Charles Cyphers and the 8th Pennsylvania have left Camp Slifer behind. Soldiers are everywhere he looks, Harpers Ferry looms on the horizon, and Cyphers tells his editor to expect news of a battle soon — provided no secessionist puts a bullet through him first. Read the full letter.
In a letter to the Carbondale Advance, Captain Alfred Dart described looting relics from the Marshall House in Alexandria, Virginia - site of the death of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth. He also describes the movements of the 25th Pennsylvania and the situation at Alexandria. Read the full letter.
Letters from War: 1861 was featured by WVIA News this week. Roger DuPuis and I talked about the project, the chaotic opening months of the Civil War, and what these Coal Region soldiers' letters still reveal 165 years later. Read more and find the full interview.
A soldier from Carbondale, PA spent a night in the very hallway where Colonel Elmer Ellsworth had been shot dead days earlier - the floor still stained with his blood. Then he shipped out to fight Confederate artillery on the Potomac River. He wrote home to describe all of it. Read the full letter.
While researching Letters from War: 1861, a single line in a Coal Region newspaper stopped me cold. A sergeant had written home describing the murder of a Black man by Union soldiers. This is the investigation into what really happened on June 1, 1861 and the lynching of a man named Frank Jones.
The coal miners of the Ringgold Infantry had been in Washington less than a week — sleeping on bare floors, waiting on uniforms, short on food in the Civil War's early weeks. One of them picked up a pen and wrote home. His letter captures the chaos, the humor, and the strange excitement of the Civil War's earliest days. Read the letter.