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1025The Journal of American HistoryMarch 2016

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The Afterlives of a Confederate Archive: Civil War Documents and the Making of Sectional Reconciliation

Yael A. Sternhell

The archive lies at the center of our work as historians. We spend months and years in its reading rooms, looking for elusive facts, arcane documents, and obscure stories. The archive defines and differentiates us from fellow humanists, gives credence to our claims for knowledge, and enshrouds our narratives with an aura of truth. Both real and ro-manticized, it is our place of labor and also an emblem of our craft. Yet how often do we stop to ask ourselves questions about the archives we work in? When have we last probed our source material, attempted to investigate the circumstances that brought it into our possession, or examined the structures underlying the collections we use? While influ-ential books such as Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History and W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s The Southern Past have investigated the meaning of archival work in particular contexts, historians of the United States tend to look through archives, but rarely at them.1

This lacuna is particularly glaring considering the predominance of the “archival turn” in other fields of the humanities. Since the 1970s, scholars in a range of disciplines have grown acutely aware of the archive’s artificial and constructed nature and of the myriad ways it is shaped by social, political, and cultural forces. As the archival theorists Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook note, “archives have their origins in the information needs and social values of the rulers, governments, businesses, and individuals who establish and maintain them. Archives then are not some pristine storehouse of historical documenta-tion that has piled up, but a reflection of and often justification for the society that cre-ates them.” Moreover, scholarship on archives has also stressed the dialectical relationship between the archive’s reflective and constitutive elements. Francis X. Blouin and Charles Rosenberg have summarized this postmodern argument: “the archive itself is not simply a reflection or an image of an event but also shapes the event, the phenomena of its origins.

Yael A. Sternhell is an assistant professor of history and American studies at Tel Aviv University. She is deeply indebted to Daniel Rodgers, Gaines Foster, John Coski, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, and the reviewers and editors at the Journal of Ameri-can History for commenting extensively on earlier drafts of this article. Audiences and commentators at Princeton Uni-versity, Boston University, Tel Aviv University, and at conferences of the Society of Civil War Historians, Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association also provided crucial feedback. Funding for research was provided by the Israel Science Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the American Philosophical Society.

Readers may contact Sternhell at [email protected].

1 This distinction between looking at archives and looking through them is from Kathryn Burns, Into the Ar-chive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, N.C., 2010), 125. Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Memory and Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 105–37.

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1026 The Journal of American History March 2016

. . . [A]ll archival records are not only themselves the product of social, cultural, and es-pecially political processes; they very much affect the workings of these processes as well, and hence they influence the kinds of realities that archival collections reflect.” Inspired by a plethora of influential theoretical debates, historians have elevated archives, as Ann Stoler defines it, “to new analytic status with distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny on their own.” Students in fields such as postcolonial studies, gender history, and Soviet Russia have developed considerable acumen for reading against the grain and untangling the complex web of power and ideology underlying their source material.2

Perhaps a reason historians of the United States have failed to develop a similarly criti-cal approach stems from the high level of accessibility of the repositories in which they work. While American archives can be messy, frustrating places, and some archivists can be cranky, incompetent, or both, only rarely do scholars of the United States face the limitations so familiar to specialists in other fields. Except for scholars working on very re-cent events and on issues related to national security, the documentary record of America comes across to professional historians as a clear, untainted window onto the past.

This perception is all the more true when it comes to portable archives, collections of documents published by ostensibly trusted sources. One of the best known and most popular is The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. The OR, as it is commonly known, is a compilation of documents culled from the vast body of paperwork generated by Civil War armies and published by the federal government. Comprising 128 volumes averaging nine hundred pages each, it is a treasure trove of information on America’s greatest struggle. Since its publication in the late nine-teenth century, the OR has served virtually every scholar working on the sectional con-flict, including historians of culture, society, and politics. In many ways, it is the basis for what we know about the Civil War.3

2 Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science, 2 (2002), 12. The most famous theorizations of the archive are in Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowl-edge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London, 1972); and Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, 1996). Useful overviews of recent trends in archival studies include Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, 4 (Jan. 2004), 9–25; Caro-lyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, 2002); Irving Velody, “The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes towards a Theory of the Archive,” History of the Human Sciences, 11 (no. 4, 1998), 1–16; and Thomas Osborne, “The Ordinariness of the Archive,” ibid., 12 (no. 2, 1999), 51–64. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, “Part I: Archives and Archiving,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Mem-ory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor, 2006), 2. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009), 44. Other important works in this field include Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, Eng., 1996); Gayatri Charkavorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory, 24 (Oct. 1985), 247–72; Indrani Chatterjee, “Testing the Local against the Colonial Archive,” History Workshop Journal, 44 (Autumn 1997), 215–24; Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, N.C., 2005); Nupur Chaudhuri, Sherry J. Katz, and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (Urbana, 2010); and Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).

3 U.S. Department of War, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confeder-ate Armies (128 vols., Washington, 1880–1901). The War of the Rebellion is available today on a searchable cd-rom and online. See, for example, “The War of the Rebellion: Original Records of the Civil War,” ehistory: Ohio State University Department of History, http://ehistory.osu.edu/books/official-records; and “The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,” Making of America: Cornell University Library, http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html. Scholarly treatments of The War of the Rebellion include Dallas D. Irvine, “The Genesis of the Official Records,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 24 (Sept. 1937), 221–29; Joseph L. Eisendrath Jr., “The Official Records—Sixty-Three Years in the Making,” Civil War History, 1 (March 1955), 89–94; Harold E. Mahan, “The Arsenal of History: The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion,” Civil War History, 29 (March 1983), 5–27; Alan C. Aimone and Barbara A. Aimone, A User’s Guide to the Official Records of the American Civil War (Shippensburg, 1993); and Joan Waugh, U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth (Chapel Hill, 2009), 169–70.



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1027Civil War Documents and Sectional Reconciliation

The appeal of the OR is easy to understand. At first glance, the gargantuan collection seems devoid of ideology, an impartial body of records published by a seemingly reliable source. It consists solely of military records, eschewing explicit engagement with politics or ideology. OR volumes are arranged spatially and temporally, moving between one cam-paign and the next, from one theater of operations to another. Union and Confederate records appear side by side without any commentary or context, allowing historical actors on both sides to speak for themselves. The OR, in short, comes across as the ultimate re-pository for hard facts on the Civil War. Yet that is a highly misleading impression.

In fact, the management of wartime records by the Federal government and their sub-sequent publication in the OR were thoroughly politicized and deeply embedded in a shifting ideological landscape. Unsurprisingly, this was particularly true for the papers originating in the South. The Federal government’s Confederate collection started out as a storehouse of papers to be used in legal proceedings against the leadership of the rebellion. Yet those trials never took place, and the meaning and function of the documents under-went a radical change. A decade after the South’s bitter defeat at Appomattox, the written record of the Confederate war effort was repurposed and incorporated into a bipartisan collection assembled to commemorate the war. The transformation of wartime records, no doubt, presaged a broader cultural shift slowly gathering steam. But the government’s archival venture did not merely reflect contemporary perceptions; it also functioned as an agent of change. In the crucial decades between the closing of the war and the beginning of the twentieth century, the work of collecting, organizing, and publishing wartime doc-uments had a formative influence on sectional reconciliation and the rebirth of American nationalism from the ashes of civil war.

The role played by historical documents in postbellum nation building was very much in line with events elsewhere in the world. The nineteenth century was both the age of nation building and the age of archive building, and the two, historians have come to realize, were inextricably intertwined. To govern properly, new centralized states needed their records cataloged and kept in an orderly and uniform fashion. Yet as nation-states expanded and solidified, archives also served the equally pressing task of conferring le-gitimacy on far-reaching (and usually exaggerated) historical claims. One of the boldest manifestations of the newly born French republic was the opening of the Old Regime’s ar-chives to the public in 1794. Yet in the decades to come, the ideal of an open, democratic archive largely disappeared, as each political order imposed on repositories modes of con-trol that served its own interests. In the wake of the upheavals across Europe during the Napoleonic era, one country after another embarked on ambitious archival ventures in their quests to form cohesive nations. Prussia founded an official state archive in 1803 and began publishing the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1819, a collection of primary sources dating back to the millennium between the year 500 and 1500. These efforts to create a usable past both reflected and fueled the consolidation of German principalities into a single nation and that nation’s ambition for continental domination. In England a striving national government, galvanized by its fierce struggle with France, organized a record commission in 1800 and established the Public Records Office in 1838. In the Netherlands, the post-Napoleonic merging of city-states into a single national entity pro-ceeded lockstep with the professionalization and standardization of archival work, which manifested in the founding of the first professional organization for archivists and the publication of the first manual for record keeping by three of the organization’s members.



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As Blouin and Rosenberg put it, archives in the nineteenth century “were almost entirely repositories created for and around the purposes of new national histories, centered on the politics and policies of what was increasingly understood as a natural organic state.”4

The United States also followed this global trend. Though the federal government had fallen decades behind other nations in founding a central repository for its records and would not establish a national archive until 1934, Americans had long been engaged in maintaining a written record of their collective history. This work was an important ele-ment in the complex process of national self-fashioning in the postrevolutionary era. As Kariann Akemi Yokota has argued, even as Americans’ victory over Britain and their in-vention of a new form of government instilled in the former colonists a great deal of con-fidence, “the problem of how to form a nation with clear, well-established internal ties of ethnicity, geography, and consanguinity presented numerous imponderables for these newly minted Americans.” Seeking to create a shared identity amid considerable division and strife, Americans from all walks of life remembered, commemorated, and interpreted the brief but eventful past of their country. They celebrated the Fourth of July and the anniversaries of the first New England towns; they idolized Revolutionary War heroes, honored the common soldiers who fought under them, and offered an ecstatic welcome to the Marquis de Lafayette when he returned to America in 1824; they read history en-thusiastically, buying ten editions of George Bancroft’s A History of the United States (the first volume was published in 1834), and invested in commemorative merchandize for their homes. Even as Americans drew widely different conclusions from their shared ex-periences and used public memory to advance disparate and often-competing political claims, the regular and pervasive evocation of American history was essential to the pro-cess of making real the idea of a United States.5

Concerted efforts to preserve important documents began even before the nation was formed. The Bostonians Ebenezer Hazard and Jeremy Belknap began advocating in 1774 for a system of preserving records from the colonies’ struggle against Britain. In the 1790s Hazard published a two-volume collection of documents from the early colonial period, while Belknap helped found the Massachusetts Historical Society and gathered a large collection of papers in its archive. Both modes of preserving records—printing and ar-chiving—became incredibly popular in nineteenth-century America, amounting to what

4 Lara Jennifer Moore, Restoring Order: The Ecole des Chartes and the Organization of Libraries and Archives in France, 1820–1870 (Duluth, 2008); Jennifer S. Milligan, “The Problem of Publicité in the Archives of Second Em-pire France,” in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory, ed. Blouin and Rosenberg, 20–35; Peter Fritzche, “The Archive,” History and Memory, 17 (Spring–Winter 2005), 13–44; Ernst E. Posner, “Some Aspects of Archival Development since the French Revolution,” in A Modern Archives Reader: Basic Readings on Archival Theory and Practice, ed. Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy Walch (Washington, 1984), 3–14; David D. Van Tassell, Record-ing America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607–1884 (Chicago, 1960), 103–10. Peter Horsman, Eric Ketelaar, and Theo Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order: The Context of the Dutch Manual,” American Archivist, 66 (Winter 2003), 249–70; Terry Cook, “What Past Is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria, 43 (Spring 1997), 17–63; John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth, 2009), 21–68. Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford, 2011), 26.

5 Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford, 2011), 10. Recent studies of revolutionary memory and its role in the emergence of American nationalism include Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2002); Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Nationalism and Impartiality in American History Writing, 1784–1860 (Athens, Ga., 2008); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, Mass., 1997); Michael A. McDonnell, et al., eds., Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst, Mass., 2013). George Bancroft, A History of the United States, from the Dis-covery of the Continent to the Present Time, vol. I (Boston, 1834).



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one historian has called “documania.” During this period 110 historical societies were founded, most of which devoted their energies to collecting and publishing letters, dia-ries, pamphlets, and government papers. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., Congress supported the publication of sixteen documentary projects undertaken by private print-ers, including the thirty-eight volume American State Papers (1832–1861), the nine-vol-ume American Archives (1837–1853), and the twelve-volume Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (1829–1830). In 1860, due to the federal government’s pas-sion for printing official documents (and because of widespread accusations of corruption in dealing with private printers), Congress established the Government Printing Office. Thus, even though a national archive was slow in coming, a combination of public and private initiatives created a vibrant tradition of preserving records, in print as well as in brick-and-mortar archives. The War of the Rebellion built on this tradition while also con-siderably departing from it. Both the acutely sensitive context of the OR’s making and its formative influence on historical writing have made the collection into an unmatched undertaking of nation building through text.6

Excavating the federal government’s long-forgotten “archive-making” venture address-es several key issues. First, it helps remedy the curiously underdeveloped discourse in American history about the nature of archives and their role as essential sites for state formation and cultural production. Even the most cherished and reputable collections, it turns out, are not always what they seem. Second, it prods us to rethink the debate on sec-tional reconciliation. As the federal government was churning out volume after volume of wartime records it was also creating the first national military parks and funding blue-gray reunions on the anniversaries of important battles. Writers, artists, and journalists of all hues were publishing popular, highly romanticized, and deeply nostalgic portrayals of the Old South and its war for independence. In universities, historians were crafting narratives that presented the Civil War as an unfortunate but unavoidable stage in the evolution of the United States as a modern nation, assigning blame to both sides. In the last two decades scholars such as David Blight and Nina Silber have established this phe-nomenon’s powerful impact on the politics and culture of the Gilded Age. Other histori-ans have since offered important modifications to the reunion thesis, emphasizing what Caroline E. Janney has called the “limits of reconciliation” and arguing for the persistence of sectional feelings in both the North and the South. Yet even as disagreements about the nature, extent, and particular manifestations of the reunionist sentiment continue to en-rich our understanding of the period, a gradual rapprochement between the once-warring sections was an undeniable and deeply influential cultural current, intimately intertwined with the era’s racial politics, military dynamism, and ebullient nationalism.7

6 Van Tassell, Recording America’s Past, 103. Clarence E. Carter, “The United States and Documentary Historical Publication,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 25 (June 1938), 3–24; Clifford L. Lord, Keepers of the Past (Chapel Hill, 1965); Van Tassell, Recording America’s Past, 103–10; Randall C. Jimerson, “Documents and Archives in Early America,” Archivaria, 60 (Fall 2006), 235–58; Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore, 2006), 72–103; Eliza Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Defer-ence, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2007), 87–89. Ebenezer Hazard, Historical Collections: Consisting of State Papers and Other Authentic Documents; Intended As Materials for An History of the United States of America (2 vols., Philadelphia, 1792–1794). American State Papers (38 vols., Washington, 1832–1861). Peter Force, American Archives (9 vols., Washington, 1837–1853). Jared Sparks, ed., The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revo-lution (12 vols., Boston, 1829–1830).

7 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1993); Michael Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (Baltimore, 2000); Timothy B. Smith, The Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation: The Decade of the



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The OR largely preceded the great majority of reunionist displays. The major archival and editorial decisions that shaped the collection were made during the stormy 1870s, when sectional animosities still ran high and former Confederates often still seemed like open enemies of the federal government. The very name of the collection, War of the Rebellion, harks back to a time when secession was considered an illegal insurgency and hints that the OR was more than just another manifestation of a broader trend. Thus re-constructing the making of the OR both complicates our understanding of how and when sectional reconciliation started and introduces record keeping as an important element in this process.

Finally, delving into the creation of a documentary record for the Civil War provides a rare opportunity to watch the abstractions of archival theory spring into life, to trace the complex relationship between the reflective and constitutive elements of the archive unfold in the dimly lit bureaus and dusty storage rooms of Washington, D.C. The after-lives of the Confederate archive reveal the extraordinary power of historical documents to shape not just narratives of the past but also the contours of the future.

The initial thrust behind the Federal government’s attempts to collect Civil War records reflected its agenda at the closing of the war. On April 5, 1865, three days after the first columns of U.S. troops marched into Richmond, the Confederate capital, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton notified Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana that he had instructed the commanding officer in the city “to secure all the letters, papers, and cor-respondence in the post office and other departments at Richmond and transmit them to [Secretary of State William] Seward.” In Richmond, Dana was pessimistic about the prospects of locating many papers of value, since “the records and papers of the Depart-ment and of Congress were removed before the evacuation and during the firing the capital was ransacked and the documents were scattered.” The following day Col. Edward D. Townsend, the army’s assistant adjutant general, issued General Order no. 60, stating that “all military records, such as files of public letters, letter books, order books, and other record books, muster-rolls, &c., are the property of the United States, and will be required for future reference in the settlement of claims against the Government and for other official purposes.” Townsend directed Union officers to “collect and forward to this office any papers left behind by the rebels which may be of public use or interest” and reminded soldiers who had already been discharged to turn in records they may have taken home.8

In the first few days of Union occupation, the work of collecting papers advanced slowly, as Federal troops in the field had more pressing concerns. Then came the assas-

1890s and the Establishment of America’s First Five Military Parks (Knoxville, 2008); Michele A. Krowl, “‘In the Spirit of Fraternity’: The United States Government and the Burial of Confederate Dead at Arlington National Cemetery, 1864–1914,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 111 (no. 2, 2003), 151–86. Caroline E. Janney, Remem-bering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2013); John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence, 2005); Robert Hunt, The Good Men Who Won the War: Army of the Cumberland Veterans and Emancipation Memory (Tuscaloosa, 2010); Barbara Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill, 2011); Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, Mass., 2011).

8 Edwin M. Stanton to Charles E. Dana, April 5, 1865 (microfilm: reel 9), Edwin McMaster Stanton Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.); Dana to Stanton, April 6, 1865, ibid.; “General Orders No. 60,” April 7, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, by War Department, ser. 3, IV, pt. I, 1258–59.



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sination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14. Shocked and enraged, northerners largely assumed that the Confederate government had been part of the conspiracy and that additional plots might be underway. The search for Confederate paperwork suddenly became a critically important task. Maj. Gen. Henry W. Halleck appointed Col. Rich-ard D. Cutts as keeper of the public archives and ordered rooms in the customshouse in Richmond cleared for storage of captured papers. Cutts soon began sending to Wash-ington box after box of correspondence, orders, accounts, statutes, reports, and all other manner of official records. Despite the wealth of paperwork in his charge, Cutts warned his superiors that he was sending mostly debris because the truly valuable material had been carried off before the evacuation of Richmond and most of what had been left behind was destroyed by fire or plundered by relic hunters. Regardless, on May 11, Halleck, now in command of the forces in Richmond, expressed hope that among the documents “may be found . . . much evidence in regard to plots of assassination, incen-diarism, treason, &c.” Two days later Gen. John M. Schofield discovered the records of the Confederate War Department hidden in Charlotte, North Carolina. Under orders to send the papers “immediately for use in the present trials” (against Confederate of-ficials for complicity in the assassination of Lincoln and for other treasonous acts) and to “preserve every paper, however unimportant it may appear,” Schofield sent to Wash-ington eighty-one boxes, weighing ten tons. Some of Jefferson Davis’s papers, scattered

The fall of Richmond, Virginia, in April 1865 scattered Confederate records. Some were removed by the evacuating Southern government, while others were damaged or stolen. Union officials hoped they would be able to secure some of these documents during the occupation of the former Confederate capital. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, lot 11486-A, no. 9.



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along the Confederate government’s escape route, were also captured and shipped to the capital.9

By late June, the federal government had become the custodian of several hundred boxes, barrels, mailbags and hogsheads of Confederate papers sent from all over the South. The challenge was to sort through them as quickly as possible and find incriminat-ing evidence against Confederate officials who were going to be put on trial. On July 21 the War Department officially established a bureau for the “collection, safe keeping, and publication of the Rebel Archives that have come into possession of this government.” Al-most unintentionally, a national archive for the moribund Confederate States of America had been established in the capital of the United States.10

Stanton appointed as chief of the new bureau the highly regarded Francis Lieber, a Columbia Law School professor famous for authoring the Union army’s code of conduct known as General Order no. 100. Lieber and his clerical staff embarked on the mammoth task of sorting through hundreds of thousands of documents and finding the smoking guns that would support the federal government’s legal cases against the leaders of the re-bellion. The regulations for the Archive Office, issued on August 23, revealed the delicate nature of its task: “The business of the office will be strictly confidential”; an armed guard would watch over the building day and night, and written permission from the Secretary of War would be required to enter the rooms, receive access to documents, or convey any information about the progress of the work being performed.11

Those precautions turned out to be somewhat superfluous, as the Archive Office yield-ed virtually no incriminating evidence against the Confederate leadership. “Entre nous, very little of any special importance has been found,” confided Lieber in a letter to Hal-leck on September 10. In his official reports to Stanton and the House Judiciary Commit-tee, Lieber assured them that he was retaining every shred of evidence he could find, but that did not amount to very much—only “possible assassination plots, and oblique, often unspecified threats to hurt the Federal govt. etc.” In the end, the Archive Office never ful-filled its mission of providing substantive material for criminal trials.12

Although the Rebel Archives Bureau was founded first and foremost as a legal tool, that was never the only justification for its existence. From the beginning, Stanton, Halleck, Li-

9 “General Orders No. 3,” April 25, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, by War Department, ser. 1, XLVI, pt. III, 944; Richard D. Cutts to Dana, May 4, 1865, box 2, Letters Received, Records of the Archives Office, rg 109 (National Archives, Washington). Inventories of Confederate records sent from Richmond by Richard D. Cutts are in Cutts to Dana, May 2, May 3, May 4, May 5, May 10, May 12, May 13, May 20, 1865, ibid. Henry W. Halleck to John M. Schofield, May 16, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, by War Department, ser. 1, XLVII, pt. III, 510–11; Halleck to Stanton, May 11, 1865, ibid., ser. 1, XLVI, pt. III, 1132; Schofield to War Department, May 17, 1865, box 3, entry 438, Letters Received, Records of the Archives Office; Stanton to Israel Vodges, June 30, 1865 (microfilm: reel 10), Stanton Papers.

10 U.S. Department of War, “General Orders no. 127,” July 21, 1865, box 1, entry 441, Orders and Regulations of the Archive Office, Records of the Archive Office. The regulations for the Archives Bureau, published on August 23, 1865, changed the name to Archive Office of the War Department. Yet the name Rebel Archives stuck and continued to appear for many years in both official and unofficial documents, including, most prominently, in the official stamp of the office, which was imprinted on all of its documents. This article will therefore use both terms to describe this government agency. “Regulations for the Archive Office of the War Department,” Aug. 23, 1865, ibid.

11 Regulations for the Archive Office of the War Department, Aug. 23, 1865, box 1, entry 441, Orders and Regulations of Archives Office, Records of the Archive Office. On the Archive Office during Francis Lieber’s time, see Dallas D. Irvine, “The Archive Office of the War Department: Repository of Captured Confederate Archives, 1865–1881,” Military Affairs, 10 (Spring 1946), 93–111; Carl L. Lokke, “The Captured Confederate Archives un-der Francis Lieber,” American Archivist, 9 (Oct. 1946), 277–319; and Henry Putney Beers, Guide to the Archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America (Washington, 1968).

12 Francis Lieber to Halleck, Sept. 10, 1865, box 28, Francis Lieber Papers (Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.); Francis Lieber, “Report to the Judiciary Committee,” May 4, 1866 (microfilm: reel 11), Stanton Papers.



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eber, and other Union officials were also thinking of the Archive Office as a repository for the history of the war. In his May 11, 1865, dispatch to Stanton, where he expressed hope that some valuable papers could be salvaged from the wreckage, Halleck added, “at any rate, they will prove of great value to those who may hereafter write the history of this great rebellion.” Lieber was of the same mind-set. As he toiled in the hot rooms of the archive, poring over mounds of papers covered in Richmond street dirt, the historical significance of the work he was doing was never far from his mind. He assumed that the archives would eventually be open “for proper use by the student of history” and urged the government to publish the most important records, which were “of great value for the formation of a correct opinion on the struggle for the integrity of our country, the national character of our government and the extinction of disintegrating State sovereignty, as well as slavery.” Having given up on locating innumerable records lost in the war, he sought to complete

Francis Lieber, shown here, was a professor of history and political science at Columbia Uni-versity. He wrote General Order no. 100, “Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field,” during the American Civil War and was instrumental in gathering and preserving wartime documents. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, LC-BH82-4591 C.



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the archive’s holdings with state records, newspapers, and congressional publications. The organization of the records was done “with a view to their classification for reference and publication,” including abstracting, indexing, and cross-referencing between different col-lections. He welcomed the possibility of receiving the wartime papers of the Union army as well and transforming the archive into a “General American War Archives.”13

Lieber’s acute awareness of the archive’s importance as a central repository for the his-tory of the war grew in part from his anxiety regarding Reconstruction’s tumultuous poli-tics. During his two-year term as chief of the Archive Office, he watched in dismay as the conciliatory policies of President Andrew Johnson breathed new life into the defeated South and endangered the hard-won achievements of the Union war effort. “Our affairs here are not in as good a condition as they should be after such a great victory,” he wrote a German friend in March 1866. With Halleck, he took the liberty of being more blunt: “Things in general stand badly, and the rebels have again their heads up like killing snakes. Johnson has revived them.” He was particularly frustrated by the prohibition to publish records that revealed the Confederacy’s moral depravity, and he worried that the entire project of the Rebel Archives would soon be quashed. “Between ourselves,” he wrote the radical Republican senator Charles Sumner, “I expect a complete suppression of the Ar-chive Office and destruction of the archives, if a pro-Southern secretary of war comes in.”

In an official report to Stanton written in January 1866, he warned the secretary that “too great precautions cannot be taken for the preservation of records which are of the last im-portance to the faithful history of this rebellion.”14

In the end, what Lieber feared did not come to pass. The archives of Confederate cul-pability would be neither destroyed nor hidden from the public. Instead, they would un-dergo a remarkable transformation and become official records, printed and bound in a nonpartisan compilation the federal government published to wide acclaim. Ironically, the emerging reconciliationist sentiments that Lieber feared eventually aided in preserv-ing and disseminating the written record of the rebellion. Even more remarkably, these same records would precipitate the evolution of a full-blown culture of reunion.

On June 23, 1874, Congress appropriated $15,000 “to enable the Secretary of War to begin the publication of the official records of the war of the rebellion, both of the Union and of the Confederate armies.” It was not the first time lawmakers in Washington dis-cussed making public the documentary record of the Civil War. As early as April 1864, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, introduced a joint resolution requiring the secretary of war to print all reports, dispatches, and telegrams “relating to the movements, engagements, and operations gen-erally, of the armies of the United States.” Wilson was acting on a request by Halleck, the army’s chief of staff and master bureaucrat, who was struggling to keep up with the vast piles of paperwork generated by the Union’s massive war machine. Work on the compi-lation began immediately under the supervision of Townsend, then the army’s assistant

13 Halleck to Stanton, May 11, 1865, in War of the Rebellion, by War Department, ser. I, XLVI, pt. III, 1132. Lieber to Lorenzo U. Whitney, Oct. 27, 1865, book 1, entry 435, Letters Sent, Records of the Archive Office; “Re-port of Francis Lieber, Chief of Archive Office,” Jan. 18, 1866, folder 1, box 1, entry 436, Records of the Archive Office. Unsigned, undated memorandum, box 1, entry 438, Letters Received, ibid.; Lieber to Halleck, Sept. 10, 1865, box 28, Lieber Papers.

14 Lieber to Carl J. A. Mittermaier, March 1, 1866, box 38, Lieber Papers; Lieber to Halleck, May 19, March 20, 1866, box 28, ibid. Lieber to Charles Sumner, undated, box 47, ibid.; “Report of Francis Lieber.”



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adjutant-general. By next summer, Townsend had prepared eight volumes, but they were a far cry from the original plan. The collection consisted solely of the official reports submitted by the army’s commanding officers and excluded all other material. When the Public Printer received the volumes he refused to print them.15

With the end of the war in April 1865 the project had ceased to be a pressing mat-ter for the military, but Congress took up the issue again in 1866. By then, the context and meaning of publishing a documentary record of the Civil War had changed entirely. While easily accessible records of battles and campaigns were still useful as instructional and organizational resources, other considerations were now in play. In the intervening period the Civil War had transmuted from present into past; the Union army’s opera-tions were no longer an urgent challenge requiring careful management through written records, but a glorious history in need of a reliable and permanent account. Furthermore, in 1866 the government also had Confederate records, stored in the Archive Office. With memories of the conflict still fresh and relations with the South as strained as they had ever been, Congress approached the question of how to deal with the mammoth collec-tion of documents from the war.

Congress had already been energetically involved for decades in publishing documen-tary collections. Yet in the past, it merely sponsored publication projects undertaken by commercial printers. With the opening of the Government Printing Office in 1861, Con-gress was finally free to control the process and determine the shape and scope of the col-lection commemorating the war. This was a major shift. As Oz Frankel has argued in his study of British and American state-sponsored publications, in both countries the move by the legislature from supporting private documentary projects to assuming a new role of publisher manifested the nation-state’s coming of age.16

Another difference from previous printing ventures was the volume of records in-volved. The great national crisis of the 1861–1865 period famously created mass armies of citizen-soldiers, but it also created mass bureaucracies of citizen-clerks. The material already received by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Printing, congressmen were told, was “so vast, and in part of such doubtful historical value” that it was necessary to rethink the whole matter. Wilson, once again the driving force behind the legislation, em-phasized that the work needed to be well edited if it were “to be of real historical value” and “to be any credit to the country.” He called for the appointment of “some competent person of ability and literary experience familiar with such work” and suggested the ma-terial be organized not simply chronologically but in a way that would enable easy refer-ence. “It would seem reasonable that whatever concerned one portion of the country or one army—General Sherman’s army, for instance, in its movements and marches, all the public papers and telegraphic dispatches and reports in regard to it—should all go to-gether because they illustrate each other.”17

In stark contrast to the 1864 discussion, which was brief and technical, the 1866 de-bate revealed that the burden of history was clearly on the senators’ minds. They consid-ered possible schemes and probable costs, questioning whether such a great undertaking

15 Government Printing Office, Statutes at Large, 43 Cong., 1 sess., June 23, 1874, vol. 18, pt. 3, p. 222. Con-gressional Globe, 38 Cong., 1 sess., April 21, 1864, p. 1771. Aimone and Aimone, User’s Guide to the Official Records, 2; Elihu Root, “Preface,” War of the Rebellion, by War Department, ser. 4, IV, vi; Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 1

sess., May 24, 1866, p. 2804.16 For a list of collections published to commemorate the revolutionary era, see Tamarkin, Anglophilia, 87–89.

Frankel, States of Inquiry, 29.17 Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 1 sess., May 24, 1866, pp. 2804–5.



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was even feasible and whether any of them would live to see it brought to completion. They debated how the material should be organized, who should serve as compiler, and what editorial methods should be used. While some senators were deeply hesitant to ap-prove such an expensive and unwieldy project, the chamber agreed to repeal the 1864 resolution so Townsend’s substandard work would not be published. The Senate then sent the entire matter back to committee where a new plan could be devised.18

The discussion also touched on whether Confederate records should be published too. Wilson started out by saying that the collection should comprise “an authentic record of the deeds of the loyal armies, and find its way as such into every library at home and abroad, and mold the judgment of history.” Yet as senators delved into the intricacies of the archival process, the debate shifted course. When Republican senator William P. Fes-senden of Maine brought up the matter of the Confederate records, the question at hand was not the glorification of the Union but the compilation of a comprehensive history of the war. Both Fessenden and fellow Republican senator Henry B. Anthony, a former journalist who had served twice as chairman of the Committee on Public Printing, were strongly in favor of the more complete approach. Fessenden stipulated that Confederate and Union records “on the same subjects ought to be printed in juxtaposition, so that the whole subject-matter might be seen.” Republican senators, otherwise immersed in the po-litical battles of Reconstruction, considered the publication of Confederate records from an archival point of view. If the purpose of a long and costly publication project was first and foremost to offer a credible history of the war, both sides needed to be represented. Curiously, even Wilson, who evidently saw the collection as a way to commemorate the Northern war effort, ended up concurring that Confederate records should be part of the compilation.19

Despite the interest senators showed in the project, and perhaps because they now had a grasp of its actual scale, Congress did not appropriate funding for compilation of the war records in 1866. The matter remained stalled, and requests by Secretary of War Wil-liam W. Belknap for money for the project fell on deaf ears. Finally, in June 1874, the House of Representatives appropriated for the work a modest $15,000 in an amendment to a sundry civil expenses bill. The decision to appropriate money seems to have resulted from a combination of forces: pressure from veteran groups, the interest of politicians such as Belknap and Ohio representative James A. Garfield, both of whom had served as Union army officers, and a palpable sense that the passage of time was endangering the invaluable records slowly decaying in government buildings. The war still felt close enough to evoke powerful emotions in 1874, yet it was also far enough away that it was starting to recede into memory. In the House debate that led to the appropriation, Rep-resentative John Coburn of Indiana, another Civil War veteran, warned that the records “are now in buildings where they are liable any day to be destroyed by fire or other acci-dent; they are liable to be abstracted or lost; and thus a most important part of the history of the country may at any time, for want of proper protection of these records, be utterly annihilated.” Once again, the logic of the archive exerted itself on decision makers. This time, however, early signs of sectional détente began to appear. “Everybody in the land,” continued Coburn, “whether he may have been engaged on one side or the other in the late rebellion, every lover of his country, every one who delights in the preservation of its

18 Ibid., 2807.19 Ibid., 2804, 2806.



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history, is interested in this matter.” Despite the conciliatory spirit behind those remarks, the legislation fixed the title of the collection as “the official records of the war of the re-bellion.” Rebellion was the word used in the North to describe the war in the South while it was still going on. In the linguistic culture of the era, the term was highly charged and unabashedly partisan. No debate took place on what to call the collection—the word re-bellion was the natural choice in a majority-Republican Congress still preoccupied with the aftermath of the war. While $15,000 was a miniscule sum for a project of this scope, it was large enough to launch a series of profound and unintended consequences.20

In the wake of the appropriations bill, the War Department established a new unit to manage the work, first named Publications Office, then War Records, and later War Records Office (wro). Though it was impossible to exclude Adjutant-General Townsend altogether, Belknap transferred authority for much of the work to his senior clerks, who were busy, but at least more interested in the task. As new compilers tried to imagine what a genuine documentary history of the war would look like, one thing became clear: creating a truly useful collection would entail not only arranging and editing the papers already in possession of the government but also seeking out myriad documents without which the historical record would not be complete. Despite the abundance of paperwork in the War Department’s archives, the compilers were in fact confronted with scarcity.21

The greatest challenge was the disparity in size between the government’s Federal and Confederate holdings. If the collection was intended to present both sides of the con-flict, the space allocated to each needed to be, if not identical, at least similar. The War Department was aware that the solution lay in the stockpiles of Confederate documents scattered around the South, in the homes of individuals, and in the archives of private societies. Nominally, these records were the property of the federal government, yet that did not mean very much in practice. As Belknap acknowledged in his annual report to Congress in 1875, “it seems impossible to obtain the information necessary to their recovery through the courts, or otherwise than by purchase.” As no appropriation for the mass purchase of records had been made, the only option was to negotiate with ex- Confederates to give or loan their private papers to the government that had been their sworn enemy for four long years.22

The task of cajoling southerners into handing over their records was further compli-cated by the notoriously rancorous relations between former rebels and the War Depart-ment. For years, ex-Confederates had tried, usually unsuccessfully, to gain access to the

20 U.S. War Department, Annual Report of the Secretary of War (Washington, 1870), vol. 1, xv; Statutes at Large, 43 Cong., 1 sess., p. 222. On the pressure to publish the records, see J. N. Larned, ed., The Literature of American History (Boston, 1902), 214; Irvine, “Genesis of the Official Records,” 225; Aimone and Aimone, User’s Guide to the Official Records, 2; Mahan, “Arsenal of History,” 10. While the few scholars who have written about the history of The War of the Rebellion agree that veteran groups played a leading role in lobbying for congressional action, none offer solid evidence for these efforts. Congressional Record, 43 Cong., 1 sess., June 12, 1874, p. 4931. John M. Coski, “The War between the Names,” North and South, 8 (Jan. 2006), 67.

21 Belknap to H. T. Crosby, March 3, 1875, book 1, entry 707, Letters Sent 1875–94, Records of the War Records Office of the War Department, rg 94 (National Archives); Belknap to Edward D. Townsend, Sept. 15, 1875, ibid.

22 U.S. War Department, Report of the Secretary of War; Being Part of the Message and Documents Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the First Session of the Forty-Fourth Congress, vol. 1 (Washington, 1875), 26.



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documents kept in the Archive Office. Non–staff members were generally barred from the office, and applicants who wanted a search conducted by the clerical staff needed both connections and luck. Beyond a habit of secrecy and a lingering animosity toward the South, the Rebel Archives had become a crucial resource for the federal government, its only shield against thousands of claims filed by southerners during the 1870s. As a result, most applications for papers from the archives were refused. The state of Virginia asked in 1869 for its executive journals from the war era but was denied as the books were “of great historical interest” and formed “one of the most valuable links” for understanding the conduct of the Old Dominion during the war. When the wartime Virginia governor John Letcher applied individually for his private papers in 1877, even a recommendation by Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson was of no help. Referring to Letcher’s re-quest, the chief clerk of the War Department cited the immense workload in the Archive Office but also admitted that “compliance with such requests in a measure impairs the advantage of the Government of possessing the Rebel Archives.”23

23 Bezalel Wells to Townsend, June 24, 1869, box 2, entry 438, Letters Received, Records of the Archive Office; Crosby to R. W. Thompson, Aug. 16, 1877, ibid.

A Union general and later secretary of war, William W. Belknap, pictured here (ca. 1861–1865), reached out to ex-Confederates after the Civil War to obtain missing wartime documents. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Online Cata-log, LC-BH82-1556 A.



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The unavailability of the Confederate records was a source of immense frustration for southerners devoted to studying and commemorating the history of the Civil War. This group, however, was by no means the majority of ex-Confederates. In the years immedi-ately following the war, southern whites were preoccupied with rebuilding their lives in a radically altered social, political, and economic environment. While memorial activities for Confederate dead began during the war and continued in its aftermath, most men and women involved in the Confederate war effort were eager to set aside the trauma of defeat and move on. Nevertheless, amid what sometimes seemed like willful forgetful-ness, a few stepped forward as professional gatekeepers of the Confederate past. A group of former officers in 1869 founded the Southern Historical Society (shs), an organization dedicated to the preservation and propagation of the Confederate version of the war. The society began collecting documents for what was essentially a competing enterprise to the Archive Office, and in 1876 the shs launched its own publication project, The Southern Historical Society Papers.24

While often struggling financially and with little popular following, the Southern His-torical Society aspired to gain ownership of the Confederate historical record. That a great store of papers was hidden away in Washington infuriated the shs’s zealous executives, and they were deeply suspicious of the use the Archive Office was making of the records. The Southern Historical Society Papers recounted how Robert E. Lee “tried in vain to get access to his own battle reports and field returns” and how the “Executive Department of the State of Virginia has been rudely refused to see or to have copied its own records.” The Rebel Archives were both a source of constant humiliation and an impediment to the southern attempt to vindicate the Confederacy through the writing of history.25

This new momentum for the publication project upset the balance of power between the Archive Office in Washington and the Southern Historical Society in Richmond. Belknap appointed one of his senior clerks, William T. Barnard, to examine the Rebel Ar-chives and issued an official order mandating parity of Federal and Confederate records in the volumes under preparation. On August 17, 1875, Belknap’s chief clerk conveyed the secretary’s “wish that the rebel archives should be prepared for publication under the act of June 23, 1874, pari-passu, with the Federal records now being prepared for publi-cation.”26

Belknap followed up on his order with a letter in early 1876 to the Southern Histori-cal Society, quoted in the New York Times. He expressed his desire “to secure every offi-cial report, letter, telegram, or order emanating from either side during the late war” and promised that he had “no thought whatever of discriminating in favor of one section as against another in their publication.” The shs was not impressed. The society’s indefati-gable secretary, J. William Jones, thanked Belknap and spoke of a “general disposition” to aid the government in the publication project, as there had been “a wide-spread fear at the South that few of the captured Confederate records would ever see the light, and a gen-eral feeling that their suppression, and a refusal to give access to them, would be a great

24 On the Southern Historical Society, see Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York, 1987), 47–62; Blight, Race and Reunion, 261–67; Rich-ard D. Starnes, “Forever Faithful: The Southern Historical Society and Confederate Historical Memory,” Southern Cultures, 2 (Winter 1996), 177–94.

25 Southern Historical Society, Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. V: January to June (Richmond, 1878), 255. Emphasis in original.

26 Belknap to Townsend, Sept. 15, 1875, book 1, entry 707, Letters Sent 1875–94, Records of the War Records Office; Crosby to Townsend, Nov. 17, 1875, Aug. 17, 1875, ibid.



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wrong to the cause of justice and truth.” However, Jones offered the society’s cooperation only on the condition of reciprocity. “We will have furnished you properly authenticated copies of such as are in our possession, and will assist you in procuring others—it being understood, of course, that your department will afford us similar facilities in the prosecu-tion of our work.” Neither the written exchanges nor a face-to-face meeting with Barnard effected a change. The shs refused to open its files to the War Department unless the gov-ernment allowed the society access to the documents in the Rebel Archives.27

In January 1877 Barnard approached the shs again. By then, Belknap was replaced as secretary of war by Donald J. Cameron and pressure to obtain Confederate papers was mounting. Barnard had no choice but to offer the society something in return. He assured Jones that they both shared the desire “to make this work as national and unpartisan as it can be made” and proposed to send the shs the volumes printed by the War Department once they were submitted to Congress, but before they were officially published. “This con-cession has never before been made or proposed by the department and I trust you will unite with me in securing its acceptance,” Barnard wrote. His prediction was overly opti-mistic. When Jones replied the next month, he reassured Barnard that the shs was indeed anxious that the publication of Confederate documents “shall be as full and accurate as possible,” yet, he continued, “at the same time we feel that our society should receive some equivalent benefit for what we may be able to furnish the department.” At this point, Bar-nard was losing patience. In his response, he reminded Jones that the object of the shs was the “dissemination of the knowledge, contained in its archives among the people,” which is why the War Department approached him in the first place. The letter ended with a lengthy admonishment, which deserves to be quoted in full. The War Department, Barnard wrote

of course as an official matter, would not feel called upon to publish anything be-yond what its files contained, or go beyond them, in seeking for official material, but, as its representative in the matter, I am solicitous that the motives and actions of neither side should remain in doubt or be misconstrued, because of the absence in an official governmental history, published to the world as an authentic record of records that are still in existence and are accessible. If your society does not practi-cally unite in this desire, it would be a source of personal regret, but not a matter of concern to the Department, whose rules have been stretched to the utmost in allowing me to make the proposition now before your society.

Jones and the shs executive committee remained unmoved. On April 16 they confirmed their position “of not allowing access to our archives by the War Department unless they agree to reciprocate” and called on members of Congress “to oppose appropriations towards collecting and printing the records unless the Southern Historical Society is granted access to them.”28

Three months later Barnard quit his job as compiler. While no agreement was reached during his tenure, his exchanges with the shs show the distance traveled by the War De-partment since the passage of the July 1874 appropriations bill. The huge gaps in the Rebel Archives compelled politicians and bureaucrats to negotiate with die-hard defend-

27 “The Confederate Records,” New York Times, Feb. 7, 1876, p. 2; J. William Jones to Belknap, Feb. 3, 1876, box 1, entry 710, Letters Received, Records of the War Records Office.

28 William T. Barnard to J. William Jones, Jan. 26, 1877, box 311, Robert Alonzo Brock Collection (Hunting-ton Library); Jones to Barnard, Feb. 14, 1877, box 8, Southern Historical Society Papers, Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Archives (Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va.). Barnard to Jones, Feb. 23, 1877, ibid.; Southern Historical Society Minute Books, book 2, p. 5, ibid.



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ers of the Confederate past and coax them into giving their papers by promising that the OR would offer an entirely balanced narrative of the war. The changing mood in the country, manifest in both the victory of the Democratic party in the midterm elections of 1874 and in the compromise of 1877, no doubt played a role, but so did the need to obtain Confederate paperwork. All of these factors put the government in the unpleasant position of having to beg and eventually induced it to commit to an entirely impartial publication.29

After Barnard’s departure in May 1877, Thomas J. Saunders, another clerk in the War Department, took his place as superintendent of the OR. Saunders served for only a few months and the paper trail he left is uniquely thin. Yet, curiously, right before he resigned on December 8, the Southern Historical Society produced a document that revealed that the shs’s relationship with the War Department continued to evolve during the second half of 1877. On December 6, the executive committee of the society unanimously ad-opted a “memorial to Congress to vote ample appropriations to the War Records office in view of the pleasant relations now established between that office and our society.” Whatever had been agreed upon between the two sides during Saunders’s brief term, the compilation process was slowly bringing the society and the War Department closer to-gether.30

Despite the renewed interest of the War Department in the publication project and ad-ditional congressional appropriations totaling $125,000, work on the OR was still mov-ing forward only haphazardly by the end of 1877. After Saunders’s resignation, Secretary of War George W. McCrary appointed Robert N. Scott, who would be in charge of the project and have no other duties in the War Department. Scott was a lawyer and career officer in the army who had filled a range of administrative positions and was well ac-quainted with Civil War paperwork. Yet he was an interesting choice for another reason. Born in Tennessee and raised in Louisiana, Scott was arrested at the beginning of the Civil War for voicing pro-Southern opinions in public. Yet after that incident he served the Union honorably and was a close aide to Halleck both during and after the war. Having applied repeatedly for administrative positions in Washington, he embraced the opportunity to serve as chief of the War Records Office and embarked on the work of compilation with an exacting method and tremendous zeal.31

While previous compilers had assembled and organized a considerable quantity of papers, only under Scott did work on a publishable collection get underway. He revolu-tionized the work in the War Records Office by creating the system that had been lack-ing for so long and by structuring the volumes so they would be convenient for histori-cal reference. He set clear and consistent standards for which types of documents would be included and which would not, and decided that the volumes would be divided into

29 On William Barnard quitting, see George M. McCray to the Chiefs of Bureau of the War Department, June 16, 1877, box 3, entry 438, Letters Received, Records of the Archives Office. On the changing mood of the nation, the 1874 elections, and the 1877 compromise, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988); Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, 2007); and William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Baton Rouge, 1982).

30 Thomas J. Saunders to Secretary of War, Dec. 8, 1877, book 1, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office; Southern Historical Society Minute Books, book 2, p. 15, Southern Historical Society Papers.

31 Mahan, “Arsenal of History,” 10–12. For Robert N. Scott’s complete record of service in the U.S. Army, see file 330 acp 1872, rg 94 (National Archives).



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four series. He made the critical decision that all documents pertaining to a particular event would be arranged together, and that events would be grouped according to the campaigns of which they were a part. Scott was neither an archivist nor a historian, but his instincts led him in directions that largely followed common practices of nineteenth- century archival work. His absolute commitment to publishing only official sources aligned with the prevailing concept of the archive as an institution devoted exclusively to the preservation of state papers. While the initial mandate to publish a compilation of public documents was set by Congress, Scott was the one who enforced it diligently and fought against attempts by senior officers to insert into the compilation memoirs or un-official papers. Like other bureaucrats working in budding national archives around the world, Scott was deeply committed to the primacy of the state as a source of authoritative knowledge.32

Yet the most fateful decision Scott made regarding the OR was abolishing the sepa-ration between Federal and Confederate records. “By all means,” he wrote the secretary of war in his first report, “the Union and Confederate accounts of any event should be given in the same volume. This, to my mind, is a matter of vital importance to the na-tional welfare.” Integrating the Federal and Confederate records reflected Scott’s intu-ition as compiler as well as his inclination toward sectional reconciliation. Having both versions of the story side by side answered the need for a comprehensive narrative of the war, while granting all perspectives an equal hearing. In Scott’s new organizational scheme, the political and historical functions of the archive merged. The print archive he was constructing would embody, in form and in spirit, the ideal of a reconciled United States.33

Before he could turn to arrangement, however, Scott needed to obtain the records he wanted to publish. Gathering the documents from the Union side was relatively simple because they were either stored in the War Department or easily obtainable from officers who had taken them home. The real challenge was closing the gaping holes in the Rebel Archives, and, as a collector of records, Scott had a transformative impact on the govern-ment’s Confederate holdings. On July 1, 1878, the War Department took another un-precedented step by hiring a former Confederate general, Marcus J. Wright, as its agent for the collection of Confederate records. In many ways, Wright was the architect of his own appointment. Struggling to make ends meet in Tennessee, he identified an opportu-nity in the government’s interest in collecting Confederate records after 1874. He struck up a correspondence with the War Department in 1875, offering papers for sale and volunteering to collect additional records in the South. He remained in touch with the department in 1876 about papers in possession of a woman in Tennessee and impressed Secretary Belknap with the “service” he had “rendered the department and the generous spirit in which it has been done.” At a time when the compilation process had been mov-ing helter-skelter and the stores of documents kept by taciturn southerners seemed all but out of reach, Wright stood out as a forthcoming and cheerful collaborator. Within a

32 On Scott’s strategy for organizing the volumes and on what types of documents would be included, see Robert N. Scott to Secretary of War, Jan. 26, 1878, book 1, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office; Scott, Report to Secretary of War, Sept. 30, 1878, book 1, entry 708, ibid.; Scott to Secretary of War, Sept. 1, 1879, book 2, entry 708, ibid.; Scott to Secretary of War, Sept. 30, 1880, book 2, entry 707, ibid. On common practices of nineteenth-century archival work, see Moore, Restoring Order; Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past; Cook, “What Past Is Prologue”; and Horsman, Ketelaar, and Thomassen, “New Respect for the Old Order.”

33 Scott to the Secretary of War, Sept. 30, 1878, book 1, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office.



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few months of Scott’s appointment in 1878, with help from Tennessee congressman H. Casey Young, he was rewarded with a salaried post as the War Department’s agent in the South.34

While the War Department had been in touch with individuals and societies in the South for a while, the arrival of Wright transformed the relationship between northern and southern record keepers. He began by contacting a range of senior ex-Confederates and their heirs, and published a circular letter in southern newspapers urging officers to send their papers to him. In just his first month he secured promises of documents from Jefferson Davis, Pierre Toussaint Beauregard, Stephen D. Lee, and from the widow of the southern extremist Nathan B. Forrest. Davis wrote that he was glad to hear of Wright’s appointment “for the sake of truth and courtesy” and pledged to send “any of the reports or records in our possession which may be wanted to complete your files.”35

Wright also contacted the Southern Historical Society, whose executives repeated their old demand for unrestricted copying privileges from the Rebel Archives in exchange for the society’s documents. This time the shs had an enthusiastic backer in Wright, who brought up the issue in his first report to Scott. Scott was reluctant at first, reminding the Secretary of War of the “unsatisfactory correspondence” his predecessors had with the shs and claiming that the War Department had actually allowed senior Confederates in the past “to get from the Union archives such data as has enabled them to wage a supplemen-tal war.” He was “averse to having any bargain made between the United States and any association of individuals, be they of Union or Confederate antecedents.”36

Regardless, Secretary of War McCrary said yes. On August 5 Scott formally authorized Wright “to inform the Southern Historical Society and like associations, that duly accred-ited agents from them will be allowed access to . . . consult and take copies from such records as are of purely historical value and not bearing upon claims against or in behalf of the United States.” J. William Jones, the shs secretary, celebrated his victory publicly, telling a newspaper on September 26 that the War Department’s “offer, made voluntarily and without condition, was all that we had ever asked, and was in the highest degree grati-fying to our committee.” In the wake of the agreement, Jones visited Washington and was allowed for the first time to set foot in the Archive Office.37

But Wright had other ideas too. After having cleared the way for shs, he requested that the Archive Office prepare for him copies of certain reports and correspondence of Con-federate generals. This was too much even for McCrary, who chastised Wright for having tried to obtain papers from the Archive Office without permission. “Wright’s employ-ment gives him no privilege in regard to the records of the War Dept., not enjoyed by any other person, but is confined specifically to collecting records from outside sources.” In

34 Quotation from Townsend to Marcus J. Wright, Sept. 18, 1875, book 3, entry 435, Letters Sent, Records of the Archive Office. See also Thomas M. Vincent to Wright, June 21, 1875, ibid.; Townsend to Wright, July 29, 1875, Aug. 13, 1875, Jan. 10, 1876, ibid.; Wright to Townsend, Jan. 19, 1877, box 4, entry 438, Letters Received, Records of the Archive Office. Wright to H. Casey Young, May 3, 1878, ibid.; Young to George W. McCrary, June 25, 1878, ibid.; McCrary to Wright, July 1, 1878, box 1, entry 445, Marcus J. Wright Papers, Records of the Ar-chive Office.

35 Wright to Scott, July 31, 1878, box 1, entry 445, Wright Papers, Records of the Archive Office; Jefferson Da-vis to Wright, July 18, 1878, box 2, Jefferson Davis Papers, Brockenbrough Archives.

36 Robert N. Scott, endorsement on copy of Wright to Scott, July 31, 1878, box 1, entry 445, Wright Papers, Records of the Archive Office.

37 Scott to Wright, Aug. 5, 1878, book 1, entry 708, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office. Emphasis in original. “The Confederate Archives and the Southern Historical Society,” undated newspaper clipping, box 1, entry 444, Records of the Archive Office.



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response, Wright wrote a long letter citing examples of ex-Confederates who had asked and received copies of their papers, and pointing to the difficulty of denying the “princi-pal actors in the events recorded” access to their own documents. “It places me in a deli-cate and unenviable position . . . to ask Confederate officers for their military books and papers to be placed in the archives of the dept. and then inform them that while historical societies and other persons are permitted to have copies they are excluded from this privi-lege.” Despite his initial opposition, McCrary succumbed and granted Wright permission to copy papers that would aid him in his work.38

The far-reaching concessions Wright won from his employers laid the foundation for the War Department’s extensive and successful operation of assembling Confederate rec-ords based on the now-accepted principle of reciprocal copying privileges. With a growing volume of Confederate papers being prepared for publication and the work moving faster than ever, the relationship between the War Department and ex-rebels deepened and be-came a full-blown collaboration. The War Records Office grew to depend on southerners to search for elusive documents and fill in what Scott called the “missing links” in the his-tory of the war. Beyond the mere furnishing of papers, the Confederacy’s leadership was instrumental in correcting, fact checking, and proofreading the documents that would make up the OR. Thus Joseph E. Johnston was asked to fill in words missing in one of his dispatches, and James Longstreet and John Pemberton were requested to decipher their own telegrams.39

Even more critical was the cooperation of Jubal A. Early, whom the historian Gaines M. Foster has called the “prototypical unreconstructed Rebel.” General Early served un-der Robert E. Lee and fled to Mexico after the war, believing he could not live under Union rule. Returning to Virginia in 1869, he quickly emerged as a central figure in the early efforts to establish and promulgate the southern narrative of the war, becoming president of the Southern Historical Society in 1873. Until his death in 1894 he waged a relentless campaign to uphold the reputations of Lee, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the Lost Cause. It was precisely that obsessive devotion to Confederate history that made him such a useful resource for the War Department. Wright, familiar with the central ac-tors in the South’s postbellum history wars, contacted Early soon after his appointment, sent him battle reports he had requested, and asked him to complete the War Depart-ment’s collection of his own papers.40

In August 1879 Early was approached by Edwin J. Harris, the first ex-Confederate clerk to serve in the War Records Office. Harris was hired to proofread and verify thou-sands of names, dates, and other details in Confederate paperwork. Even in 1879 the em-ployment of an ex-Confederate officer in such a sensitive position still required explana-

38 Townsend, endorsement, Aug. 17, 1878, on Wright to Davis, Aug. 15, 1878, box 2, entry 710, Letters Re-ceived, Records of the War Records Office; Wright to J. W. Kirkley, Aug. 23, 1878, ibid.; McCrary, endorsement, Aug. 24, 1878, on Wright to Kirkley, Aug. 23, 1878, ibid.

39 Scott to Secretary of War, Sept. 30, 1878, book 1, entry 708, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Of-fice; Scott to Jones, July 24, 1879, ibid.; Scott to Jos. E. Johnston, Sept. 25, 1879, book 2, entry 708, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office; Scott to J. C. Pemberton, Sept. 12, 1879, ibid.; Scott to General [James] Long-street, March 4, 1880, book 2, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office.

40 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 55. For widely disparate interpretations of Jubal A. Early’s role and influ-ence, see Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York, 1977); Thomas L. Connelly and Barbara L. Bellows, God and General Longstreet: The Lost Cause and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge, 1982); Gary W. Gallagher, Jubal A. Early, the Lost Cause, and Civil War History: A Persistent Legacy (Milwaukee, 1995); and Gary W. Gallagher, Lee and His Generals in War and Memory (Baton Rouge, 1998). Wright to Jubal Early, Nov. 22, 1878, box 10, Jubal Anderson Early Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress).



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tion. “The gentleman selected is specially qualified, and was vouched for by distinguished men of both great political parties,” Scott assured the secretary of war. Harris told Early that he was working on a “correct roster of General officers, senators, +c. for the Con-fed. States one that our people would recognize as satisfactory. Knowing your accuracy of statement and love of truth it occurred to me to write and ask your assistance in the mat-ter . . . I would gladly mail you these papers, if it would be agreeable to you to look on + correct them.” From then on the War Records Office regularly turned to Early for help examining and proofreading records and for hunting down absent papers. In exchange, Scott offered Early easy access to the Rebel Archives, often voluntarily. “Did you ever see the correspondence in relation to yourself between Gov. Smith and Genl. Lee transmitted by the return to the War Dept. October 14 1864?” he asked at the end of a routine letter searching for missing documents. “If you so desire I will send you copies.”41

A uniquely productive relationship also formed between the wro and Jefferson Da-vis, who was living on a Mississippi plantation and working on his own history of the Confederacy. In the celebratory introduction appended to the last volume of the OR in

41 Scott to Crosby, Aug. 9, 1879, book 2, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office; Scott to Secretary of War, Sept. 1, 1879, ibid. Edwin J. Harris to Early, Aug. 9, 1879, box 10, Early Papers; Scott to Early, Oct. 10, 1883, box 12, ibid. For the rest of the correspondence of Marcus J. Wright and Scott with Early, see ibid.

The Confederate general Jubal Early, shown here in a painting by John P. Walker, resisted reconciliation efforts but became an important assistant to the War Depart-ment in its work to publish Confederate records. Courtesy Virginia Historical Society.



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1901, Secretary of War Elihu Root thanked Davis profusely for his indispensible services to the federal compilers: “Jefferson Davis, during his lifetime, and his widow after his death, afforded the Government access to his papers relating to the late war, and from this source were obtained copies of archives of the greatest historical value.” To allay con-cerns regarding how Davis’s precious contributions were handled, Root assured readers that the department had employed ex-Confederate officers “to assist in the compilation of the Confederate archives, to represent the Confederate interests and to assure impar-tiality.” Root’s effusive expression of gratitude was not an empty gesture. The former Confederate president was called on time and again to furnish papers from his private collection, to decrypt dispatches, and to fill in missing words or numbers. “Is it asking too much to request that you furnish me with a list of such of your dispatches (letters or telegrams) to General Lee as you are willing to furnish for the compilation?” read a typi-cal letter from Scott in 1879. Scott repaid Davis by sending him back his private letters that had been in the government’s hands since 1865, by providing him with free copies of the published volumes, and, most crucially, by agreeing to withhold documents Davis did not want published.42

Though the War Records Office had developed personal connections with many se-nior ex-Confederates, the Southern Historical Society remained a vital source for both the collection and correction of Confederate documents. Within a few months of Wright’s appointment, shs secretary Jones was sending Scott gushing letters thanking him for the “uniform courtesy” and “many favors” the society was receiving from the wro. At the same time, Scott, who was deeply committed to both accuracy and thoroughness, was growing increasingly dependent on the services of Jones. Sending Jones a draft of the ros-ter of Confederate officers, Scott promised to “make it as full and complete as is possible” and asked “to that end, and all that you can do for us will be highly appreciated.” Copyists for the War Department were regularly stationed in Richmond, and the War Records Of-fice published for the society its catalog of Confederate papers. The society received first copies of unpublished volumes printed by the War Department, accompanied by requests “for information as to any errors that may be discovered in these preliminary prints, as of proper names, dates +c+c.” Jones bragged about the volumes to Early, pointing out that “these are the first copies that have been allowed to leave the department” but asked him to keep quiet “as it would probably raise a howl if known at the North.”43

By the early 1880s, when the first volumes of the OR appeared in print, the transforma-tion of ex-Confederates from bitter enemies to essential partners was complete. Naturally, the new relationship was also the product of a broader trend of sectional reconciliation, which had begun to gather steam in the late 1870s. But other manifestations of this cultural shift did not become prevalent until the mid-1880s: the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant, which Joan Waugh has identified as a “benchmark event for sectional reconciliation” took place in August 1885; Century magazine began publishing its reconciliationist War Series in 1884,

42 Root, “Preface,” xi. Scott to Davis, Sept. 12, Dec. 19, 1879, Jan. 8, 1880, Nov. 4, 1882, book 2, entry 707, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office. Scott to Secretary of War, May 11, 1880, ibid.; Scott to Davis, Nov. 24, Nov. 13, 1882, ibid.

43 Jones to Scott, Dec. 23, 1878, June 27, 1879, box 2, entry 710, Letters Received, Records of the War Rec-ords Office; Scott to Jones, Aug. 11, 1879, book 2, entry 707, Letters Sent, ibid.; Scott to Virginia E. Dade, April 22, 1879, book 1, entry 708, Letters Sent, ibid.; Minutes of Southern Historical Society Executive Committee, April 30, 1879, book 2, Minute Books, Southern Historical Society Papers; Scott to Jones, Dec. 18, 1878, book 1, entry 708, Letters Sent, Records of the War Records Office. Jones to Early, Dec. 28, 1878, box 10, Early Pa-pers.



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and reissued it as Battles and Leaders of the Civil War in 1887; battlefield preservation was at its peak in the 1890s; and blue-gray reunions did not begin before the mid-1880s.44

While only a few short years separate these classic expressions of sectional reconcili-ation from the compilation of the OR, this subtle chronological distinction is crucial. The shift began with attempts by Belknap and Barnard to reach out to the Southern His-torical Society in 1875 and culminated in McCrary’s and Scott’s enthusiastic incorpora-tion of ex-Confederates into every aspect of the compilation process in the 1878–1879 period. Thus it was not merely an elusive trend that shaped the relationship between former rebels and the War Department. The connection actually worked more signifi-cantly the other way around. The decision by Congress to publish a documentary history and the commitment of the War Records Office to a comprehensive and credible col-lection necessitated close collaboration with people in possession of the relevant papers from the Southern side, and, no less important, people with knowledge and expertise in

44 Waugh, U.S. Grant, 218; Blight, Race and Reunion, 173–76; Smith, Golden Age of Battlefield Preservation, 5. For a work that argues that the 1870s were a period of “mixed feelings,” during which sectional animosities coexisted with a nascent reconciliationist sentiment, see William Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill, 2004), 106–43.

Former Confederate president Jefferson Davis devoted much of his postbellum career to defending the Confederacy and reinforcing the Lost Cause. His correspondence and close working relationships with Confederate officers such as Jubal Early made him a useful figure for War Department officials who were trying to gather wartime records. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860–1985, 528293.



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Confederate history. The fact that these were the most unrepentant rebels, the same people whom Scott once described as waging a “supplemental war,” seemed to matter very little. While the OR did not begin as a nation-building project, it largely grew into one. Filling the gaps in the government’s archival holdings and converting manuscript material into publishable records united federal and ex-Confederate record keepers in a joint effort of collecting, arranging, and proofreading thousands of pages of text. This is not to suggest that southerners and northerners were eager to give up their long-held be-liefs. As Michael Kammen once noted, even into the twentieth century, “reconciliation continued to encounter its potent nemesis: spiteful vindictiveness.” This tension certainly underlay work on the OR. Each side had its own vested interests in the project, and ex-Confederates were first and foremost concerned with propagating their version of the facts. Yet that is precisely the point. Regardless of the different agendas of the compilers and record keepers, the making of the war’s authoritative print archive assumed a life of its own, playing an important and unrecognized role in the restoration of the Union af-ter the Civil War.45

While the work of compilation was significant in its own right, the unique place of the OR in American history was also a result of its wide circulation and enthusiastic recep-tion by historians of all stripes. Like other governmental publications in this period, the OR was initially distributed through Congress, whose members had developed a habit of sending out to their constituents large numbers of official documents for free. In 1882, as volumes began coming off the press, Congress ordered a ten thousand–copy printing of the compilation. One thousand copies were to be divided between departments of the executive branch and another thousand marked for distribution among army officers and contributors to the work. The rest would be parceled out to members of both chambers, with each senator receiving twenty-six copies and each representative receiving twenty-one, to be sent to “libraries, organizations, and individuals.” Subsequent Congresses fol-lowed suit, authorizing allocations of three additional copies to each new member of the House and Senate. Leftover volumes were sold to the public or transferred to successors of members who had not used their allotment.46

The distribution files of the War Records Office reveal the great geographical reach of the OR. On August 4, 1900, an ordinary day of business at the office, clerks sent out volumes to institutions as remote and diverse as the Aberdeen Public Library in South Dakota, the Gates Academy in Neligh, Nebraska, the Birmingham News in Alabama, and the Female Seminary Library in Washington, Pennsylvania. Among the individuals wait-ing for volumes were Professor J. W. Conger in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, Mrs. Martha B. Bohan in Los Angeles, California, and George Burns in Denmark, Mississippi. Free dis-tribution by congressional representatives ensured that the compilation traveled far and wide, reaching a readership broader than the patrons of wealthy libraries that could afford to pay for a large and expensive collection.47

45 Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 115. Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 vols., New York, 1888).

46 Frankel, States of Inquiry, 19. “Laws Relating to the Printing, Distribution and Sale of the Work,” box 1, en-try 720, Papers Relating to Distribution to Members of the 56th and 57th Congress, Records of the War Records Office.

47 Receipt, Aug. 4, 1900, Washington City Post Office Registry Division, box 1, entry 721, Reports on Financial Transactions as Regards Sales and Distribution, Records of the War Records Office.



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As Scott had predicted, the main users of the OR were writers of history. In 1939 the historian Douglas Southall Freeman estimated that “if it be true that the War be-tween 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.” Historians—northerners and southerners, amateurs and professionals—welcomed the compilation enthusiastically, often thanking the editors in their notes. James Ford Rhodes wrote in his influential multivolume History of the United States from the Com-promise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 that his “greatest obligation” for the Civil War portions was due to the government “for the unique publication” it had produced at great effort and expense. “Rarely has money for the behoof of history been better spent,” he added. Rhodes belonged to the nationalist school of scholarship, which divided blame for the Civil War and Reconstruction evenly and offered a ver-sion of American history that stressed unity and continuity. Bisectional and judgment free, the OR was ideal source material for historians writing in this vein, and the col-lection remained popular and equally formative in years to come. In 1938 Clarence E. Carter, an Illinois-born historian of the West and president of the Organization of American Historians, complimented the “courageous work” of Robert N. Scott: “By associating former confederate officers on the staff, Scott was able to procure essential records of the confederate army, and by his policy of excluding irrelevant matter, espe-cially non-contemporary materials, a work was produced which will never have to be redone.” Outside the South, the OR offered historians the documentary basis for narra-tives that gave both sides an equal voice and made battlefield drama the central interest of Civil War history. It enabled the comforting, reunionist histories that marginalized the importance of emancipation and generally ignored the role of African Americans. These would be the books Americans would read for the better part of the twentieth century.48

Among Southern-leaning writers, the shs led the way with an enthusiastic review in 1883 in its official publication: “We have so often expressed our opinion of the importance, and value of this work, so skilfully compiled under the able supervision of Colonel R. N. Scott (to whose courtesy we are indebted for continued favors) that we need add nothing now,” it read. “Colonel Scott and his assistants seem all to be not only very competent to the discharge of their duties, but fair in their treatment of Confederate as well as Federal reports and documents.” Responses by individual his-torians followed suit. Freeman, a staunchly pro-Confederate historian, noted in his The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (1939) that “the Official Records amazed the South by their impartiality. Except for the fact that the ugly word ‘Rebellion’ appeared on the books, the only fact to indicate they were issued by the victors was that the Union reports and correspondence always preceded the Confederate.” Writing in the 1950s, Shelby Foote referred to the OR as the “most useful” source he consulted for his three-volume, hugely popular, The Civil War: A Narrative, and praised the authentic feel of the documents, in which he “could hear the live men speak.” The OR, a federal publication with a national reach, gave histori-ans sympathetic to the Confederate cause both the source material they needed to tell

48 Douglas Southall Freeman, The South to Posterity: An Introduction to the Writing of Confederate History (New York, 1939), 94–95; James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the McKinley-Bryan Campaign of 1896 (8 vols., New York, 1920), VI, 111n1. Carter, “United States and Documentary Histori-cal Publication,” 16.



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their side of the story and the confidence that the country was ready to listen to what they had to say.49

“Every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation of a record, by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of that record,” wrote the influential archival thinker Eric Ketelaar in 2010. “Each activation attributes to the archive’s infinite meaning. All these activations are acts of co-creatorship that participate in determining the record’s meaning.” This was certainly true for Confederate records in the aftermath of the Civil War. Each time the records moved from one office to another, from the hands of one record keeper to the next, their meaning changed and their impact was recalibrated. First intended as a tool of retribution, they ended up as a vehicle of reconciliation, a testament not so much to the horrors of civil war as to the nation’s ability to leave that war behind. Much more than a repository of old papers, the federal war archive was instrumental to America’s recovery from sectional conflict and its emergence as a reunited nation-state.50

49 Southern Historical Society, Southern Historical Society Papers, vol. XI: January to December, 1883 (Richmond, 1883), 575; Freeman, South to Posterity, 93; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, vol. I: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York, 1958), 813.

50 Eric Ketelaar, “Records Out and Archives In: Early Modern Cities as Creators of Records and as Communities of Archives,” Archival Science, 10 (Fall 2010), 203.



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