When Henry Stokes Figures (1841/2-1864) wrote the accompanying letter to his father, he was a young salesman living in Montgomery, Alabama — then the capital of the newly formed Confederate States of America. Figures' family home was in Huntsville in Madison County, in the hill country of northeast Alabama; he was the son of William B. Figures, then editor of the Huntsville Southern Advocate. One month after the letter was written, on 10 June 1861, Figures enlisted in the Confederate army. He served as private and sergeant in Company F of the 4th Alabama Infantry (the "Huntsville Guards") before being named adjutant, with a rank of 1st lieutenant, of the 48th Alabama (May 1863). He was killed at the Wilderness on the evening of 6 May 1864. Robert T. Coles, who served with Figures in Company F and later wrote a history of the 4th Alabama, recalled him as "a gallant soldier and esteemed friend, a youth of decided military talent" (Jeffrey D. Stocker, ed., From Huntsville to Appomattox, p. 166).

From the opening session of the convention of seceded states (4 February 1861) to the Congressional vote to remove the capital to Richmond (20 May), Montgomery was the epicenter of secessionism. The capital's two hotels were overrun by arriving politicians, soldiers, newspaper reporters, and office seekers. Confederate rhetoric likened the place, and the events transpiring there, to 1776 Philadelphia, and an earlier revolution. By the time of Figures' letter, 9 May, the apparatus of government was in place; the great task at hand was to place the new polity on a wartime footing.

Of the more notable figures mentioned in the letter, Colonel Davis is of course Jefferson Davis. P. G. T. Beauregard was at the time a newly minted military hero, the Confederacy's first, having commanded the batteries that forced Fort Sumter to capitulate on 13 April. William Howard Russell was a journalist for the London Times, who had established a reputation as a "war correspondent" during the Crimean War. As one with the potential to enhance the Confederacy's credibility in Britain, he was much courted in Montgomery.