Civil War Civilians

April 25, 1861

I will be dissecting the letter from which D. H. Homan’s sister Caroline is writing him while he is away at war. She seems frantically worried about him, which I imagine most family members were at that time. They were always wondering what was happening to their siblings and how they were getting along. Sending letters was the only way to communicate with loved ones back then which caused much anxiety for family members because they could not get immediate responses. As we can see in the letter, families yearned for these letters to come, to see how their boys, or men were doing while they were away.

D. H.’s sister is writing in concern for her brother’s well being. I would imagine from the vernacular she is using and the pride that she has in her surroundings that this family is one of the confederacy. “Of the soldiers, how I wish you was one of them, all in uniform, now all the time, from your ever.” As I read in the “Civil War Civilians” text the citizens during that time were very supportive of their side in the war. Everyone who could enlist basically did, and everyone who couldn’t wishes they could. And if you were one who couldn’t enlist you were probable working on some sort of task that was in part accommodating to the war.

“We neither sleep nor eat, about here no work going on, what is to become of us is hard to tell.” This quote speaks of the hardships that the mothers daughters and basically anyone who wasn’t in the war had to go through. Women and children worked twice as hard to get even less than they were before. Even though they were supportive the women and children were very frightened at the fact that they might loose their primary care giver, head of the household, or assistant to the head.

War was surrounding society and there was no way to get away from it. It was inevitable; the affects of it consumed every man women and child living in that time period. They were so