“A pretty place to pass my Wedding-day!”

On this date in 1863, Theodore Lyman wrote a letter home to his wife, Elizabeth, from his camp with the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac. U.S. and Confederate forces had clashed the day before, November 27, on a line that stretched from New Hope Church to the south, past Robinson’s Tavern in the center, north to the farmstead of William Harrison Payne, and overnight, the Confederates had slipped away. The Army of the Potomac started November 28 with a cautious advance westward to find out where the Confederates had gone.

The campaign had started on the morning of November 26. “Thanksgiving day,” Lyman noted in his journal, “when the fat turkey is served in state. And this was appointed for our flank move on Orange Court House. . . . It was quite cold and the water froze in the tent.”

While the holiday no-doubt triggered thoughts of home, hearth, and happiness, Lyman had particular reason to cast his thoughts toward his wife on November 28. “A pretty place to pass my Wedding-day!” he wrote. “Twelve months ago we were in Paris, and enjoying the quiets of the Hotel Wagram. And this morning, behold me, with little Wife hundreds of miles away and a cheery prospect of mud and intermittent rain!”

Lyman and “Mimi,” as he called her, had married in 1858. In 1861, just two weeks before war broke out in Charleston harbor, the couple departed for a long-planned tour of Europe. From afar, Lyman watched news of the developing conflict, first certain it would be all over before he could return; later—after word continued to arrive that other young sons of prominent Boston families like himself were going off to war—he fretting that he was missing out on his duty. Mimi’s brother, Henry Sturgis Russell, and cousin, Robert Gould Shaw, were among those who had already signed up.

On the European trip, Mimi became pregnant. Their daughter, Cora, was born March 9, 1862. The tour lasted another year, but in late May 1863, they finally arrived home.

Lyman found waiting for him a letter written by an old friend, George Gordon Meade, written in the aftermath of the December 1862 battle of Fredericksburg. The two had met in 1856 while Lyman was on a scientific trip along the southern coast and Meade—then just a lieutenant—was on duty building lighthouses. The young lieutenant had, by the time of Fredericksburg, become a well-respected division commander in the Army of the Potomac. And by the time Lyman read the letter, Meade was days away from becoming the commanding general of the army.

Lyman made the decision to join his friend as a volunteer aide—a role that allowed him to be of personal service to a friend while also assuaging his conscience about serving in the war. “I beg that you will let Mrs. Lyman understand that this is all your doing,” Meade wrote to Lyman after accepting his friend’s offer, “and that she must not hold me responsible for anything beyond not throwing obstacles in your way, which is view of your very agreeable company, she could hardly expect me to do.”

Lyman arrived with the Army of the Potomac on September 3, 1863, during a time of relative quiet for the army. Meade and Lee, staring at each other across the northern Virginia terrain, were trying to decide their next moves while anticipating their opponent’s. Skirmish line flare-ups and small cavalry clashes kept this armies in constant contact as each commander sought intelligence on the enemy’s position. Things picked up in earnest in early October as Lee tried to outflank Meade, who flushed from his position and eventually moved toward strong defenses near Centreville, Virginia. Fights at Bristoe Station, Catlett’s Station, Rappahannock Station, Kelly’s Ford, and elsewhere along the axis of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad bespoke of the ongoing grapple.

The campaign finally culminated along Mine Run. As Lyman wrote to Mimi, U.S. soldiers discovered strong Confederate fortifications on the west side of the stream. The armies would take three more days to sort things out; by then, Federals would be back on the north back of the Rapidan River, safe but no closer to defeating Lee.

Such was the life Lyman had chosen for himself—his doing, as Meade had said. Lyman had answered his own heart’s call to serve, leaving behind his wife and infant daughter to serve a man he called “Old Peppery” and an army fighting to preserve his country. It might not have been Lyman’s preferred way to spend his anniversary, but I have no doubt, he was satisfied by his choice.

In these days after Thanksgiving, early in the Christmas season, let us not forget those men and women today who have likewise volunteered to answer the call, who are away serving our country that we might be able to enjoy time with our own loved ones.

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Lyman is a fascinating guy. You can read his journal for yourself: Meade’s Army: The Private Notebooks of Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman, edited by David W. Lowe (Kent State University Press, 2007).