2025-01 Raynors Historical Collectible Auctions
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 1/25/2025
A Union soldier's pious letter, 4pp. 8vo., written by Gettysburg, Pa., resident and Union soldier, Pvt. John Coshun, Co. F, 165th Pennsylvania Vols., May 29, 1863, Suffolk, Va., to his brother, reading, in part: "- it is very durty marching. A person almost choaks with [dust] but our Regt. gust [got] home last Tuesday evening. They were out thirteen days. After they pulled up the Seaboard & Roanoke Railroad they marched cross to the Petersburg& Windsor Road & commerce & pulled - up the iron [that] was carried back to Norfolk - our officers act very strangely sometimes especially when they get a snake in the hat and that is getting pretty often. I wish every distillery was burnt to the ground - as long as this evil is carried on we can not look for success - sometimes they run the men hear & there; are fighting among themselves, so drunk that they doe not know the roads, or what they are doing. In coming from Windsor they run the men around about 5 miles [on the] rong course of Suffolk - especially Cochran's Legion, an Irish fraternity - from New York City. They went in for killing up things rite and burning everything that came before them. Every hog, cow, or sheep, even pulled up an old goose off her nest that would soon had goslings, killed hour, took her along - they came to a house where there was no person, but a poor woman and a few little children & the woman was confined to her bed. She had given birth but 3 days previous. They carried hour out and laid hour on a pile of rails & was going to burn the house. The Indiana boys caim up and tried to shame them out of it, told them they shurely had a mother, or she, at least, had had been as helpless as that poor woman - they still burnt it down. There general was drunk - our colonel deserves praise. I have not seen or heard of him drunkest. He would not let the men destroy any property - if a man will steal or destroy here, in the army, he will do it at home- your brother, John Coshun." Negligible dampstains. Fold splits with archival tape repairs, else VG.
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