Marines deployed by the Union Army during the Civil War played an intricate role in battles and skirmishes that took place along rivers and coastlines. The library at Augustana College has compiled and transcribed the diary of Basil H. Messler, a soldier in the Union’s amphibious Mississippi Marine Brigade, which outlines his exploits as a soldier and commissary during the final years of the War.  This resource tool is great for anyone looking to get a personal view of how marines operated during the Civil War.

The site also has the diary of Illinois volunteer G.D. Molineaux, as well as a detailed outline of the troop deployments of his 8th Illinois Volunteer Infantry from 1861-1865.

When Democrats could not agree on a single candidate from the 1860 election, the northern and southern wings selected their own – Stephen Douglas and John Breckinridge, respectively. This development alarmed President John Buchanan, as a letter from August 1860 reveals. If “a re-union between the” northern and southern Democrats did not occur, Buchanan told editor Gerard Hallock that “the Constitution & the union cannot be perpetuated.” Yet the split in the party was not a simple North/South divide. While Hallock’s New York Journal of Commerce had provided able & valuable support…to [Buchanan’s] administration,” other northern Democrats were not as loyal. Calvert Comstock’s Albany (NY) Atlas & Argus had, as Buchanan explained, failed to “sustain the principles of my administration” and “[held] political doctrines in violation of the Constitution of the United States as expounded by the Supreme Court.”

Walt Whitman is the subject of not one, but two, interdisciplinary lesson plans hoping to explore the connection between the literature of the Civil War and the War itself. The first, aimed at students in grades from 7-12, is written by Nancy Hall and based off of Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War, which has already been discussed previously. The second, aimed at students in grades from 9-12, is available through the National Endowment for the Humanities.

While both ask students to evaluate Whitman’s work in the context of the War, the lesson plan from the NEH is arguably the better of the two. Specifically, it asks students to examine primary sources such as photographs and letters, poems, and short prose pieces he wrote. Topics covered in the lesson include Civil War hospitals, the 51st New York regiment, and Washington DC during the War. In addition, students are encouraged to look at pages from Whitman’s notebooks, which offer an interesting look at how the writer worked. Group work is essential in completing this lesson and assumes an average of thirty-one students per class, though the numbers are flexible depending on individual class needs. Conclusions to the lesson include having students write their own poems or small presentations.

The American Antiquarian Society, an independent research library, has provided a digital collection of the Grant-Burr family papers on their website.  The letters in this collection were written between the years 1827-1892, and a majority of the correspondence is between Daniel Grant and his wife Caroline Burr Grant.  There are over 500 letters, covering a great range of 19th century topics from courtship and childrearing to westward expansion and the Civil War.  The collection can be searched by keyword or, perhaps more usefully, can be browsed according to subject.  Additionally, the website offers genealogical information and images of the family.  All of the transcribed letters are available as a scanned pdf file which is useful for those seeking to use these letters in the classroom.  For more information on how to use primary sources in the classroom, teachers may want to refer to this page from the Library of Congress.

After his victory in the 1860 election, President-Elect Abraham Lincoln quickly started to work on filling the positions in the federal government that were political appointments. While selecting cabinet members was an important task, historian Harold Holzer explains that “Lincoln understood” how critical it was “to purge [the] Democrats” and “guarantee the loyalty of the federal bureaucracy.” Even as Lincoln considered the appropriate response to the secession crisis, he held countless meetings with office seekers who showed up at his temporary office in the Illinois Statehouse (see image to the right – it is #1 on this map). Those unable to travel to Springfield sent numerous letters to recommend either themselves or their friends. Other letters offered Lincoln advice on the appointment process. “Do not be led astray by corrupt Politicians,” as one anonymous author warned. The significant amount of incoming mail even caught the eye of at least one reporter. After a meeting in December, the reporter’s only comment about Lincoln’s office was to note that “[the secretary’s] desk [was] heaped up with letters and documents.” The political activity in Springfield did not escape the notice of Democratic papers like the New York Herald, which used the opportunity to portray their rivals as corrupt. The Herald predicted a “great republican feast” on all “the fat things” and identified the two “cooks” who would direct “the distribution of federal offices” in Pennsylvania.

Marist College’s Kathryn Silberger has put together an impressive collection of thirty-one letters by  Union soldier Daniel Francis Kemp from his tenure as a landsman in the US Navy between 1862 and 1863. Your Affectionate Son offers a wide range of pictures detailing the specific events and locations described in Kemp’s letters. It offers a unique first-hand perspective and is invaluable for anyone wishing to know more about US Navy actions during battles in the Civil War.

Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center is an invaluable resource for studying the life and culture of American women. While the collection covers a broad range of topics on all aspects of women’s history, its strength is in Southern women and there are a great deal of resources pertaining specifically to the 19th century. This page features an extensive list of the primary sources that the collection has relating to domestic and social life in the 19th century.  Any one of these collections of family correspondence and diary entries could be useful in understanding the cultural and domestic context to the Civil War, but many have not yet been archived online. The resources that can be accessed online now are found here. Other collections relating explicitly to the Civil War period can be found on the subject guides page. Hopefully the Center will continue to provide more digital resources so that the documents in this collection can be accessed by a wider audience.

Though previously mentioned in another post, the The Valley of the Shadow Project has a wide range of primary sources from newspapers, maps, letters, and statistics all available for use in the 7-12 classroom. Broken up chronologically into three periods, the Project archives two communities (Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania) between the years of 1859 and 1870. A particularly good lesson plan by Alice Carter compares the impact and the development of the railroads in both counties using various articles from historical newspapers. The lesson provides a teacher with preselected articles, however, one may choose to either find newspaper accounts that reflect individual class interests or allow students to search for their own, using the newspaper indexes. One special note: teachers could extend the lesson and explore the impact of railroads during reconstruction.

The Valley of the Shadow is a great resource for anyone who wants to learn more about the different ways that northerners and southerners reacted to John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry. This digital history project, which from the Virginia Center for Digital History, focuses on two communities – Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania – and their experiences between 1859 – 1870. Besides letters and diary entries, four newspapers are available (two newspapers were published in each county in 1859). The site also provides transcripts for most items as well as enough background information to put the material in context. While everything related to Harpers Ferry is not in a specific section on the site, it is easy to browse to find it.