Paula Tarnapol Whitacre - A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilburs Struggle for Purpose

People often ask me about how I found Julia Ann Wilbur and her diaries, which she kept in various forms from 1844 to 1895. We connected through Alexandria Archaeology, part of Alexandrias extensive local history program, in 2010, when I volunteered to research the more than thirty Union hospitals that sprang up during the Civil War. Among other sources, I consulted Julia Wilburs diaries on microfilm in the Alexandria Librarys Local History and Special Collections Room.

One thing led to anotherfirst I offered to transcribe the Civil War years of the diaries. Then I decided to learn what Julia Wilbur did right before the war to set the stage, then right after, then long before, etc. Finally, after peering at microfilm for a year or so, I visited the originals in the Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College. Douglas Steererespected Quaker thinker and activist and Julias great-great-nephew (direct descendant of her youngest sister Mary)donated the diaries to the college, where he taught from 1928 to 1964.

At the time of my first visit to Haverford, Julia Wilburs papers lived in four gray boxes, about the size of shirt boxes (since transferred into six more neatly partitioned containers). I opened the first to find her pocket diaries, each a small, leather-bound volume. Nice. It was amazing to touch what I had only peered at through a microfilm machine. But I really jolted when I opened the next box. There sat several dozen packets of cream-colored stationary, about 5x7 inches in size, tied up with red ribbon, a parallel set of diaries that began in 1844 (more than ten years before the pocket diaries). In them she waxed on for many pages on one day, then wrote maybe just a line or two on the next. The collection ends abruptly in 1873, but in reading them and her other diaries, I assume later years got lost. Known to scholars and others who used the collection, these diaries surprised my colleagues in Alexandria and me.

But I had just spent two years transcribing the pocket diaries. If I tackled this second set, I would probably still be typing today. A solution emerged. Friends of Alexandria Archaeology, a nonprofit group, and Haverford split the cost of scanning and uploading the pages onto a dedicated website. About twenty-five volunteers in Alexandria each took seventy-five pages, often many more, to transcribe. As a result, we transcribed, proofread (albeit still with typos), and compiled more than 1,800 pages in just over a year.

I fulfilled my original goal: transcriptions of Julia Wilburs diaries are online and searchable through Alexandria Archaeology.

My goal grew, as this book attests. Beyond making individual diary entries available, I wanted to draw on them to tell Julia Wilburs story and the story of an amazing time in our nations history.

What would Julia Wilbur think about this endeavor? After working with the diaries for many years, I believe she knew she was preserving something special for posterityalthough probably did not envision posterity to encompass so many of us. We have Professor Steere to thank for transferring the diaries beyond the family confines.

As I dug into the pages, I wondered, however, if I violated her privacy, particularly her painful experiences in 1860 and 1861 related to losing custody and virtually all contact with her beloved niece Freda (see chapter 3). I think not. She reviewed her diaries many times over the years. Later in life she started extracting entries into another record, which she titled Journal Briefs. She easily could have taken out pages or crossed parts out in her look-backs. Moreover, she referred to thoughts deemed too personal or damning with cryptic comments along the lines of People have wronged me today. And she only alluded to events most scandalous for the time, such as her sister Francess marital difficulties. A few times, too, she wrote about rereading and destroying personal letters.

A note about the direct and indirect quotes in this book: all conversations, thoughts, and dreams attributed to Julia and others come from diaries, letters, or other source materials. I wrote out a few abbreviated words (such as cd. and wd. for could and would) to ease the reading and have added explanations in brackets. A few terms discomfort us today (such as colored), but I have maintained the original in all cases.