"...There is a flag of truce up now. I don't know whether they are going to surrender or what it is for, I hope they are..."

Autograph letter signed by Samuel H. Hastings (1818-1863), Co. H, 53rd Massachusetts Infantry, to his wife, Dorinda Clifford (1820-1875). Port Hudson, Louisiana, 13 June 1863. 4 pages, 8 vo.

After organizing in the fall of 1862, the 53rd Massachusetts was assigned to an expedition in Louisiana, departing New York in late January. After a brief encampment, the regiment was sent by steamer to Baton Rouge on March 6 to join the force which was being assembled for operations against Port Hudson.

This siege was the final engagement in the Union campaign to regain control of the Mississippi River and lasted for 48 days, ranking among the longer sieges in American military history. By the time Hastings writes to his wife, his regiment was 22 days in, and already the uncertainty and the heat seem to be wearing on him: "We remain here yet...the cooking is the hardest part of the row now this hot weather. There is a flag of truce up now. I don't know whether they are going to surrender or what it is for, I hope they are."

After stopping for the day to cook rice, Hastings returns to his correspondence the next day, on June 14, "a day of sorrow," after an assault in which the 53rd was heavily engaged and bore a great number of wounded and killed soldiers. As Hastings describes, "probably hundreds have been killed ere this. The battle commenced at 3 this morn...Port Hudson must be ours before noon today."

He observes that most of the 53rd's battles have taken place on a Sunday, which strikes him as ironic: "I think there are days enough in the week besides Sunday to fight but most of ours come on that Day. Could I be where I could attend church today, I should rather than to hear the sound of the cannons & muskets & the whizzing of the bullets."

Again, after a pause for cooking -- beans, this time, which he "can't tell who will be left to eat them" -- Hastings resume the letter downtrodden, after another failed attempt at capturing the city: "We did no succeed as we thought we should but met with great loss...I wish this war was over."

In closing, he tells Dorinda that he expects to return home on furlough around the first of August "if spared." Even if he cannot go home immediately, he is eager to leave the brutal heat of Louisiana behind, writing, "It is so hot. It is worse for the men can't stand what they could in cold weather...I am as well as I expect to be while I stay in this climate."

Jjust five weeks after writing this letter, Hastings died of disease in Baton Rouge on July 21, leaving behind Dorinda and their daughter Lilla Maria (1853-1893). Hastings was among the 133 members of his regiment, nearly 18 percent of its entire enrollment, who succumbed to the deadly diseases that ran rampant in Louisiana, due to its oppressively hot climate and poor sanitation conditions.

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