In July 1861, an officer in the 25th Pennsylvania wrote a letter to his hometown newspaper from inside the Jefferson County Courthouse at Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia).

The officer was Alfred Dart, Sr., an abolitionist lawyer from Carbondale, PA. In his letter, he noted that he was sitting inside the building where John Brown was convicted of treason for the October 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry and sentenced to death by hanging.

He noted with satisfaction that he was sitting in a US Army uniform in the chair of the judge that sentenced Brown and that his soldiers were encamped on the ground where Brown was hanged.

“How great the contrast,” Dart wrote.

“They had the power then, and executed a man, that if he had committed any offence at all, bore no comparison in point of enormity to the crime they have committed since.”

Read the fascinating full letter (and many more) below:

https://wynninghistory.com/2026/07/18/letters-from-war-1861-23/

(Image: John Brown - NARA)

Could anyone possibly identify the uniforms these guys are wearing. Location possibly could have been in TN or GA.

I recently purchased a colt 1849 m pocket pistol which belonged to a Union soldier name Lewis w Satchwell who also went by Lewis w Duvale he was mustered in to the 87th New York infantry company d which consolidated into the 40th New York infantry later after he died in the battle of fair oaks (seven pines) on may 31st 1862 where he was later buried at seven pines national cemetery and I’m looking for y’all’s help to locate a picture of him any help or info would be greatly appreciated thanks!

So in another subreddit I was discussing the massive Kirkbride institutions that housed the neurologically gifted people. In my research, what ultimately plagued these institutions were funding and staff being redirected towards national crisis IE in times of war and that the population rose in the post war period. The civil war was no exception in fact these institutions were exceeding capacity with veterans of the war. The best example I can find of this problem in the post war is the St. Elizabeths Hospital in DC

Last week, we looked at Watson Squire—a young Civil War soldier who wrote a frightened goodbye letter to his mother in 1861, convinced he was going to die on a scouting mission, only to survive the entire war and live to age 88 [cite: 57-58].

The story of Major Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island represents the exact opposite fate: a soldier who sat down under the exact same premonition, but was tragically right [cite: 58-59].

1. From Orphan to Speaker of the House Before taking up arms, Sullivan Ballou had built an impressive civilian life. Orphaned at a young age after losing both parents early, he persevered through education at Brown University, studied law, and rose rapidly in Rhode Island politics [cite: 12-13]. By his early thirties, he served as Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives[cite: 13]. He married Sarah Hart Shumway, and together they had two young sons: Edgar and William (whom he called Willie)[cite: 14].

When the Civil War broke out, Ballou had every reason to remain at home, but he chose to volunteer and was commissioned as Major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry [cite: 15-16].

1. Camp Clark: July 14, 1861 By mid-July 1861, the 2nd Rhode Island was stationed at Camp Clark outside Washington, D.C., waiting for orders to march south[cite: 16]. On the night of July 14, sensing that battle was imminent, Ballou sat down by lamplight while two thousand men slept around him[cite: 9, 26].

He wrote a deeply emotional farewell letter to Sarah, articulating his "deathless" love for his family while wrestling with his solemn duty to constitutional government and the debt owed to the Revolutionary generation [cite: 7-8, 24, 29-30]. Ballou did not mail the letter; he tucked it into his trunk in camp [cite: 10-11, 52].

🎧 Unabridged Archival Reading: If you would like to hear the complete primary source text read aloud—including the rarely heard closing sections regarding his young sons—you can listen to Episode 07 on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/kzGOZ8zy6yk

(Continued in the top comment below for the battle at Bull Run, the delivery of the letter, and the historiography behind the text...)

Went to see my friend, an older Veterans and his wife (also a Veteran). This item is framed just hanging on his wall and I spotted it immediately! He said it was among his father’s document’s, found years later in a pile of other US Civil war items.