Pip: Letters that survived two centuries of attic boxes, estate sales, and archivists with good judgment — and here we are, reading them on the internet

Mara: This episode draws on Griff’s recent posts, covering soldiers writing home from the front, personal correspondence from the home front and beyond, and one early maritime letter that predates the Civil War by half a century.

Pip: Three very different kinds of distance — battlefield, frontier, open ocean.

Mara: Let’s start with the soldiers.

Voices From the Front Lines

Pip: What does a soldier actually put in a letter home — and what does he leave out?

Mara: James Bennett McKee, writing to his sister Mary from camp near Fredericksburg on New Year’s Day 1863, gives us the texture of it: “soldiering is hard business.”

Pip: Five words that carry a lot. He’s just survived Fredericksburg, where his regiment took 177 casualties in an hour and a half, and that’s what he offers her — not horror, just a plain accounting.

Mara: The letters are full of that restraint. He worries about a missing box from home, asks after a neighbor’s wedding, gently scolds Mary for wishing him ill so he’d miss a battle. The domestic and the dangerous sit right next to each other.

Pip: George Brown Eckert, writing to his sister Rachel across eight letters, is less restrained — he calls the defeat at Fredericksburg “a bad one at that” and describes Union troops destroying pianos in the city with axes.

Mara: Eckert is also lobbying hard for a furlough. He writes from the Mud March aftermath — sick with chills and fever, rheumatism in his arm — describing sixteen horses struggling to pull a single light artillery piece out of the mire.

Pip: Meanwhile Mathias Shumaker, writing from Brandy Station just weeks before Spotsylvania, tells his friend Henry Martz “I like it better here than at home. We have more fun here than at home.” He would be wounded, captured, and dead at Andersonville by July.

Mara: Abram Clark, writing from Fort Marion in Florida, measures his experience against his cousin’s: she mentions a relative who was “under fire for 5 days.” Clark counters that he was “under as heavy fire as any man living ever say for 13 days and nights” and watched comrades “dropped by hundreds at a few rounds of grape and shell.”

Pip: The assistant surgeon Adam Clark Baum writes the longest dispatches — battle narratives that read like dispatches, including a scene at Cold Harbor where Union and Confederate soldiers quietly stopped shooting, climbed out of their works, and started chatting until an officer ordered them back at gunpoint

Mara: Abbie Brundage writes from the Aurora home front, three days after the Gettysburg Address, worrying about the cost of living and how the poor will survive the winter. Her husband’s regiment fought at Gettysburg; she’s writing to a cousin still in the field.

Pip: Henry Ballou is counting alligators on the Mississippi. Forty-four of them, from the deck of a troop transport heading to New Orleans.

Mara: Charles Weeks, recovering from a wound at Bethesda Church, writes a brief practical letter trying to keep a friend out of the Invalid Corps. John Crabb reports the fall of Fort Blakely — the last major assault of the war — with quiet confidence: “I think our work is about done now.” And John Augustus, writing from South Carolina in January 1865, asks his sister Jane to pray for him.

Pip: The range is remarkable — from Eckert’s furious lobbying to Augustus’s simple request for someone to remember him.

Mara: The next letters step away from the battlefield entirely.

Letters Between Friends and Family

Pip: Not every letter in this batch is addressed to a regiment — some are just people trying to stay connected across distance.

Mara: Ellie, writing to her friend Cinda Hughes in Ohio on April 16, 1865, captures the whiplash of that particular week: “The folks were almost crazy here when the news came Richmond was taken and Lee had surrendered. They rung all the bells in town and have had bonfires almost every evening this week.” Then Lincoln was shot, and the flags went to half-mast.

Pip: One letter, two American moods, forty-eight hours apart.

Mara: Phineas Talcott writes from Denver in December 1873, describing a frontier life he calls “a Mark Twain Life” — his sewing machine sales agency has gone bust, he’s heading to a ranch to hunt antelope, and he’s been practicing conversation with an Indian chief. And James Ward, a Confederate soldier at Chaffin’s Farm, writes to Viola Haney in the Shenandoah Valley, defending his intentions and reporting that the men haven’t had meat in ten days.

Pip: From jubilation to bankruptcy to a hungry soldier pleading his case to a skeptical woman — the personal letter contains everything.

Mara: Speaking of distance measured in ocean miles — one letter in this episode predates all of them by sixty years.

Quarantine on the Mediterranean

Pip: What does a letter look like when it has to be dipped in vinegar before it can leave the ship?

Mara: Jeremiah Winslow, writing to Thomas and Charity Rotch from quarantine off Marseille in October 1806, explains exactly that: “All letters passing from vessels at quarantine must be put in vinegar. Therefore you must not think it strange if the paper should be colored.”

Pip: The paper is stained, the brig has been battered by one of the worst Mediterranean storms in memory, and Winslow is stuck on a rock island with a French pilot and a guard, waiting six days for clearance to go ashore.

Mara: He reflects on the voyage at length — the near-wrecks, the profane sailors, the captain who had drifted from his Quaker faith and seemed to be finding his way back. Winslow writes that in the moments of greatest danger he felt “more calmness than I could have experienced on the most high was my only refuge.”

Pip: Two hundred and twenty years old, and it still reads like a man trying to make sense of surviving something he wasn’t sure he would.

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Mara: What holds all of these together is the gap between what the writers know and what their readers know — every letter is written into uncertainty.

Pip: And somehow they all found their way here. Next episode, more of what the mail carried.

Pip: Letters written in pencil, on knapsacks, in the rain, beside rivers with green water — Spared and Shared 23 arrives with a full mailbag.

Mara: All of it from Griff, who has assembled a wide range of primary sources this episode — soldiers writing home from active campaigns, a pre-war letter from a naval officer at a fashionable resort, and families writing across the distances that war and life opened up between them.

Pip: Let's start with the soldiers themselves — the ones writing from the front.

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Writing Through the War: Voices From the Field

Mara: What these letters collectively document is the psychological and physical texture of soldiering — not the grand narrative of battles, but the daily reality of mud, bad coffee, guard duty, and the slow realization that war is nothing like what the recruits imagined.

Pip: The post anchoring this segment follows Charles E. Koonts of Co. E, 19th Ohio Volunteer Infantry — seventeen years old at enlistment, dead at Chickamauga before he turned nineteen, and the writer of twenty-seven letters to his younger sister Clara across nearly two years of service.

Mara: The early letters capture a voice still adjusting to camp life. In October 1861, writing from Alliance, Ohio, he tells Clara: "I have nothing of any importance to say as I am here in camp and nothing going on. But I expect that we shall leave here pretty soon as the regiment is about full."

Pip: That sentence is doing a lot of work. Nothing to say, and yet he writes anyway — because writing to Clara is the thing that keeps the distance manageable.

Mara: The post frames the arc precisely. Before Shiloh, soldiers wrote about hoping to see a battle. After it, the post notes, "they wrote about hoping to survive the next one. It was a grim jolt of reality that hardened the young men almost overnight." Koonts' later letters bear that out — detailed accounts of the fighting at Stones River, requests for shirts and fine combs, opinions on generals, and a strikingly bitter postscript warning Clara away from a man he calls "a contemptible snake."

Pip: The mundane and the devastating sitting in the same envelope.

Mara: Two other letters in this segment offer useful counterpoints. William Hunting Rogers of the 98th New York writes to his brother Ed in April 1862 from Newport News, watching the CSS Virginia — the Merrimack — patrol the James River within a mile and a half of camp. He's playing euchre, getting a tooth filled at Fort Monroe, and reporting on the ironclad standoff with a mix of frustration and dark fascination.

Pip: And then there's Augustus Adams of the 25th Massachusetts, writing from the same Newport News in November 1863 — rebel torpedoes floating down the James, the whole brigade under marching orders, a sister named Julia whose health is "no better."

Mara: Joseph Nellist of the 28th New York writes to his wife Loretta from Darnestown, Maryland, in October 1861 — cold nights on guard duty, one woman in the entire regiment, and an eight-year-old drummer boy in soldiers' clothes. Arthur Aldrich of the 13th New Hampshire writes to his father-in-law from Portsmouth, Virginia, in March 1864, cheerful about rebel prisoners and matter-of-fact about his malaria. Charles Huntington of the 9th New York Cavalry writes to a friend named Hattie from Camp Fenton on New Year's Eve 1861, gossiping about neighbors back home. And the unidentified James P. M., writing from Dalton, Georgia, in May 1864, passes his letter by flag-of-truce boat and reports that of all his old friends from before the war, he can "hardly count ten — all beneath the sod of the battlefield or disappeared God knows where."

Pip: Charles Ballou of the 9th Rhode Island rounds it out — a three-month garrison soldier who spent a day touring Washington and left his name scratched into the Capitol plaster.

Mara: Taken together, these letters map the full emotional range of the war — from boredom and homesickness in the opening months to grief and exhaustion by 1864. The families writing back complete that picture.

Pip: Which is exactly where we go next.

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Home Front: Letters Across the Distance

Mara: The letters in this segment come from the other direction — from parents, siblings, and spouses writing toward the front, and from one pre-war correspondent writing from a sulphur spring in Virginia.

Pip: The anchor here is Ralph DeLancey Izard III, a young naval officer writing in July 1841 from White Sulphur Springs to his physician. He describes the resort's famous mineral water as tasting like "a solution of gunpowder."

Mara: What that letter captures is the texture of elite antebellum correspondence — social observation, careful health updates, a dry wit about the resort's policy of housing bachelors separately from married guests. John B. Martin's 1834 letter to an old friend in Alabama covers similar personal ground before turning into a detailed critique of Andrew Jackson's presidency, nullification, and Martin Van Buren. And Catharine Bramkamp's 1865 letter to her brother in Ohio reports that her husband William was drafted, traveled twice to Cairo to report, and was sent home both times — the second time because Lincoln had just been killed and the office was closed.

Pip: The Anderson family letters — Parney and John Anderson writing to their son Emerson in the 2nd Massachusetts — are the emotional spine of this group. Relief at his survival after Winchester, careful instructions about what to put in a care package, a Thanksgiving letter that notes the absent son "was not forgotten, neither at the Festival board nor at the alter."

Mara: Distance measured in letters, stamps, and the anxiety of not knowing whether any of them arrived.

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Pip: What stays with you across all of it is how much of the war was just waiting — waiting to march, waiting for pay, waiting to hear back.

Mara: And writing through the wait, because the letters were the connection. Next episode, more from Spared and Shared.

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.