An Englishman in a Kentucky Regiment: The Civil War Letters of Robert Winn

But let us look at the nature of the war going on - is slavery likely to be interfered with? If so by which party, and how? Would a restoration of the union at the present time not help to strengthen slavery and save it from destruction? Would a long protracted war not be the means of its destruction?¹

The letters of Robert Fletcher Winn form part of the Winn-Cook Family Papers held at the Filson Historical Society. Between 1861 and 1865, millions of Americans like Winn marched off to war with the expectation that they could maintain contact with their home communities via the mail. From his first days in training camp in Kentucky to his last campaign in North Carolina, Winn maintained a steady stream of correspondence with his friends and family. Winn's surviving letters from the war number 175, a considerable quantity for any one soldier. Together they provide a remarkable portrait of the experiences and musings of a frontline participant in America's most destructive war. The collection of Winn's letters not only offers insight into the worldview of an ordinary American living in extraordinary times but also reveals much about the common soldier's experience of writing and fighting his way through America's greatest conflict.

Letter from Robert Winn to his sister, Martha Winn, dated October 21, 1864. Includes drawing of a woodcock, a horned pheasant, and an unnamed soldier.

FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Born June 12, 1837, in Gateshead, England, Robert Fletcher Winn was the eldest child of John Winn and Mary Fletcher. The couple had twelve children, the last born after the family emigrated from England and settled in Hancock County, Kentucky. The local coal mining industry provided employment for the large family. The Winns settled in a slave state where, on the eve of the Civil War, one in five Kentuckians—some 225,000 men, women, and children—was owned by another.²

Though Winn, like many white Kentuckians, had sympathies for the rebellion, his loyalty to the Union proved stronger. Along with thousands of Kentuckians, he answered the call to arms during the fall of 1861. He enlisted as a private in Company E of the 3rd Kentucky Cavalry Regiment, an outfit organized in December 1861 in Calhoun and McLean counties. A fellow regimental comrade, Matthew Cook, later married Robert's sister Martha, and thus the two Union men, who served as brothers-in-arms during the war, became brothers-in-law afterward. The 3rd Kentucky Cavalry saw action in several notable engagements. Winn witnessed the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, the drive toward Atlanta and the March to the Sea in 1864, and William Tecumseh Sherman's campaign in the Carolinas in 1865.³

Like their predecessors in previous conflicts, Civil War soldiers went for months and even years without seeing loved ones. Unlike their predecessors, however, most Civil War soldiers were literate and had access to a reliable national mail system. Deployment to faraway battlefronts fueled an even greater demand for both letters and the means to deliver them. Soldiers spent hours daily writing letters. This was one of the chief forms of leisure and helped sustain men's morale as they endured long stretches of boredom, punctuated by moments of terrifying combat. The hardships of active campaigning and the horrors of battle tested their resolve, while the periods of inactivity made them all the more eager for letters that provided amusement and helped sustain their will to fight. Winn, like many Civil War soldiers, derived great joy from the mail and regularly pressed his correspondents to write often. During the campaign to capture Atlanta in the summer of 1864, while he was convalescing at Ringgold, Georgia, Winn wrote in a May 29 letter to his sister Martha, "I expect reading matter to be scarce in Kingston—so you had better, if you can spare the time, write some more of your good old fashioned letters." Winn claimed to write many "good old fashioned letters" throughout the war, at a rate...