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Civil War Service Reports of Union Army Generals

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Civil War Service Reports of Union Army Generals http://gdc.gale.com/archivesunbound/ CIVIL WAR SERVICE REPORTS OF UNION ARMY GENERALS These generals’ reports of service represent an attempt by the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO) to obtain more complete records of the service of the various Union generals serving in the Civil War. In 1864, the Adjutant General requested that each such general submit "…a succinct account of your military history…since March 4th, 1861." In 1872, and in later years, similar requests were made for statements of service for the remaining period of the war. Date Range: 1864-1887 Content: 8,712 images Source Library: U.S. National Archives Detailed Description: Following the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, President Lincoln called for volunteers to supplement the small Regular Army. The latter was raised directly by the U.S. government and consisted of individuals who joined both before and after the commencement of hostilities. In response to the emergency, so-called "Volunteer Army" forces were generally raised by the States and only later brought into the Federal service. In this publication, the Regular Army and the Volunteer Army are usually referred to collectively as the U.S. or Union Army. Except for the rank of lieutenant general, awarded to Ulysses S. Grant in 1864, brigadier general and major general were the only grades of general officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. An officer during that period could attain the permanent rank of brigadier or major general in the ordinary course of promotion; he could also receive a brevet commission of general for meritorious service. It was possible, because of the simultaneous existence of a Regular and Volunteer Army and two different kinds of commissions, for an officer to hold several general’s commissions at one time. Thus Ranald S. Mackenzie at the end of the war, was a permanent brigadier general of Volunteers, a major general of Volunteers by brevet, and a brevet brigadier general in the Regular Army. However, his permanent rank in the Regular Army when he made his report of Civil War service in 1873 was only that of colonel. Subsequent to the conflict, other wartime generals made reports of service with postwar grades as low as captain in the much-reduced, peacetime U.S. Army. 1 These generals’ reports of service represent an attempt by the Adjutant General’s Office (AGO) to obtain more complete records of the service of the various generals contacted. In 1864, the Adjutant General requested that each such general submit "…a succinct account of your military history…since March 4th, 1861." In 1872, and in later years, similar requests were made for statements of service for the remaining period of the war. It should be noted that almost 600 permanent generals, plus more than twice that number with only brevet commissions as general, served in the Union Army during the Civil War, but there are reports of only 317 generals reproduced in this publication. The reason for the variance between the total number of generals and the number for whom there are reports has not been determined. Contents of the Generals’ Reports Seeking both comprehensiveness and uniformity, the AGO requested of each general that he include certain kinds of information in his report. As a result, most of the reports consist of chronologically arranged sketches of activities associated with battles and other engagements. The generals usually included information concerning the inclusive dates of their service with each command, the dates of their tours of duty as members of military commissions and courts-martial, and periods of leaves of absence. Many reports give the names, ranks, and dates of service of their personal staff officers, and a summary or list of engagements in which the general took part. In order to provide information about specific engagements, many of the generals included copies of pertinent reports made by other officers during the course of the war. The lengths of the generals’ reports range from the one-paragraph response of Brigadier General Francis Vinton, declining an AGO request for information, to the multivolume reply of Brigadier General Henry W. Benham. A few reports include newspaper clippings, maps, or pamphlets. In the reports are numerous accounts of battles, including First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. Some accounts of engagements contradict other versions of the same events, as in the case of Brigadier General George A. McCall’s report. McCall included a pamphlet entitled Pennsylvania Reserves in the Peninsula: General McCall’s Official Reports of the Part Taken by His Division in the Battles of Mechanicsville, Gaines’ Mills, and New Market Cross Roads, in which he attacked the accuracy of Major General George McClellan’s account of those battles. Another example of conflicting interpretations of the same events is the denunciation by Brigadier General William P. Carlin of certain accounts of the battle of Chickamauga. The performances of Major General George H. Thomas at Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga, and of Major General Winfield S. Hancock at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg are documented, as are the wartime activities of President James A. Garfield. General Benham reported on his campaign in South Carolina in 1862. Brigadier General Abner Doubleday’s report contains some 50 manuscript maps primarily depicting troop positions and movements on the battlefields of Cedar Mountain, Groveton, Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. 2 Some generals’ reports concern Indians. Brigadier General James H. Carleton’s report on activities in the Department of New Mexico includes a pamphlet entitled Synopsis of Indian Scouts and their Results for the Year 1863 and a copy of a proclamation issued by Governor Henry Connelly of the New Mexico Territory on March 23, 1864, proclaiming a day of celebration for the quelling of Indian raids and the removal of the Navajo to reservations. Other reports that relate to Indian affairs include Brigadier General Henry H. Sibley’s accounts of his campaign against the Sioux and Dakota Indians in the Minnesota Territory and of treaty negotiations with the Sioux and Cheyenne; Brigadier General Benjamin Alvord’s report of treaty negotiations with the Nez Perce; and General Hancock’s narrative of fighting with the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, and Apache in 1867. A few generals digressed from military events and expressed personal feelings about the war and slavery. One such report, written by Brigadier General John W. Phelps, reflects the writer’s strong abolitionist sentiment; another, submitted by Brigadier General Davis Tillson, expresses dissatisfaction with the work habits of African Americans. Brigadier General Daniel Ullmann’s report includes a printed speech entitled "Organization of Colored Troops and the Regeneration of the South," in which he emphasized the positive attributes of African Americans as revealed through his experiences with black recruitment and as a commander of Colored Troops. Brigadier General David Hunter included in his report a copy of a letter written by President Lincoln, dated April 1, 1863, concerning the recruitment and enlistment of African Americans. Brigadier General Napoleon Buford’s report briefly discusses the establishment, in 1864, of an orphanage for African American children in Helena, Arkansas. A few generals also extended their remarks to encompass duty during Reconstruction. For example, General Carlin, in his follow-up report, gave a detailed account of events during his service as Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in Tennessee. In particular, he discussed a riot in Laurens County, S.C., in October 1870, in which a number of people were murdered allegedly by political adversaries belonging to the Ku Klux Klan. Carlin was assigned the task of apprehending the rioters. Organization of the Reports There are sixteen volumes of reports numbered from I through XIV, two volumes serving as appendixes to volume X. The reports in the volumes appear to have been bound approximately according to the dates of their receipt by the AGO; although exact chronological order is not followed within any one volume, the first volume contains reports that were written mainly in 1864 and the last volume includes reports written as late as 1887. Follow-up reports are bound separately from the initial report by the same general. Each volume contained an alphabetical name index, showing, for each general listed, the corresponding report number and/or first-page number of his report in the volume. The pagination of the volumes is sometimes confusing. Some reports are written on both sides of each sheet of paper; others are written on one side only of each sheet. In the first case, every page may or may not have been numbered consecutively by the writer; in the second case, every other page may or may not have been numbered consecutively. The AGO bound the reports of the generals in volumes and assigned its own numbers within each volume, 3 but gave only one number to each sheet (generally centered at the top), even if both sides of the sheet were written upon. The AGO numbered the sheets of the reports as follows: 1, 3, 5, etc.; the opposite side of each sheet, whether they contained writing or not, were implicitly but not actually numbered 2, 4, 6, etc. The result is that each side of a sheet containing writing may bear two numbers, the general’s and the AGO’s; however, it may bear only the general’s page number, only the AGO’s, or none at all. In this publication the fact that blank pages (with their implicit AGO numbers) usually were not reproduced accounts for the absence of numbers in the AGO pagination sequence within individual volumes. Finally, it should be noted that the first page of each report also bears a report number, usually in large figures in the upper right-hand corner, assigned consecutively by the AGO within each volume.
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