If I Do Not Return

On 14 July 1861, from Camp Clark in Washington, Major Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island wrote home to Sarah in Smithfield. He was thirty-two, a lawyer, a husband, a father of two small boys. The army was about to move. First Bull Run, the first large battle of the American Civil War, was a week away. He knew enough to write as if the letter might outlive him.

The text Americans now know is a marital cry and a patriotic one braided together: love like cables, country like a wind toward the field. It is famous because it is eloquent. Eloquence is not a witness that the coming battle would have any of the order of a sentence. On 21 July the Union army broke. Ballou was terribly wounded. He died on 29 July. The body that was later recovered had been treated as war treats bodies. There is no pretty version of this. A letter cannot make a rout into a hymn.

The original sheet is lost. The Rhode Island Historical Society holds manuscript copies that are not in Ballou's hand. His other surviving letters do not all sound like the famous one. Scholars have argued that the text was polished, perhaps recast, in nineteenth-century publication and commemoration. Ken Burns's 1990 documentary made the polished cadence immortal for a new century. Immortality is not authenticity. The marriage was real. The death was real. The exact words may be a collaboration between a husband and the culture that needed a last letter.

Sarah lived almost fifty years as a widow. That duration is also the story. Wartime love letters are often read as if they end at the battle. They do not. They end in kitchens, in pensions, in the long ordinary of being the person who was addressed.