The Confederacy Is on Her Way Up the Spout: Letters to South Carolina, 1861 - 1864.

Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (1992). Octavo, tan cloth (hardcover), xiv, 157 pp. Near Fine in a like dust jacket. From dust jacket: On July 18, 1863, from his camp near Richmond, Virginia, Confederate private Lawrence Barrett wrote home to his brother-in-law in Pickens County, South Carolina, “The soldiers has a by word,” he wrote, “when any body or anything lost saying its gone up the spout... I say the Confederacy is on her way up the spout.” His prophetic lines are from one of the thirty-three Civil War letters, all previously unpublished, (truncated) included in this volume. Written in a plainly eloquent southern vernacular, the letters focus on a single upcountry South Carolina farm family over the course of the war and enhance a perspective of the Confederacy for which documentary evidence is scarce. The letters, published here with their original spelling and punctuation intact, were written by seven soldiers between 1861 and 1864, and sent to Lucretia Barrett McMahan and her husband. Three of the soldiers, Milton, Benjamin, and Lawrence Barrett, were her brothers, and one, William Collett, her brother-in-law. The other three were friends or acquaintances of the family. The editors’ introduction and their commentary interspersed throughout the letters provide a general historical context as well as extensive information about the Barrett family and the region and social sphere in which they lived. Twenty of the letters are from Milton Barrett, who as a member of the famous Eighteenth Georgia Regiment saw action in most of the war’s major battles. Like a series of Mathew Brady images, the letters are filled with details that summon a startling and immediate sense of recognition and identification: they tell of camp life outside Goldsboro, North Carolina; of a food riot in Richmond, Virginia; of a despondent, tearful Yankee prisoner on Little Edisto Island, South Carolina. They also reveal a consonance of descriptions, opinions, and emotional expressions that substantiate the harsh realities of the Confederate foot soldier’s daily life, from diet (”we have bicets [biscuits] that is so hard i could nock a bull down with one”) to discipline (”there Was a man shot out here the other day for deserten”). As the conflict dragged on and the soldiers’ commitment dwindled to hopes for “a spedady end of this wicket war,” a chilling matter-of-factness surfaces in the letters, as when Milton Barrett, from near Lookout Mountain, Tennesseee, writes “the Yankees is advancen i must lay down my pen and go to shooting.” None of the three Barrett brothers, nor their brother-in-law, survived the conflict. Like their letters, their deaths illustrate the final reality of this war: two died in hospitals, one of blood poisoning following an amputation, the other presumably of mortal wounds; one died of smallpox in a prison camp; and one disappeared in the confusion of battle. Sincere, spontaneous, and decidedly unphilosophical about their authors’ motivations for taking up arms, these letters will now speak to a wider readership through their tragic subtext of loss innocence. (Inventory #: vita5924)