The Untried Life: The Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War

Bibliography

 Bibliography The goal of this work is to tell the story of the Twenty-Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry (OVI), as much as possible, in the words of the soldiers and officers who served in it. Initial fears that too little of what the men of the regiment said about themselves had survived were resolved early on. My research produced a surprising quantity of wartime letters, both published and unpublished, and several diaries. A review of extant Ohio newspapers of the period recovered more than 180 published letters written by the regiment’s soldiers and officers. This does not include numerous letters written by soldier-correspondents of other regiments of their brigade in which the writers mentioned the Twenty-Ninth Ohio, nor does it include the many squibs written by the various newspaper editors to keep the homefolk posted on the regiment’s whereabouts, health, personnel changes, and battles. Most of the newspaper-published war letters were written by a compact group of soldiers, officers mostly, each of whom served as field correspondent for his favorite newspaper. Chaplains Russel Hurlburt and Lyman D. Ames, Colonels Thomas Clark and Lewis P. Buckley, and officers Comfort Chaffee, Wilbur Chamberlain, Gurley Crane, William T. Fitch, E. B. Howard, Jonas Schoonover, Theron S. Winship, E. B. Woodbury, Josiah Wright, and Myron T. Wright all composed at least a half dozen letters for public consumption. Other men published letters under a pseudonym; most prominent of these were “S. B.,” who was revealed as Josiah Wright, and “Pvt. W” (later “Ofcr. W”), who most likely was Theron Winship. Soldiers using a nom de plume who cannot be identified, but who each wrote several letters, were “Seelye,” “James,” “J. R.,” and one writer who signed his letters “Anonymous.” The majority of these letters were published in the Ashtabula Sentinel, Jefferson, Ohio; the Summit Beacon Journal, Akron, Ohio; or the Conneaut Reporter. A significant number of letters and diaries that were never published have survived. The largest body of letters by a Giddings Regiment soldier are those written by Sgt. Wallace B. Hoyt. Forty-six of his letters have been preserved. Most are found at the Ohio Historical Society. Several more Hoyt letters were discovered during research in his survivor’s pension file at the National Archives, in Washington, D.C. Thirty-three war letters of Lt. John G. Marsh have been identified. About twenty of them, written mostly to his little sister and favorite correspondent, Ida, were traced by historian James Hudson to Ida’s descendant Mrs. Maryal Hantz Hunt. Copies of these letters are located at the University of Arkansas Library, Fayetteville. The others are found in the Marsh pension file at the National Archives. Professor Hudson published the group of Marsh letters written from Fredericksburg, Maryland, in the fall of 1862 with limited but valuable annotations. See “Civil War Letters from Frederick, Maryland: The War Correspondence of Sergeant John G. Marsh,” Old Northwest 9 (Fall 1983): 237–53. From a bit of marginalia in his working notes it appears Hudson had considered publishing the entire body of Marsh letters under the title “If a Hundred Deaths Stood in the Way.” His plan was not fulfilled, which is unfortunate because Mrs. Hunt apparently possessed rich details of Lieutenant Marsh’s life and times, passed along through the family chain, which are not recorded elsewhere. A small group of Marsh letters was edited and published by C. Calvin Smith. See “The Duties of Home and War: The Civil War Letters of John G. Marsh, 29th Ohio Volunteers (A Selection),” Upper Ohio Historical Review 8 (1979): 7–20. The dozen letters surveyed in Smith’s piece, and catalogued by Hudson, were those examined in the original form during 468 i n d e x research for this book in the Marsh pension file at the National Archives. A tantalizing lead toward the possible existence of Marsh letters other than those noted was suggested by the discovery of a stray notation for a forty-one-page piece prepared by Lyle W. Durham of Urbana, Illinois, in 1978. Unfortunately, Durham may not have published his work in any conventional way, and it cannot be located. Pvt. Cass Nims’s parents kept about a dozen of his letters and sent them to Washington, where they currently reside in the Nims pension file. Also found in the pension files were 110 letters written by various Twenty-Ninth Ohio soldiers, including Christopher Beck, George B. Dice, Thomas Fales, Oscar Gibbs, Nelson Gillett, Ellis Green...