Personal letters of soldiers to their families changing the way we view history of the Civil War - Essay Example

In this article, I will be highlighting these findings and new discoveries that I unearthed from reading the letters. The General American Population is well averse with at least the fact that this war was one of the deadliest war ever fought involving the Union solders. According to official statistics from the Civil War Trust, this war involved casualties of the war stood at 620,000 with admission that some of the bodies could not be accounted for because they could not be traced (Civil War Trust).

This means that the count given is on the lower scale and thus still tops as the deadliest war. Additionally, majority of these casualties were solders from the confederate states that wanted to secede due to the election of Abraham Lincoln as the President of the United States of America. This can be attributed to the inferior number of Solders from the Confederates as opposed to the union. The same civil war trust organization puts the number of solders as 2,128,948 for the Union solders and 1, 082, 119 (Civil War Trust). . From the letters from the solders, there is inference of Union soldiers complaining about the terrains of Centre County and some solders deriding the confederate State soldiers as knowing little about the terrain yet the war is being fought in their grounds (Olsen 314.). The African American soldiers in the Union Army were also understood to be underpaid as compared to their white counterparts.

One such solder, T.D Freeman, is quoted complaining in a letter to his brother-in-law about how the majority of the African American soldiers, “were in low spirit…enlisted for 13 months and have never received one cent” (Silber & Sievens 47) Another aspect of the war that I was already too familiar with was that most of the time was spend by this solders writing letters to their family members and playing games and this is evident from the large number of letters that have been archived in libraries in America.

Letters were written by all shades of solders be they Union solders or the confederate soldiers. One soldier is quoted as writing to his wife saying that the war was “99% boredom and 1% sheer terror” (Silber & Sievens 2). These letters, however, have helped me get to learn a few facts about the civil war that I did not know yet. One of this is the fact that not all letters were sad and contained a narration of how harrowing and terrifying the war was. Not all these letters were complaining about the hardship in the battlefield as there are others that I got to read that was lively and filled with humor and hope in its contents.

Such letters as expected were written mostly by the Northern-based soldiers who were the Union soldiers and it is