Olga Tsapina, a history curator, removes logs containing extensive holdings on Abraham Lincoln, right, including telegrams the president sent to his generals in the field. (Arkasha Stevenson, Los Angeles Times | Associated Press) |
A long-unknown, 150-year-old trove of handwritten ledgers and calfskin-covered code books that give a potentially revelatory glimpse into both the dawn of electronic battlefield communications and the day-to-day exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and his generals as they fought the Civil War now belongs to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.
The collection, acquired in a private sale on Saturday and disclosed Wednesday, includes 40 cardboard-covered albums of messages that telegraph operators wrote down either before sending them in Morse code, or transcribed from telegraphic dots and dashes at the receiving end. There are also small, wallet-like booklets containing the key to code words Union commanders used to make sure their messages would remain unfathomable if intercepted by the Confederates.
"This opens up some new windows that we haven't really been able to look at. It's a major find," said James M. McPherson, a Princeton University historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1988 study "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era." Had it been available while he was researching his 2008 book, "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief," McPherson said, "it would have enriched my own work."
PHOTOS: Lincoln treasure trove
"Anyone doing research on the Union war effort and the communication between the nerve center and field operations would now go to the Huntington to look at all this," he added, and it also could be important for students of communications technology and cryptographic codes.
The cardboard-covered telegraphic ledgers of up to 400 pages had been stowed away by Thomas Eckert (1825-1910), a pioneering telegraph operator who ran the U.S. military's telegraph office at the War Department in Washington, D.C., from 1863 to 1867. The collection also includes ledgers from 1862, when Eckert served as telegraph chief for Gen. George McClellan's Army of the Potomac.
The Eckert collection's existence wasn't known to historians and archivists until December 2009, when an owner who'd bought it from Eckert's descendants put the documents — 76 books in all — up for auction in New York City. The collection sold for $36,000, including a buyer's premium, according to a record of the sale on the website of the Bonhams & Butterfields auction house.
Huntington officials said the library's collectors' council committed funds on Saturday to buy the Eckert collection from a dealer in White Plains, N.Y., adding to substantial Civil War holdings that include the world's third-largest archive of Lincoln's documents, behind only the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill. The Huntington declined to give the purchase price.
Historical archives elsewhere contain Civil War military telegrams, said Olga Tsapina, the Huntington's curator of American historical manuscripts. But they are the individual paper slips or pages, copied from what telegraphers transcribed from the wire, that were handed to the intended recipient. The individual telegrams tend to be haphazardly archived, and many are missing, Tsapina said — "[Gen. Ulysses S.] Grant was known to say the best way to file documents was in his own pockets." What the Eckert collection offers is a systematic, centralized record, in chronological order, of Union military telegrams.
Operators in Washington, D.C., and other locations wrote the messages down as they sent or received Morse code dots and dashes over the wire. The texts are penciled in word-by-word across as many as seven columns set off by red vertical lines, usually with a single word to each column.
Tsapina said that Lincoln, eager to get news and responses to his orders as soon as possible — and also inclined to hide out from patronage-seekers who wanted to see him at the White House — spent many hours in the telegraph office at the nearby War Department. According to the Huntington, Lincoln wrote an initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation there.
A first public glimpse of some of the ledgers and code books is planned for the fall, when the Huntington will mount two exhibitions on the Civil War, "A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War" (Oct. 13-Jan. 14, 2013) and "A Just Cause: Voices of the Civil War Era" (Sept. 22-Jan. 14, 2013).
The Eckert collection's code books show that Lincoln had an assortment of aliases: Ida, India, Irving, Ingress, Ingrate and Ingot. His war secretary, Edwin Stanton, was Indigo or Infant. If a message said "shaker" or "sable," it was talking about an attack. The code words for "infantry" were "rapture" and "ramble."
The terminology seems "completely arbitrary," Tsapina said — which may have been why the Confederates were never able to crack the code.
In her initial sifting through the material during the month before the Huntington decided to buy it, Tsapina said, she found some very human moments along with messages that appear to convey historically important facts.
In February 1862, two months before sharing command with Grant at the Battle of Shiloh, an important and extremely bloody Union victory in Tennessee, Gen. Don Carlos Buell sent a telegram from his headquarters in Louisville, Ky., to unknown recipients code-named Andes and Ocean, complaining of "constant intrigue to displace army officers" under his command, "which I beg you to defeat … until I tell you there is just cause. I learn that Col. Hazin is one of the purposed victims. His removal would be gross injustice and a serious loss."
After the concluding signature, "Alvard" — Buell's code name — appear three additional words: "Good for Alvard," a nod of approval by a telegraph operator putting in his own two cents. Tsapina said she also has found instances in which telegraph operators tacked on insider investment tips to one another, based on how the battlefield news they were transmitting might affect the market price of cotton or gold.
Tsapina said there are "masses of telegrams" concerning supplies and railroad operations, which could help scholars studying Civil War logistics.
While Eckert held a military commission, rising from major to brigadier general, the operation he oversaw was privately contracted by the government, in a sort of precursor to companies like Halliburton playing key roles in today's wars. Tsapina said that may have been a factor in his having kept the telegraph records after returning to private life in the New York City area, where he worked for tycoon Jay Gould, whose holdings eventually included Western Union.
David Zeidberg, director of the Huntington's library division, credited Seth Kaller, the historical documents dealer who sold the Eckert collection to the Huntington, with keeping it intact rather than splitting it up for individual document sales, and praised Kaller for offering it only to prospective buyers who would guarantee they'd make it available to the public. Before buying it, Zeidberg said, the Huntington offered a right of first refusal to the National Archives because the Eckert material would have complemented the Washington, D.C., repository's holdings of Civil War telegrams.
Zeidberg said that a computerized archive of the find, making each code name easily searchable, would require additional funding because digital copying becomes "extremely expensive and labor-intensive" when it involves historical documents that need special care and handling.
mike.boehm@latimes.com
The collection, acquired in a private sale on Saturday and disclosed Wednesday, includes 40 cardboard-covered albums of messages that telegraph operators wrote down either before sending them in Morse code, or transcribed from telegraphic dots and dashes at the receiving end. There are also small, wallet-like booklets containing the key to code words Union commanders used to make sure their messages would remain unfathomable if intercepted by the Confederates.
"This opens up some new windows that we haven't really been able to look at. It's a major find," said James M. McPherson, a Princeton University historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1988 study "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era." Had it been available while he was researching his 2008 book, "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief," McPherson said, "it would have enriched my own work."
PHOTOS: Lincoln treasure trove
"Anyone doing research on the Union war effort and the communication between the nerve center and field operations would now go to the Huntington to look at all this," he added, and it also could be important for students of communications technology and cryptographic codes.
The cardboard-covered telegraphic ledgers of up to 400 pages had been stowed away by Thomas Eckert (1825-1910), a pioneering telegraph operator who ran the U.S. military's telegraph office at the War Department in Washington, D.C., from 1863 to 1867. The collection also includes ledgers from 1862, when Eckert served as telegraph chief for Gen. George McClellan's Army of the Potomac.
The Eckert collection's existence wasn't known to historians and archivists until December 2009, when an owner who'd bought it from Eckert's descendants put the documents — 76 books in all — up for auction in New York City. The collection sold for $36,000, including a buyer's premium, according to a record of the sale on the website of the Bonhams & Butterfields auction house.
Huntington officials said the library's collectors' council committed funds on Saturday to buy the Eckert collection from a dealer in White Plains, N.Y., adding to substantial Civil War holdings that include the world's third-largest archive of Lincoln's documents, behind only the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill. The Huntington declined to give the purchase price.
Historical archives elsewhere contain Civil War military telegrams, said Olga Tsapina, the Huntington's curator of American historical manuscripts. But they are the individual paper slips or pages, copied from what telegraphers transcribed from the wire, that were handed to the intended recipient. The individual telegrams tend to be haphazardly archived, and many are missing, Tsapina said — "[Gen. Ulysses S.] Grant was known to say the best way to file documents was in his own pockets." What the Eckert collection offers is a systematic, centralized record, in chronological order, of Union military telegrams.
Operators in Washington, D.C., and other locations wrote the messages down as they sent or received Morse code dots and dashes over the wire. The texts are penciled in word-by-word across as many as seven columns set off by red vertical lines, usually with a single word to each column.
Tsapina said that Lincoln, eager to get news and responses to his orders as soon as possible — and also inclined to hide out from patronage-seekers who wanted to see him at the White House — spent many hours in the telegraph office at the nearby War Department. According to the Huntington, Lincoln wrote an initial draft of the Emancipation Proclamation there.
A first public glimpse of some of the ledgers and code books is planned for the fall, when the Huntington will mount two exhibitions on the Civil War, "A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning and Memory in the American Civil War" (Oct. 13-Jan. 14, 2013) and "A Just Cause: Voices of the Civil War Era" (Sept. 22-Jan. 14, 2013).
The Eckert collection's code books show that Lincoln had an assortment of aliases: Ida, India, Irving, Ingress, Ingrate and Ingot. His war secretary, Edwin Stanton, was Indigo or Infant. If a message said "shaker" or "sable," it was talking about an attack. The code words for "infantry" were "rapture" and "ramble."
The terminology seems "completely arbitrary," Tsapina said — which may have been why the Confederates were never able to crack the code.
In her initial sifting through the material during the month before the Huntington decided to buy it, Tsapina said, she found some very human moments along with messages that appear to convey historically important facts.
In February 1862, two months before sharing command with Grant at the Battle of Shiloh, an important and extremely bloody Union victory in Tennessee, Gen. Don Carlos Buell sent a telegram from his headquarters in Louisville, Ky., to unknown recipients code-named Andes and Ocean, complaining of "constant intrigue to displace army officers" under his command, "which I beg you to defeat … until I tell you there is just cause. I learn that Col. Hazin is one of the purposed victims. His removal would be gross injustice and a serious loss."
After the concluding signature, "Alvard" — Buell's code name — appear three additional words: "Good for Alvard," a nod of approval by a telegraph operator putting in his own two cents. Tsapina said she also has found instances in which telegraph operators tacked on insider investment tips to one another, based on how the battlefield news they were transmitting might affect the market price of cotton or gold.
Tsapina said there are "masses of telegrams" concerning supplies and railroad operations, which could help scholars studying Civil War logistics.
While Eckert held a military commission, rising from major to brigadier general, the operation he oversaw was privately contracted by the government, in a sort of precursor to companies like Halliburton playing key roles in today's wars. Tsapina said that may have been a factor in his having kept the telegraph records after returning to private life in the New York City area, where he worked for tycoon Jay Gould, whose holdings eventually included Western Union.
David Zeidberg, director of the Huntington's library division, credited Seth Kaller, the historical documents dealer who sold the Eckert collection to the Huntington, with keeping it intact rather than splitting it up for individual document sales, and praised Kaller for offering it only to prospective buyers who would guarantee they'd make it available to the public. Before buying it, Zeidberg said, the Huntington offered a right of first refusal to the National Archives because the Eckert material would have complemented the Washington, D.C., repository's holdings of Civil War telegrams.
Zeidberg said that a computerized archive of the find, making each code name easily searchable, would require additional funding because digital copying becomes "extremely expensive and labor-intensive" when it involves historical documents that need special care and handling.
mike.boehm@latimes.com
Save over 
