If your topic is tactical in nature or relates in one way or another to the conduct of the battle at the tactical level, one type of primary source you may find useful are the tactical manuals written during the time of the war and used by both the Union and the Confederate armies. These can be valuable primary sources for interpreting and understanding various accounts fo the battle, although as with all primary sources you should evaluate the evidence they provide with a critical eye. For example, one must recall that any field manual describes the ideal of how an army wants its units to conduct themselves -- and the reality in combat may reflect the desire to varying degrees at varying times. Nevertheless these sources can be quite useful. Below is a select and introductory bibliography of some manuals from the Civil War era relevant to the study of the ction in 2nd Bull Run campaign.
McClellan, George B. Manual of Bayonet Exercise: Prepared for the Use of the Army of the United States. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1862.
Mahan, D. H. An Elementary Treatise on Advanced-Guard, Out-Post, and Detachment Service of Troops and the Manner of Posting and Handling Them in Presence of an Enemy. With a Historical Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Tactics, &C., &C. Intended As a Supplement to the System of Tactics Adopted for the Military Service of the United States, and Especially for the Use of Officers of Militia and Volunteers. New York: Wiley, 1862.
Hardee, William Joseph. Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics. Memphis: E.C. Kirk & Co, 1861.
Gibbon, John. The Artillerist's Manual. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1860.
Casey, Silas. Infantry Tactics for the Instruction, Exercise and Manoeuvres of the Soldier, a Company, Line of Skirmishers, Battalion, Brigade or Corps D'armée. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1862.
Electronic reproductions of many of these manuals are available online. You can use the WorldCat database to locate them, using a process similar to that explained in detail in the section "How to Find Unit Histories and Personal Narratives' above. Familiarize yourself with those instructions and generally use the same method to locate these works but when examining a list of results in WorldCat, take great care to note the date of various editions in your set of results. Try to find one dated 1862 or earlier.
Unit Histories (Regimental Histories) and Personal Narratives
The men who fought in the Civil War never forgot it. Indeed, the history of how people remembered the war is as complex as the history of the war itself. Indicative of this complexity are the staggering large numbers of histories of individual Civil War units of both sides. Writing and publishing these unit histories started almost immediately after the war, usually at the hands of veterans of the particular unit. Most of the unit histories were written at the regimental level, hence the term “regimental history”. For decades after the war, regimental histories appeared on the book market and started to shape the historiography of not only the overall course of the conflict, but of its principal battles. In modern times, both scholarly and popular historians have taken a hand at writing regimental histories. Many such modern works are based upon the Official Record.
Early regimental histories, however, indeed constitute primary sources when and if they were written by veterans of the unit or contained excerpts or quotations of their testimony. Yet, like all primary sources, they vary in trustworthiness, objectivity and detail and therefore vary in usefulness to the modern-day scholarly historian. Some regimental histories are not histories at all in the modern sense of the word, but mere collections of reprinted unit rosters, muster rolls, etc. Some merely reproduce the same unit reports of their unit that are found in the Official Record. Needless to say, these kind of regimental histories are not of much use to you in the present assignment. On the other hand, some of the early regimental histories contained a great deal of personal reminiscences not found in other primary sources. These can provide valuable supplementary primary source material that amplifies or even contradicts evidence from the OR.
Sometimes participants in the Civil War wrote not about their unit’s history but simply recorded their own reminiscences and memories. Historians must use these kinds of primary sources with care. Memories can fade. Even if a person consciously seeks to avoid distorting his or her memories of an important or harrowing event, recounting the experience years later is rarely the same as recording it at the time it happened. Historians should nevertheless NOT ignore memoirs, as they are indeed still eye-witness accounts. Rather, the research but simply scrutinize them and make a reasoned subjective judgement about how much faith to put in the evidence from this kind of primary source.
The West Point Library holds many histories of Union Civil War regiments and personal narratives of Civil War soldiers in print form. In addition, a great many are also available in online form through the HathiTrust Digital Library and Internet Archive and Google Books. You should pay very close attention to the opportunities to use these digital copies, as they are very valuable. One can use a database called WorldCat to find digital copies of published unit histories and personal narratives, which is often than searching each of those databases individually.
Your instructors have prepared a select bibliography of unit histories and personal narratives related to various Union and Confederate regiments that fought at 2nd Bull Run. Click on the first link below to view it. You can then click on the second link below to find some instructions on how to use WorldCat to find electronic copies of them. (Depending on your browser, you may need to right-click and download the file to your device).
Long after the end of the Civil War former Confederate combatants wrote about their experiences. During the decades that followed the Civil War, popular periodical publication in the U.S. rose, so it is no coincidence that journals, magazines and periodicals oriented towards creating the Confederate memory of the war appeared. Although their content is heavily imbued with the ideology of the "Lost Cause" understanding of the war, a scholarly military historian today with a critical eye can certainly still find uses for the first-hand accounts published in them.
Two such periodicals you may find of use are Confederate Veteran and Southern Historical Society Papers.
Below is a listing of volumes of each with issues containing source material on 2nd Bull Run.
Confederate Veteran
Vol. 2 (1894)
Vol. 13 (1905)
Vol. 14 (1906)
Vol. 17 (1909)
Vol. 22 (1914)
Vol. 23 (1915)
Vol. 25 (1917)
Vol. 29 (1921)
Southern Historical Society Papers
Vol. 6 (1878)
Vol. 7 (1879)
Vol. 8 (1880)
Vol. 10 (1882)
Vol. 12 (1884)
Many of these issues are available digitally and easy to access using a database called WorldCat. Click on the link below for instructions on how you can use WorldCat to find them.
Manuscript collections in archival repositories are often at the heart of the historical research process in all areas of history and certainly in military history. Manuscript material includes personal and official correspondence, official records of government agencies and military units. During the period of the American Civil War, a great deal of government official business was. Oftentimes the division between "public" and "private" correspondence is not clear in records from that period.
For many years the only way to examine manuscript sources was from visiting the archives in person. Although that is still an important part of the historical research process -- as many manuscript sources still exist only in their original form in the archives -- libraries and archives have always worked to make remotely accessible copies available. For many years this was done by creating microfilm copies and in recent decades that microfilm has been scanned and provided digitally, or in some cases the original manuscripts have been digitized.
This is the case with many important manuscript collections from the period of the Civil War, including those especially relevant to the 2nd Bull Run Campaign and the 2nd Battle of Bull Run.
If you have not used manuscript primary sources before or have only begun to do so, some basic knowledge will help you. Libraries and archives organize manuscript material by criteria much different than those by which they organize books and published materials. A collection is often organized into subunits (sometimes called "series") and sometimes into smaller units as well. Sometimes a research will find a description of the collection overall in a library catalog just like one would find for a book. But this description just tells you about the overall collection, not what documents are in it. To learn about the contents of the documents you must also consult an inventory, sometimes called a "finding aid". This will often list the various series, sub-series (if the collection is organized that way) and, if one is fortunate, sometimes even individual documents. Some finding aids are available online; some as just simple .pdf files but others structured like an individual webpage and navigable as such. (Note that not all finding aids are equal, some collections will have very detailed one while others will have none at all, and other something in between.) For the purposes of your paper on 2nd Bull Run, however, you are fortunate in that several large repositories have extensive collections of digitized manuscript material relevant to the campaign with detailed finding aids.
The Library of Congress's Manuscripts Division has two -- the Abraham Lincoln Papers and the George McClellan Papers.
You can find descriptions of each overall collection as a whole in the Library of Congress catalog and a online copy of the finding aid (that is, detailed inventory) of the linking to that catalog record and vice versa.
A great deal of manuscript letters, messages, memoranda, etc. in the McClellan Papers are available digitally from the Library of Congress digital collections.
Like the entire collection, these digital selections are organized in general chronological order. To find documents relevant to the 2nd Bull Run campaign, narrow your results down to material just from the period of the campaign. Under “Refine your results” column near the left of the page, select “1800 to 1899” and then keep refining down to just the year 1862. You can then move to the “Sort by” box near the top right, trying choosing “Date (oldest first)” from the drop-down box. This will make it easier to scroll through the pages until you come to the material from the summer of 1862, which will likely be most relevant to the 2nd Bull Run Campaign. Then try examining documents from the summer of 1862, looking closely at the names of correspondents and dates.
