Private Charles McDowell wrote to his wife that he hoped she hadn’t forgotten him, that Abraham Lincoln looked “about like any old farmer," that many soldiers with him were sick or exhausted.

“I have seen some of the men drop right down in the middle of the road, they would be so tired,” McDowell wrote on June 19, 1864. “Sometimes the dust flies so we can’t see a rod ahead of us.”

“It is all I ask for in the world, that your life may be spared so that you can return home,” Nancy McDowell wrote back. “I don’t think that anything would make me unhappy when I could have you so near me, and know that you wasn’t in such great danger.”

The letters are part of the book “Ever True: A Union Private and His Wife”, that Lisa Saunders, of Mystic, wrote after discovering her great great-grandparents’ letters in her mother's attic in New York.  Charles McDowell and his wife, Nancy Wager McDowell, wrote the letters from 1862 to 1865.

Saunders will speak and read excerpts from the book on Feb. 1 at the Groton Rotary meeting at the Mystic Marriott Hotel. Groton City Police Chief Bruno Giulini will read excerpts from the letters with her. The book with the letters was published in 2004.

Letters in the attic

Saunders said she always knew she had relatives who had been in the war, but knew little else about them.

Then, at a family reunion in 1992, she asked her mother if she could find out more.

“And my mother was like, ‘Yes, I have the letters they wrote to each other. They’re in the attic,’” Saunders said.

Saunders went upstairs, found a small, wooden box, and brought it down. Her aunt pulled out a letter at random. It was from Charles McDowell.

“We have (Secretary of State William) Seward down here about every other day, and sometimes he fetches Old Abe with him and (he) looks about like any old farmer,” he wrote.

She was hooked.

“I had to read the rest,” she said. Saunders said she struggled to read the letters at first, because the couple wasn’t educated; they didn’t spell correctly, follow grammatical rules or use punctuation.

He was 25; She was 17

McDowell was 25 years old when he enlisted in the army.  His wife was 17. They’d married on Christmas Eve, 1860.

He served as a member of the New York Ninth Heavy Artillery, built forts in Washington, D.C. and contracted typhoid fever in the army. He was able to doctor himself back to health. She joined him in Washington for about a year. She baked and sold apple pies there to soldiers, then also caught typhoid and had to return home.

Charles McDowell wrote about several battles, including the Shenandoah Valley Campaign, and sometimes fought alongside the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery. He wrote to his wife that he was lonesome without her, and that he would never do anything to embarrass her.

“I could write you a good deal about some of the boys, but then it’s against our rules,” said McDowell, of the troops in 1862. “Well not my rules, but theirs, because I ain’t a-going to do anything that I am ashamed to have them write about.”

Nancy McDowell wrote about neighbors involved in scandals.

“They say that when Miss Converse was to Auburn, she went and called for a room, and then sent for Burt," Nancy McDowell wrote. "Burt’s wife says that she wished she knew what Burt had done before she went to see him. She would not have gone a-near him.”

Suffering

They both wrote about the war.

McDowell told his wife about wounded soldiers laying on the ground for hours,  friends losing their limbs, and the company being overrun in Maryland.

“There was too many of them for us,” he wrote on July 18, 1864, after a battle along the Monocacy River. “Our company is pretty small now. There is a good many killed and wounded and missing, and I can’t tell you who all was wounded now, for there was a good many left on the battleground.”

McDowell described confederate soldiers as good marksmen, and said they had shot a man in the head as he got up to get his coffee. But McDowell also wrote of  Rebels panicking.

"Their own artillery and wagons run over some of their own men," he said in one letter. "We are still in pursuit. We have taken lots of prisoners and a good many peices of artillery."

Nancy McDowell wrote of a relative wounded in battle, “My cousin Stephen Wager has got home. Poor fellow. He has lost his right arm. Some says (they’d rather) been killed as come off as he did, but I would (rather) been in his place. But if it had been his leg it would have been better, I think, for now you hafto cut all his victuals up on his plate. He can’t help himself at all.”

Cruelty

Saunders said she saw the war take its toll as some of Charles McDowell's writing changed.

 “At first, he would feel sorry for (Southern families whose food was taken), but at the end, he was just hungry and he wanted them to be demoralized so they’d give up,” Saunders said.

The descriptions give details about the cruelty and desperation of soldiers on both sides.

 “My old friend Jef is at home now,” Charles McDowell wrote in January, 1865. “They say they think he will heft to have his leg taken off, so Bill Horn was a-telling me. I helped carry Jef in when he was wounded. He laid there on the ground till next day noon before we found him.”

Another solider began turning Jef over and searching for his money as he lay wounded, McDowell wrote.

“He would almost cry when he told about that.  He said he thought it was too bad after shooting him to take the last cent he had. . . I could have made a thousand dollars if I had a-went around and got our wounded, and killed and searched them, but I wouldn't do such a thing. But there is lots of them that does do it. . ."

Insights

McDowell made it home without becoming wounded. The couple eventually had two children - a daughter and a son - Saunders’ great grandfather.

Nancy McDowell died at age 86, in a rocking chair looking out a window, Saunders said. Her husband had died 18 years earlier, and Saunders believes she was looking for him.

“She just lived for him and loved him,” she said.  She said the letters give her insight into history and her relatives.

“I was touched by her love for him,” Saunders said. “She didn’t say, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ She would say, ‘if I only could cook for you again, I would never complain or be unhappy.’"

She said she also related to the pain the letters described, and to the endurance that required.

"It makes me appreciate times of peace," she said.