Do They Miss Me at Home? The Civil War Letters of William McKnight, Seventh Ohio Volunteer Cavalry (review)

When presented with a letter describing Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s campaign in eastern Tennessee, Donald Maness discovered a much larger collection of letters and collaborated with H. Jason Coombs to present the collection in a cohesive format. This book presents more than one hundred letters, primarily penned by William McKnight to his wife, Samaria. The editors of this collection copied and transcribed the letters, a great find for Civil War scholars, from the original fibrous paper with only some slight punctuation changes to improve the reader’s flow. Spelling and grammatical errors were retained as McKnight wrote them. The collection is further enriched by illustrations including many family portraits.

When he joined the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry on September 12, 1862, McKnight was an atypical Civil War soldier, being twenty-nine years old and married with four children. He was assigned to Company K of the Seventh Cavalry and by November 8, 1862, rose to the rank of first sergeant and became a second lieutenant by April 19, 1864. He was killed in action at Cynthiana, Kentucky, in June 1864.

During his two years in the Cavalry, McKnight penned letters to his wife almost daily. These express his longing to be home with his family, his concern for his family’s comfort and survival without him, his sense of duty and honor, his unshakable faith in God, and his respect for his company and commanding officer. The letters also reveal the day to day life of a soldier in camp, searching for basic necessities and the frantic pace of a cavalry man on the move in contested terrain and in pitched battle. They reveal the personal struggles of a man bound by a sense of honor to serve his country and his state while answering his wife’s accusation of deserting his family.

In July of 1863, McKnight received word that John Hunt Morgan, the “Thunderbolt of the Confederacy” had raided his hometown of Langsville, Ohio, and stayed for several days at his residence. His assertion to his wife that he would have liked to have been there, in his own words lay to rest the rumors that McKnight was in Ohio pursuing Morgan at the time of his Langsville raid. McKnight gives details of the specific battles of the Cumberland Gap and Knoxville, which the editors checked for accuracy against several nineteenth-century histories of the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry and found to closely follow the official record. The editors used many secondary sources to provide background and collaborative information, and they provided extensive end notes.

The editors have wisely chosen to keep their narrative confined to only that which is essential to place the letters in a larger historical context. By allowing the letters to stand alone, they have created a more vivid picture of William McKnight’s military life while maintaining historical accuracy.