Confederate Citizens File transcriptions
The Confederate government paid its private contractors by voucher, and the vouchers survive. When the United States War Department compiled the papers of Confederate citizens and business firms between 1874 and 1899 — now National Archives Record Group 109 — it gathered, firm by firm, the bills, receipts, requisitions and certificates that passed between a founder or machinist and the officers who bought from him. These are working documents. They name the piece, the quantity, the rate and the officer who signed for it.
They are also, page for page, some of the least-read primary sources on Confederate ordnance manufacture. Most have never been transcribed. This section publishes complete, page-by-page readings of the files that bear on artillery — guns, carriages, projectiles, fuzes, mortar beds, gin and implement work, and the shop labor behind all of it.
How these transcriptions are made
Every file here is worked to the same three-layer rule, and the layers are never blended:
- Diplomatic transcription — exactly what the page says, including the clerk’s spelling, his abbreviations, his arithmetic and his mistakes. Nothing is silently corrected.
- Normalized data — the same content in searchable form, kept separate from the transcription so a modern spelling never displaces the period one.
- Proposed identifications — who an officer or a firm most likely was, drawn from outside the file, always flagged as external and never merged into the record itself.
Accounts are checked by arithmetic: quantity times rate should equal the extension, and the extensions should equal the footing. Where a page proves exactly, the transcription says so. Where it does not, the divergence is stated and the figures are left as the clerk wrote them. A Confederate bookkeeping error is evidence; quietly repairing it destroys the evidence.
One trap is worth naming, because it has misled published work before. A printed (No. 12.) or (No. 22.)—VOUCHER. at the head of a sheet is a Confederate form number, not the voucher number. The forms say so themselves: one prints the instruction that it “will be used for miscellaneous disbursements.” The voucher’s own number is written in by hand, elsewhere on the page.
Files transcribed
| File | Place | Images | What it documents |
|---|---|---|---|
| A. N. Miller | Savannah, Georgia | 111 | Founder, blacksmith and machinist to the Engineer’s Department and the Ordnance Bureau: ten-inch mortars and beds, 42- and 32-pounder grape, canister, 8-inch rifle shell with brass percussion fuzes, Columbiad shell, torpedo work, gun pintles and traverse circles, and the shop labor of the Savannah defences, 1861–1865. |
Fold3 indexes the Miller file under South Carolina. It is a Savannah file, and the mis-filing is very likely why it sat unread. Every letterhead in it reads “The Engineer’s Department, Confederate States, Savannah, Geo.”
What is not published here
The scans themselves are not reproduced. The images are licensed to their host and are not ours to republish; what is published is the transcription, which is our work. Each page is cited by its image number so a subscriber can pull the original and check us. If you find an error, it is an error worth reporting — these readings are meant to be tested against the page.