I am peter carmichael, the director of the Civil War Institute and the director of the History Department here at gettysburg college. It is my pleasure to welcome my good friend Stephen Berry. Stephen berry is the gregory professor of civil war at the university of georgia. I have a few rules, and this is one. Everything Stephen Berry writes ive got to read. He brings incredible writing with rich insights. His work is so good that you want to succumb to the jealousy, but you cant. He is a terrific guy. At the university of georgia, he scholar,nly a prolific he has written or edited six books. My favorite is all that makes a ambition, and the civil war south,s dissertation at the university of North Carolina. Bardi was still teaching at North Carolina. Edited is a he fantastic book called were doing the war. , he iss another thing engaged in a lot of Digital Projects and has his graduate students working on his projects as well. My favorite of all the Digital Projects is titled private voices the corpus of American Civil War letters, and many of the letters come from soldiers who were either semiliterate or illiterate. All the letters are transcribed. You dont have to sauce through the handwriting so much. And it is a fantastic digital project. Going toephen berry is speak to us on the language of common soldiers. Let me welcome steve barry. [applause] thank you also much. I am delighted to be here. Thanks, pete, for that generous introduction. Mentioned, im Stephen Berry from the university of georgia, where i specialize in civil war studies, but lately i am more involved in the running of our center for virtual history, which specializes in Digital Projects. One of our first projects was this, invasion of america. It animates every native American Land session. As you might guess, all of those were made under great duress over the course of the century. The United States seized 1. 5 million acres. You have to imagine this playing out in pieces and parts as make their land sessions from coasttocoast. Siteight guess that this plugged into contemporary debates on who is an american, who is an immigrant. The site quickly went viral, crashed our servers, and garner views in every country that we do analytics, including eastern ireland. This is another one of our projects, the u. S. News map. It allows you to search 11 million pages between 1789 and 1922, and shows you results you can see on a map and through time. You can essentially watch things go viral across the United States map. Was awarded from the nah and from the library of congress. Lately. My baby coroners and quests from the south. It was called a profoundly mournful new digital history site. You all dont know me, but a beautifully conceived and a family mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone and profoundly mournful is something i would like to see on my tombstone. [laughter] prof. Berry but my focus today is on one of our other projects, when i think is more ambitious, and it has gotten way little attention, not as much as it deserves. I know private voices sounds like a porn site. We thought it would lift up the traffic. The language is devoted to the civil war, soldier, so it is private in the sense that most of the men we are looking at our privates. We are closing in on 10,000 letters, and they have been painstakingly selected from archives across the country by my partners in crime. , professoris emeritus at missouri state, and michael montgomery, to wish Professor Emeritus at diversity of South Carolina distinguished Professor Emeritus at the university of South Carolina. When i say these were painstakingly selected, i mean the letters can only be included if it was written by someone called transitional illiterate. These are men and some women who learned their letter sounds, but dont know proper spelling, syntax, et cetera. For instance, the majority of the men on our site spell family amly, without an i, because thats how it sounds. If you dont have your nose in a boat, you spend most of your life drawing with your friends, and these men did. Famly is good enough. We have best respects for all inquiring friends and tell them all to write to me as soon as you all can. I understood that abigail was in a family way. I would be glad to come home, but i cant come home. But i cant. Please tell mother that she must not trouble herself about me, for i was just a boy for a good soldier. Please take care of my dog joseph and dont let my gun rest. Rust. 174thgilmer, pennsylvania. You know that kit was drafted. Our people hate the idea of the silent e. Silent es are stupid. They are not married to their fe, they are married to their wif, which is more than good enough to them. It is with the greatest love and pleasure that i drop a few lines in answer to your letter that you sent. Dear wife, you never said in your letter how much money you had received from me. I would like to know how much you received for me. I would like you to let me know when your next letter. I would, if i could, get a chance to send it to you. I would send it. Motherorrow to hear that has been sick, but i am in hope that god will restore her to perfect health. I can say to you that i do want to see you and the dear little children the worst i ever did in my life. May god bless you and them for the best of health until i come home again, is my prayer. Son is stupid. Sun makes a lot of sense. Those of us who have sons, when they go, it is darker. Littlea shout out to my one. Sun, i write you a few lines to ensure you i am well. Or, i want you to send something good to eat if you can get a chance, for our rations are very scanty. That sound like something will would write down in a text to me, though his spelling is a little better. I come to the coast tonight and my hand is so numbed that i cant write anymore. I want to see you very bad. Sometime or another, i will close. I could say much more but it is so cold. Remain your affection until death. One last one to complete our family, daughter. Kidding . E you that is stupid. We dont think about these things because we are so used the english, and i love the language, but it is not as if it is logical. This makes a lot more sense. Pepper the place with silent es . I have nothing that pleases me here to look at if i was with you in my little baby, it would be enjoyment to me, but as it is, i can only study about the loss of a dauter. I hope god will spare us and let us live together on earth and live in the way we should live. In all of these cases, what you see are men who are using what they know, individual letter sounds to approximate the way things should be spelled, if english made any actual sense. Ok. This is back to the michaels. Adont need to point out what herculean effort it was to assemble and transcribe 10,000 letters written by soldiers who cant spell. Obviously you cant use a spellchecker. You cant use autocorrect. You have to get every letter right, and none of them make sense. There are around punctuation marks everywhere, and you have to get those right too. And you can imagine they dont have the greatest handwriting in the world. This is a classic of the genre. But men who are transitional lee literate dont transitionally literate dont have the greatest hands. They have never been so far from home, never had the need to write. The point is, these things are scarce. I like to put it this way. In a tiny fraction of archives, there are a tiny fraction of letters like this one. This letter is like a needle in the haystack, and michael spent a decade and a half assembling a haystack of needles. What is the actual point . What can we do with a haystack of needles . Thats what i came here to talk about. First, you can actually hear what a Civil War Soldier sounded like. These men are fanatic writers. In this case, he is revealing that he does not say ought to. He says order. E order go orter go thats what the letter sounds make, so thats what he writes. Spellsprior slide, he itter, because thats how he says it. Same with chair, they spell eer. Ch or take this example. Keep a heavy guard around us day and night. Nobody goes out nor comes in. Dont know when we will draw, but i hope it will be soon, but i have to got little tobacco and no money. Got little tobacco in no money. T. Rt of like ain this isnt truly useful, but i find it interesting. We can imagine actors using our site to try to improve the pronunciation of the characters, how they might actually have talked. Other linguistic values. William brotherton was not the only man in the Confederate Army orter when he meant ought to. These are not idiosyncratic pronunciations. They are regional variations. We know that because there are littersother orters and in our archives. These boys dont move around the way we do. It is not a national job market for them. They dont take a job in san francisco. That does not happen for them. It is true that movement west was a seminal aspect of life in that period, but these are families who mostly stayed put. Its not just that they came from their home counties. Their language comes from their home counties, and that means we can map it. In this case, what we are looking at is what is called aprefixing. Ima hurrying, that kind of thing. Each dot represents not a letter, but a letter writer. These are the counties of origins of individual authors who tended to use aprefixing. What you can tell from this is everybody does it. At least the transitional lee literate men are coming and going. Thats the way they talked. It was not distinctly regional to the north or the south. Howdy is something that might be set in the south. Yeis a contraction of how do , and it is something you gave. I gave howdy to all black and white. This one sort of surprised me. I did not realize that rick wasng creek as c a northern phenomenon. It might have changed through time, but thats what our data reveals. This one, i think, many of you may be familiar with. Dixie was not originally what dixie called itself. Dixie was what the north called it, so all of our letterwriters used the word all of our letterwriters who used the word dixie are from the north. Is this a word . I have never heard of it in my life. It means latelate morning, essentially, but it is truly a northern phenomenon, a pennsylvania phenomenon. This is another one, gain. If we are gaining weight, that is a bad thing. That was not true for Civil War Soldiers. The average weight was 143 pounds. I dont know about you boys, i left 143 back a while ago. The average weight of the american male is now 200. When somebody is gaining weight, thats a good thing as far as they are concerned. Again, it was northern. These are ones i cant figure out. Maybe in the q a you could help me. , the the word fairly northerners only use the word middling. In this example, our ground is middling. I will someday give you something of a true detail of the killed and wounded for i believe i know middling well. That is what they use in the north, especially in pennsylvania. They do not use it in the south. They have a comparable term which is tolerable. Wordouth uses the connection for kinship networks, and the north does not use it at all. Northern families are huge and have giant kinship networks, but they do not use the word connection. Give me respect to all of the cornection. Since it is fathers day, i thought i would finish with this section by looking at what people called their fathers back in the day. I thought there was no more southern word in the language then daddy. I hear that a lot in georgia. It is more southern, but it does not a candle to the use of the word dad. Bys is actually confirmed google. If you look at the blue line, it is running much stronger through 1900, and it is only relatively late that daddy comes on as a term. Because it is fathers day, i will give you one more. Thats the word of father running at the top, a very formal word. Grams is a very formal body of literature, so i would discount that almost altogether. Hat you see here is that papa was running much stronger until relatively recently. Gains in the quick last few years. Other linguistic value is looking at nilo chisholms neologisms. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Civil War Soldiers. I like thinking about how they talked, but some of you might say, no, professor, i dont think the battle of the bettys berg they gondola bettys gettysburg battle of turned on their daddies. This is a way of measuring the impact of any war, the impact they leave on the language. Desperation, the novel circumstances and experience all demand and elasticity of expression, and english is one of the most elastic languages in the world. If you want to know what difference they were makes, why not ask what impact it had on the language . One of the classic examples from the civil war is the word ske dadled, which basically did not exist anywhere on earth, but by 1862 it was in every americans mouth. I have never seen a curve that steve if you look in the lower left. It is just overnight everybody talkingaboutsked about skedadeling. George washington ran away. One of the soldiers described the battle this way, i cant describe the horror of the scene, are men running in every direction, and everywhere we turn we meet the british, men up to their knees in mind, screaming for help, everyone else running to save their and skins. I skedadled. Every civil war historian here edadlethat is what a sk looks like. I can speculate by bull run, probably, that is one heck of a skedadle. And the scare of civil war armies are massive by comparison to anything that has been on the. Ontinent my larger point is what the soldiers then did with this knee logism. Him neo rebels have possession of this town. Skedaddled,ave essentially. Second example, we have been skedaddling for eight days. This is what the common soldiers will take that word and do with it. Morehead has skedaddled. After they get their bounty, most of them will skedaddle, as a good many have done. What you are seeing them doing is essentially appropriating a military term to create a synonym for desertion. They do this a lot. Civil war soldiers had a fiendish love for taking military terms and making them ridiculous. The synonyms for desertion, half of them are repurposed military terms. All this means, i am going to flank out, run the blockade, press a furlough, break the guard. Argo. S there remember, many of these men are transitional illiterate. That does mean transitional ly literate. They need an argo to match, and that is what you start seeing them doing. That it isappreciate a lot of work. They are making a demand on us in some ways in the way that they write. The idea of being a high private, there is no high private, but for a man who wants to comically claim that he has dignity left, by god, he is a high private. He does not want to be promoted. For him, thats as good as it gets. Quickstep, or a bodyguard. They are taking these military terms and applying them to an experienced that is about desertion and pain and dignity and trying to make some kind of meeting, trying to claim some kind of dignity from that. They did this not just with military terms, anything they wanted to take the air out of, and they wanted to take the air out of everything. We are all familiar with seeing the elephant. E itont really examin much. It is a term for getting a taste of battle. But doesnt it marry with the more disturbing idea that the order is an obscene circus . Also, i have seen the monkey show, or have seen the monkey dance. Johnny rewrites home, i guess you have heard before this time that i have seen the monkey dance, and i did not enjoy the sixth of april as i have enjoyed some sundays. He is talking about shiloh, the great bloodbath of american innocence. I did not enjoy that as much as i did some sundays. [laughter] i have seen this before, this ironic minimal lysing and misdirection. I call it surrendering to the fatal absurd, an amount that amounts to, im dead anyways, so bring it. The idea made things easier. In the circumstance, there did not seem to be anything else to do. As soon as he got past the point where he said im dead anyway, his time went a lot easier. But you see that in the civil war too. I had been living in hopes that the people of in c North Carolina would do something for peace, but they have been talking about it so long. Up to the idea that we have to fight until we are all killed. Same conclusion. If i had not been a student of the civil war, i would have been a student of world war i. There is an old argument about world war i, the inextricable decimation of 8 Million People actually as a cultural effect. Has a cultural effect. The argument made in rate war in modern memory is that world war i was the midwife to the modern. It destroyed victorian parities and gave birth to iron he. Irony. Beforeew age that was said. Ore more sad if you go back to the greek literature, the characters have more power than most men usually have. Even into the medieval age, you are writing about heroes, men who have more power than is realistic. You get today kids, and you get verytle orphan who has a realistic amount of power for his situation, where the best thing that could happen is he gets another after world war i, we tell stories of men who wake up as cockroaches and worry about getting to work. That kind of observe is him has been born absurdism has been born. Cubism comingis in before world war i. It becomes Salvador Dali and these nightmare dreamscapes of surrealism. You see it in science. Even science will band the culture. If 8 Million People are killed, it will. Before you have newtonian physics, the newtonian system is destroyed in part by world war i. Einstein did most of his work but become did most of his work before world war i but becomes popularized after. It is an attempt to explain what they did to themselves. It marks the culture. 8 Million Deaths make a difference. The question has always been, did Something Like this happen after the civil war . Most historians said no, outside of a few outsiders, men who were actually damaged by the war. The dominant culture managed to absorb the 700,000 dead and to see their sacrifice as pure good. The lost cause and the one cause. Later, and emancip