Two Diaries, Two Lifetimes Apart

In the fall of 1862, two Hoosiers from different generations enlisted in different Indiana regiments and did the same thing: they started keeping books.

One was a seventeen-year-old farm boy named Theodore Frelinghuysen Upson, of Steuben County in northern Indiana, who mustered into Company C of the 100th Indiana Volunteer Infantry on September 10, 1862. The other was a carpenter named William Bluffton Miller, a generation older, who enlisted that summer in Company K of the 75th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, raised at Wabash. They did not know each other. Their regiments served different brigades, different divisions, different chains of command. The campaigns that drew them together — Atlanta in 1864, the March to the Sea, the Carolinas — drew thousands of Hoosier units onto the same roads without their men ever crossing paths.

Both men survived the war. Both came home to Indiana. Both books survived too — though by very different paths and for very different reasons. Upson’s manuscript reached print in 1943, edited by an Indiana University historian named Oscar Osburn Winther and published in Baton Rouge by Louisiana State University Press. Miller’s diary stayed in family hands for another sixty-two years, until Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert J. Willey of the University of Tennessee Press published it in 2005.

This is the third entry in this series to read those two diaries. The fourth entry read them as content. The fifth read them by negation — and corrected itself on the third voice the first had missed. This entry reads them as objects: as the kind of documents they actually are, as the editorial traditions that carried them, as the gap between what a soldier writes and what reaches a reader. What two diaries do that one diary cannot, and what reading them three ways shows about the war’s documentary record.

Theodore Upson and the layered voice

Theodore Upson’s service record, as preserved in the Indiana Historical Society’s finding aid for his collection (SC2966), runs as follows. He was born May 5, 1845 in Orland, Steuben County, Indiana, originally named James Madison Doyne. Orphaned as an infant, he was adopted by Jonathan and Elizabeth Upson of Lima (now Howe), Indiana, and his name was changed to Theodore. He was a schoolboy when Fort Sumter fell. He convinced his family to let him enlist at seventeen, mustering into Company C of the 100th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in September 1862 at Fort Wayne. By the finding aid’s count he marched some four thousand miles, was engaged in twenty-five battles including the Vicksburg approaches, Missionary Ridge, the Atlanta Campaign, and the March to the Sea, and walked in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington on May 20, 1865. He mustered out on June 9, 1865. He came home, learned carriage-building in Morristown, New Jersey, married Anna Elizabeth Beach on May 8, 1867, returned to Indiana with his family, served as commander of the local Grand Army of the Republic post, and died on January 29, 1919.

What the published volume known as With Sherman to the Sea contains is not, strictly speaking, his wartime diary alone. The manuscript Upson actually wrote — held today at the Indiana Historical Society under collection SC2966 — is a 342-page handwritten reminiscence composed around 1890, twenty-five years after the war, drawing together earlier letters and field notes. The published 1943 edition by Winther stitched that reminiscence together with Upson’s wartime letters home and surviving field-diary entries, presented in chronological order as a single continuous voice. Winther’s editorial introduction names the assembly openly; the text itself does not flag the seams.

The result is a published text doing three things at once. A young soldier writing home to his family in 1863. The same soldier writing for himself in a field notebook in 1864. An older man writing for memory and posterity in 1890. The chronological presentation makes all three sound like one voice. They are not. They are three voices recovering the same months across a span of decades, each registering different facts and different feelings about the same campaigns. The reader of the published edition is reading, simultaneously, what Upson knew at seventeen and what he had come to understand at forty-five.

William Bluffton Miller and the same-day pocket book

William Bluffton Miller’s service record, as Patrick and Willey present it in their editorial framing of the volume, runs as follows. A carpenter by trade before the war, he enlisted in Company K of the 75th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the summer of 1862. He spent his first months at Gallatin, Tennessee, as a hospital steward. He was wounded at Chickamauga in the regiment’s September 1863 engagement. After his recovery, he served as a general’s orderly during the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, then returned to his regiment for the March to the Sea and the Carolinas. He rose to first sergeant of Company K — the rank that gives the book its subtitle.

The diary Miller kept is, in the form the Patrick and Willey edition reproduces, a same-day record. According to the editors’ framing of the volume, the diary spans Miller’s full three years of service — from Gallatin through Chickamauga, the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and the Carolinas — and records his daily activities and observations alongside his thoughts on the war he was fighting.

What Patrick and Willey track across the full three-year span of the diary, and frame in their editorial introduction, is a documented evolution in Miller’s politics. The writer they describe began the war with the racial prejudices of his time and place — a white Indiana carpenter of his generation — and recorded, across three years of campaigning, hospital service, encounters with formerly enslaved people, and the war’s accumulating moral pressure, his own movement toward antislavery conviction. The evolution is not retrospectively claimed in a later memoir. It is in the day-by-day pages.

Why each form preserves different things

Upson’s reminiscences give shape. Across decades, the writer compresses, rearranges, finds the line a scene was actually drawing. A teenager’s confusion about a battle becomes, in middle age, an account of what the battle did to the country. A letter sent home to a mother in 1863 becomes, a quarter-century later, a sentence about what the writer was trying to spare her. The retrospective layer adds meaning. It also smooths edges, and the smoothing is itself a kind of fact about what the war did to memory.

Miller’s same-day pages give granularity. The dated-entry form preserves the fact of a writer’s position on the date he held it, before later thought reshapes earlier conviction. The political evolution Patrick and Willey describe in their introduction — Miller’s movement, over three years, from the racial prejudices of his time and place toward antislavery conviction — is preserved in this granular form. It is not retrospectively claimed in a memoir. It is in the day-by-day pages, on the dates the writer’s thinking actually changed.

Neither form is the truer record. Each preserves what the other cannot. The compressed clarity of decades is unavailable to a writer in the moment. The dated specificity of a same-day pocket book is unavailable to a writer reaching back across forty years. Reading both together gives a reader two species of testimony about the same war. Each species answers questions the other cannot.

Why each book survived

The two diaries reached print for different reasons, in different decades, through different editorial cultures.

Upson’s papers, after his death in 1919, passed through family hands until they reached Oscar Osburn Winther in the early 1940s. Winther was a respected mid-career historian at Indiana University — a scholar of westward migration and the trans-Mississippi West — who recognized the manuscript’s value and brought it to Louisiana State University Press, then one of the academic presses willing to carry Civil War primary sources from authors outside the major Northeastern university orbit. The first edition appeared in 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. Indiana University Press reissued the book in 1958. It has not been out of academic circulation since.

Miller’s diary stayed in the family. Sixty-two years passed between Winther’s edition of Upson and Patrick and Willey’s edition of Miller. In those decades, the field of Civil War history expanded; new university presses opened; the appetite for soldier diaries — particularly diaries from the western theater and from non-officer ranks — grew. The University of Tennessee Press’s Voices of the Civil War series, in which Patrick and Willey’s edition appeared in 2005, is a direct product of that expansion. Miller’s book reached print not because it was found in 1943 and ignored; it reached print because the publishing infrastructure that could carry it took six decades to build.

Both diaries waited for editors. Both editors waited for presses willing to carry the work.

The third and final pass

This series has now read the Hoosier diaries three times.

The fourth entry read them as content — what Upson and Miller had written, characterized in paraphrase, with the 28th USCT’s institutional record treated as a silence beside them. The fifth entry corrected that reading: the 28th USCT was not silent; Chaplain Garland H. White had published a body of letters in The Christian Recorder, and the Trail brothers of Henry County had left a folder of correspondence at a small museum library in Tennessee. The voices the first reading had missed were always there, in archives the dominant Civil War publishing tradition had catalogued separately.

This sixth entry reads the same documents a third way: as objects, as the kind of records they actually are, as the editorial traditions that carried each to print at decades’ distance. What survived was shaped, in each case, by the publishing infrastructure of its moment. What reached a reader was shaped by an editor’s choices about how to present what survived. Saidiya Hartman, whose framework the previous entry leaned on, is right that the archive is always uneven; this entry’s smaller point is that the archive is also always edited.

That completes the trilogy. This series will not return to Upson, Miller, or the 28th USCT in future entries. The seventh entry moves to new ground — to other regiments, other states, other voices. The first thread is read. The work continues.

Sources

• Theodore F. Upson, With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries & Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson, edited by Oscar Osburn Winther (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943; republished Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958).
• Theodore Frelinghuysen Upson Civil War Reminiscences manuscript, ca. 1890, collection SC2966, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis. Finding aid accessed 2026-05-16.
• Original review of the 1943 Winther edition, Mississippi Valley Historical Review (now Journal of American History) 30, no. 1 (June 1943): 127.
• William Bluffton Miller, Fighting for Liberty and Right: The Civil War Diary of William Bluffton Miller, First Sergeant, Company K, Seventy-Fifth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, edited by Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert J. Willey (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Voices of the Civil War series.
• William H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, 8 vols. (Indianapolis: W. R. Holloway, State Printer, 1865–1869). Canonical primary record for the 100th and 75th Indiana regimental service.
• Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14. Cited in the previous entry and referenced once here for continuity.
• This series, Entries 1 through 5, available at /blog.html.