Autograph letter signed by Ira E. Morse, Co. D, 3rd Vermont Infantry. Camp near Hagerstown, Maryland, 13 October 1862. 4 pages, 8vo. 

After suffering from "diarrhea for two months," he writes to his brother and sister with details of the Battle of Antietam: "The Battle of Sharpsburg was an awful slaughter. Our Brigade lay on their bellies 36 hours under a raking fire of the enemy. John Stanton was shot through the heart. He was all the one that was hurt in our company. Every house & old barn and shed was full of wounded. The fields was full of dead. We passed across the battlefield en route for this place three days after the fight. It stank awfully then. The dead was not all buried. They burnt a lot of them." 

Ira E. Moses enlisted on 1 May 1861 and was mustered into Company D of the 3rd Vermont Infantry on June 16th. Before the Battle at Sharpsburg, he was shot at Lee's Mills, Virginia, in April. The 3rd Vermont was part of Brooks's Brigade and arrived at the Antietam battlefield the morning of the 17th. It was ordered to support Sedgwick's Division, Second Corps, on the Union right, but before getting into position was ordered instead to support French's Division. It formed in Mumma's Cornfield, not far from Bloody Lane, and was subjected to relentless fire from both Artillery and Sharpshooters. 

After suffering from chronic diarrhea, which Moses mentions here, he evidently fell out of the ranks while on the march near Boonsboro, Maryland. He was found by local civilian Cornelius Wertz who tended him until he died. 

A good Antietam letter from a soldier who met a tragic fate. 

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