Pip: Spared and Shared arrives with ink-stained fingers and mud on its boots — letters written by men who were either deep in the field or anxiously watching from home, wondering when any of it would end.

Mara: Griff has assembled a set of Civil War correspondence that moves between two distinct worlds: soldiers writing home about what they’re living through, and family members on the home front trying to make sense of what’s happening to the men they love.

Pip: The gap between those two worlds is where most of this material lives — and it’s a surprisingly rich place.

Mara: Let’s start with the home front letters, where the war arrives as news, grief, and local politics all at once.

Home Front Family Correspondence

Pip: The question this set of letters keeps asking is what the war looks like when you’re not fighting it — when you’re in Illinois or Delaware, reading dispatches, burying brothers, and trying to hold a household together.

Mara: Thomas Barnfield’s letter from Vicksburg on January 5, 1865 captures the soldier’s side of that gap perfectly. He’s just ridden out in rain since four in the morning and he drops into pure storytelling: “We ‘wented’ at 9 a.m. yesterday and met Gen. G with 3 brigades of cavalry and 2 or 3,000 contrabands and 800 prisoners about 12 miles from town, badly in need of both food and forage.”

Pip: That word “wented” is doing a lot of work. He’s an officer writing to a fellow officer, and he’s still performing the whole thing as a comedy of exhaustion.

Mara: The stakes underneath the comedy are real. Grierson’s raid had just severed Confederate supply lines badly enough that Hood’s retreating army couldn’t get fed. Barnfield knows he’s describing something consequential, even as he calls it an “entire success” with deliberate lightness.

Pip: His second letter, written around mid-February, keeps the same register — humming “I want to go home” between lines about an upcoming expedition whose details are, he deadpans, “a profound secret only known to the Confederacy.”

Mara: The home front answer to Barnfield’s letters comes in Alfred Matthews Mann’s letter to his brother John Preston Mann — the same John Mann Barnfield was writing to — dated November 1863 from Pleasant Ridge, Illinois. Alfred is reporting on the death of their brother Clinton at Chattanooga, the local elections, and the mood in Randolph County.

Pip: Which was, apparently, a county divided enough that a Copperhead’s complaint counted as a political analysis.

Mara: Alfred quotes one directly: “the damned Union League done it all.” He means it as a victory report — the Union sentiment had just flipped the county by over two hundred votes.

Pip: And then there’s the Smith brothers correspondence — William and Grover writing home to Dover, Delaware across four years, tracking everything from boot sizes to battlefield losses to family farm decisions.

Mara: William was mortally wounded near Petersburg in October 1864. Grover survived and kept writing. Together their letters form a long, plainspoken record of what the war actually cost a single household, letter by letter.

Mara: The field letters carry a different weight — men writing from inside the thing, not around it.

Soldiers In The Field

Pip: If the home front letters are about absorbing the war from a distance, the field letters are about being inside something you can’t fully see — and still needing to write home.

Mara: Thomas Lancaster’s letter from Goodson, Virginia in November 1861 anchors this segment. He’s a Confederate pork contractor, not a soldier, but he’s watching the war arrive in real time. He writes: “We have had very exciting times here for 7 or 8 days. All ready to fight except some that has run away. The Union men in East Tennessee made a rise up for Old Abe, burnt five bridges between here and Chattanooga.”

Pip: The upshot of that passage is that Lancaster is simultaneously processing hogs by the hundreds and watching his region fracture along Unionist and secessionist lines — sometimes violently, across the Holston River at one in the morning.

Mara: His letter also documents something the history books tend to abstract: the logistics of salt. Getting it from Saltville required sending your own sacks, attending the kettle yourself, and paying seventy-five cents a bushel on the branch line. Without it, the pork contract — twelve to fifteen thousand hogs — falls apart.

Pip: Salt as a strategic material is not a glamorous subject, but Lancaster makes it feel urgent.

Mara: James Burton Allen’s letter from Richmond, dated May 1, 1861, sits at the other end of the experience. He’s just enlisted in the 15th Virginia Infantry, one week in, drilling five times a day, and he writes to his father: “I don’t hear anything about war and I don’t think there will be anything of it.”

Pip: One week in. That sentence lands differently knowing what the next four years looked like.

Mara: Edward Bond’s letter from June 1864 comes from yet another angle — a civilian teamster on General Sully’s Northwestern Indian Expedition into Dakota Territory, writing from a camp he addresses as “Camp Demoralization, Iowa.” His fellow teamsters he describes as “the worst of the worst of the dirty, low-lived villains and rascals that you ever saw.”

Pip: Even the logistics of violence had its own miserable supply chain.

Mara: Bond’s letter is the odd one out geographically — Dakota Territory, not the Civil War’s eastern theater — but it belongs here as a field correspondent writing from inside an operation he can barely explain and definitely didn’t romanticize.

Pip: All of these letters share the same quality: they were written before the writer knew how the story ended.

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Mara: What holds this material together is the distance — between the front and home, between what soldiers knew and what families understood, between the moment of writing and everything that came after.

Pip: And the fact that someone kept the letters. That’s the whole premise of this site, really — next time, more of what survived.