January 1863—From John McClure, 14th Indiana

The 14th Indiana was the first Hoosier State regiment recruited to serve a three-year enlistment. Organized in the spring of 1861 near Terre Haute, the Gallant Fourteenth as it would be called later in the war first saw action in West Virginia, before marching some 450 miles in five weeks to begin its service to the Army of the Potomac’s Second Corps under the command of General Winfield Scott Hancock. The regiment saw action in all the major Eastern Theater battles and in 1885 the state of Indiana erected a limestone monument honoring the regiment on East Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg. One soldier who survived the war was John McClure, though he suffered sickness and woundings, he was a diligent chronicler of the Union’s war efforts. He wrote his sister, Mary Jane and his future wife, Frances Anne Purcell, often and with keen political perceptions. McClure volunteered for the 14th Indiana after being expelled from school for letting loose a hog that heavily damaged the school’s property. He soon grew bored with farming for his Uncle Arch and sought adventure in the Civil War. And adventure he found.

His granddaughter, Nancy Niblick Baxter, found the stash of his Civil War letters in an old chest in 1971 while preparing the old farm for sale. She published the letters entitled: Hoosier Farm Boy in Lincoln’s Army – The Civil War Letters of Pvt. John McClure of the 14th Indiana Regiment.

January 1863 – Fredericksburg, Virginia

Sis,

I do not know what you think of the war, but I will tell you what I think, and it is that the north will never whip the south as long as there is a man left in the south. They fight like wild devils. They fight like wild devils. Every man seems determined to lose the last drop of blood before they give up…. What kind of Christmas did you have? I expect you had a certain better one than I. I had fat pork and crackers for dinner and fat pork for supper. I am thinking if Old Abe makes his words true you folks will have an awful bad smell amongst you by the time we get home, and you get all the niggers on an equality with you. But I do not think old Abe and all the rest of his nigger lovers can free the slaves because the south has a little to say about that. Old Abe has got to whip the south first, and that is a thing that he will not do very soon.