“Editorial Method” in “Prison Pens”
Editorial Method
This volume presents the entire collection of fifty-five extant letters that George Washington Nelson Jr. (Wash) and his fiancée, Mary Scollay (Mollie), exchanged between 1863 and 1865. They are housed in the Nelson Family Papers collection at Virginia Tech’s Special Collections Library (Blacksburg, Va.); copies are also held at Long Branch Plantation (Millwood, Va.). There are five letters from 1863, twenty-six from 1864, and twenty-four from 1865. Envelopes for many of these letters exist in the collection, and they have helped track the movement of correspondence. To our knowledge, extant letters from the period 1867–71 either do not exist or are untraceable. There are only four letters from the period 1871–72, but because none of them furthers the narrative that the wartime letters present, we have not included them here.
The letters in this volume vary in length, sometimes numbering as many as five handwritten pages, but most do not exceed one handwritten page. This brevity was a requirement of prison censors, who set this page limit for letters entering and exiting prisons in order facilitate timely delivery. Longer letters took additional time for censors to scrutinize and were often delayed, causing anxiety for both Wash and Mollie. Not all letters arrived when planned, and sometimes Mollie and Wash received multiple letters at once. Other times, letters never arrived. As a result, there are letters missing from this collection.
In addition to the letters, this volume also features Wash’s 1866 memoir. Two versions of the memoir are held at the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond, Va.): an undated typed transcript, probably from the mid-twentieth century, and a manuscript in the hand of Wash’s sister, Jennie, dated 1866. It is unknown whether Wash dictated his reminiscences, and this is the only copy of the memoir, or whether Jenny penned a copy for herself later that year, and Wash’s original draft is in private hands or lost. The physical condition of Jennie’s manuscript copy suggests, however, that the latter case is more likely, as these pages seem to have been pasted into an album at one time. Significantly, when Jenny copied the narrative, she remarked how she “wanted Wash to rewrite this, condensing a little and adding other items of great interest—but he says he can’t.” She wrote further, “Some of the most touching incidents of his prison life were in connection with his letters—to which—naturally he does not choose to refer.” Jennie reminds us that all historical narratives require choice and are never complete.
In March 1876, Wash’s memoir was published in an issue of the Southern Historical Society Papers devoted entirely to treatment of Confederate prisoners of war. Created by the Southern Historical Society in 1873, the SHSP was intended to promote a distinctly southern history of the Civil War. The publication circulated fairly widely among Confederate veterans, though it never reached the popularity of the more familiar Confederate Veteran. Regarding Wash’s memoir in particular, the editor wrote, “The narrative was written not long after the close of the war, when the facts were fresh in his memory, and could be substantiated by memoranda in his possession.” Apparently, Wash wrote to the editor that his reminiscences were “all literal fact, understated rather than overstated.” Wash also explained that he shared the story with his fellow bunkmate while at Point Lookout, who corroborated Wash’s facts.1
We have retranscribed the memoir from the original manuscript and provided scholarly annotations for pertinent historical terms and proper nouns, as well as unfamiliar language. Our annotated version of Wash’s memoir is significant for many reasons, but especially because it removes it from a politically oriented Lost Cause rendering of the Civil War found in the SHSP, placing it, instead, within the context of Wash and Mollie’s lived experiences of war and defeat. In transcribing the memoir for this volume, we worked from both the typed transcript and Jenny’s 1866 manuscript, as well as the version published in the Southern Historical Society Papers. In many cases, the typed transcript was inaccurate, and we have corrected those errors. The version in the SHSP does not always follow the original manuscript’s paragraph breaks and, as a result, is less accessible for students and researchers.
We transcribed both the letters and memoir using high-resolution digital images of the original manuscripts, though we each worked with the physical materials in the archives as well. In order not to encumber the reading of these sources, we have retained original spelling without the use of [sic], unless doing so offered needed clarification. In instances when either writer repeated a word or phrase in succession, we deleted the repeated word. We have also omitted phrases that the authors struck in the original manuscript. Biblical quotations in the letters came from the King James Version of the Bible, which was the only version Wash and Mollie would have known. Finally, we took certain editorial liberties with style, formatting, and punctuation. We silently indented paragraphs where they broke and capitalized the first words of sentences when the authors did not. Too, Wash and Mollie often ended sentences with dashes, and we replaced them with periods. In the case of possessive nouns, Wash placed apostrophes over the penultimate letter, but we have transcribed the word according to modern conventions. Similarly, we have removed superscripts for ordinal numbers and also standardized the alignment for the openings, closings, and dates of the letters. Finally, although Wash’s sister signed the manuscript memoir, “Jenny,” both Wash and Mollie spelled her name “Jennie” in their correspondence, and so did we.
We have identified the most significant personal and place names, as well as battles, that appear in each letter. In some cases, we have not identified individuals with minor significance to the broader narrative; often these family acquaintances or friends were impossible to locate in the historical record with the information available in the letters. In identifying many individuals from the Nelson and Page families, we consulted Richard Channing Moore’s Genealogy of the Page Family in Virginia (1893). For other individuals, we relied on digital images of U.S. census records from the Library of Congress microfilm collection of these records that are held in databases on Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com). We also used this website to corroborate information in Moore’s Genealogy. In order to render our annotations in a clear and useful way, we have only cited the permanent census information: microfilm collection information and pertinent page, dwelling, and family numbers. Readers should note that we accessed all census material on Ancestry.com. We have also taken care to gloss Latin and French phrases, and annotate literary extracts. Doing so underscores the broader intellectual culture of the Civil War era from which Wash and Mollie drew inspiration.
1. Southern Historical Society Papers 1, no. 3 (March 1876): 243.
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