Fuller, Corydon E., b. 1830

Journal, 1856 June 22-1859 June 9
2 vols., 416 pp. (total)

Background note:

Corydon Fuller was born on November 2, 1830, and spent his youth in several places in the midwest, including Chardon, Ohio. After graduating from college, Fuller seems to have settled, at least temporarily, in Mishawaka, Ind., where on New Year's day, 1855, he was married. It is unknown whether he and his wife, Mary, had any children, but they could count James and Lucretia Garfield among their friends.

For a time, Fuller was employed as an itinerant bookseller, peddling Colton atlases from door to door. He took this business southward in 1857, hoping to tap into a the expanding market in the states of the old southwest. For seventeen months, he criss-crossed Arkansas and bordering areas in Louisiana and Mississippi selling his wares, and recording his impressions of southern culture and law during the years in which the sectional crisis was approaching its apex.

Scope and Contents:

Corydon Fuller's intriguing journal follows the paths of the young itinerant bookseller in a fascinating series of situations and places. A college graduate, Fuller writes both well and copiously, recording the events and his impressions with impressive clarity and depth.

As a man prone to some reflection on the political and social issues of his day, Fuller's journal is a valuable resource for study of the hardening sectional lines in the Trans-Mississippi South. By 1857, Fuller believed that an impasse had been reached, reflected both in his reporting of adamant Southern views on slavery and states' rights, and in his own hot-tempered opinions on moral right versus wrong. Through Fuller's eyes, if only retrospectively, the fever pitch of Southern paranoia clashes with the moral revulsion of Northerners, with only one possible, inevitable outcome: war.

M-1697
Recat. 10/96 rsc

Link to subject index to the Corydon E. Fuller Journal

Contents listing for the Corydon E. Fuller Journal

Alphabetic index to the Schoff Civil War Collections

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