My Dear Nelly: The Selected Civil War Letters of General Orlando M. Poe to His Wife Eleanor

By Earl J. Hess

An epistolary chronicle of love and reflection from the Civil War front

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, West Point engineer and Brevet Brigadier General Orlando M. Poe (1832–1895) remains one of the Union’s most unsung heroes. He served the Union in uniform from day one of the conflict until the Confederate surrender in North Carolina in late April 1865, and he used his unparalleled ability to predict Confederate movements to lead multiple successful campaigns that turned the tide of the war. Accordingly, the roar of battle permeates this collection of 241 highly literate and previously unpublished wartime letters to his wife, Eleanor Brent Poe.

Yet readers will discover more than just Poe’s battlefield experiences. His observations to his wife regarding sense of duty, marital responsibilities, societal issues, and broader home front matters also provide a unique window into the nature of husband-wife relationships in the mid-19th century. The raw intimacy of these letters, coupled with Poe’s strong sense of social awareness, illustrates the contrasting forces of “manliness” and domesticity during this time period, exemplified by vivid descriptions of both the dynamics between a soldier and his wife and between the home front and the battlefield.

This collection of letters from the front lines offers a bird’s-eye view of some of the Civil War’s most hard-fought military campaigns. Coupled with Paul Taylor’s insightful editorial notes and annotations, Poe’s private Civil War letters are set firmly within the broader context of the war and the home front, revealing unique and moving insights into America’s bloodiest war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781631014253

Earl J. Hess

Earl J. Hess is Stewart W. McClelland Chair in history at Lincoln Memorial University. He is author of several books, including Lee's Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-Kirkland-MacRae Brigade and Pickett's Charge--The Last Attack at Gettysburg.

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HESS

Preface

I first became familiar with Brevet Brigadier General Orlando Metcalfe Poe (1832–95) during the early part of the twenty-first century’s first decade when I was researching and writing a book on the Civil War’s 1862 battle of Ox Hill, which took place in northern Virginia’s Fairfax County.¹ After my family moved to Michigan from Virginia in early 2003, I rediscovered Poe’s name in that he was mentioned throughout the state’s historical sites, from the various nineteenth-century lighthouses he designed in the decades after the Civil War to the iconic Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie. Serious and casual Civil War students are also familiar with Poe’s name, often associating him and his engineering activities with the 1863 siege of Knoxville, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s 1864 Atlanta Campaign, his supervision of the burning of Atlanta, and Sherman’s subsequent March to the Sea and March through the Carolinas Campaigns.

As I sought to learn more about O. M. Poe, the most readily apparent fact was that relatively little published material existed about him. Rectifying that oversight held considerable appeal for me, since writing a biography presented a fresh creative challenge coupled with the subject’s deep Michigan and Ohio connections. Over the next several years I read almost all of Poe’s private letters and published governmental reports, spanning his entire fortythree-year military and civil career, as I worked on what became the general’s first-ever biography. That book, Orlando M. Poe: Civil War General and Great Lakes Engineer, was published in late 2009.²

The foundational cornerstones for the biography’s research were Poe’s unpublished personal letters to his fiancée and wife, Eleanor (Nell). I also utilized important and unpublished military-related letters written by him that were housed in various archives around the nation.

By far, the largest and most important of all Poe collections is the Orlando M. Poe Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. That massive collection numbers some 8,500 items, stored in more than twenty archival boxes, and includes 355 of Poe’s private letters to his wife, spanning their entire marriage. The collection encompasses such diverse material as diaries, personal and professional correspondence, maps, blueprints, newspaper clippings, and biographical material relating to his military service during the Civil War and postwar eras. His papers document the life of a man who was born in the bucolic, agrarian Midwest during the Age of Jackson, seemed to have been everywhere during the Civil War, and then utilized his considerable engineering talents as part of the Midwest’s rise to industrial prominence during the Gilded Age.

In many ways Poe’s life story and progressions mirror that of the United States. As I came to these realizations during my research and writing of the biography, I determined that a collection of his letters would be a viable, future project. In fact, an anonymous scholar who read the biography’s initial manuscript made that very point during the publisher’s peer-review process. Life and other projects intervened over the next decade; nevertheless, the idea of preparing that collection was always percolating in the back of my mind. By the fall of 2016, I decided the time was right. Admittedly, I was surprised that no one else had previously undertaken such a project. When one considers the untold number of letter collections penned by obscure, uneducated enlisted men that have been published over the decades, I found it remarkable that the letters of a highly educated Union officer as intimately involved at the tactical decision-making level as Poe should to this day remain unpublished.

Readers may view this book as a companion volume to my earlier biography, with each one enhancing the other. Other historians have previously taken this tack, such as Stephen W. Sears’s admirable biography of George McClellan published in 1988, which he then followed up a year later with a volume of McClellan’s selected Civil War correspondence. More recently, Ron Chernow wrote an excellent biography of Ulysses S. Grant, then continued his Grant study a year later with a selection of the general’s wartime correspondence to his wife.³

Orlando M. Poe (MOLLUS-Massachusetts Civil War Photograph Collection, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA)

Poe’s letters reveal a well-educated, cultured, keenly observant, and professional military man who was devoted to his family and country. He was not overtly religious, was well attuned to the social dictates of the era, and was apolitical, with little use for politicians, though he did obsess over professional advancement and perceived career sleights. By his own admission, Poe was a man who felt one’s actions should speak louder than one’s words. Yet as the Civil War progressed, he learned firsthand and often to his dismay how promotion and politics were intertwined—how his lack of political connections hurt him.

Poe wrote letters constantly when he was away from home, which was not uncommon for soldiers who had ready access to pen and paper. If circumstances allowed, he often wrote daily to his wife during the Civil War. In almost every instance, his letters touch upon various family matters mentioned by Nell in her prior letters to him. Whenever possible, Poe pointed out to his wife that he was returning the letters he had just received (and read) from her so that she could preserve their joint correspondence for posterity. In those instances where much of a given letter speaks only of private family issues, yet still contains an important piece of military, social, or cultural observation, I have edited that letter to avoid mundane familial repetition, so noted at the beginning of a missive with the words Edited for Clarity. A three-dot ellipsis is utilized to indicate that I excised a section of a given letter. In addition, the editorial annotations between letters may include contextual references to Poe’s remarks written within letters not utilized in this book.

For this volume, I have selected 241 letters written by Poe to Eleanor from the time of their 1860 marital engagement through the Civil War’s conclusion in 1865. Of those letters, 143 are from the 1863–64 timeframe, when Poe achieved his greatest fame as Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s chief engineer during the 1863 Knoxville Campaign and then as Sherman’s chief engineer during the 1864 Atlanta and March to the Sea Campaigns. All letters reflect what I believe to be the man’s essence, portray the integral eyewitness role he played in the Civil War, and offer a window into the nature of mid-nineteenth-century husband-wife relationships and their concurrent social customs.

Poe’s handwriting was quite fluid and legible. Since he was a well-educated man, his spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar are rarely a challenge for the modern reader, though they do occasionally reflect nineteenthcentury epistolary styling. Accordingly, very little editorial assistance was needed to make his letters fully comprehensible to today’s reader.

Paragraph indentations are where Poe placed them. Underlined words are those that Poe underlined in his letters. Capitalization, or the lack thereof, is often expressive and therefore has been left as written per Poe’s handwriting. In those few instances where I have inserted a word or phrase for clarification, that addition is enclosed in brackets. I have also identified as many family members, friends, acquaintances, politicians, and military figures as possible within the text’s footnotes. Ranks and stations stated for those military men identified in the notes indicate the grade and post held by the soldier or seaman at the time of Poe’s letter.

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In the world of music, an artist may create a solo album, yet there are always other musicians, sound engineers, and producers who assist in bringing that work to life. It is certainly no different in the book world. Accordingly, I want to offer a special thank you to Patrick Kerwin at the Library of Congress’s Manuscripts Division. Patrick’s suggestions and constant long-distance support were invaluable to this work’s completion. Equally helpful—and certainly enjoyable—were my interactions with Julie May of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and Elizabeth Miller of Saint Louis, Missouri. Elizabeth is a direct descendant of Thomas L. Brent Jr., Eleanor Poe’s younger brother, and Julie is a direct descendant of Winifred Brent, Eleanor’s older sister. Their vast genealogical research into the Brent and Lyster family histories and gracious generosity in sharing their unpublished family letters and photographs with me was of immense value to this project.

The anonymous scholars who reviewed the manuscript’s early drafts offered suggestions that proved invaluable. Their insightful analysis enriched this book significantly, and for that, I thank them heartedly for taking the time and effort from their schedules to critique this work. I also want to thank Earl J. Hess for his generosity in providing a thoughtful foreword to this book. Master cartographer Hal Jespersen created eight original maps illustrating Poe’s Civil War journey, for which I am both delighted and grateful. His maps identify those towns where Poe wrote from as well as those places and battles—many of which Poe witnessed or where his engineering work affected the outcome—mentioned within his letters or in the editor’s annotations.

To conclude, I wish to express my gratitude yet again to now retired Acquiring Editor Will Underwood, Director Susan Wadsworth-Booth, and all of the staff at the Kent State University Press. This is my third book placed with their superb press. It is indeed a pleasure to work with people who consistently exhibit professional expertise, attention to detail, and high-quality production values. My sincere appreciation goes out to them for their desire to bring these important Civil War letters to the public.

One innocuous remark by Poe in one of his letters to Eleanor always resonated with me. Prior to the commencement of the Civil War’s concluding 1865 Carolinas Campaign, Poe informed his wife that he had burned all of her letters to him still in his possession. He then instructed Eleanor to do likewise with all of his letters to her that she had purposely and carefully preserved over the years. We do not know why Poe felt that way. Historians should be grateful that young Eleanor ignored that particular instruction.4

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1. Taylor, He Hath Loosed the Fateful Lightning.

2. Taylor, Orlando M. Poe.

3. Sears, George B. McClellan; and Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan; Chernow, Grant; and My Dearest Julia.

4. O. M. Poe to Eleanor Poe, Jan. 24, 1865, Orlando M. Poe Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Hereafter referred to as Poe Papers, LC.

Introduction

The adult life of Orlando Metcalfe Poe can serve as a case study of the early career-oriented professional; an employment concept that did not broadly exist when Poe entered the US Military Academy in 1852 but had become accepted and entrenched by the time he died in 1895. He was, by any measure, a man of his era.

Poe was born into an average, middle-class farm home in Navarre, Ohio, in 1832, the eldest of five children born to Charles Poe (1807–52) and Susanna Warner Poe (1813–81). Like many young men of the era, he sensed that a martial spirit existed within the country, resulting in a yearning to attend West Point. Founded in 1802, by the 1850s that institution’s educational focus on engineering and mathematics had helped it develop a reputation of being one of the finest schools in the country. This was generated in large measure by the country’s growing demand for skilled civil engineers, surveyors, and mapmakers. Poe first applied for admission in February 1852 and was accepted later that fall at the relatively older, and therefore probably more mature, age of twenty. From day one he displayed the focus and purpose that would be a hallmark of his psyche throughout his life. The academy’s motto of Duty—Honor—Country became pillars of Poe’s essence.¹

His few earliest-surviving letters from 1852 reveal political leanings toward the Whigs, a party whose core principles held that the educated and cultured elite of the United States should guide the masses forward. The Whigs—firm believers in self-restraint—stood in opposition to the common-man virtues espoused by the majority Jacksonian Democrats, who believed that every man, regardless of his social or economic station in life, had the innate ability to identify his own self-interests, which in turn would lead to the nation’s collective betterment. To the Whigs, this crass mobocracy, as they called it, had the danger of allowing base human desires to overshadow the higher faculties and values necessary for societal advancement.

In writing to his cousin, Andrew Poe, penned at the time of his 1852 West Point admission, Poe displayed the foresight that would serve him well during the Civil War.² He predicted: It will not be twenty years until the parties will be changed into Northern and Southern. The Whig Party will merge into the former and the Democratic into the latter. I make this prophecy by means of a train of inference drawn from the course of the two parties in general.³

Moreover, Poe proclaimed his refusal to be made a man-catcher by any law or decree, a reference to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which mandated a return of all runaway slaves to their owners, regardless of where they might be apprehended. Though declaring himself profoundly antislavery, Poe also expressed anger at being called a damned abolitionist, revealing an awareness that to be called an abolitionist in the early 1850s was not a badge of honor to most of Northern society. To most of the white North, being against slavery was not automatically synonymous with a belief in racial equality.⁴

After all, Northern businessmen were making fortunes acting as middlemen for Southern cotton, as textile factories in both Europe and the North required more of the raw fiber to keep up with the growing consumer demand. From their perspective, such important business interests had to be protected against those vocal abolitionist crackpots and incendiaries, who were apparently willing to see it all tumble down in order to elevate the black race.⁵

Poe’s youthful farm chores served him well by giving him a hearty physique and strength. Upon his 1856 West Point graduation, he stood at six feet two inches tall, six inches taller than the average Civil War–era soldier. Union general Jacob Cox later described Poe as the model for a young athlete, tall, dark, and strong, with frank, open countenance. With jet black hair, ramrod-straight physique, no-nonsense martial demeanor, and, as one junior officer wrote, a very piercing almost wicked looking eye, Poe was considered by many army privates as an officer not to be trifled with.⁶

Each year the top seven graduates at West Point were allowed to select what branch of the service in which they wished to serve, subject to availability. Poe was ranked sixth, which prompted him to choose the artillery, also called ordnance at the time. He believed that branch offered him the best chances for advancement, given that promotions in the antebellum army occurred at a glacial pace. Until August 1861 the army had no official retirement-pension system. This created a backlog of young, junior-grade officers awaiting promotion, with infirm or elderly senior officers often financially forced to remain in uniform until the day they died.⁷

For many professional soldiers and West Point graduates, serving in any scientific branch of the service was preferable to being relegated to the infantry. When Poe learned that the opportunities within the artillery were not as great as he first believed, he appealed to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to be allowed to switch to the topographical engineers.⁸

In the antebellum army, West Point engineers were divided into two distinct groups: topographical engineers and the elite regular engineers. The former group’s primary responsibility during wartime was reconnaissance and mapmaking. They surveyed the ground where the army was encamped as well as enemy positions, from which they would recommend marching and attack routes, and where the army should fortify. In peacetime the topogs essential mission was more in line with a civil engineer, as they were often assigned to survey the nation’s coastlines, harbors, lakes, and rivers with an eye toward enhancing navigation and commerce. Davis agreed to Poe’s request, and by the late fall of 1856, Poe was ordered to report to Detroit, Michigan, for duty as part of the Great Lakes Survey. He would live and work in Michigan from 1857 up to April 1861 and the start of the Civil War.⁹

Though the topogs were held in very high regard, the antebellum and Civil War army’s regular engineers were considered the cream of the intellectual crop. Army regulars initially looked down their nose at the Union army’s volunteer engineer units, whose functions were more construction than design. By the start of 1863, however, the volunteers had earned the West Pointers’ respect.¹⁰

Despite his stern martial exterior, Orlando Poe was an emotional, sentimental man who also possessed a dry sense of humor. Nineteenth-century manliness allowed for displays of heartfelt and tender emotion, though always within the context of self-control and a display of civilized morality. A true man had to possess a firm grasp on how his emotions affected others. Genteel society, of which Poe considered himself part, viewed manhood as an achievement rather than a mere chronological point.¹¹

All of these qualities are revealed in Poe’s private letters to his fiancée and then wife, Eleanor Carroll Brent Poe. Eleanor was born August 22, 1843, at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. She was the second of four children born to Capt. Thomas Lee Brent and Jane (Wilkins) Brent of Detroit. Captain Brent was an esteemed West Point graduate—class of 1835—who had served honorably with the artillery during both the Seminole and the Mexican Wars. After Brent passed away from pneumonia while on quartermaster’s duty at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on January 13, 1858, his widow and children returned to Detroit to reside with Jane’s father, US District Judge Ross Wilkins.¹² There was little doubt as to this relocation, for an older male relative was expected to be responsible toward female relatives in need lest he suffer loss of reputation and public standing.¹³

Poe was formally introduced to Eleanor in Detroit during the summer of 1859 by Lt. George Bayard, who was an army colleague and friend of both Poe and the Brent family. Bayard had come to know the Brents during their mutual time stationed at Fort Leavenworth. Poe was twenty-seven years old and Eleanor sixteen when they met; she was at an age for females that, within the era’s culture, held an almost mystical quality for romantics, the perfect blend of physical maturity and youthful innocence. That introduction by a third party was not coincidental but rather an essential part of antebellum courtship. A respectable young woman was not allowed to approach and introduce herself to an unmarried male who was not a close relative. The young man and woman had to be formally introduced by a third person, who, in essence, vouched for the good moral character of both the man and woman.¹⁴

Eleanor Brent Poe—a previously unpublished image (Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division)

Their respective ages and the eleven-and-a-half-year age difference between them—perhaps somewhat shocking to twenty-first-century sensibilities given Eleanor’s youth—was not uncommon for the pre–Civil War era. Young women were expected to begin seeking a suitable husband within their social class upon reaching adolescence, for a woman was defined in antebellum society primarily through her marriage and its attendant dependency as keeper of the home. Indeed, the entire point of formally introducing debutantes to society in their early teen years was to acquire a future husband. Even the era’s staunchest proponents of gender equality acknowledged that a woman’s primary focus should be her husband and family. Men, on the other hand, faced considerable anxiety, for they assumed the cultural responsibility of family provider upon saying I do. This need for him to project what was termed a certain competency of means had to be established with an appropriate occupation or inheritance; a husband’s failure to provide adequately equated to a loss of manliness. Antebellum financial dependency had no age constraints, but family breadwinner generally did.¹⁵

In most midwestern states young women were allowed to marry three or four years prior to young men, thus helping ensure a smooth transition as a dependent from one man’s household to another. Michigan, for example, allowed girls as young as fourteen to marry when it became a state in 1837, though it did require the parents’ permission if she was not yet eighteen years old. Nevertheless, most Northern women in the antebellum era tended to marry in their early twenties, which was on average four years later than their Southern counterparts. Furthermore, pragmatic considerations for marriage, such as suitability, wealth, and family name continuation (that is, fertility), were generally deemed more important by antebellum culture than notions of romantic love. Moreover, a purely romantic relationship was often discouraged by a young woman’s parents because even the merest hint of premarital sexual impropriety could create a public scandal that would leave the daughter unmarriageable. With no father in the Brent household to provide an income, and therefore obligated to reside in her grandfather’s eleven-resident household, there is little doubt that Eleanor’s family viewed Poe as a suitable and potential spouse, not because of their respective ages, but regardless of them.¹⁶

Poe’s letters to Eleanor, who was almost always referred to as Nell or Nelly by both her husband and her family, simply overflow with the flowery romantic prose endemic to the era. Poe admitted in an early letter to her that he was quite undemonstrative, as well as proud, imperious, exacting, and unforgiving. Two years later Poe reminded her that he possessed a very forgiving disposition but not a very forgetting one. Yet he always strove to keep those traits in check. He claimed his love for his future wife was too pure to be paraded on all occasions, indicative of the strong, silent male so often portrayed as part of the era.¹⁷

In young Eleanor, Poe had a wife and correspondent whose educational level was higher than most women of the era. She was born into a family who were firm believers in education for both men and women. Her paternal grandfather, William Brent Jr., was a graduate of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He ran a school for the sons of elite Virginians from the 1820s to the early 1840s and consequently taught his sons French, Latin, mathematics, and other subjects. His son, Thomas (Eleanor’s father), then went on to attend West Point. Eleanor’s mother, Jane, was also a well-educated woman who passed this value on to her children.

Like practically all soldiers, Poe’s wartime letters to Nell consistently sought more correspondence from her while relaying his feelings of distant isolation. Readers will also note how, on occasion, he wrote to her using an instructional or gently scolding tone that modern readers might consider more fitting for a father to his daughter than for a husband to his wife. This was also not uncommon for the era, given the dominant patriarchal society, Eleanor’s youth, her worldly inexperience, and after December 1863, her newfound responsibility in caring for a newborn, all the while running a household on her own.¹⁸

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance that Civil War soldiers placed on letters from their loved ones back home. In return, many soldiers—and Poe was certainly no exception—wrote home as often as battlefield circumstances and access to pen and paper allowed. If Poe, or any soldier for that matter, wanted to relay some important piece of news, he often wrote of it in several successive letters in case one or more of them were somehow lost in transit. Meanwhile, each day’s mail call prompted every man’s heart to beat just a little quicker with the hope that a treasured word from home was in the offing. Like all soldiers, Poe relayed how buoyed he was when he received a new letter from Nell and how his heart sank when he returned to his tent emptyhanded. Union and Confederate officials and commanders were well aware of how important letters from home were to their soldiers’ morale and how homesickness could be almost as a dangerous to an army’s overall health as the enemy. One officer still noted almost seventy years after the Civil War ended, "Homesickness may well be the occupational disease of the American soldier. It is therefore of little surprise that Poe often wrote of his loneliness to his wife. To deal with such potential widespread melancholy, each unit often designated specific individuals as responsible for collecting and delivering mail. Specialized tents and wagons routinely served as mobile post offices. These letters from family provided an essential psychological link with loved ones and a citizen-soldier’s normal" domestic life back home. Moreover, they gave him peace of mind if all was routine and secure in his family’s world. Unfortunately, if the family was struggling or in financial peril, such letters only added to a soldier’s worry and in many instances could lead to him deserting in order to go home. For the family, because newspaper information was often unreliable if not outright wrong, a letter from their man in uniform off in some faraway state provided them with a reasonably accurate representation of what was happening in his immediate world and, hopefully, his safety in it. This was why Poe wrote so much of his own travails and actions within his own letters rather than the grand movements of great armies. In reading Poe’s Civil War letters, his love and longing for his wife and family is obvious as well as his patriarchal role that men held at the time. Considering their age and life-experience differences, Poe’s admonitions and instructions to his young wife in the early years of their marriage are also quite apparent.¹⁹

Union army mail wagon (National Postal Museum, Curatorial Photographic Collection)

Poe agonized over career advancement and often displayed considerable anger in his letters when other officers were promoted over him or when he felt he did not receive the recognition due him. He disparaged the army’s internal politics and the obvious role it played within promotions yet exhibited no hesitation in using whatever influence he possessed in order to promote himself. On those occasions when public acclaim did come his way, Poe showed little hesitation in displaying some peacock-like vanity to his wife, but then he cautioned her against showing such letters to the public or sharing his prideful sentiments with others. He knew that to be seen as tooting one’s own horn in public was viewed by his era’s genteel society as a considerable social faux pas.

Poe’s sense of professional superiority was certainly not without merit, however. In the eighteen months from September 1861 to February 1863, when he set his engineering skills aside to hold regimental, brigade, and even temporary division commands within the Army of the Potomac’s infantry, he again earned the respect and admiration of his men and superiors, though the volunteer privates did not initially care much for his strict martial bearing. Throughout his professional life, he was considered by his colleagues to be a superb military and civil engineer as well as a master of the mathematic formulas necessary for such work. Poe’s longest and most insightful obituary observed that he was never happier than when deeply engaged in challenging mathematical analysis.²⁰

When the Civil War started in April 1861, roughly 70 percent of the army’s professional officers were West Point graduates, including most of its senior commanders. In war West Point’s professionally trained engineers were the men who designed and oversaw construction of permanent garrisons, field fortifications, breastworks, and siege works. They also designed trestle and pontoon bridges, oversaw corduroy road construction through fields or swamps, kept existing roads passable, and determined whether and how captured enemy works could best be converted to their own army’s use. It was these engineers who also planned and oversaw the destruction of enemy resources—such as railroads, foundries, and factories—in the most expeditious manner. When the topographical and regular engineers were consolidated in March 1863, such distinctions vanished.²¹

It must be noted, however, that in the antebellum and Civil War era, the term engineer was also given to those skilled workmen who operated machinery as well as to the West Point–trained professional engineer. This joint usage of the same descriptor caused no confusion to those engaged.²²

Poe carried out each and every one of those specialized, professional duties during the Civil War. The five campaigns in which he served as his army’s chief engineer were all decisive Union victories.²³ Every commanding general he served under—whether George Meade,²⁴ George McClellan, Philip Kearny, Ambrose Burnside, or William T. Sherman—all sang his praises and formally recommended him for promotion without hesitation. His colleagues on General Sherman’s staff described him as a man of genius, sensible, judicious … and thorough, as well as a man of marked ability.²⁵

What ego and pride Poe may have possessed as a natural part of his psyche was only reinforced by the four years he spent at West Point. The academy’s motto of Duty—Honor—Country was repeatedly drilled into the young cadets along with the belief that they were acquiring talents and culture not held by average men. In a society that disdained the idea of a permanent standing army while glorifying the unprofessional citizen-soldier, Americans admitted that their West Point–trained officer cadre possessed not only the functional skills they acquired as engineers or topographers but also the necessary martial expertise required to lead those citizen-soldiers in time of war. Thus, an acquired byproduct for the academy’s graduates was a sense of professional elitism. Poe was fully immersed in this growing culture of the professional; he became a man whose immense engineering expertise was matched only by his professional pride. He displayed no hesitation in touting any acclaim sent his way, but he only did so in the privacy of his own letters to and conversations with his wife.²⁶

Religion did not appear to play a significant role in Poe’s life. In an early letter to Eleanor, he referred to churchgoing only as an agreeable duty. He had little use for public servants, including men of the cloth, for Poe believed their actions often stood in sharp contrast to their lofty words. He and much of refined mid-nineteenth-century society considered a man’s honor and character to be his most important possession and a type of transcendent wealth. Character was noble willpower, tempered by self-restraint, and coupled with principled actions and a devotion to truth. A commitment to these traits abound in Poe’s letters to Eleanor. Beyond that, there is little, if anything, in his writings to indicate an intense spiritual path. This is not surprising considering his early years spent at West Point. The Episcopalian faith that was dominant at the academy’s chapel melded nicely with the army’s need for bonding and fellowship. Getting along was essential in the tightly bound army fraternity.²⁷

Religion and race posed very few contradictions to most whites of the middle and late nineteenth century. In fact, virtually all mid-nineteenth-century white Americans, North or South, would be considered racists when examined through the lens of current twenty-first-century values. Much, if not most of white society’s antislavery convictions did not equate to a belief in racial equality. Prior to the Civil War’s commencement, only a relatively small handful of antislavery abolitionists believed in true racial equality, and they were generally regarded by polite society as agitators and troublemakers. In the context of the antebellum era, white society’s acceptance of its inherent superiority was simply taken for granted, due in large measure to the scientific, technological, and cultural progress that white European and North American civilization had generated compared to other races and ethnicities. Poe was certainly no different in this regard. A handful of his Civil War and postwar letters reveal a commonly held and matter-of-fact racist perspective toward African Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans. In this regard he was simply a man of his time.²⁸

Orlando M. Poe’s Civil War letters to his wife offer a bird’s-eye view of the front lines of some of the Civil War’s most hard-fought military battles and campaigns, all written by a man whose engineering work and advice to his superiors played an integral role in his army’s ultimate victory. His chesslike prescience in correctly predicting the Confederates’ upcoming moves is often striking. In addition, they serve as a social-history lens into the midnineteenth century’s perspectives on manliness, duty, and domesticity as well as the marital dynamic between a soldier and his wife and how the home front and battlefield affected each other.

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1. Hope, Scientific Way of War, 246–47. Also see Morrison, Best School in the World.

2. Andrew Poe (1826–89) was Orlando Poe’s first cousin. Their fathers, Adam (1804–68) and Charles Poe, respectively, were two of eleven siblings. Seilhamer, Fragmenta Genealogiae, 203–4. Also see Adam Poe lineage at Ancestry.com; and Andrew Poe, Find a Grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13792437/andrew-poe.

3. O. M. Poe to Andrew Poe, Sept. 21, 1852, Poe Papers, LC. The Whig Party imploded within a few years, soon replaced by the antislavery Republican Party.

4. O. M. Poe to Andrew Poe, Aug. 2, 16, 1852, Poe Papers, LC; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 14.

5. Muelder, Theodore Dwight Weld and the American Anti-Slavery Society, 22.

6. Cox, Military Reminiscences, 1:19–20; Sears, For Country, Cause, & Leader, 118.

7. Newell and Shrader, Of Duty Well and Faithfully Done, 54–55; Coffman, Old Army, 58, 99.

8. Poe to Jefferson Davis, July 17, 1856, Orlando M. Papers, Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant. Jefferson F. Davis (1808–89), best remembered as president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. He was also a US senator from Mississippi (1857–61) and served as US secretary of war (1853–57). O. M. Poe Papers, Clarke Historical Library. Also see Strode, Jefferson Davis, for analysis of Davis’s antebellum political career.

9. Congress authorized the Hydrographical Survey of the Northern and Northwestern Lakes in 1841 to prepare maps of the Great Lakes, their coastlines, and major connecting rivers as a means of enhancing commerce. In the twenty years between 1841 and the start of the Civil War, Congress authorized over $640,000 toward the survey, more than for any other federal project. See U.S. Lake Survey, United States Lake Survey.

10. Malles, Bridge Building in Wartime, 45–46, 153, 349n.

11. Foote, Gentlemen and the Roughs, 56–57; Mitchell, Soldiering, Manhood, and the Coming of Age, 49–50.

12. Judge Ross Wilkins (1799–1872) served on the US district court in Michigan from the time of its statehood in 1837 until his retirement in 1870.

13. Brent, Descendants of Collo. Giles Brent, 164; Reed, Bench and Bar of Michigan, 160–61. Wilkin’s wife, Maria Duncan Wilkins, died in 1856.

14. Bayard, Life of George Dashiell Bayard, 141; Volo and Volo, Family Life in 19th-Century America, 38; Riegel, American Women, 86.

15. Syrett, American Child Bride, 5–6, 56; Lystra, Searching the Heart, 142, 186; Riegel, American Women, 84; Volo and Volo, Family Life in 19th-Century America, 48; Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War, 149.

16. Syrett, American Child Bride, 17, 31–32, 45; Volo and Volo, Family Life in 19th-Century America, 37; Wayne, Women’s Roles in Nineteenth-Century America, 4. Wilkins’s full household included four servants. See 1860 Federal census, 3rd Ward, Detroit, Wayne County, MI, Ancestry.com.

17. Poe to Eleanor, Oct. 10, 1860; Sept. 21, 1862, Poe Papers, LC.

18. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War, 158.

19. Frank, Women in the American Civil War, 1: 257–58; Wiley, Life of Billy Yank, 189–90; McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 131–33; Dalessandro, Army Officer’s Guide, 311.

20. Detroit Free Press, Oct. 3, 1895.

21. Newell and Shrader, Of Duty Well and Faithfully Done, 51; Public Resolution No. 57, Mar. 3, 1863, US War Department, War of the Rebellion, ser. 3, 3:93–94 (hereafter cited as O.R., all references are to series 1 unless otherwise stated).

22. Calhoun, American Civil Engineer, x; Merritt, Engineering in American Society, 5.

23. Those campaigns were Rich Mountain (1861), Knoxville (1863), Atlanta (1864), the March to the Sea (1864), and the March through the Carolinas (1865).

24. Then Capt. George G. Meade served as head of the Great Lakes Survey from 1857 to 1860 and was Poe’s immediate superior. See Warner, Generals in Blue, 315–17.

25. Nichols, Story of the Great March, 44; Howe, Marching with Sherman, 131; Tidball, On General Sherman’s Staff as Aide-de-Camp, 1881–1884, John C. Tidball Papers, 65.

26. Hsieh, West Pointers and the Civil War, 2–3.

27. Poe to Eleanor Brent, Oct. 9, [1860], Poe Papers, LC; Orlando M. Poe, On Character, Folder 3, Box 16, Poe Papers, LC; Volo and Volo, Family Life in 19th-Century America, 49.

28. Taylor, Orlando M. Poe, 230–31, 264–65.

ONE

This Is a Holy War

From the Great Lakes to Regimental Command,

October 3, 1860–December 26, 1861

After his West Point graduation, Poe was ordered on September 19, 1856, to report for duty to Lt. Col. James Kearney at Detroit to be part of the U.S. Great Lakes Survey. Michigan and its Great Lakes thus became Poe’s home up until the start of the Civil War.¹ The following letter is the earliest-known surviving correspondence from Poe to Eleanor. They were introduced in Detroit in the summer of 1859 and were recently engaged by the time of this letter.

(1) POE TO ELEANOR BRENT—POE PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Grand Haven [Michigan]

Oct. 3rd / [18]60

My dear Nelly,

After one of the most tedious rides I ever was compelled to take, I have reached this detestable port, and taken room at a tavern.—If there is any language capable of expressing sufficiently the disgust I feel, from my first impressions of G.H. [Grand Haven] may I be imbued with its spirit that it may find utterance whenever this place is alluded to.

And here does fate doom me to pass the next few weeks. It would not be so bad, were you here—for then, methinks the town and its surroundings would be but of little moment. Judging from my feelings this evening, it will be the merest chance that I do not render myself ridiculous from the number of visits made [to] Detroit.

Imagine all the sand you ever saw. Then try to imagine a hundred times as much more. Then more sand—ad libitum, and pile it up in big piles, and you may form some idea of the topography hereabouts (We must speak topographically now.)—Then if you can, imagine the effect of a windy day. Eyes full, mouth full, nose and ears full, & all of sand.

As yet, nothing has been done to further the object of my visit, beyond putting on an air of importance, using big words, and creating an immense sensation among the natives hereabouts. It is known that an observatory is to be located here, and the excitement may yet be too much for G.H.-ites. The most ludicrous remarks are made about it, and one man thinks it will be a very good idea, if the thing don’t blow up.

It is new and strange to me this feeling I experience in writing to you—my promised wife. Yet I hope I am fully impressed with the importance of the step we have both taken, in solemnly pledging ourselves to each other. I know the oath before the man of God can no more bind me to you than I am now. I don’t know how to express it—but I feel as though the sacred ceremony had actually been performed—so high is my respect for you—so little of the Earth is there in its nature. I can say these things now—for there can be no taint of flattery in a single word of what is written, neither am I willing to believe there can be anything ridiculous in the love I here give. The sentiment is too holy for that.—My dear, you may or may not have noticed that in my nature I’m extremely undemonstrative. If the former—don’t suppose that—I don’t feel as sensitively as if I acted otherwise. My love for you is too pure and unaffected to be paraded upon all occasions—and if I have been led rather far on this, a very slight check from you will prevent future transgressions in that direction. In writing or talking to each other let us be frank and clear, it will save us many a heart burning. Let us at once establish between ourselves as perfect confidence as if we were already married. I’m satisfied it is our most judicious course, and one we will never regret. Don’t be afraid at any time to say to me just what you think. Doubtless it will sometimes be bitter to hear it, but it will be better in the end.

I will write often, if only ten lines, and I beg you to do the same. If you don’t hear from me as regularly as you think you ought, don’t think that I neglect you, but depend upon it. There is good reason for my silence. Or if I write too frequently, don’t become impatient with my importunity, but remember that I’m alone, and always thinking of you. Let us be tolerant with each other, in everything, for a measure of our happiness lies therein. Above all, let us each study the other’s disposition, & nature, and as completely as we can conform ourselves accordingly, for a lifetime of pleasure or of woe depends upon it. I believe we both have a juster idea of the obligations we are assuming than the majority of those who marry. Let us never for one moment forget those obligations, but always keeping them in view, live for each other.

My Nelly, I have high hopes of our future, for I believe our marriage will be one, not only in the sight of men, but in that of God, wherein will be found the peace of our lives.

My love to you all

Yours

Orlando M. Poe

My address will be Grand Haven Michigan

(2) POE TO ELEANOR BRENT—POE PAPERS, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Oct 9th, 1860

My dear Nelly,

Last evening I was delighted to receive your letter of the 6th—and the more so—that I hardly hoped for it before this evening. Your promptness, evincing, as it does, the feeling which should now actuate us both, is extremely gratifying. But more than all am I obliged to you for the expressions of regard you make. A man is always proud to inspire respect & love, how much more so when he is convinced that such are the sentiments of his chosen wife. No one in the world is more fully acquainted with the total heartlessness and want of true affection to be found in many a wedded life than I am, and there is