Letters from War: Civil War Correspondence from Northeastern PA

The opening months of the U.S. Civil War saw waves of volunteers mobilize to defend the Union. Among them were recruits from Pittston, Pennsylvania, training with the 15th Pennsylvania Infantry at Camp Curtin. In May 1861, as they trained in Harrisburg, a heartfelt gesture from the women of Luzerne County reached them: a package of medical supplies, including bandages and lint, intended for the battlefield.

This act of support resonated deeply with the soldiers. In a letter to the Pittston Gazette dated May 8, 1861, Capt. Solomon Sturmer expressed his gratitude: “A soldier’s gratitude is easily awakened. It fills his heart with joy when he is assured there is an interest awakened in the minds of ‘the friends he leaves behind him’ for his welfare,” he wrote. The sentiment was echoed in the soldiers’ appreciation of the efforts made by the women back home.

Historian Jake Wynn has curated a new blog titled “Letters from War: 1861,” which offers modern readers the chance to experience these firsthand accounts in real time, 165 years after they were penned. Wynn highlights that while 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the U.S., these letters provide insight into a pivotal moment when the principles of the Revolution were severely tested.

Q: Jake, what is your background? And how did it lead to this project?

A: I’ve been writing, researching about Coal Region history going back to about 2013 … been writing online since 2014.

I’m very passionate about history across the Coal Region, focusing a lot on labor history about the United Mine Workers of America, the Working Men’s Benevolent Association … trade unions in Pennsylvania coal communities … but also talking about the American Civil War and the experience there.

I previously worked at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, which is where I live currently. I did grow up in northern Dauphin County, the southwestern end of the anthracite coal fields.

The coal region communities sent men by the tens of thousands off to fight in the Civil War, many of whom don’t come back or come back changed forever by either wounds or emotional, emotionally scarring experiences. So, it’s a really important moment, not only in the country, but also for the community that I grew up in as well.

Q: This isn’t the first project of this type for you, is it?

A: This is a follow-up to a series I did a few years ago, also called Letters from War, which shared letters written from a World War II soldier to his hometown newspaper in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. That series resonated with a lot of readers.

I’ve long been fascinated and interested in the American Civil War, and I have been collecting some of these pieces of correspondence for different stories I’ve told over the years about the Civil War in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and decided to kind of pull them all into one place.

Q: What is your definition of Northeastern Pennsylvania, just so we can be on the same page geographically?

A: Lackawanna, Luzerne, Schuylkill, and Carbon counties. I have letters from Pottsville, from Hazleton, from Wilkes-Barre, from Scranton, and all the way up to Carbondale. There’s some events from Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) as well, in Carbon County. [Editor’s Note: What is now Lackawanna County was part of Luzerne County until 1878.]

Q: If someone goes off to war today, they will email or text or Zoom family members at home. Were these soldiers writing to their relatives who shared the letters? Or directly to the newspapers?

A: It’s a little bit of both.

Some of these writers worked for these newspapers, so some of these letters are written for public consumption.

One of the letter writers who appears numerous times in the series is a guy named Charles Cyphers. He actually worked in the printing office of the Pittston Gazette, so he was writing home to his boss and to the readers of that newspaper from some of the army camps and then on the battlefields of the Civil War.

In other cases, family members who receive letters of particular interest may actually submit their loved one’s letter for publication, in some cases, where soldiers were complaining about some things — you know, people could send food and clothing to those soldiers to assist them, because they didn’t have great uniforms at the beginning of the war, for example. I would say that these letters are kind of analogous to social media today: Oftentimes, even the ones written to family members are really for the consumption of that community.

Q: Do you think being written for the public influenced the content of the letters?

A: You need to take that into account in some cases, because there is sometimes a bit of posturing that goes on.

But they do give a very kind of day-by-day, week-by-week accounting of what it was like to live through one of the most tumultuous events in American history.

What I’ve been trying to emphasize through these letters and sharing them is that you’re seeing it through the perspective of these guys writing these letters, and they don’t know what’s going to happen next, they don’t know what’s going to happen in the Civil War, and they don’t know what’s going to happen to them.

Q: Will readers find out what happens to these soldiers?

A: I have been very deliberately not sharing what happens to these correspondents, what happens to them in the future. I’ll do that as a wrap-up, at the end of the series.

In some cases, it’s death on the battlefield, or in a Civil War hospital, or serious wounding, or being captured and sent to places like Andersonville. But for those guys writing these letters in 1861, all of that was ahead of them.

Q: Was there any government censorship of these letters?

A: No, there was no censorship whatsoever of these letters.

That’s going to be something that you’re going to see in later conflicts. In World War I and World War II, for example, you see pretty rigorous government censorship, but there’s very little that is censored from these letters.

They are a very real accounting of what life was like, and also what events were transpiring where these guys were, whether they’re in army camps in southern Pennsylvania or eventually going off to battlefields in Maryland and Virginia.

Q: What was that first year like?

A: It’s chaotic — the first months of the war, especially, as thousands of soldiers are going to join up.

These are raw recruits. They are men and boys from all walks of life. Some of them are immigrants, some of them officers — in particular, leaders from these communities. They’re lawyers. What unites all of them, though, across different demographics, is that they had very little military experience.

They are going into these kinds of makeshift army camps in places like Harrisburg at Camp Curtin. Many of the letters are written from a place called Camp Slifer, which is just outside of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in Franklin County, close to the Maryland border. The Mason-Dixon line, of course, is the border between slavery and freedom in 1861 and so that is close to what will be the front lines of the war.

What they’re writing about, oftentimes, is their experience of what they call drilling, which is training for war. They spend eight, 10, 12 hours a day in these kinds of practice drills … and that’s what they’re writing about a lot in the first couple months of the conflict.

But there’s just a lot of chaos, because you know this is a country that is unprepared for this massive conflict, a war that is, in the end, going to include 3 million participants in arms.

At the beginning of this conflict, none of that infrastructure exists. There aren’t military encampments or military hospitals or uniforms for all of these men. It’s a very makeshift affair.

Q: Yet even in those first months, it was clear that the mobilization was significant, right?

A: Already at this point in the first year of the war, they’re leading into things like the [first] Battle of Bull Run in July of 1861.

This is already the largest conflict that the United States has ever participated in, and it’s a civil war, which means that they’re going to be fighting their countrymen.

And that is the substance of a lot of these letters as well, kind of gearing up to take on their fellow Americans, people who politically have significant differences, and ultimately, they’re going to have to settle those differences, they realize, on the battlefield.

Q: Union soldiers were not monolithic in their views, and I wonder if you could speak to that. I mean, the people you’re hearing from, are they fully committed to the cause?

A: These letters bear out the differences that these men had.

On the one hand, you do have some of these men going off from across the Coal Region who are abolitionists. They are advocates for the abolition of slavery. They’re going off to put down a rebellion of slaveholders in the South, and they would like to see the end of slavery. Many of these are supporters of President Abraham Lincoln.

But by and large, these men are going off to serve to save the country. They’re not in a fight to end slavery, they’re fighting for the preservation of the union, and numerous letters talk about that: Save the country, put down the rebellion, pull the country back together, and keep the institutions as they existed under the Constitution — which did protect slavery at the time, so you have this range.

Q: And racism was not limited to the Confederacy, was it?

A: You also have some of these [Union] soldiers who are vehemently racist as well.

By modern terms, pretty much everybody [in 1861] is racist, but even by those standards, there are there are some horrific things written in these newspapers as well, and it’s going to be coming out in some of these letters — these soldiers’ perspectives on on race, on slavery, as they’re experiencing it for the first time as they go into Maryland and Virginia.

This actually manifests itself in some pretty awful violence as well, racialized violence that’s going to take place in places like Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, near these army camps, as these soldiers are encountering large populations of African Americans for the first time.

I think that these letters show that there’s nothing monolithic about the first year of the war … and there are so many different reasons these men are fighting.

Q: Immigrants served on both sides — in particular, Irish immigrants — and I wonder if you could speak to that.

A: There are quite a number of immigrant perspectives that are shared in these letters.

The largest group — one of the largest groups of immigrants across the Coal Region communities — is the Irish. There are letters from members of the Irish immigrant community that settled across Northeastern Pennsylvania, oftentimes working in the anthracite coal mines. They’re serving in the first year of the war, they’re joining up, many of them are talking about fighting for their adopted country, going off to save their adopted country, and preserve the union.

There are German regiments as well, German units that are going to sign up in places like Wilkes-Barre and Scranton that are going to go off to the front lines in the first year of the war.

Whether they are immigrants themselves or the sons of immigrants, they make up a huge part of the United States Army, and will throughout the American Civil War — not just from Pennsylvania but from all over the Union. There are hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are going to serve … and they play a really crucial and important role in the conflict.

I do just want to make one note on the Irish in particular. A few of the perspectives on race actually come from Irish immigrant writers who are, in many cases, experiencing for the first time seeing large communities of African Americans. Their perspectives on slavery are pretty rough to read … You have all of these different dynamics coming into the fore, all these different perspectives clashing into each other, and this massive conflict going on as the backdrop to it.

Q: In 1914 and 1939, there were some very optimistic and incorrect thoughts about how long the world wars would last. Did Americans in 1861 expect a long conflict?

A: No. By and large, they do not expect a long conflict.

You see it in how long these units are going to sign up for. Originally, in the weeks after Fort Sumter, President Lincoln’s going to call out for 75,000 men. He’s going to get way, way more recruits than that.

They actually have to stop recruiting. These men are signing up for 90 days, that’s it, just three months of service, and the federal government, the state of Pennsylvania, is also a little bit under the understanding that this is going to be a short conflict. There is not an expectation that this is going to grow into the yearslong slog that it will become.

You do see in the summer of 1861, even before the Battle of Bull Run … there are Pennsylvania units that are going to start being signed up for longer, and some of these letters that we see in the series come from the Pennsylvania reserves, they’re actually being signed up for three-year service in the summer of 1861

So, there is a pivot taking place where they’re realizing that we should probably sign these guys up for a little bit longer in case this conflict lasts a bit longer than just the summer of 1861, which, of course, is going to become the case.

Q: Why do these letters and stories matter? Why should modern readers care about events from 165 years ago?

A: It’s about these communities, these towns and cities, and what they did to preserve the union as a whole, and how these communities remembered their service in the Civil War.

I spend a lot of time looking at Civil War monuments across Northeastern Pennsylvania, and thinking about how they remembered their experiences, the veterans, and then their children and grandchildren, all the way down to us today.

It’s something that I think a lot about every day, just trying to better understand how our understanding of Civil War history has evolved over time, and how that’s impacting our country today.