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xix EDITORIAL METHODS AND NOTES This book brings together 103 letters written by Thomas Henry Carter between 22 June 1861 and 7 March 1865. He wrote 101 of them to his wife, Susan. He sent the remaining two to his stepmother, Ann Willing Page Carter, and to his wife’s brother-in-law, John Coles Rutherfood. All but three of the letters reside in the collections of the Virginia Historical Society (VHS). Photocopies of the three that are not at the society but which are included here were generously provided from a private collection. The majority of the letters come from one collection at the VHS, the Thomas Henry Carter Papers, 1861–96 (Mss1C2466a). The three from the private collection and one from another collection of Carter’s papers at the VHS have been identified in the lead note for those specific letters. Readers will note that there are three significant gaps within the time span of the letters. The first occurs between 1 May and 15 August 1862, during which period Carter’s battery fought in the Seven Days Battles. The second takes place in 1863 between 25 June and 18 September, depriving the reader of Carter’s description of the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath. The final gap is in the summer of 1864 during the hectic Overland Campaign. Why those gaps exist is largely a matter of conjecture. During that first period, for example, it could be explained by Carter’s location near his family’s King William County home. When not fighting against the Union army east of Richmond in late June, he could have been spending some of his peaceful moments with his wife. Throughout his letters , Carter describes his attempts to find Susan nearby accommodations. That may account for the missing letters in the summer of 1863. As far as the final period in 1864 is concerned, the opposing armies were in almost daily contact between 5 May and 3 June. It is likely that Carter simply did not have the time to compose thoughtful letters home. There is one final theory that may account for the gaps. In a letter written in 1915 by Tom xx • Editorial Methods and Notes Carter’s son Thomas, he mentions that some of his father’s wartime letters were in the hands of an Episcopal priest in Hanover County and that he does not know what became of them. It is impossible to know if those are the same letters mentioned above that eventually made their way to the VHS or if they are the missing letters that would have filled many of those gaps. Thomas Henry Carter’s prewar background as a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute and as a medical student at the University of Virginia and the University of Pennsylvania is evident in his clear, well-written wartime letters. They are quite legible, even when he succumbed to the practice of cross-writing to save paper. To ensure ease of reading as well as to maintain the accuracy of the original letters, a number of editorial decisions have been made. Like many of his contemporaries, Carter was an inconsistent speller. Those misspellings, however, have not been corrected, nor has the [sic] notation been inserted to indicate a mistake. The same goes for his use of capital letters for words within a sentence or for proper nouns. They remain as written. Carter was also somewhat inconsistent in his use of punctuation marks; he tended to use dashes instead of periods at the end of many sentences, and he did not like to use many commas. He also did not bother to make the effort to indent new paragraphs. One gets the sense that he was an impatient writer. In the case of dashes at the end of sentences, they have all been silently replaced with periods. Missing commas and other missing punctuation marks that might lead to unclear sentences for modern readers have been added in brackets []. Where it is clear that a new paragraph begins, the modern rule of indention has been applied. Abbreviated words that would be confusing if left as written have been completed with the missing letters placed within brackets—yr or yrs have been rendered as y[ou]r and y[ou]rs, evr as ev[e]r, and recd as rec[eive]d. Also, words represented by one or only a few letters have been expanded with the missing letters included in brackets—R...

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