COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

Letters from the Field:
The Civil War at First Hand

COMAN LEAVENWORTH
 

The current Butler Library exhibition is devoted to letters from Civil
War soldiers to their frie^ids and relatives at home. It was arranged
by Mr. Coman Leavenworth of the Special Collections staff. During
World War II he had, among many other duties, the task of censoring
such mail. This article, which is based on a selection of items in the
exhibition, shows that there is a timelessness about the reactions which
ordinary men have to a war situation.

editor's NOTE
 

^ O L DIE R S ' letters of the Civil War seem remarkably
familiar to one who had occasion during the Second World
War to censor the correspondence of hundreds of enlisted
men. Soldiers have been, and remain, of a kind everywhere, and
any variation in tone or emphasis, as well as in content, in two
such groups of letters must be attributed to fundamental differ¬
ences in the two war situations.

In this regard how, then, is the Civil War situation to be dis¬
tinguished from that of the later conflict? It was, for one thing,
a "Brothers' War"—fought between men who were citizens of
the same nation. The combatants were not first of all "Johnny

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