PREFACE | THIS EDITION | ANNOTATION | HEADNOTES | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

Lieutenant Joseph Perrin Burrage died leading his company in a nighttime bayonet charge up a steep mountain slope in Tennessee. Only fifteen months before he had read an essay on “Cicero’s Private Life as seen in his Letters” at the 1862 Harvard commencement. In the interval he composed eighty-nine surviving letters to his family that present a detailed account of what he saw and did during the American Civil War.

Burrage was the eldest son of a Boston merchant; though committed to a life of service and not without personal courage, he had trained for a career in ministry and was little prepared for the privations of life in the field. His epistolary journal has much to say about the evil food, painful marches, and personal indignities he suffered, while at the same time repeatedly expressing confidence in the rightness of his cause and optimism about its ultimate success.

The letters reflect the writer's piety as much as his patriotism; he was fighting for morality and temperance as well as abolition. Like other Yankees Burrage was an inveterate reformer given to criticizing lax behavior and inefficiency. He expresses frustration at the inability and unwillingness of the Army of the Potomac to prosecute the war. He is eager to fight, even after witnessing the carnage at Gettysburg: “The nation will always remember the day, and I am sure I shall, and in future years may be glad to say that I was in the front on the 4th of July 1863” (5 July 1863).

“But I must have some dinner,” he continues, breaking off abruptly. For the most part the Burrage letters are concerned with the quiddities of camp life, meals and mud (the red clay of Virginia is as much a presence on his paper as in his words). Burrage is a good describer; his training at Andover and Harvard is sometimes put to good use: “Soon after that we had our first appearance of rebel shots. We had been marching for some time through the woods, till I thought I should have to drop unless they stopped soon, and had just come to a little clearing when we heard a bang and a whiz close to us. We didn’t think much of that...” (5 May 1863).

When Burrage is able to get out of camp, and can think of matters beyond his aching feet, he is capable of passages like this, of the banks of the Potomac near Alexandria: “If I was anything of a sportsman I should be almost crazy to have a gun and dog. For those swamps are full of wild rice, and the rice full of birds. When you go along whole flocks fly up, and keep flying till there seems to be no end to them. As it is, I couldn't kill any if I had all the hunter's equipment, and then too I came after bigger game than birds” (18 Sept. 1862). While seldom so literary, the Burrage letters, more than most, give one a sense of what it was like to “be there.”

Burrage was part of an extended kinship network that makes itself felt in the letters. The family had been living in Boston and its western suburbs since the 1630s; they had been out at Lexington and Concord and nineteenth century Burrages were inclined to regard the present war as an extension of the former conflict with Europe. Joseph's father and uncles grew up on a small farm in Leominster; most were wealthy, self-made men moved to support the war by motives of civic duty. Five of Joseph's cousins were in the field at the time he was writing the letters, including Henry Sweetser Burrage, afterwards state historian of Maine.

Among them was an impoverished younger cousin, William Allen Burrage of Leominster. “Willie” enlisted in the same company as Joseph with the idea that the older boy would look after the younger. They formed a fast friendship, and in the event the younger boy seems to have devoted himself to looking after his socially-superior cousin. Willie survived the war to return to obscurity; we have reprinted four of his letters (and one of Joseph's) from The Burrage Memorial, a family genealogy published by Joseph's Uncle Alvah in 1877. Willie's terse, unsentimental, and belligerent letters to his uncle are very different than Joseph's to his parents. Another William Burrage letter is taken from manuscript.

The character of Joseph Burrage senior is difficult to construe from the letters. He was a leading citizen of West Cambridge (now Arlington) Massachusetts, building a large house on Pleasant Street and taking an active part in the newly-formed Orthodox Congregational Church. Family story has it that fellow church-goers had recommended that he seek out a wife in Vermont; both Joseph's mother, Frances Perrin, and stepmother, Mary Closson, were Vermonters. Family story also has it that he was devastated by the death of his first-born, that after recovering his body from Tennessee he left off business and retired to Vermont. In point of fact, several years intervened. Joseph Burrage senior was in the wholesale shoe and leather business and one hears much about boots in the letters.

Joseph Perrin Burrage could not have known Mary Closson very well since he was away at Harvard when his father remarried in June 1861. She came from a substantial Vermont family and likely had more education than Joseph's father; both seem to have dedicated themselves to the Beecher program for sunday-schools, abolition and temperance. Joseph valued his stepmother's letters highly. Joseph's other correspondent in the surviving letters is his younger sister Fannie Eva, who did become a missionary: she went on to spend fifty years as a schoolmistress in the Ottoman Empire. Her partner in this enterprise was a Sarah A. Closson, presumably the Sarah of Joseph's letters and a sister of Mary Closson.

PREFACE | THIS EDITION | ANNOTATION | HEADNOTES | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS EDITION

The unpublished letters are transcribed from manuscripts belonging to a descendant of the Burrage family living in Charlottesville, Virginia. The editorial work was undertaken as a class project by graduate students and faculty in a digital humanities course taught in the English Department at Virginia Tech, Spring semester 2008. After transcribing the letters students did preliminary markup in TEI P5, which was then revised and completed by Professor Radcliffe, who also contributed the style sheets. The project is published by CATH at Virginia Tech under a Creative Commons license.

Style sheets are used to present the letters in three forms: page images, diplomatic transcription, and a regularized and annotated text. The markup uses TEI encoding for "original" and "regular" forms of spelling, abbreviations, and punctuation. Spelling changes are confined to what appear to be slips of the pen, and the abbreviations expanded are mostly ampersands. Most of the editorial work has gone into punctuation, of which there is little in the manuscripts and that of a peculiar form.

Joseph Burrage wrote most of his letters in a kind of shorthand, possibly acquired for the purpose of note-taking at Harvard. The two letters addressed to the sunday school at West Cambridge are written in a more formal style, without ampersands and in a somewhat different hand. The familiar letters, often written piecemeal and in haste, have shorter paragraphs and simpler syntax; in them end-of-sentence punctuation often consists of an all-purpose kind of dot or mark between clauses. As often as not independent clauses begin with a lower-case letter, even when a new sentence is obviously beginning.

Some paragraphs begin on a new line; in other cases a new paragraph is indicated by extra space between sentences (which may or may not be separated by the dot or mark). Sometimes a sentence will be slightly indented at the beginning of a line, as though beginning a paragraph where none seems intended. The handling of whitespace looks like a form of rhetorical punctuation — longer spaces indicating a longer pause, as in a new sentence or paragraph — but without much consistency.

Colons, semicolons, and dashes are very seldom used; a dot or mark between clauses can be construed as any of these things depending on the context: sometimes the dots are periods and sometimes commas. The small vertical or diagonal marks that look like commas often indicate full stops. In the diplomatic transcription these marks are handled as commas or periods as the context requires, and in the regularized version they are handled as whatever punctuation grammar, sense, or style suggests.

The sense is, most of the time, clear enough but inevitably situations arise when it is unclear whether a phrase should be joined to the clause before or the clause following. These ambiguities are not apparent in the regularized version, in which commas and semicolons have been added and letter-cases are normalized. Because Burrage has left so much to interpretation the diplomatic transcriptions and indeed the page images should be consulted before the letters are quoted: punctuation in both the transcriptions and regularized versions has involved extensive editing.

PREFACE | THIS EDITION | ANNOTATION | HEADNOTES | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ANNOTATION

Before undertaking this project we looked at other collections of Civil War letters published on the web and discovered that while few had been edited, even fewer had been annotated. As students in a digital humanities class, we have tried to take full advantage of what the new medium affords by adding supplementary documents, maps, links, notes, and glosses. In what follows the annotators reflect on what they have done.

Student of literature are familiar with annotations, and in annotating these Civil War letters we took anthologized works of literature as our model, striving for short, pointed notes. There are some differences, however: in the digital medium one can repeat a note rather than using the print-saving "ibid," and because the notes are not visible unless selected by a user, one can have many notes without cluttering the appearance of the text. In annotating the Burrage letters different persons worked on different kinds of material: places, names, glosses, and notes for items, organizations, titles, and other things unfamiliar to modern readers.

It is often necessary for a reader to know where Joseph was at a given time to understand his meaning and appreciate his experience. His letters almost always give a location in the heading, leaving us with a way to track his movements throughout the war. Most of these locations are forts or camps no longer in existence; for these we first turned to various online Encyclopedias (Wikipedia and Britannica) and see if they had entries. For towns and rivers Webster's Geographical Dictionary was also useful, and in desperate cases resort was made to topographical maps.

In some instances we found what we were looking for in nineteenth-century newspaper entries (Brook’s Station and Spotted Tavern, for example); in others, annotated collections of letters (Ascension General Hospital, for example, was found in a picture caption in another collection of letters). The regimental history written by Col. Underwood was also useful. A very few have remained elusive, while some, like Camp Orland(o) Smith, still have not been exactly placed in geographical coordinates.

Ambiguous place names posed a challenge: only by happenstance did we discover that the Long Island of the letters was not in New York, but rather a conscription camp on Long Island in the Boston Harbor. Louisville was another ambiguous name: on first thought we assumed that this meant Louisville Kentucky, but there is also a Louisville Tennessee where Joseph was bound; in this case the obvious name turned out to be the correct one. The letter usually supplied the necessary context: while there are Newberns in many states, a reference to Cousin Eddie and a little research fixed the selection on North Carolina.

Personal names were also a challenge, since most of these do not appear in in biographical reference books, and there are often many people sharing the same name. In the case of friends and family known to the original readers, Joseph often omits the family name altogether. In the case of the Burrage Letters we were able to identify most of the Massachusetts names with the assistance of a few printed resources.

The most valuable was The Burrage Memorial, a genealogical history published by Joseph's Uncle Alvah in 1877. Here were dates, and often brief biographies, of Joseph's uncles, cousins, and siblings, many of whom appear in the letters. A number of persons in West Cambridge (now Arlington) could be identified through The History of the Town of Arlington, Massachusetts (1880) by Benjamin and William R. Cutter. Additional information on the Burrages was gleaned from Leominster Massachusetts, Historical and Picturesque (1888) by William A. Emerson.

Several personal names have yet to be firmly identified, which are likely to be members of the Orthodox Congregational Church in West Cambridge (“Mr. and Mrs. Bates”), employees of Burrage and Henry in Boston (“Worcester” and “Reuben”), and members of the Closson family in Vermont, several of whom seem to have been visiting in West Cambridge with Joseph's stepmother, Mary Closson Burrage (“Sarah” and “Frankie”). We hope that more help with these names will be forthcoming once the letters are published online.

If names of persons and places were obvious candidates for annotation, references to events, organizations, titles, and objects presented more of a challenge: just what is in need of a comment? Where to stop? We elected to annotate whatever seemed unfamiliar to ourselves, or what we thought might be of interest to others, doing what we could in the time allotted. We read through the letters and made a list, put the list into a spreadsheet, divided the task between two annotators, and set to work.

Dictionaries and other reference books were consulted, but the internet proved the most ready resource; it is particularly rich in material related to Civil War history. Terms like “Adam’s Express,” “Zouaves,” “hunter watch,” and “balmorals.“ were not difficult to identify; in the case of others, like “anguntem” we are still looking. We considered adding some illustrative essays on recurring topics such as soldiers’ food, foot problems, and medicine, but time did not permit it.

PREFACE | THIS EDITION | ANNOTATION | HEADNOTES | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HEADNOTES

Headnotes presented a different sort of challenge. Considered individually, the letters are often tedious enough, though when read in sequence they take on life as the character of the writer emerges and a story appears out of the welter of detail. Ideally, headnotes would indicate how individual letters contribute to the greater narrative arc of the correspondence. A primary concern was to keep the headnotes unobtrusive and complementary to the letters, short enough to be interesting, but long enough to convey the contents of the letter. This required a discipline that might be codified as:

The Ten Commandments of Composing Headnotes

1. 1. Thou shalt not spoil the letter.
2. Explanation: If the headnote relates all of the information contained in the letter, why would anyone want to read the letter? The headnotes must be complementary to the letter, not duplicates of it.
3. 2. Thou shalt practice brevity in headnote composition.
4. Explanation: A lengthy headnote detracts from the letter and runs the risk of violating Commandment 1.
5. 3. Thou shalt treat the individual letter as a chapter of the primary text of the collection of letters.
6. Explanation: Creating a narrative arc within the headnotes relates the action of the individual letter and the collection. Each headnote, like each letter, relates to the one preceding and following it.
7. 4. Thou shalt compose only interesting headnotes. Mundane and disinterested language shall be reserved for other occasions or media.
8. Explanation: If the process is not enjoyable for you, it will not be enjoyable for your readers.
9. 5. Thou shalt maintain an unassuming manner of formatting.
10. Explanation: A headnote should not detract from the appearance of the letter it intends to accompany. The headnote is merely a complement, not a primary component of the letter.
11. 6. Thou shalt not take any sort of artistic liberties in composing.
12. Explanation: Do not assume what the author was really trying to say. The letter is law and your job is not to read between the lines.
13. 7. Thou shalt compose in a manner and language that reflects the tone of the letter.
14. Explanation: Your writing style should match the writing style of the author of the letter. Keep your diction formal and match your tone to that of the letter's author.
15. 8. Thou shalt be inclined to create suspense in your readers.
16. Explanation: In accordance with Commandment 1, you mustn't give away the most exciting parts of the letter. In order to entice your readers to continue through the collection of letters, find a way to keep them in suspense.
17. 9. Thou shalt not be redundant.
18. Explanation: Do not repeat information that is listed in other menus on your website or within the collection. Your work should not detract from the work of others.
19. 10. Thou shalt let the author do all the talking.
20. Explanation: Your headnotes should not assume the character of the author of the letter. Leave all name-dropping to the author, keep your words brief yet intriguing.

PREFACE | THIS EDITION | ANNOTATION | HEADNOTES | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Transcription and preliminary markup was done by the students of ENGL 5074: Thomas Fellers, Elizabeth Fletcher, Bryan Friel, Kelly Goad, Laura Hartmann, James Hunter, Ryan Keefe, Sean Kelly, Taylor Loy, Rachel Milloy, Rebecca Mueller, Amanda Mullins, Luke Pruitt, Matt Sams, Jeff Spicer, Bonnie Stovall, Bethany Tucker, Joseph Wingenbach.

Matt Sams constructed the chronology; Kelly Goad composed the headnotes; Bryan Friel assembled the maps. The annotations were done by a team of researchers: place names by Elizabeth Fletcher, personal names by Jeff Spicer and David Radcliffe, the miscellaneous notes are by Amanda Mullins and Luke Pruitt.

David Radcliffe acted of general editor, scanning the images, writing the XSL style sheets, creating the supplementary documents, and doing the final coding and editing.

Particular acknowledgments are due to Jeanne B. Radcliffe of Charlottesville, Virginia and Constance Daly of Clyde, North Carolina for lending documents used in the project, and to Aaron Purcell, Director of Special Collections of Newman Library at Virginia Tech for instruction in Civil War documents, and to Dot Porter of the University of Kentucky for visiting the class and giving us instruction in TEI. Dan Mosser of CATH was co-instructor of the class and lent sage advice at every stage of the proceedings.

Please send notices of errors and omissions to:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.