Omne Mali Avertam O Deus : The Civil War Diary of Theophilus A. Wylie, 1861–1862

Theophilus Adam Wylie (1810–1895) spent most of his adult life in Bloomington, Indiana, raising his family and working for Indiana University as a professor, librarian, and sometime interim president. Wylie was also a licensed Presbyterian minister who preached regularly at college chapel and served as pastor of Bloomington's Reformed Presbyterian congregation. For sixty years, beginning in 1832, Wylie kept a diary. Most of those volumes are held in the collections of the IU Archives. The excerpts that appear in this article come from the first two years of the Civil War. They tell one man's story of war and its effects in a small midwestern town; everyday life, often including the sickness and death that stalked the lives of young and old; and family life on the home front, as Theophilus and his wife Rebecca dealt with seeing their son go off to war and, within three months, return to Bloomington in a coffin.