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  • United States Regulars in Gray: Edward Ingraham and Company A, 1st Regular Confederate Cavalry
  • Richard B. McCaslin* (bio)

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Letter from Edward Ingraham to “Mother and Alice” [Elizabeth Meade Ingraham and Alice Ingraham], July 1, 1861, sent from Camp Van Dorn near San Antonio, where Ingraham’s Company A guarded Federal prisoners of war. Sue B. Moore Collection.

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President Abraham Lincoln told a special session of Congress on July 4, 1861, that while “large numbers” of United States Army officers had resigned “and thus proved false to the hand which had pampered them, not one common soldier . . . is known to have deserted the flag.” He added that while he did not wish to detract from the honorable actions of the officers who continued to support the Union, “the greatest honor, and the most important fact of all, is the unanimous firmness of the common soldiers.” The embattled president’s insistence that the enlisted men, like the “plain people” of the North, remained true to the Union was only slightly amended in subsequent accounts of the Regular Army during the Civil War.1

A common maxim holds that while hundreds of United States officers resigned and then fought for the Confederacy, only twenty-six enlisted men did so. The latter number originated with Emory Upton, who declared it to be correct in his history of the Army, which was published in 1904. It has been repeated in scholarly works as diverse as Maurice Matloff’s American Military History, Mark M. Boatner’s Civil War Dictionary, and Everette B. Long’s Civil War Day by Day. Most recently, in 2011, it appeared in Of Duty Well and Faithfully Performed: A History of the Regular Army in the Civil War by Clayton R. Newell and Charles R. Shrader. One of the most influential historians of the Army, Russell F. Weigley, simply quoted Lincoln and did not challenge the commonly accepted figure. But at the time that Lincoln spoke to Congress, fifty-one enlisted men of the Regular Army had already [End Page 25] deserted and joined Company A of the 1st Confederate Regular Cavalry at San Antonio, Texas, and a dozen more would join them later.2

A closer look at this Texas cohort can help not only to correct a persistent myth about the Regular Army in the Civil War, it can also provide valuable insights on other wartime issues. Richard P. Weinert, in an article for Military Affairs, has already suggested that the total of Army enlisted men who joined the Confederacy was probably closer to four hundred, and he included this number again in his book on the Confederate Regular Army published in 1991. Six years later, Herman Hattaway, in Shades of Blue and Gray, declared that “at least seventy” enlisted men changed sides early in the war, and that the total “eventually approached four hundred.” But neither of these historians provided primary evidence for their assertions. Thanks to a recent gift of access to the letters of the commander of Company A, Lt. Edward Ingraham, concerning his operations in Texas, much more can be understood about recruiting and training former United States Regulars in Texas. The perspective that emerges confirms the suppositions of Weinert and Hattaway and should put to rest the claims of previous scholars about the Regular Army of the United States in the Civil War. Additional records detail Company A’s subsequent service throughout the war and the fate of the surviving members afterward. These materials also reveal the Confederacy’s struggle with its first prisoners of war during a turbulent period when policies had not yet been defined. Finally, on a more personal level, Ingraham’s story reveals just how complex Civil War relationships could be: his maternal uncle was Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, who won the Battle of Gettysburg for the Union after both of his nephews, Ingraham and his brother, were killed in Confederate service.3

For Confederate authorities interested in recruiting Army veterans, Texas provided a great opportunity. Of approximately 16,000 officers and men in the Army on the eve of the Civil war, about 2,700...

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