Raynors HCA 2015-11
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 12/3/2015
Union soldier’s letter written by “George Ireland” who enlisted into Company A, NY 140th Infantry, August 14, 1862; Camp near Fredericksburg, September 6, 1863, 4pp., with original cover. In part, “It is quite sickly here .. the prevailing disease is the typhoid fever ... George and David Moore got in camp last Sunday.. they went to take up their boys and take them to Washington to get them embalmed. ... It was undoubtedly very trying for them for John Moore was buried in the mud with nothing but his balnket ... Where he died it is nothing strange for them to bury from twenty or thirty in one day. ... There are various opinions in regard to Lincoln’s late proclamation, but with my limited knowledge of the matter, I don’t think that we can .. benefit from it. For it is a well known fact that we must first get where the slaves are before we can liberate them. I don’t feel that it is my duty to..run the risk of being shot, or dying with disease, for the sake of liberating a few slaves. What man in the North that is so rubbed in his slavery notions that would be willing to send his son down south for the purpose of freeing a black man. Implying by this that he was better than a white man. If the slaves are ever freed by fighting, you will find that it will take most of the men which is left in the North to do it. I for one am not willing to live the life of a soldier for any such purpose. ....”
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