Wyatt, who burned the courthouse of Washington County, Virginia, as a way of settling old scores in his hometown of Abingdon.

They could point to individuals like the Thirteenth Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry captain James B. Beginning in spring 1863, Southern journalists, historians, and private citizens argued that Union soldiers willfully targeted and destroyed public and private archives across the South. Indeed, the preservation of public archives during the Civil War is thirdly significant because the issue became a matter of cultural dispute. The organic growth of government records-as much as their legal and symbolic value-induced Americans on both sides of the war to articulate the value of records and archives. 4 Similar growth trends occurred in the states, as various government clerks, personal secretaries, governors, and state librarians transcribed or published records in bound volumes. Today, the archival remnants of the Confederacy's War Department alone measure over nine thousand cubic feet-nearly all of it created between 18.

government accumulated more quickly as a result of the war James Gregory Bradsher estimated that federal records quintupled from less than two hundred thousand cubic feet in 1861 to over a million cubic feet by the 1870s. As the national powers of government expanded, the Union and the Confederacy created and preserved vast quantities of manuscripts and printed volumes.

First, decisions to preserve records of the war affect what is known and knowable about the conduct and administration of the national and state governments during the war. The history of public archives during the Civil War is worth telling for at least three reasons.

American civil war navy archive