Letters to the Home Circle: The North Carolina Service of Pvt. Henry A. Clapp, Company F, Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, 1862-1863.

Letters to the Home Circle: The North Carolina Service of Pvt. Henry A. Clapp, Company F, Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, 1862-1863. Edited by John R. Barden. (Raleigh: Division of Archives and History, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, c. 1998 Pp. xlii, 252. Paper, $28.00 plus $3.00 postage, ISBN 0-86526-270-5. Order from the press at 109 East Jones Street, Raleigh, NC 27601-2807.)

Henry Austin Clapp was a Harvard graduate who served in a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in eastern North Carolina from October 1862 to June 1863. Over the course of his stay he wrote forty-four letters to his extended family, a group he referred to as the "home circle." His mother kept these letters in a bound journal, which was subsequently stored at Tryon Palace Historic Site in New Bern, N.C., where historian John R. Barden worked and became acquainted with them. He has since edited this volume of Clapp's accounts of his brief Civil War career.

Clapp was not a distinguished soldier. The reader looking for grand narratives of battles will be sorely disappointed. In one of his company's skirmishes with Confederates, for example, Clapp ingloriously lost his rifle. Although Clapp may not be the best source for his military heroism, his letters cover a wide range of topics, including fellow soldiers, the sights and atmosphere of wartime eastern North Carolina, and even a few passing comments concerning the demise of slavery. Perhaps the most significant items of this volume are Clapp's detailed notes, on enumerating a census of former slaves in the region.

On the whole, besides some beautifully written passages, Clapp's letters leave something to be desired. He spent a great deal of time discussing food and a host of trivial issues that obviously had more relevance to his family than to future historians. While the letters themselves may not be as noteworthy as those of Robert Gould Shaw's of the 54th Masachusetts, the greatest asset of this collection is the thoroughness with which John R. Barden researched every aspect of Clapp's descriptions. Barden provides meticulous notes concerning every soldier or battle Clapp mentions in passing, as well as the lives of Clapp's Massachusetts neighbors, the cultural habits of the former slaves, or the "secesh" residents of eastern North Carolina.

"These terrible times have come in our generation," Clapp wrote to his brother and added, "how little either of us thought when we were small boys and read of the revolution, that we should live to see battles, in comparison to Bunker's Hill and Yorktown would seem skirmishes (p. 206)." Although Clapp did not witness Gettysburg or the fall of Richmond, this volume of remembrances from a rather nondescript volunteer was produced with considerable skill by an editor with an eye for detail. While not of the caliber that will have a great bearing on Civil War scholarship, Clapp's letters are engaging on a certain level, and the notes are useful in providing a wealth of background information.

TRACY CAMPBELL

University of Kentucky