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�I rev. March 20 J 0

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 .

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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.

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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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