civil war letter writing assignment

How the Civil War Taught Americans the Art of Letter Writing

Soldiers and their families, sometimes barely literate, wrote to assuage fear and convey love

Christopher Hager, Zócalo Public Square

Sarepta Revis was a 17-year-old newlywed when her husband left their North Carolina home to fight in the Confederate States Army. Neither had much schooling, and writing did not come easily to them. Still, they exchanged letters with some regularity, telling each other how they were doing, expressing their love and longing. Once, after Daniel had been away for more than six months, Sarepta told him in a letter that she was “as fat as a pig.” This may not seem like the way most young women would want to describe themselves, but Daniel was very happy to hear it.

Civil War soldiers and their families had abundant causes for worry. The men were exposed to rampant disease as well as the perils of the battlefield. Women, running households without help, often faced overwork and hunger. Letters bore the burdens not just of keeping in touch and expressing affection but also of assuaging fear about loved ones’ well-being. Yet most ordinary American families, never having endured a long separation until now, had little experience writing letters to each other. Sometimes barely literate—Sarepta had to ask her older brother to put down on paper what she wanted to say to Daniel—Americans quickly had to learn the delicate art of recreating the comforts of physical presence using only the written word.

Much of the time, they did so by writing about their bodies. In hundreds of millions of letters sent between battlefield and home front, moving across the nation by horse and by rail in recent innovations called  envelopes , ordinary Americans reported the details of how they looked, what they ate, how much they weighed. Their world had been one of doing and touching rather than reading and writing, but now, by their ingenuity and resolve to hold their families together, they reshaped the culture of letter writing.

Letters were close cousins to newspapers: Only a few centuries before, in early modern England, had private letters and commercial news reporting gone separate ways (though the habit of calling journalists “correspondents” remains)—and early Americans still considered a good letter one that could “tell all the news.” Yet news was something soldiers sorely lacked. Isolated from the world beyond their regiments, awaiting orders they rarely understood, men could not satisfy their families’ yearnings for news of the war. “You can see more in the papers,” a typical soldier wrote home. Modern historians have sometimes been frustrated to find rich archives of Civil War letters that seem curiously silent on political and military affairs, but these were subjects ordinary Americans thought newspapers were covering perfectly well. What was left to them was reporting the news of their own physical selves. It may have felt a little odd at first—had Sarepta Revis gone around the house comparing herself to livestock?—but it was what families wanted, and writers found ways to oblige.

Reporting a healthy weight was one of the readiest ways to assure a distant reader you weren’t sick or malnourished. A wife as fat as a pig certainly wasn’t starving, a husband like Daniel Revis could be relieved to know, which was more important in wartime than anyone’s notions of beauty. Soldiers enjoyed the small luxury of reporting healthy weights to the folks back home in exact numbers, because they had access to scales. When regiments were encamped and relatively idle, medical staff could hold regular “sick calls,” examinations that included being weighed.

The resulting numbers made their way into hundreds, probably thousands, of letters from soldiers. Loyal Wort, a 31-year-old Ohioan in the Union Army, wrote to his wife, Susan, “i was waid the other day and waid one hundred and seventy one pounds So you See i am pretty fat.” Thomas Warrick of Alabama assured his wife, Martha, “My helth is good at this time” and, as evidence, reported, “I waide one hundred and seventy-fore pounds the last time I waide and that was the other day.” A Georgia private named Andrew White enthusiastically declared, “I way more now than I ever did in my lief I way 197 pounds.” He believed that if only he hadn’t spent an entire night out in the rain on picket duty, “I would have reached 200 pound in a Short time.” In a war that would see men’s bodies torn apart by shells and reduced almost to nothing by privation—one Union soldier lucky enough to survive the notorious Andersonville prison weighed 80 pounds at his release—numeric snapshots of the physical self acted like needles on the gauges of anxiety.

Pictorial snapshots had appeal, too, of course, and the relatively new technology of photography became tremendously popular among military families for similar reasons. Virtually all soldiers and soldiers’ wives who had the money and the opportunity got their portraits taken and exchanged them in the mail. An Iowa coupled joked that their photographs of each other were getting “all rubbed out” by too-frequent kissing. But photographs captured only a moment in the past. The back-and-forth of letters could document change.

For younger soldiers, especially, going to war meant proving themselves to be men and not boys, and they strove to picture themselves that way for their families. William Allen Clark wrote to his worried parents in Indiana, “If you was to see me, your doubts in regard to my health would certainly be dispelled. You wouldent see the same Slim, stoop shouldered, awkward, Gosling.” He weighed 12 pounds more than he had the previous summer. William Martin of South Carolina told his sister, “I am Now Larger than My Father My weight is Now 175 pounds.” He also wanted her to know “my whiskers is getin prity thick and they are two inches Long.” A young Georgian named James Mobley was engaged in a kind of competition with his friends: “I wayed 170 pounds and I now weigh 175 and if I keep on I will weigh 180 before long . . . Father wrote to me that John Reece said I weighted 170 and he said he weighed 177 he is only 2 pd larger than I am and I will get them on him if I dont get sick.”

When times were good—when fighting slowed, medical staff had time to make the rounds, and winter’s hardships had not set in—reports of good health prevailed, like the boasts of Wort, Warrick, and White. But the news was not always as good. If some men and women tried to spare their loved ones by withholding worrisome information, many did not. Ebenezer Coggin wrote home from a Richmond hospital that his weight had bottomed out at 105 pounds, although he insisted he was on the mend. Daniel Revis replied to Sarepta that, for his part, he was “as pore as a snake, we dont get anuf to eat.” (In 19th-century vernacular, the opposite of “fat,” “stout,” or “hearty” was “poor.”) It wasn’t what Sarepta wanted to hear, but one didn’t need a formal education to insist on honesty. “Dont tell me you feel better when you dont,” Betsy Blaisdell admonished her husband in December of 1864. She had received no letter from him in the previous day’s mail and worried it meant his recent illness had worsened. Forlorn in the cold of upstate New York—“I never dreaded winter before” Hiram left for war, she wrote—Betsy told him, nothing could “fill your place.” When Hiram’s letter of reassurance finally arrived, it featured his best effort at recreating his physical self: “I have just washed up all clean and nice,” he reported. “I guess if I was there I would have a kiss and it would not mess up your face much.”

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Post Office Department had been delivering about five letters per capita annually. During the war, the average soldier sent more than five times that many. People who felt little capable of long, expressive narratives about their mental and physical well-being proved all the more resourceful in approximating bodily presence. For Americans during the Civil War, embracing loved ones on paper was a hardship they could only with difficulty overcome. Most of them, no doubt, would have rather not had to resort to it. For us, their efforts created a record of something we rarely get to see: glimmers of the emotional lives of ordinary people long gone.

Martha Poteet of western North Carolina endured labor and delivery, for at least the ninth time, during her husband’s absence in 1864. When she wrote to Francis a month later, she cheerfully described the easiest postpartum recovery she ever had experienced. “I had the best time I ever had and I hav bin the stoutest ever sens I haint lay in bed in day time in two Weeks today.” Of the baby, a girl she was waiting to name until Francis came home, Martha could report no weight—scales and doctors were rare things in the Blue Ridge.

She had a better idea. She laid the baby’s hand on scrap of paper, traced a line around it, and carefully cut it out to tuck into the envelope. Some days later, in a long-besieged trench outside Petersburg, Virginia, Francis Poteet opened that envelope and held  his new daughter’s hand  in his.

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A selection of original Civil War correspondence between soldiers from the battlefields and their family members and friends on the homefront. These letters describe firsthand accounts of battle, reflections on the nature of war and its profound effect on those involved - both on those at the front lines and loved ones who remained anxiously at home. Many are love letters home to sweethearts and wives, some cautionary advice from fathers to sons, one a harrowing account of capture and escape over enemy lines; all seemingly are reflections of the same sentiment:

"The battle has been raging all day in the distance and I am unable to ascertain whether any thing has been gained or not. O how I long for this war to end. How I long for peace. How will I hail the day when I return to the bosom of my family. My Dear I hope to see you." (Samuel D. Lougheed letter to his wife Jane "Jennie" Lougheed, April 30 - May 1 1863)

The letters and original writings have been transcribed as written, with no attempt to change spelling. Many of the correspondents have ties to the Pacific Northwest, some eventually settling in Washington State.

About the Database

The Civil War Letters Collection was created with the CONTENTdm software's innovative new program, JPEG 2000, which enables materials to be displayed in a higher quality, more usable online format. This new software includes pan and zoom capabilities which allows the user to move in and out of the image and move across the image to display the details. In addition, transcriptions were provided to allow for easier interpretation of the letters. The letters and other materials in this collection were scanned using a Microtek ScanMaker 9600XL saved as TIFF files, manipulated in Adobe PhotoShop to achieve the best and clearest possible digital image and loaded into the Contentdm JPEG 2000 software and linked with descriptive metadata.

Selection, research and descriptive metadata for the Civil War Letters Collection was done by Sheri Boggs, Kristin Kinsey and Rose McLendon in 2006. The textual materials in this database are selections from various manuscript collections held in the UW Libraries Special Collections.

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Letter Writing in America

• Civil War Letters

As tensions in the United States rose to a fever pitch and civil war broke out in 1861, Union leaders began to develop ways to isolate the mutinous southern states. In addition to erecting a blockade meant to keep supplies from reaching the South, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair cut off mail service to states that had seceded. Confederate stamps were valueless in the North, and mail addressed to the Confederate states was taken to the Dead Letter Office and subsequently returned to the sender.

Letter images courtesy of Bill Proudfoot.

Suspended mail service to the South caused significant problems for the many families who were split by the country’s division. Although the purpose of stopping mail service to the South was to isolate and corner the Confederate states, some mail still managed to cross the border in what were known as “flag-of-truce” ships. When the Union began blockading southern ports, letters were often carried across the border by blockade runners or routed through foreign ports. While these methods meant that letters often took a long time to reach their intended recipient on the other side of the border, they still allowed friends and families to stay connected as their divided country raged around them.

Soldiers in the Civil War also had a difficult time sending mail to and receiving mail from their loved ones at home. While it was relatively easy for the army post to find soldiers when they were encamped for several weeks, periods of intense action saw both armies in perpetual motion. This continued shifting of location made delivering the mail a very real challenge. Families and friends persisted in writing, however, since the letters they exchanged were their only connection to their men at the front, and soldiers greedy for any reminder of home clamored for more mail. Newton Scott, a private in the Iowa Volunteers, epitomized the soldier’s need to hear from family and friends in a letter to his childhood companion Hannah Cone: “Well, Miss Han, I will tell you that I and Will has written about a dozen letters since we left home, and received but two or three letters. This is the second one that I have written to you and received no answer.” In between battles time went slowly for the soldiers, who needed the occasional word from home to know that they were not forgotten.

Scott and Hannah Cone exchanged letters throughout Scott’s four-year tenure fighting in Arkansas, he providing her with first-hand accounts of the war and she giving him the all-important images of home. Their correspondence, filled half with grim battle tales and half with fond memories and news of home, illustrates the strange condition of Americans during the Civil War. In one letter dated January 19, 1864, Scott described the hanging of a rebel spy in one paragraph and moved on to recollections of the Christmas season in the next. After commenting on Hannah’s cheery holiday, he said of the boys in the camp that there were “No roasted turkey for dinner and no visitors to see us, but we stay at our camps thinking of home and of old times, and hoping for happier days to come.” Hannah’s stalwart letters to her friend, a connection to home when he needed it the most, drew the two comrades closer over the duration of the war. They married in 1866, a year after Scott was released from service at the war’s end, and went on to raise nine children together.

Not all Civil War letter-writers had such pleasant thoughts as love of home and family on their minds. James Paxton, a Confederate soldier confined as a prisoner of war in Indiana’s Camp Morton, described the atrocities he faced there in a letter to his friend Val Giles. “New Year’s Day, 1864, was the coldest day I ever saw,” wrote Paxton. “Several [prisoners] were frozen to death; others were so injured that they fell sick, and the ‘old gray horse’ was kept busy hauling out the dead.” When several fellow prisoners, despairing of ever being released, attempted to escape, they “were caught and tied up by the thumbs to a rack, and then, stretched up on tip-toes, were left standing as long as they could bear it. This was called ‘riding Morgan’s mule’ by the prisoners.” Far from writing for pleasure or companionship, Paxton, who succeeded in being released from the camp and eventually settled in Texas, wrote this letter as a testament to the terrible things he had seen during the war.

One of the major issues of the Civil War was the continued practice of slavery in the Southern states, and some of the most moving letters of they day came from slaves or former slaves. Prominent abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass, who had been a slave in Maryland until his escape in 1838, wrote a letter to his former master Thomas Auld ten years later, and eventually published it in his abolitionist newspaper TheNorth Star. In the letter Douglass recounted the morning of his escape—“I have no words to describe to you the deep agony of soul which I experienced on that never-to-be-forgotten morning . . . . thanks be to the Most High, His grace was sufficient; my mind was made up. I embraced the golden opportunity, took the morning tide at the flood, and a free man, young, active, and strong is the result.” While ostensibly a personal letter, the publication of this missive allowed Douglass to “make use of [Auld] as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery.” His public reckoning of the abuse he suffered at Auld’s hand became a document of great power in the fight against slavery in America.

Equally moving to read are letters from slaves who escaped their condition to join the Union Army. The hope they held for the future, and their faith in the government that let them fight for their own freedom, are evident in the letters sent by those former slaves who had learned to read and write. One fugitive slave named Spotswood Rice, a Union soldier wounded in battle, wrote to his former mistress Kittey Diggs demanding the release of his children, who were still being held by the Diggs family. Rice lambasted Diggs for her treatment of his family, writing, “ . . . mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own, and you may hold on to her as long as you can but I want you to remember this one thing, that the longor you keep my Child from me the longor you will have to burn in hell . . . .” The fate of Rice and his children is not known, but his letter stands as a demand for the rights of a parent and repudiates the claim that the children of any human being could ever be another man’s property.

While becoming a Union soldier allowed free blacks and escaped slaves to fight for their freedom, black soldiers still had to face unequal treatment in the army. They were paid less for the same service given by white soldiers, they were often denied the same clothing given to whites, and doctors were frequently reluctant to treat them when they were sick or wounded. This last fact resulted in the rate of death by disease being twice as high among black soldiers as it was among the rest of the army. Hannah Johnson, mother of a black soldier in the 54 th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, wrote to President Lincoln and entreated him to secure equal conditions for black members of the Union Army. Encouraging the President to adopt her cause, Johnson wrote, “Will you see that the colored men fighting now, are fairly treated? You ought to do this, and do it at once, not let the thing run along . . . . We poor oppressed ones, appeal to you, and ask fair play.” Johnson’s letter acted as a petition to her president, the man who officially freed all American slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, and encouraged him to keep working for the equality of every citizen.

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In early 2023 Shenandoah University's McCormick Civil War Institute (MCWI) began a joint effort with William Griffing to place the thousands of Civil War letters he transcribed over the decades in a central location. This site, which will continue to grow as additional transcriptions are added by MCWI's team, will also contain transcriptions of the letters from MCWI's collections that have not been published as either stand-alone volumes or in our annual Journal of the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era.

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Featured Letters

Peter J. Peterson

John Peterson (b. ca. 1821) was a Catawba County, North Carolina farmer and gunsmith. At the time of the 1860 Federal Census, Peterson and his wife, Hannah (b. ca. 1820) were living in the Hickory Tavern neighborhood of Catawba County with their eight children. His son, Peter J. Peterson (b. ca. 1846), enlisted in the 28th North Carolina Infantry on March 1, 1864 and died of wounds on May 20, 1864. John Peterson joined the 28th North Carolina on October 28, 1864. He was captured at Petersburg on April 2, 1865 and confined at Point Lookout, Maryland before being released on June 16, 1865. There are letters from John and Hannah Peterson and from Peter J. Peterson, as well as from relatives serving in the 22nd North Carolina Infantry.

Joseph Wright

Joseph W. Wright (b. ca. 1834) was an Alamance County, North Carolina tenant farmer. He enlisted as a private in Co. G, 44th North Carolina Infantry on February 28, 1862. His service records indicate that he was hospitalized in Richmond for a gunshot wound to the shoulder on May 15, 1864 and returned to duty before November 1, 1864. Wright was captured in the fighting south of Petersburg on April 2, 1865, confined at Hart’s Island in New York Harbor, and released on June 17, 1865. At the time of the 1870 Census, Joseph Wright and his wife, Susan (b. ca. 1832), were still living in Alamance County.

William E. Talton

The Talton family (also spelled Tarleton) owned a small farm in DeKalb County Georgia. William E. Talton (b. ca. 1844) was the son of Martin P. and Amanda Talton. William mustered as a private in Co. E, 7th Georgia Infantry on May 29, 1861 and died of disease in Richmond on September 20, 1861.

Frederick Andrea

Frederick Andrea was from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania (the family name is also recorded as Andrie, Andres, and Andreas). On April 23, 1861, Andrea mustered into service as a musician in Co. G, 8 th Pennsylvania Infantry, a three-month regiment that performed guard duty along the Potomac before it was mustered out on July 29, 1861. Despite noting that he did not intend to serve longer than three months, he enlisted in Co. I, 98 th Pennsylvania Infantry on August 23, 1861. He was wounded at the Battle of Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864 and was discharged at the end of his enlistment on September 5, 1864. Frederick’s younger brother, Jacob, mustered into service with the 9 th Pennsylvania Cavalry in May 1864 and mustered out in July 1865. Frederick Andrea’s German ancestry comes through in some of the language of the letter. 

Isaac B. Coleman

Isaac B. Coleman was a farmer from Talladega County, Alabama who mustered into service as a drummer in Co. I, 30 th Alabama Infantry on March 22, 1862. The non-standard spelling, lack of punctuation, and erratic capitalization is typical of individuals, North and South, whose access to schooling was limited. The variant past tense drawed was widespread in 19 th -century American English, as was haint for have not or has not and was with a plural subject ( I Dont no what they was firing at ). The pattern of subject-verb agreement which allows a plural or compound noun subject with is ( corn bread and very poore beefe is what we have to eat ) was widespread in the Midlands and South. Features which are more specifically Southern include sorrow as an adjective ( I am very Sorow ) and the phonetic spelling cear for care ( I have ben a little cearless about riting ).

John B. Gregory

John B. Gregory (b. ca. 1830) was a farmer from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. At the time of the 1860 Census he resided on his farm with his wife, Martha (b. ca. 1833), and their four young children (ages 1-5).  J. B. Gregory enlisted in Co. B, 38 th Virginia Infantry (the “Pittsylvania Regiment”) on July 10, 1861 and was killed at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, when his regiment took part in the assault on Cemetery Ridge.  During the battle more than half of the 400 men of the 38 th Virginia were killed, wounded, or captured. The letter appears to have been written for Gregory (see last line of page 10).  John Eanes was the Gregorys’ next door neighbor in the Swansonville neighborhood of Pittsylvania County. 

Joseph A. Drummond

Joseph A. Drummond (b. ca. 1831) was a farmer from Barnwell District, South Carolina. He served as a private in Co. G and Co. E, 1st South Carolina Infantry (Hagood's). At the time of the Federal Census of 1860, Drummond and his wife, Martha (b. ca. 1830), had two children, James (b. ca. 1856) and Susan (b. ca. 1858). Martha and the children appear in the 1870 Census but Joseph does not. In the 1880 census, Martha is marked as widowed. His military records indicate that he was wounded at Second Bull Run on August 30, 1862, then taken prisoner and paroled at Warrenton, Virginia on September 29, 1862.

Coleman Bruce

Coleman Bruce (1802-1885) was a native of Campbell County, Virginia.  In the 1830s he moved his family to Missouri and settle near Jamestown in Moniteau County, where he became a successful farmer and wealthy land (and slave) owner.  His letter is addressed to his daughter and son-in-law and was written ten days after the Battle of Wilsons Creek. His son-in-law, William Jackson, served as an officer in the Union Army.  The Judge Scott mentioned in the letter was Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court in 1852 when he was involved in the Dred Scott case.  The Bruce letter reflects the conflict between Southern sympathizers in Missouri and pro-Union German immigrants who resided in the state.  

Solon L. Fuller

Solon L. Fuller was born in New Jersey ca. 1800. At the time of the Federal Census of 1860, Fuller was living in Randolph County, Alabama with three teenage sons. His occupation was listed as “mechanic,” but the family apparently farmed as well. In the early 1860s Solon Fuller remarried and by 1862 was serving in Croft’s Battery, Georgia Artillery (AKA the Columbus Light Artillery). Fuller’s two oldest sons, Phillip (b. Alabama ca. 1842) and Sidney (b. Alabama ca. 1844) served as privates in Co. E, 5th Battalion (Cavalry) of Hilliard’s Alabama Legion. When Hilliard’s Legion was disbanded, the 5th Battalion became part of the 10th Confederate Cavalry. Solon Fuller’s youngest son, John (b. Georgia ca. 1837), also served in the Confederate Army. Solon Fuller and his son Sidney both died during the war.

Wilburn Thompson

Wilburn Thompson (b. ca. 1825) was a Milton County, Georgia tenant farmer. At the time of the 1860 Census, Thompson and his wife Charlotte “Lottie” (b. ca. 1830) had three children (another was born in 1864). According to the census, Thompson and his wife could not read or write, so others wrote his letters for him. Wilburn Thompson enlisted as a private in Co. G, 56th Georgia Infantry in the spring of 1862. He was wounded and taken prisoner at Dalton, Georgia and died at Camp Morton, Indianapolis in August 1864.

Abraham Van Loon

Christopher Van Loon (b. ca. 1818) was a farmer from Schuyler County, New York. He enlisted as a private in Co. H, 107th New York Infantry on August 4, 1862 when he was 44. Van Loon’s letter is typical in the lack of punctuation, non-standard spellings, and eccentric capitalization. As with many other letter writers, he commonly confuses the spellings of homophones (close/clothes, threw/through, tail/tale, our/hour, wood/would). However, Van Loon is fairly articulate and there is little in his letter that would suggest a particular region of the country.

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About Common Tongues

The Corpus of American Civil War Letters Project (CACWL), which we also call "Common Tongues," is a collection of thousands of letters written by Civil War soldiers who wrote "by ear." Instead of writing grammatically-correct English, these "transitionally literate" men used the alphabet to capture the sounds words made when they spoke them. The letters have been painstakingly collected by Professor Michael Ellis of Missouri State University, and the result is a linguistic bonanza: a body of evidence that captures the dialect and pronunciation of the under-educated classes of the Civil War generation. The CACWL is a bonanza for historians as well. Almost all of these men were army privates, and their letters reveal a great deal about the lives and motivations of the Civil War's common soldiers. Ellis has also produced a new book devoted to the collection's North Carolina soldiers and their usage of English.

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• Read and Respond: A Civil War Letter

If you had been a soldier during the American Civil War, letters would have been the only way to communicate with your loved ones. Written correspondence allowed soldiers to reflect on their experiences and connect with their famlies back home. 

In this activity, children will read a now famous letter from Sullivan Ballou, an officer in the Union Army in the American Civil War, to his wife Sarah. The letter, written just one week before his death at the First Battle of Bull Run, speaks of his love for Sarah and their two young sons, as well of his patriotism and commitment to the Union's cause. 

After reading the letter, children will use the accompanying worksheet to write a response to Sullivan's letter from the perspective of one of his sons or his wife. As they do so, children will consider the human cost and experience of war, not just for soldiers but for their loved ones as well. Designed for fifth graders and other history students, this is an especially meaningful activity for Veterans Day or Memorial Day.

What You Need:

What you do:.

• Print out Read and Respond: A Civil War Letter , which includes a copy of the full letter from Ballou to his wife. As your child reads the letter, ask them to put themself in Sullivan's shoes.
• Invite your child to notice the language Sullivan uses, and how it may differ from the way we write today. If necessary, take some time to rewrite or rephrase passages together using more contemporary English.
• After your child has read the letter, ask them to consider how they might feel if they were Sarah or one of Ballou's sons and were reading it for the first time. 
• Ask your child to then use the space on the worksheet, or a separate piece of paper, to draft a response to Ballou.
• When they have finished the letter, read it together. You may wish to extend the conversation by asking your child to consider how a soldier might communicate to their family today. What might be similar, and what might be different?

This activity was adapted from  The Civil War Kids 150: Fifty Fun Things to Do, See, Make and Find for the 150th Anniversary.

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Soldiers' Diaries and Letters

By ian delahanty.

Civil War soldiers’ diaries and letters | Sullivan Ballou | Library of Congress | Huntington Library | United States Army Military History Institute | John L. Nau III | Duke University | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | Emory University | Louisiana State University | University of Michigan | Western Reserve Historical Society | Connecticut Historical Society | Chicago Historical Society | New York State Library | Filson Club Historical Society | Tennessee Historical Society | Virginia Historical Society

Civil War soldiers were among the most literate in history. About eight out of every ten Confederate soldiers and nine out of every ten Union soldiers could read and write. The letters and diaries written by Union and Confederate soldiers have bequeathed to scholars in the field the unusual problem of having an overabundance of firsthand accounts to consult. In turn, Civil War historians have relied heavily and at times exclusively on soldiers’ letters and diaries to craft groundbreaking works on how the conflict unfolded and what it meant to participants. Any student or scholar of the Civil War who wants to know what contemporaries believed to be the cause of the war; how the war dragged on for four deadly years; or how the course of the war reshaped the attitudes and beliefs of those who experienced it must turn to the work of historians who spent thousands of hours combing through the writings of Civil War soldiers to find answers to these questions. Without the mountain of letters and diaries written by Civil War soldiers that in one form or another have survived to the present, we would have a much dimmer understanding of that conflict and of nineteenth-century American history. Yet much disagreement remains on how historians should use these sources and what they ultimately reveal about the men who fought the Civil War. In fact, one of the most influential historians of the Civil War Era recently argued that historians’ indiscriminate use of soldiers’ letters and diaries has led scholarship on Civil War soldiers to “a point of diminishing returns.” [1]

The purpose of this essay, then, is threefold. It is first to illuminate the origins of Civil War soldiers’ letters and diaries with particular attention to the logistics of their creation and the number of them. Having examined their origins, the essay will then turn to where and in what form the writings of Civil War soldiers can be found today. The bulk of the essay discusses how scholarly usage of Civil War soldiers’ diaries and letters has changed over time and where historians agree and disagree about the conclusions that can be drawn from soldiers’ writings. A brief conclusion draws attention to innovative recent works that illustrate how historians might continue to use soldiers’ letters and diaries moving forward.

Civil War soldiers’ letters and diaries were as diverse in terms of their creation as the individuals responsible for them. Where and when a soldier had an opportunity to put pen (or pencil) to paper depended on what time of year it was, whether that soldier’s unit was actively campaigning, and what objects might be available to assist in the mechanics of writing. Winter quarters generally afforded soldiers with chairs, desks, and dependable supplies of paper and ink. But during the spring, summer, and fall months, soldiers in the field had to improvise. Knees and thighs, books, tins, and instruments became desks, as did the backs of fellow soldiers. Union Private Abraham Kendig wrote a letter to his family in 1861 “[b]y light of a candle stuck in a pine stick, setting on the ground leaning against Bruce Wallace who is asleep.” [2] If all else failed, lying in the prone position with the ground as a surface was always an option. Soldiers wrote whenever they had spare time. Some surviving letters include reports of fighting that forced the author to drop his pen only to pick it up again once the shooting had died down. [3]

A combination of socioeconomic background, rank, and timing dictated what was available for soldiers to write with. Ink was preferable though not always available, and the frequent use of pencil was unavoidable, much to the chagrin of future generations who have tried to decipher the faded contents of penciled letters and diaries. Stationery, according to the historian Reid Mitchell, was “anything handy,” including but not limited to “backs of military forms, old brown paper, [and] letters from home.” [4] Soldiers with the means to do so could purchase more formal stationery, some of which included illustrations of famous commanders, notable forts, and patriotic emblems. Diaries were fashioned out of ledger books, pocket-sized daily calendars, and scraps of paper stitched or strung together. Surviving letter collections from an individual soldier might include several different types of stationery, while diaries might skip days and months or end abruptly when a soldier found a sturdier book. [5] While most soldiers had little trouble acquiring rudimentary writing implements (i.e., pencils and scraps of paper), most surviving letters and diaries are necessarily made up of more durable materials that were more readily accessible to officers and wealthier men in the ranks. [6]

While it is impossible to determine with precision how many letters or diaries were produced by Civil War soldiers, the numbers must have been staggering. More than three million soldiers served in the Civil War, and literacy rates on both sides were high (above 80% for Confederate soldiers and near 90% for Union soldiers). [7] Of course, literacy rates were lower for certain groups within the ranks, particularly among the more than 100,000 recently-freed slaves who fought for the Union and foreign-born soldiers on both sides. But soldiers who could not write often dictated letters to literate comrades, and some learned to write while in the army. [8] Of the approximately 900,000 Confederate soldiers, at least 700,000 had the ability to write, and of the nearly 2,000,000 white Union soldiers, at least 1.8 million could do the same. [9] But the frequency with which Civil War soldiers wrote is much more difficult to determine. To give just two variables, soldiers were more likely to write letters during their first months of service, and they had more time and amenities for writing while in camp. [10] Still, some evidence allows for a very rough approximation of the volume of soldiers’ letters. In The Union War , Gary Gallagher notes that one Union regimental chaplain sent out 3,855 letters in a single month. Allowing for variations in volume depending on the time of year and overall strength of this regiment, Gallagher estimates that soldiers in the chaplain’s regiment might have produced some 15,000 letters in one year. Applying this line of analysis to the Army of the Potomac as a whole, Gallagher hazarded a hypothetical estimate of more than a million letters written per month. [11] In his pioneering study of the common Union soldier, Bell Irvin Wiley wrote of a civilian observer who found that some northern regiments were sending out 600 letters per day in the fall of 1861. Wiley also found a single Union soldier who wrote 164 letters for himself and 37 letters for comrades over the course of 1863. [12] A fair assessment is that soldiers in the Civil War wrote several millions of letters and at the very least tens of thousands of diaries.

Whose letters and diaries survived, and where are they now? While a relatively small number of archival institutions hold a substantial portion of surviving soldiers’ letters and diaries, there can be no definitive answer as to where all of these materials are or even what proportion of surviving letters and diaries have been archived or published. It might seem reasonable to assume that states which sent the most soldiers into the army hold the largest manuscript collections of Civil War soldiers’ letters and diaries. But according to the historian James McPherson, native-born, middle- and upper-class Americans were more likely to preserve a family member’s letters or diaries than blue-collar, immigrant, African American, or non-slaveholding families. [13] States like New York and Pennsylvania, for which larger numbers of foreign-born soldiers fought, and North Carolina and Virginia, for which larger numbers of soldiers from non-slaveholding families fought, might be underrepresented in terms of the total number of surviving letters and diaries written by their soldiers. And while family and friends who preserved soldiers’ writings usually deposited them at institutions in their community or state, some institutions like the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, and United States Army Military History Institute host collections that are national in scope. This is to say nothing of private collectors. Texas businessman and historic preservationist John L. Nau III, one of the largest private collectors in the United States, has a collection of soldiers’ letters and diaries that numbers in the thousands. [14] Due to these circumstances, surviving letters and diaries do not form an aggregate representative sample of the wartime writing of soldiers who served in the Union and Confederate armies. Additionally, these materials are scattered across the country in such a way that begs the question of where to begin.

However, the footnotes, bibliographies, and acknowledgements sections of scholarship on Civil War soldiers will point readers to a handful of archives that hold exceptionally large manuscript collections of soldiers’ letters and diaries. The holdings of the United States Army Military History Institute are especially well-represented in studies of Civil War soldiers, and for good reason: a 127-page, single-spaced inventory of its Civil War Document Collection (comprised mostly of soldiers’ letters and diaries) details only a portion of the Institute’s Civil War manuscript holdings. [15] Several university research libraries in the South a smaller number in the Midwest hold ample collections of Civil War soldiers’ writings. Bell Irvin Wiley’s seminal studies of Union and Confederate soldiers drew extensively from manuscript collections at Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emory University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Michigan. [16] More than half a century later, these same institutions continue to fill out the bibliographies of scholarship on Civil War soldiers. [17] Finally, many of the major historical societies and public research libraries in states that took part in the Civil War hold sizable collections of soldiers’ writings. A few of the most often cited include the Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland), the Connecticut Historical Society (Hartford), the Chicago Historical Society, the New York State Library (Albany), the Filson Club Historical Society (Louisville, KY), the Tennessee Historical Society (Nashville), and the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond). The institutions mentioned here by no means constitute an exhaustive or ranked listing. Rather, they exemplify the types of institutions where interested parties can locate substantial collections of soldiers’ writings, and they illustrate the logistical difficulties of consulting anything close to a large sampling of surviving letters and diaries.

Fortunately, for scholars without the means to travel and especially for undergraduate and graduate students approaching the subject of Civil War soldiers for the first time, there are scores of excellent published collections of soldiers’ letters and diaries sitting on library shelves. The most useful of these collections have been carefully edited by historians with a thorough knowledge of soldiering in the Civil War, the regions or battles discussed in the soldier’s writing, or a particular group with whom the soldier can be identified, such as immigrants, African Americans, or evangelicals. [18] By not only making accessible the contents of a soldier’s wartime letters or diary but also correcting factual misstatements, filling in the gaps of knowledge endemic to any firsthand account, and pointing the reader to additional pertinent sources, such edited volumes can be invaluable resources for experienced and first-time researchers alike. [19]

The history of the publication of soldiers’ letters and diaries also reveals much about how historians’ and the public’s interests in these sources have evolved. To the extent that soldiers’ letters or diaries were transcribed and published in the century or so after the war ended, they were usually written by generals and other high-ranking officers. [20] Debates over battlefield tactics, military leadership, and high-level political decision making dominated Civil War scholarship until the mid-twentieth century, and the correspondence and diaries (as well as the memoirs) of commanding officers helped to settle the score on these issues. Historians writing during and in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement raised what are now essential questions in Civil War scholarship pertaining to slavery, race, and emancipation, however few thought to seek answers to these questions in the letters or diaries of soldiers. [21] Not until the 1980s did interest in the common Civil War soldier reach a critical mass that allowed edited volumes of soldiers’ letters and diaries to become staple publications. [22] The belated but fruitful entry of social history into Civil War scholarship, as well as the opportunity to sell firsthand accounts of soldiers’ wartime experiences to ever-increasing crowds of battlefield tourists, probably best explains the uptick in the number of soldiers’ letters and diaries published over the last three decades. [23] Ken Burns’ 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War has introduced millions of Americans to the writing of Civil War soldiers. A reading of Major Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife on the eve of the Battle of Bull Run—set to the mournful tune of “Ashokan Farewell”—conveyed to listeners in an unparalleled way soldiers’ feelings of honor, duty, patriotism, and manhood. The Civil War also quoted liberally from the published diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, a Rhode Island soldier who enlisted as a private in 1861 and was mustered out as a colonel in 1865. This wildly popular documentary’s spotlight on what Burns describes as Rhodes’ “simple, unvarnished” prose doubtless heightened the public’s interest in other soldiers’ wartime correspondence and diaries. [24]

Most Civil War soldiers could not match Rhodes’s epistolary economy and poignancy, but the contents and style of their letters and diaries are nonetheless compelling. Soldiers commonly began by telling their correspondent, “I seat myself” or “I take pen in hand” to write, only to continue by lamenting the lack of anything noteworthy to write about. Yet their letters could continue on for pages, covering, in the words of Bell Irvin Wiley, “everything, for there is hardly an item in the entire range of human activity and interest that does not find some place in their correspondence.” [25] Wiley’s extensive research in soldiers’ letters led him to conclude that less-educated soldiers were more apt to write about the seedier side of army life, while more refined writers tended to omit grisly details of battles and camp. [26] Spelling and grammar ran the gamut from soldiers trained in Latin and Greek to soldiers barely able to spell their names, though most authors were mediocre at best. In The Life of Johnny Reb , Wiley provided readers with a chart of commonly misspelled words in soldiers’ letters and diaries, such as “dus” (does), “snode” (snowed), and four variations on hospital. [27]

Above all else, most readers are drawn to these sources because they unveil the human element of war. Historians who rely on wartime letters as evidence in their scholarship often point out that soldiers’ correspondence was uncensored, allowing for unusually frank, forthright commentary on the war by those who fought it. [28] It was not ideology or political opinion but rather the mundane ephemera of army life and a ground-level perspective on the course of the war that the pioneering work of Bell Irvine Wiley recovered from soldiers’ letters and diaries. [29] Wiley has the distinction of having originated the subfield of scholarship on Civil War soldiers, and his books on Confederate and Union soldiers, respectively, drew extensively from manuscript collections of soldiers’ writing. [30] Thanks to a wide-ranging examination of soldiers’ letters and diaries, Wiley was able to write vividly about what soldiers ate, how they viewed the enemy, what they did for recreation, how they responded to hard times, and even (as the notes to this essay will show) how they wrote their letters. However, Wiley wrote as opinion polls taken during World War II revealed that most American GIs cared or knew little about the political issues at stake in the war, and he mistakenly assumed the same to be true of Civil War soldiers. [31] Inevitably, then, Wiley discounted the potential for soldiers’ writing to illuminate commonly held ideas and beliefs about the Civil War.

Not until Americans fought their most domestically divisive war since the Civil War did scholarship on Civil War soldiers reach a formative state. The Vietnam War challenged deep-seated notions of American servicemen as timelessly indefatigable fighters (a view that Wiley himself helped to perpetuate), prompting some Civil War historians to question if that perspective was warranted in the first place. [32] Thus began the ongoing debate over the motivations of Civil War soldiers that has dominated scholarship in this field since the 1980s. To be fair, not only the Vietnam War but also the rise of social history as a distinct category of analysis and the influence of European military history pushed historians to ask new questions about Civil War soldiers. [33] Additionally, post-Vietnam scholarship on Civil War soldiers moved beyond the basic issue of why soldiers fought by examining how they adjusted to army life and combat, how antebellum culture and society molded their wartime experiences, and how they shaped the progression of military strategies and polices. [34] But since the question of motivation remains paramount in the field, almost all studies of Civil War soldiers since the early-1980s have made claims about the nature of soldiers’ ideologies and political opinions. The letters and diaries written by Union and Confederate soldiers comprise the largest and most insightful body of evidence that historians have consulted in order to make such claims.

What historians have said and where they disagree about Civil War soldiers’ views is less of a concern here than how they have used wartime letters and diaries to reach their conclusions. [35] The historian Gary Gallagher posits that the “most diligent scholars visited repositories across the United States to survey collections of letters, as well as a smaller number of diaries, en route to generalizing about soldiers’ experiences. They strove for representativeness, looking at soldiers of different classes..., from different regions, and with varying types of service.” [36] Two of the most influential works that fit Gallagher’s qualifications are James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought the Civil War and Chandra Manning’s What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War . The two books address related but ultimately separate questions regarding Civil War soldiers’ motivations and ideologies. More importantly, both authors discuss the nature of their sources and the methodologies on which their conclusions are based. McPherson’s “quasi-representative” sample of letter collections and diaries includes 1,076 soldiers (647 Union and 429 Confederate). African Americans and foreign-born soldiers are “substantially underrepresented” in his sources, but soldiers who died in combat (those who actually fought, as McPherson contends) are overrepresented. [37] Manning drew from the writing of 58 more soldiers than McPherson (657 Union soldiers and 477 Confederates), and she claims better “approximate cross sections” of the Union and Confederate ranks. [38] Both scholars visited dozens of archival repositories (22 research libraries and several private collections for McPherson; more than 40 archival repositories for Manning), and each read thousands of individual letters and hundreds of diaries in order to discern common experiences and views among the soldiers in their studies. [39] In terms of the breadth of their sources, McPherson’s and Manning’s studies are truly impressive, and each offers a bold, compelling argument about the “common” soldier in the Civil War.

But just what makes one soldier or a group of about 1,000 soldiers “common?” Even studies as rigorous as McPherson’s and Manning’s could not (and it is worth noting did not) claim a truly representative sample of Civil War soldiers. Illiteracy among certain segments of Civil War soldiers combined with the haphazard process by which soldiers’ letters and diaries were preserved precludes any sampling of letters and diaries from being representative. All studies of Civil War soldiers that rely on such sources are therefore impressionistic to some degree. [40] As the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar points out, a plethora of firsthand testimony from the men who fought the Civil War allows scholars to “pluck something from a soldier’s letter, diary, or memoir and make claims that this opinion represents most or even a substantial portion of those soldiers.” [41] These “politicized practices,” according to Kenneth Noe, are “lamentably frequent.” [42] This is not to say that the letters and diaries used by scholars like McPherson and Manning did not demonstrate discernable patterns. The point in these critiques is that even historians who read hundreds of letter collections and diaries cannot be sure that the patterns they uncover are applicable to broad segments of the Union and Confederate armed forces. [43]

Fortunately, several recent studies provide models for how historians can continue to use soldiers’ letters and diaries while avoiding the traps of overreliance and representativeness. In The Union War , Gary Gallagher combined the writing of 350 soldiers with other types of evidence that complemented ideas expressed in soldiers’ letters and diaries about the centrality of the Union to the northern war effort. Patriotic envelopes, lyrics to popular songs, and regimental histories written immediately after the war showed Gallagher that the pro-Union sentiment he found in his 350 soldiers’ letters and diaries was ubiquitous throughout the ranks. [44] Joseph T. Glatthaar’s work on the Army of Northern Virginia offers a more innovative approach to the problem of representativeness. To support his conclusions in General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse , Glatthaar worked with experts in statistics to develop a sample of 600 soldiers that is “almost equal to a pure random sample” of Lee’s army. [45] Glatthaar did not abandon firsthand testimonies. Instead, he used the statistical sample to determine if patterns found in letters, diaries, and other firsthand accounts were unique to particular groups of soldiers. [46] Conversely, the historian Jason Phillips views representativeness as not only impossible but also undesirable. Phillips argues that historians would do better to focus on “influential groups” (one of whom was certainly the Army of Northern Virginia) who changed the course of the Civil War, drawing from firsthand accounts by and about them to explain how they exercised such decisive influences. [47] By following the approaches laid out by Gallagher, Glatthaar, and Phillips, and by asking new questions of the letters and diaries left behind by Union and Confederate soldiers, Civil War historians can fruitfully continue to mine this precious trove of sources.

• [1] Gary Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 61.
• [2] Kendig quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), 183-4.
• [3] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 184.
• [4] Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 90.
• [5] See for example Michael Donlon Letters, Civil War Miscellaneous Collection , United States Army Military History Institute.  Carlisle, PA [hereafter cited as MHI]; Charles Gardner Diary, 1864-1865.  Massachusetts State Archives [hereafter cited as MSA].
• [6] For additional discussion of the circumstances behind soldiers’ writing, see Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 183-91; Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Indianapolis: Bobs-Merrill, 1943), 201-8.
• [7] Chandra Manning, What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 227, f.n. 17; James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), viii. 
• [8] Bell Irvin Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb, 207; Dudley Taylor Cornish, “The Union Army as a School for Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 37, 4 (October 1952): 368-82. 
• [9] Totals for Union and Confederate soldiers from Mark A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?  Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” The Journal of American History 76, 1 (June 1989): 40.
• [10] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 183; Gallagher, The Union War , 57.
• [11] Gallagher, The Union War , 57-58. 
• [12] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 183.
• [13] McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , ix.
• [14] “John Nau shares his passion for history with Houston,” Houston Chronicle , February 24, 2013, accessed September 9, 2014  http://www.chron.com/about/houston-gives/article/John-Nau-shares-his-passion-for-history-with-4290499.php .
• [15] United States Army Military History Institute, “Civil War Document Collection: An Inventory.” For works that draw extensively from the Institute’s collection of soldiers’ letters and diaries, see for example McPherson, For Cause and Comrades ; Manning, This Cruel War ; Kenneth W. Noe, Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010).  
• [16] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 438; Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb , 419.
• [17] Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking, 1988), 247-52; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , 187-8; Manning, This Cruel War , 311-23; Noe, Reluctant Rebels , 289-94.
• [18] See for example Christian G. Samito, ed., Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., Germans in the Civil War: The Letters they Wrote Home , trans. Susan Carter Vogel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Noah Andre Trudeau, ed., Voices of the 55 th : Letters from the 55 th Massachusetts Volunteers, 1861-1865 (Dayton, OH: Morningside, 1996); Jean Lee Cole and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, eds., Freedom’s Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry McNeal Turner (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2013); W. Eric Ericson and Karen Stokes, eds., Faith, Valor and Devotion: The Civil War Letters of William Porcher DuBose (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010).
• [19] Several Civil War bibliographies include published volumes of soldiers’ letters and diaries in their contents.  See Judith Lee Hallock, “Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters,” in Steven E. Woodworth, ed., The American Civil War: A Handbook of Literature and Research (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 72-74; Alan Nevins, James I. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley, eds., Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography , 2 vols. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967-1969); C.E. Dornbusch, comp., Regimental Publications and Personal Narratives of the Civil War: A Checklist , 2 vols. (New York: New York Public Library, 1961-1972).  
• [20] This point is made in Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 439.
• [21] For two later works that did use soldiers’ letters and diaries to examine the issues of slavery, race, and emancipation, see Manning, This Cruel War ; Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: Free Press, 1990).
• [22] For examples, see the works cited in Hallock, “Memoirs, Diaries, and Letters,” 60-65.
• [23] Marc A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” The Journal of American History 76, 1 (June 1989): 34-58.
• [24] Ken Burns, “Why I decided to make The Civil War ,” accessed September 10, 2014,    http://www.pbs.org/civilwar/film/ .
• [25] Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb , 207. 
• [26] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 184-5.
• [27] Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb , 203-4.
• [28] McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , vii; Manning, This Cruel War , 9; Jason Phillips, “Battling Stereotypes: A Taxonomy of Common Soldiers in Civil War History,” History Compass 6, 6 (2008): 1408.
• [29] Wiley, Life of Johnny Reb ; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank .
• [30] On Wiley’s importance, see Aaron Sheehan-Dean, “The Blue and the Gray in Black and White: Assessing the Scholarship on Civil War Soldiers,” in Dean, ed., The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 11; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , 91.
• [31] Wiley, Life of Billy Yank , 39-40; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , 94.
• [32] Phillips, “Battling Stereotypes,” 1410; Carol Reardon, “Civil War Military Campaigns: The Union,” in Lacy K. Ford, ed., A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2005), 11.  The definitive work among scholars who answered “no” to this question is Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1989).
• [33] Sheehan-Dean, “The Blue and the Gray,” 12-13; Marvin R. Cain, “A ‘Face of Battle’ Needed: An Assessment of Motives and Men in Civil War Historiography,” Civil War History 28 (1982): 5-27.
• [34] For examples, see Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Joseph T. Glatthaar, The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign (New York: New York University Press, 1985); Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Towards Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• [35] For a thorough historiographical overview of the field, see Sheehan-Dean, “The Blue and the Gray in Black and White.” 
• [36] Gallagher, The Union War , 61.
• [37] McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , viii-ix.  For criticism of how McPherson created his sample, see Phillips, “Battling Stereotypes,” 1410-11. 
• [38] Manning, This Cruel War , 8-9.  For criticism of Manning’s methodology, especially how it influenced a key argument in her book, see Gallagher, The Union War , 80-81.
• [39] McPherson, For Cause and Comrades , 183-184; Manning, This Cruel War , 311-24.
• [40] Gallagher, The Union War , 61.
• [41] Joseph T. Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011), xiii.
• [42] Noe, Reluctant Rebels , 13.
• [43] On this point, see especially Phillips, “Battling Stereotypes.” 
• [44] Gallagher, The Union War , 62-74; 119- 1 50.
• [45] Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia , xi; Glatthaar, General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse (New York: Free Press, 2008).    
• [46] For another exemplary work that combines quantitative and qualitative research, see Noe, Reluctant Rebels , especially 13-18. 
• [47] Phillips, “Battling Stereotypes,” 1418-19; Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Culture of Confederate Invincibility (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

If you can read only one book:

Wiley, Bell Irvine. The Life of Johnny Reb. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943 and The Life of Billy Yank. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952.

• Soldiers' Diaries and Letters Essay
• Soldiers' Diaries and Letters Resources
• Author's Biography Ian Delahanty

Berlin, Ira; Reidy, Joseph P.; and Rowland, Lesley, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Ser. II: The Black Military Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Dornbusch, C. E. comp. Regimental Publications and Personal Narratives of the Civil War: A Checklist. 9 vols. New York: New York Public Library 1961.

Foroughi, Andrea R., ed. Go If You Think It Your Duty: A Minnesota Couple’s Civil War Letters. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008.

Gallagher, Gary. The Union War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011, 54-62.

Glatthaar, Joseph T. The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaign . New York: New York University Press, 1985.

———. General Lee’s Army: From Victory to Collapse . New York: Free Press, 2008.

———. Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee . Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Hess, Earl J. The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Kohl, Lawrence Frederick and Richard, Margaret Cossé, eds. Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh . New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.

McPherson, James M. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

McPherson, James M. and William J. Cooper Jr., eds. Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998, 81-95.

Manning, Chandra. What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War . New York: Knopf, 2007.

Sheehan-Dean, ed., Aaron. The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers . Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007, 9-30.

Mitchell, Reid. Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences . New York: Viking, 1998.

———. The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Nevins, Alan, James I. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley, eds. Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography . 2 vols. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press/Broadfoot, 1967.

Noe, Kenneth. Reluctant Rebels: The Confederates Who Joined the Army after 1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

James I. Robertson, Jr. Soldiers Blue and Gray . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Rozier, John, ed. The Granite Farm Letters: The Civil War Correspondence of Edgeworth and Sallie Bird . Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Sheehan-Dean, Aaron. W hy Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Organizations:

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Web Resources:

Civil War Diaries and Letters at the University of Iowa has a large collection of diaries and letters available on line.

Visit Website

Virginia Tech’s Virginia Center for Civil War Studies Gateway to Digitized Sources in Civil War Era history provides links to dozens of websites with digital collections of soldiers’ letters and diaries.

Virginia Military Institute’s Civil War Letters, Diaries, and Manuscripts Collection is available on line.

Other Sources:

Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

This is the guide to Civil War Resources in Duke's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library contains a large collection of diaries and letters which are available to read at the library. 

Emory University’s Southern History Collection

Emory University’s Southern History collection includes the papers of more than two hundred Civil War soldiers which are available for study at the University. 

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s “The Civil War, 1861-1865” Collection

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s “The Civil War, 1861-1865” Collection is available for study at the Institute. 

Princeton University Library’s Collection of Civil War Diaries Letters and Memoirs

The Princeton University Library Collection contains over 1,000 diaries, letters and memoirs and is available to those with a University NetID. 

Ian Delahanty

Gary Gallagher

Joseph T. Glatthaar

Chandra Manning

James McPherson

James I. Robertson, Jr.

Earl J. Hess

Aaron Sheehan-Dean

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Letters Home From The Civil War

This section is dedicated to the words of those brave men and women who participated in the American Civil War and shared their experiences with friends and loved ones through the written word. All letters archived at this site are authentic and have not been edited by me in any way. If you have a letter or series of letters that were written during the Civil War, please consider submitting them for inclusion on this site. You can get more information on my Submissions Page .   Regiment Identification (Alphabetical) Soldier's Name Internal or External Link    1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery, Company A Private George F. Elliott Jr (Artificer) (3 letters) Internal    1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery, Company I 2nd Lieutenant James P. Elliott (3 letter) Internal    6th Connecticut Infantry, Company A Private Halsey Bartlett KIA on 6/17/64 at Bermuda Hundred, VA (1 letter) Internal    7th Connecticut Infantry, Company C Private William Norton (1 letter) Internal    4th Delaware Infantry George W. Johnson, Jr. (1 letter) Internal    33rd Illinois Infantry, Company C Captain Henry C. Kellogg (2 letters) Internal    1st Indiana Heavy Artillery, Company K Private John K. Ingle (2 letters) Internal    25th Indiana Infantry, Company C Private Joseph Saberton (20 letters) Internal    29th Indiana Infantry, Company E Private Robert W. Christie (1 letter) Internal    29th Indiana Infantry, Company E Private John Harvey Grable (2 letters) Internal    123rd Indiana Infantry, Company F Private John Miller (34 letters) Internal    133rd Indiana Infantry Colonel Robert Hudson (1 letter) Internal    13th Iowa Infantry Assistant Surgeon Seneca B. Thrall (44 letters) Internal    36th Iowa Infantry, Company A Private Newton Robert Scott (16 letters) External    8th Michigan Infantry, Company D Private Dirk Keppel KIA on 4/16/1862 at Wilmington Island, GA (14 letters) Internal    3rd New Hampshire Infantry, Company B Private William H. Walton Died of wounds on 7/21/1864   (1 letter) Internal    4th New Hampshire Infantry, Company D Sergeant H. B. Morrison (1 letter) Internal    6th New York Light Artillery Artificer Franklin Moore (2 letters) Internal    22nd New York Infantry, Company F Captain Frederick E. Ranger (3 letters) Internal    2nd Ohio Cavalry Surgeon Napoleon B. Brisbine (2 letters) External    30th Ohio Infantry, Company A Private William Henry Harrison Canter (1 letter) Internal    94th Ohio Infantry, Company I Private Josiah Reed (7 letters) Internal    1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Battery B (43rd Regiment) James Hemphill Maclay Internal    149th Pennsylvania Infantry (2nd Bucktails) Private Isaac Oliver (1 letter) Internal    4th West Virginia Infantry, Company G Sergeant John T. Greer (1 letter) Internal    5th Wisconsin Infantry, Company D Private James Powers (1 letter) Internal          5th Alabama Infantry, Company D Private Richard H. Adams (POW Letters) External    7th Georgia Infantry, Company G (Franklin Volunteers) Zachariah H. J. Benefield (1 letter) Internal    21st Georgia Infantry, Company G Private Thomas Jefferson Wright (1 letter) Internal    63rd Tennessee Infantry Colonel Abram Fulkerson, Jr. (3 letters) External    4th Virginia Infantry, Company I 2nd Sergeant John A. Ervine (1 letter) External    23rd Virginia Infantry Lieutenant Colonel Clayton G. Coleman (2 letters) External    24th Virginia Infantry Lieutenant Colonel William Weldon Bentley (1 letter) External    27th Virginia Infantry, Company C 3rd Sergeant John Garibaldi (38 letters) External    37th Virginia Infantry Colonel Samuel V. Fulkerson (8 letters) External    47th Virginia Infantry, Company I Captain Samuel S. Brooke (2 letters) External    49th Virginia Infantry, Company E Private Joseph Milton Elkins (3 letters) Internal    52nd Virginia Infantry, Company B Private Henry H. Dedrick (19 letters) External    Rockbridge Rifles Robert H. Campbell and Charles Varner (8 letters) External