William Drayton Rutherford Papers, 1858-1862, 1864

"Oh how I wish your nullifiers and our abolitionists could be compelled to fight out the battle by themselves.”

- - 9 Jan. 1861, from J. Chapman (Hartford, Connecticut) to Mary Fair (Newberry, S.C.)

About the Collection
A native of Newberry District, S.C., William Drayton Rutherford (1837-1864), the son of Thomas Brooks Rutherford (1801-1865) and Laura Adams Rutherford (1808-1859). Educated at male academies in the Districts of Greenville and Newberry, S.C., Rutherford attended The Citadel and later entered the sophomore class at South Carolina College. Although, quickly promoted to the junior class, Rutherford's participation in a student uprising led to his expulsion from college. He studied law in Newberry and in 1860 received his commission as "Solicitor in Equity."

The William Drayton Rutherford papers, consisting of one hundred fifty-three manuscripts, date to 1858 when Rutherford began courting Sallie Henderson Fair (b.1842), the daughter of Simeon Fair (1801-1873) and Mary Butler Pearson Fair (1821-1867) of Newberry. The collection includes letters written to Sallie Fair during her enrollment, 1858-1859, at the South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute (Barhamville, S.C.), and from former classmates after her return to Newberry. The courtship of William ("Drate") Rutherford and Sallie Fair was interrupted in 1861 by secession and war.

For more information about W.D. Rutherford and this collection, please see descriptions published in 2000 and 2004 in the South Caroliniana Library's Annual Announcement of Gifts:

W. D. Rutherford Papers, 1858-1864 (published in 2000 USCS Annual Program):

http://www.sc.edu/library/socar/uscs/2000/rutherf.html

Additional papers, 1859-1897 (announced in 2004 Program):

http://www.sc.edu/library/socar/uscs/2004/ruthrfrd04.html

"… this thing of living after the war begins to occupy my thoughts! always looking ahead for trouble! What am I to do, how to make my bread....Tomorrow, I am twenty-seven years old, and have not begun life! The past seems a blank, the present only hurrying me on into an unknown future big with fate and uncertainty"

- - WDR to Sallie Fair Rutherford, 20 September 1864

• Civil War Soldiers and Sailors (National Park Service)
• History of Kershaw's Brigade (Project Gutenberg)
• Records of the War of the Rebellion (Cornell Libraries)
• Time Line of the Civil War (Library of Congress)

Acknowledgements
The William Drayton Rutherford Papers Digital Collection was completed with the help of Brian Cuthrell and Henry Fulmer of South Caroliniana Library and Lauren Glaettli (MLIS, 2005), Laura Masce (MLIS, 2006), and Kate Boyd of the Digital Activities Center. Lauren scanned the papers and created most of the metadata. Laura created the home page. Brian edited the metadata and Kate uploaded the records and worked with Henry in managing the project. The work could also not have been done without the help of Tony Branch, of the systems department, who is the systems administrator for the CONTENTdm database and helps to manage the computers and scanners in the Digital Activities Department.

At home, citizens in Newberry were upset with the "appearance of the impressment officer." His wife was harsh in her criticism of the "old women...[who] give up their horses more reluctantly than they do their friends to the war"

- - Sallie Fair Rutherford to WDR, 30 July 1864

Creating the Digital Collection
This was the second manuscript collection to be completed by the department and much larger than the first. As a result, the metadata is not as comprehensive, but should be sufficient for searching. The scanning began in the Summer of 2005 and was not finished until the late Fall.

Lauren scanned approximately 750 images on the UMAX PowerLook 2100XL scanner with Silverfast scanning software, creating 190 records. She scanned the images as color TIFFs at 24-bit and 300 ppi, although a few are at a higher resolution. From the TIFFs she created high quality JPEGs, which were then uploaded to CONTENTdm and compressed as JPEG2000s at that time. Laura created a home page for the collection, and Lauren created the metadata in an Excel spread sheet. Brian edited the metadata and wrote a brief introduction for the collection. The metadata records follow the Western States Best Practices Dublin Core format. Kate reviewed the collection records and images and uploaded the images to the CONTENTdm database. Once the images were loaded to the CONTENTdm database the TIFFs and JPEGs were burned to DVD and the TIFFs were moved to the SAN server for archival storage.