Congressman Rutherford B. Hayes to Lucy Webb Hayes, August 27, 1866

CINCINNATI, Monday, August 27, 1866.

MY DARLING:— There is to be a convocation of the Union faithful at Columbus on Wednesday, the 29th, and I shall attend. If you can send the boys by the stage to Columbus Wednesday or Thursday, it will save time and expense for me to go on with them from there Friday morning. Of course you will not send them if Grandmother is not improving. . . . Friends here all well. Cholera pretty much gone.

Politics funny—very—and decidedly agreeable. We think favorable.

I may go to Philadelphia from Fremont to the Southern Convention on the third. We open up here September 8, and keep it up then until after election.

Affectionately,

R.

MRS. HAYES.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 30

Congressman Rutherford B. Hayes to Sardis Birchard, July 7, 1866

WASHINGTON, D. C., July 7, 1866.

DEAR UNCLE:— Have you melted away? Not heard from you for a good many hot days.

We have the inevitable tariff before us noon and night. I hope we shall get off in a fortnight. A little cholera wouldn't be bad now. Anything to get up a scatterment. - Write a word.

Yours,

R. B. HAYES.

S. BIRCHARD.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 28

Congressman Rutherford B. Hayes to Sardis Birchard, August 6, 1866

CINCINNATI, August 6, 1866.

DEAR UNCLE:— Our convention* went off just to my taste. There seems to be no doubt as to the result in my district. Lucy is at Chillicothe, or rather is at her Aunt Boggs'.

A good deal of cholera here and increasing. I shall go to Lucy the latter part of the week. Will not come to Fremont for ten days or a fortnight. Love to the boys [Birchard and Webb].

HAYES.

S. BIRCHARD.

_______________

*The Republican Congressional convention, at which Hayes was renominated for Congress without opposition.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 29

Samuel Gridley Howe to Charles Sumner, August 20, 1850

Paris, Aug. 20, '50.

My Dear Sumner: — I am always cheered by the sight of your “hand-o'-write” and that of your last letter was more than usually welcome. Notwithstanding your sad errand you seemed to be in an elastic and healthy tone of mind, and I know too well by experience of the opposite condition what a blessing that is: may my friend never fall from the one into the other! You will be surprised at the date of this, and exclaim, “Why are you not en route for Frankfort?” I'll tell you. I had concluded or been persuaded by your letter and other considerations to go and attend the Peace Congress. I left Paris for that purpose on Friday evening last so as to be in Frankfort on the 20th, but I had hardly got an hundred miles when I began to feel the sure premonitions of an attack of cholera morbus. I remained all night in a miserable inn, hoping to be able to go on by the early train; but it was too certain that the grip of disease was upon me; I therefore turned back with all speed to get properly attended here. I was quite ill Saturday and Sunday; yesterday better but unable to travel, and to-day not fit for a fatiguing journey. I must therefore give up the Congress. All I should have done would have been to move for an adjournment en masse to the seat of war in Holstein, and discuss war between the two hostile armies. I am sick of this preaching to Israel in Israel; the Gentile ought to hear. Peace men should go to Russia, and Abolitionists to the Slave States. Besides, this calling upon France and Germany to disarm while Russia has the open blade in hand is what I cannot do. Our combativeness and destructiveness are the weapons God gives us to use as long as they are necessary, in order to keep others less advanced than we are in quiet by the only motives they will heed, selfishness and fear; you may as well appeal to conscience and benevolence in babes and idiots as in Russians and Tartars, I mean en masse. Conscience and benevolence they have, ay! and so have babes and idiots, but they are (not) yet called into life and action.

You tell me to go about sightseeing and to enjoy the rare opportunity before me. I go to see nothing — I care little for shows. I want to be back in the only place in the world which is fit for me or has charm for me; in my own office with the harness on my back. I wish you had my opportunity and I had yours. So goes the world. . . .

Kind words to Longfellow, Hillard, Felton, &c. Tell Briggs my conscience has been continually smiting me about my neglect of that Frenchman in prison. I hope he is out.

Ever, dear Sumner, most affectionately thine,

S. G. H.

SOURCE: Laura E. Richards, Editor, Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Volume 2, p. 322-3

1st Lieutenant Charles Wright Wills: April 4, 1862

Camp, near Point Pleasant, Mo., April 4, 1862.

I received your last letter within three days after it was mailed, and praised Uncle Sam duly therefor. Our regiment has had a run of bad luck since we've been here. Two men killed on the plank road, two wounded at same place, two killed by falling trees in a storm of night of April 1st, and a dozen wounded, and yesterday one drowned while watering his horse in the swamp, and our horses dying off very fast of horse cholera. The latter is a serious thing in a regiment were the men own the horses themselves. For they (or nearly all of them) cannot buy others. Most of them are still owing for the horses they have. The positions of troops and state of the war generally remains the same here as it has been ever since we took Madrid. Main body of our forces at that place. Five regiments here under Plummer and five seven miles further down the river with Palmer. That is as far down as we can go on this side for the swamps. Between here and Madrid we have batteries every three miles and the Rebels have rather more on the opposite side. Both are right on their respective banks and have their flags fluttering their mutual hatred in each others faces. We can see them very plainly without the aid of a glass. The Rebel gunboats lie just below our lower battery and 'tis rumored to-night that several new ones have arrived from Memphis or New Orleans.

This fuss about “Island 10” I think is all humbug. Don't believe they have attacked it yet. It don't sound like Foote's fighting. Look on the map and see what a nice pen there is between the rivers Tennessee and Mississippi. Don't it look that if Grant and company can whip them out at Corinth, that we'll have all the forces at Memphis and intermediate points to “Island 10” in a bag that they'll have trouble in getting through? If they run it will be into Arkansas, and they can take nothing with them but what their backs will stand under. Seems to me that the plans of the campaign are grand from the glimpses we can get of them and have been planned by at least a Napoleon. Certain it is we are checkmating them at every point that's visible. I firmly believe the summer will see the war ended. But it will also see a host of us upended if we have to fight over such ground as this. It is unpleasantly warm already in the sun. It's 10 p. m. now and plenty warm In my shirt sleeves, with a high wind blowing, too. We had an awfu1 storm here to commence April with. We are camped just in the wood's edge and the wind struck us after crossing a wide open field and knocked trees down all through our camp; killed First lieutenant Moore, one private, seriously wounded Captain Webster and a dozen men. During the storm I though[t] of our fleet at “Island 10” and it made me almost sick. Don't see how they escaped being blown high and dry out of water.

SOURCE: Charles Wright Wills, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, p. 76-8

Diary of 1st Lieutenant John S. Morgan: Friday, June 18, 1865

Cholera morbus all night, was 6 cases in Regt. quite weak today. Yellow fever in Matamorass. awful hot & poor water.

SOURCE: “Diary of John S. Morgan, Company G, 33rd Iowa Infantry,” Annals of Iowa, 3rd Series, Vol. 13, No. 8, April 1923, p. 606

Diary of Alexander G. Downing: Saturday, September 5, 1863

No news of importance. The weather continues hot and sultry. Many more of the sick are being sent home on furloughs or taken to hospitals. Although half of our number are sick with the chills and fever, yet a kind Providence has certainly favored the soldiers of the Union armies in this region; for though in past years it was a common thing for the people here to have a siege of cholera or yellow fever, we have thus far been spared such a scourge.

Source: Alexander G. Downing, Edited by Olynthus B., Clark, Downing’s Civil War Diary, p. 141