The 154 has gained a name but at what a loss. Our company has lost 17 in killed wounded and missing. Seymour Sikes is [killed] he was hit with a piece of shell in the head. Mart Champlain is missing, [but] that is all that is missing from our place. The regiment lost 227 men. We had a hard fight.
I am tired and worn out with hard marching and hard fare.
I looked for a letter from you when I got back but did not. I am in hopes to get one to night. I got the likeness of the children and it pleased me more than anything that you could have sent me. How I want to see them and their mother is more than I can tell. I hope that we may all live to see each other again if this war does not last [too] long.
This is from a last letter home by a Union soldier, Amos Humiston, after Chancellorsville and before Gettsyburg, where he died in battle, holding in his hand the picture above, which is the one he mentions in his last letter home several weeks earlier. He was found on the battlefield with nothing to identify him but the photograph; newspapers ran descriptions of the photograph nationwide, and, seeing one of them, his wife wrote, was sent a copy of the ambrotype, and learned why she’d not heard from her husband in the few months since Gettysburg.
Erroll Morris, the documentary director, has a wonderful blog on the New York Times site in which he does long, meditative series about historic photographs. A while back, he did a series about photographs from the Crimean War. This week, he’s done a five part series on the photograph, above, the story of how it was found and identified, and the story of how writer Mark Dunkelman, who has made a lifelong study of the unit in which Humiston served, found Humiston’s letters home and has now written a book on the subject, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier, The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston. Part one can be read here; part two here; part three here; part four here; and part five here.
One interesting bit of perspective is the author’s list of stories “everyone knows” about Gettysburg. Dunkelman lists them in an interview with Morris in one of the posts: “John Burns, Jennie Wade, the civilian who was killed in her house when a bullet struck her while she was baking bread, and the Humiston story. It’s a big story.” The first was a War of 1812 veteran who grabbed his musket and joined the fray. All three stories are from the Union side.
But those aren’t the one that come to my mind– there’s a story close to equivalent to Humiston’s from the southern side that “everyone knows,” that of Jeremiah Gage of the University Grays, killed in Pickett’s Charge– there is a famous and moving eyewitness account of his death (“Doctor, I am in great agony; let me die easy, dear Doctor. I would do the same for you.”) and equally famous battlefield letter to his mother (“Bear my loss best you can. Remember that I am true to my country and my greatest regret at dying is that she is not free and that you and my sisters are robbed of my worth whatever that may be. I hope this will reach you and you must not regret that my body can not be obtained. It is a mere matter of form anyhow. This is for my sisters, too, as I can not write more. …This letter is stained with my blood.”).
h/t Razor for the Errol Morris heads up.
Sad that he was so optimistic for an honorable discharge in May, then hopes dashed and gone a few months later. There is almost a precognitive tone to his letters. The footnotes in this series are almost as interesting as the article/series. Thank NMC for a wonderful read!