A.C. Dicken Diary, 1862-1865
This diary is comprised of paper sheets with
cursive writing in ink and is bound with a
leather cover and fastened by a leather strap.
There is a drawing in the diary of a bearded
and mustached man holding a letter that reads,
“Dear Dick I love you.” The man is saying, “I
am in a deal of [trouble] my gal has written to
me.” Underneath the drawing is cursive text
that reads, “Dick wants a furlough for he thinks
that its time, that all men ought to be at home
attending to there own familie for other men are
doing to much.”
Background Information
Absalom Columbus Dicken, a native of Camp- From the collections of the Kentucky Historical Society • Accession Number 98SC287 • 5” x 6 1/8” x 1 3/4”
bell County, Kentucky, was the author of this diary. Dicken enlisted in the Confederate Army on September 15, 1862, and was mustered in on October 7, serving
as a soldier in Company D, Fourth Regiment Cavalry, Kentucky, Volunteers. Dicken wrote the majority of this
journal during his military service, from 1862 to 1865. The diary is a day-to-day account of life as a soldier and
touches upon camp life, battles, troop movements, and minutiae such as the weather.
The Fourth Kentucky Cavalry was organized near Owenton, Kentucky, on September 10, 1862. The first commander was Colonel Henry Giltner, and his field officers included Major Nathan Parker, Colonel Moses T. Pryor,
and Major William R. Ray. The Fourth Kentucky fought battles at Blue Springs, Rogersville, Laurel Gap, and
Saltville, before ultimately surrendering at Mount Sterling, Kentucky, on April 30, 1865.
Significance
Diaries are valuable resources for historians to research, because they are primary sources—a piece of information, usually written or recorded, that is a contemporary description of an event that its creator witnessed or
experienced first-hand. Primary sources include diaries, letters, speeches, interviews, photographs, or recordings.
They differ from secondary sources, which compile and interpret primary sources to convey a message, opinion,
or conclusion about an event that was not experienced first-hand. Secondary sources include published books,
documentaries, or scholarly journals.
Absalom Dicken wrote a first-hand account of his Civil War experience in his diary, including battles he participated in, weather that affected camp life, his company’s movement through the country, and other day-to-day
things that may have seemed mundane or boring to him, but are important to historians researching the Civil
War. Though it is not known for what purpose exactly Dicken wrote his diary, it is possible that he understood
the enormity of the war and wanted to document an event of its magnitude.
Some people used diaries to reflect on their lives and to express their feelings, while others, like Dicken, used it
to simply catalogue what they were doing. Diaries are different than most primary sources in that they were usually intended for the writer’s eyes only. A diarist might be more candid or open with his or her opinion than they
would be writing a letter to a family member or a friend. In using a primary source such as a diary, historians can
learn how an average soldier experienced the war in an open and unfiltered way. A soldier’s memory was also
likely to be more accurate when writing in a diary than recollections published in a memoir decades after the
war ended.
Related Resources
• Read another Civil War diary, written by a young girl in Atlanta, Georgia, on the American Civil War Web
site’s section on women. http://americancivilwar.com/women/carrie_berry.html
• Learn how to interpret diaries and other primary sources on George Mason University’s “History Matters”
website. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/index.html
• See how the University of Iowa is using “crowdsourcing” to quickly transcribe Civil War diaries and make
them available to researchers. http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cwd/transcripts.html