6/24/2023 0 Comments Stephen sears gettysburg![]() ![]() ![]() No fewer than twenty-five regiments were due to be mustered out during June. ![]() This reflected both the casualties of Chancellorsville and the tidal wave of departing men whose time was up, and the downward spiral of the numbers was not finished. “My marching force of infantry is cut down to about 80,000…,” he explained on May 13. ![]() In mid-May, as Hooker and the president discussed the pros and cons of renewing the offensive on the Rappahannock, Hooker observed that his former numerical superiority over the enemy was shrinking alarmingly. “The dull monotony of camp life,” Corporal James Latta entered in his diary on May 24, was enlivened by “the occasional distant shouts of troops whose terms of enlistment has expired and may be heard day after day.” According to General Sedgwick, every day, day after day, a thousand men were leaving the army.17 At the same time, 16,700 short-termers-nine-months’ men from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, enlisted for service during the Peninsula-Second Manassas crisis times in August and September of 1862-were also preparing to start for home. Spring 1863 saw these two-year men-thirty-one regiments of New Yorkers and two regiments from Maine-scheduled for mustering out. In the first weeks of the war, two Northern states, New York and Maine, had signed up volunteer regiments for two years of service rather than the three-year standard in other states. ![]()
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