This real letter from the American Civil War accompanies the free lesson plan Civil War Letters
U.S. General Hospital
Annapolis, Md Dec 5th 1864
Mrs. Maryann Yeager
Tipton Co Indiana
by request of your brother I address you a few lines to inform you where he is and how. he and I were prisoners together. I landed here last Spring. he arrived here the fourth of this month is sick in head with the cronic but is mending fast. he requested me to say to you that he will come to see you as soon as he is able to leave the hospital. he desired you to write. Direct to U. S. General Hospital Division No. 1. Annapolis Md.
For Moses White
By O. P. Olingen
Research Notes
Moses White
Union soldier, brother to J. J. White and Mary Ann White Yaeger. Moses was in St. Louis, Mo on Dec 1861 sick with fever while his reg. was at Springfield. In June 1862 he was in Mursfreesboro. He was a prisoner in Andersonville, Ga early in 1864. He arrived in Annapolis Md. U.S. General Hospital on Dec. 4th 1864 very ill. He died there Dec. 19, 1864 of scurvy and diareah.
Murfreesboro
Tennessee, a town 30 miles southeast of Nashville, where two battles of the Civil War were fought (Dec. 21, 1862, and Jan. 2, 1863) The Union armies were under General Rosecrans, and the Confederates under General Bragg. Bragg, with thirty thousand men, was trying to advance north into Kentucky, but was met by the Union forces and so shattered that he had to stay quietly where he was for some months, and attempt to recover.
Andersonville
Georgia, a village in Sumter County, 62 miles southwest of Macon. It became noted in the Civil War as the site of a Confederate miliary prison, in which many thousand Federal soldiers were confined, and where more than 12,000 died from disease caused by exposure, bad food and water, and filth, between February, 1864 and the close of the war. In August, 1865, Major Wirz, the superintendent of the prison, was tried by court-martial, found guilty of cruelty and mismanagement, and hanged (Nov 10, 1865)
(Research notes on the Civil War by Dorothy Scalzo, who also wrote about American Civil Rights.)
