Letters Home: The American Civil War in Soldiers' Own Words

The American Civil War may be the best-documented war in history from the point of view of the ordinary soldier. Hundreds of thousands of men who had rarely traveled far from home suddenly needed a way to reach the people they had left behind. They wrote letters, often on whatever paper they could find. Because most of those letters were never read by a censor, they speak with a frankness that later wars rarely allowed.

Why soldiers wrote so much

For most Civil War soldiers, the letter was the only link to home. Historian James McPherson, whose research drew on more than 25,000 soldiers' letters and nearly 250 diaries from both sides, describes Civil War soldiers as among the most literate soldiers in history. Many were away from home for the first time, and they wrote often.

The Smithsonian's National Postal Museum puts it simply: some soldiers wrote home weekly, while others seemed to spend all their free time writing. Letters carried news in both directions. Soldiers asked about crops, children, and neighbors. Families sent word of births, illnesses, and deaths, and answered questions the soldiers had asked weeks before.

How the mail reached the army

Getting letters to and from moving armies was a real logistical challenge. The Postal Museum notes that the armies assigned personnel to collect, distribute, and deliver soldiers' mail, and that wagons and tents served as traveling post offices.

"Soldier's Letter"

Stamps were hard to keep dry and hard to buy in the field. Beginning in July 1861, Union soldiers were allowed to mail letters without stamps by writing "Soldier's Letter" on the envelope. The postage was collected from whoever received it. That small rule removed one obstacle for men who wanted to write but had no money or no stamps on hand.

A divided mail system

The war also split the nation's mail. According to the Postal Museum, the Confederacy set up its own Post Office Department in February 1861, two months before the fighting began, and federal mail service to the Southern states was suspended on May 31, 1861. Ordinary letters could no longer simply cross from one side to the other.

Letters without a censor

Readers of letters from the World Wars are used to seeing words blacked out or cut away. Civil War letters are different. McPherson notes that soldiers' letters were uncensored by military authorities, and that this is why they are often so frank, including in their criticism of officers and policies.

There were exceptions. The Postal Museum explains that letters passing between the lines under a flag of truce were checked, and prisoners' mail was censored. PBS's American Experience, in its feature on war letters, notes that the first heavy censorship of U.S. soldiers' mail came during World War I.

When a soldier, or a wife, could not write

Literacy was widespread, but not universal, and the gaps are part of the story. Families found ways around them.

Writing for others

The National Park Service at Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky describes how many soldiers in the United States Colored Troops, a large number of them formerly enslaved, relied on their white officers and chaplains to write letters for them. One officer, writing from Texas in July 1865, observed:

The men like to send and receive letters, and few of them can read or write.

Lt. Warren Goodale, letter of July 5, 1865, quoted by the National Park Service, Camp Nelson National Monument

Many of these men used their time in the army to learn. Private Edward Francis wrote to his wife in Kentucky, "I am learning to write myself & I can scratch right smart."

The poet Walt Whitman, who visited sick and wounded soldiers in Washington-area hospitals, often wrote letters for men who could not write themselves. In 2016, one such letter turned up at the National Archives in the pension file of a soldier's widow, who had submitted it as evidence of her husband's medical condition.

A marriage carried on through other hands

The Library of Congress holds the papers of John Carvel Arnold, a Pennsylvania laborer who served in the 49th Pennsylvania Infantry, and his wife Mary Ann. She could not write, so neighbors in her town wrote her letters for her, and the handwriting changes from one letter to the next. In one, she explains the delay:

you no that i cant write myself and so I cant write when i pleas

Mary Ann Arnold to John Carvel Arnold, 1864, John Carvel Arnold Papers, Library of Congress

John sent her the alphabet so she could learn. He was killed at Sailor's Creek, Virginia, on April 6, 1865, three days before Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

The letter the nation remembers

Some letters reach far beyond the families they were written for. Sullivan Ballou was a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry. On July 14, 1861, at Camp Clark in Washington, D.C., expecting to move toward battle within days, he wrote to his wife Sarah:

Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write a few lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Major Sullivan Ballou to Sarah Ballou, July 14, 1861, as transcribed by the National Park Service

Ballou tried to explain how he could love his family deeply and still feel bound to go. "Sarah, my love for you is deathless," he wrote. According to the National Park Service, he was struck and killed at the First Battle of Manassas, also called First Bull Run, one week after writing the letter.

Ballou's letter is widely known because it is so eloquent, but most surviving letters are plainer. They talk about weather, food, sickness, pay, and homesickness. Historians value those ordinary letters just as much. Together they show what daily life in the army was really like.

Where Civil War letters are kept today

Civil War letters are scattered across thousands of collections. If you are looking for letters from a particular soldier, or simply want to read them, these are good places to start:

• Family papers. Many letters never left the family. Ask older relatives, and check attics, Bibles, and scrapbooks before assuming nothing survives.
• The Library of Congress. Its manuscript collections include soldiers' and families' papers, and some, like the Arnold papers, are online.
• The National Archives. Union pension files sometimes contain personal letters that widows or dependents sent in as evidence, as the Whitman discovery shows. Our guide to finding military service records explains how to request records.
• University and digital archives. The Valley of the Shadow project, begun at the University of Virginia and now part of New American History, gathers thousands of pages of newspapers, diaries, and letters from two counties about 200 miles apart: Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania.
• State and local historical societies. Letters often ended up close to home, in the archives of the town or county where the soldier's family lived.

Reading a Civil War letter well

Civil War letters are primary sources, written at the time by people who were there. That makes them precious, but it does not make them complete. A few habits help:

1. Note who wrote it and to whom. A letter to a mother may sound very different from one to a brother or a friend.
2. Check the date and place. Match them against the regiment's known movements before drawing conclusions.
3. Read the spelling with patience. Phonetic spelling, like Mary Ann Arnold's, reflects how people spoke. Transcribe it exactly rather than correcting it.
4. Notice what is missing. Silences about battles or losses can be as meaningful as what is said.
5. Preserve the original. Store old letters flat, away from light and moisture, and make copies for everyday reading.

Letters home did not end with the Civil War. Fifty years later, a new generation of soldiers would write about the Western Front, and some of them turned their letters into poetry. You can read about them in the soldier-poets of the First World War. And if a veteran in your own family is still here to tell their story, our guide to recording a veteran's story can help you capture it in their own words.