To My Beloved Wife and Boy at Home

John Hartwell, a 31-year-old married house carpenter from Herkimer, New York, enlisted in the Union Army on 23 August 1862, over his wife's objections. For the next two and one-half years, Hartwell filled six diaries and one hundred one letters describing his journey through hell. In 1989, Professor Ann Hartwell Britton discovered Hartwell's hoard of letters and five of the diaries among family papers in Florida and Massachusetts. Britton and her law faculty colleague Thomas J.