Special Collections Research

I began my research looking at personal letters sent from soldiers to their families and letter sent to the soldiers in return. Most of the documents were pretty difficult to decipher due to the writing and age of the papers. After failing to find much readable materials in that collection of papers I moved onto a file that was full of pictures from magazines and articles from newspapers that were much easier to read and gather information from.

The first documents were pictures from either a magazine or newspaper in New York, I didn’t see anything exactly stating were these pictures were from or what the original source was. The pictures themselves were cartoons mocking political figures. The first picture depicted a Union general holding up Confederate President Jefferson Davis off the ground by the throat. The Union general was drawn a large strong man who’s strength was greatly exaggerated. David was shown as weak small man with a large cartoonish head. The cartoons show how the opposing sides viewed each other even if slightly exaggerated. Another interesting picture was a picture drawn of Jefferson Davis that held one way showed his face from the side with the caption “Jefferson Davis going in” and then when the picture was flipped sideways was a picture of jackass that captioned “Jefferson Davis going out.” It’s interesting to me because this kind of political mockery still takes place today and it just shows the political battles today are nothing new.

I also found a picture of songs written by families during the war from a magazine or newspaper called “Chas. Magnus” in New York. One was titled “Bring My Brother Back to Me.” The opening lyrics were “Bring my brother back to me, when this war is done; give us all the joys we shared, ere it had begun. There was also one titled “Willie We Have Missed You.”

The last part of the collection I looked at was the party platforms from the Democratic and Republican conventions in 1864 when Lincoln ran against McClellan. The Democrats main points were failure of the Republicans to lead, restoring states rights, preserving the federal union, and ending the suppression of rights by the Republicans. The Republicans main points were not compromising, loyalty to their country and constitution, respect and honoring the flag, and ending slavery and rights to people regardless of color.

These are the most interesting findings to me personally out of the collections I looked through.