December 15, 2020 Edged Weapons, Armor & Militaria
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 12/15/2020
An interesting archive of eight wartime letters and nine covers relating to the Civil War service of Albert F. Matlack (1845-1915) of the 43rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry (OVI), covering its distinguished service in the Tennessee and Georgia campaigns, 1863-1864. Matlack enlisted for three years of Federal service on 12 December 1861 as a private in Company G of the 43rd OVI. The regiment had a hard-fighting record as part of Fuller's Ohio Brigade in the Missouri and Tennessee campaigns of 1862, especially during the battles of Corinth. Discharged in December 1863, Matlack reenlisted (again in Company G), along with most surviving original members of the regiment, serving with it until mustered out of service with the rank of corporal at Louisville, Kentucky on 13 July 1865. After the war, Matlack spent "25 years in the railway mail service between Pittsburg and Cincinnati" per his obituary, dying in his home town of Steubenville on 19 April 1912. The eight letters were all written by Matlack and relate to the 43rd’s activities during Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign and subsequent “March to the Sea” in 1864, the first dated May 20th at Kingston, Georgia and the last at November 8th near Marietta. The recipients all resided in his hometown of Unionport in Jefferson County, namely his mother, younger brother Almeran and a former tentmate, Clark D. Beebout (discharged from Company G on 17 July 1862) and his wife Mary Martin. They provide many interesting details of the regiment's engagements and service, as well as more mundane but colorful aspects of military life. Following the battle of Resaca, he downplays the regiment’s hard fighting in that action in a May 20th letter to his mother, but requests socks, and a calico shirt, as “there is no telling when we will stop and draw clothing again my red Flannel Shirt wasent [sic] of mutch [sic] account [as] It Shrunk up and was to[o] little for me.” He warns her that he gave a “Revolver to Lt. Thompson to take home for me if you get it don’t let Almeran take it apart as he will spoil it” and that she should “get somebody to shoot the loads out…[that] were in it when I got it.” The following day, he confessed to C. D. Beebout in another letter that “our regt. only lost 22 men killed and wounded i don’t see how we got off as well as we did [as] the 35th New Jersey a Zouave regt in our Brigade lost 25 men.” With the exception of one cover addressed to Albert Matlack at Cincinnati from Steubenville, Ohio before the regiment's departure to the front, all other covers are for letters written by him and bear cancellation stamps in Tennessee and Georgia during 1863-1864.
Item Dimensions: 10" x 10"