Fighting Words

November 23, 1862, Falmouth, Virginia: "Dear Sister I thought I would write you a few lines to let you know that I am still living and in good health at present we are laying on this side of Fredericksburgh . . . this Winter we have seen one Battle and the killed was awful we buried 44 from our Regt I helped to Bury them and it was a sight I shall never forget Your loving Brother John"

John Nelson Black was a three-year enlisted man in the Union infantry. History remembers his regiment for its hard luck, with its ranks decimated at Antietam, Maryland, and its men captured in the siege of Plymouth, North Carolina. But Black himself would have remained virtually anonymous, save for a quirky gent named McNutt and a discovery worthy of a Dan Brown novel.

In October 2004, C. Nelson McNutt passed away at the age of 105 on the very acreage where he was born in June 1899. Living in a ramshackle cabin among neighboring mega-mansions in Weston, McNutt, who was the grandnephew of John Black, had two passions: saving everything and tending his vegetable garden. The rail-thin figure - a ringer for the farmer with the pitchfork in Grant Wood's American Gothic - thrived on engaging passersby with a cheery wave. He was quick to inform them that he remembered driving a Stanley Steamer, that he had been drafted into both world wars, and that a lawyer in the Sacco-Vanzetti case had been his lawyer, too. But McNutt never mentioned the stash of letters gently yellowing in the house he had built in 1934 - letters handed down to him from his mother's mother, a direct link to America's charismatic past.

"I met Nelson over 20 years ago, when I was driving by in the winter and he was shoveling out a bank of snow using one of those old wooden shovels," says Richard Ulbrich, an orthodontist from Wellesley, who inherited McNutt's Weston house and its intriguing contents. "I had a plow, and I told him I'd give him a hand. We struck up a friendship." It was that unlikely but abiding relationship between the orthodontist and the centenarian that resulted in McNutt - unmarried and with close relatives gone - bequeathing Ulbrich his house. "I felt a little bit overwhelmed," says Ulbrich. "We were just good friends, and I would have expected nothing from him."

When Ulbrich eventually put key to lock, he entered a dust-laden time machine of sepia photographs, gold-leafed autograph books, centuries-old Bibles, and dozens of letters. "They were in a dresser drawer," says Ulbrich. "Just a bundle of letters in a shoe box tied up in a ribbon." But flipping through them, the dates mesmerize, quickly entering white-cotton-glove territory: 1944, 1918, 1863, 1847, 1819. The 1860s letters, in particular, originating from the decade that saw Abraham Lincoln rise to the White House and the Civil War erupt, are magnets for the eyes. At first, the smoky ink is difficult to read, the writing curlicued and spidery. There are misspellings, older spellings. There is a different rhythm, with commas, periods, and paragraphing absent and just a stray capital letter here and there.

But when Black's 1862 letter is read, a tiny trickle of anticipation crescendos to a roar as history flows from the page: "it was midnight when the Burial service was read over them poor men there was no sister there to shed a tear over there graves . . . it was a picture I should like some of the great men in Washington to see"

In eight such posts, the Union infantryman details the movements of the 16th Connecticut Volunteer Regiment on Civil War battlefields. The letters are written to Hannah Black Wyman of Weston - Black's twin sister and Nelson McNutt's grandmother. Another sibling, Lizzie Black, also writes to Wyman (from Monson, Massachusetts), creating a round-robin of correspondence. The fading pages from the collection of letters, together with regimental histories, government records, and census reports, are like so many still images in a child's animation book: If you flip the leaves very quickly, you're rewarded with a flickering reenactment of John Black's life.

On August 24, 1862, at the age of 30, he leaves behind his wife, Rebecca, and two toddlers in Stafford, Connecticut, to enlist in the 16th Connecticut infantry. Cheering spectators throng the Hartford riverbanks as 1,010 volunteers are mustered into service. Three weeks later, having learned to load a musket just the previous day, the troops are thrown against Robert E. Lee's roaring batteries on the Union's left flank at Antietam. It is on this "bloodiest day of the Civil War," with neither side victorious, that Black's regiment is detached from the brigade to bury the dead. After three months of trudging through mud, sharing blankets, and living on salt pork, Black sees action again at Fredericksburg, Virginia, as 12,000 Union soldiers fall:

"I tell you it was pretty warm work there but our Regt did not get in the Battle soon enough to get injured much there was one man knocked right from my side . . . it just missed me but it took him"

Not all Yankees prove as valorous as Black: "all that is in the Regt dont go in to fight for when there is going to be one they will play of sick and I am sorry to say it . . . there was only 20 of our company that would go over at Fredericksburgh"

And family concerns weigh heavily: "my Wife and Children have all been sick I could get along first rate if they would all keep well at home but what I have to suffer and then have them suffer too I feel very downhearted sometimes"

In May 1863, Lizzie Black pens her sister with devastating news: "Rebbeca is dead she dide this morning." Now John Black faces death on the home front as well as on the battlefront: "it was very hard for me to be out here and could not get home to see my wife before she died but I hope and trust in God that she is in a better place she was always a good Wife to me"

As Black's children move in with their kin, summer 1863 finds the 16th "tramping all through Virginia." "we was gone about three weeks with no change of clothing for that time . . . plenty fell down on the road that could not go any farther . . . we marched into Williamsburgh, fortress Monroe, and White House Landing about 160 miles . . . I should have liked something good to eat I could have relished Johnny Cake just then"

On the march, Black earns sergeant's chevrons with $4 additional monthly pay and declares Virginia "a great place for farming." The regiment settles into "a pretty good camp" in Portsmouth for six months before transferring to Plymouth, North Carolina, to protect the Union-held garrison deep in seceded territory.

He writes that he has "not tasted Liquor nor Beer nearly 4 months," but a midnight raid into Rebel turf stirs boyish spirits: "it was snowing very hard at the time . . . we crept up to them very close . . . they was not expecting us on such a night . . . we pounced onto them before they could fire a shot they had a big fire and was enjoying themselves in great style but we spoiled there fun . . . dont write to my Mother about it"

But the next encounter of blue and gray banishes all boyhood euphoria. The letters cease. Under siege at Plymouth in April 1864, Federal troops, outnumbered five to one by Confederates closing in by land and water, resist doggedly. The 16th defiantly rips apart its regimental colors before surrendering. Many witness a stunning atrocity, as African-American and North Carolina soldiers in blue are singled out and shot. Another horrifying repercussion can be uttered in one word: "Andersonville." The notorious Southern prison at Camp Sumter, Georgia, ingests the enlisted POWS, today known as "Plymouth Pilgrims." Black's regiment is caged in Andersonville's pen, with rampaging disease, starvation, and exposure as companions. One in three will die. To maintain morale, prisoners each reverently conceal and preserve shreds from the regimental flag. After enduring 10 months at Andersonville, Black is paroled, his record aptly stamped "survived."

And here the story dead-ends - or it would have, save for Fred Campbell, Nelson McNutt's lifelong neighbor and friend. Much like in a made-for-cable movie, Campbell improbably comes upon a forgotten sack that McNutt once gave him. Its contents? Additional vintage letters - and the story's final chapter.

Correspondence from Davids' Island Hospital in New York Harbor delivers crushing information: John Black, weakened and broken from Andersonville, has asked a member of the 10th New Hampshire to write for him:

"Ap 25 1865 Dear Loving Sister you think that my lot is a hard one so it is . . . i hope that you will never suffer as i have but i ham as well as i can be untill i have my legs taken off I dunot know when they will take them off but I hope that it will be soon for I want to get home once more and see you all if it is God's will"

Two days later, on April 27, 1865, Sergeant John Nelson Black died.

Diane Speare Triant is a writer in Wellesley. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.