1860 failed Virginia poet's manuscript compiled before joining the Confederate Army

Occasional Pieces Written by Dan. J. Evans of Virginia. 5 leaves, 8 x 6.5 inches, with illustrated cover. 8 manuscript pages of verse with a little explanatory prose noting the date, location, and sometimes circumstances of each piece. Residual creasing from being folded into thirds with half-inch split to the lower right folds; small chip and pinhole losses to first leaf; about Very Good (the condition, not the poetry, which is pretty awful).

Four pieces: “Spring,” “Acrostic,” “A Dedication,” and the 4-page “Sleighing in Spring,” a romantic narrative that takes a detour into dialect during a brief exchange between a young woman (the object of the narrator’s affection) and her “servant.” The manuscript was compiled before the author enlisted as a Confederate soldier, the pieces identified as written between 1857-1860 while the man was a teacher (“Bug School House” and New Concord are named).

Several individuals are named: "Sleighing in Spring" was written about a Mr. John Williams of Appomattox, and the “rose bud of his affection,” Miss M. Sue. Hunter—presumed to be Martha Susan Hunter (b.1842), daughter of Washington Lafayette Hunter, who enslaved three men and one woman according to Appomattox County Historical Society records of "The Burned Years." It follows that one of these individuals would be the "servant" in the poem's dialogue interlude: "Miss Sue, man gwine long lane in slay... Comen dis wa, wia har long like my arm...:

The poem's postscript notes: "The above lines were composed by me in the month of March 1858 as I was going home (at that time at S.W.A. Booth’s) to the residence of Mrs. Elizabeth Sorrenci on Naked Creek, Campbell County Virginia. Dan. J. Evans, 1860." Laura Doss is also mentiones, the golden-haired subject with a "swan-like neck of snow" for whom he proudly composed the acrostic.

Evans enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861. After the war, he returned to work as a school teacher in Campbell Co. He married sixteen-year-old studen Lillian Franklin in 1871 and had 3 children. He has no publication credits we could find. His military record reads: "2nd Lt., Btry. A, 20th Va. Heavy Arty, Bn. from March 27, 1682: (Appomattox Invincible Btry., Va. Heavy Arty., to June 21, 1862). "Acting A.Q.M. & A.C.S." Captured at Amelia Springs, Va., April 5, 1865; to D.C.; to Johnson's Island, Ohio; released there June 18, 1865; 1st Sgt., Co. A, 44th Va. Inf. Reg., May 5, 1861; "Sick in Charlottesville (Va.) Hosp. (typhoid fever)" Oct. 20-Dec. 10, 1861; present to 2nd Lt.; co. organized as btry; Major, 117th Reg., Va. Militia from Concord Depot, Campbell Co., Va."