This collection consists of 69 letters written by Francis G. Barnes to his wife, Frances M. Barnes, plus 2 manuscript documents that cover his entire career in the Army during the Civil War. Barnes was a native of Phoenix, Oswego County, New York. Barnes served in the 21st New York Independent Battery. The first letter, 21 November 1862, is from French's Hotel in New York City where Barnes receives the State Bounty of $50. By 12 December, he and the rest of the men who volunteered at the same time have been mustered in as an independent battery. By 15 December he is writing from the ship taking them to Fortress Monroe. Once there, he stays two extra weeks in the hospital attending his brother who has suffered an accident. By February 1863, he and his ship are in quarantine in the port of New Orleans because of an outbreak of smallpox. Once released into the city itself, their first duty was to guard a railroad 40 miles above New Orleans. His battalion was posted at Jefferson College (where Barnes pilfered books); their first battle was a skirmish preparing to assault Port Hudson, which they did in the wake of July's Vicksburg victory, under General Banks. Barnes was granted leave in the summer of 1863, and returned in late fall to Louisiana via Cairo, Illinois. In February 1864 he is mustered out of the 21st Battery to accept a commission as 2nd Lieutenant in the 8th Regiment Corps d'Afrique (which became the 80th Regiment US Colored Infantry.) In June 1863 he had written his wife that he thought preparing colored troops "a grand idea" and Lincoln should have done it sooner. Even in his previous battalion, he had been in charge of African-American laborers and admired their prowess. In April 1864 the regiment moved up to St. James Parrish, where they remained guarding river traffic until close to the end of the war, with occasional forays to a camp at Bonnet Carre. In April of 1865 they were ordered to Mobile, Alabama, and learned of Lincoln's assassination while at a desolate camp on the Tombigbee River. In July, the troops not mustered out were ordered to Galveston. There exist, of course, many collections of Civil War letters. What makes these desirable? First, their completeness, and Barnes' propensity to record his experiences in detail, and at length. Then, his war career, while not exciting militarily, placed him in the South, and with African-American troops - and his observations on both are valuable. A considerable bonus is the fact that a John Demos transcribed all the letters in the course of preparing an undergraduate thesis. Included with the gift of the letters is the transcription, and the appendices to the thesis - which include good essays on Barnes' religious beliefs, on his attitude towards African-Americans, and on his impressions of the South, as well as Demos' footnotes that trace Barnes' biography. Generally, Demos showed that Barnes was typical of an educated, rural-dwelling Northerner - carrying with him his prejudices. Even as he defends the worth of his soldiers, he decries their inability to handle money responsibly, to withstand the cold, to act on initiative. By January of 1865 he declares himself sick of living amongst his troops. The South he is both fascinated and repelled by. He treats it, always, as a foreign country, and the Secessionists themselves as little better than agents of the devil. Yet, despite his many vindictive harangues, he muses in his very last letter that he might like to move to the South after the war.
