Some books have really been around. An article in today's Washington Post profiles the well-traveled volume one of W.F.P. Napier's four-volume set, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France (1842). The book’s earliest history is not known, but in June 1864, it was quietly sitting in the shelves of the Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) Library. But then, on a warm summer day the book became part of the national traffic in wartime souvenirs when Pennsylvania soldier Charles S. Gates, participating in General David Hunter’s Lynchburg raid, came along and stole it. Gates, thinking the library belonged to the Virginia Military Institute (a school that still remembers and proudly resents its burning at the hands of Hunter’s men), stole the book and wrote a note in it, erroneously identifying the text as the property of VMI and subsequently, war booty.
That Gates stole this book is not all that surprising. Wartime book theft was actually quite common. During all four years of the Civil War (but especially during the large-scale raiding campaigns of 1864-1865), Union soldiers stole all kinds of things from southern homes: books, clothes, candlesticks, silver plate, sewing needles, watercolor paintings, musical instruments, private letters. Most of these objects were not useful to soldiers on the move; they stole for emotional pleasure rather than for monetary gain. Most importantly, looting was an act of vengeance; Union soldiers stole southerners’ property as punishment for secession. It also probably gave Gates a thrill of satisfaction that he stole a book on military strategy from what he thought was a southern military academy.
Stealing was also about class status. Many northern soldiers were literate but working class; the massive libraries of southern planters and their universities were symbolic of their elite status. Class resentment provoked some soldiers to destroy books in addition to household objects like pianos and massive mirrors, objects that represented the wealth and taste of the southern upper class. Gates may have lugged this book around for a while in his knapsack but he probably sent it home to his family as soon as was practicable. At this point, it ceased to be a symbol of southern class status or identity and became a tangible reminder of the significant events of the war for Gates, and evidence of his participation in them. Hence his inscription in the book—he writes his own wartime experiences into its history.
That volume one of the History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France found its way back home the Washington and Lee Library is also not surprising. In the years after Reconstruction, book returns were part of the reunion effort that submerged narratives of emancipation and sectional division into a post-war afterglow of brotherhood. Many southern libraries have collections of these texts, all of them with inscriptions similar to Gates’ and all of them valued not for their content but for their context.
