we want to assess the effect we could look not to high culture but to the low. We should look to a haystack of beetles. One lesson ive learned so far working with private voices, lets start with the question of literacy. Literacy rates for Civil War Soldiers are to pick the estimated at 84 for confederates and 90 for filters and im not disputing that but im disputing the idea that literacy is one thing that uniform condition that we either are or not literate. Its not that. Its a continuum. So, take this letter as an example. Another letter came this evening of the father was dead and im sorry to hear the news, i want you to write to me as quick as this letter comes to hand for a dont get any letters by the mail. The soldier who wrote the letter was born in 1842 bern in 1940 any but he got one of his buddies to write this letter for him because he is desperate and sexton was his buddy and they were desperate. So we have to treat this condition seriously. He doesnt know if it is that is that a resistor is that its a different kind of help business and we recognize this because we can get the sun now we can google anything in a nanosecond we have people in our fingertips but they are far away and very remote under duress but as it turns out sexton was fine and was never learned that but he was killed they are the enslaved, we are used to black people, theres a black boy here that visits us sometimes we pull a good deal of fun out of him and information that he cant read but is trying to learn who he is as smart a boy as ive ever seen to be educated. I love the idea that hamilton is a pennsylvania soldier and this guy is uneducated and he clearly doesnt see that is in a transitional literacy state and that is my point that we need to realize that all of the Civil War Soldiers are operating on a spectrum of literacy that needs to be taken seriously. So, what would it matter . Well, if theyre not habitual writers or readers will will will much more information client will report i will i i had gone to college to answer one simple question, how could i be a good man in of that and broken world . Back in the soft glow of my parents television, i along with 40 Million People found an answer and at the end of the first night when the narrator read a token farewell, a letter by a young major to his wife sarah. My love for you is deafness and seems to bind you with a single omnipotence could break my love of country comes over me like a strong wind to embarrass me irresistibly on the change to the battlefield. If i do not return, never forget how much i love you and when my last breath escapes me it will whisper your name. Hi remember this moment very distinctly because it was the moment i became a civil war historian. To my young brain everything that was honorable in this world. It is everything i wanted to be love of country and love the family and served back to me as truth but it was in until i was well into graduate school that i understood about his death, decapitation but that is not my point. My point is in that people are generally awful. But whoever wrote the letter wrote it in what i call the civil wars hide home infected through the signature cadence of shakespeare. Because educated men wrote so much because they belong to families with trunks and attics and property that they transfer down the line and love the high time its irresistible all of our history is in it and its been effectively overwritten. An example will help and i remember the first time i read this that i might leap it away. I thought i never read anything so beautiful to watch the nation that i love suicide itself its gorgeous. Ive learned to appreciate the second example. It appears our country is ruined and distracted forever and i feel we will never be a happy peep again so we better try to fear for death, its not as beautiful but mcguires version depends upon her understanding of other literary sources and shes channeling the bible on the last day of the feast, there great jesus it up to anyone theres let them come to me and drink and out of his heart will flow rivers of living water she can expend her feelings but she doesnt have access to express feelings and they become so much harder to him for this language. The thing about this letter is he didnt write this one either in a total one it takes a corrective empathy that make the moment for him. I agree its harder not as beautiful but that doesnt mean its any less true so what would happen if we went for and rewrote the war and low town. What would the war look like it would have a directness or wellness, fairness. These sources and private voices which basically means a cultivated coolness with no more asked to give so let me know in the next letter whether it sex video. I cant imagine to get the letter on valentines day but theres an honesty to it, wellness and that is what he wants to ask. But the letter which regularly received, i can tell you, you have a heap of men that they get drunk and run after negros and nude white women but i tell you i take no part with them. I was the white guy i would say i sure thought its just off but its just naked but its road abatement saying i have a sore throat i lost my baby, she lived nine days. Hoping this finds you both well and we have nothing else to write about you want to know why it lasted the way it did and men could say 80 casualties in the cornfield and get up and fight the next day. Look no further than women who could lose a women in nine days and got the right they had nothing new to write about. These people are tougher than we are. As tough as they were in hard as they got there there was exactly one thing they were soft about even softer than sullivan ballou, this is what we like about the website. I was hanging about the website and i searched every variation and what you might find is that none of the boys talk about saint peter with pearly gates but its where families meet her partner more. The civil war marked the first and only time for many poor families that the only time they were not together. Absence is much as violence defined at the torment. I never knew what it was before and i know something about it now. So i still hope that the time is coming that we will meet again and if we dont meet in this world i hope we will meet in heaven where we will part no more. I read this again and again, part no more. All i want is to go home and what sounds like heaven to them is family permanence and he said his love of country came over him like a strong wind and dragged him back to the battlefield and that is beautiful. But some of the voices were literally dragged to the battlefield and not because they were forced to cut what would it have been like if the first night had ended with this letter. Would i even be a civil war scholar. Seek myself this morning with a troubled heart and a d stress mind to try to write a few lines to let you know that i heard my sentence read yesterday and it was very bad. Im very sorry to let you know, for i know you have a great deal of trouble already. I have to be shut the ninth of this month and im sorry to inform you i have but seven days to live but i hope and trust in god, that god was chief my soul to rest where i will meet my baby was gone before. Now, maybe thats unfair to expect that you would end the first night of the civil war with that particular letter but what about this one. Do your children, you all express you want to see me so bad that he i know you dont want to see me worse than i do you. I think through the mercies of god he will be able to see you all again in a short time because i think this thing will surely come to a close for looks like we cannot stand it much longer. He was killed shortly after in chickamauga. My dear, you are my dearest friend in the world, if ever i live to get through with this war, i always will take your advice and anything you say. It appears i will never get to hear anymore in this world. If i could just have one hour it would do me more good and the best thing that ever would be, ive never craved anything as much in my life but if it not be the good lords will to spare our lives, i hope we meet each other in the happy world where we were never part again. He was killed shortly after in virginia. I said at the outset that they have to give credit where credit is due and in october 2017, the magazine admitted that we had discovered the first ever known use of the phrase kick [ null ]. To be honest they treated our discovery as a linguistic oddity that appeared on a Strong Language blog, as where he blog about swearing. And now, if youre gonna talk about swearing, we have to start with peter carmichael. That came out wrong but you have to start with an essay that he wrote for my selection and now for his book. It begins in a world war i classic under fire in a soldier named barack approaches the narrator who is immersed in writing in his journal about the muck and death of trench warfare. He asked the writer of his comments will be quoted verbatim. Will characters in print speak like the soldiers really do or will you tidy it up and make it proper . I am talking about swearwords. The writer agrees he has no intention of hiding the rough language of holger talk even if the readers may condemn him as a foul mouth. Hes not convinced telling the author he has an undoubted desire to be daring but at the last moment you will fly in hard and refuse to be honest, so if you dont put it in the picture will not be accurate its like you wanted to paint them but didnt put in one of the most glaring covers wherever it appears. I will put the swearwords in because its the truth. The truth. Is there anything all of us should be more committed to . I think she had peaked to write and civil war historians had tidied up the war and made it proper. I believe the key to reversing the trend is to do exactly what was called for a decade ago and barack called for a half century ago and we need to pay careful attention to language. So, lets do that by ending on this kick [ null ] letter. Now, the writer is John B Gregory in 1860, a farmer from pennsylvania county and virginia are residing on his farm with his wife martha and the Young Children ages one through five. He wrote his wife and said i would be glad to see tom oakes come with you to fetch the box and we will be paid one dollar and a half for a pint of whiskey. And we are rightly obliged to buy some. They were so tight with us as they were sometime ago and everyone is drum every day and they dont do anything without unless the, they fight them and then they will put them in the guardhouse until they get sober. He came to get us to volunteer again and he thinks everyone not to stay. Okay, you have to know your timing, your civil war chronology, its february 1962 that means that many of the terms of enlistment are coming up and that is what is going on and why the old captain gilbert is running around and why the army is being prudish about how drunk everyone seems to be. We know that ultimately, often these men would say i dont want to do that and then ultimately the confederacy would have to institute a draft and start to forcibly constrict people, too much longer tourism. But, here is the thing about gregory, amid this cavalcade of complaints about the goingson in camp he writes the words i want to kick [ null ]. That is what he wants to do. He writes the in between his own lines, with all the griping gregory was in it to win and in it for the duration. Gregory, this man, the man who wrote the letter was killed right here on this ground at gettysburg on july 3, 1910a 1863 on Cemetery Ridge where more than half of his regiment was killed, wounded or captured. He left for children and a wife at home, they never knew where he was buried, the they barely knew what he was dying for. Honestly, i dont know if gregory kicked ass but i know he got his ass kicked it. In concluding the article, the artist and the author noted that the gregory letter is just one tantalizing example of many that should turn up in the private voices archive, launched with 4000 letters from four southern states, 6000 more have been transcribed and are expected in the coming year, along with a dynamic mapping feature that users can explore regional variations and word usage and speech patterns. As the article concludes that sounds pretty kicked ass to me. Indeed it does. Thank you very much. [ applause ] are you aware of the book. Soon . I was wondering what you think of having a civil war book known to be written in the same context as this book was because it was first written in the early 1900s and people rejected it because it was written in the vernacular, so i wonder what your thoughts are . That would be a fantastic idea, i hope someone takes that on, i might take that on. I dont know if everyone is aware of what that is but its the story of a slave, reportedly the last slave written in the vernacular of the slave telling the story as opposed to being written in polite english. Thank you thats a great idea and i appreciate it. Hello, im lee from talmage ohio and im curious about the website in the way its all put together. Do you have them identified by what regiment they are in or anything like that so if you wanted to search you can search by regimen . You can search by regimen, state or last name and do a global text to search for individual words. In keyword searching, its a site where everybody spells whatever they want to and its a little more interesting so weve solved the question of how to do fuzzy searching. You cant do it. But, this is very fuzzy indeed and you have to do be careful to make sure you get everything you want but there are lots of ways to get inside the text. It sounds like something overdue. Yes, thank you. I have a question in regards to where you think this is going from here in the modern age. I see a lot of students write very frenetic we and they are told to sounded out. Do you think we are going full circle or you think its another reason its coming back. I think its an interesting point and when i made with this joke about my son but they speak in text, its the quickest way but do they actually know how to spell . Im not sure. But they are spelling phonetically or shortly to get everything as an acronym, everything has three letters and its an entirely different kind of language that does. When i first read it i thought oh, im a writer and a reader and i love books and i watch the generation and know for a fact the student has been born that will go through the university of georgia and never read a whole book. But not cover to cover. So at first i was like im cranky about that because i write books and that makes me cranky but then i realized they are awash in different kinds of information and communicating in a slightly different way. But im not sure yet what its gonna do to our language. But i appreciate that and my mate for insight on the common soldier but using the high tap that is my favorite thing in the world but im not sure that is whats happening, im not sure but its a great question. Thank you all so much, i really appreciate it. Clap clap [ applause ] all week we are featuring American History tv programs as a preview of what is available every weekend on cspan3. Lectures and history, american artifacts real america of the civil war, oral history, the presidency and special event coverage about our nations history enjoy American History tv now on every weekend on cspan3. The first africans to land in english north america arrived here in 1619. That would begin an amazing experience in the development of the United States. Saturday, special American History tv, the washington journal feature as we look back to the first arrival of africans to america. This is 400 years