That Body of Brave Men: The U.S. Infantry and the Civil War in the West (review)

Abstract

There were two types of regular soldier in the U.S. Army during the Civil War. The archetype was a veteran of the Mexican War or an Indian fighter hurriedly moved east to the Virginia theater of war. Mark W. Johnson introduces the second type: young men, with little or no prior military experience, who enlisted in the regulars after war's outbreak. Some 58,000 men enlisted in the U. S. Regulars during the Civil War (p. 716n.8), many in eleven new regiments organized in the Regular Army in 1861. Four of these regiments, the 15th, 16th, 18th, and 19th Infantry and Battery H, 5th Artillery (collectively known as the Regular Brigade), fought in the Western, or Trans-Appalachian, Theater, campaigning from Kentucky to Georgia between 1862 and 1864. Johnson chronicles the story of these men, enlisted and commissioned, and the few old soldiers who provided the leavening that made these regiments formidable fighting organizations. This is useful, since the host of volunteer regiments raised to fight the war has long overshadowed the role of the regulars in the Civil War.