War letters supply peace from home

In 1864, an irritated Union soldier named John Arnold wrote to his wife, Mary Ann, back in Pennsylvania, complaining that he’d had no recent letters from her.

“Dear wife, what is the reason you don’t write oftener?” he wrote from the front lines.

He had waited for her epistles in vain, he said.

But John, 33, might have guessed the reason, as Mary Ann noted later.

“You know that I cant write myself,” she responded, so “I cant write when I pleas.”

Mary Ann Arnold, 31, was illiterate. She could not write and signed her name with an X. She was then raising five children by herself in a village on the Susquehanna River, and had to ask friends and neighbors to write her letters to her husband.

The Library of Congress has had the couple’s correspondence, which included locks of children’s hair she sent to him, since 1937 and announced in a Nov. 1 blog post that it has been digitized and posted online.

Michelle Krowl, the Civil War specialist in the library’s manuscript division who wrote the blog post, said that Mary Ann’s letters appear in the handwriting of three or four people.

Sometimes her letters identified who had written them.

Sometimes Mary Ann would mention who had written a particular letter (inset). In one case she mailed John a “pensyl” and noted later that neighbor David Keller had written the letter that went with it.

Sometimes she could find no one to help her.

The correspondence is an intimate look at how one rural family, with the help of its community, managed to stay in touch during the war. Mary Ann had to trust her sentiments to her writers. And, as she probably couldn’t read, John likely knew his letters were being read aloud by someone else.

The letters also reveal the impact the war had on the small community. John Arnold fought in some of the war’s worst battles, and he told in his letters of the deaths of local men. John was slightly wounded in the leg at the bloody Battle of Spotsylvania in May 1864 and was killed at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek on April 6, 1865.

He had been home on leave in February 1865, and the couple’s sixth child was born Dec. 4, 1865.