Skip to main content

The Brothers’ War

March 2023
2min read

Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones from the Blue and Gray


Edited by Annette Tapert; Times Books; 242 pages.

“All I desire,” wrote Philip Powers, an officer in the Confederate army, to his wife, “is to drive them from our soil and secure peace—I would not shed another drop. . . .” He was being magnanimous; the Union army had just been defeated at the First Battle of Bull Run, and Powers’s regiment had been credited in the Rebel newspapers with “turning the tide of victory” to the Confederacy. Later in the struggle he could not muster such liberality. “How long will a merciful God permit this war?” he asked his wife after the death of Gen. Jeb Stuart. “And will the wail of the woe that rises from bloody battlefields never cease?”

The Brothers’ War is filled with questions like these. The letters home are written by Union soldiers who find they hate the abolitionists as much as they do the Rebels and by Confederates who think every day of deserting and of a peaceful end to the conflict. The book captures the fear of the soldiers on both sides as well as the zeal of the idealists and the confusion of men fighting their brothers.

On every page there are stories of hardship and excitement, of practical jokes and inhuman horrors. A private in the Union army tells his brother how grave the tobacco shortage is and how he is forced to search for the “precious weed” in the pockets of dead Rebels. A Confederate officer tells his sister how one of his men, returning from battle wearing a salvaged Yankee overcoat, was shot through the heart by one of his fellow soldiers. After the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, a Rebel defiantly writes his wife to say, “I think the Yankees and the rest of mankind must soon come to the conclusion that the South cannot be subjugated.” And a Union son gives his mother an eloquent and moving account of his brother’s death at Gettysburg.

The letters are often ungrammatical and simple; they are also honest and straightforward. Tapert has arranged them chronologically, allowing us to see the gradual fading of excitement and high principle into the dusk of attrition and misery. In the beginning, moral certainty is the muse of many of these soldiers, both Union and Rebel; the pressing awfulness of death and battle replaces their cocksure abandon with pleas for survival. But the loss of idealism does not make for less exciting tales. We are treated to firsthand accounts of Bull Run and Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. We read the testimony of Union soldiers watching Rebels rifle through the pockets of the Federal dead, taking family pictures along with money and ammunition. We are told of Confederates disguised in Union uniforms, of what it was like to be a “Fighting Quaker,” and of bitter instances of racism on both sides. One Union soldier explains that his company hates the sight of a black “worse than a snake” and tells of the men throwing rocks and branches at blacks who cross their path.

We follow the lives of captured soldiers as well. “As I went strolling by a crowd,” a Confederate captain wrote to his wife, “I found a young, fine looking [Union] officer trying to trade off a neat . . . little pocket flask, silver mounted, for a half cake of bread.” The Rebel officer extracted a promise from the prisoner that he would not attempt to escape, then took his enemy to breakfast at a nearby farm. “He said I had fulfilled the scriptures, in that when I found mine enemy a-hungered I fed him.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1989"

As newlyweds in 1901 they were the first to climb the towering Montana peak, but when evidence of the feat surfaced after eighty-four years, nobody believed it

Authored by: The Editors

A Lucky Lady of the Sky

Authored by: The Editors

Civil War Letters to Their Loved Ones from the Blue and Gray

Authored by: The Editors

Pioneers of American Broadcasting

Authored by: The Editors

A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841

Authored by: Richard F. Snow

Wherever you travel in this country, you have a good chance of bringing a piece of the past home with you

Authored by: Oakley Hall

THE MOVIES, THE WARS, AND THE TEAPOT DOME
A journey of a hundred miles on a Wyoming interstate turns up the true stories behind the powerful Western myths

Authored by: Peter Davison

The author walks us through literary Boston at its zenith. But Boston being what it is, we also come across the Revolution, ward politics, and the great fire.

Authored by: Geoffrey C. Ward

Clues uncovered during the recent restoration of his house at Springfield help humanize the Lincoln portrait

Authored by: Christopher Weeks

The little town of Lebanon, Connecticut, played a larger role in the Revolution than Williamsburg, Virginia, did. And it’s all still there.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.