Learning How To Write History The Hard Way

If I had to state my occupation in retirement, I guess it would be amateur historian, with the emphasis on amateur. What I mean by that is that I have no professional training in the field - actually I have never had professional training for my two career jobs, banking or not-for-profit finance. When you don't have professional training, in the history case, graduate level education, sometimes you learn things the hard way.

One thing that fits into that category is something I learned just recently. One of my projects is to publish the Civil War letters of William Lloyd of the 33rd New Jersey. Somewhere between 30 to 40 of his letters to his wife, Mary, survive and, as anyone who read "The Mutinous Regiment" will know Lloyd expressed his opinions without any inhibitions of any kind. That is why the working title is "I May As Well Speak Plain."

As is fairly typical with Civil War letters, while we have all these letters from Lloyd to his wife, none that she wrote to him seem to have survived. In editing the letters one of the things that I wanted to do was try to speculate about Mary's experience at home in New Jersey while Lloyd was away in Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas. One way to get a sense of that is to examine the newspaper accounts of the regiment's battles and campaigns that Mary most likely read. From Lloyd's letters we know that she must have seen the New York newspapers on a regular basis.

Since the New York newspapers from 1863-4 are available either on microfilm or on the Internet I have been making copies of some of those accounts. Only after doing that did I decide to get via inter-library loan the definitive book on the Northern press - "The North Reports the Civil War" by J. Cutler Andrews. That's actually where I should have started since several chapters give a clear picture of how the war was covered, but more importantly from my perspective, how long it took detailed accounts to be published in the New York papers. So this lesson, learned the hard way, is that in areas like this, the first step should be to look at secondary sources that summarize primary sources and than, as necessary, consult the primary sources.

Of course, that isn't always possible as I am finding out in my other area of research, early base ball in New Jersey. As I have posted before I am writing a history of the Eureka Base Ball Club of Newark for the pioneer project. The Eureka made their first extended road trip in September of 1863 visiting Philadelphia for what was to be three matches with Philadelphia teams before rain intervened. If I hadn't already written "The Mutinous Regiment" I probably wouldn't have been aware that just before their trip, Newark was struggling to meet its quota for the 33rd New Jersey.

The fact that the Eureka, almost all of whom were in prime age for the military, were planning this trip at the same time that Newark was struggling to find volunteers for the 33rd says something about the isolation of the young men who made up the Eureka from the impact of the war. A few of the Eureka did serve in the Union Army either before or after 1863, but this to some level suggests that military service was not a priority for the kind of young upper class men who made up the Eureka.

If I hadn't already written about the 33rd, the most likely source for such information would have been a history of Newark during the Civil War. Unfortunately no such book exists, Bill Gillette's "Jersey Blue" is a fine book, but its focus is more on politics not life throughout New Jersey during this era. There are histories of Newark, but they were written a long time ago and tend to be less critically written. This reminds me again of how understudied New Jersey history really is - something that needs to be remedied. So if I have learned anything in the process, in the future I should look for general secondary works for some issues and be mindful of what else is happening in the period I am researching and writing about.