This dissertation explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly-raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Period observers and historians have typically regarded such later arrivals as substandard to the “Boys of ‘61” who enlisted at the war’s start. Tapping the methods of social and traditional military history, this work is among the first to assess the record of these soldiers under fire. It does so by tracing the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments, starting with their formation and continuing with their service throughout the Overland and Petersburg Campaigns (May 1864 – April 1865). Both outfits fought in the Army of the Potomac, the Union’s largest field army, in which only half of whose veterans reenlisted on the expiration of their original three-year terms. The 17th and 31st maintained moderate to high levels of unit cohesion, showed determination to accomplish battlefield objectives, and sustained heavy casualties in the process. This project justifies a reappraisal of the later arrivals, a population of approximately 820,000 white men who donned the uniform between 1863 and 1865. These forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy. / History

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / The 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment is one of the most famous regiments of the Civil War through its membership in the Iron Brigade of the Union Army of the Potomac. This brigade has been hailed as an elite unit of the Civil War. This thesis is a regimental history which critically examines the socio-economic profile of the 19th Indiana and the combat record of the Iron Brigade. This thesis finds that the 19th Indiana is largely reflective of the rest of the Union Army in terms of its socio-economic profile. Also, the combat record of the brigade was not overly successful and not necessarily deserving of being singled out from among the hundreds of other brigades in the Civil War.

Of the roughly 3,500 volunteer regiments and batteries organized by the Union army during the American Civil War, only a small fraction has been studied in any scholarly depth. Among those not yet examined by historians was one that typified the western armies commanded by the two greatest Federal generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. The Forty-fifth Illinois Volunteer Infantry was at Fort Donelson and Shiloh with Grant in 1862, with Grant and Sherman during the long Vicksburg campaign of 1862 and 1863, and with Sherman in the Meridian, Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolinas campaigns in the second half of the war. These Illinois men fought in several of the most important engagements in the western theater of the war and, in the spring of 1865, were present when the last important Confederate army in the east surrendered. The Forty-fifth was also well connected in western politics. Its unofficial name was the “Washburne Lead Mine Regiment,” in honor of U.S Representative Elihu B. Washburne, who used his contacts and influences to arm the regiment with the best weapons and equipment available early in the war. (The Lead Mine designation referred to the mining industry in northern Illinois.) In addition, several officers and enlisted men were personal friends and acquaintances of Ulysses Grant of Galena, Illinois, who honored the regiment for their bravery in the final attempt to break through the Confederate defenses at Vicksburg. The study of the Forty-fifth Illinois is important to the overall study of the Civil War because of the campaigns and battles the unit participated and fought in. The regiment was also one of the many Union regiments at the forefront of the Union leadership’s changing policy toward the Confederate populace and war making industry. In this role the regiment witnessed the impact of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Of interest then, are the members’ views on the freeing of the slaves. Also of interest are their views on the arming of the slaves into black regiments, and on the Copperhead, anti-war movement in the Union. With ample sources on the regiment, and with no formal history of the unit having been written or published, a scholarly, modern study of the Lead Mine regiment therefore seems in order, as it would provide further insight into the Civil War from the Union soldiers’ perspective and into the sacrifices the men made in order to preserve their country.

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