Day 96. June 4, 1862. LETTER.
96
if I have the chance I will come home soon….
There is a June 4 diary entry today, too.
LETTER
June 4 1862
(Note: The letters I reproduced for this manuscript appear exactly as they do in the original physical copy as the words move down the page; the line breaks are the same, as in Ephraim’s actual handwriting.)
12 miles South of Lieurey Page Co Va
Dearest wife & children
I seat myself this morning far from you
to converse with you on paper. I write to you from Cattetts
station and we have been marching nearly all the time
since I last wrote to you we have saw hard times & marches
we have marched since the 29 of April that was when we left
Winchester. 3.34 miles we had to walk the whole way
we have come back the way we came when we marched
from New Market. Accept the bridges are burnt along the
Shenendoah. we have came up 4 or 5 miles further up then where
we crossed. I can’t give you any news this time but
I hope this may reach you and find you and
the children well and father and mother and all the
rest of the friends. I am midling well accept a pain in my
breast and I have the Rheumatism* sometimes but not very much
accept when it is wet it pains me the most I don’t know where we are
going I have thought I could have written you from Frountroyal
It rained all day yesterday very fast we were in all of it as
We marched 12 miles through the rain water up to our knees
and mud as the runs and hollows were flooding and we could
do no better then cross. The roads are very hard the ground is very
full of water. and swampy. I can’t say when I will come home but if I
have the chance I will come home soon I will not write much this
my kindest regards to all Much Love to you all and many kisses to you and children
Tell Lee* to be a good boy and his papa thinks of him very often Remember me in your prayers
I received your letter of the 21st of May I have not received any since and I don’t know when
we will get any. I remain your loving Husband
E Burket Co. D. 110th Regt P.V. 4th Brigade Shields Division Washington City D.C.
On the left side margin written sideways: Write soon I wish I could come home now
On back of the letter, which is folded three times:
We were not in the Valley of Virginia
since we left new market
I heard there was a fight there
Between Banks and Jackson
I can’t get no papers any more
as we have been where we can’t
get any we have not gotten a mail
since we left Fredericksburg
we don’t know when we will
get paid but I reckon not for
sometime
*Rheumatism: Rain makes the condition worse. The barometric pressure makes tissues expand. For him it would have been a misery which attaches itself to everything. Everything. Imagine having that on top of everything else.
**Lee Keller Burket, my great-grandfather (9/14/1859-10/16/1920, buried at Fairmount Cemetery, Denver, along with his son– my grandfather– Warren J. Burket 10/24/1894-9/1/1973), as well as his son, my father, 3/20/1936-7/11/1980). Lee, with his brother Elmer, opened a coal and feed business in Wayne, PA (along the Mainline railroad) in 1887, & until recently was the oldest continually operating business along the Mainline (Route 30, otherwise known as the Lincoln Highway, the first long-distance paved road in America) in SE PA.
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 97-98
“The republican heritage of the United States, with its emphasis on the need to protect representative government, democratic practices, and public virtue, was still strong some eighty years after the American Revolution. The Northern cause, which tried to preserve this unique heritage, was a potent force in mobilizing the Northern population. It explained the Southern rebellion as a perverse revolutionary attempt to create an empire for slavery. By 1861, a widespread belief existed among Northerners that the institution of slavery had degraded white society and destroyed democracy in the South by creating an elite class of wealthy slave owners that had engineered secession for its selfish gain. In the minds of many Northerners, the Confederacy represented values and ideas that were antithetical to the national heritage. Such a dangerous entity and all that it represented had o be destroyed, not only to save the political union of the states but also to preserve the cultural foundations of national unity.
Although ideology played a huge role in motivating Northerners to support the war and to join the army, the extent to which it was a factor in helping them deal with the dangers of the battlefield is controversial. Many historians have discounted its role. Ironically, historians of combat morale in other wars have tended to give patriotism and ideology more credit than the few historians of the Civil War who have addressed the issue.[italics and bold mine] Ideology certainly played an important role in helping men endure battle. Union soldiers lived only two or three generations removed from their nearly legendary forebears who have triumphed against difficult odds in the War of Independence. They were receptive to simple patriotism, morally charged values, and inspired ideas. Ideology was taken seriously by the generation that fought the Civil War, and belief in it intensified in the wake of the unprovoked attack on Fort Sumter. Defenders of the faith readily embraced an ideologically charged interpretation of all the turmoil that fractured the nation.
“Better for humanity that this and the next generation should be draped in mourning than out glorious institutions perish and freedom and Democracy bow to Slavery and despotism,” wrote James Abraham, a member of the 2nd West Virginia Cavalry just before his region became a state. He demonstrated that the rhetoric of the cause, and its power to influence action, was not confined to the northern tier of states; many loyalists from the upper South felt its effect. Alexis W. Tallman of the 22nd Wisconsin weighed in with similar sentiments and a further demonstration that the ideology was accepted by many individuals across the nation. Writing in 1864, long after he had come to know the true nature of combat, Tallman reasserted his faith. “I do not sustain the war because I love the business, but on account of what we hope to, in the end, attain and secure by prosecuting it– the preservation of our wise and good government, and the establishment of universal liberty and justice o’er all the land.”
Ideology was so strongly embraced by so many soldiers because it ennobled the struggle, draped it in a mantle of transcendent significance not only for the people of the United States but also for the millions who would eventually benefit from the expansion of republican ideals throughout the Western world. Not all Northern soldiers took to this message, but its wide appeal cannot be denied, for it linked the military struggle to fundamentally important goals that justified suffering and sacrifice.
The depressing string of defeats in Virginia severely tested ideological faith for the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. Time after time, they saw their sacrifices apparently wasted in pointless or mismanaged confrontations. Fredericksburg was a prime example. Ambrose Burnside ordered his men to repeatedly assault Lee’s veterans, who were positioned behind a stone wall, which left this field of battle littered with bodies and soaked with blood. Walter Carter of the 22nd Massachusetts survived it and managed to hold on to his faith: “My sense of right and love of country and its glorious cause would impel me forward to death, even if my poor weak nature hung back and human feelings gained control over me.”
P. 101
The authority of ideology was so strong that it inspired comparisons between the Northern cause and Confederate motives for leaving the Union. Northern soldiers naturally concluded that there was no basis for comparison. They viewed the Southern cause as no cause at all and found it difficult to believe that anyone could willingly fight for the Confederacy. Many Northern soldiers believed that the Southerners were cruelly misinformed about the nature of the conflict, having been forced into military service by a despotic government and a selfish planter class. They often viewed rebel soldiers as poorly educated, disadvantaged victims of a social and economic structure that denied them opportunity for individual improvement. Of course, this picture of the Confederate soldier was not only ungenerous but also greatly skewed by the passions aroused by the war; it was powerful and widespread, however. The ideology of the cause added a sharp, bitter edge to the war, in addition to providing a solid foundation for motivation.”
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War James M. McPherson P. 174-175
“Not all Union soldiers felt this way, of course. The beats, the skulkers, the bounty men, substitutes, and draftees, the short-timers who had not reenlisted, the psychiatric casualties who could not take any more– these soldiers wanted nothing so much as to go home or at least to stay as far away from combat as possible. But there were enough who believed in the Cause and were willing to keep risking their lives for it to turn the war decisively in favor of the North in the fall of 1864. Their iron resolve underlay the message conveyed by a dispatch from the American correspondent of the London Daily News to his paper in September. “I am astonished,” he wrote, by “the extent and depth of the [Northern] determination to fight to the last…. They are in earnest in a way the like of which the world never saw before, silently, calmly, but desperately in earnest; they will fight on, in my opinion, as long as they have men, muskets, powder… and would fight on, though the grass were growing in Wall Street.”
The conviction of Northern soldiers that they fought to preserve the Union as a beacon of republican liberty throughout the world burned as brightly in the last year of the war as in the first. After marching up and down the Shenandoah Valley a couple hundred miles in Sheridan’s 1864 campaign, the last twenty-five miles barefooted, a private in the 54th Pennsylvania wrote to his wife from the hospital that he was ready to do it again if necessary, for “I cannot believe Providence intends to destroy this Nation, this great asylum for the oppressed of all other nations and build a slave oligarchy on the ruins thereof.’”
The Historian’s Craft Marc Bloch (1953) P. 193-194
“….in history, the fetish of single cause is all too often only the insidious form of search for the responsible person– hence a value judgment. The judge expresses it as: “Who is right, and who is wrong?” The scholar is content to ask: “Why?” and he accepts the fact that the answer may not be simple. Whether as a prejudice of common sense, a postulate of logicians, or a habit of prosecuting attorneys, the monism of cause can be, for history, only an impediment. History seeks for causal wave-trains and is not afraid, since life shows them to be so, to find them multiple.
I can’t get no papers any more….
They’d write last letters to parents, wives, children. They’d write the words down a page splattered with blood from a wound they knew’d kill them in a few minutes, a few hours– did it really matter at that point?– yes, only to get the words down, words that ran across a blood stream across those pages, dripping from above, & he’s slurring words out now in his own blood, & he’s writing home to everyone he’d never meet again, who’d be left with this, a last piece of paper with red running across the lines, drops, streaks, patches he tried to wipe with the sleeve of his uniform, grey or blue, & he’s straight out using the same words they all used, that he didn’t have long, then invariably he’d sign his name, his Reg’t number in a fidelity to his unit to the last terrible end, & also maybe something about a God but maybe not at this point, then he dies so the nurse or attendant uses up whatever space left to tell the recipient how he died, & it was always courageously, comfortably, that he died for country, he really did, each & every one, each & every time. If there was space. If the leftover white wasn’t covered in red. If.
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