Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio

Epilogue

epilogue In the final letter of this collection, Andrew laments the small size of the family left at home with him. Of his eleven children, four had died during the war—Abraham, John, Amos, and Ann—and only four remained at home, as Indiana lived with her husband, George Early, across the county in Feesburg. Will was at medical college in Cleveland, and Sam remained in the field with the Freedmen’s Bureau. The war years took a heavy toll on the Evans family, shrinking their numbers and alienating those still living from relatives and old friends. Through these letters we saw Andrew lose a daughter and three sons, one to illness contracted in the army (John) and another because military absences necessitated a grueling regimen for those at home (Amos). These tragic events, despite his soldier sons’ luck on the battlefields, made Andrew especially desperate for Sam to come home. The war not only took away family members, but also divided the Evanses from neighbors, friends, and even their closest relatives. Most dramatically, Sam and his first cousin Jane terminated their affectionate relationship because Sam could not stomach her racist opposition to emancipation and half-hearted support for the war. After this, the story of Jane, her ne’er-do-well brother Laban, and the rest of her family is largely lost to history. Jane’s father Amos, accused of deserting his regiment in February 1863, after being left in a shipboard sickbed at Nashville , never returned home or otherwise reappeared in the historical record.1 Like the life stories of so many common Americans of any generation, what little we know about the Evans’s history years later is necessarily anecdotal and fragmentary. The war, and the fact that Sam and Andrew Evans so fastidiously saved their letters, gives readers a unique window into the story of these people’s lives, but only for the four years Sam spent in the field. Sam’s return to the family homestead reduced the need for 1. Josiah Morrow, The History of Brown County, Ohio, Containing a History of the County . . . General and Local Statistics; Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men; History of the Northwest Territory; History of Ohio; Map of Brown County; Constitution of the United States (Chicago: W. H. Beers, 1883), Biographical Sketches 158–59; United States Civil War Records , Amos E. Evans, National Archives, Washington, DC. regular letter writing, and the end of the Civil War eliminated nostalgic or documentary reasons for continuing to save any correspondence Sam and Andrew might have found reason to exchange. Thus the details of their day-to-day postwar lives are largely unknown— a stark contrast to how much we have learned about their wartime experience. From various sources documenting Brown County local history, one extant postwar letter Sam sent a former commander, and Andrew Evans’s last will and testament, we can trace an outline of the Evans clan’s postbellum lives. Andrew Evans died at age sixty-nine on September 12, 1879. His wife, Mary, survived him for thirteen years. All seven of their children still living at the completion of the wartime correspondence outlived their father. At the time of Andrew’s death, the five eldest all were married and living locally, Indiana at Ripley and the others, Sam, Will, Mary Grierson, and Isabella Hawk, at Hiett (a new town in Huntington Township, presumably named after their mother Mary Hiett Evans’s family). The two youngest, Joseph H. (Jo in most letters) and Lee, resided at home with their mother. Joseph H. Evans remained in Brown County for the duration of his life, which ended prematurely in 1892.2 Sam and Will lived full lives that extended long past the Civil War. Well after scenes of battlefields faded into distant memory, they remained deeply proud of their exemplary military records and continued to celebrate wartime achievements of fellow Ohioans. The depth of their adulation for favorite Ohio generals is demonstrated by the tribute both Evans soldiers paid in the names of their first sons born after the war, Sam’s U. S. Grant Evans and Will’s boys W. T. Sherman Evans and P. H. Sheridan Evans (twins like their father). Sam and Will never strayed from wartime loyalties. Passionate Democrats before their military service, Sam and Will followed their brother John in abandoning the party of Jackson for the Union (Republican and pro-war) Party.3 They never turned back. With slaveholders just across the...