Of Letters and Memories (Patricia Potter)

One of the most powerful letters I’ve ever read was one featured on Ken Burns’ Civil War series on PBS several years ago. If you do not remember, it starts, “Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love for country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.”
It finishes, “If the dead can come back to the earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by . . .”
The letter was written by Sullivan Ballou, who died a week later in the Battle of Gettysburg.

I was thinking about that incredibly moving letter today as I went through some boxes of letters, notes, news clippings, etc., that belonged to my Uncle Phil. Phillip Potter was a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun for many years and was regarded by the paper with the same awe as H. L. Mencken, according to the newspaper’s history.

He was a war correspondent during World War II and was present at the signing of the Japanese surrender. He was Washington correspondent during the MacCarthy hearings and was one of several credited with bringing him down. He wrote a devastating piece about Nixon which the then vice president blamed as one of the reasons he was defeated in 1960. He was asked to be press secretary for Lyndon Johnson but turned it down and instead covered those tumultuous years as chief Washington correspondent.

He died a decade or more ago, and his wife some months ago. My cousins, knowing my great interest in his career and in history, asked whether I would like his memorabilia. I didn’t have to think twice. Send them, I said.
Boxes arrive day by day. Boxes and more boxes. Every day brought new treasures. Then came two stuffed file cabinets. Uncle Phil apparently threw very little, if anything, away. There were clippings of stories he wrote, ranging from the MacCarthy hearings to the China/Indian war to World War II and great events through the sixties. Included in those boxes was personal correspondence with the great and near great during the forties and fifties and sixties.

I’d always revered him. He was the reason I went into journalism. I had always loved writing, but when I met him my interest went from fiction to reporting. At fifteen, I was visiting him and he took me up to the National Press Club where I met Art Buchwald. I decided then to be a reporter and at twenty became a reporter with The Atlanta Journal. In later years he introduced me to two presidents.

But I digress.

The point here -- I think -- is letters. Due to deadlines and my own mother’s illness, I’ve had only sporadic forays into this treasure but during those brief visits I found not only historical treasures but family treasures as well.
One box included a letter from a woman whose direct connection to me is still a mystery, but it’s there. She is a great, great, great, great aunt or grandmother. Haven’t figured out exactly which yet, but I think further exploration will tell me. Her life would had made a great historical romance. She was a nurse during the Civil War and after the war married a military surgeon. She was one of the first woman to attend medical school and became a doctor herself, then ended up in a gold mine camp in the Yukon.
The letter was written by her to a relative back home in Minnesota. Her description of life in the mining camps is pure magic, particularly about the part that everyone had difficulty sleeping. Since it was night twenty-four hours a day, no one knew what time it was, and visitors were was likely to knock on the door at 3 a.m. in the morning as five p.m. in the afternoon. Just a quick examination of some boxes tells me there are many more discoveries to be made, more intimate glimpses into legendary times.

The art of letter writing seems to be disappearing. There’s email, of course, but how many emails are kept and preserved? They disappear with the click of a button. And there’s something almost holy about reading a letter written a hundred years earlier in that person’s own hand rather than produced by an impersonal electronic device. They never quite convey the same emotion, the power of words.

People seem not to have the time today to sit down and pen a missive. I know I do not, and yet I am ever so grateful when someone take the time to actually write me a letter. Business people tell me that young people today are not taught pensmanship in school. It is assumed that that everyone will use computers. And I wonder if future generations will lose a wonderful legacy. Will people actually keep those emails wrapped carefully and tied by ribbons for future generations to see?

Note: If anyone is interested in the complete Sullivan Ballou letter, search Ken Burns/Civil War, then historical documents.

UPDATE ON WORK IN PROGRESS

Bring out the wet noddles. Very little progress since I was finishing reading the edited manuscript of a book scheduled for publication in April(I always make changes). Also had twenty entries to read for my chapter’s contest(some really terrific ones). My bathtub cracked and flooded my bathroom, my car died and my 96-year-old mother had a few emergencies. And then there are all those lovely boxes to open.
I know. Excuses. Excuses.
Hopefully will do better during Thanksgiving Week.