2024-01 Raynors Americana Auction
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/20/2024
Union soldier's 3pp letter written by Daniel A. Handy who mustered into "F" Co. RI 2nd Infantry, 6/6/1861. He was Wounded 5/6/1864 Wilderness, VA. and was discharged for wounds on 7/8/1865. The headline "The Dear Fought Victory at Willimasburg Fought on the 6th Day of May A.D." In part, "... to give you a poor description of the position in which only 25,000 Rebel in ambush under the protection of a rear line of forts of vast strength with heavy cannon in position awaiting the advance of the Union hosts. ... No painting of words can convey an idea of the nature of the ground, which the Rebels first picked out, and then ingeniously prepared with axes wielded by slaves ... Standing upon the parapets of Fort Magruder, a bastioned work as large as Fortress Monroe, with a wide moat filled with water ... You look upon the plain, you count one, two, three Forts ... yes, forts. ... The trees were cut so as to interlock their branches. They lap each other. ... Get through the monstrous cover if you have a change of clothes and hope a second growth of skin. Get into the thick standing forest of which it was last week a part. Here is a dead Alabamian, five rods behind him a sharp visaged Virginian barefooted and naked now to the waist turns up to be sunlight a breast with the blue rimmed bullet hole and proves in this dense beyond the wrecks of fallen timber, the Rebs first engaged us under cover and practiced their barbarous civilization of robbing and stripping their own dead. Far then into this entangled swampy forest you keep coming upon the ragged and dirty clad barbarians lying upon their face and more upon their backs in every form of bloody death, their faces without a single exception denoting a different race of people than those who, alas, was their companions in death. They have met, they have fallen side by side in the conflicts fiercest strife. Suffice it to say, on the night of the seventh they...evacuated the place ... we drove their pickets out and entered the village of Williamsburg."
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