February 9th

Down in Louisiana, a young lady named Sarah Morgan was delighted to receive a letter from her brother James, serving in the C.S. Navy. Her diary entry for 9th February 1863 reads, in part, as follows:

" A letter from my dear little Jimmy! How glad I am, words could not express. This is the first since he arrived in England, and now we know what has become of him at last...My delight at hearing from Jimmy is overcast by the bad news Lilly sends me of mother's health. I have been unhappy about her for a long while; her health has been wretched for three months; so bad, that during all my long illness she has never been with me after the third day. I was never separated from mother for so long before; and I am homesick, and heartsick about her. Only twenty miles apart, and she with a shocking bone felon in her hand and that dreadful cough, unable to come to me, whilst I am lying helpless here, as unable to get to her. I feel right desperate about it."