How this collection was made

What was searched

Volumes 1 to 44 of the Southern Historical Society Papers (Richmond, 1876–1923), as digitized by the Internet Archive. The full text of every volume was searched two ways. First, the running head at the top of every recto carries the title of the article on that page, so the whole run was reduced to a list of its articles — two thousand two hundred of them — and that list was searched for Charleston matter. Second, every page of every volume was scored for the vocabulary that can only mean Charleston harbor: Sumter, Moultrie, Wagner, Morris Island, Secessionville, Castle Pinckney, the Stono, the Hunley, the Swamp Angel and a dozen more. The second search catches what the first cannot — short pieces and letters, which never get a running head of their own.

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. A Virginia brigade that reported to Beauregard at Charleston on its way somewhere else is not a Charleston article, and neither is Honey Hill, which was fought fifty miles away to hold the Charleston and Savannah railroad. Pieces that were read and rejected are listed with the reason on the collection page.

One trap in this particular run: Battery Gregg and Fort Gregg name a work on Morris Island and a different work in the Petersburg lines, and the Papers write far more about the second. Every Gregg article in the run was read; all of them are Petersburg.

How each article was pinned to a page

The Papers were bound annually and paginated straight through, and every page of text carries a running head: a verso gives the page number and the journal’s name, a recto the article’s own title and the number. Those heads are what the pagination here is built from. They are not taken on trust: the opening page of every one of the 39 articles was fetched again as an image and read a second time with independent software, and the number in that fresh reading is the one the citation uses. The volumes also restart their numbering for bound-in appendices and rosters, and a volume’s own table of contents is a column of titles each ending in a page number — which is the shape of a running head. Both were caught and excluded.

The transcriptions

The text of each article is machine-read from the page image by the Internet Archive and cleaned here only of what the scanning did to it: the running head, the page number, the hyphen the compositor set at the end of a line, and the doubled spacing the reader puts between words. A word broken across a line and a word that is genuinely hyphenated look identical once the lines are joined, and the Papers are full of both — torpedo-boat, iron-clad, twenty-four — so each article is asked about itself: where the same pair stands hyphenated somewhere the line did not break, the hyphen is the word’s own and is kept. Nothing the Papers printed has been corrected. Where the scan is plainly wrong on an article’s opening page — a date, a name, a page number — it is set out under The scan on that article’s page; 10 articles carry such a note. Every article links to its own page in the scanned volume so that any passage can be checked against the printing.

Dates

The Papers came out monthly from 1876 through 1887 and annually afterwards, and every volume is paginated straight through, so a citation by volume and year is complete without a month. The month is given only where the masthead of that number was actually read from the scan; it is never worked out from the page ladder and presented as though it had been read. 10 of 39 articles carry a month for that reason.

The editorial notes

There are 365 notes across 39 of the 39 articles. They answer statements of fact that are wrong, doubtful, or worth setting beside a different account — often one printed in these same Papers. The Papers contradict themselves constantly, and the contradictions are frequently the most useful thing in them: four articles here argue about who fired the first gun at Fort Sumter and no two of them agree; three give three different numbers for the men drowned in the Hunley's first accident; and one account of the David's attack on the New Ironsides is answered, in the next volume but one, by the man who sent her. A note quotes the article's own words and answers them beside the text; nothing in the text itself is altered.

23 of the 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. Every claim a note quotes is checked against the transcription before the page is built, so that a note cannot answer something the article does not say.

Every article in the collection carries notes. That is not a claim to have caught everything: the long regimental histories and the Morris Island roster hold hundreds of names and dates that have not been checked one by one, and a note is only ever an answer to a statement someone thought to question.

What is likely missing

Untitled paragraphs inside the editorial columns are the weak point: they carry no running head, and the density search skips them for being too short. Later instalments of serials whose continuation heading drops the Charleston word may also have been missed. Volumes 45 to 52, published between 1937 and 1959, are not searched at all — see Rights below. Anyone finding a piece that belongs here is asked to say so.

Rights

Volumes 1 to 44 were published between 1876 and 1923 and are in the public domain in the United States. The page images are the Internet Archive’s and are linked, not copied. The later volumes, 45 to 52, were published from 1937 onward, are not assumed to be in the public domain, and are not included here.