Confederate letters: ‘we had apirty lively chrismas’

A retired USC linguistics professor is tapping into forgotten caches of Civil War letters written by soldiers as part of his life’s work to document the lost dialect of the South.

Along the way, Michael Montgomery and a colleague in Missouri expect to create a website of transcribed letters from the 1860s that would be a gold mine for social historians and, especially, genealogists. The two hope to have a website for the online collection in the coming year.

The original letters – often written in pencil, faded and worn – can be hard to decipher.

Even transcribed, they are easier to understand when read aloud.

The uneducated soldiers probably would not have had cause to write letters before going off to war, Montgomery said. They spelled phonetically, capitalized erratically and used words that are no longer common. Sometimes, they seemed to mimic the phrasing of preachers they’d heard from the pulpit.

Their letters reveal worries about the fate of their farms and families, a preoccupation with loneliness and endurance, complaints about the food.

“It’s almost like looking at history through a one-way mirror ... without the writers ever imagining in 100 years someone would be looking over their shoulder and reading their mail,” said Montgomery, professor emeritus of English and linguistics at the University of South Carolina.

A letter written Dec. 26, 1862, from what was then the Beaufort District of South Carolina by A.H. Lister describes games played on Christmas Day. “we had apirty lively chrismas yesterday Shootin and runing foot races,” he wrote. “ther was five men drawn from each comp to shoot to hun dred and fifty yeards for aprise a par of Shoos was the prise”

Such letters became family keepsakes, handed down through the years, because they were often all that was left of a life that ended far from home.

“It’s not like today, when they send remains back, or personal effects,” Montgomery said. “There were countless soldiers who just disappeared. All the families had were a few crumpled letters.”

The Civil War, which began 150 years ago, was the last major war in which correspondence was not censored, Montgomery said. Soldiers could be blunt about military mistreatment and morale.

“These letters provide an almost photographic picture of their experiences,” he said.

He often finds their sentimentality “eloquent without being literate.”

Civil War historians most often rely on military records and the correspondance of officers. Letters of the common soldier, gathered from special collection libraries around the Southeast, do not provide insight into battle strategy and the like.

To the contrary, Montgomery said: “People wrote because they were achingly lonely ... even though they had nothing to say. ‘I have no news to report,’ or, ‘We have marched 20 miles and don’t know where we are.’”

To find the letters, colleague Michael Ellis, who teaches English at Missouri State University, in Springfield, has been in contact with more than 50 universities, state archives and private historic societies from Mississippi to Virginia.

The two have collected about 6,000 letters. So far, about two thirds of them have been transcribed. The transcription is painstaking work, done with the help of Ellis’ students, who are trained in 19th century handwriting and are knowledgeable about the Civil War.

Most of the letters collected so far are the correspondance of Confederate soldiers, preserved by their descendents.

Others were written to soldiers by their wives, mothers and other family members.

Fewer still were written by slaves or former slaves. “Those are much, much harder to find,” Ellis said.

But all are from archives, and would not have been available unless families had put them in safekeeping for later generations to find, Montgomery said.

The collaborators are working on separate dictionaries, with Montgomery collecting material on Southern mountain speech and Ellis focussing on the more narrow language of North Carolina during the Civil War.

The value to genealogists is that the letters are full of names and communities.

“Many, many letters talk about comrades,” Montgomery said. “They would send news from the unit back to the home folks, and the letters from home would often give community news. Family news, too.”

For the past 30 years, Montgomery has been researching and documenting the history of Southern American speech. His work “tries to present the living language of the times – and that, by definition, is speech.”

He was struggling to find evidence of the common speech of the 19th century, when “proud” meant “pleased” and “commenced” was used for “start.”

About four years ago, he seized on the Civil War letters of soldiers. That provided him with a potential 500,000 soldiers as sources. Many wrote home every week.

There are so many letters, he said, he doesn’t know where to stop.

Allen Stokes, director of the South Caroliniana Library, said the University of South Carolina probably owns “tens of thousands” of Civil War letters. Having them transcribed would make them much more accessible, he said.

“The vast majority of the manuscripts we’re working with,” Montgomery said, “have been sitting in archives for decades, and nobody has been paying any attention to them.”