In April 1861, Dick and Tally Simpson, sons of South Carolina Congressman Richard F. Simpson, enlisted in Company A of the Third South Carolina Volunteers of the Confederate army. Their letters home read like a historical novel, complete with plot, romance, character, suspense, and tragedy. They gave firsthand accounts of dramatic events from the battle of First Manassas in July 1861 to the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Their letters provide a picture of war as it was actually experienced at the time, not as it was remembered some twenty or thirty years later. It is a picture that n ... More

In April 1861, Dick and Tally Simpson, sons of South Carolina Congressman Richard F. Simpson, enlisted in Company A of the Third South Carolina Volunteers of the Confederate army. Their letters home read like a historical novel, complete with plot, romance, character, suspense, and tragedy. They gave firsthand accounts of dramatic events from the battle of First Manassas in July 1861 to the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. Their letters provide a picture of war as it was actually experienced at the time, not as it was remembered some twenty or thirty years later. It is a picture that neither glorifies war nor condemns it, but simply “tells it like it is”. Written to a number of different people, the boysʼ letters home dealt with a number of different subjects. Letters to “Pa” went into great detail about military matters in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia — troop movements, casualties, and how well particular units had fought; letters to “Ma” and sisters Anna and Mary were about camp life and family friends in the army and usually included requests for much-needed food and clothing; letters to Aunt Caroline and her daughter Carrie usually concerned affairs of the heart, for Aunt Caroline continued to be Dick and Tally's trusted confidante, even when they were “far, far from home”. The value of these letters lays not so much in the detailed information they provide as in the overall picture they convey — a picture of how one Southern family, for better or for worse, at home and at the front — coped with the experience of war.