What grabbed my attention was the first line: “My dear and most affectionate lover…”  What a way to start a letter–doesn’t it sound racy? But actually many letters written during the 19th century were as full of love and feelings as modern letters are. The difference is that the 19th-century term “lover” does not necessarily carry the same connotations as it does today. This was a letter written by George Ward (1837-1927) of Tazewell County on 16 July 1861, while serving with 21st Virginia Infantry Regiment, Company H, to his love interest, Mary Jane Ratliff. Ratliff (1842-1905) was the daughter of Abednego and Louisa Vicey Matney Ratliff, also of Tazewell County. George writes of his feelings for [Mary] Jane (“dear Jinnia”), his hopes to marry her, and how he hated parting from her. George mentions the possibility of his death numerous times in the letter, ending it with his hopes that they meet in heaven should he not survive the war.

Transcript of George Ward letter

I have come across many love letters while working on the Legacy Project and always find them so endearing. Often times they end in heartbreak as I find out that the men died in battle or from disease. Luckily George Ward survived the war, married Mary Jane Ratliff, and the two lived out their years in Tazewell County, and later in Iowa.

If you have any letters, diaries, or other manuscript materials to add to the CW150 Legacy Project, we are having a scanning event at the Library of Virginia on 6 April 2013 from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Please contact me at renee.savits@lva.virginia.gov or (804) 692-3629 to tell me about your collection and schedule an appointment.

-Renee Savits, CW150 Legacy Project Coordinator

The guide is organized alphabetically by name of the individual, organization, business, or political entity that created the record and includes a letter index at its top to facilitate searching.  Each entry contains name, title of the collection (whether a private papers collection or a public record), date range and size, accession number, a description of the material, and whether the materials are originals or copies.  Entries link to catalog records and, where applicable, to online finding aids and databases created for the collections.  The Civil War Records in the Archives Guide will be updated on a regular basis as new collections are added to the Library and catalogued.  Jason Roma and Doc Frank of the Library’s IT department provided the necessary technical work to make the guide a valuable online resource.

-Trenton Hizer, Senior Finding Aids Archivist

Major Robert Waterman Hunter, a veteran and an officer in the 2^nd Regiment of Virginia Volunteers, was appointed the first Secretary of Virginia Military Records by Governor Andrew J. Montague in 1904.  Hunter served in this capacity until 1910 when he was succeeded by Joseph Virginius Bidgood, former Commander of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans.  The Office of the Secretary of Virginia Military Records merged into the Adjutant General’s Office in 1911 and became the Department of Confederate Military Records under Bidgood in 1912.  An act of Assembly passed in 1918 abolished the department and their records were transferred to the Virginia State Library.  The result of their work was twenty volumes on Confederate Rosters arranged by unit.

The Library of Virginia houses some sixty-eight cubic feet (62 boxes and 48 volumes) related to the Department of Confederate Military Records, commonly known as the Bidgood Papers.  The collection contains correspondence, muster rolls, scrapbooks, payrolls, news clippings, rosters, printed material, letter books, military orders, photographs, and other items.  Particularly useful are the unit record files which often contain original materials from the Civil War.  Hunter and Bidgood’s correspondence is an underutilized resource that sometimes includes genealogical information or personal recollections of veterans or their families.  Two scrapbooks of obituaries document the deaths of over sixteen hundred Confederate veterans who died between 1910 and 1917.  Also significant are muster rolls and payrolls for militia units stationed in Harper’s Ferry following John Brown’s Raid in 1859.  Last, but not least, there are the aforementioned twenty volumes of Virginia’s Confederate veterans.  The Library of Virginia created an online index to these rosters which provides the name and unit of the veteran.  Though not considered an official roster like the National Register of Compiled Service records, the volumes and database provide easy access to an online list of Virginia’s Confederate veterans.  More importantly, the records of the Department of Confederate Military records represent the Library’s largest collection of Civil War-related materials.

-Craig S. Moore, State Records Appraisal Archivist

The CW 150 Legacy Project was recently in Fairfax for a scanning event at the City of Fairfax Regional Library. The event was a great success with a number of diaries, letters, and photographs scanned. We also had one of our biggest ‘wow’ moments when a donor brought in a box of almost 400 letters from her ancestor for scanning. Most of the letters, written between Cecil A. Burleigh of the 20th Connecticut Infantry and his wife, Caroline, were still in their envelopes. It is exciting and rare to see a collection that is not only large but also comprehensive, with letters written from husband and wife. These materials give both sides of the story of a couple separated by war, as Cecil wrote from localities such as Stafford Court House and Alexandria, Virginia, and after participation in the Battle of Chancellorsville, while Caroline gave updates on life in Connecticut.

Due to the size of the collection it will take us a while to scan and post everything, but to have such a great resource from one family is just amazing!

-Renee Savits, CW 150 Legacy Project — Eastern Region

Blog AJ_Ledger_Transcript

Sometimes archivists encounter the unexpected. While looking through an unidentified business record, I expected to see the usual debits and credits typically found in nineteenth century business volumes. The ledger, found in the Lynchburg (Va.) Courthouse, belonged to a group of volumes entered as an exhibit in some long ago settled court case. Only one of the volumes was labeled – with “A. J. Ledger” inscribed on its spine. This volume turned out to be A. J. Ledger C (Barcode 1097496), but it contained more than the financial activities of an unknown Lynchburg area merchant.

 Amidst the notations of customer purchases and payments made in 1812, names were written in pencil at the bottom of pages – Charles B. Stewart, James Ellis, William H. McCune. Additional names and doodles were scribbled over the carefully organized ledger entries. Curious, I continued to thumb through the ledger and discovered it had been autographed by the 206^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry while the unit was on provost duty in Lynchburg, Va. The 206^th  was among the first to march through Richmond after it fell, and the troops were later sent to Lynchburg where they spent two weeks on provost duty.

 Many members of the regiment signed their names in the ledger. Lieutenant Abraham E. Litz wrote an account of their march on Richmond in the volume: “The first Reg to march through its streets was the 206 PA Vols. Inft. And camped in the City Poor House, used by the C.S. as a military institute. But the first Regt. to enter the City was a Regt. of Darkeys, who stacked around in the suburbs of the city until after the 206 PA Vols. paraded through the city at 8:15 a.m.”

 See the transcript above for a list of names and places mentioned in the pages scanned for this entry. The ledger is part of the A. J. Ledgers collection and is open for research.

-Bari Helms, Local Records Archivist

(Note: Guest contributor Mari Julienne joins us this week with some timely background information on a pivotal document in the state’s history.  Virginia’s signed Ordinance of Secession will be on display at the Library of Virginia on Saturday, 16 April 2011. See our schedule for other events related to the Library’s exhibition, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide.)

17 April 1861. While meeting in secret session, the Virginia Convention took a vote on whether to secede from the United States. Two weeks earlier, on 4 April, the convention delegates rejected a resolution to secede by a vote of 90 to 45. The convention, which was called to consider Virginia’s response to the secession crisis, had been meeting in Richmond since 13 February. The delegates had spent many weeks debating whether secession was legal, wise, or in the state’s best interest. Following the surrender of Fort Sumter on 13 April and President Abraham Lincoln’s call for troops on 15 April, the question facing the delegates became which side to take: to fight with or against the new Confederate States of America. Late in the afternoon on 17 April, the convention chose the Confederacy and voted 88 to 55 to submit an ordinance of secession to the voters in a referendum. On 23 May, Virginia voters approved the Ordinance of Secession, which repealed Virginia’s 1788 ratification of the Constitution of the United States and its subsequent amendments.

While working on the Library’s Union or Secession exhibition (on display in our gallery until 29 October 2011), I learned that not one, but three parchments of the Ordinance of Secession were created after the 17 April vote. The most well known is the parchment elegantly penned by William Flegenheimer in May 1861. It has been in the Library’s records of the 1861 Convention since 1929, when it was returned to the state archives after having been taken from the Virginia capitol in April 1865 by a Union soldier. On 14 June 1861, during the convention’s second session, delegates began signing the parchment created by Flegenheimer. Delegates continued to sign the document until December 1861, when the convention’s third and final session ended. A total of 142 delegates, including former United States president John Tyler, signed the Ordinance. Some of the signers, however, had not been members of the convention at the time of the 17 April vote since they had arrived later to replace delegates who had resigned, died, or been expelled after the first session. The convention authorized lithographic copies of Flegenheimer’s ceremonial version to be made for the convention members, and some of these lithographs still survive today.

The Library of Virginia also has a second parchment in its collections. The enrolled version is the formal, legal text of the Ordinance. It was also inscribed on parchment, along with the other ordinances passed by the convention during its three sessions. During the June 1861 session, this document was signed by the convention’s president to make it official. In the margin are also the signatures of two members of a committee appointed by the convention to verify the text of the ordinance. Both of these documents are part of LVA’s state records collection, in the Virginia Convention (1861: Richmond), Records, 1861–1961, Acc. 40586.

Another parchment version of the Ordinance of Secession was created in the days immediately following the vote on 17 April. It was signed by 92 members of the convention between 24 April and 1 May, when the first session ended, but before the Ordinance was ratified by Virginia’s voters. Some of the signatures are squeezed between columns and in the margin, which may have led to the convention’s decision to commission Flegenheimer to produce his more elaborate ceremonial version. This earlier document was also taken from Richmond in April 1865.  It ended up in the possession of the State Department and is now at the National Archives.

All three versions of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession can now be examined together in our extensive online resource, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide.

-Mari Julienne, Assistant Editor, Dictionary of Virginia Biography

Editor’s Note: Guest contributor Brent Tarter offers the following post, pointing out some interesting finds made by the creators of the Library of Virginia’s Union or Secession exhibition.

During Virginia’s secession crisis in the winter and spring of 1860-1861, men and women across the state wrote to Governor John Letcher to comment on public affairs. They wrote to tell the governor what to do, to ask for help, to offer advice and assistance, or to get something off their chests. While researching in preparation for the Library of Virginia’s exhibition, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide , we spent time looking through the letters received by Governor Letcher. Like the records of every Virginia governor since 1776, the letters are preserved in Record Group 3 of the state’s archives in the Library of Virginia. The Governor’s Office records are an extremely rich source for the beliefs and words of ordinary Virginians.

During 1860 and 1861 the governor received letters from men and women in every part of the state who expressed every possible opinion and political allegiance. “I would like to Know from you what is to prevent me from Voting for Lincoln,” Giles County resident John M. Smith asked Governor Letcher in September 1860. “As he is the man I prefer. the reason of this letter is that there is a great deal of threatning on the part of Slave holders in regard to poor men excerciseng the elective franchise.” It is unlikely that Smith was able to vote for Abraham Lincoln on election day, 6 November 1860. Although 1,929 Virginia men voted for Lincoln (most of them in the northwestern counties and in the upper Potomac River Valley), there is no record of any of those votes being cast in Giles County.

At the beginning of the crisis, most men and women in Virginia opposed secession, and it was not until April 1861 when the people of the state had to decide whether to fight with or against the United States that a majority favored secession.  In April 1861, Sarah A. Logan, of Goochland County, asked the governor to “Accept my services for my State. I have no son old enough, and my husband is one of the ‘homeguard’ so I wish with the assistance of my daughters to do something—anything. Hearing that red flannel shirts or jackets are needed, I will make as many as you can send me the materials for,— say five hundred or a thousand.” Probably referring to the more than fifty enslaved laborers on her family’s plantation, she assured the governor that “I can do it, as I have a large force at my command.”

The words of enslaved Virginians appear in court records that are preserved in the governor’s papers, too. Many enslaved people correctly foresaw that war would offer them new opportunities for freedom. According to testimony in a Mecklenburg County case, a slave named Sam made statements around his neighborhood that “from what I can find out, Old Lincoln is coming down the Mississippi river and will free every thing as he goes, and I think if we be pretty keen we will get our freedom too.” In May 1861, the county court convicted Sam of conspiring to make insurrection and sentenced him to be sold out of state, which the governor later commuted to forced labor on the public works, which likely meant Confederate defensive fortifications.

Virginia’s secession and the outbreak of war led to the creation of the new, free state of West Virginia. In May 1861, Robert Johnston, from Clarksburg, asked the governor to provide for the defense of politically divided western Virginia, explaining that in the west, “our intercourse is almost entirely with the West and the North, we have none with the Central and eastern portions of Virginia. We are not Slaveholders, many of us are of Northern birth, We read almost exclusively Northern newspapers and books, and listen to Northern preachers.”

Like a majority of Virginians, Governor Letcher (read his biography here) opposed secession until the middle of April 1861, and like most white Virginians in the east supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. His mail can be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this period of Virginia’s history.  Learn more about this collection at the Library of Virginia in the Guide to the Executive Papers of Governor John Letcher, 1859-1863 (Accession 36787). 

 -Brent Tarter, founding editor of the Dictionary of Virginia Biography

 Edwin Ray, Reference Services Librarian, was featured in a Wall Street Journal story about the recent rethinking of accepted Civil War casualty figures. Ray is the driving force behind the Virginia Military Dead database which draws from 937 different  sources to document the death of Virginia soldiers in service to Great Britain, the United States of America, and the Confederates States of America. The database is an ongoing project and should prove useful to historians and genealogists.

 A Los Angeles Times story gave a touching account of the CW 150 Project’s visit to Warrenton. Renee Savits, Senior Project Archivist, is part of a team that is travelling the state to digitize Civil War-related documents that have, until now, remained hidden from public view in family hands. We are so happy to know that these stories will be preserved for future generations.

 -Dale Dulaney, Local Records Archival Assistant.