Letters between Captain William S. Bradford and his wife Lucy convey a deep devotion to each other and to the Union during the U.S. Civil War.
Rev. Bradford married Lucy W. Adsit on April 1, 1857. The couple had been married only four years before Bradford, minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Muncie, enlisted with the Union Army. He served as the captain of Company F of the 57th Indiana Regiment at the time of the pair’s correspondence from December 1861 to April 1862.
In her last letter to her husband on April 19, 1862, Lucy Bradford wrote:
“I dream of you almost evry [sic] night and am sorry when I wake to think it was only a dream. Sometimes I think I must send for you I want to see you so badly and when I hear of others coming home I wish you would have come too but when I think for a while I feel contented for I know those who come home are not half as good and noble as my own little husband and I am very proud to think he stays where duty calls him…”
In the same letter, she told him, “I have a dozen plans laid out for the future and you may chose [sic] whichever one you please. Just so you stay at home with me all the time. For I am not going to let you leave me anymore after this rebellion is crushed.” Tragically, the couple never got that future together. A few weeks later, Captain Bradford contracted “camp fever” – typhoid or epidemic typhus – a common wartime malady. He left his regiment and returned to Muncie to recover, but ultimately succumbed on May 16, 1862, less than a month after Lucy’s final missive.
These letters and other items from the William S. Bradford papers (S0155) can be read here. For more information about the collection, please review the collection finding aid. These images and more are online to explore in the Indiana State Library Digital Collections.
