Confederate Strength 1862

[Saphroneth]

Comte De Paris: "For a few days the passes of the Blue Ridge were thronged with these men, numbering, it is said, from twenty to thirty thousand, who were struggling with great difficulty to reach the rendezvous which had been indicated to them"

I fear I should ask if we know how the Comte de Paris actually came to know the numbers here. The book this is from was published in 1875; are there contemporary scouting reports, or is he basing this on the same circular logic of "there are X men missing and they must have been here"?


Certainly from the observations made at the time the Confederate army seems to have been large in Maryland. Steiner in Frederick observed "not more than" 64,000 men in the main body, and "8,000" for DH Hill, though a brigade or two of DH Hill, plus the cavalry, plus Walker, never marched through Frederick.

John Esten Cooke (on Stuart's staff), from 1866: "This great crowd toiled on painfully in the wake of the' army, dragging themselves five or six miles a day; and when they came to the Potomac, near Leesburg, it was only to find that General Lee had swept on, that General McClellan's column was between them and him, and that they could not rejoin their commands. The citizens of that whole region, who fed these unfortunate persons, will bear testimony that numbers sufficient to constitute an army in themselves, passed the Blue Ridge to rendezvous, by General Lee's orders, at Winchester."

This suggests that the "great crowd" reached the Potomac near Leesburg at a time after when McClellan's forces crossed the Monocacy, which means September 12th or later.
However, a Union scouting mission towards Leesburg on September 13 found basically nothing (not a crowd of 30,000 men or the fringes thereof) and on September 11 the scouting report said there were two brigades at Leesburg of which one went to Winchester, while the rest of the Rebel army was north of the Potomac. On the timeline Cooke gives the "great crowd" would have been in or around Leesburg on the 11th.

These scouting missions should have run into a lot more than two brigades. I agree with the idea that there were some men who straggled behind in Virginia (or to be more correct a mixture of men dropping out of the ranks and returning casualties from Richmond), probably several thousand, but the scale of that number doesn't derive from observations but from "well they weren't at Antietam"

 

[Saphroneth]

I doubt that Freeman was a contributor to your "circular argument".

Well, where do his numbers for the count of stragglers come from? Actually, does he give a number for the count of stragglers at all?

That Lee had only ~ 36,000 PFD on his reports for September 22 (which are noted as "very imperfect") is correct, but the implications of this should be considered - Lee suffered about 17,000 casualties in Maryland and the report doesn't include the cavalry (5,700) or reserve artillery (~700). This means that having ~36,000 infantry PFD on his reports for September 22 means having ~59,000 PFD (in Confederate PFD) in his force before the fighting of the Maryland Campaign...

J. R. Jones reported from the Shenandoah Valley that he had sent back between 5000 and 6000 by September 27, and on October 8 Secretary Randolph noted with satisfaction that the strength of the army had increased by 20,000 in eight days.

...which eight days is Randolph talking about here?

The total strength of the infantry goes from:
September 22: 36,000 (at which point there were at least 9,451 wounded)
September 30: 52,000
October 10: 57,500 (at which point there were no more than 5,000 wounded, few of whom had died)

I make it that the increase took twenty days, not eight, and that the great majority of the increase took place in September. It's also not clear whether the stragglers being talked about here were from the movement from 2BR to Maryland or whether they'd fallen out on the march Williamsport-Harpers Ferry-Sharpsburg.

 

[NedBaldwin]

Certainly from the observations made at the time the Confederate army seems to have been large in Maryland. Steiner in Frederick observed "not more than" 64,000 men in the main body, and "8,000" for DH Hill, though a brigade or two of DH Hill, plus the cavalry, plus Walker, never marched through Frederick.

Steiner gave a headcount of the total mass, so not PFD but aggregate present. Or as you once put it, Steiner includes "all sergeants, officers servants, scouts, skirmishers, teamsters, cooks, stretcher bearers, medical orderlies, blacksmiths and a whole host of other people". And all of Hill marched through Frederick.

This suggests that the "great crowd" reached the Potomac near Leesburg at a time after when McClellan's forces crossed the Monocacy, which means September 12th or later.

No it does not. Whites Ford is east of the Monocacy. US Cavalry had reached the ford by the 8th.

 

[67th Tigers]

Except there is evidence.

Harsh had these being new recruits and recovered convalescents who had left Richmond after the divisions and were attempting to reach their commands.

M. LEE'S DEPOT AT WINCHESTER

There is much yet to be learned about Winchester as the depot and stragglers camp for the Army of Northern Virginia during the Maryland campaign. Any study should start with the letter Joaab Goodson of the 44th Alabama wrote to his niece on September 14 from Winchester, in which he observes that "three or four thousand men already here, and numbers coming in daily." 54 Other suggestive information is provided by Berry Benson (1st S.C.), Henry Berkeley (Hanover [Va.] Artillery), and Drury Gibson (15th La.). 55

Many of the soldiers at Winchester were not stragglers in the true sense. They were convalescents returning to their units from Richmond who had followed Lee's orders not to enter Maryland. It is not clear why Lee did not bring this force to his support at an earlier date. Mary Mitchell graphically recorded her childhood memories of the Confederate stragglers who engulfed Shepherdstown from September 13 on. But these men seemed to have been traveling on the fringes of the army on the march, and likely they were constantly in and out of the ranks. 56

Harsh, Joseph L. Sounding the Shallows: A Confederate Compendium for the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kindle Locations 6062-6073). The Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.

 

[Saphroneth]

No it does not. Whites Ford is east of the Monocacy. US Cavalry had reached the ford by the 8th.

It says that "McClellan's column was between them and him".


Map of the night of the 8th:

McClellan's column is nowhere near blocking this route (via Point of Rocks), or indeed the route over Cheek's Ford. Are you suggesting a couple of regiments of cavalry could block 20,000 to 30,000 stragglers?


The described situation, where McClellan's column is between the stragglers and Lee, fits most closely with the situation after McClellan had troops over the Monocacy.

Steiner gave a headcount of the total mass, so not PFD but aggregate present. Or as you once put it, Steiner includes "all sergeants, officers servants, scouts, skirmishers, teamsters, cooks, stretcher bearers, medical orderlies, blacksmiths and a whole host of other people". And all of Hill marched through Frederick.

I think you've confused me with 67th, who was referring to something else; of course, Steiner was referring to the marching columns and not the wagon train (which followed the main column, but preceeded DH Hill). The wagon train would have included at least some of the men mentioned above, such as teamsters.

I was under the impression that GB Anderson did not march through Frederick?

 

[atlantis]

Can we agree it would have been better if the 1 yr men had left by June 62 when their enlistments expired. The army needed to be culled of the deadwood mostly older men who were better suited for militia/home guard duty.

 

[Saphroneth]

Can we agree it would have been better if the 1 yr men had left by June 62 when their enlistments expired. The army needed to be culled of the deadwood mostly older men who were better suited for militia/home guard duty.

I don't think this is really the case, because it's a simple fact that the Confederacy has to be more mobilized than the Union in relative terms - certainly in relative white population terms - and you can't mobilize your entire 18-30 age cohort at once for example.

In 1862, especially June-September, the Confederacy's able to achieve near parity with the Union in the East (the theatre where a decisive victory or defeat is most likely in the short term) until the Union does a second mobilization. Then in 1863 the Confederacy has another chance to achieve near parity when Union troops go home; by 1864 they're heavily outnumbered there, of course, but this situation would come about much earlier if they'd reduced their army size in 1862.


Of course, there's a more direct issue. If you allow 1 year men to go home in June 1862, then you lose Richmond in July.

 

[atlantis]

I don't think this is really the case, because it's a simple fact that the Confederacy has to be more mobilized than the Union in relative terms - certainly in relative white population terms - and you can't mobilize your entire 18-30 age cohort at once for example.

In 1862, especially June-September, the Confederacy's able to achieve near parity with the Union in the East (the theatre where a decisive victory or defeat is most likely in the short term) until the Union does a second mobilization. Then in 1863 the Confederacy has another chance to achieve near parity when Union troops go home; by 1864 they're heavily outnumbered there, of course, but this situation would come about much earlier if they'd reduced their army size in 1862.


Of course, there's a more direct issue. If you allow 1 year men to go home in June 1862, then you lose Richmond in July.

Well if you look at the desertion rate conscription didn't work out so well for the confederates. Also how many 1yr men survived to serve out 2 more yrs I know 1 who didn't my gg grandfather kill in action June 62

 

[Saphroneth]

Well if you look at the desertion rate conscription didn't work out so well for the confederates. Also how many 1yr men survived to serve out 2 more yrs I know 1 who didn't my gg grandfather kill in action June 62

In which case you kind of need to demonstrate that the loss from the desertion rate increase upon conscription was greater than the loss of 1 year men; even if it was, the issue still comes up when the 2 year men's time comes up, and so on.
Conscription does tend to increase total number of men in service, which is why militaries bother with it!

 

[Rhea Cole]

A historian friend of mine once told me that Confederate record keeping is the reason so many CW historians are bald. The system used to report the strength of CSA units was guaranteed to sow confusion.

The same army could have wildly different numbers at the same time. There was the total of the raw number of names on the roll. There was the number of men being paid & issued rations. Then there was the number of men present, healthy, armed & equipped ready to fall in.

The king of confusing returns was Joe Wheeler. At one point, IG found that the number of troopers mounted & ready for duty was 10% of Wheeler's reported strength.

Commanders such as Joe Johnston used the the number that supported his agenda. At various times he used the highest number to lobby Richmond & then switched to the lowest number depending on which one best served. That charming manipulating of the numbers was one of things that gave Jefferson Davis fits.

Desertion also makes CSA returns problematic. When the CSA abandoned Little Rock, for example, entire regiments disappeared into the night. Officers awoke to empty camps. It was literally here today & gone tomorrow.

One of my CW ancestors had a last name that could be spelled a variety of ways. One of my cousins discovered that he accounted between three to five of those present. He was an artificer, which facilitated the over count.

My ancient relative, it could be argued, was really equal to five Yankees… of course… he was also in the Union army, but only as one person.

 

[Saphroneth]

I tend to think that the most reliable numbers are the Aggregate Present (as they are a statement of the number of men with the army, whether or not they're considered to be at their duty station) but even that is a bit of a different definition between Union and Confederate. A Union force with 50,000 Aggregate Present will include e.g. cooks as part of that number (as all men doing the job of "cook" were soldiers), but a Confederate force with 50,000 Aggregate Present may have some black slaves or freedmen doing jobs like "cook" and not listed as Aggregate Present.

The most directly comparable number could be argued to be the commissary return. If a Confederate army is issuing 110,000 rations then it should have the same fighting power (men in line) as a Union force issuing 110,000 rations, because slaves and freedmen need to eat too.

 

[Rhea Cole]

At any given time in 1862, the exact number of men in the CSA ranks was essentially unknowable. After the Battle of Perryville, Bragg barely made it through the passes back to TN. The earliest & coldest winter in human memory set in. Pickets were discovered at their posts literally frozen where stood. The retreat to Knoxville was an excruciating ordeal.

Bragg left the army to take a train to Richmond to report to Davis. Bragg told him that he did not know how many men he still had. He was not sure where they were, either. At that point, nobody to this day knows how many men were still in the ranks of the A of TN.

For reasons that only Davis would know, despite the debacle, Davis returned Bragg to command of the Army of Tennessee & ordered however many they were to Murfreesboro TN.

Units destitute of a pot to cook rations if they had any, detrained in Murfreesboro . They milled around brush fires in snow covered fields until reequipped. Those units had left a trail of disabled men from Knoxville to Murfreesboro. Those men were still on the rolls, but some of them would never be in a condition to rejoin the ranks in a firing line.

On the last day of 1862, Bragg lost about1/3rd of his army on the first day of Stones River. It would be weeks before an accurate count of the strength of the A of TN. Folks who study Wheeler report that as usual, his returns are wildly inaccurate.

The lesson here is that nice neat numbers on a graph are not necessarily much use in determining the strength of an army. Opposing Bragg at Stones River was about 60,000 men. What is often left out of the equation is that the Department of the Cumberland that Rosecrans also commanded had about 240,000 men.

What is the old saying? Numbers don't lie, but people who compile them do. I have no idea what the troop strength numbers in 1862 are to be used for. All I can do is warn you that a soldier who lost his toes to frostbite or had his health permanently compromised by the bitter cold were still on Bragg's rolls. In the end it was only men fully equipped & answering the roll call who fought.

 

[Saphroneth]

Well, the point of the numbers is that we can use them (with notable caveats) to determine the available strength assets of the Confederate army. The fact that we can't just plug the numbers straight in without any data-cleaning analysis doesn't mean we should give up trying.

It's sort of necessary to do any kind of strategic evaluation to at least have a sense of available assets. This doesn't have to be in number of men (it can be in number of regiments for example) but Lee concentrating 180,000 of 240,000 to defend Richmond looks different to Lee concentrating 180,000 of 360,000 to defend Richmond.

 

[19thGeorgia]

 

[19thGeorgia]

 

[Saphroneth]

Useful, but incomplete. The June 30 report in particular excludes the Dept. of Henrico (about 15 regiments IIRC), Jackson and Ewell's divisions, and anyone in the Shenandoah Valley; it's also post Seven Days, and the Seven Days (and Seven Pines) were bloody. This doesn't make it of no use, but we do need to keep that in mind.

It's also not necessarily using the same definitions for all units.

 

[CanadianCanuck]

Not really. I broke it up as:

- JEJ: Joseph E. Johnston's existing army, possibly slightly reinforced. It has the three triangular corps of GW Smith, Longstreet and Jackson, and totals 115 infantry regiments.
- REL: Lee's army of reinforcement divisions stripped from the coast in my first pass, partly comprised of historical Seven Days reinforcements but not entirely. It's large enough that it is itself broken up into two binary corps, and totals 54 infantry regiments.
- ASJ: AS Johnston's army in the West, which I bulked up to make four complete corps under Hardee, Polk, Bragg and Van Dorn. Each of these corps is triangular and the total comes to 156 infantry regiments.
- MID: The troops in the middle (i.e. in the mountains and at the Cumberland Gap). This command is corps sized in its own right, though not concentrated in one place, and totals 31 infantry regiments.

In addition to these categories, there are troops which I had not assigned when I made the spreadsheet. These are marked as OTHER, and total 68 regiments (four of which were organizing at Raleigh at the time), of which 46 were coastal. Based on this I concluded an additional corps could be formed on top of the above allocations.

Okay now I see. I wasn't exactly sure how you'd settled on the designations (I spent a while trying to figure out what Confederate generals initials spelled MID for example) though that overall looks like a pretty solid record of the regiments in Confederate service at this period in time.

 

[CanadianCanuck]

One of my CW ancestors had a last name that could be spelled a variety of ways. One of my cousins discovered that he accounted between three to five of those present. He was an artificer, which facilitated the over count.

My ancient relative, it could be argued, was really equal to five Yankees… of course… he was also in the Union army, but only as one person.

My family on my fathers side has a similar tale. We can trace their history accurately from 1840 onwards, but that's only because some letters survive, but there's an amusing problem with them. Dutch immigrants (or Dutch descended) from the United States to Canada, some British civil servant seems to have heard their name, and written down permissions for them under a completely inaccurate one. The pre-existing "Van" got dropped from our names, and it was misspelled to make many people believe we were actually Jewish.

It makes for an... interesting attempt at research.

At any given time in 1862, the exact number of men in the CSA ranks was essentially unknowable. After the Battle of Perryville, Bragg barely made it through the passes back to TN. The earliest & coldest winter in human memory set in. Pickets were discovered at their posts literally frozen where stood. The retreat to Knoxville was an excruciating ordeal.

Bragg left the army to take a train to Richmond to report to Davis. Bragg told him that he did not know how many men he still had. He was not sure where they were, either. At that point, nobody to this day knows how many men were still in the ranks of the A of TN.

For reasons that only Davis would know, despite the debacle, Davis returned Bragg to command of the Army of Tennessee & ordered however many they were to Murfreesboro TN.

Units destitute of a pot to cook rations if they had any, detrained in Murfreesboro . They milled around brush fires in snow covered fields until reequipped. Those units had left a trail of disabled men from Knoxville to Murfreesboro. Those men were still on the rolls, but some of them would never be in a condition to rejoin the ranks in a firing line.

On the last day of 1862, Bragg lost about1/3rd of his army on the first day of Stones River. It would be weeks before an accurate count of the strength of the A of TN. Folks who study Wheeler report that as usual, his returns are wildly inaccurate.

The lesson here is that nice neat numbers on a graph are not necessarily much use in determining the strength of an army. Opposing Bragg at Stones River was about 60,000 men. What is often left out of the equation is that the Department of the Cumberland that Rosecrans also commanded had about 240,000 men.

What is the old saying? Numbers don't lie, but people who compile them do. I have no idea what the troop strength numbers in 1862 are to be used for. All I can do is warn you that a soldier who lost his toes to frostbite or had his health permanently compromised by the bitter cold were still on Bragg's rolls. In the end it was only men fully equipped & answering the roll call who fought.

Part of the reason I'm curious of Confederate strengths is that, while it appears the Confederate army was large, I don't quite understand the impetus for the sudden roll of conscription acts that came in early spring 1862. If there was a sudden fear half the army was going to vanish it made sense, but if there was still going to be a vary large army left behind I was scratching my head and the new draconian conscription orders. Knowing how large the forces available to the Confederacy before all the big battles is quite helpful to me since it can give a scale of why more men were needed, and how many may have been lost in the fighting of 1862.

 

[Saphroneth]

Okay now I see. I wasn't exactly sure how you'd settled on the designations (I spent a while trying to figure out what Confederate generals initials spelled MID for example) though that overall looks like a pretty solid record of the regiments in Confederate service at this period in time.

It should be, that was the goal!

I did the same for the Union, which was what got me the total allocations of infantry regiments for a Trent scenario. The Union definitely had more infantry regiments total (591 plus 13 who didn't make my cutoff date), of which 34 were captured by the British during or shortly after the outbreak of the war, but garrisoning the northern frontier, the coast and allowing for an offensive field army ended up consuming 239 regiments.

Part of the reason I'm curious of Confederate strengths is that, while it appears the Confederate army was large, I don't quite understand the impetus for the sudden roll of conscription acts that came in early spring 1862. If there was a sudden fear half the army was going to vanish it made sense, but if there was still going to be a vary large army left behind I was scratching my head and the new draconian conscription orders. Knowing how large the forces available to the Confederacy before all the big battles is quite helpful to me since it can give a scale of why more men were needed, and how many may have been lost in the fighting of 1862.

I think the reasoning is simply that they needed as large an army as possible; they couldn't necessarily assume the Union was going to duff their summer offensives. Remember that the Union was raising "500,000 men".

 

[Rhea Cole]

Another factor that complicates the raw numbers is the blockade of Jesuit's Bark/quinine. At a time when malaria was a seasonal epidemic, guanine was the only substance that could control the debilitating symptoms.

One of my go to plantation matron journals includes a passage about quinine. It had become more valuable than gold. She kept her precious hoard under lock & key.

At the outset of hostilities, Union quartermasters had simply purchased every ounce of the bark that they could find. That coupled with the blockade meant that no significant supplies from South America were ever run in by blockade runners.

At various times during the Vicksburg Campaign entire CSA regiments were incapacitated by malaria. Of course, the mosquitoes were agnostic. The difference was that Union victims could be returned to duty by regular doses of the bark. Just because a CSA regiment was listed as having X number present does not mean that the regiment had any combat capability.

During the Petersburg Campaign, the diet Lee's men were not consuming enough calories to maintain muscle mass. Night blindness & the symptoms of scurvy were rampant. Once again, a grid chart of numbers does not translate into combat capability.

The raw numbers are a starting point, nothing more. From there it starts to get really interesting.