Three Years in the “Bloody Eleventh”

Hailing from the Keystone State’s rugged western counties, the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves was one of the Civil War’s most heavily engaged units. Of more than 2,100 regiments raised by the North, it suffered the eighth highest percentage of battle deaths, earning it the gruesome sobriquet "Bloody Eleventh."

Three Years in the "Bloody Eleventh" tells the story of this often-overlooked element of the Army of the Potomac from before the war up through 1864. Drawing on letters, diaries, and archival documents, Joseph Gibbs writes of men such as Colonel Thomas Gallagher, who led his troops into battle smoking a cigar, and Samuel Jackson, who became the regiment’s commander following Gallagher’s promotion. He rediscovers the complexities of the men who commanded the brigades and divisions of which the Eleventh Reserves was a part—figures such as George Meade, John Reynolds, and Samuel Crawford.

While Gibbs writes about the officers, he never loses sight of the men in the ranks who marched into places such as Gaines’ Mill, Miller’s Cornfield at Antietam, and the Wheatfield at Gettysburg. Nor does he forget the homes, wives, and children they left behind in western Pennsylvania.

With its meticulous research and lucid prose, Three Years in the "Bloody Eleventh" provides both scholars and Civil War enthusiasts with an unprecedented look inside the trials and tribulations of one of the war’s most battle-tested units.

“This history of the 11th Pennsylvania Reserves is a book of decidedly uncommon merits. Unlike many regimental histories, this one is marked by exhaustive research in the manuscript repositories, and Gibbs shows impressive skill in judiciously evaluating his sources. The resulting narrative affords an excellent balance between human and military content. Make no mistake about it: this is as fine a piece of research as you will find on a regimental-level unit."”—Robert K. Krick, author of Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain and Lee’s Colonels

“Regimental histories are notoriously uneven in quality. Some are little more than ‘cut and paste’ compilations of official sources and modern opinion, while others are truly gems of research and writing. Joseph Gibbs’ Three Years in the Bloody Eleventh: The Campaigns of a Pennsylvania Reserves Regiment decidedly falls into the latter category. Making extensive use of manuscripts, original letters and newspaper accounts, as well as many records in the National Archives and other repositories, Gibbs has created a thoroughly researched and engagingly written story of a unit that saw incredibly heavy service.”—Tom Clemens, America’s Civil War Magazine

“This history of the 11th Pennsylvania Reserves is a book of decidedly uncommon merits. Unlike many regimental histories, this one is marked by exhaustive research in the manuscript repositories, and Gibbs shows impressive skill in judiciously evaluating his sources. The resulting narrative affords an excellent balance between human and military content. Make no mistake about it: this is as fine a piece of research as you will find on a regimental-level unit.”—Robert K. Krick, author of Stonewall Jackson at Cedar Mountain and Lee’s Colonels

Joseph Gibbs has worked as a reporter and editor on several Massachusetts newspapers. He is Assistant Professor of Mass Communication at the American University of Sharjah (UAE) and author of Gorbachev's Glasnost: The Soviet Media in the First Phase of Perestroika (1999).

Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A County Divided

2. Soldiers in Dead Earnest: Camp Wright to Camp Tennally

3. No More Bull Run Affairs: Great Falls, Dranesville, and the March to the Rappahannock

4. One of the Awfulest Battles the World Has Ever Witnessed: The Road to Gaines’ Mill

5. Another Way to Take Richmond: Libby Prison, Belle Isle, and Glendale

6. Shot Down Like Sheep: Second Bull Run

7. Brave Comrades Falling: South Mountain and Antietam

8. Butchered Like So Many Animals: Fredericksburg

9. A Regiment Worth Its Weight in Gold: Gettysburg

10. Duty in the Context of the Cartridge Box: Falling Waters, Bristoe Station, and Mine Run

11. Winter 1863–1864

12. An Awful Sight of Men Cut Up: The Wilderness to Bethesda Church

13. A Remnant Returns: Muster-Out

14. “He Will Sit with a Small Mirror, and Look at His Reflection”: An Epilogue to the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Long before most of them had ever heard a shot fired in anger, the soldiers of the Union army’s Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves called their regiment the “Bloody Eleventh.” The moniker likely stemmed from bravado—a “bloodied” unit had seen action and earned a measure of battlefield glory—and like most recruits of 1861, the men were eager to get at and “whip” the Rebels.1 Regardless of how it emerged, the name was prophetic. Of 2,144 Union regiments raised during the war, the Eleventh Reserves suffered the eighth highest percentage of men killed in battle. The unit carried 1,179 soldiers on its rolls during three years of service, and 196 of them (11 officers and 185 enlisted men) became combat fatalities— 16.6 percent of its total. Not counting its many wounded, the Eleventh Reserves was one of those regiments that, as William Fox observed in his 1889 study of Civil War casualties, could “fairly claim the honor of having encountered the hardest fighting in the war.” Factor in 1 officer and 112 enlisted men killed by disease, plus the fact that hundreds of its members spent time in Rebel prisons, and the unit’s tour of duty becomes even grimmer.2

The regiment’s ten companies, about a hundred men each when at full strength, were raised in seven western Pennsylvania counties: Cambria, Indiana, Butler, Fayette, Armstrong, Westmoreland, and Jefferson. Mostly farmers and common laborers, leavened with a mix of back country lawyers, wagonmakers, blacksmiths, and students, the rough-hewn men of the Eleventh proved to be good soldiers. They were led in the field by equally tough Regular Army figures, such as George Meade, George McCall, Truman Seymour, John Reynolds, and Samuel Crawford.

The Pennsylvania Reserves organization as a whole comprised fifteen regiments, thirteen of which were infantry, most of which remained grouped as a division throughout the war. Save for stretches spent in two short-lived Union formations—Irvin McDowell’s Army of the Rappahannock and John Pope’s Army of Virginia—and a stint in the Washington defenses early in 1863, the division was always part of the Army of the Potomac.3 Accordingly, the Eleventh Reserves was present at most of the eastern flashpoints of 1862-64. Preceded by a skirmish at Great Fallson the Potomac, its combat tour began with the Seven Days’ Battles on the Peninsula. It ended in the middle of Ulysses S. Grant’s grinding 1864 campaign of attrition against Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

These battlefield actions started at Mechanicsville in late June 1862, at which a fraction of the regiment was engaged. The Eleventh fought as a whole the next day, at Gaines’ Mill, and was nearly destroyed. With the Union line pierced in several places, the unit held its ground alongside a New Jersey regiment while the rest of its wing of the army withdrew. Forced to surrender, its troops were marched to Richmond’s Libby Prison, the enlisted men later taken to the Belle Isle stockade. The prized regimental flag (or “colors”) became a Rebel trophy. Yet if capture could be marked by humiliation, the Eleventh’s performance at Gaines’ Mill earned only praise.

While most of the regiment was in Confederate prisons, a fragment remained in service, losing more than 30 percent of its numbers at the vicious 30 July 1862 action known as Glendale, Frayser’s Farm, White Oak Swamp, or Charles City Cross Roads (among other names). Two members of this ad hoc force earned the Congressional Medal of Honor for gallantry during this battle, marked by one of the few times in the war when participants fought hand-to-hand.

Reconstituted after the war’s first major prisoner exchange, the Eleventh Reserves saw hard service during the remaining months of 1862. It was routed along with the rest of its brigade on the second day of Second Bull Run, and the victory at South Mountain a few weeks later came at the cost of most of the regiment’s officers, killed or wounded by a single Confederate volley. The Eleventh Reserves suffered several more killed at Antietam, where it fought at the edge of the infamous cornfield on the Miller farm. At Fredericksburg it, along with the rest of the Pennsylvania Reserves division, had a hand in the day’s only successful Union assault on Rebel lines.

Following the Fredericksburg disaster, the shattered Pennsylvania Reserves division was sent to Washington to rest and thus missed the Union defeat at Chancellorsville. With the Rebel army subsequently on the move into their home state, the division’s officers petitioned headquarters to be sent back into action. Their return to the Army of the Potomac climaxed on Gettysburg’s second day, when the Eleventh Reserves was involved in the counterattack that started from the slopes of Little Round Top and surged into the Wheatfield, breaking the Confederate advance.

The next spring, though its term of enlistment was soon to end, the regiment took an active role in Grant’s Overland Campaign toward Richmond. It fought its way out of entrapment in the Wilderness and lost more men at Spotsylvania Court House and elsewhere. Its final engagement, repelling a Confederate attack at Bethesda Church, about two years after but only a few miles distant from Mechanicsville, arguably brought the Eleventh Reserves full circle.

Some high-casualty units earned notoriety from a single, disastrous engagement. The Eleventh Reserves had many terrible fights—Gaines’ Mill, Second Manassas, Fredericksburg, and the first day of the Wilderness, especially—but its high losses ultimately represented steady attrition. Its men were less colorful than other units of its division—the famous “Bucktails,” for example, of the Thirteenth Pennsylvania Reserves, who earned a superb reputation and habitually led the advance as skirmishers. Yet judged by casualties suffered, few units in the Army of the Potomac endured more fighting over time.

Few also earned less postwar notice. Aside from the diligent Samuel P. Bates, who allotted about ten pages to the Eleventh in his multivolume 1869 History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, no contemporary historian seems to have seriously chronicled the unit. A weighty 1865 account of the Pennsylvania Reserves as a division of the Army of the Potomac makes only occasional mention of the Eleventh. Such terse attention explains why many works on the eastern theater include only brief references to the regiment.4

In this book I try to tell the story of the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves using a variety of sources. These are undeniably fragmented and incomplete, as only a scattered amount of relevant contemporary material has survived. Letters, diaries, and other first-person writings provide a starting point, and others will likely emerge from private collections over time and be useful to researchers.

To cite some examples, multiple letters survive by two members of Company A—the “Cambria Guards”—Andrew Lewis and Philip Lantzy; both died in separate battles in 1862. A single letter by “Brady Guards” (Company K) Pvt. Thomas W. Sallade describes some of the scenes in the regiment’s early training; one by regimental chaplain the Reverend Adam Torrance details service at Gettysburg.5 Several missives exist penned by Sgt. Harvey Fair of Company B, the “Indiana National Guards,” who like Lewis died at Gaines’ Mill. Late in life, Aaron Kepler of Butler County’s “Dickson Guards” (Company C) penned an unpublished memoir of life in the Eleventh up to his wounding and capture at Gaines’ Mill, following which he was eventually exchanged and then discharged. Another Butler County unit, Company D (the “Connoquenessing Rangers”) is represented by diaries kept by young corporal Jesse Fry and fifer Charles H. Minnemeyer. Their comrade Robert E. McBride published a memoir of army life—the first four months of which were spent in the Rangers—entitled In the Ranks.6

James X. McIlwain, a sergeant in Armstrong County’s “Independent Blues” (Company G), survived three years in the regiment, and his letters have found their way into archival collections. The family of Samuel Jackson, who was originally McIlwain’s captain and later commander of the regiment, found his 1862 diary among his papers after his death and published it. As this book was being finished in 2000, letters by Pvt. Andrew Ivory of the Independent Blues and a single letter by Robert McElhaney of the Dickson Guards came onto the collectors’ market. Other stray items from members of the regiment will likely emerge in the future.7

Further illumination comes from the notebook-diary kept by Indiana County’s James McGinley, a corporal in Company E, one of two companies in the regiment that originally called themselves the “Washington Blues” (the other was Westmoreland County’s Company I). McGinley’s volume had a few adventures itself when its owner lost it after writing his 1 May 1864 entry. A Confederate captain found the book, writing his own name on the flyleaf but fortunately not eradicating the earlier notations. A Union cavalryman recovered it and in 1890 finally located McGinley, who had moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and returned the diary to its rightful owner.8

Contemporary periodicals are another valuable source, and they are generally more trustworthy than postwar accounts, always potentially tinged by a rearrangement of facts. Kepler’s 1900 memoir told of his captain confronting an Irish private who had brought a rattlesnake to camp. “Begorra ai’m a goin’ to schwear ’im an’ let ’im go!” the soldier replied jokingly, citing the practice of releasing prisoners after the latter had taken the Oath of Allegiance to the Federal government. But the tale echoes an anecdote published in at least one western Pennsylvania newspaper in 1861; it must have circulated many times during the war. And by the time the regiment unveiled a memorial at Gettysburg, the veterans’ remembrance of what they did on the battle’s second day bore little resemblance to either contemporary accounts or their former colonel’s 1877 letter on the subject.9

Firsthand soldier accounts found their way into newspapers through several channels. Relatives shared camp and battlefield missives with local editors, and some soldiers wrote directly to the papers, often employing initials or pen names. Such accounts are invaluable, but papers from several of the Eleventh Reserves’ component counties have had a poor survival rate for parts of the war. And as the conflict progressed, fewer literate pens remained in the ranks to send letters back. Finally, a caveat must be attached to published letters, because editors who cleaned up spelling and punctuation may also have removed details deemed unimportant at the time.10

Not every letter home following a fight, whether kept private or made public, contained details of a battle. Many who survived the shock, gore, and chaos of war sought only to scrawl a few words to let the homefolks know that they had survived. And as the war progressed and they became desensitized to combat, soldiers spent less time in their letters dwelling on particulars of battle.

On a more official level, the National Archives and Records Administration is home to an illuminating set of miscellaneous and personal papers from the Eleventh Reserves, contained in Record Group 94. And although the regimental and company books are not part of the archives’ collection, ordnance inventories in Record Group 156 provide data on weapons and equipment starting with the fourth quarter of 1862. Additionally, as the government granted pensions to veterans and their survivors, applications housed in Record Group 15 detail the service, wounds, and personal and family data for veterans of the Eleventh. These pension folders may hold a handful of pages or hundreds. They can include government forms, surgeon’s certificates, responses to annual questionnaires, letters written home from the field, and even notes scribbled on scraps of paper. Because of their varied contents, some judgment had to be exercised when citing pension file materials. In many cases, particularly when data was culled from a series of documents, it seemed best to simply give the certificate number assigned to the soldier’s (or his family’s) pension folder.

Some pension folders from members of the Eleventh Reserves were unavailable for study. They had remained in the Department of Veterans Affairs’ records holding facility in Suitland, Maryland, which was subsequently damaged by a February 2000 fire. It is unclear at the time of this writing what records were affected by the fire.11

Sources outside the regiment itself also help flesh out a picture of the conditions affecting the Eleventh. Meade and Reynolds, for instance, wrote home about their experiences in the Pennsylvania Reserves division, and the former commanded the Eleventh’s parent brigade for a time. Then there is the U.S. government’s omnibus collection of wartime reports and correspondence, the Official Records, in which the regiment’s movements and battles were summarized and chronicled by its field commanders.12

All Civil War sources need to be used with care, and many disagree over details. A historian perusing the 1861 files of Warren, Pennsylvania, newspapers highlighted the rare occasion when “rival editors substantially agreed in their descriptions” of an event.13 Confusion is most noticeable— and should be expected—in recounting battle action. Battle accounts and maps only approximate the chaos; an author can at best synthesize a mass of conflicting data. Many Civil War survivors deemed accuracy an impossible goal. One Confederate veteran-turned-brigade historian noted: “No one soldier sees all that occurs in the battle in which he participates; it is impossible he should. Officers and privates do not see alike even when observing the same occurrence, for they look from different angles and standpoints.”14 A dozen years after the war, when Union Col. Kenner Garrard responded to a request for his memories of Gettysburg, he did so acknowledging that “no doubt others may differ widely from me in these matters.” He also volunteered: “There is little truth . . . in the details of wars as recorded in history.”15

That said, these soldiers’ stories were vivid ones, and it seems strange that no hefty postwar regimental history came from the Eleventh Reserves’ veterans. Some definitely thought they deserved one. “Other regiments were as good, but none better,” former officer Hannibal Sloan remarked when the unit unveiled its granite memorial in the Wheatfield at Gettysburg. He continued: “it is meet and proper that the survivors should gather the testimony and show that this regiment did its duty. Otherwise history will record [only] that . . . it was organized, mustered into the service, served three years and was mustered out. This won’t do—we must brighten our memories, refer to our diaries, look up and write up our history, and demand that the truth be told of us and justice be done to our dead and to the survivors of our regiment.”16

None of his comrades seem to have taken up Sloan’s challenge. Many potential chroniclers of the three years of service, of course, had been left in graves across Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The survivors may have avoided writing about the unit immediately after the war, when their recollections were freshest, because their service had been hard and they may have wanted to put the conflict behind them. For these men, reminders of the war might be only a few houses away, in the form of neighbors who came back mangled. In late summer 1863, when the Pennsylvania Reserves division presented an elaborate sword and sash to Meade, he acknowledged not only those “now sleeping their sleep in lonely battlefields” but also wondered “how many others are now limping over the country mutilated cripples.”17

The Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves provided many of the latter. Pension applications reveal men who lost limbs or were partially blinded or deafened in battle. Some stopped musket balls with their teeth, others survived gunshot wounds in the genitals. Yet many soldiered on rather than seek discharges. As medical historian Jack D. Welsh wrote of the people of the era, “They did not consider themselves victims but accepted what happened and carried on with their lives.”18 Some suffered in mind as much as in body. One veteran struggled with fits of dementia every time he heard a loud noise. Another was locked in an insane asylum with the war still raging. Released from the service, he promptly signed up in another unit, unable to exit the conflict despite its horrors.

Such stories underscore the rigors of service in the Eleventh Reserves. One newspaper account of the men discharged following the Fredericksburg and “Mud March” campaigns noted: “They, with but two exceptions had all visited Richmond as prisoners, and some of them twice; they were discharged in consequence of sickness and wounds—the majority for wounds received in the hard fought battles in which the Pennsylvania Reserves generally took a conspicuous part. Several were wounded thrice, some twice, and others being more lucky only happened to be in the path of one ball shot by traitors to the best Government the sun ever shown upon.”19

A year and a half later, another writer commented on the regiment’s return following its 1864 muster-out. “The remnant of the 11th P.R. reached Pittsburg[h] on Wednesday last, their three years term of enlistment having expired. . . . The Regiment went out over one thousand strong, and although we did not count them when they got off the cars in Pittsburg[h], we think that only about one hundred and fifty returned.”20 The “Bloody Eleventh” had more than earned its self-appointed, self-fulfilling nickname.

Any Pennsylvania Reserves unit challenges a researcher, as it did the Civil War–era administrator, because of the organization’s confusing numbering system. The regiments received two designations: a “reserves” number reflecting the state formation in which they originated; and a “line” number corresponding to their integration into the Federally mustered Pennsylvania Volunteers. Hence, the Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves was also known as the Fortieth Pennsylvania.21

In spite of the attempt to impose a standard numbering system on the Pennsylvania regiments, the Reserves continued to call themselves (and be called) by their Reserve number. Accordingly it was (and remains) easy to confuse Reserves and non-Reserves units. Consider the 1864 plight of Frederick Rexroud, then a thirty-six-year-old Philadelphia-born machinist. At a recruiting station in New Brighton, on 26 February, he signed papers for three years, or the duration of the war, in the Eleventh Pennsylvania Volunteers. Due to a clerical error, he was sworn into Federal service as a member of the Eleventh Reserves. One regiment was not as good as another for Rexroud, who probably had friends or relatives in the Eleventh Volunteers. The officer who signed him up, district provost marshal Capt. John Cuthbertson, tried to get the adjutant general’s office to fix the mistake, but it refused as the mustering had already taken place. The conscientious Cuthbertson kept at it, and the secretary of war finally issued special orders correcting Rexroud’s enlistment status.22

The spelling and grammar of the primary sources used herein varies widely in quality. I have tried to closely transcribe the materials, using brackets when clarification seemed necessary. Please note that deciding whether a nineteenth-century writer’s cursive character indicated capitalization was often a judgment call, as was my decision to use the modern spelling of Butler County’s Connoquenessing Creek throughout the main text.23

The companies that formed the Eleventh Reserves had their own identities and characters. In this work, their original nicknames have been used interchangeably with their letter designations. Several tables within the text give both identifications, as does the following:

Company County Original Designation

A Cambria Cambria Guards

B Indiana Indiana National Guards

C Butler Dickson Guards

D Butler Connoquenessing Rangers

E Indiana Washington Blues (I)

F Fayette Union Volunteers

G Armstrong Independent Blues

H Westmoreland Westmoreland Guards

I Westmoreland Washington Blues (II)

K Jefferson Brady Guards

(Note that the letter J was not used in U.S. Army company designations.)24

Although much of this book deals with battles, I have tried to focus on movements and activities directly involving the Eleventh Reserves. Accordingly, strategic-level overview has been kept to a minimum, with many important details in Civil War history summarized or omitted altogether.

I long ago took to heart Civil War historian Robert K. Krick’s maxim “Good books about the war contain good and plentiful maps on their specific subjects; bad books contain few or none.”25 That said, production realities unfortunately limited the number of maps that could be included here. Readers further interested in individual battles may wish to examine those contained in the general works—as well as the highly detailed National Park Service troop movement map sets, when available— cited in the notes and bibliography.

Nor was it possible to include a complete regimental roster—a staple of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century regimental histories. Fortunately, each company’s rolls are transcribed in pages 854-75 of volume 1 of Bates’ History of Pennsylvania Volunteers. This standard reference work was republished, in a slightly different volume configuration, by Broadfoot Publishing, Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993.

Like many modern Civil War books, this project originally sprang from personal genealogical research, and my first thanks go to several distant relatives who put good fortune to historians’ use. In 1978,Vernon Krug and his wife, Lovelle (née Lantzy), learned that the Lantzy family had saved a cache of nineteenth-century documents, including twenty-eight letters sent home during 1861-62 by Philip Lantzy, Company A, Eleventh Pennsylvania Reserves. With the help of Lovelle’s cousin, genealogist and history buff Charles Lantzy of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, the Krugs transcribed Philip’s writings, then sent copies of the transcripts and photocopies of the letters themselves to several research centers, including the United States Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The originals are now deposited with the Department of Special Collections at Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University.

Enthusiastic support came as well from Madeline Paine Moyer of Raleigh, North Carolina, a descendant of Andrew Lewis, first lieutenant and later captain of Philip Lantzy’s company. She passed along significant genealogical and anecdotal information about the officer and his family, gave feedback on portions of the manuscript, and also made available family photographs.

I owe a great debt to Michael Musick of the National Archives and Records Administration, who aided me immensely in finding data sources in the collection he oversees. David Wallace of the same institution wasalso instrumental, as were private researchers Vicki Killian of Takoma Park, Maryland, and Ronald L. Waddell of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and author Thomas P. Lowry, whose Civil War works have set a standard for using the National Archives.

Many National Park Service historians offered constructive criticism and insight. They include Alan Marsh and Joan Stibitz at Andersonville; Ted Alexander and Keith Snyder at Antietam; Frank O’Reilly at Fredericksburg/ Spotsylvania; John Heiser at Gettysburg; Chris Bryce at Manassas; and Robert E. L. Krick at Richmond. I am also indebted to author and historian Steven R. Stotelmyer of Sharpsburg, Maryland, for sharing data acquired in his research on the Maryland campaign of 1862.

Thanks goes to Pam Cheney, David Keough, and Michael J. Winey at the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for invaluable access to documents and photographs from their various collections. I also drew upon the resources provided by the staff of the Brandeis University Libraries; Katherine Kominis of the Department of Special Collections, Mugar Library, Boston University; Michael Lear and Ann W. Upton of the Archives and Special Collections Department of the Shadek-Fackenthal Library, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Elinor Hernon of the Newton (Massachusetts) Free Library; and Richard Hill of the State Library of Pennsylvania. The maps reproduced here came courtesy of David DiBiase and Mark Wherley of the Peter R. Gould Center for Geography Education and Outreach at Penn State University. Additional photographs came from Ronn Palm of Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and Ziegler Studios in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Various Pennsylvania historical societies and government officials contributed time, advice, and resources. I am grateful to Connie Mateer of the Armstrong County Historical Society; Leslie Conrad of the Cambria County Historical Society; Cindy Pierce of the office of the Cambria County Register of Wills; Carla Wright of the Capitol Preservation Committee, Harrisburg; John J. Craft of the Civil War Library and Museum, Philadelphia; Carol Bernie and Colleen Chambers of the Historical and Genealogical Society of Indiana County; Jennie Benford and Linda Pelan of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Marianne Heckles of the Lancaster County Historical Society; Ron Gancas, senior curator at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall in Pittsburgh; and James Steeley and Jennifer Wilson of the Westmoreland County Historical Society.

Outside of the Keystone State, I owe thanks to James Greve and Sandra Peterkin of the Library of Virginia; Donna J. Williams of the Maryland Historical Society; Bonnie Wilson of the Minnesota Historical Society; Carolyn S. Parsons, Mark Winecoff, and Katherine Wetzel of the Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond; Crista LaPrade of the Virginia Historical Society; and Barbara Billings of the Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland. I also gleaned important feedback and support from friends and colleagues Niall and Eva Heney, Tanya Karpiak, Richard K. Lodge, Les Masterson, Marina Parsons, and Ann Ringwood.

I have special regard for the editors and staff of Penn State University Press (including their anonymous peer reviewers) and am grateful for their confidence in accepting and working with my manuscript. Last but not least, my wife, Tatyana, was a true partner, and her patience and love was essential to my undertaking and finishing this project.

With those thanks given, please note that any errors herein are the author’s responsibility.

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