D'Epineuil's Zouaves

Gerald E. Wheeler is an assistant professor at the United States Naval Academy. He has a doctorate from the University of California where he specialized in American diplomatic and military history. D'Epineuil's Zouaves GERALD E. WHEELER the civil war had more than its share of grim and bloody engagements , but occasionally the years of horror were lightened by campaigns that, were it not for the casualties, would have passed for opera bouffe. The beginning movements of Brigadier General Ambrose E. Burnside's expedition to Roanoke Island in January, 1862, certainly set the stage for something less than the traditional operation with its attendant frightfulness . Adding levity to the character of Burnside's movement was a series of misfortunes that befell the 53d Regiment, New York State Volunteers , more commonly known to its time as "D'Epineuü's Zouaves." In the summer of 1861, after the Union rout at Bull Run pointed up the need for reorganization, training, and leadership in the Federal army, Lincoln turned to Major General George B. McClellan. As commander of the Division of the Potomac, McClellan emphasized drill and projected plans for operations against the Confederacy. Among his many plans was the pet scheme of organizing an amphibious division, principally to operate in the Chesapeake Bay. This Coast Division, accompanied and protected by a naval flotilla commanded by the Army, would land troops behind the Confederate lines, force a dispersal of the defenses, thereby weakening resistance to the southward movements of the Army of the Potomac.1 In laying this plan before Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, McClellan suggested that the Coast Division consist of two brigades, each made up of five regiments "of New England men, for the general service, but particularly adapted to coast service, the officers and men to 1 Augustus Woodbury, Major General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps . . . (Providence: S. S. Rider & Bro., 1867), p. 21; also General Peter S. Michie, General McClellan (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1901), p. 133. 93 94GERALDE. WHEELER be sufficiently conversant with boat service to manage steamers, saüing vessels, launches, barges, surf-boats, floating batteries, ¿Sec . . ."2 Though not exactly sanguine about the value of amphibious operations, Lieutenant General Winfield Scott gave McClellan the green Ught. On September 12, 1861, General Bumside was ordered to New England "to raise a force of two brigades of five regiments each." Burnside found the New Englanders very cooperative, particularly Governor WiUiam Sprague in Burnside's Rhode Island, but he was competing with Generals Benjamin F. Butler and Thomas W. Sherman who similarly were recruiting for amphibious expeditions of their own. Regiments once raised were pirated or shifted from one general to another, frequently to the confusion of the War Department, and as often as not enraging the touchy state governors and colonels involved.3 But after a month of vigorous recruiting activity Burnside was able to move his headquarters to New York City and there receive and transfer incoming regiments to Coast Division headquarters in Annapolis or keep them in the New York City area for training. In August, while General McClellan was taking the Division of the Potomac in hand, thirty-one-year-old Lionel Jobert D'Epineuil, recently arrived from France, received permission to form a regiment of New York Frenchmen. Convincing the War Department that he had seventeen years of French military service, D'Epineuil was enrolled as a provisional colonel and ordered to recruit his own regiment to be known as the D'Epineuil Zouaves.4 On October 16, 1861, though only haU filled, D'Epineuil's unit was mustered into the Federal service at New York City and designated the 53d Infantry Regiment, New York State Volunteers . In leadership the regiment had a decidedly French flavor, but its ranks reflected the "melting pot" character of New York City and its environs. Probably to the eternal mystification of the continental D'Epineuil, one company of Indians from the Tuscarora Reservation of western New York joined the regiment to do battle for the Union. 2 McClellan to Simon Cameron, Washington, September 6, 1861, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington...