The average Civil War soldier was a farm boy between 18 and 30 years of age. He possessed little formal education; and by modern-day standards, his military training was superficial. He was more fighter than soldier, and he tended to scoff at military discipline and other formalities of army service.

Several factors prompted his voluntary entrance into the army. Intense patriotism, the determination to fight for one’s particular cause, the enticement of enlistment bounties, or the simple love of adventure were all strong inducements. Many men, however, were drafted into service when both sides resorted to conscription in 1862.

In that same year the North began organizing regiments of ex-slaves. The first Negro regiment to perform conspicuous service was Col. Robert Gould Shaw’s 54th Massachusetts, which suffered heavy losses in a July 18, 1863, assault on Fort Wagner, S. C. In all, about 186,000 Negroes became Federal soldiers. They served under white officers and often suffered discrimination in such matters as pay and bounties. Yet they proved courageous fighters in several of the battles in which they participated.

Conversely, Confederate officials were slow to use slaves as Southern soldiers. Many feared an uprising once the Negroes were given arms; others opposed the use of slaves as soldiers on grounds that the Negro was ill-prepared for such high responsibility. Not until March, 1865, when the war was almost over, did the Confederate government authorize the formation of Negro regiments. While some units were mustered into service, none were sent into combat.

To become a soldier, a man normally joined a military company being raised in his own locality. This company then went to a state training camp and joined similar units preparing for war. At the completion of basic training, ten companies were banded together as a regiment and mustered into national service. Orders came soon thereafter assigning the regiment to duty in the field.

The Federal private received $13 per month and a clothing allowance of $42 annually. Customarily, his uniform was dark blue and consisted of a kepi (a cap that slants toward the front), heavy wool coat, and lighter colored trousers. His prescribed equipment included rifle, ammunition, knapsack, blanket, haversack, canteen, bayonet, and cartridge box. The Federal lived mostly in a tent, cooked his meals with his messmates, and was personally responsible for the good condition of his equipment.

His Confederate counterpart was not so well provided. In addition to his musket, he normally carried a blanket slung over one shoulder, canteen, knife, and cartridge box. Gray was the color of the official Confederate uniform. However, few of the soldiers were uniformly clad after the first months of service. Many wore instead clothing taken from dead or captured Federals, or made at home and dyed in a solution of walnut hulls. The home-dyed uniform was light brown, or “butternut”, in color. Few tents existed in Confederate armies. Southern soldiers thus became accustomed to camping in the open. The Confederate private received $11 monthly until 1864, when his pay was raised to $18 because of widespread Southern inflation.

The Federal soldier received much better rations than did the Confederate. His bread was a thick cracker called “hardtack”, and many jokes were made over its toughness. The Union soldier also received meat, dried vegetables, coffee, sugar, and salt. The Confederate soldier, unable to get coffee because of the blockade, learned to use beans, rye, parched corn, and even acorns as substitutes. Rarely did Southern troops have ample food. Personal accounts by Confederates often reveal pitiful instances of widespread malnutrition in the ranks.

For recreation, each soldier was left to his own devices. Letter-writing, reading, singing, card-playing, and sleeping were the favorite pastimes of troops in camp. In winter men on both sides constructed huts of logs and mud, or piled dirt against the sides of their tents as insulation from the cold. Reveille normally sounded at 5 a.m. in summer and 6 a.m. in winter. “Taps”, a melody first played in 1862, generally came between 10 and 11 p.m.

Fighting in the Civil War was generally savage, and guerrillas on both sides often killed in cold blood. Yet when opposing armies were camped close to one another, it was not at all uncommon for blue and gray pickets to establish informal truces, swap newspapers, tobacco, and coffee, and even to camp together. Sometimes this fraternization might last through an entire winter. Even in battle, many soldiers on both sides displayed great compassion—even to the extent of risking their lives in order to help a stricken foe. Sergeant Richard Kirkland of South Carolina was so overcome at the mounting Federal casualties during the battle of Fredericksburg that he crawled out upon the battlefield and voluntarily gave aid to dozens of wounded Northerners.

Yet army life of the 1860’s had many and severe hardships. Improper diet and insanitary conditions often prostrated half of a unit’s membership. Since filth abounded in every army, a soldier who did not have his share of lice and fleas was a rare exception. Moreover, the fact that a majority of the soldiers were from rural communities made them very susceptible to such “city sicknesses” as measles, chicken pox, and small pox. The death rate from these diseases were very high. In the Federal armies, sickness and disease accounted for 7 of every 10 deaths. One authority has estimated that among the Confederates three men perished from disease for every man killed in battle. Small wonder that a Civil War soldier once wrote his family from camp: “It scares a man to death to get sick down here.”

Soldiers suffered too because of the limited medical knowledge of that day. Blood transfusions, X-rays, antibiotics, sterilization, vitamins, vaccines, wonder drugs all came after the Civil War. No assured treatment existed for typhoid fever, yellow fever, measles, or pneumonia, and great uncertainty prevailed over the proper way to stop a hemorrhage. Most bone fractures, and all wounds of the joint, meant amputation. In the Korean conflict of the 1950’s the chances of surviving a wound were 50-1; in the Civil War the chances were only 7-1.

That men of blue and gray endured these miseries is proof enough of their amazing capacity for hardships. Of greater importance to our American heritage, however, was their courage and devotion to duty. It shone forth on each side, and in every battle. Bell Irvin Wiley has commented:

“The Civil War was in large degree a soldier’s war. In that war the determination, self-sufficiency, and endurance of the individual in the ranks were of utmost importance. Officer casualties were heavy, and in the hurly-burly of combat those who survived often were able to exercise little control over their units. In the crucial, climactic stages of battle the common soldiers were to a large extent on their own, and it was often their courage and tenacity, individual and collective, that ultimately decided the contest.... For it was these men and their kind whose strength was the bedrock of their respective causes and whose greatness made their war one of the most inspiring in the history of embattled humanity.”