Mar 21, 2024 - Sale 2663

Sale 2663 - Lot 301

Price Realized: $ 1,125
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(MILITARY--CIVIL WAR.) A Confederate soldier's regiment faces Birney's Colored Brigade at the Second Battle of Deep Bottom. Autograph Letter Signed from William J. Kirkland to his wife in University Station, NC. 2 pages, 8½ x 6¾ inches; mailing folds, minimal wear. With original envelope bearing a 10-cent Jefferson Davis stamp and Hillsboro, NC postmark. Brizzell Hill, VA, 19 August 1864
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"So many dead men and things piled up together . . . Negroes lying dead on a white man."

A North Carolina soldier wrote three days after the Second Battle of Deep Bottom: "Had one of the hardest sort of fights on the 16th. Our line was driven from the works at first, but our men ralied and took them again. . . . Our men killed a great many Yankies and Negroes to. They had one brigade of Negroes in our front, so we had them to fight. They left a great deal of plunder at our works when they fell back. Our men got any amount of knapsacks, blanket, oil cloths, &c, in fact every man has got as much or more than he can carry. You never saw the like in your life to see so many dead men and things piled up together, to see Negroes lying dead on a white man. I was in hope that we would not have the Negroes to fight, but we will have it to do."

The letter's author served in the 33rd North Carolina Infantry, which was among the small Confederate Army that successfully blocked a Union advance toward Richmond that day; it was also known as the Battle of Fussell's Mill. Among the regiments in William Birney's Colored Brigade were the 7th, 8th, and 9th United States Colored Troops, and also the 29th Connecticut Colored Infantry, which would be the first Union infantry regiment to enter Richmond a few months later.