Single folded unlined letter sheet with four pages of inked manuscript text, headed : Fort Ethan Allen Sept. 19, docketed above: Hartwell Sept. 19, 62. Written by Hartwell Freeman 2 nd Lt. 40 th Mass. Infantry. After perfunctory greeting to his mother he writes: I have heard several vollies of musketry since I commenced this letter. I suppose there is some sort of a skirmish going on. All around the hill that we are camped on, the tops of the trees are cut off by caannon balls, and the trunks are riddled with muskey ball, the marks of some past conflict. Our 1 st Lt. Was in a battle on this very place...The officers of the company are in the next tent playing cards. I hear that Charley Silva has gone to Port Royal, with the rank of 1 st Lt. To take care of a plantation there. There are regts. All around us, look on every side and you will see some fort or the white tents of a camp. The road up here from the river is steep and hard of ascent. I can see Washington from here in the distance. The men are all thieves out here. You cnnot leave anything outside of your trunk .Not a team with anything to eat on it can pass by the fort without being robbed of its contents. The other day I saw two teams go past here, one of them as large as that cargo Herring River team that used to go by the house some years ago...some of the fort boys stopped the wagon which was full of watermelon...almost tipped over so that the boys got all of the melons out and ran off. The other wagons suffered the same. The waggoners could not do a thing, this is of every day accurance…From Your aff. Son Hartwell. Condition normal folds, else Fine. From a group of letters rtecently found in a Kentucky estate.