The Lone Picket at Night

Picket duty put a man out beyond his own lines, alone or in pairs, a few hundred yards into the dark between two armies, for two hours at a time. He was the early warning system. He was also the most exposed person on the field, and sleeping on post was a capital offence.

What the letters describe, over and over, is how quiet it was and how close the other side turned out to be. Pickets from both armies could hear each other cough. Often enough they talked. Informal truces sprang up all along the war's static fronts — men agreeing not to shoot at each other's posts, and then trading across the gap: Southern tobacco, which the North was short of, for Northern coffee, which the South had almost none of, passed over on little bark boats floated across the Rappahannock.

Then an order would come down, or a new regiment would rotate in, and the shooting would start again the next morning. Soldiers wrote about this with more unease than about any battle: the difficulty of firing at a man you spoke with last night.