To My Beloved Wife and Boy at Home

John Hartwell, a 31-year-old married house carpenter from Herkimer, New York, enlisted in the Union Army on 23 August 1862, over his wife's objections. For the next two and one-half years, Hartwell filled six diaries and one hundred one letters describing his journey through hell. In 1989, Professor Ann Hartwell Britton discovered Hartwell's hoard of letters and five of the diaries among family papers in Florida and Massachusetts. Britton and her law faculty colleague Thomas J. Reed have, in this volume, copied, annotated, and edited Hartwell's letters and diaries for use by scholars of the Middle Period and by general readers interested in the common soldier's understanding of the War between the States. Hartwell lived through every major battle of the Army of the Potomac from Antietam to the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House and Second Cold Harbor. Since Hartwell was a draftsman as well as a builder, he carefully mapped his regiment's actions in some of those battles, as well as his winter quarters in 1863-64.