Beschreibung:

John B. Foster letters, 1904-1911. 15th Mississippi Infantry, Co. E, 23 letters, 16 illustrated postcards After four years of hard service in the 15th Mississippi Infantry, John B. Foster returned south to resume a career in medicine, building a practice that specialized in curing addiction to morphine, laudanum, and opium. In this rich and chatty series of letters -- many humorously illustrated -- written to a young friend in NC, Bonnie Eloise Manney, Foster describes his experiences while attending Confederate reunions forty and more years after the end of the Civil War. The hard times he had experienced during the war, including being taken prisoner and surviving Perryville, Fishing Creek, Shiloh, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, and Franklin, led to tight bonds with his comrades that lasted the decades. The Foster collection includes only seven letters, however these are unusually long and descriptive, written while attending a reunion near Meridian, Miss., in October 1904. In a folksy, rambling way, Foster tells his young correspondent about how his fellow veterans had fared since the war: Dr. J.B. Ritchey of McMinnville, Tenn. -- he is 72 years of age -- writes of our days at College together. Dr. R. wrought (I say worked) in a black-smith shop for money to pay for board and tuition at college and was over 25 when he graduated. At the end of the great war he didn’t have a cent -- now he has three (3) fine farms, a fine drugstore, is a partner in a great produce business and is a prominent insurance man and a bank director, etc. etc. I suppose he is worth away yonder over one hundred thousand dollars -- and he gives and always has given on tenth (1/10) of his profits to the Lord.... The third letter was from the best friend I have or ever had -- the tears dim my eyes as I write -- it was from old Abe Cook of Fountain Inn S.C. R.F.D. No. 2. We were in the same company during the great war. Our respective pocket books were common property, i.e. if one bought anything while the other was asleep and needed money he went to the others clothes and helped himself if the other had it... Some of the stories are less rosy. During the reunion, a man presented Foster with a badge from a previous reunion that had been lost by a comrade in the 15th Miss., John McKinzie, and asked Foster to return it. When the badge was lost at New Orleans, Foster remembers, McKinzie was drunk. He goes to all the Reunions and gets drunk every time. He has been sheriff of Cornwall Co. -- and also of Montgomery Co. since the great war -- and has been a member of the Mississippi Legislature. Poor man, he is a sot now. He has I think two beautiful and highly accomplished daughters and their property, much of it, is so fixed that their father can’t go through with it. I like him, but shun him. On Thursday I saw the poor man, drunk and lying on his face in one of Nashville’s beautifully green yards. I climbed the brick fence to look at his face -- to make certain... Much more. Foster’s letters also include reminiscences of the war: The 15th was actually the 5th Regiment to go out as the state of Mississippi reserved the ten (10) numbers for state troops when needed... The 15th was as Fishing Creek -- we lost killed and wounded 236 men there and 234 at Shiloh and 860 killed in the war! Killed on the Battlefield!!! Among his stories is a rambling, humorous one in which Foster begins by recounting the time he pilfered a hot half-moon pie in Jackson, Miss., stuffing it down his shirt, and getting burned in the process. But the payoff for the story came after the war when he returned to Jackson and encountered the woman who had run the hotel where the pie was pilfered: “’The Confederates used to ‘lift’ your goods occasionally, didn’t they,’ said I. “‘Yes, said she, and I wish they had gotten more of them for when the Yankees came they took the last blessed thing we owned.’ “Do you remember that a Confederate lifted a hot pie from your store one day? “S