Editing the Letters of a Midwesterner in the Civil War: The Making and Meaning of Dear Delia

Lance J. Herdegen, the foremost historian of the famed Iron Brigade in the Civil War, once asked rhetorically, “Did the Midwest Win the Civil War?” He correctly underscored “the growing industrial and agricultural might” of the Upper Midwest in feeding and arming the burgeoning Union armies as well as the “Western boys” who fought so valiantly against the Confederate insurgents. “As soldiers,” Herdegen explained, midwesterners “had a certain dash and sense of themselves of the like never before seen in the United States. When a Western regiment appeared—one volunteer said—the ‘fine physique, the self-reliant carriage of its men at once challenged attention.’”¹

Historian Jon K. Lauck argues that with its role in the Civil War “the Midwest determined which political and economic system would prevail and thus the course of American history.” Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin led the Northern states in the percentage of military-aged males who joined the Union army, “all ahead of eastern states such as New York.” Walt Whitman wrote eloquently about the role midwesterners played in keeping the Union intact after four years of bloody internecine war. When the nation needed him most, Whitman extolled, the “tan-faced prairie-boy” came “to the rescue”—“out of the land of the prairies.” To the South and the East came the Midwest’s “plenteous off-spring,” armed with “their trusty rifles on the shoulders to save the young republic.”²

While a cadre of historians maintain that midwestern troops “outperformed their eastern counterparts on the battlefield” and “made Northern victory in the Civil War possible,” scholars have tended to pay more attention to the Confederacy and Southerners than to the victorious Union states and their citizens. According to the distinguished historian William C. “Jack” Davis, “Northern studies, perhaps because they lack the romance of the ‘lost cause’ mythology, have been slower to appear and still are not adequately represented in the literature.” Historians also have devoted even significantly less attention to the war in the Far West and the Rocky Mountain regions. “Then there is the Midwest,” Davis notes. “Here the dynamics are different. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the Midwest participated in the war all the way from Kansas to Virginia. So the war can definitively be told at least from the perspective of the region’s contributions to the fronts. No major battles were fought in the Midwest, but Indiana and Ohio saw Confederate raiders, and every midwestern state hosted prison camps for Confederate prisoners of war.”³

Davis observed correctly that historians increasingly have recognized that “the Civil War was a midwestern war, too, and at last the region’s part in the drama is being explored.” Unquestionably, the experiences, ideas, and thoughts of midwesterners—also then known as westerners—provide an essential regional perspective on the internecine conflict. But the fact remains that the midwestern perspective is underrepresented not only in Civil War–era monographs but also in documentary editing projects and collections that focus on the Northern states. Randall M. Miller, an authority on both the war’s Northern home front and the field of documentary editing, has observed a “comparative lack of [documentary editing] collections from the Middle West when stacked up against those from east of the Appalachians.”⁴

During the twentieth century, documentary editing emerged as a specialty as historians defined the field as a subdiscipline of history, one in which scholars transformed manuscript texts into either letterpress volumes or other formats, including microforms or digitized texts. Whereas nineteenth-century antiquarians and amateur “gentlemen scholars,” most notably Jared Sparks, celebrated famous persons by printing texts of documents, often excising “material regarded as private and personal, or degrading to the memory of a national hero,” modern historical documentary editors adhere to fixed archival and historical standards established by the Association of Documentary Editing. In addition to acquiring comprehensive collections of documents concerning one person or a historical event, today’s editors introduce, faithfully transcribe, and annotate the texts to identify persons...