Gideon Welles - The Civil War Diary of Gideon Welles, Lincolns Secretary of the Navy: The Original Manuscript Edition

The Original Manuscript Edition

Edited by William E. Gienapp and Erica L. Gienapp

PUBLISHED BY

THE KNOX COLLEGE LINCOLN STUDIES CENTER

AND THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

URBANA, CHICAGO, AND SPRINGFIELD

2014 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

C 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Frontispiece: Gideon Welles ca. 1862, photograph

by C. D. Fredericks & Co. (Photo courtesy of

The Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Welles, Gideon, 18021878.

The Civil War diary of Gideon Welles, Lincolns Secretary of the Navy :

the original manuscript edition / edited by William E. Gienapp

and Erica L. Gienapp.

pages cm. (The Knox College Lincoln Studies Center series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-252-03852-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-252-09643-3 (e-book)

1. Welles, Gideon, 18021878 Diaries.

2. United StatesPolitics and government18611865.

3. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Naval operations.

4. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865 Sources.

5. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865 Friends and associates.

6. Cabinet officersUnited StatesDiaries.

I. Gienapp, William E., editor.

II. Gienapp, Erica L., 1946 editor. III. Title.

E467.1.W46A3 2014b

973.75092dc23 2014004477

For my students

by James M. McPherson

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

The establishment of a publication series sponsored by the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College was first proposed by the late William E. Gienapp of Harvard University, a leading scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War and a member of the centers Board of Advisors. It was Professor Gienapps idea that such a series, in addition to featuring the centers own publications, could accommodate significant works of other scholars with a comparable aimto provide access to important source material for the study of Lincoln-related topics. The example he gave was a project he himself was then working ona new edition of the diary of Gideon Welles, Lincolns secretary of the navy. This proposal received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Board of Advisors, and as a consequence the Lincoln Studies Center publication series was launched a few years later in partnership with the University of Illinois Press. Tragically, Professor Gienapp died before he could finish his edition of the Welles diary, but the work has now been faithfully completed by his wife, Erica Gienapp.

Gideon Welless diary has become well known for its shrewdly observed and detailed accounts of the people and events surrounding Lincolns presidency and beyond, for he kept it until he left office in 1869. It was first published in 1911, thirty-three years after Welless death, by Welless son Edgar. In addition to regularizing the punctuation, spelling, and grammar, Edgars edition also seamlessly incorporated layers of later revisions and additions, while censoring and even omitting some of his fathers more uninhibited remarks. In 1960 these undifferentiated elements were carefully identified and sorted out and omissions restored by historian Howard K. Beale, whose edition has been a mainstay of scholarship on the Civil War era ever since. But Beales method of showing these elementsthe original words, the later revisions, the subsequent addition of new material, subsequent revisions to the later additions, the alterations and deletions by Edgar of his fathers texthas proved problematical for the user. This is principally because Beale elected, for whatever reasons, to use a photographic copy of the 1911 edition as the basic text, which he then marked up with a system of handwritten corrections and marginalia. Longer additions to the original diary are shown in footnotes or at the end of the work. Every effort has been made, Beale wrote, to restore the text to its original form so that both the historian and the reader interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction can have the diary as Welles wrote it while the events he describes were happening.

But this was precisely the issue that troubled Professor Gienapp, for although he wholeheartedly shared Beales belief that the foremost consideration for the historian was access to the diary as Welles wrote it while the events he describes were happening, he found that the Beale edition too often failed to produce that result. The reason was hardly a mystery, for while the Beale edition makes it possible to identify and extract the words of the original entries with reasonable fidelity, the process for doing so is exacting and requires mastering an editorial system with a challenging learning curve. At the Library of Congress, Professor Gienapp made a careful examination of the leather-bound volumes that Welles used for keeping his diary and confirmed that the words the secretary initially wrote down could, with few exceptions, be readily distinguished from later revisions and additions. Such a text, he believed, with all its compositional irregularities and spontaneity, would go far to capture the moment that Welles was living in and the feelings he was experiencing as he wrote. Because Welles revised many of the entries in his retirement, compared his judgments with others, and toyed with the possibility of publication, these later reworkings tend to have the opposite effect.

The Gienapp edition confines itself to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, but it presents that portion of the text of the Welles diary in a new form and, consequently, in a new light. It is designed for the reader whose principal interest is in how Welles responded to the people and events of the Lincoln administration as they crossed his horizon, without the distracting admixture of subsequent changes. This original text is backed up with a full measure of annotation to aid the reader in comprehending the diarys references and historical context. We believe it will prove to be a welcome source for students and scholars alike, and we are pleased to be able to publish it in the series William E. Gienapp first envisioned and to whom it is dedicated.

James M. McPherson

I wish that this edition of Gideon Welless diary had been available when I was doing the research for my recent books on Abraham Lincoln as commander in chief and on Civil War navies. The diary was a valuable source for both studies, but like other historians who have consulted it before now, I had to use the volumes edited by Howard K. Beale in 1960. Beale applied professional standards to his editing process. His system of markings enabled the reader to distinguish between what Welles wrote in his almost-daily entries in the 1860s and his later revisions, additions, and deletions and those of his son Edgar, who further altered or deleted some passages before the first published version appeared in 1911. I could thus excavate Welless original entries from the layers of later changes, but Beales editorial method of crossed-out words, added marginalia, and mysterious diacritical symbols made this edition extremely user-unfriendly.