Letters Home from the American Civil War

On July 14, 1861, a thirty-two-year-old major in the Second Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry sat down in Camp Clark, Washington, DC, and wrote a letter to his wife Sarah in Smithfield, Rhode Island. The army he was attached to — the Union Army of Northeastern Virginia under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell — was about to move south into Confederate territory for what most Northerners assumed would be the war’s decisive engagement. The major, Sullivan Ballou, was a lawyer, a father of two young sons, and a former Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged,” he wrote. “And my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government.” Then he wrote: “If I do not return, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you.”

Seven days later, on July 21, 1861, Ballou’s right leg was shattered by a six-pound Confederate cannonball at the First Battle of Bull Run. He died of his wounds on July 28 at Sudley Church. The letter, never mailed, was retrieved from his trunk by Rhode Island’s Governor William Sprague during a visit to the battlefield and delivered to Sarah. She lived to be 80 and never remarried. The letter survives in the Rhode Island State Archives. Approximately 620,000 to 750,000 American men died in the war Ballou’s letter introduces. This piece is about how the survivors learned of it.

The Mail

The Civil War was the first major American conflict in which most soldiers on both sides could read and write. The literacy rate in the Union army was around 90 percent; in the Confederate army, around 75–80 percent. Both governments maintained military postal systems, though the Confederate Post Office, headed by Postmaster General John Henninger Reagan, was a far smaller operation. Letters between Union soldiers and home travelled by army courier and railroad and were free of postage charges for soldiers from 1861 onward.

Soldiers wrote constantly. A Union private’s typical correspondence ran to several letters a week. The recurring themes — the food, the weather, the boredom of camp, the longing for home, the cataloguing of which men in the company had died of dysentery or measles or in the last action — are the texture of the war’s lived experience. The Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Virginia Historical Society, and dozens of state archives hold these correspondences by the carton. They are the largest body of working-class American writing from the nineteenth century.

Beyond Sullivan Ballou, the names worth knowing include Charles Harvey Brewster (10th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry), whose letters to his mother and sisters were edited by historian David Blight as When This Cruel War Is Over (1992); Wilbur Fisk (2nd Vermont Volunteer Infantry), whose newspaper dispatches were collected by Emil Rosenblatt as Hard Marching Every Day (1992); and Spotswood Rice, a formerly enslaved Missouri man serving in the 67th US Colored Troops, whose September 3, 1864, letter to his still-enslaved daughter Mary’s enslaver — promising to come back at the head of an army to retrieve his children — survives in the National Archives and is now widely taught.

The Photographs

The other major change in how the war reached the home front was photography. Mathew Brady, an established New York portrait photographer, secured permission from President Lincoln in 1861 to send teams of photographers — among them Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, James Gibson, and George Barnard — to cover the army’s field operations with portable wet-plate darkrooms. The Brady studio eventually produced more than 10,000 plates documenting the war.

The pivotal moment for the American public was the exhibition of Gardner’s Antietam photographs at Brady’s Broadway gallery in October 1862. The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, in western Maryland, remains the bloodiest single day in American history: 22,717 casualties (3,650 killed, the rest wounded or missing) in twelve hours of fighting. Gardner and Gibson arrived on September 19 with cameras and made the first photographs of American battlefield dead ever taken. Brady put the prints on display under the simple title The Dead of Antietam. The New York Times reviewer, on October 20, 1862, wrote: “Mr. Brady has done something to bring home to us the terrible reality and earnestness of war. If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door-yards and along the streets, he has done something very like it.”

Amos Humiston

On the evening of July 1, 1863 — the end of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg — a Union burial detail discovered the body of a soldier in a fenced yard at the corner of Stratton Street and York Street in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The body bore no identification. In one hand the soldier still held an ambrotype showing three young children: two boys and a girl, formally dressed, looking at the camera. He had evidently been looking at the photograph as he died.

The image was given to a local doctor, John Francis Bourns, who had reproductions made and sent to Northern newspapers in October 1863 with a request that the children’s mother be identified. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran the story under the headline “Whose Father Was He?” In Cattaraugus County, New York, Philinda Humiston, the widow of a sergeant in the 154th New York Volunteers, recognised her three children — Franklin, Alice, and Frederick — and confirmed that her husband Amos had carried the ambrotype with him. The donations that poured in from readers across the North supported Philinda and her children for several years and eventually funded the National Homestead at Gettysburg, a residence for orphans of Union soldiers, which opened in 1866 and operated for fifteen years.

The Walt Whitman Hospitals

One of the war’s central literary witnesses was Walt Whitman, the poet who in 1862 came to Washington to find his wounded brother George (53rd New York Volunteer Infantry) and stayed for the rest of the war as a part-time volunteer in the army hospitals. Whitman wrote letters home for soldiers who could not write themselves, sat with the dying, brought them small gifts — paper, postage, oranges, ice cream — and recorded their stories in the notebooks that eventually became his 1865 collection Drum-Taps and the prose Memoranda During the War (1875). His estimate, in Memoranda: “Probably no future age can know, but I well know, how the Hospital part of the affair of ’61–’65 deserves to be recorded… The marrow of the tragedy is concentrated in those Hospitals.”

Women in Uniform

One of the persistent surprises of Civil War research has been the documentation of women soldiers. Working with regimental records, hospital admission registers, and postwar pension files, historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook in They Fought Like Demons (2002) compiled documented evidence for roughly 400 women who served as enlisted soldiers, disguised as men, in both armies. The actual figure is probably higher.

The best-known cases are Sarah Emma Edmonds (alias Frank Thompson, 2nd Michigan Volunteer Infantry, served 1861–63, later wrote a memoir, received an army pension in 1884), Jennie Hodgers (alias Albert Cashier, 95th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, served 1862–65, lived as a man for the next fifty years and received a Union pension until 1913, when his sex was discovered after a leg injury), and Loreta Janeta Velázquez (alias Lieutenant Harry T. Buford, Confederate States Army, whose 1876 memoir The Woman in Battle was both popular and contested). Most served as ordinary infantrymen; some served as cavalry; several were wounded in action; at least a handful were killed and buried without their sex being discovered.

The Mourning Culture

The war’s emotional aftermath reshaped American cultural practice. Death tolls were of a scale Americans had never previously experienced — roughly 2 percent of the entire population of the country, the equivalent of perhaps 7 million Americans today. The mourning rituals that emerged — extensive black crepe, formal mourning attire worn for years, postmortem photography, elaborate funeral processions, the creation of national military cemeteries — drew on existing European Victorian practices but were intensified by the scale of the casualties. The federal government created the National Cemetery System beginning in 1862 with the burial of Union dead at fourteen sites; Gettysburg National Cemetery, dedicated by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, became the prototype. Memorial Day, originally Decoration Day, emerged from local commemorations beginning in 1865 — including a May 1, 1865, ceremony organised by formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, at a Confederate prison-camp burial site — and was formalised by General John A. Logan’s General Order No. 11 of May 5, 1868.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Two distortions appear regularly. The first is the sentimentalisation of Civil War letters. The surviving correspondence is overwhelmingly not romantic; it is grindingly practical, full of complaints about pay, food, lice, weather, and the incompetence of officers, with extended discussions of which men have died of what diseases. Sullivan Ballou’s letter is famous because it is unusual.

The second is the reduction of the war’s human cost to a number. The standard 620,000 figure, in use for a century, has been substantially revised upward — the 2011 demographic study by J. David Hacker, using census data, places the true figure at roughly 750,000, and emphasises that civilian deaths from disease, displacement, and violence remain largely uncounted. The number was so large that, as Drew Gilpin Faust argues in This Republic of Suffering (2008), it forced the United States to invent its modern institutions of death — the national cemetery system, the systematic identification of remains, the federal Pensions Bureau — almost from scratch.

Why It Still Matters

The American Civil War remains the most-researched conflict in American history because it was also the best-documented at the time. The surviving letters, the photographs, the regimental records, and the pension files together constitute one of the largest archives of nineteenth-century working-class experience anywhere in the world. The way the war was felt — by the soldiers, by the women who waited for them, by the formerly enslaved people for whom the war was simultaneously emancipation and dislocation — is the substance of what made it historically transformative. The numbers are the surface; the letters are the depth.

For related history, see our pieces on the New York Draft Riots of July 1863, the Lost Cause, and Robert Smalls.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Sullivan Ballou letter?

Sullivan Ballou (1829–1861) was a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteer Infantry. On July 14, 1861, at Camp Clark in Washington, DC, he wrote a letter to his wife Sarah expressing his love and acknowledging that he might not survive the campaign about to begin. He was wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21 and died on July 28 at Sudley Church. The letter, never mailed, was retrieved from his belongings and delivered to Sarah. It survives in the Rhode Island State Archives and was made widely known through Ken Burns’s 1990 PBS documentary The Civil War.

How many Americans died in the Civil War?

The traditional figure of approximately 620,000 military deaths has been substantially revised upward by historian J. David Hacker, whose 2011 demographic study estimated the true figure at approximately 750,000 men. Roughly two-thirds of the deaths were from disease — dysentery, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and others — rather than from combat. Civilian deaths from war-related causes remain largely uncounted.

Did women fight in the Civil War?

Yes. Historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook documented approximately 400 women who served as enlisted soldiers in both the Union and Confederate armies disguised as men. The best-documented cases are Sarah Emma Edmonds (Frank Thompson, 2nd Michigan), Jennie Hodgers (Albert Cashier, 95th Illinois), and Loreta Janeta Velázquez (Harry T. Buford, Confederate Army). Some were wounded; some were killed. Beyond combat, tens of thousands of women served as nurses through the US Sanitary Commission, the US Christian Commission, and Confederate equivalents.

Who was Amos Humiston?

Amos Humiston was a sergeant in the 154th New York Volunteer Infantry, killed on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 1, 1863. His body was found clutching an ambrotype of his three children — Franklin, Alice, and Frederick. The image was reproduced in Northern newspapers in October 1863, and his widow Philinda recognised her children. Donations from readers supported the family and eventually funded the National Homestead at Gettysburg, a residence for Union orphans that operated from 1866 to 1881.

Who took the famous Civil War photographs?

Mathew Brady, an established New York portrait photographer, organised teams of photographers including Alexander Gardner, Timothy O’Sullivan, James Gibson, and George Barnard, who collectively produced more than 10,000 plates documenting the war. Gardner’s photographs of the Confederate dead at Antietam, taken on September 19, 1862, and exhibited at Brady’s New York gallery in October 1862, were the first photographs of American battlefield dead the public had ever seen.

What was the National Cemetery System?

The federal government began creating military cemeteries in 1862 to provide burials for Union dead. Gettysburg National Cemetery, dedicated by President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, became the prototype. The system grew to include cemeteries at most major battlefields and, after the war, at Arlington (1864). The National Cemetery System is now administered by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and the US Army.

Sources

1. Library of Congress — The Civil War in America (collections)
2. Rhode Island State Archives — Sullivan Ballou Papers
3. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008)
4. J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57 (2011): 307–48
5. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1997)
6. DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)
7. David W. Blight (ed.), When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)
8. Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (Camden, NJ: 1875)
9. Mark H. Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston (Praeger, 1999)