Alden Spooner, a Sharp Shooter with the 32nd Mass., would have only a month to live! He died of an accidental wound one month to the day after this letter was written.
· “Camp Near Jerusalem Plank Road, VA. Jan. 9th, 1865 …You had ought to have been with us on that raid for I tell what we had fun, we tore up the railroad for nearly twenty miles and burnt the irons. Some of them we took when they was hot and withed round the trees that made old Warren laugh when he saw that, we had grand times killing hogs, cattle, sheep, and all kinds of poultry.”
· “We got plenty of honey, syrup, cider, whiskey, sweet potatoes and everything you can think of. Some of those old cusses had twenty barrels of whiskey in their cellars, the boys would pull out the spikets, hold under their canteens til they were full, then go off and leave it running. The whiskey was half over shoes (deep) in some of the cellars.”
· “The first day they poisoned five men to death with their whiskey. After that the boys would go to a house and draw a glass of it, and make the old man drink it, and then they would go in.”
· “We burnt a lot of new ties that they had piled up by the side of the track, and acres of wood they had cut and piled up. We burnt three stations and all the buildings along the route.”
· “Coming back we found three of our men with their throats cut and set up by the side of the road then we just went in and burnt everything as we came back along. You could see the black smoke rising on either side of the road.”
· “Old Griffen said he believed that the men would march forty miles in a day if they would only let them destroy everything as they went, well it was a regular race to see who should get to the next house to set it on fire, if they had wanted to take Wilmington they ought to have let us gone down there for we did not have a man with us but what thought he could lick a dozen rebs…”
A nice 4 page letter in ink.
#L81 - Price $325
