This post by Ervin “EJ” Jordan Jr., Research Archivist & Associate Professor at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, concerns a recent acquisition, “Isabella, Jumain, Miriam and Rosa Letter,” March 7, 1865 (MSS 16853)

This document of historical rarity on a unique maritime aspect of the American Civil War was recently acquired by the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. It consists of March 7, 1865 letters of an anonymous family of four Confederate women Isabella and her daughters Jumain, Miriam, and Rosa (their surname unknown) to their husband/father in Havana, Cuba. Trapped by the Union Navy’s blockade of Galveston, Texas, their anxious departure attempts were a backdrop of Southern blockade-running activities (‘running the blockade’). Postal supply shortages and costs necessitated these letters’ single sheet of blue stationery; its 160-year survival implies receipt by the husband/father, interception by federal blockaders or never having been mailed. (Its cover envelope is missing). Extant letters by blockade runners’ civilian passengers are rare as mail confiscated by Union blockaders was usually destroyed.

Building a Blockade: Team Union Navy Blockaders

The Federal government imposed a naval blockade (April 1861-May 1865) of Southern seaports during the Civil War, patrolling 3,550 miles of coastline with a blockading fleet of 400 ships assigned to six geographically-based squadrons: Atlantic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Gulf, East Gulf and West Gulf. Captured blockade runners were taken to federal-held ports as war prizes, their cargo’s cash value shared among ships’ crews as prize money. Several seized vessels were commissioned for Union naval service. The blockade gave notice that foreign nations trading with the Confederate South risked confrontation with the United States. Although the smaller Confederate Navy (100 ships) never seriously challenged the Union Navy (700 ships) nor imposed its own blockade, Southern commerce raiders attacked Northern merchant vessels and whaling fleets in the Atlantic, Arctic and Pacific Oceans, decimating trade and increasing shipping insurance rates.

Breaking the Blockade: Team Confederate Blockade Runners

Southern blockade runners, privately or government-owned, were specially-built seagoing steamships constructed or purchased in Britian, Scotland and Ireland with large cargo holds and comfortable cabins. Known as “greyhounds of the sea” for their gray paint and swiftness, many bore colorful names like Let Her Rip, Rattlesnake, Banshee, and Vulture. One Confederate government-owned vessel, the Fingal (later the ironclad CSS Atlanta), returned from Europe in late 1861 with 10,000 rifles, 400 barrels of gunpowder, and a million bullets.

Blockade runners exported cotton for British textile industries, tobacco, sugar and rice to Europe in exchange for munitions, shoes, blankets, meat, coffee, medicines, and Bibles. They also carried civilian passengers and private and diplomatic mail to and from Europe and the South’s Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports (usually as night runs to avoid detection): Fernandina and St. Augustine, Florida; Beaufort and Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; Galveston and Brazos Island, Texas. Favored foreign ports included Liverpool (Great Britain), Bermuda, the Bahamas (Nassau), Halifax, (Nova Scotia, Canada), Tampico, Matamoras and Vera Cruz (Mexico), and Havana, Cuba. European nations were officially neutral but vessels owned or crewed by their citizens dominated blockade-running. After the war international arbitration (the Alabama Claims, 1869-1872) resulted in Britain’s compensating the United States $15.5 million for ‘damages’ caused by British-built Confederate ships.

Blockade-running was a business often financed by joint stock ventures euphemistically known as ‘exporting and importing companies’ whose investors reaped profits ten times their cargoes’ original value. Such voyages were inherently perilous–1,500 ships were run aground, captured or sunk, drowning crews and passengers. “King Cotton” exports slumped by 95 percent; the Confederate South’s cotton embargo strategy to pressure European intervention in the war failed, contributing to its ruined economy.

The golden age of blockade-running ended by the early spring of 1865 as the Union army and navy increasingly captured Confederate seaports; though blockaded, only Galveston remained under Southern control. Ironically, blockade runners’ successes may have helped strangle the blockaded Confederacy by increasingly trafficking extortionately-priced luxury goods like silks and champagne while Confederate armies suffered shortages of badly-needed military supplies.

The Letter(s): “We have had some adventures”

In the first of this anonymous family’s four March 7, 1865 Galveston letters, “Isabella” writes to her unidentified husband of her frustrated attempts to join him in Cuba via Matamoras, Mexico—a regular route for self-exiled Confederates. Several tries by an unnamed blockade runner [paddle steamer CSS Lark?] on which she and their three daughters booked passage, had been thwarted by Union ships [the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, 990 miles of the Gulf of Mexico coastline from St. Andrews Bay, Florida, to Texas-Mexico border] “since last Saturday night” (March 4). Their misfortunes (“We have had some adventures, without any Success or Advantages”) were compounded by seasickness, “loss of Sleep and great fatigue,” their ship’s running aground and frequent engine trouble, barely avoiding seizure. An incoming schooner, Charles Russel, was turned away because of “Yankees firing at her in great rate.” Isabella provides a clue of the family as Texans, remarking “when we arrived here 21 years ago” [1844] and concludes: “I must close now the Children want to add some[.] I wish you farewell again with the hope of Your Health and Happiness.”

The second letter, “Jumain” [eldest daughter?] to “Dear father,” offers sentiments similar to her mother’s. She relates another sailing attempt Sunday night (March 5) that only traveled a few hundred yards, stopped by engine troubles a half mile from the Yankees, forcing a return to Galveston. Another attempt was planned for that night (March 7) but she concedes the “Yanks blockade outside very effective, and no doubt we will have some trouble getting out.” She hopes for gainful employment in Havana “as this loafing about don’t Pay” and concludes “Bad news today if it comes true about Charleston having been taken.” [Confederates evacuated this South Carolina city in February 1865; Union troops subsequently burned it.]

The third letter, “Miriam” [middle daughter?] to “Dear father,” complains: “We have not as yet departed for one reason or another, but if we do not get out tonight we will probably have to stay until next moon.” She says because “Mother” (Isabella) had already written about “our proceedings” it would only trouble him to repeat them.

The fourth and last letter, “Rosa” [youngest daughter?] to “my dear father” in childlike handwriting, is the briefest: “I bid You good bye again.” In a penciled postscript her mother Isabella reports interrupting Rosa’s initial use of ink because it was in short supply. (The first seven letters “my dear f” are in ink.) Isabella made her use a pencil “fearing she would [turn] the ink over” but Rosa apparently pouted at being denied an ink pen: “She does not like [using] the Pencil and therefore only bid you good Bye.”

The Confederacy never lifted the Union blockade, and the war ended a month after the family’s last known breakout attempt; subsequent efforts, if any, are unknown. On May 24, 1865, the South’s last blockade runner, CSS Lark (built in England for the Confederate government), departed Galveston for Havana. Three weeks later, June 19, 1865, during its postwar Union military occupation, Galveston became the birthplace of Juneteenth.

Select Bibliography

Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog,“Builder’s Drawing of Wren and Lark.”

Heidler, David and Heidler, Jeanne, eds. Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A Political, Social, and Military History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

Mr. Edwin W. Hemphill, University of Virginia Library “Bibles from Britain for the Blockaded Confederacy,” 29 May 1949, MSS 3224, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Isabella, Jumain, Miriam and Rosa Letter, 1865, MSS 16853, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

The New York Times, February 2, 1865: “Correspondence of the Associated Press/HAVANA, Saturday, Jan. 28.”

U.S. Naval War Records Office, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion Series 1, vol. 22. Washington: GPO, 1894-1922.

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: “CSS Lark”; “Danish West Indies”; “History of Galveston, Texas”; “List of ships built by Cammell Laird”; “Postage stamps and postal history of the Confederate States.”

Wilson, Paula. St. Croix Landmarks Society, 2007, https://www.stcroixlandmarks.org/history/transfer-day/

Perspectives from the Digitization  

of the Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books 

This post is contributed to by two former UVA students working with the Digital Production Group (DPG) to digitize the Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books.

A sampling of the Gordon Books taken by Stacey Evans, DPG

Perspective A: How a French Graduate Student Recovered a First Edition Novel From the 17th Century 

Contributor Biography: Christina Coomer received her MA in French from the University of Virginia in 2024. As a second-year graduate student in the Department of French she worked part-time at UVA’s Small Special Collections Library digitizing rare French books in the Digital Production Group Studio. She focuses on women’s studies in 18th Century French literature. She was awarded a 2023 Rare Book School fellowship to complete research on forgotten female authors of eighteenth-century France.  

To write about how I recovered a first edition French novel from the 17th Century, I first must explain the Gordon Collection and to tell my personal connection to it. The Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books is a collection of over 1,200 rare French books dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. The collection comprises first-edition copies of every notable French work by every famous French writer. The collection’s defining characteristic is the custom gold-leaf and leather book bindings. The collection is impressive in its magnitude of titles, and with all the matching book bindings, an aesthetic masterpiece.  

I first learned about the collection when I accepted a part-time position at UVA Library in the Digital Production Group (DPG). DPG was seeking a French graduate student to digitize a portion of the books in the collection. It was a dream to come to work and touch first-edition works by Moliere, Michel de Montaigne, and Balzac to name a few. After months of working at the library, I went on a tour of the library vault which houses some of the most rare and valuable books in the Special Collections Library.  

Taken during Christina’s tour of the vault by Stacey Evans with DPG

While on the tour, I learned more about the collection, which made it even more impressive in my eyes. The collection contains a book that once belonged to Madame de Pompadour and was custom made to match her apartments at the Palace of Versailles. The collection also includes a book rumored to have once belonged to Marie-Antoinette. The collection’s shining star, a beautifully bound set of Diderot’s Encyclopedie, was at one time believed to have been a part of the library of Catherine II of Russia. The identity of this set’s former owner remains a mystery. However, that day in the vault there was only one book on my radar: La Princesse de Cleves by Madame de LaFayette.  Gordon 1678 .L3 v.1/2 

A screenshot of the digital scanning of La Princesse de Cleves v. 1 title page by Christina during the digitization process.

La Princesse de Cleves was the novel that persuaded me to specialize in eighteenth-century French literature. After studying it in Jennifer Tsien’s graduate course, I fell in love with the novel and period. It is the novel that defined French Realism and was France’s first psychological novel (as well as being highly entertaining on its own). I found the Gordon edition in the vault and instantly inquired about its digitization status. To think I could have the opportunity to digitize my favorite book was a pipe dream. To my disbelief, the library’s records indicated that it had not been digitized yet. I made my request to my supervisors and advocated for the novel’s importance and significance in literary history. More than that, Gordon’s specific edition of the novel included handwritten notes about the characters – information any French scholar would be eager to examine. I wanted my lasting impact at the UVA Library to be digitizing this novel for readers and scholars all over the world to enjoy. Thanks to the kindness of the DPG, my request for digitization was accepted, and I was allowed to personally digitize La Princesse de Cleves.  

Perspective B:

Contributor Biography: Vaino Judson received his MA in French from the University of Virginia in 2024. He worked in the Digital Production Group studio in the UVA Library to digitize many artifacts in the UVA Library’s Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French books.  

The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library is personally my favorite building on Grounds. Working in Special Collections means handling extraordinary and uncommon artifacts on a regular basis. Language, drawings, handwritten notes, and handmade things all make up the artifacts in the library, so really the extraordinary in this case is a variety of human activities in contexts that used to be common. Knowing that customs that have fallen out of use were once considered just as ordinary as the customs familiar to myself seems to contradict fascination with them on the surface. However, this knowledge also serves as a reminder that the human experience transcends not only myself and people I know, but the entire current moment as we understand it. In the case of the Gordon Collection of rare French books, the context in which the artifacts were made stretches back to as long as five hundred years ago. Many of these books contain biographies of major political actors and political treatises as well as philosophies that affected how people perceived themselves and others. In other words, people have been living in their own times for hundreds of years. 

Example of French hand writing

Coming into contact with the persistence of human consciousness does not only offer fascination but a humbling moment of resonance with a larger view of life. Scholars look to the past and to the previously formed ideas contained in books to understand the significance of current events. At the same time, current events relate back to the past such that the worlds of the living and the dead are intertwined. 

The library houses a number of priceless rare books and manuscripts, including those that belong to the Gordon Collection, in a secure underground chamber where the controlled temperature, moderated light level and humidity conditions shield these historical artifacts from change. Storing the books in this way makes them available to future generations and safeguards the knowledge they contain. However, they are simultaneously placed in a world unto themselves where the constant necessity of change that gives ideas gravity cannot affect the books. One way of affecting change on rare books, however, is by rendering them digital. Digitizing rare books takes these books that date back to hundreds of years in the past and recreates them in a way that is intelligible to how information is stored and shared in the present. It creates a kind of synchronism between the present and the past: a series of images in an online viewer. This relatively newly invented technology displays the use of an older technology to convey thoughts. People expressing interest in the lives of one another has existed for longer than anyone currently has been alive. Something about desiring to preserve that is distinctly human too. 

Voltaire, and Douglas H. Gordon Collection of French Books (University of Virginia). Lettres Philosophiques. Chez E. Lucas,
au Livre d’or [i.e. Jore], 1734.
Gordon 1734 .V65
https://search.lib.virginia.edu/items/u2334116
University of Virginia Library – search.lib.virginia.edu
Under 17USC, Section 107, this single copy was produced for the purposes of private study, scholarship, or research.
Copyright and other legal restrictions may apply. Commercial use without permission is prohibited.

This post is contributed by Kim Cull, McGehee Rare Book Librarian sharing an exciting milestone with the McGehee Miniature Book Collection.

Did you know that the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has more than 10,000 miniature books, maps, and objects within its collection? No? Well, get your magnifying glass because we do! Most of our miniatures belong to the McGehee Miniature Book Collection given to the library in 2005 by Caroline McGehee-Lindemann-Brandt in honor of her first husband, Carden Coleman McGehee.  

Now, you may be asking, “What is a miniature book? Is it just like a regular book but smaller?” Short answer: yes. The Miniature Book Society reports that in the United States, a miniature book is a book that is “no more than three inches in height, width, or thickness.”1 Miniature books can come in all different shapes and sizes; they must fit within the parameters established and generally accepted by collectors. Within the McGehee Miniature Book Collection, there are traditionally shaped books that were meant to be carried around in a pocket and enjoyed wherever the reader finds themselves. There is a secondary type of miniature book: the artist book. These books often appear to be works of art and are meant to be enjoyed visually. Artists’ books can be very abstract and tend to focus more on the book as an object and less on the content held within. There also exists a subgenre of miniature books: the micro miniature book. In this subgenre, book artists tend to compete to see who can create the smallest possible book, and readers usually need a strong magnifying glass to even attempt to read the text.

Check out McGehee 01354 and 01355 which came with the original gift.

Now that we have established what a miniature book is, we can dive a little deeper into the history and contents of the McGehee Miniature Book Collection. Every collector has an origin story and a reason why they collect what they do. Mrs. Brandt is no different. She started collecting when she was a young girl with encouragement from her parents. She started by keeping the little books attached to dolls and expanding to collect anything that fits the criteria of a miniature book. In the early 2000s, Mrs. Brandt was hoping to downsize her house in preparation for retirement and needed to find a home for her collection. Miniature books may be small and therefore take up little space, but by then, her collection numbered around 11,000. The books were stored in specially made miniature bookcases, shoe boxes, etc. As an alumnus of Sweet Briar College, Mrs. Brandt contemplated gifting her entire collection to them. At some point, Mrs. Brandt reached out to the university her first husband attended, the University of Virginia. Of course, we wanted her amazing collection. How could we not? After careful negotiations and support from many people, most of the collection was transferred to the library in 2004. 

Caroline Brandt’s “crown jewel” of her collection – her Omikuji; currently uncataloged.

The path to making these miniatures available in the online catalog, Virgo, has not been without its challenges. The major hurdle has always been the size of the collection. A second hurdle is that fact that Mrs. Brandt has never limited herself to collecting only English language titles; she has collected books in all or almost all the major languages. She is very fond of Japan and has collected many Japanese texts. Sadly, libraries in the Western parts of the world have not always been equipped to catalog non-roman language materials. Luckily for the library, Mrs. Brandt has kept a very detailed inventory excel spreadsheet that could be manipulated and uploaded to the catalog to make the titles accessible. It was not a perfect solution, so trained library staff had to go in and correct records. Over the years various staff members have helped to catalog the collection, including Gayle Cooper, Allison Sleeman, Barbara Hatcher, Annette Stalnaker, Teresa Brown, Jocelyn Triplett, Jackie Parascandola, and Kim Cull. Thanks, and kudos to everyone who has helped with the McGehee Miniature Book Collection. As of April 2024, we have cataloged over 10,000 miniature books and reached call number McGehee 10000! 

McGehee 10000 opened to show a Medieval nail maker at work!

You might be wondering what some of our favorite miniature books are. We would encourage you to visit the Special Collections Library and check out our “Miniature wall” where 100 different miniature books have been photographed and displayed for all to enjoy. Next to the exhibit is an iPad that contains a little information for each book. These books were chosen primarily by library staff, and we hope that you will love them just as much as we do! We also encourage you to explore the collection yourself! Titles can be discovered by searching McGehee Miniature Book Collection in Virgo; it is ok if you cannot choose just one. We know. There are so many fantastic ones to see! 

Come visit our miniature book wall display and check out a sampling of the collection!

We look forward to seeing you soon and hearing what your favorite is. Please feel free to take photographs, sans flash, and share the images online. Tag us @rareuva on Instagram and include the hashtag #McGeheeMiniatureBooks. 

​​References 

​​Society, Miniature Book. n.d. What is a miniature book? Accessed May 22, 2024. https://mbs.org/. 

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