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home, that I would set a different example before my children.
I have prayed that he would, and that I might keep my resolution to the day of my death.
I wrote you a letter on the same day, while my eyes were still wet with tears.
I asked your prayers in my behalf; I know you have prayed for me. Can God in justice forgive me?
I pray he may, I know my children will; may God bless them and help them to do so, and save them from following my bad example, at the same time to take my good advice and carry it out, that they may be saved from that awful hell to which I was leading them.’
Letters from the camp were regarded as precious treasures by the fathers and mothers of the brave boys who had gone to the war. The scene so graphically described below was almost daily repeated throughout the
Confederacy:
I went to a neighbor's some time ago to buy chickens and meat, for I am a new comer in the settlement, and didn't fill my smokehouse at the right time.
The man was making a split basket before the door, and his wife was spinning, as nearly every wife in the country is. They were old people, except a hireling boy, alone on their farm.
Their three sons went to war last spring.
I had not been long in the house before the old lady brought out the last letter from the son before Richmond and put it into my hand, just as you would offer the morning paper to a guest at your office or house.
I was at another house where a neighbor called in, and without preliminary said: ‘Fetch that letter here you got from the post-office Thursday.’
The letter was brought and read to us all, from beginning to end. Every letter, after being opened and read by those to whom it is addressed, seems to be common property.
Though roughly written and spelled, some of them are vastly entertaining and informing, and there are touches of the heart toward the close, at which the mother or wife of the writer, who listens for the twentieth time to the reading C66
