The Sources: Record Groups 94 and 393
When President Abraham Lincoln called for thousands of volunteers to answer the call to arms and preserve the imperiled Union during the spring and summer of 1861, unlike today there was no Army Career Center at which those interested might report. Instead, these men promptly gathered (or were enticed to do so by locally-raised pecuniary incentives) and organized themselves into volunteer companies of between 80 and 100 men. Once the ranks of these companies were filled and officers popularly elected by the men, the nascent units usually traveled by foot or rail to a nearby “rendezvous camp” where they were summarily assigned to a larger aggregation of ten companies called a “regiment” and commanded by a volunteer colonel with a commission from the state governor. Christened with an impersonal if martial-sounding moniker like “53rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry” or “7th Illinois Volunteer Cavalry” after having been mustered into volunteer Federal service by an itinerant enrollment officer, the United States Army had taken the first step in its tireless (and ultimately hopeless) effort to strip the newly formed regiment of its unique identity and convert it into a functionally homogenous unit, interchangeable with any other.
Unfortunately, though veterans of these organizations wrote exhaustively after the conflict of wartime exploits within their specific beloved regiments, these accounts have largely been discounted by Civil War historians as just so much hagiography. Accordingly, historians have been tempted to assume that differences between particular regiments were of minimal import, instead studying aggregated samples of “common soldiers” in hopes of deriving general principles applicable to all. Indeed, claims of the unmatched bravery or inestimable glory supposedly exhibited by any given veteran’s unit during the war should rightfully be discounted by the critical reader. But the distinctive operational behaviors, particular experiences, and social or cultural nuances that veterans noted as varying significantly between these impromptu collections of citizen-soldiers is important to acknowledge and explore. These differences were the direct by-product of a given organization’s unique history. Moreover, volunteers did not experience the war as a member of “the Union Army,” but rather as members of first their respective companies, and secondly their respective regiments. In order to understand the experiences and behaviors of these men, as well how the organizations they inhabited functioned and evolved, the researcher must first uncover the microhistorical narrative that marked the lifetime of each particular unit. Any such investigation must necessarily begin with (and be built upon) an exploration and understanding of the evolving social structure within each organization.
Fortunately, the United States Army Revised Regulations of 1861 can inadvertently assist researchers and interested parties in this endeavor. These published regulations, designed initially for the antebellum regular army but adopted by all volunteer commands during the conflict, emphasized the importance of maintaining strict and detailed accounting of all volunteers in the field so as “to keep the government informed of the condition and strength of the [volunteer] forces.”1 Each morning while in service, the men assigned to each company in a given regiment would rise from bed at reveille, drowsily don and button their uniforms, and find their assigned spots in the morning accountability formation. An Orderly Sergeant (the highest ranking non-commissioned officer in each company) would then carefully account for the location, disposition, and health of each and every volunteer within the command, carefully recording the data onto a printed form or “blank” for later copying into a larger “morning report” book by a junior officer in the company. After this transference was complete, the data from all the companies of a regiment would be sent to regimental headquarters for consolidation and recording into the unit’s official “consolidated morning report” book. This process of consolidation and transference was repeated all the way up the chain of command until a final report concerning the disposition of every volunteer in the service of the United States could be (in theory) submitted to the War Department and, if requested, Congress or President Lincoln himself.
Due principally to the sheer volume and detail of data collected at the lower levels, consolidation of such data at higher-levels of command required a reduction in detail and definition. For example, whereas it was of great importance to a company or regimental commander to know precisely how many sergeants, corporals, and privates a given company could field on a given day, how many were sick, and how many were at home on leave, this data was of less immediate value to an army corps commander responsible for upwards of 30,000 men and dozens of regiments. Instead, higher-level reports generally consolidated lower-level data into four categories: “Present for Duty and Equipped, Officers,” “Present for Duty and Equipped, Enlisted,” “Absent, Officers,” and “Absent, Enlisted.” These categories gave an army commander all the information he really needed to know: namely, how many rations he would need to feed the army that day, and how many men he could realistically put into battle if necessary. While these numbers (reported to the War Department on a regular monthly basis per regulation) have long been widely available to historians and the general public alike within the 128-volume Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, they do not offer the insight into the social structure of individual regiments and companies that commanders of those smaller organizations required and that researchers need if they are to explore the evolving social structures of such smaller volunteer units.
Instead, historians must turn to the original company and regimental morning report books themselves. Housed within the voluminous Record Groups 94 and 393 in the basement of the National Archives and Records Administration building in Washington, D.C., the surviving (and a surprising number are extant) volumes annually collect dust after having been turned over to Federal authorities following the mustering out of each regiment at the close of the war. Many of the books are in remarkably good condition, while others literally disintegrate in the reader’s hands. Leather-bound covers are not infrequently marked by bird excrement, pages marred with tobacco stains or inadvertently smashed insects, and blank spots filled with idle doodles drawn by junior officers bored with the exigencies of military bureaucracy. When ink either ran dry or was exhausted in the field, regimental adjutants routinely shifted mid-page to recording daily reports in pencil – a practice that renders these marks all but invisible to the modern reader, and becoming increasingly more so by the day. Even still, when the fragments of these surviving records can be pieced together by the careful researcher, the contours of the lives of these war-torn volunteer formations can be reconstructed in impressive detail. Though little more than columns of numbers to the untrained eye, transcription of this data and manipulation with digital tools unimaginable to the original recorder can convert his faded marks into an opportunity to briefly glimpse his world.