Notes
Introduction 1. Douglas Southall Freeman, “An Address,” Civil War History 1 (1955): 10–11. Freeman delivered his remarks to a tour group from the Chicago Civil War Round Table on May 7, 1953. They appeared as the very ¤rst item in the ¤rst issue of Civil War History. 2. The Weather Bureau’s typed synopsis of Mackee’s ledgers, at the head of the¤lmed copy, mistakenly locates the readings at Lewinsville through October 1860, and the ¤rst month at Georgetown as November 1860. The original documents, however, clearly show the shift to Georgetown in November 1859. Furthermore, Mackee was enumerated in Georgetown by the 1860 census, which was taken ¤ve months before November 1860. Although the scope of this book extends only to June 1865, Mackee’s ledgers continue to May 1866. The 1860 census and the Weather Bureau cover material are cited below in notes 4 and 5, respectively. 3. In his weather notes he wrote his name repeatedly as “Mackee,” with a lowercase “k.” 4. The Mackee household appears on page 106 of Georgetown, Ward Three, of the Eighth Census of the United States, M653, Roll 101, National Archives, Washington , D.C. 5. The title page at the front of the micro¤lm roll that contains Mackee’s ledgers bears the heading “U.S. Department of Commerce, Weather Bureau, National Weather Records Center, Federal Building, Asheville, N.C. 28801.” There is no hint of either Smithsonian or Signal Corps involvement in Mackee’s manuscripts, although some of the other stations cited elsewhere in this book use forms that bear indications of those organizations. Although there is no date on the ¤lm that includes Georgetown ’s observations, most of the other stations used in this book were copied in 1952, for instance, the Richmond manuscripts (see the narrative covering October 1860). Notes 6. The full title of Darter’s work, which runs to 222 pages (including lxii as roman numerals), is The National Archives: List of Climatological Records in the National Archives (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1942). The verso of the title page reports the publication as “The National Archives Special List No. 1.” The tables in this book use reports from two of those three Virginia stations (Alexandria and Richmond ) to cover the brief Georgetown gaps. 7. Darter, List of Climatological Records, xlvi–xlix. The National Archives internet site (www.archives.gov) offers a current ¤nding aid to Record Group 27. It obviously affords a more current overview than that in Darter’s book, but without nearly as much detail (it covers only twelve pages). The modern designation for the Smithsonian records within the record groups is Record Group 27.3. In April 2006 a Smithsonian archivist reiterated to me the thorough transfer of weather material to the National Archives, and cited only “a small amount of material” surviving in their own Record Unit 60. 8. For the full text of this insightful comment (by a Richmond Howitzers soldier) about weather and diaries, and citation to the original, see the seventh entry for April 1862 and its corresponding note. Chapter 1. 1860 The times of sunrise and sunset in the tables for 1860 come from (Cottom’s Edition) Richardson’s Almanac, 1860 . . . Calculated by David Richardson, of Louisa County, Va. (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, [1859]). 1. Elizabeth Lindsay Lomax, Leaves from an Old Washington Diary (Mount Vernon , N.Y.: S. A. Jacobs, Golden Eagle Press, 1943), 130–32. 2. The manuscript Richmond ledgers were ¤lmed in 1952 for the weather archives in Asheville under the heading “The United States Weather Bureau, Climatological Records, 1819–1892, National Archives Disposal Job No. III-NNR-12.” A few gaps appear in some months of the Richmond run (through February 1862), and all of June, August, and December 1861 and January 1862 are missing. The 1860 census (Henrico County, Western Division, page 916) reported Meriwether as age sixty-two, born in Virginia, married to Louisa M. (age ¤fty-seven), and owning $20,000 in real estate and $14,500 in personal estate. 3. A handful of weather ledgers from Fredericksburg survive from this period. They were copied in the same 1952 National Archives project that made the Richmond ¤lm cited above. The “violent storm” quote and 4-to-midnight timing are from that manuscript. The “cruel storm” quote is from the Fredericksburg News, October 19, 1860—an evening paper, reporting on very recent events, and timing the onset as 1 p.m. 4. Fredericksburg News, November 2, 1860. 5. Betsy...
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