Army Service in the Civil War: An Overview - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

Subtitles section Play video

John Deeben: Okay, it’s after 11:00 so I guess we’ll get started. Good morning and welcome to the National Archives.
I’m glad the rain didn’t keep everybody away. I was a little worried about that.
When I came in this morning it was pouring buckets. This morning’s talk is part of our Beyond the Basics lecture
series where we take some basic records that we generally deal with in our Introduction to Genealogy lecture
that we give every month and we go into a little more detail. I’m John Deeben.
I’m one of the genealogy specialists in the Research Support Branch here at Archives I.
So I guess we’ll get started. We’re going to give an overview of army service in both the Confederate and Union forces during the Civil War.
One of the things that I want to point our first – I’m going to turn the lights down a little bit further. Is that okay for the camera back there?
Okay, then we’ll leave it on. Can everybody see the screen okay?
I wanted to point out the two major record groups that we’re going to be dealing with.
All of the records that relate to soldiers in the Civil War are going to come out of two basic record groups.
Record Group 94 for Union soldiers, which are the records of the Adjunct General’s Office.
The Adjunct General of the U.S. army was basically the chief record keeper of the army at that time,
so all of the records relating to the service of these soldiers eventually came to his office.
And then for Confederate soldiers the main record group that we’re dealing with is Record Group 109,
the War Department collection of Confederate records. These are basically the records that
survived the war, whether they were captured or surrendered during the course of the war or at the end.
Then they were turned over to the War Department by the U.S. army and the War Department organized them.
They actually had a division within the War Department called the Rebel Archives, and they put these
records there and arranged them for publication. So that arrangement is still how the records are used today.
There are basically two types of service that we’re going to be talking about that pertain to the Civil War.
The first type of service is the volunteer soldiers. This is always what has been characteristic of the United States army,
the citizen soldiers. These are the men who were called up for service during a war or a time of national crisis.
They were enlisted, recruited, and they fought during the course of the war. And then at the end of the war their units were disbanded and they went home.
That’s basically what distinguishes their service from the regular army. And the War Department documented their services in specific ways.
The basic type of record that we have for volunteer soldiers during the Civil War is the compiled military service records.
And the thing to know about these records is that they’re not contemporary to the war itself.
These records were created by the War Department decades later in the 1890’s. And the basic premise was that they wanted to create a consolidated
source of information to document veteran service during the war to facilitate the pension application process for pensions for these soldiers.
So they created these compiled service records. What they did was they created a series of cards,
and then they looked at all of the available records from the war itself that still existed –
– the muster rolls, regimental book records, all of these things that we’re going to be talking about in a little bit –
and they would comb through these records and record every piece of information that related to an individual soldier on a card.
And that card was stamped with the soldier’s unit, his company, and every specific piece of information was recorded on a card.
And this is how they created the compiled service record for every individual solider.
They started doing this for Union soldiers during the war. The idea became so popular that they eventually
went back and started creating these compiled service records for other wars, as well.
So now what we have today here at the Archives are compiled service records for volunteer
soldiers from the Revolutionary War all the way up to the Philippine Insurrection, which ended in 1902.
So any volunteer solider who served in a specific war during that whole timeframe, will have a compiled service record for that individual.
The compiled service records for Union soldiers, as I said, are in Record Group 94.
This is the basic series that the records are located in, Entry 519 in RG 94.
These are the carded records of volunteer organizations for the Civil War, and again these are just the Union ones.
They’re arranged generally by state and then by arm of service – whether it’s infantry, cavalry, or artillery.
Then by the numerical designation of the unit, and then by the individual cards
in the jackets are arranged alphabetically by the soldier’s name within the unit itself.
We have compiled service records for every major northern state that contributed troops to the Civil War,
but these are only available in textual form currently. We do have available microfilm records for Union soldiers,
also soldiers that were raised in the Border States – Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and sometimes Delaware is also considered a border state
because it was a slave state during the war. Also the District of Columbia is considered on the border.
So these are available on microfilm. And also Union soldiers that were raised from the western states and territories –
California, Territory of New Mexico, things like that. And also we have compiled service records of Union soldiers
who were raised from the southern states. Most people don’t realize this, but we do have records of Union
soldiers who served from every major southern state except South Carolina during the war.
Of course these regiments were not raised by the state governments in the south. They were recruited by the
Union army as it moved down through the territory and reoccupied different states.
They did their own recruiting and did raise at least a handful of regiments from every state throughout the south except South Carolina.
Those compiled service records are also available on microfilm. If you look at the green handouts that you got –
the one on the top says the microfilm compiled service records – this will give you the
microfilm publication number for all of the indexes and individual publications from every state for both Union and Confederate compiled service records.
So you’ll want to keep that handy as you’re doing your research. And there are separate indexes for each state as well for the Union service records.
I took a little example of what a compiled service record looks like just in case you haven’t seen one before.
The first image here is the jacket that the records are kept in. The basic information that the jacket will always
show you is the soldier’s name at the top, it will give you his unit and company designation, and it will
show the rank he held when he went into service and the rank he held when he came out of service.
So in this case, this is a service record for John W. McLane who was the colonel of the 83rd Pennsylvania.
That’s why the company up here is designated as F&S, which stands for field and staff.
The two cards here are just two examples of the cards that are located in the jacket.
These show specific information that was gleaned from two different records pertaining to John McLane during the war.
The middle one shows information take from a field and staff muster roll from May and June of 1862.
And the third card over here shows the muster out roll for the regiment that was taken in September 20th, 1864
when the regiment was mustered out of service, just before it was reenlisted as a veteran volunteer regiment.
Both of those muster rolls show that John W. McLane was actually killed at the Battle of Gaines’s Mill during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862.
The reason he shows up on the 1864 muster roll is because this is a muster out roll and it includes a complete
listing of every individual that was associated with that regiment during the course of its existence.
So even though he died two years previously he was listed as the first colonel of the regiment there.
And you’ll also notice there can be some discrepancies in the records. This record notes the battle as
the Battle of Chickahominy and this one notes it as the Battle of Gaines’s Mill. Most people generally know the battle as the
Battle of Gaines’s Mill during the Peninsula Campaign, but sometimes you can find little idiosyncrasies like that throughout the records. Yes sir?
Audience Member: When did they begin to produce these records?
John Deeben: Beginning in the 1890’s. Like I said, they used available muster rolls that were kept during the war.
They used regimental book records, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. They gleaned through hospital
records that were kept at the time, prisoner of war records. We have all of those.
Everything that they used to create these compiled service records, we have in this building.
In addition to the state regiments that were raised during the war, the volunteers, there was also a variety
of what they called U.S. volunteer regiments that were raised directly by the federal government.
They were not associated with anyone in a particular state. They were recruited across state lines.
The most famous of those, of course, are the U.S. colored troops. Originally recruited in 1863 as a handful of state
regiments, the most famous of which was the 54th Massachusetts, and then they took on the U.S.C.T. designation.
But we have the compiled military service records for the U.S.C.T. troops. These are in the process of being microfilmed.
At least for the infantry regiments, there were some 138 regiments that were recruited during the war.
And so far they are only partially microfilmed. But what we currently have available on microfilm in addition to the index –
so all of the service records which are available in publication M589. We have all of the cavalry units on microfilm
in publication M1817, all of the artillery units in M1818, and we currently have the 1st through the 55th U.S.C.T. infantry on microfilm.
And each individual publication is listed on the green handout to show you which publication has which regiments.
And then we also have the 55th and the 54th Massachusetts, which are reproduced
on their own microfilm publications as well in M1898 and M1801.
There are other U.S. volunteer regiments that were also raised. There’s one general index that covers all the
different types of units and organizations which is M1290, but the actual service records for these units are not microfilmed.
So they’re only available in textual form. But you see from the list here that it’s a pretty eclectic group.
Some of these you’ve probably come across before. Most people are familiar with the U.S. Sharp Shooters, generally known as Berdan Sharp Shooters.
These are the guys in the green uniforms that most people are generally familiar with. Signal Corps, Pioneer Corps, Indian Home Guards.
These two on the bottom here, the Mississippi Marine Brigade and the Mississippi Flotilla –
even though these sound like they should be naval units they’re actually not.
These were army units that were recruited to serve on the river in conjunction with the navy, but they’re actually army units.
We have compiled service records for individuals who served in all of these types of organizations as well.
In addition we also have compiled service records for the Galvanized Yankees, which were
formally known as the 1st through the 6th U.S. Volunteer Regiments. These were the captured Confederates
who volunteered to serve in the Union army during the war. Rather than send them back into the field to fight
against their former comrades, the Galvanized Yankees were sent out west to fight the Indians in 1864 and 1865.
Again, their service records are covered in M1290. But for the Galvanized Yankees, their specific service records are available on microfilm.
They have been filmed in publication M1017. And we also have records for individuals who were assigned to the Veteran Reserve Corps.
This was originally referred to as the Invalid Corps. These were the men who were slightly wounded,
but they were not so disabled that they could not provide some type of service so they were enlisted into the Veteran Reserve Corps.
Mostly they did general garrison duty; they didn’t do active combat fighting. Mostly fort and garrison duty. We have a microfilm
publication that indexes those records in M636, but again the compiled service records for the VRC are only available in textual form.
In addition to the Union we also have compiled service records for the Confederate soldiers.
These records were created by the War Department starting in 1903. And then for the next 24 years they
worked to create these compiled service records for the Confederates as well. And these are available
in Record Group 109 in the series “Carded” Records Showing Military Service Entry 193.
They’re arranged identically to the Union compiled service records: by state, then by type of service, by unit,
and then alphabetically by soldier’s name. The difference here is that all of the Confederate service records
have currently been microfilmed, so everything’s available on film. And again the individual publications are listed on the green handout.
There are also separate state indexes for each southern state that supplied Confederate soldiers as well as a
consolidated index for pretty much everything. And again those are all listed on the green handout as well.
In addition to the microfilm indexes that we have available, I wanted to mention two different indexes that are
available online because these can also be useful. The first you might have already heard of at some point before.
This is the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System that was created by the National Parks Service.
It’s actually based pretty much on the microfilm indexes that we have here. It contains over six million names.
And not only does it provide the basic unit information for each soldier, but it gives unit histories and battle summaries
as well that you can click on and get more information. And if you go to Ancestry.com, they have
two specific databases that you can search to find service information in their Civil War collection.
The first database is the American Civil War Soldiers, and this is a database that’s based on published soldier
rosters that were compiled at various times by different states. And then the U.S. Civil War Soldiers
database is actually based on the Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System itself. The only place that
I currently know of that you can actually look for digitized images of some of the compiled service records are on Footnote.com.
The thing to keep in mind though is that they currently only have scanned images only of the microfilm publications.
So all of the compiled service records that have not been reproduced on microfilm so far, that are only
available in textual form, are currently not available yet on Footnote. So to reiterate, what you can find are all
the Confederate records, the selected Union ones from the Border States, the western states and territories, and the southern states, and the U.S.C.T.
With one exception: they only have the publications running up through the 46th infantry.
So the most recent publication that just came out within the last year or so that goes up to the 55th U.S.C.T. is not currently on Footnote yet.
Most of the scans for the Confederate records are pretty much complete, between 99% and 100% complete.
But the Union and the U.S.C.T. scans are still in various states of completion. If you go on and look at the
actual records and click on the different data sets you’ll see percentages for how far things have been scanned.
Before we go on I wanted to show you, if you’re actually interested in looking at these databases and websites and seeing how they work.
So we’ll do that for a couple of minutes. Let me get out of here for a second.
This is going to go to look at the Soldiers and Sailors System first, and if you actually go to the park service’s main webpage on www.nps.gov –
I was not able to find a direct link to the Soldiers and Sailors System from the page.
But if you go to the search box up on top and just put in “CWSS” for Civil War Soldiers and Sailors and do a search on that,
it will bring up the same link to get you to this page. So this is what the Soldiers and Sailors System looks like.
And you can see here there are different links to search for soldiers and sailors. You can look up regiments, cemeteries, battles.
Not all of these down here are fully complete yet, but the soldiers and sailors information are.
And this is what the search page looks like. Does anybody have a specific name you’d like to search?
First name? Thomas? And you said Stafford. Union or Confederate? Do you know what state he served?
Is this the same person or is it two different persons? You see the search gives you two different options.
And when you click on the soldier’s name it gives you this information which basically comes straight off the service record jacket.
It’ll show his unit, what side he’s on, in this particular instance it doesn’t list
what company he’s in, but it shows that he was a private coming in and going out.
And it will also show you here which microfilm index the information was taken from.
And those are the indexes that we have here that I mentioned before. If you go back and click on the unit information,
this will give you an overview of the unit itself, the unit history. And then you can click on any of these highlighted
engagements and it will give you an overview of the battle itself. One other thing that might be useful that I saw here:
at the very top of the front page of the system, if you click on Researcher’s Toolbox it gives you
information on how you can request the information from the National Archives. It identifies the specific mailing forms that we have available, the NATF forms.
85 is actually for pension records, but for service records you can use NATF form 86.
And it gives you information on how you can submit the request if you want to get an actual copy from the
archives of the original service record. So that information is available at the front of the system.
Let me show you Ancestry real quick. Actually for Ancestry I want to go through our subscription that we have.
If you’re in any archives facility, we have an institutional subscription to Ancestry so you can use it for free.
But you have to be in one of our buildings using one of our public access computers. To get to it you go to the
genealogy section of the website and then down here where it says, “Within a National Archives Facility.”
Then you can click on the Ancestry link, and that will take you to the Ancestry institutional subscription that we have.
And then once you’re in Ancestry, up here in the main search box you’re going to select military.
And then if you want to get to those specific databases that I mentioned, down in the middle of the page here is a
listing of all the individual databases that are part of the U.S. Civil War collection. So here’s the American civil war soldiers.
And this time we’ll do my ancestor. I had a great great grandfather who was in the war.
His name was David Hodge, he was Union, and he served from Pennsylvania.
I happen to know just from looking before that my David Hodge is the first one listed here.
So you can highlight where it says View Record and it gives an overview of his information. Or you can click on View Record,
and it will show you again – it shows that he was listed as a corporal, his date of enlistment, and the date he was mustered out.
And then if you want to you can search for more information on the other enlisted men who were in the company that he served with from these links.
And then it gives the source information down here, where the information was taken from. Yes mam?
They have thousands and thousands of different databases that they’ve compiled from other records that we have and other
published records that are available. They might have something, yeah. And then if we go back and look at the other database here quickly.
Down at the bottom is the U.S. Civil War Soldiers. And I’m going to do David Hodge again.
And I already know that he was in the 6th Regiment. And here again it gives you pretty much the same information that you could find
in the Soldiers and Sailors System: his company, his rank, and the microfilm index that the information was taken from, M554.
Finally I want to quickly show you Footnote – what you can find on there. If you go up here and select Civil War,
this will give you all of the different collections that they currently have available related to the Civil War.
So you can go down here and select either Confederate Soldier Service Records or Union Soldier Service Records.
And then they’re arranged by state. Again I’ll just take a quick look here. And up here where I told you, it shows you the state
of completion of the scanning. And this currently shows that the Maryland Union service records are currently 20% scanned.
So they have quite a ways to go. But within each state they’re arranged by unit, and if you select a unit then they’re arranged
alphabetically by soldier’s name. And eventually it will take you to links for the actual images of the compiled service records.
And then you can select an image. And there’s the service jacket that the compiled service record is located in. Any questions about the
websites before we go on? Yeah? We’re working with several partnerships right now to do the scanning, and Footnote’s one of them.
One thing I didn’t mention before: you see where all these numbers are. A lot of people look at these numbers and they
think they lead to more records, but that’s not actually the case. This is just a record keeping technique that the War Department employed.
Each one of these numbers corresponds to a number they stamped on the back of one of the cards that are inside this jacket.
So it’s just a means for the War Department clerks to make sure that the right cards stay in the right jackets.
They don’t actually lead to other records. Yes mam? On Footnote?
We should be able to find him. Do you know what unit he was in?
This particular search is not going to be useful. To get to the actual service record you need to know that. So let’s go back to Ancestry.
What was the name again? And he served from Virginia. It looks like there are two Martin Ganders.
Does Leakesville, Page County sound familiar at all? This one shows that he was a sergeant in Company I of the 97th Virginia Militia.
For the first one. And the second one might be for the same guy, because it also references the 97th militia,
and then he went to Company C of the 39th Battalion of the Virginia Cavalry.
We might have something on him, but it might be somewhere else that we’re going to get to in a couple minutes.
In addition to the compiled service records, we also have what are referred to as personal papers for the volunteer soldiers.
Again as the War Department was creating the compiled service records and going through all these regimental records, whenever they would come
across an individual document that related to a specific soldier they would file that document with that soldier’s compiled service record.
So in the compiled service records you’ll find different types of personal papers filed in there including
the original enlistment papers, like this example that’s shown here. You can find inventory of effects.
If a soldier was killed or died during the war, the War Department usually filled out an inventory of his personal effects.
Final statements of service are in there. If he was a casualty, sometimes the War Department filled out a casualty sheet.
You might find those in there. Yes? Probably not naturalization, because that wouldn’t pertain specifically to his military service during the war itself.
But if he was in a hospital there might be a hospital record in there that was filled out.
Something of that nature. So you might find these filed with the compiled service records.
Now this record some of you might have already seen before. This past spring did any of you get to watch that T.V. show
“Who do You Think You Are?” Did anyone see that show? Anybody remember seeing this document on that program?
This is the inventory effects for Private Robert Martindale. This was the great great grandfather of Mathew Broderick.
When they did the episode on his ancestry they featured this document from his compiled service record,
so I thought it would be neat to show it again. But anyway, this is what a particular inventory of effects would look like.
It gives the information about his service; it shows that Robert Martindale – information about his death –
it shows that he died on the skirmish line in front of Atlanta during the Battle of Atlanta by reason of a musket ball through the head.
In this particular instance, though, it doesn’t list any of his personal belongings that he had on him, which I find a little unusual.
Even though he was out on the picket line he still would have had his military catchments with him. I would have thought that they
would have listed that, but for whatever reason the clerks didn’t. But this is what the typical document would look like.
We also have personal papers for Confederate soldiers. For obvious reasons they’re not as prevalent as
they are for the Union because a lot of them didn’t survive the war. But if you come across a compiled service record and they’re not specifically filed
there in the service records, we have another series called Unfiled Papers and Slips Belonging to Confederate Compiled Service Records.
And this is available on microfilm in publication M347. This was intended by the War Department to be a catch-all
series because they ended up coming across documents that they didn’t know what to do with.
They either found a record that didn’t correlate to an established service record and they didn’t have enough other corroborating information
to create a service record for that individual, or some of the records actually relate to civilian service in the Confederate army like teamsters.
Things like that. So if you’re going through and looking at compiled service records and you don’t
find any personal papers, you might want to at least take a look here and see if something shows up.
We also have what they call a Record of Events or, sometimes, Troop Movements.
As I said, this carded record system apparently became very popular within the War Department.
So in addition to creating the compiled service records for individual soldiers, they created carded histories for the regiments as well.
And they went about it the same way as they did for the service records. They went through all of the existing records for a particular regiment –
especially the muster rolls – and then they created a series of carded records that documented the
activities for that individual regiment month-by-month and company-by-company.
So you can actually trace it on a month-by-month basis. What this company did, where that company was
temporarily assigned, if they were in specific skirmishes, or things like that. These record of events cards were originally
filed along with the compiled service records for each regiment, but when the archives decided to microfilm them
separately they were separated out into their own series. So these are available on microfilm.
The Union carded record of events are in M594. And again they’re arranged similar to
what the service records are for the soldiers: by state and then by type of unit.
And then we have a separate series for Confederate record of events or troop movements in publication M861.
But as I said, these are not as complete as they are for the Union because a lot of the regimental records did not survive.
But they’re basically arranged the same way. And if you’re familiar with the OR – the official records of the
war of the rebellion, these are the published records of the war that were produced
by the War Department in the late 19th century – there was a supplement to that which was published in the 90’s.
And these provide complete transcripts for both the Union and Confederate record of event cards. So you can find them in published
form here in Janet Hewett’s supplement to the OR, or you can find them individually in the microfilm publications.
Now as I said before, the compiled service records were based on the original records that were kept during the war itself.
And we have those records. Specifically we have the muster rolls available. The Union rolls are available in RG94 in Entry 57.
You can see the rolls for the Civil War are kind of consolidated with a bunch of other wars, so it’s one huge series.
But they are available. We also have medical records that you can look at. And again these are carded medical records with the exact same
principle as for the service records, but they were specifically created to document medical information for the volunteer soldiers.
Those are available in this series, “Carded Medical Records, Volunteers: Mexican and Civil Wars,” Entry 534.
And this is an example of what the carded medical records look like. As I said they’re virtually identical to the compiled service records.
This is another one of my ancestors, Michael Jacobs, who was a great great uncle. And the first two cards show that
he spent some time in a military hospital convalescing. Up here it shows you that he was in here for incipient amaurosis.
Anyone know what that is? I don’t know what causes it, but basically it’s temporary loss of eyesight.
So he developed blurred vision for whatever reason. Probably sleeping out at night on the damp ground, I don’t know what causes it.
He spent some time in the military hospital convalescing for that. This card here shows that he was admitted on March 1st, 1863.
And then on April 3rd he was transferred to a general hospital. Both of these hospitals were located in Philadelphia.
So the middle card shows him being admitted to that general hospital on 16th and Filbert Streets in Philadelphia.
And then he was finally returned to duty on April 23rd of 1863. The last card here shows when
he was wounded in battle during the Battle of New Hope Church during the Atlanta Campaign.
So this information was taken from a list of casualties for the regiment. It shows that he was wounded din the leg on May 25th, 1864.
And then down here at the bottom, I want to point out, is a reference to the original record that that information was taken from.
And just to reinforce the point that these cards were created by referencing the original records,
here’s that originally casualty list that they information was taken from. And here is where Michael Jacobs was listed,
showing that he was wounded in the leg on May 25th in Dallas, Georgia. And on the reverse side up here is that list
number that was referenced on the carded record. Casualty List 8638, that’s where they got that from.
I’m not going to talk extensively about the casualty lists, but these are also available in Record Group 94 and they’re arranged by regiment.
We have muster rolls for the Confederate army as well in two different series: “Muster and Pay Rolls” in Entry 18 and
“Miscellaneous Rolls for Detailed Men” in Entry 19. They’re arranged pretty much similarly to the Union ones,
but again they’re not as prevalent in nature as the Union records. And then we also have their regimental book records
that were created during the war. These are the records that the regiments kept while they were operating actively in the field.
There are a lot of different types of regimental book records that were kept. There were morning reports, order books, and things of that nature.
But the ones we’re mostly interested in are the ones they referred to as descriptive books. And these are available for
volunteer organizations in RG94 Entry 114, again arranged by state and then by type of service: infantry, cavalry, or artillery, and then by unit.
And here you can find specific information about the individuals who served in that regiment.
Sometimes they’ll have lists of officers, they’ll have lists of dead and wounded for each company that were compiled during the war,
and then they’ll have individual descriptions of each member. This is an example from the 46th Pennsylvania, Michael Jacobs’s unit.
But I’m actually showing you a different person here. We’re going to be taking a look at number 76 here, Amos Wenrick.
A typical entry in a descriptive book will show you his age when he enlisted (he was 19), it will give you a little bit of a physical description
(it shows that he was 5’6”, he had a ruddy complexion, brown eyes, and sandy-colored hair), he was originally from Dolphin County, Pennsylvania;
he was a farmer by trade. Most of these entries cover two pages, so this is page one.
If you go to the next page it will show you the date that he enlisted (September 2nd, 1861 in Harrisburg),
it will give you the recruiting officer’s name, and his term of service (which was for three years).
And then in the remarks section here it will give you any incidental information about the soldier. Yes mam?
They were probably compiled by the regimental adjutant. As I mentioned before, the adjutant general
was the chief record-keeper of the army, and each regiment had their own adjutant as well.
He was part of the regimental staff, so during combat he would have been with the regiment but otherwise he was responsible for keeping the
records while they were in camp. And they carted the records around in the regimental wagons, as well. So they kept them in the field.
So he made a notation here showing that Amos Wenrick drowned in the lock of dam number 6 on the Potomac River while
on picket duty on the night of January 31st, 1862. Sometimes you’ll find little interesting tidbits of information.
Wenrick must have made some kind of impression on his comrades in the company, because the adjutant wrote here that,
“He fell in the line of duty, a mild, inoffensive boy. Always ready and willing, intelligent and pious, in fact a model soldier.
Long will his memory be cherished.” You don’t normally find something like that, but it’s nice when you do come across it in the records.
Okay, so that basically covers service relating to the volunteers. The other component of that during the Civil War
was service in the regular army. And this was the standing army that served during peacetime and during war.
At the beginning of the Civil War, the peacetime army was very small: about 16,000 men.
But still it served to form the core of the Union forces during the war. Because these men were regular
soldiers their service was documented differently by the War Department. The War Department did maintain a
series of registers of enlistment for the regular army units and soldiers who were recruited into the regular army.
And these are again available in Record Group 94 Entry 89, and they’re also available on microfilm in publication M233.
And you can see it covers a huge time period. So you have to have some idea of when a soldier enlisted,
because they’re arranged by year of enlistment and then generally by the first letter of the last name.
So they’re not completely alphabetical, but they’re generally alphabetical, if you know what I mean.
All the names beginning with B are together, but they may not be arranged strictly alphabetically within. But it will give you
specific information about the soldier including his name and rank. Again it will give you a physical description.
It will tell you his occupation in civilian life, his date and place of enlistment, his date and place of birth, and his enlistment
and discharge information. So basically it gives you the beginning of his service and the end of his service.
Here’s a typical example of what the Register of Enlistments looked like. Again each entry covers two pages.
We’ll take a specific look at this page and we’ll look at this soldier: Robert Allen. If you read through his entry this
is what you find out about him: he was 18 years old when he enlisted on November 15th, 1862.
He enlisted at Hilton Head, South Carolina, but he was originally from Massachusetts near Bedford.
We find out that he was a paper-maker. His physical description was “blue eyes, brown hair, brown complexion, 5’3”.”
And he was assigned to Company E of the 3rd U.S. Artillery. And in the remarks section, which generally tells you when
he was discharged, it shows that he served until February 21st, 1865 and his reason for discharge
was “expiration of service,” which took place at Wilmington, North Carolina. He was a corporal at the time that
he ended service. So again it will give you a basic overview of his service; when he went in and came out.
We also have personal papers relating to regular soldiers, but because we do not have compiled service records for
regular soldiers these records are arranged separately. But they are available. So we have a
specific series of enlistment papers for regular army soldiers in Entry 91. We have other personal papers that
are available during the Civil War period in Entry 94, again arranged by unit and then alphabetically by soldier.
And again, aside from enlistment papers you’ll find the inventory of effects. If somebody died during service you may find a report of death and interment.
Those were also filled out by the War Department. This series, “Final Statements,” used to be part of the personal papers.
It had been the intention of the War Department at the time to separate all of the personal papers out by type and
arranged them separately into separate series. They got as far as the final statements, and then I guess they gave up on the project.
So all the other types of personal papers are still arranged in a general series, but final statements are available in Entry 96.
And those records generally document the reason a soldier left service: whether his enlistment expired,
or whether he died, or whatever. And I’ll show you an example in a second.
Here’s the original enlistment paper for Robert Allen, who we just looked at in the Register of Enlistments.
This is the original document on which that entry was based. All of the information that you found in the register
was found in his original enlistment paper. This is the final statement of service for Private John Boyer of the 10th U.S. Infantry Company B.
And again it gives all the basic information about him: where he was born, a physical description, his enlistment information.
And then in this column here it shows his reason for discharge. And in this case it shows that he died during
service on October 19th, 1864 at the Lincoln General Hospital in Washington, D.C. from an inflammation of the lungs.
So you find those types of records in the final statements.
We also have carded medical records for regular army soldiers identical in nature to what we’ve seen for the volunteers.
We have a separate series for the regular army in Entry 529, and then a series for the Pioneer Corps,
and also a separate series for hospital stewards, noncommissioned officers, and musicians.
But again, they’re virtually identical to the ones that we’ve seen for the volunteer soldiers. And we also do have regimental
descriptive books for the regular army arranged by arm of service: artillery, cavalry, infantry, engineers, and other specialized units.
But these are not located in Record Group 94. These are in Record Group 391, which are the records of the U.S. army mobile units.
But they do include all of the regular army regiments that were raised and served during the Civil War.
I haven’t mentioned descriptive books for the Confederate army mainly because we have very, very few that have survived.
So it really wasn’t worth mentioning them too much, but you may find one or two for a specific regiment for the Confederates.
But they are by far not nearly as prevalent as what we have for the Union army. But if you do want to
see what we do have, they are listed in the finding aid for RG109. If you go to a particular state, you can see for the regiments that were
raised for that state there might show up a descriptive book or an order book for one or two particular regiments. But you’ll find them listed there.
We do have a couple of published sources for officers during the Civil War. For whatever reason, officers seem
to get more attention than the enlisted men do. All of these different publications you can go to
to get specific information about officers in the regular army who served during the war.
And we have all of these publications over here in our library. They should be available in most university libraries
or public libraries as well. So this is another specific source that you can go to to get basic information about officers.
The Confederates did have their version of the regular army, as well: units raised directly by the Confederate government.
But the difference here is that we do have compiled service records for these regular army units, as opposed to what we have for the Union army.
And that’s generally because when the War Department was creating the Confederate service records, they just went ahead and created the compiled
records for whatever type of soldier they found whether it was from a state regiment or one of these regimental units that are listed here.
So we have compiled service records for C.S. regiments, Native American regiments that were raised –
they also had their own version of the Invalid Corps as you can see down here. But basically as I said, these are
regiments that were raised directly by the Confederate government; we have all these different types available.
We also have a series of compiled service records for Confederate generals, staff officers, and nonregimental enlisted men.
And this is where I thought your question might come in. You said your ancestor was a courier for General Lee?
Then it’s possible you might find him here. As I said this includes staff officers, general officers, and it goes down
to the army corps division and brigade staffs and aides to camp. So if he was a courier he might fall under the aides to camp category.
So that might be worth looking at to see if you might find something on him. These are all microfilmed similarly to
the other state compiled records for Confederate soldiers in M331. And we also have a separate index in
M818 that covers both the organizations raised directly by the regiment, and the general and staff officers.
And I thought there was another one. I guess not. So this covers all of the compiled service records
that we have that would generally relate to what would be regarded as the Confederate regular army.
And that is your basic overview, in a little more detailed sense, of what we have available for general service in the Union and Confederate armies.
Again, this probably doesn’t even scratch the surface of what we have. Of course we have pension records for Union soldiers.
I mentioned at the beginning that we have hospital records: field hospital records, regimental hospital records during the war.
We have prisoner of war records for both the Union and Confederate prison camps.
So there are a slew of records that you can still use to research service in the army during the war.
But the records that we covered here should at least get you started. Any questions?
The draft records that we have for the Union army are in Record Group 110, which are the records of the provost marshal’s office.
But we do have the general or consolidated draft lists. Those should still be here in this building, but all of the other
field service records that were created during the draft have been sent out to our regional archives. So they’ve been disbursed.
We have them, but they’re at the regions. But the consolidated lists should still be here in this building. Was there another question?
Audience Member: Where would we go to find information about contracted surgeon pensions?
John Deeben: I’m not sure what the date range is, but I know in RG94 we have a series
relating to contract surgeons. We do have that, but I’m not sure if it extends beyond the Civil War or not.
Audience Member: Could we find them online?
John Deeben: I’m not sure if they’re online. I would probably go to the finding aid.
The finding aid for RG94 is “Preliminary Inventory 17.” So if you ever go over to our finding aids office, just ask for PI17.
And that will give you a listing of all the series in RG94 with a pretty good description of each individual series and what they have.
You had a question?
Some of the state colored troops were re-designated as U.S.C.T. The 18th U.S. Colored Troops? Is that what you’re referring to?
I’m not sure how you would go about finding it out, but we should have something. Probably if you asked one of the
reference archivists over in the finding aids room they should be able to figure out what U.S.C.T. units correlated to former state troops.
Another question?
Basically what we have are the records that the government created during the war. So I know that state archives have their own records,
their own enlistment books, and things like that. Those also exist, but those aren’t federal records. Any other questions or comments?
Audience Member: Why were there no Union recruits from South Carolina?
John Deeben: I thought that would be pretty obvious. South Carolina, those were the hotheads. Pretty much.
And the Union army didn’t finally get into South Carolina until the very end of the war, so there
probably wasn’t a lot of time left to do any recruiting. Any other questions or comments?
Audience Member: During the Civil War, could you speed up the process of naturalization through enlistment?
John Deeben: Yes, during the Civil War you could expedite the naturalization process by joining the army.
But those wouldn’t have been military records. You still would have had to go through the naturalization process in court.