A man slipped into Camp Cameron in Harrisburg to lure a Minersville recruit away from his company. He left under four guards, two bayonets close behind, as Captain Horace Bennett's men lined up to watch. A soldier signing only "J.S.B." told the Miners' Journal everything. Read the Full Story.
September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest day in American history. Pennsylvania's Coal Region was in the middle of it. Letters home from soldiers at the front, coffins arriving by train, and then the draft riots and labor unrest that Antietam's aftermath set loose across eastern Pennsylvania. Read all the stories here.
"Now commenced the really grand spectacle." In a letter to a friend in Wilkes-Barre, PA, Sgt. Louis Roth described the Battle of Hatteras Inlet on North Carolina's Outer Banks in August 1861. He described the fighting, the Union victory, and the terrible conditions as follows. Roth also writes a great passage about his regiment's consumption of lager beer, a favorite among the German regiments. Read the full letter.
A 12-pound artillery shell left behind by New York troops had been lying around Anthony Burns's house near Pottsville, PA for a year as the Civil War drew to a close. Someone brought it inside and the results were horrifying. Read the story.
The 48th Pennsylvania fills its ranks at Camp Curtin — and loses its first man before leaving Harrisburg In early September 1861, Coal Region regiments were pouring into Camp Curtin for three years' service. Before Colonel Nagle's 48th Pennsylvania even left for the front, a train at the Harrisburg depot killed Private William Millet — the regiment's first casualty, and he never saw a battlefield. Read the letter.
A father visits his son at war - and ends up behind Union lines in Virginia Peter Byrne came to Washington to check on his son, a lieutenant in the 1st Pennsylvania Light Artillery. He left having crossed into Virginia in a borrowed uniform, stood behind an artillery battery in the pouring rain, and talked his way back across the Chain Bridge using a pass that called him "Colonel." Read the full letter.
A soldier kneels at his young wife's grave - then marches back to war. Luther Dodson's wife Sarah died of tuberculosis at 25, less than a year after their wedding. He came home on leave that August, visited her grave at dusk, and wrote about it in a letter that stands as some of the most moving passages in this entire series. Then he went back to the front. Read the letter.
A constant rumble of baggage wagons, night and day" | Washington at war, August 1861 A Pittston correspondent spent a week in Washington in late August 1861 and sent back a portrait of a city transformed — cavalry clattering through the streets, tent villages visible from the Capitol, and two armies drawing closer by the day. He also had some sharp words for the "Peace Party" back home. Read the letter.
Shot in the foot at Bull Run — and too stubborn to stop moving When a Confederate bullet hit Josiah Wildermuth in the foot during the Second Battle of Bull Run, he got up, fell down, got up again, and kept going. What followed was a days-long ordeal on improvised fence-rail crutches that took him from a field hospital to Centreville, Virginia to Washington. He told the story 38 years later at a veterans' reunion in Pottsville, PA. Read the story.
From his post guarding the Chain Bridge above Washington, Lieutenant Martin Byrne watched General McClellan and President Lincoln ride through a grand review of the division on August 21, 1861. Lincoln, he noted, had "that lofty, though care worn appearance." Read the full letter.