Pip: Dispatches from people who really, really wanted to be somewhere else — welcome to Spared and Shared.

Mara: This episode draws on letters Griff has tracked down and transcribed, covering soldiers writing home from the Civil War front, and one earlier letter touching on family news and the politics of the day.

Pip: Let’s start with the battlefield letters — there are a lot of them, and they carry a lot of weight.

Letters From the Front Lines

Mara: The question running through all of these letters is the same one soldiers have always faced: how do you describe where you are and what you’re doing to someone who has no frame of reference for it?

Pip: Hamp Squires, writing to his brother-in-law Jetur White from a sandbank camp three miles from Helena, Arkansas in March 1863, finds his frame of reference in home. He writes: “The sand reminds me of Old Long Island but it is not quite so nice and white.”

Mara: That one line does a lot of work. He’s placing himself on a map his reader can picture, and in the same breath making clear the distance between that familiar image and where he actually is.

Pip: And then the letter just keeps going — card games, hard crackers for dinner, the river fifteen feet from the tent. The biography attached to Hamp’s letter is something else entirely: captured at Brice’s Cross Roads, sent to Andersonville, wasted from 175 pounds down to 80, and somehow secreted 60 cents past the guards to buy paper and write a letter that reached him six months later.

Mara: That biographical detail reframes the breezy tone of the 1863 letter entirely. He didn’t know yet what was coming.

Pip: The letter from Joseph Kerschner to his brother Edward in October 1862 runs on a similar frequency — practical, almost businesslike. Joseph has just received his discharge and is heading to Annapolis to chase a commission, while Edward, an assistant surgeon, had already survived the sinking of the Cumberland when the Virginia rammed her.

Mara: And Calvin, writing to his mother from camp near Fairfax in January 1863, is doing something different again. He writes: “I am happy in reading my bible and Saint’s Rest, and mother, you wrote that you hoped I would discharge my duty as a Christian. I will try to do so and my mother’s advice shall ever be borne in mind.”

Pip: That’s a soldier managing his mother’s worry as carefully as he’s managing his own.

Mara: William Bartlett’s letter from near Fredericksburg is the most domestic of the set — he spends most of it coordinating a care package: tobacco, notepaper, envelopes, maybe stockings, routed through Springfield to save on express fees.

Pip: Logistics of love, essentially.

Mara: Horace Derry’s two letters to his mother span April 1862 near Yorktown and November 1862 near Falmouth, just before Fredericksburg, where he’d lose his leg. The November letter captures the army in a holding pattern: mud, misdirected guard details, raw pork on the march, and pickets close enough to the Confederate line to have a conversation across the Rappahannock.

Pip: And then there’s Greenwood Norris, eighteen years old, writing from Beaufort, South Carolina on July 8, 1862, saying the island is the healthiest around. He died three days later, or possibly three weeks — the records disagree, but not about the outcome.

Mara: Walworth Porter’s letter from St. Louis in May 1862 rounds out the set — writing to his brother Sam before heading out with the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry, already nursing a bad cold, already watching a comrade’s body being retrieved from Pittsburg Landing.

Pip: Seven letters, and the through line is the same: the ordinary texture of days, written by people who had no idea which letter might be the last.

Mara: That gap between the mundane and the mortal is what makes the archive matter. Which brings us to correspondence that never touched a battlefield at all.

A Letter Between Brothers-in-Law

Mara: The 1848 letter from Noah Wells to his brother-in-law Hiram Bell is a different register entirely — a schoolmaster’s letter, measured and expansive, covering an election, a Thanksgiving sermon, and a riot outside his window.

Pip: He writes: “I hope, therefore, no more will be heard about hickory poles, or ash poles, or hard cider, connected with the dignified business of electing a president for twenty millions of people.”

Mara: That’s Noah reacting to Zachary Taylor’s victory, arguing that New York’s electoral weight decided it, and hoping the spectacle of campaigning gives way to something more principled. The letter from Augustine Sackett, writing to his sister Flora from a gunboat on the Broad River in July 1863, keeps the family-news frequency going — asking after their father, wondering who will run the mowing machine, and noting that watermelons have become a significant event in the ship’s summer.

Pip: Priorities, correctly ordered.

Mara: Both letters are doing the same quiet work: maintaining connection across distance, filling in the texture of ordinary life for someone who isn’t there to see it.

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Pip: What stays with me is how consistent the impulse is — soldier or schoolmaster, 1848 or 1863, everyone is trying to close the gap between where they are and where the person reading them is.

Mara: And the letters that survive are the ones that made it through. Next episode, we’ll see what else Griff has found waiting in the archive.

Pip: There is a specific kind of intimacy that only survives because someone kept the envelope — a letter written on the march, or from a plantation on the Mississippi, or from a city coming apart at the seams.

Mara: That intimacy is what runs through this week's posts on Spared and Shared 23 — all of them brought to us by Griff. We're moving through Civil War soldiers writing home, family letters spanning decades, and one remarkable dispatch from the Confederacy's final collapse.

Pip: Let's start with the soldiers and the people waiting for them.

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Soldiers' Letters, Home Front Voices

Mara: These posts place us inside the experience of men serving in the Union Army — what they ate, what they feared, who they missed — and beside the people on the home front trying to hold things together while they waited.

Pip: The anchor here is William Henry Mix, writing from opposite Fredericksburg in December 1862, and he opens with something that reads less like a war letter than a flirtatious dispatch from a man who has not forgotten how to be charming.

Mara: He sets the scene immediately. Describing a letter that arrived already opened, Mix writes: "Surely John must have called the morning and sent it off, and taking so many kisses from your dewey lips, there was not enough moisture left to dampen the mucilage."

Pip: And then, a few paragraphs later, the same letter turns. He describes Thanksgiving on the march — no turkey, no pudding — and writes that he saw "not the happy faces and manly forms of many brave fellows that were with us full of health and life one year ago. They have fought their last fight."

Mara: That pivot from wit to grief in a single letter is what makes it so striking. Mix survived Gettysburg and went on to serve in the United States Colored Troops — the full arc of his service is documented across three letters on the site.

Pip: Wakeman Young Andrews does not have Mix's gift for the light touch. His November 1862 letter to Colonel Palmer is a document of institutional chaos — sick men left behind, tents burned, orders nobody passed along — and ends with Andrews telling his commanding officer that a hernia and a hemorrhaging throat mean he cannot continue. He asks plainly for permission to go home.

Mara: The letter from Abel Hartley Comstock, writing from Fortress Monroe in April 1862, has a different register entirely — he cheerfully tells his cousin Mary he ran the picket line to visit a friend and "stood a good chance of getting shot in the operation, but nothing ventured, nothing had."

Pip: George Chauncey Peck writes from Seabrook Island, South Carolina, watching Confederate pickets on horseback from the treeline, and Augustus Norton writes from Lexington, Kentucky with something heavier — a creeping sense that the future has gone blank, that he may never return to Athens to live.

Mara: The Edmund Blackmar collection spans nine letters from Louisiana to the Shenandoah Valley. By July 1864, writing to his sister, he says he is "desirous of next January to bid adieu to the army and go to some place where I can live in peace and retirement and away from the sound of the bugle and drum."

Pip: Three years in, and the uniform had become something he viewed "only with abhorrence." That is a long way from the man who enlisted in January 1862.

Mara: Joseph Henry Capen's letter from April 1863 gives an almost hour-by-hour account of listening to the cannonading at the Siege of Washington, North Carolina, from a picket post miles away — anxious for news of the eight companies of his regiment inside the besieged town.

Pip: And Joseph Emmons Blanding, writing from winter quarters outside Washington in January 1862, describes log-and-mud huts with tent roofs, rabbit hunting in the woods, and a colonel who arrived as a religious man and ended up arrested for riding drunk across the parade ground. Blanding was wounded at Malvern Hill six months later and did not survive the year.

Mara: The range across these letters — from flirtation to grief, from bureaucratic fury to quiet despair — is the whole human weather of that war, one envelope at a time.

Pip: Which makes the letters that have nothing to do with the war feel, somehow, even more charged.

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Letters Across Decades, Families Across Distance

Mara: The family correspondence segment opens much earlier and further south — with George Marble writing from Natchez, Mississippi, in 1836, describing cotton plantations, a flooding river, and a city he finds more alive than anything back in New Hampshire.

Pip: He writes to his cousin Judge Putnam with the breezy confidence of a man whose ambitions have outrun his means, and he signs off: "Martin Van Buren and Liberty!" — which is either a political toast or the most cheerful non-sequitur in the collection.

Mara: The McGill brothers' correspondence with Levin West spans from 1856 to 1865 — Charles writing from declining health, Robert from his desk at the Treasury Department, both watching the country fracture. By January 1861, Robert writes that he is "too old to fight, too old to run away, too old or too lazy to work," and wonders what is to be done.

Pip: And then there is Louisa Fairman, writing to her in-laws from Michigan in 1850, waiting for her husband Harry to come home from wherever he has gone — she does not know exactly when, but she says simply: "let me but get with him again, and I'll go where he goes after that."

Mara: That kind of patient, unguarded loyalty turns up in letters across every decade here. The distance between sender and recipient seems to clarify what matters.

Pip: Which is also what Charles Holst is writing through, though under very different circumstances.

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One Letter From the Edge of Everything

Mara: Charles Holst was a Danish-born carriage maker in Chester, South Carolina, writing in March 1865 to the woman he intended to marry — and the world around him was in freefall.

Pip: Wheeler's cavalry had just passed through, and Holst catalogs what they took from his neighbors: mules by the dozen, silver buried in a graveyard, gold watches found later in soldiers' boots. These were Confederate troops robbing Confederate civilians.

Mara: He describes the scene in the letter directly: "We are in the most intense excitement. Wheeler's Cavalry of infamous fame — over 5,000 men and horses — have left us. In a letter I cannot describe the outrages and depredations they as Friends and Defenders done us and our people."

Pip: The phrase "Friends and Defenders" doing that much work is — something.

Mara: He goes on to describe Columbia in ruins, Charleston garrisoned by Black Union troops, the railroad torn up, and famine approaching. And through all of it, he is writing a love letter — telling Isabella Woodruff that he would go mad without the hope of seeing her again.

Pip: The war ends. The letter survives. That is the whole premise of this site, and this one earns it.

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Mara: What holds all of this together is the specificity — a hernia, a flooded plantation, a colonel drunk on a parade horse, a graveyard with the silver gone.

Pip: The archive keeps the small things. Next time, more of them.

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.