Book Pilfered in Civil War Returns to Washington and Lee

Book Pilfered in Civil War Returns to Washington and Lee

Nearly 145 years after it was taken by a Union soldier during a raid on Lexington, Virginia, a book on the Napoleonic Wars has found its way back to the special collections department of Washington and Lee University. Charles S. Gates, of the 54th Pennsylvania Infantry, pilfered it from Washington College, as it was then called, on June 11, 1864, when Union Gen. David Hunter raided the town and burned the neighboring Virginia Military Institute.

Gates noted the theft in an inscription on a blank page, but mistook it as belonging to the VMI collection. “Although the soldier’s note refers to VMI,” W&L Technical Services Librarian Laura Turner said in an April 15 university release, “it’s clearly our book, since it has ‘Washington College’ handwritten on the title page that other volumes of that era have, and also matches perfectly volume two in that series, which is still in our possession.”

The book, volume one of William Francis Patrick Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814, published in Philadelphia in 1842, was returned to the Leyburn Library by Lake Forest (Ill.) College Handball Coach Mike Dau in February. Dau had inherited it in 1988 from a Lake Forest couple, Myron and Isabel Gates, who had kept it in their family for generations. The Gateses had befriended Dau when he was a college student and hired him to do odd jobs. Charles S. Gates was Myron’s grandfather.

W&L Special Collections Librarian Vaughan Stanley told American Libraries that this was not the first book returned in a similar way. “Several years ago, a university alumnus, John Lynch, returned a volume that we had lost during the war. He told a similar story: The book had passed down through members of his family and he had the good conscience to get the book back to us.”

Stanley said the Napier volume was in good shape except for a loose binding. “I will have it repaired by a conservator near Charlottesville,” he said. “The front board is detached, so we should be able to preserve the original binding.”

Much of the Washington and Lee library collection remained intact after Hunter’s 1864 raid, although some 1,000 books were returned after the war, according to the April 16 Washington Post. Dau was able to identify the correct owner of the book with the help of some bibliographic sleuthing by Harry G. Goodheart, a rare-book dealer in Tryon, North Carolina, who is a W&L alumnus.

Posted on April 17, 2009. Discuss.