As I wrote Harper’s Donelson, I wanted to get an accurate description of the weather during the months of January to March, 1862 in the vicinity of western Kentucky and western-central Tennessee. Of course, I had descriptions available from writers of the histories of the major battles, and relied heavily on Volume One of Shelby Foote’s work, The Civil War: A Narrative (Vintage, Sept 1986); as well as Volume One of Battle and Leaders of the Civil War (Castle, July 1983).
But, of course I wanted more. The issue with the first two sources was that they only covered specific dates in my time period, but did not cover all of the dates in the story.
After searching Wikipedia and the on-line site of the National Weather Service, I had resigned myself to having to go through the documents available in The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. I felt these would include reports of weather conditions in the various reports from the field. But I was still not certain that these would give me the day-to-day coverage I desired. Furthermore, a search of these records would have been quite tedious. It would be wonderful time-saver if I could read copies of newspapers of the time and vicinity.
The Official Records are now available on-line from the Cornell University Library ebooks.library.cornell.edu/m/moawar/waro.html.
I visited the website www.sonofthesouth.net/ operated by The Sons of the South. This site contains collections of many historical documents and images associated with the Civil War, the most important for my immediate purposes being an entire collection of Harper’s Weekly. This was a national newspaper of the time. The collection includes all editions published between January 5th, 1861 and December 30, 1865. Unfortunately, reviewing these newspapers had the same limitations as reading Foote’s work. There was not a complete set of weather data for the time period of the Harper’s Donelson. Nor did it provide information about the local weather conditions in western Kentucky and Tennessee.
All of these methods led to dead-ends or incomplete data. I needed to see a locally-published newspaper. But not knowing the names of the newspapers, I was stuck. That is, until I came across the website: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, available from the Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/. This was the final stop in the search.
The newspapers are catalogued by state and by date. My first search was disappointing. The collection does not include any publications from Kentucky for the period January-March 1862. I searched those states neighboring Kentucky. For Illinois, I found papers from Joliette and Ottawa. For Indiana, there were papers from Jasper and Plymouth. But a search in Tennessee yielded the best results, providing papers from Athens, Fayetteville, Memphis, Nashville, Clarksville, with the Memphis Daily Appeal being a daily.
I looked for papers from cities inside the geographic area of Harper’s Donelson: Nashville or Clarksville. Unfortunately the Nashville Union and America and the Nashville Patriot are available for only one date and the Clarksville Chronicle appears to have been a weekly. But, knowing that weather in the U.S. tends to move generally west-to-east, I did a keyword search within the catalog and discovered what I needed in the Memphis Daily Appeal. Using keywords ‘rain’ and ‘snow’, I was able to fill in the blanks for the weather during those days not included in the battle histories with sufficient accuracy to meet the needs of the novel.
