Scope and Content Note
The Donald Benham Civil War Collection spans the years 1806-1918, with the bulk of the items dating from 1850 to 1870. The collection contains correspondence, financial and legal records, military orders and records, speeches, and miscellaneous items, many containing personal accounts and commentary by officers and soldiers of living conditions during the Civil War from various stations and campgrounds. Battlefield letters home reveal details of camp life, enlistment payments and quotas, battle engagements, military strategies, slavery issues, and social conditions in the South during its occupation by Union forces.
Items in the collection inform on diplomatic policy and military strategy and include recruitment and mustering orders, supply and distribution records, and records of the Potomac Flotilla, a unit of the United States Navy created to protect communications in the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River and its tributaries from Confederate disruption. The collection includes letters from New York publisher Horace Greeley concerning Abraham Lincoln, the prosecution of the war, and political battles in Washington, D.C. A letter home written from Tennessee by a Union officer, August 24, 1862, confesses the evolution of his views on slavery stating, "I am getting to be more and more of an abolitionist." Another letter written from Burke's Station, Virginia, April 13, 1865, provides an eyewitness account of Robert E. Lee's evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia, and his subsequent retreat westward. In addition, the collection contains a typescript of a speech by William Woods Averell, Union cavalry general, concerning selected subjects relating to his life and military career, including retrospective accounts of wartime espionage and efforts to uncover spy networks in Washington, D.C., following the First Battle of Bull Run.