By Rich MacAlpine
As Gleaned from the Yates County Chronicle, July 18, 1862
The Chronicle was filled with letters written by Yates County men in the Union army who had been pushed back from Richmond in a series of six major battles known collectively as the Seven Days Battles. Among them was Penn Yan’s J. Smith Brown of Berdan’s Sharpshooters: “Here, twenty-three miles from Richmond by land and forty-five by the river, does the Fourth of July find us. Instead of being a joyous crowd reveling at the capitol of the Southern Confederacy exulting in victory, we are lying in the mud – tired, exhausted with eight days of marching, fighting and starving. We have not tasted meat for nine days; we have not had a night’s rest in that time, but only toil, danger and death. I shall not attempt to give in detail our trials and work; a hundred Chronicles would bot hold it. Neither could I ever make you understand or appreciate it in the least. What do you know of eight days hunger, you who never went two hours hungry? You at home can no more understand what a deprivation of food and rest for so long a time really is, than a man who has never lost a limb can appreciate the loss of his right arm.”
Harrison DeLong, also of the Sharpshooters, wrote: “Those who are yet alive and have been in the recent scenes of licensed bloodshed and have escaped without a scratch, think themselves providentially favored.”
John Cooley of Berdan’s Sharpshooters wrote to his father in Penn Yan that he was safe and so was his brother Bruen, of the Keuka Rifles. “I have seen men lay on the ground crazy with the typhoid fever, in the cold rain, in the mud and water, no one to take care of them and there are thousands of such. I do not know whether it is right or not. You will hear tales of horror that I dare not write, through other sources. Bruen’s reg’t (the 33rd NY) done nobly and fought hard and often and they are very lucky, all the Co. I boys safe.”
“Colored men are plenty good enough to work for rebels without pay – Why are they not just right to fight Rebels for Uncle Sam?”
“It is said a knot of Traitors meet nightly in this village since the battles before Richmond, where our men fought so bravely. Let the public mark the Traitors.”
