A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut’s Civil War by Lesley J. Gordon (review)

In this sustained treatment of the 16th Connecticut, Lesley Gordon brings light to the unusually tumultuous history of one of the Union army’s least decorated, yet most cantankerously vocal, units. Drawing on an incredibly rich source base, Gordon highlights such key themes as soldierly motivations for fighting, attitudes toward political questions, perceptions of group identity, and the process of collective memory-making. At once a micro-history and a biography of a whole unit, A Broken Regiment offers a new trajectory for future studies of Civil War regiments in a compelling and readable style (3–4).

The approximately one thousand men who joined the 16th Connecticut did so for many reasons. Gordon carefully traces these motivations to muster through biographical sketches and thereby contributes more evidence to answer the perennial question of why they fought. She next leads the reader through the battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), noting the critical ways the battle defined the regiment’s sense of identity, and hints at the elements of conflict that would plague the Broken Regiment in the years ahead. In subsequent chapters, the author is nothing if not thorough: she describes the regiment’s winter camps at Fredericksburg, Newport News, and Suffolk; she studies the effects of the changes in the officer corps; and she brings to life the countless hardships suffered through soldiering. Gordon also highlights a recurring theme, namely that the men of the regiment became “increasingly convinced that they were suffering more than most” (68). The succeeding years brought further hardships, though not without some military victories, and an enjoyable lull in fighting. The Battle of Suffolk in May 1863, most especially, permitted the regiment to feel a sense of “regeneration” (86). Garrisoned at sites along the Virginia coast, the men of the regiment mostly disdained the African Americans whom they encountered. Gordon finds that in their camp life at Portsmouth, the Connecticut regiment was, at best, willful and independent and, at worst, arrogant and racist.

Until this point in the narrative, readers may well lack sympathy for the 16th Connecticut. After the events of May 1864, however, everything changed. Gordon surveys the regiment’s movement from Virginia to North Carolina, its capture at the Battle of Plymouth, and its ensuing confinement at Andersonville Prison and elsewhere. Significantly, the massacre of African American soldiers and civilians at Plymouth provided most of the regiment’s soldiers only a slight pause for concern. As Gordon explains, the mental and physical anguish experienced at Andersonville permanently broke the regiment’s martial spirit and fighting prowess. She notes how the soldiers attributed their continued captivity to the federal government’s failure to agree to a system of prisoner exchange with the Confederacy (driven, they believed, by the Union’s misguided effort to protect the lives of captured African American soldiers). The excruciating months of imprisonment are rendered in stark detail: the arbitrary system of paroles at Andersonville, the transfer of enlisted men to Florence and Charleston, South Carolina, and their final relocation to Camp Parole in Annapolis, Maryland. The long-suffering regiment’s remaining wartime contributions took place at Roanoke and New Bern.

A final chapter on the postwar period, followed by a brief but powerful conclusion, delivers a satisfying ending. As it was for so many others who fought, the Civil War was the defining episode in these soldiers’ lives, both for good and for ill. For example, Gordon cites numerous instances of insanity and suicide in later life. As might be expected, certain men emerged as keepers of the regiment’s history. Readers will learn of the culmination of their efforts in the publication of regimental histories, the collection of comprehensive biographical information, and the casting of two bronze statues, both titled Andersonville Boy, on the sites of the former prison and the grounds of the capitol in Hartford, respectively.

One searches with difficulty for areas in which...