Hoosiers for the Union: An Indiana Memorial Before Memorial Day

On September 13, 1862, two soldiers of the 27th Indiana Volunteer Infantry sat down to rest in a Maryland meadow outside Frederick. Confederate troops had bivouacked on the same ground a few days earlier. In the trampled grass, Corporal Barton W. Mitchell and First Sergeant John M. Bloss of Company F found three cigars wrapped in a sheet of paper.

The paper turned out to be a copy of Special Orders No. 191, issued four days earlier by General Robert E. Lee, detailing how the Army of Northern Virginia was about to divide itself into five separate pieces during the Maryland Campaign. Within hours the order was on General George B. McClellan’s desk. Within a week the armies met at Antietam Creek — the bloodiest single day in American history, and the political pivot that gave Abraham Lincoln the cover to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

Two Hoosiers, three cigars, and the course of the war.

The 27th Indiana did not write the war’s history. It walked across it. So did most of the roughly 196,000 men Indiana sent into Union service between 1861 and 1865. They came from Vincennes and South Bend, from Evansville and Fort Wayne, from farm townships nobody outside the state had ever heard of. They formed 129 regiments of infantry, 13 of cavalry, and 26 batteries of light artillery. About one in eight of them did not come home.

This is the first entry in a standing series on the citizen-soldier Union — the regiments, the men, the dead. Before Memorial Day, before the holiday, before the long weekend, there were the units that made Memorial Day necessary. Indiana’s are the units this site begins with.

What Indiana raised

The man at the center of Indiana’s war was Governor Oliver Perry Morton, a Centerville lawyer who had been in office four months when Fort Sumter fell. Morton’s response was immediate and disproportionate to a state of Indiana’s size. Lincoln’s first call asked the loyal states for 75,000 ninety-day volunteers; Morton offered Indiana’s six-regiment share within a week, and within two weeks was wiring Washington that he could deliver twelve regiments if the War Department would accept them. Most of the surplus was eventually mustered in.

The Adjutant General of Indiana, William H. H. Terrell, kept the books. His eight-volume report, published between 1865 and 1869, remains the canonical primary record of every Hoosier regiment that fought for the Union. The totals it documents are these: approximately 196,363 men enlisted from Indiana for Union service, second per capita among the loyal states. 129 infantry regiments numbered 6th through 156th (with gaps). 13 cavalry regiments. One regiment of heavy artillery. Twenty-six independent batteries of light artillery. And the 28th United States Colored Troops, mustered at Camp Fremont in Indianapolis beginning in December 1863 — the only African American regiment Indiana formally raised, and the regiment whose service the state, at the time, paid for least and owed most.

Morton fought the war on a second front from his statehouse. The Democratic-controlled Indiana legislature of 1863 refused to appropriate funds for the war effort, intending to break Morton’s pro-Union administration. Morton kept the state government running for two years on private bank loans and federal money — constitutionally questionable, politically risky, and effective. He created the Indiana State Sanitary Commission and a state-agent system to find, treat, and bring home Hoosier wounded from distant battlefields. It was the earliest formal state-level military recovery apparatus in U.S. history, and the National Cemetery System would later look like an expanded version of what Morton built first.

The regiments that carried the weight

A standing series will eventually get to every Indiana unit that deserves the page. This first entry names four whose story sets the scale.

The 11th Indiana — Wallace’s Zouaves

Organized at Indianapolis in April 1861 under Colonel Lew Wallace, the 11th Indiana wore the red-trimmed Zouave uniform and drilled the French light-infantry tactics that had been imported into the American imagination by the antebellum militia movement. The regiment served first as three-month troops, fought the small but symbolically important action at Romney, Virginia, in June 1861 — one of the war’s first organized Union victories — and reorganized as a three-year regiment in August. Under Wallace and his successors the 11th fought at Fort Donelson in February 1862, at Shiloh that April, through the Vicksburg Campaign in 1863, and ended the war with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley at Cedar Creek. Lew Wallace himself rose to major general, took the field at Monocacy in July 1864 in a delaying action that almost certainly saved Washington from capture, and after the war wrote a novel called Ben-Hur.

The 14th Indiana — from Cheat Mountain to the Wilderness

The 14th was organized at Terre Haute in June 1861 and served almost without break for the rest of the war. The regiment fought at Cheat Mountain, at Antietam in the Sunken Road the field still calls Bloody Lane, at Fredericksburg, at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg in the defense of Cemetery Ridge, and in the 1864 Overland Campaign at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. The 14th took roughly thirty percent casualties at Antietam alone. It is one of the regiments that defines what the phrase “hard fighting” means in the eastern theater.

The 19th Indiana — the Iron Brigade

The 19th Indiana mustered at Indianapolis in July 1861 and was assigned to the brigade that would become known, after Antietam, as the Iron Brigade of the West — alongside the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin and the 24th Michigan. The Iron Brigade carried the highest percentage casualties of any brigade in the Union Army across the war. On the morning of July 1, 1863, at Gettysburg, the 19th Indiana went into action in McPherson’s Woods with roughly 308 men. By the end of the day it had lost about 210 of them — killed, wounded, captured, or missing. Numbers like that explain why the brigade fought as it did and why the regiments that survived it never recovered their pre-Gettysburg character.

The 28th USCT — Indiana’s regiment of U.S. Colored Troops

Mustered at Camp Fremont in Indianapolis beginning in December 1863, the 28th United States Colored Troops was the only African American regiment formally raised in Indiana. It fought at the Battle of the Crater outside Petersburg on July 30, 1864 — the catastrophic mine assault that ended in a slaughter of Union troops trapped in the crater walls, with Black regiments taking some of the heaviest losses of the engagement. The 28th took heavy casualties there. They wore the same blue. They are buried in the same ground. The state’s record of their service is on the same shelves as every other Indiana regimental file in the Adjutant General’s report.

The cost, counted honestly

Approximately 24,416 Hoosiers died in Union service. Roughly 7,243 were killed in action or died of wounds. The remaining seventeen-thousand-plus died of disease — dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, measles in camp, malaria in the southern theaters, and the routine infections that pre-antibiotic medicine could not stop. That ratio — roughly seventy percent disease, thirty percent combat — was true of every Civil War army, and it is a fact worth holding in mind every time a Civil War casualty figure is quoted.

Morton’s state-agent system did what it could. Indiana sent surgeons, supply trains, and field representatives to wherever Hoosier regiments were operating; Terrell’s report documents the recovery work in detail. Some of the dead were brought home for burial. Most were not. Most lie where they fell, or where they died of fever afterward, in National Cemeteries the federal government built later, at battle sites that have since become parks. Visit Shiloh National Cemetery, or Stones River National Cemetery near Murfreesboro, or the Gettysburg National Cemetery, and the headstones are not arranged by state — but the Indiana names are there, in alphabetical sections, by the thousand.

From cemetery to calendar

Indianapolis got its great cemetery in 1864. Crown Hill, on the north side of the city, opened with the war still in progress and immediately became a Union burial ground. Today the cemetery’s national cemetery section contains the graves of more than eight hundred Union veterans of the Civil War. A separate, walled plot maintained by the federal government as a matter of obligation holds the Confederate prisoners who died at Camp Morton during the war. They are recorded by the cemetery and by the National Park Service. They are not memorialized by this site.

The holiday came four years after Crown Hill opened. General Order No. 11, issued by Grand Army of the Republic Commander-in-Chief John A. Logan on May 5, 1868, called for the graves of Union dead to be decorated with flowers on May 30 of that year. The order found ready hands in Indiana. GAR posts across the state — Indianapolis, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Lafayette, Terre Haute — ran some of the earliest and largest Decoration Day observances in the country. The work was done by Union veterans, for Union dead, in cemeteries the Union veterans had helped fill.

The GAR held its final National Encampment in Indianapolis in 1949, eighty-one years after Logan issued the order. The last surviving Union veteran the GAR officially recognized died seven years after that. By the time the holiday became “Memorial Day” by federal statute in 1971, the men who had built it were ninety years in the ground. The day outlasted them. That was the point.

What this series will do

This post opens a standing Union-history thread on PatrickNeilBradley.com. It is not a Memorial Day sprint. It is a sustained look, regiment by regiment and state by state and where the record allows name by name, at the citizen-soldier army that saved the Union and made the day that honors its dead.

Future entries will move outward from Indiana — to the Iron Brigade’s Wisconsin and Michigan regiments, to the Massachusetts 54th and the rest of the early USCT order of battle, to the Pennsylvania Reserves and the New York volunteers and the Western theater regiments that won the campaigns the East rarely gives them credit for. The dead earn the page.

Memorial Day arrives in four days. The cornerstone essay of this site’s ten-post Memorial Day series publishes on Saturday, May 16, and runs daily through the holiday on May 25. This Hoosier roll call is the table the rest of that series sits on. The numbers above are not for inspiration. They are the floor.

Sources

• William H. H. Terrell, Report of the Adjutant General of the State of Indiana, 8 vols. (Indianapolis: W. R. Holloway, State Printer, 1865–1869). The canonical primary record of every Indiana regiment that fought for the Union.
• Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion (Des Moines: Dyer Publishing, 1908). Regimental service histories and unit casualty rolls.
• U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, multiple volumes. For specific battle reports including Antietam, Gettysburg, and the Petersburg Crater. (Cited as “OR.”)
• Lance J. Herdegen, The Iron Brigade in Civil War and Memory (Savas Beatie, 2012). Brigade-level treatment of the 19th Indiana’s Gettysburg engagement.
• Stephen W. Sears, Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam (Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Standard treatment of the 27th Indiana’s discovery of Special Orders No. 191.
• Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indiana Historical Bureau, 1965). The standard secondary state history.
• National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS), soldier and unit search, nps.gov/civilwar (accessed 2026-05-12).
• Crown Hill Heritage Foundation, “Civil War at Crown Hill” archival materials, Indianapolis (accessed 2026-05-12).
• Indiana Historical Bureau, “Indiana in the Civil War” reference resources, in.gov/history (accessed 2026-05-12).