Autograph letter signed by A.A. Thayer to his wife, Annie Thayer. Marion Hostpial, New Orleans, Louisiana, 9 August 1864. 4 pages, 8vo. With original envelope with red 3-cent stamp, and New Orleans cancel. 

Alfred A. Thayer of Mt. Vernon, Ohio, enlisted at 24 years old as a private on 13 August 1862 and mustered in a few days later into Company B of the 96th Ohio Infantry. The regiment spent its service in the Western Theater, participating in many pivotal engagements, including the Battles of Chickasaw Bayou, Port Gibson, two assaults during the Siege of Vicksburg, and the Red River Campaign. Thayer suffered from an unnamed illness throughout his enlistment, first hospitalized on 20 August 1863 in Memphis, and returned on the first of December. He was again hospitalized on 16 March 1864 in New Orleans, from where he writes this letter to his wife. He returned to the regiment in September of that year, seeing out the rest of the war and mustering out with the regiment on 7 July 1865 at Mobile, Alabama. 

Here, Thayer writes an engaging account of an accidental visit into a New Orleans brothel: “You need not be afraid of any the [Louisiana] women running off with me. There is some very good looking ones here but there is some streets here that you can’t go on but they will be calling you in. I was up the other day with one of the other nurses & we were going along & it came up & rained & we stop in & they asked us up to their rooms but we told them we couldn’t see it. The land lady told us if it rained all nite she could keep us & find girls to sleep with but we got out of there.” He continues with a description of the attire of the sex workers: “they go [dressed] in the day time with shirt & skirt but at nite [dressed] tiptop for at nite they run the streets. I never have been out only one nite since I been here there got in by 11…” 

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