A collection of US civil war artefacts belonging to combatant Isaac Plumb has performed superbly at auction in New York.
The collection, which included three swords, 185 letters and his cardboard wallet, sold for $46,000, up 206.6% on its $15,000 estimate, at the October 2 sale.
 Plumb recounts the horror of the US civil war |
It is the harrowing yet fascinating content of the letters that helped push the collection to its considerable total.
"You need not make much calculations on ever seeing my face at those Sunday dinners again," wrote Plumb in a June 1862 letter to a friend, during the early stages of the war.
Plumb, a captain of the US 61st New York Infantry, also recounted his experiences at some of the conflict's bloodiest battles, including Antietam and Gettysburg, where his life was saved from a musket shot by two keys and a silver pencil in his pocket.
"If we had remained in the fight a short time longer there would have been none of us left," he wrote of Gettysburg, where 65 of his regiment's 100 men lost their lives.
The items were bequeathed to the consigner by Plumb's niece.
Plumb did not survive the war. He died in July 1864 from wounds received a month earlier at Cold Harbor.
A first edition of the Constitution of the State of New-York, printed in 1777, also performed well at the sale.
The first such example to appear at auction since 1944, it matched its high estimate with a $15,000 showing.
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