Civil War Regiments

When it became obvious that Civil War was imminent in the United States in 1861, regiments of soldiers began organizing both in the Union and in the individual states as they seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy.

Henry Steele Commager has written that:

The Union and Confederate armies were haphazardly raised, badly organized, poorly trained, inadequately fed, clothed and housed, and almost wholly without comforts, sports, entertainments or proper medical care. Whether a regiment was well or badly trained, disciplined, and cared for depended largely on its officers, and to some extent on the initiative and enterprise of the men themselves.

Commager’s words, while possibly surprising to some, are nonetheless true. The result of the chaotic organization of regimental units both in the fomenting Confederacy and in the nominally established U.S. Army is that very few records exist of these regiments.

This catch-as-catch-can formation of regiments both North and South means that it is impossible to known even the number of individual regiments that formed during the Civil War. It is estimated that 2,047 Union regiments existed during the Civil War; 1,696 of these were infantry, 272 cavalry, and 78 were artillery. As for the Confederacy, records of their regimental units are even more scarce; a number of between 764 and 1009 Confederate regiments has been suggested, the disparity between the two numbers indicative of the paucity of information about these units available.

Histories of individual regiments both Union and Confederate have been compiled, but there are far more regiments unaccounted for than regiments known. It is no surprise that most of these existent histories concern Union regiments; while the records kept by the U.S. Army were far from complete or exhaustive, the better-staffed and better-equipped Union army kept more records than the germinating and thus disorganized Confederacy. In fact, most of the histories of regimental units of the Confederacy were written from recollection by veterans in the years after the war, typically in the form of memoirs rather than regimental histories.

However, regimental histories do exist, and if you are interested in reading more about Civil War regiments, then check out these books available at the Civil War Shop:

• Through Blood and Fire at Gettysburg - Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Author’s experiences with the 20th Maine Regiment.
• Co. Aytch - Samuel Watkins. Watkins’ recollections of his Confederate regiment.
• Rebel Private Front and Rear:Memoirs of a Confederate Soldier - William A. Fletcher. Fletcher’s memoir of his time as a Rebel soldier.
• Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War - Stephen V. Ash. Details the history of two black regiments.