How this collection was made

The volume

Confederate Military History: A Library of Confederate States History, edited by General Clement A. Evans, ran to twelve volumes published at Atlanta in 1899. The fifth is South Carolina, written by Brigadier-General Ellison Capers: twenty-one chapters and fifty-one pages of biographical sketches, 424 pages in all. The series was written by Confederate officers for a Confederate readership, a generation after the war, and it is commemorative in purpose. That does not make it valueless — Capers had the official reports and his own service to work from, and much of the detail here is not easily found elsewhere — but it is not a neutral record and is not published as one.

What is published

Nine of the twenty-one chapters. The test is the subject, not the state: a chapter is here if what it is about is Charleston, its harbor, its defenses, its garrisons or its waters between 1860 and February 1865. The twelve that are not here are South Carolina regiments in Virginia, in Tennessee, in Mississippi and in Georgia, and each is listed on the collection page with what it covers and a link to the scan.

Chapters are published whole. Two of the nine carry matter well outside Charleston — chapter I runs on to Manassas, chapter XXI to Bentonville — and they are printed entire anyway, with a note saying where the chapter leaves the harbor. A chapter cut down to its Charleston pages would be a source the volume never printed.

Where the words come from

This collection does not publish machine-read text. The transcription is Project Gutenberg’s ebook 50737, typed and proofread from the printed volume by volunteers, and it is what gives this collection its paragraphing, its block quotations — the volume quotes official reports at length, and the printed page sets them apart — and its printed page boundaries.

That transcription was then checked against a second, independent reading of the same printing: the Internet Archive’s scan of the University of Toronto copy, read by its own software. The two were compared word for word over every chapter of the volume, published or not. The readings agree on between 97.9% and 98.6% of the words, chapter by chapter. Where they differ it is almost always the scanner that is wrong, which is the point of using the proofread text; the measurement is published so that a reader knows how much checking is left. It gates nothing — no chapter is withheld on it — and every chapter links to its own opening page in the scan so that any passage can be read against the printing.

How the pages were settled

The volume is paginated straight through and every page of text carries a running head: a verso reads 188 CONFEDERATE MILITARY HISTORY and a recto SOUTH CAROLINA 189. Those heads were read off all 460 scanned images, and 308 printed pages came back. They are not taken one at a time. A page number is only kept if it behaves like a bound book: the printed numbers increasing, the images increasing with them, and the gap between the two never shrinking — a plate bound into a volume can only push the images further ahead of the pagination, never pull them back. 7 misreadings fall out that way, and the 7 places where the gap steps up are the folded plates and the portrait leaves.

Every one of the twenty-one chapter openings was then checked against the image itself: the page the volume’s own contents gives for a chapter must be an image that opens with a chapter heading and carries the words of that chapter’s argument. All twenty-one pass, the twelve chapters that are not published as well as the nine that are. On one of them — chapter XI — the scanner reads the numeral itself as CHAPTER XL, an I taken for an L; the argument on that page settles it. Nothing is published on an unverified page.

The plates

Three of the volume’s plates fall inside the chapters published here, and they are reproduced rather than linked: the map of Charleston and its defenses compiled by Lieut. John Johnson of the Confederate engineers in November 1863, the sketch of Boyd’s Neck and Honey Hill, and the state map from the official records atlas. Two of the three are folded into the binding, and the scanner photographed each in two halves without unfolding it. Both halves are given, side by side and unjoined. Stitching them would produce a picture the volume does not contain, out of a guess at where the halves overlap.

What has not been done

There are no editorial notes. The Confederate Veteran collection in this section answers every doubtful statement of fact beside the text; that work has not been done here, and it is needed more here than there, because a participant’s narrative written in 1899 for a commemorative series will differ from the official records in places a reader cannot see. Until the notes exist, read these chapters as Capers wrote them and check them against the record before relying on them.

Nothing in the text has been corrected. The volume’s own inconsistencies stand as printed — Morris island beside Morris Island, defenses in the chapter arguments and defences in the quoted reports — because a source that has been tidied is no longer a source.

Rights

The volume was published in 1899 and is in the public domain in the United States. The transcription is Project Gutenberg’s and carries no additional restriction on the text. The page images are the Internet Archive’s scan of the University of Toronto copy; they are linked, and the six leaves reproduced here — five of map and one of portrait — are credited to that copy.