President's Report Masthead
December 31, 2012
Treasures from the Civil War

A letter written during the Civil War era, from the University's Special Collections.

Treasures from the Civil War

From diaries to touching letters from the front, the Binghamton University Libraries’ collections include numerous documents, books and photographs from the Civil War era.

The collections are a resource for researchers with an interest in the war as well as local history, as many of them focus on residents of central New York and their role in the war. Highlights, as selected by librarians in Special Collections, include:

  •  A book from 1837, Anti-Slavery Manual: Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery, the earliest abolitionist title in the collections at Binghamton as well as an early example of cloth binding.
  •  Addresses Delivered Before the Virginia State Convention, published in 1861, Binghamton’s only example of a Confederate imprint.
  •  Letters written by Lewis H. Brown, who served as a corporal in Company D of the 27th New York Regiment of Volunteer Infantry. In one letter, written by Brown to his brother Burritt Brown in July 1861, he describes his own battlefield performance. “I had some difficulty loading and firing my gun,” he writes, “for it was something that I had never done before. You see we had to load and fire at the same time. Whether I killed anyone or not I cannot tell. I know one thing that is I tried hard to do so.”

For a slide show featuring these and other artifacts, visit: http://discovere.binghamton.edu/photo-galleries/civilwar-4-5026.html