“Writte to Me as Before and Let Me Know the News in the Town”: Soldiers’ Families, Local Identity, and Their Letters

Between 1739 and 1789, enlisted men wrote a great deal. Recent research in English, French, and German-speaking lands reveals the consistent presence of low but consistent levels of literacy, producing at least some identifiable letters which survive from the armies of the Old Regime. This paper examines the presence of local community and family ties, as well as religious themes in letters from British and Prussian soldiers during the last fifty years of the Old Regime. Eighteenth-century common soldiers used religion in a surprising variety of ways. They interpreted the decisions of their governments through a religious lens, in order to prop up the ideologies they supported. They relied on religion as a source of inspiration and hope in extremely adverse material circumstances. Perhaps most surprisingly, they consistently utilized religion to advocate for peace in wartime, emphasizing portions of the Christian tradition which at times undercut military objectives of the states they had pledged to support. For these men, religion was an integral part of their worldview, one which provided an acceptable way to support, survive, and critique the decisions of their governments. In order to complete the research for this project, between 2016 and 2019, I traveled to the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Germany, researching at the Templer Study Centre, British National Archives, British Library, Trinity College Library, the Kent Local History Centre, Royal Archives at Windsor, British Library, and Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv, the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin.