"I Am Yet Among the Living": The Writings of Civil War Soldiers

Civil War soldiers wrote millions of letters. They maintained thousands of diaries. In April 1863, Richard Eddy, chaplain of the 60th New York Infantry, reported that he had mailed 3,855 letters for soldiers in the unit. It's hard to say if all units wrote as voluminously as the New Yorkers; but if they did, a million letters went out in one month. And this was in April, when soldiers tended to be on the move. As Gary Gallagher points out in The Union War (2011), where he discusses Eddy's dual role as chaplain and postmaster, soldiers probably wrote more during winter encampments.

Literacy rates varied, of course. They were higher for the Union army than the Confederate, higher for those from urban rather than rural areas, higher for white native-born citizens than for blacks and immigrants. Thousands of volumes of letters and diaries have been published since the war, making material in archives and in private collections readily available to historians who have used these sources to illuminate all aspects of the war and to add unique voices to the narrative. An annotated bibliography by Gerald Cole, Civil War Eyewitnesses (1988), listed nearly 1,400 titles published between 1955 and 1986. A follow-up volume covered 1986-96 and listed nearly 600 items for that decade alone. No similar work exists for the past seventeen years, and such a volume would now have to include scores of online editions of letters and diaries. It does not matter that there seems to be little new to learn from previously unpublished manuscripts. Each soldier's story is unique, a snowflake of the war. No two express their hopes and fears in the same way, no two comment on political and military affairs with the same words, no two even record the weather in similar fashion. Walt Whitman understood this. He titled his memoir of the war Specimen Days (1882), each story singular yet each an epitome.

Untold numbers of Civil War letters remain in private hands. In 1995, Kevin and Patsy Alderson attended a household auction in Cashton, Wisconsin, and spotted a cardboard box filled with old letters. They won the contents for $95 and discovered over 160 letters from Guy C. Taylor to his wife Sarah, written in 1864 and 1865. Taylor, a farmer and a Christian, had joined the 36th Wisconsin Infantry as a private. He entered the war late, taking advantage of a bounty offered after President Lincoln issued a call on February 1, 1864, for a half million additional troops. His letters offer a Midwestern perspective on the Eastern front. They also illuminate an issue that has only recently begun to gain attention among historians: how illness affected soldiers and how at least some soldiers used illness to secure positions as non-combatants. In her introduction to this well-edited collection, Kathryn Shively Meier points out that Taylor "parlayed his skills, as well as his relationships with medical personnel," to escape combat, and that his letters provide a rare glimpse of life behind the lines during the final Virginia campaigns of the Army of the Potomac (pp. xxi-xxii).

Something of Taylor's preoccupation with his health can be gleaned from a letter written to Sarah on May 28, 1864. The heading reads "Mt. Pleasant Hospital" in Washington, and in the opening sentence he writes, "I take my pen in hand to let you know that I am yet among the living" (p. 33). Taylor fell ill, perhaps with measles, and was left behind when his regiment went into battle. The 36th fought at North Anna, Bethesda Church, Cold Harbor, and the assault on Petersburg. According...