Off the Mark

Today I finished reading the book that will serve as one of the main foundations for my paper:

Kaser, David. Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War
Experience. Edited by Paul Wasserman. No. 48, Contributions in
Librarianship and Information Science. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood
Press, 1984.

It only addresses part of the situation that my paper will cover, but it is invaluable nonetheless.

It looks at, well, just what the title says.  Except for it really looks at reading in general, newspapers, magazines, Testaments and religious tracts, novels,and literature; and the provision of these materials to the troops.  While covering both the Union and the Confederacy, there is a decided Northern slant.  I imagine that this is due to the amount of source materials available to work with.

Contents:

1. Reading by American Men in 1860
• Factors Affecting Reading Before the Civil War
• Channels for Delivering Reading Matter
2. What Civil War Soldiers Read
• The Leisure to Read
• Purposeful Reading
• Religious Reading
• Newspapers and Magazines
• Reading for Escape
3. Reading in Wartime Settings
• Reading in Camp annd Battle
• Reading in Libraries and Reading Rooms
• Reading in Hospitals
• Reading in Prison Camps
4. The Sources of Soldiers’ Reading Matter
• Military and Personal Sources
• Commerical Sources
• Religious and Charitable Sources
5. Aftermath
• Post-War Reading by Veterans
• The Nation’s Libraries

There were three factors affecting men’s reading in the antebellum period:

• Degree of literacy - overall literacy of free males in the North 90%+ and in the South 70%
• Availability of reading material - plentiful; Beadle’s 1st dime novel (1860); 3000+ regularly issued newspapers; magazines growing, Harper’s (1850) & Atlantic (1857)
• Leisure time - only for the elite.  The "rank-and-file American adult male" engaged in ""purposeful" reading, that is, reading clearly intended to contribute directly to the salvation of their souls, the wisdom with which they would exercise the democratic franchise, and the fulfillment of their roles as father and breadwinners, usually in that order" (6).

Time to read during war?

Wars are not all gore and glory. Since the beginning of organized warfare, soldiers have been burdened by huge blocks of time during which they have had nothing to do but wait. Just whiling away long stretches of idle hours or days, or even months and in some cases years, caused by the military vagaries of strategic timing can be a taxing experience for soldiers. Their best creative genuis is often required simply to fill in something, anything, between the beginnings and conclusions of seemingly endless periods of idleness (13).

Of the five principal idle-time activities engaged in by soldiers—card playing, sleeping, talking, reading, and in some locales, foraging (which will be discussed later)—the social agencies felt free to supply the wherewithal only for reading. Sleeping and talking were innocuous, foraging in most situations was technically illegal, and card playing was viewed as being, if not immoral in its own right, at least a long stride down the path to certain perdition. Reading alone, if selected with discrimination, could be a positive force for good among the troops (14).

The primary sources for reading material are listed above under chapter 4.  I want to mention 2 in particular, which fall under military sources, picket exchanges and foraged materials.

Picket exchanges:

One of the most interesting processes used by Civil War soldiers to obtain newspapers, especially when other sources of supply were largely cut off from them, was to swap for them with the enemy. The very nature of later wars has made this process almost incomprehensible today, but during the Civil War swapping with the enemy was a very important method of obtaining the news. Both sides benefitted, and the practice was almost universal, even though it usually suffered official, although somewhat perfunctory, disapprobation.

The process was simple enough: a soldier on picket duty somewhere in a remote part of the lines would call out to his enemy counterpart that he had a newspaper to trade, if the enemy was interested. If he had enough interest (and he almost always did), a brief, informal two-man truce was agreed to on the spot, and both came forward and made the exchange. Newspapers were the common medium of exchange, although rebel tobacco was also often swapped for yankee coffee as part of the deal (83-84).

Foraged materials:

Although many soldiers felt remorse at plundering, may did not.  Books and other reading materials were often "liberated" from their previous owners.  They were also often wantonly destroyed.  Gov. Page’s mansion, Williamsburg, was ransacked and "priceless colonial and Revolutionary documents, [were] pillaged, and letters of Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and countless others were hauled off" (90-91). 

And in direct response to a large part of my motivating query for this paper:

Enormous damage to books and libraries occurred during Sherman’s march to the sea and his subsequent move north. Near Eatonton, Georgia, the libraries of the Tuner plantation, where Joel Chandler Harris was first exposed to fine books, were destroyed—some four thousand volumes in all. A plantation library of more than six thousand volumes near the South Carolina coast was completely ransacked, and eyewitnesses reported seeing "the plates of Audubon used for kindling fires; and recently, plates from the Boydell Shakespeare, and Hogarth were found stopping the cracks of a negro house" (91).

There were some successes in trying to stop the reckless destruction of libraries, but they were few.  "For the vastly greater part, however, the damage done to libraries in the zones of war was so extensive and so devastating that many of them still bore evidence of the experience fully a century later" (92-93).

For my purposes, I need so much more of this sort of information, as heartbreaking as it is—but, alas, that was not Kaser’s main purpose.

Post-War Reading by Veterans:

"Few who had discovered the pleasures of reading during their periods of service, however, gave up the practice after their discharge, and the impact of that aggregate change in the reading habit of the nation was felt for decades thereafter" (119).

When Civil War servicemen arrived home in 1865, they found in many cases that their villages and townd were in need of a very different kind of library service than they had had before. Many of these men had known no library service at all previous to their military service, and they could now testify to its value from their personal experience. Even some of those who had seldom, if ever, read books prior to the War now joined their voices with those of longer bookish orientation in support of both the establishment of more social libraries and of the new public library movement that was gathering force. As a result, new tax-supported and often free public libraries came rapidly into existence in unprecedented numbers (121).

Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle is an excellent book.  It is the size of a trade paperback, 125 pages, large number of endnotes in each chapter pointing to numerous primary sources and many secondary sources, medium-sized type, and is well written.  But, why in the hell is it $91.95? 

Highly recommended.  Just get it from the library.

This is seriously going to have to be my last post for a while.  I need to start writing, and read a few more articles and a chapter or two out of a few books.  But the writing is imperative.  If I don’t get to this post haste I’ll end up seriously and dangerously depressed at the beginning at a new semester.  I don’t even want to consider that prospect. 

I will link to the 2nd iteration of the Carnival.  And I may try to get something out for the 3rd week’s but if it isn’t just lifted out of my paper I may have to skip week 3. <sigh>   One could say that I got myself into this situation, but that would be a gross oversimplification.  I will get myself out of it; that is simply how it has to be.  [Em, my dearest Southern belle, please check up on me this week.]