Editors’ Note#

Transcribing and editing the Civil War letters and papers of the Wade brothers has been a challenge and a blessing for both of us. Mr. Webb Wade presented us with this fascinating opportunity in order to make the contents of these fragile and sometimes barely legible papers accessible to his children and grandchildren.

Mr. Wade did not want a literal transcription with all of the spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors of his ancestors, but a collection of readable and understandable documents that do not require further translation or interpretation. Although purist historians might disagree with this approach, we agree that it was appropriate for Mr. Wade’s purpose. We also believe that we were able to achieve this purpose without affecting the voices of the individual writers, which still come through as unique and rich in personality.

These documents are rich in history as well. The reader will find accounts of an 1862 baseball game at Fort McHenry, political skullduggery between New Orleans and New York, battlefield maneuvering and fighting, and attempted bribery related to smuggling cotton out of Mexico. Above all, these letters are first-hand looks at the lives of Union soldiers in the field.

Beyond the grammar and spelling issues, we encountered words that defied identification. These may be because of aging ink or pencil, deteriorated paper, the use of unrecognizable archaic terms, gross misspellings, or just plain poor penmanship. As best we could, we used contextual clues, dictionaries, histories, maps, and other people’s eyes and minds — even so, a few words are still unknown to us. In these cases, we substituted words that make sense within the context of their respective sentences but may bear no physical resemblance to the original words.

We hope that future readers will enjoy reading these letters as much as we did.

Melissa Dewey & David Jones

Jacksonville, Florida, 2007