Illinois's War: The Civil War in Documents

Acknowledgments

xvii Acknowledgments It seems a long time ago when Christine Dee and Marty Hershock initially approached me about doing “the Illinois book” for Ohio University Press’s Civil War in the Great Interior series. No problem, I thought. How much work could an edited collection be? I soon realized that I had taken on a more substantial project than I first imagined. I’ve learned a great deal researching, documenting, and writing the story of Illinois’s war, and for that and more, I owe Christine and Marty a lot. They not only showed great patience and faith in me, they also offered advice at various stages in the writing process that made this a much better book. The same can be said of the several scholars who read early drafts of Illinois’s War, or portions thereof. I thank Susan-Mary Grant, Theodore Karamanski, Mark Neely, Jr., and two anonymous readers, whose critical assessments saved me from several errors and pointed me to both important sources and to larger themes in Illinois’s past. The folks at Ohio University Press have also made this a better book. I thank Gillian Berchowitz, editorial director, for showing patience when I needed it, and for prodding me to move forward, also when I needed it; Nancy Basmajian, for her professionalism and keen editorial eye; and all the other members of the editorial and production team, for making this a handsome book. Any collection of primary source documents would be impossible without the efforts of librarians and archivists, who identify and preserve the sources that we historians rely on in our work. I cannot recall the names of everyone who assisted me during research trips, and at any rate, listing them all here would appear tedious and run the risk of slighting the ones I forgot. Instead I will simply thank the staffs of the following institutions, and rely on the folks working at them to remember helping me, and the gratitude I showed them at the time: the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; the Chicago History Museum; Eastern Illinois University’s Booth Library; the Library of Congress; Morris Library’s Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper room at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and the Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Urbana Free Library. I am grateful to Eastern Illinois University, my home institution, for help along the way. There was a Summer Research Grant that defrayed the costs of research trips around the state. There were also all those graduate student assistants, who pored over microfilmed newspapers in search of obscure editorials or stories: I thank Bryant Davis, Nancy Lurkins, Jason Miller, Adam Morrisette, and Krishna xviii Acknowledgments Thomas. I am also indebted to Michael Kleen, another of our recent M.A. graduates and a budding historian in his own right, for making the election maps that appear in this book. Finally, I thank my immediate family: Kim Hubbard, Max Hubbard, and Pierre Viallant. They may not understand my curious obsession with history; in fact, most of the time they think I’m downright strange. But their love and support makes everything worth it, and that is all I could ever ask for. The luckiest day in my life was the day I met my wife, Kim. Ever since, she has filled my days with love and laughter, as only a soul mate can. Her stunning beauty, sharp wit, and genuine zest for life never fail to take my breath away. This book is but a small down payment on everything I owe to her. ...