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Sarepta Revis was a 17-year-old newlywed when her husband left their Due north Carolina home to fight in the Confederate States Army. Neither had much schooling, and writing did not come hands to them. Still, they exchanged letters with some regularity, telling each other how they were doing, expressing their love and longing. Once, after Daniel had been abroad for more than six months, Sarepta told him in a alphabetic character that she was "as fat as a grunter." This may not seem like the fashion most young women would desire to draw themselves, but Daniel was very happy to hear it.
Civil War soldiers and their families had abundant causes for worry. The men were exposed to rampant illness too as the perils of the battlefield. Women, running households without help, often faced overwork and hunger. Letters bore the burdens non just of keeping in bear on and expressing affection only also of assuaging fear about loved ones' well-being. Even so almost ordinary American families, never having endured a long separation until at present, had niggling experience writing letters to each other. Sometimes barely literate—Sarepta had to ask her older brother to put downward on newspaper what she wanted to say to Daniel—Americans speedily had to acquire the delicate art of recreating the comforts of concrete presence using only the written word.
Much of the time, they did so by writing nigh their bodies. In hundreds of millions of messages sent between battlefield and home front, moving beyond the nation by equus caballus and by rails in recent innovations called envelopes, ordinary Americans reported the details of how they looked, what they ate, how much they weighed. Their earth had been one of doing and touching rather than reading and writing, just now, by their ingenuity and resolve to agree their families together, they reshaped the culture of letter writing.
Letters were shut cousins to newspapers: Only a few centuries before, in early modern England, had private messages and commercial news reporting gone separate ways (though the habit of calling journalists "correspondents" remains)—and early on Americans still considered a good letter i that could "tell all the news." However news was something soldiers sorely lacked. Isolated from the world beyond their regiments, pending orders they rarely understood, men could not satisfy their families' yearnings for news of the war. "You can see more in the papers," a typical soldier wrote home. Modern historians have sometimes been frustrated to notice rich archives of Civil State of war messages that seem curiously silent on political and military machine diplomacy, but these were subjects ordinary Americans idea newspapers were covering perfectly well. What was left to them was reporting the news of their own concrete selves. It may take felt a picayune odd at first—had Sarepta Revis gone around the house comparing herself to livestock?—but it was what families wanted, and writers found means to oblige.
Reporting a healthy weight was one of the readiest ways to assure a distant reader y'all weren't sick or malnourished. A wife as fat equally a grunter certainly wasn't starving, a hubby similar Daniel Revis could be relieved to know, which was more than important in wartime than anyone's notions of beauty. Soldiers enjoyed the minor luxury of reporting salubrious weights to the folks back habitation in verbal numbers, because they had access to scales. When regiments were encamped and relatively idle, medical staff could hold regular "ill calls," examinations that included beingness weighed.
The resulting numbers fabricated their way into hundreds, probably thousands, of letters from soldiers. Loyal Wort, a 31-yr-sometime Ohioan in the Union Regular army, wrote to his married woman, Susan, "i was waid the other 24-hour interval and waid one hundred and lxx ane pounds And so you lot See i am pretty fat." Thomas Warrick of Alabama assured his wife, Martha, "My helth is skillful at this time" and, as evidence, reported, "I waide i hundred and seventy-fore pounds the last time I waide and that was the other mean solar day." A Georgia individual named Andrew White enthusiastically declared, "I fashion more now than I ever did in my lief I manner 197 pounds." He believed that if but he hadn't spent an entire dark out in the rain on spotter duty, "I would have reached 200 pound in a Curt fourth dimension." In a war that would encounter men's bodies torn apart by shells and reduced almost to cypher by privation—ane Union soldier lucky enough to survive the notorious Andersonville prison weighed 80 pounds at his release—numeric snapshots of the physical cocky acted like needles on the gauges of anxiety.
Pictorial snapshots had appeal, likewise, of class, and the relatively new engineering of photography became tremendously popular among armed services families for similar reasons. Nigh all soldiers and soldiers' wives who had the coin and the opportunity got their portraits taken and exchanged them in the mail. An Iowa coupled joked that their photographs of each other were getting "all rubbed out" by also-frequent kissing. Just photographs captured just a moment in the by. The back-and-forth of messages could document change.
For younger soldiers, peculiarly, going to state of war meant proving themselves to exist men and not boys, and they strove to picture show themselves that way for their families. William Allen Clark wrote to his worried parents in Indiana, "If you was to see me, your doubts in regard to my health would certainly be dispelled. You wouldent meet the same Slim, stoop shouldered, awkward, Gosling." He weighed 12 pounds more than he had the previous summer. William Martin of South Carolina told his sis, "I am Now Larger than My Father My weight is Now 175 pounds." He also wanted her to know "my whiskers is getin prity thick and they are two inches Long." A young Georgian named James Mobley was engaged in a kind of competition with his friends: "I wayed 170 pounds and I now counterbalance 175 and if I proceed on I will weigh 180 before long . . . Father wrote to me that John Reece said I weighted 170 and he said he weighed 177 he is only 2 pd larger than I am and I will go them on him if I dont get sick."
When times were good—when fighting slowed, medical staff had time to make the rounds, and winter's hardships had non ready in—reports of adept health prevailed, like the boasts of Wort, Warrick, and White. But the news was not always as practiced. If some men and women tried to spare their loved ones past withholding worrisome information, many did not. Ebenezer Coggin wrote habitation from a Richmond hospital that his weight had bottomed out at 105 pounds, although he insisted he was on the mend. Daniel Revis replied to Sarepta that, for his part, he was "as pore every bit a snake, we dont get anuf to eat." (In 19th-century vernacular, the reverse of "fat," "stout," or "hearty" was "poor.") It wasn't what Sarepta wanted to hear, but one didn't need a formal education to insist on honesty. "Dont tell me you feel improve when you dont," Betsy Blaisdell admonished her husband in December of 1864. She had received no letter from him in the previous day'south mail and worried it meant his recent affliction had worsened. Forlorn in the cold of upstate New York—"I never dreaded winter earlier" Hiram left for war, she wrote—Betsy told him, nothing could "fill your identify." When Hiram'south letter of reassurance finally arrived, it featured his best endeavor at recreating his physical self: "I have just washed upwardly all make clean and nice," he reported. "I guess if I was there I would have a kiss and information technology would not mess up your face much."
At the outbreak of the Civil War, the U.S. Post Office Department had been delivering about five messages per capita annually. During the war, the boilerplate soldier sent more five times that many. People who felt fiddling capable of long, expressive narratives well-nigh their mental and physical well-being proved all the more resourceful in approximating bodily presence. For Americans during the Civil War, embracing loved ones on newspaper was a hardship they could only with difficulty overcome. Most of them, no doubt, would have rather not had to resort to it. For us, their efforts created a record of something we rarely get to see: glimmers of the emotional lives of ordinary people long gone.
Martha Poteet of western North Carolina endured labor and delivery, for at least the ninth time, during her husband'due south absenteeism in 1864. When she wrote to Francis a month later, she cheerfully described the easiest postpartum recovery she always had experienced. "I had the best time I ever had and I hav bin the stoutest e'er sens I haint lay in bed in day time in two Weeks today." Of the baby, a girl she was waiting to name until Francis came home, Martha could written report no weight—scales and doctors were rare things in the Blue Ridge.
She had a better thought. She laid the infant's manus on flake of newspaper, traced a line around it, and carefully cut it out to tuck into the envelope. Some days afterwards, in a long-besieged trench outside Petersburg, Virginia, Francis Poteet opened that envelope and held his new girl's hand in his.
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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-civil-war-taught-americans-art-letter-writing-180967913/
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