The primary authors of this correspondence, William Lafayette Barrier (29 April 1834-17 May 1864) and his brother Rufus Alexander Barrier (28 June 1836-8 April 1876), were born in Cabarrus County in the North Carolina Piedmont, the sons of Mathias Barrier and Margaret Mitchel (m. 1828). Mathias Barrier (1803-1873) was a prominent local planter and civic leader, whose two-story Greek Revival residence in Mt. Pleasant (1853) still stands. He was a deacon at St. Stephen's Evangelical Lutheran Church and a trustee of North Carolina College, built in Mt Pleasant in the 1850s on land deeded by Barrier to the North Carolina Evangelical Lutheran Synod. The 1860 Federal Census values his real estate at $2640 and his personal estate at $7500. He held 11 slaves. The older of Matthias Barrier's two sons, William Lafayette, is identified in the 1860 Census as a dentist, living unmarried in Mt. Pleasant. In June 1861 he enlisted in the army, and was mustered in to Confederate service as a sergeant in Co. F, 1st North Carolina Cavalry. This was one of the storied Confederate cavalry regiments of the war, veterans of some 160 engagements, attached mainly to the Cavalry Division (later Cavalry Corps) of the Army of Northern Virginia. Barrier received a saber wound to the head on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg (3 July 1863), and was reduced in rank to private shortly thereafter, for reasons that are not clear. He was shot in the arm at the Wilderness (6 May 1864), and died following surgery at Seabrook's Hospital in Richmond, 17 May 1864. The younger of Mathias's sons, Rufus Alexander Barrier, is identifed in the 1860 Census as a farmer, with real estate valued at $1400 and a personal estate of $774. With the advent of war he raised a company of men from Cabarrus and was mustered in to Confederate service on 13 September 1861, as captain of Co. H, 8th North Carolina Infantry. (Many students from North Carolina College were members of Barrier's company). On 8 February 1862 the entire regiment was captured at the battle of Roanoke Island; Barrier was paroled on 21 February and exchanged in August 1862. Until the spring of 1864 the 8th North Carolina, attached to Clingman's Brigade, served mainly in the Carolinas, and avoided large-scale engagements. But it was decimated in a sequence of battles spanning little more than a month, at Plymouth (17-20 April 1864), Drewry's Bluff (16 May), and Cold Harbor (1-3 June). Barrier had been transferred to regimental Field & Staff and promoted to major on 1 February 1864; after Cold Harbor he was given command of the regiment, as lieutenant colonel. He remained in command until the close of the war, though he suffered a gunshot wound to the left eye on 22 Aug 1864, and was away from the regiment until October. After the war Barrier returned to his farm at Mt.Pleasant, and married Roxanna Anthony (1845-1905). He died on 8 April 1876.