Editorial Note

The documents presented in this collection make up roughly one-half of the extant wartime correspondence between Cimbaline and Henry Fike, who exchanged more than four hundred letters between August 1862 and July 1865. A few dozen messages have not survived, and others do not appear in the following chapters for various reasons. Some replies are quite short, consisting only of a few sentences or noting the enclosure of mementoes, and many more are extraordinarily long, dwelling on the people, occurrences, and thoughts that surface more succinctly in the excerpts that follow. A handful of letters, such as the first reply from Cimbaline, appear in full, but most have been edited for the sake of redundancy or brevity, omitting information that is extraneous (describing, say, the weather in a distant town), unclear (referring to people and past events whose relevance to the Fikes remains ambiguous), or repetitive. During the summer of 1863, for example, Henry often cut the boredom of his prolonged stint at Fort Pickering by writing multiple letters per day, many of which reiterated the same points. Both Fikes were also incorrigible scolds, forever reproaching the other for not writing more often. Such comments, which sometimes stretched across entire pages, have largely been omitted.

These transcriptions try to maintain as much fidelity as possible to the Fikes’ handwritten correspondence. The original spelling and punctuation are mostly unchanged, and editorial notations such as [sic] appear sparingly in order to retain the substance, tone, and color of each author’s unique voice. Although exasperating to modern eyes, the peculiar spelling used by Cimbaline exhibits the phonetic consistency of a person who drew on spoken language to guide her transition to written communication. Readers who struggle to make sense of her passages should try reading them out loud. In the cases where even that might not eliminate confusion, explanatory brackets appear to suggest her intended meaning. Many of Henry’s letters, whether complaining about musquitoes or wishing to get payd, likewise reveal that spellings in nineteenth-century America were more variegated than today’s readers might expect.

The primary material in this book is accompanied by a digital component, a website that allows students and scholars to interact with the volume’s content. Search for this book on www.ugapress.org for links to the bonus material.