The Green-Mountain Freeman leads with stirring wartime poetry and a soldier's letter from near Brandy Station, Virginia, painting a vivid picture of Union Army camp life in January 1864. The unnamed correspondent writes from the Vermont regiment about the miserable muddy season—mud so deep and sticky that men lose their shoes in the red clay—but notes soldiers prefer winter quarters to the dangers of active campaigning. Most notably, he reports that seventeen rebel deserters came into Union lines that very morning, with cavalry pickets noting that Confederate soldiers are deserting in squads, sometimes with their own officers, preferring Lincoln's proclamation to continued service. The Fifth Regiment Vermont is heading home after re-enlisting, and the Sixth Regiment will soon muster out about 100 'veterans' for thirty-five-day furloughs. The letter closes with a poignant account of a soldier's funeral—a substitute who'd enlisted for bounty money, fell ill, and died friendless among strangers far from Vermont.

This January 1864 dispatch captures a pivotal moment in the Civil War. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (issued over a year prior) was now reshaping the conflict's character and the army's composition. The mass desertions the correspondent describes signal growing demoralization in the Confederate ranks and validate Union hopes that emancipation would undermine Southern fighting capacity. Meanwhile, the re-enlistment drive reflected Northern determination to see the war through—these 'veterans' volunteering for another term represented the political will needed to sustain what would become a grinding, total war. The letter's complaints about mud and camp disease were universal soldier experiences, but they also hint at the sanitation and logistics challenges that killed far more soldiers than bullets.

• The correspondent matter-of-factly mentions that three soldiers were killed and several injured when the Fifth Regiment's train derailed between the camp and Alexandria—a deadly accident that underscores how dangerous simply traveling home could be in 1864, yet receives only parenthetical treatment ('perhaps it may not prove true').
• Bounty substitutes—men paid by drafted men to take their place—were deeply resented: the dead soldier had received bounty money to enlist as a substitute, then proved unfit for service, and the letter notes bitterly that even officers and surgeons 'shared' the men's refusal to sympathize with him, calling his death almost deserved punishment for 'cheating the government.'
• General Sedgwick's strategic decision to stay east of the Rappahannock rather than retreat to Warrenton was justified partly on creature comforts: soldiers had already built 'firstrate quarters' and would lose them in a pullback, giving the commander political cover by appealing to troops' desire for stable winter camps.
• The poem 'The Summons' invokes the Macedonian cry to Paul (Acts 16:9), a biblical reference to a divine call that would resonate with religiously educated Vermont readers in ways lost today—it frames the war itself as a spiritual summons that lazy men ignore at moral peril.
• The paper cost $1.50 if paid in advance, or $2.00 otherwise—roughly $28–$37 in modern money—making it accessible mainly to the literate middle class, yet it was distributed free throughout Washington County, suggesting subsidized political communication during wartime.

• General John Sedgwick, whose strategic opinion the correspondent cites, would be dead within sixteen months—shot by a Confederate sharpshooter at Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864, just months after this decision to hunker down for winter. His last words were reportedly 'They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.'
• The Fifth Regiment Vermont Infantry mentioned as leaving for home had served since 1861 and would re-enlist as a unit—a remarkable feat of institutional continuity in a war that killed or disabled hundreds of thousands. The regiment's survival and re-enlistment testified to Vermont's deep commitment to the Union cause.
• The sermon reprinted here by Reverend George B. Spalding represents a sea change in Northern religious thought: just two years earlier, many churches had defended slavery or counseled nonresistance; by 1864, abolitionist theology was becoming orthodox in Vermont, a state that sent 35,000 men to fight—a higher per-capita contribution than any other Northern state.
• The correspondent's description of rebel desertion en masse—'seventeen came in this morning,' cavalry saying 'the Johnnies were deserting'—foreshadows the Confederate collapse that would accelerate in 1865. By war's end, desertion rates in Lee's army exceeded 50 percent, exactly as this letter predicted.
• The bounty system the letter criticizes (paying men to enlist or serve as substitutes) would ultimately enlist over 120,000 substitutes and fuel one of the Civil War's most infamous moments: the July 1863 Draft Riots in New York, where working-class men rampaged against a system that let the wealthy buy their way out of service.