But, I did promise.

Friday I neglected my usual yard chores to browse all day in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library Of Congress.

LC’s massive collection represents some of the finest Civil War photographs available and I was looking for prints to illustrate the Confederate soldier’s diary that I’m preparing for publication.

When I was young, I worked for about ten years at the library; at the time I knew my way around what was then the 14 million volume stacks. But now the library has expanded. Now I find the digital collection really difficult to navigate.

And, once you do find something, you’d better bookmark it well.

I’m continually saying, “Now, where did I see that? I know I saw it just a few minutes ago. What happened to it?”

Work on the diary nears completion. Good thing. I’m getting sick of it. Discrepancies in dates and place names drive me to verge madness.

It’s all the yankees’ fault!

Just look what they did:

The War has been over for years but still the invaders rape and plunder and burn and pillage. When that bastard Sherman passed through, he ordered his marauders to burn the crops, chop down the fruit trees, poison the wells.

Today, even occupied Iraq fairs better than the American South did.

Sherman even ordered his men to shoot all the cows shot so Southern babies would have no milk.

And I think his spirit hinders my work on this Confederate diary!

Yes, Sherman’s ghost muddles the diary of our guy, so that I’ve been having such a hard time preparing it for publication.

In fact, if I had not promised the old lady who owned the diary that I’d do what I could on this, her pet project, then I would have dropped the whole thing long ago.

This is not my baby so why should I raise it?

But I did promise.

And although the old lady is long dead, my promise is still alive so I’m doing what I can, even though I’d rather be working on something else.

As literature or history this soldier’s diary does not rank up there with the Rose Cottage Chronicles (see my February 8^th, 2005 posting in my blog archives) or Mary Boykin Chesnut’s Diary From Dixie. No, the diary I’m working on falls in the area of things “not good enough to keep but too good to throw away”. Essentially it’s Civil War ephemera and I hope to preserve it mostly in my self-appointed roll as an archivist.

But I did promise.

So I track down facts and reconcile discrepancies and I pray and curse and fuss and fume. I cut. I paste. I delete. I insert. I go nuts. So the work does progress -- in spite of the damnyankees.

Oh, here’s a tip, if you want to look at LC’s Civil War prints, go to the Library of Congrees website at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html .

They are all in there somewhere.

I suppose that the most positive thing about my experience in searching for Civil War photos at the Library of Congress is that while I’m browsing for those on my computer, I can’t be looking at pictures of naked ladies on line.

That’s something.