We often look things up in the Official Records, but have we ever considered the enormous effort spent in compiling them? – Jonah
The Official Records
An excerpt from The
Amazing Civil War by Webb Garrison
Surprisingly, within seven months of the
surrender, thousands of reports, letters, dispatches, and telegrams had been
sorted and arranged for publication. When this first large section of what
became The war of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Armies (OR) was ready for the printer, there was no money
available to publish it. During an entire decade in which more and more
military documents were processed by clerks, Congress dawdled. By the time an
initial appropriation for publication was made, a staff under the direction of
Col. E. D. Townsend had processed enough material to fill tens of thousands of
printed pages.
On March 4, 1873, Wilson was sworn into
office as Ulysses S. Grant's vice president. In that office he used his
influence to accelerate the lagging project he had launched a dozen years
earlier. With the leadership of the gigantic project turned over to Capt. Robert
N. Scon, forty-seven volumes were set in type by the end of 1877.
Today that accomplishment may not sound
impressive, but at the time, barely a generation after hostilities had ceased,
it was almost unbelievable. Clerks had deciphered hundreds of styles of handwriting,
ranging from formal reports written from luxurious headquarters in splendid
copperplate to crudely scrawled battlefield memoranda. Working without the new
device beginning to be offered to the business world as "the
type-writer," detailed indexes were generated for the forty-seven volumes.
In 1880 Congress authorized an edition of ten thousand copies of each existing
volume. These began coming from the press five years before the Linotype
machine was first put into commercial use in New York.
Pouring from the U.S. Government Printing
Office in a steady stream, 127 immense black-bound volumes were created,
containing practically all military material from 1861 to 1865 that was then
known to exist. Five volumes were devoted to the Atlanta campaign while both
Vicksburg and Gettysburg filled three volumes, and an October 2, 1862,
skirmish near Columbia, Missouri, merited half a page. In 1901, this
project-considered to be finished at the time-climaxed with a 1,248-page
general index that was accompanied by an official atlas of the Civil War.
Including the atlas, the Official Records runs
to just under 140,000 pages that cost taxpayers the staggering total of $2.8
million-equivalent to perhaps forty times that sum in today's dollars. Entire
sets were sent free of charge to most public libraries that simply requested
it. The fact that a set required twenty-one feet of shelf space meant that many
libraries-some of them relatively large-had to decline the free offer.
Many users found it inconvenient that the 127
volumes were divided into four separately numbered series and that numerous
numbered volumes were divided into two to five parts. This cumbersome system
has been largely overcome by the current practice of citing serial numbers,
such as 79, in lieu of Series 1, Vol. 39, part 3. Material originally designed
for use in Series 1, Vol. 54, parts 1 and 2, went elsewhere. As a result,
serial numbers 112 and 113 were never produced.
The index alone (serial 130) is a monument to
years of hard work. In an era when indexes were prepared from handwritten
entries on index cards, OR 130 was packed with more than 146,000
listings. Most of them are personal and geographical names and listings of
military units from each of the thirty-four states that existed when the
conflict began and from war-born West Virginia. Each entry in the index refers
to the volume or volumes in which references are to be found. The index of a
typical nine hundred-page volume runs to about one hundred pages.
Indexes of individual volumes include
thousands of full names of persons whose surnames only appear in the text. By
the time the general index was ready, compilers had discovered approximately
eighteen hundred errors in volumes whose serial numbers ran from 1 through 129.
Indexes of individual volumes refer users to such errors by the use of a plus
symbol at the end of an affected entry. Clumsy as this system appears to
current users, it was the product of tens of thousands of hours of diligent
work.
To some who had worked full time for years on
the gargantuan project, it must have seemed that the record was as complete as
it could be when serial 130 came off the press in 1901. At least a decade
earlier, however, U.S. Navy officials complained that naval activity had been
ignored in the compilation of the massive record of the war. In response,
Congress authorized publication of The Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (NOR) on July 31,
1894. Since masses of source material had already been sorted and made ready
for printers, the first volume came off the press before the end of the year.
It launched a second spree of publication that stretched for more than thirty
years, during which thirty thousand printed pages and another comprehensive
index were produced.
The final NOR volume came off the
press in 1917. By that time, researchers had uncovered significant caches of
Confederate material not known when the OR was completed. Authorization
to publish a second series under NOR came while Josephus Daniels was
serving as secretary of the navy.
During a period of five years, three large
volumes of Confederate material were issued, two of which were almost entirely
devoted to naval matters. The third volume was 1,336 pages long and filled with
such things as proclamations and appointments of Confederate president
Jefferson Davis and Confederate State Department correspondence with diplomatic
agents. Since the OR was completed in 1901, it offers no hint that
immense quantities of material dealing with Confederate actions on land are
included in NOR. The index volume, last of the series and comparatively small
at 458 pages, was issued in 1927.
Together, the OR and the NOR constitute
by far the largest project that the U.S. Government Printing Office had undertaken
up to that point. Part of the amazement that every user finds here stems from
the fact that when a search is made for information about a given person or
place, relevant passages are virtually guaranteed to yield gems of information
that were not sought specifically.
Tom Broadfoot of Wilmington, North Carolina,
issued from the publishing house that bears his name a modern reprint of the
entire OR slightly more than a century after the war ended. In the
process, he realized that substantial primary materials about actions on land
were not known when the massive set was produced. As a result, in 1994 he
launched a multivolume Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and
Confederate Armies (SOR). The diaries, letters, newspaper reports, and
other source material offered here add substantially to the
government-published set.
Logically, the accumulation and publication
of enough supplementary material to fill about 10,000 pages in addition to the
existing 170,000 pages issued in Washington should end the saga of the OR. That
it does not is due to the way in which we have come to consider desktop
computers as indispensable as telephones. In recent years at least three
publishers set out to make the OR available on compact disk. In addition to
accelerating the speed with which searches can be performed, a CD-ROM is not
limited to the personal, geographical, and unit names that dominate the indexes
of the printed version of the OR.
During four years in which Americans fought
Americans with ever-increasing fury, their experiences-almost wholly confined
to battlefields-generated a publishing program like no other. Using methods and
equipment that today seem primitive, hundreds of people put together an
estimated one million words that keep every minor clash and major struggle
alive for future generations.
