Letter, 13 May 1864, of John Lord Boatwright was written by this Confederate soldier from Savannah, Georgia, to his wife in Columbia, South Carolina, and notes how dull his days were with no letter from her.

Boatwright was concerned over her pregnancy and the uncertainty surrounding her time of delivery. "Oh! what would I not give, just to be with my darling now just to tell her how much I have missed her & how miserable I have felt the many, many long nights away from her, how I have laid awake in bed for hours thinking of her and the little charge she is about to deliver for me, and how I would almost find myself in tears not knowing how long it would be before I could see her again.” Yet, "with the aid of some one above who is the giver of all good things," Boatwright assured her, "we will be able to over come all our troubles & yet see happiness beyond measure.”

The letter reports no war news but comments on life in Savannah, noting that the "gay season…is about stopping here now” and "all the ladies are beginning to go up the country." Soon, he thought, "Savannah will be perfectly destitute as far as ladies are concerned….”

The 1860 census identifies seventeen-year-old John L. Boatwright as a resident of Columbia and student at West Point. He was the son of Columbia mayor John Henry Boatwright. Boatwright married Anne Pendleton Taliaferro in 1863 in Orange County, Virginia.