Heart of the Commonwealth : the men of the Fifteenth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry & the Civil War, 1861-1864

Abstract

This thesis examines the men who served in the Fifteenth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the American Civil War. The regiment was formed in Worcester, Massachusetts in the summer of 1861 and served with the United States until the summer of 1864. The Fifteenth served with the Second Corps of Army of the Potomac in the eastern theater of operations and participated in nearly every major engagement during its tenure. The thesis uses the regimental muster rolls, census data, and other primary and secondary sources to analyze the men who served in the Fifteenth. It divides the men into three distinct groups: those that originally joined the regiment during its formation in 1861, those that volunteered to join of the regiment after casualties and disease had depleted its ranks, and those that were drafted into service with the regiment. The thesis seeks to show that these three groups of men differed from each other in terms of age, occupational class, and residency. The original men of the regiment where almost exclusively from the communities of Worcester County, Massachusetts and reflected the age and occupational classes of the region. As the war progressed, however, the men who joined the regiment grew less representative of the area as more men were from other communities and states. Finally, the thesis seeks to show that the Fifteenth was a hard-fighting veteran unit that was typical of the Second Corps and the Union Army and as such represents the types of experiences had by the common soldiers of that war. The fact that the draft provided an inadequate number of men to fill the ranks of the regiment and that fewer men from the regiment died of disease than from battle presents interesting deviations from the accepted common knowledge of the experiences of the war.