July 14th, 2011
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 7/14/2011
War-date Union soldier’s Autograph Letter Signed by Charles W. Gooch, 27th Maine Infantry, 4pp. octavo, March 22, 1863 “on picket line 4 miles from Camp Genl. Casey, Vir[ginia]” and reads in part: “...Isaac and I went over to Washington...We went into the Smithsonian Institute. There is things from every part of the world; birds, beasts, snakes, eggs, minerals of all description in the known world, skeletons of man and everything, ice mummies...All the trophies from Japan and other foreign countries...but the things that were most interesting to me was Washington’s things that he had in the Revolution. There was his tent he slept in and the poles belonging to it. The cloth of it looked like an old table cloth but I should been very glad to get a piece of it but it was in a glass case and I could not. There was the suit of clothes that he wore when he resigned his commission at Annapolis, his war sword was there and all his plates which was peuter...Old General Jackson’s dress coat that he wore at the battle of New Orleans was there and a full tea set that Lafayette gave Washington’s wif and looking glass and other things too numerous to mention...” Fine condition. In June 1863, the 27th Maine’s enlistment time was at an end and Lee’s second invasion of the North was just beginning. The War Department, desperate to keep up the defenses of Washington, offered any man in the 27th that stayed the Congressional Medal of Honor. Of the 864 men in the regiment, 311 did stay. Unfortunately, no list was kept of who had stayed on so the decision was made to award all 864 members of the 27th, the Medal of Honor. These medals were later purged by Congress in 1917 as the actions of the regiment did not meet the criteria for receiving such a medal
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