"I AM TO BE SHOT AT TEN O'CLOCK TODAY" (CIVIL WAR--CONFEDERATE.) Brownlee, Charles. Letter written by a Missouri bushwhacker on the morning of his execution. Autograph Letter Signed to his mother. 4 pages on 2 sheets, 7 3/4 x 5 inches; minimal wear, "enemies" inked in a later hand in upper margin. With typed transcript. Springfield, MO, 10 May 1865
Charles Brownlee (circa 1838-1865), an attorney from Moniteau County in central Missouri, served in the Confederate cavalry as an aide in General J.O. Shelby's Iron Brigade. During a long and destructive 1863 raid through Missouri, Brownlee was captured and charged with murder and robbery as a "bushwhacker" guerrilla. Sentenced to death by a military commission in Boonville, he escaped before his execution and rejoined the Iron Brigade, reaching the rank of lieutenant. At the war's end, while making his way home to Moniteau County in May 1865, he was apprehended and brought to Springfield, where he was executed under the 1863 charges (see Wood, Civil War Springfield; Arthur, General Jo Shelby's March, page 163). The execution was controversial at the time, as it seemed to violate the amnesty granted to surrendered Confederate troops. This poignant and articulate letter was written on Brownlee's last day: "Dear Mother, I am yet liveing and well, but ere the sun will have reached its midday throne my spirit will have gone to God who gave it. I am to be shot at ten o'clock today, according, as I am told, to the sentence of a commission which tried me at Boonville in 1863, but I do not fear to die. I have faced a thousand of the enemy's muskets and have escaped unhurt, but the few I must shortly meet will end my life and troubles. I hope you will not grieve to much over my sad fate, for in a few years at most we will meet again. . . . I have done nothing for which you need ever be ashamed. Those principals of honor which it was ever your care to instill into my bosom I have always cherished and practised but the close of this revolution has drawn me into its vortex and I must perish. . . . Good by to you all, Charles Brownlee." The letter is consigned from a private collection. It has been cited in Guerrilla Warfare in Civil War Missouri, page 403, but has not to our knowledge been published.
