Over the summer, I had the joy of working with the Nau Center for Civil War History at UVA on the Letters Home digital history project. The John L. Nau III Civil War History Collection, housed in UVA’s Special Collections Library, contains thousands of letters, diaries, and photographs from the Civil War era. The Letters Home project will make this material more accessible to scholars around the world. It will include transcriptions of the documents along with interactive maps and biographies of the soldiers and their families.

My name is Hannah Fleming. I am a 4th year undergraduate student studying history with a concentration in War, Violence, and Society at the University of Virginia. I have always been interested in military history, and my time at the University of Virginia has fostered a deep passion for Civil War history. I became involved with the Nau Civil War Center after taking a course on the Civil War and Reconstruction with the Nau Center’s director, Dr. Caroline Janney, that motivated me to pursue research outside of the classroom.

Imagine being given a box of family letters and Civil War artifacts that had been stored for decades in a Florida attic. How would you transform this valuable but long-neglected collection of loose, unsorted letters into archived documents, transcribed text, and data? This was the challenge I faced in Fall 2020. The box contained the private correspondence of Rev. John W.

The Civil War caused a national letter-writing boom, as young men rich and poor traveled far from their homes to fight. Many Civil War soldiers were experienced writers. Sons of wealthy plantation families were well-educated and well-read, and they wrote letters peppered with literary references, purple prose, political ideology, and sharp insights into the world around them. Some coped with the lonely hours in camp by writing elaborate love poems to their spouses at home.