17th Pennsylvania Infantry, 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry & US Volunteers

Item LTR-7266

Description

Original Civil War soldier's letter. 4 pages written in period ink.


Yorktown, Virginia
March 21st 1863

Your two letters of the 16th and 17th reached me this evening Darling and I can’t tell you how glad I was to get them. These days of non-intercourse seemed to have trebled the distance between us and now that they are over and I seem to be with you again in your dear words, I can echo precious thoughts.

Sweet love. Direct lines, sweet life
Here is her hand, the agent of her heart
Here is her oath for love

I feel sorry, though as I contemplate my accumulating heap of letters to think that day after day should disappoint you too my darling but when they do reach you they will furnish reading matter for a long time. Prosy enough to be one for I’ve had nothing to recount but the malicious freaks of this horrible storm.

It has turned into a drizzling rain today and the heavy snow drifts are fast disappearing beneath its influence making the roads in the meantime all but impassible.

You can imagine what a condition the streets of the fort are in from the taste of that sort of thing you have at home in a thaw. Here it is infinitely worse for the ground is only mud.

However, I hope the rain will clear it away tonight and, in a few days, we shall be all right again.

Farnsworth returned this evening bringing his wife and family. Miss Minnie Halsey and Mrs. Ingram’s sister and Whitehead, who has just got back from his party. I fancy he couldn’t have had the pleasantest time as the world in fact he didn’t say much about the party. But contends himself with describing his visit to Dr. McClellan’s where his cousin, Miss Strothers, is staying.

I should like very much to bring you down some of these days to see Fort Monroe and Old Yorktown. I will if you continue to care about it, but my darling, I look forward to the time, before these journeys, when I may have the right to take you wherever you care to go. When no invitation will be needed.

So old Lenox is going to come in and all its beautiful scenery be transferred to the bottom of an ugly iron mine. We must hurry and see it before this catastrophe culminates. I want to learn to admire under your guidance those views that gave you so much pleasure last summer and we can take it enroute for Portsmouth, NH. Which I should like to take you to see my Uncle Commodore Pearson, who commands the Navy Yard there. He is a dear old gentleman and lives very pleasantly in the quarters at Kittery. I haven’t been there for a long time. Not since the summer when we were all at Nahant’s. but I remember it as a very pretty place and my uncle would be delighted to greet his new niece.

These are among the many things we shall have to discuss when we are at last together which Heaven grant may be soon. I have not heard anything further from Washington but shall send my renewed resignation by tomorrow’s mail.

The General has been summoned there to give his testimony before the Committee of Investigation on the conduct of the war and will probably leave here on Monday. I’ll get him to go to the Adjutant General Office and hurry the action in my case if he can. So that I may get home this month. Goodnight my darling. I do dream of you sometimes, but I think of you always and my day dreams, which I can control and far pleasanter than the unrealities of a dream.

With my regards to Richard, whose perseverance in business I greatly admire and a good friend.

Ever your own,

Ossie