I Seat Myself to Write You a Few Lines:
Civil War and Homestead Letters
from Thomas Lucas and Family
Collected and Edited by Dona Bayard Sauerburger,
great-great granddaughter, 2002
and
Thomas Lucas Bayard, grandson, 1960
With chapter introductions by Andrew German
Heritage Books, Bowie, Maryland, 2002
History of the letters:
This collection includes about 350 letters
that Thomas Lucas wrote to his wife Letty during his three years in the service,
as well as several dozen letters written during the war to Thomas by his
comrades and family. In his letter of November 17, 1861, Thomas asks Letty
to save his letters in case they are needed for reference, and apparently Letty
had already been doing so. In another letter, Thomas explains that he
destroys her letters to prevent others from reading them. Thus this
collection contains only one letter from Letty (March 17, 1863), a letter which
very likely was never sent.
The collection also
includes more than 100 letters that Thomas and his family and friends wrote
after the war. Most of these letters were written to Thomas’s daughter
Millie. Millie and her younger sister Elizabeth and their families
remained in Pennsylvania when Thomas and the rest of his children and his wife
moved to Nebraska. Millie continued her mother’s tradition of saving
letters. She saved the Civil War letters as well as the letters her family
wrote from Nebraska, and passed them on to her children. Two of her
children, Lettie and John, as well as John’s wife Lena lived with her on the
farm in Rice’s Landing, Pennsylvania (near Carmichaels). Another of her
children, my grandfather Thomas Lucas Bayard, moved west and eventually settled
in California.
According to Thomas Lucas’s grandson
Thomas Lucas, Thomas Bayard visited them in Nebraska in 1950 and asked about
Thomas Lucas’s Civil War memorabilia, pictures, and information. In the
fall of 1960, as the centennial of the Civil War approached, Bayard visited his
brothers and sister in Rice’s Landing and worked on the letters. On
January 13, 1961, after he had returned to California, he wrote to his cousin
Ruth (daughter of Thomas Lucas’s youngest son Thomas):
"You know about the letters, I’m sure, from
Lettie and doubtless from others. There are about 400 of them, written as
often as two or three a week from August, 1861, to September 1864. Lettie
has been interested in the letters for a long time and has made typewritten
copies of most of them. I became interested in them when I spent three months at
Rices Landing last fall, and thinking I might get something about them
published, I brought them home with me."
The letters in the collection were copied by
typewriter, probably by Thomas and Lettie Bayard. Those from August 1861
through the end of May 1863 were copied word for word, following the original
spelling and punctuation faithfully. The letters from June 1863 through
August 1864 were condensed and excerpted. The former may have been done by
Thomas and the latter by Lettie since the former are done on the same typewriter
that Thomas uses after he returns to California.
Thomas Bayard borrowed the letters and worked on them when he returned to
California. He visited the Huntington Library in San Marino where he found
a regimental history and a biography of the regiment’s first commander, George
D. Bayard. He got information about Thomas Lucas and his comrades by
paying people to send him copies of military service and pension records from
the U.S. National Archives. He was frustrated when they returned the wrong
papers or partial records, but as always, he remained polite and gracious, and
included in his letter "an allied question, which I hope will make it impossible
to answer this letter with one of your handy forms!" Thirty five years
after his experience, I went to the U.S. National Archives, which is not far
from my home, and lamented that my grandfather hadn’t had the free access to it
that I had.
In 1960-61 Thomas Bayard also asked his
cousins, the grandchildren of Thomas Lucas, to share any anecdotes and stories
they remembered about him and his family, and in the 1990's I asked Thomas
Lucas’s great-grandchildren (and the son and daughter of his son Thomas) what
they remembered about his children. This information and the stories are
included throughout the book.
Thomas Bayard tried to interest publishers
or archivists in the letters or articles written from the letters. The
only positive response he got was from the Washington and Jefferson College,
which is near Thomas Lucas’s home town of Carmichaels, Pennsylvania. Boyd
Crumrine Patterson from the President’s Office encouraged him to consider their
Historical Collection as a repository for the letters, explaining that it
contained “considerable original material relating to the westward movement of a
century ago and other material concerning southwestern
Pennsylvania.”
When he got a hopeful response from
one publisher, Thomas Bayard copied the letters a second time to be considered
by the publisher. The Oklahoma Daily said they had
more historical articles on hand than they could publish in the near
future. The Denver Post responded, “Thank you for your inquiry regarding
your grandfather’s Civil War letters. Unfortunately we are overstocked
with Civil War material and cannot encourage an article from you at this
time.”
The most encouraging response was from
Frederick Hetzel, Associate Editor for the University of Pittsburgh, who wrote
on August 3, 1961, “Thank you for writing about your collection of Civil war
letters. Of course the only way any publisher can reach a fair decision
about these letters is to read them in typescript. But I don’t want to
cause you needless trouble, I am suggesting, therefore, that you wait until the
Director of the Press, Mrs. Agnes L. Starrett, returns from her vacation.
Soon after she arrives in Pittsburgh, on September 5, I am sure that she can
give you some indication of whether or not an edition of the correspondence of
Thomas Lucas would be suitable for our publishing
program.”
Bayard became hopeful, and immediately
began the tedious process of copying the letters a second time. He
responded September 4, 1961, “I thank you for your kind reply to my inquiry
about publication of my Grandfather Lucas’ Civil War letters. When I
wrote, the greater part of the letters already had been typed, but unluckily not
in form suitable for submission to a publisher. I have been working to
correct this condition by copying them again. I should complete this
typescript in about two weeks, and can submit it to Mrs. Starrett then if she
decides this is desirable.”
On September 6, 1961,
Mr. Hetzel wrote, “On August 3 I suggested that you wait until the return of
Mrs. Agnes Starrett before sending the University of Pittsburgh Press a
transcript of the Civil War letters of Thomas Lucas. Mrs. Starrett has now
returned to Pittsburgh and has considered your proposed manuscript very
carefully. Because she is already engaged in negotiations with the editors
of two other collections of Civil War letters, she feels that we can not
consider your manuscript. I hope that this month’s delay has not
inconvenienced you, and I wish you the best of luck in finding the proper
publisher for your manuscript.” He typed them double-spaced, as he
felt that manuscripts should be, and edited them somewhat, smoothing out some of
the grammar and deleting phrases and sections which he considered unnecessary or
not suitable for publication, such as Thomas Lucas’s reflections on religion and
how much he missed his home and family (see page for a sample of the
editing).
In spite of his efforts, however,
ultimately no publisher or journal even considered publishing anything from the
letters. He wrote to his cousin Kate Kirkhuff on June 29, 1961, “Either
the periodicals are finding little interest in the Centennial commemoration ...
or else a great deal of material has been brought to light early. ... I’ve
given much thought to the matter of getting the letters or their substance in
the hands of the descendants and anyone else interested, but haven’t come up
with any solution.” He also wrote her, “I have had a feeling that I should
make duplicate copies of Grandfather’s letters in some way so that all of his
descendants might have them. It would be a time-consuming and expensive
project; maybe I will undertake it if I can make some money selling an article
about them to some periodical.”
Thomas Lucas Bayard
died a few years later, and for 30 years nothing was done about the
letters.
So where did all the Civil War letters,
copies of letters, and archival information end up?
And what about the
letters from after the Civil War -- the homesteading
days -- where did those come from?
We don’t know where the bulk of the original
Civil War letters are, and so we are extremely grateful that Lettie and Thomas
Bayard copied them for us to enjoy. Lettie Bayard or John Bayard’s wife
Lena may have given them to someone, or Thomas Bayard might never have returned
them. We also don’t know the whereabouts of the photographic album of
family members and Civil War comrades which Kate Rose Kirkhuff, daughter of Lucy
Lucas, said was given to her by Lettie Bayard in her letter of January 30th,
1961. Descendants of both Thomas Bayard and Kate Kirkhuff are not aware of
the location of the letters or album.
Apparently Thomas’s daughter Millie, or
Millie’s daughter Lettie, gave some of the Civil War letters away, because
descendants of other Thomas Lucas children have found among their family papers
some letters (or copies of letters) that were not among the letters that were
copied by Lettie and Thomas Bayard in 1960. They must have also given away
some of the homesteading letters. In a letter from Lettie Bayard dated
January 9, 1955 to Permelia Gregg Douthit, daughter of Thomas’s daughter Emma,
Lettie says, “I was looking through some old letters the other day and found the
letter that I am enclosing, thought you might enjoy reading them, we have such a
lot of them Grandpa’s letters written during the Civil war letters from his
father and sisters and from Grandpa, Aunt Emma, Aunt Lib and Aunt Annie
certainly give you a picture of what the family were like and what will be come
of them?”
Some of these letters that were given away
to Permelia Gregg Douthit and others might have found their way into this
collection. Two daughters of Permelia -- Helen Douthit Reutlinger and Joan
Douthit Wallick -- have found and submitted letters that were among their
mother’s things when she died. One of these is a letter written by
Permelia’s mother Emma, one is a letter from Thomas Lucas written New Year’s Eve
1861, and one is from James Gregg written from Stanton Hospital on November 10,
l863 -- they each made delightful additions to the
collection.
However there may be other letters
missing from this collection. For example a letter was probably written in
June 1863 explaining how Thomas was wounded because he refers to the wound in
subsequent letters, but we have no letter describing the event. We are
very grateful to each of those descendants who found and shared letters that
were passed on in their family -- perhaps more will show up that can be added if
there is a second edition to this book.
As for the
letters written after the Civil War, Thomas Bayard evidently kept those that
hadn’t already been given away. He also kept his second typewritten copy
of the Civil War letters (the one that he prepared for the publishers). He
saved the letters and documents that he had accumulated from his search for
information and his attempts at publication, and a tintype of a group photo of
several of Thomas Lucas’s Company F comrades (page ). After he died, these
were passed on to two of his sons, John and Richard. Several dozen
original Civil War letters as well as the first typewritten copies of the
letters were kept by Lettie Bayard. After she and her brother John died,
John’s wife Lena Darby Bayard gave these letters and copies to descendants of
Millie’s sister Elizabeth, and they are now with Elizabeth’s grandchildren Max
Knestrick, Joanne Moninger Piatt, and Kathy Moninger Ford. Lena sold the
farm soon afterward and later went into a nursing
home.
In 1960, my grandpa Thomas Lucas Bayard stayed
with us a few days on his way home to California after working with Lettie on
the letters in Rice’s Landing. I was 14, and can vaguely remember him
showing me some of the letters, but I took little interest in them. Twenty
five years later, Grandpa’s papers sat in a box in his son Richard’s
garage. No one even knew that the thick stack of old letters in the back
of his son John’s cupboard drawer were written after Thomas Lucas and his family
had moved west (these “cupboard-drawer letters” are the bulk of the collection
in Section II: “From Home Town to Homestead”). Grandpa had of course known
his cousins (grandchildren of Thomas Lucas) and their families, but my
generation didn’t even know they existed and knew nothing about Thomas
Lucas.
However when the descendants of my
grandparents (Thomas Lucas Bayard and Mary Frank) began to have family reunions
in 1989, their son Richard shared stories about the family history. He
told us we had a great-great grandfather who had served in the Civil War and who
wrote letters about it. This piqued our curiosity, and I finally read
Grandpa’s typewritten (edited) copies of those letters in 1994. I was
enthralled, and decided to help achieve my grandfather’s dream of getting copies
to Lucas’s descendants.
My efforts led me to read
about the Civil War, investigate records in the U.S. National Archives, and meet
many wonderful people who are fellow descendants and relatives, historians,
aficionados, and librarians. Information from these sources, as well as
the information that my grandfather Thomas Bayard had gathered, helped provide a
rich chronicle of Thomas Lucas, his family, and his
comrades.
For our 1997 reunion of the Mary Frank and
Thomas Lucas Bayard family, I organized a tour of some of the sites where Thomas
Lucas was during the Civil War. Among more than 50 family members who
attended, we had about two dozen descendants from Millie, several descendants
from Elizabeth, and several from Thomas’s youngest son Thomas Martin Lucas,
including two of Thomas Lucas’s grandchildren Betty Lucas Osborn and Thomas
Lucas. Our guides, who filled in the historical information, were the late
James Moyer, tour guide and co-author of a series of books about John Mosby, and
Frank S. Walker, Jr., President of Tourguide, Inc., both from Virginia.
Several homeowners graciously allowed us to visit the houses where Thomas Lucas
stayed (houses which he calls the Jackson house and Dr. Slaughter’s
house), and we visited battlefields, Madison Mills where he and his cousin
dumped the flour while the enemy watched, and the site near where Mosby’s men
attacked and captured his brother Jonas. I produced a videotape of that
tour which is available to those who are interested.
In preparation for this tour, I printed enough copies of the Civil War letters
for people to read. When my aunt and uncle Shirley and John Bayard
realized that the Civil War letters themselves were missing, they thought that
the 3-inch stack of old letters in the back of their cupboard drawer might be
them. When they brought them to the reunion, we were bitterly disappointed
to discover that they were written 20-30 years after the war, and I put them
aside. Later, after reading a few of them, I realized we had an even more
valuable treasure -- letters written by the family after they moved west.
These "cupboard drawer" letters are now included in this collection (Section
II).
My voyage on this adventure of working on the
letters and planning the tour has been replete with serendipitous help and
connections to such a degree that I sometimes wonder if I am being guided by
unseen persons. The stories behind these incidents and resources and how I
found them would fill another book, and I despair of doing sufficient justice to
the many people who have lovingly and enthusiastically provided help and
information. I have tried to give credit in this book where appropriate
but many people are not named, from the helpful librarian in the Virginia
reading room and the desk assistant in the Virginia land records office, both of
whom put me in contact with valuable resources, to the delightful “resident
historian” of Old Georgetown Pike Road at whose home I randomly stopped in
search of the “Jackson House” and the gracious homeowners who allowed us to
visit the sites where Thomas Lucas was during the war. To each person who
helped me along the way, I thank you warmly.
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