Some thirty years ago, I wrote an op-ed piece on Memorial Day about one Alvah Kirk, a Civil War soldier whose letters I had discovered. He remains for me a personal touchstone, not just when we honor our dead: a link to history, if only to a single forgotten particle of history’s dust. I also wrote a longer essay on Kirk that appeared in the journal New York History. Here is a condensed version of the story.
Around 1990, while at an outdoor antique show in a Connecticut meadow, I came across a dirty plastic packet labeled “Civil War letters.” I wavered, but my wife, knowing of my interest in the Civil War, insisted that I buy it. Those letters told a story tinged with pathos, mystery, tragedy, and a bottle of brandy.
The sixteen letters in the packet were from Kirk, a farm laborer from Putnam County in New York’s Hudson Valley, to his wife Mariah in Poughkeepsie, during the Virginia campaigns of 1863 and ’64. The letters are strange, enigmatic, and bleak: banal on the surface, yet intriguing in their reticence and often mystifying. Factually, they reveal little except that their author was poor, troubled, and probably illiterate, since the letters are in several hands.
Stock phrases recur; even the expressions of tenderness seem rote. There are signs of marital discord, homesickness, and the strain of battle. ‘You must keep up good courage,” Alvah tells Mariah repeatedly. “You must be father and mother to the children” – a boy named Tommy, and a girl who is never named. Should he not return, he says, “I’m in hopes I shall see you in heaven.”
A year later, he writes: “I think a little more of you if you would write oftener if you don’t write I will look for another woman and see if she will think more of me than you do… from your affectionate husband Alvy Kirk.”
Kirk had good reason to harbor morbid thoughts. He was a private in Company K of the 95thRegiment, New York Volunteer Infantry. Made up of men from the Lower Hudson Valley, the 95th was in the thick of the fighting in the Eastern theater: Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor. Alvah Kirk’s life, like that of his comrades, must have been a nightmare of hardship, confusion, and fear.
Through archival and genealogical sources, I was able to piece together some additional facts. During the brief span from 1859 to 1862, Kirk lost his first wife and a small daughter -- the causes of death unknown. He had married Mariah Fitzpatrick under hasty and undocumented circumstances; fathered two children by her, named George and Annie, and gone away to war. (Tommy, it seems, was Mariah’s son by a previous marriage.)
A younger brother of Alvah’s, William Kirk, also served in the 95th, and was wounded at Gettysburg. For a few months in 1862, Alvah went AWOL, probably to go home for the summer. Like many soldiers who returned voluntarily, he wasn’t disciplined.
In early May 1864, the 95th New York was engaged at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in Virginia – fierce battles a week apart that initiated the final phase of the war, in which Grant, unable to outmaneuver Lee, elected to beat him by attrition. Alvah Kirk was wounded twice that week. Military records indicate that he was shot in both legs and one was amputated. A few weeks later he died in a Washington hospital; the Army listed the cause of his death as “exhaustion.”
It’s not impossible that, as Kirk lay dying in Washington, a gentle poet came to his bedside to soothe him. Walt Whitman did that for many dying soldiers.
The government he died for, however, couldn’t even get his name right. It is variously listed in records as Alva, Alfred, Alvin, Abbah, and Oliver. But the military files at the National Archives do record his personal effects: dog tags, one pocket book, one comb, and “cash .05 cents.”
He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, the supreme national shrine to America’s war dead, which by 1865 was so swollen with graves that it spilled over onto the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s estate.
When I showed Kirk’s letters to a journalist in Poughkeepsie, he wrote a column about them, and on the same day, got a call from a woman claiming to be Kirk’s descendant. Furthermore, she and her cousin had additional letters from him.
The woman mentioned a letter in which Alvah asks Mariah to have a bottle of brandy waiting for him on his return from the war. When I heard this, it rang a bell – and I ran a search for the word “brandy” among the letters in my computer, which immediately turned up a letter containing an identical request.
It turned out that the two elderly cousins were great-granddaughters of Alvah Kirk, and shared a house that had once belonged to their grandmother Annie Kirk, just a few blocks from where Alvah and Mariah had lived in Poughkeepsie before he left for the war.
I met the two women a few days later. They had six Kirk letters and a few fragments, in an envelope that had lain for decades in their Aunt Mabel’s cupboard.
These newfound letters only cast further shadows on my elusive subject. In one of them, for example, Kirk mentions a daughter named Josephine, and asks Mariah where she is living and whether she has seen her. As far as census and legal documents are concerned, Josephine never existed.
Another surprise was that the cousins eventually told me they had a painting of Alvah Kirk. It’s a pastel portrait, seemingly based on a period photograph. As confounding as everything else, it seems to depict a more distinguished and self-possessed man than the author of the letters.
Americans have re-examined the Civil War in recent decades through a number of fine lenses, including the PBS series by Ken Burns; several films, and a continuing stream of books. (By my estimate, since the surrender at Appomattox a book on the Civil War has been published about once every eighteen hours.)
Alvah Kirk’s sad, crude letters provide an important counterpoint. They attest to the war’s impact on one ordinary forgotten soldier – and a million like him; to the importance of family history in American life; and to the singular power of the written word, even in the unlikeliest circumstances, to echo down the years. Kirk’s unpolished words are a fragile bridge across time. They speak for all our unremembered dead.
Why Alvah Kirk? Because I was commissioned by fate to be the custodian of his small legacy, and to resurrect what little I could of him. Why the Civil War? Perhaps because that bloody struggle over raxce, rights, and the nature of the Union , the defining event of our past, doesn’t just haunt the nation’s conscience each Memorial Day. It is our conscience.