A drummer boy is depicted writing and receiving letters from home in Thomas Nast’s "The Drummer Boy of Our Regiment," published in Harper’s Weekly, December 19, 1863. The Gilder Lehrman Collection

Letters Home
Long separations from home were hard on soldiers and on their families. Letters were the only form of communication, and the soldiers’ most tangible connection to the civilian lives they left behind. Mail from home could raise morale or, at the other extreme, instigate desertion.