Brigadier-General Thomas Kilby Smith to his Daughter, March 26, 1865

Headquarters Ditrict Of South Alabama,

Fort Gaines, Ala., March 26, 1865.

My Dear Daughter:

Shall my letter to you, my sweet daughter, “rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea?” The ocean waters are in my ears continually, chafing and fretting, never by day or night one moment still. My house is close to the beach, so close, that the spray of the wave sometimes wets my window pane. The deep water is nearer to me, as I sit to write, than the little grass plat before the front door to you as you stand in the threshold. The last sound that I hear, as I turn to sleep, is the wave on the shore; the first object that greets my eye as I wake in the morning, is the wave dimpling in the calm dawn or throwing up its white caps in the freshening breeze. And all about me tells of the great deep and all its wonders. You have never yet seen the ocean, my dear child; nor much of those who go down to the sea. When its vast expanse meets your eye, you will be wonderstruck. All the day you can watch by its shore and never weary. I wish you, with your sister and brothers, could be with me to wander on the beach and gather some of the beautiful shells that are washed on the sands, and watch the breakers and the roll of the surf, and stand at evening and see the sun go down, plunging with his last dip, apparently, into the sea itself, and then throwing up his long rays like arms in agony. Sunsets at sea are very beautiful, and very suggestive of beautiful thoughts. I have got a nice little island here about ten miles long, and in the widest part about two miles. I wrote to grandma the other day that it was all covered with white sand, and that there was no vegetation save pine trees; but I was mistaken, for I have found one or two pretty garden plots, and in one of them peach trees, and lemon and orange trees, were in bloom. I have found some very old orange trees a good deal thicker at the trunk than your body, and as high and branching as any apple tree you ever saw. There used to be several families on the island, but the commandant sent them all away to New Orleans. They made a little livelihood by catching oysters and fishing for the Mobile market, and some of them burned the oyster shells into lime. You would be astonished at the great banks of oyster shells there are here, showing what a prodigious quantity of the creature is raked up from the beds, which are yet apparently inexhaustible.

SOURCE: Walter George Smith, Life and letters of Thomas Kilby Smith, p. 382-3