June 16, 1863
This letter is from Mark to Roe, who is still in the hospital. It sounds like Roe is on the mend though Mark reminds him not to rush his recovery because if he falls sick again, he’ll have a much harder time getting well the second time around. The weather must have been pretty uncomfortable at the time as Mark mentions the heat a few different times throughout the letter. Indeed, on average Tennessee summers are hot and rainy. I found some data online about June weather in Nashville, TN. While Abbott is currently in Murfreesboro at the time of this letter, it’s reasonable to assume that the weather is pretty similar. In recent times, the daily temperatures fluctuate from 82 degrees Fahrenheit to 88 degrees. It is typically humid as well during this month, with humidity ranging from 47%-91%. Mark does say that they have been able to find some shade, though it apparently did not offer too much relief as he tells Roe, “as I write sitting here in the shade the sweat is just fairly running right out of me.” It is true that perhaps the weather averages have fluctuated a bit in the past 150 years but today’s averages still give a rough estimate of what weather was like during the Civil War. It would’ve been miserable to drill and fight in high temperatures and humidity. According to the Civil War Trust, a Union soldier’s uniform consisted of trousers, some sort of dress coat or jacket, a hat with a visor, a wool flannel shirt, underwear, and socks. Now, I don’t know about you, but I certainly would not want to wear flannel on a humid day. I’m sure that some of the soldiers took off layers as they went but that would mean one more thing for them to carry. Really, with the combination of the uniforms and weather, travel in June (and probably the summer months in general) surely was very uncomfortable. Works Cited: The Civil War Trust: Saving America’s Civil War Battlefields. “Two Week Curriculum for Teaching the Civil War, Bluebellies and Butternuts: Civil War Uniforms.” http://www.civilwar.org/education/pdfs/civil-war-curriculum-uniforms.pdf (accessed March 10, 2014). WeatherSpark. “Average Weather in June for Nashville, Tennessee, USA.” http://weatherspark.com/averages/29787/6/Nashville-Tennessee-United-States (accessed March 10, 2014).
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AuthorTessa Wakefield, student intern at the Concordia College Archives, assembled these blog entries in 2013-2014 for the Isaac Mark Abbott Civil War Letters Collection. The posts summarize the content of the letters, interpret Abbott's experiences and place them in the larger context of the Civil War. Archives
March 2014
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