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A Widow and her Soldier: Stylometry and the American Civil War
1The College of New Jersey USA
2University of Akron USA
3The College of New Jersey USA
David I Holmes, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The College of New Jersey, PO Box 7718, Ewing, NJ 08628-0718, USA E-mail: dholmes{at}tcnj.edu
Fifty years after the Confederate assault on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg, the widow of the General after whom the assault is named, George Pickett, published letters purportedly written to her by her husband, many of them from the field of battle itself, during the four-year-long American Civil War. These letters fit into the ‘Lost Cause’ literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are, however, anachronisms and other factual problems in the published letters, and they have been questioned, at least in part, by writers and historians of the Civil War. Other historians believe them to be essentially genuine. This paper conducts a stylometric investigation of the Pickett Letters as a complement to traditional historical research. Our investigation strongly suggests that Pickett's widow, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, did compose the published letters. Eleven handwritten letters are, however, thought to be from George's hand.
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