“...without retiring or starving...”

WARTIME LETTER WRITTEN BY GENERAL NATHANIEL P. BANKS TO GENERAL MEIGS ON SUPPLIES 

Autograph letter signed by General Nathaniel Prentice Banks (1816–1894) to General Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (1816–1892), Quartermaster General of the Union Army. Woodstock, Virginia, 14 April [1862]. 5 pages, 7 3/4 x 5 in.

During the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of spring 1862, Union Major General Nathaniel P. Banks occupied Woodstock, Virginia, as part of his pursuit of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Written from Woodstock, this letter to Meigs discusses the availability of supplies and the difficulties Banks’s army had encountered in obtaining them: “What we most have wished for has been shoes, clothing and provisions that would support us in an advance of sixty miles - So far as the country will support us, we shall not call upon the government...we should be able to maintain our position without ‘retiring or starving.’”

During the war, Banks acquired the nickname “Commissary Banks,” or, more derisively, “Old Jack’s Commissary General,” because of the large quantity of supplies he lost to Stonewall Jackson during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign.

[Civil War, Union, Confederate] [Manuscripts, Documents, Letters, Ephemera, Signatures, Autographs]