Private Voices, also known as the Corpus of American Civil War Letters, is an online archive of thousands of letters written by soldiers during the U.S. Civil War. Because the soldiers lacked formal education and wrote “by ear,” the collection is a treasure trove of pronunciation and dialect from that time and place. One phrase frequently appearing in these letters is go up the spout, meaning to die, be lost, or ruined. In fact, the transcript from the trial of John Wilkes Booth quotes a witness who testified that Booth told him Old Abe Lincoln must go up the spout. A similar idea is expressed by the phrase go up the flue. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Civil War Letters”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
What if I told you that you could go back in time and actually read the correspondence of Civil War soldiers, not the officers, but the everyday soldiers? What might that tell us about our nation at another really divided time?
There’s an incredibly cool new collection of thousands of letters from everyday Civil War soldiers. It’s online and it’s free.
Linguist Michael Ellis and Michael Montgomery and historian Stephen Barry have put together a new archive online, and it’s called Private Voices. And what’s really special about all these letters from Civil War soldiers is that it’s from guys who wrote by ear. That is, they were untrained in spelling or punctuation or capitalization. So sometimes it’s hard to read them, but you can sound them out.
So I’m going to read a letter from a Civil War soldier later in the show. But for right now, I just wanted to mention one expression that jumped out at me, and that’s one that occurs time and again in these letters, and that’s the phrase to go up the spout. Do you know this expression, to go up the spout? It means to die or be ruined or be lost.
There’s a letter from 1863 in Alabama. A guy writes, our noble old army is becoming very tired of the war and deserting like hell. 100 left General Daniel’s brigade last night. I fear they will so many leave that we will have to go up the spout.
So I did a little bit more digging on the term to go up the spout, and I found it in the transcript of the trial of John Wilkes Booth, because one of the witnesses said in the trial that he heard John Wilkes Booth say, old Abe Lincoln must go up the spout, and the witness understood by the expression must go up the spout that it meant he must be killed.
So the spout refers to what, a tornado or a water spout? I think it must be the spout on a house because there’s a similar expression to go up the flue. And I think it just means, you know, go up into the atmosphere.
Oh, I see. So your spirit has left your body and it’s disappearing into the ether.
Yeah. And it seems very common in a lot of these Civil War letters in this database online, but we don’t hear it today.
The other thing about this collection of papers is that it kind of tells the lie on the belief that we have that everyone wrote incredibly formally back then.
Oh, absolutely. That somehow their English was perfect and that they all had the perfect school grammar and great vocabulary, but they didn’t.
Right, elegant, elegant. It’s not elegant at all. It’s very much like our social media posts today.
You know, that’s a great analogy. Absolutely.
Well, it’s just a delicious collection to dig into, and you can just Google Civil War Private Voices and find it, or you can go to our website. We’ll put up a link there.
We’d love to hear from you. If you’ve got questions or comments or stories about language having to do with slang and new words and old words or something you found in a letter from a relative from a long time ago, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.
