The Green Mountain Freeman leads with a soldier's letter from the field—Letter No. 63, dated May 25, 1864, from near Noel's Station in Virginia. The anonymous correspondent writes vividly from the thick of the Overland Campaign, describing relentless marching across Virginia toward Richmond. "We are still pressing our way on to Richmond," he reports, having just crossed the North Anna River. The soldier captures the chaos of Civil War infantry life: exhausted men marching through woods "almost impenetrable" and "mud holes that are very penetrable indeed," confused movements in darkness, the constant threat of Confederate skirmishers, and the grinding uncertainty of military operations. He describes a desperate night march where stragglers risked arrest by the Provost Marshal, artillery bombardments, desperate assaults on entrenchments, and the regiment dwindled by exhaustion. Yet amid the combat narrative runs a thread of dark humor—the soldiers' nickname for their general, 'Old Uselesf,' and their sardonic observations about never knowing whether they're attacking or defending. The letter provides an intimate, unvarnished glimpse of what Union soldiers endured during Grant's bloody campaign to break Lee's army.

June 1864 was a hinge-point in the Civil War. Grant's Overland Campaign—which began in early May with the Battle of the Wilderness—had ground through weeks of brutal fighting at Spotsylvania and the North Anna. This soldier's letter arrives during one of the most desperate and costly Union operations of the entire war. Though Grant was ultimately pushing Lee's army back toward Richmond, casualties were astronomical, and Northern morale was fragmenting. Lincoln himself faced re-election that fall, and many Americans were asking whether the war was worth the price. Letters like this one—honest, exhausted, and unideological—shaped public opinion back home in Vermont. The Green Mountain Freeman's decision to publish such raw military correspondence kept readers connected to the actual human cost of the conflict.

• The soldier mentions that 'wagon load of entrenching tools are coming, which give promise of employment to-night'—a reminder that Civil War soldiers spent nearly as much time digging as fighting. Fortification work was relentless and hated.
• He describes his ration as 'hard tack, raw pork'—and notes that pork 'has been a rare luxury on this campaign,' suggesting supply lines were already stretched dangerously thin by late May 1864.
• The paper's subscription rate: $1.50 if paid in advance, otherwise $2.00—plus 'postage is Twenty Cents a year'—a significant cost for rural Vermonters in an era when a soldier's monthly pay was roughly $13.
• The masthead lists C. W. Willard as 'Publisher and Proprietor,' suggesting this was a one-man operation, typical of rural Vermont weeklies that depended heavily on war correspondence to fill pages.
• The issue also features a long romantic poem titled 'The Keys' by 'Graham' and an article on 'The English Commons House and its Members'—showing that even amid war dispatches, papers maintained literary and international content for educated readers.

• This soldier's regiment is unnamed in the letter, but the brutally specific details—crossing the North Anna on May 25-26, the assault on entrenchments, artillery fire, mention of 'Old Uselesf' the general—likely place him with the Army of the Potomac under Grant. The Overland Campaign would ultimately kill or wound over 100,000 men combined, making it one of the deadliest military operations in American history.
• The soldier writes from a captured Virginia plantation owned by 'Anderson,' and notes it was 'covered with rebel troops last night.' Many such farms would be burned or destroyed in the coming months. By war's end, the Virginia landscape was scarred beyond recognition.
• His description of marching 'through woods that are almost impenetrable' and 'mud holes that are very penetrable indeed' captures the Wilderness terrain—a nightmarish landscape where visibility was 50 yards, artillery useless, and soldiers fought blind. Grant would lose 17,000 men in three days there in May 1864.
• The soldier's fear of the Provost Marshal arresting stragglers was real and justified—Union armies executed soldiers for desertion, and stragglers faced harsh discipline. By 1864, morale was held together partly by fear.
• Vermont itself sent roughly 35,000 soldiers to the Civil War—about 5% of the state's population—an extraordinary per-capita contribution. Letters like this one were eagerly read in every Vermont town, making distant battlefields feel personal and immediate.