Sullivan Ballou was born in March 1829 in Smithfield, Rhode Island, into a Huguenot family, and lost his father as a young boy. He went on to Phillips Academy, Brown University and the National Law School in New York, was admitted to the Rhode Island bar in 1853, and was elected to the state House of Representatives the same year, rising to clerk and then Speaker. He married Sarah Hart Shumway in 1855, had two sons, and was a committed Republican and supporter of Abraham Lincoln. After Fort Sumter he volunteered and was commissioned a major in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry and judge advocate of the Rhode Island militia.

At Camp Clark near Washington in July 1861, Ballou wrote to Sarah, then 24, about his debt to the Revolutionary generation, his guilt at risking leaving his sons fatherless, and his promise to remain near her even in death. He never mailed it. At the First Battle of Bull Run on July 21, a six-pound solid shot killed his horse and shattered his right leg, which was amputated at Sudley Church in Manassas. Left behind in the Union retreat, he died on July 29 at 32. Confederate troops later exhumed and desecrated his body, and only ashes and bone fragments were recovered for reburial at Swan Point Cemetery in Providence.

• The letter was found in Ballou’s trunk, and Rhode Island Governor William Sprague, who went to Virginia to recover soldiers’ effects, delivered it to Sarah about a year later.
• Sarah never remarried, later moved to New Jersey to live with her son William, and died in 1917 at 82.
• She was buried beside her husband in Providence.
• The letter reached millions through Ken Burns’ 1990 documentary The Civil War.
• It has since inspired music by the band Goodnight Texas, choral works, stage productions, and a quest in World of Warcraft.