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EDITORIAL NOTE

The excerpts in this book come from the first published edition of Gideon Welles’s diary. It was edited by his son Edgar, with an introduction by historian John T. Morse, Jr., and published in three volumes by the Houghton Mifflin Company in 1911. The main purpose of this note is to describe certain problems with that edition and to explain how the editor has dealt with them.

At various times after leaving office in 1869, Welles revised the manuscript diary, partially rewriting many entries, deleting others, and adding new material. It was this much-revised version that was published in 1911. But neither Edgar Welles nor Morse disclosed that Welles had written or rewritten parts of the diary years after the events he was recording occurred and that he had excised some passages. Furthermore, Edgar Welles not only made minor changes in the text (e.g., in punctuation and spelling), but also deleted a number of passages that were in the manuscript – some of them, presumably, because he did not want to offend still-living persons discussed in the diary or their descendants. Given his father’s scathing criticisms of some individuals, he may even have been concerned about libel suits. In a brief preface, he acknowledged having made a “few” deletions, an understatement of their actual number.

Soon after the 1911 edition appeared, one reviewer suggested that it contained at least two passages that Welles had written at a later time. Additional doubts about its faithfulness to the original were expressed during ensuing decades. But the extent to which the 1911 edition diverged from the manuscript diary did not become clear until 1960, when historian Howard K. Beale, who had painstakingly compared the 1911 edition with the manuscript located at the Library of Congress, brought out a new edition, published by W. W. Norton & Company.¹

The new edition consisted of a verbatim reproduction of the earlier edition, together with Beale’s extensive annotations.² Beale specified every change that had been made in the original text (except for corrections of Welles’s misspellings), reproduced the language that had disappeared in the process of revision, and resurrected the passages that had been deleted.³ He also identified a number of passages that were not in the manuscript diary. Although they apparently were written by Welles, it is unclear under what circumstances he wrote them, whether they were later additions, or why they existed apart from the manuscript diary.

The present editor checked all of the excerpts chosen for inclusion in this book against the Beale edition and found that many, but by no means all of them, had been revised to one degree or another. This raised the question of whether in all such instances he should revert to what Welles had originally written. After much deliberation, he adopted a more flexible approach instead.

As Beale himself acknowledged, many of the revisions were minor, such as the insertion of a missing word or a change in punctuation or paragraphing.⁴ Furthermore, in many instances when Welles substituted one word for another or rewrote a phrase or clause, his purpose appears to have been not to alter his original meaning but to express it more clearly. In some other instances, he probably was exercising a writer’s prerogative to burnish his language for purely stylistic reasons. (It is possible, as Beale noted, that Welles made some of these stylistic changes in the course of writing the original entry, not at a later time.) The editor has retained these kinds of revision, some of which make the text more readily comprehensible and none of which misrepresents what Welles had initially written.

It is quite another matter, however, when in a diary valued for its immediacy a revision substantively changed what Welles had written on the day the entry was dated. Thus the editor has substituted Welles’s original language whenever, in his judgment, a revision altered a passage’s tone, emphasis, implications, or explicit meaning, or reflected the influence of hindsight, or seemed otherwise misleading about what the diarist actually had thought or observed at the time he first put the passage to paper. This proved to be necessary in only a relatively small number of instances because, as Beale noted in his introduction to the 1960 edition, Welles made far fewer substantive changes to the wartime portion of the diary than to the post-war portion.⁵

Several additional explanatory comments are in order. First, in addition to writing a brief introduction to each chapter (printed in italics), the editor has inserted supplementary information (also in italics) immediately before or after selected excerpts. Supplementary material will also be found in many of the footnotes. Second, the bracketed language that appears in some excerpts was inserted by the editor. (Words appearing in parentheses were placed there by either the diarist or his son.) Third, Welles was inconsistent in how he indicated the date of diary entries. In this book, the date of each excerpt appears in boldface italics at the start of the passage. Finally, some of Welles’s orthography will strike the modern reader as at best odd; for example, his hyphenation of “to-day” and “to-morrow,” his use of the lower case “n” in “Negro,” his spelling of “anyone,” “someone,” and “sometimes” as two words instead of one, and his preference for “intrenchment,” “intrusted, and “indorsement” instead of “entrenchment,” “entrusted,” and “endorsement.” These were all commonplace usages in Welles’s day, and the editor has seen no need to clutter the pages with the notation [sic] when they appear.

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¹ In a lengthy introduction to the 1960 edition, Beale, who had initially raised doubts about the 1911 edition in a paper he wrote for a Harvard graduate course in 1924, called the diary an invaluable historical source, summarized earlier criticisms of the 1911 edition, described his editorial procedures, and identified seven different types of revision Welles had made, ranging from minor technical corrections to the insertion of language seemingly intended to make the diarist look more perspicacious.

² Beale did not, however, reprint Edgar Welles’s preface or Morse’s introduction, which were largely irrelevant to his goal of determining what Welles had originally written.

³ The only passage deleted by Edgar Welles that is included in this book is the December 15, 1863, entry about the controversial appointment of a new U.S. marshal for Connecticut (see Chapter 7).

⁴ Welles probably inserted most of the missing words, but it is likely his son made many of the changes in punctuation – especially the substitution of semicolons for the em dashes of which his father had made prolific use.

⁵ In several cases where a revision has been replaced with the original manuscript language, the revision is of sufficient interest that the editor has reproduced it in a footnote.