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Ferdinand Kilbourne Civil War diaries, 1861-1864

Two pocket diaries, one for 1861, the other for 1864, belonging to Pvt. Ferdinand Kilbourne (Kilbourn) of Covington, Tioga County, Pa. Kilbourne, a soldier in the 1st Rifles, Company I of the 42nd Pennsylvania Regiment--the famous "Bucktail Regiment"--has written the entries in each diary, from Jan. 1-Dec. 31, in Pitman shorthand. The Bucktails trained at Camp Curtin, Harrisburg until June 1861, when they joined the Army of the Potomac in and near Washington, D.C., where they spent the next four years. During those years, they fought in many battles, such as Ball’s Bluff, Harrisonburg, Mechanicsville, Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Manassas, Bristoe Station, and Spotsylvania. Endpapers and the first and last leaves of both diaries also contain miscellaneous names and addresses, fragments of verse, accounts of money and postage borrowed and lent, purchases (reams of paper and envelopes), a list of articles of clothing issued by the army, and a list of authors, perhaps to be read, or already read, including classic writers, Thucydides, Livy, Polybius, Sallust; and modern historians Prescott, Gibbon, Robertson, and Bancroft. In the 1864 diary, Kilbourne records the sum of t

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