Just over a month ago, I attended my college’s library book sale which was soon followed by a similar such sale at the Goffstown Public Library . I’m a sucker for these events and brought in a haul of roughly 20 books for $15 or something absurd like that. Over half of these books (which now sit in a box in my crowded office) were on the Civil War. A fair number of them were academic, but I also found a nice collection of more popular works. Truth be told, I’m starting to read popular history more frequently in an attempt to make my prose my accessible.
One of the first books out of this batch that I read was Jeffry D. Wert’s A Brotherhood of Valor which is a comparative history of the Stonewall and Iron brigades. I read this work mainly because I wanted to see if these elite units shared something in common with the 5th New Hampshire. In what ways might their experiences have been similar? Having completed Wert’s book, I reached four conclusions.
Traditional Measures of Discipline Did not Capture a Unit’s Will to Combat
According to Wert’s account, the Stonewall Brigade suffered from poor march discipline and experienced high rates of desertion. There are mitigating circumstances that explain this behavior. For one thing, the brigade was pushed very hard (especially during the Valley Campaign). For another, it had been recruited in the Shenandoah Valley, so whenever the men marched anywhere near their homes, the temptation to leave the army—whether it be temporarily or permanently—was often too great to resist.
“A Straggler on the Line of March”: This image, by Allen C. Redwood, appeared in the article “Our March against Pope” on page 515 in Volume II of Century Magazine’s Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.
Despite these problems, Wert argues that in the summer of 1862, the Stonewall Brigade was the best unit of its type in the Army of Northern Virginia. What he means is that few Confederate brigades demonstrated the same will to combat as these Virginians. I suppose that such an assertion is arguable (what about the Texas Brigade?). But Wert produces plenty of evidence to back his claim; the Stonewall brigade suffered enormous casualties over the course of 1862 yet continued to perform extremely well on the battlefield.
The experience of the Stonewall brigade seems to demonstrate that traditional measures of discipline do not necessarily capture a Civil War regiment’s will to combat. In this case, there seems to be a substantial difference between the Stonewall brigade and the 5th New Hampshire. By all accounts, the latter was a well-drilled regiment. It is also evident that Edward Cross, the first colonel of the 5th New Hampshire, was a stickler for discipline—even if he didn’t always apply it consistently or fairly. In his assessment of Cross’s leadership, Thomas Livermore wrote that the colonel taught “us . . . that implicit obedience to orders was one of the cardinal virtues in a soldier” and he succeeded in doing so by importing “several excellently drilled men into the regiment who aided us exceedingly in acquiring a correct drill.”[i] Among the original volunteers, desertion was only about 8% over the entire course of the war, which was below the average for the Union army as a whole. Undoubtedly, drill and discipline helped the regiment attain its reputation as one of the best fighting units in the Army of the Potomac.
Having said that, there was more to the 5th New Hampshire’s effectiveness than drill and discipline. In his estimate of Cross, Livermore added that the colonel “had impressed those under him with his martial spirit, and I believe that the regiment as little contemplated retreating as he himself did.”[ii] In this context, Livermore remembered one particular episode that occurred towards the end of the Battle of Chancellorsville. After the regiment—which had served as part of the rear guard for the Army of the Potomac—was forced to beat a hasty retreat from its position near the Chancellor House, Livermore said in the colonel’s hearing that “he wished we were across the [Rappahannock] river” or “wondered when we should be.” Cross responded, “’What do you want to go across the river for?’ in such a tone that I knew he was displeased at the idea of any one’s suggesting retreat.”[iii] Livermore recalled, “It did me good then and I think it did afterwards, and it was the same spirit that he infused into the regiment.”[iv] In other words, discipline was no good without a pugnacity of spirit.
Disputes among Officers Did not Necessarily Impede Effectiveness
It is no secret that in both the Stonewall and Iron brigades, brigadiers found themselves at odds with field officers, and field officers found themselves at odds with company commanders. Stonewall Jackson thought his successor, Richard Garnett (whom Jackson later arrested after the Battle of Kernstown), was unfit for the task. The brigade heartily despised Charles Winder, who followed Garnett as its commander. Upon hearing that Elisha Paxton had become the head of the brigade, the officers fell into an uproar because they felt that Andrew Grigsby, then commander of the 27th Virginia, should have received the honor. And so it went. The situation in the Iron Brigade was not quite so volatile, but many officers and soldiers thought John Gibbon, a regular army officer (West Point class of 1847) who commanded the unit from May to November 1862, was a martinet. And Gibbon’s dislike of Solomon Meredith, who led the 19th Indiana before succeeding Gibbon as commander of the brigade, was widely known.
Soldiers from Company C, 2nd Wisconsin Infantry Regiment (1861): This tintype was taken early in the war when the regiment still sported a combination of grey militia uniforms and Yankee blue. What they all have, however, are the famous Hardee Hat (otherwise referred to as the Model 1858 Dress Hat or more colloquially, the “Jeff Davis”) associated with the Iron Brigade. See https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wisconsin_Iron _Brigade_Troops.jpg
The situation in the 5th New Hampshire was just as explosive if not more so. In this blog, I’ve already adverted to Colonel Edward Cross’s run-ins with his company commanders. He arranged to have Edmund Brown (Company B) and Richard Welch (Company K) dismissed by a brigade board of review for incompetence in February 1862. He obtained Richard Davis’ (Company H) resignation in July 1862. He hounded Ira Barton (Company E) out of the regiment in September 1862. He maneuvered Horace Pierce (Company F) into resigning in January 1863. In the meantime, Cross’s accusations of cowardice compelled his superior, Brigadier General John Caldwell, to call for a board of inquiry to clear his name (October 1862). Shortly before the Battle of Fredericksburg, Cross had two of his captains (James Perry of Company C and James Larkin of Company A) court martialed for mutiny. Perry and Larkin returned the favor by bringing charges against Cross. Even after Cross was killed at Gettysburg, disputes continued to roil the regiment. In the spring of 1864, Charles Hapgood (colonel of the regiment) and James Larkin (now a major) brought charges against Richard Cross (the regiment’s lieutenant colonel and Edward’s younger brother) and had him cashiered.[v]
When I first contemplated these disputes, I was inclined to conclude that these units were highly effective despite the bitter disputes that characterized relations among their officers. Surely, conflict within a regiment or brigade had to be confined within certain limits for the unit to avoid utter dysfunction. But as I thought about this issue more, it occurred to me that the same qualities which contributed to battlefield effectiveness also sparked internecine disputes. High quality units consisted of brave, strong-willed, and ambitious men who competed for promotion through conspicuous displays of valor on the battlefield. That same bravery, strong will, and ambition—stoked to high heat by competition—probably also contributed to numerous quarrels.
Elite Civil War Regiments Could Absorb Enormous Punishment and Remain Effective. . . .
Over the course of 1862, the Stonewall Brigade suffered over 1,200 casualties.[vi] Wert emphasizes the degree to which the brigade was very much reduced by the Maryland campaign in which it lost large numbers of men to combat and desertion. And yet, the next year, the Stonewall Brigade displayed its old will to combat as it participated in Jackson’s great flanking movement at Chancellorsville and suffered over 500 casualties.
From the fight at Brawner’s Farm (August 28, 1862) to the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863)—that is, in less than a year—the Iron Brigade suffered 1,800 casualties in combat. Even after sustaining these heavy losses, the brigade fought with tremendous courage at Gettysburg where it lost another 1,200 men.[vii]
7th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment (1862): This image of what appears to be a company of the 7th Wisconsin was purportedly taken in Virginia in 1862. If this was a company, I’m going to guess this photo was taken at during the first half of the year before the Iron Brigade suffered such catastrophic losses. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iron_Brigade_7th_Wisconsin_Group.jpg
Likewise, the resilience of the 5th New Hampshire was impressive. The regiment had suffered heavy casualties in three major battles: Fair Oaks, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. By the time the regiment went into action on the afternoon of July 2, 1863 at Gettysburg, combat and illness had reduced the unit to just under 180 effectives. Nonetheless, the 5th New Hampshire performed magnificently, stopping elements of the Texas Brigade in their tracks and almost driving them out of Rose Woods. By the end of the day, the regiment had lost another 80 casualties or 45% of its numbers.
. . . . until They Couldn’t
At a certain point, neither the Iron or Stonewall Brigades could not sustain continued losses and remain their old selves. Wert claims that in the summer of 1862, the Stonewall Brigade was the best infantry brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. His implication is that after this point, it was so badly used up that its effectiveness began to decline. Wert seems to intimate that it had ceased to be an elite unit well before it was literally wiped out at the Mule Shoe during the Battle of Spotsylvania. The loss of qualified and experienced officers along with attrition among the rank and file had proved too much.
Wert is much more explicit about the degradation of the Iron Brigade’s combat effectiveness. Gettysburg did it in. It never recovered from the loss of so many experienced officers and men. The conscripts who subsequently filled up the ranks, Wert writes, were not up to the task of hard fighting (although, in all likelihood, most of these replacements were substitutes). At the same time, the remaining few veterans had seen enough; they were not willing to engage in “headlong recklessness.”[viii]
The case was much the same with the 5th New Hampshire after Gettysburg. Edward Cross was mortally wounded in the Rose Woods while leading the brigade to which his old regiment belonged. His demise seemed to mark a turning point in the 5th New Hampshire’s story. Years later, Livermore wrote that with Cross’s death, “the glory of our regiment came to a halt.”[ix] Livermore was right—but only up to a point; even had Cross lived, the regiment had suffered too many casualties to ever fight as it had at Antietam or Fredericksburg. In August 1863, when the 5th New Hampshire returned to Concord, NH, to rest and recruit, only about 125 officers and soldiers were able to march from the train station into town under their own power.[x] Over the coming months, although the regiment did attract some volunteers to the colors, it relied mainly on substitute to fill the ranks. While the company officers did their best to whip the new men into shape, the 5th New Hampshire suffered badly from desertion for the rest of the war. It is emblematic of the regiment’s subsequent fortunes that the two most important engagements in which it fought during the remainder of the war—Cold Harbor and Farmville—were disasters in which substantial numbers of men were both killed and captured.
Conclusions
When I first chose the 5th New Hampshire as a vehicle by which to explore the various dimensions of soldier life, I did have reservations about the appropriateness of my selection. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as a typical Civil War regiment, I feared that the unit I’d selected was too unusual. After all, over the course of the war, if it suffered more combat fatalities than any other Union regiment. I justified my pick by rationalizing that the very experiences that made the 5th New Hampshire unusual—its huge losses, the heavy reliance on substitutes after 1863 (many of whom were foreign-born), the wave of desertions that followed, and the fact that its soldiers served as captors and captives in prison camps—allowed me to explore various topics that the study of other units would not permit. But having found in this post some interesting points of comparison between other units and my chosen regiment, I’m starting to think that the 5th New Hampshire was not exactly unique. Surely, it does not resemble all other regiments. Then again, no unit can. But perhaps it is the archetype of a certain kind of regiment, and that is something I need to think about as I move on with my research.
[i] Thomas Livermore, Days and Events 1860-1866 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920), 256.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid., 209.
[iv] Ibid., 257.
[v] See http://ourwarmikepride.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-nasty-scrap-with-col-crosss-brother.html
[vi] Jeffry D. Wert, A Brotherhood of Valor (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 215.
[vii] Ibid., 279.
[viii] Ibid., 280.
[ix] Livermore, Days and Events, 255.
[x] Mike Pride and Mark Travis, My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross & the Fighting Fifth (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 248. See also New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, August 5, 1863, 2.
The 5th New Hampshire Project 
