{"id":37839,"date":"2014-10-21T17:30:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T17:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37839"},"modified":"2014-10-21T17:30:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-21T17:30:57","slug":"confederate-officers-wartime-diary-decoded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37839","title":{"rendered":"Confederate officer’s wartime diary decoded"},"content":{"rendered":"

Confederate officer’s wartime diary decoded<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Associated Press<\/a>
\n2014-10-13<\/p>\n

Chris Carola<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.<\/a> (AP) \u2014 A century and a half after Confederate<\/a> officer James Malbone wrote his Civil War<\/a> diary partly in code<\/a>, a couple of Yankees<\/a> have figured out why he took the precaution: He liked to gossip.<\/p>\n

Sprinkled amid entries on camp recipes and casualties are encrypted passages in which Malbone dishes on such juicy topics as a fellow soldier who got caught in bed with another man’s wife.<\/p>\n

Malbone also writes about meeting the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis<\/a> and describes her looks in an apparent echo of rumors at the time that she may have been of mixed race.<\/p>\n

“That’s pretty shocking,” said Kent D. Boklan<\/a>, the Queens College computer science professor and former National Security Agency cryptographer<\/a> who deciphered Malbone’s code with little difficulty. “It’s a military diary and you expect military information, but you don’t expect the first lady of the Confederacy to make an appearance in this diary.”<\/p>\n

According to Boklan, Malbone’s encrypted entry about Varina Howell Davis<\/a> describes her as “dark complected” with “very very brown skin dark eyes” and “high cheek bones wide mouth.”.<\/p>\n

Davis’ wife was a well-educated woman for her time, and as a result, was the target of “all kind of gossipy innuendos from the ladies” in Richmond, Virginia<\/a>, the Confederate<\/a> capital, according to Sam Craghead<\/a> of the Museum of the Confederacy <\/a>in Richmond<\/a>…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Confederate officer’s wartime diary decoded The Associated Press 2014-10-13 Chris Carola SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. (AP) \u2014 A century and a half after Confederate officer James Malbone wrote his Civil War diary partly in code, a couple of Yankees have figured out why he took the precaution: He liked to gossip. Sprinkled amid entries on camp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,20],"tags":[2822,18213,18212,18215,18214,8569,18211,18210],"class_list":["post-37839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-associated-press","tag-chris-carola","tag-james-malbone","tag-kent-boklan","tag-kent-d-boklan","tag-the-associated-press","tag-varina-davis","tag-varina-howell-davis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}