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This collection consists of 113 letters, written primarily between Union soldier Doctor Tarbell and his fiancée, and later, wife, Mary Lucy Conant. Doctor served as a Sergeant in New York's 32nd Infantry, Co. A, and as a Lieutenant, Captain, and Brevet Major in the Commissary Regiment, U.S. Volunteers.

The Doctor Tarbell and Mary Conant papers are comprised of 112 letters, written primarily between Union soldier Doctor Tarbell and his fiancée (and later wife), Mary Lucy Conant, and one genealogical document. Doctor served as a sergeant in the New York 32nd Infantry, Co. A, and as a lieutenant, captain, and brevet major in the U.S. Volunteers. The collection covers Doctor’s war-time service in the Union Army and some of his post-war career. The Civil War letters form a remarkably dense series that highlights the intimate relationship of Tarbell and his fiancée Mary. The collection contains 35 letters from Doctor to Mary, and 46 letters from Mary to Doctor, mainly during 1864 and 1865. Additionally, Doctor wrote one letter to his parents T. B. and Lydia Tarbell, and received two letters from them and two from his siblings. The remaining 29 letters are either from relatives of Mary or they pertain to post-war activities of the Tarbells.

Both Tarbell and his fiancée wrote in an educated and literary style; their letters reveal an affectionate relationship. Between January and February 1864, both Tarbell and Conant wrote almost exclusively about their relationship. However, as the Army of the Potomac moved south, both writers began to focus more on the progress of the war and to assume a more fervently patriotic tone. Many of Mary's letters contain political asides ("Does the Army weary of Gen. Meade, or is it politicians & aspirants that wish to oust him?" March 13, 1864); references to life at home during wartime; and several extended lyrical passages and pro-Union sentiments. Tarbell's responses, which were also substantive and descriptive, often referred to military matters, his work as a commissary, and army morale.

At times, Tarbell's patriotism and pride in his commission shine through, as during his company's inspection by General Ulysses S. Grant (April 18, 1864). Tarbell described the journey down to Richmond, his regiment's movements, what he knew of the progress of the war, the actions of the 6th Cavalry Corps, and his encounters with southern civilians. He wrote to both Mary and his parents from Danville Military Prison, expressing his hopes that an exchange of officers was imminent (October 22, 1864, and November 20, 1864). After his release, he recounted the parades in Washington, D.C. following the ending of the war, and the review of General Sherman’s Army (May 25, 1865). On July 28, 1865, he mentioned his promotion to brevet major.

The 5 letters written to Mary during Tarbell's imprisonment are filled with sympathy and encouragement, along with family news. In a letter from Mary's young niece, Hattie Carpenter, she described the return of soldiers to Iowa (January 15, 1865). Mary A. E. Wages wrote to Miss Hardy requesting funds to establish a freedman's high school in Richmond: "The black people of Richmond are the only loyal people in the whole city...They not only need help, but are worthy objects of it" (Nov. 18, 1866).

The 13 letters from 1881 suggest that the Tarbells were in some unspecified financial difficulty, and that Doctor had been employed as a typewriter agent. The remaining 10 letters were written by Tarbell or Conant relatives and friends.

This collection also contains one genealogical document that lists the birth and marriage dates for members of the Conant and Tarbell families (1793-1884). Included is a list of Doctor and Mary Tarbell's children. This document is undated and unattributed.

The journal of E. Augustus Garrison documents his work as a lay preacher to his family's slaves, duties as a sergeant in the 2nd Mississippi Infantry Battalion (later the 48th Mississippi Infantry) and chaplain to the 48th Mississippi Infantry, and post-Civil War efforts to reconstruct his (prewar) life as a cotton planter.

As the journal of E. Augustus Garrison opens, the Civil War looms as a reality just beginning to touch his home in Copiah County, Miss., and it ends eight years later, after his life has taken a complete and irreversible turn. From his trials as a lay preacher to his family's slaves, through duty as a sergeant in the 2nd Mississippi Infantry Battalion (later the 48th Mississippi Infantry) and chaplain to the 48th Mississippi Infantry, to his scrapping efforts to reconstruct the genteel life he had known before the war as a cotton planter, Garrison's journal probes deeply into the mentality of a young man coming to grips with the enormous changes confronting the nation in the 1860s.

During the war, Garrison kept his journal only sporadically, and most of his military experiences are recounted in memoir form, written after the fact from recollection, notes, or other journals. The narrative veers in form from daily journal to memoir, sometimes seamlessly, sometimes with odd gaps or elisions. This organization leads to some periods far better documented than others. Particularly well documented are those periods while Garrison was at home before enlisting, and on leave during the first five months of 1863 and in October, 1864 -- precisely when his military duties were at a minimum. Though written after the fact, his descriptions of the Peninsular Campaign are fine accounts of the clever campaign waged by Confederate commanders to delay the advance of the Army of the Potomac, and though far briefer, his accounts of Antietam, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Petersburg, particularly the Crater, provide useful, small anecdotes. But it is Garrison's willful decision to ignore the changing tide of fortunes of Confederate arms, his desire utterly to ignore federal victories on either the small scale or grand that makes his memoirs so interesting. His pervasive belief in the righteousness of his cause and his faith in Confederate arms arches over everything, leaving him secure in his belief that Southern manhood was never defeated, and unable to accept the changes in status that resulted from the loss of the war.

The hardships of the first four years of Reconstruction are well portrayed in the second half of the journal, and historically, are among the most important parts of the journal. A palpable sense of the pain, arrogance, and indignation that characterize Garrison's attitude smolders in his heart before leaping into the flames of family turmoil. The quixotic mixture of doting upon his infant son and bitter criticism of his parents and wife appears to arise directly out of Garrison's changing social and political position, filtered through the personal, and in this way the journal provides an intimate sense of the adjustments that many southern planters endured during Reconstruction, and their ways of coping with a new political system in which the possibility of equality seemed to threaten. Through Garrison's eyes as well, a more diffuse view of some of the adjustments required of freedmen emerges, as the transition from slavery, through contract labor into sharecropping runs full cycle.

Among numerous vignettes from the Reconstruction period worth noting is a curious account of a Black man, Dr. Dab, making a stir by claiming to identify thieves and recover stolen objects, and an interesting encounter between an elderly former slave, Aunt Silva, and Garrison over the apparent decline in his faith. When Aunt Silva inquired why Garrison did not preach to the "black folks" like he used to, he replied "I have not seen a week since I neglected my Christian duties, but what I have had serious thoughts, and my conscience would often reprove me, and this old negroes words were the right ones, I felt they were sent by the spirit, I made some feeble reply, but we conversed together for a half hour on religious topics, and she knowing my case, cause of coldness &c, gave me sound advice, 'to look up' 'Cast your burden on the Lord &c' and it did me good" (p. 175-176). While such stories are very brief, to some degree they suggest the manner in which Black and white spiritual expression had grown together in the South.