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

The Civil War regimental history has had a checkered historiographical career. First-generation regimental histories, written by veterans about their own units, appeared in the late nineteenth century and were drawn upon extensively by Bruce Catton and other writers of the centennial era, who regarded them as primary sources. The second wave, launched by John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War in 1957, likewise drew upon the veterans’ reminiscent works and followed the same template of describing the unit’s recruitment, training, baptism of fire, hardships, and eventual return, focusing on the transition from civilian to soldier with emphasis on dramatic or humorous moments, while downplaying the political side of the war. As academic historians began to take a more critical approach to the phenomenon of memory in the late twentieth century, some rejected first-wave regimental histories out of hand as being written too long after the event and too agenda-driven to tell us anything meaningful about the war. The writing of new second-wave regimental biographies came to be seen as the province of amateur enthusiasts and local historians. With A Broken Regiment, Lesley Gordon has reinvigorated the genre by offering a model for a third-wave regimental history. She recognizes the primacy of the regiment as the source of identity for the average soldier and uses wartime and postwar writings to see how the members of such a unit sought to shape that identity for themselves, their families, and the public.

Gordon’s subject is the Sixteenth Connecticut Volunteer Infantry regiment. The unit was organized in response to the July 1, 1862, call for 300,000 volunteers. Before its men received any meaningful training, they found themselves engaged on the left flank of the Army of the Potomac at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, where many of them panicked and ran away from enemy fire. The regiment spent the next year on garrison duty in southeastern Virginia, a posting that kept them safe from major engagements like Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, but also denied them the opportunity to redeem the military reputation that they had lost at Antietam. In 1864 they were transferred to Plymouth, North Carolina, another backwater of the war, where they were besieged, captured, and sent to Andersonville. Although Gordon is not the first to write a history of a less than glorious regiment (see John Zinn’s The Mutinous Regiment: The Thirty-Third New Jersey in the Civil War, originally published in 2005), the extraordinarily unsuccessful career of the Sixteenth Connecticut immediately distinguishes this work from most previous regimental histories.

The selection of a regiment that failed to live up to the traditional model of Civil War heroism is central to Gordon’s thesis, which is to show how veterans attempted to shape the public and personal memory of their experience to conform to that model, even in the case of a unit whose performance clearly differed. This process began during the war itself, in letters, newspaper articles, and journal entries written by soldiers trying to explain what they were going through and to define it in terms that were consistent with contemporary understandings of masculinity and patriotism. Gordon describes how the process continued and accelerated after the war, and in doing so he challenges Gerald Linderman’s argument that many veterans went through a postwar “incubation” period during which they kept their memories to themselves. Among Gordon’s richest sources is the work of George Q. Whitney, a veteran of the Sixteenth Connecticut who attempted to compile biographical information for every member of the unit so that he could write a regimental history that would, in Gordon’s words, “be free of anything embarrassing, unmanly, or dishonorable” and thus make the men “whole again” (2). This was a challenge, given the regiment’s lack of battlefield success, but Gordon shows how the veterans...