“We got the word, or Captain did, that Thomas Armstrong is dead and his letter also said there are twenty dead already out of their company — four in one day. They appear from what they write to be very discontented which is not the way with the 102nd. They are all as contented as the day is long. They are all willing to stay as long as need be to secure our nation’s freedom.”
— Stephen Boyd,
March 24, 1863, letter to family in
Ashland County, Ohio, from his
encampment with the 102nd
in Clarksville, Tennessee
As the bloody march through the South deepened during the Civil War, the soldiers’ resolve would appear to have remained remarkably strong, though the Boyd brothers’ wish to return home to help on the farm is reiterated by both John and Stephen Boyd in letters home to their parents and brothers near Jeromesville, Ohio.
Explaining that rumors of the war’s ending abound, Stephen, who must have been 17 when he volunteered his service, in the summer of 1863 writes, “I hope it may be so, but I am content to stay as long as I have health. There is a good chance to enlist for a three-year regular in a battery. They get a $350 bounty and a 30-day furlough, but I guess I can’t see it. I would like to get home and go to school if I could be done without at home.”
Writing that “deaths are not very frequent now,” Stephen says, “they have a very good hospital they say, but I have not seen it yet as I can’t get out of camp through the guards. It is a ladies seminary which they took. It is a very spacious building and affords a very good chance for a good hospital.”
The war raging all around him, Stephen understandably was as concerned about illness as he was war injury. “If health is good, we can get along very well, but let the soldier be deprived of his health and be taken to that much dreaded hospital, then your heart sinks within you and you begin to think about home.” Stephen said he had been in good health since he came back to Bowling Green after sickness in Louisville and Frankfort.
March 17, 1863, Stephen wrote to his “dear brother” to say, “I am in hopes that I will be home against Harvest for they say that Jeff has sent in a proposition of peace on these terms — that the south will come back into the Union as they were previous to the breaking out of the rebellion if we will but let them keep their slaves. I hope that he will accept the proposition for I think the slaves are far better off with their masters than they would be with their freedom. There is a great many now free who have ran away protected by the administration. Their owners cannot retake them.”
In a letter to brothers Scott and Joseph on May 30, 1863, Stephen asks a favor. “I will send you a register of ours. I want it framed no matter what the cost. Take it out of my pocket for I paid a good piece for it and if I ever live to get home, want it. It will give you all the names of those who ever belonged to our Regiment and show you who has died and been discharged up to this time, and will also give you a short sketch of the travels… Now be sure and get it framed with glass over it — if it costs five dollars, I don’t care.”
This official roster lists Stephen A. Boyd as age 18, serving for 3 years.
July 17, 1863, finds Stephen writing of “the columns of the daily papers are crowded with both cheery and interesting news from all quarters of our army, which we get in camp every day for the low price of 10 cents a copy. The fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson is a death blow to the rebel cause, as it has opened to unmolested navigation the great western river, the Mississippi, thus shutting off their sources of supplies from Arkansas.
“Lee, so the papers state, has lost the principal part of his army during his unsuccessful tour into Pennsylvania, which did not prove as successful as his hopes anticipated, but it is bully for us.
“Two forts in Charleston harbor has been taken and it is the anticipation that Sumpter has fallen this time. But the most fun and what pleases us the most is the raid of Morgan. I guess it will wake up the Copperheads’ ideas a little.
“We are all in the best kind of spirits hoping that the war will be over in time for us to get home and help husk the corn this fall,” an optimistic Stephen writes to his beloved brother, Scott, to whom he appears to be exceptionally close.
Next week: Finale
