Styple Delivers News From Civil war Front

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 26, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

William Styple's latest book contains a treasure trove of letters written by Civil War soldiers that provides a look at what patriotism meant to those eloquent men.

This magazine first wrote about Civil War historian Bill Styple 11 years ago when he released his Echoes of the Blue and Grey, videos in which Styple had collected footage of Yankee and Confederate Civil War veterans at reunions and other occasions from the 1890s forward. Three years ago, Styple published The Little Bugler, a book about a 12-year-old boy who volunteered as a musician with the 40th New York Infantry and witnessed such battles as Chancellorsville and Gettysburg [see "Civil War Young Hero," Nov. 2, 1998].

Styple is the editor of Writing and Fighting the Civil War: Soldier Correspondence to the New York Sunday Mercury [Belle Grove Publishing Co., $27; 308 pp], a collection of 500 letters out of nearly 3,000 published in the Sunday Mercury, a widely read weekly newspaper of the second half of the 19th century. The letters had been written to the paper by soldiers in the field who were firsthand witnesses of the battles and many other related events. Every issue of the newspaper during the four years of the war carried many of the letters.

Amazingly, Civil War historians have not yet made use of this correspondence, a fact that surely will be remedied by Styple's book. The letters are history in the raw. No professional historian stands interpreting between letter-writers and the reader. They often are deeply moving. Many of these young men were eloquent writers, able to express what they saw in ways that would never have occurred to professional journalists. Taken together, they offer a look at what patriotism and glory meant to young men in the 1860s, Styple tells Insight, and how the patriotism endured when the glory began to fade in the horror of war.

Insight: How did you get interested in the Civil War?

William B. Styple: I can say without a doubt that I've been interested in the Civil War ever since I was aware of the human drama around me. l grew up during the Civil War centennial, back in the 1960s, and visited places like Manassas, Richmond, Petersburg [in Virginia] and Gettysburg [Pennsylvania] on family trips with my mother and father and brothers, triggering a lifetime interest.

This also was excited by growing up in the town of Kearny, N.J., too. Kearny [pronounced Kar-ney] is named for Gen. Philip Kearny (1814-1862). It also was the site of an old Civil War soldiers' home, so a lot of the old-timers in town told me stories of the old Civil War veterans, and that further fueled my imagination.

Insight: How did you happen to come across issues of the Sunday Mercury?

WBS: It was my continuing research on Gen. Kearny. I'm putting together his biography and, naturally, I go through the newspapers. He commanded New York troops, Michigan troops and Maine troops. So I look at their local hometown newspapers for a letter from a soldier because it was fairly common for the soldiers to write home about what was happening, and the newspapers occasionally printed their letters.

Just by chance I was looking through a copy of the Sunday Mercury at the New York Historical Society. The society had only a few issues from 1862, but I noticed immediately that this paper printed more letters than most and that they were written directly from the battlefields. This was important material, and I realized it had not been republished or quoted in any magazine or book.

Insight: There's been so much written about the Civil War. It's amazing that such letters could have gone undiscovered for so long.

WBS: My opinion is that when scholars researched the old newspapers they looked at the New York Times and maybe the Washington Star, the famous newspapers. But they said, "What's this, a weekly paper? The Sunday Mercury? Nah, who's ever heard of it?"

Also, there is no single collection of the Sunday Mercury in any one library or archive. Scholars are human, and it's easy for them to miss what's not right in front of their eyes.

After I'd finished reading those issues at the New York Historical Society, I was so hooked by the material that I was determined to find more issues. This set me off on a search from library to library to try to assemble as full a collection as possible. And that's what I did, more or less.

Insight: To how many libraries did you have to go? How much did you find?

WBS: Four or five. The Library of Congress. The New York Public Library. The New York Historical Society. For some reason they had the year 1864 out in Chicago, so I went to the Center for Research Libraries there.

I found 225 weeks' worth of correspondence running from April 1861 through August 1865. I found every issue except for three issues in 1864. And wouldn't you know it, since the book has come out, a descendent of a soldier in the 25th New York Cavalry has contacted me with a clipping belonging to his great-grandfather containing a letter from one of the missing issues.

Insight: Publishing on Sundays back in the 19th century was unusual, wasn't it?