The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War

by Robert E. Bonner, James G. Basker (Foreword by)

Overview

They are all infantrymen; none were commissioned officers. One is a German-speaking artist whose sole record is nineteen stunning watercolors that cover a year's enlistment. Another is a free black from Syracuse, New York. Six are from slave states, one of whom was a Unionist. Drawing from the more than 60,000 documents housed in the privately held Gilder Lehrman Collection, Robert E. Bonner has movingly reconstructed the experiences of sixteen Civil War soldiers, using their own accounts to knit together a ground-level view of the entire conflict. The immediacy of diaries and the intimacy of letters to loved ones accompany the humor of an anonymous cartoonist from Massachusetts, the vivid paintings of Private Henry Berckhoff.

All reproduced for the first time in The Soldier's Pen, the documents and images that Bonner weaves together, providing context and explanation as required, powerfully re-create the day-to-day lives of the soldiers who fought and died for Union and Confederacy. Not since the 2000 publication of Robert Sneden's paintings and papers in Eye of the Storm has a collection of original Civil War documents so evocatively captured the war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781429924122
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/30/2007
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, Robert E. Bonner is the author of two previous books on the Civil War. He lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Read an Excerpt

ONE

The Tender Lines of War

Before joining the army late in 1862, James K. Magie helped edit a small midwestern newspaper, where he made his living by circulating printed words to a largely anonymous readership. Not long after he became a soldier in the Seventy-eighth Illinois Infantry, Magie assumed another role in the wartime transit of information. The following letter explained how the thirty-six-year-old private had gained this enviable position, which he would use to assure the safe and speedy exchange of intimately inscribed sentiments between Union volunteers and loved ones back at home.

Franklin, Tenn

Feb. 17, 1863

Dear Wife—

I have a few minutes in which to write and I improve the opportunity. We have had no mail since we left Louisville. There has been so much dissatisfaction about Mr. Painter as Postmaster that he was removed this morning, and I was appointed in his place. In less than an hour I was promoted to the office of Brigade Postmaster. This gives me the privilege of going out or coming in just as I please. I am also furnished a horse, and I have the privilege of selling papers, envelopes, letter, paper, etc. by which I can make from 30 to 50 dollars per month. I shall go to Nashville tomorrow and bring out our mail. We are clear behind hand in news. . . .

As soon as I receive our mail and hear from you I shall write you again. I hope you received the $40 all right. . . .

Good bye my love.

Your affectionate James

Over the next several weeks Magie made the most of his new assignment. Besides picking up and delivering his brigade’s mail from Nashville, he delivered special parcels, completed minor errands, purchased newspapers, and brought back pens, pencils, stamps, and envelopes, which he sold to soldiers. Serving these needs gratified Magie, who bragged to his wife about his growing popularity with the troops. Yet helping men stay in better touch with loved ones had a more practical side, as the following letter confided.

Franklin, Tenn

March 1, 1863

Dear Wife,

. . . I am fearful all the time that some untoward event will happen to break in upon my present arrangements. If I can hold my position, and have the monopoly of the express and newspaper business for 100 days I can send you home $1000, which will buy us a snug little home. You need not tell the soldiers families how much I am making, for I don’t let them (the soldiers) know that I am making so much, for it might create jealousness or the like. The feeling so far is high in my favor. They get their mail regularly rain or shine. They have found out that when the train fails I don’t fail bringing the mail. The man who was trying to run me opposition, I think I will get rid of. The orders are very stringent against passing the lines. I have passes to go through the lines at any time. I think this will rule out all others. . . .

I have so little time that I cannot write you a long letter today. I start for Nashville in a few moments. . . . I will write oftener to make up for short letters.

Your devoted

James

Hillory Shifflet was the sort of soldier likely to resent Magie’s calculation of personal profit. These two middle-aged midwesterners fought in the same armies, survived several of the same campaigns, and regularly corresponded with wives and children hundreds of miles away. Yet in other ways Magie, the Republican newspaperman, and Shifflet, a struggling farmer from southern Ohio, seemed to come from entirely different worlds. The following note suggests that the thirty-eight-year-old Shifflet had not been a regular letter writer prior to his enlistment. The emotions it expressed and the news it provided explained why he took up his pen every few weeks and, like thousands of others, drew sustenance from the written messages Magie and others helped to reach their destination.

January, 1862

Camp Wood, Heart County, Ky

Dear Wife,

I take my pen in hand today to let you no that I am well at presant and hope these few lines will find you and the children all well. I recev your letter last night which gave me greate satisfaction to her from you and that you was all well, but when the mail came I was vary much out of heart for I thot tha was no letter for me but when george open his letter I found yourn and I soon red it and the was a few tears fell from my eys. I cod not help it for I was so glad to her that you was doing as well as you was and I hope that you will still do well tell I come home and I hope that wonte be long. our union men have gain another greate victory on cumberland river. Tha kild a greate meny of the sesesh* than that is the place that Cit is and Ian Hardin, all the baker boys. The regiment tha was in had to dismount from thare horses and fight on foot but I dont no whether enny of them was kild or not. I look for a letter from them tomorrow. . . .

We had inspection this morning. Our company look better than enny of the rest. We had on our dress coats. I hav got a vary nise dress coat and look as well as you ever seede me. I shave ever week and put on a clean shirt. I wash a shirt ever weeke. I have jest bin to the doctors and got vaxinated in my left arm George and Amos and Tom Westerman and Thompson Ennis and Tom Smith you sed you wanted me to send you my likeness. I will send it to you when I git pade of and tha captain told me that we wood git pade nex Tuesday or Wednesday and when I git hit I will send you twenty dollars. I will git twenty six dollars but will have to keepe some for I will neade sum. I neede a good deal but you neade it worse than I do so if I git it you may look for it nex Saterday. So you must do the best you can if I live to git home I will have rite smart of money unuf to give us a start to do well.

*This colloquial term for "secessionist" identified all Confederate enemies of the Union.

I want yo to right me as soon as you git this letter. . . . If you hante got no money to git postedge stamps I will sende you one that will do you till you git some. hit is a harde matter to git stamps her but I will send you one that will do you to send me a letter as soon as yo git this one. I want to her from you ever weeke hit dos me a heepe a good to her from you. . . .

I rote daddy a letter last weeke. I look for a letter in a day or two and I rote one to Irvin and expect to git one poty soon and then I will her all about the battle that Cit was in and I will right to you all about it. . . . When you Right, Direct your letter to the first Regiment of Ohio Volunteers, Company C, Captain Thurston, Camp Wood, Heart County, Ky.

Hillory Shifflet to Mima Shifflet

Over the course of his enlistment, Shifflet sent and received a steady stream of such letters. Like most soldiers, he continually asked for even more frequent communication. His last note, written three days before he was killed at the battle of Missionary Ridge, expressed love to his wife, "Mima," listed items that would make army life more comfortable, and suggested how these might make a safe journey through the mail.

Chattanooga, Tennessee

November 22nd [1863]

Dear wife,

I with Pleasure take my Pencil in hand to let you no that I am well at this time and I dwo hope when you git these few lines tha will find you all well and harty. I hante had no answer from my last letter I Sent you with ten dollars in it but I thout I wood right you a few lines and send you ten moore in it and I want you to right me a answer as soon as you git this if you git it a tall, for I will be uneasy about it tell I her and Mima, I want you to send me a par of yourn gloves for I cant git enny her and the best way to send it is to do it up in a nusepaper and put it in a invelope and direct it jest like you do your letters. And send some thread for I cant git a bit to sow my Buttons on my pants when tha Brak of. If you send them, send them soon as you can for I nead them mity Bad Mima. I cant right much this time. I am two or three letters ahead of you ennyhow. I hante no nuse only we ar looking for another fight ever minit. If you git this money I want you to git little Jonny a par of Boots and all of the rest what tha neade and donte forgit yourself. So Mima, let me no soon about it so I will close these few lines So farwell my Dear wife untell Death.

Hillory Shifflet

Both Magie and Shifflet entrusted their most personal expressions and prized possessions to the large, standardized structures of the U.S. mail. They did so without much thought, since they had little reason to question the Federal postal service, which by 1860 had become the country’s largest bureaucracy and one of the most effective communications systems in the world. Without such a reliable, rapid, and relatively cheap network for transmission, far fewer soldiers would have regularly committed their thoughts and experiences to paper. The Civil War would have drawn the same sort of written commentary from enlisted men as had appeared during the American Revolution and the Mexican War, when poor army mail service made diaries more reliable than letter writing. The fact remains, however, that the Civil War became a written war primarily because a regular exchange of letters allowed millions of personal stories to be recorded and preserved for posterity.

In fact, most soldier correspondence contained details that testified to the ease of sending and receiving mail. Given the high expectations about rapid and safe delivery, correspondents went out of their way to record those minor disruptions and inconveniences that resulted from the lack of stamps, the difficult conditions of camp, or the delay in sending money or other valuable items. Charles Morey, a twenty-year-old soldier from rural Vermont, was typical in complaining about the hardship of using a barrel for a desk, even though such an inconsequential constraint scarcely kept him from writing. Like many of those young men who had volunteered in the first weeks of war, Morey began his service with a stock of patriotic stationery that sustained his regular reports of a new life of soldiering. He also had time to keep five diaries that documented each new year’s service with the Army of the Potomac, which was the largest of all the Civil War armies.

The South’s mail service initially promised to be every bit as effective as the North’s. After all, the U.S. government had implemented the same postal infrastructure on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line between 1790 and 1860. There was the same culture of correspondence in the slave South as in the free North, and Confederates’ early enthusiasm for patriotic stationery matched that of their enemies. Private Edward K. Ward, the son of a noted Memphis doctor, druggist, and slaveowner, used his earliest letters home to broadcast his support for the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis.

At the beginning of 1862 Ward sent his sister the following letter, which blamed his lapsed correspondence not on Southern postal difficulties but on his own lack of spare change. He added an equally improbable excuse that letters had worn out in his pockets before they could be mailed. His sister probably was unconvinced by these explanations and may even have suspected that Ed’s greatest concern was letting himself off the hook with those who had expected more regular army news.

Columbus [Ky.]

Jan 17 / 62

Dear Sister,

Most certainly your school is a model one where strict etiquette is preserved in all things. So that you could not consistently write until you were written too, or you have thought it was not worth the pains or you would have written before now. I have written you one or two letters, and carried them in my pocket until they wore out, waiting to borrow five cents to pay postage on it—Haller is up here and brought the only silver I have seen in two months. . . .

Figure 1. Charles Morey to his sister Mamie, August 2, 1861.

I don’t know where you are. Every time I hear from home it seems that you are there just ready to start, and I never know where to direct my letter. Now if you have not got excuses enough I will give you more next time for that is one thing my female friends say I am never without. I shall not attempt to give you the news for fear of telling you something you have already heard. I am very well with the exception of one ear which has been deaf and roaring for some time. . . .

I must stop for the police guard have ordered my light out twice and I don’t want them to again. My love to all the girls. Write soon and tell me all the news they tell me Somerville is a good place to hear Memphis news.

Your aff. brother,

Ed

Confederate troops would in time face unique challenges in keeping up correspondence with home. Federal occupation of communications routes and the surrender of key cities like Nashville and New Orleans hindered the flow of mail to and from the Rebel armies. Such failures of the official mail service often forced soldiers to find other means to transmit their news. From the very beginning, Ed Ward of Memphis had sporadically entrusted his notes to individuals traveling back and forth to the army. (The stampless envelope with the Jefferson Davis image no doubt fell into this category.) His habit became a necessity when Federal troops occupied his hometown in the spring of 1862 and blocked the official lines of communication between his family and Rebel troops.

Figure 2. Patriotic envelope sent without stamp by Edward Ward to his sister, June 20, 1861.

Worsening the situation was the provision in the 1861 Confederate Constitution that required mail service to become self-sustaining within three years. This measure effectively ended the previously large subsidy for postal service, which had been an indispensable factor in the success of the U.S. mail. Slower and more irregular service resulted almost immediately, as did the cost of using the mail. Many poorer Confederate soldiers responded by deliberately rationing their correspondence. Marion Epperly, a middle-aged Confederate private from southwestern Virginia, met these challenges by squeezing as much ink as he could on every note he composed. In one letter sent home in 1863, Epperly used a single sheet of paper (and a single ten-cent postage stamp) to convey five different notes to various members of his extended family. Regardless of the difficulties, Epperly insisted that the mail service continue, even if it meant that government officials had to resort to extraordinary means to preserve a soldier’s right to the mail. However the following letter traveled, it apparently did arrive at his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and it was among the dozens that he was able to read and to cherish when he returned home to his family after the surrender of the Confederate armies.

Camp Near Marietta, Ga

June the 29th, 1864

My Most Dear Companion,

. . . I haven’t gotten aney letter from you sins the one dated the 2nd of this month. I have written you som 4 or 5 letter in the month, but I am afeard you haven’t gotten them as the Yankees has possession of the Railrode and have burned a Grate many Bridges on the Rode. but I hope our letters will go from high Point to Floyd C.H. by Hors back I hope the Postmaster will see that our letters will go throo soon and you will get them in due time. . . .

I still remain your tru Husband til Death,

C. M. Epperly

Confederate soldiers’ frustration with the mail was worsened by the pinch of the widespread paper shortages across the South. At a time when some Southern editors were forced to issue their newspapers on wallpaper, letter writers and diarists invented new ways to record and circulate their wartime impressions. Surviving letters suggest that the initial stock of patriotic stationery ran low early in 1862 and that even basic paper and envelopes became rare. Resourceful soldiers still had a range of other materials, however. The thirty-three-year-old bachelor Jeremiah Tate, who had been a grocer in Pickensville, Alabama, prior to his enlistment, began to reuse the envelopes sent from home. He was equally inventive in converting an appointment book into stationery and even commandeering personalized letters and envelopes captured from the enemy, bearing the return address of the Twentieth Maine Volunteers.

Whatever the challenges of the mail, few soldiers were inattentive to the importance of staying in touch. Americans often insisted that the flow of information was as vital to the nation’s existence as the circulation of blood was to the fate of a living organism. Civil War letter writers similarly believed that long-distance relationships would wither if not sustained by a regular exchange of sentiment. What a letter said was important, of course, but so too was the way that its arrival expressed a basic commitment to an ongoing conversation. In this way, wartime mail was part of an evolving relationship, which writers developed over time. Such relationships influenced what sorts of observations soldiers made in their letters and how they decided what to include and what to filter out.

Excerpted from The Soldier’s Pen by Robert E. Bonner.
Copyright 2006 by Robert E. Bonner.
Published in First paperback edition, 2007 by Hill and Wang.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.

Table of Contents

Foreword     xi
The Penmen     xv
Introduction: "Glimpses of Many Things Untold"     3
The Tender Lines of War     15
Army Life and the Comforts of Home     49
Combat, Bloodshed, and the Traces of Battle     79
The Union Divided?     113
The Fading Gray     149
Bonds Broken, Bonds Restored     189
Relies of War     223
Index of Source Material from the Gilder Lehrman Collection     237
Acknowledgments     247

Editorial Reviews

For anyone interested in viewing America's traumatic Civil War from the perspective of ordinary individuals who found themselves in the Union and Confederate armies, Robert E. Bonner's The Soldier's Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War will be a very rewarding experience. This expertly edited collection of letters and drawings mailed to the families and friends of sixteen ‘typical' but quite diverse citizen–soldiers conveys a deeply human dimension to America's most dehumanizing war.” —David Brion Davis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World

“Walt Whitman once said of the Civil War that ‘The real war will never get in the books.' But the real war does get into this book, in the form of letters and diaries written by sixteen enlisted men, Union and Confederate, who tell it like it was.” —James McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom

“Robert E. Bonner has not only found some of the most riveting, impassioned, humorous, and powerful Civil War letters and journals ever written, he has brilliantly woven them together so that the overall collection reads like a first-rate work of literature. The Soldier's Pen is a masterpiece of scholarship and, without question, one of the most extraordinary anthologies of Civil War correspondence I have ever read.” —Andrew Carroll, editor of The New York Times bestselling WAR LETTERS

“Thought-provoking.” —Richard Sauers, Civil War News on Robert Bonner's Colors and Blood

“Bonner's outstanding research and analysis provide hope for those who still feel that first-rate scholarship might inform, contextualize, and transcend contemporary historically charged and emotionally passionate polemics. An outstanding work.” —Choice on Robert Bonner's Colors and Blood

“This is a fantastic accomplishment.” —Paul Christopher Anderson, American Nineteenth Century History on Robert Bonner's Colors and Blood

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