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To Order Keep Up Good Courage

Alan Houston tells the story of an ordinary man who, with half of his small New Hampshire town, volunteers to fight in an extraordinary conflict. The author deftly uses correspondence and diaries—written in quintessential Yankee prose—to transport the reader over 140 years back in time to experience this most important of American wars from the inside out.

—William P. Veillette, Executive Director, New Hampshire Historical Society

 

The letters in this book tell the unvarnished story of the Civil War from both home and camp, without the distortions of postwar revision. Seldom are such collections edited with such comprehensive research and insightful analysis.”

—William Marvel, author of Andersonville: The Last Depot and Mr. Lincoln Goes to War

 

American poet Walt Whitman wrote, “The real war will never get in the books.” Relating the everyday life of a common Union soldier, Corporal Smith has come close to writing such an elusive Civil War narrative—from his New Hampshire farm to training camp, battlefields, and occupation duty.

Superbly edited with illuminating commentary culled from wartime local newspapers and correspondence, this volume is graced with numerous photographs and artworks. Editor Houston, a stickler for accuracy, has retraced Smith's fifteen thousand miles of travel, four sea voyages, and service in six Confederate states. Such painstaking dedication to Smith's experience has produced an outstanding Civil War book.

—Richard E. Winslow III, Author, “Constructing Munitions of War”: The Portsmouth Navy Yard Confronts the Confederacy, 1861-1865

 

 After a number of reverses for the Union in 1861, the government recognized that the war would be prolonged. Consequently, President Lincoln called for three hundred thousand volunteers on July 1, 1862. The farming community of Sandwich, New Hampshire, sent slightly more than half of its three hundred and forty eligible men off to serve in the Civil War. Of these, eighty-five enlisted for three years in mid-August 1862, following the president’s July summons. The men from Sandwich, one of whom was thirty-year-old Lewis Quimby Smith, formed most of Company K of the Fourteenth Regiment of New Hampshire Volunteers. Lewis and his family corresponded dutifully and many of these letters survived.

    The Sandwich Historical Society’s collection of Smith family letters, totaling over one-hundred and twenty-five, is unusual in that letters from Lewis are about equaled by the letters from family members back home. Thus, from the soldier’s side, it is a record of his and his regiment’s experiences along the Potomac River, in Washington, in New Orleans and on the lower Mississippi, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and, until war’s end, in Savannah, Georgia. In Lewis’s absence, his family experienced illness and epidemics, vagaries of weather and money, and sharply contested politics at the town, state, and national levels. For the folks at home, the challenges often equaled -Lewis’s.

The catalyst for this project came with the discovery of Lewis’s 1864 pocket diary. His entries include the battles of Third Winchester, Fisher’s Hill, and Cedar Creek in the fall Shenandoah Valley campaign. In addition to the diary and the Smiths’ correspondence, an equal number of letters and a handful of other diaries from other writers in the regiment contribute to the record. Thus, Keep Up Good Courage, A Yankee Family and the Civil War, is the history of a soldier, his company and regiment, and his family, town, and state. It is a record not from the staff tent or the officer’s mess, but one from the ground up—three years as a soldier.

 

About the Author

    Alan Fraser Houston graduated from Amherst College and Boston University School of Medicine. He served in the United States Navy as a flight surgeon from 1970 to 1972. He and his family settled in Sandwich, New Hampshire, near the family homestead, where they lived for over two decades before moving to Durango, Colorado. Dr. Houston is the author of historical articles that have appeared in California History, the Pioneer (Journal of the Society of California Pioneers), Montana, the Magazine of Western History, and the “Excursions” of the Sandwich Historical Society.   For further information, visit the author’s website:  www.alanfraserhouston.com

 

 

Reproduction of any photographs on this site are prohibited without the consent of the Sandwich Historical Society.