The Lead Mine Men: The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Engaging the Civil War) - Softcover

Thomas B. Mack taught for several years at Dallas College at El Centro. His research focus is the Civil War soldier, whether Union or Confederate, and he explores soldiers’ collective wartime and postwar experiences though writing modern regimental studies. 

INTRODUCTION

Capt. John M. Adair wrote the first history of the 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment and delivered his account in 1869 at the unit’s second postwar reunion. The captain singled out the regiment for its fighting on June 25–26, 1863, during the siege of Vicksburg, noting that in being the first to attack after the mine explosion under the 3rd Louisiana Redan, the 45th experienced such horrific savagery in the fighting that it made the rest of the unit’s service in the American Civil War seem like “mere boy’s play in comparison.” The fighting on those two days earned the regiment a place of honor eight days later, as well as lasting renown.

After Confederate lieutenant general John C. Pemberton surrendered the Confederate citadel of Vicksburg, Mississippi, at 10 a.m. on July 4, 1863, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant led members of the Union’s Army of the Tennessee into the captured city. Following Grant, his staff, and the corps commanders marched the 45th Illinois, given this honor because of its service during Grant’s eight-month-long campaign to take Vicksburg and because it had volunteered to lead the June 25 attack. The regiment suffered a 33 percent casualty rate during the campaign, and in the assault on the Confederate bastion, it experienced severe losses, with the unit’s entire command staff either killed in action or mortally or severely wounded.

Adair’s remembrance of the regiment’s fighting on those two days in June 1863  in contrast with the rest of its experience in uniform should not detract from the stoic service the men of the 45th provided to their country throughout the war, from Camp Douglas in Chicago in 1861 to their mustering out of service in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1865. Although not all its members served honorably, the 45th Illinois as a unit never broke and ran during combat.

The 45th, called by its men the Lead Mine Regiment to honor the history of iron ore mining in Galena, Illinois, was organized in the latter half of 1861 and compiled an impressive record during the Civil War. In addition to the Vicksburg Campaign, the unit served in Grant’s 1862 Tennessee Campaign, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s Meridian raid, and Sherman’s Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolinas Campaigns before marching in the postwar celebratory Grand Review in Washington, D.C., on May 24, 1865. The first phase of the regiment’s service encompassed its inception, raising, and extended training period from July 1861 to January 31, 1862. During the second phase, from early February 1862 to early July 1863, the 45th’s soldiers first experienced Civil War combat, fought in five major battles and minor skirmishes and actions, and served in the war’s first major siege, suffering catastrophic losses from disease, sickness, and battle. These pragmatic soldiers embraced their leaders’ new war goal and widening of the war’s destruction, regardless of the impact on them or the Confederacy’s citizenry. After the men of the Lead Mine Regiment completed their service, they reenlisted to become a veteran unit and then displayed their self-reliance, hardiness, and commitment to their republic by walking nearly two thousand miles in implementing the Union’s hard war on the Confederacy from July 1863 to July 1865.

While defending their republic, the Lead Mine men built an outstanding record. The regiment earned honors before entering the field and later at a corps inspection and received commendations for its fighting at Fort Donelson and Shiloh, during the Vicksburg Campaign, and later on General Sherman’s Meridian raid. Some in the regiment deserted, others suffered punishments for various transgressions, and still others shirked their responsibilities during battle. Overall, however, the regiment’s record is impressive. Yet despite this honored service, a study of the 45th Illinois does not exist.

In a 2008 article titled “Battling Stereotypes: A Taxonomy of Common Soldiers in Civil War History,” historian Jason Phillips calls for more unit studies to “retrieve some of the individuality” that the war had quashed. He pushes for these studies to counter stereotypes, especially that the “Civil War soldiers were God-fearing, independent, hard-working, family men.” According to Phillips, the studies should show these soldiers’ various backgrounds, social statuses, and incomes as citizens and that they were “not angels yet not brutes,” but men of their era, flawed yet fighting for their nations. Moreover, Phillips advocates for more works on the “crack regiments” of men who became outstanding soldiers and “merit more attention because of their exceptional influence” on “individual soldiers or groups.” Phillips argues that unit studies, unlike monographs, would “transcend historiographic debates that pigeonhole soldiers” and tell a story about “how men experienced the war” and “soldiering in the nineteenth century,” as well as how to write history today. Historian Peter Carmichael, in his 2018 work on Civil War soldiers, also calls for more studies of these pragmatic men so as to “fully recover the life of the rank and file as it was lived.”

This work answers Phillips’s and Carmichael’s calls in part, as it shows the soldiers of the “crack” 45th Illinois as they were, men of their time, who eventually accepted President Abraham Lincoln’s expansion of the Union’s war goals to include the emancipation of the Confederacy’s enslaved people. Pragmatically, they knew the policy hurt their enemy’s ability to wage war, and they empathized with those who were enslaved after seeing the brutal realities of chattel slavery.

This is not to say all were patriotic Christian saints fighting for their republic. As men of their time, most likely did not see Black Americans as their equal; yet these everyday men became enthusiastic emancipators, knowing their service would aid in bringing an end to the institution of slavery. The 45th initially had a dim view of Lincoln’s decision to create Black regiments, but in time these sensible men saw that the president’s plan benefited them in several ways, notably by working to end the war sooner. The regiment’s views of the antiwar Northern Democrat Copperheads, however, never strayed from virulent hate and desire for retribution. From their first days in the field, the 45th enthusiastically joined in the pillaging that came with the Union’s increasingly hard war on the Confederacy and its citizenry, both out of opportunism, knowing it would help shorten the war, and because they had seen the horrors of slavery. Of note, the Lead Mine men’s and their comrades’ pillaging happened much earlier than what several historians have contended. While some men operated as Sherman’s bummers out of personal gain in implementing this hard war, the majority accepted their leaders’ policy change even though it caused them severe hunger and increased the possibility that they could be captured and die in an enemy prisoner-of-war camp.

Over 80 percent of the Lead Mine men came from eleven northern Illinois counties dominated by Republicans but with concentrations of pro-Union Democrats when war came. That the 45th’s members shared the same fervent patriotism is evident in the regiment’s battle record, its reenlistment in 1864, and the fact that the Copperheads’ treasonous antiwar work did not result in the demoralization or high numbers of desertions that occurred in other Union units. Compared with the Union army as a whole, the regiment had less than one-third the percentage of...