Styple Delivers News From Civil war Front

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 26, 2001 | by Stephen Goode

A week later, the author of that letter was killed in the assault on Atlanta. He was 21 years old. His name was Albert Finbar Kennelly. The editors identified him by name after his death, but his letter was signed only A.K. What foresight this man must have had to imagine monuments for the war in which he was about to give his life!

A few weeks ago, I got a letter in the mail from a Kennelly who lives in Charlotte, N.C. Just by chance he was doing research on the 17th New York, his ancestor's regiment, and he realized that the A.K. letters were written by his relative.

Insight: Nearly 3,000 letters! It must have taken you some time.

WBS: Working on that book took 18 months, full time, seven days a week. I was getting up at 4 or 5 a.m. and transcribing letters. I read every one of the 3,000, and the print on the Sunday Mercury was small. I chose 500 of them for the book. For me it was a learning experience -- I felt like I was being given an opportunity to learn a story of the war told by the men who fought it as it happened. It can't get much better than that.

Insight: What impressed you most after going through all those letters?

WBS: The patriotism and the glory. When the glory faded, the patriotism remained. They all went off to the war thinking it would be glorious and short and that they would be home by Christmas. Of course they knew there would be some casualties, and some might even be killed, but they were all so confident of an early victory.

You can tell in their letters what they're feeling. They often are very beautiful writers, producing terrific dispatches, and then the correspondence no longer would come, and there would be the notice that such and such a correspondent was killed. That would be powerfully affecting. It was as though I were living through the war with them.

It would all come over me as I was typing up the letters. I don't know how many deaths I recorded, but it was a great many, and as I typed I thought of all those people at home who were grieved by the passing of those men.

Insight: How did you decide which letters to include in the book?

WBS: I established definite criteria for selecting letters to include. Descriptions of battle and content about battles was one. A second was if the correspondent had been killed, in which case I tried to use his material. Third, if he had met an important historical figure face to face--like an encounter with Abraham Lincoln when the president visited the men or seeing Robert E. Lee on the battlefield.

Also, I wanted to make use of at least one letter from each week of the war in order to relate the course of the conflict. I broke the letters down into the years they were written, week after week for 225 weeks, except for the time of the missing issues. Of course, after a battle like Gettysburg or Manassas, I'd use more than one letter to depict what was happening.

Insight: Do you have a favorite Civil War historian?

WBS: For regular reading, I prefer soldier letters and diaries. I even try to stay away from postwar memoirs written 40 or 50 years later.