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Transcript of CIVILIAN SOLDIERS : LETTERS HOME IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
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CIVILIAN SOLDIERS : LETTERS HOME IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
by
MARY TIBBETTS FREEMAN
Professor Charles Dew, Advisor
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History
WILLIAMS COLLEGE
Williamstown, Massachusetts
April 1 8, 20 1 1
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One A Difficult Adjustment: Antebellum Culture and Letters Home in 1 86 1
Chapter Two
Rediscovering Individual Voices: Letters Home in 1 862
Chapter Three A Changing Cause: Letters Home in 1 863
Chapter Four Resisting Disillusionment: Letters Home in 1 864
Chapter Five
Still Civilian Soldiers: Letters Home in 1 865
Conclusion
Bibliography
1
1 5
39
6 1
8 1
1 0 1
1 1 9
1 23
Abbreviations
CLRB
ESBL
LVA
SSCL
SSCRC
VHS
Chapin Library of Rare Books, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass.
Eleanor S . Brockenbrough Library at the Museum of the Confederacy, Riclm10nd, Va.
Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va.
Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.
Swem Special Collections Resource Center, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Va.
Virginia Historical Society Richmond, Va.
Acknowledgements
I have found the process of writing this thesis rewarding in large part due to the help and advice I have received along the way. First, I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor, Professor Charles Dew, for agreeing to work with me and for guiding me throughout the research and writing process. I would also like to thank Bob Volz, Wayne Hammond, and Elaine Yanow at the Chapin Library of Rare Books for employing me and feeding my interest in rare books and manuscripts. I am especially grateful to Bob for assigning me the cataloguing project that triggered my interest in soldiers' letters, and for encouraging me to pursue it to this end.
I would also like to express my indebtedness to the Williams College Fellowships Office, and to the donors of the Bostert Travel Fellowship. This fellowship enabled me to expand my research to archives in Virginia and to visit the battlefields I had read about in soldiers' letters. I am grateful to the staff at the Library of Virginia, the Virginia Historical Society, the Swem Special Collections Resource Center at the College of William and Mary, and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. I particularly appreciate the help of John Coski and Theresa Roane at the Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library at the Museum of the Confederacy.
I would like to acknowledge Professor Chris Waters and the members of the honors history thesis seminar for providing me with indispensable feedback on my ideas and writing over the course of this year. I am also grateful for the help of Jason Rapaport and Robby Finley in editing my final draft. And, of course, I could not have made it through this process without the suppOli and company of my friends.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents for encouraging me to be curious about old things. Growing up in the antiques and rare books business has predisposed me to have a passion for knowledge of the past, and I never would have achieved this level of obsession without their encouragement.
Introduction
On September 1 6, 1 864 Homer A1urid Plimpton of the 3 9th Illinois Volunteers wrote
from the trenches of Petersburg to his aunt and uncle in Ohio,
We are not altogether a set of "ruffians" fit only for works of blood, but men like unto those at home, not unmindful of the blessings which you, far removed from scenes like these, are enjoying. Hence it is that letters from "home friends" are always hailed with delight by the soldier.
They remind us that we are not mere machines, made to do the bidding of this one or that one; nor targets to be set up and shot at; but that we have an individuality of our own, that we are centers about whom the thoughts and affections of others cluster; and it is this thought which gIVes us courage & strength under the most trying difficulties.
It is by this mystic union established through the instrumentality of the pen that we receive our regular supplies of "home cheer" & encouragement, and as an army suffers by having its "communications" cut, so do we if the above supplies fail to reach us. 1
Plimpton's words in this remarkable letter serve as an apt illustration of how Civil War
soldiers turned to letters not only as a practical means of communication, but also as a
source of emotional support under the grueling conditions of war. Letters were the sole
means of direct contact between the home front and the battlefield during the Civil War,
and, taken as a whole, soldiers wrote and received letters in massive quantities.2 Both
Union and Confederate commanders recognized letters as essential to army morale, and
they implemented military postal systems for the primary purpose of keeping open lines
of communication between men and their families.3 These systems did not always run
smoothly, however, and soldiers and civilians alike were sometimes left waiting
I Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 1 6 September 1 864, Plimpton Letters, Chapin Library of Rare Books, Wil l iamstown, Mass. (Hereafter noted as CLRB.) 2 Gerald Linderman gives the figure of 45,000 letters per day written by Union soldiers in the East passing through Washington, D.C. , each day, as well as 45,000 more passing through Louisville from the West and Deep South. Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 94. 3 James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 997), 132 .
anxiously for weeks or months with no word from the loved ones they so ardently
missed. Still, despite such difficulties, letter writing during the Civil War allowed for an
unprecedented level of contact between combatants at the front and civilians at home.
Plimpton' s letter exemplifies how soldiers perceived communication through letters as a
manifestation of home and as a means of verification of their individual identities as
civilians.
Soldiers on both sides wrote home for a variety of reasons, and in a time before
official censorship, they freely expressed just about anything that was on their minds.
Some letters carried news-of the war, of politics, of business, or of family, while others
provided troops with a way to pass the long, tedious hours in camp with descriptions of
camp life, poetry, and reminiscences of home. Sometimes soldiers made basic requests
for money or supplies. Other times they wrote for emotional support, seeking or
providing reassurance of their safety and of the merit of the causes for which they fought.
Often, men wrote their most emotional letters in times of crisis or celebration, using pen
and paper as a means of catharsis . Through their letters, soldiers expressed themselves
intimately to those whom they held dearest, but from whom they were separated by vast
expanses of land and experience.
Historians turn to Civil War soldiers' letters as crucial first-hand accounts that
encompass the diverse strata of society that were represented within the Union and
Confederate armies.4 Konstantin Dierks, a scholar of eighteenth century American
epistolary habits, comments on the appeal of letters, "We can instead witness history
from the ' inside, ' full of the kinds of uncertainties and fallibilities we find in our own
4 Letters principally represent the literate population of soldiers, although there were instances of i l l iterate men dictating letters to l iterate comrades.
2
lives in the present."s Civil War soldiers' letters combine the broader history of the war
that can be gleaned from newspapers, marching orders, and official records with
individual experiences and perspectives that illustrate how the war unfolded in the minds
of the men in the ranks. The medium of the personal letter allows correspondents to
assume a certain intimacy and confidentiality that can be even more powerful than a face-
to-face conversation.6 Lacking the ability to express emotion through facial or vocal cues,
letter writers tend to rely upon strong language to convey emotion to their audiences. It is
this sense of urgency, which gave Civil War soldiers' letters unique emotional
immediacy and poignancy. Although writers remained separated from their intended
recipients, letters "straddle [ d] the gulf between presence and absence . . . between the
possibility of total communication and the risk of no communication at all ." 7
In this study, I search for the moment when a Civil War soldier' s letter transformed
from a documentation of daily events into a means of mediating the gap between civilian
values and military realities. My aim is to illuminate how letters provided a sphere for
soldiers to ponder, test, and forge ideologies. In a certain sense, I am attempting to
answer the much-discussed questions of why Civil War soldiers fought and what kept
them fighting. I am approaching these questions from a unique angle by focusing on the
act of letter writing as a reflective activity that contributed to the cultivation of
nationalistic values and reinforced the Civil War soldier's sense of duty to his country
and to his family. Historians generally accept the notion that the letters soldiers received
5 Konstantin D ierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), x i . 6 William Merril l Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (Chapel Hi l l : University of North Carolina Press, 1 998), 5 . 7 Theresa Strouth Gaul & Sharon M. Harris, eds. , Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760-1860 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 3.
3
or failed to receive from home dramatically affected army morale for both the Union and
Confederacy.8 In this study I hope to prove that the letters the soldiers wrote themselves
had an equivalent value to those they received in terms of providing a field for dealing
with their experiences in the army, for reconciling these experiences with their civilian
identities, and for establishing a value system that spanned the battlefield and the home
front.
The mind of the "common" Civil War soldier has long been a topic of fascination for
historians and casual students of the war alike, perhaps because these men were the first
American civilian soldiers-laymen who took up arms in defense of certain patriotic
values. The romanticized legacy of the civilian soldier characterized the study of both
Union and Confederate combatants for many years after the close of the war. In the
aftermath of the war, veterans and historians recognized the importance of soldiers'
letters as historical documents that would be of interest to present and future students of
the conflict. Certain letters and diaries were edited and published for mass consumption,
but these publications tended to favor the officer classes and often underwent substantial
revision from their origins as candid letters or diary entries. Such collections also failed
to encompass the diversity of soldiers' backgrounds and experiences and sanitized the
raw emotionality of such personal accounts .
Bell I. Wiley pioneered the intensive study of the common soldier in the Civil War
with The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy and The Life of
8 Two examples of this may be found in: McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 132-133; and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel H il l : University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 115-118.
4
Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union published in 1 943 and 1 952 respectively.9
These two works are still highly regarded as comprehensive surveys of almost every
aspect of a Civil War soldier 's life. The subjects of individual chapters range from
everyday concerns like food and personal health to more complex issues of morale and
perception of the enemy. The studies are primarily catalogues of excerpts from soldiers'
letters and diaries synthesized to form a well-rounded image of average men in the Union
and Confederate armies . Wiley rarely probes his sources beyond their function of
documenting the writers' lives-he does not question why soldiers expressed particular
opinions, nor does he consider how writing letters contributed to soldiers' experiences of
war.
There is no doubt as to the merit of Wiley ' s groundbreaking texts, and Civil War
historians who have succeeded him continue to find themselves indebted to his research.
Nonetheless, historians since Wiley have taken scholarship of the common soldier
beyond the catalogue to draw conclusions about the psychological, ideological, and social
motivations that drove men-at-arms. In Civil War Soldiers, Reid Mitchell insists "an
understanding of why men, North and South, went to war, how they fought and killed and
died, and what happened to them is crucial to understanding the war' s meaning for
America." lO Mitchell constructs his study around the question of how soldiers
continuously dealt with the violence and destruction of the war and the constant prospect
of death. He argues that as the war progressed, soldiers increasingly assumed new
identities that reflected their military experiences and separated them psychologically
9 Bell I . Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1943); Bel l I . Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1 952). 10 Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1 988), 3 .
5
from the civilian population. I I In this claim, Mitchell does not consider the impact of the
constant contact men had with friends and family through letters. In a similar vein, in
Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War, Gerald
Linderman emphasizes the process of disillusionment soldiers underwent by the end of
the war that divorced them emotionally from the civilian populations who still felt
connected to patriotic ideologies. According to Linderman, by the end of the war soldiers
identified more closely with the troops they fought against than with the home front, and
they continued to fight for no greater cause than self-preservation. 1 2 For both Mitchell
and Linderman, the answer to the question "Why did they fight?" was tied to certain
cultural values and ideologies, but the answer to the question "Why did they keep
fighting?" entailed a shift away from identification with these civilian ideologies and
towards a new, disillusioned military identity. Neither author takes into account the
connective power of the thousands of letters exchanged between soldiers and civilians on
a daily basis.
James McPherson challenges Linderman's argument in his book For Cause and
Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. He argues that ideological convictions
were the most important motivating factors for soldiers throughout the war. While
McPherson feels that military discipline and bonds formed between army comrades had a
place in motivating troops to press on in the midst of combat, he draws upon a wealth of
soldiers' letters and diaries that clearly state ideological motives as a driving force up
until the end of the war. 1 3 McPherson also critiques Mitchell and Linderman's
suggestions that servicemen experienced an estrangement from civilian populations. He
[[ Ibid., 56. [2 Linderman, Embattled Courage, 3. [3 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 13.
6
maintains that any separation was caused by the resentment soldiers directed towards
those whom they felt shirked their duty to their country-it was not directed at the loyal
civilians who continued to endorse the patriotic principles for which they fought. 1 4
Chandra Manning supports McPherson' s argument for soldiers' motivations driven
by ideology in her book entitled What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and
the Civil War.15 Manning draws upon letters, diaries, and regimental newspapers to
develop the theme that McPherson touches upon that values concerning slavery were
central to soldiers' motivations. 1 6 Manning contends that a study of soldiers' views on
slavery is essential to an understanding of the war because the "two arenas" of battlefield
and home front so often "melted into one.,,17 Northern and Southern men entered the war
with views on slavery shaped by their respective social and geographical contexts, and
over the course of the war their relationship with slavery continued to interact with that of
their respective civilian populations. 18
Both McPherson and Manning emphasize that war-weanness failed to outweigh
soldiers' dedication to ideological values through the end of the war and that this
phenomenon reflected a continued bond, not a rift, with civilian values, but neither
historian addresses how this bond was cultivated during an extended period of physical
and experiential separation. Gary Gallagher' s The Confederate War and Drew Gilpin
1 4 Ibid., 141-142. 15 Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 6, 11. 16 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 117-130. 17 Manning, What this Cruel War Was Over, 5. 1 8 Manning argues that in the N orth, Union soldiers' intensifying commitment to the abolition of slavery paved the way for public acceptance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. I n the Confederacy, the central role of slavery in Southern society made i t essential to the cause of the Confederate army until the very end of the war, when the threat of black enlistment shattered soldiers' confidence in their abi l ity to uphold the institution. See Manning, What this Cruel War Was Over, 193, 218.
7
Faust 's Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil
War each investigate aspects of patriotic ideals and how they manifested themselves or
failed to do so in the Confederate army and civilian population. 1 9 Other historians,
including Earl 1. Hess in The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat
and Reid Mitchell in The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home, have
addressed similar issues with respect to the motivations of Union soldiers.2o These
studies, however, do not take the dual identity of the civilian soldier driven by continuous
contact with the home front as their primary subject.
In the body of letters I have consulted, I have found it impossible to ignore the
ideological values expressed by both Union and Confederate combatants as motivating
factors, from the first days of the war to the last. My study differs from the works I have
discussed in its focus on the medium of letters and the act of letter writing as reflections
of and outlets for soldiers' emotions and experiences that significantly contributed to
reinforcing the unity of values between the battlefield and the home front. Although the
men who fought in this war became hardened by the trials and deprivations they faced,
they clung mightily to their civilian identities that were defined by values including duty,
honor, courage, and individualism. Writing letters to loved ones at home sustained these
identities and values. Drew Gilpin Faust touches upon this function of letters in her
1 9 In Mothers of invention, Faust points to Confederate civilian women' s lack of nationalistic fervor as a major factor in discouraging morale in the Confederate army and causing a gradual disintegration of motivation within the ranks. According to Faust, negative letters written by civilian women to their soldier husbands was a contributing factor in the downfall of the Confederate army See Faust, Mothers of invention, 244-246, 1 1 6 . In The Confederate War, Gallagher interrogates this idea of internal weakness of morale in the Confederate civil ian population that spread to the ranks and argues instead for the existence of strong Confederate national ideology that held on throughout the war. See Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997). 20 Hess primarily explores how the N orthern soldier dealt with the experience of combat. See Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1 997). Mitchell examines the Union soldier and his domestic context. See Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 993).
8
discussion of condolence letters in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American
Civil War:
The letters may have served in part as a way of reaching across the chasm of experience and horror that separated battle and home front, as an almost ritualized affirmation of those very domestic understandings of death that had been so profoundly challenged by circumstances of war, as a way of moving symbolically out of the meaningless slaughter back into the reassuring mid-nineteenth-century assumptions about life' s meaning and purpose?'
I am in complete agreement with Faust that soldiers' letters had the capacity to close the
gap between the battlefield and the home front. They allowed the soldier to engage in
conversations with his civilian correspondents in which he recast his experiences of war
in familiar cultural terms.
The study of soldiers' motivations through evidence found in letters and the study of
letter writing in nineteenth-century America have remained in separate spheres that
occasionally brush up against each other. I hope to unite the two. To begin, I will provide
a brief summary of some of the themes cultural historians have identified in letter writing
in America during the Civil War era. In Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America
Before Telecommunications, William Merrill Decker presents the compelling argument
that letter writing in America was unique from the very beginnings of exploration and
settlement because physical separation from family and friends over great distances had
always been common to the mobile population?2 Letter writing was the only means of
keeping in touch in spite of this separation, and over time it became an increasingly
common practice as more and more Americans became literate and as the postal system
21 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic a/Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 31. 22 Decker, Epistolary Practices, 10.
9
grew less expenSIve and more efficient. The fragility of the letter served as a bitter
reminder of the distance between the correspondents, and the harrowing journey an
epistle took to find itself safely in the recipient 's hands reflected the mortality of the
author.23 In the time that passed between the act of writing a letter and the date that it was
received, unforeseen events could render the author and addressee permanently separated.
For Civil War soldiers and their correspondents, this threat loomed with every day that
passed without receiving a letter. The cliched phrase with which so many soldiers opened
their letters-"I take my pen in hand to let you know that I am still in the land of the
living"-was hardly a cliche at all to the men who witnessed death on a daily basis and to
those at home who braced themselves for the worst.
As much as letters served as reminders of absence, their primary purpose was to
emulate presence, to "strive to collapse the time and distance that separate [ d]"
correspondents, and to create the impression of a face-to-face encounter, "the ideal
paradigm of the meeting of minds.,,24 In his discussion of the letters British immigrants to
the United States wrote to family members who remained abroad, David Gerber
comments on the role of the letter,
Its existence marks an absence, but it assists the correspondents in bonding relationships rendered vulnerable by separation. It is the closest approximation that both parties involved in a correspondence may come to that which they most desire, but cannot obtain-an intimate conversation.25
Gerber argues that in the case of these British immigrants, letter writing facilitated the
preservation of a common cultural identity between immigrants and the family and
23 Ibid., 38, 42. 24 Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (New York: Routledge, 20 1 0), 1 5 , 1 6. 25 David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2 .
1 0
friends they had left behind. He maintains that letter writing encouraged self-reflection
and self-awareness-they were "devices for sustaining relationships and in doing so,
confirming identities.,,26 Along similar lines, Konstantin Dierks suggests that letters in
the eighteenth-century United States acted as a medium through which middle class
writers "defined the meanings of communication and expression, of personal identity and
agency, and of social order and change.,,27 Therefore, although letter writing necessarily
drew attention to the separation of author and recipient, its two-fold connective power
overwhelmed this sense of absence. First, correspondents were able to imagine
themselves in conversation with one another, and second, the act of letter writing
compelled them to reflect upon their own thoughts and identities. These connective and
self-reflective aspects characterize the letters of Civil War soldiers and reveal how they
were able to reconcile their experiences of the war to their civilian identities and values.
This study maps out the chronological unfolding of the war through the medium of
soldiers' letters. I have chosen to follow a chronological trajectory in order to trace the
role of letters as a field for developing civilian soldiers' identities and values over the
course of the war. The epistles I have selected reflect the general course of the events of
the war, but they focus on internal developments rather than external events. Instead of
the traditional story of the Civil War told in victories and losses on the battlefield, I hope
to tell the story of the war from the pen of the civilian soldier as it reflected his coming to
terms with his role in the great conflict.
26 Ibid., 9l. 27 Dierks, In My Power,S.
1 1
In order to tell this story, I have drawn the bulk of my Union sources from the
collection of Civil War soldiers' letters held by the Chapin Library of Rare Books at
Williams College. This collection includes approximately one thousand letters, the vast
majority of which were written by Nothern soldiers.28 When I came to them, these letters
were entirely unpublished and uncatalogued and were for the most part unread. This
project began with my reading and cataloguing the letters as a research assistant for the
library. Upon my discovery of the wealth of the resource, it expanded into this study. To
supplement the letters in the Chapin collection, I have gathered information from
approximately five hundred Confederate soldiers' letters from archives in Virginia.29
Within the Chapin collection and within the letters I consulted elsewhere, the authors are
geographically and socioeconomically diverse. Due to the composition of the archival
collections I visited in Virginia, this study will focus on letters written by soldiers serving
in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the Union armies concentrated in Virginia,
particularly the Army of the Potomac and the Army of the James, although there are
exceptions to this rule.
As a final point, it is important to note that no study of the common soldier of the
Civil War can encompass every individual's experience. Historian Gary Gallagher warns
that the natural abundance of firsthand sources traceable to Civil War soldiers makes it
possible to cherry-pick quotations to support almost any possible interpretation.3o The
28 According to my estimations, based on the catalogue I created for the Chapin Library of Rare Books, there are approximately 900 Union soldiers' letters and 50- 1 00 Confederate soldiers' letters in their collection of Civil War soldiers' letters. 29 Confederate archival sources are drawn from the Library of V irginia, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library at the Museum of the Confederacy, all in Richmond; the Swem Special Collections Resource Center at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg; and the Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of V irginia in Charlottesvil le . 3 0 Gary Gallagher, "Disaffection, Persistence, and Nation: Some Directions in Recent Scholarship on the Confederacy," Civil War History 55, no. 3 (2009): 3 5 1 .
1 2
key, in Gallagher' s words, "lies in playing it straight" with the plentiful material, reading
between the lines only to the extent that the majority of a large sample of sources
allows.3 1 Due to the nature of the collections I have consulted and the nature of letters
themselves-that letter writing is limited to literate people-the letters in this collection
do not represent every Civil War soldier.32 Nevertheless, the beauty of such a diverse
medium as the soldier' s letter is that there are always new discoveries and arguments to
be made. Letters will always be worth probing in order to glimpse, if only through brief
sentences and paragraphs, what sustained these divided countrymen as they marched into
combat against one another for four long, difficult years.
3 1 Ibid. 32 My definition of the "common soldier" rests upon the conventions that historians before me have set in their own studies. Traditionally, the common soldier is white, middle to upper middle class, and has enough education to be at least moderately literate. (See Linderman, Embattled Courage, 2 .) In this study, the common soldiers I have studied very rarely held a rank higher than company captain. A weakness of this study, and of most studies of the common soldier, is that it excludes the significant group of black troops who fought for the Union after 1 863. Unfortunately, the fact that fewer black troops were literate meant that they wrote fewer letters, making their experiences more difficult for historians to access through traditional means. Chandra Manning provides a more comprehensive treatment of the common soldier by including in her source material regimental newspapers, including camp papers from black regiments, and letters in African American newspapers. (See Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 1 0). Konstantin Dierks offers a compelling discussion of the construction of the racial epistolary divide in the United States. He argues that the restriction of letter writing (and l iteracy) to whites facil itated the development of middle-class values that refused to acknowledge race, inequality, conflict, or social ethics. (See Dierks, In My Power, 8.)
1 3
1 4
Chapter One A Difficult Adjustment: Antebellum Culture and Letters Home in 1861
During the first months of 1 86 1 a feeling of suspense united Americans in the North
and South as their country perched on the brink of armed conflict. By the time Abraham
Lincoln assumed the presidential office on March 4, seven southern states had already
withdrawn from the Union. On April 1 2, the first shots of the Civil War rang out over
Fort Sumter, prompting the Union and the newly formed Confederate States of America
to mobilize volunteer armies . On both sides, the call to arms hardly fell upon deaf ears.
The men of 1 86 1 felt compelled to enter the fray, driven by the influence of a
contemporary culture that emphasized patriotic duty and rewarded individual sacrifice.
These men had been living in the shadow of their Revolutionary forefathers and eagerly
seized the opportunity to prove themselves in battle.
The men who filled the ranks of the Union and Confederate armies threw down the
tools of their civilian trades and took up military arms. But they did not shed their civilian
identities when they enlisted-they became soldiers as a temporary measure to defend
their peacetime livelihoods, their families, and the national values they supported as
citizens. It was important to these civilian soldiers to maintain consistent contact with the
homes they left behind, and by the mid-nineteenth century such a capability was not only
possible but also expected. In the antebellum United States, families increasingly found
themselves separated by great geographical distances, but with the development of an
affordable national postal network this division could be mitigated by letter writing. The
onset of the Civil War, which swept hundreds of thousands of men away from their
homes, tested postal systems in the North and South as unprecedented volumes of letters
passed to and from army camps on a weekly basis.
1 5
As this study argues, one way in which the common soldier reinforced his civilian
identity and values throughout the war was through the act of letter writing. In 1 86 1
volunteers wrote home, often for the first times in their lives, both to give news of their
experiences and as a means of processing them for themselves. Before we can consider
these recruits' experiences and how they portrayed them in letters in 1 86 1 , it is essential
to consider first the broader cultural baggage they carried with them as they enlisted.
In spite of the perceived and real cultural differences between the antebellum North
and South that triggered the onset of the Civil War, volunteer soldiers on both sides held
many values, beliefs, and experiences in common. They shared a cultural heritage with its
roots in Christianity and in the legacy of the American Revolution that spanned regional
and socioeconomic boundaries. In his study of Civil War soldiers, historian Reid Mitchell
calls the Civil War a "conflict over the meaning of a shared past" in which "the
generation of 1 86 1 regarded liberty as their heritage." I Furthermore, as inhabitants of
nineteenth-century Victorian-American society, volunteers carried with them a code of
moral conditions and expectations. Although over the course of the war these
preconceptions were challenged and often permanently altered, in 1 86 1 men enlisted with
their civilian values intact. They held expectations of themselves shaped by societal
definitions of manhood, and they enlisted to fulfill their masculine duty to themselves,
their families, their communities, and their countries. They also had expectations of what
war would offer them. Men sought adventure as a respite from the dullness of daily life,
and they regarded the war as a referendum on the religious and political dilemmas they
I Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), 2.
1 6
struggled internally to resolve. The experience of war would challenge these expectations
in ways the enlistees of 1 86 1 could never imagine.
The nineteenth-century American sense of self was grounded in the idea that, as
Gerald Linderman writes, "one' s actions were . . . the direct extension of one's values.,,2
Men were "painfully sensitive" to the values they were meant to cultivate in
themselves-the success of which would be outwardly measured in their behavior. 3
James McPherson suggests that the fundamental motives that prompted men to enlist
were "country, duty, honor, and the right.,,4 Such concepts were shaped by their inherited
American identity born out of the Revolution fought and won by their forefathers. Union
men fought to uphold this American identity while Confederates saw themselves as
purifying an identity that had become corrupted by North. Soldiers on both sides
"regarded liberty as their heritage," a liberty that in 1 86 1 was "most threatened not by the
despots of Europe or the Indians on the frontier but by one another."s The North and the
South differed in their definitions of liberty. In 1 86 1 most Union men did not advocate
for the abolition of slavery, but the recently formed Republican Party ardently opposed
the expansion of slavery into new territories and expressed their aversion directed at the
Southern "slavocracy" of wealthy and powerful slave-owning planters. One Union
soldier blamed "the codfish olligarky of the cotton states" for "all our troubles. ,,6
Southern volunteers, on the other hand, fought for the liberty of white men to own
slaves-they viewed slavery as an extension of white men' s property rights. Soldiers on
2 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 2. 3 Ibid., 35 . 4 James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6. 5 Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 2. 6 Unsigned - Union Soldier, Letter to Friend, 28 September 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
1 7
both sides recalled the sacrifices of the Founding Fathers for the cause of liberty in letters
that explained their decisions to enlist. In a letter written on December 29, 1 86 1 , James
Hale invoked the familiar motto of the Revolution, "give us liberty or give us death" to
justify the Union cause.7
In the broader scope of Victorian-American culture, the men who became Civil War
soldiers ascribed to themselves values of duty and honor. They felt they had a duty of
conscience to uphold the principles of their country, to protect their families, and to prove
their masculinity. Honor was a more abstract concept that was particularly prevalent
amongst Southern soldiers who felt compelled to memorialize their family names, but it
motivated Union soldiers as well. 8 Confederate soldier William Anderson wrote to his
wife and assured her that duty "calls upon me not to retract until our liberty is
accomplished and the honour of our family also demands it.,,9 A soldier was a
representative of his family, embodying the commitment to the cause of his country that
he shared with his parents, wife, and siblings. In addition, both duty and honor were tied
to masculine responsibilities in Victorian-American culture. To prove oneself in combat
"quite literally separated men from boys," and many men enlisted with this duty to
themselves in mind.lO Fighting was, simply put, a man's job, and any man who shirked
his duty faced the threat of being judged inadequate by his peers and failed to associate
himself with the morality and patriotism valued by his society. William H. Phillips
chastised one of his female cousins for allowing her brother to stay home in a letter
7 James W. Hale, Letter to Henry Hale, 29 December 1 86 1, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 8 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 23-24. 9 William Anderson, Letter to Creek, 23 October 1 86 1 , Papers of Will iam Anderson, Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. (Hereafter noted as SSCL.) 10 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 25 .
1 8
dating to June of 1 86 1 , writing that his failure to enlist "shows too much like a coward." II
Such sentiments would only intensify as the war progressed.
Masculine duty and honor can be categorized together with courage as self- and peer-
imposed pressure to demonstrate one's inner values through one's actions. Gerald
Linderman argues that while Civil War armies lacked military discipline, particularly at
the beginning of the war, "by far the most important function of courage was to sustain
the minimal discipline required to organize armies, to bring them together on the
battlefield, and to motivate soldiers to fight one another.,, 1 2 Courage, duty, and honor,
were central tenets to the Civil War soldier' s value structure, and they acted, at least at
the start of the war, "as the assurance of success; as a substitute for victory; as an
insulation against battlefield trauma; and as a tie between enemies ... the brave would live
and the cowardly would die.,, 1 3 This was the culturally understood view that volunteers
carried with them as they enlisted, settled into army life, and awaited battle in 1 86 1 . Their
viewpoints changed as the reality of battle defied their expectations, but, in many ways,
the idea that a man' s "fate would continue to rest on his inner qualities" when faced with
danger shaped soldiers' motivations throughout the war. 1 4
A final component of the Victorian-American value system that influenced the Civi
War soldier' s sense of self was the significance of individualism. In some ways, the
cultural emphasis on individualism and freedom from authority worked against Civil War
armies, preventing them from attaining the high levels of discipline and obedience that
might have made them more efficient fighting forces. But, as James McPherson points
II William H. Phil l ips, Letter to Marie F. Crowder, 1 5 June 1 86 1 , Swem Special Collections Resource Center at the College of Will iam & Mary, Will iamsburg, Va. (Hereafter noted as SSCRC.) 12 Linderman, Embattled Courage, 3 5 . 1 3 Ibid., 6l. 14 Ibid.
1 9
out, "The volunteers considered themselves civilians temporarily in uniform," not
"automatons.,, 1 5 Companies insisted on electing their own officers, and resented it when
the men they elected attempted to exert what they deemed to be petty authority over
them. Confederate soldier William Harris Clayton reported on June 1 3, 1 86 1 , "This war
business isent what the boys thought it would be. Laws are very tight." 1 6 Volunteers
expected to continue to exert their civilian liberties, and they found military order
oppressive. Unlike the regular armies of the past, the armies of the Civil War struggled to
strike a balance between military discipline and democracy in the ranks. This pattern
reflects the same cultural trends described above in which society "held each individual
. . . mainly responsible for that individual' s achievements or failures.,, 1 7 In other words,
soldiers believed that their individual character and actions would determine their fate,
not the choices made for them by a superior officer.
Antebellum culture not only influenced the way volunteers perceived themselves and
their role as soldiers, but it also influenced their expectations of what the war would offer
them. Prior to the Civil War, Americans sought to answer moral and ethical questions
using their experiences in their careers, leisure activities, travel, and politics. According
to cultural historian Anne C. Rose, the war promised them a means of definitively
"recasting ideals.,, 1 8 Volunteer soldiers sought validation of their values of liberty, duty,
honor, and individualism. In 1 86 1 , many recruits were lured by this promise, as well as
by the prospect of personal glory and adventure.
1 5 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 46, 6 1 . 1 6 William Harris Clayton, Letter to Mother, 1 3 June 1 86 1 , William Harris Clayton Letters, V irginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va. ( Hereafter noted as VHS.) 1 7 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 6 1 . 18 Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 992), 3 .
20
Letter writing situated common soldiers within a dialogue of exchange between their
antebellum cultural values and their wartime experiences. David Gerber argues that
letters "were less objective, factual reports ... than devices for sustaining relationships and
in doing so, confirming identities. 1 9 During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans were
comfortably situated within a network of affordable postal exchange. Westward
migration, punctuated by the Gold Rush of 1 849, spread families far and wide and
necessitated an accessible means of keeping in touch. Literacy rose to unprecedented
levels throughout the country, and correspondence became "both the reward and the
litmus test for learning how to write. , ,20 By 1 86 1 Americans had attached certain cultural
significance to mail. The nineteenth-century transition of the postal system from acting as
a vehicle for the exchange of printed newspapers and business correspondence to
distributing personal mail created a "metonymic string" that linked handwritten letters to
the bodily presence of the sender.2 1 Letters increasingly became a legitimate form of
intimate communication with the capacity to maintain and develop relationships over
long distances. At the same time, letter writing, as "the narrative construction of the self,"
facilitated "intense self-awareness and inwardness" in addition to these external
I · h· 22 re atlOns IpS.
Cultural codes informed the act of writing a letter and the content of the message
itself. First, there was the notion of the confidential nature of a personal letter-as postal
historian David Henkin puts it, "mail bags were public repositories of private
19 David A. Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 9 1 . 20 David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 24. 2 1 I bid. , 55 . 22 Gerber, Authors of Their Lives, 75, 57.
2 1
expressions.,,23 There was tension within this notion of privacy. Letters were meant to act
as a means of conducting a personal conversation, but the need to send a note rather than
speaking face-to-face created the possibility that an intimate message could be revealed
to a wider audience without the sender's consent. Nineteenth-century letter writers,
including Civil War soldiers, sometimes closed their epistles by requesting that the
recipient burn them. The survival of such messages demonstrates that such instructions
were not always carried out.
There was also an expectation of reciprocity inherent in personal correspondence.
Nineteenth-century letter writers negotiated the terms of the frequency and content of
their correspondence both implicitly and explicitly-letters "not only sustained a
dialogue between individuals, but were themselves also a mutual creation conceived in
dialogue. ,,24 A prevalent complaint among soldiers writing letters home was that their
addressees were neglectful in their writing habits. A Union soldier by the name of Wilson
wrote to his father in October of 1 86 1 , "I do not know what is the reason but 1 do not get
hardly any letters . . . I want you to write me a great big letter as soon as you get this as 1
do like letters better than my dinner. ,,25 If a soldier wrote home once a week, he expected
a response at least as often, and he became disheartened when his epistolary efforts
seemed to exceed those of his correspondents. He might level his disappointment at the
family members whom he perceived to be shirking their duty to communicate, or he
might instead direct his ire at the post itself. Overall, the wartime postal networks for
both the Union and the Confederacy were remarkably efficient, but the mobile nature of
23 Henkin, The Postal Age, 99. 24 Gerber, Authors a/Their Lives, 94-95. 25 W. Wilson, Letter to Father, 27 October 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
22
army life could result in letters reaching their destination only after the addressee had
moved on.
Letter writers followed certain linguistic conventions in composing their letters. To
the modern reader, these conventions appear stilted, formulaic, and cliched, but to the
nineteenth-century correspondent, they were a means of adhering to cultural norms, and
they indicated a writer's awareness of the standards of propriety associated with the
particular method of communication. Many soldiers opened their letters using a variation
of this phrase, penned by a Union soldier: "1 now think it my duty to inform you and your
family that I am in the land of life still and enjoying perfect good health at present and I
trust you and your folks are enjoying the same.,,26 With this opening, the writer made
clear that the gesture of composing a letter was not casual. It was a task that was required
as part of his familial obligation, and it followed its own formal social patterns.
Furthermore, in an observation that is also applicable to nineteenth-century letter writing,
historian Michael Roper notes that in soldiers' letters of World War I, "Families resorted
to stereotypes as a means of conveying deep and authentic feelings.,,27 Similarly, David
Henkin writes, "formulas and cliches . . . could be useful in enabling, excusing, or even
disclaiming whatever intimacy might follow" in the body of the letter.28 When a Civil
War soldier sat down to write a letter home, he did so with the intention of intimate
conversation, and the medium of the page enforced certain conventions for him to follow
in order to achieve his objective.
26 William McDonell, Letter to Brother, 9 December 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 27 Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 23 . 28 Henkin, The Postal Age, Ill.
23
The men who enlisted in Civil War armies in 1 86 1 had grown up during the rise of
the new postal era. Although many of them had never been separated from their families
before and had rarely written letters, they expected to use the post while they were away
to keep in touch with family members and friends. The letters soldiers wrote during the
war made it clear how much they valued this form of communication. One man wrote to
his wife, "you dont know how eagerly I read your letters, over and over and when they
are several days old I will read them again, and when we are ordered to march, in hope of
meeting the enemy it always makes me cry to have to tear them all Up.,,29 On a
particularly lonely night another man wrote, "I would give a dollar for a letter from Home
tonight, one from wife first, then from the rest afierwards. ,,3o In spite of the challenges
presented by communicating through letters, soldiers embraced the medium in order to
maintain their relationships with loved ones at home. Through the sustainment of these
relationships, soldiers remained in touch with their civilian values and identities
throughout the war.
As we turn to 1 86 1 and the outbreak of armed conflict, we can begin to see how such
a connection to the home front and its established cultural values supported and
influenced the motivations of common Civil War combatants. As I have previously
discussed, when Americans went to war, they carried cultural baggage with them, and as
civilian soldiers, they refused to shed it when they donned uniforms and shouldered arms.
Although their perspectives changed over the course of the war as they experienced
bloodshed and destruction on an unfathomable scale, they clung to their cultural values as
29 William Anderson, Letter to Wife, 1 September 1 86 1 , Papers of William Anderson, SSCL. 30 Martin V.B. Richardson, Letter to F .T. Richardson, 7 October 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
24
tightly as they could. The tenuous strands that kept them engaged with such motivations
were the letters they sent to and received from friends and family members at home.
This study focuses on soldiers' letters at three temporal points in 1 86 1 . First, in the
spring, fresh volunteers flooded the ranks eager to "see the elephant." Next, in late
summer, immediately following the first battle of Bull Run, the Union suffered an initial
embarrassing defeat and the Confederacy swaggered with confidence. Finally, in the
closing months of 1 86 1 , soldiers hunkered down in winter quarters after an inconclusive
summer campaign. The realization began to dawn upon them that there was no end to the
war in sight, and their hopes of a divinely ordained settlement to the division of the states
were foiled.
The election of Abraham Lincoln and the secession of states propelled Americans
towards war during the early months of 1 86 1 . By the time shots were fired over Fort
Sumter on April 1 2, many citizens felt relieved that, in the words of University of
Virginia student Randolph Fairfax, "something has happened to break the suspense,
which every body felt so painful.,,3 1 In both the North and the South, men poured into the
ranks, eager to enlist in the name of a cause they perceived as fundamentally sound. The
first letters these volunteers sent home to the loved ones with whom they had recently
parted reflect their eagerness and intense patriotism, as well as a thirst for adventure and a
desire to prove themselves in battle . These first intimate epistles also illustrate, however,
the anxiety men already experienced as they faced an uncertain future and were separated
from their families, not knowing whether they would survive to meet them again.
3 1 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 1 5 April 1 86 1 , Fairfax Family Papers, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Va. (Hereafter noted as LVA.)
25
One of the first to enlist in the Union army, a soldier named Henry from the 1 0th
Massachusetts Infantry, wrote to his father on April 26, "There is hardly anything
mentioned here but war. The excitement occasioned by the passage of troops through
here has been intense.,,32 As one of the first volunteers, Henry probably shared this
feeling of excitement, but he took the opportunity in his letter to express anxiety as well,
"I hardly know how I have written this with a steady hand for when I think of parting
from you all, probably for the last time, my heart almost foils me. I do not expect
anything pleasant or agreeable.,,3 3
In spite of their doubts and anxieties, Union soldiers enlisted in vast numbers,
exceeding President Lincoln' s initial call for 75,000 volunteers. Although apprehensive
about leaving home, they also felt excited by the prospect of adventure and were
motivated by duty to themselves and to their country. One soldier, writing home in May
of 1 86 1 , joked, "Can't expect to live like a prince in the army. ,,34 Rhode Islander George
Place wrote, "We are obliged to go wherever Old Abe is a mind to send US.,,35 Many
Union soldiers expressed their patriotic sentiments not only in the personal content of
their letters, but also through choices of illustrated stationery and envelopes. These
epistolary materials, which bore mottos and images and were usually printed in red and
blue ink on white paper, "amounted to a mass patriotic expression" by soldiers and
civilians alike in their daily correspondence.36 Captain 1 .S . McNeil of the 2nd New York
Volunteers chose to describe his journey south to Virginia on paper with the motto, "If
32 Henry, Letter to father, 26 April 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 33 Ibid. 34 Unsigned- Union Soldier, Letter to Mother, May 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 35 George A. Place, Letter to James Farbrother, 4 May 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB. 36 Henkin, The Postal Age, 1 39 .
26
anyone attempts to haul down the American Flag shoot him on the SpOt.,,37 McNeil 's
choice of such stationery injected patriotic fire into an otherwise ordinary letter.
Confederate soldiers less often had access to embellished stationery, but that did not
prevent them from expressing their own patriotic sentiments in letters home. From the
beginning, they perceived the war as a Northern invasion. Their excitement for battle was
expressed as anticipation of adventure as well as eagerness for exacting revenge for
incursions on their lands. On April 20, Virginian F.T. Kue wrote, "The war news grows
thick & fast upon us, it seems that the whole North are up in arms against us, ready to
furnish men & arms & money to Lincoln to whip the South.,,38 Kue remarked on the
recent secession of Virginia and urged the other border states to follow-"there is, there
cannot be, any middle ground for the border States they must either go with the South or
expect to see Civil War sprung up in their midst with all its attendant ruin.,,39 A few days
earlier, the secession of Virginia was far from certain. On April 1 5 , Randolph Fairfax
wrote, "I think it is such a disgrace that Virginia is not out of the Union now. Those dolts
or traitors, I don't know what to call them, in the convention have dishonored the name of
the Old State, and if they don't go out now, they deserve to be hanged.,,40 Southerners
experienced uncertainty as they waited to find out which side the slaveholding Border
States would take in the conflict. Letters could serve as propaganda to stir up broader
support for the Confederate States, but more frequently writers like Kue and Fairfax used
the medium as a means of venting personal political anxiety or discontent.
37 The motto refers to the famous telegram sent by U.S . Treasury Secretary John A. Dix to treasury agents in New Orleans in January of 1 86 1 . J .S . McNeil, Letter to brother James, 26 May 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 38 F.T. Kue, Letter to Will, 20 April 1 86 1 , Civil War: Confederate Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 39 I bid. 4 0 Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 15 April 1 86 1 .
27
In spite of any uncertainty they felt concerning their new country' s stability, Southern
volunteers were confident in their desire to go to war and in the moral strength of their
cause. Fairfax struggled against his mother' s orders for him to abstain from enlisting. He
thought it would be "a fine thing . . . to go to war in a company of collegemates. ,,4 1
Writing to his mother about his decision to obey her wishes, he revealed to her the
internal conflict he faced in determining whether obedience to her outweighed his duty to
his country:
I [t] cost me a hard struggle; for it was hard to see so many of my friends getting ready to go off while I was staying behind-an when the time for going came I really felt miserable that I could not go & share with such noble fellows whatever might happen to them . . . . I could hardly restrain myself from joining. I feel as much affection for the company as any old veteran could possibly have for his . . . . My only consolation is that I have acted from a sense of duty.42
While Fairfax agonized over his decision, letters from new enlistees overflowed with
patriotic sentiments. Volunteer James Calfee was proud of the "beatiful confederate Flag"
that waved over his village, and William Francis Brand recounted the story of a brave
secessionist who defended Alexandria from Federal troops until he was shot down
because "his love to the New Confederacy was sweeter than death.,,43 In writing to their
friends and family about their devotion to the blossoming Confederate cause, these fresh
soldiers bolstered their own and their correspondents' patriotic spirits.
By June of 1 86 1 many of the early Union enlistees had made their way south but had
yet to encounter the battlefield. They experienced true separation from their homes and
families in a strange land and wrote home to describe what they saw and felt. One such
41 Ibid. 42 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 17 Apri l 1 86 1 , Fairfax Family Papers, LV A. 4 3 James Calfee, Letter to brother L.S. Calfee, 19 May 1 8 6 1 , Calfee Papers, SSCRC; Wil liam Francis Brand, Letter to Kate, 25 May 1 86 1 , Wil l iam Francis Brand Letters, VHS.
28
instance of this was a letter Iowan David Cleveland pem1ed from Missouri on June 24. He
appreciated the country except for "that awful curse of slavery" and claimed that his
"object is to support the union & her Glorious Flag & to allow free speech & evry man to
vote for his own man.,,44 It is not clear whether Cleveland supported the abolition of
slavery, but his letter follows a pattern identified by historians James McPherson and
Chandra Manning in which Northern soldiers, after encountering slavery first hand,
increasingly saw its eradication linked to the preservation of the Union and its democratic
ideals.45 Soldiers used letters to share the picture of slavery they encountered with the
Northern home front.
As they moved from home to army camps in the summer of 1 86 1 , Confederate troops
tempered passion for their cause with reluctance to leave family members behind. They
devoted equal space to both sentiments in their letters. Virginia cavalry Lieutenant John
F. Murray beseeched his wife on June 20 to "try to bear my absence with Christian
fortitude" and in a later letter proclaimed that he and his men were "ready to meet the
Northern rabble and fight for our rights at the point of Bayonet.,,46 Georgian William
Harris Clayton recounted a story told by a man from a Baltimore, Maryland, regiment
"that he had a brother in the Nothern Army & that he would kill him as much as any one
if he should happen to meet him.,,47 South Carolinian William Anderson perhaps put it
most simply when he wrote to his wife, "all are anxious to meet the enemy as soon as
possible and have it all over with and get back home to you all again. ,,48 In these early
44 David Cleveland, Letter to Lambert A. Martin, 24 June 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 45 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 1 1 7- 1 1 8; Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over (New York: Vintage, 2007), 49-5 \ . 46 John F . Murray, Letter to Mary Murray, 20 June 1 86 1 , Murray Family Papers, LVA. 47 William Harris Clayton, Letter to Father, 1 8 June 1 86 1 , Will iam Harris Clayton Letters, VHS. 4 8 William Anderson, letter to Creek, 19 June 1 86 1 , Papers of Will iam Anderson, SSCL.
29
weeks of the war this was a sentiment that men on both sides identified with and used to
reassure themselves and their families in their letters home. As much as they sought the
thrill of fighting for a noble cause, soldiers struggled with the separation from their
families and their civilian lives that the war forced upon them.
On July 2 1 , 1 86 1 , came the battle of Bull Run-the first major armed confrontation
of the war. Men on both sides who had been anxious to prove themselves in battle finally
had an opportunity to do so. The battle ended with a disorganized Union retreat,
devastating Northern expectations of an easy victory and encouraging Southern
confidence in the Confederate war effort. Given this outcome, Union and Confederate
soldiers had different responses to the battle . Yet at the same time, men on both sides
reacted similarly to their vicious first taste of real combat. They were left straining to
process their experiences far away from home, and they were forced to use letters to
communicate their confusion. William Anderson's letter of July 24 illustrates how deeply
soldiers longed for home at this point in the war:
I recieved your long letter and Maggie and your likenesses with it just as I came of[fJ the Battle field Oh Creek you dont know the consolation it gave me to hear from you just at that time and to look at you both made me the happiest man on the field. I read your letter over and over sitting under a tree in the middle of afield by fire light (where I slept for the night) and could not help crying for happiness, and my prayer to heaven was that he might continue to shield me with his protecting hand and return me to you both again safely.49
While not all soldiers were able to write as expressively as Anderson, many of them had
also seen their own mortalities reflected in the fracas and sought reassurance from home
by conversing through letters.
49 William Anderson, Letter to Creek, 24 July 1 8 6 1 , Papers of Will iam Anderson, SSCL.
30
On July 27, Union soldier H.P. Carse gave a stark summary of Bull Run to his sister,
I have seen some hard fighting since I wrote to you and we got whiped bad it was a sorriful day to us all . . . we had to retreat and leave our ded and wonded behin and all of our bagage I have nothing left but what I have on my back. 50
The initial shock of defeat left Federal soldiers disheartened and disillusioned, but their
disappointment quickly turned to outrage and renewed commitment to the cause of the
Union. This was particularly true for those soldiers who were not present for the battle.
Samuel Saskill wrote, "I have seen lots of wounded soldiers since that batle at Bulls run I
tell you that it looks hard but for all that I had rather be wounded fighting for my cuntry
than to go home.,,5 1 While his letter betrays his ignorance of combat, Saskill also defends
the nobility of a man' s sacrifice for his country. This was a position taken up by the flood
of new Federal volunteers in the wake of defeat at Bull Run. These fresh troops gave the
Union army a shot of optimism that encouraged them to recommit themselves to their
cause. One such volunteer was Amos Kibbee, who sent a letter to his Cousin Hattie on
August 26 informing her of his decision to enlist. He wrote,
I am in the army striving to maintain the nationality of our common country and her prestage among the nations of the earth . . . Yes Hattie this is a "horrid war" and the number of its victims is already very great and the struggle is but just begun but I am consoled by the though[t] that when the storm has passed a brighter day will succeed and we will corne out of the fire the purer for refining.52
Kibbee's letter also shows how soldiers began to deal with the bloodshed of war. As their
value structure demanded, they justified war and its victims as part of a purification
process in which they would be tested and the nation redeemed. Soldiers used their
50 H.P . Carse, letter to sister, 27 July 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 51 Samuel Saskil l , Letter to Wallace Saskil l , July/August 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 52 Amos Kibbee, Letter to Cousin Hattie, 26 August 1 86 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
3 1
individual experiences of war to fuel their own dedication to the cause and to encourage
that of their correspondents at home.
In their letters, Confederate soldiers depicted Bull Run as a glorious victory against
great odds. On July 23 , John F . Murray called it "the greatest Battle ever fought in
America" with their army facing a Federal force three to five times larger.53 Some
Confederates hoped for a speedy conclusion to the war based on their triumph. Henry 1.
Dobbs wrote on August 7,
there has been enough Blood shed in this Conflict and may the Northern Congress take time by the forelock and acnoledge our Independence which she can do now without Disounor to her self Would to god that Lincoln had of been here to see the feilds of carnage it would make the blood boil in his veins to see the unnessery Blood spilt for his unholy Cause.54
In spite of the hope invested in their victory, however, Confederate soldiers were not
insensitive to the horrors of the battle. Murray saw "more suffering than I can describe
and never want to see the like again" at a Union field hospita1 . 55 John H. Barker
proclaimed, "a battle field is the most offulist place that ever I beheld in my life," and
William Anderson told his wife on July 24, "for me to attempt to give you an acount . . . is
impossible as it almost beggered dicription.,,56 Anderson wrote a more detailed letter a
week later, seemingly having had time to compose himself,
I did not at the time realize it, until it was all over and had time for reflection, but I never was any more excited during the fight than if I had been mending the old mill, not even so much for you know I always got mad when I had that to do, I stood it far beyond my own expectations.57
53 John F . Murray, Letter to Mary Murray, 23 July 1 86 1 , Murray Family Papers, LVA. 54 Henry 1. Dobbs, Letter to Mil l ie & Patty, 7 August 1 86 1 , Barker-Cooke Papers, SSCRC. 55 Ibid. 56 William Anderson, Letter to Creek, 24 July 1 86 1 ; John H. Barker, Letter to sister, 28 July 1 86 1 , BarkerCooke Papers, SSCRC. 57 William Anderson, Letter to Creek, 30 July 1 86 1 , Papers of Will iam Anderson, SSCL.
32
Victory at Bull Run inspired intensified commitment to the Confederate cause. As
Anderson asserted, "when the bullets were falling around me like hail . . . 1 knew that it
was for our homes and sacred rights we were fighting and heaven would smile upon our
efforts, and if 1 did fall the sacrafice was made in a just and noble cause."S8 Processing
the events they witnessed in letters home allowed soldiers to step away from the horrors
of the battlefield to reaffirm their bonds with their families, which reminded them of their
obligation to defend their country and their homes.
Renewed dedication to the Confederate cause came with the understanding that war
meant extended separation from home and further bloody battles. On July 3 1 , John
Murray confessed to his wife, "I have so much time to think of you, Lillie, and home that
I get low spirited 1 strive against it as I feel that I am here defending my rights and the
honor of the South."s9 Randolph Fairfax wrote to his mother shortly after disobeying her
wishes and joining a regiment, "You don't know what a change a few months
campaigning makes in a man's appearance. 1 could hardly recognise some of my oId
acquaintances.,,60 Though Fairfax may have been simply remarking on his comrades'
appearances, the first experiences of battle permanently changed men in both the Union
and Confederate armies . Increasingly, soldiers on both sides turned to letters as a means
of compacting the physical and mental distance from loved ones and enabled them to
process their experiences and ameliorate homesickness.
As 1 86 1 dragged on towards its conclusion, both armies came to realize that the war
would cost more than they had initially anticipated. There would be no quick and easy
58 Ibid. 59 John F . Murray, Letter to Mary Murray, 3 1 July 1 86 1 , Murray Family Papers, LV A. 60 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 12 August 1 86 1 , Fairfax Family Papers, LV A.
33
victory, and the volunteer soldiers now had to reconcile this with their desire to return to
their homes and to resume their civilian lives. At the close of the year, Virginian soldier
Joseph Rawlings summed up the atmosphere in his regiment, "The war feaver seemes to
be wareing off these rampant yankee killers . . . there wire edge have wore off and are now
quit content at home.,,6 1 Rawlings' s observation was equally salient in the Union army.
But in spite of this malaise, men on both sides held onto the values that had motivated
them to enlist. In their letters, they labored in an effort to come to terms with the toll
fighting for those causes would take on their lives and on their countries.
In the Union ranks, the sting of defeat at Bull Run faded as men imagined the Army
of the Potomac stronger than ever under the leadership of General George McClellan,
whose disciplinary techniques transformed untrained men into a formidable fighting
force. Although his reluctance to engage his army became apparent as the war
progressed, McClellan remained intensely popular with his troops through 1 86 1 . Inspired
by McClellan, many men felt more willing to make great sacrifices to restore the Union.
One Federal soldier wrote on September 28,
Yes sir war to the bitter end win if it takes the last dollar and the last drop of blood this rebellien must be crushed out at all hazzards win if it should result in the utter overthrow of slavery and the extermination of every man white or black in arms against the government. 62
The Union army was also reassured by the unity of purpose that resounded throughout
the North. As one soldier from Maine put it,
there is a chord of sympathy connecting those who are so bravely de finding our government and giving protection to the Loyal citizens of our country with those who are away from the scenes of contention and of Battle which chord when touched creates a shock which vibrates form
6 1 Joseph W. Rawlings, Letter to Will iam M. Rawlings, 30 December 1 86 1 , Rawlings Papers, SCCRC. 62 Unsigned - Union Soldier, Letter to Friend, 28 September 1 8 6 1 .
34
Maine to Washington and all along at the intermediate connections equal to the shock which pases along the electric wires.63
This national agreement made the troops feel that they were supported at home, and
much of this backing manifested itself physically in the masses of letters full of
encouraging words they received.
Although soldiers felt renewed fervor for the Union cause, they also faced the
realities of a long-lasting war. They were homesick and feared dying before they could
reunite with the loved ones they left behind. William McDonell sought to reconnect with
relatives during the war. On December 9, he wrote to his brother, "Dan I have not heard
from you or your family now over four years and I trust you will not be bacward in
writeing to me this time for I am sure it would give me great pleaure to hear from yoU.,,64
While he may not have felt separated from his family before the conflict, the looming
prospect of death in battle compelled him to reach out.
Many other Union men contemplated also contemplated their mortality in writing.
When they enlisted, they foresaw a short-lived conflict with an easy resolution, but they
quickly realized that they might not be lucky enough to survive the war. This concern
became even more pressing as the troops settled into winter quarters. On December 29
James Hale wrote to his brother,
Henry I think sometimes I wish that I was at home and then I think that I am in a good cause I think Henry that perhaps I may never return to my home again . . . perhaps I may get shot perhaps I maybe taken sick . . . . I hope you will not forget me perhaps it is the last time I shall seat myself to communicate with you again if I never see you again on earth I hope to .
h 65 meet you m eaven.
63 A.J. Cole, Letter to G.H. Nye, 24 October 1 8 6 1 , Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 64 William McDonell, Letter to Brother, 9 December 1 86 1 . 65 James W . Hale, Letter to Henry Hale, 29 December 1 86 1 , Civi l War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
35
Soldiers like Hale clung to the tenuous connection to home offered by letters as they
contemplated the magnitude of the sacrifices they might be compelled to make in the
name of their country.
In late 1 86 1 , men in the Confederate ranks dealt with similar concerns in their letters.
Like the Union soldiers, they remained dedicated to their cause, but they began to chafe
under the hardships of army life . Their new understanding of the commitment it would
take for them to win the war made them feel homesick and weighed down morale,
especially as winter approached and active campaigning ended for the year. Some men
remained optimistic for a swift end to the war. On November 1 2, George Bouton wrote to
his daughter, "I think the war will soon be over as it is costing both countries so much.,,66
Many Confederates, like Bouton, hoped that the Union would prefer that the Confederacy
claim its independence to expending enough money and troops to put up a extended fight.
Other Confederate men foresaw a long and difficult conflict and committed themselves to
life as a soldier until it was resolved. William Anderson told his wife in October,
I think that our being sent home before our time is out highly improbabl[ e], no one would be more happy to have it so than myself, but I know the safety of our cause will not admit of it at present, and I am willing to suffer any disapointment or Privation for the good of our contry. As to my revolunteering when our time is out circumstances must alone decide, should our contry still require my services, I feel assured you would be the last one to throw any obstacle in the way of my serving her.67
To men like Anderson, it was becoming apparent that the conflict between the North and
South would not be settled without substantial sacrifice. Anderson's letter to his wife
reads like a contract for his military services and his honor. He may have hoped that
committing himself to his cause in writing would make it more difficult to lose faith.
66 George Bouton, Letter to Moll ie F. Bouton, 12 November 1 86 1 , Civil War: Confederate Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 67 William Anderson. Letter to Creek, 23 October 1 86 1 .
3 6
Other Confederate men did not deal with hardships so gracefully. After entering the
ranks eager for adventure in battle, they were gravely disappointed by the reality of army
life. They missed their families, and even though they believed in their causes, they also
wondered whether they had made the right decisions in leaving home. Southern
servicemen used their letters as outlets for these concerns, which would be met with
distain or punishment if voiced in camp. Charles Thurston wrote to his mother on his
twenty-first birthday,
My birthday. 2 1 years old, and I feel twice as old some times . . . You[r] son Charles is now able to vote & I tell you I would never vote for Lincoln do you think I would. What suffering he has brought upon this once peaceful land of ours, it may be for the best but not for me at the present time.68
A soldier' s life was admirable, but it did not meet the expectations of the volunteers who
filled the ranks in 1 86 1 . The letters they wrote home traced their progression from eager
enlistees to early veterans who valued the civilian lives they gave up in pursuit of a
greater cause. Men reflected on these changes in their letters, which acted as substitutes
for face-to-face conversations with trusted family members and friends.
The first year of the war began and ended in suspense. In its opening months, the
fresh secession of seven Southern states made the threat of war loom until tensions
exploded in gunfire over Fort Sumter. By the closing months, the divided states were
engaged in a full-fledged war, but there was no indication of when and how the conflict
would resolve itself. The volunteers who filled the ranks of the two armies struggled to
adjust to military life with the understanding that their stint as soldiers would not be a
fleeting j aunt. In this first year, the lives of tens of thousands of men had changed
68 Charles H. Thurston, Letter to Mother, 20 October 1 86 1 , Charles H. Thurston Papers, SSCL.
37
dramatically, and they no longer had ready access to their familial support systems.
Already the postal system played a major role in offering soldiers mental reinforcement
and had become a means of participating in domestic life. This role would only become
more pronounced as combatants continued to use letter writing to reconcile their
experiences in the army to the civilian values they had carried with them into the war.
Soldiers' antebellum values of liberty, duty, honor, courage, and individualism had
already been tested and would face much greater challenges in the coming years, but
through practicing letter writing in the first year of the war, men on both sides were able
to contemplate and reframe their experiences in ways that strengthened their
commitments to the war effort.
3 8
Chapter Two
Rediscovering Individual Voices: Letters Home in 1862
With no sign of abated hostilities after the sporadic clashes of 1 86 1 , men in the Union
and Confederate ranks realized that there would be no peace without further bloodshed.
Questions of how protracted the war would become, when and if they would see their
families again, and how long they could bear the life of a soldier darkened their
optimistic outlooks. The clear values that had shaped their civilian identities before the
war-liberty, masculine duty and honor, courage, and individualism-no longer seemed
so easy to attain. Whereas the war had at first seemed full of promise as an arena for
validating and enriching these values, the gap between the volunteers' expectations of
war and its realities began to take a severe toll on morale. The tension between soldiers'
civilian and military identities grew, and they expressed this inner conflict in their letters
home.
While in the first months of the war many enlistees had written home with fresh-faced
fervor for battle, with the dawning of a new year came a turn towards introspection in
their letters-"a veteran's solemnity replaced the recruit' s eagerness." 1 In 1 86 1 , letters
had been sounding boards for soldiers' enthusiasm for their new career, but now they
became fields for reconsidering their motivations. There was a sense of increasing
desperation to feel cOlmected to the home front and the values it represented. Men often
seemed to be writing to convince themselves as much as their correspondents of their
dedication to their causes and to the values that had driven the North and South to war.
They felt the pain of separation from their loved ones ever more keenly as the gap of time
and experience stretched wider between them. Union soldier Lemuel F. Mathews wrote
I James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 997), 33-34.
39
on October 1 4 to his wife, "Oh how I would like to have just one kiss I believe i [t] would
do me real good but I am afraid that I would not be satesfied with one. ,,2 Men like
Mathews came to rely on letters not simply as a means of communication, but as a
repository of home front sentiments that mediated the tension they felt in assuming the
identity of a soldier.
In the openmg months of 1 862, many troops on both sides of the war found
themselves confined to winter quarters. With few obligations beyond preparing meals and
daily drilling, soldiers had ample free time to ponder the course of the war and their own
roles in the great conflict. Already in 1 86 1 , pen and paper had begun to assume the role
of private confessional and therapist-a substitute for home front companionship when
men shouldered physical and emotional burdens unlike anything they had known in their
civilian lives. In early 1 862, this role of letter writing expanded as soldiers increasingly
expressed feelings, hopes, and doubts in their letters that they feared to speak aloud. In
their letters, combatants tested their commitments to their respective causes and began to
forge new values that modified or replaced those they had carried with them when they
volunteered. Letters provided a field in which men pondered their transformations from
civilians to soldiers.
After the discouraging campaign of 1 86 1 , Union men turned to letters to relieve
frustration during long periods of inactivity . On January 6 Noah Richardson wrote,
I am in hops that I shall have something to Writ about soon . . . . the Men tell about riting long Yarns about what hapens Hear but I cant Make up lies to writ it is bad enuf To tell storys hear with Out riting them hom.3
2 Lemuel F. Mathews, Letter to Yishie S. Mathews, 14 October 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 3 Noah Richardson, Letter to Walter Fesenton, 6 January 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
40
Richardson alluded to the common practice of exaggerating daily exploits to
correspondents. Not only would this make the author' s life seem more exciting to his
addressee, but such tall tales also made soldiering more interesting to the writer himself.
In such times of idleness in camp, men both wrote and read letters as a source of
entertainment. Writers who cast themselves as the heroes in exciting tales of brushes with
the enemy simultaneously achieved the purposes of personal amusement and impressing
friends left behind. The practice also reflected the doubts men felt about their usefulness
when they sat idle in camp rather than actively pursuing the enemy.
In their letters, Union soldiers contemplated their changing values and the directions
in which the war was pulling them and the country as a whole. These ponderings could
be as simple as deciding who was worthy of their correspondence and friendship. Many
struggled with the new divisions between former countrymen imposed upon them by the
war. On January 22, Pennsylvanian Gilbert H. Mitchell told his sister, "I wrote to Joseph
last week I was a good notion not to for I dont like secessionists no how but he and I had
always been good Friends so I thought I would write him a little.,,4 In spite of his qualms
about his friend's political or regional affiliations, Mitchell chose to continue cultivating
their relationship, maintaining their connection through letter writing. Another Union
soldier, Illinois cavalryman Amos Kibbee, considered a similar question in a letter he
wrote to his cousin on January 23 ,
I know there are many noble true hearted men in the south and some who are my friends are in the southern army. You may ask how I can reconcile the two antagonistic principles of friends and foes I answer that were I to
4 Gilbeli H. Mitchell, Letter to Amanda Mitchell, 22 January 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
41
meet my father or brother in the opposing ranks I could fight them with a clear conscience and slay them if I could.5
The first year of the war had divided countrymen, but some soldiers, like Kibbee, held
out hope for a peaceful reunion. They fought to eradicate secessionist sentiment for the
sake of the greater cause of the Union. It was difficult for them to turn their weapons
upon those whom they considered part of their national brethren, yet they justified the
bloodshed with the conviction that it served the greater good of a unified democracy. In
Kibbee' s words, "Here the language of Brutus would be applicable to my case 'not that I
loved Cesar less but that I loved Rome more. ",6 Kibbee used his letter to assert the
principle that the Union soldier 's allegiance to his country trumped emotional ties.
At the same time that Union soldiers proclaimed their commitment to reuniting the
Northern and Southern states, the realization began to dawn on them that the irrevocable
differences between the sections-most notably slavery-needed to be resolved for their
reunion to be achieved. Kibbee voiced his opinion, "I would not make the abolition of
slavery the object of the war but if it follows as a natural consequence let the blame lie at
the door of those who begun it." He was not forward-thinking enough to advocate
immediate emancipation but instead called for "a system of gradual emancipation and
remo[val] ." He saw a need for the removal of the black population if they were freed
because
the idea of Negro equality . . . is but a mere chimera of a heated brain a visionary idea that can never be realized . . . . stop, think, look down into the depts of your own soul. . . . Do you not find there independent of your own will a natural repugnance to associating with the negro on terms of perfect equality. It is not all the fruit of predjudice or education it is naturaL . . 7
5 Amos Kibbee, Letter to Cousin Hattie, 23 January 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Lettesr, CLRB. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.
42
Similarly, Pennsylvanian Samuel McNutt wrote on February 2 1 , "I say free [the slaves]
and collinise them in some territory of the United States . . . but this thing of eaqualizing
them among us never.,,8 The solution of re-colonization was appealing to many men in
the Union army who hoped to weaken the South by eradicating slavery, but these men
also maintained strongly racist opinions about African Americans. They reconciled these
conflicting motives by settling on re-forging the Union as a republic of white males.
Union men worked out these views in their letters and would continue to do so
throughout the war. In these epistles, soldiers exercised political agency from afar. While
their absence from their communities precluded them from participating directly in
politics, their written words could still influence local opinions.
In early 1 862, Confederate soldiers also turned to pen and paper in an effort to clarify
their views on the war and their commitment to the fledgling Confederate States. In their
letters home, men oscillated between espousing their patriotism and confessing their
doubts and between downplaying the hardships of war and giving lurid descriptions of
the trials they faced. In each case, letter writing was an important means of maintaining a
solid connection to loved ones in spite of the separation imposed by the war. The tone of
letters composed by a single author could change drastically from week to week,
dependent upon the continuity of postal communication. On January 3 1 Virginian John F .
Murray wrote to �is wife, "bid us God Speed in this noble cause although it may cause
our hearts to bleed but still I do not think my Ellen will falter in making any sacrifice
when honor is concern[ed] .,,9 A few weeks later, with no change in location, Murray' s
mood took a turn for the worse, "All of the other men get one and two letters a week and
8 Samuel A. McNutt, Letter to parents, 2 1 February 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 9 John F. Murray, Letter to Mary Ellen Murray, 3 1 January 1 862, Murray Family Papers, LVA.
43
I only get one in two or three weeks. It was very distressing to think that my wife wrote
to me so seldom whilst others received theirs regularly . . . . I hope your love for me is great
as it ever was.,, 1 0 In the same letter, Murray asked his wife to find him a substitute so he
would not have to reenlist. Murray feared damage to his relationship with his wife more
than he feared dishonor in the name of his cause. With such tenuous strands as letters
holding families together in turbulent times, the offense of the negligent correspondent
was magnified. Separation forced family members to rely on letters to communicate
major milestones. In response to a letter from his wife relaying the news that she was
pregnant, South Carolinian William Anderson wrote,
Oh Creek at any other time than this the news you send me would have made me feel the happiest man on earth, but as it is . . . I almost regret that it has happened at a time when their is little prospect of my being with you . . . .
Anderson assuaged his disappointment knowing that he "could not stand in the way of
any man doing his duty to his contry." l l Sadly, Anderson would not live to see his child.
He was killed in battle later that spring. Anderson is but one example of the thousands of
men in the war whose last contact with their families was made through letters.
Separation was not the only hardship Confederate soldiers faced, and many men
recorded other complaints that tested their commitments to army life. On January 9,
Randolph Fairfax wrote to his mother after suffering through a snowy march through the
mountains, "During this trip my patriotism has at times been put to severe tests & I am
sorry to say has sometimes been at a very low ebb . . . . I don't think I ever was more
1 0 John F. Murray, Letter to Mary Ellen Murray, 22 February 1 862, Murray Family Papers, LVA. I I William Anderson, Letter to Creek, 9 February 1 862, Papers of William Anderson, SSCL.
44
disgusted with war than then.,, 1 2 Fairfax was quick to reverse these sentiments after
receiving concerned letters from his mother in return. On January 3 1 he wrote,
I am so sorry to see that you feel so much anxiety & distress about my welfare . . . . You must not allow yourself to be so alarmed by the exaggerated newspaper accounts of the sufferings of the army . . . it has been nothing like as severe as you would be led to suppose from reading the newspaper reports. 1 3
While letters home provided soldiers with an outlet for their anxiety and complaints, in
many cases their central function was to reassure family members that they were alive
and safe. Even the most miserable men were quick to downplay their suffering for this
higher cause, and in doing so they convinced themselves that their hardships were
surmountable.
After exploratory forays into combat the previous year, the summer campaign of
1 862 promised to be dramatic and bloody. The growing sizes of the Union and
Confederate armies demonstrated the dedication of both sides to their causes-this was
not a conflict that would peter out after one or two clashes. But for men who had already
been in the ranks for a year, the life of a soldier was getting old, and they wondered why
others refused to carry the burden. The Confederate government instituted a policy of
conscription, and some Union men supported a similar policy in the North. Soldiers
struggled to reconcile their sense of duty and commitment to fighting on behalf of their
country with anxiety for combat and powerful homesickness. Their letters expressed
these sentiments, and they also reflected how soldiers dealt with the widening gap
between their experiences of war and the value structure of the home front. They
12 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 9 January 1 862, Fairfax Family Papers, LV A. 1 3 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 3 1 January 1 862, Fairfax Fami ly Papers, LV A.
45
attempted to recast the events they witnessed in terms of civilian values, simultaneously
helping their correspondents to understand their experiences and instilling those beliefs in
themselves. One phenomenon that illustrates this point is how soldiers were reluctant to
admit to feeling fear during battle in their letters. They often chose to actively deny such
feelings or referred to them only euphemistically in order to preserve their masculine
identities. 1 4
As spring came with the promise of renewed fighting, Union soldiers evaluated their
Southern surroundings. While they geared themselves up to fight the enemy, many men
studied their foes in letters-seeking out the inherent differences in character and intellect
that had driven them to the folly of secession. They characterized Confederate soldiers
and the Southern population as a whole as untrustworthy, backwards, and wretched. On
March 3 1 Gilbert Mitchell wrote, "I was not aware that we were at war with barbarians . . . .
such heathens are not fit to live . . . . " 1 5 The idea that Southerners were somehow mentally
impaired or gullible seems to have been popular as an explanation for their allegiance to
the Confederate cause. One Union soldier stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, commented,
After what I have seen . . . I am almost led to believe that the people of this section are a step behind us in civilization. . . . One cannot talk with the people here without thinking they are just the sort of persons to swallow the lies and accept the subterfuges of the leaders of this unholy rebellion. 16
Already, the cost of the war to the South in terms of the lives of young men was widely
evident. For some Union troops, this stood as an encouraging sign that the war would
soon be over and the South punished for its sin of secession. On May 1 5, Union soldier
W. Hazen Noyes told his mother, "one general thing you will see in every house
1 4 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 36-37 . 1 5 Gilbert Mitchell, Letter to Amanda Mitchell, 3 1 March 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 16 Henry, Letter to sister, 3 1 May 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
46
occupied is that every lady wears mourning . . . our bullets have been pretty fatal . . . the
only plague is Sesession of the State.,, 1 7 By framing the war as a clear contest between
the civilized people of the North and the backwards South, Union soldiers asserted their
moral dominance and justified violence against their former countrymen.
Union General George McClellan began the spring with his Peninsular campaign in
Virginia that centered on a failed attempt to take Richmond. It culminated in the bloody
Seven Days' battles. In the aftermath of these contests, Union soldiers wrote home to
vent their frustrations-they had been so close to the Rebel capital, yet they took the
humiliating course of retreat once again. The spring offered the first taste of the kind of
continuous slaughter that would come to characterize Civil War campaigns. The scale of
this bloodshed was hard to fathom for many. After the battle of Malvern Hill, Harvey
Putnam wrote to his father with a brief description, "we had a very Hard Battle with
witch the Reble loss was about 50,000 men and we lost good 25 ,000 . . . . " 1 8 These casualty
figures are highly exaggerated, but they illustrate how vast the destruction seemed in the
eyes of one soldier and how difficult this was to express in writing to family members
who had no experience of combat. 1 9 Such inaccuracies highlight a challenge that letter
writers continuously faced-when forced to communicate through pen and paper,
experiences that the recipient could not physically observe had to be reduced to an
inadequate written description.20
1 7 W. Hazen Noyes, Letter to Mother, 1 5 May 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 1 8 Harvey Putnam, Letter to father, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 1 9 The actual casualty figures at Malvern Hill were 5,500 Confederate soldiers kil led and wounded, which was about twice the Union loss. Over the course of the entire Seven Days' B attles about 30,000 men were kil led or wounded. See James McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 988), 470-47 1 . 20 For further discussion, see David A. Gerber, Authors of their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 60.
47
The most common reaction to the Seven Days' fiasco that Union men expressed in
their letters was anger. They bristled at the dishonor inherent in defeat, and they were
quick to seek targets for blame. On July 1 7, Union soldier William W. Hawkins wrote
that in response to Rebel threats to block the Rappahannock River, "our men will set on
there behinds and let them do it without raising a hand . . . . you may think I am afraid of
the Rebs but I think they will lick us yet. . . . ,,2 1 Most men were more reluctant to settle on
the flaws of the troops themselves as an explanation for their defeat. They did not want to
appear weak to their home front correspondents, and letters were all they had to
communicate their side of the story. The more common scapegoats were the commanding
officers, the government, or the lack of patriotic spirit from the North. Union soldiers
begrudged military-age men who had thus far failed to do their duty to their country.
Some were in favor of conscription-a policy the government adopted a year later.
The first hard winter of the war left many Confederate soldiers feeling worn out and
homesick, and the institution of a draft in the spring of 1 862 created friction in the ranks
as some men hunted for substitutes to take their places in exchange for financial
compensation. Soldiers wrote home to their families requesting that they gather funds and
seek out appropriate candidates. The standards of honor and duty to which these men
held themselves made this process deeply embarrassing, and they often used letters as a
means of justifying their motives to their loved ones. Soldiers feared the consequences if
their comrades or superiors discovered their efforts. Virginian Howell S . Nelson warned
his wife after requesting that she hunt for a substitute for him, "Ann, dont let any one see
either of these leters except those you get to assist you as I should not like for any one to
21 William W. Hawkins, Letter to Folks at home, 1 7 July 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
48
think that I am a coward. That would stick me at once. I do this for you. ,,22 A few weeks
later, failing to procure a substitute, Nelson expressed resignation to his fate as a soldier,
asserting that he would "be sure to give a good acount" of himself in battle and
expressing thankfulness that he and his wife would be able to remain in contact through
letters .,,23 A letter dated July 1 8 and written to Nelson by his brother-in-law, P.H.
Overbey, who served in the 1 st Louisiana Infantry, reveals that Nelson gave in to his
homesickness and deserted. Overbey wrote to reassure Nelson that his old captain
"appreared quite indifferent" to his whereabouts and believed him to be on a sick leave.24
For Nelson, letter writing proved too weak a connection to home to sustain him through
the hardships of a soldier ' s life .
Other Confederate soldiers professed optimistic outlooks in their letters, hoping that,
as one man put it, "our course is bright & brightening . . . I think this year may see the
curtain drop on the last scene of the bloody drama.,,25 They used letters as a space for
optimistic conjecture and as a means of bolstering support for the Confederate cause in
themselves and in their addressees. Randolph Fairfax summarized a recent sermon he
heard in camp for his father in May, writing "God sometimes uses a more wicked
instrument to punish one that is more innocent but . . . the punishment of the wicked
instrument would surely fall sooner or later. . . . "26 Fairfax' s sentiments of hope in the face
of hardship were echoed by many other men. As John F. Murray told his wife, "our
soldiers endure it like men should who is fighting for home and everything they hold dear
22 Howel l S. Nelson, Letter to Wife, April 1 862, Howell S . Nelson Papers, Eleanor S. Brockenbrough Library at the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Va. (Hereafter noted as ESBL.) 23 Howell S. Nelson, Letter to Wife, 1 1 May 1 862, Howell S. Nelson Papers, ESBL. 24 P.H. Overbey, Letter to H.S. Nelson, 1 8 July 1 862, Howel l S. Nelson Papers, ESBL. 25 Whitfield B. Kisling, 26 March 1 862, Whitfield B. Kisling Papers, ESBL. 2 6 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Pa, 1 6 May 1 862, Fairfax Family Papers, LV A.
49
in this world . . . . "27 North Carolinian R.C. Martin wrote, "I though[t] when 1 was at home,
that 1 certainly would come home when my time was out, but under existing
circumstances, I think it is my duty to reenlist, for if there ever was a time when my
Country needed me it is now.,,28 Fairfax, Murray, and Martin' s letters acted as
reassurance for themselves and their correspondents that the hardships they endured were
not in vain. Their letters expressed the view that although they were far from their homes,
they had not forgotten that they fought for the claim to their native soil. They attributed to
themselves a sense of duty to home and country that burned just as brightly as when they
had initially taken up arms.
May through July of 1 862 consisted of almost constant fighting for Confederate
soldiers in Virginia. The summer campaign was successful-Robert E. Lee ' s army kept
McClellan's Army of the Potomac out of Richmond, and General Stonewall Jackson
terrorized Union troops in Virginia' s Shenandoah Valley-but it was also bloody.
Confederate soldiers were chilled by the destruction they witnessed on their beloved
Southern lands. James Dinwiddie recounted scenes from the battle of Front Royal,
Virginia, on May 23,
Women & children poured out of town in droves during the cannonade. I met several beautiful young girls with their clothes up around their waists and running for life to the woods and ravines. Mothers with staring eyes streaming with tears, clasped their little babes in their arms, and besought me to tell them a place of safety . . . . I thought of you, my dear Bettie, and thanked God that you were spared such horrors.29
Dinwiddie illustrated the horrors of war brought to the Confederate home front, relating
the events of the battle in shocking terms by emphasizing the violation of home and
27 John F. Murray, Letter to Wife, 2 1 May 1 862, Murray Family Papers, LVA. 28 R.C. Martin, Letter to Sister, 30 March 1 862, Martin Papers, SSCRC. 29 James Dinwiddie, Letter to Bettie Carrington, 12 June 1 862, Papers of the D inwiddie Family, SSCL.
50
family. Such terrorizing of civilians brought to mind Dinwiddie's own home. He felt
compelled to reassure himself that his friends and loved ones were safe, and he and other
Confederate soldiers reached out to them in letters like this one.
This kind of reassurance-both for the letter writer and for his correspondent-
shaped many of the letters written by Confederate soldiers following the battles of the
summer of 1 862. They used familiar values of duty, honor, and courage to relate their
experiences and to justify their continued commitment to the Confederate cause in the
wake of the destruction the war wreaked on Southern land, property, and lives. In a letter
of consolation to the father of two brothers who died at the battle of Seven Pines, M. T.
Shepard wrote that in spite of the loss of many friends, he knew
[I]t is a glorious cause & if one has to yield his life in the bloom of youth he could not go in a more honorable way. They was at their posts when death met them in full discharge of their duty yes they were battling with a foe that threaten to invade our homes confiscate our property & even lay the brutal hand upon our mothers, wives, sisters, & daughters if any should ask the question in regard to bravery send them to me . . . . 30
Even the trauma of injury was a question of honor. John B. Wise of the 1 51 Richmond
Howitzers told his cousin, "Some of the boys have endeavored to teaze me about getting
hit in the back, but they know too well that I was at my post. ,,3 1 Wise wrote not to inform
his family of his physical safety but to confirm his honor in the face of injury. In their
letters, Confederate soldiers seem to have been anxious to move on from the carnage of
battle and to turn the grief they felt for fallen comrades into renewed vigor to defeat the
enemy. Andrew Barksdale wrote to his sister shortly after the battle of Seven Pines,
That battle has been the cause of many to weep and morn, but now is the time, my dear sister for our tears to be turned into sparks of fire and we with determined resolution to whip or die. Think of what the south has
30 M.T. Shepard, Letter to James S . G ivens, 1 8 June 1 862, Givens Family Papers, LV A. 3 1 John B. Wise, Letter to Cousin, July 1 862, Letters of Louis A. Wise, SSCL.
5 1
been through, what we are fighting for. . . . We are defending our country, our homes, families, mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children, wives, and everything. 32
Writing down such convictions helped soldiers to come to terms with the violence of the
battlefield by rekindling their passion for the Confederate cause. Men wrote promising to
protect their country, knowing that the home front relied upon them for defense against
Yankee invasions.
Abraham Lincoln 's announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation on September
22, 1 862, marked a turning point in the war. The opinions that Union soldiers had been
tentatively voicing in their letters home that the institution of slavery was central to the
enemy' s strength bore fruition in a way that few would have expected before the war
began. Among Union men, the Emancipation Proclamation was generally met with
support. Although there was a significant body who opposed it, the majority was in favor
of defeating the South by any means necessary. They supported taking advantage of any
weakness that would secure victory for the Union and restore them to their families
sooner. Union soldiers wrote home voicing these opinions and encouraging their
correspondents to support the army by supporting Lincoln. Confederate soldiers, on the
other hand, were outraged by Lincoln' s audacity in making such a stand against Southern
values. Rather than disheartening them, the Emancipation Proclamation instilled a deeper
fire in their hearts that intensified the sense of honor they felt so deeply. Their letters
reflect how they took Lincoln' s announcement as a personal insult and as proof of the
North' s ambition to subjugate them. For both Union and Confederate men at this time,
letters were essential as a means of establishing solidarity between soldiers and civilians.
32 Andrew Synor Barksdale, Letter to Sister Omis, 4 June 1 862, Andrew Sydnor Barksdale Papers, ESBL.
52
Union soldiers wrote home after hearing the news of the Emancipation Proclamation
fresh from victory at the battle of Antietam in Maryland-the only bright moment in the
otherwise disappointing summer campaign. George W. Hadden wrote on September 25,
seemingly unfazed by recent events, "they begin to talk a bought peace down hear but I
think that it will be some time be fore it will come for these rebels are hard looking
fellows . . . . " Hadden' s only comment on the Emancipation Proclamation was, "some of the
folks down hear dont like old Abe[ ' s] procklamation for they say it is not right thar is a
good many slaves around hear and they fair pretty hard.,,33 In this concise statement,
Hadden implicitly showed his support for, or at least acceptance of, Lincoln's actions.
But he also made it clear that such a measure would not make the end of the war
imminent. Perhaps Hadden did not want to express too much optimism to himself or to
his correspondent, suspecting that he and his comrades still had much work before them.
It was true that not all Union men approved of Lincoln 's measure. Some found that
the Emancipation Proclamation came very suddenly and felt that it opposed the cause for
which they had enlisted-to preserve the Union as it was before the war. Samuel A.
McNutt wrote in opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation on October 1 9 . He stated,
"I hardly know what for to think of the Presidents proclamations . . . . I will support no
sutch unconstitutional messhurs I have been fighting for a reconstruction of the Union
butt there is no youse in one waving for this government. . . . ,,34 McNutt 's words exemplify
how some Union soldiers felt compelled to fight to uphold the values of their beloved
country but felt betrayed when changes were made to these values without their sanction.
McNutt voiced his support for gradual emancipation and re-colonization of slaves in a
33 George W. Hadden, Letter to George, 25 September 1 862, Civi l War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 34 Samuel A. McNutt, Letter to Father, 19 October 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
53
previously dated letter, but when he heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation he
was outraged because he felt the government had acted without his consent.35 While
McNutt and other Union troops were willing to free the slaves in order to defeat the
South, they were for the most part unwilling to accept the integration of black citizens in
their own communities. These men were accustomed to having a voice in major political
decisions, but this voice had been stifled when they left home and joined their army.
They relied upon their letters home to act as conduits of dissent in regards to such
matters.
In their letters, Confederate soldiers were particularly keen to emphasize the
consequences of defeat by the North. Andrew Barksdale predicted that Northerners
would "take us for their servants" and John J. Lancaster observed, "the Northern people
seem to cling to the idea 'they can subjugate us. ",36 Such forecasts of Northern intentions
were confirmed by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which threatened to overturn
the rigid and long-established social hierarchy of the South with slavery at its core.
Lincoln signed a bill in the summer of 1 862 that abolished slavery in United States
territories. Barksdale wrote in response, "I am glad Old Abe has passed that bill, it will
make our men fight all the harder. Every one I hear say anything about it says they will
die before he shall whip them, or US.,,37 After the Emancipation Proclamation, William T.
Nelson wrote, "Have you seen olde Abs proclemation it sem as though he inten[ d]s to
continue the war.,,38 Such an attack on Southern societal standards destroyed any
remaining possibility of peaceful compromise. The Emancipation Proclamation was a
35 See letter cited on page 43. Samuel A. McNutt, Letter to parents, 2 1 February 1 862. 36 Andrew Sydnor Barksdale, Letter to Sister Omis, 4 June 1 862; John J . Lancaster, Letter to Cousin, 30 July 1 862, Waring Fami ly Papers, VHS. 37 Andrew Sydnor Barksdale, Letter to Sister Omis, 4 June 1 862. 3 8 William T. Nelson, Letter to Wife, 29 September 1 862, Wil liam T. Nelson Papers, VHS.
54
direct attack on Confederate soldiers' honor. Their letters acted as testaments to the
sustainment of this honor, assuring their correspondents that they would not take such an
insult lightly and that they remained committed to the cause of Southern independence.
During the closing months of 1 862, Union soldiers in the Eastern theater felt
disheartened by the inconclusive summer campaign in Virginia. Lee ' s Army of Northern
Virginia was also disappointed after its first foray into the North during August and
September ended in retreat at the battle of Antietam. As fighting dragged on through mid
December, and the year concluded on a bloody note at the battle of Fredericksburg,
Virginia, men on both sides felt overwhelmed by the scale of death and destruction they
witnessed on a daily basis. Furthermore, combatants struggled with increasing conflict
between their identities as civilians and as soldiers. They were becoming accustomed to
life in the army, but they felt more and more distant from the home lifestyles they had put
on hold. Letters continued to mediate the gap between home front and battlefield, while
also making the breach maddeningly obvious to soldiers who struggled to reconcile
civilian values to the harsh realities of war.
Union soldiers in the East, while buoyed by their victory at Antietam, were
aggravated by General McClellan's failure to follow up this success with another harsh
blow to Lee 's army. William Pattangall, an artillery lieutenant from Maine, wrote on
October 23 criticizing the "cowardly, wicked, disa[ s ]trous policy" of the government that
"holds back our army" rather than marching it forward to meet the enemy. Pattangall
feared any compromise that would "yield one sentiment of personal liberty" to the
Confederacy, predicting that such a compromise would force the North to "cringe to the
55
power that has enslaved us . . . . ,,39 Men like Pattangall used their letters as an outlet for
political activism for which there was no room in the regimented life of the army.
Pattangall noted in a previous letter that soldiers had "no more liberty than convicts" in
camp, and that "men who have been accustomed to a great share of liberty feel the
restraint . . . the change is so great from home.,,4o While Union soldiers knew it was their
duty to endure such restrictions of their individual voices in the name of their country,
they took advantage of the opportunity to sound their opinions in the letters they sent
home, hoping that their words might resonate through their families and communities.
Union servicemen were particularly concerned with Northern public opinion of the
war and of the soldiers themselves. Whereas in 1 86 1 , the North seemed to be generally
united in its support for the war, by 1 862, the seeds of the Peace Democrat, or
"Copperhead," movement were already in place. Soldiers, who endured great hardships
and put their lives at risk for the sake of the Union, deeply resented these voices of
dissent, and often expressed their indignation in letters home. On December 1 5 ,
Pennsylvanian Gilbert Mitchell wrote to his sister, "If our Copperhead friends talk verry
savage tell them I can flay the Devil our of the whole kit and posey of them.,,4 1 More
broadly, soldiers worried about the support of the home front for their efforts and sought
recognition for their endurance of difficult trials. Erastus W. Everton blamed the press for
the negative Northern opinion of military men, "It has become the fashion . . . now a days
to force a responsibility on a man and damn him forever afterwards for trying to fulfil its
requirements . . . . Now the public understands this and makes us great 'heros' great
39 William R. Pattangall, Letter to Wife, 23 October 1 862, Civil War: Pattangall Papers, CLRB. 4 0 William R. Pattangall, Letter to Wife, 14 September 1 862, Civil War: Pattangall Papers, CLRB. 4 1 Gilbert H . Mitchell, Letter to Amanda Mitchell, 15 December 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
56
' generals' great ' statesmen' and greater fools through its press.,,42 Other men voiced their
disappointment in the Northern population as a Whole. Byron Charles wrote on Christmas
day, "I hear to day that Mass. & N.Y. have refused to send or find any more men for the
war. I think that the North will soon be sick of the war. . . . ,,43 Frustration with Northern
civilians who failed to support the Union war effort only grew as the war dragged on. But
soldiers' irritation was rarely directed at their correspondents, unless they failed to reply
to their letters in a timely fashion. The ability to write and receive letters from home
allowed soldiers to engage in dialogue about civilian morale. They were never isolated
from the problems that the home front faced, nor were civilians shielded from knowledge
of the burdens men-at-arms took on in the name of the Union. This exchange of
information, facilitated to a large degree by letters, played a major role in sustaining
morale and motivations in both arenas. While soldiers often felt inhibited by the
restrictions placed upon them by army life, their frustrations were alleviated by their
ability to continue to have a civilian voice, if only within their personal letters.
Confederate soldiers, in spite of their successes in battle over the summer, saw the toll
the bloodshed of the war had taken in the thinning ranks of its armies by the end of 1 862.
They had been anxious to "bring the war home" to the North and to "teach them the true
meaning of the term 'Civil War,' in all its most hideous forms," but the failure of Lee ' s
army in its first Northern invasion dashed these expectations.44 Hoping to find support for
the Confederacy in Maryland to bolster their ranks and their supply lines, instead they
42 Erastus W. Everson, Letter to Fred, 28 December 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 43 Byron Charles, Letter to Mother & Sister, 25 December 1 862, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 44 John Bowie Macgruder, Letter to Henry Macgruder, 8 June 1 862, Magruder Family Papers, LV A.
57
found it to be "akin to Bangor Maine in sentiment.,,45 They, too, felt discouraged by the
performance of their government, and, faced with ghastly scenes of death both on the
battlefield and from sickness in camp, Confederate soldiers felt dwarfed by the
magnitude of the task before them. They wrote home alarmed by the scale of death they
witnessed amongst their comrades. On October 1 3 , Colonel Thomas S . Garnett wrote to
his wife of the army' s losses at Antietam, "Few can escape the perils of the battle field.
He who falls today is only a few hours before him who will follow tomorrow. We have
the same troops to fight with day after day and it really is only a matter of chance who
falls first.,,46 In another letter, Garnett complained,
Our Congress accomplishes nothing. They [are] a set of imbeciles and vile demagogues. The army is not sustained by the government. We fight and conquor . . . but are unable to reap the fruits of victory for want of men.47
Like their Union counterparts, Confederate soldiers used letters as a conduit for the
frustrations associated with their new, military identities. They had enlisted to fight for
the independence of the Confederate States, but they now found themselves chained to a
cycle of death. Randolph Fairfax, the young enlistee from the University of Virginia who
had volunteered against his mother' s wishes, wrote to her on December 7, "I think when
peace is declared I shall feel somewhat like a man just released from prison or perhaps a
condemned criminal just receiving his pardon.,,48 Fairfax' s youthful optimism had faded
to a sense of imprisonment in just over a year of service. He was killed in the battle of
Fredericksburg only a few days later, on December 1 3 , another partially written letter to
his mother folded in his pocket.
45 John Bowie Macgruder, Letter to Father, 4 December 1 862, Magruder Family Papers, L VA. 46 Thomas S. Garnett, Letter to Wife, 13 October 1 862, Garnett Family Letter, VHS. 47 Thomas S . Garnett, Letter to Wife, 27 October 1 862, Garnett Family Letters, VHS. 4 8 Randolph Fairfax, Letter to Mamma, 7 December 1 862, Fairfax Family Papers, LV A.
58
The year closed on a bloody note at Fredericksburg with another discouraging defeat
for the Union and another victory at great cost for the Confederacy. Confederate Colonel
John Macgruder described the battlefield after fighting had ceased: "I never saw such
carnage in my life . . . . [The dead] still laid in heaps, in every conceivable position &
mangled in every conceivable way.,,49 In an earlier letter, Macgruder told his brother,
"when one calmly considers through what trials & difficulties our soldiers have to pass,
he is surprised not so much at the number of those who die as of those who survive, &
really one feels disposed to say blessed is he who dies. ,,50 Whereas 1 86 1 inducted men
into the trials of war, 1 862 marked the true beginning of the transformation of the men in
the ranks from civilian volunteer to soldier. This transition was expressed through and
mediated by communication with the home front via letters . The trials soldiers faced
tested the values of liberty, duty, honor, courage, and individualism that had driven them
to enlist and that they had expected to carry with them through the war. They began to
wonder what victory in the war would cost them and to weigh this against the actions of
their governments. Letters became a means of preserving the civilian voice of the troops
through a connection with home and also provided a space for experimentation with
soldiers' new, military identities. The act of letter writing not only bridged the gap of
distance between soldiers and their loved ones, but also mediated the breach between
soldiers' civilian values and their experiences of war. This function would only become
more apparent as the war dragged on, and the gap grew wider.
49 John Bowie Macgruder, Letter to Papa, 20 December 1 862, Macgruder Family Papers, LV A. 5 0 John Bowie Macgruder, Letter to Henry, 9 December 1 862, Macgruder Family Papers, LVA.
59
60
Chapter Three
A Changing Cause: Letters Home in 1863
Civil War soldiers in 1 863 alternately accepted and railed against the effects of
the conflict in which they were engaged. Their experiences over the course of two
campaign seasons brought them to the realization that the war made it impossible to
separate home front from battlefield. Soldiers' civilian and military identities became
ever more entwined. They became increasingly candid in their letters home about army
life and the horrors of the battlefield, but they still framed much of their correspondence
within their antebellum civilian value structure, and they continued to feel intense
connections to their addressees . For men on both sides, letters were a means of
organizing their thoughts and remaining engaged with their families, friends, and
communities. While their experiences in combat and in camp threatened to alienate
troops from the values they treasured before the war, in 1 863 the act of writing letters still
mentally transported them home, thereby maintaining their connections to these values.
Epistolary contact with the home front encouraged soldiers to reflect on their military
experiences while also revisiting the relationships that shaped their civilian identities.
Union men continued to be separated from their loved ones by significant geographical
distances as well as by gaps in experience. For them, letter writing was an important way
to gamer support for the Union cause. Union soldiers wrote letters to ensure that their
voices would be heard, both as civilians enforcing their Constitutional rights, and as
soldiers privileged with special perspectives on the war. Confederate soldiers, on the
other hand, felt less need to educate their addressees in the horrors of war, knowing that
their families and friends had most likely been exposed to nearby skirmishes or Yankee
raids. While the Union army was a conquering force, Confederate soldiers fought to
6 1
defend their homes. The line between home front and battlefield became even more
blurred for them.
During the first months of 1 863, soldiers turned to letters to react to the changing
trajectory of the war. A major instigator of change was Lincoln 's Emancipation
Proclamation, which officially took effect on January 1 . The Proclamation included a
provision for the enlistment of African American volunteers in the Union Army. These
were two major leaps forward in Northern policy, and they had substantial implications
for the war as a whole. While the roots of the war had always been deeply imbedded in
slavery, neither the Union nor the Confederacy stated this explicitly until this point. The
war was now openly a conflict to determine the fate of the institution in the South.
Soldiers on both sides reacted to this development and its implications for them. They
used letter writing both as a means of voicing their political opinions and as a space for
self-reflection, engaging in imaginary dialogues with home front correspondents as they
wrote.
On January 1 , 1 863, Massachusetts infantryman Byron W. Charles wrote from North
Carolina, "The negros are free to day. They dont seem to be celebrating much here . . . . " J
While Charles seemed unfazed in his letter, the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation
elicited vocal responses from other white soldiers. As Chandra Manning points out, at
this point in the war Union men strained to envision slavery not just as "a malignant mole
on the body politic" but as a "more insidious cancer" of the United States as a whole that
1 Byron W. Charles, Letter to Sister Luvan, 1 January 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
62
required "traumatic surgery for the entire organism" to ensure its elimination.2 Many
Union soldiers, having directly witnessed the cruelty of slavery during the war, were
willing to accept such an official transformation of "a war to preserve the Union into a
war to reform it.,,3 But soldiers also knew that support for such measures was not
necessarily universal, not only within the ranks, but, perhaps more problematically,
amongst the civilian population of the North as well. In their letters, some Union troops
grappled with their own feelings about such changes and also attempted to bridge the gap
of distance to convince family members to stand with them in this revised cause. On
February 24, Homer A. Plimpton wrote of a newly formed brigade of United States
Colored Troops (USCT) under General David Hunter,
They say they make good soldier[s] , and I see no reason why they should not. Gen. Hunter is bound to make use of every means possible to put down this wicked rebellion, he has concluded that "arming the negroe" will ten[ d] to do this & as far as the experiment has been tried it has proved successful.4
Plimpton also wrote in response to the Emancipation Proclamation, "As for myself I
endorse the President' s Policy & go in for cutting off the right arm of the Rebel power. It
must be done or we shall never subjugate the South.,,5 Plimpton offered no moral
commentary on the abolition of slavery. Instead he appealed to practical concerns. He
emphasized the duty of Lincoln and his generals to make use of every resource in order to
optimize the Union army' s strengths and take advantage of the enemy' s weaknesses. By
2 Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 85 . 3 Ibid., 8 1 . 4 General David Hunter had previously gained notoriety for issuing a declaration of martial law abolishing slavery in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in the spring of 1 862 without seeking permission from President Lincoln. Lincoln revoked this order, but soon afterwards he began appealing to Congress to consider emancipation legislation. See James McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, Oxford University Press, 1 988), 499-503 ; Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Aunt, 24 February 1 863, Civil War: P limpton Letters, CLRB. 5 Ibid.
63
avoiding racial issues and focusing on the strategic advantages presented by Lincoln's
policies, soldiers like Plimpton used their military authority to bypass civilian qualms.
Soldiers were expected to win the war-they knew best what measures were necessary to
do so-and they used their authority to persuade the home front in letters.
The Emancipation Proclamation laid out new goals for the Union Army in 1 863, but
these uncompromising objectives also carried the threat of prolonging the war. Union
men suffered from low morale through the winter after their humiliating defeat at
Fredericksburg in December, and their dismay manifested itself in letters in bouts of
extreme homesickness and articulations of frustration with the handling of the war by the
federal government or by officers. Although Union soldiers had grown accustomed to
military life by this point, they were reluctant to commit themselves to the army any
longer than was absolutely necessary. They were particularly anxious to maintain contact
with their families through letters in order to continue participating in domestic life. As
one man wrote, "Letters from home is half the life of the poor Soldier.,,6 Another Union
soldier mused,
I cannot help but feel sometimes gloomy. . . . It seems as though I cannot bear the thought of staying away three long years, if I live. But I must keep up, if ! can . . . . Dear one do not give up I hope I will live through this dread ordeal. I do want to for your sake. It seems to me as though I had hardly a friend here & I dont care for any, neither much. I think of home & the sweet love that awaits me when I return . . . . I get so tired of the empty pomp & glitter of glorious war. 7
For these men, the primary sustaining motivation was not victory for the Union, but the
prospect of returning to a peaceful home. Some feared that their efforts in the army,
especially when subject to the slow-moving authority of their superior officers, would not
6 Jim J. Harley, Letter to Mary C. Harley, 6 January 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 7 H., Letter to Wife, 2 Apri l 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
64
be sufficient to preserve this ideal. Thomas Archer, a member of the Volunteer
Engineers, wrote
In fact a private soldier is not supposed to know anything or have any feelings, consequently if he exhibits either he is treated worse than a dog . . . . No thanks to our officers if, at the end of the war, the servivers of our large army should return to their homes the most degraded set [of! beings on the face of the earth. 8
Penning such sentiments provided an emotional outlet that soldiers would not have found
elsewhere in army life . In an atmosphere where they felt their individual voices stifled by
the monotony of military life, Union men seized the opportunity to write letters in order
to be heard by those who sympathized with them at home. Their worst fear was to lose
this contact that preserved their sense of individual worth.
Confederate soldiers also suffered from low morale during the early months of 1 863 .
Although they had been victorious at the battle of Fredericksburg in December, they, too,
feared a prolonged war and pined for the comforts of home. Many Confederate troops
grasped at the possibility of procuring substitutes. Prices for substitutes soared beyond
what most common soldiers could afford, and they were generally unreliable when it
came time to shoulder anns and report for duty. Louisiana Captain E.L. Colemen
remarked, "my confidence in substitutes; in men who fight in this holy cause for m[ e ]re
pay is very limited.,,9 But some Southern men were so blinded by homesickness that they
were willing to give up just about anything to leave the army. Such men leaned on letters
home as their only hope for procuring a means of getting out of the war. Abner Dawson
Ford, a private in the Lynchburg Light Artillery, wrote home with repeated pleas to his
wife to raise money for a substitute by selling their slaves. When she failed to do so, Ford
8 Thomas Archer, Letter to Friend Ellen, 24 February 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 9 E.L. Coleman, Letter to Cousin Annie, 19 January 1 863, E.L. Coleman Papers, ESBL.
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wrote, "I havent got a friend in this world that will take intrest enofe to get me out of the
army . . . thay are afraid that thay will loose some few dollars to save my life . . . I all ways
though[t] I had no friends & now I know it. . . . " l o Acknowledging the inflammatory nature
of his letter, Ford concluded by instructing his wife, "you had better burn this dont let any
body see this . . . . " l l Men like Ford used their letters home as a covert means of expressing
discontent with their situations. They were still committed to values of duty and personal
honor-enough to prevent them from deserting and enough for them to feel ashamed of
their inability to withstand army life-but letters were a private means of escape in which
men could not contain sentiments of yearning for home.
In spite of their homesickness, many Southern troops remained devoted to their roles
as defenders of the Confederate nation. They used their letters to encourage their
correspondents to continue supporting the war and the Southern cause. On January 2,
William Francis Brand wrote, "I think the picture of our confederacy is brightning and I
hope before long we will be a free and independant people.,, 1 2 John Coleman expressed
his opinion to a female cousin that "There is nothing I admire more than a ragged
Confederate uniform, provided, an honest manly heart throbs beneath it. . . . " l 3 He implied
that she should refrain from bestowing her affections upon any man who failed to serve
in the Confederate ranks. Even men who expressed a desire for the war to end and felt
little hope peace that would come soon still felt committed to carrying out their duty until
the end, whenever that came. William Harris Clayton asked his sister, "Do you see any
prospect of it ending soon? I am sure 1 cannot. Myself & Company have reenlisted for the
1 0 Abner Dawson Ford, Letter to Wife, 26 March 1 863, Abner Dawson Ford Papers, YHS. 1 1 Ibid. 12 William Francis Brand, Letter to Amanda Catherine Armentrout, 2 January 1 863, Will iam Francis Brand Letters, SSCL. 1 3 John Coleman, Letter to Cousin Annie, 26 March 1 863, E.L. Coleman Papers, ESBL.
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war. You know that 1 always said 1 intended to remain in service as long as the war went
on.,, 1 4 Men like Brand, Coleman, and Clayton wrote with an air of confidence that the
Confederate cause was in the right and would prevail over any obstacle. But inherent in
the positive tone of their letters was the notion that the army and its ability to achieve
victory depended upon the support of the civilian population.
As the opening of the spring campaign in Virginia drew nearer, and the prospects of
getting out of the war grew slimmer, Confederate soldiers steeled themselves for battle.
Angered by the Emancipation Proclamation and the enlistment of black troops in the
Union army, many men began to look forward to encountering the enemy with renewed
vigor. Colonel Thomas S . Garnett asserted, " [I] had rather let my bones bleach on the
1 -battlefield, than to bow my neck to the yoke the yankees have ready for us." ) The
issuance of the Proclamation triggered a rhetorical response amongst Confederate
soldiers that confirmed that the purpose of the war was not just Southern independence,
but also escape from Northern oppression. Like the Union troops, they understood the
importance of sustaining home front morale, and their letters reflect efforts to renew
civilian support for the Confederate cause. Virginian Meriwether Lewis told his wife in
late April, "I dont think 1 ever saw the army so devoted to the cause as now . . . . the
transient passions have long since subsided, and the pure flame of devotion to our
Country, Liberty, & Honor burns brightly upon the altar of almost every heart." In
response to slaves running away from owners in his neighborhood, Lewis claimed, "the
poor deluded creatures leave comfortable homes, for misery & starvation.,, 1 6 Lewis
refused to acknowledge how detrimental the loss of the slave population was to Southern
14 William Harris Clayton, Letter to Sister, 29 February 1 863, Will iam Harris Clayton Papers, VHS. 1 5 Thomas S . Garnett, Letter to Wife, 5 April 1 863, Garnett Family Letters, LV A. 1 6 Meriwether Lewis, Letter to Wife, 27 April 1 863, Meriwether Lewis Papers, VHS.
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stability. Instead he used paternalistic rhetoric to express concern for the well being of the
escapees.
Some Confederate soldiers began to concentrate on the Northern problem of
compromised home front support and counted on the Copperhead movement to weaken
the Union military force. Virginian John Murray wrote, "a great many of us think that the
Northern mind is fast coming to the point to cry down the Lincoln Government and for
peace.,, 1 7 This focus on the challenged faced by the North drew attention away from the
difficulties that plagued the South and emphasized the unity of support for the
Confederate cause in the army and among the civilian population.
On April 1 9, Confederate soldier E.L. Coleman wrote to his aunt anticipating the
upcoming spring and summer campaign,
Idleness is to be exchanged for activity and peaceful camps for bloody battlefields. Probably before this letter reaches your hands the boom of cannon and rattle of musketry the hideous groans of the wounded and dying will be heard along our lines as another battle is fought and another price is paid for independence. 1 8
Coleman's predictions were correct-the spnng of 1 863 was an eventful one, and
soldiers on both sides had much to report in their letters. The first major battle of the
season was in early May at Chancellorsville, a crossroads near Fredericksburg, Virginia.
This battle resulted in a devastating loss for the Union Army of the Potomac under the
newly appointed General Joseph Hooker. Union soldiers were frustrated by the continued
failure of their generals to conquer territory in Virginia, and felt increasingly threatened
by the lack of backing for the war in the North. The first conscription act was issued in
17 John F. Murray, Letter to Wife, 5 January 1 863, Murray Family Papers, LV A. 1 8 E.L. Coleman, Letter to Aunt, 19 April 1 863, E.L. and John B . Coleman Letters, ESBL.
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the North in the spring of 1 863 and was met with widespread disapproval by the civilian
population. As discontent grew, the Copperhead movement continued to recruit
supporters. General Robert E. Lee chose to capitalize on his victory at Chancellorsville
by commencing another march northwards, but Union forces repelled his army at the
battle of Gettysburg in July. Chancellorsville was costly to the Confederate army as well,
both in terms of manpower and morale. The much-loved and celebrated General
Stonewall Jackson fell from friendly fire on the Confederate lines, leaving behind
thousands of devastated admirers . The loss of Jackson, depleted ranks, and defeats at
Gettysburg and Vicksburg were all major blows to Confederate morale that soldiers dealt
with in letters home during the summer campaign.
Union soldier J.R. Dumfries wrote to his father while awaiting news from the battle
of Chancellorsville. While he hoped for victory for General Hooker' s army, he predicted
that "the war will never cease until the noise of clamor & sympathy for the rebellion is
hushed among the people of the North, in short until the fire in the rear is quenched out
effectually . . . . " ] 9 By the summer of 1 863, Union soldiers felt that they were fighting
another war within the larger crusade to triumph over the Confederate rebellion-the
contest for public opinion in the North. As Oran M. Rowland told his aunt, "We dont
believe in Copperheadism and would just as soon fight Northern traitors as Southern
rebels. ,,20 On bloody battlefields Union soldiers were armed with shells and bullets, but
for this secondary conflict men deployed letters as their weapons. Union volunteers
believed they were properly upholding their obligations of duty and honor to their
country by fighting in the war, and they used these values, as well as comparisons to the
19 J.R. Dumfries, Letter to Father, 4 May 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 20 Gran M. Rowland, Letter to Sophia Rowland, 1 0 March 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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Revolution undertaken by the founding fathers of the United States, to express their
outrage towards the Peace Democrats. Minnesotan James L. Battey wrote to his father,
From some parts of the north there seems to be a strong sympathy for Valla[n]digham?! If there are any there, and they want to know what is tho't of them by all true men in the army, or what will be tho't of them by future generations, they have only to look at Benedict Arnold to see a true ref[l]ection of themselves . . . . These men that are crying peace and trying to distract the north are helping the rebellion more than they could in any other way short of taking up arms for them . . . . 22
Union soldiers like Battey appealed to their addressees' senses of duty, honor, and
patriotism. A man who failed to serve in the Union army was as good as a traitor, they
argued. Soldiers felt that they had the authority to take such a position as the true
defenders of the Union-they had proven themselves by taking up arms for their country.
In letters, they used this military authority to convince their civilian correspondents to
show support for the Union cause.
In addition to the political Peace Democrat movement, opposition to the war arose in
reactions to the conscription acts of the spring and summer of 1 863 .23 Most Union
soldiers supported drafting new troops-though they felt that every able-bodied man
should have already volunteered to fulfill his duty to his country. Many felt that they had
done their time in the army and that, "some of the rest ought to try it now.,,24 They did
not take kindly to those who attempted to shirk their duties, especially after military
service was mandated by law. Josiah Fuller of Massachusetts expressed his opinion that
2 1 Clement Vallandigham of Ohio was the leader of the Peace Democrat Party. He spoke against the war on May 1 , and he was arrested for violating General Ambrose Burnside 's general order No. 38 declaring "expressed or implied" treason punishable by death or banishment. Vallandigham was tried and banished, but he received the nomination by the Peace Democrat Party for governor for the 1 863 election. He was defeated at the polls in October by War Democrat John Brough. For a complete discussion see James McPherson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 592-596. 22 James L. Battey, Letter to Father, 3 1 May 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 23 The most famous examples are the New York City draft riots in July of 1 863 . 24 Byron W. Charles, Letter to Salie & Will ie, 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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Those who are thus estimating our nations groanings and the prise in view and for which so many thousands have suffered fought and died ought to leave home and dear ones and come out here tarrying only a few months and they would have different and enlarged ideas of means and results.25
Fuller 's letter illustrates the resentment Union men felt at the unfair toll the war took on
soldiers and their families while others stood idly by. Union soldier Bloom Osborn sent
his brother a copy of resolutions drawn up by members of his regiment in opposition to
the $300 clause of the Conscription Act, which allowed any man who was drafted to
escape service by paying a fee of $300. The resolutions stated,
[W]hile we are ready and willing at all times not only to assert but to maintain our Devotion to the Constitution as framed by our Fathers, the whole Union, and the Dear old flag, we heartily detest the introduction of any resolution into the Army for the purpose of a purly political effect upon the masses of the people at home?6
Osborn's diligent copy of his regiment' s resolutions demonstrates how soldiers used
letters as a means of continuing to express their voice in home front politics-a voice
they hoped would be strengthened by their experiences in the army. Although these
resolutions did not succeed in reforming military policy, the transmission of their
contents to sympathetic family members may have influenced civilian political values .
While Union soldiers struggled to unite the Northern home front behind the war in the
summer of 1 863 , Confederate soldiers dealt with demoralization within the army. While
the battle of Chancellorsville was technically a Southern victory, it started the campaign
on a disheartening note for Lee 's army. The battle had a high casualty rate, and among
those casualties was Stonewall Jackson, who had become a revered figure for the troops.
In the aftermath of Jackson's death, the soldiers' letters reverberated with grief. On May
1 1 , the day after Jackson died, Joseph F. Shaner wrote to his sister, calling it "the worst
25 Josiah Fuller, Letter to Wife, 23 May 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 26 Bloom Osborn, Letter to Elias Osborn, 1 1 April 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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news we have heard scince I have bin in the army.,,27 Confederate soldiers could not all
participate in the public ritual of Jackson's funeral, but they could mourn him privately,
and they eulogized him in letters home. On May 1 3 , Habun R. Foster wrote, " [H]e will be
mightly missed in the Southern confedercy for he was a strong spoke in the wheel and I
fear that we have no one to fill his place. ,,28 It seems unusual that one man could have
such a great impact on an entire army' s morale, but Jackson had become a symbol of
hope and military vigor for the Confederacy. He had been present for their first triumph
at the First Battle of Bull Run, and he had continued to succeed in combat thereafter.
Jackson epitomized the ideals of honor and courage that Confederate soldiers sought to
cultivate in themselves by enlisting in the army.
The epistles written about Jackson followed the tradition of condolence letters that
developed during the war as a means of communicating the details of a man' s death to his
family members. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes of condolence letters, " [They]
sought to make absent loved ones virtual witnesses to the dying moments they had been
denied, to link home and battlefront, and to mend the fissures war had introduced into the
fabric of the Good Death. ,,29 While in this case soldiers wrote to their own family
members, not Jackson's, Faust points out, "Narratives of dying well may have served as a
kind of lifeline between the new world of battle and the old world at home.,,3o Soldiers
used letters to come to terms with death by framing it within the values and customs
related to mourning and death they remembered from their civilian lives.
27 Joseph F. Shaner, Letter to Sisters, 1 1 May 1 863, Joseph F. Shaner Papers, VHS. 28 Habun R. Foster, Letter to Wife, 1 3 May 1 863, Wills Papers, SSCRC. 29 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic a/Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 1 5 . 3 0 Ibid., 3 1 .
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After the battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee 's army began its second northern
march. Soldiers expressed hopes in their letters that such a move might capitalize on
Union unrest concerning the war and speculated that victory in such a campaign might
convince foreign powers to intervene on their behalf. They relished taking the
opportunity to turn the tables on the North, when most of the fighting so far had taken its
toll on Southern civilians and their property. Whitfield B . Kisling wrote on the march
northwards from Pennsylvania,
we are now playing the part of the invader on the soil of the Old Keystone State . . . . The people along the line of march were literally quaking in their boots . . . their joy was unbounded at our orderly march. They freely gave us any & everything they had to eat an intimation as all that was necessary & the pots of applebutter, milk, bread &c were forthcoming.3 l
Union forces repelled Lee's army at Gettysburg on July 3 , forcing them to retreat
hurriedly back across the Potomac River to Virginia. This defeat, combined with Grant's
simultaneous conquest of Vicksburg, Mississippi, and the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana,
cast a "dark cloud" over Confederate troopS.32 In the aftermath of Lee ' s Pennsylvania
campaign, John B . Wise reflected on the time spent as invaders of the North and
emphasized how Southern character had proved superior to the Yankee destruction of
Southern property. He admitted, "some were treated badly, shamefully . . . . They had been
told by their friends of the suffering we had received and thought of course that we would
retaliate." But Wise resolved "That instead of making the women and children suffer I
would exert myself against those in arms . . . to demoralize an army.,,33 In their letters,
both Kisling and Wise accentuated the honorable spirit of the Confederate army in its
treatment of the Northern citizens. Kisling implied that the supplies they took were given
3 1 Whitfield B . Kisling, Letter to Cousin Ginnie, 25 June 1 863, Whitfield B . Kisling Papers, ESBL. 32 John B . Wise, Letter to Cousin, 18 July 1 863, Letters of Louis A . Wise, SSCL. 3 3 Ibid.
73
to them freely, in gratitude for their dignified march. Wise portrayed himself taking the
high moral ground when faced with the temptations of pillaging Yankee property.
Confederate soldiers like Kisling and Wise downplayed the military failure of the
campaign in favor of emphasizing the army' s ethical disposition-the implication being
that they chose not to stoop to the level of the Union army in extending the war to the
citizenry. Lee 's army would still shine in the eyes of the Southern home front, if not for
its unmatched military prowess then for its upstanding moral character.
As the summer campaign of 1 863 drew to a close, soldiers reflected on the events of
the last few months and prepared themselves for another difficult winter. After a slow
start, the Union army had claimed several important victories. Northern soldiers
continued to feel concerned about the level of commitment to the war felt by the home
front, but Clement Vallandigham's defeat in the gubernatorial race in Ohio in the fall was
a promising sign of Northern rejection of Copperhead sentiment. Union soldiers' letters
home in the later months of 1 863 emphasized their recent victories and the sustained
strength of the army. They continued to write to reassure their correspondents and
themselves that the war was worth the cost in lives and finances it was exacting upon
their country. Meanwhile, the Confederate army faced difficult internal problems. The
bloody battles of the summer had left their ranks severely depleted, and the problem of
desertion escalated as men became increasingly desperate to return to their homes. While
the soldiers who remained were still committed to the cause and to their duty to the
Confederate nation, the thinning ranks were difficult to ignore and took a severe toll on
army morale. Confederates continued to reach out to their friends and families through
74
letters, but this means of contact with home was not always adequate to support them in
times of crisis.
Union soldier Newton Fox called the October gubernatorial election in Ohio "one of
the greatest battles for the Union" and remarked that without the hope of foreign
intervention, the Rebels' "main stay must have been in hoping the north would elect
Govs. who would be opposed to the administration and thro[w] all the obsticles in thier
power in the way of the President of the United States.,,34 Fox's letter reinforced the idea
that in 1 863 the Union was fighting both against Confederate Rebels and against
Northern traitors to the Union cause. He suggested that, after the military victories of the
summer and after the public repudiation of Vallandigham in the election, the Union was
on track to triumph over both types of opposition. Fox predicted that the downfall of
Vallandigham was the precursor to the subordination of the Confederate States to Union
military forces. He expressed this opinion with confidence in his letter in an effort to
persuade both himself and his correspondent that Copperhead sentiment had abated in the
North in favor of support for the vigorous Union army. Another Northern soldier, E.W.
Thompson, wrote in December for a similar purpose. He informed a female friend after
volunteering, "My enlisting was something new to me as well as to you. Suffice to say I
did enlist and that is my answer to the charge of being a copperhead.,,35 Thompson' s
letter demonstrates how joining the army was still a symbol of fulfilling one ' s duty and of
confirming one's personal honor, even after the war was called into question in certain
circles in the North. His letter shows how the values of the antebellum United States had
been preserved this far into the war-a man was still judged by the extent to which his
34 Newton Fox, Letter to Father, 18 October 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 35 E.W. Thompson, Letter to Annie, 23 December 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
75
actions reflected his sense of duty, honor, and courage. Whether or not Thompson wanted
to be a soldier, he enlisted to verify his dedication to such values and to disprove
accusations that he was a coward or a traitor. His letter was a testament to this
commitment.
Even as such values continued to be shared between North civilians and the Union
army, other considerations had changed the moral perspectives of soldiers. The year had
been the testing ground for black troops. They proved themselves admirably in battle, and
many of their white comrades in arms had come to respect them. Julius Swain, a
lieutenant in the Signal Corps, was one such man. He wrote to a friend that he admired
the black Union soldier who "is willing to fight for a Constitution that has always cursed
him and loaded him with wrongs . . . . " But, as Swain noticed, these changing values were
not universal in the army or throughout the Northern home front. He found that "the life
& rights of the negro are lightly esteemed by all after one year in the army" and found
"the horror[ s] depicted by Ms. Stowe rivalled by the treatment of the great army of
Freedom.,,36 Such a statement shows that while Union soldiers had undergone substantial
value shifts concerning the treatment of slaves, they still had a long way to go before
accepting the equality of African Americans. Men like Swain could not necessarily
profess their views openly within the army, so they used private letters to relate their new
values to sympathizing civilian correspondents.
Whereas Union soldiers expressed faith in their cause after a successful summer on
the battlefield and felt renewed confidence in home front support, in the last months of
1 863 Confederate soldiers reached out to their family and friends with unquenchable
anxieties about the course the war would take. They manifested their anxieties on paper.
36 Julius Swain, Letter to Frank, 1 8 October 1 863, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB . .
76
When the ability to communicate with home was interrupted, these anxieties were
amplified-letters home were they only means they had to broadcast their voices to a
wider world. When they were not heard, they felt worthless. Virginian Charles A. Wills
wrote to his wife, "I have got out of heart, when I put my letter in the office there was a
man there that told me that the rats would eate the letter . . . it may [be] the rats has eat[ en]
all my letters and you not received one from me yet. . . . ,,37 The delusional tone of Wills' s
letter shows how acutely he felt powerlessness when he was unable to carry on a postal
conversation with his wife. His failure to receive letters from her indicated that the letters
he had written previously were futile attempts to communicate. Wills had lost his
mooring to home, and he felt frantically adrift without it.
Whereas at first it had been difficult for men to process and express their reactions to
the violence and death they witnessed in the army, by this point in the war letters had
become an acceptable outlet for emotional responses to such topics. Confederate soldier
Whitfield Kisling wrote to his cousin on October 27 of his feelings of loneliness, "first
one then another of my oId chums either die, or get married til I am getting to be solitary
and alone like Roderick Dhue the last of his clan.,,38 Kisling concluded, "I will have to
follow their example and do either one or the other. The army presents an excellant field
for the former but a very poor one for the latter. ,,39 Before the war, death had been a
foreign and abstract idea for these young men, but by 1 863 it had become a very real
occurrence that leered at them every day. It was difficult for men like Kisling to remain
engaged with their duties and values when they saw the lives of comrades slipping away
37 Charles A. Wills, Letter to Wife, 30 July 1 863 , Wills Papers, SSCL. 38 Roderick Dim is a character in Sir Walter Scott's narrative poem The Lady of the Lake, first published in 1 8 1 0. He led the highland clans in the war between the Scots, but he was the last member of the Alpine Clan. In the poem, Dim dies in battle. 39 Whitfield B. Kisling, Letter to Cousin Ginnie, 27 October 1 863, Whitfield B. Kisl ing Letters, ESBL.
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all around them. And perhaps even more horrifying was the idea that even if they
survived the war, soldiers may have already outlived the opportunity for them to lead
happy, fruitful lives. Virginian William Francis Brand reflected on his brother' s death,
I never new what it was to have a brother shot down in battle before . . . . The time allotted to us hear below is short indeed. If we stretch out our hands, we may almost touch the portals which terminate the path of our mortal pilgrimage. If we listen with attention we seem to hear the labour of him who is engaged in diging our graves.40
For Brand as well, death was an all-too-present reality. In his letter, he processed the loss
of his brother in battle and also contemplated his own mortality. The toll the war had
taken on the lives of young Southern men was impossible to overlook, and this was no
more obvious to anyone than to the men who were dying alone and far from home.
Soldiers turned to letters as a means of voicing their fears to the loved ones who would be
most affected by their deaths, preparing themselves and their correspondents for the
possibility that the letters they wrote could be their last.
The troubles faced by Union and Confederate soldiers in 1 863 would only intensify in
the next year of the war. Southern troops struggled to balance their vision of the war as an
ideal manifestation of antebellum values with the gritty reality that was plagued by death,
disease, and desertion. And for the North, the war to preserve the integrity of the Union
and the Constitution had become a war of reform of the antebellum values of both
soldiers and civilians. Men on both sides continued to be grateful for the connection to
loved ones that letters provided, and they increasingly used letter writing strategically for
political and personal ends. Whereas in 1 86 1 and 1 862 soldiers had mainly used letters to
40 William Francis Brand, Letter to Amanda Armentrout, 2 November 1 863, Will iam Francis Brand Letters, SSCL.
78
track the transformations the war had brought about in their lives, by 1 863 they
recognized the power inherent in letters as a unifYing force between home and battlefield.
They continued to use epistolary means to process their emotions and experiences, but
they also relied on letters to memorialize their words and opinions at times when they felt
as if their identity would be obscured by the war. As they became accustomed to the
epistolary medium and to their new identities, soldiers gained a sense of self-awareness in
composing their letters.
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80
Chapter Four Resisting Disillusionment: Letters Home in 1864
By 1 864, Union and Confederate soldiers had become accustomed to the harsh
realities of war and had given up certain aspects of their individuality to accept the
discipline of army life . Gerald Linderman calls this process disillusionment, arguing that
the common soldier felt that he was "less an actor in war than an object caught in a
process moving in ways that would inexorably encompass his own disaster." } In many
cases this was true-soldiers in 1 864 often seem to have felt devastated by but also
emotionally removed from the experiences they described in their letters. Linderman also
argues that important aspects of disillusionment were soldiers' intensifying feelings of
isolation from the civilian population and resentment towards the home front.2 Soldiers
undoubtedly underwent a significant process of emotional hardening over the course of
the war, and this process appears to have peaked in 1 864 during General Ulysses S.
Grant' s bloody Overland campaign followed by the trench warfare at the siege of
Petersburg, Virginia. Men increasingly identified as soldiers, even though they generally
had no formal military training before the war. And the idealistic patriotism cradled so
fondly by both sides at the begilming of the war was continually thwarted, as more and
more lives were lost with little sign of progress towards peace.
Such sentiments are widely evident in soldiers' letters, but even as men adapted to
their military identities in the most brutal months of the war, they also used letters to
remain connected to their civilian lives. Through this bond, men were able to avoid
feeling subsumed by their disillusiomnent. Instead of allowing themselves to feel
1 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience a/Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1 987), 244-245 . 2 Ibid., 2 1 6.
8 1
isolated, they consciously made use of letters to cultivate relationships with family
members and friends. There is very little evidence of detachment or animosity directed
towards correspondents, and the primary objective of most soldiers' letters was to
mediate the physical and emotional separation of writer and recipient. Therefore, even as
men became hardened by their experiences in the army, contrary to Linderman' s
argument, they still retained deep connections to their homes in 1 864.
During this year, soldiers on both sides faced greater challenges than in any previous
stage of the war. Union combatants continued to feel that they were fighting on two
fronts-the Presidential election loomed later in the year as a referendum on the war
while the Confederate troops continued to prove themselves difficult opponents. Many
Union men had initially resisted being labeled soldiers, insisting that the arms they
wielded were temporary measures to protect the United States and their antebellum ways
of life . After almost four years of war, they needed the time they spent serving in the
army to be worth something-for their hardships and casualties to add up to a redeeming
victory. Northern soldiers expressed these feelings in their letters home. They continued
to nurture the connections they had struggled to maintain up until this point, and they
hoped that their descriptions of on-the-ground experiences might elicit sustained support
for the war from the civilian population.
Confederate soldiers felt the same way-they wanted their sacrifices to pay off in
independence for the Confederate States . They, too, looked to the Northern election as a
referendum on the war. They speculated that the enemy might be undermined enough by
internal divisions for the Union war effort to collapse, leaving the South free to claim
victory. Even as they felt disheartened by short rations, thinning ranks, and
82
uncomfortable conditions in camp and dreaded battle, Southern troops remained devoted
to the Confederate cause. They held onto the belief that giving into the Union would
place their homes and livelihoods in greater jeopardy than continuing to fight. Soldiers
manifested this dedication in letters home, in which they continued to proclaim faith in
their mission in spite of their many hardships they withstood and the war-weariness they
felt.
In the early months of 1 864, the prospect of total war affected Union and Confederate
soldiers' value structures, both in terms of the objects of their respective causes and with
regards to their perceptions of themselves. Letters continued to play the general role of
mediating emotions and experience between the battlefield and the home front. Writing
and receiving letters to be central to soldiers' lives in camp, and letter writing was still an
activity through which soldiers processed their thoughts and feelings. Soldiers continued
to value letters as their only means of regular interaction with loved ones, and, faced with
another destructive, bloody year, they treasured this form of communication and feared
its disruption even more. Men recognized letters a means of compressing space and time
to "converse" with family and friends as if they were physically present at home.
Correspondence acted as a force of normalcy that mediated the chaos of war. Letters
provided soldiers with access, or at least the perception of access, to the home front and
the attention of the people there. In early 1 864, soldiers were more aware than ever
before of the therapeutic and expressive qualities of letters and used them consciously to
alleviate feelings of frustration, fear, despair, and confusion.
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By 1 864, the object of the war had already shifted from sustaining the Union as it was
before the secession of the Southern states to improving the Union by eradicating the
institution of slavery. Many Union men explained the challenges they faced as crucial to
this process of redemption. In January, Chester Taylor wrote,
[T]he old Union will come out stronger Brighter & more to be loved for this fiery trial she is now passing through than ever before. She will be a free asylum for the oppressed of all nations under the sun Black as well as white and may God grant that . . . you & I even Old Grand Mother live to hear the last clank of the last chain on the last slave in the Union. Then shall we be a free people indeed. The more I see of the workings of the accursed institution and all its degrading influence to the white race the worse I hate it. 3
For soldiers like Taylor, the war had developed from a contest to subdue the seceded
states into a necessary purging of national sins. Slavery had always been inextricably tied
up in the divisions between Northern and Southern states, but at the beginning of the war
its importance was downplayed in favor of reuniting the Union as it had been before the
eruption of armed conflict. The shift in attitudes demonstrated by Taylor' s letter in 1 864
illustrates how the conflict of 1 86 1 had become a total war that would transform the
nation. While in 1 86 1 Union men like Taylor saw themselves as civilians taking up arms
to defend their values, by 1 864 they had embraced their roles as soldiers who would bring
about far-reaching reform. They used letters as a means of pledging their commitment to
total war, and to convince family members of the legitimacy of the transformation of the
Union cause.
The lack of home front support for the war was perceived as a greater threat by Union
troops in 1 864 than ever before. Soldiers continued to feel that they did an unfair share of
the fighting for their country, while other men languished at home. In letters, Union men
3 Chester Taylor, Letter to "respected friends," 1 7 January 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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continued to contrast their values of honor, courage, and upholding their duty to their
country to those who refused to enlist and might be targeted by conscription. Lemuel
Mathews wrote about an acquaintance who remained at home, "I would like to know
what he thinks of the draft I wonder if he isent trembeling in his boots . . . . I hope the draft
will come, on the account of brin[gJing out some of these cowardly fellows . . . . " On the
other hand, Mathews wished a draft would not be necessary, proposing, "What a glorious
name it would be to have in history that Illinois did not have to draft eny of her men, to
help to put down the rebelion.,,4 Before the war, values of duty, honor, and courage were
central to masculine identity. As the war progressed, soldiers increasingly associated
these values with men who participated in the war, and used their antitheses-neglect of
duty, dishonor, and cowardice-to contrast themselves with men who avoided military
service. They purposefully used letters to propagate this revised value structure, hoping to
garner recognition for their efforts in the war.
In early 1 864, Confederate servicemen also responded to the policy of total war by
using letters to assert the integrity of their cause to correspondents behind the lines. They
dreaded the hard fighting of the upcoming summer campaign, but they remained devoted
to the cause of Southern independence and hoped for a swift and victorious conclusion to
the war. They lauded the Confederacy and condemned the Union and Lincoln in their
letters in order to emphasize the unity and justice of the Southern cause. As Union
soldiers increasingly called for the abolition of slavery, Confederate troops reacted
against this policy. Alabama infantryman Joseph D. Stapp wrote in March of 1 864, "I am
willing to bear any hardships if we can only whip the Yanks and gain our independence,
4 Lemuel Mathews, Letter to Angie, 1 March 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
85
and live independent of old Abe and his negro sympathizers.,,5 Confederate men no
longer portrayed the war as only a struggle for Southern political independence-it was
now also blatantly about preserving the institution of slavery. This revelation led to an
escalation of violence against blacks-especially black Union troops. Virginian Clayton
Coleman recorded that during a raid at Plymouth, Virginia, Confederate forces took about
three thousand prisoners "amongst them a good many negroes," but he also noted, "our
men did not take any negroes with arms, but killed them all.,,6 Confederate soldiers were
incensed by black troops. They viewed them as participants in an insulting violation of
what they considered to be the natural social order, and, indeed, engaged in servile
insurrection. In their letters, they framed the North and the South in contrasting terms that
highlighted the upstanding moral character of the Confederacy in opposition to Union
depravity. Philip D. Stephenson described the disposition of the Confederate army in a
letter to his sister,
The southern army presents the surprising spectacle of an immense course of men of all nations nearly, of all classes of society, of all characters mixing harmoniously and orderly together, and as a whole preserving a tone of morality never before seen in any army of the globe . . . . Indeed the army is not considered a receptacle and distributer of evil. On the contrary I really believe it has saved the characters of many a young man.?
Stephenson depicted the Confederate army as the epitome of social order and morality.
Its mission was to defend the South from the inversion of these systems.
Like their Union counterparts, Confederate troops contrasted their commitment to
serving their nation with the deficiency of those who shirked their duty. While Union
men focused on the division of values between volunteer soldiers and draft-dodging
5 Joseph D. Stapp, Letter to Mother, 6 March 1 864, Joseph D. Stapp Letters, VHS. 6 Clayton Coleman, Letter to Wife, 24 April 1 864, Clayton Coleman Letters, ESBL. 7 Philip D. Stephenson, Letter to Til l ie, 29 April 1 864, Philip D . Stephenson Letters, ESBL.
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civilians, Confederate soldiers discerned a socioeconomic partition. North Carolinian
Charles A. Wills observed during a wave of conscription, "they wont get any of the rich
they exempt all that has sixteen negroes and the poor will have the fighting to doo if they
ar fools enough to doo SO . . . . ,,8 Wills was irritated by the notion that the rich stood by
while poor Southerners fought the war for them. He reflected on the freedom of slaves in
the South and mused on his own condition, concluding, "I wish I could be set free. ,,9
Habun R. Foster, a relative of Wills, also felt that wealthy men frequently avoided
military service. He wrote to his sister, "I hope that they will call out every man . . . that
voted for secession and has bin extortioning on the poor people I want them to come and
get a taste of the war that they caused by seceding . . . . " ! O Men like Wills and Foster were
sick of the hardships of army life, and they continued to be pained by separation from
home. But writing letters provided them with a conduit through which their voices would
be heard on such issues, enabling them to feel less isolated in their plight. Virginian
Henry Wright wrote to his sister in April, "I fear we will have a greateal of hard fiting
this summer. I hope you all will not forget to remember us in your prayers at a throne of
grace for our protection and safety and that we may be faithfull to the cause which we
have espoused." ! ! Knowing that, through their written messages, soldiers asserted their
presence at home and invoked their remembrance amongst family members, Wright and
other Confederate soldiers found the will to continue fighting.
8 Charles A. Wills, Letter to Wife, 22 February 1 864, Wills Papers, SSCRC. 9 Charles A. Wills, Letter to Wife, 7 March 1 864, Wills Papers, SSCRC. 10 Habun R. Foster, Letter to Sister, 27 March 1 864, Wills Papers, SSCRC. 1 1 Henry Wright, Letter to S ister, 20 April 1 864, Civil War: Confederate Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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As the summer campaign commenced, Union soldiers had high hopes that General
Ulysses S . Grant, in his new role as commander of the Union armies, would succeed in
his efforts to crush Lee 's Army of Northern Virginia and take the Confederate capital at
Richmond. Grant 's formidable reputation as the conqueror of Vicksburg preceded him,
and Union troops rallied around him with hopes for his success in Virginia where former
Union generals had failed. One Union soldier wrote, "It looks as if thay [the Army of the
Potomac] was going to try and do something this summer." 12 Grant instituted a "total
war" military strategy during the summer of 1 864, which resulted in his bloody and
relentless Overland campaign. The dramatic loss of life in the Overland battles struck at
the mental resilience of many soldiers on both sides. By the end of June, with no end to
fighting in sight, many men-at-arms expressed their disheartenment. Confederate soldier
Louis A. Wise told his mother, "1 never was so sick and tired of any thing in my life as I
am of this war. . . . If peace were declared I hardly think we could believe it at first. My
live previous to the war seems but a dream.,, 1 3 The horrors they had witnessed caused
men like Wise to feel isolated from home to a certain degree. But even when they could
not verbalize their experiences, letters helped them to reach across the chasms of death
and grief to access the values of the home front to ameliorate their misery.
The emotional toll the Overland battles took on Union soldiers is evident from the
stark accounts they gave in letters home. One man wrote during the thirteen-day Battle of
Spotsylvania Court House,
We are in front of the Johnnies talking to them with powder and lead . . . . We have been fighting for seven days . . . . It i s a perfect grave yard in this part of the country we are walking over dead men's bones all the time . . . .
1 2 S .B . Wait, Letter to Cousin Lucy, 27 April 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 1 3 Louis A. Wise, Letter to Mother, 27 June 1 864, Letters of Louis A. Wise, SSCL.
88
There is no chance for a fellow to get lonesome out here they keep him a . h 14 movmg to muc .
But although Union soldiers in Virginia saw the bloodiest fighting yet in numerous
battles in May and June, they were encouraged by Grant's determination, and they
harnessed this inspiration in their letters to convince family and friends of the imminent
success of the Union cause. Illinois soldier Homer A. Plimpton wrote to his aunt and
uncle,
Everything here points for Richmond that nest of traitors must fall : that is the feeling of the Armies here. Both sides are fighting with desperation; for both understand that the crisis is at hand . . . . The destruction of human life that is now going on is perfectly awful. You at home cannot realize it as we do in the field. We can well be called a nation of mourners. But notwithstanding the heavy losses our armies have sustained . . . they feel confident of ultimate success. 1 5
As Plimpton suggested, Union soldiers were torn between being struck by the scale of
bloodshed they witnessed and daring to hope that they felt momentum building towards
victory. Men expressed the tension they felt in their letters-they regretted the losses the
army had suffered, but these losses would not be futile if they succeeded in the end.
The building suspense around the Presidential election in the North contributed to this
tension, and in their epistles, soldiers often associated claims of impending victory with
the reelection of Lincoln. In the same letter, Plimpton declared, "I hope the Buck-eye
State will roll up a big majority for the father of the emancipation proclamation. If he is
reelected & I believe he will be, it will do as much towards ending this rebellion as the
capture of Richmond would.,, 1 6 Another Union soldier wrote, " [A] ll I can hear 4 soldiers
1 4 Thomas Study, Letter to Julia Casay, 19 May 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 1 5 Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 1 1 June 1 864, Civil War: Plimpton Letters, CLRB. 16 Ibid.
89
out of 5 are going to for old Abe . . . . Every good loyal man [should] vote for him.,, 1 7 In
such statements, Union soldiers equated victory in the war to victory for Lincoln,
persuading their correspondents that a vote for Lincoln supported ultimate Union success.
Just as they fulfilled their duty to their country by taking up arms, soldiers felt that
civilians were obligated to show support for the war through political channels.
The Confederate army concluded the Overland campaign with sparse and battered
ranks. The only solace they could take from the battlefield was that both sides suffered
severe casualties-in such battles there were no sweeping victories. William Harris
Clayton wrote during the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, "For ten days the battle has
been raging. I have never seen the like before in my life. I have seen more dead men in
one days, than I ever saw before . . . . " 1 8 After the battle was over he told his mother, "I am
still in the land of the living. I never thought that I would experience what I have in the
last two weeks. I have seen death in its most horrid shape.,, 1 9 Like their Union opponents,
Confederate soldiers struggled to convey in words the sights they witnessed in battle, and
their letters became a means of dealing with these experiences. Perhaps even more
difficult to express in writing were the mixed emotions men felt when they were
wounded in combat. William B . Calfee wrote on June 24,
Dear Father I take my pen in hand to write you a few lines to let you know that I have met with a very sad fate since I saw or heard from you last I was severely wound [ ed] on the 22nd in the right arm and also had it amputated the same day . . . I think I am getting along very well . . . a man will not be worth much with his right arm off. . . . 20
17 Unsigned - Union Soldier, Letter to Sister & Nieces, 25 June 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 1 8 William Harris Clayton, Letter to Mother, 14 May 1 864, William Harris Clayton Letters, VHS. 1 9 William Harris Clayton, Letter to Mother, 2 1 May 1 864, Will iam Harris Clayton Letters, VHS. 20 William B . Calfee, Letter to Father, 24 June 1 864, Calfee Papers, SSCRC.
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Calfee was both horrified by his injury and grateful to be able to return home with his
life. He reverted to formal letter writing conventions to convey this news to his father-
the letter provided a culturally regulated means of relaying information when emotions
were too complicated for soldiers to put into their own words.
Faced with superior numbers and fierce tactics, Confederate soldiers continued to
emphasize the potency of Southern moral fiber and to contrast it to Northern cowardice
and depravity. After the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Ethelbert Fairfax described
the death of a wounded friend to his mother, "I don't think I ever witnessed such an
exhibition of fortitude and christian resignation as he showed. Although so far from home
. . . and his early friends no words of complaint escaped his lips. He wrote a beautiful letter
to his father soon after he rec' d his wound. ,,2 1 The character of Yankee soldiers stood in
direct opposition to this noble man. Joseph Shaner wrote during the Battle of
Spotsylvania Court House, "Oh how hard it is to think of having our best men butchered
up by a set of drunkards as they are they say the[y] have to make them drunk before they
can get them to charge our men . . . . ,,22 Being drunk in battle was a distinct sign of
cowardice of which many Confederate men accused their foes. Joseph Stapp wrote, "We
have been fighting old beast-buttlers, thieves, and give them a good whiping . . . . They
were all drunk . . . . "23 When soldiers could not proclaim victory in battle in their letters,
they boasted of the moral strength of Southerners and the weakness of character of their
opponents to reassure themselves and their correspondents that their cause was not lost.
21 Ethelbert Fairfax, Letter to Ma, 1 5 May 1 864, Fairfax Family Papers, LVA. Ethelbert Fairfax was the brother of Randolph Fairfax, several letters of whom are cited previously in this study. The friend Fairfax refers to is James R. Montgomery, and the letter he mentions is preserved at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. For a discussion of this letter, see Drew Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 1 7. 22 Joseph F. Shaner, Letter to S isters, 1 7 May 1 864, Joseph F. Shaner Papers, VHS. 23 Joseph D. Stapp, Letter to Mother, 3 1 May 1 864, Joseph D. Stapp Papers, VHS.
91
They believed that every Confederate death was a "Good Death" accomplished with
masculine honor and patriotic duty that would be repaid by Providence with future
blessings.
In the aftermath of the bloody Overland battles, Grant and the Army of the Potomac
crossed the James River and began the nine-month siege at Petersburg, Virginia, against
Lee 's Army that would ultimately result in the capture of Richmond. The siege at
Petersburg was long, drawn out, trench warfare. Conditions for soldiers on both sides
were rarely comfortable and often miserable. Long periods of inactivity punctuated by
bursts of artillery fire kept soldiers on edge-they were listless while always anticipating
a fight. To alleviate their boredom, men wrote letters home at every opportunity. As one
Union soldier remarked in July, "the onley thing that trubles us much now is the wont of
paper and posteg starmps to pass a way the dreary hours these worm days wrighting to
-IT ].
d ,,24 our .L lr len s . . . .
Even after the bloody spnng, the men of Grant' s army expressed faith in his
leadership in their letters. Due to the upcommg Presidential election, they were
increasingly anxious to ensure support from behind the lines, and they felt that Grant' s
attack on Petersburg was the swiftest means to bring about a victorious end to the war.
Edwin Aldritt told his parents, "general grant is the man that is goeinge to nock the
Confadracy in to a co[c]ked hat in the corse of a year. . . . ,,25 G.S. Westlake declared, "The
people at home that has never seen the army has not the least idea of the machine that
24 Edwin Aldritt, Letter to Parents, 2 1 July 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 25 Ibid.
92
Uncle Same is running. They would be perfectly amazed . . . . "26 Union writers were eager
to emphasize the growing weakness of the enemy. Aldritt reported that Rebel deserters
crossed their lines "averay day in small numbers fore and five at a time . . . . "27 Another
man conjectured, "their army must be reduced very low during this heavy campaign &
where are they to recruit their army. their haversacks must be getting nearly empty-
where are they to fill it. ,,28 Showing a strong face in their letters home reassured both
soldiers' correspondents and the writers themselves that the hardships and losses of the
spring and summer brought the Union ever closer to triumphing over the Confederacy.
Much of the need for Union soldiers to encourage the intended recipients of their
letters sprung from fears of the influence of Peace Democrats in the North over the war
and over the results of the election. Aldritt wrote,
Some I supose are at home woundring why general grant dont take riclm10nd if i wose thare I culd tell them why becorse young stought able b[ 0 ]d[ied] man lay at home eather coper hads ore courds . . . i wish hould Abram lincon would draft averay Coper had in the north . . . ?9
Men were vocal about their political opinions in letters. The Presidential election shaped
their future and the future of the Union. A victory for the Peace Democrats under their
nominee, former Union General George McClellan, threatened to end the war
prematurely, compromising Union values for a negotiated peace. After sacrificing so
much and seeing their comrades struck down in battle, this was not a prospect that many
Union men were willing to accept. Soldiers used letters as a means of actively
campaigning for their chosen side. Homer A. Plimpton wrote,
26 G.S. Westlake, Letter to Wife, Children, & Friends, 29 September 1 864, Civi l War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 27 Edwin Aldritt, Letter to Parents, 21 July 1 864. 28 T.K., Letter to Brother Cal, 4 August 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 29 Edwin Aldritt, Letter to Parents, 21 July 1 864.
93
In regard to the "political" question now before the people this army stands firmly by the Administration candidate . . . . To be a McClellan man here is considered to be in exact harmony with our enemies over the line, for we frequently here them cheering for little Mac.3o
Another Union man told his mother, "i suppose that you think [if] little mac is elected we
will have peace it will be [ a] verry poor compromise for the nation that he will make.
C .S .A. will have the whole thing their own way . . . . ,,3 1 Both writers asserted their military
authority in their political manifestoes. They felt that their opinions were privileged by
their experiences of the war-they had committed their lives to the Union cause and were
unwilling to accept a compromise. Through letters, soldiers consciously navigated the
space between their civilian and military identities in order to win over the sentiments of
the home front.
As the summer of 1 864 dragged on, Lee 's army suffered from thinning ranks
caused by battle casualties, disease, and desertion. The siege of Petersburg truly tested
soldiers' commitment to the Confederate cause, and many men wrote home expressing
acute homesickness and desperation to escape from the war. The idle time men spent in
the trenches at Petersburg was especially discouraging-surrounded by death,
Confederate soldiers could not help but contemplate their own fates. Virginian Andrew
Barksdale reflected on the awful scale of death he had witnessed writing, "Oh, it is too
awful to think of today a man may be in purfect health and maby to morrow this time all
that is seen of him is his name cut on a piece of plank stuck up at the head of his grave . . .
this you see i s the soldiers path . . . . "32 But letter writing was also a way for men to escape
from the realities of war that surrounded them to reconnect with the internal values that
30 Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 1 6 September 1 864, Plimpton Letters, CLRB. 3 1 Y. Blanchard, Letter to Mother, 30 October 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 32 Andrew Sydnor Barksdale, Letter to Sister Omis, 1 August 1 864, Andrew Sydnor Barksdale Papers, ESBL.
94
shaped their actions. In spite of their hardships and their desire for the war to end, men
continued to express faith in their cause. For some Confederates, dishonor was a more
horrifying prospect than death. In the same letter cited above Barksdale wrote,
Suppose the North tell us if we come back into the Union every state should have its rights . . . this would be a great temptation and I am afraid we would go back but if my vote could keep us out, I would forever give it. No I say never go back into the Union . . . they would again commence their deep schemes to get us bound both hand and foot. . . . 33
Men like Barksdale thirsted for Southern independence, but the horrifying prospect of
succumbing to Union subjugation acted as an even stronger motivation. Their letters
demonstrated their unceasing dedication to upholding Southern honor.
Confederate soldiers, like their Union counterparts, looked to the Northern
Presidential election as a determinant of the course of the war. They saw the political
divisions within the North as signs of weakness, in contrast to the unified support for the
war they perceived in the Confederacy. Virginian Abner Dawson Ford sagely told his
wife, "the onley chance for us to get peace is for the people at the North to fight among
them selves . . . . "34 Mississippian William B . Wall wrote, "If Lincoln be reelected, we may
all (every able bodied man) prepare for an unending strife . . . . By this course both north &
south will bee effectually ruined . . . . If McClellan be elected I think the war will end.,,35
Confederate soldiers clung to the election as a tentative point of hope in the midst of the
bitter challenges their army faced. The speculations they made in letters served as much
to brighten their own outlooks as they did to bolster morale behind the lines.
33 Ibid. 34 Abner Dawson Ford, Letter to Wife, 30 October 1 864, Abner Dawson Ford Papers, VI-IS. 35 William B . Wall, Letter to Wife, 9 September 1 864, Civi l War: Confederate Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
95
On November 8, 1 864, Abraham Lincoln was reelected as President of the United
States, ensuring that the Union would pursue the war to its bitter end. For the morale of
Union soldiers at Petersburg, the results of the election were equivalent to a triumph in
battle. Homer Plimpton called it "the great bloodless contest . . . when ballots instead of
bullets were employed . . . . "36 At last, felt Union soldiers, the Copperhead threat was
crushed permanently. For Confederates, victory now rested upon the strength of their
army, not upon Northern weaknesses caused by political divisions. Historian Gary
Gallagher argues that Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia functioned as the
fundamental source of Confederate national strength throughout the war. 37 This was
especially true now that Lee 's army was the sole obstruction standing between the Union
army and the Confederate capital at Richmond.
Faith in the home front was restored to the Union ranks after the election, and soldiers
wrote home in celebration. They promised loved ones that the outcome determined Union
victory. Homer Plimpton told his aunt and uncle,
[W]e were not surprised . . . . We expected it. For we could not believe that our friends at home had so far forgotten their best interests and the rights and interests due to their children and their children's children, as to unite in the support of a man whose only recommendation to public notice is his ability to accomplish nothing . . . . Your decision . . . that the blood [of] our brave volunteers, which has crimsoned so many battle fields, has not been spilt in vain, comes to us like words of encouragement, inspiring us anew for the work that is before US.38
Plimpton's feeling that Lincoln's reelection validated the sacrifices of life made by
soldiers was almost unanimous in the Union ranks. Augustine Sackett told his sister about
one man who voted for McClellan,
36 Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 1 9 November 1 864, Plimpton Letters, CLRB. 3 7 See Gary W. Gallagher, This Confederate War (Cambridge, Mass . : Harvard University Press, 1 997), 63 . 38 Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 1 9 November 1 864.
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He had ample opportunity to know better and I cannot forgive him for that deed . . . . I cannot depend on such men, he struck a blow which might have made useless all of the sacrifices made for the preservation of the country in the last 3 years. As it was it injured no one so much as himself.39
Federal soldiers imagined no greater insult to the men who had given up their lives to
defend their country than for the Union to forfeit victory in favor of compromise. They
took pride in their duty to their nation, and even as they grew tired of war, they yearned
to fulfill that responsibility. The war had drawn out divisions between the values of some
Northern civilians and soldiers, but the reelection of Lincoln proved that the country had
succeeded in maintaining unity in the face of disaster. The personal letters that facilitated
communication between the battlefield and the home front played a significant role in
preserving this harmony.
For Confederate soldiers, the reelection of Lincoln and the close quarters of the two
sides at Petersburg renewed animosity towards the enemy, particularly towards Union
black troops. Southern men, met with black opponents, approached battle with a new
savagery. This resulted in racial atrocities committed in the field. In a letter to his uncle,
Confederate soldier Edmund Fitzgerald Stone described his regiment's experiences with
black troops,
their sable coulered troops . . . so enraged our boys that the officers could hardly keep them form fireing on them . . . at eight oclock an order came for us to make ready to fire . . . in a few minutes every man was at his post with gun in hand & thumb on hammer & finger on trigger ready to pour a deadly volley into the ranks of the unsuspecting blacks hundreds of balls went whistling into the enemies ranks . . . it made me feel very bad indeed it looked very much like cole murder . . . . 40
39 Augustine Sackett, Letter to Sister, 26 November 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 40 Edmund F itzgerald Stone, Letter to Uncle, 7 December 1 864, Edmund Fitzgerald Stone Letter, VI-IS . Stone' s description bears resemblance to the violence directed at USCT at the battle of the Crater at Petersburg on July 30, 1 864. The date of Stone's letter, however, suggests that he is referring to another instance of Confederate hostilities escalating out of control when faced with Union black troops.
97
Violence and death had become a part of soldiers' daily routines, and as a result, they
became hardened or disillusioned. But as Stone 's letter illustrates, men were still not
blind to these atrocities. Stone was able to recognize and come to terms with the horrific
nature of the events he witnessed when he formatted his thoughts as a written
conversation with a trusted family member. While the conditions at Petersburg were
miserable and Lee's army' s prospects of victory slim, Confederate soldiers found the
strength to press on by cultivating their connections to the home front in letters. They
were sustained by the thoughts of home that encouraged them to continue to cherish
values of duty, honor, and courage.
By the end of 1 864, most of the men in the trenches at Petersburg were hardened
veterans. Soldiers' expectations of living to see a peaceful end to the war dulled as they
witnessed their comrades succumbing to wounds and disease. As Virginian John 1.
Lancaster wryly noted, "If this war lasts much longer we will all become so used to
hardships and exposure that a more civilized life would be injurious to our health.,,4 1 The
transition to army life had initially been difficult for men on both sides to accept, but the
intervening time and experiences had molded civilians into soldiers. Nevertheless, men
were not divorced from their civilian identities and values. They were able to maintain
relationships to family and friends and even to participate in family and community life
through the letters they wrote home. These epistles helped them to process their
experiences in the army in terms of their civilian values, closing the gap between
disillusionment and patriotism. They enabled soldiers to continue to feel connected to
their home front identities. And although men like Lancaster felt that army life had
4 1 John J . Lancaster, Letter to Cousin, 2 1 November 1 864, Waring Family Papers, SSCRC.
98
changed them permanently and feared they might never live to see peace, they always
hoped above all else that they would be able to return home and take up the vestiges of
the civilian lives they had left behind them. In the meantime, they used letters as
substitutes or placeholders for personal relationships and clung to home front support to
sustain them through the end of the war. Lancaster concluded his letter with a sentiment
felt strongly by soldiers on both sides, " [W]e are in the right, and in right there is
might.,,42
42 Ibid.
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1 00
Chapter Five
Still Civilian Soldiers: Letters Home in 1865
As the fifth calendar year of the American Civil War dawned in January 1 865, both
armies felt trepidation as they awaited the spring campaign. On February 5 Confederate
soldier John S . Gwyn wrote from the trenches of Petersburg,
We in the army want peace pray for peace, but it must be a final peace one giving us Independence-no Unionists or reconstructionists here-We are not willing that the blood of the thousands of our brave boys should have been poured out like water in vain-We are not willing to sacrifice one iota of the principles for which we have been contending during the past four years-True we suffer and have endured much-but we will suffer the direst extremity and endure the greatest calamities-aye extermination itself rather than be the suppliant for peace upon any terms other than those which guarantee to us and our heir forever, the principles handed down to us by our forefathers-an independent government being ourselves the makers of our own laws and guardians of our own liberties . i
In this letter, Gwyn expressed sentiments common to soldiers on both sides of the
conflict. Although in 1 865 homesickness and war-weariness pervaded the ranks, soldiers
still called upon patriotic ideologies in their letters to affirm their commitment to fighting
the war. Soldiers continued to write letters as a way to reconcile their military
experiences with civilian values.
The period from January to July of 1 865 was fraught with peaks and valleys of
morale for troops on both sides. And the last months of the war often lie at the crux of
historiographical debates responding to questions of soldiers' motivations, the
sustainment of morale, and the potential for rift between the values of the military and
civilian populations. Some historians, including Reid Mitchell and Gerald Linderman,
argue that the experience of the common soldier in 1 865 entailed a psychological shift
away from identification with civilian ideologies to a new, disillusioned military
I John S. Gwyn, Letter to wife, 3 February 1 865, Civil War: Confederate Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
1 0 1
identity.2 In contrast, James McPherson and Chandra Manning have argued that war-
weariness was coupled with importance of ideological values to soldiers' motivations
until the end of the war and that this reflected a continued bond, not a rift, with civilian
values.3 Although the soldiers who fought this war became hardened by the trials and
deprivations they faced, they clung mightily to their civilian identities that were defined
by such values as duty, honor, and courage. Writing letters to friends and family
sustained these identities by enabling soldiers to engage in dialogues with families and
communities about their experiences and emotions.
Union troops faced hardships in the first months of 1 865, but many anticipated the
spring campaign with a cautious optimism, motivated by Generals William T. Sherman
and Philip Sheridan's recent successes and an influx of Confederate deserters to their
lines. In their letters they impressed their optimism upon those at home, whom they
feared might have lingering Copperhead sentiments . The nature of the letter as an indirect
form of communication encouraged them to voice their assurance of an impending
victory more vehemently on paper than they might have in person. On February 1 3 , Bob
Thompson wrote, using dramatic language, "I feel very confident that the war is about to
explode evaporate and banish into a double trigerd whilrwind . . . Sherman must give them
one or two more good cleaning outs and then I think they will come to their milk. ,,4 After
hearing of the fall of Charleston, George Glidewell described cheering in the ranks and
2 See Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1 988), 56; Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 239, 244-245. 3 See James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 997); Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War, (New York: Vintage Books, 2007). 4 Bob Thompson, Letter to Joseph Nevitt, 13 February 1 865, Civi l War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
1 02
remarked, "I guess the Rebs wil loose all their main pleses after while and themselves to
iff they dont loock out."s Espousals of faith in victory gave Union soldiers the confidence
to set a timeframe for their homecoming-in Thompson' s case "in time to help husk corn
next fall"-a prospect that would have seemed all but impossible during the brutal
Overland campaign of the preceding summer.6
Morale lifted in the Union army during late March 1 865 as more Confederate
deserters poured across the lines at Petersburg and flags of truce began appearing. On
March 2 1 , James K.P. Smith wrote near Petersburg, "i think this will be the place that
will strike the Death blow upon the rebelion We all feel satesfied that April and May will
settle this war," and on April 1 Arlin Forte described Lee 's final attack at Petersburg, "the
rebels ar getting licked all along our lines . . . they cant run the Devils must starv or come
out into an open field to fight us & they have not got the men to do this so they must cave
in.,,7 These men wrote on the brink of victory, sharing their elevated hopes with family
members. They may have curbed themselves from voicing such hopes aloud for fear that
they might be foiled, but letters provided a private space for the contemplation of peace.
When Union soldiers wrote home, they reinforced their bonds with the home front
and their own civilian identities. They wrote with tentative plans for after the war, after
their victory had been achieved. The act of inscribing such plans to paper brought them
one step closer to realization as each envelope that journeyed from the soldier' s hand to
the hand of his addressee acted as a metonym for the soldier himself.
5 George Glidewell, 26 February 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB. 6 Bob Thompson, Letter to Joseph Nevitt, 13 February 1 865. 7 James K.P. Smith, Letter to Father & Mother, 21 March 1 865, Civi l War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB; Arlin Forte, Letter to Maggie, 1 Apri l 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
1 03
In the first weeks of 1 865, circumstances became evermore grim for Lee 's Army of
Northern Virginia as reports poured in of General Sherman's march of destruction in the
Carolinas. Confederates in the trenches of Petersburg were cold, hungry, and homesick,
and their letters reflected an atmosphere of pessimism and war-weariness. But even as the
men suffered, many espoused continuing support of their nationalistic cause in their
letters and even expressed hope for a peace that would bring Confederate independence.
Reid Mitchell claims that these men represented a minority who "suffered from what can
only be termed insane Confederate optimism," and Gerald Linderman argues that the
disillusionment soldiers experienced forced them to "abandon many of the war' s initial
tenets."g But the sentiments contained in soldiers' letters support James McPherson' s
claim that for many men on both sides-mainly veterans of the war who had enlisted
during the early years-"the values of duty and honor remained a crucial component of
their sustaining motivation to the end.,,9
On January 5 , Virginian Claude o. Forbes wrote,
the soalgers is not in as good spirits as they wer last spring though things may change be four the spring and I hope they will for the better I was verry close to the yankeys yesterday . . . I hope they will get in a notion to stop fighting before next spring as I am tired of this place now and would like to get home once more. 1 0
Forbes' s letter shows how a complex array of emotions influenced Confederate morale at
this point. While he recognized his own homesickness and the generally low spirits in the
ranks, the only foreseeable scenario for peace and his return home was the eventual
submission of Union forces. Forbes retained his sense of Confederate honor and duty-as
long as there were Yankees to be fought, he would be there fighting them. For men like
8 Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 1 9 1 ; L inderman, Embattled Courage, 240. 9 McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 1 68 . 1 0 Claude O. Forbes, Letter to Lizzie, 5 January 1 865, Forbes Letters, SSCRC.
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Forbes, letters served as outlets for feelings of homesickness and distress, but they also
provided reassurance that Confederate independence was not a lost cause.
Philip D. Stephenson, a private in the 1 3th Arkansas Infantry, expressed similar
sentiments more vehemently in his letter of February 5 . He wrote that the present rumors
of peace were "but idle dreams" because
We can not have peace but on our own terms, and we will have them if the whole south is made a howling desert first. We are in the right and God defends the right. We have leaders true and tried . . . It will take years to accomplish our end probably but Oh! it is well worth the struggle. With this fact staring us in the face our people are firm and self reliant; and nobly do they brave death for Posterity' s sake. I I
In a similar vein, William Francis Brand wrote on February 1 4,
our hopes for peace are all crushed thare is nothing left us now but fight untill our broad foes shall nuckle & acknowledge our independance. If we should surrender now to our enimis we would I believe be one of the most downtrodden Nations in the World, so we had better continue our strugle untill we have all found a horne in our mother earth. 12
Forbes, Stephenson, and Brand expressed what John Gwyn called "the sentiments of the
body of our soldiery"-motivations of Southern honor, duty, and the repudiation of
subjugation that were central to the civilian value structure. 1 3 Letter writing provided a
means for these men to access these values during times of desperation when they felt
otherwise distanced from them.
In early March, Confederate soldiers continued to convey optimism and faith in their
cause in the letters they sent from the front. On March 3 , Robert L. Moore eagerly
anticipated the spring campaign in the trenches of Petersburg, "as soon as the weather
will admit of it we will attack Grant & Sherman both and I feel full confident that they
1 1 Philip D. Stephenson, Letter to Till ie, 5 February 1 865, Stephenson Letters, ESBL. 1 2 William Francis Brand, Letter to Kate, 14 February 1 865, Wil l iam Francis Brand Letters, SSCL. 13 John S . Gwyn, Letter to wife, 3 February 1 865 .
1 05
will get the worst thrashing they ever had." I 4 In response to the low spirits and desertion
he had witnessed, Moore wrote, "I hope all is gone that wants to go we can do verry well
without them and all the rest that wants to go they are no count to us we will just have
them to feed." I 5 On March 5 , William U. Morris chided a friend for his demoralized
attitude, "I do not see any good and sufficient reason, for such utter and hopeless despair.
In the days of the revolution, things were in a worse condition than they are at present,
yet we succeeded in acheiving our independence so we can in the 1 9th century." I 6 Such
devotion to Revolutionary War-era principles remained constant over the course of the
war for both Union and Confederate soldiers. As Morris's letter illustrates, even during
the weeks leading up to Lee 's surrender, the invocation of the Revolution in a letter was a
cultural common ground almost synonymous with referencing a Biblical text. 1 7
Confederate troops and civilians saw themselves as emulating their Revolutionary
forebears' rebellion against British oppression as a justly motivated David battling
subjugation to the Goliath of the Union.
Other Confederate soldiers were not so confident in their army' s ability to deliver a
crushing blow to Union forces, but their letters still exhibited determined commitment to
the cause of Southern independence. Joseph D. Stapp commented on the controversial
measure of enlisting black troops in the Confederate army, "I suppose we will soon have
a force of 300,000 Negroe troops in the field & it will take all the whites for officers (llih
ha, ha) I expect to be Brigadier General yet but any thing rather than subjugation." I 8
Although Stapp mocked the effectiveness of this measure, he, like many other
14 Robert L. Moore, Letter to Ma, 3 March 1 865, Robert L. Moore Papers, VHS. 1 5 Ibid. 1 6William U . Morris, Letter to Friend, 5 March 1 865, Josiah Staunton Moore Papers, VHS. 17 Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 1 . 1 8 Joseph D. Stapp, Letter to Mother, 4 March 1 865, Joseph D. Stapp Letters, VHS.
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Confederate troops, was willing to accept it if it held off Union defeat and the subsequent
humiliating oppression he predicted would follow. 1 9
With our present knowledge of Confederate soldiers' suffering during these months
and the impending surrender of Lee 's army, it is tempting to judge these men as deluded
or deceptive-painting a false picture of the current state of affairs to reassure family
members at home. Delusion and deception were certainly part of the equation in at least
some Confederates' letters from early 1 865, but in order to grasp their motivations more
fully, it is worth considering the context of such letters and the purpose they served for
the men who wrote them. When troops wrote letters home, they were reminded of their
civilian identities and gave up their rough soldierly ways. For a short time, soldiers were
given a respite from the daily violence, deprivations, or simple boredom they faced and
returned, at least in imagination, to their family hearths. In trying to transfer feelings from
mind to paper that were often indescribable and incomprehensible to those who had never
set foot on a battlefield, soldiers walked a fine line of exaggerating to get certain points
across, while downplaying others to prevent unnecessary worry. Although when
Stephenson' s conviction that he would fight for years until the South becomes "a howling
desert" seems to be an exaggeration to the modern reader, we must keep in mind the
contemporary culture that was replete with self-conscious literary conventions of
emotionally dramatic language. Stephenson was writing in the common cultural terms
understood by him and shared by those to whom he addressed his letters. Through these
terms, he mediated the space between his experiences as a soldier and his background of
civilian values.
1 9 Chandra Manning argues that most Confederate troops were not wil l ing to accept black enlistment and that this destroyed their wil l to fight. See Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, 2 1 8 .
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The war came to a close as spring arrived in late March and April of 1 865, and both
armies experienced more shifting of morale. Confederates were by no means resigned to
their defeat, and the Union army' s victory was marred by the assassination of President
Lincoln. Reid Mitchell points out that throughout the war soldiers on both sides expected
a climactic ending in which "the nation would be redeemed at one stroke . . . the enemy
would retire after one final charge . . . the side with courage and righteousness would
triumph after it had manifested its superiority on the field of battle.,,2o Lee 's Army of
Northern Virginia essentially ground to a halt at Appomattox in early April, failing to
fulfill the expectations of grandeur both sides held for the end of the war. Soldiers' letters
show men struggling to express the conflicted emotions they felt as the conclusion of the
war defied their expectations.
During the first days of April, Petersburg fell and the Confederates evacuated
Richmond, leaving the Rebel capital at the mercy of the Union army. On April 8, Union
soldier J.T. Bert wrote to his wife describing the fall of Richmond, unsettled by the sight
of "women & children driven out dores or are afraid to stay to home.,,2 1 Bert and his
Union comrades were the victors, but few of them were able to return to their homes
immediately after Lee' s surrender. Therefore, the stream of communication between the
Union army and Northern home front was kept up through the tumultuous month of
April. Very soon, victory celebrations were cut short by news of Lincoln's death, and
soldiers wrote home attempting to reconcile their great achievement with the loss of their
beloved leader.
20 Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 1 85 . 2 1 IT. Bert, Letter to wife, 7 April 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
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Two such men were John D. Reynold and Homer A. Plimpton. On April 23 , Reynold
wrote to his father from his post in New Albany, Indiana,
We have lost our noble President. We can bear it since it pleased Heaven to allow the devilish act to take place. But what have the South lost? They know too well. In any other country such an occurrence would have caused another revolution, but our country stands firmly braced and does not waver. The Government will go on as if nothing had happened, its policies will be carried out, and we shall emerge from the dark waters of rebellion and civil war, purer, stronger than ever.22
He followed this by retelling a preacher' s allegorical story of two pear trees owned by a
boy and his uncle. The uncle chooses to prune his tree, while the boy allows his to grow
wild. When a storm comes, the boy 's tree is destroyed while the uncle' s tree survives
because the pruning allowed it to grow strong roots. The preacher asked, "Where is the
heart today that does not feel its life blood turned back, and a fixed determination to
uphold this Government, and carry it safely through the storms which again seem to
spread over it?" and Reynold noted, "He is a democrat, and spoke of the unity which now
prevails among the people of the North.,,23 Reynold's letter encapsulates the belief that
was often voiced in the North that, in the words of one Union soldier, Lincoln "was too
good for Rebels and insurgents . . . God required a man of more severity in meting out
justice to the confeds.,,24 This conviction reflected the religious fervor of much of the
Northern population, including many Union troops, during the war. If their victory over
the South was God's will, so was the assassination of Lincoln-the best explanation
being that his work for the Union was finished and that he would be rewarded for his
noble leadership in Heaven.
22 John D . Reynold, Letter to father, 23 April 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB. 23 Ibid. 24 C. Jones, Letter to Elizabeth, 8 May 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
1 09
Five days after Reynold' s letter, Homer Plimpton wrote to his aunt and uncle with a
detailed account of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, at which he was present. Plimpton
described his reaction to the news that Lee had surrendered,
The tears rushed to my eyes. My heart was too full for utterance. It was to accomplish this very result that I had left home and friends some of them forever hid from mortal sight and periled my life time and time again . . . In this surrender we saw end of this wicked rebellion and we thanked god for it. I saw Gen. Lee when he took his leave of Gen. Grant after the papers were all signed. I watched the countenance of our gallant chieftain as he came away and I shall never forget it. It was beaming with a smile of satisfaction; and as he raised his had when passing one of our sentinels who presented the proper salute I knew it was done as a mark of homage to the noble boys who had so gloriously accomplished this great work.25
Whereas Reynold focused on the impact of Lincoln's death in his letter, Plimpton, in his
physical and emotional proximity to Union victory, only briefly mentioned the
assassination. He simply noted that the soldiers "were shocked -yea horrified" to hear of
it during the march from Appomattox and claimed vengeance for the act in the name of
God. Immediately after his mention of the traumatic event, Plimpton closed his letter
with generic pleasantries and by noting, "1 have doubtless wearied your patience
already." 26 Perhaps Plimpton simply ran out of paper, but his concise treatment of such a
momentous event in the context of his otherwise verbose letter suggests that this subject
may have been still too tender to probe to articulate in writing. It is probable that many
Union soldiers felt this way when they found their victory so unexpectedly and tragically
marred.
Reynold and Plimpton both seem to have been still working through their reactions to
recent events in their lengthy, detailed letters. The act of letter writing helped these men
to process the momentous events they had witnessed and to clarify their own feelings
25 Homer A. Plimpton, Letter to Uncle & Aunt, 27 April 1 865, Plimpton Letters, CLRB. 26 Ibid.
1 1 0
about them. Letters forced men to give clear, concise explanations of what they had seen
and their reactions to it in terms that related to the values and experiences of family and
friends at home. For Plimpton, who stood witness to the surrender at Appomattox, Union
victory left him with feelings he could hardly describe. Though the war had not ended in
a spectacular climax as some soldiers anticipated, for Plimpton, the meeting between
Generals Grant and Lee was equally dramatic in that it redeemed the sacrifices he and his
comrades had made throughout the war for their country. It is clear that Plimpton wanted
to convey his experience of this moment to his aunt and uncle so that they could
participate in the Union victory-it was an occasion to be shared between soldiers and
civilians.
The grief that soldiers felt after hearing about Lincoln' s death was more difficult to
process, and as Reynold noted in his letter, it was a grief that the overwhelming majority
of the North shared. At this point in the war, however, soldiers experienced grief
differently than their civilian counterparts. In her study of death in the Civil War, Drew
Faust places the common soldier 's experience of death and grief in the context of the
Victorian concept of the "Good Death" in which the dying person' s last moments were
carefully witnessed and interpreted in order to understand the state of their soul as it
would be judged by God.27 In the context of the chaotic front and the wholesale slaughter
of the battlefield, the rituals associated death had to be significantly modified. The scale
of death and grief that soldiers experienced was so great that it was impossible for them
not to undergo a process of emotional hardening. Nonetheless, Faust argues that soldiers
retained as many traditions associated with death as possible, enlisting their comrades in
27 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic a/Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 9.
1 1 1
arms in the work of delivering an accurate description of their death to their family
members?8 She asserts, "Their Victorian and Christian culture offered them the resources
with which to salve these deep spiritual wounds.,,29 Lincoln's assassination, coming so
unexpectedly, represented yet another compromise of the Good Death. Some soldiers,
like Reynold, rationalized it through their Victorian-Christian lens in which all events
occurred under God's plan. They wrote their own epitaphs to the fallen President in their
letters home. Others, like Plimpton, seem to have struggled to fit this last, great aberration
into their Christian worldview and were unable to vocalize their feelings through letters .
Confederate soldiers found the end of the war traumatic . They suffered the dishonor
of defeat and then were abruptly thrust back into their civilian lives. On April 9,
Virginian Clayton Coleman wrote to his wife from Richmond describing the city ' s
evacuation,
The city came very near being entirely destroyed by fire . . . . I witnessed such scenes . . . as I hope never to see again . . . . it was indeed a melancholy sight to see people leaving their homes and families, and some trying to get of in little carts and every description of vehicle, not knowing where they were going, nor how their families were to be provided for. . . . Well ! I tell you the people of Richmond are conquered.3o
The same day that Coleman wrote, Generals Lee and Grant met at Appomattox
Courthouse to negotiate the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. The surviving
Confederate troops trickled home and for the most part their letters ceased. Distance no
longer necessitated the writing of letters. Furthermore, the dissolution of Confederate
organizations and the destruction of Southern infrastructure made mail delivery in the
South difficult for some time. Coleman's letter represents the last bastion of Confederate
28 Ibid., 1 1 . 29 Ibid., 3 1 . 30 Clayton Coleman, Letter to Wife, 9 April 1 865, Clayton Coleman Letters, ESBL.
1 1 2
soldiers' letters as the realization dawned on them that the cause for which they had
fought so vigorously had been subjugated to the Union. Even as Coleman wrote of the
tragedy of the sights he witnessed in Richmond, he began to look to the future and to
cope with the circumstances of Yankee victory. He noted that while immediately after
evacuation, "almost every store was broken into and robbed and literally sacked by men
of the worst description - negroes and white men, drunk with the liquor they got, (which
in some places ran in a stream in the gutters), -the worst mob you ever imagined of,"
upon the arrival of Union troops he was "agreably surprised by their order and
behavior.,,3 1 Coleman was by no means a Union man, but the sight of Richmond 111
flaming chaos was more fearsome than that of the gracious and organized enemy.
Letters like the one Coleman wrote provided first-hand confirmation of reports of the
defeat civilians might have read about in newspapers. The personal nature of these letters
brought the news home in a way newspapers never could. Writing down the events they
had seen also helped Coleman and other Confederate soldiers to prepare for the unknown
future. Letters like Coleman' s must have been difficult to compose. The recent events
were emotionally complicated and difficult to describe, especially when the writer had no
idea what might happen next, even in the time span it took for the letter to reach its
addressee. At the time he wrote, Coleman may have had some inclination of Lee 's
imminent surrender, but if so, he did not reveal i t explicitly. In his description Coleman
speculated on the trials the civilians of Richmond faced in leaving their homes, rather
than on his own trials in the military or those of his fellow soldiers. He witnessed their
evacuation and felt compelled to reach out to his own home and family, perhaps to
reassure himself that they were still alive and awaiting his return.
3 1 Ibid.
1 1 3
In the immediate aftermath of the war-from May to July 1 865-the fates of Civil
War soldiers remained uncertain. By the end of April, complete Union victory was
secured by the surrender of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnson to Sherman in North
Carolina. Upon hearing this news, one Union soldier wrote to his wife, "Magie you dont
know how proud I feel to think that I have don my Duty to my Country & my Children
hereafter . . . my Sufferings have not been nothing compaired to my joy at this moment.,,32
Meanwhile, the Confederate armies in the East disassembled and troops readjusted to life
at horne-although for many, horne had been as much affected by the experience of war
as they had been.
Some Union soldiers remained in the South after the war' s conclusion, unsure what
the United States government had in store for them. One soldier wrote in j est, "I have no
idea of what they intend to do with us whether they will hang or drown us to get rid of
us. ,,33 While some regiments were granted their discharges almost immediately, others
were put to work doing some initial and necessary rebuilding of Southern infrastructure
or overseeing governmental transition as they awaited, as one man put it, "that eventful
moment that translates transposes & transforms us into Citizen and tells us gentlemen
you may go horne if you wish to ie if you have any horne to go to.,,34
Most Union soldiers, however anxious they were to return horne, retained the same
sense of patriotic duty and honor that had motivated them at the start of the war and had
sustained them through their trials. There is no denying that many troops had left horne as
naive civilians and returned as hardened veterans, but this transformation did not
32 Fenton, Letter to Magie, 28 April 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB. 33 G.L. Momson, Letter to S .P . Hathaway, 1 1 May 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 34 Fred J. Wright, Letter to sister Julia, 1 5 July 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers ' Letters, CLRB.
1 1 4
necessitate the stripping away of patriotic ideals nor the loss of civilian identity. On May
1 0, Union soldier George Muzzey wrote to his mother,
I want to come home and get out of the army as soon as possible . I think I have spent the best portion of my life in the army and I think I have done my duty to my country and now the fighting being virtualy over I can receive my discharge and come home with honor to myself and to yoU . . . . 35
Most men, including Muzzey, still viewed their time spent as soldiers as the patriotic duty
of citizens, not as a permanent, identity-changing career. They were eager to return to
their families, communities, and usual pastimes, even if their experiences in the war made
this difficult. The majority of Union soldiers felt that now that the rebellious South was
subdued, justice was best left in the capable hands of the government, and that they, as
civilian soldiers, should be allowed to return to the prosperous lives promised to them by
their Revolutionary forefathers. For some, even the congratulatory pageantry of the
Grand Review of the Union armies in Washington, D.C. , in May was superfluous when it
interfered with the discharge of troops. On May 25, J.W. Darly wrote from a hospital in
Washington outraged by the spectacle,
[I] dont care to see soldiers march along the street to amuse a few foolish folks that could not make it convenient to go to the front to see them. I have seen them march along when they looked sober, when they knew they were going where they were all needed, and many would never come out. And now to march those boys around for a show . . . . 36
Soldiers like Darly would tolerate no more military involvement than was absolutely
necessary to win the war, after which they desired nothing more than to return to their
civilian lives.
Confederate troops were no longer hindered by their commitment to military service,
and most rushed home to reunite with their families and friends. But for some, the
35 George Muzzey, Letter to Mother, 1 0 May 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 36 1.W. Darly, Letter to Burton, 25 May 1 865, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
1 1 5
experience of homecoming was particularly strange. Edgar L. Tschiffely was a member
of the 1 5t Maryland C.S .A. regiment, and had, therefore, disassociated himself from the
border state' s Union allegiance. Upon returning to his home state after the war,
Tschiffely and his comrades were "met by about 20 Yanks who informed us that we
could not remain at home unless we took the oath, this we had made up our mind to do,
so in we went and swallowed the Elepent.,,37 Adding insult to injury, the Union soldiers
further demanded that they give up "all government property," except for their uniforms,
of which Tschiffely said they were "allowed to war them and are yet if we choose.,,38
Tschiffely found his home state much changed from when he left it:
While the people have not suffered for any of the necessaries of life they have in other respects suffered. . . . what our souldiers did not take, the Yankees did . . . . it is but little better now . . . the people have all learned to wait on themselves as they will not hire the negroes who are very worthless. We depend altogether on white labor which is very scarce.39
Tschiffely was displeased by these conditions and by Northern control of the Maryland
government and state constitution, but he took pride in the sentiments of the general
population, noting, "since we came back the girls wount look at any but those that have
been in the confederate army. ,,40 It is evident from his letter that when Tschiffely found
his home state dramatically changed by the war, he blamed much of that change on what
he saw as Yankee oppression-the imposition of emancipation and new government. He
maintained a sense of Southern patriotism, and he felt united in his views with the
civilian population.
37 Edgar L. Tschiffely, Letter to "my dear friends," 8 July 1 865, Civil War: Confederate Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid.
1 1 6
Tschiffely addressed this letter to friends in Virginia who would have sided with the
South during the war. As he gave his account of his homecoming, Tschiffely was
asserting his continued allegiance to the Confederacy. Though he could no longer wield a
gun against the Yankees, he could still wield a pen against them in letters addressed to
those whom he knew shared his views. Immediately after the war, ex-Confederates
recognized the power that their written accounts could have in the writing of the history
of the war, and almost immediately began crafting a romanticized legacy for the Southern
struggle against Yankee oppression-a legacy that evolved into the Lost Cause tradition
that still burns in certain historical circles today. Letters like Tschiffely ' s were the first
step towards congealing this united identity within the hearts of ex-Confederate soldiers
and civilians alike.
Soldiers were changed men when they returned to their homes after the war. Most
were incapable of forgetting their experiences in battle and in miserable army camps, and
their memories of war influenced their civilian lives. They had witnessed violence on a
greater scale than they could have possibly imagined, and they had suffered through
miserable weather, gnawing hunger, and disease for four long years. These experiences
had hardened them, but soldiers were almost universally eager to return to their families
and communities. They were anxious to resume the relationships and livelihoods they
had left behind when they took up arms for their causes. Although distance, time, and
experience had separated them from loved ones, the exchange of letters had mediated
their absence. Epistolary contact facilitated the continuation of past relationships and
even the development of new ones. At the end of the war, soldiers still turned to letters as
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a means of participating in domestic life. The connection to home that letters provided
sustained soldiers by encouraging them to develop a sense of self-awareness. They were
not blind to the ways in which the war changed them. Through letter writing, they were
able to navigate these changes by participating in internal dialogues that helped them to
process their experiences and remain connected to civilian values.
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Conclusion
What can the matter be, Why don' t you write? Has fancy taken you Off in her flight?
Are you down in the depths, Where the niads dream, Or above yon clouds, Where the star-lights gleam?
Have you sailed across Some oblivious sea, That you have forgotten To write to me?
Have you been drinking Of Lethe's stream, And remember old friends As only a dream?
If thus you've wandered In fancy' s ear, From luminous world To roving star.
Oh haste away from Lethe's stream, Recross oblivions sea, Write to your friends of all you 've seen, But write-first write to me. 1 864 1
This poem was printed on a sheet of stationery used by Union soldier L.W. Carpenter
to reprimand his Cousin Ella. The text of his letter reads :
1 dont know wether 1 had better write or not but I guess I will you are not very punctual in writing that is the onely fault that I have to find in you 1
guess you have furgoten that you ever had a Cousin Lafe havent you.2
Carpenter' s humble letter, prefaced by the flowery poem, reveals how highly he valued
the contact letters provided him with loved ones at home. This was true for most men
who served in the Civil War. Mississippi soldier John Coleman told his cousin, "My
letters from home may truly be compared to 'Angels visits, ' 'few and far between,' one
does occasionally drop in on me, and though soiled by time and travel, it is dearly prized
for its contents, and the sake of those who wrote it.,,3 Another Confederate soldier told
his wife, "I showed [s]ome of the boys you[r] letters and it made them cry like children.,,4
Such reactions demonstrate how letters could encapsulate the essence of home-beyond
the text on the page, the message was a physical sign of care and support from the family
and friends that soldiers had left behind when they enlisted.
1 L.W. Carpenter, Letter to Cousin Ella, 5 April 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB. 2 Ibid. 3 John Coleman, Letter to Cousin Annie, 26 March 1 863, E.L. & John Coleman Letters, ESBL. 4 Howell S . Nelson, Letter to Wife, 1 1 May 1 862, Howell S . Nelson Letters, ESBL.
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The majority of Civil War soldiers were volunteers-average men who gave up their
lives to fight for a cause that was bigger than they were. In order to function as successful
military forces, these civilian soldiers had to put aside their Victorian-American cultural
values or stretch them to fit new circumstances. Soldiers' experiences of the brutal war
tested the ideologies that they adhered to when they first entered the fray. Ideas like the
protective merits of individual courage were disproven time and again as thousands of
brave men were killed by enemy fire.5 The volunteers became hardened to the slaughter
of battle and accustomed to the disciplined life of a soldier. They had to adjust certain
beliefs accordingly. But Civil War combatants never lost sight of the civilian aspect of
their identities. Much of the war took place amongst civilians, in cornfields and beside
farmhouses, and through letters soldiers were able to maintain an unprecedented level of
contact with family members and friends. In the act of letter writing, soldiers were unable
to forget for whom and for what they were fighting. Even when patriotic ideologies
looked the most lackluster from the perspective of the front, soldiers' constant interaction
with the culture in which they were molded kept these values alive in their hearts as
motivation to keep fighting through the end of the war.
Men did not only treasure the receipt of letters, but also found satisfaction in writing
them. One Union soldier wrote to a friend, "I feel lonely to-night and though you may say
if that is the case I had best not write you I cannot deny myself the pleasure of a little
conversation with you . . . . I have no other way at hand, in which to pass the evening so
pleasantly, as this.,,6 As this letter suggests, Soldiers perceived the act of formulating a
5 Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1 987), 65-68. 6 Unsigned - Union Soldier, Letter to "dear dear Friend," 18 April 1 864, Civil War: Union Soldiers' Letters, CLRB.
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letter as a private conversation, albeit one protracted by distance and time and occurring
within their imaginations. Esther Milne suggests in her study of epistolary presence that
letters are especially significant as an inventive and interpretive exercise : "The letter
writer performs a version of self and the recipient reads that performance.,,7 When
soldiers sent letters home, they reflected on their experiences and framed them in a way
that they suspected would appeal to their correspondents' interpretations. Effective letter
writers acquired a strong sense of narrative self-awareness that helped them to convey
their messages clearly and articulately. This skill developed naturally as men became
more experienced as both soldiers and letter writers and began to exploit letters
consciously as a substitute for face-to-face conversation.
The study of letters and letter writing is still in its infancy, although it is becoming
increasingly popular as more and more historians recognize the massive cultural
influences literacy, printing, and epistolarity have had on societies as we see them today .
This is especially true as we are in the midst of a hastening shift from printed to digital
media and the handwritten letter begins to emerge as a relic of the past. We do not use
letters and letter writing in the same ways that Civil War soldiers did, or even as we did
twenty years ago. We rarely face such dramatic and permanent separation, nor are we
usually forced to imagine the voices and faces of our loved ones. Soldiers today, while
their communication with home is limited to a certain degree, seldom wait weeks or
months for an envelope to arrive bearing their name. More often, they log into email
accounts where they can send and receive messages almost instantaneously . The means
and speed at which we exchange information has changed just as drastically as cultural
values have, and in some ways one type of change has influenced the other.
7 Esther Milne, Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (New York: Routledge, 20 I 0), 9.
1 2 1
As I embarked on this project, I was dazzled by the sheer volume of correspondence
produced by Civil War soldiers and by the scale of its preservation in museums, archives,
and private collections. As I grew closer to my sources, I understood that they have not
only a historical value to modern historians with regards to their content, but they also
possessed a great emotional value to their authors and recipients. These letters may have
been everyday productions, but the connections between soldiers and the home front they
represented enabled them to embody relationships. David Gerber writes, "relationships
are not merely maintained in personal letters; they continue to grow, with the
conventions, restraints, and opportunities presented by the letter forming a new context
for their ongoing development."g I would argue that this statement is true not only of the
bond between writers and recipients, but also of the writer' s relationship with him or
herself. Over the entire span of the war, soldiers used letter writing both as a means of
escape from army life to contact friends and family from whom they were separated, but
also as a field for reflection in which they reconciled their experiences in the army with
their civilian values. Through letters, men were able to embody the idea of the civilian
soldier, adjusting to the trials of war while remaining committed to their non-military
identities .
8 David A . Gerber, Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 4 .
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