The Combs collection comprises nine personal letters, written from 23 November 1862 to 24 March 1865, sent by Private Combs to his wife in New Hampshire. The four earliest letters (November 1862-March 1863) were written from Poolesville, Maryland, where the 14th New Hampshire was on picket and patrol duty along the upper Potomac, defending the city of Washington. (The last three of these letters, from February and March of 1863, were dated "1862" by Combs. Combs was not yet in the army in the winter of 1862, and the 14th had yet to be formed. The letters' content confirms that they were written in 1863). Two subsequent letters (January 1864) are from Camp Adirondack in Washington, where the regiment was on garrison duty. The final three (March 1865) were written from the environs of Savannah, Georgia, where the 14th New Hampshire had been assigned to provost duty after the city's fall. From 6 March to 5 June Combs was part of a 60 man detachment occupying Fort Pulaski, on Cockspur Island at the mouth of the Savannah River. In his letter of 23 November 1862 Combs betrays a disaffection for the war shared by countless other recruits in the Union regiments newly formed in the summer of that year. Lincoln's July call for 300,000 fresh volunteers had provoked little of the enthusiasm of 1861, and quotas were met only through the advance payment of bounties and the threat of conscription. (The slogan on the patriotic letterhead derives from the year's popular recruiting song, "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand More.") Thus, Combs writes, few in his regiment would have enlisted had they known anything of army life; most of the men have been sick; and abolition is no good reason to fight, since it is rejected by the very people whom it would set free. Combs' evident antipathy for blacks is more baldly stated elsewhere, as in his letter of 15 February 1863: "i like here first [rate] i should like to live here but I dont want the damd nigers I hate them worse than the devel." In all the letters Combs' spelling and grammar are idiosyncratic — somewhat less so in his later efforts, written in 1865. The tintype portrait of Private Combs accompanying these letters is of uncertain date. In later life Combs resided in West Dummerston, Vermont.