A young Civil War soldier gazes back at me from a carte-de-visite, a playing card-sized photograph I recently purchased. He has a steely look, and his right hand grasps the lapel of his military dress coat. His left hand, in his lap, wears a ring. A small fur cap, a winter luxury, sits atop his head. I don’t know who he is. He’s unidentified. And when I look at him, I wonder if he posed for the photograph to let someone special back home know the fur cap had arrived in camp. If so, they never got the message. Because this photograph, like thousands of others, bears the characteristic marks—an identifying number written in red ink and the traces of brass mounting clips—of having ended up in the Dead Letter Office.
During the Civil War years, hundreds of thousands of young men left home for the front lines, traveling out of their state or hometown for the first time in their lives. Unaccustomed to the separation and the sometimes-stifling loneliness of war, they wrote home. But many were poorly educated or had never even addressed a letter, and the recipient’s name and address on the envelopes were undecipherable. Sweeping changes to recent postage
