About this Collection
The papers of laborer and Union soldier John Carvel Arnold (1833-1865) consist of 190 items (533 images) in one container and span the years 1856-1937, with the bulk dating from 1864 to 1874. The collection principally contains correspondence of Arnold with his wife, Mary Ann Arnold, during his Civil War service with Company I, 49th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army, relating chiefly to his views on the military situation in Virginia and Maryland (1864-1865), army rations and pay, the Confederates, Copperhead Democrats, family finances, and his wife's difficulties in maintaining a home and educating the children. Mary Ann Arnold was unable to write, thus none of the correspondence in the collection is in her own handwriting.
The collection also includes correspondence between Mary Ann Arnold and her children, Carrie E. Arnold, Edwin S. Arnold, Grant S. Arnold, Idabell Arnold, and Mary M. Arnold, dating primarily from the time of the children's attendance at the McAlisterville Soldiers' Orphan School in McAlisterville, Pennsylvania, following the Civil War.
Miscellaneous receipts, printed matter, and other papers represent the remaining items in the collection, which is organized by type of material.
A finding aid (PDF and HTML) to the John Carvel Arnold Papers is available online with links to the digital content on this site.
All or selected parts of this collection were transcribed by volunteers participating in the By the People crowdsourcing transcription project of the Library of Congress. Crowdsourced text associated with the specific image from which it was transcribed can be viewed by clicking on the “Image w/Text” option above the image itself, or by selecting the “Text” option in the dropdown menu below the image. Selecting “Text (all pages)” opens a document containing the available transcribed text for all the images in the respective object record.
A transcription dataset for this collection is available online as part of Transcription dataset from "'Such Eventful Times': Women and the American Civil War", Manuscript Division. For general information on transcription datasets at the Library of Congress and their uses, see “Datasets at the Library of Congress: A Research Guide.”