Dahlgren Status

J. D. Petruzzi has been working his way through the draft of the Dahlgren manuscript for me. I got another three chapters from him the other day, which means that he’s gotten through 9 of the 13 chapters for me. Scott Patchan’s also returning the favor (I read and edited his Shenandoah Valley in 1864 manuscript for him earlier this year) by reading it for me. When they’re done, it will then go out to four folks to read and review: Horace Mewborn, Bob O’Neill, Ken Noe, and Ethan Rafuse. Teej Smith, who read the very rough first drafts of each chapter as they were completed, also wants to take another run at it now that it’s been polished a bit. When I get their feedback, it’s done.

My problem is that I keep finding new tidbits of coming up with new little twists that need to be included, or which change my thoughts. Here are a couple of random examples of what I mean here:

1. The most recent issue of Blue & Gray includes a letter from the magnificent collection of historian Wiley Sword. This letter, written by Judson Kilpatrick in the fall of 1862, seeks the intervention of President Lincoln to get him released from Washington, D. C.’s notorious Old Capitol Prison, where Kil was being held on unspecified charges. Lincoln intervened and arranged for Kilpatrick to be released. That letter raised the possibility that perhaps Kilpatrick was thereafter beholden to Lincoln, and that perhaps the payback for this intervention was the mission to kidnap and assassinate Jefferson Davis and his cabinet in the winter of 1864. That was a real eye-opener for me, so I added an entire paragraph to the conclusion chapter to address this possibility. Fascinating stuff.

2. Just for fun, the other day, while watching over Susan’s recuperation, I did a Google search on Ulric Dahlgren and found something I had missed, which was a discussion of Dahlgren’s woundng at Hagerstown on July 6, 1863. It raised the possibility of identifying the individual who fired the shot that ultimately cost Dahlgren his leg. However, the source could not be corroborated, and I added discussion in an endnote to that effect.

The upshot of all of this is that even though the book is done in the main, the process of tweaking and fine-tuning continues unabated until we reach the point when it is literally too late–too far into the publication process–to make any further changes. The research process also continues until the moment when it is literally too late, and even then, it sometimes doesn’t stop. It just reaches a point where it’s too late for me to use what I find. That doesn’t mean, though, that my search for material ever ends.