Writing letters during the Civil War was very different from how we communicate today. Not only did people have to take into account the fact that any messages they sent would take days to arrive, but letters were often sent to be read to entire families. Anything that was more personal in nature was written on pages marked “private” or occasionally done in code.

It is also not uncommon to find sections of letters carefully cut out to remove any information of a delicate nature and there are many references in letters to whole batches of letters being burned to prevent them falling in the hands of others, either to protect information, or just to evade the teasing and laughter of others.

Letters were often much more conversational in tone, as if the writer were talking to the recipient face to face, rather than the more formal and organized manner most modern letters or emails are written in. Very often you will find letter that will interrupt their flow to say, “Well, Lucy, (or whatever the recipient’s name is) and then continue the sentence. Writers also informed their recipients if any significant breaks of time occurred between beginning a letter and finishing it. If a person began writing a letter and left it for a few hours, he or she would make note of that break as soon as he or she began writing again, usually by admitting to stopping to eat a meal or do some kind of work.

The mail was not always reliable, and letters frequently were lost due to a variety of factors including theft, destruction en route, or simply mislaid in the course of traveling from cities and rural villages to sometimes very remote locations on the field of battle. Because of this, many writers numbered the letters that they sent to each other so that they would know if any went missing, and to more easily refer to which letter they were replying. These numbers were often placed on the top right corner of the page above the location and date of the sender.

Another challenge letter writers had to deal with was the availability of both stamps and paper to send letters. Many soldiers complained about the difficulty of obtaining stamps, which “could not be had for love or money.” If they couldn’t get their friends and relatives to send them stamps in their reply letters, some of them would chance mailing letter without postage in the hope that the recipient would pay the postage on its arrival. These letters would have “soldier’s letter” written on their envelopes to indicate why they were being sent without postage.

Besides using stamps, soldiers were also able to “free frank” letters by having them signed by congressmen, senators, or certain military officers. This signature was placed where a stamp usually was on an envelope and waived the normal postage fees for a letter. Stamps, if you had them, continued to be more convenient than hunting down a signature for your letter and so the vast majority of letters continued to be paid for with stamps. However, due to the popularity of stamp collecting and the value of Civil War era stamps, it is also not uncommon to find that many envelopes had their stamps cut off sometime in the years that followed the war.

Shortages of paper were especially acute for soldiers of the Confederacy, but occurred for everyone from time to time, either because there was no more paper to be had, or because the writer simply didn’t want to start a new sheet if they could avoid it. Because these shortages of paper were common, many people used the same systems to squeeze as much writing as they could onto a sheet.

After a writer filled a sheet and was unable, or unwilling, to start another they had two main courses of action. Some of them would turn the letter upside down and then try to fit the new lines of text in between their original lines of text. This could be quite effective for those that had left large spaces in their letters to begin with, but as many writers knew from the start they were writing long letters and didn’t leave such gaps, another method was also used.

In the second method, the writer would fill up their page with as much text as they could and then rotate the page ninety degrees and continue writing perpendicularly to the their original text. This gave letters written at this time a unique gridded look and makes them quite difficult to read quickly, though they can usually be parsed out by reading the words slowly aloud, which is how they were most likely to be read to begin with.

It is in cases like this that preservation of the original image of the letter, rather than just a transcription of its content, adds significantly to our understanding and appreciation of the time in which it was written. While personal letters give researchers a lot of insight into what people were thinking and feeling about the war, the thoughts and worries that might not appear in more official texts such as speeches and newspaper articles, they were subject to their own constraints of the time as well. Some of these constraints had to do with the dangers of the letters falling into the hands of people they weren’t meant for, and others were drawn by the writing conventions of the time, or even by the simple fact of having no more paper with which to write.

Through online digital collections like the Research Arsenal, scholars can get full access to an amazing trove of letters, complete with scans of the original images along with typed transcriptions that allow them to access both the content of the letter as well as the original form that governed it. Digitization also means that it’s simple and convenient to access letters from every state right at your home, rather than having to travel a great many miles to archives in numerous states to get the same body of information.

Over one hundred and sixty years after the start of the Civil War, the digitization of Civil War letters is giving us the most comprehensive source of information on day to day life of people at the time, as well as their thoughts on the swiftly changing world around them. Modern digitization also allows for the preservation of the letters in full color, unlike the many microfilm records of previous decades. Finally, digital metadata tools make it easier than ever to search large collections for the most relevant information possible.

Despite our distance in time from the war, now just might be one of the best times to be a Civil War historian. The documents have never been easier to access and every day new records are scanned and shared with the public. The words and thoughts of those long past will never be lost as long as we stay committed to preserving and sharing them.