?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(CIVIL WAR.) Mansfield, Joseph K.F. Autograph Letter Signed to John A.B. Dahlgren. 3 pages, 8 x 5 inches, on one sheet. Camp Hamilton, Fort Monroe, VA, 27 October 1861
Joseph K.F. Mansfield (1803-1862) was a career army officer then serving as a Brigadier General in McClellan's hapless Army of the Potomac. He detailed his strategy for winning the war in this significant letter to the commander of the U.S. Navy Yard: "It is my opinion that a strong movement should be made now to carry all those batteries in the Potomac, by a large landed force marching down the river in concert with the Navy. . . . I don't like this plan of scattering forces. We must whip them, & if we do it soundly in Virginia, it will do for the whole southern country." Writing six days after the disastrous Battle of Ball's Bluff, Mansfield also wrote "They have made a bad business of that affair of Edwards Ferry. The defeat was the result of a badly planned operation. We must not have any more such bad work." The next year, Mansfield was killed at Antietam. A short-lived major league baseball team, the Middletown Mansfields, was later named in his honor.
