The burdens of information gathering

“P.S. please excuse this scribble and burn it as soon as you read it. Good by.”

If you spend days in university archives reading the chicken scratches of everyday folks from the 19th century, then you will run into lines like this. And when you do, your eyes may get big. A request to destroy or keep private a letter oftentimes means there is something juicy.

In this particular case, there wasn’t. It was an innocuous missive from the Civil War that discussed religious conversions and closed with a prayer “that we may have peace and happiness instead of sorrow and bloodshed.” Perhaps most interesting was that the recipient did not honor the request: the letter was not burned; it was kept, collected and later archived for me to read.