A never-before-seen Civil War archive from a prominent Goldsboro family has been unearthed. The collection contains letters detailing the action and personal thoughts of members of the Baker Family, whose sons fought for the Confederacy, just as the war was coming to an end.
Nathan Raab stumbled upon these documents by accident.
“I didn't go out there to find a Confederate archive. I went out there cause the person had a document signed by George Washington and another of Thomas Jefferson.”
Nathan is the president of The Raab Collection, a private dealer in historical documents. He had flown out to the West Coast to meet with a descendant of a prominent family of Kinston and Goldsboro — The Baker Family. She took him downstairs to retrieve the documents from Washington and Jefferson.
“You're walking in into a room that is a smaller version of. You know that room at the end of Indiana Jones, where they store the Ark, and it's this endless hall of boxes put, and you never know what's in the boxes."
While downstairs, she had mentioned the family’s letters only in passing.
“And I was like, 'whoa,' let's back up a second. Tell me a little bit more about this.”
The collection contains letters from two brothers and a cousin fighting for the Confederacy and their sisters back home. All letters were written toward the end of the Civil War.
“You see the boys on the front line. Really struggling with what life was like at the end for the Confederate troops, which is we don't have any food. We're very cold. The union. I can see the Union troops off the coast.”
One brother, Jesse, was at Fort Fisher in Wilmington, a critical hold that protected trade routes for the Confederacy. It was attacked repeatedly by General Ulysses S. Grant and finally captured by Union soldiers in January 1865 - just months before the war ended.
“So, you're seeing you're seeing the Confederacy kind of collapse around them . . . And so, you see his correspondence leading up to that moment and then it's culminated with a letter from his brother saying I, I hear that my brothers died. And of course, in the archive is the actual bullet that that killed Jesse, which was kept retained by the family.”
The bullet was also part of the archive collected by Raab. An item documented and preserved by his brother.
“It's crazy to see that bullet surviving.”
Jesse’s older brother John was stationed outside Petersburg, Va. Upon hearing of his brother’s death, he wrote "I hope we may all be better prepared to meet that end to which we are so fast approaching. The harsh roar of cannon and the sharp crackle of rifles tells us that a great many more mothers will have to give up their sons."
The other half of the archive are writings from the women of the family, including a journal from Mattie Baker, a young woman at the time.
“Mattie's Journal is so powerful as a sign of the pride that these families felt at home. It really highlights the fall. It is filled with Confederate hymns and poems and discussion of the boys out on the front line."
The collection provides a glimpse of her life back in Goldsboro, a critical railway junction for the Confederacy. The letters from a cousin Rachel to her brother in Richmond are more personal in tone.
“You don't get the fall from Mattie in this journal, but who you do get it from is her cousin Rachel, who is serving as a strong support for her brother who's fighting on the front lines, writing constantly. So, there are a number of letters from Rachel to him and a number of letters from him to Rachel, where they're comforting each other."
The value of the archive comes from their first-hand accounts of pivotal events in the war and the intimate conversations between brothers and sisters.
“I am touched by the scenes of despair and desperation and uncertainty. You can't help but read this and be touched by a family's personal anguish and journey. You can't be human and not have that reaction. I say that as a northerner whose family thought on the Union side."
The archive sold last week for $15,000 to a private collector in the Carolinas.
