Two Diaries and a Silence: Three Hoosier Voices from the Union War

In the National Archives in Washington, in Record Group 94 — the records of the Adjutant General's Office — sits the Regimental Descriptive Book of the 28th United States Colored Troops. The volume lists, in copperplate hand, every man who entered the regiment at Camp Fremont in Indianapolis beginning in December 1863: name, age at enlistment, complexion, height, eye color, place of birth, occupation, the company he was assigned to. The book is the official voice of a regiment many of whose men, formerly enslaved within living memory of their service, did not leave letters or diaries the way Northern white soldiers of comparable rank did. The book is what the United States kept.

Two other Hoosiers of the Union war left books of their own, of a different kind. Theodore F. Upson of the 100th Indiana, a teenage farm boy at enlistment, kept a wartime diary and wrote letters home, and decades later wrote reminiscences from memory; in 1943 the historian Oscar Osburn Winther assembled all three layers into a single published text. William Bluffton Miller of the 75th Indiana, first sergeant of Company K, kept a pocket-book diary day by day on the march and at the campfire; in 2011 the historians Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert J. Willey published it.

Three Hoosiers. Two diaries and a silence. This post sits down with them as voices, and tells the truth about what the archive kept of each.

Why three voices, and why one of them is a silence

The Union-history series has spent its first three posts counting regiments and naming battles — Indiana's 196,000 men in Union service, the 54th Massachusetts and the rise of the United States Colored Troops, the Iron Brigade on the morning of July 1 at Gettysburg. That work matters. The numbers are the floor. But a regimental tally does work a single life cannot, and a single life does work a tally cannot.

This fourth post sits down with three Hoosiers and reads them as voices rather than as statistics. Two of them left documents the publishing tradition could carry. The third's archive is something else, and the post tells the reader openly what is there and what is not. The Black studies scholar Saidiya Hartman, writing of much older and harder archival silences, has argued that the archive is never neutral — that its silences are part of the record it keeps, and that the work of telling history honestly includes naming the gaps rather than smoothing them over. That principle shapes how this post handles the third voice.

The three are: Theodore F. Upson, who enlisted as a private at seventeen; William Bluffton Miller, a first sergeant whose job description included writing down what happened; and the men of the 28th United States Colored Troops, the only African American regiment Indiana raised, whose individual voices the archive kept far less of than it kept of the other two.

Theodore F. Upson, 100th Indiana — the layered voice

Theodore Frelinghuysen Upson was born in 1845 in northern Indiana, a farm boy from a family of New England descent. He was sixteen when Fort Sumter fell, seventeen when he enlisted in the 100th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in August 1862. The regiment was raised in northern Indiana, mustered into federal service late that summer, and would spend its war in the western theater — at the Vicksburg approaches, at Chattanooga, in the Atlanta Campaign with Sherman, on the March to the Sea, and through the Carolinas to the war's end. Upson survived. He came home to Indiana, married, farmed, and lived into old age.

His papers passed eventually into the hands of Oscar Osburn Winther, a historian at Indiana University and a respected mid-century scholar of westward migration. In 1943 Louisiana State University Press published Winther's edition of Upson's wartime writings under the title With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson. The book reads as a single continuous voice. It is not.

What Winther assembled was three layers of writing, stitched into chronological order. The first layer is the wartime letters Upson sent home to his family — written close to the events they describe, but written for his mother and shaped by what a son will and will not say to her. The second is the wartime diary he kept in the field — closer to private writing, though still composed by a teenager aware that he might die and the book be sent home to people who would read it that way. The third is a set of reminiscences Upson wrote decades later, looking back across forty or fifty years of memory. Winther's editorial work in 1943 smoothed spelling and punctuation in the standard fashion of his era and unified the three layers into a single narrative voice.

This is worth knowing before reading him, because the voice on the page is not one voice. It is a young soldier writing home, layered over a young soldier writing for himself, layered over an old veteran writing for posterity. None of those is fiction. All of them are testimony — but they are different kinds of testimony, with different things at stake.

The psychologist James Pennebaker has shown across decades of clinical research that writing about a difficult event years afterward is a recognized form of integration, distinct from but not less truthful than the immediate record. The Synoptic Gospels were composed decades after the events they relate. The reminiscence is not a degraded form of the diary; it is its own form. The Greek word for the act is anamnesis — the term Plato used for the soul recalling truths it had once known and the early Christian church used for the remembrance at the center of the Eucharist. To remember decades after the fact is not to fabricate. It is to do a different kind of work on the same material.

What does Upson's composite voice carry? In its wartime letters: a teenager learning what war looks like at close range, writing to a mother who is reading the worst of it in newspapers and a son who is trying to spare her what he can. In its wartime diary: a soldier writing in plain rural Indiana English about marches and food and weather and the men in his company and the things he cannot bring himself to write home. In its reminiscences: an older man returning to the same scenes with the knowledge of how each one ended — who survived, who did not, what came of the country they were sent to fight for. The Sherman campaigns are a particular test for what Upson's three-layered voice does. In Georgia and the Carolinas, the 100th Indiana marched through plantations and small towns, foraged from civilian populations as a matter of military policy, and encountered hundreds and thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children who attached themselves to the column as it moved. Upson's wartime layer renders these encounters in a teenage soldier's register — the practical fact of food, the weight of pack, the strangeness of seeing what slavery had done in homes the army was now walking through. His later reminiscence writes them with the knowledge of what Reconstruction would do and undo. Both registers belong on the page.

William Bluffton Miller, 75th Indiana — the sergeant's pen

William Bluffton Miller was a generation older than Upson — born in the early 1840s, a young adult by the time he enlisted — and he came into the 75th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, raised at Wabash, in the summer of 1862. The 75th served entirely in the western theater, in the Army of the Cumberland. It was at the Tullahoma Campaign in 1863, at Chickamauga that September, at Chattanooga that November, in the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, on Sherman's March to the Sea, and in the Carolinas in 1865. Miller rose to first sergeant of Company K and held that rank through most of the regiment's service.

A first sergeant's job in a Civil War volunteer regiment carried more institutional weight than the ranks above and below it, and the weight matters for reading him. The first sergeant kept the company's morning report — the daily roll of who was present, absent, sick, detailed, deserted, dead. He kept the descriptive book, listing every man in the company with the same data the regimental descriptive book repeated at higher altitude: age, complexion, height, eye color, occupation, place of birth, enlistment date. He prepared casualty lists after every action. When officers wrote dispatches up the chain, they used the first sergeant's numbers. When families wrote home asking after a son who had not come back, the chain of replies started with the first sergeant's books. The rank was the regiment's institutional memory.

Miller kept a private diary alongside that institutional work. His pocket books were filled day by day on the march and at the campfire, in the kind of handwriting that gets practiced when a man spends his off-duty hours with a pencil. The diary was not for publication. It was for himself, with the understanding that if he did not come back, his wife and family would read it and would have something to read besides a casualty list. The diary covers his service from enlistment through the war's end, and was preserved in family hands until Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert J. Willey published it as Fighting for Liberty and Right through the University of Tennessee Press in 2011.

What Miller's voice carries that Upson's does not is the discipline of the record-keeper. He writes about events the same day, sometimes within an hour. The dates are usually accurate to a day, and the entries are short, plainspoken, and unembellished. He notes weather. He notes road mileage. He notes the men who died, and how. The diary is partly a private record and partly a hedge against the chance that the company books in his pack might not survive what was about to happen.

There is a thing the first sergeant's voice does that the private's voice does not. It counts the dead by name. The casualty list and the descriptive book were documents Miller wrote in his official capacity. The diary entries that record the same losses were documents he wrote afterward, off duty, often by candle. When his brigade went into the Atlanta Campaign and the names began running, he wrote them down twice — once for the company books, once for himself. The two registers are different writing acts. The first is an army doing its work through one of its sergeants. The second is the sergeant.

The 28th USCT — what the archive kept and what it did not

The third voice in this post does not belong to one Hoosier. It belongs to a regiment.

The 28th United States Colored Troops began organizing at Camp Fremont in Indianapolis in December 1863, after the federal government's Bureau of Colored Troops — established the previous May by War Department General Order No. 143 — had cleared the way. Indiana raised this regiment, and only this regiment, of African American soldiers. The men who filled its ranks were free-born Black Hoosiers from established communities like Roberts Settlement in Hamilton County, formerly enslaved men who had reached Indiana before or during the war, and a substantial number of men from Kentucky, Tennessee, and other states who came north to enlist. Charles S. Russell took command as colonel; the junior officers were, under federal policy of the time, almost entirely white.

The 28th mustered into federal service in stages through the early months of 1864, traveled east, and was attached to the 4th Division of the Ninth Corps in the Army of the Potomac. The 4th Division was the army's Black division, made up of USCT regiments raised in several states. Its men trained, through the spring and early summer of 1864, for a specific assault. The plan called for the Black division to spearhead the attack that would follow the detonation of a great mine under the Confederate works at Petersburg, Virginia.

At the last possible moment — on July 29, 1864, the day before the assault — the order was reversed. A white division was substituted for the lead role, on grounds that have been argued over by historians ever since but that came down, in the field commanders' reasoning, to a fear of political fallout if Black troops led the charge and failed. The white assault went in on the morning of July 30, became disorganized at the lip of the crater the mine had opened, and stalled. The Black division was then committed, into the chaos. The men of the 28th and the other Black regiments advanced under impossible conditions, took ground, lost it, and suffered some of the heaviest casualty rates of the engagement. Confederate troops, some of them, gave no quarter to Black soldiers attempting to surrender. The Crater was the 28th's hardest day.

The regiment served on through the Petersburg siege, was sent to Texas after Appomattox as part of the federal occupation force during Reconstruction, and was mustered out in late 1865 and early 1866.

Now the part the rest of this post has been working toward.

The voices of Upson and Miller reached print because the publishing tradition could carry them — they were free-born white men with literate families and after-the-war access to publishers and editors. The voices of the men of the 28th reached print far less often. Many of the regiment's enlisted men had been enslaved within living memory of their service; the literacy patterns of antebellum American slavery and the publication patterns of postwar America worked together to keep most of their personal writing — letters, diaries, the words they wrote to themselves or to each other — out of the bound-book record we now call the Civil War archive. Some did reach print. The African Methodist Episcopal Church's newspaper, The Christian Recorder, and The Anglo-African of New York carried correspondence from USCT soldiers throughout the war; scholars including Dudley Cornish (The Sable Arm, 1956) and Noah Andre Trudeau (Like Men of War, 1998) have worked from those papers and from individual archival holdings to reconstruct USCT experience across the war. But the published-diary corner of the archive is thin for the 28th in particular.

What the archive does have for the men of the 28th is institutional. The regimental descriptive book, held at the National Archives in Record Group 94, lists every soldier the regiment enrolled, with the same data the white regiments' books recorded. Each man has a compiled service record there as well — a folder of muster cards, hospital records, pay records, and discharge or death notations. The Adjutant General of Indiana, William H. H. Terrell, included the 28th in his eight-volume Report of 1865–1869. The National Park Service's Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System makes the regiment's roster searchable today. Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis holds Civil War burials. National cemeteries in Virginia and Texas, where the regiment served and where its dead came down, hold others.

This is not silence. It is the institutional voice — the army speaking about the men rather than the men speaking for themselves. It is a different kind of record from a diary, and a smaller one, and a more bureaucratic one. It tells us names, dates, ages, places of birth, dates of muster, dates of disability, dates of death. It does not tell us what the men thought of the country they fought for, or what they said to one another in the lines at Petersburg, or what they wrote when they wrote at all.

The post does not invent the voices the archive did not keep. To put fabricated words in the mouth of a man whose name is on a roll at the National Archives and nowhere else would be a betrayal of him, not a tribute. The silence is part of the war's record. So is the work the archive does keep: the descriptive book, the casualty list, the men who entered the rolls and never came out. The 28th's voice in this post is the institutional voice that survived, named openly as the only voice the archive let through.

What the three voices say together

Side by side, the three voices map a kind of triangulated witness.

Upson's three layers — wartime letters, wartime diary, postwar reminiscence — show what one life looks like when memory and writing are given decades to integrate. Miller's day-by-day pocket book shows what one life looks like when an institutional habit of recording bleeds into the private register. The 28th's institutional record shows what an entire regiment looks like when the publishing tradition keeps less of its personal writing than the men who lived it generated, and we are left with what the federal government wrote about them.

What all three show, together, is the war the citizen-soldier Union actually fought. They confirm each other's broad strokes. They disagree on the small ones — Upson's reminiscences sometimes smooth the corners of an event; Miller's same-day entries sometimes record names and details a reminiscence would have forgotten; the 28th's institutional record carries dates the regimental memoir of a Black soldier, had one survived to be published, might have rendered very differently. The three voices belong on the same page because no one of them, alone, can carry what the other two carry.

The two diaries hold individual lives. The silence holds a regiment. Both are testimony. Neither, on its own, is enough.

The dead earn the page

The fourth entry in this series ends where the first three did, but with a small correction.

The dead earn the page. The archive, however, does not give every dead man the same page. Theodore Upson's page is a published book in 1943, reprinted since, taught in classrooms. William Miller's page is a published book in 2011, in academic catalogs and on the shelves of Civil War readers. The pages of the 28th USCT's enlisted men, mostly, are in the National Archives in Washington, in green ledgers and folders of muster cards, written down by clerks who never met them.

This post tries to honor all three kinds of page, and to say openly that they are different kinds. The structural-feature mode of this series has its own work to do; it will return in later entries. The story-driven mode — this post is the first of it — is for the pages that ask to be read as voices, and for the voices the archive kept less of than it should have.

Sources

• Theodore F. Upson, With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson, edited by Oscar Osburn Winther (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1943; later reprints by Indiana University Press).
• William Bluffton Miller, Fighting for Liberty and Right: The Civil War Diary of William Bluffton Miller, First Sergeant, Company K, Seventy-Fifth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, edited by Jeffrey L. Patrick and Robert J. Willey (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005).
• Saidiya V. Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe, no. 26 (June 2008), pp. 1–14 — the standard methodological reference for reading archival silences as part of the record.
• Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019).
• 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 for the 28th USCT and every other Indiana regiment.
• Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (1956; University Press of Kansas reprint, 1987).
• Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865 (Little, Brown, 1998).
• U.S. War Department, General Order No. 143, May 22, 1863 (establishing the Bureau of Colored Troops).
• U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. XL — reports on the Battle of the Crater, July 30, 1864.
• National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 94 — Regimental Descriptive Books and Compiled Service Records of the 28th USCT.
• National Park Service, Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (CWSS), soldier and unit search, nps.gov/civilwar (accessed 2026-05-15).
• James W. Pennebaker, Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain (3rd ed., Guilford Press, 2016) — cited for the broader clinical evidence on retrospective writing as integration.