HUNTED DOWN AFTER GETTYSBURG
John Futch was functionally illiterate, but in letters dictated to other comrades, many of whom were barely literate themselves, Futch gave subtle indications to his wife, Martha, that he was returning to North Carolina with or without a furlough. On August 16, he told his wife, “I want to come home the worst I Ever Did in my Life.” Futch could not say much more to Martha, because “it is Said our Letters is Broke open and red.” Four days later, on August 20, Futch nearly stated his true intentions, hinting that his days in the army were numbered. As he dictated this final letter, he must have known that he would be vanishing from the army that night. “I expect to bea home before long,” he promised.
A New Hanover County resident, Futch had enlisted in the 3rd North Carolina in early 1862. His brother Charley and a cousin had been serving in that regiment since summer 1861. Within a few weeks of joing the army, Futch fell ill with an undisclosed ailment that kept him in military hospitals until early 1863, when a physician cleared him to return to the ranks. Futch boarded a train that took him past the Goldsboro hospital, where Martha had often been at his bedside, nursing him back to health. The scene was emotionally wrenching for the North Carolinian, “Oh I thought of old times when [I] passed Goldsboro…,” he dictated, “[and] when I looked at that old hospital I all most Cryed.”
When Futch rejoined his regiment, snow, howling winds, and meager rations enervated his already weakened body, and he spent most of his time secluded in his tent, dictating letters about his poor health and the army’s indifference to his worsening condition. He continued to lobby his captain for a discharge. “My health is so bad and it is so cold here that I am perfectly miserable,” he explained shortly after his arrival, “and I am doing my Country no good and myself a great harm.” Futch’s wife urged her husband to leverage his feeble health to secure a military discharge. “Dear husband,” Martha wrote on March 29, 1863, “i learn that you have not goin before the [Medical] bord and i want you to go….[I]f you wanted