How this collection was made

What was searched

All forty volumes of the Confederate Veteran (Nashville, 1893–1932), as digitized by the Internet Archive and listed by the Online Books Page. The full text of every volume was searched three ways: for the name Charleston in every spelling the scanner produced; for the vocabulary that can only mean Charleston harbor — Sumter, Moultrie, Wagner, Morris Island, Secessionville, the Hunley, the Swamp Angel, Castle Pinckney and a dozen more; and, separately, for every capitalized heading in the run containing any of those words, so that an article titled for its subject could not be missed because its text was too badly scanned to match. Each volume’s own annual index was read as a fourth check.

What counts as a Charleston article

The test is the subject, not the dateline. An article is here if what it is about is Charleston, South Carolina, or its harbor, defences, garrisons, waters or prisoners, between the secession crisis of 1860 and the evacuation of February 1865. Reunion notices, convention reports, chapter minutes, travel sketches and obituaries that merely mention the city are not here. Neither is Charleston, West Virginia, which supplied a great many of the magazine’s contributors and none of its Charleston articles.

How each article was pinned to a page

This turned out to be the hard part. The Archive’s own text and its own record of page numbers disagree with each other often, and each is sometimes wrong on its own. So every candidate page was fetched again as an image at higher resolution and read a second time with independent software; the page carrying the article is the one whose fresh reading contains the article’s own distinctive words, and the printed page number is the one in its running head, checked against the numbers on the pages either side. Sixteen of the citations here differ from what the Archive’s text would give, and one article turned out to be thirty pages from where its own scanned text put it.

The transcriptions

The text of each article is machine-read from the page image and cleaned only of what the scanning did to it: the running head, the page number, the hyphen at the end of a line, the column break. Nothing the magazine printed has been corrected. Where a word cannot be recovered with confidence it is left as the scan gives it and flagged under The scan on that article’s page, because a plausible guess in a transcription is worse than a visible hole. Every article links to its own page image so that any passage can be checked.

The editorial notes

There are 280 notes across the 75 articles. They answer statements of fact that are wrong, doubtful, or worth setting beside a different account in the same magazine — the Veteran contradicted itself constantly, and the contradictions are often the most useful thing in it. 11 notes end in a warning that the point could not be settled from the available record; those are marked so, and should not be relied on either way.

Dates

The volumes are bound annually and paginated straight through, so an article’s month has to be recovered from the issue mastheads. Where the masthead for that issue was legible the month is read; where it was not, the month is worked out from the page ladder of the volume and marked with an asterisk in the list and a note on the page. 15 of 75 articles carry an inferred month.

What is likely missing

Short paragraphs without headings, printed inside the news columns, are the weak point: one is included here because a volume index named it, and there are certainly others the index did not name. Serial articles whose later instalments carry no Charleston word in the heading may also have been missed — one was, and was recovered from a volume index late. Anyone finding such a piece is asked to say so.

Rights

The Confederate Veteran ceased publication in 1932 and no copyright renewals were found for any issue or contribution. The text is in the public domain. The page images are the Internet Archive’s and are linked, not copied. The editorial notes are the work of this site.