Most people, if they know much about the Civil War, know that the regiments were raised locally and were organized largely by towns and counties, so that men fought side-by-side with neighbors, fathers, brothers, cousins, and workmates. Communities made great sacrifices in the Civil War. In an especially fierce fight a community might lose a large proportion of its young men, sometimes in a matter of minutes. This was true for both North and South. The communities that supplied these men seem stable, consistent, and well-defined. Communities in the Civil War appear more cohesive than today, places of bravery, duty, and honor, where women at home reinforced these values in their men and displayed dignity, dedication, and stoicism as well.

Our idea of Civil War communities tells us that we should admire their purposefulness and resolution, so much so that we have lost sight of the history of these places. They were more complicated than we sometimes imagine. For many Civil War soldiers the old conflicts and allegiances of their communities moved from the civilian world into the army. Some, it turns out, fought with men who were not their neighbors. Others died in places without their regiments and were buried in unexpected fields. While most whites had the privilege of fighting and dying in units from their home town, most black soldiers fought side-by-side with strangers.

The Valley of the Shadow Project explores the meaning of "community" in these complex contexts. The Valley Project compares Franklin County, Pennsylvania, with Augusta County, Virginia, throughout the Civil War. It tracks down the soldiers who served from these communities, locates the civilians in these counties, and follows them through the war and beyond. This task would seem straightforward. But when the stories of these places and the people in them come to light, they present surprising connections and complexities that challenge our standard view of communities in the Civil War.⁽¹⁾

Franklin County and Augusta County lie two hundred miles apart and on separate sides of the Mason-Dixon line, yet they were connected by the bonds of commerce, family, and history. The Civil War wrecked these bonds, displacing them and forging new ones of exigency and war. Charles Joseph Smith, for example, felt the war's devastation and ugliness come to his home. He served as a surgeon with the 69th Pennsylvania, a unit without any ties to Franklin County. But in his Compiled Service Records at National Archives a letter requesting leave detailed Smith's personal history in the war. He lived in Augusta County before the Civil War and practiced medicine there until he was "obliged on account of my Union sentiments to leave my home." Smith moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania,--in Franklin County--where he joined the Union army as a surgeon and was assigned to the 69th Pennsylvania. His family stayed in Chambersburg until "it was burned" and Smith's application for leave was to go home to find a new house for his family. After the war Smith returned to Augusta County, practiced medicine, and was buried in Sangersville, Augusta County, Virginia. In this story community definitions blur. To which community did Smith really belong? In Augusta his unionism apparently violated the political definitions of the community, a place which proudly called itself unionist throughout the secession crisis. Once in Franklin Smith found himself in non-Franklin regiment. Then Augusta County men and the others in McCausland's brigade burned his new community and displaced his family. Yet, after the war he resettled in Augusta.⁽²⁾

The story of Charles Joseph Smith came to our attention at the March 1998 Virginia Historical Society Banner Lecture by Edward L. Ayers on the Valley Project. Mr. Bruce Halsted sat in the audience and after the lecture came forward with information on his relative, Charles Joseph Smith. If it had not been for Mr. Halstead in the audience at the Virginia Historical Society, we might never have found Smith's story. Even if we were to find his grave stone in Augusta Co., it is plain and reveals nothing of his military service in the U.S. forces. The Valley Project is a collaborative effort to build history and welcomes the participation of audience members, friends, and local history buffs. The idea behind the Project is to include in its history everyone from these two communities--soldiers as well as civilians, generals and privates, merchants and farmers, blacks and whites, men and women. Our project's aims are to create an inclusive history of the coming, fighting, and aftermath of the Civil War, gathering as much evidence as possible about these two places and putting it into an electronic archive for use by people all over the world.

The Valley Project uses the technology of the Internet to try to reconstruct the histories of Franklin and Augusta counties, producing a history for the World Wide Web and CD-ROM. Visitors to the Valley Project archive can search for people, explore trends in data, find everything from baptismal and confirmation records to military service records. The Valley Project electronic archive includes every mention of every local citizen of Augusta and Franklin in those counties' four newspapers for a run of nearly eight years in the era of the Civil War--if they won office, they are noted in the archive, if they gave a lecture, got married, died, did not pay their taxes, or grew the largest beet at the county fair, their names and notes are recorded in the archive. Organized in searchable database format, the U.S. census data can open up some of the most important questions about these places: was the Northern community more industrial, were Northern black citizens richer than free blacks in the Southern community, what kinds of occupations did each have, and what were the structures of the households in each?⁽³⁾

History longs to include everyone in its dramatic narrative, to tell the whole story, and to render an authentic story. Social historians have labored for decades to build and restore a history of previously overlooked people. In this spirit the Valley Project attempts to join social and military history, telling the story of the people from these places and of the battles they fought.. Including everyone in this history means that the story of generals and politicians becomes a proportionately small tale. Inevitably and often immediately, archive visitors stumble on something that challenges their understanding of the war. Visitors to the Valley Project archive regularly record their surprise at finding evidence and ideas that challenge their long-held views about the Civil War.⁽⁴⁾

The Valley Project's electronic archive receives over 7,000 visitors a day from all over the world, including, for example, Sweden, Japan, Canada, Brazil, Africa, and Russia. They are greeted by the subtitle, "Two Communities in the American Civil War." Communities often have boundaries--geographic, racial, cultural, and historical, to name a few. These definitions of community intersect and overlap, making it challenging to figure out where one community ends and other begins. Charles Joseph Smith found himself alienated from one community and out-of-place in another. Taken on their own these boundaries seem arbitrary and exclusive. In the Valley Project the county boundary defines whether someone is "in" our project or not. Sometimes it too is an arbitrary distinction. Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, for example, straddles the county border between Franklin and Cumberland, so half of its residents are included in the project while the half are not.⁽⁵⁾

The definitions of community and what the Civil War did to communities are questions that have long occupied historians and writers of the war. Writing in 1961 on the Centennial of the Civil War, Robert Penn Warren reflected on the meaning of the war as a tragedy. He lamented that "we have not yet created a union which is, in the deepest sense, a community." Warren saw that Americans yearn for that sense of community. "Beyond the satisfaction it [the Civil War] may give to rancor, self-righteousness, . . . armchair blood lust, and complacency," Warren summarized, "we can yet see in the Civil War an image of the powerful, painful, grinding process by which an ideal emerges out history. That should teach us humility . . . and at the same time, it draws us to the glory of the human effort to win meaning from the complex and confused motives of men and the blind ruck of event." How do we approach such volatile and kinetic issues as the Civil War, as Warren suggests, with humility, yet aiming to capture the glory of the human effort to win meaning from it?⁽⁶⁾

Civil War history has become for many an exercise in national affirmation. While the Valley Project neither confirms nor denies such sentiments, it does stand in contrast to the narratives that historians and writers have created recently. In some respects popular Civil War history has developed into a great play in which all the characters, mostly generals and politicians, repeat their lines and choreograph their movements and the audience anticipates every word and every move. In many respects modern Civil War history treats soldiers and everyday people as part of the background crowd, bodies for eliciting sympathy or describing the brutal terror of the battlefield. Ken Burns deserves much praise for bringing the voices of everyday people to his popular Civil War documentary, The Civil War, but he uses them most often to "personalize" his larger story about the course of the war. The main characters in Burns's film are the generals and politicians who "made" the war and main events in his drama take place largely on the battlefields. They take center stage in his drama, overshadowing the many other people and events still waiting in the wings for their cue to appear on stage--women, blacks, home front concerns, economic life, and diplomatic missions.

Drama seems especially suited to describing the human condition and helps to understand the Civil War's meaning and make sense of what seems, as Warren wrote, "the blind ruck of event." Often, drama provides a useful focus, because it concentrates on the change that individuals made in history. In a play the main character usually stands for the nation or community. Lincoln provides the great protagonist for a drama on the Civil War, his gradual move toward emancipation mirrors the nation's growth, his personal honor and dignity represent what many Americans want to see in our national past, his violent death a catharsis for all the violence of the war itself. Some understand the Civil War as a Greek tragedy, with commanders, such as McClellan, displaying hubris, with seers, such as Frederick Douglas, predicting the meaning and outcome of events, and with a chorus of a few representative soldiers and everyday citizens, commenting on the general conditions and rendering opinions of the action.

One of William Faulkner's protagonists observed that for every white southern boy, it is always two o'clock on July 3, 1863--the moment just before Pickett's charge at Gettysburg. This moment was recently dramatized in the film Gettysburg when General Lewis Armistead, a Virginian, stands before his troops, just minutes before he himself would fall mortally wounded at what has been called "the high-water mark of the Confederacy" on Cemetery Ridge. This moment is also the high point in the film, displaying the grandeur, bravery, and honor of the Confederate effort and the resolute determination and steadfastness of the Yankee cause. In this scene, one that the audience might see as the embodiment of the war, the Confederates attack and the Yankees defend, a strange reversal of the overall military situation in the war. The scene portrays the South's cause as misguided and ultimately doomed, but grand and honorable, and the North's as divinely ordained, right, and progressively self-aware.⁽⁷⁾

Faulkner's statement about Pickett's charge and the past derives a great deal of its resonance from Civil War history's persistent use of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg to contain nearly all of the war's motivations, experiences, and results. For many Northerners and Southerners the symbolism of Pickett's charge suggests that the South's bid for independence peaked in 1863, that after Gettysburg Southern defeat was a foregone conclusion. Even Shelby Foote-the great Southern writer of the Civil War--in Ken Burns' documentary of the Civil War considered the South's cause gallant but hopeless in the face of Northern superiority of manpower and industry. Evidence from the Valley Project suggests otherwise.⁽⁸⁾

At Gettysburg the soldiers of Augusta and Franklin experienced a different story, one punctuated by defeat, marginality, embarrassment, and some glory. For the soldiers of the 107th Pennsylvania the first day of the battle of Gettysburg was disastrous. They fought in the 1st Corps in Robinson's Division and Paul's Brigade. In the afternoon at the critical moment in the fighting, the 107th held the far right of the 1st Corps, but the subsequent retreat through the streets of Gettysburg left nearly half of the regiment missing in action--93 missing out of 230. On the third, however, the 107th returned to action defending Cemetery Ridge, the small band of a regiment, only 78 men, winning back some of the reputation it had lost on the retreat through Gettysburg two days before. Their report stated, "the regiment was marched with others along the crest or brow of the hill [Cemetery Hill] in rear of the batteries, through the most deadly fire ever man passed through, it appearing as though every portion of the atmosphere contained a deadly missile." Meanwhile, the 52nd Virginia and the 5th Virginia came up on the far left of the Confederate line and remained on the outskirts of the main battle. On July 3rd, far away from Pickett's charge, they made an brief and costly attack on Culp's Hill, only to come up with nothing. The commander of the 5th Virginia, Col. J. H. S. Funk, conceded in his report on the battle that his regiment's efforts were not "crowned with the ususal success."⁽⁹⁾

On the home front in Augusta and Franklin Gettysburg took on none of the significance that it has assumed since the end of the war. Newspapers in Augusta reported very little about the battle for weeks. The Staunton Spectator claimed it a victory for the Confederacy and called the battle "one of the severest of the war, . . . a hard fought battle...in which we were successful, though with heavy loss." Meanwhile, newspapers closer to the action in Franklin reported a victory for Meade but spent most of their space chastising him for not pursuing Lee and capturing the Army of Northern Virginia.⁽¹⁰⁾

Some Civil War scholarship locates the failure of the Confederacy not on the battlefield, or in the overwhelming resources of the North, but on the Confederate home front--in the communities from which the soldiers came. The Valley Project archive offers a place to test out these theories in the larger context of the war. Several historians have revised the account of a gallant and united, but ultimately overwhelmed South. These historians have talked about the South as a potentially victorious nation undone by internal division and failure of popular will. The main points of these arguments suggest that class divisions split yeoman from planters, that self-doubt about slavery undermined white southerners support for the cause, and that white southern women pulled back from initial support for the war effort and undermined the effectiveness of carrying on the struggle. Other historians, notably Gary Gallagher, caution against discounting the southern will to win. Gallagher recently wrote that Confederates mobilized a stunning effort that showed few signs of failure of popular will. He asks us to consider that 750,000 to 850,000 white men fought for the Confederacy--75 to 85 percent of its draft age white male population, that 254,000 of these men died in the war, and that the rate of killed and wounded for the Confederacy was about 37-39 percent, the highest casualty rate in American military history.⁽¹¹⁾

Augusta County, Virginia, does not appear to have lost the will to support the Confederate effort. Women in Augusta formed aid societies and sent socks, blankets, and supplies to soldiers throughout the war. The women of the Presbyterian church agreed to send their 500 pound church bell to Richmond to be melted down for iron to make cannon. As late as 1865 newspapers in Augusta reported women's support for the war. The Staunton Artillery convened at their camp near Fishersville on February 1, 1865, and adopted resolutions affirming: that the same spirit motivating them in 1861 was still strong, that they refused to fail in the cause, that they refused to accept any peace agreement that did not recognize Southern independence, that they thanked the women of Augusta County for the bountiful meal prepared for them on January 28th, and that they pledged their commitment to fight another four years to defend liberty if necessary.⁽¹²⁾

Not all Augustans shared the spirit of these resolutions. Everyone was weary with the war effort, but their weariness did always translate into opposition to the fighting or loss of will. Some held on to their unionism throughout the war, a few like Charles Joseph Smith leaving Augusta for the North. Others began to lose faith after years of fighting. The full mobilization of Augusta County in 1864 left little room for further expansion of the war effort. According to one woman in February 1864 the only white men left were older farmers who she predicted would not join the army even if drafted. "I say it seams starvation will end it anyhow," she wrote, "there is a number of farms that there is not a man on. if the farms are stopped I think the war must stop. they cant fight without bread." She concluded, "I think the southern confederacy has gone nearly up the spout."⁽¹³⁾

Some historians have questioned the Valley Project on the grounds that its two communities are not "typical" and therefore not representative of the North and South in the Civil War. "The massive amount of material for these two counties creates a certain kind of coerciveness," commented James M. McPherson, "There is the potential that they will be regarded as typical . . . Neither the Republican Party in the North, or its polar opposite, the Southern rights Democratic Party, was powerful in these two counties. They were full of people who would have favored compromise." Yet, the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won in 1860 in Franklin County and Augusta County supported the Confederacy til the very end of the war. For McPherson and others, it seems, only the extremes can represent North and South, places where we see the sectional conflict coming a long way off. But shouldn't we look very carefully at the places "full of people who would have favored compromise" to see why and how it was that these people did not in the end compromise but instead chose war?⁽¹⁴⁾

Both Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, represent the "border region" in the Civil War era, the strip of states along the Mason-Dixon line North and South, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Tennessee, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio, and Illinois. This region proved pivotal in the coming and fighting of the Civil War. These states along the border supplied 46 percent of all Union soldiers and 36 percent of all Confederate soldiers. In the Confederate forces Virginia alone supplied 14 percent of all Confederate soldiers--only North Carolina supplied as many. The situation was similar in the North, as Pennsylvania provided 13 percent of the Union soldiers--only New York supplied more. All of the major military engagements between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia took place on Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland soil.⁽¹⁵⁾

At the heart of the Valley Project Civil War archive are the nearly 12,000 soldiers from these two communities who fought in the war. Some from Pennsylvania fought in the western theater in Tennessee and Kentucky, but the vast majority waged the bitter and decisive campaigns in the East between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. The Virginia units from Augusta fought in the legendary "Stonewall Brigade" and with J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry. The Pennsylvania infantry units stood with General Joseph Hooker's First Corps at Antietam, Reynolds' First Corps at Gettysburg, and Warren's Fifth Corps later in the war, while the cavalry units battled with General John Buford at Gettysburg and General Philip Sheridan later.⁽¹⁶⁾ A remarkable number of black men from Franklin Co. joined the U.S. Colored Troops units. Some local histories contend that over 500 men joined the U.S.C.T. units. The Valley Project has found the Compiled Service Records of almost 125 men who served in the U.S.C.T. from Franklin County in over 25 different U.S.C.T. units. At least four fought with the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, featured in the popular film Glory.⁽¹⁷⁾

In the twentieth century Americans tend to see war as something that happens elsewhere, far away, home front and battlefield as separate and distinct worlds. Bosnia and the gripping siege of Sarajevo represent civilians caught in the crossfire and suffering the exigencies of war, while D-Day and Vietnam the distant places where Americans fight. For Virginians and some Pennsylvanians in the Civil War, the war could come home at any time. The ebb and flow of armies in these areas fully staffed military hospitals, and draft boards and provost marshall's offices, as well as the constant fear of invasion and occupation. Many fled before the armies, going "refugeeing." One Staunton woman wrote to her friend in November 1862, "We have been several times alarmed, for fear the Yankees would get us, but they have not succeeded yet, and I trust Jackson will never give us up to them. They have been as near at eighteen miles in several directions. At one time we had a regular panic, and almost everybody left Staunton, but after playing 'refugee' about a week, they returned and were laughed at a great deal about it." After General John McCausland burned Chambersburg in July 1864, at least 600 families were homeless and lost all of their property. Many Chambersburg residents fled the town on the rumor that the Southern cavalry was headed their way. Soldiers from Chambersburg requested leave from the army to help their families. One soldier left his unit without leave, "to see my mother, whose house had been burned, by the enemy, and I found her, as I had heard, out in the fields, with four small children, and no protection from the weather, and but little to eat. I only left my regt. for the purpose of affording her relief and protection." About to bring his family with him, this soldier was "arrested Aug. 12, 1864 by two soldiers . . . as a deserter."⁽¹⁸⁾

Considering Civil War history from the perspective of communities, the distinction between battlefield and home front becomes blurred. The soldiers on the battlefields were connected inextricably to their communities, and citizens at home closely followed events on the battlefields. In Pennsylvania and Virginia fighting took place in and around Augusta and Franklin. Even in places as far from military action as Arkansas and Maine, citizens at home sometimes knew of the results of a battle before the enlisted men on the front heard the full account. The war may have seemed a long way off to some Americans, but it was close-to-home for nearly every community. Emotional ties brought communities fully into the war. No one could avoid it. The degree to which the violence of war came to communities varied, but the exigencies of war were constant. Both citizens and soldiers, those close to the action and those far from it, found themselves fully implicated in war.⁽¹⁹⁾

Letters can be seen as ligaments between home and battlefield, carrying news of major battles, everyday affairs, and family matters. Soldiers wrote home for news, often summarizing their days with "no news of interest." They relied on hometown newspapers, letters from home, and sometimes rumors to keep them abreast of all the goings on in the lives of their families and friends. The Valley Project letters collection contains 100 fully searchable letters, half from both Franklin and Augusta. A keyword search on the word "home" reveals that the word was used at least 130 times in those letters. One soldier proposed marriage in a letter home, writing "Now, Jennie, you have heard what I have long wished to say I love you as truly as a man can love and ... if you will concent to become the wife of this 'ugly, mean, rascal' you will make me the happiest man in the Yankee Army." Letters from soldiers to their loved ones also demonstrated the ways soldiers transported themselves home by writing a letter. P.H. Powers wrote to his wife: "A little stove keeping [our tent] warm, but not as comfortable as by your side. No other place can be. I miss you. how I long to be with you again." Even little girls at home might receive military maps with full accounts of the battles, drawing them into events on the battlefields. Jedediah Hotchkiss, whose maps guided Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, wrote his young daughter, Nellie, about the battle of Fredericksburg and enclosed a map to go with it. "I must now tell you about a battle we had last Saturday, the 13th of Dec.," he wrote, "and I will make a little map for you to look at and see how the armies were located when they fought. Look at the map I have made for you. The roads are put down in red lines, our troops in black lines and the Yankees in blue ones." Hotchkiss went on to explain, "we must thank the good Lord that he enabled us to whip them and drive them away, for they would come and destroy us and our country if they could."⁽²⁰⁾

As the war ground on, some soldiers, especially those fighting a long way from home, may have felt forgotten and out-of-touch with their communities. The soldiers of the 77th Pennsylvania from Franklin County battled in the deep South and western theater of the war. They went so far from home as to be finally discharged in Victoria, Texas, after the war--sent there because of the supposed threat of French troops in Mexican villages. These soldiers were mustered into service August 1, 1861, marched through Kentucky in February 1862, and arrived at Shiloh on April 7, 1862, just in time to help save the Union Army from defeat. The local Franklin County newspapers, the The Valley Spirit and the Franklin Repository, covered the 77th Pennsylvania with great attention in 1862, publishing sixty-six articles on the unit in that year. The following year, though, they reported on the 77th only twenty-six times, or about once a month in each paper. In first six months of 1865 the papers ran only five articles on the 77th. Their service took them a long way from home, and it seemed the farther away they went the less attention they received. Battlefield and home front, for the most part, occupied separate worlds, but each informed and complemented the other.⁽²¹⁾

When news of events on the battlefield came to these communities, it did not always produce harmony. Old political party conflicts persisted in the war, and new ones emerged with potentially violent consequences. In Augusta County the local Democratic paper ran a brief notice celebrating the good fortune of Col. Asher W. Harman in one of the recent campaigns: "'Beautiful Silver Set'--We saw a beautiful silver set, which was captured and sent as a present to Mrs. Col. A. W. Harman." The editor of the Whig Staunton Spectator picked up the story and editorialized, "We acknowledge that the above announcement contained in the Vindicator of last week surprised us. We had supposed that everything captured by soldiers in the Confederate service became the property of the Confederate States. Have we been mistaken in this supposition?" Later, on the streets of Staunton, Col. Harman confronted the editor about the suggestion of impropriety in the editorial, angry that his honor was suffering at the expense of a "a party fling." According to the Spectator's editor, Harman "went on to say that the conduct of military officers was not subject to criticism and comment in the newspapers, and that he would not consent to have his conduct discussed by them." When the editor suggested that he would continue to cover such military news and write editorials on it, Harman told the editor that "he wanted no personal difficulty and that he did not desire to intimidate or to threaten me, but that he wished to warn me that if I made the least allusion to him in my paper he was determined to kill me." The editor held his ground and Harman, apparently enraged at his intransigence, physically attacked him, breaking his arm and beating him senseless.⁽²²⁾

Harman had served with distinction in the war. He commanded the far right of the 5th Virginia Infantry in the Stonewall Brigade at Henry House Hill in the Battle of Manassas in 1861. He was wounded in action at Battle of Brandy Station. Just weeks after the incident with the Spectator's editor, Harman was captured at Bolivar Heights near Harper's Ferry after the battle of Gettysburg and taken prisoner. He was sent to Fort McHenry, Fort Delaware, Johnson's Island, and eventually Fort Monroe military prisons. He was not released until February 1865, when he returned home to Staunton. The Vindicator reported on his release from prison, "His health is 'somewhat shattered,' but his spirits are high. He returns home with even higher conviction in the ultimate success of the Southern cause."⁽²³⁾

Community history in the Valley of the Shadow Project lets us see the Civil War in context. Soldiers, no longer divorced from a part of themselves, appear in their connected and interrelated place. The war itself, no longer dominated by the conventional watershed year of 1863, appears far from over in late 1864, full of contingency. Finally, communities in the Civil War appear not as the simple places of legend that stuck together, but instead as fraught with contradiction and complexity.

The author would like to thank Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin for their thoughtful comments and suggestions on this essay. In addition, he would like to thank Alice Carter for her help preparing the images for the article, the anonymous reader for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography for his/her helpful suggestions, William B. Bergen of the University of Virginia School of Law for his reading of the essay, and the students of HIUS 403: Digital History of the American Civil War at the University of Virginia. The Valley of the Shadow Project: Two Communities in the American Civil War is found on the World Wide Web at the University of Virginia's Institute For Advanced Technology in the Humanities at http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2. The Project will be published in book and CD-ROM by W. W. Norton & Co. with the first part to be released in fall 1998. The Project Director is Edward L. Ayers, the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Project Manager is William Thomas, a research assistant professor at the University of Virginia.

1. See Reid Mitchell, "The Northern Soldier and His Community," in Toward a Social History of the American Civil War ed. Maris Vinovskis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78-92. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987) and Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988) for analysis of the soldier's ties to his community. See also Daniel Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (New York: Free Press, 1995).

2. Charles J. Smith to Lt. Anthony W. McDermmott, April 15, 1865. Compiled Service Records of Charles J. Smith, 69th Pa. Vol., National Archives. Smith attended the University of Virginia in 1853-4, listing Augusta as his home. I would like to thank Mr. Bruce Halsted for this valuable information on Smith.

3. For reviews and analysis of the Valley of the Shadow Project, see Andrew McMichael, "The Historian, The Internet, and the Web: A Reassessment," AHA Perspectives (February 1998), 29-32. Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, "Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web," Journal of American History (June 1997), 132-155.

4. On the efforts of social historians of the Civil War, see Maris A. Vinovskis, Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990). One visitor to the Valley Project archive wrote that the piece on the U. S. Colored Troops from Franklin Co. gave her "a much better understanding of the role blacks have played in our history." She went on to say that the site made her "now view black people in our present day in a whole different light." Valley of the Shadow Project, University of Virginia, electronic mail response dated Fri, 27 Feb 1998 22:18:45 EST.

5. According to Lil Colletta, president of the Kittochtinny Historical Society in Franklin Co., the local history society in Franklin Co. is receiving 10 calls a week from people as far away as England, France, and Saudi Arabia who have used the Valley Project. "Web site shares county history with the world," Chambersburg Public Opinion, March 1998. See the Letters to Henry Bitner in the Valley Project electronic archive: http://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU/vshadow2/personal/bitner.html

6. Robert Penn Warren, "The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial," A Robert Penn Warren Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 310.

7. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Random House, 1948), 194. Gettysburg, a film directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, 1994. See also Carol Reardon, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

8. The Civil War, a nine-part documentary film directed by Ken Burns and shown by the Public Broadcasting System in 1990. See also, Richard N. Currant, "God and the Strongest Battalions," in Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Donald (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960). For an overview of the competing interpretations of Confederate defeat, see also James M. McPherson, Drawn With the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 113-150.

9. Report of Lt. Col. James MacThompson, July 10, 1863, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I. Vol. 27. Part I. Reports. Serial No. 43., No. 50, p. 305-43. Report of Col. J. H. S. Funk, August 18, 1863, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I. Vol. 27. Part II. Reports. Serial No. 43., No. 492, p. 526-27.

10. Staunton Spectator, July 7, 1863, p. 2.; Valley Spirit, July 8, 1863, p. 2.

11. Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 89. By comparison for the North the rate was 17.5 per cent--for the U.S. in the Revolution 4.2 per cent; in the First World War 5.4 per cent; in the Second World War 5.8 per cent; and in Vietnam 7.7 per cent. What if the North had suffered comparable casualties, Gallagher asked--as it was the North showed much evidence of failure of popular will. For other historians' interpretations of Confederate loss of popular will, see for example, E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1950), Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), and Paul D. Escott, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

12. Staunton Spectator, March 25, 1862; Staunton Republican Vindicator, February 3, 1865. For a detailed look at the Augusta County home front and the issues of popular will, see http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ela/auhome/main.html

13. To Mary Catharine Rolston, Feburary 21, 1864, in "Until Separated by Death"

14. Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 1998.

15. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 179-80.

16. For further information about these units and their histories, see Richard Sauers, Advance the Colors! Pennsylvania Civil War Flags (Harrisburg: Capitol Preservation Committee, 1991) , and Ted Alexander, The 126th Pennsylvania (Shippensburg: Beidel Printing House, 1984), Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-65 (Harrisburg: B. Singerly, 1871), and Southern Revenge! Civil War History of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (White Mane Publishing Co., 1989), The Seventy-Seventh Pennsylvania at Shiloh. History of the Regiment [by John Obreiter]. The Battle of Shiloh. [by David W. Reed] (Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing Co., 1905). Robert J. Driver, Jr., The 52nd Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc. 1986). Lee A. Wallace, Jr., The 5th Virginia Infantry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc.1988). Robert J. Driver, Jr., The 14th Virginia Cavalry (Lynchburg: H. E. Howard, Inc. 1988).

17. Southern Revenge!, p. 48. See also Ted Alexander and W. P. Conrad, When War Passed This Way (Greencastle, Pa.: Lilian S. Besore Memorial Library, 1982). This number seems high since the Franklin County population census in The Valley of the Shadow Project search results showed 325 black and mulatto men between the ages of 15 and 45 who would have been of military age in 1863.

18. Lizzie to Mary, November 18, 1862, Valley of the Shadow Project, http://cti.itc.Virginia.EDU/~ela/auhome/lizzie.html. Compiled Military Serivce Record, George H. Deems, 21st Pa. Cav. Co. D and L, National Archives.

19. For a recent community history of the Civil War see for example, Daniel Sutherland, Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865. See also Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home and Philip Shaw Paludan, A People's Contest: The Union & Civil War, 1861-1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988).

20. For "no news of interest" see A. S. Byars to wife, April 4, 1864, Fredericksburg National Battlefield. Lucius P. Mox to Jennie, undated, U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks; Phillip H. Powers to wife, December 17, 1862, Fredericksburg National Battlefield. Jedediah Hotchkiss to Nellie, December 17, 1862, Hotchkiss Family Papers, University of Virginia. For a electronic version of the letter and map of Jedediah Hotchkiss, see http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ela/auhome/nellie.html. See http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ela/letters for an etext and analysis of these Civil War letters from Franklin and Augusta.

21. http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~ela/77pa/mission.html

22. Staunton Spectator, May 26, 1863.

23. Staunton Republican Vindicator, February 10, 1865.