Civil War Regiments

The regiment was the essential “building block” of Civil War armies. Assigned by states, most volunteer regiments were organized based on soldiers’ home residence and reflective of those local communities. Each branch of the army—infantry, artillery, and cavalry—formed into regiments with varying numbers of companies and overall strength. There were regular army regiments and units specially designated for African American troops. As the war dragged on, regimental strengths diminished dramatically. The Confederate Army tried to refill older units with conscripts and new recruits, while the Union created new regiments to replace depleted ones and later consolidated smaller ones. Neither side was entirely successful in restoring regiments to full authorized strength. Nonetheless, the regiment was more than a mode of organization—it was the prime source of identity and pride for volunteers and later veterans. While armies, divisions, and brigades were crucial to winning battles, and companies forged tight bonds of loyalty, it was the regiment to which most soldiers claimed a personal allegiance. Famed regiments like the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment, the 1st Texas Infantry Regiment, and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment cited their battle honors and high casualty numbers as proof of their fighting prowess. After the war ended, veterans produced hundreds of regimental histories, recounting their battle service and seeking to claim a place in history. Although many historians dismiss these accounts as worthless for serious scholarly research, regimental histories offer rich firsthand accounts of the conflict. They also offer a vehicle for narrating the war in a form well familiar to the soldiers who experienced it.

The Kentucky Campaign of 1862 and Drought

In the late summer and early autumn of 1862, Gen. Braxton Bragg’s Kentucky Campaign failed to regain Tennessee or add Kentucky to the Confederacy. Starting in Mississippi, Bragg’s Confederate army had first entered Tennessee. After Maj. Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith’s smaller Confederate army invaded Kentucky, Bragg followed. Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s Federal army trailed Bragg north before diverting to Louisville. Summer heat and a massive drought made campaigning onerous, while supporting Confederate actions in northeastern Mississippi failed to divert troops from Bragg’s path. Bragg won a confused tactical victory at Perryville, but his outnumbered army retreated to Tennessee along with Kirby Smith. Throughout the campaign, enslaved Kentuckians seeking emancipation sought protection from Union forces. On the fringes, a brutal guerrilla war flared up. Bragg’s ultimate failure secured Union control of Kentucky for the remainder of the war.

The Maryland CampaignCarnage and Emancipation

The September 1862 Maryland Campaign resulted in three highly significant events: the largest surrender of Union soldiers in the war, at Harpers Ferry on September 15; the bloodiest single day of the war, on September 17 at Antietam; and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln on September 22. Logistics played a prominent role in the conduct of the campaign, limiting the speed of the Union advance across Maryland and causing massive straggling in the Confederate Army from logistical failures. The ferocity of the Battle of Antietam and its massive carnage shocked soldiers of previous campaigns, and the operations of the two armies and resulting fighting dislocated civilians and caused significant damage to property. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation changed the war from one to preserve the Union to also include the destruction of slavery. Despite the carnage of the campaign, it strengthened rather than diminished the determination of both North and South to continue the war.

The Chancellorsville Campaign

The Chancellorsville Campaign of early May 1863 was one of the most strategic military operations in any theater of the American Civil War. Union Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker and his powerful Army of the Potomac were miraculously defeated by the outnumbered Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under the leadership of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. In a daring flank march and attack, the Rebels crushed the federal Eleventh Corps on May 2 and over the next several days hammered the rest of Hooker’s army back across the Rappahannock River. Northern morale sank, Copperheads gained momentum, and German Americans, feeling the sting of nativism, began to question their role in the Union. The initiative in the East once again passed to the South, creating conditions for what became the Pennsylvania Campaign. But Jackson, wounded accidentally by his own men, died, destroying the fragile command team Lee had carefully built over the previous year. His loss was a turning point in the war.

My Dear Susie, the Bullets Began to Scream

As his wife, Susie, followed the news from Collinsville, Illinois, Kelso marched in the 1862 campaign led by General Samuel Curtis’s 12,000-man Army of the Southwest, chasing the Confederate army out of Missouri and into Arkansas. After the Union victory at the Battle of Pea Ridge, Kelso joined the 14th Missouri State Cavalry as a first lieutenant. His first major battle with that regiment was an embarrassing defeat at the Battle of Neosho. Kelso’s account of the battle is vastly different from that of his bumbling colonel, John M. Richardson. Throughout, he wrote letters to Susie, hoping she would admire his courage and sacrifice and fearing that she was being seduced by a former friend.

An Ardent Desire to Participate in the Capture of Vicksburg

The Mississippi Squadron, under David D. Porter, played an important supporting role in the Vicksburg operations conducted by Grant. The war ships protected the civilian steamers that funnelled supplies and reinforcements to the Army of the Tennessee, enabling Grant to maintain his position. Porter also bombarded the Confederate river batteries along the east side of the Mississippi north and south of Vicksburg to support the attack of May 22, and his mortar boats bombarded Vicksburg itself during this time. The bombing of the city produced civilian casualties as well as wrecked private houses and buildings used by the Confederate army. Porter also supported a brigade from John McArthur’s Seventeenth Corps division which advanced along the east bank of the Mississippi toward South Fort, a Confederate earthwork anchoring the southern end of Samuel H. Lockett’s defence line. That brigade, however, was ordered east to help McClernand before it could launch an attack on South Fort. The Federals literally had Vicksburg surrounded with warships in the Mississippi north and south of the city and Union infantry occupying De Soto Point west of town. Grant had the option to starve Pemberton out of the city now that storming the defences had played out.

Being a Father and a Soldier in the Civil War, 1861–1865

The fifth chapter depicts the conflicting demands addressed to young men as family fathers on the one hand and as citizen-soldiers on the other hand. It discusses the Civil War and its effects on fathers, mothers, and family life through close readings of the diary and letters of Confederate soldier John C. West, who saw himself as fighting this war for his family and his country. While West was scared to death by the bloody battles and the fierce fighting of the Civil War, he nevertheless romanticized the war as a struggle for southern family life and patriarchal masculinity in his diary and letters. He portrayed his service in the Confederate Army as fulfilment of his masculinity in the name of white womanhood, southern culture, and family life, a message he sought to send to his wife and, in particular, to his four-year-old son back home.

Epilogue

George and Serena Croghan’s son, St. George Croghan, inherited Locust Grove and moved from New York with his young family in hopes of farming the estate. He failed, and after mortgaging the place, returned to New York to spend years litigating his wife’s inheritance. With no means of support, he joined the Confederate Army in 1861 and was killed that November. The Croghan homestead was rented, then sold, and today stands as a National Historic Landmark museum open to the public. The enslaved Croghan workforce was freed in 1856 by the terms of Dr. Croghan’s will, and although Stephen Bishop and the slave guides eventually opened a hotel for black tourists who visited Mammoth Cave, the farm’s enslaved people moved to the city and disappeared from the history of the place where most of them had been born.

Introduction

The introduction begins by discussing Edmund Ruffin, a pro-secession Virginian who published Anticipations of the Future, to Serve as Lessons for the Present Time, a novel in which the South secedes and maintains the institution of slavery and even spreads it to states sick of aggressive New England abolitionists. Ruffin accurately predicted that the south would use its enslaved population to sustain the war effort while remaining subservient to the white population. He did not imagine African Americans fighting alongside whites as soldiers. Despite Ruffin’s and other Confederates’ aversion to allowing African Americans to enlist in the army, claims that racially integrated units existed in the confederate army are widespread. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) was the first organization, beginning in the late 1970s, to insist there were black Confederate soldiers. They hoped this narrative would negate any claims that the south fought to preserve slavery. In reality, most black people directly involved with the Confederate army were camp slaves or were forced to perform labor to keep the military running.