Soldier Life – Page 2 – The Gettysburg Compiler

By Heather Clancy ’15

Another Compiler post, another letter between brothers. This time we will turn to Alexander “Sandie” Murdoch, an Ordinance Sergeant in the 2nd North Carolina State Troops. Engaged in combat during the battle of Gettysburg, Murdoch faced his understandings of mortality perhaps even more immediately than did F.M. Stoke. On August 10, 1863, Murdoch wrote home to relay his reflections on the battle’s conduct. While several weeks had passed since his involvement in the fighting on the first week of July and although he rarely identifies them as such, Murdoch’s letter is full of references to death and his own mortality.

In the most explicit reference he makes to the very real possibility of his own death, Murdoch writes the following of laying in expectation of the order to attack:

There we lay looking around upon our comrades and wondering who would be the ones who would be taken from us and in full health with the life blood coursing joyously through our veins we stared death in the face.

Continue reading ““We Stared Death in the Face”: Confronting the Realities of War”

By Heather Clancy ’15

On October 23, 1863, F.M. Stoke paused from his duties at the Gettysburg Hospital to write a letter to his brother. More than three months had passed since Union and Confederate troops had brought war to the rolling ground of rural Pennsylvania, but reminders of the recent conflict were everywhere. Stoke apologized for the span of time since his last letter home. He had been busy lately writing letters for the patients in the hospital and had found no time for even a brief note for his own loved ones. Things were going well enough at the hospital, he wrote.

The impromptu clinic was located about a mile east of town (about where Ewell formed his battle line, he added) and consisted of large tents set up over approximately eighty acres of land. The tents were organized in “streets,” much as in military camps, an outline that made the hospital look nearly like a city of its own. When he first arrived, there were already 5,000 sick and wounded convalescing in the tents and it was not uncommon for seventeen men to die in one day. Continue reading ““No More”: F.M. Stoke’s Letter Home”