Letters from the Front

Something like nine out of ten Union soldiers could read and write, which had never been true of a large army before, and they wrote constantly. Estimates run into the millions of letters crossing between the camps and home. Regiments carried portable presses. Men who had never written anything longer than a receipt filled pages by candlelight because there was nothing else to do and no certainty of a next time.

Because of that, the Civil War is the first conflict we can hear in the voices of the men in the ranks rather than only their generals. The letters are not what you expect. They are full of the price of butter, gossip about officers, complaints about the mail, requests for socks and newspapers — and then, without warning, a paragraph that stops you dead.

The most famous of them was written by Sullivan Ballou of Rhode Island a week before First Manassas, telling his wife Sarah that if he did not return she should not mourn him as dead, because he would be near her on the softest breeze. He was killed in that battle. The letter survives because it was found in his trunk.