FRANK LESLIE’S

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER IN THE CIVIL WAR

NOTE:
This is one of three very similar Civil War Books published by Frank Leslie. The other two are:
The Illustrated History in the Civil War (1885), and
The Soldier in Our Civil War (1893)
It should come as no surprise that at least some of the engravings are duplicated in all three.

The main reason this version was created was to be sure a digital record exists for the amazing engravings, freely available to all. And while they can be a bit gruesome, they do serve to remind us that wars are terrible and are not something that should be started unless there is no other option. A minor reason is that most of the illustrations in the book are in portrait mode, and the book must be rotated 90 degrees to view them. They are in landscape mode in this edition.


HOW THIS VERSION WAS CREATED


This document originated from scans by the editor of  each of the 500+ pages from a personal copy of the book, performed on an Epson Expression 1640XL scanner. Each image was edited in Adobe Photoshop CC to enhance the readability of text and the appearance of the engravings and saved as full size Photoshop and Photoshop PDF files. Adobe Acrobat Pro DC was used to reduce the file size of the PDFs.

In order to create versions easier to read than the original, The Index of Illustrations and the long History Index were run through ABBY FineReader PDF, an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program, and converted to editable text files. These were then edited in LibreOffice to correct the few OCR reading errors and to convert the text to table format. These pages were exported from LibreOffice either has HTML (Web) pages or PDF files. The HTML files were finalized in SeaMonkey Composer. This included adding links to the pages so that the reader is taken directly to the page searched for.

All work was done on an Apple 27" iMac.


A FEW COMMENTS FROM THE EDITOR OF THIS VERSION


  • I am not a Civil War expert, and thus cannot attest to the accuracy of any of Leslie's text, particularly in the History.

  • The History section also includes engravings throughout. These engravings are included in the Illustrations Index. However, most of these images are smaller than those in the rest of the book, so may not appear as sharp as the other images when viewed in many browsers.

  • Some of the engravings in the book cover two facing pages. Since all the pages were completely separated from the binding in the copy scanned, the two images could be easily completely scanned all the way to the binding edge, joined in Photoshop and minor defects cleaned up.

  • Readers will note that the book includes the use of the terms “colored” and “negro” to refer to African-Americans, which is highly objectionable, and rightly so, as are some of their depictions in the illustrations. Consideration was given to omitting those in this version, but since this was the historical usage at the time, and this is a reproduction of a historical document, they have been left in. No disrespect is intended.

Charles A. Reeves, Jr., Summer 2022

Click Here to Continue