After the war many states published extensive histories about the organizations that took part in the conflict. North Carolina’s contribution was a massive five volume 1901 opus edited by a former Confederate colonel, Walter Clark. In spite of its cumbersome title, Histories of the several regiments and battalions from North Carolina, in the great war 1861-’65, Written by members of the respective commands, it remains one of the best sources of information about units from the Old North State. There are rosters, bios, eyewitness battle accounts, and loads of pithy anecdotes from all the fights that Tarheels participated in. It is also quoted extensively in many general battle histories.
Finding a copy, especially if north of the Mason-Dixon line, can sometimes be difficult, so I’m happy to announce that it’s now available on the web. Google Book Search has had Clark’s for some time, but only volumes 3-5. Google allows you to view page images and plain text, altho the text has a lot of errors and it’s hard to cut and paste large chunks. You can download the book in PDF form, but it has no text layer, which makes searching difficult (and the original index isn’t that great either).
Recently I found that Eastern Carolina University (Greenville, NC) has all five volumes available in their digital library. The interface is quite a bit different than Google’s, but has the full text and page images. The text has far fewer errors and is much easier to cut and paste, altho the search engine is clunky. I found it easier to just download the entire text as an HTML file and search it with my browser.
Lots more Civil War stuff here, too, mostly related to eastern Carolina, including regimental histories of Federal units that served there.
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