Augustus Caesar Buell Diary and Sketchbook
Processed by T. Lewis
Department of Special Collections
© 2003
Davidson Library
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Phone: (805) 893-3062
Fax: (805) 893-5749
Email: special@library.ucsb.edu
URL: http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/speccoll.html
Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Augustus Caesar Buell Diary and Sketchbook, ca. 1867-1868
Collection number: Wyles SC 40
Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara- Department of Special Collections
- Davidson Library
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- Santa Barbara, CA 93106
- Phone: (805) 893-3062
- Fax: (805) 893-5749
- Email: special@library.ucsb.edu
- URL: http://www.library.ucsb.edu/speccoll/speccoll.html
- Processed by:
- T. Lewis
- Date Completed:
- 13 May 2003
- Encoded by:
- David C. Gartrell
© 2003 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Title: Augustus Caesar Buell Diary and Sketchbook,
Date (inclusive): ca. 1867-1868
Collection Number: Wyles SC 40
Creator:
Buell, Augustus C., 1847-1904.
Extent:
.05 linear feet
(1 folder)
Repository:
University of California, Santa Barbara. Library. Department of Special Collections
Santa Barbara, California 93106-9010
Physical Location: Vault
Language:
English.
None.
Copyright has not been assigned to the Department of Special Collections, UCSB. All requests for permission to publish or
quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections. Permission for publication is given
on behalf of the Department of Special Collections as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply
permission of the copyright holder, which also must be obtained.
Augustus Caesar Buell Diary and Sketchbook. Wyles SC 40. Department of Special Collections, Davidson Library, University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Purchase, 1987.
Scope and Content of Collection
Augustus Caesar Buell was born in 1847, and fought in the Civil War as a member of Company L of the 20th New York Cavalry,
having enlisted on August 21, 1863. Although he was promoted to corporal the following November, by April 1864 he had been
demoted back to private. He was mustered out of service at the end of July 1865 and returned to New York. Buell was living
in the area of Chittenango and Utica in upstate New York, near Syracuse, when he kept his diary/sketchbook, which contains
entries dated 1867 and 1868.
In 1890, Augustus C. Buell published a fraudulent Civil War memoir,
"The Cannoneer," Story of a Private Soldier, in which he claimed to have fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in early July 1863. He would later find fame for his mostly
fabricated biographies of naval hero John Paul Jones (1900) and President Andrew Jackson (1904). A spurious account of the
life of William Penn was published shortly after Buell's death in 1904. His writings were debunked in "Augustus C. Buell,
Fraudulent Historian" by Milton W. Hamilton in the
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography v. LXXX (1956) and "Pursuing the Elusive 'Cannoneer'" by Silas Felton in
Gettysburg Magazine, July 1993.
The diary contains Buell's account of some misadventures he had during a spate of burglaries, notes on the Greek language
and his thoughts on the
Iliad, long ruminations on topics such as the characteristics of German immigrants and the nature of self-reflection, passages written
in German, Latin, and Greek, and several sketches of Civil War-era scenes. It concludes with a recipe for lemon cake filling.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.
Buell, Augustus C., 1847-1904.
Box
Diary/sketchbook, 1867 - 1868