The South Carolina State Library has begun working with the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room to assist in digitizing important documents to make them available to anyone via the internet. The first collection the State Library has digitized is the Colin J. McRae Papers, Huse Audit Series and is making them available through the SC Digital Library.
Colin J. McRae (1813- 1877) became the chief financial agent for the Confederate government in Europe from 1863 until the end of the war. An astute businessman prior to the war, he had served as an agent for the Confederate Ordnance Bureau from July 1862 until he went to Europe a year later. On his arrival McRae brought better order to Confederate government purchasing and built enough financial backing for European purchasing so the accounts were no longer overdrawn. The Huse series was an investigation of Caleb Huse, the Confederate purchasing agent for the Confederate Ordnance Department in Britain. Accused of defrauding the government in Richmond, Huse sought to clear his name by the audit which McRae oversaw starting in August 1863. The audit cleared Huse and showed that the principle British agent, S. Isaac Campbell & Company, had overcharged the Confederate government for which it agreed to settle. The Huse series is one of seven in the McRae Papers. Click here to view the collection.
The State Library will continue working with the Confederate Relic Room on more collections as part of an ongoing project to make historic South Carolina documents available through the SC Digital Library.
For more information, please contact Jessica Dame, Digital Curation and Preservation Librarian at jdame@statelibrary.sc.gov or 803-734-0583.
