The largest library in the world and an institution known both as “America’s Library” and the “Nation’s Memory,” the Library of Congress is located in three large buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, and the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, which houses 6.2 million moving images, sound recordings, and related documents. (Materials in Culpeper can be called to or accessed from the Library’s Washington facilities.) From 740 volumes and 3 maps in 1801, the Library’s collections increased, by 2011, to more than 145 million items—on all subjects and in almost all media. Reflecting America’s membership in the community of nations and the diverse origins of its people, the Library’s collections are international in scope, including material in more than 460 languages. Yet the heart of the Library is found in its vast collections of written, visual, recorded, and electronic materials that chronicle the origins and development of the United States of America. Its matchless array of materials pertaining to the American Civil War, preserved within several specialized divisions, constitutes an unparalleled resource for the study of this defining era in the history of the United States. Below are some of the highlights of each division’s Civil War holdings.
American Folklife Center (AFC), http://www.loc.gov/folklife/
AFC’s Civil War–related materials include recordings of reminiscences of former slaves collected during the Depression era by the Works Projects Administration Federal Writers’ Project; tales of the Confederate Army recorded by Julius Franklin Howell (1846–1948), veteran of the Twenty-fourth Virginia Cavalry and throughout his long life devoted to preservation of the memories of Confederate soldiers; recordings from the Blue Ridge Parkway Folklife Project Collection and the Vaughn and Kay Brewer Ozark Mountain Collection, in which people describe their grandparents’ wartime service; a recording of The Adam and Eve Wedding Song, a composition attributed to Abraham Lincoln, and recordings of other Civil War–era music; a recording of a 1940 celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation held at the Library of Congress; and a 1954 recording of the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War program honoring Minnesotan Albert Woolson, then 107 and the last surviving Union Army veteran.
General Collections (Humanities and Social Sciences Division, HSS), http://www.loc.gov/rr/main/
The General Collections include thousands of volumes pertaining to the war, from memoirs, diaries, and letters published during the conflict to present-day histories. These collections include accounts and analyses of individual Civil War battles; treatments of various aspects of the war (for example, naval warfare, guerrilla warfare, cavalry operations, weaponry, intelligence gathering, politics, government, and diplomacy); books on slavery and African American wartime experiences; books on camp life and Civil War humor; Civil War–related fiction and poetry; regimental histories and bound volumes of the newsletters and magazines of veterans’ groups; and Civil War almanacs, chronologies, and encyclopedias. To browse items in the General Collections, go to the Library’s main webpage, www.loc.gov, click on “Library Catalogs” at the top of the page, and select either “Basic Search” or “Guided Search.” Under “Basic Search,” choose “Subject Browse” and type in, as the subject, United States-History-Civil War, 1861–1865.
Geography and Map Division (G&M), http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/
The Library’s cartographic collections, the largest in the world, include more than 2,240 printed maps, manuscript maps, and sketch or reconnaissance maps made by both Union and Confederate forces immediately prior to, during, or in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. G&M collections also include more than seventy-five atlases prepared by both Union and Confederate troops as “after action reports” regarding specific battles and campaigns. Among the reconnaissance, sketch, and theater-of-war maps are detailed battle maps made by Major Jedediah Hotchkiss for Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson; maps of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Southern military campaigns; and maps taken from newspapers, diaries, scrapbooks, and manuscripts compiled by individual soldiers. These materials are accessible online through the Library of Congress American Memory webpage, at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/civil_war_maps/. Also accessible via this webpage are Civil War cartographic materials from the Virginia Historical Society and the Library of Virginia.
Law Library (Law), http://www.loc.gov/law/about/
The world’s largest law library, the Library of Congress Law Library holds more than 2.65 million volumes. Included within its collections are records of military trials/court-martial proceedings conducted by the departmental commands of the United States Army during and after the Civil War against Union army personnel, civilians, and, in rare instances, members of the Confederate army. Law also holds state session laws for the Civil War period; bills from the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congresses (1861–1865); and A Digest of the Military and Naval Laws of the Confederate States, from the Commencement of the Provisional Congress to the End of the First Congress Under the Permanent Constitution (Columbia, SC, 1864).
Manuscript Division (MSS), http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/
An especially rich repository of Civil War materials, the Manuscript Division holds the nation’s premier collection of original Abraham Lincoln documents, which may be accessed online, at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html. The division also holds the papers of Lincoln’s private secretaries and biographers John George Nicolay and John Hay and those of most of his cabinet, including Postmaster General Montgomery Blair (in the Blair Family Papers), Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. MSS is also the principal repository for the papers of Generals Nathaniel P. Banks, P. G. T. Beauregard, Benjamin F. Butler, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Jubal A. Early, Charles and Thomas Ewing Jr., James A. Garfield, Ulysses S. Grant, Samuel P. Heintzelman, Henry J. Hunt, Joseph W. Keifer, George B. McClellan, Montgomery C. Meigs, Carl Schurz, Philip H. Sheridan, and William T. Sherman.
Admirals Andrew H. Foote, Louis M. Goldsborough, Samuel P. Lee, and Matthew Fontaine Maury are also represented by collections, as are hundreds of noncommissioned officers and enlisted personnel. The Confederate States of America Collection and the papers of war correspondent Whitelaw Reid (Cincinnati Gazette), newspaper editors Horace Greeley (New York Tribune) and Manton Marble (New York World), nurse and American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, Burton N. Harrison (secretary to Jefferson Davis), and poet and Civil War nurse Walt Whitman are noteworthy among the more than one thousand discrete collections in the division that relate to the Civil War.
Notable individual items within these manuscript collections include: drafts of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emancipation Proclamation, and first and second inaugural addresses; Ulysses S. Grant’s commission as lieutenant general; Varina Davis’s letter to Montgomery Blair describing the capture of her husband, Jefferson Davis; Clara Barton’s war lectures; the letters of artist and soldier Charles Wellington Reed (many decorated with scenes of army life); Jubal Early’s postwar scrapbook (see here); and, in the Gladstone Collection, a letter from African American activist, orator, dentist, and lawyer John Rock seeking a Washington attorney’s assistance in Rock’s successful bid to become the first African American to be admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court (see here and here).
In sum, Manuscript Division Civil War collections provide an abundance of information on virtually every aspect of the war, from the experiences and contributions of women and African Americans through the motivations of volunteer soldiers and the treatment of prisoners, to the financing of the war and wartime diplomacy.
A more detailed listing of MSS Civil War Collections can be accessed by going to the division’s “Catalogs, Bibliographies, and Guides” webpage, at http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/findaid.html, and activating the “Civil War Guide” link. (To peruse all MSS online finding aids, go to the Finding Aids home page at http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/f-aids/mssfa.html.)
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division (MBRS), http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic/
Repository of the world’s largest film collection and the nation’s largest public collection of sound recordings, MBRS holds Civil War materials ranging from ten minutes of raw, unedited footage of a 1930 Confederate reunion through modern documentaries exploring the entire war, individual battles, and leading figures (including Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and Harriet Tubman); the African American wartime experience; guerrilla warfare; and Civil War music. Fictional films held in the division run from silent film–era director D. W. Griffith’s groundbreaking—if ideologically indefensible—Birth of a Nation through the 1939 Clark Gable–Vivien Leigh epic Gone with the Wind to 1989’s Glory and the 2003 film version of Charles Frazier’s National Book Award–winning novel Cold Mountain.
Recorded sound collections include recordings of interviews with people who were living during the Civil War—for example, a series of interviews with seven Union veterans conducted in the 1940s by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. The NBC Radio Collection includes broadcasts from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, between June 30 and July 3, 1938, relating to the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the battle. These broadcasts feature brief interviews with both Union and Confederate veterans; a short radio drama about the battle, That a Nation Might Live; a description of the seventy-fifth anniversary parade; a memorial service; and selections played by the U.S. Marine Band. The recorded sound collections also contain recordings of Civil War songs and such dramatizations as MacKinlay Kantor’s Lee and Grant at Appomattox, and a You Are There dramatization of “The Battle of Gettysburg,” as well as a recording of the radio broadcast of Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic narrative poem John Brown’s Body featuring Tyrone Power, Dame Judith Anderson, and Raymond Massey.
Music Division (MUS), http://www.loc.gov/rr/perform/
Holding more than 20.5 million items covering a thousand years of music history, the Music Division collections are particularly strong in material related to American music, including manuscripts, correspondence, and papers of every notable American composer and musician. The division holds more than 2,500 Civil War sheet-music titles, which can be browsed online via the Performing Arts Encyclopedia webpage, at http://www.loc.gov/performingarts/ (see the list of “Special Presentations,” and follow the “Civil War Sheet Music” link). The division also holds band books used by Civil War army bands, important morale-boosting components on both sides of the conflict. A presentation, “Band Music from the Civil War Era,” is available on the Library’s American Memory website, at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwmhtml/cwmhome.html. The Francis Maria Scala Collection contains the music manuscripts and papers of noted bandleader Francis Scala, who was the director of the U.S. Marine Band from 1855 to 1871.
Prints and Photographs Division (P&P), http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/
Another particularly rich repository of Civil War materials, the Prints and Photographs Division holds thousands of Civil War–related materials in a variety of formats, including:
Photographs by such masters as Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner, and Timothy O’Sullivan, as well as many less well-known photographers. Portraits of leading figures on both sides, photos showing life in army camps and the grim aftermath of battle, and haunting images of “ordinary” soldiers and sailors are included in this photographic record. In 2010, the division received the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs, more than 700 ambrotype and tintype photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers (plus other war-related artifacts) collected and donated by Tom Liljenquist and his sons, Jason, Brandon, and Christian. A number of photographs from the Liljenquist Collection are included in this volume, their first appearance in a major print publication.
Drawings including both rough sketches and finished documentary drawings by Alfred R. Waud; his brother, William; Edwin Forbes; and other artist-correspondents for the Union’s illustrated newspapers, as well as British artist-correspondent Frank Vizetelly, plus watercolor drawings by artist-soldiers William McIlvaine and James Fuller Queen.
Popular graphic arts including both color and black-and-white lithographs and woodcuts depicting wartime leaders, battle scenes, fortifications and hospitals, and sentimental vignettes, as well as political banners and cartoons.
Miscellaneous materials including patriotic envelopes, advertisements featuring battle scenes and depictions of war leaders, illustrated sheet-music covers, illustrated pamphlets, and illustrated books and bound portfolios such as Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War and George N. Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign.
Thousands of the division’s Civil War–related items have been digitized and made available via the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, at http://www.loc.gov/pictures/.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division (RBSC), http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/
Among the Rare Book Division’s many Civil War treasures are the Walt Whitman Collection and the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of publications, manuscripts, prints, and other material related to Abraham Lincoln; unusual Lincolniana held by the division include the contents of Lincoln’s pockets on the night of his assassination and a few pieces of Mary Todd Lincoln’s jewelry. Rare Book’s Confederate States of America (CSA) Collection consists of 1,812 volumes, including a rich selection pertaining to the CSA national and state governments and 158 broadsides featuring ballads relating to the war, as well as almanacs, textbooks, volumes of history, prayer books, and other works produced in the wartime South. The Broadside Collection includes Union and some Confederate recruiting posters, special orders by military commanders, and such interesting ephemera as a poem by General Lew Wallace that may have been published to help raise funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. The division also holds a collection of illustrated Civil War envelopes and such unusual items as the Myriopticon (see here) and a game, The Campaigns in Virginia (see here).
Rare Book’s African American Pamphlet Collection contains 396 pamphlets on topics such as slavery, colonization, emancipation, and reconstruction, and the Daniel P. Murray Pamphlet Collection contains an additional 184 pamphlets pertaining chiefly to slavery and abolition. A majority of the pamphlets in the Congressional Speech Collection (consisting of speeches delivered by members of Congress between 1826 and 1940) date from the last six decades of the nineteenth century. Other special Rare Book collections that include materials on the war and its causes include the Dime Novel Collection and the juvenile collections (children’s books dating from the early eighteenth century to the present, encompassing such titles as The Anti-Slavery Alphabet, published in 1847).
Serial and Government Publications Division (SER), http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/
This division’s newspaper collection includes many papers from the Civil War era representing both Confederate and Union perspectives as well as titles that best document the military aspects of the war, many of which are illustrated with battlefield maps. In all, the Library holds more than 790 original bound newspaper volumes covering the period 1861–1865. It also holds a collection of separate newspaper issues containing illustrated battle maps. Selected items in the division’s Historic Events Newspaper Collection document landmark battles and other important occurrences as covered in such papers as the New York Herald, the New York Times, the Vicksburg Citizen, and others. Postwar papers sometimes feature veterans’ recollections.
Online Exhibitions, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/all/
Selected materials from the Library of Congress collections are always available to in-person visitors through both permanent and temporary exhibitions in the Thomas Jefferson Building and smaller exhibition spaces in the James Madison Memorial Building. Online versions of all major Library exhibitions are available through the Library’s website. Those pertaining to the Civil War include:
The Gettysburg Address, featuring the Library’s two manuscript copies of the address (given by Lincoln to his two private secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay; see the earliest known copy, given to Nicolay, on here) and other documents relating to the address, including the invitation sent to Lincoln to make some remarks at the opening of the national cemetery at Gettysburg.
The Last Full Measure: Civil War Photographs from the Liljenquist Family Collection, featuring 379 Civil War–era ambrotypes and tintypes of enlisted Union and Confederate soldiers; it provides a poignant reminder of the human cost of the conflict.
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition. Created to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the 1809 birth of the nation’s most revered president, this exhibition reveals Lincoln the man, whose thoughts, words, and actions were deeply affected by personal experiences and pivotal historic events.
Civil War materials are also included in the following exhibitions:
American Treasures in the Library of Congress
The African-American Mosaic: African-American Culture and History
The African-American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
“I Do Solemnly Swear…” Inaugural Materials from the Collections of the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Webcasts, http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php
Included in the large and constantly growing collection of video recordings of programs presented at the Library is coverage of the Lincoln Bicentennial Symposium, featuring many noted scholars of the Civil War era. Webcasts of author talks include considerations of the entire span of the war as well as many of its individual aspects, including Washington during the Civil War; the African American journey from slavery to freedom; Robert E. Lee, as discovered through his letters and papers; and the “parallel lives” of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman in wartime Washington.
To access webcasts pertaining to the Civil War, go to the Internet address given above and type “Civil War” into the Webcast Pages “Search” module at the top of the main Webcast page.
Information about and artifacts from the Library of Congress are also available on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr (where photographs of Civil War soldiers from the Liljenquist Family Collection are available, as well as nearly two dozen photographs of Abraham Lincoln).