Description:

Civil War
Warrenton Junction, VA, April 17, 1862
Fine Content Union Soldier's Letter April 1862, on Patriotic Letterhead with an Ironic Magnus Engraving of Lincoln and McClellan Seeing "two cannonball holes in a house that stood here...a number of graves of rebel officers"
AL
A great Civil War-date autograph letter, four pages, 5" x 8.125", Warrenton Junction, Virginia, April 17, 1862. Penned by a soldier in the 1st Regiment N.E.C., Co. L to a family member on superb patriotic letterhead featuring a Magnus engraving with vignettes of Lincoln and McClellan. Although this letter is not signed, it concludes with a full and thought-out sentence, and is in near fine condition.

On the very day that Union troops, among whom is our writer, marched towards Fredericksburg under the command of General Rufus King, he pens, (spelling and grammar are slightly corrected), in most part:

"…It is the first time I have had a chance to write to you since I got your letter….We left Washington on Friday and arrived here the 7th. We crossed Long Bridge in the morn of the 4th and stood on (I should say in, for the horses were knee deep in mud) the sacred soil of Virginia. We marched as far as Fairfax Court House this day. There is nothing unusual in the appearance of the country between Washington and Fairfax except the prostration of the beautiful groves and the distribution of rail fences and some houses. Fairfax is not much of a place…We lay down on the ground...and rest till morning April 5, and we are routed early this morning by a heavy rain which is coming down in all its fury…we had got to march all day in a pelting rain mud anywhere from six inches to ten foot deep…but good luck happened to attend us and it cleared off about ten o'clock and came out warm and pleasant…at noon we find ourselves at Centerville. This is a very strongly fortified place, forts and breastworks commanding the road to Washington and every other point whereon a lookout could be made, but our army was out flanking them and would cut off supplies, and the rebels had to leave one of the strongest strongholds which cost them large sums of money and many a hard day's labor. Here [are] thousands of log huts where the rebels were quartered this past winter. They were well built and were better quarters than our Army had and by the appearance, they had plenty of meat to eat for they found some number hundreds of hides, and as we stopped there to feed our horses I took a cruise round among the huts and every one contained more or less of stinking meat. And another thing I took particular notice of was every hut contained any quantity of bottles and every one that I smelled had the smell of whiskey…some of them were half full. I guess they had plenty of the Criter [?]. We were very careful not to taste it although we handled a great deal of the stuff. We again started on our march and soon found ourselves in that for-famed place Bull Run. This is a larger stream than I had supposed, and should have been called the Occoquan River as it is the upper part of it. We soon began to see desolation sure enough. Among the first objects of interest…were two cannonball holes in a house that stood here and a number of graves of rebel officers and soldiers, most of which had rough slabs of free stone…".

Our letterhead clearly predates the Lincoln-McClellan rift because on March 8, 1862 Lincoln—impatient with General McClellan's inactivity—issued an order reorganizing the Army of Virginia and relieving McClellan of supreme command.

This item comes with a Certificate from John Reznikoff, a premier authenticator for both major 3rd party authentication services, PSA and JSA (James Spence Authentications), as well as numerous auction houses.

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  • Dimensions: 5" x 8"
  • Medium: AL

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