July 14th, 2011
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 7/14/2011
War-date Union soldier's Autograph Letter Signed by Joseph Lukens, 118th Pennsylvania Infantry, WIA at the Wilderness and Five Forks, Virginia, lost a brother on the first day of Gettysburg, 4pp. octavo, pencil, July 8, 1863, Bivouacked near Middletown, Maryland, with cover addressed to his father, and reads in part: "...I finished a letter on Sunday and gave it to a citizen of Hanover to mail, in it I gave you the synopsis of our late movements. I dont know whether you will get it or not...The people of Philadelphia have been from all accounts in a high state of excitement but they by this time feel all right. Your Army of the Potomac have had a hard time of it since they have given the Rebs such a whipping. We (the 5th Corps) move in Penn just one week. We went into the state (Adams Co.) on Tuesday morning June 30, and came out again yesterday about 10am. The people is a general thing treating the soldiers no better than they have been treated in blasted Virginia. Very seldom selling any thing and when they did sell charged very high, for instance 50 cents a loaf of bread where I got a better breakfast in Maryland this morning for 10 cents than I got dinner in Penn yesterday for 50 cents. I did not expect it but it is so...After finishing my letter on Sunday and mailing it the brigade was laying pretty well to the front and a burying party being out I took a walk to that part of the field when our boys brought the Rebs to a stand. It was a terrible sight. I counted 5 dead Rebs standing on a little rock (it was a very rocky place). I counted 55 dead rebs lying around several officers, one of the officers was dressed in very fine silk underclothing & a dubblet shirt bosom, but all this did not save him, he was pitched into the trench along with the other dead. One Reb had been crouched on one knee behind a rock firing on our boys. Somebody had finished him & there sat he in the crouched position dead, it was a terrible sight. Soon after we got orders to move & were on the go...the boys are in high spirits. We got a Baltimore paper this morning & we seen that Vicksburg was taken & by the time Genl. Lee's Army gets into Virginia it will be so used up it won't be worth much. If the Army of the P. gets another shot at it, I think they will almost wipe it all out..." Fine condition.
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