A Union Tested

A marriage maintained and a war fought on all fronts, revealed through Civil War–era letters of a young Unionist couple

Drawing on hundreds of letters exchanged between 1862 and 1865, A Union Tested details the lives of an Illinois homemaker and a quartermaster in the Union army and reveals how Civil War correspondence sustained relationships disrupted by war.

This volume reveals how an ordinary American couple, Cimbaline and Henry Fike, wrote their way through struggles that challenged the survival of both their nation and marriage. Drawing on hundreds of letters exchanged between 1862 and 1865, A Union Tested details the lives of an Illinois homemaker and a quartermaster in the Union army and reveals how Civil War correspondence sustained relationships disrupted by war.

In his research Jeremy Neely found that such letters became an epistolary bridge that sustained families—wives and husbands, parents and children, brothers and sisters—across the years and miles that stretched between them during the tumult of war.

The Fikes’ years-long correspondence shows how a fully formed marriage reconstituted itself within the handwritten lines the couple cast across hundreds of miles. Amid the extraordinary circumstances of wartime, writing to one another prompted a remarkable degree of self-reflection and provided for each the space to learn anew about their partners, their country, and themselves.