"I take up my pen": Letters from the Civil War

"This online exhibition is adapted from an exhibition of original Civil War soldiers’ letters currently on display at the new Museum and Visitor Center at Gettysburg National Military Park, which opened in April 2008. The letters are drawn from the Gilder Lehrman Collection (on deposit at the New-York Historical Society), which contains more than 12,000 Civil War soldiers’ letters, most of them never before seen by the public." Continued

Photo: Union soldiers writing letters home from Camp Essex, Maryland, in 1861. Courtesy Center for Civil War Photography.