Union Army

The Union Army refers to the United States Army during the American Civil War. The Union Army is also known as the Northern Army or the Federal Army.

History

Formation

When the Civil War began in April 1861, there were only 16,000 men in the U.S. Army, and many Southern soldiers and officers were already resigning and joining the new Confederate States Army. The army consisted of ten regiments of infantry, four of artillery, two of cavalry, two of dragoons, and one of mounted infantry. These regiments were scattered widely. Of the 197 companies in the army, 179 occupied 79 isolated post in the West and the remaining 18 manned garrisons east of the Mississippi River, mostly along the Canadian border and on the Atlantic coast.

With the secession of the Southern states, and with this drastic shortage of men in the army, President Abraham Lincoln called on the states to raise a force of 75,000 men for three months to put down the insurrection in the South. The war proved to be longer and larger than anyone had expected, and on July 22, 1861, Congress authorized a volunteer army of 500,000 men. It was this callup of Federal troops that incited four more states of the South to secede, making the Confederacy eleven states strong.

At first, the call for volunteers was easily met by patriotic Northerners, abolitionists, and even immigrants who enlisted with the hope of a steady paycheck and food rations. Over 10,000 Germans in New York and Pennsylvania immediately responded to Lincoln's call for volunteers, and the French were also among those quick to volunteer. As more men were needed, the number of willing volunteers fell, but nevertheless, between April 1861 and April 1865, at least two and a half million men served in the Union Army, most of whom were volunteers.

It is a widely held misconception that the South held the advantage of a large percentage of professional military who resigned to join the Confederate States Army. At the start of the war, there were 824 graduates of the U.S. Military Academy on the active list; of these, 296 resigned or were dismissed and 184 of those became Confederate officers. Of the approximately 900 West Point graduates who were then civilians, 114 returned to the Union Army and 99 to the Confederate. Therefore, the ratio of Union to Confederate professional officers was 754 to 283. (One of the resigning officers was Robert E. Lee, who had initially been offered the job as commander of the Union Army; Lee accepted the position as commander of Virginia forces instead and became the commander of the Confederate States Army.) The South did have the advantage of other military colleges, such as The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute, but they produced fewer officers.

Major organizations

Noncommissioned officers of the 93rd New York Infantry.

The Union Army was composed of numerous organizations which were generally organized geographically.

Department: An organization that covered a defined region, including responsibilities for the Federal installations therein and for the field armies within their borders. Those named for states usually referred to Southern states that had been occupied. It was more common to name departments for rivers (such as Department of the Tennessee, Department of the Cumberland) or regions (Department of the Pacific, Department of New England, Department of the East, Department of the West, Middle Department).

District: A subdivision of a Department (e.g., District of Cairo, District of East Tennessee). There were also Subdistricts for smaller regions.

Military Division: A collection of Departments reporting to one commander (e.g., Military Division of the Mississippi, Military Division of the Gulf). Military Divisions were similar to the regions described by the more modern term, Theater.

Army: The fighting force that was usually, but not always, assigned to a District or Department but could operate over wider areas. Some of the most prominent armies were:

Army of the Cumberland, the army operating primarily in Tennessee, and later Georgia, commanded by William S. Rosecrans and George Henry Thomas.
Army of the Gulf, the army operating in the region bordering the Gulf of Mexico, commanded by Benjamin Butler, Nathaniel P. Banks, and Edward Canby.
Army of the James, the army operating on the Virginia Peninsula, 1864–65, commanded by Benjamin Butler and Edward Ord.
Army of the Mississippi, a briefly existing army operating on the Mississippi River, in two incarnations—under John Pope and William S. Rosecrans in 1862; under John A. McClernand in 1863.
Army of the Ohio, the army operating primarily in Kentucky and later Tennessee and Georgia, commanded by Don Carlos Buell, Ambrose E. Burnside, and John M. Schofield.
Army of the Potomac, the principal army in the Eastern Theater, commanded by George B. McClellan, Ambrose E. Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George G. Meade.
Army of the Shenandoah, the army operating in the Shenandoah Valley, under David Hunter, Philip Sheridan, and Horatio G. Wright.
Army of the Tennessee, the most famous army in the Western Theater, operating through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas; commanded by Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, James B. McPherson, and Oliver O. Howard.
Army of Virginia, the army assembled under John Pope for the Northern Virginia Campaign.

Each of these armies was usually commanded by a major general. Typically, the Department or District commander also had field command of the army of the same name, but some conflicts within the ranks occurred when this was not true, particularly when an army crossed a geographic boundary.

The Regular Army, a term used to describe the permanent United States Army, was intermixed into various units and formations of the Union Army, forming a cadre of experienced and skilled troops. This force was quite small compared to the massive state-raised volunteer forces that comprised the bulk of the Union Army.

Leaders

Several men served as generals-in-chief of the Union Army throughout its existence:

Winfield Scott: July 5, 1841 – November 1, 1861
George B. McClellan: November 1, 1861 – March 11, 1862
Henry W. Halleck: July 23, 1862 – March 9, 1864
Ulysses S. Grant: March 9, 1864 – March 4, 1869

The gap from March 11 to July 23, 1862, was filled with direct control of the army by President Lincoln and United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, with the help of an unofficial "War Board" that was established on March 17, 1862. The board consisted of Ethan A. Hitchcock, the chairman, with Department of War bureau chiefs Lorenzo Thomas, Montgomery C. Meigs, Joseph G. Totten, James W. Ripley, and Joseph P. Taylor.

Scott was an elderly veteran of the Mexican-American War and could not perform his duties effectively. The war did not go well for the North in the first two years, and many people blamed the over-cautiousness and poor strategy of Scott's successor, Maj. Gen. McClellan, for this. McClellan led the disastrous Peninsula Campaign and was replaced by Halleck as general-in-chief. Although he was popular among the soldiers, McClellan was relieved from duty because of his over-cautiousness and his contentious relationship with his commander in chief, President Abraham Lincoln. Halleck arrived with a successful record in the western theater but was more of an administrator than a strategic planner and commander.

Ulysses Grant was the final commander of the Union Army. He was already famous for his victories in the West when he was appointed lieutenant general and general-in-chief of the Union Army in March 1864. Grant supervised the Army of the Potomac (which was formally led by his subordinate, Maj. Gen. George G. Meade) in delivering the final blows to the Confederacy by decisively defeating Confederate forces in many fierce battles in Virginia, eventually capturing Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. He developed the strategy of coordinated simultaneous thrusts against wide portions of the Confederacy, most importantly the Georgia and Carolinas Campaigns of William Tecumseh Sherman and the Shenandoah Valley campaign of Philip Sheridan. These campaigns were characterized by another strategic notion of Grant's—deny the enemy the supplies needed to continue the war by widespread destruction of its factories and farms along the paths of the invading Union armies.

Grant had critics who complained about the atrociously high numbers of casualties that the Union Army suffered while he was in charge, but Lincoln would not replace Grant, because, in Lincoln's words: "I cannot spare this man. He fights."

Union victory

Grant's decisive victories resulted in the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. (Northern newspapers of the day hailed U. S. Grant as "Unconditional Surrender" Grant). Southern diplomats had been trying to negotiate terms of peace, or even conditional surrender, ever since the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, but Northern leaders would not hear of it. The prevailing opinion among Northern leaders was that anything short of the Union Army defeating the Confederate Army in the field of battle would be a failure and could leave the door open to future conflict.

That goal was achieved on April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee officially surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant at Appomattox Court House. Although there were other Confederate armies that would surrender in the following weeks, such as Joseph E. Johnston's in North Carolina, this date was nevertheless symbolic of the end of the bloodiest war in American history, the end of the Confederate States of America, and the beginning of the slow process of Reconstruction.

Casualties

Of the 2.5 million men who served in the Union Army during the Civil War, about 390,000 died in combat, or from injuries sustained in combat, disease, or other causes, and 280,000 were wounded. More than 1 out of every 4 Union soldiers was killed or wounded during the war; casualties in the Confederate Army were even worse—1 in 3 Southern soldiers were killed or wounded. This is by far the highest casualty ratio of any war in which America has been involved. By comparison, 1 out of every 16 American soldiers was killed or wounded in World War II, and 1 out of every 22 during the Vietnam War.

In total, 680,000 men died during the Civil War. There were 34 million Americans at that time, so 4% of the American male population died in the war. In today's terms, this would be the equivalent of 5.9 million American men being killed in a war.

Ethnic groups

The Union Army was comprised of many different ethnic groups, including large numbers of immigrants. About 25% of the white people who served in the Union Army were foreign-born.^{[citation needed]}

Breakdown of the approximately 2.2 million Union soldiers:

1 million (45.4% of all Union soldiers) native-born Americans of British ancestry.
516,000 (23.4%) Germans; about 216,000 were born in Germany.
210,000 (9.5%) African American. Half were freedmen who lived in the North, and half were ex-slaves or escaped slaves from the South. They served in more than 160 "colored" regiments. One such regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, is dramaticized in the film Glory. Others served under white officers in Federal regiments organized as the United States Colored Troops (USCT).
200,000 (9.1%) Irish.
90,000 (4.1%) Dutch.
50,000 (2.3%) Canadian.
50,000 (2.3%) born in England.
40,000 (1.8%) French or French Canadian. About half were born in America, the other half in Quebec.
20,000 (0.9%) Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish).
7,000 Italian
7,000 Jewish
6,000 Mexican
5,000 Polish (many of whom served in the Polish Legion of Brig. Gen. Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski)
4,000 Native Americans
Several hundred were: Hungarians, Portuguese, Chinese, Indians (born in India), and other nationalities.

Many immigrant soldiers formed their own regiments, such as the Irish Brigade (69th New York, 63rd New York, 88th New York, 28th Massachusetts, 116th Pennsylvania); the Swiss Rifles (15th Missouri); the Gardes Lafayette (55th New York); the Garibaldi Guard (39th New York); the Martinez Militia (1st New Mexico); the Polish Legion (58th New York); the German Rangers (52nd New York); the Highlander Regiment (79th New York); and the Scandinavian Regiment (15th Wisconsin). But for the most part, the foreign-born soldiers were scattered as individuals throughout units.

For comparison, the Confederate Army was not very diverse: 91% of Confederate soldiers were native born and only 9% were foreign-born, Irish being the largest group with others including Germans, French, Mexicans, and British. Some Southern propaganda compared foreign-born soldiers in the Union Army to the hated Hessians of the American Revolution.

Desertions and draft riots

Template:TotallyDisputed Desertion was a major problem for both sides. The daily hardships of war, forced marches, thirst, suffocating heat, disease, delay in pay, solicitude for family, impatience at the monotony and futility of inactive service, panic on the eve of battle, the sense of war weariness, the lack of confidence in commanders, and the discouragement of defeat (especially early on for the Union Army), all tended to lower the morale of the Union Army and to increase desertion.

In 1861 and 1862, the war went badly for the Union Army, and there were, by some counts, 180,000 desertions. In 1863 and 1864, the bitterest two years of the war, the Union Army suffered over 200 desertions every day, for a total of 150,000 desertions during those two years. This puts the total number of desertions from the Union Army during the four years of the war at nearly 350,000. Using these numbers, 15% of Union soldiers deserted during the war. Official numbers put the number of deserters from the Union Army at 200,000 for the entire war, or about 8% of Union Army soldiers. It is estimated that 1 out of 3 deserters returned to their regiments, either voluntarily or after being arrested and being sent back.

Of all the ethnic groups in the Union Army, the Irish had the highest number of desertions per capita by far; by some accounts they deserted at a rate 30 times higher than Native-born Americans.

Many of the desertions were by "professional" bounty men, men who would enlist to collect the often large cash bonuses and then desert at the earliest opportunity to do the same elsewhere. If not caught, it could prove a very lucrative criminal enterprise.

The Irish were also the main participants in the famous "New York Draft Riots" of 1863 (as dramatized in the film Gangs of New York). The Irish had shown the strongest support for Southern aims prior to the start of the war and had long had an enmity with black populations in several Northern cities dating back to nativist attacks on Irish immigrants in the 1840s, when it was observed that blacks, who rivaled the Irish at the bottom of the economic ladder, were frequently reported encouraging on nativist mobs. With the view that the war was an upper class abolitionist war led in large part by former nativists to free a large black population, which might move north and compete for jobs and housing with the poor Irish and others, it could hardly be expected that the poorer classes would welcome the draft that a richer man could buy his way out of. As a result of the Enrollment Act, rioting began in several Northern cities, the most heavily hit being New York City. A mob reported as consisting principally of Irish immigrants rioted in the summer of 1863, with the worst violence occurring in July during the Battle of Gettysburg. The mob set fire to everything from African American churches and an orphanage to the office of the New York Tribune. The principal victims of the rioting were African Americans and activists in the anti-slavery movement. Not until victory was achieved at Gettysburg could the Union Army be sent in; some units had to open fire to quell the violence and stop the rioters. By the time the rioting was over, perhaps up to 1,000 people had been killed or wounded (estimates varied widely, then and now).

References

Eicher, John H., and Eicher, David J., Civil War High Commands, Stanford University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8047-3641-3.
Hattaway, Herman, and Jones, Archer, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War, University of Illinois Press, 1983, ISBN 0-252-00918-5.

External links