RICHMOND, VA., June 15, 1862.
Dear Mother:
I hope you are not uneasy about me because I have not written before. I knew if I wrote it would take a week for you to get it, so I put it off till I could send it by Mr. Albert Farmer, who will go tomorrow. The Surgeon of the hospital has given me a passport to stay wherever I please in the city and report to him every week. I believe I should go crazy if I had to stay out in the hospital where everything is so dull and disheartening. In fact I don’t believe I am the same being I was two weeks ago, at least I don’t think as I used to and things don’t seem as they did. I don’t believe I will ever get over the death of George. The more I think of him the more it affects me, and unless I am in some battle and excitement I am eternally thinking of the last moments of his life. How he must have suffered, if he was conscious of it. I shall never forget it. I think a long letter from some of you would make me feel so much better. I shall send by Mr. Farmer my watch, sleeve buttons, also the shirt I wore off. Everything I ought to have left at home I brought away and a great many things I ought to have brought I left behind. I only brought one flannel shirt, and by the way I’ll send this one back and try this summer without them, as they are very heavy for summer wear. The war news you read every day in the papers, but Capt. Billy Brown came down from Gordonville with some of Jackson’s prisoners. He says he was in Lynchburg. Twenty-two hundred were sent in and that thirteen hundred were on the way.
The Yankees that are near Richmond, we don’t hear anything of, everything is quiet. Please some of you write me soon.
Your loving son,
WALTER.
Letters from two brothers who served in the 4th North Carolina Infantry during the Civil War are available in a number of sources online. Unfortunately, the brothers are misidentified in some places as Walter Lee and George Lee when their names were actually Walter Battle and George Battle. See The Battle Brothers for more information on the misidentification.